Transcript:
thank you scott and there we go so david you said you
are getting some rain in arizona oh yeah we had some a couple of days ago quite a bit
and we're expecting to get some later this weekend and pretty much all through next week
what about the fires has it helped with the fires any oh it certainly has held with the fires
in uh southern arizona and in fact right now there's some very serious cloud buildups
cumulonimbus buildups i can see right outside yeah so we're getting much
needed badly needed rain right now well i bet
errol how hot did you say it was there today because it'll probably be here tomorrow it was 98 in the car about an hour ago
yeah gosh yeah yeah we'd be glad to share that if we
get something better behind it if you get any good weather give me a call i know it'll be headed my way
clear skies would be much preferred i agree it's kind of partly cloudy here today
kind of getting ready for the rain looks like
there's chuck here he is where are you guys welcome thank you
hi chuck good to see you hey david how are you doing pretty good i'm doing all right
you're going to tell us how to forecast all the weather right i am meteorologist
we need all the help we can get that's exactly right how many here have a sky
quality meter i do i do
carol you're the only one i gotta get one and be in the cool kids club i guess i'm going to have to do that yep
actually i'll borrow from scott krantz okay though what do you guys need to borrow
from me you can do that too
you know it's been so long since i've been anywhere i really hadn't thought because i usually pack it and take it with me wherever i go
uh to check the skies and it's been so long since i've been anywhere um i forgot about even taking that yeah
does that just generally check sky conditions light pollution measures uh magnitude per square arc
second for the sky uh it's logarithmic so there's a world
of difference between 21.5 and 22. but
21.5 is roughly portal 2 maybe low 2 and
my site ranges from maybe 21.20 to
21.45 not ideal but
adequate well michael you might be interested in knowing that nashville bridge
21.5 okay
excellent are you headed out that way hopefully we are soon as a club uh
john's working on setting that up for later in the year when uh the the nights get a little longer i think but that would be some
some great conditions for viewing and imaging oh yeah definitely
michael what's the name of that site uh the one the one that john just
mentioned was uh is it natural bridge in rock ridge county natural bridge
state park in virginia there's one in kentucky too i think but no this is the one in
virginia and it was privately owned since the time of uh
what's that guy thomas jefferson wow i really own until about six seven
years ago when they when that current owner was getting up there in years and he wanted
to do something for the uh community for the state so they
he offered to sell it as a as a national park as a state park and as a result this place has very
little light [Music] in fact at the main observing spot when
you look out over the the vista there aren't there are no lights
so the nearest lights you're really going to see are many many miles away it's a good place about how far is it
from my uh uh populated area well from from my house it's about
uh 52 minutes but that's not bad at all yeah from roanoke it's uh time-wise i
guess it's uh 40 minutes maybe i don't know
a normal day at work is very different day to day because you never know what's going to happen
it could be anything from planning an outreach event or you have meetings all day long where
you're planning for an upcoming event things change all the time but we're always planning for the next event we're
always planning for the next activity my name is stephanie clark and i am the
outreach coordinator for the hubble space telescope i've always loved science i have a
degree in kinesiology which is exercise science i've always loved earth science in particular biology and just how things
work i've always found that really fascinating so i wanted to pursue a career in science and
i've always loved working with people i've wanted to work with children my whole life this job gives me the
ability to do that and talk to kids about science and space and it's just really amazing when you
you see that a kid learns something new you can kind of see it in their face and their face kind of lights up and they're kind of like wow
that's really cool again this is really cool [Music]
my number one responsibility is planning and coordinating outreach events coming up with new materials that are
interesting for people to engage with when we're at these outreach events
to giving teachers the tools that they need to spread along the word for us
that's a part of it too is you know provide the materials that they can use to inspire creativity and inspire wonder
[Music] my favorite image is star cluster
westerland 2. i just think it's absolutely beautiful the colors and
seeing all the stars is just amazing [Music]
the thing about working on a project like hubble's it's the reason why you
you know what you know about space this is amazing this stuff is going to be in textbooks the stuff that hubble's
providing and this is going to be impact on the world forever and then you kind of realize hey my kids are going to be learning
about this one day and i'm a part of it it's it's an amazing feeling but when you take a step back and you talk
to other people and you you know you go to events and you talk to kids and you see how you know they want to be an astronaut or
they want to be a scientist and they want to use hubble for a certain thing that it's just amazing that's to me that's the that's the best
[Music]
part
well hello everybody this is scott roberts from explore scientific and the explore alliance and it is my distinct pleasure to
introduce the executives of the astronomical league that are live with us today on
astronomical or the astronomical league live number eight and uh terry mann puts together these
programs uh and so i will turn this program over to her but you know i was
just thinking about terry and all the time that she has spent under the stars all the time that she's devoted to
the astronomical community at large you know she has she has been the face
of the league for a while but she has also been someone that has been behind the scenes a lot and um
she's ever present and i think that i'm grateful that uh she has she has devoted all of her
energy and time to encouraging amateur astronomers around the world to get involved
and to go to the next level with the astronomical league so i'm going to turn this over to you terry thank you
very much thank you scott and thank you everyone for being here we have got
a great program tonight so david how about if we start off with you david
levy and thank you so much for being here again we really do appreciate it
well thank you terry and scott it's my it is my pleasure to be here i've been a
part of the astronomical league for many years i think it is an absolutely first-rate
organization and i like it particularly when they work with the royal astronomical society
of canada so we're really all rascals when we do that i think
anyway i i always begin these um sessions with a little what i think is
an appropriate poetic quote and uh i have to admit that i am not a
happy person today i learned only yesterday that my godson
the son of a very close friend of mine christopher scotty passed away yesterday
very suddenly very suddenly from a liver failure
and so in his memory i'm going to read you sevilla martin's poem
written in 1905 which i revised in 2014 my eye is on the sky whenever i am
tempted whenever clouds arise when songs give place to cyan
and when hope within me dies i draw closer to the sky from care it sets me free my eye is on
the sky and i know it watches me my eye is on the sky
and i know it watches me thank you back to you jerry thank you
thank you david i'm sorry to hear about your friend that's that's too bad yeah
and thank you that is such a beautiful piece of poetry there um so how about if we check with carol
and we will let carol ask carol to do an update on everything that needs updated thank you terry and
david that was beautiful i always enjoy your poetry y'all was looking the last few days at
the proofs for uh reflector articles various reflector articles including the observing awards
and it became very apparent that there is still a lot of observing going on out there
even through all this pandemic individually people are out there our members are out there still looking at
the sky which is so encouraging maybe our uh outreach uh events are down
and they're down considerably almost non-existent but individual observing is still there people are doing that throughout the
whole pandemic so that's very refreshing another thing that i'd like to talk about is the uh
and i think chuck and kerry may say more or less i'll just generally say it i won't steal any ammunition here
but uh 2021 virtual is coming up very soon outcome virtual and
if you had uh talked to us a year or so ago and says why don't you do a non a convention
online if you're not able to do it in person and see what happens i said well yeah but how would we do
something like that well the answers are of several members of the team on this program today terry chuck scott
john everybody has really been active in making this all happen and it is just incredible the generosity
of our member clubs we're now up to i think 7 600 and counting as far as door prizes
when we uh asked for volunteers at the executive league level uh of who
might be interested in heading that up uh terry and chuck both enthusiastically jumped in and says
we'll take a shot at it and they've really done a fabulous job there are in fact we almost have a
problem we've had so many donations uh we're wanting to make sure we have enough time for our speakers but
it's a good problem to have so it'll work all right the one thing that was sort of also brought home to me
within the last couple of weeks is that yes we're moving out of the pandemic but we're not quite there yet
uh i had a cousin uh second cousin uh just within the last week who passed
from kovalev so that really brought it home that yeah we are we're getting close but we're just not there yet
so yeah we can do that you know we we've uh we can get out there and uh follow cdc guns and
uh it's just being smart if we're in some groups that we're not used to we don't know people have been
vaccinated we always put a mask on and i know that has some discussions but we can put the mask on and really
protect ourselves another stroke so just a word of caution there the
other thing is um we will be uh looking more uh at future alcons
coming up at our council meeting in a week from now on the 17th right now of course we've
got albuquerque in 2022 and we'll have other
presentations for 23 24 and 25 so it's a good problem we've got them um scheduled that for our
events and i think that's the extent of my comments for right now
uh terry back to you okay thank you carol i appreciate that we actually we do we
have a lot of things going on right now a lot of different things that we're looking at and
scheduling and getting ready for and it's actually amazing and i am seeing more star parties coming back
live it looks like august september i'm seeing more and more coming back which is really encouraging
because i'm sure i'm like everybody else we're kind of ready to get out there again under the stars some
but cautiously as you said you know so i'm looking forward to that and i'm definitely looking forward to
alcon alcon in albuquerque it'll be nice to be able to actually see everybody again
it's been a while that group has been so patient they've stayed with us for three years so we're very appreciative of that very much yeah
and got a great program so i am really looking forward to albuquerque too
so all right how about john goss would you like to go ahead you've got
something really cool to talk about that i'm looking forward to so john i'll let you take it away
um thank you thank you terry before we start on that i'd like to talk about uh a couple other
things really quickly and i may be jumping ahead to maybe what chuck is going to say
i just want to briefly mention the 75th anniversary of the astronomical league and there's a lot to say about it but
really what i i'd like to say is that we have a pen a pelvis right here
which uh very nice you will all be seeing more of this as time goes on everybody on the screen i see will be
seeing more of this pin so uh keep your eyes peeled
okay i have something else uh well i must get get get right into it you
know uh this year
uh here i'm talking about the fifth anniversary of the league but this month is the fifth anniversary of something
really special as well and i'm afraid it is something that we just forget completely about
but it is actually a next very fantastic thing in our lives 50 years ago at the end of
this month was the moon landing of apollo 15. i i i'm and i'm kind of sorry to say
that much like it was back then by the time they got up to number 15 uh a lot of the public just
kind of you know what wasn't too interested in it anymore they weren't nearly as excited as for apollo 11 and
the others um but 15 was a a pretty cool pretty cool mission by itself let me see i
