There are rules of good behavior that apply to dealing with police officers. The first is that their job comes with special authorities and special responsibilities. These are balanced in law with some tipping in favor of police authorities. They act as law officers. The natural police function includes maintaining the peace and scene to domestic tranquility. These derive from the common law of England. Their US authorities and responsibilities are further influenced by the sovereign rights of citizens. These rights are recognized even without government, otherwise accepting significant citizens sovereignty over government. Appropriate authorities and responsibilities are written into the purpose for our having a government, as found in the preamble to our Constitution. Like much of the common law, police authority had to be reborn after the American Revolution. Police authority and responsibility have been largely codified in written legislation. Our courts have accepted legislation to be of greater authority than the principles of the common law. Still, these authorities and privileges are based on delivering justice and maintaining domestic tranquility. There is a natural reason to support the police so long as they are about the business that we the people set upon our Republican form of government. The most definitive authority is fulfillment of warrants. A warrant provides the authority to act on behalf of we the people as represented by a judge and based on evidence and an oath or affirmation of someone generally noted in the warrant. A warrant gives the one who serves it police powers to do what is in the warrant and authorizes nothing beyond this. The first intelligent step in being presented with a warrant is to receive and read it carefully. A police officer cannot act on a warrant with special authority until other people affected have had opportunity to receive that warrant. A citizen who has seized or constrained or whose property is to be searched and or taken has to have opportunity to read or to hear the authorized actions. Police authority under a warrant is specifically limited by what is written into the warrant. If authority is not specifically passed to the officer, he or she acts only on normally available authority. Take the time to read the document or if you are providing support to a family member you can read it to them. This is a sovereign right and only as you receive it without choosing to read it are they initially free to violate your person or property. If a warrant says the officer may enter a home and search for something specific, then they may do so. It does not grant authority to look for other things. It does not grant authority to break locks or to do other damage unless this is specifically written into the warrant. It does not grant the entrance of general police authority into a private dwelling that is searched. Warrants are strictly observed as to the authority they grant to the one who serves it. Violations of warrant are not to be acted upon through inappropriate resistance. They are always a judge's order to the officer and most judges will be supportive of citizen complaints of overzealous use of the judge's granted authority. If the police damage property or do injury in violating the limits of their granted authority a judge can direct that the officer be prosecuted for crimes or take personal responsibility for the losses or damages. While there is no way for a citizen to force a judge to act in support of his or her warrant's limit the overzealous police officer is disrespecting judicial authority with witness to the act. It is up to the judge whether this insult is to be answered immediately or to be taken up privately with the police authorities or to be ignored. Other police authority is natural and is granted in full light of the danger of dealing with the worst of humanity. Police must assume that they work in a hostile environment. They have a special right to protect and defend themselves as long as they see to the peace and as they perform legal functions in defense of domestic tranquility. It is because of police pressure and authorities to act that we can walk among others in public places without general fear of being victimized by criminal conduct. The citizen rule is that you do not interfere with police as they perform their common duties and most certainly you never publicly confront them in a hostile manner. If you have a problem with a police officer you seek opportunity to present it to a judge and then it is the judge who has authority to restrain or otherwise redirect the officer of the law. If you engage in rioting or public hostility you are the one who is disturbing the peace and threatening the public tranquility of others. Citizens should not allow themselves to become part of the problem that the police are authorized to resolve. It is never wise to resist an officer who has reason to believe that he has engaged in his policing duties. Complaints should not be raised to the officer personally but may be noted as a reason for the citizen to witness his actions to a court of proper jurisdiction. The trained officer knows that this is a citizen's authorized action and will not normally act in threat or harm to one who seems willing to take it to higher authority. The one exception is the police officer who appears to be engaged in a felony. There is a citizen right to interfere whether alone or en masse to prevent serious crimes. The trained officer will know enough to back away on pain