Alright, good afternoon. Great to see you here in Warsaw, beautiful place. I will talk about data pipelines in quite broadly about many different kinds of data pipelines. So I'm here representing partially from Baylor College of Medicine. There are two universities, there's Baylor University, there is Baylor College of Medicine. So and also from Data Joint Neuro, the company we have we started about two years ago helping neuroscience labs and multi-lab collaboratives build data pipelines. So just for context, one project that we have been involved in that shows the some of the challenges of running large distributed multi investigator multi-modality type of experiment. This is this project is called Microns, standing for machine intelligence from cortical networks and part of it involves three groups working at Baylor College of Medicine acquiring two photon calcium data from mice very detailed, a full cubic millimeter using two photon and three photon imaging. Every neuron in a full cubic millimeter is fully characterized in terms of its visual response properties. Then the same animal goes to the Allen Institute where electron microscopy is conducted and that volume is completely imaged. Every detail, every vesicle, every membrane. And then the data goes to the Princeton University where the data, the anatomy data are segmented and then the entire data set is brought together where we know each cell, you know it's anatomy, know what it did when the animal was still looking at pictures. So just to give the some of the challenges, one is complexity. So the mouse is imaged multiple times, multiple sessions. In each session about 27,000 cells are recorded and then over multiple days the full volume in one cubic millimeter you have about 100,000 neurons. So and after you show all the movies, you end up with about one million neuron hours from one animal. And then this is not the only thing that's done. The animal is also behaving. It's whisking, it's moving its eyes, it's running. It views images and so all of these modalities are combined. And then so there is a lot of data, data quality is affected by manufacturers. The animal is there, it's not trying to get a nature paper out. It's just really living its life and so it can fall asleep. It can do think it's not necessarily doing what you ask it to do and if you are recording for hours and hours keeping track of the state of the animal from a lot of physiological and from behavioral readouts just you know if the eyes are closed obviously the data are not good. And then so a lot of as algorithms are designed for example for segmentation, for image segmentation. They're designed in a little sandbox with one single data set. But in real life when you have to deal with many different aspects you have to control your entire pipeline very precisely so that you have all the controls to rule out the bad data to make it work. So again your image very large so this is another recent, it was posted on bioarchive from our app. Just if you with the complexity and with the size you find new patterns that you couldn't see before simply because sometimes more is not just more it's different. And then you need to have extreme flexibility. So this is a fraction of the data pipeline and so data pipelines don't stay fixed. We continually improved different phases so we may like to improve motion correction or segmentation and then the entire pipeline needs to re-do its work. So this is for example the spike finder challenge fairly recently last year ran a competition of different calcium spike detection algorithms. And so we want to work efficiently so we can do new kinds of experiments that we cannot afford to wait for days for data reprocess to get re-analyzed. So in this in this paper it's called the inception loop. The approach is where inference is made, inference about brain function is made in the following way. The activity of the brain in response to stimuli is recorded on day one and then a neural network is trained to predict the output of the brain and then on day two or overnight the network is then used to generate images, new types of stimuli by running the network backwards to figure out some test images, some test stimuli that will prove that we understood something about the brain. So some of them are called maximally exciting images basically using the neural network to produce the image that we predict will be most exciting to the nervous system. So to do this you have to be very efficient. You have to make sure that as you run experiments and run many of them per day then all the data are processed and ready to go for the next experiment in the following day. So that's the context. So what do we need to do this? We talk about data sharing there are different kinds of data sharing. The types of data sharing and the fear principle primarily talks about this type of data sharing at the end. When the study is done you package your data set you share it. I click something. Okay and so okay back. So the data sharing I want to talk about is the data pipeline sharing. So live data not data sets but data pipelines. Live evolving data as people are working together at the same time. So for that you don't just, fear is just is just the tip of the iceberg. Things like concurrent access and just efficiency of searches and so the data need to be indexed for efficient search. Data integrity and consistency and we'll talk a little bit more about this. Speed precise queries so because these are distributed teams they need to access just the data they need so you don't have to send the data sets around.  So for that we have a framework called data joint that supports data pipeline. This is specifically the tool for general tool for creating computational shared computational data pipelines for for it's quite general but we happen to use it for neuroscience data pipelines and then to data joint you connect can connect a lot of interfaces and applications. So again we're working with computational relational databases where basically what that means we combine a schema basically the rules of data integrity with computation as part of the model and workflow. The main advantage of data joint and the main kind of the claim to significance here is that we can take students who are not computer scientists and kind of we reduce down to the principles we can teach students and postdocs to become database programmers and database experts for computation. So basically if you know about relational databases data are represented as tables and each table is not just a spreadsheet each table has a specific meaning it corresponds to some something in your experiment for example one table might be called mouse and it contains mice the next could be a session which is a recording session a neuron and there could be a spike detection out parameters or algorithms that produce spikes and on activity statistics things of that nature. So data integrity is something that so a lot of neuroscientists work with data as data repositories or data collections but not with databases and concepts of data integrity are not familiar and I know we mentioned some of them like identification so some of these some of these concepts need to be taught and institutionalized for example entity integrity just the guarantee that what you represent corresponds to what's in the real world and that representation remains unique so that when you work together and you go to a specific mouse and you update something about it you updated the right animal and the right and everybody sees this so referential integrity compositional integrity these are inherent part of the of the process. So if you know a relational databases in the in the common kind of talk people think relational means SQL there is no SQL involved in data joint and in fact SQL was intended to be a simple language but it turns out to be very complex because it doesn't make various by just it turns out that by making a few simple assumptions you can significantly simplify and create a language that to to interact with data that is much more conceptually clarified. This is just an example if you have done any databases there is like kind of a hello world example in databases is university registration database this is just an example from from that world and you can see that with data joint the query like give me all the currently enrolled students would be student and enroll in current term in SQL you would have to learn how to write these types of queries and takes a semester to learn usually but with data joint we can teach students who are neuroscientists as part of their job to work efficiently with shared structured data so each each node is represented as a python class or a matlab class interchangeably so that you can work from matlab and python and you can define computational so the data structure is the first that that's the definition that defines how this node fits into the pipeline and then the make is what what computation that nodes performs it just fetches data from above in the pipeline performs the computation and inserts the result result into itself so that's basically what it is data joint is a language for programming databases and computation the architecture underneath it's a relational database we use mysql for the most part plus to store the bulk data a file system or s3 with amazon or it's compatible services like minio for example is a great program that you can install on premises that will act as s3 and works amazingly so yeah so and then as as so we I came up I wrote the first version of data joint for my own experiments about 10 years ago it's spread through the lab and it's spread to other labs and then with microns people started hearing about it so we we started a company to to help labs if they need any extra everything is open source and free and a lot of labs have adopted it but some some are specifically multi lab collaborations often need support so we started the company now we have this group and so we need we have also some software engineers and data engineers and it it engineers to help with some of these more demanding projects so these are the labs that we know currently to be using data joint but we don't know all of them because it's just a free open source tool and so some the ones that are highlighted the ones we work directly either in blue as an academic collaboration from Baylor College of Medicine or in green as contract contracts so this type of approach allows separation of labor where where kind of the data engineering is hidden you you deal with a more high level representation of your data pipeline is this logical structure with computations defined for them and then the all the parallel computing all the things that need to happen to make it efficient happen in the background set up by the people who know how to do it so this is kind of the separation of mindset the scientist deals with the conceptual questions the data scientists who creates the the logic of the experiment the logic of the data pipeline the logic of computations and statistical tests but does not need to know how the cloud works or how the how how to convert and migrate data so one example one some large projects evolving to a large project but some projects now are put together so the international brain lab is a great example that where 21 leading labs were put together to work on a common problem and and and I needed to set up an effective common data infrastructure and so so our our team joined the project to to help and become that bridge so this is just a fragment from their pipeline theirs is open source you can see it this github link or if you just google in the international brain lab several other similar projects of similar scale are currently in progress and so one of them is for as an example is that called the mesoscale activity map it's funded by the simons foundation and it's between four labs bcm genulia farm stanford and nyu and so we we the data scientists defined the data pipeline we set up a a amazon cloud pipeline for them but but they define the logic of the pipeline they define the computations and run them and then the argon national laboratory provided massive storage so to store shared data in accessible to everybody this is this is my summary we have um djneuro.io is the uh the company website um i will be uh running a demo here we have a little booth we can we can show um but yeah a lot of great things are happening this this is um this is a great time to be uh both a data scientist and a neuroscientist and ideally both thank you yes thank you very much um questions rick getting my exercise today uh suppose instead of coming maybe from draw sql someone's coming from another or um like let's say i've used jango and so i have a jango developer and i uh what would i be looking forward to in in in data join i can imagine one thing might be uh you've thought about the quantities and volumes of large scale data that obviously someone just running a web normal web server wouldn't have and so maybe jango wouldn't be a good jango arm wouldn't be optimized for but imagine you might have some other thoughts on on that as well about what are some advantages of data join if you'd like to share those that's right so there there are family of concepts programs called or libraries called orm subject relational mappings and the idea is that there