Virtual Star Party 5 Part 2

ends time as a transit and the midpoint time so the resolution for time is based on
what your exposure length is and longer exposure length makes that less precise
okay if you've got shorter exposure if you're doing 30 second exposures then you can have high time resolution
uh in that regard and the other thing about cadence is that in bitrate i think what you're talking about there also is
that when you when you take an exposure there's a certain amount of time that it takes to read the data out
and and store it so that's the cadence okay so let's say you're doing
one-minute exposures and you spend 10 seconds reading out the data as opposed to doing three-minute exposures
and you take five seconds or two seconds to read the data out that's uh that's basically uh an efficiency type
of uh calculation where you say okay my effective imaging was was 90 or 95 of the time i was imaging i
got data if you're doing really long data runs and you've got long readout
times because your bit rate is slow then you might lose some time resolution
What kind of camera are you using
but you also uh extend the time of the observing session
um to get the amount of data that you want basically is what it comes down to
so and that i think is that what you're referring to in terms of the bit rate and how how how efficient the data gathering is
that's a very thorough answer i mean i i thought about i said what how does bit
rate affect what you're taking but it's because of the timing and the measurement that you're doing with the time measurement
how about a more simple question uh jerry what kind of camera are you using on the on that scope
so i think at this when we did this measurement originally we had um either our
qhy 174 camera which is a monochrome camera with the filter
we also use currently we use a qhy 163 color camera
which is a one shot color but we also use it for science by bending it by two so we combine all
the colors into one measurement uh and then go through a filter that way
um so and and we've i've done a calibration on
that and when you combine the pixels by bending by two it
it's very accurate it's still very linear it's just like a monochrome camera in terms of the readout that you get
from the data from the camera as it passes through a filter i did a calibration
on our v-band filter which is a visual photometric filter and compared it so i i took uh some star
field uh m67 did a measurement of all the different stars in the in the image different bright
brightnesses uh and then plotted it against the catalog value for brightness
and it matched up pretty nice i mean there was no error no skew no no curvature to the curve is
very very uh linear and so you can use a one shot color as a
science camera if you bend by two as a monochrome treat it as a monochrome can uh image through a filter and that
that seems to work fine yep great terry there was a um
What was it like being president of a club thats predominantly a male hobby
there was a question uh that was asked by uh someone in our audience
and they they wanted to know um you know what was it like to be
president of a club that's predominantly a male hobby
well uh the astronomical league when i first went in i was secretary and i didn't know
anybody but everybody was very nice you know they made me feel at home and as you kind of come up through the
ranks i went from secretary to vice president to president you know everybody and over those years
you have met so many more people and very honestly i was very fortunate because all of the
people that i worked with and all the people that i had met everybody was very nice i never had any
trouble probably the funniest thing i have is because of the way my name is spelled
when people don't know me and they see my name they assume i'm a man and the time i'll never forget meeting
don parker don parker's mouth just went down he's like whoa you're a girl
yeah and that's probably the biggest thing that i run into um because i really have been very
fortunate and i think it's because astronomy is such a great community no matter what part of the world you're
in whoever you meet everybody seems to be pretty welcoming so i've been lucky i i have i didn't have
any trouble and i still don't um i think a lot of women are coming into the hobby
and so we see you know the really maybe isn't the problems we might have
seen way back a few years ago but now i think it's pretty pretty even i think they listen and you
know everybody kind of talks back and forth they listen they share information um so i'm very fortunate and
i think for most women coming into the hobby i i would hope that would be the same thing that they would find that
you know it's a very welcoming hobby right excellent okay
well gary how's it looking out there oh yes scott can you hear me yes
you can call that's right because it flashed up on my screen that the mic had disconnected so i wasn't sure that it was actually uh
a few minutes ago we had a momentary loss of uh live streaming but uh it was just momentary and we came back on so
we're all good um we're still capturing here anyway that's
the main thing um and i've got nothing flashing red on the screens and the clouds have come over so
that's hey gary i want to interrupt you i'm i'm looking at the youtube stream right now scott and it says
first it's starting soon 337 is the time index on it i'm watching youtube
i'm watching um facebook live right now it's on live if you refresh your feed on youtube
it'll come back
yeah i see it's it's live cool that's good we're all good
so grant houston's coming out in spain at the moment
hi gary yeah it's looking looking pretty good um i see 1101 is too low in spain it's down
at six degrees um so i've gone to the next one which i think was the crescent
i'll share that that's coming in really nice um you see that
Exoclock
yeah cool that's good um i just wanted to mention following
what jerry was saying if you don't mind um i had a talk uh on sunday um by the co-coordinator of
the aerial exo exoclock uh project which is a european space agency project which is launching in
i think it's 2028 to study in depth um exoplanets around a thousand
candidates and they've got a project running at the moment called exoclock which is where amateurs can submit
transit data and the idea is to help them um sort of refine the models of the
particular candidates they're going after so they're actually asking for amateurs to jump in with with
you know small medium-sized equipment to help them with their mission in 2028 so if you're
interested in transits i think that's a really good project to get involved in and they've got some excellent software
uh for amateurs to use as well right this is awesome
i love it all right i was new today sorry that sounds really good um if people are interested at the talk
we put it on youtube now so i i really recommend watching i learned a huge amount myself and it kind of got me
quite fired up in the exo planet stuff so um yeah hopefully it will inspire some other people to get
involved as well cool i'm not i like the uh
like the idea of this imaging in spite of clear skies um it really suits my appetite at the
moment after such a drab here this is excellent software as well i
didn't mention the software before but this software is called starlight live which is some live stacking software uh
i believe it's free i know it's free um there's somebody develops a while back and it works really really
well for just building up the image quite quickly so you can see something you know when you're doing outreach work you want to see something on the screen
as soon as possible but it just continues get better and better the longer you leave it running
excellent yeah it looks very clear on on here unlike mine coming through team viewer
yeah he's not so clear
cool sorry thanks sir grant so simon what's happening out your
The Sun
side on the sun is there anything out there um if you're expecting an alien to fly
past then the answer is no but the seeing has actually gotten worse um
because it's starting to pick up a little bit of wind here let me just share the screen real fast
so you can kind of see that it's wiggling around a lot more than usual and it's kind of a little bit soft
oh it just went kind of clear all of a sudden i'll stop talking i should just stop talking you know that's actually looking quite nice here
yeah no it was uh questionable literally a moment ago but i did do um
a quick stack of everything so it's gonna stop the share and then switch over to
my desktop so you're gonna see a lot of mess so
let's just minimize this for a second and i just stacked the image together
and and inverted the image as well at the same time so that's what we've got right now
so that's just uh that was just not that was from just a moment ago so i'm gonna play you guys a quick video
um so for people who follow me on instagram and stuff like that they would have seen a lot of this stuff
but just so you guys can get a an idea of this this is actually a time lapse
are you guys seeing that yep
beautiful that's amazing so these so each frame is literally
uh 30 seconds apart and it's interesting because a lot of people
don't realize how fast the sun actually moves from our perspective so far away when we look at it
only the large features are somewhat visible to appear like they're moving but the closer you get to it let's just
say we can get on a spaceship and fly towards the sun and get closer to something like a prominence you can actually see
things moving in real time the closer you get the more you can actually see and the faster it appears to move it's
actually quite scary how much craziness is happening on the sun so for those of you who
want to just see that again real quick i'll just play it again one more time and you can just it just looks like rain
coming down from the atmosphere i mean there's no umbrella in the world
that's going to save you from this stuff i'll tell you that much do you have an idea of how big the earth is compared to that scale there that
image size funny you should say that uh not on this particular image but i do
have one on something very very similar if i can find it real quick
let me just see if i can dig it out real quick oh uh real fast that's uh another iss
transit that i got so this was actually a good one because the size of the iss looks massive in comparison uh comparison to
the sun uh but let me see if i can find that picture
because i do every now and then i do do size comparisons of different things
i just don't know where it is uh no that's just gonna move this out
the way there we go
you can see i've got tons and there it is how big is it
so hopefully this gives you an idea
so this so this is a prom that happened uh nearly three weeks ago so you can see
that the actual size is seven earth widths in height uh and then obviously if you were to
compare it to jupiter it's almost as big as jupiter if not bigger so by comparison what you just saw
is probably around about the halfway mark it's it's not that big by comparison
but in terms of the speed of the motion of that gas i mean it covers thousands of miles in a few
seconds it seems like so um i don't have this animation to hand
i did do a calculation on one of them um by accident i wasn't paying attention when i was shooting something uh on the
sun and when i started to process these images were taken 15 seconds apart
there was no prom originally and on the last frame there was this thing that just stuck out
and it was around about two earth widths in height and i was like wait a minute this wasn't here a minute ago so i had to go back to all the old data
