Video Astronomy on International Observe The Moon Night 2020

I sort of procrastinated writing this and it is now kind of leaving my mind, so here's a very rough and quick summary of my sidewalk astronomy adventure on September 26th, 2020, or International Observe The Moon Night.

I had been aware of NASA's Observe The Moon Night for about a month, but I was gonna let it slip by with perhaps just a passing glance through my Galileoscope. It was just too dangerous to do a sidewalk astronomy session during the pandemic. But that all changed two days before the night.

I saw this reddit post about a Radical Astronomy Vehicle for Educating Neighbors, a sidewalk astronomy setup on a push-trolley which included a 10" Dobsonian, a homemade radio telescope, a laptop, a phone camera on the dob, and a large monitor to display the phone picture.

After messing around trying to find a solution for showing my phone's view on the television screen, I realized I had everything I needed to make a video astronomy setup myself. One which would be compatible with mask wearing and social distancing.

I hastily made an announcement post (which I've taken down as it isn't relevant anymore) and linked to it on instagram, twitter, and registered it on NASA's observe the moon site. As far as I can tell, no one showed up based upon seeing my announcement. Oh well, that wasn't too surprising--I don't have a large following.

I went to the Sheetz gas station near the Cline Observatory. Arrived at about 7:10 PM. Sunset at 7:15 PM. Intended start at 7:30 PM, but ended up being more like 7:40.

I decided to use my Celestron Omni XLT 150 on its CG-4 equatorial mount instead of the dob, because I'd have access to the slow motion knobs and I'd be able to track the Earth's rotation easily.

Set up took a long time. I had to plug in all the electronics, set up the equatorial mount, get the telescope pointed at the Moon, and... wait. It looks awful. 

Oh.

I took the telescope apart to clean the primary mirror, and I did not remember to collimate it after I was done, so it was extraordinarily out of collimation. Luckily I had my collimating eyepiece so I was able to give it a quick (but by no means perfect) tune-up.

I used the 15mm Goldline (not a great eyepiece--fuzzy at the edge of field, but it provides minimum useful power in my XLT150 with the tiny pupil of the phone camera) at first. Image is projected onto camera lens, where it is displayed on the camera app. Phone screen is mirrored on my laptop, with the mirroring software displayed on the large secondary monitor. These software are stock features on Android & Windows 10.

Me & my setup.

Throughout the whole night (closing at 10:10PM), I had about 30 or 35 people come to take a look.

I ended up not being even close to polar aligned (Polaris was behind the building), so I had to use both knobs to track, which partly reduced the usefulness of the equatorial mount. The mount was just kind of a pain to work around, because in the orientation I had it I had to lean up against the mount to get to the eyepiece to look for whatever my target was. Not a problem once I'd found and tracked the target though.

To change magnifications, I swapped in and out the 2.5x and 5x Barlows, finding them to be fairly useful when used like this.

I only looked at the planets (Jupiter & Saturn) on one occasion, near the beginning of the night, while two girls watched and assisted. It was very difficult to get and keep the objects in the eyepiece, and they look nothing like as good as they do through the eyepiece. It might be worth trying these objects with the specialized NexImage 5 camera instead of the phone camera.

Full disk Moon. 50x

Most of the time I kept the Moon barlowed up (2.5x w/ 15mm Goldline, or 125x), which didn't quite fit the Moon in the field of view, but vastly improved the quality of smaller features, which I often zoomed in on. There's a lot of distortion at the edge of the field of view with this eyepiece--no good for video imaging, as the shapes and scales of the object would change as the object drifts through the fov. Luckily I wasn't doing videos for stacking, I was just showing off the live image, and it wasn't too noticeable. I often used digital zoom in the camera app to zoom in.

Some highlights:

• I steered one person away from buying a Celestron telescope. (The Omni XLT150 is a Celestron telescope, which is why it came up) They're either really expensive, high quality scopes, or they're cheap beginner trash which is way too popular on Amazon. I turned him in the direction of a Dobsonian.

• A loud group of teens who had been kicked out of a party swarmed around Sheetz. I showed them the Moon. "Are you famous?" "Pfft I wish!" "[other kid] is tik-tok famous." (They should probably have been doing a much better job at social distancing than they were doing, but some moon nerd isn't gonna persuade a bunch of loud teens to take the pandemic seriously.)

• A family with an autistic kid (4 years old) came to look. The kid was obsessed with space and knew so much about it. Reminded me of myself when I was young. His favorite planet was even Jupiter! I sent them my tweet thread about how to buy a telescope for a child.
  

•  People recognized me from past times I've been out with my Dobsonian. One fellow nicknamed me "Mr. Moon Man." One person recognized me from the Observatory.
  

Two objects I kept coming back to were Plato, with its flat lake and nearby islands, and Copernicus, a large and very well detailed crater. I also investigated Messier, my favorite lunar crater, though it had no shading and it was kind of fuzzy with the not-quite-collimated scope at 125x.

Sea of Rain, Bay of Rainbows, and Plato. 125x+

I probably should have just used the 6" Dobsonian instead of the Omni XLT 150. Would have made set up and pack up much easier. Setting up or packing up the mount is a multi-step procedure with the XLT150, but with a dob it's just "carry two things to the car." Given that I had so much electronics to deal with, the extra time it took to deal with the mount wasn't really helpful. Next time I think I'll use the dob. Plus I get to say "this only costs 300 dollars!" instead of "well it normally costs 500 but i got it for 300 because i bought the mount new and the tube came from craigslist and--" and that's very helpful. Most people think telescopes are extremely expensive! They're one or two orders of magnitude less than most people think they are.

The general response was good, people thought it was cool, there were a few oohs and ahs, but it was nothing like the reaction you get looking through the eyepiece with your eye ball. But still, compromises must be made for safety. If you want to look at the Moon through a screen, you can usually do that by just going online.

 

Copernicus. 125x+

I was afraid someone might think it was fake, which never really happens with visual astronomy. There was only incredulity once, and by stepping in front of the mirror to block out the light I managed to convince them it was in fact real.

Video astronomy sort of has the downsides of both visual astronomy and astrophotography. Like visual astronomy, the results aren't processed to bring up brightness or sharpness or get around seeing. Like astrophotography, it's a sort of difficult, technical thing and it doesn't leave you with the same "this is real" impression you get with visual. But it is the only truly safe option during a pandemic. I can't sanitize eyepieces on the fly every time someone uses them.

I'll definitely be doing this again, but I'll be yearning for the day when I can do it safely through the eyepiece directly. I'm going to dress up as an astronaut and do this again on Halloween, I think. I still have my Halloween costume from last year, where I attended at star party in the mountains and helped out the local astronomy club and impressed every child under 10 with my hyperrealistic (read: tyvek suit and a helmet from Spirit) costume.

So yeah. Video astronomy. Not ideal, but safe.