Telescopius - Astronomy Planning Made Easy

Insight Observatory recently developed a beneficial partnership with Telescopius.com (formerly known as DSO-Browser). Telescopius is a great online tool for astrophotographers who are planning an astrophotography session. The website provides plenty of useful information covering the deep-sky objects visible from your telescope's location and hosts an active community with an image gallery to share your images.

The Insight Observatory Astronomical Telescopes for Educational Outreach (ATEO) locations are listed in the Telescopius Observatory Parameters section.

Since developing and releasing the ATEO Portal, Personal Image Request (PIR), and Educational Image Request (EIR) online applications for accessing Insight Observatory's three remote telescopes, we have always provided a link to Telescopius.com to allow imagers to get some recommendations for deep-sky targets. Our online applications, in text, provided the ATEO remote telescopes' geographic coordinates and locations so the user or student could enter them on Telescopius.com to view and choose targets from our two remote observatory locations. Recommending using Telescopius to our users was very helpful with selecting targets both in the classroom and for personal use.

In late February this year, Insight Observatory and Telescopius partnered up to bring the perfect deep-sky target selection possible with the use of the ATEO remote telescope network. Insight Observatory's two remote telescope locations are now integrated into the website. When a user or student chooses one of our three telescopes to image with, then clicks telescopius.com to look for target recommendations, the location of the telescope and observatory is immediately selected. There is no longer a need to enter in the coordinates and locations manually. If you go directly to telescopius.com and click in the "Observatory Parameters" field, you will see Insight Observatory listed. When clicked on, it displays all three ATEO remote telescope locations. SkyPi Remote Observatory for ATEO-1 and ATEO-2A and Deep Sky Chile for ATEO-3. One of my personal favorite "What's in the Sky Tonight" features is the hourly and monthly altitude graph that displays the rise, transit, and set times of a deep-sky target. That gives the imager information for the best time to capture that object.

Screenshot of Telescopius.com's Telescope Simulator tool demonstrating the field of view of M45, The Pleiades through Insight Observatory's 16" f/3.7 astrograph reflector, ATEO-1.

Telescopius' owner and developer, Sebastian Garcia, went above and beyond in addition to the features he developed previously mentioned. Sebastian also added all three ATEO remote telescopes to the Telescopius Telescope Simulator. This tool allows users and students to select a telescope and deep-sky target to analyze the field of view (FOV). There have been numerous occasions when working in the educational environment when we would receive questions from instructors asking which telescope would be the best to image certain objects. Now users and students can see how the object "fits" in the field of view of the telescope they are choosing. This makes the process of our educational programs more intuitive than they already are.

Insight Observatory would like to thank Sebastian Garcia for his contributions and efforts to our ongoing mission of "Bringing the Universe to Classrooms Around the World!"

Telescopius is a free online application and is funded largely by donations via Patreon and PayPal.

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Hosting ATEO Images on Astrobin

After carefully seeking out an online gallery solution for their Deep-Sky Image Database of images taken by the Astronomical Telescope for Educational Outreach (ATEO), the crew at Insight Observatory has selected Astrobin.com as the platform.

AstroBin is an image-hosting website specifically designed for astrophotography. The service was created out of the desire to end something that had been going on for too long... The waste of incredible material to the sea of chaos that the Internet can be. For years, fantastic astrophotographs have been uploaded to Internet Forums, often with little or no data, or to general-purpose image hosting websites, invariably with no data attached.

Such an image would be seen by some people, then quickly forgotten, and reduced to nothing more than a bunch of pixels in the giant wasteland of the Internet.

Screenshot of IC 5067 - The Pelican Nebula Imaged on the ATEO on Astrobin.com.

Astrobin is the response to an effort to host, collect, index, and categorize the output of astrophotographers all over the world so that their precious data would serve a purpose, and have meaning forever.

This online service also allows "groups" to be created that will benefit Insight Observatory in separating and keeping track of data collected by school groups and individuals that utilize the ATEO remote robotic telescope located in New Mexico well as other third-party remote telescope networks they use.