is that programmers are used to to work more with objects and the object model which usually has an object with its properties and you access them that way a relational database to work very very differently in a relational database the idea of a relational database that you work with data is with sets you don't iterate through sets you have set operations whereas in the object model usually you you iterate through some properties and the links and follow them and so there's kind of a mismatch and uh between so it's actually called the the object relational impedance mismatch and uh and so a lot of people have tried to kind of patch that um data join does not make that trade off it is fully relational so you work with data as sets and there is no that that mapping doesn't it so so the operations are fully relational things like joins and in um so basically to um and I'll throw in some examples but basically when you work a query will look um so you basically don't tinkle with the with the properties you you work with data much more on the level on on the much higher level of abstraction than than you would be with Django for example so Django is more specifically designed for web design rather than working with scientific data so we work with scientific data so one thing that we did databases are not very good with um by themselves and so data join helps solve that is work with scientific data like arrays massive uh uh and so um numerical arrays uh bulk data and so we had to put a lot of features there to to make it seamless so then when you fetch data it comes back as a non-py array so we never working with data join you never work with file there's no concept files there's no concept of file formats or anything of that you when you fetch data by specific criterion you get an numerical array in math or python that contains the data exactly the data that you ask for and and because of the flexible query language you can you can get data in different combinations that are specific to your analysis so you can say you know give me all the tuned cells from these three animals that have this genetic marker and you don't have to give the entire data set you just get that those pieces of data in one say structure array or array of dictionaries in in python was that uh okay any further questions specifically uh yes and I'd already like to ask uh the other two speakers maybe to quickly come in front we are a bit behind schedule but I think we have maybe time for a few concluding words instead of the panel discussion in this project you also so you have a client which exports data in nwb format right so probably in many oh this is this is more like planned yeah we have uh yeah we have clients to export yeah okay so this is work in progress work in progress but we have good demos for this yeah but so this is so nwb with the way we work with it is primarily as a kind of the output of the pipeline in the pipeline itself people work with the database and then and then just for the final kind of we sometimes refer to that as the golden record kind of once you're done with your project or once as you're done with the part of the project you want to package a data set for people to analyze that's but do you see a lot or sufficient amount of commonality between projects for you know you could provide some unification or harmonization on how you know even within nwb like custom classes and all that yeah so nwb we're in uh data join solve very different orthogonal problems and we work with nwb in teams so we work with a lot of teams that are some of them used nwb some don't and for those who do uh for example we recently were completing a project with lauren frank's lab at ucsf who uses nwb for high performance computing because they have recording selector physiology recordings that go on for days so they're they have they need to be able to index into a raise and just select parts this is something that they have already developed and so and they also adopted data join for their uh data management because it has all the search capabilities all the queries so they want to have both so we work with them and we had a little little project to to integrate the two process so when they vegetate and data from data join they get an object that is actually capable of indexing into an nwb file and that's also transparent so there's one when users work with it they don't need to open files they just get an nwb object back out of a data join query and then just can work with it right in memory and that's also open source that's also open source yes so that's coming out that's actually right now is getting tested so that's for his lab


I'm going to take you through a problem that I've had in iMovie and I've only just worked out how to fix it so I've got iMovie open these are all my projects here and these ones I just can't delete them so if I click on day 30 the way to delete the day 30 project look if I open it it's all in there if I go back to projects go down to day 30 if you hover your mouse next to the title you see the three dots you click on that and it brings up a little menu for you and when you go down to delete project it asks are you sure you want to delete this project all media files in this project will be copied into your library in an event named day 30 that's great so I click continue and then you get this error message which is the file name couldn't be moved to the trash because you don't have permission to access it now all of my files I've shot myself these files just happen to be from a dash cam camera in our car I couldn't work out how to get to the file to delete it so that I could delete the project and free up the memory space and my iMovie started taking out like 60 gigabytes of just storage that I couldn't budge I've just worked out how to do it so if you've had the same problem as me here's how you clear it oh hello I'm Neil by the way I'm in the garden today I don't know why it's the hottest day of the year and probably the worst place to be doing this I couldn't be indoors here's how you can find the file that refuses to be deleted so that you can free the project up and delete the project and delete the event I forget the whole thing ever happened if you go to the desktop click on the macintosh hd so we're in finder and I've got four choices you go for this the way I did it click on users and open that up and you'll see among all the folders there applications desktop documents there's one labeled movies if you open that up by clicking on the triangle you've got the iMovie library and the iMovie theatre now the problem with this is if you double click on iMovie library it brings up iMovie we don't want that so let's go back to the finder what you want to do is on iMovie library right click on it it brings up this menu and we want to go down to show package contents so that it's going to show what's there instead of actually opening it up and look the folder that I want to delete the project I want to delete is called day 30 so if I find day 30 there it is among all the projects that it's remembered some of my greatest hits now available on youtube and if you click on the triangle of day 30 it will bring up some more folders analysis files the name of the project again but there's also this folder here called original media so if you click on the triangle there it actually opens up the folder that has all of the copies of the files that you actually want to delete iMovie takes its own copy it can as you can see from the size of the files there it can take up a lot of memory what we want to do now right click on the file that you can't delete so I know all my dash cam videos are here right click on it and then go down to get info there it is it's locked there's a little checkbox a little tick next to the word locked and what we want to do obviously is unlock it so untick that box or close it and I'm going to have to now do that for every single one of these files get info locked it's a good way to show you how to do this there we go so I've gone through all of the files that are likely to have this locked problem now just to show you that it works if you go back to iMovie so we go back to day 30 if I click on the three dots again and then hover over delete projects are you sure you want to delete this project yes continue it's gone yes we win the way to now free up the memory do it the usual way click on media and you can see now there's a new folder underneath iMovie library on the left hand side here and there's day 30 so click on that now if I right click on day 30 I can go down to delete events are you sure you want to delete the selected events continue boom it's gone and that has now freed up that memory those gigabytes for you to use for something else


Good morning, John! Let's have this conversation. I feel like every single one decided that I just want to have lots of really tough conversations on Vlogbrothers. Let's take these, let's face it, head on! John, I have a problem, and its name is meat. Let's get this out of the way. There is definitely some conflict going on between the vegetarians, vegans of the world, and the rest of the world. I'm gonna talk about why I think that is in this video, and I'm gonna start with the fact that vegetarians are right. Yes, animals raised for food do not have nice lives, and even if they did, they would still be killed in the prime of their lives so that I could have a tasty snack. Yes, the amount of food eaten by animals who will later be eaten is massive, and so as more people eat meat, more land has to be put under cultivation. Yes, livestock contribute massively to climate change, and are a primary reason for deforestation. And yes, most people don't need to eat meat to be healthy. And there are reasons both ways. Like, more than a billion people make at least some of their living from livestock. You don't want to take all of those people's livelihoods away all at once. But as the global population grows, as the global economy grows, it is very difficult to argue that vegetarianism is not a good thing. Basically, the important thing here is vegetarianism allows more people to have more food with less impact. It's good. And so, when someone tells me that I should be a vegetarian or leaves a comment on a video asking me how do I justify eating meat, I have no recourse but to say that they are right and that I am wrong, but that I will continue eating meat because I'm the kind of person who has a hard time controlling myself, and it's hard enough not to eat a half bag of Oreos for breakfast. Now, my personal willpower aside, there's a fundamental conflict going on here. I live in a society where eating meat is normal and being a vegetarian is not. It's Montana, you guys. Like, there are places in America where vegetarianism is very normal. This is not one of them. But there's a difference between acting in accordance with society's expectations, which will very rarely get you criticized and is definitely the easy thing to do, and actually living in a way that is best for the future and for people and for all of the organisms on the planet. And that's the reality of me eating. It is a thing that I don't need to do, but I do, despite the fact that it makes the world worse for current animals and future people. This is a big one for our society, but there are lots of examples of this. Like, I've always found it a little bit immoral that I spend money on things that are not necessary, like Coca-Cola and flying to San Francisco and that fifth ticket to the Force Awakens, when there are people dying of preventable diseases. I do those things instead of giving that money to save the children for the same reasons that I eat meat. Because it's easier, it's simpler, I like them, and I'm not perfect. But it's also more than that. Like, acting in accordance with society, to a certain extent, isn't just the easy thing to do. It's also kind of the only thing to do. I've experienced this. You can only do so much breaking with culture before you become extremely uncomfortable. It's very hard to find self-worth. It's very hard to find connection. Like, imagine if every time I saw someone buy a Coca-Cola, I, like, mumbled under my breath, like, you know, there are people dying of preventable diseases. I would not have a lot of friends. So why are people annoyed by vegetarians? Because they have the audacity to work extremely hard to live in accordance with their values. And because those values conflict with the values of society at large. People don't want to be told that the way that they live their lives and the things that they enjoy are making the world less good. Especially when you got other stuff to worry about. But look, as frustrating as I'm sure both sides can find this at times, this cultural conflict is not a bad thing. I honestly believe that we're on our way to a better, brighter future. And 200 years from now, people will think it's ridiculous that we ate meat the way that we do. There's no reason not to appreciate vegetarians for working very hard to live in accordance with their values. And I completely understand their desire to convert me and other people to their cause, to have us eat less or no meat.  And yet, I'm going to continue eating less, but not no meat. Because it's easier, it's simple, I like it, and I'm not perfect. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.