and only had four or five frames worth of data and i'm not kidding you this is literally
the space of like two minutes this thing had just popped up from nowhere so depending on the feature it moves real
quick so one of the fastest moving things that you will ever see on a sun is actually a solar flare so if you see
one of these suckers go off that you can almost see it in real time that's how crazy it is
um i don't again i don't have the calculations and the actual video in front of me but i did work out its actual velocity based
upon knowing the size of the earth having the comparison and i had five frames so i could work out how fast this
thing was moving it was some alarming rate it was like 22
22 000 miles per second or something crazy something i can another story i have
simon has to do with me doing a uh an astronomy event at woodland hills
uh of all places we had we had a coronado h alpha uh
telescope and double stack was out in front this is when i was working at meat
instruments and i was looking in the eyepieces and as i looked down i'm looking at this this uh sunspot
active area and two white jets flew out on either side
it was just like somebody stopped on a tooth you know tube but toothpaste two of them going on
on either side and it was just like over in seconds and it was just like
no one's gonna believe this you know what i've i've i've witnessed something very
similar to that and i've i was a member of an astronomy club and i said to something very similar that i
saw something and they go oh it's not possible that it doesn't move that fast and that's actually what got me into the learning
the science behind some of this stuff is what i actually thought was a solar flare
so you can see these in real time and you can almost predict them um can i show
a website real quick okay yeah feel free
Solar Dynamics Observatory
so obviously i'm not going to try and advertise anybody specifically but you can obviously see i was watching
the stream
so the solar dynamics observatory runs a website um called sdo strangely enough
and you can actually see what is actually happening on the sun there and then so they have
uh data on all different wavelengths and it's almost near real time but what i'm more interested in
is actually this this tells me what is coming um just so you guys know
it's actually called stereo a and stereo b a stands for head stands and b stands for behind now if i
remember correctly stereo b is the one that doesn't work right now which is why you've got this black
um area uh long story short is there was actually a solar flare
with a major cme that hit that particular satellite and knocked it out so it's out of commission and they don't
they have no clue where it is it's out there still orbiting along with the stereo way in the earth obviously
but they have no idea where it is to contact it to get it to turn back on or anything
but all i'm interested in is this line here that says zero to negative 90 anything within that
uh range is visible to us but anything after negative 90 to 180 is what's
coming so you can tell if something big is about to come around the corner
and give you a good show so if you were to look at say some of the uh the data out here uh i'm
gonna use this particular one we can actually see if there is anything
coming along so the problem and the active region that we were just looking at or that we are looking at
should i say this area here is actually this part
here and then you can just about make out the problems uh showing up in this
particular band now this is not hydrogen alpha this is a different bandwidth altogether
i don't remember which one this one was called specifically but just for you guys at home so you can see
that there is actually um the prominence up there so we have a point of reference hi yeah
that's uh that prom that you see there
is actually this part here that we're looking at
so you can see it's pretty much in near real time and then daystar themselves have a
website which also has a live view of the sun in hydrogen alpha so you can kind of get a good idea of actually what's going on
uh this particular one is actually done in big bear but they haven't darted all over all over the world it's not just the us
so it's pretty damn fun yeah very interesting let me
stop the screen but yeah i mean i i've got other pictures other than deep sky uh other than solar obviously so um
if you guys want to go have a look at that just let me know on the chat and um i'll show you a handful here and there
cool excellent excellent is um is it getting nearer time for joey
Telescope Giveaway
to do any more questions it isn't time it is absolutely time and this this this uh particular question this is
the number three question right jerry yeah that's the one let me see yeah
first i can also post that um
we had quite a bit of an internal chat here
now i'm going to have to do a clue on this probably along with the question
although is this question uh like you should be able to find it pretty easily
without even me giving a clue so maybe i won't give a clue okay okay all right so i'm gonna you can
ask the question i'm gonna post it okay okay so what is my local astronomy
club name i was the president of this club
i probably gave it away what's the prize the prize is um
your choice of a 52 degree explore scientific waterproof eyepiece
argon purge warrantied forever under our no fault transferable warranty
so the better the prize the easier the question it sounds like
and if you can get it back to me and you know any part of it i'll replace it so there you go
you know scott you probably don't talk about this nearly enough but um a lot of your products if not
all of them carry this uh lifetime warranty and it's a it's a forever warranty every
time i my mouth i'm talking about it almost but you know what yeah i guess but i mean i gotta give you
a lot of um uh props on this because there is a great story that you've told us before
and it's this is not just a story for a sake of a story but scott actually replaced two telescopes
if i remember correctly because of the um paradise fire it was where the guy
out the the two front elements and you still replaced it yeah
yeah it was two eyepieces i actually have them uh in a glass case here somewhere
Paradise Fire
um but uh and i'll show them here at one point but they are absolutely melted uh super
hot fire in the paradise fire he lost everything he lost his house caught i think everything he owned
and uh uh he had lots of telescopes and stuff like that um plus he had some of our eyepieces two
of our eyepieces he was uh able to find them in the uh in the destruction after the fire and
return them to us and we replaced them yeah so
i've kept the letter i've kept the eyepieces um it was very sad you know uh but uh
you know i think that um you know we were at least a little bright spot in all that
so you know i'd like to think that you've made such a big impact in the
astronomy community i really do and i'm not saying this just to blow smoke up here behind
but seriously um for as long as i've been doing this it's
funny because that's the scope i started with is uh at explore scientific scope i had the 127 and i wish i never got rid of
that damn thing i know where you can get another one so what no hold on hold on so
this one we star tested this one and i remember when i bought it because
daniel um bouncy from the store he [Music]
Explorer Scientific Telescope
he he wanted to get rid of stuff you know sales guy and this is really before i was uh was
working there and he was pushing me to buy this thing so i said you know what screw it i'll buy it
it's used it's okay it looks beaten up it doesn't matter but we took it back we star tested it and everybody around me who
was really into all of this stuff who don't do all the starches like this is an explorer scientific scope i was like yeah why what's the problem
and they're like we've never seen one like this it's like you don't want to lose this thing and i kept it for ages
and the time came where i got the opportunity to get a bigger scope and i needed to put the money together i sold
it and i kid you not i wish i didn't um we know who the customer is who bought
the scope and it was amusing that he did the same thing he did a star test and goes there is
no way in hell am i going to let you have this scope back because i asked him can i have it back
Product Selection Philosophy
well you know we we uh we provide you know we we choose
telescopes [Music] out of the production that are diffraction limited or better they have
to be and uh you know i i know that you know for my experience and
working for another company that not all of them were that and so
i kind of have a philosophy that i i don't want to get product back because someone wasn't
happy with the optics or they weren't happy with the electronics uh you know it is far less expensive for us
to get it right the first time uh you know the customer can be satisfied you know there are there are
better telescopes than than explorer scientific telescopes uh you know takahashis are out there astrophysics
telescopes are out there there's better there is better uh you will have to pay a lot more for them
but um i think that somebody wanted to do wanted to have a nice telescope
something they'd be proud to show something that they could do research with for the rest of their lives
then uh you know you can do that with an explore scientific telescope so i'm not going to make a big pitch for
the company here this is a star party and there's lots of other great
equipment that's out there you know so uh that's also available at extremely reasonable prices and uh
if amateur astronomers were ever living in a golden age of product availability product selection
sophistication all of this stuff it's right now you know we're we're here uh showing you
we're sharing live from astronomers from around the world uh uh the telescopes and what they can
do um you know and it doesn't cost uh you know a fortune to get into this so
you can you can have a telescope that uh that you know that for about the same
price as a telescope cost in the 1980s you can have one now that's robotic
you can have a camera system that is you know very affordable uh we have the internet
now we can communicate this stuff all over the all over the globe and you can let other
people control your telescope so it's very easy um you should uh
i will plug jerry hubble's book on remote observatories it's a great book on how to do this kind of stuff um but
uh you know all the people here karen uh you know gary uh
grant um all of us here can help you get into uh you know understanding how to do a
remote setup whether you're you've got an observatory or you're just placing your backyard and you're letting
your friend and you know in another country or another state operate your telescope it's a lot of fun
and um you know i had someone in the chat here asking me what's the
best way to get kids involved in astronomy and i think the best way to get involved involved in astronomy
is let them get hands-on but how do we do that during covid okay well we have all the tools to do
that during covid you can set up a telescope and connect a classroom and a teacher
somewhere and and let the kids uh take images through your scope you know and uh gosh how amazing is that
so solo is one of the quickest ways to get them involved
Outreach
it's one of the easiest ways because the kids are not up late then when we're moving to winter it's a lot
easier because the skies are darker earlier and you know six seven eight o'clock um
