Astronomical League Live IV

Transcript:

and let's see
that was your week david my bigger pardon how was your week well it's pretty good
i'm messing around with new monitors on my laptop but uh oh yeah but it's doing very well and
we're having the observatory roof rebuilt next week oh yeah that's there's quite a bit going
on this starts sunday or when does it start yeah it's going to be a very busy few
days and meep minerva my telescope is here
too very nice
i appreciate you waiting for me i know i've delayed the meeting for you no i in exchange i will refund all of
your money [Laughter] thank you david thank you thank you
yes hi david hi the check's in the mail as they say
you guys could um uh you know since this is an outreach effort uh if you have a way to share this
program with your if you're on facebook you know share it with groups or friends
watch this this is going to be an awesome program
sharing it right now with the neil degrasse tyson group this has about 100 000 members
facebook astronomy club they have 40 000 members
and who has 40 000 members scotty facebook astronomy
club that's run by uh was started by tom yeah telescope addicts i don't know how
many they have but i think they have quite a few um they're a great group
the rit astronomy club sharing with them
astrophotography and we're doing another uh global star party next tuesday right scott
that's right good i shall be there
well because you're going to be there i'll be there thank you but only because of that
how about the southern astronomical society we'll we'll share with them
car astronomy club that sounds very
international [Music]
central illinois
group
chicago astronomical society
visual astronomy club
we already have a bunch of people watching including my sister theresa so
hi hello teresa yeah yeah is watching from uh
cloudy southern arizona jay manifold watching from equally cloudy kansas city
book davies is watching mike nick whitaker jeff wise jim's astrophoto from michigan
chris larson
[Music]
so
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[Music] so [Music]
well hello everybody this is scott roberts um here to proudly present the astronomical
league live number four okay and um we have with us uh league officers the
president uh carol org and the league secretary terry mann she's also former president
of the astronomical league uh and of course joining us here are some really
i mean just amazing iconic astronomers including david levy barbara harris out of florida connie
walker in arizona david is also in arizona uh terry
i'm glad that we're still doing these programs it looks like we have many more to do
um and uh you know it's just an honor so i'm gonna turn it over to you
and you can uh give the introductions and get things kicked off here okay thank you very much scott it is an
honor to be here and thank you for everything that you are doing and now i'd like to talk a little bit
about david levy um i've known david for a while and i have met wendy i've been to their home
and always felt so welcome they are two people i've considered friends for a long time
very generous as nice as you can find and seeing all of the telescopes and
everything at his house has just been amazing david you are an incredible guy that it
has been an honor to know you for all the years that i have and will um so i am going to turn it over to you
and let you kick us off well thank you terry i hope you can hear
me okay i'd like to add my welcome to all of you at this
wondrous astronomical league event tonight it's going to be a lot of fun and we're
going to hear from a lot of people i know all of you pretty well except not so much barbara harris but
that i will get to know her tonight and connie walker wendy and i have been
friends with connie for decades we used to entertain the project astro group
that connie used to run at our home uh many years ago and i kind of missed
doing that that was a lot of fun a lot of the time we really enjoyed doing that we enjoyed connie's
expertise in uh astronomy education which is really second to none
anyway i'm going to begin this with a quotation and tonight's quotation is going to
introduce kind of a new type of poetic phrase which i don't really know is is a phrase
or not but i call it phasing and what i'm going to do is i'm going to quote from
one piece of poetry and then i'm going to move to a second piece of poetry
those of you who are listening might be able to notice when i make the switch by changing pages in my magic book
to get to the other poem the first one of the the first part of the
poetry is from romeo and juliet and i believe it is the only quotation
from shakespeare it may be no it's not the only quotation because um there's a quotation from nasa
at the apollo 11 site and the apollo 17 sites
here those from the planet earth first set foot upon the moon we came in peace for all mankind and
that's those that sits on the moon but this also does and it sits on on the moon where
jean shoemaker's ashes are and uh it's a quotation from mommy and juliet
and then after i'm done with that i'm gonna phase into a tennyson quotation from tennyson's
ulysses and so here goes come gentle night come
loving black proud night this is something that really urges and
wants you and calls for you to look at the sky come gentle night come loving black
broad night give me my romeo and when he shall die take him and cut him out in little stars
and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship
to the garish sun though much is taken much abides and
though we are not now that strength which in all days moved earth and heaven
that which we are we are one equal temper of heroic hearts made weak by
time and fate but strong and will to strive to seek
to find and not to yield back to you now terry thank you thank
you david all right thank you david that was
really good thank you um i'd like to start next uh with carol orch he's the president
of the astronomical league and he's got an update for us still let us know what's going on
so carol why don't you go ahead thank you terry it's good to be here again and good to see some people i haven't
seen in several years on the program here tonight so welcome everybody
i'd like to give an update on what's happening as far as our national convention can i go and
share my screen here
terry see i think i'm there let's see
look no cake terry i don't see anything carol see the
screen yet all right let's try again
okay are we good now terry nope don't see
anything yeah so you're you're clicking on the share screen button the green one on the bottom right and then you highlight the
this the um the thing you'd like to share and then you have to hit share right oh
okay there you go okay duh okay that you have there
all right carol do you have any room for anything else on there
you're not supposed to see that very clear
uh we've uh made the decision within the last week that officially i don't think it's any
great surprise that it's probably not the best thing to have a convention in person so
we have made the decision the executive committee of the league has that we are going to reschedule to uh
july 2022 in albuquerque once again to have a physical convention
in the meantime however we've also made the decision that 2021 will be all virtual
i'd like to thank terry who has graciously volunteered to be one of the co-chairs for that event
along with chuck allen the vice president of the league and scott i'd certainly like to thank
you in a big kind of way you can explore scientific for agreeing to give us some major
technological help with this it's going to be invaluable so thank you so much well it's our honor it's our honor thank you
i think you'll find that it's going to be a really special event i know
leading up to all this on our various uh zoo meetings we've had a range of quality people giving talks
and i see that we're going to be heading in that direction for alcon as well we're doing something just a little bit
different it will be a friday through sunday weekend event we usually don't go uh sundays in the
past but we think it'll work out okay we envision it to be a
a block in the morning and also one in the evening on those three days and get her want a
chance to pull back a little bit in the middle of the day before we have some other special speakers in the evening
we don't know exactly just yet when the dates will be except it will be in august we're down
to two dates and mkhitaryan and chuck will be communicating those
quite soon another thing we'll be doing at the
virtual alcon is presenting something hopefully from our new
alcon junior program we were scheduled to do that in person in albuquerque in 2021
but again covet got in the way and so we hope to have a presentation uh
overview of what that's about at the virtual event
and as with everything else it's a little difficult to present physical awards in person
so i have a feeling scott will come up with some magic that will make it seem almost like it's happening
so uh we're depending on you scott
uh these awards will include our youth awards that everyone's used to seeing our national young and strong award
which uh scott and explore scientifically scientific so gracefully uh sponsor we'll have
also the horkheimer awards the service awards the mabel stearns newsletter award and the
webmaster award as well and i don't know uh
those people looking up watching out there if you can see the addresses on in blue or not so i may just read
those just make sure everybody can see them if not here's the actual event uh email address
for each of our awards and by the way the deadlines are the end of march the national young
astronomer award the address is nya at astrolage.org
that's maybe a little hard read there the horcom journalism award which i'll say a little bit about that
that's a journalism uh essay that
students eight to 12 write and there's some nice cash prize for
those the winner gets a prize of a little over a thousand dollars i think it's actually
twelve hundred dollars and there's two runner-ups which get uh prizes for 500 and i think 250. we
recommend that be on some kind of a science uh endeavor however
we would prefer it beyond astronomy but rules let it be on any
field from a science another horkheimer award is the parker
imaging award and that is one like it says for youth to submit images
that one also has a cash award for it and finally the horkheimer service
awards we have two of those the first one is the horkheimer smith jack horkheimer
when he was before he got interested in astronomy many many years ago he uh learned about astronomy from
a foreign league president his last name was smith and so that's why he named it for
smith one of the two quarter service awards the other one was named for the founder
of the winter star party uh tippy and that's the address for that one to
send in uh to enter that again the deadline for those two are
march the 31st the bottom in case you can't read it in the blue there
horkheimerserviceastroleg.org then we will have a lot of adult awards
we'll be presenting virtually and then sending the plot later
starting with the sketching award which has been a very popular award in recent years for many years we seem to get away from
sketching in the field of astronomy but it started coming back a few years ago and we have an award and lots of our
members are still involved in that and doing some very nice uh detailed work on that the address for
that one is sketch at astrowig.org and another one that gets lots of entries in most years is the
mabel stearns newsletter award named after a former executive secretary of the league
and that one is stearns newsletter at astrolake.org
another one we have is the webmaster award and that's given to a special
webmaster uh whose who has set up a very nice page and a
functional page and and so on and the final one we have listed here is the horkheimer library telescope award
this is a club award actually it's given to a local library uh
they submit our uh entries and then if they're selected as one of the finalists they get a library
a a telescope to provide for their local library
if you have any questions about any of those words chuck would be the person to get a hold
of he could give you more information on those
other wars we will be giving at the convention or of presenting virtually will be such
things as the master observer award plex that is for master observers who have not
attended a an alcon convention to get a physical plaque for celebrating their wonderful
achievement the master observer award is presented to
observers who i don't know the magic number exactly but it's a tremendous number of league awards one has to
observe in order to get this and then there's different levels as well so it's a very it takes a lot of time takes lots of
nice skies lots of persistence and all kinds of uh attributes like that
the astronomical league award is presented to a person in astronomy who has contributed a great
deal to the field as well as the astronomical league the wright award is named for a former
uh officer in the league uh that's our service award and it's for like i say for service for
outstanding uh efforts and help with the league programs and then there's always
some special awards we slip in that we don't have a nice category for
so i'd like to encourage you to mark your calendars now for august 2021
with the specific weekend days to be announced fairly soon it should come within the
next month and if you have any questions about anything that's come up uh either you can email me president
astroleg.org or if it's directly uh involving world awards
programs then uh vice president at astrolake.org
thank that we'll do it terry thank you thank you carol um library telescope program don't we
also award those one to an uh mal to a um
yeah we do it to vote one for each region correct that's correct one for each region and one for a
member at large which means they're not affiliated with any particular club
yeah and you can find that form i think on the website under awards isn't it that's correct and
uh uh vice president ashrael.org will also get that for you
okay thank you carol appreciate it uh now what i'm going to do now i'm
going to ask the three questions so i'm going to share my screen
um and let's make sure
that i've got that
it's taking a minute there we go now can you see mine yes okay
now for this one you might watch the global star party we do things a little bit different on the global star party
but for this um series of quest questions you will send the answers to
secretary astro league.org and please send those answers to that email
as soon as you can when i get done the winners will be announced after the keynote this time so we will
ask the questions and present the prize uh before the show is over
and after the winners are announced carol orange the president of the
astronomical league will be contacting you and making sure we've got your address
and where to send the prizes so tonight the prize will be a astronomical league
baseball hat so each winner will receive a hat from the astronomical league
and so we're going to start with the questions [Music]
as soon as i there we go what is the name of this object and what
type of object is this that's question one don't answer it in chat
send it to the secretary at astroleague.org that i have also put into the chat there thank you
scott next question is what is the name of this nebula
third question what is the name of this cluster and for those of you that are familiar
with all these you'll know they all three have something in common so send those answers as quick as you
can to secretary astrali got dot org and then i would
like to explain we're going to make some changes to the way that we are presenting door prizes
and this will be mainly on the global star party on tuesday
march 16th which will be this tuesday that is coming up we're going to start a new way to do
this and we will not be announcing winners each week instead we will ask the questions we'll
give the answers and then at the end of the powerpoint presentation
you're going to see a list of individual names that answered the questions correctly those
names will be added to an excel list and at the end of every month
we will award prizes and then twice a year we're going to do grand prizes and
we think august will probably be our first one at alcon while we're doing the virtual event
we'll probably do uh a grand prize door prizes at that time will be our first time and
every name that has on that excel list will be added for the grand prize so
the more questions you answer correctly the more times you will see your name
or your name will be on the excel list the better chance you have so answer all the questions that you can
and we will keep building and building that list up and then we will use a number generator
and that's the way we will select the winners each week so that will start on the next global
star party and i think that is going to end
my part there and so the next person up is going to be
connie walker now i know a lot of us know connie walker um she has done some incredible stuff an
amazing person as we were talking just not enough hours in the day to do
everything that she would like to do we need to clone her i think but connie has been a scientist at the
national science foundation's nor lab for 20 years creating with the educational team
innovative programs on dark skies education as well as optics and astronomy programs
through inquiry and research to incite teachers and students in stem and then sharing
these programs by a workshop talks and events all over the globe
she has been involved in leadership roles with light pollution issues on the ground and in space
her efforts in bringing dark sky awareness to the public ida awarded her the hog robinson award
and asteroid 29 29 2 connie walker was named by discoverers
david levy and carolyn shoemaker for her efforts in educational outreach
her amazing husband daughter and son and cat thankfully tolerate her interest
in the dark side of astronomy connie it is such a pleasure to have you here
thank you very much uh and i will let her talk to you about her
topic well thank you very much for having me here it is such an honor and it's a great it is a great
pleasure to uh see you i haven't talked to you for a while and scott and david or david and um and
my goodness and when david i'm i'm very embarrassed that all that was said but when david uh
announced that i looked behind me and there was a wall so i didn't i didn't realize at first that he was asked actually
awarding the uh the asteroid name after after me and it was just
i told him it was the best thing since i got my phd and i was really very very impressed with that and uh and
i still thank him to this day and i thank wendy as well um but i'm going to start sharing my
screen here and let me get the powerpoint up and i will get it going into presenter
mode and is it looking okay for you it's great
it looks fine looks good again thank you everybody i truly mean
it's a pleasure to be here and i am lucky to be part of noir lab which is your national observatory
and i've been asked to talk to you about this international citizen science program on light
pollution call globe at night and how you can participate
so there is uh this is a rhetorical question that i have up here because i know as immature astronomers you all know the
answer to this but um imagine you did live in one of these cities on earth that you can see from schools
basically and what kind of sky just imagine what kind of sky you would see and the rate of growth of light
pollution is actually more than the greater growth of the earth's population the rate of growth of the earth's
population at this point believe it or not and with about 80 percent of the people in the united states never having seen
the milky way arch overhead majestically and and brightly people are
actually starting to take notice thankfully that the night sky is something that they should treasure and and protect and i and i i want to give
you an opportunity to do to do you know more than um well
more with globe at night let's just say so one of these um there's many different
areas in which you can actually you'd be protecting the night sky and other things as well in terms of
energy consumption and human health and wildlife light pollution affects all these areas billions of dollars are
wasted each year as you probably know through energy consumption through unshielded lights shining up where
they're not needed and when they stay on too long and you all know that and and glare creating hazards and light
trespass and all sorts of predicaments from light pollution and circadian sensitivities uh that people
have if you are disrupted by too much light at night and i think that it actually does
increase things like obesity and depression and sleep disorders and whatnot and melatonins in your in
your melatonin levels in your body that can be depleted uh and that actually have and i think baby barbara
can speak more to this but there's been some research that have some ties to cancer to
two or three types of cancer and the habits and habitats of animals actually are negatively affected
uh because you know migrating birds and and sea turtles that bring them to basically
the brink of survival so there's a lot of things to think about when protecting the night sky uh in terms of how it relates to your
own life including having a washed out sky which basically impedes you know you and me from viewing and
enjoying the night sky and and and your research and the those of other astronomers
to understand our universe and its origins so um there's a lot here that we are protecting
and of course you all know this too there's a variety of ways that you can protect the night sky
you can basically start at home and ask yourselves you know does your outdoor lighting
serve a clear and necessary purpose you know do you have to have as many lights around your house and uh do you have to leave them on for
as long a time period um is it is it appropriate for the task that's intended to do
uh are there bulbs energy efficient um can you have some sort of uh shield over
them so that they're facing downward uh is it is it connected to active controls like timers and motion sensors
or dimmers and then of course you want to have a warm color that it emits instead of a harmful blue light
and um so all these things and more you can actually if you want to know more you can actually go to the dark sky dark
sky dot org website which is the international dark sky association's website and they have so much information there
they're just a really leaders in this field of protecting the night sky
so that was my preview to uh talking about globe at night and
why by being part of globe at night and actually being able to basically
rate the brightness of your night sky is an important thing to do we want to keep in touch with what our
levels of light pollution are where we live and we want to know when they are getting worse and if we
have to really do something about it um and so globe at night was actually
born about 15 years ago now it's a pretty successful international citizen science campaign
whether they aim to raise the awareness of the public in terms of light pollution and uh it's
been active in about 180 different countries to date and maybe two-thirds of a million people
have been involved and in just 2020 we had a record-breaking year with close to 30
000 measurements from almost 100 countries which was fantastic and um so it just
it basically involves very simple steps of recording the night sky brightness by
matching your view of the night sky like with a constellation of orion which is the the
constellation of the month basically with with uh maps of progressively fainter stars
and i'll show you some of those in a moment but these campaigns uh happen over a 10-day period each month
when the moon is not out in the first half of the night to avoid to avoid it being
a natural light bulb in the night sky basically and what i wanted to bring your attention to with the uh with the the
maps that you see the top one being of europe and the bottom one being of the u.s you see all these colored dots on there
right um and the brighter the dot basically the brighter the sky and that was the measurement it was
you know like you'll see surrounding the cities especially or in the cities uh very bright dots um that goes hand in
hand with bright skies and then um where there are darker dots you have the darker skies mostly near
the national parks basically and i just wanted to show you our web
page it has a plethora of information so if you go there you will not hopefully not be disappointed
but you have pages for you know if you want to learn about our dates you go to the observing page
if you want to learn about reporting observations you go to the report page obviously you have
maps and data and we have a variety of resources including our postcards and activity guides
and web pages in more than two dozen different languages so hopefully you'll find something that
satisfies your what you need and so the report page is something that this is one way of
getting to it right here so we'll need to access that in a minute um
hold on for a second i have to delete a couple of windows that are open okay um so to take
the measurements it's very simple you're going to start obviously if you can turn off as many lights around your
house if that's where you're taking your measurements as many likes as you you can um and then you want to also make sure
you go out and you guys know this better than i do with all the observing that you do you want to go out at least when it's nautical twilight or astronomical
twilight that's even better so more than an hour after sunset you want to go out to take these measurements
um and then uh you want to allow your eyes to adjust to the dark it's
very very important that your eyes so um for me i'm getting a little older so
it's probably 15 20 minutes but for younger people it's probably like you know 10 minutes but so you you just make sure that your
eyes are adapted to the darkness around you hopefully the darkness around you
okay and then um you will find try to go out and find the constellation and sometimes you can use an app
to do this you know there's a variety of apps out there from free to a couple dollars a piece
um but you guys know the night sky better than anybody so i think that's not going to be a problem
and you just find in this month uh it's the constellation of orion next month orion and leo actually
and next month it's also leo for the northern hemisphere and uh and those are pretty prominent
constellations and then you're going to go to the globe at night webpage and again you can go
as i showed you on the home page to the tab at the top right that says report or you can use this web address that you
see on your screen right now and it's called web app for a reason because when it was actually invented um back in 2011 2012 or so
there was really no apps out there just yet and we actually had the foresight to make a report i mean an actual um
web page uh and just like an app in some sentence and even better because here
you can go to it and it doesn't matter what browser you're on and it doesn't matter what phone you're using
you can actually take you know take data with this app on your phone
so that's what makes it really cool and really nice nice and again yeah and so um then for this part uh
you're gonna you're gonna actually um uh you're gonna actually put in if you
don't have a smartphone you actually put in the date and time and the location and for the location
it's merely your student desk or if you don't want to give that maybe it's two streets that are um intersecting or if you're at the
eiffel tower all you have to put in is the eiffel tower um or something like that a landmark of