This video explains how to cite theses and dissertations according to the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Theseses and dissertations refer to works completed for masters and doctoral degrees. The terms are often used interchangeably and they are cited in the same way. I'll show you how to cite online and print theses or dissertations in both your notes and in your bibliographies at the end of your paper. In these examples, all punctuation is in red for emphasis. In your actual paper, all font will be black. In your note, start with the author's name followed by a comma. Then, in quotation marks, the title of the theses or dissertation followed by a comma. In brackets, indicate the type of degree, for example, a master's thesis or PhD, and the abbreviation for dissertation, and the university, and the year it was completed. Outside the bracket, place a comma followed by the page number where the reader can find the original quotation. If you read a print version of the thesis or dissertation, you would end there. For the online thesis or dissertation, place a comma after the page number and if you accessed it, free on the internet, add the URL. If you accessed through the library website, add the name of the database to use instead, for example, ProQuest. Here are two completed examples. Notice how in your note, the first line of each citation is indented and the following lines are aligned left. Also notice that the URL is not hyperlinked or underlined. If the database provides an identification number, you can include it in brackets after the database name. Next, let's look at how that information would look in your bibliography. In your bibliography, put the author's last name first. There are also differences in punctuation. In some places where you used a comma in the note, you use a period in the bibliography, and there are no brackets around the publication information. In your bibliography, the first line of each citation is aligned left and the following lines are indented. But where do you find all that information? Everything you need is on the title page of the thesis or dissertation. Whether you're using a print or online version, you can easily find the title and author, type of degree, university, and the year on the title page. For more information about Notes Bibliography Style, check out our other videos or visit the Munn Libraries website for our Chicago Style Guide and chat live with library staff. Thanks for watching!


everybody. It's 10.35 a.m. Sunday, July 24th, I think. Bob is doing a few chores downstairs, including I think finishing the pond repair. We had a leak in our little pond in the backyard. Anyway, the vegetables I transplanted yesterday from the seedling pots seem to be doing really well in the spots I picked. So I mean, I've tried growing tomatoes and stuff before with little bit of success. We don't get the most sun in our backyard. I don't think this is the best spot to grow things like that, but I mean, we'll see. We'll try it one more time. The kids are going to come take the rest of the seedlings at some point, maybe not today, but soon. I'll keep them watered in between. And I got mood boards done for the Facebook group for August, September and October just now. I need to do my August sketchbooks and get those prepped. I'm going to be away from the sketchbooks for a bit in August, so I need to do a few drawings ahead. And I also printed shed mood boards that I just created and I have a composition notebook. I'm keeping them all in, so I'm going to cut them out and add them. Anyway, I know it's a lot. I'm also doing dishes and laundry and it's Sunday, so it's tour day. I may try to get the vlog edited today too. Bob has a Masonic thing he's going to go out to this afternoon and I might try to edit the vlog while he's gone and get that done ahead of time and get it loaded and stuff for Wednesday, so I don't have to do it tomorrow. Maybe we'll see. I'll be back. It's hot out here. I want to get the seedlings watered. I've got the, all the work for, well, I got a lot of work for to this morning down. I got the mood boards done. I got the journals ready. I got all the video clips for last week's log loaded to the computer and they're ready to edit. They're all formatted and ready to edit, which I'm going to do after lunch. And then I'm going to work on drawings for today and also all the daily drawings for the first week of August. So in the meantime, I'm going to check on everything I moved around in the backyard for ourselves. I'm going to water the seedlings the kids are going to take, keep everything alive until they can find their new home and then have lunch because that sounds like a plan, I think. I'll be back. Getting the list done. So I got the vlog edited a day early and out of the video footage I shot for said vlog, I got two patron videos. So they get extended cuts of things like new painting at the easel and stuff like that. FYI, if you want, it's only $2 a month. So check it out. Anyway, Patreon link is down below. Anyway, so I got that done. And the first of the three videos is loading the patrons from Patreon. Patrons and supporters have their own private YouTube channel that you don't get access to unless you know you're one of them. So anyway, after the main vlog is loaded, I'll load the stuff to the Patreon channel. Dishes are done. Laundry is working. All the posts I needed to do and schedule are done. The August journals are done. I just need to sit and do some drawing now. Drink some water while things are loading. The air conditioner's on because now it's almost three o'clock. So we're hitting our like peak temperature right now that we're going to get. So today's the first hot day of the next week is going to be hot. We got heat warnings just now. I got a text message and an email because that's a thing. I was going to go walking when I got to the point where the videos were loading, but now it's excessively hot outside. So as you can see, I'm doing laps around the sofa. I don't know. Yeah, it's a thing. I'll be back. You guys, have I vlogged you today? I don't think so. It is Monday morning. I'm sorry, Monday afternoon, July 25th. It's 1 12 p.m. I have been catching up my watercolor sketchbook there.   I don't always draw them all. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't. This time I only drew three out of the ones I printed. So I should be more careful about what I print. But anyway, that's all done. I've had lunch. I'm going to go downstairs because I've got to do dishes because the dish this thing is full. Anyway, it's going to be somewhere between 90 and 100 degrees today, but bonus Bob's car should be finished and we might be able to pick it up tonight.  I have a it's already like 10 36 a.m. It's Tuesday, July 26th, and it's already 82 degrees outside. I'm going to go get a few steps in before it gets any hotter and do a little neighborhood sketching. So we'll see what we can see. It is already warm though. I can tell you that. All right, let's get to it. Shall we? I'm starting to get sweaty. I have one more drawing to do, but I think I'm going to head towards home. I don't want to have to take another shower again, but yeah, it is warm already. I'll be back. So the furnace guy was here. Furnished an air conditioner. He checked everything out. Good thing they came. They haven't really had a chance and we haven't had a chance to double check the new air conditioner since they installed it because they installed it in the middle of winter and until recently hasn't been hot enough for us to even use it. If you're following me, you know last week we had a problem with it make the condenser making a funny noise outside and they were able to fix it. I have like but he came today for a complete system service and I'm glad he did because he found a little bit of condensation in the furnace closet upstairs. There's a drip pan. It didn't damage anything, but it took him a little bit and he was kind of new to figure out what it was. I do think he's fixed it. Cross your fingers. We're going to keep an eye on it and if it's not, we'll call him back out and yeah. It was an adventurous day. At the same time, my daughter is working on something for me and she's asking me for photos from the Yahoo Small Business photo shoot I did for them in 2018. That was a long time ago and so it took me like two hours to find some photos. I do think I found them. I did tell her I have a lot of stuff on the backup drive if she wants to just come over and just take the backup drive. That might be easier, but it also might be easier for us to just do a new photo shoot. She is a photographer fun fact besides a realtor and an expert in advertising and social media. I don't know what we're going to do, but I'm guessing there's a photo shoot on my horizon. Oh yay. I'm going to go sit down now and have a snack and have some water and decompress a little bit. I'll be right back. It is 9.57 a.m. Wednesday, July 27th. I already had my counseling appointment this morning. Really helped a lot. Helped a lot to talk through things with somebody. If you're struggling from anxiety or depression or any other mental health issue, there's no shame in seeking help. Medication, counseling, therapy, like do it. I'll put a link for someplace here in the U.S. that you may be able to call or email to get some help or get references for a place to get help. If you're in a different part of the world and you have a link, I should put below. Let me know. All right. We are waiting for the furnace people to come because they thought they fixed the condensation leak. Only it's still leaking a little bit. So they're going to come take a second look at it. Plus, I think both of us feel like the kid yesterday was very sweet, very honest and did a great job, but he admitted that he's new. So did he fix it right? We don't know. He did as much as he could. He did his best. That's what he said. And that's fine. But he said if it was still leaking to call back, so we did. Yeah. All right. And I can't do anything else till they get that gear and that gets over with. So that's okay. All right. I'll be back.  