Transcript:
[Music]
wow that's a cool background
The Humble Deep Field yeah
hey Scott do you want the title changed
um yeah on Twitch can you do that yeah what do you want
the title to say set it up for you technology you couldn't say clear status network is streaming uh virtual Star
Party four
nice because I mean it's like almost instant um streaming
what no he's we're just counting up we start in about a minute
he's counting down and go live on Facebook and all the
other weeks in one minute
foreign
foreign
Scotty I can't hear you I can hear you David yeah but can you hear Scotty
no yeah I can hear Scott
how does that sound there you go right now I can you've been talking for about
a minute anyhow um share with the explore scientific and
welcome to uh uh the virtual Global Star Party four um this is a program that we have been
doing every Tuesday night and uh uh it's uh become a lot of fun for us and we've
got a great lineup of astronomers for you and speakers
um you know starting of course with uh David Levy and then on to uh Jay Kelly
Beatty from Sky telescope magazine but uh what you hear on the board right now from left to right I'll go I'll go
across here we have Rodrigo soleda from La Serena Chile and North Optics they
are an explore scientific dealer as well as a dealer for a lot of other great products
um to my right is David Levy at the jernak observatory um then we have uh Jerry hobble from The
Mark Slade remote Observatory also of explore scientific uh down below there's Astro bear Richard
um there in his mission control center uh and then we have Jason gonzale uh
also known as the vast reaches amazing astrophotographer David ing uh from
Temecula California he's been on uh I think every Star Party we've put on so
far uh Gary Palmer from the UK uh regular um uh here on our show and an amazing
astrophotographer and image processor uh world famous check check Ayub from
Chuck's astrophotography uh if you've uh many people watch all those YouTube
shows and he's done an amazing uh you know uh job of teaching people and
inspiring people about uh getting into astrophotography James Hubbard the astrophotographer
um and uh he's out there live with his telescope Kelly Beatty uh up next uh
from of course guy in telescope magazine he's the voice of sky in telescope for many years and we were just talking
about a little story about that Dustin Gibson from opt and Gibson picks and the
guy that started the clear skies Network um uh or at least one of the guys
is uh from the UK uh getting into astrophotography uh Dr Sam Lynn buxner
from the planetary Science Institute she will be giving a talk uh about uh things
going on there uh Cesar brolo uh from uh Optica siraco in Buenos Aires Argentina
and then we have Steve Malia from Ontario telescope so we'll go ahead and
get started I'll put the spotlight on David and um let him get started here
well thank you very much Scotty and it's really a pleasure and an honor to be part of this star party and
um and to be sharing the night sky with you for a little bit as you can see by this
Zoom program we're having we're living for a very odd time the pandemic is really wreaking havoc on
every all of us and it's interesting when we get together in the first question we ask
each other is are you all healthy I'm glad to tell you that all of us here are
and we hope to heck that all of you are as well one of the things that uh one of the big
questions that comes when we talk about a pandemic is to follow the science
and in in the United States at least there are people that want to follow the
signs and there are other people that don't that has nothing to do with what we're doing tonight because we're going
to follow a very different kind of science a science that comes really from the depths of passion as
much as from looking up things in a textbook or online I started astronomy when I was a little
kid mostly because I was very very shy and it was very difficult for me to make
friends and I remember realizing as at a very young age
that the night sky with its stars and planets and maybe a few shooting stars
and a couple of comets could become very close friends to me and these are friends that would never
leave me and I think that in the dawn of my own life is how I got to be interested in
astronomy um these depressions that I used to carry as a youth
really had some physical um manifestations I was a very bad
asthmatic and I had to spend 14 months at the Jewish National home for
asthmatic children in Denver probably the most important day there was one day in the middle of March of
1963 when the mail was distributed and I got my very first copy of sky and
Telescope magazine and we're going to hear from Kelly shortly I don't I think that March 1963
was before your time Kelly at Scott and Telescope he's agreeing with me
but it had information it had columns and it had uh things that I've never
forgotten I still have that sky and telescope and it's come Faithfully every
month since then as I moved around different places in Canada and then
finally to Arizona and I still get it every single month I
wrote for it for a long time for uh 20 of the happiest years that I've had really enjoyed writing for it
but now I enjoy reading it every every month and I think I could say that there are
probably of all the people on the uh on the zoom platform tonight
I would be way at the bottom when it comes to scientific knowledge and
actually being a scientist however I doubt there is anybody and I think I
don't mind maybe bragging writes a little bit but I don't think there is anyone in the world who was simply more
passionate about the night sky than I am I love it I enjoy going out and even
though I do have a considerable collection of telescopes including one that is sitting right next to me right
here I am my favorite observing moments are when
I'm just looking up at the sky watching the constellations and watching for shooting stars it's something I enjoy so
very much I'm going to close as I always do with a poem
and uh tonight's poem is by Sevilla D Martin who wrote in 1905 His Eye Is on
the Sparrow she wrote it as a religious poem I
changed it in 2014 quite a bit it is no longer a religious poem the way
I interpreted it but I now wrote it as something that means a lot to me
whenever I am tempted whenever clouds arise when songs give place to sighing when
hope within me dies I draw closer to the sky from care it sets me free
my eye is on the sky and I Know It watches me my eye is on the sky and I
Know It watches me let's enjoy our night tonight together it's going to be fun thanks Connie wow that's wonderful
David who wrote that again via D Martin
c-i-v-i-l-l-a-d Martin fantastic
okay so uh our next uh speaker is uh she
wrote she wrote it the way she wrote it was His Eye Is on the Sparrow and I
changed it to my eyes on the sky so it's quite a bit of a change from what the
original that she wrote awesome that's I think that's a nice set a nice modification there
um our next speaker is uh Jay Kelly Beatty I was so excited
um to have um uh Kelly uh uh join us uh well I I I
just envisioned that uh you know I would somehow get the chance and opportunity to get him to speak once but uh he's
joining us for a series of talks for uh the next six uh start parties that we do
so uh he is going to be covering uh astronomy past present and future
um and uh you know just a little bit of background about uh Kelly he
um he is an award-winning uh journalist uh he's been involved in astronomy since
uh maybe way before the 80s I find out about him in the 1980s because I'm
listening to uh his um his uh star talks
that he would give that's not what they're called but he would give information about what was up in the sky
and so when I'm getting started selling telescopes I really don't know too much much about the sky I'm very enthusiastic
I'm selling telescopes who are even more enthusiastic to people that want to get started because Hallie's comet's on its
way and um so every day I would start off my day by calling sky and Telescope
magazine just on the telephone and listening to Kelly Beatty talk about what's up and so
um he has instructed people for decades he has uh tirelessly contributed to the
magazine to amateur astronomers he's an inspiration to all astronomers professional or otherwise and so
um you know I'm really really pleased to have him on and uh and we're going to
put the spotlight on you Kelly and of course Scott thank you so very
kindly for those words I do hate you because you put me on after David and that's a tough act to follow
David and I go so way back and uh and you know I want to thank all the rest of you for coming here this evening
um astronomy really is a kind of universal Pursuit it's it's a kind of
glue that that binds us all together across the miles and continents and and
uh whether you're in summer or winter or whatever I I really think that amateur astronomers are are some of the most
passionate and selfless people when it comes to their hobby there's nothing more I would love to do than to grab
somebody off the street and say hey come take a look at this this is John Dobson used to so what I hope to do
over these weeks has kind of give us an arc a framework for the past present and future of
amateur astronomy um and uh use that as sort of uh basis for I hope will be some
further discussion and when I start by the very distant past um some of you might know the name
Russell W Porter if you don't know the name you probably would recognize his iconic drawings of
the Palomar 200-inch telescope the cutaways that showed all the interior
even before it was built and and he was an amazing guy who who did the turn as
an Arctic Explorer and and he found himself in his hometown of Springfield Vermont
and it was a hundred years ago this month in August of 1920. that he
gathered a bunch of people together in the machine shop where he was working to teach a class on telescope making
basically the first class on amateur telescope making because in those days
it was virtually impossible to have your own telescope unless you could make it yourself and there were there were 15 people in
that class uh 14 men and one woman who was a school teacher and many of those
people uh in that class later went on to form what a club called the Springfield
telescope makers which continues to exist today they are the hosts for the annual cellophane conference and it
Remains the case that in order to be a member of the Springfield telescope makers you have to have made your own telescope from the ground deck so so if
you think about it Porter was one of the two giants of the dawn of amateur astronomy the other being the guy by the
name of Albert Ingalls who was an editor at Scientific American and he had a he
loved astronomy and he'd heard about Porter so he went up to Springfield Vermont and did a story on him and the
group there that appeared in Scientific American in November of 1925. and he he
had hoped that it would be popular he had just gotten started at the magazine he said for those of you reading this if
you're interested in more drop me a letter and let me know and you got more than a thousand letters uh afterward and
so that was the beginning of a very long running series within Scientific American that eventually spawned a
couple of books on amateur telescope making and really got uh the The Craze for
making your own telescope started uh of course these days we have plenty of
options for buying commercially made telescopes explore scientific near the top of that Heap but it is still
possible and there are still clubs who uh carry on the tradition of grinding mirrors and and fabricating mounts uh as
a way to sort of earn your stripes in amateur astronomy now sky and Telescope wasn't there at the beginning of that
era but it didn't come long afterward and and you know sky and telescope is uh
a funny name for a magazine but then you know there's Field and Stream Car and
Driver and other but there really were two magazines called the sky and the
telescope that merged in 1941 it's an interesting story I won't go into a lot
of detail here but the the the the two people who who were the uh Genesis of of
that where Charlie Federer and his wife Helen Spence Federer who had been
working at the uh Hayden planetarium in New York City and the director they had a small
publication there called the sky meanwhile out in Delaware Ohio uh there was a a Perkins
Observatory a brand new 60-inch telescope and they had a small uh
periodical called the telescope the telescope focused on the science of astronomy and what was being learned uh
through research and the sky over in New York was more focused on what you can see in the sky and so it came to pass
that not long after the World's Fair in New York City in 1939 uh the the planets
aligned in a way and Charlie Federer was asked to take over both magazines he and
his wife moved up to Cambridge Massachusetts where they were literally running what became sky and Telescope
out of not much more than a closet in Harvard Observatory and and you know this was it was a it was a big time uh
uh big events were happening it was World War II was going on and and they were starting Olympus Sky telescope
started then in uh in 1941 and grew slowly at first uh and and especially in
the post-war years uh it grew a lot more and Charlie and Helen managed to hang on
and and uh you know they were delivering something that I think all of us would have wanted then as now information on
astronomy and telescopes and what to see in the sky now Sky telescope
at that time was of course the only was not the only amateur telescope making
magazine or astronomy magazine there was a magazine called Popular astronomy but Charlie had a real vision for for the
future of amateur astronomy and he became instrumental informing what is today called the astronomical League uh
and in fact Charlie wrote the Constitution and he really promoted the astronomical league and and in fact in
the early days of sky and Telescope he provided members of The League with a discount on subscriptions to Sky and
telescope and I'm happy and proud to say that that's your tradition a tradition that carries on today if you're a member
of an astronomy club uh you can get the discount to you know to Sky and telescope and so it's it's always been
the case that Sky telescope was in the fabric of amateur astronomy at least
after the its Inception and it obviously astronomy has changed a
tremendous amount in those intervening 80 years um
we're you know there there are so many things now that weren't even envisioned then and and and yet the passion is
still there you know people who would spend hundreds of hours grinding their own telescope
mirrors just so that they could have a look at Saturn's rings or the Orion Nebula with a little bit of clarity
those people are still around today they're they're here on this event this evening and they're going to show you uh
what modern technology and what modern telescopes are are able to do so as we proceed through these coming
weeks I'm going to take you on an arc through the ages of how amateur astronomy has blossomed
stumbled regained its footing and getting ready to launch into uh the
remainder of this Century so Scott back to you wow okay that was fantastic that's fantastic
um well uh we are going to kick off uh this star party first with our we
promised Newark Rises okay so we're gonna give away three door prizes uh each getting better as we go along here
uh these door prizes are being sponsored by um
uh uh the astronomical league and uh Dustin Gibson came with uh door prizes
as well so that's very cool and so we will um we'll start with um
uh with uh Jerry Hubble who is for some reason calling me on the phone right now
yes Jerry your enter when that went down okay all
right so and
the internet went down because of a thunderstorm so we lost Jerry but that doesn't mean that we can't ask a
question and do this so I'm going we're going to do this kind of in a wild card kind of fashion and we're gonna let
David Levy ask the first question and um so the deal is is that um uh David
will ask the question you will there's a couple of rules here you will uh send
your answer email it to Kent and I'm going to put it down here in the in the text message
Kent at explore scientific
.com now you also have to be a member of the
explore Alliance and you can get a free membership by going to explore scientific.com
forward slash Alliance okay and and go and get your free membership
um uh the strategy would probably be to email the question first and then go get your membership okay so that you're
you're tied in so that's that's how that'll work uh no matter where you are in the world uh wherever you're
listening uh and I know we have a worldwide audience uh you are eligible for uh these door prizes which will we
will mail to you um and so uh David
um do you have a good question here that we can I wouldn't say it's a good question
but it is a question and here it is okay do you uh uh consider that the recent
comment that just went by comment Neil wives would you call that the grade comment of 2020 or not
okay is there a wrong answer to this no there is no wrong answer there is no
wrong answer okay all right so the first one to answer that question whatever the answer is uh and is a member
um of the Explorer Alliance will receive uh the first door prize and it's just
going to be your choice of a 52 degree waterproof eyepiece okay from explore
scientific these eyepieces are waterproof argon Purge and um uh so you
pick the focal length that you like and um and we'll be uh sending that off to
you so again send your answer into Kent at explorescientific.com and uh we're
gonna go back to our astronomers here so uh I know that we have some astronomers
that uh have some live views right now we should probably touch base who who
out of our group at this point has something that they can show through a telescope
hey Scott this is Jason I do if um all right so Jason fast reaches we're gonna
put the spotlight on you here for a moment all right there you go
I'm gonna try to share my screen here
is the screen coming through yeah it's coming through it's Saturn how's
the feed that's very good it's very good you can see uh let me try to get it more
in Focus here I can see this division for sure and every once in a while it looks like you can see
perhaps hanky's division as well kind of pops in and out
yeah it'll come into focus a little bit better here
I wasn't prepared to take it so quickly but thing isn't the best tonight so this is
yeah um live view of Saturn through um my TPO 12 inch Newtonian
so it's an F4 Newtonian and this is a ASI
533mc Pro Camera so it's a one shot color camera
um with the 5x Power Mate in between and I did take
um how big it is on the screen it's beautiful yeah is the video feed coming through smoothly I didn't know if that
would be it's spectacular absolutely good looks really good yeah so some interesting things here um
you know for me I live in Michigan so the the uh the altitude of the planet is
really low right now and with that uh 24 degrees above the Horizon with that you see the um blue
fringing on the top of the planet and the red fringing on the bottom and that's the caused by the atmospheric
dispersion as we shoot through the air column um the basically the atmosphere
separates the colors like a prism and um that's something you kind of have
to deal with when you're shooting in color they do make some equipment to get around that uh called a dispersion
corrector but I don't have one of those uh usually don't shoot planets in color but I'm trying it tonight
and um so I took a video of this and I just quickly ran it through
um fix Insight here just to show you know what what the
processing um ends up looking like so this is a 2000 frame video
and uh just quickly kind of sharpened it up here there's a tool called the restoration filter which is really good
for for kind of quick sharpening um so with the 2000 Stack video it comes
out of the stack looking like that and with a little bit of sharpening you can
recover some details and definitely see some banding in the atmosphere and the you
know the division in the Rings I like to see the shadow of the planet on the back
side of the Ring there yeah yeah that's that's interesting around opposition you know that chatter that shadow moves from
side to side so when we're at opposition and um we are between the Sun and the planet
that Saturn that that I keep saying Saturn that shadow isn't really visible but as we move past opposition then we
begin to see past the planet in the shadow on the Rings beautiful yeah so this is not my normal
setup for shooting planets but I thought it'd be interesting at least to present it in color
thought people might be interested in seeing that let me get it back on the screen here
so what's the effective um focal length or
um it's about I think about 6 000 millimeters six thousand yeah that's a
pretty long focal length yes and then this is like the this is the whole frame of the camera
and if I really start jacking up the exposure
um you can kind of see some of the moons I think this is tightened down here and
um I just had it pulled up on my screen let me see yeah that's tightened down there
and this is Brea and I'm sure if I went a little bit
further you could see even more here
yeah so once you jack up the exposure you can see uh see tethis and settlus Dione
and that's uh I don't know how to say it mimus or mimus right there off the ring
it's pretty interesting you know you can see the whole Saturn system I'm sitting there in front of you that's amazing
is that coming through all right everybody see that oh yes yeah this is actually so this is Titan here the
bright one this is actually just a bright star in the back of the field
I thought that was pretty cool it is cool foreign
certainly an object that has uh converted many many people uh to uh you
know devote their lives to uh observe the sky sometimes it only takes one look you
know and they just can't believe when they're looking visually through a telescope that that those rings are
really there and uh that they're seeing uh you know seeing this other world uh
live and and you know often you I mean no one gets to see visually uh ex maybe
through some of the world's largest telescopes uh a view like you're seeing here that's this is what
astrophotography can do for you you know so um I think it's they're the the way that
a live visual view can touch you and change you is very important but uh you
compare deeper and and uh you can see details that um you can't take home with
you unless you're making an astrophotograph and um so you know software like this
equipment like what uh uh Jason is using is uh can give you something you can share
with the world like we're doing right now and uh and then later you can go and study it
and uh image process it whether you're going after you know beautiful images uh
