I'm amazed at what can be accomplished with a 5 year old $50 webcam and a few modifications. I took a Quickcam 4000, removed the lens and added a nosepiece made of a 1.25" PVC drain pipe.

Both of these were taken using my Celestron C6-R, 6" f/8 achromatic refractor, stopped down to 4" to alleviate chromatic aberration, for an effective focal ratio of f/12. The camera was set to 640 X 480 which yielded 15 fps.

First image is my entry attempt for the Cloudy Nights September Beginner Bright Object Astrophotography Challenge, Rupes Recta, or Straight Wall. I captured 3 minutes of video with the camera set to 640 X 480 under very marginal seeing conditions. Processed with Registax 5, I was only able to get 93 good frames. I wasn't able to get the 3^rd quarter moon in the scope until after 1am, so I was already too tired to wait till it got any higher. Watching the video was like looking at something underwater. I think it's a little overprocessed, so I still want to do some fiddling with the Registax settings.

This image of Jupiter, I took earlier the same night. The seeing was marginally better since the planet was a bit higher than the moon. I just had to hurry and get the video before Jupiter got into the trees. Observing from my house just plain sucks.

Anway, this is a stack of about 900 frames. It's amazing the amount of detail that Registax can pull out of a video that at times only looks like an out of focus blob. It really makes me wonder how true to life the images are, with the amount of processing that gets done on them. Not only mine, but all of the webcam images that are all over the web.