Astrophotography

For those that don’t already know, I’ve a couple of webcams on the roof, unprotected, securely mounted using the cheapest gaffer tape available. The site isn’t great, but it sort of works. It’s at http://webcam.willowhey.net Please don’t go crazy on it, otherwise it’ll kill my internet 🙂 But you get the picture (excuse the pun).

It uses Ubuntu and the UVC driver, with the “motion” utility, and for what it does, I think it does it quite well.

What I’d really like to do however, is somehow use the webcam to take long exposure  photographs (maybe up to 10 seconds) of the night sky to see what I can capture. I’ve had reasonable success with a normal SLR, but wanted to see what was possible with a half decent webcam.

Most information available is for modifying a webcam to look down a telescope, well maybe that’ll come later for me, but it’s just a long exposure shot with the standard webcam I’m after at the moment.

It appears that the UVC driver doesn’t support it, so before I go looking at using one on the Windows platform, does anyone have any ideas if it’s possible with linux?

Thanks! Mark.