Transcript for Part A:
the starship was delayed it's gonna try and launch in about 46 minutes
yeah we were watching it a while ago
what are you watching on youtube i'm watching the uh actually felix's
feed for what about it remember he's a fella we over in germany that has that
channel that's popular i'm watching this i have padre live from boston yeah you know what it
is that's one feed but the the feed that he's showing is the actual spacex feed
so if you just look for spacex basics that'll show you the actual feed
from them but padres got their own cameras out there
also um
i'm checking mine right yeah i can't we can only see the top of
your head
yep i shrank [Music]
is it just called starship i'm so yeah it's just a start
called starship yeah
um
i'm doing an interview tonight with tim robertson about the exoplanet section the new exoplanet section on the
uh aopa is it a video or a podcast no it's just a podcast it's a recording so he's going
to record it and then he'll brush he'll uh post it later on i'm not sure how long
it'll take him to post it but okay so yeah they said it's not alive and it's not a live broadcast
i see
[Music]
[Music] my
you know what they stopped the launch sequence earlier for i think they had an aircraft intrude into the airspace which is kind
of stupid like a private aircraft
i'm sure when he comes back down he's going to get a stupid pilot truck
is yeah that thing going through uh my
private plan might be upstairs all involved
tim myers says no tfr question about question mark yes of course there's a tfr
of course was that like a no-fly zone temporary flight temporary flight
restriction is what tfr stands for yeah and you're supposed to check the no
tams for everything before you take your flight otherwise
can do this type of stuff and not know what's going on
people get their license suspended because of this stuff because by law you're required to learn
everything about the flight that you're about to take you have to know all the information involved with the flight
you're about to take but then it requires you know effort
of course effort it always takes effort for doing anything that's worthwhile right
right yes right now flying an airplane should just be like
driving driving a wagon around the playground so how worthwhile is using your phone if it takes no effort to use it
very worthwhile
[Music]
so [Music]
my favorite way to observe the moon
[Music]
foreign
[Music]
well hello everybody this is scott roberts with explore scientific and uh i just lost my little headphone
set here uh ken how crazy is it here
well it's a little crazy a little crazy we've shipped about 12 or
13 boxes in the past 24 hours a thousand it seems like um it was a
tyler just looked over the cubicle while it was not in his head yes 12 or 13 000 boxes i know that's
probably an exaggeration by a factor of two three three maybe two or three anyways we have
shipped thousands uh orders are pouring in like crazy um it's a nice problem to have uh but it
you know when when you are used to handling um no hundreds of orders a day
and then they and then it goes like that now it's thousands okay so it's um it's something you can't
prepare for uh uh you know there is no market prediction for it
um and um so it's uh it's nuts compounded on top of that
ups and fedex were not able to prepare for this either and so uh you know this is not just a
little old explore scientific this is shipping products uh from anybody to anywhere
um and um so there was an article i was reading uh recently um about how
it was either fedex or ups basically notified a fairly sizable company i'm not going
to mention the names because i can't remember exactly who it was but uh they just basically said they
they wouldn't be picking up for them for them anymore because they couldn't handle the volume
you know we've had that trouble and we've had trouble getting trucks i mean you know we we asked for a semi and we
get a box truck you know we asked for a you know a trailer and a box truck shows up and they're
like sorry that's all we're getting today so it just sits there on the dock i think that we got
most of the backlog off the dock today but there's still hundreds of pallets
left to go between now and next few days ondel pro was looking for something stephan tell us what it is that you were looking for
here in chat now we've got you know i've got kent here we can see so scott why why don't talk about what
we have in stock since we you know this issue so the last time i was on we had a pretty good stock
of everything in the past uh 24 hours we have
uh sold out on the first lap first light mack kaz 127
on an eq 3 mount so that's a you know planetary camera or planetary telescope which is i'm sure
people are buying you know telescopes like that for the great conjunction it's a it's and we've had i've had conversations
with people and heard the csrs talking about it we also sold out of that tame the same
uh mc-127 on the twilight nano on the left right up down and so so
do we have uh in telescopes in stock now we have the first light ar 127
1200 mazzo 1 so it's a long focal length 127 millimeter telescope
uh on a left right up down with slow motion controls a really good mount solid mount handles
that telescope will uh i suspect will run out
early next week is my prediction on that okay
what do you think the date is for people to get there what's the date
what's the last shipping date for people to get their telescopes for the great conjunctions we don't know
we really don't know because it's really possible to
yeah i'm afraid that you know everybody says oh you know the 22nd you can still get it before
christmas i don't believe that even if you pay for overnight i'm not convinced that that'll happen
honestly i think that that it's going to be the 20th you haven't ordered it by the
by the you know 15th or 20th say that we say that kent but i just received a gift
from a friend who uh on monday ordered something for me and i received it today
yeah so so it's still possible but um you know it's uh it's going to be
increasingly the the process probability is going of the probability of you getting something
is going to decrease over time here in the next week okay so moving on down the road uh we
have the first light mac 1900 uh it's a tube only we've got a few of them so you have to
have your own tripod to put it on the first light mac has 127 on an eq3
on an equatorial mount they're sold out as of yesterday afternoon uh
the first light newtonian 130 millimeter in diameter 600 millimeter focal length
ota you have to have your own tripod we've got those in stock um then we have uh
two kits that are in stock in the first light series the first light newtonian on an eq3 we've
been selling a lot of those in the past week uh we've lost more than a quarter
of the inventory in the last four days um i think that is part of that's driven by
it's available but um it's a it's not a huge telescope
it's a it's a hand manageable telescope at 600 millimeters focal length it's not
it's not you know huge long or anything um and so it's it'll handle well on the eq3
mount and the other first light telescope we have in stock is the same telescope on the mass01 which is
mount asthma so it's got slow motion controls left right up down really easy to make it move in a natural
way um you know for beginners the azimuth mount are pretty easy to master
the equatorial mounts like the eq3 that require polar alignment those can be harder to master
um and like anything else if you're wanting to get this telescope to look at the great conjunction
you need to buy it this afternoon so you can get it you know early next week and spend time
practicing because that's like saying i want to drive to the grocery store and get a car and try and drive for the
first time probably not going to go well and if the first time you try and use one of these
telescopes is to go out and look at the great conjunction on december 24th it's 24th right first 21st december 21st
you're going to probably not find success so now one of the things to keep in mind
with this great conjunction even though the closest approach is on the 21st there is still
several days or weeks been to to see the two the two uh planets next near each other
close together so even tonight even starting now you can start looking at stuff but
again it's going to go into the next year and they'll still be fairly close to each other um
in an eyepiece i think you know right what i think is fun is watching them move because over the course of a night you
can see them moving closer and closer and closer together so this is not really an event i don't think to go out and go on on the 21st
and go okay i've seen it let's go inside it's it's the watch go out night after night
and watch these things get closer and closer and see how it changes and then and then watch it over the the days
afterwards to watch them cross and get farther and farther for the planet the dance of the planets correct and so
that's what this is about it's not a once and you've seen it it's about being able and it's cool to
be able to see something actually move over a period of nights to be able to chart those those girls
and that's why you know sketching used to be important because you'd sketch what you saw and then you could see how
it moved over time um it's why events like mercury transits and venus transits are
so uh memorable and important to amateur astronomers because they actually
i mean it's just in your face uh that you know that you're in a solar system you know
and um you know that's uh that's something that uh you can't be
you know burned into your memory too many times it's right and that's all about that's what this hobby really is about is looking
for change in the universe not just looking at the static universe you know you know the same
thing that's why people people misunderstand observing the moon of course the moon surface does not
change perceptibly from the earth's surface being able to observe it but it's the play of shadows and the
little details that pop up as time goes as the sun moves across the
sky on the earth from the moon's surface right and the shadows change
you know that's where the excitement is and observing the moon that's where the excitement is in observing the minor planets and anything
else in the solar system that's that moves you can see the movement you can see it's a dynamic universe it's not
just a static sky yeah that all started with galileo you know looking at the moons
move across the across jupiter so you know that's wow okay this is this is
amazing and it's you know this kind of movement uh watching retrogrades and
and um you know or even the change in seasons of the the stars you know uh talk about
retrograde some people may not know what retro they hear it they hear it in maybe uh
uh astrology you know they say uh jupiter is in retrograde well what does that mean it just means that
it's moving it appears to be moving opposite of its normal path across the
sky and this has to do with you know we're we're in a closer orbit our speeds are different okay and um you know there'll be a point
where okay everything looks like it's moving in the right direction and all of a sudden mysteriously it looks like it's going in
retrograde okay backwards going backwards and then it seems to catch back up again
and go go again yeah so it's just like uh it's just like two cars passing each other that's what we're doing we're passing on the planet
and it's going and it's going well driving in a big circle yeah right
there's some real good animations out there that show what it looks like so that you'll see the orbits of the planets and it'll show you what it looks
like from earth's perspective and it's really cool to see it goes
and then starts going forward again over a period of weeks and it's really cool to see that you
know there's there's lots of things out there like that that you know that are easy to see from light
polluted from your whatever backyard you are the planets of the moon provide wonderful
you know viewing because it's so bright they're not really affected by my light pollution didn't jason didn't jason uh kenzel show
us an animation last night on the star party with uh was it pluto
astronomer collaboration to do that so and it's really cool to see how the the
ancients tried to come up with what they called epicycles and there were circles and circles and they built these really complicated
machines to try and explain what we now know is very simple motion but you look at some of those epicycle
machines where they have circles and circles and circles trying to figure out yeah like they had them
going like this trying to figure out how to make this work and and to explain what they were seeing
and it was it was it's fascinating to read on those and what their efforts were to try and explain what they saw and it turned out to be
something much more simple once you realize the whole driver for that was they wanted to maintain an
earth-centered universe correct that's absolutely correct and so couldn't let go of that
yeah well if they did that head would get chopped off so there was that you know so anyway uh the other
you know as far as other packages with telescopes go uh we've got some high-end toys and some
entry-level telescopes with tripods that would be good for the conjunction
and on the moon uh you know but as far as first light level up that's it
so um we don't have any mounts they're all on back order um
it's it's not pretty you know from a forward-going inventory standpoint scott
and i were just sitting here trying to talk about you know what our forecasts are for next year right and how do how do you forecast
next year based on covent sales that doubled or tripled or quadrupled that in
some categories yeah dealers get 400 increases in business you know if this was any other business
uh and you came in and said okay well you know you you know if you're a ceo or president of
company you'd say okay mr salesman you you had a 400 increase this year we need you to do a 450
percent increase next year or at least or maybe match what you did you know it's an
it's kind of an impossibility yeah but that industry is a very volatile industry yeah we have
special celestial events that drive things uh this this pandemic has driven
business in ways that nobody expected i mean there's just no prediction for that at least you can have some
prediction on um i mean for instance this december 21st uh conjunction that's going to happen
this great conjunction uh if the media uh catches on to this and i think they will i've already seen
some media attention to it uh everyone's going to want to rush out and
get a telescope and take a look at it and they're going to think about this about about now okay about right now and we're
already so close to the event all right in those days that we've known for a year
you know well we've known it for 30 years or however i mean forever it's not like this is snuck up
on us because no you know you can buy you can download a free program
without eclipses partial eclipses you know um you can get a surprise
comment okay comments are about the only thing yeah comments are surprised all the time yeah little asteroids a little aster well if
you do have periodic comments like hallie's comment that for you you know how good it's gonna be it could be a great comet or it could be
a dud you don't know but it's halley's comments so no matter what no matter how how good or how dud it is people are
still gonna try to go out and get a telescope for it so we've got a ways to go before hallie's comment gets back here again
so it's today's the 9th and the conjunctions the 21st oh and scott by the way are you
recording this uh all of our shows excellent so when
you try and make me do a 450 percent increase next year i'm going to pull up this video and play it for you it's got to be another 400 percent
increase yeah i know that's what i'm saying i'm going to pull this video up and say now wait a minute scott that's that that's not what you
said you told me you're a great salesman you know so i believe i tried but man i can't make i mean
honestly who would have thought making the world sick would drive telescope scales through the roof
who would have thought it and and it's just it it's sad i mean i
i don't like it you know i mean but it it the rat that what caused it because you know i've people very close
to me have died from it and um it's just
it just is what it is so well but we can take comfort in the fact that we have a hobby that can comfort people
in this time and make make them feel better and give them something to do you know
and i really i really encourage i keep i said this before look if you're in astronomy
the best thing you can do is be trying to identify people around you who have got telescopes and do
everything you can to make things make them successful
because the more people in this hobby the stronger the hobby becomes and we need to make the help those
people who got into it on a whim or just out of desperation make
them successful and by making them successful they'll buy more telescopes they will uh
that helps them right and that helps that drives innovation in our industry
you know if it's just the same thing over and over and it's the same 50 people buying telescopes there's no
no real push for innovation and you know that that flow and that growth is what we really need
and it also gives us more people potentially talking about controlling light pollution
which is a you know yes you can narrow band filter and you know but when you can't see the
milky way it's hard to understand what the milky way is when you look up in the sky and see 30
stars you don't understand what's up there and it doesn't have to be it's a very simple
thing to fix it's just going to take a little time sorry that's my rant scott do you have any questions any
other things you want to talk about i don't think so uh there were some questions about inventory okay uh somebody wanted to
know if any of those 127s that you were talking about are available as ota
only uh yes we do have some otas
[Music] did they say specifically which ones 127 they didn't say which one you give me
the mac 127. it would be my guess let me look up the number real quick
mike wiesner said some people will step outside the evening of december 21st and discover they can't see the planets
because a building is in the way well that's a that's a great point mike because this is happening in the
southwest sky it's not high overhead it's happening at sunset and and so you need to be going out and
scouting and finding the planets tonight tomorrow night and figuring out where they are so you don't run into
exactly what mike talked about that's a brilliant observation mike thank you yeah we've got uh matt kaz
127s in stock yeah yep and so uh i if
if they're not on the website uh you can email us give us a call and we'll get you set up
but do not wait don't call your dealer if you've got your favorite dealer
call them place yourself through them tell them you saw that the first light mc127 1900 ota
optical tube assembly is available get it ordered but do not wait because
you'll be disappointed potentially you need to figure out how to make it
work before then what else you got scott that's it that's it i know you need to
get back and uh get back to processing orders so hey thanks everybody for watching i love
doing these thank you love doing this have a great day everybody bye take care bye-bye
hey scott i just uh so just to let everybody know if you're not aware of it already whoever's watching
the program right now the starship is going to launch in about 20 minutes
guys as much as you love us i'm sure whoever is interested in that
will probably shut down from us and go to that i i i recommended i put out the link i'll
put out the link again okay um and uh you can just open up
another webpage and yep jump back and forth or have two web pages up together and right and uh
keep your eyeball on on the launch so you don't we don't want you to miss it so right
it's an important historical event right
yep and so now um uh jerry is uh jerry's gonna continue on with the
mentoring uh program uh there's a lot to go through and so he'll just give his install
uh for each program or each each show that we do so yep so i'm gonna continue on today
um let me
share let's see
i've got my big fat cursor there for everybody to see where i'm at so i'm going to continue on
the uh we started with celestial charts yesterday or
monday i guess it was and i talked about the manual uh or the paper charts
that we have available to us today um for example
i think this is the one i showed this is one of the uranometria sharks
which is a very nice chart set of charts and then there's also the uh
these charts which is kind telescopes pocket sky atlas charts and i'm going to move on
i started to introduce the the planetarium program cart to seal and i'm going to move on to
that in a minute
so and this is going to dovetail into my
discussion about celestial navigation okay so one thing that we need to do
to navigate it's just like navigating on the earth with a map you need to know where you are and where you're going
right to be able to connect those two dots if you don't know where you are how do you know how to get where you
want to go that's true that's a common you know that's a very fundamental piece of
knowledge there if you don't if uh but remember jerry not all who wander are lost
well that's true they know where they've been they know where they've been well they
do know where they've been that's true um so two of the two of the star charts
that i are the planetarium programs which is actually a star chart program there's two types of
actually i should differentiate those there's two types of programs there's an electronic star chart program
and there's also a planetarium program now pl if anybody's out there i'm sure a lot of a lot of our
audience have been to planetariums and that's basically a realistic depiction of the sky that's what a
planetarium does a star chart is basically an electronic version of a paper chart
so there's different levels of detail and different levels of reality brought to the
computer level program the one i'm gonna show um is here
is carte de seal uh which is um basically bills itself as a star
chart program okay because it's not doesn't really give a realistic view of the sky
like stellarium does and uh and for everybody's information i posted
this this document that i'm using here this training document that i've developed
over the over the last year uh on the pmc8 forum so
it's in the file section of the main main group under under explore scientific official
files you'll find it there so the thing about paper charts like i
talked about yesterday is that they're for a very specific uh epoch or specific date all right
and uh it's also called the equinox date and some some people may call it
the equinox date but the any any church you find today that are paper charts are using
january 1st 2000 as the date for the depiction of the star coordinates that's because the earth's
procession causes the ra right ascension and declination coordinates to change over time
for each object in the sky so the nice thing about computer charts
which i'm going to show in a minute cart to seal is that you can you can set them to display the j2000 coordinates
grid or you can make it display the current epoch date today's date
coordinate grid which tells you what the apparent coordinates are today so that's the those are the coordinates
that you typically use when you go to a a position in the sky you tell it based
on today's date what's the right ascension and declination coordinates of the object that's what the planetarium will do so
um those are those are things to keep in mind when you're using electronic charts um
so celestial navigation is basically it's it can mean different things uh
you know celestial navigation on the earth's surface is using a section to measure your position on the earth's
surface as a reference okay so you can look with a sextant and point and measure the angles
and the current time and you can determine the longitude and latitude on the earth's surface where you're at
in in the celestial sphere we use term navigation as understanding where in the
sky we want to point our telescope and that's why you see telescopes called
go-to systems or go-to telescopes because it will go to the object that
you want to go to in terms of pointing the telescope at it to look at
but i i like to use the general term navigation celestial navigation not just go to because celestial
navigation is actually more more involved with it than just go to him you know go to the
right guys sure it's like it's like taking a a simple camera and say it's a point-and-shoot okay you can point and
shoot it of course which is like go-to but there's there's some things you can do to improve your images and there's some
more to it to understand more about what's going on with your images instead of just pointing and shooting
you can set the exposure you can set the iso you can do a lot of different things and that's kind of the way it is with
using a planetarium or a scar star chart program to navigate the sky
there's other things involved that's that's more than just go to
the object in the sky uh so let me bring up the and i brought
it up the last time i think uh cart to seal um
and here it is can you see that it's uh
right now it's uh celestial section six celestial navigation
yeah can you see my chart or oh i guess i'm not sharing that i'm not sharing that piece
okay let me let me go back to that see i'm going to stop the share i'm not
going to reshare the chart
happened to the chart i gotta bring it back up again and then
go back to the zoom and hit share
and hit cart to seal and then share there it is all right so this is the chart
right now it's uh there's a cup there's a lot of different features and menu items and things i'm not going to
get into all the details about about this but suffice it to say
you can display any area of the sky on the chart you can you can so first of all you can
see right now what what coordinate system it's in that's on the left hand side this is in the out as coordinates and right now it's
pointing straight up to zenith the center of the and this is kind of like a planetarium
view except or a planosphere view except it's not centered on the north celestial pole it's centered on
zenith okay planospheres are centered on the north celestial pole
which is what the equatorial coordinate system is all about so this
is this is what you would see looking up on the earth's surface straight up so if
you look straight up you'd see the center of the chart and if you go over left or right you'll see the horizon line
right and you can see over to the left there's southwest um i'm not sure if
that's let me see if i can get my big fat finger here i don't know why it's not showing up
um i do have a big there's a cursor right here see where it
says southwest right there yeah that's the that's the horizon line
and then south is up here all right and then you go to the other side you can see northeast and north
so this line right here is the meridian it's a line that passes
from the north celestial pole which see right here is polaris see there
that's polaris and it passes from the north to the north star through zenith to the
south and um to 180 degrees
zero degrees north to 180 degrees south that's that's the uh meridian
all right that's that's the part of thing uh let's go to the i'm going to zoom up
now and you can that's the nice thing about these electronic charts is you can zoom in and out and show more and more stars
as you zoom in and get more details so this is looking at the zenith so you can see the zenith
right here let's see if i can get my finger to come up again
all right right here is the zenith marker it's like a little plus symbol okay
and as as you can see i'm clicking i'm doing a click on the on the object and i can go about and
show information about the object that i've clicked on so this is 13 la careta this star right
here and you can get information that's another that's another feature that these
star chart and planetarium programs do for you is it gives you all these information about different objects
uh one other piece of information that you can get let me zoom back out and i'm gonna go
to an object you can find objects uh up here you can see where i'm gonna
search for jupiter okay and it should center the chart right on
jupiter and you can see it changes the perspective so the center of the chart
is on jupiter so let me zoom up and we can see right
now how close jupiter and saturn are to each other we talked about that earlier
um okay and there they are so you can
i can right click on jupiter and see about jupiter and it shows me a picture
and shows me an uh some information about it what its location is and right ascension declination
where it currently is uh in altitude and azimuth so right now the current
coordinates are and if you're looking up at the sky if you were to go outside in my location
and look up at this guy if you looked up 19 degrees in altitude and at 220 degrees azimuth you would see
jupiter and saturn next this uh let's see how close uh jupiter and
saturn is so i can i think i can right click on this this tool gives me a thing
to uh to click on saturn after i clicked on jupiter i think and it'll show me the
distance between the two objects okay there it is right there the separation
