Transcript:
of course that presentation of Our Youth Awards for all of those young youth members out there in the astronomical
League bear in mind that March 31st is the deadline for being nominated for or
applying for our horer Service Awards our horber uh Oma journalism award and
our horer Parker Imaging Awards these Awards bring with them along with the
national young astronomer award which is open to non-league members as well uh
produce over $14,500 in prizes to its winners plus trips in some cases to the National
Convention we also have General Awards those of you who are in the league or in
a league club please consider nominating your newsletter editor for the Mabel Sterns award nominating your Web Master
for the Web Master award these are National recognitions uh we also have a sketching award and we'll have the
Willamina Fleming Imaging awards for female League members as well again this
year uh just as a quick update the league is now at 25,200 members the largest that it has
ever been in its entire history 310 societies and we're uh doing well at 70
uh at 79 years of age at this point um John Goss uh past president of the
league and our media officer will be talking about the library telescope program in a few minutes and I just
wanted to emphasize that the de deadline for our drawing this year is May 31st it's usually at the end of June but we
had to move it up because our convention is in June this year uh fin finally I'd
like to uh mention again that just one issue the March issue of reflector will
be digital only uh we're transferring our flag to a different publisher at
this point and this will help us in the transition and it will also allow us to
recoup some uh over ages and expenses that we've had over the last couple of years and without having to touch any of
the interest off of our trust fund so this should be very helpful to us also uh don't forget don't forget NE coming
up uh it's a fantastic telescope fair that we uh attend the league has two
booths up there for the uh event it's going to be held in early April the first weekend an opportunity to drool
over everything from telev UI pieces to dobsonians to telescopes from the old days like
these unitron so I hope you'll consider joining Carol and Terry and I up at NE
we'd love to see you up there and I'll stop sharing at this point and um turn
uh the meeting over to John Goss past president of the league
John helps if I was paying attention there sorry sorry about that um I'd like
to cut cut my uh presentation a little a little bit short because we're under some time constraints but there are a
couple things I'd like to talk about um so I'm going hopefully I have permission
to screen share
yes excellent good thank you uh actually there are two things I I want to want to
talk about Chuck was just talking about the library t scope program um over the past 10 years or
more each year we have given away a number of these telescopes uh to two clubs uh one from
each region and also one to a member at large um I'd like to discuss a little
bit what the library telescope is for those of you who don't know it's a it's the idea of of clubs donating a small
easyto use telescope small enough to make it very portable but large enough that you can
actually see stuff with it idea is to donate it to library and where the patrons would check it out as they
normally do books and this program has just taken off across the country there are um I'd say there's well over a
thousand libraries across the country that have these things um this year uh
we're going to do the same thing we're going to give away 10 or 11 telescopes as I just said however uh our telescope
of choice was was the 4 and a half inch O'Brien Orion star
blast you probably know that Orion is no longer with us in the astronomy world so
we're having a tough time finding a suitable replacement we're working on something and hopefully uh that will be
resolved in the next few months so once that's resolved uh this program will
continue we are having it this year we are having it so that the deadline for
the um drawing or for entering is uh May 31st uh all the information is on our
website which tells you how to do it fills out a little form uh so please if your Club is interested in doing this uh
please enter and I'll tell you why and in a really short paragraph here I'll
tell you why you should do it because this really is the perfect Club program
Club activity you have a club you bring on speakers you do some observing and
you wonder what else could we do well this is something that you can do because this is a a program in which um
the the the club wins the library wins the library Paton wins amateur astronomy wins it's a multiple win situation so if
you're not doing it now think about it seriously about doing something like this because it really makes your Club more more more
viable okay next thing I want to talk about
one of the awards that we give is the hor karmer omea journalism award which Chuck just alluded to and what it really
is is an essay contest for kids between eight and 14 years of age so if if you
know somebody who really likes writing especially if they like astronomy uh if they could write a a nice uh science
related topic preferably on astronomy and send it in uh that would be great
and I know there are a lot of grandparents out there who want to involve their grandkids into this hobby
this is a great way to get them started um because it really encourages kids to
um to practice their writing skills and practice their uh uh composition and all
all that stuff it's it's a good program to to get involved now that deadline is
March 31st uh go on our leak website you'll you'll you'll be able to find it it'll
tell you all the details and how to enter and what it's all about more than what I have just said but uh with that I'm going to turn
it back over to Chuck uh I may be on again at a later date to talk a little
bit more about various topics that uh that you may have known that I like like to talk about which is basically the
whole issue of volunteerism and how to make your Club go so Chuck uh let me
