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.
Eric Wright: 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.
Eric Wright: 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.
Eric Wright: So come July 14th.
Eric Wright: We'll be having a new moon at 9:43 UTC on July 14th.
Eric Wright: The new moon will pass over the area.
Eric Wright: 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.
Eric Wright: Come August 12th, we'll have the next total solar eclipse.
Eric Wright: It'll pass over Russia, Greenland, and Iceland in the path of totality, as well as a few other European countries.
Eric Wright: And finally, we'll have our next new moon.
Eric Wright: On July 14th, we'll be having a new moon at 9:43 UTC on July 14th.
Eric Wright: So be on the lookout for that.
Eric Wright: Now, within the state of Nebraska, one event I have for you is a church called Calvary Memorial.
Eric Wright: We'll be holding a VBS for kids that is inspired by astronomy.
Eric Wright: They'll be learning about the Word of God through the process of learning about constellations and other celestial bodies.
Eric Wright: And I think that sounds cool to me.
Eric Wright: So without further ado...
Eric Wright: I'll turn this back over to Eric for you.
Eric Wright: Today's guest is Eric Loyd, better known as Astropotamus.
Eric Wright: 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.
Eric Wright: 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 Wright: Eric, I want to thank you for joining me and welcome to the Back Focus podcast.
Eric Wright: Well, thank you, Eric.
Eric Loyd: I appreciate the invite, and I'm looking forward to our conversation today.
Eric Wright: Awesome.
Eric Wright: Well, hey, as a nod to your podcast (StarRiver Podcast), I know that you like to do a sip of your
Eric Wright: favorite drink. This is not something I do on my podcast, but I wanted to give you a nod
Eric Wright: to yours. Today, I am sipping
Eric Wright: stream soda. It's just
Eric Wright: mug soda. So I don't know if you have anything on your side, but we'll
Eric Wright: clink glasses. I
Eric Loyd: always do. I
Eric Loyd: always have some water because my throat gets dry when I talk. So
Eric Loyd: that's what I've got today. It's
Eric Loyd: the middle of my workday. No
Eric Loyd: cocktails or wine for me here right now. But
Eric Loyd: thank you for the shout out on the ritual there. I
Eric Loyd: appreciate that. Cheers.
Eric Loyd: Not
Eric Wright: a problem. Cheers.
Eric Wright: Okay,
Eric Wright: Eric.
Eric Wright: Nice name.
Eric Wright: So I
Eric Wright: just want to get to know about you, your background, and how you kind of got into astronomy. What kind
Eric Wright: of really got you inspired to do this kind of work? So it's
Eric Loyd: a multi-chapter story. I'll try
Eric Loyd: to keep it short though. When I
Eric Loyd: was a wee little kid, my father got me a cheap, probably Sears, you know, Tasco, whatever, department
Eric Loyd: store telescope. And I
Eric Loyd: lived in the country and I had space to set it up sort of in a clearing in our yard. And
Eric Loyd: there
Eric Loyd: were no lights around to speak of. And there
Eric Loyd: were, you know, beautiful skies. So I
Eric Loyd: looked through this little cheap-ass telescope and saw, you know, I tell people that I
Eric Loyd: didn't see the rings of Saturn, but I could tell that Saturn was more than just a round
Eric Loyd: blob. You know,
Eric Loyd: it really was a cheap-ass telescope. That's cool.
Eric Loyd: They usually
Eric Wright: are when you first start out. Yeah, right.
Eric Loyd: You know,
Eric Loyd: my dad didn't know if this was something I was going to be interested in or, you know, was I
Eric Loyd: going to destroy a, you know, a thousand dollar telescope, you know, or whatever. So, you
Eric Loyd: know, I understand. I respect
Eric Loyd: his decision. The funny
Eric Loyd: thing is, I've always been interested in science and space, but the telescope itself just sort
Eric Loyd: of, it wasn't good enough to keep my attention once I understood its limitations. And honestly,
Eric Loyd: it became a prop. I'm trying
Eric Loyd: to debate how much information to give you here. But so
Eric Loyd: the, my life was complicated as a kid. I had
Eric Loyd: a father and a stepfather. I call
Eric Loyd: them both dad. It was
Eric Loyd: the stepfather that gave me my telescope. But my
Eric Loyd: first father was a police officer. And so
Eric Loyd: I had like toy guns. You know,
Eric Loyd: you're the child of a cop. You have
Eric Loyd: toy guns. And that
Eric Loyd: telescope became like the bazooka of my toy gun collection. That's awesome.
Eric Loyd: Because when
Eric Loyd: you removed it from the tripod and you had the little, you know, the plastic mount thing
Eric Loyd: that would go back onto the tripod, you could like bolt something to that and it became
Eric Loyd: a handle. And then
Eric Loyd: you had all these little extended pieces and stuff you get out onto it. And like,
Eric Loyd: it was just perfect. Like set
Eric Loyd: on your shoulder. Pretend it
Eric Loyd: was like a rocket launcher or whatever. So it
Eric Loyd: actually started in a couple of home movies when I was a teenager. And it
Eric Loyd: was literally a prop. But that's
Eric Wright: fantastic. But and
Eric Loyd: I'm not going to drag this on too much longer. But there
Eric Loyd: was one thing about this telescope that I thought was unique. It had
Eric Loyd: a Barlow that came with it. And the
Eric Loyd: Barlow had a very small little plastic sleeve at the end of it. That you
Eric Loyd: could use to just slide it out like maybe a half an inch to like fine tune the magnification or
Eric Loyd: the focus or whatever. And that
Eric Loyd: plastic sleeve was clear. And so
Eric Loyd: the weird thing about this was they designed it to be able to do that as a Barlow. But then
Eric Loyd: if you used this plastic sleeve and like put it down on a piece of paper, as long as you
Eric Loyd: had light shining through that little plastic sleeve, it became like a little miniature microscope. Oh
Eric Loyd: cool.
Eric Wright: So I
Eric Loyd: got intrigued by the optics of how this worked. And it
Eric Loyd: stuck in the back of my head. And when
Eric Loyd: I went off to school, I actually studied micro electronic engineering, which is building microchips basically.
Eric Loyd: But a
Eric Loyd: lot of that is, you know, staring through microscopes at the actual chips and looking for defects on
Eric Loyd: sub micron, you know, scales and things like this. So the
Eric Loyd: optics was never too far from my brain. And when
Eric Loyd: I became kind of a make your own Barlow. I got
Eric Loyd: interested in photography, specifically wildlife photography and birds of prey. So eagles
Eric Loyd: and hawks and things like that. So I
Eric Loyd: amassed quite a collection of big glass for my camera, my cameras. And mind
Eric Loyd: you, this is back in like the 90s. So I'm
Eric Loyd: shooting slide film, you know, basically trying to get published, which I did get some published pictures.
Eric Wright: But at
Eric Loyd: one point, I was like, I'm going to do this. But at
Eric Loyd: one point I said, oh, hey, I have this vague memory of, you know, looking up at the skies as a
Eric Loyd: kid. At this
Eric Loyd: point, I lived in the city. There wasn't
Eric Loyd: a lot of skies to look at. But Comet
Eric Loyd: Yakutaki was in town. And so
Eric Loyd: I threw my camera onto a tripod and I started taking pictures of the comet. And of
Eric Loyd: course, with slide film, you have to wait to see what the results are. Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Wright: There's
Eric Loyd: no
Eric Loyd: integration, right? It's, you
Eric Loyd: know, if you take a 30 second picture, that's what you got, etc. Anyway, it
Eric Loyd: was horrible. It's absolutely
Eric Loyd: horrible. And I
Eric Loyd: shelved the whole thing after a while. My wife
Eric Loyd: comes along a few years ago and says, hey, you were interested in astronomy as a kid. I'm
Eric Loyd: going
Eric Loyd: to get you this Christmas present for SLOOH.com, S-L-O-O-H, which is still in existence. It
Eric Loyd: was
Eric Loyd: one of, if not the first sort of remote operated telescopes that you could subscribe to. Oh,
Eric Wright: super
Eric Wright: cool. So, you
Eric Loyd: know, you got like, I don't know, 10 hours a month or whatever. It was
Eric Loyd: that you could aim their telescopes at a target and it would capture images and you would
Eric Loyd: get the data. And on
Eric Loyd: the one hand, it was really cool because these telescopes are on like the Canary Islands and Chile
Eric Loyd: and all these sort of, you know, remote places that we're used to these days. But this
Eric Loyd: was sort of brand new at the time. And, you
Eric Loyd: know, you figure out- And 10
Eric Wright: hours is a lot of time. Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Wright: And,
Eric Loyd: you
Eric Loyd: know, it would reset. So it
Eric Loyd: wasn't just like, here's 10 hours. It was,
Eric Loyd: here's 10 hours in January. Here's 10
Eric Loyd: hours in February. Here's 10
Eric Loyd: hours in March. And I
Eric Loyd: wasn't quite sophisticated enough to take advantage of what, you know, what that meant in
Eric Loyd: terms of target selection at that time, but I understood what it represented. And so
Eric Loyd: no matter what I tried to make use of my 10 hours, even it was just like, aim at the
Eric Loyd: moon, you know, or whatever, just do something. And that's
Eric Loyd: when I started- Let me,
Eric Wright: I'm going to interject real quick. That part
Eric Wright: of astronomy is one of the biggest aspects of astronomy is target selection. You have
Eric Wright: to look at the weather. You have
Eric Wright: to look at the location, the light pollution, the target, where it's going to be in
Eric Wright: the sky, how much time you're going to get with it. Because you
Eric Wright: might have 10 hours to shoot, but that target might only be up for five hours. Yeah.
Eric Wright: And
Eric Wright: at
Eric Loyd: the same time, I don't want to make it sound like, you know, I would
Eric Loyd: just pick something basically at that time. I'd be,
Eric Loyd: you know, they had a rudimentary version of what would sort of like, if you went to Telescopius today,
Eric Loyd: you could, you know, kind of put some parameters in. It would
Eric Loyd: give you a list of potential targets. They had
Eric Loyd: something similar to that. I didn't
Eric Wright: really know what I was doing. So I
Eric Loyd: just like, you know, well, that looks like it might be fun to take a picture of Kind of
Eric Wright: thing. But, you
Eric Loyd: know, I am more sophisticated now. There's obviously
Eric Loyd: a lot more sophisticated software than there was 20-ish years ago. More than
Eric Loyd: that, actually. But at
Eric Loyd: the same time, you don't have to be, you know, you could just literally like look at the
Eric Loyd: sky and say, that looks interesting. I'll see
Eric Loyd: what happens if I take pictures of it. And, you
Eric Loyd: know, if you happen to be taking pictures and the full moon comes up, maybe next time
Eric Loyd: you'll make a note and say like, oh, well, you know, that turned out badly because the
Eric Loyd: moon. And maybe
Eric Loyd: you'll choose differently next time. Or maybe
Eric Loyd: you lucked out and the moon wasn't a factor. And so
Eric Loyd: now you realize that, oh, the full moon might be a factor if I'm aiming towards it. But
Eric Loyd: if
Eric Loyd: I'm aiming away from it doesn't matter. So, you
Eric Loyd: know, it is a learning experience. But the
Eric Loyd: SLOOH got me back interested in it. And then
Eric Loyd: I purchased an actual Celestron C8 telescope. I talked
Eric Loyd: about this actually in one of my podcast episodes with somebody who went down almost the
Eric Loyd: exact same path of what technology. A Celestron
Eric Loyd: C8, a Canon 450, also known as an XSI, you know, a T-mount adapter. For the
Eric Loyd: back of the camera. And then
Eric Loyd: trying to get that C8 to take pictures on a Skywatcher EQ6R mount. Okay. That
Eric Wright: was
Eric Loyd: frustrating. I will
Eric Loyd: say this about the process. It taught
Eric Loyd: me a lot about the engineering of mounts and how the telescope is actually made. It reminded
Eric Loyd: me of all those optics stuff that I'd learned as an undergraduate. And to
Eric Loyd: finally answer your question, I did start amassing some equipment to be able to do,
Eric Loyd: you know, what we would today call sort of real backyard astrophotography. But I
Eric Loyd: didn't live in a place that was really easy to do sort of logistically. I still,
Eric Loyd: different country, but I still live in the country. I don't
Eric Loyd: mean different country like politically. It's a
Eric Loyd: different countryside than where I grew up. But I
Eric Loyd: still live in the country now. And it's
Eric Loyd: a beautiful sky. And I
Eric Loyd: love to take pictures of it. But at
Eric Loyd: the time, like lugging that EQ6R Pro mount out, setting it up on the tripod, putting a Celestron
Eric Loyd: C8 on it, mounting a camera and the camera adapters and cables and blah. You know,
Eric Loyd: it's
Eric Loyd: two hours of setup. And then, uh-oh,
Eric Loyd: looks like it might rain. You know, quick,
Eric Loyd: undo everything as best you can and literally chuck it in the backseat of the car.
