Global Star Party 23

Transcript:

we're going to broadcast here we're broadcasting now okay all right so I need to share my
screen I didn't realize we're on this early yeah it's 10 to 7 right yeah 7
o'clock I thought we didn't start broadcasting till 7 uh it's almost
7 651 right now right okay but that gives you an idea of what I'm
pushing the limits of this
system wow that's really
something got the the Moon up here on my CA as
well yeah I'm actually Imaging the moon also right
now for
okay great
so those of you uh um who are participating right now you might want
to start sharing uh if you can share with your friends share with your this is um kind of an Outreach effort for Von
BR Astronomical Society and uh so we'd like to see have
a lot of people as many people as possible watch
this I'm going to start sharing it to all of my groups that I belong to
than
right for
have a number of our regulars already watching the program it's great to see everybody
Don it was great to have you on earlier too yeah it's great I really appreciate
this Scott this is just uh this is such a great thing for us I really appreciate what you're doing yeah and it's it's something that
uh uh you know if uh if you guys want to do another one
with us or do one completely on your own I I'm all uh you know uh ready to help
uh give any kind of broadcasting tips or anything like that you know based off
the system I use well and you know if we if we continue to do live streaming we're
going to need uh some kind of software yeah figure out how to get it out there and uh the thing the thing
that concerns me a little bit is we we might want to have more than one camera and if we do we'll have to have somebody sitting there switching we have to have
an Editor to to switch back and forth from camera a camera so that could get complicated fast yeah it depends on how
you I mean you can make it really complex I try to keep it simple you know for
um but if you have a a like a panel or something yeah you'd probably want to
two or three camera setup there's a device uh that that we actually use here
for doing that I don't use it but my uh my videographer does and uh we use him primarily for
for um programs that we're doing for uh some of the large customers that we deal
with you know Costco Sam's Club you know these
guys and those are not really broadcast they're kind of more like real polished
Zoom meetings you
know I focused on the broadcasting because I like to do astronomy outre you
know okay we're about a minute and a half we have uh some introductory videos
here um have a little feature video from Huntsville Alabama Mar Marshall space
flight center which is kind of
cool I'm going to silence my phone there we go
I would encourage everyone to open their chat window up also yeah the one the um
uh the best would be to look at twitch or to to the YouTube because you can see
all the all the chats uh to get to that you'll go to explor scientific.com SL
live and then you'll scroll down and you'll see a twitch link or a YouTube link
L but it's probably more fun to watch it on your own B BR [Music]
[Music] as NASA Centennial challenges looks to
the public industry entrepreneurs small businesses and even garage inventors to
develop revolutionary solutions to some of the biggest challenges that NASA faces since 2010 Marshall space flight
center has been home to Centennial challenges during that time we've been able to accomplish great things together
our astronaut glove challenge sourced novel ways to improve the gloves that astronauts use in space making it easier
for them to perform tasks during space walks my background is in costuming I'm a designer and fabricator and these
challenges allow people like myself to participate in a dialogue about Aerospace that otherwise it would have
no entrance in our lunar lander challenge tasked teams with building and flying a rocket powered vehicle that
simulates the flight of a vehicle on the moon W new record our sample return robot
Centennial challenge asked competitors to develop an autonomous Rover that could seek out and cash samples for
future return missions from other worlds it takes high resolution pictures of the area it analyzes those images and then
it sends the robot after it this is like a a top-notch competition and it's NASA
I mean well it's awesome our 3D printed habitat challenge sourced ideas and Technologies to develop 3D printers that
could one day print habitats on the moon and Mars and also here on Earth it's often counterintuitive that space
research actually improves Earth but it's seen time and time again we are all together developing a technology that
advances the way we think about constructing buildings on Earth nothing
gets done without multiple people coming together our space robotics challenge is
advancing robotic software and autonomous capabilities for space exploration missions on other worlds
sending robots ahead of humans could give us a robotic leg up we look at this robot as being a type of caretaker robot
that can manage human environments while the crew is not there NASA's first inspace competition the cube Quest
challenge tasked the public with developing small satellites capable of orbiting the Moon surviving the longest
in deep space or being able to communicate from beyond our moon back to Earth It's a Wonderful challenge to be
able to go and push the boundaries of what exists excited might be an understatement it's an amazing
opportunity our vascular tissue challenge is tasking the public with creating vascularized human organ tissue
in vitro in order to advance research and benefit medicine on long duration space missions and on Earth it will have
an enormous impact on humankind it can really change the face of Medicine as we
know it NASA's CO2 conversion challenge is all about converting carbon dioxide into sugars as a step to creating
Mission critical Resources by combining these byproducts with on-site materials we could create fuels food construction
materials and even medicine the NASA Centennial challenge really open the door I think it's a really great
illustration of how open NASA is to change and how important these competitions are the NASA Centennial
challenge for me was a life-changing experience together NASA's Marshall space flight center and Centennial challenges have come so
far thank you for all that you've done to help us Thrive over the last
[Music]
decade well hello everybody uh this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific
and this is the Explorer Alliance live presentation of the global Star Party uh
the Von brw Astronomical Society Edition and we have with us Don Martin the
president of the Von BR Astronomical Society and many of the members of that
uh organization uh to bring you a star party uh unlike others that we have done
in the past this is really a um uh a larger Outreach project um uh with uh
Vass as they call it uh and we've got uh we've got AST photographers here we have
um uh David Levy is with us uh as as he is on every Global star party and um uh
I think you're going to really enjoy uh what you see here tonight so uh let's go ahead and uh let me introduce Don Martin
who was on with me a little bit earlier today Don you are okay and Don Don is going to
uh largely Host this program tonight um and uh uh I
um I'm G to pretty much turn this over to you um U but uh I would like to say a
few words about uh you know uh my impressions of Von Bron Astronomical
Society I I I think it's really cool that they are in Huntsville Alabama with
you know so much uh spaceflight hardware and history around them uh all that
innovation that surrounds them and um you know the uh uh the Von BR
Astronomical Society itself has this really rich history that starts in the mid-50s started by high school students
collaborating with wner Von braa himself who helped build uh their facility so I
think that's totally cool uh they'll tell you more about it as we go along um and of course we have U uh David Levy is
with us uh David has been on uh all of our um our Global star parties
this is the 23rd one that we've done uh since we started uh and our audience has
included hundreds of thousands of people around the world uh so it's um um it's
it's an honor to have David with us uh um he is uh he always uh uh makes us um
uh through his words and through his singing and through his poet R uh you
know imparts wisdom and feeling that always sets the uh sets the stage right
you know and for for anyone that uh wants to look up and um explore the sky
so um Don I'm going to turn it over to you I'm going to let you introduce uh
David uh I also do want to mention that we have Carol ore the president of the astronomical league with us tonight um
and uh the astronomical league is the official sponsor of dwar prizes for the global star parties oh beautiful so don
it's all yours man well well thank you um David Levy um I don't know what else
I can say you're a prominent common Hunter here right and You' got some poetry for us
yes well thank you thank you and it's a real pleasure to be here tonight and
um uh you know if one of these times I'm thinking that if someone really does not
want me to be on or just wants to give me a very limited time and or if I do something that someone doesn't like and
they start throwing pots and pans at me and they say okay David you've got one sec you got 15 seconds if that were to
happen the quote I would use would be from Horus who wrote these words in the first century BC with my head exalted I
shall touch the stars and uh but I but so far nobody's throwing PA and pans at me no there are
a couple of items of business that I'd like to take care of first before I go on the zoom these Zoom meetings are not
just a convenience for us they are absolutely essential there are way of communicating with each other right now
during this pandemic and it's so important to be here to have the zoom
working so that we can all be together despite this horrible horrible
pandemic uh a couple of uh of vaccines have been introduced and I hope that
within the next six or seven months they will be uh able to be um generally
available and uh then we might be able to start resuming meeting in person but
until then I'm begging you please please take this pandemic
seriously in the United States so far we have now passed a quarter of a million
people who passed away from that and of those quarter of a million people one of
them is the son of one of the most valued members of our uh of our local
astronomy club and that's as far as I'm able to go with that right now but except to say please take this seriously
wear a mask if you're outside and um maintain the social
distancing do what they tell you because this is not to be taken lightly
okay but when we're going out looking through a telescope at the night sky that's really what we're all about I'd
like to tell you a little story about I'd say 15 years ago Wendy and I were on a cruise we were on a cruise that took
us to the east coast of Africa and the we were seeing an eclipse but the ship
stopped at a number of ports and one of the ports Wendy and I got off and we
decided Well see all they have there is a tent with tables and their selling Stu
stuff and Wendy was looking at things and I was looking at things and then I passed a table where they had couple of
telescopes and I picked up one of the telescopes and I have it right
here you can see it uh that's a little lens wow I mean if you look through it
the lens is a lot of um of um you know the coloring isn't
very well isn't very good and all the stars look like they're multi colored but it's not a bad telescope and I asked
the guy how much he was selling this telescope for he says oh that's an old piece of junk how about $200 but I'm
willing to go down if because I really like to sell this to you and I said okay and I picked it up and I looked at the
uh the I brought the draw tubes out and I looked at the farthest one next to the
eyepiece I mean chromatic aberration is what it has and anyway I'm looking at
this thing and it says Dolan London and I put the telescope down and I backed
away and I whispered to Wendy I said do you know how valuable a Dolan an original Dolan
is and she said why don't you just get it I said okay and I went up to the guy and I said I think I'd like to get this
telescope but would you accept $50 for it and he said yeah sure I just want to get rid of this
piece of junk so I gave him $50 and I took the telescope and I'm getting getting back onto the boat onto the ship
and um there was a famous astronomer Owen
gingerich who was on that same cruise and he met me at the uh entrance to the ship and he said did I get this right
did you just buy a Dolan refractor for $50 I said yep and here it is and this
is what it is when I got it back to TU I lent it to
Dean kig at starizona and a few days after I lended to him his store out of
fire and he told me that the telescope had been destroyed in the fire and I was
really sad about it but uh this happens in life but
until uh last week when I went to pick up something else from starizona he had
totally resurrected this Dolan telescope fixed it cleaned it and is now as good
as it was when it was brand new you so I'm showing you for the first time my
new Dolan refractor and I've already used it it's had a new first light the
other night I looked at Jupiter I always choose Jupiter when I look at the um at
a new telescope at the night sky and uh from the very first time I had a
telescope named Eko and I chose Jupiter as that one whenever I get a new
telescope Jupiter is always the object I looked at that and as I did the other
night so my quote tonight is going to be um since nobody so far has has thrown
any pots or pans at me um it is my honor to quote from
Hamlet before I get to that I just want to tell a little sidebar story
about about uh about Von Brun we wheny I
used to do a uh a radio program where we'd interview people and one of the people we wanted to interview was indeed
uh Tom Geral late Tom gals now may he rest in peace and uh he did not like Von
Brun he was very um upset at the fact that Von Brun
had a bit of a Nazi reputation during the second world war one that he tried
very hard in his later Life to Live down and uh I told him that we were uh going
to talk about that but before we interviewed him we would be playing the song that Tom Lara did about Von Brun
which I said I thought he'd find it funny he said I'm not gonna find it funny you can play it but I'm not gonna find it funny by the time I think all of
you have heard that song but by the time we finished playing the
song you know and uh he was he was laughing as
hard as we were about it and he said that was a very appropriate introduction to talk about this very complicated
person Von Brun but what I remember about Bon Bron is at ay University's physics
department there is a fantastic photograph of the Saturn 5 being towed to its lawnsite with verer Von Brun
following it as that was his major contribution to society was the design
of the Saturn 5 and and uh I just wanted to share that story with you and still nobody's throwing pots and pans at me so
I can get to do my Shakespeare quote and I'm going to end with that it's from Hamlet and I'm going to read it exactly
as Shakespeare wrote it this most excellent canopy the air
look you this Brave or hanging firmament this majestical roof Fred with golden
fire the night sky what a piece of work is a man how Noble in reason how infinite in
faculties in form and moving how Express and admirable in action how like an
angel in apprehension how like a god the beauty of the world the Paragon of
animals and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust and on that note I
give it back to you and thank you for letting me say hello to everyone well that was that was great do you read a
lot of poetry David or do you just uh pick up on a few things here and there I
pick up on a few things here and there and uh I have what's called a magic book
which is here and uh before every talk I usually choose what items of poetry I
will be quoting some are short and some are long so it saves you the trouble of having to actually read all those poems
you just pick out a few quotes oh I I read them though but uh I'm not very
good at writing poetry but I'm a lot better at reading it and I think that these poets that I read always have had
to have some connection to the night sky including William
Shakespeare all right that sounds great um all right well thanks very much for
that let me go ahead and uh what I'm going to do is I guess introduce myself now um I'm Don Martin and I'm the
president of vibas I also edit the newsletter uh called The V staris
and vibas um we have property unlike a lot of clubs we actually have property
in monteo state Park in Huntsville Monty sto state park is well as I said it's a
state park it's about uh 101 15 minutes from uh from downtown Huntsville uh it's
not a super dark spot but it's uh it's free from glare we have a lot of trees
so there's uh we don't see the City Light uh very much uh we've got about I think it's about three acres of land and
uh in addition to just having land we have buildings we have a planetarium it's called The warneron Brown
Planetarium uh I'm going to get into that in just a minute but we've also got a library a pretty good uh pretty
extensive Library uh with stuff that would be appropriate for families but we've also got some reference materials
we have a a 21inch telescope uh that was built by uh I think it was built by some
of the early German rocket scientists uh Jeff delmus is going to speak about that a little later we've got a rollof roof
Observatory with a 16-inch Celestron but it's not just any Celestron it's serial number n it's the ninth ceston that was
ever made it was purchased by Von Brown and uh some other some some of the other
people in at Marshall Space blight Center and I believe they were using it to to research uh locations on the moon
uh for the moon landing um we are members of the astronomical League uh I I follow their
programs a lot I do I use their programs a lot uh we also have a large observing field like I say with three acres in
just a few small buildings we' got a lot of room to set up telescopes uh every Saturday night we
have a planetarium show while now lately we haven't been doing it because uh because of the the shutdown but uh
typically we have a planetarium show every Saturday night at 7:30 five bucks to get in $3 for students it's a 34 foot
Dome so it's a pretty good siiz planetarium it's not uh it's not Griffith but it's a it's a pretty good
size Dome uh Spitz a e Spitz a3e projector uh we upgraded it recently
with an LED light bulb so the stars are really sharp right now um we develop our
own shows we don't purchase content I go to planetariums all over the country and
it's great I'm not complaining about it but they have uh you know Oprah Winfrey or Leonard Nemo doing some kind of a
presentation which is great like I say but uh we develop our own shows we don't
have any purchased content so uh and and typically we have a a theme for
the year like I think right now well I don't know what it actually is because we haven't really met since March but uh
typically we have a theme like for example uh one year we had women in astronomy or women in science or the
solar system the different planets in the solar system and then after each show we have
a a star party on the on the observing field so if we have clear weather every Saturday night we do a show we have uh
we have telescope set up we have our own scope members bring their own Scopes we typically have at least three or four
sometimes we have uh we have a lot sometimes we have you know 10 or 12 out
there and uh we have a newsletter the V staris that's available free of charge
to anyone if you want to uh learn more about it or anything else you can go out to our website vbs.org that's VB as.org
and uh you can also the the the newsletter contains information the usual stuff you'd expect about our
events planetarium shows astronomical information as astronomical League programs every month we feature an
astronomical league program and say oh do you know try this one out and and put a little bit of uh
information in there um we're located in Huntsville Alabama which is the home to
the Marshall space flight center as you saw in the introductory video here the Redstone Arsenal where the Redstone
Rocket was developed for the Mercury Redstone program we also have the University of Alabama at Huntsville and
uh famously we're home to the United States Space and Rocket Center and space
camp so you've probably all heard of space camp we have space camp um we have a uh sort of an in town
or a nearby uh observing site that uh is uh it's about a bordal for site so we go
out there to do our real observing or you know if you want to get somewhere a little bit darker than your backyard
that's the place we go it's about if I'd say about a 20 25 minute drive uh from downtown
Huntsville and then we also have uh every month we have a speakers meeting that's what this is right here this is
our our speakers meeting on the third Friday of the month and we typically get speakers from the University and other
popular speakers or members sometimes members present and then we also have and we're going to talk about this a little later
maybe we have what we call special interest groups which uh function as sort of like smaller smaller Gatherings
a club within a club club uh typically there's anywhere from maybe three or four people to uh 20 25 people have
showed up sometimes and uh then we have a number of projects
here our big project right now is uh our 21 inch telescope upgrade Jeff delmus is
going to talk about that in a little bit um and then we're also in sort of a planning phase to upgrade our facility
so that uh right now we've got a uh around planetarium where we have our
meetings which can be kind of awkward if you've ever tried presenting uh to a round audience you know it's a classic
planetarium where people are sitting in a circle you point to something over here and the people that are right below it can't see it so you end up having to
point all over the place to uh to do that so we're talking about maybe upgrading our facilities and having uh
something more of a lecture hall uh and and up and and other facilities
upgraded the buildings we currently have were literally built by Von Brown uh Ern stool and jurine and their friends they
literally uh got this land and poured the concrete and stacked cinder block bricks up and uh so that's that's
literally how we got our our our facilities so we're talking about upgrading this and hopefully we'll
upgrade the electrical and upgrade all of the facilities uh at the same time uh locally what we do we do a lot
of things locally we routinely do special shows for Scouts uh school school groups Church groups uh
we even had a few wedding proposals believe it or not you know somebody wants to propose Under the Stars so we
light up the stars and they go in and they propose they pay us a a certain fee nominal fee and they go there and they
propose and I think we may have even had some wedding receptions in there I'm not sure if that's correct but uh we've got
other people that that can address that um we work with the Rocket Center pretty
extensively to provide them with uh telescopes for special event uh and we've also they have a beer fest
every I think every Wednesday so uh they they feature a different charity each
week and we've been uh their charity uh one week a year for the past few
years and and then they have beer yeah H Huntsville is a beer town by the way I
don't know if you guys realized this but it was founded by wasn't founded but it was expanded and made into what it is by
the German rocket scientist so you can imagine we've got a lot of beer here uh in within about a 30 minute drive I
think there's 20 20 craft breweries something something like 20 um and then
every October we have astronomy day uh typically uh we advertise it pretty
widely and we typically have about 200 to 300 people come through this year we did it virtually we had nine hours of
online uh presentations uh by Zoom of course uh it
was it was successful we had uh maybe 40 or 50 people cycling in and out at any
given time uh it wasn't two or 300 but uh under the circumstances I think it
was uh it was very successful so our virtual efforts have been very successful and in fact we're
planning to keep streaming things so hopefully people in different parts of
the country or people who who are members here and leave and go to live somewhere else they can still take part
in what we're doing here plus we have a lot of people that are maybe an hour to an hour and a half
away we're the largest astronomy club in the area so there are people in muscle scholes or scotsboro or we've even got
people coming down from the Nashville area and uh it's a bit of a drive you
know it's an hour hour and a half times two to get down and back so by doing the
the streaming we're hoping that we can uh uh hopefully reach out to them and provide more service to them and expand
our membership that way and then finally I think I would be remiss uh if I didn't point out that we are a 501 three
nonprofit and uh donations are tax deductible so feel free to make donations and then finally I just want