stop sharing and you can have it back okay thank you so much John uh next up
is my good friend Don NAB Don uh is one of our council members one of our board
members for the astronomical league and also a a valued uh participant in not
only creating and running the website for the mid east region of the astronomical league but also for our
virtual convention that we had back in 2021 uh due to co uh which helped us
make that such an incredible success and so don turn it over to you all right
I'll do a screen share
here should be coming through I will go to
slideshow okay should be coming through I'm going to spend just a brief look at the uh the highlights of what's coming
up in the night's sky and uh gonna first recognize John Goss who uh makes all these wonderful
guides every month he puts these out multiple a month the February night sky guide here
this month he put one out to look at uh Mercury and Venus and the young moon in the evening Sky he put one out about um
looking at Venus Crescent uh these these are all available free open for anyone
on from the AL website how do you find them here's how you find them go to the astronomical League
website from there you would roll all the way to the bottom of the page and
then you scroll up until you get to navigating the night sky and here are all the night sky tools
and uh this is everything you can look for here the Poke around the site there's many many Night Sky Tools
available here so take advantage of this they're free for anyone use them on uh hand them out anywhere you want to
everyone you can uh Take a Little Closer Look at um at this one which is the uh
Na nating the February night sky that John does and it's more than just a Sky Map what John does here is walks us
around the sky so if you find number he says first of all everyone can find the Big Dipper so
step one find the North Star so even beginners can get their orientation to the night sky then he says turn around
look South and then look straight up overhead you're going to find capella from capella you can make a leap to
pereus another leap casapia from capella the other direction you find cast and
Pollock and this time of year we'll find Mars uh then the next step he does go
straight south of capella you will find ril and Beetle Juice in constellation
Orion and you can use those belt stars to go up to Al debron and the plees and
the other direction down to the brightest star in the nice Sky Sirius then beneath that a great time of
the year being January February it's so cold out uh rather than set a telescope up he has binocular highlights listed
here so and those are listed as um as letters so a is going to be the naked
Ice Finding the plees okay so there's the plees and beyond that is the double
cluster which he points out here in the middle in this orange circle uh from
there you go to Westward to the um
31 the Orion Nebula I'm sorry the Andromeda galaxy that's that's C then
from D we go down to the Orion Nebula and then
m41 in next to sirius and then finally m44 we'll spend another moment on each
of these these most of these uh items but this is a great handout give it to
your club members give it to people you see in the street give it to anybody you can find hand these out they they're
invaluable resource so lunar highlights this month the lunar straight wall is on February 6
uh one one night after the first quarter it's a great object you to see on the moon you can use deal with
binoculars and then uh also the same night the moon and the plees are only
like a degree away so that's like two full moons uh hard to photograph I tried
to do it last month when the moon actually ulted the plees and It's tricky to do do I'm not even going to show you
my picture is so bad this is a wonderful time of year to
see the planets through January and February you can see Mars Venus Jupiter Saturn with the naked eye and Uranus
Neptune with a telescope P oculars then at the end of the month February 28th you can see Mercury so and if you look
down your feet that would count up to they would see the Earth you can see all eight planets it's going to be tricky to
see them all on one night uh because mer Mercury doesn't become visible until the very end of the month and by that time
Saturn and Neptune are probably going to be lost in the glow of the fading Sunset but uh you know if you saw all of them
but Mercury earlier in the month you can see add Mercury to your list at the end of the month and here's a great
opportunity if you don't know how to find Neptune here's a great opportunity on February 1st uh Venus the Crescent
Moon and Neptune are all lined up so you can use this is a guide and we zoom in a
bit there'll be a couple Stars here you can start to the Moon Star hop over two stars and down and you can find Neptune
so add Neptune to your life list if you haven't seen it yet Mars Mars is this the star of the
show right now it's such a joy to walk outside in the evening look to the east to see Venus look straight up to see
Jupiter I'm not sorry West to see Venus straight up to see Jupiter and to the east to see Mars Mars is shining like a
red Beacon there in the Eastern side guys so easy to find once you can find
uh as we walk through the night sky guide that John made you can find uh Orion just head over to the twins pastor
and Pollock and you'll you no mistaking that bright red Mars uh next to castan
Pollock so I like to look at a lot of naked eye things during this time of the year one of those one of my favorites is
the winter triangle and that you can find from Sirius Beetle Juice prion
beautiful big triangle in the sky uh the summer triangle is fun font but that's gone until a couple months from now so
here's the winter triangle and probably the biggest asterism that I know of is the winter hexagon it's similar to the
winter triangle but you would start up a capella down to poock down to cion down
to sirius up to Riel Al debron and back to Capella I can't think of any asterism
that takes up a larger section of Sky than this so uh it's a it's a fun thing to point out to uh to your friends and
