Virtual Star Party 1

Transcript:

wow

so well hello everybody this is uh scott

roberts here and this is the explore alliance live program and it's our first virtual star

party and um our subject tonight is going to be m13

uh so if you're watching here you can see this image of m13

taken from the palomar 200-inch telescope back in 1953

by walter botta and uh it was uh i'm sure at the time a

remarkable image probably the best image in the world of m13 at the time and um it is um

it's still a remarkable image uh but tonight we are going to uh we've got four astronomers and a

special guest tonight um uh who of course is also an astronomer and a

well-known one uh dr david levy and

so let's let's bring on let's bring on our team here

and here we are this is this is everyone uh uh that uh is part of our group

uh we have uh uh alberto levy uh from uh san diego

we've got jerry hubble from virginia we've got david ing from

temecula california david levy of course in vail arizona

and richard grace from baltimore maryland and so uh and of course myself i'm here

in springdale arkansas at the explore scientific offices and so um why don't we start uh with

some uh with uh a uh a little presentation here from david uh

he's joining us for a few minutes and uh really happy to have you on david this is great

well thank you very much scotty can you hear me okay yes i can sure great um uh let me start

to share the screen here okay

and uh we're gonna share it here and we share it here and

uh and let's see if that works okay

um tonight is truly a mid summer night any problems scotty no problems

okay um tonight is truly a midsummer night's dream i steal the title

from this mini talk from uh shakespeare and his famous play

but one of the great things about going out in the summer time is just looking up at the night sky

if it's clear tonight you won't see too much because the full moon the almost full moon is in the sky

however if you stay up late enough you'll be able to see half the solar system at

once by looking towards the east you'll be able to see venus

you're standing on the earth and sort of pretty high up in the south

will be mars and then sinking in the west is jupiter and a little bit east of jupiter is

saturn so you're seeing half the solar system all at once

and uh let's see scotty wanted to know if i had seen the

comment yet well i haven't you know comments are all the time with me so i haven't bothered with this one

now that's it i went outside that morning and i had the binoculars and i went up

i looked at the star capella and i just moved the binoculars down slowly and then suddenly this

came into the field you can imagine how i

do felt and it filled my mind with wonder we are the uh

we are the tragedy of comets we're the progeny not necessarily of this comet but of

comets that um have come through our solar system

over many billions of years and one of those comets at least that collided with

the earth brought the simple alphabet of life with it carbon hydrogen oxygen and nitrogen

and that eventually sort of evolved into uh proteins

evolved further into amino acids evolved further into rna and finally evolved further into dna and

finally into you and me this comet that we're looking at now comet mealwise

isn't the one that started life on earth but it's related to it and it's really nice to be able to see

this beautiful wonder in the darkness um

now we have another picture

uh let's see where we are here oh this is nice suddenly the uh

suddenly the the computer decides it's not there goes okay there we are

yeah i have uh started a um i have a lot of telescopes out in the

observatory but this one right now is my favorite this is called eureka

all my telescopes have names and i named this one eureka for a very simple reason in 19 i think

it was 1990 i was observing with the shoemakers at palomar

and they weren't there that that month instead there was uh henry holt and he and i discovered an

asteroid that turned out to be orbiting in the l5 position the lagrangian

five point in mars orbit it was the first discovery of a martian

trojan asteroid and we decided to name it eureka

to celebrate archimedes famous expression of delight when he discovered

his his law of displacement while taking a bath

and the story is he jumped out of his bathtub ran out of the house yelling eureka

eureka there is nothing in the historical record that says anything about whether he's bothered to dry

himself off and get dressed before he did all that but anyway i wanted to name we named the

asteroid eureka and this telescope which is optically by far

my best telescope uh is named eureka and if you look closely it is a your

it's explore scientific 12-inch Dobsonian telescope and we've added a little bit to it there

is a uh encoder system on it right now and dean conan put that on and

uh so i'm having a lot of fun with this telescope it really is nice and uh

being able to see the comet in the evening sky is even more special the comet is

starting to fade but the moon is heading out of the way so we should be able to get a nice few

nights of looking at it while it's still reasonably bright

also this spring i was able to get this picture of a meteor this with the meteor shower right now

that's coming up is the perseid meteor shower little specks of dust

in the atmosphere that come from comet swift tuttle from 1862 and then back again

in 1990 uh 1992. um but uh we're not getting huge numbers

that's we won't be getting huge numbers of persians this year but we should get a few

the last quarter moon will interfere a little bit but not too much this picture is a lyric meteor that i

took at one of my observing sites last april

i went to the southern hemisphere visited brazil and i had to get this picture from the

hotel parking lot you can see the lights down there i just set the tripod up

in the parking lot with the light and got this lovely image of the southern cross wanted to

share that with you even though i rarely rarely get to see it

it is still one of my favorite constellations just to look at

and here is a piece of hallie's comment no this isn't halley's comment no matter

how hard you look you won't find hallie's comment in this picture but if you look toward the left

you'll see a very bright etta aquarium meteor and the anti-aquarium meteors are specks

of dust that come from ali's comet and speaking of comets i'm looking

forward later on in the next few days to going out and looking at comet mealwise again

but i've had a few personal experiences with comets

and none more important or exciting than a comment known as shoemaker levy

9. it is a comet it was a great comet not for what it was but for what it did

it was the first known collision witnessed by humanity of a comet colliding with a planet and

this was really very exciting and during the week of impacts

so much happened it was so interesting to see all 21 fragments of that comet

collide with jupiter it brought me back to when i first started on september the 1st 1960 i had a very

small telescope and i used it to look at the planet

jupiter having absolutely no idea what that um what role the planet jupiter would

play in my life later on and uh i remember my dad and my mom

coming out and i remember talking with dad daddy come look at the evening sky

to the edge of tomorrow's dawn and now if i i mean my father may he rest in

peace is not here to enjoy sl9 or tonight

but i always like to think of him sitting there looking through the

telescope at jupiter and seeing the impact spots and seeing them as something personal as

i do oh yeah anyway i'm going to end with uh two things

this is this is a media this is a movie that you can see sam kubrick steve's

please step aside um if you look carefully on the

midway in the about near the middle you see a bright star and then just off to the right of that

star about halfway between that star and the right edge you see a star that's getting brighter

and then disappears and then gets brighter again it is a movie

of tombow star which is a cataclysmic exploding variable star and i've happily caught it in outburst

one night and this is the movie of it that you are seeing right now very nice wow spectacular fantastic

it's really very difficult to get back to um

getting back to uh what i wanted to see the the

the the uh the the idea of my father looking through a

telescope i'm going to play this for you

it's a song that was written by and performed by ken miedema in 1995

and with his permission i'm now going to play it for you

[Music]

for the wonders yet to come and we'll follow the course of the great

sailing ship to the ship

[Music]

it's a mighty and it goes

to come and we'll follow the course of that grace

a sailing ship sailing through the vastness of space finally coming home to jupiter and as i

