Micro-Astrophotography

My setup includes a mini-dobsonian (76mm mirror, 350mm focal length) and a MS Lifecam that I pulled apart and stuffed inside a old 35mm film cannister. The webcam is attached to a tiny netbook with SharpCap installed. All in all, the whole setup fits inside a thick briefcase. While it's pretty much useless for deep sky astrophotography, bright deep sky objects like Orion and the Pleiades are easily visible with the eye piece. Closer to home though, the webcam is great for picking up details on the moon as well as Jupiter's moons. Here's a shot of the moon take from a window in the stair well of our apartment in Vienna. The whole moon fits in the field of view of the mini-dob.

And here's an animated GIF of the moons of Jupiter moving over a period of 4 hours. (19:30 to 22:58 on the 10.01.2014). The frames are about 30 minutes apart.From Left to right we have Callisto, Io Jupiter and Ganymede. Io was unfortunately at it's farthest point from Jupiter from our point of view and so was at it's slowest.