i got something to share here i think
let's see if i can do this
okay good
i'd like to start out uh by talking a little bit about apollo 15 uh 50 years ago at the
end of this month you know it was it and the uh
hadley ridge area near uh mount mons hudley in the apenny mountains you
might remember hearing about the uh hadley reel it was the first mission of the uh lunar
rover that was a big a big thing but where a lot of us might remember the
mission was the physics the elementary physics demonstration given by one of the astronauts
which he whipped out a falcon feather falcon was the the nickname of the spacecraft whipped
out a falcon feather and had a trusty hammer held them up
in the vacuum and dropped them both onto the lunar surface and just as predict as physics predict
they both fell at the same rate and hit at the same time on the surface that was a great demonstration which i
think is still available today certainly on on youtube somewhere but it's something to keep in mind that
this mission uh provided us some pretty not just entertainment but some interesting science as well
because they collected a lot of rocks and three excursions um at the eastern edge of uh mayor embryo
and so there was a lot of geology that they could do and help figure out more about the moon enough about that
but keep that in mind
in late 2018 i was uh developing a series of questions 300 trivia questions for the moon and uh
one of them um one general topic was about how how large the moon really is there are many different ways
of figuring this out or asking it one way is by a comparative analysis
i happen to come across a statistic saying that murray christine
was about the same size as the state of of new mexico well okay you look at the moon and look at mario
krasin you think it no way is in any shape or form like new mexico
it's a kind of oblong kind of squashed north to south and uh it just doesn't just doesn't fit
well i started thinking about that and it occurred to me well the reason is for is because of a lunar foreshortening of the disc
that uh it played a played a very very big big role in this um so what what is foreshortening and
that's really what this this talk is going to be going to be about lunar foreshortening foreshortening is um
it occurs because the moon is really a sphere it's not a disk even though in our sky we think it's a disk or it sure looks
like one but the closer you get to to the limb that is the edge of the disc the lunar surface
curves away from you and the closer you get to the edge the faster it curves away from you so if
you're like 70 degrees from the center of the lunar disc off to one side uh it curves away about
twice as much excuse me about three times as much as you move along the disc so it curves away quite quite rapidly
which accounts for this lunar for foreshortening um i'm gonna bring up
some high school trigonometry
now maybe it won't it'll it'll be a minute when i do that so i have a hit an image
here that i took in my uh my iphone of the moon through the telescope
okay so i cropped the uh mari carcium out blew it up a little bit so you could see
it and and measured the aspect ratio physical size of it
then i stretched it now you might remember back from high
school [Music] they may have mentioned something called
a seek and i remember because i was thinking there's no way i'm ever going to use this
secant it's really just an inverse cosine of the angle so who's going to use secant well this is one instance it comes in pretty handy
uh the the secant of the distance and in degrees from the center of a disc are from a sphere measures the amount of
stretch that's required to uh correct for the lunar foreshortening so can i interrupt you for just a minute
are you sharing your screen am i i am sharing my screen yes i don't
see it i do oh i don't have it okay yeah i see it i can see it yeah
it's broadcasting okay for some reason it's not showing up online
okay okay if everybody else sees it that's okay i just i can't see anything but you
just get it fixed before august terry
this is a practice run yeah i just hate it when that happens don't don't you how awkward
but anyway i'll try to describe it then what what we're looking at we're looking at that cropped image
of mari carcium stretched about one and a half to three to three times uh its
width ratio okay big deal well take a look at the lunar
reconnaissance orbiter picture of mario kryceum when it's pretty much directly overhead of that
of that sea you can see the images look pretty pretty much alike so when you do
some stretching on the computer you can get it you can gain an idea of what the moon really looks like in a 3d perspective
just to complete this uh i took the lunar reconnaissance orbiter image and then scrunched it down compressed it
uh two and a half three times so it now reasonable number five there resembles uh what we would see through a
telescope so these are the steps i'm not going to
go through this but these these are the steps one two three four five getting the original image cropping it stretching it comparing it
and then compressing it again so it's kind of a full circle and it really does
does does work like this to show you what's on the lunar edge i can do the same thing on the western edge of the moon
uh with the crater grimaldi but i'm not going to go over that because it's the same same operation but it's uh could be time
consuming if i go through all this so this led me into something else
i was reading a little bit about the history of uh manned exploration of the moon well
really back in the early 1960s before anyone had had been there nasa was
trying to get a handle on what the moon really looks like so there was a um an experiment done by
a person whose name i think was william hartman who took a ball a bit a large sphere
and projected a very high resolution image of the moon onto that sphere then he could walk
around to the side of that sphere and see what's kind of right on the edge and he i won't say he discovered
but he uh helped uncover the mystery of marie oriental which is on the side of the moon
something that people couldn't see and i'll get to that again in just just a moment
so we're going to talk about something completely different now as michael can say because he was at
the club meeting when we did this this makes for a really cool a really great in-person inventory
at a club meeting since we're going to start meeting again i hope with clubs maybe in august
september october this might be something to try out because it's it's completely different what you need
is a 12-inch ball about i tried it with a nine inch too small an
18-inch ball it's it's pretty pretty large to do with that so like a 12-inch beach ball
and what you should do is paint it with primer then you paint it with ceiling light
so you have a nice light ball then you get a computer projector which is you
can see in the pictures the thing that down below i didn't have one so i had to go to our local library and borrow there
so most of this is what you're going to see is taken at the library and while i was doing this i attracted
quite a bit of attention from the library patrons so i had a room of people watching me do this so i was on the spot
and worried i was going to goof up which of course i did but anyway so what you want to do is
position the ball and the projector exactly precisely so that we can project an
image onto that ball and what happens when when you turn out the lights and project an image
that needs the ball and
you can project an image of the moon right on it now this is if you haven't seen this before it's
it's pretty stunning because cool i i'm right there and i'm within two
feet of this ball and it sure looks like i'm within two feet of the moon or you know orbiting around it at just a
few thousand miles above it it is it is pretty strange to see
point out just a few features on the moon which a lot of you know already there's your marie cristian over there
on the right hand side on the far eastern edge um crater plato up towards the northern
end copernicus kind of towards the center grimaldi which i mentioned a few minutes ago off on the
uh western side and then tycho which is a lot of people's favorite crater is down towards
the southern edge so what you can do you have this ball it's it's you don't really have the moon
in front of you it's just a beach ball and you can go up to it and sit down
and look up towards tyco get a picture of that and you can see what tycho would look
like from an observer orbiting the moon in the far southern portion of the moon
um if you look on on this picture you notice that tycho is elongated slightly east to west or left to right
well when you're directly above it it's round and again that's the lunar fourth chord
uh so you get a completely different perspective of the moon a different view
you do the same thing uh on the north side with a crater plato uh from our point of view on earth when
we look at it through telescope it is again elongated uh left to right or east to west
but really it's round and that's simply because of lunar 4 shortening
now what was really cool it was really surprising and i think i can get a lot more work
out of this if i play around with this some more but i want to show you what happens when
you have a movie of the moon rotating so you're standing there as i said two
feet away from this thing and it really looks like the moon is rotating there you have uh the far side of the
moon um coming up to the right the center
the round dark area is maurice mythy i'm not sure that's how i pronounce it very smartly and just to
its upper left is marie cricium again it's uh no foreshortening there you can see it
really is kind of elongated east to west and then the rest of the moon comes
around i swear you're sitting there thinking i'm orbiting the moon it's right smack
in front of me uh if you're having this for a demonstration this would be a good
time to invite all the people in the club to get up you know how it is you're at your club
meeting people sit in their chair and they stay there for 60 minutes well this makes them get
up out of that chair and walk around to see the different sides of the ball of the moon
and uh it gives an interesting effect for instance uh to show you i'm
driving home more about this lunar foreshortening there is more carcinoma on the far eastern edge of the moon
and i'm standing there with my camera really only about two or three feet away from it and i i walk around it
so there you can see the terminator on the moon as well there's another that's the elongated
shape of mario krysten now you can continue this on the other side but i don't want to get too too repetitive here
pretty strange stuff i don't remember what this was on let me
find out oh okay we have the rotating moon again
and this is the one which i'm walking around while it's rotating
yeah there's me in front of the cam the projector so of course there's the white ball there is no moon there
and then they're out off to the sides first projecting on it again and again there's more chryseum right
smack in the center no no foreshortening at all it really looks like that you're standing two feet away from it
looking down at this thing it is strange
okay as i said when i was filming this at the library there were a bunch of people there
watching me and uh you know i'm nervous and i'm filming this and my elbow hits the ball
so it goes i i destroyed the moon it was flying off bouncing on the
floor an idiot you know kind of put it back try to get everything lined up again
redo it you know we had some good snickers in there but i think they were they were suitably impressed with this so just just review
on what we have said we'll talk about the three three dimensional moon this is makes for a great meeting
demonstration uh it's something that your your club members will
find completely unexpected all you do is you need a white ball about 12 inches in diameter they're
pretty easy to find this time of year a beach ball paint it and white i need a stand for the ball so you got something to rest it
on computer projector which are pretty common these days and then uh download a movie uh probably
from nasa of the rotating moon or whatever uh just to tell you something else about this i did try this with a rotating
image movie of mars it's uh it doesn't look nearly as dramatic as
the moon i guess the contrast differences mars just kind of the big oranges red rotating thing yeah
it doesn't have the the mari that that the moon does but the critical thing is you got to
have the precise alignment with the projector in the ball or otherwise you'll get some weird shadows on it and it'll look kind of funny but this
helps helps you view the effect of foreshortening
i have time here one more thing okay let's go back to grimaldi
and uh mari oriental just just wanted to tell you a little bit about this as well as i've said
in the early 1960s um people did this projecting it on a ball and they could walk over and see marie
oriental kind of not really but they could tell that there really was something there
here's here's my lame photograph of the deal here got grimaldi there and you can kind of
see the ripply rough areas of mari or intel right on the edge
okay this is what we this is what i see
