Virtual Star Party 2

Transcript:

go back

want to see canis majoris and canis menorris this is

hmm

okay we are streaming they can hear us but uh okay yeah

those people get um settled in

got should i be out by my scope for the very beginning or if you like that yeah if you'd like to

okay yeah either way it doesn't matter i think in here can you see it okay from the like on my screen that was my one

concern i suppose probably not really unless i zoom in we can see it can you when you get highlighted you'll

be full screen so it'd probably be okay i think okay perfect

and tonight's the perseid meteor shower too right yeah tonight and tomorrow yeah

yeah we're stuck here in the city absolutely if it clears up later i'll be

able to see a couple maybe even photograph one

yeah thinking about pointing my 14 millimeter straight up after the star

party see what i get

i should definitely lock my chair so i don't find myself trying to rock the whole time

right steve malia what what uh you got the g11 is that you're showing

uh no not tonight i have a new amount that i'm trying out right now

next week okay

[Music]

i'm going in

hello [Music]

[Music]

well um welcome everybody to our virtual star party uh we have

astronomers from canada to the pacific west coast

and uh so i'm going to bring them all on now in gallery view we have people

they're logged on with the zoom client as you can see and so i'll just introduce everyone that

you see from the upper left hand corner is jerry hubbell jerry's on with me every day doing live

broadcasts we have jason guenzel and jason you are from michigan is that right

that's correct that's right okay angela puri uh ansel is

logging in from los angeles we have kent martz kent works here to explore scientific as

well kent is uh here in northwest arkansas

uh dusty haskins dusty where are you logging in from minnesota minnesota okay all right

that's great and then alberto levy um alberto's from san diego

uh alberto was clouded out on our last uh our last uh virtual star party it was

kind of our test run steve malia is on with us and steve is uh from the owner of ontario telescopes

and uh he's up there in toronto uh canada so thanks for having me scott telescope um

i'm gonna introduce uh david levy last but uh because he'll be giving his uh

talk here but we have david daving here dave is in la area as well uh

and astro beard uh who is richard grace and richard

uh got rained out in our last event and he's in annapolis maryland

and of course uh we're going to start off kick this off with mr david

levy dr david levy dear friend uh author

shakespeare enthusiast night sky enthusiast outreach icon uh comet discover

i could just go on and on and on but uh thank you david thanks for being on our show

and uh for kicking off our largest virtual star party ever

so thank you thanks scotty

oh you know my is it my turn now it is your turn you have you have the stage well thank you scotty

and welcome everybody those of you who might have read the uh announcement of the virtual star party

tonight might have read that i have some uh knowledge about shakespeare so i

really should start with a quote from shakespeare hung be the heavens with black

yield day to night comets importing changes and times

and states brandish your crystal tresses in the sky above five weeks ago

it was the full moon at the end of june or early july i went outside went all the way back

to an observatory building that we have in the far south part of our yard i had a pair of

binoculars and i looked through it at the star capella which at the time was just getting high

enough in the northeast and i moved the binoculars down and down until

suddenly there was a zero magnitude comet comet meal wise it was

wonderful just to look for a comet like that and just find it with the full moon

setting the uh dawn very bright it was just amazing and wonderful and um

i think scotty wanted me to come tonight to give you a sense of what observing is all about

tonight the group that we have here jerry kent scotty jason and angel alberto

and the others are going to be sharing a little bit of their

observing experiences with us and i really think that they'll give you some inspiration

to go out whatever you do do not forget tonight is august the 11th the maximum of the

persian meteor shower persians come from a comet as well they

come from comet swift tuttle which last appeared in 1992

and next is going to come in i think 21 27 something like that but the earth

crosses the orbit of comet swift tunnel

every august 11th as it will tonight and when that happens it picks up a lot

of dust that swift tuttle has shred during its long journey

around the so many multiple journeys around the sun

i'm going to interrupt a little bit as i know that scotty doesn't really want to make anything

to talk about anything political on a presentation but i'm going to make an exception to it right now

today as you probably know um kamala harris was announced as the

democratic vice presidential running mate and you're all saying why are you talking about that

and the reason is nothing to do with politics but that i feel pretty privileged because kamala

harris went to westbound high school which is the same high school i went to

this was not a high school in the united states her mom apparently took her and her

sister to montreal canada for a while in the late 1970s

and she got a job doing research at the jewish general hospital and she also was teaching at mcgill

university and her daughter kamala went to west mount high school from which she graduated in 1981

so there's a little bit of information some of you might not have known she graduated from westman high school

and i'd like to think that she and all the republicans and independents

and democrats every now and then will stop thinking about what they always think

about and we'll think about something a little more relaxed a little more pleasant and a little more

eternal the night sky it's always been my goal that if you

wanted to run for you want to run for the house of representatives you have to have

identified all 88 constellations you want to run for the senate you would

have had to i've identified at least 47 variable stars

or the messier objects or of a few dozen messier objects or

if you wish to become president you have to have discovered not just one

comet but two because one can be an accident

if you want to be president but in any event the important now you're running the

important thing i think is that you go outside and um look up at the night sky

scotty has a ton of wonderful telescopes for you and i'm sure you'd be very happy

to sell you some of them quite honestly to get excited about the

night sky i think he will agree that you do not need a telescope you don't need binoculars you just need

a pair of eyes you go outside you sit down and you look up at the night sky and you surely do not

need a telescope tonight because you can go outside and look at the persian meteors as i

hoped to in a few hours and then it goes with a quote and the quote goes like this

our fondness for the stars has touched our souls we all share the feeling of discovery

whether the object we've found is new to all or new only to us

the thrill penetrates our being as we try to describe through drawings photographs or words

how we have been changed by a universe sharing a secret with us thank you very much

all right thank you very much that's great uh we had some comments uh during your

talk one of them uh john perron or perroni says uh that that would weed out a lot of people and

we would only have smart politicians unlike what we have now oh yes i

couldn't resist it and uh astro blender says they sell

themselves i think that's what he was talking about with explore scientific stuff thank you very much that's very nice

um but uh we have uh we have quite a few people uh watching our program right now we

want to say hi to wherever you are in the world and uh um before we get started with the

uh uh the next uh spotlight here uh we have

questions that we will ask you okay and if you uh

if you answer these questions correctly if you're the first to answer it correctly okay you will be the winner of a uh

of a door prize and so we have progressively harder questions as we go through the

night here these were posed by uh by uh jerry hubble okay

and so when i was first asking jerry for questions he was uh he was coming up with some questions

that were uh not for the beginner okay

but he went even if you are a beginner he wouldn't have questions he would challenge you with okay so there you go uh the way this is

going to work okay uh kent you need to listen up here because

what's going to happen is that we are going to ask uh

you to answer your questions okay or to answer the questions uh by emailing kent k-e-n-t

at explore scientific explorescientific.com and so he's going to see these come through in his email

and then we're going to announce the winner at the next um star party which will be

next tuesday so um now you don't have to be president at the next star party we'll just

announce the winner but it's more fun if you are so and the first one to answer correctly is the

winner right that's right that's right so the first question

and i'm going to read it twice the question is what coordinate relates to the altitude

of the north celestial pole at your specific location

all right no one say anything okay especially you jerry i'm not i'm not saying anything

nothing that's applies to this this applies to the south celestial pole also

it could yes yes like coordinates relates to the altitude we could just say of your celestial pole

at your specific location hey scott send me those questions so i don't have to write them down okay

i sure will well all right okay so we are going to go ahead and one

that's question one so just reply that's question one that's one and now we're gonna go on and we are

going to get started with jason gonzal and uh jason i'm gonna put the spotlight

on you okay okay and here we go okay yeah so um

just a little bit about myself um i've got some kind of artifact on my

screen okay there i don't know if you guys can see that but there's a big box in the middle of the screen no um yeah so my name is jason gunzel i'm a

amateur astrophotographer um i just um you know like to share my

work i put it out on on social media um get pretty good response off of it um

today uh you know i got to know scott a little bit through the hobby and um

got to talking a little bit about doing um some imaging with some some of the um

achromatic scopes so that's what i have today to show and for those that don't know

the achromatic scopes are really kind of marketed towards the visual

discipline because they're good for visual observing they've got some drawbacks for photography

but i've been working hard to kind of work around those and hopefully get a chance to show you

some of that tonight and i also use this scope that i'm talking about for solar imaging also so i'm pretty deep

into that discipline also so with that i'll try to uh

share my screen here if that works

just let me know if this comes through it's coming through okay here we go so what i wanted to show

at first was the setup i'm imaging with and let me turn on my outside lights so you can

see this so i've got my um

i'm sitting inside but i've got my camera pointed at my scope out there

oh this is like a webcam or something that you have it's like dslr but yes there are okay why is this

not going away

let me try to minimize this can you guys still see this yes okay all right all right so this is the

scope out here and i'm going to take an exposure here well that is old let me uh take an

exposure so you can see this setup right here

hopefully it comes through there you go can you see this yes we do okay yeah so this is just a uh

four second shot i took with the digital slr pointed at the scope out there um i had it framed up nicely but

obviously the sky moves and the telescope moves through the course of the night so you can't really see the camera too much

anymore but with the setup i have here is an explore scientific ar 152

and i'm sorry i'm going to geek out about the gear um you know if it's over anybody's head i

apologize um you know what like i said i'm kind of deep into the astrophotography side of it

so if anybody's got any questions or want me just wants me to stop or slow down please watch the chats and see if

anybody comes up with anything um so this is an explore scientific ar152

it's a six inch aperture um achromatic telescope which means it's just uh it's got a doublet lens

a double element lens glass lens in the front and the drawback to that for

astrophotography is that it doesn't focus all the light at the same point you need additional optics to do that

but with proper filtration you can get around some of that limitations so that's kind of what i'm doing here

so behind the scope i've got the 0.7x focal reducer and corrector and then

i've got a filter wheel here and just off the screen at the bottom is the asi

183 mm pro camera that's a monochrome camera so i'm using that in

conjunction with narrowband filters on this scope to um to get some decent results

and i've got a motorized focuser here it's kind of pieced together here with a lot of duct

tape and rubber bands but it works and um guide scope with a guide camera

and this is just to keep the frame centered and then this is all riding on a celestron

avx mount this isn't my main imaging setup this is one i've just been um

tinkering around with um seeing what kind of performance i can get out of it and i've been really really surprised with what i've

gotten out of this so you can see i'm shooting right now um this camera is live shooting the sky

i'm on m27 the dumbbell nebula and you can see the conditions are not ideal

i've got some high clouds and haze here but i can show you the live images

coming through and so this is the live output from the camera right now

i'm shooting the dumbbell nebula at four minute sub-exposures and i've taken ten

so far this is on frame 11. and this is what the frame looks like

yeah so you notice the asi 183 the raw frames have this

phenomenon called amp glow where there's i think it's an infrared light leak on

the side of the sensor that can be calibrated out and that doesn't show in the final image but it

will show in the raw frames here just in case someone's wondering what this starburst over here is

but if we look at this uh dumbbell nebula and kind of change the screen stretch here zoom in a little bit

see that there's um oh wow pretty good detail coming through on that

yeah what i'm gonna do is take a bunch of these frames i'm going to stack them up i'm actually stacking them

up live right now um so we can see a um an integrated output which would be

averaging these 10 or however many i can get frames together we can see the output

is that sequence generator pro or what is that yeah this software is sequence generator

pro um and so this this handles all the

imaging um sequencing and focusing and centering of the objects so i've got

a target list here these are other things i was shooting with it but um you know you put in your target

here the coordinates of that target and you can plate solve to center the object in the

frame and that's what i've done here so it reliably centers it

um all you got to do is click you know right click and hit center on target and

it'll go do its thing what planetarium program do you use um i use scottish safari on my phone

but this has a really nice framing and mosaic wizard and this will

show you show you your object framing so if i for example put m27 in here

and hit fetch it'll pull up a sample image from a sky survey of that

object and i can drag a box and this shows my camera frame you know my field of view for my camera

so just like that you can hit create sequence and you can you can set up a target in here so it's

really simple to use um but it is you know it's innocent more advanced

imaging you know setup well it's very very powerful and

convenient excellent okay so let's um let's pause for a minute uh jason and we

are going to uh jump to the next astronomer here and so

we'll have you stop sharing your screen okay and there we go and um

our next uh our next astronomer here is uh ansel pury and ansel is uh as i mentioned he is

from los angeles and um

introduction to yourself and uh start your program can everyone hear me okay yeah

it's a little bit long that's okay okay hi everyone my name is on

all you know i i have to take this time to thank scott and the entire explorer scientific team

for giving me this wonderful opportunity to interact here you know it's my first time uh thank you

scott thank you jerry and thank you ken yeah thank you um last few weeks of being able to attend

you know these people explore scientific shows online with such luminaries like dr levy and others

has been awesome and frankly a blessing in disguise for me during this

unprecedented time of covert 19. i think it is just a reinforcement of

the fact in my mind that we have to always try to stay positive in the face of

adversity never stop looking for those wonderful shells under those unturned stones

which i am trying right now um you know i'm an architect by profession i'm licensed in california

i've lived in the la area for about 22 years i usc to do my masters in architecture

back in 2000 but i was born in india north india to be precise um

i also did my undergrad in architecture and from new delhi uh school of planning and

architecture but originally i'm from a small town ship further north by the foothills of the

himalayas next to a city called haridwar which is located on the banks of the genjis

stargazing in astronomy has been my passion from my childhood days and uh i'm probably the only amateur

astronomer here who has not done any astro imaging yet but i hope to

change that very soon um as a seven-year-old boy in the late

1970s i remember lying down down on the front lawns of our home

late one evening with my dad and looking up at the cloudless night sky with thousands of stars and i

distinctly remember feeling as if i was in the cockpit of this silent spaceship

the i did you know 180 degree field of view the imax view

i got so dizzy and felt i was missing a seatbelt or a restraint or something

and i held my dad's arm for balance this was um almost 40 years ago now

and it was a turning point in my life and my love for astronomy began at that moment fast forward in the mid