neighbors uh one of the things you will see up there a nice huge open cluster is
the alpha persi cluster it's like multiple full moons in width okay
um and you can uh you can you can see that using the map that we saw earlier
uh we we found capella and just leaped away to find Perseus oops and uh yeah this is this is
the the cluster the alpha Peri cluster right in the middle is uh is murac nice
bright star uh m44 another one that was mentioned in on the nice sky guide that
um that John made and that is to find the Beehive cluster cancer is a very dim
constellation a little tricky to find but with binoculars you easily find it uh go to Castor and poock and go and go
south go go go down from there um it's a great thing at Star parties this is what
a professional photograph would look like of uh of the Beehive um this is more like what you
might see with your own binoculars or telescope not quite as colorful not quite as Rich a field but unmistakable
and this is a great thing to show people at a at spring star parties because they can't believe they can barely see the
cluster in the sky and it's just full of stars another one that I really like is
m41 this is the little beehive m44 is the main beehive this is the little
beehive and U you know Walter Scott Houston he wrote uh for many many years
deep Sky wonders in sky and telescope and he talks about visual observers seeing curved lines in
m41 and on photographs they don't really show up but he's saying in his 10-in reflector he could see the bright red
star and these these curves so there's m41 in uh in Canis Major the big dog so
Orion is just overhead you just go south go go toward the Horizon see serus
there's M4 a great binocular object uh this would be a professional photograph
of it more likely this is what you're going to see in your telescope binoculars but it's it's say there red
star there's the red giant you sort of see some of these curves that uh that he was talking about so um better viewed
through the binoculars and the telescope than photographs and then when you're in the
in the neighborhood of m41 not far away is three other open clusters a binocular
telescope objects um m47 nice open cluster m46
probably a little more dense must be further away much more active more more
more dense cluster and I'm not sure if it's going to show up in your screen but there's a little interesting object here
and what that is is a planetary nebula so this would be more for advanced observers with a maybe a little better
telescope to pick up NGC 2438 um but probably need a telescope to
see this you're not going to see this in binoculars but um that would be more for an advanced Observer so how else can you
find things in the sky two other resources I'll show beyond what the astronomical leave offers and that's a
SK IM maps.com every month there's a new new map put out it goes through the
calendar month through the uh through the day month day by day for the month and then list also naked eye binocular
and telescopic objects every month downloaded for free another one I really like is WhatsApp tonight it doesn't have
a a dayby day but it does list the most uh significant things that you can
observe so and and some extra you know information but also at wats just just
do a Google search for WhatsApp tonight it'll show up so get on some warm clothes and get out there and uh see the
sky okay back to you Chuck thank you so much Don great job as
always really appreciate your bringing everybody up to date um well now we come
to our talk and I'm going to slightly abbreviate the bio here because it's quite impressive uh but we do have
limited time so want to introduce our speaker tonight Lori Anor she's a
lifelong photographer and amateur astronomer with degrees and photography
business management and project management she's a lifetime member of the astronomical League uh and the Girl
Scouts USA she's part of NASA partner programs including Girl Scout Stars
Eclipse ambassadors and Eclipse uh Stars she led the fall 2018 Girl Scout team
that won the 2019 astronom day award through the astronomical league and again in 2024 with the Westminster
Astronomical Society uh she learned about the league in 2017 through
participation in the astronomy Camp uh for Girl Scout leaders and has since
completed over 35 of the League's observing programs and challenges which is impressive she achieved the
astronomical League's Master Outreach award for all of her uh Endeavors in
public education and astronomy and is currently a Girl Scout volunteer educator she's treasurer of the
Westminster Astronomical Society where she leads and AIDS many events um and
periodically does planetarium shows as well uh she's also a member of the Tri-State astronomers uh Lori has been a
beta tester for the night sky Network and is a volunteer beta tester for unistellar electronic telescopes uh
she's now retired in Maryland so we can tap her more and more for astronomical
activities with the league um and uh she lives at home with her uh husband Al and
three spoiled rescue kitties I'm told uh she's a gardener a quilter a citizen
scientist and a former elected Town counselor so I'd like to introduce my friend Lori ansor who's going to talk to
us tonight about perhaps uh how to handle audio problems on League live
programs wow if there's any one way to jinx a program that's electron rically
delivered it's uh to name it um uh that in the computer age uh I guess you never
tell an actor to um have a good show you want to say break a leg for that
reason okay so I'm G to share a screen
here and I'm going to open
up so I will take hit for the um the title jinxing us tonight amateur
astronomy in the computer age um but it's also um observing in the
computer age tooling up our observations I want to thank the league for inviting me to speak tonight I know that we have
some time constraints sorry we had a um uh delayed start so I'm going to jump
right in so like many people um I have uh started off with paper logs
for doing my observations I my husband and I got a 8 in Newtonian we learned
