Transcript:
i i have good intentions the week before yeah i'm gonna get it all done be nice
and early um you know check everything through and it's always in the last
uh five minutes before something that everything gets set um i do think you can think about things
too much you can think about what you're going to go through and you know how it's going
to look and you can overcomplicate yourself yeah confuse yourself with it
right my uh had a talk with one of my
children one of my kids about that they were just talking about how they
wanted to get something done but they were overthinking it you know
yeah um i think that's just experience though isn't it as we get older we learn to
relax more and and take things in our stride when we're younger we're we more i suppose we more care about
what other people are thinking right it doesn't really doesn't quite matter
too much no it's just you know you get on with your own little things
as long as people understand it that's the main thing
right
okay i'll be right back guys
excuse me
okay
um um
cool
i love that music and that your clock plays wendy
so
okay
so
um
um
so what's the weather like there andreas cloudy and cold
same here yeah it's uh him
off sweden is uh snow yeah it won't be long before it's here won't
be long and a little longer before it's
here yeah yeah winter is coming
it's already getting uh it's going to be down in the 30s
here in a couple of days so yeah we were down to about five degrees
outside tonight so i think we are three in sweden
yeah and i i was talking to somebody the
other day in california and they're saying it was uh 90 degrees overnight
yeah it's crazy i mean you get you know we get into these situations
where it's literally hot one day and then cold the next day you know yeah so it's um
it's pretty crazy steve how are you man i'm fun thank you okay yeah i'm the man
behind the star field okay so right
all right captain thank you thank you for joining us this is your first global star party it's sue
hell's uh first global star party as well so so hell's from uh kosovo steve where
where are you i mean and nothing i'm sure and okay in
the uk i have been on before by the way oh have you really okay i'm so sorry i'm the one with the
mobile planetarium if you remember yes yes it has been a whirlwind of doing all of
these you must meet so many different people [Laughter]
well stefan here on in the chat says you guys
haven't seen weather until you come down to melbourne
four seasons in one day [Laughter]
we already have a global uh audience here nicholas rocia hello guys how are you
kelly little turnout evening folks um dale beasley happy friday
martin eastburn we are here we are or is it that past sense of being
i don't know martin that sounds very philosophical somehow i was watching the astonishing
simplicity of everything interesting indeed yes
steve hauser hello from idaho usa uh staphon morning guys haven't seen oh
okay yep let's see dale beasley california where i am it's 64 right now
uh stefan here 44c on monday 11 c on tuesday
that sounds like arkansas that sounds like arkansas hi tim tim myers is saying hello
is my microphone working yeah you can hear me loud and clear right
here you're loud and clear hello everybody hello hi hi guys
hello hi schneider
all right hello your internet's working
yes internet's working i just need to put a background filter on
because my wife is mo she said oh you need to put a filter on so let me find an image
tim myers explore scientific when will your observatory start being sold
tim i think you're well you could be talking about the observatory tents um we're already
selling it and we have already started selling the um the uh fiberglass domes the pulsar
domes as well uh steve collingwood i think is going to be on the show tonight so maybe you can
give some sort of an update but but yes we have we have the domes
on their way jessica roberts my daughter's watching right now that's great
yeah martin eastburn we sent from we went from 85 today to 68 in the
passing of a front yes daving hello happy friday
i think since the we've all had these lockdowns one day rolls into another the
the weekend doesn't have the same meaning as it used to no it certainly doesn't
one long permanent weekend yay
unfortunately from 6 p.m tonight we were we're in a full lockdown
oh of course you are you well wales aren't you yeah yeah we've kicked the english out you're not
welcome anymore [Laughter] as we certainly should be
we'll be back i think
the discussion was to go into tier three from monday i think
yeah yeah so i think really it should just be a case if they just bring in another fortnight
knock down my kids you know that's it everybody can start
getting back to normal for christmas then or a reasonable amount but to keep bringing in all these tears
and confusion um i don't think it's only us i think there's quite a few other countries that
got the same problem but it's just the way that it's transpired and being brought in um
different rules everywhere just makes it confusing for everybody ryan hannahoe's joining us and francis
all right hello hi how are you
[Music] hi ryan carol you guys hey carol good to
see you again i know a few of everybody here
hey david hey ryan hi carol good to see you good
to see you david how are you doing pretty good pretty real thanks we first started uh logging in here i
thought oh wow hardly anybody's showing up
but uh we got and steve i remember you now i do i do remember yes that's okay
the memories now the the neurons are firing again it's so awesome
you'll be cocky then have you yeah that's right
scott yes yes how do i go how do i how do i turn my phone so it's landscape
i'm not right am i oh you're kind of sideways yeah but that'll make everybody notice
you more i guess so but that's really hard that's really bad
does anybody else just turn your phone just turn it let's see what happens
oh there you go there you go francis is fixed again yeah he is thank
you again uh thank you all very much good evening from texas
i wanted to show this visual is it's more than a visualization it's real imagery
of uh osiris-rex uh tagging
uh the uh asteroid bennu and collecting samples so this is
do we have had a sample return mission before with like commentary dust right but this is the dog stardust spacecraft
yeah but this is the first asteroid return mission so
and good lord if they didn't get some samples from that i don't know what they would have gotten samples from
that's that looks like a successful hit to me
uh i have another question scott sure can i now get into the zoom on my
computer to share my page because i'm on my phone you can you have to use a different account
you know that's all well hello everybody this is scott roberts with explore scientific and this
is the 17th global star party um and um
let me stop sharing my screen here and show everyone that's on with us so far today
we've got looks like hollywood squares right we've got david levy up here we've got gary palmer
andreas nielsen suhel ahmedi steve ibbitson
carol org shyalendra sharma ryan hannahoe and francis walsh all with us today so we've
got astronomers from europe and uh uh
and the united states at this time there may be others logging in a little bit later but um
it's a good way to spend a friday and um you know we always love this so and i've
been kind of reading through the chats as uh we started our program
and we already have some people from around the world watching our program at this time so
um the visualization that uh that animation scene that you saw before
uh was from the uh osiris-rex spacecraft i don't
know if you guys watched it live but it was absolutely fascinating uh to see uh
you know this this uh tag uh operation happened where they were able to we hope collect uh actual
material from asteroid benno so um
jeffrey horn uh reminded me japan's hayabusa ii that's right is bringing back a meteor sample this december
it's landing in australia i believe so there you go so it's kind of you know these things to
me are almost like manned missions uh uh to uh these these uh
celestial bodies because we're scooping up stuff and we're bringing it back but i'd like to introduce
david levy david has been has committed to doing all of our global star parties
he has done i think since the announcement of the pandemic and
you know a lot of us doing online type of things he's done over a hundred such presentations for astronomy clubs
and different organizations probably mostly related to astronomy
you know i met david long before his famous discovery of comet shoemaker levy
9 he was at the
riverside telescope makers conference i met him in the early 80s and uh
you know somebody pointed out he's they said that's david levy over there he's discovered comet and i just go wow i was
so excited uh and very nervous to meet him actually and um but uh you know david has become an uh a
great friend and he is someone that
has uh you know the sustainability of
very few people that that i know of in in astronomy he he goes out for the love
of it every clear night that he can to do this search for comets and as he
always says that it's not it's not just finding or discovering the comet but the search for comets that that he loves but
we all love him his his his uh talks are always warm
interesting and uh often poetic and so i will turn the stage over to david
levy well thank you very very much scotty
global star party 17 welcome all of you welcome friends from around the world
we're going to have a lot of fun together this evening
excuse me osiris-rex
i think a lot of you as you are logging in tonight saw the beautiful film
of the osiris-rex spacecraft gently just tapping
the surface of the asteroid menu vacuuming up some stuff and climbing
back up it took a matter of seconds and in three years
it'll be back on the earth wendy and i were watching trevor noah last night and it was
he had a very interesting take on it he he couldn't get over how exciting it was
that we can actually send us a robotic spacecraft to an asteroid hurtling through the
solar system touch it grab a sample and then come back
but in his next scene he's holding a bag of dirt he says in three years from now
when it lands someone's going to grab the bag of dirt and say anyone want this oh i'll just throw it out
i don't think so i think this is going to be very much anticipated and well received
and there may be someone in the audience tonight who will end up being part of the team
to study that the other thing that happened regarding osiris-rex was that
wendy asked me you know we were discussing the funding of a mission like that
and wendy sort of put me through the the story as to whether
if i were a member of congress could i justify the expense of sending a robotic spacecraft
into space and landing it on an asteroid picking up
material and bringing it back home i don't think i did so well that night
to justify it but i'll try a little better now the whole idea
is you know you can go outside in your backyard and you can pick up material just as osiris-rex did from the asteroid
but that material has changed that material on earth has evolved and
has changed over so long over say four and a half billion years
of the development of the earth as a planet the idea is that asteroid menu
is absolutely pristine there has been virtually no change since
the asteroid was formed with the possible exception of a few collisions
from smaller asteroids or bigger ones and if we could get a sample a sampling
of material from it it would show us what that asteroid is made of and what
the materials of it comprise the idea is
we might get an idea by studying venue we may get an idea of
what the solar system looked like four billion years ago
when he listens to me and says is that worth doing of course i said i'm i'm i'm a member of
the choir and i said of course it's worth doing but can i come up with a reason for it
that's a little bit more difficult a reason that joe six-pack and his family
might be able to accept we search the sky and we search the
stars whether it's me looking for comets or whether it's osiris-rex picking up material from venue because we want to
know what's there we want to know what our solar system is like today
and we want to know what it was like four billion years ago it is extraordinarily
simple and elegant yet very complicated to do that
if we can find out what the solar system was like so long ago
it might just tell us a little bit more about our earth about our planet
and about our home and what its history was like we all have aunts and uncles and
grandparents and occasionally we some of us are fortunate enough to read a book or
something by them that tells us what their life was like
way back then i don't know if you're interested in that or not
but to me that is fascinating i really would love to know
what the what canada was like when my great-grandfather was here what new orleans was like when my
mother's parents arrived from russia
when my mother's mom arrived from russia and then later married my grandfather
my mom passed away in 19 a couple of years ago and she is
now resting at the charishmaim cemetery in montreal about a hundred
meters away from the grave of leonard cohen and i love to think that up there in
heaven she and my dad and other members of my family and leonard cohen are sitting around on a
couch talking about things and wouldn't it be nice if one of the questions that comes up is could we learn
something about us by picking up material from the asteroid
venue my quote today will be two short poems one of them is from thomas gray's elegy
and the other is a rewriting that i did of leonard cohen's song hallelujah
i think that uh theology that i'm about to quote are the four most beautiful lines ever written in the
english language what follows is not so beautiful but is something that i wrote based on
one of leonard cohen's songs the curfew tells the null of parting day
the lowing herd winds slowly or the lee the plowman homeward plods his weary way
and leaves the world to darkness and to me it's time to go
outdoors tonight the sky is dark some stars are bright
the milky way shines overhead now see ya
a comet rises in the east with into strife it brings
us peace and calls us to a cosmic hallelujah
hallelujah hallelujah
hallelujah hallelujah
thanks scotty baxter that's great it's awesome i love it
i love it um okay so um
i am hold on for just a moment there we go there we go
gary palmer and i have been working together on global star parties
also since the beginning and gary never fails to
astound and stun people with his his incredible images of the sun and
deep sky objects and also with his knowledge and
you know i i feel very grateful that he has appeared on so many of our shows
so many of you that watch our programs and have followed our shows have learned
some really important processing techniques
ways to get uh the images into your telescope and with the least amount of
work and and with the uh uh you know and and with a lot of speed because uh in in
the uk they fight clouds a lot and when they get a break they have to make
the best use of it as much as possible but watching watching gary go through
pix insight or some of these other programs so easily
uh is you know is inspiring in itself and
but uh gary loves astronomy and he loves the community
and this is why he's put so much energy into it uh if you've taken any of his classes or
courses or you've seen him speak anywhere else you know what i mean um
but gary i'll give you the stage and and let you uh thanks scott thanks for the uh
the night the nice comments and words there um i think uh
and thank you to david it's really hard following david you know that each time
it gets more and more difficult and why david's coming up with something you're listening to it you're trying to think
of something to something to say all right and in the end you just go i'm gonna
give up you know um yeah thank you david it's really thank you i know he's not always it's my place
and interesting and makes you think you know and thanks to everybody else who's watching us online and who's
joined us here tonight um i think with astronomy um on
uh you know certainly on the astrophotography side you do get um quite complacent with it i
suppose in a sense you you take these images and you process them up and i i
have been an avid one of what i get on the night or on the day is what we post up
rather than just trying to post up the best of anything it's a case of if it's cloudy that day or if
we had bright moonlight or whatever the the scenario is or even problems with the equipment you know nothing goes
smoothly in this world um but to try and come across like that we do get a little bit complacent and
sometimes it's not until certain things happen um you might wander along a poster you
did a couple of days back in a group or something and it makes you actually sit back and think
whereas in a sense you're a little bit of a machine you're either working on the equipment you're working on the
images you're processing them up and then you're on to the next a lot of things or going off and doing a series of talks
so it's quite interesting seeing you know sometimes you don't post
for quite a while because the weather or just because you're busy and then you'll post an image you just take it as your everyday thing
an average picture and then all of a sudden it gets shared and liked right across the internet um
and it really does make you sit back and think about it for a minute whereas before that you're not paying
any interest and that probably happens with a lot of other people um that you know they're
just running along in their own area in this but don't really pay much interest outside that area in a
sense you'll see other images you'll like them you'll comment on them you know and you'll praise them um and
that doesn't matter whether it's somebody's first image or their thousandth image you know sometimes it
does give me a lot of enjoyment to look at some of the images that somebody takes out of
the you know the first couple of shots and i was actually working with somebody yesterday um and i was looking at the
data they're getting for one of their first shots and i thought wow they really jumped up the ladder yeah they
properly listened to everything and taken the information in and this raw data in the background
now i'm looking at and thinking if i process that i know exactly what will come out this is it's stunning data
so you know everybody has a different level and a different variation in this but what makes it
enjoyable is is everybody joining together and it doesn't matter what side of astronomy they come from
and i think that's where social media really grips in now with everybody um you know with this pandemic going on
it's making the world a smaller place and in all sorts of hobbies and
interests and in astronomy it's making it a really small place because we've all met you
know if we weren't doing this i wouldn't have met david and you know a lot of these people here are on my friends list
but you don't actually talk with them in a sense you know you you might send each other a message on something but you
don't even interact with each other and that's the enjoyable part of doing
this from my point of view it's not just putting the information across it's listening to the other people and their
interests in astronomy and where their direction is going
so you know i don't know what other people on the panel think of that but that's my
view on these sort of virtual style parts is it's not just about us and what the information we're putting across
it's the other people's information i think that's what a lot of people say um that have been on these programs uh
because we actually we get to hear someone describe something or share their passion uh a
lot of people on this program share their passion they maybe say something on this program
about how they really feel in ways that uh they might not have said to anyone else
you know but here they are telling the whole world okay about what they love about it what they think is so important
about it um how it brings people together how it dissolves divisions
these kinds of things you know so um and kind of the undaunting spirit of amateur astronomers you know they will
you know they won't it doesn't matter what's happened okay we're still going to do our thing and uh
try to share it with the whole world so um i still think groups of amateur
astronomers should be running countries they're very good at problem solving yes
look at what the problems they come across and how they get around them yeah i'm
sure they could do a lot more good in the world in different places okay
well um uh gary uh i'm gonna let you be uh uh the host of
this show uh for for the most part um uh i will
