It's time for some ministers to resign, says the NNPP presidential candidate, Rabiu Kwonguoso, and youth candidacy drops 6% ahead of the 2023 elections, says Yaga Africa. This is Plus Politics, and I am Mary Anna Cohen. A president under normal circumstances should surround himself with competent people. These were the words of the presidential candidates of the new Nigeria People's Party NNPP. According to him, Nigerians have to put aside their issue of sentiment and must be careful in the coming 2023 elections. Speaking on the state of the nation, the presidential candidate said there are enough resources in the country to take care of everyone, and this is evident in Kanu state. In a one-on-one session with the NNPP presidential candidate, Senator Rabiu Kwonguoso discussed the upcoming elections and the party's level of preparation. Take a listen. Senator Rabiu Kwonguoso is so good to have you join us on this show today. Thank you very much. I have spoken with you before we started the campaign, and of course I did ask you why anybody would want to be the president of this country, knowing that we have problems on every side. If Nigeria were to be a circle and we tossed the pen everywhere the pen face would have one problem or the other, but it's very incredible when people say they want to run this country. But let's talk about the campaign seasons. We've seen that the PDP had kicked out of their campaigns on Monday, and we're yet to hear from the NNPP, but you are in Lagos today, inaugurating some campaign offices. Let's start from there. Thank you very much. Let me start by thanking Almighty God for making it possible for us to be here in Lagos today, and it is also an opportunity for me to thank all our members, members of the New Nigeria People's Party and NNPP who ride from the airport where they are early in the morning to receive me and members of my entourage were taken to the venue, to the office, and we were pleasantly surprised to see thousands and thousands. Some people are saying good fraction of a million people in that venue, and we thank Almighty God. The office has been officially opened, and I had some meetings with some stakeholders, and the meeting will continue through the night to look at the situation in Lagos, and even in the southwest in general. I'm happy to say that our strategy is working. First and foremost, we have succeeded in showing a lot of presence in all the northern states. We have gone very deep and white in northern states as expected, and now we are now coming into the south. So far in the north, we were able to open our offices in all the states except Zamfara, Yobi, and of course Jigawa. These are states that are around Kano itself, and very soon we will go and open the offices and ensure that all offices at words, local governments and states are there in touch. Might I ask why the three states are yet to be opened since they actually surround parents? No, you see normally we go with the circumstances in the states. Some of the states were able to get the offices on time from the words up to the state level. Some states are working on it, and therefore we always agree with the state on the issue of date of visiting those states. But in any case, there will always be number one, and there will be number last if you like in when you start this campaign. Now the issue of candidates starting the campaign, you see many people don't even understand politics. Politics is not a one-day affair. You just don't wake up just overnight and say you are a politician or you are starting a campaign. Our campaign has been on at least in the last 30 years. 30 years ago, I was deputy speaker house of representatives. I was in the consulate conference from 1994 to 95. I was governor of Kano, 1999, 2003, minister of defense for the second term of Siv Oleshega Mubasebdo. And of course, I was senator of the federal republic. I was in the NDDC, representing the Northwest. And I was also advisor to president under Fulhan Somalia when they had those issues. So our campaign is continuous. We may decide to receive my flag and that of my running mate. We don't want to be a colorful ceremony, but campaign for us is day in, day out. And that's why by the grace of God we are able to establish a huge, huge goodwill across the country. And many people, if you ask them even the cryptics, they will say, oh, it's Kano. Others will say, oh, he's Northwest. Others will say, oh, he's North. But whatever the case, you can see the pattern of the support. When you say Kano, Kano, people will say it just casually. It's a huge blessing. But that's just one state out of 36 states of the federation. And of course, you know that Nigeria, mother never is very invited, especially for this election. So I think I should ask you, how do we tend to blur those lines? Because it looks more like to be out on looker that this election is more of original election. We're seeing candidates representing regions as opposed to representing Nigeria. I am not representing region. I am representing Nigeria. And that is why you can see wherever we go, you may think that is where our strength is. We have been to some states in the South. We were in Cross River. We were in Delta. We were in Aqai Bo. We were here and in fact, we are now in Lagos. And many other states, especially Ohio State, I was there a couple of times since joining the NNPP. And all other states, if we go there, you may think that is the home of NNPP. And that's how it should be. So we thank Nigerians for the support. Of course, they are not doing it just for nothing. Our support is solid. It's organic in the sense that it's based on our antecedents, it's based on our performance, not interviews or telelikes or using social media or even conventional media. We make very little noise about what we have done. In fact, we very much rely on the very old Lucas you mentioned. They are the ones selling us across the country. And sometimes we feel very happy by people under rating our party or the candidates. We just move in. And I think as we are moving, fortunately or unfortunately, we are beginning to cognize that NNPP, for many obvious reasons, is the party to beat. Because we in our group believe that the three other parties that people talk about have reached their climates. They have reached their peak. There is nothing, nothing PDP or APC or any other party will do between now and February to challenge fortune. Nothing. It is, yes, it is the NNPP that is a growing party. All those people and goodwill that other parties are losing are certainly coming to NNPP. That's why it's the fastest growing party. Others have reached their peak. And we are happy that they did because we have their history, we were in those parties. And it was because of our personal experience in those parties that we decided to form this or join this party. Together with our brothers and sisters who share our own principle and ideology. And I'm happy that people are beginning to recognize that our party is the only way out for the country. Let me go back to a question that I asked you earlier about blurring the lines. And the reason why I asked the question is there's so many problems that we're facing, whether it be ethnic, religious, and of course the politicians are at the center. How do you intend, because you talked about your strategies working, what strategy are you going to use to deal with the divisions that we have in the country? Former president Lushevon Passenger recently spoke about the fact that these elections might just make or break us.  So what do you intend to do to make sure that that is not you? Yes, you see, by the grace of God we are going to have a very peaceful and successful election. And NNPP will win that election in 2023. I told you right from the beginning that all these supporters we have in this country were not doing it for nothing. It was based on the solid achievements that we had in Kano and elsewhere. As I told you, I was the governor of Kano 1999, 2003, and of course 2011 to 2015. We have done extremely well, especially at that particular time, our main issue in Kano then was the issue of education. We have performed to the extent with due humility no government in the history of this country did what we did in Kano. Because there was no government, state government that sponsored over 3000 young men and women of Kano, not indigenous of Kano, residents of Kano who have been given free scholarship to go and study various fields across 14 countries of the world. It was only our government really at that time that established two major universities, Kano University of Science and Technology and Northwest University. It was our government in four years that established 26 institutes that had to do training, retraining, and of course supporting our young men and women in various trades and businesses. So we have done so well. It was only us that sponsored thousands of students to private universities. We have done it in Kalam University, 412 students or young men and women from Kano to that university, 300 to Ignidian University, 300 to Dells University, 200 to Crescent University, 25 to Abti. These were people who came from Mr. Nobody. And now they are graduates, some of them doctors, PhDs, some of them are even professors. So we have done so much in education. And it was only in Kano, I believe, that every child of Kano during our time had opportunity to go to primary school. All of them, but only to go and sit on the floor with a chair. It was only during our time that any child that graduated from primary school had an opportunity to go to secondary school because we established hundreds of them, including 44 technical schools and so on and so forth in Kano. It was during our time that anybody who see university qualification that had admission either in this country or outside the country. And we are so happy with that. And that's why when they say we have support from Kano, it's not just not for nothing. And we are able and happy to say the issue of security, the Boko Haram at that time did everything possible under the sun to take over Kano. But going by my experience from the Ministry of Defense, what we did was to bring in all the services, the military, of course, the army, the Air Force in Kano, the police, the SACS, the civil defense, and all other people in uniform. Together was our own security, the special services in Kano State. We brought them together under the Bulgaria commandant. We gave them all what they required. And that's how we work together with enough intelligence. And we did hundreds of thousands of young men and women who are empowered. And along the line, of course, we included them in the issue of security. And our agencies at that time, security agencies, had no problem with intelligence. There is very much available to them. And that's why, up till today, it is very difficult for anybody, any criminal, any terrorist to reach Kano easily. It's not possible. I'm curious, if you were able to do that in Kano, why is it something that we cannot replicate across the states in the areas that are mostly affected by either Boko Haram or the so-called gunmen or the bandits? I mean, we see how stretched, thinly stretched our security forces are right now, including the police. And this is one of the biggest problems that this administration has faced, especially for a government who rode into office on the wings of that. So why do you think the problem, or why do you think the problem is? Because you've spoken about what you were able to do in Kano, and that still stands as we speak. But why can't it be replicated across the country? Well, as a federal government, that's what we intend to do. But if you are looking at a token of governance, you see, unfortunately, from my experience, from 1999 to 2008, most people who are opportuned to be governors, they want to stand on themselves to think that they know everything. They hardly learn from any other person. You see, in 1999, 2003, I was governor of Kano. We have done so well. I lost election because of some obvious reasons in 2003, not because of performance or credibility or anything. No. Because of the sentiments of that time, Yudhara Buhari came. At that time, everybody was shouting, say, Buhari, we were in the PDP together with Obasejo. We stood by Obasejo and worked so hard. That was the only time they put gubernatorial and presidential election same day. And along the confusion result was announced, I lost election. Now, that was the first time we stood by the party. Now, but when I came back eight years after, the first place of call was this Legos to