but generally with a lot of the schools and things we end up with solar to get them started
and the questions and you know just putting some sunglasses on a group of children and they're like
near cats looking up at the sun and you get that wow um that's before
you they've even looked through a telescope um that that's what it's all about it's good fun
i'll in terms of the outreach stuff um i think starlink's doing us a lot of favors there i've had a lot of interest
um with particularly young people that have been going outside specifically to look for the starlink
clusters going over so you know it has its positives there as well sure it's like uh like uh everyone did
trying to find sputnik back in the 1950s right so uh we have some comments here um uh
let's see uh paul rodzap says jeez almost have the same story uh
he's responding to you simon uh i had the uh 127c carbon fiber sold it because i
wanted a bigger one back when i thought bigger was better i tried to track the person down a
couple years later to see if i could buy it back never found him you know it goes to show
actually the funny thing is is um if it's not if it's not your first scope i don't
know it's almost as bad as the death scope um if it's not your first scope and you're going into an intermediate scope the 127
and anything in that kind of size range is actually the best
because it's it's not too big and it's not too small it's got the aperture and apart from it looks really cool um
they are the best sizes and i've gone through the entire range from the smallest like an 80 sorry a 61
millimeter scope all the way through to a 150 but it's the 127 ish type sizes the ones i keep coming
back to all the time well the one thing that i've found in terms of astrophotography and you
Focal Length
know criticalist critical sampling is is as uh important and the sky for 90 90 of the people that
want to shoot astrophotography in their backyards the sky's only going to give them two to three arc seconds of seeing and
in that that regard a thousand millimeter focal length is the sweet spot for me
uh in that range so there's no sense in in doing anything different if you
want to get the best widest field with that is with the highest resolution
you can get from your backyard a thousand millimeters focal length is about what you want
right yeah we we also have here uh at telescope house the saying that
all of us have gone for the biggest thing that we could possibly afford and none of us own them anymore um it's
simply because your ambition when you're just starting out you always think you want bigger
and you want better but bigger isn't always better at all and simon i quite agree um
127 for me it's just the most versatile scope that i've ever
owned um full stop so uh well i mean we've actually got a beginner here uh
chocks um give us a quick rundown of your equipment because again you are a
beginner at the end of the day so and go through why did you choose that particular size
Scopes
yeah no worries um i looked at the various different options um newtonians because
again like i said i didn't know anything about telescopes or anything so um a lot of it was internet
research looking at what the various different options of scopes were
um a lot of it was talking to people like um rother valley optics i think i've owned
telescope house harrison's telescopes i spoke to various different people
everybody kept referring me back to getting a refractor because i looked at the scts um
one person didn't recommend an sct to me but then when i sort of checked with other people they said well you want to make sure the s
stops quite quite small on those on a scope if you're going to use it for astrophotography
so i did a bit of research on the 102 sky watcher um and it got okay reviews a lot of
people complained about the chromatic aberration and the vignetting but to be honest i didn't know what those
things were so i thought if it takes a half decent picture it's fine
um and it'll give me a view of the sky it wasn't overly expensive so i went for that
i then bought the ixs 100 um and it it was great um i think i
outgrew it fairly quickly so that went back um and upgraded to the exos
2 gt the pmca and that's been brilliant adding the guide
scope uh using nina has just made it a real doddle actually it's made it
a lot easier to see what you're doing what's required there's a lot of research involved lots and lots of
research watching lots of youtube videos i originally started with apt
um and then i moved on to nina after that so i've been using nina for about two months now and yeah
so the next thing i've got to upgrade is the scope the guide scope again was a budget scope
it's an sv bony 50 millimeter um with a zwo asi
guide camera on the back and i'm using a 600d as the main imaging camera unmodified at
the moment so um i'm not sure i need to modify it yet camera can come later on i think the
scope's the next thing to upgrade right
excellent excellent um uh how's it uh how's your sky is working
Intermittent Cloud
there gary i'm intermittent cloud i can see mars over the side
um andromeda has disappeared for a couple of minutes
that wasn't going in spain
so i um i jumped onto um [Music] uh the little galaxy that somebody
suggested i'm trying to remember the name of it now it was uh is it gone
ngc 1275 but it was so tiny um in the field of view we've got over there that i've i've given up on that
and i'm just starting an m15 now so should in probably another three or four minutes let's just have something called m15 to
share excellent excellent
all right hey scott going back to uh outreach and getting people into doing uh
astronomy um if you guys really want to get into
it you can always look into your local astronomy clubs to see if they have anything going on um
obviously with today's current situation most of them tend to do all these online
star parties and things like that but even when we weren't doing them even during the daytime and this is fun
because i used to do this quite often and i might try it tonight is finding planets during the daytime
and people will always say you can't see them during the daytime the answer is yes you can and i've actually seen jupiter
at three o'clock in the afternoon with the dobsonian um so right now
jupiter is very close to the moon so it's going to be dead easy to find this thing so i don't know if it's going to get high enough
but if we run long enough and it does start to peak up i will point the scope over that
direction so you guys can try and see it because it's now coming up to what five o'clock in the
evening for us so just to prove that you can see planets during the daytime
okay all right we'll see if we're we're on for that at uh that time uh
Terrys Scope
i did want to come back to uh terry uh for a moment uh terry you were explaining about your
guide scope uh assembly and we did not have the uh spotlight on you can you show that again
your guide scope yes and you're you're muted
there we go okay um
yeah it is just a 30 millimeter i've got the asi 120 on it um and it just is mounted onto
a quick release bracket and that bracket connects onto the l bracket to my camera
and that's how i use auto guiding to auto guide the sky guider pro and then i've got the asi
air pro also so can you hold the spotting scope up higher there we go
yeah i see yeah so the bottom of it actually just has you would slot normally just
slide in whatever bracket or whatever you want to hold there but what i did instead of sliding the
bracket in i put it on the other side and then slide the bracket part on the l
bracket on my camera got it
and finding a guide starts really i think relatively simple right yeah the asir pro does a magnet but i
really enjoy the asir pro i do plate solving i was doing i had
the canon l 100 to 400 on there but it's not really made for photography but i
wanted to see if it would hold the weight and guide and before i had was doing plate solving
i could shoot about two minute exposures i can easily shoot five minutes with that now and i was looking for something
to travel with something i could put on a plane and just do something besides a camera and a tripod
oh yeah i wanted something i could use easily and i upgraded the base to a william optics
it's got a base on the sky guider pro to make it a little bit easier uh to maneuver around it sets a little
bit easier so i've upgraded a little bit and kind of taught myself how to auto guide
with being home so much excellent excellent all right well great
so what else do we have who else has something for us can i add something else in sure of
course okay i was watching simon's work on the sun and you know i'm an aurora chaser and so
every time i watch the sun quite a bit i've got a solar max 90 double stack and i watch
the sun quite a bit but then i'm always watching because i really want to watch the aurora too
so i've got about can i show a short aurora video that i shot in alaska
okay let me see if i can get where i need to what i'm sure
yeah you go to share and then i think you just pick there we go i'll pick out uh this video was one one of the
Alaska Aurora
one i think i shot this in 2017. wow you can see the big dipper and this
is coronal um aurora this is what we were talking about yesterday when you see it
you'll never forget it if i can get it to go
i think that's it yeah now i laid on the ground in the snow and just watch this and i'm only going
to play the first couple of minutes it goes on like for 20 minutes but this night i had the aurora
went coronal 17 times during the night up there that this is
what you dream of when you want to see the aurora this is what you really want to watch and i will say this is from a 787
a7s and it is not i have not uh processed it in any way
terry is this in real time this is real time this is a sony a7s
real time and what you're going to see i haven't processed it straight out of the camera and you just when it goes coronal it
moves so fast you about have to have your camera in the right place but it's an incredible
sight it's something you'll never forget and it's easy to do with a camera and tripod
um you know if you're just starting out or that's what you've got but alaska has some of the most
beautiful aurora when it is active that i've ever seen is this part is this
passing over your head almost yes it is so we're looking so we're looking right up at it
yes you are uh in alaska i'm in fairbanks at this time the big dipper was over my head earth
major is up there over my head and so you can see it's like a vortex um
and it just and it's very energetic like i said 17 times a night and one night for the coronal
part was just amazing i've never seen that before or since and then see how it dissipates
it just dissipates and then it fires right back up wow
yeah i said i just laid on the ground and did that wow it was amazing but when i was watching
simon's work with the sun that just brought all of this back to me and it
it just gets so active and it moves so fast and you can see so much structure in it but i'm at 25
000 iso with this wow got to get one of these cameras oh yeah
i want to upgrade to the three the a7s iii is what i'm looking at now and you can see i'm i'm experimenting now with the exposure
or with the iso i wanted to see if i could make it any better it's one of the best uh comet cameras
the a7 3 that's amazing yeah and i can stop this
at any time but just simon's work made me you know he's watching the sun and we're talking solar cycle 25
and i'm thinking oh my gosh let's get going i want to see some good aurora again yeah it's amazing i'll have to get there
first when when was this taken uh march this was march of 2017.
