40$ USB super telescope, easy to make, sees craters on the moon

Step 3 Make a housing for the webcam

It's very easy to make a housing, just use 2 encaps and a piece of pipe with a slot for the USB wire. It can all be glued or taped together.

On the pictures, you can see the various stages of assembly. One endcap needs quite a big hole, otherwise the parts on the pcb will touch the endcap tilting the webcam pcb which is bad for optical quality.

Comments

[jamesfd2]

...still working on mine. Started with a Nikon back lenscap to simplify mounting. BTW the focus plane is 46.5mm behind the lens mount on nikon-mount lenses. The CCD in my webcam is so tiny that at 30' a 50mm lens on the sensor creates an image of a doorknob that fills the frame.

[sergivaqx]

Hi, what are the distance between the camera and the lens? thanks for the info and thats a good project!! I'll try it with a old telescope that I have....

[hanzablast]

Hi, the distance from the lens to the ccd usually around 3cm. In a photo camera, the ccd or the film would be around 3cm behind the lens. Just don't glue anything untill you've done the focus test that I'm showing in the video. If you can't focus, play with the distance a bit untill you can. Then glue it together. Can't go wrong if you do it that way!

[Blackarrow]

Just a couple of pics my cam.

[hanzablast]

Wow, Thanks for showing it, it's really fun to see other people actually build this as well! I like the tripod nut, my solution was kind of primitive ;-)