look up at the sky at night i'm reminded of ralph hodgson who wrote

these words in 1913. i stood and stared the sky was lit the sky was

stars all over it i stood i knew not why without a wish

without a will i stood upon that silent hill and stared into the sky until my eyes

were blind with stars and still i stared into the sky thank you all very much and

good observing thank you very much david thank you

love that question thank you was awesome okay

all right well let's um let's get with introducing our astronomers here we are going to start with richard grace

uh richard you are uh i'm going to put the spotlight on you and um uh richard why don't you give a

little introduction to yourself and uh the setup the gear that you have tonight for your

for your uh astrophotography right

let's see you are muted

all right okay that's right that's grace um let's see here uh living in annapolis

maryland we got some uh some clouds and normally uh quite a bit of light pollution but uh got into uh astro photography

last fall and uh started off with a cell phone camera and a small newtonian and

worked my way up to try and get some decent images so uh quite a bit less than a year in uh

anniversary somewhere around october uh actual real images probably more in november

and um see here we're working with a skywatcher eq 6r pro

and the david levy comet hunter ah excellent um tonight we're running a

teleview 2x powermate and uh asi 183 with a star zone a filter drawer and an

optilong uh l enhanced filter to cut out some light pollution uh it's not doing a very good job

cutting out the clouds right now but we'll see what we can do okay all right

so now we'll move on to um uh jerry hubbell uh

and uh jerry i think you're muted there and yep yeah

hey everybody um let's get you on here there you are i uh

a lot of you know me already probably most everybody because i work for scott [Laughter]

and you were on the air with me today i was on the air earlier that's right yeah exactly so uh the system that i

have the privilege of using tonight is uh is an observatory that we built

about almost five years ago it contains an explorer scientific 165 edi apo um fpl 53

uh our flagship telescope it's got a uh lost man an explorer scientific laws

mandy g11 pmc8 mount system uh i like to think that i'm the father

of the pmc8 so that's my that's my child there so i take good care of it and uh yeah it's also got the telescope

drive master uh on the system which is awesome uh and we can talk i'll show you some

information about that a little later when we get into the observatory so i'm i'm actually in virginia i'm five

miles from the observatory so i'm gonna be demonstrating how i operate it remotely using

remote access software called type vnc excellent excellent okay all right

thanks jerry next up is going to be david ing uh david's in uh oh i'm sorry

i've got alberto levy here hold on for a second we'll do alberto levy next [Laughter]

alberto okay you can be david ing this time yeah hb come on that's right alberto

levy this is da this is uh david levy's brother um and uh uh show us what you got uh set up

for us tonight here okay uh because i was testing my uh

my mount and my uh guiding camera yesterday i have right now uh the

fluorite uh fsq on from 106 from takahashi

actually my my history on telescope making comes when i goes back to when i was 10

years old building a galilean telescope and then grinding mirrors

eight inches and all too but then you become lazy [Music]

over the years and you start buying equipment you put a nice system in there that's

all uh a naivetron mount uh okay like

i eq 45 pro and uh i have a camera

it's the s zwo 1600 monochrome nice because

you know for uh global clusters most of the stars are white so a black

and white does a good job and it's quite sensitive and i'll be using also uh

vatinov these a really marvelous thing to use for to focus basically uh

i this is recent i bought this i would use all the straining of my eyes to to focus

and go crazy but with this it's a great invention it's uh 10 to 15 to 20 dollars this one is in

metal it was 19 and it's really very practical and it helps a lot oh yeah i just hope

clouds are marine layers coming in um less than four miles from the

coastline but hopefully we'll get some images for you guys awesome all right we're looking forward

to it okay and next up now is uh is david ing and david is from

temecula california and he's a little how far away are you from the coastline there you're

what half half an hour drive something like that half an hour 45 minutes yep so um i'm daving

i live in temecula i've been here for about two years and when i first got here i went to my first

star party and it's the first time that i've ever looked through a telescope uh just a couple years ago

and i was just blown away and so i joined the club i'd give a shout out to my club temecula

astronomers and and since then i've just been very wrapped up in it

um i started doing astro imaging excuse me i don't know if you hear me over a plane flying over my head

it's fine um i started doing astro imaging about four

months ago maybe five months ago so i got myself uh an explore scientific

ed-102 it's sitting on a celestron avx mount

i'm using the asi air that's a raspberry pi module and that's what i do all of my image

capturing with and for my camera i have a nikon dslr

it's a d50 300 and then i also put in a excuse me an off-axis guider that has an

asi 290 mm mini awesome awesome so that's a great

collection of uh we smart man smart man

okay all right so uh so this is our group uh tonight and um

we are going to start off uh uh with uh some focusing demonstrations

and some image acquisition demonstrations we'll start off with richard grace but before we do uh jerry once you show

what the weather looks like here in the united states

okay uh let me share my screen let me get my i'm gonna hide my observatory from you

guys for right now i'm gonna bring up the united states yeah and while you're doing that

let's see

looks absolutely clear [Laughter]

oh yeah it's clear where you are we got a good night across the united states right now

well let's go down let's go where we are first and i'll zoom up and okay it's pretty clear but there is

some stuff right here in south west virginia coming i don't know which way it's coming that maybe

hopefully it won't be too bad run the uh animation and you can see the yeah and here's where uh rich is at

you can see it's got a line of stuff there i see and then uh let's go out to california

and that looks good okay so east of oceanside is temecula

okay right right there yeah you can see escondido

uh this there's vista escondido and i think a little bit south of uh

escondido out on the 15th a little bit further south maybe

no actually a little bit is a little further north yeah palomesa

fallbrook even higher oh higher that's right it's been a while since i've been out there temecula there it is there it is

okay yeah temecula often has clear skies um you know so it's a it's a good place to

be as an amateur astronomer and then all the way down in san diego is where alberto levy is

and as he said he's only four miles away from the ocean so uh that's uh

that's gonna be a little bit uh dicey uh but sometimes that marine layer just hangs out there so

we'll see if we get lucky we'll see if we get lucky so i'm kind of all right

these uh these uh earlier there was nothing in virginia

now there's some stuff popping up which is kind of interesting but this stuff will blow through

pretty quick i think i think so nothing up there's nothing up where i'm at but uh we'll see how it looks and we're uh

and hopefully this stuff is blowing away from from where uh rich is at

you're in annapolis yeah yeah so right there

no look out where you are rich you got clear skies still

it's probably muted no it's

say that once again rich

[Music] all right your your your audio's kind of going in and out

rich right now you're silent

okay so that's uh that's the weather forecast that's the weather forecast

yeah see if rich can get his audio fixed here

well why don't we start uh well rich is getting uh going here jerry why don't we see your get get

started with you okay

and you are you're muted jerry

you're muted jerry yeah i know i'll get there i just i was switching through a bunch of windows trying to figure out where my

zoom was at yeah because i shared it popped it up to the side so i was right

okay all right well now let me uh all right so let me share my desktop now this this will be the observatory desktop

okay and maybe you can show the telescope yep which i know you've shown before

there it is yep let me get this i got this big window with everybody's face on it

out over there so let me move that out of the way oh it's down at the bottom now

what can i move it over i'm going to do the little

i'm trying to figure out where to put it all right so let me adjust the uh

the uh i think over here a little bit so you can see it so you can see

right now see up through the slit yeah why did that go back to

that's four seconds okay so oh i know what happened i'm trying to adjust the uh the gain is

right the gamble's good why did it go to the i see clouds yeah that's what that's

what i was going to say there's clouds right now where earlier there weren't and i also

see some stars it looks like well that's those are hot pixels on the camera pixels

hot pixels all right because we don't have stars inside the dome like you see there no

no that's very true yeah planetarium so yours your telescope's all set up you

don't even really need to focus or anything right well i do need to focus and i'll demonstrate that

but i wanted to get into a little bit more detail so like i said i've got the es165 fcd our fpl 53

scope with the lost mandy g11 pmc8 and [Music] telescope drive master the camera i'm

using is a qhy 163 color camera and we've got a filter wheel on it with

a with some filters on it that are science filters and the way we do science with the color cameras we bend

too and to combine the four color pixels into one big

pixel basically and uh and that provides good uh good data for that we can

filter with our filter wheel um that works fine the um so i'm going to be using the

camera bin 2 right now so right now i'm parked and i was going to um

so you want me to go ahead and move it into a target yeah and see let's go ahead and see what we can do

let's see see you go through the process and you can describe it okay so right now uh if you look at the

lower uh left-hand corner you'll see my hand controller for the telescope control for the pmc8 um

and i'm gonna um and i've got it connected to my chart which is carton to seal

okay and believe it or not all this brown stuff is our that's our

local tree line it's we have quite a bit of trees where we're located at and if you see this white circle that's

where the telescope's pointing right now that's where the north star is so we can't align to the north star we

have to do it uh thing we call declination drift alignment uh but let me go ahead and

i'm going to just pick a star out here uh 72 office and i'm going to center on

it and i've got to go to the telescope and i'm using maxum dl to run the uh

observatory that's what you see here um so i've unparked i've unparked the

telescope so that i can slew it to the target

okay uh so if you look

um i guess since i centered on it i'm trying to see where the i guess i can't really see the white circle but

i'm going to slew it now and then you'll see the white circle come where the telescope's pointing it'll move in and then you'll also see

the telescope moving um on the image it's kind of dark in there i'm surprised i don't get better

typically i can see it better it's really uh maybe because there's so much light coming in through the slit

i think if i uh well i'll just leave that so let's go ahead and slew

and if you watch closely

you'll see that it's it's taking long exposures it's a four second exposure myron is saying the msro skycam shows 50

cloudy but moving through pretty fast yeah right yeah so you can see the blurry

image of the scope moving here right and uh

i believe i yeah i pointed it uh west of the meridian so that's why

the counterweight is is towards the west the the way that's termed is the

telescope is east pointed west that's the way it gets arranged as a german equatorial

mount so right now i'm i am pointed up near the zenith and i'm

gonna i'm gonna go ahead and you can see the the image here where it shows the uh

drawing of the scope pointing up and then i'm gonna slave the dome so the dome slews around

to center the telescope pointed through the slit automatically when i when i turn that on

and you can see here when we get the picture back you can see that the slit has moved

little bit blurry and you can see that tree line through the slit right tim myers is asking a question and

he says i'd love to know how jerry put his tree line into cartouceel he says he

knew stellarium allowed that but he didn't know that you could do that in cartoon seal yeah so real quick under setup

if you go to the observatory setup yeah there's a tab called horizon

and you can see and there's a file that we create which is just basically a text file that has each of the coordinates

and azimuth and then the then the altitude so it's an azimuth and altitude and that's the that's the

horizon line i say so that's what this uh file is right here display the local horizon line with this

i see and you just did that like in a spreadsheet or a common device it's just a text file it's just a notepad file yeah it's just a text file

okay so that's all there is to it now i'm gonna i'm gonna speed this up a

little bit i don't like this video being so slow lots of people on with us tonight

um mike wiesner was on with us for a little while uh

wade purdy is with us um

i'm gonna try to take a picture mystic neon hello thanks for the invite for masterbeard

okay that's awesome uh dusty haskins says ooh i i keep telling

my wife she needs to get me the 16-inch eureka she wants it by suddenly changing her

background on all of her electronics to a pic of it

oh yeah that always works dusty a gentle a gentle reminder oh look we got stars

so it looks like the sky is clear enough to get a bunch of stars that's a that's a 10-second exposure

there you go and look how many stars how do you focus i you can't i'm going to demonstrate

that enough mask up there no no i've got a i'm i'm pretty spoiled here i've got a automation to help me focus and i'll

demonstrate that now okay um so and this this is kind of a clue right

here so i'm gonna go ahead and i'm going to position the focus um quite a bit off i'm going to move it

500 steps off all right i'm going to move it out 500

steps and bring it out of focus and i'm going to take another image so that you can see that this is out of

an out of focus image

and this star right here is the one that i uh slew to so it's pretty close to the

center it's not perfect but oh i see so now you can see see how blurry it is

right so now i've got this nice little thing called autofocus

and what it does it starts a program on maxumdl that that acquires an image

it picks out a star and then it starts running it in and out

it pulls it out to where it's defocused and says okay i'm going to start here and i really pulled it away out of focus

it's 67 so the full width a half maximum is 67 pixels oh now it's getting closer you see how

it adjusted itself in can you see that yes so now it's

switching to fine focus mode okay yeah now i've picked the star out see it up there in the corner i'm going to zoom up on it so you can see

okay so now it's sitting there

running the focuser and taking an image and it's figuring out where to start

measuring so now it's decided okay i want to start the measurement now so now it's going to run it in

and um so kent martz wants to know kent's watching from home he wants to

know how much movement is one step in that focuser yeah this is a very fine it's a moonlight focuser it's a

it's a very uh precise folks there's four microns four microns four micron steps there you

go so um a thousand steps is four millimeters

not much not much so you can see now so what it did [Music]

it run it's running it in in the focus it's running it all the way in and what it is it comes into focus and then it

goes back out of focus right right now it's going to be able to draw it's going to do a line a linear fit

before each of these two slopes and find the intercept and say that's where the optimum focus position

uh is okay now it says it found it

all right awesome now it looks like it's a bit of a blob though so that doesn't look right to me so it

looks like it what it did i need to move it off what it did is it found that big bright star and tried to

focus on it that's that star is way too bright so i'm i'm just going to move this you're going to go to a fainter star i'm