Eric Loyd: Oh, that's the
Eric Loyd: worst. Quite literally, I
Eric Wright: have the same exact mount right now. And I, it
Eric Wright: takes an hour and a half to lug this heavy thing out there. Now I don't
Eric Wright: have a C8, so I'm not dealing with that heavy weight. Usually I was
Eric Wright: using like a regular tiny Rokinon camera lens and that's all I would use. So the top
Eric Wright: wasn't that bad, but I just upgraded to a Newtonian that's a six inch F4. It's not huge,
Eric Wright: but it puts a little extra weight on it. Yeah. You always
Eric Wright: have
Eric Wright: to be concerned about the optics of your equipment. You know, you
Eric Wright: could toss it in that seat, but you're going to use that seatbelt. Well, there were
Eric Loyd: days like maybe too many days in, uh, some inclement weather where I
Eric Loyd: was literally riding around with my astrophotography gear thrown in the backseat because I
Eric Loyd: didn't want it to get wet. And yet I
Eric Loyd: didn't have a place to put it. I don't have
Eric Loyd: a garage. I don't have
Eric Wright: a shed. You know, it's
Eric Loyd: either in the house or it's in the car or it's on the lawn. Yeah. You know,
Eric Loyd: there's,
Eric Loyd: um, there's no place to store things really for us right now. Um, so
Eric Loyd: it
Eric Loyd: was very frustrating to just literally set things up, maybe get a couple hours of imaging and then,
Eric Loyd: you know, I'd have to tear it down in the morning unless it was going to be a
Eric Loyd: fantastic day. Um, so the
Eric Loyd: progression there was, uh, I got a tele gizmos 365 cover and that at least let me
Eric Loyd: leave the guts of everything. Like the scope
Eric Loyd: and the mount were left outside. Actually for a
Eric Loyd: couple of years, uh, 24 seven and I live in upstate New York. So that means,
Eric Loyd: you know, we get a hundred inches of rain, we get a hundred inches of snow, we get
Eric Loyd: a hundred degrees temperature. So, um, oh,
Eric Loyd: and we get a hundred days a year of clouds. I know the
Eric Wright: feeling. I live in Cleveland. So I,
Eric Wright: yeah. Oh yeah. So,
Eric Wright: you know, it
Eric Wright: was better
Eric Loyd: because I could just go out with the cover off, attach the camera and be ready to
Eric Loyd: go. And if the rain was coming,
Eric Loyd: I could detach the camera and throw the cover back on.
Eric Loyd: Um, but it was still frustrating. And so I don't want
Eric Loyd: to like, uh, make this like
Eric Loyd: an ad, but I will say that three years ago I bought a Skyshed pod used the person
Eric Loyd: who owned it that I bought it from was buying like the new version, which includes a, uh, automated
Eric Loyd: rotating dome and a slot, that kind of thing. So he had his old
Eric Loyd: manual Skyshed pod, um, that he
Eric Loyd: was
Eric Loyd: gonna sell. I bought it. He was literally driving to Canada to pick up
Eric Loyd: his new one
Eric Loyd: and I was on the way. So he dropped it off, which was like, that was awesome. My
Eric Loyd: wife made him cookies. It was, you know, it was a
Eric Loyd: good old time. And you
Eric Loyd: know, it's a good time when the wife brings cookies.
Eric Wright: Um, so that pod, that Skyshed pod. For me was the
Eric Wright: moment
Eric Loyd: where I really started to feel like,
Eric Loyd: okay, now I am at, I am an astrophotographer as opposed to just somebody who takes pictures because my gear was
Eric Loyd: set up 24 seven. If it was raining on the pod, not my gear. If it
Eric Loyd: was a good night, even if it was just like,
Eric Loyd: okay, well it might rain, you know, at midnight, but it's winter or whatever. It's, you know, as opposed
Eric Loyd: to the middle of summer, um, you
Eric Loyd: know, maybe I could get a couple hours before that. I can go out, open it up. And
Eric Loyd: then it's still manual.
Eric Loyd: I have to go open it and
Eric Loyd: close it myself, but that's
Eric Loyd: a lot easier to just be like, okay, it's going to rain. I'm going to go out, I'm going to
Eric Loyd: close it and walk
Eric Loyd: back into the house, then have to tear things down. So I don't have to tear things down. I
Eric Loyd: don't have to
Eric Loyd: set them up. They're set up once I
Eric Loyd: leave it. And in the, so I've
Eric Loyd: had that for three years now. And
Eric Loyd: in the past three years, I have taken more images than
Eric Loyd: I have in the entire rest of my life. Um, just because my equipment is available 24 seven,
Eric Loyd: basically. Um, but
Eric Loyd: that is the progression of me becoming an astrophotographer. Okay.