be in the background uh jumping from scene to scene and uh trying to keep everybody uh
um in line here not that not that that's very hard so um
but why don't you introduce everyone okay we have um
as the screen um shows to me we've got andreas uh at the top there from sweden um
always enjoy andreas's talks and work uh
and you know it's funny um in distance we're not overly far from each other and to be
honest the weather conditions are not a lot different so i i can fully sympathize with andreas in you know how
hard it is to get some of the images and that's what makes it interesting you know
um is seeing what other people do around the world um steve ibbitson
imaging um also runs the uh planetarium
um which is probably a little bit more on the quieter side at the moment i would say um
but you know um again it takes lots of nice images uh very interesting uh
person to listen to ryan um ryan and i have known each other
a long time um again one of those people where you sort of message every now and then about
different bits that are going on um but always like ryan's images and ryan's
input into things very very energetic and is very informative very knowledgeable
in the background about all sides of astronomy really um shalondra um you're based in london
um it's still fairly new to it and coming along you know um leaps and bounds
and it's the same with everybody you know i'm the same and was the same it's two step forwards and three steps back
and then another two step forwards and it gradually comes along and um you know the key thing is the
passion um francis i don't know that much about you francis so you're gonna have to
uh come across with that so if you can turn your mic off and then you can introduce yourself a little bit more on
that one [Laughter]
you can tell he's on a mobile phone right hold on
there we go glasses
sorry sorry sorry hey everyone my name is francis walsh and me and astronomy are really partners
these days here outside of houston texas and located in central texas which is
known as the hill country of texas everybody thinks texas is flat but it actually has some hills
we have a cosmic obsession observatory kerbville which is a roll-off roof
observatory with multiple peers that we have been operating now for just
over a little bit over a year it being our second observatory that we
built our family myself my wife my father-in-law my mother-in-law my son
there's five of us who put a lot of uh energy into astronomy these days
now i can just keep going on but i want to stop for a second because i want to tell everybody that
our family really got involved in astronomy as adults
probably i was 40 and my in-laws were older
so sometimes we get a lot of views of astronomy and astronomers who've been in
astronomy a whole long long time or we'll have younger generations who are getting into
astronomy at the younger age and we celebrate and appreciate all of those things
but i'm finding in my circle here and i'll expand on that that impressing
astronomy on full-grown adults who have never had an interaction with the night sky is
really where i've been focusing i'm gonna put my glasses on i'm sorry and i've been paying a lot of tension in
my neighborhoods we all know that with the pandemic
as astronomical equipment has been pouring out to the neighborhoods across the world around the world around the
globe i'm sure everybody knows that more and more households have a
telescope but maybe they don't know exactly what to do with it
and so whenever we started our process of learning about astronomy
was back in 2010 and it began with the past of the international space station
and at that point in time we had drag raced for 25 years
semi-professionally so that was a whole hobby that for 25 years was
built up and produced and because of that iss passing over texas on that night at
that time it was the right time for a transition from what was happening into a love for
astronomy and a goal to achieve great insight
into imaging what's out there when is it out there
now there's equipment structures learning about peers
our first observatory cosmic obsession tomball was just a mile from me here and i'm
just 40 miles outside of houston we built a
three-room observatory one had one room on one side was a control room the other side was equipment room and in the
middle was the telescope room and it had a big dome on the top and the pier was
14 feet tall i say that because after a year and a
half of using a 14 foot tall pier you learn like 14 foot tall piers really
inconvenient and and it's just the process but i want i
want to impress that the power of experience as an adult with this astronomy
in all different directions now my focus and what i really like to do
and i i had a radio program for quite a number of years
and what i would do is there would be news about astronomy about science on
what was recent relevant and then i would go and get the scientists who are part of that project
so i go to southwest research institute and call on dr vincent hugh and dr
vincent hew would talk about the juno whatever that particular person was about
and so for a number of years i got the opportunity to talk to dr abby loeb about the two interstellar travelers and
so as this process started 10 years ago two years later i'm
really deep into learning about astronomy we're building uh observatories now we're
taking our own pictures the network that we have on social media is you know loving what's going on
because you know though we have all these people here in this group i find personally
there's still few avenues for people to go to and find you know
what's going on so i find it my personal duty to go out and try to share as much as you know you all
have i'm i'm i'm i'm no different than anybody just in my corner um doing the
radio shows and teaching myself that was let me say that that was probably one of the one number one things
when i really when i also started there was a comet called the lenin and i'm not going to get into the whole deal but
commodore lenin had a lot of discussions surrounding commonwealth lenin back in around 2010.
i told myself the only way i could prove what i was hearing wasn't true because
it was negative things is that i had to go out and see it for myself
and what i did is i learned about a little network called global rennes telescope
global renoscope now it's itelascope.net and i rented a telescope and pointed it
out at the comet and watched it move across the sky and was able to dispel a lot of things that
people were saying now that's it's a it's a totally left-sided discussion
about what people are thinking is going on out in space and what their ideas about that
is but taking that specific situation and at that point i said the only way i'm
going to be able to prove it to myself is through an observation of the object itself and then i could come back and
have a discussion and tell them one of the biggest things in this is people do
after they've been in it a little amount of time start to come on to teaching
people they have to pass that knowledge across for some reason and in this hobby that's it or this
interest right across the board it seems to be quite a common thing that joins a lot of people together that once they
start to gather that information they're passing that across but what we're going to do france is going to come back to
you in a little while and what i'm going to do is um we've got sue hill
um from kosovo which i'm correct um here's one of the team we've got
carol lord who's president of the astronomical league
um so carol will be coming in with some um door prize questions and some answers
and different other bits from what's been going on in past shows and some new questions for this show
there was a question that came in online that's been passed over to me and that's the david and somebody wants to know
how you search the comments so i thought i'd get that one out of the way quite early
actually the way i do it for comments is one field of view at a time gary
yeah it's it's being methodical and slow and having the areas
worked out so that you're not going back over those same areas too quickly exactly i go one field and then to the
next one then to the next one approximately one second per field
it is um something that requires more than anything else patience in fact
people people ask me what you need for um
to to search for comments i said patience need three things patience
a telescope with a wide field of view and patience that's what you need and if you
if you do it long enough sooner or later you should find a comment took me 19 years to find my first one
then i kind of got the hang of it and got a little bit better hope that helps do you find that you
need a good memory of the actual areas that you're looking at
um it helps but now with the use of a um
of a little thing like this that tells you what the ra and the deck are you don't need it quite as much as you
do as you do before but a good star atlas
is very helpful yeah because that that's one thing that we're
probably not so used to using so much these days with the advent of the
um go to telescope and the the you know the control systems the
visual planetariums that we've got now um and a lot of those visual planetariums
or the telescopes concentrate on the brightest objects in the sky and not necessarily
other pointers that step on from those brighter objects unless you start doing your homework
yeah but it's essentially it's still the way it was back in the day where you need to have a lot of patience
however now um almost 100 of the new comets are found by the automated professional
searches so i would not recommend that a young person
start off searching for comets the way i did so many decades ago
but for me it's still fun it's the search that is more important than the discoveries
i i think that's the thing that anybody is in really whatever field if they're looking
for different things i mean i was saying earlier i have it with the sun it's the the chase you see the objects
or you're chasing for an object so you're hunting all around for and it's certainly over the last couple of years
with a lack of features you're hunting for the smallest of features now that we'll just you know
make an image or make a difference uh to your week it's been quite quite weaker or quiet
so you you spend a lot more time going over that and maybe looking for me looking at different wavelengths so but
once you find that it's then the challenge of you know getting that so there's always that challenge process there for
everyone thanks for that um what i'm was going to move to because i
know ryan's not going to be on too long so i was actually going to bring ryan on um to introduce himself a little bit and
then sort of go into his presentation first because i know he's only going to be on for around in the hour or something like
that all right all right well thanks for having me um
you know i'll kind of start off with a little story um you know i you know astronomy i i love
it because um you know as well i got interested when i was a kid
and um you know it's the kind of hobby um that well i mean or profession that
you know you could reach out to anyone in the world and and you know get in contact with and
talk about um the night sky and and you know my contact or one of my contacts
early on when i was a kid was was david and we had communicated by by email and
we didn't meet each other until um well we both went to a star party a
little place called springfield vermont cellophane and we've we've hit it off and been
friends ever since and gosh david's that's that's over 20 years now so
you know astronomy is a very humbling um hobby and you know for some people that
gets to lead into a passion and you know for those listening um
to this session especially the kids um if you've got interest you know just
just ask people out there um more than happy willing to help you
and and whatnot it's just so it's such an accessible hobby um that i'm excited
to be a part of and so uh kind of what i wanted to do is um share my screen
and i'll start out by sharing one of my night sky photographs
and then um kind of go through a little bit of a presentation or some some things some
opportunities that i wanted to share with the group and so i took this with a
a 10 inch app else literally um
ryan's internet might have broken up a little fraction
and that's the result we get after um
your internet's breaking up quite a bit there right we're lost here for quite a bit sorry um you know
i think we lost him all together okay maybe he can come right here later
no he's still on he's there there you go yeah so sorry about that i i should have said earlier
um we're getting ready for a winter storm warning and so we are projected to get
10 to 15 inches of snow in the town wow yeah right
and and like the high on sunday is going to be zero degrees
and that's that like freezing at 32 that's that's zero degrees
where are you where where are you montana and so i'm in in the capital city of montana
okay so i don't know where while i was talking where things left off
and so i'll just bring up this photo again and um just kind of um start there
and you know um one of the things that we do at the at the montana learning center is we have a
great astronomy program i mean that's that's my background my interest and i love sharing space with others
um you know before covid you know even with being a small um
uh organization in montana you know our star parties were getting upwards of 250 people at a
time and so it's really exciting um to be sharing the night sky with others
what i want to do is is take a few minutes today and talk about some
outstanding opportunities i realize some of these are more us based but some of the opportunities
um are more can be worldwide too in terms of some of the nasa partnerships
that we work on and so um the montana learning center the organization which i'm the director
of is mainly does science camps for kids and teacher
training but we're also one of two nasa partners in the state of montana
the local university system being the other partner and we're fortunate enough um to
to provide a series of programs one of them being nasa student challenge we particularly
host the the program in montana but this is nationwide and also
worldwide too and this is um can start anywhere from like third grade students
all the way up through 12th grade and you know just in terms of um relevance
um this year's theme which we're we're just rolling out is is actually uh the
programs called rhodes on asteroids and it's part of the the northwest earth and space science pipeline
we're fortunate to be a member of that and what the rhodes one asteroids
program is is it allows kids and their teachers or mentors
to engage in robotics aeronautics um and aerospace
and all in it's kind of like a competitive atmosphere but we want kids
to have fun um while learning um a few years ago
uh what we did is if i go back here and scroll down
uh this is a small shot of one of the teams that i worked with
from one of the reservations in montana is um you know the the kids would basically
recreate or try to recreate a nasa mission um using a lego robot i actually
have the robot that we're going to use this year this is called a make block i built this
yesterday because i'm getting ready for a teacher training and it's a programmable um robot
that the kids actually will land a drone on
and this is kind of like your rover and they set up a course
where they will go around and let me actually bring up a photo of one of our past
competitions and so you can see that and so you you
know the our first year that we did this we provided these competition mats this
year um the teams and the kids actually recreate
um and they create their own competition mat and so this year it's um
made around um the the mission and so on vesta you've
got this really exciting feature called the snowman feature and we thought what it would be a great
way um to kind of make this year's challenge around that and hence rhodes on asteroids and so um
you know for for anyone that's interested um you know i know like teams in the us and this can start anywhere
from third grade all the way through 12th grade um you know we are able to provide some
some support for teams i know um specifically with the learning center and our role
with overseeing the programs in montana uh we're mainly supporting teams or our
funding allows us to support teams that are underserved under representative audiences
like last year we were extremely fortunate to sponsor 12 native teams
from the seven reservations here in montana and so if it is of interest um i've got
our website up on the screen and um i'll put it in the chat and i don't
know if scott or gary can get it out um but we've currently got the registration
open um you know i know different states in the u.s are able to provide um different
kinds of support based off of the fundraising or the funding that they have
since teams can do this uh internationally the funding that i
particularly have or my organization does has to stay within within montana
but it's all relatively low cost um and you can re recreate or try to recreate a
nasa nasa mission with kids and try to do different things like
uh programming and whatnot here are some you know closer up shots and you know
some of the kids had some like creative outfits and whatnot if you ever um have
seen first lego league or lego league this kind of puts a space spin on things that i'm really excited to be a part of
and so um you know we're currently uh looking for teams and i realize you know with kovid
it kind of puts um you know it makes a makes the competition real interesting and so we
we've planned for that and you know we have information on that
um anyone internationally can go on the website and grab the the course
curriculum i was fortunate enough to partner um with the national team on this and we
actually came together and wrote literally a curriculum for middle school and high
school and it's aligned to national science standards and and math standards and whatnot
um but you know there's several different units and we start out with mission planning talk about planetary
geology astrobiology and then we mainly get into the the nuts
and bolts of like robotics and drone programming and whatnot so i can drop this separate link
also to scott as well to get out um so this is out out there it's free um it's
freely accessible anyone around the world as long as you have the internet connection you can get to it
um my specialty or at least in this project was unit one and it's basically
introducing the kids to space science how to work like in a team and it pulls you know if you're a
teacher it aligns to standards it'll give you the full lesson plan kind
of give you a guide of timing and whatnot and it's um you know especially
in covid times or the pandemic times we go into a lot of you know how to do this
in a small group setting how to do it in a virtual setting because many many school groups are
online and whatnot and so that's one opportunity i wanted to share
the other one this is more for the northwest region in the u.s
and we currently have our registration and and both opportunities are free um
you know there's there's no cost if you're able to get uh sponsored as a team for the robotics challenge
otherwise like with the aerospace scholars program there's a very little cost or no cost to
this in fact we have a heavy scholarship program we work with the museum of flight in seattle and nasa and the
university of washington on this project and we were our registration deadline is
coming up in a week and this is a great program for students that are juniors in
high school to get an experience in aerospace and and
the field and we actually have um registrations open it closes in a week it takes about
a student an hour or two to do it's a little lengthy but it's it's a it's a really
exciting worthwhile program like the students will actually um there's two
phases the first phase and i'll put this link in the chat as well um the first
phase has students complete a online course through university of washington and that's for students that are based
in northwestern u.s and they can obtain five college credits for their work
and i mean you know it's a pretty cool opportunity to be in high school get college credits and you know learn about
space science at the same time that you can apply to your degree if you go into college
and then phase two of that program um the the scholars at least in
montana will come to us at the montana learning center um for a face-to-face
experience like they work with the on the telescopes with me um you know
in non-coveted times we actually will partner uh with several groups down at the local airport and take the kids