well on our spinning ball there we have grammar there and right center is mario
oriental and you can see the uh the round nature of the basin and the concentric green
rings of the uh the mountains uh caused from the impact um this is an interest
say this is an interesting feature on the moon actually it is probably the most interesting feature on the moon
that if marion oriental was was placed directly in the center of the near side of the moon
it would be the most dramatic object on it and one of the most talked about in the solar system so we would definitely see it um
set up something to keep in mind here then there's the lunar reconnaissance orbiter picture
same thing grimaldi there and then you've got the round uh basin of the uh mari and
so now we know what it looks like with that i'd like to uh stop my share
but one more thing
that's the star of the show right there yeah a lot of people wanted to know how this
was exactly done i'm not kidding when i say it's a beach ball in fact if you look closely you can
see the little striations in it and uh it's just a primary ceiling light on it a couple couple of coats
that's all it is put it on a stand hit it with your elbow and you'll
destroy the moon that's it that that makes for a really interesting thought-provoking club presentation
because it starts to get you thinking about what you're really looking at when you're looking for your telescope you're not looking at a disc
you're really looking at a sphere um and that's how your view is affected
on that note any questions how when you you're projecting the image
is it just a standard projector of just a standard image of the moon
yeah well what i i wanted to get a fairly high resolution image of the moon so it would look nice
but i just went to the nasa snot nasa's night the nasa site and stooped around and and
found a nice image of the full moon uh what i i didn't show tonight was looking uh
doing the same thing but like only projecting uh a first quarter moon on
or um you know a crescent moon or something uh to see how how that would look that's
pretty dramatic as well as long as you have something that has a fairly high contrast image
lunar highlands are pretty white light and the mario are pretty dark so you can get some some good contrast that way
so there's yeah yeah okay well that that's what i have and i
hope you'll all try something like this it's thought-provoking that's amazing
john thank you i'm sure we're going to have more questions about that have you got
something on the league facebook page about this [Music]
there needs to be something on the league facebook page well i i certainly could in fact uh well you saw i have uh you know four or
five movies i could surprise another and put her on youtube and put it on facebook
yeah that that might make a nice youtube presentation i mean if you wanted to get into more detail about it because i think a lot of
people would probably probably be interested in using that as a demonstration i know i would be um that's amazing
yeah i i i i'm kind of speechless when i do it uh because like i said you're only two
feet away from the spinning moon well being underneath it shooting up to
tycho i mean that that makes you think so yes please put something together
kind of detailed maybe on the league website on facebook or the league facebook page and that way
people can access it if they have questions they can come in on the league facebook page and ask questions if you know but i
think that's an amazing outreach project can you imagine at a star party before it's dark
or inside a building and darken the room especially if it's a night when the moon is out
well i said it it also gets people out of their chairs because they have to go out and you want
to really appreciate this thing get up right to it as opposed to you know sitting 20 feet back to the
room you got to come right up to two feet away and it's impressive
when john presented this at our club meeting i think two or three years ago i had some of my students that were just randomly visiting that night
and the first thing they wanted to do after the presentation was run up and just stand next to it and and you don't always get that with
every presentation like it's a very interactive thing very handsome yeah
they they just loved it i bet well that's amazing john thank you so
much i look forward to seeing that on the league facebook page and
something we can print out and work with a little bit so thank you so much
all right chuck allen you about ready to go i think so okay well i will let you take
over okay i'm going to go ahead and share screen here for a moment if i may okay
looks kind of dark right now doesn't it okay here we go um i set up my telescopes
at a place called patoka lake um it is on a peninsula
about 65 vertical feet above the lake next to a pavilion that's never used in
a field that is always mowed and has four great horizons it couldn't be a more perfect place it's in the middle of
a hoosier national forest and i go in all conditions such as cold conditions for example this was the
end of a night uh in which i observed for 10 hours and it was -2 degrees at the low point
during the night but it was actually a very productive night this was after i'd already
shut down the telescope and had put one of the tables away before leaving in the morning those who
know me know i do a lot of visual observing i used to do a lot of astrophotography back in the 80s and 90s
but i got hooked on these observing programs for the league and so i've been going up
there a great deal and i'm leading up to something that has to do with weather here that's what we're going to be
talking about this is the number of all-nighters i've pulled at patoka lake
in the last three years 74. the problem however is that patoka lake this
observing site is 72 miles from my home so it's not a trip i want
to make unless i'm sure it's going to be clear when i get there that's a very critical element here
among the things that i need to know before i make that trip are first of all is it going to be
cloudy is it go or no go secondly what kind of transparency am i going to have
am i going to have any high thin clouds am i going to have haze am i going to have smoke from forest fire somewhere i need to
know all of that i'd like to know what the seeing conditions are like a lot of the galaxies that i
hunt for it really isn't that critical but some of the other observing i do it is critical uh
dew and frost am i going to have to have the heaters on high as i start out or can i start at the low
setting and work up to it you want to stay ahead of doing frost those if you've had trouble with this on
your secondary mirror on your corrector plate or on a refractor objective lens know that you fall behind
in this fight and it's hard to catch up again temperature is also important
i always tell people to dress for alaska even on the hottest summer days when you go observing
because the temperature can drop drop like a rock at night so the question is how do i make these
predictions about when to go and save myself
a needless 144 mile round trip i used two services one's called clear
sky chart that many of you are familiar with and the other is called spot weather or spot wx
is the abbreviation it uses if you combine the information from these two models
you're almost guaranteed to have the weather you're expecting when you get to your site
and we're going to look at both of these tonight and so just to give you an idea of those 74
all-nighters that i pulled at patoka lake that was out of 76 trips uh
two of the trips got ruined one by fog that i couldn't have anticipated very easily and the second was
affected by an odd band of high clouds that came in that were not projected but the
success rate and using these two sites uh in predicting whether i should go to patoka on a given night
is running about 97 to 98 percent it's that effective this is one evening as i left the house
to go observing at patoka it was pouring rain by the time i got to patoka it was bone clear it was a
beautiful night all night long and i did this in reliance on these models so let's take a look at these weather
models and see what they have to offer here i'm going to shut that down now and go
first of all to the clear sky chart
and here you see it many of you who are have been around amateur astronomy for a
while are very familiar with this it is a chart that provides information about cloud cover transparency seeing
and other conditions at a given number of sites now it's run by attila danko and
alan rahil from the canadian meteorological center is the one who created the forecast
models that are used in this if you scroll down here you'll see a list of provinces and states
and you can for example i can go to indiana where i observe click on a
map right here and a map of indiana comes up
now right here is the patoka lake observing sites okay so i can click on that and get
information and we'll look at this in a little bit if you live in an area where there is no
site maybe there's a large area only indiana is marked here so
there are plenty of sites in ohio and illinois as well but if you live in an area where there's no marked site you can apply
to mr danko for a site may i get my own chart it's at the
bottom of the home page you can go down here and just email him give him longitude and latitude give him
the name of the site you want and he will plug in a new site for your observatory i have friends who do this even for
their backyards you can call it your home observatory or whatever you want
and it's very effective so let's look at a couple of examples of how this might
work i'm going to pick one in maine these are i'm going to go to the map of
maine right now we're going to go to eustis ridge which is right here
and you click on that little marker there and then you click on the little link right here
and the clear sky chart for eustis ridge comes up
now this shows a roughly two and a half to three days period of time and it provides
local time uh across the board here these are all local times for
eustace ridge so this time right here for example is 5 a.m on sunday july 11th
you can uh let's take saturday night for example if i under cloud cover if i put my cursor
right here at 11 o'clock you'll notice the little white pop-up says oh 10
covered so i've got some cloud problems at midnight ten percent covered at midnight and then
at one am it's clear so i know that from 1am until dawn i'm gonna have clear skies
the transparency marked here however is not as perfect it is marked as average
there's above average and then transparent transparent would be very dark like this blue
color right up here there is a legend down here for cloud cover transparency
and seeing we'll tell you what the color codes mean okay yes i like to say something i i don't
know if anybody else is having problems but i can't see your screen share or it's uh
it's frozen i don't know several slides going it hasn't changed
is that yeah when he went to the map i have i thought it was me again um when he went to the map i lost
uh i lost it it might be selected to just be sharing the powerpoint presentation and then when he went out
of it it might have stayed and okay so just go just stop sharing uh chuck and then go back and share all
right hold on that should fix it all right let's just close that
now i can't get back to full screen
i just love cause causing problems i'm glad you said something here
hmm something's frozen here
chuck if you want to i'm going to stop share there we go okay now i'm going to reshare screen
okay can you see my lap my desktop see you guys okay all right let's try
this again sorry about that folks we're going to go to clear scott chart
tell me if you can see the clear sky chart home page okay yeah it looks good yes all right
thank you for calling that to our attention john we might have gone too far here without it okay i'm going to go
you see a map of maine now yes okay i'm going to click on eustis
ridge and do you see the eustis ridge observatory yes chart okay here again we're looking at
saturday night if you can see my cursor right here we're looking at i'm hovering over the little block under
cloud cover at midnight and it says ten percent covered in the little white pop-up right
underneath that at one o'clock it says clear two o'clock clear so i know i'm going to have clear skies
during this period right here in the morning the transparency is listed as average
that's not good news it's not bad it's just not above average or fully transparent like we'd like it
seeing conditions are good that's excellent especially if you're doing double star or multiple star work that kind of thing
there's a smoke line here that it provides information about forest fire smoke and we'll look at that in just a
minute and again the legend for cloud cover transparency and seeing is
down at the bottom of the page down at the bottom of every page no matter what observatory you pick
now i'm going to back up
a couple of pages here and go to a different site in nebraska
okay i'm just picking these at random and here's a place called starlight
ridge observatory i click on the pin and then i click on the link right here and the
the chart for starlight ridge observatory comes up now maybe i'm trying to anticipate when i'm going to be able to observe
