Transcript:
and carry we all have screen share capacity is that set up yes should be
yes yes you will uh can I do an audio check from my from my presentation just to see if it comes
through uh at this point now [Laughter]
okay it's against the rules
I like this visualization I think this is from ligo yeah that was from our
first discovery Shane do you work directly with ligo yeah I'm I'm in both the ligo
and the Lisa collaborations you'll hear mostly about Lisa today so okay yeah so I have there's about a a three minute
pres uh video uh about ligo thinking how it works and all that stuff so it's cool
an opportunity to visit ligo when I was in college but I had like a marching band gig that weekend or something so I
didn't get to go and I was very sad oh there's a visitor center at the Louisiana site but they're building a
visitor center at the Washington site so you'll always be able to drop in if you ever pass through oh
cool hi Carol I see you're there yeah I'm here yeah how's it going
T hi Carol good to see you well good to see you it seems like uh the last couple
weeks I've seen you at least once a week yeah I know this uh this Global star
party is just a perfect way to get together I just love
this what do we do before this I guess we we're actually out observing weren't
we not observing I was actually taking airplane to give live
lectures last one I took was the end of February to Houston haven't been out of
the house since then
yeah hopefully we can all meet in Albuquerque that's oh Terry that would
be terrific you're gonna tell us about that right I like Carol tell you about that
maybe we'll have just a little bit about that well the interesting thing is that by the time that League meets in
Albuquerque it's possible that uh we'll be able to travel
then and the exciting thing about Albuquerque is that my daughter and
grandchildren live there well another reason to go David oh it's a big reason to go we'd love to see you there I'd
love to see you there if if the uh if the Corona virus thing has finally taken
off and left us you can be there's a good chance we'll be there
it's a little easier to get to than Los Cruses so should be crues is easier crues is easier for
us but Albuquerque is fine because because our family is there okay I I was
looking at plane tickets to uh actually no sorry I was mixing things up the aavso conference last year was in Los
cres and I was like how do I even get there it's so expensive to take a flight there I'm like no I can't go it's too
expensive Molly what you do is you fly into Tucson and you're in a car and you drive for three and a half hours and
then you're there that didn't sound like fun
either don't you have that really cool van Molly I I have a a trailer um yeah
but uh New Mexico is like a that's like a 16h hour drive for me
nothing that's a 16 hour drive like like when I'm not Towing I'm towing I have to
go slower on the uphills because my car I don't have a I have a compact SUV
which can tow my trailer but uh going up hills is a little bit of effort for it so yeah unless I want to burn all the
gas I gotta slow down because like so I have a turbo and the Turbo can can handle it if I want to
get like eight miles per gallon hey guys if you're watching this on a separate like a Facebook page uh
share it share it to your friends and groups whatever that you belong to we get a
bigger audience that way besides that they'll all want to
see they'll want to see their friend do this
so I have to say I was I was pretty tickled to have my my name next to like
Scott Roberts and like astronomical League uh like Executives and stuff like
that I was like oh my goodness we love you
Molly like like all these you have done a ton of Outreach
you are you are you're a great Ambassador you are
I'm currently finishing building my slides today definitely not not procrastinating
right I just brought my stuff up because I thought oh my gosh I've got to do a couple things I better get things ready
so I can bring it up when I'm ready than have to hunt for it so Molly how far is Albuquerque from you oh boy uh um see if
I drive there let's see I was looking this up recently because I was going to go visit some friends down there let's
see [Music] Albuquerque uh so if I were to drive it
is a 16h hour drive it is 16 okay yeah I was for some reason I thought it was
closer than that no it's a you gotta drive all the way across Arizona after
All the Way South through California so that's true yeah yeah um yeah the west
coast is is Big yeah kind of like driving through Alabama to get to Florida yeah like it
blew my mind when when I was uh living in in Ohio um it blew my mind that that
Disney World was only 16 hours away and I I made that drive and I couldn't believe it like like New York and DC
were only 10hour drives away like like here on the West Coast a 10hour drive might get me to the next state might not
you know it's crazy
yeah Molly yeah where did where did you live in Ohio um I lived in uh in Dayton OH I
grew up in Salena that's okay that's great Carl and Molly Dayton is only
about an hour's drive away from delos where the great lesie peler spent his
life yeah yep I couldn't find his grave last time I was up there as anybody seen
[Music] it I know the graveyard but I couldn't find it I learned about about Le pela
and my astronomy club out there uh uh I guess there was some connection or
involvement or something like that the astronomy club out in Dayton has been around for a hundred years yeah part of
the Miami Valley yeah yeah I knew lesie he and I were good friends
and I I just I visited him twice and uh
Lifetime and uh he was just a wonderful wonderful person to talk to he was so
modest and uh when I tried to praise him with from Starlight Nights he's just
sitting there looking bored thought I was going to put him to sleep and then I said lesie I know some a gal who hated
Starlight Nights boy did he wake up he said tell me all about
that he just Lo jumping up he loved it he loved somebody hated
it I had a friend that took me up to his Observatory after he had long passed
away and I got to go inside it you know it felt amazing just being inside of
that Observatory yeah but yeah the uh Miami Valley
Astronomical Society has the lesle peltier's merrygoround that has been
restored and that's it's kind it's really cool to set in that I haven't set in in a long time but to sit in there
and turn the steering wheel around and have the telescope and the whole building follow you around really kind
of cool it's a little tiny shed and it's got like a chair in it and a telescope
and you can just sit in the chair and go Point wherever you want in the sky using this wheel and like I never actually got
to look through it but I looked inside of it one time and it was just like like the cleverest Little Thing feel like
you're sitting in a driver uh you know driving a car because you have a steering wheel in front of you and a little chair but you sit down almost on
the floor it's pretty cool where is it at yeah it is it really really is and
I'm looking at Simon's uh screen right now or at least a couple of seconds ago there was a nice little flare activity
next to the sun there it is off to the left of the sunspot
looks like we got a little flare activity now yeah see darting in and out right
this second I am so happy to see the sun coming alive
again yeah uh the the broadcast is streaming
on the astronomical League's uh Facebook page okay thank you Scott you're welcome
wonderful it's warm here yeah I should do some solar Imaging today as
well I just have a white light filter but uh I can still get some nice sunspots with
it Som I'll get a a quirk or a an solar
telescope or something but these things are so expensive Howard are you
there I I'm here uh but I my video is not working as far as taking a picture
of me it doesn't like the camera that I've got but I've got the I've got the uh sun on the
screen okay I've got the sun let's just see I'm
gonna try this okay long as you can share it you should be good uh let me undo the lens covers I'll
see if I can do that you may not be able to share it
right now because I'm sharing something already oh okay
[Music] yeah I'm not sure quite how to
get there we go let's see I get this down
okay okay sounds like we just heard the sound
of the rcbo telescope falling
down darn David now I on my computer screen I do
have a cak image but I'm not sure how to make that so you can see
it oh on once once uh uh Scott's not sharing his screen then you can screen
don't anybody show oh well we're never mind what um one of my questions is
about um uh aoso so uh don't go
there [Music] yeah yeah that said science science news
showed a video of it going down I saw that that was impressive the way this
the way this broadcast will will um will happen is um I'll introduce Terry man
and then Terry is going to um you know take over his host and she'll be
introducing each person as we go along she'll introduce David first um uh you
know for the first talk and then uh uh she's got a whole Schedule H how do how
do you uh see it going there Terry okay my schedule is starting with David and
then we will go to Carol to talk about the astronomical League okay then Scott
you and Carol uh talking about the upcoming stuff yeah have Molly on to
talk about Imaging and then Molly and I are going to discuss very quickly the new Imaging program Carl winning will be
up next for the North Central region of the astronomical League speak a little bit about that we'll take a 10-minute
break and Shane will be up and in between all this all of our our solar and um Shandra or shyra I'm sorry um we
be looking at the sun and night sky in very short views it's kind of sprinkled in between the
speakers okay that's cool and I've got son in cak and H Alpha
they'll be black and white but uh I'll just cover up the lenses and if you just give me a head up heads up about a minute before you need it I'll be good
to go okay thank you
okay okay we're about two minutes out Wendy says hello to everybody well hi everybody hi Wendy Wendy
who is everybody what what is this astronomical League oh well hi guys have
a good time a special Global star party with the league oh we're spending the day on Zoom meetings and it looks like
we might be able day it's in August oh good oh the vaccines the league is uh
meeting in Albuquerque in August okay well we may be able to join
it vaccines are done yeah be let's hope they're
out and I think we can add to the list of people who have we've lost during the
during Corona virus we can add the arbo telescope we can blame it on Corona
virus
yeah you have to admit this feels like old home week finally seeing faces we haven't seen in a while boy does it ever
yeah
the other meeting's over Wendy
y 30 seconds
this is the sound of two black holes colliding em merging where did this sound come from a long time ago in the
distant reaches of the universe two black holes each about 30 times as massive as our sun were locked in orbit
and spiraling in towards each other the only visible traces of the spinning cataclysm would have been the way their
gravitational fields warp the light of distant Stars even as they collided and merged there wasn't a flicker of light
to be seen the real and very violent action in the system was in the form of gravitational waves rippled in the very
fabric of space and time these waves were constantly draining energy from the black hole orbits leading to their
Ultimate Collision and merger to form a single black hole at that instant the
power of the gravitational waves was 50 times greater than that of all the stars in the universe
combined that pulse of gravitational waves lasting only a fraction of a second expanded through the universe
passing unimpeded through countless galaxies about 1.3 billion years later
it reached Earth gravitational waves alternately stretch and squeeze space itself everything they
pass through but the effect is minuscule their effect on Earth here has been vastly exaggerated to help visualize
something that is otherwise invisible on this scale to detect them and directly measure their properties scientists
built ligo the most sensitive measuring device ever made ligo uses a device
known as an interferometer to measure the tiny displacements in space in this simplified represent ation
a laser beam is sent towards a partially reflecting mirror and split along two paths the beams travel along 4 km arms
and reflect back towards the central mirror which recombines them directing their light to a
detector as the gravitational waves pass the distance between the central beam splitter and the end mirror stretches
along one arm and compresses along the other this changes the time it takes the
light to travel along the arms the recombined light w shift with respect to one another and produce a
signal at the detector incredibly tiny stretching and squeezing of space can
actually be measured directly in this way how little does space distort to
make this signal let's zoom into a hydrogen atom until we reach the proton at its core ligo is so sensitive it can
measure changes in distance as Tiny as a thousandth the diameter of a
proton and this tiny measurement made by ligo was the final step in a journey
that began 1.3 billion years ago in the distant Universe when two black holes
CED
hello everybody this is Scott Roberts with explore scientific and this is a very special Explorer Alliance
presentation of the astronomical League live um I'm joined here with um uh Terry
man former two ter term president of the astronomical League um uh Carol orge the
current president of the astronomical League uh we have Carl winning from uh
uh NC Carl what does that stand for North Central region the north
central region of the astronomical astronomical League uhuh uh our keynote speakers David Levy and Shane Larson um
uh we have astrophotographers here uh uh Molly Wakeling Simon tang and shendra
Sharma um and I think uh Howard skelson is also with us so that's great um and
um you know I wanted to uh take a moment just to introduce Terry if you haven't
met Terry uh then you probably have not been to many astronomical League events
because she's been at many many of them for a long time uh she developed a
passion for astronomy as a child uh begging her mom not to read her regular
stories as as a toddler but to read her stories of the Stars okay so she had
there was a there was something in her that U made her interested in astronomy
and and the and the starry night sky from maybe from birth I don't know it's
maybe it was a Mozart effect but um uh she uh she also started astrophotography
quite young as she at age I think seven or eight years old stole stole her dad's
camera so she could take a picture her own photograph of the Moon okay which I thought wow okay so this is somebody's
determined you know because she thought that she would get the beating of her life for doing that but instead her dad
understood and helped her uh get that film developed and encouraged her and
maybe gave her some tips also on how to improve the image so uh I think she
tried to use a flash or something to get the to get the Moon which is it's a great story but um she has been a
lifelong astronomer her passions uh of course are into
astrophotography uh she is very well known for her Aurora photography that
she does uh and um she's made uh countless and selfless uh uh
contributions to the astronomical league so it's a real honor to know her uh she's a great friend and Terry I'm going
to turn this over to you you thank you very much Scott and thank you for that
fantastic introduction I almost don't recognize that person oh well thank you for everybody
for being here and Scott thank you for broadcasting this we really appreciate it and uh we have a great lineup of
people here so many things that we can see and do it sounds like shy lindra has
clear skies in London Simon tang in California clear skies Howard eslon in
uh Florida I think has clear skies and so we we will be looking U at very short
views in between the talks here so I am going to go ahead and get started and I
am going to start with um David and I have known David leing forever I'm sorry
but it it seems like he is an old friend that um I have actually sat on the board
at ASP with him um and that's really where I was first really introduced to
him and it was such a great honor to be introduced to somebody that had
discovered comets uh written books and to find out he was as friendly as
anybody anyone can talk to him it just kind of amazed me because I you know you
never know what to expect and David has just been as friendly and open with all
of the knowledge he has he shares everything and that makes such an impression on all of us and we held an
Alcon which which is an astronomical League conference in Tucson and David and Wendy invited us to their home and
we actually got to look at telescopes and it was so nice to meet Wendy Wendy
is an amazing lady as friendly as can be her and David are a perfect pair and
they made us feel so welcome in their home and so I know Wendy's there and I
appreciate everything that Wendy did that day to help all of our group we all had a great
time um so that there everybody pretty much knows David
but just know he is as friendly as he seems and as knowledgeable as he seems
online so David welcome thank you for joining us and I will let you take it
from here well thank you Terry and God bless you I I really appreciated that
introduction and I especially appreciated what you said about Wendy I think it brought us both to tears and uh
we now remember that night we remember the meeting we remember um Liz kis G reaching out to us
before the meeting to invite me to give a talk I remember the night out here and it was just wonderful yeah well and I
understand that if assuming that covid-19 is gone by the summer that
you're going to have a convention in Albuquerque and Whitney and I can try to
make it to that if we can but we're not sure at the moment it's a little far out anyway I wanted to talk with you a bit
excuse me moment sorry I want to talk to you a
little bit about The Wonder of the night sky which I see every single night I go
out every night clouds clear but most of the time there are at least some stars out and um I'm still out with my little
telescope and you can see it right here this is minurva right next to me and uh
I use that one and I use a lovely telescope I got from Scotty I'm aor scientific a 12in called
Eureka and then there's Miranda with which I have found most of my visual
comets all but one and um and so I just want to introduce you
to those telescopes of mine that are out there and I love it when I go in to go
to bed finally at night I close the Dome I mean I close the observatory door and
I go in and I often think you think the telescopes when I'm gone just sort of
talk among them amongst themselves talking about what they saw what I tried to show through them and if I knew what
I was doing I really don't know but I like to imagine that they do because telescopes to me are people too and they
are precious gifts and whether I bought them or whether they were given to me
they are precious gifts that I will never forget it's been a tradition at these
Global star parties that I usually have a poem and I certainly have one today
and this one is so off from astronomy that I'm probably going to be expelled from the league after this the
board of the league will get together and vote to expel me just as I was very nearly expelled from the Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada back in 1967 and uh Scott has just admitted that
he's caught his telescopes actually talking I hope they were talking in English those of you who um those of you
who might have this book or would like to get it and if I could give a little ad for it for a second it's my
autobiography and you can get it from starizona
www.arizona.com has copies of it you can get it if you call Dean at
starizona uh he'll actually set it aside and I can autograph it for you but anyway so much for the
commercial anyway the the first poem that I'm going to read from is actually a very ancient
American folk song which has nothing to do with astronomy until a few minutes
ago when I realized that one of the women that it refers to is Dina Dina
turns out to be the goddess of the moon in many Ang ancient in many ancient uh
mythologies and including in our own religion of Judaism and uh because there
was a penumbral eclipse of the Moon last week that some of us might have seen it brings that to
mind but for other reasons uh the song kind of tells the story of the of Dina
As Told in Genesis chter 34 but uh he here's the song you all
know it feel free to sing along from Facebook and YouTube and everywhere that
you're watching this from and let's have some fun I've been working on the
railroad all the live long day I've been working on the rail road
don't talk don't laugh too much Scotty just to fast the time
away can't you hear the whistle BL Dino won't you Blow Your
Horn can you hear the whistle blow Dina Blow Your Horn B bum someone's
in the kitchen with din someone's in the kitchen I know someone's in the kitchen with Dina
struming on the old Ban Joo and singing f f fiddly IO F fiddly IO oh
fi F iio struming on the old Ban
Joo you know one thing you love about American folk songs is that they really
this song is about nothing it makes absolutely no sense at all until suddenly it clicks and it does and it's
about the moon and uh uh we're gonna have a lot of fun today and I'm going to
end with a more serious quote from John Keats he wrote this Sonet I'm just going
to read the first three lines of it in 1819 just two years before his early
death from tuberculosis I love to think if John Keats were alive
today he'd be with us I think he'd be with us he'd be with us on zoom and he
would probably want to read the poem himself but he can't so I will bright
star where I were steadfast as Thou Art not in Lone Splendor hung Aloft the
night and watching with it Eternal Lids apart I dedicate that little three lines
of the sonnet to the star serus which is what I suspect he was looking at the
brightest star in the sky and Terry I'm going to give it back to you now let's have a lot of fun
today thank you very much David I really appreciate that it's good to hear from you
again and we plan on having a whole lot of fun so next up I have Carol ore uh he
is the current president of the astronomical League uh he and his wife Betty have both been good friends of
mine for quite a few years I could probably talk for hours for the experiences that Carol and Betty and I
have all seen everywhere we traveled for alcons and within the astronomical
league but I won't bore everybody with that uh he's been keeping up with the League members writing the whats up with
the league newsletter and Carol is a really active person with a lot of different organizations he volunteers a
lot of time doing what he can to help anyone he can and he is very active in
the I believe it's the astronomical League of Kansas City is it Carol yep all right Carol I'm going to turn it
over to you to update us a little bit on the league thank you so much Terry and
uh I'm glad you didn't share all those Secrets because not all that should be published I think so but anyway yeah
it's very nice to be here Scotty thanks so much for making this possible and I'm
going to uh give a combination of upgrades of what's going on with the league as well as just explaining what
all the League's about because I know we've got an audience uh many of whom uh
know about the league but some who may not so let me see if I can get started here and share my screen
[Music]
can you see that uh Scott and not yet
[Music] okay what about
now H not yet see here so just go down okay now you're
gone you're gone
go okay it's so good to be here uh many of you I'm sure on the same boat as we