He thought he put a temporary like fixing on it, but we probably need new parts. Again, it is under warranty. Anyway, after he left the temporary fix started spraying water everywhere, so he's back. This would have been during a heat wave. Anyway, I'll be back. Morning, everybody. It is 916 a.m. Thursday, July 28th. Yes, I want to say January again. It is not January, not yet anyway. I am just not capable of multitasking. So hang on. Let me log into the computer. That's not the right password because you know. So I'm just taping. Oh, okay. So yes, the air conditioner unit is got an issue still. But we can run it. We seem to have some faulty parts and it's not allowing for proper drainage of the water condensation in the air conditioner unit when it's on. Thankfully, we have a drip pan under set unit here in the house, which is actually here in the art room like over there. So there's no chance of it leaking or flooding or anything like that. We'll keep an eye on it. But of course, they don't have the parts in stock and it'll be a week or so before they can get the parts and get back here to fix it. So we will be cautious about using it and keeping an eye on it. And that's okay because we don't generally use it a ton anyway. We are going to have a couple hundred plus degree days coming up here at the end of the week. But we have found if we leave upstairs windows open all night, it does cool off the house significantly. And then you know, when the inside temperature meets the outside temperature, you close everything up and then the house will warm up at some point and we'll keep fans on and then we will turn it on and just keep an eye on it. So anyway, fun times right. Me time is fun. I tried to film some videos using my arm art foam ease and I kept having battery issues. So my camera batteries, some of them are not holding a charge anymore because they're old. So I guess I'm going to have to order some new batteries. So that might be a thing. Lovely. I'll be back. Cookie dough is made. It is chilling in the fridge. Lemon lavender cookies and the raw dough tastes great. So unless they bake up weird or something, they're going to be good. So all right, now let's go see if we can edit some more of the video I shot this morning. You guys, to my huge surprise, we did get three art foamy videos out of all that footage despite the battery issues and it's been edited and it's loading right now, scheduled out over the month next month. And here's the secret. I'm coming out with some new art foamy designs. The samples come in sometime next week and I will be showing them after I have a chance to get them and play with them and KP will be doing some lives with them and yeah. Anyway, now I'm going to go breathe the heat and check the mail because yeah, it's gross outside. He's just up there staring at me. I'm just waiting for you to finish. I want to interrupt your vlog. Hey guys, it is just about 9 30 in the morning on Friday, July 29th. And yes, I just constantly want to say January this month. But anyway, I have an eye doctor's appointment this morning and those of you who know my journey with my anxiety and depression know that medical things are one of my triggers.  I have since I was born legally blind without corrective lenses. That's, you know, now I'm older, I have mild bilateral cataracts. So you know, anyway, so I am just allowing myself time to get there and not rush remembering my breathing techniques. So I carry in my wallet a little card I laminated that has the breathing techniques on one side that were recommended by my counselor and the five four, three, two, one calming technique on the other. I'll try to put some links for both down below. And so you breathe in for a count of four, hold it for a count of four, breathe out for a count of four, hold that for a count of four. And I know it sounds like simple and sort of silly, but it does really work. I'll be doing it on my way to the doctor's office this morning. And I am going to run a couple errands on my way there.  So I want to get anything I want to get done before I go so I can just get myself home afterwards and not have to like deal with it. So just remember to breathe. All right, I'll be back. It is almost 9 30am Saturday, July 30th, I think. Yeah, pretty sure. Anyway, Bob is off to his eye doctor appointment. And I've already got all the plants watered inside and out. I have to finish my coffee and do some dishes, do something with this hair. We are meeting the kids later tonight for dinner. Paulius' parents are in town, helping them with some DIY. And we're going to meet for dinner later to celebrate my birthday because my birthday is in a couple of days. So anyway, I will probably close the vlog early at some point today so I can get it edited before we go do that. But all of that will be included in next week's vlog.  That's important. All right, I'll be back. So it's about 5 30. We were going to meet the kids and our daughters in laws and everybody for dinner. But there's some stuff going on. So we're not doing that. So I'll have a birthday dinner with them later. But dad, Bob and I are going to go out and we are going to go get some barbecue. And then we are going to get on with the rest of our week. And I'll be back. Man, that was a good dinner. Buster's Texas style barbecue. If you're in the Portland, Oregon area, check it out. I love their smoked brisket salad. It's good. Anyway, dad loved his food. None of us were very hungry and yet we cleaned our plates. Anyway, it's been an interesting week. Our air conditioner, yes, as I've said, is got a condensation leak and thankfully things are going into the drip pan and we're just not using it if we don't have to. And it will be fixed. It is under warranty, but it's going to take like two weeks to get a person because that's a thing. In the meantime, we have something else going on, something special, but that'll be in next week's vlog. If you want live, updated video clips, mostly unedited, yeah, you need to be a patron or supporter. They get a first look at some stuff. So there's that. But it'll be coming up in the next vlog. So stay tuned. Please like, share, and subscribe. You know, it hasn't been too bad of a week. I mean, you know, life gets in the way of making art some days and that's just what it is. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I'll make it up soon. Anyway, I hope it's been good for you. It's been good for me. Don't forget to check out the video description for relevant links. By the way, one thing I don't think I showed on camera this week, I made these really great lemon lavender cookies. They're a big hit with everybody. Yeah, I'll be making them again. I need more edible lavender, though. If I can find the recipe I used, I'll link it down below. Really good. And not too, not too hard.  Have a great day, have a great week, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye, guys.


Human society and nature interact in a complex way, with human activities leading to changes in the environment as well as being affected by it. To understand this relationship, researchers have used collective risk social dilemma gains to study how individual contributions and the risk of future losses are intertwined. Some studies have shown that these interactions are governed by a co-evolutionary process, where individual decisions influence both the level of risk and the amount of cooperation in the population. This paper takes a different approach, developing a co-evolutionary game model that incorporates the effects of individual strategies on risk levels. The authors found that the level of cooperation in the population depends on the initial proportion of cooperative players and the type of feedback loop between risk and strategy. Additionally, they discovered that the evolutionary outcomes depend on the initial conditions, with either a stable equilibrium or an oscillatory pattern emerging depending on the feedback loop. Finally, they showed that a critical starting point of cooperators and risk level is necessary for guiding the evolution towards a desirable outcome. This article was authored by Lin Zhe Liu, Xie Jiechen, and Atila Solnoki. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


So far, we have looked at ionic compounds as single entities. Ionic compounds actually exist as large 3D structures known as a giant ionic lattices. In this lesson we will learn about, and you got it, these giant ionic lattice structures. When we talk about sodium chloride, there aren't actually any individual sodium chloride molecules. Instead, the sodium and chloride ions are arranged in a regular repeating 3D pattern known as a giant ionic lattice. Let's now have a look at the giant ionic lattice of sodium chloride. We know that sodium and chloride ions are electrostatically attracted to one another. Because of this, you will see that the ions are arranged so that the sodium ions are always next to the chloride ions. This arrangement is seen in all directions of the 3D structure. The electrostatic attractions in a lattice structure are very strong. Let's think about it. Each sodium ion is held in place by the electrostatic attraction of six neighboring chloride ions in all possible 3D directions. And similarly, each chloride ion is held in place by the electrostatic attraction of six sodium ions, also in all possible 3D directions. Since this lattice structure is so strong, it explains some key properties of ionic compounds. Ionic compounds have very high melting points. This is because a lot of energy is required to overcome the strong electrostatic attractions holding the 3D lattice structure in place. Ionic compounds are also very brittle. This means that they break rather easily into small pieces. A ceramic flower vase is also brittle. If knocked over, chances are it will break into small pieces. But why are ionic compounds brittle? When a force is applied to the 3D lattice structure, we'll disrupt the regular repeating pattern of sodium and chloride ions. So the sodium ions are forced to be next to other sodium ions, and the same is seen with chloride ions. Like charges repel one another, and this repulsion essentially breaks the lattice structure. In summary, ionic compounds exist as giant ionic lattices, not as single molecules. The giant ionic lattice is a regular repeating 3D pattern of alternating positive and negative ions. The electrostatic attractions holding the structure intact are very strong, and this accounts for the fact that ionic compounds have very high melting points and are brittle.


