Transcript for Part A:
um
i've just sent you an image on um facebook jason all right smashing thank
you that looks quite good
it's a good group today it's going to be fun yeah yeah it's always fun it's um
that's what it's about [Music] and it's the great david telescope
giveaway this afternoon i'm giving away some of my telescopes so they don't okay
they'll tell everybody that it'll be that house as long as they go to a good use that's
the main thing oh yeah until over a year
there's a young fellow over here doing some work out there and i asked him are you in the market for a
telescope and he said you bet i really am and so he's inheriting one of the eight-inch
f8s that i have oh wonderful oh cool and i'm uh
i want it to be used and i'm glad he's going to get to use it
this
hello
steve um
hi everyone hi steve hi steve right yep um
just gonna grab a drink while i'm uh we're in countdown before i start
spitting feathers spinning feathers hi steve must be really good evening
yeah uh i hope there's no feedback on this mic because i've had a bit of trouble with it
sounds okay sounds okay very very quickly good right
excellent you're back in a moment folks a little bit of feedback never hurt
anyone
now gary palmer is upstaged at all in the chair steaks and he look at that chair
hey that's some cheers that's a nice chair that's a nice
now but it's an old antique morris chair designed by the poet william morris
very famous late 19th century british poet yeah and
he also designed furniture including these chairs that i inherited it from my grandfather
and i'm sitting in it now but you can't see it i'm afraid um they
knew and flash isn't always better is it
well the one arm sat on isn't it's only added two years it's starting to go the lump
i think i i've got a fairly new chair that's starting to go lumpy and i'm starting to think it might be me that's going lumpy
it might be the chair's worth telling me to lose weight yeah mine doesn't
i like to have a large leather back chair to feel like an executive
he loses the grandeur but it worked
i suppose it saves me sitting on the floor true
i'm just randomly trying to think of something to talk about later on when i get my slot
so excuse me if i stare at the middle distance i'm just just thinking of coming up with
something as you do yeah why not
i bet everyone else is prepared aren't they
what i'm thinking of doing i haven't done for a year
[Laughter]
it's over a year ago since i was in the dome and it's
i'm going to be rusty i know that and it's going to be very basic but
i need the practice i'll let you into a little secret steve as the representative of someone that
owns a dome company mine isn't working tonight right
because i bought myself a mount hub pro this week um
well i wanted to have permanent dewbans running on my um takahashi to stop molding grass and
things yeah and uh i was fed up with having boxes and cables all over the place
so the only thing i haven't done is replaced the power feed
because the broadcast said it was going to be solid cloud for the next two weeks yeah of course it was but because
because all my cabling was like built and tied in i cut it all out thinking i'll replace that in the week the
universe has decided just because he's cut all his cables we're going to clear the sky for him
different kind of dome steve i was talking about
oh fair enough inflatable planetarium
yeah yeah i used to do um planetarium shows for uh hurst monsoon yes yeah yeah
yeah i think i'm going to kill that clock just a minute
well i would think about the clock
i got to watch him throw the clock across
uh voyager 1 flies past jupiter that's the reason why the poster has the voyager 1
flying past you jupiter in the posters so
steve we were kind of expecting you to take the clock and throw it across the room
talking about things that being passed on that that clock was made by my dad so well
really the outer case was not the uh not the workings
you want to talk about things passed on that
is a book passed to me that was stolen from east greenstead library in 1937 by patrick moore
stolen [Laughter] he took it out the library and just
never ever returned that's great
i stole the book once well but i gave it back to the queen's library
and i didn't realize that i had it and then after years and years later after i had carefully rebound it
i gave it back to them autographed it was a 19th century book about comets
by amadeus okay a very very valuable book but i felt it
needed to go back to the library and that's that's where it is now
[Music] well if patrick comes back they're gonna
have to put him in jail right library jail library jail
astronomy is largely the study of light from distant places each unit light carries different
information that adds to our picture of the universe the upcoming anti-grace roman space
telescope will detect a key range of white for studying the universe visible is near infrared
infrared which starts at a wavelength of about 0.75 microns will allow the roman
space telescope to make many critical observations roman engineers now plan to add a new
filter extending its range from 2 to 2.3 microns
this seemingly small change will make a big difference our galaxy the milky way is filled with
bands of dust and gas that block our viewers with cars behind them
part of what makes infrared light so useful to astronomers is its ability to travel through this gas and dust
infrared light has a longer wavelength than visible light which means it is less likely to be scattered and absorbed
by small dust particles as it travels over long distances upgrading from 2 to 2.3 microns
allows astronomers to see through two to three times as much dust this opens up much more of our galaxy to
study including hundreds of small dim stars that glow mostly in infrared
infrared is also good for studying the more distant parts of the universe as the universe expands it stretches the
wavelengths of light along with it a process called redshirt the farther away an object is the more
the light from it has stretched by the time it reaches us distant galaxies have all of their
visible light shifted into infrared stretching over distance makes redshift
one of the key tools for measuring the universe since astronomers can usually determine
what wavelength they would see from up close they can tell how far a galaxy is by how
much the light has changed closer to home is a search for water within the solar
ice system specific wavelengths of infrared light providing a fingerprint of its presence
as telescopes see farther into the infrared they can see more of this fingerprint
if objects in the outer solar system such as rocky fragments in the distant kuiper belt contain water ice light
reflected off them will have gaps where the water has absorbed that wavelength this allows astronomers to detect water
at much greater distances the nancy grace roman space telescope
will form an unprecedented partnership with hubble and the james webb space telescope
with its extremely large field of view roman is uniquely equipped for large surveys of the infrared sky allowing
astronomers to identify interesting targets for more detailed study using hubble and webb's overlapping wavelength
ranges and smaller fields of view this collaboration will usher in a new
era in infrared astronomy
welcome to the 35th global star party co-hosted by gary palmer astronomy
and we are joined with a bunch of astronomers here from throughout europe and with uh
gary palmer and uh mr david levy in tucson i'm here in springdale arkansas
and so it's great to have we have you all here it's great to have our audience watching from around the world
and this is a educational outreach event and
so if you could uh you know share it with your friends or other astronomy groups
you might belong to on social media if you can't share it for some reason
certainly like and subscribe uh it's a a pleasure for me to reintroduce gary
palmer gary is a long-term
dedicated astrophotographer an astronomer who shares his knowledge with
virtually anyone that asks him questions about it and then some people that don't ask
questions he's willing to share but uh uh gary palmer astronomy has taught a lot
of people the fine points of making high quality astrophotographs
and when i watch gary work um his magic and image processing um with images
sometimes that are have some issues to them uh he can he always turns out extraordinary stuff one of the
best astrophotographers in the world mr gary palmer i'll let you have the stage
thank you scott um it's always quite hard to follow an introduction like that because i i feel like i'll wing it quite
a lot of the time um but yeah it's really nice to be on
again um and welcome to all the the people that are watching and all of the guests that
have agreed to come on tonight and share their knowledge somewhere along the lines
um as usual we always start off with um the renowned david levy
uh introducing uh all of the style parties so far and um i always find it quite hard to
follow david uh it always gives me something to think about um every talk that he does
um i'm left there sort of thinking when i should be speaking afterwards and introducing other people so
um without wasting any more time i'm gonna pass this straight over to david
well thank you so much gary and uh for introducing the renowned david levy and the renowned david levy
is not having the greatest day today because a couple of days ago someone
came to install brand new wheels on our observatory roof wheels that he claimed would last forever
and the first time i tested the roof it opened just fine that as it was closing
the reels were destroyed and now the roof cannot be closed and needs to be rebuilt
so this isn't the greatest day but it's it's something that needs to be done and uh
it's happening and it's going to have a very happy ending i'm sure so the unrenowned david is now joining
you this afternoon do you ever have like a 18 year old
teenage boy or girl come up to you and say i just wrote this poem what do you think
and you read it and you say it's not bad and when you get older you might actually be a good poet
not so with poet john gillespie mcgee canadian poet number 412 squadron royal
canadian air force he was in pilot training during the
second world war and a couple of weeks before he was killed sadly in a training accident
he was um he was thinking he was trying to avoid gary's telescope that gary is trying to
work on right now but anyway he wrote a poem about how much he enjoys
flying his airplane he sent it to his parents and uh there kind of stayed for a while
and then got published after a while and published again and again
and eventually became probably the most famous poem in canada so famous that during the
i know um jason was talking about this earlier we'll be hearing from jason later
but with the challenger explosion in 1986
this poem was so famous that president reagan read quoted from it at the funeral
and i'm going to read it right now as a poem to welcome us to this lovely
35th global star party high flight
excuse me and try it again oh i have slipped the surly bonds of
earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings
sunward i've climbed and joined the tumbling marth of some split clouds
and done a hundred things you have not dreamed of wheeled and soared and swung
high in the sun with silence hovering there i've chased the shouting wind along
and flung my ego craft through footless halls of air up up the long delirious
burning blue i've topped the windswept heights with easy grace where never lark or even
eagle flew and while with silent lifting mind i've
tried the high and trespass sanctity of space
put out my hand and touched the face of god
thank you and welcome to the 35th global star party back to you
thank you david thank you again some really interesting words to listen to
i will never be a poet there is no way worse than with me
uh images working with those sorts of things they work but uh poetry while i
enjoy it i could never sit there and write it
well thanks gary it's an honor to be to be here and a privilege to be able to do my
weekly quotations here for you and i hope you're enjoying them i do
it does yeah we'll sit there and take something in from these uh these words that uh
you you come out with you know the quotations the poems the different other things and
it's always interesting to to listen to so
thank you very much for that david um i believe we're gonna run around and just have a
quick introduction of the people that are on here so um i'm gonna go as i'm working on my screen
we're andreas who's in sweden um andreas is a
avid imager um always surprising me uh with what uh images he comes up with
and that's because of the location he's in you have to remember that he's in a very very light polluted area and
imaging off of a balcony so uh these images um
they're always inspiring and uh we always sort of take a good view on that
when their uh conditions are challenging and not only that he has as bad or weather as the uk so um
that that's that that's a challenge in its own right
we've got joseph mcdonald on who's gonna talk a little bit about uh all sky optics um
and meteor cameras and capturing the night sky in a different way um so we're pleased to have jason on
tonight thank you steve collinwood yeah always good to have steve on um
owner of pulsar observatories um and domes um
there's also does a lot in the telescope world repairing telescopes and uh goes
back a long way it's always good good fun to have a chat with steve um
pekka yeah also in sweden um pekka's into imaging as well so we'll
listen to um pekka later and uh libyan styles
always good to have libby on and listen she's inspiring um
very very interesting talks in the past and all of the star parties so far so it's nice to have you on libby
and we've got steve ibbitson on um steve chases the sun like me
among other things um it's very good at imaging um also has uh
one of the planetariums that he organizes and runs so um we're going to listen to steve a
little bit later on um but it's very nice for all of you to join us and i think there's going to be a few others later on
um apart from that uh i think it's going to be over to me for a little bit um to
start off the first bit of this and as i mentioned on one of the other style parties what we're going to
talk about is calibration frames and the reason why we're actually using them in the images
now i want to keep it really really simple because this can really get
blown out of all propulsion um the main calibration chromes that we use
all of the time uh dart frames flat frames and light frames
um the dark frames are there to correct hot pixels they're there to correct and flow
and they're there to correct lots of other different defects
that are in the image so what i'm going to do is share my screen over i'm just going to move some
screens around because i actually haven't got enough screens tonight um and then i'm going to bring up
this screen here just give me two seconds because everything's shrinking as i'm moving it around
we go and hopefully you can see this screen here yep
um dart frames if we actually look at them they contain a couple of different
things here so the first one is amp glow this is a severe case of outflow
it's not common in cameras but it can happen dslrs can suffer from this when
the batteries warm up they can create this pattern on one side of the image and you get this glow effect
when we also look at the image you can see the hot pixels and they will be colored this is actually a colored image
but it's not been you get so that's one of the things that um dark frames are removing is the ant
glow the other thing which quite often gets confused with amglo is
um the the actual uh electronic noise
this is normally coming from where the sensor is connected to the bulb and again it's reduced in a lot of
cameras but we have seen it in certain models over the last couple of years and the
key thing to removing both this and the electronic noise
uh um ant glow is to actually capture the images with the same settings as the
light frames so they need to have exactly the same settings there if you image for
60 seconds and it has um a hundred game on the camera or 600 iso
on the camera it needs to be exactly that for the dart frames we also need to remember as well
if you're capturing dark frames with a dslr to make sure that you actually cover the viewfinder at the back because
that lets light into it so a lot of people will put the cap onto a
lens or they cover it but they leave the viewfinder open at the back and that's actually going to make your frames grey
not not black um cooling of the camera if you can cool
the camera down and bring it down to the same temperature that always makes a big difference and the other thing is is to
capture them in the same software so dark frames really need to be captured for capturing them in uh the
images in sharp cap or sg pro or whatever else the software is
the calibration phones need to be captured in the same software the other last thing to remember is is
the cable so if we're using a two meter cable that connects our camera for our capture and
our light frames then we need this two meter cable to be connected when capturing calibration
frames it changes the size of the image so when it goes for subtraction this is quite often why the software will come
back with an error and say i can't subtract this anymore but the dark frames are the most
important out of all of them a lot of people think um you know they can get away with the calibration frames or some
of the calibration frames i would really say dart frames are the most important out of all of the frames
if we drop these two images down for a second we then move on to
the flat frames and the flat frames here really they're correct in a few things
they're cracked in some of the optical defects so they will correct some vignetting and if we see here in the top
corner if i zoom in deliberately put these here we can see the dust spots there so they
can be created by anything yeah in our optical train it can be dust on the camera dust on the lens or on the filters
um you can sometimes find that the actual dew yeah on the lens so if we've been
outside it's really cold you might find it's due on there unfortunately those are not going to get subtracted because
when we take the dark uh the flat frames the jews not on the flat frame and if you introduced
these into the images then they're going to create all sorts of problems but they also do some color correction
as well on color cameras so flat frames again are quite important and also
the settings so i've set this system up here just a rough basic system
and if i bring that on we should be able to see that now yeah there is
a camera connected to the telescope and we're going to set this up to actually take some flat frames
now what we're after is a mean value on the flat frame so we we need a value
an amount of time um and a setting for the flat frame to actually subtract
correctly so if we um set this up with the uh histogram
there we go we see that we're sitting down here and we're not interested in the green because nearly all of the color camera
is going to be biased in green they're going to have more green than they are red and blue we're actually interested in the white
which is a combination of all of the colors together and when we look over on the right
in our software whatever we're capturing with we need to look at the mean value there so i'm actually after a mean value of
somewhere around 22 000. i would generally leave the game
at the same setting as what i used so i'm going to leave my gain at somewhere around 100
you know it's not exactly on but it's near enough and then we're going to adjust our exposure time down
to bring the mean value down so we're just going to adjust that
somewhere around there that would be fine then we need to check all the settings are the same all that raw settings our
actual image size and that we've got no rotations on on the image
the cooling's not so much of a problem with the flat frames it doesn't really matter and we would be capturing
somewhere around 100 of these um for a good subtraction
uh four if i just stop sharing for two seconds
for the purpose of this you'll see that i'm actually using a flax panel yeah and this makes life
really really easy because using the flats panel in general what we would have done
uh in the older days would be to use um something like a white t-shirt a white cloth we would put
that over the the telescope itself or our camera lens and then we would be um somewhere around
30 minutes after sunset we would be pointing up at the sky and we would be capturing the the flat
frames and these generally when you look at them on the screen they look slightly blue um
or grey but the problem and what we don't realize is that every second that goes past the sky is
getting darker now we could switch that around and we could maybe capture the flat frames at the end of our image in
session and capture those in the morning in which case the sky is getting lighter
so every one of those frames is a different value and what you'll find is that if your
exposure time pushes right up so we move up to somewhere around the two seconds three
seconds maybe we're using narrowband filters that's going to increase our exposure time
that every two or three frames the mean value is not the same and we can get lots and lots of problems
so these flat panels are really good because they have digital readout on them now a lot of them are usb
controlled so i can control the brightness and they just make life um a lot easier
and the image is more consistent so if we go back to the screen share
there we go okay so
that should be sharing now um all we need to do is make sure that they're captured
around that and the same parameters in the image size same fit files
also remember that lots of software like this um for instance has uh the ability to do what we call live
stacking so it stacks images and it does give us the option to capture
calibration frames at the top there a lot of people think oh i'll capture the dark or i'll capture the flat using this
system and they don't subtract correctly yeah there's lots of problems with this so
really we need to make sure that we're actually capturing these in the same way that we capture our images
so that's the the flat frames really covered now by us lots of people are saying about bias
do we need it with more modern cameras don't we need it i generally use it
i've used it right from the beginning it's not just calibrated against the main image so people will argue that
you know some of the dart friends are taking bias out so you don't need to double subtract it
but there are subtracting bias from the flat frames so this is one of the key things and you'll
see this in a more modern software now is actually asking for flat phone bias frames or it's asking for
what we call dark flats which i'll run into in a minute but as we can see from this this is a master bias and it's
removing again the electronic noise these lines from the back of the sensor sometimes we have a column out on a
sensor so you might have a complete column uh that's failed on the sensor
it will also help in removing that from the finals uh image that's stacked
together so dark flat frames they're they're a more modern thing and they're um dark frames
that are actually captured to uh the same settings as what your flat
frames are so if we go back to that system here uh where are we because i
think i just moved it there we go if i bring this back over
so what we would be doing with this now is leaving exactly the same settings
as the flat frame and then we're going to remove the flats panel and we're going to put the cap
back on and we would capture 100 frames with the same settings and these would be dark
flats generally i only use these once we start going over two seconds
but it's become more and more popular and a lot the software is asking for this now so pix insights asking for it
now um astral pixel processor and other pieces of software but they are actually
using the darts to calibrate against the flats and that that's really what they're there for
but all of these optical defects go to ruin an image and that's the reason why we're
capturing these um in the background and then processing them through
so when we actually look now at if i bring up the new processing system
that's been updated in pixin site give me two seconds
there we go when we actually load these into the
system you'll see that they come in like this now under the darts
we've got one set there for our master darts yeah at different times and then we
would add these um dart flats in in the same area
the difference on this now is is we've got a new control panel here so i can select this and then i can set the
debayer in the system over here and so on so really that's the way forward with this now and that's
the reason for using some of the calibration frames but if anybody's got any questions on these they're welcome to ask throughout the show
right know gary uh i think for the last part of that the screen wasn't shared
oh that's all right that's right we'll have a look at that bit in a little bit sure sure
so who's our uh who's up next here um
let's have a look through andreas let let's run over to you and um we'll have a
chat for a while because it's always interesting to listen to what you're uh what you're running through there
oh thank you gary it's very nice to be back on the show again and
this has been very cloudy in part of sweden for a long time and uh
i have a couple of uh [Music] couple of nights when i has been
very good weather and i've used much of my time to learning to process my image
once again i have a captcha with my new setup wwe 2600 camera so i
go back and re-post reprocessed all my data and i think i could do something better
last after the last show i go back and started reprocessing
my first lost planetary of mars and
i'm also what you call a lacy astronomer i am up late into 4 00 a.m in
the morning and i go to work so i'm lazy in that way that i don't use i
only use lights and dorks and i don't use anything else
and that's common a surprise to you and is because of some issues with the
always what i call light pollution they always destroy my immersion there are some
heavy gradients so i have learned to process them out in the pixel site and other programs so i have
the better getting a depth the battery i be processing the image
tonight i'm going to spoke a little about planet imagery i know
damien peach was on and the man was interested how to became a damien peach
he is very good at capturing uh planets so i'm going to share some
insight how to capture how i capture planetary i'm going to
share some also some pictures and
compare some uh results with like one one minute for different
targets to show like uh newcomers what's the difference between
all targets how bright or with just one minute with my hyperstar
system so i'm probably going to see here going to share my screen by sharing
if i share the correct one
hopefully i share this or the right screen yes
yeah i can see that are they incorrect hopefully you see all my images correct
yep here i live it's stockholm sweden here's my portal eight nine and skies
here's some here's some oh
light see the light as a gun this is the cloud
images in your folder at the moment android okay sorry
see how
[Music]
we try it again
and now it's here is this the correct one
okay i can see your background and i can see the folder yes that's it yes yes that's the correct way that's it now
yeah this is my uh bortilate nine zones here i am shooting uh
so somebody complain about one light i have a lot of lights as you
can see this is my backyard i'm shooting from so
here i'm at night this is powder by the way it's like this
and now i'm going to share some
talk about how we capture i reprocessed my latest
this is about three minutes i'm gonna talk a little about hike how i captured it
i captured it with uh my c8 with uh with a with a bordeaux or a power mate
and the powermate is a lot better in just the quality when
you're capturing and i use a mono camera then you have can you and then i shoot in
rgb red green and blue so i will have to learn about every planet to
rotation speed so i capture this with the one minute video with the
five second interval and with each filter i refocus
before i start the session i swing out to mars and then i have some
set to go over the settings so every channel has an own setting with milliseconds or so
and on the last channel on the blue channel i refocus because that channel
oh it's focused in another way so i shoot
one minutes video and then i stacked it in in the auto stacker and
then i process the video i'm going to share some uh
raw some some video how it may look like in uh
when i shoot this is a raw video from coming from uh
when i shoot so um you have to have to think about planet rotations
when i don't overshoot it too long and then
the most important one is shooting uh high power is the stable you have to look for a high
pressure in in the clouds and and i can always look at
the the sky and look at if the stars twinkle more than it's a lot of
what you call it's a lot of job streams so um so i focus on that night that or um that's
not twinkling so much then i know that this stable is strong as
i can show you this is also i showed some this is a raw video with the moon
is stable and shot at four thousand millimeters this is raw image before i process it so
it's very stable that night then i shot also mars
so as stable is uh the the post most important thing and seeing
and then let's calm down what the equipment you use they use then you have
to calculate something called sampling it's making use the
the best performance or the optical so with a big scope you use big pixel if
you have a small scope like a small refractor then you use uh small pictures
and calculators for that very easy to uh
and then last time i showed them there are some high-powered
martian lunar actually steak and this is also after stacking and
reprocessing uh i think i wanted to share this box
this atmosphere was very stable so this is what you can get out of it
and i have a lot of time to reprocess my image and i launched i learned from a guy
called the astro blunder he has he has a outreach program he's educational i shoot with the
hyperstar system and i discovered that my when i used the hell extreme felt i was
clicking so i always get ten percent of light in half h alpha and uh when i shoot in
ellen hans i got to around fifty percent and i tried it out myself so i
image like a test image and that was actually the case so
he helped me a lot and i just used the correct filter for my sky there
is a new filter called the ida's mbc out or no it was mbx but they
have some problems but there are coming new filters for
mars and for uh deep sky that are dual bound and uh with the
fast system and uh now i'm going to share this is
the first image i reprocessed this pleiades so i got didn't click so much highlight
so i reprocessed that image i'm very satisfied with that one i think
this was i have to learn processing when you do pics inside
the order i have to construct the order that works for me and the sequence when you do
some distractions and do all other things that will affect the
image in the final so i have find a solution that works very fine for my
skies and i can maintain a lot of detail and also
get a very clean image without using some
some calibration calibration frames or flat frames because i'm lazy and i don't have
the time to do it so i i try to be very good at processing but we'll see in the future if i start using
them next this is this m33 triangulum galaxy and also
reprocessed it goes out with a lot more
detail in it so it was also a success and next one is the
warshadowflame and i learned from my friend who has uh
it is called sean nelson he has a astrichan he was here on explore scientific
and uh he showed me that if you should use snore on the green channel then the
stars turn blue when you shoot nerve bound so that was uh helpful for me so
that helped me a lot so this is two hours and 20 minutes i think of shooting with a f
1.9 system on my hyperstar system next this is
i'm orion this is about three hours in integration this turned out really fine
i get a lot of crowds and i didn't bother to shoot it at the second time because i
i was not happy about the story i am it was a new mount and i
i tried to get it i was not happy but uh now i
started using multi multi-store guiding and my guidance works a lot better
next thing we missed is the force helmet this was only
15 minutes of integration and i have a lot of gradients in that
image but um it was just a try i'm gonna reshoot it with uh
now and now now i have the guiding all fixed off with the native f7 but this
takes a lot time to do it so this was one try here we have the result
that was showed over two nights i have two clear nights over here in
february the
12th and 13th and this was shared at what they call it valentine's day
so this is what this look from my sky in oh
with 5 hours on integration so this is always
iris in this also so this is what's the first thing is that i use multi-scale
multi-star guiding and i got 33 better guiding so this is about
0.8 0.9 arc second so it helps me a lot and i think this revolution in just
planet or guiding for that matter the next one is reprocessed capturing
from the sombrero galaxy is uh one is one that i shot one year ago i didn't
what is that i didn't process it correctly i didn't know how to process that so i get back to the whole date and
reprocessed it and i'm very happy about the result then it's
came out better than i think so this is one target i'm gonna shoot with a f7 system on native lists
later if the clears out sometime here's the m33
hello m13 hercules cluster this shot this was my first torque shooting with
f7 so this is a very high image this was around four hours in
integration but i only kept about one hour so i blanked it in about
maximum i always blinked it in picks inside so i concentrate at the core so we can
probably swim into the core and count all the stars in it and all around and uh looks very fine so i looked for
detail in that it was not a guide in that effect and target
affected the image i introduced blink that then it was i think it was the sky that was
affecting my image with the wobbly sky or some gut streams not the
guiding so uh i it took a while to uh get the image that i wanted andreas
can you hold that so i can count the stars yeah i have to count to the three
hundred thousand yes so i should i i i will begin now
okay come on go on yes a little galaxy up here i showed
this in uh full mode yes uh just around full moon it's very good to
just sources in star clusters so that doesn't affect the image that was also shot within my same
reply to 2006 camera it's a very good camera for ins the best camera i always used
well i was before i shot this image uh let's see
go back the last dms i shot was a moon picture
i just do a quick moon shot i stacked it um it's a high resolution
moon i do with my uh same camera before i do some deep
just for fun it turned out better than i anticipated so this was uh
well one of those nighttime everything went my way
[Music] i'm always going to touch on a little about
many ask what type of beginners they ask what kind of targets
i'm gonna shoot here's four second flame just one minute of hyperstar it's very dim as you can
see we don't see a lot in one minute but you see something that was my test target for ellen haas and l extreme that
i uh discovered it that helen has was a lot better than the
with this system when i should gonna shoot f7 then i'm gonna use alex stream but um
that depends on how fast or what configuration you have on your system
next uh is one minute of the m33 and uh this this target is a lot
brighter and it's very uh you can show this with a 400 millimeter
or 500 millimeter this is where bright's popular new target
next is uh m rhyme it's a very popular target
a new beginner's target this is just one minute to show the difference between all the targets
so they're uh they can show how bright they are compared to one another
often when i shoot i use a program called uh any desk
it's where i sit on my desk or my phone and i can just this is m13
i just take a screenshot over it and um this i use for just for uh
to uh to have uh monitor my system also i always
this is live feed from one minute from mri and so
i always monitor via via my phone or via my
computer depends on where i am are you really in stockholm
this is a 10 minute test shot i did
i know but i can't i can't get those picture and i leave you only
it's also just a test picture and i just played to bring out the trapezium but
yes it was only a test shot this is not included in the final stack of my orion
really good really good obvious and uh next i want to try out is multi-store
gate guiding it's a new it's only alberto but
the thing is that you use one star and then then picks uh 12 stars and you've got a
higher rms number and that levels out the guiding and helps my system to guide
a lot better than norman do with the system i was surprised it was about 30 to 40 better
guiding and i think this is the game changer for all astronomers who buy
maybe uh don't have a high-end mount or i think this is the future in just
guiding to help us as strong and to guide better and if you're not if you're
new to this hobby and you don't know power alignment then this could help you guiding a lot so
so this is uh this is what i have in mind in
sharing for today i think there's some there's some really nice images there andreas yeah dude i always
look at where you are that that's my key thing um those images of those street lights running outside
your place um they're the thing that crop up each time that i see one of your images
but yeah it's a lot yes uh i have a lot the image and that's therefore i don't use this calibration
frames because my scope is pointed at one direction i got light from one place and pointed at
the other i got so that's a very uh if i were in a more uh
if i don't have this light maybe i will use it but i learn how to uh process out all my
oh yeah the bad weather and this is just three hours um
that's the fun with astronomy that you uh you're never satisfied satisfied and
uh next uh i probably gonna hopefully go six or nine hours i will take this to
the limit too i don't the mark of a good astro photographer is
is they're never satisfied they're always after improving on their last set of images
and it is that process you look at them and you go well if i did this i did that
if i change this setting if i use that filter or i did something else and that's how we're improving the
images and moving forwards all the time yeah and the new camera i was very happy
about the 2006 channel camera for in my mortal scale it uh
it pick up a lot of less light pollution with same filters and
the image are a lot of cleaner to work with so it it's really helped me a lot
and for my where i live so this is probably the
only way i can do astronomy if i don't have any
i can shield galaxy like with f7 system with a reducer but it
will take uh take some more time to produce an image but i will get there also
it's all the learning process it's no different as quick as you think you've learned something then like the
the guiding the new guiding using guiding using more styles that totes another learning process and then
there'll be something new next week that will come out and then we'll be so you're forever building on this and
learning uh as we move forwards um sometimes you do have to put a stop on
it and learn what you've got otherwise you you go past all of these things
learning little little bits of them and not really getting all of the information
about what the changes are but everything seems to have a change every couple of weeks you know it's like the
same with the new um weighted batch processor and picks insight that's changed
you've got changes with the guiding software changes with cameras changes with filters
uh so it needs to seem to never-ending uh chasing battles sometimes to keep up
with the technology yeah also it uh helps me a lot in the one you do when you do when you have
this stuff always tacky and deep structure for a guy called elon mcdonald he compared
deep sky stacking with pixel sight and the result was exactly the same
so there was no difference there deep sky stacker is more friendly i don't have to use all this calibration frame
so another pixel sight that i i have discovered when i do a division
and i do it in sim in a different order the whole
image turned out different and i got a really more cleaner image so
this is a learning process process we are all in different kind of
situation i have all this slight pollution to work around so this is a painful but
learning experience but thanks very much for that android can
you just turn your screen share off for us please yeah there we go excellent
so well over this side it's still remaining cloudy i did see a few
uh styles earlier but there's no live imaging i don't know whether anybody else has got anything up and running i
think it's all uh pretty cloudy everywhere with everybody that's on here at the moment the old sky
camera's up and running but it's cloudy yeah i've got mine running here and it's cloudy it's exactly the same
um so yeah i haven't done much imaging this week so let me just fire up another
screen we had a small solar flare today
so that started off that's nice yeah that started off like that that's where the one-shot color camera it was
just on at the time um clouds came through and then switched over to
a slightly more wide field camera so we could see what else and we can see it
going out there and then that's the end so after about 15 minutes
20 minutes um it's all over with but the solar flares are uh quite rare
at the moment and it's not even big enough to register on anything but uh we did capture it
um deep sky imaging one are processed up uh from earlier this week i say processed
up i calibrated it we did no processing with this apart from stretch the image
so there's no noise control no nothing else it's just that is the image
more or less straight from the camera we've just subtracted the darts the flats and the biases
um and that's a hydra now for image um from the week and
i processed up an image from december had some high cloud go through so it's bloated the styles out
um but that was an image from december that got processed up this week um which was about an hour's worth of
data um on the same telescope that i've got behind me that we were doing some tests
on it's just a shame that the styles have got a little bit bloated out by the clouds but
apart from that uh this week on imaging we've not really uh
not really done a lot so but probably more than others have done so
i know that you take every chance damage though i i have captured quite a lot i've just not had a chance to process it
and that seems to be the problem at the moment that i end up with folders and
uh like the orion image there i was asked for an orion image and it was uh yeah we did that back in december
and it's still sitting on the hard drive and not processed um so you're going through quite long periods
of time uh without getting them processed even though the weather's not been that good but i have managed to capture quite
a lot of data this week it's just i don't know when i'll get around to getting it all calibrated out so
um i think on timing before we go to a break we are going to
go over to chuck allen from the astronomical league and ask some
questions and answer uh give us some of the answers from one of the last
star parties um always nice to speak to chuck and hear what the astronomical league's
doing in the us and around the world with its um its affiliations that run out now for
people who live outside the us thank you these these uh questions and answers are
for door prizes that are given out and
i think that chuck has the email address but i will go ahead and put it down here
it is explore alliance at explorescientific.com
and you will send your answers into the email address uh
and and not into the chat because that that's what gets you uh in
the running to win and i'll turn it back over to you chuck okay thank you scott and thank you gary i'm sorry you're
having clouds in europe uh we had six straight weeks of clouds here and it finally cleared up and now i can't get
any sleep so we're having beautiful nights here anyway let me share the screen here
uh if i can find it there we go
and there we go is that visible to everyone yes okay
um first of all we always start off with a solar warning because uh a lot of
these door processes involve equipment that can be used of course for observing and we want to make sure
people don't make any mistakes that will cost them vision for the rest of their lives so
never observe the sun without professionally made solar filters that include energy rejection filters that
fit securely on the front end of the telescope the top end don't use solar filters or welders
glasses that attach only to the eyepiece and as heat can build up and shatter those
don't leave a telescope or binoculars unattended in daytime especially if kids are around
make sure if you're using eclipse glasses that they're certified
that you've obtained them from a source that is reliable and
that you do not use eclipse glasses with other optical equipment like binoculars or a telescope they're solely for naked
eye use and consult knowledgeable solar observers in local
astronomy clubs before you undertake this they can save you a lot of heartache
okay so moving on uh we'll look at the answers to terry mann's questions from gsp 34.