flying um you know we have a boeing uh plant near our facility and you know we'll
take the kids for a tour that sort of thing so it's a really fun time um you know we've got a lot of
scholarships um for kids you know that that can't afford this type of opportunity and
you know that opportunity is open for the next week i wanted to share those two i know it's kind of like a break
um from my um oops let me minimize that i know it's
kind of a break um from talking about like imaging processing and my own astronomy
work but i did want to kind of close with this before i turn it over
this is our group shot of the group that that our class that we just did and typically you know our class that's
online it's usually double in size for montana um you know i know
you know this program's been running for a long time with the museum of flight this is year five for us in montana with
the mlc and um typically we'll have double the amount of students start the program
online and about half will will complete it because it is a rigorous course while
they're in high school it's similar to like an ap course
[Music] experience and so i'll kind of open it up if if the
group's got any questions about either one of these programs otherwise i'll uh go ahead and
copy the links in the chat
you said then thanks for that ron i don't know whether you've actually disconnected again or you you can hear
me in the background still there yeah i'm still here okay i can hear you
your video's not moving at the moment though
yeah but we carry along for a minute and ryan probably dropped back in but that the first program there that ryan was uh
talking about your first program there um i actually thought there'd probably be a few parents
that might well look at that um and take different aspects of that out for children
you know so it's not just you know from an educational point of view although it
covers all of that for schools or teachers or different things there might well be kids that got
interested in that side of things and the parents can have a look on there and run through that
but thanks for sharing that ron it was um it's really interesting to see how
other people are doing things you know but over here we're a lot different and i think with this
you know the pandemic that's going on people are looking for different things to do there are
hunting around for different information or different projects um
it's good to see what you're doing on on sort of your side and the interest that's there
in there well thank you i appreciate it um i'll go ahead and put those links
into the chat and then that way we can get the information out um like the robotics channels
if you want one quick note there um with that is like you know it doesn't
have to be a school group it can be a scout group some you know somebody that has an after-school program at like a
4-h or in the library whatever i mean it can even be a group of parents getting together with some
some kids to do some really fun and awesome stuff while they're learning at home during
this time too okay so here's that link going out into chat right now
cool thanks for that right thank you guys now that was really interesting it was good to see
a different slant on things and uh you know some different areas in it the robotic side looks really interested in
sitting down and doing that but that's the engineering head coming out of me yeah for that side of things
um what i thought we'd do is um have a chat with carol
yeah and let carol give us a little bit of information about the astronomical league again um
because you sponsor the the door prizes or some of the door prizes for this event
and you're on lots and lots and lots of these shows so for other listeners who've not tuned in
before um i thought it'd be quite good if you went through a little bit of information for us sure yeah my name is
carol orge i'm president of the astronomical league it's so good to see ryan on here uh i've talked before about
the league's youth awards and ryan i don't know how many years ago he was one of our star uh applicants for one of the
programs so i have very fond memories of those years back then so we're still alive and well on those
awards right so we have the youth awards uh for uh
high school-aged students uh backing out back just a second we are
18 000 members strong our group is both nationally and internationally have
approximately 300 societies within the us in addition we
have several societies coming online internationally now so we're very excited about that movement that we're
having as well in addition to the youth awards we have approximately 75 observing
awards for any interest that anyone would have whether it's a beginning program whether
it's an urban program for a ward specifically designed for
observing in urban areas where the light pollution is a little stronger than we
would like it to be or whether it's in very uh caters to very dark skies such as nebula
programs uh and uh other dark sky events so that gives you a little bit of a
preview uh we are in fact just recently uh
we scott uh became a sponsor of our newest program which is
a new imaging award and we're very appreciative of that that'll be open to the adults uh
from the youth angle we already have an image award in place there
so uh we're very thrilled about that in addition uh explore scientific sponsors the national young astronomer award
program as well as the peltier award program for adult astronomers so
we're very very grateful for that now
i was amazed on this because i'm a member at large and i was looking
through what you do yeah i was looking on the website and i was actually thinking i
should have been a member at large when i was about 14 to get through some of these achievements
that's right yeah and you might just now be finishing some of those observing awards i'm glad
you brought that up because yes the members at large is a very good program as well for those who don't have an
astronomy club close to their uh uh neighborhood uh that that's a very very
nice thing to do so yeah thank you for bringing that up no no problem it it it is really
interesting and it's again by looking through those uh observing awards and
different things it does take your mind onto other parts of the industry or the hobby itself
so you again you can get sort of fairly mind tracked in what you're doing you know maybe imaging or
um but there's lots of other types of imaging that you can go on to do and then observe it
you know amateur astronomers always want an additional challenge and so we're
constantly bringing new awards online and we have what's called a master observer award and that's when uh the
observers who almost run out of everything anything to observe that has a certificate attached to it they get a
certificate and plaque recognize them as a master observer and that we make a big deal of that at our alcon conventions
which is the national organization uh of course these times we're in right now
has put a crimp into style as far as having conventions in fact i was just on the phone before this meeting today with our
albuquerque group who hopefully is going to sponsor our 2021
convention the first week in august but just a couple of days ago uh covered had
other plans for the state of uh new mexico and they're shut back down uh
in large measure so some of the times but hopefully all turn around very soon
yeah yeah and and that's the thing i think it's just a case of everybody
working around these different problems isn't it you know really to be honest nobody knows what's
going to happen in two weeks or a month's time at the moment and we just you know work around that and
uh move along and and still get along and then you know encourage everybody to
enjoy themselves as much as they can in this time and it's so refreshing uh i
know we've all been on these kind of learning curves on these type of programs but i tell you it's really uh
expanded the reach considerably so it's a good thing out of all this excellent thank you
thanks um sue hill you're out in kosovo
yeah which is over this side it's out in the european side so would you like to explain
really where you you're from where it's around yeah so people have got an idea and and what you you know what you do
yeah what's your passion in astronomy thank you gary hello everybody
it's such a an honor to be among you guys and thank you scott for inviting to be part of
this star party this is my first time yesterday we had the chance with scott
who i was part of the open go to community which also shared with audience what's happening here in kosovo
so kosovo is a small country located in the balkans
in europe and we have one of the youngest population here in kosovo in europe
sorry and what we're doing here is we're trying to spread the knowledge of science and
astronomy to all the people here in kosovo i have a what i'm going to be talking here uh is
an old observatory that we have here in kosovo that was not being used for like
40 years and we were founded in 2014 and we're trying to
bring it back to life maybe i can share my screen here just a second
so i'm very very honored to be part of the explorer alliance
membership one of the newest numbers and it's very nice because now we have the support of
the ministry of culture and the ministry of education and the pristine municipality for the activities but
before i continue i have a really important announcement announcement to make
so i found out what's happening with the toilet paper
no [Laughter] i know so that's where it's been going
so i finally after so many months researching and looking now we know
where all the toilet papers are going so people are just buying them to make telescopes
this picture of his of the close friend of mine is jen pierre so
so for those people who don't know me this is like a short bio uh
it's uh i'm also a national coordinator of astronomers without borders and i was recently
appointed as a european young ambassador which i will be representing kosovo in the european union
and the passion of astronomy was came from an early age since an
early age i was involved in the volunteer work and activism this is my first telescope it was a 60 millimeters
so it was a gift from mr saudi goshi so this this is where all everything
started my passion for astronomy it was very it's very bad because because we have a lot of lacks
of of astronomy and a lot of flexing of equipment so we basically started with
just one telescope and we were founded in 2014 and when um
different astronomers like you guys and other fans who were seeing what we're
doing here in kosovo they wanted to support us with equipment so they did
they brought so many equipments here in kosovo which we we used and we are still using uh and these are some of the
members that we have which we wouldn't have been here where we are if it wasn't for them
and uh i said the the we got we had the chance to have the four one sky telescopes it was a crowd
found campaign by astronomers without borders and we got this so many uh educational
materials which we distributed for free in our events so we organized so many
events everything is in a voluntary basis and also we're part of the
uh we're part of a star shine for every one program it's a program which uh gian pierre from
belgium and he is distributing free telescopes to countries that they need
so we were among them so it's very interesting with the amount here this was one of the events that we had and
we've been using them ever since and for the moment this is the largest telescope we had we have it's from brasser and
it's um it's a 152 millimeters uh in diameter
but what were observatory of christine as you might as everybody might know
uh kosovo has a lot of flex and we we've been trying to throughout our
activities to promote science here so this observatory here it was functional in the 80s so can you
believe it's not been using like for uh 40 years and now it's finally in our
possession and we found this very old picture that i wanted to share with everybody and this is now the
observatory kosovo doesn't have one and we want to put it back to use unfortunately the municipality of
pristina is going to help us renovate this observatory which we're gonna open it for the public it's not in the
best location but for the moment it's very good because um it's like a meeting point because a lot
of people are asking us where if we have like an office or something so people can come here and observe this is a
small video made by a very uh popular tv here in kosovo it's called kankusuba
and it's telling how other countries have these big observatories but in kosovo there is no observatory
and it's telling what we're doing towards uh renovating the observatory here in
kosovo because uh next year we celebrate the seven years
as i said everything is on a voluntary basis we've been organizing so many events with the equipments we have but
of course we're lacking equipment because we still need like planetary cameras and other
equipment so we can give the astronomy to the public here
so this is prishtina the capital this is actually there is a telescope
here it comes from where ussr is very old this dome rotates 360 degrees
and interesting fact about the dome is because the origin of the dome is from ashdod
illinois oh wow okay it's coming from ashdome so we've been
in contact with the ceo and they've been helping us with some equipment so we can put it back to
use this is just like to tell the public that there's an observatory here in
kosovo and uh that people can um in the near future they can come and observe
and we're still raising like donations we're not thinking about what kind of
telescope to put it inside
so the original it was founded in 1979 by a group called the coastal jungle research
and it kind of feels like it's uh it's very old because it's just sitting
here
so this in the background you can see there are some of our members and
it's very important because um probably i don't know about other countries in the balkans but we had like
conflict in the 1990s knight is in the former yugoslavia and so a lot of
buildings are destroyed and but thankfully this observatory survived for so many years
that's very fortunate
i wanted to stop more about to talk about this observatory and
[Music] this is me trying to report
so too many donations we have also have for the first time in
kosovo people are observing two hydrogen alpha telescopes we had a discount from coronado and also we've been having
receiving solar glasses here in kosovo because people are observing for the
first time through solar glasses and it's very huge uh stuff because all of our activities
that we're doing are making a huge impact in difference in the community here and i know scott i mentioned yesterday
we also um won like uh grant from the united nations
yes which we wanted to include all communities living here in kosovo it's amazing
we call the initiative under one sky and the meaning of it is like we wanted to break all inter-ethnic barriers
through astronomy so we've been going to these cities where the majority is from
other minorities and we're trying to tell them that no matter where you come from or what
ethnicity you belong astronomy can bring us together and we can share the wonders of the universe
together this is from she's explaining
what we do what we're gonna we have done it until now
so kosovo is like 95 albanian but we also have other minorities this is why
we have the six stars in our flag
and these are some of the materials that we tell the the size comparison the earth compared
to the to the sun and so as you see it's very accessible to the
people and uh so we have this cooperation with the
education department so school schools can come and students can come and visit
the observatory which would be something very interesting for the people
excellent so this is uh nortena is one of the founders of the astronomy club
and it's uh so compared to where we were seven years ago we really made a huge
impact here in the community because we're people are shocked when they
look through a telescope for the first time or when they see that there's an astronomy club here in kosovo
it's very interesting because uh for the first time we're organizing these events
and uh because that's as you know there should be someone who are giving this opportunity to people because as you
know united states and other countries are very developed in this field and we are still
in in the beginning but as i say great things have small beginnings
and this is what we think like the observatory should look like this is an artistic vision what we're going to do
and our future project so there we have this astronomic commission as part of the ministry of education different uh
professionals from kosovo are gathered together and we have we made this it's for the moment it's a project in the
paper but we hope to make it possible in the near future so it's a scientific
center of kosovo of course they should be far far away from city lights and uh
it's we really want to build this and just be part of the like every other countries
who are investing in science and education and we really want this to happen
and this is one of my favorite picture because no matter if you're old or young or astronomy can
be for everyone and this this picture makes my day because it's when we go to
these schools is is very to see like this young people have so many ambition
and they know so many things about the space and the universe and they are the future of our country as a carl sagan
says that we should invest more in our children's because they are the future
of the country yes right now this is my presentation i
don't know if somebody who do you find you have
thanks thanks to help do you find you have as much interest from the adults there as you do for the children
actually uh most of our members in our astronomy clubs uh are from younger generations
uh unfortunately older generation they don't have so many interesting in the field of astronomy or science in general
what we're doing we're going to every school we're teaching the teachers the professor how to practically use a
telescope because most of the schools they have those hopefully but they don't have the enough knowledge how to
uh use them and um most of the older generation for example
when we have like public observation they don't believe what they're seeing they sometimes mistake it with a camera
or they say like you put a picture this is not true so it's uh it's very
interesting it's very funny it's i like what i do because we're not just
spreading the knowledge of science but also have a chance to meet different people coming from different
backgrounds and it's very nice because i meet a lot of people and it's such an interesting hobby
here thank you yeah it is it's really interesting again to see how other
people are dealing with it and one of the things that i'm noticing there on what you were saying was
that in the uk and i've heard it mentioned in the us and other places that i've been
to that it seems to be more older people that are interested in the hobby rather than the young people the young people
have already got an interest there but a lot of the organizations are filled with older people so it's quite
interesting to see the differences between the different cultures and what's happening
we talked yesterday at the open go to community that also has one of the youngest population in europe and uh
the younger generations are doing the astronomy the outreach the because the older generations like our
professors they can directly talk about astronomy but at
their time they didn't have these possibilities like the equipment and all that we're doing is thanks to you guys
who are donating them here in kosovo so we can use it in a good community and
for the first time people are observing through telescopes and we're trying to
break all the barriers and why not like i hope in a near future kosovo or i me
personally or other members in our astronomy clubs can discover like uh asteroids or other important things so
that we can be in the history yeah i mean that that's it's a nice goal
for those younger people to look at isn't it it's something to look up to and you know look back in
history across the world really on what people have discovered and then become part of that you know
and complete that in the future it's so nice because now in kosovo there are so many other uh formal or non
non-formal groups here who are doing astronomies in their city and we're helping them develop as a group so we
can have like representatives in other cities and spread it as much as possible
cool thanks thanks very much thank you gary thank you for the opportunity
no problem okay i think what we're going to do is we're going to go to carroll to ask the door prize questions and then
