Astronomical League Live V

Transcript for Part A:

better shut the door so that the noise doesn't get out in the other room or people people are trying to
watch tv
we were just talking about you howard oh i'm so sorry
[Laughter] how you guys been doing we're all ready
for our astronomical week tonight we sure are yeah it should be a lot of
fun yes it will
we are good
[Applause] um
it's a real neat uh contrail this morning the uh spacex launched cool
barb harris got some great pictures she posted on instagram it's a beautiful launch we didn't get out until afterwards and and uh
see this is uh oops got it let's see you gotta do it this way this
is uh the picture of the contrail that we saw it's just another corkscrew into such a
strange shape but it was incredibly beautiful
i saw barb's pictures on facebook too well no she texted to me actually from
her front yard that's just amazing yeah it really is yes
part of the excitement yeah
yeah we were lucky to get to see that because we've had a lot of rainy weather and then we got about three good days and now it's clouded up again tonight so
i don't know what tomorrow holds yeah i had three inches of snow last week
oh my goodness yeah we broke the record we had snow flurries yesterday today's the first day we haven't had
snow or flurries in the last couple days it's been yeah it's been winter again here well
i'll pick the four inches of rain we had over the last week yeah over the snow
we haven't had four inches of rain this year yet it's just weird to see snow under
blooming dogwoods it is something just not right about that
everybody's got sheets over everything around here all their trees all the bushes
oh my yeah
then it's supposed to be 80 one day next week we're all gonna be sick oh boy you know i lived in nebraska and
when i the last uh winter i was in nebraska february 28 got up to 80 degrees oh my
gosh and march 1 the high for the day was yeah 28. like arkansas wow
yeah we gotta we can do something
wendy say hi to everybody hi everybody hi hi now i can hear you all so be careful
what you say we were going to say some stuff but now
there was a great dilbert cartoon this morning about uh he says i hate these
these zoom meetings they have to deal with all these morons and so uh your mic is on [Laughter]
always assume it's hot in whether you're broadcasting or not
scott you don't you don't know the story but i was in jonesboro uh two years ago and visiting a friend
and some friends and it was to say it was hot would be putting it mildly
i'm just just walking across the yard i saw some gentleman walking down the
sidewalk with a dog and i just casually said wow it's pretty hot huh and he said you're not from around here are you yes
that's right [Music]
as we say in david levy's area it's dry heat but it's
of the front of the gates to my eternal reward saying but at least it's a dry heat
uh carol yes yeah uh meet connell richards this is carol orange who's the president
of the league hi colin hi how are you very nice to meet you
looks like you got a very pertinent topic you're talking about tonight uh that's true um i'm one of only a
couple people i know who's been focusing on teen astronomy i'm looking forward to talking about it and sharing some of my work excellent
looking forward to it
the northern cross northern science foundation north across science foundation in the northern central
region of the astronomical league are here [Music]
the hubble's face oh that's pretty for its 31st birthday has captured a glimpse of an
incredible star one of the brightest stars in our galaxy this giant luminous blue variable star
known as a.g karen a is huge 70 times more massive than our sun
and shining with the brilliance of a million suns the star is surrounded by a glowing halo
of gas and dust this vast structure was created from giant eruptions from the star about ten
thousand years ago creating an expanding shell that is now nearly five light years across
similar to the distance from our sun to its nearest neighbor star the outbursts expelled the star's outer
layers blowing out material nearly ten times the mass of our sun
the nebula around the star from these ancient eruptions is being impacted by a powerful wind of
charged particles flowing out from the star at a million kilometers per hour
ten times faster than the nebula itself is expanding as this outflowing gas slams into the
slower moving outer nebula it creates a snowplow effect clearing a
cavity around the star and sculpting structures in the nebula
searing radiation from the star is lighting up the nebula as seen by hubble in both visible light
and in the ultraviolet light that can only be seen from space red colors indicate glowing hydrogen gas
laced with nitrogen gas at the upper left in the image the diffuse red glow
shows a region where the stellar wind has broken through a tenuous region of material
and swept it into space blue features shaped like tadpoles and bubbles are
dust clumps shaped by the stellar wind and illuminated by the stars reflected light
this incredible image from the hubble space telescope shows how even one star can be
incredibly beautiful and powerful as it impacts its surrounding environment
since hubble orbits above the earth's atmosphere it can give us a clear detailed view of this kind of
awe-inspiring beauty and activity in the universe for the past 31 years the hubble space
telescope has changed the way we think of space and our place in the cosmos hubble has
revealed an incredible diversity of stars and gives us pristine views into
beautiful interstellar nebulas where new stars and their surrounding discs of dust and planets
continue to form looking even deeper into space hubble makes it possible for
us to see across billions of light years revealing ancient adolescent galaxies that we can compare
with our own milky way hubble is even refining our understanding of the age of the universe
and its rate of expansion it sees the telltale effects of mysterious black holes
dark matter and dark energy over time in the past year alone hubble revealed a
large concentration of small black holes nestled within the heart of a globular cluster of stars
it rewound the clock to calculate the age and sight of a supernova blast
it also detected a possible new second atmosphere formed on a distant exoplanet
and closer to home hubble spotted a comet lurking near jupiter and its trojan
asteroids these are just a handful of hubble's recent discoveries
hubble remains an excellent technical health and is expected to continue its exploration of the universe for years to
come from 1993 to 2009 there were five astronaut servicing missions for repairs
and upgrades of the telescope these along with an ongoing crew of
attentive experts on the ground are keeping the telescope today at the peak of its scientific capabilities
you can find out more about the hubble space telescope at the website nasa.gov hubble and on social media
at nasa hubble
well hello everybody this is scott roberts here from explore scientific and it's my pleasure
and my honor to introduce all of these great people here from the astronomical league
coordinating the astronomical league 5 is terry mann terry
arranges these speakers and makes sure that everybody's on course to give the great
information that you can only give from the astronomical league so i'm going to turn this over to terry
right away and terry thanks for for making this happen well thank you scott it is such a
pleasure to be here is so nice because you know we finally
see all these people that a lot of times we didn't used to see until we were at a conference
you know we always said so many people we see all the time are extended family uh you know this is the first few times
that i've seen david levy and wendy it's been forever and you know
if there's one good thing i can think of here that's came out of the pandemic a little bit is we see even though we don't see them
face to face we are able to see them personally i haven't seen howard uh oh my gosh it's
been quite a while at the winter star party yeah it's so it kind of brings everybody
together so it is so good for to see everybody and thank you all
for being here as speakers and thank you all for tuning in we really do appreciate it
so what i would like to do as i just mentioned david uh david would you please kick us off
and thank you for being here it's very nice to see you again well thanks terry it's really a pleasure
to be here my first personal experience with the astronomical league was the
annual conference in 1984 and the night before that conference
began some of you already know this that david eicher and i witnessed the
the blowing up of the freeway in milwaukee that is a story someday you might want
to ask david to tell it but if i were um
i'd like to introduce you to someone who is no longer living right now but he was
a pretty advanced amateur astronomer back in the 19th century he had his own
telescope with which he observed i think he observed donati's comet with it
and i know he looked with his friends when he was out in shopping at the great comet of 1861 and that's
written up in his memoirs but he even though he was an amateur
astronomer and he loved looking for telescopes his real goal was to be a poet
and uh when he first came out with poems chiefly lyrical in the 1830s
they were reviewed by people who think they know about poetry and they were just they just knocked it
to pieces and it got him so depressed that he thought he was going to withdraw from
being a poet a year later his best friend arthur hallam passed away of a stroke
being very very young in his 20s and uh and very
uncertain about about what he is um what he wants to do just like his friend
who was named alfred anyway but that really changed alfred and he decided to write
some more serious poems and uh in the 1840s he came out with
absolutely magnificent poetry but 1850 was a publication of in
memoriam an elegy video to his friend arthur hallam and there's a couple of passages for it
i'd like to quote to you a time to sicken and to swoon when science reaches forth her
arms to feel from worlds to world and charms her secret from the latest
moon and he's talking here probably about the discovery of neptune
in 1846 but as and his last name i'm sure you all know
by now is tennyson i wish i had known this man
because i think we would have had a lot in common i do have a lot in common with his great-great-grandson
who i do know and who is a professor of astronomy of all things at university college london
and uh i asked him about his great great grandfather and he
said oh no i try to be completely separate don't even like to talk about it and that's it when i walked into his office
the first thing i saw was a framed portion of a little bit of in memoriam and i
pointed to it and i pointed him and i said so you really don't like to pay any attention to his poetry do you
and he said well just kidding a little bit we had a wonderful wonderful conversation
i'm now going to end with the close of that poem in memoriam that tennyson wrote where he talks in
the poem about the rise of modern cosmology
and he talks about whether the something that really was
way ahead of his time he's talking about whether the universe will expand forever as we now believe it
will or whether it will stop and then start contracting and then in a big crunch in his time
that goal was not understood but later understanding of hubble's constant opened the great question
of whether it will really end in a big crunch in which the universe is condensed into
a single point as it existed about 13.7 billion years ago
and that point or whether we'll expand forever is the ending of the memorial and at the
end he goes back again to the loss of his best friend and he writes
that friend of mine who lives in god that god whichever lives and loves one
god one law one element and one far-off divine event
to which the whole creation moves thank you terry and back to you
thank you david that was beautiful we sure do appreciate it
next up i would like to introduce carol orch which many people already know carol he is the president
of the league and he is going to give an update on what's going on what might be coming up so
carol you take it thank you terry and it's always good to hear from david levy
with his words of wisdom and he went down memory lane a little bit there to begin with
and that reminds us and you many of you probably already heard this but the league is celebrating its 75th
anniversary this year there's lots of activities going on and it's amazing when we start digging in
the archives what we will find some uh things we had no idea were back there
uh 50 years ago and thanks to chuck allen for doing a ton of work on the history
part of it as well as being on that committee for example we found out that back in
those days the youth movement was alive and well in the astronomical league
and i know each group in many different fields right now many different hobbies are catering
to the youth uh group to try to get more members or people answering the hobby
so it's a repeatal in a way but it's a really refreshing to go back in our archives and find out
that in those days the youth were interested and i think we're also and i think scott can attest to
this we're seeing a resurgence this year the pandemic situation
of interest in astronomy telescope sales and across the board another thing that's happened is that
among many of our clubs and societies we've noticed that they're becoming extremely creative
you know what we're doing right here now is uh something we wouldn't have thought about doing a year and a half or two years ago but
uh scott being the technological guru he is he he embraced it and boy he's he's
every place scott is and thank you so much scott for the great efforts we really appreciate it my pleasure
i know of an instant just recently where uh one observatory from a local club is uh involved in uh
non-eyepiece type viewing outreach for the public and that might seem like a an obvious
thing but until the club was pushed to do that they had not even thought about doing
that they were concerned about having the bodies inside a small little room and uh observatory which would hold
maybe 10 people at a time and that was the extent of if you had a major event on the weekend
whatever time the observatory was opened then it was extremely hard for everyone to get a
a view of the eyepiece and so they're becoming very creative they're coming up with alternatives
and having more of a mass situation for people to look at the images in a different location it's not
quite the same as looking through the eyepiece however if the odds are that
many people might not have time with the crowds uh getting to see the objects through the
eyepiece then that's not a bad option to at least get to see the image so i think we'll see a lot of
enhancements continuing from that situation or the club members and society members of the
astronomical league the regions and so on tuning in tonight i would like to remind
you many of you already know but we are postponing alcon 2021
again this year we'll have the in in person one in albuquerque next july in albuquerque however
we have an extremely uh promising event planned and thanks to terry mann and
chuck ellen for agreeing to co-share that event al con 2021 virtual it's going to be a
very different uh situation but like these type of zoom calls we're on it's
going to allow us to reach a far potentially bigger audience than we would ever think of
reaching otherwise and one of the things we've come up with is
encouraging clubs across the region of not regions well regions but across the
country to uh get involved more sometimes the
league we need to look at different ways of keeping in contact with our local
organizations clubs and uh other organizations so what we've come up with this year
is uh asking for uh uh door prizes from our individual clubs
so that they can uh individual clubs can showcase what's going on in their societies and it's really a good
opportunity to bring do an even better job of bringing our clubs together in one of our league
activities so we're looking really looking forward to that in fact just today i received three or four
inquiries uh from our local clubs uh or i mean their national clubs uh
wanting to know what they could do to help and thinking it's a tremendous idea so we're really looking forward to that
and i might make the point that uh chuck and terry are both co-chairs of that event they've had lots
of experience around conventions and it promises to be an extremely good
and let's see that's about all i've got for right now
uh so i think i'll turn it back to terry thank you very much
thank you carol appreciate that yeah there's a lot going on it's it's amazing how quickly and how
busy this year has been and how quickly it's going by everything seems to be coming up on us
pretty quickly so hopefully we'll all be able to travel and get out again by the end of the year
and next year hopefully we'll see everybody in albuquerque uh do you know for sure that our dates
will be in july yes they will be in july that is already locked in for i forget the exact dates and of course our
dates for outcome 2021 virtual are august 19th through the 21st
which is a thursday through saturday and chuck and terry uh very efficiently set
up the schedule uh a early evening schedule a lunch break and then another session
later on in the evening so it's going should work extremely well yeah yeah it should work well we should we've
got a lot of people that we're talking to about being a speaker a lot of variety it's really interesting how
much people want to be involved in something like this i think it gives them a chance again to
just kind of reach out to the public meet more people even though it is on zoom it just keeps us all involved a little
bit more so thank you again carol i sure do appreciate it thank you terry
yep and now i am going to ask the questions uh we have changed the way we do
questions on the global star party but on the league's live event we are
still going to do them like we used to do it uh i will ask three questions whoops and
we will answer those and award the prizes on the same show instead of waiting so i am going to
share my screen and get going here
um it takes my computer a minute
there we go and as you can see you will be hearing a lot about alcom virtual coming up um we look
forward to having all of you there scott is broadcasting it so we will be right
here where you're watching so here are the questions for tonight oh
i guess better wait and do that these are the door prizes for tonight three of the winners will each win one
tote bag and so that all three will win the same thing please send your answers to secretary
at astroleague.org and please send them as soon as possible
because i will announce the winners after the keynote tonight so uh try to
get those answers in before 8 o'clock if you can
and carol orange will be the one to send you a letter to get all the information too from you
to where to ship it to all right here is the first question
what kind of eclipse is happening on may 26 this year
and again send it to secretary astroleague.org
question two what color is the hottest star
and question three what meteor shower peaks on may and this is behind i have
to move my pictures on may 5th
all right so we're i'm going to stop there and please like i said send your answers
in as soon as possible because i will start um i i'm going to use the random
number generator to do this and i will list all the names so please send them in by eight o'clock
and i will be working on that in the background so great
okay um next up what i would like to do is introduce chuck allen and chuck
is the vice president of the league um and as you heard chuck and i are co-chairing
alcon virtual but i would like to have chuck introduce our next speaker so chuck if
you would please be happy to thank you terry and everyone um
between the ages of 11 and 18 i had the privilege of being a member of a group called the louisville junior
astronomical society this is a society that produced at least four professional astronomers
and several physics lab directors and a number of other professors in different topics it was a precocious group and it
had a lady by the name of virginia laparte who sponsored it she often provided transportation for
kids to give to public events and observations she encouraged people
to lead to teach to speak to present papers and to do research in
fact it was mrs lepard who first put me onto duke university when i was 13 years old and
it stuck and i ended up going there uh to have people like that involved in
your life along with your parents who are also incredibly supportive is very critical
and the opportunities provided by junior societies is extraordinary well what happened to them in the 1950s
and 60s we had as many as 13 junior societies represented
at league conventions one that comes to mind looking at the historical records in denver in 1959 when 13 different
societies were there this was the era of the international geophysical year
the space age the atomic age was new the bell science series was causing
families to gather around tvs to listen to programs about blood and about the sun and about cosmic rays and then
came the 1970s in light pollution in vietnam and more
important social causes at the time and as a result of that the junior societies all disappeared partly because
of light pollution i think that made backyard astronomy in the vicinity of cities very difficult
and transportation to distant dark sky sites was just not an option for a lot of kids and a lot of parents
tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you a young man an extraordinary young man named connell richards
who lives in clark summit pennsylvania he is a an honor student and a senior at
abington heights high school he is not only a member of the national
honor society but it was also invited to join the slavic national honor society because of his academic achievements in
russian and studying russian in high school he is also president of the russian club
in the high school he's on the swim team a backstroker and a freestyler he is vice president of the team
leadership committee at his local library and very very active in astronomy in the
high school and in the community he's already written a major article for the reflector which will appear in an
upcoming issue he's an astrophotographer he spent most of the last mars opposition and
apparition studying mars through a six-inch reflector conducted public outreach for the
jupiter saturn conjunction last christmas he's already achieved three of the astronomical leaks observing awards
and he's a member of astronomy ireland a group an outreach group in ireland which he's
participating in actively but more importantly perhaps he's the president and founder of the
abington heights high school astronomical society and that is only
the second junior society that i know of in the entire astronomical league now and hopefully the beginning of a new
trend to get juniors back into astronomy so it's my pleasure right now to introduce connell richards
thank you very much chuck i appreciate the invitation to be here so of course as you mentioned um
we're facing a situation in amateur astronomy right now where we're looking to get youth involvement
back to where it used to be and we're looking to bring new people into the hobby and keep ourselves sustained in passing
this valuable knowledge of science and astronomy along so of course as you and carol were talking about earlier
uh the junior societies they used to be all around the country and the 70s and a lot of the consequences that followed from that
sort of brought them down and we're seeing right now a resurgence an interest in amateur astronomy
and science and engineering and space flight and a lot of these things and because of this i founded the having
tonight's high school astronomy club not only to share my own interest in astronomy and my own observing efforts
but also to engage other people and get them to join the hobby and do these things themselves
so i'll start by screen sharing here if i can i apologize if this takes a little bit
i'm working with some new equipment here so please let me know if you can see this so i'm going to share the screen
um go to my presentation here you see it all right very good very good
i'll put this up there you go so i'll start off i'm titling this
reaching out to the future um it shares the same title as the reflector article that chuck referenced
and there's a lot i wanted to pack in there because not only are we just reaching out we're not just um
bringing out a telescope and showing people what's in the sky it goes a lot beyond what we're doing in the present day so when you're telling