how to Star Hop we didn't have any tracking on it and it was fun it was
also very slow this is an example page from uh an early log and I found myself
going to the internet and clipping out pictures of things like um m64 and M3
and and using my glue stick to put it in there so that I had a a visual because I
have a photography background of what it is that I saw that night and then the point and shoot
cameras got a lot smarter so here's Comet neowise from 2020 and then a
little bit of the paint program and I could point out the bear constellation Ursa Major and where Neo wise was in
relation and kind of hand holding a cell phone could U log that picture as well
still not greatly satisfying so we delve into a little bit of DSL DSLR work and of course caught
the Outreach addiction bug and put together all these great pieces of uh
metal onto our Newtonian and learned about tracking
um was really excited when we got this free adapter that could make the whole
thing work and oh my gosh um took the plunge into this thing called
astrophotography uh even found this revolution 2 imager and uh that came in
handy during covid because we needed hands off for everything especially dealing with uh young students coming to
the eyepiece and no touch for this and that and um so we kept trying kept
trying and we kept hearing people say hm
Imaging is Imaging um no so we kind of
had to make a decision after playing with this thing called processing and using software to try and make images
come out do we want to be like Hubble or do we just want to see things better
well along my path I did learn that there's lots of stuff on the internet that'll teach you lots of things about
astrophotography and Astro backyards just one um not saying they're the best
but they're just one by the way in this presentation in the background I am offering up some of the images that I've
captured over time and in the lower left corner you'll see which scope and Which
object it is so a little bit of eye candy as we go so Imaging is not necessarily Imaging
there's this other brand called electronically assisted astronomy and what that is is a form of observational
astronomy with a telescope that uses a camera instead of an eyepiece but sometimes has an eyepiece as well and
what it does is it captures a sequence of short exposures and processes the
images in near real time on a connected screen and it differs from normal
observing since you're viewing it on the screen so you get the term
electronically enhanced visual astronomy or observational
astrophotography so this is actually a hybrid from a a
form of astronomy and astrophotography this observational
astrophotography is a separate Pursuit a lot of people kind of bunch it together
and I really am seeing this this niche in this computer age coming together that is really
important with this technique you get an image quickly less time than the
astrophotography and the processing and all that stuff that you need to do to get those Exquisite pieces of art my
hats off to people that can do that and have the patience core difference is that this EAA is primarily a form of
observing not necessarily Imaging so it is an image but it's
not with all of the fancy Frills that you see with the Hubble like in images
and in the background here you can see uh two images um of two different comets that
were taken through this this method so for EAA or electronically assisted
astronomy you really need to have a camera a telescope a mount and a laptop
with software this is really going to become more and more common place too as light pollution
becomes a greater problem and people take one of many paths um we've got a a
couple members in the club that have put together some amazing pieces of equipment that you wouldn't think would
normally come together and are providing outstanding Outreach by uh employing
just these simple tools camera telescope Mount laptop together to get an image
that really is wowing the public when they come to an eyepiece and we're having to explain to them too what
they're seeing so one of the advantages of
electronically assisted astronomy is that it can be anywhere it can be your cell phone so it's not doing anything
with stacking it could be reuse of that existing equipment I just mentioned and
it can also be used to study an object later more like you see the professional
as astronomers doing it so in the background you see here I've got a a
picture of the Rosetta nebula so at an eyepiece I see one thing looking at the
Hubble images I see another thing this image shows me what I saw that night
with the atmospheric conditions with the information that I
recorded for that site I can come back to it time and time again and study it it's my image of what
I saw that night basically so on the scene now we have
lots of these electronically assisted astronomy telescopes or these Allin ones
uh many of you probably have seen some of these on the markets some are newer
and some not so new and all of them are updating and and improving their
applications and really going after folks that just want to see things that
they're looking at these all-in ones have the camera have the telescope have
the software have the computer all in one unit and is generally controlled by
a cell phone so where do these all-in-one
Scopes fall in astrophotography well well there's a
number of categories of astrophotography but they're really in that electronically assisted astronomy
category that I was just talking about helps you see the real time um images
just like when you're in Outreach and you want to show the public something the ones that have an eyepiece are
actually a preference for the public the public coming up to your scope they want
to see things through an eyepiece they've left their living room for the
night and that's what they've come to do it's interesting because the Scopes that
we've had out that don't have that eyepiece that just have a computer screen or a cell phone while the objects
are interesting to look at they keep coming back to the eye pieces very interesting
Phenomenon with the EAA you have image sharing and you can compare your image