are uh in the midwest uh we're not having uh many Star parties at all uh
we're finding new ways of doing that and we're getting all kinds of reports from new clubs all the time that are
finding very creative ways of reaching the public some of the benefits for people
who haven't been around the league or maybe some who've been around the league but haven't uh uh caught up with what
the new things are for several years here are some of the benefits and I won't bore you with liing all the
objects we have the reflector magazine any member gets that which has really reached a new high in recent years and
Terry was talking about the Alcon national conventions for the first time since World War II we had to cancel our
2020 convention in Albuquerque but we're going to try to get it right in 2021
well I'll say more about that just a little bit uh we have various other
benefits that I'll get into with individual slides here in just a second we are 300 astronomical societies
strong and we have many members at large across the country and the world we have
18,000 members in all the clubs and we're just moving in to International
memberships and we're really excited about that program as well since astronomy is a worldwide
situation we talk briefly about the regions and Carl will say more about his individual region here in just a few
minutes we have 10 across the country uh some of which have several miles involved to get from one organization to
another and like I say we just now are starting the international
region the reflector uh it has just been come out the last one for December and
if you need a copy of that let us know at the national office we'll get you a complimentary copy for that it's also
online at the website one of the big things that we
have at the astronomical League are observing Awards and that's one of the main benefits that a lot of people uh
belong for we have various levels of uh observing award programs starting with h
Sky puppy for kids that's when the kids can get out and learn the sky and uh
then move up to other things another thing that's been very popular is the universe sampler it's just like it says
a sampling of several things that uh you can see in the night
sky and then if you have and most people do
have a pair of binoculars if not get with Scott he'll get you a very nice pair and there's many ways of uh using
get out there out of the night sky and looking up with binoculars you don't always have to have a telescope for some
awards there's one there uh you do have to travel to the southern sky to see that gives lots of our astronomy friends
excuses to go to the southern hemisphere then for the intermediate
Observer we have the asteroid program calwell double star mesier and mes is
one of the first programs most people uh set up for their observing program we have 110 objects and started
by they were all observed by mesier Charles mesier and
more and then for the advanced observers who have seen everything else in the other ones we have H the our peculiar
Galaxy program and so on all the way up to hersel 2 and we're constantly adding
more we're now up to about 75 programs and we'll talk in just a few minutes
about another uh new program we're very excited about uh with the explore
scientific and astronomers tend to be a pen
collectors and here's a good excuse if you didn't have an excuse already to start observing the nice Sky you get a
nice pen for many of these programs we also have manuals that
accompany some of the awards programs and it makes it just a little bit easier
as you're going through your journey of uh doing whatever certificate you're working for
one of the awards we're very proud of is the Le lesle C beler award we talked about that
earlier and we're very grateful for explor scientific for sponsoring this is
presented to an amateur astronomer who has contributed to astronomical observation of lasting significance and
excuse me we were able to present this in person this year so we were able to
run down the award winner he's from uh New Mexico and he's displaying the
plaque uh that he received and the telescope he uses and so we made it
happen his name is Howard J Brewington thank you Scott for
sponsoring yet another uh effort for the astronomical League that's great thank
you and another uh program sponsored by explor scientific is the national young
astronomer award it's amazing what uh uh skills are found in high
school age students you know we hear about education is not what it could be
but I'll tell you dealing with these kids that we deal with each year in this program they are really into science
with h both feet they're they're doing very well here's our first place Award winner Karen uh Le from uh
California uh she uh the image on the right there
she set up her own builted actually her radio telescope setup and it's just
amazing what she was able to do she not only set it up but also did all the research that uh for her her
project second place was Vivic he is 16
years old going on about 35 or 40 uh it's amazing uh and I'm going to talk
more about him on a future slide here here's the name of his research here
characterizing the pulsations of Delta scoa stars using the mg 1B triplet uh
one of the things that his sponsor said about him was that he could take the
subject like this that not everybody knows of the ins and outs of it and make
it explainable to lay people and that's a gift for any age but particularly for someone uh
16 years old and there's uh vivik was again the
winner of the one on the left the horer Smith award this he gave a talk in
California several talks involving that subject spectroscopic too and his
sponsor was uh inviting him back several times for that talk in various parts of
California because like I say he explained it so easily to uh lay people
who knew nothing at all about astronomy but can make it understandable the uh other
uh service award winner for the horer series was uh J shat with building a
telescope display he set up the library and he actually set up a Outreach event
where he uh showed what it took to build a very basic
telescope another uh award we give from the youth side is is the horer Parker
youth Imaging award and the second part of that is named after Don Parker many of you know him from the winter star
party and he's also internationally known in Alpo as well
uh was the first place winner and this image of the Milky Way was imaged from
downtown Houston and he did a tremendous job one of the things uh he and his
family do is traveled the world in search of locations for Dark Skies so he
can do this kind of Imaging and he's a like uh 14 or 15 years old and just
really enjoys it and does a very good job of it this year we had sort of a unique
situation we have a horer omera journalism award that gives an award to
kids who work who uh give a presentation who write up an article an essay about
astronomy or science in general and this year we had a h family uh first and
second place winner first place winner was Lucia Castile uh sh with the plaque
there and her brother to her right was Stephen he was also the second place
winner and so we kept it in the family there uh they were sponsored by the the
Northwest Suburban astronomers and so we're very pleased to welcome them uh
for their sponsorship an adult award another adult
award we have at the league level is the Mabel Sterns newsletter editor award it's presented for an outstanding
amateur League Society newsletter and of course newsletters have evolved they're
uh mostly digital now first place winner this year was Bruce Bowman from the
Indiana Astronomical Society have a webmaster award for the
best Society website uh sometimes we take the award where the event and the
person is and that's what we did a few years ago I had the honor of presenting at the Springfield telescope makers uh
at Stella Fame and that was a very positive experience
one of our newer programs is the horer library telescope program each of our 10
regions are eligible to uh submit an application for setting up
a telescope and one of the libraries and their local location we a one for each
uh each region and that's been very successful that program has been
extremely successful Countrywide and it it's allowing astronomy to be uh
accessed by people and areas that would never have that if it wasn't going to
the public library we were talking earlier about
alcom 2021 and David keep your fingers crossed I think we can make it happen uh
registration we think will be up around the first of the year uh Embassy Suites is a wonderful location for it something
different that we're going to be doing this year is having our Alcon Junior portion of that that is headed up by
Peggy Walker and that's an opportunity for the kids to uh assemble their
telescopes and also have a lot of fun learning more about astronomy and the
process that'll be sponsored by the or hosted by the Albuquerque Astronomical
Society so mark that on your calendar August 5th through 7th I hope to see everyone there
another award that we have uh yearly is astronomy day the 2021 dates are May
15th and October 9th and we have some repeat groups that routinely submit an
application for this because they're out there every astronomy day sharing astronomy with the public and we really
appreciate that and uh if you notice here the deadline is June 13 if in your
local clubs or you have have someone uh who is willing to uh uh organize that we
would love to have you participate and and S an application at the bottom there is the contact person uh Gary Thomson
handles that program for the league and we'd be delighted to have you
participate if you want to get a hold of the league for some reason that's your contact number by phone or by email
they're at the bottom and so I thank I'm about done with my alloted lot of 10
minutes Terry am I still on track I think we're about right so thank you very
much thank you Carol appreciate that it's nice to hear everything that is going on and we sure do hope Albuquerque
can happen so what I'd like to do now is I know Scott does not need an
introduction but Scott I'm going to introduce you anyway oh no yes Scot and
Carol are going to talk about uh some of the one of the new um Awards
come one of the new uh programs coming up and so I have known Scott for years as you everybody
can probably tell everybody pretty much knows Scott I think the first time I met him was at an Alcon and I needed to buy
a flip mirror for my telescope and you were the one I talked to that fixed me up with a flip mirror and over the years
we have been involved in so many projects um so many conferences at same
time um just if it was astronomy you know it's amazing because the astronomy Community really is a community we're
like we're all like an extended family pretty much all of us have known everybody for quite a few
years um but but Scott's always whether you were at the winter star party or wherever if there was something going on
and you needed help or you needed advice or needed to borrow something Scott was always there he he made it easy for US
amateur astronomers if there was a problem to go and say hey I've got this but I could re I'd like to see your
eyepiece in my telescope and there were times he would let us borrow that and actually be able to use borrow his
equipment for a little while to test out and that just amazed me but what we're really grateful for is exactly what
Carol said too another thing we are grateful for is his support or explore
scientific support for the national young astronomer award and the lle C Peltier award Lord I mean you have just
helped tremendously recognize so many people and so many kids and we greatly
appreciate that and as you can have all seen he puts on fantastic Global star
parties last night Mount Wilson was amazing I loved it I I have never seen
Uranus and its moons like that in my life the nebulas uh everything Mars even
look good everything that was incredible to me I really enjoyed the great or the Mount Wilson star party and I think
everybody else did from what I have seen and so he's always helped with
educational astronomy too so for that and all of the above Scott thank you for
all of your help everything you've done amazing guy if you got any questions talk to him and I going to turn this
over to you and Carol to talk about what you're going to talk about okay than gosh Terry thank you I'm I'm I'm
blushing over here so thank you very much it was very
kind um so uh Carol and I have been uh well actually it was Carol that
approached uh approached me and explore scientific to be sponsor of yet another
award and this one would be about astrophotography and uh I have here in
front of me um uh you know the entry form uh so H how does the from the
league Point uh Carol how does the U how do people uh enter into this program and
um uh you know what what uh what historically has happened I think that
opt at one point was sponsor of this maybe they kicked it off um yes opt was
a major sponsor for several years and what happened we had submissions of
Astral photography work Imaging as it uh it's also called in certain quarters and
uh and so there was an application process that they went through by having
it by a certain date and then we gave an award out each year so uh Scott and I have talked about enhancing that process
and making it uh something that uh would get a lot more uh uh participation I
think in that we very possibly would model that uh similarly after astronomy
uh picture of the day not that we would have a picture each day for this program but maybe once a week or something like
that and really get some interest across the country and the world uh of this
program uh we would probably uh recognize participants on a weekly basis
and then uh at the end of the year then come up with a grand champion so to
speak from our judges and really honor the
uh astrophotographers and imagers who put so much into this I know not too many years ago at the league we were
talking about doing something for Imaging because they seen everything in
the sky but they were still loving to take the pictures but there was nothing for them from the lead level so that's
what got us into it originally but I see this as a really an opportunity to enhance this and Scott thank you so much
for stepping forward and being so generous thank you thank you I'm excited about it um I'm excited that the league
U uh is embracing the idea of um uh giving more exposure to more people
there's a lot of great astrophotographers out there and it will be truly difficult to pick out the very
best image you know so um you know I'm I'm I'm I'm happy just to be the sponsor
of it and not the judge because this is going to be tough so we're gonna have
more than one to take the pressure off the judge just a little bit that's the way to do it you just sponsor it you
don't you don't get involved in judging it so yeah but it is an honor and I'm I'm
I'm very excited about the program yeah to Echo what Terry said yeah you've always been there for the league for
many many years had a very good relationship all the way through and it's yeah very much I I love the league
and I love all you guys so yep well thank you
oops better unmute myself so stay tuned for more information on that we will
publish it just as soon as we uh firm up some
details thank you Carol what I'd like to do now um we're a little ways in um
let's start with shyra do you have any Dark Skies right now that you could show us anything
shendra hey Terry yeah give me two seconds let me just get on
screen shy Andra is in the UK um he has
been uh on many of the global star parties and uh just in the last few
months we've seen his work just get better and better and better so he's he's really becoming a uh entering the
realm of Master astrophotographer so cheers Scott thanks
for that um so sharing my screen now um
if you can see it's guided I've had to start it again because I hit clouds and
and there we go an image has just popped on screen as the clouds have cleared and
that's a five minute image of the North American nebula and The Guiding has not been too
bad on that at all actually if I zoom in a little bit yeah maybe you can move the dialogue
box so they can see the image a little better yeah uh the the guiding there you
go oh wow that's that's North American for sure that is nice that's not bad guiding
it's 72% zoomed in stars are still round and the details really clear it's
still a little bit cloudy but it's not too bad I've have got better images of
that one um if I
this one there's an image that I got last week that was an hour on each filter of
sh and there we go clouds have just come
in oh let go but you know it is amazing to see the
live images I mean we're looking um shra are you in London um about 20 miles out really so
it's amazing to be able to see your Sky though I mean you're the only one on here tonight right now that is in
darkness so thank you so much for showing us that and we might pop back to you again here in a little bit no
worries thanks for having me cheers Terry thank you shyra um Molly we're
gonna come up to you next but what I am gonna do Molly's going to be speaking for about 15 minutes um we have Simon
tang and Howard eslon um in Florida in California and
Howard's in Florida uh you guys kind of get ready after Molly and I'm going to come to you both uh real quick after
Molly gets done so I am going to introduce Molly and I have known Molly for a while too um I'm in Dayton she was
in Dayton so we have um known each other for a while but
Molly got into astrophotography in July of 2015 after receiving her first
telescope as a gift there was much trial and error and later she has now has
three astrophotography rigs set up in her backyard in in the San Francisco Bay
Area uh she has dedicated one of them to variable star and Expo exoplanet uh
Transit observation she is very involved in stem Outreach having accured more
than 100 hours of volunteer activities reaching over a thousand people she is a
daav vso Ambassador and explore scient or explore Alliance
Ambassador and is a panelist and broadcaster on the astroimaging channel
YouTube show Molly is currently pursuing her BHD in physics at the University of
California Berkeley where she studies with her two cats Orion and Apollo so
Molly welcome good to see you again you can take it from here all right all righty um well I've
got one of my cats here with me this is oh yeah he's standing on top of the green screen
so way my my other cat Apollo is uh
elsewhere in the house probably taking a nap or or destroying my Christmas tree one of the [Laughter]
two yeah so um let me go ahead and get my screen shared
here and my
slides yeah there we go all right so um uh in addition to the
uh the League's uh Imaging competition there's also the League's uh Imaging
observing program um that I think is going to be uh talked about in a in a
little bit later on this program um so in order to get involved in that uh in
both the Imaging competition and the uh and the Imaging program much like the
observing programs now they have a an Imaging program as well that I'm very excited about and I'm going to definitely submit for I think I have
almost everything I need to submit for that somewhere in my 500 plus
images um uh so I'm gonna talk about how you can get started in
astrophotography and the how the League's Imaging program is a good way to learn astrophotography since it
requires Imaging a wide variety of of targets and kind of gives you some some framework on on what kinds of things to
image uh so um a little about me Terry uh did a very nice job introducing me so
I'll just uh show off the the pictures I have here um those are two of my of two
out of my three rigs although I just got a new mount for the one over there on the left I have a ioptron 740 that I
just got up and running and it's working very very nicely so far so very excited about that um and I have my uh really fun little
camper there that I can now use to go the dark sky sites I just got earlier this year very excited about that uh and
I I do most of my Imaging from here in my backyard in the San Francisco area
and um I've been able to do a lot more now that I've gotten some neuroband
filters but occasionally do go out to dark sky sites to be able to do better with my wideband stuff like the iris
nebula there on the left um so uh the um the Imaging program
requires that you capture a lot of different types of objects so I'm G to
have some some examples of that later on in in today's show um but uh here's the
types of of things that the that the program requires you to image as well as
the uh some optional things on the upcoming slides so um open clusters
cabor clusters and these are all images that I'll likely be submitting for for
these categories although I have a a pretty cool one for dark nebula that I'm going to do instead of this one um but
uh and then some some the of the uh optional pieces because you have to submit uh 25 deep Sky Images total so um
here's some other kinds of options that you can submit for all those categories including uh variable Stars if you want
to get into doing scientific observing I'm not going to get into how to do that today because that's a whole like
separate talk um but I do have some talks with the aavs on YouTube and many others uh who have
presented on the topic as well on how to image variable stars and uh
Novi and of course there's the uh solar system side of the house as well uh
which kind of has some some different equipment requirements but is actually probably an easier place to start for a
lot of people depending on what what gear you have because the you don't need as good of tracking and you don't need as good of of Imaging equipment I've not
actually ever imaged an asteroid before so I'm gonna have to have to do that here pretty
soon and then some some uh other things you can image in the solar system as
well all right so um as far as getting into astrophotography let's talk about a couple of different kinds of telescopes
that are good for doing astrophotography uh first uh and then they all have their their pros and cons
so uh refractors are a really good place to start if you're not really sure where
to start uh because of their wider field of view and their fast focal ratios they
are they don't require as as highend of amount to be able to stay steady and
stay on target and and have nice round stars um and they do vary in price quite
a lot depending on uh how nice of one you get how long of focal length how big
of aperture things like that but there's quite a few affordable ones out there uh however they're kind you're kind of
limited to the types of targets you can do because of their wide field view they're not great for doing most
galaxies or most planetary nebula um and getting ones that have good Optical
quality can can cost a fair bit of money a lot of people may have newtonians they've used for visual
observing and unfortunately a lot of the visual observing newtonians
don't Focus so um there's there's newtonians that are built for Imaging that have the primary mirror moved up a
bit uh so that the uh cameras can reach Focus but they do tend to be a little
lighter weight than uh at least than some other types of telescopes although they can also be heavier depending on
which kind you have um they often times have very fast fulker ratios and are kind of the middle of the road between
having a small field of view and a large field of view so you can access a wide variety of of targets and be able to get
nice images of those um
uh you may like or you may not like I really like seeing defraction specs um but I I haven't done any any a whole lot
of deep sky astrophotography with a Newtonian I'm currently using my Newtonian for the variable star
observing because I haven't got a coma corrector working for it quite yet uh and then of course there sh C
