Ep. 300 300th Episode with Trevor Jones

What's up, everyone? Kevin here from SkyWatcher. Welcome to another episode of the What's Up

Webcast. We do this every Friday, 10 a.m. Pacific right here at the SkyWatcher USA YouTube

channel. Cover everything from What's Up in the Night Times Sky to equipment to helpful

tips and tricks. And of course, at the end of the month, we have a special guest on

to talk about their specialty in the field of astronomy. Today is a pre-recorded episode.

I am out. I'm actually at Luke Days, Luke Air Force Base here in Phoenix. We're demoing

the Helios Star 76s and 100. So stop by STEM City. Say hi. I'll be out there all weekend.

It's going to be hot if you're in the neighborhood and you are coming out to it, but it should

be really fun. But in honor of today, today is our six year anniversary doing the What's

Up Webcast, almost 300 episodes. This actually started as an idea during COVID when

Nief got canceled and we weren't going to star parties. And we just wanted to be involved

with the community and you guys. And it's just turned into what it is today. I can't thank

you enough for tuning in every week. Those of you who watch it even after the episodes

are recorded on our library, most of our episodes are live. But when we're traveling and

things are going on, we pre-record the episodes so we don't miss a beat. But all of those

episodes are saved right here and you can always go back and watch if there's something

that you want to check out. But today we're going to be going through some of our favorite

clips throughout the last year or so. So without further ado, we're going to go ahead

and get started again today as a pre-recorded episode. So if you are using the chat and

hanging out, that's great. But I'm not here. We will be back next week for our 300th episode.

So it's going to be pretty cool. So without further ado, once again, we're going to go

ahead and get started. Our first clip is from Celestron VP of Sales Ben Hauke. And we're

going to have him on his little clip here in just a second. Again, thanks all for your

support for watching. If you like what you see here, please go ahead and subscribe. Leave

a like on a video. Let us know. We're doing a good job. And yeah, I'll see you in just

a little bit once this clip is done. See you.

I'm sure you've seen it just because you're a US-based company. Do you make it here?

It doesn't mean you're free from the tariff either. We have friends who are affected

that way.

Yeah. And that's a question I've been asked before is why don't you move production to

the United States? Now, Celestron does some production, some assembly, a lot of testing

in California. But mostly it's the higher end stuff, the higher end stuff where the

cost can be justified of doing it locally. It's more expensive to do things in the United

States than it is in China. Everybody knows that. I would love to have production in the

United States. But the problem is, as you said, the concept of doing that, especially

if you're talking about entry-level, mid-level products, people have to kind of take a step

back and look, okay, well, what's in that telescope? You've got glass, you have aluminum,

you have plastic molded pieces on a lot of these. You have electronics, you have boards,

you have motors, you have hand controllers, you have all of these components. Well, let's

just say we wanted to do it in the United States. We don't have supply chains for any

of those products in the U.S. Where are you going to get inexpensive optical glass that

would keep the cost of that product viable? It doesn't exist right now. So could I buy

goods from China and from this country and that country and bring them in an assemble? Yes.

But as you said, now you're still paying the tariff rate on the components you're bringing

in, right? And let's be honest, if you want to build at mass scale, you need large scale

factories, you need equipment, a very expensive equipment, you need trained staff, you need

knowledge and know-how, you need all of these things that don't currently exist here. And

again, it's not impossible. Technically speaking, it would be possible to do it. But the amount

of money that would have to be invested by somebody in that is like several million or probably

quite a bit more to do any of that at scale. And let's be clear, who, in their right mind,

would buy factories, buy equipment, establish supply lines, hire employees, train employees,

all something that maybe you'd be operational five years when what happens in five years? What if

the next administration decides to remove the tariffs? Now, you have a factory in the United

States that is nowhere close to cost competitive with somebody else bringing in the goods from China.

You have to essentially invest in years of work and millions of dollars in a non-viable factory

that ultimately you're going to shut down as soon as those tariffs go away. Nobody is going to make

that investment. It's not going to happen. So as much as it's possible to building the United States,

it is not going to happen.

There we go. That was VP of sales, Ben Hauk from Celestron,

and an amazing screenshot of my face at the end there. Ben is, again, like I said, VP of sales

for Celestron. He's usually at NIEF. So if you're going to be at NIEF, he'll be there,

along with many others from Celestron, very knowledgeable individuals. But in the industry,

a long time really knows his stuff when it comes to sales and behind the scenes of what makes

the industry tick. So our next guest really needs no introduction. Many of us have known him for

years. Maybe you haven't met him, but you know of him. But David Eiker from Astronomy magazine

has been a major pillar in the hobby, especially from the media perspective, promoting our hobby

and different write-ups and all kinds of things. You've probably even seen him at events before,

particularly NIEF and some of the larger events. He's been there covering it. Overall,

great guy, extremely knowledgeable, loving of history, and definitely want to have him back on.

We were lucky enough to have him on this year. So without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and

run this clip for you guys, and I'll see you in just a second.

On the magazine now, and become so-called editor emeritus. So I'm still going to be writing,

contributing some things, but now I can mostly have fun all day.

Must be nice. I have found, when you become, whether your goal was to become a known person in

the hobby or not, I think we both kind of just fell into this, our positions to where we are.

And I do find when you're passionate about something, it's really easy to kind of grow and rise

through it because it's kind of infectious. But as I'm sure with you, and I can definitely say

for myself, I couldn't be here without many other people who helped along the way to make it happen.

What was it? Because we were just talking about it earlier, which we'll talk about here in a minute,

that it wasn't. I don't think it was Newton, but you stand on the shoulders of giants.

And I didn't know Newton personally, I'm not that old, but it was Carl Sagan who I wrote when I

was a young teenager just to start starting deep sky monthly, and he wrote and was in touch with

a lot of encouragement and so on. And I've gotten to know in more recent, at the last 10 or 15 years,

a lot of sort of very high level folks through the Starmus Festival, which we can talk about later.

But yeah, it was really Carl Sagan who encouraged me to go and start with the publications.

And I discovered when I was in college as a physics major that I really enjoyed writing about

all this stuff and communicating about it. And I didn't really want to take data all night when I

befriended many professional astronomers and found out what their life was really like.

No disrespect to professionals. I have the same, I went to U of A, I wanted to go to a,

I wanted to be an astronomer. And it was the same thing. It was just like, oh, cool. You get to do

all this stuff. And then I got to sit down with someone and it's like, what do your professional

astronomers actually do? Well, they're like, well, the telescope operators are the ones that run

the scopes. The astronomer, we just give you data and you chew through it like, oh,

well, that's not. Yeah, it's not even as much fun anymore. You know, Alex

Phillipenko, who's, you know, he's gone to Hawaii to Monicaia, many, many countless dozens of times.

Now is a professional astronomer. You don't even have to go to. You can stay in your office and

take data and run a, you know, a telescope remotely. So it's not even as much as adventurous

as it used to be going to distant exotic mountain tops.

So that was David Eiker. David Eiker is a fantastic person. I've gotten to hang out with him a

little bit. If you ever have a chance to meet him, he's very approachable and don't get him

started in history because you'll be there for a while, which is really, really fun. Just make

sure you have time. But doing the webcast over the last few years has allowed us to talk to some

really interesting people. We've had astronauts. We've had andryan on. We've had various

astronomy influencers on. We try to get representatives from various companies. We really try to make

this interactive within the community as a whole. A big goal of ours is not to make this just a

flat out sky watcher advertisement all the time. Now we do understand it is our webcast and it

does give us the ability to promote our own product and talk about it. We have episodes dedicated

to that. But the real goal is the community. We want to be a part of the community. We want to

bring the community together. We do realize that there are many of us out there that don't get

to go to the major star parties that don't get to go to the trade shows and meet some of these

people. But we like to show you the face that makes a lot of these brands and organizations tick

and a lot of our friends of ours. And we like talking to our friends. So doing this allows us to

bring all of you with us to the best of our abilities because we understand that, again, not everyone's

going to want to travel across the country to need for to a big star party that we're at. It's

just it's not feasible. So it's nice to have these little webcasts and no one hour is kind of

long for some people. But it's nice to have these because we can kind of bring you along with us

and let you meet some of the cool people out there. Let you see some of the cool stuff. But we

really want to make it about the community and not just shoving product down your throat and

making sure you buy our stuff. It's never been about that. So we try to balance it between our stuff

and yay sky watcher and some really cool interesting topics as well. So our next clip is Diana

from Sky and Telescope. We had her on just recently and we got a lot of public praise for having her

on. She was fantastic. Incredibly smart person. Such a joy to talk to. I'd love to have her on as well.

But she was great. So we pulled a clip from her episode as well. So again, I will see you guys here

in just a little bit. And here comes our clip with Diana from Sky and Telescope.

It's difficult to find the words because it is such a strong feeling in so many ways. I think the

most satisfying aspect of looking at an object with your own equipment is that you are actually

looking at something that you have seen in the pages of a magazine in the object you've seen in

the pages of magazine or in the book or in a photo nowadays so much as online of course. And you're

actually laying your own eyes upon it and you are able to just drink that all in. And that was

that reminded me very much of probably the pivotal moment in my astronomy journey which was

that time in Brazil when we were in Brazil. It wasn't just going under the dark skies, the vault

of the sky. The sky is huge there of course because we were at like on a plane and

it was the first time that I looked through a telescope. There was a friend of the families. He

brought a three inch refractor and he set it up there at this wrench and everybody lined up to take

a peek through the eyepiece and you know one person went and looked and went ooh ah the next person

went and so on. And then it was my turn. And so I stepped up on the little step ladder because I was

nine, ten years old, stepped up on the little step ladder, it appeared through the eyepiece.

And I couldn't see anything. And I was like, uh oh, what am I doing wrong? It was my first thought.

I was afraid to speak up. But then I knew I just knew something was wrong. So I had to say something.

I said, I'm sorry, but I don't see anything. And the chap said, well of course I'm so you know

the earth has turned and the object has moved out of the field of view. So we just have to read

just because this was just a manual, you know, a little go to a manual scope. And so he re-centered

the scope. And so I got a second chance, you know, I stepped up on the step ladder, look through

and there was Saturn. And it was the first time, I know it's Saturn. I wish I had a more exciting

object that is always Saturn. No, Saturn was my selling point too. It still is. I know. And there I

was seeing it for the first time. And it just, it looked 3D to me, you know, I knew it so well

from photos. And I loved looking at the pictures of Saturn and so on, but seeing it with my own eye,

it just, it brought it to light. It was there, you know, it was palp way. It was like I wanted to

reach out and touch it. And it was, that was such a powerful moment. And I kind of feel that

every time I look through an eyepiece, I recreate that of course. Now I revisit many objects that

I've seen before. But it's still an incredibly visceral experience when, when, when, when you can,

you know, lean over, look through it and you're looking at a cluster of stars or you're looking at

a galaxy or you're looking at a planet and it's your eyes and your brain that is processing this.

And yeah, it's, it's magical. So that was Diana from Sky and Telescope, another fantastic

person. We got a lot of good compliments having her on. Again, like I said earlier, she's an

incredibly interesting person to talk to with a lot of very cool experiences. And that's kind of

the plus of having people on like that is you just get to meet so many different people. And

with interesting stories and history and stuff like that. So it was a real privilege to have Diana

on. And I definitely want to have her back again. But I know many of you wrote to us,

message us that you really enjoyed having her on. So big thanks to Diana, looking forward to seeing

her at Neif as well. If you're going to Neif, make sure you stop by the Sky and Telescope booth.

I'm sure she'll be there somewhere and say hi to her. She's an incredibly approachable person.

So the next clip is actually with Jared, Jared Donkersley, who is in marketing for Skywatcher here

in Skywatcher North America. He came up to the Grand Canyon star party last year. And I believe

he's coming again this year. And for those of you who have watched this and know me, you know that

Grand Canyon is my favorite event. I'm really big into outreach. And that's what Grand Canyon really

embodies while also preserving the night sky. I'm a dark sky location. So this year was a little

bit different on the Grand Canyon recap because we actually had Jared on to talk about his perspective

as a first time attendee at this event. I've been going for years at this over almost a couple

decades at this point. But it was Jared's first time attending. So without further ado, this is

Jared and covering what his thoughts were on Grand Canyon star party 2025. I'll see you right after this.

Weird. So this is going to be interesting. Anyway, I don't know where we were, Jared. But,

oh, solar. Yes, we did a lot of solar with the Helio stars. Jared had his 76. I brought my 76

for a friend of ours, Richard Wright to use. And then we also brought the Helio star 100 sample

out as well. They all performed really well. It was actually a good chance to see how well they

performed in high altitude because Elton Edelons do get affected when they're at different

altitudes. So they did really well. I don't problem with them. But that's Jared's

cell phone shot. It was really just a cell phone shot.

We say you can imagine how it looks to the eyeball. Speaking of high altitude, I still waiting for

Don Pettits solar stuff in the ISS. I'm really excited to see what he was able to do up there.

Really curious to see what Don was able to get with the solar stuff up there. But yeah,

we did do solar. We actually did it every day. That's the most I've ever done it five days in a row,

which that's kind of what you do up there. So

so that was Jared and I talked about doing solar up at Grand Canyon star party with our Helio stars.

