Global Star Party April 2nd

Live Jupiter special!

It was a beautiful night in Melbourne, then about 10:30 just half an hour before "go-live" the clouds came from nowhere. Fortunately they didn't hang around for long - it must have been a moment of climatological rebellion with the impending ending of daylight saving several hours later.

It was a little bit sad that the Great Red Spot had already transited before we got to air - but I did get some great footage of it before the clouds swept in. By the time we were on air the clouds had cleared and we continued on with the "boring side of Jupiter".

I have been in a number of virtual events usually with my DSLR plugged directly into the laptop and screen sharing the Cannon EOS utility and using live view. The best method of course is a astronomy camera in a web cam setup. On this occasion I tried something a little different. Using the iPhone 6 and an eyepiece adapter, a 25mm eyepiece and the 645 App I was able to take some of the light of Jupiter out (its usually too bright to see any detail on the disk) by taking the ISO to 32 and setting the exposure time to 1/100 of a sec and the through the lens view adjusts to a "what you see is what you get" view. Then sharing that back to my MacBook using reflection, I was able to then screen share the Reflection App into the Google Plus Hangout. Pretty cool!

14inch Smart Dobbie>Barlow>25mm Plossl Eyepiece>Smart Phone Telescope Adapter>645 Pro [Application]>ISO 32 & 1/100 Settings>Reflector to MacBookAir>Reflector Screen record.

An excellent result, but more essentially here, what astronomy can we do with using equipment that we already have or that's relatively inexpensive, but easily accessible.

Thanks to the Global Star Party for hosting me on the show!