right now tonight the separation between jupiter and saturn is a little over one degree
it's actually one degree and 18 uh arc minutes so that's that's the distance between
the two now they're going to get very close on the 21st so this is an example of what you can
see uh in a in a planetarium or in a star chart program
and uh it also gives you a picture on this this particular program card to
seal uh one of the things uh so
one of the things that you have to tell the chart like i said earlier you have to know where you are to be able to know where to go to okay
or where to where your destination is the way you do that in a planetarium or in a star chart
program is you set your location all right so any
program you get will have a will ask for information like this in
terms of your location and typically if you want to be fairly exact you want to get your
latitude and longitude in in this configuration and uh you can see here where
it shows my location right here in the united states um right there's where i'm located based
on this chord the latitude and longitude that i've put into the uh
into the box it's my local it's my personal observatory lake of the
woods observatory at my house that's where i'm located right now so
it's very important that you put this information in otherwise it will not tell you the correct placement of the stars
that's a big part of making sure that you can find an object in the sky is to understand your
location on the earth are there any questions so far
um i'm looking over at the starship to see it's about three and a half minutes to launch
you know a little distracting isn't it i know it is a little distracting uh let's see
i checked my chart find the first target recheck find secondary et cetera i've learned a lot that way
it's from book babies um
andrew says saturn jupiter he's just talking about the
great conjunction yes i hope we don't have clouds on the
weekend of the 18th well again like we talked about before it's it's not just a one day thing or
one hour thing i mean you might miss the closest approach of course if if uh the very closest but again these these
objects move slowly from night to night so you know you still can get the same
thrill by looking at the conjunction over time right like ken said it's
really exciting to see these planets move in relation to each other
so there's a lot to see two minutes and 30 seconds now oh yeah we're going to stay on the air
as this goes down so yeah right um we may build we may just be silent for a couple minutes while we
watch this thing but it's going to be like i think it's like a five-minute flight
for it to go up to altitude and then come back down i think i would share my screen but it's not
going to be anything like uh you know the you get freeze frames when you're
watching a broadcast of a broadcast you know yeah right right
so 50 yeah yep a minute let me talk for another minute and then we'll go to that so
the other coordinate system so right now i'm on the altitude azimuth coordinate system you can see how close it is to
the horizon it's 19 degrees above the horizon and it's in the southwest sky
that's where saturn and jupiter are if i go to equatorial coordinates now you can see that
it's these are lines of declination and of right ascension so you can see it's jupiter's right on
the 20-hour line of right ascension at 20 hours and in fact i can bring up the actual
coordinates for jupiter and um it's almost exactly the apparent
coordinates are almost exactly 20 hours you can see it's kind of cool right there 20 hours 0 minutes and 34 seconds that's
kind of neat that it's that close and the declination is minus 21 degrees so you can see here
that this is the minus 15 degree line right here and then down here is
the minus 30 degree line um over on the left hand side over in
the lower left you can see where i'm pointing that out and so looks like we got 40 seconds yet
so i guess i'll be quiet for a minute and then everybody can watch this okay including myself
i can actually mute myself so i can turn the sound up a little bit
20 seconds now
richard grace is saying let's light the candle ten nine eight seven
six five four three two one one
zero they lit it up
look at this thing [Music]
yeah you huge that thing is that's awesome it's like a it's like a um skyscraper going in it's
like a skyscraper that thing is just so steady look how nice that is i know
these guys are beautiful oh hell yes they know what they're doing
that thing i'm just the exciting part of it i love this shot
that they have from inside the rocket yeah that's right at the engine you know that thing is just awesome
yeah how nice and majestic that is that's just so
it's incredible are they going just straight up 12 and a
half they're gonna go up yeah they're gonna go up twelve and a half miles and then flip around and do their maneuver and then come down
and do the belly flop you know they're gonna they're gonna go like a skydiver what they're gonna fly like a skydiver
to sideways like this and then they'll flip it around to land
wow that's their that's their uh that's how they bleed off that's how
they bleed off their speed just by coming in flat
that is just awesome look how smooth that engine is yeah if you're watching us and aren't
watching youtube this is the link for spacex's feed
all right oh one of the engines just quit
looks like and then there's a fire inside a little bit
so one of the engines shut down but there but the system is counteracting it
it's amazing i don't know what they're out there did that on purpose or is this an
accident no i don't imagine that engine just shut down because of a problem
but again they're they're learning stuff yeah look how the look how the nozzles
move around and stuff to keep it to maneuver it the way they want right
they may not make the altitude they want unless they burn it longer i guess they could burn it longer because
they're not burning all the fuel as fast now right
but that thing is look at the gambling i know it's incredible
i mean this is i'm i'm sure they didn't like the engine going out but again it's a nice
test i mean it's really helps them get more data right maybe they want to stick one more
engine in there [Laughter] when they're maneuvering with two two
engines right now
maneuverability for them i don't think it does i mean it's just you can see it's cocked at a little bit of an angle now because they're off
center so that's really all their engine oh they're running big gimbal they had a
big gimbal there oh now it's one engine it's one
so it's apparently burnt off enough fuel to where it can still lift with one
engine that's amazing
it's gonna it's gonna get up to high enough altitude so i can do the well it's got a land it's either going to
fall out of the sky and not land or it's going to land so we'll see the problem is it's got a land with only
one engine now yeah it may just slam into the ground or out in the ocean
so we'll see what happens when it comes to flip around
i wonder if they're just going to burn the fuel out and then let it fall to the earth
it's like we're getting there but they could maneuver the skydive they could they should demonstrate the maneuver for
the skydive now what is happening now you see that smoke uh oh
that did not look good that did not look good it's on it's almost on fire or something
i don't know what is that that's falling out of the sky right now oh it's trying to maneuver now so it's
trying to flip now so look see it's trying to flip now okay that was hopefully on purpose
well they can't maneuver like they wanted to because they don't have the engine to gimble it to the position but they're actually
maneuvering it flat see how they're coming down oh there it goes they're actually getting the maneuver
there's the skydive maneuver amazing they're learning a lot of they're
getting a lot of good data right now so that's how it's going to enter the
atmosphere and slow down
we'll see so now there's i don't know if they're going to be able to re-light the engine at all
so it's a very stable just you know very
stable
this is just they've already got another starship ready to go sn9 ready to go yep so even if this one gets
destroyed it's not going to be you know not a setback at all
so we'll see i'll have the clouds right now they'll have to restart the engine if
they expect to land this thing otherwise it's going to slam into the ocean i imagine
well look they're controlling the descent oh they're doing it they're controlling the decent are they
you're you're five minutes you're ten ten or five minutes five seconds faster than i am let's see what happens uh that did not
look good oh they restarted the engine oh yeah they exploded oh dead yep
okay they were able to flip it around oh it just slammed into the ground oh
they didn't yeah because they only had two engines instead of three they couldn't slow it down fast they have one engine
[Laughter] it hit i mean it was
close that's what you call a hard landing yeah that's right but they hit the target too yeah he did
hit the target it looks like they did so that's awesome that was a great job
i wonder if it's still standing up or if it's just no it's like destroying i can't see i
can't see it's it's slammed to the ground yeah it's destroyed
that was great that was pretty awesome
all right well i really don't have much more to cover
with celestial navigation we'll we'll get more into it next time on friday clearlife58 said that's why
they call it a test yep that's right yeah
no they i think they did great yeah apparently i mean clearly they had still
had a lot of fuel on board because that explosion was huge yeah did you watch that
it was awesome came in a little bit too fast well they lost they had coming in
well over 100 you know i don't know how fast too fast
looks like no i expect i expect maybe they'll crash one or two more and then they'll get it
awesome test congratulations starship team yeah yeah i would say it's a success
oh absolutely on many points here
well you can't learn anything by not making mistakes basically or or having failures that's really what
what elon musk is all about right that's why we tell people when they use
their systems if they have questions about well whether i can do this or do that just try it
and you'll either be successful or fail at it and you learn something
yeah clearly 58 says don't you wish you could blow up a multi-million dollar product and call it a good dust
[Laughter] yeah yeah i
would i would declare it as success too so they got most of their maneuvering
done they got a lot of data they don't have everything they didn't complete all their checklist items but again it's they
probably didn't expect well elon musk said i gave it a one in three chance of of not having a failure so
oh sure right well you know i mean how many
you know redstone you know missile slash rockets that's right they
had nasa had tons of failures before i mean spacex really
knows what they're doing they're not going to have the number of failures that nasa had early on that's right because they've got a lot
of experience landing landing the falcon i mean they've got
and it looked like except for the if the engines hadn't failed they probably would have landed right you know the way they were
maneuvering and the way they had control over the ship um it looked you know
looked good yeah
so yeah so yeah if you're also interested to
learn more about uh space exploration and nasa i would recommend that
you might look in our uh yesterday's broadcast with uh alan stern
uh that we we did it was uh uh it gave some insight as to
the you know the struggle of of trying to get uh something launched and um uh
you know some of the politics that are involved he is a huge fan of privatized space
flight and i think part of that is is that uh there's well there's politics of course
uh it's not like um uh some of the politics struggles that uh you know
of strictly government-funded things so um but um i want to thank everyone for
watching uh you know sticking with us yeah and sticking with us you know
you didn't have to you could have just turned us off and gone to the starship yeah yeah and for sticking with us through this really super busy time and
everything um uh stefan i have an email i've put you on the
global star party mailing list um so you should get a like a little notification of that and anyone else
here that wants to be on this december 21st global star party it's the next one we're doing
we did one last night we're not doing any more until december 21st uh part of it just because it is too too
busy and um but uh we we can't we can't let december 21st slide this is
going to be you know it's the solstice it is this amazing great conjunction this
great conjunction that everybody's saying that uh it's been 390 years since it's happened
before but uh was pointed out at the global star party that the time it happened before
jupiter and saturn were lost in the glare of the sun they didn't see it anyways so we have to go back to the year 1200
something okay so this is a very very long time since anyone has seen
these two planets that close together so you know 800 years
yeah imagine my bet by hosting a global star party so we've got uh our earliest uh
confirmed people on global star party right now um would be uh
you know as far as being early here is as uh actually it's just one right now which is uh christopher go in the philippines uh
he's going to be set up so i imagine the way it's going to go is that we're going to have an early
morning broadcast we'll broadcast for maybe two or three hours and then we'll take a pause
and then we'll come back in the midday and pin down the day depending on who in europe or africa or
wherever they are okay decides that they're going to be broadcasting with us and then we'll
take a couple hour break or whatever and then we'll do the evening one uh early enough you know not at seven
o'clock but something earlier than that maybe 5 p.m something like that or even 4 p.m yeah that's because it's set
it's really low in the southern sky and it's really low in the sun i think some guys
i'm suggesting to everyone that they start shooting while they're still daylight okay because you will be able to get
jupiter and then you're in twilight you'll see saturn in jupiter you'll get them both
and then that way it'll give you longer imaging possibilities but for a lot of people they're looking
at uh they're all saying yeah we got about a 30 minute window okay um but i i think that can be
stretched out to an hour or longer so uh we'll see how that goes um but we'd love to have you on you know
forgive us for uh you know uh not being able to get our arms around everything but
um we do want you and we're very happy you guys follow us and support us and um so anyhow
jerry thanks very much um thank you hopefully uh uh in in the middle of all that
excitement of the rocket you you remember what jerry said about uh the celestial navigation navigation yeah
we'll we'll get more into it next time we'll continue on the training yeah that'll be fun
take care everyone
[Music]
[Music]
so
and now folks it's time to say good night we sincerely appreciate it i like this part i hope we've succeeded in bringing you
an enjoyable evening of entertainment please drive home carefully and come back yeah that's pretty pretty
i like to call him and thank him but that might be hard to do
[Music]
okay
Transcript for Part B:
playing right now this is the intro okay i'm going to drop off and take a bite of
my sandwich sorry guys [Laughter] thanks club
hey how are you norman good you i'm good yeah i know her man hello hey david how
are you bonjour good to see you yeah
uh backache uh knee eggs probably goes with the weather you know when it gets cold the old bones and the old
joints gets a little uh rough yet but otherwise i'm all right
hey scotch you've got the eye on the wrong side of the v what's that
you got the eye on the wrong side i sure did let me fix that
we're going back in time here we go there we go
okay fixed i saw uh it's got that you have a la
mori tonight yeah elaine is going to be on tonight all right
so um he will uh that's great he's um
derek from chile direct from chile from yes
is that right how you pronounce it attacking
yeah i met him i was telling scott this earlier i went down to his uh autocoma lodge down there last summer
did you see the 45-inch mirror i did i was we were the first ones to look through it after he had got the uh oh
you made it yeah yeah so i never i never observed with that thing oh man yeah so
he had just like it wasn't it wasn't um he needed to move the eyepiece um uh we
needed to move the focuser around a bit and so it wasn't it wasn't collimated yet okay we were the first ones to look through
it at first that was extremely exciting i'm jealous
yeah it was cool we looked at the tarantula nebula of course so of course uh that was that was phenomenal
wow i used uh his uh 20 his 24 inch and his
27 inch as well while we were down there yeah and did a ton of astrophotography and
had a great time what what is quite a spot eh yeah yeah it was it was incredible and
we went in the summertime so the milky way was up high wow i got the best view hands down of jupiter i've ever seen
because it was literally like at zenith wow it was incredible a bit
see i'm planning on going back down there at some point uh well i have to i have to
yeah i've got some friends who want to come to you that's a nice problem to have to be um
and i'll go down there and have a global star party from there yes i am on board what do you guys think
i'm in [Laughter] i'm in too
yeah because it's frustrating to be to work almost a year on this on this mirror it's a 45 inch mirror that i bit
and wow i never observed it so it is
the largest telescope in south america for use by amateur astronomers yeah
yeah it's it's something and the blank the blank comes it's not one of my blanks
it comes from united states it was a a blank that was supposed to go into a
satellite for a survey or whatever spying or i don't know and it was made
of of ule ultra low expansion ceramic beautifully made very lightweight and
the the focal length wasn't right for uh for visual so i changed the focal length i grind it
all up and i re-polish and refigure it and coat it and then when ellen heard about it he
said i want that baby i want that mirror now so he got the the staff engineer from
the big uh observatory in chile there to make and design structure
for his telescopes and uh yeah it's it's been a long time almost 45 years now and
he just started this year to do the uh observing with it so um can't wait to go down there and observe
with it yeah yeah i'll be happy to to go back now that it's uh none of these uh presumably he's mostly finished it uh
got it culminated and stuff so yeah i'll be i'd be happy to look through it again uh when it's all kind
of finished yep i have got jupiter and saturn here in
the same view right now yeah right now cool
um let me uh [Music]
you may have to step in libby how are you i'm doing good
good hi libby it's david here we can't see you david
you're in the dark no it's very dark out here i'm outside and i'm very good
okay
now over here in canada it's uh well near montreal it's all cloudy and it's about uh
minus 10 degrees celsius it's probably around 20 degrees or 15 degree fahrenheit
yeah well it's about the same temperature here but they're just a few little cirrus clouds other than that the sky is
gorgeous there okay
gary palmer is taking the night off because he's been working his butt off so okay
need to yep that over just a smidge
we should have um cesar on tonight and rodrigo
should be clear and uh chilly tonight so yes
all my right here there we go
um jupiter is here
and saturn you can probably barely see it is here oh yeah
i'm gonna up my actually let me just adjust the histogram here
hey scott can you hear me yes
i'm on facebook and um i
don't see the restream bot traffic which one should i look at to see the comments
from everyone i go to youtube
okay our channel on youtube you'll see it all or you can see it all you can smell all mixed together on twitch and
youtube okay so i won't use facebook thank you i'll be right back yeah you'll just see
facebook if you do facebook
it's almost time yeah
it's so nice to have so many of you um tonight because i know it's getting close to the holidays and
people are shopping and doing all that they do but i i wonder if people
well i know for a fact most people are have done some of their shopping online
you know uh retail store sales you know just in a brick and mortar type
of store uh dropped by 50 over last year
uh you know from the black friday cyber monday sales yeah uh but dot com
sales were saw an increase of over 20 percent
yeah there's going to be a lot of online shopping this year with coven i don't know if you get any from uh
my customer that i sent over to you scott because many people in canada call
me up for a beginner's telescope and of course i don't do beginner's telescopes so i i
refer you to to explore specific so i don't know if some of them called you
up well you can that's a good reference i can hook you up again
no problem no but i did hook you up with my with a lot of people that call me for a
beginner's telescopes and smaller instruments that i don't make so um maybe you guys don't have room for for
putting in any more into your shop you can see just over there
i really appreciate it oh yeah it's getting dark out there david
yeah it is so you probably can't even see me now nope a little bit i could see some of the
horizon you know yeah
well uh maybe we'll use david's light um
we have a little um coming up we have a video uh from goddard uh uh media
of the uh of the sun coming up so it's coming right
i always like to have some sort of little docu documentary type video
[Music]
so
[Music]
look at that wow that beautiful awesome
i was right jeez
like
[Music]
wow check this out it's like a tidal wave coming
[Music] up
[Music]
jeff y says large solar activity predicted for thursday aurora down to oregon
attention all ham radio operators at least hf ones yeah that's right
[Music] okay
yeah i'd say solar minimum's over yep
been rough i certainly agree with that
wow this is beautiful oh real [Music]
joe bergeron says i've always liked the sun for some reason me too yeah
there they are there they are and here we are um
we are live here with uh the 26th global star party it might be actually be the
27th because we did some uh uh
you know we did two kind of global star party type programs uh last weekend we had
mount wilson observatory which was really kind of a special star party a lot of fun we got to go
through the telescopes and see live youth views to the 60-inch telescope so that was beautiful but we didn't have
astronomers from around the world so i can't really quite call that a global star party uh but it was from some place
on the globe so there you go so it's either the 26th or 27th i'm calling
it the 26th so here we go and uh elaine mari how are you
doing fine i just came back from the dome back from the dome okay
absolutely uh i still observed it with uh with your mirror yesterday oh yeah
they were talking about that earlier in the program so so we have uh we have with us uh
uh if you're watching this and if it looks it does look kind of the same of what i see uh we've got uh richard grace
on the top left there richard is also known as the astor beard uh we've got um
the astra beard that's right jason gonzale the vast reaches uh i think every actually everybody should have a
nickname and you know if they're gonna be on the global star party bob denny i don't know what bob's nickname might be
but i'll just call him bob denny uh myself scott roberts jerry hubble's on
dave eicher chief editor-in-chief from astronomy magazine libby and the stars
student here in arkansas uh uh space enthusiast david levy
uh there in a black rectangle square he's actually out under the stars right now as we speak
and that's the reason why it looks black uh we got chuck allen from the astronomical league molly wakeling uh
the astronomy uh uh norman fulham and uh
goes to uh astronorm usually astronomers yeah astronomers
and then elaine mari um uh elaine's uh all the way down in chile um
and so we will we'll get started uh with david levy because he's probably uh anxious to get
at the eyepiece and uh can you see all right david i can see you yeah very well can you see
okay uh we just see a black square i see a little bit yeah so let's i'm going to
take this to speaker your ear [Laughter] right
so i can see your face and we can kind of we can kind of see you now with the red light
okay uh what i'm doing right now right this second is i'm looking through
my telescope minerva i think it's hard to see it i'm trying to um
trying to show it to you but i don't know where you're able to see it or the darkness
but i'm looking for it right now and i can see eo
europa ganymede callisto and titan and jupiter and saturn in the same field
of view wow wow all right now in the very same field if
you're using a 20 millimeter eyepiece it is really absolutely spectacular
this will be the closest on the 21st coming up in a couple of weeks
will be the closest that um david has his light on me a little bit
maybe you can see me a little bit better now but uh this will be the closest jupiter and saturn will be together the closest
great conjunction since the year 1623 and in that year
shakespeare came out with his first polio it was like seven years after he died
but uh his uh publishers got together and they said we've got to put out an issue of all his
plays and that's what they did you're also asking for nicknames tonight and i have one for you but i don't think
you want to use it publicly but i'll give it to you anyway it's one i came up with when i was at
the hebrew university okay my name is david shakespeare yeah i've heard that
yeah while we're here i would like to introduce you to a good
friend of mine sure and his name you might want to shine the light on yourself
his name is david rossiter i don't have a nickname hi everybody hi david we'll make one up
for you okay thank you yeah and now let's put it there oh here we go again
[Laughter] that is the famous handshake that my dad introduced us to
i remember when he first started with me was decades before called coronavirus
and we just do that and just laugh very loud
it was very funny to do he never told me why it was so funny but it was funny and we enjoyed doing that
and so i'm out here tonight at the kiricoa astronomy complex with david
rossiter whereas here david has a 12-inch telescope you may want to
shine your light on it so the group around the world could see it very bright light being astronomy and
all yeah it's not a bright light but it is a 12 inch telescope named archimedes
and he built it on principle sorry nobody keep on saying i get it
i get it one person gets it you win the prize of the day
and uh it's it's really it's really a beautiful beautiful night
uh the the serious crowds are about a fifth of what they were an hour ago it
looks like it's going to be completely clear so we're looking forward to some good observing even though it's pretty
cold and next next tuesday's global star party i'll be back
in the east wing of our home where i usually am so tonight if i'm going to do a poem or
a quote of some sort it's going to have to be from memory and here it goes the quote tonight is from stephen
crane and here it is a man said to the universe
sir i exist however replied the universe
the fact does not create in me a sense of obligation
i think it's interesting that the universe actually had the good sense to answer to the man who said sir i exist
but i think the answer was appropriate he doesn't the universe doesn't really
have a reason to care that many of us exist but we do exist
and the reason we all know that is that of all the the things in in out there jupiter and
saturn in the same field and uh the telescopes and this beautiful land this beautiful
state this beautiful state of arizona this beautiful planet
of the only thing in all the solar system and stars and galaxies the great wall and everything out there
as far out as we can see in the observable universe the interesting thing about it is that
of all that and perhaps more there's only one of each of us
we are unique and we are able we're the only ones that are
gifted somehow with the ability to go outside look up at the sky
and say to the universe sir or ma'am i exist and we do
you do and on that base on that note i'm going to give back to scotty thanks scott okay thank you very much david you
guys can uh very nice great time out of the skies
there in arizona that's awesome we will try that we'll be home probably around midnight or a
little earlier that's awesome yeah i promise i promised elaine we would um in
between talks we would take uh five minute peaks under the sky under the stars and so
elaine is uh you can tell he's out there in chile in
his home yeah good
okay here we are about the same thing okay so you see the screen yeah
uh so this is taken with my uh one of the raza that i have
uh guess what same same field of view yeah so here you have uh jupiter
sorry saturn here you have jupiter you get the ghost there
then uh first thing first 1623 indeed uh saturn and
jupiter were slightly closer but they were 13 degrees from the sun so i
doubt everybody saw it wow yeah people you know tell me 16 23 i say okay
and then i looked and it's very it was you know basically during the day and so the time before was 12 26. well 26.