of prosecution. If the crime is complete citizens can engage in a citizen arrest of the officer but they do not have the special police authority or responsibility behind their acts. This should be the exception and only undertaken where immediate action is demanded by the specific situation. Officers are otherwise authorized to direct the public and individuals as necessary to maintain the peace and to secure domestic tranquility for the larger public. And much of this is regulated by laws and codes that are not common knowledge. Police can prevent gatherings that are likely to be disruptive or lead to violence or criminal activities. They can direct citizens to take personal actions so long as these are not criminal. They can stop and challenge persons who fit the description of known criminals or who act in a manner that indicates that they may have engaged in known crimes. An officer who witnesses a crime in progress or being completed has immediate authority to take charge of the situation and act to restrain any criminal suspect. It is most unwise for any common citizen to interfere and any citizen challenge can easily be treated as interference with an officer of the law performing his duties or as an obstruction of justice or even as supporting the criminal act. The interference can even be approached as aiding and abetting the criminal with yourself subject to prosecution as if you took part in the crime. The general rule is to let the public officer do his job and even support his or her action as you are able. Otherwise, do your best to keep out of the way protecting yourself and others who might become victims of the situation. There may be some regulations such as on reckless pursuit of a fleeing felon but these are internal to the police and the way they govern their own behavior. Do not grant any special authority or responsibility to the citizen who is in the vicinity of police activities. There is nonsense being presented as social justice. That police are not to preferentially stop people who are of one race more than another or who wear traditional dress of some ethnic or religious origin. This is nonsense because profiling suspected criminals is a police function. Where the description of a criminal suspect includes race or demonstrated tradition these are what need to be included in their profiling and they are expected to preferentially challenge those who meet that description. If the suspect was wearing a beard they stop bearded people. If he wore a red jacket they preferentially stop those wearing red jackets near the scene of the crime. If the crime occurs in a black neighborhood which is not frequented by those of other races then they preferentially stop black suspects. If they are trying to meet racial goals they would not be doing their function as police officers. Criminal law grants authority based on the crime not on the description of the suspect. Police officers are paid to be biased against criminals. There are certain crimes that are committed with much greater concentration among some peoples than others. Honor killings for example are within the Arabic culture and come within the definition of homicide in America where there is indication of a homicide being an honor killing. It is right to act most aggressively in searching those who have Arabic names or exhibit other sides of adherence to that culture. Being personally biased against any race or creed or appearance is not part of the police authority. Acting on that bias is a public offense. It is also a matter for supervisory police notice more than for public reaction. We hear much of criminal wrongs committed by police and there are potential criminals in all fields of endeavor. The responsibility for managing police officer behavior rests with the management of police organizations. It is the leadership that is responsible for fulfilling the police function through the officers who are hired for that very purpose. If any police officer engages in crime it is also a police manager who has failed in his or her management of subordinate officers. Most criminal behavior by officers can be addressed by holding police supervisors personally liable right along with their guilty subordinates. Both are potentially responsible for results from police actions performed under color of police authority. Gaining performance through their employees is the very purpose for granting a police leader supervisory authority with authority comes responsibility. If police supervisors do not do their supervisory duties then it is right to also recognize that they are supervised by higher level officers and that they are also lacking in supervision. It is up to higher levels of management to challenge subordinate police supervisors who have responsibility for subordinates who misuse their authority. This aligns the larger police authority with the purpose of the public. It is basic management. It is recognition that the authority should never be granted without responsibility for exercise of that authority. With this, we also have to address the larger police powers granted to non-police groups. Leadership largely incompetent in performing management has not been good in containing police authority nor taking responsibility for what administration and leadership has put in motion. That is a reality of law and government in modern America. It is that the legal community is largely unwilling to challenge or reprimand officers of the law for their fear that they might themselves be seen as contributing to the wrong through failure in their duties. It is, of course, their failure and exercise of management authorities that has contributed to the misconduct of officers. There is a recognizable amount of us and them attitude in the exercise of police authority and it has given effect in supervisory management. Instead of a police management that gains something through the efforts of police officers, we often find a police administration that simply directs what it feels is appropriate for those who hold authority granted to officers. In this current orientation, police leadership has nothing to gain from change. Change is unlikely unless citizens come together and direct their government's police authority to their purposes. That is a proper direction for citizen self-governance.


One of the most frustrating things when you're just starting out in DSLR astrophotography is not being able to find the galaxy or nebula you want to shoot. Or even worse, thinking you found it, only to stack your images the next day and realizing you weren't actually pointed at it. In this video, we're going to look at the very best tried and true methods for finding deep sky objects, and then I'll show you a crucial final step that will allow us to confirm we're pointed in the right spot, even when the object is completely obscured by heavy light pollution. Hello, I'm Nico, and this channel is all about helping people learn the amazing hobby of amateur astrophotography. My website is nebulaphotos.com, and if you like what you see, consider joining us over on Patreon, which starts at just $1 per month. So the topic today is something that can be super frustrating, even for me who has been doing astrophotography for several years now, and that's the issue of actually finding and framing up a deep sky object like a galaxy or a nebula that you can't actually see sometimes until you process it on the computer. So how do we find something we can't see? Well, fresh photography through the star patterns, and you can think of star patterns as being sort of like landmarks when giving directions. Just like you could tell someone, when you see the blue house take a left, in the night sky we could say, when you see these three bright stars in a line, that's Orion's belt. So just follow those up this way until you see this triangle of stars, and then you're on your object. And there are two main ways to use the star patterns, and we're going to use them both tonight. The old school, but still very reliable way, is a process called star hopping, which is basically looking at a star atlas or a planetarium app that charts the stars and then looking at your camera in the night sky and finding out what direction you need to move to get closer and closer to your target until you're there. And the hopping part is we use bright stars to make a few hops from one bright star to the next until we're there, and that makes the whole thing a lot easier once you get used to it. And I want to say this is a crucial skill that I'd really encourage everyone to learn. I'm going to be demonstrating it of course in this video, but it's a skill that really rewards actual practice and patience under the night sky. The new school way, which also uses the star patterns, is actually to turn your photo over to some computer software called a plate solver that looks at the image and based on the patterns of the stars solves it, meaning it figures out exactly where in the sky you're pointed. And it will actually label the bright stars and you know galaxies and nebulae that appear in the photo. And so the ultimate solution I found is actually using both methods because we don't want to just be constantly plate solving, that takes a lot of time, so we're going to star hop until we get in the right general direction. And when we think we're pretty close, we'll use plate solving with a free website called astrometry.net to make sure we're really in the right spot. And if needed, we can fine tune from there. Before we jump outside, let me just give you a quick rundown of the kind of gear books, apps, all that kind of stuff that is most helpful for finding objects. And what I'll be using tonight for the demo is a Canon camera and lens on a Skywatch or Star Adventure. But this demo will work with just a fixed tripod, it'll work with different kinds of cameras, you don't need the tracker, so it's really just that's what I'm going to be using to show it. Next up, let's talk about finder devices. And the idea of a finder device is it makes it easier to get immediate feedback of where you're pointed in the night sky. And for star hopping, this is critical because it'll help you to get to that first bright star quickly. So one thing we have here, this is a green laser finder and so it just is a green laser, you can see. So this one is from Scope Stuff and it has the finder shoe attachment so I can easily put it on top of my DSLR just like that. And this is just one example of a finder device you can get. I do like the green laser, but check with your local laws on using them because in some places they're forbidden or illegal and also never use one near a major flight path or when you see an airplane in the sky because you don't want to blind a pilot. On the very inexpensive end, this is a little pricey, we have something else called a red dot finder. This works very similarly, instead of seeing the green light like that, you just see a little red dot in the middle here and you can sight your object easily. And then a little bit