going to just move it off and then we'll run it again real quick

all right so i'm going to take a quick uh image just to see that there's no

bright stars so that's the problem with going to a bright star

are you aimed at the inside of your dome i don't know i don't know if the clouds came up all of a sudden let me uh let me look at the dome oh

there's still slate to it uh it should be good let me uh

let me take another image see what it does here you're not focusing on one of those hot

pixels are you yeah i don't think so it should take a full frame image

um and show it there it goes it looks like uh yeah it

looks like there's clouds in the way right now [Laughter]

myron just said it's mostly clear about the msro well i wonder why uh

i just got an image of some stars you did um okay

i think we got the idea uh yeah we got uh we got richard grace back i don't

know if it rained where he was but uh let's let's switch over to richard and check in with him okay so

yep mic on now yeah let's uh

all right let's put some spotlight on you here oh boy it got a little wet out there

did it okay kind of rude some of the plans there but uh i pretty much had

everything done outside anyways so jerry you're gonna have to unshare your

screen i'm sorry

think you could have taken over i think we can step on each other if you're right okay all right cool when

it's uh shared uh you can't move it around so right all right drying out everything is good

life's good okay probably going to be a little bit till the uh the clouds clear out for a second but uh

scope didn't get too wet and uh i got the trash bags on some things and i don't know what happened to the microphone but

at a certain point i was like yeah the laptop's coming inside one way or another

started coming down hard i started losing the wi-fi connection so right okay all right well let's let's

check in with the guys in california at this point um let's uh how about you dave how's it

going out there uh pretty good it's starting to get dark um

can't see any stars yet let me see if i can see

not yet not yet okay maybe another 10-15 minutes i'll be able to see a

couple stores hey scott i just figured out what was wrong with mine oh yeah it had moved it way out of focus

uh for some reason uh so that's when it when it did that it

both moved it right uh really bad so now i've i've run it back into focus and i think it'll take a

picture if you want to go back real quick for with me okay yeah let's go back [Music]

all right there's the share oh i see i see wow you know way out of focus

before yeah so i don't know why it was so bad but uh let me uh

these are the little surprises that can happen huh yeah actually let me look at this real

quick i'm going to bring up a tool

ellie that's big

i'm i'm curious about this blob

okay so let me let me try uh

let me do the autofocus again real quick we got time you were looking at uh like um i moved it off profile image

of the star like right so one of the things one of the things that uh

that we're having problems with is the is the filter wheel i'm not i wasn't going to plan i wasn't planning on

moving the filter and i just wanted to make sure this was just looked like a good profile it didn't move to the diffuser because

earlier i tried to move it to the diffuser and it didn't move so i just wanted to make sure it was still there

where it's supposed to be now i'm gonna i'm gonna go ahead and hit start and we'll see what it does here

with the auto focus

oh there's the image so you see it was pretty close to focus oh yeah um

so now it's going to run it out and figure out where to start

so it found a start position just going to run it back in

and draw this v curve and then it should do i because that big

star threw it off it couldn't measure the diameter uh accurately and that just didn't know

where to position it uh so it's important when you do an autofocus that you

put it on a star field that doesn't have any bright stars in it you're right uh you can see it's coming down to

around four to five pixels half flux diameter

um [Music] and then it's going to go back up

and continue to measure it looks like the center is around 14

300 counts or so right

so that's what it came up with 14 338. all right so now focus position

okay let me take a i'm going to take a 30 second image

and then what we'll do is we'll do a plate solved and we'll do a measurement on the focus

to see how small the stars are with this 30 second image okay

this is typical of uh how you start out each night that's right so you start out i just

flew to an object in the sky take an image just to make sure you know everything's working and then

before this i had started the cameras up turned them on turned the coolers on

and right now so there um oh yeah look at that

there's a lot of stars there look at all those hot pixels yeah yeah no you can tell they're not

hot pixels because look yeah those are stars yeah they're nice and round and they're got

they're they're not just one pixel basically so this is through an explore scientific

e 165 uh right with fpl 53 glass right so now i'm going to do a plate

solve okay and this uses a program called pinpoint

which was uh that's about robert denney yeah now so

or maybe um this may be another oh there it goes

it's solved all right so it came up with this information after it's solved and it

it's so what you check what i do is i check the the plate saw position it says it's uh

their ra and deck values and i'll go up here in the telescope and look at the ra and deck and these

are j2000 values so it says the position i think i'm at is 18 hours 27 minutes uh

58 seconds and it actually calculated is 18 hours 27 minutes and 11 seconds

and the deck is six hours or i mean six degrees three seconds i'm sorry three six degrees three

minutes and 15 seconds and then this is six degrees 11 minutes 11 minutes and 43 seconds so now what

i'm going to do is i'm going to do a sink so right now it thinks it's here

at that star but i moved it off and the red is where it thinks it's where the uh and so i'm

going to um so that was what the center of the chart where the center

planetarium software thinks it's at yeah right okay where it's really at right so now

um actually if i'm going to go to telescope trek telescope so now this is where it

calculated the position and this was the target position right here okay up up here so this is where it's at

uh i synchronized it so now what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna i'm gonna basically

go back to this star i'm gonna center on it i'm gonna do a slew

and then i'm going to do a quick image and that star should be in the center of the field

and i think that star is actually right [Music]

here and just to give you an idea after this comes up

of the magnitude of that star compared to all the other ones

um there it is see how it's right there pretty darn close

yep i can't get why won't it this window's in the way yeah get that window out of the way

there we go so now let me let me show you let me check

real quick the uh the star size the full width at half

maximum i've got to do i'm going to bring up the histogram i mean the uh

the header the fits header and there's a bunch of data about the image right here but what i'm looking for is this value

right here okay that's the size of the

start the full width at half maximum for the average 2.28 pixels yeah that's critically

sampled around two to two and a half is a critically sampled image which means

you're not taking too much data you're doing all that your sky can give you basically yeah that's what you're

doing there and that's what we want uh all right that's how that's how we do the focusing

okay so you're focused right now do you want to try to go and acquire m13

yeah so now let's go let's back the chart out

okay and i'm gonna i'm gonna type in m13 up here hit enter and there it is

all right so now i'm gonna it's right above the tree line perfect we'll have to see how close it

is when i take an image so i'm gonna slow to and you can see the white

circle going to m13

all right all right so now we're right there so now let's

take an image and we'll see i'm going to take a quick 10 second image all right

and then we'll see if we're near the target or not okay

or if we're in trees oh look at that that's pretty close

that's how it works that's how it works okay well that's excellent that's excellent all right so let me

stop sharing that's great um so let's um anybody have any questions

before i go away from this i guess you want to do that or do you want to yeah yeah yeah let's let's uh let me

minimize the screen just a little bit here so i can get to the let's see if look at our chats

so myron says he's in the observatory if you need which is cool

focus his fan looks good um he's in there so he's in the webcam so he's got the light on he turned on the

light you can see him in there see him oh i see right but you can see it doesn't matter