It was cool to have Jared up there as part of our crew. If you ever do come up to Grand Canyon

star party, we have a big tight knit group of people that have been up there and a lot of us know

each other. But it's my favorite event of the year for that very reason and being able to show

people the dark skies of Grand Canyon and being able to do public outreach in a perfect location

is really nice. So you get the best of both worlds to get to show people what they want to see

and get to show them what it's like to be under a dark sky. Now speaking of outreach as much as

I love outreach, there's a couple people that I could think of that you outreach on a much bigger

scale than I do. And one of them is Geo who we just had on recently from

gosh, Geo does all kinds of stuff actually. He works up at Mount Wilson Observatory, works

with the Planetary Society. He works at Griffith Observatory, which is where Jared knows him.

That's where I met Geo as well. And we just had him on fairly recently. But Geo's such an awesome

guy when it comes to outreach. He's got a really good energy to him and he's positive and he

just loves sharing it. So we thought we'd bring this clip of Geo from the latest episode that we

did with him. So I'll see you right after this clip.

You I'm sure who have watched have been to Griffith. Griffith is such an impressive place to be.

There's a lot of history up there. But you know amongst the glitz and the glamour of Hollywood,

which is literally at the feet of Griffith, it's like you go up to this island and it's like,

wow, I've escaped LA. I haven't, but I have at the same time. So

so you know, I work at elementary school. This is where I'm at right now. And my my school here

is not in the best area. We're in Skid Row in downtown LA. And sadly,

a lot of my students are experiencing housing security. That's the political way of saying it

these days. But because I work at all these amazing places, I get these opportunities. And so just

we got a bus load and took a bunch of kids up to Griffith and they just went nuts and they were so

excited. And the next day when we were talking about it and kids were talking like we went to the

forest. We were out in the woods. And yeah, we have trees. It's a park. But you know,

it's amazing that to get these kids out of the concrete jungles and get them into that habitat where

yes, you're surrounded by trees and nature. And if you know, you might see a deer and a coyote,

it becomes like a whole other world. And you know, at the moment right now, you know, talking about

that Hollywood connection, we have Cosmic Girl on show right now. So if you watch the mass singer

and I don't, so I don't know if she's been a mass story or not. But they gave us that outfit.

It's on display right now. And so we have the Cosmic Girl outfit. So people come there just because

they want to see part of Hollywood, part of the memorabilia, you know, that place where James

Dean was shot in the movie or you know, that I'm not shot. You know, so so people want that

connection of just being able to like, you know, you're in an observatory and you've got the Hollywood

sign behind you and the city lights below. I think our director, Dr. Crop often refers to us as

the hood ornament of Los Angeles. It's a good way of putting it.

So that was a geo another fantastic person. If you're in the LA area or you're a part of LAS,

which is the big club in LA, you probably know who geo is. Geo I would say is kind of a celebrity.

If you will amongst the local LA crowd does a lot of work as you can see. But it was really

cool to have him on another fantastic outreach individual and just very vibrant person,

very knowledgeable and is awesome at getting the public involved in so many different ways and

astronomy outreach. Now another way that you can do astronomy outreach, maybe a little bit

different flavor is social media. Now there are a lot of influencers out there, you know,

we're friends with Trevor Jones and Nico Carver and there's many others that we could name as well.

But someone that we had the pleasure of meeting at NIEF last year and she will be back this year

from what I'm told. It's is a LUTSA from Space Koala. Now she was a joy to meet at NIEF as well

as her husband and we're looking forward to seeing them here in a few weeks actually. I really

enjoy LUTSA's approach to things. She kind of approaches it in a very technical manner but very

direct and they just everyone who does these YouTube videos has their own style of doing it,

which is really cool. Trevor's got his style, Nico. Of course you got Astro Biscuit in the UK.

LUTSA's got hers. You have Quiv, the lazy geek and that's just the ones that I can name right

off the top of my head. I'm sure I have missed people but I can't sit here all day talking about various

Instagram and YouTube influence but it was really nice to have LUTSA on. So here's a clip from

that episode and if you want a chance to actually meet her in person, my understanding is she will

be at NIEF and NIEF coming up here in a few weeks and you'll have a chance to meet her there.

Definitely if you have a chance, stop by say hi to her. She's a great individual. So here we go.

Let's see. Oh here's a good question for you. Do you have a favorite target or type of target?

I think it evolved over time because originally I was super into planets and while I do have

the equipment for it, I almost never do any planets anymore. I just are really hard to do.