1980s while my father was working as an executive in siemens in germany

he gifted me a telescope a small 12 inch refractor about 45 x magnification

um it had a beautiful 12 inch long metal tube with a dull green

coral zeiss lens and it was the best thing i own for a very long time

exploring the moon and the planets the township where i grew up has a recreational club with a campus

for residents of the township there's a swimming pool there's a library and there's also an open-air

theater where we would watch movies as kids under the real stars up above so it was

all open and this is right next to a national park um at the himalayan foothills

so we saw a lot of movies there as a kid and for me i think the turning point came in 1986 when

we saw star wars return on the jedi there and i was in my early teens and i

was just blown away uh i remember vividly looking at the

screen with jabba the hutt and his buddies and then looking up at the night sky

from my seat and wondering if all this action is actually taking place in real time on a planet around one of

those stars up above over the years from childhood to high

school to college to now being a professional architect i've passionately followed

um you know the various astronomical events and missions like wizard cassini and huygens and the many

discoveries made over the years and newly found answers to some of the

most fundamental questions related to the cosmos and to the same

um some of the questions generating in my mind as a seven-year-old staring at the night

sky in the late 70s with my dad at my workplace i had printed actually i

have it right here and hung up in my cubicle um i don't know if you can see but it's an

18 inch by 18 inch framed image of the hubble ultra deep field

and this thing really kept things in perspective for me for many many years

i think as a closing thought i would say that in order for us to recharge our batteries

and refill our activity we have to continue to look up and and

hope for clear skies thank you excellent excellent great

all right kent uh let's let's let's uh have you introduce yourself uh you haven't been on with this in a

while um and uh so once you take a couple of minutes

and refresh everybody's memory uh grew up in northwest arkansas you

know when i was a kid one of my first memories is is going out

uh with my dad and [Music] people you know i'm 57 so people you

know in the mid 60s you're going to remember the green wicker chairs and uh dad and my brother andy and i

would go out and in the backyard for meteor showers and the person meteor showers and

you know the winter meteor showers were just some some wonderful great memories of uh sitting there with dad uh dad was

a newspaper guy and i was into photography and you know dabbled with it you know from eight nine

pin you know and then uh we moved to northwest arkansas from from the ozark mountains in

clarksville and uh you know tried my hand at shooting lunar eclipses and

doing some daytime solar photography and long exposures and there's one picture i still have i should have gotten it

uh dig it out it's a picture it was taken in december it went out about an hour after sunset

and using tri-x or plus x film and minolta 101

put my camera on a tripod in the backyard in downtown springdale arkansas and left

the shutter open all night got up about 45 minutes for something before sunrise and

close the shutter and uh got a great uh star trail picture awesome and something

that you can't do now because of light pollution but in about 1970

76 i was able to take a a 10 hour picture

and get no reciprocity failure and now you can't take probably half hour picture without

getting something but uh comets bennett and west stretching halfway across the sky

uh are just just wonderful fascinating memories and my dad who's now almost 92 didn't buy a

telescope for himself until he was uh

always used uh binoculars just his eyes he was just a visual astronomer

and loved what he's doing and i don't know if he's on i haven't seen post so he may not be on um but uh um he he watches some of these

events and uh brags me about the way i speak sometimes the ums and odds that i that i introduced into my talk um

and spent my entire career in newspaper business uh as photography was the big push but i

was a writer and editor and publisher and uh you know newspaper state of the world is a

you know lots of people have been there a long time or get to leave and i got to leave a couple of years ago

and worked in a couple of different fields and scott came calling and he had met at

some star parties we do out of the state park the sure creek astronomical society does and

we'll have anywhere you know we've had 350 to 400 people show up and scott's been out there and uh scott

approached me about going to work performing customer service and uh i periodically thank him for doing that

i love what i do people are saying you are the bomb

that means a lot lots of accolades on uh chat here about you i saw that i don't feel like i deserved

i thank you i appreciate that very much everybody i try really hard uh to uh you know take care of everybody's needs

um i love talking to people i love interviewing people that's from my newspaper and you know i approach

customer services interviewing people uh you just have to interview them out of them the problems that the things

they're doing and the problems they're having and then apply you know a lifetime of

you know i grew up reading scientific american and sky and telescope cover to cover every month couldn't wait national

geographic and readers digest for the other two magazines that i literally lit read every word of and uh who would have thought that a

lifetime of of amateur astronomy would lead to a full-time job in astronomy

i just couldn't myself i would i had i had a co-worker come in the

office today to buy some stuff and she was like she's like this is heaven you know and and you know

looking at the telescopes and the science toys and she was buying stuff for a four-year-old and a seven-year-old grandson and she was just

in awe of the stuff we had and have and you know a lot of people don't realize that we do so much more than

the explore scientific telescopes we have uh licensed discovery and national

geographic telescopes uh we have uh range finders and night vision and

stem toys and play structures and yes literally hundreds of products and and you know

we there's 18 of us in the building and it's it's amazing how much we

produce for 18 people working in the building in springdale anyway um all right that's enough about

me i'm taking up time from the other guys so i'll show you all right all right next up is is dusty haskins

how's it going great i am i am dusty haskins and well i think uh

jason kind of did me a good favor there because he explained the ar-152 which is that one right up there over my

shoulder um

of your 152 outside that is a live image okay so uh

um let's see here let's see it's oh yeah moving right

there yep yeah but yeah so uh the difference i actually won that scope

from scott himself so it was on a twitch stream and i

was was the lucky lucky winner of that thing so that was on gibson picks right with uh

dustin gibson of opt yes it was yep yep and

uh i actually got into full-fledged astrophotography

march 8th was the first day that i set up my mom so from there when i when i originally

set it up i didn't really know what i like what i had for a scope so i actually started out

imaging with this right here wow that was just a little it's a little

tabletop dab that i went and got new screws for and moved everything forward and got

everything i mean the the focuser itself you can see i had to wedge a little piece of zip

tie in there yeah just to uh just to make it work but that was that was all it took

so yeah that was kind of that that was how i how i kind of got started i mean

originally i've always had uh uh love for space and everything like that in fact my wife kind of

she kind of jokes about it a little bit because she says she won't even let me go shopping by myself because if i come home it's either going to be camouflage

or star wars so yeah but that and that was

i mean for me that was that was really where i mean since i was little i remember

looking up at the sky and just sitting there in awe and then a little

bit later on in life we actually had our daughter was uh born and we didn't

realize it at first but then later on we realized that she was kind of hard of hearing

so we had gone through and we found out that she was delayed because of it and everything so the further along we went

we realized that she had to get tubes put in her ears and once once we did one of the first things that

she really took off with was the planets i would play i would play like this little youtube video so space i mean

that was that was the one thing for her that really i mean she she can what she's three now

she can still name all the planets all the exoplanets everything like that and that was that was the one thing that got her to

start talking and everything like that so i mean it was it was it was amazing that's that is an

amazing story little children can learn things so quickly you know and uh um so i

uh i'm glad you got her started at such a young age oh yeah in fact i think

one thing about it is if i drag like if i drag my dobsonian out or whatever there's been a couple times that my wife

has pulled home she's got home and my kid has come outside at the same time she sees my scope and runs right

past to the scope she's on her way going to it i mean it they they fight over it so

that's a good thing it makes me smile every time wonderful okay all right let's uh let's

jump to our next uh our next astronomer here and um

uh that is going to be alberto levy hello guys uh actually i was

born in the u.s my dad was a veteran of world war ii but we moved to

mexico when i was four years old so actually i grew there grew up there my dad always spoke to me

about when i became an adult people like me would be going to the moon and it

happened i was probably 20 years old when all of that happened

but as a youth i started in astronomy when i was

after i my dad gave my sister and i uh encyclopedia

a youth encyclopedia and there was an article about how to build a telescope it was a galilean meniscus lens and all

so i went with my dad to an optical shop and they had these lenses made for me

then i took uh one of those cardboard tubes that they rolled uh material you know

fabric and set it up and tied it to a post and start looking at

the moon which were full of colors of course today we know it's chromatic aberration

but it was fantastic that was my initial when i was 16 i learned there was an

astronomical society of mexico which is by the way the second oldest

one in the world after the french one 1902 1902

and a friend of mine francisco diego who's a a phd in in astro astrophysics in

london he uh he and i were classmates we joined the the astronomy

association and learned so much from professional and amateurs there there

every everybody gathered professors of of astronomy and cosmography engineers

etc and uh so i learned so much from them and uh and

i witnessed one of one of the members who was a musician also and very famous

it was like the counterweight to disney in mexico okay uh writing children's songs and all

but he owned an observatory uh outside of the city about an hour away from mexico

city and he would hand us the keys because he was losing his sight he was

a better better astronomer than composer actually and he's been he was famous but he would

hand us the keys to my friend francisco and i and we would go there and check on the

time the moons appearances and reappearances of around jupiter and that was so much

debating and we had a chance to witness the 1966

not meteor shower winter storm uh meteor storm in in from the leonids in november

1966 and if anybody has done that i mean or i'm old enough probably i'm the

oldest in the group here but um if you've seen

snowing i mean uh snowing that that was the amount of of

meteors you could see i mean coming coming down all by till total sunrise so it was

such an experience how many meteors an hour do you think it was a thousand a mile an hour ten thousand

an hour at least i mean you see yeah snowflakes coming down

i mean not a big storm of snow or snowing but a very mild you know

when it starts no storm yeah a little snow snowing snowflakes coming down that was

the amount of meters you could you could have seen and once in a while you would see a sporadic one yeah boom boom i mean really

flashing the whole ground yeah so uh so i've been

became a avid member and later on at this association they had an optical

shop with grind your own mirrors uh six inch eight inch etc so

uh i i told my dad when i was young that i want to become an astronomer he

asked me okay what does an astronomer live on he said i told him well maybe if i

discover a planet or a star or something like that he said okay that's perfect who's gonna buy it from

you how are you gonna make a living so being very handy and and interested in

mechanics i became an engineer mechanical and electrical so but that

gave me a chance to to do everything i mean i it so actually i have my own industry

but it gives me a chance to do my hobby my my love passion and i also produce

planetarium programs in tijuana every month we do a live planetarium

show and we have a club also that we found it with the

members and they bring out the telescope so after the show people come and look through telescopes

and today after years you become kind of lazy so i my gear is

more modern computerized a takahashi 106 fsq and

an ioptron i-45 eq pro so and my setup is

in my backyard i have a shed that's uh i roll off there's a i roll off

and uh i don't know should we describe this today right now or or give a chance to

somebody so let's let's uh switch to another and uh let's do that yeah i'm going to describe it in the

next round here okay all right so um i did want to uh uh put the spotlight on

jerry hubble for a moment here jerry is uh has been with us for four years now is that right actually

it's uh it's been since 2014 january 2014

six years six and a half years yeah it went by quick

quick jerry developer of the uh pmc8 system but he's a extremely avid amateur

astronomer and yeah i uh just real quick my background

i grew up in the apollo era you know as a kid and that was a that

was what took my focus when i was uh eight ten years old

and i that's when i first saw and used my first first telescope that i borrowed from our

school system had telescopes to lend out it was a little i think it was like a little three or four inch uh

newtonian on a little spindly mount i got to use that at home for a little while

but then i didn't have a telescope for a while but i grew up in the 60s with the apollo so i was really into the apollo

missions and moon and lunar and lunar uh observing that's what really

you know sparks my uh my fancy more than anything is a lunar surface

and uh so long you know i got along in years and i bought my first telescope

when i was a teenager and got uh and got uh a nice little

70 millimeter fracture was doing looking at the moon and stuff like that and then i went

further on and started my career i i have a degree in electrical engineering and then i

went into the nuclear industry and i'm a nuclear instrumentation

engineer to guide into the all the anything that's in the plant that runs the plant

i i know about it and i learned about it and worked on it and including the and then also in the

computer systems so i was i've been blessed to work on a wide range of computer systems

and the initial plant computer systems were like those shown in this room in the my background the 1960s era

xerox sigma 3 plant computer system is what was installed in our uh nuclear plant and so i got to learn

that technology and then also saw all the new technologies that came along in the 80s and the 90s

uh up through the 2000s i've i've learned all the technologies since the 1960s all the way up to today

so it's really been i've been very lucky in my career to be able to work on all this stuff

i was uh faced uh well i also got into astrophotography about

10 years with the modern electronic astrophotography that we have today

and uh really jumped in it with both feet i wrote two books uh one's called

scientific astrophotography it came out in 2012 and the other one is called remote observatories for amateur astronomers

that came out in 2015. so i'm into remote observing remote

observatories building building instrumentation building equipment you know designing

uh scott gave me an opportunity to design and build a mount control system

from scratch basically and i i said yes i can do it i've never done it before but i'll do it

so that's what i did and uh it's turned out really well i mean how

you find talent it's been a it's been a time it's been a struggle in some areas but again

that's what i like best as this is the challenge so i'm hoping uh to help people

learn astronomy and understand that it is a challenge to get your equipment up but it's a very rewarding challenge

and uh so don't get too frustrated there's plenty of us out here to help

everybody including everybody that's on this uh session tonight we're out to help

everybody learn and understand their equipment and to use it the best they can and be successful that's right that's

right okay all right so uh next up is uh is going to be

uh richard grace so hello nice to uh have you back on

with us richard you um uh unfortunately got rained out uh

during our test star party last week but uh how's the sky tonight

uh it's pretty clear earlier we got a little bit of cloud but it's breaking up uh it's just doing that thing you know after it's condensing a little

bit and i think we're going to get some good images tonight got a few earlier um yeah things aren't looking too bad

looking a whole lot better than last week so i'm enjoying this i'm dry at this point um

so yeah um let's see a little about me i uh started uh roughly uh nine ten

months ago um just taking pictures through an eyepiece of a small dob kind of like uh dusty has

what's happening dusty and um yeah uh just wanted other people

to see what i saw because i was amazed by it and uh came home and upgraded the equipment and

got a real camera i i got my first dslr for christmas this year so i have no photographic training or anything um and

had my eye on this beautiful uh explore scientific common hunter all made of carbon fiber

it really uh really drew me in and we're gonna try and make it work and uh

i'm gonna be guiding soon but i figured i wouldn't try and add too much to the uh the whole thing i got all the as common

and all the ph doing uh phd two and all that stuff so um hopefully we'll be controlling it all

from inside uh very soon but i figured i knew how to make it work for now for tonight and that's more

important and the show must go on so i'll turn it back to you all right thank you very much thank you

okay all right so up next is daniel mouncey down daniel is from uh also known as

dr d uh dr d uh you can find him at woodland hills

cameron telescope you can find him all over the internet and uh he has been a great mentor to

many many thousands of astronomers i think over the years so thanks for coming on the show can you

guys hear me we can hear you yes okay great i wha how did i get here man i don't know

[Laughter] you went through that portal you know you went to that portal sucked you in and here you are so i was

running late but i got a person i gotta first commend you guys i gotta just say a couple of

things because that we've had a very long day it is so busy this industry right now as

you guys know it's it's just beyond it's like so crazy but um jason and and dusty one of the

cool things i just love that right off the bat and i mean this sincerely is her husband acromats

and and i'm so impressed with just with what i saw you know and just that effort with acromats because there's so much

you know you don't see everybody feels like they have to have the greatest like the astrograph on the planet you know

the best ed correction but i'm amazed you know look at edward emerson barnard you know some of the stuff that was done and achieved in the

in that so but it's just so cool to see people using acromats and uh i'm gonna i'm gonna talk about

this uh tomorrow when i'm at work and share the stories about tonight so and it's great to see some familiar

faces and kent god finally get to to see kent thank you so much

guy i always go on about how amazing ken is because the service is unbelievable you know

so i really gotta give hats off it's a pleasure to meet all you guys yeah um so how did it all start it

started just a real brief um i was working as a box boy at a supermarket

in marina del rey because i live in los angeles and uh i saw this magazine stand and had a

picture of comet shoemaker levy9 on it it was a magazine it was on the front cover magazine what

year was that 93 or 94 or whatever but yeah 94. it was coming

yeah they knew those comments were coming so that image on that magazine cover was burned into my soul

you know and so from then on that was where it all started so and here we are today you know and i

worked with jeff wood over at uh scope city in sherman oaks you know we were back in the skull city days

and then i came in to get some things over it uh with fair over at woodland hills telescopes and she's like why don't you come over here and work over

here and so i think i've been with her for like 15 years and then worked with celestron with ben houck and

and several others and then i worked at vixen optics for a little bit and i worked as a sales manager with skywasher

as well so i've kind of been all over the place but fair and i are very close so

and i'm i observe mostly in the city and mostly visual and then um you know and then i'm

dealing with a lot of imaging uh challenges at work all the time you know so that's pretty much it's so busy you

know though but that's me yeah thanks thank you all right i don't want

to bore you no it's hardly so you've got a zillion stories i know

all right so if you do too you gotta we gotta do an interview with you scott my podcast i want you on my

podcast you got to tell us some stories i thought i'll join your podcast anytime you just ask me man

all right all right so next up here is steve mallius amalia is the owner of ontario telescope

he's way up there in toronto and uh he is a past president of the royal

astronomical society of canada and uh huge in outreach and um

just a great guy and very knowledgeable about astrophotography so why don't you tell us a little bit about

yourself and what kind of rig you got going on thank you thanks scott i hope everyone can hear me okay um

had some uh technical challenges earlier but i think i'm up and running now all good now okay

great so yeah um my name is steve um uh i started ontario telescope and accessories

uh wow six years ago now um and it's been uh growing uh uh quite nicely

quite happy with it um uh i i was the uh president of the mississauga center uh

which is just a city outside of toronto of um for rural astronomical society and and uh

i think i did i i mean um i think i ran things pretty well um uh they're still together now so

nobody nobody uh chased me out so i'm pretty happy with that we just did some policy changes type things but

um yeah i um you know i have a love of astronomy i always have for a while there are certain things that have been

ingrained in my in my uh i guess in my soul um

you know daniel mentions uh the um the the comet um should make it uh leave

me comment and and that was something that i remember very vividly too in the 90s and really uh stuck with me

um i think i still even have the newspaper because it was published on the front page of the toronto star um

uh you know i i grew up in the shuttle era of the 90 of the 80s right and remember waking up

any time i could to watch a shuttle launch and i remember my mom even letting me stay home

if a shuttle launch was at 10 o'clock in the morning i didn't have to go to school that day so i've always had this love of of

astronomy and space and exploration um my uh

my rig behind me i've got a few different ones and and i sometimes you know cause problems for

myself by switching back and forth um uh i um but uh this one i

um behind me is a takahashi uh toe 130 and i i have a mount that i'm

trying out um which is quite unique it uh it doesn't use a counterweight it's from rainbow

astro um and it can hold quite a bit of weight so i'm trying that out and it's

different it's got some learning curves to it um but uh you know i i worked uh pretty

closely with jerry and i think i drove him nuts a few times with the uh he's even smiling and nodding his head

so i knew it was true um it wasn't too bad i i enjoy a challenge

and i'm sure of a big challenge so um with the the g11 and pmc8 which you know

i absolutely love uh that system and uh i always find it to be wickedly accurate and uh quite reliable

um there was some bumps along the road and um i like to think that i helped jerry

out to identify some problems oh yeah probably considered me one of them but

no you helped a lot steve you really did oh great i'm glad that

but um yeah i know i uh you know i i do masturbate astrophotography from my backyard um uh

my skies are pretty bad there's a national distribution center warehouse um a

couple miles from my house in it uh to the west and it just completely obliterated my sky so everything right now is all narrow

band and uh it it works out quite well um i'll show you a uh

a shot um right now if you can hopefully you can

see my screen yep um so right now i am i'm imaging uh m27 um uh in narrow band and i'm on i'm

doing uh five-minute exposures um and uh you know one thing that um

you know reading uh scott's email earlier and what tonight's target was and he's talking about um uh the grub

telescope um uh one of the grub telescopes at 12 inches yeah i sent out an email all of

these guys saying that tonight's object was m27 and i showed them an image done by

isaac roberts back in the 18 maybe late 1800s i mean isaac roberts

was one of the aside from being a roberts okay was one of the amazing and truly amazing uh amateur

astrophotographers of all time his images still stand up today so yeah

so if fact it was done on a grub telescope was something that resonated with me i spent a lot of time in ireland in the past few years

um in um my uh my secret identity life that i follow

through with sometimes and i got to know um some key members of the uh um astronomical society in dublin uh

quite well um they let me actually use the 12-inch refractor at density observatory and i did some

observing with it um which is quite amazing to use it an f20 12-inch refractor

um and uh it what really struck strikes me is that no

matter where you go in the world uh astronomy is astronomy the stars are all the same it doesn't matter

where you are in your beliefs the stars are always there and uh it seems to be a very good

constant for uh uh for us so anyways that that's my um little little thing now and i'll i'll yield

back thank you thanks for having me yeah and uh yeah you'll have to awesome here we go

and um uh so uh next up will be uh dave ing

and dave uh was part of our first uh uh star party

um and um dave uh you uh you were successful in getting uh

shots we were shooting in 13 and you guys got a nice shot of that and uh

is that something you're able to share it is okay but once you introduce yourself first

yeah my name is dave i am from temecula california um i got into astronomy just a couple of

years ago i went to a star party and that was the first time i looked through a telescope

i saw a saturn with its rings and jupiter and the moons of jupiter and i

was just blown away i just loved it i joined the local club and i've been very interested in doing

astronomy ever since uh i've only just begun

doing astro imaging maybe about four months ago i wanted to see if i could actually create those

pretty pictures that we see everywhere so i started getting into it and let me

share my screen and see if i can show you what my rig looks like

really clear sky out where you are right now nice actually i shot that picture too

oh very nice very nice so let's see uh share my s

so that's my backyard and what i'm using is a celestron avx mount i have a

explore scientific ed-102 my camera is a nikon dslr d5300 and i use an

asi air pro which is a raspberry pi device so i don't have any laptop hooked up to

it the asia pro does everything it does the image capture

does guiding focusing polar alignment the session uh information does all that

so it's kind of a cool little device i just connect to it wirelessly with my tablet and do you do you have an

electric focuser on there as well i don't not on this one the one thing about the asi

air is that you can only use asi equipment on there pretty much for the most part with the

exception of a few dslr cameras so if i were to use a focuser it would have to be their focuser

if i use a filter wheel would have to be their filter wheel so that's one of the limitations but

it's kind of a nice setup because it's it's all in one it's really tiny it just sits on the top there sure and if you saw last week

i showed you uh my backyard actually looks at street light and that that's what the

telescope is pointing at yeah i have a so pretty bad

light pollution i in a border six area but with that light right in my path it gets pretty

bad so i wanted to show one image one uh i don't know if you can even see

anything here but there's a couple of bright stars are just popping out yep and this is just one sub it's a 30

second sub i took 114 pictures

um but i threw away probably about 30 of them ended up only

using 81 or so and i wanted to also show people not everyone

is experienced in astrophotography there might be some new people out there and i'm sure there's a lot of people who

have done a lot more than i have but just this is one picture of how it comes out of the

camera and you stretch that one image and you can start to see the target

you can start to see some stars but what really brings out the pictures when you

stack a bunch of pictures together and you can boost that signal to noise ratio

and after some processing i ended up with this oh wow beautiful my uh my capture

of m13 from last week beautiful you can see a little galaxy up there

uh it is spectacular thank you it is spectacular so this is hundreds of

thousands of stars um and uh you know is still

intensely studied by professional and amateur amateur astronomers alike beautiful globular cluster and i

understand it's like 11 and a half billion years old almost as old as the galaxy or the

universe itself right yeah there's some paradoxes about in 13

still being and globular clusters in general uh theories of how they formed have uh

have recently changed and um they they were at first thought to be

kind of leftovers of the formation of a galaxy and and now there are uh

some thoughts that uh they're kind of mini galaxies all to themselves

so something smaller than a dwarf galaxy i guess anyways that's beautiful that's great

congratulations and that was done that was done for the um

uh for our first uh virtual star party which happened just last tuesday so

spectacular shot dave's backyard is truly light polluted

and you know he was he was sharing views of his telescope and himself

working next to his scope and literally was all lit up so so pretty amazing what you can get

even such compromise conditions and i'll remind everyone that last week there was a lot of moon so that

that was also true hey dave how much how much price this is kent

how much processing time was involved in that picture uh it's kind of hard to say because i

was working on it at the same time i was working so i was kind of going back and forth uh but i i spent probably about a

day you know here and there a few hours um you know spread throughout the day

so i use picks inside um i didn't use uh i don't use anything else other than

picks inside i did use just to add my name down here at the bottom of the corner

but everything else is done with pics inside excellent excellent

okay so um well we'll move on at this point that's

great and so uh

i think we've i think we have introduced everybody in our group um david has left the building david