because the moon's out anyway and and the light we just took this picture and you can see

but for the best results of course you want it dark in the observatory yeah so is there any question

uh just comments right now i asked her beard richard gray said he's soaked uh

so sorry oh no everybody's hoping he's okay and his gear is okay he says life's good uh dan

scoff um dan scoff is the meteorologist here in uh northwest arkansas for knwa

and uh so he's watching right now which is cool um

my stick neon says forget richard grace is his scope going to be okay [Laughter]

myron says uh astro beer my parents live in annapolis whom i visit often i

used to stargaze from the double acc uh my stick neon says astro beard is

waterproof uh jeff wise wants to ask you if you can

explain critically focused one more time so critically sampled i think is what

you're referring to yeah yeah try to put it in simpler terms so in simple terms and i can relate it

to visual users so when you when you uh use a high power eyepiece like say

you're looking at uh jupiter or the mars or something like that and you've got a

good eyepiece let's say it's a 10 15 millimeter and you've got a good

crisp view of mars yeah okay you can see some features you can see the ice cap

and then you decide oh man i want to see more detail i'm going to put in a four millimeter eyepiece

so you put this four millimeter eyepiece in there and then all it does is enlarge that and but you

don't see anything more you know you still see the ice cube but it's more blobby now now it looks a little fuzzy it looks a

little uh blurred yeah that's because it's being blurred by the sky

uh the air limits the it's called seeing it limits the uh the resolution the

effective resolution that you can get uh when you image it regardless of the resolution of the camera

so in the camera what you it's just like uh if you were to over sample these stars let's say okay

for example like this this star right here you see where i've got this uh group of little that's a

real dim star okay this is a critically sampled star but if if it was oversampled you'd have

a big blob of pixels for that star okay

um that's what you would have and that's what that's what over sampled means that critically sampled means that you're

you're sampling it at the rate which is uh due to this theorem uh you

want to sample you want the pixel scale to be about one half of what the sky will give

you in terms of the full width in terms of seeing and the full width that have maximum the seeing is

is measured in arc seconds okay and the full width of half maximum is

measured in arc seconds so if you've got a sky if you've got a seeing of two to three arc seconds

you want to sample you want your pixel scale to be half that or around or a little more

so if you've got let's say you have a seeing level of two and a half arc seconds

then you would want to sample at around one around one arc second so that you have

about two and a half pixels of full width at half maximum and that's what i was showing you here on the um

on the focus uh full width at half maximum i guess i gotta do another uh plate

solve

okay so now if i go here and look at the full

width at half maximum now there's a bunch of stuff in the middle that might throw no it's pretty good so

i've got a full width at half maximum of 2.29 pixels which is excellent

for critically sampled when you're over sampled what you'll see is the best focus you can get you'll

have four pixels or five pixels or something like that that's what you'll have

yes

okay i can tell it's getting dark in california now okay so let me stop here okay uh so

let's um let's switch over to um alberto here

okay yeah i'm here um yeah so uh yeah i was surrounded by

clouds i have a little a little opening oops not that much

trying to i'm going to share my screen okay and i was able to get get vega

that was uh share screen okay

okay that's that's it jeff wise has says hello to you alberto who does jeff wise he's a he's a regular

on our shows he watches most of the show so you probably see

uh blob right now in the middle of that black screen that's yeah that's the sensor i left it out on

purpose so let me let me brush oh this looks like uh it's a fairly fast capture it looks like

video yeah it's video right now well pretty much it's like a few milliseconds but you can see

the clouds the the thin haze going in front of it like you think it's a planet turning around

very fast now right so i'll try to focus it i mean make it as small as possible but

then what we're going to use is the the bat enough

mask which will help us a lot

and this is a great a great design a great invention

and what we're going to see with the button we're going to increase the the

size of this we're going to zoom in into the star

let's say a hundred percent and let's reduce the the brightness

i'm gonna reduce the brightness oh wow look at that okay so now you see those little spikes

in there you see spikes yes the idea is that there's a central

spike you can see the bad enough mass the way it's rendered against the op it's like it's illuminating the whole

optic oh yeah let me see it makes like a thin line right through the middle

let me zoom a little more let me zoom a lot more a lot more there we go 200

okay and as we go closer

there's uh wow i never had this experience with the clouds

you see you see like uh oh yeah i mean like like an x but then there's a

middle one the the center that has to be really centered in between the that large elongated x

and i'm doing it by hand that's why it it looks like kind of shaky oh yeah but it's you you see that alberto slightly more

maybe a little bit i'm not that surprised to get it as jerry but but at least i'm getting

something done here right right no no curls so yeah

that was a lot faster than uh than the auto focusing system yeah it was right yeah it can be

um actually byron always likes to manually focus he doesn't like to use autofocus but alberto is cheating he's right at

the telescope he's not five miles away like you are so that's good that's another issue of course but again

uh usually uh under city lights uh and i tried to

and for for m13 i was planning on using uh an h alpha seven nanometers

uh the vader uh filter that will you know block a lot of the uh

light pollution even though i would have to expose longer but the way the clouds are i hope i can

still get some imaging through the clouds maybe overexposing or whatever

yeah but again so i can remove the the button off now okay so

of course you can see it twinkling because of the uh bad bad bad

uh atmosphere we have yeah uh i'm gonna go back and see the full

the full screen there it is see that oh yeah there we are okay

that's vega there's vega okay so that's a pretty bright star all right so do you want to try to uh

center up m13

[Music]

[Music] oh yeah when do we have like a jet

overhead okay i'm um not far uh about two miles from miramar air base

top ground that's right yeah yeah so david was saying oh scott there's so much road

noise and stuff like that we had a very bad uh fighter jet accident

three blocks away from from here oh in 2008 uh oh my god over three homes uh killed

the family et cetera oh it's hard it's a bad tragedy but anyhow we're well protected and

everything you know in october they usually have the the blue angels air show it's a

fantastic place to be so the runway the runway of the miramar

air base runs i just go a straight line comes over my head over my house so i'm safe i feel unsafe

there's a there's a question here uh alberto we have a question from one of our

viewers here uh he says i'm a beginner does the star need to be in the center

of the mask for focusing with the baton off definitely yes it helps because

you don't know the uh slightly defects uh that that spherical aberration or

something that could be in in any any optical system any no matter which one you no matter

what you have no matter what you have so the center should be the best uh if you can move it as close as

possible that helps and also it helps us uh like i didn't have a chance to use this

uh computerized mount to uh align with a couple of stars so

and have it have a better situation it's only one star that i that i put in there okay in order to

take it to m13 i probably would be start hopping or i'll try it

uh at a single shot and see if we're lucky enough to to get there how about we let you

do that uh try to get it centered up i'm going to we're going to jump to dave ing in

temecula uh next and um uh and uh it's going to be cloud and it's

cloudy on that side of where yeah so you'll want to stop sharing your screen okay we'll do that okay let's connect