oh okay yeah when we actually had some sunspots we had a huge cme hit
that's right that's right i was going to say because that's that's again that's why i always say to people you should always
pay attention to sdo because it tells you what's going on and again you could almost predict
when these things happen yeah that's great advice i i really appreciate your input uh it
just brought a lot of stuff back with my aurora shots so i can stop this any time when you
guys are ready to move on i'm not i'm not i haven't seen anything like this before
and i've always wanted to see stuff like this yeah it's it's incredible i
i don't know it's different every time you see it you know a lot of i've heard people say i've seen it once that's enough and the reality is you see
so many different things so many different structures um you never know what you've got you
know when you're look oh i'm sorry i just started it over that's right okay i was gonna let's see if this will
come up like see the face i shot this one and this is a house on top of a hill it is a huge structure see his eyes his
nose and his mouth is open he looks like he's blowing the north wind yeah
it's amazing i had no idea that was there until i stopped taking the image and looked
but anyway yeah solar and aurora definitely tie together and make some interesting
subjects will you see the next shot let's see yeah this one uh was just uh this is
fairbanks down here this night cbs sunday morning news was with us we
i actually i didn't get interviewed but you're going to see me at the very beginning with a very multi-colored hat
and we were doing shots then and very honestly i moved to the other end to get away from the lights
and then this one i was on i went to the arctic circle i'd never been there and i wanted somebody i had to go with the chore
we had blizzard conditions and we got right above the yukon river
and for about 40 minutes the aurora just ripped open it was beautiful and all there's a few ice road
truckers going by you see some lights we're on a hill and the aurora came out and it was just
it was incredible so that's like i said that's kind of
yeah and that's just a shot of the coronal because when it's right at sunset
you're gonna get purples and you're gonna get the pinks um and the blue sky i mean the sun had
just set there's times i could sit there and the sun would just be below and it would be dark enough and i would see bright
streams of aurora come up so it was pretty incredible intense and actually i'm in ohio
this is my backyard in ohio in 2012 i believe we had a huge sim uh cme and it's about
3 a.m i was getting up to go to work and i thought oh wow i wonder if the skies i wonder if that cme hit
and at that time i walked out and what i could see was this icy green very dim icy green aurora but this is a
30-second shot and you can see all the reds come out but it's one of the rare times in
ohio we actually had aurora beautiful yeah what is your favorite
terry thanks scott yeah what is your favorite what is your favorite image your
favorite image i call this bio48 because that night
i have so many memories from that night 15 hours on the road and you talk about desolate it there's
nothing out there and for we got we got hit with a blizzard we were actually have two or three cars together trying
to stay together because the blizzard was so bad and you know the guy the guy that was
guiding us had driven it many times he was very secure but it was just an unbelievable drive
and then to have all the skies open up for 40 minutes we stayed there until the blizzard got back
up with us and by i rolled into fairbanks at 5 00 a.m and the blizzard was funny i stayed up
on a mount on a summit up there i stayed on a cleary summit and the snow had started again right
before i got back to where i was staying and i couldn't even hardly see the road but a lot just
alaska is amazing there is so much there to see and do and when you have aurora
you're never bored as long as it's clear right
yeah it's great thank you thank you they're stunning images they really are
i'm gonna and share here there you go
i think this is a good example of how getting into astronomy and seeing
science in action it makes makes the world a difference i mean when you start getting into
heliophysics like this and seeing not predicting but seeing a cme
and then knowing that somewhere in in the world you will get aurora
and it's that's the part that people just don't realize i think is they go over to these places and go i want to
see the northern lights and the first thing i want to say to them is it's like well was there a cme and you know was did
something happen on the sun because you're not going to get the northern lights if nothing happened on the sun
so it's it this is where science uh really does fall into place it's just
awesome i mean i i so want to go and see this stuff i really really do you'll never forget it no i
know the the trouble beside a minimum is it
it's quietened everything down so much and it just feels so long
um since there was any activity in really aurora and flares and cmes and so on
i mean we have had aurora it's been quite weak and that it's just been created by the increase in
the coronal holes through the solar minimum yeah so over in the uk we've
had plenty of alerts and you've got coronal holes really every seven to ten days
there's been a coronal hole and they've been huge they've been the full length of the sun some of them
so that consistently streaming lots of data lots of uh energy out yeah but it's got
no faults yeah we had some good sunspots like simon was saying just you know at least
something to show solar cycle 25 is coming to life yeah really and that's encouraging at least
there's been a few there i mean my um all of my work stopped at the
moment it's all of the stuff that i've been working on i can't do um until we get the larger sun spots and
the big active areas then i can't really do anything at all um so we're just waiting at the moment
every now and then you get a smaller sunspot group so we just put some solar equipment on there
and just check that what i'm working on and what i'm looking at is still working the same um or the new ideas
are potentially going to work but it's um it seems like forever waiting for this at the moment to pick up
yeah definitely yeah okay all right how's it going out
there uh grant yeah we've got a nice uh image of of uh m15 coming in i'll
share the screen and a good example of uh issues with um
satellites as well so there we go um unfortunately this software doesn't
Discussion
have the ability in this in the stacking algorithm it uses to to sort of exclude those
um so you've got a good example get them i guess huh
yeah um obviously if we were stacking normally we could easily get rid of that because that's only probably going to be in one of the frames in this
um 30 second exposures at the moment maybe a couple of them maybe have it so you'd easily be able to get rid of it
in processing but not in the live stacking at the moment this software just can't do that
very globular classic beautiful it's very nice it's very hard to control
um you know getting the core and the and the outer stars about just blowing out the core on this in in post-processing you could use
processes to to handle that but in the live stacking you're a little bit more limited um but still i think it's a nice image
yeah yeah yeah lots of detail it's fun to look up object information
too you know when it was discovered and stuff this one was discovered by a guy named john dominique murali in 1746
and uh charles messier uh cataloged it in 1764.
