For planetary imaging, I shoot with a Phillips ToUCam Pro II 840K Web camera, modified for long exposure, which also enables it to be used for deep space capture and auto-guiding.

Capture Software: IRIS
Stacking and processing software: Registax
Animations done in Windows Movie Maker

Basic concept.

Using a special adapter, the webcam is plugged into the back of a telescope where the eyepiece would normally go.

The webcam feed is picked up and visualised on a computer monitor using a specialised program like IRIS (Freeware) in real time.

A short video is captured, e.g. 80 seconds for Jupiter and saved on your computer as a file called an AVI. This file contains all the individual frames that make up the video. At 10 frames per second (fps) for 80 seconds this equals 800 individual frames in the video.

Later, using Registax, the best and worst of these frames are sorted and used or discarded, keeping the best frames to stack together to produce a final single image. This image can then have its algorithms adjusted to sharpen and clarify detail and to smooth out artefacts and digital noise.

If you do a number of videos, say, one every five or ten minutes for a few hours, you can process each one in turn to come up with a sequence of individual images. You can then string these together in an animation and see the rotation of a planet like a time-lapse. This requires patience and time.

Jupiter Ganymede Transit

This took a couple of hours of capture, and quite a bit of time processing, but as you can see, the work pays off.