that's a little yeah so that's why there was a year either way it's more than a lifetime oh
yeah you know i hope not but it might be
so anyway i took this to this image a while ago because right now it would be like very very low
the two largest planets in the solar system then i took the adjacent field which i'm sometimes going
to be able to move then you zoom like crazy because i made
a an identification beforehand
and you see that star that has a circle around it
the red circle yeah yeah that's the largest asteroid in the solar system
or like david would call it uh the smallest planet yes
yeah no it's the largest that's right so this is pluto and they are basically in the same zone of the field
and this is maybe a track by some elon musk or i don't know
right yeah it's tesla
i took a picture a while ago several months ago where jupiter and pluto were in the same the same field of view
and well you know i'll intervene i'll make some more pictures a bit later so okay thank you for just
making a different view thanks alain thank you okay
all right so coming up next year we will um uh we'll bring up uh
david eicher david uh and i were talking earlier this afternoon and i was letting him know
that um we had a uh we had a 90-minute uh uh chat with uh alan stern
principal investigator of the new horizons mission and uh
he was very giving of his time he answered lots of questions and stuff but of course we talked a lot about pluto
and david eicher's talk tonight is about pluto so i'll give you the stage david it is
thank you scott and tonight i'm going to talk a little bit about the age-old question is pluto a planet and of course anyone
can decide this any way they like as we know it was discovered by our friend clyde tombaugh in 1930 i want to be very
careful here and and precise in what i'm saying uh because it's a controversial
subject and we've had a completely non-controversial year so i want to get this straight
here [Laughter] but so for 76 years pluto was considered
a planet of course then came the international astronomical union
at a 2006 meeting in prague many of you of course know this iau astronomers
voted to demote pluto quote unquote to dwarf planet status taking it out of the
status as the ninth planet in the solar system they focused really on three
criteria to define what makes a major planet
number one a planet orbits the sun number two a planet is massive enough to
exist in the hydrostatic equilibrium that is it's spherical number three a planet has cleared the
neighborhood of smaller bodies within its orbit according to the iau astronomers pluto
satisfied the first two criteria uh but the last was
in question it did not so they very generously gifted uh pluto um with an
asteroid designation which is 134 340 pluto and it was eventually termed a dwarf
planet of course david i don't mean to interrupt you real
quick when it says it it cleared his plan it's a field of of planets that
pluto didn't do that then neither did neptune well i'm going to get to that you're
gary you are right on the mark buddy there's the story behind this here
that's what i'm curious about several several others they said right as well
yeah including the one we're standing on but i'll get to that short okay
but first of course came heartbreak from the school children spread all over
the world who wept in their milk and couldn't go on virtually
hearing what had happened to pluto and maybe its heart was largely in
america because it was a very american discovery if you will nothing of that
stature in astronomy had been discovered in the united states before maybe it was because of the
disney character too but for whatever reason school children around the globe went
ballistic hearing about this to exacerbate the hard feelings of
course another colleague and friend caltech's mike brown
uh who is the leader of course of an asteroid discovery team uh that has turned up uh very many
interesting objects wrote a book called how i killed pluto and why it had it coming
just to make the kids feel better okay you know this is all about as we'll end
with the story of pluto is the story of a planet with a big heart we'll get to that in a moment as you know
so in new york just to throw more gasoline onto the controversy our pal at the rose center for earth and
space our pal neil tyson took pluto out of the new and rebuilt
exhibit that focuses on the planets and put it with the small bodies of the
solar system the asteroids and the comets and that was too much the new york school children
went crazy so at this point just in terms of fair
disclosure i don't know is david still with us
uh left left already yeah he's okay well i can
embarrass him under the sky there yeah i can i can talk freely then without him being here but i was hoping you would
see this but he's probably watching this right i'm sorry he's probably watching
i have to say in terms of full disclosure i knew clyde uh near the end of his life quite well
as some others of you did as well it was david who introduced me to clyde and we spent quite a number of
nights under the stars here and there observing he was an incredible guy he was very funny of course at this time
very late in his life he was very small and hunched
over and his uh his appetite for launching puns however
was absolutely undiminished he would you know you'd be talking about lunch
you know in a chicken salad sandwich and he would throw a pot out and you'd it
was so bad and he would do this about every two minutes with a pun and you'd have to
just say oh god clyde you know and just moan you know but he was a master very clever guy but
he was also silly and as you may know david levy is silly as well and so here
i show some evidence here of this is a sketchbook that i used to
draw lots of deep sky objects and comets and things in in the old days i had this
at the texas star party one year and um i couldn't find it and i was trying
to make some drawings with a large dobsonian telescope that was there in the early year this was the mid 80s more
or less um and david and clyde and i were observing there with some of these galaxies and so
on so we couldn't find the book anywhere and finally clyde stands up we had folding chairs out near the telescopes
clyde stands up and goes oh i was sitting on the book and so of course to be silly he wrote
i sat on this book and signed it clyde w tombaugh 29th may 1987.
david never to be outdone wrote it was might share david h levy
and i wrote it's my book dave if you can
you can see that there that's just fantastic subscribe like comment
observational uh near due wells who were hanging around with him there
so i have to say that i have a fund that's in my heart for clyde and and also for lowell observatory which i'm on
the uh board of advisors for but that nonetheless there
we can look at the story objectively too and you can come down any way you like of course on it but the pluto argument
of course comes down and hinges on that last technicality clearing its orbit
jerry you you hit it man okay i'm going to mention now planetary
scientist alan stern scott you talked to him today he made the points that a house is a house
regardless of where it lies at 40 a.u at the orbital distance of
pluto earth would not clear its orbit of smaller bodies
excuse me earth would not have been formed there because there is not enough material
well but planets arguments by the way this is this is not a you know audience participation thing i'll
get to questions afterwards thank you but it's good to see you pal elaine um
so if it had existed at 40 a.u if it were in a different place which is what
the point of the sentence is earth would not clear its orbit of
smaller bodies so would earth then not be classified as a planet moreover in 2010 astronomers discovered
the first first earth trojan asteroid 2010 tk7
and a second associated asteroid 3753 cripney in an overlapping horseshoe
orbit so our planet doesn't even clear its orbit where it is now
moreover five trojan asteroids of mars are known
nine associated with neptune and jupiter of course has a substantial
population of the namesake trojan asteroids as well as the hilda
group of asteroids in orbital resonance so the whole argument to demote pluto in
2006 made by astronomers alan stern would argue and not planetary
scientists by the way there's a distinction falls apart according to many planetary
scientists the definition that they would say is sloppy vague and ill-conceived
thanks to the new horizons mission regardless of whether you say pluto is a
planet or an asteroid or a dwarf planet whatever you like to call it we now have
an incredible look thanks to new horizons at the pluto system which is very interesting it's uh much more
active geologically than anyone uh had anticipated we think that there may be
subsurface very salt briny oceans even which is exciting and we know that the
system of small moons uh at pluto probably formed from a large impact uh
which produced cheron as well as the smaller moons in similar fashion perhaps to earth's uh
large impact we believe that created the moon so it's a very very interesting
place you can you can call it any way you like in the end whether it's a planet or a dwarf planet well dwarf
planets or planets too so it really doesn't matter but there are some inconsistencies with the way it has been
discussed and defined over the last uh better than a decade um so it's
something for us to think about but again you can decide any way you like on this question pluto doesn't care it's an
interesting place and pluto doesn't care the first good close-up look at it fortunately now because of the flyby of
new horizons and we know that it's going to be an interesting place to go back to if we ever get uh
politicians interested in science in a big way in the future ever again
thank you so now you can disagree and bring up questions and so on if you'd like
i have i i put out there in the audience i asked the audience what what do they
believe you know uh here's an email i can give the
antithesis of all these okay one of the episodes that was missed is
that uh when it came time to name asteroid 10 000 brian martin suggested we name pluto
asteroid 10 000 and again it was like a lot of people who are upset with the
the idea that uh astro uh asteroid 10 000 pluto would be like that
um the iau uh has been criticized a lot but
i know the way it works and it worked correctly one of the first thing is that you
remember that the trans-neptunian belt is called the kuiper belt and of course it should not
kuiper in the 50s predicted there would be an asteroid belt much further away than pluto because at the time they
thought pluto was a planet it had the air the the mass of the earth and so on and so on
uh julio fernandes in the 60s is a neurogram astronomer a very very nice
person made a paper and predicted there would be an a trans-neptunian belt okay
mike brown of course wrote this book and so on and so on the person who really demoted if you want use demoted
pluto is julio fernandez what happened is that the iau before the general
assembly elected a committee to define what is a planet because clearly there was a
problem that was going to happen uh you had like a huge number of transnepuna and asteroids a lot of them
had the same property as a same dynamical property as pluto meaning it's
in resonance with with nephewn the committee was i think i don't
remember there was rick bienzel
owen gingeriff he won williams in a british uh
andre bryck and a japanese guy i forgot the name and they came up with this idea of
hydrostatic equilibrium and the idea that everything larger than 1000
kilometer would be called a planet everything smaller would be
an asteroid the main problem is and that's that's the point
you cannot measure the diameters of these objects easily even pluto which is the largest one the
biggest one we measured it correctly well what happened
i i'm one of the co-author of the publication we observe pluto a relative with the
occultation and the problem was if the atmosphere is stratified or not stratified the diameter changes a little
bit but basically we published a paper before the flyby and it turns out that
new horizon found the same diameter as us your horizon is very good
well done the biggest asteroid we took like 70
years to find the correct estimation of the diameter aries was about the same thing mike
brown believed that he was between 3 000 5000 kilometers
using spitzer space telescope hst and so on and so on we observed i mean we were two there was
a group at la cia and i was here with a 20 inch telescope we observed an occultation and we got
the diameter slightly smaller than than aries so the largest asteroids are very
hard to measure when you have an asteroid which is like 1 000 kilometer it may be 1300 700 and basically the
idea is that you cannot use the diameter as a parameter to define what is a planet was it what is an asteroid if you
measure i mean if you do it correctly uh you will see if you put inclination
and then mass because a planet is a massive object i
mean in our in our mind you will see that you have the eight planets and then a lot of asteroids and pluto is just in
the pack of asteroids so for many people it's just an asteroid
the problem is is this one imagine you have a group of people and you try to select which are which but then on the
criteria like the blood group you can just not look at the people and so this is uh a
plus this is odc no you cannot you cannot measure it so you cannot classify
things using parameters you cannot measure you are not able to measure
of course there are the very very small ones so everybody will agree that a 50 kilometer object if it's 100 20 is an
asteroid you have the very big one so you could argue that uh pluto is an asteroid aries is an
aesthetic it's a planet sorry omega is a planet but then you have like ten thousands of objects in between that you
cannot classify because you don't have a precise measurement and that was the
idea so the people of the committee of the iu committee arrived at the commission of
you know the iu general assembly there are very few moments where everybody is together so there is a like a room where
there are the you know the cosmology another where they are the i don't know the quasar people the stellar people and
there is a room where there are like small bodies people and of course all of them rejected uh the
the definition that the group at the diu group had come with come up with yeah
because it's it's idiotic you cannot measure the only thing you can measure correctly
basically is the orbit and that was it that's why it was rejected and the bad thing is
very hastily they made a new definition and so on i agree that the third the third law if you want clear its orbit is
not very clean but in a way it's clean because the
trojan asteroids are there and they are there to stay so it's clean when you have a
an earth crossing asteroid normally you can say that in the next million five
million years the thing is going to go away so that was basically the idea and then
some people were very upset so they very created hassily dwarf planet category
which is uh that's the only point with which i agree with mr stern
which is that this is a stupid category what happened is that we went from an
epoch where the planet a planet was mercury venus the earth mars jupiter
saturn uranus depended it was a list of objects there was no physical definition
then the astronomers came up with a nice definition of planet which you may or may not agree
it could be changed or not and so on and so on and then dwarf planets which have
absolutely no definition a dwarf planet is pluto arizona
orcus blah blah blah blah blah yeah then and then we don't know uh mike brown as
uh if you look uh if you google mike brown and dps division of the
planetary science he has a he has a web page where he keeps all the translatory
and objects yeah and it's it's a very interesting page because basically you see that it's a mess so it's really
anyway that was my point of view of course sure well i and mike mike brown's email
is pluto killer at caltech.edu yes
mike is a friend and i knew brian marsden well and i grew up from teenage years knowing rick
binsel so so it's a small group of people who are on multiple sides but whatever we think about it it's fun to
talk about and elaine i had one of the most fun nights of observing of my entire life
at your place there and i hope to get back there soon
mirror the 45-inch wow i was there before the 45-inch was there
it was maybe a decade ago so so i would love to come back and use that yeah
it was an astronomy magazine group that's right maybe six seven years ago or something like this yeah yeah yeah
but i think it was before the 45 was there oh yeah clearly the 45 inch well i bought the mirror
what was it like five four five years longer i think at least four years ago
yeah it took four years to make because it's a lot of money
it's not finished well not that my son is coming from france and in in
his suitcase he has the encoders uh the motor is in santiago it's a big
mess and of course i don't have money right now i got to look through the 45-inch last summer
it's really cool underneath the best sky on earth
and with that group of large telescopes you have that that's in all seriousness
that's a place to go visit elaine every astronomy enthusiast in the world should
get down there it's got a sunflower field of telescopes
yeah there's nothing that you can imagine uh that you'd like to look at that you
can't look at under that sky and with those telescopes you can look at anything you can think of it it's
starting the good thing here with the latitude we have is the the the small deeper is the only
constellation we don't see yeah you can see more or less and so we have
a you know quite nice view it was a there's a question from chat
okay and somebody would like to know is the diameter of a planet essential to
identify it as a planet is that one of the well in the sense that it's large enough
to be spherical yes yeah okay
okay kind of more that's what you were saying
you can find 100 kilometer asteroid which is very cold but it will not be because of the of the pressure just like
the shape is like that yeah right so the diameter is directly proportional
to the mass and the the object is massive because there were a lot of asteroids there a lot of
material and they collided to make to make the planet that's why the argument
yeah i didn't like the argument you know if the if the earth was in the transfusion belt
it cannot because it would not never have been formed and that's why there is no earth there otherwise it would be
anyway all right what about uh what about uh titan with
an atmosphere if it was located where mars is what would that be considered
triton titan from saturn you mean yes
you would have collided with mars and make an even larger planet i mean
instead of if a type if like you take mars out like take mars out and switch it with
titan what would that be considered uh
physical impossibility and there's also an element of human
psychology here too you know it's not an absolute uh you know what i mean if
there were a you know a relatively a among the biggest of the moon sizes
planet uh that that had been recognized for a long long long time maybe in there
physically although it may be difficult or impossible to have been because of the accretion of bodies there
um maybe it would have been but but these are all you know we could we could you know
scientists are not supposed to talk about counterfactuals and say what if you know
yeah listen there but there is uh which is that pluto was discovered in
1930 or said otherwise 1929 plus one year there was no great news in the
united states at the time and clay tombow became from like amateur
astronomer to maybe the the most well-known astronomer in the world
uh because there was this publicity and the fact that the journalists needed like to
put a happy face a little bit to show that the united states was great you know there is a thing with america maker
great america quiet no politics no probably cute i can't i
can't boost these programs if we get into they shut them down so no politics it's
not a theme from like 2017. already in 1930 uh during the great depression uh
the the discovery of pluto was really a very big event as was for example the 200-inch mirror
because it it helped people to you know believe in their country again
and in a way it's a little bit like you know the so-called american dream which
is kind of a joke because of course everywhere in every country maybe not north korea
north korea but in any regular country if you you know intelligent hardworking people normally succeed much
better than lousy idiot ones yeah this is pretty universal
like a farm boy that then suddenly became the the most well-known person
and there is a very effective situation with pluto and the americans
it's a real good story in a in a terribly difficult era in not only the
us but in the world well 1930 was cool compared to 1942
[Laughter] if you compare while you guys are talking about molly
share her screen because yeah she still has uh saturn and um
jupiter in the field i'd like to show it so yeah let me double check real quick okay
and then we need to go to libby all right um
okay so uh this is the field through my uh takahashi refractor um i know it's a
little bit dim let me brighten this up just a smidge um we have uh jupiter
up here on the left and saturn down here on the right my camera's flipped around
um but uh yeah i'll zoom in on these real quick just to prove it to you that those
aren't molly looks like there's an unidentified previously undiscovered planet between
the two oh no one's laughing at planet jokes anymore
what are you getting all serious [Laughter]
[Music]
i go all the way out here see some moons yeah and then i will go down to
[Music] saturn over here there it is
yeah oh you can even see it has a shape to it yeah yeah it's a pretty it's a pretty short focal length telescope
you can see you can tell it's kind of oblong so uh yeah i don't think i'm quite in focus
either this this telescope is very temperature dependent and i had it focused earlier and it probably drifted a little bit but uh yeah there they are
and by by uh let's see next or sorry the week after that on the 21st they're
going to be close enough to see together in my eight inch schmidt cassegrain at native focal length at 2000
millimeters so um that's going to be super cool and i'm for sure going to be imaging that
and uh hopefully i have some cool images to show of that at the show yeah
so we will have a december 21st global star party uh so anybody that's interested in
participating in that definitely get in touch with me uh we're planning to get uh
people all the way from will christopher go in the philippines which would happen uh early our morning uh here in arkansas
so uh i'll be dropping i'll be doing live broadcast maybe two
or three times that day so it's gonna be a lot of fun i've got a couple of comments about the imaging of
these two planets they're going to be i imagine they're going to be different in terms of brightness saturn is going
to look really dim compared to jupiter when you image it so it's going to be interesting how people try to compensate
for that i'm probably gonna do like what i've done for um when planets have been near
the moon is to just take two exposures without moving the telescope and put
them together which i know is easy but it's the only way to see both of them no but it's good to present both views
because then people understand that you know saturn is a lot dimmer than jupiter and it's farther away so you
have to demonstrate that somehow i've got i've got mars right now and the msro if you i can show that real quick
for people okay mars i've been we've been tracking mars for a while
for the last few weeks actually a couple months and uh let's see here
so can you see it oh yeah it's much diminished from what it was a few weeks ago when i was doing the same
exact view and you can see my seeing is not quite as good um
but and it's a gibbous phase now you can tell that you can see some markings but uh again this is imaged with the only
850 millimeter focal length and it's an f5 so it's not really made for planetary
but again you can still see some stuff yeah um so i just wanted to share that real quick thank you
very much great before everybody gets uh too far away from the pluto discussion you i just dug
something up out of my archives you guys want to see some amateur images of
pluto sure sure
share my screen here you see this
yep all right so this um like i said i dug this up from the past
but this was actually four years ago and i
got into kind of an ad hoc collaboration with some uh friends on the cloudy nights forum and
we we started imaging pluto um through the late summer um early fall
when it transitioned from retrograde to direct motion so
took a picture of the main star field and then sequentially imaged the planet over the course of a few months to put
together an animation um and i'll play that for you here um because a lot of the conversation we
were having about you know clyde tombow and discovery of the planet um
it's kind of reminiscent of of maybe what he was um what he was seeing through the
through the telescope as as the days progressed um you know when you blink damages back and forth you can see the
movement so i'll play this i just thought it was kind of interesting went along with the conversation so you can see the planet
moving here through the days and the in the lower corner nice um
but i have um then the observation dates and the uh the names
of the you know the astronomer that observed it through those days
so all these images were taken registered to the star field and then overlaid on top of each other
so that we've got um you know the concurrent observations with the different astronomers
and then what you see here is that um the sky direction actually reverses and i trace the path here with the arc
over time so i'll just pause it here but this is um from august 31st 2016 through october
3rd and the path of that it traced through the sky and that's just a curve drawn through
the observations it was moving from the retrograde you know reverse motion
and then go into direct motion at the end that's great
yeah bravo very nice hey thanks so you know i took
a bunch of them six of us you know put that together but it's kind of cool uh collaborating with it also shows how is
uh clyde tombaugh's observation skill were to see that little dot moving
it's like wow yeah i mean if you look at them if you look at the slides without the uh
without the labels you get an appreciation for what's involved oh yeah it's like it's just a tiny little dot
here moving yeah and clyde you know looked at over a million images before the discovery on
those plates yeah well david they're eating a vacation
after that he got one that night you know he went down to the movie theater
in flagstaff and watched gary cooper in the virginia that's that's what you do after you discover that was his vacation
that's right yeah i've seen that movie it's a good movie uh david
yes sir yeah one story that i'd like to add to this first of all
the rose center demotion if you will of neil tyson occurred in 2001 well before the iu made
its decision in 2006. so he really jumped the gun on it yes that's right and i think david had some issues with
that uh david levy had some issues with that at the time as i recall
and secondly when virgo slifer showed clyde tom by the ropes at the
observatory i believe in 1929 he took some images of gemini and
put them on the blank comparator and uh just to help clyde thomas get used to
the blinking process and then clyde worked for a year and got around to gemini again and found pluto and then
looked back on those test pictures that have been taken a year before yes and found pluto on those plates as well
you're absolutely right chuck yeah oh man how
can you imagine no can you imagine that
the thing is i can claim i discovered pluto twice
what happened is that while scanning for asteroids sometimes you just go over pluto yeah then it's like 14th magnitude
when you go to magnitude 21st is is very bright okay and i was like wow what a bright thing
you know and yeah and i dammit it's pluto again [Laughter]
yeah on the modern telescope of course with the 33 centimeter astrograph and
the photographic plates of the time it was really a faint object okay but uh right now if you photograph it with the
typical server instrument it's like you know you have diffraction cross yeah
and so on but you know first you go like ah pluto
okay so we should uh we should bring up our next speaker which is uh libby and the stars and libby's gonna
live's talk tonight is about nebula
nebulas were one of the first things that got me really interested in space
because it was so cool that all the pictures i found they were so colorful
because of all the chemicals in the nebula and they were so beautiful and colorful so i started to do space studies and i
got really into these because they were just so interesting not only because of the beauty and how like
colorful they were because of how cool they were too like scientifically
and uh i was really into like the beautiful photos i could find online of
those nebulas and then i started really researching them and um
and i got excited about learning about like stars and nebulas in their life
because um it was kind of like a full entire cycle that
there's a star and then it explodes and dies and it there's these all beautiful
colors and then it can form new stars and then from the for no stars once they
die they formed more and more and more so my idea was when i was learning about
this was hey maybe every single night or so
far out in the galaxy there's another another nebula exploding so that means
there's going to be more stars for me to look at and i thought it was like a full entire
cycle because uh it was so cool to think about like exploding
and so um i was a couple weeks ago i was researching
about black holes and i was wondering how this happened because like there has to be a way for
this to happen and um and i got very excited because i like black holes and nebulas
and um it turns out black holes do form from nebulas and so i got really excited
about nebulas and like was super excited so i've been wanting to do uh imagery from my
telescope for like nebulas and stuff because they're just so beautiful and a lot of people like to photograph
them because of all the beautiful colors they can make from like the chemicals in them
and i know like a lot of pictures online people can like look up if you just look up nebulas you
got a full afternoon until you got a full afternoon noon to look at them they're just so pretty
um and so i was like researching on the scientific side because i thought it was
so cool that like a star can just explode and turn into new stars
and so uh when i started getting interested in their ryan nebula um
at space camp they tell us a lot about it we used to sit in these giant national geographic movies either all
the kids said in each and every row and we have them all spaced out because of the coronavirus and so um
i remember them talking about the orion nebula because the people at space camp they were very passionate about it
because it is one of the things in our sky right now that is very active it's always uh changing and it's very
exciting because you're always hearing news about it and um i was very happy because i'm
one of the like a million generations to be able to
experience extra a star exploding close to us because it's very exciting because once
it explodes we don't know what it could bring it could bring black holes our way
you don't know it's very surprising and i know uh i definitely want to do imagery with it
because they make because um i kind of want to discover my own because uh whenever i like look at nebulas they
always have these cool names like the uh rose nebula the ryan they always have these cool
shapes and names and i always think how it's cool how like it just rounds off
perfectly in some areas and then in the rest of the nebula it's just fuzzy
i mean it's beautiful how it can just change like that um and i was also like wondering about
like the dangers of it because when i nebula i was very interested in that because you don't know what that could
bring that could bring either a beautiful nebula or it could bring it like a black hole our way
and so um it was very exciting because i got to learn a lot about it at space camp and
it was very fun because all the kids and my class were like very excited about it
and we had a fake airplane lane landing area out in
the courtyard and we would all sit on the little airplane landing concrete area it was
just a huge piece of concrete and they painted it like an airplane landing area
so we all sat on there and the sky was so clear uh we were back away from like
a bunch of the city lights and everything was off like all the lights were off
and she would point and she we would all have our star maps out and all the kids would be moving around be like oh oh my
gosh there's an avion there's a new year um it's very exciting that um the horsehead
nebula is my favorite because it's an orion that was the first picture of a nebula
i ever saw like and once i like saw it i started getting like interested in it
because it was so cool how in some parts it was like solid shapes and then the other parts it
was just like disappearing and like fading in and out and um
they showed us this video at space camp about stars being born and like the life
cycle of a star and i was very interested in that because apparently it's like a huge part of
nebulas and um i know i were talking about like this sound a couple weeks ago
and like in a million years a couple million billion years it's gonna explode
and i was thinking like what if it took a black hole to earth
but imagine how beautiful that would be i mean i know it would be probably dangerous for all that radiation coming
at us but imagine how beautiful it would be to have all the all those nebulas and
tiny stars growing up right next to earth and how cool that would be
and um i've always been interested in art and i started like doing a lot space
art and i've been wanting to do like a lot of nebulas because they're because like they look like clouds
it's like our earth sky and the clouds are the chemicals and it's all just so beautiful
looks like a bob ross painting painted in space and it was so pretty to me
and i just got so interested and um i
and i started learning about stars and so they grow up and they're uh they're kind of like a little bit redder
in the beginning they become bright blue and then they would come back red again and then they die off
and now it's very interesting to learn about um and that's very stunned so
i've been like looking at images of nebulas to do and um i know a lot of people here
probably do a lot of imaging nebulas and i feel like nebulas
are like they're they're really fun in all ways for
astronomers because you can do art with them you can research them uh
they're beaut they're beautiful but they also bring like black holes and stuff
and um i was looking at the orion nebula on like the nasa website and looking at
that and this image came across of a black hole and it was so pretty
and usually your idea of a black hole would be like just a shiny black orb
just looks shiny it was like a little shiny mark on it but it was red around it
and um i came to realize that that was the chemicals from the nebulas that had
pulled and radiated and it was so pretty because you know most of the
black holes you see is the nebula are from like art or something that someone makes online from
like scientifical understandings but um most of it
is like the picture that i saw was real and it was different
and um i was thinking about the expanding universe too because if you think about it
one star like explodes and dies and then it creates a whole bunch of new
stars and then those stars grow up and then they die and creates a bunch of new
stars of their nebulas and all just keep on going and going and and um
[Music] i was very fascinated by the expanding universe theory because i was like oh my
gosh there's more star 16 this guy every single like a billion years
and uh a lot of people in like space researchers they're like oh my gosh there's the expanding universe and most
and when they talk about it they make it seem like so fast like it's all going to happen so fast and most of it happens
very slowly and i'm glad that we're in a generation that we're like kind of learning with
the orion nebula and i'm happy to like see it and everything because the photos
that we're getting from nasa are beautiful and i think those are the photos that inspire me to get into space
great libby thank you thank you you know um
your your um your part about how stars grow up and
and die off and create more stars you know i think that's when the most fascinating aspects of
of uh learning about the universe and it's how it's constantly evolving it's always like in this state of
destruction and construction all the time you know
in our sky we haven't seen like a lot of nebulas for a long time that's i find it
extremely cool that i'm a a young astronomer and i'm growing up with
a nebula in the sky which is very interesting to look at my mom's like is that the third beetle
juice is that the star beetle juice well i guess that is then it will die off and we'll have a
beautiful nebula excellent libby thank you so much thank you
thank you thank you okay so thank you very much
we've been running for about an hour we can go we can go a little bit longer if you like or take a break how do you guys
think i can show you a few images let's see some images yes
let's see some images and then we'll take after that we'll go to chuck
uh and do our door prizes okay and um chuck a lot of people really
enjoyed uh the presentation you gave on extremes uh it was uh it was pretty awesome i was
talking to terry dan about it and she said well i said do you think chuck still has something like that that he
could show again he goes chuck always has something up his sleeve so
if you if you stick around uh we'd like to see more so that i might have something for you okay great
great so let's see what uh alain has here
and uh richard gray says he's got the andromeda galaxy live
okay there we go we'll see some quick live targets and do door prizes and then take a break
there it is so i'm going to launch an image right now
okay so i'll just say through the rasa correct what this is through your rasa telescope
yes yes okay okay wide field thing about nebulae
one of the well one of the things that i can do in fact is
show you this one this is a 30 second exposure okay
you all know the object of course wow yes
and uh that one is an a an easy one one of the nice one that i observed recently
uh is ic 418 which is in lepus
and that's one of the only planetary nebula which is red it's a really very very nice object very
small very tiny but you know you clearly see the reddish side
one which i fought already twice to see and i haven't seen yet is what's called the
engraved hourglass nebulites in mosca
and it's a pain in the ass i used filters i didn't see it the whole
object is about six a second but i think the extension well it's a trick you know you have the
hst image you find like very beautiful eye looking type nebula
but i went over the field several times i have to i have to continue i will i will observe this stupid nebula
hello here you have uh well let me do that
it's omega centauri you no no 47 toucan okay
yes on the upper right you have the small magellanic cloud with some nebulae and so on oh wow and one of the things
that i like to show when i observe is this tiny thing you can see you know you see my cursor
yes yeah yeah so there is the big globular cluster and there are two things on each side so it makes me f you
know reminds me of messier 13 with the two stars okay yeah yeah this one is a galaxy and this one is ngc
121 which is a globular cluster in the small magellanic cloud wow
oh yay and so when you observe you can have
both two globular clusters one close to us
let me see yeah you see the two globular clusters wow
that's kind of cool to observe because then you have like 15 000 light years 220 000 light years
it must be quite a big thing to be like yeah far away the last thing that i wanted to show you
is an animation that we made recently except i have to find it sorry
i don't know of course yeah makes sense i'm on that pc and now i want to show you
this pc do you see this screen yeah okay it's an observation that was made
recently uh further away than jupiter there are a lot of objects which
are called the center objects and one of the very interesting center object is 29p
so 29p is a comet which very often has outburst
we don't we don't see your other screen we just still see the rosso one
that's really the first time an outburst was caught in real time you have the light curve here okay elaine we cannot
see it we cannot see it no you cannot no we're still seeing the rest of you
okay okay okay but let me do something stop this
zero stop start again
now you see it yes okay a comment
a video 29p is a very interesting object normally it's like 17 16 magnitude and
then it becomes magnitude 13 sometimes they have been outburst at magnitude 10.
and so that was the first time an outburst was caught in the process so you see in the square you have the the
comet yeah and look at how bright it becomes in a few hours it's really two hours
wow oh my gosh right oh you said that was two hours
yeah wow it's kind of fun because now we have the light curve and we can understand really
what's what's happening yeah
yeah super anyway just wanted to show you some actuality that was like the 19th of
november well he made already a few outbursts more since
okay wonderful merci that's interesting that that's really
neat that's cool thank you okay and uh
um richard grace had uh m31 live you wanted to show
you're muted i think richard i don't think so okay there we go
all right uh see we've got uh m31 live uh stacking collecting uh photons in the
backyard with the explore scientific 80. wow fcd1
um carbon fiber and uh optilong l-pro
uh in a filter drawer with a 183 zwo and uh guiding at uh five-minute
exposures and um even though normally i have uh pretty
dark skies for quote-unquote cities guys at quote-unquote portal six and i have a led street lamp 100 feet away from my
imaging location boy everybody's got their christmas lights out tonight yeah [Laughter]
but uh we're getting what we can get and uh i wanted to share that uh early so i got time to uh stack up a little bit
more for later thank you sounds good sounds good very nice
we'll turn to uh chuck allen and door prizes uh chuck uh
uh we uh have our participants email
their answers to explore alliance i'll put it in chat
at explorescientific.com
and for all of you that correctly answer uh the um the questions that chuck will ask um
we pull those correct and we mix them up and we pull a random answer winner out
of that group and then you're notified that you're a winner and you can choose
there are door prizes from our door prize partners which include
the mark slade remote observatory gary palmer astronomy and
the vacuum of space and of course explore scientific and so
um so we'll switch over to we'll switch over to you uh chuck all
right this time yeah thank you scott let me get the screen up
here okay by the way i want to commend
you and uh all of the people from the astronomical league for the great uh uh event that was put on on last
saturday so i think we need to thank you for your help with that it was a big success i just like connect with
the wires i said i only connected the wires you
guys were good work it was awesome we appreciate it anyway very much thank you support of our other programs including
nya as we usually do at the beginning of our door process we'd like to remind
everybody about keeping your vision safe in terms of observing the sun
you may be receiving door prizes or maybe buying your own telescopes or binoculars and it's important to
understand some of the things you should never do uh when you're observing in daylight or
you're around telescopes or binoculars in daytime always never rather use the sun
observe the sun without professionally made solar filters that fit on the front end of the telescope that reject energy
before it enters the tube they should be securely mounted and not scratched or
with holes in it never use a solar filter or welder's glass that attaches only to the eyepiece
some telescope companies back in the 1960s used to sell these and heat tremendous heat would build up
inside the telescope and behind those lenses and could burst the lens
for the safety of kids you may be around don't leave your telescope or binoculars around where kids might pick them up or
use them to try to acquire the sun with regard to eclipse glasses
make sure they're compliant with iso 12 312-2 international safety standards and
that they're not knock-offs that contain false certifications also don't assume that eclipse glasses are
for any purpose other than looking straight at the sun through the eclipse glasses they're not for use
in observing the sun through binoculars or a telescope but the light from a telescope will melt right through them
instantly don't use makeshift filters like sunglasses exposed film cds or other
type of objects for filters use professionally made filters you have clubs near you who have
experienced solar observers who can tell you how to do solar observing safely and
make sure if you're letting people observe safely through a well-filtered telescope that you don't forget to cap
that finder scope so they don't get a nice little burn hole in their cheek as they observe through your telescope
these are the scope off yeah these are the answers to our gsp 24
questions we asked what the third most massive planet in the solar system was the answer is
neptune which has the equivalent of about 17 earth masses uranus is larger
due to its lower gravity but has only 14 and a half earth masses equivalent so
our winner there um i'm sorry i can't read the last name because it's light hill thank you
richard lighthill the screen was covering it next question was the first magnitude in
our sky that's actually a six star system and the answer to that is caster and gemini
we have two large stars which orbit a common center each of those has a red dwarf orbiting it and then surrounding
the system orbiting the entire system two more red dwarfs also orbiting a comet center very complicated system uh
the winner of this one was andrew corkell wow the largest constellation in the sky by
area is hydra sort of like russia it covers seven time zones seven hours of right ascension in
the sky and has 1 303 square degrees and the next four largest are virgo ursa
major cetus and hercules and the winner of this question was scott eden so congratulations to congratulations
that's great very good okay tonight's gsp 26 questions
assuming that all eight planets had hard surfaces only four do of course on what
planet's surface would you weigh most nearly the same as you do on earth
again do not answer this in chat send those answers to explore alliance at explorescientific.com
now you understand you cannot stand on the surfaces of gas giant planets but if there were a platform there and you were
standing on it on which planet or the terrestrial planets would you weigh most nearly the
same as you do on earth and the correct answer is not the earth itself and we're comparing it to the earth so it'd be one
of the other seven okay what is the popular name for tomball reggio this prominent feature on
pluto
and the third and final question this messier object the planetary nebula
is known as the little what nebula
there's a bigger version that has the same name this is the little version of it
and that will complete the three questions and scott thank you very much and all right everybody stay safe out
there yeah thank you very much okay so um
we will um switch to a 10 minute break um
go uh get a sandwich or something to drink and we'll be back i
can see that rodrigo zaleda is with us let's see who else has joined us um
uh dt uh gautam from nepal is with us as well we can go go to her later
and uh but up next will be uh norman fulham uh who is going to finish off
the second part of his uh presentation and i think he might even play a song for us
which we always love so that's great so stay tuned and we'll be back in 10.
