Halloween With Live Video

[Skylook123]

I thought I'd share a bit of my adventure with my new Mallincam PRO on its first real adventure out in public.

For the last eight years we have put on a little astronomy show and tell in front of our house on Halloween. I set up the 10" SCT and show targets of opportunity, while my wife Susan, having done the appropriate mail order shopping months before, has non-candy give-aways, usually small rings or pins appropriate for the event - sometimes plastic rings with skulls or spiders, more recently rings that flash bright colors when activated. We now get repeat customers each year who've moved away but return for the telescope experience and the novelty give-aways.

For the last two years I've used NGC457, the Owl Cluster, as my showpiece. In the eyepiece this time of year, with the star diagonal appropriately positioned, it appears upside down so I call it The Bat in honor of the season. And for the parents it is, of course, ET or even Johnny 5, the robot from Short Circuit.

This year was a new addition - live video. I started video astronomy with the Mallincam Junior this spring. It worked great at the Grand Canyon Star Party on the Moon and Saturn, but I wanted more integration time on the prettier eye candy so I recently upgraded to the Junior PRO. Where the JR has a max integration time of 4 seconds, the PRO can go to 99 minutes. Better have some sort of guiding involved or the polar alignment nailed down for that sort of duration! Now that I have the MCJR as well as the MCJR PRO, it is tempting to add my 90mm ShortTube refractor to the bigger OTA as a guide scope, and use either the ST-4 port or EQMOD to guide. Oh my, I am falling into the hardware pit I claimed would never happen.

I started out on Venus, which was gorgeous in the monitor. I used the 10" f/10 SCT with a Celestron f/6.3 and only the visual back, no diagonal. While waiting for the visitors to come by, I tried all settings of shutter speed (ALC) from 0 through 1/12000 seconds, and anything faster than 1/3000 seemed to work very well, showing the current phase as about half of the disk. Since I was only using the monitor and not a computer to take frame shots, I used a small Canon Powershot A495 to take a few screen captures and also a few shots of the planet directly. It is always fascinating that our eye shows a bright disk in the sky, but the camera picks out the phase nicely.

By now, stars were popping out and only our next door neighbors had been by to see Venus, so I did a single star alignment on Schedar in Cassiopeia, then centered on The Owl. I added a 0.5X Antares reducer to the camera nose piece. Memo to self - add the reducer and adjust focus on the alignment star before going to the target! I turned off the shutter control and enabled the integration, choosing to start at the maximum native 2.1 seconds. This combination put the Owl exactly framed in the monitor. By rotating the camera, one can put the bird at any orientation. Usually I like to keep the control buttons on the back of the camera such that they are oriented in the way they will work in the On Screen Display, but the object is just a bit too big to be fully framed upright as The Owl or upside down as The Bat. By rolling the camera about 45 degrees, I was able to perfectly fit the target into the display frame, and we had show time for about an hour and a half, maybe 175 visitors. About a third were many time returnees, both for the flashing rings and for the telescope views. Now with the live video, even the littlest children could easily see The Owl/Bat. Between breaks in the crowd, I tried some very productive experiments. First, I varied the integration times between 1 and 2.1 seconds. I also adjusted the brightness of the monitor. Since a lot of the use my video is with a solar scope, the brightness works best down low and tint at the far end. So I centered the timt, and started varying the brightness level along with the integration times, between touring groups. Holy cow, what a difference. Not in The Owl; it is so bright I could leave the integration at 1 second with low brightness, and it was just fine, like posing for a portrait. But up the integration time and slide the monitor brightness past mid-range, and the whole doggone Milky Way jumps out behind the Owl! What a fantastic context. The Owl standing out against a background of what seemed to be thousands of individual perfect sugar sprinkles.

Well, the crowd abated around 8 PM so I tried my first experiments with the wireless connection to set longer integration times. I did a three star alignment, and jumped over to The Ring. I arbitrarily set the integration to 10 seconds, remembered to set the SENSE UP at maximum to allow the increased integration time, removed the O.5X reducer, and went through the focusing miseries again (dang, focus on Vega first, dummy) and eventually the most beautiful thing I've ever don with a telescope came into view. To see the natural color of the discarded remnants of the central white dwarf, illuminated by the UV of the hot dwarf and emitting the visible color of the ionized hydrogen and oxygen was spectacular. I tried the zoom function in the On Screen Display, and got no effect. Memo Number Two to self: this is NOT the Mallincam JR., where No/Yes activates the full zoom. I forgot about the slider bar to set the zoom level. Later I would find it was set at 0. Duh.

Great night. Kids saw a treat in the sky under heavy, heavy light pollution, with Cassiopeia barely visible, and despite the glow of the urban lights, The Ring was awesome with no filter augmentation. VERY impressive since I chose the EX HAD Color version of the camera.

And for the first time, my wife, with her visual disability (blurring membrane over the rod cells in both of her eyes) that does not permit night focusing even though she taught astronomy for many years, got to see The Ring for the first time. And that was my treat for tonight.

Below are pictures of Venus in the sky, and on the monitor

[Joves]

Another great report, Jim. Please keep 'em coming!

[Skylook123]

Thank you, Joves.  I'll try, if I can persuade the weather and work to cooperate.