we're going to have a break and come over to uh schulandra because he's running some live images
and i did have a quick look outside it's sort of clear here but i'm not going to trust it because i do know there's rain
coming in and i'll be sitting here and uh yeah the screens will go down where it's all got wet so
what we do is uh go over to caroline and run through the door prize questions and then we're going to have a break for 10
minutes okay let's see let me see my screen here
uh the first thing i'd like to do before we talk about the prizes
we are uh wanting everyone to know because some of the prizes that are won
will be such things as eyepieces and other optics so we want to make sure that
everyone's being safe so we want to put this statement up here about observing the sun how you should never look
directly at the sun most of you already know that it's good to see the reminder
and now let's give the answers to the last gsp star party
and this was by was presented by john goss at that one the first question we asked
what is the closest planet to earth right now what planet comes closest to earth and
what planet is closest to earth the most often and the answers were
respectively the closest planet to earth right now mars what planet comes closest to earth
venus what planet is closest to earth the most often mercury and the winner was larry
byra g purgey i think how you pronounce that one
congratulations question number two from the previous star party
the first person to use a telescope to study the moon in a scientific manner was galileo in 1609 and 1610. why were
his observation considered to be so important even revolutionary the answer is
let's see he found that the silver silvery orb was not perfectly smooth as
had been taught by ancient astronomers and philosophers throwing doubt on their earth-centered model of the universe
second item there he found that the moon had seas containing life
that was one of the options and the answer was a which he found that the silvery orb was not perfectly smooth as
have been taught by ancient astronomers lucky winner is andrew corkel
congratulations andrew number three how many a.l that's astronomical league
messier observing program certificates have been earned the answer is approximately 2 900 and that's been in
effect for probably 30 some years the winner is matthew wask
walsh and now let's turn to tonight's questions
question number one how much would a 100 pound person that
is 40 what 45.3 kilograms weigh on the planet mars
how much would a 100 pound person on the planet marsh so 100 pound person
on earth right yeah 100 percent on earth william on the planet marsh okay
okay so think about that for just a second and uh send your uh
submissions in to uh kent at explore scientific and i think scott scott the exact address
there actually we changed the address to explore alliance at explorescientific.com
so i put that up in the chat so now question number two
what is the planet uranus's closest moon hmm
uranus's closest moon number three
how do write how do red giant stars get their name
now there's more than just the obvious answers you need to elaborate just a little bit on that one
so as soon as you get all these done send them in to the address that's scott's
posting yeah explore alliance at explore scientific.com you can see it in chat
there and we really want to thank the astronomical league for sponsoring being
the official sponsor of the explore alliance in all of its programs thank you thank you scott and we're so
privileged to be involved with you in this project so thank you thank you thanks very much carol
okay so we are going to go on to um we're going to take us on to about a
10-minute break um and then we'll be right back
cool i'm gonna grab a drink
okay
um
okay
so
um
well hello everybody uh you are watching the 17th global star
party this is what we call the european edition because it's the nighttime's more centered around
that that corner of the earth and tonight with us is gary palmer
um andreas nielsen shylandra sharma
and steve edmundson uh and suhil ahmadi who was
with us from kosovo so um i'll let uh gary i'll let you uh
uh introduce uh shylyndra um and um
we'll go from there i think i think he has something live in the scope yeah i believe he has um
chilandra has been on with us a few times in the past um and it is gradually getting into the
swing of the the astronomy scene um and has produced some quite good images
so far so i'm going to hand over to you silvandra and you can run through what you've got
yeah cheers gary thanks uh let me just share my screen
so i've been going since nine o'clock on this
and my guiding has not been great in areas um
and i'm not really sure why i have an inkling into why but
i'll just show you some of the early data here's something from the ha
now this is the first full session i would have done on narrowband i've never done a narrowband
full session yet with all three filters i've got the odd image here and there as you know because of the clouds in
england um and i tried to do it last night while cloud dodging and i haven't checked the
date yet but this for a five minute sub on the ha today has been pretty good seeing
conditions um now i have noticed
because while i was looking at the oxygen filter i was thinking did i get my focus wrong
but looking at the first image i don't think i did and then looking at this one
the focus looks a little bit out on oxygen but then what i did notice is if i go
back to the [Music] sulfur
the focus came back so i think next time what i'll do is do the oxygen
after the hydrogen the sulfur and then refocus
but what you'll find what you'll find is that your oxygen three is down
in the green blue area and your hydrogen alpha and your sulfur in the red area
so their focus depending on the filters yeah and the manufacturer filter can be
a lot closer than the oxygen so then if you move to illuminance you would see that the focus would go completely out
because the filter is looking again at a different distance yeah to the actual target
different difference on the sensor so if you zoom in the easiest way of doing
this is judge one night is to practice by going on to one of the brightest
styles like vega right if you have a focus mask that's the easiest way to look at this because that
will show you quickly yeah the distances between your filters
and what you do is put the focus mask on set up for a refresh rate five seconds
with a little bit higher gain so you can see the style and then as you swap the filters you'll see the focus changing
and then you can understand so if you look at which way you focus your focuser whether
it's in or out for that particular filter you get an understanding of what way you
need to go very slightly for each filter there's some forces they call that
atlantic flat um yeah in the real world with the uk seeing conditions
yeah it could be anything could be higher cloud could be um condensation on a
filter there are so many things but the first thing i would say try try the focus mask
yeah and you'll get used to it it sometimes you get away with it but another time
if it's the weaker filter it can really affect the images and you're right okay pulls the stars
out the styles go very wide but it's starting to look really good yeah
yeah i mean looking at the um seeing conditions today i mean if you look at that normally i could maybe see five of
those but i can see quite a lot of stars today and then i've had astro toaster stacking it
in the background and that's what it's come out with so far from all of the filters
whether my image will look anything like that at the end of it it's a different matter
that i was looking at on your guiding there which might be a help and this depends each mount is different even two
mounts from the same manufacturer is maybe to up your timing because at one second
you're actually pulsing to the mountain very fast on commands
okay it you can get a lag in the mount every now and then right so the the pulsing is
going to come on move and the mount is going yeah all right i'm moving and then all of a sudden the the pulsing is going
right when it moves the other direction and the amount's going i'm still moving this way
yeah because i mean i've noticed today but i think i did i took my mount and
everything out last weekend to test the batteries i'd bought
and i've put it back together and what i think i've done is i think i've over tightened some of the cables because
this style is normally in the center and it was to start with but gradually over time it look now it's
going back right but it it keeps doing that a lot and normally these milliseconds are normally
around the 200 and if it's giving me anything at all that i hardly get anything in deck but the decks keep
shooting up shooting back down and this is having to readjust back so
um yeah i think i've got an inkling of what it is but yeah distortion in the atmosphere one
second is not a lot for a guy camera to try and punch through it so by bringing that up yeah it's
actually steady in the style i mean a lot of amounts you can actually run up to say three seconds on the guide style
three and a half seconds it is
[Music] the odd amount come in where i have to
raise that up yeah it's different for each you know each imaging session in a sense
but i don't know how much the atmospherics in the uk um really don't uh
help the guiding you know depending on the aperture of the guide scope and pixel ratio and things like that in
general i would be running at two seconds but what you might find that you have to do is stop the guiding
and go through a recalibration because if you just change the timing it's not going to recalibrate it to me
yeah see i did i did a recalibration today because i moved a few things around so i thought right i'll
recalibrate before i start session um and the recalibration came out fine but
it's it's since it's been going through the image stages that it's sort of
it keeps knocking itself out and then coming back in and although
the total there is not too bad right yeah and normally if if it was that my
style would be in the center but i think what i've done is i've tidied up some extra cables and i think
i might have over tightened the central yeah on the deck
and that i think is restricting it slightly as well
um i just want to say they're high chop i can i can see you've joined us there in
the uh background from the astronomical link yes um the other thing as well i was going to
say is [Music] bear in mind with the balancing on the mount that some people go too critical
with the balancing and they try to get the telescope absolutely perfectly balanced
and the problem with that yeah is that in certain parts of the sky on certain targets the gears are not meshed
so as you your guiding sends a pulse through the gears are not even really meshing
properly and it's what we call free floating so there's the telescopes pointing at the target it's tracking on
the target but the gears are not messy enough to actually start moving for guiding in one
direction or the other so it's worth bearing in mind on both axises just to leave a little bit of
over balance and it measures the gears and you might find a quicker response then on your guiding as
well okay i'll try that because i think you're right it is pretty much
bang on balance on both axis yeah and you you can find that causes a
big problem i have a tendency on most mounts just to slightly over balance it in each
um uh axis yeah in one direction forward or minus yeah on the scope and the same
on the counterweight um and then that meshes gears together so if you think about the gears they're
like that they're loose at a certain point and i i generally always find that it's up
around boats boats can be a real pain on something else to get into because the telescope
goes into a free float in that area yeah and you finally like the guidance been working you know every other
location of the stein you get up there and that's it yeah the diving all goes
to part and you're playing around with the calibration and playing around with settings so i always slightly over balance unless
amount doesn't require it and you'll soon notice that you know the amount that uh the guiding goes to
part and you just have to reset the balance on it oh right okay
yeah see what china do is get one balance for all um and so far success it's been successful
apart from tonight it's giving me a little bit of chip um
and i still use it on all sorts of things but tip x yeah a mark
where the balance point is so when you're setting up you can't wait to just go straight on you scope those into that
that mark on the um on the shoe um and the same with like the adapters
that go on the cameras yeah i'll mark them with a little bit of tip x then and you know once you've finished with that
that run and change your equipment i'd be you just rub the tip x off but it's a good way of getting everything aligned
really quickly and getting you you know more or less balanced um pretty fast because in the uk we're
covered in cloud yeah you know so if we're going gap hunting yeah you gotta
be pretty lively on the setup there um so yeah all of these different little ways of doing that
yeah oh yeah i'm gonna try that i'm gonna get a sharpie i'm just gonna put it on there permanently
draw it everywhere just just a little bit of tip eggs i know you know on systems before we add all of
this plate solving and rotators and everything if i wanted the camera in the same
alignment for the next night i would put two marks on the the tube to the camera and two marks on the back end of the
telescope see it aligned exactly where i had it the night before yeah and that way you know you're only
going to be you know a very very slight tilt on the rotation out
but in the stacking you're just going to literally just crop the edges off which are no different than normal you know
you'll always get stacking errors there to crop off anyway so you pick these little bits up just go
along oh yeah i i always say that people say a wise person learns by his mistakes
and i always say a wise person learns by others mistakes yeah if they pay interest on what others
are doing yeah they pick up what mistakes are made yeah yeah well i've got my session coming up with you gary so um i should
hopefully pick up some more tips on the um editing part yeah cool looking forward to that that'd
be good we'll probably organize that for next week at the moment yeah excellent
so thanks for that um what we're going to do is andreas is going to be up later than uh steve and i
yeah so we're going to run over to andreas who's always interesting
um lives in sweden and puts up with very similar weather as what we've said to the uk and probably a bit colder and a
bit more snow but yeah
[Music]
i would never met you cool guys at this uh
all these shows so um and it's always cool to share experience with other
people around the world and i think you know astronomy unites
people from all over the world different kind of religion so
and i think i was 15 or 16 when i saw my first
eyes through a solar telescope it was a blesser
and that changed my mind they'll change my view of the space
that keep me down in in astronomy and
later on i bought the own scope two three years ago my first task
telescope so so on i have been more and more interested and
for two or three years i have started immediately
now we're going to share some share some
images or share some tips i think um
did i share this right screen yes
this is the right hopefully yep that all looks good yeah
yeah i live in as you see stockholm sweden and
this is 59 parallel so this is uh when you're on road around the world
you end up in in alaska in the
middle of hudson bay so i can show you on the map where here's
sweden this is taken from aurora forecast that predicts auroras around the world
and uh here's the parallel go around so stockholm is uh in the southern part of
alaska so i can see aurora's here in stockholm if it's strong enough
it must be stronger down 5.5 in the cape scale and
the kp scale is probably how strong there are already is so this is
when we can see it in stockholm so you can you can see it further south also but
you have to go up north to see it and we are
all have now we have bad weather but i have got a few
nice with the new um some clear skies some get some good date
done and half the country is covered in snow so we have uh challenges with
very cold winter and we're warm at summer and the very turbulent uh weather
like in the uk so when i am again
i the stuff i use is is suppression pads this is very
good to have on your mount so you don't get any vibrations a bad enough mask is very handy to focus
so you get pinpoint sharpness and it's very easy to uh
oh just to focus on you get pinpoint the stars so it it's helped me a lot to
doing some imaging and uh for one year my for the touch uh focus
room died and got broken and i saw a guy dylan
on the internet and uh he showed me him doing with a cloth film
so then you can just notch it with the fingers this is uh a cooler
trick you can do with a sat oh yeah so you buy nush it with your fingers
and you got to fight one to five ratio so this is a very cool trick to learn
some insight and uh when i imagine i always
plan for the weather and all the clear skies and
i learned from a guy in canada he is he's called sean nelson
has astor shannon called the visible dark sky and as i learned about pigs inside and he has a great
video showing off how to do a custom celery so i did that
i took one this is from my inner yard and this is from my outer yard
and then i stitch it together to to
do an image that i could fit but i can see
i can't see uh 360 but i guessed so it should fit together
then when you stack it in stellarium that looks like this and then you have uh and i can plan with
the along it with the equatorial and how much time i have on each target
so i know where the like the m42 came up and how much time i have on
the sky on this evening so i can on the planet where it
i have a building in front so i can know where it uh passes some 4g towers um
so on so this is something i uh how i plan my immediate
and um yeah and this uh i uh
and this time i showed you this is from uh summer i do some strawberry missions
i've done a lot to that and when i do uh when i
use the daystar quark in my export scientific and then when i shoot i overexpose it when i want to
have the detail of the them and
the plasma is coming out from the song and then i just stack an image in
[Music] and then produce an image and bring up the colors
and this one is shot by a regular standard so
so i got both sides so one over exposure this is
in uh right exposure so you can see a lot of stuff coming out of the song it's pretty
cool and this is uh normally look when i imaged the sun here's calvin's sunspot
from for the summer it's called 277 ohm and
[Music] i stack this to an image process this this is
quite short on the image of the sum from this
summer so last week i shot mars
and it was pretty windy i i think it was
17 miles an hour in us i guess in the wind got this
get down in the middle so i had to try to shoot it and this is raw data coming out from
my mars photography when i focus on mars many uh
uses to focus on the detail i have a quite other solution to that i look at
the wobbles in the stars with the blue filter and when this wobbles the less than i have
[Music] then i got all filters into sharpness and that
really worked well when i stacked the image so this is my
commercial mars so you can see uh limbus ones here and this is pretty much
what you get out from c8 systems and around 2525
000 images stacked wow so this is about three minutes
yeah one minute each i shoot with a 174 mm mono and then i just align that
process then in lightroom so this is how i do
planet photography and also last
from a week ago i shot
nebulosa called ngc 132 called the embryo galaxy it was the first
that i got the clouds from my location my late nine skies
so i can [Music] so i got a lot of
a lot of the dust that's enormous and don't show up in the city when i shoot
from they always get lost but this was the first image that uh
revealed that dust so it's uh hopefully it's hope period uh stockholm to use the
right camera camera right exposure and to bring out the detail
so uh i'm very excited for the whole coming year to shoot
a ride on them or some flame below to get a lot of detail so um
it's very exciting to use this camera i used a couple of times
so um this is probably to share this time i guess
you've got some really nice detail in it bearing in mind don't know what your
your light pollution there is like there is no detail there
and you know as you move along it's just adding more time to it more data to it
and it brings out more and more um those faint clouds in the background um
so yeah it you know provided you get the clear skies it's going to be interesting to see what you get in you know a month
or six weeks on a few of these objects yeah i see all the progress all the time so i hopefully
it's always dependent on the wonder the better the weather has been poor and i
didn't think i would get anything on this target the mdc 133 is uh
it's very small target for a hyperstar system i just tried it out if it worked and uh
i got an image of it so uh it's surprising in me to uh
uh reveal so much detail in one hour and 25
seconds in 25 minutes with the hyperstar system so it's worked very well
normally i want to shoot longer longer time but uh the problem is always
well there is always some when i shift it from my back and i have from 17 degrees up to 55 and then i can't
shoot that target and then i have to wait to the next level and next time to shoot that and
on this probably be poor weather and i normally don't shoot when this moon is
out i can't shoot now i can um shoot with narrowband of course but this is a
broadband image reflection nebulas are the most
harder to shoot from stockholm but also you you have to take into
account some other things here that you're not mentioning and they're things that i just know in
general through imaging and i know that if you're imaging off of a balcony it's not just light pollution there's
going to be heat distortion you know all sorts of different other little factors that come in on this
um and that that will change so by getting these you know you're doing a
good job there doing a really good job yeah yeah i have a street outside with a lot of lamps so
that's one type of light so in stockholm we have a mixture of
uh led lights and regular lights so this the light pollution don't cut everything
out but the narrowbands are great to bring out take every light
pollution away but that's the problem i can't shoot uh narrowband with uh with this reflection
uh type of targets i must shoot broadband to reveal all the
all the gas and dust in it but you um you're also used in the fast imaging
system and this is the thing as technologies moved along over the last few years
certainly with the speed of cmos cameras and using them on a fast imaging system
uh it's making light pollution uh or it's not making light pollution but
it's allowing you to image around light pollution a lot easier now by using shorter times
whereas a few years back when we were just on the ccd cameras it was quite an art to get through that
oh yeah they look really good they look very good excellent yeah thanks for sharing
that yeah no problem it's always pleasure to share it's always a pleasure to have you on
it's always a pleasure to meet fellow astronomers it's also always humble to uh
get invited in the first place so it's uh it's always subtraction
i think from my point of view you know not just your image is good and i can see
you know where you're you're going each time that you've come on is
you are pushing that point you know that more and more across the world people are living in like polluted areas
so you're showing them that you know i think what is is a lot of people you
are too used to the old things well that you can't do that from there or you can't do this
and this is showing that you can do this yeah it will take a little bit of learning it'll take a little bit
different way for you maybe to someone else but it is possible to do these things from those locations
yeah i know i also want i also share my experience
with others we have a community in facebook they call astropixel and i
always try to help other people if they need advice
if i can help we are we are trying to help each other so this is uh
one great about the astronomy and i have others that use that kind of system of
the hyperstar system and [Music] more and more um get there oh
see the benefits of using that kind of system well
not not just for my part of bad skies but uh even a dark sky
yeah if you shoot from a dark style you can put the game down and use the whole full
well of the camera and get uh great detail so uh so this
different kind well where we live so i i have to adopt my uh
technique to my uh solution my part of the
guy so i always i start there i start the shock when i
imagine i is a great inspiring to the solar and
astral backyard i always follow him a guy called yolanda dolan i follow all
this channel to incorporate new techniques and maybe change it to
fit my bill or if it if i can do something especially all
with thinking out the box so the thing is is you're using an f2 2.2 system
and yeah they're 1.9 yeah so and a lot of people think
well i'm going to go for an f2 system you know i'm going to get around but there's a whole host of other problems
come in when you use the file system that you don't think about when you're using a normal say f5 to f7 refractor
and there's all sorts of different things that come in on this and one of the key things is
you know alignment of the the mirrors in them it's got to be absolutely perfect any little wearers on there you know and
you you're going to get your your styles flaring out and all of those sorts of things so it is a
what i call a whole round package you know that that's got to be attained to get the image it's not just a case of
you know putting it all together it's actually keeping it all together and keeping it all running
yeah cool thanks thanks very much for sharing that it's really a problem thank you for
this pleasure to talk about astronomy and uh i wonder if how and
is it always this pandemical we can call it has brought maybe people that don't uh
meet in the regular circumstances i have always wanted to travel to leave
to meet fellow astronomers but uh but this is also cool to meet them i hope this
will also be sustainable in the future and i think it's more informative
i think it's more informative in a sense because you know scott and i have been to nief um you know we turn up there
we're setting our equipment up we're racing around with customers we might be lucky if we actually talk
for five seconds for a whole weekend as we're continually passing each other at
these events you'd be surprised that you don't really
interact with a lot of people at these events unless you're going now to meet other astronomers um certainly
when you work in the background of these events they're quite a stressful time to get everything you know people who
turn up an event they turn up there and everything's all on display for them you know everything's all done whereas when
you work in the background of these events in the couple of weeks coming up to them
and then the the days that they're running they're really quite stressful to get they're enjoyable but they're
still stressful to make sure you've got everything there and it's all set up and it's all running
um i never get to go to the shows as a just a normal person yeah i'm always working
at the show it's pretty much like what started so um you do see a different side to it
then and i think these are just a lot more informative you know
it's a lot more relaxing people get a lot more information out of it um
and you know we still answer the same questions in the chat here as what we'd be asked at the shows
yeah and no long lines in airports [Laughter]
i remember going into dallas about four years ago for a connection to uh kansas
and dallas just decided to close the airport down and scrutinize every single
passenger when four planes had landed yeah so it was it was nearly five hours
just to get through the airport yeah and i think it's so much stupid it
was about 12 o'clock at night um and i think there was a hotel right above the airport and i just went on
going in there for the night that's it um the time i got in there was like that hot house one in the morning and i had
the connected flight first flight out at sort of six in the morning something like that says so three hundred dollars
for the hotel for about four hours something stupid overnight but you know that happens that
that's part of you know traveling around to these events and you know as this sort of thing kicks in i think
it's going to make more of a difference and slow different things up in different areas you know as
we get back to a new normal it's probably become more stressful yeah what is that what is the new normal
yeah yeah well you know we've gone back in again we're tonight 6
p.m tonight we've gone back into a locked down here for two weeks and that's a full lockdown
so all pubs bars closed again you know now while that doesn't necessarily
affect me i'm i'm remote i'm up in the mountains it does affect people in the busier
cities you know that are further down south wales or up in north wales um
and you just don't know what's going to come up now you know you can't really plan i mean in the real world i
suppose back in about july we were thinking maybe november we might start putting on a few more
um you know imaging workshops at events and places like that but probably not
going to be till you know mid next year at this rate if at all then so this sort
of thing's going to move on i think and continue going and continue growing yeah
right uh someone named pekka pekka hatala i
think is how you pronounce it says andreas has helped me a lot in astrophotography here in stockholm
uh almost like everything i almost i can't everything i can do today is
thanks to him so thank you good good job that's great
yeah this is a humbling experience to meet first time us was on the show i think oh
my god there's a lot of people that oh scientists and stuff and then you
start meeting them then just normal people like me um and i get more and more
relaxed doing this and uh every time so it's uh always a learning curve
and also when i look back to myself if i ask myself
a year ago i probably wouldn't do anything like this but this
is i think it was someone to push me over
the threshold to do this so uh it's always fun to do this kind of thing now
so that's the same with me for probably a year people have been asking me in the us to do online stuff and i've been too
busy and now it sort of pushed that side because we've quite down on
the other things to do um and it i think like the zoom platform
has come along a long way isn't it it's helped us all you know a year ago everybody was a bit skeptical
and you know sometimes we've used skype and different other things um
you know for the these sorts of things when we find the failure in that or the plus point in that and then
it's taken there's probably a good few of these star parties as well to find where we're comfortable you know what
systems we're using and and you know the odd phobia here or there but that's what happens
but anyway we're going to move over to um to steve yeah um
based in the uk same as me um see lots of your astro images come up
online and different other things that you're doing so um the platform is all yours steve
well thank you again thanks for inviting me tonight and well um when you got in touch guys
ah well look at the weather forecaster and i thought oh i'll be doing something live
we get that so in the best traditions of
um blue peter how do i share this come on remember
remind me right share button down at the bottom yeah so as you hover down the bottom there and then
select the screen or area that you want to share yeah there you go
that's a green button as you mouse over yeah yeah uh not that one now on i think
so this was last night oh wow cool um
c11 uh zw0178 caller
and two and a half powermate and at this stage i got the mount to behave
itself as you know gary the temperature has dropped slightly
yeah and the eq6 i'm pushing it with the c11
yeah it was binding was stall inside to get the tools out
and you know what it's like in the dark and eventually i got it to to run so he's
tracking quite nicely at this stage and yeah i've also remembered to
check the dual collector plate sorry corrector plate and uh
cleared that off and we got half decent what i thought view
of mars oh yeah so
more than half decent see see there's some nice detail there but i was just gonna say on that what you were saying
about the you know the corrector plate people don't realize that like here in the uk with the due
the due starts in about september and disappears in about july so we have about two months for that due
here and if you're using you know if you're using a c11
you know that is two jew heaters running at nearly max on the front end of that
to stop the dew around the you know your secondary yeah um and quite often with the juice
shield on it and all of the other bits running they don't realize what's involved with the slightly larger
telescopes imaging from here and the same if andreas was doing the same there you know the temperature changes are
massive on this uh well i started off last night and the humidity level was about
88 yeah and when i come in it was
97.98 and as you said with the jew shields and stuff like that the balance boosted part
oh you've just been
yeah depending on what juice shield you got if it gets breezy then the uh the juice shield's blown off at an angle
and you're back there on the front of it and this is you know they're all part and
parcel and the other big thing is is if you take anything off breathing anywhere near it it's like if you take a knife um
sorry a bio off or a filter off you've actually got to hold your breath here
while you move it around in front of you before you put it back onto the telescope
yeah and if you fiddle around the front with your hands the heat from the hands you know
if you get the hairdryer out and you can't see a damn thing for
10 minutes anyway that's that's what i got with that so following one of yours
uh ideas screen again and going to
reggie stack yeah first thing you oh it's stacked in auto stack at three
yeah 80 percent of however many frames it was quite a few
just with it being a color camera and
it be mars and the rotations not so critical i'll tend to leave it to run a little bit better
so as you be balanced hit auto balance
we're not actually seeing that screen here steve so you know no you might have actually scraped
shared the application the last time rather than the main screen so if you go back to screen share
and click on it again now go back to it and then you'll be able to select screen
one and then anything that comes up on there will come up on on the live feed
is that it that's it yeah i can see it now there we go so yeah i've hit auto
balance rgb align show area a little bit bigger
it'll chew through that relatively quickly he says
i've got about 20 odd things running on the background and this is where the next bit is where
the magic really happens for me and it's down to
you gary basically with the wavelets
it's really funny with wavelengths i think i did an article for sky at night probably it must be about four or five
years ago now and it was around understanding the wavelets and trapping noise in the
wavelets you know there's there's so many adjustments on there and i can remember like
certainly with older cameras we had to play with them a lot you know um to get the the adjustments that we want but now
it's quite minimal to be honest cool there you go
um that's it into photoshop over the course balance
there's some really nice fine detail i mean even running through this system and screen sharing and i also know
that registax is such an old program now that its display is quite poor you can see a lot
of errors displayed in registex which don't come out in the final image
so you could adjust your wavelets to layer three and it looks like it's it's meshed across the top of the image yeah
they're not actually in the image and if you process it when you put it into photoshop they're fine and that's
looking really good on the screen here
looks great and then back to
screenshot i'm doing a long way around um [Music]
yeah yeah as i say it's only a bit of color balance um d speckle
and i'm quite happy with that yeah you can see a lot of detail in it
you know and the colors are really quite nice on there they're quite balanced you know um that that's
uh what we're looking at you see the pole cap nice and clear and white yeah so yeah round up at the north and
on the limbs as well no that looks nice i'd be happy with
that yeah i i did get three out of the load i did last night i got three about
this stage uh about 1am local time that one
that one i've shown and that's the last one that one's a bit blurred for some reason but
it's still this stuff around here yeah yeah it's the uk
it is like joking a witch uk
yeah um this is the desperate solar astronomy you're talking to here
another one excellent yeah and on thursday
yeah it was supposed to be broken crowd through the afternoon so
of course being the forever optimist i'm an astronomer so i set the gear up when
in a sunny spell and of course it went cloudy and i waited and i waited and
fell for the subtle sucker holes about four or five times big tip for all
beginner astronomers get yourself a big cover
because it rains as well yeah uh you can just nip out and if you've got a big cover
you can just slip it over the top of the top if you get one of those nice tailored ones that are designed for that
scope size sometimes a struggle to put them on well you've also got a stop
one of the old tents that i had it got damaged but it it had the cover that goes over the top the astronomy tent
yeah and i've still got the cover from the top and i just laid that over the top of the equipment rain comes along you just pull it off
shake it off yeah and you you're still running in normally you're on target as well
and at star parties i use a toilet tent
yeah the trick set up once basically and just
leave retail put it on so that was and the colored bit like you know
what scope would you use him for that looks like a lump it is a lump uh that was a good guess
[Laughter] um with the twist yeah let's see it's got a coronado rich tune on the front as
well for the double stack yeah cool yeah and
a bit of more creative processing and that pulled the yeah the nice prom
out there and the obviously there's a nice filament over on the left
there as well just below that yeah yeah you can see that running right across to
what we call a filler problem so it's half on the edge in half yeah half on the surface yeah that's
cool we used to do when i used to do some stuff on night sky network
i was talking to a guy and i was doing some live solo one afternoon i was talking to guys oh that's what we call a
philly prom and he went well i'm from philadelphia [Laughter]
and i quite like this at the moment one of the ways of bringing stuff out a little
bit more is inverting and that is using
um what's it called
i am ppg yeah and they use the curves in there to invert uh and it's quite an easy
process to whip it around and and just to be able to bring that color out of course you can see the uh
the dust bunnies around the edge as well and almost but is this
soul nothing nothing to pick up activity
yeah that's cool just um just on that little bit there i'll stop it did you know that um davestar have
introduced a new yes uh front mounted uh flat
panel yeah it's fine i didn't see it the other day yes yeah um and basically you can put that on the
front of the telescope now and that is really for these full disc shots this is to help towards this sort
of stuff more than the close-up stuff yeah and that that looks quite interesting i'd be really interested in
when uh they're stocked over here to try that out and just see what we can do with it because the full
disc shot has always been the problem and generally it's in the center of the
image as you know um a lot of people think that the sun's a 2d object yeah so they cannot
understand it's either really bright or really dark
in the center and it's because it's so much closer to us so it's closer to the optics
yeah and it's a brighter point isn't it so um that's always been the issue but
you've got some nice detail in that problem there yeah now uh going to back to
the the flats panel business what i've done is i somebody
mentioned an idea of using an opaque plastic bag yep
white truck yeah i got mine from little actually that was the
and i'm only going on what i was told
a lot um playing around so you need to shop at waitrose yeah and get one of their bags but yeah i i've
heard the same thing what i've done is i've butchered two plastic plant pots
yeah and trap the bag between the two plant pots
so it holds it in so it doesn't flop around and because there's always problems of sticking it over the end and the plant
pot makes a nice holder to go over the end and if i was really tuned up for this
it would be to hand and be able to show you but it's it's it's in the garage so and i'm not venturing out there now
for another day that one and it does work
