Pop-up Virtual Star Party, March 2022
all right so we're back okay um so yeah there we are uh much better with the stars uh orion nebula um the one thing i wanted to try tonight and i was hoping to i'm i have my long uh focal length uh telescope out tonight so we're gonna try to capture the horsehead super hard uh actually first try with this telescope so let's see what we can do here all right uh let's search for said okay oh three okay so let's see four three four yeah so the horsehead nebula is identified as ic434 we're just taking a peek see if we can't find it okay yeah it didn't have to move very far so it's just a star and a a few uh a belt over all right let's see what we might have yeah i got to work on the speed of this thing i may have to hook up a network cable hopefully up on the hill chris was saying that we have fiber up there so yay all right oh let's see i'm not making anything out so let's see we're gonna need a longer exposure let's try 60 seconds you do uh so tonight's software is the coming from the si air um some of you probably already knew uh about this it uh uh it's a little pi device basically and it's uh uh connected to uh my camera uh it's mounted underneath the front of my um my telescope on the vixen bar wirelessly it connects to um tablet or phone or in this case i'm using the android subsystem for windows in order to emulate a tablet and then i'm capturing that into obs so that we can take a peek at it so this is happening um from my uh front yard hopefully it will be from uh the board telescope uh the next time it's clear so we've had some technical difficulties we're working on those primarily mine the android subsystem doesn't work on anything except windows 11 unless you want to use bluestacks and that's tough so i was planning on using that this works really well and i have hooked up to my desktop computer here at home but uh trying to take that over to the hill is a little tough so uh we're doing it here tonight like i said practice so um hopefully um everyone is having a good evening um maybe you're out doing the same thing i'm doing so um let me know how you feel about all of this the other one is some of the things that dave was talking about in some of the last few announcements really trying to take a look at astrophotography although it's something that we've done before in the past we're really trying to get it to a point where we look more at it i do a fair amount of astrophotography myself or better yet electronically enhanced astronomy uh which is kind of what we're doing here is we're basically star hopping um taking a look at different things um we just took a oh 180 second uh look at the horse head hopefully we can capture something i've like i said i've i've never really done this with this telescope so i'm not sure what to expect from it i didn't even go through [Music] the process with stellarium to actually get an idea of what this thing is going to look like with the equipment that i'm using as a matter of fact maybe i should do that while we're waiting for this oh it's floating good so with stellarium it has this handy-dandy little option which kind of uh and right now it's set to my asi 533 and my uh eight inch telescope okay great uh so um we have to now find um well let's see where's orion at there's beetlejuice so we're close uh ryan is right there [Music] and the horsehead should be wow nothing you can start to see things make out here some of those may be uh artifacts um well that's gonna be tough let me uh let me see what else is good tonight so hold on tonight's best i'd like to take a look at that um oh yours is setting um triangulum oh that's in a really bad spot oh let's look at the miss air objects the crab oh crap is a really good place so it should slew over there quite nicely um like i was saying here let's uh pop that up real quick um let's see which software am i looking at here okay so stellarium we'll show that we'll turn off asi air um so so there's orion we're gonna turn that dude off so we can see better so beetlejuice is up here orion's belt his sword uh the bows right here um so um orion's nebula is right there flame nebula um alrighty so um yeah that is if i had enough time to actually do this um i'd be able to uh probably capture a pretty good image of the horsehead um so and the reason i say this is right there is the what the frame would kind of look like with my camera with that telescope and so on so um it's not it'd be nice if i could get a reducer for it and maybe pull it out to encapsulate those but huh all right so um yeah so the asia was having trouble [Music] man it should be all right oh let's see i'll let you take a peek see what it's doing here sometimes this thing will uh just get confused it's really weird uh but uh let's see what we can see here anyways so while that's loading uh we'll go back over to stellarium um you get something take uh 10 seconds take a peek real quick all right yeah so there was a 10 second one and we're gonna have to go to probably 120. uh let's make that instagram go away now i can stretch this differently i mean i might get more success out of it but let's make that a little bigger there so i started a another image i'm going to 120 seconds um but uh we'll take a look at stellarium while we're doing that so if we go to and look for uh crab nebula crab nebula pops over to it so that is what we're looking to try to grab so even with a so the focal length on this uh telescope is 2032 uh millimeters uh so it's uh it reaches out fairly well uh comparatively um so and even there the crab is kind of small so it might work out better if i had something with a little more focal length say like the bohr telescope which would have been really nice to work with tonight um like i said technical difficulties windows 11 is my nemesis so let's go back to asi air real quick take a peek at it uh yeah we haven't rendered yet so that's good um uh starting to get chilly out but it's a lovely night so i couldn't hardly miss it see what else is going on tonight tonight's best the moon comes up oh it's not