next it must be obvious that that's going to be sunday night sunday night's looking really good here
now i can click if i want to see just how clear it's going to be i can not only hover over 12 o'clock
on the morning monday morning where it says clear in the pop-up i can also click on it
and when i click on it a map comes up that actually shows the cloud cover chart for that whole region of the
country and i can actuate the image down activate the image animate excuse me the
image down here with this link and now i can hit this button and it
will show the movement of clouds here's the observatory location i can see according to the time up in
the left-hand corner when clouds will be coming in and when they will be leaving the area i can also stop it and
advance the image one hour at a time if i'm interested at a particular time
maybe let's say seven hours ut on july 11th i can see i'm
going to be right at the edge of a cloud bank that might be leaving the area nope it's coming in so i've got troubles you can also
amazingly with this site you can also click on the little block for transparency and it will actually
give you a transparency map that's also animated if you wish it to be now there's the
location of this observatory it's in a dark area which means very transparent and
you can animate it to see again the observatory is located right here in northern nebraska
and you can animate it hour by hour to see when areas of bad transparency are coming in
and you can do the same thing with seeing conditions although i do that less often you can click on
this block here and get a map that will actually show you seeing conditions across the country it's a little bit a hard map but you see
the seeing conditions in the middle of the planes right here are pretty good at this particular time
that's listed up here and again you can animate that and change the time hour by hour as you need to
now we've decided we're going to observe on sunday night everything looks great no cloud cover
transparent seeing conditions are good but we've got a problem down here look at the smoke we've got a problem
right here if i hover over this bar here it says 5 micrograms per cubic meter
of of fire smoke coming from forest fires now i can click on this it may not work
but i'll show you what what you do if it does i'm going to click on this and it did work this shows here's the
observatory under this cross right here and it's in an area of fire smoke coming from western ontario
and so i i'm now concerned that this is going to affect my transparency and
trust me it does uh this is the kind of stuff that makes your daytime sky look
kind of milky white and it certainly cuts your transparency during the night
and so once again you can advance this hour by hour here's here's my observatory in nebraska
if i'm from that place and you can see when the smoke is moving out and when it's
moving back into nebraska boom there it is coming in from forest fires in idaho uh
very useful there so now i have to make a decision whether i'm going to observe on this night because of the smoke
problem it's pretty it's moderately bad at this point so that's something to consider
so you make your decisions on observing using the clear sky chart but i always like
before i make that 72 mile trip i like to back it up with a second
opportunity a second opinion if you will so i go to a source called spot weather
or spot wx and this is what spot wx looks like
now i can type in the location any location i want or i can just zoom in
and pop my cursor anywhere i want i when i go to patoka i
type in the name of a little village called wycliffe it's very near wycliffe indiana which is very near
where i observe less than two miles away and this allows me then to go down below
to a series of models that provide forecasts for periods i use four of
these models i use the 18-hour forecast that i've highlighted here the 21-hour forecast
here the 3.5 day forecast here and the 10-day forecast located here now sunday night for
starlight nebraska let's let's see if let's suppose smoke was not a problem and it looks like it's
going to be clear starlight nebraska is roughly right here so now i can look at my three day 3.5
day forecast and it will pop up this chart and lo and behold look at sunday night right here looks
clear no cloud cover zero clouds from about six or seven p.m
right in the middle of the chart here to the right i can then go up here and click
on let's say midnight or 1am in this case and i can see temperature in centigrade maybe
the dew point in and if i don't like that i can go up here to the right and change units i can change celsius to fahrenheit
i can change wind to miles per hour precipitation to inches save that
go back to the chart and look at sunday night now i see the temperature at 1 am is going to be 67 degrees
fahrenheit the dew point 51. that's a 16 point 16 degree difference which means
very low humidity i'm not going to have dew problems on this particular night that's good news
am i going to have wind problems not at all i come down here find out the wind's going to be two miles per hour with gusts of two miles
an hour that's virtually zero breeze this is full of confirmation that i
should go ahead with my observation provided that the smoke is not an issue which
unfortunately it is now i looked the other day to see what my july was going to look
like and to do that i wanted to see what the next little period of time is 10 days so i use the
10 day forecast for wickliffe indiana highlights wickliffe i click on 10 day
forecast and it's just awful rain
rain rain rain rain the entire rest of the lunar cycle so i'm out of business uh for the july cycle from this point on
the 10 day obviously is not as accurate as the 3.5 day the 3.5 day is really good if you're anticipating
maybe on wednesday or thursday am i going to be able to observe this weekend and then when you get to the morning of
the observation you use that 18 or 21 hour forecast to get a really accurate
indication of whether to go forward if both spot wx and and clear scott chart agree
you're probably in great shape for your observation that night these models are terrifically accurate
uh it's shockingly so and again the only surprises i've had were
very rare over those 76 trips that i've made up to patoka in that time so that's it
i will stop share and if there are any questions i'd be happy
to answer them ah let's see
no but i think probably everybody's writing down that website spot wax
that is really amazing and and a lot of us amateur astronomers knew about clear sky
clock that i'm putting that spot wx website up
there um and attila danko is uh gosh what a what an amazing
uh guy he is for you know he's had this up for maybe i
think maybe going on 20 years something like that yeah and uh many amateur astronomers swear by
it that's for sure and i've never heard anybody swear at it
so there you go well weather is notoriously unpredictable but
with these satellite models seeing the patterns uh these computer models are have really
gotten it to a point where if i'm going to go out and have an activity outdoors whether it's observing or not
if i'm worried about whether there's going to be freezing rain these charts are fantastic spot wx
will give you rainfall totals for your area by the hour i'll tell you about freezing rain snow
accumulations at what time during the day so it's a great predictor if you've got to drive somewhere or make some plans for outdoor
activities as well right all right well
thank you chuck sorry i didn't know i had my camera off yeah since i messed up the first time
i've been trying to text everybody and say what's going on okay um thank you my gosh that was an
amazing first hour i i have learned so much thank you all
uh why don't we take about a ten minute break scott and we're gonna come back with michael martin
okay sounds good okay thank you
c
you
c
you
john that was excellent
yeah john i have a question how big do you think he could make i mean how you could make one of those
spheres
you're muted we can't hear you
no there we go yeah uh the the problem is the brightness of
the image uh if the projector i don't know how these things are rated but
if the projector is very bright you can have a much much larger ball otherwise your image is dims down but um
that's why i was saying that the the 12-inch ball at least the one i was using uh it worked out
very well an 18 inch ball it would have been better but the image just wasn't bright
enough it was bright but it just didn't give that impact as a smaller brighter image
i didn't answer your question
but a very bright projector could do it yeah i i got a really bright one and i was
going to use it at nif last year and i think you could use a
black sheet as a screen for this thing so it would probably work great for that
for an 18. i'll have to try that absolutely
do you have a link for that particular video john um someplace yeah i can send it to you
okay thank you it's just off the nasa site somewhere another issue is that the bulge i i said
i was using a ceiling white paint uh if the ball is reflective you get a lot of glare flex right off of
it so you want to get it as dull as you can that's why the ceiling white was
was working well so you've got a ball beach ball
there's a question here uh just curious can you see or observe asteroids with the telescope what can be used what
does nasa use can it be observed like like since some are predicted absolutely
there are hundreds of asteroids within the range of small telescopes and there's a
chart a site called in i think in the sky
that will provide you with charts for uh for asteroids that are available at a
given time especially the brightest ones one of the parts of the
solar system program for the astronomical thing is to track an asteroid over maybe three to
five nights and then see how it changes against the star field and that really makes it very real for you that these are
you know uh uh separate things from the background of space in our solar system it's just
you're really just tracking a little a little a little pinpoint of a bright object but just to see it change from
night to night is pretty incredible thing
for me one of the most impressive things that i that i have actually seen was a um
an asteroid that came very close to earth so it moved across the sky very quickly
and using a telescope most astronaut astronomical objects don't change certainly not within
minutes uh but some of these close passing asteroids you can actually watch
it slowly move across your field of view as as it scoots by the earth earth and
the moon interesting to see
excellent excellent i i posted up the uh uh alpo's minor planet
uh section for people who might be interested in getting involved in maybe um
some of the you know more research level amateur research level type work on
minor planets what uh in the observing programs with the astronomical league is there
one for minor planets yes yes there is there's an asteroid program
okay great actually there are two programs you have near earth yeah near earth objects too
and it's a little a little harder i think 40 to complete that program and 100 to complete the asteroid program
right so anyways uh i will transfer this over
back over to terry but there was that little question there uh from a guy who goes by the handle of
splash so no problem thank you scott uh what i'm
gonna do i'm gonna share my screen before we go to michael i forgot to ask of the three questions for the door
prizes today so i am going to share mine
and as carol kind of spoke about earlier we will have alcon virtual coming up
there we go that is coming up in august we have got an amazing lineup of
speakers an amazing amount of door prizes um you just can't mess with this
uh there is so much going on over the three days and the clubs and the individuals have
came forward to donate door prizes and it has been amazing and we thank
everybody that has done so much that they have done so much for the door crisis and scott
you and explore scientific are right there too and we thank you very much for all your help broadcasting
for the grand door prize saturday night which will be a telescope a 20 127 millimeter mac cast telescope with a
twilight mount and that will be amazing that will be given away saturday night
um we have added we've got speakers we've got two more two or three more that will be added
we're working on bios and getting uh last minute details together but as
you can see we've got uh dr jocelyn bell burnell discoverer of pulsars
dave eicher kelly beatty alan dyer dr david levy paul cox from sleuth
and i've got the rest behind anyway we've got so many speakers and so many door prizes
please register understand when you register your email is not going to be sold we're
not going to load your mailbox with emails it is only to notify you
if you have won a door prize we have to have a way to contact you that is all registration is for this so
let me go on uh tonight is astronomical league live eight tonight's door prize is going to be a
tote uh three of the winners each one will receive a door prize and it will be
that tote that you see on the right and send your answers to secretary astro league dot org
and please answer your questions as fast as you can because tonight is different than the global star parties
