Live Stream Chat

[Gordon G. Spear]

What do I need to do on your YouTube channel to use Chat? I was there for the last stream, but could not use Chat. It told me I needed to create a channel??? What is that, and how do I do that?

[Bob Denny]

You shouldn't need to create your own channel. If you clicked the big blue button in the email it takes you to our channel at https://www.youtube.com/dc3dreamsastro. If you go there now, you should see this:

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And if you click as shown above you should see this with the chat stream on the right.

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[Gordon G. Spear]

This is all fine. This is what I see. BUT, when I try to type in the chat window it tells me I need to create a channel. When I try to create a channel it tells me it must first have a name. I have not been able to find how to specify a name... so I can then create a channel????

[Bob Denny]

I see you figured it out :-) Thanks for the suggestion last night. I have put it into the system for a future release. I do have a question: Most people need to adjust the firle from the catalog position in order to include comparison stars, and these would vary depending on the field of view and camera geometry and orientation. Would the exact coordinates of the variable, which would place it exactly in the center of the field, be generally useful?

[Gordon G. Spear]

I see you figured it out :-) Thanks for the suggestion last night. I have put it into the system for a future release. I do have a question: Most people need to adjust the firle from the catalog position in order to include comparison stars, and these would vary depending on the field of view and camera geometry and orientation. Would the exact coordinates of the variable, which would place it exactly in the center of the field, be generally useful?

Bob,

Observers and imagers always have this problem.The solution always has been take an image, adjust the coordinates a little, take another image, repeat ad nausium until you get something you can live with. With qued observing this can take some time. My "ideal solution" would be to have a clickable image of the field. Click where you like the center of your image(s) to be. Then some gremlin does the hard work and you get images that you want. That probably sounds too difficult. An alternative would be to ask the user something like... "enter arcminutes left/right and up/down where you would like the new center of your image(s) to be." Then the behind the scenes gremlins would do the work, and, voila, you have the images situated the way you would like. Observe normally always know their field of view in arcminutes. In case they do not, perhaps the gremlins could tell the user the field of view before asking for the offset adjustments.

Does this answer your question at all? (By the way, such a feature would be great!)

-Gordon

[Bob Denny]

In that case, most users employ a pictorial planetarium app and line things up the way they want. Sky Safari and TheSky HD (iOS) are good ones, and of course the old stand by TheSKy and Starry Night, with the latter being widely used in education and the former among amateur astronomers, (and of course those with Paramount mounts). There is also the Aladin The ACP web user interface does have a miniature interactive planetarium that, when activated, shows the field at which the telescope is currently pointing. This also comes from Aladin, and is interactive with a search facility, selectable field of view and color palettes. By composing the image in that simple little facility you can get the RA/Dec to put into the web form and have the composure you want.

I was just at the AAVSO annual meeting in Flagstaff, and asked a few people whether they adjusted their fields to "get" comp stars, and the answers were mostly "I don't need to", so your suggestion to add the variable stars is a good one. Actually the GCVS 5.1 could be extracted then added to the existing ACP Deep Sky catalog. I have added this as a to do:

ACP-1652 - Add the GCVS stars to the existing "Deep Sky" database

[Eric Dose]

For AAVSO photometry, I have to adjust many more fields of view to get good guide stars than to get comp stars.

[Bob Denny]

You were featured tonight :-)

[Eric Dose]

You were featured tonight :-)

AAaaaggh...no no no it's not true, I didn't do whatever I was accused of...Tolga must have done it, his scopes gobbled up all the photons, that's the ticket...

[Bob Denny]

Yeah it was Tolga for sure!!!