we asked this question a moon in the solar system bears the name of a condition manifesting itself by the
inability to retrieve a word from memory when needed what world does this moon orbit well the
moon's name and the condition is called dysnomia and it is the moon of eris
one of our dwarf planets this galaxy which lies 32 billion light
years away from earth today is the furthest galaxy ever imaged what is its name
it's gn z11 the z11 refers to the fact that the light's been traveling to us
for so long that it's the wavelengths of light coming from the galaxy have been stretched 11 times its light took 13.4
billion years to reach us and the winner was james hubbard and i neglected to say
that the winner of the previous question was gary alban on dysnomia
in question three aridness the river also the most mispronounced constellation in the sky
was one of the 48 constellations the ptolemy identified in the second century
aridness was also taken as the latin name for what real river on the earth
and the answer to that question was the poe river in italy the po river is not quite as windy as a
redness is but nonetheless that's the correct answer and the wonder winner was andrew corco
excellent okay so here are our questions for tonight the first one choosing among a yellow
star a blue star and a red star which is the hottest
okay and question number two the term dog days of august comes from
the egyptians who thought that the extra heat from the dog star combined with that of the sun to create hot weather in
the summertime what star did the egyptians call the dog star
and finally manned and unmanned space missions have landed on a total of two planetary moons
in the solar system they are the earth's moon of course and what other moon the surface of which is seen here
okay and that will do it for the questions for tonight scott and gary thank you very much yeah thank you thank you chuck
thanks chuck okay um i think we're going to go to a 10-minute break now
okay when we come back we're gonna have libby give us a presentation so uh we're gonna
go straight into a ten minute break time for everybody to grab a cup of coffee and
uh something a bit stronger if required if required
all right okay here we go
so
thank
[Music]
so this morning
thank you
uh
uh
going forward
oh
uh
earlier
yes
that's just what's needed mate
i haven't even written a talk yet
never mind we'll wing it as usual i i'm being good
on my orange juice tonight i've been on coffee all day
i have enough problems speaking straight as it is let alone alcohol as well tonight well
cheers anyway yes orange use as well
i have to say andreas forget where you're imaging that picture of the moon is probably one
of the nicest shots i've seen thank you
you mean the full moon huh you mean the full moon yeah
yeah it was shot to me with my reducer and edge hd with
and i use to film it with the asi cap so i
filmed a one minute video and i use rc lm auto snacker and then i reprocessed in
lightroom so this was my second time or i did uh
what they call a mineral moon the first one i did with explore scientific i was this is on my wall here is
i was not happy about the caller but i the time was right so i was shooting in
full moon with the m13 so i i wouldn't try to get a battery shot so it turned
out well i think i think where you've won is so many people in astrophotography terms
chase detail with and sometimes you can lose the photographic
you know the art of it i suppose and a pleasing image you know what what your picture the full
moon has got as you know it's a really pleasing image that happens to have lots of detail and
sharpness so many times you see loads of pictures where they've either been over processed
or they've been processed to show a lot of detail at the expense of the image
looking as nice as it could if that makes any sense yes this makes a lot of sense
i see when i before i uh shoot anything i researched the picture
i often look at stellarum and look at that and i get a detail in my head how the i want
it to be look like and then as i have uh my mother's
brother was a painter or an artist so i got some thing in my vein about
that creative side i was i didn't become a musician i
i should i do astrophotography instead so this is my creative side so uh
and uh i shoot i photograph wildlife um
anything with a camera besides this so this is a hobby for me also i love taking pictures and
i just stumble upon this like uh three years ago
and loads of us fall into it somehow yeah
and um this was uh
i remember gary buying his first imaging scope yeah that was a while back it was a
while back wouldn't it
that you had that c11 kicking around the bike shop as well didn't you i have a couple i had the
hd 11. and i had the
um it was the cpc11 that's it
yeah cpc11 and the cpc8 yeah and the hd
i hope steve had the hyperstar on it well how long ago was when did i do my bike training with with you
that must be i'm gonna say about nine years yeah eight nine years yeah i had
hair then back in the day
it didn't turn me gray anyway it's not me bald
that that's putting the bash out on and off yeah yeah hyperstars is very easy for beginners as
well to uh start the imaging yeah
well you suddenly you suddenly go from going through a full optical system to shoot in f2
and then i was stupid enough to go for a lx 200 gps
fantastic telescope don't knock it and we're back uh
uh you are watching the 35th global star party um co-hosted by gary palmer
astronomy with uh none other than himself gary palmer so gary i'm going to give you back the uh
stage and um let you take it from here thanks scott um well it still clouded
out i keep seeing a nod style in the night sky but there's nothing uh tremendous going on it might never know
mike clear um we'll have to wait and see but i thought we'd uh drop over steve collinwood
yeah from pulsar observatories and put him on the spot and you just thought you'd do that because i haven't prepared
anything [Laughter]
fasten your seat belts in people this is winging it 101. let's um
do something inspired by where is it hang on i will screen share
in a second inspired by andreas picture of the moon oh no
oh yes brace yourselves here we go so if i go to the desktop and
then a shower right you should be able to see
desktop there we go can you you can all see a rather mediocre picture of the moon i take it
yes yep good that's the start it's this bit
i'm going to talk about
that is we don't need the squeegee right that was a straight wall most people recognize it rupert's rector
a fantastic target i have to say one of my favorite targets
on the moon because i'm we're we're at the base level here we're not talking about
cameras and image processing um i like looking at the moon
with mark one eyeball um but i just it's a fantastic fantastic
target and it's just next to my favorite crater on the moon
my favorite crater um is a crater called bert
mainly because it's called bert i've got to be honest i just think it's a great name for a
crater but it's one of those wonderful things about them we know we still know so little about it and yet discoveries are still so recent
you know so um it's named after um a selenographer
called um well william burt you didn't see that coming did you um
celenography of course is the scientific mapping of the moon um and he was doing that in the 18th century
um i think he died in 1881 so he'd been going quite a while
but i just it's a tiny little crater it's a little network of craters it's just it's been a lifelong
project to try and actually photograph it recognizably as simple as it sounds it's not
difficult but i've never i'd never managed it until a couple of weeks ago
and um i didn't use any fancy gear
it was just it was just one of those nights as andreas was talking about his full moon every so often you just get a night where
it goes together and um i like doing things with basic equipment
so every day we're surrounded by all the flash stuff um i will show you what i use to
generally image the moon and i do this i use
one of those two ah so that's a four and a half inch f-15
that's a three-inch f-13 um traditional acromats
the one at the back the brass one i made and um
it's just a wonderfully tactile you you're out there with the moon
it's just you and the moon and you don't have to worry about taking darks flats biased frames
you don't need to worry about picks in sight and sharp cap and pixel depth well depth noise reduction
you just look at the moon and where it comes to imaging is
often missed loads of people will jump straight into the idea of imaging without
really looking through a telescope so my first bit of advice to anyone
any of you guys ever tried sketching
yes but no yes me too yeah um yeah bit agricultural is probably the easiest
way of putting it my sketches was it a stick man on a circle saying moon
[Laughter] it's um the thing is it
observe if you want to if you want to really succeed in imaging i think it's really helpful if
you actually have a have a degree of experience observing because you get a feel for what the
telescope can do you get a feel for what the object may or should look like especially if it's a brighter object
like orion or something but sketching teaches you to observe
it's getting it gets you sitting at the eyepiece for half an hour on a single target
you know how often do we do that nowadays unless you're imaging it i think one of the biggest things is is
when you first come into astronomy and you first look through a telescope it looks nothing like the images in the magazine
that's right um you you get a little bit of disappointment there um
and then you start working out the uh cameras the way that you're gonna get the images in the magazine
but after a bit of time when you you run around imaging even if it's with a basic dslr you put an eyepiece back in
and you learn to appreciate the targets and take out the detail you can see and then when you start getting larger
telescopes or different telescopes you really do realize how good the optics are in some of them to what you
start with oh yeah absolutely but the beautiful thing observing is one of
those skills that stays with you yeah can you can you guys remember those observing observation sheets
very yeah manually write down everything seeing what
telescope you are using okay i had just one and one ocular
but you throw the whole sky and write it down manually
so one of my one of my favorite books
because i i always like to bring an old book when i'm on
the moon the moon is patrick moore and hp wilkins it's a
very controversial moon book because a lot of the images and things were
um let's say it was suggested they were embellished they were they were
exaggerated and details were added that weren't really there um but this is actually the beauty of it
is it's actually an observing record of two guys trying to map the moon oh wow
and i don't know so if you've never read it it's really worth trying to get hold of a copy i think it was published in the 50s um
might be wrong on that someone would probably um normally i would know because i have
that sort of brain but i'm on the hop today um anyway we'll call it 50s but it
literally is it's an observing record with sketches
of what they looked at and it's a magical it's a magical read
you know it doesn't rely on any any photographs particularly they're all hand sketches
and uh you know it really inspires you to start hunting down some of these targets yourself
there are still quite a few people over here who are sketching yeah absolutely
he's really good at sketching um dietrich out in ireland she does a lot
sally russell's luke moon um sketches are second to none
really i mean there's actually paul abel that challenged me about uh sketching um
we were doing a star party at patrick's house years and years ago and we were both looking at the same target through
different telescopes and at the end of the night we're having a drink in the the study and he showed
me these pictures he'd drawn i think of jupiter and they weren't what i'd seen
you know and he said well you know you record every detail as you go and you build up this
picture a bit like taking a video and stacking
through but you're doing it with your eyes and your hands and and it's just a wonderfully tactile
it really connects you with what you're looking at i think i think a great way to see
uh how well this works is to look at something observe something very faint like a
galaxy and without looking at the photograph of it but just
putting your hand down to where you think that there's detail and then comparing it to a photograph
you will see that you actually did observe much fainter than you then just you know one
one long look would do you know so it's it's um it's uh it is interesting how that how
that uh happens it i think it and what it do it trains you to observe and to benefit the detail
it gives you patience it gives you an eye for accuracy um you know it helps you develop
techniques such as averted vision where you look slightly past the objects
you know um there's it's just a wonderful i mean i'm not saying it's a forgotten
art because they're you know it isn't but it's easy to gloss
over i think people also do struggle with eyepieces when they first start
looking through it um you see that election is doing live uh
outreach events absolutely people come up and they look at through the telescope and it's
you know it doesn't matter how bright the object is i can't see it yeah yeah and then you you know you tell
them to move their eye around the eyepiece and and um not put their eye too close to it
yeah come back a little bit and then move in and then it's oh yeah i can see that's really nice so it's really clear
but people do struggle with uh yeah funding objects certainly when they're failing and of course ip selection is
key and it's also matching the type of eyepiece to the type of telescope which
is often overlooked as well you know for instance if like me you like double stars
and literally i just enjoy taking stars in and out of focus i'm a sad sad man
but um yeah i like i'm an optical engineer people it's what you do um
i like orthoscopic eyepieces now you try using an orthoscopic eye
piece when you've never seen a telescope it's not going to happen they're a pinhole yeah but if when we do outreach at the
observatory science centre um down in sussex which is in the uk and it's opening very soon you should all go and
book a place and go and support it um we have a we have various large historic telescopes so we always use low power
eyepieces and the first people first things people say is
how much power can we have how big can you make it yeah and
it you you naturally want to zoom in yeah but it's learning to actually do you know
what i'd love small bright and sharp and then work from there yeah and you
know you'll get 40 or 50 families up and you we we always i always let the kids go first and you always say something
right tell me what you can see i won't tell you what we're looking at and it's just magical to hear a
five-year-old or a six-year-old describing the belts on jupiter where you haven't primed them and what
they're looking at but the beauty we use in the large telescopes in the observatory is if they
grab the eyepiece it doesn't move anywhere where's when we do
when we do this with an uh 110mm or an lx or something like that
yeah the first thing most people do is actually physically grab the eyepiece and you have to tell them don't touch it
yeah because you're they're moving the telescope back onto the target again it's one of the pitfalls
about outreach astronomy but it's also one of the yeah it's part of engagement isn't it it's
part of engaging with people and some people are going to grab it and move it and that's life that's it yeah
it is seeing the look on their face when they actually see that target you know hearing the comments
we're going to even with a pair of soda sunglasses you get a group of children you give them solar sunglasses and they
look up like meerkats at the sun and it's wow uh you know all of those comments that are
coming out and that's what makes doing that sort of thing really good oh yeah and i've been lucky enough to be in it
long enough now where i mean i've been volunteering at the science centre for probably 17 years um
doing outreach and i remember you you'd have a family come in
and look at the they'd see saturn or the moon or jupiter or or iran or something
years later they would come into um telescope house and so we've come to buy a telescope because actually we were at
the science center about a year ago and this guy showed us the moon and we just haven't been able
to get it out of our head and we're gonna chase it you know you see these people entering in and it
it's just from that that wonderful magic of looking through the eyepiece yeah and that that's what it's about
yeah i'm not saying that imaging detracts from that in the slightest i think imaging is a natural progression and
inspires just as many people you know you see the picture and you do lose half of the night sky when
you put an eye piece in you look at the target you move off to another target and then so on so you actually do a tour
of the sky when you're on a camera you're imaging that for x amount of hours so theoretically 99.9 of the sky
you've missed yeah yeah through that yeah the thing is
it's all up there to view yeah yeah that's it not much else you can do with
it you might as well look at it
thanks for that yeah really appreciate that what we're going to do now is is
move over to libby yeah and libby's gonna give us a talk about light pollution
you know which i'm quite interested in listening because i used to live in london so i know loads and loads around
the light pollution and uh problems it causes so welcome to the
the star policy libby thank you i made a presentation so i'm going to share my screen
so here it is um light pollution is one of the problems
that genres have a bunch of right now um
i know none of us will not none of us but most of us may live out in
some more remote places or some of us may live out in cities
and it's just different for all these people um my cushion is caused by light when it
gathers and i when i first got my telescope my first
telescope my 16 millimeter me telescope uh i had to bring it out to the front i had
to bring it out to the front yard i can't use my backyard because i have dogs and they'll push my telescope over
and in my front yard i would have to go to the driveway
and i would always remember cars would drive by they would shine their lights at me
there were multiple problems i had faced because a bunch of my neighbors they all had
their house lights on and street lights car lights coming by
and i felt like that was a problem a lot i mean no one really seemed to think that i was
in the genre and uh a bunch of the lights in the neighborhood whenever i walk outside
they all turned on and uh like dang it they all turned on
um high sides can cause lots of light pollution um
definitely turn them off when you leave the house and i always try to turn
all my lights off in the house when i'm not using them or if i'm not in the room
currently or it just whenever i leave the house just to make sure
and uh some of us are genres if you don't live in a remote place that has you know no
light pollution uh there's things called national dark sky spots which i
it's like a fresh like breath of air to finally be able to go out and
see the actual stars because me uh i can hear the highway
right from my bedroom window and i i always complained about it because i'm like
we live so close to the city we need to we need to move farther out um
and like it's just like a rush of fresh air
because there's like you can see all the stars um the stars are brighter
um some places you can even see your shadow from the milky way
where i live you can see your shadow from the moon but you can't see it from the milky way and you can only see
stars like you already only see like some constellations the moon
and some some if you look hard enough if you
look very hard you can see star clusters so please do turn off the lights um i'm
pretty sure i was a stronger we all know that uh we're all gonna turn out the light
because we're we know we all know the struggle of light pollution and
that's why we go away to star parties because the dark sky spots because you know we
don't have light pollution we have all this slight pollution at home and uh
it was funny one of the other nights i took out my red flashlight which i usually don't do because i haven't been
to a star party since i started a real like a real star party because i started doing astronomy quarantine
and so i got out my red flashlight and i thought maybe it would keep people
from shining their lights at me maybe it'll make them turn off and they did not turn off all the lights
and most of the cars just didn't care that i had a red flashlight or didn't care that i had my telescope out
and uh looking back like a long time ago when it was like the renaissance of
astronomy and discovering you know like every single like every
single day someone could walk out into your their backyard and see the milky way
and you know that that has definitely changed
changed a bunch since you know a lot of cities use a lot of light um i
know new york is famous for the city that never sleeps because they always have their lights on everyone's always
like 24 hours a day everyone has lights on and that's i've
taken a couple trips to new york before and it is always like like the sky isn't even black it's just
a very very light blue and um one of the things that uh annoys me in
my neighborhood is the white the street lights are not led lights
so led lights are better for you know like lighting
than the like more orangish ones that a lot of people use that are the traditional like
oranges oranges ones and some recently a lot of people changed them
over to the led white lights and but my
my neighborhood all down the street i have the traditional lights that calls
light pollution and it's just nice to go to national dark sky spots and
be at star parties share pictures and everything because a lot of people have light pollution that's a problem
and where you love counts i know i was saying a lot of people here might may live remote or
far out when and a bunch of people too they so if they have an observatory they also
make sure to put it far out and remote and i
live and wanted like i've lived in a very likely
place and i've been trying to find ways around that so
apparently i'm trying to figure out ways to edit my photos which you can also edit your photos
from light pollution there's a bunch of editors out there now it takes a lot of skill though
um so yes please turn off your lights because it does matter
i mean it matters a lot um i like to complain that i have this golf place over
by my house and the light pollution is almost unbelievable and um
it's very hard to do astronomy but i always travel far out to manage so
if you can please turn your lights off
wonderful great job very good thank you it really is a
big topic for astronomers whether you're visual or whether you're imaging and there are
lots of changes we we're seeing them certainly in the uk we've moved more to lead lighting now so
the the biggest problem with led lighting from an images point of view is its white light
and white light is actually what we're imaging in space therefore it's quite a hard
problem to remove that from an image and i i know when the the lead lights
first came out over everybody's going oh we're gonna you know remove all the sodium the yellow lights and or orange lights and
uh everything will be great and i said yeah but when the ground gets frosty and it's cold it's going to act like a big
mirror and when you've got lead light coming down to it it's going to reflect back up into the sky and and that's
what's happening but luckily uh lots of places more rural over here they do shut the
lights down from sort of 1am yeah until the early morning so it does
go dull and we've had a couple of dead lights i have a couple of odd ones here that are around but companies are doing
other things now the new uh i-dash filters these filters here these are target in
um led lighting yeah so they're after target in some of the the stray
led light they're very good the new enhanced filters uh and
extreme filters that uh more go after the narrowband things that they're working but the
biggest thing is if people switch the lights off then it's a lot better for everybody hello kevin
isn't your street lighting still gas and candle gary your candle
[Laughter] cause you're out you're out in deepest darkest whales i thought i am a man
unfortunately they uh put one of these um i'll just share this over now because
it's actually running there so you can actually see on the image here we can actually see one star in the
middle there at the moment but if i come back out on the the cameras field of view you'll see
give it a couple of seconds to bring an image in you'll see the led light in there
yeah yeah they haven't put any shade on it so um
we're in arguments at the moment and if they don't put shade on it then it's gonna get a paint gun
yeah with probably black or something like that shot all over it there's nobody around here to use the light
anyway it's so quiet around here so find their way around
huh how would you find their way around yeah it is
yeah um so that light it doesn't really affect most of the deep sky imaging that
i'm doing unless we get over that side uh in which case you just have to wait
until it's after 1am when it goes off but yeah it's nice it don't even go off
here yeah they installed them and when they were the yellow lights we
had no problem because nearly all of the light pollution filters were catering for that sodium and removing it so yeah
that's cool we were really lucky we sorry all my neighbors lights are like
automated so anytime a car comes by all lights just automatically turn on
and then anytime i get my telescope on like telescope just rule that to my driveway all the lights just turn on all
the way down the street and it's almost a joke
we don't have that here they're either permanently on or their their time to go off and it just gets really
annoying because nearly all the time there's mess up and when you get into the summer months the lights you've got less and less light here so we only get
about two hours real darkness in the uk andreas probably gets less than that um
and then all these lights are left on right into that that sort of two-hour spot so
i think that's a big problem yeah i think they're starting to think now aren't they the councils especially in the uk these led lights because they're
so directional as in you don't get the light pollution shooting upwards like you used to do with the old orange
lights they're so directional downwards they don't need to do anything but when we had the snow the other week
as you said before it just reflects straight back upwards and they are really blinding yeah yeah i i
think there's a lots of studies at the moment there's studies with wildlife how it's affecting
them um and even with us you know how our sleeping patterns are changing for areas
that have the lead lighting and um it doesn't switch off you know it's on all the time so
that sort of hints at a wider issue doesn't it that because it's like the blue light from screens
you know you spend your day strapped to a screen and a phone and a tablet and um
that blue light just keeps you awake yeah yeah and it's it is very unhelpful
for you and we're also just talking about humans and what it does to us but think about what it does to birds what
it does to all kinds of animals okay that rely on a dark sky yeah this the stud has been
done that that's saying it's actually now these these led lights the white light that they're producing is actually
affecting their clock mechanism yeah so yeah
and we have to be dead honest about it it's only done for cost yeah there's no other reason you know
it isn't as if it's better for anything it's just a cost reason that it's done
um for now oh yeah well i'll be honest i'm really lucky because they they put led lighting in my village
but it's all low level it's all shaded and i my house back to my garage see
seymour has he backs onto miles and miles of farmland and the farmer is an amateur astronomer
so all the security lights are turned off yeah overnight and he also
recognizes that it's important for the wildlife to have night and day you know um so i'm really lucky
and that i still get a little bit of uh what libby is talking about you know you
can't escape everything but i'm probably one of the luckier ones here
where um even though i live on the edge of town i live in a little village two miles out of town
it's remarkably dark because it's quite sensible i'm curious in the uk and uh
and i have heard a little bit of uh some litigation that's actually happening where you know i mean if your neighbor
was playing really loud music and it was keeping you awake okay you could call the police and and
they could they would come over and tell them to turn it down you know yeah
but what about the guy that's shining light into your yard okay
and uh it's called an air rifle or a hamstring
they're right away is gary's neighbors are too frightened of him to shine lights and make noise
that's what it is
do you know have you have you spoken to them about their lives
no not much um not much of the neighbors knowing really a scholar
um sometimes people come by with their cars i live right next to a highway
um an outdoor golfing place i'm next to that and so there's a huge like cloud of
light pollution not like a cloud but like it's huge and it's it's like
what what are they gonna do about it they're not gonna you
know there might be a good way in that gradually introducing a few of the
neighbors to look through your telescope that's true that's what i did so my neighbors had
loads of flood lights and security lights and flashing disco lights and all sorts of their gardens
and when they when they found i was an amateur astronomer um because they were trying to work out
what the strange building in my garden was mainly um they they saw we're really sorry we
didn't realize that you you stargazed we'll turn them off and i've been really lucky
not everyone is in the same boat but uh it's also a great in you know if you pop around and say look your lights keep
coming on but i'm really trying to look at this through my telescope would you like to have a look
um you know you never know what it will lead to that's true certainly when the moon's out one
evening that's the start yeah it's just let them have a look at the moon the telescope it's a nice easy target and
they suddenly start to work things out and it builds conversations and oh you wouldn't
believe it then you get annoyed with them keep coming around and not giving you any peace and quiet but yeah
itself nobody's it's very true so i with with everything that's been going on in the uk with brexit and kobe and
all those things you don't want to talk about i got fed up with our village facebook group being negative so i
posted a picture of the moon never done it before on there didn't know anyone on it just posted a picture
of the moon and i had something like 300 messages from our people in the village so that's
amazing have you got any more and now whenever it's a clear night i get messy i get messages coming up what
are you what are you looking at where can we find it it's it only takes one
the experience doesn't it and it's been it's become a for me it's become a reason to open my observatory
and take a picture my friend's grandparents can live across the street
anytime that there's like any i like even my just my telescope out the international space station comes by
um we'll come over and we'll watch it and we'll chase down the street and chase it down the street we'll trace
the international space station all the way
and actually what you've done in doing that libby is actually quite revolutionary in astronomy terms because
quite often astronomy is a very um solo hobby it's a it's a very you know you're
out there on your own you know and it's quite it's not as it's not as popular as it should be with
families and groups of friends getting around it's not it's not so much a
social hobby so if you're getting your relatives coming chasing the iss with you that's fantastic
you know and inviting the neighbors to see the moon or something you know could really open up a
it could revolutionize it you could argue it could change the world
you know putting a grand scheme on it you certainly change your neighborhood
absolutely i have a friend in ohio who put an observatory in
his backyard he's a former great lakes chair and um
his neighbors had a bright spotlight in their backyard and so and he was on friendly terms with
his neighbor and went over and asked him about it and the neighbor got mad said he didn't believe in science and ended up adding
another spotlight that aimed directly at the observatory oh my god this went on for quite a while and i
said look if if you've tried everything go to court there is such a thing as
light trespass which is no different than the noise that scott referred to a little while
ago uh anything that deprives you of the quiet enjoyment of your property
is actionable and i'm not saying this this is a last resort i'm talking about but obviously this is a neighbor who
uh was bound and determined to ruin his opportunity to observe and to speak to to libby's topic i i
firmly believe that light pollution is the reason astronomy societies in the united states
and i'm sure in europe can't seem to find a lot of young people anymore
our hobby is aging and the fact is despite the internet despite
the beauty of hubble space telescope images the thing that really hooks people is the sky itself when they see
it on a dark night and i had that opportunity where i live in
the suburbs of louisville kentucky in my backyard now it's just mall glow
here and i have to drive 72 miles to get to a dark sky site at patoka lake in the
middle of the hoosier national forest and i've done that 70 times in the last two and a half years but
even in those two and a half years i've seen deterioration of the skies there because of towns like french lick and
jasper indiana which you've never heard of probably and they're
they have enough auto dealerships and factories to create white problems that
and the ubiquitous uh security lights that seems like every farm and home has to have now that are
not shielded um it's it's a huge problem for restocking the hobby from
the youth end i think absolutely but i think libby's right
i think it's like how like there's like a full sky ahead of you and people think
that it's fake you know it takes hours and hours of sitting
outside of your telescope working hard taking pictures and
you know like sharing them around the world and like people to think that you just spent like 30 minutes just coloring on
the nebula because it's all real you know you can even point to it in the sky
it's all real and absolutely but
you said this so and it is a big thing if you live in a city and you go to a dark sky site any of
those uh small amount of locational styles that you use for anything maybe setting the
telescope up or finding your way around the sky they're lost yeah there are so many stars i mean here
you can trip over yourself overnight time yeah once all the lights are out it is so dark you could lose those main stars
yeah you find that with a lot of people when they come out to style parties or events from a city they're like wow we really
didn't know that that existed in the sky oh yeah i i lived in the city for years
and when i moved out to the village i decided i was going to put an observatory it went outside and thought it was cloudy
so it was about to turn around and go in then i realized it was the milky way yeah because i've never seen it
in 20 years of being an amateur i've never seen the milky way
it was it was exactly the same when i was in london it was no different now it was very very similar london's good for
city viewing is okay for planets though i have my best view of saturn from london ever
i took one of my best images from manchester of uh saturn um
it was on one of the scopes we were on about earlier from a cpc-800 and that was right in the middle of manchester
and uh stunning image from there so it is really down to what you like to
view and um what you like to uh image but i i can see where chuck's coming from you know
without people seeing looking up and and grabbing that interest that that's there is a decline there you
know in one respect you could argue i'm not exaggerating when i say if you know if people did turn their lights off yeah
and and you know libby and all of us engaged with our our neighbors
to say you know i'm looking through a telescope you want to kind of look why don't you turn your lights off you would actually change the world it's not an
exaggeration yeah because if you can get into the habit of getting people to turn their lights off
you you're using less energy you know so you're not you're not you're saving yourself money on electricity
you know you're you're you it's better for the environment in terms of light pollution as libby's
talk said you know it's actually a revolutionary thing we're doing in one respect yeah yeah
i've made it far grander than it actually is for the internet to say but
you know everything's got to start somewhere everything and you know turn your lights out yeah
a slogan that could change the world quite literally anyway i think we're gonna move over to
joseon yeah thanks for joining us jason joseph
runs a company uh all sky optics and
they are um building units for the uh
really for tracking meteors and tracking all sorts of objects in the night sky from
an actual static camera so i'm going to let jason uh explain what it's all about
and the reason why it's gaining popularity because it is becoming very very popular
okay so thank you gary uh for inviting me and scott for letting me be on as well um so my name's jason mcdonald as
you can see from the screen uh i've been into astronomy for years uh mainly
visual um not really into a photography side of it uh the only side that really captures my
interest is is solar when i started a solar uh facebook group many years ago which is
now quite popular uk solar imaging and observations um i work long hours uh in a in a retail
job and i don't get that much time to get home set the equipment up spend all
night outside um and then have to get up the next morning early so
i thought what can i do to take some visuals of the night sky so i started to look around and i found the
old sky cameras and there were several companies out there that make them
but they all seemed to me to be reasonably expensive for the amateur astronomer um if you just wanted to
spend a 100 couple of hundred pounds uh with an odd camera lying around and or you could go build your own so
um i went to a few star parties mainly kelling heath um in east anglia in
in the uk and uh had a chat with a few astronomers there um and decided that i was going to
build my own so i built my own sky camera basically using a honeywell security dome uh
drilled a few holes in it dumped a camera in there ran through few cables in and off we went uh and it worked i was
pretty gobsmacked to be absolutely honest with you um so i had it out on the uh extension on the
house and one evening i totally forgot we were having a storm and it blew the thing off completely uh
smashed it across the patio et cetera so that was the end of that one so i had
a quick look around uh sourced a few materials off the internet um and came up with a design
that you can sort of see behind me um which is this one's just mounted on a tripod
uh a normal photographic tripod took it to another couple of star parties had a bit of interest from it
a couple of people said would you be interested in making me one i said yes uh
so i made them a couple of units got some feedback and
basically i was told i think you should basically have a go at making a business out of this
so i started all sky optics uh about two and a half years ago a
little bit of help from a friend of mine called tim duke you might know me runs due control um
[Music] and we start i will i started to sort of mass produce these units uh so over the
last couple of years um i've probably built in the region of
about 50 or 60 units over the last two years uh some of them have been sort of
tailored to customer needs and i've now sold
uh canada america south america uh australia new zealand asia
um um quite a few in the uk of course um so it's been quite a
a successful little uh hobby that's turned into a successful little bit of a
business venture um so i have if i can do i'm gonna try and share my screen this is the first
time i've used zoom so please apologize if i don't get this right but i'm just going to show you uh some of the clips
that i take uh from my house here in harrogate in uh north yorkshire in in
the uk um as we've all spoken about before and libby definitely highlighted this
light pollution is a nightmare especially when you've got a perspex dome um that reflects light all over the
place um so i'm just gonna try and share my screen with you and i'll show you a few clips and i'll just show you a
couple of the customer builds as well that have been custom built for them so bear with me a minute please uh bear
with us can i get this right i don't know
there you go okay i got you yeah can you all see that yep you're sharing uh your whole screen
uh your whole uh desktop am i okay uh if you go back and stop sharing
can you see that now there you go that's better and now going into presentation mode okay so you can see here this was a
unit that went into uh queensland in australia that was one of the very first units
that i built here's one that got that's another
design totally different on a uh basically a um
tv aerial mount that's gone into scarborough in the uk
i'll give you a quick time lapse so this is can you see that time-lapse
running yeah okay so if you if you watch the time-lapse you can actually see the iss
go across yes yeah and if you if you've got really really sharp eyesight
um you'll be able to see one of the dragon x capsules follow it it's really really fake but it is there
very cool it doesn't make a great meteor camera
too i think yeah uh so in this the skies in harrogate uh when they're at the best
they look like this
so we've got the roof uh across the sort of mid uh 12 o'clock till four o'clock is laden with snow
nice so you can basically leave these running
these cameras running 24 7 if you want to um you can feed them live into
a website which you can have a a live screen running 24 7
or you can set them to start from say eight o'clock in the evening turn off at uh seven o'clock in the morning um
depending on what software you use and you can capture numerous frames and then turn them into
time lapses like you see here uh simplest software that you can use is sharpcap
that's a real real simple software to use to create your timelapses with
or you can get a very more dedicated uh software which is a free software
it's called all sky eye all sky eye allows you to feed into a
live website it allows you to put overlays onto the uh the actual time lapse so you can have
north south east west you can have your observatory name on there etc um you can
then plug into live weather stations so you can show your local weather as
you're running your time lapses or your live camera
um so the units that i've built um i sort of first started to build the idea
was to build them sorry this picture that you can see here is the typical
english weather at night so the units that i bought started to
build um i was building them around zoo cameras the zoo aside 120
one seven eight but i've started to 3d design uh cradles now that will hold altair
uh gp cams uh the qhy5 cameras um just so that
they're they're they're affordable units um because there are some companies out there um i think the cheapest is about
650 700 uk sterling pounds um which to a lot of astronomers is quite a lot of
money um so i just made the decision let's try and keep the package down as best as possible to an affordable
price mainly i think for me it was um a lot of astronomers
uh it's like buying nike trainers each year when the new model comes out yeah you buy this year's camera then you
put it to one side and you then go and buy the next year's camera so um i think the packages sort of appeal to somebody
that's got a camera lying around and that can use it so that was that's basically myself
that's all sky optics um and i do appreciate uh having the time to come and talk to you guys about it i hope you
have got some questions you may want to ask um so please fire away if you do uh
jason have you had any of your uh users uh use this camera for uh auroral
displays um no i haven't uh not yet uh tracy
snellis uh if you've heard of tracy uh comes from one of the
uh astronomy societies in north wales i believe she's trying at the moment uh
out on the fringes of anglesey where she's been with a dslr trying to catch the aurora so i believe
she's taking the units up there because i built her one last year
just looks fantastic great and and uh your website is
allskyoptics.com or yeah the website is also www.allskyoptics.com
and again with the website it's um what i found when i first started
four or five years ago trying to build all sky camera units is uh you were you were basically hunting
around the internet all over the place to find parts and part of my uh thinking was well what
if i could just bring this all into one place yeah you know so it's a one-stop shop
basically i can either build the whole units for you tailor them um or you can
buy the parts take it away um and have a little project and have a go at it yourself
um so the the next phase that's coming along and the next craze is to use the raspberry
pi units computer boards um and the new raspberry pi hq cameras
um because it's quite easy now to be able to have uh one of these full sky camera units on
your observatory yeah which is 13 30 40 feet 50 feet away from your house
but still be able to pick up your internet network
i'm liking this i think you sold some already on this program so well done
like some orders i i resorted to making my own
yep it was a total failure because because i machined it out of aluminium
yeah just because i have a lathe when i should have just used some mastic and a plastic box and some thought
a little bit of thought helps usually but actually what i just think is one of my favorite
types of night sky photography yeah wide field yeah extreme wide field as well
yeah i mean if you think about it your zoo camera your zoo si 120 2 2 4 1 7 8
they all come with these lenses yeah and a lot of people just throw them to one side and don't even think about using
them um but what you you know you can capture for example i mean sharp cap is is is
such a great free software just to be able to put a time lapse together you get some of the more complicated ones
ufo uh old sky and you can actually just use the camera to literally the software
will literally pick up the meteor entering the atmosphere take a numerous amount of frames and
then it will switch itself off and it's great for repurposing when you've upgraded your planetary camera
yes you know there's one month jason
if you can turn your screen share off for a second
yeah i can do it for him if you'd like yeah can you cause i'm not catching here we go okay there you go thank you for
your help there and then if i share this one back over
it's not that clear at the moment but you should be able to see that there aren't yeah
but what i'm actually using it more for is is the poor weather forecast here yep that's the key thing so i can see the
cloud coming in in the distance i can look down in the bottom corners here yeah and i can see the cloud anywhere
entering into the field of view and that means then there's less chance of the equipment getting wet
yeah yeah which is really what i'm i'm after i've been talking to uh one
guy who um is a programmer builds apps um and he's
quite seriously contemplating trying to build an app where he can if you've got a complete remote observatory that's
automatic yeah yeah um he can you he he's looking to build an app where you can plug into the app you can plug it
into your object your computer running in the observatory it will it will show you the picture of
what the weather condition is like outside your observatory um and then you can remotely trigger
your observatory to work cool just while we're talking as it has cleared there's m13 coming yeah so
that's that's live capturing as well um as we're talking away but that this
was my main thing here because we're really really bad on these the forecasting for where i am it is very
very remote but also looking at other things as you're saying there's lots of cameras
people have got laying around and maybe modifying different types of lenses on it and playing around and seeing
what you can image through the summer as chuck was saying you know the aurora we get it down here
when it's really active so again it'd be interesting to see what this can pick up and and how it works
yeah and just generally playing around with it but my main thing is is whether that is the real key here
yeah and that's what a lot of people use it for is it you know is is i mean i've i've got had a couple of
customers that i've actually wired these things into their um
home security camera systems and they'll actually just sit inside
with the log fire burning away and they'll flick their tv screen over onto their security system and they've
got a vision of the heavens outside yeah we we get quite a few guys with our
domes um actually use similar things inside the observatories to monitor for cable snags and
obstructions yeah as well as outside with the weather station because our equipment will
automatically shut the lid if it rains or you know however you set it but
loads of people will have next to it mounted at some sort of all-sky wide field device it's it's a thing it's
becoming a thing anyway yeah i think also it's not very expensive
no it's not yeah and for people who are not necessarily into setting all of
the equipment up and all of the other stuff with a little bit of playing around with these there's the opportunity you could
do good time lapses in the milky way from locations like where i am over the summer you could time-lapse the
milky way and then do a full rotation of that as it goes over
um i mean if you go to i have a facebook group old sky camera and if you go and
have a look on there um there's some fantastic views of the milky way that people have done with time lapses that
are you know some of them are are in real dark sky areas um you know not you know far better than
what we've got here in the uk um and and some what you the detail you can actually see and the magnitude down to
the magnitude of star you can see is quite phenomenal yeah and i like to say i think playing around
with a few different lenses on this um or different camera types you know just getting a camera with a
different uh pixel level you'd be able to zoom in i think you'd probably pick out the north american nebula quite
easily here in the uh in the summer well in those couple of hours when it is dark it would easily pick that out um
with the change of camera on there so but thanks very much for sharing that with us thank you for letting me on that's great
thank you very much i don't know if anyone else has seen it and i'm not trying to hijack jason's thing because i really like those um but in a similar
vein but more my technical level has anyone seen those silver can
it's a big fan with it with a bit of film in it and a pinhole yeah
for an entire year and then pull it out and scan the paper and you get the solar trial for the year
yeah oh wow i love it it cost me 15 quid yeah i was
20 yeah i was looking at those as well i did one i did one over the last couple years or a couple over the last couple
of years i'm looking at uh making one so that like the can that you've got there once you've opened it
that's it it's used yeah yeah um i'm looking at at the moment at making one
that all you do is you unscrew the lid you take the uh photographic paper out you process it
yeah you put a new photographic paper back in and you start again so you're not destroying one can
yeah no i and that's a brilliant idea because i'm it's sad i'm really excited about this
but it's it's that sort of thing i like i like nice and basic i mean i have a life of the technicalities during the
day i love you know i love getting back to basics and simple pinhole photography and and wide
field all sky you know you're you're all sky optics i mean i've used similar things for quite well and they don't
require tracking and guiding and nonsense you you just choose a site
yep and and go and you know that makes everything accessible doesn't it yeah the whole i
mean one of the my thought processes with what i designed you can see behind me is i can build in a tripod mount onto
it as well so you can basically you can take it to your star parties yeah you've got five meters of 12 volt cable running
in you've got five meter usb 3 cable yeah you stick it on a manfrotto uh tripod or it's the same sort of plate
underneath yeah you can take it with you you can take it off you take it home you build it onto the wall bracket that's
that i produce as well yeah so you've got quite a versatile little
astro camera unit basically yeah it's it is i think it's a growing
trend in in imaging yeah and there's there's i think there's only uh
three other companies out there that might just have to read me notes and i think there's a company called
starshoe or uh which uh i think they their cameras
i don't think they make them anymore there's a company called starlight express which starts at around 700
uk pounds um and then there's the alcor camera which i couldn't find a price for
that one but i don't think that's cheap either but if you can produce these things at a price where
and some of the feedback i've had is where the people i've sold them to especially at kellinghead star party have said you
know what i can afford that yeah if i get sick and tired of it in six months time actually i haven't lost
that much money but when somebody's paying seven eight hundred pounds plus that's a lot of money just to put back
on the shelf so yeah in an awkward position because michael at starlight express is one of
my best friends but but it is i haven't got one for that reason um i i can't justify 700 yeah as
fantastic as it is i'm not going to knock the products or yeah no neither would i i'm not knocking it it is a jump because you you've spent
your money on your telescope gear and your camera and your filter wheel and you you know whatever and you think well
this is an extra yeah this is this is like a side investment moment and
is it being a bit unknown as well you know because if you haven't done it before it's a lot of money to stretch
yeah and that's my sort of theory work behind these was to bring the bring the price down uh to the affordable
uh budget that somebody can just afford and you know not have to worry too much
yeah i i think yeah it looks like you've done it you know um
i mean i wasn't building one was fun i'm sure you really enjoyed the construction of the first one
but yeah i mean the first one i built it was like i was like really proud that i've done it
yeah you see i enjoyed the machining and then the failures of everything else i
hadn't thought about just spoiled the whole thing and i gave up yeah but i enjoyed the machining of it and i
just celebrate i just gave a tape without dnk to the observatory roof occasionally um
but it is on the it's on the list for you know for the coming months because i i think
especially with what i do outreach wise which is post mediocre pictures on village facebook groups
um all of a sudden it's their sky as well yeah
i mean the good thing is with these you could you know you could just feed them into a live view
yeah across the internet and like you say your your your friends across the village whatever just plug
into the website and and it's there for them to see exactly now there's i think it's i love
that sort of thing i i think any you can actually do valuable science
with that sort of thing as well as make nice time lapses and pretty pictures so i'm just going to share across
because i'm grabbing the couple of minutes that we've got of clear sky here so
uh having to wander around so m51 nice yeah 60 second exposures
um we're not guiding on anything because of the cloud coming through so we just let it uh run for a little bit
there what's the field of view here it's pretty good it is not bad um this
is on the uh 26 i died 2600 so we could go over and put the full frame
camera on it that would give it so there's the cloud come straight through so it's a bit intermittent but we are
managing to see something which is making a change from normal normally
it's cloudy so anyway um i think we're going to move over to steve and have a chat with steve
yeah hibbitson because [Laughter] put him right on the spot there
too many steves yeah that's it it's a popular name apparently gary's dying out now yeah
there's no we living something like that
um i don't is there only one dave on here tonight
oh david yeah because i've got a load of daves that live around here
you're outside in the gun you shout damn you get about four of them come round what do you want
right um my name is steven buttson um i run a mobile planetarium
when i can things have been a bit different this last year or so so i'm a bit rusty and i
could do with a bit of practice so i'm going to practice on you a lot and it's going to
be um rather basic
that's our level that's good
so have you got my uh shared screen now yes yeah uh it's basically still area
so this is what we would have just after sunset tonight i'm looking due south
i'd usually do this in the dome with a laser pointer but i'm having to work over two screens so
the mouse is going to have to get a good workout towards the south
will be the constellation of orion one two
three four brighty stars that make what i call the box of orion
top left hand one here i call it beetlejuice it's supposed to be metal jars i believe
and at the other side is another bright one called rigel between these two stars are three stars
in a bright in a row called orion's belt
and if we follow orion's belt down we come to the brighty star in the night sky
called sirius the dog star if we go back up to the three stars of
orion's belt and falling upwards the slight curve we come up to
aldebaran in the constellation of taurus the bull
now to help this let's put a few lines on so we're back to orion four stars that
make up the box the three stars in the middle that make up a ryan's belt down to sirius
the brightest star in the night sky back up again once more
to aldebaran the eye of the ball here's the head of the bull
and his two horns and then on his back
he's a fuzzy patch and that fuzzy patch is called the pleiades or the seven sisters
or if you live in japan subaru and at the moment it's got a visitor in the mix
the bright planet mars last year it was actually uh venus if
you remember that was a year ago believe it or not
above taurus the ball we have a ryger the charioteer who i think looks more like
the end of the house so you've got the end of the house there and the roof stuck on the top
the bright star there is called capella not propeller but capella
and the side of it here we've got three stars that make up what they call the kids
now capella is one of my favorite constellations for looking around for open clusters
the three wonderful open clusters in here m36
m37 and m38 in a small area here and you can pick all those up
in binoculars if you can hold them steady enough um tricks for holding binoculars steady
use a clothesline an up-tailed brush or get a proper binocular mount to hold
them nice and steady so you can have a little look in that area
if we go back down to taurus and back down to orion and we follow the three bright stars of
orion downwards here we come again to sirius the dog star and above sirius
the little dog and the bright star here is called prasaya
now for those of us in the uk we used to remember uh sir patrick moore sir patrick moore
had a triangle of three bright stars in summer called the summer triangle well
steve has three bright stars that make up the winter triangle
[Music] and above the winter triangle are the twins in space
called gemini the twins two match stick figures side by side in the sky head
a matchstick body there's his legs out stretched heart arm
on the other twin here again he's body in his legs and helps stretch arm just here
the twins in space at the side of the twins
is cancer the crab now from here from my back garden you can barely see cancer
the crab because of street lights we were talking about earlier it's almost washed out
and i like to think of cancer as an upside down y in the sky
let's actually put some images on here as well go back here at the side of cancer we
have leo the lion and we have entering into springtime now
and in the spring it will be the time of the galaxies or the realm of the galaxies if you like
and here we have leo the lion let's take the patterns away once more
and come yes we fed you away and go back to the lights and here we have his eye
the back of his head his mane his chest his body his tail
and back to his head now that's what most people see but i think it also
looks a bit like sphinx if you look at the side of the pyramids you got the head of the sphinx
and it's laying there but where i live
we have um anybody that you basically know or vaguely know
well they get called ducks around here as in eop medok so this is actually
not a lion not a sphinx but it's a dope because there's his head
it's chest it's swimming along on the pond and there's its tail figures so i
think it's actually leo the duck
and once we get to about time as it is now in the uk which is
around about midnight leo should just be clearing the tree over the street lights
down the road where i live that don't unfortunately go off at 1am
and that was successfully campaigned for by a local councillor because he convinced
everybody that we would get killed in our beds if the street lights went out
on very handily when they built them they're an extra meter higher than the old sodium lamps i'm afraid
as we head further into springtime high overhead will be
the great bear ursa major his nose his head his two front legs
his body his back legs and there's his tail an odd tail for a bear
because as far as i'm aware the only bears i've seen only have short tails but this one's got an extended one
because this bear was picked up and thrown this into the
sky apparently by his tail and that's why he's got a long tail
if we find the seven stars of what those
brits call the plow there's the handle
the blade that cuts into the soil the americans call it the big dipper i believe it's
it's something that you sample milk with or take a drink there's a handle
and there's a cup on the end but in more modern times i think it's maybe more like a shopping trolley
handle and there's the basket if we find two end stars
of ursa major the plow we follow them upwards we come to the pole star
polaris not the brightest star in the night sky about the 50th brighty star in the night sky and here we have
what the americans call the little dipper i think heals more like a flysquat
let's go back to the bear and this time follow its tail around
follow it round in an arc so we aren't round two arcturus the brightest star in balti's
the shepherd or boots the shepherd you might know his friend
or his relative boots the chemist come on steve and gary you know that one
um i don't think it's actually um either i think it looks more like an
ice cream cone well there's a corner stuck on the top is a great big pile of
vanilla ice cream maybe an old necktie turned upside down
yeah maybe i was thinking boots sounds more like a funk bass player from the 70s
that's true steve steve have you read about the big deeper
second star in the handle that it's uh in the old times the indian soldiers
have they sight test if they saw the second star
there was uh enough good for the warrior yeah um the one i use when i'm working
in the planetarium they used to use it in the navy apparently and if you could see see split the stars
uh mizar and its companion you were good enough to go up in the um
crow's nest um myself personally i would not be able to split marzar and alco because i don't
fancy climb in that master stand up there looking at him to see
yeah so yours was an army one was it no no india indian warrior indian
warrior yeah yeah yeah
so i i think that will do for the time being because it's very brief and very halting i'm
afraid i'm sorry about that because i'm very very much
out of practice well i think he did a good job
thank you very much because as i say i am very very much out of practice
now where are you now come out of the family though where because didn't gary palmer do all the
stick figure drawings for you yeah he did i i like these ones in there
right yeah yeah he he's all the sharper than i think yeah
yeah they're very sharpened i i do look at a lot of these and and
the patterns on them and think that i i really need some of the alcohol they had in action
or what or what else to see these patterns they're gonna have extremely good imaginations
oh quite some quite good um well it's
they they all have stories don't they they do so that allows a certain license doesn't
it yeah some of them most of them have stories the more modern ones you know like uh
what was it uh well some of the southern ones that are very very
uh basic so some hemisphere ones
um that don't that won't come to mind straight away i'll think about it it'll
come to me in about five minutes time when i'm done
there's some as i say the very very basic you know um
i saw a lot of i saw when i used to use the star lab
cylinder for projecting within the dome uh because i can do um full dome video
now i a lot of the south african ones
were just like little fires or ostriches or something
this is very really they picked some really random stars to make these things
and they say oh that's a bird anyway yeah okay
i don't know what you're seeing but i ain't seen a bird it's a it's a magical way of connecting
the the night sky to culture isn't it it is indeed it is indeed
you know because if you if you go back you know over to well over 3 000 years
you know a lot of history was uh was story yeah it wasn't written history
and and a lot of a lot of cultural makeup yeah and allegorical and
yeah they passed the stories between themselves they also use them for navigation and still touch light so you
you add a story to it it becomes more memorable i think absolutely yeah
yes that's right yeah you also have to think of um you know really using
the sky in all forms day and night of uh time
yeah because a lot of these things were used to define some form of time before we standardized it
very much so and also one day i'll do a talk on um
please don't no [Laughter]
no the um the constellations in the old testament yeah
that that's leading up to the star of bethlehem that would be interesting yes please
that would be interesting it would be very boring for everyone else but i i can't do that
[Laughter] that's it that's what i needed to do i
needed to go on that to that screen oh it was a lot easier in the dome
in the old dome days working in the dark working in the darks a lot easier
i could see things i could see the mouse it's very often around for a bit steve
um i said you're hanging around for a bit steve in a little while um show us some
of the solar images you put up earlier this week because they were quite nice they're on the other computer so what
we're going to do is log out and log in on the other computer if that's okay yeah yeah we'll let you back in don't
worry yeah fine right i'll see you shortly i'll be back
okay i think we're going to move over to pekka pekka's been sitting there it's it's getting late now as it must be help
us one where you are no problem for me no problem i'm so used
to used to for these hours okay i have two topics today i want to
talk about and they changed it during this event today so there is much
light pollution and we do have it here
[Music] i think i will begin a short
introduction where how much slight pollution i have
let's see what did i do where is my there
oh okay it's there which screen are you seeing now
let's see i could do it like this i was i was seeing google earth then yes
and now yep
we are going to my place where i live i'll be here and
as i talked last time that i will build this micro up micro solar system
this is the place this is my solar system area i will have it
nice so so it's round it's a football game soccer game plan
so i will try it it's i in the middle of the calculation
of the because this is
the whole area is let's see
and then we take feeds it's 256 feet
so i have to calculate how big the planets are and how big the sun will
be so i have to calculate that now i will see
the light pollution here i have an
uh do you say
how do you say where airplanes starts and airport airport
thank you thank you gary and a huge marketplace
so i can see all these lights from the
south every evening right so
sometimes i can't see nothing from south so that's the light pollution
area uh now i will go on say stop when i'm
to finland okay okay now you've now closed that screen
and i can see a nice image of the moon okay that's did you see it so you see it
now or yeah i can see the moon so the application that you're in you need to
open back up yeah sorry
so i will track that one i'm not so used to this
yet but that's all right i will it takes time for us all to get
used to these new things yes yes okay okay uh what get me into
uh i am re uh writing two books at the same time with all this stuff
and one of them is my history of how did i get into the astronomy
and as long as i write as more i can remember
and one of them that makes made me begin to be interesting very much
about do you see finland no not yet you're not screen sharing at
the moment you're not sharing the screen you've turned it
okay i can see i can see your folder with all of this okay all folder okay well let's see i
have to stop sharing again and share and
if i open now you're still on the folder okay
there we go okay that's finland like you see it in the map
no it's a no it's a mirror okay mirror image of finland
now we laid it down can you see it now yeah and the moon what do you can see here
okay can you see finland if we go back
yeah they have a similar shade and that was something when i was eight
years old i was thinking what the hell
me me finnish young boy and finland on the moon that must mean something
and it meant something and it meant so much for me that i began to be an astronomer
do you do you want to hold that image there a second yes because if you go to tyco
yes and go to the left yes the large smear that's just up a
little bit there just yeah yeah now now across just there right that
there that's yeah now if you look there it's all land
no if you look at the head of that just above it yes it's a dog freddy krueger with his hat
ah okay it's looking me like a small dog [Laughter]
you can see the hat there when uh when you get different ah yes there you are there's more hat yeah here's the eyes
and and the shoulders nose and uh smile
yeah i don't think i could ever look at the moon the same way again now yeah i i thought that the finn
now you can see finland over there i i was told telling that to molly because i met
molly in one hour uh education for pitching sites and she
never hurt her because i have never read about finland i have read about man women
rabbit everything else but not to finland and i was so that i must be
something special because it's is it only me that can see finland
and now you can see it okay and back to finland do you know what
this is now it's not now
we are on mars right now okay this is a humidity meter that was
built for perverance uh in finland
was tested in finland and verified in finland by a young girl who is
multi-space engineering engineering engineer
and it sits right here
okay and here it is
on perverance right now made in finland
like that and
that's all for finland and now we go
to my next
about ah we can take i have this huge project i have it's my remote
observatory it's all the way to 20 feet
from me from this room but yesterday i got it up and running
verified everything and everything is it's in function
really i had a gray hair about that
i have a four square meter big balcony
that i can't be there since at the same time as my scopes
so this is my computer room server server hall and there is
i both it's an asus i3 uh mini pc with
eight gigahertz internal memory two terabytes hard drive
so i can put everything directly into it i have
temperature and humidity meters in here and under my mount
and here is the control room here is the temperature meters with three different
sensors and here is the new one it's my old game uh ipad
because i post two indoor uh server server lanes camera it's
330 around and up and down and i thought okay they are indoor i
can't have the outdoor 24 7. so i uh i ordered from
amazon and this um it's a i don't know what it is but it's
yeah yeah it looks like what you put the an old clock in yeah yeah
yeah and i glued it's a plastic i drew a hole
for the for the for the electricity and i glue it with
how to say silicon glue and put it inside this from
electronics that for the uh do okay
very fine and then the evening came and this has lights it has red lights and it
has a green light and it reflects from from the plastic
and i couldn't see anything so don't do that
if you are planning so don't use indoors
cameras and this is the view from my cameras
when i picturing yesterday oh that's cool uh very good and this camera they are so
they are er commerce also so this is the view from one camera can you
see orion and orion's nebula yeah with those indoors yes
so i can almost imagine by them
okay we had a good good time lapse up for those yeah i can record and so on but i just
have them for look for my scope when it's turning and so on
and now for guiding that's my that's my biggest concerning
and because of the all light pollution we have so i have
bad nights two nights to make a decision
uh how to go forwards from now on i have to
we have so little uh clear nights so i have to learn imaging for deep sky i have to
learn pics inside i have to learn guiding i i have to learn everything for deep
sky um you're in uh sweden yeah yes stockholm the
weather's as bad as what it is here so that means that you should get plenty
of time to learn pics inside yeah and the odd night yes i i nee i need some data i need to
collect data for summer time to learn because i don't have data to to
train that's the biggest concern for me so
i already have made a decision that i will
continue with the dso next season but i will collect
uh as much i can data there's plenty of practice data you can
pass her and different other places that you can put into the software i got something from
mark but the download time was like two days
yeah yeah that that is a problem with some of them um we have it
here when i download big data sets and i'm on very fast uh internet it can be uh two hours two
and a half hours but i know that that would take somebody two days three days elsewhere in the world exactly so now
now i have to think if i uh take the time
which i have left to learn uh tracking
the ethering and guiding or just imaging
as bad it is okay a question i have for you do you
actually get any dark sky in mid-summer no no i didn't think you did because we
only got two hours here we have we we have uh like uh
we don't have any uh even uh
from from first of june to end of
august we don't have even what do you say
twilight yeah yeah we got we our first uh astronomical
night we got in the middle of the november sometime
basically in sweden we can do uh an astrophotography from the elm area from
the from the end start of may to the middle of august
because the sky is too bright here so we have to image some something else like solar
planetary and lunar so that's our problem here is freedom
we have the we call it midnight summer and they become so bright so
we can almost see the sun at the summer so that's a problem in sweden all girls on the street on the
beach i think here we roughly an hour and a half to two hours
um would be around the uh longest day of the year
you'd be lucky on an hour and a half so but um
it makes it challenging wherever you are yeah yeah but
from the beginning the moon was like
it was my heart and i like imaging
moon a lot a lot i don't think you can ever get bored
with it i i no no because i i as soon it is up i
begin to imagine or just making visual so
it's you can't do a lot of things
very well you can do few things good but not
many different as good you like to
so i think that it's better that i make my focus on moon and
maybe planets and when it moon is so
down or something i take the chance and [Music]
make training on on guiding and getting data for uh to learning pics
inside and so on but i i got last night i got
with my ed 72 no filters it was an um
astro modified dslr canon 600d and
this was it's a triplet uh hercules triplets
as you can see here the light pollution is terrible
and the guiding was good in the middle but i got elongated stars
on the edges and i asked molly
and she told that uh that's uh because i didn't use anything flattener
yeah so it really would be spacing or flattening yeah so the guiding was good
because this is the guiding of of
that yes so i don't i don't know because i don't have any references to compare so you
are the experts so how is the guiding i mean i ignore the graph i i really
ignore the graph i actually look at the image and i zoom into the image and see whether the styles around
yeah because the graph can give you so many variations depending on the scene conditions yeah because i was dealing
with the air i access yesterday and i was looking for this 1.01
because there is this groove you can adjust
because my there will be other factors that come in on this as to the size of
the size of the guide scope the pixelling and the camera all sorts of different things
even a fraction slightly off of level and you'd be amazed at that
how much that fraction can make
is really finicky on balance as well isn't it yeah i saw that because we we was
making uh my uh uh oreo nebula
with molly and what the program can do it was i was
so amazed it i it blow my mind
you can you must you must have the knowledge to handle it
but so you don't need to to really go into a lot of the the things that are on there
that that's the big key with this it's quite often easier to keep it simple yeah
i realized that i realized that molly is doing everything manually
and she got so much data from my picture that i
couldn't believe it yeah and now it's
i don't know there's because space is so it's so huge that i can't decide because
i like the moon but i love to image dso also but dso
in my place it's uh it's a struggle you have to put the whole
day to planning and i have trees uh on the way
because when i have i could have orion for one hour then it's gone for half an
hour then it's coming back for half an hour and then it's down
i think what um the the problem is is a lot of this stuff is over complicated yeah yeah it
really is over complicated and that that's because we love it that's the way
there is an old saying isn't there a kid keep it simple yeah keep it simple yeah
yeah exactly um and and that applies to this and it's like steve was saying depending on the
some mounts in phd love to be balanced to you know within a
being on either end um whereas another amount will need to have the the
uh engagement on the gearing yeah off balanced one way but anyway i i just
was talking thinking today that in this pandemi
uh i have had none possibilities to to speak with somebody
to like speak not writing in an email i began imaging in
may last year and i didn't i didn't know
nothing about software i had looked at the stellar room before
that's it it was it was visually all the way 45 years
and after my my surgery i thought okay let's try it
let's make uh let's make a move and i was
i took my first dso of venus and i was
so deep in that after that but see by keeping it simple and
concentrating on the basics yeah the mount level you know the balance the the
settings to the actual mount these images that i'm running here tonight are unguided 60 seconds unguided that's
because i i choose i chosen to have my mount 24 7 on the balcony
that's why i built an remote observatory so it is
always ready to go depending on whatsoever because if you
can remove guiding it's so much easier it really is yeah
you know most of these cameras now um are really up for uh giving you data
out of 60 seconds yeah because i have light polluted as well you don't want to
be running into three minute images you know one in 60 seconds to keep the last
60 seconds here exactly so i i'm
shooting 60 seconds with and i love dslr imaging yeah because i feel that
that is the real imaging i i don't say that uh
those ccds that are but i i i want to hear that quickly
you know a lot of people put down condition dslr cameras and i still think dslrs are
really good yeah they are they are the you know the the basic start of imaging for most people
um and you you get some fantastic results out of them yeah only 30 seconds
with my full moded modificated dslr 60 seconds
you have thousands of stars hundreds hundreds
the issue normally with a dslr is um you know most people will start well it's
not cold or it's not this or it's got a big ir filter on it but
the software these days takes care of that yeah yeah you know the the amount of detail you can pull out of an image
in the software i should moan with non on non-modified
600d then i have an astra modified with uh by the acf and then i have fully modified so i
have three dslrs for two for deep sky and one for only from
moon and i love take the dslr images for them but i i
have mmm um 178 mm for two
very close up uh shoots for the moon with my c8 and c11
i like the 178 for solar it's a very very good camera yeah it's a great camera
yeah i think there's an important thing here though but
you it's like looking at your guy you can spend you can waste a lot of time
looking at guiding graphs and and analyzing faults that that may or may not be there and and i'm terrible
for this i mean i'm a trained telescope engineer so i analyze everything and get it wrong usually
i'll look at an image and i i won't think i haven't got my flatness spacing right i think it's not
guiding yeah and it isn't till the morning after where i look at the data
and i think well hang on a minute most of the stars in the middle are round yeah therefore it must be guiding
go around it and i don't care what the guiding graph looks like the amount of times i've had
every so often i'll do a 20 minute exposure just to see if it can do it yeah the guiding graph will look horrendous
you would send them out back based on the guiding graph but the stars around i thought that my new mount was
it was uh graph will also depend on what scope you
use him for guiding yeah you're going to get a different guide graph on there
depending on the the size of the telescope but if you look at the guide graph and you know better than igale
admittedly but the parameters that can affect a guide graph for everything from how you set up the camera and guide
scope parameters initially using the wizard or not yeah it's have you run the
cat the wizards and they get in the various settings yeah you can change values in phd and
watch your guide graph change and the problem is is the wizard while it's there to make life easy for a lot
of people depending on the equipment connected can actually cause more problems
yeah and i have told people this in the past they i i've had people come to me at shows and they're like
having a massive problem with phd and it's like well did you use the wizard when you
originally installed it and they're like yeah just like right uninstall it and now reinstall it and enter the data
manually rather than use the wizard and they normally get a message back in a couple of days saying oh that worked
perfect yeah it's all up and running and i've got good guiding now isn't it also
one of the most overlooked things is exposure time on the guide camera because quite a lot if you have a too
shorter exposure time you're trying to compensate for fluctuations in the seeing conditions
and not movement so you can cause problems having a too short exposure
if i share this screen over here now this has actually got the the um the
system there it's not up and running i haven't connected the camera but the biggest box that's overlooked in
this is the calibration steps yeah and if you're using one of these really small guide scopes and guide cameras
when this first installs it's set at 750 ms for the calibration steps that's like
for an f10 telescope so if you're using a 300mm
guide scope something like that that needs to be anywhere between 1400 and 1800
yeah and then you find all of a sudden the graph smooths out and everything runs but when you're doing the wizard the
wizard seems to leave this area alone and of course the guy graphs spike in
around like anything and that's where the main problems come in the siding is in that brain area of the calibration
steps so hd doesn't change that value when you put your
guiding scope focal length here no it doesn't 99 of the time it leaves it set
at 750 and the value if it does change it so if you ask it to calibrate or to assist you
in the guiding the figure that it comes back with is normally and that's because your scenes changing
or the timing so a second or a second and a half other
than three or four seconds and how to calculate that value now you calculate it by looking at round
styles in the image that that is the best way of doing it is
to actually look at your image yeah take a 60 second shot blow it up on the computer and all the style around in
the center of the image if they're not then the guiding is not running correctly yeah because the the graph
sometimes here if the scene is bad the graph will be through the window yeah it'd be literally zigzagging across
and yet the stars are perfectly round on three-minute shots so tape over the screen where the graph is
yeah good point and the important thing is if you start getting preoccupied with the guiding graph and then it's time to
just stop and have a dream i i haven't realized that yeah yeah because i i
didn't i i thought that he is this astrophotography that i am sweating i am
uh you know in finnish
i swear swearing swearing i've always said the same thing in in astrophotography think outside the box
and that basically means a lot of the information out there is old it's very very old you know and it's
just been adapted and updated taken on by somebody else a little twist
on it but the actual information is quite old you know on solar imaging if i'd
listened to people over a decade ago i wouldn't be nowhere close to what i do now yeah
yeah i took an image today yeah and i can remember this we were going to put live images up in color on
the sun and everybody said you can't do it by yourself learned gary yeah
and i turned and said there's no such word as can't yeah watch this space
and today i did the same thing we used the color camera on the sun yeah just for the fun
guys and i don't know if anyone else agrees with this let's go back 15 plus years
like gary will remember this when you first started well first majored on solar
you know we were we were doing stuff like buying cheap reversing cameras from ebay
you remember me doing it you know and sellotaping them to telescopes
the sun i can remember going around the supermarket and they had their budget webcam
yeah i think it was about seven pounds or something like that and i said to me mate it was with me at
the time we're right here one of those you watch the image we get out of it at the end yeah so we and we did we took it
apart stripped it down put a nose piece on the end of it took the little lens out put it on the solar
scope and we were having images of the sunspots and it was to sort of say that you know
your budget can be anything and if you think outside the box a little bit you can do these things but
there is quite a big negative from a lot of the industry on things and
i always say that everything's possible it's just there's two things time and money
they're the normally the negatives but don't you think that as
you get results if it's fun yeah if if it's fun you you you find ways of doing it
yeah and it's a good filter for what's really important you know so is your guiding graph
important or is actually looking at a picture on the screen with round stars important
and and you know what when when it comes to to to to guiding and some of the numbers
um uh you know to kind of add to what gary gary was saying gary and i had talked about this in the past
uh recently just off the side one-on-one um some of the information
that you're seeing there is is uh in just a beside the guide graph
as long as your numbers are within a certain range you're pretty much okay
right if you do if you do the math to figure out what your pixel scale is and there's websites that are there that'll
do it and see your pixel scale comes in at 1.6 arc seconds per pixel and you're
guiding and your graph looks like a sawtooth the entire way but your but the amount of error comes in at one
arc second per pixel yeah
it's still good right it's only when you start going outside those parameters that you start
seeing the stars not being round oblong in one way or the other and you can tell where
the air is going to be depending on on which way the star is being stretched
a lot of this as well comes from using small guide scopes because everybody wants to be portable and they want small
mounts they're going to use an equivalent of this sort of thing and this will only run up on your main
imaging scope probably around 100 millimeter once you start getting over 100 millimeter then
you want to start up in the size of the guide scope oh everybody seems to think that this is going to work on you know a c8 it's
going to work on everything and it's not so you're going to get the variation in you're going to craft
and you actually have fun in the wrong area yeah that highlights the fashion of the
telescope industry to a team because when i started and when auto guiding was
you know you you the rule was you had a guide scope that was at least the focal length
of your imaging scope if not more and that was common practice when we i
know jerry when jerry's been on jerry's been on about this as well as what i have yeah
you know but people are expecting an absolutely perfect guide graph and yet really they're using you know
substandard piece of equipment to try and get that perfect guy graph i'm wondering why it's going up
yeah and to be honest pekka's guard graph didn't look too bad
i've had guide grafts like that from equipment and the stars have been off the skull in the amount of drag in them
i can show one share one picture this is 60 second with an ed 72 and my full
modificated dslr can you see it
yeah nothing wrong with that no that's his only 60 second
that's good but if you switch that that screen off there and then i go over to
this other screen you just shut your screen off for a second
and then we jump over to the live one second try again so 60 seconds is
quite enough this is exactly what's coming in now on 60 seconds wow
about huh yeah so that and we have got clouds going through i can see the cloud going
through there's no guiding on this no nothing 60 second shot what what scope are you
using uh it's a 108 millimeter uh quintuplet okay
yeah so it's uh it is an astrograph it's uh okay okay
ask rs fra 600 yeah do you want to stop your share for a minute i'll chuck a picture up yep on
one of those rare moments that i will show one of my deep sky images [Laughter]
passing your seat belts people right um you didn't take that one well
that's awesome yeah just this is the pecker's benefit
this is obviously it's the rosette this has been an unmodified eos 1100d
dslr wow um in the dark sky you know i can't it was a dark sky but
that is i think it's three or four six minute shots and if you saw my guiding graph
you you would have get you would have gone in you would have just given up um i never
have a good guiding graph my guiding graphs are always worse than the one you show always
but that's down to the noun and the engineer who stripped them down that's very true
but look at it i've got round stars and i've got a bit of color i'm happy
yeah that's it it's the thrill of a chase as much as anything but
you can get really drawn up in and picked insight has made it worse to a point because it's giving you the tools
to pull out stuff that you can't you wouldn't normally expect to better
pull out so the level of complexity has gone up you know if you if you go back and i'm always hiking back to basics but
when we used to image with a small refractor and a film camera there was only so much you could do because
reciprocity failure on film meant that it would get less sensitive as time went on so and you had to hope you loaded the
film in you wound it on and you know there are all these things the more com the more sensitive digital
cameras get the more data you pull in of course of course you're going to start seeing far
more tracking errors and and onto collaborations because it's not getting less sensitive as you go
what is that if i turn this round i agree steve with you totally
totally if i move that round this particular mount has actually got a guide scope
built in yeah and you just ruined your alignment yeah
if we actually look and that takes three hours yeah there is a guide the camera actually
built into the head of the mount yeah but the problem is is it's tiny
yeah it's really really small it's only a tiny aperture so that that's the aperture
yeah the cover on it so you'll you'll really you effectively you're no different to this
exactly the same you've probably got a poorer quality camera
inside there you know a cheaper version of the camera anyway so as soon as you get bad scene conditions
the first thing you're going to notice is your styles have gone within a fraction of a second rather than you're holding on to the stars
and it might only be a little bit height now then you're pulling through you know the camera
and this way this may be just sheer coincidence that i found that
um since i've been using an ultra star mono camera which is quite an expensive
camera really yeah and my everything has improved yep
um i i've had qhy i've had the qhy5s i've had all sorts of guide cameras they've
all worked but when i load stuff just seems to have jumped it up or not
steve steve do you you image moon a lot yeah don't you okay how many
uh single images do you think it's enough
with dslr that you can stack
there is a problem with this see a while back some of the camera manufacturers who were struggling is the easiest way
to put it had bad uh electronic noise and glow they were saying oh well you should take a hundred
dart frames you take a hundred dart frames off a 20 mp camera and try and fire it through
the average mp ain't working it's not gonna work yeah you're actually gonna make your
images worse you would be better with say 20 or 30 images
yeah and maybe doing it over different sessions and then integrating the different pieces of data certainly
you can do that now can i show can can i show one picture and say
be honest if there is a too many i i've seen lots of steve's pictures so
i'm used to being honest yeah okay can you see family go gary i'll speak to
you afterwards can you see it or yeah the moon okay it's not sure it's
300 single images yeah no no uh calibration frames at all
yeah shot through uh ed
72 very crisp very nice be honest with you
yeah when i do moon unless i'm doing close-ups of the moon in which case i'll usually use an asi 178
because i love it um if i'm doing wider field moves i usually do single shot
yeah i did 302 single such and because i do one
and i've never ever taken a dark frame ever okay just one yeah i i but that's
not for everyone but i i bracket the exposure so i will i will do a whole range of exposures
then choose the one i like the most okay because the full moon with the uh
you know the particle or contrast well yeah full moon is
really difficult um and usually i would use a neutral density filter or two yeah because i was i i wanted to
pull push me itself to the limit and wanted to see if i could get
the contrast and what i got is on also the
dark mineral parts you've achieved it i mean that's a really nice picture of the moon that's a
good moon shot i like it and we were talking earlier i don't know if it was on the break or whether we were
live but um we're talking about andreas's moon picture and i was saying that it's really easy to get caught up in chasing
the detail yeah and then it stops being a nice picture yes
dead balance isn't there there's a knife ticker with sea power specially in reggie
stacks you have to be very careful with the
wavelets yeah one thousand of millimeters to the right and you have ruined your
picture uh i i'm not very good with the wavelets but um with my solar pictures i remember
gary just giving me a bit of advice which is move slider five all the way up and then see how you go from there and
it's worked for years and i didn't know what those wavelets
levels are they are eight levels on the record registers i i i didn't know what the
meaning are for one two three four five six seven eight and i asked molly i'm only
knew what they are they are for one pixel the number one the highest or
always that's for one pixel and the second one is for
area for two pixels you are you are making difference for two pixels
and so on yeah and it's being sensitive to when it starts
to look too noisy yeah exactly i always want the sharpest
possible picture yeah but sometimes you have to say do you know what it actually looks nicer a little bit soft
because exactly what's the point of taking a nice picture of the moon if it's actually just not a nice picture
yeah and i wanted to have the contrast and the
shadows yes yeah but also in in the first quarter and the
last quarterly and so on and now i'm chasing for two things in
the moon that's the blue lake and uh the x-cross
yeah i i in 30 years i've got the lunar x once yeah
and i'll freely admit it was accidental okay that's nice and the blue lake
what it's uh called uh ah but blue lake that's uh
my target to get and i am planning to get it
yeah i see 178 mm with my 11 inch caldistrom
yeah that's exactly i use the same camera and i love it i think it's great yeah
uh i bought that only for moon photography yeah mine's for sun and the
moon but yeah i'm with you on that but i think your picture's great and don't spend too long analyzing your
garden graph mate okay i'm i'm forgetting i i'm taking taking from my show list
because they're a weird list what they can see i think gary would agree the thing if
you're worried about the stars at the edge you need to look at the field flattener and the spacing yeah that's that's it
i think the sky watchers ed72 is something that many people have
come and will come to have a problem with because it's so much strange
uh things on that tube
you can try have you got a flattener for that yeah yeah the same for 80 same fl i have a ready
chef latin and i have a chest flattener and i was trying to
yesterday and i didn't know where to put it is it
directly on the dslr t-ring or after the t-adapter
and i thought i was traveling and a half an hour with focus and that's all no i
can't spend all these uh minutes for just focusing on the on the sky watcher
flattener it's the flatner t-ring camera usually because they're spaced for the throat of the camera
okay they do a special t-ring don't they yeah yeah yeah yeah
i have also just regular fleet philanthropy the user and
what i will try is it to just screw directly on the t-ring
yeah anyway yeah we've got some new people joined us yeah thanks for you
thanks for having me no problem no problem it's always always interesting
so we've got um richard astrobeard i just came for the for the party but i
figured i'd bring a friend cool yeah and we've got uh tom there as well so um
why don't you introduce yourselves and and tell us a bit about what you do
well uh let's see um this is my first time on the european star party um normally on the uh the normal tuesday
night ones and uh i just figured i'd stop by for the uh the after party and uh tom's normally uh streaming out of uh
the uk and uh you guys probably aren't too far apart from each other i have no idea exactly where either of you are but uh
yeah i spent a whole lot of time watching tom and uh figured if it was a uk star party
or a european star party that uh he does a whole lot of streaming and yeah i think it's probably cloudy for
both of you right now it's actually clear here at the moment
yeah so um i'm just setting up another target but um tom so
tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do and where you are
you're actually on mute there at the moment i can't hear anything
hello now we're good yeah hey thank you very much guys thank you very much for having me on here good to
join you guys thank you tom hi yes my name is tom i
stream on twitch as the astro canuck and i share live images of space um in like
10 minute increments some interesting images of the night sky and you know met astro beard initially
through instagram and then saw him uh appearing more and more in the in the streams
and yeah just been enjoying sharing the night sky with everybody because you know not everybody has the
opportunity to look up at the sky and actually see anything interesting be it light
pollution or just maybe their situation with curiosity but not enough funds
so yeah so i just i'll i'll share images of uh
of the night sky taking like 10 16 minute exposures with the one shot color camera
yeah just trying to get some interesting things to show people and it's been a really there's been a really good reception and a lot of people are
you get that reaction i've never seen that before i never knew that was up there is this real so
it's always kind of see that uh that reaction that's kind of cool well so
any part of outreach is seeing that reaction isn't it you know
anytime you say to people you do astronomy i i've often wondered about that i've got an interest in it or you
know that something that i looked at more when i was a child you know those sort of words come out
i think with images um showing people uh really does bring it across
and you see as much as the light does but just in the current climate we can't get out there and do the live
viewing so we're all coming with other ways around it and it's great to see more people doing
things like this and it's just expanding just that little bit more on on twitch which is really cool and just on youtube
and facebook that more people are doing this and i think it's incredible that more people are kind of
coming out of the woodwork almost you're seeing the i say a benefit of the pandemic that
that astrophotography and astronomy has kind of boomed as well and that nobody can keep stock
there's a lot of the products that's true yeah it is uh it's you know the the technology to do this
has been around for a while it's just that uh um perhaps we didn't take as uh advantage
of it as much as we should have and um you know so now we're able to
share our love for the night sky and and and uh techniques and astronomy with
people all over the world you know and uh i think it's wonderful so it's it's uh
it's it's really been uh it's been exciting it's been great it's added a dimension to my own personal interest
and enjoyment of astronomy as well oh same here i i also love when people
are asking new questions that i don't have the exact answer to which gives me an opportunity to look into something else
maybe find a new piece of equipment or just some new information on
anything a new discovery that i haven't kind of looked into that offers that personal growth as well
uh to expand the knowledge base excellent cool so tell us more about
your show well i started streaming on twitch back in october
okay and you know i had a few people kind of popping in just had like three four
viewers at a time and wasn't quite sure how it was going to go i it was something that i was inspired by
um by econ greg he straight extreme greg streams by that name on twitch
and he's been doing it for over a year now and i thought you know i want to do this as well i want to be able to to
share my passion and yes slowly well i say slowly it's been
a few months now but you know we we regularly have about 40 some odd people hanging out on the stream
uh talking about astronomy astrophotography and you know we do have our cloudy
nights i will do image processing just show people kind of that process that you're going
to get from a single image to a stacked image to like a final image that you're going to share on social media or
something like that so to kind of show people that it's more than just um
a single photo and all of a sudden here is a hubble space photo and
you know it doesn't always work that way right so yeah just kind of showing
the the progress that you that you have to go through and also the fact that a lot of people who are watching kind of deal with the clouds
that roll in as well so they share in the the frustration that comes in like tonight we're i started off with it with a
really clear sky excellent seeing and then about an hour and a half later all the clouds rolled in and that was it
so we should get that hour and a half now exactly uk is that right yes i am
i've been living in the uk for the past 10 years now okay whereabouts uh just uh essex
ah near me oh excellent hey yes yeah i've been doing i'm living here
i've been doing astrophotography for the past just a little over four years now
and yeah it started off with i've always had an interest in astronomy and it started off i went to a star party
with my friend and my wife and i just snapped a picture of the moon through the viewfinder
and that was it my wallet has been crying ever since what star party did you go to
uh the north essex astro okay yep yeah
that was good yeah they're really cool um yeah i always enjoy hanging out there when
good but yeah it was uh yeah as soon as i had that first picture of the moon i'm like everybody else needs to see this
right now did this happen in uh when you were living in canada when you
moved to the uk it was in the well i was in the uk oh i see yeah
great yeah great is the best place in the world to get the astronomy bad scott
yeah you know there are so many people that are into astronomy there you know um
i uh i've long known about it um we did a
very very short visit to uh to london and then on to wales um
you know i just met some really just incredible people and i know that you know i could probably go back every
year and just meet you know just amazing astronomer after amazing astronomer
there i think it's the culture of science in the uk is deep and long and uh
um one of the things that i've i you know paid attention to
also there's documentaries about uh hobbyists in the uk and just how deep
and committed they are to almost any kind of hobby that they're involved with you know and i just i find that
fascinating and it may that that culture of uh being of having
a hobby you know that diversion that uh that people need uh
i i wonder if if a lot of it started in the uk and spread all over the world
um well i don't know that's a theory i have it it's
probably quite pretentious to suggest that is actually true um but
but we you know i think we share you know certainly the uk shares uh
we have a long history of the mechanics of astronomy yeah we have you know um i mean i can
speak with a small degree of authority on telescope building as a prime example um you know we go back
pretty much you know android developments things like the modern microscope all sorts but um i don't know there's
something about the british culture that we need a hobby you need something
we need i mean you see people all over the world have hobbies but it's that it's it's just the
it's the commitment and intensity that i i uh it's not just it that's what it is
i think it's just we want to have the the will to achieve that's what it is yeah i also think everywhere else takes
it too seriously we just all have a laugh and a beer [Laughter]
that's an idea that's an idea i'm gonna fetch myself a beer yeah cheers that's it
you traveled to japan and went to one of their star parties you'll find it's quite a very much likely to be a family affair i
mean there is i went to the uh tainan star party twice
and that star party is held with all the lights on serving beer serving sake having rock
bands fireworks there's a there's a science center building right there with a big
observatory every telescope manufacturer in japan is there okay and about 18 000 people show
up all the kids and grandma and everybody and also you can see because all the
lights are turned on white lights are turned on like a circus um
you see saturn of the moon or something and people are blown away by it and and it's it's wonderful because it's not
precious is it it's accessible very accessible yeah and we we do the
same at the royal observatory uh hurstmann suit gary's spoken there once or twice um
we've done 16 of them now most people that go to the main star parties in the uk will not go because
they just get too irate you've got lights on you've got you've
allowed children in our children
and they miss you know it misses the point it really is a star party
yeah it's a party yeah so i i forgot to get too serious i like the festival i like the party
part of it yeah damn stripe i love the astronomy too you know but of course you know but it's
having that as a whole isn't it but yeah you know if if someone mentioned earlier about the fact
that it's sort of an aging hobby um and
the only way you're gonna change that is if you make it accessible and and blow out some of the doors you know the
stuffiness and the sure make it accessible
yeah but you know all of us that do outreach we love it when they're kids or people
of any age come and look through the telescope and you know they're seeing saturn's rings for the first time
or the craters of the moon for the first time or their first galaxy or orion the first time
you know they're they're just held you you see them in awe struck and in wonder and and uh you know and they're standing
back they see a meteor streak across the sky and it's just like they're so switched
on you know so you find yourself living for that that gasp and that wow that's great you do
yeah that's makes it and then when you go backwards it's not a selfless thing it's a very
selfish thing because you get such a charge out of it you know i've just started a new astronomy group
here in harrogate the harrogate astronomers and it's aimed at it's aimed at kids
and it's to get the little budding scientists and astronauts interested for future um and i've had we're in
lockdown yeah but it's the the response i've had has been overwhelming it's massive awesome
and you know i said uh through all sky optics once we can get out a lockdown and we can start
meeting then i'll buy some equipment we'll get out on the nearest fields near us and we'll have a meet and we'll get
the kids interested and it's just absolutely that's what we need to do yeah
i agree it's electric yeah yeah and this is the only thing i'd
say is it's certainly for me i i when i was doing it more often
because obviously in the last year or two we haven't been able to do it properly it's sort of um
it makes you feel when you're back in your own observatory or your own background it feels a bit solitary and a bit strange
a little lonely yeah it depends on whether you like people though
uh stephen mallio in canada because he's joined us this evening
nice to hear from steve yeah gary hello everyone hi steve how's it going
i i have a quick question for for tom yeah where are you from in canada
uh originally from toronto oh okay well i'm in bolton i don't know well
excellent yeah i guess i could say about i guess brampton more specifically well i used to live in brampton
i i grew up in mississauga holy smokes
the rest of the world's like these two guys are crazy i haven't heard of any of those places another place
that's because they're cold yeah well that that's why we have beards
to be honest it is quite transfixing you could camp in those beards
i'm going camping tomorrow night when you're living up north is that white guys grow beards you guys that can't grow beards i can't
grow a beard that's what i draw one the way i shave guys is i put i put
cream on my face and then i hold a cat and i let lick it off and that's that's
it i i i shaved this morning yesterday
um yeah so so i know i i uh it's been a while since i've i've been on one of
these uh these star parties last one uh scott if you remember was back in december with the conjunction and uh the
aria scene oh yeah the uh the marathon uh conjunction event that
we did yeah all 18 hours of it and and uh two hour long star party
yeah and that was no that was a lot of fun i had to i really really enjoyed it um
and uh it's been i just been swamped i haven't been able to get back on uh so it's been a while i wanted just to
uh pop in and say hello and hang out and be part of the discussion that as friends and and put my two cents in
where where it makes sense and and uh uh gary and i we we actually talked on uh on a regular basis um
and uh uh i called him up this morning uh this afternoon or i guess this evening for himself and and uh he said well you come
on so here i am and and just want to be part of the uh uh the overall discussion and and hang out and it's been cloudy
here past forever and i haven't been able to do anything uh but the weather is starting
to change and start to get into uh warmer temperatures next week
and i'm hoping that's going to turn into clear clear skies so i can dust off the equipment and get it going and hopefully
do some imaging on um during a star party and and share
what uh what we have over here uh the light pollution you know we're talking about light pollution earlier um it's
pretty bad here i've got um there uh there's a retailer in canada called canadian tire and they're one of their
national distribution centers is about five kilometers
uh west of me so i i have a lot of bright light and so artificial artificial light led so the worst we can
get um and then next door to them is an amazon warehouse so my western sky is a shot but you know
with the uh the advent of some really cool filters that have come out lately it's been able to save a lot of my
imaging sessions luckily um so i you know i can still image from my
backyard and get some pretty good results this image behind me was was from my backyard
and uh um uh that was taken that's the uh
the pac-man there below taken over uh uh few nights or different filters and
so on and then muddling my way through pics insight to uh to at least get something um
and uh i will admit i was a bit of a snob when looking at my guiding
and making sure that all the numbers were close to zero as possible um
but uh uh uh you know it it's uh let's say it's hopefully it's getting better here and i
can do some uh do some uh live imaging yeah i think he was snobbish over the guiding because
the uh you're just checking the manufacturers built it's a tolerance right yeah so
something like that um uh yeah i i i sell this stuff so i gotta
test it out i know what it can do so um i try to uh
um at least know what i'm talking to see what we seem to know what i'm talking about but um
yeah so that you know just want to be part of the conversation for tonight and enjoying the fun and and
it's always good to have you well it's always good appreciate that yeah
um and as much as it comes from europe it's really it's open to anyone yeah we're
not in europe yeah well we're not in there yeah we're gonna have to change this now aren't we
to the uk astronomy because we're not really part of europe anymore yeah brexit saw that yeah done and
dusted give it another month we won't even have
internet so you know just give up anyway uh steve ibbitson you've i asked
you whether you would switch computes over and show us some of your solar stuff and then we we've got a couple of
other new people james hubbard and uh cameron's come on so uh
right where i have a chat with them while you're running with those i need to go and get a drink so i'm going to
come off here for a couple of minutes yeah i think i'm going to do the same so i will let you talk between
yourselves for a couple of minutes while i go and grab something you guys talk amongst yourselves okay check your phone
gary hey how's everybody doing today right you're right
yeah fine i've shared this can you see it yes ah
right well last week i broke out the shaving mirror
it's the rc and through that night i took this
um things didn't go particularly well and
this got higher and brighter and washing out the target and also got a bit due on
the secondary on it and i thought i'll i'll just nip over to the moon and use
the original filter that was in there and the ccd camera and did a quick
six pace pain mosaic of the moon now um
what i will do here is actual pixels
and that is sort of what i got so bad is it outside
um to the
other i thought it came out rather well i did that's good very nice no
let me fit on screen that's better there you go yeah so
i was quite pleased with that to say the conditions he was taking on it was
rather hazy as well so quite happy with that
that's a good shot thank you thank you um very very minimal uh processing with
that what what camera and what what's what scope was it a chinese rc uh it was a tuscany
oh okay italian yes yes one of the um eight-inch ones yeah
i remember the first of the the toscano rc's because ian king used to bring him in yeah yeah i thought
he came from yeah i used to do the optics before they went out all right i think you ought to have a trip to you
to be collimated yes i'm struggling oh good luck with that [Laughter]
yeah i don't think it's a good idea to send it through the pulse though time it
could be it will probably the same collimation as it's in now be honest though collimating an rc
is a bit like most of the discussion we've had this evening it's about stepping back and taking out some of the complexity yeah
i to start from basics and work your way to the end you can't for those a
cheshire or a tax scope is is genius i've got a tax goal
yeah spot if you're lucky enough to have a tax code you're on a winner yeah i don't
like oh no you don't hate him that's going to be sorry i said last week
i tried to do it from memory right it
didn't work so i went and reprinted the pdf and went out and started from scratch
and it went a lot easier wonder why see i'm quite lucky
i i've got so you probably can't see it but that in that box
yeah it's um a 16 and a half inch reference grade optical flap ah
so this is an optical bench i've got a double band pass optical bench so um collimating them is a bit
easier yeah but uh i've i gave up with rc's but i do have an f12 classical category
yeah i saw the lighter i love it i i really i really like it it's a great
telescope it's the same guts as the rc but just the different mirrors obviously yeah um and it's the first mirror scope i've
used in years because i don't like mirrored scopes i'm not particularly keen nowadays no i
want to look at it not at its reflection yeah yeah i said that's why i called it shaving mirror yeah
but never mind but you know to be honest that rc seems to work all right because it's pulled out
these were the ones that gary wants me to show the one behind it
so i these were last week last friday i think
yeah we had two sunspots come around didn't we yeah yeah and it sort of disappeared onto the limb just there now
if i push these up to full size they would be huge they are on this screen they are
what are they um eight and a half percent twelve and a half percent
and you're one of those is calcium mother look at it it is at the bottom it's calcium k
yeah um that's with the oh the ed-80
so it's a one it's a one 600 yeah that goes in the back of there
go on i will i will do it have you got your sunglasses
pixels yeah he got a bit bigger
yeah yeah that was there's nothing wrong with it is it yeah and what is i take it that's a what
scope's that it's a lung 60 mil long uh pressure tuned with um
rich field tuner on the front oh okay um because i i bought myself last year i
got rid of all of my my last vestiges of working for mead i got rid of all my coronado and i bought
a lunch ls50 yeah i like small i like small scopes
and i'm blown away with it good that's really nice
too but yeah yeah i the cac i've been lusting after one for a while
yeah okay um they were on offer so i snapped one up
um and i'm still getting to grips with it as you can see it's a bit fuzzy around the
edges but it will be at this size get rid of that one and then a couple of
days later it was um
actual pixels there you go
oops yeah that one that one it got to the edge yeah but the scene on this day
was nowhere near as good uh as you can see i was started to get
uh newton's rings coming into play as well and it's probably overpushed just to get
that a little bit more out of it than i should have done but not quite
sorry what camera um said wwa zwo
one
you put quite a few of your photos into uh uh uk solar imaging and observations yes
this one my site yeah yeah i did um
unfortunately earlier this year i had an accident with the chameleon camera that
i used to use right and i've ripped out i've done damaged the uh
the connections into the back of the camera and um
i tried to get in touch with point grey or fleur and they didn't answer me so
i'm i'm waiting on somebody a team's team electronics guy that i know
that when we come out of lockdown he'll have a look and he'll see if he'll be able to
reattach the connections on the back hopefully because i did like that camera i did get on with it fairly well
or did it added a full disc as well huge i see i love full disc yeah yeah
gary likes to go in and yeah yeah i like the full disc see my local horizon doesn't really
stand up to it oh yeah the gary gary's roof um
last time i was on which was probably last
sept august september i've started on this one and it was with the dual rig
so i thought nice nice yeah um i did some rgb
short exposures for the stars this come out reasonably well but it's uh
as you know for oxygen three that one quite happy with that one yeah probably
that's a more recent one beautiful
and that one was last sort of summer's long long long project
it sat in a folder for months and i eventually decided to process that
one and i'm quite i'm happy with that one i am happy with that one so far wizard
yeah there was a yeah done many times now this one
is a real long term project
this wow probably i like that in excess of 120 hours of data wow
120 hours wow wow um the o3 which is the squid
itself is only just above my local
white pollution noise level so it's taken me a lot to pull that out
and just three if not four years working that so far
but i haven't given up yet i will carry on so i won't get happy with it
and that was taken with a small 71 mil telescope
it's a cracking shot i i i am quite proud of that one i would be too that is
a good shot yeah and i think um that's very nice yeah it's more
um [Music] like the dog behind me chewing a bun
once i've started with something generally speaking
i'm very reluctant to let it go until i'm happy with it uh and this one
it's getting there there will be more data added if we ever get clear skies um but these are
stupidly long sub exposures of a half a half an hour each
and it says there's 85 hours worth of all three in there
how many years did you image that over because 85 hours in the uk is really three or four years
that's looking more like a decade's worth yeah no it's ccd as well so it's
the cmos boys are apparently moving this up much quicker yeah but you'll have a you'll have a
cleaner signal to noise yeah that's true it's nice to open the floodgates now
[Laughter] like i recommend the moon shoots
it takes only a couple of hundred seconds
yeah exactly like the first one i showed in that season that's beautiful that's marvelous
picture yes i'm gonna stop sharing now there you go
i'm gonna share over the live screen because we've still got live images coming into it so look at something
different change so um just for packing i've switched the
guiding on now yeah so that's three minutes uh subs on this
um i'm not interested in really what the guy graphs doing what i'm interested in the styles around
yeah which is what we were saying earlier really m81 m82 um that's coming in quite nice the sky
is clear it's not fully clear so the three minute exposures
um i've just brightened it up a little bit just so it makes it more visible on the screen but that's the actual capture
coming in there i love the spiral structure on m81 that's that's beautiful
so if you actually brighten it up um a bit too much
never find the right balance there we go somewhere around there you can see that spiral structure really nice
even though we're a dark sky here all of the lights are off out there now so it's pretty dark
i still use a box standard light pollution filter on this yeah and that stops anything like
wandering noise or other issues yeah on that so it's just one of the cheapest light pollution filters you can
find literally um 12 pounds something like that actual sky showing
gary sorry what's your old sky you're showing sorry i couldn't hear you then sorry
what's the old sky camera showing uh i haven't i've not gone back to it yet uh okay i will do in a second if you
give me two seconds i'll just switch it back on because the internet was just slowing a
little bit a while back so i just shut it off and let me just switch over on
[Music] here optimize quality there we go
how bad is it yeah so it's a little bit out of focus that was me earlier because i took it
out of the cabinet and i was playing around with something and it was cloudy so i couldn't focus it
back on anything apart from the clouds um so yeah it's a little touch out but it's
not a bad view on that it really is a quite a nice view okay m51 is directly overhead yeah yeah
yeah exactly so um and if we look at this we're only on uh four and a four and a half second
exposures yeah that's pretty good if we actually run this up a little bit now start running it up to so 15 second exposure
yeah cut your gain down a bit um we'll see what it does yeah yeah it's
quite dark here so you can get away with with quite a lot
there we go and then knock it back on here that's better you could actually see that there is still high flower there
you can see it milling around in the image that was one of the reasons for keeping the grain up then just to see what's going on yeah
run it down to about there you do a time to that on a star trail
you'll be well away it's very very slightly out of focus at the moment yeah it's just i had nothing
to focus on earlier so and i'm not standing out there now doing it because it's pushing sort of minus
four out there is it the slight the slight out of focus is probably helping you under these
conditions yeah that's it it will it um
i can see your camera the licensing version i need to copy it
but yeah it's working working pretty well and like i say the other image in rig there
yeah that's running pretty well so um makes a change can't argue with that
no let me just shut off the screenshot there we go
cool so who else we got cameron you've joined us as well hey gary how you doing how are you
awesome hey it's good to see everyone here so hello scott hi steve steven steve
we got richard tom jason james uh andreas
and chuck good to hear see you all good to be part of the party here i'm
you can probably tell from my accident i'm a fellow canadian a so uh when i hear mississauga and stuff like that
i used to live there for a short time after uh i'm actually um born in yellowknife for those canadians
who know where where that is uh way up north and uh that that's professional cold
yes yes actually 50 years to the to the day today is my birthday so
happy
i'm in seattle right now i look outside and there's rain of course but i'm very happy to say uh a
couple of days ago i got another clear night uh the transparency was degrading through the
night uh you know we have fog usually with the changing of the weather here but i
was able to get a couple of pictures um and you know when i see the picture of the squid and you know the rosette and
all the pictures here very newbie i am i might be a an experienced um uh visual observer but
when it comes to astro imaging i'm really a novice so i i uh really respect
uh the work that everyone is doing here of course gary leading the the the charge here and with
all your capabilities on image processing that so i really uh want to get to that stage um
but uh but i'm taking small baby steps right now i just i'm using a smart a
smartphone and um i'm kind of uh leveraging my visual experience uh of knowing the way
of around the sky to kind of pick a couple objects and then kind of experiment and
and play around so uh if you guys want i i'm gonna share my screen
let me just uh share my screen there
okay let's move this out of the way
i'm going to put in a picture make sure i'm showing my whole
screen like last time you can okay it's coming up here can you see my
screen oh here we go sorry is it sharing or maybe not let me try that again
sharing screen [Music] all right try that
okay can you see my mouse
ah your mouse so your mouth oh
i see what's happening it i always have to i found out in in uh i had this problem last time give me a second
uh display settings duplicate sound there we go now you
should be able to see it
can you see my mouse now yes yes we can okay good yeah when i put it in
in presentation mode it puts it into a weird slide mode so i want to get the full screen so you can see because
okay so you can see in my mouse okay so these are the objects i'm going to move this out of the way these are the objects i i imaged
you know when i say imaged i mean very very primitive image okay this is i'm in
a total very bottom of the barrel uh with my imaging but uh you know i
took uh of course the orion nebula beautiful love it i was trying my
sensitivity with the flame nebula that was my test object and very very
very poor picture but at least i got it uh i'll show you the horse head i have the air vicinity i did the plate solve
but there's nothing showing up thor's helmet same thing rosette nebula nothing i need filters basically i have uh boral
eight so uh if i use filters and do some stacking and stretching and all that
cool stuff um i will get there but i just wanted to get the basic idea so i'll show you those briefly
eskimo nebula came out really good m46 with the planetary nebula ngc 24630
i got that um some of the leo galaxies uh here uh several sets
uh also uh actually m105 um and then needle galaxy i got that in
coma vernicius uh the whale galaxy the hockey stick galaxy being canadian i had to have that
and um m106 uh a whirlpool galaxy and i managed to at
the end of the night i got the ghost of jupiter to kind of tape so all the pictures were taken uh between two to
thirty seconds with iso to 400 to 32 3200 on the game
this is the equipment i used so i have a i upgraded the last time i did this uh scott and team uh a week ago
i used my uh mac 102 but i use my c8 uh uh this time
i'm using the same eyepiece uh the 26 milli this is a nice one because uh it fits very
very nicely on the um uh with with my uh coupled with the uh
celestron uh phone adapter uh gives you a good view and it gives you a nice uh the 62
degrees gives you an uh with with the image uh the ccd image
sensor can actually get the whole whole view in there which which makes it nice um and then uh this is the picture
of the uh of the of my sky conditions uh orion mars on the top right
i move this out of the way you can see the pleiades up here um and you can see basically as i said
previously i have portal eight pretty or sorry yeah portal 8 towards seattle this
is looking west and then towards the east i get around portal 6. so that gives you
an idea one other thing i wanted to say on the equipment
i used a tablet this time as well because what i did is i controlled my
my uh c8 with my uh with sky safari and that made it easy because then i
could uh do a plate solve on that uh uh while i'm using uh the the phone
connected to the adapter so i didn't have to jiggle things around it was all it was easier to manage
um okay so here's orion nebula um iso 400 30 seconds
framed up here and uh and uh i i used the
stellarium to kind of do the uh you know the plate solving if you will uh for this presentation
um so i was pretty happy with the way that turned out in fact uh this is what got me
excited about smartphone imaging uh when i when i could see with my eight inch i could take a relatively short exposure
and just take a snapshot um i was like oh i'm pretty happy now then i started going deeper uh then i
wanted to see if i could resolve the uh the trapezium
and that was a bit of a challenge because you know talking about pixel size and all that you can forget about it i haven't done the calculation
yet but obviously with a smartphone and an eyepiece and you know 2000 focal length and all that kind of stuff um
the globby stars but i will figure this out when i have more time to optimize and get the right
image scale for my eyepiece and with the smartphone so that so i can optimize uh the star sizes and start doing
stacking and stuff um so this is just a single shot the first one was 1600 one second so very short
exposure and then i getting a sharper iso 200 so i could get tighter stars at
15 seconds i zoomed in with this this is all with the same eyepiece so that's how i got the uh
so that's why it's more pixelated uh then the flame nebula
um very very faint but i don't know if you guys can see it but there's you can
start to see the outline here very faintly yes i had i had to go 30 seconds
and these these uh these artifacts are because of the uh the infrared i have haven't figured that
out yet but i want to be able to disable does anyone know here how to disable the uh the ir on the smartphone
tear it apart yeah yeah what i what i do is i put a piece of electrical tape to reduce it uh so so
that's that that helps but it's still not good enough anyhow that there's some artifacts unfortunately one of that um
the horse head now this was fun i did i took millions of pictures here okay uh
just because i actually have never seen or imaged the horse had yet in my even though i i used to have an 18 inch uh
dog um i never was able to take it out here in the winter in seattle in all my years
because it's very clear night so uh i was never able to see that the horse head so i was trying i'm still trying
and it might be in here but if you look at these four stars here this is kind of the the plate solve if you will
right here the horse head should be right here but you can't see it of course this is with iso 8003 so i want
it obviously with the right filter lh alpha um and all that in the future uh i
could probably do it but i just wanted to get the technique down and and and get better you know obviously i could start stacking and
stretching and and and using filters uh to get it but this is my first attempt and but one
thing you can see as you can see i see uh ngc 2023 up here just slightly uh
glowing a little bit so i knew i was in the right place i think that's so cool that you can
you can determine where you you're pointing that you're in the right spot
yeah you know no thanks starters yeah you know what risks really have i must say skype
yeah sky safari uh is awesome for that uh you can zoom in you can look at the eyepiece
size uh and then this is just using stellarium doing the same thing it's kind of you know a little artistic here
but but uh but you're right i i was able to see these and that's how i'm finding for
example even in my portal six to eight uh skies i can pick out like magnitude
12 almost magnitude 13 galaxies on a moonless night with my uh it's just changed everything
when you can use uh you know these these uh star maps that you can zoom in
and then they have all the stars you can exactly do a star hop and triangulate exactly where the deep sky and then when
you use your advertis vision you can really pick out much fainter objects than you'd otherwise see
so so that's what i'm using that same technique with my visual
to to do this and so uh i'm looking forward to finally capturing the horsehead one of my times i just i just
look at those pictures and i'm like one of these days i mean i'm going to see it anyhow
then thor's helmet yeah another one of those elusive objects that you know i've seen millions of pictures everyone's
taking beautiful pictures and here's my picture which doesn't show anything but but again plate solved uh this is
where it should be right here and maybe if i stretch it and i stack it i i might be able to pick out
uh pick it up and i do want to do that in the future i'll take multiple images and then and and optimize this
but you can see the the telltale sign of where it is is these four stars here uh which even you know this is
here but you can see it better on the uh on sky safari
rosette nebula you know i saw those beautiful pictures again that you've taken i'm really loving that i respect
that very much but here's my version of course without any filters it's it's basically you just don't get above the
noise so the best i can do is this but at least i know where it is this is the cluster and i see there's a bit of vignetting uh
going on as well so but anyhow that's this is at maximum gain 3200 and only 10
seconds but if i blow it out then i chose something a little more positive eskimo nebula and i took a
picture of the eskimo nebula last a week ago with my 4-inch and the
interesting part is i'm using exactly the same eyepiece same phone everything's the same except
obviously the focal length and aperture is quite a bit better so what you start to see is uh is you start to see some
structure which i'm really happy in the nebula itself you see the outer uh hood if you will and the inner face
and of course the central star is bright enough but you can actually separate those and you can see the varying brightness as well so i was very happy
and and i was playing around with different iso game settings and exposures to kind of get different details and
this is kind of what i thought so anything from 10 seconds up to 30 seconds but i wanted to get iso like try to go
to a lower iso so i can get a less noisy and a more well-defined image so this is
kind of the best i could do with just a single you exposure to uh enter some of your
smartphone images in our next astrophotography contest it'll all be a smartphone imagery
oh thanks yeah that would be that would be really fun yeah i would love to do that we need to do one with that girly
lyo scope soon yes
and then uh here's a fun one um ngc uh 2430 which is a fine and template nebula
inside of m46 so you got your m46 cluster and it's like oh that's nice and then you see a
little puff here and then i tried to pull it out and i was able to pull it out here uh with 30
seconds iso 800 you can see the ring smoke ring here and then this is zooming
in at 30 seconds with iso 400 a little sharper but the one thing i noticed with the lower iso with the lower gain on the
amplifiers uh what you get is you get a better more defined image so if you can
take a longer exposure with lower iso you can get a better signal of the noise or better definition
so that was that was kind of something i've i've been discovering as i'm going on this journey
but this is kind of this is a pretty good medium happy medium iso 800 and then uh
now we're getting into galaxies uh it's coming into galaxy season you know as the time i took these pictures over four
hours uh and then as i was saying um over those four hours the sky
transparency went worse and worse and worse but i still was able to get some pictures so
um these are some galaxies inside of leo uh in in the in the triangular part the
back back end of leo as kind of just the test and you can see three of them nicely here these are all
artifacts we have to ignore that and i'm gonna have to get rid of that in the future but you can see them nicely defined here
and then and then the leo triplet this is uh the the field of view wasn't enough to get
all three so i got these two here uh m65 and then m66
and then if i go to uh and there's three six two eight this is the challenge object
um you can barely see it here uh with my mobile phone
yeah with mobile phone exactly yeah fairly sick if you look really carefully you can
actually see the the dust lane and you can see the other side of the uh disc i barely see those with my
dslr 60 second yeah very bad but what was happening is uh
this big meeting i didn't the phone got misaligned so it kind of threw it off it's hard to do it with galaxies because
you don't have uh generally a rich star feel to kind of get everything in focus so it was i was
kind of losing alignment on my eyepiece here then i got uh m105 uh these three are the other uh
galaxies uh other part of the trip there's a little cluster of three galaxies by m105 uh so you got m105 3384
and then you could barely see uh ngc 3389 and i zoomed in here pretty good you know three three eight nine coming
out uh 30 seconds um and you can see them pretty well but
pretty grainy you know not not awesome but that's because of the zoom and stuff but again i can improve that in the
future um and then of course everyone's favorite the needle galaxy roman bernicias four six four five six five
there's different explosions and i tried again i played with the different iso settings so on iso 800 30 seconds you
can see it here nicely defined very sharp but not very bright and then of course i blew it out
at 30 seconds with 3200 game on iso
um then if we go now the whale galaxy getting a little more uh obscure but a
very big galaxy i discovered this late in my observing sessions i still have my 18 inch
dub and this is a fantastic object oh my gosh in a dab
and you can barely see the 4627 off of it but you can fairly
you can easily see the shape and then here's a blown up view of it eight iso 800
um 30s all three seconds but you can see that pretty pretty well defined
whale galaxy and then the hockey stick they call it the crowbar in but i call it the hockey stick uh you can barely
see the little hook here uh zooming in i had to blow it out unfortunately but
and then m106 i love m106 i love the spiral arms uh they they come out really
strong especially this one here um comes out and then i zoomed in and you can start to see actually some detail
structure in the center so not bad you know iso 1600 30 seconds with a smartphone uh m106 so that's just a
single picture and you i can just imagine in the future when i take multiple images take darks flats
use filters well i can't use filters on galaxies but on moonless nights better transparency this will just get
better um and then uh m51 this is the wide field view compared to
the four-inch view i took a couple weeks ago you can actually get the spiral structure here right away
with iso 1600 on the 8-inch and then i zoomed in
and you highly very grainy of course because of this but when i went on low iso i get
a better a better image but you can start to see the spiral arms already at iso 800 but then it starts blowing out
and again i'm experimenting with iso and i i'm starting to come to the conclusion that better to go with lower iso
and you know we already knew that from photography days uh you know less grainy
and just start stacking um and so i'll get to that and finally the
end of my day um from my night four hours into it around
11 30 um ghost of jupiter and what i like about this image is you can actually see
pretty good structure you can see the central star you can see the different brightnesses
of the inner bubble and then the outer bubble and again very greeny i mean this is not an awesome picture compared to
what you could do with an image or whatever but not bad with a smartphone iso 400 uh 30 seconds so
anyhow that's my uh my little uh adventure so
cameron that's awesome that's very very good hey i wanted to uh take a moment just to
recognize all the people that have been on the uh in the audience today we've had uh
you know well over a hundred uh messages uh in the stream here
um i i know i'm gonna miss some of the people here but michael whitaker was on beatrice heinz mike wiesner
james the astrophotographer who i think is on with us right now in the after party andreas nielsen okay who is also
in the uh in the lineup of vips there that um uh book davies um
uh martin eastburn uh john jardine goss was on tonight
watching us uh chris larson um uh
tim myers uh talking on about light pollution harold locke
and and much more so thank you for watching uh you know we're we're still going but
uh and i did put out the link again for the after party um i know it's starting
to get laid in the uk but uh what time is it now gary is
zero clock 20 past two but it's crystal clear here so i'm just good that's good
keep running i'm clear i'm outside here in american sight too so i'm gonna log in on sky
but i was gonna uh wander over to james because i can see he's sitting out there with a red light on him
somewhere [Laughter] welcome what are you doing this evening
thanks for having me yeah james i know it's it's hard to get you on a program because of your workload but uh thank
you it's uh i haven't been on since what the third or fourth star party so it's been
quite a little bit of time yes yeah and finally have a clear night well it was clear it's there's some clouds right now
but i'm just gonna camp it out and wait and keep freezing i'm i'm gonna stick it out tonight it's it's
friday so no work tomorrow okay but uh since i'm not shooting right now i i
have to apologize i'm only on my phone yeah so at least we can see you so that's okay
but i'm going to show you my rig since i'm using a uh i use an xos2
you see that uh a little bit okay sorry
yeah here's the mount um that i have on top of a it's a skywatcher quattro eight
f4 newtonian and uh use a zw asi air
and uh guy cam and everything um i was shooting
uh the horse head this evening in the flame nebula but like i said the clouds started
coming in but this is what i was getting um
i don't know how easily you can see that or not we can see it but that's a five minute exposure at uh
i iso 1250 and i think i got seven or eight of
those in before the cloud started coming in so i'm just gonna keep waiting for it
and uh shoot at the next open open spot of sky
that comes available for me and oh nice you know just it's nice being out for a
change it's it's i i was on a uh almost three months
december 8th i was was last night i was out and then tuesday night i got out for
about a half hour before the clouds came in so i'm already out a little bit longer than
that but just waiting on these clouds to clear again and go for some something else
awesome that's great yeah actually out in the field uh you know
with their telescope like that so that's very cool yeah i'm uh i'm about a half a mile from
lake erie where i'm at at this place uh it's out of my buddy's farm it's a
little bit of a darker spot for me but it's just i like the seclusion
and you know i hear coyotes off in the distance i can't see anything so i'm not really worried about them and
they're going to need a whole bunch to tackle me down
very cool very cool thank you i just like to everybody's presentations
this evening and uh just enjoy being a part of it
thank you we really enjoy having you participate as well well thank you it's great it's wonderful
well um back to you gary
yeah it's um well like i say it's still clear here i'm just going to log one of the cameras into the the show so it's on
the screen now so um richard what have you been doing lately
you're sitting there joining the european style party for the first time
so um what have you been uh up to this week let me uh share my screen here
yeah feel free another m42
um luckily uh this one is the first one or
pretty much my first postable image that uh after replacing my secondary mirror with
a larger one after moving up to an aps-c size sensor
and finally got the whole scope aligned collimated and put back together and this image
came from uh tuesday the last star party that we just had
beautiful yes i guess it was like like like a 80
moon or something you know what i like about this richard is is you this is the hardest thing to
do is to get the inner part of the nebula the full dynamic range right and and the outer tendrils at the same time
that's that's incredible you can see it's it's a bold
yeah that's impressive yeah yeah great detail on that shot i i got to give a little credit to that uh that asi 2600
with the 16 bit i think it helps i could be wrong but how many different filters
did you use uh i just used a opti-long uh l enhance
oh the triple is that the is that the three tri-band uh it's not an aeroband really i mean
it's slightly narrow band on the hydrogen it's uh pretty wide open through the the green
and the blue i i don't know the specs on it at all but it's a 2600 rgb uh asi
camera um i use um color rgb because i'm showing live images
all the time and you know being able to show to as many people as i can is more important that what i'm doing to
show live than for me to switch to monochrome and do a lot of extra imaging and seeing
black and white live yeah i always think in the same i mean you see these guys now going to the
monochrome of course getting that awesome depth and you you can't beat the uh
because you have all the pixel density right you don't have the rgg or whatever oh it's definitely better it's
definitely better but as far as lives concerned it's it's kind of what i need to be using uh i am
considering um picking up the 2600 mono uh later this year and um
doing some things with that but uh let me stop uh sharing my screen here nice
and what was the uh instrument you used on that one is that the six inch this guy right here uh the
explorer scientific uh comet hunter oh yes the 152 millimeter max tough uh cast
green you're one of the lucky ones who got one one of them i'm one of the lucky ones
you've got two now parallel imaging awesome
you see i'm only shooting with a dslr i have a canon 60d and i i'm still trying to decide if i
want to take that leap to a dedicated camera or not and i don't know if i want to do
color or mono it's just it's still a big decision on which way i want to go if i even want to
do that route because pretty happy with shooting with the canon right now but i know i'd get much
better images if i had a dedicated camera especially when it's warm outside
oh that yeah without a doubt i was thinking about maybe in the summer because it gets pretty hot and humid up
here and i was thinking about maybe putting a building some type of peltier cooler for that camera but then that just adds more
weight and pretty close to the the max payload for photography or with the xos2 with that
eight inch nude on it and all that extra weight right but it's it handles like a dream i i
can't complain one bit about this mount it it it rolls and rolls all night
thanks james cool i'm gonna sign off everybody i want to thank everybody for having me again and
uh have a great evening thanks for joining us you too have a blast thanks take care thanks thank you
so yeah we're um still running clear here uh i have a thought i just wanted to share
about you know we're talking about cameras it's now color versus mono
i i've been running with the color my color camera more even though i have mono cameras i've been running with
color more often because i just don't have the weather or the patience right now to to get
the imaging that i want to do and i can do a lot with the color and with the filters that are available now i can
still get some pull some narrowband stuff out of it um
so it's what a project that would take something like this took a week and a half
right i could probably get done in less than half that time there are a few issues with some of
these uh dual band quad band tri-band filters and i've noticed quite a few of them are
really hesitant to grab objects when there's any moon out
whereas the dedicated filter does fly through it and grab it when you even when you've got a full moon
yeah well yeah gal whilst we're on topic uh
that is i use it cc i use a trius pro 674 single shot color
and that was taken during the full moon last week yeah um with an l enhanced filter yeah
excellent i've got the l enhanced but what you'll notice is it really really drops off on the o3
it does what i've also noticed is if you don't get if it's my my issue with my images with it are
my the way i've got it set up on my fsq the filters a little bit too far from
the chip yeah so i'm getting an artifact which i photoshopped out but you'll see on some
stars i've photoshopped them out but you'll see that line yep
and i'm i initially i thought it was guiding and then i went down the rabbit hole and did it but actually i think
it's the filters just a bit it's the coating on the back of the filter and you're seeing it on the l-pro
filter on certain cameras as well yeah it so if you image a large style so if you get
in around the horse head uh yeah i had flames and
you're getting a line right off of the image and the problem is with this is when you actually look at it it's a reflection back onto the sensor
yeah so it produces a line in the image and then it spans that out past the star
one of the reasons tonight while we got a box standard light pollution filter on was to cross reference that and all of
the styles are perfect in this and there's no lines coming off them no like proved the point that it's a coating
issue on some of the filters yeah but i think in principle i love single shot color
yeah yeah and certainly if you've come from the dslr fold which i have i still use a
dslr quite a lot um going i i now use a single shot ccd
i love the immediacy of it i like the control of it and it's just seems cleaner than a dslr for certain
things um but a good halfway because if you go to mono you're gonna have to start getting
the filters and so while we're talking yeah if i share this image over this was
an image um of a bright star with the old pro filter and you can see
the blue back onto the center yeah that's what i was getting on all my images and that is caused by the
anti-reflective coatings on the back of the filter what a wonderful irony
i only managed to process a few of these in the week but um these are some of the images of more or less the same areas
that uh steve was showing on so i've not even got around to actually editing these all that they're stacked
just so i can make room um but i did manage to throw a couple up that was one
that came out quite nice in the week and there was one over there as well
i did use um there we go the hdr that you showed us last week on there gary yeah one or two
now i don't use it on the surface yeah not too much uh if i do then i'll crop
the surface off yes the reason for that is is it will expand out into this area
here yeah and that will mess up the limb so using the http or you have to use it but
on these i don't worry with the hdr yeah we weren't exactly clear um
[Music] at the end of the day these are they've got me around it so
shots for the weather you can see the higher cloud there blocking it out so it's got classic day star
um delineation between the limb and the
photosphere around the edge in it yeah um but
what you're gonna get let's go right the way down on these yeah there was a new active area there i
did see that today those two areas that sort of expanded a little bit more
but it just wasn't clear enough and there was a solar flare going on so that was more interesting um
you have to pick your your things when the weather's not that bright
by something shiny yeah it's that magpie mode some it's moving
and it's quick let's grab it um and then
you can see here there was some quite nice filaments there and if we actually play around with that image we get those
filaments out and they will all look quite nice um and then i played around with the
quantum but i put it on the airy lab hat and the scene really wasn't good enough for that but it was worth a
shot just to see um what was going on so you can see we did get in quite close
and you can see the 3d structures there you could probably bring this out but it's not going to be razor sharp
so yeah we were we have been doing so a little bit same thing again not had time
to process all of the images um and most of the the color ones are there
most of those were just off a standard doublet one of steve's in actual fact one of the uh style fields
yeah so thanksgiving was imagining this been swapping them all around we had some solar last week off of the
um 102 fcd they came out quite nice as well so yeah it's just sort of changing
things around at the moment and um playing around seeing what we can get
you mind if i share something you were just talking about the moon getting blocked out by um
different filters and stuff yeah and let's see here
this one sure all right we should be seeing the
rosette yeah five minute subs uh this is right before the moon comes up
and we're just gonna blink through these five minute subs
there it goes oh yeah perfect
okay what would be interesting is the you know the different signal to noise there's a threshold
right so it's like there's probably a formula out there which says okay if you have this much
moon glare this is the exposure time and how many you have to stack to get the equivalent
detail yeah i was like should i stack the first four or the first six
yeah because all the rest were just gonna make it worse these
really people go on about these filters are quad bands they're tri-band whatever
they are a dual band filter they are a two-band filter as far as a color camera can see
yeah so you can you can sit down and you can draw all the graphs in the world yeah that you
want on the box yeah you can say that you know it's going to pick off that nanometer in the light spectrum and it's
going to pick off this area and different manufacturers will adjust them around but as far as the camera sees it
is just a two channel filter so if you look at o3 and hydrogen beta
they're right next to each other yeah they're both down in the green area yeah and if you look at hay and s2
they're both in the red area so as far as the color camera sees it only sees green and red
that's why you want a monochrome right yeah it cannot pick off yeah the difference between s2 and hote
yeah so really it's a bit of a hype around some of these filters and what you're looking at is the
tighter bands that are uh in the primary areas which is hotel and o3
but wouldn't you say gary that is is like is that filter pretty much all those filters are really
designed for mono because uh then you know if you if you look at like you say the the rgg gb
uh you know roll off the filters are going to be kind of not on the opt on the peak
right so whereas whereas whereas a monochrome is going to have a nice you know wide monochrome wouldn't
wouldn't necessarily differentiate that much on these because they're primarily designed for the color sensor
right so if you had a mono camera then yes you would go over to your mono filters and and that would give you a a
reasonably um good shot at it and and generally if you get a tight band 03 filter somewhere
around a 3.5 nanometer three nanometer even with a bright moon you get some
quite nice detail there um the standard seven nanometers they're a little bit looser so you're going to
get more chance of bringing in the moon yeah and it's going to distract from the
actual target in the image but what i'm sort of coming across that is some manufacturers seem to have got
these filters really good yeah and they're normally just calling them a dual band
filter and others are sort of pushing them a try or a quad band filter and
they're having all sorts of problems with the moon bleed into the actual image so you can see a bright moon
come right across the image when it comes through and then it also knocks one of them out but the key thing is is
it's not actually a while it might technically be a four channel filter the camera doesn't care it can only see two
colors okay you know what you're right i just thought about it you're right gary because if you have a tri-band on a mono
you're you're you're not doing anything actually yeah because it's it's it's it's still mono
it's going to treat them all at the same channel so so that it's just luminosity whereas so you actually want to have
uh dedicated h alpha s2 and o3 filters
when uh with a filter wheel if you want to do model basically right yeah
and they they will produce a nicer image it doesn't matter whether it's a ccd or
whether it's a cmos they will generally produce a nicer image and i'm not saying that the
quad bands and the tri-bands are no good what i'm saying is is they do have their limitations
so everybody you know they're a new thing really over the last two years and again everybody will jump on
everybody wants to produce one of these filters they know there's a market there for it but all of a sudden when you get
into that market there's lots of problems with these and that is the limitations of what you're trying to do
so there will be certain targets that you'll go to image when you've got say a half moon out and it won't see most of
the detail that's in that that particular area uh it doesn't matter whether you do a one minute or a
ten minute exposure it's not going to see it because it's actually getting bled out by the moon
and that will be the looseness of the the actual band on the filter so you do see some variations in them
some are nicer than others yeah but you know the one thing i am seeing at
the moment is a lot of these uh reflections like what steve's got and not what i've had over the last couple
of months and that's probably become more prominent because we've been imaging when the moon's out because it's the
only time it's been clear you know so we haven't had a lot of choice and all of a sudden you're
starting to pick up on these errors that we might not have seen because you know we've had plenty of
clear nights and the full moons out we just got we're imaged the moon we won't bother with uh deep sky
but it's pushing a lot of people to image maybe the wrong time or you're trying to fix that
there is a simple solution shoot the monsters instead
there's only so many months of the year that you can just through the moon and really from november through till
really mid last month is more or less been a lot down the clouds there's been odd
days that have been clear but you're talking few and far between yeah
picking the spirals out you know on galaxies over the last few months i have
five clear nights since november yeah five or six
i wouldn't say i've had four clear nights but here i'm very very good at picking off the odd hours
yeah so i can grab an hour here or an hour there and it's not really prime conditions like so a lot of it has been
full moon or we've had higher cloud or other uh you know phenomenon going on
and it does get tedious but what i'm sort of coming at is that all of a sudden you start finding these
problems somewhere that maybe you might not have seen and it's quite good seeing steve's images because they're just backing up
what i've been saying for the last month there is a coatings issue with some of these filters
i have got a pick for it though i did fix it i have two fixes for it i took the
filter out and when that didn't work i went in yeah
that's another thing i quite i must be odd because i don't mind
a mono image no i don't know right sometimes i'll just go
it's finished there's no quality um doesn't have to be
when we look through a telescope normally we don't see much color let's take a mono image
yeah i'm thinking about that steve because one of the things i'm i'm after is uh i want to replicate the visual
experience as much as possible and uh you know you can you can get very
you can take a lot of imaging sequences in the night with a mono
uh you know and if you want to do a sky survey or something like that uh and get a very good experience and good images
it's nice to get star color i agree but sometimes
right it's going to be mono and it looks nice in modern it's nice and sharp
stars are small it looks good that's it it's finished
but your squid image is awesome steve your screen is just amazing oh no that's
mono from the color camera yeah oh that's nice wow so nice
yeah that that's just it's just playing around i used it as a mask yeah um and i thought i actually quite
like that so i kept it really good you know i look at this image gary it's it's like
you think about the the plates uh from the palomar plates right when they were mono
and and then you look at what this is in comparison like first of all the round there's no spikes diffraction
spikes right because you don't have a spider in the front and then you have the depth and the
tendrils is incredible the detail the resolution of this is probably even better than that those hubble plates
yeah it's amazing and this is the thing i mean i really do like mono i quite often look at an image
and think we're stripping the color out of it i don't like it yeah scott's getting it um
yeah this in actual fact this was with the 102 it's one that i've not put out yet it's uh
i'll stop sharing there what is a
this is a glass plate taken with the 100 inch of the moon
and it's from 1924 it's dated october 21st 1924.
excellent it's got tons of detail in it i would buy it from you it's got
only 100 years old don't drop it yeah it's pretty cool
i still have the original envelope and everything for this i i
eventually i will turn it into you know i'll donate it to a museum or
something but uh i like looking at it for right now and uh yeah
i don't have very many things like that but a couple of things they're great
sort of keeps keeps you alive doesn't it having that sort of uh yeah yeah yeah yeah
i mean just holding on to this in 1924 i mean we're it's almost 100 years old you know
and uh it's still it still contains all this data you know
and uh doesn't require any electronics to look at it and uh it's pretty awesome
yeah it's fantastic i mean that's a hundred years old whoa and still here's my cheap picture
of the moon uh with my four-inch mac um it's not as good as the early ones i
love pekka's picture and i think one of the steves had an excellent picture too
uh earlier but um i was pretty happy to be able to to get these uh
these pictures with my with my four-inch mac
again a nice tonal range nice and sharp yeah it's a please that
how many times keep saying it how many times you see over sharpened pictures of the moon
you know it's just lovely it's crisp no problem natural
thanks i would say 75 percent of the moon images i see are
oversharpened yes um probably mine are as well and mine
yes everybody has a tendency to do it just because you see somebody
and that's right that's why i wanted to do you to
say because i'm i'm not the person who's touching
my images the other ones are the judges and the
only way i learn to be better is that somebody else say
a little bit more a little bit more or a little bit less that's the only way
to be better because i i see only my work
but the other others say maybe those who we know what they say
that they sharpen a little bit less a little bit more contrast
whose image is this this is uh i just found this this is the one with that star in that we're on
about with the lines coming off of yeah i love the running mat the running man
down there is awesome yeah that's phenomenal that's really nice it's the rest of it um that's caught out what
we're also noticing is it's splitting the style colors as well so you're actually getting blue
up to sort of halfway through the star and not uh controlled and it's not the optics of the telescope
because we're proving that we're putting another filter on and it's perfect yeah i did the same
yeah the real colors of the stars red dwarfs and
blue stars yeah but the point being is is the blue is only coming halfway through the star
so normally you would attribute that with something like the the reducer maybe
yeah uh maybe that the camera's got tilt in it those you know those would be the
reasons for uh getting a color to stop halfway through a star okay actually offer the filter that's
causing it so that you know these are the things that
i sit in the background working on all the time it's not just taking images and this is why half the images don't
get out online you know so like these images were taken tonight they might go out this week they
might go out in the years time yeah you know they might get used for some other purpose but you just never know
um what we're going to do or what's going to occur but um these are actually in a sense test
images tonight they're just running at different objects that we're going to test the images and uh see what
comes with them so that that's like a brain surgery so you don't let
the patient out before it's good to be on the streets
yeah we're forever finding um we're hoping to find good images
but in a sense you're also finding bad images because you're correcting the issues that are going on with something
right from a filter to the optics to the cameras whatever it is so that's the
main thing here a lot of the stuff that's coming in is either um prototype it's new
you know it might be something that's out in the market that there's a problem with it can be any any number of reasons
i think the biggest problem for us uh beginners as i see myself
is that we don't have any references to compare with what is real what is
this is what it should be looking like yeah but let's see the color i mean if
you use photometric color calibration in um pics inside then that actually references it off of
the catalogs as to what colors it should be okay if it's a narrow band image it's your
choice of colors it's down to you yeah and you know at the end of the day if you've got a
an image of orion and it's really green and red there's nothing wrong with it it's pretty much how it looks in the
eyepiece to be honest but everybody expects an image not to have
green in it you know that oh you can't have green in it oh you haven't removed the green you
know the from the the um the overlay the bow matrix or this out
the other and i i get bored with that it's a case of what pleases you
okay not what pleases everybody else out there um because there's lots of what we call pixel
peepers who go into images and they're looking for everything every era in the image
yeah and really when you look at lots yeah and when you look at a lot of their images they're rubbish anybody so
it's you know they're just finding fault for finding fault and um a lot of the images
look really nice that go up online there's no need to be a critic of
you know what goes on because that color is down to you and i i choose different colors like that orion i put up a little
while ago it's quite red it's got a little bit of yellow in it it's just being different
it is just making it slightly different from the other 10 000 orions that have gone up over there that's art
really are but yeah it's down to you and i say this with solar so if you look
at how solar images are recorded in mono you know um
you're adding color to them so you you're adding color in there to make it look nicer to do whatever
so by adding the color you're removing detail it's not really a scientific
image anymore although everybody wants to see them in color yeah but the proper problem with the moon imaging is that
people see everybody have seen moon and they can relate when they see the moon picture they
relate that ah the moon doesn't look like that it it's much more brighter and and so on
but orion how many have seen orion in colors with their
bare eyes yeah but even with the moon yeah you don't see the mineral colours with your
eyes no no yeah so by you adding the colours and andreas
his image of the moon was really nice earlier yes i've done images which are slightly more
um you know copper colored for the mineral colors yeah and they look really
nice you know that's art too yeah but the colors are technically there the
camera they are they are but we can see them just because it's in the images
the colors to bring them out yeah um and it's the way that you saturate the image
in the first place it's the way you separate the colors and bring them back together and saturate them and that's
difficult what colors you bring in i know that's a difficult job to get those
so you do it in mixed insight you don't do it in photoshop because photoshop just naturally looks at all the colors
and saturates all of them yeah exercise and picks inside everywhere and i have to learn that pixel sight
um now that's subjective in itself because as your eyes age the way you
register color changes to a given level so we will we would probably describe orion totally
differently yeah even though we've seen it
technically in color you know um yours was probably on the 100 inch i suspect scott um
mine was on a 36 inch f4 um colors in the um in a nebula
yeah i mean if you i'm sure you've seen orion in colour i have seen orion in color uh
the smallest scope that i've seen orion in color where i could tell there was color
uh was under the incredibly dark skies of rodeo new mexico with an eight-inch
telescope yeah really low power very low power
averted vision but you could definitely you could see that it was not blue gray
you know startling color where you go holy smokes
oh my god okay 60 inch telescope yeah
telescope they yeah you had a video right scott you were was it uh the 60 inch um
i forgot which which observatory it was but uh they were they were looking at the iran it was mount wilson yes and uh
they really zoomed right in there you could see the trapezium and and like many stars there must have been 50 stars
in the view and it was full color that was incredible for all of you guys watching we do
when when we get our vaccinations we're going to resume the uh mount wilson star parties that we do
and uh that we are setting up for next september next year
not that not 22. and we will do a tour of the jet
propulsion laboratory uh we'll go into the 60 inch this will be a whole weekend of
really um you know so i have to book the hotel room right now you're gonna have to book hotel
rooms
we'll go to mount wilson uh uh [Music] friday that friday we will go to the jet
propulsion laboratory then we'll go to mount wilson that night on that friday night some of you will stay in the
iconic um yeah monastery where all the famous astronomers used to stay and uh
and then um they just don't have that many rooms so uh when you say somebody
what's that when you say somebody you're talking about me obviously obviously
but seriously scott if if it's possible when do you get uh get
out with all the information about the bookings and someone plan it very soon i
will i will put up the dates and everything so could you please
because i i will travel to usa this year and the guy that uh that took the image
of the moon that i was showing you uh is this gentleman right here
his name was francis pease this is him at the 100-inch telescope okay
uh famous astronomer he was an instrument maker too but uh he did a bunch of images of the moon on glass
plates uh with the 100-inch oh that's pretty cool i can feel a promotional trip coming
across yeah yeah i think you know i think i'm gonna need to visit my american distributor at
the earliest possibility
i've never been to america oh goodness of all of the years that i've i worked
with me instrumental that never never went over oh my goodness okay we'll make it happen
well i was going to come over to neith with a dome and um this little flu thing happened
okay that that you know blink and you miss it i know but um yeah oh goodness
yeah i had my plan last to last march
i had everything planted to cape canaveral
but then i get my transplant transition then everything was
poked off yeah so i was planning for that trip for
almost a year yeah so everything was spooky then and so on
too well this year i'm sorry that we get together to do this this is
yes yes it's good fun on the subject of uh mono imaging i'm just
going to script share this over and then i'll put up the software
and picks insight so this is what it starts out like
and then with a lot of processing and working out it's not finished yet you've got your
two versions there so you've either got your color version or your mono version
and it's your choice how do you get those colors huh how do you get out those colors
uh by using pix insight
amazingly the dark nebulosity that that's what it started out like that was the original integration that's where
it's come from so once it's all stacked yeah and it's calibrated and then we
bring it up to this so all of that's hiding in in the image oh my god
yeah um it's a little bit noisy it's not finished yeah so that's why it's just
sitting there but if you actually go in there there's a lot more detail to be brought out inside here
yeah that's amazing that all that data is there but it's just how to get
through and that's that's an hour's worth of data so
i'm running into the photography yeah yeah
amazing so it's it's there it's it's just a case of
you know it takes time to learn the software and play with the software yes
they're captures themselves anybody can do the capturing yeah yeah yeah the after job yeah that's the
that's the real job i must make a confession
because i've now bought the i saw um officially
i'mma just dip my toe in half at half a little toe
in into pics inside so i'm officially a pixie now all right cool
cool i have no idea what i'm doing yeah but i mean
i mean you've got to remember i've been using it probably five years now something like that maybe six years when
it was really new okay i was an early adopter for
pleiades uh 2004 yeah when they first brought it out and
i could not get on with it i remember myself and then
i've been looking at stuff i'm looking and looking and looking and thinking i i i looked at it step forward
so i bought it so i'm going to have to use it now i think that using astro art at the time
um and i i bought it i i switched it on i looked at about half a dozen bits on
it and went that can wait yeah and i didn't go back to it for about two months something like that and then it
was like well i've bought the software let's sit down and start learning it yeah guys you are scaring the of me
but the the thing is is really you can do lots of work all of the wavelets are a lot nicer to use in pix insight for
solar and lunar imaging than they are in um registers registerx is very old now
registers can't even disable what most current computers um can so you see a lot of errors in
images that are not actually there i like it
i like it anyway yeah but i'm just saying if you get a large high resolution image in it it
can't render the image properly yeah um and that's the problem whereas you can
put it in the pixel inside and get a real good reference uh to the image so
what is high resolution for you gary so that again sorry what is high
resolution for you 5000 high resolution pictures no not really
it's about whether the software can render the image okay and that's what you find is with um some of the software
you got to remember that in general astronomers are tight they do not like spending money
so they spend money on equipment yeah because that's what i'm thinking
yeah i'm i'm going to paying the inside now or waiting
for the next autumn no it's worth learning on this because pixel insight i
mean i paid for my copy i might work with it and everybody thinks oh you know you get it free or whatever i paid for
mine yeah yeah and it's always been upgraded yeah free
they've never charged anything for it um i will i will but i've been thinking if
i wait until awesome but if i pay it now because my
trial period is almost finished i
need it i want it but i don't have any data but if you guys help me with data or one server
somewhere there's always data milling around i can chuck a link over for something yeah so i can download data
there's 10 years worth of data sitting here and probably a third of that's not processed so you'd be doing me a favor
to process the setup absolutely absolutely but i'm not guarantee the quality
but what i'm getting there is it's not just a one-trick pony it will look at you know um solar
images you can do quite a bit work with that i have seen it's so
powerful too the luna we've done some on the shows before you where we separate them the rgb we
balance out the color on them recombine them back up again and you know it does a really really
good job so you're not just doing it for deep sky when you name it luna you are
i'm sold what you've got to remember is is what i was sort of saying is is people spend
lots of money on equipment yeah yeah uh counters mounts all sorts of stuff when
it comes to software they want to spend nothing yeah that's true that's totally true you know that's like going and
buying a ferrari and sticking diesel in the tank yeah it ain't going to go far
gary disclaimer gary that all of the expensive astronomy equipment is actually very reasonably priced and good
value for money yeah [Laughter] so this business in the
telescope manufacturing is taking what was multi-million dollar technology and making it available for a few thousand
dollars yeah but what i'm sort of getting out there is because they're all handmade
you know people will spend two three four thousand dollars time they've got cameras they've got the mount they've
got the the telescope the guiding rig and yet they're equivalent at like you know 250 euros or whatever it is and
thinking it's expensive and it's like well you know that's where i come up with the
this sort of thing that really astronomers are quite tight um or they're they start playing around
with you know outdated software stuff that's been around you know for over a decade and then they're moaning it's not
working probably it's like well what do you expect you know you got a 20 mp camera there and you expect a 10 year
old piece of software to process it it's not going to happen i think we are the only people that uses their
expensive uh gears the rich people they have ferraris and
lamborghinis and so on they don't try with them every day we use our stuff
every day yeah but it's it's really about a learning process with all of it isn't it
it doesn't matter what the cost is yeah exactly you know it can be it can be a galileo scope
yeah you can still get good moon images out of it if you stick a two thousand dollar camera on the back of it yeah
yeah yeah
so um what i'm sort of getting at though is is because you've i've learned over the long
periods of time of what you can get away with and what you can't get away with you can play with the stuff
but if you skip areas if you suddenly like let's say you got i don't know a couple of months out of the dslr you've
not really learned how to use it and you suddenly go to a cooled camera and then you suddenly jump to the next
model of camera because that looks nicer you're only learning little fractions
of really the whole process and therefore you you haven't learned anything
and that's why you probably still get problems and people need to spend a little bit longer with the equipment
that they've got anything so gary on a path i mean it looks like you know
i'm going to be on a path to get fixed inside sometime in my future but uh before i
get pick some insight uh pick some insight uh can i actually what do you recommend deep sky's tracker
or registax see registax is is so outdated now
i mean the only thing we use it for is is the wavelet's in there just for speed if i'm being dead honest
you know so we throw a solar image in there or a lunar image in there and i can have it back out the other side of
regis stacks within seconds and it seems weird but you've got to think
that the old days and they're old small cameras yeah i could do my solar imaging in the
morning and i'd have the images out by lunchtime the cameras now are so big that i've got
100 gigabyte in an hour of data and i'm having to go through that and go with that's good that's
or just pick you know a random five or six videos and process them
so you're looking for speed in the process inside so if it's a really really good image of something then yeah
it go through and picks inside the general everyday stuff that we're throwing up that everybody's going well
we're just running through registers but it's not really designed for images
for modern cameras you know so this is why the on speed wise people use
auto stacker to stack yeah and we wouldn't record an avi file we're
recording ser file yeah but yeah gary is
alto stacker and all those free softwares though are
unneeded off the pitch inside um no you still need things like auto
stacker for stacking uh luna planetary yeah yeah yeah but uh deep state sticker
and so on sky stack is so limited and and the thing is is you could put
10 the same set of images in there 10 times and get 10 different images out the other side
ah right and you might get two or three of those that look similar
but in in essence it it it is quite limited on what it can do
and the same thing again we're using high resolution cameras now yeah a few of us only have been talking
about the 2600 camera you know these are big cameras yeah they are not small and we're asking
a free piece of software to process an image from a camera that's you know maybe two thousand to five
thousand dollars people who think nothing they're spending there i mean the the one that's
on here if i take it off
the one we used for the the flats a little while ago i mean the size of the sensor on that
if i can get it in there in the light there we go yeah that's a four thousand dollar camera
you know um you're not gonna put that through um
you know deep sky stacker you're going to put that through if i've spent that sort of money on that that camera you're
going to put it through something good and really that boils down to a dslr a dslr's image is huge
yeah they are they are a canon 70d that's got to be around a 20
20 mp image yeah my 600d is around
i don't remember so you you're going to ask your computer and i think this is the other key thing is this all works
around the speed of your processing computer yeah there is no because let's say now we've taken
30 adults we're going to take 80 biases yeah 80 flats and 80 dark
flats and then however many images so if we were like steve and he's done like i
don't know 120 hours on there yeah then he's gonna have a good few hundred
images there but even if you did an hour's worth of 60-second images that's another 60 images to that yeah
every single one of those is 20 mp yeah and you're going to put them into your software and you're going to say to
your computer there you go get on with it [Laughter] do your job
yeah three weeks later you come back to it and it's still got the little
you know so in a sense we're going back in time aren't we because if you think about this windows 7
for instance we used to get an image out of a deep sky camera then and we put it into
something like deep sky stacker or we'd start processing it in photoshop using fits liberator or something
and we'd be there till the morning waiting for that image if it ever came out the other side because normally the software
would crash but you are asking a lot of your system and i think this is the other thing that
people are not looking at that it does actually free up the computer a little bit to work on these images
because even if you're going to get astray pixel processor that you know everybody uses oh i can jump on asset
pixel processor i process them in that it's a lot faster than pix insight have
a try on it now it's moved its game up he's processing the images it's still going to sit there for an hour hour and
a half running through the images it does and if they're a full-frame camera like that yeah you're going to be there
a long time you start firing 500 images through the software and you need something that can actually
process you know without slowing up and without essentially crashing the computer it can
heat your house with when you're processing pictures with the computer you know so in an
astronomer's equipment really is the computer yeah because this is about capture as
well isn't it if we're looking at say um you know planetary capture solar capture
so a camera i was testing today's new one uh launched out and it's really really good i mean i was
getting 136 frames a second at full frame yeah um on a five meter extension lead
and it was firing 136 frames a second down the line so
you know that is good but your computer's got to be able to write that to the hard drive yeah yeah and if it doesn't process that
what you're watching a live view of that image coming in whether it's luna solar
yeah and the screen rendering will start to run down and that's the the computer
itself starting to stutter and then you can start watching the drop frames how many frames it's actually losing
so if i'm actually looking at the um deep sky camera that's on or the
camera that's on the night sky there that's done something like um
1826 frames since we last switched the resolution on
it and it's dropped 10. yeah
it's about the computer that's on the back end of it because a lot of people are thinking that this is
just you know what you're seeing and what's going on there so if it starts dropping frames rapidly effectively
you're doubling your image time if we let's say we're recording a
thousand frames for a solar image and it starts dropping them you're actually going to double that because all of
those drop frames that the computer's just throwing away so there is a big thing here that a
computer is as well yeah yeah do you have luck do you have luckily persuade me to
continue with peaks inside i i think it's daunting i'm not going to say it's not you know it is daunting but
it's worth the journey and i think you know if you're looking around anyway you'll you'll see that yeah
all right i'm good thank you can you hear guys hear me oh sorry you're right yes yep
keep going so so gary uh just going back to the uh
i'm i'm the newbie here and like i said i do want to get to that point and i you're absolutely right when it comes to processing and time
i'll want to have a you know a powerful pc of course a good fast hard drive and uh
and then picks inside but on my journey uh i wanted to check i'm gonna share my screen here quickly um
the the this auto stacker is that is this the right one
right yes auto stacker we use really for planetary solar luna that sort of thing
it's not really designed for stacking deep sky images okay even though this is the whale uh
galaxy yeah i mean you can get away with doing it but it's not necessarily designed
for doing that it is really a planetary piece of software and then register is the is the other
one right yeah but registex now is probably i don't know 15 years old from
its first version i think it was last updated give you a date there if you scroll down a little
bit on that page yeah it give you a date there when it was last loaded up
yeah you're talking a long time ago there you go 2nd of april 2011. yeah using it 10 years before that
yeah so this is what i was saying that you're using we only use this really for
the wavelets yeah that is all we're using it for if you put in an image out of an average
large camera into that now it would just sit there and sit there and sit there and probably a crash before it's even
started to analyze the image i understand that gary but i'm looking for a stepping stone because i'm using
smartphone right now and what do you recommend because i you know i i recording most videos or are you
recording with stills both actually like i have like some video for example of the
no reason why you can't convert the video files yeah you can convert those using uh pip
pipp um that will convert over any video files so you can then put it into an avi
or an sel and you can run it through um you can run it in uh
auto stacker yeah you want to put uh image image software after pip
yeah there you go that's it
that will also have the ser player on there as well which you'll need if you convert into ser files
that's really good program really good okay and that's good from converting a lot of
the still images as well so really it converts most formats i remember when we used to use some of the
movie files from canon and all sorts of things you can convert more or less anything in there
basic stacking from phone images probably deep sky stacker unless you're going to
pay for something you know what i mean it's there isn't a lot of choice on the market
you could try auto stacker but you're gonna have to probably convert them into tiff to get them through that
yeah it needs to be a minimum of a tiff file so so basically uh just to make sure i
got it so before pixelman's fixing site this is really are my only options right
i mean uh i'm sorry uh registered and deep sky stacker there's not a lot
out there on the market that's you know free but all about making sure you've got the correct format
yeah from the camera they make a massive difference yeah gary peeks inside can picks inside
handle uh close up shoots videos from moon
it doesn't do videos pics inside okay so bp is my only option for close-up yeah
because you would need pip to convert all you running through yeah and that's good that's good
in on it but if you're recording offer like zwo you're just recording an ser file and
then put it straight into auto stacker and it's job done okay i i'm going i
don't even need to convert the image then it's just the easiest way forward oh because in pip you i can choose
this background level to zero directly so i use that therefore i use because if
i shoot moon at daytime then i get the blue one blue moon and
blue sky yeah but if i want and i can choose the background level to
zero but you you can do that in photoshop okay uh photoshop i don't have photoshop
in whatever piece of software that you're working on afterwards you could even do that in
uh registax so if you're doing the wavelets in there yeah i generally don't mess around with
images until they've got through the stacking if you darken the background too much
then you you're limiting the way that the stacking is
yeah so if you choose in the beginning you choose background level zero
then you get black sky and yeah but the problem is with that is you and you
could end up with a real harsh uh limb on the moon ah okay because you you're bringing that
you're you're moving the the black point of the image before you're processing it yeah okay yeah so i i would be you know
just setting my uh black point as standard if the sky is blue you can still soon get rid of the
blue yeah there isn't a problem with that okay what you've got to watch is you don't manipulate images too much
before you actually get to starting the post process in a more process stacking and everything first and then
yeah um and it's the same in the the actual capture you know with the
software see depending on what uh program you use and this is a little bit of an annoying
thing with zwo if you use the ascom driver the ascom driver on the
white balance for the red and the green yeah it's set to um i think it's 51.51
if you use the sdk which is actually put into the software the blue is set up at 95.