to say we're really grateful to Scott uh and the and explore scientific for helping us out with this this is really
a great opportunity for us we're we're truly grateful for this thank you we're
honored and so we gonna move on we're gonna do live Imaging here all
right so I think that you have uh you have done on Deck here right you ready
to go don don Reed yeah I'm ready good deal hello
everyone uh don do you want me to just uh couple of minutes here just to show a quick live view of what we're looking at
can I can I just introduce you a little bit here uh don Reed Don Reed is uh he does primarily
astrophotography and uh he does deep Sky stuff um he is a past president he was a
president a couple years go and uh he's I think you've only been a member about what four or five years something like
that right and uh he has uh he has started out from from nothing with
astrophotography the last four or five years he has come up with he's producing stunning astrophotography it's really
outstanding anyway go ahead Don yeah thank you for those kind words Don let me just put a call out to all
the astronomy clubs that maybe listening tonight I think aomy clubs are just the the best way to get into the Hobby and
like Don said I was one of those guys that knew nothing about astronomy uh kind of got up there and they have a
show every January where it's uh so you got a telescope for Christmas what do you do with it and uh I went up there
and those guys kind of helped me out so um my my thanks to those guys so let me share my screen I'll just show a quick
view of uh what I'm looking at right now and you guys see that
yes so what you're looking at here is a live view of uh the Eastern V
nebula and uh the software program I'm using a sequence generator Pro uh the telescope that I'm using is an explore
scientific ed127 I originally bought that telescope to look at the eclipse a few years ago
and then I got it under the stars one night and was quite impressed with the quality of the optic so it became one of
my two main uh op uh Imaging systems and then uh it's mounted on a Paramount MX
plus m uh I'm using a QSI 660 camera I have um
some metrics here to kind of walk you through what we're looking at here but
um with this uh telescope and Camera combination my field of view is about
one degree by uh little over three4 of a degree I'm shooting narrow band tonight
so what you're looking at right now is the latest download and I believe that
you're looking at the Oxygen Channel right there so my current view I need to
move you guys beautiful yeah so um yeah that's the uh that's the Oxygen Channel
I'm shooting three narrow band filters the QSI camera by the way has an internal filter wheel I love that feature of that camera so we're we're
using aspon filters and I can just cycle back to the previous couple of
images there's the uh sulfur Channel and I believe that's the ha
Channel wow very impressive that yeah what are the
skies like where where you are Don you know I'm probably in a bordal six uh
side I'm I'm outside of Huntsville on the on the outskirts of hunsville a uh area known as Monrovia but we have a lot
of light pollution here but the skies tonight are very clear we've had good good weather all week but the clouds move in
tomorrow yeah this is uh this is stunningly good weather that we're having the last week or so and and and
it coincides with the New Moon instead of the full moon which is also unusual It's usually the the full moon where we
get the clear weather oh and also let me just say uh
Hansville just recently had a uh um a lighting ordinance committee uh in fact
Jeff delmus who will be speaking later was on it uh and uh they're talking about putting in uh I don't know what
the latest is but they were talking at the time about putting in motion sensors and lights that will dim automatically
and shielded lights and all kinds of good stuff so hopefully your bordal six Zone will drop down to bordal five or
four or something like that so don as the as the evening progresses I'm prepared to show a variety of objects
the I'm using a program called sequence generator Pro and at uh 8:00 pm tonight
it's going to cycle from the Eastern Veil over to the Flaming star nebula and
then after that I'm going to zoom over to the horsee head so I'll be doing a variety of targets tonight so as we go
through the evening uh just call me as you as you want to and we'll uh we'll show them what we're looking at back to
you that sounds great okay so uh next up is Jenna you
ready to talk Jenna yes I am
beautiful you're gonna Jen Jenna is our director of Education
correct correct yeah and so Jenna is teach math at the University of Alabama
in Huntsville and you do a lot for Vass and one of the things you do is you
arrange the planetarium shows every Saturday
night and that's corre I mean we haven't done a show in six or eight months but that's
what you that's what you normally would be doing right yes that's
correct and so um she's going to give us a little talk now about the the history
of Vass and how it got started all right
um the Von Brown Astronomical Society was first known as the Rocket City
astronomical Association so you will see that in some of my pictures and then um
after Dr Von Brown moved to the DC area the members of the society decided to
rename the club after him and with his permission so it started because Sammy
puit he was a high school student approached Dr Von Brown because he knew that Dr V Brown was involved in the
space program and interested in astronomy and he said we want to start
an astronomy club what should we do and Dr Bon Brown said well we got to have a
telescope so he arranged a meeting with some of his uh colleagues and put $100
down on the table and pretty much demanded that everybody else anti up so
they collected $800 and that was when the organization began all right um er Dinger was one of
Dr Von Brown's right-hand men uh he's very prominent in the history in this
town and he and Ted puden took a little airplane trip and found a site for where
they were going to build an observatory for their telescope they found it in mon Sant state Park and the state of Alabama
granted a 25e lease for $1 and we keep renewing this lease every five
years the price has never gone up all right so they Dr Bon Brown went
shopping for a telescope he found one in California negotiated to buy it and
here's a picture of them uh putting it into the new Observatory wilham Angela designed and
built the OB Observatory Dome out on Redstone Arsenal here was the build the original
Observatory building that they built by Community donations and volunteers a lot of work in this uh region was done by
community volunteers at that time hey janev you're you're not you're not sharing your screen right now oh I'm so
sorry I thought I was I don't know how to do it okay so there's a green button
at the bottom if you onun your mouse under underneath the video yes I did that you see share screen and if you
click on it you'll see options and you you just find the uh the application
that you want to share you click on that sorry okay now now you are there you go all right I will just flip through the
pictures real quickly I won't say everything all over again all right so
here is um the the first telescope that they bought Dr Von Brown bought and had it shipped from California to Huntsville
here's the picture of the Dome being built out on Redstone Arsenal the first
Observatory building it's just that we still have this building it's concrete blocks still
there um did I do
this there you go all right and then uh the Dome being installed onto the
building and this is on top of a mountain by the way well we call it a mountain it's 1600 feet and in north
Alabama it's a mountain in Colorado no all right so this is Dr Von Brown he is
the fifth man man from the left on the roof he's the man wearing the shorts and
the Argy socks that is Dr V Brown himself and on the right side is Dr
steinger ER steinger okay so here's Dr Bon Brown and
Dr steinger with their telescope inside the Dome wanton
Observatory all right so this is in our archives and I just thought it was very interesting I think y'all might enjoy it
this um was the secretary at the time and he was writing a letter to Sky and Telescope to purchase the subscription
the magazine subscription for the club members and the subscription was
$2.50 per year for members of Astronomical Society so they sent a
check for $127.50 for um
51 telescope uh sky and Telescope subscriptions that's
1957 okay we have had some famous people visit in our Swanson Observatory log
book we have autographs from Gordon Cooper the astronaut and also Alan
Shephard the records show that looked at Jupiter and four moons on that night
that was June 1959 okay so we also have they did some
mirror grinding they um ground a 21 inch mirror for the 20 for the Swanson
Observatory and the grinder was designed and built by Dr Angela this here's a picture of the mirror being ground and
we still have this mirror grinding equipment it was recently restored to
working conditioned by one of our members uh the Swanson Observatory was
featured in a novel a young adult novel by Roger Reed he's an alabamian who does
a discovery programs on the state of Alabama on the public television network
he wrote a book and featured our Observatory okay so our
planetarium is very unique there's not another like it anywhere in the universe
because our planetarium Dome is spare rocket Parts this Dome that you see in
this picture was the Dome we have in our planetarium it was being used to test
for testing purposes for the Saturn 5 rocket wow um
so here's a picture of this Dome being installed so when there were it was a mockup of the forward bulk head of the
fuel fuel tank of the the second stage is sat five rocket so when they didn't need it for the testing anymore Dr Von
Brown noticed it on the scrap pile and said H that would make a great planetarium dump they were very good
scavengers so it got shipped to Huntsville and installed and we still
have it we use it every Saturday night wow all right so here was the after it was
finished in 1966
that's what it originally looked like we've gotten it it's a bit more cluttered now these days like everybody
who's been around for a while you start collecting things um we've had three different projectors that I know of a
Mercury doto for many years and and in 2011 we upgraded to a spits a3p some
people may not think that's an upgrade but for us it was and that's what we use now and here's a picture of the our
facilities uh we don't get snow very often in Alabama so this was a beautiful scene I wanted to share with
you and that is it okay
awesome that was that was really awesome there's a lot of stuff in there I I hadn't seen before so that was uh a
really good good thing to see here so
um next up uh we have uh Jeff Delmas you ready to go Jeff Jeff is our Observatory
director and he's also the director of planetary uh of planning and research so
he's wearing two hats and uh the 21inch telescope that you saw Jenna describing
earlier where the guy was grinding the lens um that's the 21inch telescope
primary and I think they made three of them I'm not quite sure but I think they made several of them and they used the best one uh at least I think I don't
know I've seen some uh interferograms from them but anyway Jeff is uh here
he's going to he's he's in the middle of a big project to uh upgrade the
telescope and bring it into a more modern uh design and make it into more
of a robotic type telescope now so anyway I want to introduce Jeff Delmas H
go ahead Jeff yeah hi can you hear me yeah I can hear you all right um yeah
I'll just uh I'll just kind of fill in where Jenna left off the uh the Swanson
telescope it was constructed completely here in Huntsville uh including the mirror as we
saw the mirror grinding machine and the uh the structure for the
telescope the trust tube was manufactured by a local Engineering Company brown engineering which is now
telon brown and um about 20 years ago we under
undertook a fairly significant project to motorize it it originally had uh
basically a a clock drive so it was it had on the ra axis it had a drive system
but it had on the deck it just had a tangent arm and you could do minor
modifications with it and about 20 years ago we did a significant upgrade where
we uh completely motorized that uh using AC Servo
Motors and a control system um and got it
computerized through a fairly complex gearing system I'll show you a picture in in a moment um but it's it's had it's
it's had some problems and I will go ahead and share the screen if I can
let's see there you go
yeah okay so uh there's a a an image a picture of the of the 21 in its current
configuration and we use that on Saturday evenings typically um with for public viewing and
it it's only used as a camera platform when when it was originally put in place it was a CAG grain and it was it had a
an F16 uh Crain system 21in F-16 it was
basically a 9 meter focal length and through that you could well you could
see detail on the moon and you could see U planets really well but it was not very good for deep Sky objects so we
converted it the primary was um parabolic and we converted it at the
same time we did all the mechanical conversions we converted the optical train to be Newtonian uh and its F4 in
that configuration so we've got much wider uh field of view and here you see we've got
a a little malen cam ds10 c on it um which is a a color
camera uh and that works out really well for our our public viewing because
people want to see things right away and you know there's we don't want to spend a lot of time taking shots in
different you know black and white our Pro previous camera was an sbig 8300 and
um monochrome and it would take quite a while to form a color image so with this
we can basically provide immediate feedback uh for the
public but we do do operate this only as a camera platform because in the Newtonian configuration you have to have
a ladder to get up to see whatever it is uh you would want to see and having
strangers in the in a dark dome climbing ladders uh that's just not
a a good that's not a good thing to have so we do operate this as a camera
system exclusively Jerry Hubble I just had a quick question have you tried the
other types of uh you know uh EA type cameras a video camera system that uh
people use for doing Outreach and live views and that have integration built into the video camera well this this
camera does it is a video camera it's a seos uh camera and we can do uh we can
do I mean it is a video camera and it's got built-in integration yeah the system I'm kind of
talking about are the analog video systems that are out for EAA they're called electronically assisted astronomy
cameras where they're they're more of like an eyepiece a camera well uh prior to the
prior to this I mentioned the sbig camera but we also used Malin cam I mean
um Stella cams uh analog but we are removing we're basically you said this
was a Mal cam right this is a malam this is a okay that's what I was that's what I'm thinking about so that's correct
yeah that's okay I understand but we've uh we're converting uh we've just
recently removed all of the analog cables on this thing so this cable mess
up here uh it's partially because of the analog we actually
operate uh let's see four cameras when we operate the scope so we operate our
main camera here and this is our finder camera so it's a super wide angle uh
maybe it's about 8° and then we have a little a little
camera at the very top that is focused on the Dome because we have to manually
adjust the Dome and we want to manually adjust the Dome because it is so creaky
that uh if it were if it were automated to move with the
telescope uh it could really mess up the images and then finally we uh we have a
camera camera right on the floor down here which uh looks at the telescope
system and we operate when we operate the telescope we're downstairs in the
control room so no one is upstairs the lights are completely off it's it's
totally dark and usually on public nights I I open the I you know fix a an image on on our
large screen and then open it up for a tour and have people come up and take a look
at it so Jeff um this is the Dome they made this Dome correct Von Brown and
those guys they made this is yeah that was the Dome Jenna showed in hers so it's a it was being uh lifted up with a
crane and set down in place this is that Dome that's right and the
aperture uh the aperture of the Dome it was modernized in also about 20 years
ago and it is actually some old Sky lab I'm sorry space
lab um gsse ground support equipment uh
material so it was it it's salvaged as
well the Dome has been described to me so the Dome is actually plywood and wood
reinforced with metal cladding on the outside and one of the older members
described it to me as a uh a a dome made of nails held together by a matrix of
wood yeah because they just nailed this
nailed the heck out of that thing okay so uh just on to what we're doing
now so now we're converting this uh this is really the biggest upgrade that we've
made even bigger than the one 20 years ago certainly in cost we are we are um
converting to a direct drive system and absolute encoders so right now we have
an open loop system and we have to you know we have to site it
we we actually have a Target on the wall we have to start from a home position
and go to a star and synchronize with the star before it really knows where
we're pointing and our our pointing accuracy is not real good and our tracking
accuracy um you can't really see the gearing but we've got some periodic
error and we've got some even some strange error in the tracking
so rather than kind of fix all that in software we wanted to go uh complete
direct drive and absolute encoders and I want to show you now uh oh well we just
recently got some parts the reason I've got this document we just recently got a nice donation from DRM LLC they made
these parts for us that you see here these are um anodized aluminum parts
parts and um there's kind of a picture of some of them these are motor um
frameless motor support components and then we have um some other components
with them and we also got uh the original manufacturer telon Brown they agreed to
do some of the parts to and I'm going to stop sharing right now and kind of show
you so one of the one of the parts they made for us is the stainless steel
encoder ring support system nice yeah
this thing weighs about seven and a half pounds um but we've
got 200 mm renesha encoders for that we're going to be using and here
is this is the stat and I I've got what I've got here is
basically a jig um for inserting the rotor into the stat so right now this
the rotor is not installed and the the thing at the top there is just a
cardboard mockup just so we can practice because
inserting these um these are extremely powerful motor I mean mag magnetic
motors and uh if we mess up we could we could crack the crack the
magnet or do something even worse um so we've got to be really careful the
motors weigh about 30 I think they were 34 pounds a
piece so they are very
Stout and here's another component that this is actually going to be the rotor
uh support component so both DRM and telon brown
did really fine work on this um I did all of the design work did
the cad drawings and everything and supplied them with CAD models that they put on their CNC
machines um and everything seems to be fitting real well so far anyway and we
expect to start the conversion the actual um we're going to disassemble the
existing telescope later this month probably right after Thanksgiving and expect to be
finished in January and we've uh We've also done
some other work prior to this um you also had the mirror the primary and the secondary reined correct yes that's
that's right um so the yeah the mirrors got recoded and when they did uh the
inspection that was done on them showed really no no flaws no no detectable
flaws that was really good I said earlier that there were three mirrors is that does that make any sense I thought
I saw no I believe there were I believe there were
um I'm not sure if there were two mirror I I know there are two mirrors available
and one of the mirrors I believe was manufactured for NASA and then NASA
discarded it uhhuh yeah I saw interferograms from three mirrors that uh I think West yeah
we also have the third mirror that you're talking about is a flat it's a a
21 in flat extremely valuable mirror frankly it was used for testing at Nasa
and then I'm not sure exactly how vibas acquired it um I really need to look in
the history for that but I believe it was donated along with the parabolic
mirror it was probably stolen property like everything else we've
got um but yeah uh a 21inch flat mirror those are hard to make yeah they
are and do you know how accurate it is I don't know how accurate I think West Swift would know you know
um yeah and and uh they're very good for testing telescope mirrors they're
exactly that's what it was used for exactly right they're they're awesome for doing that sort of thing all right
well that sounds great well we're kind of ahead of schedule here so I'm hoping um we can slow down I don't know if that
makes any sense anyway uh so Michaela Jennings uh you know every year in
September uh we do what we call a starbq and the starbq is just uh people come up
on a Saturday afternoon before or I think it's a Friday typically a Friday Friday or Saturday I think it's a
Saturday and people come up and they we have hot dogs and hamburgers and a barbecue and then uh for the show that
night we typically have uh students do presentations and we see what some of the local students are doing for their
science projects and things like that uh and that's how we met Michaela Michaela was uh involved in the science fair
program and so were her two brothers and so we uh we invited them to speak to us
tonight and I think we're going to start with Michaela is that right yes great go
ahead
Michaela can everybody see my screen yep yes looks good looks good
good okay my name is Michaela and my project is using transit photometry to
identify habital exop plants using the double dip method Transit photometry is when
astronomers they look at a star and see if there's a dipen light coming from the Star and if there continues to be a dip
in the light coming from the Star astronomers look for a next planet as the cause a super Earth is an earthlike
Planet that's close to Neptune's mass and H a hot Jupiter is a Jupiter Planet
that's close to its star my research question was will a
super Earth following the orbit of hot Jupiter cast a double dip Shadow when using the transit
photometry my rationale is one of the the main questions in astronomy is are
we alone it is much it super Earths are
much more habitable than hot Jupiters but hot Jupiters are way easier to see
with Transit photometry so I wanted to see if there was a super Earth and a hot
Jupiter going around the same star would it you be able to see a double
dip my hypothesis was that there will be a double dip using the transit
photometry method what I did was I got a 4 foot box
and I painted the inside back to simulate space I got an LED light bulb that could
change color and brightness and above it I made a motor system with a string
attached to it and on the end of the string was a foone ball to simulate the hot Jupiter on the other end I had a
pulley system with a small bead attached to it to represent the super Earth I
also had an arino light meter to see if I could measure the double dip using the
light meter I ran the hot Jupiter fast and slow around the star to see if that had
any effect on it I put the my findings in the Excel
spreadsheet and then I looked at the data to see if I could see any
dips so this is my results for the white star on the left it was the hot duper
when it was moving slow the small dips are the super Earth and the large dips
are the hot Jupiter on the other side is when the hot Jupiter was moving fast and the
larger dips appear more
often my results were when the hot Jupiter was moving slower it was easier
to detect the super Earth for the white star when that Jupiter was moving fast
it went around the star in 24 seconds when hot Jupiter was moving slow it went
around the star at 12 29 seconds my conclusion is that you can
see a double dip if a hot Jupiter and a super Earth for oring a star and when the hot Jupiter is moving slower the
super Earth was able to block more light from the Star but when the hot jupit was
moving faster it blocked more light from the Star so the super Earth would appear
dimmer is there any questions
well let's look in the chat here and see if there's any questions that we have here uh people are uh complimenting you
saying impressive uh presentation
um but I don't think any questions just yet but we may ask later I had one uh
since I you would I do exoplanet work with our Observatory so I'm I'm very
interested in what you're what your experiment was um so what what resource
materials did you use to uh to create your hypothesis and to create your
experiment well um I've been doing projects to see the easiest ways to
detect exoplanets using Transit photometry so I wanted to see um since
super Earths were more habitable than hot Jupiters and I've been using hot jup
for my experiments would there be a way an easier way to detect super