come to Fashola and say how I did this, how I did that, to learn more. Not because I didn't know. When I was governor, Fashola was here, certainly, was not a governor. It was not in the Bolatino book. That's what we started together. So people should learn, people should compare, people should listen. There is so much to learn in this country. Many of us were in government house for a very long time. Those of us who started, especially those of us who have started in 1999, were nobody. In fact, the general thing is, I am now the governor. It is the seat and nobody listens to other people. So we were ready. In fact, even at that time, there were many things that we were doing in Kano, that I tried to share with the Northern governors. That's one of my second term. But most people were not even willing to do it. But the point now is that I think you are right. And that's why we are in the rest. What we have done in Kano, what I have done in the Minister of Defense at that particular time, because I am sure Nigerians will remember, during our time, it was extremely difficult for anybody to raise his head against Nigerians. It was very difficult. In fact, we were out there. Our military was in Liberia. Our military was in Sierra Leone. The military were in Darfur in Sudan and so on and so forth. And they did extremely well. Now many things have gone wrong to the extent that we are not even talking of going out for operation anywhere. Even to protect ourselves is becoming extremely difficult now. And we have seen the issues. We have known the issues. And it's well documented in our party. And very soon we are coming up or coming out with the details of what we will do in the areas of security, areas of economy, areas of education. We all want to do it differently because that is what is needed today. You know, the general thing, I mean, everybody will talk, I will do this, but we'll come out with the details in our blueprint. Since we're talking about different aspects of the country, let's talk about the oil situation, the oil theft. The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party, Divayo had mentioned the fact that government was complicit in the level of oil theft that we've been experiencing recently. And I'm sure that you have heard that there's been a pipeline that is stretching to the sea that government just discovered where our oil is being funneled into the hands of thieves. Why do you think that this is happening right under a president who is the minister for petroleum? And of course, an NNPC that has been rebranded over and over again, but change has not necessarily taken place. What do you think about that situation surrounding oil? In my own opinion, in the first place, president, ordinarily she didn't be the minister of petroleum. In this case, he is. Unfortunately, he is. And you see, NNPC is just like all other ministries, departments and agencies. Things have gone wrong. The problem we had now, or we have on the ground, is that president under normal circumstances should surround himself with very competent people. All areas, all these places are being mined by somebody. And for the minister or the group managing director and even the security agencies that are responsible for ensuring the safety of our infrastructure, especially the pipes you are talking about. An anomalous circumstance is the time for many of them to resign. You see, he cannot be going around collecting money in terms of debts from outside loans while at the same time your own assets are being taken away day and night by criminals. It doesn't tell you. And you see, I am one of those who hate the issue of loan. For the eight years I was governor, I never borrowed one naira. And twice I was going to government house in 1999 and 2011, I was in heriting huge debts from my predecessors. But there was never a time in those two places that I left one naira as debt. I would pay them and exit living zero debt. And that is how it should be. And that's why we always tell Nigerians and everybody who cares to know that there is enough resources in this country to take care of ourselves. And we have proved it in common on two different occasions, 1990, 2000 and the 88 years in between. When I lived in 2003, no zero, when I came back hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars were being borrowed. The first thing I did was to exit from those loans and paid off and left Kaloan 2015 zero debt. So you see everybody wants to be governor. In fact, even everybody wants to be president. But the problem is how many people have got the capacity and how many people have proved to the country and the world that they have the capacity to do the work of the president. Some of them just want to be there because they want it. Some may think it's a place to enjoy. Some will think it's a place to amass some resources and so on and so forth. It doesn't work that way. I am personally in politics to make the difference. I was in the civil service of Kano for 17 years before I left service because I started very early after my technical education in Kano. I joined RECA and served for 17 years as a civil servant before retiring from the civil service in 1991 and I became deputy speaker in 1992 of the House of Health. So you see that is why Nigeria's, this time around, this 2023 election, they have to be very, very careful. They have to put aside the issue of sentiments that this one is from my ethnic group. This one we go to Moscow or the church together. This one is from the north. This one is from south. What we are advocating is that people should put their antecedents on the ground. We want people with capacity to do the job. We want people with integrity, people who would come and say, yes, you are doing wrong. You should be punished. You cannot say one should be punished while you have done 10 times, 20 times worse than that particular person. So I believe now that campaign has started. So many things are likely going to come out. That is why I believe strongly that the other parties will only come down this time. They cannot say nothing they will do to impress Nigerians because if there was anything, I am in the position to know because I was part of the formation of the PDP 1998-1999. I became governor of Afghanistan. I was part of the formation of APC in 2013-14. And of course 2014, I was a governor. I left the party PDP then because we thought PDP was the worst. We wanted change for the country. Unfortunately, we realized later that some were even arguing that PDP itself was better than the APC. And they were banking before NNPP really was populated. They thought they would defeat APC because they were bad, but APC was the worst. But now the equation is completely different and Nigerians are coming out really because everybody is worried. Everybody in this country is negatively affected except few, very, very few people who are there pretending that all is well while, as you rightly pointed out, we all know that things have gone so bad. And the worst thing is they don't even want to hear that. If you go and say things are bad, say, oh, this one is an enemy. Let's talk about what political pundits have been saying about 2023. Most of them, if not 70 percent, have said a journey to unify. Now let's also talk about the economists. They are saying that even if we were a God himself that would be the president in 2023, it's not going to be an easy fit. How ready are you for that? Now, you see, for those of us who have been in civil service, those of us who have been in politics at least for three good decades now, those of us who had the opportunity to look at what was happening and what is happening in other parts of the world. You see, Nigeria and Nigerians are good. Nigerians are good people. The elasticity limit of Nigeria. Do we keep stretching Nigerians until this week? Yeah, I mean, if Nigeria was another country, I would have reached the elasticity limit long time ago. But we are still here as Nigerians. We are still moving as Nigerians. And now the only hope that Nigerians have is that there will be election in the next few months and believe in that some people will come and change the status quo. The status quo is not working for Nigerians. It's only working for very few people in this country. That is why people have hope, especially the young men and women, people who could not go to school, people who have finished their degrees, diplomas, L.C. and so on cannot find a job anywhere because government could not make the conducive atmosphere necessary for them to employ more people and even more importantly, to create a better environment for businessmen and women to employ more of these young men and women in this country. So it's very unfortunate to the extent that young men and women are taking drugs now. Those of us who are going into crowds, those of us who are in direct contact with these young men on the streets, it's very pathetic. You look at them, look at their eyes, look at their lips, look at their palms. You could see these guys are not well, are taking drugs. You can see it in their eyes. They can see it even in their behavior and so on and so forth. And nobody is doing anything about it. Look, in Kano, for the eight years I was a governor, we established what we call a reformatory institute. All the young women and women who are into drugs, who have been mocked, put in the reformatory, stayed there for three months with psychologists, with Klaigi or Slavic malams and so on, talking to them, with other doctors, medical doctors, taking care of the health aspect of them and so on and so forth. And all of them without exception were employed directly by government or indirectly by way of taking them to ITF for special training in their chosen career and then giving them free capital to go and do their businesses. And they are all there in Kano and we dealt with the barrels that we are bringing in the drugs into the country. We even went to the extent of the source outside this country to talk to them and warn them and report it to federal government and so on and so forth. So we have done so much and that is why you see these young men and women you see on the streets of Kano and northern Nigeria or even in the south, anybody you see dancing, pressing, concocia has one reason or the other to do that. And if you ask them, they will tell you why they are so happy with what we have done and what they are expecting us to do when we have the opportunity again. Well, always a pleasure to speak with you, but finally the candidates that you are competing against, the APC Labor Party, the economist recently wrote about Pitao B saying that he is touted to win this election by all of their statistics and the statistics they used in measuring all of the candidates last week. What do you think about the Pitao B phenomenon? Are you worried in any way? You see, we operate at the grass roots, that's where we are. Anybody who is disguised can stay there as long as he can. And you say that Pitao B did not say that? I'm not saying that. What I'm saying, I'm being general, but you can fix it anywhere. You see, I think people have to be careful on what they see and especially things that look obvious, that is not true. Now, parties and the businesses, for example, of making fake our opinion poor, that's no good for anybody. The economist is a very famous and renowned economist. They wrote, I want you to read it very well what they said. They are not recommending anybody. They are not pressing anybody. You see, some of these propaganda doesn't work. It doesn't work. I think that's why I told you, the other parties have read their pick. All the people who are propagandists, people telling lies, people stories that are true. You see, only facts and truth can turn the test of time. What we ask Nigerians to do is to look at the real antecedents of these candidates. You tell us what you have done and of course, debate will come. People will tell us and of course, we know all the states, these 36 states of the federation, we know them. Some of them are colleagues, in fact, some of them are junior colleagues. We know those who are performed. We know those who have done nothing and they are keeping quiet. And we know those who have done nothing and are making empty statements that does not turn the test of time. Well, we're looking forward to 2020 because it's going to be a very interesting year. Thank you very much, Neri. Senator Rabiu Mosa-Kwan Koso is the president, child candidate of the New Nigerian People's Party, NNPP. Thank you so much for speaking with us. We appreciate it. Thank you very much. All right.


