Welcome to Bill the Sky Guy LiveStreaming

In a time when…

Well it’s the height of the Covid-19 Pandemic and it appears that things are not going to be getting back to normal any time soon which means I can’t do the thing that I love which is hold public stargazes for the resorts here on Hilton Head.

Because I have an interest in AstroPhotography and can computer-control my telescope mount it became apparent that it wouldn’t be all that difficult to live-stream the telescope view over the internet for people who are used to attending my stargazes.

Stocked for Stacking

So I looked into it all and have been able to devise a way to get this all together. It required a new kind of astro-camera software that can do “Live Stacking” which allows the camera to take a string of relatively short images and keep adding them together to make a really detailed long exposure image that really looks pretty good and has a lot more detail than you can see through the eyepiece, especially if the Moon is up.

In the past I have shied away from “video astronomy” because I like the immediacy of being able tell people that “the light that hit your retina just now has been traveling in space so long there were dinosaurs on the Earth when it left that galaxy in the Virgo Cluster”.

But I can’t do that anymore until things get back to normal so I’ll have to embrace the benefits of the camera which, in terms of the image I can present to people, is considerably better on some types of objects like wispy nebulas and galaxies.

Life is but a Stream

Next I had to locate some streaming software that would work on my computer and came across a good basic solution in the form of “OBS” a cross platform, open source streaming program that runs pretty well on my older Mac laptop. Once you understand how these programs are organized, it’s fairly easy to put together the various assets to display a combination of live video, the telescope cam and still photos along with my snappy patter about what we’re looking at at the moment.

Internet Access on the Go

The next big issue was to see how I could get my program onto the internet from a location dark enough and with access to the majority of the sky. I’m still experimenting with this but right now I’m hoping that my phone might be able to handle it in “personal hotspot mode” as long as I don’t do high frame rates of complicated videos. And I hope that “unlimited” data plan is just that or I could be in for a rude awakening!

At your Service

The only thing left is what service to use to present the program on and I’ve selected YouTube Live as the most ubiquitous choice. Click the link here to go to the channel and see the videos that I’ve posted and perhaps view some past live streams of memorable shows. The objects I show aren’t going to change much week by week so I’ll keep the best show from Summer, Winter, Autumn and Spring so there’s a wide variety of objects to see.

Show Archives

Here are links to some past shows: