is this thing where it will caption as I talk. So I'm going to turn that on. It's going to be distracting, so just don't look at it. If you can hear me, you don't need that. This is for people who might hear the video later. Yeah, welcome all. Here's the link to these slides if you want them. There's also a link on the conference website on the session description, which I just put up there. So you can take a picture or just go check the website. So who am I, and why do I think I know something about presenting? So my name is Matt Quarks. I've been building websites for a pretty long time. I'm guessing that's the case for lots of people in this room. I've also been speaking about Drupal for about 10 years, starting here at the Montreal Drupal camp. So I've had some practice at it. I've spoken twice at DrupalCon North America. I also was one of the organizers for this event for about three years. So there's lots of people who know way more about presenting than I do, but I do think I know the basics. Oh, and I have to throw this slide in there. In case anyone knows somebody looking for a job, I won't try to poach you from wherever you are now, but we are hiring on our team. Anyways, moving on. Who are you folks? So who in this room has given a presentation before at a conference? Three of you. Three of you. Does one count? Sure, yeah. Like more than three people, like not just your immediate colleagues, you're standing up there. You probably have some slides. Yeah, great. So that counts.  OK, that's not everybody, but more of you. That's great. And so what are some things that you're hoping to pick up today to learn in the session? Just try to find out what I don't know. OK. Find out what you don't know. Great. Anything else? How to brainstorm the idea for the proposal? How to brainstorm the idea for writing the proposal? Or the idea of the mission? Like the whole idea for the talk? Or how to write it up? How to write it up? How to write it up? OK, great. I see any. My needs is about the same thing for me. OK. And really thinking on the conference biases. And so I wanted to give one, but I want to make sure that the content is on target and then interest that everyone wants to do. OK, great. Is there anyone else? OK, I'll do my best to cover that. What we'll cover today, so why I hope to see more people giving presentations at conferences. How to get comfortable with doing it? So just the stage fright part. That's a thing in and of itself. And then how to actually structure the presentation once you've gotten over that. Great. So why should you do it? It's a great confidence booster if like 50 people or however many people come and listen to you for an hour when they could have been going to 10 other talks and then come and talk to you afterwards and give you feedback. It's good validation about your skills, what you know, or you'll get advice like, oh, that part you could have done a little differently. When you teach something, you first have to make sure you know it really well. So it forces you to go and do that research, to round out your knowledge of whatever your topic is in a way that you wouldn't have to normally. I'm sure at some point you've had to, well, you've all gone through at least one interview, I'm guessing. So you've had to present yourself sometime. So it's good practice for that. Even if you don't give a talk at a conference, you probably have clients or potential clients that you're giving presentations to. If you work internally in a large organization, you have other departments, other stakeholders, and you need to convince them that your plan for your project makes sense. So this is good practice for that. Also, at least in my organization, it can mean that you get to go attend more conferences. I went to DrupalCon this year because I was speaking. Otherwise, my employer probably wouldn't have paid my travel expenses. So if you like going to conferences, it's good for that. Sorry, I'm skipping slides here. After giving talks at conferences, people have come up to me and asked if I was looking for a job. They've asked if my agency would be interested in taking on a contract, so it's very good visibility that way. And if you work for a large organization, it's visibility within your organization. If I'm not saying this about myself, but if hypothetically you were looking to move within your organization or move up to a more managerial role, move up a level, it's a very good practice for that, too, and visibility. And finally, why? So IT, as all of you, I'm sure, know, or you could figure out by looking around at any software conference as a serious problem with representation, with the demographics of who's working in this industry. Part of a solution for that is having role models for people from underrepresented groups. If that's something that you think you can do by speaking at a conference, research shows, and from my understanding, that that can encourage people who are earlier in their careers to consider working in IT and consider your field, our field. Yeah, so to start, who here is scared of getting up in front of other people? Yeah, it's very common. Yeah, you're not alone. The good news is that this is a skill that most people can learn. It's all about practice. All the people I see who are brave at speaking, if I go and look at their CV at LinkedIn, I see they do a ton of speaking. The very best conference presenters have seen, they're basically professional conference presenters, like Confu or the bigger ticket conferences like that. They're people who fly around the world and do nothing but speak at conferences. And unsurprisingly, they're great at it. So this is something that you can learn. You just have to practice. A couple of ways that you can practice, if you're not familiar with these, there's a non-profit group called Toastmasters. It's just for people who want to give speeches or presentations in a business professional context. They just sit around giving practice speeches to each other. The speeches can be about anything. That's not the important part.  They also have activities like competitions for teenagers, younger kids. If you've got a kid who you think might be interested in that or who you want to be interested in that. An interesting one is improv comedy. Improv comedy has gone surprisingly corporate. People have realized that if you can stand up on stage and make a fool of yourself and make up jokes, then you can really get over stage right really quickly. And so a bunch of improv comedy clubs have noticed this and they've cashed in and are marketing this. So if that sounds more fun to you than Toastmasters, that's an option. There's even an open mic storytelling is this thing you might have heard it on like a podcast, like The Moth for example. So you just get up and tell a story that's supposed to be true about yourself. I don't know how much fact checking goes on. But the point is you're on stage and you're talking and afterwards people will say, oh that's great or that part there, you looked a little awkward. I personally didn't do any of these, but I've done a bunch of amateur music, musical performances, starting inside when I was a kid. So then you're up on stage and if you screw up, a lot of people will notice. So I personally got over stage right that way. If that's your thing, that's another way to do it. And I'm sure there are lots more. I'm gonna move on now to how to give a presentation. Yeah. And if you, for those of you in the room who've given presentations or different ideas, please don't hesitate to give me, give your suggestions or if you've got different ideas here. But I'll start with what's worked for me and what I've seen work well when I see other people give presentations. So I started with a quick summary.  So you want the right people to just stay in the room and if the talk isn't for someone then you want that person to know that and go to some other talk right at the beginning so they don't waste their time and your time. When I go to conferences I usually like circle two or three things on the agenda at once and I'll go to one but I've always got a plan B if the presenter or the content isn't what I was expecting. So that's a good thing to do. Yeah, then you need to have a goal. What do you want somebody to know when they walk out? What are you trying to teach them or demonstrate or explain? So examples might be that you're presenting on security and you want someone to realize some new security issue that they haven't heard of is very important as something they should follow. Confidence and a brand new piece of technology that they haven't seen that they can learn how to use Node.js or Varnish or whatever or project management that's a popular. There's usually a couple of talks at this conference about like how to use different parts of agile work and that's how I personally learned about agile from going to conference presentations. So what do you want people to, how do you want them to feel when they walk out? What's their takeaway? And what do you want them to remember? So in your slides put a few key points and share your slides. Always share a link to your slides, please folks so that people aren't frantically scribbling the whole time. Put some points in your slides so that people can go back and review and refresh their memory when they're back at their desk or they're explaining what they saw in your great presentation to their colleagues. But hopefully people are spending more time listening to you than reading. I personally have a bad habit of putting too much text in my slides so I'm not saying to copy my example there. Yeah, and then since you want them to come away feeling like they learned something, like they're able to do something new when they go back to work on Monday or whatever, give them some links, like give names of books and links to blog posts. If you show code, please share a link to that code. Put it up on some public repository somewhere. If it's code from your work that your boss won't let you share, then make a clean up version with dummy values and like all the passwords out and put that up. Please take a few minutes to share your code. If you just look at a whole pile of code for five minutes on a screen, that's very different than being able to go back and read it line by line and figure out that tricky part that you didn't quite get in the presentation. So share resources, that will make your talk more useful. Now I'm going to talk about some principles to keep in mind when you're organizing your talk. So where to start? If you're talking about some fine detail of optimizing your CDN, don't start with some configuration style, some detail about the configuration file. I would suggest that you start with a big picture, don't assume, try to make your talk accessible to people who already know something about what you're describing and people who have never heard of it for whom this is a brand new concept, who've never heard of agile project management, for example. So give it at least a quick overview to put everything in perspective so that people know where you're starting from and then a lot more people will be able to find your talk useful. So this, you can talk about who invented this technology, who's built it, what it's building on top of. You can talk with any piece of tech, there's usually five other things you could have used instead. So why did you choose this one? How is it better? How is it worse? What are the advantages? What's the, what's its use case? And what are examples of a use case where you should be using something different? Most tech has like some assumptions. Like you'll require a certain runtime or like it only makes sense for people using iPhones or whatever. So explain all that and don't assume everyone in the room has that familiarity because you're trying to aim your talk at everyone. Next step, when you learn things just like as a plant grows, it happens gradually. If you want some large complex understanding of a piece of tech, you need to start small and build with that. So pick, start with some really easy examples that are just a couple of lines so that anyone can take in quickly and then keep adding new ones on top of that. You might not get to the end. You might need, if you have to stop and answer a lot of questions, you might not have time for that, but that's fine. That means that you're explaining the basics to more people.  Every, but you're trying to, it's given a conference presentation, it's like a movie trailer. You're just trying to give the highlights and give people interested to sit down at the desks and do the hard work of actually learning the technology and using it themselves. So you're the, in a world, little trailer that's just trying to hook people and get them interested to go and spend the hours that it takes to learn how to use whatever it is you're describing. And you can do that by showing a few key examples like cool tricks, like representative moments, just like in a trailer for a movie with a lot of fighting, there's gonna be at least one explosion and then that tells you, okay, this is what you get if you're coming with this movie. And if you don't like that, go watch a different movie. Mention, but so give simple examples that show the general principles, but always reference the fact that there are other things that you can do for their possibilities and give some link to, or some pointer to some reference where they can learn even more. So make people wanna go home and learn more about whatever you're describing because it's a cool new piece of technology, right? But while you're doing all this, so you have to remember that the presentation, it's not about you, by which I mean the point of the presentation isn't getting up and talking for an hour, isn't to show off what an expert you are, you're not auditioning for something, you're trying to build the audience's understanding of something. If you're not sure if you know something well and you need some affirmation about that and you just want to talk, to show off your knowledge of it, this conference presentation is not the time and place to do that. You're hoping to enable the audience to reach new heights and build on each other. So you can, to do that, try to focus on, if you focus on teaching things and not just prescribing all the fancy things you did in your project last week, the audience is going to find that more useful. So as I mentioned, try to keep, try to start with small examples, and keep that focus, so that your talk will be useful to the people who are listening and not just something that shows off your vast experience. And then if there's some tricky question at the end and somebody needs to know that thing, they'll ask you, or maybe they'll contact you on Twitter after or something, but don't try to just show up as much, how much you know. Although that said, I personally feel like it's okay to talk faster than people can write notes because you're giving them the slides. So you can mention something and just say here's the link and then move on. But make sure that people understand the big concepts instead of talking too much about the little details. And yeah, as I said before, if you need to skip a few slides