i want the album norman yeah we want an album
that's a good one i could take we could take all these recordings and make an album out of it yeah he sang
a song for when he gave a program from my club that just set it on fire i mean it was
fantastic that's what's the whole program thank you
that could create the uh the global star party soundtrack album
uh
get yes
i
oh
um
uh
so
uh
so
um
um
hmm
well hello everybody we are back um and um
we are happy to bring on um
norman fulham norman is always a delight whether you're seeing him live in person
at a star party or here on the global star party maybe you had a chance to wander into
his shop and see all those amazing telescopes but norman where do we
where did we drop off at uh for your last presentation and where did we pick it up okay uh last
what was two weeks ago i think i believe uh was from the beginning of my telescope
making and mirror making up to uh was true with my basement and then i moved
out from my basement to my first shop and then we stopped at the when i moved to my
shop that i have right now uh and that was about eight years ago when i moved in here so what the presentation
i'm going to do tonight is about from let's see 2012 about up to about
two years ago so it's not up to date yet because i didn't have time to to finish a new one but uh will give you a good
idea what i'm saying what i'm doing right now sure oh maybe there'll be a third part
to this president yeah it could be i got to do it though this is a no powerpoint that i did for the royal
astronomy society of canada that i presented at the astar fest actually in
one of the big star party in near toronto that you you came
so uh i'm gonna share my screen
this here do you see that
not yet not yet
me okay here it is here share
you see it now yes all right okay so let's
let's try from the beginning of that presentation okay
so okay so like i said um when i moved into
this uh the presentation will show a bit a little from the last presentation what i
was doing in those years those are some pictures taken with one of my uh
optics from mr anthony wesley in australia very nice
picture of jupiter and saturn and mars
that was a in 2014 that's an old picture okay so
we recognize the place cellophane uh that's when uh
i was building uh i'm still building wooden telescope but that was the main thing that was building them at wooden
telescope this is a my uh bertha number two in that telescope there's my first
mirror that i made uh 12 and a half inch f 7.1 that i
house is in the new structure and a new a new base and then
i presented that telescope as telephane and i won the first place award for there
beautiful scout thank you so i'm gonna show you a few of my wooden telescopes that i was building those years
uh this one here actually uh marcus lewdis owns it uh
this is another one at 10 inch so when i moved in this shop here
that that was a um what i was building actually
and of course the man in the moon altitude bearing hand car and my signature
altitude bearing yes love it and also what i was presenting a wooden
telescope at neve in new york so that was in those years and then at one point i said okay i need a new orientation
people were asking me for larger and larger mirror and bigger telescope so i had to do something different i
couldn't use wood for the structure and i needed to find a supplier for
large optics so and i had to create to build to make a plan
expansion plan uh and to do so well i had to build larger polishing machine for larger
mirror because i only could do up to about 20 inch with the
machine that i i had in my shop so i had to build new machine i needed a larger
shop too to house those machines and i contacted laval university here in
quebec to help me out on designing uh my machine and also for the new optics that
i was planning on i would that would go through this into this presentation
and also needed a large scale for what i was thinking of doing so uh we'll go
through this we're starting with the large polishing polishing machine that i
built because i had in mind to make telescope to uh at least a meter and a half which is about
16 inches or a little more than that for uh to start with so that i had to build
the machine because i could not afford to buy a grinding and polishing machine for this size was way too expensive so i
decided to build it myself so it's the the plateau of the machine that you see here
and uh on the plateau i was thinking what if i'm grinding and polishing and figuring
a mirror on a machine why not do it on on the same type of cell that would be
in the telescope so that way there won't be any change in the figure or or stress in the glass itself
when the mirror is finished and put it in the same environment than it was made for so this
is a 54 point uh floating cell floating point cell that is on the
grinding machine and is the machine here was the frame of
the machine and the machine is actually on rail because it's very heavy and it has to be moved around uh when i do uh
testing and all so i put the machine on on rails and you have the plateau here and you're
gonna seal the next one here the the first
the the mortar for the turntable here is installed
and also i needed uh the plateau of the machine to be removable from the machine so i can take
the entire structure the plateau and the mirror to do the testing and then go back on the machine so instead of moving
just the mirror and having to uh realign it on the machine every time i would do a testing
i decided to get the plateau and all the the mirror cell itself off the machine
with the mirror and be able to transport it and put it right on the on
the tilting table to do my measuring and the testing so the entire structure of the mirror is here the plateau the
machine and all the edge support is on is on the tilting table
and as you can see it has a 50 inch mirror on the on the tilting table here straightening up so
so when when the measurement is done i just flip it back and then take the entire structure and put it back on the
machine so i don't have to realign the mirror on the machine itself so it's already realign it
save me some work so this is the the overarm holding a
grinding tool on the mirror here and i think i believe a little further
out or what is the happy man when the first started to work with the
machine and everything worked fine so i was quite happy here
and here we go this is a a 50 this one is a 50 inch
mirror on the on the grinding machine as you can see it's brand new
how much does this mirror weigh about 350 pound only oh that's light that's very light for 50
inch mirror yeah and there's a small video here of the machine uh polishing
a 50-inch mirror here i don't know if it's working
and over here you have a dripper like i built a small
container with the polishing slurry that will drip automatically on the
surface with the photocopier uh motors and a windshield washer pump
that's awesome did you see what yes it's dripping by itself so i don't have to be next to the machine every time to to
apply the the slurry the overarm over here
[Applause] yes there we go this is the second second mirror uh motor
and we'll see underneath that the mirror sits on the 54 point cell
like it would be in the telescope [Applause]
oh does the mirror cell get permanently attached to the mirror itself no it's just the mirror is just sitting on it
just sitting on it yeah okay this then also i have a small video of
other machine and that works for the same principle and this big one
this is a 20 inch mirror
all the control for the speed and then the velocity and all
and see another machine next to it for a smaller mirror there you go
of course all the abrasive and water is added by hand so there's no automatic
feeder for the small machine friend of mine
the hell good help that's great so uh i needed more space for the what
was coming the big big thing here is the kill that i i
i got now at the shop as you can see here there's a hydraulic car lift just
to lift the lid uh it's 100 inch inside by 100 inch and by 48 inch inside so
that will become the master kill for the what's coming i'm going to show you what i'm going to
build in that so this is the kiln arriving at the shop in two large sections as you can see
here there's elements on the wall there's some on the ceiling and there's some on the floor so and it's very very well uh inside
insulated on the outside so we installed the the new
kale in the i so i had to rent a second a second uh
work area next to mine so i had to double my uh floor uh
at the shop so i had only had two thousand square feet now i have 35 or 38
3800 square feet because i had to add this area to it so as you can see here
and you have the computer control here that i can control the rays and the lower uh
if i can i can adjust the temperature to go up it's in a degree per hour or go
down a degree per hour if i wanted to so it's uh it's very very precise
and um and why i got that kill to make a techno fusion mirror so the techno fusion i
will show you how it's done uh how i do it uh i don't like the the the name
sandwich mirror it's a popular name but i don't like the
name myself so i think i call them techno fusion techno fusion does sound better it sounds much better than
sandwich mirror yes [Laughter] so i developed that with
the help of laval university optical team over there i i came to them and said i need a way
to make a large mirror much cheaper than what it it is right now with exotic uh ceramic
or a spatial glass much lighter than a solid mirror
and something that would be as precise and as uh good give as good a result than a
standard mirror so we came up with this idea of making a mirror with the top plate bottom plate
and columns in between to make the the structure of the mirror itself so it's very very sound and very strong and
rigid and by doing that i'm using uh
the material that i'm using is bro silicate 33 which is a pyrex okay and i buy it in sheets
different thickness and i i get the water jet cutter to to
cut the the diameter of the mirror and also it cuts me some strips of the
same material from the same sheet of uh of borosilicate that i recut here in my
shop to the length that i need to do that a certain mirror so what it's like
ikea you see the bottom the bottom plate and i located my computer
imaging tells me where exactly where to uh install all the columns so i do the assembling like like ikea
and it comes to and at some point i have to be able to to manipulate the uh
the the base of the of the mirror so i use a suction cup and
with the suction cup i put it in the oven and after and when it's in the oven
i finished the assembling and then i put the the top part of it which become the bottom part i will show
you there we go so here's the one this is a 36 inch
blank uh it's just assembled it's not fused yet uh what i do is uh
so uh the column stays up and don't do the domino effect i use a small amount
of epoxy glue on at the base of each column but not in between the the post
and the plate but right on the edge of it so it just holds it hold the post in place
so otherwise it would be impossible to assemble and just for so you everyone to know
there's an interface at the each end of the columns which is a secret
[Laughter] secret component will
melt before the structure will collapse on the under the high heat uh and it makes the
well that what makes the the fusion itself i see so there's a there's one it's in the
kiln right now the the floor of the kiln completely is on rail so come out underneath
i can install the mirror on the on the floor and then roll it back underneath the the lid
amazing there we go this is a 61 inch blank
just coming out of the oven after the first fusion as you can see here the bottom part is
thicker that will become the front of the mirror okay what i do is i fuse two sheets together to make them more more
rigid okay and the bottom the top top plate here will become the back of the mirror
so when we flip it over but right now it's the fusion a parallel okay this is a flat
bed here so it's all fused flat parallel and a small example of a 16 inch wooden
telescope at the back and to do to be able to grind a large mirror
to a a certain reassure of curvature if the if the
front plate is very thin i kind of do fast mirror because i would have to grind the entire material at the center
so we came up with the idea of using a convex mold that you saw the base here
with the the region of curvature as a convex so we
take the mirror that which is already fused and put it on the convex mold
so only the center touches the moles and and when we heat up the glass the glass
softens and then takes the shape of the mold as you can see here the back of the mirror is convex
and when we flip this mirror it will be concave to the radius of curvature needed so the
top plate has all the same thickness from edge to the center so there's no uh
uh that the one when we get to it to thermal equilibrium the entire surface
gets in the same uh at the same speed at the same uh at the right temperature at the same speed because there's no
thicker area right and now you can't see here that's what
are the few first mirror that i i fused together there's 236
this is the 65 inch and then a 50 inch right here those are the first that i had
fused together a couple of questions man yeah go ahead yeah one is somebody who's interested
to um to know how long it takes for you to grind your largest mirror
okay um it's it's not that long to grind because like like i said it's already pre-generated
the the curve is already pre-generated to an approximate uh regions of curvature so you're just going for a
polish afterwards well it's not polished i just i have to grind it from 46 grit all the way to three micron the
same thing but yeah i don't have to grind the center the center is already
grinded to the eraser it's just to uh because when it come out of the oven even if it's on the on the mold the mold
is not perfect so it has a little bumps there and there so i have to grind it perfectly so all the way to the three
microns and after that i have to do the polishing and then the figuring and this image that you see here it's a
focal test of a 50 inch parabolic mirror of techno fusion
because people a lot of not many but some optician or companies
in the past uh have tried to do the sandwich mirror and the big problem that they had was
the the print room of the columns on the surface in the figure of the mirror so it would they didn't have
they were not able to eliminate the the pressure point underneath each
column okay and i developed a technology and a way to grind and polish and figure
and that you don't see those it doesn't appear so this is the image of a 50-inch
foucault test that is another one here a different area of the mirror if there was any stress or any print rule you
would see dark area all over the place yeah everywhere where there's a column you
would see a darker area so it this image shows that there's absolutely no print
through whatsoever so uh so i got the mirror i got the
machine i got everything to grind polish and figure and test and i don't have
anything to to aluminize the the mirror so i already had that small
uh aluminum coating vacuum chamber that could do up to 22 inches
so uh i could not fold the 60 inches in there so i had to get a larger vacuum chamber so
i have to build a mirror a machine that could do up to 65 inches and uh
that's what we did because uh it was too expensive to ship those mirror all the way down to california
to have them coded and back so and the company that i was using to do the coding in the past for the larger mirror
it was in pittsburgh and they had closed down and they wouldn't sell me their equipment
i had to build my own so here it is took about six months of work to build
the vacuum chamber so i have a uh electrician electrical engineer i had a
structural engineer and a very good welder to help me uh to do the the work
and this is the assembling see these the big the the back and the front part are
uh i bought from uh you know the big trucking company that make the big uh
uh con sight and citron trucks okay or were you
on the truck carry liquids or something yeah yeah exactly those are the end part of these very smart
the metal has to be very very strong and the the welder has to be a professional
a real good because uh when the vacuum is achieved to do the coating on this
big chamber there's 15 tons of pressure that wants to crush the the vacuum chamber so it has to be
very very strong so here's the back you see the
diffusion pump and all the connector that will connect
all the the feed roof or the electrical parts
as the front that this part goes down this is the electrical uh part that on
next to it and uh there's this the 61-inch mirror that you
saw earlier coming out of that vacuum chamber there we go
that was uh the first very big mirror achieved here uh
fused here grind polished figured and aluminum coated here
norman how what kind of process are you using to coating the coatings
okay it's um there's a tungsten element inside okay inside
uh and there's also some we call that boats that are that we put silica in it
okay in powder of silica so each tungsten element we we put some pure aluminum that we
already calculated the amount of aluminum on each tungsten element to
be able to be because when we do the evaporation it's it's not directional it's
everywhere inside of the vacuum chamber that get covers so we have to calculate how thick of a coating we want so we we
came up with the number the weight of aluminum that we needed on each element
so why not it's done and the vacuum is achieved with the first the mechanical
pump remove 90 of the air and then the after that we do uh with the diffusion pump
will burn the residual molecule inside the vacuum chamber and in theory
when we achieve the the the vacuum needed for the evaporation uh there's
theoretically about two molecules left of air in the inner chamber so it's a
very very deep deep vacuum so when we achieve that vacuum uh
one after the other one i apply uh currents to the element to heat them up
and when the aluminum gets to the temperature that it wouldn't melt usually melt in in the air
because there it's a vacuum there's no air it becomes a gas okay it becomes a fraction of a second becomes liquid and
a poof it's a gas you call that sublimation so the gas expand in the vacuum chamber
so after we do all the elements one after the other i have to do the evaporation of the
silica which will do the protection on top of the aluminum so it won't oxidize
because of the air so after we do all these two process
the mirror is done so we have to re reintroduce the air in the vacuum chamber it takes about
45 minutes to bring back all the air and then we open it so i'll show you here i
think i have a small video when we open this is a 30 inch coming out
and we can see a small video when we open the vacuum chamber
the first mirror coming out and it was a success
[Applause]
yeah we were very happy that after the first real the first mirror came out that came out of there it was a success
and uh no leak in the vacuum chamber whatsoever
and uh everything worked perfectly so we're very glad i'm not happy
so now i have big mirrors why not build big telescopes
because when i started to do the technofusion i wasn't making large structure
and like i said in the past uh i am a visual observer so i like to observe with my
eye i love imaging i love to look at image of the night sky but
for me it's visual so um for large telescopes
when you get to a 30 40 and 50 inches telescope if you do a regular system
newtonian the eyepiece is very very high up at night so you don't want to climb up 10
12 15 feet up in the ladder at night to observe so i came up with an idea to do
a folder newtonian this is an example of a 36 inch f 3.5
and you will see that the eyepiece will be about here when it's done i will show you in
and here we have an example of a 50 inch f 3.5 uh installed in california
and the eyepiece when i'm looking at the zenith is a eight and a half feet high only versus uh about 16 feet high for
the regular newtonian so it makes makes it more enjoyable
safer and i don't know i feel better in the eighth foot ladder
at night than the 16 and 16 much much better
well this is the same scope in the in california wow you see only a couple steps and then
you are the eyepiece so it's very safe so here's the idea the basic primary
mirror normally uh newtonian the secondary will be here and the eyepiece would be about
here and then so i decided to lower the the secondary mirror change the angle and
you put a kuda in the focuser brings the eyepiece straight to you right at you
so it's much safer so it has the example of the 50 inch
that another one that this one's in in italy in the making here wow
but like i said i'm not a very good computer guy to design a computer so i designed all my big structure on the
floor on paper first on paper on paper the life size the life size
and then from there measure it and then get all my aluminum get all the cut all
my aluminum and perforate the aluminum myself here
and then i got a company that does a laser cutting for the altitude bearing and the ground board and the rocker
so everything was designed first life-size on the floor
so you see the rocker here the ground board the mirror box the mirror the
mirror box yeah there's uh the top part of the telescope assembled
standing in the telescope that's a real telescope when you can stand inside of your telescope that's that's a that's a
real one yeah
so i do all the uh get the company that does all the powder coating of all the parts there's a nice red for the for the
base this is for the 50 inch so it's very very strong paint so it
doesn't get chip or anything when it when it's assembled i always try the mirror inside before i
do the coating make sure everything's as well balanced and all
you got the edge support of the mirror because you need a special edge support for the techno fusion
54 point miracel underneath floating point so same thing that was on on the machine
i also do the regular newtonian with the the techno fusion but for the smaller one this is a 32 inch f 3.5 is pretty
much the highest that i would go for a straight newtonian
for the height of the telescope itself and this is this sits into one of my
best customer in ontario doug cunningham and his wife
he's got a roloff roof observatory and got seven on my telescope in there wow [Laughter]
when the roof is open this is the 32 there's 16 got a 10's got
a 12 and a six got a different telescopes and also
once in a while i got asked to do observatory roll-off roof so i i get kind of dabbled in that too so i
i'm able to make the roll of roof observatory
and here it is 36 inch of 3.5
folded newtonian all motorized and everything so you can't see the the eyepiece for the
this is andre here is about six foot one and at the zenith he has his two feet on
the ground i mean beautiful yeah so here it is that's i'm at that point
now but that was about three years ago so now next next time will be the next presentation will be up today what i'm
doing now so we're looking at like a hundred inch telescope on the horizon uh
well i'm more looking into 80 to start with okay
and i don't know screen sharing is stuck okay
yeah right fantastic so are you ready for a piece of music of course
always always okay i have a very scratchy voice today
so i'm gonna do an instrumental i'm not gonna sing i'm gonna play i'm uh
just people know that i build my own guitar too on my free time you know yeah
[Laughter] yeah this is an instrumentals piece that i
composed many many years ago um like guys i'll i was telling you in the
past in star parties i always bring my guitar and it's nice to have music or
singing but most of the time it's nice also to only have background music okay
and i compose that piece for the observing session very relaxing calm
and uh just to to smooth out the the mood to everyone
so there it is i have no title yet for it [Music]
do
[Music] [Applause]
[Music] do
[Music]
do [Music]
[Music]
do
do [Music] [Applause]
[Music] so
[Music] do
[Music]
do
[Music]
do
[Music]
so
[Music]
[Music] wow wow
that's beautiful that's wonderful yes we do one beautiful thank you
it's a good observing music thank you love it i love it it
definitely sets the mood and the tone and uh you know i can imagine just
sitting back like in a recliner up at the milky way seeing a you know
nice bullet coming past and hearing this music wafting through the night you know so that's great
it looks like alas and a recliner right now [Laughter]
well it was my pleasure and um i'm gonna have to go home now
okay thanks for coming out to play it's always always my pleasure and then um
yeah i gotta go and see you with that 45-inch
he's been begging us to come down so yeah i will go i will go as soon as that covet is gone i would go
in three years i don't know i hope
because pain in the ass [Laughter] see you guys okay
all right that's great so let's take a few minutes and look at
what richard grace has in his telescope and uh deepti
gatam has joined us from nepal so we'll go with her next
oh wow here we go this is this is libby's favorite uh object her favorite
nebula is right here it's upside down um and we got 15 minutes in on it so far
there's no up in space yeah there's no open space yeah but it's a horse head
this is true yeah so uh 15 minutes in after it came
out of the trees i started getting a little live stacking on it and uh that's what i got so far very great and