um while the main speaker while michael martin is speaking i am going to be finding the winners for
the totes so please answer the questions as quickly as you can
if you watch this later it's already over with as far as the door prizes so
please just answer your quest ask answer the questions as fast as you can
and carol will be sending the winners a letter of congratulations and getting
your information of where to send the door prizes to so as i said secretary at
astroleague.org on what date was the final shuttle launch
on july 3rd sunspot ar 2838 did something we haven't seen
for four years what happened
and the last question what is the approximate dollar amount of the door prizes for alcon virtual
we've got great door prizes thanks to all of our clubs and everybody that donated
and that is it as far as the questions so i'm going to stop my share and
let me introduce michael martin the title of his talk is going to be the
joy of astrophotography and how to share it with others he has had an interest in amateur
astronomy from a young age brought upon by my faith and love of science
in my early twenties i began to get serious about the hobby by exploring the night sky
and documenting my observations through a blog in the past five years i have joined my
local astronomy club rvas and enjoyed working on several al observing programs having
recently completed the messier and solar system certificates for my day
job i'm a high school social studies teacher where i also sponsor an astronomy club for the students
beginning in 2020 i started to film and produce observing guides
product reviews and astrophotography tutorials on my youtube channel late night
astronomy when i'm not teaching about politics or studying the stars i spend as much time as i can with my
wife lauren and my daughter lily who just turned three so michael welcome and we look forward
to your talk thank you so much and you may hear that three-year-old running down the hall
uh on and off as she gets ready for bed thank you for that thank you for that
wonderful introduction um i've been a member of the astronomical league now for five or six
years and i really appreciate all that you all do through the local clubs and chapters and
nationally and internationally just to promote the hobby for others so terry when i got your email of invitation i
i really appreciated the opportunity tonight to talk a little bit about my journey through the hobby and specifically astrophotography and
sharing it with other people so thank you very much you're welcome thank you for being here
all right let me screen share here and if at any point it's looking like something isn't
presenting correctly or isn't loading correctly just please let me know um or any questions that we may have
throughout it or saving them for the end whatever you all like to do would be uh would be completely fine with me on that
so i'm about to start a new series on youtube called the joy of astrophotography and
um and pretty much just looking at how to image things in the nighttime sky
and just what i personally get out of that in terms of as you said in the introduction my my
personal faith and also just my love of science that i've had for as long as i can remember um i got
my first telescope when i was uh five years old back in 1992 for christmas not to put a date on
my age one way or the other uh i've got an eight inch dobsonian telescope now i
love visual observing um i love astrophotography and imaging and there's just so much we can do in
this hobby and obviously share it with others through a variety of ways so i got into astrophotography in 2009
and these were the first pictures i had taken of saturn and jupiter um
and i was thrilled with these i took uh a digital camera i didn't have a an
iphone yet or a smartphone so i took a digital camera held it right over the eyepiece and just
clicked snap to take a picture uh and i was just blown away that you could kind of make
out the rings of saturn kind of make out jupiter um as time has gone on i've added new
equipment i use a dslr camera now almost exclusively for all of my imaging for planetary and deep sky
and uh over the years those images have turned into these images um
so i think it's really good regardless of what you do in the hobby just to
to keep logs or documentation of what it is you've observed and what it is you've imaged just so you
can go back and see how far you've come over 5 years 10 years 15 years or more in the hobby
the picture you can maybe make out in the middle there was the first shot i ever took of the orion nebula with
again just kind of a a point-and-shoot digital camera not on a tracking mount just on a tripod
and i could make out a little bit of blurry detail in the middle and i was thrilled with that
and then this is an image that i took of the orion nebula with some newer equipment uh about four months ago so just kind of
to start off with where i was roughly 10 11 12 years ago to where i am today talking
through for you all how i got to where i am now from the starting point that i had
uh roughly 10 or so years ago so um i think the best place to start
for anyone in terms of imaging the nighttime sky is to start with uh the moon and planets and the
beautiful thing about that is you do not need too much expensive equipment to do that
go outside with a point-and-shoot camera with a cell phone and take a picture of a crescent moon
right after sunset take a picture of venus which is the brightest object uh in the western part of the sky right
now and it's just beautiful uh right after sunset just take those pictures start with what you
have don't feel like you have to jump into the deep end with thousands of dollars of equipment
to start to explore the nighttime sky begin with what you have and have that be the starting point
for what may come down the road for me the telescope and the cell phone
was when i first started to get a little more seriously into astrophotography uh just
using whichever iphone i had at the time i think this was the iphone 10 that i
was using the image here i bought a 20 camera adapter just to kind of perfectly put it over the eyepiece that
i had just to really show what i would see through the eyepiece now you're not
going to be able to make out many deep sky objects or hardly any at all with this type
of imaging but the moon and planets is going to be some remarkable things that you can
photo uh image and record to share with others so just take pictures just take a video
and just keep working at it with what you have uh even if you don't have a telescope
but especially if you have a telescope to getting closer on these solar system objects and the incredible thing about
um what we're able to use today is it's a fairly standard thing on most newer
smartphones to have 4k and even 8k video recording capabilities on some of these
cameras and even at higher frame rates of 60 120 some of them can even do 240
at full hd and if you get a little deeper into image processing that's a really cool thing but even just
posting it online at that resolution can be a really neat thing to do as well using the techniques that i just
showed right there as my three-year-old daughter runs by the room uh i've got this video right here i took
of the moon using my eight-inch dobsonian telescope my iphone and i just let it record and
this is a perfectly beautiful video that you can just post and share online for your friends and
family to see no processing done with it at all just a good simple video of the moon
moving on to the planets these also were captured with i think it was my iphone 6 at the time
but we've got saturn and then jupiter these two videos moving across the field
of view right here you can make out the galilean moons this is no processing at all this is just the raw
hd video um that uh that allowed me to uh to go through and
to do that with these videos that we had
regardless of your starting point in astrophotography don't be shy about sharing what you take
i think it's a very easy thing to go on to instagram or facebook and see images and pictures
that are gorgeous and beautiful from nasa from people who own thousands or
tens of thousands of dollars of equipment and say well what i have doesn't really compare to that you really can't look at it that way
this is your image that you own that you took and it's very personal to you so share
the picture of the moon that you took whether you think it's a great one or not share jupiter share saturn venus
whatever it is you're able to initially um take share it with friends share it
with family don't be shy about that i think that's something that we can kind of get caught up in is always
comparing our work to others particularly with astrophotography when there's
quite a bit of that out there right now on the internet with some remarkable resources to help out so to
start off with use what you have if you got a telescope that's great if you've got a smartphone use that
take some images of the moon and of the solar system let's say you do that and then you
decide you want to move on to the next level you want to move on to maybe the next price range in terms of
astrophotography for me that was buying a dslr camera this is the same dslr
camera that i used pictures of my family it's what i use to record my videos for
youtube it's uh it's what i use for a lot of different things
you can get these used on ebay for two to five hundred dollars and
sometimes even less than that depending on the model and how old it is i bought a t-ring adapter that was about ten dollars
uh an extendable camera adapter and then i did need for my telescope's focal ratio a two or
three times barlow lens depending on what i was imaging that night um typically
two times for the moon and then i use it three times one for the planets uh i bought just a budget barlow lens um
got it off at ebay for twenty five dollars uh very affordable equipment in terms of
the barlow lens and the adapters for that so you're going to mount this to your
telescope and i've got a video here kind of going through what i do for a normal night of imaging this was for venus
about a year or two ago i go in and i connect it to my telescope i make sure
it's at the fastest frame rate possible i go in and adjust camera settings depending on
the quality of the sky and the image that i'm looking at you go in and live view and kind of tap
to zoom in and that kind of helps you do a fine-tuned focus of whatever the object is that
you're looking at checking focus throughout uh the video recording
a few times is important when you're getting different shots of it but this is what it looks like connected
and set up to my camera and once i've found the object once i know when i'm recording everything's set
up correctly i press the record button and i let the camera float across the field of view
for anywhere from 30 seconds to 60 seconds it depends on whatever it is i'm imaging that night i
don't have a telescope that tracks so it is floating through the field of view
sometimes those pictures are good enough to post just doing those videos like that
but if you want to go deeper into it there's some tremendous free software out there
that i use for these the first one is pip planetary imaging pre-processing
the second is auto stacker three auto stacker four may be out or may be coming out
soon i've written an article about that uh around the start of this year and regis stack six which register six has
not been updated for quite a while but particularly with the wavelets that we'll look at in a second
it's just incredible at bringing out fine surface detail particularly on jupiter and saturn so
all of this software is free to use from dedicated groups of individuals or small teams that put it
together and it's just it's excellent to use so i've taken my my video of the planet
moving across the field of view what i want to do now is process that i want to pick out the
best frames of those videos so i was shooting at 60 frames a second the higher the frame rate the better
um at 60 frames per second i'm going to have software go through and pick out the
sharpest frames with mainly just the atmosphere it's going to take those sharp frames
it's going to stack them and that's going to allow me to go through and do some pretty incredible
things with with the equipment that we're using here in this presentation
so to look at this example here um let's load up uh pip and open up uh
a file that we have of uh of a planet that we image i think this example here was an image
or video i took in jupiter so we've got jupiter at 60 frames a second moving across the field of view
pip is going to center that image and stabilize it so it's going to go through and make
sure that the image and video of jupiter is frozen
in the center it's going to take that shifting image and put it in the center uh it's not taking out any frames it's
putting it in a format that works for down the road but if we click on this right here we
see that the image of jupiter that was coasting across is now centered uh it's jumping around a
little bit a little bit that's the program a little bit of that is uh the telescope and in fact that it
doesn't track but we have a a video now a file of jupiter
that is centered that we can take to the next step which is going to be auto stacker 3.
i pull up this pip file that i just took and i'm going to have this program go
through and analyze and then i'm going to pick out the best frames out of the few thousand
that i was able to capture as it moved across the field of view you can kind of go from right to left here
you can see some examples of uh the highest quality frames and the worst quality frames that we
have there and you're going to make a judgment call as to how many frames you want the program to keep for tonight i think
i picked around 75 of them it's going to depend entirely upon what your video was and the quality
of it you then want the program to follow parts of the planet so that it can align
it for stacking to make sure that the image is stacked properly and sharp and
typically the larger these squares are the better i've found to cover fairly large areas of the
planet's surface when you click stack here it's going through
it's taking those best 75 of the frames of the video and it is stacking them into one final
file that i'm going to go into here with registax registax is going to take this
stacked image that i've put through pip and that i've put through auto stacker 3 and it's going to go through and it's
going to allow me to fine tune adjust the not really the
layers of it but really the the detail one of the first things i do is go in and do an rgb auto balance to
help with uh color correction i go up here to the histogram and kind of clip off a little
bit of the end that i uh maybe overkill and maybe information that i don't need to give a
more natural and impressive looking uh image we then come over here to the the best
part of uh of um of registex um i'm gonna do a zoomed view here to
help out a little bit uh how these wavelets work i have no idea i've i've watched youtube
videos about it i've read articles about it i i don't i don't get it other than the fact that it works
and uh i i use a different setting almost every time i use it um i'm sure there's
someone out there who's cracked the code for it but every time i adjust it a little bit
differently the results are a little different but i go up here and i adjust the different layers from one through five
i sharpen it a little bit i de-noise it a little bit to take out some of the noise from it to soften it just a little
bit to make it look more like a natural image with not without blown out edges for example um
and from that i have this image of jupiter from the
wavy video that i took through all the different levels of processing you can bump the saturation up a little
bit to get a little more of that color through most times i would take it into a
or photoshop or something like that to do a little more fine tuning with the color correction
but this is just a kind of a quick run through of some of the free software that's out
there particularly for imaging uh the planets and the result of what we
just saw we had uh this video here of jupiter
we then took it into pip we then took it into auto stackers and we pretty much got this out of it
and then after registex this is what we ended up with where you have there uh the
shadow of one of the moons beaming down the shadow on its surface
so just a little bit of the one two three steps using all three software uh a dslr
and my 8 inch dobsonian telescope for these initial results for planetary
imaging and planetary post-processing again don't be shy about sharing these
results uh you've put time into this you put a lot of effort into it probably even a little
bit more money right now into it um if you started sharing these things on
instagram and facebook continue to do that but maybe you want to start getting some advice and sharing things over on
cloudy nights um cloudy nights as i'm sure many of you know is just just a wonderful online
community for any type of troubleshooting or questions about anything that we're talking about here tonight
a newer one that's come up recently is astro bin where you can set up an account and set up things there that one's more
astrophotography based where cloudy nights covers almost everything in amateur astronomy but you
know take it to these websites that have people on there uh who have done this who who know about it um and maybe they can
give you some feedback and some advice on what you can do to uh to take what you have and maybe make it
even better once you've imaged or started to image
the solar system um it's a it's a natural thing to want to move
beyond the confines of our solar system um so let's move out of our solar system
with the moon and planets using a cell phone and a telescope um or a dslr and a telescope to to
at least what i do in terms of deep sky astrophotography
um what's the best way to start with this i think the best way to start with astrophotography of the deep sky
is with a tripod and a dslr um because with that you can do
some remarkable things just from star trails um this is how i got started a couple
years ago uh four three or four years ago now in astrophotography where i would just find polaris and i
would just take different exposure links just to see what moved and didn't move in the nighttime sky
adjust the colors and get some just beautiful results this right here for example is a one
minute exposure this was a six minute exposure a dslr
focused and fixed on a tripod and then this was a 30 minute exposure
and this kind of shows you uh where you know polaris uh the north star is not exactly at
uh the point where everything rotates uh you can even see the 30 minute exposure
that that has shifted a little bit as well and then the farther out you go from it the more you have that beautiful almost
uh old-fashioned star trek warp speed effect going on there so use a tripod
use a dslr and go out and just learn how to focus on the stars learn
the nighttime sky a little more and just mess around with exposure links do some color enhancements to it and see
what you get if you've done that and you want to move on further what i decided to do was
invest in my first tracking mount and this is still the one that i use to this day i've had it uh two years now almost
exactly two years and that's the iotron sky guider pro i believe this is still the version of
this that they have out there's uh uh the sky tracker and many different companies that do similar uh
products that are just a good quality but i ended up going up going out with uh the ioptron sky guider
pro which was about 500 uh so this was the first time i'd put uh uh
some some some very decent serious money towards the hobby um and then i decided i wanted a lens
that zoomed in a little more so i bought a used refurbished uh 250 millimeter zoom lens for about a hundred dollars
um this lens is not going to give you perfect results but it's going to get you closer to
targets it's about 100 and i thought it was a good starting point just to mess around let's let's
see where this goes let's see what we want to image in terms of more things in the nighttime sky so
for about a year and a half this was um the image the uh the imaging
equipment and the lens that i specifically used for deep sky asteroid photography
so to go through some points of the steps for this
step one of the process is going to be polar alignment
where polaris is going to fall on the reticle is going to depend on uh where you live and the time of the
night that you're out um but like i said earlier it's not going to be at the center of it that's the number one question i get on youtube
is should you should you center polaris um you you shouldn't if you're doing any type of uh
high focal length observing um you're not going to want to have that uh you're going to want as perfect of an alignment
as possible so find polaris go out polar align
make sure everything's solid locked down if you don't get this first step right
especially if you're shooting at higher focal lengths even with the dslr uh even with some
dslr lenses when you get to 300 and 400 millimeters you're going to notice star
trails if you start to do exposures that run uh one or two or three minutes in length
if you're properly exposed the star trails that we saw earlier for about a
20 or 30 second exposure will become this a 20 30 second exposure
where the stars probably are brighter you're probably picking up more faint ones as they land on the
sensor but they don't move even if you zoom in one to one
with pixels uh you shouldn't see much shifter movement at all if you have good
polar alignment and a pretty solid tracking mount from there i like to go in and adjust
the settings of my dslr the one thing i always want to reiterate is always have it on raw
you can get by with not having some of the other things set up correctly uh but if you don't have it on raw
you're going to lose a lot of data that you would want to use for um post processing that we'll get to
in a little bit at this point you may start to try to figure out what your exposure or shutter
speed is going to be for your target what iso is going to work best for your dslr and that can vary
greatly even for cameras from the same family or brand in terms of that so i
set up the settings of my dslr from there you need to find your object
and this is where i was very blessed and fortunate i had spent about um
about uh six or seven years really figuring out how to navigate the
nighttime sky before i got into astrophotography if you're using something like the sky guider pro
it is not going to point to what you want to look at you're going
to have to find it yourself and manually discover it for some of the brighter deep sky objects it can be a little
simpler but for a lot of them it can be quite complicated especially if you're working through light pollution so
um understanding the basics of the constellations the nighttime sky
through a lot of the astronomical league programs that are out there um helped me out a a great deal in terms of
just finding the objects so for this example here i'm using one of the probably the most
image thing of the nighttime sky at least of a deep sky object and that's the orion nebula
um i clicked the camera into live view mode i zoomed in i got the focus as best as i
could if you've got a botton of mask i bought one of those about four months ago that has been a
wonderful tool to just um to to achieve uh as perfect a focus as you can for
your image and then for this step i start to take test shots do i want it to be a 30 second exposure a 60 second 90 second
two minute exposure that's going to deal with the camera that you have
or the imaging sensor you have uh the the f-stop of your lens basically how
wide open is it how much light is it actually letting in um and what are the capabilities of your
tracking mounts for the uh for the um sky guider pro that i'm using right now
uh two to two and a half minutes is as far as i can push it on most nights shooting at around 250
millimeters you'll find some people online they can go a little longer a little a little less i don't do auto guiding
for it which may be part of that as well but find your object focus on your object
step four this is when the night really begins in terms of imaging um and this is when you're going
to take the most important thing out of all the images and frames you may take the light
frames which are the actual images of the object everything after the light frames is
used to help out your final image but if you don't have properly exposed
sharp well-tracked light frames nothing's going to matter after this process so this is what you're going to
spend the most amount of your time on in the evening with the equipment that i'm using
is taking these separate exposures uh for example if you take you know 30 second light frames about 120 of them
that's going to be roughly one hour's worth of data that you can stack as we'll see a little bit later on so um
light frames improve your signal to noise ratio and they can bring out more faint detail um in terms
of the object that you're looking at stacking light frames doesn't it doesn't
increase the brightness that's set more by your your lens and the f-stop but it can reveal
uh fine detail of the object that you're looking at the more that you get of it after i take
the light frames i try to do maybe one to two hours of light frames depending on the night and if there are trees in
the way of what i'm imaging or neighbors houses uh i move on to flat frames so these remove the vignetting and the dust