at the end, be ready for that. Like build to that. And somebody should be able to take away something from the first 80% of your slides without needing the ones at the end. And if you don't know something, for example, if you, definitely if you get a question and you don't know the answer, maybe someone else in the room does. So don't be willing to say when you don't know something. The next point. Make sure as many people as possible can access the content of your talk. That's why I turned on these little captioning at the bottom of the screen. So this is a photo of a staircase in front of the courthouse in Vancouver. So there's a whole bunch of steps going up to the other level. But that thing you see going across diagonally is actually the wheelchair ramp or the ramp for somebody with a stroller, for example. So it was integrated into the rest of the staircase which I thought was a really great example of accessible urban design. The stairs keep going up on the right but the wheelchair ramp goes right to the top as well. So by which I mean there's a few little things you can do. You can describe pictures. In my case, I also put alt text in. So that if someone is attending who in the back and they have poor eyesight or are blind or they're watching video later that they still know what you're describing as opposed to just putting in a graph and sitting back and waiting for people to look at it. It can help if you describe the pictures that you're showing tell people why you're describing the pictures you're showing so that they know when they go and give a talk next week that it's a good thing for them to do too. Yeah, if somebody asks a question only if the people sitting around them are gonna hear it you have to repeat it for the people in the back. If there's sometimes a microphone in the room for the people asking questions that if somebody doesn't use that you need to repeat it. You also need to repeat it so that in the recording because there will probably be a recording that question is captured. And a pet peeve of mine is people who ask if the people at the back can hear them. If they can't hear you then they're not gonna hear you ask if they can hear you, right? That doesn't make sense. So don't do that. If the room, these rooms are small enough and they're set up with a chair's race of everyone can hear pretty well but if there is a mic if the people who design the building put mics there it's probably there for a reason, use the mic. Another example of accessibility is in choosing examples. I sometimes see people thinking kind of perilously about how they pick the examples of their real world use cases in the slides. Is anyone familiar with the concept of implicit bias? It's a, yeah, it's a concept. There's a link so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail with this but the main point is that it's possible with technology to measure people's stereotypes and implicit biases about things that they're not biases that they have which are they are not themselves aware of. You can do that by like showing people two pictures and asking them to rate which person looks friendlier but what you're measuring is reaction time on the keyboard or like tracking their eyes. And it was interesting stuff. But you have to try to think about this consciously in order to be aware of it and in order to counteract that. So here's a good example, another pet peeve of mine. People sometimes ask me if something I'm designing is easy enough for my mother to understand. It really annoys me because my mother was a computer programmer programming mainframes in the 70s and yes she can figure out your smartphone app and if she can't the problem is not her. Yeah, I'm not normally a big Dilbert fan but this one, this slide, this cartoon I think sums it up well. So yeah, the boss is asking if the interface is easy enough for Dilbert's mom to understand. Dilbert says yeah, my mom taught herself Ruby on Rails in the weekend. The boss says can you imagine someone else's mother and Dilbert says can I imagine a sexist imbecile. Which is a pretty good answer. That's mostly what I said to those people who asked me that question. Yeah, as I said before, put your slides online, link to them from the session's description. They'll always be a field or a comment or something in there. It's a simple thing to do but I feel like less than half the people I see at Drupal conferences don't do it. In Google Slides you can put an alt text just like on your websites. You can put an alt text for videos and for images so do that. Twitter, if you promote on Twitter, you can enable an option to write a description of any image you paste. It does not count towards your character count. It's just a separate new field that's only accessible to blind people and people using screen readers. So use that. You can turn on captioning in Google Slides if that's the presentation tool you're using and you don't find it too distracting. And in YouTube you can add subtitles to your talk. Probably the talk is being posted by someone else like the conference organizer, but you can ask them to enable what's called community contributions. That means that anybody in the world can suggest subtitles on your YouTube video but you still need to review them and approve them. It's not, so don't worry about spam. I asked the organizer at this conference to do that. I haven't heard back yet but hopefully that happens.  You need to, I was talking about the importance of practicing. So after you think your slides are good, go find an empty room, book a meeting room in your office or whatever you need to do and do your whole presentation. Just check the timing. Check how, because you'll be speaking out loud that's different than writing something that people will consume just by reading it. So make sure it makes sense, then the flow from one slide to the other makes sense when you do it out loud. And if you have time, ask a couple of colleagues to sit there and listen. But do it alone in a room first and don't subject them to that. Then afterwards, if someone's got time, you need to do a dress rehearsal, especially if you're new at speaking, that will help your presentation and it will help your confidence as well. I'm sure you'll make mistakes when you're presenting. Everyone does when they're getting up and performing in front of people to some degree. But just like in music, if you just keep going, people, it'll be fine. And most people won't notice and they definitely won't judge you for it. If you've got a bunch of members and you can throw them in a graph, like improvements in performance time or something, if it makes sense to put it in a graph, put it in a graph. Yeah, try to ask the audience questions. Definitely ask who is already familiar with what you're talking about so that you can adjust your level of explanation.  To help you remember, you can make a slide that just has a question.  You're not doing a recording a video that people are just gonna watch at home so take advantage of that. Or if everyone's kind of looking confused, stop and ask if there's something you need to explain.  