Earths yes that's that's interesting uh I be do you have a
uh Have you shared your PowerPoint presentation yet have you put it online
anywhere no that's something that the the club
might want to share with the with on your website perhaps I'd be interested
in seeing the details of your uh of your uh experiment how you constructed it and
things like that if you have got have you got that [Music]
material yes I love to share it so so but you you've done the uh presentation
several times though right yes um were you looking for uh uh you
said super Earths and hot Jupiters were you looking for super Earths specifically with a hot Jupiter was
there a reason why you wouldn't just look for super Earths is it harder to see if it's just a super Earth is that
your point yeah it's really hard to detect a super Earth with trans photometry but since hot Jupiters are so
big and they're Clos to their Stars it's way easier to see hot Jupiter's it's
yeah I understand that but why why is a super Earth easier to see with a with a
hot Jupiter nearby
because you'd be looking for hot Jupiter's when You' be using trans photometry so if uh super Earth and hot
Jupiter oring a star you would be able to detect the super Earth so in other words you would be looking at the star
because of the super the hot Jupiter and if there was it so you're only looking at stars that have got hot Jupiters and
the question is would you see would you be would it be possible to detect the super Earth at the same time yeah it' be
po see if there would be a double dip right wow that's really
good um okay that's really that's
really you are muted um I'm
sorry that's very impressive Michaela um did anybody else have any questions or anything like that I think my chat might
be uh delayed for some reason but anyway I'm looking at the chats now uh people
are you know commenting I should have paid more attention in [Laughter]
school you know yeah it's very very impressive Michaela thank you it's really inspiring to see it's inspiring
to see young people get into this modern Space Age and all the all the technology
and all the uh all the work that's going on that's really exciting for us as older folks you know we just dreamt
about this stuff now it's actually reality so well when I was when I was her age I was uh using Heath kits and
Shing resistors together now you know that was the building block was a resistor and a transistor and a
capacitor now the building block is an Arduino yeah right a little bit
different now you got a whole computer the size of a credit card and that's what you're starting with so it's uh
that's it's another world but anyway okay thank you very much Michaela and now we've got um thank you thank you and
Michaela I I I want to add too that uh you should consider apply for the
national young astronomers Award with the astronomical league so I think that
perhaps you might need a sponsor for that um uh Carol ore from the
astronomical League can speak to that later okay I look into that okay all
right so uh so now we're going to uh speak with Mr Jordan Jennings is he
there is he uh there we go hey Jordan hi okay so uh I uh I don't really have
anything to say except uh take it away we just want to see what You' got here
okay okay hi my name is Jordan
can everybody see this yes that's working great hi my name is Jordan and
my project is a comparison study of different spaces of bamboo to Common woods used in
building so the purpose of this experiment is to investigate the different strength properties between
different spaces of bamboo to Common woods and building my research question is how
well does bamboo hold up in comparison to to woods and
building the materials I'm using this experiment is veradis yellow Grove
prominin and machino bamboos the woods I'm using are Pine Oak
and popler so the reason I'm conducting this experiment is because humans are
destroying large areas of forest and this is having a big impact in global
warming so my hypothesis is that bamboo is just as strong or stronger than Oak
Pine and Popa woods so the first step I did was I got
pulley metal cable and recycled wood and I built a tensil strength machine out of
that and so this is what it looked like I had a platform which I stacked weights on and
I had two pillars which I cut in the hole which I cut a hole in the center of it and I put the materials inside of
that and then I wrapped a metal cable around it that was hooked up to the platform and the platform was holding
401 pounds oh wow so it's a lot yeah so my
conclusion for this experiment is that yellow Grove did the best out of all of
them followed by veradis prominence macino Oak popper and
Pine so this shows that all the bamboos were stronger in this experiment and
they took less damage during the experiment although none of them
although none of the materials actually broke but they all held 401
pounds so my conclusion is that bamboo could be used as a replacement material
for woods and framing materials for
houses wow that's really something and in fact bamboo grows like super fast right like I think I've heard like two
feet a day or some crazy number like that yeah for bamboo to be fully grown it takes just three to five years
whereas most trees it takes 25 to 30 years for them to be fully grown yeah
shows is more renewable than Woods yeah that's that's really amazing
that is really great this is the second time I've seen this maybe the third time I've seen you do this talk it's always very uh very good all right excellent
yeah very good thank you Jordan and then uh you've got Javon there somewhere too
right yes hello beautiful hey Javon oh there he is down there
hello everybody my presentation will be on the use of virtual machines to
prevent cyber attacks so the agenda for the presentation will go as follows I'll
give a short introduction then I'll go into what cyber attacks are then I'll
give an example of a fishing email and see if you guys can spot it and then we'll go into how virtual machines can
help with cyber attacks and then a conclusion so a little bit about myself
my name is Javon Jennings I'm in the 10th grade and I've been interested in science technology engineering and math
for a long time outside of that I also enjoy robotics bowling and many types of
design such as graphic or computer Aid
design so what are cyber attacks a Cyber attack is an assault launched by cyber
criminals using one or more computers against a single or multiple computer on
a network or networks a Cyber attack can maliciously disable computers steal data
or use a breach computer as a launch point for other attacks security magazine stated that an
estimated 2 million cyber attacks in the year 2018 resulted in more than
445 billion in losses worldwide as local government struggle to cope with
ransomware and other malicious incidents so now can you
spot what's wrong with the email when I flip the page I'll give you 30 seconds
to review the email listed below and to see if you can spot what's wrong with
it and start
and [Music] time so now some of you may have noticed this this but some of you might not in
the email that is being sent accounts has three C's and also in the attachment
it's spelled new not news which if you were getting an email from a large corporation you wouldn't tend to see
spelling mistakes in places like these so now what are virtual machines
and how can they help with cyber attacks in Computing a virtual machine
is is an emulation of a computer system virtual machines are based on computer
architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer their implementations may
involve specialized Hardware software or combination of the two so in simple a
virtual machine is a computer inside of a computer so now how can they help with
cyber attacks a virtual machine operates completely separate from the host or
main machine so if a virtual machine was attacked by say
ransomware the host machine would remain unharmed during the attack virtual
machines can be used on iOS windows or Linux and some can be downloaded with
little outside resources needed to run it using a virtual machine to check one's email to keep them safe from many
types of cyber attacks so in concl conclusion cyber
attacks come in many forms but email is the primary way they're used it's estimated that about 90% of cyber
attacks come through email and fishing emails like the one before can be hard
to spot and may look almost exactly like normal ones now keep in mind when you
guys were trying to spot the email one you knew there was something wrong with it and to you were taking the time to do
it most people wouldn't have questioned that email and would have just gone to
opening the file which could have contained ransomware or any other harmful uh
virus virtual machines can be used to contain cyber attacks and keep the host
machine safe and this concludes my
presentation W okay thank you Javon I'm I'm actually writing that down for our
own company Okay so I will have our it people look at that
yes I know a lot of companies had started to look into using virtual machines in that way
right all right that's beautiful well um thank you very much you know I haven't seen that talk before I've seen uh I've
seen uh Michaela's and Jordan's talk but I don't think I've seen that one but you have presented to us before haven't you
yes I presented a different project this this is that's what I thought it was a different topic
um okay so I guess uh we're moving on to the next topic uh Carol I Carol I'm
going to pronounce your name incorrectly is it pronounced ore very good you got it the first time that's wonderful like
I've never pronounced it that way until I heard Scott pronounce it that way I've always thought it was iorg or something
like that because I get your literature and so it's like iorg I don't know I don't know as long as you're close we
don't worry too much all right that's good everybody
so glad to see everyone I'm really thrilled to be on here with the bbas uh
they've been a longtime member of the astronomical league and we really appreciate all the positive things
you're doing uh from uh showcasing the youth to uh doing all
the observing award programs that the league has many of those and it's I wish we could clone some of that energy you
all are showing and distributing around the country uh one thing uh as Scott was saying uh
we have the league does the national young astronomer program and Scott and explore scientific uh so graciously have
sponsored that award for many years as much appreciated Scott
and it's been a real opportunity to get a lot of young people involved in in uh
astronomy and we really appreciate that uh I would just say just a few things about
that that award we have a deadline of March the 31st each year for that and
you can find out more information by looking at our website astr
league.org and it tells you the information there and we would encourage
you uh to enter that program it's uh we get some very good entries we got a lot
of bright kids across this country and so when we hear that education is going going down the tubes no it's not we've
got a lot of good things coming up in the pipeline okay and I really appreciate
all the presentations tonight that's uh that's really a lot of things I certainly didn't know about your your
club and uh VBS so thank you so why don't we go ahead and uh give away some
door prizes now do you Carol do you have the U answers for the U last last um yes
I do have do those first and let me let me explain that um uh I have put in chat
the email address which is explore Alliance explor scientific.com this
email is where you will send your answers when Carol gets uh to the
questions for this uh Global star party uh and you will send in your your
answers there uh what will happen is is that because um are different channels
that we're simoc casting to some some Show the simoc cast a little a few seconds earlier than the other one so
the deal is is that you'll put in your uh you'll answer your questions all of
the correct answers will uh the emails that have correct answers will be put
into a u u basically a pile and we will let random then pick a uh a winner from
those who have answered Carol's questions correctly and so that that keeps that makes it a little bit more
even and um anyways good
luck and before we start we'd like to show this screen because some of the
prizes you you get may have uh bpce or something similar so we want to make
sure that everyone is aware that if you look at the sun without the proper
filtering there could be a problem so we want to make sure that everyone aderes to uh to that situation are you uh
sharing your screen right now I should be let's see here there's a little green button on
the bottom there it says share screen yeah follow was there SC let's
see
okay there we go okay excellent so that's the proper uh warnings about
uh making sure you don't look at the sun look at the sun directly when using filters and that sort of thing so now
the moment you've all been waiting for is the answers from last time the first
question on H last Tuesday's uh answers
was observers on Earth enjoy meteor shars such as the Leonid meteor Shar
which peaked early this morning to an hyp HP hypothetical Observer on the moon
could Leonid meteors be seen streaking across the Blackness of the lunar
sky and the answer is no no lunar atmosphere exists to cause the meteor
roids to burn up and the winter was Norm Hughes and if you were on that broadcast
you also Al saw another one uh question number two was when examining double
Stars through a telescope The Observer typically notes the magnitudes of the
primary and secondary Stars their angular separation and another value
which one is it of the three here listed the positive angle their altitude above the horizon or their combined Cassini
index the answer is the position angle
all
right number three one of the benefits of astronomical League membership is
being able to submit an entry into the astronomical League horkheimer youth
journalism of wor competition and these are for ages 8 through 14 years of age
and it's a 300 to 500 work essay doesn't have to be specifically on a but some
area of Science and the deadline is March 31st 2021 what is the competition's first
place prize and C is the correct one 1,000 big
dollars so I encourage you to enter that one the winner for this one was Larry
bridge and now we go to tonight's questions question number
one in what year or years was the lenid meteor Shar first
discovered that's the first part then the second part is who made the
discovery got that okay Y and remember to don't answer these in chat answer
these to this email address address ear yeah all right number two what are the
two brightest globular clusters in the
sky thinkk that through real real carefully now before you send the answer and
finally question three what are trojan
asteroids another good one so get your thinking caps on and submit those to the
address that Scott uh posted just a few minutes ago and thank you so much for
your support and uh uh now back to our host well thank you so much for that and
you know what's most impressive is those are not multiple choice questions you have to they essay questions you've got
to actually know the stuff and be able to throw right that's uh that's beautiful okay
um so uh I guess are we uh are we going to try and fill it out for another 20
minutes or we going to take a 10-minute break Scott what what do we do here we're kind of wait um you could uh we
could uh call upon one of the astrophotographers to give us a quick peek on one of the uh you know what uh
uh they're being what's being image right now you got molly Wakeling uh with us uh Jerry Hubble and of course Don
yep I've got Messier to up here oh want to show that good
deal um yeah okay so I'm mess2 is a globular cluster in
Aquarius um I've got it here shown on my uh whoops on my Takahashi refractor and
my zwo ASI 294 MC Pro color camera on my
Celestron AVX Mount out in the backyard and I'm using sharp cap to do the live
stacking so that um you can actually get a decent amount of signal to noise here
uh Without Really any like postprocessing so this is uh every every 15 seconds a new image is coming in and
it's being averaged with the other images to uh to show the image that's here so this is a live view of
messi2 it's about uh 37,500 light years away globular
clusters live in the Halo of the Galaxy so usually like above and below the
plane so they're a lot further away than a lot of the other astronomical objects objects that we look at that are within
the Galaxy such as nebula and planetary nebula and it's about 175 Lighty years
in diameter and contains 150,000 Stars wow and it's 13 billion years old uh as
the estimated age globular clusters are some of the oldest objects in the universe and there's some thought they
may actually predate Galaxy formation um so there's still a lot that we're learning about
them but yeah just very very dense bundles of of stars that if if we if our
planet was inside of a globul cluster our night sky would be full of of stars like Sirus and capella but all over and
not just a couple um they're very very Dense Star environments in fact we wouldn't ever
really have nighttime as I as I understand is that is that correct we wouldn't have what we normally um yeah
the sky would certainly be pretty bright with stars I'm not sure I guess it would depend on what part of the globular cluster you were in um a different sorry
I say if you were in the middle of it it would be different than if you were that's true yeah so it'd be quite
something else you might you'd probably have a hard time seeing uh other galaxies and nebula and things like that
because there's so many stars in the foreground and and the stars in globular clusters are typically made of hydrogen
and helium and they don't have a lot of the heavier elements right yeah because the stars are a lot older so um uh
they're um in the population of stars that are primarily hydrogen and helium
and don't have a lot of the what astronomers call Metals right astronomers consider Metals anything heavier than helium really which is
really I mean like they consider uh things that are not metals to be Metals is just uh one funny Quirk of the
nomenclature are there are planetary nebula in globular clusters in fact I'm
actually working the astronomical leagues planetary nebula program right now and one of the things you have to
look at is these P OB objects in the uh in globular clusters it's just it's just
insane there's some tiny little dot you got to Star Hop through a globular cluster to find planetary nebules wow
that's really [Laughter] cool but that's the way it is um okay
does anybody else have anything uh Jerry do you have anything yeah I've actually got uh last
time I was looking at Mars because of the sky I had at the time but I'm actually on Mars right now so I can
bring that up real quick uh take me a second
um oh do you see that am I on the wrong screen oh yeah I'm on the you see the
observatory okay good uh so that's really zoomed up hard so I just to
preface this image it this is with the Deep Sky setup on the telescope it's not
uh set up for for planetary Imaging at all I I like to push the uh limits of the equipment to see what I can do with
the data and this is just an example of what the what Mars looks like right now
it's you can see a slight gibbous phase right here along the Terminator along
the right Edge and you can see the dark markings here the seeing is not the best
right now you can see it's wobbling around although it's been worth this could look like a yell an orange mush
just a blob of Orange but at least we can see some markings you can't really see the uh the polar cap on it right now
so and it's gotten smaller than what it's been the last you know when after its peak in
October I think October 13th was its uh closest approach was
um yeah so right but so I was talking earlier about my sky so
let me show you my local Horizon looks like in the uh I'm going to zoom
out and you'll start to see this brown stuff so that's what my sky looks
like pretty bad Oh you mean as far as the Horizon that's your horizon that's the tree line this is all trees right
around the observatory yeah mine's pretty similar yeah so that's what you get uh
that's what we get here but we can do a lot of work because we have a good view of the ecliptic and there's a lot of
interesting there's always something that's interesting that's up and I'm interested in planetary lunar and uh
also so and I'll share some of that work later on um it's great well that's great that's
fantastic and uh how about Don Reed what do you got yeah uh don I probably should
have showed this earlier so let me Begin by sharing my screen here and showing uh
a of my setup I'm kind of envious if some of you guys out there in in observatories this is the life of a of a
backyard astronomer if I can get my screen here to go into a presentation can you see my
screen now yeah looks like you're near a large body of water though that keeps the seeing conditions perfect right
that's and my grandkids love that so I took this picture Earl earlier
today uh this is my Imaging system just a a couple of things for those of you that may be trying to put together an
Imaging system and and uh you're you're a backyard astronomer of course I mentioned earlier this is the explore
scientific ed127 Optical tube and you see my Imaging camera here is a QSI 660 behind
it and right up here you'll see a u a load star X2 guider I like this setup because there's no um intervening filter
wheel that adds another you know cable uh for both data and power so like that
also you'll see a little red component here that's riding on top of the telescope that's a single board computer
it's a primal Luchi lab Eagle 3 controller that ties everything together and then you see down here I have a
little AC to DC converter and of course there's one single wire that runs over to uh the workstation here and that then
communicates with the laptop of my house uh via remote desktop so I don't have to sit out there and be tempted to jump in
the pool a little bit closer Viewpoint we're talking about explore
scientific t this is their uh7 focal reducer I find that it gives me a flat
field across the entire field of view so I like that cable management is a problem that we all have so you see that
end up in the corner here in the lefthand corner you see just the edge of a of a rig Runner that's how I distribute power on the telescope and
the last thing I want to kind of shout out before I take you to my live view I want to thank a couple of folks that
really help helped me get started in astronomy and just put another call out for astronomy clubs they are a great way
to get started if you're watching tonight or listening and and you want to get started I would encourage you very
strongly to go to your local astronomy club uh guys like Don Martin Who's online with us tonight but also guy by
the name of Jared Cassidy Tom Burleson uh we have a local astronomer Doug herek and of course Frank shank all those guys
helped me and the other thing I would tell you is I went to the uh kit Peak National Observatory uh intermediate
Astros astrophotography course it's taught by a guy by name of Casey good I think he's online tonight with us
Cas Casey is a wonderful instructor and hopefully when the uh the pandemic uh
gets us back into a normal mode kit Peak will start back up with their classes and I encourage everyone to uh go to
that class let me uh take off the Powerpoints now and take you to a live view of the
telescope so let me bring up the
telescope can you guys see the telescope now yes okay so let's check our guiding I just
want to show folks a couple of things here I use pht2 for guiding as you can see right now my guiding is pretty good
the overall image scale of my system is 1.4 AR seconds per pixel and right now my total air is at 065 so I'm uh I'm
actually doing pretty good with the guiding and if we go back to the telescope itself you can see that since
we last uh spoke I was on um NGC 6992 or the Eastern Vil the telescope has now SL
to a new Target which you're looking at here is IC 405 this is the Flaming star
nebula I'm shooting a narrow band tonight this object is in the constellation of Raa and it's actually
both a reflection nebula and an emission nebula this Bright Star right here is causing a lot of things to happen in
some of the outer regions you see this the light being reflected but the closer you get into the gaseous parts of the
nebula that gas is actually being excited by the energy from this star and causing it to emit its own signal so
it's both a reflection and an emission nebula what I'm going to do is take you
back let me just finish up here so uh this object is is is about a magnitude six object and I'm gonna follow Molly's
lead she gave you the distances this object is as well is about 1,500 light years from Earth so the photons we're
looking at now have been traveling for quite a long time um I'm going to move
you guys over just a little bit here so right now I'm shooting ha and if
you look at my sequencer I always have to orient myself I'm shooting uh three different
channels tonight so right now I'm uh I'm on the the uh hydrogen channel so
what I can do is show you the previous two
channels that's what the sare looks