I have 5 different setups for astrophotography here, and tonight they are all going to be centered on one patch of sky, the core of our Milky Way galaxy, in an epic one night shootout.  Welcome my name is Nico Carver and I'm interested in helping people explore this wonderful hobby we call astrophotography, which simply means photographing the night sky. I'll show you some different approaches to astrophotography in terms of the gear that you may choose to use to shoot the night sky, and I'll walk through how each system works, how you set each one up to get the best results possible, and of course we're going to compare the final images that I've produced with each kit all in one night. This is a shootout in the sense that the other night I shot the same patch of sky with each kit, but it's by no means a scientific test as the systems are just too different in nature to try to closely match settings. So it's not apples to apples here, it's more apples to oranges to passion fruit, but that's the point. For fans of short videos, this is probably not going to be one of those, but check out my channel and subscribe because I've been putting out a lot of shorter videos recently, including a series you may have seen of five-minute and under-videos every Friday that I'm calling five-minute Fridays. First off, I want to give a huge thank you to High Point Scientific, which is a great online store for all things astronomy and astrophotography. They have telescopes, mounts, cameras, accessories, really everything that you'd need to get started. And this is not sponsored by them, meaning that no money is exchanged hands, but in my request High Point Scientific did lend me the Skywatcher EQM35 mount and the Apertura 72mm refractor, which came with a matching field flattener. This is a huge help because going forward with this channel, I can't afford to buy everything that I want to review and show you in these videos, but that said, everything else in this video are things that I've personally bought over the years. I really have way too much stuff, but I can always do more giveaways. I wanted to say that a number of these cameras and the Skywatcher Star Adventure and things like that are things that I've bought specifically for this channel with proceeds from my Patreon campaign, which really keeps this channel going. So another huge thanks to everyone who supports me over on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash Nebula Photos. And if you're interested, it starts at just $1 per month, and there's tons of benefits in joining my community over on Patreon, including participation in imaging challenges, exclusive giveaways, exclusive channels on my Discord server, zoom chats, all kinds of stuff. The first kit we're looking at here may look a little bit strange if you're new to amateurst or photography or new to my channel. This is a device that I built to manually track the night sky. It costs about $30 in parts to make the tracker. And if you're interested in building it, I have a video for that, of course. I'll link it in the right corner here and also in the video description. The rest of the $100 for this kit is used for buying a sturdy tripod that I got. You could get used and a clamp for your smartphone. I'm not including the cost of the smartphone itself because I'm guessing most people have access to a phone or some kind of camera. Another thing I want to point out with this kit is I call it the DIYer because my thinking with this one is just trying to get the most out of things you have around the house or can build for pretty cheap, which is why I don't include the cost of the smartphone itself. Because the point is really just use any camera you can get your hands on, whether it's in a smartphone or a point-and-shoot or whatever it is and put it on top of this barn door tracker. And with any of these cameras, including the smartphone, it's worth seeing if the camera shoots in raw format and use that rather than JPEG if that's an option. If it only shoots JPEG, that's okay too for this. Just make sure you pick the highest quality JPEG option. Let's now go through the steps of setting up the DIYer. Thank you to Maggie so much for assisting with the B-roll here. So we start by putting the tripod on solid ground and pointing it roughly north or south if you're in the southern hemisphere. And then we put the barn door tracker on, make sure it's securely attached. And then the same thing, we put our phone or whatever camera you're using on top of the barn door tracker. Then comes polar alignment. In the northern hemisphere, a cheap way to do this is just with a basic sighting device, like a little straw. I'm using a metal drinking straw here. And we just need to line up the pole star, which is Polaris, which is pretty close to the North Celestial pole. Okay, then after we're polar aligned, we're just going to take the phone, point it at the center of the Milky Way, work out some of the settings here in the camera app. The app that comes on my Huawei phone is very good for giving me pretty much full control over the settings in Pro mode. But if your native camera app isn't very good, just check out your app store, your Google Play store, as there are a number of alternative apps these days. I've heard about Nightcap camera for iOS and DeepSky camera for Android are two really good apps I've heard. Okay, let's talk about the pros and cons of this kit. The pros are it's inexpensive. If you're using a camera you already have around like a smartphone, it's very quick to set up. It's pretty lightweight. The cons are you're limited to very wide field, both due to how the tracker works. But also just if you're using a smartphone, it probably only has like wide angle lenses. Another con and sort of a big one for me actually is that it can get sort of tiring and boring because you're manually moving the clock wheel for the entire time. And this could be overcome by adding a small motor to the tracker, which is something I'm really interested in trying. Okay, the last con is that it requires a lot of tinkering to get good results. Both the manual barn door tracker and the phone required a lot of trial and error with both technique and with settings before I could really get anything that I liked. And this isn't necessarily a con. It's just something to keep in mind. If you don't like tinkering, then this kit is probably not the one for you. Okay, let's look at the image I produced now. I'm pretty happy with it. The colors look reasonably good. The star color, we got some nice detail on the large dark nebulae in the Milky Way, and it shows off some of the other kits in the bottom right corner here in the foreground that we're going to be talking about. This next kit I loved just because of how simple it is. Hence the nickname I picked for it, the keeping it simple. What you need for this kit is just any DSLR or mirrorless camera with the wide angle zoom kit lens that came with it. And we're going to use the kit lens all the way zoomed out. So in my case, that's 18 millimeter focal length. I'm using a Canon T seven here, which is their most affordable DSLR. The only other two pieces of gear I used are a tripod. And again, I prefer a used tripod. If you can get one from like a good brand. And then lastly, we have this super cheap little shutter release cable here. This thing is pretty great because it doesn't even take batteries.   If you press halfway, it focuses. If you have it on autofocus and then you can also lock it like that. And so I've used this before as a manual bulb timer, like just like lock it, wait for five minutes and then unlock it. Um, but a commenter on an older video of mine pointed out that you can just put a DSLR on continuous shooting mode and then lock the switch. And the camera will continuously keep taking photos until you either unlock the switch or the battery runs out or your memory card fills. And I love this because it's simple. And it does exactly what I want in nothing more. And I don't have to worry about what is interval versus, uh, delay mean or that kind of thing. And it's also cheaper than an intervalometer. I don't have to worry about batteries since it doesn't take any. So the only time I still use an intervalometer is if I'm taking pictures longer than 30 seconds each. And that usually only comes up once you add tracking, which we'll get to next setup for the keeping it simple is a breeze. You just plop down the tripod, add the camera pointed at a bright star or planet manually focused by making that bright star as small as possible in the live view with 10 times zoom turned on. And once you're focused, you pointed at what you are shooting in this case, the Milky Way core, you lock the shutter release and let it take hundreds of photos. And for super wide angle stuff like this at 18 millimeters, we don't really even have to recenter that often. I always just recenter when I check focus, which depending on how much the temperature is changing, I usually do every 20, 30, 40 minutes, something like that. So I think I recentered once during the night and I took like 600 pictures. The settings were ISO 3200, 10 seconds exposure lens, wide open at F 3.5. The reason I went to 10 seconds, even though that was a little bit past what the MPF rule suggested is F 3.5 is a little bit slower than I'm usually at. So I wanted to get as much light in as I could to bring down the noise. Here what I see as the pros and cons of this setup, the pros are it's very simple and it's pretty low effort. The setup time is just very fast. You just need to focus, point it, Milky Way starts snapping away. It's relatively low cost. If you're a photographer, you might already have a camera and lens you can use and a tripod and the shutter release cable. And it's pretty easy to upgrade. You just need to upgrade the lens to get much better results. Now speaking of the results, I'd say that's the only con is that the results aren't like super great. They're not that much better than the DIY or where we had the barn door tracker. But the reason is I think because the kit lens is just a little bit soft. So you could consider a lens upgrade to get better performance. Um, you know, if you want to throw money at it, or if you're a tinkerer, you could combine this kit with the DIY or so if you have a DSLR, you can put that