They're the easiest thing if you want to get the most basic picture because you can just see it

and take a picture but if you want to go to those really high resolution amazing planets,

that's like the most difficult things to do. I enjoy galaxies a lot but I do feel like my

nebulas are better than my galaxies so I feel like I want to improve more in processing of

the galaxies because I find them absolutely mind-blowing that you can see something that is

so far away and it's like billions of stars all together and you get to result the structure of

a far away galaxy. So this is why I find them fascinating. Yeah, galaxies are pretty neat but they

are in their own unique way difficult to process. So that was Lutza from Space Koala. If you're not

familiar with her work, go ahead over to YouTube and look up Space Koala. All kinds of cool stuff

on there. It does some really nice reviews. She's got some really interesting equipment too if

that's your thing which the majority of us, that's our thing. But an incredible astrophotographer

believes she's doing some toxic niac this year again. If you have a chance, definitely

take a seat and listen to what she has to say. She's very knowledgeable, very nice person to talk

to, very talented astrophotographers so we're glad to have her on as well. Now another woman in

the astronomy world that has made a lot of headway throughout her career for lack of a better term

as she's building her career is Pranvera Highseni. And we've known Pranvera for

10 years, maybe not quite that much, a while. We've known Pranvera for a while. And she is from

Kosovo. She's got a wild history. If you ever have a chance to listen to her speak on where

she's come from and all this stuff that she's been through to now where she's at today is quite

impressive. And I believe Pranvera will also be at Neve this year from what I've understood.

Don't quote me on that, but that's what I've heard. But she's an amazing individual as well.

We're very happy to know her, support her and have her on as well. So I'm going to bring this clip

in and then I'll see you guys on the other side of this as well.

That's pretty cool. It is something to be said when you walk into these observatory domes.

It's like you just kind of feel like, whoa, like what are we going to discover tonight?

For what's been discovered in here, like you just feel like you're doing, even if you're just

looking through the telescope, like even I'm sure the observatory in Kosovo, it's like we're

just looking at the moon, but just being in a dome with a telescope, you're like, this is legit.

I know. I know. Never gets old. Never gets old. No, it's, it's very special to do it.

I want to give you time to talk about it. So you started astronomy outreach of Kosovo or AOK.

And now there's an observatory in Kosovo, which you help spearhead. Do you want to tell everyone

like how did that? Because it's a big deal to make something like that. And you know, I run my

own outreach program focus and it's a process and you know this with AOK. It's a process just to

put on events and organize a team and do that to build a facility and get funding and to have it

be a thing though, is a monumental undertaking. So where did that start? And then maybe you can tell

people about how it's, how it's going now. Yeah. So that was definitely a huge project and it turned

out much better than I expected or ever anticipated. We started as a small team and we were doing all

these outreach events across Kosovo. The enthusiasm was there. The motivation, although we did not

have much. We had only the equipment provided by Steven and you guys and we were putting that to

use every single week, making doing events like a few times a week at schools and public squares and

and there was the enthusiasm from the public as well. The interest was there and after a few years

2017, that's when I started traveling internationally a little bit. I came here to the States

and it was interesting. Like you would go and stay with somebody who would host me like so many of

these astronomers who supported my trip and then they would be like, oh, let me show you my

backyard observatory and they would roll up their roof and show me a 14 inch sitting in their yard

and all the astrophotography gear and I would be like, oh, damn, like, why can't we probably have

something like that? And there are also other amateur astronomers who have basically domes,

like tiny domes that are in their backyard. So those are observatories and same with Australia,

when I went there, I had people who had these observatories and they were not only there for

astrophotography, they were basically doing asteroid occultations, they were doing supernova

search, discovering stuff and I was like, this is exciting, you can basically, it doesn't take much

to have a small facility to be able to contribute to science, to discover, to look for stuff

and I came back home and I was like, hey, what do you guys, how do you guys feel about having

this project? What if we build an observatory in Kosovo? And at first, I still have the drawing,

like we were thinking about a small dome, like nothing else, just a small dome with a telescope

and at that time we had an eight inch reflector and we thought we could just place that on the

pier and have something like that. But then the idea kind of expanded, we were like, oh,

but what if we add a control room so we don't get cold at night? What if we had a little kitchen

at? What if we had a planetarium? So the idea just kind of grew from there. But then when we design

this, which was also kind of challenging because, yes, I have visited so many of these facilities,

but I don't know exactly what it takes. Like, yeah, we need a control room, we need restrooms,

we need a little space to make some food, we need this area, we need a conference room, like

you don't realize how much effort it goes into designing something or planning something like that.

But then we worked with a team of architects in Kosovo who, by the way, had never, ever visited

an observatory, never seen one in real life. So they were helping us make this design and they

did an awesome job. They basically did a lot of research on ash domes and a lot of these engineering

constructions. And we came up with this beautiful facility, but to build that, we needed money.

Because they estimated it was going to cost 300,000 euros. And that's big money for Kosovo.

So the only way to make it happen was either through donations or through the government,

if the government supports it. We tried the donation one, but we were not even able to make

a 10,000 and go found me because it's a large money. Like, yes, it's a great cause, but it's

it's going to take years to accumulate that fund. And then we approached the government of Kosovo

and they approved the project. They were fascinated with something like that to have a science

facility in Kosovo that we never had. It was a great idea. I was a great plan. So the parliament

voted yes in 2019. That was also the time when I came to NIEF. And I came there invited from

Celestron to give a talk. And then I mentioned the observatory that we want to build this facility.

And this is our dream. It was more like an idea back then. And Corey Lee from Celestron,

he talked to me and he was like, Hey, if you guys build a observatory, we will donate a C-14

for that dome. And that was like a huge push because at that point, we knew that we're going to

have a really good telescope. We just need to make a home for it. We need to build it.

So that was Brand Vera Heisseni. If you're not familiar with her work, I'd definitely recommend

going and checking her out. She's actually very busy. She's always bouncing around somewhere

doing something. I don't know how she sleeps or keeps up with anything. But she does it. It's quite

impressive actually. But she does some really amazing work. And again, if you have a chance to say

hi to her, definitely say hi. Now, one of our most popular episodes, which we didn't expect

it to be, is called State of Skywatcher. And this is where we sit down with the director of Skywatcher

Jeff Simon. We also have Jared Donker's Lee marketing and myself of product development. And we

basically give you the lowdown of everything that we can talk about and answer as many questions

as we can for you guys about the state of Skywatcher. Now here in North America, at least for Skywatcher

North America, we try to approach you guys as being as transparent as possible. You know, obviously

we have NDAs and we can't tell you about what's being worked on to an extent and in detail. But we

like to be transparent. We like to be as honest as possible. And we're a part of the community.

We want to be a part of the community. So that's kind of how we approach it is we want to be a part

of the community. We want to be transparent. We want to be open about as much as we can be. And we

just want to be like everybody else because we care about it. So here is a clip from our State of

Skywatcher for, I guess it would be covering 2025, but aired earlier this year, believe it,

January is when we did this episode. So here's a clip from that.

I am very optimistic that the engineers are working on something. We know they're working on

something and we've got some feedback. I am optimistic that what they come out with is going to be

significantly different enough from what's out there to make it its own product even within that

category. So it's just a matter of making all the pieces come together and make them work because

we're not going to release as you guys have seen in the past like with the hack 125 before it was

the DX. That was released early. We knew it was released early and that's why we didn't bring it

into the US market when they fixed it. I believe my my phrase was we'll bring it into the US market

when they take all the stupid out of it. When they took all the stupid out of it, we released it as

the DX and now it works really well. So same thing with the Skywatcher SmartScope. As long as

they're still stupid in it, we're not going to bring it in. But once all the stupid is out of it,

then we will bring generally most of our products don't start out with stupid in it just to be fair.

How would you describe the relationship Skywatcher has with other companies in the industry?

We're friends with a lot of people. Good friends with stellar view. The crew at astrophysics are

really good friends of mine or ours actually. I'm sorry. Starlight Express we're good friends with.

We've no people at Lunt. Loss Monde is scientific. When I worked at Mead, one of the first people I

worked at a big project with was Scott Roberts. He's one of my favorite people. I can't actually think

of anybody especially now. The list would be way shorter for people we don't like and I can't

think of anybody at the moment. I mean, even like the people at ZWO, we haven't really spent a lot

of time talking to them. But we've talked to them. We're at the same show. We were just at AAS

and they were there. So I mean, I know. How do you how do you be mean to somebody that has the

C star? It's a great product. It is a great product. We're the only way that you people, you people

out there, the consumers, the people that are listening to this are going to trust us in anything

we say as if we're honest about everybody else's stuff that we talked about. And if we're honest

about the stuff that we come out with that is not up too snuff like the hack 125 stupid version.

