Transcript:
oh no i said hey i'll test it for you i'll let you know that it works yes guys
will be clear since he's not in town and it's sitting on his door i mean i don't mind because we live in the same town so
if daddy might i wouldn't mind the skies clearing up
yeah it's been uh cloudy here the last couple nights looks like it's gonna not cut her up for a bit so but i had a
really good september i got lots of imaging done in september where are you molly i'm in dayton ohio
see i have a i have a uh a backyard set up so i can image on nights where the forecast is not looking favorable and it
ends up clearing out anyway i can image on nights it's only going to be clear half the night
as long as there's no rain in the forecast i'll uncover the scopes and image and just see what i can get
what are you going to do this winter are you going to leave them out yep yeah i might i might get some uh
like 100 watt light bulbs to put underneath of them yeah depending on how things go
but um yeah we'll see how things go i think you know that the uh that grease that's in
there should be good down to you know some temperature and it doesn't get super cold here just gets like kind of cold so
yeah it just gets muddy and nasty here yep yeah
so um yep that's the plan and then i'll be able to run it really cold temperatures
on the camera everything will be nice and cool and natural like yeah i can run it like minus 25. i've never run lower than -25
um but we'll see what happens this winter i don't i don't have dark i barely have enough darks for minus 25.
but now that i have a permanent set up i can get darks on cloudy nights and fill out the rest of my darks library yeah
it's supposed to i think clear off for tomorrow night i believe oh i think so anyway i haven't quite got
that far because i was looking at the same thing yeah i was supposed to rain today oh it's gonna rain tonight um but
uh tomorrow night actually yeah looks like it's gonna clear out about midnight yep so i'll carry on
some of these wonderful 40 degree temperatures your way because we're having a a
really cold night tonight i'm i'm out of town in springfield missouri but
it's going to be cold tonight but it's clear at all
yeah temperature's going to drop tonight it was uh it was in the like 80s yesterday and in the mid 70s today but
tomorrow it's only going to be 59 with a low of 41. so
off a bit yeah with this rain the cold front is coming in behind it oh yeah it does look
like that yeah it looks like we're actually going to be clear the next several nights yeah it looks like something's gonna be good
too yay yep
john's just sitting there smiling away like yeah yeah yeah
yeah the backyard setup is so nice and i got my science rig back up now for um
doing uh variable star observing so yeah were you here when i said barb harris won't be here tonight yeah okay yeah she
wasn't uh we'll catch her next time okay
yeah i'm really behind i have i have like two months worth of variable star data
from earlier this year like february and march and i think a little in april
that i haven't processed yet yeah i've been trying to come up with a way to to automate
more of the pre-processing like to automate the calibration and file conversion but i haven't figured out kind of a way
to standardize that yet um so i have to go pull the correct darks and flats and then
um you know if it's one by one binning i gotta use one
cosmetic correction process if it's two by two i gotta use a different cosmetic correction process and
um yeah so i haven't quite figured out how to boil it down to something uh that i can put into like a process container
yet hey give it time winter's coming up that'll make it a little bit easier
yeah i am planning on writing some scripts to auto pull calibration files for me but it's gonna be a
[Music]
so
[Music]
uh [Music]
so
[Music]
so [Music]
uh
[Music]
um
hmm
well hello everyone this is scott roberts from explore scientific and the explore alliance and it's my great
pleasure to uh announce the astronomical league live number 10
the celebration has to do with the uh there is actually an uh
a connection between you know the major holiday of this month which is halloween
uh that is uh all hallows eve or it's also known as the cross quarter
day which has to do with uh the interval of uh between the equinoxes so
um it is uh it is a day more or less midway between an equinox when the sun sets due
west and a solstice when the sun sets at its most northern or southern point on
the horizon um our the host of this program is terry
mann she has a an incredible lineup of speakers um as she does on every astronomical league
live program and i'm going to turn it over to her thanks terry thank you scott i love that introduction
and the hubble that was really good i like that were you doing sound effects or was that actually that was me yeah
that's what i thought right i had this whole thing set up so that works
all right well thank you scott thanks for uh hosting this we really appreciate
it and uh thanks for just helping us out as much as you have you have really been a
great support for the astronomical league so and we really do appreciate that it's my great pleasure thank you
um i am going to turn this over to david levy and he will do our celestial
incantations so david i will turn this over to you
well thank you very much terry it's good to see all of you it's good to see you mary
and uh john and carol and molly and scotty and all of my friends here and
this is halloween so i'm going to try to be as scary as i possibly can which is not
very scary my poetic invocation tonight is going to be
from one of the scariest writers of all of english literature edgar allan poe
no i'm not going to read from raven quoth the raven nevermoor
even though gene and carolyn shoemaker had two wild ravens that actually lived
near them and of course they called them never and more instead i'm going to read a poem did you
know everybody that edgar poe was an astronomer
and he uh do you know the story the story about the night sky being dark
it shouldn't be dark when you look up at the night sky every square inch of sky should be brighter
than the sun because you know you have 20 first magnitude
stars and you have 106 magnitude stars and you have a zillion 20th magnitude stars
and it keeps on going so every square inch should be as bright as the sun it is not true the night sky is dark
and uh albers paradox is the famous seer theory
i'm not going to go into that but you know who first suggested that i don't think it was albers i think it
was actually edgar allan poe kind of interesting need to look a little bit more up about that
anyway my poem for today will be from al raf
it's a poem that a very long poem so you better sit down it's going to take me about four days to read this
and uh so terry relax everybody get a good nap and this is originally written i believe
to celebrate the supernova of 1572 and they probably took him 20 years to
write it but here goes spirit.dwellest where in the deep
sky the terrible and fair in beauty vibe
beyond the line of blue the boundary of the steam
which turneth at the view of thy barrier and thy bar
of the barrier over one by the comets who were tasked
from their pride and from their throne to be dredges till the last to be
carriers of fire of the red fire of the heart
with speed that may not that may not tire
and with pain that shall not part who live us that we know in eternity we feel
that the shadow of whose bro what spirit shall reveal
thank you terry back to you didn't take quite four minutes i was gonna say four days just buzzed by
so quickly i must have fell asleep thank you david we really appreciate you
being here oh thanks you're not oh i'm sorry david what
just said i love being here and i really appreciate the honor to be part of the
league this way well we are sure glad you are here and you're welcome anytime and all the time