or you're actually going to do science you know you've got all those tools in your hands so it's very cool thank you
Jess yeah no no problem I don't think there's a astronomer or astrophotographer that
doesn't have a story of like the first time they saw a Saturn through the telescope I think it hits everybody pretty hard and you know I don't know
that necessarily seen it on a computer screen like this does it justice but um you know it's
definitely a beautiful sight to see live right hey Scott real quick piggyback on
that I work [Music] Library telescope brand in St Louis and
there's nothing more special than seeing a kid's face just light up the first time they see Saturn in a
telescope yeah you know that they're actually properly looking through the telescope when they're when their eyes
look that's a good word for it too lighting up because uh they're you know
they're seeing something that just uh blows them away you know so um I have yet to really meet anyone
that's seen Saturn through a telescope and goes is that it that all there is to it you know uh
it is it is uh it is a spectacular experience if you're watching the show
and you've never done this good Lord you need to go out and uh uh you know uh
look you know find an astronomer they'll let you uh observe through their telescope certainly this is something
you would do uh maybe after our uh you know after the pandemic but uh it's
something you want to put on your bucket list to do for sure for sure
all right that's that's that's great so um Jason I think that what we're going
to do is we're going to uh switch astronomers here we're going to show one more view uh through anybody else's
telescope right now that uh has a live view and then we are going to
um introduce sanlin or let at sanlon boxner introduce herself she is uh I
know just a little bit about her um I think Kelly knows a lot more about her but uh
um who else in our group has a live view going on right now
well I did but my camera won't power on so
I'm kind of having a little bit of bad luck all right how about you Caesar uh you mentioned that you might have the
moon and the uh in the scope
Caesar I don't hear you
let me check
I have the the um
let me give me a one minute because I go to the telescope how about you Dustin
yeah yeah yes I prepare I I give you my
place to yeah
a mile from the Pacific Ocean how it's still noon here still noon okay yeah yeah solar
telescope out yeah yeah I know we still have daylight here I'm looking outside right now we still got a little daylight
so got a little more time probably another 30 minutes here for us and Chuck
you're probably clouded out right but Scott can I show off something I captured on Friday you sure can of
course let me let me show you this if I know how to share my screen here let's see I hit this little green button
here we go and hit share yes sir all right
let's see here oh that's me okay well there's my Explorer scientific
it was all set to image but the camera I'm not sure maybe when I took the cover
off something came unplugged I'm not sure I was going to show you the wizard
nebula but this is what I captured on Friday I captured a Transit of one of
Jupiter's moons that is beautiful look at that yeah it was really fun to see and I didn't know this was going to
happen I didn't check the moons in advance but you can see I think it's called Ganymede it's the largest moon
you can see the shadow going across the planet and the one on the far left yeah is IO I don't know how well that shows
up in this in this feed but you can see the shadow I hope you can see it it's coming across
perfectly yeah that was a lot of fun to capture and this is about a two hour
time span good Lord look at the red spot there and you can see I mean you can actually see
some shading in the red spot uh oh yeah the red the red spot comes around the bend so that was a bonus yep yeah
yeah yeah that's amazing yeah so that was fun to capture it's a great day it's
a great month for planets with you've got uh Jupiter Saturn and in the morning you got Mars and Venus so yes I'm
getting phone calls here uh at Explorer
which one that's fantastic fantastic
now uh Chuck do you do you off an image uh planets or
um um I I do once a year but this month I've been doing it all month really
because they're all out this month and even the moon it's just a great month I don't remember another month like this
where you can do all of the planets in a single night right yeah oh that's fantastic yeah it's a treat
what a treat okay all right so
um I think what we'll do is uh we'll bring up uh uh uh Samuel buxner next
um and uh she is from the planetary Science Institute she is a research scientist uh and uh you know I think she
brought perhaps her family with her uh to participate or at least a watch and
uh you know so that's really cool I know that she mentioned that her husband's an amateur astronomer
um
thank you um so yeah you might you might hear my children coming in because because they
always know when I'm on a zoom call that's kind of how it goes so you know exactly
um and so let me just share my screen here you are let me put the spotlight on YouTube
all right and I'm so thrilled to get to come to the star party and like I said both my
husband and I um are amateurs um and love star parties and I of course
have my story about when I first saw Saturn when I was 16 years old at Chamberlain observatory in Denver where
I lived and loved it and I kind of started me on a great path of my amateur
astronomy love um am I observing love but I have to say that I always have the most utmost
respect for all of you because I'm just not as great with a telescope although I do use telescope
um I love getting to go to Star parties and I am trying to actually make my screen full here
okay if you go down to the bottom there's like a little screen icon down there there is there's just a zoom thing
in the way there we go okay perfect there we go and so what I wanted to talk really briefly about is the kind of work
I do professionally um at the planetary Science Institute and we also live uh and work in Tucson
and we love to talk about Planetary Exploration that's what we do so here's an overview of who we are and we have
110 research scientists we live all over the world you'll see a little star here
in Arizona in Tucson that's where we are headquartered so if you are in Tucson we are near the intersection of Fort Lowell
um and Campbell in kind of a non-script building and then we do have a satellite office in
Golden Colorado and then everyone else kind of works out of different Labs again all over the world we have
research Associates education and communication Specialists programmers and a lot of support staff
and what we do is Planetary Exploration so that's what we do every everything
you can imagine all the planets asteroids comets moons
um we do it all and have a lot of fun doing that and so you know I could talk about all 110 astronomers and and we
would be here for days but I just wanted to highlight uh some of the wonderful ones that I work with and then talk
about a new program that I hope our new project that I hope will be something you might be interested in
and so here's we actually are in the middle of the PSI Retreat virtually this is a picture of our Retreat last year in
Tucson and we are all meeting together for the next three days um sharing all of our science and this
is this is kind of a snapshot of what we look like when we all get together
um the first person I want to point out uh is Dr Pamela gay she is not only a
research scientist but a communicator and you may know of her work um she does
a lot of video feeds and podcasts including 365 days of astronomy
astronomy cast and the daily race and she does that each day um but the work I really want to
highlight is her citizen science work and so she runs a site called Cosmo Quest
and the most exciting part I think is that recently the citizen scientists of
Cosmo quests mapped bennu For an upcoming encounter and so our scientific
team wanted to know what did the rocks look like all over the planet and we
were able to get the pictures and have everybody all over the world mapping the
rocks to help the scientists select a site for their sample collection and in October of this year osiris-rex which is
also run here out of the University of Arizona will be taking that collection
so we'll be kind of touching the surface and hopefully collecting some of those particles to bring back to Earth and
that we will be able to analyze here but it was a really great connection again with non-professional astronomers being
able to do this really important work that has really big impacts on in
planetary science so I love to talk about the work of Pamela the second person I work a lot work with
is Amanda Hendricks and Amanda um previously worked on Cassini she's
actually done a ton of work and so she worked on the UV um spectrometer there
but now is the principal investigator of this virtual Institute called Trex which
is the toolbox for research and exploration and this is a really interesting collaboration and what
they're doing is they are characterizing airless bodies and they're looking at
the fine-grained dust doing spectroscopy Imaging all sorts of things to get ready
to send people back to the moon and they're going to be doing the team will be doing a lot of
um field work that of course was delayed due to covid and so you'll get to hear a
lot more about how they're doing some ground truth work of the spectroscopy out in the field up in Utah and other
places to be able to get ready to go to these airless bodies the other thing
about Amanda which is fantastic is right now she is the elected chair of the division for planetary science and so it
does a lot of work in that way and a lot of great science
Jay it has lots of hats of the kind of science she works on is cratering and
she does a lot of multi-spectral analysis of craters she looks at the moon and other bodies but she really
wants to understand the age of creators she wants to understand the prevalence of cratering on the moon and the earth
as well as lots of properties and she works on a lot of different teams and then of course is an artist and a poet
and does a lot of other work in equity and diversity and then the last I'll just talk a
little bit about the work the work I do um so I do work on the Trex team and I I run the public engagement and we have a
lot of great programs that we've been doing um virtual talks all over the country uh
now with covid connecting our scientists with minority and Serbian institutions to increase the diversity of planetary
scientists um I work with the Lucy Mission there is a fantastic piece called Le Space
Academy and if you are or know of young people who are undergraduates who want
to learn more about what it would be like to be on a NASA Mission this is for them it is a free Institute it has
always been virtual and now that's really important but it helps people learn all the aspects of being on a NASA
team everything from budgeting to engineering doing different pieces and they're going to design something and go
through a review and so there are different academies that might lead to a NASA internship again being run by by
the Lucy Mission the Lucy Mission which will be visiting Trojan asteroids around Jupiter something that I hope many of
you participate in and that we are a major part of is international observe the moon night which is
um mostly run by the lunar reconnaissance Orbiter and this year will be on September 26th definitely
looking for lots of live feeds of the moon for that and people like you to
engage our audiences all around the world we've had an estimated in 10 years about 1.5 million people participate in
international observe the moon night in about 110 countries all across the world and we are going to keep that going full
force and something that we are always looking to expand to get people excited
about their personal connection to the Moon and then the last thing I want to talk
about is uh how I really got connected in with everyone which is we are how a new project so with Rachel freed and
Michael Fitzgerald and I we have this wonderful opportunity to detail the stories of amateur astronomers and I
have been talking to dozens of people in the last couple weeks I just got started and we have a book chapter that we are
finishing but we have been so inspired um by everyone we've talked to that
we're going to be doing a lot more work internationally um to do this and so if this is something that you're interested in and
you would like to talk to us um and share your story about how you got into astronomy amateur astronomy we would
love to hear from you and I'll put my uh my email in there and so like I said it's something that we're thrilled about
and we will be sharing out with the community and we have a chance to get it all put together
and that is all I have so well that is fantastic that is fantastic thank you so much
thank you um Let's uh
before we take a we're going to take a 10 minute break but before we do uh
let's sort out who is uh who would be ready to go up next um to uh either
show images that they've taken before show live images that they have through their telescope or to
um perhaps show uh like a demonstration of image processing
I have my image from last week and that is that's for Beard Esther
beard okay all right so let's uh let's see last week's image and then we will
take a 10 minute break here and I'll put the spotlight on you
I think I'm sharing you are sharing uh the screen right here this is uh
actually the image for last week wow um this is the one
from last week oh wow that's really nice I uh pushed
the saturation real far the Stars aren't the right color but nebulosity just kept coming out and
I I just kept uh working on it and I'm very happy with the way it uh turned out
there's a lot of information there and uh
what can you tell us about this exposure um there were two-minute exposures unguided
uh with an explore scientific ed-80 uh the carbon fiber model uh with an ASI
183 cold with an optolong L enhanced filter
uh I said there were two minute Subs I'd say they were probably a little over an hour worth I don't actually remember
um about half the night um and then it kind of started getting into the the gradient so I kind of lost
a lot of what I had there but uh yeah it turned out really cool and uh I
don't know if anybody knows but that right there looks very interesting oh
right look at that I don't know what that is but it looks very cool
yeah I don't think that's a reflection no no it looks like a planetary nebula
or something I'm not entirely sure but uh just figured I'd uh share that because
uh it's cloudy outside it's still cloudy I could see where Vega is and where Jupiter is so uh I figured I'd get this
out of the way and maybe go get set up and maybe the clouds are clear before the end of the show okay so I'm gonna
stop sharing and send it back to you okay that sounds great okay well uh
everybody um it's time to take a little uh break here we're going to be back in 10 minutes uh so you don't have to uh
disconnect or anything uh the stream will be still live but um we just have a
little um uh intermission segment here that will uh uh will be there and then
I'll we'll be back on live I promise okay and we'll have uh another question
uh that uh that we can ask the audience and I think actually Jerry Hubble joined
back in so um yep we're back okay so that's
wonderful all right so um we will see you in a moment and uh
thanks for watching and and saddle thank thank you so much for for uh uh you know
revealing what the planetary science institute's all about it's fantastic
here we go
so can we talk during this intermission
can you talk to each other while this is on a
going on the year I don't know I don't know if we're broadcasting our
well just in case I'll shut up [Laughter]
I think Scott took a break
foreign [Music]
foreign
yeah what's that
definitely okay all right you can you can jump into the broadcast
foreign
foreign
can you hear me
yeah jiren hear you everybody's hot everybody can hear it it's hot in here
it is hot in here the hot universe
oh we have some amazing astronomers here and just oh yeah all these people in one room
together it's it's incredible
Mystic neon says only the Hubble Deep Field but I can stare at that for hours
it's actually meant to hypnotize you but yep
reduce all your anxieties I think that I think that astronomy does
give people that perspective to reduce anxiety you know I think it's really good for you
I don't know about that I'm pretty pretty anxious right now are you really yeah
clouds rolled in I can't get nothing now oh
yeah at least you have clouds I've got I got a clear sky and I got nothing working oh God yeah just think of clouds
as like a giant
well uh well out of my range with everybody else here Dusty ask me you're
muted guys I I had the moon the entire night and when you tell me show me the
Moon the moon disappear uh uh um
[Music] how do you say uh What uh disappear
between the wildings because it's a City come out
now I am I have Jupiter in the field my son is searching is putting the whole
bitter in the field but it's let me see yes now I have
with a horrible scene but we can see who Peter
Jupiter and Jupiter yes
yeah there's a lot of places right now amazingly so it snuck up here
when I came into the office at eight I thought man it's gonna be a beautiful
night Tyler's gonna have fun and it's clouded up by an hour and a half it was clouded up yep
amazing dog that's a beer we've had days and days and days of
clear nights oh yeah yeah it's like buying a new scope
it gives me a chance to figure out the pmc-8 more so that's a plus
hey everybody uh we're back uh we just had to take a little break
um um but uh of course you can still hear us all chattering in the background we're all uh we're doing what we love to
do and let's talk about astronomy and and look at what's going on there I did promise though that we would show some
uh space art and Dusty Haskins promised that he would bring some of some of his
uh his artwork on so I I did want to I wanted to put the spotlight on Dusty for
a while and uh check out some of his uh beautiful artwork
oh geez [Laughter] well last week in my sickness as I was
sitting here uh Scott had seen over my shoulder my painting there and I mean really how
are you how are you going to tell you no I regardless I'm not going to do that you know so what I did was I put together a few
pieces that I had done a while back
now I don't know if you guys remember
but uh I kind of got into it I I was always kind of into
this but what really sunk it in was the fact that my uh three-year-old will be
four in about a month she uh was behind with her hearing and the one thing that really kind of helped her move forward
was space so uh I decided after you know I saw how into
it she was I decided what I was gonna do was I was gonna paint her wall for her so
uh I did a couple practice pieces which that was my first practice piece
that I did oh well and and uh
you know I kind of kind of stood back and I'm like you know I could I could maybe do this I I could maybe do her
wall you know so I just kind of I did I did I did one more after that which was this one
right here and it was you know I I enjoyed doing it so it was kind of one of those deals where I'm like well you
know what I'm gonna go for it and I uh didn't know how my wife would take it
so I did the smart thing and I waited until she was in Las Vegas at a wedding
convention and uh when she got out there
that was the first picture that I sent her oh my God okay yeah so you could you
can kind of imagine what her reaction was at that point I mean she she was a little bit worried
uh-huh so I mean then I then I sent her uh
a little bit more progress on it cool and then
by the time it was all said and done I had gotten to that point wow
and what was your daughter's reaction to this her I I mean she was pretty much
speechless it was oh that's so cool dad you know running back and forth up and down in her room I love it
so I I mean right then and there I knew I had done something right you know she was she was extremely ecstatic with that
you're a good father oh well thank you I do I do my best with
all four of them running around it's definitely trying once in a while hello
that's incredible that's incredible very very uh
very um you know kind of inspired and um
uh you know she'll she'll have that up on her wall hopefully all of her lives
so oh I I think so and then starts with what's up
she'll have it and tells she perhaps starts her own family but uh she may want to take the wall with her so did
you think of that I I mean I could pull some cheap Rock down that's okay I get roped into enough projects pulling
down a few pieces would be totally worth it I guess sure uh but then uh my oldest daughter saw
that and she was mad so of course I had to do her a painting so I did did that one for her right afterwards
cool and then um shortly after that a friend of mine
asked if I would do his ceiling at his house so I did that which was
oh it would be part of his ceiling
nurse from the other side okay and this is why you kind of need a full
face mask when you do it [Laughter]
very patriotic though oh yeah so are you spray painting this or yeah how are you
doing this all spray paint yeah it was just kind of a kind of a fly by the seat of my pants and try it out
and watched a couple YouTube tutorials and just went to town on it and I you know I
enjoy doing it I do it quite a bit when I present bomb cans yep yeah just break ends so so how many
how many real cars have you tagged now ah none none yet I'm I'm old married and
have kids I can't I I don't know all those all those pretty boring now as I get older which
I'm okay with that's okay that's great
but then I have I have this one too which is on the uh Mr Mr Sparkman stardom space has that
one hanging in in his uh in his Studio too so those are those are
my that's my artwork my little side deal that I love doing besides astronomy thank you man thank you for
sharing all that that's cool you're welcome now
of course you you uh you love to do astronomy you have uh you have at least
one telescope I know of and uh so tell us a little bit about what you love about astronomy and and what drove you
into it well we have so our first kid when we
had her she was kind of a kind of a miracle child and after that we were kind of told we
weren't going to have anymore so we've gotten to the point where we were just kind of
basically gonna say you know let's just be happy with our
one and right around the time that we decided that we found out we were pregnant again so from there it went
I have an eight-year-old and now a four-year-old or a three-year-old a
two-year-old and one-year-old so it was like boom boom boom while in
between kids two and three I realized that at this point I have
nothing no hobbies that I get to do anymore you know that because I mean it there just
was no time with everything that we had going on that's true so I went I went and bought myself actually hold on
I got myself this telescope from Menards yep
and it was you know it was one of those deals where
I sat and struggled with it over and over and over I mean it was I couldn't find anything couldn't find anything and
I got up before work one morning and I saw Saturn and I was done I mean I
my my next words were this is going to get expensive oh yeah but I mean I knew I knew exactly where I was going with
that so um yeah I mean that was kind of and ever since then I mean it's been
my original plan was I I mean I I originally loved Visual and I still do I mean to
this day if I'm all Imaging nine times out of ten I have one of my jobs out with me too but that was my my original plan was to
to get a 16 and like like I told you I mean my my hint to my wife because I
still want it my hint is to take pictures of it and put it on all of her uh electronics subliminal messaging
right yep yep so no but that was I mean
it it was just one of those deals where I had I had messaged a friend here in town who you know I was kind of looking
at mounts and stuff and he said well you know I just so happen to have a friend who was selling one
yeah that was I was done so as soon as I got that I took took my first image
I got I got the mount in March of this year and then
I took my first damage then with uh with my just my cell phone because that's all I had and then like two weeks later I
got a DSLR and that made a world of difference and
now I'm sitting with with that thing
yeah that is pretty that's cool wonderful yeah so so yeah I got I got
that and those and then I have uh without moves and stuff
I got all of those too I don't know if you can see them all
so be Central man oh yeah Mission Control right here that's right that's great
well guys thank you thanks Dusty for uh sharing all that and um uh we are going
to uh ask a question um uh since now we have Jerry with us
and um
uh how do you want to uh how do you want to give away the um your your prizes
yeah so we got five opt shirts and you can just give them away with your normal questions all right okay well we'll just
keep going then because I know that Jerry can come up with uh four more questions so yeah I've
got actually I've got uh four questions right now uh so if we need another one I can come up
with another one yeah all right all right so the deal is okay then there
was some people that asked okay if I they asked okay if I sent in my uh my
answer to Kent at explore science scientific.com and I'll write it down here again at
explore scientific.com
there we go drum roll okay uh they asked do I can I wait till tomorrow
to join the explore Alliance the answer is probably yes because we are going to
announce the winners at the next uh virtual star party which is going to happen in Europe but starts here in um
Arkansas time as I like to call it at uh 4 P.M so
um uh Gary Palmer uh who will be talking here in a little bit
um uh we'll be heading up that star party uh I get to play host and to
stream it live uh to all of our channels but uh that will happen instead of our
regular show that we have for explore Alliance and the open go to community uh we will have this virtual star party so
it's going to be a lot of fun and something really different for for me so that's on Friday that's coming three
days from now right that's right that's right so so what's what's going to be the
question Jerry you're right I'm gonna get an opt shirt and
um we will do another 52 degree eyepiece
cool okay so this first question
based on the information on their website how many clubs are in the astronomical
League Ah that's a good question more than one
yes and this is I can't win though so they're dark this is I'll send you I'm
going to send you this email I sent to Scott that's got the questions and the answers Kent so I'll do that in a minute sure thanks yeah that makes uh make my
life easier yeah okay so I'll repeat it again
based on their based on the information on their website how many clubs are in
the astronomical League and this is this is what they State on their website
so that's what we're looking for okay
whether yeah whether it's updated or not we don't know it's Google right and I and I uh I I did
this this is as good as it was about an hour ago or an hour and a half ago that's when I found this answer
so if somebody if the webmaster is over there changing it right now uh
if you're listening from the astronomically do not touch that website Okay so
or if if the answer comes in give us a link to the page
and to prove your answer if that's what you want to do there we go that's a good answer
that verifies it right there all right okay so uh Caesar brolo told
me he announced that he has the moon uh set up and are we ready to go live Caesar
you're muted now okay yeah okay yes we're gonna put
the spotlight on you there we go
check now yes we have hope it we have he'll beat them now Jupiter okay yes
thank you this is the live view
but I see this is from your this is from your patio in uh yes do you have some
pictures of my uh how do you say about Con in English balcony balcony yes
because we live in an apartment in an apartment in the middle of the city you
know in a world in that kind of Tower have they have a Gardens the a roof at
37 floors and uh but now by by the pandemic
the common areas of of the tower are closed and you can you you can't use
and of course I need to use my balcony only and the the field of view that I
have is really really narrow and when we talk about the the the show the Moon the
Moon word was uh traffic
behind behind the buildings and we lost the moon behind the wildings and now
fortunately we have Jupiter in the field and with this video we can try uh
um I using my cell phone actually all all uh voting over the over the
eyepiece I using an eyepiece of 10 millimeters 52 degrees explore
scientific that you know this company this this is a live view through your
iPhone right now yes yes it's a note 5 it's a very
Samsung Note 5 and it's pretty cool yeah you know I I choose the most Elementary
Implement to show that how it's possible to to show other to to view planets or
uh or deep Sky of course today I did the sky is not easy to to make something
like sometimes we can do it but today we
choose planets but uh um I can show you later if you like some
uh individual likes pictures and how we can process uh for example nebulas like
ETA Karina or Orion using the APO
80 millimeters explore scientific with a very very easy very no this is sorry
very simple Mount of altazimot Mount uh go to mount and
um it's something that sometimes I like to I like to try with the most Elemental
equipment that is possible to to make something and uh well
we can try with this video because we are we are presenting now uh from the
smartphone to the computer and we are recording a video that we can
convert from npm4 that is the the the the
goal of of the cell phone to a d i ivi
Avi that is most uh the one the one to
use in in for registers or some uh some
a type of of uh software for process processing software for planetarium view
of course and well yeah it's amazing what you can do with
with uh with the everyday um you know I mean almost everybody has
a smartphone uh it's it is uh definitely affordable and here you are sharing a
live view of Jupiter to the world um and you know so that that's that's
really uh that's that is amazing it is yes it's incredible that only with a
cell phone a smartphone uh an adapter IPS and Telescope yeah and a single mode
and it's not an equator amount actually it's it's a a Ultra go to mold but maybe
sign very very small telescope and the telescope is a is a max out of four
inches no more actually for this wow really impressive
you know in the 1980s if you'd asked me if somebody could take their phone and share an image of Jupiter around the
world with it yes impossible yes possible
yeah it's incredible it's incredible that for for for people like like you and me are
people that we started to to make astronomy in in the in the 80s yeah
think about these possibilities is incredible is it's something that uh
when I talk with the people that we lost maybe three or four films of 36
exposures to have one one decent picture
sometimes zero of course yes and and you know that
um and go to the Haggis posture I don't remember the name of it we
um maybe do you remember Scott the the name of a high uh I remember that we
bought the the special films that was processed with gas if anybody remember
the name uh the information Kodak I pair hyper hypersensitive
yes hypersensitizing with with the that's with the height was it hydrogen or what
was it with with hydrogen some side person nitrogen nitrogen yes
nitrogen yes with nitrogen because many people just
flow them and in the in the 90s it was if this was a hydrogen but it is
incredible the long history or the long way that we have today
um where uh we have these possibilities uh I can share okay
the video finishes and yeah we lost the live view okay and and
this this type of things were were today I talked with my customers
when they tell me a lot of times oh this
don't work this is impossible to to use or I say come on you don't know about
how the telescopius or how the telescope the telescopes was only
uh 25 years ago and today the possibilities that they have
at the prices prices that are impossible to imagine uh where in in a for example
uh mounts like exos 100 with a
Newtonian of six six inches and you have an a small
Observatory totally automatic automatic side because the thing that we can do it
is with very very small telescopes and is is impossible sometimes to to
explain to young people to say come on they have an excellent tools to to have
image or you know it's it's a it's another another dimension from the past
but only we are talking about 25 years that's right and so a lot has been
developed over the last 25 years and Dustin Gibson and uh uh Steve Molly of
both are people that uh have been up to their eyeballs in um in this kind of uh new technology uh
so Dustin let's let's uh let's have you describe a little bit about
um what opt has been doing uh you know I know the story but uh uh
in a lot of your list a lot of people listening right now might uh have tuned in to get some picks
um and also to the clear skies Network um to learn more about uh what's
available but uh you really have some amazing equipment out there uh that
you're giving freely uh free access to these things and you're guiding them
along I I really believe that you're really at the Forefront of uh
astrophotography Outreach you know uh I've experienced you know I was on get
some fix with you uh cost me a a telescope or two
yeah the cost of Entry okay okay thank you thank you guys yeah yeah there it is
right behind him Dustin what what are some of the more amazing experiences that you've had and
I don't know if you can show one of your observatories at this time or uh but uh yeah I could probably bring it up let me
see how to get give me two seconds here I could bring up um three of them we are
building them around the world um so the goal is 62 observatories around the world to give away for free
to the public to use and the way we started was at our local Club
um res we built observatories for ourselves to try to work out all the bugs and there have been a lot of bugs
um with a project of this scale you know there will be especially when it's not something we can just replicate but we
have to kind of start from scratch so let me see what I've got here can
uh let's see can you see that yep all right so let me make this a little
bigger uh did make the windows any bigger but
that's all right so uh what we got we can go into each Observatory and I just had one of our opt team members out
there helping me get this one fine-tuned some of these Scopes are undergoing some upgrades right now so this is a 17 inch
plane wave that's actually about to come out and get replaced with a radian uh
cdk 17 inch with four cameras on it so it'll have planetary uh deep Sky which
would be another 16803 sensor um and then color camera as well and a
spectrograph so yeah we're putting these systems there with the idea that they
will be used for a lot of different purposes um I intended to use this one tonight but as you can tell when he left he left
the lights on so I just buzzed them and was like hey we
got a we got a light problem to fix but I'm sure he'll help us out there notice
note to self yeah light switch remote that's again you need a power switch for
that that's right yeah the web power switch absolutely everything else it's funny because everything else is on a
web power switch but since we're rarely out there the lights we just it's always off so there was just no point but uh
yeah I guess you got a little uh a little happy leaving there it's like 110 degrees out there every day
um but that's one of them this one was the radiant cdk 10 inch and just came
out um so that's another Observatory you can see the box here on the left he is installing you know the flat panels have
to be gigantic so this is like a a three foot by three foot flat panel that goes
on the wall that we can shoot Auto Flats because the whole point of these observatories is to be the test bed for
full Automation and simplicity we want to create access to the universe for everybody and what that really means is
you have to overcome all of the hurdles including the learning curve and so if
we don't feel like these can be controlled from anywhere in the world from a cell phone then we haven't really
beat the problem yet and so that's what we do is we we put these things through
hell I mean we throw everything we can at them um you know we're constantly changing
things trying to find things that are a little more stable or a little more simple we've been even developing some of our
own interfaces to just try to make things so easy and fun it's got to be picture heavy this is a visual hobby so
we want people to see you know the exciting stuff and um that's kind of
what it is and then I've got a good friend that allows us to use this one is
a Celestron Ross and so we use this for the uh the virtual star parties that we do with Fraser Kane from Universe today
and so because it's a color camera on a rasa we can get you know data very very quickly and we've actually had this one
on the home page of twitch which is like 800 000 people seeing you know space and
that's the whole goal is like how do we take this hobby that we're also you know addicted to that has changed our
perspective and you know created a new energy and like excitement in all of us to the point where I mean a lot of us
it's you know it's it's changed our life path you know I was at a completely different industry people were looking
at the moon that day I had no idea what that was about to do to me you know and
so you know five five years later I'm here and telescopes are all I do all day every day but there
are a lot of people that way and um so that's the idea is how do we give this perspective to everyone and those are
you'll find the missions that we have at opt are all centered around that so the
telescope The Observatory project has been my baby from the beginning um that's that's the one we started with
first and these are the test beds the other observatories are in Texas in West Texas and you know even better Skies but
then we have a project called future stars with the intention of giving every
public uh high school in the United States a free telescope
and so trying to really you know really solve the problem of access because we
don't feel like there's enough access to this you know to this perspective or a
chance to even you know get into this or grow through this so that is the mission that's what we're trying to do and
um you know working very hard to make it a reality that's fantastic it really is I mean
it's uh such a ambitious project but you're making the dream come true and uh
you know I uh saw and what you know I saw you working
with some uh very young uh uh uh you know teenage level or maybe even younger
than that something like uh who was the who was the uh the 12 year old that made that amazing uh deep Sky image that um
so there's two of them two two 12 year olds actually and both of them are my heroes uh one of them's name is William
he's the one that he logged into one of my observatories with me and took a better image than I ever have ever
you know his processing was Unreal um so he had he'd never used a telescope
before but you know I told him from the beginning if this is going to be your image you're doing everything every click every creative decision everything
and he did and it was a blast it was it was probably my best you know one of the best experiences for sure that I've ever
had in astronomy was working with William I absolutely loved it but then also and we actually have him here
tonight in twitch on clear skies network is Mr Aurelius that's AE MIDI and um
this kid I'm telling you is uh he's he is destined to be one of the greatest
astronomers alive I mean if you look at the work he's doing already at 12 on his own it is absolutely unreal and so
inspiring you know uh when you walk into opt now he actually sent me a picture of him with his telescope and a couple
gifts and so when you walk into opt headquarters the first thing in the
building is actually a picture framed of Aurelius you know it's it's that
inspiring that you know we wanted it to be there we want you know we want the staff when everybody's back it's like this is why we do this guys this is what
we have to do let's make sure that every kid in the neighborhood is taking better images than we are
let's always be jealous of the younger generation that's the goal that's a good
goal that's a great goal that's fantastic well that's awesome that's awesome so this is this is what astronomy can be
for uh the amateur astronomer uh and even this gear as sophisticated as it is
um is uh of course it's higher price than than some of it but it's still
amazing how inexpensive it really is for what it is you know so it's uh this this
equipment uh uh is certainly something that uh almost any High School could
afford to put in and uh uh you know but just to be so generous as you are Dustin
to put together the money the effort the time to spend all this time on the air
uh uh to interact science is I gotta take my hat off to you man it's
it's really inspiring well thank you I thank you I mean you know that you know uh Craig as well as
anybody Craig was the old owner of opt for uh 42 years he owned it and you know
he's old it's been around 74 years this year and um you know it's been through a
lot I mean Craig took this company that was quite literally as you know Scott it
was a tiny tiny camera store on Coast Highway Pacific Coast Highway that was
meant to serve the local community and the original owner that was the vision served the local community with like portraits and family photos and things
and Craig took this business that was so small it wouldn't have you know it
wouldn't have worked in a business the size of like a Subway restaurant you know it was smaller than that and
um he he grew it to be the largest telescope retailer in the country got it
in the top 500 list of fastest growing businesses in the nation
uh multiple times and by the time we got there you know I didn't come here to buy the company I
just wanted to work at opt and learn from everybody there because it didn't take much research to find out like you want to know something those people have
the answer right and um man being around Craig like the enthusiasm like every the whole
staff is just so contagious that finally when Craig you know kept asking Ginny
and I to she's like I gotta get this to somebody that can take it into the digital age and you know keep this push
alive it's the Legacy right it's got to go forward um you know finally we were just like
yeah I I can't imagine what else we would do with our lives that's going to be better than what we're talking about here sharing the universe with people
like yeah yeah let's let's do this and taking it there and
you know if if it's something that you can put your life throw your whole life into it uh you know
what what could be better exactly exactly it's it's the mission people you
know commune with the universe in the way that they are with with uh those observatories with your staff uh with
the gear that they can get you know through opt so really fantastic
you know and uh another guy that is doing a lot of uh a lot of this as well
is Steve Malia Steve you're how are things out there in uh in Canada right
now well the weather certainly improved um and the uh the rain is held off so
I'm quite happy with that and after a couple of hours of of equipment fighting
um I'm glad to say that I won that battle and uh I'm finally doing some Imaging um
but uh right now right now yeah um you know I I have to say Dustin after
hearing what you're uh what you're doing right now I'm I'm actually quite uh inspired and I might have to uh copy
some of what you're doing up here uh please do please do let us know if we can help right you can't do too much
Outreach that's it's impossible right um but uh yeah I don't think
um you know I got my uh I got my rig going um and uh
final Imaging I don't even remember what I'm Imaging right now but my first sub finally came through uh this past
weekend Scott would have been uh starfest yle yeah and that's the big star party in Canada it's the largest star party in
Canada it's put on by a local uh club called the North York astronomy Association the Nya
um and they've been doing it since 1982. uh it's been growing uh ever since I think at its peak there's close to a
thousand people that would uh attend which I guess for for Canada that's pretty good uh now I
think it averages about five to six hundred people um for the weekend we got some really good speakers that
come up as well uh we had Carolyn Porco um I think six years ago uh foreign was
up here a few years ago um and uh it attracts uh uh all types of
astronomers uh visual astrophotographers um uh
and everything in between and some people just go for the talks because the talks are really good they go on for two
days straight um but as as with everything else it was canceled this year but I was able to uh
sneak up to the uh campgrounds this past weekend um to try to enjoy the night skies and I
was completely caught it out all three days um I was able to pull at least polar line
though each night although that worked
um but uh you know astronomy is uh it's alive and well um this uh the past few
months uh we've seen a major spike in uh
um in the overall business in the interest of astronomy a lot of parents a lot of grandparents calling saying I
want to get a telescope for my for my child um which is uh quite refreshing because