someone to look through a telescope and you're describing what they see or when you're creating a video online or doing a talk like we are tonight
uh you're not just showing people something that's up right now you're engaging them and you're
developing a passion in them to go and study these things on their own so you have
sustainability built into the outreach that we're doing and that's something really critical we need to understand to continue the hobby
forward so i'll give you a little bit of background around myself chuck talked a little bit about some of my awards
so i've been observing for five years now um i was i received my first telescope when i was
13. i turned 13 and my parents gave me a six-inch reflector that i still use to this day
i see there's the names over here but you can see that over on the right that was me observing the solar eclipse of 2017 down in clayton georgia
um i remember looking through that telescope for the first time i remember setting it out and i didn't
really have to too much guidance with it i remember i'd been reading about astronomy for a long time as a kid i had these books i
remember vividly going through this one diagram of the space shuttle it showed where they put the payloads into cargo bay and space
lab and the different decks of the crew compartment and i was just fascinated by
the tools we were using to explore space and some of the objects up there i also remember reading about all the planets
as a young kid and that kind of sustained me into my teenage years i thought about it a lot i thought about a lot
and then i asked my parents the one day i said i'd love to have a telescope just to explore this for myself
and that's where i really got into astronomy and the hobby as we would know it
so i remember the first night i took that out and you know i was kind of fumbling with it trying to figure out what i was doing
um i made a mistake that you know it's a little embarrassing a little funny i remember i had the lens cap on
on the telescope as i was trying to look at the moon and only took off the collimation cap that goes on the end so
it was this little 20 millimeter diameter piece that i'm using to try to figure out with my telescope so eventually i learned to
collimate i learned to star hop and find different targets and i remember that satisfying moment when i
finally set my eyepiece for the moon on the moon for the first time and it was only you know 30 times
magnification i'm trying to focus i'm trying to learn and and just engage myself with this new
piece of equipment and it was a beautiful view i could see copernicus and tycho i remember it was a
waxing gibbous moon uh the different ray systems the different seas and that really hooked me into it uh i
knew at that point that when i looked through the telescope for the first time there was nothing else i'd rather be doing um that remains to this day i'm
still going out every chance i can with that telescope or my binoculars or even just stepping outside and
taking in the view to see what i can see so right now some of my favorite targets are star clusters and spiral galaxies
uh since i started engaging in some of the league programs i found the universe sampler and some of the deep sky
programs like the binocular messier they've been a lot of fun to go through and see some of the different different targets and explore a couple different
things um of course it's very hard to pick a favorite you know as an astronomer because i remember i started off with
the planets and seeing jupiter in the moon and then i got to galaxies i went to planets i i just did
everything and anything i could like the eclipse right there there was no stopping me with you know
setting whatever setting my sights on whatever i wanted to with that telescope
and a lot of what engaged me in this hobby at first leading up to getting that telescope uh
was reading and books and tv programs and that kind of a thing because i could go into a book and like i said i
looked at the space shuttle i looked at the the different planets and that kind of took me to these different
worlds and showed me what they were like and then i learned that i wanted to do that myself and see if i could go there
in a sense with my telescope and of course i'm very excited to share this hobby with others and that led me
to starting my astronomy club in high school let's see can i fast forward this pardon
me just for a second like i said i'm using some new equipment so in my junior year of high school
around the start i remember i was talking with some friends about some of the observing work i was doing and
at that time one of the big things i was doing was going through the virgo galaxy cluster and i've never seen that many galaxies
in one spot before i was trying to work my way through the messier catalog trying to learn the ropes of deep sky
observing and that was a project that really hooked me so i remember i was telling my friends oh i saw m87 and m86
and m84 and all these different uh elliptical galaxies and i was talking about
galaxies like m104 maybe where you can see these dark lanes and the spiral arms
and you know they could see my passion for the subject and that got them interested too i remember some of them saying yeah i
remember i'd go out sometimes if i was out in the country and use some binoculars and check out the whole milky way and everything like
that so i knew i had a base and a couple of friends who were interested in this and at the beginning of my junior year i
thought i'm going to start an astronomy club i have to share this with everybody and kind of get it out there so down at
the bottom you can see a picture this was from our april meeting just earlier this week we were actually looking at
um one of the league's handouts that was posted to the facebook page of the different objects in the night sky
and one of the things i've been mainly focusing on with my astronomy outreach is getting people
just to look up i want to teach that they don't need the most expensive telescope or the nicest equipment
or the best experience or the best mentor or whatever they just need to go out and explore it for themselves
so i was talking about how you can find the planets along the ecliptic there some of the spring constellations coming up and the objects you can find there
uh one of the things they found particularly interesting is that i was talking about what we would call as astronomers
galaxy season when we're out observing so of course how the milky way the plane of the milky way is very low along the horizon
and we're looking straight up out of it and seeing different galaxies without having to look through all of the debris and dust and
star clusters and everything like that along the band of the milky way and that was uh one of our big steps in
going from just naked eye observing and planet watching and those kinds of things to really deep sky observing and
learning how to interact with our sky a little bit more so we're committed to astronomy outreach mostly for teens and young people
i've done a lot of work through this club and through the library in teaching people to look up i've talked
about how to observe meteor showers how to observe comets in the night sky we had neo-wise over the summer that was a
big deal of course so i shared some of my photography there with people and that proved really powerful in kind of
getting people to hook into the hobby and understanding that this was something they could do for themselves
and it wasn't just something on a television program it wasn't just something that the hubble space telescope could see
it was something that they could see for themselves and recently um i've decided that i wanted the club
to join the astronomical league earlier this year i was checking out how i could forward my observing a little
bit and seeing you know what other programs were out there where i could gain more observing skill and i came
across the astronomical league i joined in january and it seemed logical that the first program i would complete would be the
lunar program that was one of the simplest ones i had some observations behind me for that one and chuck allen was the advisor for that
i remember getting in touch with him through there and he said look if there's anything you're interested in doing anything with
the league i'd be more than happy to help you and that was that was quite a great introduction i felt very honored to have
that because he understood like he mentioned earlier that youth societies and getting young people
involved in this hobby are very critical for its continuation so we got talking and went back and forth a little bit i i
told him a little bit about my club and some of the observing work i was doing and he said well there aren't many
junior league societies these days they all kind of died out in the 70s the space race was gone the vietnam war took
people away from their their hobbies and their interests like this and we had to
capitalize on the new resurgence in astronomy and science interest so he's been helping me throughout the
process of getting our club in the astronomical league hopefully in the next couple of weeks we'll be the the
league's newest member as a junior society one of only two right now
so as we finalize that we're really excited to share some of our programs with the rest of the league
and teach others on how they can engage with teens so um like i mentioned planet watching
star gazing really basic things and the foundational skills that i've been looking to build have
greatly benefited through the astronomical leagues observing programs that they've provided the about 70 plus of them that i've been
going through and that i've been teaching my other club members to go through i've talked about the messier programs with
binoculars i've talked about the lunar programs and one of the great things about those is that they build on all levels of
skill so you can start off with something like the universe sampler or the lunar program and work your way up to cellular evolution or globular clusters planetary
nebulae all these different kinds of things so one of the big things that are involved
with doing outreach to teenagers is social media and uh kind of we have to adapt to a
scrolling culture we have a very fast-paced environment that we're trying to do our outreach in
and it's essential to understand this to reach teens and reach young people and keep things going so as i was
starting up my club um i found great attendance i i was really happy to see members coming
in fact when i was looking to start the club at the beginning of my junior year this was an interesting story
i went to the principal and i said what would it take for me to get this club started and he said you know conal it sounds
like a great idea uh you'll have to write up a proposal for us find an advisor and i'd also like to have a list of 10
or 15 people with with a demonstrated interest in the club just to know that the club can sustain itself and i said okay that sounds great
and i remember going around the school it's a school of about a thousand kids and 15 isn't too bad for a club that's that's
considered a good standard and i came back to his office two or three days days later with a list of 37 names and i
handed that to him kind of with a smile on my face and i remember watching his eyes bug out he said
you know this is really amazing please go ahead and have your club and right from there that's when we were having our first meetings
so going through that i found people were thrilled to ask about astronomy they wanted to know about black holes they wanted to know about
uh what the latest crude missions to the international space station were doing they wanted to know about the rovers on
mars they wanted to know about how they could observe things for themselves with the telescope they wanted to know everything just like i
did when i was starting to get involved in astronomy so i created a couple of social media accounts and a website of my own
i'll show these in just a little bit to give you a bit more of an in-depth look into them so i started off you can
see here this was the club instagram page i remember thinking where could i go
to access where teens are where they're kind of living online this was of course in the covet era
we're looking at how do we adapt to people being kind of stuck at home and it's very hard to get out and engage
with the club so i created this instagram page and you can see we have a couple of different posts on here this was talking about lord ross's
reflector this was talking about um an event lowell observatory did the i heart pluto festival surrounding the
anniversary of pluto's discovery by clyde tomba we have yuri gagarin there we recognize
the 60th anniversary of his flight into space as the first person to go there and then this is what i'm
talking about by doing short bite-sized amounts of information so this was our st patrick's day post i
thought i'd do one about lord ross's telescope in ireland once the largest
operating telescope in the world i think it was before palomar that that surpassed it but anyway um teenagers are are very
absorbed and you know just captured by these short bits of information so i'm thinking
maybe i can't hold a 40-minute club meeting right now maybe i can't record a long video or a long lecture
how do i reach people with these short bits of information so i wrote up a post like this that
would talk about lord ross exploring m51 for example and people found those very interesting that
was um quite successful in kind of getting these little bits of information out and then of course i knew some people
were excited to go and explore these things for themselves and i wanted to provide a venue for them to do that
and look into things with a little more depth so this is a screenshot from our website i provided some of the photography
myself uh being an astrophotographer there were a lot of wide field things i talked about the astronomical league
here i have a list of resources i'll show you in a little bit that i collected and these were things that really got people involved because they could start
off with the bite-size things on something like an instagram page and then go more involved by looking at our website and seeing some of the
resources that i recommended as a more experienced amateur astronomer so if i can go out here um i can show
you the website and walk you through how i designed it and some of the different benefits that came from that
with with people looking to explore astronomy this was through um mid to late 2020 as i was developing
this website um that that's that's where a lot of my club activities were based
so i'm going to drag the names down here pardon me just for a second so members are greeted with this page of
course they go on i have a little bit about us i talked about our purpose as a club to educate
and share the value of astronomy and how it's a humbling and character building experience in carl sagan's
words and that seemed to to resonate with a lot of people because i remember saying to to all these different students um
you know what's a black hole what happens if i go near one when's the next rocket going to the space station they wanted to know all
these different things i was able to concentrate these in one spot so if you go on the website i can i have
the the section about the events we're doing a little bit about the astronomical league and then these are the resources
i collected that was the one of my favorite things to kind of build as i was putting this together
because i had all these uh websites and books and things that i would go to that people were fascinated by as
amateur astronomers and i knew these would be a great gateway to getting everyday students who had a
passing interest in space maybe they'd explored it once or twice and wanted to go into it a little bit
more so i referenced sky and telescope magazine here um a couple of different uh science
blogs night watch by terence dickinson was one of the big books that got me involved into astronomy
and of course his his other book um what's it called the backyard astronomers guide that's one i highly
recommend to people i recommended a lot of carl sagan's books kind of talking about science for those who might not have
wanted to go out with a telescope but just wanted to read about some of the discoveries and history behind this
science that we love i talked about photography for those looking to get into what i was doing the astrophotography some wide fields
this was while comet neo-wise was passing through our skies uh in the evenings and the early
mornings i photographed satellites people were really interested in those and i wanted to teach them how they
could do that for themselves so i uh of course i had to include space flight as well i personally have a
fascination with engineering and the space race and the planetary science missions
especially those of the 70s and 80s like voyager and i wanted to share those with people
through the missions that were going up now through space flight now is launch calendar and then i i realized through covid that
i had to come up with some way to create an event and get people uh engaged in the club once again because i
felt like we were losing um our enthusiasm through covid we had to figure out a way to engage
and i came up with a program in october called mars week this was while mars was passing through the sky during its opposition
this was of course a very favorable one it was high in the sky it was very bright very close i took my telescope several several
times out myself and i remember over a course of two or three months
i'd observed what mars looked like at a certain time and of course mars rotates about 40 minutes slower than the earth does
so i was able to get sketches uh for every one of the longitudes at least once along the martian surface
and i combined those sketches i put them all together and posted them myself to social media i put them up in the club
meetings when we were doing presentations and people were just blown away that you could see the surface of another planet
from some very modest equipment in your backyard that was very fun to bring to people so as this was going on perseverance
tn11 hope they're all launching from their respective countries in the summer and of course a lot of those have have
arrived recently and done some great science i collected a lot of the resources
about those missions and about the observing i was doing here some were from nasa somewhere from
sky and telescope of course lowell observatory they had a lot of fun programming um and then i found some talks on um
mars rovers and curiosity and opportunity and the science that they were doing and i wanted to create some myself so i
created a video series mars week was a week-long event that i designed and we were focusing on the opposition
and the missions so i created a series of about four or five videos and we focused on a different topic each
time i put these on the website they focused on climate and geology the history and exploration of mars you
can see observing mars here that was about a lot of the work i was doing and then finally towards the end we
wanted to talk about the future of humans going there people were asking me about spacex quite a lot so that was a great opportunity to
talk about the work they're doing the starship and some of the other missions going there like perseverance and ingenuity
that are on the surface right now now if i can go over here i can show you the
instagram page i used for the astronomy club i hadn't been on social media too much myself so i was trying to think of the
best way to reach people and i came to instagram as the best resource because it worked very professionally
it was essential in reaching something a lot of young people were involved in and it was something that i could get that bite-sized media that short form
text and everything i was talking about earlier on here to share with other people so i have the perseverance rover here i
talked about the geminids meteor shower i heard pluto uh there was an eclipse that was going
on a partial lunar eclipse those were really fun to share with people because they were hands-on things they could either go and learn about
or go and observe themselves so i'll go back to my slides here
hope everyone can can see everything all right here like i said i apologize i'm just working
with some uh new equipment here it's all fine oh good wonderful scott
thank you so finally i wanted to talk about what i'd like to share with
the rest of the league for astronomy outreach with teenagers um this is where we come to a really
critical point we're looking at focusing on the future of our hobby and bringing things to people who maybe
have not engaged with this before have an interest but not really a way to access this information
this was the most important part of my outreach and i think one of the central issues that we're looking at in our hobby right
now so of course i mentioned it's it's essential to us sustaining our hobby and
our interests but i want to talk a little bit more about how i did that and how i reached those people
so i was asked quite a lot about like i said missions going to the space station the current events in astronomy the
latest discoveries and i found the current events and topics that really captured people's
imaginations were the most affected so as i mentioned earlier i talked about a little bit of history
but then i found that modern astronomy was very interesting to teenagers they wanted to know about
um when the european southern observatory photographed uh the black hole in m87 that was a
really fascinating story to a lot of people when spacex was doing their missions over the summer with their second
demonstration with the two crew members test flying dragon to the space station as well as the crew one and then the
crew ii mission that launched just this morning those were really interesting to a lot of people and i realized that it's
it's it's about young people engaging with the world they wanted to see what was going on in their communities
what was going on in their country and how they could go to that directly so that's a lot of why i set up the
website a lot of why i shared some of my own observing and that was that led to a lot of my
photography efforts so through covet i'm developing this website i'm developing these social media accounts
and the photography i was doing some of the astrophotography of neowise and satellites
that brought people to meet a lot of the programs that we were doing so they could see
these things out in the world and then they could see what i was doing and they could understand that it was something they could explore themselves
social media was really critical in all of this because we're living in a virtual environment right now obviously we're all speaking to each
other on zoom everything for school was being done on zoom and i needed a way to get my members and
other young people engaged in astronomy without having to go out and and risk anything with coped
or you know i didn't want too much of a physical hurdle with a telescope or binoculars or equipment they weren't familiar with
so that's why we focused a lot on the christmas conjunction i focused a lot on the perseverance rover of course people could look up
and they could see mars moving through the sky they could see a retrograde in constellations they could see it dim and brighten
throughout the opposition um that was one of the best central things to capturing teams
interest was a lot of that astrophotography so going forward what i'd like to share
with some of my fellow league members and fellow um club
presidents throughout the country is that teenagers represent the future of our hobby and we need to think about
the best ways to engage them i found that through social media through photography through current events those were things that really
captured people's imaginations and i found the best ways to capitalize on those were short-form media through
my instagram accounts as well as the website that i developed and kind of put together with a lot of my favorite different
resources for those who are interested in going a little further so i'm i'm happy to hear from anyone
else if you know what their experience with young people in astronomy has been but i've been really happy to share this
uh with others so thank you very much excellent thank you connell
my gosh that's that's amazing but i i got a question could you put your finger on any one
thing that really appealed to teens everywhere
yes as a matter of fact it was it was human space flight they captured their interests the most um like i was talking about throughout
2020 spacex was testing a lot of their rockets and though they might not have much to do with astronomy and the astronomical
league um people were looking to that in a way that seemed to be like how people
