The Astropotamus

Eric Wright: Welcome to BackFocus, bringing astronomy together. I'm your host, Eric Wright.

Rowan: And I'm Rowan.

Eric Wright: Just as BackFocus is essential for a sharp image, this podcast is about bringing the people behind astronomy into focus. Every episode, we sit down with astronomers, astrophotographers, educators, observatory staff, content creators, and community leaders to hear their stories, learn from their experience, and celebrate the hobby that brings all of us together under the night sky.

Rowan: And it is in pursuit of that goal that I have an event calendar for you, as well as some events within the state of Nebraska and a few other places. So come July 14th. We'll be having a new moon at 9:43 UTC on July 14th. The new moon will pass over the area. It'll be a great time without any bright moon to look up at the sky with a telescope and get to see some of those faraway things. Come August 12th, we'll have the next total solar eclipse. It'll pass over Russia, Greenland, and Iceland in the path of totality, as well as a few other European countries. And finally, we'll have our next new moon. On July 14th, we'll be having a new moon at 9:43 UTC on July 14th. So be on the lookout for that. Now, within the state of Nebraska, one event I have for you is a church called Calvary Memorial. We'll be holding a VBS for kids that is inspired by astronomy. They'll be learning about the Word of God through the process of learning about constellations and other celestial bodies. And I think that sounds cool to me. So without further ado... I'll turn this back over to Eric for you.

Eric Wright: Today's guest is Eric Loyd, better known as Astropotamus. Eric is an astrophotographer, astronomy outreach advocate, and host of the Star River podcast, where he explores the unique journeys that connect people together through space and time. He's also passionate about restoring used telescopes and putting them into the hands of kids at star parties and helping to inspire the next generation of astronomers. Eric, I want to thank you for joining me and welcome to the Back Focus podcast.

Eric Loyd: Well, thank you, Eric. I appreciate the invite, and I'm looking forward to our conversation today.

Eric Wright: Awesome. Well, hey, as a nod to your podcast (StarRiver Podcast), I know that you like to do a sip of your favorite drink. This is not something I do on my podcast, but I wanted to give you a nod to yours. Today, I am sipping stream soda. It's just mug soda. So I don't know if you have anything on your side, but we'll clink glasses.

Eric Loyd: I always do. I always have some water because my throat gets dry when I talk. So that's what I've got today. It's the middle of my workday. No cocktails or wine for me here right now. But thank you for the shout out on the ritual there. I appreciate that. Cheers.

Eric Wright: Not a problem. Cheers. Okay, Eric. Nice name. So I just want to get to know about you, your background, and how you kind of got into astronomy. What kind of really got you inspired to do this kind of work?

Eric Loyd: So it's a multi-chapter story. I'll try to keep it short though. When I was a wee little kid, my father got me a cheap, probably Sears, you know, Tasco, whatever, department store telescope. And I lived in the country and I had space to set it up sort of in a clearing in our yard. And there were no lights around to speak of. And there were, you know, beautiful skies. So I looked through this little cheap-ass telescope and saw, you know, I tell people that I didn't see the rings of Saturn, but I could tell that Saturn was more than just a round blob. You know, it really was a cheap-ass telescope. That's cool.

Eric Wright: They usually are when you first start out.

Eric Loyd: Yeah, right. You know, my dad didn't know if this was something I was going to be interested in or, you know, was I going to destroy a, you know, a thousand dollar telescope, you know, or whatever. So, you know, I understand. I respect his decision. The funny thing is, I've always been interested in science and space, but the telescope itself just sort of, it wasn't good enough to keep my attention once I understood its limitations. And honestly, it became a prop. I'm trying to debate how much information to give you here. But so the, my life was complicated as a kid. I had a father and a stepfather. I call them both dad. It was the stepfather that gave me my telescope. But my first father was a police officer. And so I had like toy guns. You know, you're the child of a cop. You have toy guns. And that telescope became like the bazooka of my toy gun collection. That's awesome. Because when you removed it from the tripod and you had the little, you know, the plastic mount thing that would go back onto the tripod, you could like bolt something to that and it became a handle. And then you had all these little extended pieces and stuff you get out onto it. And like, it was just perfect. Like set on your shoulder. Pretend it was like a rocket launcher or whatever. So it actually started in a couple of home movies when I was a teenager. And it was literally a prop.

Eric Wright: But that's fantastic.