levy has left the building but uh we continue on and um uh

so i will uh i've got a couple of things here i'll start off my i found this really wonderful poem i

so i was i would promise poetry david david is very poetic but i'm always inspired by

by his poetry this one is by a gentleman i i believe a gentleman may maybe it's

not a gentleman but uh metaphron okay was the name and uh it's a it's a love poem okay love

you know so and obviously this guy likes loves the stars as well and it goes you have the eyes i have

them too a complete purple sky a moon of pure blue

pull me into the sea of stars let me view the world below as you rain down from the clouds and

birth a luminous rainbow join me now cold are the stars i need your warmth

you're my son and i your mars pretty nice pretty nice and so

um i'm going to switch to some artwork i promised

artwork as well and we have the space art of carlos hernandez uh

and uh he has some beautiful stuff here so we'll play this whole movie

come on buddy

there is music to this it's very low

foreign

yes

and uh so if you would like to see more of carlos hernandez's work you can often find him on facebook

sharing his uh incredible art art work he often makes illustrations that

are very contemporary of things that are going on right now and he's quick and he is

he is someone that learned to draw at the eyepiece at uh as a young man and he was taught

by a guy named chick capen uh and the lineage of chip capan uh if

you read about chuck cape and you'll find out that he was he's a famous uh planetary astronomer

uh worked at lowell observatory and there is a direct lineage i can't remember all the people

that are that are involved with uh the training of how to draw out the eyepiece but it goes from percival lowell through

uh schleifer ultimately to chip cape and and directly to carlos hernandez and so he's probably

last man standing that actually has the training that was passed down from percival lol

from lowell observatory so that's very very cool so uh we will come back around and let's

check back in with uh jason genzel and find out what's going on oh you're going to make me follow poetry

i love pollen yeah i can't compete with that

yeah so i've just been uh just sitting here still imaging um you know i realized after everybody else

went i didn't really um introduce my background or how i got started in the hobby

just um just a little bit about myself you know i had a lifelong interest in astronomy and

photography and well back i don't know about six or seven years ago i

um you know i got the bug i wanted to to try to get a scope to you know

observe the sky visually uh so i thought um you know so i went after

uh eight inch sct setup um [Music] which is great for you know starting out

visual observing but i had an eyepiece on at one time and i had a camera on it for the rest of its days

so um really jumped in um headfirst into the into the imaging game but

um you know that was 2013 i don't know that i necessarily took

myself seriously at first but um you know started started getting into

it and getting more involved in the process both the acquisition and the

you know the software the processing and over time you know um just kind of honed the skills in and

started to you know tailor make the imaging systems to to perform how i wanted and so you know

the rest is kind of history i just uh just kind of built on a simple foundation but just kind of plowed my

way through it um you know astrophotography takes a good bit of

a stubborn attitude um to to really push yourself through it so i can share

now into my current screen still imaging m27 like i showed

before can you see my screen yes we can okay

so um these images stacking at this time also i am stacking them separately which

i'll show here in a second so what i did here is you can see my run here i took

uh frames through a hydrogen alpha filter four minute sub frames i've taken 15 of

them so i've got an hour of hydrogen data on the dumbbell right now

the m27 and then i've moved on to oxygen and i've taken 20 minutes of data

there so my goal during this this star party is to try to get an

hour of each and stack those together into an image but what you're looking at here back

behind is the oxygen data i can take a little bit of the stretch off that so you can

start to see the detail down in the core oxygen

well this is an acromet this is not an apocrypha telescope um really amazing right yeah and then

you know the science of it will tell you it doesn't matter right because you're focusing on

one single wavelength through the lens right and so you don't have the problem of the focus

dispersion or whatever you want to call it um you know the problem with an acromat is

it focuses red light at a different place and it focuses blue light and so if you take a

broadband image of all the colors in the spectrum the majority of it is out of focus but

um what narrowband filters do is exactly what the name implies is it takes a narrow slice of

the spectrum so for the oxygen data we're just looking into a narrow narrow slice in the

blue-green area of the spectrum and because we're looking at a narrow

wavelength range all that light can focus at the same point and so you get a sharp

image through a telescope that's you know

not corrected for broadband light right so this drawback on that the

drawback on that jason is this correct that uh it's like it's almost like going back to film days you have to do very long

exposures because you are cutting off quite a bit of the light that you would have with a broadband

filter or with just no filter yeah exactly it pushes you into narrowband imaging and i

you know i think it takes an astrophotographer to understand what that means from a from the camera side but you do

eliminate um of the visual spectrum you're eliminating what

what does that make about 90 percent of it or or more of the of the light hitting the camera

right so you're able to uh you're able to compete with other light pollution you know the

artificial light in the area so that you could through narrowband imaging you can image from an

urban environment uh you know you i don't know how close you are to uh

to uh a city or the city lights but i've seen narrowband images shot from gosh

chuck ayoob uh lives six blocks away from downtown detroit

and uh he i think he won three or four astronomy pictures of the day uh on that nasa website so it's pretty

pretty amazing what can be done and um the other point is too is that you're

shooting with an acromat which cost far less than a you know similar

aperture um apple yeah and you know i a lot of people you know

maybe don't like to talk money but let's i mean from the point of view of the

optics um in the in the cost of entry this is an extreme value because

what you're looking at here is a telescope i think it retails for 7.99 and it's on sale now i think

at least i saw um it's in the low 700 range yeah and um a competitive scope

that is an apochromatic so it um has a three element lens and

you can shoot broadband with that without with less of an issue um you're talking

about um three four thousand dollar range for a similar sized instrument five

thousand dollars yeah so and more and more

yeah so i mean you're talking about like 20 or you know like you know of some competitive instruments

um and cost wise and and really you know they do if you're shooting both

band and through through both telescopes there's not going to be a huge difference you know there

there's maybe quality of optics you know comes into play but definitely you know what i've said about

this experiment that i'm running here is the proof is in the pudding you know like um i can pull up um

[Music] an image that i've completed me see here

this is uh that's a cheater that's a fully finished image of the dumbbell but

um yeah and if anybody wants to find my work um you know i'm on astr bin you can

search my name um i'm on instagram i go under um the handle the vast reaches um so you

can find my work there but this is uh a shot of the cave nebula this was shot through

the the telescope i'm using tonight so the ar-152 um so this is a finished

processed image of the cave nebula um with a relatively short exposure time

this is a three hours of exposure um seems short to me but then you know

i'm shooting images that are 20 to 50 hours on other telescopes so

um three hours might seem like ages to somebody else but i was really happy with the detail that

came out of this image um from that telescope it is beautiful

that's something that uh scott that we we like to talk about as a value the value system

you know that's the point it's not just uh signing the system how inexpensive that is but it's where

do you want to put your money you know for an actual photographer they may want to put it into

throw it into a better camera or you know a set of superior narrow band filters or a superior amount

you know so you balance the system for what you're trying to do basically you design it to fit it

perfectly and you and you get the most value for your buck basically right

so to talk about money to talk about money the the 152 acromat that doublet is 750

and the 152 uh triplet is forty five hundred dollars yeah um

right can can i have one second here because this is doing something and you gotta make sure it's like no problem

no problem astronomers got to go to work

yep yep

can anybody tell what it's doing from that i think it's going to be okay i just want it's going to do a meridian

flip here and i just want to make sure it's not going to hit the tripod yeah i was going to say i just did a meridian flip a few minutes ago

yeah i know rich has probably got a meridian flip going on or has completed one already

yeah it's it's moving right now um anyway i won't keep uh too much longer i

just want to show the uh the image of m27 so this is the hour of

stack data wow um and pics insight look at that those shells and yeah so um this is

definitely there it's beautifully stretched image shows the even the outer shells here yeah um for

one-hour data i'm pretty satisfied with that um

yeah i imagine if you just keep going the dumbbell nebula would become unrecognizable

yeah but you know if you take the exposure down a little bit you can see

all the detail into here all the way into the central white dwarf star right in the middle there it's

lighting up that whole nebula does anybody know the size of the

the dumbbell uh i just had the wikipedia pulled up and the distance is 1200 light years

yeah so so what is our that brings us to a question let's do question number two okay

question number two is what was the first planetary nebula

that charles messier discovered and added to his famous list of objects and when did he discover it

just what was it and when right charles messier two pieces and you're

gonna send the email as question number two

yes there's two which question it is question number two answers to kent

explore scientific dot com subscribe to answers that's right

all right so the door prize the door prize for number one was pick any of the 52 degree eye pieces

that you want okay so you can look at those if you're the winner select which eyepiece you like okay

question number two uh is pick any of the inch and a quarter

82 degree eyepieces that you like

that's a very nice that's a very nice fear about that you sure you want to do that stuff

that's some serious that's crazy talk right crazy dog okay all right

hey scott is there any rules about the same person winning more than once no so the problem is that comes out of

my budget not his you didn't care wow look at this

this is beautiful are you still seeing my screen oh yeah yeah yeah this is the oxygen

data so this is 15 minutes on oxygen that's it huh wow

and the oxygen becomes the blue correct yeah if you map it to um you know true

tone that would be a hydro you know hydrogen oxygen oxygen for rgb

is the typical way to do that so it would become a teal color

and you know it'd be a 50 50 mix of blue and green

but to get a real true tone you have to mix some hydrogen into the blue

to represent the hydrogen beta which ends up giving the image a little bit more of a

blue tint but i'm going to do that mix here i mean i don't know if we're going to come back

around but i should be able to get these come back we'll come back around for the last one

all right well i'll let it go here all right

okay and um let's uh let's jump to uh back over to dusty

haskins so i hear i hear everybody's been

imaging already and i hadn't even really started yet

but i guess what's the steps what are you going to do to get started uh well i went through and you guys kind

of saw when i went and set everything up that was about as far as i usually take it okay and then uh really

what i got is i don't know if you can see that yes

yeah kind of all right so

just type in where we're headed

and what is this what's this client that you're using this is uh the asi air okay

so there we go and you can see

number eight patches

and

and now what it's doing is just i don't know if you can see it once it

gets there plate solves and we'll start as soon as it gets there

okay so maybe you could describe a little bit what a plate solve is for people that might not know that uh

plates all basically what it's doing is it's taking a quick picture of the sky and it's looking at

all the stars that are there and it's you can kind of tell where it's at in in accordance to where where

everything is and it knows whether or not it needs to move to one direction or the next

okay okay all right well we'll come back to you in a moment and i'm sure you'll

have some imaging by the time perfect all right

let's jump to alberto levy oh hello guys yeah that's me

okay going overhead yeah i'm i'm

i'm just about a couple of miles from miramar air base top gun op gun that's right i'm quite

secure here very safe no russians are coming they're not

coming yeah but you did have a plane crash not too long ago right a few years ago

the airshow comes over my head over my house so it's it's really free

yeah but okay this is the gear oh let me let me turn the

the ipad i have it i'm shooting i'm shooting with uh in color

okay uh canon uh d60 a all right and

through uh

fsq106 and i added uh the 1.6 barlow

in order to have a better uh a larger image and i haven't guided yet i'm i'm just

shooting about 40 seconds right now and absolutely not only the calibration but basically

what what's my best iso and uh and time to to get it

and i have a very simple uh light pollution filter i'm not far from downtown so

this is what i got maybe i can stop the uh the camera for a

moment and see what we can see maybe it could show

something where is it where is it

no it's quite dark no no i have to give it more time

and better so i i drop it too much but i'm going to show you what i did with

i can explore scientific just uh you can see that one second one

second would it be in focus or like kind of

overexpose here but but actually it's a better image i don't know if i could

well that's the dumbbell and uh well this is that was shot with an explore scientific scope

yeah the 127 are uh two weeks ago with an h alpha seven

nanometers oh wow and i and i just made uh got 18 uh shots uh

stacked but i mean it looks here overexposed but actually it's it's a better

it's a better image than this but maybe if i enlarge it it will it would probably yeah

you know that the the camera tries to over expose the the image yeah but actually it's not

that burnt in the middle right yeah you just can't get the scale

uh by looking at it yeah this is a

lots of detail in the nebula yeah this is through my iphone so the resolution

won't be there but i'll send it over okay meanwhile i'll i'll keep on adjusting in

a few minutes try to show something okay more realistic in color

all right all right let's jump over to uh steve maliak here

hello hello steve oh i got myself out of there we go all right sorry you

you think for someone who works at home as much as i do i figure out how to use zoom by now

haven't you been i think you've been living on zoom yeah yeah i've i've

i've been running jobs remotely for years and and uh i still can't figure it

out um so i you know i just had a meridian flip happen a few minutes ago and and that

went smoothly um okay now meridian flip for people who don't know what that means we kind of

throw some of these terms around but what's what happens during a meridian flip okay so as an object um that you're

imaging uh and anything approaches uh the meridian which is basically

straight up from where you are zenith um it's going to cross over that think of it like an imaginary line

right while your scope can't can't continue going in the direction it is without potentially crashing into the tripod or