Well, especially in this industry too, because all of our consumers are pretty bright intelligent

people. And if we're blowing smoke, they're going to figure it out pretty soon. Yeah.

So that was a clip from our state of Skywatcher episode that we did earlier this year.

The first time we did that, we actually did it last year. So that would have been the beginning

of 2025 or basically went over what happened in 2024. And we had a lot of people that were

interested in it. You actually wanted it more often. But at this point, we find that it's easier

to keep it as an annual thing because we don't want to dilute it too much. And so we do it once a

year at the beginning of the year to recap the year that just ended. So you'll probably find this

episode coming up in January again. So it'll be a little bit wild. But we'd like to dig in and

give you a little bit of the behind the scenes and where we're at as much as we can.

And yeah, we want you to feel like you're part of the crew as much as we're able to do. And I

know people like to know what happens behind the scenes and all that fun stuff. But at the end of

the day, it is a job for us. And we do get paid to do this. It's a fun job. There are definitely

perks to it, like most jobs have. But there are days where it's work as well. So not to undercut,

I love my job. And so do the rest of us on our team. But there are still days that it's a job.

But it's it's a lot of fun. So that was a recap or a little short clip actually from State of

Skywatcher 2025. So I hope you guys enjoyed that. There's only a couple clips left. These

pre-recorded episodes tend to finish a little early because we're not talking to you guys. We're

not hanging out. But before I jump into the last two, if you like what you see here, please go

ahead and subscribe. Leave a like on the channel. Let us know we're doing a good job. If you want

to support the channel, you can always buy product from SkywatchUSA.com or any of your dealer,

favorite dealers. You can always head over to Skywatcher.threadless.com and pick up some cool swag

over there as well. I should have had the links to put up. But you guys can figure that out.

But you can support the channel that way and also just liking and subscribing the channel to

keep up with what's going on. Now the webcast gives us the ability to announce new products to

give you guys details into new products. And I'm going to tell you right now there's a lot of

stuff right around the corner that we're about to unload into the market. So we're excited about

that. And if you want to know more about that, I'm sure you've seen some of it kind of bouncing

around the internet. But we're getting very close to announcing some of these new products.

We usually try to do it around neith anyway. But stay tuned for that coming up in April and

coming up in the next few months. There's a lot of stuff that we need to cover as far as new stuff

that I think you guys will enjoy. Now our next clip is from a friend of ours. This is Chris

Montemar from Takahashi, America. Takahashi doesn't need much of an introduction because it's

Takahashi. They make amazing products. Optics are way up there. It's a second to none. But there's

so many really good companies up in that level. So we're going to go right ahead and jump into it.

This is Chris Montemar from Takahashi, America.

Our Takahashi optics, probably particularly fluorite, you could probably tell the story a little

bit better, outsourced to Nikon. It's not Nikon, it's camera. It's Canon. Yeah. And it has

an optical division that builds lenses as large specifications. And so for those who don't know,

a lot of major manufacturers, not that talk isn't, but mass production like Skywatcher and William

Optics and StellarView and a lot of the big brands like that. We're using like ED glass,

like whether it's FPL53, FCD100, FPL55, all the really good stuff. Talk uses that on a lot of

their scopes as well. But there's the doublets are all fluorite lenses. Well, one of them is not

both of them. But that's really unique because they have to go to Canon to source that we're

Canon literally grows the crystal and then you make it into a lens. So it's really kind of a sweet

little thing. Is there a reason Takahashi has stuck with fluorite for the doublets and not

moved them into the triplets or, you know, that is not exactly correct.

In my backyard right now is a FCT65D and that is a 65-millimeter fluorite triplet. And it has

great color. Actually, the color performance of that is a little bit better than a TSA120 overall.

But where it really shines is in use as an astrograph telescope. We produced something for a really

short time and I can't tease things that are going to come in the future. But I'm going to show you

this because this is one of my favorite things. And I don't know if you guys can see this.

This is my FCT76 from 1998. Okay. And this is a 76-millimeter fluorite triplet.

So these are incredibly rare. But this is one of my very favorite telescopes to use because of all

the things that you just mentioned. It's a triplet that has all of the advantages of the fluorite

doublets. So that's a Chris Monomer. I have a few. Again, if he coat a neaf, he's usually there.

Takahashi really is an amazing company. A lot of it is still made by hand in Japan. And

optically, they're excellent. I'm a big fan of their fluorite doublets. The images are just really

clean on how it renders an image. And there's quite a few of them out there. Many different

generations. But if you ever have a chance to look through Takahashi, definitely check it out.