i keep every uh astronomical league live we have i always say david can you make
it so all right carol org uh i know you're
here i know you're not home you said uh how about if we go to you and we'll just
kind of make you the wizard of this program tonight so if you would you go ahead and give us
an update or whatever else you would like to tell us well this wizard doesn't have too much
experience with halloween related things except i can be scary occasionally but we'll let that happen for another time
maybe david you set the pace for us uh you said it just right and
thank you scott uh terry and everybody else for making such a fabulous thing we do each month for the astronomical
league like to give just a few updates from the league the first one is that
uh we have 20 000 people as members of our organization
and it really points out the fact that throughout the pandemic and everything
else we have really uh had an increasing interest not an increasing interest but
a return to the interest in astronomy uh of course scott we have all talked about
these factors before uh vendors just can't get enough of telescopic equipments and other astronomical
equipment and uh we are seeing the same phenomena uh as far as the membership numbers for the
astronomical league and i would like to give just a few updates
by the end of the year we hope to have our new and improved website which will
be functional and really exciting to look forward to
and the other thing just some reminders as we uh set this scene for
doing the halloween type stuff this is a good chance to go out and do some observing in these nice skies as it
gets uh cooler in the fall it's a perfect time to go out there and as uh
all the astronomers of professional astronomers say uh i should say professional amateurs
drummers and the winner is when you get those good views if you can handle the the extreme
temperatures and it's a good sign i've been reminded the last couple of days of it being close to the winter
season and the fall season so the other thing i just remind everybody is that whatever you want to observe
there is something for you in the astronomical league whether you live in an urban area and have
light pollution or whether you live in the most dark sky type areas of the
country in the world there is something for everyone as far as our lineup of observing award programs and we have
roughly 80 a few more actually and there's something for everyone whether you're an imager whether you uh are more
into a visual or whatever there is there's something for you i'd just like to remind everybody of the upcoming
calendar uh thanks to scott uh terry uh chuckle
and everybody else who made our virtual convention for 2021 so successful we're
going to follow up on that in 2022 and try for the third time
to have our convention in albuquerque and i know david levy has already promised that he will be there uh and uh
the albuquerque club has been very patient with us and they're saying we will stick around for the third try at
this we're going to make it happen this time really looking forward to it
especially because it's the albuquerque group it's so wonderful the league is wonderful and
our grandchildren live there so that's really an uh a lock-in for
yeah i think uh david's about 100 sure he's going to be there we're so delighted to always have you uh there
for our events david the uh other uh upcoming events passed this
year as far as alcons we're going to uh in 2023 we're going to baton rouge
louisiana that should promise to be a very good event we haven't been to that area of the country for several years so
we're really looking forward to it i have family there [Laughter] another excuse for another person to go
and beyond that then we have an upcoming uh all the details haven't been worked
out of the rest of the upcoming lineup however we'll be going back to bryce canyon as some of you may know uh or
remember back in 2011 uh
we went to bryce canyon and saw some of the darkest skies in the country and we
still have lots of rave use terry mann has promised me that
lowell line and others are going to pull that off again so it's a good good experience and then finally we are
going to extend our international influence we had a taste of that on our
virtual 2021 with our speaker from the uk which was an outstanding situation
one of the better outcomes we've had lately and we want to extend that international
theme by teaming with the royal astronomical society of canada
and probably 2025 in toronto so uh another reason for
david levy to uh follow the league since i know he's a a uh a uh
a member of that group and also a citizen of canada so that gives us a lot of things to look
forward to we're very excited for the future uh we've almost uh it's almost like we're having
another renaissance in astronomy it seems like after each major
comment or something like that that we've had in the past we've had a resurgence of interest but what we're seeing right now seems to trump every
bit of that because it's really uh getting a ton of interest from all quarters so
uh a lot to look forward to and terry uh thank you so much and back to you
thank you carol um actually i am looking forward to going to albuquerque um i went ahead and
went out west this year but it will give me another opportunity to travel the other direction after i leave
albuquerque so i am looking forward to that uh and it looks like it probably will happen so
you know i think the odds are getting better all the time yeah i do too i really appreciate the
albuquerque group also hanging in there i know it's been a long time it'll be nice to see
everybody again in person it seems like it has been so long you know that we've actually been
anywhere in person so i'm looking forward to that so i am going to share my screen i am
going to do the three questions we have door prizes tonight
and tonight's store prizes are going to be the astronomical league tote bags because you have to have somewhere to
put your halloween candy so there will be three winners
and we will give away three tote bags trying to get there we go
and with this please send your answers to secretary at astroleague.org
and if you would send them within the next 30 minutes because i will need to
work on the winners while one of the speakers is speaking and we will i will announce the winner
after the last speaker which will be mary adams so i will announce the winners then so please send your answers
as quickly as you can and uh once we announce the winners someone from the astronomical league
will contact the winners with the information that we will need to send the door prizes and again please send
your answers to secretary astro league dot org
and here are the questions we have a lunar eclipse coming up on friday november 19th
i'm looking forward to that so everybody say no clouds i'd like to see it from home
now is this a total lunar eclipse true or false
next what telescope just took a 16-day ocean voyage that covered 5 800 miles
the telescope has arrived in the french guiana to prepare for its december 18th
launch again answers to secretary at astroleague.org
and the last question what date does the orionid meteor shower repeat this year
and all right i am going to stop there
and we are going to go to mali molly wakeling uh let me and molly's
here in my area we were just discussing cloudy skies and what it has been like
uh molly is astro molly got into astrophotography in july of 2015 as
after receiving her first telescope and i think um
molly i think i've got the wrong one here but i'm going to go ahead and read this anyway
she's moved back to the midwest here and she has got a three rigs set up in
her backyard including one dedicated to variable star and exoplanet transit
observation she won first place in the astronomical league's 2021
wilhelmina fleming award and second place in the deep sky category of the 2017 astronomical league imaging award
molly is actively involved in stem outreach having accrued more than 160 hours of volunteer
activities reaching over 50 000 people in person and virtually she is a double
a vso ambassador and an explorer alliance ambassador and
is a panelist and broadcaster on the astro imaging channel youtube show
molly is currently pursuing her phd in nuclear engineering
so molly welcome i know you've been here before but welcome again and i will turn
this over to you all right well thank you for the introduction terry and i'm thrilled to be among such a group of esteemed
astronomers this is this is awesome i love doing the astronomical league events and the
explore alliance events and other whatever other events i get to do um so uh my chosen topic for this evening
is spooky nebula of the night so let me share my screen here
all right get my notes up here um yeah so uh humans love to give
fun names and ascribe anthropomorphic
human-like features of objects that we see in the night sky
and those can be fun and happy things and those can be kind of spooky and weird things and humans are very
obsessed with with that so there's a whole bunch of these in the sky so i've kind of made a list of some of
my favorites and some of the coolest ones and some of the ones that have really cool stories attached to them as
well so of course the first one i have to mention is the skull nebula
and this photo here is is from my aussie friend terry robeson
uh i would i put as many of my pictures in here as i could but i've not imaged the skull nebula yet
so uh the but i have seen it vis uh visually through a large telescope when
i was in the southern hemisphere in chile and that was really cool to see so this is the planetary nebula
it's in the constellation status which and zetus is a is a is the sea monster
which perseus was sent to slay in order to rescue andromeda whose mother
cassiopeia had earned the wrath of poseidon after saying that she and andromeda were more beautiful than the nerids or the sea
nymphs so uh the constellation being named for uh the sea monster that uh perseus had
to fight and it's uh 1600 light years away it has a lot of hydrogen and oxygen light in it
so if you're gonna look at it visually really cool to use like a like a o3 filter to to see it really nicely
also along the lines of greek mythology is the medusa nebula this is also planetary nebula although it was
originally thought that it was a supernova remnant given its odd shape it's in the constellation gemini and was
discovered in 1955 by george a bell at ucla as part of the abell uh list of of
objects and it's 1500 light years away this is one of my images of it from my backyard
using uh narrow band filters to get those cool colors on it through all the light pollution that i have
this one doesn't have a scary name but i think it's kind of a freaky
looking nebula it reminds me of how the skull nebula looks visually except this
one is is almost perfectly spherical it's two and a half light years across
it is also a planetary nebula and it's expanding at 35 kilometers per second
so i you think about i mean space is big so you know we're not going to see this
visibly expanding over a given night but over years of observations it has been
observed to be expanding and 35 kilometers per second in earth terms is pretty darn fast
and i love the kind of the spooky sort of um grayish blue color that it has and
the very blue star at the center it's just sort of a spooky looking object
now i know i said i was going to talk about spooky nebulae but there was one galaxy in particular
that i wanted to include in this display of spooky objects and that is the black eye galaxy
it's it's just so creepy to look at it's like this this eye that's pointed a little bit away from you but this is
heavily littered eye messier 64. it's in the constellation of
coma berenices it's also called the sleeping beauty galaxy or the evil eye galaxy for
reasons that are clear looking at this picture it's 17.3 million light years away
and what's really kind of spooky about it too is that it's actually made up of two counter rotating discs so the
the central disc is rotating in the opposite direction as the outer disc
there although the stars in this galaxy are not counter rotating it's actually just
the gas so it's got some really weird morphology it's some some it's thought that it was
probably a gas-rich galaxy that collided with another galaxy here
or that this galaxy has been accreting uh intergalactic gas onto it um
so there's some various theories but yeah it's a really cool creepy looking galaxy and all the kind of black eye portion of
it are really thick dust clouds that are kind of near near
the core of it hubble has a great picture of the core of this galaxy
of course you have to talk about some body parts as well when it comes to things that can be kind of spooky so we
have the heart nebula and the heart nebula has this really cool intricate
twisted structure in the center so it's cool to image both wide fields see the whole heart shape and also narrow field
zoomed in on that twisted structure in the center this is an emission nebula so new stars
are born here out of the out of the ashes of old stars
it's in the constellation of cassiopeia this is andromeda's mother whose vanity
it was uh that caused andromeda to be tied to a rock on the ocean to be devoured by a sea monster but because of
her vanity she wasn't just placed in the sky she was placed in the sky tied to a chair
and and hangs upside down for part of the year as as part of her punishment according to the greek mythology
this nebula is 7 500 light years away and some of its stars are 50 times the
mass of the sun so just enormous enormous stars here
and you can't talk about the heart nebula was talking about without talking about the soul nebula they're kind of together in one
structure of the sky the last image was a sort of a natural color image of it and this is a narrow
band image of it this is not one of mine this is data from stephen miller that i
processed myself um in it as part of something that the astro imaging channel was working on
uh this is also an emission nebula also in the constellation cassiopeia right next door to the heart nebula
also 7 500 light years away now in the soul nebula there is a really
bright radio source known as westerhout 5 and this spans an area the size of four full moons
and it contains large cavities of gas that have been carved out by radiation and stellar wind
from some of the massive stars within the soul nebula so a lot of uh
really violent actions going on in in a lot of these nebulae even though they're happening very slowly
on human time skills there's of course the helix nebula which
is also commonly called the eye of god or my favorite the eye of sauron
[Laughter] if you're a lord of the rings family like i and my family are
it is a planetary nebula but it's really close to us it's only 650 light years away
so it appears very large on our sky and that also makes it difficult to visually observe but it does show up pretty
readily in pictures and it's also expanding extremely fast it's expanding at 31 kilometers per
second and this is a hubble space telescope image of it and it really does kind of look like a
giant of all of the planetary nebula i think this one looks the most like an eye
especially with all of the fine globules that really just look like an iris and this
huge dilated pupil in the middle and you can kind of see the eyelid in the hydrogen alpha gas around the edges it
just really looks like an eye now there's a whole class of nebula that
are called dark nebulae and these are actually molecular dust and
uh and dust particles that absorb the light and obscure the light
from stars that are behind them and this is called the snake nebula this one imaged here in the center and i
actually kind of see a bit of a shape of the head of a bowl in the lower left
part of this image i took this at the 2017 texas star party i think it was
uh actually with my dslr it's so dark out there that you can see these dark nebula both with the camera very readily
and also at the eyepiece you can see a lot of these dark nebula out there it's in the constellation of piacus so
it's very close to the direction of the core of the galaxy
a few kiss what's really fitting about about the snake nebula being in the constellation of fiacus is that epheicus
is known as the serpent bearer in greek and roman mythology
some later myths had a fiatus as a representation of lacun who's the trojan priest of
who was the trojan p priest of poseidon who warned the trojans about the trojan horse
he was later killed by a pair of sea serpents who was sent by the gods as punishment alternatively ophiuchus is seen as
asclepius a doctor who discovered how to avoid death when he watched one serpent bring
herbs to another serpent that healed that serpent and but of course zeus killed him with a
bolt of lightning in order to avoid the human race from becoming immortal from this doctor discovering how to prevent
death so lots of lots of snakes around the snake nebula is also 650 light years away
and i so these dark nebula they include a lot of different types of particles in them they're dust
particles that are coated in frozen carbon monoxide and nitrogen they also can contain hydrogen helium
ammonia formaldehyde which is the stuff that's used to embalm dead bodies
and other organic molecules that's what i find out really fascinating that there's actually a lot of organic chemistry happening out in space and a
lot of that has been observed with radio telescopes and uh you can kind of imagine that and
there's some thought that i you know earth wasn't just sort of a soup of
carbons and hydrogens and oxygens that came together there's organic molecules being made out in space
that almost certainly had to do with the amino acids and proteins and other things being generated here on earth
that eventually led to us up in the constellation orion is a
reflection nebula known as the witch head nebula and it's sort of a very spooky looking
nebula because as opposed to being an emission nebula that glows red this is a reflection nebula that reflects the blue
star light from rigel which is the bright star up in the name of the image here
and it's also blue because the dust also appears blue because the dust reflects
more blue light than red light in a similar way that the the sky above our planet tends to reflect blue light
preferentially it's about 900 light years away and i don't know i don't think it's very
easy to observe especially because its size is very large but it shows up really nicely in the cameras and makes
for this very kind of spooky like like um like a spell working its way toward
you and this image is from uh the digitized sky survey
on the topic of witches there's also the witch's broom nebula also known as the western veil nebula
more commonly which is part of the cygnus loop zygmus loop is actually a supernova
remnant when a star about 20 times the mass of the sun went supernova about 10 to 20
000 years ago and uh whoever was around at that time
would have seen that this net this uh supernova was brighter than venus and
could be seen during the day it's up on the constellation cygnus 2 400 light years away
the whole nebula is enormous it covers the area of three degrees which is 36
full moons in in area and it's expanding at one and a half
million kilometers per hour so there's so much energy from the supernova and it's just blasting out
into space at these incredible speeds and this part of the nebula is being lit
by the star here and has really this very intricate uh filamentary structure that kind of
looks like a broom that i which my scent might sit upon
we also have the ghost nebula this is an adam block image from mount lemon
and yeah i mean it looks like a ghost what else can you say about it
this is uh some dark nebula and reflection nebula together it's got some really kind of other ghostly demony type
shapes coming off of it it's in the constellation cepheus osephius was the wife of of cassiopeia
and the father of andromeda all tied into this one story here it was cepheus idea to sacrifice his daughter andromeda
uh to the sea in order to save his country that he was the mythological king of ethiopia
from being ravaged by the sea monster status andromeda and after after cepheus
rescued andromeda they were to be married but she was promised to
uh sorry rescued by perseus she was promised to her father cepheus's
brother phineas a lot of confusing names here uh of course a fight broke out over
them both wanting to be her husband and this resulted in perseus brandishing the head of medusa who we saw the nebula for
earlier which caused both cepheus and andromeda to be turned to stone so a lot of fighting a lot of uh bad
things amongst the the greek mythological characters here and this one is
1470 light years away moving away from things in the visible
spectrum there's a lot of really cool shapes to be seen in other parts of the
spectrum this is a shape in the so there's this number below that is optically visible
the boomerang nebula uh overlaid of the hubble image here is a radio
image from alma the atacama large millimeter submillimeter array
and it this nebula is 5 000 light years away and the radio image overlaid here
really just looks like a cute little ghost [Laughter] and uh so this is located in in the
constellation centaurus so a little further south the boomerang nebula is the coldest
known object in the universe being at minus 458 degrees fahrenheit or
just a hair just one and a half degrees above absolute zero which is actually colder than just the background
radiation of space which is at three three kelvin or three degrees above absolute zero
and uh so the reason why it's so cold is that the star in the middle is sloughing off
gas from its outer shell and this gas is expanding in space in much the same way
that you hopefully learned in high school chemistry where when you expand a gas inside of a bottle
instead of a fixed volume that it makes the gas get colder much the same thing is happening here
sort of like when you use a can of air duster or
maybe even hairspray if you spray a single continuous burst for a long time the the bottle starts to get cold
uh we're actually back in the visible spectrum for this one uh this is sort of a very spooky image
that came out of the hubble space telescope that i really thought was going to be in that video that scott showed at the beginning
of uh this is actually part of the constellation pleiade the plea we're not the constellation the star cluster the
pleiades and it's it's a small bit of the reflection nebula the
cloud of dust that the pleiades are traveling through right next to the star marot
and it's just such this really cool kind of ghostly structure it almost looks like it's being sucked toward merope although
really more of what's going on is morope is pushing its solar wind is pushing the gas and changing its shape
and it's actually slowly destroying this dust cloud and uh the pleiades are in the
constellation taurus and they are 444 light years away it's relatively close to us but it's this
really kind of spooky optical light image of this little bit of the pl of the dust and the pleiades cluster
and finally i have to end on this fun little guy here uh known as the screaming skull
so this is not an optical image this is actually an x-ray image from the chandra x-ray telescope
it's looking at the perseus cluster of galaxies and
so so these are quite far away they're 320 million light years away and we're looking at sort of a a lot of
x-ray objects that are emitting really hot light so um
in this image you don't actually see the galaxies you're seeing the hot intragalactic gas that is being
superheated up to 50 million degrees kelvin and that's why it's emitting this
x-ray light and the bright source at the center next to kind of one of the the skull eyes
there is actually a supermassive black hole in one of the galaxies that is
spewing huge amounts of x-rays and this image spans over a hundred thousand light years
in in the perseus cluster of galaxies and some of those darker areas are where
the hot gas is being pushed away by other things it's actually in the actually um the uh like where its mouth
is is the shadow of one of the galaxies that's not emitting a lot of x-rays uh
casting its shadow on on the x-ray flex that's behind it so uh really cool lots of extreme stuff
going on here and making the face of sort of a weird distorted but kind of
cute skull honestly it reminds me of the little sugar skulls for dia de los muertos
so with uh with the inspiration of all these spooky nebulae and galaxies i want to wish you
a happy spookaween [Laughter] spookaween spookween
that's pretty good i like that oh my gosh
that was amazing there's so many i never really thought about how many
things there really are out there there was more i wanted to include but uh you know i didn't want to i didn't want to
talk all night i mean i wouldn't talk all night but i'm sure other people want to talk to you
no molly i'm glad you included the uh ghost nebula that one to me is the
scariest one of all oh it's so creepy looking and once i get out you have to be in dark skies to really get those
those dark nebula so maybe at some point when i'm out at the texas star party or okie text or
somewhere i might give that one a go although my telescope's not as big as the one at mount lemon other people have
imaged it as well so i'm hoping to get maybe get some of it oh good luck good luck to you
yeah i like the witch's hat i mean i just that just seems to kind of fit we're
gonna have to think next year if we do a halloween party next year what all we would put in there but
boy that was a great collection of images a lot of interesting information thank you so much molly you're welcome
appreciate it all right so let's uh now maybe we'll go to astro bob
and that is bob king bob king fell in love with the night sky in astronomy when he was a kid growing
up in illinois and loves to share his passion with people of all ages he writes for sky and telescope's
website and magazine and maintains the astro bob astronomy blog which i look at quite often you've
got some really great stuff there sure his book
night sky and the naked eye and wonders of the night sky you must see before you die
describe the joys of sky watching while urban legends of space examine science
versus pseudoscience and astronomy bob wants to see everything he's read
about in astronomy books with the exception of falling into a black hole
welcome it's so good to have you back again i can't wait to hear your talk
well thank you so much terry for that nice introduction i appreciate that and great to be here with everybody good to
see you all and to meet some new people too uh very nice presentation molly and
we'll uh continue on with the spooky stuff here i've got a little presentation about
black holes uh which i've titled where matter goes to die i suppose on halloween seems like the
appropriate time to talk about death by black hole so we'll go there at this evening
and i'll just bring it to the slideshow hopefully you can all see that
is that visible not yet i hear it i here yes no you're
not sharing your screen yet oh okay sorry um oh sorry
pardon me my my bad on that let's try again how about how about this
yes yes so it's called uh black hole where
matter goes to die and there's a really scary yeah it's pretty scary
creepy picture
oh you're welcome to put this in your collection molly we'll start with
of course any discussion of black holes starts with where they originate where do these things come from anyway and the
primary source of black holes as we'll learn here in just a second is supergiant stars and one of our favorite
supergiant stars is betelgeuse in the constellation of o'ryan the hunter here
so ryan coming up over my house uh just before dawn and orion pardon me beetlejuice is one
of the brightest stars in orion but it's variable sometimes a little brighter than rigel sometimes a little bit fainter than rigel which makes it a very
interesting start to observe but we know that it is an enormous star what's
called a supergiant a red supergiant and it's approximately about 900 times the
size of the sun there's our sun it was really tough for me to make the sun 900 times smaller than beetlejuice
but that's the best i could do just a little dot what's interesting about these two stars
is the fact that although they are so dramatically different in size and appearance and even temperature
they both share one thing at least one thing in common they are both in the battle of
their lives for their entire life within the stars the star's core and
deep within the star there's enough heat and pressure for the stars like beetlejuice the sun all the stars to
fuse elements like hydrogen into healing and in that process of nuclear fusion
heat and energy are created and that heat and energy pushes back against the
i like to call it the dumb force the just the dumb simple minded single-minded force of gravity that
wants to just crush that star out of existence but the heat generated by nuclear energy
within both beetlejuice and the sun push against the force of gravity which
is why we can see the sun come up every day the same appearance the same size it's not shooting back and forth and so
on so they do share that the sun as it evolves
will gradually lose its outer layers and it will shrink down to a white dwarf
it'll burn up its fuel and then gradually cool kind of a quiet way to go so to speak
whereas a supergiant like beetlejuice can cook up more in its core because the
temperature is hotter the pressures are greater so instead of just hydrogen to
helium inside beetlejuice it will cook up helium into carbon carbon into neon and those elements then into silicon and
sulfur and then silicon and sulfur serve as the fuel to create iron now you might
think wow this is fantastic now we got a core of iron there surely must be a lot of energy there unfortunately you cannot
fuse iron with anything it just if you try to put more energy into it it just breaks apart
so when iron forms in the core of a supergiant and this is likely to happen
with the star betelgeuse sometime in the distant future basically the furnace shuts off within
that star and without the heat and the pressure from the core
what's gravity going to do it's going to go like so it's going to want to just crush
that star and so what happens is i've kind of simplified it here for you but
here's our massive star all right it's still maintaining equilibrium like the sun and beetlejuice
here's the core collapse this is what happens when the engine shuts off in the core and this will happen with
beetlejuice and when the engine shuts the outer layers of the scar star come
crashing down on the core rebound and just rip the star apart in an enormous explosion that we call a
supernova but there's a little something there after the dust clears because all that
pressure of all that weight crushes the core of the star to the
point where the gravity of that core of that material becomes so immense that it
just keeps on being crushed and shrinking and shrinking and shrinking until it's finally crushed so incredibly
dense you've got like three to four solar masses in the center of a star like betelgeuse it's now becoming
crushed into an area about 20 miles across and at that point the gravity is so
intense it actually causes the light that's leaving its former core
to bend back in on itself to actually be pulled back in and when it pulls in that
light when the gravity is so strong then it becomes invisible and we call that a black hole so after all of the dust
clears from a supernova explosion sometimes not always you will have a black hole there which is the remains of
