Salutations Celestial Sightseers David Fuller here with eyes on the sky and wanted to share
with you an idea that my wife Kimberly and I had that we would like to further Implement
for helping people be able to see more of the night sky because we live under Bortle
4 skies which is a rural transition type of area so the Milky Way is visible it's not
as bright as a Bortle 1 or Bortle 2 but it's way better than even Bortle 5 where my friend
Dave and I used to live where my friend Dave lives you can notice a difference you'd only
see 90 degrees in the Milky Way there here you can see about 160 degrees in the Milky
Way so that's pretty good and it's much brighter and what we also wanted to be able to do was
show people how to starhop using simple binoculars just like these these are just Celestron Cometron
7 x 50 binoculars very simple I bought a bunch of them so that way everyone would have the
exact same experience because they'd be able to use the binoculars that are the exact same
ones I'm pointing things out with and be able to show them things in the night sky so what
we've done is a couple of things number one we have completely transformed our property
so right behind me let's see if you can see this over here
this area of our property we left still has a bunch of golden rod and things on it of
that nature and there was a lot of that along with dogwood and just under brush stuff that
really didn't belong here because this is a this is Prairie this was originally Prairie
and we want to restore a lot of this to prairie so if you look out over this way and hopefully
the sun doesn't kill it too much we completely leveled all that which is great we have one
little section over here which we still need to have hit again the guy that brought out
the forestry mulcher to do it his hydraulic line broke so he couldn't quite finish it
he's coming back out to finish that up so that's kind of where we are with that but
I want to show you this idea that we have because down on the
southeastern part of our property we have a shed which the shed is useful for holding
obviously things to cut the grass and some of the trees and things like that small trees
or cut branches but more importantly we want to sort of use this as an area that we can
have be
used for astronomy and it has worked well for that both for you know having some friends
over but also we did a meet-up group the nice thing about the Meetup group was is that we
had a bunch of people come out and it was cold but we have the heater so that worked
well to be able to have them just be able to hang out still warm up see the night sky
what we did with that though was we had an indoor presentation first brought them out
to the property they could see the dark sky use the binoculars showed them a number of
objects and then we went back inside for the remainder of the presentation we wanted to
try to just do everything outside so how do we do that well I'm going to show you very
quickly in two minutes what I did to make that happen so here we go
That is a 200 inch screen diagonally so it's about 14 feet wide and almost eight feet tall
so it's large it's actually larger than I expected it to be it wound up that the shed
is just slightly smaller than I expected but it works so yay and what's exciting about
that is is anyone who is in the Chicago area Bloomington Champaign because we're kind of
equidistant from all those areas that has more light pollution we want to invite them
or if you happen to be passing through and want and are able to stop by for one of our
meetups at the time we want to have you come out here I'll do a presentation over on the
screen and then you'll literally be right here and hopefully we'll have clear skies
obviously because it is the Midwest and you never know but with clear skies you'll be
able to literally look up use binoculars and see those objects immediately and that's something
that we think is a little different than what probably anyone else is offering now maybe
someone else does this if they do I'm not aware of it most things start inside and then
go outside so we're going to try to do one where everything's just outside even if it's
cold we won't do bitterly cold obviously but even in cold weather you know people bundled
up and we had the heater and they were warm and things worked so that is the new plan
and I hope you will be able to join us for that if not I'm going to do a bunch of other
content help you be able to still find things in the night sky as well and for that I will
obviously ask you to you know if you've not already a subscriber please hit the Subscribe
button like this video and like the future ones that are coming your way and with that
keep your eyes on the sky your outdoor lights aimed down so we can all see what's up and
I'm David Fuller wishing you clear and Dark Skies