seventy-five percent of the time um not always for me and that's yeah
operator error this is one of them ones where we i remember doing one of the daystar talks
when i was out there i think it was when scott was there was quite a while back now but this came up on one of the talks and
there's quite a few of us and it can get quite mathematical to work this out for a full disc shot
it's not a dead straightforward thing um and that is because your difference
of the surface and your dark background so yeah
and also the vagaries of the um uh salons as well
yeah yeah etc etc
the new cameras help the only thing is is that manufacturers still keep making the front glass
yeah magnetized to dust yeah and we notice you know in the daytime when you're imaging there's a
lot more dust around there's a lot more other particles in the air so as soon as you get your camera out of the covers
then you've got the problem of removing the dust and you know you can go on and on and on
trying to do that i've got a certain model of camera here which i'm not going to name
which when you actually bring it out the box uh it's like it's been in a fire bucket of sand um and it doesn't matter
how many times i clean it and somebody the other week said to me if you said try one of these cameras so i can't keep
it clean at the moment i said i know it's just yeah um
you notice that more in the daytime solar imaging than what you do on any night imaging runs
i think the method for cleaning the camera is
get your air blower out give it a blast get your wonder fluid out or
fluid of choice give it a go put it on oh it's slightly better grass still want to get that one
off yeah you have another goal you make it worse and you have another goal
and it's a little bit better and the fourth or fifth attempt you think stuff it is going back on yeah
do you know one of the best best fluids for cleaning cameras and cleaning filters
is your breath is that still yeah yeah your breath is still there so you're not actually putting any chemical on there
no no and it's the chemical that actually activates the static for the dust
right and this is the problem so lenses are a little bit different lenses nearly always come up clean yeah what a
lot of new people have got being really careful of is some of these lens cleaners that come as wipes
do you yeah um i've actually seen them used on the front of the camera and take
the uh anti-reflective coating straight off the front yet it's safe because you use them on a
camera lens yeah you know so you do have to be careful with some of this on the optics and the eyepieces and
the other things of what you're cleaning them with and sometimes gentle is really the way forward
i i know one or two guys who can take off the coatings just with their breath [Laughter]
yeah i think it was good
i i think that's about it for me beautiful beautiful thanks thanks for
sharing that steve yeah thank you very much
thanks gary for improving my images with my mars images
this is what it's all about though isn't it you know it it's just trying other things you
know i i see other things come up i see you know the new kid on the block trying
a few things out and you know i look at what they're doing and i play around with them
and some things it suits and some things it doesn't i i
stopped using reggie stacks for years yeah himself and damien
said you know the wavelet's in there you know i've watched some of the youtubers
and you know get yourself back in there basically with the advice it's old it's
walking on the zimmer frame this program but it still works and it did
in computers the only thing that lets it down is now we're moving with the screen
technology so now we've got like qhd and 4k screens
and that's its problem so in a sense that's where i have gone a little bit more to say pix insight for
the wavelets or using another program that can just render a better image on the screen
because you miles if you stick it on a 4k screen looks like a pin head
and then like you adjust your resolution up and then you you know it's looking all pixelated when in real terms it's
not actually anything like that it's just the way you you are visually seeing it or it's interpreted to you your kit
that you're watching oh by the way that solar image was about 10 minutes
above the local shed horizon cool so i i was
that's the desperate solar imager yeah having seen the the decent prom and the
spot uh thinking a spot a smart smart i'll get out and image it
oh no you won't yeah i've had that so many times over this last
uh you know um sort of minimum when we've got a lack of
details coming along that's a real issue where you know something finally does
come on and then the weather goes now you're not going to see that yeah until when i haven't with this i missed it
when it first came around the limb and i imaged it yesterday as it's entering so
i've not got in close to it in the center that gets really annoying certainly when it's a little bit large
larger than what we've been seeing over the last few months see i've got myself a bresa
127 acro to use with the herschel wedge
yeah i've managed one one session with it because
it's it's actually a bit long and if the weather's a bit iffy
i don't want to take you down because it's not mine yet and the other thing as well is is you know
like now the sun's going the sun's low for us so it's the equivalent you know it's going
to be down in what jupiter and saturn have been for the last two years it's right down on the horizon yeah you know
here it won't clear the top of one of the houses um so i have to move the scopes around you know or play around a
little bit yeah or be out just in the morning but even when you do get there it's not clear
you know it's crumpled up a little bit you know whatever else but yeah i'll be
i would play musical mounts um to clear the garage and she had the
conservation of the wall um that's really interesting that steve if
you can do us a favor and shop uh stop sharing yourselves sorry sorry forgotten
that's all right that's good because what i was going to do is i'd
already had this set up i didn't know what you were going to show but i imaged that last large prominence
yesterday so i thought we'd have a quick run through
how we join those two together because taking the prominence and taking the surface shot
you do it two different exposures on most systems now when it's a really nice state and it's really clear you can do
the two at the same time but they're few and far between so i thought
what we would do on this side i just shrink this screen down a little bit there we go
like that and then i'm just gonna come back to that because i've got
screen share at first there we go okay so i've already loaded this up now
it looks small and that i don't know what it actually looks like to you because i've never seen these screens
but anyway um this is the prominence yesterday um captured for the the uh
um extended site so we've over exposed the surface yeah and if we actually look
at this let me just run that there this runs through the video
now i've already analyzed this once and you can see it running around you can see how much it's moving around
and then this was done on an 85 millimeter telescope so it wasn't a big telescope at all
but what we're going to do is start off now good guides to this a lot of people say how do you get
the whole of the prominence in you know what's the easiest way of not over exposing it too much
because if you overexpose it then the stacking software won't lock onto it and the easiest thing is is this
chromosphere line here if you adjust the exposure so you just get the bottom of the chromosphere line
that means that this part of the image yeah will be exposed about right for what you need to do
so we find a good point we move the top marker along
somewhere around there and then i'm just going to analyze it again so i've got this set surface
improved tracking expanded because otherwise it'll start cropping it in and i might want that
area when i join all of this together and then we look down there i've taken 2 000 frames on it so i'm going to stack a
quarter and set this up a gradient and a noise robust of
around six and then global one there and then we just run that
fairly fast on here um when we got the poor seeing this sort of monitor
the quality graph there certainly when you're at a prominence doesn't really stack up if you're being dead honest
it's looking at the um it's looking at the uh brightness of the
image as it's running through and we're on the prominence so we know we're already overexposed
i use 104 for the alignment points yeah and then i'll place those on the grid
we're already on a good point there so i don't need to adjust this but if the quality graph come back and i was in a
really low area i'd probably move the slider along until i get into one of the
higher points here try and help it as much as possible in the winter um
file options yeah we're going to open it in registax send it straight through to there so you just make sure you've got
registex open yeah and away we go just say it's a stack
fairly fast on this system might take a little bit longer on
slower computers that's it stacked so we go through to
registex and then let's move this around a little bit
first thing is show full image yep so that we get an idea of what's going on in the image and this is what i'm on
about by the pixelation so i don't know whether that's showing up on your screens but i'm using a 4k screen here
so it is showing up to me um set the wavelets to two
double tap on the actual prominence itself so it selects that as your visual reference
and then we're just going to run this along a little way i'm not going to go too far somewhere around 30 to start with
too much so we're going to go back somewhere around there oh wow
and then what we're going to do is just help it a little bit with a histogram at this point it's easier to help the prominence now than it is in photoshop
so just going to drag this along a little bit just till it just brightens it a little touch and that's going to
bring out this top area um click the do all button
yeah and then we're going to save the image yeah and i'm actually gonna
yeah i'm gonna save it there i'm just gonna change the name on this because i might have another one saved in there
so let's save that and then we're just gonna go back to
here and we're going to grab the corresponding surface image and drop
that in so same thing again um control and click you can bring your
your box over to the center and then we're just going to run along
nice and gentle and try and pick one of the nicer frames somewhere around there
analyze it so this is going to give us our two halves and the image
roughly on the histogram bar would be about 70 for the surface that would give me a
nice nice surface with plenty of detail in it hopefully
place your aps on the grid again use all of the same settings that we just used before
the only thing that you need to keep an eye on is your amount of frames yeah if you've taken less frames then
you're going to stack a smaller percentage and then we stack
okay so back to registex again and here you'll see that we are
a little bit worse off for where with the surface it's still usable but it's not going to be as sharp so
what i'm going to do for the surface is i'm going to come down to layer one i'm just going to raise it up a little
bit somewhere around there what you're looking at is not introducing
noise yeah so we're going the initial layer one for this i'm going to click do all
there we go and then we save it exactly the same thing again just going to take a couple of digits off here so i
know which ones and then we'll save it always leave these open never just close
them down if you close them down you might well need them sorry tool boxes getting in the way there we
go and then we're going to go to
here i'm going to open this up and then we're going to send this over
to photoshop you can do this in other software
there we go and then we're just going to expand it up a little bit just so that i can see what's going on
a bit too much come back down there we go and then we need to open up the surface
shot so there we go
okay so exactly the same thing
what we need to do now is crop the stack lines off the edge that's the first thing to do
so i can remove the stack lines there
and then what we need to do is mark underneath the chromosphere line
and that's easier said than done it depends i always find it easier with a mouse if you're using a track pad you
can get all sorts of chokes in this it doesn't overly matter there that i've missed the uh stack lines
we'll grab them back out but you need to do this in short lens if you go too long with this you
end up with this looking all pointy and not smooth you can use the magic wand on
this but depending on the brightness of the image is dependent on how well it grips to the
darker contrasted line there so i generally always do this manual just take a little bit of time with them
other bits are faster in the process in this area we just want to be
a little bit more general we we're only doing this really rough for our
um demonstration here so if i was doing this
on the other computer i would be a lot more precise so what i'm going to do here is just come in underneath that and take
that back out because we would have removed it anyway so we've got it selected i'm going to copy it
and then we're going to go i'll shoot a copy then
um then we're going to go over to our prominence image
i'm going to paste it
we're moving around all over the place today for some reason
depend because as i go up to the top here i
keep clipping the actual controls for skype so let me just go back to that other box
cool so we've pasted it in i'm gonna move it up to the edge here
you can use your arrow keys for this just to put it into a rough position
what you're looking is for even spacing down here yeah so that if i move this right over
where it is now you're going to be close in the center up at the top edge there you're out a little bit further so
you're looking for a nice even space in here
let's start there i'm just going to crop that back out on the edges here
cool now with the surface because it's quite bland and it's moving into winter it's
not the sharpest of images yeah we can sharpen up a little bit more by inverting it it's each person's
choice at this point whether they keep it as the normal surface are inverted
so if we're going to invert it
yeah what we need to do is go to shadows and highlights you're going to shadows and highlights
to lighten up the underneath of the chromosphere line where we took it off of the other image
but you can if this area is a little bit light if you've got different optical issues
you can use the highlights at the bottom there to just darken that backside you'll see it darkening
yeah if i adjust the shadows amount take it back you'll see it's darkening the limb well if we're inverting we need this
fairly even otherwise you're going to get a massive white area come down this side when we join them together
so we've done the shadows and highlights you can always go back on this if there's a bit of a problem and then what
we're going to do is go to invert and then we're going to adjust the contrast a little bit on the levels
whichever way you want to do it just going to bring it back a little bit so it brings out a bit detail
okay and then we're going to go to
okay cool
so what we can do now is start to add some color to it um it's quite straightforward
yeah bring these up to eight bit images put them into grey scale don't flatten
the image so you leave the two separate yeah and then we're going to go into duotone
i've got my colors already preset in here but to add the colors yeah if you just
click on each one now i run this as tritone so you've got black in here for contrast
yeah um if you do duotone yeah you're only going to have two colors and then you'll find a problem with the background so
i'll run tritone and then i use true match colors but the the world's your oyster at this point
you can have it purple pink true hydra and alpha's pink nobody likes pink images
and then we go over to rgb color yeah same again don't flatten the image
so what we're going to do i always start on the prominence first to make sure that's selected
yeah and then i'm going to go to color balance and i'm just gradually going to bring in a little bit of color
at a time
then we're going to do exactly the same on all of these just little bits that you get it the
right shade that you like it's not really at this point um what's perfect because
it's false color in actual fact blue works really good blue and white on this for showing out detail but again a lot
of people don't like it and think it's wrong and it's not wrong it's really what you use
to define the detail that's there that's right it's whatever you want it to be yeah
this is a false color image you know it is um
a mono camera to get the detail you know um over a color camera
so we're just making it artistically not look nice um that's the key thing
so we could go somewhere around here um then what i'm going to do is adjust
contrast and i use legacy mode just because it gives me a deeper color in it
okay and then we're going to go to the prominent do exactly the same thing
now what i want to do what i'm aiming for here is to leave the detail in the prominence
that get the background a little bit blacker so by a couple of
playing around with somewhere around there and add a little bit of brightness to it at this point just to
what you're after is just keeping the tips in here they're very faint yeah because of our weather here
yesterday and then we can go to selective color yeah and go to the blacks
and you can just pull it back a little bit there okay so now we're ready to join it and
everybody's different on this i personally hate it when it's really bright at the edge
of the prominences and the edge of the surface so i actually select the background and move it over
yeah just go to the select tool and then i adjust it right
in to where i want it
somewhere there again go back to your crop tool mark it out
get rid of the lines that they are
and while it's still in its two separate halves just before you start to join them all together i
actually sharpen at this point so um first thing to do on each layer is de-speckle it because you have
stack markings in there or sorry wavelet markings um and then just go into a
unsharp mask you know whatever other tool you want you know it's totally up to you we use that looks quite nice
and then we go exactly the same to the prominence and then we're gonna um
so again these specular and then we're just gonna go unsharp
mask yeah you can see what's going on there yeah it's live preview when you do this
so if you're not sure on something um stamp on the box yeah and it'll move
it around in the area but you'll see if i really adjust this right up now you'll see the main image adjusting if you go
too far you're going to destroy all of the work that you're doing down here so you might think that it looks nice
but it doesn't you know so you've really got to be gentle with the amount that you do these sliders so we were down around 2.1
somewhere around there just a little bit more on it
there we go now we're ready to flatten the image so
you can flatten the image back that's the two halves joined together still a little touch on that so i'm just going
to go back in the history yeah go back to the unsharp mask
yeah i'm just going to do that again it's just a little bit of darkness coming
through there that i didn't see so go to the sharp and then just go in a bit less this time yeah so i'll bring that
down to about 70 somewhere around there and what you can do
is if they still stay in there you can sharpen it manually on the prominence it's not an issue
just using this as a guide anyway so flatten this back
and then get your blur tool yeah so you might want to come in a bit closer on the image before you do that to zoom in
a little bit and what we're going to do
we're going to blur out the join line
again trying to be steady with this and not kill your prominences at the same time
yeah don't touch up those little tips there yeah that's it so you just and you
can turn the harshness down on this i'm just being a little bit rough now i'd be a lot smoother than this
yeah um but we're just using this for demonstration right it looks quite natural though
yeah and then we resize it back yeah so double hit the hand side
and then we can contrast that a little bit more if we want now as a whole image so just go in now go to contrast legacy
and we can use that as a rough example um the actual image that i did
yesterday was just needs to come out of this box in there
and if we open that in photoshop there you go that was the image