were doing in the 60s with the apollo missions and the gemini and mercury programs i've been asked over and over again
online and in my club meetings about what that's been all about people just want to know
what others what our astronauts are doing what experiments are going on in orbit what's happening with the space station the lunar gateway
they're just fascinated by that aspect of human space flight i think it's that that sort of human touch and point of
engagement in that that really draws people to that yeah
that is amazing uh do you find people do they think a lot about maybe they might be one of
the people to stand on mars one day a little bit um i've been asked that
some you know could i get to mars myself and i said you know i don't know i'm um i'm just the kid with a telescope who
looks up within a while
you know like like you say they do see it as as a part of our future as um a space-faring country and a
country that's centered around science that made me really happy to see because i've heard in doing youth outreach
um in fact i'll tell you a story about this so i remember when i was first getting involved in astronomy and kind of figuring out
observing this was in 2016 in april of 2016 i got that telescope and i spent some time observing to it
with it and i remember going to the northeast astronomy forum i got the flyer in the mail because i was a sky
and telescope subscriber and i went to neith in 2017 to kind of see what it was all about
and my cousin about the same age as me she's very interested in astronomy we went around all the different booths
you know looking through the latest telescopes and the latest equipment and uh got to check out some
of the cool books there um but we were with my dad and my uncle and everywhere we went
you know people would pull us aside and say oh that's nice you brought the kids and they and they look at my father or my uncle and say so so what are you
interested in looking at we have these refractors and these telescopes and my dad would say
no no you're with the you're it's the kids here who came because they're interested in astronomy and they thought that was amazing you
know people would light up when we told them that in fact uh scott i'm not sure if you remember this or not but i remember
going to explore scientific over there in 2017 these two young kids show up and they're checking out all the eyepieces there
um and it was a pleasure to meet you there and see some of the other um you know people in astronomy who are
making all these changes yeah but you know what i'm talking about it was really fascinating
for the amateurs who'd grown up with the apollo program or they'd grown up watching all the
planetary science missions go off in the 70s and 80s and seeing these young people going and enjoying the hobby
um but anyway to answer your question that's where a lot of the interest is coming back from people are seeing that
there's a human connection up there and that there's things that they can be involved in and that's why we're seeing this resurgence i think even in spite of
light pollution and in spite of people saying well young people don't have the time they don't have the interest it's there
without a doubt we just need to know how to access it right one thing i'm wondering um
connell if you've noticed within your own club something that we observe in many clubs
around the country and that is the diverse interests that people have in being a part of a club such as for example
people i like to observe people who like to do astrophotography people who like to work with computers
people who like to create and maintain social media people who like to write people who like
to teach or do public outreach do you find that maybe drawing these different interests to your club
might help sustain it that hell's helped to sustain it even as i started up in the
past two years um i've had different officers with different interests myself i've been mostly focusing on the
observing and a lot of the hard astronomy work but i've had others
who've thought more about the science outreach aspect of it and some of the writing
some of the journalism involved so i'll supply them with you know the science the observations some of the things i'm
doing and they'll be happy to write about it and do some of our social media work and also go around the school and reach
out to people say hey have you seen this rocket launch did you see this image did you see this discovery uh we've we've had plenty of
room for people with diverse skills and interests whether that be with computers with writing with journalism
with doing the science themselves or um kind of gathering people and sharing an
interest in what's up there i've had all levels of interest as well people who are die hard you know i know i want to study this in college
to people who you know just enjoy a look at a starry nights guy from a dark country
place have you been involved in outreach there at your school or how's that worked out
sorry what was the question have you been involved in outreach they're through your school or how's
that worked out it's been a little challenging um going through the covet situation lately
so most of our outreach has been based online we have been able to do some of that where i've been focusing a lot of my
outreach on lately has been through the abington community library that's my local library where
i'm the vice president of the team leadership committee there they recently purchased a telescope and
binoculars which are still kind of going through the mail you know in a black hole or wherever they are they
ordered this a while ago but we've been looking to start some programs there through the local library
back when apollo hit its 50th anniversary apollo 11 they were doing a lot of work they had an astronomer come in i don't remember
exactly who it was and do some sidewalk astronomy with some of the kids look through telescopes and
that kind of a thing and i asked about sustaining that program with the support of the high school club that i was running
so these would kind of come up as sister clubs i'd be able to do more observing and more outreach as we
would traditionally know it there but then going through the pandemic and going through
online classes and navigating some of that i've been doing more virtual outreach events uh in the school like uh
like what i did with mars week excellent wow i'm also curious uh do you
see a lot of women involved we do actually um it hasn't been a strictly male interest
like some might think it is um and even though we haven't done a strictly women in stem or women in
astronomy event many of the officers many of the members have been women
and they've been fascinated by the potential of going into this as a hobby as a profession
or just as an interest so that's really made me happy to see is that there's a diverse interest not only in skills
but in the types of people we're bringing in um because the the interest is really universal i don't think it's limited to
one group or another like i mentioned earlier it's a question of accessibility we leave this open to everyone
and i think that's what's contributed to more of a balance in men and women being involved in a hobby like this
sure does anybody else have any questions
i just you know i just wonder uh and i said it in the chat here i wonder where uh connell richards will be in 20 years
from now you know are we going to see him as a planetary scientist an educator a
doctor you know this guy's going to go places and uh it's going to be fun to watch it happen
so i look forward to it thank you in 20 years i hope i'm still observing
that's what i'll be doing i've learned that there are plenty of things to observe to keep you busy for the rest of your life
oh i won't run out i won't run out there's no doubt oh well carl i look forward to you
already being a member but i look forward to your club being a member you are exactly what we like to see all
youth coming in and so passionate about their hobby you can tell you really enjoy what you
do and that's we love seeing that and you would definitely be
a large help in helping others get started just the way that you have just because
you love the hobby and teaching outreach uh you do an amazing job
and i am so grateful you came here tonight to speak i look forward to seeing what you become
thank you very much terry thank you for inviting me to the event i had a lot of fun talking about it and sharing with others
um i hope the work i'm doing and the work we're doing with the league i hope that inspires a lot of other
clubs to go out and share this with young people in their communities and keep our hobby going so thank you very
much thank you actually thank you thank you yes thank you scott why don't we do
about a 10-minute break and we are going to come back with howard okay sounds good all right thank you
oh that was fantastic thank you very much chuck i appreciate it it's wonderful
it was and we'll be tapping that again soon i have no problem with that
are you all are you all electing uh officers for next year now uh in your club or do you wait till
september to do that or august i guess it would be usually it's towards the end of the year and we kind
of we select the members on our own so i found that that was a process for a lot of abington heights clubs we did
that in the russian club as well um when i i was starting the astronomy
club like i said i had a couple of friends who had an interest in it and i picked them to provide a succession plan
and i've been talking to my vice president right now and some of the work she'll do when i leave i'll be sort of an league
coordinator coordinator and she'll be selecting some of the newer people um but there has been been a good base
there in sustaining it do you think you may try to do something similar in college too
i've been thinking a lot about it actually um some of the universities i'm looking into right now
um a lot of them in pennsylvania have um different astronomy clubs or even
astronomy as a as a minor or a major uh one of the ones i'm looking at right now is is a penn state
and at their main campus they have a 24 inch reflector that they use just as a club just just
for fun so i'm like you know i might have to go just just for the massive mirror the aperture fever
you wouldn't mind using it in other words no no not at all no i mean i meant if they they may have
astronomy clubs at most universities i'm not sure uh but if they don't i was wondering if
you might be interested in trying to do the same thing you did in your high school absolutely i'd be happy
to join and try to build a connection there with the league like i've done with my own club or if there is no club i had no trouble
starting this one there was no trouble finding the interest i'd be able to do that again and of course build from some experience that
time and be able to work through with the league through some of our observing programs and get more of a sturdy foundation
there that's great
college is it college station penn state is that the town
um it's it's state college right straight state college yeah and college station is in texas um yeah
24 inch there might be actually pretty uh pretty good shape i don't know what the
light pollution is like there but it's not terrible there's not too much out there it's mostly just the college town in the
middle with um cows
but um that's one of the universities i've been looking into right now um you you mentioned i remember you were
telling me this on the phone a couple of weeks ago about your meeting with ohio state and you said they had
a very long question and answer session they were just thrilled to have someone who had some experience in it
only two hours only two hours that's got to be some sort of world record i mean actually this wasn't too
bad tonight but uh i'd like to add my echo uh what truck has been trying to say i
think we really hit on a live one here with you and i hope that you will join us on our
regular tuesday global star parties uh coming up and uh be able to
add your own enthusiasm to what we do and i think your most important point
is that you guys and gals are the future of not just astronomy but the future
not just a hobby but of astronomy itself because if all of you just go through
lives go opening up a business or uh doing whatever it is you do
who's going to be left to look at the night sky and wonder and ask questions and i think in a way
conan what you're doing is perhaps the most important thing anybody can do
i know you did a really good job of it today thank you dr levy i appreciate it um
like you said this this does build the foundation for the hobby and it does get people it keeps them interested i'll tell you a
story you'll appreciate i remember i was at a bar our 4th of july barbecue a couple of years ago
and we had some friends of the family there who had an interest in astronomy the husband was a photographer the wife
she'd done some observing of her own and she said i remember you know back a couple of years ago when shoemaker lady9
was impacting jupiter and she told me the story of taking a four and a half inch reflector out there
and exploring jupiter for himself for herself and seeing the little black impact marks from the chunks of the
comet that had broken up so the work that you did and the work that you continue to do
has impacted many people and captured their fascination and i've been very inspired by that to do myself and bring on to others
thank you for sharing that with with me cona i think that's that's wonderful maybe someday i will
meet that family but um but i think what you've done and what you're doing
is really wonderful and the only suggestion i can give i think it might be echoed by the rest
of the group is never give it up keep on doing it no matter what
roblox might come in your way never give up the spirit never give up the dream
thank you very much yeah you're going to find it's a a hobby
or perhaps a profession but whichever it is it's it's a lifetime activity
and it never ever gives up i mean there there's always something more to do something more to research something
more to observe something new to photograph some better way to photograph uh the
avenues for interest in astronomy are just vast and i've been i'm saying that as someone who started
into this at seven age seven and you know it's still limitless so
it's a great opportunity also to meet a lot of neat people
in your community at school gives you an opportunity to meet people really around the world
especially when you link up with organizations like ours and i have an opportunity to to meet
those people very valuable to me and i think it will be to you as well
yeah i see what you mean it's been a pleasure just being here tonight and meeting some of the different league officers
and astronomers and people who've been very passionate about this um throughout most of their lives i've
i've i see no no reason to ever give this up in the future i i couldn't see ever dropping it and
and i couldn't imagine doing anything else so i have you know what what is it 74
programs to go if i want to go with the leaks program all the courses i could ever ask for all
the targets i could ever want to observe i've even gone pretty far with just a six inch just
knocking off some of those simpler programs well you have you have one telescope and
you know so you just have 49 to go right right yeah 50 is kind of the standard
that's standard yeah i like to be standard sometimes
yes telescope don't laugh i know so i have a friend in indianapolis who has 47 telescopes oh my gosh i'm not kidding
i've met many i'm sorry you really don't need that many telescopes all you need is just one more yeah
[Laughter] i am curious connell do you ever discuss
light pollution with the club or how's that ever came up as a topic
because that is something that definitely it doesn't keep us from doing astronomy by any means
but it definitely can't affect uh how you walk out and see anything in your backyard if you can't see anything in
your backyard uh we have discussed it a little bit so far so of course this was
i think this was the first week of april the ida did their international dark sky week right and i was promoting that a lot on
our social media at the first meeting we had in april this month i was talking a little bit about
how light pollution may make it hard to see something like the milky way that's uh excuse me coming up in the summer so i think
especially more in the summer where we have that that really rich milky way view that is so much transformed by light
pollution if i drive even 15 minutes out of this little town it's it's vastly different in the
experience of seeing that so i'd like to talk about that a little bit more in the future but we have addressed it a little bit so far yeah
one thing i would like to add just before we start again is that when i was approximately your age
my father gave me a real encouragement to continue with astronomy he woke up from a nap in a terrible mood
and he said david all he thinks about her is damn stars i've walked back over really good
very very close uh in future years but
that's all you need i think once you get under really truly dark skies it's something
you never forget i went to a cherry spring state park
i'm sure that that name's familiar to a lot of you just oh yeah in august a couple of years ago that's
an unforgettable view just stunning to look up at scan the sky with binoculars
unbelievable yep well we're back we have uh
howard is skeleton coming up and [Music] terry why don't you uh once you do the
introductions i will gladly do the introduction uh howard skiltson is a member and i hope i
pronounce this right alachua alachua
close ask astronomy club he is an astronomical league member and
a member of the association of lunar and planetary observers
he has been interested in the sun moon and stars since childhood in the years that followed after that
howard attended medical school raised a family which meant he had little time for stargazing
finally after a quarter century hiatus he returned to regular observing in
2002 when his wife ferry purchased him amid
125 he has sent nearly 8 000 observations of the sun and the moon
to the association of lunar and planetary observers for the solar and lunar section he has
written articles on solar photography for their website his photos have appeared in
spaceweather.com lunar picture of the day astronomy magazines photo of the day national
geographic and other websites in 2020 he was awarded the walter hoff's observer award
from alpo and i think that's amazing that's huge yes and tonight's presentation will give
a humorous overview of cosmology as portrayed in the galaxy song
from monty python's 1983 film the meaning of life it offers a light look of cosmology
through its almost accurate lyrics howard i can't wait to hear this i like
that it's almost accurate i i did emphasize
thank you for being here i sure do appreciate it welcome um we got things backwards we
just had the keynote address anything i do after connell's presentation is just going to be an
encore that was fantastic i mean it brought back so many
happy memories of when i got started and then you um
the difference was back when i got started we didn't have computers we didn't have cell phones we had a landline which was a party line in the
middle of nebraska so anything i did was on my own there was no club to work with but with the enthusiasm i can still
remember that and i just wanted to comment on uh you mentioned my wife's name is fairy and she bought me that
meat etx i was going to get some little 60 millimeter thing she want to get something that's going to be the right size
i had a sort of six inch reflector that i'd ground and polish the mirror myself but after
completing that i realized i am no uh glass grinder and i stopped it down to five inch has
got to actually work but she got me the etx that worked great and just after we moved to florida
i had that out in our front yard because that was a place where i could see the moon and venus and they were both in the
crescent phase so i was looking at him this little lady came by and she had like a seven-year-old son and maybe an
eleven-year-old daughter and she says do you mind if they look yeah come on over well we could hardly get his her son off
the telescope and she was apologizing that's great let him look all he wants well we can't do it her daughter looked
at it was that yeah stop that's great see you later boy he had to look some more
and finally when his mom finally pulled him away he says that's a great telescope i'll bet it
cost a thousand dollars i says well it wasn't quite that much but that was a good guess is it pretty close to that he says wow
you sure are lucky to have a wife that buys you luxury telescopes
he had no idea how right he was okay i'll go ahead and get the lsc i
need to share the screen then right so i'll go ahead and share screen oh now
let's see desktops what we need right i hope
okay let's see allow zoom uh i don't know if i've done it yet or not
i don't see anything yet howard i don't either so i'm gonna close this thing down let's
see wait a minute zoom us okay click lock to make privacy
well i think we're going to do this let's just start over again so i want to share screen
okay and i've got desktop as listed yeah you you've look at the window that
you would like to share okay i've got the desktop and you have to click share again okay i'll
hit share allow zoom to access your screen open zoom preferences
hmm now i'm back to zoom us location services
i'm going to try something different let me just do this i'll get this partly up and then oops let's see get that down to
where it's okay that didn't work
i've rehearsed this and rehearsed this and i thought we'd have it right where we wanted it but okay so let me just go back to this okay
i'm going to go back to the share screen i've got the program open ipad safari finder finder unknown microsoft
powerpoint okay powerpoint i'll try that one see if that works
lucifer system preferences
well this is becoming an exercise in frustration looks like
because i've gone there howard pardon me oh he said i've been there
um i wonder if i should shine i'm on a macbook air oh you may have to
go to your preferences uh you know you go up to the little apple up there
okay up to the apple okay yeah and then you have to go to your preferences and allow
allow your macbook or your apple to share with you okay yeah that's where we're at
location contacts it says click lock to make oh click clock to make changes okay
it's true oh i got okay use password i've never done it before and your on your app will it's going to make you
do that on this side it's open you just okay i've got it i think cool let's see uh it
says accept allow the apps to record content screen while using other apps okay so i've got that
now i'll go back to share screen and see if that works this time okay microsoft powerpoint so i'm going to try
and share oh i'm back to system preferences again [Music]
so click lock to make changes use password
unlock oh shoot that's too bad we'll figure it
out on a mac on a mac so okay during the screen
desktop okay so on mac os 10.15 catalina you need to allow zoom access
to screen recording to share your screen you can do this in your system preferences security and privacy privacy
and screen recording okay check check the option for zoom dot us that may be the last part that
you're not doing okay let's see you know you have to unlock the lock and after you do that
relock the lock there's a box there okay first
click and reopen oops oops cancel wait a minute oh i have to leave the meeting and come back it looks like you can do that
well let's let's you can do that we'll we'll wait here for you okay i'm gonna get rid of i know some
other astronomers here that have things to say okay wait a minute i think
i think we're there really okay yeah let's try sure you're doing it there you go we're
doing it okay that's it okay great then let's go ahead and ah i don't really see the similarity here
what there we go say where we go you know what escape
we've got a problem here let's no we don't have a problem i just got to get to the front that's the very end okay did it change it changed
okay i've got the whole thing on here it's beautiful
okay so basically i don't know how many people have heard the galaxy song but it's something i stumbled across and
actually did a recording of for the tampa bay ukulele society i thought it was kind of fun and uh okay it's not working
i'm not going down oh there we go and so or a light look of the universe
by howard by me of course and my two main interests are um the
moon and the sun and partly that's by necessity because i live in a small relatively small town but
we've got a lot of light pollution yesterday morning was it yesterday morning yeah i was out looking for
lyrids and i was out for about an hour from five till six our sun rises at seven
and i saw three meteors two are sporadics and one was a lyrium and i just remember in nebraska seeing
counting 20 plus 25 the first time we looked at it around 1965
but nebraska the milky way is so bright it looked like a neon sign and yesterday morning i just barely
detected um the milky way going through uh cygnus so the galaxy song so hold on here it
comes [Music] and pay attention to the
that's words and revolving at 900 miles an hour
it's orbiting in 19 miles a second so it's wrecking a sun that is the source of all our
power the sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
are moving at a million miles a day in an outer spiral armed forty thousand
miles an hour in the galaxy we call the mountain wave
our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars it's a hundred thousand
light your sights inside it bulges in the middle sixteen thousand
light years thick but up by us it's just a thousand light years
[Music] and our galaxy is one of millions of
billions in this amazing and expanding a universe itself keep on expanding and
expanding in all of the directions it can whiz fast as it can go as you know
so remember when you're feeling very small and insecure how amazingly i'd like to use your bird
pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space cause there's bugger all down here on earth
yeah afraid that there's an alice in my somewhere up in space
thank you i didn't know if i should pass out kleenex for people to wipe their eyes after now there were people holding
up lighters you know there you go so anyway since we got
through that we'll go ahead and just kind of go through each verse and uh i'll go a bit about that of course
no doubt that this is a planet that's evolving and obviously it's evolving quite a bit even
currently although i'm not sure if it's evolving for uh better or for worse i guess time will
tell i always think about you know in one case we've got evolution of these new species that have
specialized and such and such and then next time we're turning around talking about these are invasive species
that you know it's just one it's just kind of a continuation of what goes on with life um but um so evolution is
is no doubt although honestly i was raised a very strict fundamentalist religion
and basically what got me i was very interested in science and astronomy which uh i the comment about i could relate to
the earlier comment about the father my parents had nothing good to say about
science and this and astronomy and here these were two of my main interests and the reason i ended up finally leaving that
religion is because i was also interested in interested in geology so i set out to prove that the earth is only 6 000 years
old and it did not take long to figure out the rocks say otherwise so just kind of interesting revolving at
900 miles per hour they must be talking about how fast it spins around at the surface
well according my figures i could come up with the earth is actually approximately twenty four
thousand nine hundred one and point four six one miles in circumference now how they can say that that accurately i don't know but that's
the source that i had so it'd be over a thousand miles an hour instead 900 miles an hour unless of course
they're talking about 900 nautical miles per hour which uh one nautical mile per hour is 1.15 statute
miles but usually they would say knots rather than nautical miles per hour one other possibility is the latitude of
the uk uk where the song was written the speed would be around 700 miles per hour and maybe 900 could be a compromise
but anyway it's just a little bit confusing as far as the realities of it
and also uh that's at this point that would be wrong revolving about a thousand mile an hour
earlier on early the moon when it formed was probably only about six seven thousand
miles away from earth and uh or maybe a little bit farther than that i'm no yeah i'm sorry it was close
to back up again the moon was much closer to the earth and the days at that point were probably
only about six hours long and each year the moon gets a little bit farther and farther away and to conserve the angular momentum of
the system the earth in correspondence has to slow down a little bit and it'll eventually get to the point
uh where the uh earth will slow down to the point where it's in tidal lock with the sun but that's going to be a long
way off and the moon would also be a long way off at that time next one it's orbiting at 19 miles a
second so it's reckoned and that's a pretty reasonable estimate true orbital speed around the
earth it's is equal to that to about two significant figures however
that uh speed is not constant we think about kepler's laws that we're actually in an elliptical
orbit rather than a circular orbit so when the sun is
or when the earth is closer to the sun it's going to be moving faster than when it's farther from the sun
and so just for fun you take a look at the diagram that we have here is the sun worth closer to the sun in
winter or in summer and a look at perihelion is january 3
and aphelion is july 4. so the answer is well both depending on which hemisphere
that was a trick question sorry about that so but uh in the northern hemisphere of course
we're actually close to the sun in the in the winter time which doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless we're not that much closer to make a lot of difference
and it's amazing that the tilt of the sun can make that much of a difference in the in the temperature
through the seasons i that had me scratching my head for a long time as a kid how could it do that
but it does it says that we're ordering a sun that is a source of all our power
and this is a calcium k image of the sun was taken close to the cycle 24
peak maximum and the sun is now starting to come back we just came out of a
minimum solar minimum in the last year and a half and today we had two spot groups there
and they had totals of 10 spots and it's getting more and more interesting to look at the sun
source of all our power what's almost all of our power including solar and wind obviously
the hydro power well yeah i guess that is isn't it because it's the sun that drives the evaporation spreads the
uh um moisture about and then causes condensation which comes down the rivers
then goes into the hydro plants so that definitely is solar power and fossil fuels
we're not just burning dinosaur farts here what we're doing is um um consuming fuel
that was created from sunlight by plants eons ago and it's interesting
we talk about the need for renewable sources there will come a time when we have no
choice because we're using uh the fossil fuels at a massive rate uh at which time and
sometime in the near future there will be no fossil fuels to use so we hope that we get this sorted out
as far as other alternative sources in the meantime now there are some non-solar power
sources that uh are available to us and uh this is probably one of the last ones the person
would think of if we thought what sort of power do we get other than from the sun and the geothermal activity about um
80 of that energy radioactive decay of elements which are within the earth and i didn't
realize this but as i was going through uh some of this information about 20 percent of the geothermal
energy we have is actually left over from planet formation you think that's been cooking for about four and a half billion years that's
pretty amazing there's one other thing that's uh interesting to me in this photo
that has nothing to do with the energy but look at all the steam coming out of there recently on mars there's been some
calculations that maybe the water that used to coat mars cover mars didn't
break up in the upper atmosphere and leave into space it may have been incorporated into minerals and may be bound underneath the surface
of mars so there's some real uh suggestions that there might be a lot of water under mars but it never got
re-released because they don't have plate tectonics to recycle this recycle the crust and and bubble up the
steam and stuff so it's uh when you think of it earth is very special place
another non-solar power source lunar tidal effects so you can imagine some sort of uh
energy source possibly in that area with its attendant uh ecological problems
and then the other non-solar power sources we have to really consider nuclear fission which you know we have
some nuclear plants but there's been lots of it's very problematic and maybe someday nuclear fusion
now nuclear fusion i've heard is only about eight to ten years away and
i've been hearing that for the last 50 years so it'll be interesting to see if we ever can get sustainable nuclear
fusion when you think of these magnetic bottles you have to contain it with in the amount of pressure and forces i
i don't know how they can even begin to manage it um but perhaps with the superconducting
magnets and stuff it may eventually become possible but obviously with both these
sources there's quite a bit of division over fission and some confusion over fusion
so maybe that'll be an option in the future maybe not i'm really hoping the fusion gets going
and it's it's a selfish motive i want to see more incentives for returning people to the moon
because there's helium-3 that could be mined from the regolith of the moon
which is directly comes from the solar wind and that would be an excellent source of fuel
if they can ever get to work sun and you and me and all the stars we can see are
moving at a million miles a day well nobody's perfect um
the estimates that i've come up that i've seen are closer to 12 million miles per day so but it's only off an order of
magnitude okay so i'll go into my political thing it's not very far off we're only off by
one order of magnitude okay well that's too much said already
okay in an outer spiral arm at forty thousand mile an hour what's correct we are in an outer spiral
arm of the milky way galaxy and uh we were talking about um some
neat observations we've had the neatest observation i've ever seen of the milky way galaxy i was in
colorado a place um mountain view was a name of the camp
that i was at where at 8 000 feet it was march and when you stepped outside
besides saying oh my gosh it's cold you look up and the milky way was this huge glowing
thing and you felt you were literally part of this milky way that was just expanding outward towards you you just
felt drawn into the into our island universe of the milky way it was just really spectacular
but uh based on a million miles a day they it would be 40 000 mile an hour but
since the actual speed is close to 12 million miles a day it's about 480 000 miles per hour which
is really moving right along and it's in the galaxy we call the milky way okay what
can you say about that that's a hard one to get wrong that's right
our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars well some estimates are a bit higher but
it's a reasonable approximation especially when you consider this was uh done a few decades ago
and the estimates that we have um vary from time to time as we make new
discoveries if we have new equipment oh and one thing i was going to mention you had some beautiful
images from the hubble space telescope i had the privilege of taking care of a gentleman
who had worked for elmer perkins so i asked him what he did he says i designed the fine guidance system for the hubble
space telecast telescope and my wife helped assemble it in the clean room so every once while he'd
bring in his paper retirees from elmer perkins we'd get to talking about that and half the time we forget why he was there he'd forget why
he was there and we didn't care we're having too much fun so you get to meet some really special people and you just ask
a little bit more about what they're going on okay i've been showing this picture for the last couple of uh slides
so for miles redeemable to your next visit to mars what galaxy is this
you don't have to say you just think it in your head okay if you guessed aim 81 call elon
immediately at the number below tell them howard sent you
sorry about that galaxy's 100 000 light years side by side that's the
next lyric and at the time that they wrote this the galaxy's estimate
were a hundred thousand miles plus or minus 20 i'm sorry 100 000 light years plus or
minus 20 000 light years uh but there's been some recent discoveries that suggest it might
be 150 or maybe 200 000 light years in uh diameter uh rather than just 100
but you know you keep making more discoveries and like say we have much better equipment new things
out there and plus the hubble has been a real workhorse i was really delighted too when i heard that the hubble
telescope is likely to be able to continue on for several years because the rumors were that maybe 2022
2023 we had to bring it home because the it was going to run out of operating uh gyros but it sounds like
they may have something around that to keep that going i sure hope they can it bulges the next line is it bulges in
the middle 16 000 light years thick more recent data suggested maybe 30 000
light years at the center especially when they're looking at globular clusters but uh during the course of this time
this song has been it's been anywhere from sixteen thousand estimate to ten thousand to twenty thousand
um so again it depends on what time you're looking at things and
what the latest information is the next line is out by us it's only 3
000 light years wide well that's a pretty reasonable estimate but when you look at the spiral arms it
makes sense the outer arms may vary considerably in thickness and it i've read that they may vary from to a
thousand to ten thousand light years thick but still that's pretty long skinny uh
relatively speaking um proportions by the way i'm sure
everybody recommend uh uh recognizes the andromeda galaxy here and it's two satellite galaxies which is
headed our way by the way but it'll be a long time i probably won't be around to see that when we when we merge with that galaxy okay
and as i mentioned before the authors did update the estimates periodically they had different times that they released this
there's initial release and then if uh several years later there's another release for different and
one of the editors or the composers tried to update the information but it
kept changing they'd get one way and oops they changed it this this way so i
changed it now they're telling me i was right the first time and so they said something in effect i wish our esteemed scientist
could come to a concise consensus because let's see at the bottom of the slide
we're 30 000 light years from galactic central point and that's actually a pretty good estimate the last one that i was able to
find estimate was about 25 000 light years so that's not bad and this was something
that i kind of didn't realize at the time but it makes sense that each time you go around
the sun's orbit around the milky way you don't come back to where you were before you end up a little closer a
little closer to that great big swirling black hole in the middle i guess but when you look at the spiral arms that's what they look like too as
they're coming in they're closing in towards the center very very gradually
so we go around every 200 million years that was the next line in this and actually it's close to
the actual figure of 220 to 250 million years which might be the age of this uh
fossil stromatelite which is from my own personal collection unfortunately was given to me when i was a kid and i don't know
the context of this i don't know if this is uh millions of years old or if it's
billions of years old uh it could be either probably it's probably something in the millions uh
tens to hundreds of millions of years old rather than on the order of a billion years but nevertheless the line is fairly
close but when you think about that going around every 200 million years a lot can happen during that time
um 200 million years that's about the time the end of the what they call
the triassic and going into the jurassic period in other words the last time we were about this same
point in our galaxy was the time of the dinosaurs and a lot can happen during that time as it shows
on the uh on this point that i found in green river wyoming um we've got a point that was formed
it's got micro fossils in there that were alive quite some time ago and then it inter peop
people came along found uses for it and interacted and used it to make their own tools now this is
probably i um i can tell you this is not 200 million years old it was found in the green river
formation area and the rocks from around there are on the order of about 50 million years old they're from the eocene so
it's probably a remnant from the eocene but nevertheless there's a lot can happen 50 million
years that'd be a one quarter of the way around the galaxy
so since the appearance of complex life is we've only gone around our solar system
has only gone around the galaxy maybe two times before that all you had was
single cell fossils like this stromatolite again and when you think of it from the time
of the cambrian explosion we've gone around twice
and it's been about uh 10 times or 14 times we went around from the beginning
from the formation of the solar system so 2 out of 14 that's not very much time we had complex life on this earth
when you think of the time that uh mammals and then human beings have been on earth we've been here for a very very very
short time compared to the length of time in the universe or in in our in our solar system
the next one our galaxy is one of millions of billions and you'll recognize this another one of
the hubble uh deep sky survey images well some estimates are that there might
be a trillion uh galaxies i don't think anybody really knows for sure because we can't observe
the entire universe and so we're just making a lot of guesses and assumptions
um but that's what you do is you make your best of uh best guesses then you make observations to the limit of your ability to see
what's happening but some estimates are over a trillion but a trillion is a thousand billion
not a million billion so again they're off by quite a bit however if i'd have been writing this
song i would have instead of saying a thousand billion i'd have said a million billion number one it sounds
better lyrically and um it just it just flows off the tongue a whole lot better so it's i give
them some poetic license on that i'm not too excited too upset about that
in this amazing and expanding universe well expansion was discovered by edwin hubble
of course which we named the space telescope after but it required measuring some astronomical distances
like when you think about measuring things go back 500 years how do you make any
measurements of anything how did you measure time how did you measure calendars
very difficult even just a couple of a century and a half ago the railroad going across nebras
across the united states different places had their own time there'd actually be big arguments about whose time was
correct so it's just been in the last several decades we've had the had the
convenience of having an accurate calendar and clocks and so we know precisely what time it is have you ever wondered why on
earth would you put christmas in december 25 i mean according to history christ was
probably born in april somewhere in that time however if you go december 25
that's the first day after the winter solstice so you can definitely tell the sun's coming back
anybody can get that and they don't have to have a calendar they don't have to have a precise clock
the second example easter okay why is it the first sunday after the first full
moon after the spring equinox again that way everybody celebrates the
same time because you don't have to have these calendars so it's amazing how we've come from that
to this point where we can measure distances long ways away we started off
by kepler figuring out the three laws of planetary motion which gave the proportion of the semi-major axis in its
relationship to the period of the orbit and once they solved the distance to one of the other
members of the solar system they had the values of all of them could be easily calculated and then they found other
ways to uh verify this but then how do you measure the distance to the stars
well if you hold your finger out in front of your face close one eye and look at the other you'll see it shift back and forth
you've got parallax so you can measure a parallax and that was done yeah but that's only good to maybe 50
000 light years possibly 100 000 light years with this telescopes we have now
and then with the hipparcos um uh spacecraft they actually did
um parallax was measured in orbit around the earth to the point
they could go up i think it was a thousand light years i'm not sure that's one of those numbers that fell
out of my brain just about an hour ago because i was looking at it earlier but i think it was up to a thousand but
again that's very limited so how do you see beyond that well that's a good question okay we got
the kepler's laws in the nearby stars so you've got a few of the nearby stars you know but you've got to figure out some way else to
measure distances farther out from that and the discovery came from henrietta
swan levitt who discovered what we call the yardstick the universe using sephoid
uh cepheid variables um in fact it was henrietta levitt that came up with the term
standard candle now i one of the prestigious uh online sources
said that was discovered by edwin hubble it was discovered by edwin hubble's team
and she was part of that team but she was the one observed that the period of variability
is related to its absolute brightness so you can calculate the absolute
brightness versus its apparent brightness and it's very simple calculation then to determine how far
away that is in the meantime other standard candles have been discovered including
type one supernovae and uh are our lira stars but that opened it up we can
measure distances to the full milky way as well as oh my gosh these clouds these
nebula we see some of them are a long long way beyond our galaxy this was a major
major discovery so i like to put it this way and this
this is a po half of a poster that i made uh a few years ago for women's history month
edwin discovered the expansion of the universe we get by using the yardstick discover uh the universe
was discovered by henrietta swann so he discovered the expansion of the universe
by standing on henrietta's shoulders
so and uh from what i've been able to read about her she was a very interesting person and and uh did a lot of research and work
but couldn't would never get a degree just because of the limitations they had at those times but uh without her discoveries we wouldn't have
what we have now i will say one other thing about the standard candles
it's something you have to continually look at and look from various
try and find other standard candles to compare with so you have did we get it right when you look at the
parallaxes you're talking about one a parsec is a parallax of one
second of an arc so it's hard to get very many significant figures of how
white is that parallax so that limits how close the distances are but you can
get a foundation that you can build on and we can get correction by getting other types of measurements as well
and of course you know the distant universe we measure that by red shifts
so that can be major distances beyond where you can actually resolve the individual stars in some of
the more distant galaxies one thing that was interesting was this uh cepheid variables
they turned out not to be exactly the same in brightness because when you look at the ones in the
milky way you're looking at what they call
second uh second generation stars uh second type stars in other words they
have a higher metallicity content anything higher uh anything heavier than heli hydrogen in
it um whereas the type one um stars they were the initial stars near
primarily hydrogen without helium beryllium and any of the other heavier elements so they were actually a
little bit brighter in the distance galaxies which mean those distant galaxies were actually farther than what we thought but by
comparing the different types of measurement they were able to figure that out which it's just amazing
next one is the universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding in all the directions it can whiz well
there's little doubt to this the uh the redshift the hubble constant they show that the universe is expanding
and i've been reading a very interesting book a brief history of time by stephen hawkins and he goes into this
in a great deal and i can understand about half of it but it's very well written i'm probably