so you just change those last two numbers around uh if it's uh it says it's about
33 000 light years from earth um has a total luminosity of 360
000 times that of the sun and is one of the most densely packed globular clusters known in the milky way galaxy
its core has undergone a contraction known as core collapse and has a central density cusp with an
enormous number of stars surrounding what might be a central black hole that's pretty interesting
it's home to over a hundred thousand stars um and it's got a lot of variable stars uh
pulsars including one double neutron star system called m15c
uh really cool at this is magnitude 6.2 you can see it
with the naked eye under good conditions with binoculars or a small telescope of course with
your system there we've got a nice uh operation of stars um it's a beautiful
image and um so that that's excellent it's amazing that we're watching this all the way live
from spain so that's very cool could you imagine having uh being on a planet that's a rogue planet and
intermixed in the cluster and seeing all the stars so close and carlos hernandez should
paint a image of that on a planet surface inside of a globular cluster we have carlos do a visualization from
inside m15 so yeah that would be pretty awesome yeah globally clusters are amazing
objects i think visually they're some of my favorite objects to look at and just seeing that many stars in in that
dense space is pretty mind-blowing it's um pretty unbelievable yeah do you have a
wide enough field of view to see the double cluster not really it's um i think i can go to
it and give it a shot next um but i think you yeah the other thing the double cluster
is a weird object i've never seen it photographed as nicely as i think it looks visually
i don't know it is a visual one i'm not gonna lie the double cluster is a visual cluster because
when you kind of dart between the two you pick out the blue stars or you're picking out the orangey red stars
and a photo has never done it justice but it's always a good fun one to look at though it's a gorgeous object stunning objects
particularly if you've got a really nice wide-angle eyepiece um with a you know super super wide
field of view it's stunning incredible enough to take a spaceship
ride close to one of these things and just see it
okay here um there's been enough bit of cloud coming through but
at the moment the the images are coming in and we're going
to stack them and see what we can get for the um the next star party or something okay
okay um everything seems to be working okay
which is the uh the main thing um yeah let me just switch this over
that's something that beginners get frustrated you know they they have problems with their equipment and set up but that still
happens to even uh for me i have those problems every once in a while with your equipment and it's just a setting
problem or something you you know no matter how long you're into this stuff you're always going to have
every once in a while issues with your equipment um you can see here where the cloud comes
through now yeah so we're just getting the cloud come through and balance the guiding out
things that things are running quite smoothly in spain tonight but i i had another one of these sessions where all the software just crashed completely
and i was thinking what a disaster but the feedback we got from some of the participants was it was great to see you struggling with the
software because they're the types of issues we have it's great to see that everyone has these issues and it's just
part of the part of the process no more it's more more yeah that's really what it's all
all about um but at the moment i'm after really this sort of thing this
is what i really want to get back on to i want to get back into the heart of these solar flares at the moment so
everything's sort of gearing up for this to see what we can do well gary you
showed this image before uh when we had had you on and uh just covered a bunch of your
images but uh this one is really spectacular can you describe this again yeah
yeah this was um it would have been the september when we had all of the um
two large active areas come around about four years ago um and one of these sunspot groups that
was sending out i think it sent out 46 flares in one day all different denominations so
throughout the whole um rotation across in front of us of there's rotation it was really really
active so it meant from my point of view i could look at the
uh what i was trying to do and basically that was to image the exit point of the solar flare from
the photosphere from the surface of the sun and that's quite hard because lots of
the equipment doesn't show where the flare comes from if we generally image a solar flare it will
um it it's very similar to a leak in a ceiling if you have a leak from above it
never comes through directly underneath it it comes through over in the corner of the room or somewhere else and you've
got to trace back where the leak is and the sun's like that when it sends a flare out so when we generally look at
it we're looking at the um the exit point through the chromosphere
and that's not really anywhere close and also the the plasma
that ejects out is moved around quite a lot so through the forces and through it coming
through the chromosphere it gives you some really nice effects and you get some big streams of
plasma through the chromosphere but it's not showing me where it really comes from and what i wanted to do was see the exit
point so doing a lot of work with the quantum i've got a 0.28 quantum which
is um one of the real low bound ones and gradually worked out with spacing and
changing some settings that we could peel the chromosphere away so this point here is actually the exit point of
uh x9 solar flare wow but normally you would overexpose the
whole area this is the the key the idea was was to bring this
really really tight in with the imaging so that we could capture what was going on there otherwise in normal terms we
wouldn't see any of this you would just see white in this area and maybe a little bit detail on
the surrounding edges of the image so yeah it worked um and
we've done this quite a few times since um but we're also picking up all sorts of things like the element bombs you can
see them hanging around in these areas here um also picking up um
magnetic structures connecting areas and magnetic structures and i can pick those up every day of the
week now so this sort of process has led on massively um
even though it's been quiet but really want to get more detail of what's going on
here in general quite often with the
ribs coming off them which are long filaments i've been picking up lots of activity in
those which are in quite symmetrical uh lines so they're not random they they
look like they're traveling either underneath the ribs or in the roots themselves
and they look like tiny little white dots like this but they're they're not random when we look at this image we can see them
random all over the place in these roots they're in dead straight lines yeah
like sort of three rows as if they're traveling to and from the actual sunspot itself
it's crazy that's an amazing image
i think it's one of the only amateur images done in the world like it i know it sort of stopped
everything the the first image that i did is that come back out there first
image very well and what angstrom bandpass was that um
it's 0.28 so um the pass was right up high on that i can't
remember what it was now it was right at the top end of what the quantum will go but it was actually changing the spacing
as well it wasn't
from the audience here uh brett blake wants to know does anyone at nasa or any
university know flares compulse like this i watch a lot of lectures
and nobody's mentioned this yeah it's really really a lot of this is
how close people are in to to visually looking at it and a lot of the seo stuff is quite a
long way away in its field of view when it looks at the sun sometimes it goes in close but
in general it's quite old now so it was designed to look at you know the whole sun
rather than close up i'm just trying to it's escaped to my mind at the moment but the japanese uh
satellite hinod is probably one of the best ones for getting close on the sun
their anniversary video was stunning um on showing what they can do and what
they can't do but this sort of image here again is three-dimensional um is another thing that i want to work
on but where the sun's getting quite there's nothing to turn three-dimensional um this again was just a test image
really it was the first shot out of a new piece of equipment i designed so it was just a test shot and it worked
you know um but these sorts of things the really you think is their dynamic
objects are the same as the aurora solar flares cmes jupiter's
really dynamic it's changing all the time um quite often with an image like this it's
a once in a lifetime image you may do that once and you will never see anything like it again it's true yeah so you'll come close to
it but you won't actually get anything the same um and that works for a lot of these
objects but the deep sky is really nice i love doing the deep sky but it stays the same
um all the time that's the the thing so in my lifetime you know there's very
few things that are going to change we might get supernova you know in a in an area and that will
be about it imaging the sun um you never know what you're going to see
in the morning and i as much as i i know what simon's on about we're looking at sdo
i refuse to look at it i still like the surprise in the morning of looking through the eyepiece on the solar
telescope i think that's a big part of astronomy for a lot of people once they get into
it they understand it more after they've done their deep sky images that they want to see change in the universe
they don't want to see a static universe they want to detect and see the changes that go on
and that for me is what's always driven my interest in in minor planets and today in exoplanets
you know you see dynamic processes going on and you can measure it with your small instrument
at home you know it's like that's pretty amazing you know
it is you know you know when i'm doing the the solar room and certainly when we get a
really nice clear valley and you you get the big guns out you know you've got the 152s and
you know the the airy lab hat we get that out that's a 210 uh casagram
oh you've got one of those scopes those are really like cats yeah yeah what how are they because i've been
i've got i had my eyes on on one but it's like shipping that corrector plate over there to get it
coated is the part that makes me nervous yeah it's um i've actually got it on loan
from somebody somebody learned it loaned it to me um a while back and murray has been quiet
i've used it a few times but from our point of view the scene has to be really good
yes um it has to be stunningly clear i and i think that's really the thing
now in the uk we're finding we've always discussed this really the 127 is about
the top of your daily limit here um the 152 only comes out on a good day
um or if there's something there that you really want to get in close to the 152 i've got is
i've modified anyway because i put so much different equipment on it um it needed to be um shortened
slightly to to aid all of this so um that needs quite a lot of extension
tubes on it these days to run other standard equipment but that's why i like
running a 165 in our observatory at f 5.1 it's got the 0.7 correct
uh it's got a focal length of 850 millimeters it's yeah it can gather a lot of light and
it's got a good focal length the the problem with the daystar stuff is you can run it at f16
but it's not that clear if we're being dead honest and you're after under a lot of these prominences and these players you're
really on about getting into um into the image
and um that's the issue with it now you know the weather is changing we
notice in the last five years certainly over here that you're getting less of the days where they're
completely blue they're they're whitish blue in the sky so there's always some uh atmospherics
going on now before that five years it used to be more jet stream upset so the jet stream would move
around and you could see it in your images your images would really bounce around with the jet stream there so we found that the actual
aperture of the telescope we're using it is shrinking but then we're changing it with the camera yeah and we're using different
pixel sizes on the camera now to come in close to the object um but
i wouldn't say it's as nice it does look like a little bit of detail there but it's a way around the problem it's
the same as most astronomers amateur or whatever are very good problem solvers
yeah they don't work out how to get around that's their issue or their problem that's true yeah amateur astronomers are
ingenious a lot of times you know they are they solve all sorts
of rooms they'll turn right around and prove you wrong so that's right yeah but then i think
that's where i came from with the solar it was about proving people wrong it was
about um no what you've actually written there is wrong you can do this um it was a very
negative thing when i came into it there was a lot of negativity about what you can and can't do and it had to be
done like this and you know um if you mentioned anything
like trying to do that sort of 3d stuff six years ago people like well you can't do that
um i i can actually remember when i posted that image one of the editors to a magazine in the
us came on and said that image is not possible and i said well that's because you actually don't know what you're
talking about and that is that's it that's really what
quite often you're up against um so i quite often say to people you
know go off and do your own thing if you've got those ideas and you think that they've got the legs to run then then go
for it have a good play around and it will be frustrating it'd be very
frustrating but all of a sudden you you'll get those images coming through those ideas will work and
that's what it's about yeah um that really makes you smile you know
that as well jerry when you you're finding this stuff you know when you find these things you spend ages hunting
for them oh yeah yeah jump on them um you know um it's all your christmases
come together on that day so scott i've got a i've got three
videos that i can quickly show everybody they're not that long okay so let me steal the screen share
for a moment okay so i'm going to show you this one first because it's kind of the
small one but it this just goes to show some of the craziness that's happening on the sun right now
and you can see there's a close-up of this thing and it kind of looks like it's getting sucked into a little sinkhole over there
oh yeah it'll it'll uh loop itself you'll see it in the bigger picture and then the smaller close-up
i think it's like a bigger picture i mean there's that's actually a part of a flare that went off there it goes
crazy so there's that um i'm going to show this one first before
i show the other one because that one's a fun one this is an example of of the seeing conditions
changing non-stop and you can see when it goes out of focus almost it goes really soft
yeah and i mean that's kind of the things that when you're using a large aperture scope is you are fighting
atmospheric turbulence um which can be a big problem and then lastly
i'll play this is the mercury transit oh yeah look at that look at that
nice little close-up of it amazing yeah so i mean
it i'll tell you right now i mean solar observation has come such a long way from where it used to be
um i mean it was more visual than anything else if i remember correctly there wasn't that many people that were doing imaging per se and then
it kind of exploded when the cmos cameras hit the market and it just
allowed it opened it up and anybody could get into it i think also those cameras allowed
people to change what they were doing you really did have the generic yellow surface of the sun and the red
prominent ring and every magazine around that you know every article
was that and with the change of cameras um you know that that allowed
everybody to do um all sorts of things um
you know and also the equipment wasn't easy there i mean the solar max 90s they had like cone in
like anything on them once you started putting barlows in oh yeah and exactly the same with the early
lunch you know that they had all sorts of problems with that when you stick a barbell in them so to try and do some of the
imaging that we were doing sort of seven or eight years ago was really hard um and took a lot of working around
those problems we didn't have tilt adapters we didn't have flat correction that's in the software
now it's really really easy to be honest um it's so easy to do the soda and
come up with really nice images yeah excellent excellent
well uh we are coming up on uh uh it's like uh 1 20
in london right now and um so that's the those of us in the states
can keep keep going on we got a lot of energy left but uh uh gary went on until five o'clock four
o'clock in the morning yeah the other day right five o'clock in the morning it was seven o'clock here
we said yeah i think it looked like you're about
ready to fall off your chair by the end of that session that was a long long session that was
but it was good it was good fun it was it was very interested and i
think we would have had fun on that let's see let's see
um i was expecting to have the answers
for last the last uh the winners from the last um uh star party from kent yeah oh yeah if
you guys give me a moment i'll go and check and see if ken's still here he was going to get them but i wonder if he
left the building without uh doing shots yes he asked me some questions about it
earlier today so i think he was working on it
uh while scott is searching for ken i'm just going to quickly show a couple of images um because i know some
people probably noticed i got a folder full of stuff so here's [Music]
take care lagoon nebula hopefully if it loads yeah kent miraculously came running up
so after you're done sharing uh your screen here i will uh i will give the answers
and the winners uh for last uh our last virtual star party which was vsp for last tuesday
and our next star party will be next tuesday so we're doing these oh it looks like my
computer's decided to go nope i've had enough oh oh oh what's that big error
filing system area whatever so here's uh the lagoon nebula and the
triford nebula so we're looking at the core of the milky way that's
it's a nice one to have a look at oh yeah look how it's nested in there it's so nice
oh yeah and and here's the thing a lot of people don't seem to capture the little foot at the bottom down here
it kind of looks like a big toe almost i don't in the uk because it's normally
below the horizon oh is it is that that much of a struggle it's actually it is right on the horizon
that um in the uk is very very low down in the rubbish uh let's see if i can open this one real
fast and then we'll uh i've got a funny view here we go
so eagle nebula with the pillars creation that's always a nice one to look at
and then here's the fun part is if you don't own a telescope there is
nothing stopping you from doing other things like milky way shots and i almost want to turn around and say
i actually have more fun doing milky way than i do have doing anything else to be honest so
we're gonna just quickly show a small version so it will load hopefully yeah there we go so this was taken in a really dark dark
place in the middle of nowhere look at that very good very cool
all right it's all you now
that was actually easier than doing andromeda anybody can do the milky way if you go to the right location
it's got a lot more detail than andromeda does but it's a great starting point though i
think yeah i think the only thing you have to watch over here is probably
jew on the camera lens um that is quite a common problem over here
even uh through last month and uh june june we had for the frosting
so which is unheard of i've never known frost here in the dune but we had two or three days killed lots
of the plants i've killed lots of the insects off you're out imaging um with that and
that's a big issue with your camera lens you know so it's um one of the
cheapest ways of uh coming up with a jew heater for that is to get an extra large starbucks cup
cut the bottom off and then put your lens through the bottom of the starbucks cup and turn it back on
and that will give you a
have a comment here uh larry bird says i really like the friday star party scott well this is the
first one we've done so i'm glad you like it kind of hard to attend during the week when you're an
old man like me who has to get to bed early for work lots of laughs um well
we'll see about uh doing more of these i really enjoy i mean this for me this is like this is an
internet moment for me okay to have uh you know astronomers uh around the world
uh meeting up with us and sharing their work and their ideas and their passion i think it's awesome
let me read off some of the answers and the winners from the last star party
which was last tuesday this was a for question one that the
prize was a 52 degree eyepiece and an opt t-shirt so opt was on
with us dustin gibson was there and this question was read on by david levy so
and it was an opinion question with no right right no wrong answer right
whoever was the fastest okay on the trigger one and the winner was jonathan hallsman
with yes okay so uh i forgot what david levy's question was um but uh uh
it was either a yes or no question uh and both answers were right so anyways he's from providence
rhode island it's very cool uh question two was based on the information on on their website how many clubs
uh are in the astronomical league and the answer was 240 so that was won by jeff wise uh jeff
congratulations um and that was a uh that was a 52 it's actually greater than 240 that's
just the number they posted that's why i went with that it's greater than 240 but the 240 was the number
yeah yeah that was a 52 degree eyepiece um and uh and then we had
so we had five door prizes for that particular uh star party uh question three how many
different sizes and eyepieces does explore scientific currently offer on our website um and this was for an 82
degree eyepiece inch and a quarter of your choice again one by jeff wise man that guy was like
sharp on the on the web you know jumping on the web uh so it is