I think that the hobby does need some new blood some new Young Blood to come in and and take it to to another level
um uh with the tools that are available now uh with the uh the ability for anyone to
take a picture even with with just a phone and that what you can do with just that uh Scott you and I
have talked about that before right um uh that the technology is there and and the the younger generation that's
coming and know how to use that technology which is nice because it's a night it's taking from different uh
fields and bringing it into uh astronomy and and seeing what we can do with it
um so to me that that's quite quite exciting and uh um quite inspirational to keep uh keep
doing what I'm doing as well um but uh until I'm able to get something I'm not
really going to be able to share much uh right now um I'm back I do have my uh my last
Mandy well the explore scientific last Mandy G11 with the PMC it running
um and as always I was working flawlessly and it is a amount that I do suggest everybody take a serious look at
um I appreciate that Steve that's really you know it's my baby and I I defend it
to the death you know it's like that sometimes he does yeah that's true
I know firsthand many times
from those early days I think this is the first one that came out um that was sold to the general public
um I think it was numero no yeah yeah right I remember when I was having trouble and Jerry logged in and he saw
the firmware version like how did you get that I think it was on version two you shouldn't have that like okay
um yeah yeah but uh no it works really good even with the I access 100 and the Xbox 2 with pmc8 the uh
um the ability again talking about technology to use um you know everyday devices like a
tablet and and uh some of that most people are familiar with or just about
all people are familiar with and and just get into it right away uh you know
you look at when you buy an iPad they don't come with a manual no and and especially children or the
younger generation be able to pick it up and just just start using it um and then using an app like explore
Stars pick it up and just start using it right that's a testament as to to where where the field is going and
how it's an uh an excellent way for people to get started into the hobby uh
with with something that they're familiar with they don't have to do um uh start picking up manuals and or
scouring the internet watching YouTube videos on on what to do just to be able to get their amount to move
um so I think that that's an excellent uh excellent primer um I heard I heard something today about
um it had it it was in relation to uh mentally challenged kids
um and their ability to um uh interact with with the world and
they were talking about neuroplasticity which was kind of a new term uh to me but
um uh it has a lot to do with making something challenging enough to engage you
but not so cumbersome that that it prevents you from from doing what you
want to do you know and so there's that balance It's A Real Fine Line and uh you
know if you get the uh the the the right teacher the right gear the right you
know uh to where you can stay engaged stay challenged because you can't have
it do it for you right there's no challenge there right you got to learn something so
uh one of the guys that um uh often uh follows us on our shows is Ron delvo uh
Ron do you want to show you wanted to uh you came on the show as a guest and uh uh we wanted to
um uh learn a little bit about you this is the first time for me to actually see you live so how are you doing Ron pretty
good how are you great great I um you work with a lot of uh telescopes and and
um you're always bringing up some information about uh uh you know the
equipment that you own yeah I have a bunch of Scopes uh over the years I started when I was young I
have a video I can show you uh that I made back in 2015. I I have um
a backyard which is awesome I have a golf green area and a little building
and I put my Scopes in the building and there are times when I can leave my Scopes out for you know two or three
weeks just cover them and they're aligned and ready to go just put my cart
near them what I'm going to use and start hooking up my stuff and go for it right uh I don't have any I I'm a visual
and extra photographer but mainly I love Visual and I still do visual all the
time and I have a bunch of telescopes to use for different things they have a couple of old ones anyway if you want
I'll play the um video share the screen and I have some of my current stuff that
I've taken pictures of and uh I have some art I can show you that
I've done I'm assigned I was a sign painter most of all of my life I'm retired now okay and um
the video I'm going to show you is when I lived in Surprise Arizona I live in um
Fountain Hills now which is 50 miles on the other side of um
um Phoenix okay anyway um just after I did this video uh I was
diagnosed with having a aneurysm on my heart and uh I was lucky to find it and
I'm still here which is amazing it was like three inches it was huge I had open
heart surgery had fixed and everything which is cool so I'm kind of thankful to be here that's good anyway so uh if you want me
to share and this is kind of a hokey thing I have a neighbor that did video
and um we threw something together just to have and so here it is I'll show it to you
see share the screen hopefully it's loud enough
tell me if you see it yes uh-huh okay here it goes
hi welcome to the delvo observatory I live in Surprise Arizona USA
I am Ron delvo I live in the northwest corner of Phoenix Arizona
there's approximately a hundred thousand people who live here five million of them live in the Phoenix
area light pollution is everywhere but we have low humidity and many clear
days and nights I started into astronomy when I was 12 years old my parents got me a 40 power
refractor and as my interest grew we were able to get me a four inch reflector
with a crude equatorial Mount and three eyepieces I was able to view all kinds of stuff year after year I learned the
constellations and was able to find the planets in some deep Sky objects after I was married I purchased a 10
inch reflector and enjoyed years of visual astronomy there were occasions where I took some photographs with a
film camera and it camcorder but most of my observing was it's visual
I joined an astronomy club in Toledo Ohio and shared and learned so much in our club they even built a 25 inch sat
reflector and uh and an observatory and I helped build that too with them it
was a lot of fun moved to Rochester New York where it was cloudy most of the time for many years I
lived there and it was very discouraging in 2007 we moved to Arizona
what a great place this is I bought a modified Canon 40D camera
in 2012 I started learning to do astrophotography I traded two guns for my Mead LX 200
8-inch telescope from that time on I've been collecting telescopes and learning software and control the camera and to
process extra photos I take each telescope is like a tool in a
toolbox it has special purpose for each one and even the cheapy ones can be used to
take pictures even the inexpensive ones in someone's closet that they've been disgusted with because they can't see
anything even though you think you can't see anything you can I host star parties and I go to schools
and share the heavens with my neighbors the wonderful thing about this technology is as time goes on more is
learned in the photographs we are now doing are better than the large observatories were
producing back in the 50s and 60s during the time I was growing up I consumed all the magazines and books I
could find now the internet is so awesome the future is too because it's unlimited what you can do
I have discovered an x on the moon uh it's the shape of an X oh wow looking to
publish uh the idea that I found it and I've uh made pictures up and Graphics of
where it is and I've uh posted it everywhere to try and try and get some kind of credit for it
there are many aspects to astronomy as an amateur you can actually
contribute to the science finding comments to novas capturing events that occur only one time
and there's even more and it's wide open
wow thank you Ron yeah pretty much man okay let's see
uh that's just a thank you for the guy that did the video
very nice okay let's see um while I'm here I'll just show you
quickly some artwork I did for the Challenger Learning Center in Rochester before I moved to
um Arizona and uh this is uh the entrance to the
Challenger Learning Center um you know I
I did all kind of artwork very nice yeah and it was uh fluorescent lettering
so they had black light and it all lit up I also did uh some um
which call it um foam Graphics to make it look like the space station yeah
that's cool yeah and uh and this is a wall Purity and I had to get out to get
back and uh anyway there's that then um on my uh Dover
observatory in um Facebook
my machine is lightning fast as you can see all right
um it's coming up here in a second I got some pictures about Jupiter and Saturn and um Mars
uh recently uh
let's see if I can get down there um we have uh in Fountain Hills here
they're going to build an 18 million dollar um complex and going to have a 60 inch telescope or
let's see 40 inch telescope or something in the building and are going to teach and have
classes and do me things oh my goodness that's great yeah
anyway let's see I want to go down far enough to see the this is what my Observatory looks like we've got shirts
recently so we look Semi-Pro now to get one of those
yeah let's see here's uh picture of
Venus I took there's Saturn uh
and here's Mars this came out pretty good that's beautiful very nice yeah that's with my lx200 and
um okay
the next one is um
somebody that was watching the show about uh uh he said when designing a
Schmidt Casa Grande telescope reflector telescope is the focal length value for
the primary mirror the distance to the secondary or near to it or is it the full light
path to the focuser you know that answer no
yeah not a technical guy look at it Schmidt Casa green telescope like uh the
eight inch F10 for example yeah uh they use a an F2 primary and then the
secondary is actually very close to the to the primary mirror they use a five power secondary so the magnification
actually happens from the secondary you know to get that whole F10 focal
length so cool wow well thank you very much Ron yep
that's excellent thank you very much for sharing sure um we have uh one other thing I wanted
to talk about was um where I live now it's a dark sky Community it's been so
for two years and there's a lot of people that are dedicated to get other towns and cities uh involved in keeping
the sky dark so people can actually see the um Milky Way which
um in some cases here it's very bright uh up north in Arizona it is so bright
that you can get the the Milky Way to cast this shadow it's
not just so bright it's amazing anyway that's my time I guess
um appreciate it and uh I love coming on and doing your go-to thing and I try to
ask interesting questions because and you do I'm an old guy thank you for sharing Ron sure thank you
okay well I know it's getting uh it's getting late for uh Gary Palmer and
Gary's been hanging in there uh so Gary why don't we why don't we uh switch to
you and um uh uh I'll put the spotlight on you man hey
Gary what time is it there four in the morning hi everyone it is 5am 502.
oh my goodness guys here uh we've had a big storm come
through so tonight what I thought we would do is have a look at some uh processing on
mosaics yeah so whether it's a mosaic of the Sun or a mosaic of the Moon and
um really why we're doing it and how we get a reasonably good Mosaic together
um there's a couple of different reasons why so let me share up the screen first
there we go and let me just shrink
basically I can't see anything at the second give me two seconds there we go
Okay so one of the reasons for most eights is
really being able to get a little bit more detail than a full um disk image or a single shot
recorded with the camera the other reason
um might be that you know field of view might have a large telescope something like an SCT so let's go
um and your camera's field of view is not going to allow us all this shot so
the idea is is to join um multiple shots together and create a
mosaic of the image so here's one of the Moon and this is the sort of thing that we're
trying to attempt to get to um they're not necessarily the easiest
thing in the world so here's a solar one if we go back to the full
price there's about 50 um images in there 50 videos that are
all combined together in uh Auto Stack Up and then they're put into single
files and um come up with a single shot so
if we go to where is here there we go so here's one
of the single shops as it's been spat from the uh
Auto stack up and it's a little bit sharpening and some people turn around
and say don't sharpen other people say sharpen I find if you give it a little bit of Sharpening at some point with the
wavelets it helps some of the software also align these objects
um depending on how many you put in the software is dependent on how how well it works
now Photoshop has a system on there and normally you can get somewhere around 20
to 30 images to all the line and combine themselves together
more or less automatically but it can have a big meltdown
um that that's the key thing and one of the the things that has a meltdown on is is when you actually create the Stacked
image from a video you end up with lines around the edge and you need to go through each one of these images and
delete or crop off the stack lines otherwise this causes the software all sorts of
problems there is other free software as well um you've got something like Microsoft
device yeah so I've loaded some of these pre-loaded these in
and it's really simple you just load these in you can go to stitch
there's your image straight away and then we can go to crop
the downside to this with it being a free piece of software
um is if you've got any gaps here if you've not overrun into the dark areas
and the same works on the sun and that gives you an uneven blend somewhere in
this area here and it it is really hard to actually get a nice even blend
because each shot will have a very very slightly different contrast or exposure
and that also depends on maybe using solar filters um you might have a soft spot in part of
the filter so it'll be brighter in one area than what it is in another area on the image
but basically that's how quick it is it's a really quick piece of software to use that's amazing so
Photoshop analog this is quite old today so deliberately dumped this out from uh quite a long
time ago um we can see that the the side of the
film so I think it was on a Coronado 90 millimeter so probably I had that about
five or six years ago something like that and our cameras were quite poor then so you used to get quite a lot of
problems um getting a nice even contrast right the way through the image
but um there are ways around this um generally you would go in and you
would try and match most of these together to get the same result contrast on each layer so you just select each
one and gradually adjust it nowadays it's a lot easier because we have flat frame subtraction in the
software so it creates a fairly uniform Mosaic when we're doing this right the
way across but we can for instance go into here and we can select
um all layers and then we can go into edit and we can tell it to also
blend the images
I haven't actually counted how many were in this one I just sort of prepared it as something to look at
now one of the Beauties with Photoshop this Photoshop will have a look at the outside edge and it will match this all
in what you can see here is some very faint lines and that's where we've not gone
into each layer and blended it a little bit closer to the the layer that's next
to it but you can see that we've got quite a bit of detail in there yeah and if we sharpened all this up and
went through the time process it would work quite well it'd look quite nice
this is one that I um tracked out this was the iron uh one that we just ran through on
the Microsoft ice software so if we just roll back
yeah in the uh history here yeah so we've moved a couple of these
around now what we're going to do is exactly the same thing yeah and also blend
all of these why is the moon green
that is the actual camera itself so
um lots of color cameras uh on most color cameras um have a biased ring so for every red
and blue pixel you've got two green pixels which make up the buying Matrix
um some cameras like the zwos they have modified these in the color balance uh
in the SDK the downside to that is is that they've actually moved the blue up to 90. so if
you plug it in the standard zwrite at the moment it's got a relative color of on the blue channel of 90 and it should
be down in the 50 area which will give you a slight tinge debris and when I spoke to them they said oh
well it looks nice on the screen but in a sense for processing we actually need
uh we really need to remove the green so that is a simple process and we actually
look to that um so if we drop that down I've already opened this in picks inside
that's the image there and what I've done is I've split that image
at the top here and so it's uh rgbase so you can see here that the blue is really
really dark the green is quite bright and the red sort of in between the two
so we can use linear fits pretty straightforward yeah and we can select
the green Channel because that's the brightest one and we want to balance the other two channels the same
this is probably um this process is the best way of getting the good cover calibration you
can do it in software like Roger Stacks or photoshop but it's actually quite hard to get a really nice color
calibration on it once we've done the linear fit and they're all fairly evenly balanced
together we can generate our cover image so if I just open that
up a little bit more
there we go now what we want to do is add in a little bit more color and maybe adjust the brightness very slightly so
if we reset this put it back into brightness mode
and just brighten up a little fraction somewhere around there
apply it to the image and now what we're going to do is turn
over to saturation so we're going to bring in or bring out should I say some of the color that's in
the image no Gary I'm going to ask you to give
yourself a little plug here because if you want to learn how to do image processing like this Gary's the guide to
teach you and uh he does he does this kind of thing online all over the world with the
astronomers so somewhere around there I would be quite happy with that I might adjust the
background very very slightly on it um so that's roughly 10 panels
for a mosaic and now everybody actually zoom in you can see that we've got some nice detail
on there and a lot of this will work around your Optics it work around your your seeing conditions
uh there could be a hundred one um reasons why it'd be clearer or why
it'd be software in the image but that that's a general sort of view and it works exactly the same with the solar
side of things um got one there I actually did this this was a test
image um they are absolutely no solar features
prominences but it's a 20 Panel test motorcycle um and again you can see that you can
get a nice blend on it um depending on your camera as to whether you're going to get a darker
limb on here um but you can blend this all down this was done um I think it was done in about November
something like that so it's quite late in the year for us so you can see a couple of little software areas but it
is only a 60 millimeter um telescope so
that was really expensive there we go
okay uh Gary that's that that's uh we're back back now that's right but he said
that uh clearlight 58 it was here in the chat and he says amazing you must have
some really good coffee there to be able to talk at this level of detail at 5am you said your work is right yeah it's uh
it's been readily filled but it's fantastic as I said uh Gary
Palmer is uh really uh one of the you know amazing uh astronomers astrophotographers out there but he also
does uh um do workshops he does them virtually online um you can take one-on-one with him and
Gary what's the best website to go to for you um the best website is uh astrocourses dot Co dot UK website
uh if you want to have a browser the images the images are on the solar system averaging dot Co dot UK
dot Co dot UK there we go thank you very much
um we go down now to uh uh to Chile to
uh Rodrigo zaleida and uh Rodrigo you've been very patient uh thank you for
hanging out with us um you're in La Serena uh Chile and uh
you are the owner of North Optics down there telescope retailer but you're a
passionate astrophotographer too and uh we are all
very jealous because you are the darkest guys in the world so what can you share with us tonight
and well today in La Serena is probably again and raining but
I chatted with you some picture okay
um with the refractors it says inch and like that okay
is that refractor it's not a nice character thank you
and that's an explore scientific ar-152 back
there yes okay
do you see the the picture not quite yet
there it is okay this is this picture is with the size is
refractor from La Serena wow um
the I'm using the Dual narrow bug filter but and if you see the the star is free
achromatic aberration yes okay the filters and eliminate the
operation with the it's a it's a it's a a narrow Bob filter of ocean and either
of him it's beautiful it's beautiful now explore scientific ar-152 is a crown and
Flint acromat this is not an apocrymap refractor and what's making this possible to have
this kind of star quality uh with the virtually no secondary color in the
image are these narrow band filters um several astrophotographers including
uh Jason gonzale the past reaches has been doing a similar type of work
now what's amazing about the scope also is it's low price to get some some image
quality like this is uh it blows me away so this is a big telescope and a great
capture of life for the photograph and
I take another picture um without a narrow bar filters and the
first photograph you see the acrobatic
aberration yes
in the soul and this is this star with a
chromatic aberration is is normally in tablet achromatic telescope but with a
little process is better
oh yeah I'm better a little process with a pigs inside I
extract the the blue Hollow on the start
and the picture look very well right
incredible this is the original picture and the process a little green and
another color balance and the picture will look better
I see a nice bright red star there about 10 o'clock or so
and yep the process is
the color yeah that that bright red star is about
halfway to the bright star to the top left oh there's one right next to it too right
and hey and what programs are you using
primarily um this price is only for the the
soldier in the Imagine is Jim and free support for a 18.