Alright guys, if you've been looking for a way to connect your mirrorless or DSLR cameras to your phone as a monitor, then this is something you will need. This is the brand new Aksun SEMO, it's an HDMI to USB monitoring adapter. This is made specifically for iPhone and iPads. If you do have an Android phone, unfortunately you won't be able to use this with that just yet. Let's go ahead and unbox this and set this up, but this is a very quick and easy way to use your iPhone as an external monitor for your digital cameras. In my video, I'm going to be using my Sony A7C and I'm going to be replacing this screen that comes on the camera itself, which isn't too great, especially when I'm filming outdoors and I'll be using it with my iPhone 14 Pro Max, which has a very good large screen and a much better brightness level than the ones on the cameras themselves. So let's start off by unboxing this. You've got yourself a user manual with very clear information of how to get this up and running, but it is very straightforward. Essentially, you have this type of cold shoe mount, which will sit on top of your camera. There's a few buttons on ports I'm going to showcase on how to use this in a second. You have your cold shoe adapter there. You have a little Allen key that you can use to just tighten and angle the position of this cold shoe adapter. Then you have a USB-C to lightning cable to connect your iPhone. And finally, you have a USB-C to USB-C cable for those iPad versions that do have a USB-C port. You cannot use this for Android phones because you need to connect this to the iOS app, which is called the Aksun C app, which you'll find on the iOS App Store. OK, now, although these are the only accessories that you do get in the box, these things alone will not be able to power your phone as a monitor from your camera. You're going to need two additional things. One, you'll need to source your own HDMI to micro HDMI cable or whichever port your digital camera has to connect to an external monitor. So I'll be using this micro HDMI cable and then to power the Aksun device itself. This requires NPF batteries that you can purchase anywhere online. And I have a pack of two RAVPOWER NPF batteries, which I'll also use to power on this device. So you'll need those two additional accessories to source yourself. And I'll leave a link in the description of where you can buy these two accessories yourself for your cameras. So let's go ahead and set this up and showcase to you guys how it works, how it looks and how the app performs by using the Aksun C app. Let's take a quick look at the Aksun C mode. You've got a button just in the middle there for the phone clamp. When you expand this out, it locks into place to unlock it. You press this and it will come back down on the left hand side. You have the HDMI in and then the five volt out. The five volt out is to power the device. If you wanted to use a USB-C power port to actually charge this up if you don't have any MPF batteries. And on the right hand side, this is where you'll put the USB-C port for the cable for your phone or your iPad. So that's the video output there. Then you also have the on off button to actually turn this device on. I'm going to use an MPF battery because when I film outdoors, it's so much more convenient to have a wireless power source rather than trying to find a plug outlet. Clip it into place like that. I'm going to use my HDMI cable, put that into there. And then let me just connect the quarter inch thread there at the bottom to the cold shoe mount. There we go. We've tightened it. You can unlock this, put it on your camera. Once you twist it, this will lock it into place like so. Connect the HDMI cable into your camera and then I will connect my phone to the mount. In fact, there's also an additional cold shoe mount at the top of the Axon device. So if you wanted to maybe put a microphone or a studio light or something like that on there, then you also have the option. And then the last step is to connect the USB-C end to video out just on the other side. And then connect the lightning port to your phone. And that's it. Quick and easy. The only thing I now have to do is turn on my camera and then I'll turn on the Axon device by pressing the on off button just to the side. And then I will launch the Axon C app. OK, so I've just connected a slightly longer HDMI cable because I want to maybe trial using this at a further distance than the camera. But nonetheless, everything is now connected. I've opened up the app. The first thing you need to do is hit the monitor button there. And you'll see it automatically loads everything that you see on your camera. So I think that's very quick and convenient. There's some apps that will allow you to connect to specific camera models that you don't need to have a cable for. But one of the key problems with that outside of the app itself is latency. This one, because it is connected directly with the cable HDMI in the Axon CMO, you get minimal to no latency at all because it will be exactly like having an external monitor. So let's just quickly test the latency. So I've got my lens here. I'm going to quickly zoom in and you can see on both screens. It is pretty much exactly instantaneous and it matches like for like. This is one of the key things where I would use this so often because I would like to see everything that happens in real time rather than seeing any type of leg. For example, I wave my hands and it doesn't matter how quick you do it. The quality on it will be exactly matched to what you see on your screen. And one of the other benefits to this as well is the screen quality of your phone will keep improving year on year. So if you do buy the latest iPhones, for example, you will always have better brightness, better screen display, better refresh rates and all of those kind of things which make it so much better than the actual screens, which are tiny, small and never change on your mirrorless cameras. Now, let's have a quick talk through of the functionalities of the app itself. Along the top, you have key information about your recording setup. One thing to note is this does max out the video input at 1080p at 60 frames per second. So if you wanted to have the input at 4K, then unfortunately that won't be able to occur in this version of the app. But that may change in a future update. It has H264 video codec for encoding. Then you also have a 48K 16 bit audio input just there on the right with AAC encoding on the audio. Then you have a whole bunch of different options along the bottom there that you can see, and I'll open them up to showcase all of the different capabilities of this app as well. So the first option there you can see is a toggle between black and white and color. In fact, if you hit the settings button just on the right hand side here, this will bring up all of the different options that you see along the bottom. Now with the RGB one, if I do turn that on, it's on red. We can actually switch between green and blue as well to add that hue. If you go into histogram, I'll turn RGB off. There's a whole bunch of additional options to show you the histogram as well. If you want to switch between Luna, the size, the position and the opacity as well. And then if you go into waveform, you can also do a very similar thing by changing all of the different options here for waveforms. If you want to see any focus peaking, then you can also adjust that there. You can set it to red. I'll actually turn this on. You can do green, blue, white. For me, personally, I like the red ones, and it just allows me to see, you know, where the focus on the camera lens is actually peaking and at what max level. You can adjust the levels as well in case you wanted to maybe focus on something a little bit more closer or further away. If you go into look, you'll be able to select a external LUT file that you can attach from your phone. So there's an option there to select a LUT file, and this is a very quick and easy way for those people that do add LUTs to their filming. You can see a live view of what it would look whilst you're actually recording it rather than doing that in post production. So I think that's a very convenient form to do that. And it also supports AUT files in addition to CDL files. If we go into zebra, you can also focus on the zebra markings just there in the distance and see where the exposure levels are currently focused on. If you go into audio, you can also position the audio to be left and right and then set the volume. If you go into markers, you can set specific markers within the frame of your video and then change the ratio of them, the aspect ratio. So, for example, mine is on two thirty five one. If I do maybe 15 to nine, 14 to nine, four by three, you can see in the background is adjusting the frame of the video or you can just leave it back on your camera's default. And if you swipe, if you now go into distort, this can actually de-squeeze the frame. So if you maybe use an anamorphic lens, then de-squeezing would be quite convenient for that purpose. I'll just leave mine back onto the original. You can also display grids. If you go to the display option, you can also have a limited range, full range. You can set the color ranges. You can set safe markers and ratio markers. And then you can also have an overlay. So you can also select a picture as well to overlay and showcase an opacity. And this could be useful in some scenarios for whatever filming you're trying to do. And finally, if you back out of that and you like what you're seeing, that last button there is to take a screenshot. You press that and the screenshot will be saved to your gallery. So that's all of the different things that the Accune C app can do. And I think that's, you know, quite advanced compared to some of the other apps that I've seen in the past that try to do similar things in a wireless capacity. And then finally, the record button on the app. This will actually record the video directly onto your phone. And then you'll have it saved in your phone's gallery instead of having it saved to the SD card in your camera. If you record using the record button on the camera, that will record it directly to the SD card that you've got onto the camera's memory rather than on your phone gallery. So these are kind of like two independent recording methods as well, which is something that any other external monitor that you buy from Amazon that cannot do anything like this. So that is a very quick and convenient way to set everything up. That's an introduction to the app. And here's some scenarios of how this becomes very useful. OK, so you guys can see the setup now when I'm recording directly from my Sony A7C, the actual screen on the Sony turns black. If I do have a monitor connected to it. So in this case, my iPhone 14 Pro Max is doing a really great job for me to really clearly see how I look in the shot, how the focus is something I won't be able to see if I was trying to just use the actual Sony screen itself, especially from a slight distance. So for me, you know, the quality I think is absolutely great. And if I am going to be filming outdoors, this is going to make a massive difference because when I turn the brightness up on my phone, it just makes things 10 times clearer than anything that I can get from either the Sony screen itself or even some of the