sorts but something that's very close by or potentially it would be best if you would do it
exactly where you're standing but um it doesn't have to be lat long but it actually calculates for you based
on your address what the lat long will be so if you have a smartphone this is the coolest thing
to me actually the the date the time and location get put in automatically so you don't have to do a thing
okay at that point but for the next step the next step you're choosing you're
actually making that judgment call as to what your light pollution level is where you're standing and and the way
you do that is very simple because all you're doing is looking at seven charts and determining what is the faintest
star in that chart that you actually see up in the night sky and and i'll show
you exactly what i mean by that in a few more slides but but these are there are seven different
charts that are important and actually there's eight that display but the one there's one that has nothing on it and i
i tend to ignore that one because i'm hoping nobody has to use that particular slide so the seven ones i'm going to
show you in a few in just a minute on the on the next slide are the seven ones that you are going to um
actually be using so let me get to the next page here okay so uh chart one is like you would
see in new york city okay you might see the absolutely brightest stars and none of the fainter ones obviously
and as you go progressively up in the charts you're going to see more and more stars and i don't usually say this to the
public but you guys know that that what you're talking about here actually is limiting magnitude
so how faint your star you know your your star you can possibly see what is your limiting magnitude so each
of these charts maps directly onto a limiting magnitude chart one is living magnitude one and
chart seven like you see here in the second um slide is what you you know uh living magnitude
seven and that's what you would see probably in a national park and um that is probably
there's so many stars in that one you know you might not even distinguish one constellation from another so there's that's really great
so again it's very very simple okay and here the next step is uh that
you should put should you know try to do is um there's four different pictures of
how many clouds are in the night sky to you so clear night sky versus a very very cloudy night sky for the fourth
uh image that you have on your your app and um and so again it's very easy
whatever you click on that's going to be the measurement that you stick with and the next piece
is the fifth step is uh just entering if you have it is a sky quality meter now the sky quality is something that a
lot of you do have and that's why i'm i'm making a point here because i think of all the population in the entire
united states the most most people with the sgns are probably the amateur astronomers so i'm happy to say that if you have one
here's where you can use it if you don't have one don't worry it's not it's just an optional thing you can do
and of course you just hold it above your head you click the start button and if it's a dark site you wait for it
to stop ticking because it's integrating and then you look at the number and you jot it down um in the app
and there's a place for it there and then there's just submitting it it's
really so simple you're done in 30 seconds but it takes a long time to get your eyes dark attempted
so that's that's the you see you spend more time dark dark adapting your eyes and you do taking the data
unfortunately um and then so just to summarize here you go with the six steps
and what i wanted to point out primarily is that uh for this
step here the third step where you're actually inputting data probably for the first time if you have a smartphone is that you
if you see these little thumbnail images at the very bottom can you see my my cursor in action there good okay so you
see these thumb thumbnail images here and there's seven or eight of them and when you're clicking on them
it appears above oops i have a trigger happy mouse there sorry about that let me try that again
[Music] okay so um uh you see the the picture and i'm not trying to do that without
moving this thing again so this big picture will be whatever thumbnail you've clicked on
and where you leave it is your measurement so be very careful to become to have convinced yourself that that's
the right the right image okay and again the next one over here in
the the part four those are your um your weather basically your cloud
cover and you click which one is appropriate and that's your measurement and so it's
it's that simple and let me see if i forgot any i have a little notes here to see if i've said everything uh and of course there's
a mode for uh where you see it's pink up there on the on the top right here it's in night mode so you
don't have this light blaring at you as you're trying to take your measurements and i think i've said most everything i
wanted to mention okay that's good and let's go to the next slide so just in case and i
won't spend time on this too much but i just want to make a point that again it is important to monitor changes over time
because if things do get worse you want to know that you should take action and this data actually feeds into a big
database lots of people have used this data for different projects and i might name one of them
uh in a minute so um so it does this your efforts are
very needed and i can't partic in particular i cannot be everywhere uh with with uh taking this data and
neither can my colleagues we need we rely on citizen scientists uh to take this data all over the world
and we do appreciate all those measurements thank you so just to let you know
one great effort by amateur astronomers and some high schoolers uh was in norman oklahoma a few years
back where they took data both with sky quality and visually and you'll
see this lit area in the very center is uh is actually their university and
that's where they had a lot of globe lights and they actually petitioned their city council to please make the laws
stronger the lighting laws and they won after about a two-year endeavor and so this is what you guys can do a
lot of good things another example which was a great project we had a lot of fun with
we had amateur astronomers um take control over taking measurements on four major roads
in tucson arizona and we are very lucky that on either side of tucson we have
two national parks we have a bio blitz celebration that is something that the national geographic
sponsors every year for the national park and 10 years ago now i hate to say it so
long ago but we had uh amateur astronomers uh be in charge of the roads across tucson that's a great distance across
there they took a lot of measurements every mile or half a mile and uh and then there were the park
rangers in the back country on the in the park to the east and we had boy scouts uh taking measurements on the
park to the west and this got media attention and we found for instance at the very center of
tucson where you see this yellow dot that is about a hundred times brighter than the the measurements to the eastern
edge of the rincon mountains to our east so that's a that's a result that um is
interesting so anyways there's just other things and my favorite project for research
has been this one on bats and the the arizona game of fish asked us to collaborate with them and we
took 3 500 measurements in tucson with sqms evenly distributed all over the town so that we could make
this contour map and the the colored lines you see are the roots of the bats going from the
saguaro national park east that i just showed you 25 kilometers to where they feast every
every every night and coming back in the morning and they circumvented the town for a reason and
they wanted to know whether this reason was due to light pollution so it was a very interesting study got very interesting results and i just want
to show you that this is the way we do use globe at night data and this is um does come into very very good use
so i just want to end with uh with some campaign dates if you're interested in we have a couple
more nights this particular campaign before we head out of a new moon and then um we
have dates in april all the way through the end of the year and actually there's one after december 4th up toward the end of
december oops sorry where you could do it during christmas week if that's what you want to do
during christmas week there's a campaign that will advertise at the end of the year and uh that's it
for me if anyone has any questions
uh my comment was very well done and uh count me in so
book davies uh says the sqm my house comes to 20.5
really that's very good yeah yeah and i think i answered this
question right john pinto said what's the serial number in the sqn data and i i think it's just the serial
number of the device uh and the model number which you can pull up with different button sequences
is that that's right yeah yeah you hold it down you press twice and hold it down and you'll see a couple more numbers and one
of those numbers is the serial serial number and you don't need to do put that in there it's just
okay no it's optional good question any other question here
i have one while you're looking connie what is the most interesting thing in the years that this has been going on
what thing surprised you the most well okay just last year we had the whole continent of australia
get involved and they decided they were going to go for the guinness book of world records and see how many see how many
measurements they could get in one single night and guess what they did such a good job
rallying the entire nation that they got 6 700 measurements in one night which was yeah which was
their longest night during the yeah june 21st is their longest night wow
that's impressive and and needless to say they got into
the guinness book well that's a good idea you should make
it a competition among among states or cities or
yes people compete yes we're hoping to repeat this and then
to do it for the northern hemisphere during our longest day of the year but the thing is it's when people are out of school and a
lot of people are on vacation a lot of people are you know the kids are the ones who do a lot of the measurements so
um anyways it's kind of it's a little bit harder for us but yeah yeah yeah how many years have
uh has there been counts it's going on 15 years wow
and what area has shown the biggest deterioration
well that's a really good question oh i don't know if i get in trouble if i answer that
well as astronomers we want to stay away from those areas let's go the other way how about the
biggest improvement well i would say that the countries with the largest growth in population
probably are the countries the most industrialized countries the ones that usually uh are the ones that are showing greater rates of light pollution
but at the same time you know it's hard to single it out because at the same time there are a lot of communities actually in the
united states who are taking um it under their advisement to really do a good job at selecting the right kind of
lighting they're retrofitting they're really taking it seriously and that that gives a lot of hope
you know yeah yeah i know i'm tired of driving
45 minutes away just to find clear skies and a lot of people have to drive farther than that or dark skies i mean
um i'm like a lot of people i'm in the national parks a lot because that seems to be the best uh
most beautiful sky and so much scenery to do during the day if the family goes with you they have a way
of keeping busy and so you can go out and image or observe at night and you know it just makes it so much easier
so you know i'm very grateful for our national parks and everything that they do
just recently the city of kansas city announced they're going to change out all their lights to led
so we're hoping that we can get through the missouri ida chapter get them involved
and really tweak that process to be more advantageous for a stronger so
it's a yeah okay i'm sorry carol it's an uphill battle but i think
we can make some progress because uh they've already said some of the right things as they're starting it
like we want to be as efficiently possible uh energy used correctly and all that but
they're not going the full direction of course yeah you want to make sure that the color
temperature of the of the devices of the bulbs are probably less than 3 000 kelvin
that's something that's very important and and they're getting better and better so some people are actually quoting 2200 kelvin for
a temperature for the bulb so i don't know if that's going to be possible but um you know shoot for
whatever you can get that's right thanks honey we're probably
going to be talking to you again because with what we do keeping our dark
skies is very important for all of us you know whether no matter what we're doing if we're observing or taking pictures
it is really important to try to keep our skies as dark as they can possibly be because as you said 80 percent of the
people can't even see the milky way which to me it just is amazing you know some
of i can walk out in my backyard and i am fortunate enough to see the milky way you know not super bright but i can tell
it's there and it's just amazing how quickly we are losing the dark skies yes we want to preserve our cultural
heritage for future generations as best definitely so so
does anybody else have any questions before we take a break general comments uh oh why says everyone
needs to have bright everyone needs to have bright front and back lights around here
uh street lightsaber oh he's complaining so yes that's too bad
connie are there any any standout um countries or locales
that uh really have done and have made an improvement in in um in reducing light pollution
or is it this ongoing growing problem there's places like borrego