going to turn right around and read it again after i get done with it because it's got some implications and stuff that are really fascinating especially
dealing with the expansion of the universe and its ultimate fate we mentioned about the big crunch
if we had a closed universe where eventually it was there was enough matter to slow halt expansion have it
crashed back in on itself the other option which seems to be in favor now is that may go into
unlimited expansion accelerated expansion which could some people have called that the big rip
uh which um would be quite a way to put that but um either way it has some
interesting implications for the destiny of the universe uh not that we're going to be around to see it
but nevertheless it is it's amazing to think about the different possibilities on that now they talk about as fast as you can
go at the speed of light you know the speed of light is the fastest speed through space but
space itself can actually contract uh expand faster than speed of light
which okay i'm starting to get dizzy trying to think about all this sort of thing
so the first thing comes to mind well if space is expanding was it expand into
well this brings up a polynesian word that i read and uh read about a few years ago when i was
studying about french polynesia tahoe and that was usually in response
to some missionary who's preaching about how things were and what to be which literally which taken as close
can literally is this thinking is hurting my head with the implication knock it off already would you
but um nevertheless i think it's fascinating to look at the diagram of
how the universe is inflated and then inflated through in time you had the uh
in the very beginning you had what they call the dark ages and it had nothing to do with the inquisition it was before there was any matter and
there was any light and then the earth the universe cooled the point where that could form then later on we developed stars uh
galaxies and uh to where we are today and it just it just fascinates me
the one thing that they're talking about that stephen hawking was talking about in the uh book a brief history of time
is they think that he has had the impression that this was a closed um
an unbounded universe but that it was finite okay how do you
have something unbounded that's finite okay you're standing on it earth there
is no boundary where you go around move on earth we're going to fall off the edge but it is finite and that is funny
because i just read that today because it had it had me in a big tahoe trying to figure out something
okay now that makes sense i hope i hope people aren't headed for
the aspirin in the tylenol right now next they said 12 miles 12 million miles
a minute and that's the fastest speed there is the speed of light's 186 000 uh miles per second 60 seconds that's
about 11 million 160 almost 12 million miles a minute
and again aquatic license 12 million miles a minute is a lot better than 11 million miles a minute in a song wise
because it just flows a whole lot better
and that's the speed of light through space but it doesn't limit how fast space can expand now the other thing is
uh there are things that can travel faster than the speed of light through objects or through fluids for
instance through water and in some of the reactors they you get this eerie blue glow
in the cooling water around there that's from what they call charetkov radiation where subatomic particles are actually
moving slightly faster than the speed of which light can travel through that liquid
which again that's given me a headache trying to think about retinoid it's just really amazing
so just remember when you're feeling very small insecure how amazingly unlikely is your birth
but we're here so get over it one time as i mentioned before
i was raised in a very fundamentalist church i was talking with a good friend of mine and uh he was a physician i worked with
and he was talking about you know this enzymatic thing we're talking about clotting of blood and how well
this is so precise so it couldn't possibly have just happened i said you're right
it couldn't possibly have just happened and therefore we do not exist
well that was kind of the end of a conversation we went on before i mean you can multiply out okay look at a
thousand generations back if so and so i hadn't met so-and-so and got together we wouldn't be here
okay that's one tahoe or headache i don't need to worry about i'm here and i'm happy with that so
please leave 25 cents in the cup as you exit the building tonight for the psychological counseling
okay and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space now the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence is uh to me is very intriguing and one of the things that really got me
going is they think how long have we been here we've been able to send radio messages
for what about 80 years maybe maybe it's more than that but i mean as far as so
the closest any other people could pick up would be 80 like uh light years from now
so there could be several different places out in space where there could be
life and we'll never pick it up because there's too far for their signals to reach the other thing and just it made me sad
when i read it and thought about it is let's just say human existence is capable of doing that
exists only for say five for a hundred thousand years before whatever happens and it uh ceases to be
able to send these messages so you're looking at a band of signals it's only about a hundred thousand light years long okay
that's the the the uh width of the galaxy but at the same time
that means there's going to be a beginning and an end so we're if we do catch any signals from somebody
else or other intelligent life of some sort it's just a narrow window that we'll be able to catch so there could be
life out there they could be sending signals and we may never pick them up too so it'll be interesting to see what uh
becomes of that of course when i see this i think of jody foster in the movie contact i love that movie
okay because there's bugger all down here on earth need i say any more
that's about intelligent life in space so i'll finish up wizard i have proof
and this came from a cartoon that i read i have proof that there's intelligent life on mars
apprentice then why haven't they contacted us you're not listening
okay any comments or questions at this point yeah i have a couple howard thank you
very much um that very interesting structure presentation i loved it um
a couple of comments i would make first of all with regard to hubble standing on uh henrietta swan
leavitt's shoulders he also stood on vesto slifer's shoulders yeah a few people really recognize
the unassuming vesto slifer lowell observatory who discovered
the recessional rates of about 11 spiral galaxies in 1919
uh he basically determined their redshifts and it was the correlation of those
redshifts with hubble's use of henry at a swan levitt's period luminosity relationship that
allowed him to come to the conclusion that the universe was expanding and he never credited schleifer for this
and slifer never complained about not being credited but he did receive slifer did receive a
standing ovation at an aas meeting american astronomical society meeting in 1919 when he revealed the
redshifts of those galaxies wow so those were very significant shoulders that he stood on
henrietta swan levitt also an interesting sidelight was considered by the nobel prize
committee for a nobel prize they actually communicated to the harvard college observatory into
harlow shapley a letter asking for his uh
basically support for um have i lost zoom here
no i can steal with us and i can yeah well i've lost video for some reason but you can still see me yeah yeah okay
good um uh henrietta swann levitt was considered but she had been dead for
four years she had died of cancer in her late 50s yeah and so i was not eligible for the
nobel prize because of that um also you you alluded to the errors
in the seafood variable uh correlation between type 1 type 2 and so forth
and that was part of the reason that when hubble first measured the distance andromeda he
came up with 750 000 light years which was still extra
galactic and still significant for that reason but not quite as far as the two and a half million we know it to be
today and so i just wanted to add those couple
of points and and uh thank you again for the presentation
oh you're welcome i really enjoyed doing it i hope it wasn't too boring no it's funny
and interesting
yeah i had done that song for the ukulele club online ukulele club that we did and i
thought you know it's got so much in it it'd be worthwhile to work something up so that's why i did it
that's awesome it's awesome well i didn't know you could play the
to have you on global ukulele party just to play they'll be honest it's uh uh 2012 is when i really started
taking it out okay doing very well my proof that you can teach an old doc
new tricks you're doing very well that's awesome thank you oh my gosh thank you howard
that was amazing uh i never really i had never heard the song before
so i that really brings a lot to light makes you think you'll have to see it in the context of
the movie i've never seen the movie i'll have to look at it
yeah i think it was the last part he asked the lady if he can have her liver after that oh gosh okay
moving right along huh that's right
thanks again howard uh well i am going to go ahead and announce the winners of
the questions so i'm going to go back to sharing the screen
and okay where was i at okay so here are the
answers um what type of total eclipse it is
a total lunar in some parts of the world but it won't be here
the winner is josh i have to move my pictures again
kovac go back um it is a lunar uh let me go to the next
one am i not sharing my screen yeah you're right you guys fine turn
but i'm not on the okay there we go
what color is the hottest star which is blue pika help me out here
thank you yes is the winner on that one
meteor shower that peaks on may 5th is it at a aquarium meteor shower
and michael overracker has won that so each of these people will win a tote
bag and carol org our president here will be in contact to get your
address to mail that out wonderful yes congratulations yeah so
as i have said uh alcom virtual will be coming up in august and we've all kind of talked
about that um chuck you can listen here and if you have anything to add please add it to this uh it will be broadcast
by scott roberts and again we so appreciate your support scott
and it will thank you sure it will happen as he said august 19th through the 21st
two sessions a day we are going to start the first one at 3 p.m on eastern time take a two hour dinner
break and come back at 8pm eastern time we'll have speakers door prizes and
there'll be more we're still in the planning stages our website will uh be live uh sometime between the
beginning and middle of may and we will definitely announce that our
next uh astronomical league live six will be on may 7th we will definitely announce
the website at that time and that will be at 7 00 p.m eastern again right here
so those are the winners and thank you and stay safe out there
and uh i would really like to scott that thanks scott and to thank all the
speakers we've had i mean it has been an amazing night uh paul did a great job howard
that was an amazing talk a lot of a lot of information there and um i'll see if anybody
else ha i'd like to thank the speakers all of the guests carol chuck everybody david and scott
and i'd like to thank everybody for tuning in too we really appreciate you being out there and we have a lot of fun doing these as
you can tell so if anybody else has anything they'd like to say please join in and do that
thank you terry for all the work you do with this it's very much appreciated well thank you howard i really do enjoy
it's just so nice to be able to get out there with everybody again and have all these speakers it's kind of
like being at your local astronomy club you know on a friday night just hanging out listening to speakers and that was
kind of the whole point for this so um again i'd like to thank everybody
and does anybody else have anything they'd like to say
well i think it was great to see everybody here and uh you know so uh there's
always so much to learn from the astronomical league and um you know if you're watching out
there you're a league club or president uh or just a member
uh you know make sure that you're that you're watching and sharing and subscribing
uh this program it's a you know it's an effort for the league organizers
to put it together and um you know they deserve uh your support so one thing i would encourage our
leagues clubs out there to do uh you see what youth can do they can really make a
difference and i'd like to encourage all of our clubs to tap those people in your own individual
clubs the families and there are other people who are interested in astronomy if we just give them a chance so keep
that in mind as we go forward and thank you and scotty you may want to
mention about next tuesday's gsp that's right yeah we have the the 44th
global star party coming up on next tuesday that will start at uh 8 p.m central
and um we as always will have a great lineup so uh and the astronomical league will be
there so we're we're looking forward to that yeah i believe chuck allen will be there
uh for that chuck will be there and chuckle usually gives a uh a nice
lecture along with that too so people have been fascinated with his talks on distance
and scale of the universe and uh just some of the strange and weird facts about uh about
our cosmos and i believe scotty we have found a
uh a third young person to join deepti and libby and the stars oh
bring our um maybe connell richards huh
we'd love to have you on and be a regular on global star party so i'd love to join in i've watched a couple of them over the past couple of
months while you've been doing them through the pandemic it's a great show it's a lot of fun great well you'll be in good company so
all right all right uh yeah and howard you should ever play the ukulele
oh we're going to have you on at least once to play ukulele that would be great that would be awesome that's cool all right
all right uh thank you everybody we appreciate it and we hope to see all of you on tuesday
for the global star party and may 7th for the next astronomical league live program thank you
thank you very much good night everybody bye-bye good night good night all right thank you everyone
good night
so [Music]
oh [Music]

Transcript for Part B:

wow [Music]
[Music]
really
forever i messed up i'll fix it later
the name of the program yeah my titling yeah you also uh
the title for one of the global star parties is wrong it's number yeah yeah 30 i can't remember it's the one we
were on with the msro oh really i gotta fix it okay yep
it was just
i'm talking about maryland caitlin i i was born in maryland and i when i was nine years old my my dad was
in the military he was in vietnam back in the 60s and i lived in laurel maryland near
green near goddard space flight center and
i got to visit there in my cub scout pack during uh when apollo 11
landed on the moon our cub scout master was uh worked in goddard
uh that's so cool i my mom used to live in laurel maryland for her
for her job i'm from west virginia and so so is she yeah right yeah my mom was
was born in west virginia also which part in princeton okay that's where my
grandparents lived a lot most of their life pretty much and my uh a lot of my aunts and uncles
yeah i lived in alexandria virginia oh i don't know as a child like in the
early mid 60s you know mm-hmm
yeah i was born in fort meade what's that i was born in fort meade
maryland like you were mm-hmm you were named you were born in a place that's named after
a telescope company that's right yeah that's right it was a fortified mean at that time
they were really uh they were really obnoxious so they had to protect themselves
i didn't ever consider that mean fort mead and mead telescopes i never thought about that before until now
right that's now what they call their warehouse right
that's right
great
um
excellent planets are very difficult to detect because they are tiny little objects
orbiting very bright stars
other telescopes are designed
it has to be a system that just by chance has to be aligned so that the planet is orbiting its star
along the line of sight of the hubble space telescope
for doing a lot of the exoplanet observations you have to catch what's known as a transit one the orbit of the exoplanet has to be
such that it's going to go between you and the star it's going around
and then you have to do the timing we can't just do an exoplanet observation whenever we want whenever it's convenient we have to do
an exoplanet observation when it's first starting to go into the star so they have to know
very accurately the timing of that we have to schedule it ahead of time this is not something that hubble can get around to when it wants
to we have to say no at this point in time on this date you have to be pointed here and you have to be looking here
when that planet passes in front of its star the starlight some of it is blocked by the planet
but some of it comes through the outer ridge the outer rims of the atmosphere
of that planet on its way to the hubble telescope some of that light is absorbed by
whatever is in that atmosphere and it is absorbed at very particular
frequencies that correspond to the atoms and molecules that are in the atmosphere of that exoplanet
then when the hubble telescope receives that light and we take it in usually with a spectrograph
we get the light we spread it out into its constituent colors or wavelengths of light and we can tell
which of those wavelengths have been absorbed and that tells us by the pattern of
spectroscopy what are the elements and molecules that are found in the atmosphere of that
planet hubble has detected things like sodium and hydrogen and even evidence of methane and water
vapor by using transit observations of exoplanets and measuring not only that composition
but also the height of the atmosphere which can tell us something about how heavy the atmosphere is and that tells us
something about its composition as well hubble was the pioneer in doing that and
now other observatories are also using the transit technique to analyze the atmospheres and exoplanets
[Music]
okay everybody this is scott roberts here today and i'm with jerry hubble
and caitlin aarons and uh kaitlyn i don't see your video there um
there she is there she is okay i'll bring everybody on now
but um anyhow uh still still learning uh some of the ins
and outs of our of the audio system here even with even with richard grace's uh settings
and everything i still run i can run one show and it's one way and i turn it down
uh the other way and and so it's just uh i don't i don't quite understand the
mysteries of uh of uh audio broadcasting but anyhow uh i did want to bring up that um
uh you know that we have a new program that will be coming on pretty soon uh uh with caitlin aaron's and it's
called seven months of science and i thought maybe you could talk about that a little bit
caitlin and
hello yeah absolutely yeah there we go okay did i there's a
i mess up her audio too yeah that's a little bit of dead air you don't want to hear that
it's all good now now i can hear you okay we're good we're all good all right caitlin how are you anyways i mean i
know you've been uh busy uh i think it's really cool you're putting this program together
um so uh was this um i think i asked you earlier but uh
did you was this your your brainstorm to create this program or how did it come about uh this came
about where our astronomy club back in west virginia called the central appalachian astronomy club
i we've been having meetings on the side virtual no less by every
june july we tend to have a huge star party at the green bank observatory and
unfortunately uh because we're still uh at the at the bitter end of uh of
quarantine and whatnot and thankfully vaccinations are coming out right i we still had to cancel our
event for this summer just to still be safe uh and certainly to uh to those at the
green bank observatory as well but in this case we still wanted the excitement
of astronomy uh and bring that about to the public right certainly for a virtual event so
that way we i can attract uh everybody from different time zones
different types of astronomers uh we definitely want this to be a very
interesting event to get ready for star quest 2022 uh dates yet to be
confirmed but we are still set at least for with the green bank observatory uh to have starquest our
actual star party that would be very cool to have a star party at green bank so it's very dark skies down there because
you're you're also in a radio quiet zone too so definitely not a lot of light pollution down there
which is fantastic dark skies and i start quest we'll have a lot of
astrophotographers uh down there as well we tend to have classes we'll have children's activities
there as well um certainly a full day of lectures and we'll have keynotes uh and
and so on so it's gonna be a really exciting event uh but in this case this is more of our
our way of of getting people excited uh on a virtual
platform at least right now uh i've been to a radio
telescope i went to the uh the fast telescope in china and i remembered that they you couldn't
bring anything electronic up there at all uh that you know it was uh
you know no cell phones no you know a bunch of stuff except that for some reason they let us
take video and use our not make phone calls but you know uh actually take photographs
and stuff like that but i found it very interesting caitlin that they were doing a lot of work by having um it was either donkeys or
mules pull things around and uh you know it was like
when they wanted radio silence that meant no running no combustible engines nothing
you know it was like that uh what's that they brought some tesla's do you think they bought tesla's now to run around
there never puts on you know maybe i don't think so um but uh what's it like at green bank
is it are there times when it's truly radio silence like that or um it can certainly feel like that
for sure uh so your your cell phone can at least turn on it could be used as an alarm clock and
that's probably about it for its function i oh so everything else is like blocked
and won't even work correct correct so i you can barely use your gps
to get there if you're good uh if you know but as long as there's signs
everywhere thankfully uh and also the green bank uh telescope is large enough uh that you're
driving down the road and you see it and you see it's uh it's that direction so it's really not that hard to get to
but there's a there's a barricade where to a certain point uh it certainly passed the visitor's
center and passed a lot of the offices that they have there um you get to that barricade
and your car can no longer go past that point you have to diesel vehicles um so that way no
electric sparks from your car can offset any signals oh wow okay yeah so so they keep things very uh
very radio and silence so someone's asking is there like a small town nearby that's
all radio silence as well there are yes i yes absolutely and the
the folks down there i love it by all means um it's it's very interesting to get
away uh from just the the technology for a little bit so yes there are landlines
landlines are still being used down there uh yes phone cards are definitely a thing
down there i they have to use very specialized microwaves
given by the observatory uh so it's a very large
piece of equipment of a microwave but yes uh so you can't just go go to lowe's and get a microwave and
bring it back nope yeah not going to best buy no no by all means no you are not right
at all uh it gets to a point though that if if they find any sort of a leak
a radio leak from anything they will go to your house in what looks
like a ghostbusters uniform uh with all the the wires and the antennas and they'll scope out
like what's what's the leak where's the leak where is oh my goodness well i i met this lovely
elderly lady who had them come to her house one day and it turns out it was
her uh her dog bed uh her dog bed her dog bed was actually leaking radio
waves just strong enough that the telescope blocks away uh was actually picking up that signal
so they replaced her dog bed with a certified uh radio quiet dog bed
yes were there electronics in this dog bed i mean it was a heated dog
that's why we go through the expensive emi rfi testing we do for the pmc8 scott so we can run it in in the green bank
bank right yeah no is that true that's not true is it no we do so we no we we do uh tests for
emissions we don't do susceptibility testing which means we get we can get impacted by something outside but