Eric Loyd: Well, yeah, that's fantastic. I personally, my experience is a little
Eric Wright: different
Eric Wright: than that. Um, I
Eric Wright: think that started because of COVID. I've always been interested
Eric Wright: in science and space and technology. Uh, but
Eric Wright: the, when COVID hit. I, when COVID happened is when
Eric Wright: I started streaming and that's when
Eric Wright: I started trying to do gaming and I tried to have some kind of social
Eric Wright: life, which didn't really exist. So I bought all this expensive equipment. I have lights, cameras, microphone,
Eric Wright: and then I got another job and
Eric Wright: COVID kind of ended and kind of waned to the side. I didn't really
Eric Wright: have any interest, but I still loved the stars.
Eric Wright: And then. The big moment happened when we had the, uh, the
Eric Wright: total solar
Eric Wright: eclipse. And I was like, oh my gosh, I've got to take a
Eric Wright: picture of that. I've never seen one before. And I went out and tried to
Eric Wright: do the best internet search
Eric Wright: I could find as a professional computer tech. That's something I would hope I was good at, but I
Eric Wright: was
Eric Wright: terrible at it. And some people recommended this and some people recommended that I ended
Eric Wright: up getting an NK 105, which is like a bird watching telescope. It's probably.
Eric Wright: Okay. Ish for the moon. And I used it for
Eric Wright: the solar
Eric Wright: eclipse
Eric Wright: and my experience wasn't
Eric Wright: that great. I just had a regular tripod. It was not equatorial at all.
Eric Wright: It was not tracking and I
Eric Wright: wasn't taking photos. I didn't know
Eric Wright: what exposures were, so it was all new to
Eric Wright: me. But what I learned from there was when I jumped into my
Eric Wright: local astronomy club and I started learning more. I started learning more about astronomy and it really is
Eric Wright: kind of
Eric Wright: a give and take. You learn information from the group and your knowledge grows. And then
Eric Wright: of course your equipment changes, your goals change and your
Eric Wright: equipment changes. And it's kind of that loop. And so that's one thing that
Eric Wright: we as astronomers have to be
Eric Wright: a little careful about is just burning that hole because that hole in your pocket gets bigger and
Eric Wright: bigger if you're not careful. Well, I would actually like to see those images of yours
Eric Wright: someday
Eric Loyd: that you took of the eclipse because I joke about eclipses as saying like eclipses are like
Eric Loyd: sex and chili. Even bad sex and chili is still good sex and chili. This
Eric Loyd: is true. You only get like one or maybe two, if
Eric Loyd: you're lucky, eclipses
Eric Loyd: in your life unless you hunt them. But. I figure like, you know, yeah, it might not be
Eric Wright: what
Eric Loyd: you
Eric Loyd: might see in a magazine or what have you, but any picture of a solar eclipse is still an
Eric Loyd: amazing picture. So I'd love to see those someday. That'd be cool. Yeah. I,
Eric Loyd: what's ironic about it is I took
Eric Loyd: the pictures, but
Eric Wright: the
Eric Wright: pictures that I have are screenshots of the pictures. I don't have the raw image. I'm kicking myself
Eric Wright: for that. I
Eric Wright: took it on in a T3i
Eric Wright: Canon camera. Yep. And I
Eric Wright: don't have the raw images anymore. So I will
Eric Wright: have
Eric Wright: to hunt the next one because I don't
Eric Wright: think the next one that comes to America is until like 19 or 2040 something. So it's. Yeah. Yeah. If
Eric Wright: you feel like, you know, burning through
Eric Wright: some passport
Eric Wright: miles,
Eric Loyd: you
Eric Loyd: can see a few eclipses in the next few years. But none of them
Eric Loyd: are here. This is true. Yeah. So that's
Eric Loyd: kind of been my experience is.
Eric Wright: Um, I was
Eric Wright: fortunate
Eric Wright: to have a little extra money to go
Eric Wright: buy this and that I didn't buy everything all upfront at once. A couple of big ticket items.
Eric Wright: I did kind of pull the
Eric Wright: trigger and say, yep, there goes
Eric Wright: my vacation for this year, but it took about two or three years for me to really gather
Eric Wright: all the equipment to get the pictures I have now, which are amazing astrophotography images, especially since I
Eric Wright: got a cooled astrophotography camera. So now it maintains a temperature
Eric Wright: at negative 10 C and I
Eric Wright: was able to get the pics insight for processing. The software is actually quite expensive, but there are free
Eric Wright: alternatives out
Eric Wright: there to use that are just as adept. But once I started processing
Eric Wright: my images, they really started coming out.
Eric Wright: So the unprocessed is still raw. And that's, I think that's something
Eric Wright: that I want to touch on
Eric Wright: is. Yeah. When you're looking through your telescope, that's an unprocessed image. When
Eric Wright: you're
Eric Wright: taking a picture, that's an unprocessed picture. You're only seeing
Eric Wright: their bare bones. But the interesting part about astronomy
Eric Wright: and astrophotography and specifically is that
Eric Wright: the data is always there. You just got to pull it out.
Eric Wright: I tell people, so I
Eric Wright: don't know how much you share your
Eric Loyd: images with people beyond your like immediate circle. But I often get people asking me the question
Eric Loyd: of, you know,
Eric Loyd: I'll show them a
Eric Loyd: picture of whatever it is. Orion nebula, classic example, right? Everybody eventually actually probably starts by taking
Eric Loyd: pictures of the
Eric Loyd: Orion nebula as their first
Eric Loyd: deep space object or one of the first, but even through a decent
Eric Loyd: pair of binoculars, it's obvious that there's something different about that, you know, that section of the sky.