Eric Loyd: But and I'm not going to drag this on too much longer. But there was one thing about this telescope that I thought was unique. It had a Barlow that came with it. And the Barlow had a very small little plastic sleeve at the end of it. That you could use to just slide it out like maybe a half an inch to like fine tune the magnification or the focus or whatever. And that plastic sleeve was clear. And so the weird thing about this was they designed it to be able to do that as a Barlow. But then if you used this plastic sleeve and like put it down on a piece of paper, as long as you had light shining through that little plastic sleeve, it became like a little miniature microscope.

Eric Wright: Oh cool.

Eric Loyd: So I got intrigued by the optics of how this worked. And it stuck in the back of my head. And when I went off to school, I actually studied micro electronic engineering, which is building microchips basically. But a lot of that is, you know, staring through microscopes at the actual chips and looking for defects on sub micron, you know, scales and things like this. So the optics was never too far from my brain. And when I became kind of a make your own Barlow. I got interested in photography, specifically wildlife photography and birds of prey. So eagles and hawks and things like that. So I amassed quite a collection of big glass for my camera, my cameras. And mind you, this is back in like the 90s. So I'm shooting slide film, you know, basically trying to get published, which I did get some published pictures.

Eric Loyd: But at one point, I was like, I'm going to do this. But at one point I said, oh, hey, I have this vague memory of, you know, looking up at the skies as a kid. At this point, I lived in the city. There wasn't a lot of skies to look at. But Comet Yakutaki was in town. And so I threw my camera onto a tripod and I started taking pictures of the comet. And of course, with slide film, you have to wait to see what the results are.

Eric Wright: Yeah.

Eric Loyd: Yeah. There's no integration, right? It's, you know, if you take a 30 second picture, that's what you got, etc. Anyway, it was horrible. It's absolutely horrible. And I shelved the whole thing after a while. My wife comes along a few years ago and says, hey, you were interested in astronomy as a kid. I'm going to get you this Christmas present for SLOOH.com, S-L-O-O-H, which is still in existence. It was one of, if not the first sort of remote operated telescopes that you could subscribe to.

Eric Wright: Oh, super cool.

Eric Loyd: So, you know, you got like, I don't know, 10 hours a month or whatever. It was that you could aim their telescopes at a target and it would capture images and you would get the data. And on the one hand, it was really cool because these telescopes are on like the Canary Islands and Chile and all these sort of, you know, remote places that we're used to these days. But this was sort of brand new at the time. And, you know, you figure out-

Eric Wright: And 10 hours is a lot of time. Yeah.

Eric Loyd: Yeah. And, you know, it would reset. So it wasn't just like, here's 10 hours. It was, here's 10 hours in January. Here's 10 hours in February. Here's 10 hours in March. And I wasn't quite sophisticated enough to take advantage of what, you know, what that meant in terms of target selection at that time, but I understood what it represented. And so no matter what I tried to make use of my 10 hours, even it was just like, aim at the moon, you know, or whatever, just do something. And that's when I started-

Eric Wright: Let me, I'm going to interject real quick. That part of astronomy is one of the biggest aspects of astronomy is target selection. You have to look at the weather. You have to look at the location, the light pollution, the target, where it's going to be in the sky, how much time you're going to get with it. Because you might have 10 hours to shoot, but that target might only be up for five hours.

Eric Loyd: Yeah. And at the same time, I don't want to make it sound like, you know, I would just pick something basically at that time. I'd be, you know, they had a rudimentary version of what would sort of like, if you went to Telescopius today, you could, you know, kind of put some parameters in. It would give you a list of potential targets. They had something similar to that. I didn't really know what I was doing. So I just like, you know, well, that looks like it might be fun to take a picture of Kind of thing. But, you know, I am more sophisticated now. There's obviously a lot more sophisticated software than there was 20-ish years ago. More than that, actually. But at the same time, you don't have to be, you know, you could just literally like look at the sky and say, that looks interesting. I'll see what happens if I take pictures of it. And, you know, if you happen to be taking pictures and the full moon comes up, maybe next time you'll make a note and say like, oh, well, you know, that turned out badly because the moon. And maybe you'll choose differently next time. Or maybe you lucked out and the moon wasn't a factor. And so now you realize that, oh, the full moon might be a factor if I'm aiming towards it. But if I'm aiming away from it doesn't matter. So, you know, it is a learning experience. But the SLOOH got me back interested in it. And then I purchased an actual Celestron C8 telescope. I talked about this actually in one of my podcast episodes with somebody who went down almost the exact same path of what technology. A Celestron C8, a Canon 450, also known as an XSI, you know, a T-mount adapter. For the back of the camera. And then trying to get that C8 to take pictures on a Skywatcher EQ6R mount.

Eric Wright: Okay.

Eric Loyd: That was frustrating. I will say this about the process. It taught me a lot about the engineering of mounts and how the telescope is actually made. It reminded me of all those optics stuff that I'd learned as an undergraduate. And to finally answer your question, I did start amassing some equipment to be able to do, you know, what we would today call sort of real backyard astrophotography. But I didn't live in a place that was really easy to do sort of logistically. I still, different country, but I still live in the country. I don't mean different country like politically. It's a different countryside than where I grew up. But I still live in the country now. And it's a beautiful sky. And I love to take pictures of it. But at the time, like lugging that EQ6R Pro mount out, setting it up on the tripod, putting a Celestron C8 on it, mounting a camera and the camera adapters and cables and blah. You know, it's two hours of setup. And then, uh-oh, looks like it might rain. You know, quick, undo everything as best you can and literally chuck it in the backseat of the car.

Rowan: Oh, that's the worst.

Eric Wright: Quite literally, I have the same exact mount right now. And I, it takes an hour and a half to lug this heavy thing out there. Now I don't have a C8, so I'm not dealing with that heavy weight. Usually I was using like a regular tiny Rokinon camera lens and that's all I would use. So the top wasn't that bad, but I just upgraded to a Newtonian that's a six inch F4. It's not huge, but it puts a little extra weight on it. Yeah. You always have to be concerned about the optics of your equipment. You know, you could toss it in that seat, but you're going to use that seatbelt.

Eric Loyd: Well, there were days like maybe too many days in, uh, some inclement weather where I was literally riding around with my astrophotography gear thrown in the backseat because I didn't want it to get wet. And yet I didn't have a place to put it. I don't have a garage. I don't have a shed. You know, it's either in the house or it's in the car or it's on the lawn. Yeah. You know, there's, um, there's no place to store things really for us right now. Um, so it was very frustrating to just literally set things up, maybe get a couple hours of imaging and then, you know, I'd have to tear it down in the morning unless it was going to be a fantastic day. Um, so the progression there was, uh, I got a tele gizmos 365 cover and that at least let me leave the guts of everything. Like the scope and the mount were left outside. Actually for a couple of years, uh, 24 seven and I live in upstate New York. So that means, you know, we get a hundred inches of rain, we get a hundred inches of snow, we get a hundred degrees temperature. So, um, oh, and we get a hundred days a year of clouds.

Rowan: I know the feeling.

Eric Wright: I live in Cleveland. So I, yeah. Oh yeah.

Eric Loyd: So, you know, it was better because I could just go out with the cover off, attach the camera and be ready to go. And if the rain was coming, I could detach the camera and throw the cover back on. Um, but it was still frustrating. And so I don't want to like, uh, make this like an ad, but I will say that three years ago I bought a Skyshed pod used the person who owned it that I bought it from was buying like the new version, which includes a, uh, automated rotating dome and a slot, that kind of thing. So he had his old manual Skyshed pod, um, that he was gonna sell. I bought it. He was literally driving to Canada to pick up his new one and I was on the way. So he dropped it off, which was like, that was awesome. My wife made him cookies. It was, you know, it was a good old time.

Eric Wright: And you know, it's a good time when the wife brings cookies.

Eric Loyd: Um, so that pod, that Skyshed pod. For me was the moment where I really started to feel like, okay, now I am at, I am an astrophotographer as opposed to just somebody who takes pictures because my gear was set up 24 seven. If it was raining on the pod, not my gear. If it was a good night, even if it was just like, okay, well it might rain, you know, at midnight, but it's winter or whatever. It's, you know, as opposed to the middle of summer, um, you know, maybe I could get a couple hours before that. I can go out, open it up. And then it's still manual. I have to go open it and close it myself, but that's a lot easier to just be like, okay, it's going to rain. I'm going to go out, I'm going to close it and walk back into the house, then have to tear things down. So I don't have to tear things down. I don't have to set them up. They're set up once I leave it. And in the, so I've had that for three years now. And in the past three years, I have taken more images than I have in the entire rest of my life. Um, just because my equipment is available 24 seven, basically. Um, but that is the progression of me becoming an astrophotographer.