smaller, compact monitors that I bought off of Amazon in the past. And personally, for me, any of you guys that are content creators that do filming on the regular and you do it, especially in remote locations, this is a must have gadget, especially if you have an iPhone or an iPad to take external monitors with you in your camera bag or accessories bag. I think it's just a bit more of an overhead that you can avoid by just having your phone with you at all times and using that as a monitor as and when you need to. So for me personally, I think that's really great. Not only do you need to just use an iPhone with it, this can also work with an iPad. So let's go ahead and set this up with my iPad and see how this looks on a much larger screen. Of course, you won't be able to mount this on the Axon C mode device itself. So you'll have to have it separately, maybe mounted just next to you on the side. But just to showcase a variety of the different options that you get with this device, let's take a look at that. OK, so this is why I wanted to have a slightly longer HDMI cable connected because I've now connected this camera to my iPad Pro. You can see the cable. I've got it all the way along the side connected to the Axon C mode device. And they connected that by the USB C cable this time to my iPad Pro. And I do get a live view. And again, it's a very quick and responsive view of your videos. And personally, for me, this is a really great way to get a live view of your filming so you get a better perspective to see if everything you're filming is actually in frame, if the colors are right, if the focus is accurate and all of those types of things. One of the other key features about the Axon C app is live streaming.   What you can do is you can enter your stream code, URL and paste it into there, whether you're using it for YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, any other live streaming app, just enter the URL code, hit go live. And then you can go live directly from the app itself, which I think is a very quick and convenient way to go live in with a much higher quality camera, such as your DSLR or mirrorless camera. So I have the camera set up outside now. The camera itself is off. I've got the Axon C app on. But as you can see, nothing is being shown if I turn the camera on. It just takes a few seconds to load the live view into the app. And there we go. Having the iPhone 14 Pro Max with the brightness level up makes it so much easier and clearer to see myself than on this tiny little screen, which you can see is still pretty dark. So at a distance, it's going to be so much easier when I do filming outdoors. I can just tap anywhere on the screen to go into full screen view, get rid of those options. And then from here, I can now start filming by seeing myself so much more clearly. And one of the most common use cases for you guys to actually get this product is when you do filming in remote locations, when you are outdoors. This is the perfect complementary thing to have with you, because it just allows you to see yourself, especially when you're filming on your own outdoors, to see if everything is in frame, if you've got the best shot. Because the last thing you want to do is to film yourself, not clearly see that you wasn't in focus all that time. And then you have to do a reshoot. For me personally, when I am filming this outdoors, as you can see here, I find it so much clearer and easier to see if I've got the perfect shot the first time around. And it saves me a lot of time and effort. And in my own opinion, for anyone that does own an iPhone and also owns a camera that does filming quite often, this is the missing piece of the puzzle for you to have the perfect camera set up. You literally just set this up within less than a minute and then you have an iPhone as a monitor. And then you can actually use this as your go to camera rig for most of your remote filming. So that's it, guys. Hopefully that review was very useful for you guys. If you do like this, then do check out the link in the description. This was just released. I recommend if you are using an iPhone and you do a lot of filming and you create content, this is a must have in my opinion. So let me know if you guys have any other questions. Make sure to like this video. I've got new videos out every week with cool gadgets, much like this one. So make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of those ones. And I will catch you guys at the next video. Take care.


This video is sponsored by Squarespace. This telescope costs $300. This telescope costs $1,400. This telescope costs $1,900. And this telescope costs $2,300. All four are refractors with apertures between 86 and 90 millimeters and focal lengths between 464 and 560 millimeters. In this video, I'm going to review these telescopes from a deep sky astrophotography perspective. And I'll present my results from a one night shootout with the same equipment all capturing the Pinwheel Galaxy, which is a very exciting target right now because it has a new, very bright supernova explosion within it. And I'll say a bit more about that at the very end of the video. So definitely stick around for that. Hi, my name is Nico. And this channel is all about astrophotography, the art of capturing the night sky. And while you don't need a telescope to start out an astrophotography because I have many videos on shooting with just a normal camera and lens, many of us eventually do buy a telescope because they typically have some advantages over lenses in terms of light gathering, having well-corrected optics for shooting the stars, and other features that a normal lens may lack. The dollar amounts that I have in the title and the intro for these telescopes are only for the telescopes themselves. So to get actual photographs of deep sky objects with these telescopes, you'd also need a good quality motorized mount, a camera, an auto guiding system, a number of cables, and a computer. And if all of this is new to you, this is your first video about astrophotography, I'd suggest actually not watching this one and go to my overview video where I show different rigs at different price points and sort of explain what goes into it. And then I've also done other telescope review shootouts. I have one on 80 millimeter aperture refractors and another on 60 to 65 millimeter aperture refractors. So this is now an 86 to 90 millimeter aperture shootout. And the 86 to 90 millimeter aperture range is pretty great for imagers like me who love shooting Nebulae, but also might occasionally want to go after a brighter galaxy like Messier 101. Since this video is a review, let me share a few disclosures up front. The SB Boney SV48P was bought by myself with proceeds from my Patreon campaign and it has been featured before when I wanted to talk about refractors versus reflectors. This Founder Optics FOT86 was lent to me by Founder Optics for the purpose of this review. No money exchanged hands, they are not telling me what to say. And I will be sending it back to them after the review period. Same thing with this Apertura 90 millimeter triplet, no strings attached, lent to me by Highpoint Scientific. This Stellar View SV86Q, or SVQ86 I should say, I actually bought it in 2018. So about five years ago now and it was featured in my, it's very, not my first, but my second video on the channel which is sort of like an overview video. I've always wanted to do a review of it but then right after I bought it, Stellar View discontinued it. They only made one really small batch. So I never really got around to the review because it was sort of like, well, you can't buy it. But I thought this is a perfect opportunity to finally review it. And so the only way you can buy this scope now is if you happen to find one of the few dozen that were produced on the used market. I am not selling mine because I love this telescope but you might be lucky and find it somewhere. Okay, so the first thing to compare with these refractors is their optical designs. The SV Boney SV48P 90 millimeter is an acromatic doublet meaning a refractor telescope with two glass elements neither are ED glass. ED means extra low dispersion and the benefit of ED glass is that it helps control the violet halos that you're gonna see in a doublet refractor like this SV Boney. It does not include a field flatener nor could I find one for sale from SV Boney for this particular telescope. So I'm using it as is with no corrector and correctors just, you know, help sharpen up the corners with a larger field. The telescope has 90 millimeter aperture, 500 millimeter focal length. So that makes it a focal ratio of F5 which is great for deep sky, plenty fast. The Founder Optics FOT86 is an apochromatic triplet and two of the three glass elements are ED glass. They don't specify the ED glass type. They also state that the glass elements are widely spaced which is I guess is not unusual and similar to the design of the famous Takahashi TOA line of refractors which are widely regarded as excellent scopes. And the company also states that this telescope has a well corrected 44 millimeter image circle. So it should handle full frame sensors just fine. It includes a field flatener in the package. The telescope has an 86 millimeter aperture and five 60 millimeter focal length. So that makes the focal ratio F6.5. There is an 0.8 X reducer listed on their website but I don't have that for this review. The Apertura 90 millimeter triplet is an apochromatic triplet with ED glass elements and they specified that the ED glass type is FPL 53 which is a special kind of glass made by the Japanese company Ohara. They also state a 44 millimeter image circle for full frame imaging. They do also include a 1X field flatener in the package and this telescope has a 90 millimeter front aperture with four, five 40 millimeter focal length and that puts it at F6. Lastly, we have the SVQ86 from StellarView. This is a quadruplet design. It is apochromatic. It does not need a field flatener because the corrector elements are built into the telescope. You'll often hear these kinds of telescopes called astrographs because they're really designed for imaging with a camera, not looking through an eyepiece. This scope is discontinued as I mentioned so I can't remember all the stated specs and the web page is down but I believe the image circle was stated at 60 millimeters which is plenty large. It has a front aperture of 86 millimeters and a focal length of 464 which makes the focal ratio F5.4. Next, let's look at the physical characteristics of these telescopes and I'll go over what is included when you buy each telescope. All right, here's the SV Boney SV48. According to my measurement here, it weighs 2.3 kilograms or five pounds, one ounce. The design language on mine is pretty bare bones, no even branding here on the Dew Shield. I have seen on Amazon, they seem to have updated it so now it says SV Boney right there. They also seem to add rings which is nice so you could rotate the telescope that way. On my version here, they just have a little bolted on vixen dovetail on the bottom. It does work just fine but rings would be a nice addition. Here on right in front of the focuser, we have a little Cinta style finder shoe. It did come with that. The focuser is pretty basic. It's just a two speed, I don't know if this is a crayford or just something simple here, works okay. It's just a little slow and sticky but it works just fine. It does have markings for travel so let's see how far out this goes. It's a 70 millimeter travel on the focuser. Okay, the Dew Shield does not have a lock so that just means if you put a heavy flat panel on it or something, you just have to be a little bit careful. I just recommend taping it in that case. Okay, the front cap is metal and it's a screw on. Which is not my favorite as imagine trying to do this in the cold at night. It's a little tough. And the appearance here, I'd call this a semi gloss. It's fairly matte actually but not like super matte.  