 Hey everyone, Nico Carver here. I just arrived at a very dark, rural location right on the border of Oklahoma and New Mexico. I'm here for the Okitex Star Party and it's going to be great. I'm going to be here all week and I'm going to share the experience with you. I've been here a few days now. We've had exceptionally clear weather, it's been an amazing star party. This is a Bordel 1 location. You can see the extent of the star party below. There's plenty to do here. You can go hiking during the day. There's nature. I've seen giant grasshoppers, tarantulas. But the main event here is of course stargazing and for me astrophotography. And there are many other astrophotographers here. Some with really cool setups that I've been happy to explore with people. So I think that's really the reason to go to a star party is to meet people and to get fresh ideas because there's a lot of really excellent amateur astronomers and astrophotographers out there that come to these and are happy to share both their views through sometimes giant dubzonians, hand-built telescopes, really custom cool telescopes. And so there's a ton to do, a ton to learn. There's also usually scheduled talks. So I was one of the speakers at Okitex. I presented on Whitefield astrophotography. This was an amazing night. The one that I'll always remember. This is on the southern coast of Iceland. It's called the Jökul Sarmann-Gracier Lagoon. And I call this my first star party because you can really see there's a bunch of photographers over here. And they were from all over the world and people from Japan, Europe and people with all kinds of different setups. This time lapse was a little bit more challenging to put together because tours kept coming in on buses and when the tour groups came out they all had their cell phones over taking flash photography. And so whenever there was a flash in my time lapse it would sort of really sort of distract from the beauty of the scenes. Question is how do you tell how much light pollution is in the sky? There's a lot of good ways to do it. One is just with our eyes. John Bortle developed the Bortle Scale which is a way to just do it with your eyes and that ranges from Bortle 1 to Bortle 9. So here we're in a Bortle 1, when I'm in Boston I'm in a Bortle 9 which means the brightest guys. And so right now it's the Twilight Hour. There's actually a giveaway going on right now. So a lot of people are at that but then right after the giveaway ends they're going to come out here onto the observing field, start setting up their telescopes getting ready for the night. This has been an amazing gift for me as someone who lives out on the East Coast. So you know from my channel if you've been watching that a dark sky for me is like Bortle 4. And this again was a Bortle 1 sky so it's just really something else when you see that many stars and so many deep sky objects that I'm familiar with I can make out just naked eye. Like you can sort of see the outline of the North America nebula in Cygnus. You can see the lagoon is pretty well defined. The star clouds and the Milky Way of course really pop out but there's plenty of others. The M31, M33, so many cool things just to sit under this sky and just take it in.