the core crushed basically out of existence at least from our point of view in this universe
but it has effects on other stars and things that happen to stray too close here's a a black holder
remarkably simple objects really when it comes right down to it uh here we're seeing potentially the future of the
star betelgeuse and orion it will crush down into what we call a
singularity that's where all of the matter basically got crunched and that material because gravity has kept acting
on it and still is acting on it will crush it down into a point that actually
has no dimension at all it's my it's sub microscopic it's
an infinitely dense infinitely small point and around it is what we call an event
horizon so this is the second part of a black hole and the event horizon is kind of a point of no return
if you're in a spaceship out here off to one side of the black hole and you're far enough away you could
actually orbit around it you'd be safe but the hole because you're close is
gradually pulling you in and if you allow it to pull your your spaceship in
once your spaceship crosses this boundary it's actually kind of a threshold a point of no return
once it crosses that boundary it actually has to travel faster than the speed of light in order to escape
going over the ledge and down into the black hole and into the singularity
uniting with the singularity so since nothing according to einstein can
go faster than the speed of light if you go there you're going in there's no
getting back so that's a key a key part of a black hole like i said basically two parts singularity in the
center where all the matter is continually being crushed to this infinitely dense point
surrounded by this invisible ring called the event horizon the point of no return
well all of this mass this incredibly dense material just concentrated in such
a small amount of space warps the fabric of space time space time we live in this
space-time universe which consists of three dimensions of space one of time kind of makes sense in a in a real
practical way if somebody were to ask you hey let's go out to eat you'd have two questions right first
question be where in other words it's location in space in three dimensions second question is when
time now those two or four things really because one has
three dimensions and the dimension of time together will allow you and your friend to get together at the right time
and place but if you just gave the person a time or a place you'd never be able to get together you need both
so space time includes both time and the three dimensions of our
regular resistance and it can be warped by very massive objects we can't see it with our eyes
but we can kind of imagine it like you can picture a bowling ball sitting in the middle of a trampoline
the sun is like a bowling ball warping the fabric of space-time and it puts a modest warp in it and that warp
is what makes the planets circle around the sun they're following the curvature of the warpage the black hole is so
dense that it just keeps going down i show you this because
just so you can kind of get a three-dimensional picture of a black hole because the previous image makes it look so two-dimensional just the ring
and the singularity but if you could see it in actually four dimensions three of
space one at a time you would see something like this this great warp in
the fabric of space-time here's an attempt to illustrate that warpage and the black hole it's a very nice
animation black hole in the center here's the warpage of space that dimple that it
creates like the bowling ball and that trampoline and one way we can detect
a black hole is if something strays close enough to it that it's captured by
the gravity of the hole and it's accelerated and as is
accelerated it's literally torn apart by that gravity and
the material heats up because it's rubbing against other material all this stuff gets ripped apart and it heats up
and it starts to glow it can reach temperatures like 10 million degrees and shoot out all these x-rays and visible
light and all kinds of things and then as it goes down and crosses the event horizon
hasta la vista that's it nothing's coming back if it had an identity beforehand right
here's a particular star a rogue planet an asteroid the identity is gone it goes
down into that hole and it becomes crushed and just totally isolated from the rest
of the cosmos with no identity right down there in the blackness another way
to detect the black hole and this is actually how we first found them was how
their gravity affects stars near them and also we have seen discs of bright
material that a black hole will pull off a nearby companion star because there's
tons and tons of double stars out there binaries are very common in the universe and when you have a binary and one of
the objects is a black hole maybe it was a super giant at one time
it evolved became a black hole if they're close enough it can draw material right from its companion and
that swirls and heats and then before it disappears they can radiate tremendous amounts of energy then goes down the
black hole never to be seen again i tried to find an earthly example of how a black hole grabs material and this
is the closest i could come with a little bit of a halloween flavor to it when somebody comes to your door and you
offer one piece of candy and they kind of get their hand and they start raking away more material
so whether or not this works for you but this is an earthly example sort of black hole trick-or-treating
we have until 2019
black holes were no one ever actually observed one there were no images of black holes that were
available until the event horizon telescope which was a whole series of different
telescopes spread across the planet and all together acted like an enormous
single instrument looked into the core of a galaxy and took the first image the first image not
just diagrams or what we imagine a black hole to look like but it took the first image of a black hole and this is no i'm
sorry this is not exactly what it looked like but something like this there this is the correct slide
it photographed the core of the galaxy m87 again many many telescopes did not
exactly in a photographic way but all of the data was put together to create this
image of a very large black hole i've only talked about black holes that are of stellar
mass like a beetlejuice size one you know something maybe 25 miles across
but black holes can coalesce into larger black holes they can sink into the
centers of galaxies and virtually every galaxy modest to large galaxy that we
know of has a supermassive black hole in its core even the milky way there's one
down there that's four million solar masses and it's about as wide as our
solar system look at this one six and a half billion suns in the core of this galaxy
23.6 billion miles wide here's our sun and the orbit of pluto just for scale
and here you can see that dark inner part of the hole within this is the event horizon and this bright light
around it is material that is swirling down into the hole light heating and
giving off radiation now i mentioned that black holes warp
space right we saw that they dimple down they bend the fabric of space and the
more massive the object is the greater the warpage well
space and time are intimately connected if you warp space you will also warp
time so in this example here and the simpsons are helping us out we have marge who's
away from the event horizon at a safe distance and her clock is running and then homer who's excited is all heck to
get past the event horizon perhaps there's an infinite amount of beer beyond the event horizon we don't know
he doesn't know yet from marge's point of view as she looks towards homer
she will see that his clock is running slower than her clock and as homer gets
closer and closer to that event horizon his clock and his