grains which is where I actually started for as protography which is probably uh it's a pretty difficult place to start
for astrophotography but um it's they're excellent for doing planetary Imaging
it's really what you're G to going to need for doing that um they tend to be a little on on the cheaper side uh even
though I mean it's Astro gear nothing really really cheap um the Optics are a little easier to correct uh you can um
focal reducers field flatteners are are relatively inexpensive um but they do have some
Optical uh issues that make your images not always as gorgeous as ones out of
refractors for example the secondary mirror makes Stars a little bit mushy the mirror can flop
around uh things like that uh so when it comes to uh mounts
for doing deep sky as photography you're taking long exposures you need a mount that is stable and need a mount that's
going to be able to hold the telescope that you have and it needs to be computerized so that you can uh tell it
to go to a Target and so that it will track on that Target and you but you
also want it to be relatively portable especially if you don't have a nice backyard setup you don't want to have to
be lugging uh 100 or 200 pounds of gear up and down the stairs of your second story apartment like I've done in the
past um you uh because then you'll be less likely to actually go out and do
astrophotography and there's quite a lot that you need to do in order to uh to do this program so you want to get a mount
that is uh light light enough to be able to handle and move in and out of your
house but also is robust enough to be able to track well with with the
telescope Halo that you have generally the rule of thumb is the capacity of the mount which is the amount of telescope
and Camera capacity that capacity usually does not include the counter weights um because you can so so you can
ignore um you don't have to add in the counter weights in order to figure out whether your Mount can hold your
telescope or not generally for good astrophotography you want to stay at about half of that payload capacity
so let's say the payload capacity of the mount you're looking at is is 40 PB then
you'll need to have a telescope and camera setup that weighs 20 pounds or less in general there are some mounts
that can handle a lot higher fraction of that payload capacity and still have good tracking but that's kind of the the
the approximate rule of them when it comes to cameras if you a good place to start if if you're totally
new to it is with a DSLR they're multi-purpose they're relatively cheap
you can see the images right away you don't need a computer to control it it's kind of an easier entry point um however
they're they tend to be noisier because they're not cooled they have a spectrum filter that makes them really great for
getting good colors in your daytime Imaging but blocks a lot of the red signal that is present in space so that
uh you don't get as as good of Reds uh like like in a lot of the large emission nebul and stuff like that um um and they
they tend to be less sensitive than the Astro dedicated cameras and not as many of the astrophotography software
programs support capturing with the DSLR so you kind of have to hang and jam it a little
bit sometimes on the other hand there are dedicated as of cameras that uh are
cooled so you have much lower noise designed for astr photography don't have that Spectrum filter but they are more a
diff more difficult place to start for newbies because you have to use a computer to control them um but and
they're a little pricier but you will get higher quality images out of them although I have gotten some really good
images out of my dslrs so if that's if you have a DSLR or or aren't ready to
spend a, Dollar on an astro camera yet or are getting into the technology a
DSLR is a great place to start and you you can still get nice images out of a DSLR uh in fact the the image that uh
the opt astronomical League Imaging award that existed previously actually
got second place in that competition with an image I took with my DSLR so uh you can still do quite well with those
all right so there's a lot of different software out there it can be hard to know where to start so I've laid out a
list here for you for doing deep Sky Imaging on the basic side of the house if you have a DSLR an intervalometer is
a good place to to start because you there's no computer control required you plug it in and you can you can program
the intervalometer to say all right I want you to take6 second exposures and it will click that
camera for you so you don't have to sit out there with like a timer or something like that uh it will it will take care
of that for you so you can go get a cup of hot cocoa um backyard Nikon backyard
EOS is a relatively cheap program that uh they so the Nikon one obviously controls nikons EOS One controls Canon
cameras uh to be able to do that camera control via a computer so you can see
the images bigger and um and have greater access to to more features and
things like that uh sharp cap which does technically work with Canon cameras with
a new driver that has come out recently but that driver is still in development um it's really more designed to work
with Astro cameras like the zwo the qys the um the cameras along those lines and
then for controlling your telescope Mount uh you can use uh cart do CL or
stellarium or EQ mod uh depending on the type of Mount that you have to do basic
like you know point to this target point to that Target from your computer as opposed to having to sit there with the hand controller so those are just some
options on the more advanced side of the house if you want to start to automate your telescope so I've got my three rigs
out in the backyard I run them all night long and I go to sleep and sequence generator Pro runs it all for me and
some people use nenina which is relatively new open source program uh Voyager uh the skyx there's some other
ones that kind of increase in price as as you go along then uh for processing to to get started
uh deep Sky stacker is a good place to start there's a lot of tutorials out there um but for making higher quality
images you'll want to get Photoshop or pix in sight or these other programs listed here to to start making some some
higher quality images but deep Sky stacker is a good place to start if you're just getting into it um if now on the solar system side of
the house there kind of some different requirements you will need a longer focal length telescope to be able to get
any kind of detail on the planets or on the moon or on the sun uh and you can
add a barad to increase that resolution or that magnification and I i' i' really the
king of the crap for planetary Imaging is schm cig grains that's what all the so people like uh Christopher go Damen
Peach uh people who take really incredible planetary images tend to use schmi CAG grains theyve got really long
focal length and a pretty compact package now the nice thing about doing pun Imaging is that you don't need
really a good Mount at all it does not have to be an equatorial Mount even uh it doesn't have to track very well I use
my I frequently use my my Celestron nextstar SE which is the altaz Mount that's uh pretty affordable the whole
package of the 8 inch telescope and the mount uh only like
$1,200 and uh it's a great planetary Imaging platform it's it's really easy to use you don't need uh and well all
Taz mounts in general you don't need to Polar align and do all those somewhat more complicated things but you can even
hand trck a dobsonian or if you have like a go-to doonium with with with tracking in one of the axes uh you can
you because the exposure times on planetary images are very short so you don't need long exposure tracking just
enough for a fraction of a second uh per frame to get a video so you can even
hand track a dooni and if if that's what you have for doing planetary Imaging I've seen I've actually SE some really good results of the International Space
Station from hand trck St zians it's really cool the camera requirements are also
less stringent uh I have used a DSLR for doing planetary uh Imaging although the
video compression makes for some artifacts uh but instead of a DSLR you can also spend like 150 bucks and get
one of the one of the cheap um uh planetary or autoguiding cameras that
have high frame rates and uh they are computer controlled but um they're
they're a lot cheaper the the ones that are not cooled and have and have much smaller chips so uh cameras like the
actually I'm going to have some examples on on a following slide here of specific models to take a look at um but I yeah
those those little cheap cameras that you can use for auto guiding uh actually make great planetary cameras uh software for capturing uh
sharp cap and fire capture the two that people tend to use them most often there's some other ones out there just to acquire those videos
and then for doing the processing regist Stacks Auto stacker are kind of the two main programs I've had more success with
auto stacker but then I actually use them both because I do the stacking and auto stacker and the wavelet
deconvolution aka the sharpening and render Stacks there's a lot of Internet tutorials out there on how to do that as
well um so uh here's an example of a of a good deep Sky setup but is still
budget as as we'll call it in in a a astronomical terms here uh if you get a
refractor um and a lightweight equatorial mount a ones shot color
camera and a light pollution filter you can do quite a lot of Imaging with that setup uh on the two to four grand
range and you can use that same mount with a schmi cassin telescope or if you
have like a simple altaz mount for visual observing which is the one I use for all my Outreach activities um then
you can get a lot of planetary Imaging out of that as well with a cheap one shot color camera um and that setup
tends to be less expensive now all that being said those are recommendations those are things
that will get you good images but use whatever you have there's you'll hear people say oh you got to have this
telescope you got to have this Mount or else it's not going to work I started with uh the the one on the right which
is the altaz Mount shint cast grain no f reducer and a DSLR and I got images that you know
nowadays you know I look back I'm like oh man that that would have been those aren't the best images but at the time I
was so excited about them and they meet the requirements for the uh for the Imaging program uh the observing program
so um get started with whatever you have and kind of you can grow from there and
um look for cheap used gear on astromart and other things like that so use what you have do what you can and it's a
really awesome side of the hobby to get into as photography that's what I
got all right thank you Molly appreciate that a lot of good information in there
um and we we're goingon to discuss the program a little bit here in a few minutes uh Simon are you there and do
you have any views of the Sun at this time I am here and yes there is a view
of the sun um on fortunately seeing is really starting to go downhill compared
to what it was when we first started this but what I'm going to talk about real quick here is this is the Sunspot
uh 2790 for those of you who have been following this Sunspot this was actually the cause of an mclass solar flare that
occurred about I don't know 3 four days ago and basically what that means uh for
us is we now know that the sun is truly awake and is active um because obviously
there's a lot more activity than what we' normally have and to have a solar flare signifies that soldar cycle 25 is
definitely underway um I'm just going to show you a quick picture of the same Sunspot from
earlier this morning and what you're actually seeing here is there was actually a flare in progress uh when we
first started looking at this and myself and Scott Roberts when we logged in we saw how he described it as tuber
toothpaste being squirted out and this is essentially it's a inverted image so
obviously the tuber toothpaste is now turned black as opposed to white but we actually saw this thing unfold in real
time and actually just leaping across and it was gone just as quick as it
showed up uh but I think from what I can confirm we caught the tail end of this
solar flare that's nice that's amazing to be
able to see I'm sitting under clouds yeah it's not often we get to see
uh stuff like this happen in real time um I mean this is probably one of the
ones that I've actually been able to witness in real time which is kind of a shame because the one that happened we couldn't see it and by the time it had
happened we got these amazing coronal Loops which is another rare phenomenon that occurs on the sun and oh yeah it
was just everybody was just going crazy anybody to do with solo was going crazy yeah I bet I love that first image
you showed that's amazing to be able to see that kind of action on the sun after it's been quiet for so long oh yeah uh I
think this is what everybody's been waiting for uh when it comes down to solo because we've had such a quiet
spell of almost what two years with just nothing happening maybe the odd splattering here and there obviously we
had the eclipse uh back in 2017 so the you know it's we're looking
forward to more and more activity as it goes on although I think this um cycle
is going to be slightly quieter than Cycle 24 I don't want to hear that I want my
Aurora back well uh well technically we should have had an aurora recently
because of that flare that occurred in fact actually I will let me show you guys a quick uh
video let a look needless to say don't need to do a screen share because of the way I'm doing all of this but this video
shows this flare recurring uh this is actually through stereo a which is
actually not in the view of Earth so the next one um image that you're going to see is a chronograph and you'll see that
coming towards us so there it is again closer up so we should have seen some activity in terms
of Aurora from this yeah yeah definitely burp
that's that is amazing well thank you Simon I sure do appreciate that uh Howard are you set up
in Florida well yes and no but now there's a giant or arboreal Sunspot uh in other
words it's it's gone behind a tree I don't have any visual images I could share images I took earlier this morning
if you would like go ahead and show us a couple of those okay I'll go ahead and
and get that and we'll get the white light now let's okay I got to go to screen share right yes
okay and that's what I want right there okay can you see that yes yep okay
and let's see there's now there's a thing right there's a de there we go
there we go there's a pop-up screen right in the middle we've got the spot here I believe this is
yeah this this is right left reverse and the the big spot that was on the sun earlier is over here where the pointer
is and let's see that was 27 uh what was it
27868 that was 2786 85 is gone around and then this is uh uh uh 2790 and
there's actually a little spot here let me see if I can get this enlarge this little bit so e you see there's a little spot group right over in here that
hasn't gotten a number yet and moving on over this is in calcium K and calcium K is where the
action is if you want to see the magnetic fields we've got an old tired magnetic field there that was Associated
spots on a pre with spots on a previous rotation we've got the 27 86 spot with
its plug and you've got the uh magnetic remnants here you've got the magnetic remnants and I forget what the number of
this one was it actually had spots in it but you've got those magnetic Rems and then this is with h uh
2790 and the thing about these these are all tired and worn out they're just spread out so they become more and more
diffused eventually they go into the background you get kind of this background granulation but this is a
more compact over here this new spot unnamed it's more compact so it's it's Arisen fairly recently but I don't
expect great things come to that I think it'll be just a few spots and then it'll disappear and then finally the other
thing that I have this is Cal this is H Alpha and calcium K and HL for what we
call the chromosphere of the sun it's just a couple hundred met a couple thousand kilometers above the Sur the
visible surface of the sun which is what we see in white light but again here's the spots 2 790
2786 and you can kind of see some tangling stuff here that's associated with the Plage associated with this new
spot and up here again this shows the magnetic fields um and some of the spicules that come off of that um I
didn't well let's see I did okay here's a second exposure that shows some of the prominences around the edge there's
actually a minimal one here but it's pretty hard to see but these are basically the images taken from today and it's really fun to watch this as it
progresses day after day well thank thank you Howard yeah it's we'll come back probably before
this is over and see check with you and Simon shyra and see what's going on a
little bit more so thank you very much well you're welcome my pleasure okay
Molly oh you and I are going to talk a little bit uh the new Imaging program
that we have been talking about from the astronomical league is called foundations of Imaging observing program
and that is the name of it and M and I um Molly if it's okay I'll go ahead like we talked about and I'll go ahead and
start off and then I'm going to let you wrap up how about that yeah okay so I'm gonna share my
screen and what I'm gonna do oops there we
go and that's one of the images of the sun I took in Al Alpha it's been a while
since I took that one of the things I wanted to go over with was the Imaging targets for this award
our constellations and asterisms nightscapes meteors lunar and solar
Stars binary variable and Nova planets deep space objects comets and asteroids
and eclipses and occultations now I am one right now that has been using a DSLR so all the images
here that you are going to see that I took R DSLR and this is through a solar Max 90 that I took and that one of the
requirements is the full disc of the sun whether it's in white light or Al Alpha
and so that would be one of the requirements you can see where there's some um prominences up here and on the
edges but it doesn't have to be H Alpha white light will work just as well uh
lunar you can also take pictures of the Moon the full disc of the moon is one of
them and these are part of the um you need 28 of the solar system also these
two would be included in the solar system and then what I wanted to jump to
was I have been doing a lot of uh knif skates and that's one of the things that
with the Aurora that I also do and there is an option that if you can't get some
of these 28 that you need above you can use some nightscapes and so this one I took uh up
on Lake Superior and and you can see the Milky Ways in the back and that would be
one of those that you could use for the foreground and the night sky so that would be another option and all I'm
doing this was taken with a Canon 6D and just a tripod so you can start this
program off very simply if you want to until you get more information and learn
more about Imaging with a deep sky or an astro dedicated camera you can start off
this way and learn more as you you go or save money as you go and build up and get your
camera this one is um one of the zodiacal light with the Milky Way and
again this is a panoramic I think I took five shots and stitched them together but that would also be usable as a Milky
Way shot or you can take any the Milky Way off of the first picture would have work too so this is another idea that
you can use and you can learn more about photography when you start you need to start to understand the workings of the
sky the constellations how things move everything that's up there you need to learn that I mean you got to have a
computer I mean it's nice to have a go-to at some time but it's really nice to know the sky yourself not everybody
does but let's say your batteries die you're kind of dead in the water if you don't know where anything is at so it is
good to know at least the basic the major constellations but the more you know the better it will be like here you
can see Ryan setting right down here it's getting ready to set into the ocean
um and so the more you know the more you're going to learn and very honestly with League observe programs you will
learn it is not something that you say oh that's a breeze that's easy I can do this whole program in three nights if
you do that then you will not have learned anything um they are they can be
tough and that's part of the good challenge of it it makes you learn uh star Trails is another one that
uh you can use also in this program and again simple tripod camera and that's at
Star Quest Star Party Green Bank West Virginia um amazing things that you can
see and do oh and a time lapse let's see if this
is going to work this is a time lapse that I did in Alaska watch the ground
how it lights up this is very short but this is real time Aurora wow look at the
ground wow if you could hear everybody cheering and screaming at that point you
would not believe it but anyway uh time lapse is another one that you can do
that is a simple camera and tripod you can learn how to shoot star Trails how
to do time lapse how to shoot the Milky Way in a foreground object those are
things that you can learn as you build into getting a dedicated Astro camera so
Molly that is going to wrap my section up I am going to turn it over to you
there is a question Terry uh somebody wants to know how do I sign up for this program uh you need to be a member of
the astronomical league and once you become a member you will be able to do any of the astronomical League programs
that we have they are on the astronomical League website which I bet to Scott is typing in right now yes uh
so when you do that you will find there is a coordinator for every program that
we have and the coordinator for this program I know I believe I know his name
but I'm not gonna say it till I find it is Don Dan I'm sorry Dan croen from
Missouri and I think it was he and two other men that put this program together
so any one of our 80 plus programs you just go to the website you will see who
to contact and that's how you get started and once you do this uh you will
have I don't know for sure if this has a certificate or a pin but some of our Awards do have the pins too so very easy
to get started so if there Scott is there anything else that I'm
missing we good to go to Molly if there is we'll figure it out and talk about it later okay Molly go ahead and take
it all right sorry my screen froze there for just a second but I'll go ahead and get
here all right so um I wanted to put up some examples uh uh just like Terry did
um minor more on a telescope rig but to kind of show like like what a what a a
good example of it is if you if you if you really get into astrophotography and also what an acceptable example is um if
uh like from my earlier days of of doing astrophotography just to kind of to kind of say like it doesn't have to be
amazing it just has to be good um so here is globular cluster M13
uh the Hercules cluster which I'm sure every visual Observer has seen and OD at
and uh so when I I mentioned earlier that I actually started with the Schmid
casso game which is a really hard place to start with asop photography but that's what I had available to me at the
time taken with a dedicated Astro camera on a high-end mount in light polluted
Skies but on the right is when I took with my DSLR on um like a well amount
that I wouldn't say it's high it's kind of medium but it has its issues um and you know this is a a series of oh
yeah I was going to put how many exposures I think I think this is probably only like 20 or 30 like 30
second exposures you know you don't need to sit on a target for hours and hours especially one like a glab the cluster
that's quite bright where actually I think lots of exposure time might actually make it worse um but yeah so it
doesn't doesn't need to be uh really high quality but uh the the program does
lay out that the star should be not really bloated it shouldn't have a whole lot of noise or uh gradients or a lot of
vignetting and stuff so um uh yeah it's just reasonable
image another category for the Deep Sky area is galaxies so um on the left is
one that I took at Deep Sky West on one of their super fancy like 14inch plain
wave corrected doll kums on their like really expensive Paramount tourus with this really high-end camera that I got a
really epic image of but you can do decently well with a Nikon or I here I
use my Nikon b5300 which is like a entry Mish level DSLR on a lmani G11 with a a
decent telescope uh it's a Neo acromat not an Appo uh telescope where
apochromatic refractors have um less chromatic aberration but I still get reasonable IM is out of it with uh with
that telescope that's on that was on there Molly what galaxy was that oh sorry that was m33 thank you yeah uh
it's on the bottom of the side there but I forgot to forgot to mention that um so
uh dark neb now I the Texas Star Party and going out to other dark sky sites
are excellent places to take images of dark nebil because you need to be able to see them against a background of of
brighter stars and that's really hard to do from the city
uh picture here of the snake nebula which by the way I took with a DSLR and a less than $1,000 refractor telescope
on a less than $1,000 Mount when I was at the Texas Star Party um but over on
the right we have the trifid nubula which uh is actually a m like many targets bang for your buck image it has
AEM Mission nebula reflection nebula dark nebula and it's got an open cluster over there I I think that's a what is
that M21 something like that um if you take a wide enough Field image of it through a refractor so um you can kind
of uh you still have to have a minimum number of images but you can tick off multiple boxes with with one image as
well uh planetary nebula is one of the like a one of the optional categories to
get your 25 deep Sky images from the city I've been utilizing um narrow band
filters to be able to get lot of so to be able to to get a lot of
really awesome detail on this nebula um but you don't have to go to that that level of of Awesomeness the one on the
right is u a very much entry level camera on my 8 inch MC which is also a
really excellent planetary Imaging scope on an altaz Mount and this is probably
like 10 or 12 30 second exposures under Bal 5 skies and yeah it's definitely not
the best image of the dumbbell nebula but uh this I've got good some good star color here you can see the nebula
there's not a whole lot of noise the stars look pretty nice I had to delete a whole bunch of frames so the Stars didn't track very well um but there it
is the dumbbell nebula which this is one of my first Aster images and being able to see something like so much more on a
given object than I could see with my eye was just the absolute coolest thing uh yeah so those are some examples of of
deep Sky targets and how it doesn't have to be aod quality but can instead just
be [Laughter] decent all right thank you Molly I
appreciate that and from you we are going to go to Carl winning now Carl is
in his second term as chair of the north central region of the astronomical League he has been an amateur astronomer
since being introduced to the Sky by his grandfather during uh during yeah July
1957 today he is an astronomical League Master Observer that means he has done a
whole lot of observing programs he would be one if you had questions he would probably have the answers he has been
involved in a Twin City astronomers of Bloomington Normal Illinois since
September of 1978 he currently serves as the club's president historian and editor of the
Observer mag newsletter which he received the AL award in
2017 the Mabel Sterns newsletter editor award he continues to serve as sole
Northern Lights newsletter editor Carl was planetarium director from 1978 to
2000 and a physics educator from 1994 to 2008 at Illinois State University he
continues to teach physics education courses in retirement so Carl I'm going
to turn it over to you and thank you for being here thank you Terry thank you for asking
me now uh let me get my little share started here uh Terry asked me to uh
speak briefly about the north central region of the astronomical League uh we are very active as far as that goes uh
it turns out that we consist of seven states as you see here in our little logo our uh biggest states in terms of
participation are of course Minnesota Iowa uh Wisconsin and Illinois we only have one
member uh Club up in North Dakota none in South Dakota and one up in the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan nonetheless we're 32 active Affiliates we have annual
conventions and of course Statewide star parties in each of the states where we have a significant presence now what I
really want to talk about today are some of the things that are a little bit more unique about the region and uh from
people looking at our region reports which we give to the National office once a year uh people have said to me
why you really have an active region what are you doing uh well let's go ahead talk about some of the things that
we do and uh perhaps if other regions can use this as an example uh that's
terrific uh again you can contact me my information is on the website that you see here but you see our website uh is
maintained it's got a tremendous amount of resources in it for any particular region there's nothing special to our
region here uh in particular that can't be modified to some other region so we
have our listing of our officers Affiliates the bylaws the various things I'm going to talk about here today as
well but uh just for the record our website is pretty simple it's encal
wordpress.com and if you go there you'll get this Banner at the top of the page and you'll have all these pull down
menus so I want to do talk about this as well Facebook we're pretty active on
Facebook there's a few of us who tend to contribute on a fairly daily basis or maybe sometimes a couple of times a day
uh but here's a post here from just December 3rd as you can see the Jupiter Saturn conjunction that a lot of people
are talking about now and it's one way that we've uh used to uh keep in contact
with our membership we have 1900 members spread out over you know all these states in the upper uh Midwest here and
it's really kind of hard to develop camaraderie especially when you have to do things like cancel inventions like we
had last year because of the uh the covid uh but we're looking ahead and we'll talk about that a little bit more
but Facebook is something that we do uh to keep our uh people involved here uh our newsletter seems to be the flagship
of communication within the region itself uh the flagship newsletter here
Northern Lights is distributed quarterly goes out with each of the seasons or shortly thereafter and it goes out
through a mass emailing that we have uh so members individually subscribe to the
uh email list and that we send them Communications such as the newsletter and other special updates from time to
time now the newsletter is designed to not compete with commercial magazines
such as sky and Telescope or astronomy it's designed not to compete with reflector uh we have unique content
things like chairs messages Regional news program reports uh we do a profile
on amateur astronomers nowadays uh observing accomplishments seasonal updates for what to see in the sky and
so on and also what we do is uh we have a series of usually a feature article or two typically three or four but these
are a few that I've written in the last couple of months from my perspective as a as a leader in the educational
astronomical Community thoughts on making amateur astronomy uh you know better uh the state of our astronomy
clubs healthier at risk Club leadership for our time if there's a time now for
leadership this this is it because we're just now hopefully coming out of the pandemic and I've I've talked with
several Distributors of astronomical equipment and they tell me that they're being just lambasted with orders and
questions and things like this my impression is there's a lot of people out there who now have some pent up
demand and uh my belief is that you know we need to get our regions we need to get our Affiliates each of our own
individual clubs uh ready to to to provide the impire impetus that people
need to get involved with astronomy and our own clubs in our region so uh the
newsletter is a great resource as typically 25 to 30 pages long comes out again like I say quarterly uh one of the
things that's very unique is that uh We've developed a grant program here uh
as a large region with 1900 members and 32 Affiliates we have a fairly good Treasury and when I was elected in 2017
I believe that you know here we are we're setting on over $10,000 and not doing anything with it and I firmly
believe that we should be using that to better amateur astronomy and I also think that it's really nice because in
our region we have 32 little incubators that is each of the Affiliates each of
the clubs can develop and present new things to help amateur astronomy so in order to do this in 2019 the region
approved two small mini grants only $250 uh each uh one of them has to do
with membership recruitment so a club can apply for get the Grant and use that money to build its own membership and
the first grant went out in 2019 the club of 40 people got 32 new
members that's not a bad investment for $250 uh then there's an affiliate
recruitment Grant as well uh that went out this year but unfortunately the pandemic has involved itself uh with us
and so uh it turns out that we we might not get the things done this year but we will continue with this project next
here but the idea is to recruit new Affiliates for the astronomical league
and by default the region so uh this is going to come come on board here we're
looking at the Illinois State University astronomy clubs active group of members on campus who had been doing little more
than sitting around in the planetarium uh thinking about how they might become amateur astronomers and so uh the Twin
City amateur astronomers have taken them under their wings and are now teaching them how to do things like sidewalk
observing uh which unfortunately has been put put on hold now because of the pandemic so
if you'd like to see reports about these and some descriptions of them please do check out our reports in the Northern
Lights newsletter available through our website we have Awards of course all regions I suspect have Awards we have
the major one here the region award which is conferred each year to worthy
candidate who's done a really good job promoting amateur astronomy within either the community or The Wider public
we have a newsletter editor award we realize that newsletter editors do a tremendous amount of work get very
little uh acknowledgement for it of course we do get the national award you know uh and I'm familiar with that we
having won it but I still think there's people who do great jobs and you know they may not be up there in The Ether uh
with some of the people who produced the greatest of of of newsletters but they're still quite good and I think
they need to be acknowledged and of course something we started here a year ago is the mini Messier Marathon Awards
uh these are typically observing programs with 27 or 28 seasonal messier objects and uh people go out and observe
them and uh if they get the 27 or 28 objects they just check them off on a list a lot of times people use goto
they're finished an hour hour and a half but I've gotten a tremendous amount of response from people saying this is a
great program it gets people out to observe and that's the idea behind it's
not designed to compete with the the als's observing programs which generally take months if not sometimes years to
complete but get them out there one night and I've had a lot of commentary from people saying yes yes yes this is
wonderful it gets us out to observe this came from a discussion that we had as a
part of the business meeting in 2017 up in Minnesota for our regional uh meetings and we asked how many of you
have ever gotten a certificate or a pin from the astronomical League only about 10% of the people there actually had so
we're trying to light some fires here and then of course we have some of these wonderful resources out there there one
of the things that we've put together here based upon many years of experience and then also some research following up
several of our conventions with questionnaires we've put together a very extensive convention planning guide and
uh it is only one of many many different types of resources that you can find and uh if you want to see the convention
planning guide go to the enra website there's also something called the Twin City amateur astronomers guides uh which
is put together by our local Club here and uh these are tremendous resources
the introduction to amateur astronomy is a something like a 75 or 80 page booklet
that we used for our introduction to amateur astronomy course and it's it's it's really right down there I mean
what's a finder scope what kind of amounts do they have why is my picture upside down in my in my uh telescope and
so on astronomy is a hobby people don't understand what hobbies are today which is really unfortunate the art of Sky
interpretation if you've ever want to know how to give Sky lectures by by all means please do I've been giving Sky
lectures for 40 years and you know I've shared some of my ideas here so a lot of really helpful ones today right now very
popular gets a lot of downloads is this one buying binoculars and telescopes put
together for the general public so they know what they need to know uh so there's a lot of other things that you
can look at as well uh and of course uh we have up here in the top Center is some of the benefits of memberships that
we use with other clubs to try to get them involved with our particular region so the state of the central
region is is good you feel the pandemic has caused a lot of pent up interest that we want to take advantage of and
we're moving ahead in that particular realm so if you think that there's something that incra's doing here that
might be of interest to you uh please uh let us know and we will be glad to share
any details if you got some questions for us so that's all I've got for you Terry I'll turn it back to you thank you
Carl you know um I cheer the Great Lakes region and I look a lot at all the work
you've done you have done an amazing job your your clubs everything your whole region is just amazing um thank you you
kind of make a Guiding Light for the rest of us to look at and say okay I could do that maybe too so thank you for
everything that you have done appreciate it all right Scott how about we go for a 10-minute break and we will come back
and we're probably going to um go to Shane right as we come back and then I want to go back to if all the observers
uh shyra uh Simon and Howard are there and Molly if you want to join when um Shane
gets done we might all hang out for a while and see what's going on in the sky
okay so 10 minute break here we
[Music]
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that you drinking your coffee there Scott yes thought so my juice anyways
yeah yeah I see you guys got uh looks like you got nice uh image of the Sun
going on there yeah seeing this Rock Solid all of a sudden so I was like I'm just hammering that record button right
now good I had a bit of a an issue with the drive earlier on where all the data
I captured earlier on isn't there and I'm like uhoh oh that's
terrible well it's probably there I just have to do some kind of recovery on the drive yeah but um I'm not wor really
worried about it right now cuz my intent was not to image originally
mhm well you never know when you might get that toothpaste squirting shot you
know well I did and uh technically I might have lost it oh oh no oh man no
Terry I want to tell you it's a real honor to do this with the astronomical league so very cool oh Scott we are so
glad well we're happy to be here like I'm in the uh you know the the uh
working with in the big leagues now well thank you we really appreciate
you being here uh we've done a lot with this Global star parties um and we've
loved all of it I mean it's amazing meet so many people and see so many new things and to be able to do live view
all over the world just amazes me yeah yeah the the um uh you know we've
reached over well over a million people this year and uh
hundreds of thousands have watched the videos uh the video that we had
um uh with Mount Wilson last night uh continues to grow that that one was
really that was that was a lot of fun uh that was an amazing night yes it
was everybody ought to watch that video it is
incredible I'm amazed they actually got as much as they got because of the Cent wins but they're so high
up
yeah well we're back uh uh you are watching uh the astronomical League live
and their special program of the shaking Universe um Terry man is um Terry man is
the uh um official host here uh for this program and what you're seeing right now
live is the sun with uh Simon Tang hello hello
hello yeah we've actually caught ourselves in this um rare minute where
seeing is absolutely Rock Solid um I don't know how well it comes across on
your guys' screen right now but I'm telling you now it is not really moving
it is just unreal huh that's beautiful yeah that's really nice I was wondering
what kind of uh Hal Alpha setup are you using so this is a quark uh from dayar
instruments and I'm just using a 100 millimeter refractor okay that's beautiful filter
say again the H Alpha filter yes this is a Hal Alpha filter um it's a chromosphere version
specifically thank you that is amazing Howard we'll come
back to you and shyra and Simon too and Molly if everybody wants to stick around
after Shane gets done talking we can all talk a little bit more and look a little bit more so at this time I would like to
introduce Shane L Larson um Shane is a research associate
professor of physics at Northwestern University where he is associate
director of the center for interdisciplinary exploration and research in
astrophysics he works in the field of gravitational wave astrophysics specializing in studies of
compact Stars binary and the Galaxy he works in gravitational wave
astronomy with both the groundbased ligo project and future space-based
Observatory Lisa he's an award-winning teacher and a fellow of the American
astronomical I'm sorry astrophys physical Society he's an avid Avid Astro
or amateur astronomer observing with two homebuilt
dobsonians one is a 12 and a half inch telescope named Equinox the other is a
22 inch named Cosmos Mariner he contributes regularly to science to a
Science Blog at science right WR science
wordpress.com and tweet with the handle at science ji so I would like to
introduce uh Shane lson Howard um I'm not sure why your
screen is staying
on there we go see if to Shane I think
uh Scott has it now is it okay now yeah you're fine there we go there Shane
great okay well thank you uh Terry and Scott for hosting uh I do want to thank uh the
astronomical league for inviting me um one of the great pleasures of my life is that I'm both a professional and an
amateur astronomer and so uh you know I spend my days thinking about this stuff but then I spend a lot of time out in
the backyard with my telescope uh as many of you do and so it's always a great pleasure to come talk to uh
amateur astronomers in particular about things that are very near and dear to my heart uh professionally and so uh it's
always a great opportunity to get invitation so so thank you Terry and and Scott for hosting uh so I'm going to
talk to you today about gravitational wave astronomy which is what I do professionally um in the background
behind me here this is an artist rendition of what the Lisa spacecraft will look like um next to me right now
in the image it's probably about life size the full spacecraft will be about 2 m across from one side to the other it
has two 8 in telescopes uh that they might be 12 in by the time we're done
but right now 8 in telescopes uh that shine lasers back and forth uh to other
identical spacecraft uh that are about 2 and a half million kilometers separated from this and we use that technology to
detect gravitational waves and that's the future of gravitational wave astronomy that I'm going to talk to you
about today okay so let me share a few slides
here um can you you all see my slides yep okay perfect so uh
gravitational wave astronomy is brand new way of doing astronomy it's literally only 5 years old though the
Endeavor to bring it to fruition is a 70 plus year effort uh that has been
ongoing since the middle of the 20th century uh I'm at uh Sierra which is our inter disciplinary Center for
astrophysics at Northwestern and gravitational wave astronomy more than
almost any other branch of astronomy that I can think of truly is interdisciplinary it requires without
fail engineers and computer scientists and data scientists and uh relativists
and physicists in order to actually make the missions work and so it's a very
invigorating field to be involved in it's very um rewarding in terms of the kinds of science we do and the
boundaries that we're pushing in terms of what we understand about the universe and both in terms of what we're able uh
to measure about the universe and so I hope to give you a little bit of that story um today in this short talk that
I'm going to give you uh there's a link to my uh blog it is a public Science
Blog as I like to tell people it's there so my mom knows what I do my mom is a Forester my dad's a biologist um and so
I talk about astronomy and all sorts of things there and of course you can certainly follow me on uh social
media so for almost 400 years since the invention of the telescope uh we as
amateur astronomers like professionals have accessed the universe with this kind of technology so these are my two
telescopes uh that Terry mentioned that's Equinox on the left and Mariner on the right we gather all of our
knowledge almost all of our knowledge about the universe by the collection of photons and almost everything that you
read about in astronomy magazines or news articles or astronomy textbooks has
really been learned gleaned by the reception and the interpretation of
light itself in all its Myriad forms and what we are at the cusb right now is the
beginning of a new era um professional astronomers are scattered around the world just like amateur astronomers but
networked in that distribution of astronomers is this new network of
technological observatories called gravitational wave observatories there are five active ones and this map is
already out of date uh but uh there are five active ones the ones here in the United States are called ligo Uh there's
one in Hanford Washington one in Livingston Louisiana in Europe uh the large one is called Virgo outside of
Pisa Italy there's a small 700 meter One 600 meter one in Germany called Geo and
the Japanese just brought kagra online uh here uh this year and so kagra is now
actively uh operating with us uh a third ligo is being built in India and that
should be online in the next 2 3 four 5 years something like that there additionally are radio astronomers
around the world at parks uh in Europe and in the United States both at Green bank and at uh in Puerto Rico uh which
use uh radio astronomy to do gravitational wave observations uh there's a entire group uh many
experiments at the South Pole which are observing the microwave background in order to do gravitational wave astronomy
and I'm going to talk about Lisa for the most part which is and orbiting uh uh
satellite Trio of satellites that will work together as a single gravitational wave Observatory so to talk about what
this whole Network's about and the the place that Lisa holds in it I want to start with uh a story which some of you
may know from electromagnetic astronomy that I called the Spectrum Parable so this is a very famous thing that William
herel uh discovered in the 1800s uh we were beginning to understand
light and try and understand what his properties were and hersel had developed this experiment where he would take a
set of thermometers and was placing them in the different color bands of the
Spectrum in order to understand whether or not all the different colors of light were the same okay and as The Story Goes
he accidentally left one of the thermometers just outside uh the range of red light in the Spectrum and he
noticed that the thermometer was increasing in temperature and so he developed a little bit more
sophisticated measurements and he discovered that well outside the boundaries of what you and I call visible light he could detect that there
was energy coming through the Spectrum so this was the discovery of infrared
light and at that time we had absolutely no technology to use anything uh any
wavelength of light for astronomy except the telescope so Vis visible astronomy
was all we had but here hersel had discovered that there was light our eyes couldn't see and that our instruments
couldn't collect that we could possibly use for astronomical purposes and this
is very typical of the way that science works we make some fundamental discovery about the universe we barely understand
that Discovery at the moment we make it the idea that there's light our eyes can't see but then it takes time for
Technology and Engineering and creativity to catch up before we actually utilize that knowledge for some
other purpose and indeed what most of you know uh that did indeed happen the
electromagnetic spectrum as we know now is quite wide it spans well above the blue range of light and well below the
red range of light the different parts of the spectrum have the names you see there through the middle gamma rays
x-rays ultraviolet visible infrared microwave and radio waves um the figures
there underneath the names are common objects that you may be familiar with which have the approximate same size as
the wavelength of the color of light in that part of the spectrum okay but the red line there shows that the property
of light the physical property of the light that we measure the wavelength changes as you go across the Spectrum
which is why our technology had to catch up in order to be able to respond or
collect or measure each of those different uh wavelengths of light but indeed it did catch up and much of the
story of the history of the development of astronomical technology in the 20th century is building instruments
technological pieces of equipment that were capable of measuring the light in
each one of these parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and as it turns out every single one of those bands is
useful for astronomy so there's many images which you may have seen over your life that show this is true but this is
one of my favorites so this is the antenna galaxies in corvis which some of you may have seen your telescope the
optical image is down there uh in the center uh so this is two colliding galaxies they are
uh their cores are slowly uh merging they're in the center but they're leaving behind them these long tidal
taals as we call them which are streams of stars and gas that are being left apart and distorted by the gravitational
interaction of the galaxies what we've discovered is when you take an astronomical object you may be able to
see and understand what's going on from a single image like the optical image
but if you look in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum different colors of light different wavelengths of
light then you discover that different physical processes are illuminated in the radio and the infrared you can study
uh gas and dust and its thermal properties in the optical you see stars and their luminous properties if you go
up into the x-rays you see high energy processes where gases are becoming very energetic and very hot okay and so
together with all of these measurements of this single object we can construct a
story about what the past history of the Galaxy was what the future history of them might be and indeed what is going
on with them right now the whole picture at least more of the whole picture is obtained by gathering more data and more
information which of course is the way science Works limited data tells you something you can speculate all you want
about what might be going on and why but the only way to answer the big questions that come up is to gather more data and
using different colors of light is one way of doing that of course I don't work
in Optical omy or electromagnetic astronomy I work in gravitational wave astronomy and so gravitational waves are
something Einstein predicted in 196 just a year after he first published general
relativity but he had deduced that gravity like everything else in the
universe has to obey the ultimate speed limit it cannot propagate faster than the speed of light and so that means
that when two objects are moving and changing the way they influence the gra
gravitational forces in the area around them that information about the changes
must propagate away from them and be obtainable by distant observers and
other parts of the universe but that information has to travel slower than the speed of light and so that
propagating information is indeed what we call gravitational waves this is a particular visualization of
gravitational waves that I like from my colleagues at Godard uh space flight center uh you saw another one that Scott
was playing at the beginning of the live stream uh from the ligo collaboration this one I like in particular it's two
black holes that are slowly spiraling together and merging uh the bright
points that you see in the movie are the wave fronts of the gravitational waves but what you should noce from this movie
are two things one is the uh waves propagate in every direction from the
two black holes and that's really why this is useful for astronomy it means you can be anywhere in the universe and
the gravitational waves from this event will eventually reach you so we standing here on Earth will see gravitational
waves from this but our counterpart astronomers orbiting some planet in around some star in Earth a major they
will also see the gravitational waves from this event as they merge the other thing you should notice is the
brightness of the lines that you see corresponds to the intensity of the Waves so uh this particular event is a
merger where the two black holes coming together it's initially kind of dim but then it gets very bright and then it
gets dim again so these events can indeed be transient in the same way that
electromagnetic events can be transient we have this enormous burst of gravitational energy the merger event it
goes off and is very bright and detectable but then it slowly Fades away and so just like in electromagnetic
astronomy where you're looking for supern noi or Gamma rabers or any kind of transient event if you're not looking
you're not going to see it okay but uh as uh as we've discovered Over The Last
5 Years the universe is very active and these things are popping off all the time and so this is certainly a way uh
to to learn and observe the universe so the reason I told you the
parable of the spectrum is that there is equivalently a spectrum in gravitational
waves and so this is uh a representation of the spectrum it's been cleverly
colorcoded to go from short wavelengths on the purple end to Long wavelengths on
the red end which is the normal tendency in color in the electromagnetic spectrum
but gravitational waves don't necessarily have color but it helps with your visual uh interpretation if we do
it that way the lower line there list the frequency so those of you who remember your physics classes may
remember that you can describe waves in terms of one of two numbers their wavelength or their frequency the
frequency is basically how many peaks of the wave go by you each second that that goes on um gravitational wave
astronomers favor frequencies so almost all of us use frequencies but if you want to think about that in terms of
astronomy I like the top row which is if you take the inverse of the frequency one divided by the frequency number it
gives you some time scales there milliseconds seconds hours years or the age of the cosmos and what those time
scales are is the time scale over which an object is changing its dynamic
configuration the period of an orbit how rapidly something falls into a black hole things like that so the
astrophysical time scale of the object basically tells you very roughly what
the frequency of the gravitational waves that you might be able to observe that object in okay the little boxes then are
the places where we have Exquisite and developing technology to measure gravitational waves unlike
electromagnetic astronomy where it took us almost a century starting with you know radio telescopes with Gro Reber and
Carl jansky in the 1930s to the development of X-ray telescopes and infrared telescopes in the 1970s
gravitational wave astronomy is kind of coming online all at once across the
entire spectrum and we have good technology uh to monitor gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background
using radio astronomy monitoring of pulsars with our groundbased observatories like ligo that's ligo
there in the lower right um or in space and space is where I uh I do most of my
work okay but the beauty of the spectrum and the reason it's so interesting to us
as astronomers is that when you look across the Spectrum there are sources of gravitational waves in every part of the
electromagnetic spectrum and so these are all things that we know exist there are certainly plenty of things that may
not exist that we speculate may exist but there's plenty of things that we do know should exist and so this is why
we're so excited and why we're so energetic about gravitational wave astronomy is there's a lot to learn
about with gravitational wave astronomy and just like the example with the antenna galaxies if we can add
gravitational wave astronomy to our toolbox add all of that knowledge to our encyclopedia entry about all of these
things that we might observe it will only enhance our understanding of what these astrophysical phenomena are so
you've probably heard a lot about ligo if you've been following gravitational wave astronomy at all so that's this uh
purple band over here uh we see uh if they if they happen nearby uh we'll see
explosions of stars supernovas uh we see binary mergers the merging of black holes and neutron stars and a variety of
other sources but Lisa which is in this blue band you'll see it has a robust a
plethora of sources that we uh hope to be able to observe many of these are
known they're already observed with the electromagnetic t Scopes and so we we absolutely know we'll see them with Lisa
and we will just enhance our knowledge of each of these sources let me tell you a little bit about Lisa so as I said at
the beginning Lisa is three spacecraft you can see them there in the lower left of the image each one of them is
identical to the others and they shine lasers back and forth between them okay so it takes about 8 and 1 12 seconds for
the laser light to fly from one spacecraft to the other um but you can think of it if you just cover up one of
the laser beams it will look very similar to you uh to ligo so if you've studied ligo or if you've heard talks
about ligo it kind of works the same way ligo does a little different because we're in space but but it's still a
laser measurement to detect gravitational waves and the way we make the measurement is we time how long it
takes the laser to fly to one space after or the other and when the gravitation waves pass through the Earth
uh through the solar system uh that would change the length of time it takes that laser to fly back and forth between
the spacecraft it is an orbit around the sun which you can see there and I have a movie yes I have a movie that shows that
uh nope I don't I thought I had a movie that shows that I sorry about that uh it orbits uh around the Sun it follows the
Earth uh so it'll be behind the Earth in this triangular configuration that it maintains uh for about 10 years or more
okay so the source is the difference between ligo and Lisa is just like the
difference between electromagnetic uh infrared observations or electromagnetic
ultraviolet observations you're looking at different parts of the gravitational wave spectrum and the consequence of
that is that you see different astrophysical phenomena so for ligo we see small systems that are fast and what
I mean by fast is I mean the time scale over which the astrophysics happens is
very short fractions of a second so these are things like neutron stars colliding small black holes colliding
whereby small I mean Stellar Mass black holes or things like supern things that
happen just almost instantly and then they're done by contrast Lisa sees what
we call Big slow systems and what we mean by slow is systems that have
changes to their astrophysical configuration on the scale of tens of
seconds all the way up to the scale of a day or so and so that could be uh Ultra
compact binaries as we call them over there on the left two white dwarfs orbiting around each other it could be
super massive black holes they're in the center at the centers of galaxies when galaxies like the antenna galaxies
Collide their black holes find each other and eventually merge and when they do they'll be in the least of band they
take kind of hours to orbit each other and then lastly uh some of you may recognize uh there on the right that is
small Stars going around big black holes or falling into black holes
and whoa big noise there uh those of you who pay attention uh Nobel prizes uh
will recognize that this is uh the center of our own Milky Way galaxy where the group from UCLA and the group from
Germany have been observing Stars orbiting the big black hole uh for 10 15
20 years now and can actually see the stars complete orbits around the black hole and if the stars get close enough
to the black hole then Lisa will be able to detect them in gravitational waves
okay so let's oh there's my movie that's the movie I guess I had my slides out of order so this is a movie showing that
Lisa will follow the Earth around its orbit you can see there that it's uh a triangle it maintains that configuration
uh but it kind of does this slow reverse cartwheel uh as we say as it goes around
uh its orbit around the Sun so what sorts of things might Lisa see so let me
tell you a little bit about that uh and we'll get to the end here so one of one of the most important sources and the
one that most of my professional astronomy colleagues are excited about is the possibility that Lisa will
observe merging massive black holes so just like the antenna galaxies uh were
merging we see merging galaxies throughout the Universe in many configurations those of you who are
astrophotographer imagers may have taken pictures of some of these yourself but this is just a collection from Hubble uh
what we know what we've learned in just the time since I've been uh a professional astronomer is that most big
galaxies most big spiral galaxies like the one you see there in the lower right if they have a prominent bulge that
usually means they have a big massive black hole okay so typically millions or
tens of millions of solar masses that means when the Galaxies merge and become
a single new Galaxy all the stars become a giant collection of the new Galaxy
typically an elliptical galaxy but the black holes being the heaviest things in the system tend to sink down towards the
center and when they sink down towards the center eventually they find each other they spiral around each other and
they merge and the the consequence of that merger is they emit gravitational waves that we can see with Lisa now the
reason that's interesting is because one of the great mysteries in modern astrophysics is how do big black holes
grow how do they get to be the size they are and why do we see so many of one
size versus so many of another size and so part of answering that question is
recognizing how do galaxies grow and how do black holes become associated with galaxies but another part of that is
what happens when galaxies Collide and how often do the black holes find each other and what do they eat along the way
okay so this is part of that story and So Lisa will provide a direct measurement a way of understanding how
over the long course of their lives galaxies assemble with other galaxies
their black holes find each other and they merge okay now one of the problems
that I have as a gravitational wave astronomer is that I can show you pretty pictures like this all of us have grown
up during the age of Hubble and we're used to seeing pretty pictures like this but in gravitational wave astronomy this
is a measurement of the universe that our biological senses are not designed
mind to deal with so when I make a detection the thing that I've measured
is really best represented as a graph but if I send that graph to the editor
at the Chicago Tribune they're like go away kids you bother us they want pictures of Hubble just like you and I
are used to seeing because that's the way they're used to experiencing and interfacing uh with the world of
astronomy but one of the things we can do is we can take our data our waves our
gravitational wave signals and one of the things you probably remember from
your science class is that there are many kinds of waves in the universe you probably learned about water waves and
sound waves and light waves and waves on a string but the truth is waves are
waves are waves they're all mathematically described in exactly the same way and so one of the most
beautiful things is that if I take some waves and represent it mathematically
and I put it on your cell phone when it comes out the headphone jack you get Katy Perry or Leed Zeppelin or The Glenn
Miller band or whatever it is you listen to on your phone when you're listening to music but if I steal your phone and
replace those mathematical Wiggles on your phone with gravitational waves then
when it pushes that wiggle out through your headphone jack you won't hear Katy Perry you'll hear an audio
representation of the gravitational waves and so this is one of the ways we like to help
people understand that there's real astrophysical content in the gravitational waves so I think this will
work over Zoom so let me do this for you a demonstration here let me just play two sounds for you so these are uh the
kinds of things we expect to be able to observe with Lisa this is a 10 solar mass black hole falling into a 10,000
solar mass black hole and as it does it will change the gravitational configuration of space and time around
it it will create gravitational waves which will propagate Across the Universe and that we can then detect and so as
I'm a theoretician that means I do a lot of math with my fountain pen and my computer so I can calculate what that
wave looks like and so I've just taken those Wiggles and I've just pushed them out through an audio generator like the
one on your phone okay so I'm going to play you this gravitational wave signal
10 solar mass black hole falling into 10 10,000 solar mass black hole twice but
the first time I'm going to do it with orbits that are circles that are shrinking to smaller circles and the
second time I'm going to play it with orbits that are eccentric they're elliptical or oval shaped okay and what
and that's the only difference between these two signals and the point is is that your ear is very good at hearing
those differences you don't have to have a PhD in physics and you know Take 5 years of tensor calculus steady
gravitational waves to hear it your ear is perfectly capable of making that measurement okay so I'm going to play
those two for [Music]
you okay did you hear that could you hear that I don't know if that the playing over Zoom or not pretty cool
yeah so that's the famous chirp so what's happening when the Orbit's big
the low the the sound is low pitched but as the orbit gets smaller it's going
faster and faster and faster and so the the sound gets higher pitched and then when they merge and they become one
black hole gravitational waves are over so it chirps and it ends okay here's the exact same system except I made the
orbits oval
shaped sounds like your car right my old car your old
car my moped
okay so you can totally hear the difference there so what's happening there is that when you're on an tical
orbit sometimes the two black holes are close and sometimes they're far away and so when they're close the gravity is
very strong and you hear a pop but when they're far away the gravity is weaker and you hear that gap between the pops
but as the orbit shrinks and they get closer and closer together the pops happen more frequently more frequently
and it begins to sound like the first one that you heard okay so by making a measurement like this Lisa would be able
to tell us that orbit was circular and that orbit was elliptical which tells us something about the history The
evolutionary history of the black holes before they got to that point where they were going to emerge now what we spend a lot of time
studying in my group are what we call Ultra compact binaries so those of you who are uh double star observers will
know that stars sometimes orbit each other the way the moon orbits the earth or planets orbit the Sun but but that
process happens very slow if you want to actually see a star move in its orbit
it's kind of a multi-year Endeavor so I've been watching gamma virginas for uh what 10 years now trying to see it move
in the sky okay but Ultra compact binaries like those yellow ones swirling around right there they orbit everyone
uh each other once every 16 minutes right so these are two objects the
masses of stars white dwarfs going around each other once every 16
minutes okay so these are called the ultra Compact binaries and in the Milky Way galaxy alone there are between 10
and 50 million of them okay this is the Stellar graveyard of the Milky Way and
everyone that's in the Milky Way will emit gravitational waves that Lisa is sensitive to there are so many that most
of what we detect in gravitational waves is going to be what we call confusion
it's like all sitting together at dinner time at a star party everyone's talking and laughing and telling jokes about ey
pieces and you can't hear anything but the whole hubub of everything of everyone talking okay but what you can
hear are the really loud people talking really loud or you can hear the people that are close to you and this will be
the case of the Milky Way galaxy the 10 million Ultra compact binaries will be all confused but there will be between
10 and 30,000 individual ones that are loud or close enough that we can pick
them out of the hubub of the Galaxy so this is what we do in my group
we simulate the entire galaxy on the computer to represent that uh this is a movie from my colleague Tyson lenberg
zooming out from the Sun showing the detectable the 30,000 or so Lisa
detectable sources uh so as you zoom out you'll see every dot that appears is a
uh white dwarf binary that we will be bble to detect with Lisa you can see they trace out the entire shape of the
Milky Way galaxy the black ones are ones that we already know of we see them in
telescopes and we study them all the time the purple ones compared to the red ones are ones that will be detectable
both with Lisa and telescopes and that's a notable population for us as amateur astronomers because many of these are
accessible to those of us with uh Imaging and photometry Tech technology in our backyard uh in fact there's a one
of those black dots is a very famous star called am CVN uh it's a variable
with a 1,28 second period the only reason we know the period of am CVN is
because of the observations of the amateurs the period of am CVN was unknown for a long period of time uh but
a group of amateurs called the center for backyard astrophysics uh worked it out in the mid 1990s and so we know the
exact period of amcn now and know that it will be a very strong Lisa source so
there's some interesting work for amateurs who are interested in science overlap to uh work on uh Ultra compact
binaries uh in the Lisa overlap realm another thing that we do is uh we don't
actually know what all the properties of the Milky Way are and so in my group one of the things we do is we're changing
our computer simulations we say okay how well do we know the distribution of stars in the Milky Way you know we have
a number teach you when you take Astra 101 but there's error bars on that uh number because some measurements are
good and some measurements are bad some measurements are hard right and so we just don't know the number precisely um
there are other things like uh there's a number astronomers use called metallicity which is what's the relative
chemical balance of chemical elements in the Milky Way and it varies across the
Galaxy and it's uncertain in parts of the Galaxy so we vary all of those numbers and then we re simulate the
Galaxy to ask how will Lisa's perception Lisa's measurement of the Milky Way
change if the Galaxy was one way versus another way basically we're trying to
say how will Lisa be able to tell us what the properties of the Milky Way actually are so this is a pair of
galaxies where we've done exactly that and the difference you should notice between them is we've changed the
properties of the Milky Way bulge and so if you look Lisa's view of the Bulge in the Galaxy on the left is it's a much
much smaller much thinner bulge but if you look at the uh Milky Way on the right the Bulge is a bit thicker and a
bit fatter okay and so that has to do with the Stellar evolutionary history of the Bulch and the way the Stellar
graveyard has evolved over the entire history of the Milky Way okay so that's
the kind of stuff that uh we do in uh our group so there's there's a whole
bunch of things that Lisa will observe like the black holes or like the uh Ultra Compact binaries and so one of the
things that uh we've done with that audio thing is unlike ligo or unlike
Supernova searches or other things that you're used to in astronomy we're not just sitting around waiting for these
things to happen for Lisa this stuff is on all the time just like being in that
lunchroom no it never gets quiet everyone's just talking the whole time okay and so what we've done is we've
poured all that simulation together and we've made another audio file of the entire gravitational Universe playing
simultaneously all the same time okay so this one's a little bit quieter I hope you can hear it but let me go ahead and
play it what you'll hear is uh black holes merging you'll hear the Galaxy
you'll hear small things falling into black holes a whole bunch of different things all overlap together and our job
as gravitational wave astronomers is to dissect this total signal in order to
determine what each of those individual things is so let me play that for you and then we'll wrap
up that was a black hole merging in the [Laughter]
middle so it's going to be this constant cacophony of signals and what my
colleagues and I spend lots of time worrying about right now is how do you actually extract that cacophany how do
you get actual astrophysical information um from it and as it turns out there's
been a lot of work done uh on this uh question uh in particular uh the
separation of large overlapping signals has been worked on by the Telecommunications industry how do you
separate 10 million uh text messages from high schoolers around the world well that's the same problem as
separating 10 million gravitational wave signals from each other in the Lisa data so and there's one more big black hole
in there okay okay so my last message for
all of you is that science like most things just like amateur astronomy as we've heard all day today is really a
community Endeavor the scientists around the world are constantly working on this together there are folks who are
Engineers folks who are teaching in classrooms folks who are sitting in the Miss Operation Center folks who are
building the satellites folks like me who are sitting on computers analyzing data and we really can't do anything we
do without all of these people involved it is a national Endeavor certainly but
it is absolutely for this kind of astronomy a worldwide International Endeavor um I would be remiss if I
didn't notice that that wasn't true as well I've been mentioning my group all along so these are the folks I work with
uh my uh closest faculty collaborators are across the top there uh but the the group of young folks you see there at
the bottom those are all the students who are currently doing their uh their undergraduate and their graduate work with me uh in my group at Northwestern
so uh all of them uh are going to be standing where I'm standing in 20 years giving you the talk about all the things
that Lisa has definitely discovered so so I always like to leave you with a few things to read uh here's a couple of
books uh if you're interested in the history of uh the building of ligo uh
this is a very great book by Marsha bartusiak called Einstein's unfinished Symphony uh she won a great science
writing award by uh on this uh Mara is a excellent science uh uh science author
for those of you who read public science books uh she writes really great books but this one in particular um is just
about gravitational waves there are two editions of the book so if you get the second edition of the book it will be
after the first discovery uh but if you get the first edition of the book then she's talking about the leadup to the
construction of ligo uh the middle book there is a is a recent book by Brian CLE uh who's a famous science writer I think
he's probably more famous in Europe than he is here in the United States uh but uh it's specifically focused on
gravitational waves and so it's a very nice public level book just about all the sorts of stuff uh that gravitational
waves can teach us and then the last book is uh also won a very famous science uh award uh is written by Kip
Thorne who was one of the Nobel Prize winners for the gravitational wave Discovery it's called black holes and time warps it's kind of more broad than
just gravitational waves but if you're interest Ed in relativity U black holes worm holes all of that sort of stuff as
well as gravitational waves it's a it's a great book uh to pick up uh down there
in the lower left this is a citizen science project that uh we at Northwestern uh have developed with our
colleagues at Adler um and the X Universe it's called gravity spy uh that
image you see there is one of the ways that we represent our data visually it's called a spectrogram uh and different
sources have different spectrograms and so the way this is and science project works is we show you different
spectrograms and ask you to classify them uh so you can do it on your phone in the after time when we all can
commute again uh while you're sitting around instead of been watching Netflix or something you can certainly do gravity Spike classifications for us uh
but basically what we do is we take all the classifications that you do we take them back to the computer and we say see
this this is not gravitational waves and this is gravitational waves waves right
so we're using your power of pattern recognition as a human to teach
computers to not be dumb uh and it makes our our analysis life a lot easier so
we've had uh I don't know quarter of a million people uh working with us on that and something like two two million
classifications done and it it really is a a really neat project um people people
participate in all kinds of different Z Universe projects uh but this is our our gravitational wave one uh and then
lastly there's series of links there uh to various sites related to gravitational waves including uh the
ones to my blog and I'm going to end there and say thank you so much for your attention I hope you all are staying
safe and well and have a great weekend thank you Shane that that was an
amazing talk do you have time for a few questions yes I can take questions
absolutely okay Scott do you want to read the ones in chat sure um one of the
questions is uh do the gravitational waves affect regular light several
wavelengths coming from stars like it affects laser being like it affects the laser beams which is only one
wavelength yeah so that's a great question so this is a question that that we often get in the context of the
detectors uh because the detectors are a type of scientific instrument called an
interferometer and those of you who remember your physics uh training you remember that interferometers are often
taught to you in terms of wavelengths of light sitting inside the detector
perfectly and so the question is well do the gravitational wav stretch the light or not so the gravitational waves are
stretching space and time not the phenomena that exist in space and time
um the effect is so tiny that um in order to detect it you need very large distances to measure it which is why
ligo is 4 km long and Lisa is 2 and2 million km long but the wavelength of
light are billionths of a meter long and so the fractional distance that a gravitational wave would stretch a
wavelength of light is so small that it's not detectable by any technology that we have today wow okay uh that's
good yeah that's a hard question great question great answer uh another question um will will uh we be able to
determine the direction of the gravitational waves yeah that's a great question so uh when I first showed that
Network map of the gravitational wave detectors across the world this is one of the reasons we need multiple
detectors on Earth is because the multiple detectors are spread around and
the gravitational waves when they pass by they get to one detector first and another detector second and another
detector third and that allows us to triangulate where on the sky The Source actually came from with Lisa you'll
remember I said the sources are on the whole time time and so as Lisa goes
around the Sun at one point in time it hears the source in a certain direction
but as it changes its profile as it goes around the Sun it can kind of tell it's coming from a different direction
related to Lisa itself so this is very similar to the way your ears work you have two ears and so if you walk around
a room you can kind of tell with your eyes closed you can tell where someone is sitting based on the fact that it
sounds different depending on where you are in the room right okay and I think that I think that also answers Chuck
Allen's question of how does Lisa triangulate the location of gravity waves sources or events so I think I
think you clearly U answered that um let's see if there's any other questions
here uh yes aside from the black hole mergers the White
Noise oh okay no they're just making a comment here about uh the White Noise
here um
Shane another question if Shane was working on E Lisa time I don't know what
I'm not sure what that means anyways um they they love the
presentation uh they this is really U uh tough physics and I was able to grasp it
thank you very much my pleasure you know um once Shane I I was able to
sit in and listen to uh Stephen Hawking give a lecture at Caltech and I I'm not
a physicist and and um don't pretend to be um but I wanted to sit down and be in
the environment I wanted to just kind of soak it in somehow and I was so
surprised at how uh Stephen Hawking could take the most
complex Concepts and reduce it down to explain it so that really anybody could
understand it and um there was a uh he he answered questions you've probably
seen him give lectures but he answered um questions from uh undergraduates at
Caltech and most of them were pretty straightforward and he answered them and then they got to this one question this
question must have been two pages long okay and and so basically he said let me
just let me just bring down here it was something like that I'm paraphrasing but he said what this guy's really asking is
this and what the answer is is that okay and he said if you don't know how to ask
the question you don't really understand it okay you know so so it was people
people often ask me they're like you know how is this going to be useful right you know how is discovering
something about black hole and and my answer to them is actually that same answer right we barely understand what
we just discovered right and so we can't even possibly imagine how to use this knowledge to improve your golf game or
make your life in the kitchen better or help orphans or whatever people want to do with with science and technology and
so so that that notion that that knowledge is uncertain and that we're uncertain about what we know and don't
know and even how to ask questions let alone them answer it is kind of at the heart of how all the science at this
level works and so it just takes time right yeah well let's just take away all the science that was ever done ever and
what would their life be like you we would still be working on clay tablets we don't even realize
right that's true that was wonderful Shane thank you yeah thank you so much
yeah thank you Shane we sure do appreciate it all right how about if we take about
a 10-minute break and we will come back with um any astrophotographers that are
still there I see Simon Tang is still there um Molly's probably here anyway
we'll come back and speak with them and Shane again thank you so much for your time I really appreciate it that was a
fantastic talk it's my pleasure thank you everyone thank
you okay so we'll go to a 10-minute break yeah if anybody if everybody wants to just see what everyone's looking at
that's still left on the program please stick
around yeah um I I have about three images it might be worthwhile one
showing solar minimum versus solar maximum and then comparing solar maximum
with our current status two days ago and there's some interesting it take me about two three minutes just to kind of
describe the differences no problem that is Howard right Mrs Howard yeah yeah
okay we'll go to you first then oh okay is that okay sounds great thank you okay
we'll come to you right after the break okay so Terry I'm going to sign off okay
thank you again Shane I really appreciate it I love the talk that was amazing thank you it was my pleasure and
I do appreciate the invitation if no one invites us we'd never get to talk about these things so thanks so much right all
down Shane do it again sometime okay thank you okay take care thanks Scott if
you're still there thank you Shane thank you it was wonderful nice to meet everybody I hope I see you all again
soon I'll see you down on it there you
go byebye bye bye
byebye right I'm about to lose the sun behind my roof so I'm going to do something different okay um have to
reset prominence yeah there's a little prominence sticking out in fact let me just so you guys can see it there is
other prominences that's the only one of any major interest and then there's one
well I'd say there's interest but this one's too faint but you can pick it up
yeah well then whistling around on the other side there is this guy oh
wow going a bit too fast and then there's a tiny one there
and seeing just got really good all of a sudden there's another one right
there yeah there's a there's a bunch of them scattered all over the place that's I always like to look at prominences
those look pretty cool um are will you have anything still available as we come
out of break so I'm actually going to capture this real fast because it's clear um I'm
actually going to try and find Jupiter and Saturn oh great I know it sounds ins cuz it's actually 136 the only thing
here is though um I don't know if the glare is that severe because it's far
enough apart from the Sun for me to try and find it okay um but whether or not we'll see it
is another story be able to I've imaged Venus while the sun was up and while it was only a
few degrees from the Sun Well Venus is a lot easier I'm not going to
lie it's a lot brighter so I I it's going to take me a second to find it because I have nothing to go against
okay we'll come back to Howard then we'll come over to you okay so fingers crossed I can find it okay sounds great
right I got to reset this so I'm gonna get off the uh headphone for a second okay shyra are you still
there hi Terry yeah still here okay checking the sky
okay hang in there if you can we're gonna do a couple looks with Howard and Simon and then we'll check with you if
that's okay yeah yeah no worries I mean I'm clouded out I've got tiny bits but
nothing really outstanding you can't even see the
really yeah I can show you some pictures yeah yeah if you're clouded out feel free to do that brilliant cheers okay
thank you Molly you're hanging out too right yeah
okay have you got anything live or you gonna just do some pictures or um I'm clouded out so I can't do anything live
but I I could show pictures I'm not really sure what might be good to show
okay well how about I'll leave you in the background if you have something you want to show just speak up how about that okay okay sounds good
I could talk a little about about year if uh like show my current backyard
setup if that might be of interest okay well I'll hit the three guys first and
then if you have anything to say just let me know okay okay
e
show
Molly are you thinking about going to the Texas Star Party I am thinking about it I went
ahead and applied um I'll obviously not go if know depending on the covid
situation but I'm gonna try and go and I since I have my camper um I don't have
to like use the public sh or bathroom or anything so um I could social distance
there pretty well yeah so we we'll see how things look if they have the Texas Star Party I will
likely go yeah just because I I I can do a pretty good job of isolating while I'm
there so sure you've got some beautiful images from there yeah yeah thank you um
Dark Skies make an incredible amount of difference yeah I recently imaged the iris nebula from uh
relatively dark sky site so like bort three and a half uh out near Sacramento
and yeah having Dark Skies just makes a world of difference what's your backyard what bortle is your backyard
s it's a what it's bort seven seven okay which is not as bad as you might think
for my proximity to Oakland and San Francisco but I can actually see quite a few stars and constellations more than I
expected to be able to see so I as it's about seven yeah yeah but you've got
some nice images from your backyard really yeah I'm very happy with what I've been able to get uh from my
wideband stuff I just take oodles and oodles of data and then of course now I have narrow band filters which uh work
really well from here so um I tend to have decent seeing because of my proximity to the water so um yeah I've
been able to get some really nice images from here well why don't you plan on going through what your equipment is
like describing what your three um setups are and maybe what filters you're
using and then we'll do the sun we'll go in the order we just talked about and then come back and then because I'm kind
of curious what everybody else is using too I wouldn't mind knowing what Howard and Simon and shy lindra are using too
um because I think sometimes that's we all look at pictures and we don't understand exactly what equipment is
being used to get you know that type of image yeah I think it makes for a good reference for people who uh you
especially if you're just getting into it you don't really know what's what's out there yet see people have kind of gives you some some like knowledge of of
what all is out there and what's required to to take a good image like what can I get away with on on budget
you know yeah yeah and it helps people too to see what your equipment will do maybe you can they can see something on
your setup that they'll see on another setup that is a different camera or a diff you know it just gives you an idea
of what all you can maybe put together to put an image together or what you need if you have a certain time of type
of image you want to do yeah so yeah I'll grab some example images from each
of the rigs I have set up as well okay that sounds good you hanging in there
Carol you're muted I'm still
here very interesting yeah oh amazing yeah Shane I Shane oh I was amazed with
his talk at Greenbank he I really enjoy his speaking and everybody else has been fantastic
too well organizing all this Terry that you've done an impeccable job on that
thank you well everybody we are back so uh
hopefully you enjoyed your your little break there uh I went and made a burrito
and you made it and I'm ready to
go all right I told Howard we'll go to him first and then we are coming back to
Simon shyra and then to Molly so okay I'll share the screen and then
let's see if we can get what I'm looking for there we go so we learned a lot about subtle changes that can be
detected by the Lego U gravity wave observers so we're going to check some
subtle changes that occur from uh solar minimum which this was uh um around
February of this year and this is a calcium K image and you can see there's just granulation there's just not much
Howard we can't see an image oh you can't see an image no all I can see is your name oh my gosh well let's try
again okay um I sharing your screen
there there we go okay good and so this is uh solar minimum this is as blank as
Sun as you will ever see just a little bit of granulation this is in the calcium Kev now we'll see the the subtle difference
between that and round solar maximum can you everybody see the
difference uhuh and actually this is a year after the solar maximum but still
there's a lot of activity on the sun and you got the spots plus you've got the various magnetic fields or the Plage
they call them and uh some are tight and Compact and very active like these two
and some are kind of fading out and then some are tired old remnants of previous spots so that's kind of an interesting
thing we're just seeing the uh the boring disc image still yeah we're seeing the boring one first oh are we
really I thought he was making a joke I'm sorry probably you if you have two
two separate image windows open you're trying to switch between them uh you probably clicked on one of them when you
shared your screen and you actually want to share your whole screen instead okay now this is this is gone nuts yeah so if
you stop sharing and then reshare and share your whole screen instead then we'll be able to here and then start share again yeah and then
uh instead of clicking on a particular window click on share whole screen share whole screen which would be where uh
probably upper left where it says like screen or screen one yeah there we go that's it let's go back uh can you see
this now that's it yeah that does look different now yeah see the difference I was looking hard Molly going I don't
know you know something's wrong with my eyes so here's some of the tight compact
PL plages that are associated with that and up here these are active growing spots you've got some uh around here and
then you've got some the tired older stuff down here that's leftovers and these are these are spots that are in