Eric Loyd: If you've got really good vision, you might even be able to
Eric Loyd: see something just
Eric Loyd: with your naked eye. A cell phone camera can take a pretty good image these days and
Eric Loyd: show you
Eric Loyd: some even more detail. But when you start taking pictures with even just a, you know,
Eric Loyd: put your cell
Eric Loyd: phone camera up to the eyepiece of a telescope, let alone a, you know, a
Eric Loyd: cool dedicated astro camera or anything like that. Orion really is an amazing thing to take pictures of.
Eric Loyd: There's just so much there.
Eric Loyd: So I get people who ask me all the time.
Eric Loyd: Is that what it would
Eric Loyd: look like if I were standing next to it in
Eric Loyd: space? And this is where I tell people two things. First of all, your eye is
Eric Loyd: not a camera, even though it's very similar to
Eric Loyd: a camera, the camera works differently from your eyes. So, you know, I can take a five minute
Eric Loyd: exposure with a camera and I
Eric Loyd: can gather light over the entire course of that five minutes. Your eye sort of is constantly
Eric Loyd: gathering light, but it's not summing it's not adding
Eric Loyd: the light that it gets now to the light a minute ago. You
Eric Loyd: know, it's like, it's constantly renewing. So you can't physically like stack that image in
Eric Loyd: your brain. You have to use a
Eric Loyd: computer to do that and be able to get that either
Eric Loyd: long exposure or multiple exposures that you stack to kind of increase the effect of exposure. And the
Eric Loyd: second thing is-- One day. Okay. One day. Yeah. Six Million Dollar man is
Eric Wright: coming, except it'll be $6
Eric Wright: billion at
Eric Wright: that
Eric Wright: point. But
Eric Loyd: the
Eric Loyd: other thing is this is the thing that I try to really
Eric Loyd: drive home is. I'm an artist. I am taking, yeah. If you used the same equipment
Eric Loyd: and
Eric Loyd: you followed the
Eric Loyd: same process that I
Eric Loyd: did, you know, this exposure for this amount of time, et cetera, you'll get the same data, but
Eric Loyd: that's like saying, you know, two people in a water. Water a watercolor art class looking
Eric Loyd: at the same bowl of fruit they're going
Eric Loyd: to paint that bowl of fruit differently they're going to choose to emphasize certain colors or they're going to
Eric Loyd: choose to emphasize a certain contrast in the light you know they're
Eric Loyd: going to make it look the way they want it to look and so I am an artist
Eric Loyd: 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
Eric Loyd: want you to see purple so I'm going to bring out purple you know you other eric you might
Eric Loyd: be like I hate purple um I'm going to shove purple to the background and I'm going to bring
Eric Loyd: out the red um you know so you're going to process that image differently. And to me
Eric Loyd: this is what makes astrophotography such an amazing wonderful tool and
Eric Loyd: an educational process and a artistic process and to some people it's a very mathematical process
Eric Loyd: but the data like you said the data is always there and so there
Eric Loyd: are sources of astronomical data whether it's nasa makes all their images public uh some people share their
Eric Loyd: raw image data just because they're nice and you can go get somebody else's raw data and
Eric Loyd: you can process it the way you want so you don't even need to have a telescope or
Eric Loyd: a camera or yeah you know you don't because you live in downtown manhattan and you can go be an astrophotographer sort
Eric Loyd: of adjacent I guess by processing the data that other people took. And again you're going
Eric Loyd: to process it differently than I am going to process it and I'm going to process it
Eric Loyd: differently from the person next door to me and I think that's what's so wonderful about this hobby
Eric Loyd: is I am always learning something because there's always somebody else who did it differently and when I
Eric Loyd: see the difference even something as common as the orion nebula or m-31 or these sort
Eric Loyd: of classic things that are up there I see a picture somebody else took of it
Eric Loyd: and I'm like wow I never noticed that detail before you know that dust or that shadow looking thing or these
Eric Loyd: colors or whatever like how did they do that and you ask them the question
Eric Loyd: and they're like oh well I did this and I did that and I did it in this order or
Eric Loyd: 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
Eric Loyd: a difference so
Eric Loyd: you
Eric Loyd: know
Eric Loyd: just
Eric Loyd: I
Eric Loyd: guess
Eric Loyd: it's
Eric Loyd: very
Eric Loyd: similar to um cooking in that you know every chocolate chip cookie is basically the same ingredients but grandma's chocolate
Eric Loyd: chip cookies are different than you know your chocolate chip cookies because you make them differently um
Eric Loyd: and I think that's what really keeps me in the world of astrophotography and
Eric Loyd: astronomy in general because I think anybody can do it you don't have to
Eric Loyd: spend a lot of money on it you don't have to spend any money on it
Eric Loyd: these days and you can still reap most of the benefits of doing that and learn an amazing amount of stuff about the
Eric Loyd: sky above us. Absolutely and honestly that's something that I've learned through building the cvas website I built
Eric Wright: the astronaut astronomy imaging tool and one of the guys asked me hey can we
Eric Wright: put other surveys on here and as we started going back and
Eric Wright: forth
Eric Wright: with surveys we started noticing certain objects in the sky that aren't labeled and we as a group have already well at
Eric Wright: least one person in our group has already discovered a planetary nebula and he's working on
Eric Wright: confirming that data but it's this is something we can do now and we don't have ginormous expensive
Eric Wright: thousand dollar telescopes um I will say that the mount I have the whole rig I've got I probably
Eric Wright: dropped probably about two or three thousand
Eric Wright: dollars on it but realistically you could take a small as long as it's a tracker they probably
Eric Wright: cost a hundred two hundred dollars something like that maybe a little more and you could throw a
Eric Wright: dslr camera that you might already have from your covid streaming days a lot of people bought
Eric Wright: cameras and a lot of people bought microphones they could use for astronomy um and all you would
Eric Wright: need is a camera lens that's what I use is broken on camera
Eric Wright: lens and I at first used a canon camera that's what I used to initially start my photography was
Eric Wright: it the best no because I was still learning it if I took that same equipment today I would
Eric Wright: make a lot better pictures because I've been through the rigor of setting up my equipment for three hours