a pier or or something to that effect so um what happens is the scope will flip

around and uh reorient itself on the other side of the tripod or the pier

and uh that's that that's what happened um uh just now and and some other uh some

of the other guys here that happened also and hopefully that went smoothly for everybody um and then when it does that as dusty

had mentioned about uh plate solving it uh the software that i'm using which is

uh sequence generator pro as well uh will do uh some plate solving to reorient

itself uh back to where um it needs to be to realign that object the only difference

is that if your object was a little bit to the right originally now it's going to be a little bit to the left but when you're stacking

your software um i can fix insight like what jason uses i use pixel sight as well or if you use other software such as

deep sky stacker um and uh um sure in pc world sorry in the mac world there's other

variants um it'll take those images and stack them all up as

mentioned earlier about the signals noise ratio the signal increasing you get a better image that way but the

software is intelligent enough with the way the files are are written initially from the imaging software it

can take those ones where everything is kind of backwards and and flip them flip them around so

everything really reorients itself so that that's essentially um

you know what happens with this with the images after meridian flip everything's flipped over but uh yeah my

um my rigs working pretty good uh tonight my guiding is uh

uh relatively uh well relatively still but we won't show that

right now um my uh seeing isn't that great it's a little humidity's a little high

so it's not not the greatest i haven't seen any uh meteor streak by yet uh keep looking up um

but uh surprisingly the temperatures uh dropped down yesterday i had so many problems with my equipment

i couldn't even take a picture the humidity was that high my camera would cut out so i was a little worried for tonight

but luckily uh things worked out um

well what else would i want to that i want to mention

i think i think it's all i have to say for now totally okay something else right okay let's uh let's jump to

uh richard grace here

all right back inside yeah back inside it if i could i just want to say one

quick thing sure richard i love your beard thank you inspiration man

use the astro beard that's inspiration for me right there i

haven't cut it in a very long time oh i don't know i sometimes i i think i'm gonna do it but

yep see uh scout do you want me to uh share the uh m13 from last yeah let's see your n13 shot all right

here let's put this down

you sure that's not omega centauri up on your desktop there i think it's this one yeah it's this one

that's amazing here we go got the uh the galaxy over here pretty good

yeah you did there's one there and there's a couple up here too that i

had no idea were even in there but uh beautiful you pixel peep it too

hard they get a little bit not so round but uh i'm unguided i haven't been doing it too long so

i'm happy to get to bring that to the table yeah now how how long have you been imaging

um actually imaging probably like seven eight months wow okay excellent

you're doing a really great job so yeah look forward to seeing the uh you shared

the file with me earlier today and it was uh it is really spectacular are you able

to share your screen uh with the viewers here or is that did i not

i'm sorry uh we are just seeing uh your monitor oh there we go ah wow that's

that's it that's here we go there you are okay so there you go over here

right in it blowing out the core unfortunately but uh yes lanes in it that's beautiful there we got uh

one over there the other galaxy there yeah and then up here in the top there's uh

this one this one and uh that one i think yeah wow there's lots of galaxies there

it's beautiful it got in uh not too bad for unguided that's all i can say uh

guiding is coming soon yep to a telescope near you that's right

what's your exposure time what's your exposure time on those uh 60 seconds

uh at f49 uh through a 152 common hunter oh okay and that's a uh a zwo 183

uh as well with the gain let's just call it half up nice uh that's about um

you're gonna laugh it's about 30 minutes of data looks beautiful looks fantastic how do

we unshare this thing uh oh there it is yeah you got it

maybe something disappeared here i can stop your sharing there we go there we go okay i want to

make a comment on on your image which i think is fantastic that if you look looking at the core of m13

it's you can see the individual stars right in right in the uh written chord i think it's a fantastic

job yeah i try not to blow things out as soon as something blows out it's pretty much no good to me that's a fantastic m13

um let me share one more uh screen here because i got what's going on here um as i figure out which one this

is there it is sure okay so uh right now we got uh

90 seconds on the uh the apple core here oh yeah it's not

showing up super well but 90 seconds in color it'll stretch out real good start to see it a little bit of blue some reddish color

in there mm-hmm and i always get green images when they're

kind of natural so i've been learning how to use my pix invite inside through to you know

get that working better um i still don't know how to undo that so yeah i can do it right here there it

is got it i found it now all right okay

all right and uh we are going to jump to ansel prairie and then to jerry hubble so

what do you think about all this answer are you enjoying the star party so far it's awesome i love it i can't wait to

to join the ranks of these awesome people [Laughter]

so hopefully that's going to happen soon but let me i'm going to share my screen and

maybe you know i put together a small presentation of uh um

some of the things which i talked about earlier let me know if you can see my screen

yep we sure can okay so a little but um

it dies dies off the formality uh explore alliance uh today is a

virtual star party august 11th and a small presentation which i prepared for for

us this is the view of the night sky which i was talking about um you know one

disclaimer i have to say the images are something which i have you know are not mine and i have put credits for each of these

images at the bottom left um this is sort of what i remember

back in the 70s you know lying down in the front lawn looking up in the cockpit of a silent

spaceship and that's what i became after

after that day this image is from the latest issue of the sky and

telescope magazine from june 2020 and yeah my childhood was kind of like this but this guy really takes the cake

it's from one of the readers um paul livio from torrance california i think

it's his grandson uh

this is another one which is burnt into my soul as well the pale blue dot i put the

quotation or the paragraph from carl sagan here and it's funny this morning when i

woke up um in my bedroom there's a beam of light coming through and i could see like tons of these dust particles

and immediately this thing came in in my head and i'm like well we are on one of these dust

particles floating you know somewhere in space um it's very profound um

um you know that that little speck has everything we have ever known we'll ever

know um moving on again one of the images which

i think we saw this a few weeks ago with dr lopez she had

um shown and i think it was also there at the beginning of this presentation um shot by cassini

with the sun in the background and saturn in the foreground and that's us right

there again a small speck in in the vast blackness of space

um this is the image which i had i think earlier it's

uh for the hubble ultra deep field and i just you know this is something every time i

look at this image it's just um it's mesmerizing it is crazy

it's like first thing you see is the gravitational lensing um and i mean i always pause at this

it's like between all this matter in the background and between us

what is causing all this gravitational lensing i mean to date um that discovery has not yet

been made dark matter slash dark energy um and i i was you know contemplating

and i compared this image to a couple of uh parallels um maybe

this is what really is who knows i mean we could be just shells scattered on a beach on an

endless beach each of these shells are maybe

each of these galaxies and each of these shells are 100 to 200 000 light years across

um where does it end um is there a shore or an edge to this

or is there not i mean i i had this question about 20 to 30 years

ago and you know i'm i'm amazed that we still don't have an answer i'm not sure if he'll ever will um

um the and correct me if i'm wrong the edge of the observable universe is

80 billion light years or something but with everything receding with more and

more velocity acceleration of the stretching of the fabric of space time

not sure if you will ever be able to find that edge um

or is it really you know are we like jellyfish floating in an in a in infinite ocean

are we in a jellyfish deep field um in my mind i think this seems a

little closer to what it could be because the creatures here floating in in ether they have no idea

that you know this there's a limit to this there's a surface to the water and if you go above the water then you

are in a different medium um the water percolates through

everything we see on the screen and in my head i think it

is comparable to the real thing because if currently the space time fabric is

expanding but i read somewhere recently that the density of

the dark matter or dark energy or whatever that is which we haven't discovered yet that

is the same that is not changing which is um super confusing to me

and and i think that if we look at this model where let's say there's a rip current or

you know some disturbance in the water and all these jellyfish move away the water is also moving away

but something else or or more water is filling up the space in between and the density of water itself is not

changing so um

or are we in a set of multiverses like these soap bubbles you know floating up

in the air are we you know in one of these bubbles floating in the

um would be great to find an answer um you know within the span of our

lifetimes um i thought i would draw a parallel

from um my profession from architecture

um 18th century german writer white uh mentioned um a famous quotation by him

is music it is liquid architecture um architecture is frozen music i think the second part is

something which i'd like to focus on architecture has frozen music

built architecture at the human scale a good representation of frozen music is

you know the disney concert hall in los angeles designed by architect frank gehry but again this is

this is built architecture built by humans but we have another architecture at a

grand scale you know grand a funny understatement and i would

like to go back to i think the initial image of the deep field um

this is the grandest architecture i think there could be um at least

as of yet what is known to humanity but is this really frozen it may be frozen

in our lifetime as a species but if you stretch it across trillions

of years then the equation would it's constantly evolving things are constantly moving

and i think it's a colossal symphony um we may not be i think our lifespans are

not even enough to hear a single note but it is a full composition stretching

out trillions of years architecture is also there similar at a

smaller scale you know this is the image of the dye atoms um

so magnifying you know further down

from where we are um and again this is also not so frozen architecture

this is a smaller symphony beautiful shapes though right right and this is also another

i think musical composition a symphony which is ongoing perpetually never ending

but it's i think it's interesting to me to look at this image and then look at this

image um and draw similarities from these two

i also attempted poetry which i'd like to share i wrote this in 2012 um

sort of capturing i think the spirit of the slides before i shared

so many dreams to accomplish such mysterious depths to fathom

life is seeming unfairly fleeting to marvel at every pixel of this immense

kaleidoscope to touch every pattern of this myriad of colors

to relish every node feeling humbled at the momentous flash

of existence may be best then to savor just one

flavor and discover a universe in it and i can only think of i think the koi

pond where these fish they they have no idea you know that's their whole universe um a little small pond and there's a

surface above but basement their entire lives circling in that you know tiny universe of them of theirs

and they're perfectly content um

thank you thank you very much very much

thank you okay all right so we have a question um uh

and it has to do let's see this let's see oh peter singh uh on

facebook is saying uh as asking do most popular tracking software

have meridian flip built into them

i think that i think that they i would say that the answer is yes uh for for german equatorial mounts

uh especially you know right that that the functionality is not

uh directly built into the ascom driver if it's a mass com client software that

we're talking about it's up to the client to to control and initiate the meridian flip according to

the astronomers desires right so there's one way sometimes when you're

doing imaging you want it and you're in the middle of an imaging run you want it to track past the meridian

and not do the meridian flip until after it's done with that sequence so a lot of mounts can handle that uh

where you can finish the sequence and then it'll say okay now you instruct

now the client will instruct them out to do the meridian flip and center back up on the target and continue the next for the next run

great uh bergman scooter is making a comment here uh he says this is a great star party he

says i'm sitting in my lawn chair looking east northeast watching the sky and i've seen

several meteors shoot through the night sky and i'm also listening to the show

it is magic tonight great show so thank you bergman that's that's very

kind of you uh and uh jerry yeah you got some stuff to share here right

and you are imaging at the mark slade remote observatory

and you might be muted jerry i'm not sure

it always catches me i'm muted so i switched over started talking yapping you know so i'm

i'm bringing up the equipment so just a real quick uh recap of the equipment i've got a

explore scientific 165 fpl 53 refractor with the on mounted on our g11

pmc8 system with the telescope drive master high resolution tracking

drive correction system the camera is a qhy 163

uh color camera we have a filter wheel on it we also we actually do a science

imaging uh by bending we've been by two to get monochrome pixels out of the

color camera and then we filter that to do our science imaging right now i've

got the filter wheel in the open position and we're doing color imaging of the

of the of m27 and before i get too far along i want to show

my picture from last week um oh that's right you were able to some data yeah so i was going to run off and

do that so here's let me zoom back up

so this is from last week and i actually imaged it again last night when i'll i'll show that so this shows

the detail from last week uh what i was able to get oh yeah and i use maxim dl to do the

processing i didn't do any photoshop or anything i'm not uh i'm not known as a deep sky imager

uh and typically when i do these deep sky objects i do monochrome

which is this is um it's a monochrome image instead of a color image

so but i was able to like steve said be able to show a lot of

the detail in the stars in the center without overblowing it and uh which it

turned out pretty well uh the scene was pretty good last week

this week last night i did the same uh image and i'm gonna bring that one up here

i think it's oh no that's not the one that's the same one we just looked at

okay there's the new one um is that right

that's the a i'm trying to select which one i want to show that's the a version this is the this is

the one from last week that was the one from last night i'm sorry this is the one from last week it's just

the first star so you can see there's a slight difference it's uh the seeing wasn't quite as good

as it was last night but you can still see the center of the image of the cluster

there's a couple of features in here so i'm trying to find uh one feature is called the propeller i

think this is it right here you see where i'm circling it's got these dark lanes right here that kind of

changes oh i see it like a three blade propeller replay

propeller right exactly let me see if i can show it in the other one um

yeah you can see in the other one too yeah so that's my image from last week this is

only uh 30 seconds 30 uh 60 frames at 30 seconds

each so it's 30 minutes worth of imaging very nice result

very nice so right now i'm i'm working on uh

m27 i wanted to go through i haven't focused yet i mean i i basically started the image run before

the meridian flip and and then i just did the meridian flip about 20 minutes ago 15 20 minutes ago

okay so let me uh let me i'm going to go through a focusing run just to show people how i do a focus

on this uh on this system and this uses maxim dl as a control system

so i i basically connect to everything that uh we got a power switch we got the webcam which i just showed you

we've got the dome control um in here we've got the focuser control

and we've got the telescope and on the focus control i can do an autofocus of the image

which brings the stars down really nice and tight so i'm going to attempt to start this and we'll see how it goes and

see where it ends up at right now the focus position is this value right here it's 14