but like i imagine i don't know what the requirement is to be there with the system but you know we do we do that testing we
should send one to green bank and see let's see how it works to fill a pass
that could get interesting or hide it into a dog bed or something like that and see if they can find it you know easter eggs absolutely easter
eggs yeah they didn't they didn't see it would have to actually fit in one of those big easter egg things but you know you bury it
there's woods [Laughter]
so uh what was the other question mike wiesner wanted to know he said what about
cameras with wi-fi and nfc and telescopes that use wi-fi well we were kind of talking about some
of them we don't know about all the different telescopes out there but it might be interesting to
try to control a pmc8 although you know it would be the tablet
or something too that would be the kind of the equation there but but enough of that
you know we know it needs to be radio quiet up there and i think it's very cool and i think it's also
ultra cool how dark it is at green banks so um uh do you already know what your
first uh program will be on seven months of science yes i am so excited for our first speaker which will
be may 12th at uh 7 pm eastern so our first speaker
is going to be paul knightley who is a student at the arkansas center for space and planetary
science uh a couple summers ago he uh which ended up being like a huge
month-long expedition for him but what's cool is that he got to do a
test run in the middle of nowhere canada in the canadian wilderness
uh in this habitat that the canadian space agency actually built
and had people actually simulate themselves to be martian astronauts so they had
hardly any communication to the outside world they had tasks that they had to do they had certain
equipment that they had to use and live all in this little habitat bubble
that was truly in the middle of nowhere in canada uh so it's and so he's going to be
talking about his experiences on being a merchant astronaut and certainly what all the tasks that he got
to do um he had to also test out the spacesuits that they gave them
as well so it's going to be very exciting to hear his uh his story yeah
so i'm interested in that that's for sure uh we had i had an earlier conversation with uh
john briggs which i'll talk about this later but uh he's gonna have a presentation tonight on the
global star party about staying over over the winter in uh in antarctica
and what that was like and so we we had this big conversation about how staying in a place like that
okay and like your speaker uh you know subjecting yourself to this
kind of isolation because when we get to astronauts to mars uh it's going to be very much like that
you know it's going to be very isolated and it really makes me wonder
and maybe there's a lot of psychological studies
that go on when you're doing these kinds of tests uh you know how how do people
you know behave during those times do you become some sort of uh neurotic you know person
or do you do you somehow learn to deal with it so i think it's an unusual person that can
do that i'm sure they've they've uh spent a lot of time studying the
exploration of the 1800s of people that went up in them because they were really truly isolated from
everybody because they didn't have any communications at all right so that's really a whole another level
in my mind in terms of isolation right that's very true
very true well uh caitlin i i appreciate you coming on to the show
today is there anything more that you'd like to pass along before uh
we get to jerry here i i don't believe so but just keep up with
explore scientific with calendar uh and uh i will be producing
monthly flyers with whatever speaker is of the month for seven months of science
and so just stay tuned very very cool very cool i like that background behind you too
caitlin that's thank you bye a lot of our the the heroes and adventure and all of
that behind you that's really cool all right well that's great um uh
jerry i'll i'll turn this over to you um how's everything going in the world of
open go to community good uh we've got some some good stuff going on
uh since we've released the uh new firmware update um the indie uh folks
uh michael fulbright originally wrote the indie driver for the pmc8 back three forty
almost four years ago i guess it's been and uh that the the users is probably a good
four or five six users that use nd and actually actually it's more than that
because the asi air product is a linux based system that
uses the nd driver system so we have a lot more people that use our pmc indie driver
through the asi air but but wes mcdonald's been working with
uh uh one fella his name's carl i can't recall his last name i apologize carl's been working on doing
the upgrades to the indy driver to support the new firmware and that's been working out
pretty well so that that kind of so we've got some active development
going on for the system uh it's it's going to pick up more in the future
so in that regard the open go to communities i don't want to say it's thriving but
it's active yeah oh very good
i did a uh survey i had to bring that up and look at the results a few days ago i
asked uh i did a survey on what people were what their plans were for the firmware
whether think they were going to install it or not and and if they did install it what problems they had or if they didn't have
any problems so let me let's see if i can bring that web page that'll take me a minute
to get that up here
um i'll share my screen here when i get it
pekka is saying he'd like to speak about usb protocol with you sometime usb protocol in terms of um
well so usb is basically serial port and there's this i can talk about the
serial communications that goes on between the pmc8 and the host computer i
don't know a huge amount about the actual usb hardware standard i don't think he probably means
that but uh but we could talk about the communications protocol for sure
where the hell's that pole at i'm trying to find
oh here we go all right all right cool so this is this is the
first time i've looked at it in probably three or four days um
it looks like it's changed uh a little bit so i'm gonna bring that up
i may have shared this last week so here it is
all right so i asked what kind of amounts people had
looks like even today there's more xs2s out there that that responded at
the poll anyway compared to the ixs 100 even though the ixos 100 is
a little less expensive than the but the xs2 has been around longer so i think we expected um
so about five percent of people say they don't plan on updating
um [Music] eighteen percent said they do plan
and then uh several people 14 that doesn't add up to 100 but again
you know not everybody answered that question i guess uh or selected one of those um
so the way i look at this is about 40 of
the people that have already updated those that plant
that plan on they planned on doing it 40 have updated their firmware and uh so this has changed
since we saw it last time yeah and uh still a majority of people
have not had problems doing the update and then uh only a few people had a minor problem
that they could get over they could figure it out so that's a good that's a good sign that
when you have the vast majority of people being able to do the upgrade with little
or no problem that's that's a good thing now and we're always there to help
you know people that can't figure it out for some reason uh it is it is kind of tricky it is a
somewhat technical we're trying to make it easier as we go on it's it's uh this hobby is just a
technical hobby you know i say that i think so well over
the last year and a half i've said that several times on the show and it's just it's part of the attraction well that's that is that right that's
what the hobby that's really what the hobby is about is right is is not just
for some people it's it's just as much looking at the stars or the objects in the sky as it is to
run the equipment to learn about the equipment sure
so that's that's progressing the results here are similar to what i would expect uh when i started the poll
so have you found anything that um uh about the new release that you've been
disappointed in or you you're going gosh we should really improve on this particular aspect
are you still feeling pretty solid about well that way it was about a month ago
what's that when we're in the middle of the beta testing that's when we had that stuff go on
yeah we finally you know there was some real there's like two or three real subtle problems that if we hadn't had
our public beta you might not be lurking out there we would not discover it for a while maybe
uh or you know because even with the previous version of the firmware we went we went probably two or three years
or two years at least on on a couple of problems that we never that the customer ever ran into and
yeah and one customer configured his system a certain way or used it a certain way and discovered the issue
and luckily we were able to repeat the problem that's the key to solving that problem
of course is to be able to repeat it so that's always important for anybody that's out there that that has a problem
try to describe your configuration as accurately as you can to us and try to uh try to see if it's
repeatable for yourself it might just be a one-off thing that that that particular setup that you had
was goofed up somehow and when you go back to redo it again from scratch that it's not there anymore
try to make it repeatable for yourself and if it is then tell us about it and then we'll try to repeat it on different
on different computer systems that's really the biggest thing that we find scott is that
the variation in different people's computers is really a large driver for some issues
uh we know that at a certain level we know the hardware is the same for everybody so unless you
find a hardware problem that's really particular it's not going to be a hardware problem it's not in the same way with the firmware there's a
lot of people using this firmware over the years and so if you run into a problem and suspect it's the firmware
then and you're the first one to discover it then we're gonna probably show a little bit
of skepticism on that and it's a bias i know it's a bias and it's not maybe not such a good bias but
again we have to start somewhere we have to assume what's the most likely well basically what's the most likely
skeptical but you're going to ask a bunch of questions yeah we'll start asking questions pointed questions about their setup
to try to see what else it could be before we start suspecting it's the firmware right right
uh let's see um david simard is saying that
[Music] i he said he he tried this weekend
to answer uh but it's not working for me could tell you i will try to put it on
this coming weekend so oh is he talking about the trying to
firmware this weekend yeah let's talk about yeah um andrew corkill
reports he says he did not download i haven't downloaded and installed the new firmware yet i have great tracking
after doing polar alignment on the explore scientific last mandy g11
[Music] yeah i wouldn't expect anything less
david simard says there's no way you could replicate me it was a mistake made 61 years
ago
don't be so hard on yourself yes that's tough yeah we have a we have a
tough audience today you know on themselves not us that's right they're pretty easy on us typically
because yes we try to make them that way right becca wants to know is there an after
party tonight of course there is of course so we gotta go we have a good lineup to
uh of course tonight we will have david levy and david eicher um uh
we have um uh we tried to get on um uh stella kafka again but she's
again uh kind of wiped out this time i think it's because she's getting vaccinated which is a good reason
um you know and you got vaccinated too right jerry [Music]
we'll see how you do i don't i feel normal right now you feel normal right now yeah you don't
have my arms not sore or anything i'm pushing it feels good so let's see we have the
schedule looks like this uh of course david levy starts david eicher comes on next
molly wakeling is going to do a special presentation called how energy is made in the sun so
that's pretty cool uh i mentioned that john briggs and i were having a conversation
he'll be on after molly and his presentation is called the long
night at amundsen scott south pole station okay which is kind of cool
living the stars will be on uh chuck allen will be on uh to do the door prizes from the
astronomical league and then we'll do a 10-minute break and then uh jerry's still standing okay we will have
he he'll come on at 9 25 and then we have adrian bradley who will come on he's got
a little presentation called moonrise which is cool chuck allen from the astronomical league will do
another one of his really amazing talks that guy's that guy's uh presentations
are so mesmerizing um and then molly wakeling will come back on to do astrophotography
uh with us because it'll be dark in california by that time and then about 10 20 the after party
will start and so uh those of you you know we we may have peop other people just kind of
joining in um that already have the link and are regulars on the global star party
if you're not a regular and you want to come on uh watch for the uh there there will be a
link in the description uh when we go live of where you can log
in for the waiting room and uh you'll meet up with ken ken martz i imagine we'll probably open
the waiting room about magic what'd you call him ken
kent not ken you say ken martz did i say kenmore
sorry ken mars i mean can't maybe there is a ken mart's out there i don't know i bet there is yeah oh anyways if you're
listening now ken martz we were not talking about you okay um
we have uh no you'll you'll be there in the waiting room with kent okay and kent will just make sure that
you're that your video and audio is a good enough condition to go broadcast
live with us you know all the pro the program is is about
astronomy so you need to be on topic and you have to present you know it's not just some place to go and hang out
because we'll make you get up in front of the stage and say something or do something so um
but you know what you do as long as it's astronomy we're good with it you know some music um don't mistake don't miss
it you know don't mistake astronomy for astrology don't don't think that i know i gotta put astrology in there didn't astral
astrologers were kind of the ones that got the astronomers their jobs though right they were the first ones to really
think about the stars in a certain way of course yeah so you know without the astrologers
there would be no astronomers i had a good high school friend of mine contact me
and says are you you still doing astrology i said no no i'm not still doing that i
can't tell you how many times that i've been like even on the news with other people
and stuff like that uh and they they call the astronomers astrologers you know and
this is you know news people it's not cringe-worthy that's when you cringe yeah right and you're trying to be all
smooth and everything and kind of glide through that but you know you just and you don't want to like snap their heads off
actually you would like to snap their heads off but that's right right i'm going to knock them off of that
knock it off or at least have a cream pie so you can just like throw it in their face and say look it's astronomy all right so the
astrology cream pie let's make one of those
that's right what uh put mars in conjunction with jupiter on there and then in the morning
right chris larson says um astrology people are the ones that
coined the term super moon and it drives me nuts but you know who gets the benefit from
it the astronomers do so you know i don't i don't really i'm not
that hard on the astrologers you know so if uh you're gonna have a good week
those guys the flat earth people all of those guys you know so so caitlyn said scott don't go there
don't go there on flat earth it's fine yes
okay all right so anyhow um beatrice says
if they think if you talk about constellations that you're automatically an astrologist so
anyways um hey all you guys watching right now make sure that you uh tune in tonight okay global star
party uh starts at 8 p.m central it's our 43rd
event um and um you know uh we'll be looking for you
and uh you can help us out by liking sharing subscribing ringing that little bell
that they have on youtube or whatever 43 that's right i expect a huge audience for
caitlyn's program seven months of science you know so i want at least 7 000 people watching
live okay so what does this uh i see i don't know kim
like just barged in what's going on dude ken martin's on my phone my phone started blowing
blowing up that y'all were making fun of me so i had to find out what's going on
well jerry incorrectly said that i called you ken he accused me we can roll the tape
we can roll the tape on that one look i i unpaired baseball i disabled the instant replay button on
on this broadcast it's already been recorded i think on youtube i i played i um fired some baseball games friday
night okay much worse than ken [Laughter]
much we've all been called much worse worse than can you know i mean ken's a nice thing to be
called right just one letter off yeah it's just one letter off that's right yeah mike wiesner i heard ken too mike
you're not helping me out here dude i was wondering if scott was slurring
his speech a little bit i was gonna i do i do splurge my speech i do uh
when i worked at meat instruments uh and they they wanted to like throw me out in front of the camera i was scared to
death you know and um i tended to slur my words a lot it
wasn't because i was intoxicated or anything but you know it was just because that's just
the way it was so um i think i still tend to do that
from time to time sorry about that ken so you're calling you're calling can a slur
is that what you just just call
you guys are hysterical so don't get us off on a tangent it's
not hard oh please that's right that's right i had a day full of meetings and this is what i
end up with okay that's right after all that science and everything that's going on all that nasa stuff what have you been
looking at nasa caitlin oh i we're we're coming up on something really big with nasa
um early june you need her to hear first folks uh early june uh
nasa will be selecting the next discovery mission uh so there are four missions in the
running and it's gonna get narrowed down to one uh so discovery missions uh
can you say or are or is that a secret yes yes yeah absolutely so so the four in
the running i i don't remember the acronyms uh as to what they stand for though but we
have veritas which is for venus we have davinci plus
for venus which now that i said that out loud sounds like a vitamin than a mission you gotta yeah the plus
and now with davinci plus yes it has it has zinc and vitamin d yes all on venus
so you know yeah you're gonna need it i then you have the ivo which is the io volcanic
observatory uh and then you have oh yeah definitely and then you have
trident which is a neptune triton orbiter oh nice wow so in our audience right
here if you had to vote which one would you vote for oh no [Laughter]
your tax dollars at work okay so
we need to have a serious conversation with you i i can happily say that there
are instruments with each mission that i am excited about oh wow there you go so you don't care
which one goes right no not really not not me personally i think
every mission certainly has its its oohs and odds for sure like for for venus specifically
with the two venus missions we haven't had a venus mission ever so
ever never ever is that because the united states has never had a venus so we rely on russia's
images for our images of venus right yes the the now the raz cosmos
uh russian sector and also the europeans as well so this will be our our full-fledged
american missions uh to venus if they get selected the uh io one uh will be joining the fleet
already around jupiter which is the juno mission uh we've already been there with galileo
back in the 90s um voyager flybys new horizons flyby
you also have the juice mission from the european space agency coming up for the jupiter mission as
well uh but io being so volcanically active io would get its own mission so
that would be pretty cool and then obviously neptune and triton is very exciting because neptune
never had its own uh mission mission yeah we got to whisk by and take a
couple of nice photos and goodbye so nice photos yeah hello neptune is
gorgeous but how long do you think it'll be caitlyn before we have orbiters around all the
all the planets including the planet pluto well
or humans or humans dwarf planets are still planets that's right they're still playing there
we go yes i knew there was a reason i liked you guys i
i think unfortunately it it'll take a while i that are our main obvious
obstacle is uh is funding and that's that's the the whole shtick of it though but you know what
i there's a lot of exciting missions coming up for nasa though so i besides the discovery mission to be
selected in early june we also have a lot of lunar missions coming up as well uh
starting at the end of this year actually where there is a rover that's going to go to the moon very soon
so that's going to be exciting um we have a rover i believe the end of this year or at least early 2022
if it doesn't get delayed i i believe 2023 has a couple
uh coming up as well we have the viper uh rover to the south pole of the moon uh
coming up as well so that's gonna be exciting and then all of these rovers are
gearing up toward our artemis uh program which is essentially going to be apollo 2.0
that's kind of like the surveyor oh yeah i guess the surveyor missions that were done in the 60s it's the same kind of thing the ranger
missions i guess exactly that's exactly the the blueprints that we are
using at this point is can we scope out the potential areas that we want to send our
astronauts to very very interesting you know the the
upcoming moon missions i'm i really wax nostalgic over it you know i think any of us that saw apollo
happen you know uh will will feel the way that that uh at least three of us here do you
were too young but you know so wasn't even poor you can watch old uh reruns of the apollo mission
i have now i bet you have i bet you have um the um
um but you know it i think nasa as an organization is just absolutely amazing uh they
one of the things i find because i'm only searching uh for outreach information that they
have and by the way uh uh you know i know that you're a nasa solar system ambassador i am too
i can't are you a ambassador yet i am not i probably need to make that happen
jerry so but um uh you know the thing that's great about
nasa is the kind the quality of outreach they do the amount of information that they put out
make freely available so i run a lot of the the videos and stuff on our programs
which i love esa as well they i think they compete with nasa somehow in this regard um but uh they they all do a great job
and um you know so uh the a really inspiring uh video that i just
ran was um you know people who have jobs at nasa and one of them was like a
fashion designer another one was uh you know jobs that were very unlikely
very very unlikely that you would think you know you think that you would you would have to be like you caitlyn
where you studied you know space science and you know i mean you're a bona fide scientist you
know so uh but you've got people there they they have to make uh
the spacesuits they've got to do there's a lot of support and to get people back on the moon uh is
gonna take tens of thousands of people and all that energy and effort to get them back up there and
then to go to mars will take even more i think so but um uh but uh
you know i i uh i you know admire that you're that you're working at nasa
i think it's great and uh and we love the idea that you're coming on to our programs
uh to talk about seven months of science it's going to be wonderful um uh as far as ssa goes
uh they are allowing me to use uh the uh global star parties uh
official ssa events so that's kind of cool wonderful yeah i
got i got 43 or 42 that i gotta backlog into my schedule here so um
but uh yeah that was really wonderful and uh i'm going to try to get uh solar system
ambassadors to be an official guest host of global star party at one point so it'll be a lot of
fun until that time uh and you know that happens every week
for global star party until those times uh we will see you and just keep looking up hey scott hey
scott hang on a second i got i got to make a joke with uh harold harold locke
star trek fashions are back in vogue let's just make sure that none of them
are red uniforms because that's always a bad color scheme for star trek characters oh