across different dates sites and conditions of the sky uh particularly interesting when you
have something like our closest uh or star or sun in this particular instance
um I'm showing some sunspots in the background on this
image so EAA for me opened up doors dramatically my first scope with this
was the unistellar ev2 scope and it can see um objects that uh are an
area of the sky about the Sun or the full moon and the battery life on it about 8
or 10 hours that's an image of M27 in the background and the way it gets
controlled is through screens on an app on your phone um the ev2 has a manual focus I
also beta test The Odyssey Pro and it has an autofocus both have an
eyepiece um with a bat andof screen you can focus it using these lines that
appear and adjusting the exposure allows you to then get that little circle in
the middle to fine-tune your exposure one of the things that unistellar done is they allow you to save your image in
the catalog of objects that you have so once you've seen it like the flame nebula here it saves that image in your
catalog so you can come back to it it gives you a 50 times magnification on
your cell phone however your cell phone you can blow up those images with your
two fingers and make it up to 400 times so you can really zoom in to find those
teeny tiny little objects like the smoke ring in
m46 I've also had to get into the Celestron
origin U which is also cell phone generated this too is a product that was
built from the ground up by Celestron they built it from the background of a very large company unistellar did it as
a Kickstart they have two different kinds of approaches and they are good
for different kinds of objects the cell phone uh screens for
the Celestron origin are a little reminiscent to some of the controls that
you might expect to find in astrophotography so you have a telescope
fan you also have a do heater built in um you have some den noising and it
does all the stacking within the computer uh telescope itself it's also
using what I'm told is the Sky Safari which is a Mac product for uh their
catalog for finding things in the sky but it's a pictoral kind of a way to look for things so it's really giving
you a view that's a lot closer to what you would expect a an adventure
astronomer to be looking for when they're looking for things in the sky whereas with the unistellar screens it's
really catering it appears to me more to those who are buying a telescope and
just want to know what's up and not necessarily where it's at although if
you learn your Sky of course it's always going to be to your benefit in terms of
knowing where to look for the kinds of things you want to see in terms of
Outreach we uh have a little sign that we put up for the unistellar letting
folks know how to download the app and that they can save the pictures as a
souvenir of their Outreach experience that is also a capability
that the origin from Celestron has but here's a really exciting
offshoot from this this whole path here and where we really get into the title
which jinxed us tonight of astronomy amateur astronomy in the computer age
and that is the particip atory citizen science aspect and in the background I'm
beginning to show you some images here from that Celestron origin and there's lots of technical reasons for why it
comes across as crisper and and sharper Stars I won't get into that
tonight but let me tell you a little bit about the amateur astronomy um piece
here in terms of the whole citizen science and computer uh age so we still
have amateur astronomers who are discovering comets um you can be your own David Levy
you'll probably never discover as many as he has but in 2023 there was this
Japanese astronomer amateur astronomer who found this Comet named after him
with his DSLR and 200 mm lens I mean how exciting is that hat so
I went out with my little um U EAA type scope and I tried to catch this comment
there are limitations with these EAA all-in-one Scopes as you would expect I
mean you you want to get the right tool for the job and sometimes the pliers will put the nail in the wall but maybe
not the way you want it to go in so this little tiny picture here shows the part
of the Comet that I could get through several attempts to uh manually slew it
and catch an image and check to see that I've got it in the pre Dawn hours before
the Sun finally blocked me out with this EAA scope real exciting to to try and do
that and capture it there's also citizen science that
really doesn't require any equipment at all but because we're in the computer
age it's something that kids and adults can do from their home you go outside
you look up at the sky at the particular constellations that glob ATN night.org
has listed for their campaigns which is about a week per month and take a look
at the images to see how many of the stars of that constellation you see in that Sky you click on it and that data
gets crowdsourced to help us understand and light pollution which affects
Wildlife your health as well as astronomy for everybody everywhere they
find that actually those light levels are a lot more accurate when they are
measured from the ground up as opposed to from satellites down so this is my
PSA to everybody to please participate in Globe at night it costs nothing but
it's a way to participate p in citizen science but without any equipment and by
the way there are citizen science certificates that you can earn through
the astronomical League just look at the exer the observing programs on the
website so EAA um with unistellar has programs for uh citizen
science as well so right in the app they have Comet program
um near Earth object planetary defense programs and exoplanet programs
satellite programs all of these things that users can participate in real
science this stuff actually gets used and directly is contributing to science
so for example um the dart mission where we as
Humanity got to strike an asteroid there were unistellar users on the
ground who captured images and were able to share those with the scientists and
now the paper is published in the prestigious academic journal
