Welcome, everybody to today in space. This week, we're talking
about the total solar eclipse. And it's April 8, it's coming up
fast, we're going to talk about what it is, and what makes this
one so special. And then we're going to talk about what to
expect during the eclipse. And then we're going to talk about
what equipment you can use, but also what we're going to use,
including our new telescope from veinous. here that we just got
off the Kickstarter, we'll do an unboxing. And we'll show you how
it was using it the first time. But welcome to the show. Let's
dive right in. So April 8 2024, is the total solar eclipse here
in North America. It's going from Mexico to Maine, and
through Newfoundland into Canada. And it's the last total
solar eclipse for the US for at least about 20 years. Based on
the research that I did, you guys can check those links. On
this week's episode, if you want to look into that as well, the
total path of totality that goes from Mexico through
Newfoundland, in the US, it goes through 13 states, those 13
states are Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky,
Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont,
New Hampshire, and Maine. And Texas has been really lucky last
year in October for the annular solar eclipse, they also had a
path of totality through Texas. And now there's another one
going right through in the same area, those people right there
in that cross are very lucky. But there are 31 million people
that live in this strip of totality. In the US, it goes
through some of the major cities in the country. But then there's
also people like myself and plenty of others probably you as
well, that are traveling as close as they can to the path,
which means there is a lot of people that will have eyes on on
this total solar eclipse. So so let's talk about what it is
first, and then we're going to talk about what to expect. So
total solar eclipse, I'm sure some of you may know what this
is. But let's just break it down real quick. This is where the
alignment of the Sun, the Moon and the Earth is perfect in that
the moon actually covers the sun entirely. Which means during the
point of totality, when the eclipse is at its peak, you can
actually look at the Eclipse because the sun is fully
covered. And that's where the real magic happens. Because at
that point, that is when the people that will be in the path
of totality will be able to experience the corona, which is
the atmosphere, the outer portion of the sun that we don't
ever get a chance to see because of the sun's brightness and
strength without it being covered. So this is an extremely
unique opportunity. The it will basically look like Twilight, it
will basically become dark, we'll talk about some weird
things to look for when that happens. But a really, really
unique thing that's also going to happen here is we have a
comet that is currently very close to the sun, and will be in
viewing path during the total solar eclipse. So not only will
it stars and the planets seem to come out of the sky from nowhere
in the middle of the day. But there also may be a comet tail,
as well. So that comment is comment 12 P ponds Brooks. And
it's been, it's been nicknamed the devil comment or the devil's
comment. And part of that is really just because unlike
Halley's Comet, or some of the other comments where the tale is
kind of consistently being created, there's off gassing as
it's going around the sun. So it's like it's it's, it's easy
to see. And you can kind of rely on that commentary tail.
Common 12 P is not consistent, and it seems to burn at
different rates, which means there may or may not be a tail,
and it may be easy to see, and it may not. So it all depends on
the day of and what that comment decides to do. But it is
possible that you may also get to see a comment during this
total solar eclipse, so keep an eye out for it, which means it's
a perfect opportunity to jump into our next topic here. What
to expect. Now this is our this will be our third solar eclipse
that will have been a part of the first one was in 2017. That
was kind of the first of the great American eclipses that we
were going to experience here. This one being one of the last
ones for a little while here. But in 2017 That was the first
time I had been an adult and actually was attempting to look
at an eclipse without like a teacher or an after school
program doing it for me as a kid. Right. And there's a lot
it's an experience right. The Solar Eclipse itself will range
anywhere from I'm in at the peak of it where the sun is
completely covered and totally eclipsed anywhere from two
minutes to four and a half minutes, where the longest will
be in Mexico at the beginning of that path, we will end up up in
Maine, three minutes and 20 seconds to as little as two
minutes of that Corona experience of the total eclipse.
So you want to make the most out of that entire time that you do
have. But you also have the minutes and hours before and
after, where the moon is starting to cover and then
starting to move out of the way of the sun. And so there's a lot
to experience here. Number one, this can be done without any
equipment, this can be done just hanging out or just experiencing
it, maybe you are like so many people who will be working that
day, and you only have a moment to jump out maybe on a break. Or
maybe when everyone's doing it. If you have trees nearby, look
at the shadows, look at them the day of early on in the day, and
then look at them as the moon starts to eclipse the sun, and
you will notice that the shadows actually start to change. And
you actually see the slice of the sun that is actually
uncovered. So basically, you're gonna get these little slices of
sunlight, going through the shade up to eclipse, and then
you'll get the same thing. And it's, it's a very interesting
effect. It's like a shimmering effect, I highly recommend it, I
think that is a super fun thing to just point out. And I think
it's something most people aren't paying attention to.
Because they're so focused on the Eclipse itself, there's
actually a lot of magic happening on the ground around
you. So make sure to look for the shadows, and also nature and
sounds right around you, the animals, the wildlife around
even the temperature around you is going to change because
obviously the sun is getting covered up. But not only will it
get cooler, the winds might also change. But also listen again,
no other equipment other than the sensors that you have
onboard assuming that you can hear the sounds of nature will
start to die down as animals think that Twilight and bugs
think that Twilight is coming early. So it captures a lot of
attention. I even noticed that a lot of you know I live in the
suburbs, a lot of the yard work and the the noise of the
neighborhood also died down at that time as people were struck,
starting to realize, Oh, is that Eclipse happening right now. Or
I just noticed something interesting going on, maybe they
didn't even know it was happening. We mentioned the
corona. Of course, I've never seen one, I'm very excited to
witness the corona, myself, I'm not really sure what to expect,
I'm not sure what my telescopes are going to be able to pick up.
But we're gonna, we're gonna show you those in a second here.
But definitely the corona, if you get to go to the path of
totality. That is the high ticket item, for sure. And then
the bonus round is the comet if we're able to see common 12 P
pawns Brooks, that would be incredible. If the comet decides
to actually spark up and have a tail and burn off something as
it's getting closer to the sun, that would be amazing. But it
should be within our viewing window for this eclipse. So
those are some things to look out for. But like I started to
say about my first whole Eclipse, don't take on too much
brightly. So it's a very exciting event. You want to do
the best you want to, you know, capture the moment and of
course, in our world with our cell phones, and taking pictures
and videos of everything, I'm sure you're going to want to.
But take all of those things. We talked about the shadows, the
nature and sounds around you as well as the temperature in the
environment. How do those change? How does the corona look
that's different than any other time. And of course, the comment
itself. If you're looking for what you can use on that day, I
would say pick one thing and stick to it. If it's your first
eclipse, if you're a little bit more experienced, obviously, do
what you can do what you want to there's there's some great
opportunity for content, I will be bringing two telescopes, a
camera and definitely something to record audio. So I will be
doing a lot but this is going to be my third Eclipse. So I'm able
to be a little bit more present that that's the key is find out
whatever it is that you need to do to be present for this
because it's a moment that not that most people don't ever get
to experience. So if you're able to go to the path of totality,
or just experience the Eclipse, soak it in and be present. It's
it's really magical. Now, equipment, what are you going to
use to watch this eclipse? Obviously, if you have solar
eclipse glasses, those are great. And then once totality
happens and the sun is fully covered, you can take those
glasses off and kind of experienced the whole thing. And
then as the sun starts to uncover glasses on make sense,
but as we found out on the last Eclipse for the annual Eclipse
we had a few clips from the podcast, we talked about how to
be safe not to look directly at the clips, and many people
online did not like that did not like being told what to do. And
you know what, you're more than welcome to make the decisions
you want. But an interesting thing came up about people
saying that there really is no danger to looking at the sun. So
I figured you know what, let me do a little research and look
this up. I'm no doctor. But this is what I found out. When you're
looking at the sun, your eyes, your cornea is taking in that
light, we don't have pain receptors in our eyes. So if
you're doing damage, which seems to be just as much as like
getting sunburned, right, your son burning your cornea, that's
not great, but it's your choice. So just realize that it's not
going to instantly make you blind, but it's also probably
not great for you. And there's nothing built into your eyes,
and your body to let you know that too much is too much. So
keep that in mind when you're watching the Eclipse. Anytime
that you bring in a lens, like a telescope, binoculars, that's
when things get a little bit more dangerous because you're
focusing light. So just make sure you have the right filter.
Good rule of thumb is make sure it has some kind of ISO
certification, there are legitimate ISO standards that
regular solar glasses are made for. You can go on nasa.gov,
they have plenty of articles, they even have one where they
talk about what to look for with your filters so that you're
safe. But basically, if you're using anything with a lens, you
definitely want to have the appropriate solar filter. So
this is the solar filter. Let's talk about what kind of stuff we
have here, our solar filter for our main telescope, the vest
bearer from Bioness, it's an automated telescope, I can align
it, it has this whole process to have me put the lens on to get
ready for it. It has GPS is a lot easier than most of the
telescopes I've ever used before, which is great because
it also leaves me hands free and able to go do other things and
experience the moment while it works for me instead of
tinkering around with it and trying to make it work. This is
our solar filter that we'll use. I'll give you guys a quick look,
here is this bearer. So really cool little device, the
telescope arm goes up like this and the lens and closes back.
Very excited to get this back out for this eclipse. We took
some videos, what we could have the annular eclipse, it's New
England was very rainy, we did our best, but we got something
out of it, which is at least what we're hoping April 8
doesn't guarantee that there is no rain or clouds. So we'll see
what we can do. Then we have this our new telescope Hestia,
which is purely optical, there's no power to it, there's no
battery, there's no electronics, it's all lenses, and focusing of
light. And you use your cell phone, your cell phone goes
right over here, the camera, and essentially the camera and your
cell phone become the brain of your telescope, which I find
really fascinating. It's a lot, it's a lot less expensive than
say this telescope, I would say a factor of less, you know,
maybe a quarter of the price for this. And it's great, we took it
out, did a little bit of work with it to try and get some
practice a week before the Eclipse we had a clear blue sky
that we can actually do that. And we'll we'll show you more of
that at the end of the episode. But that's going to be our main
equipment. And then there's the old reliable the pinhole camera,
which really is very simple. It allows you to watch the clips
without directly looking at it. So we've done this before you
can do this with any kind of box, you get a box and you poke
a hole through the back of it. I like to cut a hole and put some
aluminum foil over it and just do like a little pinhole in it.
And then you want this box to be kind of big enough, you can kind
of put it on your shoulder and then look at it. So you'll cut
out a window on the other side of where you poke that hole. And
I like to put a piece of white paper there, wherever that
sunlight is going to come through. It just makes it easier
to view. And that becomes your camera for the day. You know,
you basically face the opposite way the sun put that hole facing
the sun, you kind of align it and you see it come in this view
window in your pinhole box. It's about as low tech as it gets.
But it's super effective and it it lets you easily watch
throughout the day. You can pass it around with people have them
look at it. It's a really interesting way to look at this
but that's that's it folks that's we are very excited to
take out our new equipment. We're very excited to take on
our old reliable, our Aspera telescope. And we're just very
excited to share this with you guys as well, especially for
anyone who can't make it to the Half of totality, we will share
as much of that as possible. So, on April 8, make sure to look
out for us today in space pod on Instagram and Twitter. We're at
today in space on Tiktok. And today in space podcast on
Facebook, you can email us today in space podcast@gmail.com. If
you have anything that you want to add, have us talk about on
the podcast, anything you'd like us to dig into deeper. Or if you
just want to connect and say hi, we'd love to hear from you. Make
sure to spread love and spread science. And we'll see you next
week after the total solar eclipse for another episode of
today in space. Until then spread love spread science.
See you next time. All right, folks, we are here to unbox our
new telescope from Bioness. It is Hestia we're going to be
using it for the total solar eclipse on April 8. Let's break
into the clutch pack. So here is the box. And right here. It's
our little clips pack. This is the lens, the solar filter this
is it. Here is the beauty. There was a really great deal for
Hestia when they were doing Kickstarter for it, I knew how
much they had done with their first one. They got me We
interviewed Cyril Dupree, the CEO on the podcast on today in
space and look I think the team is awesome. The support has been
great. So now let's dive into their next telescope here nice
and gentle Yes, this is my 3d printing lab if you guys are new
here if you've never seen this background before this is where
we bring all our ideas into reality so it seemed like the
perfect place to open this and look forward to showing you guys
more about this as as the year goes on. But let's open it Oh
nice. So right away seeing a lot of really good things. This
looks like the IPs for my cell phone camera. Looks like that's
probably the stand for the cell phone
so light
oh I see so oh maybe
I wonder if you could put your eye up to this. That's something
for later getting ahead of myself. So lens caps on
everything lens films. Here's our model number that looks
beautiful. Out here we got a sleeve for it good I like it
nice here's the cleaning kit so we all the things that would
need clean lenses. See a microfiber cleaning cloth and a
little bit cleaning wipes. Perfect
All right. Boom. That's that we've got some instructions
here. Here's where we can download the app. Get help.
Okay, this looks like
I'm looking for here. Phone
All right. Cool. Nice, simple I could have sworn that I got the
stand, but maybe not off the Check
All right, I think
interesting. So so that can fit. Okay. Well, I'm going to do a
little bit more research on this, but I am like it couldn't
mount this to anything. So be interesting to see what features
this has in general, especially for something like the the
eclipse is it going to be tracking I don't think so. Which
means that the view window for the eclipse is probably going
to, like, the sun is going to be a lot smaller in the same visual
screen, as say, like the, the vest bearer that we have, that
telescope kind of fits the sun and the entire screen. I don't
know what kind of zooming they're doing from the actual
lens. This might be maybe a little bit more raw. I don't
know all the details, but I am excited to bring this long. It's
a different type of lens, a different type of telescope.
Certainly not the, the price range of say, the sparrow, or
Vesper two or Aspera Pro, or there are other telescopes that
are more powerful like Hyperion, which is I think, their most
powerful one. And there's also one more that I'm forgetting.
But it's like between the two, Selena, that's the name but I'm
excited. This is very cool. It's a budget friendly telescope
slash landscape viewer. We're going to dig into this and learn
a little bit more okay, we forgot to do one last thing open
up the solar filter. Let's take a look
little guy
look at that that is that is fresh. Save that for later.
All right, so this was us taking out Hestia for the first time,
we had a clear day in New England after so many weeks of
rain. But this was our first time taking it out. Now, I do
really mean this is my first time taking it out. I didn't
look at a lot of the instructions. And I was just
trying to see how easy setup was going to be. I had one of my
cameras set up watching as we did this. And you can see here
on the right we are using the app. This is when I realized I
probably should have looked at the instructions. And it wants
me to scan the QR code on the bottom of the device, which is
all fine. I ended up getting it off the mount here in a second.
But the app gravity from them is what runs everything is the
brain. It helps you pick which mode that you're going to be
using and it helps you run all of the various options like
exposure and zoom and you know having you was the sparrow
before the other telescope I have from them, the first
telescope I got from Venus, they really did a great job with the
combination of the app and the smart telescope. Here, they
really went heavy on the app itself. And I really like what
they've got, there's multiple modes for this. So you have a
scenery mode, where you can actually, you know, take long.
Basically, your, your, you've got a giant zoom machine for
your cell phone camera, which I have tried before, when we went
to go see the Artemis launch Artemis one, I would have really
liked this device to use my own camera to either livestream
launch or take pictures of the launch. It seems like it's going
to be a perfect device for that. Here, you can see me struggling
with actually getting the focus of the right main camera, I have
an iPhone 13 Pro. So for me, the third camera, sorry for the
timer, the third camera, the main camera was a little hard to
find. So this is me, trying to figure it out. Really cool stuff
like this eyepiece focus in the app itself, it's actually giving
you an idea of where this needs to go. And this is me struggling
to get the camera in the right place here.
