Recently I bought and modified a webcam to be used on my telescope. There are cameras that you can buy meant for this purpose but they all seem to be in the hundreds of dollars. A lot of people seem to have done this but none of the pages I found online had good end-to-end instructions, so I’m hoping this will help anyone looking to try what I’ve done.

Camera technology moves quickly, so I’m sure this post won’t be relevant for too long, but hopefully it will help someone!

First Up: What Did I Buy And How Much Did It Cost?

The method I used only required 3 pieces:

Logitech C170 webcam: Amazon Link ($18 right now)
Solomark 1.25” webcam adapter: Amazon Link ($15 right now)
A 3D printed part to connect the webcam to the telescope adapter: Thingaverse Link

Unfortunately that last part needs to be 3D printed, so if you don’t have a friend with a 3D printer like I did then you’ll have to have a service print it for you. It’s a tiny part, so I’d print two or three just to make sure it came out ok.

Once you have the three pieces you’ll only need a few tools. A knife and a small Phillips screwdriver will get you started. A power drill is helpful later on, but probably not necessary.

Our three necessary components: webcam, 3d printed adapter, and telescope adapter

Removing The Webcam Casing

The most important thing that we need to do is remove the lens from within the webcam itself. We don’t want this lens because the telescope itself will be our camera’s lens. To start this process we need to remove the mounting bracket that normally holds the camera to the top of a computer monitor.

To remove the mounting bracket use a small knife to peel the rubber coverings off the hinge to find a small screw. Remove the screw and carefully push out the pin holding the mount.

Remove the rubber ends to expose the small screw

Remove the screw and push the pin out to remove the mount

Once the mount has been removed you need to remove the outer casing to get to the internal circuit board. The outer cover can be removed easily with a fingernail, but that exposes a plastic cover that has 3 screws. Remove these screws, but make sure to save all screws you remove from here on out, you’ll need them to put it all back together!

The outer cover comes off easily, the casing underneath has 3 screws

The circuit is held in with two screws, the camera lens can be seen on the left

Remove The Existing Camera Lens

Now the circuit board is exposed, so be very careful while handling it. If possible make sure you’re grounded to play it safe.

There are two screws that hold the circuit board in place, remove these and use a screwdriver to gently unseat the circuit board from the plastic enclosure.

Remove the two screws and gently unseat the circuit board

The camera lens is the round object on the left side of the image, it is held on by two screws and a small amount of adhesive. The screws are on the back of the circuit board.

From this point on you must be extremely careful! We are going to expose the image sensor, and it’s amazingly delicate. Don’t touch it, don’t breathe on it, don’t let any dust get on it.

Once the screws are removed carefully shimmy the lens back and forth to un-stick the adhesive.

Remove the two screws holding the lens in place

Gently wiggle the lens mount to unstick the adhesive holding it to the board

Attach The 3D Printed Adapter To The Camera Sensor

The 3D printed adapter piece will connect around the camera sensor and use the same 2 screws as the lens to hold it in place. Being careful not to touch the camera sensor, line up the part and connect it to the circuit board with the two screws. Some left over adhesive on the circuit board may help hold the part slightly while you line it up.

Attach the 3d printed part to where the camera lens was using the same two screws

At this point we want to put the whole casing back together. The biggest problem now is that the hole in the plastic that the lens looked through isn’t big enough for the 3d printed part to stick through. Unfortunately we need to make the that hole slightly larger without busting the plastic if possible.

I used a power drill to slowly widen the opening until the casing fit back over the 3d printed part.

Carefully widen the hold in the casing to make it large enough for the 3d printed part to poke through

Once that’s done all we’re doing is putting the case back together. The Solomark adapter will be able to screw into the 3d printed part to complete the modification. The 3d printed part doesn’t have any screw threads, but it still screwed in easily enough. Either the plastic in the 3d print is soft enough, or the natural indentations in it line up nicely with the threads, but it connected nicely.

Screw the Solomark telescope adapter into the 3d printed part

Handle it carefully, the image sensor is still exposed to the elements

Something to keep in mind is that we never protected the image sensor, it’s still open to the elements. Either put a filter on the top or keep a duster cover on the make sure it stays safe.

Using The Webcam With Your Telescope

Your best option of using the webcam is to take video with software called Sharpcap or Firecapture. In my first experiments I found that I just barely couldn’t achieve focus with the webcam connected to the telescope, so I have to use a 2x barlow lens. This barlow setup works fine because the extra magnification actually helps with Jupiter and Saturn.

From here you can process images however you want. My process is to take video in Sharpcap, align and crop images in PIPP, stack them in Autostakkert, and then do some wavelets sharpening in Registax.

I’m still getting a handle on taking video in Sharpcap, but my initial results are extremely impressive for how little money I spent!

I hope this little guide helped! Clear skies!

August 2 2019 Update: I've discovered that this Logitech webcam has a frustrating quirk. Logitech has put the shutter speed backwards compared to most other webcams and the sharpcap software on my laptop can't correct for this. Unfortunately I may never know what the true shutter speed is for this webcam, I'll have to learn to dial it in through experience and reference stars. If you run into this issue you're not crazy, it's just how it is.