Transcript:
and we just kind of go with the flow uh the goal is to be done around nine o'clock sometime around there nine nine
thirty so we're good perfect fantastic well like i said certainly looking forward to it and hopefully it can
answer all the questions that people raise and let's just have a shout out for the astronomical week i mean my goodness i
mean what a wonderful thing this is oh thank you yeah and that's our president carol orange there is the
president of the league so so we are very pleased to have this other way of reaching out to
membership and the world you might say i agree i mean this is a real silver lining isn't it because really in the
past the sort of thing really even though it was possible it really wasn't that popular and
i have to say that the this is something that i really enjoy i mean i'm here at my home and uh
my home studio and uh you know i know that in the past we've reached people like you say really
around the world and it's just remarkable to to know that so it's not like being face to face but i'll tell
you it has increased our uh reach tremendously and i think remember clubs
have noticed the same phenomena as well good good yep i think so too and i think
we finally all gotten pretty comfortable with it you know at first it was a whole new thing to learn you know how to do
this and then once you kind of get into the groove of how it works and doing everything then you kind of get a
little comfortable and it seems like you're talking to old friends and every once in a while i forget oh my gosh you
know all right i don't know who's watching this i'm just talking away
i think i've made every mistake that one can make on zoom during the course of these two years or whatever but i like
to think i've learned a little bit from it definitely i'll just say that we're going to keep the camera from the waist
up at this point so uh you know it's it's a it's a it's a it's a it does
take some getting used to it but i think now that we've all kind of cracked it it's a it's a very viable way of communicating with a very broad and
diverse group of people yeah i don't think it'll ever go away because it hasn't excreted our outreach
so much yeah agreed yeah
you got a lot of snow up in minnesota mike well terry you know it's funny you should ask today was like i think we had
a high of about eight fahrenheit and uh it's just uh this is i guess the coldest winter in
eight years i mean this is like one of these weather facts so yeah it gets a lot more snow than ohio does for sure
and it kind of what happens is it snows and it just stays cold enough that there's this perpetual blanket of snow
but next week we're looking at temps in the 50s so everybody's excited we're getting our barbecues out we've got our hawaiian shirts
we are ready to just have a great time it's i'm sure it'll make there'll be some national news headline about you know
minnesota a person in minnesota was seen doing x y and z and you know 50 degree temperatures yeah
yeah i know we had a 70 degree day last week and it felt so good
you're killing me that's wonderful but um yeah
it's all it's all part of the all part of the territory i will say one thing about minnesotans is they know how to clear the streets i mean you know the
moment it even has a hint of snow the salt trucks are out the plows are out and it's it's never really an issue so
everyone's in it together so it's not like that reminds me of being in rochester maybe uh six or eight years ago for a a league event a regional
event and it was amazing overnight the streets were totally okay yeah
yeah absolutely that makes it nice
it makes a big difference when you wake up and except you have that mound of snow in your driveway but apart from that
we actually got a huge battery-powered electric snowblower and i am i'm super impressed on this thing it just starts
right up and it chucks the snow uh you know wherever and um what kind of range do you have as far as
time well it clears the driveway so that's my range and that's the i had a test case about a week or so ago but it was about
45 minutes i would say this was about six eight inches of heavy wet snow on top of slush it was chucking you know
slush you know you know it advertises 30 feet when it's fluffy snow it's 30 feet but this was probably
about 5-10 feet and it worked great i mean it's just there's no issue it always starts up if it dies halfway
through you just go in the house and charge the batteries and they charge right up and um absolutely a big fan
yeah
for those interested there's kind of a semi-aurora alert coming through in the next couple of days so
i saw that i wish i was up in your area no well it's gonna of course snow on
sunday night but um yeah we'll just keep an eye on it and these you know space weather and earth
weather when they magically come together it's a beautiful thing yeah it definitely was
[Music]
when we picture a galaxy we tend to imagine a tranquil pinwheel of stars spinning in the cosmic night
astronomers imagined something similar the disc galaxies like our own milky way had reached their present states
billions of years ago now a study led by susan cassin at nasa
goddard has turned this thinking on its head we find that just like galaxies become
progressively more ordered with time this was a surprise to people on the field because we thought that galaxies
already a billion years ago we're going to be very much like galaxies today whereas that's really not
the case over this period of time galaxies spin faster the the amount of disordered
motions that they harbor has decreased and their total energies increase
over the past 8 billion years disc galaxies began as train wrecks and then evolved into the orderly systems we see
nearby today we found out how fast they were rotating and how much distorted motions they have
from spectra from the telescopes and then in order to interpret the rotation
measurements we needed images from the hubble space telescope to tell us how the galaxies were oriented
so we find the mass of the galaxy plays a large role in how organized it is the most massive galaxies are the most well
organized at all times and the least massive galaxies are the least well organized at all times
so on average the percentage of galaxies which are settled increases with time
here you're seeing it for the higher mass system it's also the case for the lower mass
systems the percentage of galaxies which are settled just increases with time but the
overall percentages for lower mass systems are always lower than the higher mass system we've yet to figure out why this is
in our models of how galaxies evolve we find that galaxies are possibly more disordered in the past because they're
bombarded with more material there are more small galaxies that accrete onto it there are more major mergers of galaxies
and there's more accretion of gas from our models we expect that this constant of environment should slow down
with time and this might be why we're finding this in the observations and what we're finding
might also be due to a decreasing amount of supernova with time however the simulations as they are now
i'm really only at the stage where they're giving us clues as to what's going on in order to get the detailed
measurements to really find out what's going on we're going to need the james webb space telescope
this new picture tells us that disc galaxies like our own milky way experienced a rowdy past for a much
longer time than previously imagined a period that includes the formation of the solar system and the origin of life
on earth
well hello everyone this is scott roberts from the explore alliance and explore scientific and you are watching
the 15th astronomical league live program with special hosts uh terry mann
and uh our regular cast of uh of people that are normally on the
astronomical league uh live programs uh it is uh a pleasure to have to host
these shows and uh they always have amazing guests um
uh i'll be turning this over to terry mann who is actually the real host of this program
terry uh got interested in astronomy as a very very young girl
she uh i guess when she was before she was maybe
five years old maybe as young as she can remember she asked her mom to tell her stories but always stories about the
stars and before she turned eight years old uh she begged her parents for a telescope
that she could photograph the moon with terry has devoted her whole life to
astronomy and promoting astronomy all over the world and uh it's great to have her on uh every time so terry thanks for
inviting us to participate in uh streaming these programs
and i'll turn it over to you thank you scott well we sure couldn't do it without you so we appreciate your
help too we couldn't be here without you thanks well i hope everybody's staying warm
tonight i don't know i think all of us are experiencing snow with the exception of david uh david's in arizona i doubt
that you have snow but uh and maybe albuquerque i'm not sure jim in albuquerque if he lives in
albuquerque is experiencing snow either but i think a lot of the a lot of the
east coast up north definitely experiencing snow so stay warm we got a lot going on tonight
so first i would like to start with david levy uh david has been a friend of
the league for so many years and i have enjoyed just sitting and talking with him and
he's just an amazing person an amazing author and david we're so happy you are here so i will let you take it away
well thank you very much terry and scotty it's good to be here
and uh it's good to be here with such an erudite group and the astronomical
league has meant a lot to me for many many years and i'm really glad that the
convention this summer is going to be held in albuquerque because for a number of reasons the albuquerque
astronomical society has a tremendous reputation and also not no less important is that
our grandchildren live there my our my granddaughter summer's first
word that she said when she was about two years old when she and her mom were
sort of meandering around in their yard and summer looked up and saw this
strange thing and her mom said it was the moon and that led to summer's very first word
moon for my quotation today ever since 2010
when i completed my phd in the uh at the hebrew university of jerusalem
and especially since the pandemic has begun i have been trying to find appropriate
quotations things that are appropriate to the groups that i'm with
quotes that are appropriate to uh the research that i've done and quotes that are appropriate to the
astronomy that i've done for this week i found one that i believe is appropriate
to astronomy this is from
um it is from the iliad by homer and it is the translation
by chapman i think we're all familiar with the keith's poem about chapman's homework
but what i found in this is really pretty interesting it's at the place where palace falls from heaven like a
comet and it has some eerie eerie allusions
to an event that happened not very long ago and here it goes abound
who cast herself from all the hypes with which steep heaven is crowned
and as jove as jupiter brandishing a star which we a comet call
hurls out his curled hair abroad that from his brand exhale a thousand
sparks to fleece at sea and every mighty host of all press edges
and ill-haves a sign mistrusted most and so palace fell to expose the camps
and suddenly was lost i wonder if that reminds any of any of
you of any event that has happened in our lifetimes and with that i go back to terry and
thank you so much terry thank you david yeah you always leave us with something
to think about oh okay how about terrell how about if
we go to you and maybe you can give us an update on what's going on in the league or or what's
just happening in your state quite a bit going on in the league right now starting with
a new and improved website that is hopefully going online within
the next month we're doing some uh the final testing right now so i know our membership has
been very eager to see that and the good news is we're almost there so i hope to
be able to announce that officially uh next month so i think i'll emphasize tonight's uh
message and uh david thanks so much for once again giving us such an outstanding
uh uh uh presentation there it uh
we love listening to your words of wisdom they're always something new that motivates me
uh i'd like to talk tonight about the various deadlines coming up on our major
awards for this year uh most of our youth awards are the deadlines for those are the end of
march basically three weeks from now those include the national young astronomer award