and that's technically wrong yeah so the answer you'll get from zwo
is is well that looks nice you know the moon looks grey or looks blue yeah but then you're playing with the color from
the camera to start with okay i only use the better off setting manual settings
yeah to it and it might look a bit green on the screen but you're going to get a better color rendition off of the actual image
i should only uh moon close up with the ic 178 mm
and dslr for whole moon but you're seeing this on the the deep
sky images with a lot of people they've got a lot of blue in them and it's actually because the blue balance is set
wrong in the software yeah and because it's set to auto people think oh that's correct they don't even look at that
that's one of the things that they won't even look at because it's automatically set and they presume
it's correct but if you load the asscom driver you'll see a totally different setting for it i saw that yesterday
yesterday yes when i was shooting with my dslr full moded
with cls filter it was totally blue no stars at all
but the cls filter is not really the the sort of filter to use on the moon no no no
i'm just sort of saying you know in general cls filters are quite harsh
yeah if you use an eyedass filter it's very very green very green yeah okay and
if you think you've already got double your green pixels on there now you really might as well amplify that by
four so until you get in there and start doing some correction with the images it's going to
look really really harsh there's nothing wrong with it it's just the actual image so if we were using it like
now we're going wow i can't actually see the target there there's no green in the image but some of these filters are
really harsh they do knock the colors back hence the reason why i like tonight is just using a box standard light
pollution for one yeah i'm thinking about the
er ir pass filters i have 652 nanometers and 752 for moon
yeah uh do they differ in more or less anything the same as the sun yeah
[Music]
they're very good it's just making sure that your camera is not cutting off too quick some of the older cameras have a
sharper cut off yeah so they really do uh run in the low iron
okay so how about 178 right up into um 750 nanometers
okay to be totally honest the best um camera is based off the 462 chip
so the qhy 462 or zwo's version of the same one
if you're trying to do near infrared those are by far and wide the best cameras
good one on the market which one is that one that's the player one so that's actually got the ram inside it
as well it's got two five six gigabyte of ram in it so which would you recommend that for
close up moon for those with the uh let's say
it depends on the scene yeah everything of course of course depends on the telescope how well collimated it is
yeah because yeah yeah you know i i would say mono camera probably a 178 is very good
you've got a good change of resolutions on that you might find if you stick it on a c8 it's a little bit too close
because it's not collimated or it's but if you take your refractory one 120 ed
yeah so i'd probably go 178 with that good there isn't a lot of choice in the
mono market to be honest at the moment well don't forget there's the 174 i mean
it's got larger pixels as well yeah but it it sort of counteracts the zoom doesn't
it's like using it it's really good you put in a cork and you've got a 4.2
barlow and then all of a sudden you've you um dropped it back to around three times
you know so just by the pixel ratio on it so the 174 is a very good camera
yeah and it is high speed but it doesn't really get you in close on stuff unless you you barlow the
backside out of the camera really but i can come to 178 mm
almost with my dslr with what
this software what do this
software you can put on a canon camera magic lantern
i don't use that so um you come up to 670
pixels per second yeah so it's almost like a 178
with pixels um i use the 178 the 290 use all sorts of
different things but it all works around the ceiling conditions yeah yeah exactly exactly yeah
that's right that's it that's right you know so simple as that
yeah but yeah the 462 if your color is really
good yeah i quite like that sensor it's quite nice which one there's also a new one out
isn't there which ones do you say i will find it for you because
gary which one did you say one 462 for color or 62 yeah
there is a new one out 260 no what did you say gary four six two four
six two yeah you never heard it give me two second one i'll find it yeah it's it's a
relatively new camera what makes it so unique is when you actually put an ir pass filter on it and then block
everything else out it effectively becomes a mono camera okay wow
right i'm surprised you guys are all still
awake it must be like three o'clock in the morning no it's uh half past four oh jeez
[Laughter] you're on the west coast what brings you here tonight
sorry me yes oh um sorry so nobody sees what i'm writing in the chat so um
i had the uh garbage people do the pickup yesterday and for whatever reason the line that
runs to my house which is our internet line they managed to get caught on the truck as he's driving through
and i'm sitting in my office and i'm not paying any attention and i can hear the garbage truck and suddenly i see my
modem shoot off towards the wall i'm like what's going on and then i hear
this truck backing up going forward backing up and i look outside and i'm like whoa whoa whoa whoa because there's
this great big line right no the lion's like getting pulled taut because he doesn't realize
he's got it caught the modem's like jammed into the wall and then i looked around the other side and it's trying to
punch through the drive was like oh you've got to be kidding me
so i'd liter i only got the internet back just now because um i had to dig out an old modem
to just just throw everything back together again i've just spent the most of the day just
patching up the wall where i had to just remove the dryer wall i had to order a new modem because it
just went straight through the wall essentially and i was like really so that the guys will buy you a new one
oh they're not gonna bite they that guy shot off like there was no tomorrow's like trash day's over let's go
so the the new sensor on the block for color is
that one yeah which is the 464 sensor
imx 464 yeah so that's slightly larger than this
uh 462. still pretty quick though 93 frames a second full frame
yeah and uh again with these they're going to come out with ddr3256
on them so they're certainly worth uh keeping an eye on on what's going on on the market
as new stuff coming out it's interesting they've gone for this weird hexagon design
it's really good very very good and it's also got a tilt adapter on the front end
you know the first thing i can think about is all our cameras and i can probably say for anybody who's on here
we all have these ewo cameras or starlight express or whoever they're all round the number one thing is you put
them down they roll away yeah where's that yeah put it down it stays
there yeah yeah so but i have to say from my initial stuff that
i've been doing with it has been very very good and i used that color one on solar today with the cork and it was really good
oh that's interesting because i've been testing the 294 mono um and i can show a
few examples on my instagram but i gotta admit i was a little bit disappointed with how that actually performed because
on paper yeah it should have been really good but in reality it wasn't
so there was a camera launched and i you're you'll know the sensor there's a
um 8 um deep sky camera that was launched by a
couple of companies last year it was quite a low resolution camera but it was um quite a large pixel size on it
and that everybody thought the mono version would be really good for solar yeah
obviously having the large pixels and it was rubbish it just didn't uh
didn't kick out it was okay for deep sky but everybody was going well large pixel
and really the small pixels work better on the solo well the biggest problem that i come across with any camera because uh you
know i've been doing research on finding a suitable replacement for the 174 at
least higher resolution is it's the frame rate is the biggest killer yeah and the problem that i found
here is if you're doing like more than 500 frames too much time has passed in
order to capture anything and people don't realize this but when i do my time lapse videos
they're all 30 seconds apart but you'll be amazed how much motion occurs within 30 seconds
and all of that translates into the stacking and i always get this soft fuzzy image
yeah it basically it it pushes the image together rather right here it it collapses the image
but the 183 is not bad on solar i've used that quite a lot um and again because it's got plenty of
roi settings yeah um the other camera that i've got to fiddle around with is uh the qhy 2
268 that's a mono chrome version of it um i haven't really tried that for solo
because again the sensor is just way too big for that kind of stuff but it might be worth a look into at some point when
i can be bothered to dismantle my the roi settings so that's how you're
speeding these up is by yeah dropping them in 8-bit mode and then drop the roi settings and they fly along
so the 183 mm pro you can get that up to well over 60 frames a second oh yeah easy
yeah so it makes it a good contender then yeah the only drawback here is any type
of fixed pattern noise that can become that bothersome issue for some people i mean the 174 has its disadvantages as
well with um the columns that show up yeah but i mean i've been using that 174 now for what
nearly three something plus years and i think out of all the cameras it's been the best one i've ever used
do you can i mean the fixed pattern noise is on the 178 as well yeah you can uh take that out with um
flat subtraction live flat subtraction it just eradicates it straight away oh yeah i didn't see it eradicate the 462
today but it wasn't in the image so on the live display it wasn't eradicated but it wasn't in the image
you're right there scott you look like you're about to no it has been
you know it's been it's been a day you know so but uh you know this is a much uh more
enjoyable part of uh of what i do so that's for sure you know
i love being um uh you know involved with uh the community and um
you know hearing about the astronomy you know for sure
yeah it's better than counting inventory or something you know
right looks like tom's screen is raining right now
somebody's playing on my channel rewards oh i'm still logged into everything
are you like in a shower or something you know it's just like this is going to get real questionable in a second
i swear no it i left my channel rewards on for the
for streaming someone was playing with the buttons there anyway
i've got one last share for this evening
and it's a different um use
for the dome
huh yeah
yeah there was uh myself from the uh the ring bearer as he became yeah
outside the dome in the church oh and i'm not seeing anything
i think you're only sharing the uh the one screen so this this what you're having right now is not shared
all right sorry uh see right i'll do it this way then do it that way
yeah so oh yeah there we go see that's cool
that's the planetarium though she wanted to get married under the
stars so we did nice very cool
nice [Music] don't know if you notice the time
is that einstein yeah yeah i got away with that
i was told i can't i couldn't wear my star trek one oh yeah
but at least you weren't dressed up as a klingon oh right
yeah wanted to say that i am i am like a
young jedi uh long all jedis over there
i once did um star trek convention
in uh in england in the uk in leicester
it was and we did the dome during the day
and at night we were abducted by some glaswegian
klingons and they forced beer down our necks
all night long for some reason and we really resisted
we really did honestly um and the next day we we had to get them to do more dome shows
the first one was supposed to start it at 9 00 a.m it didn't
we started at 10 and we blamed the cop blame the clean guns for that
we we were not allowed to resist
well excellent all right i'm just gonna quickly share um some of the solar images that i took
over the last couple of days so see if i can get this done
let me share the screen
all right so there's one of them right there [Music] now that's actually done that's actually
done with the 294 and then so this is chromosphere mode
and this is prominence mode i know that doesn't look like a big difference but if you look at the uh
the active region here for sure but not much difference in the prominences
no which is kind of interesting in some ways but um i guess they weren't that well they were
quite strong prominences usually it depends on the aperture as well simon it does it it totally does if you're closer
in then you do see more detail with a prominence version well i mean seeing was not particularly
good um we've had such bad seeing for the last couple of days it's just been horrific but
this is just really me trying to test that camera out so people can get a good idea for it but
it you've really got to just mess with it in order to get it to work and it just became more than it's worth and
then just to give you an idea the biggest problem is feel a flat field
of view by the looks of that yeah i think i was being lazy but you can um you can see
the amount of noise really does start to kick up quite badly some of these later sensors do attach
the game quite well and that proves a problem when we're using them for solar because
we need gain to get through the filter yeah or you or you're going to get a slow exposure um
so there are issues there with it and you um i've not really worked with it using it for solar um
but i would say looking at the image it looks like one that needs to be down under a third on the game
oh geez it the gain has to be turned up so high because in order to get 16 milliseconds
which is usually the good mark for chromosphere my game was like way up there
so i think you'll find that um that that might be the issue
this happens on a lot of the imx sensors so 183 178
uh 290 once you get up over a third on the game it actually attaches to the
image it becomes part of the image yep where's the 174 and some of the like uh
120s you know the old acting sensors oh yeah you can run the game at maximum and it
doesn't attach the image that's the difference between the sensors
let me see if i can just quickly go back in time and dig something else out
um you guys can keep talking yeah that's all right oh found it
yeah i'm gonna uh i'm gonna duck out i got a early day tomorrow so have a good night everyone okay steve nice to meet
you good morning everybody good to see everyone again
okay take care are you all guys all
everybody using daystar no i am i don't know
uh i do both actually i use both the chromosphere and the prominence because the version that i have is called the
gemini so it can do both not at the same time it's uh one or the other sorry i should have specifically
which one did would you recommend for beginner
chromosphere yeah the chromosphere okay well although in total honesty um i
wouldn't recommend getting a daystar quark as a beginner per se i would start with something like a lun a small lunt
or i don't know if you put it on an 80 millimeter something like that it's okay it's fine it's people just jump in with
large aperture telescopes to get aperture fever and want to get as close to the sun as possible well that's
that's where the problem is to me though because it's got that 4.2 barlow built in that is just going to amplify any
issues that you might experience that and the 174 80 millimeter 174 70 millimeter 174
camera really good i thought with the 72 ed 72 88 the
interference eliminator that's awesome look at this yeah it's cool
cool so believe it or not um
what was it astronomy astronomy photographer of the year i actually
entered it with those three images i have no idea if i'm even going to get shortlisted so
i didn't bother this year i haven't bothered the last four years because um yeah i won't go into that but i just
haven't bothered well this is my first time entering uh into this i mean i haven't entered any
of these competitions before to be totally honest i usually don't but you know i spent more time sitting at
home scratching my head and watching my modem get ripped through the wall you know it's like i might as well try and
do something yeah you know exciting but yeah so just so you guys know um
this is actually done within an esprit 150 so it's 150 millimeter apertures this is with the quark
uh oh it's with the gemini sorry and it's the 174. yeah and
the big difference here is a lot of people don't realize this it's not just about your camera equipment
it's also about the computer and the screen and what happened here was this is when
i switched over to uh 4k ips screens and the difference was outstanding because
when you actually turn on the hdr mode you see more than you could see before
especially if the monitors can handle it and what i'm actually processing now i
can really get into it and figure out what's going on and how what's going wrong in some certain cases like i'll
know if the black isn't running in smoothly or if it's got this jaggedy line that's just come out from nowhere
monitor is a real big thing and the brightness of the monitor
in processing that if you get the brightness wrong on the monitor then you know if your image is too
bright um it's going to be very very dark when you post that online yeah and
if it's dark it's going to be too bright you know so most people sit there with a laptop and they have the laptop really
really bright in front of them they're used to it and they're not realizing that when they post the images up we can't see anything
in the image yeah it looks fantastic to them on their screen because their monitor is running so bright
but calibration there's loads of them out there i use the spider yeah yeah a lot of people use
a spider yeah there's loads of others you know there's a lot more newer ones on the market
um but i use that it calibrates all the monitors the same gets them the same brightness
it works fine you know i'm finding that tonight so i've got the
the work laptop as it is the one that i use in the dome and that is
i've been looking at that one because for some reason they won't work over there um and it's far too bright
i'm struggling with it you know what i don't know about you simon i adjust my
monitor to look at the solar so i have the monitor brighter so i can see the dimmer prominences in the background
they're made up you've got to drop those back down again so on usually when i'm doing anything with
solar um i actually have because i do a lot of video production so this is different for me and i don't expect
anybody to go out there and start buying video production equipment just to do imaging but
um the ones that i have are color calibrated there are specific brightness specific luminances
and when i'm out there with uh in the sun this monitor because it's like 1500
nits in terms of brightness i could see everything and that alone has made a big difference
and then again when i come back and process i darken everything down on purpose
and then as a quick tip for everybody um use your phone to check your images
don't post them up immediately just look at your phone send it to your phone and look at it and if it looks good on your phone that's what everyone else sees
right you can post it to yourself can't you yeah facebook you can just send it to
yourself have a look at it yeah that's okay and they'll post it properly yeah
yeah but that works quite well but using sharp cap i use the adjustable histogram
stretch at the bottom that works really well as well for seeing dimmer stuff on solar because you're not adjusting your
image right i mean a lot of the times i only look at the image for uh focus reasons and then
otherwise i'm looking at the histogram i'm looking at statistics because what i see on my screen on my laptop is
completely off because you know it's it's such a dim screen that i just can't see anything
so yeah that's that's usually why i have other tools in my arsenal in order to
figure some of these things out because you just simply can't see it with so when did you capture the image on the
screen this one yeah i forgot i was still sharing the screen um when was
this this was november 20th i think i'm going to say you're getting quite good seeing there we won't
get any dude seeing on this day was so unreal that um
somewhere buried in my hard drives is the original footage for this it looks like i just took one long image and it never
rippled yeah for like a good four to five seconds and that basically translated to
what 400 plus frames that 100 usable yeah
that's the thing on the on the solar it just varies you never know what you're going to get until you set up really
oh yeah there's been too many times where i've got i'm just about to get everything set up and i see that moment of clarity and then hit record and it
just goes i'm not the it doesn't just happen to me
that then does it no i mean it's like it disappears into a
central eating health outlet stream i had it a few days back it was
it was lovely out there um and then we had this little bit of cloud come through for about 20 minutes and i
thought oh yeah that you know that'd be really we just carry on afterwards and the sim is just like a bowl of water
after that piece of cloud went through that was it that was it was just gone you couldn't image anything at all
well the worst one is when i when a jet goes past yeah and when seeing is actually really
good the problem here is is that jet stream stays there or the uh the jet wash stays there for ages and you're
like really yeah sometimes i'm in here overnight time in the mountains we get a lot of
the planes going over the atlantic for um you know canada and america and whatever and
you'll see the trials on them and the trails will just start to expand and all of a sudden these trolls are just
opening up and taking up the whole of the night sky and it's like oh come on
that's been clear for ages and now i've got that sitting there so i had that happen to me the other night there's a plane flew through and all of a sudden
like out of nowhere this massive cloud just appeared like what are you doing but yeah
i have a limited view and it just blew everything out different temperatures you're watching
it um you're watching it it expand out you know that that's the the annoying part
of it so i tell you what that is cool though if you're imaging in hydrogen alpha
and a plane transits in front of the sun it's the spookiest thing you've ever seen because you do not see the plane
coming along and then suddenly it shows up on the solar disc and when it reaches the limb
of the solar disc it just vanishes through yeah you see it's almost like the plane went to warp because on the
other side of the sun um where the plane disappears you get this fantastic whooshing effect
and there's an astrophotographer by the name of andrew mccarthy who got this fantastic shot
um and he has the videos demonstrating it it's very similar to the schlieringer effect um with all the the rippling and
it's it's just like watching a plane going to warp
are we losing andreas now good night all right good night hey
it isn't it it is aliens simon he's aliens son it probably is
klingon klingon cloak i'm going to try and find it because um
it's it's one of these things that is just you just keep watching it over and over again and it's the strangest thing
in the world i'm just hoping he's posted it as a video oh he did he did okay
all right i'm just gonna share my screen um again uh it's just on a permanent loop so it's pretty straightforward to
watch this one oh yeah so it just appears out of nowhere and just vanishes into nowhere yeah the way
the jets goes and it's funny because you wouldn't
think you can pick it up but that's just air just uh air turbulence that we're actually imaging right there and it's it
has that much effect um on the other
on the other side you can see it yeah it it just in he showed me the actual original footage of all of this
and we were looking at the black and white image and i had already cranked up the contrast and just like i suspected
it would not go away it took a good five minutes before it actually diminished to the point where it didn't
affect the image any longer ah because when you have seeing that good
nothing moves in the atmosphere basically yeah that's really cool
there's a great story behind this the so he sells these prints um he actually found out the flight
number on this particular flight and the captain actually got a hold of him to buy a copy of the print
wow very cool excellent but yeah i mean that's um andrew mccarthy cosmic
background if you don't follow him follow him oh he actually got a really good shot of the iss during the
what was it a couple of days ago so he sent me this image and he was like going have you ever seen this before and
i've never seen the panels um do two different positions and i found out that
the reason why that was like that was because the iss was in the middle of doing the panel servicing so one is
tilted and one is facing the other direction so they could add the other panel in and
remove the old one and i told him had you have caught this transit literally 30 minutes later you would have caught
the panel going up with spacewalk and he was like oh no
but the contrast with the moon in the background is fantastic really oh yeah he does some cracking moon shots
he really does i mean you could just see it's like it's almost like his forte is the moon you know
just like everything that i shoot is pretty much solar
so you can kind of get an idea what's his name oh uh andrew mccarthy um cosmic
underscore background okay let me put it here that's some awesome work
oh dude i mean to be totally totally honest and and i know uh andrew as well
out of everybody on instagram i probably would turn around and say he's probably the number one guy that's on instagram
right now more so than trevor jones believe it or not i mean this guy gets a lot of recognition and he doesn't do it
for just purely commercial purposes he genuinely cares and wants people to see
and experience things that you know the average person may not necessarily be able to pull off but you
get to see things i'll post his uh instagram page
here in the chat and then of course there's all of my crazy stuff like um my personal favorite
watching that go boom
never return to a misfiring rocket oh there you go
and then um oh there's a couple of other things that i've done recently is um getting hold of nasa data and processing
it so when you see the original versus the stuff that i've processed it's just like
worlds apart when you actually get a chance to actually process it the actual video
that they that they did um i'm still trying to get a hold of the original raw footage uh from jpl it's just because
they're going so crazy right now that they haven't been able to get um dedicate any time to me
so i've just basically had to go back into one of their processed videos which is heavily compressed but i did tidy it
up quite a lot uh i don't know if i can make this any bigger oh yeah there we go
and then if i get through if you look at their video versus this video you start to see way more detail
resolving sooner than their original shot so you can see all these crazy
dunes popping up uh and everything and the only reason why i was so
fascinated in with this was i was more interested in the landing where the dust would kick up
yeah because it tells you so much of what's going on and then what we're looking at is and i
suspect that this is an old tri um lake bed or a river at some description
and the dust that kicks up looks remarkably like silt so if you can see that there's no
evidence of these weird little dunes anywhere else in that particular fashion until you see the riverbed itself and it
just looks like a dried river i think i can imagine the dust is like
talcum powder oh you'll see it in a second like in a lot finer detail um
once we get closer to the ground because it will the screen will split in a second and that's what really irritated me
so i couldn't really get all the parts that i wanted so we're gonna start seeing the dust move now
and you can just see how fine it is yeah wow this will be a big problem for
colonists on mars well you see that's that's the thing um i've been talking to some of the guys
who've been you know right who've been working on this problem and
you know hopefully at some point i'm going to get to see one of the experiments that they're currently running
um because they're having weird issues happening with um what the rigolith is actually doing
and how it's reacting so i just want to see it in action and just start throwing ideas at them and saying
hey have you checked out this have you checked out that oh sorry i gotta show you guys this
i i did um the orion nebula stylus and i flipped it around the other way because it's not something we get to see every
day and the more i looked at it the more i realized what i was staring at
here's the cookie monster it's the orion nebula [Laughter]
it's like there's his mouth there's his hand there's his mouth there's his hand oh boy
we want intergalactic cooking yeah i thought you guys might have a
giggle from that one that's funny do not feed the monster it's funny because um
every time i see some nebulas it's you know people always see different things um the rosette nebula is a classic one
some people see a skull uh some people see casper the friendly ghost um i don't see the rose i just see the
damn skull now which is just like killing me now um there's a great part in
the seder region uh where cygnus the swan is there is a dragon that shows up there if
you're familiar with that yeah that's always a good fun one and then there is another one called
um is it the fighting dragons i think it was that was a really good one as well
and these are and the funny thing is though these are not like just regular nebulas that you could just take a picture of with uh you know say a large
scope you can only really get them when you have a really wide field like um you know 100 and something odd millimeter
lens from a camera or something it's that crazy yeah my one of my favorites is pillars
of creation there is a dog there is a cat
there is stingray i've heard that one cartoon one before and if you look in the other thing
in the valley there's a little house with smoke coming out of the chimney there is yep oh now you got me here hold
on i need to find a picture where where would the house be
i could see everybody at home doing this now uh
let me just fall blah blah blah blah quick video
no it's not is this something that can be seen if you just took a monochrome image in
haiti this is the hubble one this is out there oh the hubble one okay yeah
um it should be in one of these folders here somewhere
well i've got someone that powerpoint
so how long is this going to be running for then scott the stock party
yeah this program well two weeks ago now for about six
hours oh boy yeah yeah we will uh probably wrap this up
here we'll uh oh here we go there you go uh there's a gargoyle that last share is going and uh
yeah yeah it's uh 4am here now so yeah i think um and it's just started
clouding out now so whose is this cameron
all right down a bit cameron well stop up
left oh no no too far
stop left a little with your mouse not too far just a little bit on the
image right a little there's a gargoyle
oh yeah i see that one yep above it is a stingray yep i remember that one at the top
of that pillar is a
oh yeah yeah there's his nose he's here you remember i used to have an oldish english sheepdog
ah okay now i see it between if you go to the next pillar
down a bit down a bit down a bit in the valley yep
to the right a little bit to the right down of it down a bit there's a little cottage oh yes i see it
coming out the chimney there you go yeah you've got it
how about the angry man on the uh downwards of the uh
the dog can you see eyes nose and mouth there yeah oh yeah
down a bit further to the two and two hands yeah yeah he looks alien like
pekka yeah nose angry mouth two eyes and hands
downwards both sides and legs it's like yeah there is legs
it looks like a big party grade to me if you go to the stingray
just to the left of it there's a cat there is a cat i told you it was a cat it's a fault it's a fox no
it's a cat it's a cat the dog at the top he's barking at the cat
the dog oh i'm using my finger this is ridiculous yeah the dog has got his mouth open he's got his great big pink
slippery tongue and he's barking and what's he knocking at well he's barking at the cat
which just goes to prove that not the dog's not the only thing that's barking
you know the funniest thing here is though the one that everybody sees also well at least i see it is the wizard
nebula that is by far and wide the my favorite so yeah but
that's also the flying course oh gosh i haven't seen that one okay go
and show me you've got to turn it round oh okay yeah that's so that's always
another one yeah you got to turn it around
oh dear you're gonna get pestered now
all right so where's the legs and stuff then uh there's no legs there's just wings there's a wing and a head
now i've got to orientate it right
oh i can kind of see it almost now now that you mentioned it where the wizard's hat is is where the horse's head is i'm
assuming that's right yeah and then you've got the two arcing wings as if it was uh that's right yeah and
the downdraft yeah yeah if you look in the sky and telescope
um dsl object little booklet they call it the flying horse i think
well i'm trying to get everybody to um start calling the orion nebula the cookie monster nebula now
and i want everybody to uh the moon
is the finnish moon have you seen simon what's in the moon
what's in the moon have you ever seen no i haven't
shoot a show yeah please if we got time scott what's that
can i show scott the moon to find london okay
let's see this will change your uh
uh side of the moon for rest of your life simon that's fine that's that i like i like
doing stuff like that are you ready for that go ahead okay
this is finland okay and this is a mirror picture of finland
right the finnish lady because before world war ii
finland had two arms the russia took this arm
yeah so only we have only one arm left
this is the finished lady and now she's laying down
and now you can see her and the moon can you see
ah yes and there we have it all land between sweden and finland
this small island love it that's a good one okay
thanks oh we just love doing these types of things
our audience here they're starting to say goodbye i think sleep deprivation is getting
everybody that's why we're seeing things we're clouded out here now anyway so the constellations were formed they made a
bunch of early astrologers you know stay up all night maybe a couple of nights a
couple of days and then decide what the constellations were
wait so what are asterisms going to be based off of then i mean
the guy amateur astronomers as they make these deeper shots you know of regions that
really weren't presented to us and the you know textbook uh images uh made by
palomar and some of the other big observatories uh we're finding all kinds of really
interesting aspects of you know calling um you know nebulae by different names
and stuff and and we you know and you see it so so i i find that very uh very enjoyable
actually so and you once you and you once you think you see
you will see it the rest of your life yeah
it's it's difficult to change the mind well like i said that's why i would i
started this cookie monster um nebula thing just to see how many people would get it but when you do see the two
pictures side by side and you see him holding you know the cookie and then you see the the running man nebula and the
funny thing here is though you can only see it if you flip the orion nebula
otherwise you just don't see it it's really odd that it requires this type of stuff
i mean the horse head the funny thing is it doesn't matter how you look at it upside down inside out back to front it
always looks like a horse head yeah real true
well gentlemen at least i made it scott what's that at least i made it i did you
know i tried to get here you know what they say simon discovery
consists of looking at the same thing everyone else yeah seeing something different yeah
there you go well gary thank you so much for hosting uh this event
awesome it was awesome thank you gary it was enjoyable it's great to have all the guests that we've had on today you know
becca i think this is your first time to be on the global star party so you know welcome back you know of course you too
tom uh thank you very much um steve uh thank you again for joining us
once again you too cameron you've been on now twice right is that right yeah this is my first time
on the uh the european edition oh okay all right yeah yeah inside i was with
that last last week yeah that's right that's right it was it was excellent simon thank you for joining and making
the effort even though the trash man almost destroyed your home so you know
and we really want to thank the audience as a great audience tonight lots of interesting comments and um
uh questions and that kind of thing so as always we will have our next global star party
the 36th one uh next tuesday um starting at 7
7 central pretty soon we will be changing to i think eight central uh for
the global star parties uh because i think it's the 14th that we have
we change our clocks here so yeah i believe so it's the 14th right they go forward
yeah we sprint forward yeah so you're going to lose some sleep like we did right now so
i'm already feeling that you know what actually um before we run
away since since the pandemic the time change hasn't really affected anybody as
drastically because we don't actually have to go anywhere now that's true and they've actually mount
points to the wrong place well yeah well try setting the thing and telling it to go back or forward
but yeah it's actually interesting to see that there has been a study to say that if you're not going anywhere or you
don't have to be somewhere that time shift doesn't actually affect the circadian rhythm as much as it would do
if you actually had to be somewhere so lesson in life stop rushing around and look up there's some emotional
thing that goes along with you trying to keep a schedule you know so and uh i just like get rid of daylight
saving it's just stupid yeah let's just all go switch to universal time in that yeah it'd be so
much easier i'll never be late for another meeting again
there is the next one what time it is you know when you go to china china is
uh has one time zone for the whole country yeah
east eastern you know central mountain and uh
and pacific so in china at exactly a certain time i
think it's like five six o'clock all you hear is the clackering of chopsticks because it means that everybody eats at
the same time that's true and they do eat on time oh
yeah and finish on time that's right all right well good night everyone thank you
again thanks for a great uh star party gary i think you now hold the record for uh longest uh continuous broadcast of
the global star party um we had we had a longer one with global star party uh with a conjunction
but it was held in in sections you know so we would we would um log off and log back in that was a great
week that was a great day yes that was awesome yep thank you so much everyone thanks again and uh night and
clear skies have a great weekend all right thank you for putting this on take care thanks everyone all right
thank you guys yeah thank you thank you good night
oh i've never seen this one before oh
it's gary palmer's logo wasn't that awesome yeah i've never seen
that before so
[Music]
[Music]
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and our folks it's time to say good night we sincerely appreciate your patronage and hope we've succeeded in
bringing you an enjoyable evening of entertainment please drive home carefully and come back again soon good night
[Music] yeah drive home carefully
where on earth did you find that what's that over here simon
well i've seen these before after party starting now
this is the best this is the best part of this epic outro i'm so addicted to watching these outros
now the fun starts that's right now they're
Transcript for Part B:
Does it make any sense that a 7080 sun catcher would be more
expensive than a eighty 102 to 102 that seems backwards to me?