the process of Decay and like down here um it's also interesting to notice that
if you drew the solar hemisphere kind of across this line uh do we have more Northern or more Southern
spots and these are hard to tell because they're pretty close to the equator yeah but i' I'd put my guess on more Northern
spots yeah and if we go to uh are we seeing a different picture now yes yes
okay this was taken two days ago I didn't get any images yesterday because of clouds and Rain uh and I haven't
finished processing ones from today but this is different obviously than near the solar minimum and you've got more
spots going on but there's a couple of differences you know here's the hemisphere where all the spots
now yeah south southern hemisphere and you've got the tired old Plage from a
previous spot that's up here and uh so you see a um asymmetry in hemispheres
and that's very well covered in today's spaceweather.com if you just type in
spaceweather.com they go over that the explanation of that and also it relates to you get a double peak in the solar
cycle now there's one other solar uh one other difference uh that's very subtle
and this will that'll be all all go over if you go through the equator here these notice how far these are from where the
equator would be and if we go back to this one from near solar uh maximum or
just within a year they're getting close to the equator so that's another
characteristic of the solar cycle is that early at the beginning of the solar cycle the spots tend to be at high
latitudes uh North and high latitude South and as the cycle progresses they migrate towards the center and if you
were do a scattergram graph of this it produces kind of a butterfly pattern which is characteristic of solar Cycles
so I just wanted to share those because we just kind of an interesting U aspect of the solar cycle to see what's where
we're headed and where we've been that is interesting Howard I'm curious what
equipment you are using um I'm using um for white light I
use an Orion 70 mm uh solar telescope it basically has a
builtin um um filter at the front of it so there's no way you can take it apart or
have it accidentally come off and so I use that for visual observation as well as for uh as well as for um um Sunspot
counts and this is a picture that I took with it the same day two days ago and you can see the different the sunspots with that it does a decent job for 70
millimeter uh for the calcium K I've got a Lunt
um filter a right angle filter and then I use an 80 millimeter Orion um um it's
actually the Orion 80ed I won that in a photo contest about 10 years ago and so
it works really good so I I I just leave that filter on that that's exclusively what I use it for and then I have a Lun
um 80 mm well let's see get the full right things it's the LUN
0t ls80 th refractor and I I do have it double stacked um which is interesting
but there's a closeup of the double stack can you see that or yes looks nice on that so that's basically what I'm
using and they're all mounted on One Mount and it's an Orion Mount and it
they come real close to meeting or exceeding the uh limits of the mount as far as weight's concerned but as was
discussed earlier in the Imaging processing when you're doing doing uh stuff like this with very short exposures you can get away with that
yeah what camera are you using for the uh for the uh closeups I'm just I'm
using the um uh skyus 236 monoch monochrome camera uh and that has a
higher pixel density or smaller pixels so I can get close-up images without having to use a barow although I got to
start experimenting with using a a small bar ratio to bring these bit but I've
been pretty happy with that and then for the uh for the like the whole dis I'm using a
um oh shoot I can't even say the name that's I got read yeah the DMK 41 I've had that for eight or nine years and
it's it's still performing just terrific yeah yeah yeah they do they look fantastic and then what I do for
processing I go through Auto stacker first and then after I go through that I go to uh Photoshop or not the Photoshop
but the uh oh the other stack program let's see it's just Stacks yeah yeah regist stacks and use the wavelets
function and then from there it all goes to um Photoshop where I just adjust the
U brightness and and image and then colorize it sharpen it very gently
because it's really easy to over sharpen these things and make them look really grotesque that's basically what I use
and there's one other filter that once in a while I'll use uh to get the U like the close-ups sometimes there's a on
there there's a filter called Shake reduction after you've done all the little things you can to try and get a
good sharp image hit the shape reduction and sometimes it really makes a big difference sometimes it introduces all
kinds of artifacts and it's worthless but it's it's worth an experiment on you really works good yeah it looks nice
well thank you Howard uh hang out here we might be back we're gonna make the round and see what everybody else is
doing so thank you that that's some excellent shots I enjoyed that you're
welcome so Simon how about you I am still hunting around for
Jupiter although every now and then I can see birds and bugs way off in the
distance showing up which is kind of weird cuz I don't usually do this um cuz
it's actually only 2:00 in the afternoon here and every now and then if you look
very carefully in fact I'm oh damn where is it I'm trying to chase it right now you'll see something up in the sky that
just drifts apart in the frame like now there's a couple of things flapping around those are all birds and things
like that I don't know what that is oh wow yeah every now and then you'll see something flapping around it could be
bugs it could be anything um but yeah I'm just literally trying to find U
Jupiter right now okay but there it is no
no damn it I don't know which way it went okay we come back to you we'll go
we'll see if Char Char lindra is is available hey yep so my um everything's
gone actually the the clouds have come in and it's taken me out so what I thought I'd do I'd share some of uh the
pictures that I taken recently um the actually I'll show you
the setup first here's my current setup what I've got it's explore scientific
exos 2 GT pmca with the explore scientific um
ar102 with a ASI 1600 um cold camera with the
zwo mini filter wheel with the 1.25 filters and then I've got an SV
bony 50 mm guide camera with the ASI 120
MCS I've got a little mini PC that you can't really see on this image but you
should be able to see on that's nice um but there's a Mini PC there which runs
the due heers and the mount and everything else yeah I think Simon
collaborated a little bit on some of that equipment right yeah yeah Simon sorted me out with the camera because
before that I was using a DSLR I've been doing it for about 10 months so these
are some of the initial DSLR picks I got of Andromeda
um these were with the um not with that scope but these were with a sky Watcher
102t mhm and then that was
m81 this was M27 from a bort force sky because
I'm in a bort s from the backyard but s traveled away with that scope um and
that you do see a lot more stars and and so much more detail this was the RS
nebula with about 45 minutes to an hour worth of integration with the
DSLR um and then when Simon got me the uh
ASI and I started to move to pictures like these um that was the Seda region
but Micro lensing has caused my star to blow out a little bit so I haven't gone
back to that one yet um elephant trunk nebula wow few different ones on
one um flying horse nebula which I did a couple of weeks ago wow look at that
that's amazing that's beautiful and that's the 1600 yeah y all that kit
um neula as well that's oh that's
beautiful tons of nebul sort of and then Pelican nebula as I've got
so I've been really lucky actually the last month or so the skies have been really clear um North American nebula
part of again and the last one is the bubble nebula well you know quite a lot the
colors that managed to get and I've been using um Nina to do all of the
captures using p s to do the stacking and the editing so
it's it's been a yeah thanks um I did start with free tools with the DSLR I started using
um and Cal I tried sequator I tried deep Sky stacker to be honest I didn't really
get on with the program um and then yeah then switching over to pix insight and
astop pixel processor to start with um and then I had a a tutorial with Gary
and Gary said probably better if you stack it and process it in the same program so I started stacking everything
in pi insight and then using pi insight to do all the editing and yeah it's been a big learning curve but it's I'm
getting there I think yeah yeah so you do you use pix and site pretty much for
everything then at this point yeah yeah yeah all the site yeah yeah yeah yeah that that
does have a learning curve to it doesn't it it does yeah yeah yeah there a lot of
it is trial and error yeah sorry go Molly I was just going to say there's a lot of resources online for written
tutorials and video tutorials and all kinds of stuff to kind of start to figure it out and then once you uh learn
some of the basics you can start meshing them together to work with your images
yeah that's exactly what I've been doing sort of finding things that look okay at the end and then changing a sequence and
just sitting there with trial and error trying different processes and it it yeah I think I've got a a half decent
workflow that I can use as a basis now and then work from there so I think
you've done a great job in a short time those are amazing oh cheers thanks Terry
sure well let's check back with Simon and see uh
Simon um I'm gonna say I can't confirm that a DOT right there I think that that
it isn't and I'll tell you why it isn't because in my field of view I should see Saturn at the same time oh
that with that c I don't know what I'm looking at at this time I mean I don't
think it's a um where they called flying saucers these days well actually in all
honesty you just missed a um a satellite going past um cuz I know what I'm
looking for a lot of these times and there was one that was going past and I was going to follow it but then didn't
want to lose this dot so right now I'm just scooting around looking for uh
Saturn to pop up into view cuz if I see Saturn I know I've got Jupiter okay I'll tell you what I'll go
to Molly you keep scanning around and we'll come back to you we'll do okay Molly tell us about what you've got what
you're using yeah just a second
all right so uh I want your to Backyard yeah you so I've got a little
tiny backyard uh here in in the Bay Area just north of Berkeley uh most people's
yards are quite tiny here um but it conveniently came with two cement pads
and I don't know how I got so lucky in that regard and uh the fence completely
surrounds it and is quite high so it's not visible from the road uh and also the fence is high enough it blocks all
my neighbor's lights it's actually quite dark back there at least as far as local light is concerned um and my house
blocks the street lights and whatnot so I it's actually a really nice little spot to set up and I've got an outdoor
power outlet and I just run everything over to there so great these are my
three rigs I just took this this brand new image this morning because I just got uh a new Mount the one in the middle
is the ioptron sem40 just got that set up it's been doing really well so far
uh so on the left I have my my this is my main rig my Paramount might that I
got last November and I just had to renew my skyx subscription wish I hadn't done that so
close to Christmas um I have a Celestron 8 inch
Schmid Cass grain this is my very first telescope uh actually is that Schmid Cass grain but it's a great little
Imaging platform there and I can do planets and wide and uh deep sky with it
if I take the focal reducer on and off so I put a a prucha laab AO focuser on
there uh so that I can I can focus without having to move the mirror which really helps uh prevent mirror flop and
stuff like that I have a uh a 6.3 f6.3
focal reducer on there I have a zwo asi1600 monochrome camera and a set of
astronomic uh LRG B filters the L filter actually be is a CLS CCD which is their
uh CC CCD their their non DSLR basically version of a light pollution filter is
the CLS CCD um yeah so that's the big on the left the center rig is my secondary
Imaging rig which is the ioptron sem40 I have I do have that is a Takahashi that
is indeed a Takahashi on there Takahashi fsq 106n I bought that from my uncle at a
pretty pretty wonderful discount love love my
uncle on there I have a zwo ASI 294 color camera and there is a filter
wheel on there and that's because I have a light pollution filter the same astronomic CLS DCd and a luminance
filter because this is one of the rigs I take with me out to the dark sky sight my my portable rig U that way I can
easily swap back and forth between the light pollution and the luminance filter depending on how dark my skies are Molly
how long do you leave your equipment set up at a time fulltime full time yeah do
you see over there on the left those uh kind of tan colored bag looking things yeah telegizmos 365 covers so I just it
up over top of each of my mounts and it blocks the sun it blocks the rain the
weather here in California is pretty mild so that's why I can leave them up all the time it never gets below freezing here it doesn't get super hot
um we don't really have torrential rain and wind and stuff like that so I I can leave my gear set up with just the
covers and it's pretty well protected great yeah I can leave it all polar aligned and aligned and not have
to touch it so basically when I when I set up for the evening I take my laptops outside put them on the table there under the towel plug everything in and
hit go and that's it I go to bed awesome the the rig over on the right is
a Celestron Advanced VX which um uh it's
that was um one of the first amounts that I actually bought as opposed to somebody giving me one um and on there uh currently not I I
just swapped it over from uh because I had another AVX that recently broke so I
just moved that telescope over to the functioning AVX so none of the cables are hooked up yet but that is a vixen 8
in F4 Imaging Newtonian with a QSI 583
monochrome camera on there that was uh graciously donated to me from a member of the abso and it has a full set of
photometric filters in there that was given to me by a club member from Ohio nice um so yeah a lot of a lot of GE
people have either uh given to me or sold to me at a steep discount uh I actually have a few other uh semi-broken
mounts inside that I'm trying to fix and uh another telescop or
too I have all kinds of stuff but yeah that's my backyard setup and I I image with all three pretty much every night
because we have a lot of clear nights here that's that's nice yeah yeah I can
I can confirm that this is Jupiter that we're looking at oh okay you want how
about if we go to Simon real quick Molly we'll come back to you yeah because I want to show some examples of some pictures I've been able to take from
here with these rigs yeah I want to see them too so we'll come back to you okay
okay Simon what do you got okay I can confirm this is Jupiter I just looked at the co on my hand controller on the
planet yep you can see the bands um I can't quite get Saturn to show up because it really is washed out uh in
comparison because the sun's still kind of high up by comparison two in the afternoon I mean I know so but this is
just to prove that you can see and find planets in the middle of the daytime
that's right that there is still a universe during the daytime
right yeah yeah that is pretty amazing because you can see the
bands be iming the uh Saturn Jupiter conjunction coming up at the end of or
on the 21st uh in before the sun sets because that's when it's highe enough for me to be able to get from from where
I live so yeah I I think it for us when the sun actually is um has set it's only
5 degrees above the Horizon for us yeah oh wow that is low I'll be able to get
it when it's about 13 degrees High uh and I um I should be able to see Jupiter
with my eyes at that time um but on the uh let's see now I'm gonna have to set
up my other rig um yeah it I I have to move to the other side of my yard so I'm going to use that next star uh altaz
Mount that I have to do this and just set it up really high and isn't it amazing how we can see everybody's
Wheels start to turn when they say oh wow I gotta move stuff I I would suggest
everybody in the northern hemisphere to start trying to image during the daytime you know at least get get Jupiter on
because you can see that you can get Jupiter on in bright daylight um I don't
know if there's any uh filter that might help but um no I'm going to tell you now Scott there is absolutely no filter in
the world that can help in a situation like this because the the real problem here is is we're dealing with so much
refraction off of our atmosphere that only the brightest objects can show up why Venus is actually the easiest by far
to actually be able to see sure um I will have some words of cautions for
people who do try to look for Venus because sometimes it can be Incredibly Close to the sun you have to know at all
times where the sun is and you have to kind of go out of your way to calculate the field of view that your camera and
your scope actually has right so you can see right now it is daytime okay I mean
I know it's gotten a little bit darker because we're finally in the shade but we can actually see a
planet right there and then and I have to go down to a 1 millisecond exposure
just to even be able to see anything and I've tweaked the histogram as much as I can to have any of the cloud band show
up and this is only 100 millimeter scope don't forget this is a small scope relatively so and the fact that I'm
actually tracking can confirm that this is actually Jupiter as well right it's great that is it's amazing
it's great thank you and we'll come back and see what you're doing Simon if you
find yeah I'll I'll yeah I'll stay around and I'm gonna try and find satin at the same time I'll let you know
sounds good Molly we'll go back to you and you can show some images from the different setups
cool Simon you were using a zwo camera uh yes it's actually the same
camera I was using to do uh the solar Imaging yeah awesome yeah I I really
like my uh my zwf 1600 is probably my favorite camera uh and I've got the t94
as well and we'll see what else I get in the future what oh nothing I I'll ask later
okay so H this one I did capture from my backyard here in my bort s Skies of uh
just Northeast of San Francisco uh this this largely looks as
good as it does because I have a set of I a chroma oxygen 3 filter and a chroma
hydrogen Alpha filter on that 8 inch Crain
and um actually sorry um s something so I can I can get so
much more detail because they're piercing through the light pollution of the city because they're only three
nanometers wide the the band gap on those two arob band filters so it
pierces through all the light pollution and gets me an image like I would be able to get at a dark sky site um and
for nebula that have a lot of oxygen and hydrogen signal you can get an image that looks like it's natural colors this
of course doesn't work on galaxies and what not uh although I can enhance a galaxy image that with hydrogen Alpha if
it has hydrogen Alpha regions in it like a lot of galaxies do yeah so this is through the 8 inch Mass green okay
that's what I was going to ask that's nice that is real nice from your own backyard that's pretty amazing yeah I
was very happy when I started getting the 03 images in that got the the extended halo around the dumbbell I was
ecstatic and was so excited to start to stack these it's beautiful uh the amount
of data I got on This was um pull this over here I it's a total
of 22 almost 23 hours of data uh most of
that is is the hydrogen and the oxygen and then about an hour and a half each of luminance red green and blue to get
the the star field that's nice thank you uh this one's not from my
backyard this one I drove out to a relatively dark sky site up Northeast of Sacramento and um this is in it's in
like bort three and a half skies and this is with the tahashi and the color
camera the uh the 294 ZW 294 and this is definitely my hands down my best image
of the iris nebula because I was able to get so much of the dark nebula and finally kind of get some of that brown
color out of the dark nebula that's really hard to get from the light polluted areas so I was very happy with
this and this is not from my backyard but with that gear that's nice too thank you I really
like the dark nebulas me too they're one of my favorite yeah me too uh this is
five hours of exposure time total 64 by 5 minute it's amazing you the dark nebula
makes makes looking at at you know these two dimensional uh photographs look it
makes it look 3D it really does it does agree yeah you can it gives depth to it
you know you just think that oh wow I'm looking through something instead of just like at this this flat plane you
know yeah you can see kind of how you you can see exactly how the dust clouds
obscure the stars behind them and you can see kind of see some Stars through some of the thinner portions and then no
stars through the thicker portions yeah and then it kind it lends some depth to the reflection nebula portion Center
here as well and just really makes it feel 3D yeah yeah that's beautiful thank
you this one was taken from my backyard this this is an example of of not using
neuroband Imaging in the light polluted areas this is mess a88 uh a Galaxy um
see I didn't write down I can't remember offand where this is at but somewhere South fish because my a lot of my north
sky is is blocked um by my house and trees but this is with my 8 inch massag
grain with uh the light pollution filter for luminates and then red green and blue
filters and this is a total [Music] of see um this is a total of just about
eight hours of data so um two a little less than three hours on
luminance two and a half on red one and a half on green and one and a half on Blue um so not not a ton of data I mean
more than I was able to take like when I before I had a permanent backyard setup I would try to do one Target in a in a
single night because it was so difficult to set up and tear down so I would get maybe three maybe four hours on it if I
was really patient which when I first started astrography I had no patience whatsoever
but now I can sit on a target for for a few months at a time this image I took
over the span of March 31st to June 12th I just sat on it and I I I took you know
an hour and a half two hours a night when it was up in the higher part of the sky where there's less light pollution
and and less muck of the atmosphere and by being patient I was able to get a
good good quality eight hours of data on it I took a lot more than that but deleted all frames that weren't as
weren't as good so my stars look nice you can got I got a lot of detail on the Galaxy Core um the color is um I I wish
the color was a little better on it but using a light pollution filter makes getting really good color on Galaxies a
challenge so I'll probably go back and reprocess this one at some point yeah oh that's nice oh I like that yeah
so this one was kind of an experiment that I was doing um I I took the Takahashi off of off of the at the time
I had it on my Celestron ABX and I put on a camera lens with my uh zwo color
camera instead um I think I've got a picture of that um yeah here um so this
this is the rig that I used where I I used a relatively cheap Nikon 55 to 200
millimeter kit lens that came with my with my Nikon D3100 back in the day um
and uh the filter wheel is aess partly spacer partly uh a convenient way to put