which is so generously sponsored by explore scientific and scott we appreciate that very much
and that includes a trip to the top finisher to alcon in
albuquerque and also a telescope one of explore scientific very wonderful telescopes as
well for the top winner the other youth awards we have and
hopefully we'll have lots of entries for these as well are the horcomer series of awards
we have the two service awards one is the whole commerce smith award and the
other one is the horkheimer de arya award and that goes to the top
two people who have been deemed the best for youth activities in the
community giving service to their communities and there's some cash awards going along
with that as well so plus a free trip to alacon in albuquerque
so that's most of the youth awards uh i might um throw another thing in here
there's also a journalism award that's part of that package and that's the omera journalism award
for uh kids through uh age 12 i believe it's the
official uh age look on astro league.org for all the specifics there but it's a real good
opportunity we have some outstanding essays from the young kids and we encourage everyone if you know someone
who would like to join some of these awards make sure you point them to the website
the other thing we have is something for the newsletter editors of our individual clubs that's called the mabel stearns
editor award it's named after one of the first reflector editors of the league and
it is really a opportunity we have to
uh applaud the people who are the link between the membership and individual
clubs and it's been so important lately lately to have that link there with covet and everything going on so we
really applaud those people so i encourage all the league presidents who are listening in make sure you get your
entry in for your favorite newsletter editor another program that the horkheimer
foundation sponsors is the horkheimer library telescope program we give a
a telescope each year to one of each of our 10 regions plus one for our
membership at large and it's a real fine thing we have uh
library telescopes scattered all over the country now we weren't the original people who came up with the idea but
once we were exposed to that idea we took it and ran and we've got a lot of telescopes uh scattered throughout the
country uh in my state for example they're a satellite astronomical society i think at last count had about 150
telescopes in schools i mean it's amazing what uh that can do and it's
another it's another uh validation that astronomy is extremely popular and we
found that out of course during the pandemic with all the back orders for telescope
equipment and other uh related equipment and so that's in our membership at the league we've
gained probably 3 000 members in the last year so it's really a testament uh
even though people couldn't get out and move around a lot at least they could get out and look up at the stars so
that's that's very helpful one of our newer awards this year for uh
uh women imagers is the fleming imaging award and again that one
is sponsored by scott roberts and we appreciate that very much uh the deadline for that award this year
is again may 31st to give everybody plenty of time to get
those images in and their applications that go along with them so if you know uh
imagers in your club the ladies who don't always have a special award
for them this is your opportunity now we had i think about six or seven entries this past year outstanding
uh images from uh those uh uh who did submit including our own terry mann uh
with our beautiful aurora and other other shots as well she presented and i think that's about all the uh of
the upcoming award information uh i'll say just a little bit more about uh
albuquerque here in just a little bit carol on the website right now i believe
all the forms are there i'm not sure we've got all the fleming um because the fleming rules will be changing a little
bit this year we'll have categories i'm not sure that that is on the website yet terry would you want uh that's sent to
your email your league email address if anyone has any information needs any information about the flaming at this
point sure sure not a problem league dot org uh terry can tell you all
about this award uh she and chuck allen are working very closely on that and until yeah because the information out
there is a little dated uh the other information for other awards as far as i know it's totally current but that one
oh one one word i forgot about is the sketching award uh and we get several
entries for that so all the people who are interested in sketching there are some cash awards that go along with that as well so make sure you remember that
and now i'll go back to you jerry okay thanks carol yeah and i think the only
reason we have extended the fleming is because uh you know we were waiting on the new website and to get the rules the
new rules all worked out too so um yes please if any uh women league members
out there need any information contact me at astroleague.org and i'll send on
everything i can so thank you and thank you carol it's always good to see you it'll be nice to see everybody in person in albuquerque
that'll be such a relief finally so all right speaking of albuquerque
we are going to go to jim fordyce uh carol do you want to introduce jim yeah i'd be
pleased to jim fordyce and his group in albuquerque are probably the most patient people in
the universe we started to have an alcon in albuquerque in 2020
well some things got in the way as most of you know that didn't work out
2021 we thought well okay this will work well that didn't work either although we had
a wonderful virtual alicon co-chaired by terry and uh and uh chuck
allen that worked out very well but it's still not quite the same as meeting in person and that's why we are so eager to
finally uh get together in albuquerque this year and jim and his group have been so
patient i think the third try is going to make it happen so we're real pleased with that jim i'd like to go ahead and
introduce you and tell us everything these people wanted to know about al khan but hadn't had the opportunity to
ask yourself well thanks carol uh thank you terry and everybody else
for having me tonight um i am actually talking to you from virginia today
not in albuquerque um and i'll bring up my slides here uh
can somebody tell me that they can see them that's good okay great so um let me just start off with uh
telling you a little bit about uh uh when and where get it working here
there we go whoops so the winning wires uh so um this thing is going to go from 28
through 30 july uh it'll be at the embassy suites hotel which has a very nice convention
facility uh we we showed that to um carroll back in 2019 actually and uh and
i think we're finally going to be able to use it and we have some pretty good room rates uh the nice thing about an embassy
suites hotel is all rooms or suites and they're offering those for 129 dollars
both for single or a double so it doesn't cost you anything else to have somebody else with you and then the
triples and the quads just add 10 more dollars each um but if you need a triple
or quad i understand you should go quickly so those those rooms are actually
available now and if you go to the uh the website uh that is that we currently
have up uh you can actually make your room reservations right now even though you can't register yet for the
conference a lot of amenities at the hotel you get the complimentary wi-fi uh you get a
nice cook to order breakfast every morning and they also have an evening reception even though in the evenings
we're going to be kind of busy doing doing alcon things so i'm not sure if you're going to be able to take advantage of that
[Music] registration costs uh we have uh settled on these
prices for the conference ninety dollars for singles 135 for
couple and uh half the single rate for students we define student as anyone who's a
full-time student so that could be a college student we just ask them to identify what year they are in school and we'll
give them that rate uh after the 25th of may just to sort of encourage everyone to
to register early that the prices go up just a bit that registration gives the registrants
access to uh the ballroom for all of the speakers as and and the vendors for that matter
a souvenir conference bag a program a lapel pin and also the
opening welcome reception on the 27th of july
uh the schedule will actually kick off on wednesday as i just mentioned on the 27th of july there'll
be an al council meeting that day that's when everybody in the astronomical league
council finally gets to see each other i guess once a year and uh i guess they they don't really like each other that
much so they only get together once a year but they do it for all day and having sat through one in minnesota
i can assure you they get a lot done in that day um there will be that welcome reception
that i mentioned and then we'll also have a star party at our observatory we
call it the general nathan twining observatory or gnto and i'll talk more about that later
on thursday we will start off as the first conference day there'll be registration
both on wednesday and then through thursday morning we'll have a vendor expo will be open at
that point i will have a a welcome from carol and and the astronomical league
leadership we will have a spectroscopy workshop to start off that day along with five speaker sessions and then
we'll do another uh star party at our observatory that evening
on friday uh we'll continue vendors we'll have the astronomical league
annual meeting that day we'll have a workshop on astrophotography there'll be three speaker sessions along
with a panel discussion led by carol lorsch he says still figuring out who's
going to join him on that so watch out you you might be pulled into that so be careful when when he asks you hey what
are you doing on the 29th of july uh the big thing for that day we think
is going to be in the evening with harrison schmidt the apollo 17 astronaut so he's the last man
to have stepped out of a spacecraft and onto the moon now he's not the last guy to have been on the moon because that
was actually eugene cernan he's the last guy who got back into the limb but nonetheless uh harrison schmidt is still
with us he's still going strong really likes to talk to people and so
what we're going to do is have a number of things with him and i'll talk more about those in a minute and then we'll have an observing session
that evening at viadora which i'll also talk a little bit more but that's a real nice place in albuquerque for observing
on saturday the last conference day now we'll still be doing the vendors we'll have the observing award coordinator
meetings that's where all those awards that carol was just talking about a lot of them anyway will be presented now
we'll have the youth award present uh presentations then we'll have the photometry workshop that
day and we'll have four speaker sessions and then we'll have the awards bank with that night uh the cost for that banquet
will be seventy dollars
uh some of the special tours trips and other events that we'll have but we'll have a tour of the the u
university of new mexico institute of meteoritics they have a really really nice uh display of uh meteors and
meteorites i guess uh in in the the institute
that uh will cost 12 for the the bus trip over to uh to unm
uh that night we'll have um our party at the general nathan twining observatory
those pictures show you there our main dome in which we have a 16 inch uh cave
reflector a real nice telescope and we'll have that up but operating that night for you
it's a four acre uh quite dark cigar uh site uh it's about 45 miles south of
albuquerque now we have both a main dome that one you see in the picture as well as an imaging dome that's off to the to
the right there in that top picture we also have a cafe and a meeting slant
bunking building that we use both of those buildings are heated so in the winter time that's real nice
when you're there in july you won't be needing any heat it'll be supplied directly from the sun that day
i assure you we have 22 observing pads this is really an observer's place
that's mainly what the site is used for as people show up with their telescopes set up and and observe through the
evening you can see in the bottom picture there a nice shot of people setting up their telescopes and getting
ready to go there before sunset um the next day on thursday
we will have a tour of the rainbow park that is actually run by the rio rancho
astronomical society they will include a lunch with that so the bus trip and the
lunch will cost 19.
then on friday evening as i've already mentioned uh harrison schmidt uh we will have uh him uh
with us uh he will do two things one is uh he will do an in-person vip session
uh for that we will charge uh participants a hundred dollars to be able to personally meet with harrison
he's a he's a really nice man to talk to a lot of fun uh we will also give you a
a drink a uh some poopoos some hors d'oeuvres to to get ready to go for
dinner and also a signed copy of his book about the moon which is a really an
interesting read now he's quite proud of that book and has uh promised
us to to sign all of them for us that should be a very nice
session with him and then following that the the regular dinner and presentation
that he will give to a larger crowd uh in the uh the ballroom uh the cost for
that meal will be 61. uh we really think this is going to be one of the big highlights of the
conference schmidt is a just a really really good speaker and i think it'll be
a lot of fun hearing uh from from really one of the the few survivors now that
have actually walked on the moon um after that
uh since it's it's july and and you know the sun doesn't go down it's a real light so it doesn't really get dark
until nine pm we're going to have a a bus leave uh after the dinner uh from
the hotel there and go over to via de oro it's a national wildlife refuge it's
on the south side of albuquerque it is the uh the first place to be designated
as an urban night sky place by the international dark sky society
and our shooting association and uh they uh they're very proud of that designation and certification they
also have a brand new visitor center that they are just about ready to open up it hasn't quite happened yet because of the
pandemic but it will definitely happen by july and we really look forward to
going over there and and and seeing what they've got to offer and it's nice close into the city and yet a
fairly dark place to do some observing then on saturday night we will have that
uh awards banquet as i said the the cost for that will be 70
um then on sunday i think will be the other really big attraction for coming
to the alcon 2022 and that's to go visit the very larger way the
the the jansky very large array uh it's actually about a two and a half hour uh
bus ride from albuquerque so we purposely put it on the day after the conference ends so that everybody
actually has a chance to go because for many people they just wouldn't have the opportunity since they have to be uh
participating in the conference so we've got it on on that sunday after the conference is over
we will have two packages for that one one is just a regular tour with transportation and a lunch that will
cost 70 and for those who want to make it even a longer day and see some extra things we'll have a dinner in magdalena
which is the town which is just to the east of the very large array we will have a tour of the lyceum which is a
setup that has been put together by john briggs many of you
probably know who john is he has got a collection of antique telescopes that is just unbelievable and
i tell you it is worth going on this tour just to see the lyceum it is really
something uh we will also do a little bit of observing and we'll get back to albuquerque in the probably the wee
hours of the morning after that so that'll be a long day but you won't have anything to do the
next day so you'll be good to go that'll cost ninety dollars for that extra package
then uh let me tell you just a little bit about the albuquerque astronomical society our motto is observe educate and
have fun so we put everything in that context first is observing we're a big observing club we've probably got more
master observers in our club than anybody else it's uh it's really amazing how many folks have have completed that
certification but we also do a lot of education we have a very strong program
of school star parties and other community events where we educate folks and then
we also like to have a lot of fun doing it and we always are telling each other hey if you're not having fun then let's
figure out how to make it fun because that's what we're here to do we've got uh in excess of 550 members
right now uh so that we're going pretty strong just like the astronomical society the
pandemic has been uh really a boon for um for additional membership uh
we we've grown about 20 to 25 percent over the last two years that's pretty nice um this is not the first time
there's been an alcon in albuquerque we actually were the hosts in 1962 so 60
years ago the astronomical league came to to albuquerque and had a good time then
hopefully we'll do even better this time as i said we've got some very active programs and public outreach and
education we do a lot of public star parties at least while we're getting restarted on public star parties we
haven't done done one since the end of 2019 but we're going to get started in april with our first one here post
pandemic and i'm really looking forward to that we do a lot of school star parties we
have a planetarium it's a six meter planetarium so it's fairly large when we set it up in the school's gymnasium
usually and get about 45 of the the students in there and and
show them what they're going to see hopefully when they go outside and look through the telescopes and then we do a
lot of other community events and and really keep people uh informed about astronomy in the area
um i also have mentioned our general nathan twining observatory we also have a very large telescope loan
program we've got 38 telescope packages right now where we
for just the charge of membership in the club we give our members a telescope with a
full package of eyepieces and everything else they need to get started with that telescope
and we really encourage people who join us and get started in astronomy to to
borrow as many different telescopes as they can so they can figure out what they want to spend their money on you know how all that is you know
you're going to spend a lot of money on a telescope you want to spend it on the right thing so we help them do that and
then i've got the url for our website there if you're interested in looking for more
um why visit albuquerque well first off it's been around a while we were founded
in 1706 so we're already uh well past our 300th
anniversary we are the 32nd largest city in the united states even though it really
doesn't feel like a large city most people call albuquerque a very large town
mainly that's because we don't have a lot of suburbs so we've got the city and they're you know the the stretch to the
population for the metropolitan areas only goes up from 564 000 or so up to 929 000 so it's not
like a lot of other cities where you know the city is has got a you know a fairly large population but then the
metropolitan area is several times larger that's not the case with albuquerque
it also makes it nice because then you can get out of the city and get to a dark sky spot a little bit quicker
we have a lot of attractions we have an old town which is a large central plaza area that has museums
cultural areas it's got a lot of commerce a lot of really interesting places to go shopping
a lot of restaurants art galleries that sort of thing all in a fairly short distance from
the embassy suites hotel we also have the new mexican museum of natural history and science which is
going to extend a really nice invitation to participants in the alcon to visit
the museum while you're there they have a very nice planetarium that's been recently modernized and it really
puts on a great show we also have something called the explora science center which is a very
nice place to visit as well especially if you have kids along with you that's a great place for the the younger folks
and then we also have the natural the national museum of nuclear science and history which is a very uh unique
museum which is over by kirtland air force base and really is a nice place to visit if you're interested not only in
any anything related to nuclear science other attractions are the petroglyph
national monument we've got a lot of very interesting petroglyphs in the area it's the largest petroglyph site in
north america a lot of the designs and symbols were carved onto volcanic rocks by native
americans and spanish settlers so a lot of people working on that over a long period of time
we've got a very nice biopark in the city it's got a botanical garden an aquarium and a zoo and also gives you
access to the rio grande river it's a really really nice place
we also have the world's third longest single span tramway so you can go to the foothills
of albuquerque and ride a tram all the way up to the top of sandia peak which
uh tops off at about 10 600 feet the terminal is just a little bit below the the actual peak of the the
mountain itself and up there you can go to a restaurant called 10 3 which is supposed to be 10 300 is where they got
that name from they just recently uh they took they i pretty much just
gutted out the restaurant and rebuilt the whole thing so it's brand new and it's supposed to be quite nice and when
you're up there at night and looking down in the city it's really quite a sight so that's a another thing to consider you know coming early or
staying late to do while you're in the area
we also have the anderson or bruzzo international balloon museum you may remember back in the 80s and 90s when
people were doing a lot of balloon flights across the atlantic and through the pacific and all that a lot of those
folks were from albuquerque and a lot of those balloons and the gondolas that
flew in them are in this museum it's really a nice place to visit and if you're interested you can get a
hot air balloon ride uh that's a lot of fun i've done many of them my dad used to own a hot air balloon i've been up uh
probably 20 30 times and i'll tell you it's it's well worth doing it's a lot of fun
uh we also have a lot of areas to bike i in addition to astronomy i'm a big
cyclist uh we have the uh paseo de bosque trail that uh
runs uh right down the rio grande river and around uh parts of the city city and
is is just a wonderful trail that top picture there is that trail and we also
have a 50-mile loop that goes up and around the city which is also a lot of fun uh for hiking we've got uh a lot of
hikes up in those mountains in the background there of the the top picture those are the sandia mountains you can
climb all over those mountains so if you're a big hiker now we can show you all kinds of places to go where you can
have a good time and then we also have the isotopes the aaa baseball team
they are currently associated with the colorado rockies so if you're a rockies fan you can see
uh the next generation of rocky stars in albuquerque
and also we have a rio grande nature center which is right down near where i live a really nice place to visit along
the river you can hike down in that area too you can also go to the indian pueblo
cultural center and the national hispanic cultural center all really interesting places to visit
and we have one thing that nobody else can offer and that's the breaking bad tour
and and you you know you may remember the uh the rv that they used
uh in the show well i see that thing all the time uh running people around the
city it's i haven't gone on it myself and it looks like a lot of fun uh really worth doing
and uh you know like i said nowhere but in albuquerque can you see all the places where they filmed that
show it's a lot of fun and uh here's some contact info i'll
leave that up while i answer any questions that you may have
i can just see this is going to be an amazing amount of fun i'm gonna i think
i'm gonna have to stay longer to do everything that looks like a fantastic
lineup of so much to do in albuquerque carol i think we ought to get counsel together the day before the meeting and
get them up to the 10-3 restaurant yeah i think we need to see who's uh adventure summit who isn't
that would be a beautiful view i can't imagine that yes it's got a ton to offer that's for sure
and the meeting facility itself the hotel it's uh geared up specifically
uh for a portion that has the convention portion of conventions uh without the
the normal traffic there so it's really a well thought out uh situation there
i bet scott are there any questions there no i i think that people are
uh certainly looking forward to this event um you know uh and uh you know if you've
not been to an astronomical league event you definitely need to go um
you know we will make this a hybrid event we will broadcast from there but it's not the same as being there and
you're going to meet the the reason for that is that you're going to make uh you know new friends probably
lifelong friends and uh um you know and you'll learn things uh
by attending that you can learn really no other way so i recommend it
yeah and with so much to do i mean it is amazing to listen to jim talk about
everything there's something that would interest anybody there if you do all the astronomy stuff
there'll be no time i think we everybody better allow about two weeks for this
everybody's into astronomy there's plenty to do albuquerque is a great city
yeah and we do have the rates at the hotel starting a few days before the conference and going after so you can
still get those nice rates for a longer period that's great yeah those are fantastic
greats my gosh this whole thing sounds fantastic i'm so glad you guys hung in
there through all everything we've been through the last two years because this this looks amazing to me i can't wait to
get there we look forward to having you
all right uh are there is there any questions from anybody here before i move on
there was a question kind of going back uh before uh josh kovac
was asking is there a refresh on the new galaxy season imaging awards
carol i have no idea do you there is none yet uh i believe that's still under
discussions and we should be announcing something probably and i'll call that
okay all right thank you all right well thank you jim this is
this is going to be a lot of fun um it looks like i'm up next um i'm
going to ask the three questions we are giving away uh three door prizes
and so let me my screen go on here
uh tonight we're going to be giving away an astronomical league calendar
to each of the three winners and it takes like there we go computer a
little bit one thing to note uh the office has mentioned we're having a lot of problems shipping stuff
internationally it's getting stuck somewhere along the way so if you happen
to be somebody out of you outside of the u.s and you
don't receive the door prize please contact us and we will see where it's at
or what's going on we'll do our best but be aware if you are an international winner we are experiencing some shipping
problems and this isn't like the gsp uh tonight
we're gonna do it all in one show uh so tonight please send your answers
within the next half hour because i will announce them after mike shaw's talk
