Philips SPC900NC Camera On Linux Is A Go

In researching information about using a webcam as a low cost camera for astrophotography, many people recommended the Philips SPC900NC camera due to its use of a good quality 1.3 megapixel CCD sensor at a decent price. I bought mine from ebay, but its also available on Amazon and Newegg. My first attempt at playing with this camera was on my main desktop running Windows XP x64. This proved useless, however, as the drivers will not work. The Philips software will install fine but it cannot recognize the camera. Windows detects that a USB device is plugged in but can’t do anything with it because of the incompatible driver. I currently do not have a 32 bit version of Windows XP, so the next course of action was obviously Linux.

My laptop currently runs Ubuntu (was running Xubuntu until yesterday, just did a little swap of GUI’s) and was a prime choice. The camera did not work “out-of-the-box” as can be expected, but a little searching netted me a working driver for the camera, known as pwc. The pwc driver works for many Philips cameras, including the SPC900NC that I’m using. Installation is very straightforward for anyone who has compiled programs. Once the driver was installed, Camorama didn’t have a problem detecting the camera and capturing images from it. Next step is to work on capturing video from the camera, which mplayer may do for me.

Since the camera is working, I took a few pictures to test it out. Image quality is pretty good and should work perfectly for my astrophotography plans. Here is a picture of my Tele Vue Pronto refractor that I’ll be using for this project: