Transcript:
7:00 p.m..Ten Minute Break
[Music]
7:10 p.m..Jerry Hubbell MSRO
hey Steve g hi guys hello
hello hello hello nice to see you again Steve thanks
7:25 p.m..Libby In the Stars
Scot helloo nice to see you again Steve
7:55 p.m..Adrian Bradley
go
so sep you guys know who sep husar is
8:10 p.m..Ten Minute Break
Right sep is from Iran she uh she had a
documentary movie made about her uh about sepid and the stars or something
8:20p.m..Till ?
and it was her struggle as a Iranian woman uh to do astronomy she was a
teenager when she started really quite unheard of
um to follow that path and uh now she's
grown and has children and still does astronomy she married a u university
Professor who supports her in her passion for learning about astronomy and
uh so be interesting I've got a funny feeling she's on my friend list
somewhere uh probably yeah I I'm sure I know got really interested in Supernova
yeah so same as yourself too many friends on
there to keep an eye on everybody yeah it's
right hey guys how are you hello Maxi how are
you H right now I'm at work you're working okay
we got a little time I 30 minutes before I go home and I'll be
today I I will not go into the gym so my wife is going to be
there I I told her that I will be online soon no
problem
hello
hi David how are you oh I'm pretty good I'm feeling pretty good today
now hope to get some marionet tomorrow night yeah I have to fight that Moon a
little
bit
Terry how you keeping pretty good how are you yeah I'm
good we good this side of the pent at the
moment are you having better Skies than we are here no no okay defitely
not yeah I wish we were at the moment but it's just that change of season yeah
yeah October it starts Cooling and you're still getting the warm days so get a lot of dam
here y it's certainly been warm today
Gary yeah it's really mild for this late in October
GL you can't see the lower half because I broke broke the shorts out
again I thought they' gone into hibernation for the winter but they're back
again yeah that's just the postmen that have them all year round
yeah
yeah the community that we're in is so small that we're on first name terms with the the posty and UPS guys and the
amaz they're the only uh only people I see here so remote post is about the
only person you see on a daily basis yeah Terry I love your background with
the Halloween Motif yeah me too thank you that's from Friday night with our
Halloween
Gathering that was fun yeah it was it was a lot of fun I can't believe we ran
three hours
well people you know get excited what they're talking about so
yeah that's cool we're excited about what Terry will
and the others will be talking about this
evening yeah you talking to me David I couldn't I just said we're excited about
what you're GNA be talking about this evening you and the others I'll be asking questions
everybody else will be talking about other stuff oh David we are moving um our next
Al live is going to be November 15 so it'll be on a Monday night I will send you the invite when I have it okay thank
you and right now I can tell you I can do it I'll be there okay that sounds great thank you thanks and I'd love to
be there big honor we'd love to have you there so thank you very much David do you know
how many virtual events you've done so
far I know how many that I've done I don't know how many virtual of but I can
tell you on many events I them
2,176 is wow wow you've been
busy and I thought Elvis gave a lot of presentation you know the event number one was the spring of
1960 when I gave a speech about comments to my fellow classmates in grade six at
resin school that's
cool had no idea what was going to have what that was going to turn into NOA
all
bring this to a Facebook group called Rob's astronomy group not sure who rob is but hope you
enjoy this
it is so warm today it's
unbelievable so we have who do we have on right now we've got ah Martin
eburn uh from Cloudy East Texas Ed Gunther's on from Pitts B uh platsburg
excuse me New York plat yes I know Ed yeah yeah so Ed uh was at the last
Arizona dark sky star party and um he uh so we've we've got the dates
pinned down and uh so we're we'll
be uh making more people aware of that
Mike weisner's on Norm Hughes Andrew corl uh Richard
Grace [Music]
[Music] um
[Music]
m [Music]
[Music] for [Music]
well welcome to the 69th Global star party uh a shared universe and uh thank
you for logging on with us this is a much earlier time than what we normally
have for Global Star Party by you know several hours but uh we have U uh some
astronomers from Europe we have astronomers also from Argentina with us so we wanted to kind of shift some
things uh forward a little bit so that we could uh get everyone on at a reasonable time um I uh I often think
about uh you know the way that or you know that that we are sharing everything
within the universe and the and the universe is sharing everything with us you know so uh it is uh a moment that
you want to keep your eyes wide open about and uh use all your senses and all
your gear that you can to explore your universe and to uh you know gain a
greater understanding and maybe somehow share that experience with others and that's what Global star party is all
about so uh I was uh reading through the chat here plenty of you from around the
world uh online right now with us and uh Pekka Howa who's sometimes on this
program uh commented he says the ierse seems to be so powerful for us humans
that we dare not quarrel about it so why not share the the place in peace and um
that we stand on and Marvel at the Great and Powerful together so that was very
nice very nice um yeah if everyone could understand uh
uh our world the way that astronomers do I I think it would be a much more peaceful place that's for sure um
and the more you people you can turn on to it the more that that will happen but someone that I know that has probably
turned on more people to astronomy than maybe any other is David Levy uh David
has I was asking David earlier in the program how many uh events he's given
and uh you know David's very good at keeping a log his observations but he's
also good at keeping logs of all of his presentations and he's given over 2,000
present ations since he started uh doing astronomy and so that is an amazing feat
U by anybody's standard I think um David is also a friend to many of us uh if you
met David uh face to face you'd find out he's a very downto Earth uh person uh
but uh he gets excited about the hunt for uh for comets he gets excited about
seeing other people get excited about astronomy um and uh you know that comes through in
his presentations in his many books uh and all of his presentations that he's
given so far with us on global star party so David I'm very very pleased very happy very proud to call you my
friend and uh so I'm gonna turn it over to you man well thank you so much Scotty
and uh right back at you I mean our friendship has gone on for for many many
decades it continues and I'm so so pleased to to be here especially when we
have a Glo truly Global event with people from England people from South
America people from Canada it is just so terrific to have a truly Global event
and I really agree with you that uh if more people appreciated the night sky
the world would be a peaceful place more peaceful place uh there are two people in particular that I would like to say
hello to right now and one of them I think is on Facebook and that's Ed
Dunford he is one of our real stars at our Adera astronomy Retreat and I am
just so thrilled that he's here with us tonight the other one who is with us on Zoom is Martha farus from Canada and
Martha has been at a retreat almost since the beginning she's become a very
good friend of Wendy's I think they were in touch just today and um and it's just
a delightful Martha that you're here and I hope that you'll enjoy these events we
hope to have a uh inperson star party next fall that I hope you'll at the end
of September 2022 that I do hope you'll be able to come and enjoy with us and to
come to more of these and in your honor tonight my poem is going to be by
a by a Hungarian poet and this is one Martha
that you sent to me some time ago the poet's name is hanos vaja born in 1827
died in 1897 and um the poem is one that I can
certainly relate to it's called the comet and some of you might know that I do have this special interest in comets
in fact of the more than 2,000 lectures that I've given the very first one was
in the spring of 1960 uh to my sixth grade class at
Roslin school and that particular talk was about comets but today I'm going to
actually quote from this poem the comet and here goes I believe that he was
referring to the comet of 1882 but one might have been any one of those major
comets that that occurred in the 19th
century across the night a crimson Comet lies it ranges from the Zenith to the
ground they say it path is straight throughout the skies and never marks
through space a circling round on where lights glittering Legions flame and
burn it runs an endless race through guls unknown it cannot or it will not
backward turn and so it is ever hopess and alone it steadfast worship to the Moon
as sent that thickle ever circling satellite Majestic mourner of the
firmament a flaring grief I praise you to the highest vast sorrow symbol of my
soul's despair our radiant brush that paints my destiny the utter loneliness
of such as we Martha thank you so much for blessing me with this wonderful poem
about a comet thank you and back to you Scott great great well uh that is just
that's beautiful and uh um yeah again thank you David and Martha that was
wonderful um the uh art before we get started uh uh with the global Star Party
number 69 uh you know we we like to have the uh the astronomical League uh join
with us uh to challenge you with questions uh to uh share the door prizes
and announce the door prize winners um uh the uh executive staff rotates um uh
the different members of the staff so they all have some experience with global Star Party um but uh much of the
planning for this uh starts with the secretary of the astronomical League um
a dear a dear friend uh uh Miss Terry man and uh she is uh uh someone that I
greatly admire um I I think that she is someone that uh has U you know explored
her life on her terms she continues to do that uh she's Brave she's uh her
mind's always working she sees the beauty of the you know of not only the whole world but uh uh the universe as
well and she has dedicated herself uh to you know tens of thousands of amateur
astronomers through her work in the astronomical League she's been a two-term former president of the league
she's currently secretary uh really uh a tireless individual
um who's uh very humble I think and uh
so thanks thanks for coming on tonight Terry and uh let's let's uh let's hear
what the astronomical league has dreamed up for the questions to challenge our viewers all right Scott thank you so
much for that kind introduction um we have we go back so many years um thank
you I do appreciate it okay
this always takes my computer a little while to catch up we always start with the slide about looking at the sun you
always need to make sure you have the proper filters on telescopes anything
that you look at the Sun make sure you always have something over the Optics a
uh filter that is made for viewing the Sun so what I'm going to start with is
the answers from October 12th and the question was the famous
nebula immediately east of theb is known as and the answer is the North American
nebula question two was in what constellation does the sun lie in front
of tonight and that was on October 12th and that answer was
Virgo question three which major planet is closest to the earth tonight which is
the farthest remember they won't be lined in a row and they won't be on the
same side of the Sun and on October 12th that would have been Mercury and Neptune
so the answer was C the people that answered this these
questions correctly was Josh kovak Andrew corkill Mich Michael
overera Thompson Israel monteroso and Cameron Gillis and their names will be
added to a list and we will announce the winners of October on the first star
party in November so the questions for tonight
please send your answers to secretary atast league.org
first question what happened to the ISS on July 29th 2021 after a Russian module
dock question two NASA's Insight Lander
measured the diameter of Mars molten core what is the diameter of Mars molten
core in what constellation will you find this nebula I'm trying to stick with the
Halloween mood this month yes yeah all right and we will be
back with astronomical League live 11 on Monday November 15th we're going to
start at 7M Eastern Standard Time and this will be the astronomical League
75th Anniversary will be on November 15 so we have a special program that is in
stored for you we're in the planning stages now so please join us if you can
and Scott thank you so much thank you thank you so much all right um so uh we
um you know I hope that you are quickly finding your answers and um you know
also when they they run the astronomical League live program they also uh give
outdoor prizes as well but you have to be a little faster on the trigger because they announce those winners
right at the end of the show so uh you want to show up you want to uh listen up and and and uh that's the way to win um
we are uh now uh going to introduce uh
our first co-host of the program which is Gary Palmer Gary has been on our program many times uh he is a guru of
astrophotography uh of image processing uh you know he's got a list of Guru
titles you know uh after his name which would also includ is solar deep Sky um
planetary uh he uh he problem solves uh putting together systems uh you know and
he teaches he's a he is a uh fantastic teachers he teaches um uh one-on-one
sessions with groups you know however that you can use uh Gary's knowledge
he's willing to share um uh you know what he knows and uh so you can you can
sign up for a program with him and uh he's very happy to take you from where where where you are you know whether
you're a beginner you know moderately Advanced or even very Advanced you know he can help you uh figure out the last
niggle of of what it takes to get past uh you know any kind of issue that you
might have and trying to accomplish the best Imaging that you can um Gary is
also uh uh you know a great friend uh I met him first at a solar conference with
dayar um this goes back maybe six years ago 7 years ago I had heard about Gary
before that so it was a great pleasure to meet him and uh and start to see some
of his amazing images and the dude just continues to Blow Me Away uh every time I see a new image that he does uh he uh
is also someone that understands complex programs like picks Insight uh where he
just in a few minutes can show you how to transform an image from something that uh looks okay pretty good you know
to something that is mind-blowing so um you know because he's able to dig that
data out and he can show you how to do that as well so as I mentioned before Gary it's great to have you uh be a u a
co-host of this program um and I'm going to turn it over to you many thanks for
the intro Scott um I always find it hard to listen to all of the things when you
list them out like that um I I I'm just me I just get on and do
what I I I do in a sense so um yeah thanks very much for that but it is um I
suppose it's something you never think about yeah you you just get on and do these things and uh then all of a sudden
you do something and it it stops and you realize what's going on um I'd like to
thank everybody for joining us this evening um um it's always a pleasure to do these shows even though the the time
zones are a bit different um but we've got a few guests on from the European
side um tonight um for my little bit of presentation on something I thought we'd
have a look at um mosaicing in PX Insight um this is where we uh maybe
through the field of view of the Optics or the camera or different things we end up with the the target doesn't fit in
our field of view so we then need to take two or three images of the target
area and it's always an issue joining those together and getting a smooth background so the background from one
data set that might be on one night and another data set from you know another night or another month um they might
have slightly varying backgrounds so it's quite nice when you get a simple piece of software that can join those
together so I'll share the screen over over hopefully you should see that so
we're looking at the the veil there's two parts here um there's another part
here just going to run through the easy first part of the process so we stack
all of these uh with a corresponding flats and darts um for the system then what we
need to do is a dynamic background extraction so it's fairly
straightforward d background extraction module just zoom in a little bit we
click on that and then we set the module up um on the tolerance same as usual
1.5 and then if we go down to the Target correction um I normally go for somewhere around 12 on something like
this and then samples per row I keep really low I normally keep that at six
um I get pretty bored of moving these samples around so I prefer to put Less on and then actually add them in so if
we generate now we see the samples have come on if they come in too close to the nebula just drag them out and move them
around and that's the reason why I say um you're better off doing less samples
and adding some in if you want to add them in then you can just left click the mouse button bring these
in have a look over in each sort of section probably move that one out there
now if you leave these in close to the Target what'll happen is you can end up with a black trough in the background
and that's really hard to remove so you're better offer these out of the way the actual Target can always uh rerun
this again if you're getting any errors on anything set the target correction to
subtraction and apply to the
image okay full stretch on it so what you have to do is to do this for each section of
your Mosaic we're going to cancel that out we're just going to drop this one up out
of the way because we don't need it that was just showing the process that's led to these two parts of the Mosaic so far
so we got the two parts here main thing we need to do is star align them yeah so
that um we're star aligning the two parts the software then knows how to um
integrate the two parts together um you can open up the star align module um
select one of the the panels whichever one you want um whichever one you select is going to be the one on top in a sense
so once you've selected that you need to change yeah the registration model so we
need to change the um sorry not the registration model the uh working mode we need to change that to registered
Union separate um if you change that to that then what is going to do is not actually
star align these together it's going to look at the edges of the fields of view and then it's going to match the Stars
on that once you've done that apply it to the opposite one to what you've got
selected in your view there so you just drag and drop it onto there once that's done you need to save
these two the process we use for joining them is the bradian U merge Mosaic that likes
to have them from files so you need to save these out and save them out in the
um pix Insight format yeah so you want these saved out as a 32bit I do this so
don't save them out as a tiff or anything go into the EXs if um system
and save them out as a 32bit once they're saved each of your panels then you can go to your gradient
merge M adds the two files in in this case nothing else we really need to do
in here this all works as pretty much a preset thing and then just Global
apply we'll take it a minute to do this it's got quite a lot of work to actually
do to align the styles on the edge of the field of view and to balance the
background
okay now we always apply this before the images are stretched yeah this is
something that we don't want the background stretched so there's the two images together if we apply a dynamic
crop we can crop off the edges of the
image there we go just close these two up out of the
way now if you scare over the background You' be really hard to find where it's actually joined
it does a really good job um on this it's a quite an impressive tool if we
wanted to change the color this is done with an extreme filter it's a by color filter there's couple of different ways
you can do it um we could just straight away apply an scnr to the image if you
just wanted to keep it real simple and not do a lot of work yeah could just bring in something like a 50%
scnr that will remove the green turn it more of
blue and then you can go on to stretch the image you can use MK stretch you can stretch it using the
histogram and so on so it's certainly something worth um playing around with
there are other motorcy techniques but that's one of the simplest ones that you can use in
here if you got any questions on that then um if you you uh post the questions
up we'll answer them as the show goes along okay I'm going to stop sharing
that screen um and we're going to move over to our
next speaker um which if I remember rightly was Steve yeah Steve ion from
the UK um known Steve quite a long time on and off and uh we're always probably
swearing at each other in the background whoever's got the clearest sky on the sun Steve does a lot of solar work and
other deep Sky Imaging um seems to get a lot more clear weather than what I do for a certain months and then it
probably reverses back around again um but I always like seeing Steve's uh
images they're interesting and it's also very interesting to to listen to so I'm
going to pass it over to you now Steve thank you Gary thank you for the
uh intro um what I've Got Tonight is just
basically what I've been doing this year um some images I've taken this year H
and some recent ones um now got to remember how to do
this uh so that up that's why we're on every
week so we don't get we don't get rusty I haven't done this for a while a
while I know yeah uh is it share screen yeah yeah ah I found it there you
go there we go can you see that yes we can good good
right um this is in a series of what I sort of comically labeled how low can you go
um in this country um and as Gary knows uh M20 is quite low down for us so
earlier on this year I I think I've just about fettled the um the William Optics
one 132 I've had issues for it with it for years and years and years but I
haven't given up on it the initial problem with it was pinched Optics when it got cold which was s um sort of
solved initially by wrapping several dual bounds around it and keeping it nice and warm um but it wasn't really a
uh a long-term solution that so I've been fiddling with it and eventually I I've I've got a little bit more happy
with it so this is a an image I took earlier this year just
uh 10 Subs of 600 seconds um on M20 with
hydrogen Alpha filter so that's what we got
there um and then I decided to go a
little bit lower uh with the Helix nebula now this
has taken over two years and there is a massive eight subframes in this image of 12200
seconds and just to show you how low you can go I uh superimpose my I put my
Horizon on to cser shield and there it
is just above the Horizon of my
garage which you can't get a car in because there's too much stuff in it also once you get the car in the
garage you can't open the doors because the garage is too narrow but that that's
it so I can get about four Subs per per uh night on it and I've had two
goals at it so I've start it together and we came up with this I'm quite proud
with that hon wow very nice we we had um
Adrian on about Milky Way on last week's star party and it was actually quite
annoying looking at his shots and seeing how much more of the Milky Way he's got below what we have here um they're very
very nice they are I was watching it as well so I do of the
morning yeah I do know what you mean on this there are some really nice Targets
in the bottom of the Milky Way and certainly where I am can't get in the
mountains we've always got something in the way of the lower side of the Milky Way so that's nice nice
image you never know in another six years I might add color to
it um perennial favorite probably not the best image in
the world but I quite like it again with the 132 and it seems that my processing
on this could have done with a little bit of work on the magenta Stars uh but through our early summer
this year I don't consider that's been a bad effort uh and Gary will know with
the we had we we had quite a mixed bag this year I I only did a short amount I
think it was one run on this target through the whole season um it just worked out that it it seemed to be in
the low Cloud on the horizon for most of the time or the moon was out you know
those sort things so um but there is quite an easy fix for the magenta
starles yeah a real simple one and you can do that picks inside and run the
scnr yeah well you you can run the um the other the other add-on in um
Photoshop yeah the hash L Vista yeah plugin um that works quite well on it
but to be honest in these sort of shots it doesn't overly bother me it looks quite nice um it just adds a
different coloring and Gary there's no wrong and like way to do narrow band no it's
whatever you get whatever you get is your image you're the artist you're you're the person who picks what you
what colors you want and what you choose so um and it's really the same as having
green in it a lot of people say oh you know there's no green in space or there's no this or there's no that it's
like it's your interpretation it's down to you there's Green in my araban IND as
you can see I think it adds another diens mention and I think it's like if I stri
green out I normally only strip a little percentage out um otherwise it just ends
up to uh onedimensional in a sense it's just you know two colors yeah um and at
least if you play around a little bit but it's got some nice detail there so and the other thing that we have in
common Gary I get bored of processing quite [Laughter]
easily magificent picture really nice thank you David um just to prove I do
other things besides uh nebula I do the occasional Galaxy this one has been an
absolute pig to get this far um I've tried several times giving up on it and
come back onto it and this is about the best I can get um this was taken with
the 8 in RC that I have osano again
something I've been working on for some years to get uh to a situation where I
can use it a little bit better to get my Imaging skills with it a little bit
better so a couple of galaxies um The Welk and
the I can't remember the name of the other one the cat handle is for it but
yeah that was from Springtime and another couple of galaxies I quite like these but again I
got issues with the Stars which shows that the RC is not quite set up
correctly and when we start moving around a little bit further in the year
it will get put on the mount and it'll get tweaked and tweaked and tweaked again to try and sort it
out color coming in um that's camera
based um that I've seen some good results on that be here over the next few weeks uh um and it's quite
reasonably priced as well but it looks very very simple um is uh going to benefit lots of
people yeah um because RC's are not the easiest thing I actually find with the big one here a ches is is the easiest
way of colorate in that right right yeah that's me personally but it's it's
another Basket Case telescope that I've picked up and I'll get something out of it
eventually oh maybe not we'll
see I do um the great ball of fire as Gary said as well this one's from
uh couple of weeks ago now at uh Kelling Heath staff party which uh we had a good
one lovely sunny day problem was where I'd set the mount up there was a
tree so for a couple of hours around uh midday it was in in the tree so I had to
do a little bit uh uh this one was just before midday and uh I just switch to
the actual pixels
um that was quite an interesting Sunspot
there um which I had a twiddle with a little bit later uh and where is he oh
that's the um the filament again I had a closeup of that
later I also color them up as well as Gary it shows a I find that applying the
false color seems to bring out my prominences on this one yeah yeah um
and you also get quite a different view when you invert them uh shows you much
so not more detail but different detail it brings out uh certainly with the
filaments um Etc I haven't quite got the uh the
transition from this to uh prominence is quite off Pat
yet I quite often separate the dis even though they're all shot in one yeah
separate the disc so I can invert the disc yeah and then pull it back into the
it back and you still got the black background yeah with the prominences in um but it is a little bit of work
and if you don't like processing um it it turns into a chore it is um now this
is your fault Gary I know what you're
doing because my normal double stack is what was it is the
Lum the carnado on the front yep yeah
but Gary pull up something about um this little beasty the day star only
problem was um the adapters I had that I needed
to get that to focus a little on the
edge so I had to do a little work in the uh in the garage on the lathe to make a
small extension tube yep of 155 I think millimeters that is so that
now goes in the back of the the Lunt minus the Lunt blocking
filter then the day sty on top of that and then the camera whatever I've done
with that with it's tilted out
to the KN unscreen pops on top of that little
beasty yeah might for a second is just take yourself off of screen share just
so that we can see your camera a bit clearer I've got you okay yeah uh
Zoom I'm doing this wrong stop screen share that's it thank you
um so we've now got wait a minute
uh so we've now got this beasy which is the L the adapter and now the camera at
the end and all fastened together nice and rigid now
with my nice adapter um it is false threaded inside to stop the internal
Reflections and we can then get in a little
bit bigger on these wonderful uh features on the Sun so what
what you'll notice now is is that you get a lot more contrast in the active areas so you get a lot more you'll see
the solar flares as they're actually appearing yeah now this is only the
third attempt yep while I was away and the first attempt with the rigid setup
so I was quite pleased to get that followed by that
one and then this one was a bit of a
mistake because I left the Coronado front end on
yeah it was pretty pretty faint uh but I like the exposure up in
the game that's the difference there where you'll see that in the the center it's actually darkening out so if that
wasn't inverted um with a conventional double Stacks you'll see that they they're
quite uneven on their field view mhm um a lot of people don't realize that if
you tilt some of this equipment even only 1 millimeter that's enough to move
it um you know you could move it by 1.2 of an amstrong yeah um and you can get
into all sorts of problems um with the solar equipment just in the fact that it
looks like it's off band and it's not it's actually tilting the Imaging system
yeah it's it's slightly out of focus at the edge um but I quite I quite like this to say
it was a mistake by leaving the the carado on the front L um which I didn't
mean to do uh and the group of people that around me were W looking at the screen um was saying Steve Steve Steve
he's very faint we can hardly see it and I said well go away and come back in 10
minutes when I've captured a series of videos process later and then you can
have a look yeah so quite happy with that one and thank you Gary that's all right yeah
brilliant brilliant idea just a Pity that the sun's getting starting to get a bit low now from here yeah I I've got
that new filter wheel in to test and it looks like it's going to be the spring now yeah Sun's sort of just starting to
drop in the sky and get lower and lower and each day I'm looking out when it does appear from behind the clouds I'm
thinking going to get no chance of some high res res Solution on that um this
year the way we're going now I don't do the
moon it's Luna but there you go so I had a little bit of a play
earlier on this year um with the 178 on the back of the
C11 it had one of his very rare trips this year onto the top of the uh the
mount um as you've probably seen on Facebook there's been very few planetary
images from me this year the conditions have been so poor uh and this was
supposed to be a planetary night but it never but I occasionally do the right
glow ball in the sky it's I don't know it's frustrating
this year that's the easiest the only way I can put it you look at it you know there's no twinkle in the Stars there's
nothing the sky looks you know pretty good get the big equipment set up and then
it's rubbish you know the first you just look at it the first images coming in you just think I well forget that but
yeah now I think this is probably the best image
I've had out the 132 was checking a few weeks ago it's close in of the elephant's trunk I'm
quite happy with that cool yeah and the
actual pixel on so yeah quite happy with that
probably a tad oversharpened but never
mind I know this is man look I got color which is an unusual thing for me as well
so it's funny when you say like oversharpened or whatever A lot of it down to the screen that we're actually
processing on right so this is the thing I mean I've got multi screens here and
as you know two of them are the same manufacturers same model same everything and they still look different yeah yeah
on both screens and they're meant to be fully calibrated so I've got you put
these things up and then you look at them on a phone or you look at them on depending on how your brightness is set
up is how you're you're find this you know so I've got two screens here from
same manufacturer again supposed to be uh calibrated with the same um
calibration thing and they're not you can see the differences between them I always find some of them uh have a
slight red tint when you look at the like the white text boxes it's just got
like a very slight red Hue on it yeah you can never seem to to lose it no no
and I know you run 4K don't you now yeah yeah well I haven't got that far
yet um 4K just shows you how bad your eyesight is
really yeah uh my eyes s is so bad that the glasses that I fetched from the Opticians last week I can't find
them didn't or not I cannot find my new distance glasses um a quick one from uh another
one from Kellen Heath um I've got a it's quite fuzzy in the background here I
don't know whether it's actually background um nebulosity or something to
do with a couple of the subs in the St but I thought i' put that one in
and this one is my latest one yeah I saw that
earlier today IC 5068 yeah which is just down from the North American and the
Pelican in fact some years ago I did a mosaic I think about nine pain Mosaic
just in ha coming from the North American and Pelican through this area
and the plan was to end up at
1318 yeah Center of sign but I never got that far um probably the easiest way to do it
is to go out and buy a a Widefield what is it 14 millimeter s lens and do it
that way never do it the easy way I love that
that's beautiful and it it looks very very
um different to most of nebuli um very
abstract yeah yeah and here's another one for you
Gary I will ask you the question while we're here um I have this is a fairly blue ver
version of um 27 that's took ear this year yeah I have some other
data that shows the outer shell much better yep how do I combine them in pics
in Insight is it quite easy or you can actually just um star align them against each other right yeah um I I generally
put the two sets of data in to the batch processor yeah then it's star aligning
them when they come out then just um integrate the images and crop off what's not needed that's my my my favorite way
of doing it the quickest way of doing it yeah but there are other ways of um integrating them you can do it in pixel
Mass but you just start to complicate everything up a little bit if you're not sure on what you're doing um and really
it liks percentages when you're doing that you know if you try and put 100% of
an image against 100% of an image it really cancels data out you know you got to bring in say 40% of one and 60% of
another or 80 20 or 5050 so in general I
find it better to come in the other way just back from process them all together yeah um it sometimes it can get a bit uh
funny if they're from different cameras on the the image sizing yeah so then you might need to um
crop all of the images first batch crop them so that they're all the same size
yeah then run them through um and do it like that but yeah uh image integration
to will probably get them together as long as they've been star aligned and use the star align in a separate module
right I've got you I I'll give you a shout if I get stuck on that yeah yeah
and dromer I quite often do it too because I end up with lots of bit images you know over the season and then just
throw them all into a big stack and and far away but they all generally come from different cameras yeah and as you
know I'm a beginner in I'm a beginning pixie
so oh I'll get this I'll get this slowly no thanks that's that's the end of the
run for me um thanks very much for it's always always interesting to
see what you're getting from uh from here yeah so um what we're gonna what
we're going to do now is um there is a question that came up that I just got sent over so the difference um between
the lump double St and the dayar CK um there's a couple of things there if you
use the double stack on the front of the Lun normally they're smaller in aperture
than the actual telescope so if you got a 60 mm lump they generally use a 50 mm
double stack so you reducing the aperture of the telescope the other thing is is that you
um have sheets and sheets of glass if you actually think about this yeah
because the double Stack's got about three sheets of glass in there your main system is going to have three sheets of
glass in it through the eSalon yeah let alone the lens in the end so if that's a doublet it's got another two sheets of
glass in there and then when by the time you come down to the blocking filter you end up with it really really dark really
contrasty so you end up then having to uh push the exposure of the camera the
camera um then has a a major issue um on running slow so this is generally why
double stacking doesn't produce really really good results um the other main thing is is
the actual block INF filter in the Quark is larger unless you're fortunate enough to have a a lum
3400 um that means the size of the actual blocking filter that the camera is looking through and on average most
people's blocking filters are up to somewhere about 1200 so that's 12 millimet if you got a coraldo they might
run to be 50 something like that so the actual aperture that the cameras looking
through you it's very very small by changing it for the Quark you got a larger aperture so you end up with a
more even field of you and therefore you don't end up with a burning on the surface so that's sort of answered that
question um what we're going to do now is go
straight over to Sweden um s Andreas and DS um always amazes me
really um lives in a city images from a balcony um from what I remember doesn't
have a North star alignment yeah or not that easy anyway um
[Music] alignment so when you see um what andr
is producing um it's always interesting and it's always inspiring to say that
you know whatever you read about Imaging from light polluted areas or Imaging from areas where you can't see pole
Styles and things like that um um pay no interest to it yeah look at things like
what Andreas is doing because they're inspiring to people who are getting into this um and even people who've been
doing it a long time so where you go Andre thank you g yes always humbling to
hear your voice about telling about me and U that's uh always feeling great to
be invited to this star parties my main camera is uh celester on 8 inch and with
a hyperstar system and I also use explor scientific for my lunar and for my um or
for smaller objects and um I live like er said in this out of
the subur suburb and this borderline I can see the North Star from my North
balcon but I don't usually image from there only the s so I often do a drift
alignment and I have measurements so I have U nowhere to stick the tripod and
then I do a drift alignment and I have go for the night so I have custom
starium that show like show me how much image I can get for the night how
much interferes with the objects in my site that I got from a guy in
Canada and uh his uh he's has a channel that's called visible star
star and um I learned a lot of from him from just
um how to do a custom starium and get the most of the night so uh this is
going to be um what do you call it um trip to trip down the mem Lane for about
eight about eight months and I'm going to show all my pictures from not all of
them I have done a lot so I going to picked the the best ones I think so I
see if I share the right screen did I share the right
screen we we're seeing your folder at the moment okay
do you see that now no I can still see the folder you might want to shrink the folder down and it might be behind
that or you can stop sharing and go share
again and pick the exact folder you want
okay it again
see
see screen [Music]
no sometimes a little tricky yeah yeah
so there we go have um do you see everything now yes
yeah it's the gallery the gallery yes now we see picture
yes let's see if you click on an image click still showing Gallery mode
okay do you have a double screen you have two monitors no just one monitor
just one okay yeah if you drop that down the folder
that's in folder View at the moment so if you go to the top and drop that down Okay
no Okay so we can that's now
showing so we're just seeing your desktop at the moment yeah that's the
that's the point yes desktop do you see in the folder yes so if you now close
the or just shrink down your internet you got the internet displayed
at the moment yeah you're showing your web browser
okay if you open that folder and double click on one it should bring up whatever your viewer
is
we're back to your desktop
there you go okay is this correct now that's it y y yeah this was uh when I
left off this is the r now I did a remaster of my latest version so I love
I learn a lot of from uh from guys at the internet and did a remaster of my
previous image bring out the the dustiness and
and U I have some issues with with the then when I miss but I came out pretty
good so uh hopefully I later this year I'm going to image that one
again then I start to do uh solo photography again and this is uh started
combining with prominence and chromosphere so I took separate images
and then started recombining them so this how I approach that one so this is
one of my first image that I recombine data from two videos so this was uh like
a trial and error so so this is uh one of my first IM is with just that kind of
method only before that I shot only one with and this is the called the summer
beehive cluster this is with serson a change with a
reducer this is very late I think it was the beginning of
May beginning to very be very bright here so that was the last Target for
That season so and then I did some more U Sun
Imaging and this is the old program I use the I later on this year I switched
programs for sun Imaging so this uh was still set of wo's program so this is the
sun region 2824 and 26
so and then we had a solar eclipse so this is a fold solar eclipse so I did
with my explor scientific and got the prominence and oh well try to
do uh just um Eclipse video I think it
was about 34%
um uhum darkened here so it that was this
is was the peak of that same same way I did that one I did
some high high power solar Imaging so I this is also combining
prominence and and uh just um
chromosphere and then I start using from beginning this year I started use other
other algorithm when I stack I always do a two 2x3
and it works out very well just in
in just just have the quality and U it
my image turn out better and better as a progress this
year this is the starting of the solar eclipse you can see the moon is coming
in on the right side and then we have on the left side we have U the down in the bottom we have
son Arc and uh that was very cool when this was the solar clip and and the sun
Arc so that was pretty cool and then I did a remaster of my previous version I
was I was happy with that one but I did a blue one so this is just another
version then I did some more uh those um
sounds aboutum this year was a trial and er to
always to improve enhance my uh how to get better and better quality
Images new settings and new um ideas this is a pretty cool image this
is a double soundspot I think it's actually three soundspot but um you can see um
two in two sound spots all from the my
first image I started invert the image and get out to more more detail and um
it was very found to uh work that way and I bought U just uh ER erf for my
telescope and that helped uh with the heat and produce a lot of
battery image this is a better cold beam H Alpha so with this filter just um
isolates just the H Alpha into the camera so I only get into the my
telescope just Alpha and just a specific wavelengths so they called it a coal
beam H Alpha for solar so I bought it from Germany in this
summer and starting using that I uh also switched to Sharp cap and that
combination was a success always started also with
the uh filming in 16 bit so Simon Tang
video recommended that you should use a 16bit video so I started in s files so
this was um my take on it it was very
promising this is same solar a little bit out just uh prominance on
chromosphere this is also combined I think this picture was picked up by a
Italian guy and he was very he liked how the just the picture
came out so um they got a lot of what you call likes or
I I think it's called passionate photography and it's bouncing around in
the internet just that one this is the can see the filament and
this is also progressing a little bit all the
time and just when you do solar is always uh weather and um you have high
clouds CLS and Atmospheric seeing and the Sun is always in the summer is
pretty higher it's about 54 degrees and the maximum and it's it's
very low now so it's hard to do the sun now this is the this is the mid on the
called the NLC or not Lite this is is crystals up an atmosphere this is
what we get on the summer it's pretty cool they got shapes like like tornadoes
and so this was shot this B was shot by my son AR one and on a tripod and manal
focus so this is um it's I like U bluish
color and I like this nights at the summer just that not a lot of
clouds and then Saturn came out it's pretty low here it's about 10 degrees so
this is both my best Ste for this year it's getting higher and
higher but um yeah and then we have Saturn with ion
shadowing so this is one of my better image at Saturn with my
8 so um done a lot of planetary photography
with I and Europe and other moons it was uh pretty cool this was Saturn Jupiter
is around 17 degrees so it's very not very high
here I go back do some more solar photography and can see a sunspot
rolling out and you can see the filament in the on the surface
so so I'm getting better at that one and then we back to hypor this is
the m m33 triangle Galaxy so I try to
improve it a bit so this is about four hours about hyperstar so it's very faint
here from when I shoot it from a Bott 9 zone so it's came out pretty good I like
it it's beautiful this is the embo Galaxy or NGC
1333 it's a very hard Target because it's covering clouds and just when
shooting just this target is very faint and just obstruction of
the just the light pollution destroys often all the data but this came out
pretty good I think it's about three hours of data so I'm pretty pleased with
that one last one is uh M M31 and Ramadan
this is combined data about three hours from last year and this year I was out
one day and it looks clear but the data was Rob so I have combined with a I have
to combine a brilliant idea so this is the first IM I did star reduction so I
take STAR Plus+ and remove all the stars and edit the pictures and then I
combined it with a rester in a photop and I think it worked out very well the
Stars didn't became as um prominent and the just the one is
hanging out my back door on the wall back on me that
image I did some uh so some um Moon photography this is cernus and
Kepler so enjoy doing high power Luna photography this was a pretty clear
night moon was out uh about I think 82% illuminated so
I didn't do any deep sky so I imaged the moon and planets that night it was
pretty nice this is the tiger crater with all his moons this is
also one of my better image and the the secrets to
shoot just the Moon is I shoot we via a red filter only and then I processed it
out the data is very clear and uh and I
use a 174 mm with my and the Power Mate on my celest 8 in so it rounds about
4,000 mm of is was clear KN this is what's was very cool I uh the
next one is right in right yes I inverted so it looks like a Birdo prey
if you can look this is the Montas or the mountain of the mountain Shain so
oh yeah it was pretty cool if you flip them back and forth you can see two Wings on the sides and you can imagine
somewhere it look like a bird of prey I think it's pretty cool that was just a mistake and I thought it was cool so I
kept it but just for for myself and it's online also it's
pretty cool I like it this is motus crator It's the crater in the bottom
always a lot of turbulence there is very hard to shoot and pretty good I think came out pretty
good and I did Uranus also that night one one of them my bettery so that one
so temperature rules so the this you can't see any detail of cloud so you
have to like a 14 inch and very clear and but it's I'm pretty pleased with
that one one this is Plato and you have the Alps
the Alpine on the right so it's also from the same
night and this is aristotles and and exodus this is also from same night this
was in the morning the shadow so this wasn't clear as clear the other
pictures this is the M14 androm somber
gxi this was a remaster version from I shot in
April and uh I wasn't happy with the my processing so I go back and reprocess
this uh for one was cloud and came out a
lot better than I expected and hopefully to come back in this with a larger scope so I can
separate clouds and everything on the was so I set out for to shoot some Burg
Al and that's what I did and that's was I always do when I not
satisfied with data so I go back to old data that I think I can improve that I
call a remaster or but uh I probably going to left it
now to maybe another year on the with other equipment the last one is M13
Hercules also a remaster version I was not happy with my latest version it was
a lot of light pollution the stars were not color
corrected now it's color corrected in in the Middle with some yellow and some red
and some blue stars so so this was my final image for
tonight so this uh is was shoot I think about
four hours on that one I have to dump one three4 of it because it was not bad
just bad um guiding it was seeing was wobbly so I
I'm very what do you call it I'm I want the best data so I ended up with a own
just only one hour so I probably will come back to this later
sometime well thanks Andre it's been really interesting looking through um
very similar to a lot of us you don't just image one thing yeah you you um
yeah I mean I've tried to be as Dynamic I'm I'm the spur in the moment so I do
when I Sho I I do a lot of uh Moon I do planets I do everything I can from to in
Sweden we have from middle of May to end of end of August we don't see the star
so so I have to in invent something so solar came into play last year so I
started with that and so this is my take on
astronomy that's what it's about it's about everybody's different View and what they see you know what they're
after and and you know when we were talking earlier you're saying that you know you're after going out and
progressing each time or after improving on whatever data you got the last time and I think that's what makes an astro
photographer in a sense that they're recognizing what's going on and really
they're never happy they're actually quite a miserable bunch of people because their images then they they look
at them they process them and within two days normally they're after improving on
that they see errors in it or they see the things that they don't like or the weather's interfered with it so that I
think that's part of being an astrophotographer in a sense is that you're always chasing these different um
these different things and uh chasing Improvement in it always
chasing do as dynamic as can so I always chasing different kind of OBS so you
proba see a bad image from me from same Target I don't I often throw that data
off and I I I like it when people do Post what they just get from the night
you know it's never perfect we have problems with equipment we have problems with weather and um software and all
sorts of different things and and you know that's just the way the Imaging runs I mean this time a year from here
probably get an hour or two hours before the fog moves in because of the temperature changes so we're getting
quite Misty air uh right the way through October and that that's a general thing
so you just have to run with an hours worth of data if you Lu at your maybe two hours worth of data it's annoying
sometimes because you think oh that that could be a lot better you know but we've had a question come in on here and it
was quite a way up on this but it somebody asked what our favorite targets are to image so I'm probably going to
say with mind would be the horse head um I find the horse head quite a challenging
Target um it's not easy and it has quite a few bright stars in there so depending
on the equipment it can cause Reflections in the images it can cause all sorts of other issues um but it's
quite nice to get the structure underneath the HSE head so depending on what Optical system but that's mine
what's yours Andreas uh or on this probably this um
my favorite and also horse head and Flame I had done a couple of times and
even on my back I have androma that's also I one of my favorite targets
because it's um hard hard to shoot from here and I hope one day to uh to be
satisfied and perfecting it so uh and uh
also some uh hard challenge like someo G this also I came back several times with
different kind of equip and and I like to challenge myself so that is also a
favorite of mine cool um Steve evson
what's your favorite
Target that works now I've uned it um my favorite one target
is it varies it's the latest challenge I think yep few years ago three or four
years ago somebody said I did the uh flying B
h21 129 yeah uh somebody said are you going to try for the
squid so I didn't say anything went away and Googled it and thought
go on then I'm 84 hours into that image wow three years um
so it's probably the latest Challenge on the solar it's the quad Lun
now that's it's it's the challenge I think uh and it's always a challenge um
it's whether to get as you said earli it's trying to go out and guess get the best you can under
the conditions that are your image under my conditions not perfect I've got an
LED street light 10 yards from where my scope where
my Mount is um and it will be like
that until I'm six foot under or we move I know which one it was probably
more likely to be uh uh it's the latest Challenge from here
as I say it um the squid and now it will be the the quot
and whatever or like that's stupid thing I I started with earlier on how low can
you go scraping the Horizon it's it's it's just a constant challenge I don't
think I've got one favorite object to go back to
I'm back to I'm back to there's plenty of targets I'm not happy with oh yeah
and it's really weird like um I try and get on targets early now so as soon as
they're really up high enough to start Imaging even though we might class I'm are still a little bit low I'm after and
that is because over the last couple of years I've ended up losing the targets through the season so something
like Thor's helmet yep cluster yeah um I
thought I'm going to leave it last year I'll leave it until it gets a bit higher and then we went through a load of rubbish
weather back on it and it's like I can't believe it I've lost it for a season it's disappeared again
um I suppose my um Nemesis is
m78 yeah I've tried several times
uh and Scatter across the web are my poor attempts of
m78 yeah they might be poor but they get put out with the ones that I consider
good as well so I just yeah that's it I mean and is in 104 Sombrero that's
another one that can be challenging from here yeah um you know it's always
skirting in the Rish from this area so there are those targets and really
you're just happy to get them sometimes let alone actually you know get a nice a
nice sort of Target but we're um we're joined by um Steve
Malia tonight from Canada Steve's the only of uh Ontario telescopes we known
each other quite a long time now um always doing something together in the
background it's always um pleasure to chat and catch up so how's things going out your side Steve very good Gary
thanks for uh having me on um and I apologize for crashing the party um Scott and not letting you know I was I
think it's cool okay I'll try to make a habit of it then yeah no problem um you know things
are good here it's amazing we have this really rare phenomenon uh that's happening right now here in the Toronto
area of Canada it's called the clear sky
and but of course we have a full moon at the same time so it's like hand in hand right
um uh th this past summer has been been a bit of a a pain uh for astronomy I
think um in most of Canada because if it wasn't uh cloudy weather and storms we were having um uh Force fire smoke from
from BC this year it was completely out of control um and a lot of there was a lot of hard work to get that under
control and hope I think they they've got most of it done now and the Northern Ontario was bad as well so um we were
fighting a lot of smoke and and that's something I picked up in a lot of the well I don't want to say a lot in the
images that I was taking um you're you're able to see it so you know you
finally get a clear night and it doesn't look like it's bad and but you can't see that smoke at night when it's really
really high up right um and uh it it added to some of the fun but um yeah you
know it it uh um there was uh there was I was able to get a a couple of really
cool shots i' I'd love to uh to to share with with everyone and yeah yeah got so
you know we were talking about um uh uh favorite targets and you know one
of the one of the targets I I love I don't want to say it's necessarily a Target but a region I absolutely love
the copia region right because um I went to it a couple years ago here's uh my
first attempt at it um and I was quite happy that I was actually able to get star color in CP and I was able to catch
a bit of the Pac-Man um nebula there this was with um uh very poor processing
skills this is H before Gary I like to call it and um uh uh it
was with an aut a modified camera and and some uh basic equipment uh but I was
quite happy with the shot and I I printed it out and uh you know it's enough to wow some friends and you know
maybe get yourself a free beer or something um so you know from there I uh
this past summer I went after it again with with different equipment um again a
dxlr and uh um it's fullframe um and I was able to capture a lot more and you
can see in the in the corners kind of uh unfocused not that's the result of the
smoke that we had um that was wreaking havoc but I was quite happy that I was able to get more so and I was quite
surprised when I saw the shot to get some of the nebulosity like the heart and soul nebula in the back corner um I
wish IID frame this up a little bit better because just below here would be the uh double cluster um and I got
remnants of the of the bubble and up in the corner and so on so you know really really nice uh beautiful area there's so
much going on this is what I found myself doing a lot more of is these really wide field type of type of images
um because you can collect so much and then when you throw it up an asra bin you get to see a whole bunch of uh um
circles pop up with uh uh through the plate solving to to see what's there so
I find it quite interesting it's it's I I would not have guess that there's so
much color in that region it's really beautiful yeah it is I was quite quite
surprised by like the star colors that are there and then there's some some nice yellows and the Reds and and the
blues um uh now this camera that I used this is was a a Nikon d810a so it it's
meant foras photography and more sensitive than the hogen alpha region um b band pass sorry wavelength
that's it um and I need to at least speak as if I know what I'm talking about
and use the right words but yeah I I was quite amazed how how it came up and I think next year um this is probably
going to be another one another region that I I'll spend some more time on um and the beauty of cipia is that it's
always up so I can I can always uh come back to this to this area um quite
easily a and uh uh the beauty of it is um you know to take a picture and then
plate solv it and then get my Mount to go back to and get it all framed up nicely is is a nice little thing I want
I want to share another image sorry you know I was quite happy and quite proud of this one um uh the uh
M31 uh this is a picture I didn't take this picture my my son took this picture
um my son Lucas he's 14 um and uh he came uh camping with me this was at uh
Scott I'm sure you remember starfest this is at the starfest campground so so every month um uh now
that we're allowed to go um uh we me and some friends would go up
and uh we would image uh for the weekend I usually spend the weekend uh testing out new equipment um and uh or a camera
just so I can get familiar with it and know what it what it's going to do but um uh my son both my boys came up with
me that weekend and they wanted to do some Imaging and and and this is what my son Lucas got and I helped them with the
uh the processing uh so I call this post Gary
um so um uh and I've been and I'm very
very proud of this picture that he took absolutely I'm sure he is too yeah we printed it out we he has it up on his
wall and and he shows his friends and uh um I'm sure he'll probably try to use it
one day to get a beer as well I we have to talk about that age
um or whatever I don't know won't kill me so right um but yeah so it it I I was
proud I was proud to to see this picture and at least I figured there's at least one good picture of the season with the
uh with everything that we were battling here in terms of about uh uh not having
clear skies with the weather and the smoke um uh in most of North America
really suffered from a lot of that uh uh smoke that happen uh from the forest
fires this year um and uh hopefully hopefully next year won't be as bad the
uh um uh and it's just exciting to see
right um you know work like this like that image of Andromeda get pay off and
and to have a beautiful image of it it's a lot better than than an Andromeda picture that I took um so uh you know
kudos to uh to Lucas on that one um you know that that that's really it but you
know like I said we have this rare phenomenon tonight called a clear sky I'm going to try to get polar aligned
I've had my Mount sitting in my Observatory for about a month and haven't been able to to pull or online
it um and uh I got I have that new firmware that Jerry released I haven't
had a chance to try it out yet so okay I want to see what we can what we can do
now um that'd be good if you could give that a try yeah yeah I want to at least tell you what I what I uh get get some
feedback uh to you on it but you know it other than that it um uh you know we're
getting into the busy season now Scott I'm sure you're starting to see it too things start ramping up right getting
into astronomy um telescopes make great gifts um and uh uh there was there was
another dealer who who who talked to our our club long time ago this is before I
got into the business um and he and uh he he had he had mentioned about about
um there was a new video game that was coming out and everyone was waiting for it and he said it sold so many hundreds
of thousands of copies and he felt you know that's so hundreds of thousands of eyes that are not going to be looking up
right but uh I've noticed now that there's been a lot of
uh uh the Resurgence in in the Hobby and people want to get their kids into it
and uh actually been noticing a lot of younger um users getting in and buying
equipment want to learn so that really encouraging and uh you know have to have
have this renewed interest in in the hobby I think it's I think it's important um to keep keep things going
and then you know it's good to have skills to be able to pass down so I don't want to get K ey to reminiscent on
anyone on that but uh um it's exciting to to see but uh was that's I wanted to
share that and like crash a party and and I got that invite from Gary and good
uh um always good to have you on and you haven't been on for quite a while so yeah I think the last time I was on was
a UK Party St party for April right and
and funny the time does really just fly by all of a sudden you you look and you
go wow that was like such and such you know June or something like that and we
October and it feels like it's only like the end of July but wasn't bad weather
you know in feeling it would just feel like a couple of months or the time does seem to fly by now yeah there's some
good and bad to that it's good because uh that well it's bad because it's everything's moving really quickly
especially when you're really busy sometimes you need to stop and and take it all in but it's good that means that summer is going to come a little sooner
now yeah and being a Canadian um I'm
surprised it'll let me back in the country whenever I used to travel abroad I don't like snow and I don't like winter
and if that was a test to get back into into the country I'd probably fail miserably um so uh then us have in the
mild October here it's really unusual you know I'm the same thing you know we
haven't had the fires on you know or heating on much it's been pretty mild right the way through October even
though it's not necessarily been the clearest weather yeah 20 degrees today
right it was 20 today it was raining but it was 20 um and like well that's good
it's just going to make the winter feel shorter yeah roll on November yeah see if we can get a few more warm days in
November and and we're on a result but absolutely yeah definitely messed up but
I really appreciate that thanks for joining us Steve oh thanks for having me Gary and uh Scott as well thanks for
letting me in oh anytime anytime Steve you're always welcome appreciate that always welcome that's
great okay uh we have had a nice run here it's very very interesting uh
presenters and it's always great to see um you know the uh images that
everybody's able to contribute I think that you know I mean our theme is sharing uh you know uh uh you know
sharing the cosmos and uh um a shared Cosmos and gosh what better way to share
than to uh show uh people what what can be imaged you know because these are
that you know you're capturing the data uh you're showing things that are invisible uh to to the uh um you know to
the naked eye um and uh you know I think that uh you know it just it makes people
just dive in deeper you know it's really cool it's really cool
um okay um I think I think that we are
going to um go ahead and and uh go to
like a uh 10-minute uh break and we'll come back with uh Maxi FIS and uh uh who
who is our second co-host here at the uh Global star party tonight and he's got a
lineup of speakers uh across South America so uh which is which is really
cool it's it's wonderful to you know as David Levy was talking about earlier that uh we can actually have these uh
Global events you know and um so oh is that your Steve is that your uh your uh
squid that's his squid
great oh that's your Adrian is that yours or is that Steve's that's definitely st's that's St
okay I came as well there it is yeah that's too narrow of a field for
something I would shoot at I like the uh wide angle yeah look at that it's so
ghostly yeah beautiful beautiful see if I could
find it I found it just before we go into the break this is 84 hours is that what
you you were mentioning earlier yeah yeah wow uh the are all 30
minutes that's that is a deep shot that is beautiful that's I can't remember
it's three or four years involved in that and I haven't done any of this this
year I've had a break this year welld deserved
one apparently it's much much easier with the camos
cameras for some reason don't know why great there was a question uh maybe this
is for Gary um but for anyone in our group that might be able to answer it uh
it says his lubo in China is asking he has an edge uh Celestron Edge uh HD and
it states that is a focal length of 232 millimeters but when plate solving ASI
air States focal length of 2089 uh the back focus to the sensor of
the telescope should be 30 13.5 mm is is something wrong with
this sounds like quite close back focus um with without seeing an image um
and I always say the same thing an image tells me a lot of what's going on on the system so um but a back focus of 13.5
mimer um is very very close right yes it is
and and if I remember rightly an edge HD runs at about I'm guessing here but I
got a funny feeling it's about 75 mimet back fotus on it yeah I I have a there's something in
me saying it's up in the the 7s for the back focus so I I'm not quite getting
where the back focal of 13.5 mm is coming no I'm sorry it's 13.5 CM C right
I was going to say yeah 13 and that's what Andreas is putting down there so yeah
yeah okay I'm um I would need to see see images but the the data that's held on a
lot of these devices for plate solving isn't always correct for all of the equipment that is one thing I will say
um it doesn't matter what system you're using it isn't always correct for the equipment so it we'll generally pick it
up um and solve on the area if it doesn't
then you'll just have to play around with the figures a little bit to to find an area that is coming in and plates
holding on but your other thing as well is is to try it without I think it said it was on
the ASI to try it on a a standard system so try it in some like sharp cap connect
it out to a laptop and plat Sol it in sharp cap and see whether the figur working
now yeah okay well it could be that there's
some rounding error with this maybe the the pixel size is not quite correct that
would throw the scale off there's a lot of other variables in there not just the Optics
yeah I I would be trying in another piece of software just to check that
it's not an error in the um the
configuration very good okay so I will U we'll switch to a 10-minute
break right now and um uh we'll come back with maxi FIS so hang in
there hello all just made a quick stop by
I'll be watching along from the background while um I'm playing around a
few other images that I got from uh okex um everything I everything I have
is wide um playing around with um an Orion
sh you still working on it right yeah and even better somebody somebody gave
me data and said hey work on this okay
and their data of course looks better than mine so I figured I I still have the USB
stick somewhere so I'll put it somewhere and eventually I'll get to it
and play around and see what I can do maybe uh maybe try a few different
things with it um ended up with the cat's paaw
nebula making uh photobombing one of my shots um didn't real iiz that if you get
high enough on the Milky Way just if you just get some of the
southern region there's two um NGC
objects the cats paaw is one of them and it just also the B nebula is a planetary
nebula and oh I don't know if if call the the the squid nebula not like that
one that has presented a few minutes ago but there is another one it's no no the
shrim the shrimp nebula is yeah there's there's one that
um is above the cat's paw and after the cats paw is where the
cut off is from where I was able to see uh down in Oklahoma oh so so yeah
there's yeah moving south a few it's like a few more Easter eggs are becoming
visible that's the first time I saw the cat's paw and um
excellent and it yeah it shows up it it looks like a cat put his footprint on my
picture so it's uh yeah it was a nice little surprise I I was actually able to
do a mosaic it was just four Images um with I believe believe uh it's
like a 35 MIM um on a fullframe modified DSLR and it worked
out I I'm on later tonight so you'll see the picture um yes yes I would be connected
I'll uh yeah I'll I'll show a few of the other pictures that I'd found since the last time I
shared um some of the images that I had
and yeah it was still just looking at that sky was uh it was a beautiful
thing um that's part of my experience is pulling out binoculars and seeing if I
can find a few um deep Sky objects with just the
binoculars um that's always uh that's always a lot of
fun and of course I have to dark adapt so it's like if I want to go back and forth between looking at a screen and
looking at the actual sky I have to be careful with uh how much I look at the
screen so it can uh it it may not always be fun but it's
uh you have to and then you continue processing and you keep yep you
keep keep working at it is what I try to do um and you know you have you you
might try to process no one and no two
TW twice ER maybe three times the same image and maybe it will be different you
know ER that that's
insane yeah it's well learning new tools I think uh I think I'll definitely be
taking some time in the not so distant future to really try
and get a handle on pixon sight and watching uh you Gary with some of the uh
cleanup work that and scripts that pixon sight has
um definitely you know I I look at the data that you start with and what you're
able to do with that data through pixon sight and I'm thinking okay this is this
is something that's got to be in my future if I W to clean some of the you know if I've captured good data I should
be able to do something with it I know Maxi yuuse picks in sight as well no but not not like
Gary Steve no I don't think so I know Gary you're the uh a long time well you
say six years but that I in baby pants yeah very new but uh yeah it's
uh it's something that would be in my future I mean taking some time to figure
that out um just to get it to where it it does what I like to do um every once
in a while I do like wide field classic astrophotography where I'm boring in on
a subject and trying to get some detail from that um I think I finally figured
out how to take a decent flat and I still have to work I gotta get to where
I'm taking decent Flats and you know stacking those in with
darks bias uh frames and things um so I'm still working at
it and um it's uh it's still it's still fun
just to be on that Journey the whole time you you have to enjoy the travel
yeah for the experience and you know for every single you learn and you realize
oh no I didn't know that so and then change your mind and then process again
what you did and it's a to to grow a
snowball of mankind of no mankind no sorry of er thoughts and knowledge yes
yeah the the flats are worth working on the flats are really really worth they
always seem dting when you first start doing them but once you get them right
they're easy yeah but they Mak such a difference to the images well I I saw um
a small a small difference already with the uh less than crummy flats that I
took um I saw the image quality of the image after stacking it and I I know the flats still
aren't perfect there there's still a little bit of ways away but
yeah if you can get them into a bit of software try and get them in value of
22,000 so even if you screen a monitor yeah put a a cloth
over them you can preset the value then once you find what that setting is for your
camera yeah so you just take a few of them and and find out what the mean value is and try and get it around
22,000 okay and if you take it in a controlled environment in a sense yeah yeah it's really easy to
do I have to I started off by aiming it at the screen and putting some paper in
front of it I got to have a t-shirt somewhere so yeah there's some more explor some more work for me to do but
um I think I'm I'm getting a little closer
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okay everybody we're back um hope you had a few minutes to stretch your legs
and get a cup of coffee or a sandwich or something and uh uh we are now up for
our second session of the global star party uh a shared uh Cosmos and uh uh up
next uh is our second uh um co-host for the night uh which is Maxi FIS Maxi uh
was first introduced to me as someone that could do amazing things with a smartphone and and his uh his smaller
telescope uh since we've gotten to know him on global Star Party he's shown us
uh his breath of talent and uh his amazing enthusiasm as an
astrophotographer and as an astronomer um we really enjoy having him on uh his
bright disposition uh his uh his his uh knowledge of uh how to get the best
performance out of his gear and how how you too can get the best performance out of yours um you know is is a a wonderful
Delight uh you know to have U Maxie on on the global star party uh Maxi I'm
going to turn it over to you uh you've got several guests and uh thanks for
putting that together well thank you Scott H hi everyone good ER good night for on good
afternoon H well first of all thank you like I say last weekend to you it's an
honor to me be here being co-hosting with Gary Palmer he's an awesome guy
with all that pictures that he did and
well H tonight well I'm I'm going to be a b a little short well of my
presentation because I have some some friends and colleagues from here from
Argentina H that H we are doing
astrophotography ER as observations ER and and everything and you know you also
do this kind of er friendly and
cooperation um well being together ER and of course
by the media and social networks we also connected ER
even the the distance between us so well H what I want to talk ER to in
this GSP is about what I what we did with our local group of
astronomers observers here in my city chy H I want to share my
screen uh okay do you see
it yeah yes yes yes as always we see that beautiful Eclipse picture Maxi yeah
this a it's a classic it's a
classic yeah I don't know when I will change this background I don't know I
maybe never maybe never in the next Max H in the yes the ring the solar eclipse
maybe the next year right I don't remember I don't remember if not next
year is the the next one well what I'm going to show you this
is a little fire where the the Southern Park of the sky here in chiboy was
promotion in the international observation of the Moon of the the day
of international of observation and we met of course in our ER Southern Skies
ER a park that we have here in our city and well this is a where at the maybe at
this time more one hour before and I be
with my with my little equipment in this case
maxu a a mount very light and my camera
CW to to do some ER projections with this projector and my notebook but also
H we have some this is a a homemade telescope that did my professor Armando
sandel and he is teaching how to put the the the telescope and qu Mount
to this um alums of his teaching and also in this place we
have this a there was a father with his son that they they put they they come with his
little telescope is a little refractor 70 and 300
millimeters and because he never saw the moon with
this little scope I think it was a a new one so we teach him how we use it
because it's it's very simple but when you start of course maybe you have to
maybe I I think we of of us we don't have some someone who teach us and
sometimes so you have to to to to see how how it works
so well this is another picture and this is a the pl the worldall that we be
projecting what we see and I was prepared here here you can see is the
Moon ER pointed with the maxo and of course here's the the
moon so it was a very clean afternoon H
very a little cold when the Sun goes down but it was okay ER well this is
when the it turns at more night maybe 8
p.m. ER and we are having in this this case I was pointing to Venus because we
have it very at the West on I think I was it was almost
uh 25 or 30 degrees it was very high so
also we saw the ISS passing by and we
for the people that that came we told them that this is the International
Space Station and the the speed that it it is passing by through us they they
see like passing very not too not too fast but when you tell them the the
speed they they was shocking of that kind of
speed H well in this case we have like I said a a soccer stadium where people go
to to play football uh and the lights really killed us but to do observations
of planetary it was okay here's a friend of mine Marcelo and this is was what was
projecting you know and people say h what kind we see in
this scope well you are seen in the in the wall I tell them not really this is
what you yes because it was the connected the camera was connected so it's live this is a live view of the
Moon you can see if I move the scope wait and then and then I do some Zoom
images ER from there and when the people see this very big on
the worldall these crators ER it was outstanding H it feels
like if you not Orting but it was if you
have the moon really really close to you I remember um a man who who started to
take pictures but she took pictures with the flashlight and I tell him that not
do that because he won't see anything because it was projecting light here
so and then I I tried to to capture the the ISS but I forgot to this increase
the the speed of capturing so I have this the line passing by and also
we pointed to Jupiter and but I I I remember now I didn't Point into Saturn
but also they everybody saw it in another
telescopes and well this is a little selfie of
me and I it between the chats and the the
teaching to the the people who arrived I did a little video with the maxutov and
I processed the the new CR when I came back to to my home and this is well with
the only 500
um frames that I it took and it was a
very single shot but you you can see the the the details from the creators and
well it was very soon and also I did a single video of Jupiter H with the
maxoto and this is the I I really like it because I was using the an a Skype
camera ER with a barad 2X ER of course
that I put on the max telescope and I well lucky us we had the the the
Great Red Spot pointing to us and of
course it was the moons and all but I really lik how how it
works so when I came back home I did this but also
I saw the the the the the the last GSP that Gary teach
us some little tips of fixing sight that I was practicing and I was doing this
processing with some two pictures that I took 50 days ago in this case with the
dumble neula or M27 uh this is not like
you H show us before this is a a 40 yes 40 minutes stacking only and I
have it very not too low but the light pollution and everything it wasn't the
great night it was very wet ER some well
the clouds that was killing but it was the night of the comment that I show but
I could some kind I could ER try to to get
out the the noising H background but also I could take some details of the
dumble nebula this is this is was with the the my gso Newtonian telescope the8
inches and and and I love when the I saw this
spikes with the Stars I really love it and then I processed the the
m42 nebula that I took the same night but it was awful the the the Horizon was
very orang for the light pollution and it was very wet and no it wasn't the
great night but even this I could capture this kind
of details of the nebula H that I really loved it seems to be little
scratched that the light pollution I I couldn't take it off but you know the
this star with the spike really th puts my brain
out and also I I loved this place this kind of nebulosity that the has in front
of and behind it the the brown nebula and the shining
stars lighting the neul the nebulosity this is an amazing place to to capture
it's an easy place to to get practice to start to starting to do astrop
photographies and we have it of course well here in in the summer Skies but and
you in the winter Skies but you you can see it ER in every place if where you
are on the planet so H you can point it
when you want it and well this is H my
little presentation I hope that you like it and
well ER this is for me now and now I'm going to passing by to to my friend Nico
Aras the hammer that he he was um
well had to I don't know what what what he wants to to show us tonight because
he has some surprises so Nico it's all yours thank you Maxi hi everyone how are
you uh well yes for tonight I I was thinking on on capturing a a double star
live but here still daylight so we go with the plan B and this week I I was uh
doing uh several attempts and different processing with the planetary E Machine
and I i' like to show you ER how I how am I now processing so I
let me share my screen here we
go are you seeing it uh yes
yes see it yes okay okay well uh as you know I used to make planetary maing with
my 10 in 10 in do hand draging and with
my qu I5 camera that is a monochromatic camera so I used
to take four videos one for the Luminous Channel and the RGB so I I will show you
how I am processing now and I am trying this software that is called Astro
surface that is free uh so it's really interesting
to the the power of this software and I will show you how you you just open the image
and has a control for wavelets it's a a little different with the with reg STX
that is is the common program for this but uh it's really really amazing the
the the convolution and the how how it manage the gain so let me show you you
have the the waveless level let's
start
here and you have all the control the the noising
Nico yes we are seeing only the the window where you are doing the W blads
only and we are seeing also the background of the YouTube
channel oh okay let me change the
screen okay
what no again it's okay let's disconnect this the second uh
screen okay you need an it supp no no because I plug the the second
screen okay here we are now yes yes
okay now we start again as I we see this is the the the wavelets functions of the
asur face and it's really easy uh to
use but it's really aggressive this image is your dobsonian yes yes hand tracked with my
10inch dob uh as you can see it's easy but it's
aggressive you can yeah go to is really
really delicated and and I will show you that's the common parameters I used to
you to to use for
Jupiter I see see and you have the two levels of
wavelength the the first one you can be more aggressive and the second
one is for the the the the light details
the the small details so this is I recommended to to use it in low
values you can see that it brings noise if you if you go
too far so you can you can make a a little
balance there and and this is it it's it's really used to it's really easy to
use this this so so let's make
the I used to apply the the same settings for the for four
channels this is the the red Channel save
us this is the green Channel you see the the noise all always
in the in the green Channel you have a little more noise so I used to
use more the noise in this channel in
particular and the blue
one okay so this was the the first step and we have the the four
channels with the the wavelets on you can see the the field rotation
that's because the the do you can see how the the planet was
rotating in the sky and this the next step is go going
to wing hopos to make the the Der rotation of
all the chn
okay
Wing shup with with Jupiter is is really fast when we use it with Saturn you need
to adjust this by manually and it takes more
time okay and now we have the the four channels and we are joining them in the in an
lrgb final
image okay and now we compile and we have the
all the channels together wow yeah you can see that I have a a
little onion sharp here maybe one of the channels was not correctly on Focus but
is a really really nice image beautiful image and I used to to go to regx anyway
just to to make the the a she be align because
I I really like how how it balances I I like the the colors that
shs make so you can see
how we you need to we need to make the four time wavelets but when you sh the
images it's really nice to see the the color image with with a mono camera this is is
really is really nice and uh well I I have another image that
use the this the same night of Saturn in this case I was trying I I was
testing for the luminance to using an UHC filter and I get a lot of
details than the the other times so you have a
some colors on the moons and I use the the same process for the
images and and okay and about that was planetary with my D
and this weeks I was making some LGB images with my my other scope my six
inch reflector with a equatorial Mount that was
the the Maxis telescope I miss it yeah and I using
with with the same5 camera that is is a planetary orch
but you can use it to the to make some deep sky this is the the nebulosity on Corona
austral and uh I use I captured 47 to this is my my favorite
close glob cluster and wow this is the result and the same process I I used to
I I make the the four images and then started in this case I I mix the
channels and it with P inside so okay this is was a little
presentation and we'll back to you Max to continue with the other friends thank
you guys well excellent presentation Nico it
was excellent work that Jupiter you know seeing how it
goes the the sharpness and to and and and get focused is amazing you know the
change when you see start to see those details of the clouds and the storms
no no this unbelievable and you you are doing in your home with
your a little qhy five camera ER also
with a singular filters RGB and
well without Motors now you are putting
pointed before passing by to scope and start to to Capt following yes and
follen is a good [Music] friend yes really really does well um
the next one is going to be Alan ging Alan also he's a friend of mine that we
started maybe together um not together but yes at the the same time doing
astrophotography and also observations he also well we met for the first time I
remember in the observatory of Mercedes where um it was the the the
date of the 47 sorry the 46 p with t with tan and
Comet it was I think we met at the um
the four the 15th of December of 2019 and I W I remember that I went with
my scope and I started to take pictures with the with a cell phone and he was
amazing and we start to to talk him and well you know ER that's how astronomy
open doors and open open ER friends to to to to to to know you and also you
know it and well Alan it's all yours
man
okay hello SC
everybody um well first of all I I want to thank
thank everyone for for this
spot I think we have some issues with your connection met with ma quite a few
years ago and I was amazed by uh
pictures and the kind of work he was doing with his uh it was a small scope
it was like what uh 110 millimeter Max
yes it Alan are you
there well yeah maybe he he lose the the
internet he connect again I think from another
place um this troubl shoots
happens yeah take it isan you're not the first
one I remember when I was here for the first time you remember Scott yeah I we
all lost connection everyone yeah I I think it's like everyone has passed by through the
down of the connection so Alan are you there okay I I think I'm back I think
I'm back I don't know if you can see me or hear me no we we can hear you but we can't see
you oh let me check the video ju just a
minute you know it's pretty clear sky here but and the Mone was really big I
yeah I said it a couple minutes ago and
no but tonight I think I I'm well I don't know what I'm going to do tonight what we we can see you now
Alan ah oh
okay
great I would
Qui um thank you all again for giving me
this this space and uh I thought the
them of of this uh episode of of the GSP uh uh the one that
Scott said about uh sharing uh the cosmos
so I made a quite a small because it's just a few a few pictures uh a slideshow
uh and this pres presentation is called uh astrophotography and a budget I mean
what better than than Shar
than um well I think he lost connection again I think he did too
um yes he really well ER what if you can
hear me Alan I think we're going to all right just bear with me I'm I'm gonna
share my screen right
now okay I'm sharing the screen are you able to see it yes we are see it yes we are
yes awesome great okay I'm going to start slideshow just just let me know if
the the screen goes black or not we can see the presentation
yeah okay well that's a picture that I took
of my first cope it was a really small uh reflector scope um it was uh I
believe it was a 3 in reflector uh 76 millimet by 9 900 millimet of focal
distance time I used a really cheap LG
phone I started um watching the SKU with a friend and um I was like okay but it's
it's all nice I can see some great things when I put my eye to the eyepiece
uh but it will be really cool if I was able to share that with some other
people so first I tried holding the cell
phone with my hand up to the eyepiece I was able to get some decent Moon shots
which by the way the Moon is a really nice Target it's by far the easiest because it's big and it's bright and you
don't need to tax your your phone or your camera too much in order to get some some sort of detail but um it's
kind of difficult to keep your phone right in the eye relief point and
perhaps you took a breath and you moved it and and you can have all sort of
things happen that take the the phone out of that position so uh I said okay so how do I solve this and and I went
looking through a a eBay like site and I found that I found that they sold
adapters to hold your phone steady so I got one of those for like I don't know it was like seven bucks or something
$7 and um managed to get some really nice views for for the uh the amount of
money I put in I mean um that scope was uh worth less I bought it secondhand
well actually my wife bought it secondhand she gave it for me as a as a as a present and
um what do you know for $455
US dollars I was taking photos of the Moon and I was like that totally blew my
mind of course you want to try more when you when you go through that situation I
mean you want to H try your hand at planets and you know that there are star clusters and open clusters and and
globular clusters so you want to try and say okay why not so I tried my hand
first the first open cluster I I picture was uh the wishing well cluster located
near the Karina constellation and um even though I managed to get uh to photograph uh quite
a bit of amount of stars it I notice that you could improve that so the next
step was getting the right Ascension tracking on the telescope so again since
I usually I'm am in a tight budget I went looking for the AR motor and uh
found that it was out of my league so if you notice right below the scope
you can see a small white box with red with red and black cables and a a light
blue power bank so I designed a aray motor out of I scratch built it I use a
cheap stepper motor a driver for the for the for the motor and um a pulse
generator uh board that I bought off eBay all in all it it set me back like
$15 or so so um at that point I got a
tracking telescope that I was able to use to um take a long exposure shots and
I upgraded my cell phone I bought a a highend but old phone this was around
200 2019 I bought an l a a LG G5 cell phone
which was the hen phone B from 2016 so I I didn't spend a lot of money
on that that allowed me to use some photograph um cam photographic camera
apps like open camera which allows you to exploit the pro mode the manual mode
on the cell phone you can change the iso value the shatter speed the focus of the
uh of the cell phone the white balance and all and that uped my game and
allowed me to get some really nice views for I mean I'll stress again that this
was done with a 76 millimeter diameter scope beginner a beginner scope with a e
eq1 Mount uh I was starting to get videos out of of Jupiter out of Saturn
getting some detail even though my processing skills were not that good at
that time but I was getting there and it was possible just by not spending a
tremendous amount of money I mean uh I've seen a lot of of Po in in in
Facebook Facebook groups and in astrophotography um forums where they
say no you have to purchase a a 5 in reflector with a eq5 mount the get the
dual access motor get a dedicated Astro camera in order to get one good picture
and um you can do you can get a nice picture without spending that tremendous
amount of cash uh I was able to use that small scope and this cell phone to to
photograph and I have I believe I have the video of the occultation of pattern
that happened in 2019 that was a a really really tough um
event because the brightness of the moon was like overwhelming for the sensor of
the cell phone but I managed to get a couple of pictures and of course picturing the
moon with a better cell phone with some new ipes because I switch uh the default
ones that come with the with the telescope the super 20 or the super 25
and the super 10 I got some some some quality brand I pieces and that uh made
really it really made a difference in the quality uh once I managed to get the the
equipment in polar to to do the polar aligning on the telescope once I managed
to to to learn that process which was difficult for me uh I started Imaging
dsos mainly uh open clusters bright objects like nebulas m42 for instance or
Omega sow um and it was really it was possible it was possible
of course you can compare this images to images from professional
astrophotographers or for instance to the images that Maxi uh gets from his
scope and his gear but I'm pretty content with that and um after getting along with the cell
phone and the telescope uh oh I'm sorry someone mentioned about the the
the eclipse picture from Maxi and I have some similar pictures that I took again
with the cell phone andd this time uh for for this event I upgraded the 76 mm
reflector to a 70 mm refractor scope um
which I was in love with that little little little
otaa again you can do all sorts of planetary Imaging using uh salones you
know that from Maxi because he has excelled at that field with his technique and his
professionalism um after getting along with the cell
phone as I was saying if friend of mine uh gifted uh this small Point shoot
camera it was it is because I still have it I still use it to to take Whitefield
uh pictures and do time-lapse videos um this is a uh Canon SX 700 HS which uh
it's you can find one really cheap online I I believe I saw it uh yesterday or the day before for $80 on I don't
know if it was eBay or Amazon um so I use it on the piggyback of the
mount managed to get uh from a bort seven almost bort eight Sky that's the
the sky quality that I have here in my house um and and and it was just
terrific because the sensor on the camera on this point in shoot is way
better than the one on the cell phone but still I mean get it as a gift but if you want to buy one you don't have to
spend a lot of money on it this is m42 that I took I believe it
was 20 the end of 2019 with the with the Canon mounted on the piggyback uh I was
using the telescope as a giant guide scope while I had mounted the the camera
top it and um after that I mean you you just I try
to go step by step I I I as I said before uh I'm usually on a tight
budget and even though I could save money I could say okay let's not buy
this camera but save that I did that to get a reflex camera uh The Next Step
will be to get an astro camera but it's that's way way ahead of me right now but
I was able to find second hand I used uh reflex Canon
T3 it's like I don't know maybe 10 or 11 year old camera um my wife again helped
me and gifted an upgrade scope for me I went uh from a SE from the 70 mm
refractor to a 90 MIM refractor with a eq3 mount and uh I had to redesign
the uh motor that I scratch built had to to redesign it and uh switch a couple of
pieces in order to fit the the different Mount point in the eq3 month um but again I mean we're talking
about small Scopes pretty perhaps inexpensive Scopes in regards to to what I with uh to
regards to the advised astrophotography equipment
that some of other people tend to recommend I mean a lot of people tend to recommend larger aperture Scopes um
better cameras or more recent with better sensor uh sensibility
to say way so this has allowed me to keep
growing in regards to the quality of the pictures taken and uh share a lot more
detail with uh friends family um people that that are interested in in in
getting into astronomy or or astrophotography because they they come at you and say like okay so you got a
large Stope I mean and I was like and I'm like no this is small a small scope I mean you can purchase a larger scope
and they're like n you you didn't get that picture with with this quote small
quote scope last year or this year this year I tried
hand at Imaging Galaxies for the first time since I I started with with this
activity and has been uh fulfilling very fulfilling for me uh I'm usually in a
couple of of WhatsApp groups and Facebook groups and when people say Okay
I want to get get into astrophotography but I cannot spend a lot of money on it
and the first thing I do is okay take a look at this picture just know that I spent 100 $120 $130 on the equipment and
the rest was research and watching YouTube tutorials in order to know how to use the
processing software or how to set up the scope set up the camera set up the correct exposure values in order to get
uh the lights and uh the the light shots and the calibration takes in order to
process them um this is well actually this is my
um background picture right now in my notebook this is the Karina neb uh I'm
pretty stoked about this picture we can we can see
it oh okay um screen is black yes Maxi
oh there you go there it goes there he [Music] is oh the screen was black I'm
sorry so I I was saying I was uh um like my mind was blown away when I started
processing this uh this set of takes uh it was a surprise to me because I was
not expecting to get this amount of color and and detail out of this this
modest uh um uh equipment that I'm
using so well that was the last the last picture I was uh I
selected for for this
show great great work Alan congratulations Excellent Man
back [Music]
well I think if you share in the the screen we can hear it but if you don't
we can can't hear it the first time
Karma maybe turn turn off your
camera
no or share your screen [Laughter]
again perhaps connection will get better later in the program
probably uh well ER next guest is also a
friend of mine that we did our first Adventure a couple weeks ago or couple I
don't know a month and a half that we went we also another person Rodriguez to
to a ro play to do some f wild fi of wild pictures of the the
the magach clouds and the the the the Galaxy and
also from the nature pictures and well
he he's Sebastian jemas Sebastian jemas that he will presented tonight
what he's doing what he's working on and hey SE how are
you hi Max hi everyone thanks for having me tonight uh it's great great being here
uh all right so as Max was saying uh I wanted to give some little
background on uh a brief introduction actually to Wi field
astrophotography um I don't know how many of you folks have already been exposed to uh Whitefield night
nightscape photography uh but in case you're wondering where to start how to start
with it um well this I hope this is a a good
ad I think we will a big fan of you this is I am looking forward to see your uh
work and how you do things I I am a fan of uh Widefield uh photography
nightscapes and everything that I think you are about to talk about so I'm looking forward to
this awesome glad to hear that hope you like it all right so uh first of all oh let
me close my window there's there's a whole party of dogs out there um so what
is it uh you might already know what is it there's no no telescope
here um so nightscape it means uh
photographing uh the night sky and including uh the landscape in it in the
picture in the frame all right uh gives us a lot of
possibilities um I jumped into photography and into
astronomy quite at the same time with very basic rudimentary equipment um and
both in parallel I I never really thought that I would be uh getting those
worlds together at some point um
so basically the difference is the focal length right with telescopes you use 300
millimeters and above 200 millimeters and above maybe um for planetary it's
much more than that uh while wide field
photography uh you're you're looking into uh 35 millimeters at the most uh
ideally 14 mm length uh would get you very good
results and we'll see why later on um there's uh there's a lot of
differences uh between focal length uh with a 35 mm length uh you can get like
an intimate um picture like this one we're
seeing here uh this is in the the place that
Maxi was talking about uh it's a different night but it's the same
place um and you can see the two magic clouds
here um with a typical very typical rural
rural landscape here in Bonos ciris and this is a a very Southern
picture I'm really proud of getting the maganic clouds whenever I can and 47 to
can and 47 to can yeah
yeah all right so what do you need to start with uh this picture is also with
35 millimet it's a Nikon lens from
1974 I think f2.8 manual focus
um manual aperture as well um but if you're if you're uh if you're
curious about it if you just if you're just wondering what happens if I point
my camera to the sky during the night and try to take a picture all right so
there's a few things you will probably uh want to know
um the the I I think the best starting point is a reflex camera a
DSLR um you don't really need it as long as the camera has a manual mode but the
sensors in DSLR cameras are much better than pointed shoot cameras
um you will also want um a nice and fast
lens um the kit lenses are um if
three. five um maximum aperture which is kind of not
that fast not fast enough um so you can
try as always you can try and see what you get you can uh increase your ISO and
try to increase your exposure um and see what you get and try
to get something out of addition um
but basically you will probably want something with a lens with
f2.8 or more all right uh you will also need a tripod
we'll talk about tripods in the next slide uh Sky conditions and limitations
um so Sky conditions are not that are are kind of for
um uh it's easier to get a nice picture
with in wi field photography than with a telescope um because you can also use
the landscape to compose your your images um like in here for example the center
of the Milky Way was really really low in the sky and I was pointing at uh at
Capital Federal here uh in buenosaires which is a very very highly polluted Sky
um it might be Bott 15 at least if if there were a bottle
15 all yeah that even on the
scale yeah let's it goes to it goes to nine but uh 50 is bright bright bright
so yeah I know let's let's call it nine plus okay um but you can see that I mean you
can see here it was a really dark night um but all this light here it comes from
from Caba from Capital Federal um so you can include elements
in your picture to make it look nicer you don't really need that level of
detail like when you do deep scape deep space photography uh you don't need to take
that much into account the star shapes uh and that kind of stuff unless
you're thinking on printing it at 100% size or something like that which you want at the beginning of
course um you can also include clouds clouds uh I'll show you a picture uh I
think I have one here uh clouds can look very very
nice um if you give me a moment I think I have here so this one I took it in Baro in
Patagonia oh wow yes right and that's beautiful yeah and not even not even the
clouds but also light pollution all this light is coming from the city
um and you can see the whole Karina region here um and you can make it look
good very very good it's as if the the clouds have added some fill light to the
U to the mountains as well right yeah right well they they were behind the
mountain the sky above the thing here is that the light is coming from here and
uh from the left of the image which uh makes all these textures on the mountain
and the clouds in behind um I mean they add a lot to the composition
yes and ASR my background um I'm not an astronomer any guy here in this meeting
will know much more uh astronomy than I um that's for sure in the case of niiko
Allen and Maxi for example um but it it
adds a lot to your pictures if you know how the sky is moving uh where the stars starts shaping
from one place to the other in the equator where are your poles what
happens if you point your camera to the North or South pole for example you you
can do some star Trails I I have one here I took it in the middle of the city
as you can see there's there are planes coming and going um so knowing where
your poles are and where where the equator is uh can also add a lot to your
pictures all right um camera
limitations let's talk a little a little bit more about equipment um so the first
limitation that you will have tied to your camera model uh is a
sensor and the sensor will limit uh how much how high you can go with the iso
all right so um a good starting point would be half the maximum set well we'll
talk about settings later on but uh just get to know that your sensor will limit
your pictures a lot um for example I used to have a d80 a neon d80 uh which I
would have said that it's it's it hasn't have any value for astrophotography but
since I met Maxi and I'm I saw the pictures that he got with that same
camera that I couldn't take more than two starts with with an lens the
8055 it's incredible what you do what what you used to do with that camera and
I can tell you enough and I already told you how glad I was that you changed it
and you can see the the results now I mean if you do if you did Magic with the v80 H well the results with your
dedicated camera are are out there you have already showed them up um but I tried to do some astrop
photography and landscape photography with the d8 and even in the atakama
desert uh I couldn't get anything decent
um and but that's what I got all right uh then I changed it a couple years back
to a d750 it has a Nikon D d750 it's a
full-frame camera I didn't really care about uh full frame I mean for the
sensor size but that camera does magic with light I mean it takes just three
phots and makes a picture out of it it's incredible um so it it has a Sony sensor
uh I think it's an IMX 128 um so Sony cameras are great Nikon
cameras are great Cano cameras are great I mean any any camera is is good enough
to start with and uh and in Brands maybe Sony does a better job with
high-end sensors uh but uh you can do it with any camera any DSLR camera that you have out
there um all right so lens and focal length limits lens as I said before uh
you will want uh something with uh F2 2.8 uh at the minimum for maximum
aperture uh if you have a 1.4 or an F2
that's even great even even even better uh you're getting uh Points of
Light focal length limits uh I mentioned 35 millim at the most you can do
something with less than that will with with a 50 mm length for example but as
the sky rotates well as the Earth rotates and we see the sky rotating with
it um it will also limit your exposure times all right so you you mount your
camera on your tripod and start shooting so if you take
a 15 seconds um photo with a 50 mm lens
you'll see all sort of strikes uh traces star traces in your
photo and they will be noticeable with a 13 35 millimeter lens
at 10 seconds 15 seconds you can get away with it uh with a 14 mm lens you
can go up to 30 seconds without noticing the the Stars the the star move
movements um so the shorter the focal length uh the longer the exposure time
there's a rule out there it's called The 500 rule it's kind of a it's kind of
tricky uh it can give you longer exposure times it's basically means uh
dividing 500 by your focal length and it it's supposed to give you the maximum
time that you can uh have your shatter open until the strikes are noticeable
but you can get times that are in my experience uh that uh it's it's not
really trustworthy um but the rule I mean what I what I
found is that with a 35 millimeter lens you can go to from 10 to 15 seconds uh
depending on where where on the sky are you are you pointing are you pointing to your camera too
um and with a 14 mm length you can go up to 30 seconds without any problems
you can see the well actually in this photo on the background uh you can see
some traces uh it's um it's a panorama I think I have it here yeah uh it's a
panorama it's composed out of I think it's three ver vertical
images and uh it's the crop version all right sorry but you can see some traces
here but very not visible and I I never thought about uh showing it at 100% so
I'm comfortable perfectly comfortable with it
um all right so equipment tripod a solid tripod there's no such thing as a solid
and light tripod so if you want a stable tripod you need to carry it it weighs
um I have a here um a mano B free tripod I don't
know it's well yeah you won't see it but uh a solid tripod is very important
especially for the wind um and other factors as well
intervalometer if you want to take uh pictures of more than 30 seconds most
cameras won't let you do that so you will either uh need to connect your
computer to the camera and control it from uh from some kind of software or an
inom meter which is much easier to do to get uh pictures for I don't know maybe
one minute two minutes which you will want if you want to mix your landscape
with your Sky because the sky will always be brighter than this than the
landscape so many times as you go on with your night
night photography you might want to take two different pictures one for the landscape with a with a greater exposure
time and another one for the sky all
right camera settings to start playing around with um so I would
suggest uh that you start with have the cameras maximum ISO not the not the for
one H1 H2 H4 not those values but but the maximum uh that the camera offers
numeric values so if your camera goes up to
6,400 ISO uh you can start with ISO
3200s uh if you can go up to 1,00
12,800 you can start with um
6,400 and so on so forth um during your first tests I would suggest that you go
higher than that all the way up all the way down and and check right because you
might think that it's good enough exposure and then it's all dark if you
try to uh increase the exposure you will bring up noise uh if you go go too high on the
iso everything will be noise and you might not even distinguish between stars
and noise so play around with it take three four images with different
settings um lens wide open with caution there are many lenses out there that um
you can see a lot of uh aberations in your Corners like let me show you I think I
have some here um this one
probably this is with the 35 millimeters as well as you go to the corners you
start seeing the stars as birds as little birds that's
aberration um our friend here Ariel Rodriguez who's watching us on YouTube
uh will know the exact word I think it's um astigmatism I think it is he he will he
will punch me in the face if it's not but I think it [Laughter]
is so uh and you can you can control these operations wow uh by kind of
shutting a little bit uh your your diaphragm your
aperture um so if your lens is 2.8 and you see this kind of artifacts on the
corners you might want to close it to probably uh three something or five so
that's also limiting the light and don't ever forget that you're counting every
photo that you get so every step of light is very
important
um and then uh exposure time well I already talked about it um it depends on
which part of the sky are you poin to uh so if you're in the Southern Hemisphere
and you're pointing South you can increase your exposure times if you are
on the North and pointing to the north it's the same while if you point to the Equator
the stars move faster so you will have uh much longer traces in your photos
so um once again the numbers go from 10
seconds with a 13 35 millim length to up to 30 seconds with a 14 millim
length you can also as you can see you can play around with with lights some
light painting um for this also takes some kind of
trial error uh and I would suggest that you count the seconds uh that you have
your light turn on so that if it's if it's all burned out you can lower one of
two seconds if it's too dark you can keep it uh on for a couple more seconds
and so on for so forth until you get something you're comfortable with um also if you're doing some light
painting I would suggest uh either uh projecting your the L the light to your
hand or to some uh or or or a piece of paper to diffuse it a little bit and
move it around so that it's not that hard because the the the light of a
single point it's very it's very hard and you will
have very uh very high contrast on your
landscape and all right so and something about basic
development sorry so I I normally use camera
raw um with sometimes if I feel like it I open
it in Photoshop and do some more complex work colors and and
uh probably noise reduction but I try to cope with that with other tools um but
normally with camera raw or some similar or or uh some basic uh developing
software photo developing software that supports raw images you'll be good to go
um always keep an eye on the on the histogram not only when editing but also
especially when you're taking pictures try to get your histogram uh as much to the middle of
the screen as as possible um maybe let me see if I can show
you let's take any of this so how are we with time are we good
sorry I I I'm not I have a number of presenters so all right all right all
right but uh so try to keep your histogram as as uh as much to at least
the middle as possible um the noise you should
evaluate your noise at 100% zoom level
um and you could use the camera raw noise redaction features but uh it's it
kind of uh blurs your image so I would try to get the right exposure if you get
the right exposure from your camera that's the best way I know of for
reducing noise uh and there are other techniques as well like uh stacking your
pictures but in landscape photography that's quite uh Troublesome more Troublesome
than than deep space cuz uh I couldn't find any uh software
that does it for you like pcks inside that's for for deep sky for
example um yeah there's some that's out there but I forget the name it takes
your sky and stacks it and then takes your last landscape and makes that your
landscape but it I haven't looked for it either and I don't I don't stack as if I
can help it the I usually just tried to go for the single image too so it's
there but it's uh it makes a difference I mean it makes a difference this this is a stacked image for example this is
what I was talking about the histogram um and if you go up to
100% the noise so this image is taken at uh ISO 1200 uh
12,800 so it's really really high and very low noise for what is for what it
is um the thing is that it is stocked it it's a stacked
image um and it makes a difference but it's also very complex yeah uh maybe
you're referring to seator um that might be it I don't really like the the quality of the
output but it's a handy tool yeah all right so I think that's pretty
much it if you have any questions or uh
would like to see more of my pictures here's my intro them and I'm really really glad that I
uh for the opportunity thank you guys those images are those images are
beautiful you beauti you made a point and it's very interesting point that you
you made a point that you you aren't fighting stars to be absolutely pinpoint
as long as you're painting the picture with your uh photography and that's part of what I suffer from is
coming from an astronomy background as you can see with the that's part of a Milky Way picture I took in the
background I fight pinpoint stars and try and get that but my foregrounds are
these little things or there's a strip of a lake so that's in one way to
improve um getting better foregrounds and composing better at something that I
see you do very well um as do some of the uh night sky photographers and some of the groups um
those foregrounds are beautiful I Rely completely on pinpoint stars and just
having this Majestic looking shot so it's something that I can I can take
with me and say you know I don't have to even if it's not perfect I can still
frame it a little better if I go of course I have to go to some better foregrounds which is why I must come to
Argentina there are great programs here yeah you're right yeah and it comes down
to what your intention with the photo is I mean if you want to print it again
like 100% well you get you have to get your your stars
pinpointed uh but normally and to play around with it to have fun or share it
in social media you don't really need that we always on that of
course yeah but we also want to get the shot cuz this guy moves exactly yeah so
you have to sometimes you have a certain window in which you can compose or you
miss literally the uh mil way it uh in the northern hemisphere we only get a
little bit of what you can see in the South all the time so with only 30
minutes I managed to take a shot that included some nebula like the the
catspaw nebula that you can only see in the South you an hour later that's gone so that that can no longer be a part of
the photo so it happens to us we Andromeda yeah you all have the same issue we can we can look at it most of
the night Andromeda has it's only so much you can shoot exactly like the play
is when I was in Miami I was seeing the play is right there in the c i I couldn't believe it so happy yes
beautiful yes so it's a both hemispheres something to share to each
other all right I think ER our NE next guest is our friend of us that he's he
was my presenter a couple months ago H he's Cesar bro Cesar how are
you uh unmuted how are you Maxi
hey well thank you for here everyone uh can you
good uh a little bit you have some issues with your connection I
think uh I I think that I can I can uh change to to another connection if if uh
let me um I know I know why okay no the best
the best thing is close everything that I have open now it's going okay I think
the connection ah okay okay okay now it's perfectly okay s it's all yours okay let
me well can you can you hear me good or or
if not I can I can change my my your internet has settled in and is now
working now working because it's
uh the problem with with the I think that this that not not I think I believe
that work good but um maybe I'm freeze for you for the it it is freezing the
voice is interrupting a little bit yeah let me let me change want
change okay something that is only yes yes it's no
problem because uh it's really easy and I helping me with a uh data connection
from my cell phone because maybe in this part of the house sometimes I have a
problem with the router of my my
um um um well I in a living room is a
problem let me check sorry sorry that I I can change now this one very fast let
me cut this and maybe we'll be unplug
far no yeah but I I think that I can
change this is the top of the time that everyone has connection problem here
it's 900 p.m. and everyone is everyone's online yeah it's online it's watching
absolutely all the movies series The Connection absolutely
absolutely yes I can change to that YouTube videos on how to make
pizzas it's okay the next better I think it's better yeah yeah yes I change I
change to my my phone because maybe in yes in my home actually
we are watching uh uh movies my
family of course yeah yeah and normally we we use well we use
a lot of of the wi of the connection more than that's possible well um maybe
Austin is mining crypto crypto Monas I don't
know yeah yeah yes it's it's like Maxi when he used a a tool that the for for a the
name is 1.5 drizzly for for planetarian image
that consume a lot of of space in your computer for the r RAM memory and uh two
weeks ago I I um I I um I was connected with maxi in in
the night two weeks ago Maxi remembered that and when uh Maxi put uh the one
point Grizzly uh Tool uh in the in the processing of of the planetary image we
I I told him okay chil Koy now is turn
off the light the entire city
because we have a left I I can I maybe I can cook with my CPU here yeah yeah yeah
we we we start to talk about make a barbecue on your processor yeah yes many
many processings in in astrophotography are uh using a lot of M of of frun of
your computer is is normal well we had a store party last weekend last Saturday
was a not a typical St party with all with people with telescopes like a next
uh November 6 uh where all people from Argentina and
people from another countries of course that you are all invited um um Saturday 6 November uh
November Saturday 6 we can make an small Sur party with an small barbecue for for
our friends in in a in historic installation of uh um San Miguel solar
physics Observatory and um well before
uh after sorry of my of uh U the people
that that talk about after photography uh I I feel really small
because I watched the the pictures from Sebastian are incredible it's and I
enjoyed the conversation between Adrian and Sebastian because I say oh these guys made the same type of of pictures
and say wow it's amazing I think that that is is
I I really I I'll hope that one day we
uh we went together we go together to uh darkest SK in Argentina with Adrian
Sebastian Scott of course to have a a great party of course absolutely for
every I will come I will bring my star tracker I will compare no with Sebastian
and try and take some absolute amazing photos we'll learn a lot from him sure
and really I enjoyed the all that that this Argentinian part of the global s
part is a honor for for me to be a part like ever well and I have some pictures
from the the surar of of the the meeting that we made
uh last Saturday we we had uh some things like a Mont International die
Observer night Observer uh we show to the people a lot of image live image of
or of course OB serving by the telescope uh um throw the telescope sorry um um of
uh of course uh Venus um Jupiter saturno was very
interesting we have a lot a lot a large file of people watching uh through the
the very old gustaff Heen telescope 120 years old um was amazing because um the
the the major the the government of San Miguel started to make uh to make um
some uh improvements in the structures of the observatories start to paint with
a very good quality paint uh paint in the walls of the observatory they they
still painting with a um special paint
the domes um this is fantastic because we are watching we we are watching how
the observatory is coming to the life again and again and this is really
really great I'll I'll share my screen let me let me uh think where I can have
here and I'm start
here uh let me see if you can see the the picture now the big picture is okay
it's just a gallery view no no no okay okay I need to change this stop
share and share screen again okay
here near to 70 70 Global SAR and I made the
same mistake with the sharing again and again
yes next Global SAR is the 70 wow yes it is number seven sure well and here you
can see now okay the the yes we can see it okay uh well we
had a very very great um meeting this is the the poster was the poster for for
the meeting the the S Miguel Municipal the
government the local government had the the he's the the single like an
angel and uh well here is starting with the you know the the identifications to
to to give to the people of the of the organization we started at very very
early in the morning to prepare everything here you can see the
cost the people starting to Camp from the from the 4 pm. to um we made um like
a tour uh uh by the the observat
story um here we have more pictures with a lot of people that is starting to come
we count around 500 people visiting in the entire ER evening and
night the people that was um was uh coming and made uh make file to watch
the by the telescope through the telescope when I I I have a lot of well
Mariano Mariano Pon it's you you know to Mariano talking about about
historical uh observation Sunspot
observations here the equip in the end of the night uh me
Mariano Mariano Pon Fernando ricardin atin
May um I I can see s Mar uh sanago
M um Andres that is andr is the Secretary of
culture of uh of the government of of San Miguel um we had the visit of of uh
the major in in in the evening um well the entire equipment of
the the entire team sorry of uh VAV Vista Al
Kosmos he here a a aial view of of the
in the end of the night with a drum when the people H
gone oron we we took a picture of oron uh Fernando ricardin took a picture of
oron by the 10 in telescope ala simut telescope only only to say okay we can
do it that nice with the one of of the
pictures with the uh of the Moon with the explor scientific uh 500 five sorry
inches maxoto telescope wow we use it a lot again yeah yeah we we are working a
lot with this telescope this telescope was for uh for the staff Sako telescopia
stuff and we using a lot to show to the people to make image have a very very
very nice resolution I have a very good pictures of hopit again uh but I don't
have in this group of in this gallery of pictures here we we had
um um stand with a a lot of things about
this guy okar feris is a is a great specialist in solar uh clocks um all
about uh santes or he study all about the the old
instruments as an in instrument of astronomy um is is a genius to to show
to the people very very interesting uh to to um to talk with the
people and show how the all the aient instrument in astronomy work uh we had a
DJ this time and he of course that the we we uh enjoy the music from Star Trek
Star Wars you know and something electronic uh from from the punk or you
know but all was about the space nothing the DJ is is a a amateur Storer and he
was very concerned to to only to to uh play music
about stars about astronomy you know space was very very very
nice and uh here while uh we used a lot of telescope to show to the
people we had a lot of people around 9 p.m. um the time where the the
connections work very bad well we have the most of the of of the people coming
around between the eight and and 10: p.m. in the
night here we we have a uh the the area to show with telescope learner surface
or observation light observation uh through the telescope too more
pictures of the day this ER this man have a real
meteorites these one are two meteoras the same the same exposion that
that we show the same show that we we um
uh show in in the last event and here but is very important that uh because um
Jorge ranki is a part of our our group
Osmos it's a is a very important piece because he worked in the observatory in
in the uh 25 years ago he was a important part of the observatory and
for us really it's uh um it's a great piece of um of uh helping for us because
he know everything about how the The Works how works the instruments and the
parts and this is very very important that Jor ransi is is is with us well
another picture of okar fer showing to the people about astrol
avus here was very interesting because he's a I don't know if how hesu is in
English I don't remember um he's a like a
monk and is his sweet among gwist I think it's called she swist shewi well
he he was a part of the of the observatory and have a lot of information is very old and for us
was was a pleasure that Santiago May and Jorge ranki talk with uh with h this man
and was amazing really uh we was uh
really amazed with the histories and the and no about the observatory that that
he have more people more people watching enjoying you
know and really was a a great a great um
evening and night we were we enjoyed a lot of um lunar observation and planets
observations here another AAL uh view with a drum of the observat
here is the leot for H Alpha telescope that we are working with that here uh
now actually this Dome is empty but we are working to fill with a telescope
that and this one is where we have the Gustav hien refractor one um it's
around uh it's a 500 uh yes five five Ines telescope from from the the end of
the 80s not the 80s from sorry is the end from the
88s it's it's around yes around we we
think that is 120 years old at least because gustan Heiden was bu it by size
telescope and if a telescope if you do you have a telescope that say gusta
gusta Heiden is is really um is older than 100 years
old because gust heed sold his company to
size you know and this is very interesting and work properly we made
the the old mechanism we we have completely completely you know this is
the obsidiana solar filter telescope SC uh Scott that I I tell you many times we
use the explor scientific uh IP for to show to the people and was amazing how
the new technology work properly like in the in the your
refractors that that the the biggest refractor of of the of the word use
explore scientific uh IP and I I say that with size telescope a very old
telescope work incredibly when when you mix the old and the new technology but
in Optics nothing is new technology you know that is for for many for years and years of
using it's incredible good Optics last for a very very very long time
absolutely yes it's something that you left to your grand grand grandchild's
grandkids yes absolutely um here the band of of the of the
government of the local uh um San Miguel vanand uh official vanand made a
beautiful beautiful they play a beautiful music for the for the sunset
was amazing really uh because this one is is in the middle of the Suburban
areas and it's great because when you go to to this uh
Observatory area you feel like a very like an very open area it's it's great
really well this one is the the the the the old one telescope uh um the the size
telescope it's not sarrao telescope sorry it's size telescope but somebody
put my my sticker of of our company no no
it's a size telescope was more of of the
band more of equipment and uh here well
another picture really really uh we enjoyed a lot we had um we
had a a great a great time uh with a lot of people and uh really we enjoy it uh a
lot and we are preparing uh and small s party with the with the amateur
astronomers with telescopes and our idea is um we invited invited amateur with
telescope and they was very happy to show to the people because we separate
the area you know because when you have curious people that come in that is perfect and we have we have telescope to
show to the people but the people start to walking to another area with the the
amateur Stromer that made that you know put their telescope and say no no this
is and this is for for only for amate astronomers you know that they have their own telescope come on to watch
your telescope and amateur sters say no no no problem come on with a great
really the people start to enjoy a lot of people when with the amateur St with
their own telescope and and I thought first that what that
say okay this will be a a nightmare because you know sometimes the people
that say okay I'm kind I made pictures or I have my telescope very but no was
amazing because the people the the the Amat drumers we we like to talk with the
people and say no this is you know this is my this and function with this better than
us maybe and of course there was friends that was very helping with the people um
really enjoyed to talk with the visitors uh without telescope showing
and talking about how is amateur astronomy to the people that and was
amazing and sometimes you scare more that than say no I'm scared I'm scared
about this I say no what amazing um many people told me wow these guys are
amazing and showed me a lot and about how they made astrophotography and well
it's amaz was amazing was an amazing night and it's very really something
that that uh be coming from uh time big
very long time without see people without
uh uh be in a real place was really
something that well we can repeat the next six uh six um 11 and of course that
we make smaller smaller s party maybe we
will be a uh no more than 50 people with telescopes and talking making pictures
of the sky the sky is of course a very polluted area is is worth maybe seven or
eight but uh we have a lot of planets and and
fun talking about uh you know and maybe Bolas Maxi and um
yeah I told something about barbecue and H um and well this is the the idea for
for our next party is it for enjoying you know you can have you can take your
uh planetarian camera put in their old telescope and you can use the your
camera reflex camera or or a planetary camera in in the old one telescope the
gusta Heiden uh we are inviting to the amateurs to use their telescope in this
historic area and um use using
to uh telescopes and the old telescope and talking about the history and
talking about how um make photography helping for the newest the newest
amateur astronomers too and of course that this this is the idea for for the
next St party yeah that sounds great yeah sounds great than thank you thank
you Scott thank you Cesar well excent I'm glad to you know what star
party that you did and all the people that come to together in this situation
that we passing by so I'm I'm glad to know that it's starting again H well our
next ER up next is our friend from Nepal dpy gam uh dpy are you you there yeah
I'm here wow D thank you for Eno joining us and see let's see what what you want
to share okay thank you Maxi Max Fellers and all all out here and I realized
today just uh just before uh just a year ago I have joined Global star party on
19th October that is 20 October n date and it's been a year now just today it's
been a year joining the glob yeah today oh wow
okay so it's the anniversary um and um today I'm connecting I'm showing some of
my photography uh which I've tried to capture through my 60mm telescope and um
all this uh Campaign which I've been running and uh sidewalk astronomy too
and I will connect um my presentations with kind of poem and relate with the
theme too so
[Music]
okay so ID like to start with connecting with the theme here's the boy uh this is
my telescope and this is the uh 8year boy uh he is pointing toward the moon he
was really curious uh to know and uh I'm connecting here like the boy uh see the
moon see the sky and pointed the moon and ask what's that I replied the moon he again
asks the star near to the Moon what's that the star near to the moon and I
said that's the Jupiter okay and he replied what are they and I said moon is
a natural satellite of Earth and Jupiter is the planet of our solar system Boy
again said but why they have much important on our life why they are
always there to see us are they observing us or are they expecting
something from us a number of question arise and why they are here what are
they doing why we are searching about it and he was really curious uh to see the
moon and Jupiter through my telescope uh I couldn't capture the picture of the Jupiter through my phone and Telescope
but I can see clearly I can see the Jupiter and it's Jupiter and it's three
moon with the my telescope here's the short video I have
captured uh through my uh mobile
phone
mhm yes and uh this is the photograph I've
taken the background I really love this background uh in the evening and I really love this scene which is created
in the evening the sunset and the Jupiter and the Moon Rises up and here
is the pictures of moon and Jupiter too and here's teliscope
and this is the uh campaign we have run in this another orphan home that is
disabled Home and these kid were really interested about we teach them about the
astronomy what is the space science and here is the students uh people are from uh age
of 9 to 14 age of 9 to 14 years old and
they were really new to about this and they were really curious about what's the Moon and
what the we uh introduce them over the creator of the Moon and um similarly all
the planet and all the phenomena of astronomy and space science and um
similarly uh I have captures the moon with my
telescope and uh this is uh which I have
captures um through my telescope is it clear yes I think yeah I have captures
uh recently uh just uh 3 days ago I have captured it but it seems uh now it
we have very cloudy weather now since uh two days the um because of the
rain and similarly and about this kid we were
teaching about them and they were listening very carefully about the space science and
the one boy after this event he said I want to be astronomer in the
future uh this month I have the campaign and in
the occasion of the old space week is I was I already mentioned in the last Global St party I was coordinating in my
local local governments uh over star over the old space week and conducting
various programs going to the school and uh others organizations and all kind of
and uh similarly I have tried uh the side of astronomy I set up my telescope and take out of out of my home and um I
just set up there and the people were curiously coming to see the moon and
similarly I use solar filter and observe um make people observe the sun too that
Sol observations in the day and uh just I was very happy to see this reaction of
the people uh while they see the moon the Sun and I really enjoyed it and
people out there also enjoyed looking up and know extra about it and one boy he
excited one boy come to me and he said uh dip can you set up the telescope I
want to look the Sun and uh I set up this uh telescope and I let it him to
observe this son are you can and he was just uh continuously looking like I want
to see it for a while just give me a time I want to see it and he was continuously looking
for uh he was not letting uh that he was looking continuously for 10 10 minutes
and like he was like oh what's that in a black dots and uh so that's a black do
what is the black dos in the Sun and he was asking of all lots of questions and
it was really great thank you this for today wow thank you very much thank you
thank you and well I think this concludes the the second
session that we we been expecting for
all the this week that passed by so Scott H thank you again for thank you
for the the the space to to show what we do here in the South ER with maybe a
single uh equipment or maybe a professional equipment and because you
know like like we always say that you can do astronomy with everything that
you have in your pocket ER with your eyes teaching everything and well this
is the spark that we want to spread H to all of the audience and H to everyone
who's interesting to starting to do ason and of course astrophotography so thank
you again for the space and well let's contining with the schedule thanks again
to all the audience you thank you Maxi thanks for co-hosting this event and for bringing on your team and uh you know
they are of course welcome to come back anytime and uh um uh you know and as
well you as you Maxi so thank you so much thanks for contributing so much to this uh this program again and again
it's been awesome um and DT congratulations to you for celebrating
uh one year with global star party so that that's really incredible as well happy birthday thank you thank you
that's right yeah I do have a question for DT deept how do you feel has the
global Star Party added anything to your um experience in
astronomy yes really uh the first time um I have got to I I want use the
telescope when I was using a year ago but um when I see this photography done
by the all out here and when I see the estra photography are done and showing
in This Global star party I really feel amazed and that was the first time I see
the um like live for live I can see this
I think I have seen Cesar BR
phra photography first time in this glob St party yes when I was attending that
and talking about the experience uh it really talking about
the I wouldn't really appreciate that the and um kind of um it is like after
joining the glob party uh it's like I'm getting getting The Inspirations and all
lots of connection with the peoples out the out out the World Around the
[Music] World in the Nepal and motivations and
kind of I'm the inspiration of many people my my friends and they are really happy to see me here and um I think U
it's the great opportunity I already I have always mentioned that it's a great opportunity for me to get in the when I
getting into the astronomy and I get I got this opportunity with you from you
just a year ago in I think we have talked about this glob party with you in
October 13 I don't I didn't forget that day that's October 13 when you come
message me about this glob party and um say me to join this uh glob party and
first I feel like uh um like what is This Global St party and all and um as
you have mentioned to join and I was really excited let's join and what happened and after joining like um I can
see the young youngest astronomer than me that is a leing the star and she's
really an inspiration for me too and what she's doing in her Ag and now I'm
17 years old and I have joined in when I was 16 year old in the school of St party and I like I feel like
uh living in this Livy has done a very good job now and like in her age uh we
just used to we just though we have interest in the astronomy we just used to search in Internet what is about it
but we didn't get the chance to involve in it uh completely though we have uh
lots of organizations around here Nepal but um um but uh we don't get most
exposes about all this astronom and space science so we now uh we get a kind
of confidence and like uh when we have to introduce ourself in the public and
uh people kind of if we said I can uh I am uh presenting my uh presentations in
the global star party and the people's uh you people want to listen us really
want tradition us when we go in the campaign and like introducing them I'm presenting in the global star party and
that's um which is organized by export scientific USA and uh they feel like
okay we we have to listen from you something and they listen very carefully and kind of um this U coming into
globalist party has given kind of wa to us a meaning meaning uh for our people
want to listen us very carefully because of one kind of uh it has a portfolio it
has made one kind of great portfolio to move on on the field of astronomy so um
I think for moving on the field of astronomy I really appreciate this uh
Global star party and the naso Neal as society which is uh completely supporting us and my own organizations
we are running our organizations and we are planning now to go to physically
conducting the programs physically around all Nepal because we are
distributed in all Nepal the team of the astronomy Enthusiast in Nepal so with we
have seven local Province in our in our country and we are we are separated in
all the seven Province so um we are deciding to conduct different programs
after because after uh after a month because we have uh festivals now
Festival is running in our country and there a great festivals of Nepal it is called doai and thar so it's kind of
vacation now in the here and so we are planning to conduct the program
physically around around all the Nepal after this uh Glo after this uh Festival
when the festival is ended and the school college and all this organization is open back then we will go to the
school college and conduct different programs and now uh this uh though the festival was running we consulted with
the school college uh do we want to we want to um share our knowledge and talk
about the space science and astronomy and share something with your students
and also the observations and some of the school and college invited us seeing
our profile page like why don't you come in our school to uh uh share with our
students they they will be it will be great if they got the knowledge in the time um like when I was uh before
joining this um Astron and science um and I think um when I was 16 I got to
join after completion of my grade 10th and there are a lot of peoples who are
joining from the S and I I was taken de in gim already in this glob party he was
he was continuously um following this uh astronomy and SP science uh it's been a
three years already and he continuously uh made the video on the different topic
and upload in his YouTube page and um similarly he laar and he
participated in different programs and he's near near my house and um uh
sometime I take him to the forther observation programs and he join with us
uh and uh he just he mentioned that I learn a lot of things um though I have I
have S A lot of things for posting the YouTube videos for making videos but um
while coming for the observation part uh while coming for in the topic of observation part this observation and
when I take him to for the observation and people uh to make the observation when the people see him uh they feel
really motivated the small kid is coming here to show us the Moon and Sun they feel like why can't we do like they like
him uh we can do like him and kind of we have created motivation and it was I
already said uh this for uh that uh the when we have gone to this uh disabled
home and the one boy at last one boy is smile say smile with his smiley face
that I want to be astronomers in the Futures and one boy was saying I want I
really want to go to the moon I want to be astronauts and like their person their passion was coming out and they
were sharing about what they really feel about the astronomy and science
um we feel like many of the peoples many of the students many of the peoples around here though they have this um
they do have the interest in this space science but they do not reflect because they they feel like we don't have any
scope in here so we don't want to make that humor like we don't have any scope
for the space science astronomy but uh we want to uh tell them we have we have
we can go far better than this and and um if we collectively uh make effort and
if we uh conduct different programs and if people come with the different interest to learn so we can teach them
together us and we have a kind of team collectively we are team around all
Nepal we are collected in in one uh already and um we can connect anyone's
around us and conduct the programs so um we have already build a community of um
all the around interested peoples around all this Nepal so as Nepal is a small
country so it's not difficult to collect all the peoples who are interested in this uh so we have already make it to
collect the all the peoples around here and we are searching for others and I'm
just preferring to collect some other young people who are just age of 9 10 11
12 so they can do better uh than us and just they can secure their life in this
field and they can do much better because if we can teach them in the
small age they will teach uh they will learn more vs and they will learn many more things yes that's right that's
right yeah because experience and all this will give a lots of knowledge not
only the book things and yeah that's great DT you're going to
go far and you're going to see these young people grow up and changed the world so that's wonderful and you're
doing it too so thank you thank you D okay um thank you so much uh we are
going to uh take a 10-minute break and then we're coming back uh we still have
more to go here we' got Jerry Hubble from the um uh Mark Slade remote
Observatory we've got liby and the stars who will be on uh Jenny Hines from the
Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Montreal Center will be on and then of
course uh everybody's uh uh favorite night sky photographer Adrien Bradley um
so stay tuned uh more to
come
hey Niko do you saw the moon right
now no let me let me see hey guys I'm
back it's amazing amazing the moon it's it's like when you are in the in the
coast Mar Plata mamar when you see the that that Moon that's shining and it's
no clouds there there's no stars it's it's I don't know how to describe
it yeah I just unpluged my my laptop to go and
check I took my telescope out oh man it's beautiful yeah I have my do outside
so for the after party maybe I connect the camera excellent
yeah no tonight I will not will not go into be outside I
think but well well thank you guys for H be part of the H GSP and and and share
what you doing oh thank you Max amazing
HK oh I'm going to yeah great host and thanks
thanks a lot for the invitation I really appreciate it you know I've been looking forward to participate for some
time you're you're welcome you're welcome
uh now I think I'm going to to cook some
Panchos to be quickly I'm waiting for Cesar Bolas oh
Cesar is going to be the six of November is that will be the date yeah okay so
yes I put in the chat
yeah yeah I will
bring from here okay okay ni
have tasted Alan too I didn't no I didn't no no that's
right I I didn't Er When when we met I didn't put
I tasted
yeah it's a really weird
conver H that's why
I did wasn't what what he couldn't be here so we can say
this well whatever we [Laughter]
want well I I will move in to my patio
excellent it's okay I'm moving to my patio
great I think in in North America they they say to patio like
backyard backyard maybe because when I see when I when I said the the astop
patio observ patio and Scot really love he understand
yes the observ Pao that's that's the name of of an
observatory made in your backyard so it's they obser
Pao
Gra
at John's Hopkins University astrophysicists are studying the distribution of matter in the
[Music] cosmos Mark nink believes an origami
model can help represent that
distribution we can only observe visible matter shown here the material that
forms stars planets and entire galaxies but this is only part of our
universe there is also a mysterious substance called Dark Matter that's
invisible astrophysicists have detected it only indirectly but many believe that it
forms the hidden skeleton of our universe the Dark Matter started to
accumulate into clumps almost immediately after the big bang and we wouldn't have as much structures we see
in the universe today if there hadn't been this dark matter the normal matter started to form structures based on the
groundwork the the skeleton that the Dark Matter laid down right away so the dark matter is really the the basis of
understanding the structures that we see today according to nink the Unseen Dark
Matter folds like origami gravity gathers and crumbles
together the Dark Matter sheet in places where ordinary matter is drawn to form
galaxies and stars pleates in the sheet called
filaments poke out from each Galaxy aligning its rotation with neighboring
galaxies in a pattern similar to an origami twist
fold in a Twist fold you have a small polygon so let's say a a a
triangle so here we have a triangle and going from the unfolded to the folded
State entails twisting that triangle even though this is a dark matter structure it it creates uh regular
matter toward that so the Galaxy here would form here it's a strong approximation that
the Universe forms like an origami model in particular the way that the
various elements of the cosmic web are spinning are very explicit in this model
we see in the universe that neighboring galaxies tend to be rotating in the same
direction and that actually relates to this origami
model nink is now working with students to create a more complex model that
captures how dark matter folds intersect to build the cosmic
[Music] web the dots on the paper represent the
galaxies as observed by telescopes whenever the paper is
overlapping there is an accumulation of Dark Matter therefore greater number of
galaxies astrophysics is now being enriched with
a new vision of a folded Universe inspired by the ancient art of
[Music]
origami Scott chooses the coolest videos doesn't
he
you're muted Scott we can't hear you that's right you can't well now we can there are so many
cool videos out there you know the visualizations that are done by NASA and the European Space Agency are incredible
um some of these programs are also put together by public broadcasting uh television stations and uh you know
often interviewing really kind of Cutting Edge scientists and and uh these people so uh when I when I often when I
see visualizations of the you know the greater part of the you know the universe the the really large scale
stuff it reminds me of kind of the neuron uh connections that are inside
the human brains you know and uh or maybe all brains for that matter uh um
but uh it never occurred to me to think of uh you know an origami uh structured
universe so very very cool stuff you know um so welcome back everybody uh we
are uh we're back uh for the third and final session uh before we go to
Afterparty of the global star party and uh up next uh waiting patiently has been
Jerry Hubble from the marks Slade remote Observatory uh Jerry it's it's all yours I I do want
to say that Jerry has been very inspirational and getting a lot of people started in science um he when I
first met Jerry uh he was uh you know very interested uh and serious amateur
astronomer uh that eventually came to work here at explore scientific he is
today vice president of engineering for our company um he uh has been overseeing
very complex projects for our go-to telescope systems uh he's been involved
in training our staff um and uh you know really as an integral part of the DNA of
explore scientific I I think and um you know he has since gone on to write books
and um uh is the um one of the directors of uh the mark Slater remote Observatory
which is uh showing people around the world how to do science so Jerry I'm going to turn it over to you thanks
Scott I appreciate it um yeah I've been lucky in my career I've had two careers
now in my life one was nuclear power and one is astronomy so I found that the interesting thing about that both both
do work in domed buildings so the containment structure of a
nuclear PL is a d building it's very similar yeah it looks pretty much the same but just different one of them you
can fly a 747 into and and not D the other one well you know you
can't right well you can but the results might not be as uh that's right one gets
one the other damage than the other so yeah but uh so thanks Scott I appreciate
being able to come on and show everyone the mark Slade remote
Observatory uh we started the mark Slade remote Observatory about it's been almost six years ago now and uh what I'm
going to show you is station one where we have uh actually have our Technical
Innovations six foot Dome and I'll show you a picture of that I'm G to go ahead and share
my desktop here I'm going to
share the observatory
desktop uh you see that not yet but it's coming here we
go so not sure what's going on with my
webcam so let me bring up the msro science web page just to
give you an idea of uh what we do we're we're into three different things re
Outreach uh training and research opportunities for amateurs and professionals alike over the last uh
three years we've been able to have several people come through our training program students in high school and also
people all over the world um have remotely accessed the March Lade remote
Observatory to do science which is kind of exciting um uh so if you go to Ms Ros science.org
that's where you'll find us and I want to just uh show you what station one
looks like so this is our first station that we're I'm going to show you the desk that we're on the desktop of the
computer inside this building right now and uh and people always wonder why
did you put the observatory up against a Grove of trees yeah you know because we only want
to see half the sky that's that's why I I was answer no that's not why that's
because it's like it's like when you which telescope is easiest to use it's the one it's the one you'll take out all
the time because it's lightweight you right it's not hard to set up so that's the one you'll use the most so that that
happened to be the same reason we built the uh building there is because there was uh a deck there already there was
power running to that location and it was just the easiest thing to set up quickly so we do have plans we do have
other stations that are out in the middle of the backyard this is Dr Mar muda's backyard but we have we actually
have three stations here this is station station one station two and three are out in the middle of the yard where you
can see a lot more of the sky and uh and but this is a good training
facility we we're training uh we have a good training program a Hands-On training program we don't do full
automation on our telescope systems they're Hands-On type of systems uh and I i' I'd really prefer
that type of process I like I like sitting in a comfortable environment like I am here in my control center you
can see behind me but uh but also I like to operate the telescope uh by hand so
that's what I'm going to demonstrate here and and right now I've slewed to earlier to M27 Messi a27 which is the
dumbbell nebula it's in it's in u the constellation
uh uh vula and
I'm going to start this camera up again because it's got a weird I don't know why it's not doing a
correct actually I'm going to just disconnect the camera and reconnect it right now so
you can see right now I've got a picture of the dumbbell nebula here that I took a few minutes ago this is a 90c
exposure uh the instrument we're using has a 6 and 1 12 inch refractor uh with
a qhy 163 camera on it color camera it can do uh we bent it by two to do
science Imaging to do photometry and astrometry which is a measure of the
star position and the brightness of the stars and you can see how nice uh our tracking system works we have a high
resolution encoder tracking system uh on the mount that keeps the
Stars nice and round nice and round over a long periods of time and we don't have
to think about it there's no autog guiding it's it's just turn it on and it
works and it gives us uh a tracking down to3 Arc seconds or
so which is good enough okay it's always you know don't let perfect ruin good
enough for your overall system that's one of the tips I would give everybody don't don't chase that little unicorn
that that's in the corner there that you think needs to be perfect uh to get the rest of your
Imaging if the rest of your equipment doesn't meet that requirement or doesn't match that so and a big and this is one
thing that's I'm maybe controversial I don't know I have to see what Adrien thinks about this but you don't need a
perfect polar alignment to do astrophotography in fact you don't want a perfect polar alignment to do
astrophotography you want to compensate for some imperfections that are in your mouth and Adrian knows about that I'm
sure that I know for a fact that uh everybody else knows about that that are
experienced as some photographers I've run around with my tracking Mount aimed it toward the Northstar and said good
enough let's see what I can get sometimes sometimes it works out well
right so um so that's just a little tip I'm going to um me go back to here and
increase this you can see the telescope in the building in that little Hut it's a 7 by7
foot uh Cube basically and it's got the six foot Dome on top of it and the
bright the lights look a lot brighter but this is a 4-second exposure they're not near as bright as that um if you
were inside there it'd be practically pitch black uh but the camera is very
sensitive it's a zwo camera and uh of course right on
time Jerry and his dog dog wants to your dog wants to help you with your presentation
my wife coming in the door probably is what what happen all the time my dog up
his ears what's going on right right you know uh we didn't
explain why you don't want to do perfect polar alignment and one of the reasons why is that uh you would like to have
your gears preloaded always pushing in the same direction okay instead of jumping back back and forth um
especially in declination you know so this is usually where you start to see drift uh because uh you know you can you
can correct for a lot in uh ra um uh but
uh you know the the residual drift is something you want to kind of keep
pushing that gear a little tiny bit in the same direction all the time whether it's going to be North or South you know
so that's right yep so this is a color version of that image
this is a Ben one image uh that it's maximdl doesn't have the best
processing for color and I'm not I'm not a color astrophotographer so it suits me
okay you know if I want to and this is a single image it's not a stacked image or anything but you can see you can see
still see quite a bit of detail now if you notice the difference between this
image and this image is that this image has been too but it's got blown out
features okay you can see it's basically saturated in this area but it's the same
90 second exposure so when you when you combine the light from basically four pixels when you bend two you're going to
each pixel is going to be Overexposed where on a color image uh like this one it may not be you
can see more detail in here and you got the color differences too so but again you you can see how
nice and round the stars are um it's a very precise uh system
that that the 165 is an excellent telescope it's awesome uh to be able to
have access to it and use it in the sky and this is of course the the dumbbell is located in the Milky Way so that's
why you got all these stars out here but even with the 9C exposure you can see I
imagine I'd have to go measure it but I think you can see stars down to like 16th and 17th magnitude especially on
the black and white on the bend image you can see these really dim Stars here
like right here right you know they're they're their 17th and 18th
magnitude which is pretty amazing with the camera systems we have today and Gary can talk about the camera
systems he's an expert on those um so I just wanted to give you an
overview and give you just talk a little bit about what we do um we I use cart to seal as my
planetarium program and uh one of the things that I like to show here you see all this brown
stuff around here that's the trees that you saw in that
photograph so this is the part of the sky that we can see right now uh that's lit up with the star chart
um so very handy yep so you can draw the horizon
that's a tip if you use cart to seal you can actually do measurements across your Horizon and enter them into a
file uh it's a simple two two entry file it's like it's got the uh the first line
yeah each line is a is a point on this Horizon and the first number is the azth
in degrees and then the second number is the altitude of the Horizon of your tree
line or whatever it is that's blocking your house or whatever so so you just create a file that's a sequence of these
two numbers the asmith and the altitude and you can make them any value you want between zero and of course
asmith is 0 to 360 altitude is 0 to 90 and then you can just uh go to your
setup uh go to the um
Observatory and there's a horizon Tab and then that's where you select the uh file and then it'll draw that Horizon
when you're in azimeth mode on the chart that's a little tip for using cart
to seal with your horizon uh anybody have any questions
about it about the uh operation we use Maxum DL like I said and uh I didn't know that in card
you can do that I think yeah yeah so try it out and also I have to to learn how
to put uh with the with the mount H and
do the the Meridian flip I think it goes right when I'm poting pointing to the
south east or Northeast then goes to the Senate and change the Meridian they have
to flip but I didn't configure it for
now excellent great so uh I have a question
Jerry what what is uh what's happening right now as far as research at
msro so minin is in a a couple of campaigns one is uh with the supern
noi uh he's been Imaging different super noi as I came come along and and and
track you know try to do it as much he's working with a another um I think he's a
college student student that's in I'm trying to remember where he's at he's somewhere else in the world he's working
with him to uh gather data on supernova curve when they you know so when they
like curves over time uh so that's one program that's going on I'm I'm working with couple of
our members or uh uh users of the observatory to do
exoplanet training we're getting uh our training program revamped and getting
our documentation working on that so that's a long-term project uh that uh we
do have U information developed already documents and all to do training but
we're just working on that we're continually working on that stuff to make it better that's basically I don't I don't
have a lot of time to work on the observatory not as much as I'd like but uh I do spend several hours a week on it
and then I do the I'm the maintenance guy for the observatory systems of course you know um and and we I manage
work with myin on the other stations we have we've networked all of our stations together we've got some uh good uh data
storage capacity we've got 12 terabytes of data storage we're using about four
terabytes of data right now over the last five years that's about how much we have uh I tell you what just one night
of lunar Imaging for me uh you can gather 30 gigabytes of
Imaging data pretty easily and within an hour it doesn't take long to uh to fill
up a hard drive if you're doing high resolution lunar Imaging you know deep
Sky Imaging is not quite as bad in terms of capacity requirements but again like
I said we've got almost four terabytes of data we've got tens of thousands of images we've taken they're ripe for for
inspection to do double you know toh do U variable star measurements all kinds
of stuff that's something I'd like to think about automating some of this analysis of this data I know we we've
worked on a uh program for catalog all of our data into a database where we go out and open each file and read the Fitz
header and then store that information in a database automatically and then we can search for
locations what images do we have at this location what you know uh so we can
do perhaps do a Time series on that on certain stars in that area of the sky or something like that you know this it's
the the benefits are huge if we can catalog all this all these images we've taken so that's another long-term
project at the observatory very cool very cool you know
there this is a i the way that I look at Mark Slade room mode Observatory is it's a excellent
uh training ground to to get involved in uh professional amateur collaborations
um the uh International astronomical Union and the American Astronomical
Society are both very involved in connecting amateur astronomers uh with
professionals there's also the dou Avo uh Alpo a couple other programs that
you can find one of the areas that you can go and uh check uh for proam
projects that you could get involved with I'm talking about projects that where you you might make a discovery or
you might you very well uh would land up on a scientific paper uh is through uh a
program uh website called Z Universe um which uh is a great uh launching uh pad
right there but you do have to develop some skills and uh MS SRO can help you
develop those skills uh so that you will be making observations like a professional astronomer would okay uh
you know you'll be working with a 6 and a half inch telescope but as you already see uh uh that 6 and a half inch
telescope can be quite powerful going you know down to 17th 18th magnitude Stars uh that would include ton of
asteroids um kind of thing um and uh you know Jerry and his team also uh uh like
to work on exoplanets they're they're part of uh they're one of the uh uh
teams that's involved with the test program uh so um but the IU and theas
are very very interested in enlisting as many amateur astronomers as they can uh
to be involved in pram collaborations because they need the they need the um
uh the additional Manpower and woman power good do this you know there's tons
of Discovery going on there's there's discovering all these objects and they can't do effective follow-up work unless
they you know that they want amateurs to help doing follow-up work it's it's an excellent
opportunity and we we train the the equipment and the um and the software
and all the techniques we teach are basically what you learn in college to
do to be an astronomer for hands on the Hands-On part of an observatory it's
using modern equipment modern software state-of-the-art software basically um and um we're a nonprofit
and we do it on a on a small budget right we accept we we we donations yeah
we want donations as much as we can but we get by I mean we we we you know
people that are directly involved fund it basically for the most part we do get donations from we've gotten quite a few
donations over the last five years which we're very wome and then explore scientific of course helps us with the
equipment quite a bit and without explore scientific station one wouldn't exist
basically in terms of the opportunity trying to do our best uh one
of the people that's involved in proam is really inspiring and she will be on
one of our future programs we're actually setting up the uh the schedule right now for her to be interviewed um
by uh Dr Rosalie Lopez from the jet propulsion laboratory but uh uh nicolina
is her name and she's eight years old and uh she has uh she has got 18
asteroid candidates right now um that are being verified so uh you know and
she was involved in a program very much like what I was describing and um so uh
you too can be part of it you know you just have to uh you develop the skills to uh to find
things you know and you can make discoveries all of your own well Jerry thank you so much man
thank you for thank you tonight and um uh you know this is kind of the uh
Northern uh North American part of the show but U uh you know again it's an
international effort um you know that makes up the global star party uh next n next one up is uh of
Libby and the stars and so Libby uh you've uh you've been traveling I know
and um so it's good to have you back and uh you know thanks for coming on to the
69th Global Star Party yep we are I'm back so um last
night I got back really late and then this night I'm staying up for a star party so been the really fun mornings so I'm
just waking up and I'm like oh fun um I did want to add um I did a
poem today and I have some stuff I'd like to share and um I know I said I'd
be doing the club that week then I was traveling and um it just ended up to
where I was going to do it so I'm now working in the poster and I plan to do it this week since I'm am now going to
be able to do that and I think I'm going to do it once a
month um since it is close to Halloween I didn't want to share I got my cat a Halloween costume you probably can't see
it oh there you go I got her a rocket that's adorable put your cat
inside of it I've I've done it before I've taken pictures when she was first
like really like tolerant with the costume and then now that it's kind of
she kind of figured out what I'm doing and she doesn't allow me to so my plan was I was going to get her into this for
the star party her like head goes right here and
she was she was she just figured out my trick so she she said
no but um here's the costume
anyway I put her in it for like um when I used to do virtual school I used to put her in it and my classmates would be
like oh my gosh she's so cute she's learned the tricks now she's
she's she's learned my tricks that's smart yep that's right great so I did a poem and um I
kind of like to share this one story which is kind of funny because I know last year my science teacher she watched
the first Global star party I did and that wasn't really the first Global star party I did remember I was the first one
where I was kind of interviewed and about you know what I like to do and stuff like that that went amazing and
then the second one which was the one that she watched was kind of embarrassing because I had a lot of
stage fright but now I've gotten pretty good at it so um it was really funny my teacher last year she loved like all the
space stuff and that's when I was first getting started and now it's kind of turned into like a bigger thing to where
I'm doing like review videos and stuff like that um I started back this year doing physical School in person as I
should say and so um I going to science
class and I didn't tell the teacher till like two weeks in because she was kind of just zipping us through everything
but I didn't I told the science teacher I said you know I do review telescope videos and stuff and she was like oh wow
she was like she was expecting me to get like two views and so um I told her I
said you know I actually like go and talk to like astronomers and stuff she's like oh my gosh and I was like yep I was
like I'd love to present to the class anytime she's like sadly we're not learning anything about space this year
that was we learned art the Mars rover last year and that was just you know like one day thing where she sent us
like a Google form it was like answer three questions name all the
planets name the sun I'm like really name the sun yeah
what is the sun a star oh okay it was like that a lot of kids don't know that
you know a lot of adults don't know that right they just think it's a light up there or something you know so yeah
but um I remember last year I used to do art and I never really found found this
till now I was trying to find something else for the star party but um the virtual background doesn't really help
but I drew a rocket oh this thing is like huge I'm not even
kidding and um I drew it and I I came across it and I was like oh my gosh how
better how much would like cool would this be if I just shared this because this is when I was first starting out to
Shan and me and I wasn't even Pro I bet this was before I started the star party
so it was kind of like it was kind of like oh my gosh this is before I started the star party I've
been doing this for over a year now and so um it's been really fun so I I was
like oh my gosh this is so nostalgic because I only did a poem today so I
decided that I would kind of share some more stuff with you guys since I haven't
been on in a while and then I know I'm doing it once a month but I did want everybody to know um that now the kids
the kids uh meeting will be this Friday last Friday it completely slipped
my mind and I was like oh my gosh and then by the next Friday I had to pack
and then I was just gone for a while and then now I'm back and I've been working on the poster and I plan to do it for an
hour to two hours if you want to stay the second hour you can um I've been
downloading NASA videos to show and I know when I first started astronomy every day of the summer I
would download the little NASA Crafts online and I print it out and I do it
and you know it wasn't anything you know so I would be doing the high school crafts which were still really easy for
me it was like make a origami star shade but I thought um that it would be
amazing thing to do for the kids and I was thinking you know literacy is an
amazing thing to share throughout astronomy and there's many different topic topics um one of my friends he was
talking to me about this and we were talking about you know math and literally every subject of like ever relates to
astronomy in one way computer skills literacy math
um everything literally can relate to astronomy and so
um I personally am a person who loves going to literacy class and stuff like
that and I remember last time I did a poem I always talked about how in second
grade whenever we were learning narratives I would just make multiple like I had a so-called library
and I would just take pieces of paper and I make little books and I give it to my friends and because it was something
that I could write about topics that I liked and so when I really came around
to the space idea I made like millions and so that was about the time that I
started learning poetry and David ly has really inspired me um he gave me both of
his books um and emailed it to me and since then every single time that a
friend comes over I'm like look David leie gave this to me you're like who's
David Levy I'm like you don't know who David Levy is right and so um I know I'm
on the star party a lot later now because um I only this once a month now
but um I I remember um he signed the
book too and every sing SLE time I'm like I always look at that book and he
even gave me a book on how to um teach to like friends and family well the
book's to teaching kids but I'm a kid so it doesn't really make that much you
know sense it's like teaching another kid so um I've been reading that book a
lot too and I've been um thinking about how different subjects can relate to
astronomy but my favorite subject other than as charmony would be literacy and I
like to mix that in because David Levy his books are truly amazing just talking
about the stars and different stuff like that because honestly every time I go to the
class the teachers are like you need to pay attention to other subjects too
because if you don't pay attention to that then you won't get this in a shy I'm like I see your tricks so um I'm
going to go ahead and read my poem um I did a little bit of Halloween theme because it's Halloween time it's not
Halloween themed really but um I was just talking about the Halloween Moon
even though we only have a full moon in Halloween every 19 years I did want to
kind of set you know the kind of like kind of aesthetic of being in Halloween
and stuff like that um the moon shines bright on the Halloween night there is
not a cloud inight all the dots of stars in the night has always been a sing
sight in front of my eyes is my universe and again night arises for I am shined
on Earth the universe expands beyond the world the galaxies twirled and the stars
dance for I just took a glance wow wonderful that's
beautiful Libby thank you so much thank you liby you need to send that to David
ly send it to David David yeah definitely
um I I take a lot of inspiration from his books and I know a lot of people who come on the star party and um I know
deep D too she's she's really good um with writing poems I know she did a couple times before and all just coming
here once a month and even I come here sometimes even more on the anniversaries
that we celebrate like every 10 star parties or so it's just like so much
inspiration because over here somebody's like oh my gosh I'm on another side of
the world and it's cloudy and on another side of the world it's beautiful and you can see the nebula CU sometimes at my
house and it gets cloudy I'm like well dang it I'm like at least I get to go to the star party tonight and I can just
see from somebody's else's telescope so I'm like this is amazing because another
thing too is I hope to my kids club um when I start doing this the show that
soon I'm going to be opening it all over the world um I'm not quite the tech
genius I mean I know how to like get on the star parties do stuff like that but
my brother is so he's going to help me with that and I know um my family helped
me with that and I'll be able to get that set up because deep te has inspired me too cuz she her stuff is um in her
high school and I'm like I love to connect to high schools all over the world like that or even all different
elementary schools even you know that's the thing that I liked about researching
when I was like in fourth grade that's when I was really reading all the books in class they're like they teach you one
thing and in your mind and then they're like okay forget that two years later
now look at this and so with researching by myself I kind of get to look into
what I want to look into and so um what I was really interested with in is uh
supernovas and black holes what is dark matter like we don't know that's the
thing that interests me it's kind of like well what is dark matter I don't know there is dark matter
is just space there's just nothing space what is it's
gravity and so um a lot of stuff like that interests me and I hope to share
that with the club now that I'm back and I get to actually start doing this since
this last month has been like a rush and so um especially now that school has
started too I was going to do it for the schools but that put a lot of red tape through you know trying to travel it's
like you don't want to have a teacher like every single
month like with a Shan mean I couldn't really find a teacher to do this um my
teacher from last here um I know I just started uh doing mountain biking and stuff like that I was like hey join the
team and if we can even do a shy too after like practice and she was like
uh and I was like you don't what to but
um I hope this week 7 pm. um the first
hour if you want to come for the first hour um second hour is optional the
second hour I'll just be kind of hanging out and you know doing crafts and
activities um I really wanted to do this because
again I said I wanted to open this to kids all over the world not just in my little Hometown because you know I'll
probably have like kids showing up with um being like okay so what are all the
planets again and then I'll have kids like into black holes and supernovas and
so I did want to open this to like all different ages all different skill levels and you know really the kids to
help each other out into different things CU um I know I never really had
an astronomy club and doing sidewalk astronomy is something I really like to do too and deepy was just talking about
how she completely just changed somebody's life cuz I remember when I
first saw sidewalk astronomy I did it it was Scott and I um he told me to go make
a birthday card for um the Apollo astronaut I forgot um Buzz Aldren yeah
Buzz Aldren and so I went home and I was so stressed out because I couldn't draw
an astronaut and so I was like how do you make an astronaut I'm a birthday card
and I drew it and I got and I just got so sidetracked I forgot to get it and now that's one of my biggest regrets in
life I'm like no only if I could give him give him Bez
Aldren the birthday card that would have been still can you still can
liby I'm gonna figure out how to draw an astronaut that changed my life forever
and now I'm doing astronomy I've got like part of my garage the sidecar
garage um is just all dedicated to my astronomy stuff
and um my parents are like hey like we need to put this in the sidecar
garage if there's enough room and I told my mom I said I definitely like to take donations too
and maybe even work on making the side car garage into Observatory even an outside Observatory
even just getting a concrete block in the backyard and just making it that with my tent
Observatory but um when you're ready Libby um uh you know you can come here
to our studio we can shoot a little video that you can promote your um your
program and uh and then uh I would be more than happy to spread that around
I'll put it in uh at the end of our uh live programs and stuff to remind people
to come to your events so I think that's very cool yeah and I'm sure your brother can figure out how to do broadcasting
but uh if there's any questions he has he can get in touch with me too so I'm happy he is he runs all my social media
accounts like I make the post on like my Facebook pages and stuff but he runs it
like I am not kidding thank you to him though that's awesome that's awesome
yeah thank you very much Libby thank you thank you for having me on um I know my
mom will probably get in touch with you or something if we need anything for the thing
sure I just want to see where I'm at when everybody comes together because
I'm like I am that person that likes to be the leader I'm like if somebody I
don't want everybody to come in and then like I don't want it to be
like a million people and then I know at the same time too that it'll be like
maybe two to five kids at the first meeting and then like over time we'll have more kids that's how it goes so I
want to see where the first meeting takes me and then I'll see if I want to
uh go out nature one day or um I definitely think that
um I think that I've never been camping before but I do think that it'd be fun
one time to go camping or once a month not like once a year maybe once a month
will be a lot um of camping but once a year out of the
um out of all the meetings to do camping and stuff like that because personally
I've never been um it's really sad it's kind of funny to think I just sit out
into my driveway and some I have a little area out in the rural country that's just a
gravel little dirt road and I picked it because nobody ever goes on it and
that's where I usually start excellent so excellent see how the first
meeting goes and then I hope to open it to more oh snap my video just randomly turned off um gota love
technology uh I'm GNA see where I'm at and then I definitely want to open it up
to more kids around the world and just kids everywhere and the vide turning off
again well I gotta get checked out liby thank you so much thanks for
coming on to the program the next meeting I will get that cat in the rocket costume good okay well don't try
too hard if the cat doesn't want to go in you you don't want to force these
things cats have ways of letting you know uh progressively worse and worse
now I don't know if your cat still has claws but if they do then you'll
you'll love how they feel when they're five inches deep inside your arm I think
if your brother is I think if your brother's this dedicated to helping you you should just make a larger version and put your brother in
it there you go at one time I got him um to dress up
um I got him to dress up in a Halloween costume once that we were both matching
in he kept it on for like five minutes and then took it off so um there's that
but um my cat she has her ways of letting me know yeah nice dry I know
your antics yeah very much I could take photo
of her and Photoshop it yeah it's not the same as when you really do get it working though yeah
there's a SL it'll be it'll be still a cute picture so if you can get that
working she'll be the m the club right that works she says she doesn't want to
say hi a well anyway thank you guys for having
me on um the next meeting uh I may even try to get on another night um or at the
4:00 party um sometime soon with the whole club once I kind of get things
organized because I know by experience the first time you do something it's a
hot mess you know I'm like wait what's your name
again and then K just running around everywhere but um the first meeting I
kind of want to see where I'm at and then I definitely want to progress from that and do more stuff since I've been
holding it off for a while now that this month was just flying by
y well you're a busy girl so and uh but you got lots of passion lots of
inspiration and lots of ability so I know you'll go far liy thanks very much thank you thank
you thank you all right I'm going to uh I want to um bring this back over to
Kareem uh uh jeffar uh he is um with the
Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Montreal Center uh and uh uh you're
going to uh give a nice introduction to janahan so well if it has to be a nice
introduction I'll do it but it's a treat for you guys tonight
instead of hearing from me you get to hear from one of the people I look up to in our Center well in our in our society
so uh as I've mentioned in the past and we've talked about some of the programming that we do I've talked to
you a little bit about the Insiders Guide to the Galaxy and the remote telescope that we have access to all of
that is made possible by the work of Jenna hin she's our Outreach coordinator for the national office and one of the
things things that I've been trying to kind of bring across over the last few months when I've come to the global star
parties is that the RC really has a place for everyone no matter your background no matter how aware you are
of the science behind astronomy and astrophysics how Adept you are at using different types of equipment when you
enter into the RC you enter in and you find your passion you find your Niche and you can move from there and it's
kind of neat that in our head office we have our Outreach coordinator who started in underwater Sciences in Marine
Biology and she started out with her studies looking down into the water and then at some point I guess she looked up
and realized that hey that's more fun so I don't know if that's true and she
could tell us later if that's still how she feels but she joined the RC and she has been a ball of energy and fire and
it's just incredible so for example she has been working all day she did her own
stuff now she's been with us for the last few hours and if the weather's good tomorrow night at 10:00 she'll be back online with zoom
with my students to run the remote telescope to try to look at ex an exoplanet Transit and this is kind of
what she does and she's you know she's been active in bringing real Outreach
and making it available to students across Canada so I'm very happy to introduce you to Jenna Hines and Jenna's
going to talk to you a little bit about some of the stuff that she's been doing but specifically this awesome project that my students have been in on from
the ground floor Jenna thank you for setting the bar as high as
possible um thanks so much for having me Scott I really appreciate the uh Scott and K and everybody else I really
appreciate the invite uh well some of our audience may remember you from last December from the great conjunction
that's true that was the last time that I was on I had a great time um I have somehow managed to pack my entire life
uh full of things not just astronomy I don't know how you all do all over what you do it's not it's 10 o'clock and I'm
ready to go to bed I'm the world's worst astronomer but here we are anyway so uh
I do yeah I'm I'm running the the robotic telescope project at at the RC right now and for the past couple years
or so we've been um trying to get high school students engaged in astronomy in a meaningful way um speaking as someone
who at one point was in high school um and learned zero astronomy um and in
fact actually didn't really understand the scientific process at all um I feel like reaching high school students is
really really really important um for me I don't know about I don't know about those of you who were who experienced
this in high school but the scientific process while it is taught isn't really well communicated it's sort of like I
mean you learn through a textbook and you're looking at um at experiments where you know exactly what's going to
happen um and if if you don't get the answer it's your fault usually it's usually something that you've done in
the process that doesn't doesn't line up with what everyone else before you has done so when I first came on board in in
at rest my goal was to just kind of break that cycle and really introduce high school students into how science
actually works before they get to University um and Kareem who says he looks up to me was the person the first
person to test run this course so I look up to Kareem a heck of a lot
so uh Kareem students were the first ones yeah um to run through this program that was fall of 2019 I think right it
was yeah and then and then and then 2020 yeah we've kept going it's been
fantastic yeah yeah we did it actually ended up working out extremely well because the entire program was uh is run
virtually um and so we adapted well to the pandemic so the first goal in the program was to get students
understanding how exoplanet transits work um and get them Imaging exoplanet
transits and so that kind of required some really uh supportive staff in each
school um which is why creem led the charge um because obviously Kem is this champion of astronomy and and really
inspires his students and can dive into big topics like this um the and that went well still is
going well it's been fantastic uh we had our first we had a club run the program
last year uh and it was all girls and non-binary students and it made me so so so happy I never thought I would see a
race a gender ratio like that um in this program and so I was just thrilled um
and so excited to see it but we've expanded the program so that even
teachers who are not familiar um with astronomy at all can now run a slightly
more SLE version of the program um and so we're we're reserving this like really intense exoplanet program where
they choose the exop planet that they want to image we image it all together they join in with us and see how that
all works um and then we send them the raw data and the calibration frames and they do take every step themselves after
that um which is obviously a little a little intense um I was only learning
how to do it two weeks before the students so and it went well for those older students who've
seen a little bit of math and a little bit of astronomy and a little bit of digital competency it really is great
for them to work through those steps themselves and see the import import of taking out noise and understanding
exactly how astrophotography is actually done and how photometry is actually done and it takes like it takes a fair
bit of experience in in life and and diving into academics to understand like turning a picture into scientific data
um and so that kind of breach it we we kind of jump that hurdle in the
program um so what we've done now is we've collapsed the program down so that
teachers are given if they wish they're given all the PowerPoint presentations they need scripts to go through them
because we're Canadian all of the Canadian content that comes with it um and all the different things that
Canadian researchers have contributed to the field um and and sets of data from our
scope that have already been calibrated all they have to do is just like measure the brightness of the pixels and look at
the transit so um with that we've seen a huge increase in the number of students
um participating and it's been awesome um the program is free and the
next steps are things like developing a math specific side um and developing we
are actually working on how to get the advanced program um following up on the
the tests uh follow-up program a followup observing program as well so that's Kareem students are going to do
that this year we're g to see how that goes fingers crossed if we actually get some clear nights in
California so far it's not been great we had smoke for two months and
then now it's raining so um yeah so I'm I'm really looking forward to that we
have a couple other students that are are really excited about it and my favorite part about all of this is that we have finally um set up an another
separate team um which is our science team and is going to be running long-term projects and we finally have a
place to send students who've gone through this program and loved it um because the students that come out the other side go this is great what do I do
next and we have to kind of sit there and go like uh University um and so now we we can
direct them into our Science Program uh where they can have some more say over the projects the long-term projects that
we're running and can work with the data themselves um and sort of get more
involved in that process at whichever point in their lives they wish to um and
I hope that that inspires people and young people the way that Libby and uh
and have have been inspired because it's just unbelievable listening to them talk like I'm sitting here just going like I
geez I hope the stuff I'm doing inspires kids the way these kids are inspired because they're just they're
unbelievable well this is exactly it when you developed the advanced program
one of the first things Jenna did is she put together a series of YouTube tutorials on how to walk through all the
steps of searching for an exoplanet trans it knowing that it will be observable and then how to actually
process the data and my students still go back to those tutorials constantly to try to understand the steps that they're
doing because these are not steps that come naturally to most but Jenna was learning literally a couple of weeks
before the the first group of students went through it so she was learning it understanding it and then finding a way
to communicate it in a method that these students actually could absorb it because just writing out a PDF no they
they don't get that I I still am surprised because those
videos are some of our best like our most watched videos on our YouTube channel and we've spent the past two
years making content and still those are doing so well so I'm glad that someone's
watching them well this past summer you also opened up the program to make it accessible for other rasque members who
aren't students who aren't doing it as part of a class to be able to take part in this we did thank you for reminding
me about that that was um we started running science courses for adults as well um we've been trying to come up
with a way that like we can do citizen science but also have Tech like have the
the citizens doing more Hands-On stuff um so not ziv is awesome there's a lot of really awesome programs out there
that you can um have citiz citizen science participate in but you need to have someone prepping that data first or
a computer prepping that data something needs to happen before a lot of those citizen SC scientists get involved um
and so so we're running these series of programs focusing on exoplanet transits variable stars and Supernova finding
Supernova in galaxies to get our members or anyone who's interested up to speed
on how to do this stuff with the data that comes from our telescope and use that to kind of propel our research
forward that's fantastic and one of the other things I have to mention uh because Adrian is here and he's coming on next is early on Jenna actually made
it available to me and said look if the transits going from 1:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. if you have students who want to do
astrophotography give me targets and we'll program them in to our camera and so can you tell them a little bit about
the equipment that we use at the uh Edis scope yeah sure I actually have a PowerPoint presentation in case I needed
to use it there's our equipment um it's it's a 16inch Aros f8.9
um I didn't know what any of these words meant before I started this program so I
feel like the world's biggest impos in this meeting uh we had I've learned a
lot since then um I know the scope is a is a pretty good rig for what we do um
there's a little outline of the different the sort of the different programs that we were looking at the advanced program versus the basic
program which is a little bit more um simple the other the other thing I forgot to mention too I'll get to the astrophotography but the other thing I
forgot to mention is that um we do have Publications with rasque and that's been one of the most valuable thing to
students is the ability to publish either like storytelling pieces in our magazine which is more publicly
accessible Sky News um or scientific pieces in our academic journal and
that's where my students were able to publish their first set of data back in 2019 they were in the 2020 March April
edition of Sky News and that led many of my other groups to then start submitting
articles to Sky News and even the current edition has a group of three students who did ISS biology research
and they publish in Sky News and so it really snowballs once you show the students what opportunities are there
they jump at it it's amazing we actually have a new group who cited your students articles as the reason they participate
in the program so there you go good job I can't wait to tell them oh there was yeah it was so it was so great to hear
so we have we have all this data as well that's as for sale astrophotography data um but we have actually we even have
this new partnership I don't know if I told you about this yet kareim um a member from our Toronto Center runs a a
club with his son at his French school um and they're extremely interested in astrophotography and astrophotography is
you know there's some science to it when you talk about taking there's a lot of Science in there yeah and visualizing
visualizing data in a way that makes sense to us as humans how we do that with radio astronomy can kind of apply
to the way we do it with narrow band Imaging um and so he's actually he's
gotten some amazing funding um and is buying access to to our data for all of
his students to use which I'm I'm thrilled about um but even when uh even
when we run the program just with Kareem and with the students we allow a little bit of time for astrophotography too there's some there's some good stuff in
there it's fun to get people trying this out for the first time um and seeing what they can do with it that's the next
stuff that we're doing is that math program we are going to make formalize that astrophotography stuff to Kine um
and and move students through the science team briefly because I know that um it's
running late and at least I usually am in bed by now I wanted to throw back to
uh to um the last time that I was here we actually ran the scope live looking
at Jupiter and Saturn um and there's the result of the the camera that's on the
back of the scope where we imaged um Jupiter and Saturn slowly uh or Jupiter slowly passing Saturn until the
conjunction so yeah it was really fun it was a neat it was a like a
somewhat unique perspective on it um our scope isn't really well set up for planets so it was nice to have an
alternative I've enjoyed getting to show that to my students the last three terms now and it just it it blows their mind
because they learn about the orbits they learn about the periods but realizing that you can actually watch them passing
on the ecliptic every 20 years their jaws just drop it's insane it's insane and it's so
I just I'm so glad that you show it to them because it yeah it blows my mind every time I watch it too it's when
you're just stepping outside and I so I love I'm going to stop sharing because um when I love star parties I do I I
literally am I've been taking my scope out after going to the climbing gym with all of my random climbing friends to be
like look here's Jupiter and Saturn and they're like loving it they're flipping out and being like no way that's
actually Saturn and like that totally fills my heart up but you don't you don't always get the like like you get
the you get the sparkk but you don't really get a lot of the like extra stuff that comes with the next step of mindblowing and that's where this stuff
comes in it's like you can actually see like how the planets move compared to background Stars if you pay attention um
and you can show things like this to really take that next step of like like that's in like that makes you feel so
small to see first see the rings of Saturn and then to see how they interact with each other um over a longer period
of time it's really fun to take that extra next step and and I tell you um as
someone who has found an exoplanet transit in data for the first time ever and spent the rest of the day being like
look look at my data do you see it do you see this do D you see I found it I did it did you see that and like none of
my none of my co-workers care but here I am walking around being like look at the plot look at the plot do you see the plot um watching watching high school
students do the same thing yeah and like get that plot is almost I would say it's comparable with seeing Saturn for the
first time that's cool yeah yeah because they they see these things in the textbook book or they see these things
in class and they're told that this is what happens but actually taking those images and finding the luminosity and
graphing it and seeing the dip and seeing that the dip matches when you thought the Ingress and the egress were
going to happen that we do know the movement of a planet around a distant star that well that we can predict it go
and see it at night it's just it's inspiring for them right Jeff wise is
commenting he says every astronomy club needs someone like Jenna
so I agree I agree Jenna Jenna's a superstar yeah that's awesome it's
awesome I do have to tone it down sometimes I tried to tone it down tonight didn't work yeah no no the one
thing I've realized with the GSP is the people that tell us to tone it down don't understand the drive and it's the
drive that makes us continue to ramp it up right that's right well you guys are
amazing both of you so thank you so much thanks for coming on Jenna and uh you
know uh if explore scientific can do anything to help out the RC Montreal
Center let me know okay definitely thank you thank you Scott thanks and good night good night okay so up next uh is
Adrien Bradley Adrien has been uh popping in and out uh for our uh program
uh um Adan are you there you're right there yep I'm here there you are okay
all right so what did you think about the uh Global star party this time this
uh the global star party was awesome we um we saw a lot of great
astrophotography to start with the first part we saw the Southern Hemisphere and
all the fun and the Outreach in the second part that you know a lot
different from the out reach that I um learned um in Michigan um here in
Michigan we're still we're still mostly visual astronomers in a couple of uh clubs now I'm in the Rask so I have to
learn the ropes I've learned that I must become a blue jay fan now so this uh
Yankee shirt here it's no listen if you're not going to go Tigers and you're not going to go Brewers then you got to
go Jays well I like all those teams but
it's been go Yanks for a while and um you at one point kind of like visual
astronomy and Yankees at one point they were what baseball was about what
astronomy was about were the big telescopes the thians and about seeing
the photons with your eyes in this era now the type of teams that a certain
rival team from Boston um all the better teams te are like that now there's
different there's analytics you could compare that to astrophotography is
becoming more and more of the norm and not the um the visual side is shrinking
a little bit and we don't want to lose either side but at the Yoki techar party for
instance there was a lot of red a lot of uh screens and you know a lot of ambient
light and the visual astronomers did struggle with that because you know when
you're at a dark sight you want your eyes to get completely acclimated to the dark so right um so there's a there's a
bit of there's a bit of Changing of the Guard when it comes to enjoying the Hobby and as out for outreach we have to
embrace that and you know the rasque has embraced it it's been tougher for some of the older astronomers the visual
astronomers to embrace it but um you know embrace it we must because that's
what's keep keeping people interested in night sky is taking a picture of it bringing it down for themselves um I've
fallen into wide angle um nightscape photography and so
I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and your work in that
has been breathtaking I I can't believe actually with what Libby was saying
about the gsps and being able to share the night sky when you have a dark
cloudy one we had nothing but clouds and rain for the last week or so and you posting
stuff from your okit's uh outing has been M letting me survive the night it's
been incredible that's exactly all of the pictures so all the pictures you see
here are a collection where I put the okek pictures
in and I have pictures that I took in the past at the various bortle zones um
and so I'm just going to start with the I'm going to start with what Kareem's talking about this is what we usually
deal with in um you know Northern latitudes are you standing outside my
house that's what I see that's exactly there you have a nice Lake and and now
this is being illuminated by the moon you go to a dark site and the clouds may follow you but
that's not the moon that's Illuminating you that is the Milky Way wow that just
look like a right that's really cool know those you should give to Libby for
her Halloween costum yeah there you go make the uh hiding the Milky Way so that
there's a difference um let's see the zodiacal light if you go to a dark enough place this is um Port Crescent
State Park it's a bordal 3/ bort 4 Zone you might catch the
zodiacal light after some Sunset and a little glimpse of the Milky Way there's
Orion um it's not bad it's a it's a very beautiful Serene
site and I do believe this is no this is not the double cluster here
I um so yeah it looks
wonderful you go to a dark site you get that to the light and then you see this
and you take it with your ha boded camera and you blow that other the other
pictures beautiful in its own right but look how much more there is to see and there's R but now he's all dressed up I
told you that I love this so lights I that's blow my yes see seeing that with
your own eyes you know is it's if you are if you are seeing
a try seeing it with the Moon Rising through it oh exactly well and that's
mostly Mars dust so right now when we can't see Mars you were seeing it yes
and uh that was and seeing seeing it with your eyes though there there's nothing like seeing the moon rise over
the horizon I was panicking going I gotta try and get a picture of it I made it a composite so I took the moon
picture separate laid it on top of a picture where I was able to get the
zodiacal light and then did some uh tried the Photoshop magic of content and
wear Phill and it it did an okay job I slapped that in and that's close to what
I saw naked eye it it really was an impressive sight that was the other side
of that image where you know shooting for Orion
shooting for the other side of the Milky Way I would try and do that from time to
time and somewhere in here I think I have I wouldn't get the color mapping
right so you get a there's Orion there's the Milky Way it's all
purple it it makes for you know purple and gold it makes for nice
colors so you saw that picture at a dark
site you can get in a lot more than that there's that there's what I was trying
to do but um Turned out a lot better you got air glow here you don't have
light pollution you have air glow and um it's a huge difference in um
because everything up here is bright and everything pops out all the nebulosity
now if you don't have an ha modified camera that region is still beautiful
here's a winter circle with a non-modified
camera and it's still a beautiful site here you got a little bit of air glow
and clouds that's just incredible can I use that one in my class yes that's just
fantastic sorry I put you on the spot I should have emailed you you can even I will see I will send the emails I did
post that to Facebook one of the coolest things that I was able to do is get the Milky Way as the moon was setting this
is uh one of my favorite bort 4 spots you can get a little bit of
detail that's nice now let's see where did it go portal one
site astronomical Twilight hasn't ended yet and look how much detail you've got
and for those of you that have not been to the okite tech Star Party Scott was just about to tell you this is what it
looks like there's a little bit more detail here but honestly this is what
you see with your own eyes that Milky Way pops out go that's
incredible I amazing right yeah you're ready to jump in now let's
uh so we get a little bit deeper um here's I'm playing around at a bort 3
site with a modded camera and I got funky with all the colors and tried to
do something extra special um it turned out looking like the Denver Bronco
color scheme on the Milky Way so that's not the craziest thing I've done at a
bort one site I put an iPhone on a Tracker and I got this iPhone 12 Pro and
got as much as I can get I got round stars for 30 seconds and there's your Milky
Way so I wouldn't recommend trying an iPhone 12 Pro still go get your DSLR because when
you get your DSLR and you take the same picture it's going to look more like
this so you've got and this is with a I think a 50 millimeter lens or 35 I
forget what I used I think it was 50 millimeter this is essentially we see in
around 50 millimeters or 45 millimeters this is essentially what you look up and
see you know you don't quite get it to the granularity that you see in a
picture and yes there's some aberration here but you do see
this and you see some of the color here rising up over these mountains at a
border of one site let's see so how about the signis
region that was my attempt at the signis region it's not bad this was one of the
ones where I didn't do too much work at okex as I could have I've actually got a
little bit better work on the signis region at a bort three Zone I we put
this picture together uh Sebastian if you're watching this is as good as it gets as far as me doing foreground and
actually trying to interact with my environment with a night pick um the
coat hanger is right here that's a very beautiful yeah yes
this is Alona very beautiful yep Alona Park it's uh this was my attempt at
actually having a beautiful picture now notice the color of the clouds here the color shines with the clouds with the
the city that's in the distance only at a border one site it's black and I've
got a picture here I think this is the one we'll use to prove it there's the
Light No Light so crossing the milk the face of the Milky Way it's black and
when it's middle when it's dark of the night and clouds come over Stars just
simply disappear because they you know you you
don't see the clouds like you do at the other bordal zones were those were those
stars coming through the trees I think those were stars coming through the trees let's look yeah Starlight look at that is
coming through the trees in this shot and you see no light below the the clouds No the Clen out
by and um so you want to do classic
astrophotography you want to shoot the Iran region this is me a poor attempt at
a bordal foresight I did my best yeah but you got Barnard's loop I got
Barnard's loop I got Lambda orus which I lovingly call the a
of Orion the rosette and no witch head here but I tried and there's some of the
regions the belt and the sword region so that's a modified camera right on a
trucker yeah it's a modified camera yep so I took a modified camera tried it at
the dark site not sure I processed it very well I still I have the raw data so
I'm going to use it to learn and the haze was in the air so things got blown out a little bit you know
these things look like they're ready to go supernova but it makes for a real interesting picture Lambda orinus is
here more detail on Barnard's Loop and there's the witch's head and that's one single picture that
is a stacked picture I want to say that that is about 40 frames
stacked um and then processed using some Photoshop Tools in Lightroom classic to
try desperately I wanted a dark sky and there's some Haze here and then the milk
you know the Milky Way that Orion sits next to um I'm going to continue working
on it because if I process it properly there's there'd be a lot more detail
here I did painstakingly up the uh exposure on the
witch's head so that it would be visible here so there's Adrian do you have the
stack image if you want to share me with me
because I'll send you I'll send you the Stacked image um I was I was gonna say
yeah you guys can you guys can take that data and see what you could do with it
that would uh I'll send it to you after this yeah so like me yeah come on yeah
all yes I'm byby yeah so I try to hand out a
panorama this is our camp is University low brow astronomers and nice nice PR
nice yep so Ryan and friends are over here plees came out really really well
look at that you can see the glow and everything yeah you know when I see
these uh beautiful Milky Way shots I can't wait till Adrien goes to the southern hemisphere he gonna make some
mind can't wait to see it Maxi and I were
just talking about that we'll knock you over it really will we be ready so let's
talk about the core of the Milky Way my favorite part and over the years trying
to get it I basically went from this which was a 49 Second with a kit lens
and a a uh old 30d DSLR from about 20 years
ago and was happy just to get some of this detail here and fast forward to
okex and this is my Milky Way shot yeah so more
detail still working to make some progress um along the way I took some
shots like this at a portal 5 Zone I was still able to get the Milky Way in Ann
Arbor Michigan I was um I tried with a modified camera to you
know I could get detail but I couldn't quite get the color right um then I said
I'll just go with the other camera and there's the light the light pollution sort of blocks this area the Milky Way
it's still a pretty picture and I think it was an HDR
attempt um then you go to a dark sky Park well no this isn't
this is over Lake hon and here's this section with Andromeda and got wiped out you know
light pollution clouds so I try in another
location start to get to North American nebula and I I blew this out terribly so
what do I do and I go to a dark site hopefully it looks a little better what
well there's still some air glow but there's Andromeda there's m33 there's
double cluster there's a heart and the soul and all of that
visible and as the sky rolls around androma rolls over here double cluster
heart and the Soul some meteors the Milky Way rolls as the sky continues on moving and
a lot of stars so so now I would I want to shoot a deep
Milky Way photo this is sort of the finale of this thing we're focusing on the Milky Way itself so sorry sorry
Sebastian this was I didn't worry about framing anything at this point but the Milky Way so at a bordal force Zone this
was as deep as I could get at the time and I don't recall I think I was using
the C the camera when it was unmodded and I got this I was pretty
happy with that then I was unmodded and I went to a bort 2 Zone and shot for a
minute I think those were long minute long exposures and I got this my foreground
Is A Wasteland I I come from an astronomy background so will this win any awards no but is it fairly detailed
in the Milky Way You Bet oh you lose a little bit of this over here because of
the light from mineno this is the up in Michigan it's a it just makes a bort to
Sky and some cool features there's this
this is a visible object this kind of looks like an e here I forget what
nebula this is It's a dark nebula that's visible um there's tared there's aler
this is h a dark nebula that you can see at a bordal one zone you may be able to see it here but when you're near Al
you got the Cod hanger one of my favorite things to shoot at Saget of the arrow is somewhere buried in here I'm
not seeing it but um you know if the coat hanger here sagitt is nearby and that leads into the signis
region this line going into Row for Yuki one single one minute photo at a bort
two site so that was a minute it's amazing this was a this was
a series of 302 photos at the border one site wow what goodies do we have here
there's a cat's paaw look at that yep and this one someone tell me
what this one is because it that's the the shrimp nebula the squ the shrimp
nebula here we are nebula yep so we caught the shrimp and the catspaw
because at at Oklahoma's um l ude a
little bit more of the Milky Way is visible on its Southern face about here is where it stops for me
at around 42 second latitude so we missed this we get the rest of this there's
your Lagoon your triffid there's other nebulosity here that I really should learn about but you
can see it a lot of detail this was again 30 believe was a 30 second yep
right here and this is a composite of four Images so I didn't quite go as high to
go find my Cod hanger but it's up there somewhere and this is a closer
view of that region I think I tried to do a little
more I think this is the Instagram version of it so it's contrasted beyond recognition
but um it still brings out a lot of the dark lanes and this now this was with a
modified camera so I did cheat a little bit at the border one site um but I
still like the results that I got there um so I think I've gone through just
about all these images um smoke didn't see any smoke at
uh okex thank goodness this what it does to an image um same place bort same part
Ral four you see this much Milky Way there's a meteor that came streaking
through the photo and oh nice yeah and then when
smoke hits that same area you can barely see it but you can image it and it just
how bright the Milky Way really is even if you're in aortal this is bortle
9 that's my Milky Way of bortle 9 it it may not look like much but I dare you
all to try this sometime basically see if you can image the Milky Way off of your balcony with some of the brightest
lights going on bortle nine sight and see what you
can get it's a great work
because watch The Milky way that this is completely invisible in a city skies in
bort 9 it's it's a great work um I have from here only one picture that took
Austin uh what was maybe one of of of his first pictures and I can believe it
when he showed me the final picture uh I
think that here is 9.3 but your your picture is amazing because
it's impossible to have and yeah appears the midle way exist this is incredible
yeah and you can just get it this was uh I forgot to shoot this one this was
supposed to be a comparison photo um me trying to get a bunch of detail out of a bort I think this was
like a minute and a half and this was 30
seconds and the the time of the short time of integration is
something that you get and still get a lot of detail at a dark site um
so one way to end this is uh the the northern hemisphere is still a beautiful
place to do imaging you just have to be more creative there are some spots where you
can barely see the Milky Way but now your foreground matters because your
night sky can't carry you as much
so you have to if you frame it just right you end up with a beautiful image
anyway and it continues to drive you to you want to share the you want to show
the night sky part of the reason I shoot and I do shoot for detail is because I
want to show the night sky and I want to share the night sky I want to um this
was when I was signing images and it's I could fix the angle on it but you want
to share the night sky and you want to do what you can if you're at a local where your light pollution hinders you
you have all these tips and tricks to try and make it so that you're still
sharing the beauty of the night sky and here we all we got kind of close to
where the cat's paw is as Milky Way Rises here um so you do your best you
process with what you know and you say this is you know this is the Milky Way
yes it is up there um then you go to then you go to a dark site and with
eight and it only takes you eight seconds to get this photo this is an eightc
shot aimed up over the mountain ISO 8000 uh F14 with a 50 mm met lens and
there is a coat hanger suffering from
aberration but um the the scenery was beautiful so
that's why I kept that photo so you shots that you take at your home
local prepare you for the type of shots that you might take
elsewhere um this Milky Way shot prepared me for
one of these Milky Way shots when I was yeah this one it prepared me for this
one and um it it's part of the reason that you
keep shooting to try and capture what you see as you know a beautiful night
sky and you share it with others and you find different ways to do that if you
want to put some symbolism in there with a cross you can do that um
or you know if you simply want to transport somebody where you
were and you know that's why that's why the type of nightscape photography I
like to do tends to Center more around you know accuracy of images but you
still you still like them to be as beautiful as you can make them and for
the first time Scott I'm going to I'll end with uh I'll end with a shot of our
own star that's for you Scott there you go thank you I do yeah on occasion I'll
take a bird in it I love it there's birds they're everywhere yeah I got them
there's the sandill crane there you go when when the skies are too cloudy take pictures of Birds Landing oh that's nice
man there's a corant land landing and somewhere around
here oh there's an aspry I think you're going to have to share some of those for
our birding program that yeah I gotta come on the birding program and yeah
there's the asprey and uh grle having words and um somewhere there was a uh a
bald eagle so so if the night's sky is cloudy
find something else to take part of the universe that's right yeah they're all
part of the Universe um somewhere in there I had a really
cool I had a picture of a uh Caspian turn well these are part of the universe
too the Blue Angels and um great white
egrets in Flight oh that's beautiful and Y butterfly and Yankees striking out
that was for Kareem judge struck out on that play that's what happened in Detroit and um those of you that love
butterflies we got you covered for that too and somewhere around here there's oh
there's a there's an eight-point buck for those of you that like
deer that we took a picture of that and I will have to find that um here we'll
end on this note this is Scott saying when are you going to be
done there you go all right thank you all for indulging
me and um that is my life in pictures yeah
wonderful so congratulations I'm freaking out Allan
did you get a did you finally get a decent internet
connection you're you're oh we can't yeah it's not transmitting your
voice we we hoped it
would yep Allan says a cool pick of the Blue Angels in formation flying yeah one
of those photos were detailed um Alan you're gonna have to come back on to our program you're gonna have to come back
on yeah I would love it so thank you Cesar
yeah guys thank you thank you so much um you know it was uh great uh 69th Global
Star Party of course our next Global star party is going to be our 70th event
um and uh so we are I'm very excited about it um we have um uh that will be
on on the 26th of uh of October and uh so you know we'll we will
uh uh conspire to have a great theme uh to go along with it and uh we will have
a special uh door prize uh that we'll give away uh during this event uh for
any winner in the world so um so I'm excited about that as well um
Maxi thank you for being an official co-host and uh Caesar thank you for
being on Allan thank you uh for being part of it as well uh Nico Sebastian
you're back there listening uh you know thank you for being on our program uh
beautiful night sky work as well um thanks for invitation yeah Steve it's
late where you are dude what time is it Stephen
hold on just a minute it's breakfast time four 10 to
four yeah so you go you I am going to go
ahead real quick this is the picture I was looking for look at that yeah the
caspan turn right before it hits the water wow wow man as soon as I took that photo
yeah it was it was cloudy as soon as I took the photo I um let me go ahead and
unshare now um as soon as I took the photo I packed up the camera and I went
home and I said this is this is it for today that's was the picture the photo
of the yeah I I I can't believe that he he told us oh I have a picture more yeah
something you know come on my God amazing amazing
says great timing AB the definition of great timing yeah the you see the bird
make its move and you start your burst and you hope that one of your bursts
captures it before it hits the water I have plenty of pictures of a fully submerged bird a bird half in the water
a bird splashing you just total Miss and that one I have it you know really close
so that that almost like it's going to kiss the water yeah it it was that close very
impressive and if I if I get Lu if I get lucky enough yeah to try again I can see if I
can catch eyes although the turn probably closed its eyes before it hit
that water so sure it did yeah so but yeah that's
uh really fast before they hit the the water because they're yeah you know they're hunting right so yeah they're
they die pretty quickly yeah yeah that's great now now I think that you have the
timing to take the pictures with telescope Adrian of the N the
international State SP from the as it flies yeah I cat it
I yeah see if I can catch it handheld take it
handheld yes without tripod yeah yeah guiding I have a picture yes I have a
picture no right
yeah wow yeah yeah yep so any uh any
last thoughts you guys before we call the
night let show you few seconds let me show you yeah the
47 to you did this
shot Nico oh this is Steve oh this is Steve yeah Steve is showing
us that with your donian six um that's beautiful Steve connected
with that image from earlier the color one just North American and the pelic
this is the Mosaic I did of it um there's only six this one there was nine
but I I got rid of three because they weren't so good at the bottom so it does
it just links in below the Pelican so that's where it was yeah that's beautiful all that's I
see it looks narrow band so all ha all ha yeah all ha yeah yeah now interesting
enough is when you look up at the Night Sky naked eye at a bort one site you
swear you can see those things naked eye it's you know and it's ha light so we
you know we typically don't see that but you can see parts of it coming through I
mean it's when it's dark enough you know you once you image it like this you get all the full detail but you see a little
bit of it you see those patches within the signis region that's pretty amazing
now there was a couple of questions uh that have come up uh Adrian some people
wanted to know what your favorite lens was okay so right now it changes from
Shoot To Shoot but right now my an old 28 to70 f2.8 lens that I used for some
of my final Milky Way shots yeah um was my favorite lens for Astro where I can
zoom in or pull out and do like Mosaic I can do p chanels that's becoming a
favorite lens for wildlife I have a 150 to 600 Sigma contemporary lens that's my
absolute favorite for that I see I see and Steve uh what um what software were
you using for mosaicing on that one I use a astral
pixel processor asro pixel processor a yeah
I've heard of that every it's really good see if I can what happened was I got a demo
version of it and I've got um a veil for four pain mic and I couldn't I couldn't
get it to join up in regie Star maxing uh whatever I tried and I got a
demo of a and it did it straight away so I bought it yeah yep so I see uh Nick
the hammer is showing us 47 Tucan yeah
yeah I would say yeah it's so bright it shines through the clouds impressive
impressive incredible yeah yeah that is one since seeing that through
um um through all of you from Argentina since seeing that I decided that's
actually my favorite cluster um even maybe more so than Omega
centuri um it's it's really beautiful to to observe and and as you say
is Omega centri is is like less shining in the in the
center yeah to is beautiful yeah Omega centuri is just it's Grand because
there's more stars than anything in the rest of the entire
sky or in Omega centuri but um the shap shape of 47 tucane is uh that surpasses
a lot of uh a lot of the Clusters I I used to like M5 for how tightly compact
the core of M5 was M3 as well um the Hercules cluster you
could you can look at that and you can think ah it looks kind of like a bug I actually liked M92 a little better um
you know for its shape but uh 472 County beats them
all yeah it's one of my favorite my
favorite also when when you see I think in 47 to you have some blue stars that
contrast with the golden and white stars so yeah that's right and and the
difference in Omega Cent you don't have those those bright Stars you have all th
little diamonds shining and when you are not
watching directly you are watching with the the size of your eye you start to
see shining one from different place this yeah the red ones and the yellow
ones yeah yeah of Jew very yeah colorful
like the I know there are several Jewel boxes in the sky but the one that is near uh the uh Crux the Southern Cross
is pretty impressive as well yeah the the CH will bu yep so we're seeing exactly how
you're stacking it um you're doing it live and it's uh despite the movement of
the uh object it's figuring it out and stacking it for you that's uh pretty
good yeah when I used uh when I to to stack an image I I start recording
in in several fits because I am with 200 M seconds of exposure and I
I post I po the the capture and
then re repoint and start again and and then let it build some more
yeah that works
ni you can point you
have yeah that's another beautiful nebula I'll never see here I
have to go go to Argentina or Argentina at this
point will be easier for me than uh Australia where you get really deep in the south maybe it will be more cheaper
for you it will be cheaper yeah yes we are gifted now I save the money for the
barbecue no yeah that you're going looking for that we're going to H Teach
You How We Do aad yeah yes definitely lots to learn I
am ready with with I don't know if you
with obviously ch and everything and enjoy the the the well
I'm also going to have to learn how to eat things that are hotter than I usually uh am used to I I'm lightweight
but I am G to have to get ready because the chili the Chili's will come and
spice up the meals and I have to have the authentic I can't uh I can't have
the version for the tourists we we want the authentic no no we don't we don't eat too much Chile or
very no it's more we we use the what we
call Chu chimu Sal or yeah Special salsa that we put in
in the meat and gives more um saour more
more taste than if you eat you you you will like it yeah I look forward
to that you will join eating that and also
we well what I how I cook the the meat I prefer to be in the the the center of
the meat ER not red no blood no I I don't like it like that I I like when it
it's all cooked okay n n is saying what
a friend is Maxi that he told me that I yeah thank you Maxi Nico is thinking now
in your entire family Maxi because yes Nico maybe you can you can say something
ironic like a noise of Motors like goto because maybe Maxi say okay you can
go yeah no no I we know that you are a genius searching things and but but they
say okay thank you guys where is no no we don't we don't like taranta much
better scul Galaxy please I think we barely saw that at the
beginning of the night um at Oklahoma before it all went
below Horizon um very faint I saw if well sculptor Galaxy I saw it in
binoculars yes it's possible to see it yeah here it it rises yeah yes here now
Maxi is over our head at this hour yeah we it was low on the horizon at that
site I had the uh I think some 16 by 70s and I barely did make it out visually in
binoculars pretty big field of view and um it was uh it was a large you know it
was large but it was very diffuse but I I it was cool that I was able to make it out
um I also went up and down the Milky Way looked for some saw some um things from
the astronomical League some uh NGC objects some some large clusters that
are in Al in uh Aquilla the eagle so yes
those are those are some interestingly shaped uh clusters once you see them you
don't miss them you say oh that's exactly what I was looking for um and then one a couple of one is
here the other one is there yeah that's it that's right there
Nico is no I don't think so I maybe it's a it's one of the glob
near perhaps are you looking for sculptor no for tarantula tarantula yeah
so I know it is in the large I know you're searching the large melenic Cloud
yeah but but it's really it's low is very
low at this time and it's uncomfortable for the the dob on for the do to
yeah it hasn't R problem far enough yet no no please a Galaxy
[Laughter] please all right well I what time is 11
I have to I'm back to work which is a shame I had all that time off and now I
have to do my day job but um I enjoyed the star party um Scott wonderful I I I
saw whenever I see that you schedule me for something I just say okay every the
plan plans are changed I'm doing that now so I uh I always enjoy coming on I I
appreciate all the kind words uh I like doing my photography and it got better
when I stopped trying to compete with all the good photographers out there and
instead just Embrace what I like about photography and what it is I try I do
try to get pinpoints in my stars but um I also I like making the night sky the
main attraction in all my photos and The Supporting Cast is the Earth it's a
little opposite Sebastian does a great job with the foreground is this
beautiful foreground and the sky you know just is accents it it really uh it
brings everything out I sort of shoot in reverse and I'm okay with that because
you know like like me with my photo I'll Zoom right in and show you the catspaw nebula in my photo um and it be a
picture that's an amazing yes this a h you know I'm glad that you could take
that picture because that show how much you learn in this all this time and you
have to feel grateful for that and you can continue taking pictures practicing and
that's a that's the way it is yeah you keep you
keep trying to Gary we're here you'd say yeah you're always looking even in that big picture the uh Mosaic of the Milky
Way now it's like well now I can try and take an even better picture and take
what I learned to see if I can you know do something in a bordal four Zone because now I'm back bort 4 uh a couple
weeks when the Dark of the Moon comes back I can try the same thing that I did
at the bort one site and see what kind of detail I can get and maybe even try
and frame it up against an actual background an actual good foreground so there's always something to learn and
yeah sure you know but then I to I'm able to share the photos as part of
Outreach it's it's not just look at my pretty photo print this in a magazine please it's look at this photo and if
you want to see this here's where I got it here's where you go here's what's in
the photo and um you know this different uh different like this beautiful
veil I've I've aimed at the veil with a 200 millimeter lens no go-to I did it
Nick the hammer way and took a photo and the veil showed up it was nowhere near
as beautiful as this but it did show up and that taught me where to find the
veil um you know if I wanted to try and
you know well now that I've seen this I just say Steve Steve's got it covered
we're all good but uh I I'll just say look at Steve's work we have a few
astrophotographers in our group that have um done similar work with the similar pallet this looks like
uh the background sued out
okay I a couple of days ago I tried to to take it at the right at that
star how it looks like yeah that that place and I have it very at the North
and it was very light pollution but and also I had wi the the
guy was I don't know not so good
but H attack The Guiding and well I I
say that that's okay I can continue it so I
took you have Hil yeah I remember seeing that comment
live with my own eyes I was I late I came into astronomy and astrophotography
late otherwise I would have had a picture of hail Bop from a plane the tail grew so long it basically covered
the entire sky this tail is really way way past the border
and past my screen it's that long and I don't remember the ion tail but I'm sure
I would have seen it this is old slide film yeah and you still you managed to
capture you managed to capture this meteor right here look at that yeah that that's that's proper that's lucky
Imaging yeah very iming very hey lucky Imaging I think I got I had to dig that
one out for a friend of mine he he asked about it when I
when Neo wise was around yeah you say well I I did this back in the 90s with
hail Bop yeah yeah hail Bop was indeed larger
or at least it loomed a little closer um I don't know if uh neowise was
as big as hail Bop in actual size but uh we certainly saw a little more of hail
Bop yeah but there were some there were some beautiful pictures there it
is yeah yeah Damian teach who is apparently a a named astrophotographer
in our field has neowise images that uh pretty much won the
prize he those are CL right say
again those are not and clouds right yeah
yes looking too yeah I have to see if I manage to get those
by accident I I don't think I've taken pictures of those but I'll have to look
because I may have I may have some where I shot some before as dusk was coming
I might I seem like I may have some images similar to that yeah we had um I
think three or four nights of um when we got um The Noy loen and the
comet those are beautiful yeah I've pulled up with this is not far from home
and I pulled up at in the driveway of the field and the horses came down to
see what I was up to and got very board very quickly and drifted to back of the top of the hill there okay and they were
in and that's when they were in perfect position for you to get your shot yeah I got good
work impressive yep three pain Stitch I've started to get into the pain stitching
because I think the detail the overall detail gets to be a little bit better um
I can use the I have the 14 mm meter Sebastian that you talked about and in one shot you get a nice beautiful image
even though there may be a little bit of distortion I have a rectilinear lens so
I try to try you know cut down on some of the types of distortion but um I've
Al I've started to learn that shooting in you know in
narrower you know larger focal links but putting them together uh can yield some
pretty good results yeah yeah yeah I like that too yeah which one was that
one with oh that was with the sigma yeah
yeah yeah I have um how about this one for a fail then if I can find it again I've seen it two or three times and I've
been flicking up and down the side you like this one or maybe
not oh no nice collection yeah you had a nice M51 down there and I've seen the
Hubble Fitz data so your M51 um is uh on its way now I once I saw
the Hubble fits data on M51 I stopped shooting at it I said there is nothing
else you can do yeah look at the uh tracking fail on
the it's still a cool photo because you you have the you got the dark blades that's the
Pickard shop yeah and then then you then you took off for another for somewhere
else and you ended up it just stopped is that kick kick at the mount
effect absolutely and Star Wars Star Wars look looks like an X-Wing from Star
Wars yeah yes a nice wi from from Star Wars I think they're saying yeah amazing
I saw the elephant trunk there you've got some that one up earlier yeah yeah
you got some yep there's your elephant trunk I quite like that one it's probably yeah one of my better on that's
the there yeah that's just nice that's good detail there look at the I I love
that amazing even the the good images and the fails all the images are keeping me up at night I still want to see
more and I'll tell you what I don't know if I'll be able to do it but I know the moon and Uranus are going to be close
together um the moon will be coming just off of full so it'll be
98% and Uranus is going to be maybe a couple of degrees not much more than
that near it um I was hoping to get an image of it as it rises but of course
just like in the UK the forecast is supposed to be cloudy for that day so I
may miss it all together unless I wait until 1 in the morning and then just take a handheld image oh you can do what
I've done Adrian and become um no
T there you go yeah I it'd be hard to get up to work there's your fireworks
Galaxy I see that up there yeah that one yeah I think I took that with the tusar
I think yes it did
YC what what bort do you have Steve
sorry the the bort Sky
um four five oh five I think think but as to say I've got a an LED Street Lamp
not 10 yards away from where the telescope is mounted so uh above it's
five probably five four on a good day but but if youing narrow brand there
that is no problem yeah then you can do it otherwise otherwise you can light
paint your Astro photos with that that's it's good
that looks like an old uh hail Bop shot yeah that's the hail Bop that I showed
earlier there's neowise for comparison there's the
M101 I see some M I think that's M 101 right
there that you took no I could be wrong I think that gave a
different number I think looked like it gave an NGC number it will do with the play Sol it does an automatic play Sol
okay so it so it is Messier 101 but it's also NGC 577 or whatever it say makes
sense this was taken with the duel rig last year I think I had the
132 uh and the one t 102 on
the a lot of small galaxies around yeah this is life life around the Dipper is
uh lots of there's there's a there's some galaxies at uh Ur a major so that
it is our only our only comeback for uh not having the melenic clouds or having
deep Galaxy fields around the dippers and that so yeah you can there's
a couple of groups I think M51 Messi A51 has its group I forget if
101 is a part of of that group I can't remember
myself but you have uh yeah M 51 and then you have the other B's galaxies are
impressive I don't know if you have them shot here but uh they are they are pretty impressive too that
horse head in a narrow band no he's amazing I see that yeah yeah that's
people were getting people were doing that at the um at this border at okex
the horse head was a popular uh Target to both try and Visually see as well as
image oh yeah and uh yeah it just maybe five hours of integration and
you had a sharp horse head let's guess this one
um I know that when it's closer up m113 can look really
impressive but from far away M13 looks more like what you have the bottom
there um on here yeah
yeah I was trying to find that 51 yeah I saw it
you zooming up and down sorry about oh it's okay ah don't worry this is the
Afterparty we yeah there's no that's 101 there's one of your M 51s right there
pry that's Nic it's a beautiful Yep this is we
tease you all in the southern hemisphere with M51 I don't know if you can because the
Dipper from where you are I think the Dipper stays below Horizon yes yeah we
we got see it look at that Galaxy that's off to the lower if you yeah look at
this ad johon Galaxy yeah don't know what that is but and then you got
another one kind of within the uh Haze of that second Galaxy you okay there it
is I I see 4277 77 we just identified [Laughter]
it here we can we can capture that I will try maybe in a couple of months the
antennas galaxies come they come South for you yes because we have it here Below in in
the that looks like the whale or the spindle I don't know which one is that the whale no or the spindle the spin the
spin Noy
5907 no it's not the ne the Galaxy no that looks that looks like the whale is
that Steve the whale no it's not the whale that one [Music]
okay yeah it looks familiar I've seen it but I can't I can't remember the name or
the the NGC is an NGC number is that a silver
dollar no is Galaxy right okay I think I can't
remember and the I have seen that before I can't remember I know what I
shot it well it is NGC 59 06 or 07 s
5907 so it's whatever it's whatever other name
yes okayo I I will start to to keep it out
all inside and go to bed because I I need to get up in in a few hours so it
was a pleasure it was a really nice night thank you Scot thank you
ml sunflower Galaxy yeah yep M65 I believe
three m63 yep okay yep M6 all right Y
and I will be and with with that I will be heading out as well
yeah take care guys all right you all take care excellent star
party thank you again Scott thank you for putting these on thank you very much thank you thanks
everyone time for me to go too so you are coming very
late you leave online SC been wait a minute no we will go
about three and a half more minutes because then we will be broadcasting for seven hours
straight so SC Network Robert
yes yeah no it's great it's fun it's wonderful that was the 24hour one wasn't it oh my
God yeah yeah yeah we we did we've ALS we have broadcasts where we uh went for
certain number of hours and stopped and then when we did the uh great
conjunction uh star party we had it started from the Philippines okay and
then you know as far as we could take it so but that was a very
enjoyable um star party David Levy uh
stayed awake for the whole thing you know I actually took naps like you know in between a little bit but um yeah
David David was uh just really uh determined to stay awake for the entire
time I think he had I think he was wait for 18 hours something like that so you
know when we were young we could stay up and do to pull a 24hour you know deal or
something but uh yeah so what's the longest that you guys
have stayed awake for a St um don't remember no
maybe well I went to work I remember a Saturday yeah and more at the
M when I I think when we went to when we met for the first time I think
that was H and also because I couldn't even sleep I I have my
finger cut in the my finger it was very cold night and your finger Hurt
No my feets was oh very oh yeah ter yeah
one one or two hours we sleep yes I and and I don't know if I
even sleep and then well I came to home at the midday of the Sunday yeah and I
think I I didn't ER lunch so I went to
well I think but it it was like when you go ER for a party with friends and you
had a headache and everything but now without alcohol this is
astrophotography this is when you come home you feel like that
but there's there's no alcohol what if you over from astronomy the leonids
around 1999 probably trying to remember which year
it was I think it was
98 okay we went when are the
leonids in November what did we go and do we went
camping that must and we had we drove up there set up camp yeah
and stopped up all night as well um and uh somebody reckoned it was
minus something minus8 oh it was ice on the inside of the 10 anyway yeah that's called and we
did three or four nights yeah on on the fourth
night we we'd obviously done too much uh because we got the camp beds out we were
in the sleeping bags looking up and it was clouded out oh but there was promise
promise of cleared spell but it was like white
noise and all three of us nodded off
oh and what woke us up was the
snow snowing so we decided at that stage that it was time to pack away oh yeah
and dve that's right before you freeze your death literally yeah um that was
that's probably the longest that's the longest yeah absolutely shattered we
were absolutely anyway is it must must be past the seven hours now is it it is
now it is okay I'm gonna SC it I want to thank all of you good night I want to
thank all of you that presented and uh I want to thank everybody in the audience
that watched uh thank you so much and uh um we'll be back uh tomorrow with more
programming and um but I'm going to I'm going to make it a uh a late day so my
uh my daughters are visiting from California I haven't seen them in over two years because the pandemic and all
the rest of it so uh and then they leave Thursday so I need to spend a little bit
more time but uh it's good it's all good so they knew I was doing the star party and I wouldn't have missed it so thanks
everyone Scott en show with that yes
thank you so much take care and you guys have all a good night and we will good night you keep looking up guys good
night guys see you by
by
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