Virtual astronomy!

[Stu]

Like the rest of us, my Astro group’s meets have come to a grinding halt with the lockdown, and we have been staying in touch on FaceBook and using our WhatsApp group.

Two weeks ago we had a Zoom call with five or six of us joining and we had an excellent time, plenty of chat and it really worked well.

I put a session in for tonight at the time and completely forgot about it, so only three of us could make it. Separately I had decided just to put my two littlest scopes out to have a look at the moon whilst we chatted, but then ended up attaching the phone to one of the scopes using a phone mount and broadcasting the images over the Zoom chat. Peter was identifying features from his Moon maps, and I was chipping in using my Moon Phase Photo Maps app, and we spent a good hour plus trawling up and down the terminator sharing the views.

I could not have chosen a worse setup for it; manual mount with no tracking, a tiny aperture and low power eyepiece, yet still it worked very well. I had some cracking visual views mainly through the TAL Alkor whilst the phone hogged the Telementor. During the call I adjusted the scopes so they were basically parallel which made life much easier.

One problem with Zoom was that I don’t think you can adjust the exposure of the video, so the best way of countering the very over exposed Moon was to zoom in a fair way, after which everything worked well.

After finishing on Zoom, I somewhat rashly repeated the idea with a live broadcast to our Facebook group. This pulled in 7 or 8 viewers too and we had a bit of chat, questions posted by the people watching which I could then answer live via the phone headset; a very new experience for me but something which I will definitely repeat. The exposure seemed to work much better on FB, both zoomed out or zoomed in which really helped.

After all that, I also had some wonderful visual views through both scopes; they blew the digitally zoomed views out of the water I’m afraid, but I guess that can’t be helped. Highlight for me was finding (at @PeterW’s suggestion) the little chain of craters running nearby the crater Müller, itself near Ptolemaeus, really good to catch in both scopes at similar power (x133 in the Alkor and x140 in the Telementor, crazy powers for 65mm and 63mm scopes!)

So, learnings? Firstly do this sort of thing much more often, even when lock down is lifted. Secondly use a sensible setup; either the Mewlon and FC100DC side by side on the AZ100, or just one decent scope on the Vixen GP which would give more stable views.

Anyway, it worked, and worked well so it will most definitely happen again.

[RayD]

Great story, Stu, and sounds like a really great couple of 'meets.' 

[John]

Sounds excellent Stu.

We are using Zoom for our society meetings and have the 3rd one using this system tomorrow night. The speaker who was booked to visit us has agreed to do his presentation "live" over Zoom so that should be interesting. The past couple of sessions have been a social 10-15 minutes then a pre-recorded presentation which we all watch "together" as it were - Zoom allows text comments as we go along.

Doing some "live" viewing would be great if we can set it up. I'll give that some thought - thanks for the info on what you have done.

We are getting about 40 folks logging on to our sessions so a live broadcast of views though a scope would be a lot of fun !

[Ships and Stars]

Excellent idea!!

[Stu]

Thanks chaps.

@John with a bit more preparation and a more sensible choice of setup the live viewing would work even better. Very engaging and gives a focus for chat and interaction. Using a phone makes it really easy to stream too.

[Stu]

I suspect that maybe the 120ED on the Vixen GP may be a good combination so that you have basic tracking to keep the image steady. You will get great resolution from the scope and it is light enough to be steady on that mount so it should be a good choice.

[Stu]

Tee hee. Hopefully this link will work, and I open myself up for the full amusement of the forum 😉😉🤪🤪🤣🤣. Totally unplanned as you can tell, but will definitely do this again!

https://www.facebook.com/stuart.davis.52831/videos/10219426151782745/

[Mark at Beaufort]

Herefordshire Astro Society had its first Zoom virtual meeting last night with Steve Tonkin doing a presentation from his home in the New Forest area. We had 29 members in attendance and the system worked well. We have another session set up later in May.

@Stu I like the idea of a zoom observing presentation of course this depends on the lockdown continuing.