that okay let me stop sharing okay here we go okay um on my setup i use a

dslr uh nikon camera um so i uh have it connected to a laptop or pc so

what i'm gonna do is turn on my camera i'm gonna use my um my finder scope

find a bright star and then see if i can center on that star and then get the image in my in the back of my

camera so i'll see if i can show that as i'm doing it okay and this is with an

explore scientific 880 or ed102 102. yep got it

so i'm going to swirl over to a star that i can see

i'm back

so it's in the finder but i gotta see if i can center it in my um my camera okay

i'm just gonna adjust the [Music]

script okay so um you can probably see the

the live view of the camera over here oh yeah right i have it in the center

there so i'm going to zoom in a little bit

and then i can adjust the focus

kind of get it where i think it's in close

that looks pretty good and then i'll throw the baton off mask

on there

okay

[Music] uh

so i took a picture of it so i could show you

okay

asking um which which nikon are you using richard d 5300 and is this there's a live view

and that's a little out of focus with the webcam but um oh yeah but you can see the baton off

mask uh spikes there yeah so

that actually looks pretty good pretty centered

take off the mask okay no

and then i'm going to go to the my home position yep

actually before i do that [Music] i'm going to do a polar line okay

what method do you use for polar alignment um celestron's all-star polar alignment

okay i can see polaris

but i can't really do it in alignment on it um i have the street light right there

yes you do i can't really see behind it too much right

so it slewt away from elter yeah back to it ron delvo says forgetting to

take off the mask is important yeah

i just started a sequence of images scott on m13 okay excellent i'm doing 60 30

second images

and uh richard um so you were pretty rained out there um it's

i don't know if you're gonna get any clear skies probably not much of a chance to uh i don't know if you can get set back up

you know that's it's still set up oh and still so you just like tarped it is that what you did

contractor bags con oh smart man well that's what i had you know that

kind of thing happens to us um uh often when we go to the winter star party

florida keys you can have the squall come in you know and everybody just bags up and

uh waits it out you know so we even had a little tornado come to the uh

uh florida keys one time during the star party and knock over a telescope and throw a bunch

of stuff in the air so oh man yeah well uh the most of the

sets taken down out back but like i said i was pretty much ready to be inside for the most part anyway so uh

sure okay my the forecast has changed

yeah all right we had a microburst come through i was

at the uh almost having star party at spruce knob west virginia

about three years ago and we set up a tent during the day and uh

this micro burst came through where it was 60 miles an hour and just blew my tent away i had a table set up with i was there

for explore scientific to show our stuff and and i had every most everything boxed up because we knew the storm was

coming but i had telescope set up the 102 that we have was on the exos 2 mount and it got

blown over uh and the tent got blown away so this squalls it's it's that stuff can

show up in no time oh yeah that's true

okay so a line now that was quick i'm gonna go back to home position i'm

gonna start the um asi air uh app and i'll show you that on my tablet unit

okay and uh alberto how how's your sky turning out uh

i feel like general custer surrounded but by [Laughter]

uh clouds but i'll tell you something i uh precisely a week ago a week ago i

imaged uh m13 with uh explore scientific ar127

and uh and because i was doing i was trying to to use this uh h alpha

filter on nebula that's why i use this i moved the telescope i removed that

telescope and i used the uh fsq takahashi for you know larger

field of view etc but i can show you uh what uh 11 seconds looked

like and then i'm gonna show you

okay this was uh i'm gonna oh i need to share the uh

i need to show the screen

screen share okay and it's this here

um okay well this was this a single shot

11 seconds with explore scientific ar127

okay excellent uh carbon fiber 2 beautiful instrument and it's you can

see very sharp and this is under city lights and we and and i had the moon pretty much on top of me but then i

added uh 11 11 shots 11 11 uh

exposure of 11 seconds and this is what i got here i use an h

alpha filter like i said also to subdue the light the city lights a

lot and this is the final result result with uh

with this and this is this is a shot from your backyard in san diego backyard yeah i'm not far i'm

i'm probably uh six seven miles from downtown san diego

yeah so it's excellent so this is my result and excellent just a few shots

and the process i used is is okay the hardware the uh software

for capturing is sharp cap this that's sharp cut and

it recognizes the camera zw 1600 mono and then to

process the all the photos i used deep sky stacker which is

fantastic it's a freeware you load up your your files your darks

and you let it run and a minute or a minute and a half later it's it's all it shows you the and maybe in

photoshop you you know you enhance a little you you you pull and and you know contrast

whatever but but it's really uh a marvelous uh software deep sky stacker

excellent interest i used to use images plus plus

but this has become very practical you don't have to you know locate put two stars and

and square them and align them and let it run this does the whole thing so it's uh

recommended very strongly excellent so well it's where did i leave my i have

oh wait i have to stop the share so so uh i think i've got it set up where

everybody can share simultaneously oh wow but i'm going to spotlight on um

on on uh well i guess you do need to stop sharing

yeah and and probably i was kind of i was kind of tired because i wrote down

a lot alafa because you laugh a lot

okay that's part of the jokes here yeah okay stop sharing right okay that's right so here we are we're

back with uh with dave okay um i have the uh asi air app uh on my tablet

okay so i've got uh actually why isn't the camera on main

camera on

okay

okay so i'm in uh preview mode so it allows me to um select a a go to object

so from here i can type in um [Music] whatever my target is in this case it's

going to be m13

and it gives me a little connection about it got it

oops which program is this again it's the asi air app it's to run

run the asi air device the raspberry pi device got it so now it's up here i can just say uh

click on go to and i'm going to keep an eye on my telescope because i know it's at the zenith and i want to make sure it doesn't hit the

camera sure but here we go

we can hear it slowing

oh the camera's like uh two inches from the tripod room oh wow okay yeah because it's it's

pointing very high in the in the sky right now for us

it's taking a picture and i think it's gonna play solve automatically

okay

and it's usually faster than this so i i'm suspecting that maybe it's going to fail

yeah try try and try again it's okay we all run into that

we'll all run into that you know what's amazing is that we're running this star party on two different

coasts we've got four astronomers all tied in together we're broadcasting um

it's uh we're having what i call one of those internet moments you

know so and different conditions for everyone that's right

that's right oh i wanted to mention did you all watch this the uh starship hopper today

it hopped today the starship hopper yeah the starship yeah the starship did

it's 150 meters yeah that was awesome that was awesome yeah man i don't know

i have to have to find out about that

no it's not

that's all right dave uh scott had me troubleshoot a problem live on the fly yesterday with the customer

yeah i remember that and i had faith that we would figure it

out but that's just one of them things you know that's where you work through it a little bit okay

well how about we jump let's jump back to jerry uh well dave is um uh working through this

and um uh you're you're uh you're gathering images at this point is

that right that's right uh okay all right you see my screen now

yep all right so i've got a there's a there's a thing in maximum dl

it's called auto save you can set up a sequence it's kind of like sequence generator pro where you can set up um