i'll probably uh switch to something else in the uh general vicinity
excellent excellent which scope are you looking for you're shooting through the 80 is that right uh yeah it's uh one of your
ed 80s um it's the uh the the fcd1 uh
carbon fiber model got one and where is the scope uh located
uh in my backyard well okay but where in the world uh annapolis maryland okay
yeah it's not doing too bad like i said the the whole lights lit up with uh with christmas lights and leds and everything
so it's still working i'm happy still working it's still working
i'm gonna stop it so uh we can get somebody else here all right richard thank you
yeah so deepti thank you for um thank you for making uh uh this um
time with us um you know i uh i know that uh you you work through the night
to get your presentation ready right yep and so is the presentation about uh
did you choose the conjunction of jupiter and saturn
you did okay all right yeah great great and how are you how is everything
in nepal everything is okay yeah everything's okay great it's good
to see you again thank you for coming on yeah thank you
i see a cat yes uh i have my space cat orion here
floating in space on my desk
he's been here for about the last uh i don't know half hour 45 minutes
yeah um i think i want to ask you all the question which is the upcoming day you
are waiting for
uh which is the upcoming day you are eagerly waiting for oh
december 21st yeah right yeah yeah that's the day
yeah that's the day for us and today my all the presentation is about
it's 8 59 am here okay
okay what's a great conjunction
yeah as we have familiar about the december 21st there's a great conviction in the day we are waiting for eagerly
waiting for is the great conduction and yeah
first of all the great conjunction is the conduction conduction of the planets jupiter and saturn when the two planets
appear closes together in the sky and as we know um just yeah
here's the time periods and the uh difference between this uh certainly in
jupiter and 21st december here is the great conjunction at the point zero six degree
uh airline and yeah and jupiter and saturn was last
aligned in the great conjunction in may 2020 and uh it's um now on 2020 after
the 20 years after this december 21st 2020 the conception the two planet will
uh appears to a trade position that is a um jupiter in saturn as uh jupiter's
overtakes the saturn yeah and um jupiter will progress to this dandruff further
and further away from the saturn throughout the decades of the 20s and uh is your familiars
and here i have mentioned the simplified way of measuring the time period of
the great conjunction of the planet two planets uh where uh in the simplified
way uh we calculated the orbital period of jupiter's and saturn or years and
synodic prayer and substituting the value and you know we take this after
19.859 earth years um after that um the great conjunction is going to happen uh
in 2020 december 21st and um
yeah and that's all and we want to submit
in the great conjunction of 2020 uh will be the closest since 1623 yeah it is
very special for us and it will occur seven weeks after the holy hell hello
centric conviction when jupiter and saturn share the same how heliocentric longitude on on 20
position bar 8 13 3 uh youth time jupiter so will be 0.1 degree south of
western in 30 degrees of the sun uh meaning both planet will be visible in
the same telescope field of view and uh through they will be uh distinguishable
from each other without optical um help optical age and uh the two planets will
be visibles and low above the southwestern horizons are in the constellation of capricorns after sunset
and from the mid northern longitude the planet will be less than 15.15 degree
altitude and one hour after the sunset and i know we are uh
waiting for that day and we don't want to miss it so me too i'm waiting for that a very
exciting you are the 21st december and after the sun said um
i'll be on just go to my terrace and i'll be sitting there i don't want to miss it
yes yes it's going to be beautiful yeah that's all i have prepared
deepti thank you so much thank you thank you i love your enthusiasm and uh
you did quick research of that that grand conjunction so that's great that's wonderful
okay well deepti i think we're going to go to all the way from nepal down to chile
right now with uh rodrigo zeleda rodrigo has
a live image and his telescope now so let's let's go there
hey scott hello hello yeah it's good to see you rodrigo
let's go and i take pictures from my eraser
to the oil nebula all right okay
and share with you my screen
there we go do you see my my screen it's coming
it'll take a moment i think
there we go yes okay yes and this is my
life for my telescope with five minutes of exposition when
i watch a camera and
i take this picture which the rsa is more more focal let our
telescope and more retire for the for the regular i
process one light with the pigs inside
okay and here right
do you you see my screen yes we see
this is a one line a little process the other nebula
i say when my my idea is two hours was a position and if
the sky and no clothes
right and in the in the week i
in the last week i take pictures for the song and
um for the solar activity and share with you this this picture
for the sun [Music]
how many telescopes are you using now rodrigo now i used in the
seo telescope now
um i check with you my stream
okay solar activity
my laptop is so slow
okay
okay yeah
okay do you see my screen now it's coming i can see you shared but uh
not yet and give it a moment
i sharing my my photo for the sound for the
uh with the apple telescope with a
a solar filter is glass solar filters do you see now
not yet not yet okay
okay
there you go yes we see
this photo is where we saw our glass filter with the
apple explore scientific telescope okay
it's a precipitation
in two minutes of a video of the camera
and this the
my first a photo like this this type and i
i practice more for more details but
i very happy with this photo yeah but
if this photo is uh unlike a um a white light
and i take pictures with the actual alpha filter they start work at
alpha filters okay okay i share with you my photo
so that one was just white light using what what what kind of filter
what kind of white light filter did you use a butter filter
it's a spectrum telescope filter spectrum telescope filter okay
this photo is a with oh yeah that's a lot of detail look at
that yes uh with a quark filter for the daystar
it is my my fifth uh picture
with this uh this this filter is it's very difficult to
take the picture for the the quark filter is a telecentric barlow
is more power in the telescope now rodrigo just to get a sense of scale
how how big would the planet earth be in this um
in this field do you think what's good i don't understand how how big
uh how big would earth the planet earth be to to the sun here about the size of
that sunspot you think yes it's a little
in the center of this the activity
complete the bladder [Laughter]
yes and in this picture i i like very much the
the magnetic regions like magnetic in you see the
the lines the and the this sector and this sector
you see the the lines like a magnetic field
right like um it's very very nice right
and that just to the curving all the way around the from about the six o'clock position at
the bottom all the way up to about um yes uh this is a
magnetic and one pole and one pole and the
uh line magnetic fields it's beautiful is my
uh my work now and this this last week is a
a very work for the solar eclipse for in chile in
chile yeah we were chatting about that earlier today and you were i know that you've been
very very busy um you mentioned that there's not many foreign visitors because of the pandemic
yes the pandemic is is complicating chile in the in the
south of chile is the totality eclipse the situation of pandemic is complicated
the these russian is in in quarantine yeah and
more visitors for argentina is more is
better weather i think chile is sort of chile and maybe rainy for the eclipse
and will you be able to travel to argentina or are you staying home no i staying home is is complicated for
pandemic and yeah i see the eclipse from for la serena in partial
yeah eclipse and it's very complicated traffic now
yeah yeah i understand i understand well better to be safe better to be safe
that's right okay it's called thanks thank you so much rogerico thank you very much
okay so um
we uh jason we have uh um
we have some time to look at some of your work that yeah thanks scott um
i already shared that um pluto the pluto one was really cool oh yeah i i tuned
into you um interviewing helen stern i thought that was a a very good interview thank
you he's a pretty inspiring guy he's done a lot and um
it inspired me to dig that up because i remembered i had that pluto sequence and um i tried to find
tried to find a link to it um on astro ben and that there was problems on astro ben and a
lot of stuff got deleted so apparently that gif got deleted too okay so i i dug up the the video the
original video and just shared it but um yeah i thought that was a pretty cool sequence um
like i said it kind of reminds me of of you know what you'd see if you were
tombow you know looking at those images way back when um i'm blinking through
them but i can share um some stuff i have on my desktop um stuff i've been working on over the
last few weeks i've got some solar work um i think first i'll share
let me click through into my
i can figure out my zoom is not working here
bear with me here no problem i share a screen here all right there we go do you see my
desktop yup sure cam all right let me go into here
uh so we talked a little bit about the conjunction it's obviously a hot topic now i um
i'm fully prepared to be underneath clouds on that day so i wanted to put together a
representation of what it would look like telescopically um through my
planetary telescope so what i did is i um took a
planetarium software and kind of laid out the scene in that planetarium
software from the conjunction on the 21st and then
took my best images of jupiter and saturn from this year and manipulated them
place them in position uh scale oriented properly and um you know
complete with the positions of the moons and all that so i took a a lot of care
with constructing this scene but this view you see here um is basically you
know scale wise with what you would see on an image and for my planetary setup it does fit
in the same you know it's a 6500 millimeter
telescope but it does fit in the field of view oh wow so it's pretty impressive it is impressive if i do have the
opportunity i'm absolutely going to go out and try and shoot it it's going to be a very challenging thing to shoot
and you know jerry hubble mentioned it in the beginning but one of the challenges is the brightness
between the two planets jupiter is going to be 10 times the brightness of
over 10 times the brightness of saturn during this event so no matter what if you're trying to capture it
your gun and you have them in the same field of view you're going to have to do something about that brightness difference and
it's what it's gonna boil down to is probably having to take separate exposures for for jupiter and
saturn right but for this representation uh you know i
obviously had ultimate control because it pieced this together but um
you know these are these are like i said some of my better images of jupiter and saturn so you can see you know zooming
in here quite a bit of detail into the planets sure
um excellent and saturn also
very nice so you put the moons in the correct position yeah so i i had taken pictures
of um both planets separately this summer uh near opposition
and yeah i had um i had captured the moons in those sessions
so i simply repositioned them you know it's the ultimate photoshop job
the the funny thing is you know i'm putting this together and i'm thinking this is this right here is way way
better than any image i'm ever going to capture on the 21st but
right you know that's a cool representation yeah i think whether or not you get great
images or you don't get great images it's just the fact you know years from now
you know you'll look back you know amateurs who who tried to take some images will look back at that particular
time you know because it's it's been such a long time since they were this close
yeah you know the funny thing is i you know i put these i put this um composite up you know on social media
and it like became my most liked image ever and i'm like oh gosh
you know this is just a photoshop job but um that's cool
that's cool this labels all the monies here why not
these are how the moons will appear and this is kind of midday and
um at least for for us in the u.s it's uh midday at
apparitions so you know i even put the blue wash of a daytime capture over top of it
very cool so i encourage anybody who's got the
opportunity to get out and try to see that like i said it's going to be a challenging thing to capture
sure low on the horizon for most of us unless you're will you know you're equipped to do a daytime capture which
presents some challenges you're going to be shooting really low on the horizon so you need a clear view
and you know really this experience
um you know with a long focal length scope is going to be you know
full of challenges but i think just sitting back with binoculars or your eyeballs is going to be
a really nice way to experience it yeah i would agree with that i would agree with that i definitely
will be out there uh trying to look myself so yeah uh but um
uh you know provided i'm not uh maybe i'll be outside with my computer
system so i'm broadcasting out there we'll see yeah that's the challenge you know you want to you want to bring it to people
live but you also want to experience it oh you want to do it same thing i went through with like the
eclipse you know rodrigo i know you're heading into an eclipse but you know
that duality of trying to capture it photographically you know try to
try to explain it and try to experience it yourself that pulls you in a lot of directions and i know when i was faced
with that you know i was making on the imaging side a lot of mistakes which in retrospect i wish i wouldn't
have made but um you know i at the same time i got to experience it
you know with the people i was with and that makes it worth it oh yeah
yeah i've seen three total eclipses and um for one of them i decided i would not do
any photography at all you know yeah that's a good choice especially
to feel it you know and that that was definitely worthwhile
um so sometimes you have you have to just do it
you know without always having that uh that those processes of how you're going
to photograph something going on you know it's like you got to go to the grand canyon
you know my totality in 2017 i was shooting with the uh
solar filter still on the front of the lens during totality and i was wondering why i wasn't getting any images and
trying to look at it at the same time you know it was one of those dumb moments halfway through it but there's a
zillion things happening i i'd say easy to make mistakes like that you know so um
um so i just have a couple you know i've been doing some solar imaging too i've got one shot of my solar setup here um
get a lot of questions about what it looks like so this is the uh explore scientific 152
you know i've been using this for um deep sky also which is why you see a guide scope on there but
this is with the daystar quark and the asi 174 mm camera on the back and this is uh
during one of the solar sessions and i shot that same sunspot that
rodrigo just showed and it looks like almost the same exact same time because it's got the same appearance but i
zoomed away and cropped way in on one of my images here and got a picture of that sunspot yeah that thing's actually
spectacular yeah i shared it on my uh news feeds so it's really beautiful thanks
and um this is the earth scale reference even you had asked that question
so that's kind of how the earth compares in size to that sunspot and that's probably the biggest sunspot
that i've had the chance to capture so pretty big one incredibly detailed it's
beautiful it's processed so well too it's just uh
you know you don't get the feeling that it's too harshly processed or you know but
i know to you know i mean you have to start with good seeing and you have to start with a
bunch of stuff but there's still a bit of work getting to this level yeah i felt even with um planetary imaging
you know the longer you do it uh presented with even the same data set um you know a few years later you you're
amazed at how much better you're able to handle the data it just comes with experience i think sure um i have a
couple videos i think i shared this one uh the last
um solar star there's the last um virtual star party yeah this
is just a um you know a monochrome image of this the
this active region over the period of about 90 minutes
and there's a nice uh filament that pops up out of there
there's like a shadow from the filament or something you know the way yeah i mean the filaments just act you know in
the when the filament reaches the edge of the disc it's a it's a prominence but
yeah when it's over top of the surface of the sun it's it appears darker
i think that's mainly because it's cooler and it's extending up into the atmosphere yeah towards us
so kind of yeah it kind of blots out what's behind it and it looks like a shadow
and then i have mesmerizing also the sunspot group which was the one
i just showed this was it was the one i just showed but this was on november 4th so
it's about a month ago wow so that close-up of the sunspot is that
one that we see i believe it's that one yeah
the same one
and then um yeah i said i was using that ar 152 for
some narrowband imaging this was one that i had gotten just a few weeks ago
of the lobster car nebula in h-o-o which is hydrogen and oxygen
mapped to a green and blue so it's a bi-color narrow band mix
yeah and um i was really happy with the way this scope is performing for narrow band work
pretty detailed look at the region and uh really like how the oxygen and and
hydrogen kind of interplay through these areas you can see the you know kind of the different
structures of the clouds laying on top of each other beautiful up through these areas you
know there's a lot of wispy oxygen nebulae through the to that area
that's so intricate yeah i love these layers here the
hydrogen and oxygen right it reminds me of um you know libby
talking about the chemicals and and the nebulosity and you know the colors and everything i
think she was trying to describe kind of her feelings of seeing a nebula
like this you know um you know where she talks about how parts of it are you know curved and then you
get these wispy parts and all the structure and everything and for for libby it's just uh
you know she really pours over images like this so yeah
she should she should look at your images more often
and uh let's see one other one i had here was the antenna
galaxies this is looking um past the bright milky way star which is here in
the edge of the field of view this was shot through a celestron
rosso telescope to get the main field of view there's a couple galaxies in here
and then i overlaid some longer focal length image for the the core of the wow look
at that it looks like a pair of arp galaxies or something you know interacting galaxies yeah this um the
antenna galaxies was just shared as an apod a few days ago i think uh you know a hubble image of it it's an amazing
image of this this core area these two galaxies interacting so these are ones that
pass through each other and they're actually you know still in the process of colliding but
um you know these streamers of stars which extend out go
away oh yeah light years out into intergalactic space
yeah can you imagine if you could fly a spacecraft from one antenna to the next
and go around the it would it would really be incredible
i always like to imagine what it'd be like you know to live in a star out there out here looking happiness in
your nightstand two giant galaxies up there right yeah
there's this a little interesting you know i've never seen this one
this one actually is a similar distance as the antenna galaxies but it's never uh been described as
interacting with these these others but similar distance and uh
you know appears close but i guess what appears close is not really that close
right that's all i had just uh all right
jason thank you thank you for sharing man that's awesome that's awesome
and you have new images that you're working on now always
i'm always way behind and stuff i've captured and trying to edit
we'll get there someday very good very good okay all right so molly what have you got uh
what have you got to share here with us um well i as far as my my telescopes go
i've started my sequences for the night um so there's not a very
uh like attractive looking views because it's all like monochrome and like a little bit washed out from the light
pollution um okay we could i could look at a
no it's still not much to look at there that's what you're doing that's interesting well i can uh i can talk a little bit
about well let's see i i could talk about a bit about how i automate my telescopes
sure okay excellent i'll share my screen then
let's do this one yeah um let's see yeah we'll talk about this one
uh okay so um what you're looking at here is uh this is the program sequence
generator pro which is uh one of one of several types of software that's out
there to do uh sequence automation on all of your gear from your camera to your
observatory dome um it's uh so what what up when i'm i i have two
computers outside that run all three of my rigs and this computer is running my
uh my new iaptron mount with my takahashi refractor and cwo295 mc color
camera so uh and my other computer is running my other two rigs right now
so i'm remoted in it's out in the backyard and remoting in uh using uh chrome remote desktop to see the view
here so uh sorry i said okay all right uh so over here uh
in and this is the kind of the main like control box where i put in uh what kind of exposures i want and what
targets so these are my targets for tonight um ngc 2903 and n99 are too
close to the moon for me to image in uh in wide band with this with this color camera i have on here so they're
unticked for now but i'm doing uh m33 which is uh that gorgeous uh triangulum
galaxy uh ngc 1579 which is the northern trifid
which is a uh a nebula that looks kind of like the trifid nebula but is this a smaller one i think it's
at a higher declination uh m78 is a really cool like reflection nebula
that's in the vicinity of orion off to the um to the east of
like the main like like the flame and horsehead nebula and stuff like that and then uh this one here is just kind
of a a scene of a couple of nebulous regions up in araga uh that are near the flaming star nebula
that i was just perusing for a target to fill a gap and i was looking through sky safari and was
like oh that could be a nice little field to image so we'll see what i can get so for each of these i have um
oops how'd that get unticked that's that's what was going on there um i so i can set the the filter that i use
which is uh since this is the color camera i just have a light pollution filter and a regular luminance filter in
there but in the same setup over on my my monochrome camera rig i can set red
green blue hydrogen alpha et cetera but how long the exposure is
and how many to take i just put in a large number and keep taking them until i feel like i have enough
um on the ones where i have multiple filters like for my monochrome camera i take multiple of these boxes and i have
light pollution which is my luminance filter red green blue hydrogen stuff like that and it will it will walk
through these targets as i image them from night to night
uh the other component of this is is all of the control of every device that
you have so i have my my camera set up the filter wheel
i have a focuser on this scope a uh zwo focuser and the takahashi telescopes
are very sensitive to temperature changes so i actually have this set to refocus for
every one degree temperature change there's a little a little temperature probe hanging off the focuser and uh so
you can see up here in the upper right corner uh what the what the temperature is right
now and what the last focus temperature is so it'll probably be um focusing here soon-ish if it continues to cool down
outside um yeah and then it controls the mount so
uh on the on the iaptron mount it just it'll send a command to the mount to go to the target that i want
and it will actually plate solve and get that target centered dead in the center
or whatever coordinates you you have fed it if you want to have multiple targets in the view or whatever it'll take those
coordinates and and take a picture plate solve it see if it's right and if it's not right
move the telescope so that it is right take another picture verify that it's right and then uh it'll iterate over
this if your telescope doesn't doesn't have very good go-to um usually i just have to do it twice
uh it will run your autoguider so it talks to phd and it will
like start it and stop it when you're changing targets or focusing or whatever
um my guiding is actually not super great right now i was able to get get it down to one arc
second uh one or 1.1 arc seconds generally yeah and i i have run peck on