flow of time as she sees it gets slower and slower and slower until he actually
freezes at the event horizon and he's there practically for an eternity it
looks like he's just completely stopped however from homer's point of view he's
moving normally his top his clock is ticking normally and when he looks up at marge's clock her clock is running fast
in comparison he's deeper within this gravity well this
deep gravity feel of the hole compared to marge this warps the space
and the time now this hapless person is attempting
to avoid crossing the event horizon in this rather wild black hole illustration
doesn't look like they're going to be successful so what we're going to do is we're going to
dive into a black hole we're going to figure out that eventually they were going to lose their grip and they're going to head right in and i'll let this
repeat so that you can kind of go along and
i can talk a little bit about what you're saying there you are you're crossing the event horizon right there you're looking back and then after you
look back everything goes black that's it so you're crossing through and while you're briefly alive when you turn
around inside of a black hole which you've crossed over that event horizon
and look at the outer world remember how fast marge's clock was going once you're inside the event horizon the
clock when you look at the outer world is spinning so incredibly fast as you're
making that crossover that you're able to see for a brief moment the entire
history of the universe the entire future what's going to happen galaxies colliding merging
stars dying the whole thing but very rapidly and then as you face
forward and you go over that horizon it's all over all you see is this
just utter blackness and tell me this isn't a scary sight just
nothingness and that's what it would look like to actually be inside a black
hole i remember i went down into an iron mine up here in northern minnesota once and
they showed us this in that formation and then they said okay we're going to turn off the lights and when they turn off the lights it was totally black it
wasn't like a starry night we could still see your hand it was pitch black just like this so if you want to
experience black cold blackness go on a mind tour of course before you actually meet your
event horizon beat your maker as it were you will be pulled stretched and squeezed as you
approach that tiny singularity and the reason why you're being pulled is because your feet
being closer to the central engine of that black hole feel its gravitational attraction that
much more intensely than your head or your hand so gradually you are drawn apart torn apart into little tiny bits
and pieces then your molecules are separated your atoms are separated and you go down as
and bill i don't even know what happens when after that but all of the particles then join the singularity again it's the
scariest thing in the sense there's no identity and there's no getting that matter back to the universe it's lost to
the cosmos now black holes we know according to stephen hawking can radiate energy away
and eventually unravel but it takes just trillions of years for that to happen so
it's matter you whatever goes in is there for essentially an eternity
have you ever been in this situation where you're trying to pack a suitcase really tightly like this i know i have
done this a number of times although i usually try to talk things a little
better before i get my knees on it um i only show you this photograph
because in a fun thought experiment we can do we can turn virtually anything into a black
hole here's the planet earth the earth is a very solid thing and the rocks seem very heavy if you pick up rocks and
metal however there's so much space between the electrons and the protons and those atoms and between those atoms
the next atom there's so much space to get rid of so if you can like that suitcase if you
could crush the earth all of that mattered down into something about the
size of a marble approximately just a nice little marble then
gravity will keep on running and suck that thing into a black hole so the
earth will be a black hole if you could crush it down to the size of a marble
and it would just be in its present position so you might
think like my daughter thought earlier today she said well won't it just suck everything into it and the answer is no
because even though the earth is now the size of a marble its gravitational field is the same as it was when it was just a
happy friendly spherical earth the earth we love and no here's a marbleized version of the earth
if you were to do so shrink the earth down to something that you couldn't even see from the moon because a marvelous
what like a centimeter across the moon could still orbit it at the
same distance and the same speed it was it would be as if nothing happened
in order for a black hole to grab hold of you earth black hole super massive black hole you have to be fairly close
to it so it's not like a vacuum cleaner where it just kind of goes around and can suck in things from millions of light years away and that's a common
misunderstanding about black holes but they are scary enough that's for sure
thank you very much thank you bob that that was really
interesting i've always i've heard about being spaghetti fives
spaghettification whatever this is a real physics term that is a real physics term i know molly's right i looked it up
and i thought okay somebody i mean i've heard about it but i didn't know it was actually used in papers now so yeah it's
not just like a journal term it's a real term [Laughter]
it's a real term so yeah not one i ever want to experience
no but there is uh terry there is a nice black hole experience available to any
to you oh yeah [Laughter] if you were to
the smaller black holes like the one that beetlejuice could potentially make in the future those are seriously
painful because you cross the event horizon and you're close enough to the singularity
that the force is so enormous that you would be ripped apart instantly and died but the one in the center of the galaxy
being so large you can cross that event horizon and still have some time to observe look around you
got close enough to the singularity to get ripped to pieces so if we ever do send a camera across an
event horizon well of course we can't and once you're across the horizon there's no waving high you're getting any information back you have to go
faster than the speed of light so what no so is it is it worth most only
yeah selfies just for yourself no transmitting no sending them back to
your friends and family what did you say scott i said i said is
it worth it i don't know would it be
someday somebody will explore it i hope yeah you wouldn't have a story to tell that's for sure
yeah well from our perspective it would uh that person would sit at the edge of
the event horizon and never move that's what's so bizarre about black it is yeah even though they've long gone down past
the event horizon that that is i mean when you really stop and think about this it is bizarre
yeah trying to comprehend it so thank you bob that was amazing thank you
terry i appreciate that thank you scott how about if we take a 10 minute
break and come back and we will come back with me all right sounds good okay thanks
believe it or not i've never actually done a black hole talk i really ought to have fun in my
repertoire
sorry i was just gonna move my teacup or something but but you would mention that you wanted to
do something on black hole sometime right um yeah i feel like that's a talk i ought to have like in my repertoire
[Laughter] yeah it's um it's always you know i've done
some talks you know for the public because i do community ed teaching and i
mean everybody wants to hear about black holes yeah yeah because they're you know they're just so bizarre and
there was uh um there's a girl who's given a black hole talk at the texas star