Eric Wright: Okay. Well, yeah, that's fantastic. I personally, my experience is a little different than that. Um, I think that started because of COVID. I've always been interested in science and space and technology. Uh, but the, when COVID hit. I, when COVID happened is when I started streaming and that's when I started trying to do gaming and I tried to have some kind of social life, which didn't really exist. So I bought all this expensive equipment. I have lights, cameras, microphone, and then I got another job and COVID kind of ended and kind of waned to the side. I didn't really have any interest, but I still loved the stars. And then. The big moment happened when we had the, uh, the total solar eclipse. And I was like, oh my gosh, I've got to take a picture of that. I've never seen one before. And I went out and tried to do the best internet search I could find as a professional computer tech. That's something I would hope I was good at, but I was terrible at it. And some people recommended this and some people recommended that I ended up getting an NK 105, which is like a bird watching telescope. It's probably. Okay. Ish for the moon. And I used it for the solar eclipse and my experience wasn't that great. I just had a regular tripod. It was not equatorial at all. It was not tracking and I wasn't taking photos. I didn't know what exposures were, so it was all new to me. But what I learned from there was when I jumped into my local astronomy club and I started learning more. I started learning more about astronomy and it really is kind of a give and take. You learn information from the group and your knowledge grows. And then of course your equipment changes, your goals change and your equipment changes. And it's kind of that loop. And so that's one thing that we as astronomers have to be a little careful about is just burning that hole because that hole in your pocket gets bigger and bigger if you're not careful.

Eric Loyd: Well, I would actually like to see those images of yours someday that you took of the eclipse because I joke about eclipses as saying like eclipses are like sex and chili. Even bad sex and chili is still good sex and chili.

Eric Wright: This is true.

Eric Loyd: You only get like one or maybe two, if you're lucky, eclipses in your life unless you hunt them. But. I figure like, you know, yeah, it might not be what you might see in a magazine or what have you, but any picture of a solar eclipse is still an amazing picture. So I'd love to see those someday. That'd be cool.

Eric Wright: Yeah. I, what's ironic about it is I took the pictures, but the pictures that I have are screenshots of the pictures. I don't have the raw image. I'm kicking myself for that. I took it on in a T3i Canon camera. Yep. And I don't have the raw images anymore. So I will have to hunt the next one because I don't think the next one that comes to America is until like 19 or 2040 something. So it's. Yeah.

Eric Loyd: Yeah. If you feel like, you know, burning through some passport miles, you can see a few eclipses in the next few years. But none of them are here.

Eric Wright: This is true. Yeah. So that's kind of been my experience is. Um, I was fortunate to have a little extra money to go buy this and that I didn't buy everything all upfront at once. A couple of big ticket items. I did kind of pull the trigger and say, yep, there goes my vacation for this year, but it took about two or three years for me to really gather all the equipment to get the pictures I have now, which are amazing astrophotography images, especially since I got a cooled astrophotography camera. So now it maintains a temperature at negative 10 C and I was able to get the pics insight for processing. The software is actually quite expensive, but there are free alternatives out there to use that are just as adept. But once I started processing my images, they really started coming out. So the unprocessed is still raw. And that's, I think that's something that I want to touch on is. Yeah. When you're looking through your telescope, that's an unprocessed image. When you're taking a picture, that's an unprocessed picture. You're only seeing their bare bones. But the interesting part about astronomy and astrophotography and specifically is that the data is always there. You just got to pull it out.

Eric Loyd: I tell people, so I don't know how much you share your images with people beyond your like immediate circle. But I often get people asking me the question of, you know, I'll show them a picture of whatever it is. Orion nebula, classic example, right? Everybody eventually actually probably starts by taking pictures of the Orion nebula as their first deep space object or one of the first, but even through a decent pair of binoculars, it's obvious that there's something different about that, you know, that section of the sky. If you've got really good vision, you might even be able to see something just with your naked eye. A cell phone camera can take a pretty good image these days and show you some even more detail. But when you start taking pictures with even just a, you know, put your cell phone camera up to the eyepiece of a telescope, let alone a, you know, a cool dedicated astro camera or anything like that. Orion really is an amazing thing to take pictures of. There's just so much there. So I get people who ask me all the time. Is that what it would look like if I were standing next to it in space? And this is where I tell people two things. First of all, your eye is not a camera, even though it's very similar to a camera, the camera works differently from your eyes. So, you know, I can take a five minute exposure with a camera and I can gather light over the entire course of that five minutes. Your eye sort of is constantly gathering light, but it's not summing it's not adding the light that it gets now to the light a minute ago. You know, it's like, it's constantly renewing. So you can't physically like stack that image in your brain. You have to use a computer to do that and be able to get that either long exposure or multiple exposures that you stack to kind of increase the effect of exposure. And the second thing is--

Eric Wright: One day. Okay. One day.

Eric Loyd: Yeah. Six Million Dollar man is coming, except it'll be $6 billion at that point. But the other thing is this is the thing that I try to really drive home is. I'm an artist. I am taking, yeah. If you used the same equipment and you followed the same process that I did, you know, this exposure for this amount of time, et cetera, you'll get the same data, but that's like saying, you know, two people in a water. Water a watercolor art class looking at the same bowl of fruit they're going to paint that bowl of fruit differently they're going to choose to emphasize certain colors or they're going to choose to emphasize a certain contrast in the light you know they're going to make it look the way they want it to look and so I am an artist you are going to see what I want you to see when I create that image and when I share it with you because I want you to see purple so I'm going to bring out purple you know you other eric you might be like I hate purple um I'm going to shove purple to the background and I'm going to bring out the red um you know so you're going to process that image differently. And to me this is what makes astrophotography such an amazing wonderful tool and an educational process and a artistic process and to some people it's a very mathematical process but the data like you said the data is always there and so there are sources of astronomical data whether it's nasa makes all their images public uh some people share their raw image data just because they're nice and you can go get somebody else's raw data and you can process it the way you want so you don't even need to have a telescope or a camera or yeah you know you don't because you live in downtown manhattan and you can go be an astrophotographer sort of adjacent I guess by processing the data that other people took. And again you're going to process it differently than I am going to process it and I'm going to process it differently from the person next door to me and I think that's what's so wonderful about this hobby is I am always learning something because there's always somebody else who did it differently and when I see the difference even something as common as the orion nebula or m-31 or these sort of classic things that are up there I see a picture somebody else took of it and I'm like wow I never noticed that detail before you know that dust or that shadow looking thing or these colors or whatever like how did they do that and you ask them the question and they're like oh well I did this and I did that and I did it in this order or whatever and I'm like oh I've always been doing yeah y things but in a different order and in this world order makes a difference so you know just I guess it's very similar to um cooking in that you know every chocolate chip cookie is basically the same ingredients but grandma's chocolate chip cookies are different than you know your chocolate chip cookies because you make them differently um and I think that's what really keeps me in the world of astrophotography and astronomy in general because I think anybody can do it you don't have to spend a lot of money on it you don't have to spend any money on it these days and you can still reap most of the benefits of doing that and learn an amazing amount of stuff about the sky above us.

Eric Wright: Absolutely and honestly that's something that I've learned through building the cvas website I built the astronaut astronomy imaging tool and one of the guys asked me hey can we put other surveys on here and as we started going back and forth with surveys we started noticing certain objects in the sky that aren't labeled and we as a group have already well at least one person in our group has already discovered a planetary nebula and he's working on confirming that data but it's this is something we can do now and we don't have ginormous expensive thousand dollar telescopes um I will say that the mount I have the whole rig I've got I probably dropped probably about two or three thousand dollars on it but realistically you could take a small as long as it's a tracker they probably cost a hundred two hundred dollars something like that maybe a little more and you could throw a dslr camera that you might already have from your covid streaming days a lot of people bought cameras and a lot of people bought microphones they could use for astronomy um and all you would need is a camera lens that's what I use is broken on camera lens and I at first used a canon camera that's what I used to initially start my photography was it the best no because I was still learning it if I took that same equipment today I would make a lot better pictures because I've been through the rigor of setting up my equipment for three hours not being able to find jupiter right you know now I can get fully polar aligned in about 20 30 minutes and that took me a long time of doing the same thing over and over again and failing and I'm going to tell you there's nothing worse than going out to the site and every single time something goes wrong every single time without a doubt something breaks

Rowan: Oh yeah, haha.

Eric Wright: I don't know if that's just me.

Eric Loyd: No it's not just you, haha. And even so you know I talk about having the skyshed pod and how awesome it is to just sort of have this like permanent observatory in my backyard kind of thing even still you know it's 50 yards for me to walk from the back door to the pod it's I mean it's not that far right it's not like I'm hiking across a five acre field or whatever and yet there are times where like I've gone out and I've opened the pod and I've you know sort of gotten things ready to go or whatever and uh you know I come back inside and of course these days there's a I have a network connection out there so everything is remote I don't have to actually be in the pod if I'm doing imaging and I go back inside and I wait for everything to get dark or whatever and I'm setting up my imaging run and then I'm I start my you know my autofocus or whatever it is I'm doing and the images are coming back you know blank or oh no totally gray or whatever I'm like what's going on and I finally ended up getting just some cheap wi-fi cameras that I have aimed some of them are aimed at the camera some or at the telescope some of them are aimed like down the axis of the scope so you can kind of see what the telescope is looking at so um I finally got smart got one of these cameras and had it aimed at the scope and I'm looking at it and I'm like oh I left the lens cap on or you know the cap on the front of the scope and it's like yeah oh man at this point I almost feel like I want that sense of I'm messed up and the universe is against me and everything and again it's 50 yards it's a hundred yards round trip to go out there take the cap off and walk back in the house takes me all of you know a minute whatever and yet there are times I'm like man screw that I'm just gonna leave it I'm not gonna take images tonight because I messed up you know it's like self-punishment there because I forgot to take the cap off the telescope or whatever.

Eric Wright: and that's something that I want to touch on is the community of astronomers uh there was for I'll give you a good example I was at observatory park with my friend willie and I think it was just us at a time and then later on some other guys came out there but for a solid I want to say a solid hour and a half two hours we troubleshot an issue where I would take a picture and the stars looked like they were doubled and I was like what in the world is going on I don't understand this I would take a picture I would take flats every single image I had doubled images I'm like I focused the autofocus worked but it wouldn't find where I was going and eventually it took me a long time to find out that I had turned on annotations in nina and all those extra stars were very tiny words for the stars they were labels of the stars and I was like are you freaking kidding me so I was taking actual pictures those were not ever imaged so I wasted two hours on troubleshooting this and I could have given up if it wasn't for the fact that Willie was there also and willie was saying no eric let's troubleshoot this let's figure it out let's just you know go through the problems and that is what I love about astronomy is that I can say hey man you're imaging tonight he's like yep and so we both show up at the same place or he can come over to my house or whatever and there's been times where I've literally been like I think I'm just gonna quit and he's like no let's take another look at it see what happens and it's me and I'm gonna give him an extra push and then I'll come around the next day and be like I really I got four hours on this target which is fantastic four hours is still four hours of data you could have gotten 10 but 4 is still really good so I really want to emphasize that has that ever ex have you ever had that experience yourself?

Eric Loyd: almost every day um now for me it's a little bit different I'm I this is going to sound weird with all the connectivity and outreach that we have um I'm going to go back to night and I'm going to show you I do in the world of astronomy I'm not a member of any astronomy clubs so um I do things sort of off to the side and remote and whatever um but I do outreach programs for local um like community centers and um things like that and so I'm engaged with people who ask me questions. like they want to get into the hobby and now I'm their mentor or whatever and so I hope I answer questions correctly when people ask me whatever the questions that they have but if they ask me something that I don't know or if I am having some sort of equipment issue that I can't figure out then you know for better or for worse we live in an interconnected world these days and there are such huge online communities in the world of astronomy and astrophotography and if you're into you know helioseismology you could do that if you have a small radio antenna in your backyard and you're doing radio astronomy there's groups for that you know it's just whatever aspect of astronomy or space science in general that you're interested in. There's a group or thousands of groups that you can connect to online and um I find that it is for me it's often like you said you did this task you thought you were doing things right and then you had like these as you call it these double images or whatever and you couldn't figure it out so for me if I have something similar it usually tends to be something related to my gear that I added a new piece of equipment and I thought I understood how it worked or how it should be connected or whatever and it turns out things aren't working I will go to an online community of some sort ask my question and inevitably someone will say well you know I have that same problem because or I had that same problem because I have that same equipment and here's the problem here's the solution get back to me let me know how it worked so you know it's a bit like uh doing a pen pal type thing uh back in the day as opposed to being in the same room but the effect is the same I get my assistance or I can ask questions on behalf of people who ask me questions and it is it's like a glorious time to be alive I think in and I say that not jokingly um you know the sum total of human knowledge is basically available on your phone it's an amazing thing and people are so willing to share that information share that knowledge share their experience in it's in many hobbies it's in many fields like that. But um you know I think there's something in the world of astrophotography specifically that people really want to share what they've done both as a you know like a finished product here's the picture I took of you know fill in the blank astronomical object but then they also want to help somebody else take that same picture and so they want to share their technique they want to share their processing they want to share their equipment they want to help other people and I don't know of any other hobby or activity involved with anyway that has that same sense of sort of uh like unconditional sharing um you know there are things that I'm involved in but they're often based on some sort of competition even if it's just like bowling night you know um if you're going bowling you want to win you want that trophy etc and so yeah you might help somebody figure out how to bowl the ball better but you don't want to give away all your secrets right you know so astrophotography I think is a little bit different in that people are willing to give away their secrets because they have such a joy of sharing that information and seeing other people take up the hobby and you know I remember the first time I helped somebody with their equipment problems and they came back to me and said you know so excited like look at this picture I took of you know whatever it was yeah you know it's like oh my god I can't believe I took this picture you know it's like that's the joy that's why you do it that's why I do it.