But different things I probably would have done, I probably
would have set this up a little bit lower the actual device
itself on the tripod, because that just would have made it
easier to view the camera and the eyepiece at the same time.
And then when it's actually in use, you'll see this later, but
I actually would have liked to have brought the device up to
eye level. So I wasn't looking down the whole time. But little
subtle things that I learned from trying it the first time.
And here you can see very close to getting that camera actually
in there, and the for the eyepiece, it's a little rubber
cone, basically, and maybe silicone. But it seems to work
really well really well once it's on the camera. In
retrospect, I think I would have done a better job of centering,
but it was also very bright. And my phone screen didn't get much
darker. So like seeing it on the record here, it's actually much
clearer in this screenshot than it was for me in real life. So
here I'm moving around, you can see the different modes. This is
for the actual Sun observations, and it asks you to install the
sun filter. So it's this little small filter, probably about an
inch in diameter, where the other ones for Maspero, around
two inches. But it screws on very easily. And the eyepiece
even can move a little bit on the outside, it doesn't do any
focusing. But it does seem like it's on a on a free rotation,
and it's a little bit loose. But here, we install the sun filter.
And then we go through the process of aligning a telescope
to the sun. Now I do this with my other telescope, and you
actually use the slit between the arm that goes up and the
body to align that. So it's one straight line, that's how you
know you're actually close to the sun. Here, where this little
piece that's on the side of Hestia actually has a view hole.
And on the plastic piece, you will actually see the dot. But
for some reason I was able to get the shadow of that through.
So I'm not sure what I did wrong here. But it still ended up
aligning and close enough later. But something something's No,
the actual dot should be on that plastic piece that's on the
side, not on my hand, like I'm doing here. But again, it ended
up working out. So no big deal.
So here, I go back into the app to the next step. And we
actually start to use the View window here. So once I confirm
that it is in the right direction, we move on to the
next. So here these are basic settings from the beginning. And
this is when I start dialing in the position of the telescope
and you can see the sun starting to peak in the bottom there. So
my weird alignment did work for some reason. But this is when I
realized that the telescope mount and just the telescope
that I had, really it's not The right one. So this is one that I
bought back in Florida at a Walmart, it was perfect for what
I needed at the time, but not the finesse that's needed here
to kind of dial in the sun. But there it is, that's our first
little time lapse, get a better view of what it's like actually
operating Hestia. And it's kind of like just displaying your
phone in front of you. So, like I said, what I would like to do
next time is actually lift this higher, and get it closer to the
actual height of my my head. So I'm just looking straight at it.
Instead of having it a little bit further down, like I'm
holding my cell phone in front of me. But you can see here, I'm
trying to do some focus. Again, this was harder to do in real
life, because of how bright it was outside. And it was just a
struggle with my sunglasses, and everything to actually see the
screen perfectly. So as I'm doing these adjustments, I'm
doing the best I can with viewing it. But I'm sure I could
get it much sharper. If maybe I had some shade over. Maybe I'll
need a I don't know hat or something. But something just to
make it easier to actually see what's on the screen. But here
I'm playing with the settings, we've got exposure, we've got
ISO focus and preview boost. So I'm kind of moving around here
and playing around with it. You can see there that the catalog,
excited to use that and another time. The wind also picks up
that away for a second to see if it's actually going to survive
the wind and the gust and actually did a good job. So that
was nice to see that. In here, I'm playing around with that
kind of loose lens on the front, it doesn't seem to do anything
for the actual zoom. It's not a focus. And the other interesting
thing here is when you take a time lapse, like it'll is
actually built in the app gravity to keep metallics,
going, and then you're tapping the camera image to take another
image and it actually needs to stabilize before it takes the
next image. So if it's a windy day, for some reason, your mount
isn't really keeping up with what's needed. It that could be
a problem, but it does seem like a very easy interface. And we,
and we really enjoyed using it. So that was our first time. We
can't wait to take it out for the actual Eclipse. And we're
excited to show you guys more. So that's Hestia thanks for
joining us. Have a great week everybody.