um it's uh eight series and 48 different eyepieces so we have
quite a bit we're actually working on more uh question four what year was explore
scientific founded nicholas shapiro one with that
with the 82 degree inch and a quarter eyepiece of his choice the answer was 2008 this is our 12th
year and uh i think it was yesterday i was being congratulated on linkedin
um with um uh being my work anniversary of starting
explore scientific so that was kind of cool uh nicholas shapiro she pro uh thank you and and
congratulations and the then we had our our top prize was an ar-102
refractor um and who was the first astronomically president okay
this was answered by jonathan halseman uh for the ar 102 and the first
do you guys know who it is and you can't answer jerry i know you know who it is
anybody in our group no i know because i created the answer
can answer it question then i was actually taught well you know so you know this is the
us-based deal so he was a famous astronomer it was harlow chaplin
harlow shapley worked at mount wilson harlow shapley was the one using the
60-inch reflector the world's largest telescope at the time
he determined that the uh uh that we were not in the center of the
milky way galaxy uh by looking at populations of globular clusters
and so um you know a great cosmologist um and uh
you know great astronomer and so there's a great answer and so that's that's that's the
questions there we will go to um our fourth question jerry
um okay this is uh this is a little
different this is trying to find some questions related to europe
door price by the way would be another ar 102 telescope okay so um
this this will be one that uh you're going to want to get yeah this is you're going to have to
look a little bit for this i was trying to find a uk related uh
question so it's honored gary
so the question is where in the uk is the beckington astronomical society
located at located where in the uk is the beckington astronomic astronomical society located
yep so again you're going to want to email your question to kent at explorescientific.com
make sure you're a member of the explorer alliance and get a free membership at it
on our website do you know where that is gary yeah i listen to us okay well don't
answer it but what i was actually gonna do was um
from outside with a question and i will donate a hour's tuition online to somebody oh
there you go excellent there you go nice question all right
so what i would like the answer for and remember to email in
not to answer in the uh chat online is um how many miles in total has cassini
traveled how many miles in total has cause
he traveled that's the satellite i'm assuming not the person that's the satellite
and yeah that's a fixed number because we all know that cassini crashed into saturn
[Laughter] so how many miles in total did the
cassini spacecraft travel send your answer into kent at
explorescientific.com and the price you put on the chat then you give you the answer to everybody
else yeah you're looking to sharpen up your imaging skills or you have gear issues
gary's your man hey scott yep uh there was a question about the um
astronomical league president um how harlow shapley was an interim
president from june to july in 1947 then we had edward halbach from 1947-48
and then helen federer 1948-49 so yeah that's what it was
now yep i got a question for you yes why do they call it a door prize
considering you never win a door well it's a it's a conceptual door
you know virtual door it's a virtual door i never heard that phrase until i got
here in the us and i just remember doing one of the uh the shows and somebody says um are you going to go into for the door
prize i'm just like why the hell would i want to win a door for
so what do they call it in the uk we just call them prizes or giveaways raffles
we probably got to our prize from the uk anyways from from england you know we're we're all
from from europe anyhow so right it's really about the entry to the
event isn't it that's where it comes from so if you have to show up at the door to win anything you have to be there
yeah is that where it came from yeah okay i'm just not going to forget that because that person i forgot who it was
i'm trying to remember who it was that was at the door when they said that um
being that the united states is the melting pot that it is it came from someplace else so oh yeah but you should you should
have seen the reaction from that person when i said why would i want to win a door and when i oh my god i really sound
like an idiot don't i well it never computed in my head what they were talking about
yes what are you um what those have you managed to image so
far bro i've got a very very nice pelican coming in if you want to have a look
oh yeah really good i remember simon you were talking earlier about um uh north american nebula and the
pelicans i don't know if you want to um talk over this a bit
hopefully you can see that yes we can it's coming in very nice it's a lovely
object to image as you can see the field of view of this setup is can't quite get it all in which is a
shame because it's a it's a one wide field object um a really nice digital slr target
so i mean you so this is what i was talking about from a scientific data standpoint is you can see what's in front what's it
behind so if you see uh there's a dark nebula to the left hand side center of the
screen that area exactly that area there that is actually in front and it's actually in front of the thing
that's on the bottom center so you see how you got that lump with the little thing sticking out like
a tendril i used to call that the snail's eye because that's what it reminded me of um but those dark clouds or the dark
nebula there that you see is actually in front of us and the big star that you see that's almost
dead center again that's also in front of that nebula but it's not lighting any of that stuff up
and if you were to remove all of that dark nebula it's just one great big nebula that reaches all the
way across the north american nebula i think the most obvious time you can
see that uh is if you have the wall of cygnus uh i wonder if i happen to have a
picture of the wall of cygnus handy somebody is asking what is the focal length of that scope
i assume they're talking about this one uh that's a good question i should know
off by heart but i don't so embarrass me i'm going to go in google my own product
so for those of you who want to work it out quickly it's your focal um
the focal ratio multiplied by your aperture size in millimeters also gives you the focal length
it's f 6.25 so 650 millimeter focal length nice
this was an object that i was i'm trying to find the images but i can't but i was um i was imaging this with a red
cap um last year sometime which is a 250 millimeter focal length so it just gives
you so much more of it particularly if you can put a a larger chip like a digital slr on you you'll
get a really really nice field of view um it's just a beautiful object and it's
quite high in the uk at the moment as well so it's well worth a go at
so it's how many millimeters focal length 650 650.
oh that's looking really good that's looking nice that scope's making a beautiful image
look at that how many minute exposures is this 30 seconds only but there's 54 of them
so far so um you know it's a reasonable amount but it's not a huge amount um again this is where the narrowband
and the mono camera is such a sensitive chip on this camera um and that for me was the biggest leap
i sort of made in astronomy was that switch from digital slr to a dedicated um astronomy camera particularly mono
when you can start playing with narrowband stuff it really really helps it helps even
you've got the clearest skies to run through all of the filters yeah i mean we sport a bit by having it
somewhere very dark in spain so it's you have to bear that in mind as well but it's not you know the kit that's out there it's
not a ridiculous kit it's just it's just nice it's not expensive stuff
it's not you know in astronomy terms it's not really
coupling the back illuminated high qe cameras with the narrowband filters really really makes it a lot better and easier
because you don't have to do 10 or 20 minute exposures anymore uh with the older cameras uh to get to
get any kind of with and to knock the noise down of course you know have you experimented with narrowband
yet chocks is he still awake yeah yeah yeah yeah no
no i haven't yet um i've just been sticking with the dslr i mean i'm still at the stage where i'm just
happy that it turns up on the screen and i can get a picture and it doesn't trail um
so that i've seen a lot of people mention the narrow band stuff i still don't really know what it is um you know what
i've seen the filter wheels and things that people buy and things i've seen them all on the forums but
yeah i've not looked into that yet because at the moment i'm happy with what i've got and what i'm getting
and then i will evolve eventually but i i think i need to get the pace processing a bit as well
um so yeah sorry go on gary you know you could you can get how you show you with the dslr
it would just take you longer so where you're more bias on the green pixels and you're
only going to have one red pixel it will still image it but you'll just have to image it longer yeah the other thing to
have a look at is one of the um cordless tri-band filters they're not
all brilliant but they they do do the job yeah they do give you some different data there to play around with and
they're relatively cheap for what you're getting when you compare them to narrowband filters
themselves yeah i've been looking at filters as well um light pollution filters mainly
um again it's about figuring out which one i need well secretly there's a secret with
narrow band imaging that astronomers have discovered i think over the last couple years is that you don't
have to buy an expensive scope to do narrow band imaging no you don't no yeah that's totally true
that's the same as solar it's exactly the same thing yeah need it to do something and you don't even
need uh an apochromatic scope either you can actually use an acromat no problem yeah
you could a 300 scope will do narrow band imaging just fine you guys agree but i find narrowbands so
much easier to process as well than broadband data okay
so i'll look at because it was only when um was it wade who joined last time when he started talking about
the oi and the h.a wait i don't really know what it was um
yeah yeah 100 hour wait 106 hours yeah that's amazing um so i went and googled
what he was talking about because his images were outstanding you know um so i started to read up about what it
was um still in the investigation phase um
so because i've got a cheap scope anyway which will be fine it's not afrochromatic so you know i'm going to
tell you i'm going to tell you now it's that i know you get to look at other people's pictures so
the uh the reaction is somewhat different from person to person but it's when you take your first ha image it's like your world just
changed and you just sit there and you're in awe because it's stuff that you've never seen before in fact yeah
um scott i'm partially tempted to ship chox out a a h a filter and a monochrome