Mine came in this hard case, silver hard case with a custom soft foam insert and sort of a bubbly foam on the top works out quite well. And nice that they include this for a $300 telescope. Okay, here's the Founder Optics FOT 86. Once you put on the rings and the dovetail it clocks in at around 54 centimeters. It weighs 4.8 kilograms or 10 pounds, eight ounces. The look is pretty unique. It's this nice shiny gloss black with green anodized accents and some silver hardware. You can see the logo here on the dew shield and in a couple other places like on the field flabner. Front cap is metal and it's a little tough to take off and on. You can see here, hopefully you can see here the inside of the dew shield is a nice sort of like ridged mat and there are baffles all the way down the telescope. Okay, the ring hardware looks plenty substantial. Comes with a nice sized Vixen dovetail plate there. They have three retaining screws for tightening up the dew shield, which is appreciated. There's a number of holes on the top of the rings here. There's a nice flat surface with I think these are a quarter inch, 20 screw holes. Okay, back here we have the two inch focuser. It does have a Sinta style shoe on there if you want to use a finder scope or a guide scope maybe there. This top lock nut is for rotation. So the entire focuser has 360 degree rotation that you can walk down right there. The bottom, of course, we have another locking nut here for tensioning or locking down focus. And this is like a nice really substantial one. I really like that, that it's like nice and big, very easy to find in the dark. The focuser is incredibly silky smooth. Like the mechanics on this are top notch, really, really nice. Of course it has the 10 to one reduction knob. If you do want to add a ZWO EAF to this, you do need to buy a special bracket but it will work with the bracket. You can see here we have a geared teeth for the focuser travel. And on the top, it does have millimeter markings for the distance that the focuser goes out. It goes out 95 millimeters. And then this is really unique. I've never seen a focuser quite like this one. So a lot of focusers will accept, you know, a two inch barrel or two inch eyepiece back here with like thumbscrews, like three thumbscrews. This is more like a rotolock system where it's like you just turn it left to loosen, turn it right to tighten.  And their included field flatener has like a little ridge right there where the compression ring is tightening down. So it's very secure. You don't have to worry about anything moving with that even though it doesn't have a threaded connection. So for photography, you'd always be using the field flatener or the flatener reducer and the matched one from Founder Optics. So this is very easy. Now, the reason this is cool is with a lot of telescope systems to go from photography to visual and back and forth, it's a big ordeal because you have all these threaded connections and spacers and all this stuff, like a visual back and a photography back are often different things. Well, with this one, if I just wanted to quickly go from photography mode to visual mode, I could just take off the field flatener with the camera and everything connected back here, take this whole thing out, put in a two inch diagonal right there for an eyepiece and be done, you know, just tighten it and loosen it and it's really, really fast. I was just thinking about that, that this would be a really versatile scope if you liked doing both visual and photography with a refractor like this. In terms of the field flatener itself, it's a two inch field flatener. It comes with connections back here on the camera side for both M48 and M42, so that's very handy. Okay, in terms of what else it came with, it came with a really cool inspection report that is actually analyzing this particular copy of the telescope with optical tests and mechanical checking, resolution test, so all kinds of cool things. It's signed by Emily Chang, that's really neat. And then it also comes with a printed manual, a nice little thank you and QR code for finding out more information. This is the hard case that it comes with. It does come with some foam. You can get it back in here, of course, but it does require taking the Vixen Dovetail off. So it's not the most convenient in terms of a travel case, but it works. And honestly, I don't end up using these travel hard cases that come with the telescopes that often because once you put a camera and imaging stuff on it, they don't fit in the case anymore anyways. So I really just saved these for if I was ever gonna resell the scope. I didn't use this, but it does come with a top handle, if you wanna put that on. And it does come with this nice rotolocking adapter for one and a quarter inch eyepieces. This is the piece for the field flattener if you wanna use M42 camera. Okay, next up we have the Apertura 90 millimeter triplet. This one clocks in at 41 centimeters. With the field flattener in, it comes in at 4.8 kilograms. All right, the look is matte white. We have Apertura branded there. You have the Apertura A in the clamps here and the rings. And then we have these nice sort of bright blue accents. Like I said before, it has a Flaws-Mandy style plate. It does have some cutouts to reduce weight and plenty of holes all over it. On the top, we got a top handle, nice big substantial top handle. My hand fits just fine in there. And it's a multifunction top handle, meaning it's not just a handle. It also has some screw holes and a track here which you could screw things into by putting a screw in underneath. So you could put a clamp up here for a guide scope or even just screw a guide scope right on top. But it also has a Sinta-style finder shoe here on the Focuser. The Focuser does rotate 360. The rotation locking knob is right here on top. And on bottom, we have a tensioner locker thing here for the Focuser. It is a dual speed Focuser, nice and smooth. There's the gold geared track right there. Focuser seems really nice.  I didn't try that, but looks like it would be possible. And then we have markings for distance and repeatable focus up here on top. It goes out to 95 millimeters, that's the focus travel. So nice and long. Then here's the field flatener. It just screws right onto the back of the Focuser. I don't know what this thread is off hand. I think it might be like 63 millimeters, something like that.  The Dew Shield does not have like a standard thumb screw locking knob. It does feel pretty tensioned though. So I don't know if you'd have any problem putting a flat panel on the front there. It also has these little micro screws here for maybe adjusting the tension of the Dew Shield. It has a metal front cap that's nice and tight, a little hard to take off. There's the front end. I don't know if you can see it, but it does have baffles. And the inside of the Dew Shield is a matte black for the most part. There's just a little bit of a shiny part up here at the front, but I think that would be fine. Okay, in addition to the field flatener, it also comes with this really cool little 32 millimeter guide scope with its own rings and finder base. Okay, and in terms of optional accessories, you can buy for it. There is a 0.8X reducer flatener. So if you want a little bit wider, faster option, there's this available for it. Another optional accessory is a two inch diagonal. So you can take off the flatener, put on the visual back, and then add this. And then to go with this two inch diagonal, you can get a two inch eyepiece from Apertura. This is a 26 millimeter, 70 degree field of view. So a nice wide eyepiece. And it comes in this very substantial case. Sort of reminds me of like a musician's case for an instrument. It does have keys if you wanna lock it. And you can put the whole telescope back in here. Don't have to take it apart or anything. It does fit back in here as long as you don't have a camera or anything else on there. By the way, here is the nice substantial visual back, which I haven't shown yet. So it can accept two inch or one and a quarter inch eyepieces. And it does have a nice smooth rotation on there as well. Okay, and then lastly, here's my discontinued Stellarview SVQ 86. It comes in at 46 centimeters. In the configuration I have it in here, it weighs 6.3 kilograms or 13 pounds, five ounces. I would describe this as a semi-gloss white. There's a few little red accents, but mostly just white and black. It does have a metal lens cap that comes off pretty easy. The Dew Shield does have a locking screw. I've actually broken my original locking screw and have been meaning to get a nice replacement, but for now it's just an M6 screw that I had lying around there that works fine for locking it down. Some baffles. And the inside of the Dew Shield is felt, black felt. Okay, it has nice substantial rings with some holes on the top for attaching stuff. And this is a unique thing that Stellarview offers. These are riser blocks. They're like solid metal riser blocks that are really nice. And the reason I really like those is if you get a filter wheel back here, it's really nice to be able to sort of rotate it in any direction and not have any sort of interference with the dovetail or anything else going on with your system. There's other reasons why these riser blocks are nice. You can put stuff underneath the telescope. So I've always liked these. They work pretty well. They don't seem to add too much instability to the system or anything. And then I had mine configured with a Los Mandi dovetail plate. You can see at this point, it's pretty well used. This is the scope that I have used by far the most. I don't know if you can see that, but this is 003. So this was the third one of this telescope ever produced. And I don't think they made that many. In terms of the focuser, you can see I don't have a locking or tensioning knob down here because I have added an electronic focuser. This is an Optech direct sink. And so the reason I like this one is because it has a little clutch. So you just turn it this way and then you can use the focuser manually. This is a three inch focuser that StellarView hand configured. It's very smooth, works very well. And then once you get sort of rough focus in, you just lock the direct sink by Optech and now it's ready for electronic focusing on the computer. It does have a Synthes style finder shoe right there. The rotation isn't on the entire focuser. Like the focus knobs don't move. The rotation is back here, which I prefer. It's a little bit rarer I find to get this, but I like it better this way because then the focus knobs stay always in the same position relative to the front of the telescope, but the whole camera system moves back here with this rotation knob right here. The connections are a little bit funky. There's, I think it's 82 millimeters up here. And then you can go from 82 to 63 to 54. That's what I have done here. And then this, what I have on here right now is a 54 millimeter Canon T-ring. A little bit rarer item. But the nice thing about that is if you want to use full frame on this telescope, there's absolutely no vignetting unless you introduce vignetting through your own spacers and adapters. So if you can find spacers and adapters that have a nice wide opening, this telescope itself isn't gonna introduce any vignetting because the bright image circle on this is something like 60 millimeters. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. I've been using Squarespace for my personal website, necocarver.com for over a year now, and I'm still amazed by how easy it is to use and manage a website with Squarespace. They provide the hosting and you can design the site however you wish with the included professional templates. There's nothing to download, nothing complex to learn because the website design system is completely intuitive and it updates live as you make any changes. So you can see exactly what your site is going to look like whether it's on desktop or mobile. If you're interested in having your own website with your own domain like mine, you can get a free trial at squarespace.com slash nebula photos. And after the free trial is over, if you like it, you can get 10% off your first purchase with the code nebula photos. Okay, now we're gonna move on to my favorite part which is the optical tests. And here are the tech details of how I conducted these optical tests of the telescopes. My target was M101, the pinwheel galaxy and it was a new moon, portal three sky. The mount was a Skywatcher EQ6R which can easily handle any of these telescopes. The camera was a crop sensor and ASI 2600MC that gained 100. And I did guide these with the ASI 290 mini and the William Optics 50 millimeter guide scope. I do five by five minute exposures here. So 25 minutes integration for each shot. Okay, and the reason I don't just do single exposures is because there's actually a few things. One is that there's a little bit more variability while you can sort of average that out with five by five minutes. Another thing is some optical things like chromatic aberration don't really show up very strongly in single exposures often or they're just hard to see unless you have a really trained eye while they are a bit more apparent if you get a little bit of integration going. Now I see it both ways. I see how some people want just the single exposures but this is the way that I've been doing it with these shootouts is doing small integrations to give you an idea of the optical performance. So starting with the SV48, here is just an integration of five subs and screen stretched. And what I'm trying to show here is just any vignetting that we can see in just a screen stretch. These are taken without any flats or calibration frames. So you can see the SV48 has maybe just a little bit of vignetting. It's a little bit more prominent on the Founder Optics 86 and I think that has to do with just the two inch field flatener and sort of the design of the focuser but this would definitely come out just fine with flats or even a background extraction. Okay, and then here is the Apertura 90 and this looks super flat, very nice field illumination on this telescope. Very impressive. And here is my stellar view 86 and it's somewhere in between, I guess, the Apertura 90 and the Founder Optics, maybe sort of similar to the SV Bony in terms of field illumination. Not a little bit of darkening of the corners but not too bad. But definitely the Apertura 90 wins in that regard. Okay, next up, what we're gonna be looking at is these were made with the Scripps Aberration Inspector under Image Analysis in Pixinsight. And what this does is it just simply takes little squares from the corners and the center and the edges of the photo to show you what the stars look like if we really zoom in on the corners. And so you can see with the SV Bony SV 48, the corners don't look too good and that is to be expected because I didn't use any field flatener but the center looks pretty nice other than a bit of chromatic aberration. Okay, and sort of there's a huge jump in quality here of course from $300 telescope to $1,400 telescope but I think this is pretty illustrative of what you can expect in terms of the increase in sharpness in the center and you get much tighter stars without any kind of chromatic aberration on them but also of course the corners and edge of a crop sensor are near perfect on the founder optics. Now I do get a little bit of star elongation mostly in this corner and maybe a little bit on this edge. So that looks like tilt to me. I thought I was pretty careful with the compression ring but maybe not as careful as I could have been. So just something to be maybe concerned with is there could be a little bit of tilt but you could use a tilt corrector or different kind of things to correct that out. Now let's compare this one to the Apertura 90. Okay, so the first thing you'll notice is that this one looks a lot brighter than this one because of the better field illumination across the chip for a crop sensor. These are not rotated exactly the same so don't pay attention to like trying to compare the stars directly but in both cases I think these star fields look really good. You know, the only thing that stands out really is just, yeah, that field illumination and a little bit of elongation from I think tilt on the founder optics but otherwise I think these look really well matched in terms of performance. So I'm gonna move this one over. This is the Apertura 90 and let's open up my stellar view. Okay, and this is a little bit wider field of view so we get more of the galaxy there in the center but again, I don't really see any issue with the stars here. Okay, next up I wanna show some processed shots meaning I went ahead and stretched them and applied some color saturation and if we look at the SV bony shot here, here's just a screen stretch and here's after I did some processing. What really stands out are these violet halos and that is just because this is an acromatic doublet. Now, if you don't wanna use a filter to get rid of those like a minus violet filter or a fringe killer filter, you can process those away in processing and so here's my attempt to do that. Now, you'll notice that when you do that, these, some of these big bright stars that have the really pronounced violet halo, the way that I sort of process them is just turning those stars basically white but it's very hard to completely get rid of that violet halo without leaving fairly large stars across the field but overall, I think this looks pretty good especially zoomed out like this. If we compare it to the founder Optics 86, I didn't get the black background quite right on this between the two but you can see that the orange stars come out a lot better and I think the sort of the overall impression is a little bit more impressive but they're actually closer than I thought they would be in terms of zoomed out like this. Here's the Apertura 90. I think this one with its larger aperture and slightly faster focal ratio gets just a slight edge but they're pretty close. I mean, they're very close in focal length. This is 540 millimeters, this is 560 millimeters so these two shots should look very similar and I think they do and then here is the StellarView SVQ 86. This is a wider shot so maybe not as appropriate for M101 but I think it held up pretty well. I like how the star colors came across. Ooh, I didn't get the background quite right on this one. It's a little bit red. I think the background looks most neutral in this one so my processing here isn't maybe perfect but this is just to give you an idea of what to expect after processing and just to show you that even the $300 telescope if you know what you're doing with processing can look quite good, I think. Okay, and then let's look at some center crops. Here we go. And not a huge amount to say here. I think these three, the $1,419 and $2,300 telescope all look very similar in terms of the amount of detail that we've gotten out of the galaxy. Of course, everything else is the same, the mount, the camera so you wouldn't expect a huge difference but I think these all look pretty identical. Now the $300 telescope is of course a little bit softer and then the main thing that's noticeable are these halos on the bright stars. I left those in for this comparison just to make it clear. You would have to deal with those in processing like I did here. But going back to this comparison what are we to make of these three results being so similar? Basically, it's that I think in terms of optical performance once you get to a certain level of telescope there's not gonna be huge differences if you have a similar aperture. So the main way I would choose between these three telescopes is the features and the price and what you're looking for. So for instance, of these three telescopes I would still keep my stellar view quad because I just really like quads. You don't have to mess around with back focus with a field flatner and there's a very convenient if you're happy with having that one focal length and don't really care about the option of having a reducer versus a flatner and different things like that. These two telescopes because they both have 1x flatners but also 0.8x reducers available it sort of gives you two focal lengths out of one telescope so you might like that flexibility. And then there's also differences in just sort of the mechanics and the look of the telescope all these kinds of things, the build quality the founder optics I thought was just a really impressive build quality for $1,400 but the aperture and the stellar view were also just really nice. So you really couldn't go wrong with any of these three telescopes. So it really just is sort of up to you of what you're looking for and those fine details in terms of the telescope design because I think optically any of these are gonna really do the job if you pair them with a good camera and mount. Two days after I started this comparison review which was again May 17th, this image right here we got word that a Japanese astronomer Koichi Itagaki sorry if I got the pronunciation wrong discovered a new supernova type two supernova bright supernova in M101. And so of course I got out that very night that I heard it had been discovered in Japan on May 19th and then night came later for me on the east coast of the US so I also captured it on May 19th the night it was discovered and there it is. It's very clearly just popped into view here on May 17th, you can't see it here on May 19th there it is. It was pretty small and not super bright on May 19th so congratulations to that Japanese astronomer for spotting something like that that's really cool. I don't think I would have even if I had captured M101 on that night I'm not sure if I would have been eagle eyed enough to discover that. But then here is what's really amazing I continued to capture M101 and just three nights later this is May 22nd look at how much brighter the supernova is this is a massive explosion. It's a red giant star that exploded in M101 and it's giving us quite the show here I mean look at this this is brighter