Eric Wright: That's exactly right um I think I've astronomy treats me a lot like linux treats me linux I 100 would love to just switch from windows to linux and I always have an issue with linux something happens something breaks and back in the day you had to write your own drivers and every time there's an update everything broke and you had to fix it yourself astronomy is kind of in that niche there's people there with you who know how to fix it too so it's a little technical but it's a little bit of a challenge to be honest with you if you put a little bit of troubleshooting thought into the issue usually you figure out the problem and you figure it out pretty quickly and if you don't there's always another night most I would say at least 80 percent of my astrophotography imaging sessions I've chalked up to experience I didn't come away with a good image from that one but I learned a lot that night I bonded with friends and I had a lot of fun and it was just another bit of experience to know hey maybe don't do that but I learned a lot that night I bonded with friends and I had a lot of fun and it was just another bit of experience to know hey maybe don't , don't do that turn on the annotations next time but I did want to hop into the astronomy spotlight section of the show I want to ask you what your favorite object is for like your favorite messier Object .

Eric Loyd: That would be m87 or sorry not you say m81 bode's galaxy um and it's not maybe the most you know glamorous or you know there's not a lot going on there it's just a galaxy I mean that sounds so jaded I guess but um it's not flashy in any sense but the reason it's my favorite there's two reasons actually one of them is like it's always there it's in the northern sky it's circumpolar you can image it almost any day of any or any night of any day of the year and because of that it is one of the most photographed galaxies and it is also it's to me it's such a great kind of if you asked a five-year-old kid who knew something about science or space to say like draw me a galaxy they're gonna draw m81 yeah that's what we see yeah that's it's like it's this like classic galaxy shape and we see it mostly sort of at an angle but kind of edge on and it's just anytime I don't know what else I'm going to take a picture of basically I take pictures of m81 and I don't know how much any how many hours and hours of data I have on that Now but

Eric Wright: I would be curious so your frame of view are you only looking at m81 like close crop or are you kind of zoomed out a bit where you could possibly get the um the vulcan nebula as Well?

Eric Loyd: so with the equipment that I currently have that I'm taking images with um it's predominantly m81 uh m82 is in there as well

Eric Wright: Okay well here's an interesting um thought experiment that somebody told me about these two galaxies so m80 in 81 is huge compared to m82 I think okay so bodes is huge compared to cigar galaxy but if you were in the cigar galaxy they're so close that bodes would actually fill up the entire night sky for you could you put yourself in a planet in the cigar galaxy and imagine looking up at that galaxy.

Eric Loyd: I actually I do this thought experiment with some of the Guests on my star river podcast and it's that basic concept of you know we look at the night sky and we see constellations that we've kind of drawn lines between stars over the generations different cultures and all that but we're mapping like a three-dimensional universe onto a two-dimensional virtual surface the quote surface of the sky um and so we have no real idea of how far away things are from each other out there we just see like oh there's the big dipper right draw a line you got a big dipper or plow whatever you want to call it um but those stars are in three dimensions they're like if you were standing next to one of them you're not going to the other ones are going to be in completely different places they're not like in a line you're not going to be in a line you have just kind of hit upon one of my favorite things. And that is the closest that we have right now to being able to see a sky filled with some other galaxy is if you are living in the southern hemisphere of the earth you get to see the uh magellanic clouds which I'm told you know they look great and wonderful and all that but they're just sort of bright smudges of light they're not that big all things considered and so forth they don't fill your vision um but you just described something which I think is amazing it's the only place I know where you could be in one galaxy and another galaxy is basically going to fill the vast majority of your night sky it'd be kind of like being on you know titan and having saturn fill your night sky or whatever yeah I think that would be awesome you and I also think it would dramatically change the culture and the mythology and the history of us or whoever the beings are that live there um because like our night sky is dominated by the moon and it's been exactly the same for you know countless generations if you looked up at the enmity one as your predominant thing in the night sky I can only imagine like what uh mythologies would be built around that as opposed to the moon which is like you know it's just a little disk of light it's a you know well it changes based on the phase but you know it's not like it has orbiting stars around it and a central bulge and all this other stuff it's just it really kind of ties all this together to me is to like why do we look at the stars why do we look at the sky and I think it's to feel connected and we if we don't actually have a connection our brains are wired to make connections and so I think that in particular is something where I think just it boggles my mind to think what kind of connections we might make if our night sky was filled with a Galaxy .

