XiCam Assembly

There are two parts to this project. One was developing a device driver to run my digital camera from my tablet. This is likely a fools errand, but you can't succeed unless you try, right? The other, far simpler, part is to build a structure that holds the camera lens fixed against the telescope eyepiece. The assembly in the pictures cost me about $9 from The Home Depot. It consists of a 2"x5" joiner plate (Simpson TP15). It's thin, but fairly rigid. I drilled holes for a 1/4" machine screw (I suppose this is fairly standard for mounting cameras to a tripod) and a 3/8" screw. I held the plate steady by hand, and nearly slit my wrist when the drill passed through and the plate spun loose. So be wise: use a clamp if you try this. I used a 1" long machine screw with nut and locking washer to hold the camera in place. I used a 3" hex bolt with nuts and standard washers (the lock washers tend to tilt the bolt unless you really tighten it). The bolt feeds into a 1" pipe clamp, which happens to fit the eyepiece perfectly. It does not, however, fit around the larger eyepiece, which I think might be more useful due to the wider field of view.

I was tinkering around with the built-in exposure and ISO settings. The ST100 allows up to ST3200 and uses an exposure scale of -2 to 2 (I don't really know what that means. Could it be a multiplier for integration time?). The first picture I took the other night. It was fairly overcast, and we get a lot of light pollution around here. I used exposure setting "zero" (for "auto") and ISO 3200. The second picture is Vega, taken last night using my medieval eyepiece attachment device. The high magnification makes vibrations even more annoying, so I will certainly need to get a larger clamp so I can use the lower magnification, larger FOV eyepiece.