going to be up for a little while which is good and bad uh be nice if we could take a peek at it but it's going to be a much later um perhaps we'll take a look at andromeda and then look for see how that is tonight oh it's nebula wow boats nebula is really good so if we don't start getting something good on crab we're going to go take a peek and look at boat all right so that was a hundred and twenty seconds um i meant to go to 180 so let's take a bigger peek at boats m81 boats and slew to it well let's see uh i'm taking a look at uh what's the other youtuber see if he posted yet subscriptions um somebody who does a really really good job with these um astrophotography they do a fantastic job he does these a lot in matter of fact he uh does uh the sun as well and has captured some really interesting uh live sun so if you ever get a chance ask chuck tester photography um and we're centering good all right take five seconds and see what we can see of boats well we are going to need more time than that let's go with 60. okay let's take a peek oh well that uh that works really well wow i'm gonna center things around here a little bit see if you can't make this just a wee bit better okay i guess that's as good as it's gonna get here um so that's out um yep let's stop that let's go to 180 seconds uh so that was our 60 second of boats and remember that's what it's supposed to look like inside the frame so we should be looking for a quite a bit of data there that's our next target so we're going to take a look at uh whirlpool uh this is one of my favorites it's probably yeah i think it really is the first deep sky object that i actually took a look at it's fairly bright it's fairly large you can make it out with a 30 second shot so um we'll see what we get here tonight with bodes and then we'll move on to this one andromeda is in a bad place right now so we're going to have a hard time seeing that uh even with a camera unless i want to do multiple 180 second shots of it so we'll see how it goes all right all right so let's talk about the sia a little bit and this is just a tool that several of the members use um it is not uh the end-all it locks you into uh cwo equipment for the most part cameras uh filter wheels um most dslrs work with it and uh as far as i can tell i've yet to run into a mount that doesn't work um and it really does simplify things you can see uh the process that i use but there are other products out there uh free products that uh uh are available now the one thing that you are going to need and this is where the asi air comes in really handy is that it's the computer part of it unless you're using the dslr you're going to run into a situation where you don't have um you're going to need a computer because a dedicated astro camera is going to be limited to whatever it's going to communicate with so it's going to need a computer to run it the asa air is capable of doing that and that's where the way it's hooked up right now but just as easily you could use sharp cap or what's that other one gosh i don't even know them all very well anymore so let's see what we saw here uh the image loaded but i'm not getting a lot of detail i can just barely make some stuff up um but i think some of it is lighting and i see the uh facebook feed is not nearly as clean as uh what i'm seeing so let's move over to uh m51 so m51 um the whirlpool is if you look at the big dipper and you see those last two stars and you kind of form a triangle with it uh in between kind of up from there um at the top of that triangle you'll see the um that's that's where the whirlpool is which makes it really nice it makes it a little easier to actually find i do want to check something real quick in stellarium so we're going to go switch over to that uh where is stellarium on this crazy computer of mine well there it is all right so and the other thing is the way i find items for instance andromeda drama is a pretty straightforward find it's usually running around the north it hops around polaris so what i look for is capella and it creates this angle or this uh w in the sky and the other one and i'll turn these on real quick so you can see them um so i think i'll turn off the horizon so the other one is finding this box and then finding the legs that come off of it and what i do is there's a star right about here and here they come off this box from uh with uh pegasus that's right um and this right here we'll probably find uh so this triangle kind of points at it and there's these three stars that come off these and these are much easier to find than these two but you can just make it out off of these two coming from that star we go in a little further that right there is andromeda so that's how i find it and uh uh when i'm not using go to uh obviously but um so if i'm using my dab or something like that that's what i would do uh without go to uh oh the wall pearl is there one second so let's take 10 seconds of the whirlpool see what we get so we did get some image so let's take a peek so you can see this is the big one this is the little one and these two are interacting with each other so um which makes it interesting um i'm going to take something a little longer a little better let's see if we can't do 60 seconds and see what we get oh yeah that's so funny so uh i'm gonna switch over to stellarium again all righty there it is okay so um a lot of times these images are these uh outlines of the constellations get in the way so i i tend to turn them off i do tend to leave the lines in simply because the lines are quite helpful in many cases so wait you can also see the stars that way oh i should probably put the horizon in so i know what i can't see tonight oh the other thing is is that when you're trying to look for the milky way arm capel is another thing that runs right through it so if we kind of back out here um you'll see that the milky way arm just kind of goes right up through there capella is one of the ways that i used to try to find that can't always be really easily found oh goody here let's take a look um yeah there it