um yes to to put up with this telescope I
I tested the Optics and test the bones I
and work for the bbca The Exodus amount
with the the this telescope and the world of the mountains is very good the
this teleco is a heavy um
2010 kilograms with the photographic department is 12 12 kilograms and the
tracking is very good
and actually we use the last photo and I take
um a few days ago the Wi-Fi
the Lagoon nebula and Tiffany nebula for La Serena
this photo is free new telescope and it's a long-term telescope for 16
millimeters yeah it's spectacular too wow really most of the Skies you have
there Rodrigo that's that's uh it's amazing yes yes I live in the city
if you go out to the city the the sky is very dark and spectacular yes it's
spectacular yes this this is my
my presentation thank you very much Rodrigo thank you thanks for thanks for
participating tonight you were with us uh the last couple of star parties too we really appreciate your
um sharing those uh Southern Sky objects you know we love to see them up here
um okay uh we have also uh some other
people have joined us um that I haven't quite got got to yet uh daveing Dave uh you want to uh
you want to share a little bit of what's going on over there in California and Temecula
sure um
a tablet so you'll need to let me in zoom in so no problem yeah just come back to me
a couple minutes please okay all right um
how about Richard Grace you got something to show us
I do it's terrible it's it's terrible there there's no um no light pollution
filter was used uh on this image earlier uh this week I captured uh some M31 and
well m110 I guess along with it okay um and that's why I'm uh received a
light pollution filter today uh and that's why it's cloudy uh let's see here
let me share a screen why is it that astronomical gear tracks
clouds I haven't really figured that out yet so I got a
got another scope coming to Mars hopefully the clouds will clear out from that till next week but uh yeah you guys
got that it's uh it's it's not very good you can tell the gradient from you know light polluted skies I couldn't get it
out um you know a little amp call on the side I couldn't get it out I need to work on my processing skills but uh it
still looks pretty good though I also just edited that in like 15 minutes like in the last uh just 15 20 minutes ago so
um yeah that's really all I've got for the night but that was with the ed-80 CF uh
from a city with no light pollution filter that's crazy yeah that's really good
takes four moons across yeah man hey hey is the the uh bright
star uh to the left of uh left to there
blow up that one real quick can you zoom in on that image
okay stop right there it looks like almost like you have a little bit of shipping screw pitch see those three
flares 120 degrees apart they're little wedge-shaped things I do I will send you a document that
talks about that basically you just loosen the shipping screws and that should take care of it
very good I was actually wondering about that because it kind of almost looks like uh you know camera lens with the uh
uh the Irish closing down for stopping down a lens so if you look at uh I
noticed it on that one but you can see the others now that I'm looking at it they're sort of wedge-shaped
artifacts they look like a wedge and there's really uh three of them if they're all tight that's so I'm sending
you that document right now cool uh definitely appreciate that and I will
stop sharing my screen because that's pretty much all I've got uh right it's
still cloudy so I'll be uh working through the weekend uh working on trying to get that uh image with uh some light
pollution filter and then also working with the new scope in the coming weeks
yes yes Jerry I think you're right I think you're right I think it is question and uh and uh door prize time
and so this time uh uh the uh the prize
will be um this is our third question and the prize will be any 82 degree inch and a
quarter eyepiece uh the 82 degree series oh man yeah tough question then
no pressure Jerry again you need be um you need to answer the questions send
it your answers to Kent at explore scientific.com uh this this side piece
will come with an opt uh t-shirt as well uh so you can wear it with pride
um and uh it will um uh you know our eyepieces come with uh you know
beautiful gift box and inside the gift box is a nice little case that will hold
the eyepiece and uh you know I could go on and on and talk about our eyepieces but I won't because we still have
astronomers to get to tonight um but um uh hand grenade the 82 degree
series is probably explore scientific's most popular series of eyepieces so we've sold uh well quite a few so
um and I knew you couldn't count that high
Scott that's about uh getting more stuff
which I had to answer some very interesting questions today uh you know dealers uh wanting to know why because
the customers want to know why uh in this time of coven they can't get
telescope equipment faster you know and the the issue is is that it just
takes a long time to make the product and um uh you know factories are shut
down for about two months this year so that's never happened before so that's uh that's also another reason
but uh they are working uh our our factors are working double shifts uh right now and seven days a week and so
that's uh that's part of it you know and trying to meet demand
um but what's the question Jerry all right so this is uh this is going to be the eyepiece related question that I
came up with and it's going to take a little bit of work so how many different series of
eyepieces does explore scientific offer and and also how many total eyepieces do we
offer so those two pieces so how many what different series do we offer and what
are the total count of all the eyepieces that we offer and I I did this earlier tonight on our website so you can go to
our website and figure that out okay and the websites
www.explorescientific.com I should ask all of our customer service reps that question so
yeah we do have quite a few uh different models of eyepieces and uh I was kind of
surprised at the total count that that kind of blew me away that we have as many as we do
yes that's right okay great thank you and um hey Jerry be sure
to write down what these prizes are because I haven't been yeah oh that's the other thing I think uh Dustin's
gonna give away a t-shirt with this prize too right I mentioned that I did mention that okay so uh the t-shirt and
82 degree IPS right Scott is for this question right inch and a quarter
inch and a quarter any of the inch and a quarter series the 82 degree
all right yeah that was a good that was a good question for that I think that was uh
the challenge that's a challenging one but God I actually have to dive out man
I've got a date with about 400 emails um you know I still have a team that expects me to do my job so thank you
yeah and spending time and uh for giving us the courtesy of having us on clear
skies Network hey thank you all for being here I'm honored to be uh in everybody's company here thank you so
much and uh thank you to everybody in the chat you know the twitch chat you you guys know you're my team so thank
you so much and thanks for uh thanks for doing our clear Network this is a blast I'm so glad to see this stuff happening
so good thanks for joining Dustin all right thanks Dustin bye guys have a good
night okay all right and uh we have uh Chuck star uh Chuck's
um uh let me let's have you introduce yourself uh you're in the UK as well
correct oh yeah yes I am yeah in the UK I'm not sure how far from Gary but yeah
it doesn't sound like he's too far away okay I'm in Wales I come from London
though so that's what I said I was gonna say because you do sound like you're from London but yeah so um
now so oh nice better place to be really
so I've been doing this for four months for deep space in about a month in total
with Photography in general um so five months in total I'll share my
screen uh okay
so I started off taking moon photos of just a DSLR that I had lying around is a
600D um just basically taking moonshots
uh and there's another one and then I'll that's when I bought the
exos 100 um and I started again with the 50 millimeter try and tracked photos
this was probably the best one I got out of it this is a five minute unguided track photo
um and that looks pretty cool that's when I bought the telescope
telescope's not brilliant equipment it's a scar watcher 102t
um I'm not using any filters I've got a SV bony
guide scope with a zwo 120 MCS guide
camera attached to it and then what I've been getting out of that has been really positive actually
on the exos 2 because I upgraded to that uh what have I got we've got
so this one was m81 I'm not really starting
off down the processing route yet this is just stacked a couple of curve
changes in um and then a little crop quite big crop uh you've got the original I don't know
it's correct very nice full very nice really good
yeah you know it takes some people years to get that level so getting into this
so um and then what I've started getting recently as I've started using Nina is
um this is what I started been playing around with thinking of M31
and that one's not too bad looking 27.
this one is another one that I edited a little bit again that's 12 Subs at three
minutes um with no doctoral lights or just processed in Cyril
and then editing with a couple of Curves really is one of Andromeda look at that
that's awesome yeah this one I've been messing around with
today so you've only been doing
astrophotography for a month uh four months four months yeah 16 weeks
took me almost a year to get to this point 16 weeks okay yeah so originally I just started with a
tiny little tripod the camera a 50 millimeter lens and I've
also got a I'm not sure what it is but it's up to 250 millimeter
um and that's what started with for the moon photos and then a couple of star
photos I mean the first time I took a photo of the sky I'd send it to a friend of mine to say is this real before I put
it online to say that I've actually taken a photo of stars and he said yeah yeah no that is exactly what you should
be getting and then I started looking down the EQ Mount route and getting a telescope and
yeah it's trying to figure it all out and it's been a journey but the excess
200 exos2 is a really good mount it the Wireless feature works really well it
has made things a lot easier um and I think the guide to coach made it a lot easier because
polar alignment was a real real pain in the ass to sort of get going
um so I did think to myself a lot of this stuff is connected online and it knows who you are where you are
so you should be able to do it without polar alignment so these are all without polar alignment
um what I've basically done is I've pointed the mount and it's all aligned
here to go dead North and then I'll play itself to a star
and then I'll play itself to my Target and then I lock it in with Nina and
it seems to give me 180 seconds track so far I've pushed it to five minutes but
um I did make a couple of darks and a couple of bias frames uh 20 of each I
think um for three minutes so I've been trying to keep everything at three minutes so I can use those to sort of compare the
difference between I've been using this equator to sort of um stack Cyril deep Sky stacker just to
see what gives me the better output to start with and then start going from there I think this one was done in
sequater um and I think one of these was
that's equator as well it's equator that one would have been in
civil so wonderful
yeah so yeah and I'm really excited um we're having to go so like when you
started getting images that uh that you wanted to share like this I mean it's it
uh oh I was over the Moon I mean the first time I saw it coming to screen on apt
which is what I started using um and I saw the swells of M51 I was like
no way look I've got a nebula in there um I just can't believe it it was yes you
know you got good you know good contrast there uh tracking looks great the focus
the focus is the main thing that people get last you know they they understand they don't understand how critical focus
is until later on but looks like you've done a good job of that hey Chucks how are you focusing
uh manually so I zoom in on a star I'll take a photo five seconds
I'm still a noob so I still like to touch the equipment and look at what it's doing and things so
um so I manually focus on a star and then I keep going I'm gonna keep taking the photos and then eventually when I'm
happy that I don't zoom in on this star so what I'll do is I'll zoom and get
perfect focus on one star and then I'll make sure I've got these Stars zoomed in as well
and then once I've got those zoomed in and they're round I'll start Imaging what uh DSLR have you got there it's a
600D so it's got a live view on the back of it yeah yeah so I keep the live view
turned around all the time just yeah but you you can use that to save yourself a
bit of time you can use that for your focusing yeah that's what I do I'll just pop that out
check it on there I always check it on there and then once I've done that
on the right hand side plus it up by 10. you'll be able to do your focus in nice
and fine then I'll just save it loads and loads of time yeah yeah cheers
because that's bit that takes the time but at the moment I don't mind because it's something worth taking the time
with focusing yeah you can spend an hour focusing before you take your images yeah yeah and then they'll come out good
yeah cheers you know all these tips are really really good and I mean all the forums I've joined everyone's been
really helpful um there's been no animosity and everyone's been really there's no
beginner question that you know it's sometimes you're afraid to ask certain questions but not with the Astro
photography guys I've found everyone's been really open and helpful yeah we've talked about that today on the show
earlier Scott about beginners being a little bit intimidated with some of the some of the information that we share
right yeah and there's really no no reason for it to be intimidated I you
know I can I can totally get um why someone might might be um
might be intimidated uh uh because you know the the technical part of this can
be daunting um uh it's um you know you see people sometimes with
very complicated looking gear uh they are doing some complex things
um and uh you know once you see somebody really working the the equipment and
doing the processing and doing all the rest of this uh to try to keep up is a little tough sometimes but I will tell
you that um amateur astronomers are probably the most sharing uh and giving group of people you're
ever going to meet you know there are other hobbies that you could be into with a photog just regular photography
is one of them and a lot of photographers do not give up their secrets okay they that's something that
they hold uh they guard very closely but uh most amateur astronomers are going to show you how to get polar line how to
get a sharp Focus how to do uh a lot of image processing they might they might
have some uh technique that is giving them a slight Edge you know but uh uh
but uh trust me you can learn it and you can be part of it and uh you can make some uh
really spectacular images and so you know with the progress the chalks has
already made uh you know I certainly expect him in the next couple of years here to be making some uh images that
will rival anything that's out there so that's that's fantastic yeah it is image processing is uh next
on The Hit List um you know some amazing tools so that's
that's fantastic thanks that's great can I ask him a question yes you can Jax how
do you make your um videos that you stack or do you do single frames oh they're
all single frames okay so all right so have you done um planetary stuff
no not yet okay I have a program that may like to use since you have live view
on your Canon I use the Canon 40D which is a really old camera but it has live
view and there's a program called EOS uh movie record it's a Russian program it
uh saves off Avi video from your camera and you're able to
um I I usually do 600 frames 500 frames and then put it in
registax and stack them and I have various things I've saved off Saved off
to do wavelets and stuff but um it works really well so if you think of it download that program yeah cheers
plan it's all on the list but from where I am they're either too low behind the
buildings and I saw Jupiter over there but there was no way I was going to see
it through the trees um so I'm just white in for some point I've got to go over there I'm hoping
and when they're over there I'll be okay but no thanks cheers for the suggestions
thanks for having me on Cheers thank you man thank you okay so we have some other
astronomers here that we have to talk to we got James Hubbard daveing Tyler Bowman and Wade fronti uh so uh Dave you
uh you were getting ready here so let's uh let's jump to you
take myself off mute there okay uh let me share out my
tablet
screen [Music]
okay we can can you see that yep all right
so right now I just said well first night I decided to shoot NGC 7635
uh that's the bubble nebula and the equipment I'm using is an explore scientific ed102 uh four inch
refractor I have a Canon DSL I'm sorry a Nikon DSLR
D5300 it's unmodified and and uncooled obviously so
um I'll talk more about that in a minute because last week I took a bunch of pictures in the Heat and I'm not happy
with the data but I'll show you that in a second uh so right now um what you're seeing on the screen is
the ASI air app which runs a small Raspberry Pi device which runs my setup
I'm guiding and it looks like I'm getting about 0.89 that's not too bad
I can go ahead and hide that and I'll hide the histogram as well
and that is the image so far for one three minute sub and I think if you squint real hard you
can probably see the nebula right in the center there um but hopefully it'll look a lot better
after we or after I stack it and process it
you can actually start to see the curve of the bubble yep
oh yeah okay uh let's see so I'm shooting 60
frames is my auto run session I'm about halfway through uh three minutes a piece
and then later on tonight I'll go ahead and shoot some darks and I'll probably do Flats in the morning
and last week I was shooting the um the witch's broom
and like I was saying was really hot and I I don't like my data and I don't like the way this came out but
um this this is the result of last week's Imaging session wow very good you
may not like it but I do thanks yeah it took me a lot of processing to get
it I first stacked all the all the images all I saw was red and a lot of noise but I was trying I
don't know if you remember last week but when I first targeted this image that
bright star was kind of in the center yeah I used the ASI go function to
re-center it and the reason I did that is at the bottom right hand side there's some nebula say that I wanted to capture
and it looks like I didn't capture a little bit of it are you trying to get pickering's triangle in there too uh
honestly I don't know what it's called I think that's what's below it is angle
come on so that that's what I had that's the result of my work from last week
um and what this is telling me because I actually spent a lot of time this week uh trying to clean it up and trying to
get this much to come out of the uh image that I had captured and um it just kind of
reinforces two things one I think I want to buy a cooled camera and uh two um I think I'm probably gonna
take a look at uh Gary Palmer's uh website and maybe hit him up for some
yeah processing um I did this in pixinsight
um I don't have any uh I I don't do anything after that I haven't done any
Photoshop or anything um the only thing I do is I don't know if you can see it in the very bottom
right hand corner is I do put my name on there and that's just a stamp with but I don't do any uh touch-up after
picks Insight so um and that's all I have for now hey
Dave I got a question just uh just for the audience review how long have you been doing astrophotography it's only
been a few months also right yeah about four months since April yep that's the magic number yeah four
months you need for months to make images this good looking good Dave thank you that is
awesome man it is yeah I'm sure uh Astro bear did one much better he was shared
the same image I think okay let me uh okay
so if I can shut off my there we go I already did it for you okay so sorry
uh James the astrophotographer let's jump to you
how's everybody doing this evening yeah good we're good how you doing nice and
quiet over there and yeah it's uh it's cleared up now but uh since I did
Meridian flip I kind of lost my Target and I'm trying to get re-centered again but uh that's
probably some kind of issue for me part of it that's the way it is for
everybody that's the secret that's the secret even even people that have done it for years and years
right that's right my pain is uh getting the polar alignment down and I I can
never see me get that correct and I did okay tonight I thought but after the Meridian flip it didn't happen