springs who've done a lot of you know a lot of good work they're um you know there's been major cities even that uh
have uh retrofitted like san diego and and actually uh some action up north uh
in the san francisco area but like davis i think it was um they they actually had put in
some very bad lights and people complained so much they had to retrofit the newly in uh installed lights to be
better yeah i know it was impressive i mean there's been um yeah there's been cities in around the
world too the uh slovakia is a very uh they have a national law they've done that in a few different places in
in europe uh so yeah and there's places that just are
jaw-dropping in terms of um like uh croatia and near uh i think it's
um laven and croatia they take incredible number of measurements and and uh monte video uh in in iroquois take an
incredible number of measurements for glove at night and they're always on top of it and um there's so many
so many countries like that all over the world it's just a very impressive thing wonderful yeah and don't forget the
astronomical league has a dark sky advocate observer program so we also have a program for dark skies
yes though if you're a league member please get into that too this is an important thing to save here
so all right if no there are no more questions scott how about if we take a 10 minute break
and we will come back to you and kent and then barbara harris will be up and connie thank you so much i really
appreciate it well thank you again for letting me be on here connie very nice that was nice connie really
enjoyed that thanks thank uh thank you and i'll answer your your question um in the text in the chat
um
um
uh
uh
this
oh
you
come on
well we are back i think i ran a little bit long
that's okay having internet problems making my
sandwich yeah that's okay you could just share with all of us
okay all right i made a sandwich for all of you guys too so yeah well we appreciate it
barbara is rebooting and trying to get back online right now we have lost barbara okay well
look i will talk a little bit about the universe sampler right now um kent martin's joining me a little bit
later but uh you know this is probably one of the best little guides uh for
anybody that's getting started in astronomy but i think it's also a good guide for someone that
has uh maybe been into astronomy before we get a lot of people that maybe they were into astronomy
years ago and now they're jumping back into it but they're a little bit rusty okay and uh so you know in the guide
itself which was uh this guy was written by uh barbara wilson and uh amelia goldberg from the houston
astronomical society uh you know they they basically set you know
made the outline for the book put in a ton of the content in here but they also helped help from people uh actually many
people including people like david levy okay so um and some of my favorite parts
in here of course the the first section of the universe sampler has to do with uh you know
understanding sky movement uh right ascension and declination how things look in a star map you know
like when you're looking through an eyepiece of different kinds of telescopes how how is the map flipped you know from
east to west north to south and that kind of thing
they have a whole section on recording your observations now i don't know if david had any input
here but i think he probably would have because david basically
his mantra is if you haven't recorded an observation it's not an observation so that's that's
um that's part of that and we'll we'll cover some of that too um i think my favorite part of it it has
to do with uh you know deep sky objects uh and how to you know look
through an eyepiece there's the art of seeing that's described in the universe sampler and um you know
uh most of us had some mentorship uh you know i'm curious uh
terry and carol um who who taught you how to observe through a telescope
i kind of taught myself i'm in a small area where they're really the closest astronomy club to me is 40
miles away uh so pretty much i bought my own telescope
and just learned by using it without you carol yeah for me uh kathy
mentioned many people know kathy yeah she's a stickler for detail and there's not a part of the sky that
kathy doesn't know upside one in the other and yeah she just kept persisting and she'd say
now here's how you do it here's the steps involved you don't look at the whole skies you uh
you skipped across the sky and that's how you find things and she before i even looked at any observing
manuals or anything like that she had me going and finding constellations so
so but that's a good one that's the star hopping method which is also another art of learning the sky and i think that
that's what this book is has a lot to do with because in order to do the you know the universe sampler
you can't use a go-to system you can't use the setting circles you have to learn the sky and they teach
you how to uh understand and remember the constellations uh an example of that is a kind of a
poem that they write about you know orion's adventure in the sky you know with the dog
you know canis major and and uh you know the rabbit lupus
underneath him and he's fighting the bull and all this stuff you know and so i think it's like six constellations
you can remember um by memorizing this this uh this little uh uh it's kind of a
ditty or a poem you know about uh or a little story about about the sky and the sky's filled with
stories you know you have 88 constellations uh to learn from i think about
almost any part of the sky you can see something like 70 percent of the sky with all the
different seasons of constellations i think that learning the constellations and learning
how to star hop a little bit is is a big adventure uh and a great feeling of accomplishment
um when i when i first got out there i had a you know with my
first big telescope i had a 13-inch do you guys remember the odyssey uh
coulter odyssey telescopes yes these are some of the first really inexpensive
dobsonian telescopes that you could buy um and it's with that telescope
that i was taught how to observe faint okay and so i i have to give credit to um
uh uh charles and i'm forgetting his last name right now he's gonna kill me uh and steve edberg okay so i was up at
the i think it was the polaris uh astronomical society's uh observing site this was north of los
angeles and so in one night uh charles morris is his last name
he's he showed me 12 comments okay and they they were getting
progressively fainter and progressively fainter and progressively fainter but i think i really have to give the
credit to steve edberg for showing me how to observe faintly you know because he he taught me
to relax and relax at the eyepiece not stare right down the tube
you know kind of look off to the side and to use different eyepieces and so we were switching we were
switching eyepieces to observe a 15th magnitude star
through an eight-inch telescope okay so this was something a lot of you know i think that i don't know what
the what they describe as far as and the advertising as far as the specification of how faint you can see
but we're going way past that okay now i admit that i was uh i was in my uh
maybe late 20s when when i did this so my eyes were younger of course but uh i think between charles
and steve they were amongst some of the very very first people to see the inbound uh you know apparition of halley's comet
i i think they saw it in 1985 well before other people were i think another one that uh
would have been in that that club would have been stephen o'meara okay uh also a great deep sky observer
but to in order to learn how to see like that it it really um you know if i was going to
add something to uh the uh universe sampler would would have been how to find a mentor
okay um because someone that can push you and teach you and have the patience to
show you how to observe faint is is a big deal okay and it also helps for star hopping too
you know because uh uh you know and you know i'm not gonna go through every
part of the universe sampler right now because ken kent will be on with me later but uh
they show you how to you know uh you know use your hand to find separations in the
sky and how many degrees that is and or how many degrees that is you know uh in the sky and
you you put your hand out at arm's length and it's remarkably actually remarkably close you know so i
don't know how you know humans maybe we evolved to have our hand out at arm's length to measure distances
in the sky but i i think that that's a very useful part in here
there is no other guide that i've really seen or read that takes all
of the other necessary elements you know that uh to help you become a a really a great
observer and someone that understands the night sky uh except for the universe sampler
and um uh you know the uh you know the beyond the list of uh deep
sky objects they also have uh a naked eye uh observing list as well
and maybe most important of all is an observing log
but i would also add to this uh drawing at the eyepiece because drawing at the eyepiece lets you
see fainter and deeper and so look i'm no artist really okay but uh if you take if you're
looking through the eyepiece and maybe you have like a circle drawn that would be the field of view of the eyepiece if you just sit there and just draw your
pencil don't look down at the paper okay just draw your pencil over areas that you
think that you see detail if you look at a astrophotograph later
you'll find that you actually did record many faint things that maybe you didn't even think you saw
for real okay maybe you thought it was like super faint and maybe you think you're seeing stuff but
um the fact of the matter is is that you're training yourself to see fainter deeper you know and
um i think that i think that for many people the advocates of visual observing uh it's certainly in
this age of astrophotography advocates of visual observing um
connect you you know they they talk about connecting you to the to the night sky into the universe
in in ways that you can't really do otherwise you know because you're seeing it live you're
seeing you're seeing uh photons come from distant galaxies you know
and there this is these are not copies of photons it's not a reflection it's
not like something that you know like like in a photograph where you just kind of
record you see the recording of something it's really coming to you live so you
know if it's uh a galaxy 30 million light years away well guess what
the the photons crushed you know that were made out of the crushing or the fusion
of atoms inside of those stars have you know come out from the stars
have floated or not floated but flown through space at a 186 000
miles a second you know 5.9 trillion miles a year you know for
millions of years and it's the original photon hitting your eye it's contact okay it's contact
and so you're all at once looking back into time all at once becoming reconnected
with those photons onto your eyes you know and if you're with the you know a
organic kind of you know astronomer like myself you know i'm going to be reminding you
that you all of your body all of your atoms everything that you use everything that you see everything you know is made from stars
and so that's it you know i i think that's one of the concepts that
got me hooked on astronomy to look at something a star or a nebula
or or an astronomical object and realize that you were looking at it
as it was millions of years ago not not as you know if it blew up a
hundred years ago you know you won't find out yet because the light hasn't gotten there yet
right that's right so it's um uh you know and if that doesn't start
your mind on a journey of exploration i don't know what will okay um uh
it is um uh but i find barbara that that you have to keep someone up
late enough to where their persona starts to wear away okay because everybody has like their
persona you know be with you and hi how are you barbara
gosh what do you have in the telescope too hey barbara do you think that there's life somewhere around the universe i
mean you know once you kind of hear questions like that you know that they're getting to the tipping
point all it takes is a gentle push
and um and now i think at that moment
a new astronomer is born yeah so barbara i'm gonna i'm gonna turn this
over to you but uh ken kent's gonna join me after after your uh talk well thank you scott
you know i can still remember i mean i knew all the my dad took me out when i was a teenager and
started teaching me constellations but you know the first saying that i remember
is follow the arc from the big dipper to arcturus and then i learned speak to
spica well now they say drive a spike to spica but you know that was one of the first
things i remember that taught me other constellations besides the big dipper
and orion i mean those were the ones i knew as a as a kid but then now i can find other
constellations and learn some names of the stars and i thought that was amazing being a teenager and being able you know
to i had no training about the stars so that really got me started too oh yeah but you you are a remarkable
person i remember in my interview with you you were talking about how young you were and really getting
interested in the stars and you were maybe three or four years old yeah yeah my mom would tell me that i was small
enough for her to rock in her lap and she i wanted to know about the stars what were the lights up there and then
as i got older my dad took over and you know took me to a college observatory every thursday night
um before that i had my first telescope in grade school i was oh wow yeah i was taking my
telescope i had a little 60 millimeter refractor and i was taking it to school to show the kids
the star the sun which unfortunately had the little screw in solar filter
and i'm thinking oh my gosh you know what could have happened but you know i all my science projects
science fairs everything was on astronomy and i you know barbara's probably along the same