[Music] your imaging session to take a series of images

and uh i'm basically i set the exposure to 30 seconds because

i don't want to blow out right now it looks kind of blow out because i got the histogram set on but when i stack these i don't want

to blow out the stars too much 60 30 second images which is a 30 minutes of

of imaging basically and it's also doing an auto plate solve every time it takes an

image and it's and it's also repositioning back to the original target coordinates so if

you watch this over time you know really zoomed up uh you'll see

that these stars basically they just it just stays right where it's at it doesn't

move it's a it's near perfect tracking oh yeah now what i'm using is the telescope drive master i'm not

auto guiding at all so uh look you'll watch when it takes this brings this next picture in here

it moves just a tiny tiny bit now what so what it'll do is i'll reposition it back

so it moved this star right here moved from from right here to right there that's

not much all right that's about that's about two arc seconds

yeah here with three arc seconds all right so let me show you what the uh let me show you what the auto guiding or

what the not i'm not auto guiding i'm using the telescope drive master what the alternative is to that i'm gonna

i'm gonna show you what the tracking error is on the system

this is a program i wrote about 10 years ago when i first was a customer with scott

when i bought the telescope drive master and uh what this will show you this is

similar to it a phd auto guiding graph except it's plotting the

real time encoder uh corrections all right

and what this is this this is about the rms value for this auto guiding or

i keep saying auto guiding it's not auto guiding it's it's a telescope drive master uh

is about point three to point four arc seconds rms auto guiding uh damn it

not auto guiding he's not auto guiding folks he's got a telescope drive master darn

it i got a telescope drive master or auto tracking auto it's it's it's

tracking error i need to say tracking it's a tdm tracking error uh you see that spike yeah i don't know

what caused that i'm curious to see if it shows up in our image earthquake maybe you sneezed maybe maybe maybe and

it felt at five miles away the guy who's in your observatory bumped

it man he's he's out of there now yeah tell that guy

let's see if it moves this image didn't look like it didn't look like it

impacted it i don't know what that spike was um

all right let me see if i can get back to it mitch michael whitaker says what i like

about this is just knowing it's not just me that gets frustrated when things don't go right oh no i get to see other people's real

setups here i got an image now [Music] oh cool so you all set up there

i have a comment as a matter of fact when i used to shoot film my definition of a good

astrophoto was take a hundred and throw a

99. yes right so do you want me to stop my share no i

didn't want to interrupt you no no that's fine i'm so i'm taking so i'm up to image 26 of 60 right now

uh taking these images so now go ahead uh i'm gonna stop

go ahead all right so i tried dimming this right now see it but it's not a very good picture

i guess but i'm going to hide this little window and i can see m13 right here

so i took a 10 second exposure looks kind of green

but what the asi air app does is it has an auto stretch feature uh so if you dumb

objects and it automatically it brightens it up a little bit i think you can see a little bit

of blob right there um this is a new feature they added in the in the recent

update but you can you're supposed to be able to hold on to that and then it turns green i don't know if you can see that green circle

yeah we did and then you're supposed to be able to just tap it and it's supposed to auto center in that

location oh boy nice um nice feature this is the second time i

tried it and the first time i tried it it didn't work okay hopefully we'll see if it works

this time yeah yeah some other comments here uh tim myers wants to ask does maxum dl

automatically stretch your image to make it easier to see there's a uh histogram window down in

the lower uh right hand corner i've been using to set the stretch it it will you can select low medium or

high or selected for a planetary or the moon so it'll set the or you can manually set the histogram uh

values that you want to show and i can demonstrate that when we go back

in a few minutes

can you guys hear me in my back yeah i hear you okay so i'm taking another 10 second shot um

and we'll see what that looks like we'll see if it's centered up yeah okay i'm going to do a plate solve

okay that took point six seconds uh there's a button here well it's not

really a button it's a link sync and go to m13 so it's going to sync with the mount and

it's supposed to center it a little bit and i heard slewing a little bit so okay that's similar to what i was

doing with maxum dl it would plate solve it and then it would center re-center the object

the things i have to do another preview shot to see where it ended up

so these are these are 10 second shots at iso 200 i'm sorry this says iso 1000 i lied

um iso 200 is normally what i shoot at okay i heard that iso 200 is a sweet spot for

this particular camera okay so i don't know if that's true or not but it

seems to be working for me okay um the auto stretch made this really bright let's see if i

can reset that wade prunty wants to know if jerry can

do 10 to 30 minute exposures without auto guiding

yeah i could go as long as uh i've gone 10 minutes before and as long

as you have a very accurate polar alignment yeah it'll work

fine you have to really tweak your your polar alignment in to get 10 minutes that typically we the most we go

is five minutes but the problem we have here in virginia is our skies are just too bright

um even with no moon uh we've got you know

we're in we're in an urban area but there's light domes in freshberg to the east of me and we've

got washington dc that's to the north uh about 50 miles north of me

and so the sky is not not i can see the milky way from my house

when it's really uh a moonless night but it's not i mean i can i can see it

but it's not like being out west by any means i think our skies we can get 5.5 to 6 magnitude skies maybe

uh average you know that's a backyard suburban uh or a suburban guy or uh

rural rural to suburban is where i'm at basically and um so i can go ten minutes but then

after that it really guy brightness really overwhelms the image so it's not really worth it

to get but um yeah the telescope drive master doesn't care what the uh

uh you know it's it's it's not guiding so you can take as long as you got a good

polar alignment you can take as long as you want oh i did miss a question here jenny

bedell shelley says not sure if you saw my question for jerry from earlier i wanted to know if jerry

is using half steps for his autofocus routine

yeah so i've got that the focuser i've got in here does have that the

driver to do half steps but i haven't i haven't found that i need to because the uh

the refractor the range of focus is around 20 to 30 uh counts

and and i guess you could call it like depth of field for the focus it seems to be

around 20 20 counts so having half steps basically doubles the

number of counts that you're allowed that so you can basically position it to two microns precision instead of four

microns yeah and uh i don't i don't see a need for that now if you were doing a very fast

if you had that focuser on a very fast system like a hyperstar where the where the focusing position is

very very finicky that's where you would need it probably

uh but with this uh system we don't i don't find that i need to use that oh jenny says she asks

because she can she can't get half steps to work for her moonlight focuser

oh really yeah uh i'll have to i'll have to give it a try i've never really tried it i never

because again i didn't i never needed it so i'd have to give that a try and see if i

can get that to work and maybe uh help you out with that jenny

yeah well i don't know if you can see it but i got it centered now oh yeah oh okay we can see it now so

that's great awesome so that's a nice feature for the asi hair

so that's the same light coming to you that i got coming to me basically at the same time

with my last image across across the united states so there we go

so now i can start imaging um there's an auto run button here okay i can tell it how many