Nature so there's a lot of different citizen science programs that with an
EAA scope or equipment you can um participate in so EAA to me
allows more time to spend with objects and be able to revisit them many times I
know that my image of the Crescent nebula here isn't the the best image of
the Crescent NE nebula from Earth or from Hubble or James web but I have a
lot of them now this one's with an lpro filter using my Celestron origin and I
can look at this image and other images with different filters on them to really
study what makes up the gases and and the uh parts of this nebula to
understand where it came from another great feature for um
EAA is watching in real time the effect of image stacking and image stacking is
where in your scope for example with the unistellar it takes 4 seconds second
exposures and it glues them together through the magic of computers and you can watch it build up to show you
details so from left to right um two rows here I I go from 110 seconds to 5
minutes to 10 minutes to 15 25 and 30 where you can see more and more of
the nebulosity appearing in the frame so
part of the pros of this is it it's all in one and the exposure and contrast is
adjustable and of course uh longer observing means more detail but the
limits for this scope is that you get diminishing returns after about 20 or 30
minutes it's not really Geared for double star observing uh and it's a little less
flexible and noisier than asro photography the Celestron will give you
10 second exposures that with that's what gives you more of that really crisp
kind of less noisy image that's uh coming up
there so got to put in a plug for my favorite astronomical League here we've
got the nice website here and you can search for awards once you earn them under award
search but within the past year and a half or so they have opened up the programs the observing programs to EAA
and imaging yay I'm very proud of these guys they uh listened to what folks had
to say and they listened to the writeups that you do for if you have a program
suggestion and as a result I got the Imaging from Messier
number one pen that I'm very proud of and I'm very proud that it helped open up the door for some of this stuff
caveat here is you must read the program and challenge requirements very
carefully because they are a little different for Imaging versus the visual
and that's fine because they are different branches of the tree and U
you're going to learn something no matter which programs that you
choose I also have to put in a plug for the current astronomical League
challenge which has to deal with the year-long anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope 35th
Anniversary and each month there's still time to do it for January there is a
short list of objects to go out and see and you can either sketch them or you
can image them and here I'm providing an example of a submission done of a page
from an A submission done for January that uses EA basically in the program
they're having you go to the Hubble website and download a picture of what H
Hubble saw and then take your binoculars or telescope or image and compare that
to what you saw through your image or your drawing here I've got my unistellar
and then I've also got my Celestron origin and I have put a box around the
section of the image that is the same as the one that's on the Hubble
website very fun I didn't realize how fun until I got to the comparison part I
strongly urge folks to give it a shot with every challenge again read the
particulars because there's usually some component that has to do with Outreach and what fun it is actually to share in
that way other uh programs I've been able to do with EAA uh you take the information
that they provide you for what an object is and you fill out your observing
report basically in this particular um program in the interest of telling a good story
my night of observation ended because at 1:30 in the morning the Medevac helicopter needed the soccer field more
than I did and uh luckily I'm pretty Compact and had everything in my bag and
was ready to flee out the corner when the firemen had come running over to help me clear the way for the
helicopter so it's always fun doing observations you never know what's going to
happen and in this particular example uh again EAA to complete a program there's
some very very tiny obscure globular clusters that I had captured images of
and in this particular case I really had to go and compare to the the web and
make sure I had it what I didn't know was that the uh program coordinator for
globular clusters pointed out that there were three that I had captured these three here that in his 12 years of being
a coordinator nobody else had tried or done or or put into a submission so I
chalked that up to using the EAA type technology that was really exciting and
if anybody's wondering what this blue is here um I go out on moonlit nights too
and that's a little bit of that Moonlight creeping in there but I got the globular cluster so now for a little
bit of uh eye candy here just to give you a sense of what some of these Scopes will do so um these are from the
unistellar product on different nights you can see that uh we've got the trifid
nebula on the right and Som Sombrero on the left very important to note too that
there's no substitution for seeing and transparency if your skies are very
turbulent and you got a lot of upper level clouds you're going to have more bloated Stars whether you're perfectly
columnated or not uh a couple more um examples I can
tell you that um in the EAA that I have done that these um shorter exposures
work better for Star clusters the longer ones work better for nebula and a lot of
times you got to um tool back some of the um actually build up your exposure time
and and cut back some of your background making it a little noisier to get some of that to come out not Hubble but lots
of fun to do and then there was uh news that there
would be a green Comet and my um um sister club trate that we hadn't joined
yet and I told him that night I guess I better join so yall don't throw me off of the Outreach field I knew that they