and after that when if you are a winner somebody from the astronomical league office will be in contact with you
so all right so let's start with the questions for tonight and again please send these answers to astronomical
secretary at astronomical league.org all right what time was liftoff of the
james webb telescope what time all you need is a time not necessarily the date just the
time of james webb telescope liftoff
now while readying the james webb telescope for launch what time was the final segment of the
primary mirror locked into place so if they're getting it ready they put
the final segment on and what time was the final segment of the primary mirror
locked in place again send it to secretary
astroleague.org and the last question how big is the
james webb hexagonal segmented segmented mirror so how big is that
mirror i'd like to have that in my backyard uh send your answers to secretary
at astroleague.org and again please do that within the next 30 minutes um and i will
uh announce the winners after my shawl all right so next up we've got don knapp
and don is the chair of mural of the mid-eastern
right mid-eastern region yes of the astronomical yeah yeah okay and
don i need to bring up your slides or are you able to i can i can do them now we have internet back after being down
for a large part of the day oh wow okay if you need anything you just taller all right i will share my
screen can everyone see that
yes all right i will start the slideshow
okay i just want to spend a few minutes on the regional events coming up in the mideast region
and i'm going to do a quick look at a number of them but i'm going to take a deep dive into one of them
one of them which is uh it's an amazing amazing event so uh this is the calendar i'm not gonna spend
a whole lot of time in this slide just a quick look google about halfway down but uh the northeast
astronomical forum has been postponed again until 2023 so uh
that unfortunately it's not immoral but it's pretty close to us that has been postponed unfortunately
because uh a number of logistical issues not just covet but a lot of logistical issues so
stone river star party that is not a merrell club but it is in merrell region down the very bottom of virginia that's
coming at the end of this month south jersey has a uh has a star party at the end of april
novak which is northern virginia astronomy club that's a club about i'm not sure the latest capital but at least a thousand members
they have an astronomy day in may 7th and uh in the not far from where i'm at now in
the pocono mountains of pennsylvania uh there's a number of uh observatories
in pulpit rock i think it's lehigh university they have a meet on paparaz pennsylvania
pretty well known event is the cherry spring star party that's in early june that is a wonderful
sight to see this guy york county star party actually this is
in it's the york county star party but it's not in york county it's in lancaster county so
don't ask me how it got that way although it's a long story but uh they have two events one in june and one
september i was at the one my wife and i were the one last year september it was a nice event it's a smaller event it's
kind of intimate it's a nice event uh green bank star quest i'm going to do a deep dive into that in a moment here
and uh i'll just stop at the next one that's the ao convention that we just talked about so the rest are fairly far out
i will skip on them anyone that wants more information meryl astronomy.org and there's a whole page
on these events and links to information about every event so you can you can always go to
there so now i'm going to talk about green bank a bit this is a it's an event that
i only have attended once it's the first place actually i met terry mann
and uh hosted by the central appalachian astronomy club caic
so where is it it is basically in the middle of nowhere uh this is where i'm up here just west
of philadelphia watching tonight we're up here in the poconos but we live west of philadelphia for us towing a
camper is about an eight-hour drive at least to go down there it is in a radio quiet zone and i'll
talk about that a little further on but greenbank is a radio observatory
and uh so central appalachian's genre club of west virginia it's an optical and radio star
party that's all the usual stuff camping here is uh i i stole some shots from the uh
the green bank of the the star quest website this one was one of theirs this one i actually took can't quite make it
out probably but that little camper there is one my wife and i had the time we actually have a slightly the bigger one now
but it's a beautiful camping field this is only half the field and this is one was just starting to fill up but the other half is just to the left where
this picture ends it's flat and it has a great view
of the dome it's just so neat to see that thing slowly moving around looking at the sky
it's a really nice place to be um this is from uh from their website this
is uh from the uh from 2007. and uh there's quite a gang they had
there you can see behind the camping field there is there is the uh there's the radio telescope that's the
barn at the barn you can get things like water you need to recharge your batteries for your telescopes
uh this was our campsite this actually is our was our club president of the time roger taylor his wife and there's
my wife barb roger with his 14-inch uh dab
so the area the campsite is great it's the gravel roads there's hot showers and that's what this picture on the right is
here that's the bunk house okay you if you don't want to camp you can stay in the bunk house but the nice
thing about camping there is that there are hot showers you can take every day uh middle of green bank observatory
complex and when you're driving down we between the the valleys in west virginia and you come around one
curve and see that telescope it's just it sets you back it's it's an amazing sight
it is the world's largest steerable radio telescope and uh it's in a beautiful valley now
you can get the scope is down for maintenance during the week of star quest you can get tours uh the day
before we got there our friends roger and linda they got to the very top i only got to this level one you know
what that was high enough for me this is larger than a football field so you can go all the way up
but it's a radio quiet area even when it's down for maintenance so you're not even allowed to take a digital watch
near the telescope let alone there is no cell service and even if you have your cell phone
with you you're not gonna get any service so uh better leave them off
you can set up your telescope right the campsite uh actually one of the uh i think it was the saturday night the uh
the main presentation he had his big job set up uh not too far from our campsite
uh you can do solar observing nighttime you can get a meal plan for breakfast and uh and
dinner and the snack bar the snack bar is is in this area it's off to the right here
nice place to sit and have lunch um at night there are presentations then
during the day their presentation but at night there are keynote presentations terry mann gave one in 2019 as i recall
about lunar expeditions it's a really nice uh really nice little
auditorium there it's a science center and a number of things to see in the science center
lots of lots of nice exhibits and yeah every night a keynote
presentation then you come back and there's night sky viewing the sky is excellent i would say it's pretty close
to what i see at cherry springs for a really good site and you can learn about radio astronomy
they do a cutting edge research it is an active telescope not the week we're there but they do a lot of work
one i may have mentioned this last year when i talked about this briefly but uh you know they need to paint this thing
to keep in a good shape and that's quite quite a chore to be fastened into your harness on these uh
on this this high up when you're painting but they do it and i guess they get used to it but i don't know how they do it
this is the main observatory uh site for the scientists that uh do the radio telescope research
and there's stuff for kids to do you can bring your kids no guarantee of clear skies but the i can't say enough about
the central appalachians johnny club staff they were so welcoming and they went out of their way to make everyone
happy feel comfortable uh this is the uh the science center there's wonderful displays in there but
such a great group of people i'm really looking forward to going back there and uh in june
so just a couple notes no cell phone service and uh no in the area i mean for tens of
miles around i think it's actually a couple hundred square miles altogether people can't have microwaves or if you
do has to be inside a faraday cage which is what they do in the snack bar they have a faraday cage surrounding
microwave they have to close it up before they can turn it on you connect computers there's a room you
walk through double door metal line double door into an entirely metal lined room
uh there is a window i'm not sure how they get around that i guess there's a screener with that you can access the computers and that's where they have
some classes uh about a hundred bucks per person for all four days
you can also get a meal ticket additional additional cost bunk house i think it's like 15 bucks a
night or something it's cheap uh no 110 volt power on the camping field but at that barn i showed you you
can charge your batteries and get water no generators no two-way radios
and for this year they are asking that everyone be vaccinated and we're masked
indoors uh keynote speakers uh shane larsen knows one day i think i
think i think sephela was the uh the keynote speaker on saturday night in 2019 if i remember right
i see terry shaking her head yep and he had his uh i don't know what it was my 20 inch dog or 24 inch dog set up in the
camping area it was a great night uh caitlyn aaron she was part of uh
the alcon virtual presenter for us and then friday night they have uh mark
kacchi mission specialist apply physics lab and then dr jason workin
astrobiology from nasa goddard so some really good presentation and there are classes all day long
so you get a lot more information this is just a screen capture from the website
there is the actual link you can go to it and uh you can schedule now you can you can register they actually have early
bird registering to the end of the month you can get registered for four days for 90 bucks instead of 100. so uh
i think that is all i had many questions
yeah i've got a question yeah so uh with the uh restriction on uh
radio and all that does that include wi-fi you know most of us now these days talk to our telescopes via a wi-fi
network so is that not no you could use that's a good question but i think the answer would be no
because they don't want any radio signals going on so i think we'd have to check with the staff there but i think they would be
unless they're absolutely shut down that night they may make an exemption but that'd be a question for the uh
for the staff of greenbank i know i know they don't even want you can't take your cell phone to take
pictures when you do the tour you they sell little uh film cameras they just send a way to
be developed you cannot take your cell phone camera you can have a camera at the campsite you can do that digital
camera or your cell phone but not doing the tour yeah they had me take off
yeah yeah you take off your digital watch everything to get rid of the telescope so yeah
yeah but it is an amazing place uh it is where the talks are at there's a restaurant inside there and when you buy
the meal plans uh in the dorm area areas where the astronomers stay they actually have a cafeteria and that's where you
buy you can buy your meal tickets over there at night and have a buffet over there but the whole place is just
amazing and as you said the club the people there are really friendly
and it's it's just a whole different area uh if you bring your bicycle they
allow you to ride the bikes your bicycles back through the dishes or anywhere on the grounds that you want to
or you can walk back there everybody takes long walks this is like hiking yeah yeah
one night about six of us took off and we could not believe all the deer all you could see were their glowing eyes
all the deer that were out there it was amazing but you also have a number of i'm not sure how many a
couple dozen items in a raffle oh my gosh these are yeah
they're door prizes i have to show you we got two quilts two astronomy quilts
you guys those are nice i must have put 50 bucks in that box
and we actually won two of them they had three available we won two of them yeah they have amazing door prizes there
is no doubt and you buy tickets for that and you it is more like a raffle so you put your ticket in on the price prices
that you would really like to win and it is amazing what they've came up with i don't know how long they have held star
quest but they do number 17 number 17 so 17. yeah i kept throwing
raffle tickets that thing every day not box [Laughter] yeah i kind of use that same idea too a
little bit every day so all right is there any questions anywhere else before i move on
i don't see any questions here okay all right scott how about if we take about a 10
minute break and we're going to come back with mike shaw okay all right we'll have a few minutes
for the uh the big board up there uh any comments you want to post up there uh
you can do that from the chat um and then i'm gonna run that visualization again from those uh the
formation of that disc galaxy it's so beautiful that is the uh
just a little tidbit of information about it it took there's something called the pleiades uh
supercomputer and in order to create this visualization which you'll see in a few minutes
it took it took let me get this right
it took it's a 13.5 billion
year time lapse okay and it took um
how many hours 1 million cpu hours to create it so
it's worth watching again here we go thanks scott
terry you're on mute
thank you i said i think alcon will be amazing i am really looking forward to that
yeah it sounds amazing i think i want to move to albuquerque i mean that was quite a uh quite a rundown of the different
attractions it's incredible oh my gosh yeah and the activities i've been to the
vla but it would be nice just to go and leisurely spend the day you know looking
around agreed yeah mike come and join us
well i went to the alcon and when it was here in minneapolis of course that was uh that was an easy commute um so it's
uh it's very very very tempting i will say that i think there was an issue with the dates but i don't know it's it's
always i mean it's amazing how i mean an in-person event like that it's just always first of all very motivating and
inspiring to hear just the descriptions of this group in the last hours of the different activities and the outreach
and stuff it's just a really wonderful thing to hear all these uh you know astronomy clubs with hundreds and hundreds of members
um and but when you get together in person there really isn't anything quite like it yeah yeah you really miss it when when
you're not able to do it i mean because we are like a community especially with the league we've all
known all these people from everywhere for so long and you really kind of miss that extended family you know for three
years we've been in our cocoons and we haven't seen folks normally
yeah hopefully that's about to change i hope sounds like we're on the in a better place on all of it
yeah yeah i really do want to go up to that 10-3
restaurant now that that yeah we got to do that maybe the ec or something goes
up yeah if we can't get council maybe we can get the ec up there yeah definitely
mike you're gonna see me drop off the screen i have to check my email and go over winners i usually get so wrapped up
in the speakers that i almost forget to do that the last time i was right in the last 10 minutes when i realized i need
to be doing something else and not sitting so
well we're back everyone and uh i hope you had a good break uh i hope you enjoyed that visualization um
and uh back to you terry thank you very much scott well it is my pleasure
to introduce mike shaw he will be our speaker for tonight mike is an internationally recognized
night photography teacher who loves exploring the universe with his camera he is the author of two books on night
photography the complete guide to landscape astrophotography and the creative and creative nightscape
and time lapses he's the host of the annual aurora summit conference which i go to all the
time and i can highly recommend you guys do a really great job there too
he is also a delegate for the international dark sky association
he recently helped create the video tutorials in the planet pro app and he
offers interactive online classes in adobe photoshop lightroom and he is a member of the astronomical
league and of the minnesota astronomical society and his title tonight is getting
started in landscape astrophotography so mike thank you for joining us it's such a pleasure to see
you again it is well thank you terry for that kind introduction and to uh scott and jim and
carol and everybody else for the the warm welcome tonight it is even though i've many i've just met most of you uh
with the exception of terry it still feels like we're old friends because because we have this uh this common link
this common denominator and i think that common denominator is really going to help in tonight's uh discussion in that
we have a shared interest in love and fascination with the night sky and what when terry
and i were talking about this possibility one of the things that came to mind was to just gives kind of a how to get started
in landscape astrophotography which i'll be talking about here in a minute or nightscape photography so uh super
excited to be here teresa thanks very much you're welcome thank you for joining us
okay well look i'm just going to go ahead and get started with the slide presentation i think the uh i know this
is a live streamed event so not quite sure how we would handle questions i guess you could email those to terry if
you do have a question i love answering questions yeah scott has a chat and people can put
questions in the chat but also yeah if you can't get to chat please email at
secretary afterleague.org i will be checking email now anyway so
that's that's really to me one of the best parts is that because there's so many things that are uh seemingly
uh not insurmountable but just kind of a dead end and just having a quick answer to that will really help so
all right well just diving right into it then here we are how to get started in landscape astrophotography
uh it's a wonderful flyer i mean i was just blown away by all the stuff that's in that so a great job to those who put
that together but to me one of the great things about um landscape astrophotography is it really
makes this bridge between the sky and you know the night sky and the earth and
so this is a time lapse video from a summer night in the boundary waters
canoe area wilderness and one of the things that always strikes me is that we really are on
spaceship earth you know we're the ones who are moving through the cosmos
uh you know the the the night sky the universe the cosmos is really out there and
just so many things to watch i mean there's i mean all of you are i know intimately familiar with this view and all the objects that we see just there
and so to me one of the great things as i say about nightscape photography or landscape astrophotography is it allows
us to at least momentarily glimpse this universe that lies beyond
our familiar uh our familiar environment so this is a more traditional view of that same scene
of the core of the milky way the galactic core region and this is kind of the type of photograph that i'll be talking about
this evening you know where we have uh some view of the night sky coupled with
some view some foreground view and often mountains uh wilderness locations are
uh often featured in nightscape imaging so i'll be talking about how you can go about what camera gear to use what
settings to use and all that sort of stuff you know milky way is certainly one of the most
popular places that people start with nightscape photography but constellations are yet another
fantastically popular night sky subject that are often overlooked by
non-astronomers shall we say and this was a kind of a funny there's a funny story behind this one i'd carefully plan
this uh shot so that orion would be perfectly positioned within this arch in arches
national park and we have a crescent moon setting we're facing as you know east and we have the crescent moon setting on
the western horizon to our right and about 10 minutes after i took this photograph the crescent moon
set and the entire arch was just black in shadow
and so i wanted to capture this view of orion while orion while the the
arch was illuminated and right when i was about to do i'd play on this thing i traveled scope down everything and this
delightful couple who you see here came over and sort of like noticed that i had a camera and said oh you must be a
photographer i was like yeah that's all right well can you take our picture in the arch i'm like
what are you talking about i'm mike shaw i am here to do this this wonderful thing you know i'm at work and so anyway
i was a grumpy old man for a while and eventually i kind of they they they waited patiently i said okay go ahead
why don't you go ahead and stand in the arch i was like oh my gosh that's the shot you know and it's just one of those
instances where i realized that um when serendipity knocks you have to open the door and i've kind of learned a lesson
from that not to be quite so self-important and self-righteous and stuff but anyway i always whenever i see this video because they were just such a
i'm kept in touch i sent a copy of the image but you know consolations the milky way the aurora borealis we are
currently there's been a some recent solar activity that may um produce a possibility of an aurora
tomorrow night sunday or day after tomorrow night sunday evening if you're interested this is in the state of
minnesota so you don't have to travel to iceland or alaska or canada to have some fantastic views of the aurora and then
of course we're all familiar with star trails i mean this is something that as astronomers you know we're very familiar with how this why this happens but to
people who are not astronomers this is often a real eye-opener of a shot so this is a another really
easy type of a nightscape and very popular one to photograph and share with your
family and your friends and of course you know here's some planets i mean this is if you look very carefully you can see venus you can see mercury right just
there i don't know if you can see i think you can see the cursor on the screen but you can certainly see mercury's reflection
in the uh from the surface of this lake here and you know just being able to visualize not only these planets in a
you know conjunction type orientation like this but also to realize just how tiny they are i mean that's it between
us and the sun and uh you know when you look at just these every time i look at these tiny little points of light i just i'm struck
by how little the objects of the united the solar
system are so i think you won't get the point i'm going there but it's still these are fantastic objects to uh capture in the evening twilight or in
the morning twilight as well now here's another we're just talking about uh you know some of the astronauts
and this is a trajectory of the international space station uh again over a lake in in minnesota and
you can see the point of light coming uh arching arcing across the sky
and there's i'm sure you've all seen the space station a number of times um but there
is something about seeing that little point of light moving slowly across the sky
knowing that there's there's people inside uh doing research and doing all the things that astronauts do and so there's
something about capturing that especially when you're out with people who are unfamiliar with the phenomenon
of you know tracking the space station and knowing exactly when and how it's going to appear being able to say hey
just just come outside with me for a minute and look over there and see if you can see anything um
up in the sky i mean we just had a workshop in minneapolis just a month or so ago and we had a pass of the iss and
it was it was almost as if i was you know merlin the magician producing this uh this this effect but this is a really
fun thing to uh to be able to see now here's another kind of a satellite trail through the sky and here you can
see it's kind of like a dashed line and as you can probably imagine this uh
this this phenomenon is produced by a satellite which is rotating in its orbit so it's kind of like this
cosmic disco ball that is um you know as it rotates we get a
reflection but then the mirrors turn out opposite or the reflecting surface turns out of position and uh you know but whenever especially
when you do a time lapse you can see these things flashing across the sky kind of like morse code or at least going dash you know on and
off it's really kind of a neat thing to see and to again appreciate some of the cosmic effect this is kind of an interesting shot this was part of a
project where i was looking at the effects of light pollution across the state of minnesota and you can really see i'm about a hundred miles north of
the twin cities of uh minneapolis-st paul and yet you can see their lights really shine reflecting off these clouds
uh as we're facing south i was about 100 miles north obscuring the night sky and so forth and in fact one of the
interesting things about taking people who are used to this view
of clouds when you take these folks out to a dark location and the clouds aren't illuminated from
below they just blot out the stars people are kind of like well they don't have a context for seeing
clouds that are not illuminated by city light so it's it's kind of a it's kind of an eye-opening experience in that sense
so constellations or as i mentioned a real popular um night photography subject here is of
course ursa major the big dipper uh comet neolize this is from the summer of 2020. not a terrible time to be locked
down in the state of minnesota it was a chance to do a lot of uh you know local photography and of course the this is another um
uh wonderful view that we can all obtain especially in the coming months of april
may april and may in particular the arch of the milky way uh in the very early morning so just as
uh you know when the milky way first rises and starts to i mean even now at the end of this month uh when you start when you first see the
milky way in the early morning hours you can capture this this wonderful uh panorama that has all kinds
of objects within you can see you know the north american nebula you can see the double cluster you can see the
andromeda galaxy the goo nebula uh you know all kinds of things i mean the list goes on and on and on and uh
it's all within a set of it's basically a single image it was actually created by three rows of 13 images per row going from
basically north to south even with a little bit of aurora borealis um behind the trees and what what you may notice
is what looks like the sun coming up over the horizon is actually the crescent moon
this was taken around two o'clock in the morning and the red glow on the horizon is from
the sun that's gonna come up but this is actually the moon which is uh which is coming up just before you a couple hours
before the sun so that's why we can still see the milky way this is this is not a photoshop type thing
um so that was kind of a fun project a full moon i mean this is one of everyone's it's amazing how many
comments i get whenever i post a full moon shot this is from a class at a local arboretum that has this iconic red
barn and even though the particular vantage point we had to set up at was kind of obscured by these trees it was
still kind of a real popular um popular event and then also the crescent
moon in earth shine this is taken with a very long telephoto lens almost a little miniature telescope attached to my
camera and you know just watching the uh you know the the very young crescent moon
setting through the atmospheric layers and kind of twinkling and distorting and eventually disappearing is just such a
magical experience it never really gets old and of course this year we have a couple of lunar eclipses coming up we have one
in may we have another one in november and this particular composite shot on the left with the left was taken from
an observation deck of the bell museum uh university of minneapolis minnesota's bell museum
in minneapolis and you can see it's a set of constant exposures so as the earth
as the moon actually passed through the earth's shadow you can see that basically um this is almost
five no i i was going to say five minute intervals but that's not it was much longer than that but in any event you can actually
see how the earth how the moon actually you know enters the earth's shadow and then it produces this blood moon effect that
people talk about um close-up view on the right and then here's uh finally this is kind of a
sort of i would say the cutting edge of nightscape photography but this is a class of nightscape images that people
call deepscapes because they combine
this is a deep sky image in this case obviously the andromeda galaxy as it sits behind
a nearby mountain in death valley national park this was actually from literally
what's today friday this is about just about a week ago almost almost 10
days ago and uh what's done here just to be clear is you track the andromeda galaxy so you
get a nice image of the andromeda galaxy as it's moving as it's getting ready to set
then you let it set and then you um loosen the you know um the the ra
clutch and then you just bring the tracker until it's locked into the mountain and then you turn the tracker off and then take a single exposure of
the mountain and you combine the two images so it's a it's the same location same
camera same everything same image is just uh you know separated by about 10 minutes 10 or 15 minutes in time
so the outline for the talk is i just wanted to go through those examples that you just saw just to kind of motivate you know nightscapes beyond the milky
way i want to talk about gearing you know cameras you know gear helpful
things and really the the camera and exposure settings these are the things that people uh sometimes have questions about and
then the single biggest thing that most people have problems with but i think this crowd probably will not have
problems with is learning how to focus in the dark and composing in the dark in particular
so these are the things i think astronomers have a natural advantage of us and also obviously just knowing the night sky but this is really kind of
like what we're uh is the game plan for tonight so again if you have any questions please enter
those into the chat you know i'm a teacher i love answering questions and going off on different tangents and stuff so that's why i'm here is uh i
just love to answer your questions and help you get started on this wonderful adventure so a nightscape image is
really anything that has an interesting night sky with an interesting foreground you know you could arguably say whether
this particular image during a this is an engagement shoot of this couple they're now actually this is about five years ago
and now they're pregnant with their first uh first child um if this actually constitutes a uh a nightscape even
though it's obviously taken during civil twilight but or maybe nautical twilight but nonetheless this
is what people consider you know if you have a night sky a couple of the foreground you're in business all right
so what do we need to do this well let's talk about the gear and then the camera settings for night photography so basically if you have anything
resembling this you're good to go and in fact um i've just started writing my third book
called a beginner's guide to astrophotography and for the first time in
in this book i'm actually including a section on cell phone astrophotography because as we know uh
cell phones are now smart devices are now quite capable of taking images of the moon the constellations the milky
way um so even a cell phone will work but to get the best quality images you're going
to want to print and maybe share with your friends you're going to want to use a digital
single lens reflex or mirrorless camera great sensors very sensitive wonderful
low low noise performance but really if you have anything as i say resembling this you're you're in business
a lens a camera body and then a ball head and a tripod as you know um
the long exposures needed for successful night photography with the exception of cell phones
necessitate the use of a tripod without other than cell phones there's really no
way to hand hold a camera for successful astrophotography so but other than that
we're you're good to go so i would really wager that most of the the viewers here are all set for their night
photography adventures the other thing as you all know is to have a red headlight it's you need this
for safety to find your way around in the dark but also to preserve your night vision so
nothing new here but this is just an important thing this is a this is what it looks like to do night photography in
minnesota this was an image of me as it's taken from a third camera that i had during this project i was doing with the bell
museum i've got my uh my orange hat on so i don't get shot
by the duck hunters and you can see this is a kind of a semi-full moon
uh star trails up here or stars visible in the night sky and when you show this this is one of the interesting things is
of course from human perspective this is essentially a black and white scene
but the camera picks up all the glorious colors of the night sky the you know the blue night sky from the moonlight the
foreground colors and people are often really thrown by being able to see this degree of uh of
detail in the night sky when what appears to be a daylight scene but this is what it looks
like i mean just me you're my waterproof boots high fashion and my cargo pants and
stuff and if you have this set up you are good to go so the two things that your camera really wants to have though this i want
to say a moment about this is a manual focus and a manual exposure
and that's because um it's changing but for the largest part most cameras there the
the the light meter in particular and the light meter apparatus doesn't really function
particularly well at night so the focusing capabilities doesn't don't really work in the exposure uh so you
can't really use auto exposure or shutter priority or anything like that and so let's just briefly go through uh
the camera settings and of course if you could screenshot this you might want to do that or take notes or anything like that you can
also buy my books i have this to show you at least what they look like but terry was kind enough to mention those in the intro
the in addition to manual focus and manual exposure you want to make sure your auto iso is switched off this can actually throw people
uh very easily in terms of a white balance i would recommend daylight because actually daylight is a fairly
good you know facsimile to the color balance for the night sky
a little bit of a you know this is a general recommendation to turn off your long exposure noise reduction unless
you're doing sort of deep sky astrophotography then that's a debatable point i'm not going to get into now but
on the most part i would say turn this off and then if your camera has a raw file format uh file storage mechanism that's
what you want to set um at this stage just to set your camera to uh to to record in a raw in a raw
file format now the this is where things start to get interesting i want to take a couple minutes and go through this in some
detail so the first thing is that uh when you have a manual exposure you
have basically three parameters the iso the aperture and the shutter speed and this set right here is what people
consider kind of like the golden uh starting point for night photography in a dark site with
the moonless sky so if you're shooting the milky way or you know constellations and you're
far away from the city and you are uh it's a moonless night so there's
no moon then you could use an iso of 3200 maybe 6400 maybe 12 800. i have many images
published that i showed you were taken with that a high of an iso and the maximum aperture minimum f-stop
uh f 4.0 or even lower if possible maybe 2.0 if you have a really fast prime lens
you might be able to go down to f 2.0 but real essentially wide open so you have a maximum opening maximum aperture
and then a shutter speed of around 10 to 20 seconds i'll say a few words about this here in a minute but this is a good
starting point for night photography so if you're just setting out for the first point you're curious what to
set your uh your manual exposure settings to this is this is where i'd recommend you start and then as you can
see at the bottom you know taking it there's a lot of trial and error in night photography
even myself i go out i have a sense of what the settings will be but i always have to make some adjustments
and if i start with this set of adjust settings that i show here and things like too bright or they're like too dark
then you can increase or you basically decrease the iso first and then then
start working with the shutter speed it'll be sort of a you know it's not locked and written in stone or anything
but that's a good place to start i'm going to come back to this in just a sec now in terms of what lens to use i mean
this is the next question people say well when should i use for night photography then basically everything has a as a use there isn't like a there
isn't a focal length that you can't find something to shoot with that focal length so here's a nearly all sky
fisheye lens which is marvelous for capturing the milky way or these aurora um crowns or aurora coronas i don't
think we're going to call these coronas anymore it's too much of a noxious uh
baggage that comes with that but in terms of an all-sky view these fish eyes are really hard to beat
and if you put the horizon at the center of the lens they actually have very little distortion as well so that's kind of a neat trick
this is a similar shot that i showed earlier and this is using a standard wide angle lens this is a 14 millimeter
focal length i believe so anything in the 14 to 24 millimeter range is wonderful for
night photography this is where most people i think sort of instinctively start as they go to
wide-angle lenses for uh for night photography but then the mid-range zooms are also mid-range focal length 24 to 70
millimeters anything in that range is really great for constellations for meteor showers for
the aurora uh here's a fast 50 millimeter lens these things are surprisingly
inexpensive funny i was gonna there's a funny story behind this one but i'll skip that um
but here's a 50 millimeter lens that's me a silhouette against the milky way and uh you know you can really
capture a lot of the detail because of the the large maximum aperture here
um in these lenses and then for the you know the you know the the long
shots of the moon or some of the deep sky asteroid photography targets that's when you want to bring out the 200
millimeter the 500 millimeter maybe add your tele extender uh to that as well
and um you know then you're going to start to use a star tracker i'll talk about that in a second as well but the point is i guess that my main
point is that really any focal length will work and so sometimes people sort of like go into
astrophotography or night photography and they sort of think well i need to get x y and z before i can start taking pictures
not so i mean if you really have a camera i mean and your knowledge of astronomy as astronomers that's a huge
advantage that most people don't have is knowing what's in the night sky when it's going to be there where to find
things most people don't have any clue at all and having that knowledge just puts you so far ahead in terms of your
ability to take images that look great to plan for things you know when objects are going to be at a certain place in
the night sky throughout the year enormous advantage and so here you can see just a comparison of
uh looks like five different focal lengths on the milky way this was taken in the badlands national park
uh i used the star tracker on the uh 105 millimeter just to keep everything the exposure is exactly the same
very minimal processing just really a matter of composing so the message here is what what's the what type of image
you are you looking for here if you really want to a star field then you want to go for a longer lens but if you want to capture the
the uh the edge of the milky way or the disc of the milky way so to speak and that's when you'd want to use a wider
angle one so so those are some thoughts on that so let's let's come back to this um this
question of the exposure settings excuse me so first of all you know this
question of the shutter speed well as you know as astronomers there's a limit to how long you can
uh this is of course why let me go back to this so this these exposure settings are
for a stationary camera on a stationary tripod so there's no tracking going on whatsoever so in that case where there's
no tracking then there's a there's this kind of phenomenological rule of 300 for the maximum shutter
speed that you can have without star trailing used to be the rule of 500 now sometimes i use the rule of 100 but the
point is that there's a maximum shutter speed really and you can get into the whole like is it you know
how many arc seconds of a pixel that sort of a thing but the empirical rule of thumb is you take the
number 300 literally the number 300 and so i you know i used to teach physics and so this is where i try to
grit my teeth and not worry about the unit mismatch here but we have inverse millimeters turning into seconds so
don't think too hard about that um but the for example at 50 millimeter lens 300
divided by 50 means you can go to six seconds which isn't very long actually before
you start to see some little star streaking in your images so just something to keep in mind in terms of
this and so if you uh go back to this range of focal lengths i was talking about again untracked
then you can see how on the right-hand song the left-hand column 14 millimeters 20 seconds 24 millimeters 12 seconds
that's not very like 35 millimeters or already down to 10 seconds and so forth so
uh and yet there we are that's that's kind of how things are so but here's the thing so
when i do these works so i'm a i'm a full-time night photography teacher that is what i do for a living i run
workshops i teach classes i do webinars i write books i pretty much do anything where i teach night photography that's
my full-time job and so one of the first things we do on our workshops is what i call an ultimate exposure
exercise and essentially all you do is only takes about 20 minutes is you just
run through all the different possible permutations of aperture iso and shutter
speed that you might actually use in your forays as a knife photographer
so for example you might set your aperture at f 2.8 set your iso at 12 800
and then do a 20 second 10 second five seconds two and a half seconds exposure so you get those four uh exposures then
you do the same thing that iso 6400 3200 and 1600 so now you have 24
pictures with an eye with an aperture of 2.8 well so what well here's the thing
all of these the ones all of these uh images that are on a diagonal have the same equivalent exposure
so for example on the upper right 20 seconds at 1600
if i you know increase the iso by a factor two and i decrease the time by a factor
two i have the same exposure so 1600 um
so 1600 iso at 20 seconds is exactly the same you know brightness if you will as two and a half
seconds at 12 800. this is kind of what that looks like in practice you'll see where i'm going with this in a minute
um you know obviously the high iso with a long time is very bright the short the low iso in the short time
is very dark but the point is that if you just look at these three images
the 20 second image is going to have greater star trailing because it's longer time but the 12 800 iso at the
bottom left is going to have more noise because it's a higher iso so when people say well what
you know what setting mike what setting should i use what iso should i use what time series i say well
it kind of depends on you because you know there's a lot of different combinations that have the same
brightness and it's really a matter of you know you deciding what your uh tolerance level is so let me take this
