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live night sky streamming site
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07-02-2011 1:36pm#1
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Its about 80% American lads, 15% European, 2% Aussie and 3% Others
Most are using a Mallincam which is very popular in Astrovideo circles. A Canadian guy called Rock Mallin heavily mods a particular type of CCTV camera turning them into the best Astrovideo camera on the market.(As opposed to Astrophotography cameras which are different beasts)
The cameras are capable of very nice colour images of lots of celestial objects which are delivered to the screen almost live. The camera can stack upto 56 seconds of exposures internally. The results aren't as highres or as sharp as the pictures the astrophotography lads can produce but what the mallincam delivers it delivers in less than a minute(ie, almost live) as opposed to the hours long exposures and even more hours worth of post processing by the astrophotographers.
Its a great site both for the viewer and the broadcasting astronomer. For the viewers, its great because you can do some virtual observing and chat live with loads of fellow amatuers while its daytime here or nighttime cloudy. For the broadcaster its great because Observing can be a solitary pursuit. Its rare that one has family that will want to join you in the cold in the back garden. The Nightskynetwork means you can have a virtual starparty right in your back garden with loads of fellow astronomers from all over the world online to keep you company.
The only thing is, is that with the bulk of the broadcasters being American this means that unless there is a few AUssies broadcasting during our daytime, or Europeans pre-midnight, one will have to wait till after midnight for the first of and bulk of the broadcasters on the east coast of America to start broadcasting when it gets dark there about 7pm.
It can be addictive stuff. Last time I was watching was a while ago now. I was watching the SST channel which is Mike Zammit who makes Starstructure Dobsonian telescopes. He had his mallincam pointed at Jupiter and the views were great. It was great when we saw what we at first thought was a dust mote on the CCD but after consulting planetarium software turned out to be the beginning of a shadow transit by the moon Ganymede. So there was this lad in Ireland(me) using software on his computer to tell someone in America what we were watching with another guy in Mexico or Indonesia confirming. A great nights viewing and chat with fellow astronomers was had, followed by the shock of looking at my watch and realising that although it was 12am his time, it was 5am my time and I was up for work at 7:30am 0 -
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dublin_daveyboy wrote: »yeah its a pity about the timezones but im a night owl anyway so it doesnt bother me,i was just on some guys channel a min ago think he had his scope on the orion nebula,im dying to see footage of the planets with the large scopes.i think its a great idea to have a site like this for astronomers or people who just want to see.
if anyone is on the site and sees something good post here.
edit:why didnt you post here and tell us about this calibos eh? being greedy:)
I guess I am as guilty as anyone for forgetting sometimes that this forum isn't all Chinese Lantern sightings and Shuttle Launch threads I lower my head in shame. It just never occured to me for whatever reason 
Its a pretty cool thing to be looking at some spiral galaxy 50 million lightyears via some guy and his consumer grade scope in his Wisconson backyard surrounded by 2ft of snow......and that the bright white dot you see in one of the spiral arms is a supernova that just happened last week (well 50million years ago + 1 week ) Thats where video astronomy is not the same as just going to wikipedia and looking at much better quality pictures of the same
object. That supernova won't be in the picture until someone updates the image.
Of course the odds of you catching something happening live thats more exotic than a satellite crossing the field of view is slim but tell that to Anthony Wesley from Austrailia who has had lightning strike him twice so to speek. In 2009 he was the first to see scars rotate into view on Jupiter after a comet strike. NASA/JPL put some presumably very important imaging work on hold and pointed the fricken Hubble Space Telescope at Jupiter based on this Aussie Amatuer Astronomers observation! Then last year he didn't just happen to be viewing Jupiter when scars rotated into view, he happened to be watching when a bloody comet struck the planet and he witnessed the bright flash of the explosion. Although he was doing planetary imaging this begins as basically the same thing as Astrovideo so he was looking at live video footage of the planet on his monitor via his scope.
WHereas with Astrophotpgraphy one takes long exposure images of celestial objects, with planetary and high quality lunar imaging one takes video footage. As we all know video is really just a series of still images taken rapidy one after the other. The beauty of modern technology and software is that an amatuer can take those 50 frames per second x 3 minutes = nearly 10,000 frames and the software and PC can sift through them and throw away all the frames where the planet is blurred by bad seeing in the atmosphere and keep all the good sharp frames, and then combine all the good sharp frames into one really fabulous picture. The likes of Anthony(Bird)Wesley and others are taking images of Mars Jupiter and Saturn with their small consumer grade scopes now that approach the level of detail of the images taken by the Voyager Probes as they passed right by the planets in the 70's and early 80's. This level of detail has only been surpassed in the last decade or so by Hubble and the Galileo and Cassini probes.