Eric Wright: not being able to find jupiter right you know now I can get fully
Eric Wright: polar aligned in about 20 30 minutes and that took me a long time of doing
Eric Wright: the same thing over and over again and failing and I'm going to tell
Eric Wright: you there's nothing worse than going out to the site and every single time something goes wrong every
Eric Wright: single time without a doubt something breaks Oh yeah, haha. I don't know if that's just me. No it's
Eric Wright: not just you, haha. And even so you know I talk about having the skyshed pod
Eric Wright: and how awesome it is
Eric Loyd: to just sort of have this like permanent
Eric Loyd: observatory in my backyard kind of thing even still you know it's 50 yards for me to
Eric Loyd: walk from the back door to the pod it's I mean it's not that far right it's not
Eric Loyd: like I'm hiking across a five acre field or whatever and yet there are times where like I've gone
Eric Loyd: out and I've opened the pod and I've you know sort of gotten things ready to go
Eric Loyd: or whatever and uh you know I come back inside and of course these days there's a I have
Eric Loyd: a network connection out there so everything is remote I don't have to actually be in the pod if I'm
Eric Loyd: doing imaging and I go back inside and I wait for everything to get dark or whatever and I'm
Eric Loyd: setting up my imaging run and then I'm I start my you know my autofocus or whatever it is I'm
Eric Loyd: doing and the images are coming back you know blank or oh no totally gray or whatever I'm like
Eric Loyd: what's going on and I finally ended up getting just some cheap wi-fi cameras that I have aimed
Eric Loyd: some of them are aimed at the camera some or at the
Eric Loyd: telescope some of them are aimed like down the axis of the scope so you can kind of see what
Eric Loyd: the telescope is looking at so um I finally got smart got one of these cameras and had it aimed at
Eric Loyd: the scope and I'm looking at it and I'm like oh I left the lens cap on or you know the
Eric Loyd: cap on the front of the scope and it's like yeah oh man at this point I almost feel like I want that
Eric Loyd: sense of I'm messed up and the universe is against me and everything and again it's 50 yards it's a hundred
Eric Loyd: yards round trip to go out there take the cap off and walk back in the house takes
Eric Loyd: me all of you know a minute whatever and yet there are times I'm like man screw that I'm just gonna leave
Eric Loyd: it I'm not gonna take images tonight because I messed up you know it's like self-punishment there
Eric Loyd: because I forgot to take the cap off the telescope or whatever. and that's something that I
Eric Wright: want to touch on is the community of astronomers uh there was for I'll give you a good
Eric Wright: example I was at observatory park with my friend willie
Eric Wright: and I think it was just us at a time and then later on some other guys came out there
Eric Wright: but for a solid I want to say a solid hour and a half two hours we troubleshot an
Eric Wright: issue where I would take a picture and the stars looked like they were doubled and I was like what in the
Eric Wright: world is going on I don't understand this I would take a picture I would take flats every single image
Eric Wright: I had doubled images I'm like I focused the autofocus worked but it wouldn't find where I was going
Eric Wright: and eventually it took me a long time to find out that I had turned on annotations in
Eric Wright: nina and all those extra stars were very tiny words for the stars they were labels of the
Eric Wright: stars and I was like are you freaking kidding me so I was taking actual pictures those were not ever
Eric Wright: imaged so I wasted two hours on troubleshooting this and I could have given up if it wasn't for the
Eric Wright: fact that Willie was there also and willie was saying no eric let's troubleshoot this let's figure it
Eric Wright: out let's just you know go through the problems and that is what I love about astronomy is that I
Eric Wright: can say hey man you're imaging tonight he's like yep and so we both show up at
Eric Wright: the same place or he can come over to my house or whatever and
Eric Wright: 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
Eric Wright: at it see what happens and it's me and I'm gonna give him an extra push and then I'll
Eric Wright: come around the next day and be like I really I got four hours on this target which is fantastic four
Eric Wright: hours is still four hours of data you could have gotten 10 but 4
Eric Wright: is still really good so I really want to emphasize that has that ever ex have you ever had that
Eric Wright: experience yourself? almost every day um now for me it's a little bit different I'm I this is going to sound
Eric Loyd: weird with all the connectivity and outreach that we have um I'm going to go back to night
Eric Loyd: and I'm going to show you I do in the world of astronomy I'm not a member of any astronomy clubs so
Eric Loyd: um I do things sort of off to the side and remote and whatever um but I do outreach programs for
Eric Loyd: local um like community centers and um things like that and so I'm engaged with people who ask me questions. like they
Eric Loyd: want to get into the hobby and now I'm their mentor or whatever and so I hope I answer
Eric Loyd: questions correctly when people ask me whatever the questions that they have but if they ask me
Eric Loyd: something that I don't know or if I am having some sort of equipment issue that I can't figure out then
Eric Loyd: you know for better or for worse we live in an interconnected world these days and
Eric Loyd: there are such huge online communities in the world of astronomy and astrophotography and if you're into you know
Eric Loyd: helioseismology you could do that if you have a small radio antenna in your backyard and you're doing radio
Eric Loyd: astronomy there's groups
Eric Loyd: for that you know it's just whatever aspect of astronomy
Eric Loyd: or space science in general that you're interested in. There's a group or thousands
Eric Loyd: of groups that you can connect to online and um I find that it is for me
Eric Loyd: it's often like you said you did this task you thought you were doing things
Eric Loyd: right and then you had like these as you call it these double images or whatever
Eric Loyd: and
Eric Loyd: you couldn't figure it out so for me if I have something similar it usually tends to be something
Eric Loyd: related to my gear that I added a new piece of equipment and I thought I understood how
Eric Loyd: it worked or how it should be connected or whatever and it turns out things aren't working I will
Eric Loyd: go to an online community of some sort ask my question and inevitably someone will say well you know
Eric Loyd: I have that same problem because or I had that same problem because I have that same equipment and here's
Eric Loyd: the problem here's the solution get back to me let me know how it worked so