So this tangent is about why representation at conferences and otherwise in IT, why I think it's important, which is why I chose to give a talk about this as opposed to some technical concept which I'm more used to doing. Thank you for coming to this talk even though I've never talked about doing presentations before. I appreciate the vote of confidence. Yeah, so why I did this? So we're all building websites for somebody. Who here is building websites for which the target audience is 80% men? Okay, what about 94% men? Anybody? Right, that's what I thought. So here's who contributes code to Drupal.org. The last, most recent numbers I could find from 2017 was about 6% women making code contributions. I know there are many other ways to contribute to the Drupal community besides code, like viewing things, organizing presentations, writing documentation, but this is one stat I have. DrupalCon North America. Most recent numbers I could find both attendees and speakers were somewhere around 20%. So 6% is even lower than IT in general in North America, but open source tends to be lower than IT in general. Probably for a few different reasons. So these are the people who are building websites. But we want everyone to be able to look at the websites. So there's something here that doesn't make sense. Here's something that doesn't make sense. So here's this title at the top says Uniting Efforts for Breastfeeding. Can anyone think of someone else that these men could have invited to this talk who would have had some experience maybe or some expertise in breastfeeding? Yeah, don't do this. So the websites we're building might not be quite as bad as this, but it's still pretty bad. Now I'm gonna show you an example from tech. I'm gonna show you a piece of technology which I suspect was built by an all white engineering team and see if you can guess why. So maybe some of you have seen this. Let's see. So here's somebody getting soap from a hand dispenser. And then here's his buddy trying to use the same one, but the sensor doesn't trigger. Yeah, I'm told this is surprisingly common. Obviously I haven't had this problem. This is a Facebook engineer based in Nigeria. Yeah, but he's got a hack. He's an engineer, so he knows how to work around this.  And that's how he gets his soap out. Yeah, so can you guess the demographics of the team who built this little sensor in the hand dispenser? Yeah, don't do that, yeah. Yeah, so that's where we're at. That's, as most of you probably know, that's where we're at in IT these days. But, better, an interesting example is the word camp in Vancouver. So in 2013, somebody noticed that the percentage of women speaking at their event was typical of IT, but they decided to do something about that. Since 2014, they've had over 50% women speakers, and now they go around and they do presentations about this and they explain to other conferences how to improve representation at their conferences. So yes, something can be done about this. Because whatever the problem going on here is, it's not because, obviously, the problem is not that women are somehow unable to do programming. And if you ever meet someone who thinks that, here's a graph, so all these lines going up. So here, we have rates of participation in people studying medicine, law, physical sciences, and IT, computer science over the years in North America. So they all start low from five to 15% in 1965. Everything's going way up, and then somewhere in the early 80s, all the women stop signing up for IT programs, but the rates for all these other fields keeps going up. So what happened there? I don't know, but there's obviously nothing genetic if you ever meet somebody who still, for some reason, believes that. As another example, in India today, in undergraduate and graduate programs in computer science, more than half of the students are women. So it's something cultural. And how can we do something about that? One way is by role models, and one way to be a role model is by speaking at a conference, and now you know at least a little bit about how to speak at a conference, so I hope you do. Finally, I just have some references. Most of the talk, the part of how to give a presentation, I borrowed Stoll, whatever, from Jen Kramer, but here's a link to how she explained it, so thanks to her. The Linux Foundation has a free training on how to choose inclusive examples when you're presenting, and they talk more about implicit bias, if that's interesting to you. The Drupal Diversity and Inclusion Working Group is a bunch of volunteers who, among other things, have a resource library and a very active Slack channel about this general topic. And the Drupal North website has some interesting links on how to prepare your presentation as well, which could be useful to check out. And with that, I'll turn it over to you questions. Do you guys have a contact need, or does anyone have any questions now? And answer everything. I have a comment. Yes, please. One thing that I've, my only experience has been giving lunch and lunch at a large company, and I've done a lot of those, and my peers really like that, so I'm hoping to expand. One of those, my pet peeves is, in company meetings, the speakers rarely explain what the acronym is that they just dropped, or it's a piece of business speak. I think you need to presume that your audience does not know what the beta means in the financial world. I certainly didn't, and I was just annoyed for the rest of the meeting because they just assumed that I knew what this financial term was. Yeah, don't, yeah, so don't use, so something not to do is to drop a bunch of acronyms or lingo that maybe people in the room don't understand, but they probably understand the concept. Just not the, if you take five seconds to explain it, they understand the concept. Oh, sure. But not the lingo, yeah. And it's perfectly fine to keep using it, but just adding a positive to that word. Yeah, if you don't know for sure that everyone in the room knows the lingo, then stop and explain it or spell out the acronym. Yeah, when they started at McGill a couple of years ago, there's a ton of acronyms, which I'm guessing is common in large organizations, and sometimes I'd ask people what the acronym was and nobody could remember what the acronym stood for. They all just know these three letters means this thing. It was really funny, but yeah, but people would assume I knew the acronym because everyone else who's been working there for 10 years knew, so I'd have to stop and ask, yeah. So at least make time to stop and ask. So thanks for the comment.  So how do you choose, like, the topic you want to speak? If you don't find the topic interesting, then neither will your audience. So I've personally always just chosen something I've learned, type of something I've learned recently that I'm really excited about, that I've done some reading on the side of it, or sometimes it's like I did a talk yesterday with my colleague, which is a case study with McGill, and I gave that because my colleague and I thought of that because we've noticed that case study presentations are pretty popular at conferences. There's people who find them useful. So some combination of those two, like what do you, if you see there's talks about this type of thing, but that one thing, but this type of technology, but one example of it which you know well nobody's talking about, that would be an example, but something, it has to be something that you find interesting and that you've got at least some amount of passion or excitement for it, or otherwise, like your audience will be able to tell, I promise. Yes, is that a good answer? Other questions? Comments? Yeah, I have a question there. You wanted to say that you were just your explanation according to the knowledge of the audience. Yeah. Would you also be just content, I'd say you could put no detail here and then you ought to add something. Adjust the content? Yeah, well, while you're speaking, you probably can't adjust your slides, but I've, yeah, like sometimes, you might prepare a couple slides on something that explain it, but if everyone in the room already knows it, then you'll just skip those slides or go back to it. I often see presenters go back to a previous slide. If you're asking a question that was, if you describe something briefly on one slide and then five slides later, they ask a question and you see they didn't fully understand that because it's a new idea to them. You can skip back to it, so they have a visual example. So you can do things like that, or yeah, if you've got time, especially at the end of your talk, you could bring up a website that shows an example or go find that blog post, but mostly by how much time you spend on different slides or whether or not you skip them could be the main way I would personally do it. Yeah, any other comments? Questions? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if we're going to move about this, but with PowerPoint, if you hit the D key, the screen goes black. Okay. So you want to focus intentionally on yourself speaking, whether or not the screen is there. Oh, okay, that's a good tip. So you said that hit the letter B and PowerPoint and the screen goes black. So then they look at you. Yeah, another tip I've seen is have a slide that's just completely blank. And then as soon as you put that slide up, everyone's heads are going to turn to you if you want them to listen to what you're saying. Another colleague mentioned a technique. He said he's heard of being used in Japan where every slide only has one word. So then people, it's just a little, to drop your memory about what you're going to speak about, but then people aren't spending time reading because they'll read with one word and then they'll look at you. So yeah, we're on the slide with just a picture, which is why I put some of those in. But yeah, I think that's a good tip. I didn't know that keyword. Are there comments? I think pauses could be very useful, too, to help delineate main sections of the presentation. Pausing between sections? Yeah, I tend to just speak really, really quickly and barely take time for a breath. But yeah, give people time to stop and, like, especially if you ask a question, give people time to stop and think about it. That's a good point. Make it digestible. Other comments?  At least a few hands. Great, most of you even. Well, I'm flattered. I also offered in this session description to go and look at your slide deck and give feedback. I don't think we've got time to go do that for everybody now, but if that's something you're interested in, and you can find me in the hallway or contact me in my email or something, I am definitely willing to take a few minutes and give you some feedback. If you haven't done this before, and that would be helpful for you. Yeah, and again, here's how to contact me. I think that's it.  Thank you. Great. Thank you. Thank you.


So I'm here today, visiting Camp Grayling, watching the participants in Northern Strike from the active duty, the Army Reserve, the Army National Guard, the Marines, the Navy, the Air Force, all participating in a multi-domain, multi-service interaction, all training for how they would defend our country in the event of a pretty bad day. In my opinion, having civilian counterparts come in and train with us and support this exercise represents what could possibly be a real-world scenario defending our homeland. So having industry and having academia and having scientific partners showing us what they're working on and also being able to try things out here in a soldier environment has benefits second to none and this is why coming together here has tremendous opportunity and should be further utilized in the future.


This is an inexpensive lens from TT Artisan, this is a medium-priced refractor telescope from William Optics, and this is an ultra-premium lens from Canon. All of these can be used for Deep Sky Astrophotography, but what's really the difference? That's what we're going to find out tonight. I'll be pointing all three of these at the flaming star nebula in the constellation Araiga in a single night shootout and sharing all my thoughts with you on what I find. Hey, my name's Nico Carver, and I'm a Deep Sky Astrophotographer. This video was the result of a question that I often get, which is, why get a small refractor telescope for astrophotography when there are so many telephoto lens choices in the same focal length range of around 200 to 500 millimeters? And it's a good question, and with this video, I'm going to try to answer that as best I can using these real-world examples here. So to give a bit of a spoiler, it's not just about the final image or image quality. There are a lot of practical reasons in terms of focusing, compatibility with other astro gear like mounts, and other astro accessories like filters that make the small refractor desirable if you're really getting serious about astrophotography, especially Deep Sky Astrophotography. But camera lenses have their place too, and they offer a lot of versatility if you're not all in on astro. And they come in all kinds of different price points. So I thought it would be interesting for this video with the two lenses to compare a lens on the low end of price, the TT Artisan 500 f6.3, with a lens on the high end, which is this Canon 100 to 300 RF 2.8. Before I jump into the review, let me share a couple quick disclosures. This TT Artisan 500 f6.3 was sent to me by TT Artisan for review. Same thing with the William Optics Spacecat 61. William Optics sent this to me for review. The Canon 100 to 300 f2.8 RF lens I rented from lensrentals.com, and that was done with proceeds from my Patreon campaign. And then finally, the Skywatcher GTI mount that I used for testing these is on loan from Skywatcher USA. So thank you to all these companies for the opportunity to review their products here on the channel. I really appreciate it and allows me to make cool videos like this. So the first thing I want to talk about is what goes into an astrophotography kit that's going to work with optics like these. 300 millimeters focal length, you know, in the case of these two, and 500 millimeter focal length in the case of the TT Artisan, is a long enough focal length in all of these cases that for deep skywork, meaning taking pictures of nebulae galaxies, you're going to want a tracking mount. You don't want to do this untracked. And you're probably also actually going to want an auto guiding system with lower focal lengths like 135 millimeter. You could just use the tracking mount or maybe even go untracked. But for 300 millimeter and up, I would suggest the tracking mount and an auto guider. And what is auto guiding? It's this thing right here. It's this tiny little telescope, a separate telescope from your main one, and also a separate camera that goes with the tiny telescope. And what this does is it makes the tracking mount more accurate by looking at the stars and doing a fast refresh. Like every second it's taking a new picture. And if those stars move out of place, it sends a small correction to the tracking mount. So the auto guider and the tracking mount work together to allow you to take long exposures several minutes long without star trailing. You get those pinpoint stars and that's what's really needed in astrophotography to reveal these dim objects in deep space like the flaming star nebula that we're going to be looking at tonight. Telescopes and telescope mounts like this Skywatcher Star Adventure GTI or these ZW harmonic drive mounts use different dovetails than is standard with regular photography. What I mean by dovetail, it's like the mounting plate, like an Arca Swiss plate in regular photography. The