Eric Wright: Yeah that it blew my mind when my friend patrick tossed it to me as well uh that's one of those things where you kind of sit because here's the thing when you get your astronomy equipment set up you got nothing else to do for the rest of the night you just kind of sit around a campfire and talk and that's amazing is I learned this I had this stuck in my head when that happened and I was like are you serious that just blew my mind the whole night just trying to imagine myself seeing the this entire galaxy like it's not it I could my mind be blown just seeing saturn but if I saw a galaxy that just utterly like I just want to go in a coma it just blows my mind so I just wanted to toss that one out there um I love that object as well it you're right it is it's right by polaris so it's always there year round you can see this target yeah you can image it and it's a perfect object especially for and I want to toss it out there the vulcan nebula because it's so faint you need so much integration on it's perfect because it's right there in northern hemisphere you can image that target put a lot of time on it this is actually uh the bodes galaxy and the vulcan nebula are actually one of my favorites that I image because as a group in our astronomy society that is our kind of I don't have anything else to image tonight I guess I'll just image that because it's always there so that's one of the things I always image so I've got tons of data in that spot as well um so I wanted to go ahead and move on to the community corner section of it do you have any upcoming events outreach or ways to get involved or important announcements for your area that you would like to put out there for your community?

Eric Loyd: So I'm going to preface that by saying again I'm not involved in any formal astronomy organization so um my outreach is predominantly done these days through the star river podcast and through events that are done through um like the local excuse me um local uh what do you call it like the um the parks and rec kind of thing um gotcha yeah and right now the next sort of formal scheduled event that I'm involved with is an actually a introduction to astrophotography that I'm doing for a local art group um they kind of were they were um amazed when I showed them what one can do with even just a very simple rig similar to what you use with your roki um for doing astrophotography there's some photography people in the group and they asked me to be a speaker so uh coming up on october I'll be doing that with an art group here locally but um like I said most of what I do these days is one of two things in the world of astronomy anyway is uh trying to bring people together through the star river podcast so they can hear what other people are doing very similar to what you're doing here uh but with kind of a different focus I guess not to steal your back focus we're there for a second but um but then I do as you mentioned in when you introduced me um I am constantly on the lookout for what I just got what I call discarded treasures of people who are like you know here's that crappy telescope from sears right that eric had me this eric had as a kid and now he's using it as a prop toy gun um when eric doesn't need it anymore it goes to you know goodwill or whatever but a lot of times these telescopes still have a lot of value in them to somebody who's never had a telescope before so I am constantly looking for especially like looking for things that are a little four inch um cats that kind of thing which they're hard to break really you can't drop something in the end and crack your mirror if you've got a newt or something like that so I really like that kind of that's my sweet spot but I get them I clean them up I refer them refurbish them and then I give them away oh nice and um that's kind of what I do for my outreach and all um but everything I do is done either through my web page of astropotamus.com or the thestarriver.com um and uh just sort of like I said not really involved in any kind of formal um organization like that.

Eric Wright: So you did just kind of tell us where we could find you at um so if you guys want to recap on that uh the star river podcast he is astropotamus and you can find him I believe it's starriver.com right?

Eric Loyd: It is THEstarriver.com. I don't know what happens if you go just to starriver.com but that's definitely not me

Eric Wright: There's the same thing for back focus there's a website out there that's just back focus and it's not correct all right guys that wraps up this episode of back focus a huge thank you to our guests for sharing their time experience and passion for astronomy with us today if you enjoyed this conversation be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode if you're listening to this podcast please make sure to subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss anything on youtube music or spotify or any of the other streaming platforms please give it a like share for someone who loves the night sky please also consider rating and reviewing the show it really helps us for discovery as well you can find links to today's guests the topics we discussed and any resources mentioned in the episode description if you know someone in the astronomy community with a story worth telling whether they're an astrophotographer visual observer educator club leader or a content creator we'd love to hear from them visit our website to recommend a guest or get in touch at backfocus.space until next time keep looking up thanks for listening back focus and keep focused