camera that i used to use just to see and have him live when we do another one of these star parties and
have his reaction live sure yeah i'll give it a go um i'll have to
do a lot of research on how to use it but yeah we'll give it a go it works just like every other camera so basically
long story short is um i have a the first generation asi 1600 um
pro but it's not the pro version um it's the previous one but it's the panasonic chip in that one and then i've
i've got uh i got a couple of spare ha filters drifting around so i'll get your information from scott or
whoever and i'll try and get that out to you at some point so you can have a go at it
oh yeah cheers that'd be really handy give me something else to play with and evolve the hobby to the next stage
yeah cheers thanks simon no probs in case you guys didn't one don't
realize i do give away a lot of my stuff because once i'm done with that i pass it on to somebody else
nice go go it's one way of keeping the house tidy
and that's an excuse to buy more new stuff too you know the funniest thing is is i i actually you know what i'm gonna lie
because i am gonna be buying another camera on monday because i have to for this um
for a transit that's happening on september 11th it's a it's a iss transit that's visible
but it's also a lunar transit at the same time so we're actually going to see the iss
coming along going through the shadow of the moon across the face of the moon for all of
0.3 of a second and then popping back out the other side so i don't know what to expect from that one
but i've got three people coming along um and i'm going to be bringing a 12 inch
dobsonian to capture this i'm going to bring my 12 inch newtonian to do this as well or the
refractor i don't know which one yet so there's going to be a lot of equipment staring at this thing and i
think people are going to think we're nuts simon can i uh can i just button here
sure just to give people watching an idea of how quick transits are i'd just like to
share a little transit um picture that i took of the sun uh the iss going over some um
a couple of months ago from here very low down not as good as your stuff at all but
it's worthwhile showing to people how totally these things
can kind of can kind of move uh right okay
are you seeing it uh you gotta share your screen first there we go there we go there we go so that
we can wait around for a long period of time and that's how quick it is in real time it's very very quick
as an event and this i was fortunate enough to be able to see from my back
garden um here uh as i said a couple of months ago sun was very very low uh this was taken
with a a lunch 60 mil uh one of the original tip tilt uh systems and this has this was taken
with a again an asi 1600 uh mono as you can see it's a bit
newton's ring in places that's the tilt tip system running but that's how quick it's over
folks um you're not talking about a very long event at all yeah yeah crazy
you got to be and it looks like you got 10 to at least 10 frames a second there
yeah well with the 1600s it was it doesn't run high at full frame rate
which was no that's true yeah that is true at all um but i wanted to get the whole sum
just to get an idea of scale uh as well yeah that's beautiful pretty cool
very cool i'm going to share an image was done by jason gunzell he calls
himself the vast reaches uh and he uses an ar 152 an explorer
scientific achromat with narrowband uh filters
uh let me see if i can get here
this image right here was a recent image that he did uh the cave nebula this has done a narrow band uh it's um
done with an acromat um an f 6.5 acromet six inch aperture this telescope
sells for under a thousand dollars but uh band imaging really just does
some amazing stuff i think it distracts your os as
well from different things you concentrate more on others in an object in narrowband
right [Music]
are you talking about me yes my neighbors it's uh it's uh it
feels like it's always cinco de mayo next door
so i'm just going to quickly show everybody a website on how to find transits because it's it's
become something popular hopefully and at least for me the more people i can
get interested in something like this it's it's another thing to do in astronomy it's not all about taking
pictures of you know pretty nebulous and stuff like that so let me just share the screen real fast
so it can be a gateway it could be a gateway into that that's another way to get people interested in the equipment
and then what they can do with it oh totally yeah and you can do this with any scope um
and a camera so to speak you know you don't have to have all this crazy fancy stuff that even i use uh because i do a lot of
high speed imaging when it comes down to the iss but so the one of the biggest websites that i use
is the iss transit finder and the way it works is you basically just type in your
location you can just do an auto detect or you can pick it from the map you choose the date and you choose the
area of the search size so we'll do the maximum size which is 240 i think
and then i can click on calculate and then it'll tell me where every single transit
is going to be within my vicinity and oddly enough there is actually one
um right here so you can see the actual transit is going to happen from where i
physically live so i'll be able to see it a lot of the times i will drive out and go and chase
these things because it's way more fun but just to give you an idea so this one's
going to be on the 30th which is a sunday so this will be a nice one to do because it's actually rated as
a four star so the higher the rating of the stars the better it will appear
but more importantly if you're interested in the physical size of the iss is it's the iss
angular size so here's the one that i was talking about on september 11th i do have to drive a little bit to to
get to this particular one so this one is i think we're driving to an area called simi valley
um which is one of the cities in california but just to give you an idea
its total duration transit duration is 0.6 of a second but that's the entire
size of the moon i won't get that we will only see a tiny sliver of where it actually exits
from which is the equivalent of 0.2 of a second
so i have to be capturing at 160 frames to even
get anything to show up because it's going to be that fast uh for the actual exposure for the
moon but more strange is this so this is another website that i also use in conjunction is heavens
above and this shows you where the iss is going to be if it's a visible past
daytime pass etc etc so again the one we're looking at is september 11th at exactly the same time roughly
six o'clock uh and this one's 82 degrees high which means it's virtually
over our heads so you can see it starts from the north west and goes
right over to the southeast and then it'll uh well i haven't set it for simi valley but you'll see that it
does intersect with the moon if i change the location but this gives you an idea of where to
be looking at and what to expect and when it's going to come along so again this website is a
heavens above and it tells you absolutely everything so i use this in conjunction with uh transit finder
that's how i knew about this particular transit not only is it visible it's also
directly above my head and it has an angular size of 60 uh 60
degrees 68 degrees or something like that which is actually bigger than venus so it's going to be a big one
and again just just to give you an uh a perspective of how big 60 degrees is let me
you mean 60 seconds sorry 60 arc seconds not 60 that'd be massive uh 60 seconds
this is an example of 60 arc seconds now here we go again i think my laptop's going to blow up
because of the heat it's also about the same size as jupiter
yes it is you have been wanting to get a new laptop anyways right simon
oh speaking of new laptop so this lap i i was doing the iss
a couple of days ago because i was trying to do a science uh something scientifically done to measure the size
of the iss as it shot through i was doing the countdown and i'm standing outside in valencia
which is just down the road for me and i think we hit 109 degrees out there
that's hot my laptop stopped right when the freaking iss showed up
so i had no recording no nothing all i saw was it go across the screen and stop and then
my laptop just went poof i was like well that was useful oh no
so yeah this is what 60 looks like so this is what i'm expecting how big it's gonna going to be as it
zips across the moon this is obviously the sun that is spectacular looks like a zipper
yeah it literally does and this is like shot in 170 frames per second
so it's fast wow go go in tight on on the iss let's see
how sharp it is it does fall apart pretty quick no look at that you can see the split between it's
amazing i mean just to give you guys an idea of what you can actually capture
when it comes down to the iss
again i have a couple of shots on my instagram page so let's go find the iss
there's one right there and that's taken with a 12-inch dobsonian
one of the most inexpensive telescopes you can possibly buy yeah beautiful
beautiful work well gentlemen and uh and lady
uh it is now 8 p.m central time here which means that it's what what
time is it in the uk it's coming up from two o'clock in the morning
okay all right so i think that we've kind of worn out our our uh astronomers a little bit although
i can keep going but uh um you know uh i want to thank i want to thank
everybody for uh participating with us um
you know all the people that watched around the world uh uh the uh
you know all of you that were able to share images with us whether they were live or
uh from images that you'd taken before uh i want to thank terry mann and the astronomical league for
uh participating in the way that they have and their continued support and you know we have we have more
ideas planned for other global star parties our next one will be next tuesday and
this will not be the last of the european edition of these star parties so i'm really looking forward to doing more
with that perhaps there's a way that we can get
children involved in one of our events and actually let them control the telescopes and make you know maybe a
class can make an image by remote control so that would be very very cool
so if you're watching and you've got uh kids at home uh maybe that's something you want to
approach us and see if we can actually pull that off you can send
your ideas to my personal email address which is just the letter s at
explorescientific.com i want to thank gary palmer grant everybody here i want to thank all
of you we want to recognize the uh uh
astronomical society of uh kosovo for uh all their great work and sahil thank you very much for all
that you're doing thanks for joining us um and uh we are going to
uh close and uh we'll be back with more so um let's uh
let's go ahead and uh and end our program uh i don't have a song i can
sing but uh maybe next time thank you very much
thanks scott yes
guys
what kind young scott looks in that picture oh my god that scott holy crowd
[Music]
[Music]
what oh no it's the pirate ship explorer scientific coming to get us
and that's it folks thank you good night goodnight everyone