326. so i'm going to start it and should go pretty quick sometimes if

it gets a really bright star in the image where you're in the in the position that you're at it'll um

it'll be too um too bright and it won't focus correctly but it looks like it managed to

grab a star here to measure that's not too bright

let me uh let me get this a little better is that does that look a little cleaner

so what this is doing is it ran the focuser out out of further out and now it's running

it in to a position uh and it's taking images every every position that it's uh

that is moving about 40 50 steps in the focuser and it's and as the image gets tighter and

tighter it measures that uh the full width at half maximum of the star image and then it bottoms

out at a certain position and then it'll start going up when you go out of go back out of focus

so then what the curve gets down towards the bottom that's sharper that's the sharpest that's the sharpest

right and you can see it's around three three and a half to four um

uh full arc seconds or pixels i should say so now it's determined that the uh found

the optimum focus now it's 14 301. so it was slightly out of focus the i think the position before was 14

326 or something like that it's not that it wasn't that far off so now let me go back and take another

image i'm going to take a 30 second image so

it doesn't take so long and uh

this just to tell you a little bit of about the msro the remote observatory this is a hands-on

teaching observatory it's not fully automated always although we can do some automation

uh with the imaging runs we've designed it to be a hands-on facility for students to

operate just like i'm demonstrating here right now to learn the equipment to learn the operation of

the observatory we are we are uh maxum dl is a very powerful program it has uh

scripting and uh other things like that so let me i'm

gonna just brighten this up a little bit so now you can see how uh

yeah how sharp it is i'm going to do a plate solve on it to measure

the um well that was been too so this is a

monochrome bend two image let's see what the uh into a plates off real quick and we'll

see how big the uh how what the full width at half maximum

is of the stars [Music]

jerry explain in as simple english as you can what is full width half maximum

all right so any star image on a on a ccd because of uh

the uh diffraction of the image through the optics it doesn't it's not a

point sources are diffracted out as a virtual uh image of the objective okay and

depending on how big the uh objective is you can get

you get smaller and smaller star images in the profile and it's the profile of the image of the star on the plate it's

shaped like a bell-shaped curve okay so if you were to look at the x-y

position well let me let me draw here let me show you what it looks like here actually now this is going to be um

a very rough graph let me do the star profile and this is

going to be a basically a half of a a profile

all right that's i don't know if that's as good as what it could be all right so i don't know if you can see

so you can see this is the profile it kind of slopes down yes that's the profile of the star

that's half of it right so and then it if if you could see further

left the other half would go the same way it'd be down like that as well and so that's the peak of the star

uh that's the peak brightness value the top would be the brightest point and then you've got one half would be

right here right and so as you go down that slope and then there's a little bump that might be a diffraction ring around

the star right exactly right so the full width is basically at

you take the peak of this of the image on the uh on the plate on the uh ccd and divide it

by two so it's going to be right around here okay and the width the measured width there is this is

again this is half the width so this is like one or let's say it's like one pixel

okay so basically it's two pixels wide okay now the significance of that

is it it's i don't want to get too technical you can get it the seeing the sky only allows you so much resolution

okay and really this is what causes your uh on top of that diffraction limit that

you have with your scope it's basically based on what the sky will give you right with the half maximum is the

measurement of how blurry or how clear the sky is the sun you know with the scintillation and

everything so this is very tight uh so the measured full width and half maximum for the

overall image was around was about about two two pixels is what we got right here

that's what this exponential number means that's two pixels um and i don't want to get into the math

and what critical sampling is and all that but this is this is not bad at all yeah it's pretty

good so it does look sharp just when you look at it right right so when you even when you

zoom up this is just a single 30 second image okay

and so that's what that's about so you saw how i went through the

focusing run and uh it got focused and then took an image and

uh again that's that's what we're doing um i'm going to be taking a bunch of

frames color frames so we can do a color image and again it's a one shot color camera

uh and that's how it works great gary are you going to be using uh

filters on that l enhanced or anything are you just using straight color no it's just straight from the camera um it's a like

i said that's a qhy 163 color camera which is a 16 megapixel camera it's got

a it's got a field of view on this optics this got 850 millimeter focal length

it's about 1.2 by 0.9 arc uh degrees field of view so it's

basically like four full moons is this image which is covered so if you look at this it cover like four full moons would fit

in here right one in each quadrant so jerry you've got the if you're shooting at 850 you've got the

uh field flattener focal reducer installed is that correct yes that's right that's right now one of the things

is that so let's say if i image this same object at uh at twice the focal length let's

say uh you've got a longer focal length scope like a smith cast marine or

something one of the limitations you'll find is that the sky will still limit your resolution to what we see

here we won't see any better pictures than that even if you blow it

up you'll just get bigger blobs you won't get tighter stars right that's a key thing to understand when

you start astrophotography is that the sky will only give you so much and what i've found over the years is that

about a one meter focal length or a thousand millimeter focal length is about the sweet spot

for imaging for most backyard skies uh that give you two to three arc second

uh seeing is what we call it two to three arc second if you're up on a mountain and you got less than one arc seconds then you can

take advantage of those uh of those big uh big scopes and

high high high focal lengths but uh for most backyards you can't really take

full advantage of that at all

all right excellent that's not my dog by the way that's

unusual i said say your dog has been taking human or dog growth hormones

that's right his name is sancho oh yeah i love sancho he's a good

standard a standard standard schnauzer yes but there might be coyotes out there and so

he's sort of chasing them away

okay so let's uh let's come back up to um let's come back up to jason and uh

and see where where he's at at this point

there yeah all right um so i got clouded out in that uh whole

process so the hour of uh additional oxygen didn't pan out didn't

pan out no i did restart but um i don't think it's going well

it's it's really uh got some high thin stuff out there so what i did is uh just came back to

the image that i was creating and i um stacked this into color okay

um so we ended up with an oxygen master and a hydrogen master

so these are the two master frames out of the telescope had an hour of hydrogen data and i think

uh 20 minutes uh almost a half hour of oxygen in the

end jason you're not sharing your screen if you're trying to show oh that's the problem

i did like the commentary yeah yeah brett brett blake on uh youtube is saying uh

love that people are imaging while we're doing this so this is cool all right is this uh visible okay

um so up here i'm shooting with a monochrome camera so the images come out black and white

um so this on the left you can see up here it says h a

this is the hydrogen data and then over here is the oxygen data so this is through

two separate narrowband filters to look at each emission of these specific gases

so here you're seeing um the hydrogen emission and here you're seeing the oxygen emission

so if i i come up here and i just look at these

images you know you can kind of change the brightness and see the detail

level that's that's in all these now if i had the time i'd go back and process these to

really accentuate those details and each each filter um it wouldn't be hard to do

it's kind of hard to do um on a timeline like we are today but um

so i can hop over and then show if i take these two images um you can blend them together to a full

color image of it by taking hydrogen into the red channel and oxygen into the green

and blue channel okay so that's what i did here if you look at what i did this shows

what i put in the red channel green channel and blue channel so i just put hydrogen in the red and green and blue

are the oxygen data and we end up with this image wow

um wow which shows the dumbbell nebula in relatively true color

now remember we're looking at minuscule slices of the visual spectrum and we're mapping those to colors

they're put in the appropriate spot but because rg and b are very wide buckets

to throw these into you know the tonality may be a little bit different than

what you would see in the eyepiece if your eye was six inches in diameter and you could

expose for an hour and a half but um so i you know i come up with that full

color image so that's kind of what what the object looks like and then taking it into photoshop you know

just um putting a little more contrast in it and a little more colors you can

see you know a little bit more of that detail it looks like there's this spike or this jet

coming off one edge like yeah here and here all the way through it you know

but um you know i'm i'm pleased with that uh for considering the amount of data that we captured and

the um the outer halo is starting to come through you know the hydrogen extends out

you can see this little crescent shape out here yeah i think there's a faint one on the other side too but i don't have enough data

for that and then the oxygen um extends above and below

there's no up in space but in this image top and bottom um

but yeah you know and you can look in the channels and you can kind of see you know back if i look click on just

the red channel that's the hydrogen data and then you know i click on the green so you know i kind of mutilated

the green a little bit but um that's just a quick look at it yeah

so that's what what i came up with how much talking if you gathered all the data

that you wanted how much time would you spend image processing on average on on something like this well quite a

bit of time i mean i you know the the uh definitely the

computer processing time is part of it the actual time the computer's chugging along

is the majority of of the workload that i did here just because um you know i was trying to

stack these images so i could show something but um the

post processing can take you know many hours if you really get into you know you want to display all the

details and i showed this image um where did i put it i showed my previous

image of the dumbbell nebula and i had um put

11 or 12 hours of exposure 11.4 hours of exposure here

similar similar wow look at that that's beautiful similar type of process but you know i

obviously i spent a lot more time you know trying to display the details on all the

different various levels of brightness yeah and that's really what you want to see you got

there's such a dynamic range in the in the image it takes a lot of processing to level

the the the ranges out so that you know the eye can perceive all these different

levels of detail obviously these are incredibly faint you know these outer halos compared to the center of the

object that's right and that's the great thing about astrophotography is that

your your reach is just so so much more you know in this way of course it's

beautiful to see things visually and had the real photons hit hitting your eye but

uh and there is that connection that sense of you know i always get that sense of exploring but this is

really peering into the depths you know so yeah it's amazing you can do this with uh in

your backyard you know with um you know uh

well that's what i love about it you know you end up exploring the images you take you know you look at

the structures here and you're like you know i you want to understand more what you're looking at um

yes you know you can go off the deep end beautifying these images to no end but

um you know i do like that aspect of taking a shot and kind of especially if it's like a

galaxy cluster or something um you know there's not a lot of information on you find if you

if you dig into the details there's so much we don't know about these things

that you can just photograph from sheer backyard they they're unknown objects look at all the

suns there all the different colors of these stars it's beautiful hey jason i was talking

about beautifying you know this is a narrowband image but i shot red green and blue filters to get

the star colors um you know in their natural tones that's something that's missing here hey jason you were talking

about uh you know go off the deep end and really start processing it how much of this do you consider to be

photography and how much of this do you consider to be art you know an expression of of how you see it

as opposed to maybe a a news photo of you know gathering facts and truth

how how do you how do you think about that um so i think that unless like you said

if unless it's like news photography or um you're archiving something i think most

photography is art um from the moment you peel it off of a camera it's uh

you know it's your artistic rendition of what what the the camera is giving you um you

can you can see plainly you know the raw data that the camera gives you

um i had it up here you know this is it so you know from that point

on it's it's an artistic

rendition your interpretation of that data because there's no once you once you

take the data and you stretch it out um to reveal these details you've already taken it

you've already taken it beyond its its scientific value

this is what the image looks like before it's it's edited so you have to boost

the levels you know to bring out these details and just the act of doing that you know

as a non-linear adjustment that's um that's taking the data away from its

natural state so my interpretation is you're not you're not taking you're not adding data though

you know you're not right you know we're not adding data it's not like you you airbrushed details in there or

something so right so the data's there yeah

i think it's got it right i think there's a lot of an artistic component though especially you know in color

representations yeah the color palette sure

very interesting very interesting

so jason i mean i would love to hear people's opinion on that because i mean that's just my take on it

yeah i would i would like to to to [Music] give my opinion about it and and even

though you're managing uh your stretching and everything you're putting

out detail and that detail it is science because let's say 10 years from now you take it

again or somebody else takes it and you'll see the evolution of the movement of certain swirls or

past stones or or whatever movement that that this expansion have

created of this uh of this uh planetary nebula so there's actually science to to look

at it if if we go i don't know the first photographs uh 20 or 30 40 years ago and now

there might be differences differences in the texture and the and the movement of of

masses there so i do think there's this i mean and they've demonstrated that with

the crab nebula over several years yeah there's a 10-year

time lapse out there and you can see the uh you can see the star spinning

in the center and the clouds in the center the crab expanding and stuff this was ten years

so i mean a remarkable a very remarkable image uh one of my favorite uh amateur

astrophotographs just to come back to and look at again and again you know so there is science there yeah

don't don't discard that yeah i'm not saying i i guess maybe

maybe my statement could be misconstrued i'm not saying that there's no scientific information within

this i mean it's not like you know i'm going in there and i'm painting in um you know a nebula um like it's a

it's a painting you know i i work with the data i have but um you know there are you know there are

aspects to it that's it's it's an artistic interpretation you look at anybody's

i mean take the most photographed night sky object which is m42 the orion nebula no no two of those look

exactly the same same underlying data everybody's collecting the same quote-unquote scientific data um but