on the barn door tracker for $30. You have tracking and that's going to give you better results too. Anyways, let's get to the final image. This is the final stacked image that I made with the kit. The, the kit lens is, you can see really blots, the blue stars. Some people actually, I think find this pretty. I think that it is okay. It makes them a little bit overpowering though, but all in all, you know, it's a nice picture of the new way core. And I think shows a little bit more detail than the smartphone shot. Okay. The name of this one is of course a little bit tongue in cheek. It's, it's, but it's true that many people who go as far as getting a small star tracker, like the sky watch or star adventure, I found get really hooked on astrophotography because they realize how fun it is. And so then they spend a lot more eventually to get the full go to mount and telescope, which is what we'll cover next. But the gateway drug is a very capable kit that opens you up to many new possibilities since the star adventure can track the night sky with not just a wide angle lens, but a telephoto lens. And in this case I'm using a prime telephoto called the Rokinon 135 f2, which is a great value for astrophotography. I got mine for $450 when it was on sale. They go on sale frequently. And the reason it's a great value is because it's pretty sharp, wide open at f2. It was pretty amazing. The Batonov mask and the USB do heater strip are optional, but they don't really add too much to the cost, especially if like me, you can 3D print your Batonov mask from a friend or a library. The Batonov mask, if you're unfamiliar, is a focusing aid that works well with telephoto lenses and with telescopes.  You have to remember to take the mask back off, but then you have perfect focus. The do heater is to keep the lens from fogging up. Really, we could use this on any of the kits, but I'm just with this kit since we're like a little bit more advanced, I think you probably should get the do heater, especially if you are in a place with high humidity or if you're going to be pointing the lens more up. If the lens is pretty perpendicular, then the, um, the lens hood usually can prevent most do from falling on the glass. Um, but in the summer, I do recommend a do heater. This setup is a little bit more involved. Uh, we need to get everything securely attached. The star adventure goes directly on the tripod legs. And then we put this thing called the declination bracket in the clamp on the star adventure. Finally, the camera and the lens go on top of that. Then we need to make sure that it's balanced between the camera and the counterweight. This is so we don't put too much stress on the gears, which are turning everything after that's done. Uh, we look through a tiny little telescope built into the tracker called a polar alignment scope. And this is how we line it up with, uh, the North celestial pole or the South celestial pole with polar alignment done. We then turn to focusing the main lens. And this time, like I said, if you have a Bobanov mask, you can use one. If not, just make the stars as small as possible. We then point the telescope at our target. Unlike the previous two kits, we now need to do a bit more of a precision pointing, um, because to get it framed up how we want, cause we're not just pointing at the Milky way. We want to point at the really interesting part, which for me is the lagoon and triphid right in the center there. And so, uh, this can be frustrating to know how to point and how to find things in the night sky. It's a learning process. It takes many nights, but I do have a video on some tips to use technology to help you out a little bit, but don't expect to be great at it right away. Okay. With all of that done, we've taken a test shot. We know we're pointed correctly. We're in focus. We then turn on tracking on the star adventure program, the intervalometer to take, let's say a hundred shots. And after about a hundred shots at 30 seconds each, that's time that I'd like to check focus. If focus looks good, then I'll take another hundred. If not, then I'll refocus and then reprogram the intervalometer, take another hundred then at the end of the night, we're going to take our calibration frames, which are our dark bias and flats. Um, with the flats you do need some kind of white light source. So like an iPad works well, a tracing tablet, anything that's sort of flat and white, you just put that right on top of the lens to take the flats. I go into a lot more detail about how to take these things in sort of my start to finish videos. So I'm not going to go into all of that now, since this is just more about comparison and how you set these different things up. The pros of this kit are it's a still pretty lightweight and portable. You can definitely take it on an airplane as I have many times before, and it's pretty versatile. We could, we could use it for tracked Milky Way shooting with a wide angle lens, or like we're doing here, focusing on some large nebulae like Lagoon and Trifid with a telephoto lens or a small telescope. It works with stuff you may already have, like it works with the tripod. It works with a camera and lens. So instead of spending, you know, the full 1500, you may just be spending 425 to get the Star Tracker. And I really liked that the Star Tracker runs for a long time on AA batteries. Very convenient. The cons are that the setup time is starting to get longer, especially if you're new to astrophotography, both polar alignment and finding objects at higher focal length can, can take a bit of time. Alaskan is that I've heard for many that the Star Tracker is not available in their country. So it can be frustrating to see all these videos about how great it is. And then not be able to buy one. Okay. Let's look at what I produced with this setup. This was 300 lights at 30 seconds each. So about two and a half hours total. I shot at ISO 3200 with the Rokinon wide open at F2. As I said earlier, I did get the calibration frames with this one. So 50 each of darks, bias and flats. And you can see we got some great detail on the Lagoon and Triphid Nebulae here, as well as the Starfield. The Rokinon lens I think is very impressive on the stars, especially on a crop sensor camera. Like I was using a Canon T7. This mountain telescope for, for this kit, getting serious were lent to me by the fine folks at High Point Scientific. And so this was only my second night shooting with this mountain telescope. I did a brief test a couple of nights before to make sure it was all working okay, which it was. And then this was my first real experience shooting with it. And I was very impressed by both the mount and the telescope. The mount again is a Skywatcher EQM 35 mount. And it does have some faults. The accuracy of the go-to system with just the hand controller, what we'd call the pointing accuracy, it wasn't that impressive. But the tracking, which is more important to me, was, was great. For 30 second exposures at a focal length of 430 millimeters with this Apertura refractor, I was getting perfect stars every, every single shot. I didn't have any trailing issues. The stars looked great across the field. For the camera, I got a barely used Canon T7 off eBay for 350. And then I had it modified for 300 from astrogear.net. And I'll be doing more of a review of different kinds of DSLR modifications and future videos. Now for the accessories, I decided to keep it pretty simple. We could have gone a lot with more stuff here, but I just went with like a do-heater controller, a do-heater strap for the telescope. I'm controlling the DSLR with an inner volometer. And I used a Bodinov mask for focusing. Now you, of course, can add a lot more to this kit. Auto guiding, computer control, automated focusing, all this kind of stuff. But I was interested in just keeping it to the basics to keep it sort of to the minimal kit for a telescope. And for me, this is the really the base kit that I'd suggest if you want to get into astrophotography with a telescope. I wouldn't try to spend much less than this. Now to power it all, I was feeding both this kit and the next kit I'll show you of one big deep cycle lead acid battery, which is a pretty affordable battery given the huge capacity. But the downside of that kind of battery is that it's super heavy. The truth is though, I would never really consider this a portable kit. You really need a car to bring all this stuff to a dark site. So you couldn't hike with this. Just the tripod is huge. So the heaviness of the battery doesn't matter too much to me, as long as I can safely lift it out of the car. Setup of this one is a bit more complex than the last one. It just, uh, it takes a little bit more time. We just need to get everything securely attached to the mount. We, we balance it. We polar align with the built in polar scope. We turn everything on. And then there's a bit of setup. There is the hand controller setup. We have to feed it some information like our location or GPS location. You can get all this information from a smartphone app, like polar finder pro. Uh, you just type it in here. Then we go through a three star alignment process. And this is to train the go to system and it's, it's going to point the telescope at different bright stars. And then you have to center them on your DSLR screen by pressing left, right up and down arrows on the hand controller. Now, even after I did this, the go tos were still about a degree off. And, um, so I really should have brought like a tell rad, some kind of finder scope cause this could really get frustrating fast. If you're doing go tos and they're off. The caveat I'll mention is that this is again, was just my second night using it. So I could maybe there's some way to fine tune the pointing. Um, one way of course is you can connect it to a computer and then you can plate solve to correct the pointing. And that's really fast and good. The pros of this setup are we can accurately track at 430 millimeters, which gives us a much more detailed view of deep sky objects. Another pro is that the mount can handle the weight of a telescope and telescopes can be really optimized for astrophotography more so than camera lenses. It also has more potential for upgrades. We can, as I mentioned, we could add complete automation if we wanted to the cons