yesterday so you know with playing around with it you can see we've got slightly nicer colors
in that image along the the um the connection line and we might be a little
bit dimmer on the top but we've got a lot more structural detail in there
there you go beautiful just different ways of doing it there's
101 ways you know it's just and every image i look at is different
and i process different i attack it differently and you can see the differences there if you don't do the
color right so the main difference is is i'm working on a 4k monitor and when
i process my stuff i'm on a qhd monitor that's color calibrated
yeah so it's an rg what we call an rgb monitor so my colors are a lot nicer
and i can see them exactly as they're going on whereas when you do them on these screens
they are and that goes for all images um your colors are a lot different
so you can add a red in and we're imaging in red yeah because it's hydrogen alpha so the more red you
add in the more detail you lose whereas if you add in another color
and this is why you don't just automatically attach red yeah because you'd think like well we're going to have it nearly red it's orange
you know red um it's somewhere in there but as soon as you attach it you're removing detail because we imaged in a
red filter so you've got to bring that in really gently yeah and just keep an eye on it
and i proved this the other week we had four screens side by side and we put the same image on the four screens
and on three of the screens it looks wrecked the image you know i wouldn't post it
but yet when you actually move on to the color calibrated screen it looked perfect so it was perfect
but it's the screen showing us that it's not right i've got two screens running here one
above the other same brown same kind of different
that is the problem and you know we spend a lot of money on this equipment to do imaging you know us
astrophotographers whatever imaging we do and one of the best things you can do is buy an rgb monitor so it's calibrated
and specified that it shows the rgb colors and it's you know yep same with the spiders and
the the other calibrators but
when you do those it will get them close but if the the monitor is not a
specified monitor in a sense um then the colors are out on it and it's not uniform so
they do cost you a little bit more you know in the uk one of those is probably going to cost you around the 400 pound
mark but when you compare that to the price of all your other equipment is money
that's true that's true the other thing we tend to forget about i think is it
ambient lighting as well yeah i've got a window at the back of the screen
but why it's going on and off behind me as you can see and
it's it does make a difference so that um the calibrator that you held
up normally will manage the screen brightness around what the ambient light is in the room
and a lot of people just because they're comfortable they turn their laptop up or their main
screen up to quite a bright setting so that means when you post your image
to a website or online your image is too dark and when your screen is too dark your
image is going to be too light because you're brightening the image to try and see it on the dark screen
and that's the key to this and when you're capturing it
it looks right on the screen but it isn't and
you've got to watch your histograms not just the screen as we know
histogram is a very important part more i would say more so on planetary
and lunar and solar than deep sky really at the end of the day you set a timing up for your deep sky stuff so it's not
so important but an accurate histogram in software in actual fact in this day and age is very
hard to achieve it seems for some manufacturers so
you know we get their proprietary software come along and the the histogram you might as well just get a
torch you know and shine it along the bottom of your screen because that's how accurate it is
and they don't understand that it's a really really important part and you know i don't just push software or
use software for no reason one of the reasons why i use sharp cap for planetary is the histogram is so
accurate so in the fire capture the histogram is really accurate but if you use some of this other
software and i did this the other way brand new camera in hooked it up put it on the
moon yeah set the histogram in their software about 70 somewhere around there
for a one shot color and all the images were really dull you could just about see them and it sort of
so well you know you you don't really understand the products that you're you're making the
software for and how people are using it but they are making it for a different
thing what the chips are they're a big company yeah the red
cameras you know and they've been supplying them for a long long time and they should be
well aware you know it's your own software that you're designing um
you know and you should be well aware of how important that that is but that that's really as important as having a
usb lead to the camera you know it it's it because
if your images are too dark in capture you're not going to recover them and if they're overexposed you're not going to
recover them so if we've now worked out that all of our screens vary every screen every computer
is different we have to have some um definition
there that says that you are correct no matter what you're seeing it might look a little bit bright or a little bit dark
but i am absolutely correct on that and if you don't get that right that that's you you're wasting your image in
the session and you know it's the last thing you need yeah
um when we're doing our deep sky if you expose it you never recover
you know i mean you can in in pics inside depending on the damage right
yeah there are hdr tools in there that you can use with the mask so m42 you know the trapezium that's the
favorite to overexpose and the center of andromeda yeah it's very easy to overexpose and
most of those you can recover back using it but it's not as easy on you know some of
the planetary stuff to get in there because your image is not big enough you know your mars image
in real terms you know it is very very tiny yeah it's really small i can always remember entering the
competition years ago and the people saying oh you you know we need this in a size exercise by that size and he's
thinking like you know this came off of a 640 by 480 camera
all the upscaling in the world is not going to make this you know a huge image
that you can print up on a big screen and
you know things have changed now you know the but the new cameras that are coming out 640 by 480 roi you'll get
away with printing those out because they're high bitrate cameras yeah and the pixel this morning now
yeah yeah it is i think it's really enjoyable this time at the moment we're seeing all this new
stuff come out you know we've had the rough days you know with the older stuff and the part
what i call the pioneering days with some of the cameras um you know and seeing what's coming out
now is really really nice to you cam
down to office world to take the webcam apart yeah remember doing that with us sticking a
35 mil uh film container on the front so it
fitting yeah the drop that's it yeah i can remember going around tesco's
probably about seven or eight years ago and they were doing an offer on their budget you know basics webcam and had a
webcam on the shelf there for seven pounds and i i just turned some invite who's
there and i said we're gonna have one of those and we're gonna get an image out of it just for the fun of it yeah and we
did so it took it back took the little lens out the inside of this webcam
and the only thing i didn't know at the time was it would only work with their own software yeah so you couldn't get
this to but we still managed to get some shots at the sun and it was just to say look
seven pound seven years ago you know cameras were really expensive seven years ago to what
they are now you can go up by a basic planetary camera for you know around 100 pounds
um and it will give you quite a good image and we know that because all of the images me you know
uh christopher go diamond peach all of those people have used these years ago when they were new you know so we know
they'd work that's right my slot expanded for quite
a lot i'll i'll mute myself now somebody else have a girl
cool so so what's in the um in the sights of the microscope
the sights of the microscope well you know i always put target grades in there and why i do that is because i just
think they're so cute and they're so interesting you know and you can see their little paws and they're eating
away and stuff and they're like me they're vegetarians so you know
but i learned today that there has been a new species of tardigrade found
i don't have them in here but you know they talk about how they can survive the vacuum of space they can survive you
know boiling water you know ice uh being dried out for years
all these things well the newest thing that they can survive at least this one species um and i don't know if i can
pronounce it correctly but it's called um let's see uh
it is called para para macrobiotis genus okay
and this tardigrade can survive many times the lethal dose of uv
[Music] radiation okay over all kinds of other animals so things
that kill viruses and bacteria and and lots of other tardigrades this
particular kind of tardigrade can survive but um but my tardy grates right now and i'm
not sure what kind i actually have are are doing quite well
and you can see that they're very busy eating away in their little garden in
this tiny drop of water in my uh in my microscope so
but i love to watch them you can see you can see the little little eyes over here and uh
you know they are some of the hardiest animals on the planet
that's a pretty good microscope you've got that it's not bad nice it's all right
not bad this is a um and there are other there are other things in here
as well uh that i wish i could identify but uh for me uh
when it's cloudy outside to look through a microscope is just to explore the
universe in another way yeah yeah i can see that
yeah it you know this is just really the sort of things that's overlooked
you know as we just walk around our everyday life you know there's plenty of other life occurring and
it's everything and in its own world if you know i mean it's like
you know it's in its own world and got no interest in us really you know it
does probably doesn't even realize we're here you know right
so uh but uh you know this is uh you can see i
guess uh maybe some food through its body and they're somewhat translucent in this uh
um in this view and uh there's quite a lot of them
let me see if i can pull over to a different area of the slide and this this view i mean this drop of
water is literally about 10 millimeters wide yeah this is uh
it's quite small oh you can see this one he's just tearing away at eating this uh this moss that they're in
you can find tardy grades they're found all over the world and uh there's thousands of species of them
and the new article about the new species of water bears what they're also called
uses a fluorescent shield to survive lethal uv radiation it said that um when they found that
they weren't killing them with uh with a certain dose they upped the dose four
times four hundred percent more and they started to glow
so he uses a fluorescent shield to protect itself
really remarkable really i mean that will be on our new safety equipment
in about 15 years finally work out what the compounds are that's right that's
right yep so how are you getting on with this um
remote telescope i know you've been doing lots of work on this haven't you yeah i'm i'm done working on it at this
point um let's see let me stop sharing my screen
you can see it behind me i i guess i could bring it around
let me do that i tested it last night
just i just wanted to check the flat field adapter on it and it seems to be everything seems to be okay
and uh i put it on wheels so i can drag it in and out
that makes life so much easier doesn't it i think so i started paying attention to
guys like chuck i ube and chandler and
several other people that would just drag their telescope in and out of their driveway you know
the the thing is is you know in the real world it doesn't matter how
heavy a mount is it's not an awkward thing to pick up when it's all together it needs dismantling right you know and
that is to look after your telescope you focus on your you know whatever even your bearings on
the mount itself yeah when you're picking it up um so it just does make sense
you know and if you've got a little bit of a rocky area you just put bigger wheels that are you know
um got air in them you know something like that it just makes you yeah
so the newest thing that i've got on on this this was just added on today
is a uh is a custom made this little box right here this is the
pmc8 but this whole box down here shows my battery draw and it's it's very
accurate and shows how much battery life i actually have left so i have a 12 volt 20 amp
uh life po you know there's a lithium i guess lithium iron battery that's running most of it
and then on the other side over here um which you can't see is a uh
is a 20 volt battery that runs this pc right here and the pc is running
all the imaging software all the uh you know the sky software and everything
on the back of the scope i've got a qhy 163 color camera this is
a field flattener here i have an op tech electric focuser back
here and then uh back up here you can see the
electric focuser itself we this is our attempt at cable management
on it and um and then we've got a little autoguider here so this is a this is an ed80 riding
up on top of uh of a 102 and um you can see the
the whole scope and everything uh this is all riding on a g11 mount
so it's ready pretty much ready for us to take it out you know once again
once they get clear skies because you you know everybody knows that when you
build a new telescope or you get new gear it gets cloudy yeah
that's right so i i did have a clear night last night and i was playing around with it and
uh just checking focus on it um and uh so and i've already gone through a
process of doing the polar alignment a drift alignment marking my points
out on the uh out on the concrete out there so i can just roll it out
turn it on go you know so um the thing is with the polar alignment
being dead honest if you're only doing an hour or two the polar alignment can be more or less
right it doesn't need to be absolutely bang on that's right you know and if you're not going to flip on the meridian
it's again it doesn't need to be so absolutely bang on um
and this is what a lot of people spend so much time doing you know and andreas you you know you
know more about this you i know that you can't see the pole style right
you know um so yeah i use a lot i use drift alignment
all the time to get perfect polar alignment i think uh every night i tried to push
like uh like 30 uh or less
what you call pixels or something in a phd i'll try to be exact as i could to uh to
obtain uh very good uh guiding that's my goal i think
yeah but it it is one of those things that i think people waste a lot of time on
do not mean that they really do they get hung up on some of these things in in this
you know i have my markets on the now outside so i only have to
lift it out my equipment put it on the right spot i take a measurement with the
and then i'm pretty much spot-ons i don't have to
fiddle with the anything so i know where to point everything so i am
so small small changes every time i go out so this is very um convenient to
have everything written down also with my mount you know the most important things on
these is getting them level and that's that that is really more
critical than an absolute perfect polar alignment because that equals
you know an evening with a reasonable run or a really bad run you know and if
the mount's not level it's really hard to find if you're quite new in this you know it's not the first thing you're
going to look at or somebody might have leveled it on the spreader plate
and the spreader plate depending on what way it grips onto the tripod could be unlevel
it's not a fixed component but for a new person that looks like a flat surface
and certainly if it's somewhere that holds eye pieces you know that's a really flat surface so um
you know uh the level goes on there and then you know it's a downhill thing because
if you're doing a style alignment on you know certain models then um you're going to have the issue that none of the
styles are going to come in the field of view and you're starting to adjust things and move things around and
it all starts from those little basic steps right at the beginning of um
you know setting the equipment up and getting into it and that is really really important on
this stuff is to make sure that it's you know level as user andreas she was
saying you use the cushion pads underneath it the vibration pad
they move around with the amount of weight or the temperature so if you get a warm day
yeah they move down a lot further than what they would on a cold day the the plastic and the rubber in them is more
rigid um so you might find that you know you've got it all certainly markers but your actual levels still running out
and bubble levels i can tell you i've i've seen mounts that are five or six
thousand pounds and those bubble levels uh the equivalent of a mount that you know a tripod that's 50 pounds
um they can vary in temperature they can vary in everything else
so it's not a manufacturer thing it's just a design thing of the way a bubble level works
you know and also sometimes you know there's just a little touch too much glue pushed in depending on how
they're mounted you know and it's out and that's it so it is one of the things to you know
use a cheap builders level you know a small little what we call boat level one of those things
um and you know you're saving yourself so much work in that early part of setting everything up
um i'm curious gary had you have taken the route of being very uh
super careful about your polar alignments how much less astrophotography do you think you would
have gotten done um we i actually looked at this with a few other people we we used to do group
meetings and there were a couple of people there who were a little bit more blase over the
alignment you know the pogo logging and they were still getting pretty good
images and you know you were sort of looking at you thinking well yeah in a sense we're only imaging for two or three
hours but maybe they're on two or three targets they're not on that one target for three hours
yeah and that's the thing and i think you know the the difference is is when we've got a peer or a more permanent set up
you do tend to image a lot longer because generally that peer means that you've got somewhere warm to sit
yes and that's the difference that is the big difference i would say over the last five years
is that you know your your mini pc there you know my
eagle the zwo system whatever it is doesn't matter where it is it's allowing
you now to do this from the comfort of your armchair oh yeah from my office or from anywhere
in the world yeah and that is the big difference so if you are set up
with a more permanent and bearing in mind you know even five years ago to start setting this up stuff up in an
observatory was expensive yes just the observatory on its own you know prohibitive for many people um
was prohibitive and that means then um you were out there
with the frost with the cold yeah with the freezing cold feet
you know with the gloves on that that don't work anything yeah so you've got to take them off each time that you
touch the screen or you touch you know the buttons or the mouse pad yeah
i think that's one of the other massive changes in this industry over the last four or five years
um and more so i probably said in the last two years we've seen a massive elevation in that
and that means now in a sense um you're going to image longer
you're more comfortable yeah you're you're going to go for the
two o'clock three o'clock in the morning just because you're not out there where's mid-winter
you know it's dark here at sort of half four or five o'clock properly dog um and it'll be dark through till you
know seven o'clock in the morning something like that we get in the depths of december and january
so you there is no way you're going to stay outside for that long
yeah absolutely no way you're going to give it about two hours at the top
so i think now maybe a little bit more we need to be a little bit more precise on some of these things
but then the advent of poll master sharp cap
all of these other things are making it so easy that it's not such a bind