and this is where I'm at with uh Western Vale or Eastern Vale nebula I
can't know if you can even see that I'm able to share my screen because I
had to do it on a phone this evening okay
but uh this is what I was getting before I did my Meridian flip
oh you got some data you know so that seems like it seems like everybody's using the ASI
air a lot I just picked it up and uh
I haven't figured out the guiding with it yet or uh yeah it takes some time to
get used to but once you get it it's simple simple I'm trying to
what's up there you go there it is you see it okay yeah that's uh what I was getting
earlier but uh enjoying the show and uh just feeling
very privileged to be part of it oh thank you thanks man so uh uh James uh
where are you set up at where what's your life I'm actually in a field
um in a friend's backyard uh let me uh turn a big light on and you can kind of
see oh I see
there's your setup okay we're in the cut we're in the country are you
I'm uh 30 miles east of Cleveland Ohio and uh I'm right on the Lake Shore in
Painesville
you're doing all this fine I think so yeah no the amazing thing is this is all
just uh through my phone right now so in connection I'm lucky I have the data isn't that
unbelievable you know so here you are we're having one of those internet moments where you can be on a phone
connection uh we can see you you can share uh you know astrophotography and
uh you know hang out with us at the Star Park so that's totally cool I know that
your brains out uh I've tried to you know I I miss you on the first go-around
uh getting you onto the star party and then uh it's been a couple of uh one or
two times where you couldn't attend but I'm glad you did this one so I'm so happy to be a part of it yeah thank you
yeah that's great that's awesome okay all right and so who else do we got here
we've got um Tyler Bowman Tyler is one of our own uh so Tyler what's going on tonight
well I was trying to get everything all aligned up because you
pressured me everything set up it's part of your
training it's part of your training it is part of the training I get it Tyler Tyler's been his next five paychecks or
ten paychecks buying a g11. it was worth it it's totally worth it oh yeah he
didn't twist my arm enough to get a TDM no I tried
you know but I got everything all set up and then here comes the clouds it's like oh my God
it happens to us a lot here in yeah but I've been talking to Wade a little bit he's going to help me figure out the the
communication that I'm having with the ASI Pro and the G11 okay what's going on
with that so I appreciate his help with that for sure that's cool that's cool
is there anything to share now or I don't have anything right now no
um unfortunately that's with two kids it's it's hard
I know that's a terrible excuse but I feel your pain no picture of your scope
okay so you know this is horrible a big part of the amateur astronomy and star
parties in general okay I mean how do you start praising have you been to where it was just so fun just to hang
out you know and talk yeah and share some ideas and see what's going on and look at gear and see images and then
just kind of take in the beautiful sky so we've got a global star party going on
you know both hemispheres and uh you know so that that's totally cool that's
totally cool that's what I like about this group because it it keeps the keeps
it going it keeps me want to just constantly trying to improve I mean because Dave's been doing it for four
months shocks has been doing it for four months it's like I keep I gotta step up my game
I've had it for a year about a year a year and a half now and uh I've I just started stacking last
week I did my first stacking yeah I gotta get back into I can't make any more excuses my kids can no longer be my
crutch and I'm involved I try the nine-year-old he doesn't care
he wants to play fortnite but my three-year-old he's all about it he go runs points at the moon and Jupiter uh
but I need to get I need to borrow some more telescopes from work and let him
use those so that means next week we expect an apod quality image out of you that's right that's right we've won a
magazine copper all right guys I'm gonna have to hit you up then because that's not gonna happen without you
okay so we're gonna next we're gonna go to Wade prunty who's 100 hour Wade I
think is his new name uh uh but um and after that we're going to uh we're going
to ask some more questions um and I want to come back and talk to uh check Ayub and um uh you know all the
astrophotographers we have here Jason gonzale and and everyone and we'll kind of do a last round uh and you can share
what you can share and then uh you know we're already heading up to the Midnight Hour here so
um and I know it's getting late for some of you um but uh and it is a Tuesday night so
if we wait long enough shocks can start doing some solar observing for us
another hour that's right all right so uh you're on
wait hey guys can y'all hear me yeah awesome so uh hey my name is Wade printy
I am uh here in the DFW area of Texas and um so um I actually uh started
Imaging um in February so I've got two extra months on these guys
um but uh you know I was at the same point I I had a lot of frustrations at
the beginning I remember one night I almost took all my gear out to the to the street corner and left it for the
garbage truck I was so upset just so frustrated um but um so uh I came across just uh
just to uh kind of throw this out there I came across uh Dustin Gibson's Instagram uh
live which pushed me over to uh it was you know his twitch uh stream which is
uh clear skies Network now and that has been a huge huge help for me um I've
learned a whole lot of uh everything from equipment to processing it was a
big thing to go from you know at the beginning you know I'm watching I'm watching Dylan and Trevor and Chuck and
you know trying to get my information from those guys and you know but you know they I can't talk to them right I
can't call them up I mean I called Chuck he wouldn't answer his phone I think he blocked me I went to his house he
wouldn't answer the door so um you know it's just hard to get you know like
answers immediately from people when you're when you're having issues but uh once I got into clear skies Network I
was able to jump on the stream and just even through the chat was able to to talk and ask questions and Dustin and
all the other guests that were on would answer the questions and I was able to get those you know immediate questions
it was it was faster than getting emails back and forth from people it was just it was really really awesome so
um but anyway uh so tonight I was going to show you um I was I was doing the witch's broom
also um but uh it actually started raining while I was sitting here
um on my equipment I had to sprint out the door and grab everything and throw
it over my shoulder and Sprint back into the garage everybody has to experience that at least once right I had that thing I had
the same thing I had her sprinklers go off on me in a oh
that happened it wasn't supposed to rain and it rained for about 15 minutes and everything got soaked brand new mount
hideout
we're all going to try to one-up each other now right her name Falls okay
so part of part of the night tonight I've been outside in my garage with my phone with uh with a stream running on
my phone towel drying everything off but um so uh I uh I do have my I you know
I've got an iPad here just like everybody else showing the ASI air and I did want to show
um yeah I can't show you the witch's broom but just the ASI air is amazing it will do everything
um the guys that are using it you know if you don't know completely understand it yet push push through it it will
it'll do everything if you if if your equipment supports it it'll do everything from uh slewing to a lining
on the target to guiding to uh plate salt you know the plate solving the
polar alignment the Meridian flip it'll do everything for you it won't control a uh Observatory yet it doesn't have those
controls but it'll do it'll do pretty much everything you need for a backyard uh Imaging session and um I'll just pull
up uh real quick these are I mean images that I you know took
wow off the asir pro beautiful and um that's with you know just a little
refractor and a 250 millimeter refractor um that's on the uh ixos 100 explore
scientific Mount so um you know I think this is a this is a 10 minute sub I did uh 30 minute Subs on
there also of this so um this this is a ha with the 1600 mm Pro from uh from zwo
the Pelican came out really really good yeah and um wait I'll show you the color
image of that here in just a second it it really really surprised me I hit it up I mean I just locked in on the sulfur
and I got so much sulfur that I got as much as I possibly could and it really
really made um the uh the Pelican on there and um
you know I know it's Mexico but if you flip this around it looks like the us so
I kind of call it the the I call it New England like coming down New England because I mean it looks so much like the
US and the Great Lakes over there but anyway um so but the sulfur really really made
that look good so um but anyway um so here I've I've got my uh
uh my Astro bin uh stuff up so this is
um the first this is the first image that I process
um if y'all can see that this is uh m42 This was done with a Nikon d750
um I took this on February the 16th I think and I couldn't I could I did not
know how to process it until May you can see the trapezium in there very
nice yeah yeah so um yeah so this was uh this is off of a stock Nikon d750 DSLR
um I use uh I was using deep Sky stacker at the time to stack um I've got all the the details of that
um you know um all the equipment I used and everything um so uh Ben is a great website uh for
Astro photographers because you know they have they have places to put all these details down you know and it
creates kind of a uh a nice online diary for uh right photographers that's
exactly right I mean that's whenever someone asked me a question sometimes I won't remember my own image the details
and I'll have to go back to here to look it up that's right so um this is uh the
first um Sho image I took
that's really cool oh my God that's a really good way thank you very
much and it and it's uh this is I mean I'm I'm blown away I'm like you know
like even right now looking at it you know I get kind of the Willies right like you know I'm supposed to look at
this in a magazine you know not on my you know not out of my on my desktop of my computer you know people so uh with
the low end Mount too so uh yeah so this this is with a
different amount this is a difference okay this is a different Mount um but um I'll show you
um this is this is really cool um this is the uh the swan or Omega but it
looks really looks like a swan here look at that so
um and these are I I just uh I just used um started using
um a monochrome with Sho a couple of months ago and I've fallen in love with
it uh the you know just the different layers you get out of it
um where you can really pull out the detail of those different layers it makes uh makes a you know just a huge
difference in your images doing this from your light polluted backyard this is bortal
nine next to DFW airport in Dallas Texas so um
let's see uh show you the
the Helix yeah it's beautiful so um tail it's great and um I I want to
show you real quick um this this right here I just posted this today on
uh Astro Bend this is this is the m17 though the
um Swan but this was a little more up close and you get a whole lot more kind
of the detail that's in there and um this is I this is one of my
favorites right here yeah and somebody's asking what is SHO
so um you know okay so whenever whenever we look at whenever we take an image
with a camera we're looking at color images well um in space you have
um you have lots of gases and um hydrogen is the most prominent you
have sulfur you have oxygen and we know what um I
what frequency on the light uh I think its frequency is the right term on the light uh scale where each one of those
lie and so we can take filters and we can make that filter only take
that band I guess that uh that band of uh flavored that gas that wavelength
thank you and so um so in the Science World what they would do is so so sulfur
hydrogen and sulfur are both red when you look at it through a One-Shot color camera and in science they want to
see the differences so like with the Hubble Space Telescope what they did is they assigned because sulfur's
hydrogen's so powerful it's the most out there they signed green to it but they
assigned red to sulfur green to um to uh hydrogen and blue to oxygen and
they put them together and what they and the reason why is now they can actually look and see the different gases now
they can scientifically look and go okay there are the different gases gases in that nebula or you know out in out in
space and so the Hubble showed us these I believe Hubble was the first one I'm
not 100 sure about that but um you know Hubble's most famously showed us these images and
um it just so you know somebody was talking about um you know Green you know with our with
a with the Bayer on our color cameras we add an extra green you know there's there's four parts to it we have a red
blue and then two green and so we over green everything well um there's not a lot of green in
space and so what we do is we go in and we try to pull that out and whenever you take an image and you have that um red
in it and you pull that green out this is what I've I don't know the technical term for this but it it it pulls that
red and makes it gold that's where these gold colors come from so that red is actually the sulfur there or the gold
that you're seeing is really the sulfur in there but anyway so that's that's what we call it Sho for sulfur hydrogen
oxygen that's how we layer those together so um the uh
um the last image um
the last image I want to show you
in just a second
Lee the anticipation yeah
there's the drawback to astrobin yeah this happened last time this is the exact same thing that happened last time
what do you use to process with so I start out in um
um I started out in pics insight and do my stacking and I do the master
stretch so I stack it and stretch it in picks insight and then I go I move over
now I move over to Topaz AI suite and do
my actual the really the the most of the post processing out of there have you ever heard of starnet plus yet
or so yeah oh yeah uh I'm surprised you haven't done it with this image yet
um yeah well I'll have to see um I've been I've definitely been
playing with it there's they just updated it actually where if you're used to it you would click on it and it would
just run and yeah and they actually added a progress bar have been told so I'm pretty excited about that that's
convenient so um so this image right here is North America
uh nebular the or the US of a nebula depending on which way you frame it I
mean doesn't that look like the great lakes in the east in the east coast right there yeah but anyway so here's
the North American nebula and so I have the I ixos 100 Mount and it's I I bought
it for 300 350 brand new um and it has a deck and a ra motor so I
can connect it to the ASI air and it'll it can completely control it it can slew
it can I can do polar alignment with it it can slow it can do the uh the plate solving for the alignment for the uh
Target alignment and um so this is a hundred hours
on that Target with that mount and I did [Music]
82.8 hours of 10 minute subs and 23.5 hours of 30 minute subs off that little
off that little mount and so this is uh this is what I got out of it and this is why they call him 100
hour away so I guess I guess every I'm probably
gonna only show a few images a year now because I'll probably have to do everything at 100 hours at least 100
hours yeah so um this is that this is what I was talking about down the side that sulfur
down the side of that and the the detail in there it's just spectacular it really is
so um yeah so uh you know I've been doing what is that I guess it's uh six
months now I've been doing this and um I'm not you know I'm I'm not in any way
like yeah yeah all it was was time and um and money of course but uh you know
just spending a you know just a ton of time on on you know uh like like I said
I've I've watched every one of like Chuck's videos and you know all the guys on YouTube I've watched uh you know I've
uh been to you know uh spent you know just tons of time on cloudy nights now
I'm on the because I have this Mount I'm on the uh PMC eight uh groups i o Forum
um spent a lot of time on there um reading through stuff and even trying to help people do things yeah you're a
great you're a great help you got a lot of experience in a short time this is uh you spent 21 days doing this image right
yes sir so 21 days August 1st to August 21st 21 days of no sleep no sleep I I
finished it so I imaged this and my front yard because um that's the only
place I could I could get get the target from and um I uh was using someone else's camera
to do this someone sent me a monochrome Cameron uh chroma three nanometer filters and if you know anything about
that that's the the filters are more expensive than the camera so um I had all this equipment sitting
out in my front yard and I didn't want to walk away so I started Imaging at 9 30 at night and Meridian flip everything
I'd get about eight hours a night um and I'd get done at six a.m right
before the sun uh came through and I would go out take all of this in and put
it in the garage and then go sleep for an hour hour and a half and then get up and go to work so uh I did that and it
was pretty much um you know there was only a couple of days where we had clouds that I couldn't
image so you know it was Texas in August so it was uh it was just hot and dry and
you know and then tonight you know that that came out of nowhere and surprised me so but anyway so uh this
was yeah 21 straight nights hey weighed in the chat function uh share the link to this uh so people can go look at the
real image and not see it over you know Zoom the real image is astounding when you look at it the
the full version in Astro bin it's worth going and looking at because it
here here does not do it justice you can get lost in it amazing
thank you very much great work thank you wonderful wonderful huge achievement well that's what amateur astronomers all
amateur astronomy is all about is breaking the boundaries you know doing things that people don't think you can
do um we are going to announce uh last
week's uh door prize winners so I'm going to give the spotlight to Kent
we're going to take a little bit of a break after that and then we're going to come back I do I see Chuck yawning over
there so I'm gonna I'm gonna we're gonna return to everybody and kind
of do a last round up before we call it a night but uh
um Let's uh let's let's announce the winners we'll
come back after our little 10 minute break and uh and do some more door prize
giveaways so okay um my problem is I don't know what the prizes were I just know who the winners
were so Jerry and Scott y'all chime in if you remember door prize number one
prize number one door pricing it was we're doing what we did last that was
the 52 right they're 52 millimeter eyepieces yeah 52 of choice okay
uh the question was what was the the full in and full out size of the
unvignetted image circle from the fcd100 102. well we would take would there's two
different of those telescopes the metal tube and the carbon fiber so either purse either one of those that were
answered first we accept it as the winner so one person if they answered
however for the white tube and they got it right they were the ones who won uh
Chuck Lewis uh answered correctly uh for the fcd100
102 carbon fiber the full end unvignated image Circle size is 34.7 millimeters
and the full out unvignated image size is 46.1 millimeters
so the point of that being is if you're using a
um full-sized a full-frame camera you can't quite get
uh the entire image circle on a 35 millimeter negative because the the
length is 36 millimeters long uh so the other answer for the white
tube would have been 34.5 millimeters and 45.8 millimeters uh thank you for Jerry
for working those questions up or those numbers up oh what
a year and a half ago um yeah it's been a while since we put it it's out there on our website foreign
and it's really nice when people call to be able to just refer them to that as
opposed to try and read it to them so we've got it up on the website door prize number two
place number two is an 82 degree inch and a quarter right
of their choice the question was what was the field of view of a specific eyepiece I don't know
which one it was a 20 mil 20 millimeter 100 degree field of view okay
so uh uh the field of view math works out to be 2.8 degrees
and uh our friend Andrew corkel is the winner of that eyepiece oh nice and then
uh door prize number three why is that 20 millimeter 100 degree
eyepiece number three and that was door price
number two yeah number three was Nar one uh 102