Any size, honestly, to check it out. And there are some rare ones like Chris's FCT that he was

showing there. As well as a handful of others that are out there. And we actually just talked about

that in our vintage and antique episode that just aired a couple weeks ago, which

this is a really good segue because our last clip is from vintage scopes and antique scopes.

Now, I know there are some of you that were asking for like dedicated episodes. We can definitely

do that. We're here looking into it. I need to verse myself a little bit better in some of these

to spend an hour discussing that. I know I've seen requests for Unitron and Clark. So I will do

my best to kind of educate myself a little bit better on them. Unitron is a vast catalog of

equipment. And Clark is very historical. So there's a lot of information to dig into there.

And how to impact that and present that correctly and effectively here on the webcast.

So we are looking into those episodes. It might be a while before you see them come up,

but we are going to take a look into that. So our last clip here is going to be from our

vintage and antique episode. And here's that. I will see you guys in just a second.

Some other names real quick because we're at the end of the episode.

There are plenty of other vintage names or antique names out there. So if you ever run it around,

if you ever find yourself at an antique store or anything like that. And you come across some,

most of these are going to be brass. Some long brass telescope. If you see one of the names listed

here on it, it might be interesting to get a hold of it. You have Bordeaux,

Brasheer. Brasheer is in there with like the Harkin Suns. They were, they made some big refractors.

Byron. Byron was actually another telescope manufacturer. You had E. E. Barnard,

a very famous astronomer. Had one of their telescopes, Cook and Suns,

Dolland. Dolland is really cool. I don't have a Dolland. Dolland is the oldest telescope

manufacturer in the world. And it's really cool to read up about them. They were experimenting

with color correction long before E. D. Glass was a thing. They even looked at smoking lenses

to where the smoke would lay onto the glass. And it would yellow the lens and help with color

aberrations. So cool stuff like that. You have E. Vian, Fitz and Zeiss. Now Zeiss, I don't have any

hands-on experience with Zeiss. I have two friends of mine that I can name right now who are Zeiss

collectors. They could just sit here all day long and talk about Zeiss. Zeiss deserves its own

episode. And there's there's modern Zeiss. There's vintage Zeiss. And there's antique Zeiss.

They would actually cover all major regions of this episode. And their optics are unbelievably good.

So if you have a chance to use a Zeiss, try it. Because they're unbelievable. I mean, we all know

they're good. But if you get a chance to try one of the early ones, definitely go for it.

So that was a clip from one of our more recent episodes as of this recording, talking about

a vintage and antique scopes. That was an episode that a lot of you were actually requesting. So we

went ahead and did it. And it's something that I recently got into. It's really neat. If you ever

have the chance to look through something from history, definitely do so. I know it's not

some big Apo refractor with a big camera on the back. But it's really nice to see where we came

from. And there's something very cool to look through a historic telescope. And a lot of times,

some of these telescopes are quite good even by today's standards. Now they may not be Apo's and

they may have some color to them. But the figure and the sharpness of some of these images are

very good even by today's standards. So especially like names like Alvin Clark and Suns,

brochure and stuff like that, Zeiss, and various names like that. There's some very, very good

optics. So just because it's an acrimat, don't go around shaming it or pooing it. It doesn't need to

be an Apo refractor to produce amazing images. Now you might get some color on it. That's a different

story, but good figure of an optic is different than color correction. So two different things.

That was our last clip. And I hope you really enjoyed this episode. Again, it's a six-year

anniversary. Just was a little recap over the last year. Obviously we could keep going and going.

There's so many different memories that we've had here. But a big thank you to all of you for

watching, for supporting the channel, for being a part of it, for your kind words when we do

get to meet you in person. All of that does mean a lot to us and we're glad to be a part of this

community and it's always fun to meet you guys and hopefully meet some of you again here in a few

weeks. But other than that, that's it for our six anniversary episode. Next week we are back

live for our 300th episode. We're going to sit down with our buddy Trevor Jones. He was our first

guest. That's why we have Trevor on a lot. He's our first guest. And we're going to check in

and see how he's doing, how Astro backyards doing, how Rudy's doing, how Ash is doing. And join us

again next week as we sit down with him live. Now it is New Moon Weekend. So get out there. Obviously

it's going to be really hot here in Arizona. So please be safe if you are heading out to some

dark sky sites. But clear skies to everyone. Thank you so much for watching and we will see you guys

again next week for another live episode. So clear skies have a great weekend and we will see you guys

soon. Take care. Bye.