everybody's interpretation of it their processing of it is different so i think on that level it's it's a lot

of our art yeah i think what you're talking about jason well to me that the science part of any

of this imaging is is really the photometry part and brightness measurements you can't

you can't stretch and do a non-linear functions on the pixel data on the counts that you get

out of the chip without distorting the actual brightness measurement value that the

that the original image had now in terms of motion and and seeing changes in the object

that's different that's a different type of measurement i think when when people talk about the

difference between uh beautiful pictures and science imaging is really dealing

with the actual measurement of the photometry and the brightness of stars

mainly in other objects in the sky so for example if i were to take your

image the raw data and measure one of the features that's in that cloud

right and without your stretching it and then compare that to it the neck

you know do a bunch do a light curve over time maybe there's something in that object that's that's with a pulsar you

know where you have or with some kind of pulsing thing like uh for example hubble's variable nebula has

a has a cataclysmic star within it that shows the nebula bright and dim so over time you can measure that

light curve for that object that's really the science that we're talking about the other side of it is

the spectral uh values of the data when you do narrow band imaging with the raw data you actually

capture that specific wavelength and what the value of that wavelength is in terms

of brightness uh that would that would be considered science data um but once you start

stretching it and doing non-linear functions like you talked about jason that's when

it becomes more uh more art it's your interpretation

yeah and you know some of that is just for um aesthetics you know if i uh

like this was the this is the image before i um this was the image as i just combined

the hydrogen and oxygen data um in my opinion the middle of it

looks muddy because you can't um the the brightness is such that the eye can't discern the details

you know so you can run a process on that to dim it down um and you know that right there is

destructive to the quote-unquote scientific data but you know it's an adjustment that was made

so that you could see the inner details there so um you know i i do think that that

you know aspects of that are just purely for artistic reasons

yes you know when uh earlier ansel uh purely showed the uh

pale blue dot image that was uh that was directed by carl sagan to take

from the voyager spacecraft he he uh argued that we needed to turn the spacecraft around

and take a shot of earth as as this dot in in the in

the vastness of space and uh he got a lot of pushback by his

scientific uh peers about that like why would we do this this is not science um you know this is

uh uh you know what what what what use would it be for us as scientists

and he did that shot for humanity and um and that has been

that particular image that uh the pale blue dodge been considered one of the most important photographs ever made and uh

so you know there are times where uh you know the doing something

um you know with uh with science instruments uh to allow you to see deeper or to see

it in a new framework um triggers the mind to uh

look you know look at the universe in a new way

and so yeah if there are artists in scientific imaging i say here here

yeah that's that's what gets that's what gets everybody excited about yeah it is the pretty pictures it's not

the stuff i do you know depends on how you're how you're looking at things but

i don't know you using a telescope to do exoplanet transits

uh at the level that nasa can do it doing it with a 200 filter on your

telescope i don't know man that's pretty cool right there it is very cool

it is yeah it's an awesome image but it might take an image like this to get you to interested to go

use your equipment in that way you know so right you have to take this the steps and it

takes the hard work uh and the perseverance of of of people like jason to uh

to take people there and so that's that's the outreach and the inspiration

i have to say i'm pretty impressed with the results out of that telescope i've only had

um a couple nights with it yeah so far but

you know rigged up like i have it it performs it definitely performs

that's great i mean you can see all the way down you know central white dwarf it's so it's

it's delivering some detail and it's only an hour worth of hour and 20 minutes of data incredible

all right let's uh let's move on at this point and uh we have some more ground to cover

um that was awesome that was awesome so uh let's come back

to uh ansel prairie

okay you know the last portion i just wanted to just uh talk about is i think some of

these we have already touched upon um i would say that you know kovit 19 has

had an unexpected fallout many of us are working from home

with lots of free time to pursue hobbies like astronomy as we have talked um

definitely i would say um i think a new arrival at our home

for which i have identified a cozy corner here in the house and also ordered a few

ornaments and the new arrival is the ed140

from explorer scientific right so i am i'm super excited

just like a kid running around for the last few days you know looking for the keys to the candy store

but i haven't seen them yet so the ornaments are the mount

and an eyepiece um i think for the scope i would say the i

i did about eight six to eight months of research i talked to various people

and you know did a lot of research i think cloudy nights was a was a great resource as well which i learned from

the the explore scientific shows uh last few weeks uh attending in the

afternoon and for me i think the criteria was number one was to have a great visual

scope uh number two was to have the largest aperture i could find without burning a

very big hole in my pocket number c well the third one was

obviously budget and the next one was the ability to do astrophotography

without any chromatic aberration and i know you know we just talked about the whole

topic of that with jason so you know i have heard some fantastic

things about ed140 so i'm really looking forward to the scope

and in the near future my hope is with the rig installed and running um it'll be

perhaps uh the fulfillment of a childhood green you know i cherish for a long i had that

12-inch refractor my dad gifted me uh 30 years ago

um then maybe i can think of joining the character of the amazing astronomers on this star

party so i look forward to that well we look forward to it too

that's great and so thank you for sharing all your thoughts with us and for um your poetry

and uh your presentation and uh you know your sincere um

your sincere comments about uh um you know your feelings about astronomy you know it's it's hard for

uh many of us to put those things into words and you did so very well so thank you that was great sir thank

you for the opportunity i thoroughly enjoyed it thank you thank you okay all right and uh let's uh let's

move on to dusty haskins and see what's uh what's happening in his corner well

i am about let's see 30 37 shots in

okay and i don't know [Music] oh well you can you can see it yeah

that's what that's what i got so far okay i am i'm shooting it with actually a color

camera so it's not going to be it's not going to be the monochrome and that was that was kind of

you'll be able to see the difference in the uh in the long run of what it's going to be like

so yeah i mean it it seems to be guiding for the most part okay okay with

everything which is which was kind of my concern because there were a few a few clouds that were up and i haven't really had

too many problems so that's been good excellent that's been good excellent well great yeah i mean i think

i think one thing one thing that i remember hearing one of the one of the guys that i know he always told me is like you know

being in minnesota one thing that you really don't get is a whole lot of good

nights so that's the one thing i've tried to do is is streamline everything

as much as i can to where when i go out without having it like a full observatory i have

if you look like right where right where the feet are of my of my scope or whatever i got that

spray painted on the ground so i know exactly where to set it every time i set my mouth there every time

and i just wanted to try to make everything go as quick as possible as far as setting up and everything is

concerned because i know that being here we don't like i said we don't

get a don't get a ton of great nights so yeah right there are a lot of good uh

astrophotographers up there though so that's uh it's kind of ironic you know and

and also uh we have friends in the uk where it's often cloudy and uh it's all about speed and taking

advantage of every every clear uh hour or a clear couple hours that they might get you

know so you know gary palmer in the uk talks about this a lot

and we will have a european edition of this of this star party uh so they'll be

really interesting for us to watch uh because it'll be daytime here you know that'll be cool

really interesting okay dusty the other thing you face is in summertime what time does it get dark

there you're pretty far north i mean so it doesn't get dark until you know in june in july until

seriously like what's that it's yeah i mean it can be after nine

ten o'clock almost sometimes before it's even dark enough to think about it so right yeah it goes it goes by quick

and and then you know the sun comes up pretty early too i mean the whole like your whole total

amount of time of imaging is is really cut down in the summertime

and then it's really cold in the winter time yes it is yes it is and that was that

was the other thing that i would i i i mean last year i know just

i i would go out and image not even image you know i just go out and just go out and look and i mean it

would be freezing cold and that was the one thing that i that i told myself is before winter i want to have everything ready to go

so i can have my nice little room that i'm sitting in right now and be able to sit there and just do what i want to do but not freeze my

butt up so right so i have to ask so what is the temperature at which you quit wearing

shorts oh well i mean i'll i'll go t-shirt in

30 degrees 35 40 degrees 40 degrees for sure it's future weather by the time

oh my goodness i have a friend that he considers 20 motorcycle weather

20 he'll he goes riding his motorcycle because it's gotten warm wow you guys know there's a canadian on

the call right yeah that's right very cool yeah yeah that's right

dude a couple of weeks ago i was talking to a guy that lived in quebec

and it was 102 degrees fahrenheit there it was it was 94 right here it was a

hundred and two is a terry larryman yep yeah oh i know terry

yeah 102 in canada yep

yeah we got we get some pretty extreme weather right where i am it can be i'm going to go

celsius so 45 degrees celsius with the humidity in the summertime and then in the winter

it can drop down to 40 degrees c which is 40 degrees minus 40 fahrenheit so

you know what we we have like an 80 degree swing where i am that's crazy

sometimes well that's in fahrenheit

oh my goodness okay how about if we check in on david ing

and uh and see what's happening there hey well i'm just enjoying the show so

far you're enjoying the show okay all right so what do you think of the show so far is it uh we started with a small group of guys

you're one you were in the first group um uh you think it's going okay

i think it's going great love watching all the uh everyone actually catch capturing some

images and not too many issues this time yeah that's right last time we got uh you know the weather uh

knocked a couple guys out um but it looks like everyone's capturing some

some pretty decent images and also i like uh that everyone's sharing their war stories and their rigs and

stuff and how everything gets put together and it's got me thinking too so right now i'm shooting with a dslr um

it's unmodified and i'm i'm trying to think okay what do i want to do next or do i even want to do anything next do i

want to continue with my dslr for a little while do i want to get into monochrome and then start shooting

filters yeah i i don't know it's kind of opens up another world for me

so uh where's one thing i do want to ask you though scott my uh ed-102 i can't in in my current

setup i can't capture m31 in one shot i was going to ask you does explore scientific make a reducer

that'll fit on my rig oh for the ed-102 yeah it's a two-inch focusing

yeah the the 0.7 focal reducer could work um uh it's not

specifically designed for your telescope there are focal reducers by third parties that would work on that

um you know the scope is already at what seven hundred and twelve millimeters yeah there you go

seven fourteen so um you know uh but uh you know it means either

you're getting a giant chip camera or um right which is very expensive

or or focal reducing it which is a much uh more affordable way to go and uh

you know so that that probably um you know i would probably look at a third-party

unit astrotech might offer something like that some others

that are out there otech this might also be another uh

opportunity and i can help you find that you know happy to do it star field star feel

there you go so steve malia can hook you up right there yep so just because he's in another

country doesn't mean you can't buy from him so that's right or at least at least

pick his brain pick his brain and that's right gets actually a lot of usa

customers so yeah he offers incredible customer service and so anyhow uh

so let's come back to richard grace and find out what's happening here

it appears to be cloudy outside you got clouded out okay well there's the the stars are out but

i'm not getting anything worth getting i see i say but uh but you did get some

data right oh yeah yeah okay we'll make it work for next week that's for sure okay

all right we'll have we were just talking about uh filling the field with andromeda that was why i got this uh

ed80 from explorer scientific was just pretty much for that right

uh i'm looking forward to getting it this year awesome hey scott how many uh like winter star

parties have you gone to where there was four of five nights you

couldn't view i mean that's sort of what we're going through right now you know although we're getting the benefit of staying home but you know

okie texas has been rained out all week long uh winter star parties had one night one good night out of seven

you know that's this is a great benefit of staying at home well this is the benefit of of doing

this kind of uh star party because uh we have uh astronomers stretched out all across the country

um and all the way into canada so uh you know we i tried to get uh

some of the uh astronomers down in the southern hemisphere in chile um uh there's rodrigo zeleda um

and uh cesar brolo who's in argentina and so hopefully on the next next tuesday's uh

star party we can have them on line two and see some southern hemisphere objects which will

add to the uh spice here and as a group i think we should decide whether uh

we're going to continue just to observe or image one object or uh let you guys

um go up free form and pick your pick your own objects which might be

even more interesting so we'll have to see how it goes um and i detect that steve malia

is getting sleepy how are you doing are you hanging in there

yeah i'm i'm doing okay i'm just uh running for some reason my my rig shut down um

and i'm trying to get it to uh go back up again i am getting a little tired um very very very busy day yeah

i can imagine last couple of days and i gotta get up early but i can tough it

out okay all right let's one point in my life i used to do all nighters so let's

try again that's right okay uh yeah let's get another question then um and we'll we'll uh um

this would be question number three i think right okay is that right yes correct okay question

number three this is this is going to be an easy one okay but we're going to do another 82 degree inch

and a quarter eyepiece of your choice okay as the prize super easy question

how far away is m27 the number nebula so again you'll send your answers to

kent at explorescientific.com just how far away is it in light years

and uh so bishop one hint i'll give one hint on

this this is from a standard source and we'd like to get the answer as close

to the value that we have selected as the correct value from a standard source yes the

measurements of some of these things have changed over the years but

be sure and put question three in the subject so i can parse out who who is the first one to google up or

know the correct answer

hey jerry how hard would it be to take everybody's data

and merge it together in one ginormous collaborative image

oh uh rescaling everybody right i mean you could take uh

it depends on what level we want to combine the images and they at the minimum they would have to

be all scaled to the same size now whether you take the monochrome data and

add it together or if you take the final images as and then scale them and then combine