were having Outreach for this Comet and I knew that their ginormous telescopes were going to be pointed at it and I
knew that I could be of help to the public with my unistellar so it was cold
as all get out that January or or yeah January of uh 2022 and I set my my scope
down and before I knew it uh some of the folks with those ginormous scopes were
sending the public over to my scope because they were having such a hard time to see the the comment and I didn't
realize what a line I ended up with but everybody had fun and that club ended up
getting an EAA scope um not long after that with a grant this is probably also the only
scope I've ever run across that has a cloud filter doesn't everybody in
astronomy want that well through the magic of computers and the stacking of multiple images
I did manage to capture in um the suburbs and I do mean like the edge of
Baltimore this uh pin whe Galaxy and literally the only thing we could see
that night was five stars we counted them there were other Scopes out there there were only five stars but through
the muck we caught some pin wheel would we ever want to put this image into a
competition or compare it to Hubble maybe not no definitely not um but the
folks that came to that star party got to see a Galaxy and they were excited and so were we so think has anybody
through Visual astronomy seen the horse head nebula through an eyepiece okay um if you have an aperture
of less than 12 Ines have you okay well good for you if you have
but uh this is seeing the horse head with about five minutes no
postprocessing yes I tweaked the exposure quite a bit um really uh bumped
up the uh the noise so that I could see the horse head and to this day it's the
only scope um that I own that I've been able to see it in is it the best nope but I've been able to see it other
drawbacks are these things are very susceptible to move
so you can see that there are star Trails here here which um typically
happens from the wind or people bumping their head into your scope at a star
party it happens those hat brims will get it and the other thing that we'll do
because of this Cloud filter is uh once I got it locked into the Sun for the
total eclipse in Texas um in April it stayed tracking and so we actually as
the clouds parted a little bit got to see some flares and stuff um which
tickled me um I was just glad to be there but now I've got a souvenir
forever and then there's some little challenges people can uh try with their
EA technology so I was told hey m33 which is the Hercules cluster has a
propeller in it it does so I took the teeny tiny little entry
level Odyssey Pro put it on it and again tweaked the exposure a little bit and I
got me a propeller you can see that little bit
there so here's H just some time lapse of the owl nebula emerging give it a
little more time you can get uh more of the nebulosity to come
up um couple more samples images of globular
clusters and you can also wonk things out a lot um this is again not something
that I would want to submit for any kind of competition but if what I want to do
is see the eastern and western Veil nebula I can do it by cranking up that
uh exposure to bring out the nebulosity and on better nights um we've actually
done a little better so through all this work and uh tens of thousands of images
with these Scopes in a very short time um and talking to unistellar about a not
so great uh app release that came out a couple years ago I said you know are you
guys testing this stuff before you put it on market and on my way to the uh October
um Eclipse I got a phone call from France you're in you're a beta tester
can we send you a scope okay so even though ID retired
from uh implementation of um applications in it
and whatnot I guess we never really retire from that so I'm proud to say
that the myself and many others globally have participated now in making sure
that these things get tested better before they go to market but I keep learning and growing too
there's always room for improvement right and I mentioned before there's no substitute for Sky quality going into
those dark skies and still skies I know I've got to also work on upgrading my
observational database G some more proficiency and postprocessing and while I have a lot of
programs and challenges completed I've also started on no less than 18 of them
that are ongoing because they're fun sometimes I want to look at planetary
nebula and other times I want to look at alternate
constellations so with that I'm going to pause and ask if there's any uh questions in the chat
anywhere uh I know of one question Lori if I can uh relay it to you how it how
does it do with say galaxies in the 12 and 13 magnitude range maybe 14 have you
tried that I have I can tell you that um
the limiting U ma magnitude is uh about
17 on the unistellar maybe 15 or 16 on the origin and there is a very faint
object close to the Ring Nebula that is supposed to be like a 14 or
15 um too bad I didn't put that in this slideshow but um a friend of mine who
just finished all 2400 hersel um pointed it out to me in an image he goes uh I've
only ever seen this once or twice from my 22 in do you realize that this is
like a 14 or 15 magnitude uh no but I do know
now so um it does a remarkable job on those really dim galaxies yeah and also
are there formats for the unistellar where you do not have the circle with the logo on it yes um in fact you can set it so that
it takes an image with and without and I am looking at my deck here
to see if I have any this one is without the circle this is actually taken with
the Odyssey Pro and they have in the latest application something called
VVT um which is something to do with being Vivid sorry I don't have that and
it spread out more of the colors um it's a little bit of um some people think of
it as more cartoony um some think of it as more flashy a lot of people love the color
but this is one without that ring around it and uh you said the limiting
magnitude of the origin was lower or less just a little yes even despite the
