BackIt is not particularly practical to use a film camera with a small telescope due to difficulties in attaching it in such a way that the camera can look down the eyepiece tube: not to mention the uncertainty in knowing what you have got before the film is processed! I thus used a Phillips ToUCam Pro digital webcam, coupled via a commercially available adaptor onto my Meade EQ114 reflector. Due to there being no lenses in between the main mirror and the camera, focussing is something of an issue: it was necessary to remove the lens-holder ring from the eyepiece tube to enable it to be racked in far enough to get a good focus, but it did just get there! The camera connects to any computer via a USB link: I use a laptop to avoid the need to trail mains cables across the garden.
The webcam is able to take pictures at up to 1280x960 resolution, or movies at up to 640x480. It can also be set to take a series of pictures at intervals: this is very useful for obtaining a sequence of shots to combine into a composite (see later). Exposure can be set to automatic but I found it imperative to use manual settings to achieve good results as the large expanse of black sky in the shots resulted in huge overexposure on automatic. The effective field of view is really quite small (about 12arc-minutes by 9), so accurate alignment of the finder-scope is vital to getting anything on the screen, and objects do track across the screen pretty quickly so frequent adjustments to the telescope mount are needed to keep up.
Captured images generally need some computer manipulation before they can be presented, partly because the low image-brightness means considerable amplification by the camera is needed, which can result in electronic noise. There is also an often greater amount of "optical noise" caused by the rapidly varying atmospheric conditions: on bad nights images can dance and flicker so much that photography is almost pointless. For essentially unvarying images, the best way to combat both types of noise is to combine several images into one: this reinforces the true image while averaging out the noise. I do this by means of a "stacker" program which can add all the images or average them or just take the brightest pixel from the set: different techniques are useful with different image types. Alternatively, electronic noise can usually be much reduced by adjusting the full-black and full-white level settings of individual images: this must be done with care though, to avoid affecting the image too much. Re-balancing the colour is also often necessary, based on the given RGB values for an area of blank sky: I know this must be true black so if not I can alter the RGBs for the whole image until true black is achieved.
Final presentation quality images are achieved by cropping off all that un-necessary black sky, rotating images into standardised orientations and carefully tweaking levels and colour to give a good result (again without compromising the actual object being imaged: I prefer accuracy over artistic interpretation!).