like oh there's the 6992 we on so I have two U I have two shots of the Flaming
star this was the um go back to my sequencer this was the um the Oxygen
Channel I'm sorry let me back up this was the sulfur Channel and this is the
Oxygen Channel here so you can see the oxygen signal is much weaker and in a few minutes we'll download and get a
view of the sulfur and show that when when the time is right so we're looking at the Flaming star done until uh right
around 10:15 and then I'm going to slew over to the horsee head nio so if you
have any questions for me use the chat function I'll send it back to Don Martin awesome beautiful that's
great um so where are we Scott what do we uh well we should uh why don't you
just kind of give um we'll we'll do a 10-minute Break um uh you still have uh
we have a number of talks still to come with uh uh Don Martin with the uh I
guess you're going to be talking a little bit more about the special interest groups uh jenevie will come
back to talk about uh Outreach at v-bass uh in the tensel trail um we'll do more
astrophotography live astrophotography we have Rod Hughes Gary USTA and uh uh so it's going to be uh um
more great stuff from the Von Brown Astronomical Society uh we'll just take
a a little break here um uh so you can uh uh do what you need to do and uh
we'll be right
back for
you
Molly where are you located I'm in the uh bay area of
California um just north of Berkeley oh
okay that's a long way away where you at Alabama oh yeah right so M do you guys
have a lot of light pollution there are you I'm not familiar with that where you're at
but yeah it's a fair bit um uh looking South I I get all the light from Oakland
and San Francisco um but it's actually not as bad as I thought it was going to be I
estimate I'm at about bordal S I can see a lot more stars than I would have
expected for being this close to San Francisco in Oakland yeah so that's
that's that's good but I do uh battle light pollution pretty strongly um and
uh so I use light pollution filter on my color camera and then do a lot of narrow band Imaging now on my monochrome camera
I'm eventually going to get one of those like multiband um uh filters for using
with one shot color cameras but I have uh three rigs set up in the backyard I had a several PowerPoint
charts I was going to walk people through but I was sensitive to time but but like you I've got I've got a one
shot color camera for my I have an HD Optical tube as well and I think I'm going toh swap that out and go with a
monochrome on that as well Naro band comes in really handy sorry got food being delivered
just a second
yeah
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they forgot to include tartar sauce in my
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okay well we're back folks so um you can see that we're all getting a little
nutrition in fact my meals right over beside me as well so um but uh uh uh
really um uh glad glad to uh uh bring back all of our uh guests and speakers
here um and um I don't know if Don Don are you
back I'm back there you are okay all
right all right so um I guess we're gonna just jump right
into it here yeah let's do that yeah yeah so um I don't know that I've really got all that much to say about these now
that we now that we now we now that I start thinking about it but um vibas you
know we're a pretty big club and we have these monthly speakers meetings like like this one tonight the third Friday
we have these we have these uh meetings where we have a formal speaker a professor of of astronomy from UAH or
something along those lines and that's great but that does not really um allow
people to to get to know each other and to network and so a few years ago I came
up with the idea of having these uh other Gatherings these other gett togethers we call them sigs special
interest groups and the idea we we started out with just one and uh the idea was to make it more
of a uh of a less formal Gathering and so that we would get together and we
would talk about whatever you know if you if you're working on a on a program an astronomic league program or if
you're you're uh doing uh you're you're building a telescope or something come
up and show off what you've got and uh it was originally intended to be sort of a showand tell opportunity so that
people could come up and just hang out without there being a a speaker normally with the speakers meetings people show
up uh the meeting starts at 7:30 and at nine o'clock it ends and people go home and there's not really as much time for
socializing or talking to people so these these are like sort of like smaller Gatherings typically about 20 20
people would be a large Gathering sometimes five or six and it's
um we started out meeting on the first Friday of the month just to kind of spread it out from the third Friday when
our regular meetings were and it started out like I said just
being sort of a showand tell and talk about different things and uh it has uh
it has evolved a little bit and now what's happened is we've split off already uh into another group called The
astrophotography Sig and the astrophotography Sig is a bunch of guys who get together and talk about
astrophotography they meet on the second Friday of the month so they get together and they talk about their equipment
their gear the problems that they're having guys like Don and Frank show up and and uh say well here's what we do
here's how we do it and they talk about uh techniques and technology and uh the first uh the first
Friday has kind of evolved into what we're calling now sort of like an observer Sig or maybe it's a visual Sig
we haven't really we've got to kind of find a new identity here um or beginner Sig and so what I do is
at the beginning of the meeting I do a little presentation on the sky and the Stars tonight so it's something for
beginners so if you're a beginner one of the best ways to get into this is to show up for this uh this Observer Sig on
the first Friday of the month up up well now we're doing it by zoom and uh and I do like I say I do a little show what's
up tonight you know what what constellations are up what can you look at in them what's a binocular object
what's a telescopic telescopic object um and uh so we go through and do a little
presentation like that sometimes Jared's there and and uh if we're if we're in the planetarium do Dome Jared can do a
little presentation you know light up the stars and we can we he can point things out uh out that way as well so
um so that's kind of how it got started and now it's like I say the the astrop
the astrophotographers kind of kind of sorted taking over that group and so we split them off into their own group so
they've got a group of about I don't know how many people show up I think like 10 or 20 between 10 and 20 of them
show up for that and then we got maybe another 10 that show up and talk about telescope making how to use your
telescope that's how uh that's how I met Gary USA who will be uh speaking in a few minutes and uh I don't know if Rod I
think Rod was showing up for the uh for the Sig uh as well but anyway so we've got that going and and uh now you know
we had uh Tom field who was the developer of rpec and it's it's a little
uh it's a little grading that you can screw in it's like an eyepiece uh grading it has the same interface and
everything and you can screw that into a little uh webcam and point it at stars
and get Spectra and he develops some software that goes in there and it uh it's analyzes the software it does all
the stuff you need to figure out what the what the Spectrum spectral class of the star is and things like that we have
we have one of those done on our uh in our filter wheel on this on the system I'm showing tonight I we use our spec
I'm good friends with Tom but uh that's a great way to get into spectroscopy and so when uh so the point
is that we've got uh you know we're trying to start some other groups and spec roscopy is one of the groups uh
that people were saying well I'd like to start a little spectroscopy group and some people were saying they were
interested in radioastronomy and then another group uh of people are saying um that they were
interested in variable stars and photometry and things like that and so I'm thinking maybe we need to split this
off into a third group a third Sig that does spectroscopy uh the uh radio astronomy
and also the ometry and I'm thinking uh you know maybe we can call it an
astrophysics Sig or something along those lines and get those people kind of hooked up so they can get together and
they can work on things on their little projects and get help from each other um
that way so anyway the idea and and I got this idea actually from um from Ham
Radio groups there's a lot of ham radio groups that do this stuff all the time where they have you know you've got ham
radio ham radio guys and ham radio is a very diverse uh hobby you can do uh
digital uh Communications you can do video you can do computer you can do uh
work on repeaters you can do long long distance so there so they so they do
these Sig all the time and uh I saw it over on that uh in that in that culture
over there in the ham radio culture and I thought that would be really great to do something here and then also at some
point I think we're going to probably want to do a scope making Sig or a you know an optic Sig or something along
those lines which is something I'd be interested in doing and getting more involved in doing telescope
making um Don I had a question about what is your membership uh to support
all these different groups we have a membership of about 150 people uh 150 to
200 um in fact the club is it's kind of an interesting uh mix of people because
Huntsville is a very well-educated town because there's because of the uh the Arsenal and the uh Marshall space flight
center so we have a lot of scientists and engineers in our town and um so
there's a very strong technical uh culture in our town so for you know a to
we've got you know huntsville's about I think 250,000 population and Mar and Madison count is about
400,000 so we have got you know a club that is you know really disproportionately large for a town this
size it's it's I think it's kind of striking that we are we are as big as we are um so we do do very well from that
standpoint but I but you know I think that in order to really get people uh
brought in here get them engaged you need to have something like that that appeals to their interest and in and in
fact one of the things I've I've mentioned and we still don't really this is another another idea for a Sig and we
still don't have a real volunteer so if anybody out there is interested in doing this uh but it's it's like for example a
um a female I'm not sure exactly how to call it a young ladies astronomer Sig or
a female astronomer Sig or something that would bring young girls into the field um and of course you could have
one for young boys too it's not like uh we're we're not against that but uh or maybe just a Young Person's or or a a
youth a youth there you go some something along those lines to get
kids more actively involved in it and and to work on projects together and meet other people their age that are
similarly uh inclined and uh so I think something like that would be would be a
uh a good uh another good group but of course you know I can't do all of these things so we need to have volunteers to
do these things and it's just uh you know we've got the people who are on our board and who are the most active
members do so much now it's like you almost can't impose upon them to do even
more there's just just uh there's we've got a lot of people who are the people who are on the board and show up all the
time every Saturday night these people are extremely active and extremely engaged in what we're working on so um
but anyway I was going to say a little bit more about vibas we've got broadly speaking we've got two uh two groups of
people in vibas the culture divides up in two ways you've got people who are involved in education and Outreach and
then you've got people who are actively involved in observing and astrophotography doing things like that
now it's not a clean divide because people go both ways they go on both uh in both both groups but uh those are the
two broad categories of activities that we have and uh jenet is one of the
people who is actively uh involved in the education she's the Director of Education and um
he also does a lot of Outreach she does a lot of work uh with with school groups
and and in fact uh I was just looking this up uh during the break um she uh in
uh I think it was 2016 she won the Los cumbre's uh Outreach award oh wow okay
the Astronomical Society of the Pacific that's right and in fact uh a few years before that we another member uh Lonnie
uh Lonnie petall he won the same award uh we we have we have got a lot of
really active people in this grp it's it's really quite striking the number of people uh that we have here and and then
we also have another member our past president last year Beth uh Beth Barrow she won just recently just this year she
won a uh a teaching award a national teaching award so you know we have got
some really remarkable people that we are associated with it's really it's really quite striking we we have really
intelligent active people in in this club and if people are out there listening and they're members and they're not getting up here very often
they they should really start getting more active it's it's uh it's a really good uh place to bring your kids you
know it's a really just a clean environment to bring your kids up and and let them interact with uh kids their
own age or other adults and learn from other other adults and people like that it's uh it's just really a very positive
experience it's not clicky I've been to clubs that were kind of clicky and you know you're not one of us so you know
what are you doing here right isn't like that uh Vass has is very very open and
welcoming so anyway I guess that serves as sort of a transition into uh into
Jen's talk from the chat I think um Mela was
already nominated to be the leader of the youth group is that right yeah
wow I'm I'm behind the time I don't know I don't know I don't know that there members that have nominated her anyways
but we're we're all duly impressed so yeah yeah yeah we've got a lot of a lot of good people here but anyway so moving
along jev viiv is our director of uh education and uh she is about to talk to
us about education and specifically something called the tinsel Trail so go ahead what have we
got you're muted
J Jenna Jenna you're
muted I'm I'm never going to get this right okay this takes practice that's
all for those of you that did that have joined us since the beginning um we are
the bom Brown Astronomical Society and we have an observatory and a planetarium
actual facility in Mona State Park in Huntsville Alabama and our facility is as is one of
the treasures of North Alabama and not a lot of people know about us so if you're
ever visiting in our area please come and and visit us and you will be glad
that you did because it's just very unique and something very special
so the Von Brown estom I'm kind of proud of how we engage our young people those
that come and get excited about astronomy and they always want to help they want to do something so we employ
an intern two we have two or three interns to help us for our Saturday night programs
um and they take up admission and sell our t-shirts and and run the planetarium
console and just make act like Hostess and hosts and make everyone comfortable
now most of the things I'm going to talk about are not happening right now
because of the pandemic so just keep in mind that we normally do all these
things and as soon as we feel comfortable and this pandemic is under control then we will Begin Again
doing all these things but we're not doing them right now all right so this is one of our
interns we we also do a special award to attract and involve young women in
astronomy uh Anne Sanford was a very active member and she was a librarian and she organized
and set up our library um and upon her death her
children donated her Questar telescope so this this is an award that
we present to a young lady uh every year and they can keep the telescope for
a year and use it and keep a log book and at the end of their year we
hopefully make they make a presentation to us about what they learned using aners telescope so that's one way we
keep young people engaged and encourage them to learn more about astronomy we
we have our most important outreach program is we have a planetarium show every Saturday night for the general
public for install admission fee and so this is a view this is a typical Saturday night audience and since we are
in the state park there's also a campground so a large portion of our
audience oftentimes are people in the campground they come over for a Saturday night program and sometimes when I walk
into the planetarium the the fragrance of campfire smoke is
just hits me in the face and I love it because we have so many visitors from the planetarium we just really have a
great time so after our planetarian program
which lasts about an hour and we use our planetarian projector and we do a little astronomy lesson about different things
every every month we send the public out to look through telescopes and there we
have have a very active group of observers who operate our c16 telescope
that you see pictured here that's on the roof and the 21 inch telescope that Jeff
Delmas has been telling you about uh they can see the images that
are being viewed through that telescope and then we also have telescopes out in our observing field people can bring
their own telescopes and set them up sometimes we will have seven or eight telescopes out there in the field for
people to just cycle around and look at different objects in the night sky um so we we really have a lot of fun
now to help us with the general public as they are standing in line to look
through telescopes we also have a a another program I call Stellar
instructors and these are more young people who are excited and they want to help they want to do something so I give
them a job I give them a laser pointer and we learn constellations and they can
go out there while people are standing in line to look through telescopes and help them find constellations and point
out interesting things to look at planets uh and whatever is out on that particular Saturday night so here are
some of our very active Stellar instructors uh another big outreach
program we have is astronomy day we choose to do it in October every year
and because we have better weather um so this has been going on for many years
and here's some typical scenes of our astronomy day and this here we were
making the night sky network has a a a comet recipe using dry ice so one of our
members was uh letting the kids help him make comets with dry
ice and of course solar telescopes abound on astronomy day and when the sky
clear we get to have a lot of fun looking at the sun all right so anytime we are asked we
do our very best to do programs in the planetarium for school groups Scout
groups uh Church groups anyone just general Civic groups come and visit or
private programs we do our best to accommodate everyone here's some uh some
of my favorite pictures of school groups that have been to visit
and we also have a solar telescope that was designed and built by Dr ster I mentioned him
earlier um he built this incredible solar telescope and it's great it's my
favorite telescope for school groups because you can just pack a whole bunch of people in there and they can look at
the image of the sun on the Whiteboard you see in the corner that
here um so as was mentioned before we also have space camp space camp is in our town and there were many Summers
when space camp brought their campers up to our planetarium because there wasn't a planetarium at Space and Rocket Center
so they utilized ours and that was a lot of fun and this is our famous blog that we have on the mountain and a Boy Scout
Group Hub Scout we also go out into the community
and this is one of our uh members promoting dark sky lighting at an Earth
Day celebration that happens every year so we do things like that and a
Venus Transit we we a lot of our members set up in the parking lot at the Space and Rocket Center to give people an
opportunity to see the Venus Transit so we do a lot of things with the space and
offic Center they are an excellent partner so we have a new project this
year that we've never done before at Christmas time um the City of Huntsville and the
City of Madison have uh trees in the park and you can you can purchase the opportunity to
decorate a tree and publicize your organization so we chose to do that this
year that's called the tinsel Trail it's a new one for us and I I am an educator
I teach math at the University of Alabama and Huntsville so this has been kind of a strange semester for us and I
asked my my students I said we need decorations for our tree kid could y'all
make some stars and I passed them out I passed out colored paper and they just made some beautiful Creations this is my
favorite one here and she says he is a smiley boy with hair like fire um so
we're gonna laminate this and hang this on our Christmas tree this is our artist segment for for this evening and here's
another this is just is so creative and so beautiful so these ornaments will be laminated and hanging on our Christmas
tree on the tens Trail this year and then here's one this is the moon and
that is a lunar lander that has been pained on the side of that orb there one of my students created
this and then here's another one of my favorites uh she painted all the planets
on on the sides of the the ornament there um those are the
only yeah you can see a lot of them anyway it's just so creative and I was really impressed I'm always impressed
with my students and how talented they are so that is what I have and I would
like to invite any of you each of you to come and visit us when this pandemic is
over when we feel comfortable about reopening I want to have a grand big
grand reopening and maybe a planetarian show every night for a week um so we
would love to have you come and visit us every night for a week that's a that's a lot of work is but I'm missing it so I
think I'll be ready I know what you mean
um all right so I guess we're back to uh to uh live Imaging thank you very much
Jenna that was really awesome that was that was so much more than I expected I mean I just you had stuff in there I've
never seen before with uh there's a lot of pictures in there I think picture my
telescopes in in there so I thought that was kind of interesting I was trying to squint on it and see if it was mine or not I have a lot of pictures I the
people okay um all right do we have any live Imaging going on here
um uh let me just get the moon reentered and have the moon up here in just a
second it kind of drifted off a bit um I'll just go ahead
and swap that over
um see let me slw the telescope a
bit almost there actually should work this way yeah
that's right okay so I've got the uh the moon here it's not exact centered let me
brighten it up just to smidge uh this is on my 8 in massin on my Paramount
Mighty uh which whose alignment model is a little bit weird right now which is why it's not quite
centered um but uh yeah on the on the C8 you know with with the foler producer I
can get the full disc of the moon on there but I can also still get a nice
amount of detail because of its large temperature um although I don't think my
seeing conditions necessarily support tonight as you can see here on my zoomed
view well I'm also um I'm dropped a little bit behind the tree now too so
I've got some tree okay probably causing a little bit of defraction um so I'll just go back out
to the whole dis V here because it looks nicer um oh yeah you can kind of see the
the light changing on the surface it's going right behind my tree br my I thought those were clouds for a
moment uh you know they might be but I'm I'm actually uh I I'm pretty sure it's
the tree at this point I know it's just about right behind it so tree is waving around in front of the moon or it's
casting Shadows yeah if if uh
uh asking Shadows back on Molly yeah Moon Shadow yeah actually
yeah it's a good point yeah it's casting some Moon Shadow oh over over my telescope
yeah yeah I've got a big lemon tree back there which is um an extremely
productive lemon tree I get an enormous amount of lemons which my neighbors love
um and it actually doesn't hibernate so it it uh produces lemons all winter because we don't go below freezing here
what's your location where do you live I'm in the Bay Area I'm just north of Berkeley okay yeah I when I was I lived
in Tucson for 20 years and we had uh we had orange trees and a grapefruit tree
in our backyard and uh if you didn't pick the fruit it would stay on there it just it
never rotted it would stay on there for a year and a half you could leave you could leave a leave a grapefruit on
there for a year and a half and uh wow crazy my lemon my lemons rot and fall
off the tree all the time I gotta clean up the back like oh yeah I guess it's
just the climate I don't know what else it's not because I'm a great Gardener or anything that's for sure but um okay so
who else have we got here uh thank you Molly yeah I uh I'd like to talk a little bit