lines you probably along the same lines a lot of us were but that was the first thing i remember that
and when i bought my first real telescope you know my refractor was a nice little thing i could just take
everywhere but my first real telescope was a six inch reflector
and i thought i'd hit the big time i had a six inch reflector with f8 hit the big
time it was a bit telescope i was i went down from this little thing right here
to a 13 inch telescope but it wasn't until it was about 25 no i was a little bit younger than
that 24 maybe yeah this is what i got when i was 10. okay it's a 40 millimeter so that's
amazing that's a big big jump in apertures yeah all right we'll wrap this one up
and get to barbara talking yeah
you get us together and we can um okay barbara harris let me tell you a
little bit about barbara harris again this is somebody that's very well known especially in double va
double aavso she is amazing with variable stars so barbara is a retired ob gyn physician
with her own observatory and it looks really cool too the bar jay observatory in central
florida she has had an interest in astronomy since high school got her first ccd camera in 1999
and wanted to dedicate most of her imaging to science which she has if you get sky and telescope magazine
april issue you're going to see barbara harris she does an amazing job she's been a
long time member of double a double a vso doing variable star photometry
barbara thank you so much for joining us i can't wait to hear your talk thank you terry and i i'd like to say
that what got me hooked on variable stars was david levy giving a
talk at the southern cross astronomical society in the late 80s or early 90s
and he talked about a book called starlight nights and it's my favorite book i have to read
it at least once a year and that is what got me hooked on variable stars
so i i have to thank david for that
and it sounds like he's saying something but i don't hear him
so i'm going to go ahead and start sharing my screen
okay so i'd like to talk about some of the astronomical league observing
programs and how you can use those programs as a springboard to doing real science and you actually are doing
real science when you're doing some of these programs but something that will continue on your
way uh terry gave me a great introduction and like she said i have a uh
observatory it's a third story uh domed observatory a third-story uh
10-foot domed observatory that houses a 16-inch schmidt castle grain
on a astrophysics mount uh and it has a proline ccd attached to
it and this is the workhorse for
most of my variable star work i also have an 80 millimeter refractor
attached to uh on top of that telescope with a 40 millimeter cannon
that i do some dslr photometry with
so what i'd like to talk about is using the astronomical league observing
programs as a springboard to uh to doing science
the astronomically observing programs are a great way to add structure and guidance to your
observing uh a particular completion of the programs you usually are awarded a certificate in or a pin
and once you finish it may trigger the desire to continue your work into uh into that same area
so this has been a a list of a small list of some of the astronomical league
observing programs uh the messier program is probably one of the uh oldest programs but there's a double
star observing program a variable star observing program caldwell herschel asteroid
galaxies some several different galaxy observing programs uh spectroscopy uh
and occupation so if you go to the league's website you can see a complete
list of all the observing programs that are available so i'm going to highlight several uh
observing programs and and show you how you can use that observing program and continue
to do science from that program and mainly i'm going to concentrate on variable stars since that's my
wheelhouse so variable stars are stars that change their brightness over time
um there are many stars out there that are variable and studying variable variable stars can
give scientists information on the composition mass temperature uh and other
uh properties of stars it also helps us to understand stellar
evolution because stars last millions and sometimes even billions of years
and we're not long enough to see one star go through its life cycle but we can observe several stars
through different phases of their evolution there are several uh different types of
variable uh stars they're usually divided into what are called intrinsic variable stars meaning that
there's something inherent in the star itself that's causing the variability in brightness or there's a group of
extrinsic variable stars and those are a good example are the eclipsing
binaries meaning that there's something external to the star that's causing it to vary in brightness
so the simplest variable star program in the astronomical league is the binocular variable star observing
program it requires about 60 observations uh with the binocular
uh of at least 15 different variables the list that's available uh in the
the uh variable star program are the list is the list that's
available at the aavso website um where it lists uh binocular stars
for observation uh after the binocular variable star uh observing
program you might want to advance to uh the variable star observing program
and in this program you observe 100 observations of at least 15 different long period
variables semi-regular uh variables or cataclysmic variables and they can be
observed visually with the eyes um or binoculars or telescope
and um they can be recorded uh by your visual estimate of the magnitude
or uh you can image and do photometry to estimate the brightness
now there's a nova observing program uh also and novas are basically uh variable
stars uh it involves locating observing sketching or imaging nova supernova a door or dwarf nova
and uh there's a two levels of certificate uh in this program a silver certificate
is uh involves 50 total observations of at least one from each class
of nova supernova or dwarf nova and the gold certificate is a certificate and a pin and it
involves 100 observations carbon star observing program
pretty much most carbon stars are actually variable stars and they're unique class of variable
stars they're a beautiful class of variables to
to observe visually because they're they're usually red stars
and they can be deep red and there could be different hues of bread probably related to
their variation you need a hundred observations of a carbon star um and the list is on
the uh the program website and you could observe visually with
binoculars or telescope and you could also uh do photometry on these and submit
observations so most of those programs i i've just gone over
uh involve uh an association with the aavso because
it requires also submitting the results of your observations to the aavso
aavso was founded in 1911 and it is mainly involved in collecting and
archiving uh observations um from actually professional and amateur
astronomers and it it is a clearinghouse so that
um professional astronomers can use that data uh in their research it's also a good
place for educators to use the data uh in in teaching
the aavso is also provides several educational programs for variables are observing also
um so um like i said many of the programs require uh some interaction with the aavso
because you have to submit your your magnitude estimates to the aavso
this requires a um what's called an observation code that
must be obtained from the aavso now you don't need to be a member to
obtain an observation code uh it is encouraged to become a member but you don't need to
become a member um to obtain an observation code so that you can submit
uh data to the aavso also a list of the targets that are
involved in the programs are usually obtained from the aavso
uh the other thing that you need the aavso for is unique chart for your variable star
from the aavso because when you're making a magnitude estimate of a variable star
you're making it by comparing it to comparison stars that are in the same field as your um
your variable started and um the the comparison starts to use
can be obtained by obtaining a chart of your your variable from the aavso
so this is an example of an aavso chart uh this is a chart of delta cpi
that is a 10 degree field of view uh this is one that i monitor on a regular basis with my canon dslr
with an 85 millimeter lens and that gives me a field of view of 10 by 15 degrees
and so i go to aavso and request this particular chart at this particular
field of view and i also specify a limiting magnitude because i know that in 85 millimeter lens
um on like a 15 or 20 second exposure which is what i usually use for
for this particular star um i'm i'm not going to get down to magnitude 16
so like in this particular chart it looks like it's limited to about 7.3
no 8.5 magnitude and even that's probably too bright uh but at least in this
particular chart in this field of view it shows all the comparison stars that you can
use to estimate what the magnitude of delta safety i is and if the variable star is
noted by the cross in the center of the chart also once you obtain the chart there's
also what's called the photometry table uh that's associated with the chart
and it gives the true magnitude of every uh comparison star that's labeled in the
chart for example this 53 star right here uh the magnitude is
actually 5.3 they they leave out the dots so that you don't get confused and
and think that it's a star so if you want to find um a more
more accurate magnitude 453 you find it on the photometry table
and 53 for a v magnitude or green magnitude what you would your
naked eye would see is actually 5.350
and uh so you need these uh these two items to do an estimate of a
variable star so once you've estimated either visually
or you can do photometry um that's that's using software to measure how
bright your your uh star is you can enter the results manually on the aavso website
by putting in the name of the variable the magnitude that you've estimated
what time your observation was and what comparison starts on the chart
that you use to estimate your magnitude and then you could also put comments
like if the moon was really bright that night or there may have been high clouds that
that may have hindered your observations a little bit uh to the right is what i do
is i do photometry so my software that i have used to estimate
the magnitude of delta fifi it spits out this text
file that gives me the the star which is delta cci
the universal time and then it gives me the estimate of the
magnitude that i've determined for delta cpi it gives me an error it gives me what
filter i'm used using this is a dslr observation so it i'm using tri-color
green and it gives me uh other parameters uh like what check star name and cop star name
ensemble means that i'm using several different comparison stars to determine the
magnitude uh and it gives you also include the
name of the chart every chart that you request it has a a name at the top
and uh that information is submitted either on the file when you do photometry or
manually when you're uh submitting your visual observations you put in the the
uh the chart id so like i said you don't need to be a
member of aavso to obtain an observation
code and submit uh data and also to obtain uh charts
for your variables uh but it's a good idea uh to support the organization
um but there are other benefits to membership and one is that you have access to a
discounted fee of choice courses aavso choice courses
are usually four-week online courses of a particular topic
there are ccd courses there are there is a dslr choice course
dslr photometry there's a visual observing choice course if you want more
uh detailed instruction in and variable star observation so these are
available throughout the year and they are available to non-members
but if you are a member the the fee for the course is discounted
you also have access to what's called v-fold it's the photometry software
uh online software that uh that aavso members can use so instead of
purchasing uh and and looking for your own software to do photometry to to uh
to analyze your uh your photometry data uh aavso has this
program called v-fold where you could upload your images to uh v-fold and and analyze
your your images there to determine the magnitude the other
thing that's big with the aavso is as a member you have access to mentors a lot of people
can can be overwhelmed at the beginning and some need some guidance as to to what
direction to go and uh we have mentors that are very available in visual
astronomy in photometry for ccd photometry for
um for dslr and photoelectric photometers also
um so any anything you want uh you could ask for a mentor and
uh those are reserved for members you also have access to aavso net
aavsa so net is a um a group of robotic telescopes owned
by the aavso and as a member you have the ability to
uh apply and use some of the robotic telescope for imaging uh there are several aavso
workshop also and as a member you have discounts to those
like i recently finished a spectroscopy workshop that was held before
the last fall meeting
so what can we learn from some of the variable stars that we're uh
we're determining the magnitude for like we have over a century of data on
several stars in the aavso database and one star that was in the
news recently with beetlejuice um the end of october of uh
2019 and early 2020 um beetlejuice was determined
to undergo some really strange dimming now we have known for over 100 years
that beetlejuice was a variable star it's a classified as a semi-regular
variable star and it does dim on a semi-regular basis
but this dimming that started in late 2019 and
peaked at about uh january uh of 2020 was an unusual
uh dimming it when we looked back at the history of beetlejuice
we had never seen it that gem and its base magnitude is about 0.3
magnitude but it had dimmed to almost uh second magnitude