and they know from andraste's point of view you can't see the pole styles so some of these things are out of
use in a sense but i think it will come along where you know sharp cap or other things actually make
this available and to be honest i've been quite an advocate of pogba lining on the handsets
it works quite well on most of these mounts for a good imaging run so
celestron's had it on them for years i've used their system for years quite straightforward
two star alignment a few calibration styles and then you go into the polar alignment
but that polar alignment will work on any of the bright styles in its chart you just select it
the sky washer systems come along very similar now over the last few years
you're starting to see it on you know multitude amounts and if it doesn't need to see the pole
style that means that it's a bonus because if you've got a place like andreas or you've got a house there or
trees there and you can't see it one of the others camera operated systems this doesn't need it it does it
off the handset i use the star cells to uh
to find my plate solving um this this system can always be used to
use the polar alignment as well so yeah very handy system but yes where i need
to uh to get quick off burn uh alignment to the sky and find my targets
so they're very convenient yeah it's um you know this is really what it's about
is is that changing technology now isn't it that's allowing us to do
all of these different things right the way through um and really at the end of the day all you
need is somebody to actually set it all up for you or it to be in the observatory and you've got a result because you wouldn't have to move out
your arm chair to do most of this stuff now i mean from from my point of view i've got a couple of
observatories here so i've got like the solar observatory we've got the deep sky observatory and
then we might have stuff out on one of the platforms here if we're working on stuff locally but with the permanent setup even though
it's changed all the time depending on what's coming in um i can have the roof open and that
imaging within five minutes you know and that's the big difference
and i think now you know this is what a lot of people are starting to see that the setup of this equipment and the way
the computers hold the positions um of the mount is really accurate now um
you know go back a few years you put a scope in park and if you didn't spend
you know sort of six or seven thousand pounds on the mount there was no way that was waking up and going to the the
um the correct position from the night before it would be you'd have to be out there and restart align it and reset it
and and everything else so now you know these mounts are waking up from
park they know exactly where they were the night before they've all got gps on them and all of these other
gadgets sure but that does mean it's less of a setup time for certain things
of this but there's still the little golden rules there going back to the level and
you know other things that you've still got to follow i have a whole system if something goes wrong my
if i drip a cable and then and this has a home sounds so it can find itself so i
can plug it in in the cdx mount yes uh just uh it's about driver i used to
also use the old x drive before that but this was not accurate enough
because uh i have to i had used it a couple of times and then
the gears fell out and i learned how to hypertune the x-ray i
pulled everything apart and i got very accurate guiding when i put it all
together so i learned how the mount worked so this is a learning experience
well i do stuff i think the only thing that's letting some of the mounts down at the moment is
still the encoders there seems to be a few issues with mounts with encoders on
the general ones without encoders even though they still find their home positions so i at the moment i've got
my opt from one here on test and that it just flies back to home so
if there is an error on something you just tell it to go and find it zero position and the way it goes
um and then off you go again back off to your target so it makes life easy
um the encoder systems i'm still thinking there's a little little bits there that need to be
improved on is um is the easiest way around it um and i do ask myself do you really
need the encoders on there it's more for visual people you know if you or if you knock in the
system it knows where it is and things like that but to be that precise
for imaging is a little bit of a different kind of fish and depending on what way you're
controlling it you can find it puts a few of the planetariums off using the encoders
um certainly on some mates amounts sends a different code through to the planetarium so you look at the planetarium the
planetarium says oh you've got a big drift here well you know it's perfectly aligned and you know that it's been
tracking on the last target but it's actually moved on the planetarium
not on the target and yet when you switch the encoders off you don't get these problems you know so
there are things there that i do look at and sort of say um do we need this or we're getting these
new mounts got one here that's got the guide system already built in and that's got his problems so it's got
a guide camera built into the head of the mill in principle a really really good idea
but the same as a new model car and never buy the first one you know there's um room for improvement
as they say it does work very well but it gets its issues when you get a little bit of high cloud come through or
you know something like that and it is such a tiny um guide scope on it you know so
it's okay but i think you'd be better off with a version in a year's time when all of the
little bits have been ironed out of it and maybe a better camera that sort of thing in it
but the principle of the idea is good because you keep your weight down you know the less equipment you've got
up top there the nicer it is yeah and it's an easier guide it's an
easier setup it's one imaging rig less there's lots of positives
i think from one or two years there's a program called pwci
to all telescopes that are developed from celestron and plane and you can automate everything without
is absolutely brilliant that piece of software i have to say that it's very rare
that a large manufacturer actually comes up with a good piece of software and that's normally because
not only budget constraints but there's normally a lot of people in the food chain of development
and ideas get walked over and bits get moved around and they get taken out so
the software normally needs a little bit of development and it takes a couple of years to get that moving and
but i have to say pwi for celestron is one of the best planetarium pieces of
software i've ever seen coming out for a mountain and they brought that out for their two top end mounts about two three years ago
um and they've only done a few updates to it a few development things and changed the interface a bit
but to give you some idea we did the polar aligning on the handset here
so we did the style alignment did the polar lining shut it down and then did that again
just to make sure that it was absolutely perfect and then we went over to the pwi
software and did the pointing model so we did the alignment through the pwi software and
went to the different styles added in about probably about 10 styles just to build the point in model and
then saved it and you know we used the same pointing model for six months wow we didn't adjust anything
all we did was open the roof switch it on yeah and tell it to go to the next
object and for a mount that was like three and a half thousand pounds for the top end one
there to get that point in accuracy in the what i call sub 4 000 pounds any amount
that can do that sort of thing for under 4 000 pounds is really really good
but then you know you were setting this thing up in seconds you'd have all your stuff on there the
other thing you'd have to check is your focus right you know because of the temperature it's like bang the way
you're imaging and um then they opened it up to run on any of their mounts i have to say i haven't
tried it on the other so i've tried it on the two cgx top end ones
but brilliant piece of software if only other manufacturers would look at that
and just see some of the things that are in it and go we're not going to have all of this in there but
those little niceties that work really really well but that thing of switching it on and
just it knows exactly where it is and what it's doing night after night is a dream
that that is an amateur astronomer's heaven yeah is to get that out of uh mount i
think right right well it's been a uh it's been an
interesting night gary yeah as usual very good
interesting people on tonight interesting people we're down to the last uh few here but as anybody i mean
my tardigrades don't really have a lot to say but uh you know
anybody have any final comments any last things they want to share
the floor's only to everybody
what it was like to to uh to hand guide uh you know at the eyepiece with the
you know and uh those people try it oh they want to do it no
not now no no to all for that now
that is the thing now you you know i think we don't realize how easy it is with any
of these computerized mounts we we know you know about a few bits not working or
maybe need a little bit more development but we really do forget how easy it is
that's the main development tool
what it allows people to do is is to now concentrate on image processing and
and you know and yeah management files and stuff where before
it was this gargantuan effort just to get data you know so
the data collection's relatively easy and uh you can spend all that energy and
effort towards learning the level that you you know it gary so and there's a lot more interesting
targets being imaged by amateurs a lot more interesting very true very
true you know nebula that somebody's imaging like uh
the you know and like wayne's spending all that time on the north american nebula
you know for amateurs to do that it was more or less impossible
you know um many years ago just because of the the quality of the mount you know engineering has
come in a massively long way also too the ability to uh skip through
images that have uh you know a satellite or a plane flying through it or
a cloud a little cloud drifting by you know to to skip through that and still
still image um to be able to share basically an original file
with someone you know without having you know i mean before you have to give up your negative now you can yeah you've
got you're sharing basically original data every time um you know the archivalness of it uh
the ability to do science with it um there's just so many positive aspects of
digital imaging you know it's it really has changed
of even the cheaper optics you know the quality of that for visual
now you you can get a you know a relatively cheap telescope and you can have some stunning views
through it um so it's not just all about the imagery you know that it's it covers all
compartments this progression sort of moving along um and that's
that's really where it i think it's going to progress more you know it's going to be
made easier i mean it there's one of the new telescopes out or sort of over here or
banded around where it's this fully portable thing with the camera in it that you literally put on the floor
um and it sets itself off and it goes off and it's quite expensive you know this is 5
000 pounds somewhere around there and i'm looking at and thinking it's too integrated now it's going to be
outdated within you know it's like a phone or an ipad yeah it's out of date
at the moment you bought it off the shelf because the new model was being designed right so there are points where i think
you can go a little bit too far with it um [Music] and you could get yourself locked in but
from an e's point of view i mean wow you can drop this thing on the floor and it literally
it's like a robot but does that take the fun out of it you know i think that's
where it goes is the the actual chase the fun what we're on about earlier
that sort of yeah yeah well there are these there are telescopes
that are being made that that do all this automatic stuff and literally you can just throw it down and
it can get images uh and that's fascinating
my own take on it now all of us that have grown up as as uh
into this astronomy lifestyle that we have um we know something about the sky
from what we've done you know and uh we know something about how the equipment really works and
we know something about how the imaging process is done
uh you know and if you're just capturing images on your iphone
um it would be fascinating and fun for a while but once you've kind of exhausted
what that can do yeah then then you're you know
you have to move on i really do think that's the thing you know um as david was saying right earlier on
when we asked about how you find comments you know you are memorizing some of that area yeah one
field at a time you know so that's right and david knows this guy like the back of his hand he really does i see it and
that's the experience you know and there are things that you're not um not
learning through you know these handsets i mean even with an average automated
system or semi-automated system a person still has to know the the sort of 10 or 15 brightest stars in the sky
now if you get those 10 or 15 brightest styles and they've been doing that for six months and they turn up at their
first star party those 10 or 15 stars don't exist anymore they are in an oblivion of you know a
million right um and we've actually done that you know
we've seen that we've been in those light floated areas and then we've gone out somewhere and it's not wow
you know it's chalk and cheese what's that um and then that makes the the hunt
even more interesting when you look at these style films
i can hardly get back out in the skies like that so yeah i mean i look at like what jerry does you know
and you maybe go to like that m27 we add up live on one of the lifestyle plays
and you know you you got a couple of hundred thousand styles in the image there and you're thinking well
there's the chance of there being a planet or two or whatever around each star
in that shot you know that's the the you know the reality of where
we're sort of moving now you know with exoplanets and with all the other
discoveries that we're sort of going so it does make me wish i would be around in sort 300 years time just to
see what we'd worked out then it's going to work out yeah how
many of these planets we're actually going to discover and whether we actually work towards
you know meeting up somewhere in the middle yeah you know um in some way or
another yes can i ask you what that scope is behind
the globe that little one this is the this scope here yeah this this is
this is the most uh important telescope in all my collection right here
this is the telescope that my parents gave me when i was 10 years old
this is what got me started in astronomy in
1969 i was nine years old i had been following the apollo program
since i was maybe six you know and uh
i um i begged i begged my parents like crazy to get a telescope you know
every moment i could think of it i was begging them for one and they finally they finally got me this one uh this
this one right here is um uh from uh kmart
okay i don't know if you have kmart over he probably didn't have kmart in the uk but kmart was a um kind of a family
discount department store okay big ones and they were everywhere all right and um
uh this telescope sold for 17.50 in 1970
and that was uh a bit of change for my parents uh that was the most expensive gift i got for
christmas and so i got my first views of the moon through this and
it helped to connect me in a way that sustained me for a long time okay
i didn't pick up astronomy in a serious way until about 1980 so from
10 years past basically but but that was the that was the uh
you know that was the seed that helped me get to where i am now you know and so
and when i look back on all the experiences all the people you know
uh all the inmate beautiful things in the sky the you know
from things like the eclipse total eclipses to the impact watching the impacts on jupiter during the daytime
from mount wilson to um supernovas to you know all kinds of
comets uh it's beautiful man it is it is it's beautiful and and to be out under this
uh and under the sky with people that uh understand uh
astronomy to a degree under the sky of like a milky way that
is just so amazing it's just uh to me it's such a transformative experience and i know
that all of you and probably most of the people watching this show uh who have experienced that know what
i'm talking about they they i know that they that they've had a kind of a
a moment of enlightenment where they they went through a stage of being very humbled
to thinking that they're so tiny and so insignificant you know to [Music]
then realizing that what you can understand in the universe
is really how vast your mind is and so you know that's
that um that exploration that astronomers do whether it's visually or astrophotographically
you know what's going on up here is really the important part you know
uh the reason i asked is because that is the same sort of thing that i started
with at probably exactly the same time and
come on confess did you look for the spacecraft going around the moon with it
oh yeah nobody told me i couldn't see it yeah i tried i tried of course oh good i
mean you didn't know you know you know we didn't know that then we
didn't know that then we didn't know that then we were hoping that we could see the the flag on the moon you know
but uh but it was still amazing to see the craters and the mountain ranges and
all of that unfortunately mine was probably not as good as that because it was a fixed
eyepiece and it was push pull mine's uh mine's push pull oh i said
you've got to focus on it no no no no no no there's no diagonal on this this is
now this h this changes magnification by pulling it okay yeah
uh focus is this oh no no no no no i'm cheating by having this luxury
well did yours have an optical finder on it let me ask you that no
this just has a tube okay just a tube there's no optics in here okay what have we got here
in my hand is the mirror yeah my first
proper telescope wow yeah that's for sure
charles frank saturn telescope
charles frank yeah saturn telescope yeah scottish honor
terrible altas now mine too and
with a 31 times eyepiece
um absolutely tiny tiny
only a kid could use it right um and
the eye relief was terrible yes and like you said a little too earlier
money was a thing but i bought my own and that
cost me four pounds for the telescope i bought it off somebody at school
i think and i pestered for an eyepiece
i upgraded do you want a half inch
oh ramsden eyepiece wow that guy'd me 56 times oh yeah
oh yeah right but i saw a lot with that that started me all those years ago yes
and i will put it back together uh for october in two years time
yeah well i've had it 50 years awesome i will put it back together
i said i was going to do it for 40 years but it never got done but it will get you'll have to come back
on the show when it's all assembled okay
that's cool man that's cool well thank you gentlemen thank you
very much um we want to thank everybody in the audience that's been watching uh it's
been a pleasure um the 18th global star party will be
tuesday night at uh 7 p.m central i imagine that we'll see
certainly gary palmer will be there all of you that were on the show of course are welcome to be there and if you're
watching the show and you would like to be on then just contact me i'll give you my email address here in
the chat it's s at explorescientific.com
i will also announce and i've mentioned it before but i'll announce again that in i think it's november 7th we
will have the asian edition the first one the asian edition of the global star party and that will
be co-hosted with uh christopher go um so that'll be real exciting um but
wherever you you are in the world whether you're doing uh you want to talk about
your astronomy experiences show your images show your gear
you know do solar work while the others are doing work at night
you know by all means uh join us and uh share what you can with
the whole world of uh amateur astronomers and other people that are not quite yet astronomers uh that are
but are interested nevertheless um because it's uh it's a great adventure and it's
something that never stops so you guys have a great night and um
thanks again thanks for uh hosting this gary thank you thank you thanks for um
putting the events on you know and thanks to the guests for coming on and the people watching it's what makes it
enjoyable yeah it was okay yeah take care
good morning
[Music]
wow
you