increased aperture yes it is 6 and2 in let me see if I had that on this
slide I did not put that on this slide and in the interest of time I I did
that's that's fine I was just just wondering uh Scott are there any questions that have come in on the chat
that you can see there's one question out there how you know this I mean these
smart Scopes are very interesting in fact I just sold one uh
about an hour and a half ago okay to a gentleman who came in was looking for something for uh his wife that was very
interested in astronomy a total newbie okay uh it's been my experience that
these work out very well for for someone completely completely uninitiated what's
your experience um yes they can there is
still no substitute for learning the sky for example you turn on something like a
unistellar or a sea star and you want to see the Ring Nebula that's going to be
real tough if Lyra has sat for the night um sometimes Scopes like the unistellar
will just have it grayed out um and then if you want to go to another object you
actually have to tell the unistellar okay um show me stuff that is close to
where I'm at so you could spend a lot of time going back and forth battery time
um but for folks who've never done it before plug it in use it I can definitely see where they would be very
pleased too very good we have it we have someone watching on Twitter uh and their
question is could you stack pictures from a cluster of these telescopes that's a very interesting
concept uh yes so in the case can be done yeah in the case of um
unistellar they uh worked very long and hard but now you have the capability of
downloading your own set of the tiffs or raws and you can and people do do their
own post processing on their computer from those and Celestron has the
capability of putting a USB drive into the machine itself and downloading them
that way so anytime you've got your tiffs or raws you can definitely take those and do
postprocessing so let's say that you have one of these I have one and Chuck
has one okay and we're all Imaging the same thing and maybe we have different
filters attached to the Scopes because I know you can attach filters could we
take all of our images and then stack them or adjust them in post I would
think so since in the postprocessing software with my limited experience is
that it's lining up the starfields yeah so if you're at the same place it should in theory
work very cool very cool okay okay well uh Scott
thank you again for hosting us Lori that was a fantastic talk really really
fascinating and uh really appreciate your joining us today and U in my honor
uh if you want to be around 25,000 people like Lori who know the ropes uh
to help you get started in amateur astronomy please consider joining the league you can do it as an individual or
through a league club and we'll be happy to help you any way we can Scott thank you very much and good night everyone
yeah uh I do want to um uh add that uh
uh Terry man was there in the background uh watching the program and she said can I mention that Tom Riner from dark sky
Ida International dark sky or dark sky International as it's now called uh will
be the speaker on February 7th his title will be 10 illusions of the night sky
well there we go so uh if um if you enjoyed this program and I'm
sure that you did I know I did uh uh you should consider joining the astronomical
league if you're not already a member now you can join by uh you know
attaching yourself as a member to one of their over 300 uh clubs um or you can
become a member at large and and all you have to do is go to astr league.org and
uh hit the join button so I want to thank you again uh Chuck and Lori and uh
our viewing audience thanks for also uh letting us work through some of our
technical difficulties today that sometimes happens um but uh and uh you
know as always um uh we want to remind you uh about the upcoming uh Global star
party that will also that's also co-hosted by the astronomical League that will be next Tuesday on the 28th
and our special we always have somebody special that hasn't been on before and this time it's uh uh and I always mess
up his last name I'm sorry if if you know it well but it's a
brother guy consel uh consel man Mano I
believe it's how it's pronounced he is the chief astronomer for the Vatican Observatory and he's going to be on um
starting at 8:30 pm. on January 28th right here on these channels that you're
watching so you don't want to miss that um and uh
everyone keep looking up and thanks again for um tuning in to the
astronomical live although the Moon is a relatively primitive body geologically its Arrested
Development provides insights into the early evolution of other Rocky bodies like Venus Earth and
Mars the lunar Magneto Sounder is a geophysical instrument designed to probe
the moon's deep interior and provide new information on the structure and geological evolution of our companion
World signals that we're looking at from the solar wind and the Earth's magnetosphere have frequencies that are
way below what you might be familiar with as radio waves these signals take minutes or even hours to complete a
single cycle the benefit of these very low frequency signals is that they penetrate deeply into the moon this
allows us to determine the temperature and composition of the interior of the Moon the magnetic fields are measured by
a magnetometer the electric fields are measured between four probes that are deployed at 90° angles around the Lander
LMS will be among the first geophysical measurements to assess interior properties of the moon since Apollo LMS
is both simpler to operate and has better performance than these Apollo era experiments its demonstration paves the
way for an even better version on a later e clipse Mission as well as opportunities for other worlds including
Mars our team at Southwest Research Institute Helia space Corporation and NASA Goddard all contributed to this
first extraterrestrial Magneto measurement commercial lunar payload Services NASA and American companies
working together
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