is and that is the purple it's about 60 seconds uh we can do something a little longer um we also have a fair amount of light pollution where we at right here um but nevertheless it's a pretty good image um if i had a filter and um i don't know say 30 or 40 of these at maybe 180 seconds we could get a really good image from this and that's the idea really of what astrophotography is is taking a bunch of images 60 seconds 120 seconds 180 seconds even five minute images and then stacking them together so that you are basically collecting as much light as you possibly can for the single image because some of these things are really dim we looked at bowed even with 180 seconds we could barely make it out the crab is kind of in the same situation and that's why astrophotography gets messy simply because it's a requirement to understand the camera uh understand the telescope understand the mount underscore stand the software necessary for capturing and then there's more software that's required and to understand for stacking now with a lot of products kind of like the asa too it actually has a stacking mode so you can do things like run a plan take a quick peek oh wait i'm in the middle of an image i can't um anyways so the idea is that you should be able to run a a plan or a light session and tell it hey i want you to follow this item throughout the night and take uh 30 images at 180 seconds and then save them so i can stack them later even to the point where asia actually has some stacking software that does a a pretty good job um i've actually done it uh uh a couple times with it and it's turned up pretty well it's never gonna be as good as stacking yourself in something like pixen sight and then adjusting it with photoshop but it does a fair job the other one is uh this also has the ability to do video so when you're doing planetarium that was something they added not that all that long ago doing deep sky objects is very different than doing planetary so you know i get why uh people have a hard time uh sometimes with astrophotography there's quite a learning curve i mean telescopes are a learning curve finding things in the middle of the night ooh that came through really nice but you can really see the the light pollution that's going on here um but yeah that's where we're at tonight um each uh our dark sky uh uh would be nice but um this is uh i think we're about a portal six um we're on the edge of of uh 5 skies but i think i'd have to go north by about an hour and a half um then there are a lot of trees so that's problematic um so here's another one a good example the whirlpool is an excellent one uh to try to look at um the process of doing electronically enhanced astronomy and like i said that's kind of what we're doing here tonight is just that process of you know hopping around to the stars seeing what you can see um taking one two three minute images um and trying to get something that looks like that um so that's really nice um some of the tools that i use obviously stellarium i use pixensight to stack i use photoshop to modify i don't want to say modified i'm a bit of a purist so i'm not a big fan of changing the colors oh and and just so you know this is a this is a one shot color camera that we're using tonight it's a asi 533 mc pro and it's really designed to be able to uh you know get the actual look of the item um i see in many cases uh images of orion and they do not look like what i see not that that's wrong it's just like i said i'm a purist let's uh let's go back there matter of fact and oh it's really a good time so ryan and it's gonna slew over there it's gonna take a little while it's pretty far away um so we were looking at something in the northern sky it was probably just above my rooftop um my rooftop uh the telescope when it faces north um some of the northern items are are hard to find uh as a matter of fact i have to go a ways down my uh uh my driveway just so that i can see over it to be able to align to polaris um which there's several pieces of software ph uh ii or phd2 phd2 um the asir they now have non-polaris alignments uh so uh even if you don't have the ability from wherever you're looking from to be able to do this you have the ability to go take a peek at that and do your alignment without having polaris in your sights um so i haven't actually tried it i i have a good view of polaris um but uh we'll see how things go see if it ever becomes necessary may just try for the fun of it uh let's see it's trying to center on orion now oh and it's centered so it'll should give us some type of image oh no um it won't take the image that's why um because i have set for 180 seconds so let's do it for 30. oh wow that moved really oh no oh that was the original two seconds so uh when it uh tries to center it uses a two second centering uh time frame so this is a two second image of a right so i mean that's a really good image of a deep sky object uh so orion is really bright this is something that you would be able to see with binoculars or a small telescope or a dlsr with a teleportal lens and not a long one so and you can actually show ryan with your naked eye but it's just kind of a blur you're not going to see this kind of detail but it doesn't take that much um in fact orion from the perspective of the telescope they were using tonight uh the 2032 is way too long to try to do this object and that's a another discussion when we talk about focal length and when we talk about aperture and so on let me uh switch over to stellarium real quick and give you uh perspective on some of these items see so the orion nebula if i were to put so uh roughly we're getting the center and that's kind of it and a lot of people will try to image they'll try to image this whole complex here let's see what uh the sr has come back with oh okay good so this is a 30 second image of it uh so and that's not really all that long we're actually getting a lot of the color the the uh dark uh nebula these are the center stars which um at 30 seconds aren't all blown out which is kind of nice um which is not easy