a filter in without having to buy more equipment than I already had um this is the North American nebula
and this is from my backyard so this is a big difference with using a a astero
camera as opposed to a DSLR is that you get so much more red signal because you're not uh the DS dslrs that are not
astr modified block part of the Red Spectrum partly their infrared filter
overlaps it and partly because they're designed so that when you take a picture the colors look just like they do to
your eyes and the human eye is not very sensitive to Red which is why we use red lights when we're out on the observing
field uh but the Astro color cameras don't have the Spectrum filter on there so you can get much better red signal
and then properly balance the colors and postprocessing using uh I use
photometric color calibration in pixon sight it's my favorite my favorite tool and worth every penny of pixon sight
honestly um yeah so uh star color I've had a lot
of trouble getting good star color from here but I I was able to get some some reasonable uh shot of the North American
nebula from my backyard here so yeah that is nice I like that that looks love it those are just
some selected ones the the the variable star rig there's not really any images that are worth showing um and I don't
have enough data to make a nice a nice light curve yet because I just got started doing that back in June and I've
had interruptions when the various mounts have died that that telescope was on so at some point maybe maybe this
time next year I'll have a nice complete light curve to show show on some star yeah we need to get Barb Harris on here
to show her light curve she's amazing yeah and she uses a DSLR she she uses a
DSLR and I think either a camera lens or a telescope I can't remember but you know she doesn't use photometric filters
and she submits a lot of good quality data to the ASO and was one of their most prolific observers so yeah she's
amazing she she does excellent stuff we'll have to get her yeah so Simon how
are you doing uh I I can't see um I can't see
Saturn at all but it's kind of I I know where it is and where it should be um it should be somewhere here
I see something oh there's a little something there it is no that's that stach's moving that
looks like a it's moving or no um I'm going to tell you now a lot of these
little sat's moving across the field look I know a lot of these random white dots okay I can actually tell you right
now the chances are is it's probably just some random Earthbound satellite that is just whizzing past because I'm
actually facing in the right direction where a lot of these Earthbound satellites are you know um and things
like that that always sharpen this vicinity um it it's fun to watch them um
I have seen um one of the rocket parts that have been up there since like 1960s
I looked it up found the so number or whatever the number is went to it and lo and behold there it was and as it spins
round because it's actually um it's actually spinning around like this you'll see a DOT and then it gets longer
and then it gets shorter again so you can see it's rotating constantly yeah I
love seeing those I get I get those passing through my deep Sky subframes all the time and you can tell which ones
are spinning rocket bodies and stuff because of that exact effect you can see
it's really Co I'm gonna have to clean that up one day you [Laughter] know working on making like space claws
to go out and like grab stuff and like shoot it back at the Earth to burn up in the atmosphere or whatever they're going to do you know I like the idea of space
class I mean if I could see where the moons any of the moons right now on on
uh Jupiter it would actually make my life so much easier to actually find Saturn because um right now where the
moon position is they will paint a long line to the direction of where it actually is um moons of Jupiter you
could certainly see Saturn because I think that they're dimmer than Saturn right oh they're way yeah they're way
dimmer but I'm not even getting any evidence of a moon out there right now
and I should see at least one of but there's nothing so it's it's a bit of a
struggle wait a minute how about the banding you were getting that so the banding this is why I'm going um up and
down not left and right so yeah I should see Saturn in and amongst here somewhere
and it's actually from the uh the field of view of the scope it should be close by so this is what I should actually see
roughly so if I zoom in slightly you'll see that as the moons show up they kind
of point to where Saturn actually is but I I just need to see one Moon and
I'll know which way to go and I'll find it but bearing in mind I've I'm going by
nothing here there's no stars to look at there's no there just this Saturn's like half a degree away something like that
right now so right now full screen I have more than half a degree I have
almost three degrees worth of view here yeah three or four at least so Saturn's
there it's just lost in the glare at at moment yeah it's like I don't even it's like a
degree like a degree and three quarters like a degree in 42 arc minutes yeah
yeah so what's that um geez that's less than the moon no no it's degrees about
so a degree in 42 minutes it's actually a little more than three times the width of the yeah three times the width of the
mo get away from me all right so let's hope that we don't lose this so I'm going to keep going until we find a bright spot show up what if we see these
giant rings come into the field of view well that's a whole different story cuz then we know for
sure what if we see a square a cube drifted well that would be the B
lasers you know like in 2001 theis I thinking the board the board
those guys yeah the board what something that looked like it's usually
my audience you know the [Laughter]
board yeah I've got the cam I've got the camera turned up quite a fair bit now so if it's here it would I give lectures
for Sleep Therapy for my audience I'm an expert in the field I'm
just going to go a little quicker just to see if we can whiz past anything see so that's Jupiter going
I would have seen it by now so Saturn is currently magnitude plus
0.6 you should be able to get that we should be able to see it yeah we should and Jupiter is well Jupiter is currently
uh -2 um right I've got that confirmed too negative -2 and that's yeah I should
see it there should be no reason why I shouldn't see it to see the moons because those are like magnitude five
and six um so now I when you when you
have it so you can see the bands um they'll at least tell you which
like up and that's right that's but you'd have to go look in both um um well
yeah that's that's what I was trying to do so let's let's see if we we're determined now before the program
finishes aren't we it's like everyone at home is like you have to show
Saturn yeah and if you just follow well uh it's not just like directly along ra
or Dey there so you have to kind of zigzag to get there oh I've got such a
wide field of view right now I should get it coming in um this is a 550
millimeter telescope um that's like uh let's see what camera do you have on there it's the 174 my field of view
actually is so it should be like like a degree a little over a degree right yeah that's
what I should that's 150 that's what I should have that red square shows me
what I should be able to see oh seems a little too big because well
maybe Jupiter so Saturn is is a degree and 44 minutes from
Saturn let me's your scope how how good's the goto on your scope uh right
now it's actually very badly set up okay so if I if I do sink it to Jupiter
Saturn is close enough that it it might be able to land it in the middle it's true let's see if I can so now here's
here's the problem this is where I don't know the hand controller for a Skywatch Mount and I hate to admit this on air
and and put myself in a bad position because I should actually know how to use this but I don't oh yeah I don't I I
don't have a skywatcher I haven't used one myself so I'm not sure where the function is if if there's like wherever
you have your alignment tools there's probably a sync function in where your alignment stuff is
at uh that's what I'm looking for right now function yeah I'll look it up online
too okay I have an excuse I don't work for skywatcher so luckily for me I don't
either right now if you're connecting stellarium you can just press control
one and it will yes yeah but if the pointing model isn't very good then it's
not going to get there accurately but if he's If he if he can sink on Jupiter in
the hand controller then he can use starium or the hand controller to say go to Saturn and it should it should plop
it right in the middle because Saturn is so close to Jupiter right now uh I don't
have yeah let me go look this up let's see well the thing is so I did bypass
the alignment procedure you know what let me go get a USB cable to plug into the mount because I can force this give
me two seconds I'll be right right back okay skra have you got anything you would like to show
us uh no that that was beat up that was enough beautiful okay we
just if you have anything you want to jump in on just let us know yeah yeah no we'll do it cheers okay
let's see performing a normal syn after you perform go-to to any object the object may not be
centered uh therefore after a go-to the app will
prompt you to use the direction but buttons to make the object fully centered this centering procedure is
sync all so I know like like in carts DCL you can sync you can hit the sync
button and it will send the sync command that's true I don't know if starium has that command I've never used starium for
Mount control so let me Google here real quick see stellarium sync yeah so we're not
worried about the skywatcher system we're worried about well either it's connected to there's two ways we can do
it uh either through the software or through the hand controller
um oh you can you can right click on your Target and hit sync scope there you
go and in starium according to cloudy nights easy
peasy all right give me two seconds let's see where stellarium thinks it's pointing real quick so I just got to
wait for it to load up okay yes so so um we're drifting oh no
yeah so so when it when it connects to the Mount I uh some of my mounts it'll it'll stop tracking while the connection
process is happening but uh yeah so in in if you get Jupiter centered and then
in stellarium right click on Jupiter and hit sa oh it's not
far yeah it's really close Okay Jupiter right click and it hit sync and let C4
uh control 3 I think it is yep it is control 3
so let's see if it will go to it we need to hear evil laughter if it comes into
the field of you all right so now we have def find the exposure uh let me just reset the
camera so it gives me a new curve there it is there it
is you could do it yay there it is wo oh
you can see the ears oh killer oh yeah zoom in on the split between the Rings yeah zoom in on the split between
the Rings he's using a 550 MIM focal length post you're lucky that you can
see it's I know I know it's awesome it's awesome so how far away was it can you can you
now back out and see both uh objects in the field of view at the same time um no
so they're not in the same field of view ah huh that's what was messing you
up yeah I know this is probably for people
looking at home going I don't see a damn thing but trust us com through okay on
over the zoom connection we saw it didn't we hold on
on right Molly right see there it is yep there it is there you go okay
let's see if we can try and get an exposure for it now oh
yeah look at that folks that's Saturn yeah seeing just kind of as
dipped that's why we have that Rippling right now yeah yes so your your field of view um
is only 1.2 degrees by 7 degrees um and
ah so it's just out yeah so Jupiter and Saturn are like one point uh let's see
1.8 degrees apart um so it was outside your field of view
damn I should have gotten a bigger camera setup on this yeah that 174 has a pretty small chip it looks like oh it's
tiny yeah so then hopefully we can let's see
if I can get both things on the screen at the same time and for the audience's information
I was using astronomy. tools field of view calculator to that field of view
that's the disclaimer oh no this is just for your information because I you know be like well how'd you calculate that I want to
know for my own yeah she she did that in her head she did not that cool now that
I have enough telescope setups I can kind of take an estimate at like okay if the chip is like this size and the focal
length is this size and you're going to have a field of view of about this uh just because I've used so many different
combinations now I do like I do like your Zoom background because it's making you you
know they say that people are you know we're made from Stardust and you actually do have stars just in your
right shoulder though so it hasn't overtaken you yet
I oh yeah that's beautiful shot true one of my favorite unfortunately none of
it this was a borrowed Sony a borrowed broking on 135 MIM F2
lens but this is only a half hour exposure this is like this is a set of of 30 second exposures so a that camera
is awesome B the lens is awesome and C dark skies are they awesome that's true combination it's
hard to beat oh yeah yeah so I'm saving up for one of those lenses uh in I'm
going to pair it with with my zwo cameras or whatever other cameras I get in the future and yeah it's GNA be
awesome yeah I would have got that lens already except I had to buy a new Mount when my CES died after my ceson cge Pro
died after my ceson CG di you can buy yourself a Christmas present it's not that far away yeah well that was the the
new Mount was my Christmas present you know I don't have any money
left I understand that too astronomy does that to it seems strange to me I
mean we only have like um I mean a little over two weeks before these
planets are supposed to be what six arc minutes apart yes yeah from from a a
degree and whatever it is a degree in change okay uh to six arc minutes apart
so probably starting now everybody should watch watch those planets every night that they can because we're going
to see something that's remarkable and have hasn't been seen in what over 300
years so yeah they just come right up on each other looking at at Sky Safari and yeah
it's going to be awesome I'm actually G to be able to fit the two of them in the field of view of
my 8 inch M Crain without the focal reducer and possibly with a barow so I'm
G to get so much detail on the two of them in the same field of view I'm so
excited right you know what would be a really interesting thing here and again this is
all perspective I guess if if you can imagine that probably in another 3 400
years time when this happens again that um Jupiter will actually go behind sorry
Saturn will go behind Jupiter and pop out on the other side that'll be the strangest thing ever to watch so
cool oh man I mean theor I know we ar right why can't we be in the right place
but I mean theoretically well it's not theoretically it it can be possible you just have to find that exact line of
where everything intersects and it'll be probably one of the best shots you've ever seen because you'll see Saturn with
two little ears stick out and then it pops out on the other side that would be something else yeah I was sad enough to
miss uhh the moon occulting Saturn because you can only see it from like the Southern Hemisphere or like the
other side of the world or something like that it wasn't visible here I was very sad
I think um wait wasn't Mars um visible with this with the moon at one point here I can't remember I think I I think
they were close but I don't I don't think from the US we were able to get an actual
occultation I mean I've seen um at least not not not in the last time around I
mean this guy must was just dead lucky that he caught this in California I think it was but probably Northern
California was when the ISS went in front of uh yeah yeah we we had uh we had him on uh
the Astro Imaging Channel um or he is going to be on the he's gonna be on the after Imaging channel here coming up Tom
Tom Glenn I think his name was right and the funny thing here is is a shot like that did pop up um a few years back
which was faked oh um which caused quite quite the stir from from everybody
because I think he got caught with his pants around his ankles essentially when somebody asked him something and
essentially gave the wrong answer which basically said okay this is a fake image
oh no hey M yeah I have a question for you do you um I know that there are some
people out there that offer tutoring do you do you offer that do you offer that
service yet um I mean I haven't really done it formally I guess um I kind of
like there's some people I reped to the email I did sit down and have have a a video chat session that I was paid for
uh for helping uh a guy set up his his new Mount and um get SE programmed and
stuff but um I haven't really figured out how exactly how I want to handle that exactly yet okay all right well
there are people that uh you know they they they want to learn more um uh about
all this uh I know people like yourself um Gary Palmer's another one of them you
know you've got hundreds or thousands of hours in into learning programs and how
to do astrophotography and um people would like to take a little bit more of a
shortcut instead of spending all that
time like to get into the all of his stuff was up and running I where you know if like like when I was trying to
figure this out initially without such like one-on-one help you know that's that's several months long process yes
it is it is definitely yeah I do have I do have a Blog
uh at aal.com where I write about how
like my my pix and site workflow and stuff like that although I will admit I've not updated it
recently I'm working on it I just you know PhD makes one quite busy yeah yes
so I do try to write these things down I'm eventually gonna make some videos uh but again it's also pretty timec
consuming so uh that way people can have him as as references and stuff but uh
those are upcoming plans um but I do I do dish out a lot of advice when people ask me questions and stuff yeah and I
think we've seen such a growth in astronomy I mean so many people have bought equipment bought cameras you know
and there is a learning curve out there that everybody you know goes through for this and uh you know speaking from
firsthand experience I appreciate all the help I can get so and you do want to save time because it does take a while
when you're starting out so well you you think about how valuable your personal time is you know yes definitely uh so
while we do most of what we do in amateur astronomy for free you know and
certainly many amateur astronomers and astrophotographers are freely give out
you know information uh to have someone really walk you through it until you've
got it okay uh that that that should that should probably be um you know
something that you should would be willing willing to invest in because you're just investing into yourself and
that's probably how I'm going to do it because like I I I came into this wanting to do like wanting to share as
much information as I learn that's how I kind of live like my whole life um so I'm happy to dish out tidbits here and
there um but to like sit down and and go through like a whole uh a whole workflow
or a whole like configuration stuff um yeah is is a lot more effort oh yeah so
I don't know absolutely to give that some thought so are we at a point where uh we need to wrap this up
pretty soon here um does anybody else have anything I mean Simon I know you are working away but does anybody else
have anything else they'd like to add yeah all right uh well let's just go
ahead and Simon unless you have anything there that you would like to finish up
with um actually probably probably yes let's as a as a quick thing just to show
everybody so hopefully you'll see this on my screen cuz again I don't do screen sharing I could just you know flick and
say hey and then flick back so what I'm going to show you here
is something that happened obviously from the um the solar flare that happened a while back is coronal Loops
which is super rare and now if you're looking carefully this is actually an animation this is not a still video oh
look at that that is so cool beautiful and again this is one of these
rare moments that happen I don't know once every blue moon well more than that
I mean the last time I ever saw a coronal Loop was oh boy I think it was
just after the eclipse it was in 2017 yeah and it was a double chronal Loop
which was even more weird what's the what's like the the frame
rate on that is that like every five minutes 10 minutes or faster no this okay so I shoot for every 30 seconds 30
seconds okay so every 30 seconds I take um say a thousand grabs right and that's
what I use to stitch it together that's what makes these animations look so incredibly smooth and I'll give you
another example of one real quick and this one was actually quite a good one because um you can actually
see it's sring around like a tornado I want like a
tornado so bad hey you got to remember this is like these are 30 seconds apart
and when people say to you that I saw something move I tend to believe them because oh yeah 30 seconds and this
amount of movement yeah you could see that move in real time yeah it was just crazy yeah that's
amazing now um I'm going to do a Shameless plug here because uh if any
has noticed my username is Simon 2940 and my post number is up to
2,948 on my 294th post that I did I decided to do a
giveaway where you could win this planetary camera it's open to anybody on this planet um all you got to do is just
find me on Instagram and just follow the rules the winner will be announced on the 7th so wow you've only got two days
left to enter in and there's like 270 something plus people that have already Instagram and how did they find you so
it's Simon 2940 and that's on Instagram so it's instagram.com Simon 2940 is the way that
I say it and to celebrate my 200 uh sorry 294th post I was going to I'm giving
away a ASI 462 MC color planetary camera
um again you don't have to be a member of anything and I don't need to like my own image you don't have to be a member
of anything you don't even have to follow me you don't even have to like all you got to do is just follow the rules that it says on there and as long
as you're on the planet Earth I will get it to you I would recommend that you also like
him well actually it makes he's a nice guy well this isn't about likes that was
the big thing cuz you know people give away things you know oh I reached 10,000 you know that's not to
like so yeah that's why I decided to do it based upon the amount of posts that
I've done um plus you get to see all of the stuff that I've been doing like this image was taken this morning which is
when I was mentioning there was a solar flare uh coming from um what was it 2790
and that's the actual designation that we give those and unfortunately the drive I've just pulled out and removed
to see if I can recover it later but this is the only frame I have now oh
well yes and of course there's Jupiter hiding behind this horrible pile of bad
seeeing but we know it's there we know it's there yeah that's the important part we know it's there yep all right
thank you all for being here Scott thank you for broadcasting this thank you Terry thank our pleasure there a lot of
thank you Simon Molly Shin shyra thank you uh it's I really LaRon everybody you
know David everybody did such a great job I mean it's all been interesting and fun all thank you all so much yep thank
you thanks pleas okay all right here we go okay bye
bye guys bye bye bye
oh
a what happened to the pirat ship logo I don't know