so this was the dimmest that we have seen beetlejuice in um in all the
uh the years that beetlejuice has been monitoring and this is what's called the light
curve what it does is that it plots the magnitude of beetlejuice uh
over time so uh this goes from 2018 to uh january 2021
so we and the the black uh circles represent people that have observed
beetlejuice visually um and they've uh estimated the magnitude and submitted them to aavso
so the black circles are all visual estimates uh the green circles are people that
have used either a dslr a ccd or a
photometer um to estimate the uh the magnitude of uh beetlejuice
and if if you notice most of these magnitudes are black or visual magnitudes
and this is how uh a professional astronomers found out that something strange was going on in
beetlejuice they were able to see the observations that um that were submitted over time by
by mostly amateur astronomers and saw that it was getting dimmer and dimmer and
way dimmer than uh it had been measured since they've been
monitoring beetlejuice it has been discovered that uh
even the hubble uh got some observations of of this unusual dimming and it was
discovered uh that the reason that beetlejuice became so dim uh was that there was a
uh a release of uh uh of gas basically from um from
beetlejuice and it created a dust cloud around beetlejuice
that covered about one quarter of the star and that's why it has such an unusual
dimming wow so you never know what's going on until you you monitor that that's why we
monitor these you know stars on a regular basis because you know they they can be unpredictable
and when we first started to see the dimming of beetlejuice there was speculation that
beetlejuice was ready to go supernova because it's it's one of a handful of stars that are close
to us in our galaxy that's expected to go supernova soon
so there was speculation when this art activity happened that that's what was happening uh but uh that's not
the case the case is basically there was a big dust cloud that was blocking
um about a quarter of the light from from beetlejuice
so my own uh variable star claim to flame was observing uh an eruption of
what's called any cur a recurrent nova there are only a handful of nova that
are are recurrent uh most novas uh a stark basically uh becomes
very very bright uh it dims and that's it and you don't you don't
see it anymore as far as uh a really bright uh event
but uh youth scorpi is a uh a nova where they have noticed
in the past that it has uh there has been an eruption it becomes
very very bright and then it dims again and um professional astronomers when
they're interested in monitoring of a particular star they will
have the aavso submit what's called an alert notice and basically the alert notice says uh
hey look i'm interested in this particular star uh i think something's gonna happen um
to it so we need as many observers as possible so i i like to do alert notices one of
my my primary uh goals is to uh to look at the alert notice and see
what what needs to be monitored uh so when this alert notice came out uh
in january of 2018 i put this star you score by on my
uh my list to observe it as frequently as possible uh it was expected to to
go into outburst um in around 2009 uh but stars don't read
uh the books and pay attention so you have to to have a window where
uh you you observe so i started observing this in 2008 as frequently as i could
um and fortunately i i caught the eruption
it happened on january 28 um 2010 i believe and
um it was exciting because once it erupts astronomers want to
observe the star at its peak and this star is unusual in that it'll erupt and
within 24 hours it's starting to decline in brightness already
um so fortunately with my monitoring uh i was able to catch it with the
eruption uh and what's nice is that i have the the image the 24 hours before the
eruption measuring it at 18.2 magnitude and then the night
or it was actually early morning of the eruption uh it went uh it was eighth magnitude
so in 24 hours it had increased in brightness over 10 000 times wow and um
so you know once once i discovered the brightness the professional astronomer who has been
monitoring this brad schaefer sent out a um an astronomical telegram
and got telescopes all over the world and even space telescopes looking at at this uh recurrent nova
uh so um you never by my philosophy is that
you're not going to detect anything if you don't look and you might be the only one looking at
that particular star that night and 24 hours before i
actually was the only one observing it but it turned out that the morning that i observed the outburst
uh one of my aavso friends who actually lives also in central florida he observed it
about 20 minutes after i did so he it was confirmed by
uh by him so it's i sometimes when i don't feel like
observing i always push myself because i say i might be the only one in the world
looking at that particular star at that particular time that's right
so um the double star observing program is another uh astronomical league observing program it
requires uh observations of a hundred listed objects you can use any telescopes um and
it can be done visually or by imaging
in the observing program it basically requires a sketch uh showing the position of the primary
and secondary uh stars but if you are interested in double stars
you can go further by measuring the position angle and separation of binary
stars and um this has kind of been neglected by professional astronomers so
the only people uh that are are doing um double star measurements are
usually astronomers and uh it can be done uh
with a ccd camera by just taking an image of uh of the star system and
you could actually determine the uh position angle and the separation uh by by using
a spirometry uh software to measure um the right ascension and declination
of each star in the pair and by doing this you could actually
calculate what the position angle and uh uh how separated the star is
or there are some software packages that will do that for you uh but the math isn't that complicated
where there's an equation uh that you could use once you have the right ascension and declination for each
star um that you can calculate the position angle and uh the separation of those stars
now uh the u.s naval observatory uh houses the washington
double star catalog and uh on from this website you can uh
go to the washington double star catalog and you could look for a list of neglected doubles um
meaning that these are double stars that haven't had any recent data uh so
they they need updated uh separations and position angles
so you can get targets from this website and also you can submit your
observations to the journal of double star observation like i said most of this work now is
done by amateur astronomers and it's work that needs to be done uh
to to keep track of uh these double stars um their position uh
angle and their how uh how wide they are in separation
the occultation observing program is another interesting astronomical uh league program and occultation occurs
when the moon uh an asteroid or another planetary body moves in front of a star and briefly
blocks the light from that star uh it can provide important information on the
occultic body and or the star that is occulting uh for this program
you must observe an asteroid occultation at least seven a total a total lunar occultation where the moon
completely uh covers a star uh and then a grazing lunar occultation uh
where just the the dark limb of the moon uh will occult uh it'll actually just
graze the star where you'll see the star blinking on and off
uh because the uh the stars actually passing uh you're actually seeing the
light pass through lunar mountain as the as the moon moves in its orbit so these can be
served visually or what's common now is by video and timing can be
done by radio uh the wwv uh radio timing channel
or uh what's common is a gps and i have done several occupations and
it's it's actually pretty exciting um to to see on video where you're looking
at a star and all of a sudden it it's like a light switch it turns off and then a few seconds
later it's like a light switch that turns the star back on um so i've done several asteroid
occultations and uh this can be a pretty exciting field and most of these are also done uh by
amateurs and if if you're going to do the uh astronomical league program it's usually
done uh through iota the international occultation timing association
it uh is a clearinghouse for data on occultation timing so uh this is where you would
submit your data uh it also provides predictions uh it has it has software uh
that can list predictions for your longitude and latitude uh
of occultations of stars by asteroids and the moon and of of grazing occultations
and there are some really hardcore uh iota members they do what's called
chasing the chat the shadow uh is that if the occultation isn't
occurring where they live they actually have portable setup
where they they go to where the occultation is going to be uh i'm
usually not that hardcore i i keep track of occupations and if
it's going to if the path is going to be over my house i
i'll i'll observe it the website also contains uh the the iota
observing manual um that has recommendations for equipment
uh and observing techniques and also software it also uh has a forum um
where uh people can discuss uh their techniques and and data
so this is a a map of my first occultation this was in 20 in 2008
so this is the first time that i've done an occultation and it turned out to be a positive uh
meaning that i did detect the star blinking off by the asteroid the uh asteroid was 19 uh for tuna
and unfortunately i don't remember what the magnitude of the star was
um but uh the the list here contains all the people uh
who were observing the occultation and it contains uh 20 20 people and
each number is is an observer and by by determining
how long the star blinked out at your location they could actually map the shape of
the asteroid that occulted the star so uh there are occultations that have
revealed uh like uh uh bilobe
asteroids uh really a regular-shaped asteroids uh so this this is actually pretty
fascinating uh to me and um it can be done with uh video equipment and
a gps time inserter uh so that you could time uh if you do
get a positive result time exactly how long the star blinked
out uh at your location if you don't want to do physical
observing uh after you've completed a program like there are several uh galaxy
observing programs if you want to continue uh along the
lines of galaxies you can go to uh the galaxy zoo website the zuniverse
website and the galaxy zoo is putting your expertise
at work and trying to identify what type of galaxy uh you're looking at so they have
all of these uh different galaxies and they want your help in cataloging uh
what shape the galaxy is is it is it an elliptical galaxy is it irregular
um so if you want to be kind of more armchair uh the the galaxy zoo
is a good place uh to put your galaxy observing um uh ability to work
um if if you don't want to do anything
with your own equipment so this is a good armchair project if you're interested in galaxies
now these are some of the books i recommend if if you want to get more involved in
scientific uh projects uh gerald hubbell's scientific astrophotography is a great
source uh for doing uh scientific research uh i if you're getting into
scientific imaging or actually any astrophotography the handbook of astronomical image
processing is a great resource that comes with uh software it was uh uh
published by will william bell and unfortunately they stopped uh publishing
it but i think the book is going to be picked up by another publisher so should be available uh soon through another
publisher uh but this if you're doing any type of imaging uh you should have this in your
um in your library and another one of my favorite books is uh the sky is your laboratory
by robert robert buckheim and uh i've used this book to death
it it basically gives you a lot more detail into uh what
kind of project you're interested in like if you're interested in double stars if you're interested
in uh asteroid photometry or occultations or variable star photometry
uh this book it does a detailed uh uh instruction on on
uh helping to uh do that
for variable stars um these manuals can be downloaded from the aavso
website you don't need um to be a member uh but like i said i i
would encourage it if you're going to be a variable star observer uh the the manual for visual variable
start observation uh the ccd guide to cc uh
to uh photometry and dsl observing manual these can all be downloaded from
the aavso website and uh the complete guide to observing
lunar grazing and asteroid occupations can be downloaded from uh the iota website um it's
it's a huge book it's actually uh like several hundred pages but it's a
wealth of information that will tell you everything you need to do uh to to do an
occultation it's truly a complete guide it really is i mean it it it
i think it's about 200 pages oh my goodness okay so all right i'll take any
questions if anyone has any questions you know i think i think in general here
i did not see a lot of questions but um i did see comments of um how impressive your presentation was i
think you've inspired some people uh to take up variable star observing and to do science in general uh with
their telescopes so that's that's awesome i also want to add too this is the first time i've seen you
give a presentation and uh um and david levy was chatting uh
also in you know in our zoom chat and um we both loved what what you uh
presented here it was very uh informative very concise very inspiring and uh david's asking me can
is there any way we can get you on a global star party and so we're going to throw that out there okay
all right so that's great that's great but i i hope my love of
not just astronomy but uh my love of variable stars i hope that has really
come through yeah uh i i just love stars i i think each star has a story to tell
and uh i'm just i i i'm not a deep sky
person i i love it just to look at the pictures uh but i love just
looking at stars and realizing that there's a story that each one has uh to
tell that's right well seeing stars become variable is really telling you that the sky's
alive you know constantly right right and so yeah and actually one of my uh favorite class
of variable stars is uh eclipsing binary where i would
uh i would observe the target over three four five hours and then
uh take an image like once a minute of that star and then i would plot the magnitude
estimate that i obtained over time and it it's fun to just when you finish
uh in the morning to to do that plot and basically see that that data come
alive you know it wasn't just this start that that was there and it stayed the same
all night when you see the plot of the light curve and to see that what it was doing that few hours
uh cataclysmic variables also are um a star that can do that also and it's
it's kind of nice to do a several hour uh observation of a cataclysmic variable
and see that it's not just this constant star that you see this activity that it's
doing over several hours and trying to figure out okay what's happening
i mean i think go ahead terry yeah when beetlejuice started dimming and i think that's the
first time when it hit the news that a lot of ordinary people that really don't pay attention to either
dimming of stars or changing uh that we can see naked eye in the sky
i think that really started people looking to see what what they could see and if they could notice i know a lot of
us would go outside and say can you tell a difference you know or is it going to come back we ask questions
because it was something so unusual and it was interesting that even a strong there were several um
astronomers that did not realize that beetlejuice was a variable stock
you know they see uh beetlejuice has the bright star in the shoulder of orion
and uh was surprised to hear that it was variable yeah yeah interesting microphone here's
anybody hear me i have a comment i'd like to make yeah can you hear me now okay
i can hear you great it looks like every now and then my microphone fades
out and what i have to do is i have to say something in greek and i was trying to compliment you barbara on this wonderful
genius talk one of the best i've ever heard and your my microphone wouldn't pick up
until i said alpha orionis and i picked up the alpha and now i can hear now
anyway barbara i wanted to thank you earlier for the nice things you said about
about my contributions to aavso i love the organization i cannot
i cannot say enough good things about it i think it's it's a wonderful organization but your
talk went way beyond that into other fields as well and i just wanted to say i just loved it
and thank you thank you thank you all right well barbara thank you so much
we will definitely be talking again and thank you that was that was amazing
that made me think a lot about things that i really never considered you know and all the programs that the
league and double a vso i mean it's amazing all of the information that's out there that if people want to learn
good resources the thing is people are doing this already without kind of realizing you
know that they're doing science and they they just need to be
focused and organized more but they're doing it without realizing that they're
doing it already yeah which is amazing so there is a question uh john paris chile
says can one do these observations without an observatory what equipment would work best for
variable star research out in the field actually binoculars like that example of
beetlejuice or alpha orionis uh most of the observations were visual
observations made actually even without binoculars you can you can estimate the brightness of
beetlejuice but there are a lot of bright stars that you could do naked eye with
without any equipment or just binoculars uh like the the first program i talked
about was the binocular variable star observing program and there's a long list of
variable stars that are are amenable to just a pair of binoculars and it's it's actually a great way to
learn the night sky and learn how to find things and um so if you're interested you could
you could go to the uh league website and look at the binocular
variable star observing program which will basically take you to aavso
to their their list of binocular observing stars and the charts that are available so
that you can pick out the variable and the comparison stars around it
so you don't need an observatory you don't even need a telescope uh you can start with binoculars okay
well maybe that's the way to start you know so you move on to binoculars and then you get out your
your telescope and eventually you have a third story observatory like barbara harris has so
and you learned a nice guy careful this could be a very expensive for you
but it doesn't have to be i mean it has to be that's true like since the pandemic a lot of
astronomers um like i i do a lot of mentoring for
uh not just ccd astronomy uh i mean variable star photometry but dslr
and um the the amount of people that have become interested in dslr photometry has
exploded during the pandemic uh mainly a lot from uh
people that do pretty picture after photography uh that they they want instead of just
doing pretty pictures they want to expand their horizon and start doing some science
uh so i've had a lot of mentoring requests uh for people that are interested in
dslr photometry and the majority of them are people that that
they have some knowledge of photography where they were doing astrophotography and they realized that
they can they can use their dslr for science yeah that's amazing yeah i think we've
seen astronomy explode across the board in the last year that's true yeah
some members of the houston astronomical society who actually you know where this thing was born from
uh told me that in 2019 that their
membership was like just under 400 members they're now up around a thousand members so it's getting you
know wow that's incredible i think it was like almost 900 actually i'm kind of rounding up but
they'll get to 1 000 but uh and the magazines also they're
seeing a resurgence and subscriptions um so where you know i'm sure the league is also seeing a
a surge in membership as well uh you know so we all did the whole community did and uh that
that's that's wonderful you know and it uh inspiring talks by all of you that
uh we're on tonight um uh you know are you know they're really stoking the
community that watches us and um uh you know and myself
as well i mean just personally i can say i get uh very charged up by this so
that's very cool definitely thank you and one thing i want to mention is that
if you go to the um the astronomical league observing program
webpage uh they they do talk about using this to to get into uh
science there is a citizen science link um from the astronomical league uh
observing program uh webpage
all right there's a little shout out here by one of the people watching the program it's uh the handles love
stargazing aw okay which is a cool handle says hey a special shout out to all the great
astronomical league members who put together and administer these programs uh we love you that's great that's great
thank you that's very nice yes all right scott barbara thank you
really appreciate that and scott are you and kent ready auras
is here he is here right yes uh-huh so there you are kent
i just flew in from oklahoma city yeah that's a boy's arm tired so
yes he's alarmed just one you know so but i'll turn it over to you guys
so a little bit earlier i gave just kind of an overview of the universe sampler uh talking about
some of the different sections that are in here uh just to give an overview but um we're
gonna dive in a little bit deeper with kent he has a little presentation so uh i just got through being
a the featured speaker at the oklahoma city astronomical astronomy club
which is an astronomical league member and you know if if your club is not an astronomical
league member you should get them to join and you can join individually as well
so what i'm going to do is earlier this afternoon on the first light chronicles i did uh lesson two from the astro
from the universe sampler and so i'm just going to dive into that
and give the same basic thing i did
there we go okay so get back up here to start with come on
it's not
sorry about that technical difficulties all right so listen stu lesson two how to find the north and the
sky and you know i'm gonna present the cover of this and amelia goldberg has done a tremendous job of of doing
this and creating a very solid very basic beginner thing and
it's this is good for anyone who hasn't got any experience it's also good for
folks like me with experience to just go back and read through to be a refresher on what we need to
learn oh and by the way i need to say hi terry hi carol hi david if you're still with
us um and hello barbara we haven't met before but now we're zoom friends
so um universe samplers observing program you can actually get a universe sampler
uh observing program by completing this and doing the things required um i very quickly
made a bitly link because the link to that um to the universe sampler which is 13
is long and involved but this this bitly link i'm going to start using on all of our programs
i'm also going to create a bitly link for the astro uh for the universe sampler observing
program which is administered uh by the same person that created this
so lesson two how to find the north and this how to find north of the sky
this is harder than people think it is or easier than people think it is depending on
where you stand the biggest myth is that polaris is the brightest star in the sky
uh and we've all heard it if we've been to star parties that oh it's the brightest star in the sky no
it's uh i was thinking it was the 50th i said that this afternoon without you know just just shooting from the hip
and it's actually the i said hundredth uh it's actually the 50th brightest star in the sky
so it's just sort of an innocuous middle-of-the-road thing uh why find polaris well
every map has a starting point and if you're starting from uh kansas city
you know to to drive somewhere you start from that starting point well the starting point for the night
sky is in the northern hemisphere is polaris in the southern hemisphere
our friends on the the that half of the world uh struggle harder to become polar
aligned because they do not have a guide star like we do and so there's a whole different process
of getting polar aligned there but in the southern hemisphere you can use the southern cross and have a good
idea where south is so this is northern hemisphere centric
not southern hemisphere centric and uh terry maybe and carol maybe you all need
to find somebody in the southern hemisphere to create a southern hemisphere universe
sampler for for all of our many friends uh on the other half of
the world that's not a bad idea i think it's a very good idea that's why
i said it uh you just got to find the person down there to a write it
and b administer it um so you know polaris is within one degree of
the pole so while polaris isn't exactly on the pole it makes a little tiny circle every 24 hours around the pole
so once you can find it once you know where north is back in the old boy scout eagle scout
days you know one of the first things you learn is how to find north because then you can navigate from that at night
the big dipper becomes the guide star and this is a very well
known i think our europeans friends call it the plow if i remember correctly i've also seen
it called the wagon maybe uh but these two guide stars right here so the handle and
here's the bowl the big dipper these two guide stars literally point almost dead at polaris
which makes it really easy if you can see polaris or see the big dipper
you know if you're the farther south you get the harder it is to see the big dipper because it gets behind the trees
and so if it's a time of the year where the big difference isn't visible cassiopeia which looks like an m or a w
if it's right side up or upside down or a zigzag if it's like it here in this
map but it's very easy to find doesn't point right at it but these two guide stars
point over here really close to it and it's the first bright star you come to
there's not much else up there in like a double hand sized area up in the sky
and we use our hands a lot to measure things in the sky and that's one of the things that we
talk about in universe sampler is way to use your hand to measure
the sky and say oh assistant look at the that bright scot bright thing to the left you can tell it's three fingers to
the left or to the west of that star once you found polaris you've lined
everything up you're now facing north okay so at that point um you know it talks about
the names of the stars and stuff but at that point you now know where north is so you're facing north
south is behind us east is to our right west is to our left we all
theoretically go grow up knowing that although i've had friends that don't know that and they still can't
master that concept so star charts become a map of the sky
just like if you want to drive uh if carol uh wants to drive from kansas city to
miami florida he's gonna have a map to get there or he could just start driving knowing it's
maybe over there and he may end up in phoenix or he may end up in in in in miami but star charts
specifically planospheres are the way to go now weird thing about planospheres is
they're upside down and if you look at this star chart west is on the right
and east is on the on the left which seems really weird and really
backwards and the first time people look at planospheres they look at it and it's like i asked
him when i talked to give a class about this i asked and said do you see anything weird about this map and