to do if you want to try to get everything else a lot of times the best way to do that is to do just a whole bunch of 30-second images um some people will actually do what they call a mask for this earth center section generate the surrounding piece with a bunch of data and take a short amount of data to do the center section simply because otherwise just too much data that gets captured and the stars just get completely blown out i'll give you an example uh we'll go with 120 seconds so that'll take a couple minutes um let's go back here so uh with this one uh with or with this telescope we're really hurting ourselves in the process because we're not able to catch all of the things that we probably would want to um this is the easiest way to work around that uh i have another i have uh two more telescopes one's a uh dobsonian which is an eight inch newtonian uh with a focal length of about 1200 again probably wouldn't work very well but the other one that i have and try to set this up telescopes let's add one my telescope uh it's an lx 85 6 inch and the focal length is 750 and the diameter or aperture is 150 six inch [Music] it looks 85 okay i'll make that go away all right so up here we can see it's the 533 and all this information but we want to see there it is okay so this one is actually yeah so this is my six inch this is far better suited for orion and you know we could even look at a one of the smaller versions of it so let's add another one and we'll say hey let's look at the red cat and i know the numbers for that so it's a 250 focal length and it is a 51 millimeter aperture sorry so and we're going to have to move to that telescope so that's a red cat okay so you can kind of see if you were trying to get the entirety of this the red cap might be something so it's a very tiny telescope it's about two and a half inches it's only about 250 millimeters long it's really tiny i mean you can literally hold it in your two hands it's itty bitty and it may or may not work really well for this one but if we took a peek at let's look at andromeda okay traumatic galaxy i have to be specific all right so if we were trying to get the entirety of an andromeda uh the red cat would work out pretty well um yeah let's see let's actually make that 350. and 71 that is the new big brother of the redcat wow oh yeah well andromeda is really setting now so a 71 millimeter aperture with a 250 vocal line seems to work out really well with my particular camera uh mine isn't a full frame camera so uh some of the space is going to be it's not going to be as big as what potentially could be viewed but so i guess my point is when we talk about the perfect telescope this is the problem it's like okay what do you want to do with your perfect telescope oh goody uh one second um oh there it is so this is uh orion's nebula that's 180 seconds it makes for a really nice image and if we stack a few of them we put together some light pollution filters in there um kind of put them together you can kind of you can actually see the uh the four stars one two three four they're a little blown out but they're not too bad uh but so you can get some really nice images with not a lot of time uh spent with it um andromeda is kind of the same uh right now like you can see there it's right on the horizon it's literally hiding behind trees probably even for me and matter of fact uh where my telescope is it's probably behind my house so we're not gonna be able to see that one so um but let's go take a peek and see if we can find some other things from tonight's oh oh that's really bad yeah it's really bad planet time really really bad this thing isn't even up yeah so basically uh the vast majority of the planets are actually on the other side of the sun from us uh they're coming back around um you can see venus in the morning and you say jupiter's right here um let's take a peek at what you can see um and what time you can actually see them so with stellarium we're going to change the time put this here we're looking at the north that's really bad we should be looking at the east east southeast so the moon is just now coming up i'll take a peek at that in just a minute uh we're coming up on an hour i think i'm going to cut it off in an hour but let's take a look at this so date time um 2300 so we're looking at the east uh two o'clock in the morning's bad uh altair comes up there's venus and mars 609 in the morning and saturn shortly thereafter [Music] so if you're an early bird here you go and then around seven we start getting sunlight um so saturn and mars for the most part are going to disappear um uh you'll be able to see venus just fine uh just so we can kind of see it i'm going to turn off the sun and this gives you an idea of when things are going to start jupiter mercury around eight the sun starts really coming up and then sometime around midday i think [Music] neptune comes up so it's morning time for the planets um and you have almost no time there on the horizon it's really blood bad time for planets that's why they call it nebula time well nebula time is actually starting to set and now it's turning into galaxy time so whirlpool boats things like that um i think i'm going to end it there uh if you have any questions or comments or you would like us to go in a different direction uh we're seriously considering putting it out on youtube if you're really interested in astrophotography uh we are starting that process to figure out how best to do it for our members um oh and just so you're aware i am one of the board members so i actually get to talk to chris and dave and and vote on things so uh let me know uh if you want to uh direct message me uh by all means if you have questions or you want to just throw a comment on this post we'll take a look at those too but this is specifically one of those things that the board is really interested in we were trying to get this started earlier but um well weather's been really terrible so um we're getting through it let us know uh throw a comment in there we'll talk to you later bye
2022-04-29 21:06