version of that in astrophotography would be a Los Mandi plate, which is a wider plate, or a Vixen plate like I'm using here. And these Vixen plates are dovetail plates are called that because they were popularized by a Japanese telescope manufacturer called Vixen. Still around makes mounts and telescopes, but mostly for the Japanese market. So step one, to even get the lenses onto the tracking mount is we need to buy a universal Vixen dovetail plate and some specialty machine screws called quarter inch cap head hex screws in the right length to attach the lens foot here to the dovetail. And we have to do all of this just to get it attached to the mount, but we still haven't figured out how to mount the guide scope. So my solution to mounting the guide scope with a camera lens is I get an extra long Vixen dovetail. The dovetail has to again be long enough that I can under sling the guide scope and camera in front of the mount like this. So again, with a refractor, all of this stuff is already thought out for you. I should say an imaging refractor like this space cat 61, I can just take this out of the package, put a few pieces together, attach the whole thing to my mount, and it's all ready to go. With any camera lens, you're going to have to do a fair amount of ordering other parts and rigging them all up in order to use the lens as a deep sky astro lens. Now, once you get past that hurdle with a lens, let's say you want to use a filter like a duo narrow band filter. Those are very popular today because they block a lot of light pollution and they let through a mission nebulae.  Really neat.  So if you're a Sony or Nikon shooter, you may find there's very little available for your particular camera with the refractor. Again, any kind of astronomical filter is open to you. Okay, the next big thing is focusing. And with the Spacecat Refractor, this is a really nice focusing system. It's an internal focus system that William Optics has patented, but then it has the traditional telescope focusing knob and the 10 to 1 reduction knob for fine focus control. The Spacecat also comes with a really cool clear Bodnov mask built right into the lens cap. This is an excellent tool for nailing focus manually by using a diffraction pattern that this mask creates with bright stars. And if you want to automate your focus with an electronic third-party focuser, with a lens, you need to find a belt and a sort of probably a 3D printed part that will work for that. And it may not really be worth it because once you add a belt, you can't rotate the lens easily. Well, with the refractor, it's very easy to add a third-party electronic focuser. And then rotation for framing purposes is never an issue here because it's here in the back behind the focuser. And this manual rotator is great. It even has the markings, so you can know exactly how far you're rotating. So I've gone through many of the advantages of the telescope for astrophotography purposes, but what about the advantages of the lenses? These ones, the TT Artisan and the William Optics, are very hard to change focus quickly for fast-moving subjects. So a big part of what you're paying for with the Canon is excellent optics, like top of the line optics, but optics that can also auto-focus very fast and reliably across a zoom range. And this brings us to another point, which is focal length. The Spacecat 61 telescope has a fixed focal length of 300 millimeters at f4.9. And that's it. There are no other options. It's just that. But it does that incredibly well. That's what it's designed to do. The TT Artisan is a fixed focal length 2 of 500 millimeter focal length at f6.3 as the maximum aperture, but you can stop down that aperture with an internal iris to a minimum aperture of f32. That kind of very small aperture is not needed for astrophotography, but it does give it more versatility for daytime shooting compared to the refractor, which has no internal iris. The Canon has a zoom range of 100 to 300 millimeters, and it can do a maximum aperture of f2.8 across that whole range and a minimum aperture of f22. So for regular daytime shooting, that kind of versatility is what you're really paying for, to be able to shoot at various focal lengths in any kind of lighting condition, bright sun, nighttime, dusk, whenever it doesn't matter. And with image stabilization in the lens means it's ready for anything. This is a Swiss Army knife of lenses in terms of the situations you could put it in. The TT Artisan is less versatile. You'd probably only use it on a tripod because there's no image stabilization. It only has manual focus, but you can stop it down. So if it's a bright day, you need to stop it down. You can. The refractor is the least versatile for daytime, but that's of course intentional because every design choice with this telescope was made with astrophotography in mind. It's not even designed for visual astronomy. This is an astrophotography telescope, an astrograph they sometimes call it. And I should also mention the Spacecat definitely has my favorite branding of the bunch, at least the most fun branding. I mean, look at the front lens cap there. And it even came with a Spacecat toy with a moving tail that my kittens were really entertained by. The last thing to talk about here is the actual glass inside these instruments. The quality and configuration of the glass inside is important for controlling imperfections that will pop up in your image. And a big one to pay attention to, a big imperfection that's important for astrophotography is chromatic aberration. Because when chromatic aberration is well controlled due to high quality glass, the stars are going to be all their true color with no color fringing around the bright stars. When chromatic aberration isn't as well controlled, the stars will have magenta violet or even multicolored fringing around them. And that can be very distracting to the final, you know, impression of the image if there's a lot of really bright violet halos. The TT Artisan uses eight glass elements and two extra low dispersion glass elements. We don't know what type those are. They don't state. The William Optics uses four glass elements in a Petzful configuration, and at least one is extra low dispersion of the FPL 53 synthetic fluorite variety. And FPL 53 is considered one of the best, if not the best and most expensive when it comes to ED glass. The Canon uses 23 glass elements for a claim to be ultra low dispersion, although they don't specify the glass type. One element is a fluorite crystal lens, and they're using actual fluorite. That's going to be the most difficult to manufacture the most expensive and the rarest way to control chromatic aberration. And I believe Canon is the only big company who actually makes fluorite lenses. So even if you get one in a high-end telescope like a Takahashi, that fluorite lens element was probably sourced from Canon. I'm interested in all this stuff, like glass types and all that, but I'm by no means an expert in it. For me, the proof is in the pudding. And that's why with these shootout reviews, I always get out under the stars and take pictures with each setup, trying to keep the all other factors as similar as possible, like same mount, same camera, to really give you an idea of what to expect from these different optics. So let's jump on to the computer and review all the images taken. Okay, here are the tech details for this shootout. I won't read through these. You can pause the video and take a look if interested, but basically all the gear is the same. I shoot these all in the same night with the object tying the sky, trying