more expensive than a red dot finder and quite a bit bigger is a telerad, but this makes a full red target that's really easy to see on the night sky. So this would be more for like a telescope. No matter what kind of finder you use, it's important to make sure it's calibrated so that the finder and the camera lens are actually pointed in the same spot. And I always do this calibration at home with the green laser, you would just, you know, shine the green laser against a wall and then just make sure that it lines up on your camera's view screen right in the center of the live view. If you're using a red dot finder, same idea, you just adjust these little screws until it's all lined up with whatever you have centered on the camera's view screen. Okay, next thing we need is some kind of star chart or sky atlas and I always keep physical paperback star atlases, but mostly as a backup. The truth is I don't use these kinds as much these days because the phone apps just offer so many more features. On the high end I really like Sky Safari Pro. It often goes on sale, so I'd wait for a sale if you haven't purchased it yet, but it just has tons of cool features including letting me have a big database of my gear so I can put overlays which are a field of view to get an idea with different cameras and lenses and telescopes. And I mention this because it can be really useful also for star hopping because you can see exactly how star patterns will look on the screen on your camera's screen. If you do want to do this FOV indicator for free, Stellarium on the computer will do all this too, and I'm going to be doing a Stellarium video pretty soon I think, so I'll talk more about that. But the app I'll be using tonight is a free one. It's called Sky. I think it's Android only, but many apps will do what it does. It's basically just a sky map, and as I move the phone around it uses the phone's compass and gyroscope to figure out roughly where I'm pointed. Now unfortunately I have found this isn't super accurate, just sort of roughly accurate partly because I think any things that metallic or magnetic fields in the area will throw it off and so there are a few things that this app suggests doing to improve the accuracy. One is to wave your phone in a figure eight motion to calibrate the internal sensors in the phone, and the other is it suggests adding alignment points when you know you're centered on certain stars. And so you'll see me doing that in the demo. I'm not sure how much it really helps, but maybe it'll help a little bit. I should also mention in the demo you'll see that my phone is going to be attached in a phone holder thing like this attached to an L bracket right next to the camera. I don't actually recommend this setup. It makes it easier to film what I'm doing, but I think all this metal pieces is throwing off the magnetic compass. So a better way to make a sort of a side by side adapter like this would be purely out of wood and plastic. So I might do that, see if it helps, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. So other than telling us roughly where we're pointed, I can also search in the app for whatever deep sky object we're trying to find. This is where there are lots of differences in the different planetarium apps, both in how many objects they have in their database, and does it require a data connection for the search to work, because some will download the whole catalog, some won't. So I'd suggest evaluating this in different apps before heading out somewhere remote. Another reason I'm willing to pay for Sky Safari Pro is that it's still fully functional without a data connection, and it has a huge database of stars and deep sky objects. But back to the free eye sky, when we want to find something we can just click this little menu icon, click search, and then tonight I'll be demoing Messier 81. So in that case we just click the Messier tab, then search 81, and tap it. And now you may be wondering why not just start with that instead of star hopping. Well I found that that can work okay for really bright, easy to find objects like Andromeda or Orion or the Lagoon, which are sort of easy to find even without a phone, and I've made videos about using it in this basic way. But for harder to find stuff, star hopping will be more reliable, and we can use star hopping in conjunction with this app, and I'll show that in the demo. Okay I'm out on the field. I've just finished polar aligning the star adventurer, and see Polaris is centered on the camera here. I also centered it on the app and with my green laser. And now I'm going to go ahead and loosen up the RA clutch, and then the deck clutch, and get us pointed at our first star in our star hopping, which is going to be Doobie, which is part of the Big Dipper, pretty easy to find. I'm just going to do some fine alignment here with both axes until I get it sort of centered on the DSLR screen, and I'm just turning off and on my laser to do this to know where I'm pointed. Now instead of going to M81, which I could from here, I mean it's hopped to a different star in Ursa Major, because that will give me a feel for sort of how the directions with RA and deck work. So I'm going to go over here to this 23 Ursa Major, and I've gone ahead and found that. So now I'm going to go ahead and head to M81, and I'm just using my app to sort of give me an idea of the direction here. I'm actually going to overshoot a little bit, because I want to show you the fine tuning thing a little bit more. Okay, so I'm