Eric Loyd: you know it's a bit like uh doing a pen pal type thing uh back in the day as
Eric Loyd: opposed to being in the same room but the effect is the same I get my assistance or
Eric Loyd: I can ask questions on behalf of people who ask me questions and it is it's like a glorious time to be alive
Eric Loyd: I think in and I say that not jokingly um you know the sum
Eric Loyd: total of human knowledge is basically available on your phone it's an amazing
Eric Loyd: thing and people are so willing to share that information share that knowledge share their experience in it's in many hobbies
Eric Loyd: it's in many fields like that. But um you know I think there's something
Eric Loyd: in the world of astrophotography specifically that people really want to share what they've done both
Eric Loyd: as a you know like a finished product here's the picture I took of you
Eric Loyd: know fill in the blank astronomical object but then they also want
Eric Loyd: to help somebody else take that same picture and so they want to share their technique they
Eric Loyd: want to share their processing they want to share their equipment they want to help other
Eric Loyd: people and I don't know of any other hobby or activity involved with
Eric Loyd: anyway that has that same sense of sort of uh like unconditional sharing um you know there are
Eric Loyd: things that I'm involved in but they're often based on some sort of competition even if it's just
Eric Loyd: like bowling night you know um if you're going bowling you want to win you want that
Eric Loyd: trophy etc and so yeah you might help somebody figure out how to bowl the ball
Eric Loyd: better but you don't want to give away all your secrets right you know so
Eric Loyd: astrophotography I think is a little bit different in that people are willing to give away their secrets because they
Eric Loyd: have such a joy of sharing that information and seeing other people take up the hobby and you
Eric Loyd: know I remember the first time I helped somebody with their equipment problems and they came
Eric Loyd: back to me and said you know so excited like look at this picture I took
Eric Loyd: of you know whatever it was yeah you know it's like oh my god I can't believe I
Eric Loyd: 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 Loyd: That's exactly right um I think I've astronomy treats me a lot like linux treats me linux I 100 would
Eric Loyd: love to just switch from windows to linux and I always have an issue with linux something happens
Eric Wright: something breaks and
Eric Wright: back in the day you had to write your own drivers and every
Eric Wright: time there's an update everything broke and you had to fix it yourself astronomy is kind of in that niche
Eric Wright: there's people there with you who know how to fix it too so it's a little
Eric Wright: technical but it's a little bit of a challenge to be honest with you if you put a
Eric Wright: little bit of troubleshooting thought into the issue usually you figure out the problem and you figure it out pretty quickly
Eric Wright: and if you don't there's always another night most I would say at least 80 percent of my astrophotography imaging sessions
Eric Wright: I've chalked up to experience I didn't come away with a good image from that one but I
Eric Wright: learned a lot that night I bonded with friends and I had a lot of fun and it
Eric Wright: was just another bit of experience to know hey maybe don't do that but I learned a lot
Eric Wright: 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 . That would be
Eric Wright: m87 or sorry not you say m81 bode's galaxy um and it's not maybe the most you know glamorous
Eric Wright: or you know there's not a lot going on there it's just a galaxy I mean that sounds so
Eric Loyd: jaded I guess but um it's not flashy in any sense but the reason it's my favorite there's two
Eric Loyd: reasons actually one of them is like it's always there it's in the northern sky it's circumpolar you can
Eric Loyd: image it almost any day of any or any night of any day of the year and because of that it
Eric Loyd: is one of the most photographed galaxies and it is also it's to me it's such a great
Eric Loyd: kind of if you asked a five-year-old kid who knew something about science or space to say like draw me
Eric Loyd: a galaxy they're gonna draw m81 yeah that's what we see yeah that's it's like it's
Eric Loyd: this
Eric Loyd: like classic galaxy shape and we see it mostly sort of at an angle but kind
Eric Loyd: of edge on and it's just anytime I don't know what else I'm going to take
Eric Loyd: a picture of basically I take pictures of m81 and I don't know
Eric Loyd: how much any how many hours and hours of data I have on that Now but I would be curious
Eric Loyd: so your frame of view are you only looking at m81 like close crop or are you kind of
Eric Loyd: zoomed out a bit where you could possibly get the um the vulcan nebula as Well? so with
Eric Wright: the equipment that I currently have that I'm taking images with um it's predominantly m81 uh m82 is in there
Eric Wright: as well Okay well here's an interesting um thought experiment that somebody told me about these two galaxies so m80
Eric Loyd: in 81 is huge compared to m82 I think okay so bodes is huge compared to cigar
Eric Loyd: galaxy but if you were in the cigar
Eric Wright: galaxy they're so close that bodes would actually fill up the entire night sky
Eric Wright: for you could you put yourself in a planet in the cigar galaxy and imagine looking up at that
Eric Wright: galaxy. I actually I do this thought experiment with some of the Guests on my star river podcast
Eric Wright: and it's that basic concept of you know we look at the night sky and we see constellations that we've
Eric Wright: kind of drawn lines between stars over the generations different cultures and all that but we're mapping
Eric Loyd: like a three-dimensional universe onto a two-dimensional virtual surface the quote surface of the sky um and so we
Eric Loyd: have no real idea of how far away things are from each other out there we
Eric Loyd: just see like oh there's the big dipper right draw a line you got
Eric Loyd: a big dipper or plow whatever you want to call it um but those stars are in three dimensions
Eric Loyd: they're like if you were standing next to one of them you're not going to the other ones are
Eric Loyd: going to be in completely different places they're not like in a line you're not going to be in
Eric Loyd: a line you have just kind of hit upon one of my favorite things. And that is the closest
Eric Loyd: that we have right now to being able to see a sky filled with some other galaxy is
Eric Loyd: if you are living in the southern hemisphere
Eric Loyd: of the earth you get to see the uh magellanic clouds which I'm told you know they look great and wonderful
Eric Loyd: and all that but they're just sort of bright smudges of light they're not that big all things considered and so