let's talk about it after the program.
Cuz we're live now, but let's let's not talk about the state secrets then.
Because if people heard about project, Jupiter and Project Venus,
Yeah. So do you like this background
this hypnotic background versus the other one from the bubble Space telescope. Uh it's a good
change.
And right about now have a big monster jump out. Right you
know with videos where there's a little puppy dog, you know and you're all calm and happy
and then this gigantic monster scares you to death.
It was like videos and stuff I remember where you'd be watching this thing and then
something would jump out and scare you yup it for a while.
On YouTube yet,
I'm about to lie.
Sometimes the other things kinda lag a little bit.
Wow, it's 5 o'clock somewhere. Yeah. it's here. Past 5
o'clock. But it's not beer thirty yet.
This is cool, I don't know if you've seen this yet.
Uh I have not.
You know what perseverance missed, it's landing spot by like fourteen. Feed
or something like that.
Yeah, we have.
Well done troops.
So sound with Scott, I can't hear it. What's that is there
sound with it? Yeah. It's pretty low. I gotta turn up to
100%. It's really low. Did you see that Hubble is just
gone into sleep mode? I did not I did not we'll have to look
investigate that.
I got a thing. I can't tell you what it is, but now I'm picking up and I can't imagine how I
got there. What would make it did you hear that early?
couldn't really understand it? Yeah. It's Apollo twelve transmissions.
Hit the You got a bunch of scope failure.
This is uh I think I think it's
a little secondary. It's so cool. To the uh,
It's much better.
Like We got a lot of to the West side. There's a lot of
people that say we never went to the moon. This the lunar reconnaissance wherever they're photographing the landing site
and deep fake just like flat
earth. It's a deep fake know what it is. Yeah. it's deep fake. I don't think so.
They're picking up a couple right now on the way back. So
the herbal space telescope, one of the gyros is shut down which gives them only two. They're
working. It can work with only one. But
it limits the amount of sky the telescope can view.
The right now.
Crappy record of court of debt that you probably got the record for swinging pieces of
the landscape.
So if they can't get this gyroscope working, they're gonna go to one gyroscope.
And Moth ball the other one, so when the one they go to fails and they have the other one to go to buy extra observing time
on my back. It starts now.
Get it going.
Here. He walked across one edge of the river and we're about fifty feet inside the ramp and
he uh. Much lighter colors uh uh soil
uh. Scott, who's that talking bean
and uh uh who's the other astronaut?
When I'm.
These guys had a good time. Pete Conrad
Yes, Pete Conrad,
right now, and it looks like a very interesting trade and he's a really different. a big one.
Now, this one is fresh enough so that you can see like you say some of the right.
Relatively structure.
Now that we have an Emu check.
Good well done I you got the Panorama.
Now you see the camera this camera.
Look at the the tracks there.
I wonder how long those tracks will last, a long time long
time long long time. I just hope that when they have tourists on the moon that they don't go and destroy these
things. hopefully the billboard walks here we go survey is
using the uh the tank, which were uh dividers and the glass
is still on the top I've been able to.
Two more on that baby.
Oh, see there's some propane tanks right there that they didn't hide just to the left of
that too long things clearly propane tanks.
Down the bedrock 4 weeks in
it out and we see anywhere else.
Right here.
Yeah, that's the lander and their little exploration field around there. That's pretty
cool. Yeah.
We were open today.
We we were open the showroom was open and we'll you know if you're here cuz we're still here in the office and I will let you come bang on the door.
Yeah just bang on the door. We're we're right here. so so we want to apologize and of
course, normally we're on everyday at 4 o'clock 4 PM Uh we had uh a pretty busy Monday
um uh Kent and I were uh you know following up on all kinds
of stuff, including the um April 10th, I believe is the.
And the yeah, it is April 10th The Northeast Astronomy Forum
uh virtual event and so we're shooting videos for that and trying to get all prepared for
that. So we're in the studio uh working on that. um we were uh
uh following up on also getting things ready for the uh tomorrow night's Global Star
party and so I can cover I can cover some of the global Star party uh. Events or features uh
it is our Thirty-six Global Star party, but it's by no means I guess it's not really
the 36 because there's been more than that. you know. I'm not counting uh the 4 days of
the Winter Star Party is global star parties. um there were there have been other events
that were global Star Party is okay that uh that we did at night uh with astronomers but
um but as far as uh what we were calling Global Star Party, this is uh the thirty-sixth one
coming up and I think that. That might be less than um than
a whole calendar year, so uh I need to go back and look when we did the very first one. uh
we maybe one of the guys leading the pack, though, as far as doing uh global virtual
events, and so II think that's probably true at this point uh but it's been a lot of fun. uh
the uh thirty-sixth event will still have uh you know we're uh as we do every event we have uh
David Levy who's given gosh she's given so many. Wonderful Uh poetic verses and so much
insight you know and he he. he just kind of you know he doesn't have to really prepare for this. He knows he knows uh
you know the feel of um of the Star Party, He knows of the um
you know he seems to find the right uh uh pros and stuff because he always likes to do
some poetry. He's inspired other people on our programs to do poetry as well. So that's cool. I'd like to hear. Of
course, because they just like that stuff but uh then we will transition over to David
Eicher, David J Eicher is getting close to the end of his seventeen part series that he
did the last um the last uh. Segment that he did was kind of
uh a biography on himself. You know an autobiography um where
he uh told us how he got started in the whole uh astronomy magazine Uh you know
uh situation is being editor-in-chief where he is today but uh you know with his
uh first magazine when he was quite young, you know, deep sky and um uh you know and just uh
you know he was born to do what he does. so it's it's it's totally cool um. Then we we
will have Libby and the stars Libby uh and her mom were contacting me. I'm not gonna
tell you exactly where they were, but uh they went up in the ozarks to a mountain top to
go uh do some astronomy with one of Libby's telescopes and as they were driving through
the park, Libby noticed that there was uh signs that said Bear crossing and let me go
bears. You know so they figured out how to this is so cute how
to avoid bears what they did is they set the telescope up on top of the car. Okay so that no
bears can get them. And they did they did stargazing from on top of the car and for what I
understand they they were. They were texting me what they were seeing and stuff and uh you know they saw the galaxy and a
bunch of other things, and I think Olivia was pretty happy with that. So we'll hear more about her adventure uh probably
tomorrow um we have uh John Go John Goss from the Astronomical
League uh reading uh door prize answers and questions uh for the uh uh next uh door. Prizes
um and then uh we are going to be joined by a couple of new people uh uh although they've
been on former programs uh but you don't see them very often. one of them is doctor Daniel
Barth He is um uh huge into
educational outreach and works with schools all over Arkansas through the University of Arkansas. so he's also written
books and and uh he's incredibly enthusiastic and uh
very knowledgeable. His talk is gonna be how um uh. You know we
all know that uh the moon and sun effect tides on earth, you know, raising I think it raises
solid earth when the moon and sun are together, it raises solid earth up one foot higher than it would be otherwise and
the open over open ocean It raises the C three feet higher,
just the tug of it. Okay, but this tug and and the the wave
of um of of the tie. In the cuz it has its own gravity too.
okay, it is actually affecting the orbits of of of of our
moon, of course, but uh uh there is a whole kind of
orbital dance between demos and fobo as it goes on Mars and so it's you know he's it's gonna
be very interesting, very fascinating new stuff. I think that you'll be interested in as
well then um over the weekend uh Douglas Struble uh you might
see him uh postings. On Instagram and social media uh
he loves planetary Nebula and he sent me this mind-blowing image of the crab Nebula. It
was a 31.1 hour exposure on the crab and it's just beautiful um
but uh he's gonna go through uh he's gonna show uh his uh
setups uh how he does it um and uh go through some of those iconic images that he's taken
and uh and uh you know uh Doug and uh Chuck au are close
friends they they live. just I guess. A few miles away from each other so uh to amazing
photographers uh both using and explore scientific refractor. So it's very cool um and then
uh and then we will uh you know we have other astronomers that visiting us. I think Cameron
Gillis will be be with us uh James the astro photographer will be with us uh Molly Wake
will join us uh you know so that's gonna be very cool uh should be a great start party
starts at 7 PM Central tomorrow. You know you're gonna wanna tune in for that um. And
then on Friday uh starting at 6 PM, we have uh the astronomical
League live for event. It's our fourth uh live event and uh we
are the proud uh broadcasters for them. uh so you'll want you wanna be uh you wanna tune in
to that uh particular thing but uh we were uh can't we were
supposed to uh announce um the possibility of uh of auction.
On the explore scientific site, uh for some of the products
that we have, which would be like, maybe some certified pre-owned products um uh some
other products that we're working on right now uh that would be available These are
not uh brand new. Um you know they're gonna be nectar ding or they maybe something that we've
closed out before uh but we're going through our inventory and uh we're finding some little
treasures here in. And so we're gonna make those available. the plan is is to make available as
an auction. We're working on the back end right now and uh uh so we'll we'll we'll make it
official once we see everything uh uh work but uh wanted to give you some insight on that.
uh what else is coming up? Ken Well we we're not supposed to talk about project Jupiter and
Venus so we're not gonna talk about those projects. okay cuz those are I don't even know about them so those are top
secret projects that we have going on uh things went up. You know uh we're gonna be uh launching on the first light
chronicles. We're gonna be launching the uh uh a trip through the universe sampler,
which uh is a uh document document a booklet from the uh
the uh the Astronomical League. Okay. That's a very good uh
real basic starting out um with. Greek Alphabet symbols
and it just goes to a really beginner guide to using you as it says a journey through the
universe for the beginner and we're gonna start going through that a little bit uh to raise awareness. It's available for.
I think $10 on the um uh uh website uh for the uh
astronomical league and uh we've been using this for years at Sugar Creek Astronomical Society as a primer for new
members who wanna learn more about the sky and you know how to how to. And how it moves and why telescopes work they do it,
says a really good foundational piece and I recommend it to anybody and you know it's really inexpensive and you know
um you know the money support a cause The astronomical League, which is you know the largest
uh astronomical Amateur astronomy organization in the in the world, as I'm aware of
um been a member for 20 years and it's it's cool organization glad to support it so uh. Uh
what else is going on um gonna be announcing an IP sale here
uh probably tomorrow that will uh kick off this weekend. Uh I'm not sure we're maybe
talking about the spring Equinox uh sale is maybe what it's gonna be called but got some pretty good prices on some
eye pieces, especially some of the bigger eye pieces. I think we're uh really hitting the uh the 100° eye pieces hard. It's
what we're looking at and uh Scott. I'm just. Watching and I think we froze on Facebook
baby. I'm not sure if we're I don't.
Nope, It's just my computer. It looks like yeah. that's usually what it is. Yup it just frozen
on my computer. That's never done that before so, um another
thing I was thinking about for the people living in the United States that are on uh daylight savings time Country Saturday
night spring forward it's uh uh daylight savings time comes back into effect on Sunday and
like 2 AM is that right? that's who I am you know Clint we need to have Clint on sometime to to
talk about the society for temporal sanity, which is a. Sort of a spoof group he
started uh to and he doesn't care, which, but he's like just stay on one of the other and
quit switching so um that'd be fun to have Clint come on the rail about daylight savings
time uh just a little fun thing. Um you know we're just all trying to just catch up and
deal with making orders and trying to get product. Uh you know to the to the customers
and I said, making the videos for is taking up a lot of time today and we'll I'll do it all day tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah, it's
a lot of prep for that uh particular show, but um you know I think it's I think it's
uh definitely worthwhile um you know they always have uh you know amazing speakers I
understand Alan Stern will be on uh you know the program as well. so it's it's gonna be
really cool So how do you sign up for that? How do you sign up for that? How do you have because it's a registration you
don't have to sign up. Oh okay. So yeah, even the even the keynote speech and all that is wide open for you to show up
on. Whatever platform you're gonna watch on cool, Okay.
Yeah. So yeah and uh what else is happening this week. This is kind of a special week as well.
Uh we have um. It is still march right and so
right and today is uh the eighth Alright so but
yesterday, John Herschel was born in 1792, which is great,
uh an amazing astronomer and he is uh he and William Herschel and uh his daughter and the
daughter there too. Sister really great uh by the way this is. What day is this Kent uh
the special day It's not the day I was born that's coming up uh your birthday. No uh what is
it truly special Amazing day? It is international Women's
Day. Yes. yeah without women all women out there. Thank you
Happy International Women's day so and thank you for to tell your wife you know so. So the
important women in your life, you know without them good lord so anyways um so there's that
uh and uh on Tuesday is uh the
anniversary of Robert Goddard launching his first liquid fuel rocket in 1926 wow. Uh you know
started the the real space race right um. On Wednesday, it's
the anniversary at Saint Patrick's Day uh but for us astronomers and space geeks,
it's a messenger spacecraft orbits mercury in 2011, so that
was pretty cool um. Let's say Leonard the first space walk
happened uh in 1965 on Thursday the eighteenth uh on the
nineteenth we got Mars at conjunction 2° north of the moon, which is kinda cool and then we've got the Vernal
Equinox coming up. Oh excuse me. I'm on the wrong line. No. no no no that's next week.
Sorry guys right. That's my dyslexia kicking in.
Skip the the eleventh and the twelfth Okay um but uh first of all all was born on the
thirteenth of March uh in uh 1855 in the Geo probe flew past
Comet Halley in 1986, and I remember that that was so cool. you know that same day William
Herschel discovered during this in 1781 so and it is we got a new moon Saturday. so that's
that's gonna be good and if it's clear for you guys, you're gonna love it. Um I know. Uh
we're gonna have some clear skies here tonight. we're testing uh some equipment out
out in the front uh doctor Daniel Barth is gonna come by uh and allegedly look through
our giant binoculars that we have the 120 millimeter giant binoculars so so those are. One
120 millimeter FI think it was 4.5 telescopes mounted side by
side with Explorer explore scientific sixty-eight 68° I
think twenty-four millimeter eye pieces, not sure I can't remember but. These are
spectacular. I've not used them at night, but looking at the sun look at the sun with two
eyes through safe solar film is pretty darn cool. Let me just tell you it's it's it's a it's
a it's a it's a threed effect without crossing your eyes Well that have a free merge Uh it's
it's definitely you know that they're not cheap, but boy they sure are pretty and the the
paint has a has a silver metal flex in it. Oh yeah. it's pretty. It's very pretty. yeah
very pretty. Is telling us, he says it's indeed a special week
as I have the experience of live imaging time with the MS. so uh that's great. Yeah cuz he
won a door prize. I guess no I sponsored him. He sponsored. Okay. Very good. Okay. I said.
I know I don't remember him winning that he was lamenting that he only had 6 days of
observing time uh all of 2020 I guess so so I barely barely
Stockholm is a particularly cloudy. Location. Yes. Yeah.
Yes. Yeah. So uh Jim Norwood says, well telescopes work.
Well. Why don't we put a third one on there? Third eye and
third eye blind, but but but if you are not careful look at the sun to be third eye blind.
Sorry about that um dad joke. Sorry, yeah. Well, um I think
that's all we have to cover for today. um we will get uh
rolling uh with Kent on the universe sampler and um cuz we
we think it's a great program for anybody to get involved with this is from that uh program is from the
Astronomical League. It's kind of the starter to getting involved in all their observing programs of which how many they
have like is is that they have like several. And oh, there's more than that. There's a
there's like there's a bunch. I mean if you wanna do the messy with binoculars, you can if you
wanna do you know constellations naked eye, I mean there's you wanna do lunar craters uh hers the all the
people. Yeah. I mean there's there's there's there's a thousands of those groups. one
for everybody. There's an outreach group. now you can get an outreach or just log your hours, which is really put a
cramp in everybody's style. The last year, our friend doctor Mike Reynolds put that together for them. Yeah. So it's cool.
Yeah and uh I've I've. I've done far more than it's required. I just haven't really
documented very well so you know uh I guess I would have the master outreach certificate if I would just type it all up
in a spreadsheet and put it out there so right, but but there's there's something for everyone
there for sure right. Yeah so anyways we'll we'll go through that and then maybe what we do
is go through some of their other observing programs because they have so many so
anyhow. uh we will see you. We'll see you at 4 PM Central and then we'll see you at 7 PM
Central with Global Star Party and um so until that time you
guys keep looking at it. Hey Scott. Why don't you talk about they can participate in the Global Star Party the after party. Of course, they can yes
you can and what uh if you don't know that uh what we do is we put out the link um for
participating in fact, if you want to right now, Kent, you can give them the link. Sure okay. I'll dig that up. I see I
have to email it to you. I'm just doing an email. We'll go ahead and talk about how how
that works. Scott Okay. So what you do uh is it you have to have the zoom platform on your
computer. It could be on your phone or on your tablet or on your desktop but uh uh the
better your connection you know the better your you know. set up. you know not having a shaky
camera and stuff like that always helps because people you shake with your with your hand and and the world shakes with
you right so um. So you wanna have a nice steady setup if you'd like to have decent
lighting good decent audio so people can hear you um and uh
uh you know so when you log in with this zoom uh application Kent will be there to uh make
sure that you have you know that you're all set up and ready to go. Okay uh the topic
is astronomy. so we're we're not you know we don't go there to talk about politics or
anything else. We're talking about astronomy Okay and uh. Live views to your telescope It
could be um you know a short presentation. you know we don't wanna kill our audience uh with
the death by Powerpoint but we want to uh keep them engaged and focused and loving what uh
what uh what you love about the night sky so um so typical uh
presentation time if you're coming in to give a presentation we give you about 10 minutes. okay um and uh. But
the after party itself at after a while just becomes like Hollywood squares and people
are sharing in fact for a lot of people watching Global Star Party, this is one of their favorite parts of the whole
program because you got people really come out and and share their best stuff and uh and
come up with a really cool uh uh stories and experiences that
that they've had and um you know the more the merrier you don't have to be an expert
presenter or anything like. You know, we really don't want that I we really want just you okay
um but uh we'll help you give a nice presentation uh so that it comes across well in broadcast
so um so the the link is in the chat. It's Scott. I don't know if I post it to Facebook this
restream on automatically post it everywhere or do you need to pick that up? What's that? I've
posted the link and chat do you need to put that out on? yeah. I'll put it out there. Hold on so basically you know around
930 or 1030 the room opens it varies on how quick things are going, so you know be watching
and you know if you know if you wanna participate and just log in to the room, you know when I
fire up the room on my end, I'll see you and let you into my room and then provide you
with the link to the to the meeting you'll leave my room and then re log in to Scott's
meeting into the. Mccoy into the into the Big Hollywood
Squares show. Hold on for a Sec.
Trying to get this thing on hey so and that's that's where I've
met face to face Facebook or uh zoom me and uh uh we we start
talking so much uh I have to realize I gotta get him off and get them into your meeting cuz we start visiting. Oh yeah
there's been two or three people I started visiting with. Well, I don't know why I can't
copy this so Jim so Jim Norwood
wants to know if we can discuss politics as it uh this as it
relates to caper and I think that would be historical politics. would that would
yeah? That's okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You guys know what I mean, yes. So can we talk about
flat earth that would be fun to talk about
Daniel? There's Daniel right there. There's Daniel right there. That's right. So
Daniel's, a really interesting guy he he teaches the science teachers How to teach astronomy
and he's got some really really cool demonstrations Uh it has a book out that he'll. I'm sure
he'll give you the link tomorrow night I believe he'll probably give you the free link
If you uh there you go. I did it there. You go get it. okay.
Alright. So okay. when is the after party starts? Okay? That's uh that's another question. Alright so uh. You
would uh log in for the after party, probably something like.
Right about 9 o'clock Okay because our schedule uh goes through, I mean uh Daniel bars
will be on at 825. uh then we go to uh Doug Struble um so.
It's I think it's Daniel. Yeah, you can have him come on in okay. Yeah. Yeah we're broadcasting but that's okay.
Hi Daniel. We're broadcasting so Daniel's actually come in
here to uh show his face and show his face there. He is he's coming in here to uh uh test
out our giant binoculars so absolutely right. So there we
go Hi Daniel. Hey. How are you sir? How are you? I'm good sir.
How's the weather Did you ride your three wheel? buggy here? I did not um it there was uh some
kind of a fire up in Washington County and uh it was really smoky when I left uh they're
doing control burns out the national forests. Yup, so I went down and uh I am uh I
heard I saw Scott send out an email on a brand new toy and I just. And to come down, that's
cool. so that's cool well. uh I think we're gonna hit it um uh
can't we've got uh so so Scott about 9 o'clock right. It's what you're guessing. I'll fire. Yeah. Yeah. yeah 30
minutes. I'm thinking about 9 o'clock and then what we'll do is uh we will have people come
in to the waiting room and you'll check out um you know, make sure your audio and video and all that stuff is good and
then give them the the link uh to come in to the Global Star Party and the people who've
done it so far like you know Cameron. And James, the Astra photographer and several others
Pac. I think has done that uh they enjoy it uh if you like it and you enjoy it and you wanna
continue on and we'll just include you on the uh the regular list for Global Star Party and and uh you'll just
come right on in but uh until that time you guys keep looking up and uh we will see you
tomorrow take care.
There you go isn't your Star party uh next one tomorrow night or that's my thought.
Yeah, you're on it. Yes.
I love your studio.
My vaccinations uh going up for 3 weeks. Oh, did you yeah, I'm supposed to go maybe on Friday
so I can't get it. I can't do it so. The Chancellor has said
that the U of a is not an online institution going back to.
So,
So cool. Very uptown and very
professional, except for that last part,