than the core usually the core of a galaxy is going to be the brightest part of a galaxy but this supernova explosion 21 million light years away is actually brighter than the core of the galaxy it's as bright as stars in our own Milky Way that's how bright it is so this is definitely something that if you have a telescope or any kind of a telephoto lens even anything that's capable of capturing M101 you should go out and try capturing this because this is definitely like a lifer type event we don't get these kinds of super bright supernovas that often I think they said this is the closest one to us in a dozen years and so it's really cool to see something like this develop over just five days here from nothing to something that bright and the official designation is SN 2023 IXF and again you can find it in M101 which is pretty easy to spot in the night sky because it's right off the handle of the big dipper and I've actually done a video called how to photograph a galaxy with your DSLR that will go through the whole process of finding and capturing M101 and if you do it in the next couple months here you'll get this bonus of a supernova explosion now after a couple months it's gonna dim again and so you won't be able to see it anymore so it's something you have to go shoot this summer and I really encourage you to do so because you don't need a giant telescope to capture something this bright. If you love astrophotography, which I assume you do if you're watching this video I think you're going to really enjoy my Patreon community. We are closing in on 1000 members and it's just a very supportive and welcoming group of astrophotographers they're all very open in sharing knowledge and we do a lot of really fun things together we do Zoom calls, monthly imaging challenges a bunch of private channels on my Discord server where people are talking all the time and in addition to all that you get direct messaging support with me so if you have any questions you can ask me and I'll get back to you usually within a day or two. So I think it's well worth checking out my Patreon starts at just $1 per month to join. Well I hope you enjoyed this one until next time this is Vanneco Carver, Clear Skies.


I am deeply gratified by the United States Senate's confirmation today of Ambassador Kenneth Adelman to be Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. It's my earnest hope that this positive step will mark the beginning of a new bipartisan consensus on the vital issue of nuclear arms reduction. I'm convinced that Kenneth Adelman will prove that the confidence which the Senate has expressed in him today is well-founded. Under his leadership, we can look forward to a reinvigorated arms control and disarmament agency that will make an important contribution to our arms reduction efforts. As we seek equitable and verifiable agreements with the Soviet Union to reduce the arsenals and the risks of war, we will need the advice and support of the Congress. I'm confident that with full consultation with Congress and the development of our arms reduction initiatives, the United States can continue to be a force for genuine peace and progress in the world. And if we're met with reciprocal seriousness of purpose from the Soviet Union, 1983 can be a year of historic importance in securing a more solid and stable peace through arms reductions. Helen? President, are we directly or indirectly supplying, arming, or training any insurgents, Nicaraguan insurgents, and if so, why? We are complying with the law, the Boland amendment, which is the law. We're complying with that fully. And in... Does that mean we are not arming or supplying any of the dissidents along the border, the Honduran border? I am not going to get it. I could not and would not possibly talk about such things. But may I point out that this whole controversy over Nicaragua is ignoring some realities, that the Nicaraguan government is a revolutionary government that took power by force, but with the promise of democratic elections, none of which have taken place. And all of this was under the previous administration. The previous administration, however, did recognize this government of Nicaragua, sought to help it with considerable financial aid, and withdrew that aid long before we were here, when it became apparent that the government had become completely Marxist, had turned away and thrown out some of the democratic groups that had supported them and fought with them in the revolution to bring democracy to Nicaragua, and were then no longer a part of the government. But also the cutoff of funds was because the Nicaraguan government had pledged to the United States that it would not attempt to overthrow any other governments in Central America, particularly El Salvador, by helping the insurgents there, the guerrillas, and they violated that promise. And they are still violating it. And anything that we're doing in that area is simply trying to interdict the supply lines which are supplying the guerrillas in El Salvador. But the picture today is that Nicaragua, with its protests that somehow someone is trying to overthrow them, it, as a revolutionary government, is trying to overthrow the government of a neighboring country, El Salvador, which was a duly elected government, and which is going to hold another election before this year is out. But, Mr. President, what is the American public to think if Congressman Boland, who as you know is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, says there's very strong evidence that we are violating the law? How do we clear this with the American people? Don't they have a reason that for congressmen is saying that we're violating the law? Maybe some of you people misled him. No, but he has access to intelligence information, to administration briefings possible. Yes, and I think Secretary Shultz and our security adviser, Judge Clark, have both been talking to him, and you have seen the statement by Barry Goldwater of the Intelligence Committee that is absolutely positive that there is no violation of the law whatsoever. I think that when they pay a little more attention to this, they're going to find out we're not violating the law. Let me do what I promised the other day, start with some of the people in the back of the room here. Mr. President, are you willing to say flatly that the United States is not engaging in any activities that a reasonable person could assume would be for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government? We are not doing anything to try and overthrow the Nicaraguan government. As a matter of fact, let's put that in perspective for a moment. Nicaragua today has created the biggest military force in all of Central America and large parts of South America. An army of some 25,000 backed by a militia of 50,000 armed with Soviet weapons that consist of heavy-duty tanks, an air force, helicopter gunships, fighter planes, bombers, and so forth, heavy artillery, and a few thousand Mosquito Indians and guerrillas. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that that kind of a force could nurse any ambitions that they can overthrow that government with that great military force. And I think that people should understand some of these things and ask themselves what is the need for them having the biggest army in all of the region. We are cooperating with the other Central American countries in the region to try and bring democracy and peace to Central America. Yes, Mr. President, this morning your Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Mr. Enders, told the House of Foreign Affairs Committee that there was a possibility Cuba or the Soviet Union may introduce high-performance aircraft or even Cuban troops into Nicaragua. Do you have any information about any impending possibility of this? And if so, what would be the American response to that move? Well, no, I think I'm not going to answer a hypothetical question with a hypothetical answer. And I only know that that possibility does exist because the Soviet Union, by way of Cuba, has been engaged already. May I remind you that at the inauguration of the Revolutionary Government when it took over. Castro was present and a representative of the Soviet Union, and both of them openly hailed Nicaragua as the first communist country on the mainland of the Western Hemisphere. Mr. President, I asked you a domestic question, and I asked you a question on a domestic issue. We want to get you next. Mr. President, considering what you've just said about Nicaragua and your past statements about how it is a staging area, doesn't the United States want that government replaced, and is there anything that you feel that we should be doing within the law to have that government in Nicaragua replaced with a democratic one? We, of course, as I said, anything that we're doing is aimed at interdicting these supply lines and stopping this effort to overthrow the El Salvador government. But what I might personally wish, or what our government might wish, still would not justify us violating the law of the land. And you're not doing anything to overthrow the government there? No, because that would be violating the law. Mr. President, you were successful in your efforts to get a job for Ron Bricker, the bold young man from Pittsburgh who gave you his resume. I understand a lot of other unemployed steel workers are now flooding the White House with requests for help. Are you planning to help get jobs for these other people, too? I haven't seen any of those resumes if they've been sent or anything. I didn't know that. I know there's been talk about up there. If you will remember that day, Mr. Bricker of course handed me his resume and asked me would I show it to anyone if I had the opportunity that he was seeking work. And I said yes, I would. I did. He's got a job. Now, I didn't expect that all of the unemployed were suddenly going to ask me to be the employment agency individually for them. I think that would be impossible. But at any time that I can be in any way of help and lining someone up with an employer who's looking for an employee, of course I'd do it because I think it's a problem on all our minds. And I think this digress us from your question. And I think we ought to recognize that throughout this country, radio and TV stations that have held jobathons have been successful in getting thousands of people put back to work. There are local groups and committees, including right there in Pittsburgh, that are doing the same thing in an effort to help stimulate and move faster. And they have to do it on a basis of individuals. And we, of course, in our own legislation with the so-called jobs bill, are doing our part here at the government level. But the main way they're going to go back to work is going to be with the recovery of the economy. Now, Bill... Mr. President, do the... Oh, I just recognized Bill. Can I... Thank you so much. Let me ask you this, sir. Do the War Powers Act and the Boland Amendment unduly restrict your authority as the chief executive? And would you like to see something done about it? Helen, I should have listened to you. I think any legislation which restricts the relation or confines itself to the relationship of a single country, our relationship with a single country, yes, is restrictive on the obligations that the Constitution imposes on the President. All right.