about my equipment yeah that sounds good um if I could and show a couple of
features so PE there might be a lot of people that are new to this program I'm
I wanted to introduce myself a little bit too my name is Jerry Hubble I'm the vice president of engineering for explor
scientific and I developed the PMC system that we're using on the mount the G11 Mount that's you see behind me
um I'm going to go ahead and share the uh The
Observatory um I'm also the vice president of a nonprofit
organization that uh the that runs the observatory it's called The Mark play remote Observatory and I'm the vice
president of Mr msro science uh we own and operate the
observatory the uh the main thing I wanted to point out is some of the some
of the equipment we have in this we have three stations at the observatory and this is station one it's
got the uh explore scientific 6 and 1 12 inch Appo refractor FPL 53 glass and
I've got a qhy 163 camera on it with a filter wheel and we use the telescope
Drive Master uh high resolution encoder Drive correction system
to uh to run the mount or to correct the mounts PE we don't do auto guiding so
it's very a nice system where we just turn it on and it works and we get very good guiding and one of the things I
wanted to show you was was what that guiding looks like here
um yeah start it up again here just just for those that are interested in these
types of things
um sometimes it dies the first time this is a program I wrote back about 10 years
ago to interface with the uh telescope Drive
master and uh so what we typically get is a is a periodic error of around. 35
arccs with the drive correction system on the G11 mount
um this information here shows the tracking error plus or
minus uh the two Sigma 95% two Sigma value which is actually twice the RMS
value this RMS Valu that's shown here is not calculated correctly so right now it's indicating a a tracking error of
about3 Arc seconds uh that with uh guiding or no
guiding no guiding oh wow on a G11 Mount that's with the telescope Drive Master
System on it yeah I'm considering considering buying that mount so that's why I'm asking yeah yeah so it's it's
possible to get very good I mean excellent tracking out of this Mount system it's
uh it's it's a very good high value mount for uh for performance price uh
what you get so so so I see te is 0.054
what does that mean that's the that's the average tracking eror so it's it's so it's should average to about zero
right plus or minus whatever the RMS value is so that's how so right now the tracking is fast okay then it goes slow
so you can see it jumps up and down the average jumps around got it so that's the average tracking error it should
should nominally be zero right but it's it's fast and slow of course you know
depending on how much PE there is or residual tracking error there is and then the 0 553 Arc seconds that's uh
that's the standard deviation or is it two Sigma that's two Sigma okay so RMS
is one Sigma value so it's about half that RMS so it's about3 arccs
RMS and then you can see on the chart you know this is plus or minus 0.9
arccs that system work with sequence generator Pro with the ascom driver so this is an independent system
it's basically like an appliance that you that runs independently of the system you can run a guiding signal
through it although it corrects it's just correcting the ra the right Ascension axis and you can if you're not
perfectly polar line you can run a guiding system to send the declination
Corrections into the I guess I just mean the the pmca system as a whole like can I command it from sequence generator oh
oh yeah absolutely the PMC absolutely is fully ascom compliant um it's got a you know I'm
kind of biased since I created it so I know how well it works you know but uh
but it you it's got a fully compliant ascom driver to do anything you want with it
um sweet I just wanted to show that a little bit of the performance of The
Observatory one other feature that we have that's I think is kind of cool I'm going to close
that is the uh so we've got a clock system a GPS clock on the system that's
a basically a laboratory level of Correction you can see here the time and
you see where it says one Sigma 1. 1285 milliseconds that's how accurate the
time is or precise the time is and it's because it's got an internal control Loop that manages the time and it's
updating the time continuously based on the GPS signal I think that and this is
a really inexpensive program it's called Nema time
um does the really precise time help with go-to tracking Etc at all this is a
bit Overkill okay for for measurements that you do for exoplanet and for uh
actually more asteroid type measurements you want to get Within a second or so
right half a second's good enough but this this is cool to have one
millisecond um yeah especially for for occultations yeah yeah well we actually
have uh another camera on the other station we have has got a GPS built into
it it's a qhy camera that's got GPS for doing uh video timing very act that down
to one millisecond or so so we do occultation work with that system and it's very actually Nasa uses the same
camera on their alation teams um that we use it's a it's a qhy
174 GPS camera I think this this is a GPS
receiver that's on the side of the mount so you can see here the image of the mount you can see the sky through the
slit here uh all the stars there so this is
an earlier picture I was just getting set up to do uh to do an image I haven't really got
it on a Target right now I got it on Mars so let me do a quick image do a 10-c image and
uh we'll see what we get here it's going to have Mars near the
center uh it's going to be pretty
bright yeah it's pretty darn bright let me move off off of Mars so I can uh
do a plate solve that's really bright too so
anything that's brighter than about eighth or tenth mag you know tenth magnitude you get pretty large Stars
it's a very sensitive camera uh I use card de seal to navigate
the mount uh I find it it supports uh large databases ukac 4 database and I've
actually got the urat database on here which is really a huge thing but I don't use it that often uh so let me take another
image and demonstrate a plate solve we use I use Maxim you can see this is
Maxum DL is what we use to control the observatory
um all right so this gives you an idea now this isn't a very long exposure of
course but um do a plate
solve and check the focus it calculates the the average full
width of half maximum on the plate solve so I can see it's 2.6 pixels which is
not too bad our seeing is around three
arccs and the pixel scale is uh 1.8 Arc seconds per um
pixel so that's a lot of detail
um I'm gonna is there any questions about that I I was going to stop my
share now if there not
questions someone was just asking how high is the Mount I thought it was about
eight feet above the ground oh yeah so this is a this is a zwo camera that's looking up just like your Observatory
there has got the camera at the floor level looking up at the uh telescope
this is the same way it's on the near the floor looking up at the Dome and uh it's seven feet so the p is
7 foot tall and then the mount and the and the building is 7 foot tall I've got a fullsize door it's a small building
it's 7 foot Cube it's basically a 7 foot Cube and it's got a six foot uh Dome on
it so so it's we wanted to make it high so we could walk in there and walk around the instrument and be able to
have room to install and take down instruments and things and to make changes and you can see the computer
there on the right hand side and then the Dome digital D Works control system
for the Dome on the wall there uh on the right hand side but uh yeah so that's that's the
system and we use uh msro science as an organization let me uh let me bring up
my other uh screen here just real quick I'll talk about
msro science
um let me uh like people talk about all the icons I have running on my
machine I also I also wrote a couple books this is one of
them well that's interesting so I wrote a book called
scientific astrophotography uh if you're interested
in that so this is msro science we basically do Outreach training and
research we provide research and training opportunities um for for our local community and also
we have people from all over the world using our system remotely and that's something I'm I'm five miles away from
the observatory operating it remotely right now U let's see here I want
to see so that's a good picture of the of the system right there that's like
the one that's behind me right now um we don't have the 102 on top of the mount
on top of the telescope right now now we just have the 165 and uh we've got you know we
instruct we do observations different things um and that's and we do we have classes
on introduction to the observatory and then we have Observer training courses
and and also technical training courses on the uh all the equipment and how to
operate the observatory so that's my quick Spiel
and so like I said this is this is the book
I wrote in 2012 and I have another book called
remote observatories for amateur photographer or for amateur astronomers
also so that's enough I can go on I can go on and on
there's a couple things I'm also the uh the editor for the Patrick Moore
practical astronomy series for Springer books so if anybody has a book proposal or wants to write a book contact me and
I can help you get published I was wondering how you got published with the Patrick more series but I guess that
answers that question well I was it was 10 years almost it was eight years ago so I lued out it was just an opportunity
that came along to write a book and I just like every other opportunity I try to jump on it as much as I can so and
then I you know once you write a book for Springer they they come back to your to an author to to get them to write
another book and I was able to do that uh with the remote observatories which is a you know second book to that Series
so yeah so if you're interested let me know that's uh that's awesome thanks a
lot uh Jerry um okay so um our next speaker Rod are
you ready to go our next speaker is Rod Hughes uh
Rod Hughes uh lives correct me if I'm wrong but you live down in Miller's Ferry
Alabama which is a bort to site is that correct that is correct bort to You'
still got so you've got a nice dark location but you still you've still got Alabama weather which is
uh maybe maybe unfortunate and you're not at you're not at 10,000 ft like uh
like Flag Staff or kit Peak or something like that but I'm sorry go ahead well um give me just
a second I started the uh presentation and it went to the wrong screen so I'm
trying to get it back so so you moved down there you lived in Huntsville for a long time and
you moved down there when you retired is that correct right I I was living in Huntsville and uh there we go and uh
working in the broadcast industry up there for several years um and then did a did a career move and
went into computer programming worked with some defense contractors got into uh amateur
astronomy absolutely loved it and uh you know hauling the year out whenever you
can uh became a uh a labor of love so
are you trying to share your screen now is that what's going on uh yeah I just go ahead and give that a shot and I'll
see if I can uh can grab it give you a what now I'm going to go ahead and grab
the screen and let's
see here you go is that it yeah okay let me see if I can
start you no you can see it full screen right yeah so uh yes we moved from
hospital to Miller fa and uh we decided to uh to make an observatory in the
backyard and since we live on Sand Island Drive we thought well we'll just call it Sand Island
Observatory kind of makes sense so um like Don said we are located in Miller's
Ferry and most people are going to say well where is Miller's
Fair well there it goes um you should see a
map coming up yeah there's coming up okay it looks like a black screen to
me it may not be plain it is playing oh you can see it so
there's Miller's fair with I guess you can see my mouse yes okay that's where
Miller's fair is located it's this is the
uhoh so this is where Huntsville is in in bbass and we moved four hours south
to uh to Miller's Fair it's on the Alabama River and it's a very small
community probably 200 200 300 people live here on the river mostly it's
hunting and fishing and half the population uh just comes there for uh
you know the hunt or a fish for the weekend or of course now we're getting into hunting
season so uh we do have pretty much bort two
Skies um almost bort to there's 2151 so it's it Teeters between a high
bort three and a low bort two uh for the most for the most part very happy with
how dark the skies are the stars actually pop out like LED lights uh when
the sky gets that dark nice summer isn't as isn't as good because of the humidity
in the weather U so I kind of look forward to when a storm is going to blow through because usually after that the
sky is cleared up a little bit but uh we we do have some nice nice clear
skies so uh we found this house in Miller's Ferry and uh we had to dig a hole in the
backyard that's my wife uh she was very eager for me to put
up an observatory in the backyard she didn't like me going out at night um you
know I going to get attacked by somebody or a bear is g to do something or so she
always liked to have me close to to where she knew I was going to be safe so
we dug a a 4 foot by four foot by four foot hole in the ground threw some Rock
in it and uh put in some concrete some
rebar and there we have our have our Pier built the base of the pier is a
18inch Sono tube and that's about 4 foot maybe a little bit more taller than that
and this top section is a 12inch uh Sono tube and there you can just barely see the the bolts for
attached them out mhm that's my son he's uh we we enlisted
family to help build the uh The Observatory took a lot of concrete we
have an automatic mixer so we didn't have to do mix it by hand uh then we
poured the uh the base for the actual Observatory
itself um the Dome The Observer the observ that I purchased was an explor
dorm Dome it's 10t square and normally it's only 4 foot
above the ground but I I contacted them and asked them to make a taller frame so I could put a full siiz door in here uh
this face of the observatory faces to the South so I I always walked into it from
the south now my son there is walking through the wall but uh the walls weren't all the way up
yet and then there we are we're attaching the walls to the uh to the
frame and it's almost completed at least we have all the walls up in the door oh
yeah you can see this the top rim and uh this face of the rim is what
the Dome will rotate on and it uses skateboard wheels
H so it must be really smooth it is very smooth it's you you can rotate it very
easily with one hand without any trouble at
all this contraction uh this is this is probably
7 foot or better uh up in the air we didn't have a crane so we Podge Podge this thing
together attach the cable to F to a winch on a
Jeep and you know we had to improvise with what we had um it didn't look safe but we tested
it and we felt safe on the ground here is the ring you can see there's little
holes across here that the drive motor will use to uh to rotate the dome but
this ring goes on top of this surface and then the Dome will set on
top of this ring so we hoisted everything up pushed the
ring on top of the of the observator and we're getting ready toh Slide the Dome
over the Dome is is awkward but it's not that heavy uh two people uh can pick it
up without too much difficulty but getting it up about 8 foot in the air
was was what we were facing with the challenge that's a looking picture right
there Rod I just want you to know yeah well directly on top of somebody and I'm
thinking boy we reinforc these uh these
2x4s uh it doesn't look scary OSHA wasn't involved in the
operation I'm sure they would have said something and by the way these These are 4x4 posts and there's a rope that goes
all the way around to keep the post from Falling Towards the people
um so you know we got the job done nobody got hurt and uh and we went on
with uh this was the biggest part of the observatory construction for me was was
how to get this Dome up on top but we managed to get her done I
have a question um I know that uh it's possible if you get the slit open
um you know uh and wind goes into the Dome that it can actually lift a dome
off its track what do you what do you have to keep it from from coming off the
track other than its own weight that's all I have is its own weight I see we've
had we've had 80 mile per hour winds blow through here a couple weeks ago the
Dome no problems now if it's 80 m per hour winds outside I will not not have
the slit open right of course not yeah yeah right so we have the same thing we
we've got cables ties the technical innovations Dome has a cable system that ties the Dome down to the building
basically is what we have on our Dome I know that um Jack Newton told me a story
about uh there's a major Observatory up in Canada and I mean a massive huge Dome
uh that was uh just laying on his tracks uh and just held there by its own weight
uh someone had left the slit open and there was a gust of wind that actually picked that multi-ton Dome off the track
okay and moved it over oh wow yeah yeah so you might you
might uh you know if you get just kind of like the odd gust of wind or something you know well I have I have
thought about just having a couple clamps that I would put on when I'm done
observing uh but I I just haven't U
maybe I should I I'll give that consideration thank you for that you know Rod you could even just pin it just
have a couple of uh pins that you stick in there so that it rotate and it can't
lift up you know just drill a hole through the Dome and into into something and just stick a couple of pins you know
four places around the dome right that's that's a good uh that's a good point thank you security it could also be a
security issue right although I think it would be easier to probably cut through the metal if they were going to do
something like that hey does does speaking of that this is a metal shed basically correct yes this is an
aluminum frame uh and just metal wrapped all the way around it and of course this
is um a fiber fiberglass does it does it uh get hot in there does the metal turn
it into an oven and bake things inside there or is it no it'll it'll get up uh
to ambient temperatures so uh I have a computer in there I usually don't run it when it's
you know 100 degrees outside but I have not had any technical issues related to
uh temperature how's the concrete pad does that have Pro provide a temperature
problem or anything we've built our system on a wooden deck above grass and it's all wood so we did that to mitigate
any temperature on the uh I haven't had there's there's uh I forget how many tons of concrete
this structure turned out to be it's massive uh If It Moves we're in serious
trouble but I haven't I haven't had any problems with u with with
that with the temperature right uh someone from the chat Jeff wise
he's talking about a um they club's uh rolloff roof Observatory which is square
he says that the roof blew off our club's 20ft Square Observatory many tons of roof blew off
so where does he live I don't know I will say that Miller's Ferry is
100 miles uh north of the gulf and it's when the Zeta blew through is when we
had the 80 mile per hour gust yeah um I actually have a weather station out
there I only measured 50 but most of the tree damage was probably 200 ft to the south of where we
were we and there were a lot of tree damages the county the county was
without power for 4 and a half days and it wasn't just our County that was
affected there were several counties uh in this area uh that were without power
U this past uh Janu AR we installed a whole house generator system that runs
on natural gas and we're kind of glad we had that
yeah Wonder we had all the Creature Comforts we needed so is is the Dome set up uh where
it has remote operation where you can operate from your home or are are you working inside the observatory right now
I'm working inside the observatory I I considered buying a uh a computer
computer system to rotate the Dome yeah and I read a lot of reports there were
some problems with it and you know other things so I decided Well I'm already
spending a lot of money I can tell you that that the biggest the biggest problems we have
with our Observatory on station one is the Dome itself the cabling system it it
is a 20-y old Dome that we have uh but the maintaining the cable system and the
rotation is is a lot of work compared to the rest of the system my plan is to uh
invoke adreno I have a u a rotary uh
encoder that can run across the smooth edge of the Dome and I'll have some
calibration points for that um but then I'm going to have to have some way to uh
attach that to the ascom interface so I can find out where the telescope's pointed and then whe it's on which side
of the pier it's on and then you know do some geometry to figure out where the
Dome should move um I've also thought about putting a camera behind the
telescope and just look outside the window of the slot and you know make manual
adjustments that way so I really haven't come up with a
definitive solution so right now I'll be inside the observatory
um now I have gone back into the house maybe for 10 15 minutes at a time and
come back out make a movement go back in you know I can do stuff like that
uh but uh other than when it gets you know super cold it will get below
freezing here in Miller sping one of the things I tell people
when they get into astrophotography that is as important as your Mount is a good
focuser is just as important you need to really have a good Precision focuser that you can control
you know from the computer if you really want to get the best images uh my My
Philosophy regarding engineering things is to do one thing at a time and I've
learned through experience if you do two mons at once you know trying to figure out which one was it you know you're
going to have to go back and use a divide conquer approach somewhere right so I right now I do not
have an automatic focuser I have one that I can attach to the equipment I
just haven't got to that phase yet right no that's the best way to build your system for sure is one step at a time
get used to the equipment the way you got it configured and then get it like
and go on to the next thing you know what that makes the journey just that much more fun because oh yeah you're
getting very intimate with your gear that's right you have to know where to poke it and when to poke it and what to
expect when you poke it so this next slide I'm going to go to
is a little video um it'll be kind of become
obvious oh there we go all right and you're your hand
turning that right yeah it's that fan in the foreground that's turning the
Dome that was my son he has a sense of humor kind of like I do so he just
couldn't resist himself and uh had to rotate the dome for the first
time cool it's all good yeah um so this brown Shack is something
we built something we bought pre-built uh I think it's 10 by 16 I call it the
cottage and I thought of attaching it directly to the observatory and then I thought
well when the when the slots open that thing has to pass around here so I
needed to have a little space for that so you know no interference but I primarily use this as my hobby
room um I can control the observatory from in there if I want I can do ham ham
radio from in there um it's just kind of like my little place out side of the
house yeah then you can see here on the uh the right picture I've got this this
wall built up here uh my next door neighbor to the north and you're looking
to the north here uh he likes to turn lights on from
time to time and uh don you may me remember the last time
we talked he installed this new light and since I've talked to him he's
showed me where the switch is so he's G G me permission to turn the light off in his
backyard fortunately it's on the North side it' be more problematic if it was
to the South but um we've got some good neighbors out
here so uh I have a magnetic lock so it's electronic lock for the door and uh
I built a platform up here this is all by Design so I could have a full hey
door to get into the observatory and on the right side I have
the um um whatever the
uh the opening so you can walk up the steps and there's little red lights there and it's all really very nice yeah
it makes it easy to get in and out and uh I'm not getting any younger so uh I
figured throw in some Creature Comforts here yeah why not
uh on the left side I got the and the um I forget what you call this anyway it's
closed um I do have a couple of work lights in there if you need to work at night need some extra light you can turn
them on and you can see the beginning of a workbench this is the uh the edge of the
Dome as you go around and there's about a 14inch uh depth to the wall so I decided
to take three sides of the observatory and basically uh put together a workbench to
put your gear in and and other things that you need you never have enough space to put stuff that you
accumulate uh this is the drive motor for the Dome and I have it loose so I
can either push it in and the clogs will engage or I can pull it out and then I
just grab here and and turn it there's a little wire here going up
to the battery just to charge the battery for the uh to open up the slit
and I'll just disconnect that cable when it comes time to move uh make rotate
Dome everything runs off of battery uh but I do put a battery charger on there when I'm operating
because you know B it takes a lot of power to cool cameras so so Rod you don't have any uh any hardwired
electrical out there at all Yes uh the electrical is underground from the house
okay along with the internet but I thought you just said everything runs on batteries well it does so if I lose
electrical power AC oh equipment still running so battery backup yeah well no
battery direct and then I put a charger on top of the battery so if if I lose power the
equipment's still running I don't have to wait for a reset you lose power out there a lot no okay but we do have uh
interruptions from time to time but not on a frequent basis right
um you know sometimes in remote locations if you lose power you know if
a tornado comes through and knocks out something you're the last one to get power that's true now
fortunately uh our main city is Camden it's the county seat for will Cox I'm 10
miles north of Camden but I have a Cameron address right
we're served by Alabama Power and I think our County was the seventh in the
state of having the most people that were without power so I felt very
fortunate to get power back in four and a half days considering the amount of damage that was done the storm blew
through I mean Selma was without power so uh they they were they got hit hard
as well let's go to the next picture I'm just continuing going around
I do have a little heater here on the floor uh I do use it why not um and then
this is the computer operating point and we're looking North uh at this point
when I get done observing I always rotate the Dome so the the slit is to the
north uh most of the Winds will come out of the South or the West uh and if it's the hurricane it
will come out of the East a lot but uh it's just convenient to have it always
pointed in one location and then on the right uh frame is is the rest of the uh
the workbench going around to the other side you can see the skateboard wheels
there's one holding the Dome up and then there's this one keeps it
centered uh the sorry go ahead I said I see oh okay uh
the equipment that I'm using right now and I just did this upgrade this uh about a month ago I have a Celestron
11in Edge HD uh and there's a seven time s uh
reducer and this just a rebel camera for testing um the mount is a 10 micron um
HPS 1000 um it has absolute encoders this is
the first Mount that I've had with absolute encoders and I can amen the previous
comment you need to have a good you need to have an excellent mount for doing
astar rine um you don't want to skimp on your
Mount uh one of the reasons I got this Mount is some of the features that were built into it and and and um I've been
been very happy with it uh this is the umbilical coordinate I don't have it attached yet to the
telescope um so it's just hanging over the counter weights on the right panel I
have a USB hub for connecting all the equipment [Music]
together uh I do have a guide scope uh this carbon fiber Orion 80
mm um I'm not really happy with this guide camera it's an
asi1600 it's uh way too large for a guide camera but it's all I had at the time so use what you got um and I did
add some uh some extras metal down here to help reinforce the camera so it won't
flex and on the right side in between the guide camera and the main scope I have a 12vt power distribution three
Circ C for cameras and then three circuits for auxiliary all of this stuff is 12
volts and in the center you can see a laser um the laser I'm using is made by
Wicked lasers and this uh the larger cir is just a piece of electrical
conduit and I was able to wedge the laser inside of it that kind of worked out
okay and you can see it here on I actually have it turned on
but uh I usually don't use the laser unless I'm doing a initial alignment or
if I have folks over and they want to see whatever you're looking at you can turn the laser on and it helps them to
see U see things in the sky so you use the laser pointer to point up at the sky
wherever the telescope's pointed at right right that's interesting a finder type of thing yeah
I use it as a finder uh you can actually see the laser being
in the main scope wherever it's pointed to it's it's fat but you can tell it's h it's
actually the laser being and so you can tell they're uh they're aligned
properly uh on the pier I've got two voltage monitors uh the mount is uh actually a
24volt DC uh Mount and the rest of the system is 12 volts which I call
camera and then I have four switches here on the side for turning the circuitries off camera let's see here
the mount is up here this is auxiliary circuits and then
this is for the Hub this is a DC todc converter to get five volts to the hub
and on the other side I got the pigtails I don't have it wired up yet when I took the photo but I'll have a 12vt to 24volt
converter here moded on the other side one thing we have in our Observatory for power is a web power which that we can
power independently on the internet I can remotely power The Observatory up and down with it uh that's that's kind
of a neat little Gadget yeah i' I've seen those and uh definitely a must have
if you're going to do a remote um I do have a home security system so I can
turn things circuits off and on that way but I don't have uh any way to
remotely uh run these particular power
switches uh at night um this is a little
mouse pad warmer uh it just runs off a USB plug and uh it can keep your hands uh warm
when it gets cold at night and I have a couple pieces of black cloth I can throw
over these strings or put them into a red mode uh so you can get it darker
inside the observatory when you need to
this is a a camera measurement a light box that I built this summer and you can put your camera on
this end of it these lids come off and I have these slides with various
diameters for letting different amounts of light pass through the box on the
right side I have one LED and the position of the LED can
change I these are an all threaded Rod I can rotate it from the back and you can
set how far the LED is to the light and that will actually precisely control how many Abus you're going to read off your
camera there's a milk glass diffuser on this bulkhead and then this is the slot
where you would insert uh your various slides uh let's see here there's a
diffuser here and another piece of milk glass and then your camera uh by using this apparatus you
can measure all of your camera characteristics um and I thought I I
enjoyed doing stuff like this so I I this is something right up my alley yeah
I I did that early on when I started getting into this you use Craig Stark's procedures for this yes yes yeah yeah
thank you Craig um I use the ASI 1600 camera because they have published their
curve uh so this is actually my data that I that I measured with my
system um 139 is what they call Unity gain and mine came out exactly like they
had predicted um and the rest of these charts followed very closely with uh
with what they had published for the ASI 1600 the only thing that's off here is
this chart the dark current chart there must have been something long my data usually you plot
temperature across the x-axis and I plotted gain um I need probably need to go back
and revisit this but I'm sure the dark current is a lot better than than a half of an electron second for Pixel I did I
did this work with my first camera I got was an a 314 Echo that I I actually
wrote a report and posted it on cloudy nights um all these camera information
uh that I developed from that first camera and uh Steve chambers of
atic uh I've talked to him I've known him for several years I talked to him about my data when first on early on and
it was a little bit different than what they had done so he was interested in what I had
found it's a lot of fun like collecting data I've got some other cameras I'd like to uh actually go through and
measure but uh it does take a bit of time uh to go through and set set things
up but it's something I enjoy doing so this is first light with the
camera uh just a u a r it's easy to uh easy to
capture and I took this of the Helix nebula uh using a one shot this is done
with a Sony a7s and I had that camera modified so you could cool it down
I stretched this one pretty big uh if you really look at it you can start seeing some banding horizontal banding
in this area but uh this is just learning and then this is the Crab
Nebula this is my Observatory um nice that's awesome the moon was actually
setting which was creating the shadows as let me back this thing up you can see it
again that's awesome you got you got to take a picture of your Observatory with the Milky Way rising over behind there
you go got it there it is I'll have to do that again uh uh and of course when I
did this I didn't have the wall up here and you can see there's a light back here that it's actually a street light
um but there are some trees to the South and as the moon was setting it looks
like it's like you know where the Saddles come from but um it was fun
putting it together that's that's really awesome Rod that is really spectacular I've had
fun building it it's been fun doing astronomy in general and
uh I'm just glad you didn't drop that Dome on yourself or something well you know what I the years
I lived in Huntsville and was uh participating in bbass right I really
really enjoyed the speakers and relationships you have with people but after I moved to Miller's Ferry as soon
as I retired you know that kind of stopped so I'm kind of all on my own so
uh thanks to the pandemic we have zoom and I've been able to uh become part of
bbass through zoom and we want to keep it like that too Rod because uh you know
you could you you can make as much of a contribution to bbass where you are now as you can be in here because of Zoom
because of all these Zoom meetings yeah well uh thank you Vass for for doing
what you're doing and by the way uh don I've been talking with some folks down
here I may have another site located where y'all can come down oh yeah it's
it's on a hill it's one of the tallest Hills in the county uh it's on some land uh used for
hunting and it's probably a little bit darker than where I'm at because it's north of here so it's could could be
really good and dark I'm supposed to go out and take a look at it probably sometime next week oh wow that's I'll
let you know the results of that we found we found a spot near pineapple which is not too far from where you are
it's like about a 20 or 30 minute drive from from where you are and we were we were Ser we were seriously getting ready
to go down there and do stuff and then suddenly you know all the co stuff hit uh but you know we were go down there
last March and and start having like little uh at least exploratory missions to go
down there and see what it was like um we have another member Michael Fedor and
he was uh he has family down in in uh in southern Louis Southern uh Alabama and
uh he stopped off there and he met the mayor and it turns out this plot of land that I was thinking about is owned by
the mayor and he said yeah sure come on down so he was like
free use of his land don't worry about it yeah just come on down I was like wow we can't go you I think I was thinking
we should uh give him some some money anyway or you know I don't know buy him a six-pack or something whatever
whatever he's into just uh well you probably don't want to buy him a sixpack if he's the mayor that I'm thinking of
oh really well yeah there's a lot of uh people I don't
know questionable people down there I'm not questionable it's just that they may not necessarily
emide okay well I wasn't thinking of a br I was thinking of a thank you know but no no not a bribery I talk
about inbi inbi yeah okay yeah well you know remote remote
loc rural Alabama is another world it's not Huntsville well it is and one needs
to be cautious where one goes uh yeah because it is so rural yeah uh this
particular place that I'm looking at is a hunting club and familiar with the members in the club yeah um they don't
believe it's going to be a problem for us to go up there the only exception to that would be during hunting season
which usually the first weekend before Thanksgiving through about the first to
second weekend in February uh but the rest of the time it should become available that's uh that's
great that's great yeah I'm hoping we can get down there uh you know we we go out to other places but it's like a 5H
hour drive I think somewhere down near pineapple or wherever it would be it would cuts it down to like three three
and a half hours or something like that so um we really appreciate having you uh
having you on uh rod that's really fantastic I've seen that presentation twice now and I you know I pick up more
this time than I did last time so it was really really good to to have you on again well I'm glad to be here be be a
part um our next speaker is Gary usab and uh there he is bottom center on
my screen you ready to go Gary I'm ready to go can you hear yeah I can hear you
um yeah I met Gary at the at the Sig he was showing up at the Sig with his wife
Siri and uh the two of them were showing up and uh and uh Gary brought his
telescope and he would he brought it up a few times I think and every time he brought it up you had something else
that You' done to it and so I guess you're gonna kind of give us an overview of this and show us what you've done and
uh and I don't know if you've done anything more it looks like it might be a little different than it was before but uh anyway here's uh here's Gary uh
with his uh with his telescope okay let's see if I can uh share the screen
here and go into presentation I think you got it Gary there you
go okay have we got
it all right let's get it up yeah we're we're good Gary we're good okay so I'm
going to talk a little bit oh there it goes um as my astronomical Journey so
far and um I would start with by expressing my astonishment to even be
interested in the area um on account of I've spent most of my life in chemistry
biophysics and medical Diagnostics and I credit my granddaughter for this um she's our
12-year-old astrophysicist and uh so for me my goals
in this have been to just ease into this as a hobby and see how far I really want
to take it um and what I can do and what I can't do considering that I'm starting
from a cold start um and essentially to get started
what I did was I bought one of these it's an 8 in dob and after all people
have been using ordinary telescopes for centuries and doing really wonderful
things so I thought I'd done pretty well to get started
but it was Heavy it was I knew it was going to be 50 PBS when I bought it and
then when I took it out into the yard it was too short it wrecked all over creation there is not a single spot in
our backyard that is level um I had trouble finding bright
objects and um going for dsos with the with a system as it started just wasn't
possible and then to none of your surprise the operation is
counterintuitive the objects drifting off to the left and down and you have to move the telescope the opposite way and
every time I moved it I moved it too far and lost the object and had to start over again so I wasn't
entirely sure I'd done well but I've never used an instrument exactly the way
the manufacturer originally intended and I've never met an instrument I couldn't
improve so here we go well the problem was it was too heavy
and it was too short so I borrowed the ideas that I saw at Vass and put wheels
on it and that now made it relatively easy to move on a hard
surface um and then I put a platform on and that at least let me uh let me stand
up so I could look at the thing instead of trying to be somewhere between a knel and a
squat um and then eventually added uh you threaded legs so that I could
actually work with uh with leveling the the the pl platform um and then it rocked you
literally it would move uh a foot and a half or you know at least six or seven
inches as it rocked from one place to another there isn't anywhere in our backyard that's level so I borrowed
another idea out of uh out of Vass and put in a concrete pad and at least it's
out of the mud and it's mostly level so that's a good start and said
well how do I find an object let alone you know bright things let alone
dsos and for me identifying constellation is work and I get better
at it every month but I'm really not good at it and after all Captain Kirk didn't didn't warp into Sagittarius he
warped to coordinates and so with stellarium and uh yeah in my homemade
asouth coordinate ring I can at least find the object more or less
easily and then uh um I added a digital inclinometer and um you know that began
to uh to get me to the point where I could at least get close to an object
and uh and and be able to take a look at it and if you're going to measure you
need to start with level um and vertical so you know the uh the
legs that I finally put into the system um have the biggest uh you know threaded
rods that I can buy at lows and one of the biggest um Wing nuts that I've ever
used and then on the um uh altitude axis
um I modified the dobsonian um you know plywood base to give me an adjustable um
adjustable height and so I can actually make sure that the bases level in the
tube is vertical and as long as I've um worked with the laser cator I have the
mechanics and the Optics properly aligned okay so now we can uh we can
start to measure but if you're going to measure you have to
calibrate um no surprise I've been doing that all my life but the problem is what do I use for a standard
well the altitude's easy um once you've got it level the inclinometer is good to plus minus 2
degrees in the middle of the range and it turns out every level I've got in the
house agrees with that one so um setting the um zero altitude is
easy setting the asouth has been a giant pain in the
neck um eventually I found that the iPhone has a theodolite app and um I can
use my old army Compass to figure out the north south line and being totally
paranoid I used a third method which originates with the Babylonians and the
Egyptians and the Mayans you have to look at the U uh the length of the
Shadow to define the north south line at solar noon and So eventually again I
borrowed an idea from a quick visit up to the Swanson and mounted a calibration point
on the back of the house um and so I've got 181 degrees uh
pretty well zeroed in and I can incorporate that into uh into our
software so now I'm in a position to uh to level to measure and to calibrate and
I can begin to find um a uh a celestial object and any
of them and incorporated into our into my uh electronics a fudge Factor so that
even if I don't get it quite right I can make an adjustment by turning one of the
knobs okay the operations counterintuitive and all the movements
are clunky I never really solved that problem until I got to be interested in
robot cars and it turns out that the robot cars contain
really nice instructions for how to go about solving that problem and there's a
very good resource on the web called dronebot workshop and yeah the explanations there
are not only clear um but uh yeah there are enough pictures in there even for me
and so I've uh Incorporated um some small stepper Motors um aruo Nanos um
t6600 stepper drivers and a bunch of homemade gears um to uh to build a an
electronic control system and essentially what I can do then is um uh
now if I want the image in the uh in the eye piece to go up I turn my altitude up
to the right and if I want it to go the other way down to the left as no longer
messing around with the uh yeah with the thinking like a dentist and looking through mirrors and doing the opposite
same thing works um uh on altitude and asouth so actually I'm uh I'm kind of
pleased with how that worked and because it's a stepper motor I can throw a switch and change the speed
range with this thing um I'm able to hold Jupiter at the top of the ecliptic
in the in the ey piece for over 20 minutes and for me right now that's
enough um that's enough for me to find it look at it you know sketch roughly
where the moons are change the filter show it to my wife and move on to
whatever else interests me for that particular night so I'm actually sort of pleased with
it um the homemade gears are uh are um
I'd like to say they are an original idea but I borrowed them from an instruction that I found on the web and
they're literally nothing more than the GG timing belts that we all have in our
um you in our printers and our uh various kinds of printers at this point
all mounted on a plywood base um plywood that I bought at
loves and to my surprise they've been uh
remarkably um sturdy you the ones that you're looking at have been yeah in pretty light use
but they're yeah they've been in use for better than a year and I haven't stripped off even one of the Nubs yet I
was afraid that was GNA be my big problem so you're basically I'm sorry uh
Gary to interrupt you I just I'm just really interested and what you've done here the so this this belt you're using
it as a gear on the motor right is that what you're doing I I'm sorry I'm I'm
not picking up the words you're using the uh that belt
to go around the plywood Circle to act like a gear like a ring gear that's that's correct okay that's cool um and
I'd love to say that I that was my idea but it wasn't it was on the web and I
stole it shamelessly still say it's your idea uh Gary you're just a
liar okay um so the altitude adjustments
really did um did give me a give me a a few surprises I had my Nifty gear and
hooked it up to my drive Motors and was immediately disappointed because the uh
um I couldn't get enough tension on the on the gear to actually lift the mirror
off the paase and so um I went to my I I gave up and said well you know what when
I use this thing I grab it with my hand and pull it down and so and that moves
actually too well so in that case I uh I made myself a little bitty
winch and um used 350 PB test fishing
line to uh you know to um be the driving system and U it works really well and I
I just recently uh you listened to the BBS beginners course and discovered that
this brand new solution that I I was feeling really good about is actually extremely old and was one of the first
systems used to uh uh in some of the oldest and antiqu telescopes to deal
with altitude but it actually works astonishingly well so I now have our jino Nanos
controlling the um digital uh digital position and by adding
encoders um I can actually get a digital position and uh and begin to know um
electronically where uh where my system is pointing it's um you know the the
encoders of mine of mine are nowhere near like the ones on the Swanson mine
are the $5 cheap encoders and and they work pretty
well um I'm beginning to find their limitations but um I'm uh I'm in a
position then to know where where the system is pointed to well under a tenth
of a degree now that's nowhere near as good as the uh the arc seconds that I've
been hearing about tonight but it is good enough you to get the object um
that I'm looking for somewhere near um the uh the center of the viewing area G
I have a question uh on the base where you have the white ring that setting
Circle can you rotate that to align with North when your telescope is poed that's
correct and so using that uh that spot on the on the house that I showed um and
uh um I'll have to go back to to show it to you but there's actually a pointer
right here now that pointer turns out to be a sharpened pencil and it points at
the uh at the position um there and it's actually good to maybe a a degree or
two and then uh once once I've got a a celestial object in the in the center of
the scope um and go to stellarium and get their uh their coordinates and
readjust that and it's it's astonishingly good um it's limited only
by um the uh the quality of the calibration of the person who made
it so so um having put the encoders on the system um I sort of opened the door
for myself to uh go to and I've been thinking about that or some kind of
drive to system with uh with a planetarium program attached or a whole
bunch of other possibilities but I'm actually kind of excited about the fact that I've done it
myself and when I decid I need a new feature I know where I can put it in or
um just rip out what I had and start over again so and now you know why someone um
on this call calls my telescope a Franken
scope but it's not scary um it has eliminated the worst uh
limitations of the dobsonian um it's ready for observations
I've been rolling it out on some of the nice nights that we've had and looked at things that wouldn't be a challenge for
any of the systems I've been looking at tonight but they were for me before I did this G are those binoculars attached
to the back of the scope say again are the binoc those are uh those are piles
of washers uh that make the back heavy compared to the front because I'm using a winch to pull it so the binoculars are
sitting on the desk yeah you know these are literally oh that's that's just a pair of binoculars that are sitting
behind it oh okay okay fasten to it yeah they're not fastened to it pointing the