to equalize things as much as possible. I also changed the total exposure time for the stacks based on the focal ratio. So I can try to sort of equalize the signal to noise ratio in the stacks. We're going to first look at some single exposures with just an auto stretch, nothing done to them. And really what I'm trying to show here is the field coverage. And so you can see with actually all three of these, the field coverage is excellent. And that's something I've actually noticed with full frame lenses is usually there's not too much vignetting with a telephoto lens. And that's true of the TT artisan here and the Canon here. So we're not seeing much shadowing of the corners, which is good. Now with telescopes, it's actually rarer to not have some vignetting in the corners, but the space cat 61 did a really nice job here with field elimination and I don't really see any vignetting. Okay, next we're going to look at the corners and the center of each one, just from a single exposure. So here's the Canon. You can see that it's quite sharp in the center. And then we have some distortion in the corners. It looks like this side is a little bit worse than this side. I think that means there's some kind of tilt going on, perhaps, probably with how the camera is connecting to the lens. I'm not really, that's usually where the issue is. It's a little bit better here with the space cat. If you look at the worst corner on the Canon, it's right, it's this one right here, and it looks pretty out of focus, pretty blurry. While we're getting a little bit better correction or actually quite a bit better with the space cat. Again, probably the worst corner is up here. So maybe that suggests that my Canon RA has a little bit of a sensor tilt issue. But if we look at the other corners and the sides here, they're just a lot cleaner, a little, a lot, you know, quite a bit less distorted here with the space cat compared to the Canon zoom lens. Now the TT Artisan actually surprised me because while, yes, we can see the classic chromatic aberration violet halos, which I expected with a $300 lens, in terms of distortion, it's really not that bad. I mean, this is pretty impressive for a $300 lens. Now you're seeing fewer stars, but I want to explain that that's not because it's less sensitive. That's because we are more zoomed in with this lens where we're changing the sampling of the stars. Because this is at 500 millimeters and this one is at three, these two are at 300 millimeters. But I think it's still okay to compare things at different focal lengths as long as you're aware of what you're looking at. Now let's move on to the stacks. I tried to keep the processing very minimal and similar with each of these stacks. Here's the Canon. I got the rotation quite a bit better with the space cat because the rotation is so much easier when you have that little rotation in the back than it is when the lens is, you had the only way to rotate is with the ring and it's a little annoying, so I didn't try too hard. Since I was doing all this testing fairly quickly, of course. Okay, and then here's the TT Artisan. And you can see again, yeah, it's more zoomed in than these two. These are both at 300 millimeter. This one is at 500 millimeter. And you can see with these, there's a little bit of a color difference. I'd say that the Canon feels a little bluer. The space cat feels very neutral to me and the TT Artisan looks a little bit yellow or greener. And so I'm thinking this is just down to the glass types. All of this kind of stuff, though, can be normalized, you know, changed with color correction, especially if you have a program like Cyril or Pix Insight, you can use a photometric color calibration. I didn't do that here because I think the differences are sort of interesting to see. And then this is the last comparison. And this one I find very interesting because they are so similar. In terms of detail and what I'm seeing here among these three, it's like really close with the Flaming Star Nebula. Now remember, this one, the TT Artisan is at 500 millimeters. Well, these ones are at 300 millimeters. So it's not as sharp as these two lenses because we're looking at something that's much more zoomed in. And these ones are basically matching it, but at a lower focal length. However, though, for a lot of deep sky objects, who cares, right? You're wanting that zoom anyways. So it's like, why not go for the cheaper lens? Well, why not? There are reasons, of course. Many of them I've already addressed in sort of the advantages with the telescope. If you're in a light polluted area and you want to use a filter, boom, right away, you're running into an issue with the lenses while with the telescope, it already has that place to put in the filter. There's all kinds, and then the place for the guide scope, place to connect to the mount, there's all kinds of reasons why the telescope for practicality beats this $300 lens. But in terms of optical performance, there's not a huge difference here.  Of course, with a lens that's $300, you're going to see some of this violet fringing on the stars. And the longer the integration, actually, the more time you put into it, the worse that gets. So that's sort of an annoyance. And once you get really experienced with astrophotography, these violet halos really might start to bug you. But if you're a beginner, I don't see any reason why you might not start with something like the TT Artisan before upgrading maybe later on to something like this refractor, which is going to, again, not maybe blow you away with how much better the image is. But when you really look at those details, like the stars here, like if I look at this star right here, even zoomed out, I can see this has a really nice natural blue halo in this image. And in this one, it's sort of muted. I don't really see much color. And the Canon, I should say, I haven't been talking about as much, but it did very well too. And it should for a $10,000 lens. But I guess the Canon, I just am including here in case I have any watchers who are already into like sports and wildlife and have something like this, and they're like, well, could I use that for astrophotography? And of course the answer is a resounding yes. It's a very impressive lens for astrophotography as well as those other things. So to sum up, I would say the Canon is your all-rounder. If you have this lens, you can use it for astrophotography, but you can also use it for any kinds of other things. The Spacecat is going to be the one you want if you're a dedicated astrophotographer for all the practical reasons, but also because it actually will give you the best results if you really care about things like the star profiles in the corners of a full-frame sensor, which if you're doing something like mosaics or something, that can actually be pretty important. And then the TT Artisan here is the Value Champ, of course. It's giving excellent results considering how inexpensive the lens is. Okay. And then the last thing I want to show you here is, as I was putting this video together and talking to William Optics, they let me know that they want to offer a special discount code for viewers of this channel. So if you're interested in getting a Spacecat 61 after seeing this review of it, you can head over to williamoptics.com, order it, and use the code Nebula Photos at checkout for $50 off that telescope. And so again, that's Nebula Photos at checkout. And I'll have links for all three of these products in the description. So thank you very much for watching. Hope you learned something here. And until next time, Clear Skies!