how many shots i want my lights how long i want them [Music]

and you know if i want to do any delays between the first one or interval in between them and then i can

just start capturing and and how many

how many images do you plan on capturing for this run uh let's see what time is it it's uh

nine o'clock here i got a couple hours um i don't know maybe 60 one minute shots

um i i'm not real confident because it's kind of pointing straight up yeah i'm

gonna be able to uh guide very well so i'm gonna do shorter exposures

and also i'm probably gonna have to flip pretty soon because i'm i'm right it almost right at

the top right i'm doing about 60 or so

at 60 seconds [Music] it seems like it's a pretty decent object a pretty bright object i don't

really need a lot of uh long exposures on it okay and then after that i'm gonna you know

do my darks and if it's not too late i'll do flats tonight uh or i might just do them in

the morning um the flats as long as i don't change the imaging train or the focus or

anything and since i'm using one shot color i don't really have to do a lot of different ones for each filter

right and then the biases because i always shoot at iso 200 i

already have a master bias at iso 200 so i can reuse that okay we have some questions here for you

dave uh jenny wants to know is the asi air wireless

yes uh yes and no um the asi air has wi-fi in there

the version one was in a plastic case and it wasn't too bad the newer version the pro is in an

aluminum aluminum case yeah it has no antenna so it gets really bad wi-fi connection

so what i've done is it also has an ethernet port small tp-link router to the ethernet

port on the asi air and that guy is what i connect to so yeah

sounds good so it it's pretty much standalone system i have a

battery pack let me see if i can move this over okay um see the battery pack in there

power supply okay there uh and that just connects to everything else and it's just one you

know self-contained uh thing i don't need any power any external power to to

run it right yeah so look at this setup uh dave's got uh perimeter lights on so

we can see what he's doing uh which is good uh which he would probably i would guess you would

normally turn those off there is uh a lot of moon tonight um so but you're still getting m13 from

your backyard which is really cool yeah it's actually kind of dark right here what's that

um the my house is probably blocking most of the moonlight ah that's good that's good excellent

okay yeah my backyard faces north and i don't really i can't really see my southern skies

very well i'd have to take up my rig out to the front if i wanted to do that

but i'm going to go ahead and set this up and start imaging okay sounds good okay so let's uh let's check

in on uh richard grace

all right there we are so how's how's the uh

how's your weather doing out there at this point still raining still raining yeah it's uh it's coming

down a lot slower uh it looks like somebody just west of fredericksburg's like cloud seating

ah okay it's just it's flowing right right up through there but uh yeah i i

think it's gonna clear out in a minute but it just uh i can't explain it neither can the weather meant so

[Laughter] well we'll have to have you we're going to do this again

on next tuesday so we'll have you just um if you're so inclined to join us again

next tuesday we'll have you in that lineup of astronomers hopefully we have better weather

yeah that's right that's right that's great and uh let's check back in on alberto

and see what's happening right there well so far this session has been uh

500 percentage in uh embedding i mean two two of

uh of our fellow astronomers got imaging and two are clouded yeah uh

yeah mine's looking up there one on each coast waiting for any opening but i doubt it

even the moon is you can see maybe some light back there

right um but yes of course we we would love to to do this again and

come back any other targets of course sure so uh well that's wonderful

uh we have we have had uh an interesting night tonight looks like

richard got up to see what get a reality check on what it's like outside

we've had some great comments tonight it was great to have david levy on with

us tonight as well um nice presentation and uh yeah jenny

jenny uh comments uh she says alberto it happens to the best of us

chuck lewis is asking has this kind of collaborative astronomy been done before scott

if not then tonight is really special as far as i know chuck i don't think so okay now has

other amateur astronomers astronomy club's done this or i have no idea but i don't think they

broadcast it like this okay so that i think that this makes us a little bit unique

um probably some other amateur astronomers have gotten together on zoom

and compared notes and that kind of thing i i believe that must have happened already

um but we will we will see about having we we've got

wolfgang in germany that wants to join us uh for the next one so i got to figure out

what the time differences are going to be like um for

that but gosh it was a lot of fun uh

if he shoots the nice guy we could do the solar solar problem yeah maybe maybe maybe

that's right we have so oh that would be very interesting to do solar and uh and uh stars so

yeah and maybe if we have like a europe european uh uh you know group uh

we could have two sessions we can have a midday session uh

here where we see stars over there and then we do the night session here we see the sun

over there so but the sun has been really really quiet you know so

uh gary palmer in the uk tends to get lucky he he showed an incredibly

beautiful and large flare um on the sun uh ron delbo says there's a sun sunspot

right now that's great so um hopefully we could uh

get that um eric royal in mexico he's shooting the sun from his home the

because of cobit he's staying has all the patience and and beautiful

beautiful shots oh yeah eric i've known eric for a while i didn't know and so i've been good friends with eric for a while he's got a telescope

drive master on his system he's got two of them

so this is great your idea your promotion about doing this is

commendable i mean i i really congratulate you about putting us together

getting to know i'm just sitting here pressing the keys on the computer that's

great but but but you pulled all the strings to get us all together oh i did that's true

that's true that's very nice of you and that check for a thousand dollar i mean 100 i mean uh 20 buck uh 10 is coming

okay okay i hope it's not bitcoins

yeah right that big boy is coming to you yes that's right yeah

it was fun guys thank you so much um i don't know if we have any more comments or questions here let me just

do another check i think we answered most of it here i

can uh there's that question about the histogram i can show that real quick

it won't take a second um

you see me yeah all right so down here

on the lower right is the screen stretch window and right now i've got it set to low so

you got a bunch of uh different selections here that you can do for automatic or you can do the

stretching with these little triangles i don't know if you can see that but there's a there's a green one you can see i'm

moving it back and forth and you can see the stars uh when you show the whole thing you can

see the brightest stars in the cluster

uh and typically you want to look at that and not over expose them if you can get away with it although you're gonna

you know you're not gonna be able to get perfect so that's why i'm doing a 30 second image instead of a one minute yes because of the

sensitivity of the camera and the and how much light the telescope's coming but you can select am i starting

to see the propeller shape in there um i don't know yes that's this looks like it yeah

looks like it where's it at it's in there yeah let me see

yeah the propeller is pretty pretty uh noticeable once you get a good exposure get the

next image here

you can see you can blow it out of [Music]

course you see the propeller in there

yes a little bit [Music] so that's the histogram

awesome okay well

um it's been great uh it's been great having all all you guys

here and um uh i look forward to having uh

the virtual star party too uh uh that will be coming up here next

tuesday and um with a backup night of thursday and like i said we plan to do this every

every week um uh you know through uh through the rest of this year so um

thanks very much guys uh and uh keep looking up uh and uh we will see

you tomorrow afternoon at uh our four o'clock central's show for the uh open go to community live

program and uh hope to see you there take care thank you scott thank you i love you

guys nice to meet you

okay