wrong way say again I say they're not fastened to it and pointing not not yet
not yet and anyway so that's been my astronomical Journey I've got a long way
to go to catch up with all of the things I've been hearing tonight thank you very much said this to
you before Gary I'll say it again you need to take this up to stalhane and enter it in the competition up there
yeah yeah that's amazing absolutely amazing it looks like
a neat thing to do all we could do is got to do is get rid of the pandemic you know it looks like it's staring at me
Gary is that that's my imagination though right it looks like there's two little
you know sets of eyes staring at me yes it does it does
then there are a few more eyes on the top that was that was flipping awesome thank you so much for doing this um
there's a there's a comment from the chat um from clear lights 58 he said he
had a problem and rather than buying what was on the Shelf he came up with his own method to solve his problem
sometimes the building the creation is more fun than what than what you are
using for that's that's the way it works for me yeah this sounds like something that
oral and Wilbur Wright would have done they ran into that's right if you ever
have a chance to go to the museum and read about and understand what he went through it's absolutely
amazing thank you congratulations Gary yeah congratulations man okay Don can
you take it back yeah yeah uh that was uh like I say Gary that was uh that is just awesome I love I love seeing what
you've done and the way you've done it because it's you've done everything wrong and yet it works you know what I
mean I mean none of this none of this is what any you would never find this in a
book you know what I mean this is not what anybody would ever recommend and yet it's just great to watch it's just
great to look at it I mean it's it's uh it's the sort of thing that makes this stuff fun you know coming up you know
you know because you're you're not the there there's two approaches to it like there's some people that want to build
all their own equipment right and and then there's some some people who want to use the equipment they don't want to build it they go out they buy it and
they just want to use it and do stuff with it but but a lot for for some people and myself included I like to
build stuff okay in fact in fact it's almost it's almost a challenge because I
also want to use it but but I want to build I like building stuff too so uh
you know I look at that and and it's like you're solving problems you say well how can I fix this and you're
solving problems and you're doing it in a way that no nobody else has ever done ever
before and it's it's and few would want to it's pure creativity and that's and
that's really you know why do you do this stuff well that's one of the reasons is because it engages your mind
and you have you have taken this thing and you have looked through this and you've come up with your own solution for every single detail of one of these
problems and it's just it's amazing to watch this stuff it's just great um so are we back to live Imaging
I think uh don did you have some have something you wanted to show us um hi Don yeah sure I think maybe uh
what I should do for those that maybe have just joined us is kind of share my screen and just do a quick review of the
equipment that we're using tonight um so that we can uh just Orient ourselves so
I'll do that real quick and then we'll go to the live view but um you know it's not all about
the hardware sometimes there's software as well yeah so uh the three software programs that you'll see working in this
live uh sequence here I use the the skyx I know someone I heard a different
U program earlier but I use the skyx to navigate around the sky and to control
my Mount but I use PhD phd2 for guiding it's uh by the way it's freeware so if
you're out there and you're looking at trying to get started in astrophotography here's a nice little software program that you can pick up
for free it's easy to use uh it integrates well with sequence generator Pro and other um software programs so I
would recommend it and then I use sequence generator Pro to fully automate the Imaging session and I can do a lot
with that uh if you just recently joined us the scope I'm using tonight is this explore scientific ed127 it's a
triplet um I would characterize this as a telescope that gives you a lot of bang for the buck and I'm not saying that
because of our sponsor tonight I'm I'm saying it because it's probably one of the best value telescopes on the market
today what you get for what you pay um using a guide camera here this is a load
Starlight Express load star2 X2 guider with a QSI 660 monochrome camera here in
the back you see the eagle controller up here that's controlling
everything um a little bit on the uh the scientif the explore scientific I wanted to walk folks through this and kind of
show the differences between various configurations and Fields of view but I use two Optical tubes in my
astrophotography and uh after buying the explore scientific mount for the eclipse here a few years ago and then trying it
out uh under the night sky I I opted to stay with it rather than going with a like something like a tah hosi or
something like that I to be honest with the Optics were just Stellar so it gives me a large field of view I get I get
crisp Optics and crisp fig photos back from me you I'll show that to you here in a second uh I got optimal resolution
with this camera telescope resolution telescope and camera combination for the skies that we have here in Huntsville so
you can see with with this combination I've got a resolution at binning one of 1.41 Arc seconds per pixel and I'm
picking up just about a degree of the sky and so this is what a uh view of M13
might look like in uh in this uh setup the last thing I would tell you is you
know sometimes as we get older liftting telescopes can can talk to your back and
uh again having a a refractor is uh is easy to set up so what kind of images
can you get with something like this uh here's one of the first shots I took with a um with the zwo camera through
the es127 this was a one shot Pro color camera uh and the exposure time here was
about 2.1 hours I would say to anyone that's out there listening to us if you have any questions on what I'm talking
about use the chat function and if I don't see the chat I'm sure Scott will remind me yeah but uh androma is up
tonight and so if you are out there trying to get a a photo of it here's what it might look like if you're looking through something similar to
what we're using tonight um something I shot here a few months ago this is the Eagle Nebula you
can see clearly the detail and The Pillars of Creation here so you don't need a big scope to do that uh this is a
5 inch refractor and it picked it up quite well as you can see very good detail and some of the extremities out
here in the Eagle Nebula you see a lot of the gas features being picked up by only two you know just under three hours
of EXP closure time um here's an object that maybe not is not so well known it's the uh it's
the fish head nebula this object is about 6,000 light years from Earth it's in the constellation sephus and I
captured it this past June with the es127 uh and you can see here I'm up 15
hours of integration time you're using a monochrome camera here with narrow band filters and you see the exposure times
for each of those filters so all in all um very good performance from a
relatively um uh exceptional telescope I'll just put
it that way and then finally the lizard nebula I shot this last summer as well 13 hours
of exposure this object is a little bit dimmer 7.2 as the magnitude but again 5
inch refractors is clearly big enough to pick this object up you see the color here the detail some of these gas clouds
Rich Starfield here beautiful yeah um here's the other configuration
that I'm not using tonight but if you're looking to go big we have a local telescope manufacturer here called AGD
Optical they make a pretty good telescope it's a higher-end telescope um I shot this with that telescope I'm
sorry this is a a picture off the Internet of what that um object would look like through that telescope and the
camera that I have on it so you can see I'm a little bit more zoomed in than what I was with the refractor but again
um good good images this is the dearl Galaxy group I shot this in in August
and again only two hours of exposure time so I guess my point is with
astrophotography uh some objects require long exposures but you can get good good quality data um from uh other telescopes
with just a couple of hours of exposure time so don't get discouraged out there with that overview I'm G to now take you
to a live view of our telescope that we have set up here and while we were
talking the telescope slewed over to well look at here we're doing a we're doing a focus
routine so let me give just kind of give you a quick snapshot while we're doing this this Focus routine can you guys
still see my telescope yeah see me okay yes I had to minimize the the chat room to see this
but what let me just give you a quick um overview here of this dashboard this software program is sequence generator
Pro and it automates this the Imaging session flawlessly uh if you look at
what I have in full disclosure here I want to I want to come clean on something a while ago we were looking at
the Flaming star nebula and I was wondering why um the Oxygen Channel
wasn't showing up and the reason is is because I didn't have this little box checked right here so uh attention to
detail is something that can get us all into trouble but uh for what we're
shooting now we're going to look at here in just a second um I'm shooting three
uh channels I'm shooting uh 10 minute subframes for each one and we're going to look through uh of the hydrogen
Channel sulfur and then of course oxygen starting here in the O left at
the top uh this is an image histogram so you can see um just a little bit over uh
into the uh the graph here from the left that's that's a pretty good looking histogram once you stack the images and
stretch them uh it'll look pretty good of course this is a a stretch version of the histogram I can uh track my tracking
here The Guiding and if I go over to phd2 and look at that uh looks pretty good I'm at the total
A8 Arc seconds per pixel which is well below my 1.41 uh image scale so um still going to
have nice cryst Stars this gives me a progress here in the lower left of uh the overall
sequence we're looking at the sequencer here where you set up you know your exposure times bending and that sort of
thing I'm GNA minimize that here real quick hey I have a question about the
screen you just had up there with your camera details you're looking at what 20
hours worth of images on which image uh the camera
detail you just had up that you were uh it's the
uh we had the camera details where you're showing what you were going to uh image ha S2 and O3 ah okay uh you're
doing what 10 minutes 50 exposures that's what like eight
hours yeah so let me just comment on that for a second um I'm going to do 25 hydrogen exposures
and then I'm gonna do 50 each on the sulfur and the oxygen you re the reason I do that Rod is the hydrogen signal is
so much stronger and the camera does a pretty good job the telescope does a pretty good job of picking those wavelengths up and so I can I can back
off the hydrogen and save myself some time but but you're correct it's uh you can't get all those in one night no no
and with the weather the way it is you'll you'll do this over several nights or several weeks the good thing
about sequence generator Pro let me just is when you go into the program uh
you'll you'll call up this view of the image and this red line here uh is the field of view that my particular
telescope and and Camera combination will give me and you can Center that up and the the power of that is when you
come back a week or two later or even a month later uh the program will grab
this uh this parameter here and uh guide the mount to this exact position and
plate solve it and and and set it up for you so there's no wow stacking errors yeah that's great yeah I'm working on a
12 panel Mosaic using that very technique and because I had never done
mosaics before but I want to learn how to do it uh using picks insight and that
is a very useful so you can come back the following night um and just pick up where you left
off you can yes I'll do you have to restart sequence generator Pro or you
can you pick off pick off where you where you resumed and left off it will remember at at the end of a
session each night I just hit a file save I'll just do it right now I'm going to go file save the sequence and it
knows that it's got 15 of 25 on this channel and so on and so forth so yeah it'll pick right back up it will start
at the top again but it'll it knows where it's at and it will remember that that's good I haven't done that yet so
thank you oh no worries um the the windows that I that I
mostly pay attention to frankly are the guiding and if you'll see over here I
have the temperature control on my camera I'm at minus5 ambient to to cool the the the chip down and this is the
thing that makes SGP so powerful and there are other programs like this is that it integrates all of your
components into a single window and you're not kind of down here hunting and pecking for different software programs
to control various components on your computer it's all integrated into one window for you and it makes the managing
the session a lot easier okay so with that I'm going to go
back up here and uh so there's our latest view of a very iconic um
uh object you see in this particular field of view the hsee head nebula which is a dark nebula over here and to the
left is the is the flam is the flame nebula and this bright star here is the
leftmost star in Orion's Belt called alnac
um we're picking up a lot of the uh Reflection from uh this light source
behind the nebula here and it almost looks like the flame is being blown out but I think in process processing I'll
be able to back that off a little bit um this star right here is putting out a lot of energy and exciting the gas uh
here in in this area of the Sky by the way if you're not familiar with the Orion Nebula it's the prominent winter
constellation and that area of the sky is a very active area of star formation and there's just a lot going on on that
part of the sky as you can see from a lot of the detail we're picking up here uh at the top of the of the image some
of these these gas clouds that you can see here it's just a there's just a lot going on in that part of the
sky yeah I think the histogram causes that Distortion because you only have two controls for your
histogram yeah I I think given the quality of this data when I go to stack
this and process I say stack I use pix insight and I think the term they use is integrate but when I go to uh put all
the frames together and process it I'll should get a pretty good image from this I will post post it to the uh Vass web
page or provide it to Don Martin he can he can post it there for others I also assume that U all the presentations that
we're giving tonight Don will will make available to uh explore scientific and
they would be available for uh anyone watching the the broadcast tonight well actually explore scientific
has recorded this entire thing and it's it's going to be uh automatically it's it's streamed live to YouTube I think is
that what you said Scott yeah yes yep but if someone wants a copy of our presentations I'm sure that U I'm
willing to make mine available I'm guess I'm guessing other presenters would so if someone wants to copy that let us
know the uh uh you know this program is being um streamed live also to the uh VB
or Vass uh Facebook page that's right and so the admins of that Facebook page
can actually just go and download the whole video so it'll be archived there
okay wow that's great yeah the last thing I would show you on this screen here is in the very the bottom left is
there there's a running dialogue and if you were watching that while we were talking that the system actually ran my dither dithering is a a function where
you're moving the mount slightly to uh enable you to take out hot and cold pixels when you do processing so we
finished that routine and now we're doing another frame which you're looking out now is the let me get this right I
messed this up last time
so this is the Oxygen Channel you can see that right now uh my my take is the oxygen is going to
be the weakest channel so I'll have to work on that in in
postprocessing this is the hydrogen Channel very bright very
strong and there's sulfur and right now we're working and you can see in the lower right hand corner right now the
telescope is using the oxygen filter to shoot a 10minute sub for the Oxygen
Channel the last thing I'll show you before we take turn it back to Dawn and take questions is I'm going to show you
the U skyx this is my navigation tool that I
use to navigate around the sky this uh yellow position here shows the position of the telescope relative to the
sky um I would show you when I did the polar alignment
the telescope builds a model of the night sky and right now we are at 6.91
arccs off the north Celestial pole so um we're getting good accuracy we look at
the guiding uh some of the seeing conditions that we see are causing some of these pertubations in the in the
guiding so very good Imaging session I don't know where we're going to go as we
get through the night but I would put this out here Don Martin and and Scott the spirit of star party as other astral
photographers come on if if our audience wants to uh slew around and take a look at a different object in the night sky
their favorite object uh let me know and I'm willing to do that for them so back to you guys okay so you're hearing that
on the chat um uh you know uh he uh he's ready to uh to go to
any object of your choice there I've actually imaged a different
object also um I went to m33 and uh did a f minute subframe on it
um I can show that if you're
interested so that's that's a f minute image wow that's nice unguided with the
telescope Drive master and I was zoom in you you'll see how nice the stars
are oh yeah tight a really good um performance with
that and um so overall the systems working pretty
well tonight the polar alignment is pretty much dead on there's
no trailing at all in declination which we would get sometimes when we point to different areas of the sky we'll get um
we'll get some declination drift because the polar alignment's off a tiny bit depending on the
how how long the imag is and how long we take images so this is this is not my
typical type of Imaging that I do I do a lot of asteroid work and some exoplanet
work where I'm taking uh you know I'll I'll set up for
various asteroids across the sky and imaging them and then ALS so for
exoplanet work I'll do a sequence of like four hours of Imaging uh every
minute and or two minutes depending on how bright the star is and then I'll uh
I'll have to do a peer flip in the middle of that I don't have I'm not fully automated I like to operate the
telescope by hand I'm kind of in between that way I could the sequences the image
sequences are pretty are automated but in terms terms of automating a peer flip and stuff like that I I like to monitor
the process and do that myself and then get back on the target I just like to
operate the telescope I guess that way you can avoid any kind of telescope
crash oh yeah and early on in the development of the control system I had an issue with that with the ascom driver
where it couldn't calculate the side of Pier correctly um and it would get turn so if
you if you were to slew if you were to track this thing can track past the Meridian for about an
hour and then so I had an early on problem where in the ascom driver it
didn't realize that so it so it would point the telescope to the ground when it would went back to the object because
it would thought it was on the other side of the pier and uh so that's one of those little details that you have to
work out when you build a control system like this Gary I totally agree with you there are there are kns when I don't
automate the Imaging session because it's it's kind of therapeutic to sit out there at 2 o'clock in the morning and
and do your Marine flip and then reenter it and get things going and you know it's very peaceful and quiet so I I hear
what you're saying yeah well we we do have animals in our backyard like coyotes we I can hear them hauling all
night long yeah right right so that's that's kind of what I
like to do that's the way I operate then the other thing about this system this our whole uh the maride remote observ
has meant to be a teaching facility a Hands-On learning uh uh system not so much a I
mean we've done some automation but not a whole lot we're used to operating telescope handson and that's how we
teach our students to run the telescopes it's it's for that purpose that uh I
maintain my skills at that you know I was I'm I don't know if any you
know you guys may not know but I've retired I'm a retired nuclear instrumentation and control engineer here so I I fully understand the the
pitfalls of Automation and you I always say you can't automate stuff too much because
then you forget how it works you know yeah right and then when you have a problem
you gotta sit there and figure it out again right like one of those Star Trek episodes where the people are inside of
spacecraft but they don't know it and they don't know how it works it just takes care of them so Jerry did you did
you develop the kiss system keep Simple the kiss oh keep it simple
yeah simple and stupid yeah well I try to be as practical as I can and example
of that in the in the control system the PMC control system I didn't include a
way to do uh periodic air correction okay I I left that feature
out for a very specific reason uh and people got on my case about not having permanent periodic air
correction I said well there's there's two things you know periodic you know
permanent periodic correction does not correct your your error 100% so you're going to have to guide and in my mind if
you're going to guide then you're layering one system on top of another that does basically the same thing and
it's not it's not good engineering philosophy in my mind to do that so I
say well do the best you can and then use the system so that it will respond
the best it can to guiding and that's what my system does that's why it's
called PMC which is precision motion control and it's got very fine
resolution in terms of uh in terms of the correction of capability of the the
control system so you're saying that the periodic error correction uh control the
idea is to take out any kind of eccentricity or imperfection in the gears right but if you're using a guide
scope well then there's that it doesn't make any difference you're gonna take it does the same thing yeah twice you're
doing the same thing twice twice right you're layering one system on top of other and it's just I don't think it's
good engineering practice for that those systems let me just add to that conversation last night I was running
periodic error correction on my Mount and struggling with the guiding and I thought it was seeing at first but then I went over and turned off the PEC and
The Guiding improved so in fact tonight as we speak I'm not running the periodic error correction routine on on the mount
I have it turned off as an experiment maybe as an experiment maybe we can next time we go live I'll turn it on and we
can watch what happens yeah depending upon how those systems have set up they can actually work against each other
that's right make things worse they have to be tuned as a as a system the tuning
is on the system level not on the individual component level and that's what you run into there
oh yeah so so so in a sense it's like you've got uh two people with their
hands on the steering wheel exactly and and maybe ex maybe they're not and but
but maybe they are but maybe they're not and so you just don't know what's gonna happen right you got one guy that's got
a inside his brain he says okay I know where to turn he's got got his eyes closed but he's got this memorization
he's memorized which way to turn the wheel and then youve got the other guy that's watching the road that's trying to fight against
him that's basically what you have you got a blind guy driving and another guy
that's watching the road trying to counteract his moves and who
wins Whoever has the biggest battery is the win that's right so so I suggest I
suggest an experiment Don let me let me share my screen let's in the spirit of live star
party uh let's try try an experiment I'm going to share my screen
and bring back up my telescope and right now my total periodic error is 73
arccs I'm going to go over to um the
skyx and I'm going to turn on on I'm in the wrong window I'm having trouble
seeing here I'm going to turn on the Periodic
error routine you'll see it come up I've got to retrieve the uh the data so you see now
the corrections there and this check box apply pick is check so I'm now running
the periodic error routine I'll close this we'll go back to uh phd2 I'm going
to clear that out we were at0 72 right we'll give it a couple minutes and then we'll see where we go I'll give you an
update hey Don what are you what are you looking yeah where's 72 where's it's the small box right can you see my cursor y
it's right here you see the air broken out for ra and deck and then the total
and the uh total over here is an arc seconds so right now I'm at 049 but it's
just now getting started and the routine has just kicked in so we'll give it a couple minutes let this graph get all
the way over here to the far right and then I'll give you guys a shout out to what the new uh
errors on the uh on on the mount wow I'll stop sharing I'll go back to
you well I'm uh I'm exhausted this has been an
overwhelming night this has really been a great thing uh I think we're we're out of speakers I don't know if we've got
anybody else who wants to talk
well I think that's it I think it is too I'm glad I'm glad Gary called his scope
to Franken SK because I was behind his back and I was afraid I was going to offend him so I'm glad I'm glad oh by
the way Gary uh what did you get your PhD
in I'm guessing something like chemicals or something you're muted Gary something stupid like that Gary oh Gary there we
go okay gotta punch all the right switches my PhD is in biophysics out of
MIT in the last century oh wow MIT biophysics that's pretty that's
amazing yeah that's amazing yeah I only got into astronomy to keep up with my
granddaughter develop it's like I was saying earlier you know VBS is just an amazing group of people we've got really
really smart people you know you saw Jeff delmus on earlier what he's doing with that thing and then Jen is won this
won this award and she's done so much Outreach and teaches math we've just got some really remarkable people it's just
really uh uh an amazing group of people and and they're and they're and they're nice people they're not mean they're not
clickish they're very welcoming so it's really it's really uh it's really an
honor to be associated with these people it's it's really an amazing group of people and we've got these big projects
going on we got these really cool projects going on yes have a great group and uh it was a
awesome night with the Von BR Astronomical Society that's awesome are we gonna are
we gonna cut out now get to see Don's experiment first before we go let see what Don oh you get sure yeah there's a
comment here from the chat here it says I think the thing that drives me crazy about all this technology for astronomy
is that there really is not three or four ways or more to do something there are there is a thousand ways right and
it's like it's like the wild west which which is great for sales but not for my
pocketbook yeah right it shouldn't have to be as hard as it is to make all this stuff work I mean I love learning but I
shouldn't have to go to YouTube videos or forums to make things work just an
opinion oh that's in the chat that's in the chat also Norm Hughes says why
doesn't uh uh he wanted to know uh don why you don't guide with the sky 10 if
you're using that program for Mount control um it's my I just I'm not
familiar with the program with with the product you know there's just so much out there on the market that that you
can go to and what I have works for me and it works quite well and so what I do
is I focus my my attention on areas where I need to improve right now that's on that's on
cameras right okay got it do we have a way of knowing what the uh what the
audience was tonight how many people were in the audience well we can see
um I think you're going to see a now we're broadcasting on several different
channels okay it doesn't do a combined um uh you
know count uh when you're simoc casting like this
um and I let's see
I'm just curious AO yeah you will I will report I'll I'll give you a report on
that afterwards right now we're not getting we're not getting a count all right okay I was just curious um yeah
but we had about 30 shares uh uh from explore scientific's Facebook page we
had from your page um
let's see if I can see any more details this is just amazing what kind of number do you see there
Don Jerry back to your point um we started at0 72 correct yeah I think so
we're up to 089 and and it was 0. n earlier so it jumped up you
know significantly the thing about periodic air correction with the worm is
that you know I only found that it's like 60% effective because each turn of
the worm is going to be a slightly different cycle and you know 60 if you got a
really good mount an expensive one you might get up to 70 to 80% correction because it's a very
consistent uh ring gear yeah and actually go ahead I said I've actually
done some modeling on the air and a mechanical modeling on what causes the
air and how you can calculate the PE based on the physical dimensions in the configuration of the worm and wheel
and uh it's kind of interesting to really study that problem how does how
does that relate when you're a belt drive system versus a gear drive
system so you got spur gear Spur Gears are typically a lot noisier you know
belt drives you have the sponginess of the belt to absorb a lot of the little ticks and burs that's the thing that
drove me crazy about Auto guiding on the early Mount I had it was a bur gear mount it wasn't belt drives like today's
modern mounts are so you had these little ticks and burs on the Spur Gears
that caus these spikes in the image you know you can't correct that with the auto guide no matter how well you do and
that's one thing I found about the telescope Drive Master early on is that it was fast enough to correct those little little Burrs and ticks on a spur
gear system but in terms of like for example our Mount we have a belt drive
on the PMC for the exos 2 Mount and also on the exos 100 which is an inexpensive
uh really high highly capable amount that we have uh you've got you can see
the error terms when you're guiding show up in different periods one is two or
three of the major periods is the fundamental of course which on that small amount is a 600 second fundamental
uh because it's only got 144 teeth so it's a 10minute worm period and then you
got the pulley which is a 4 and a half to1 gear ratio so you got 133 second
period that you can see I use a program called PEC prep to look at the uh to
look at these different ER terms that's a nice program to give you good analysis tool to look at these terms and then I
you can actually see each of these uh the small pulley on the motor is a 10 to pulley uh and you
can see the the tooth the tooth to Toth interaction at a 13 second period where
the teeth are engaged as it turns and it's kind of cool to see that little bit of detail and you can
tune you know the belt tension affects the total periodic error or the corrected error I guess I should say the
total RMS that you get after after you guide and I've worked with a lot of
customers systems I've probably got about 30 different customers that have sent me their PHD logs to analyze and to
correct their to help tune their mounts in that way but yes so the gear system
does in insert other other um periods of
error uh that that the auto guiding will correct but you still have a little bit of residual left that that you'll
see thank you okay uh someone did have a question
about what nebular filters you were using Don uh I'm using astrodon filters
and they the narrow band are five nanometers they are par focal so for those of out there looking to buy
filters uh my advice is buy par focal it makes focusing a lot easier right that's
right clear lights 58 says I love these star parties especially on nights like I
have here where it's very windy and hazy I also love seeing how many people are doing amateur astronomy or are are doing
amateur astronomy and uh how well they are how well they're doing it thanks again for
another great EXP experience and Bergman scooter says good night
so and I guess with that we're kind of getting to the point of wrap up um uh
we've been going for five a little over five hours now yeah a little over five hours long time
right almost like a real star party huh almost almost I've GNA say thank you
again Scott for helping us out with this this has just been an amazing experience guys thank you so much much um you know
we can we can always schedule to do another one uh you know I would love to
um you know be an advisor or assist if you're wanting to do these things on your own uh just to kind of let you know
uh some of the some of the broadcasting things that I've done but uh regret offering that
yeah just saying you may regret offering that Scott because no I don't regret it at all I don't regret it at all because
it's it adds to the Outreach uh uh capability of of clubs and organizations
and um um how enjoyable it really is so I'm tempted to join your club for sure
yeah we have we have a like I say really we got a lot of technical people and we've got a lot of people who are really
good at Outreach and and uh you know we we've also got you know Hun's also got a lot of natural stuff we're kind of rural
so we have the land trust for example and uh they do stuff during the day you
know hiking for birds and all this stuff looking at trees and birds and all that stuff and then at night they want us to
go up there so they can they can use their properties at night and see stars and so we do they do events where they
feature us and and you know I always like to point out that you know to people who like to hike and see birds
and trees and flowers and do all that stuff astronomy is the other side of nature it's the other half of nature
before we yeah before we sign I'm sorry I didn't mean to catch you off but before we sign off I something just came to me that I really would like I don't
mean to put Scott on the on the hot seat here but you know since we're broadcasting there's a lot of there's a
lot of amateur astronomers out there that yeah and I just talked to a guy last night who's who's trying to break
into Astro photography yeah and the focus is always on equipment and what's
the next technology that's coming out what what's the next thing that's going to hit the marketplace can you kind of
give our audience in in the guys just a quick summary what what we're working on
or or what what do I see as far as uh uh in the future you know well both I what
are you working on and what can we expect from explore scientific here you know in the near future or maybe the in
the near future you know I can't I can't there there's stuff I'm not ready to talk about yet okay that we're that we
are in stages of uh uh you know we
building out uh prototypes of and um research on and
also research and writing software for and stuff like that um uh it it's it's
you know but the future of of am you know amateur equipment is not really
hard to too hard to figure it out um uh it is a you know it's an integration of
all the various tools you know to kind of come together to work you know more or less seamless you
know so the thing that I resist as a as uh you know telescope maker is I resist
making equipment that's completely utterly automatic you know I um I the
the the the thing I don't want to build is what I call a ho in-one machine okay
let's say Don that you're a golfer and you say Hey gotot you Golf and I go well kind of you know and then you say
well meet me out at the golf course and you got your you got your clubs and everything and I come there and I set a
box down okay and and you tea off and then I put my box out there and I drop a
golf ball in there and it makes a hole in one okay every time every time and I do 18 of them you know and I'm buying
you know 18 rounds of drinks at the uh at the the bar
but but you you don't call me a golfer okay at the end of it you know because I
can't lose all right and uh and also I haven't learned anything about golfing
okay zero and so so I I like I like to have gear that
um um requires you to to learn how to do it I I see a companies like mine as
Outfitters you know and um uh and I see that I see the our clients as explorers
you know people who are actively doing that so uh when I say I resist making stuff
that's utterly automatic it is possible to make stuff utterly automatic and
you're starting to see some of it out in in the marketplace there's uh products like the unistellar okay there is uh the
U uh the stalina products that are out there you just set it down it's a little robot it goes and makes images okay
um yeah you do have to interact on a on an app okay and it's it's pretty cool
but um I can see someone exhausting that at one point okay they never get to
where you are Don okay they never get to where you are and you've learned a craft
and a skill and and it it doesn't take a terribly long time um but I would
imagine that you enjoyed every step of the way I I did and I can't tell I'm still learning
the reason I asked the question is this I I asked the question because I know that you guys I consider you guys a uh a
main player in in the marketplace and you provide a a a a wide range of
products for the hobbyist and I know that with the pandemic and the covid hitting lots of Supply chains many
companies are are struggling uh to provide product with Christmas coming up
you know there's always that because I talked to a lot of people that you know in the first question I always get hit
up with is what telescope should I buy and why you walk people through uh what
to look for and so uh just once again I want just Echo what Don said thank you
so much for thank you very much man you you uh um you're you're doing an amazing
job with your equipment and uh and your skills beautiful images um and I can
tell that you love it and so that that's that's wonderful uh I would encourage
you to um uh you know if you're ever so inclined I would love to Showcase some
of your images um we have if you're doing Outreach in astrophotography and
it's you know so if you have a following on social media or something like that or you're actually actively using your
your images uh to attract um uh people to uh towards astronomy and scientific
literacy then uh we have a program an ambassador program in the explore
Alliance love to uh make you a part of that so I think that's really great Rod
uh your Ingenuity and uh and skills and uh imagination on how to uh to take your
telescope gear to the next level is wonderful I mean you know you should have been in the telescope manufacturing
industry you know because it's guys like you that uh that keep you know that keep
a engineer ing team in our industry really uh engaged so I I am an engineer
at heart I enjoy engineering system we could tell that that's I could yeah I'm
working with a couple other Engineers that are really great helps to me because I'm I'm kind of a one man band
at the at explor scientific doing the vice president of engineering and doing the work on the control systems but this
to have feedback and and input from my peers you know that type thing I'm
working with a great guy his name is Wes McDonald he's a retired PhD engineer he
had his own company Building Systems like like this that we have and he's just a great resource for me to bounce
ideas off of and talk to and and actually do work with us to improve our
product so that's kind of what we do yeah but you know companies like ours
you know um I I don't know how much you know about my background but I was 21 years at meeting instruments and um and
then I did um 11 years uh with a company that transitioned from being called
Oceanside photographic Center to opt so we we were the ones that uh created the
opt part of that um you know but the uh
I always really enjoyed um interacting with uh users and interacting with the
engineers and uh seeing the whole thing come together so um uh you know and
companies like ours you know Celestron uh Tel all all the companies that are involved in this cottage industry which
is what it really is uh it is uh we're we're const we're always constantly
working on things to try to bring really like what used to be million dooll
technology down into something that can cost just a few thousand doar or a few hundred dollar you know um few hundred
value that that you could really get you know uh in a in an instrument uh is uh
you know is astounding I think and I I'm I I love being involved in it and um uh
I love uh interacting with our customers and uh when we can take the opportunity
to co-develop the product I I I enjoy that too our our go-to system the uh or
our Precision motion controller system uh has a community of hundreds of uh
users and developer you know um developers and themselves uh you know to
evolve our go-to system and so I really want you know after working for a
company that tried to patent every uh aspect of of uh uh a telescope go-to
system you know they had like 22 uh separate patents you know in and
and they they really uh did try to keep competition out um but you know most
go-to technology has already got prior art um and uh trying to lock out other
companies or other people as some sort of Competitive Edge is extremely
expensive because a patent is only as good as as you actually have to have
somebody copy you and you have to actually go to court and you actually have to win okay otherwise your cop your
patent isn't worth squat okay there's no patent police that's going to stop somebody from copying you you need to go
get the patent which is expensive in itself and then you need someone to copy you so that you can go and sue them okay
and you have to win all right so if you don't win or if you don't have the money
to sue them I'd say forget about patents okay so you know and and stick your
money back into satisfying your customers driving the market developing
new products you know because it costs Millions to protect it and keep and keep
your stuff secret if you want to keep it secret don't tell anybody if if you you know when you have
a patent you have to tell people how to how to build your stuff exactly you tell them all about
it otherwise it's you can't you can't what are you protecting you don't know you have to exactly exactly I I I I see
it as a uh uh the thing that's that is good about a patent if you're a company and as as a company matures it is a nice
asset and you can put real Financial figures to that asset and a
company needs assets right when you're a big company you can uh you could say we own 74,000 patents or something like
that yeah so if you're Boeing might be worth something but if you're it's worth a lot it's worth a lot but if you're a
smaller company it probably isn't then it sounds like you're saying yeah I don't know there's a point that there's
many things that people that run companies do for vanity uh
versus real benefit I think and um um so
you know if uh uh you know you might be proud that you have a patent okay if
you're an engineer it's really cool to have a patent you know you can say yeah I patented that you know so and it's up
on the wall it's cool um if uh but if you're a company you know and you're
patenting things uh you're really trying to keep things somehow uh secret or you know and it
just I I don't see it working in in our in our uh Community I would much rather
see amateur astronomers creating the not not companies telling what go-to means
okay but amateurs actually co-developing and creating what the next level of
go-to is and so that's that's the whole philosophy behind the pmca system so
right and and that's what the open goto communities about we open sourced as
much of the software as we can we can afford to do and we've made it uh our Command language open and people can
develop applications for our system with our help and they've got plenty of example code to do that uh and I don't
know if you you probably aren't familiar with it but the the fundamental design of the PMC system is different from all
the other Control Systems out there for the most part you know they've integrated in the hand controller both
the both the calculations for the astronom astronomy calculation the astronomical calculations and the motor
control system we've separated it we I've I separated that stuff out into components so the pmca control box is
actually just a motion control system it's not a u it does nothing about
astronomy that's that's at the app that's at the driver level and at the application Level so that's what's
fundamentally different about our system compared to pretty much all the other systems that are out there and it it
affords us a huge amount of flexibility and margin in terms of performance and
and future future devel BMC requires an external computer to to
to drive it is that correct yes you got that all the go-to systems do it's
called a hand controller okay and U that's right you know it's a hand
controll buy to the Mount and it's it's a or a dedicated computer or you buy a
general purpose computer to do it whether it's a tablet or a PC would you rather have you can use an iPad to
control it though yes it's a great way to control it so um but
if you're an astrophotographer U the telescope behind me here I have a u uh a Windows knok
computer you know that's that's controlling it so um uh and I think
that's a great system uh for for controlling all of that um because you
got you got a lot of things going on there you got an electric focuser this one has a guide scope it will when I get
my telescope d Drive master I'm going to take the guide scope off I I'm not going to need it uh but um uh it's um um you
know to control the camera uh and and the telescope you know it's good to have a
computer and almost all of us use it anyways and computers these days are so inexpensive tablets are so
inexpensive um when I was uh working for meet instruments uh we replaced autostar
hand controllers all the time all the time okay and uh uh and those those hand
controllers uh they were had a value I think of like
150 bucks or 100 bucks or something like that the actual cost of them was really
high you know and so uh you know you replace a couple of those things and
it's it's just not you know and it's very limited it's a it was a controller
system we had uh uh really One processor working like a fry cook in there you know uh running this operation that
operation this operation that operation the PMC has eight of them in there it's
very dedicated you know this one just does tracking and this one does that and
that one does this you know we use milspec electronics and then we formal coded them I wanted electronics that
could actually be used Outdoors you know and and the electronics on a lot of
popular amateur telescopes are made with
the most budget Electronics they can get away with and I wanted something that
you remember my first something reliable my first design J is I wanted to be able to take the pmca and hold it under water
dump it under the water right exactly but uh that was the direction we were going the only reason why you can't do
it is because the connectors it was the connectors that stopped me because waterproof connectors are like I don't
know they were about 30 or 40 bucks a pop yeah so back to your question about the processor the microcontrol has got
eight cores yeah it's an eight core processor and it's no interrupts it's
totally deterministic in its operation which is awesome for a control system yeah and J Jerry made an instrumentation
for a nuclear power plant it can't fail okay yeah that that stuff cannot fail
and so I wanted a lot of I wanted a lot of redundancy in there I wanted a lot of margin in there and guess what guys I
don't want to repair or replace electronics for my customers I just want
it to work you know I want it to work and I want them to go to the next level so that that was that's kind of the
philosophy that gives you a peak into the kind of stuff that we want to build and we will continue to
build wow that's awesome that's really fantastic so appreciate that I'm exed
here this has really been uh an amazing experience great great well I uh if I
can be of any help to the club at any time you know get in touch with me I'm
I'm glad to do it so and for Chuck Lewis who uh who
originally uh reached out to me for this I want to thank you very much a blast it
changed my model of how I'm going to do Global star parties I'm going to be inviting more clubs to do it um and uh
because i' I've heard too many times since covid hit that their clubs are not
doing anything and uh you know there's there's nothing going on you guys have something
going on and uh and by doing this now now you can see how much more you'll
you'll be able to do so great this is great now Jerry you're going to regret giving me your email address by the way
no I want I want to share it no that's great I I welcome uh any ideas and any
thoughts and and any questions or if I can help you do anything that's great yep well I've got a I've got a G11 and I
and I'm I'm not ready to upgrade it yet but uh I've been you know I'm not really I'm not doing astrography I'm still
doing visual stuff but uh you know it's a it's a Master photography rig and uh I
will get there it's just might be another year or so before I start getting serious looks like you have guys in your club that could help you out oh
yeah oh yeah all right anyway I'm I'm exhausted
I need all right okay all right well thank you guys and have a good night and
uh um uh we will uh we will be back on the
air on Monday so take care thank you thanks guys bye bye-bye
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