to an extreme so here is a dark sky location here is a full range of shutter speeds
from 30 seconds all the way down to one second from iso 12 800 all the way down
to 100 and the only thing that would work here is in the upper left hand corner clearly
so this is where you'd use a 30 second or 20 second shutter speed with a high iso this is in
a dark sky location near kanab utah it's a you know bordeal class one it's it's very very
very dark now if you go to a suburban location this is a few miles outside of
the twin cities in minnesota this is what you'll see um that same you know 20 second shutter
speed within the highest of 12 000 is just is useless it's completely overexposed and so instead now you have
have now you start to have something where if you're going to use the 12800 iso you can only get by with a half a
second shutter speed or if you want to go to a 1600 iso
then you can go with maybe two and a half second shutter speed or you can even get by if you're willing to tolerate a 20 second shutter speed you
can get by with an iso of 200. that's a very very high quality image
iso 200 there's very little noise and if you go to the brightest location this is downtown minneapolis on the stone arch
bridge you can see the situation is even more dire i mean it's you can really if you want to get down to uh
you know 100 iso you can do that with even with a 10 second shutter speed so no problem there and so the point is
again depending on so this is one of the reason i wanted to present this to you in this format is to show that when people say what
setting should i use for this instance it really depends a lot on you and where you are and your tolerance for
noise versus you know star trailing and you know vignetting from the different apertures
and stuff like that so just give this type of an experiment some thought as you uh get into your night photography
forays because if you do this uh you know this um this ultimate exposure exercise you can
very quickly you know assess where your comfort zone is with the iso and and star trailing and
stuff like that so i just wanted to present that to you so this is this is kind of like revisiting this this aspect here so just let's have
a look at a few examples so this image that i showed you with the tumbling satellite is a tumble through
space like a cosmic disco ball this is a 14 millimeter shot the iso is 8 000
aperture of f 3.5 and 20 seconds that's what that shot looks like when i go to the shot of the big dipper
this is a 24 millimeter shot ursa major comet neolize
iso of 5000 f 4.5 for 20 seconds this was actually
pretty close to the um this was pretty close to the uh
twin cities so the sky was a little bit brighter and you can see that even though there is no moon this the sky
doesn't have that darkness that you get in a this is like a portal five type uh
type location and then if we go on to the uh that same
project i was showing you where i was setting up myself with my orange hat what i did there is i collected a
couple thousand images over the course of several hours as you can see by the length of these star trails
and uh but each image each individual image was taken with a five second shutter speed
and this was made with a 3.5 aperture in iso 3200 i was actually hoping to catch
a little bit of an aurora it was predicted that might happen near the horizon here this looking almost obviously due north
and um didn't happen at all but at least i was able to salvage the star trail image and then of course with a
bright subject like the full moon right after sunset during civil twilight then you have look at this 1 300th of a
second that's a fraction of a second f 8 and iso of only a thousand so there's a
pretty wide range of things all right if you're like me like gizmos and and stuff like that so let me
go through a few things that are nice to have that are kind of unique to on landscape astrophotography
one of which is a focusing loop this is a basically like a magnifying glass and it allows you to focus directly on the
lcd screen of your camera uh remote shutter release on the left the programmable intervalometer on the
right both are very helpful in minimizing any type of a shake on your camera so that's
not a surprise there but this is one that may catch you by surprise i don't know if you folks have
come across this yet but this is a diffusing filter it's a it's a diffuser and what this does is if
you look at these are two equivalent exposures taken moments apart i mean i literally just took the image
on the bottom with i just took a straight up image of the core region of the milky way it's that teapot of sagittarius and i simply
hand held this uh fog filter um in front of the lens for just a few
seconds and what the diffuser does is it actually spreads out the point source as a light so that instead of saturating
the pixels and producing white stars the light is diffused out over a much broader area so you can actually it
decreases the intensity so you can actually make out the different colors of the stars and also makes them bigger
and it minimizes the uh the size of the smaller star so this is kind of a neat effect for looking at
orion is stunning with a fog filter for example perseus as well a compass or can i say
again this is more for people who are not familiar with heading out into the woods and this is a kind of an
interesting gizmo this is a portable equatorial star tracker believe it or not this is a polari
star tracker it's been around for ages they just redesigned it there's a number of these that uh people use the approach the skywatcher
star adventure pro i mean there's iotron has a version uh there's a number of these out there
but these are basically equatorial mounts and you can do with them what you'd expect you would do them you can actually track the sky for a long time
and decrease the iso and of course that's that's a that's a big benefit and if you do this uh night photography
with the camera in a tripod here's a nice little trick too as many tripods actually have a little hook hanging from the underside somewhere
and these hooks allow you to hang a weight which can be very helpful for
um stabilizing your tripod against winds and any other thing like that so there's that now here's the thing i also want to
mention and again you know you all have your own starry night stellarium
sky safari i mean whatever your uh your virtual planetarium of choice is
but there's these three apps that are quite powerful for planning night
photography and different aspects of photography in general that are in my opinion well worth the 10 or so that
each one costs i think if that and in particular i'm personally the one
that i use by far the most is this planet pro app and just in full disclosure as kerry mentioned at the
outset i collaborated with the planet pro team to create the a series of tutorials which you access by tapping
this this is now it used to be a question mark here in the lower left hand corner but it's now a little video screen so
i don't get uh i was paid to develop these the videos but i'm not paid to uh
in any other format so i just really like the app and i've used it for many years and it's incredibly powerful so
one of the things that it really does well is it allows it gives you the simulated view so it's kind of like a viewfinder
that you can have again in the different uh planetarium software so again this is nothing new but what is different about
this is that you can see here for the red barn you can actually draw in a marker that corresponds to the barn
itself but it also connects to google maps think about that
it connects to google maps and it actually constructs a virtual terrain that matches the actual terrain that you
see through the your camera so when you're planning your shots this is actually mount whitney this is a from
2012 this is 10 years ago almost 10 years ago this spring
you can see here on the right you have an 800 i used an 800 millimeter focal length uh apparatus
you can see that the the terrain actually matches the mountains remarkably well for this um
granted the date is a little bit off on the bottom because it was a different uh version of that here's the north window with uh this is
how i plan this shot i have you have the constellation orion i constructed a virtual window i consulted with the park
surface rangers to find out the dimensions of that arch i created that arch within the uh the app this is all
done on your phone very very easy to do with a few taps here is uh an island on
lake superior so you can construct the island again just referring to the google maps
you can estimate the dimensions of the island and put it in there and imagine what star trails would look like of course you're
looking due south and uh here again is the lagoon nebula rising over this mountain in death
valley this is from 2020 this was literally a little over two years ago and again you can see it's remarkable
how it's got um you know uh the the details of the uh
the contours of the mountain in there the trifid nebula lagoon nebula the milky way and so forth
so really really a powerful um a powerful uh tool this is my website
and if you go to i have a little learn button in the upper left hand corner if you go to that at the very bottom i have
a link to they called planet tutorials and this is a list it'll take you to this page
and this is a list of all the tutorials that you can access on how to use that tool so if you're interested in that you
can always send me an email mike mikeshaw photography.com but it's a great app to use so this is just
showing you the different apps that are in there so a couple other points uh just to kind of um
start to uh hit some of the the final points in night photography so again as you well know
uh this is what an unfocused star looks like and this is what a moderately well focused star looks like it's twinkling a little bit so it's never going to be
perfectly spherical or circular and again the best way to focus on stars as you know well is to focus directly on
the stars uh sometimes people will say you know using a focusing loop sometimes people say well
hey look my lens has an infinity symbol why don't i just focus on the infinity symbol and again as you know that's more
like a guide i mean it's not especially the zoom lens the different focal lengths have different focus points
and so um you know one good way if you're just again if you're just getting started with this or if you know someone who's
just getting started with this and needs a little bit of help what you can do is this
you can autofocus on the horizon during the day so essentially get your camera put it on autofocus
aim it at the clouds aiming at the horizon aim it something really far away focus on that
and then switch it to and then tape the focus ring in place like this and then switch it to manual focus and if you
don't touch it much you should be in pretty good shape for uh for the evening so you should be
able to to make it through the evening without a whole lot of uh how a lot of change of that now the
other thing that's a little tricky with night photography is composing and so here's a shot of orion and sirius
next to balanced rock again in arches national park so that's what the camera sees that's kind of what we see too if
you're out there you know in the field on foot but when you look through the viewfinder this is kind of what you see
you might be able to see sirius it's a pretty bright star betelgeuse but you're rigel but you know a lot of the stars
you can't really see very much and so composing is uh
is kind of a problem so you want to get this as much of this comp as much of the constellation as you can in the shot
when you get bellatrix in particular and so here's what i do so what i do is when i first
look at uh you know how far is above how far above balance rock is bellatrix i mean how
what and i sort of the length of that yellow arrow i just kind of say well it's that far
whatever that is this is just an example of this and it turns out that orion is about that wide
so those are the dimensions i want to make sure are in my comps i don't want to clip bellatrix out of the composition
so now i say to myself well okay i can see those two rocks and balance rock itself is about the same height as you know
bellatrix is above orion so then all i basically do is i just make sure that
there's enough space above balanced rock that's a little bit more than its height
so i make sure that there's more space above balance rock than it is tall and uh that use that usually works
pretty well so anyway i thought they throw that out there i mean essentially the point is that you can usually see through the
viewfinder you know some feature or some aspect of the feature that is uh
discernible in a way that you can then estimate okay well if the dimensions of that feature are such
that i want to make sure that my night sky object fits in there and uh and that will usually get you
going because usually at night especially with wide angle lenses the stars are almost invisible because
they're just so small all right so let's talk about a few things that can go wrong
focusing is hard weather we're all tired it's cold lights from other people so let's talk briefly about uh best
practices for night photography this is something that i think will be very familiar to us as astronomers and what
we do normally at star parties obviously no cell phone screens white flashlights white light well i tell you that
discussion of um uh the uh you know no cell phones no digital watches and you know the wi-fi
networks for communicating with the telescopes that was an eye-opener i mean that's that's it's okay to use your uh
your digital watch around light photography red headlamps one thing about um
using your headlamp though is if you are with a group of people try to always aim away
essentially away from where the cameras are pointing because it's amazing how just a little bit of red light can get
picked up especially by astro modified cameras uh dim the lcd screens on your cameras obviously just less light is
better uh tape over it sometimes cameras have little indicator lights that flash and especially if you're with a group of
people um that can be kind of a thing and then of course park your vehicle so
this again this is all stuff that we all know is sort of i've learned over the years as astronomers so amir if you have to leave early your headlights are not
blasting everybody in the groove too much and turn off your car's interior lights and uh
you know you know just just basically good practices so here's your first night shooting
so you make sure again you can screenshot this or take a shot with your phone or however you like to record this
but make sure you have your battery battery in your memory card i was just on a shoot
within the last within the last couple of events i've run and someone
did not have a memory card in their camera they'd gone to they'd flown out to the there was a multi-night event so