going to take a test exposure, just a one second test exposure, and do this at high ISO so I can really see the star as well. And then I'm going to go ahead and get that picture, that test exposure, onto my phone. And I'm going to first show doing this with the Canon Connect app, which is a little bit difficult. You have to put it on its own Wi-Fi network and then go through a couple steps here. It's not too bad. It's gotten a lot better over the years. I'm also going to show a way to do this without Wi-Fi camera connect, so don't worry. I'll show that at the end. So here we go. Here's all the pictures. I can take them in raw and still import them as a reduced JPEG, which is great. That's what I'm going to do here. And now that it's on my phone, I'm going to go ahead and open up, or first I'm going to turn off the Wi-Fi on my phone so that it's connecting back to mobile data. And then I'm going to open up Google Chrome and go to nova.astrometry.net slash upload and click on choose the file. I'll just find it on my phone here under files. It's the most recent file, this JPEG. And I'll upload it to this website. And this is the plate solver. So this is going to actually figure out exactly where I'm pointed right now. And it takes a couple minutes. I'm going to speed up this part of the video. But it'll sort of give you a little update as it goes. And when it's all done plate solving, it will say success, and then give you an option to go to the results. And so we'll go ahead and do that. And here's what we see. And I can see right from this little thing right here that we're not yet on m8192. So how do we know how to get there from here? Well, I'm going to show you one way to do it, which is I'm going to open up the view in Worldwide Telescope option. So over here on the right hand side, click on this link that says view in Worldwide Telescope. And it'll show you something like this, it'll zoom in at first. So just, you know, zoom back out by double finger sort of swipe. And I can see m8182 right there. And I can see there's my camera view screen. The bottom is right there with this pink line. And so I need to move the stars down about one full camera sensor's height to get to m8182. So I find this really useful because it gives me an idea of how the camera's sensor is oriented on the sky. And then I can know which direction I need to move the stars to get to my target. If you're close, that is, if you're further away, then you're going to have to go back to star hopping. But when you're this close, we can just sort of know, okay, if I move in this direction about this far, I'll be right on. So I just have to move the top stars down to the bottom and a little bit off the sensor. And then I'll be right on m8182. So let's figure out the direction we have to do it. And it looks like I have to move in this direction to make the stars go down. So I'm going to go ahead and do that until the star at the top is going right off the bottom of the screen. And then I should be right on m8182. Let me go ahead and take another test exposure at high ISO. And there we go. And again, because we're in this heavy light pollution, I don't know if I can really see 8182 here. But when I plate solve it, yep, there they are right in the middle of the screen as we would expect. Oh, so and then I'm going to go ahead and open it up in worldwide telescope. And I want to show you this little image crossfade thing, because that's pretty cool. So there's this little image crossfaded here at the bottom, the slider. And I can just very quickly see there's m8182. And there's my picture. And you can see that, you know, if you really knew where to look, you could find them in the picture, but they're almost invisible. Because they're really just little these faint smudges and they're quite small at the focal length I'm at. So that gives you an idea. I want to mention the method that I'm going to use here as the last example that we're going to do, which is what to do if you don't have Wi-Fi on your camera so you can't easily transfer images to your phone. This method was shared with me by a 13 year old astrophotographer named Arcturus Astro, who told me about this on a live stream. And so the way we're going to do it is instead of transferring, we're just going to take a picture of our DSLRs screen in playback mode. You want to make sure that if there's any info displayed on the screen that you turn all of that off and you turn off the flash on your camera. And then just get as close as possible. Make sure to tap on the screen so that it focuses there and sets the exposure there. And then go ahead and open that picture up in your app and crop it down so that you just have the screen and nothing else. So we're just going to crop it just like this. Be pretty careful to get as much as we can, but nothing else crop. Perfect. And then click save. And then we're going to upload that to astrometry.net. Of course, the cropped picture that we just took of the screen. And I have tried this a number of times now and it's worked every time. So I'm quite impressed with astrometry.net and this method that was shared to me by Arcturus Astro of just taking a picture of your screen. And I think it's actually what I'll do in the future rather than dealing with the Canon app because this is just really easy and it seems to always work. So that's it for this video. Hope you enjoyed. You can see some of my other videos here linked and also join us on Patreon and make sure to subscribe if you haven't. See you next time.