are there is much more to learn here before you can get good results. And the kid is way too heavy and bulky at this point to hike or fly with it. Uh, it's really just like a, you can put it in your car and bring it somewhere. All right. And here is the final image. I was super impressed by this, not a huge amount of effort to get really nice results. This is only 159 lights at 30 seconds each. So under 90 minutes total at an F ratio of F six ISO 3200. The star rendering is amazing. The field flatener is clearly doing its job as the stars look round in the corners. It's amazing to me that the whole telescope and field flatener is only $700. If you get them as a set, because these stars look near perfect. I didn't see any excessive star bloat or color fringing. So I think this is going to be really hard to beat, but let's see if the next kid can do it. This is my personal kit that I've been slowly adding to and upgrading parts over the years. At this point, almost everything in it has been upgraded at least once. And that's how I can afford something like this. I've never had this much money all at once, but I just save up for one new upgrade or thing at a time. If I want a new telescope, I can then offset the cost a bit by selling my old one. So to step through this, the EQ six arm mount you may have heard of, because it's just a tremendous value at around $1,600 for a mount that will reliably holds like 30s plus pounds and has, you know, reasonably good and reliable pointing and tracking. The camera I'm using, I also love it's relatively new to me, but so far so good. The QHY 268M it's a mono camera, meaning I need filters in front of it. And I use two inch filters from Antlia and a QHY seven position filter wheel. LRGB and the three main narrowband filters being sulfur, oxygen and hydrogen alpha for guiding. I use an off access guider with the ZWO ASI 290 mini. The telescope is a stellar view SVQ 86 that they only made a very limited run of in 2018. So I'm very happy to have gotten one because I love it. It has an aperture of 86 millimeters focal length of 464. So that makes it a focal ratio of 5.4.  The main ones are I have an optech auto focus system, a Pegasus pocket power box for power and do heater stuff, and then a QHY pole master for its computer assisted polar alignment. The setup of this one is actually not too bad because I've really refined it over the years and keep most things connected to the top of the telescope.  I have a whole video on how I do this kind of setup. It might need updating because I made it a few years ago now, but most of it I think is still how I do it. It's still good information. I still use all the same programs I use then like EQ Mod, cartouciel, PhD to pole master and sequence generator pro. I'm not going to go deep into the software stuff, but I'll just say that there are so many options for software that control your gear that it can be a little bit overwhelming if you're a beginner, but I just suggest trying things out, seeing if you like them, don't feel pressured to use something just because someone else does or something like that, use whatever makes sense to you. For me, once I've learned a process that is giving me good data, I don't really feel the need to change unless I have to for some reason. Once I hit start, uh, start sequence on sequence generator pro, everything is automated. It does an automated focus routine every half hour. It guides and dithers on its own. It changes the filters on its own. If the object, if the object I'm shooting crosses the meridian, it will flip the telescope to the other side of the mount. So it can continue tracking. And this is really what you are paying for with something like this. It's, it's just the peace of mind that you can leave it alone. You don't have to babysit it and it will be reliable, give you reliably good data. And for me, this is worth a lot because I can then work on big multi-year projects that I enjoy with my main kit while I'm testing things, making YouTube videos, helping friends and just enjoying the night sky. So for me, the main pros of this setup are one, automation, two reliable data quality and three great narrow band data, even from the city. This isn't something I'm going to really talk about in this video, but I have three nanometer and Lita narrow band filters for this kit. And that lets me image from Somerville where I live, which is Bordel eight right next to downtown Boston. Now the cons are this kid is very heavy and bulky. It's expensive and it's complex. And the main problem with complexity is if something goes wrong, there are so many possibilities for what it could be, uh, because there are literally dozens and dozens of possible points of failure with a kit like this one. But I've learned two things about complex astro setups over the years. First one, always bring extra cables for everything in your kid. You know, you want an extra cable. And if something isn't connecting or something's acting weird, try switching out the cable because I can't tell you how many times that's worked for some reason. Uh, even if I don't think the cables bad changing the cable, then it works. The second thing is once everything's updated on your laptop or your Raspberry Pi or whatever you're using, don't update the software. And I know sometimes you maybe you want to update the software because there's a new feature or something. If you have to update, do it on a new moon, see if anything breaks. If you, and then, you know, have a plan for rolling back to your stable setup, if something goes wrong. Okay. Looking at the final image, this is 20 luminance frames and 10 each of red, green, and blue, all at two minutes each. So a total of one hour, 40 minutes. I think the main things that make it stand apart a bit from the last image with the last kit is that it's already pretty low noise. And that's mostly thanks to this amazing camera, the QHY268M, the star color and the contrast in general are a little bit more pleasing to me. I mean, I'm sure I could match the two images better, uh, in terms of color and processing, but I basically just did very minimal processing. You had to show you more of the baseline differences between these different kits. And again, I don't think that in terms of just normal color image performance that the lifer kit is worth four times more than the getting serious kit, it's really when you add in narrow band capabilities and all the automation that you start to get why it's so much more expensive for that sort of peace of mind. Now that we have a feel for each kit, let's do some comparisons. And let's start with the weight of each kit. The total weight of the DIYer is seven pounds or 3.2 kilograms. I can easily lift the whole thing with one arm, move it around. I'd say that it would be pretty easy just to strap it to a backpack and hike with it. If you want the keeping it simple is even lighter at 5.5 pounds or 2.5 kilograms, definitely easy to hike with the total weight of the gateway drug is about 13 pounds or 5.9 kilograms. Definitely still can hike with it, but it's more than double the weight of either of the first two kits. And the total weight of the getting serious kit is 31.2 pounds or 14.2 kilograms. And this is without the lead acid battery I used to power it, which alone weighs 59 pounds or 26.8 kilograms. This is the kind of setup where I don't want to move it and any further than I have to the reason I separated the battery out from the total weight is because if the weight of the battery was a concern, you could definitely get a lighter battery. The big lithium batteries are still substantially more expensive than a lead acid, but I think the prices have been falling a bit in recent years and the lithium battery batteries will be much, much lighter like around 10 pounds. The total weight of the lifer is 103 pounds or 46.7 kilograms. And that's without the lead acid battery, which again is an additional 59 pounds. So why a three times increase in weight from the getting serious? Well, the main thing is the EQ 6R is a good reliable mount partly because they just make it super heavy. The mount head alone is like 40 pounds. The tripod is 15 or 16 pounds. And then you have 22 pounds of counterweights. And so before we even add my tricked out telescope, we're at about 77 pounds with the EQ 6R. The good thing about it being so heavy is that makes it more resistant to things like wind and vibration, which can easily ruin astrophotos. But the downside of it being heavy is that it's quite the pain to move it around. I live on a third floor apartment.  Another comparison that I find interesting is, you know, from the moment that you start taking the kit out of the car to when you start taking images of the night sky is all what I'd call setup time. So we're going to compare the setup times that I recorded for each kit. The DIY required little setup is just sort of putting the tracker on the phone on the tripod, very roughly polar lighting, you know, aiming the phone at the Milky Way, finding focus. So with practice, the total for me has is down to eight minutes with that kit. With all these numbers, keep in mind that I've practiced. I'm an experienced astrophotographer. So starting out, don't try to like match these. It's really just a point of comparison between the different kits. The keeping it simple required nothing but focus and pointing the camera at the Milky Way. So it only took me three minutes to set up. The gateway drug required putting it together, balancing, polar alignment, focusing, finding your target and finding the target was a bit hard the other night because I forgot all kinds of finder devices. So it took me 28 minutes, but I think if I had remembered a finder device, I could have brought that down to 20 minutes. The getting serious kit required putting it together, balancing, polar aligning, setting up the hand controller, performing a three star alignment and then going to the Laguna Nebula, but finding that it was off. So then having to really find it and then focusing in total, it took me 35 minutes. But with practice and a finder scope, I'm sure that I could probably get that down to like 30 minutes. The lifer is the kit that I use most often. And so it's very much in my muscle memory. And I also have tried to make the setup of it as efficient as possible since I do it so often. So I have it down to 16 minutes when I go pretty fast. I think the main takeaway from this comparison is, you know, especially with the lifer being faster, the middle two, is that a more complex setup doesn't necessarily mean longer setup time. Because there's a lot of ways that you can make the setup more efficient. And one of those is actually controlling a lot of things through the computer can actually make you faster because plate solving, for instance, makes finding things so much faster.  