it but i think i need to to do it again in a better part of the sky it was up kind of near the near zenith when i was
doing it so um i needed i just wanted to do some refinements on uh on the
the uh the guiding and stuff like that this little little command phd uh and if you have fancy things like
an observatory dome or a rotator or a flat box it will it can control all those things too
i don't have any of those fancy things not yet yeah exactly yeah so i
pretty much what i do is i go outside i take the covers off my scopes i turn the dew heaters on i
plop my laptops down plug everything in and i hit go and i go inside and eat dinner and watch tv and drink a glass of
wine and go to bed wonderful i could collect the data in the morning
it's real nice i have paid my dues in staying up until three o'clock in the morning in the freezing cold temperatures don't worry it has taken a
lot of time for me to get to this polished of a setup um but yeah so in the background here is an
image of m33 it's in black and white right now because uh sql standard pro
doesn't automatically debare the uh the preview for you um so it's uh this is a
color image but it's just appearing in monochrome still and you can you can see it pretty nicely there yeah
it's got a pretty high background but um once i stack a whole bunch of these this
is why i have to image over many many nights because i'm in a pretty light polluted area i'm in the bay area it's
portal seven so i have to take many hours of data i've
been getting between 15 and 38 hours on a lot of my targets recently which has been really cool over the course of
about two months or so so that i can really beat down that light pollution and pull out all the
nice details from the background so um yeah
molly what is your i mean what are your favorite objects i mean what really fascinates you about
um the sky object-wise i love nebula they're my favorite thing
to image uh the colors are so nice and there's just so much like incredible
intricate detail that you can pull out in imaging that are really hard to see
with the eye and and of course the color you can't really see with the eye either so like when i've imaged the rosette
nebula before or imaged the elephant trunk or something like that there's so much structure in
the nebulae that uh if you if you process it well you can bring you can really highlight that
structure and it's and it's neat all that structure is really just from the stars in the field inside that nebula
and their stellar winds blasting out and shaping the gas and with
mixed in with dark nebula and stars being in different places and
more hydrogen gas being here than there you get these really intricate details these little fingers like on the tip of
the eagle nebula the pillars of creation section of that right the bach globules
the little um uh tiny well they look tiny but they're probably actually like a light year
across or something a little like gas dark glass excuse me dark gas clouds in a lot of
emission nebula um yeah i love bringing out all that all that little detail and i'm still getting
better at that that's awesome yeah that's great i can show an image i just finished
recently sure let's do it all right um give me just a second here
sorry
all right so uh this is the flaming star nebula which uh is a an enormous emission
nebula with a little bit of reflection in it up in auriga or in the uraga area
i think it's in orega itself um and this is actually a long term project i started it last last fall
with with taken luminance data through my light pollution filter and my color camera but
i was using the wrong light pollution filter at the time and my stars were pretty bloated from the infrared not
being corrected and stuff like that um but i also uh last fall
got a fair bit of um of luminous data on my monochrome camera
and then actually no sorry i got i finally got the right filter i needed i'm looking at
my data sheet i finally got the right filter needed got more color data that was with the correct filter the cls ccd
filter and then i in january got a bunch of hydrogen data and that's what really
makes this image pop is is the hydrogen um let's see i uh
i don't have a non-hydrogen one handy but here's here's the height uh
just the hydrogen on its own right i i mixed in the the color to this
and used the hydrogen to enhance the red signal of the color image and there's so much
intricate structure i did something on this
and you get really nice tight stars too in the hydrogen channel
so much incredible structure here and then it it goes on way off over here a
lot further than my color camera could see through the light pollution
it's able just to get so much more and then when i combine it with the color data to get some really nice rich
red color this is probably the best red i've gotten on an image with hydrogen data so far
so i ended up with um uh only three
a little under four hours of color data but then i had five just a little under six hours of hydrogen data so i was able
to really kind of bring that out and there's a little bit of reflection avila in here i couldn't bring out a whole lot
of it um but yeah alas there it is the little blue sections there right
look at that like these blue flecks in there yeah yeah i think that there's there's more i've seen pictures where there's
kind of more a little bit further out from this this primary star here and you can really see how i think this
is the star that uh is really doing a lot of the shaping here because you can kind of see it's carved a little hole for itself
here and i have these these um uh structures here of you could almost
imagine like molding clay or something with with the strong force of your hand or something
right then the stars the ener the energetic stellar wind that's coming off of the star is what is
shaping all of this gas not just immediately around the star but even it's what's energizing it and making it
glow red wow all from that one star i i think yeah yeah i think so that
tends to be the case of a lot of missionary that it's really like like at least from what i've been reading it's really like one star that tends to
illuminate most of the hydrogen gas uh with some exceptions like the rosette nebula for instance is actually a
cluster of stars that are the gas wonderful there's lots of nice comments
about your images and uh you know they're inspired by you molly
um let's see i think we had um
it seemed like we had a question here
there's some comments uh they were talking about the eclipse and one guy said he had four cameras running
on the eclipse in 2017. but when push came to shove i stopped what i was doing and just looked at
looked at it next eclipse one camera only
yes what i've done for eclipses is um i really wanted to take the advice seriously of of not having a camera in
your hand and just absorbing the eclipse that for the first one i went to back in 2017 here in the
us but what i did was i used uh so i had just a dslr at the time i didn't have um
any of my astro cameras yet so i used the backyard nikon software to sequence
my my nikon camera um i could have done it in sequence generator pro but
uh it it downloads frames really slowly for some reason so uh background.com is gonna be a lot a lot quicker for
triggering exposures so i code i spent months writing the
sequence and practicing it and refining it and getting the timings exactly right and working out all possible bugs
um i had the an eclipse timer app on my phone so that i could practice like all right these are the exposures that need
to start during bigly's beads and these exposures need to go um right at
uh second contact so i can get the the prominences that are right there on the edge and i timed out the entire thing
and used fred espenak's website where he had he has a whole table of
exposure times to capture different features uh and you just set your iso and then you use these exposure times and it
worked really phenomenally so i i hit go at one minute before the before totality and then i didn't
look at it again until until after totality um and i used the camera app to remind myself to pull the
the filter off the telescope i see and they came out dead
perfect i could not have done a better job all this pre-planning and and practice
and stuff really does pay off yeah yeah and those the pictures came out perfect and it helped that there was a couple of
sun spots on the sun for that one so i was able to focus really precisely i used a little 76 millimeter borg
telescope that just did a great job and i had really really sharp focus and i did
i reused the same sequence and i went to chile last summer and because the eclipse was almost the same amount of time so i just had to tweak some of the
times a little bit right and i tweaked some other exposure times and settings from what i learned
in the 2017 eclipse but um yeah that one also went really well
and uh all of you guys listening right now you've got you know you got lots of time
before the 2023 annualer and that you can practice on the annular of course and then uh
2024 you know so start start working on it now you know
yeah being able to be totally handed off is really nice and there's a piece of software called uh eclipse orchestrator
or something like that that costs some money but saves you some of the legwork
right but i just decided to do legwork myself because i was cheap [Laughter]
being chief's okay okay after reading about alan stern and his
work at nasa you know and you know shaving off every
dollar that he could to make his um you know spacecraft uh lean
and mean and and uh under budget you know was um i think really inspiring you know that you
can get great stuff done and um you know just like in the amateur world you can get great stuff done and not spend a
fortune doing it so you know or there's a will there's a way there's
a will there's a way that's right that's right you make any of your astro gear work for you at the end of the day
that's right that's right okay so we have um
uh we have bob denny and we've got chuck allen here and um
i'm curious uh uh what you guys would like to share
go ahead chuck you're you're muted chuck
how's that a little bit better okay um i have a little mini program i can
share if you need it right now yeah okay this is sort of a take off on the
program whoops that we did last time last time we were looking at extremes in
astronomy uh record holders hottest furthest smallest
most massive and so forth today i'd like to look at something a little different can i share screen now
sure all right by the way i mean people
since you did that extremes uh project or
presentation i mean people are talking about non-stop so well i i know a few of them have
contacted me to do programs on it so i got that impression i'm happy to hear it
um we're going to talk right now about sizes in the universe and look at some
comparisons that might be of interest to a lot of people in your audience we'll start with some pretty basic stuff
here first of all this is a an image of the largest prominence ever
recorded on the sun it occurred on june 4th 1946
wow and left to a height of 250 000 miles above the solar
chromosphere above the surface and that is roughly the distance between the
earth and the moon the distance from the surface to the top of the prominence
here it was incredible here's a an image showing you the moon
on the right the earth on the left and the planet mercury in between
there are several moons in the solar system ganymede jupiter's and ganymede and saturn's moon titan that are
actually bigger than mercury but mercury orbits the sun so it's a
planet venus called our sister planet because it's almost the same size as the earth
it's about 397 miles in diameter less than that of the earth almost the same size
the sister planet moniker might be a little misplaced though when you consider the fact that the surface temperature is about 865 degrees
fahrenheit and the pressure at the surface is 90 atmospheres that's the equivalent
pressure of being 3000 feet deep in water
chuck what that prominence what year was that again 1946 june 46 june 4th
okay yep uh this is a comparison of the apparent
size of the moon seen from earth when the moon is at perigee versus apogee
there's a difference of about 40 000 kilometers when the moon is further away from the earth in its elliptical orbit
and you see the difference it makes we call these perigee moments super moon sometimes and
the others have been occasionally called micro modes [Music] here's mars in comparison with the earth
it's about one half of earth's diameter almost exactly but only about 1 8 the volume of the earth
interestingly though the land area of the earth is approximately equal to the total surface of mars
that is interesting so there's as much much uh land on mars as there is on
earth not nearly enough water though that we found yet okay
and here of course is earth with our largest planet jupiter uh jupiter about
11 times the diameter of the earth about 1330 earths would fit inside of jupiter
if it were hollow jupiter of course is basically a failed star
it's a ball of essentially hydrogen and if it were a little bit larger the pressure in the center would start
reaching temperatures that would start fusion to occur and this would make it into a brown dwarf the temperature at
the center of jupiter is about 63 000 degrees fahrenheit
which is obviously hotter than the surface of the sun but is nowhere near hot enough to
cause fusion to occur the more massive stars become they become low-mass stars red
red dwarfs rather and then become regular stars like the sun after that
here's the earth compared with saturn saturn close to nine times the diameter
of the earth yeah we could just pop through the rings it looks like
but saturn is actually the least dense planet in the solar system in fact it's
so uh lacking in density that it would float in water if you could find a pan of water big enough to float it in
interestingly saturn would fill most of the distance its ring system rather would fill most of the distance between
the earth and the moon from tip to tip it's about 75 percent of that distance
uranus about four times larger than the earth neptune is close to the same size
about 1 000 miles in diameter smaller than neptune i could then uranus rather
and here's neptune compared to the earth as i said earlier during the program
neptune is actually the more massive of the two planets even though it's smaller and the reason it's smaller is because
it's more massive its gravity has pulled in the material a little bit closer to it
here is pluto with indiana superimposed on it to give you a little idea
of the size of what used to be our ninth planet you see the heart feature over here and
uh some people think they see goofy here with the snout and the head
but uh the um or excuse me pluto the uh disney character pluto
these are the trans-neptunian objects that created a problem for pluto eris
which is seen here was thought to actually be larger than pluto michael brown began discovering a lot of these
trans-neptunian objects and the iau's consideration in 2006
started with whether to make them planets and the concern arose that too many
planets were going to be created uh i don't know why that would be a problem if you have a problem yeah if you have
50 planets you have 50 planets if kids in first grade can't memorize them all too bad but
um the uh will have to come up with the money
it's hard it's crazy you need longer acronyms is all
so uh anyway uh later measurements showed errors to be about 31 miles in diameter
smaller than pluto so pluto is still the king of the tnos and
is quite a substantial system uh chuck there's a question here uh
martin sperm would like to know does anyone know why the spins are so different from others
some are 90 degrees off and such he's talking about the planets yeah well in in the case of uranus which is
tipped over i think about 97 degrees uh it's thought that a major impact occurred in the vicinity of uranus at
some point in fact some of the evidence for that is the moon miranda which is looks like a
bunch of baby blocks that came collecting back together gravitationally after being destroyed
uh miranda is a moon that has cliffs 12 miles high a very blocky appearance as
if something destroyed it at some point and it recollected in other cases you have venus
whose north pole is considered to be down you have to understand however the north poles are now defined as
the pole not that makes a i don't know if you can see my finger
here this is a a right-handed rotation this is what the earth has we have a right-handed
rotation north pole we rotate from west to east venus's north pole is a left-handed
rotation and it's not because it was dumped over on its side by any impact but uh the the
rotation uh we still regard the pole that points in
the same direction of the as the earth's pole as being venus's north pole despite the left-handed rotation
in fact the the definition of north pole is the pole that points above the
invariant plane of the solar system that's the average plane of the planets around the solar system think
essentially jupiter's the plane of jupiter's orbit and we even apply north poles to galaxies based on whether they
point above or below that invariant plane defined by the average mass of the solar system
this is a slide that is intended to show you the apparent sizes in the sky to which the
various planets reach uh obviously the winter is venus here which reaches
as large as 63 arc seconds in size which is about 128 for diameter over the
apparent diameter of the moon in the sky your smaller venous phases of course jupiter being second
and when you have a nice opposition of mars it gets about this big not quite as big
as jupiter but we had a very nice one recently
yeah the size of the sun seen from various
planets uh the most notable would be mercury uh for mercury the sun would
subtend an angle in the sky of 1.4 degrees compared to one-half degree on
earth that means the surface the apparent surface area of the sun seen from mercury would be eight
times that of the sun seen from earth a little warm
this is a comet we visited of course comet cheryumov garasimenko so 2.7 miles by
2.4 miles roughly except for the strong indentations there so i thought i would
show you what that comet nucleus would look like if it were oh say set down on a city
and there you are so this is not something you would like to have slam into the earth at 50 or 60
000 miles per hour that would be what we term sub-optimal but a sculpture like that you know
it would look pretty cool so you better have a good base right
these are some comparisons of telescope sizes in the world the largest single telescope
that we have is the grand telescopio canaries right here
which is about 409 inches in multi-mirror system the second largest is the hobby everly
telescope each component of which is 394 inches
excuse me i'm pointing to the wrong one i'm sorry i'm this here it is it's a single unit
it's actually fixed in location it doesn't move around like most
telescopes do and it has a diameter of 394 inches and this
is down at mcdonald's observatory tied with that are the keck telescope
mirrors each of which are the same size as the hobby everly 394 inches
the largest combined apertures of multi-mirror systems the largest belongs to the very large telescope
it has four 323 inch mirrors that um
operate together uh we're back to keck in second place because it has two of those
uh 394-inch mirrors and third place belongs to the large binocular telescope in
mount graham in arizona a pair of 331-inch mirrors and here you see a
basketball court compared to some of these wow
here we're looking at a white dwarf the size of a white dwarf
now these are leftover cores after older stars that have less than eight
solar masses slough off their outer layers to become planetary nebulae and what's left over is the old core of
the star uh these are roughly the size of the earth as you can see here they're roughly equal to the mass of the sun
however but at a million times denser than the sun
the acceleration of gravity if you were standing on the earth and you jumped off a cliff you would follow that you gain
about 22 miles per hour each second until air resistance began to slow you down
but ignoring that you'd gain 22 miles per hour each second if you jumped off a
cliff hypothetical cliff near the surface of a white dwarf you would gain 11
400 miles per hour each second okay
now here we have the remnant of a star's core left over after a supernova this is
when a star with eight or more solar masses explodes in a
terrific explosion that compresses the core into what we call a neutron star
these roughly have a size of about six miles in diameter here you see it poised over a
city of about 100 000 people it has the mass of the sun compressed into six
mile diameter ball it's about one quadrillion times denser than the sun
and if you had a hypothetical cliff that even could exist near the surface of this and jumped off it you would gain
4.1 million miles per hour each second that would be the acceleration of gravity at the surface
that's right i heard that uh you'd be going something like a quarter of the speed of light uh
by the time you got near the surface or something like that well it depends on where you start falling yeah i mean if
you can give it long enough to fall i mean you're going to pick up 4 million miles per hour each second the speed of
light's about 669 million miles per hour oh and then i think i heard that um
uh your feet would be moving fat would be rotating faster than your
upper body yeah it's it's sort of doing that you're you're getting into the
spaghettification that you talk about with singularities and black holes here because the tidal forces of any object
close to something this massive the front side would be accelerating
faster than the back side so it would tear apart for example a moon that got near this
you see this phenomenon in jupiter's moon io io's very close to jupiter because of
that it gets stretched in the direction of jupiter the front side facing jupiter gets pulled harder than the backside it
stretches io in that direction io then rotates and gets stretched in another direction and it's like bending
a piece of aluminum over and over and over again it just gets hotter and hotter which is why you see such
volcanism on io rather constantly
now here we have proxima centauri um compared to the size of jupiter
and we also see it compared here to the distance between the earth and the moon to give you an idea about how big
proxima is it's a rev dwarf star about 4.2 4.2 light years away
the closest star to the sun and you notice it's not a whole lot bigger than jupiter but if jupiter
if we begin piling more and more gas onto jupiter its gravity would increase so its size would not increase
dramatically fast because of the fact that gravity would be holding it down
and eventually it would get slightly larger and much hotter in the core you need to get up around 30 million degrees
in the core to start getting fusion here are the main components of the
alpha centauri system here's proxima again and here are alpha a and b centauri
and they are very sunlight in size and
in color here are a couple of other stars this is an actual image of altair taken with the
chara interferometer wow altair is about one and a half million miles in diameter equatorially uh-huh
that's about a little less than two solar masses worth of mass and is about ten times
more luminous than the sun is is it bulging at its waist there because of
the spin or rapid spin yes i see and you'll see some more severe examples of
that in just a moment here is procyon compared to the sun it's
about one and a half times more massive about twice the diameter of the sun seven times more luminous than the sun
right foam a lot also about two solar masses but 17 times
brighter more luminous rather than the sun in absolute terms
and vega now vegas got some spin on it uh this is
this is a star that's about two solar masses again
but it's about 40 times more luminous than the sun and rotates in 12 and a half hours
compared to the sun's month basically of rotation this is 90 of vega's critical rotation
rate if it sped up 10 more percent it would break apart so it's right at the limit
regulus 2 very oblong once again about uh
has a diameter about two and a half million miles at equatorial measured equatorially
and it rotates in 15.9 hours but because of its greater mass it's reached nearly
96 and a half percent of its critical rate much faster at all and it would break
apart completely capella the first beacon of winter that
rises in the northeast is actually two stars two yellow stars
they're about seven and ten million miles in diameter each they each have about two and a half times the sun's
mass and each of them is 75 times more luminous than the sun
very bright stars spica even more significant these are stars that are three and six million
miles in diameter they have 11 and seven times the mass of the sun and
are 20 and two times brighter more luminous than the sun when i say brighter i mean more luminous scene from
the same distance we get to some larger stars here
arcturus and volodys this is 14 times larger than the sun and 170 times more
luminous geez and uh yet it has only the same mass as
the sun huh equal aldebaran and taurus uh 38 million
miles in diameter it would subsume the orbit of mercury if it were centered where the sun is it's 439 times more
luminous than the sun but again same mass as the sun
