Our local club, like many other astronomy clubs, has been itching to get back out with the general public since the virus hit. Since then, starting in May 2020, we've been doing virtual star parties where several members are online, sharing their computer screens via Zoom and Facebook Live. We take turns sharing whatever happens to be overhead at the time. Last night, Saturday, January 16th, was our latest event. The way it works is we take turns sharing our screens so I would start sharing at the beginning of the exposure and we would talk about the subject and explain what's going on while the LiveStack image continues to build. Because I live in the Las Vegas suburbs under Bortle 8-9ish skies, I'm limited to either narrowband or very short broadband exposures. Also, since I'm shooting with a monochrome camera, all of my "Live" images are monochrome. I use SharpCapPro and the LiveStack feature to automatically combine and process these images instantly for the viewers.
With the weather cooperating for us last night, we were live for 3 hours.
Here are a few images I shared. M31 is always a crowd-pleaser because of its huge size and brightness. This is 5 minutes of 15-second exposures, Luminance filter. More time is definitely needed to clean up some of the noise but I thought we would only be live for 60 minutes so I moved on to other targets.
Next up, while someone else was sharing views from their locations I set up for the Crab nebula, M1. This is one hour of 3-minute exposures, Baader 7nm Ha filter.
And my final image for the group was this shot of the Horsehead and Flame nebula. This was 30 minutes of Ha data with 2-minute exposures.
After we said goodbye to the public and signed off, the weather was still cooperating, the mount was tracking well and this pair was finally rising above the neighbor's roof so I decided to fool around and stack 2 hours of 5 minute exposures in Ha. I'm fairly impressed with this shot because I rarely go after galaxies from my backyard.
M81-M82 Bode's Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy.
All in all, it was a great evening with lots of interesting questions from our live audience. Still not the same as the face-to-face real parties but doing these virtual parties give us the opportunity to introduce the general public to some things that they simply cannot see in the eyepiece like the Horsehead Nebula. If you are a member of an astronomy club I would highly recommend doing this if you haven't thought about it yet.
