So what do you do in this digital age with the excellent lenses you purchased over the years for your 35mm film camera? Well one thing is you can purchase an adapter from an Australian company that will mate your beautiful Minolta 250mm f/5.6 RF Rokkor-X mirror lens with your trusty Philips ToUcam Pro II Web camera. What you get from that is a very good Web cam with excellent optics for all sorts of uses — especially in getting "live" images from a telescope into a computer and, potentially, on to the Web.
Years ago I used the ToUcam to do a live Webcast of a total lunar eclipse. I'd connected it to my trusty Meade 390 telescope — a 1,000mm focal length scope. The result was nice imagery of only a portion of the lunar disk. I'd wanted the entire disk to show! With shorter focal lengths I can now image the entire face of the Moon or, with proper filtration, the Sun.
I did my first test imaging with the rig tonight at 7:22 PM with the Moon in its waxing gibbous phase. The image shown here (test imaage #5) was done with the Toshiba Microsoft Vista notebook computer, CoffeeCup Software's Webcam 4.0, the ToUcam and 250mm telephoto lens. Looks good! Not quite as sharp as I remember the Meade images, but not bad for a first try! Mount this rig to a telescope with a clock drive and we'll have something!
PhotonStopper 
James, great photos. I'm amazed they came from a 1.3MP camera. I hope it will be clear skies on the 20th for both (or at least one) of us for the eclipse. I took some photos of the last one but wasn't super happy with them. Hopefully this time around will be better.
Thanks for the compliment! The finished images looked very good but, while the CoffeeCup Webcam software had some useful features, the live, on-screen views of the Moon were difficult to judge. I also had no brightness, contrast, or shutter speed control over the camera. I'm not sure if that was the demo mode for the software or missing features.Weather forecast here is not promising. I think we'll miss this eclipse and that's really a pity; it will be well-placed in the sky and at a decent hour for the majority of North Americans to be able to see it!Good luck to you! — JG
That is interesting. And, your photo is great. (nice to see something coming from Australia!!).
That's too bad. Right now the weather is looking like partly cloudy, so I'll probably be out hoping I get a few breaks in the clouds.
I thought you might pick up on the Australian connection. Actually Mogg was the only manufacturer of webcam/photo lens adapters I could find! The item I received via international post was of excellent quality –I couldn't ask for better– and works with both my older model webcam and a newer one in case I want to do more with it. By the way, I enjoyed your recent missive on the Queen's English vs. the American version! — JG
Awesome photo! Wow! Hope the weather cooperates for the eclipse! ~S