them and i'd ask this to the astronomers here what do they think

i think you could better better create a collage probably

well you could take the um the narrowband i mean those people shooting narrowband we could take those all that data and um register it

together it should it should integrate together well

it can be done that might be

the biggest thing is to settle on a standard image scale and make sure everybody's images are scaled the same

image scale and then you can then it's easier to combine the uh data

and no one's raising their hand yet well hey eurasia okay you're raised as

hell but you're the guy steve thanks hold on

you're talking to a guy you're at an auction you just scratch your ear and okay you just went up the next level

here so yeah all right right any other comments steve i processed

with microsoft paint like so yeah yeah

yeah so that'd be a good that'd be an interesting project to see uh what we could get out of that

uh in terms of it steve i have a question for you you know you

you started as this uh you've been in amateur astronomy for a while

you know and uh you weren't always into this business how has what has changed for you since

you jumped on the side of of doing this professionally

selling telescopes to amateurs rather than being an amateur yourself what what is what is now changed in your life

what has changed in my life um i get a lot less sleep um no but i met i've met some

fantastic people uh for sure and and i've been doing things um that i you know

new life experiences so you know star parties um you know finding myself looking at the

calendar every new moon weekend um and and uh learning how to read a

weather report more proficiently um but but really it uh there's a there's a

real community of of people that uh um that has dramatically changed my life

um and not you know not to get sentimental or anything but it's true right i've created a whole new set of

friends um uh from you know whether it be just in my local club

or um you know within the industry itself you know when scott when uh

um i was at aic and i and i ran into you there i had no idea you're gonna be there

um uh but it you know that whole weekend was was just a party it was fun right

because it was fun it was fun hanging out with people who who um you know want to have the same

conversation right um so i think i think it's almost true of any

any uh type of type of hobby right um that that you can turn into to a business you

develop that passion for it right um and and you know i've started

to get into more um uh you know i sorted myself i'm not

gonna get into imaging i don't i don't have the time i don't want to spend the money on the equipment and uh that that didn't last very long

um uh at all um so uh you know i've but no it's just having uh

having fun with that sorry there's mosquitoes around it just they're driving me nuts um uh but you know i wanna i i

i'm in pretty light polluted skies myself i wanted to share share a picture if i could sure um and

this was off my uh uh my astro bin i'll share my screen

i took this i took this in my backyard oh that's nice

and i'm limited to a lot of narrow band uh imaging um

i oops that's what i wanted it looks like dustin gibson was uh watching us he

said scott roberts told me the earth is flat that's right yeah yeah donald you know i know that it

looks round and stuff but it's it's flat guys i put my level on the ground

it's straight oh yeah yeah bubble levels wouldn't work if the earth was curved right yeah yeah this is this

is my m13 everyone's showing off their m13s wow that's a beautiful m13 um

and uh but slightly different color variation i got i did get the propeller

right there it is right there there it is yeah you can see that very cleanly

and uh and then you know i started off this is

my bubble right and what i really like about it is a progression that i i could see like so i was really happy

with this picture and i entered into a contest and it came in 17th place

[Laughter] that's a beautiful shot but uh but but i

but you know i've i've improved from there and it's just one of those uh um it's a it's a fun hobby where you

you can see where your where your progression uh takes place um so i like to look back i

remember the first true astronomy picture i took from my back deck was uh with um my wife's dslr was a

pentax camera and i pointed my my scope straight up to m13 and i got it it was this little really

tiny little cluster right in the center and it looked absolutely horrible but to me it was the best thing in the world

because i it was something that i saw i could see that i i couldn't see and uh that was

that was um i said that you know asking me what what's changed that's changed right

my perspective on it i'm thinking so

hopefully hopefully my rig's working now properly right well all right that's great

i think i think the biggest thing uh for me it was interesting because i had

i had come up through as a visual observer with my smith cast range from the 1980s all the way up to 2008

and i was just purely visual and i was a loner on top of that i never

joined any clubs or anything i just did astronomy on my own and then i

i looked around and saw the new technology that came about you know back in the early 2000s

and jumped with both feet right into it and and developed a very strong passion for

getting for doing this learning the technology doing the uh doing the imaging

um and i was into the science part of it a lot too i wanted i wanted to image

asteroids that i wanted to measure and calculate asteroid orbits and all that scientific stuff

so that's that's where i just fell in love with the new technology and the cameras what they

enabled you to do and the new mount systems and the new telescopes the refractors

especially you know they became affordable and and then all of a sudden it was

possible to do this kind of work on a nearly professional level at that time i didn't know it was at that point

but but it drives you once you get into it that's the thing about astrophotography

as frustrating as it can be it just drives you with a passion to get better and you push your limits all the time on

it and it's just a i don't know if it's a special type of hobby that way i don't know buddy a lot of other hobbies are maybe like

that but i haven't experienced anything like it other than this hobby in terms of uh with the scope and the

majesty of the cosmos and the sky and everything that's involved you know and the learning potential that

you have it's just amazing yes i i would say that uh

um i mean you just look at this group right here this is a nice cross section of

of uh the amateur astronomy community um what's missing are the uh some of the

i mean a lot of the women that are interested are in getting involved in this in this

community as well they've been they've always made huge contributions we're starting to see uh some great um

uh astrophotographers and uh people doing amateur science as well so

it's it's awesome uh and you know the women astronomers professional

astronomers that i know rank amongst the best astronomers of all time

uh when i'm thinking of like gene mueller kell and shoemaker um you know and then i think of uh

people done tremendous uh work in uh amateur astronomy and

outreach uh you know people like terry mann and and others uh barbara harris and and these people are

uh great and i you know so i hope to have uh more women uh uh show up for our

uh for our star parties i hope i can get more people on uh we've been on since uh

it's now 12 30 here in arkansas i know it's uh it's an hour later there

where steve malia is so he's he's gonna have to wind it down here because he's got another

full day of work you know right two full days of work

coming up but it's early for alberto you know yes way fast you know so

if you guys want to see something i can share my screen yep okay let's do that

you see my screen yes

so i just slewed over to uh jupiter jupiter oh yeah check it out

is it coming through live okay yes very nice it's kind of small i don't think this is

with the focal reducer on so it's not ideal but right how high is it right now for you

um it's probably 20 degrees maybe less i could look

here in the west coast it's about 45. it's 23 degrees right now

but um you can see the moons here um oh yeah

there they are one two three four four of them man yeah well you can

sure see the simulation right there you know seeing the moons move

yeah so that's um so europa castillo eo and ganymede up at the top

wow fantastic it's cool to see stuff like this live

well i hope our our viewers out there are getting some nice um views of some uh some meteors i think

that's uh that's great and if you're out there with your telescope observing with our with our guys um

you know we hope that you're having a great time i'm sure you are

is that the red spot that we see down in the uh the red spots over here i'm trying i

don't have my filter wheel hooked up to this program so

i don't even know what filter we're looking through i still have my uh screen focused on me

i think god no he's he's uh he's sharing his screen

oh although my feed says i have a network error

let's see what happened here

no is it not working or no we're fine we're fine yeah the red spot is almost

not far from the meridian

yeah i'm going to be way out of focus on some of these filters i'm just looking through here

that's the problem with an acromat right the switch through these focus and so

this is with luminance

oh yeah the uh twitch uh went down honest but it's back up now

yeah it just froze for a second i think that was about it yeah i lost the stream the chat stream

on it too you can still see the chat stream on

youtube ronda elbow says 1155 degrees today here

in arizona he says well 115.

last year we went out to uh palomar observatory and uh two friends and i drove out there

and it was uh 9 30 at night we pulled over oh just before the california state line

arizona and we got out it was a wonderful cool 118 degrees

in september oh my god but but it was a dry heat so

yeah right yeah you're melting at 118.

david says i should go to bed i gotta go to work in the morning but i just can't pull myself away

i know you get drawn in on this stuff uh nicole in argentina says he is going

to bed um uh david tatum says this type of art

may inspire the uninformed to care about preserving the night sky that's true very true

but ron says it's clear there in arizona as it often is

no no one likes a bragger yeah that's why people moved arizona you know

i think it's for the skies it is for a lot of amateur astronomers that's for sure they like to retire there

well you guys are watching me struggle now figuring out why this isn't working

oh is it your filter wheel you're having some issues with no i was going to try to move to saturn

but i can't get them out to move now so huh maybe there's like a bear or

something holding on to the telescope that was um

i don't know well these concepts i guess we'll stay in

jupiter then all right all right so well it's getting towards the

uh towards the end i can feel um and um do we have one more question or

not how many questions have we gone through

well i could take another take another check here but um

oh rondell has anyone used cardboard to stop down the aperture

yes i have i've made cardboard master that's the cool thing about having a big aperture telescope is you can always

stop it down you know and that does clean up the image

any uh last thoughts as we wrap up our star party here gentlemen oh well i'll be processing uh all the

shots i took on the uh canon okay 60da

and send them back to you and uh okay uh maybe i could share a previous

uh remember i showed you with uh yeah that's that's with the

explorer scientific yeah these were

you have to say you have to click it and then you have to click it so i clicked it and then it says photos

i'll click it again

can you see it oh don i'm sorry there we go now we do i'm sorry

yeah yeah so yes this was very simple i mean there were

11 shots of a minute and a half just just that this is shot tonight

correct no this was uh oh two weeks ago

tonight i i have it in color that's what i said oh yeah that's right that's right monochrome

but this is with with the explore scientific 127. very nice excellent excellent scope

and today i'm just showing you takashi is a

beautiful telescope too we're we're competing yeah yeah yeah the buying a takashi's like playing

out is is one of the rolexes of the telescope world you know so yeah very very nice for that reason i

won't be invited next weekend you're always invited all of you are so

that's great now another thing i do want to say is that uh if you are interested in

participating in this program for all of you that are listening um

you uh all you have to do is to email me and my email is very simple

it's just the letter s at explorescientific.com

uh you know tell me about your rig you will need a fairly decent uh

high-speed internet connection to participate because we're working with zoom and uh you're sharing

your screen and uh so the faster the connection the better um and

um i think that we have time for just one more question

um for another prize and uh this one will be this one will be

uh your choice between a 14 or a 20 millimeter 100 degree eyepiece

oh man whoa it's really generous yeah these are right

you're killing my budget scott killing it well we have to make this special right

so how tough is this i can't do this every week but i am this week how about that we gave

those away a couple weeks ago when we reached 500 members on the uh oh yeah but that was for a different

show right right exactly for this show

we'll we'll create another show for kent so we can give them away again

we were going to ship them to steve molly at ontario telescopes we're taking one of them away

story of my life i have plenty i have plenty so anyways your choice 14 or 100 degree

or 14 or a 20 millimeter 100 degree eyepiece this is a nice one and this is a pretty easy

question are you going to do the tough question the last one i came up with or the yeah we're going to do number five

actually okay question number five i'm not even going to read number four okay so number five for the

big prize and what does the term residual

bulk image rbi mean

residual bulk image this has to do with astrophotography rbi not baseball look at astro

look at astro beard over there googling it everybody on the show quick put him up

scott you guys on the show are also uh able to participate

but you didn't hear it any faster than anybody else so anyways can't can't say what the answer

is if you know what it is you just have to email that answer in as quickly as possible to kent at

explore scientific.com that's question five make sure you mark it as question five

yeah what does the term residual bulk image rbi mean

so there's no question four it's question one two three and five yeah we have time for four we'll use four next for our next star party

how about that all right well gentlemen thank you very

very much it was an honor to spend a night of astronomy

astrophotography poetry art i the only thing i didn't have was uh

mixing cocktails and having music you know so that was great great suggestion

and had a cocktail so there you go i was self-medicating you were self-medicated that's right

that's what that's what we used to help the focus better right that's right yeah maybe next time i can

have some live music too that might be kind of fun to me was a pleasure to meet all of you

and and learn a lot from from most of it from all of you actually

thank you thank you guys thank you that's funny

very a very rich experience thank you hey scott how many people have we had in aggregate can you tell i can't tell

i can't tell i think uh you know at one point uh simultaneously we had about a

hundred people watching the show so count up all the after the raid on

twitch uh twitch was uh equal to youtube too

yep all right uh who rated you on twitch

asteroid hunters i believe okay

they did what rated us rated where they're done with their show and they drop all their viewers on you

oh is that what they did very cool that's very cool that's very

nice great well we appreciate that was that

dustin yes yeah that's very cool

well dustin and i have been talking about doing a show together too so i think that we'll uh we'll kind of figure that thing out and

uh and uh he runs a very successful

uh you know virtual uh star party kind of show as well so um and gets a lot more

has a lot more viewers than than i have but uh you know it's not the it's not the

number of viewers in particular it is really just the quality of the experience and um

you know you guys made it happen so thank you very much thank you yeah thank you thank you and we will uh

thanks good yep we will see you all tomorrow uh

on our show uh at four o'clock central uh for the explore alliance live

open go to community program so see you then and take care after that everyone

bye

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