[Stu]

2 hours ago, Mark at Beaufort said:

@Stu I like the idea of a zoom observing presentation of course this depends on the lockdown continuing.

I agree to an extent Mark, but can also see me doing more of this even after lockdown ends to increase the contact with club members. The Facebook live stream worked well.

My club is only tiny, about 15 active members so we need to do whatever we can to increase interaction and new members.

[ScouseSpaceCadet]

It's taken a pandemic for people to catch onto useful tech. Hopefully this type of thing becomes the norm for many of us. Observing in the garden alone with a missus and kids inside who don't give a toss gets a bit lonely sometimes! 🙄

[Stu]

4 minutes ago, ScouseSpaceCadet said:

It's taken a pandemic for people to catch onto useful tech. Hopefully this type of thing becomes the norm for many of us. Observing in the garden alone with a missus and kids inside who don't give a toss gets a bit lonely sometimes! 🙄

True, but same for my company. Working from home frowned upon before, but now almost everyone doing it and keeping things moving along nicely.

Will certainly keep doing this for Astro.

[John]

I can see that this approach might have a future even beyond the pandemic. While we get good attendances for talks, its proving a little hard to persuade many of my society members to come along to our out of town observatory site to actually do some observing / imaging.

I can see that there might be quite a bit of interest in watching "live observing broadcasts" from the comfort of our meeting room.

Won't be as entertaining as this though

 

 

[Gina]

Your Facebook link isn't working Stu.

7 hours ago, Stu said:

Tee hee. Hopefully this link will work, and I open myself up for the full amusement of the forum 😉😉🤪🤪🤣🤣. Totally unplanned as you can tell, but will definitely do this again!

https://www.facebook.com/stuart.davis.52831/videos/10219426151782745/

 

[Waddensky]

Thanks for sharing your experiences, Stu! Very interesting. I've been thinking about hosting these kind of events, maybe doing some outreach (virtual star parties) for a larger audience, by looking up bright objects and tell participants about them while sharing a live feed of the telescope view.

I wonder if this could work for less obvious but still bright deep-sky objects, like the Messiers. Maybe using a webcam of some sort? Any ideas?

[Stu]

16 minutes ago, John said:

I can see that this approach might have a future even beyond the pandemic. While we get good attendances for talks, its proving a little hard to persuade many of my society members to come along to our out of town observatory site to actually do some observing / imaging.

I can see that there might be quite a bit of interest in watching "live observing broadcasts" from the comfort of our meeting room.

Won't be as entertaining as this though

 

 

Excellent! 🤣🤣

This really does work well for ad hoc sharing sessions where you are not able to meet up, or or it is not worth meeting up. We managed to share the images and the identify targets between us so it worked really well as a practical session.

[Stu]

1 hour ago, Waddensky said:

Thanks for sharing your experiences, Stu! Very interesting. I've been thinking about hosting these kind of events, maybe doing some outreach (virtual star parties) for a larger audience, by looking up bright objects and tell participants about them while sharing a live feed of the telescope view.

I wonder if this could work for less obvious but still bright deep-sky objects, like the Messiers. Maybe using a webcam of some sort? Any ideas?

The benefits of using a phone are that it just simplifies the whole process ie capture and streaming on one device. I’m sure you could rig up a CCTV type cameras such as a Samsung SCB2000 to a laptop and stream DSO views over FB quite easily, although the added faff would be enough to put me off. Lazy tykes us visual astronomers you know 😉

[Waddensky]

1 hour ago, Stu said:

Lazy tykes us visual astronomers you know

True 😄. Thanks!

[Stu]

11 minutes ago, Waddensky said:

True 😄. Thanks!

Typo there, should have said ‘us’, I’m one of the lazy ones too 🤣🤣

[Stu]

Just did a couple of nice live videos on FB using the Tak on the Vixen GP mount. Much more stable and much better views even in daylight. These are screen shots of the view.

[PeterW]

I’m now better “virtually tooled you” for when do this again. Ready to give @Stu hard things to go looking for!

good session.

Peter