hey everyone nico carver here i just arrived at a very dark rural location
right on the border of oklahoma and new mexico i'm here for the okitex star party and it's going
to be great i'm going to be here all week and i'm gonna share the experience with you
i've been here a few days now we've had exceptionally clear weather
it's been an amazing star party this is a portal one location and you can see the
extent of the star party below there's plenty to do here you can go hiking during the day
there's uh nature i've seen giant grasshoppers tarantulas but the the main event here is of
course stargazing and for me astrophotography and there are many other astrophoto photographers here
some with really cool setups that i've been uh happy to explore with with people and so i think
that's really the reason to go to a star party is to to meet people and to get fresh ideas because
there's a lot of really excellent amateur astronomers and astrophotographers out there
that come to these and are happy to share both their views through sometimes giant dobsonians
hand-built telescopes really really custom cool telescopes and so there's a ton to do a ton to
learn there's also usually scheduled talks so i was one of the speakers at okitex i presented um
on wide field astrophotography this was an amazing night the one that i'll always remember this is on
the southern coast of iceland it's called the joking sarlaan glacier lagoon and i call this
my first star party because uh you can really see there's a bunch of photographers over here
and they were from all over the world i met people from japan europe and people with all kinds of
different setups this time lapse was a little bit more challenging to put together because
tours kept coming in on buses and when the tour groups came out they all had their cell phones
they were taking flash photography and so whenever there was a flash in my time lapse it would sort
of really sort of distract from the beauty of the scenes question is how do you tell how much
light pollution is in the sky there's a lot of good ways to do it um one is just with our eyes
john bortle developed the portal scale which is a way to just do it with your eyes and that ranges
from portal one to portal nine so here we're in a portal one when i'm in boston i'm in a portal
nine which means the brightest guys and so right now it's it's the twilight hour there's actually a
giveaway going on right now so a lot of people are that but then right after the giveaway ends
they're going to come out here onto the observing field start setting up their telescopes getting
ready for the night this has been an amazing gift for me as someone who lives out on the east coast
so you know from my channel i've been watching that a dark sky for me is like portal 4 and this
again is a was a portal one sky so it's just it's really something else when you see that many stars
and and so many uh deep sky objects that i'm familiar with i can i can make out just naked eye
like you can sort of see the outline of the north america nebula in cygnus you can see
the lagoon is is pretty well defined the the star clouds in the milky way of course really pop out
there's but there's plenty of others the m31 m33
so many cool things just to if just to sit under this sky and just and just take it in