Eric Loyd: forth they don't fill your vision um but you just described something which I think is amazing it's
Eric Loyd: the only place I know where you could
Eric Loyd: be in one galaxy and another galaxy is basically going to fill the vast majority
Eric Loyd: of your night sky it'd be kind of like being on you know titan and having saturn fill
Eric Loyd: your night sky or whatever yeah I think that would be awesome you and I also think it would
Eric Loyd: dramatically change the culture and the mythology and the history of us or whoever the beings are that live there um
Eric Loyd: because like our night sky is dominated by the moon and it's been exactly the
Eric Loyd: same
Eric Loyd: for you know countless generations if you looked up at the enmity one as your predominant
Eric Loyd: thing in the night sky I can only imagine like what uh mythologies would be built around that
Eric Loyd: as opposed to the moon which is like you know it's just a little disk of light it's a you
Eric Loyd: know well it changes based on the phase but you know it's not like it has
Eric Loyd: orbiting stars around it and a central bulge and all this other stuff it's just it really kind of
Eric Loyd: ties all this together to me is to like why do we look at the stars why do we look at
Eric Loyd: the sky and I think it's to feel connected and we if we don't actually have a connection our
Eric Loyd: brains are wired to make
Eric Loyd: connections and so I think that in particular is something where I think just it boggles my mind to think what kind
Eric Loyd: of connections we might make if our night sky was filled with a Galaxy . Yeah that it blew
Eric Loyd: my mind when my friend patrick tossed it to me as well uh that's one of those things
Eric Loyd: where you kind of sit because here's the thing when you get your astronomy equipment set up you got nothing
Eric Wright: else to do for the rest of the night you just kind of sit around a campfire and talk and that's
Eric Wright: amazing is I learned this I had this stuck in my head when that happened and I
Eric Wright: was like are you serious that just blew my mind the whole night just trying to imagine myself seeing the this entire
Eric Wright: galaxy like it's not it I could my mind be blown just seeing saturn but if I saw a
Eric Wright: galaxy that just utterly like I just want to go in a coma it just blows my mind
Eric Wright: so
Eric Wright: I just wanted to toss that one out there um I love that object as well it you're right
Eric Wright: 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
Eric Wright: it's a perfect object especially for and I want to toss it out there the vulcan nebula because it's so faint you
Eric Wright: need so much integration on it's perfect because it's right there in northern hemisphere you can
Eric Wright: image that target put a lot of time on it this is actually uh the bodes galaxy and the
Eric Wright: vulcan nebula are actually one of my favorites that I image because as a group in
Eric Wright: our astronomy society that is our kind of I don't have anything else to image tonight I guess I'll just
Eric Wright: image that because it's always there so that's one of the things I always image so I've got
Eric Wright: tons of data in that spot as well um so I wanted to
Eric Wright: go ahead and move on to the community corner section of it do you have any upcoming
Eric Wright: events outreach or ways to get involved or important announcements for your area that you would like to put out
Eric Wright: there for your community? So I'm going to preface that by saying again I'm not involved in any formal astronomy organization so
Eric Wright: um my outreach is predominantly done these days through the star river podcast and through events
Eric Loyd: that are done through um like the local excuse me um local uh what do you call it like the
Eric Loyd: um the parks and rec kind of thing um gotcha yeah and right now
Eric Loyd: the next sort of formal scheduled event that I'm involved with is an actually
Eric Loyd: a introduction to astrophotography that I'm doing for a local art group um they
Eric Loyd: kind of were they were um amazed when I showed them what one can do with even just
Eric Loyd: a very simple rig similar to what you use with your roki um for doing astrophotography there's some photography people in
Eric Loyd: the group and they asked me to be a speaker so uh coming
Eric Loyd: up on october I'll be doing that with an art group here locally but um like I
Eric Loyd: said most of what I do these days is one of two things in the world of astronomy anyway is uh
Eric Loyd: trying to bring people together through the star river podcast so they can hear what
Eric Loyd: other people are doing very similar to what you're doing here uh but with kind of a different focus I guess not
Eric Loyd: to steal your back focus we're there for
Eric Loyd: a second but um but then I do as you mentioned in when you introduced me um I am constantly on
Eric Loyd: the lookout for what I just got what I call discarded treasures of people who are like
Eric Loyd: you know here's that crappy telescope from sears right that eric had me this eric had as a kid and
Eric Loyd: now he's using it as a prop toy gun um when eric doesn't need it anymore it goes to you
Eric Loyd: know goodwill or whatever but a lot of times these telescopes still have a
Eric Loyd: lot of value in them to somebody who's never had a telescope before so I am constantly
Eric Loyd: looking for especially like looking for things that are a little four inch um cats that kind of thing which
Eric Loyd: they're hard to break really you can't drop something in the end and crack your mirror if you've got a newt
Eric Loyd: or something like that so I really like that kind of that's my sweet spot but I get them
Eric Loyd: I clean them up I refer them refurbish them and then I give them away oh nice
Eric Loyd: and um that's kind of what I do for my outreach and all um but everything I
Eric Loyd: do is done either through my web page of astropotamus.com or the thestarriver.com um and uh just sort
Eric Loyd: of like I said not really involved in any kind of formal um organization like that. So you did just kind
Eric Loyd: of tell us where we could find you at um so if you guys want to recap on
Eric Loyd: that uh the star river podcast he is astropotamus and you can find him I believe it's starriver.com right? It
Eric Loyd: is THEstarriver.com. I don't know what happens if you go just to starriver.com but that's definitely not
Eric Wright: me There's the same thing for back focus there's a website out there that's just back focus and it's not
Eric Wright: correct all right guys that wraps up this episode of back focus a huge thank you to our guests for
Eric Wright: sharing their time experience and passion for astronomy with us today if you enjoyed
Eric Loyd: this conversation be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode if you're listening to
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