generally if you've got 30 or 40 people there's going to be one person go yeah west is on the wrong side and so
the reason is the map you're looking down at the ground right down here but this map of the sky
is designed to be held over your head and so if you just take this as it's
shown here and turn hold it over your head south is going to be in front of you so you need to turn around and face the
south and when you do that now east is in your left hand but it's on the
correct side and west is in your right hand but it's on the correct side so
if you're going to do it in the north you just rotate this whole map right here and i meant to flip it and didn't do it
flip it now north is in the bottom when you hold it over your hand so i'm looking at polaris because i
found polaris up there and i hold this now look up and that's north
south is there west is over here and east is over here just like you do
when you look on the ground so as we can see this map
contains all sorts of information about the sky orion which is in the evening now uh
you've got uh auriga uh three of my favorite embl objects m36 37 and 38 are there
uh you've got uh you know ursa major ursa minor
andromeda setting in the west it's northwest it's about to go by and not be able to be seen for
a number of months until morning again um or until it comes back up leo at the
sugar creek astronomical society bill murphy uh did the constellation of the month which is one of our regular features and
he talked about the m objects and the nearby virgo objects that are located
very close to leo as interesting objects lots of information here but as you can see and i've highlighted
here here's the big dipper and as we said if we follow the guide stars it veers on this map
just a little bit and i've never gone out and measured you know exactly if it's dead on straight or off by two degrees
i'm not that technical uh somebody could look at a star chart and probably figure out how far off it is
i've got one over here actually could do it on but it's the first thing you come to that's
got any kind of brightness to it and likewise remember we talked about cassiopeia over here looking like a
zigzag on this side those two stars miss it by a little bit
but the first bright star you go past basically in this configuration stop and
turn right to get to polaris right you get close to it you pull into the parking lot
so and this is a downloadable map anybody can download it for free
you know and uh it has tons of information about what's going on the back of it also contains a vast
amount of information that's useful as well so anyway that's a really quick overview
again the universe sampler is a really great way to get into an observing program for beginners
they don't have to know anything all they have to do is go through the book 13 pretty darn cheap for a book that's
going to open the entire night sky to you and you can learn the constellations
you can learn the locations of the m objects and you know i'll i'll ask when i'm talking about
planet series i'll ask who in here knows what a dm object is and most people don't raise their hand
typically there's one or two people and i ask them and you know for those of you who don't know an m object is named
after charles messier or if you grew up like i did not knowing it's french
um i speak arkansas although there's lots of people that speak texas
or you know new mexico or idaho uh it's messier objects and i finally
really it's because it's spelled m-e-s-s-i-e-r you know as a kid i you know dad he's an oklahoma boy
kansas boy it was messier you know i finally realized it's french and
very quickly started saying messier and i'm proud of my roots thank you for my dad for taking me out
to look at comets bennett and west and take pictures of and watch ah
just lay on our backs who all remembers the green wicker patio furniture but we had that
and dad would drag it out in the backyard we'd lay down with blankets and watch meteor showers all night oh that's cool you know and so uh um
you know thank you to him for getting me started on this what became a job pinch me i work in
astronomy um who knew so um
uh that's what i've got so i said pinch me i work in astronomy who knew
you know so oh thank you kent and the point of it is
uh we're going to do this every week until we get through the through it and i'm really going to try and
encourage people to hey buy the book because that's the way to you have the book to keep and b
do the observing club you know work your pin get your first pin you know and then your next pin could
easily be a binocular messiers you know although you know big cities
doing the binocular messiers is going to be a challenge uh you know because of light pollution
and every time i talk and scott knows this i talk about light pollution yes he does
because we have got to affect change for our great great
grandkids it's taking us hundred years to get here light pollution is completely fixable
with very very little effort just time but it has to start because there's
health benefits ecological benefits economic benefits um eighty percent of the people can't
see the milky way that's horrifying to me you know how much electricity are we wasting by shining
half the light of a light bulb up in the sky for no reason so how much wildlife are
we chasing away and well who who likes who likes fireflies i'll be at a star party and i'll ask
this question who likes star and i love it when there's a guy there who has an nra cap on or he's wearing
coveralls and you know you know he looks like he's a really conservative guy and i'll say sir do you like fireflies
and he'll say yes i say do you like birds he says oh yeah we're out here at hobbs bird watching
this okay so so what would i you say if i told you that led lights
just disrupt the mating cycle of fireflies
and he's real quiet i said do you think that's a problem he says well yeah that's that's a problem it's
okay and what about birds that migrate and don't migrate correctly at the right
time because of light or they fly into buildings or you know he's like well well yeah okay
so what you're saying is you don't like light pollution do you
and he'll say well no that that's that could be a problem i'd say so light pollution not is is not a green
freaky tree hugger problem you know which you say light pollution a lot of people
without any basis that's what they immediately think is a hippie freaky nature lover tree
hugger thing and that's not what it is um and so i try and find ways to to talk about it
before talking about you know 80 percent of the people can't see the milky way
you know so and scott talks about the health benefits yeah i'm more the tree hugger side of
the equation but but it is it's good for you it is good for you
and uh uh almost every astronomer actually non-astronomy just
people i take them out uh observing and uh you know they
are out under the stars you see the milky way you see it you see a meteor streak across the sky
you start to connect and uh i guarantee if we had a a doctor out there that could measure
people's blood pressure they would see it go down okay they would
become more in tune more you know they get become more mindful it's it's uh it's
very similar you know i also dive i like to scuba dive and uh that that feeling that you get
when you're down under the water and you know that you know you shouldn't touch anything or
let anything touch you because it's either going to sting or you're going to kill it okay plus you're breathing you know
a limited amount of air you become hyper aware and this also happens in uh in astronomy
you know and usually when you've been up past normally past your your bedtime okay
uh your mind just kind of opens up a little bit more and opens up a little bit more and something starts to blossom
and if you have a person like barbara or terry or carol or kent there with you and and
and coaxing you along and talking about the distance scale of the universe
and uh you know the size relationships of stuff one of your first indications that you
are um you know being drawn in is a feeling of humbleness because you
start to feel very very very tiny you know in the grand scale of things
and you know i talk about i've talked about this a lot recently but all your problems
shrink with it okay so um and a great reminder of how
small we are but how vast our minds are is to read uh the pale blue dot by carl sagan it's
a great great section there so i think all amateur astronomers get it
um and so it's uh and that is healthy for you it really is
it's kind of you know i like to do this you see me do this at star parties out when when andromeda is up and you can see it naked
eye i'll have somebody sit there and i'll say okay that's andromeda it's a galaxy you know it's the farthest
away thing you see with your naked eye right it's 2.5 million light years away
so let's stop and think about that for just a second those photons going into your eyes right
now have traveled unchanged with their tiny electrical
charge for 2.5 million years and you now have 2.5
million year old energy in your body yes that that that has traveled its
entire destiny this whole time was for you to stand here and look up
and have those photons go into your eye they're only for you yeah and they're yours they're no one else's
and most times people sit there and are very very quiet for a while because
it's very humbling to realize that that's the truth and then i get into blowing their minds and go
and you realize from the photon standpoint it existed and then it didn't
there's no time passed for that photon it was there and then it wasn't thanks to einstein's theory of general
revit relativity it existed then it didn't but for you it's 2.5
million years old and now it's in your body for the rest of your life and it's very humbling to a
lot of people to to when they realize that and take it all in kids especially get are really taken by
that yes that is something to be taken by when you really stop and think about
what what you're viewing there so yeah all right my gosh this has been a
great night we have had some amazing speakers and amazing talks uh i'm going to go
back right now and finish up the questions so we don't forget that
so i have got the i'm going to share my screen and what i have got the winners
so this will be the answers for tonight's questions that were asked earlier
the first one was what is the name of this object and the type of object it is the owl nebula messier 97
it's a planetary nebula and ursa major and beat your signs answered that
question correctly so congratulations beatrice
the next one was what is the name of this nebula this is the cat's eye uh nebula ngc 65 43 and draco
the winner is john pinto congratulations john and i'm going to be honest on this
last question of all the answers nobody answered it correctly so i threw all the names in a
over here and i drew out a name and this is hard um you know i could
understand how it would be very confusing this is a starfish cluster messier 38
and eryjah several char star chains are visible in the cluster so chris larson i drew your name
so you are going to be a winner of an astronaut all three of you will be a
winner of an astronomical league baseball cap right
all right yeah so what i would like to say is thank you and astronomical league
live event number five we'll be back april 23rd
so i'm not going to sign off right here but i am going to say thank you and stay safe to everybody and i want to
go back to everybody that's still here to see if anyone has anything that they would like to say
before we wrap up and i i appreciate so much everybody being here all the great talks
connie walker too she is offline but connie did a fantastic job we'll probably have her back as a
keynote sometime here in the near future and uh scott thank you so
much for your broadcasting kent you have done an amazing job you've been a pleasure to work with you've worked
with us all through here too barbara harris my goodness you were great that's awesome
thank you homework tonight i'm gonna go back and look at watch barbara's i caught the tail end of
barbara's uh talk i want to go hack go pack go back in and watch it nose to tail and uh that
was just the part i saw was fascinating it will open your eyes
so anybody if anybody else has anything please go ahead speak up before we end
yeah i think that uh i think overall the uh your audience was very uh inspired
and enthusiastic and we we want to thank all of them for watching and for sharing this program i want to
thank you know everybody for allowing explore scientific you know the league
for uh allowing explore scientific to broadcast this event and the other events that we've been
involved with and i also want to thank you for uh the support you've given to global star party as well which has been
amazing so been our pleasure it's awesome definitely and remember um alcon will be going
virtual this year in august and we will come out with the dates very soon
and a few more details as we move along and we'd love to have you join us for
that and scott and explore scientific and explore alliance we'll be broadcasting that for us
and so we're very grateful for that too we're very happy to do so thank you wonderful all right well if there's
nothing else i guess that'll wrap it up for tonight thank you
everyone for joining us please join us again any comments let us know thank you
take care bye everybody let's see everybody bye-bye bye-bye
[Music] terry i want to thank you for inviting me
hey barbara you are welcome anytime you want to be here i really enjoyed your talk it was
amazing yeah that that was great yeah these are great ways to connect
people it's truly enjoyable it is it's a great way to spend a friday
night just hanging out with friends talking about the stars it's raining outside at least we can
talk about yeah really
i i hope my passion came through it most definitely my my addiction
a good good night everyone