so chuck the if it has the same mass i mean if our sun when our sun goes red
red giant phase will it blow to these sizes absolutely wow that's that's our future that's our
future that's our future okay
roger uh roger is an enormous blue giant star
and i just thought i'd show you a little comparison size of the sun compared to roger and orion it's it's an amazing
star jeez antares even larger
compared to the sun heart of the scorpion of course
and the largest is the sun or i'm not sure about anterior probably not much more yeah
okay um the uh battle juice here is about 1500
times the size of the sun but almost subsumes saturn's orbit wow you see an actual image of metal
just taken with the hubble space telescope down here yeah you've probably saw some of those recently due to its
dimming and the largest known star we talked about the last time scott this is
stevenson 218. um it would uh it's a
19 000 light years away from us and has a diameter of 1.86 billion miles that's
the earth's orbit you see there on the left compared to the surface of the star
it is about 2150 times larger than the sun
right clear light 58 says and yet all of these stars are tiny in
comparison to the size of the universe just a speck of sand
or dust on the beach before you start feeling bad for the sun though bear in mind that the sun is
larger than about 96 percent of all stars most stars are red dwarfs
and uh so we're seeing the unusual stars that are huge
they're bright in our sky for that reason um and here you see a bunch of the
uh the brightest non-giant northern stars compared to the sun and we'll now throw in a few of the
giants along with it the sun gets a little smaller here as you can see
and i'll show you the distance between the sun and the earth here as a line to give you
some comparison to the size of these stars
uh what you're seeing here is called the kepler orary
what you're seeing here are the actual movements of planets the stars are left out here you see the solar system the
entire solar system represented by this circle and you see out here just a collection of other
solar systems without their stars you'll notice most of them seem to be orbiting much more tightly than our solar system
most of the planets we've been discovering are much closer to their stars than
the planets in our solar system are that doesn't mean they don't have planets further out it just means we
haven't detected them yet it's less likely for example that you would find neptune transiting the sun
from a great distance away from the sun than it would be to see the earth doing so
and here's a slide we had before the largest known black hole 666 solar masses 240 billion miles in
diameter neptune's orbits seen at the middle
wow and here are just some comparisons of apparent size in the sky if you could
see andromeda and its full extent when you look up it would look considerably larger than a full moon or
a gibbous moon in this case and indeed here you have the lagoon
nebula m8 and then 42 also larger than a full moon if you
could see their full extent in the sky visually and here are a few other objects
true to size if you were looking out at a full moon this size m33 would be
larger m42 would be larger m31 much larger and 101 about the same size
and silver coin galaxy and sculpture about the same length as the width of a full moon the veil nebula a little bit
longer now here are actual comparisons of the
galaxies some of the major galaxies in our local group this is not apparent size this is the comparison of actual
sizes of the galaxies triangulum galaxy m33 being the third largest in the group
uh estimates of the milky way size keep varying there are some recent estimates that have the milky way rivaling
andromeda in size magellanic clouds seen down here
and going to further reaches of space we start with the milky way here
we see the cartwheel galaxy here the little sombrero galaxy down here m100
uh hoax object over here a nice circular wheel galaxy and we have hercules a
and its jets seen here in the m87 we drive elliptical galaxy
and virgo seen here dwarfing the milky way
but it's not the largest the largest is ic1101
has a diameter of 2 million light years 20 times the mass 20 times the
size rather of the milky way it would barely fit between andromeda and the milky way
ic1101 compared to the milky way andromeda and m87 good luck
and this is the furthest galaxy ever imaged gn z11 uh was taken in a very long exposure by
the hubble space telescope it's a galaxy only 600 light years across has about 1 billion stars in it
and the light travel time from this galaxy is considered to be 13.4 billion years which means the light's been
traveling to us from this galaxy for most of the history of the universe which is 13.8 billion years old
when we talk about distances like this it's really kind of confusing to people obviously when the light left gnc 11 it
was much closer to us because we're seeing this galaxy as it was when the universe was only 400 million years old
and vastly smaller than it is today but the universe has been expanding the whole time the light's been trying to
reach us and so by the time the light did reach us and we took this picture it had
traveled 13.4 billion light years but in the whole time the light was traveling to us the universe was expanding so the
galaxy today is actually 32 billion light years away if that seems confusing i always tell
people to think of a dad teaching his daughter to swim you know the daughter's hanging on to
the side of the pool and dad's standing 10 feet away saying now come on i showed you how to do it to
swim to me so the daughter begins to swim like crazy trying to get to dad's waiting arms
but what do dads always do they back up and so dad starts backing away and
encouraging his daughter and his daughter keeps swimming and keeps swimming and finally after dad is backed
away to 25 feet the daughter reaches him having swung 25
feet however the whole time this has been happening the wall of the that she left
has been retreating in the other direction because the universe is expanding so when the daughter looks
back over the 25 feet that she swam the wall is 75 feet away so that's the
situation here we're seeing this galaxy as if dad were looking at his daughter from 10 feet
away but the light had to travel 25 feet to get to dad because
dad was backing away or the pool was expanding and by the time the light got to us the wall was 75 feet away the
galaxy's at 32 billion light years now how far is that
well the furthest object that we have ever sent into space voyager 1 is at 14
billion miles if that represents one unit of distance the distance of gn z11 is 13 trillion
times further and to give you an idea how much that is i would like to ask you to imagine that
the distance to gnz11 was represented by a trip around the world
in which case the furthest that we've ever sent a spacecraft would be about one-third the width of a blood core
puzzle we've got a lot more exploring to do we've got a lot more to go yes we do and
that's it wow chuck that's awesome that's great that is great
wonderful okay uh so um
my report would be very short you're hearing go ahead i promise um i
i purposely put myself behind chuck because i'm here as a
technologist and not an astronomer so i don't have an astronomical presentation
i love this i like being here i like to hear what people are doing particularly listening to molly who is
using sequence generator pro i know ken pendlebury and uh jared really well
um i work with them i also do automation software as my business so
but i'm here as a representative of the group of people who provide universal
interfaces that allow one program to talk to any device that's out there
uh so and you can talk to the people who wrote sgp they will tell you that that
software would not exist if they had to write special code for every mount every
focuser every dome every filter wheel and every camera out there didn't happen
you couldn't do it and so we have universal interfaces for each one of those things
and it has transformed now into universal across all the platforms in
the last couple of years that's what i'm involved with i'm going to share my screen briefly i
want to make sure i don't put this program up first i won't take much time
i just want to point out take your time it's no problem [Music]
it's not late it's not last call okay
can you see um a web browser here yes okay so the first place to point out is
a big threat on um on cloudy nights where alpaca which is
the new incarnation of those ascom interfaces is uh starting to really take hold it's
marked hot right here it's very very busy and a lot of people talking
mark sproul is mark 77 and he kind of got it right
away like i'll say a year and a half or so ago at a conference that um
i was at and we talked and he was very hostile to the idea he this can't
work blah blah blah and then all of a sudden a lightbulb went off on in him and he has done
an amazing bunch of work and this is the thread for the discussion of what he's been doing with alpaca which is
the same universal interfaces but over the internet so it well over network connections not over the wide area that
would be a bad idea but within an observatory over wi-fi so you could have a wi-fi mount and a wi-fi
focuser and then talk to those things using the inter universal interfaces
from software on any of the platforms as well so that's where things are going this is one big discussion here
is the azcom website itself that's ascom-standards.org
i should put that in the comments if i can i think i can hold on
i put those in the uh youtube.com which i detached okay
these two videos are possibly they're very long but
they're also possibly interesting this really goes into detail but non-technical of the history and
the what's really going on with this um and why why uh universal interfaces are
important and why universal connectivity is important and this is a demonstration that's put on by op tech one of the
companies that's kind of leading the charge on the commercial side um showing their new products that work
on all the platforms and are interchangeable there is a hot group here
on on groups.io which you can subscribe to either as a mail mailing list or you can
get on and use it as a as a threaded forum and that is linked
from here this button this groups.i o button will take you there there are actually three groups
a help forum a developer forum which you prob most all
of you probably won't be interested in and then a core team forum which is the the core team
private communications and that's the last thing i want to talk about i'm not the guy who does the development of
azcom anymore i'm kind of a flight waiver i did it personally for
over 10 years and and then transitioned over to now tim long
rick burke peter simpson and dan daniel van norde
those four people are the core of of the people who do it now and
who are going forward with it peter simpson probably does more work
then i'm gonna drop this just a sec okay i'm back um peter
does the platform and i i i hope i'm not boring people but the platform you install all it is is a
bunch of libraries that the driver developers can use to shorten the time it takes them to go from concept
to finish driver and it has test tools the universal interfaces defined so that
they just drop their code into a template a bunch of things and that's constantly being
updated and and evolved i should mention that at the end of
october nasa cut off access to the earth rotation data the
delta t numbers and so forth that are used in some of the internals and it took everybody's by surprise and so this
has caused kind of some problems in the last few weeks um there's a way to turn flip a switch
and and stop the automatic update of those numbers in the platform so that's all that's on this uh help site and it's
easily explained and that that's going to change in the next few weeks we're going to mirror that data so that
problem doesn't occur in the future and that's too much date too much detail in any case those four people are the main
energy behind the development work and i am just out with my little flag waving
it telling people why universal interfaces are important and uh why you cannot
that the reason all of this this software that you see out there is
really works well is for that reason the one area that is not universal as cameras
there is a uh we there have there's work being done
to make it more adaptable to the newer cmos cameras and
there was a change that came about this year for that and so now we're just waiting for the
smoke to clear on that but the camera interface the definition is for taking
pictures not for video streams not for taking like lucky imaging for planetary
where you're acquiring images every second or two and stacking them live and all that that's not the job that's so s
um who was showing that picture uh the the image they were taking that was live
stacked was that i don't remember yeah that's you so um that was sharp cap that you were using
yeah so that would those people still have to write directly to the cameras that that that
are out there they have to write special code for each vendor of cameras and in some cases for
each model of camera from each vendor so they have a big job of being able to provide that but at
least they don't have to worry about that for mounts domes focusers filter wheels and all the other stuff that is
standardized so that's all i want to point one more time again to the azcom
website which is i believe i don't see this now nope
why can't i get this one page one all right well i'll try it like this i
don't i think you're going to end up seeing my entire screen i don't see just the application
but anyway this is the azcom website are you seeing it now yeah
okay but inside my whole screen these videos and the information in here are
we've had a lot of discussion recently on the sites that indicate that people
are still confused they still think it's all windows dependent and you know well you need to have a windows system or it
doesn't work and there's just a lot of misinformation out there so i i'm here really
to try to help people um if you have the time and the curiosity
it is a support infrastructure so it's not you're not you shouldn't see it you should not see this stuff while you're
doing or you're observing but it is essential for the ecosystem of software that's out
there right now it would not exist were it not for this so i just try i'm just here to maybe help you guys understand
how important it is right thank you uh bob there's uh a person is
making a a wish or whatever but says i wish more programs would be
compatible with mac now through alpaca they are correct yes
yes um but i think i'm guessing the question really relates to there's not really a
lot of astronomy software running on macs anyway
you can't find sgp and pix inside and these things because it is a royal pain to develop
really deep software that runs across platforms you end up with least common denominator languages least common
denominator capabilities and you can get just so far doing that i think the
people who've done one of the best jobs of it is software bisque the skyx for being cross platform is a
really really amazing piece of work it took them a lot of years to to put the
capability of using devices through the azcom universal interfaces that is all
now part of the sky they've also added the capability say six source so more years ago that a
program like sgp can use the paramount without having to write special code to
talk to it because they put an inbound as com interface on the sky that lets
you control a paramount or any other telescope mount family so they
they got in they got on the bandwagon i'll say five six seven years ago and that for a cross-platform
is really great and i'm hoping that they'll see the benefit of um alpaca but it's just
there's not a lot of software on on the mac right for for astronomy period whether it
could talk to if let's say well okay carte du ciel patrick chavali's uh
planetarium does run on the mac it has alpaca capabilities today
and by virtue of a gateway that's available it can be
you can publish your mount that's controlled on windows let's say you have an astrophysics mount
that software for the astrophysics the driver and the astrophysics command center that
sits on windows so you you can buy a 150 200 windows baby
computer and put that software on there for your mount and then from your mac you can talk through this gateway and
use the unmodified astrophysics software from alpaca that that
that two-way gateway between the comm world and the alpaca world is is exists
today and on windows you just bring up the chooser and it will show you alpaca
devices mixed in with the native windows ones that exists today too so it's come a long way in the last couple of years
and peter simpson is and daniel van norde are the two guys that have really put the time work and imagination
and creativity into that it's just wonderful yeah it would be interesting to have those
guys come on with you at one point and we could probably do a separate program just on
alpaca yeah you might come environment and i i would i would be happy to do
that you might get some glazed eyes if you can get through i've been glazed before
if you can get through the non-technical overview on the ascom site
uh then you know if that's if it's still interesting to you after that then that's something but that really
doesn't get into the blood and guts at all it's just the conceptual what it is
what an interface is why it's important why universal interfaces are important and how
the the two types of communications are just being used to offer the same set of
function calls and functions on both on all environments
okay all right but that's on that ask.comstandards.org site which i put
um as a uh link on the chat and i don't know where else to put it
uh did you send it over to me sure oh you put it on the chat here that's yeah on the on the public chat um
i've typed it in i have it on youtube but i think your restream bot probably sent it to everybody it does it's not
that far back look for jeff weiss and it's right above that okay
um yeah okay good
well thank you for having me on too scott i appreciate it i will be here again on the 21st for sure okay and
um my i'm happy to answer questions on this i don't want to be too
much of a lecturer every time i come on it's just like replaying the same damn record recording over and over no no no
but i think that uh i think people are absorbing what you have to say and um
uh you know uh it does give me the idea of having a um a separate like 30 40
minute show okay that could do during the daytime we would promote that to um yeah like the
the developers in our open go to community there's programmers out there they would love to hear this you know so
that would be good yeah yeah just users astronomers need to know
though also that as com is not a program i hear it all the time as com crashed
no your driver crashed or your usb port got turned off by windows behind your back
or you know what and if you have a problem with your mount go talk to the mount drop maker and get them you know
work with them on it ascom's not a program right
it's just a set of definitions and a set of um libraries and tools that make it
easier for application like sgp writers and and
they use very heavily those tools to reduce the amount of time it takes for them to program their um thing and
people like astrophysics and other mount developers
use those tools to do to develop the drivers well not only tele mounts but all the other devices i said so it's
libraries and definitions that's what ascom is right right
the azcom standards that's right not a program it's not a thing that you start
right all right well um
so does uh do we have anything else that uh people would like to share here before we go
i got an image live oh great
wow nice we got a 13 five-minute subs on uh
the old orion nebula and uh actually uh i'll show you this uh
when you have a sharp cap pro you can you know play around with the uh
kind of like the same thing as the uh screen uh transfer function
uh you don't have anywhere near the uh you know the ability to get in with the
uh the the precision
yeah but that looks pretty good it looks great yeah i mean considering that all those
photons came in within the last what hour and five minutes right i mean
it's it's not really edited it's just uh you know set the uh the two bars and
um i think uh i mean i'm still very new i just passed a year uh into this like a month ago
but uh i feel like for people wanting to do outreach that sharp cap pro might be
really good especially with a uh color camera i mean i know that there's
so many programs out there and they're all good for so many different reasons but uh i had the the zwo software uh like crash
out on me in august and ended up like installing this right before a star party
and i've been using it ever since and i ended up paying for the pro version i'm very happy with it more versions like it's like 15 a year
it's not expensive like other i thought it was only once i like my software you mean
yeah [Laughter] yeah yeah i mean you can't you can't really
sequence in in sharp cap i mean you kind of can but uh it's got some other really
great tools for like the live stacking uh is uh i need to use a little more of
that for outreach events since we can do those again yeah and i use it for all my planetary capturing
i'm i'm a lot more of a manual hands-on especially at this point i mean get
getting the usb cable out the back and uh you know doing everything through one usb 3 and uh
12 volt power running out the way there's only two wires running out my window
so i mean it's working pretty good for now we uh i even had a a drop out i don't know
if it was a usb thing a windows thing or just the um the the zwo 120 um
it's been a little cranky once or twice so you've heard the 120 has some weird usb issues
yeah one of these days i i think a 290 would be nice or something like that
let me uh i uh i by day i do tech support on um my
automation software so i encounter all the problems that people have we have over a thousand customers and i see
everything and i will say usb is the beast from hell um
everything about it is bad and the so
don't use don't go to best buy and or staples and buy a usb hub and put it in your
observatory that would be number one because when it gets cold it quits you get unreliable stuff that's
for mice and keyboards and that kind of stuff not cameras that are pumping data like crazy and those hubs don't don't
cut it they say usb 3 but they have ceramic resonators on their oscillators
not quartz crystal and they drift like hell and you just run into trouble so
unreliable all right uh uh bob the uh the asteroid hunters are
watching and they said we wouldn't have our asteroid hunters sky survey without bob denney software thank you
thank you that's where i started um as you know scott because my first
public demo of asteroid hunting was in the mead tent in rtmc in like 1999. yeah
i was blown away with an eight-inch classic camera why is he doing this click click click click click click
click click yep yep 20 minutes apart one other thing about this picture that
came through is that i had a satellite go right through there
and it live stacked out in an hour actually it didn't even take that long until it disappeared
i'm not pointing any fingers in anyone i don't know whose it was
i'm going to stop shirt oh and uh also uh i apologize for the focus i could say
you know the temperature's changed but the temperature's changed since november which was the last time i focused it
i was going to mention you might want to check that focus there's only so much time here
especially on the east coast between the day show and be ready for this and
right dinner took priority over focus tonight
astro kitty has returned yeah well guy was great to have you guys on
and i'm really looking forward to the december 21st event
i will then take a break probably through until after new year's
and then we'll be back on with shows and and star parties um
we have um we'll be doing uh more uh astronomical league uh shows one each
month as is planned right now which will be very cool
we may with the the alliance of historic observatories
you may see more [Music] live tours through some of the big observatories the historic observatories
out there like lick observatory and lowell and some of these other you know
amazing uh inspiring um you know temples of uh
of uh you know astronomy so uh i really appreciate um
um you guys coming on tonight it was great and uh um
i uh i i told uh deepti uh in chat here to i loaded apt on the telescope that's
behind me um and i'm gonna have her start studying how to use it once she has an idea of
doing that we'll have you log in on zoom you can practice controlling the scope uh even here in my office that works
and um and then we'll start doing uh some real astrophotography it'll take a
little while for you to understand how all those things work but there's there's help here and help out there so
okay that's great thank you very much and you guys have a great one and we will
see you all back we'll see on the daily shows that we do and um we will see you definitely on the 21st
so thank you very much and have a good night and as my old friend jack corkheimer
used to say keep looking up all right good night
good night
so
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