shadows um that can show up uh from the lens and the sensor i believe as well
uh what i do for this is i take a white t-shirt i stretch it out as best as i can
i get a white background on my iphone put it up to 100 brightness and then take about 50 or 75
of these after that i take some bias frames this is where i'm just putting the lens cap
on um uh putting it up to pretty much the fastest shutter speed possible which i
think is 4 000 on the canon camera that i use and i take about 50 or 75 of these these
remove bias signal and read noise from the sensor so other than the light frames which are your image
everything else that we're talking about here is to clean up that image in post-processing
to take out dead pixels to take out vignetting to take out by a signal and read noise
following that i keep the same setup in terms of the lens cap on and this is typically when i'm getting ready to go to bed and just kind of
slowly closing things down for the night uh and i keep everything set up just as it was outside
and i take dark frames these have to be at the same exposure length as your light frames
and you want it to be about the same temperature outside or even on your sensor if you have a way of checking
that as well and again all of these are just to help clean up the process but the most
important part of this for deep sky imaging or the light frames that we talked about
um a couple slides ago so from that we're going to take all of
these images that we just shot of the light frames flat frames with the white t-shirt the
bias frames the dark frames and we're going to stack and combine them so that a program like deep sky
stacker which again is wonderful to use free software and for for what this does i think has a pretty
straightforward user experience so for this example tonight i uh ended
up getting not too much but i got about 25 separate two-minute light frames i took 27 dart frames
44 flat frames and 57 bias frames so deep sky stacker is going to go in
and is going to take all 150 of these images and stack them and calibrate them
and use some to take out imperfections and others to bring out detail it's it's an amazing program uh
that that's been out there for for quite a while and still receives uh free updates on a pretty regular basis
throughout the year and this is the image that comes out of deep sky stacker
and the first time i saw this i was so disappointed i thought deep skystacker was going to
do a lot of the work for me i thought it was going to be this uh this you know beautiful colors and you
know the all the cloud features of the orion nebula i got the sound i was like well that's it
um this is uh the raw tiff file that comes out a deep sky
stacker but you still have to do the work of bringing out the detail
and of stretching the image and doing a lot of different corrections to bring out the remarkable details of
it um so let's take a look at a little bit of how to do that there are a lot of camps out there in
astrophotography that will um you know only use photoshop only use pics in sight
they are both good to use for different things they can both get
the job done in a great way i i personally don't exactly care for
the subscription model to over the past few years um that and
just being blown away by some of the features in the free trial of pixel site had me picked this up
um about a year and a half ago i switched to using pixel sight
and um it's it's incredible software so uh this right here is just a a brief
example of some of the steps that i take in terms of bringing out the images this isn't
nearly everything this is just a four or five minute example but um to start off with here i kind of
do a a an auto exposure just to see what i'm working with and i saw there a lot of red a lot of oranges
that's the light pollution of where i live orion was right over the light dome of a local nearby city for where i live so i went
into automatic background extractor and tried to have the program figure out
what's the background light pollution what is the image so the red and orange that
you see there is the background light pollution which means this should be a much improved
image of the orion nebula um so just using that automatic feature and
not even doing the manual one that i now use can get you really good results just to start off with
so i've gone through this image that's been taken has been through deep sky stacker
and i've taken out the light pollution at this point i'm going to go into it and i'm going to
stretch the image so i'm going to start to bring out some of those faint details that we all see in our
astrophotography so i go over here to the histogram and i just kind of slowly start moving it to
the left this is going to be a judgment call as to how much it's too much or too little uh some people may do it more or less
this is when you get into the artistic side of astrophotography which is a great deal of it um so we now have
this stretched image of the orion nebula with the light pollution
removed and with working with you know luminance
light and different levels of detail that we want to do
so i'm going to go in here to something called hdr multi-scale transform and this is going to help me
go through and bring out some of the blown out details of the center of orion you can also correct for this by taking
different exposure lengths and stacking those but for this presentation i just wanted
to keep it a little more um a little more straightforward for it so the so the program helped to kind of kind of
tap down a little bit on the brightness of what we have there i pulled up then local histogram uh
equalization and was going through to try to uh sharpen a little bit and bring out
some more depth to the orion nebula and you can see from these examples you can definitely overdo it with this this is
again the artistic choice that you're going to make of what looks natural to you what looks pleasing to you
you may even go compare it to what nasa takes just to see what it looks like this is entirely your choice in terms of
what you make this final image that you're working with so you see from there we have some more contrast we have
some more depth coming out of it to my eye on my computer this is what i
want my version of the orion nebula to look like with the equipment that i'm using with the uh
light pollution for where i live this is a trick that uh a friend in my local astronomy club bert
told me about and uh this was to go through and to use lrgb combination
uh to really go through with a luminance layer to bring out the color and you can see
here if we kind of go back and forth it's not a dramatic thing you can definitely overdo it but we've got more
of the blues more of the purples coming through um lrgb combination is a trick i
normally use but you could go into uh saturation and just kind of manually move that around if you wanted to as
well similar to what we did for the histogram a little while ago
going down here we've got one or two more things that i'm going to do again just for this
just to give you an idea of uh of of some of the things that this program can do
in a in a brief example here today um we're going to try to sharpen it a little bit with unsharp mask
um going in here for that example you can see again it's not a dramatic thing but it's just something that brings out
a little more fine detail but you never want to overdo it with any of these settings
in terms of making it look unnaturally sharp a couple final things here just some
final uh background adjustments of the nighttime sky don't make the background sky
pitch black um it is not and it shouldn't look like that in your images it's your judgment call as to how much
of that proper contrast that you want but um you don't want it to be an exact
pure black for the background of space to give it a little more of a natural look and in
this five six minute example here we have the image to the left that came out of deep
sky stacker and then using some of the tools of pixen sight we have this image here taken with a hundred
dollar lens and a dslr that you can get now for probably around
350 or 400 used um with this setup right here
so using this setup with this 250 millimeter kit zoom lens
these are some of the images that i started taking in astrophotography uh m81 and m82 never get tired of
visually observing them and i image them every time they come around to a good part of
my sky these were taken with that camera and lens setup uh hercules an incredible target uh
right now that i'm hoping to get out and observe if the skies will ever clear over the next week or two
um i image this with the 250 millimeter lens
the pleiades this is a tough one with the light pollution where i live i'm not under horrible skies with light pollution but this one's really
sensitive to that and light pollution filters don't work uh super well with it but i was pleased
to get the the nebulosity of those stars kind of illuminating that as as the nebula clouds moving between us
and them [Music] uh i moved up about a year ago to buy a 50 millimeter prime lens a prime lens is
going to give you sharper images this one also allowed me to shoot at f2 or f3 which opened up the
lens to let in a lot more light which is really one of the biggest pieces of this puzzle so these are some images that i shot
with the 50 millimeter lens the andromeda galaxy
the double cluster the constellation orion i was very
pleased with this one i got out to uh i think it was a mortal mortal two sky
is where i got out to for this image in central virginia when i was visiting some family i could even make out a little bit of
bernard's loop i'm using a uh i'm using a uh unmodified camera so uh
some of the reds are harder to come through but i was i was very happy with that one about four months ago
uh i jumped up to the most expensive ones i purchased and this opened up a whole new world of
what i could image and and the the final details of it about the 135 millimeter samyang or
rokinon lens they're the exact same lens just with a different name stamped on depending on where you buy it or where you live
um and uh this lens i can shoot at f2 with almost perfectly sharp stars across
the field of view um i normally stop it down to 2.8 because i like the spikes coming off the
stars and kind of to me is what it should look like even though it's not but i just like the artistic look of that but i'm shooting with this right
now for about four months and this is what i'm getting with the sky guider pro
my canon dslr and this 135 millimeter lens
i took this three weeks ago of vega and the uh double double you can make
out the ring nebula which is uh quite small but you can barely make it out in the lower right hand image kind
of that uh color that it has there but the the vega uh star system just coming out beautifully
right here i love that star took this of the starfish cluster and
various other um ngc objects that surround it
the the thing that impresses me the most about this lens is just the density of the star field it can almost be too dense
sometimes uh the amount of stars that now show up from this lens compared to my other lens
on the exact same camera just blows me away all the time and then i took this one about three
months ago as my second attempt at the orion nebula
we've got the flame and horsehead nebula in that part of the neighborhood of the sky
and then these final two before we conclude today um i got out again to that dark sky in
central virginia near where my family lives uh i set the camera the lens fully open
to f2 uh these are one minute exposures that were stacked to about an hour and a
half's worth of data and uh i was just thrilled with how the virgo cluster
turned out um marcarian's chain in in particular just uh the the amount
of density of galaxies not just stars but galaxies in this region of space
um is just something that's very very hard to comprehend uh and and this this last image that we
have here uh i have not posted yet i'm gonna be posting this on instagram and i'm gonna be doing a youtube video for
this probably at the end of this month um i got a light pollution filter a cls
light pollution filter for my dslr and it helped remarkably with where i live
and i decided to test it out on the veil nebula and just the the remnants of this supernova
i've seen them through the telescope and that was enough to just be so impressive but to to image it and to get these
colors and just the density of the star field that we have here
from my own backyard is just it's why i keep coming back to this hobby this this to me is just uh uh it's
something that's just hard to put words to
one of the main sources of information that i've gotten for a lot of what we've talked about here today is
from a book by charles bracken called um the deep sky imaging primer
second edition i read it cover to cover about two years ago and it's like a technical manual for
astrophotography everything down from how the sensors of cameras work to a lot of the techniques that we've
talked about today so that's just a wonderful resource to get started or to go deeper into this
tutorials on photoshop pixel site it has everything and also and i can't
reiterate this enough uh club members being in an astronomy club is really what gave me
a lot of the starting point in terms of what lens to buy and where to go with it
for that so just friends in my local astronomy club
how do i share the astrophotography that we just talked about um i do post it on instagram but
something i've always enjoyed doing is video editing on the side just kind of as a hobby for a very long time
and um uh i decided about uh january of 2020
um to start posting regularly on a youtube channel that had just been sitting there for a while that i hadn't
done much with uh and over the past year and a half or so i've been posting on late night
astronomy where i go in and do videos for
observing guides and what can be seen in the month to come of tutorials product reviews just
whatever interests me or or the audience that's over there that people are talking about in terms of
the nighttime sky i've got a deep sky imaging series if you're interested
that goes into more depth um it's uh it's a deeper version of what we
talked about tonight i've got about 10 videos that i've put out over the past um year and a half for that uh
everything from a review of the tracking amount i talked about to how to use the lens that i did to a
hour-long tutorial on pixel sight where i want where i go through step-by-step everything that i did
for one of the images of the orion nebula that we saw tonight so if you have any interest in that for
deep sky stacker how to take light flat dark frames please feel free
to check that out and leave any questions and let me know if you need anything at all in terms of
getting started in this i've got some planetary imaging series as well for those of you that have telescopes and want to try to image with
a cell phone or with a dslr camera attached to it like we talked about earlier um
so again if you're interested feel free to check those out and let me know if you have questions
and i just started uh this month a new series called the night sky
where i'm hoping and planning to do one of these videos at the start of every month looking at
what's in the night sky for you if you don't have a telescope what can you see if you have your first telescope what
can you see if you have a thousand dollar telescope what can you can see if you're taking images of the night sky
with your phone with a dslr with advanced imaging sensors what can you image
kind of from from from beginner intermediate and a little bit into advanced users
what's out there to enjoy of the nighttime sky so if there's if there's one thing i
want to to end with tonight you know how can you share your knowledge of the heavens above
number one talk about it with people um don't be shy about what we do go out
there and show people your pictures and videos talk to them about going out with your telescope
friends and family co-workers let them know what you're doing number two post pictures and stories
about your experience on social media whatever social media platform you like to use post it let people know
what it is you're doing what it is you're imaging or going out to visually observe
and number three cannot reiterate this one enough i know i'm preaching to the choir here uh
join your local astronomy club i i honestly do not think i would have the confidence or knowledge
to do what i do today with imaging or post it on youtube if i hadn't joined my
local club six or seven years ago and met people who were doing these
things that interested me and gave me great information on how to get started on it so join your local astronomy club and
with that i want to thank you all again so much for having me here and if there are any
uh questions that you have please feel free to let me know but thank you again for the opportunity
great you do have some comments questions uh there's a gentleman that has a
mount uh that is just like yours he says i use the polar clock app on
android and he's wondering where should polaris be in the rings
he says i usually just set it outside the second inner ring that's the one that i
normally use as well i i have another app on my phone i think it's called polar alignment pro
possibly but yeah typically it's on that second outer line but depending on when you go out and maybe at the 11 o'clock position
or the one o'clock position it's gonna you only have to do it once at the start but it's going to be at a different
point depending on when you do the initial alignment okay all right uh someone else asks
uh do you use photometric color calibration yes but that that's a great question
that's very good timing so i i use that and that's a newer feature of pixen sight
but i found that i have trouble using that when i use a light pollution filter on my dslr camera
it may be because i'm using a light pollution filter on an unmodified camera but i've actually
found that just neutralizing the background and doing a standard um adjustment to uh to the colors
actually gets a more accurate image than photometric but prior to that i'd use photometric for everything that didn't
involve a light pollution filter yeah uh andrew corkill says really great
presentation for dslr um let's see thank you very much cameron
gillis says those are great pics michael nice pictures from beatrice heinz
she's also an astrophotographer so cameron uh uh let's see
excellent presentation michael very well done that was from jeff wise um keep them coming i love these
comments this is yeah andrew corkel again fantastic presentation michael
um oh beat your science is now a subscriber
of your channel so there you go always appreciate that thank you
uh phil mcdonald great presentation thank you i'll definitely be subscribing to your channel
awesome thank you um [Music] jeff wise he sub subscribed
um in stockholm says i like michael's
tutorials on youtube i've seen every single one thank you very much
yeah that's great
there's a conversation about just about posting images uh norm hughes says i even post my bad
images in an attempt to show that imaging isn't out or isn't cut and dry excuse me i got a
beautiful image that we do have but we uh do have troubles and bad nights i think that's a that's a
very good point to make is uh just post what you have and don't don't be your own worst critic about your own
work enjoy it and uh and and just post what you've taken yeah beat your signs says i do that too
it's it's important to show others uh and also to myself i like to see and
learn from my evolution in astrophotography and that's what it is you know all these
techniques honing your skills and everything you know you're an explorer you're exploring and uh
you know the the better you are the more skilled you are with the gear you got you know it just it that that takes you
on a ever increasing path you know of understanding your
your place in the universe yeah that's true michael thank you one thing i notice
when you're speaking uh we have so many people out there that are beginners one of the first things i think you
experience is you need to learn your camera and how to operate that camera in the dark you need to be because you're always
turning on lights if anybody's around you they're not going to be happy but you realize very quickly you've lost
dark sky adaption right and that becomes a big factor and i use the same sky guider pro that you
do and i can i honestly believe most star trackers out there is a great way for a beginner
to start because now i auto guide with my uh sky guider pro and
it it's a way to grow without spending more money until you get really experienced in what
you're doing so i think that's that's a great way to start you have a lot of room
to learn there by going just from a dslr to a camera lens then learning auto guiding with that same camera lens and
camera in the same guide you know and the one thing that surprised me since i've been i've just started in
deep sky imaging is i really thought you know if i have a good night thursday night when i shut down
when i go back out friday everything's gonna be perfect and it has been a real hit in the face
to realize everything could be perfect the night before and when i go out the next night or two nights later
everything is wrong and i've done nothing and you have to figure it all back out again but it is an exciting challenge it is
great it keeps your mind going and you can't beat a great night under the stars i don't care what anybody says
give me those clear skies it doesn't get any better than that so thank you
so much if anybody has any questions here michael i just wanted to make a comment i just looked at your youtube
channel you've got a ton of great information out there not only about imaging but what's up in the sky for uh the
following months and so on and so yeah you've got a great publication out there thank you
very much it is i'd have anybody subscribed to it i went through it last night a couple nights ago you've
got a lot of great information there to help people of all levels and that's what i
think we all need we can all learn from each other so thank you so much for that
are there any more questions before i give the answers to the questions that i asked
all right um beatrice signs just makes a comment
astrophotography is all about learning from your failures always trial and error yep
okay all right i am going to give the answers to the questions then
um and thank everybody that has answered them oops i better share my screen first
and my dog is going to start barking so
all right first question was what date was the final shuttle launch
and it was july 8th of 2011. they did we just celebrated just a few
days ago the 10th anniversary i cannot believe it's been 10 years from the last shuttle launch long time
ago kevin is the winner kevin doesn't have didn't give us his last name but we've got his email address to
contact him so thank you kevin second question july 3rd
sunspot ar 2838 did something we haven't seen in four years what happened
it burst through the surface of the sun and promptly unleashed the strongest
solar flare in four years an x 1.5 class explosion
and i love the aurora i was checking to see where that was at and if it was going to be earth directed which
naturally it wasn't but norm hughes got that right so thank you norm last question what's
the approximate dollar amount of the door prices outcome virtual about where
right around 7 500 and mike napier got that right so
congratulations mike and either carol or somebody from our national office will be contacting you
to get information uh to where to ship your door price and i would like to mention astronomical
league nine we will be doing alkon virtual in august so we will not have a per se uh
astronomical league live next month because we'll be busy with the conference we will be back in september with
astronomical league live so please make sure you join us then and that's the end of mine i'm gonna
okay um so thank everyone thank my speakers my gosh i know all you guys michael and now i
know you but thank you all everything that you did tonight was just plain amazing
thank you for an incredible program we couldn't have done it without each and every one of you and scott thank you we sure couldn't
have done any of this without you thank you very much it's my pleasure
thank you if anyone else has anything they'd like to say before we close please feel free
um snip shot okay and i see john zip his mouth all right
thank you everyone thank you everybody for tuning in thank you for all the answers all the
help and the support we will see you hopefully august 20 august 19th to 21st for alcon virtual
please join us and we will see you then bye-bye
thanks for watching everybody
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