refractor oh right right yeah okay so it was an 8220
no no no 100 degree 20. door prize number two was a 100 degree
20. okay the question was about the eyepiece and he was going to win right right oh yeah
okay right okay so the third question was what were the terrestrial planets
and uh on these other questions it took a number of people to answer questions
number one and two before we before we got to the correct answer however the first person in the door won
that one and the answers were Mercury Venus Earth and Mars and uh Jonathan Heisman uh wins that one
so he will begin a telescope yeah so that's great awesome so
there we go sometimes it doesn't take a lot of work to win a nice prize
it wasn't loud enough I have to have to get a plug here for
the astronomical League they are our sponsor uh and uh you know if you don't
know you belong to the astronomical League you need to check them out at astrosociety.org
um you know the world's largest Federation of astronomy clubs also open to International membership everybody so
if you're listening for wherever you are uh you can join and be part of this worldwide
organization and it's very very expensive like ten dollars a year
yes very expensive I'm not sure what the international membership was like or the
at-large membership but still very very reasonably priced
um uh Rodrigo zaleda has uh left the building so we want to say goodnight to
him and um it's got a store to open in the morning uh we're going to take a uh 10 minute
break um and then we're gonna ask some more uh door price questions and do our last
Roundup uh with our astronomers so we'll see in a moment
foreign
oh my God
here did you if you hit it down
[Music]
here because she got all the freaking things on all right I'm gonna take my camera to uh I need to take your camera
to work tomorrow the one that I used all right why because I have to take pictures of that
of the plates that had the bad you know they sent the tissue and it
flew everywhere I need to take good pictures of it so you can actually see the tissue all
right cool all right
foreign
I forgot to put my thing on mute
foreign
hey Kent
yeah I think Kent's Mike has muted he just took his headphones off I don't
think he can hear me he's coughing back there
well it's daylight here oh is it really
fine too yeah get the solar scope up yeah
have you seen the clouds there
image in Iowa there we go
I was at Mount Wilson one time and had a mead used to have a seven inch
refractor in the dome next to the city mounted on top of the Schmidt camera
12-inch Schmidt camera that we had it was my job to take care of the telescope and so one night I decided to
go and test out when it meets new CCD cameras and I I learned that I needed to take
dark so I put on the lens cap I start to take darks okay but
I'm not getting dark so I'm seeing Stars through the lens cap
and I realized I figured out later that uh I guess it was the IR coming from the
Stars was going straight through a black plastic lens cap and
um you couldn't even tell the lens cap was on it
the Madeleine's cactus required equipment or at least a cardboard
mask or something it's probably all these things you pick up over the years yeah
Gary do you know uh David Blanche Branch flower yes
nice guy yep I think we've been friends for probably about six or seven years online
yeah it seems like yeah it must be somewhere around there it's quite a long time
I can just keep watching this Hubble Deep Field an ultra Deep Field and super duper really deep field
in the show you know somebody with a Thurman if any
of you guys know anyone with a Thurman okay get them on the show
certainly one of you guys have to be a musician s there are lots of musicians there's
lots of astronomer musicians here I know gotta watch for hits by uh
yeah let's see copyright why do we still have quite a some guys
are real astral Vikings you know that you can hang the generation
well that's cool well we're back uh obviously so um I have something quick to share since
you're coming back to me right I guess we are go ahead okay this is
just a little short thing this guy here uh his name is red Henry can can you see
this guy yes he's in the uh he's in the visual astronomy
um Facebook web thing that I started in a group and he he builds these
these are um eyepieces he makes for newbies okay and gives them away free he
gets donations yeah we got binocular right here
these are these are with his tutorial I made these ones cool yeah he's a great guy
um uh lenses aren't they yes and uh they're
um Apostles and different all different kinds they even makes two inch lenses
so I thought I thought it was
I thought that was pretty cool yeah that's cool you know there's so many cool astronomers out there
it's true yeah sort of reminds me a little bit about uh you know when I when I see
stuff like that reminds me of John Dobson you know and uh you know he would make uh
get massive telescopes out of the simplest materials he showed people how to grind Optics he you know he's just a
a very unique individual and actually had a you know if you got to know him uh
just a wonderful heart so it was uh it was great he never wanted the dobsonian
telescope named after him you know that so yeah because um I said I didn't invent it
um but he is the one that popularized it for sure I made a Dobson Mount here I don't know
if you can see it very well but it's a uh yeah
check that out I put a um it's a four inch
um
there yeah I just made uh had extra wood left over made a round base right and uh
mounted the telescopes on and uh it's something to grab quick and
go out and look at things or um like an Adirondack
chair yeah exactly but in fact I had made two
Adirondack chairs and then I came up with the idea honest I did
that's cool very slow so that makes it an Adirondack mount
yeah yeah in fact well I lived in Rochester New York which is close
right well I did want to come back to uh uh Chuck uh Ayoub and uh
you've been hanging in there with us uh sitting back and um so what do you think
about all these uh astrophotographers getting started oh it's great this is a lot of fun yeah
and I'm amazed when I see so many new people hit the ground running I I just
can't believe how good they are right off the bat and I look back at how I started where I couldn't even find the
elephant drunk nebula it's amazing right that's where I'm at yeah you spend some
time I spent a lot of time trying to find asteroids the ones I was after
that's one thing I haven't tackled yet is asteroids
it's a lot of fun in all honesty though no matter All the
Troubles I go through every evening I'm out I still enjoy every time I'm out here
do you guys ever um has ever anyone ever told you guys to start looking and understanding and
learning the constellations because if you've got the constellations down you
know where you're looking I used to I was starting to learn
constellations myself and star names but then I started plate solving and it all went well the problem is a lot of these
guys are in Portal 8-9 Skies and they can't see the constellations that's right you know they might be able
to see 25 or 30 Stars I mean Chuck you're bortal nine right yeah it's bad
here can you see how many stars a night can you see including planets as stars yeah not many it's it's really terrible
and and plus all the the neighbor's lives I'm dealing with right well there's something else you have to deal
with when the skies are really good and that is there's so many stars it's hard
to tell where constellations are that's a problem yeah that's that's weird it's crazy my first night at the Nebraska
Star Party back in 2000 or something the sun went down
and I was dumbfounded that I couldn't find a single constellation because there was too many
stars it was right and I literally just sat there in a chair all night long just looking at the sky didn't eat plot
telescope knockers just sat there enjoying the night sky and it was it was
truly astounding and and an eye-opening experience and then to See Your Shadow
on the ground from the light of the Milky Way crazy wow crazy gotta if you
have never been to a dark sky site you gotta go sometime and do it quick because it's getting you know more and
more light pollution and you know Nebraska is not what it used to be and you know South New Mexico is not what it
used to be but go somewhere if you haven't that's why I paced I'd say it pays
anyway to just know the constellations you can't go wrong that's true
that's true so Jerry uh uh we how many questions have we asked
so far oh yes two I asked the hardest one
and then uh the question about the astronomical League
yeah I actually have another astronomical league question right so we got two more questions to go yep I've
got an astronomical league question which I'm going to ask now and then we've got uh an explore scientific
question okay so so the next the next uh door prize is going to be yet another 82
degree inch and a quarter eye piece of choice and then the last question
grand prize again is going to be an explore scientific AR 102 uh refractor
with the two-speed focuser I guess I guess that one should be the
harder of the two that I've got right really really hard Jerry these are actually medium these are
actually medium um so I'm gonna I'm gonna ask the so the
the eyepiece is the first one is that right yeah all right so
this is the surprises we've had people do that before so all right this is a quick to
the draw answer is what this one is so what year was explore scientific founded
yeah don't yell it out folks you have to send the answer to Kent at explore scientific.com
all right and what's what's the uh what's the next question the next question for the grand prize I guess you
could say nah hang on give them time to answer that one no they're sending it to you I know but
you're making me answer two questions at once that's brutal
I wouldn't want to be in your science class you gotta be quick to the draw you got
to be quick to the draw great uh somebody's one so you can go on all
right so who was the first astronomical league president
okay ah who was paying attention it was the
first astronomical league president yeah somebody say that while I was off the air
I believe that uh it was part of Kelly Beatty speech
well then that's good if you were listening to Kelly Bay Kelly Beatty's uh talk then you'll know I'm pretty sure he
said that that's good all right so uh again these uh you know thank the
astronomical league for sponsoring our door prizes it's really great I do want to uh you know I do want to do
a last round up here and uh you know everybody's got any images anything they
want to share anything they want to say I got one thing after beard
all right I'm gonna share a screen here
this is one of the very first things I took seriously This was
um November 11th of 2019. oh wow
that's Mercury yeah I got I got some of those yeah I was lucky enough to get that I
got up early um the the amount that I previously used of an unnamed manufacturer Let the Smoke
Out of the hand controller and I ended up guiding uh by hand all day
I actually do have one other thing that I would like to show let's see here we
had eight inches of snow on that Transit day so we missed it oh
wait did I get it for it yeah it was cloudy here too there it is
Running Man nice this was first light on uh Canon T6 so a
base model um DSLR and of all the pictures that I
took of the Orion Nebula with the cold camera and everything I love this one because of the way that the blue
actually came out and wasn't overpowered by the hydrogen so much and uh you know
this is like a month and a half into doing this so
let's go um that was actually a
um a sigma uh 150 to 600.
zoom lens yeah that that was not not a telescope yeah yeah I think uh Orion Nebula looks
great with a DSLR just for the reason you said it it tones back the hydrogen and makes
yup real natural color come out that's all I got for the night folks so
I'll pass her on and uh be ready for next week's party nice oh Ryan's already Rising yeah in
the morning I can share it real quick um just to finish up here
um I wanted to come back around to because I um finish this um
from two star parties ago you know we were all Imaging the dumbbells so this was the image that came out of the
ar-152 this was uh one hour of hydrogen and one hour of oxygen
so I've finally finished that one up I thought it turned out quite nice
beautiful and um it's just a sun image out of that ar-152
also oh look at that I haven't been shooting much solar with it but it does a good job when it when it works she had
carpeting from the next exactly yeah it's amazing and then zooming in to you
know prominences and everything it holds on to detail wow deep
look at all that how cropped is that from the Native
image what's this image not that image I got you guys covering I have part of
my screen here um it's this image actually this is pretty close to the full full frame okay
well just you know putting a cork on there is so much magnification
um you know you're sitting with that scope about four thousand forty five hundred millimeters
just think we're gonna have sunspots pretty soon yeah we had some
yeah had a couple last week and then boys and you know I
enjoy doing these surface uh animations too this is a loop of the
chromospheric chromospheric dance you know that's what that's why it was
111 today
all right well speaking of the sun shocks and Gary is it Dawn there yet it
should be pretty close daylight there yeah yeah
I tried uh star net runs and picks Insight now so there's the dumbbell with
the Stars removed uh it's called the um you know these deep
Sky objects with especially galaxies too without without Stars you know just what
the what's that spot above it this is just a bright star in the image
this is what this is before oh just had a oxygen halo around it
hmm it's pretty interesting the red star wants to stay
yeah I don't know what that is super you're gonna have to play prunty do a 100 hour M27
yeah I was really happy with this for you know I saw a super deep image of this this was just two hours
has anybody taken a picture of um what is it Beetlejuice
with uh any Links at all to see if you can see fuzziness or whatever
no it's still going to be a just a star
it's not up here yet it's still probably about six weeks away before yeah
I think you know Wade's done 100 hours I think we should you know 200
seems like the next milestone for him don't kill the guy jeez yeah he gets an
hour of sleep a day can't sleep if you can promise the clouds will go away I
will do that that's like the guy that did the guy that did The Crab Nebula for 10
years and made a video that this one right here I mean look at that yeah this was this was the month
where I just shot pretty much everything I could with that Arrow 152 so this was Venus I was shooting planetary with it
too yeah did you get Venus as I said Crescent I got it thinner than this yeah
um this one was um on April 18th
but um I did take one where it was thinner this was shot in ultraviolet and
UV through an acromat is pretty crazy God
do you remember back in the I think it was in the 80s when they when they got first images from the ground from the
earth uh with that showed the clouds on Venus yeah remember that when they first uh
that was a really important uh image achievement [Music]
do you mean amateurs taking that no professionals oh
amateurs start seeing it probably soon after because once you
learn the technique of course anybody can do it just like like the exoplanet work that I do
you know it took a while to figure out the technique but once you did or or the high resolution lunar Imaging
you know once you figure it out you could use a webcam to do this high resolution lucky Imaging then
everybody's off to the races at that at that point yeah this is a thinner Crescent yeah
that looks good yeah this was it looks pretty but the uh you know it's an
interesting effect because that that scope um gives off the ultraviolet Haze
um so that's a lot of bleed over you know um actually
astrophotography is kind of artsy because your interpretation sometimes is
different than others and and some people have great taste yeah
well I think you know that part of it is the instruments you're using too you know they they do give different results
I know you know two people at the same data won't give the same result but I don't think I could have got this result
with a different type of scope you know it's just the uh true the look of the
data come on coming off of it you you had a top view of um a top projection of
Saturn I think was the coolest pick of Saturn I've ever seen that one just knocked my socks off when I saw it
I'm hurry you can um software win jukebox will do these
geometrical projections based off of planetary data oh wow so I took um all
your original colors it's your mother be in that image right
what's that how do you how do you get how is this image produced
um so I took a uh I don't think I'm logged into my Instagram on this computer
um let me see if I can find it
if you guys see Jupiter's Juno Juno's Jupiter's pictures are awesome
too um yeah so I thought this picture is said yeah it's going to make me log in
okay anyway I took this picture of Saturn okay and um then it's run through
software to do a geometrical projection and turns into that one wow yeah that's
that opposition huh uh pretty close yeah within a few days of it but um yeah I
I don't know that I got the hexagon on the top you can kind of loosely see it if you squint but yeah I thought the you
know the way the shadow cast back on the Rings was pretty you know we were talking about that shadow earlier when I was showing it live this gives you a
different look at what that shadow actually looks like what no spokes [Laughter]
that's uh pretty awesome yeah the program I use for lunar topography
measurements is called the lunar Terminator visualization tool ltvt that'll do that type of aerial
projection on lunar images also you can rotate the the moon around
and you can place yourself right above the object if it whatever it is in it
and it gives you a true view of what it looks like from that that perspective is
it who's talking right now is that Jerry yeah I'd like the name of that program if I could get it from you yeah I'll
send I'll put the link in the uh the group chat so when jupos will do that
too it'll do uh lunar projections which I know I have on back here if I
can find it or have you guys been observing a long time some of you like uh Moon and stuff like have you have you
ever seen anything um funny on the moon like uh aliens no
no like an explosion of a meteor or anything or no I've never I actually
looked through when I do lunar data I always look for it but I never I've never yeah I haven't remember Robert
feiss um captured I can't remember what the event was it was an eclipse and he was wanting
to do a time lapse of one a picture every minute and
um his his four terabyte hard drive filled up a little more than halfway through because it turned out he was
taking straight video and he was complaining about it and I said well did you capture the meteorite
hitting it or the meteor hitting it he went what are you talking about I said oh yeah just at this time so he went
back through his video and blind dumb luck God he got a frame of it
is that the one that was near the limb yes and that made a big made a flash
that yeah and and so you know he sent his pictures off to NASA and it became part of the of the record but had he not
made a mistake he would not have captured that but he didn't get his
animation but he got a meteor hitting the moon so I'll take that oh yeah absolutely yeah it's great
once you get a 3D map of the Moon um based off your data you can do all
kinds of fun stuff well there aren't there some craters somewhere on the moon where there's been
some activity like uh some kind of a you know smoke coming up or something
so maybe I've been watching too many of those wacky shows there's a there's an actual program
um I'm uh one of the coordinators of the association of lunar and planetary
Observers and in the lunar section I'm the assistant coordinator for topographical
studies but our our monthly newsletter talks about the lunar
uh this lunar transient phenomena is what is called ltp right so our
newsletter on the Alpo uh lunar is called the lunar Observer uh it's a newsletter comes out every
month there's a big section of the newsletter that talks about these things
and what are they Jerry is it is it I remember reading something about there's
there's dust that that caused by a static discharge or something that levitates on the moon at
the Terminator and they get pictures of it sometimes well there's there's they detected there the moon actually has a
slight atmosphere it's very it's based on like you said the dust that gets kicked up and and is just floating on
the surface somehow when there's Earth I guess there's some Moon Quakes every once in a while that kicks that up but I
think 99 of what people report are more like uh transient Shadow features that
they notice for a few minutes because of the the sunlights changing all the time and you may be observing a certain
location that's got this weird Shadow configuration that that just pops up for
a few minutes and you're able to see it and then it goes away that type of thing
what do you call that Spike there what's that the spike above the spot
there's like a it's a filament there yeah
so Gary what did you say I said I found Freddy Krueger on the moon years ago
it's as bad as mine isn't it weird as bad as my ex that I found
kind of hokey all right well I can stop sharing here and just
aimlessly poking around yeah
hi Chuck yeah I'll share about that image I threw it out there
right away good you make out the Hat
DIYs check it out
foreign
that's pretty cool yeah isn't there a um there's also a c on the left Edge there
that looks like uh a bug of some kind
there's you know I think there's a list of anomalous things that people have
attributed to uh you know it's just like um
there are some star asterisms you know like the coat hanger but there's stuff on the moon that
people see and they hurry up and write it down or they've got some kind of accounting of
it somewhere do you know anything about that Jerry I've read some about that I know there's a lot of uh conspiracy theorists that
like to see big towers on the moon oh yeah Bridges and things you know
man-made features that are that are moon bases from Aliens or whatever you know it's interesting what people will
interpret I mean your your brain is a big visual processor so it's going to try to recognize patterns no matter what
it looks at so and we got to include Mars I guess there's a bunch of stuff on Mars that
yeah starts with that face on Mars right oh yeah I'll end to that hey hey Gary or
hey hey uh Scott yeah Chuck is starting to look uncomfortable being the featured
the screen guy for the last 25 minutes
you're being brutal to him I don't think I don't think it's broadcast yeah that
that's just in uh Zoom that's just in Zoom yeah is he full screen on yours rectangle
around him slicking at you because I'm not full screen so that's okay honestly okay
yeah Scott does that to me all the time in the in the daytime broadcast he'll leave it on me full screen you know let
me well we'll show himself we enjoy watching you jump up and down yeah
so um Sandlin uh do you have any um
final thoughts any I have to say like the picture you guys
have taken are you know when I think back to when I I worked in Observatory 20 years ago and like the pictures you
have shown are so extraordinary and um beautiful
and I was showing them to my husband who works on Mount Lemon at the sky Center and we were just like thrilled at all of
the images that you have done and really I think the thing that I'm most like
admire is your dedication because right like I don't know any professional who
would do what we did right and spend a hundred hours fine right an image so that's my final
thought is just like how amazing everyone's Imaging is because it's just
spectacular and um like everyone's dedication is really
like amazing so that's my I was like just awe-inspiring to be able to see all
this and see all like and I think you know as Scott said like that you're so
willing to share everything and help people out and that's just like I said
really wonderful yes it was great to have you on too I know
that I asked you last minute and you just jumped right in and said okay I'll do it so I was do it yeah I was like I
had to get the kids to bed but like I said it's been lovely and we'll we'll definitely be back so yeah yeah anytime
anytime well uh foreign
anybody else want to share something um well I'm a right now this is a live feed of uh
Andromeda uh through the the guide scope with the
zwo 120. and uh here's the last picture I just took of
it I don't know if you can make that out or not uh Tilton hold it up here hold it still
yeah and tell tilt more more
I uh it's there yes that way sorry
yeah it's kind of tough to show it that way oh there it is yeah yeah now we see
it it's live uh no um this is this is just a shot I took uh
here's live that's live right now okay
something interesting to be able to share you know to see a live a Galaxy you know in live view like that and uh
right it's flying at us yeah
I'd like to say um tomorrow night Wednesday night at uh
uh 8 P.M central time uh I'll be doing a twitch stream on clear skies Network
um it's pretty much for beginners because that I mean uh that's what I am so uh just kind of going over uh maybe
uh some processing some Hardware stuff and then after me I think uh asteroid
Hunters if you are familiar with them well um they come on at 10 uh around 10
Central so uh it will be on clear skies Network tomorrow night good deal
yeah that's a nice it's a nice uh Channel because all astronomy all the
time that's cool
so what I was going to say is this don't wish for too much because when you actually get along in this processing
and imaging and everything else you end up with so much stuff there that you actually don't get through it
there's so many pictures that you end up taking that you actually don't get around to
processing all of these even when you get loads and loads of Cloudy Nights just allow the stuff that
your running through and do and lots of literally tons of folders of
images that are just sitting there waiting for that I have no how often now
once it goes through so um at the moment we've got
this is just one folder and none of these have been processed yet oh my God
I'm with you man um processing
I can relate to that problem is becoming a big problem yeah um
quick thing I was going to say that um on a lot of this processing it is not just about
the um actual capture and all of the process and one quick thing to bear in
mind is actually calibrating the screens yeah so that when you're actually uh
processing your images your screen is calibrated so the image
your final result so that you're going to see a final uh result with a good color in it it's not
going to be too light or it's not going to be too dark and you generally see that quite a lot online at the moment yeah where the
images are either really bright and they've got no color in them or they're really dark and you're looking at the
image and going wow there's there's loads of detail there but your monitor is actually incorrectly balanced
and it does pay you to spend you know 50 or 100 pound on a screen
calibrator yeah to actually calibrate the monitor but if you're generally using a laptop
use a use it on half brightness or a third brightness and that will cover
most of the problem you look around on these websites at the moment and you see in this a lot of the
time where the images are just really out of proportion and you know there's a lot more detail there
thank you I find myself going back when you don't
have anything to do some afternoon just go into some of your folders and pick out some stuff and start playing with it
and um the thing is if you stop processing
astrophotos for a while and then go back to it sometimes you forget stuff so it's just like practice makes perfect
you need to keep keep in it I used to do that but I found that I actually wasted
my time normally that first process was where I should have been in the first place or not far off of it and I
actually end up making it worse you try too hard sometimes
oh yeah you overworked piano yeah but this is the sort of thing I was on
about with the screen caliber it's a bit like one of these spiders oh I see yeah so that hangs over the screen yeah and
then it calibrates the room brightness and your monitor if you pay for the the one that's the
next one at the run it will calibrate multiple monitors so you can use it on all your computers and screens
hey Scott I think Cesar has some images he's taken this evening to share yeah he
can share it anytime go ahead you're muted Cesar
sorry no yes sure spring
okay well something that was a surprise for us because
um while we are talking um I I took pictures from the planets
and I took a picture from Deep Sky the
the cluster Omega Centauri um the surprise that works by itself
phone uh we I choose the dng format for
pictures it's a Rob raw format that normally I never use a cell phone for
deep Sky image and this is the result is okay of course that after
see the wonderful pictures that everyone
but the idea is show something like uh to to to make
available with a cell phone or something really cheap and this is this was
um a surprise for me of course that here do you have many reflections
uh the problem is that I I use the uh uh IPS very cheap calendar 25 millimeters
but I try again with a explore scientific
yes because something of of this is a problem of design and Optics the counter
have only three elements and it's normal that you don't have
you do have the the entire area with the same uh component components of
lie um and of course that it's it's uh it's
interesting because it's easy for for to improve this
um I I'll I'll be try I I have uh customers that are trying with another
cell phones maybe that have more time or more ESO and have a bit and they live in
in whether place a small town there where they have uh a better Skies but
um it's a was a experiment um for for us was was a a surprise yeah
I take it yeah I think it's important for people to understand really how accessible these deep Sky objects are
and that the cell phone allow you to do that and they think it's some you know the typical
thing you look through in eyepiece and it's a fuzzy blob you really have to understand what you're looking at but
this really makes it much more accessible for every everyday people that don't really understand this guy
and that these objects are really they appear closer than they actually you know than they actually are when you're
starting to see how big they are in the sky people don't understand how big the Andromeda nebula is in the sky it's you
know yes eight times the size of the moon or whatever you know um they don't really have a feel for the
scale of these objects when they're looking at Sky because you can't see them yes and you control for example
Omega nebula maybe have around 10 millions of stars I remember I don't I
don't not sure about this but it's a we need to have maybe for for this is
something that can make a child have an opportunity to to take something uh that
have a huge scale and something that have start to have an idea of the how
big is is the the Universe um this is very interesting very I think
that this is very educative uh if if we can encourage more people with uh that
have less equipment and this is this
this uh this try is really with very very cheap equipment or affordable
um I I think that it was a good idea try with this of course that it is very
um it's not a perfect picture but having a real idea uh of uh the people can can
make with with small keeping equipment like for example
The Starlight first like line of personific
maybe with a stepper motor for a regression Ascension and uh an adapter
and uh and cell phone and a smartphone the people don't need more than this
they can get started that's right yes yes yes
just need to get Jerry to write some stacking software for the iPad
um yes the the stacking software was uh
diviska stacker that is free um the bad thing that we use the picks
inside but I think that we can make the same picture with using some program uh
taking the corpse and I think that I can I can try with a with a cheaper uh
software if if the final results or final results are the same is because
for like we make this with my son uh why
we are talking uh because in in a time we we talk the
pictures um we we processing uh in the in uh while
we make the show and well here is the result but we can try
um instead picks inside use something more
uh more affordable like ho ho
yes for touch the curves but of course sorry about this picture
normally we took something like this but this is not from Buenos Aires this is
from Mendoza is Mendoza I can show you
Buenos Aires is not the attacker enough Rodrigo or my routine near to the
conditioner De Los Angeles this is very interesting because normally if you watch to the sky in
Buenos Aires you can see anything maybe this is the the cross the South the
South sorry my pronunciation the Southern Cross
and this is normally the the picture the quantity of stars that you can see
area or in a farm area or in the mountains but this is a real picture
it's not a and you can see the top of the building from my balcony of course
this is with a with a Canon reflex and and
some normal and maybe yes
50 yes 500 millimeters maybe using the
sound the zoom yes
um is processor over a sky that you can see
anything normally and this is another thing that normally I show to the people
that they can make something like this is that is that the coal sack off to the
right just to the right of the corner of the building uh yes yes is it the carbons uh called
coal suck right yes yes I I was this was uh in in this
year in April I I have the bad lucky to to have my our
quarantine uh uh for the uh like the pandemic start and in our apartment not
in in our home outside the city and we we lost a lot of opportunities to
make a good picture of astronomy but we had the opportunity
to to to try inside the city how can make another uh pictures this is the ETA
Karina you can see part of the of a wielding
and the nebula is is available to see we can
you can distinguish it this is the the same but of course
processes a little better this was with an APO 80 millimeters
this is the Jupiter of tonight with a with a cell phone
from two hours ago how many how many frames
how many friends do you remember I think that's like one minute with like I don't know 24 frames per
second Maybe yeah my son yeah we took that like uh
two hours ago and it was about um uh around one minute yeah
one minute of of pictures pretty nice very nice I I I was yeah
with the phone yes with this phone in the in the telescope like very interesting to them at the same
time I was we were showing the video like the life the live film with Jupiter
I was taking a video right in that moment and yeah I I process it while you
guys were talking um this is what came out as you can see here you can see some like um
some lines I guess this is from like uh error from
the sensor image from the cell phone which is not perfect as we can
I mean I guess it's maybe it's not or maybe it's uh some stacking problem
but yeah you know the the we know that the a cell phone sensor is not as uh
good as a CMOS from a reflex or a CCD obviously yes we never use we never use
a cell phone for planets but this is interesting that it is is
Affordable to to make a good work for people that don't have a planetary
camera of course that you have a lot of problems because if you when when we use
a good uh eyepiece we don't have problems of uh of uh acromatic
aberration or the the the problem is when you have a bad eye piece I think
that the quality of the IPS is how do you say crucial or something more
important more important is the more important the quality of the
IBS yes the telescope too but
yeah we also did uh the X the X the X and the moon and we need also some
Saturn which is not a very bad scene but yeah
yes we lost the the um this is real I mean the Cassini division so
of uh cell phone astrophotography before I have to tell you this is some of the
better stuff I've seen really good thanks yeah yeah for a cell phone this is very impressive yeah I can say
we made an experiment tonight it was was something for for to make something
different I think the the Saturn can be made a
little better if I try again but yeah that's I said good as it gets pretty good
pretty good maybe we can we can differ some lines in the in the Rings maybe
with a better noise to Signal ratio but yeah it's that's
you know that's what um cell phone astrophotographers will will expect if
if they want to start get started in the in the in the hobby sure
yes well okay guys I gotta go because uh my wife gives supper to go to work
tomorrow I don't work yes she does I really appreciate you guys me too yes
thank you good night thank you very much everybody Scott thank you
good night hey and um well I'm gonna plug the clear
skies Network one more time we have a couple of uh Aussies that come on super late at night for us early in the
morning yeah um Stella Astro is running it at uh 4 a.m this morning uh
uh on clear skies network uh that's uh Pacific time and then around 2 30 in the
morning uh Pacific time uh tomorrow night will be uh Andy it's CD so uh if
y'all are up late or up early and y'all want some astronomy talk and uh
information uh that's the place to get it from great
foreign Steve how you doing man you look very intense there
try to stay awake and and keep warm it's uh cool down
quite a bit so I'm gonna um I'm gonna call it call it a night I think and then I okay I got all my uh I
got all the images I wanted to get in and uh my dark filter is about to come in into place so I can get my
calibration frames and then I'm I'm good from there but um I had uh I had another fun night
thanks Scott for having me thank you everybody was oh there we go we're parking um
it was uh it was good to see it's moving yep good to see everybody
again and uh can't wait for next week hopefully get another uh clear night
yeah great awesome not everyone everyone that's logged in and watching thanks for
uh taking the time to uh spend your evening with us on Facebook we've had nearly 6 000
people wow that's amazing really that's a lot I
didn't realize it was that many yeah 5700 or something like that when I looked a while ago I think yeah I'll
look real quick on what it was it's an impressive number
it's nice to know so many people are interested in astronomy you know took some time to share it with us
that's great that's great have a good evening everyone
all right 5176 as of right now
so hey Steve if you see many purchase orders early tomorrow I'm not going to
film them early yeah we need to talk about some stuff with weekend I'll call you I'll call you a late morning yeah
sounds good what nine uh yeah or by nine o'clock on the west coast maybe
no it won't be that bad I'll probably be here by nine yeah we'll talk tomorrow all right see you later
bye-bye can I get can I get a note for from y'all for my for my work
give it to my boss I'll sign anything
let's call a doctor that's right I'm checking out not guys
take care Ken thank you like
you guys are awesome Scott you really know how to throw a party man hey I know so you guys are the ones that
make it happen I'm really I'm really pleased to have all of you you know of course anyone that's on the show uh uh
certainly happy to have you back um you know and uh you got ideas about what
you want to show or share you know this thing's grown this thing's grown quite a bit over the last couple
shows three or four shows three or four weeks I guess three weeks yeah it's
it's you know so yeah Chuck you how often are you up this late
oh me yeah uh not usually this late
um I usually just leave the rigs running and go to sleep that's right that's right
that's why we learn to automate right but this was fun I enjoyed it
thank you man thank you it was very nice to have you I gotta figure out how to get some music
on this show though you play some music don't You Chuck aren't you
you know there's a picture of me playing guitar on my Facebook page and it was just it was pretend and people think I
can play the guitar I I have a guitar normally here but we remove from this
area because uh there was no place no yeah yeah
Astro Beard's gone yeah he's got one behind him I can't play anything that won't get us copyright struck
oh yeah true yeah the the dmca yeah it just stretched
some solos right you think Wade's a musician also
yeah yeah that's all locked up in the guitar room right now I'll work on it
well let's get a tooth pulled tomorrow that's what I'm dreading right now oh man
yeah yeah well Chuck thank you for that thank you
well uh you know thanks to all the audience watched and um uh you know we will be at
this again Friday okay we're doing the virtual Star Party European Edition it's
not going to be so late for us here in the states uh it starts at uh 4 P.M Central
um and uh you know Gary Palmer and uh a smaller group of people are going to be
participating in that um if someone wants to uh do solar while
they are doing nighttime stuff I think that would be kind of cool you know we find someone that can do that
or some lens that can do that that would be very interesting um
I want to thank everybody for for being here you know Jason uh just came back
from I think a business trip or something um so you kind of you jumped in at the
last minute no I was just a family vacation family vacation that's cool
yeah those are a lot better than a business trip yeah and um so I want to thank everybody
and uh we're gonna call it a night and we will be back on tomorrow
um four o'clock with the open go to community and back on next Tuesday night on the
clear skies Network as well so uh you guys have a uh a good one and keep
looking up as Jack corkheimer used to say so take take care and good night
see ya thanks Scott bye bye everybody
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