And I'll measure this in terms of percentages. The DIYer is 100% active time because I'm actively moving the wheel to track. So if I get an hour of data, that means that I'm sitting there for an hour moving the wheel. With the keep in it simple, if you don't take any calibration frames and you don't recenter, it's maybe 0%. But for me, it was 5% because I did check focus and recenter once. With the gateway drug, it just depends sort of on how much you check things like how much you check focus and the tracking is working. But I'd say it's somewhere between 5% and 10% because you're also I also took calibration frames. It's the same exact thing with the getting serious. I, you know, 5% to 10% something like that. I should point out, though, that with neither setup that I feel the need to manually do a meridian flip and then recenter and all that because it didn't look like there was any danger of running into the tripod legs. So I didn't do a meridian flip. But if I had that, probably would have added added to the active time, it probably would have climbed above 10% with either setup. With the lifer, as I've mentioned, everything is automated focusing, blah, blah, blah. So the active time is 0%. And you might be wondering, well, what about calibration frames? I do those at home with the lifer because everything stays connected so I can even do flats at home. So there's the, you know, after I get it set up, it's all passive. I don't have to, I don't have to worry about it with that kit. Okay, we've made it to the final comparison, which is just the actual images themselves that I took with each kit. I'll quickly show each one full screen. And then we can look at some crops. I didn't really try to have any kind of consistent workflow in processing here. I just made them look as best as they could with simple processing techniques like curves and saturation that I stacked. Here are some crops now at 100% zoom. These are centered on the lagoon nebula, sort of like in my thumbnail for the video. And then now here is centered on the triphid nebula. Again, all of these finished photos plus my unprocessed stacked tiffs for each kit is available at a link in the description. And I've also arranged these as kits with affiliate links to each item on kit.co slash nebula photos. And you can find that link in the video description as well. Hope this was helpful to you all out there. Since this is a long video, you're now seeing the names of all my Patreon supporters. If you want to be in the credits to any long video like this, you can sign up over on patreon.com slash nebula photos. In addition to having your name in the credits, as you're seeing now, there are lots of benefits to joining us over on Patreon. I organize a monthly imaging challenge, which is a lot of fun. And the winning images each month are published on my Instagram and also on an Astroven group. I also do zoom chats where you can ask me questions live. We've been doing those on Sundays. So it's really worth your while to sign up so you don't miss out. Well, till next time, this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies.


Defensive stop play in the fourth quarter, and what kind of key did that stop? It was huge, you know. It was huge. Man, it was crunch time. Guys was on the only job, and we were where we were supposed to be.   Like, I was trying to think of something to say. But we stood up. We stood up, man.  And it's going to carry its momentum going forward. What was that when you did that swim move to Sack Dam Jones? That was like, what was that like for? You know, it felt good to get that nice swim move. That's one of my moves I like to use a lot. And it was open, you know, so took it. And it felt good to get that first sack of the year. And, you know, I almost got close to a couple of the time. So it just gave me motivation as a rusher to continue going forward and motivate the guys.  So guys, we're rushing good, and we just want to continue to do better. How do you think the defensive line play as a whole in terms of containing the rushing attack and also a mobile quarterback? And how do you think you did contain the mobile? You know, aspects of it, I'm going to have to review the film. But, you know, just being in the game, being in the moment, I know guys play hard. They play their hearts out and did the best we could. And we just want to continue to build off the performance. Brady Arthur said a few minutes ago that they scored the touchdown, get a two-point conversion, could have easily been a here we go again moment. Why was it not this time? You know, because we believe in this team that we got and they went down score like we knew that they would.  All this, you know, we got to play the game. It's still a time left on the clock. We got a chance. What was it like for y'all the last two weeks? Because your 20-point loss as you come out of that, how was that different this week? What changed, maybe, within this team? Well, it's not changed. You know, we just adjusted. You know, the things that were hurting us were fixable. And I think we did a good job of that in our preparation and believing in ourselves and just, you know, knowing that we can get over that hump and continue to push. So, getting this first win is definitely a step in the right direction. Well, we want to go a long way. We want to continue to get better and go back to work. You said believe. I think everybody that's come through here has said believe. And you said something. Is that something that Arthur's really been preaching to y'all? I mean, you could say that. You could say that. But I think as a group of leaders we got on this team, that's some of the message that we wanted to get across as well. And guys are, like you say, believing in it and keep pushing and keep pushing to get over that hump. And we're not over at hump, but yet, but we're taking a step in the right direction. You said that I could say that. What is he saying that's giving you that belief? Is he literally just saying? I mean, as a competitor, you play the win the game. You better, if you don't prepare to win the game, why are you playing for it? If you don't believe that you're going to win, why are you playing for it, you know? So that's, I think that's just the message and I don't know if there's a phrase that you're looking for, but yeah, I'm good. How much of the defensive plan today was predicated on not letting Daniel Jones sneak out and get one of those big runs on you? Zone reruns. We definitely knew it was capable of a strong runner. And so definitely guys being prepared for that. And however they wanted to dress it up. And we did a good job. We did a good job today. He had a strong run on the two-point conversion.  But I don't like that play right there. But I don't like that one, you know?  You know what I'm saying? But he definitely is a super strong runner, a good leader for their team. But we didn't want to let him beat us with his legs because he was very capable. Yeah, it seemed like after that two-point conversion, you were like laying down. Like, were you just thinking I had him or something like that? Or? You know, I felt the initial joy. I thought it stopped and he had had a great second effort by him and it got in the end zone. So definitely disappointed.  So definitely something that I've got to finish better in that moment, whether it's, you know, whether that's my gap or not, you know, if I'm in the position to make a play, I want to make it every time. So, you know, every L that I take, you know, it's going to make me better. And so it is what it is. Last one, do you like it? Yeah, Grady, what does it say for the quarterback, T.J. Greeno, Clemson got stepping in for A.J. today. You get one early, but it's like you had a solid day. That's awesome. Awesome to see T.J. step up, man. And, you know, just the road he's traveled as a pro, you know, being a teammate with him up in Clemson and just see how he, you know, transfer from a rival C.V. at Clemson to a DB and just played his way into getting drafts in the second round and be able to have this opportunity here as we teammates again. So it's awesome to see his growth. And I'm sure there's going to be a confidence for him and also build confidence in our coach staff and him and maybe we can see him more in the field something. All right. Thanks, Grady. Thank you.


Hey everyone, thanks for checking out sir station border views today. We are reviewing the lost v3 rocket Shaped by Matt Biles of mayhem mayhem shapes v3 rocket follows many of the same parameters as the v2 rocket one of your main differences is the Triple wing or the double wings in the tail instead of the single wing like the original v2 rocket Also, the tail is slightly more pulled in than the v2 rocket on the reason for this is Mayhem wanted to create a one board quiver The narrow or tail allows the board to go to go well and and bigger better waves As well as having the option for five fins when it's bigger or steeper face surf you fill in the quad set It's gonna hold in and bite a little more Then for you know your everyday average surf you can ride it as as a thruster The v3 was designed to be a one board quiver Made to go in knee-high gutless mushy stuff all the way into overhead top-to-bottom barely in type waves The v3 rocket incorporates many of the same aspects as the original v2 rocket It's still a high volume shortboard made to paddle into waves easily Made to surf in the small stuff Easily, but then with the pulled-in tail and the five-pin option It gives you it gives you the ability to ride it in a multiple in a multiple variety of waves The v3 rocket is a very fast and maneuverable shortboard We have them available here at surf station. You can check us out online at surfstationstore.com Thanks for checking out surf station board reviews