they they had it back in the hotel room they'd just taken it out and they'd forgotten to put it back in the camera so i always carry extra memory cards
business so i just let them borrow one so but still a memory card battery make sure you've got your red headlight i
usually have to recommend that people arrive an hour before sunset to set up and get it all set up and composed uh
before it gets dark make sure your tripod is tight it's amazing how times the ball head is loose or one of the
little mechanisms is not tight uh you know focusing
compose your image and click and then if you wanted to send me an image and tell me a little bit about it i always love to hear about it mike
mikeshaw photography.com.com in there so anyway so that's really i mean that's
the gist of my presentation this evening i mean i've got so many other things i can talk about uh time lapse you know using photoshop
lightroom and uh on and on and on it goes but i just wanted to keep it simple and and kind of
an overview type of thing and then uh whatever questions we have uh can go
from there so this is again my website there's a lot of you know tutorials and stuff like that i'd run workshop so if
you want to join me out in the field come join me out in the field i'd love to have you
um so they'll leave that there and again if you want to access those workshops and
the other learning resources it's under the learn tab there on the website so
you know again it's really um going back to where we started this is split rock lighthouse
iconic minnesota landmark and you know this is just uh as
it slowly recedes out of view it's all i think all of us really just
love this experience of watching the night sky appear and you know we go on our night
sky vacations we go exploring among the star clusters and the dust lanes and
everything else so i want to say thanks to terry again and and to the group for organizing these
are my social media connections um so at mike shaw
photography on instagram loved it if we got connected there at microsoft photo on twitter
um these are my two books if you're interested uh the complete guide to landscape astrophotography on the left
and creative nightscapes and time lapses on the right so everything and these things like the one on the landscape
astrophotography book i think that's 440 pages so it was like a dump of everything that i could possibly think
of the creative nightscapes i think is only 350 pages so that's a that's a light read
but anyway uh so that's kind of it so i'm just gonna open things up and um
uh jump back into the group and say thanks very much i'd love to answer
any questions that anyone might have and scott you're on mute my friend
yeah there was a question from the group um from robbie keane he says can you speak
about any pro post-processing noise reduction and stacked images
yeah absolutely crazy was it robbie yeah robbie robbie yeah great question robbie so yeah you're actually on to
that so um the just of the question was on noise
reduction through stacking and yes um this is very similar to the stacking that's done in uh you know any
type of astrophotography but i'm not sure where you're coming from on this but i'll just start at the beginning
so if you take a single high iso image then the
individual pixels across the image are if you took a high iso image of a gray
perfectly gray card you're going to end up with a a sort of a speckled
you know black and white you know pixel pixel type image because the there's different
types of noise that contribute to a fluctuation in the signal that each pixel receives in a
nutshell and so a good way to get around that is you take 10 pictures of the same gray card without changing the thing
and then what happens is you take those 10 images of the same and you could do this at the milky way you could do this
up a gray card you could do this of any scene with high iso or even moderately
high iso and then what you do is you take those 10 images or 20 images or 50
or however many you want to use and you put them into a stacking program and this is what the stacking program
does it goes by each individual each each pixel at a time one at a time
and it will take like let's say the fourth row down and the fifth pixel over and it will take what value does that
pixel have overall does this for luminance and also color and it will do that for all 10 images
and then it will average that pixel value for the 10 images and so on average when you take the
average of each pixel between the 10 images it eliminates the random image
the image fluctuation that you get so it essentially eliminates the noise that naturally occurs at high iso so it is a
very effective technique now what's the catch the catch is that when
you take those 10 images of the you know let's say the night sky with the foreground
the catch is that the foreground is going to be moving so the foreground's going to get very blurry
the solution to the catch is that there are some programs secretory for pcs uh starry landscape
stacker for uh apple systems that somehow they do a magic wand and they figure out
what part is the sky what part is the foreground they keep the foreground stationary they keep those they stack
the sky and they blend the stacked sky with a stationary foreground and you get some really really nice results and um
yeah there's a section in my book that i talk a little bit about that so highly worth doing and very very very
effective uh norm hughes is asking what about the star trails it had areas of of the
trails with some distortion can you explain what caused that uh good question i wish i knew more
about the type of distortion that we were talking about if it's near the horizon it might be atmospheric distortion if it's uh there's a special
processing technique to produce a sort of a a very elongated star trail so that's a
processing technique but maybe if if norm could elaborate on the distortion i'd be happy to talk about
that sure um beatrice hines out of belgium is saying great presentation mike
uh great images so i mean really just stunning work
and i think a lot of people were uh that first animation uh that she showed
of the earth turning with the sky standing still was uh it really it at
first it's hard to get your head around what's going on because but i i thought that was amazing so
great work photographer thanks now if you're interested that is kind of a special project i've been working on for a
number of years now if you head over to my instagram page i have several instances of that i call that as my spaceship earth
series because i feel like we one of the messages i feel that all of us are trying to uh communicate to people is
that we are all astronauts you know i mean we're really i don't mean that it's like a
cliche i mean genuinely you know if you think about the astronaut support the international space station i mean they're 250 miles
i know i'm preaching to the choir here but they're only they're only 250 miles closer to the cosmos than the rest of us
that's like uh i think it's like a a billionth or a trillionth of one percent of the
distance closer to proxima centauri i mean it's just nothing and so whenever
we got under a clear sky we're looking into the cosmos i mean that's it there's nothing in between us and the stars in
space except air and that's just air and so you know this notion that um
there's a lot of talk about space travel and you know getting on board spaceship i mean it would be cool to turn around
and see the earth there's no doubt about it and to be in actual space of course but we don't need that and we don't have
to do that to really experience space directly in the three-dimensionality of it and so what i'm hoping to you know
portray with that series of uh spaceship earth videos is to uh
you know convey that notion that the earth is the thing that's moving not the universe so yeah thanks for the comments
on that scott yeah great um okay well i think that that's
that's about it i i i know people are blown away by the images i did post
um i did post uh links to your website mike and to your books and uh to your
workshops and you know i didn't i didn't catch the apps and all the rest of it but uh
it seems like uh if you want to know uh night sky photography nightscapes
time lapse this is definitely one of the guys you want to be following right here so that's awesome
yeah i think one of the one of the things too i was surprised a lot of people i mean not just a couple but a
lot of people were really confused by your planet earth your very first one video where you showed the earth moving
and not the sky quite a few comments on okay what is going on you know why how
is that like that could you just tell i mean what how what made that different trying to explain a little bit of you
know this time we're watching the earth rotate or the sky rota whichever way it
is uh could you just explain just a little bit absolutely terry now i i wanted to leave
let's let let me uh let me pull that back up again so we can watch that again and
because that is something that is whoops let's go here just bear with me for one
second i'll be happy to explain that because it's it's something that i think anyone here can with a a telescope with
an equatorial mount can can do so let me just share this screen
yeah we're still we're so used to seeing it the other way aren't we so here we go so what i'm
doing here is i'm just uh i i knew where the milky way was going
to appear so i pointed my camera at that and i just turned on my tracker
and so i have a tracker with a 45 millimeter lens and it's i just oriented the camera
horizontally or not i just align the camera with the milky way so all i did is i have a
camera 45 millimeter lens aligned with the milky way because i knew where it's going to be um
and i just aimed it there and waited for it to and the clouds were this is one of the more
more vivid ones with the clouds when the clouds appear like oh that's pretty cool um
but uh you know if you had if i wasn't using a tracker and of course i had to align the tracker and
get the tracker going and stuff but if i wasn't using the tracker then um
uh then the milky way would have appeared to move uh across the way so if you have a tracker and you want to
produce that just you know figure out what part of and then with the white house it was the same thing i just
you know uh set up the shot on the lighthouse and i turned on the tracker and then as the
foreground receded you could it just revealed the night sky and there's this great persian
uh one of the people i collaborate with is uh of iranian descent and he's often says as part of his talks
that there's this per person saying that night hides a world but reveals the universe
i just absolutely love that i do too i like that uh well mike thank you thank you so much
everybody is just amazed and your images are absolutely beautiful thank you so
much for joining us tonight and talking to us my pleasure you're you're welcome here
anytime so thanks again we appreciate it thank you very much jerry and scott and uh
everybody else for a great uh a great possibility a great event this evening so you guys have a lot of energy it's
great to be part of the astronomical league and couldn't be prouder to be a member so thank you very much thank you thank you all right let's get
to the winners of tonight's questions oops
let me go back here let me share my screen see if i can't
get back to the right spot all right the answers for tonight
uh these people each one will win one calendar from the astronomical league for this year
and what time was liftoff of the james webb telescope it was 7 20 a.m
mike albright got that the second question
uh what time was the final segment of the primary mirror locked in place and
that was at 1 17 p.m est and that is josh kovach
how big is the james webb mirror that is 6.5 meters this is kelly and help me out
here because i'll butcher this name okay congratulations kelly
and what i would like to do is thank everybody that is here or i
know david's already gone but scott again broadcasting genius we couldn't do
this without scott david levy carol org jim fordyce i am so looking
forward to alcon 2022 we hope everybody out there joins us we will keep that
front and center because that's going to be a lot of fun don nab thanks for catching us up it's
so great to see the star parties coming back to life where we can get back and see everybody again
we'll definitely be running into everybody somewhere at some point i'm sure we'll all get
back out there mike shaw amazing thank you so much for doing your presentation
tonight your images are absolutely beautiful and thanks for the explanation because
sometimes even though we kind of think we understand that it's really nice to have somebody tell us the details behind
how that image was taken so thank you very much and as i said you're welcome back anytime
all right and please join us again we will be back august august
i was at sunshine us friday april 15th at 7 p.m we should
be eastern daylight time then with john winskovich
uh he will be talking about the la range point larange points of the james webb
telescope and one of our uh our media officer heard him do this talk and he said
you've got to hear this this is really an amazing talk so please join us on
april 15th for that talk and i think that is everything i have
does anybody here have anything else they would like to say before we wrap up
i think uh everybody's got uh a lot of inspiration from mike shaw and
uh well informed by the astronomical league and fired up about alcon and uh
and all the the the other activities uh that the astronomical league has to offer so
and i believe jim uh registration will be happening within the next month correct
well i hope to have it up in the next couple of weeks so we just had a few technical problems
and once we get those resolved we'll bring it up and you can reserve the hotel right now
correct you can if you go to the uh the link through the astronomical league website to get it or through the the
task.org website you can get to that and there is a link already on that stub
for the lodging okay great you better jump in there quick because there's going to be a lot
of us going so if you want a room at that hotel you better reserve soon
and thank you again everybody i sure appreciate you being here it's so good to see everyone
and scott unless somebody's got something else to say i think that'll do it for tonight they all want to just say
thank you um so that's awesome uh mike overakker sandy just finished his 24th
uh ale club he's sending it over soon so
okay yeah we have a lot of people doing
observe programs yes that's right wonderful all
right uh you all have a great uh weekend uh
you know and uh to our audience uh that that uh hung in there with us thank you
very much and um you guys have a great weekend too hopefully it's not too snowy
or too cold where you are and uh maybe you get some clear skies so
until next time thanks everyone good night bye
bye
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