The contribution that can be made by amatuers with amatuer equipment in back gardens to 'Real' Astronomy is greater now than its ever been. For the likes of Anthony and his ilk, their contribution is not that they can deliver better images than the Pro's at the Keck in Hawaii or the controllers of Hubble but that basically these multi billion dollar instruments can only be pointed at one thing at a time. Every single night the vast vast majority of the night sky is not being watched by any Pro telescope or astronomer in the world. But there are hundreds of thousands of amatuers all over the world every night with their scopes pointed in every direction. If you see something special enough and let the pro's know, well you might not just be the first human in the world to spot a given event, you may be the human that made sure a great discovery and scientific opportuinity wasn't missed by the scientists with the 'big guns'.
On a similar note, it blows my mind that a little over 20 years ago we didn't know if ours was the only solar system in the galaxy. 20 years later we now know of the existence of over 500 exoplanets. The cool part is that amatuers are involved in calculating these exoplanets' orbits!! The brightest minds with the biggest scopes didn't know if they existed or not 20 years ago and yet today you have amatuers in their backyards helping them work out orbits!!
Its a similar story, in that the pro's have limited time and resources do do all the work themselves. With sensitive consumer grade modern technology, amatuers with amatuer scopes can record the spectral signiture of the exoplanets host stars and time the dips in the brightness curves as the exoplanet crosses in front of the star as it travels in its orbit. With this information the pros can fine tune their calculations about the planets orbits. PLanets 10's and 100's of lightyears away. With the Launch of the exoplanet hunter the Kepler probe the number of discovered exoplanets will rapidly increase meaning the services of amatuers will be called on even more.
......:o:D Sorry, went off on a bit of a tangent there....NightskyNetwork...Its pretty cool
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theres been a few channels online the past couple of nights.that camera the use is some kit really captures colors well.Apart from some great live coverage of the Moon all i have encountered there is Calibos so far !:p
great idea but lucky if anyone is broadcasting!
Edit, take it back the Orion Nebula is 'Live' now' Awesome!0 -
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Just been watching some lovely work on the Snake Valley link on this site. They are in Australia so there are two benefits. A) they are online during our day if you can't stay up, and
Views almost live of the southern sky which we can't see from here.
Nice folks to chat with too.0 -
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Hi derra this site has changed for me,i got so many hours free viewing from it,now it looks for full name,address,phone number and email address which i learned the hard way never to give to anyone online.
is it possible it is a phising site or are others experiancing the same ?
Yea, same here, disappointing because I don't like giving those details either.
I tried to sign up using an e-mail address I set up specially and used a phone no I use occasionally for just this kind of thing
, but got no notification back, seems a bit odd. 
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Cú Giobach wrote: »Yea, same here, disappointing because I don't like giving those details either.
I tried to sign up using an e-mail address I set up specially and used a phone no I use occasionally for just this kind of thing , but got no notification back, seems a bit odd.
Thanks for reply Cu, may'be Calibos can help us out about this site.
he seems to know the site well and his knowlegde about astronomy is terrific!0 -
Hi derra this site has changed for me,i got so many hours free viewing from it,now it looks for full name,address,phone number and email address which i learned the hard way never to give to anyone online.
is it possible it is a phising site or are others experiancing the same ?
Last week it was possible to just go to the site and select a channel to view, then it required you to register.
I just used an email address for those kind of registrations, phone number i used would not be a phone number anywhere in the world, name may as well be Joe Bloggs.
Other regular users commented on the new channel homepage look.Cú Giobach wrote: »Yea, same here, disappointing because I don't like giving those details either.
I tried to sign up using an e-mail address I set up specially and used a phone no I use occasionally for just this kind of thing , but got no notification back, seems a bit odd.
You can log in without receiving notification using the details you registered with. I registered twice as first time i used a fada and it turned out to be a question mark instead for that particular letter.
One i received notification and second time i did not, i just logged in straightaway using the new username and password details.0 -
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dublin_daveyboy wrote: »I just set up an email account for it and gave a mobile number and it registered straight away,was just watching the sun live,great stuff can see sun spots.
I never received an email from them and i gave a nonsense phone number.
did you give a real number?
i have just tried following the link in post #1 and it is not even offering a log in option!
i will try google it and start again,i also saw the horsehead nebula last time the link just went straight to the 'live cams', astronomers with good equipment would proably think seeing such things is no big deal.
to me it was fantastic!:)0 -
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thats grand had a feeling it was just a glitch and no problem man its a great little site,just hope they dont start wanting money:eek:,although i would throw them a few squid if it came to it.Cú Giobach wrote: »Working for me too now, must just have been a glitch.
By the way, thanks dublin_daveyboy for the "heads up" about the site.0 -
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mickger844posts wrote: »Registered yesterday but can't login for some reason. Keeps looping me back to the homepage. Anyone else having problems like this???
I did have that problem so I waited a couple of days and tried again, all ok now.
The applications may be getting vetted manually???? 0 -
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