In this video, we're going to have a look at the features of the Red Hat Free Scale API Management Platform, which is a very versatile platform that allows you to control your APIs. It's obvious that many, many applications in the modern microservices architecture communicate by using all sorts of APIs, not just RESTful, but also other sorts. And HTTP being the bigotus protocol that mostly those applications use, it's becoming quite demanding to, first of all, provide a unified entry point for those APIs, but also it's a compelling option once a company develops a number of applications based around certain APIs to actually start offering those APIs to customers and end users. Now, sometimes, obviously, those APIs are a core feature that a company provides. And they may well be given away for free. But for certain more powerful functions, it's very lucrative to be able to create certain application plans that may include rate limiting, subscription fees, and authentication, obviously, as well. And it's actually an approach that has been widely adopted by enterprises the world over. So the three-scale API management platform is basically a set, again, of modular components that can be deployed in various topologies from being hosted in the public cloud to being deployed on-premise. And companies can use this product to control their APIs and literally bring them under control of some sort of governance that they can implement using the three-scale platform. With the platform, it's possible not just to implement traffic control, meaning basically filtering of which endpoints are available to what customers and such. It's also possible to monitor the use of the APIs. So analytics, access control metrics, performance metrics, implement monetization, support developers, also customer developers with automatic publishing of documentation and similar. And of course, since the entire API platform is built on OpenShift, it provides excellent OpenShift integration all the way. It's possible to easily integrate the three-scale API management platform with all sorts of backend APIs and use it to provide comprehensive security as an afterthought rather than complicate your applications and include all sorts of non-functional concerns into the development process. If we have a quick look at the three-scale API management web interface, we can see that in terms of managing APIs, we can have a number of application plans deployed to the platform whereby we can control things like trial periods, all sorts of fees, and of course even automatic approval. And in terms of audiences that we allow to use the API platform, we can also create certain usage rules such as, for example, account plans and service plans. So in terms of account plans, it's possible to create various accounts and users can also even apply for accounts on their own. And then if we drill down a sample application plan, we can see that it's also possible to set up some pricing rules per usage, even having certain limits, so different prices for different frequencies of use, and rate limits. So again, usage limits can be per period and may have a certain maximum value associated with it, such as, for example, 100 requests per hour. We'll be looking at some of those features in more detail in the upcoming demonstration where we deploy a simple REST API and use the three-scale API management platform to expose it to different users and, of course, provide them with different rate limits and even filter certain application URLs. An important feature of the three-scale API platform is the developer portal, where we can actually automatically publish the documentation for our API and even provide self-sign up abilities for the customers which want to sign on for the usage of our APIs. Let's have a look at how to configure the three-scale API management platform to allow us access to the backend API. So first, let's have a look at how it's deployed. So I'm going to open the OpenShift web console. Have a look at the three-scale project. Over here, we have several application components and, of course, roots as well that give us access to various three-scale modules. The one I'm going to use is the three-scale administration console, which I've already opened, actually, in another tab. So I'm going to log into it. We'll be presented with the default settings. If I have a look at the API configuration in the dashboard, we can see that some applications have already been pre-created. Applications, in this context, meaning the ability for end users to consume our API. But if I look at the integration settings here, I'll be able to see that in the APcast configuration, I'm actually using a default Echo API. So I want to change that, actually, to use my own backend application. I'm going to have a look at where that one is deployed. So it's running in a different OpenShift cluster with a different backend URL, which, for some reasons, I do not want to share with my end users. So if we look at the root for my application, it's the Twitter API presenter. So if I open this in another window and issue some sort of an API request like health check, you can see the application is responding. Let's issue a simple tweet request. There it is. So I want to expose this application of mine through the API management platform, which means, basically, I need to copy the base URL for my application and configure the private base URL to actually use my application's location. So that's just the base URL like this. The API gateway is going to expose the application that I've just configured on two URLs. One is called staging URL, which allows me to test my settings. And the other one is a production URL, which basically would be the external and the public access for API users. I'll leave the mapping rules as they are right now. I'm just going to confirm the settings and issue a test request just to see if that works. So the green bars at the left-hand side confirm that the settings I've entered are valid. And I've already got a simple Curl URL that I can use to actually see if my application is responding through the API gateway. So I'm just going to issue a test request. Note that I haven't actually published valid certificates, so I'm going to tell Curl to not complain about certificate trust. There we are. This is my health response. Let's do another API request slash API tweet in English. Here it is. Note that the request has a user key appended to it. This is a key belonging to the default pre-created user or consumer in the API platform. So if I have a look at the audience settings, we see that there already is a developer user owning one application. If I have a look at that developer's application, it's been assigned an API credential, which was used in the request that I was just making to test my API settings.  You see that this developer is actually using the API service, but is using the basic application plan. So this basic application plan already has a limit of 10 hits per minute. But this limit is indiscriminate. If I switch back to the API settings for a moment and look at the integration configuration, in the APCAST configuration, we can see there's a mapping rule that says any get request to any URL is mapped to a hit. Now back to the application plans. If I look at the basic application plan setting over here in the metrics, methods, limits, and pricing rules, we see that the hits metric actually has a limit imposed, which is set to 10 hits per minute. Now this is indiscriminate, which means that absolutely any request to my application will have been throttled at 10 requests per minute. What I want to add is basically no more than two requests per minute for each of the application languages exposed, so English, Spanish, and French. What I have to do for this is to create a new method that I'll be accounting. And then in the configuration for my API integration, define some new mapping rules. So I'm going to add a new mapping rule for slash API slash tweet slash en. And I'll map that to agile API get. Another mapping rule slash API slash tweet slash es. And yet another also maps to the same method. So these three mappings will basically will cause each request to any of those three URLs to count as one invocation of the agile API get method. I'll just update the configuration. There we go. Let's check that the settings are saved. And now I'm going to have to update the basic application plan and add a new limit. You see that the method has already automatically appeared under metrics, methods, limits, and pricing rules. Here we go. I'm just going to add a new usage limit. She's going to say we said two requests of any of those API methods per minute. There we go. I'm going to update the application plan. And let's see how this works. So note that I'm invoking the slash API slash tweet URL. Let's do another one, Spanish this time. And let's try the French one. Now this one should exceed the imposed limits. Not yet. Let's do another one. There we go. We've now exceeded the limits. And we're going to have to wait for a minute or so to be able to issue any more requests. Notice that the health endpoint is not included in the API get method. So health is not restricted. It is restricted by the other limit, which is 10 requests of any kind per minute. So a ways to go before we'll be notified that there is an exceeded limit. In addition to having the application plan equipped with some limits, we can also define pricing rules. If the user wants to exceed a certain volume, we can actually impose a pricing rule saying, for example, anything above 10 hits and up to 100 will cost $0.01. There we go. Now once the account using this plan has a pricing rule associated with it, signing up for the use of the application can be configured for the users to have to provide the credit card information. And then in the platform configuration, we can actually enable certain payment gateways and configure automatic billing for the customers to occur. So this was a quick overview of how to configure the three-scale API management with a custom API. Join us in the next video. We're going to have a look at how to bring all those technologies together in a fun and entertaining way.