is it oh they they're the ones is that why you're wearing red today that's sacrificial guy right there
yeah the security officers sacrificial guys on star trek the only people who ever die on star
trek were wearing red really yeah hummer
[Laughter]
they always have some weird name that you're never going to remember anyways right so they just off those guys right they were just one
offs but they uh the yeah of course you're the aliens hate the star and they also
sometimes off them too so yeah the aliens just hated red yeah caitlyn thank you very much for
being on the show ken kent uh thanks for barging in and uh uh we'll see you tonight kent
will be uh your official waiting room uh sponsor and uh so and jerry if your arm
doesn't swallow to the size of a watermelon i hope to see you on tonight okay and take care take care thank you
bye caitlyn thank you
[Music]
hi i'm kent mars with explorer scientific today we're going to talk about eyepieces when you're out visually
observing the telescope is half the equation the other half the equation are eye pieces the explore scientific family of
eyepieces are waterproof which means they're easy to clean and do other atmospheric disturbances do not
affect them the eyepieces come in these decorative will tyrion planosphere boxes
the blue one or the white one the newest member of the family of explore scientific eyepieces is a 52 degree eyepiece we
developed it in response to customer requests the other members of the family are the 62 degree eyepiece
the 68 degree eyepiece the 82 degree eyepiece the 92 degree eyepiece the 100 degree
eyepieces and the astonishing 120 degree 9 millimeter eyepiece
which immerses you in the night sky take a look at our family of eyepieces
or to buy them go to explorescientific.com and click on the eyepiece tab
uh
[Music]
all right scott good night i'll see you we'll see you later

Transcript for Part C:

um
um
about everything else
wow
so
thank you
so who do we have here we got james the astrophotographer cameron gillis book davies aaron
thompson mike wiesner cloudy wendy monday in
arizona but hi everybody aaron thompson uh
i think i mentioned cameron gillis but if not i'll mention him again um bergman scooter
um it says great day today uh but baby says oh keys
we're back norm hughes uh beatrice heinz hello
um david samard um eduardo simone
and i think that's it for right now but
thanks for watching everybody this program although i'm live right now
this program with dr barth was pre-recorded because he's getting
uh some dental work done so uh could not do it so we recorded it yesterday but um
anyways i'll be chatting with you live
[Music] um [Music]
[Music]
[Music]
hello everybody it's uh scott roberts with explore scientific and uh this is uh dr daniel barth's
seventh um program on how do you know uh if you don't know daniel barth is a
stem educator in fact heads up all of stem for the university of arkansas
based out of fayetteville arkansas he and i knew each other from many years ago when he was working in a
telescope shop called scope city and uh so one of the things that he wanted to
touch on was some of the common questions and answers that he
would give for people selecting eyepieces and you
know what telescope you know how did telescopes work and and so he would uh
yeah you know one of the things you have to do if you're going to uh get people outfitted for the gear
that they need to explore the night sky is uh especially if they're going to do that
visually is getting them into a nice set of eyepieces that's going to really
let them enjoy the experience and so um so anyways
it's nice to see all of you i hope you had a great weekend it's beautiful weather now in arkansas
it's actually quite warm we've had some clear nights had a beautiful full moon last
night that was nice to watch this week starting
tomorrow of course we'll have the global star party it's our 43rd one and so um
that is uh that's something i wanted to point out it'll start at 8 o'clock central
i also wanted to remind all of you to go on to explore scientific dot com
forward slash skies up and down load your free digital copy of sky's up magazine
we did print out a few copies here but it's an amazing issue with lots of
beautiful illustrations and great articles from astronomers and contributors from all over the world
and when i say all over the world i mean all over the world it's it is a global magazine it's free and
uh so sky's up is a a good resource um we do concentrate uh on
uh you know the mars landing of course that was of huge interest uh by all the people that were there um
there's nice commentary from marcelo souza who's the senior editor there and uh
you know it was uh this is the second issue that we've come out with uh it's the first one we've done some
print printings of if you guys are really super serious about getting a printing it's actually
kind of expensive to get a printed issue of it but this is 74 pages of
skies up and i think you'll you'll really enjoy it
well i guess without further ado i will switch to dr daniel barth he's probably
watching right now as i mentioned he's getting some dental work done so could not be here
live in person but he might he might be in the background checking it all out
with his mouth wide open anyways take care and uh i will see you
on the other side of this uh recording hi everybody welcome back to the hobby no show i'm dr daniel barth here with
our friend and host scott roberts from explore scientific and we're going to take a little bit of a
different approach this week we're going to talk about telescopes and magnification and this one is
particularly for all our astronomy and outreach friends some of our teacher pals are going to be
interested in this because they teach optics as well but that's a smaller subset but for
everyone who's ever set up a telescope in a public place uh and scott and i have done this more
times than we can count i do about 50 outreach events a year between stuff with the university local schools
clubs and uh just because i love this stuff but you've got telescope set up and
somebody will come up to you and go hey how many power is that thing that looks pretty nice
you've got maybe an eight inch stop stone how powerful is that telescope how powerful those telescope and of
course the reason for that is the way telescopes were marketed for years not
so much anymore but for years and years and years you would go to a department store
around christmas time and you would see the christmas telescope display and they were all 60 millimeter
refractors so right so two and a quarter inch refractors and uh they would show one and they
would say this is our good telescope and it's not a simple alt-azimuth amount and it says this one does 120 power
anymore okay let me show a little bit longer model they say this is our better
telescope this one will do 350 power
and then you see this is our best telescope and it's a very flimsy
spindly equatorial mount yeah it's not slow motion cables coming off of it
and it looks cool this will do 800 power oh wow that'll make you seem like you're
standing on the moon right exactly right um it's kind of like saying we have three kinds of
uh ford pintos and this one has a speedometer that goes to 70. this one has a speedometer that goes to 120
and this one has a speedometer that goes to 350 miles an hour but it's still for pinto and at some
point if you know anything at all about optics uh or telescopes you kind of go yeah okay
and so folks have said well they couldn't sell it if it wasn't true oh my gosh the faith and
marketing uh of course scott the the answer comes to us how do you calculate the
magnification on the telescope and i suppose it's a good place to start sure we've got a very lovely telescope
here and i think it's it's not quite in our view so i'm going to hold it up this is a a dresser and this is a 100
millimeter refractor it's a four inch lens very nice product and uh it's very rugged and it's got a a
nice focuser and a carry handle on it so how do we calculate the magnification
well the answer is every telescope has a focal length so the distance between the objective lens
and where the light would come to focus and this is actually a 102 compressor
102 and the focal length here is 600 millimeters friends so
uh 60 centimeters and you figure that's about two feet 30 centimeters to the foot if you like english units
so it's a 600 millimeters from here to where the light would come to a point
now if we take a look i'm going to set this down it's kind of a beefy instrument i love it but it's a little bit and the
eyepiece that came with it folks will see sure the nice 20 is it a
26 yes it's a 26 millimeter plaster length and we'll talk about what possible means in a couple of minutes
but basically we've got these two numbers we've got 600 and we've got 26 and essentially you take the
focal length of the telescope and you divide by the focal length of the eyepiece so basically
25 millimeters four times it's a hundred four times six is 24 and so this 26 millimeter eyepiece gives
us 24 power at the eye at the eyepiece when you have that in the telescope
and the typical response when you have someone who's buying a new telescope and it comes with this lovely
eyepiece right only 26 power yeah that can't quite be enough
right that can't be enough and uh okay so get back to the
how do they get six or seven hundred power on the telescope they have devices called barley lenses
and it basically it's a it's a compressor lens for your photographic people out there and basically it's
concave and it lengthens it effectively lengthens the focal length so you can take
a 60 millimeter by uh 700 focal length telescope and you
can go okay let's go ahead and put a barlow in there and all of a sudden it's 1400 millimeters
and you take 1400 millimeters and then you put a three millimeter eyepiece in there and uh oh 1400 divided by three well
that's pretty impressive that's yeah it's close to 500 power and um so this is the episode we call
magnification yes you can no you can't and uh it comes down to a number of
things but let's go ahead and talk about that eyepiece for a minute um
we have some eye pieces here you saw the little 26 millimeter i think this will be instructed this is a
26 millimeter fossil eye piece and getting it angled at the camera here
right nice out here it's got a big lens right one gives you a very nice
large cone of light and one gives you a very small one and this is a nine millimeter by the time you get down to a three
millimeter literally some of these old telescopes the three millimeter eyepiece
uh the the lens aperture you were looking through was tiny uh a couple of millimeters
smaller a smaller cone of light than a pencil point it was very tiny and so when you start getting
magnification uh and you get greater and greater shorter and shorter eyepieces generally
to make them at all affordable you make the eyepiece
ocular or the lens elements and the eyepiece very very small so when you're talking about these eye
pieces we have different designs this one's a possible and all of these things have pod names p-l-o-s-s-l and the o has
an out on it because it's your gate but also who is an austrian fellow in the 1860s who developed this
uh this lovely design is it purple and irvil i don't know if he was dutch
or german i really don't know another fellow in the 1850s um
and then we have a couple of very nice say gee well when i get high magnification
uh and these eyepieces i tend to get very small apertures to look through and i get a
very narrow field of view and so people always used to say well it's a trade-off you can't have a nice
wide field in high magnification uh on the other hand here's a here's a
lovely piece of glass this is an explore scientific 82 degree field eyepiece and this is a
monster this is a couple of pounds of glass and you can see this is a much bigger format than our
inch and a quarter and this is a two inch format so it's a very nice big eyepiece and yes
it has a very has a lovely uh big aperture to look through and obviously a lot more glass in this
and more elements um the old designs the earfuls and the serene
robsons were two element eye pieces uh the herbals i believe are a three the fossils are a
four um some of these big modern designs are seven even nine and more elements do you know
how fans got how many elements in this i don't uh right at the top of my head i
would say that from memory it's nine nine nine sounds about right uh and so you're talking about the
difference between shaping two pieces of glass precisely in a fairly small size
as opposed to doing nine elements in a very large format and so can you
get away from trade-offs you can but you need to keep in mind friends that in
all cases it's the eyepiece that does the magnifying and it's not the telescope
when someone says how many powers that telescope what they're really saying is that they're not very familiar with
telescopes and how they work a telescope itself doesn't magnify anything
the telescope's job in fact is to gather light and
if you can think about people often use this analogy they talk about big telescopes as light buckets uh you can think about this
if you take a bucket and you say oh it's going to rain tonight i need some rain water for a washing or
for watering my plants and so you go set your five gallon plastic bucket out in your yard and if
it rains two inches you'll have two inches of rain in that bucket well if you set out a small little uh
you send out a small little uh shot glass you'll also get two inches of rain but
the volume of water collected in the large bucket is far greater than a small glass so the amount of the light
you're going to get at your eye is dependent upon the aperture the size
of your telescope so your telescope doesn't magnify anything it simply collects light why do we want a larger telescope and
aperture fever is real many of our friends watching will go oh yeah i started out with a six-inch job
and now i have this i have 20 24-inch thing that i need a ladder to climb onto
right uh and why well the more light you get into the
telescope the brighter damage will be and for every telescope there are those things
that are just a little bit too faint to see and we talk about the magnitude of the
stars and the higher the number you get the fainter it is a good pair of binoculars will get
you down to about magnitude nine under very nice guys uh by 50 or 10 by 50. you get a six inch
uh like a dobsonian or if you're very left with a sixth refractor uh that bad boy will get you down to
about magnitude 11. to see pluto which is about magnitude 15
right now you need about a 16 inch telescope in order to get that and each magnitude
is a logarithmic scale so just going a couple more magnitudes involves
a lot more glass whether that be a mirror or a lens and so the telescope aperture
gathers light it also a little larger telescope because you
can see fainter things effectively can probe farther out into the universe you see things that are farther away and fainter
right the other thing that most people don't understand they understand the idea intuitively oh
bigger telescope more light fainter object farther away i increase what i refer to as my light
grasp yes but the aperture also controls resolution
all right the other somewhat i won't say it's a city what's the detail that's
what they wanted and you got it too scott you have an impressive telescope
and someone comes up only half joking can you see the flag on the moon was that have you had that question manny maybe
how many times i have yeah and you try to explain no that's that's a three by
five foot object and it's even if it's flat on the ground um i've had people
who claim to have done it okay they called it space trash or moon trash and you're like wow okay this is now
i i calculated it out one time just because i was tired of the question so we did it as a problem in an astronomy
class you'd need a mirror about a quarter mile in diameter and it would have to be in orbit
because uh nothing that size could support itself on the ground i suppose you could have
an array of mirrors like the the very large telescope has a hazard [Music]
right but it would need something ridiculous like might be cheaper just to fly a spacecraft down it would it would
literally be far cheaper to fly to the reconnaissance orbiter which did take pictures of the
you know the right keeper to build a reconnaissance orbiter or higher elon musk
with your knife
the whole thing is that yes if you want to see more detail a larger aperture will give you the resolution so the
telescope gives you brightness resolution the eyepiece gives you magnification and you think oh
so as long as i can stack barlow lenses in things then i'm good but in fact um there's there's always
there's always trade-offs and if we think about magnification one of the most productive ways to think about
magnification although this is harder for young people today than it used to be think about a film projector or a slide
projector scott when we were in school you had film strips right little bit that's right yeah or uh operator
you know so right yeah club kids the operator right your parents may have had slides color
slides from a vacation in the house they have the old uh bombshell carousel
protector yeah but think about film projector friends so we've got a piece of film the film
has only so much information on it in real way telescope also collects
information that's what we call resolution how fine the detail can you see picture a photograph of someone take it
the president goes to make a speech and he stands and he waves to the crowd
and hi there everybody and you get this shot where you can see he's wearing a wristwatch okay well
if we magnify that photo can we see who made the wish launch can we see timex or rolex or
can we see what time it is can we see the second hand can we see the number 12 at the top
at some point you realize gee that information just isn't in this photo it's
not in this piece of film that's what resolution is the more resolution we have the more
information is there and modern cell phones are astounding modern cameras are astounding
you can take a photo and blow these things up you can take a photo with a good canon
nikon sony slr camera and you can blow this thing up and make a picture
four five six feet across and it looks fine looks great however
at some point this breaks down there's no more information to be had
back to our projector analogy we've got our piece of film that has only so much information you
can see the president as a picture of well i don't know it's a picture of richard nixon hi i'm robert crook
and he's wearing a wristwatch and you're looking at this photo okay well you know you can magnify it as much
as you want to but you're not going to get as much detail as you want all right i had someone who was very
disappointed to learn this fact in a very hard way uh when i was selling telescopes he came
into the store and says i hear you sell microscopes yes we do can i use your microscope to magnify
something and we're like dude nothing gooey or slimy he says no i have a photo and i want to look at the negative
we're like okay cool let's go and uh it's this picture of a desert
scene looking out the window of a car and actually looked like a droplet of water that's reflecting the sun he says it's a ufo and i'm hoping to see
windows or landing gear and of course aliens aliens waving in a window he was he was
disappointed he said it's just not there i thought with a magnet with it
with a microscope i could see windows or landing gear or something yeah and it was an old kodachrome
picture from the 1960s and so of course the information wasn't there i said look at the edge of the
window he said oh it's kind of grainy i said yeah there's a limitation to how much information is in the film
we didn't quite get it but i'm sure our audience does the amount of information going back to
our analogy with the film projector that's what the aperture of the telescope gives you
the projector system is what the eyepiece does for you if you think about a telescope and
you're pointing at saturn or the moon and you're pointing at the moon you're looking at a lovely crater like
ptolemais and you're going ooh there's a mountain in the middle and i want to see the shadow and i want to see the contour of the mountain
you get this on your telescope there's only so much information there you can start stacking eyepieces
but at some point you run out of information with our film projector analogy there's
only so much detail on the screen right think about it from a movie
there's only so much detail there could you take a projector and put it on a bigger
screen or if you like take your dvd and put it on a more gigantic television monitor yes you can but whether it's a
32 inch i bought it cheapy domain monitor at walmart on sale for black friday for
a hundred bucks or whether it's a you know twenty five thousand eight five inch you know amazon monitor
[Music] you know what the amount of information on the dvd doesn't change just because you plug in a better television set
right the same way here the amount of information coming out of the projector doesn't change if you think about pointing it at saturn
when the telescope comes to focus at a point a dot of light that's why we
don't look at the sun kids because it's going to focus the information on a very small place that would blind you don't do that don't
point objects at the sun well when we have our image of saturn and it's in a pinpoint
what the eyepiece does like the projector it blows that up so we can see it but
there's only so much light if we took our projector and we're showing an image on a screen
say six feet away and it's a fairly small image and it's very bright and we say yeah it's cool it's bright
it's sharp but it's not big enough remember the old days we would back the projector up so it filled
the screen in the front of the classroom right if you keep backing the projector up the image will
keep getting the larger and you're like well that's great but
we're not changing the amount of light coming out of the packaging
and eventually we can pull that projector back far enough where the image is so faint we can't
detect it and the details don't look sharp anymore they do not they do not we're running
into two problems scott and you've nailed them exactly the resolution limit how much information is there and two
the brightness limit how much information is there right and so when we think about a telescope
and again we're talking uh a relatively uh a refractor or a telescope the size
of this progressor here 100 millimeters or less okay a small
modest telescope like a lot of people start with there's essentially two limits the first limit is
the resolution limit and that occurs at about
two times the aperture in millimeters so at two times the aperture you've got
a 60 millimeter telescope that means at 120 power you've run out of resolution
yes you can magnify it more but you're not going to see more features on the rings of saturn or the craters of
the moon you're not going to see more detail in the andromeda galaxy at 2
times the aperture you run out of resolution and at about three times the aperture in
millimeters you've run into the brightness on it where you can no longer see anything uh and for a small telescope
let's say again our 100 millimeter refractor like we have here on the table
you're looking at 200 power is about the resolution limit and about 300 power is the brightness limit now
people will point out and i can see people waiting the moon is really bright jupiter is
really bright yes with very bright objects you can continue to pump the magnification that you can't get
around the resolution so at some point and i suppose there are other people are going to say
but i have an amazing toronto telescope uh scott you know my instrument my personal instrument is a napa max
yeah it's a it's a very rare piece and some people have um oh my gosh
explore makes these really outstanding uh triplet uh refractors which are just
astounding i use the 127 triplet at work in my astronomy classes it's just as
downy but nevertheless no matter how good the glasses the aperture limits resolution that's
true and it limits the amount of light you can get and yes if you point to something very bright
i could take my explore 127 i could take my alpha max which is a 133 millimeter
it's a five and a quarter inch i could point it to the moon and i could stack borla lenses and i could go to 1200 power
but uh when we're talking objects out in space star clusters nebula the brightness
limit really starts to matter how many stars can you see in the field
of view the brightness what we call the light grass the brightness limit really starts to
matter and so this this whole topic of magnification is not as simple as it seems