So we're here at Sony and check this out. This is Sony OLED. So who are you? So my name is Viet and what we have here is the A1e. This is our OLED display panel. It's being has over 8 million self-illuminating pixels and it's being controlled by our X1 Extreme Processor. Now what's important to understand about the picture quality that you're seeing on this display here is not due just to the panel itself. It's actually because of Sony's exceptional video The X1 Extreme. Exactly. Is it the same that's on other 4K TVs or is it a new one? It is similar. It's the same processor that's built into our Z9D. These are the only two models that has this processor built in. So basically Sony, is it Sony the best at this kind of processor in the whole market? There is no processor on the market like this. We are the only company that has a processor that has been capable of this type of processor. So is Samsung and LG a little bit sad? Well I can't comment on what they have but I can tell you that we have the absolute best processor out there. So I'm gonna just try to go a little bit close. So OLED. That means this is a whole new factory. You can't make OLED at the LCD factory. Yeah so this is a whole new factory. Now we don't disclose where the panels come from but what I can tell you is the A1e is being powered and controlled by our X1 Extreme Processor. So with that being said, the X1 Extreme has 40% more real-time processing than the current X1s that you see out of the market today. Now how this benefits you is when you're watching a movie, it doesn't matter where the source is coming from, it could be streamed if it could be from your broadcast sensation or it could be from your physical media. And it will take that SDR signal and upscale to near 4k HDR like qualities without any issues at all. And this is all done real-time. X1 Extreme. That's an ARM processor I guess. It has to be an ARM processor. This is Sony's processor so we actually built this processor from the ground up. Is it in partnership with MediaTek? Or you cannot say? No I cannot disclose that type of information. So it has a 40% faster than the first X1. Correct. So X1 Extreme. Yes. And here we have the 77 inch OLED ultra-fine. It's crazy. Now along with the great picture, what else do you need? You want to make sure that you have great audio right? So if you notice this year we actually came up with a speakerless design and the reason why we did that is we actually used a new technology called a Q-Sync Surface. And what the Q-Sync Surface does is actually vibrates the 77 inch glass display turning the whole screen itself into the speaker. So you know how like when you're watching a conventional TV and there's speakers on the side or in the back? Usually when that happens, the actor sounds like he's talking away from you, right? Now with the Q-Sync Surface, let's say you're watching a movie and there's a person standing right here and one standing right there. You can actually tell that the voices are coming out over this way or coming out from this side. So it's a really cool technology that we have this year and to round off everything. If you look at the back panel right there, that actually serves multiple functions. Now not only is it a stand, but when you pull off the grill, it'll actually expose the built-in subwoofer. Now without being said, you'll also see the Vesemont holes where you can actually put your bracket. So you can actually wall mount this on the wall. How's the sound quality compared to normal speakers? Oh, the sound quality is just awesome. I mean it sounds great. Really, I mean you're talking about a 77 inch display that becomes a speaker itself. But it sounds crazy, but is there any way to know that it's not a downgrade compared to traditional speaker technology? Well, this way here we have you know done a lot of research and with the Q-Sync Surface technology, this is the first time it's ever been used in this type of application. This patent pending technology, so you're going to see there's training all of our OLEDs. Okay, so is it affordable? We don't have a price point on this yet. As we get closer to release date, I'm sure we'll have more information available for you. So any number that I throw out right now wouldn't be exactly accurate. It's not a printed OLED display, no? Excuse me? It's not printed, it's not low-cost. There's no way to do this. Well, I can tell you it would be very competitively priced. So competitive with LG, I guess. Because that's quite expensive and this is a huge one. 77 inch OLEDs, 77 and 65 and depending on your region you may get other sizes also. It would be fantastic if there was some way that Sony would figure out a way to make this and sell it for like a thousand dollars and don't worry about it. Exactly. I mean as we get more and more into developing this technology and things like that, I'm sure cost will eventually go down as, you know, most electronics. But as of right now we don't have, you know, a price point on this yet. As we get closer to that date, we won't know. 77 is huge, but 65 is pretty good. And then we have 65 right here. 65, okay, let's say 1,000 for 65 and then 2,000 for 77. But it's probably going to be a bunch more. It looks crazy.


I'm really heartened by how we're collectively getting after it and getting the job done. You know, it's really seeing us at our best pulling together. The mission comes first, but it starts and stops with people. We need them to take care of themselves physically, spiritually, mentally, so they're ready to do the mission when they're called upon. Across the board, our airmen are stepping up the challenge, supporting each other, getting the job done, and I'm proud to be a part of this team.