Besides being able to describe the details of the image on their "Technical Card", Astrobin has useful educational features built into the website such as overlapping plates that label stars and other objects over the image as well as a "Sky Plot" chart that displays the deep-sky object's exact location.

http://www.astrobin.com/users/insightobs/

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Image Processing with Instagram

After recently installing the Instagram app on my iPhone, I found it has a well-designed and intuitive image processing tool built into it. The staff at Insight Observatory recently decided to add Instagram to its list of Social Networks as a platform to publish Astro-images that they or their clients have acquired using remote robotic telescopes for educational or personal purposes. Back on December 16, 2015, I personally imaged M42, the "Great Orion Nebula" remotely from Siding Spring, Australia. The exposure time was 5 minutes captured with a One-Shot Color CCD camera. After downloading the raw image file from my DropBox account onto my smartphone, I thought to myself "Why not make this image the first one to post on the new Insight Observatory Instagram account?"

M42 Processed with the Instagram Editing Tool.

As I proceeded to post the image of M42, I discovered the image editing tool in the app. I started experimenting with the app's tool and I saw that the editing tool extracted much more information from the image than could be seen on the original raw image file. This gave me the idea of integrating the Instagram app with lessons that Insight Observatory has developed for secondary schools that include imaging with remote robotic telescopes. The students could incorporate image processing with the Instagram app. It is already very popular and well known with many students of this age group. Most students are familiar with how to use the app as they most likely use it for personal social media purposes already. The Instagram app will also allow students to easily share the Astro-images they acquire and process with their friends and family on social media.

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Checkbook Astronomy

Held annually under the dark August skies of Springfield Vermont, a large gathering of amateur telescope makers unfolds on weekends chosen to coincide with the Perseid meteor shower. Called Stellafane, this “Shrine to the Stars” happening is attended by thousands of amateurs from around the world. They are all hoping to get in some dark-sky observing and admire telescopes designed and fabricated by others. This is all conducted in a friendly outdoor-camping, "down-home" atmosphere (which belies all the genius and mind-boggling technology at hand).

1990 Stellafane Convention - Springfield, Vermont.

In the late seventies, during a Stellafane's Friday night “Under the Tent Talks” sharing, I had the good pleasure of hearing a relative newcomer to the world of amateur astrophotographers. He had quickly zoomed nearly to the limit of what one could do with amateur gear, and his inspiring work was showing up in Sky and Telescope and Astronomy Magazines. His name was David Healy, and he was from Long Island, NY.

David stepped behind the modest podium and said respectfully to the assembly of mega-nerds, “I am not a telescope maker (huh? This is Stellafane!), I am a telescope BUYER.” The audience was caught off-guard and cracked up. He then went on to explain how his astrophotos were made with gear he had purchased. It was a talk graced with wit, insight, and plenty of self-effacing humor.

Hey, who has not lusted over those shiny Schmidt-Cass telescopes, CCD cameras, and exotic telescope mounts, jumping from the full-color pages of astronomy mags? But oh those prices! Gonna cost you to crank out dramatic astrophotos, son! David Healy candidly admitted he had the dough, being a NY-based stockbroker/analyst. But he lacked fabrication skills and hit the hobby head-on with his checkbook, with superb results.

I have always been scratching for funds to do astronomy. It’s just the way it is. No sour grapes toward Mr. Healy or anyone else who can afford big-ticket toys, particularly if they are used as productively as David’s were.

But for me, there is a significant upside to being a "bucks down" amateur. Maybe I can make what I need. If you think there are limits to the telescopes and gear that can be made by nonprofessionals, take a trip to Stellafane, or browse the pages of Sky and Telescope to nix that notion. True, I had a decent scope that I had saved up, to serve as the platform for my system. What I needed but could not afford, were costly accessories to create long-focus color shots of galaxies, nebulae, and clusters.

Many of my homemade projects cannot be described in detail here, but they were necessary items, like a permanent scope pier, gear racks, a heated dew cap, modest electrical gear, and the like. One particularly rewarding item was a “cold camera”, which chilled film with dry ice during exposures to enhance light response. (These were pre-CCD days!) Challenges to keeping the film dry (but cold), handling film under the night sky, and developing exposed color film chips all had to be overcome. But they were.

And there is the nub. Sure it's exciting as ever to open that FedEx package to extract the astronomical treasures therein. But how about “rolling your own” once in a while? Let’s get our hands dirty because benefits abound. An accessory that you’ve designed, constructed, and put to successful use can be a source of immense pride. I still take joy in the fact that Astronomy Magazine used an article and photos I put together describing the construction of the aforementioned dew cap, to produce a three-page feature color article on it! Best of all, that dew cap worked beautifully. Total cash outlay? Ten bucks.

I guess one could call that piggy bank astronomy.

Harry Hammond
Mashpee, MA

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