the other thing that we run into with telescopes is we're sitting at the
bottom of an ocean of air our ocean of air is 60 miles
thick 95 of it is in the first six to eight miles right the 10
kilometer limit you can't breathe anymore and water will boil in a paper cup
held in your hand because the air pressure is so low but nevertheless we're looking through at least even in the
best clearest places we're looking through ten miles
air is problematic because air suspends aerosols out in the desert the
low desert you and i met mountain california and i know you've been to many of our party out in the desert
but air suspends it does it's very clear as far as clouds but suspends dust like
crazy yes it does and so you've got these uh you've got this huge load of
fine fine dust suspended in the upper atmosphere and you can't see it to lift it but
nevertheless if you're anywhere near a city that dust reflects light back down and
causes what we call sky glow uh there's a blanking on a name right
now uh is it the bessler scale i'm thinking not i'm thinking i'm
messing it up the bortles scale portal scale thank you
very much the portal scale very good then it goes from zero to nine
and nine it's like new york city and times square where you can see the moon but that's uh
and uh where i'm at out in the ozarks i have a portal scale of two to three
because i have ridges around me that blocked the light from nearby the nearest town was about 15
miles away and my little local village there's a ridge between me and them so i get some very clear skies um
so there's sky glow and sky glow because it brightens the background if you've got something that is very dim
you're looking at something very dim and there's light coming at you if you hold a candle in front of a car
headlight and stand 20 feet away you're gonna have a really hard time telling whether or not the camera's lit
because the candle lights just being overwhelmed by the background light it's much the same here light pollution
is a problem the other object problem of course is what we call turbulence or as astronomers call it
good seeing yes the air is an ocean it's in motion hello wind breezes and
if you sometimes we notice this if we're very observant we're outside we notice oh the wind is out of the
south but oh look the clouds are coming from the west and moving east and you're like well the wind's blowing from
the south how are the clouds going this perpendicular direction there's different winds at different
atmospheric levels at different altitudes above the ground and of course at the interface where one
is going one way and one is going the other you get turbulence right
this is very much it was an astronomer called pickering and he he created a pickering scale
and pickering scale at one uh was like the worst scene where stars
like completely obliterated um uh swimming in the eyepiece uh
and as it gets better and better perfect would be a 10. okay so if you had you know if you had
bortle one skies with a pickering scale of 10 that would be a perfect night
perfect perfect night a light pollution
yeah that's right um well this this swimming the other thing people
don't realize is that the turbulence in the air it causes
eddies and these have a certain size and if you have a smaller
telescope you're actually looking through the bubble if you have a large aperture telescope
you tend to see the bubble if that makes sense if you think about a soap bubble floating in the air if you
put your eye really close to it don't do that if it pops it hurts ask me how i know but
if you blow a bubble and you're like ooh and you're staring through it uh you don't see the bubble because
you're looking through the whole thing but if you pull back you see the bubble wobbles and shimmers and all sorts of
other things so yes oftentimes when we're looking at we want more magnification we want we
want it all right we all want it all we want a big 16 inch dog
with a mirror the size of a large pizza and yes we want to see we want to be captain
galaxy and see things far far away many micro parsecs and yet the
turbulence in the air bothers us more with the big telescope than it does with a small one
many astronomers use what's called an off an aperture mask they'll take the cardboard plug the size
of the scope and they'll just have a little hole so they're actually using they're stopping down
16 inches down to say four inches and now you've got a basically a four inch
long focus long focal ratio on a telescope instead of a 16 inch short focal range telescope so you can
change a 16 inch f4 to a four inch f16
with the use of a cardboard aperture that will eliminate a lot of problems with seeing and when we talk about
seeing scott those of us who are those of you who aren't familiar if you've ever looked over a barbecue grill
and seen the shimmer coming up if you looked across the hot parking lot on the summer day right air shimmering at night many times
you can see if there's a building with a flat black tar roof and you see the heat shimmer coming
off of that as the heat rises this is simply that air turbulence in action
this is why we don't want to point our telescope and look over a rooftop if we can avoid it we don't want to take
a telescope and look set it up in a parking lot
which hello outreach people we do that all the time okay but that's what we do here is great questions
parking lot outside of the explore scientific store right lovely black asphalt with all
kinds of security lights a lot less surrounded yes and uh it's like oh my gosh this is an awful
environment to look at very nice glass so we have this uh we have these these
problems with both sky glow and turbulence and magnification and
resolution so as we start to test our telescope and people say but what power is it how
many power can this telescope go to it's much i suppose like driving a
sports car and you say well how fast can it go i suppose that depends on do you have good fuel is it a straight road is it
wide road is it narrow is it winding through the mountain tops is it raining is it snowing is the
pavement dry are your tires okay there's a lot of things that go into magnification
but the four primary ones that we need to look at are the aperture
of the telescope because a telescope and an eyepiece fundamentally works with light the size of your aperture gathers the
light with which we work so the bigger the telescope we have the more light we can gather the more things
we can do with it the second is that remember friends it's the eyepiece that does
your magnifying and many people will invest more money in eyepieces than they
did in telescope to begin with right and it's not unusual to see
someone who has say a nice meat or celestron 8-inch sct
one of the most popular telescopes in the world and they probably paid somewhere between 12 and
100 and 2 000 for it and then they open up their box and they've got three thousand dollars worth of eyepieces and
barlow lenses and filters and accessories in the little rocks it's not uncommon at all people who
start with a telescope i wanna i wanna start out with astronomy i've got 250 bucks to spend so you go okay here's a nice small
telescope and then they call you back a month later you know it only came with one eyepiece how do i get more power
open up your walls friends and let me let me tell you about eyepieces and you know you've got three four
five seven nine element eye pieces and more uh and so you go okay well you spent two
hundred fifty dollars uh here's these pretty good eye pieces at about
50 60 a piece and you want at least two more in a barlow lenses so
okay you spent 250 dollars on your telescope let's drop another 400 on high pieces and borrow ones what do
you want a filter set you know okay let's get you a nice uh five filter set for about a hundred bucks and you
quickly realize that like so many hobbies um the basic
equipment the camera body is your first investment and it's it's the little one hello photography uh
any other hobby you can think of uh astronomy skiing skeet shooting uh finally
[Music] fishing yes why are they called blood
um but that's not going to be enough is it so no it's not um so the telescope is your
first investment and you should get as nice an instrument as you can
afford you also have to think about who's going to use this do we want to take it with us or do we
want to put it in a permanent place my big refractor
is seven feet long and it weighs 45 pounds the whole
telescope with the amount of the counterweights and it was 350 pounds of equipment before you had a single eyepiece so
portable i've done it
[Music] because i like to have three people there to help me set it up sure
no one should hurt their back um and i've had this happen before i have had
people come in when i was selling telescopes i want the big one i want i want the 12-inch schmidt cassegrain
i'm really are you sure it's a 65-pound weight you're putting on a foot stand and then you have to hold it
and reach underneath and uh yeah the guy came back two months later
can i get this repaired or should i sell it and the focuser which sticks out the back the focuser
was bent at about a 40 degree angle well what happened i'm out in the desert and putting it up i'm by myself
and i stepped back to reach for the securing bolts and a rock turned under
my foot and the telescope fell on me and broke my ankle oh and uh i was able to drag it
into the car and fortunately it was the left ankle so i could drive back to town but it was a bad day like
okay um so we have to think about and that's why so many people like instruments like this this nice 4-inch
refractor uh because it's a it's a beautiful instrument and yes you can see
you can see 10 000 different things in the sky with it people sometimes mistakenly think you
need something really enormous a six or an eight-inch telescope a simple dobsonian could be a lifetime
instrument right he did stop somebody and show you 40 000 different interesting things in the sky
more than you have a lifetime of exploration a hundred millimeter refractor like this
you can see tens of thousands of surface features on the moon just the moon so
any telescope can be a lifetime instrument but when it comes to our magnification we have to remember
telescopes gather light eyepieces magnify the image but the atmosphere
ultimately puts the upper limit on what we can do both in terms of
light pollution clarity turbulence and the higher power eyepiece you get
the rarer are the circumstances when the sky will be nice enough to allow you to use it sure the other last thing i'll bring up
about uh magnification scott this heliscope magnifies everything
it magnifies every wiggle of the mountain yes
all the everything turbulence gets magnified sky glow problems get magnified the uh if there's
a lack of clarity in the sky that's magnified at 200 power and you know this with your
hand we tell people focus and let go and they want to hold it like it's a motorcycle
right and you you reach out and when you're holding this this handle this focuser knob at 200
power you can see your heartbeat in the stars yes
the other thing when we magnify the amount the field that we get
gets progressively smaller and it's when you're talking about starting
out with an eyepiece i tell people okay start out with the biggest slowest power
eyepiece you have find your object and then gradually switch up to the smaller higher power ivs well why
why can't i just start at 200 power it's like trying to read a newspaper through a mcdonald's straw
can you do it i suppose you can and we get this issue too with
binoculars um every once in a while i get an email i saw this on you know
a facebook ad or on a google ad and it says amazing miracle zoom monocular from 50 to 300 power
you don't need a telescope and i said oh are you supposed to handhold that thing
is it does it have a mount for a tripod well what's a mount and like okay you
can't hold anything at 50 power plus many of those monoculars they have
a very small aperture they're portable right they fit your hand yeah yeah zoom zoom limits the light it has a
lot of glass in it they're usually cheap zooms are usually very narrow field right
they waste a lot of light the cone of light we call the exit people coming up to your eye
is tiny a millimeter or less in size and generally speaking you can't hand
hold anything more than about 12 pounds there are techniques that you can brace
your arms against your torso and all of that and i've used a 15 i have a nice pair of
15 by 70 binoculars i've used them handheld but i'm tucking
my arms in and people are like why are you you look like a tyrannosaurus why are you doing that well you have to brace
yourself because it's magnifying my hand trouble 15 times
can you can you see jupiter in the moons without i'm like yeah try it it's all wiggly i'm like no the binoculars are fine you're weakly
well i'm not well the telescope magnifies any binocular telescope magnifies the vibration
that's why as we get to larger telescopes we're very concerned with a rock-solid telescope we were discussing this just
before the show sure you needed an amount that's rock solid and the heavier your telescope is the
longer it is the more beefy you need the mouth to be
to the point where we're talking you know huge concrete concrete reinforced with steel columns that would
literally hold up the corner of a decent size office building and you're putting a 150 pounds of telescope on top of it
but it needs to be that solid because uh vibration ruins the magnified view
the telescope also we're talking magnification magnifies the motion of the earth
and when we get past about 50 to 75 power depends on how
experienced you are if you're tracking by hand if you've got say a dobsonian which is a simple
altitude azimuth mouth and you're tracking by hand at more than about 50 power
it's difficult and people have noticed i'm looking at the telescope and hears saturn and it's drifting and it goes out
of the field of view so the more magnification the smaller the field
and the more precise movements we need to track with so many people go to a motorized mount
or i have an old-fashioned mount that just has a slow motion knob you line it up one knob tracks the sky
and it works very well but in a hundred power you know every few seconds you're
adjusting that um and that's why people who are interested in high power planetary and lunar views
want to go with the tracking mount not just people who are looking at deep sky things where they want to put a camera
and take a 10 minute exposure so magnification really is a very
multifaceted subject and depends on many factors only some of which are in
our control and when you have a telescope and people say oh i looked through it and
everything was swimming well okay try again another night don't be impatient don't give up
and uh people don't realize or just wait just wait wait yeah sometimes a couple
as it gets later wind dies down the sky becomes more calm at sunset when the sun is going down and
all of a sudden uh you're no longer adding energy to the atmosphere it's very turbulent and for the first
hour or so after sunset when buildings in the ground are cooling off the sky can be very terrible
a couple hours after sunset and this time of year that means starting you're observing around 11
o'clock at night but uh in the winter we get early early sunsets
and of course you can you can see the skies earlier if you're just a refusing and
don't move your clocks for an hour in the spring they'll say oh sunset it's seven o'clock
uh but seriously um i'm hoping that all of our viewers when
they go out they'll go ahead and take the next clear knife and who's a wonderful target and just see how far you can push
your telescope how far can you get to where you honestly aren't getting any more detail because every instrument is individual
how it works with a particular kind of eye pieces are different and so uh if you belong to
an astronomy club you know and someone has this you know really cool eyepiece oh what's that
that's an 82 degree 18 millimeter can i try that and telescope astronomy
clubs are great and people are always willing to let you have a go with their kid sure bring your scope let's give it a go
uh and you can try before you buy if you have a friendly astronomy club nearby but i'm hoping this is helping a
lot of people who uh there's been so many people who have walked in telescopes uh during the pandemic i know you've
mentioned that your business has been exploding and yeah everybody else knows the whole industry
yep the whole industry and people were saying why does it take me four months to get a telescope well
because there's thousands of other people a lot of just like uh and it's kind of like take my money i
want my telescope and i'm hoping that these new observers
i want you to continue to be amazed i want you to continue to enjoy your telescope over the summer we're going to
talk about more things to do with your telescope uh because school's not in session so the
school type activities we're going to transition over the summer into more telescope type activities
next week scott we're going to talk about lunar exploration with your telescope
what can you see and just oh i see the moon oh it's got critters
there's a lot more to explore than that that's true and we're going to talk about that next
week on the how do you know show so i hope we'll see you all there i encourage everybody if you haven't
done so please go ahead and download a copy of
astronomy for educators it's really astronomy for everyone uh 36 hands-on activities that are fun
for parents and kids and outreach people to do together look me up daniel barth astronomy for
educators on any search engine you'll find it scott has a link on the explorer yep scientific.com how do you know and
we've got all the episodes now on youtube so uh if you haven't caught all our
episodes please go ahead and do so if you're an outreach person or a teacher drop me a line
at astronomy for educators at gmail.com i have curriculum handouts for all of these scott puts them up on his website
as well and anybody has questions about telescopes about teaching this
about outreach drop me an email and i'm thrilled to hear from you all and we'll look forward to seeing you
next monday on how do you know great all right thank you very much
daniel and uh we will be back uh of course next monday with the eighth
episode of how you know take care bye everybody
okay so that was it lots of great questions uh from the
audience about eyepieces and visual observing and binocular observing and stuff so that was really
cool uh the um uh you know i have
also made a video that i've run a couple of times on our program uh on how to choose and
use eyepieces uh but you can find that on youtube you can find it on our facebook
pages as well if you'd like i can play it for you sometime
but i go through all of the formulas and everything on how to choose and use eyepieces and it works
for any brand any type of eyepieces as well uh you know once we're out of this
uh you know once we're out now uh getting back together at star parties
a really great reason to go to a star party if you're a visual observer is the ability to try and test
different eyepieces on your telescope and so a lot of you know people in an
astronomy club are willing to share when explore scientific goes out uh we
we bring all of our eyepieces and we let people check them out um because there's just no better way to
go than than trying it there is no exact formula for everybody because
that combination of uri the eyepiece optics your telescope
optics and the conditions for the night are all very very individual so you know
i know people with serious uh you know serious visual observers and they have
20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or even more eyepieces in their collection and they will just
kind of hunt and pack until they get the exact best right view for right then and so
and this is also this is really important if you're trying to recover a comment or you're
trying to make some very very critical observation of a planet
so these are you know there's there's no uh i wouldn't say there's a magic formula i
will tell you that the formulas get you very very close and will take you more than more than
eighty percent maybe like ninety percent there but uh you know those tiny little differences to a beginner
are almost meaningless but to an advanced astronomer advanced observer that 0.5
better or 0.3 percent better sometimes makes all the difference in the world so
um so thanks for watching today uh tomorrow uh we will have
you know more programming including the 43rd global star party which will start
at 8 pm so until that time you guys have a great night
you know wishing you all clear skies and we have i have a little video
a feature from nasa that i'll show you as well if you continue to watch until that time
take care and we'll talk to you later
[Music]
[Music] do
before i started here at nasa i had my own sewing business i was hoping for curry festival in
argentina so i was running the horses i would say bartender at a music festival
my name is paula gaine i am a thermal blanket technician i'm jeronimo i'm a planetary scientist
my name is producer at nasa i'm from capitol heights maryland i was
born in mendoza argentina i'm from devon which is on the southwest coast of the uk so as a
fashion design major ended up designing clothes for satellites electrical engineering actually was my
undergrad and then my master was in telecommunications then i went to germany this is where i did my phd and then it became
astrophysics i did my undergrad in biology which i loved but i also loved many other areas of science too
so i decided to do a science communication course for my master's well i ended up working here at nasa it
sort of happened by mistake you should always check the washington post ads for jobs
and they had one said are you a star trek fan do you think about space and he said come work
here and nasa did they look like a technician i had no idea what it was so i called came in for the interview
and i got the job so when i moved to germany and started doing my phd i discovered the european space agency the german
space agency and started working in connection with nasa so when i finished my phd this one they
offered me a fellowship to come here to the national gallery place by center it was university for two years and i've
been here for when i first started working at nasa i started out as the earth science multimedia fellow
so i was on the earth science team covering breaking news when i thought of nasa i thought of space i thought of futuristic things i
thought of the jetsons as a kid i never thought i could work
for nasa when i got offered to do the fellowship here i actually was scared to come here because i kind of
said oh my god am i actually qualified to be working at nasa i mean what it means to me now being a nasa employee is that
the sky is the limit and once you arrive here you realize that it's obviously it's just people that have passion for space that's the main thing
that you find in other sciences to work at nasa i think you have to be really curious
about well you just have to find your niche and where you can sit in here if you have
that passion for space not that anybody tell you what are your limits there is definitely a job for you there
are so many jobs here the fact that i am here doing it i'm getting to touch things that are going into space
working here now i'm doing things that people will never even dream of and i'm a fashion designer so don't let
your preconceptions of what people think to stop you
hello everybody this is scott roberts from explore scientific and today i want to talk about the world
famous galileo telescope kit this is a kit that you assemble by yourself you'll learn how
optics work by assembling the objective lens and also the eyepiece and there's two
different eyepieces that are in this a 25 power 20 millimeter eyepiece
but it also comes with this very clever little device here that works both as a barlow lens that will double
the magnification of this eyepiece making of 50 power or it can be used also as a galilean
eyepiece which gives 17 power to the telescope this is what galileo virtually saw
through his own telescope so you can have that same experience that galileo had looking at the moon
looking at saturn's rings looking at jupiter it is a telescope that was designed for
the international year of astronomy in 2009 and it's a fantastic kit both for child
and adult to learn how a telescope works and so if you get to the telescope like this
you can either have it on a stand like this you can hand hold it like a pirate's glass or on the bottom here we have a threaded
hole here that you can put it on a camera tripod very versatile very rugged and a lot of
fun all from explore scientific
[Music]
so
[Music]