party a couple of times and i cannot remember her name but um uh she's actually she is actually uh an
astrophysicist i think and the title of her talk is uh black holes don't suck
yup that's right and that yeah it's it really is common for people
to think and because they have such powerful gravity and people see illustrations of them like bathtub drains yeah they think i'm going down
the train yeah you know it's under it's totally understandable that that's the impression
yeah i just think it's a really clever name too yep black holes don't suck
i remember somebody said that when then famous scientists i think yeah
like who was like uh one of the ones that's on tv a lot like uh neil degrasse tyson or somebody i don't remember yeah
but it was somebody else but anyway yeah yeah yeah i know i know what you mean i can't
remember who it was so it's like somebody who's on nova sometime
you are really cooking there in astrophysics you're doing some stuff and doing a lot of photography too and
yeah it's um i i've been able to do so much photography since i've got a backyard
rig set up so i've been able to do a lot more and
i was like looking up some details on the targets and stuff like that when i share the pictures
um i actually met you at hidden hollow star party back in 2016 i think
oh you were there molly yeah i got it
what did we observe with the big red there or big blue uh yeah i think i think that
year we had i think we had two clear nights that year at hayden hollow maybe two and a half
and yeah i did some observing on big blue um in 2018
the scissor lift had a breakdown so didn't get to observe through it that year i've been out of state the last two
years i went to hidden hollow again this year and got to look at jupiter and saturn and a globular cluster through
there so oh such a great scope everybody was so great i just the people were so great
there and you know you know who came through the area here we almost got together
with dan everly do you remember do you know dan from the club
um there's there's i i'm really bad at
people i know i've met a lot of people in that club who come to hidden hollow oh that's
no big deal i can't remember all their names he uh he was the one that
picked me up at the airport and then drove me to hidden hollow and so of course i remember him well but
he came through minnesota and we were going to try to get together for lunch but then plans didn't work out
i was really looking forward to it so maybe another time oh yeah yeah it was
good no it was a great scope i'll never forget the morning i think it was dan
maybe somebody else woke me up at 5 00 a.m said hey it's clear you can't
believe the orion nebula i'd already been up like most of the night i was just trying to get an hour of sleep but
i got up and whoa was it nice oh man yeah
yeah um yeah i went i went they had they held it this year and um it was a smaller crowd of course but
we had one clear night but yeah i just i just love that group of people they're so much fun
they are and they're just friend just friends it's real friendly yeah
so are you you have your degree are you let me know i'm still working
you're still working how many years left uh two and is that a master's or phd
gosh that's a lot of education
it's what i wanted to do in college i went to the university of illinois i wanted to become an astronomer and i
started out that way but the math was too much for me to handle and so i decided i would pick
another major and i went into something else entirely different so
yeah the math uh you know i i was gonna do physics as the as the phd topic but um
uh after taking another round of quantum mechanics and stuff like that i just decided that that level of math was like
more than i really wanted to spend a lot of time doing i'd rather like code up an algorithm do
that stuff instead ah code up an algorithm good yeah what the heck sure why not yes so
um yes i moved a little more uh engineering direction um
but i i'm doing uh neutron cross sections
cross-section measurements so uh basically like neutron interaction rates with various isotopes
my main experiment is going to be on on oxygen and um that's actually coming up in a couple of weeks
oh well is that is that in regard to supernovae so it's definitely one of the applications i
uh is astrophysics so yeah there's a lot of really neutron-rich environments out
in space to especially supernova um and stars there's a lot of a lot of oxygen
in in some of the higher mass stars that are in their cno cycle um and neutron stars of course to a high
neutron environment it also has important applications for building nuclear reactors
oh great so what would you like to be doing in five years uh where would you like to see yourself oh man i don't know
wherever the job opening is i suppose yeah i might go work for one of the national labs or something like that
because uh um i had an internship at one of them when i was in undergrad and it was a blast so oh fantastic i'm getting
more a little more that direction well i i wish you well molly and i hope you're able to get there you know to
that place it's wonderful and you're but you also do it sounds like for fun you do astrophotography so
yeah it uh it keeps me sane well as someone can really be
who's really into these things uh but yeah when when when school is stressful
i asked photography i go process an image and it comes out of stacking and i'm like oh man this is way cooler than
i thought it was going to be and get a nice image out the back and post it on social media
that's a wonderful feeling isn't it too yeah get a nice image you know you're producing art you're and it's something
entirely different from the other environment you're in you know the computational astrophysical
what a release well how nice for me it's like that too i love part of is you're outside too at least i am when i do
astrophotography because like terry you know i've got my camera set up on star tracking mounts
and stuff so but it sounds like you're doing uh photography through the telescope i take
it right yeah so i've got i've got three telescopes set up in the backyard one is a
an eight inch mint cast grain one is a four inch takahashi refractor
and one is uh yeah uh
yeah so the takahashi i really didn't think i was going to own something that nice this soon
but my uncle upgraded his takahashi to one of the newer models and sold it to
me at a nice family discount so i was able to get one at a more a little
more reasonable budget well you'll have that instrument i mean if you desire you'll have it all your
life yeah it's it's phenomenal it's i've gotten some really good images out of it
um and the third thing i have is an eight-inch f4 newtonian that i use for
doing my variable star observations that is cool did you know that i'm also a member of the aavso i've been remember
since uh uh 82 i've oh wow that's awesome yeah and
yeah it's a wonderful organization are you you must submit observations then i do magnitude estimates
yeah i uh i actually have a set of photometric filters that were given to me by a member of the of the dayton club
who didn't actually know what they were i posted them on on cloudy nights like hey does everybody know what these are and looking at those symbols on the side
i couldn't quite tell what it was and someone was like those are photometric filters i'll buy a mafia i'm like oh
i might find a use for these for good so do you when you submit data then are you using v magnitudes or
all different kinds uh i do all i do four i do uh v b i and r and actually i
have a ccd camera so i can do all the transformations in our linear and stuff like that so
um yeah yes i i only have four out of the five but they're johnson cousins photometric filters so estimate in their
actual bands just a quick question what's your
favorite variable what comes to mind when you think of halloween trick-or-treating jack-o'-lanterns
wools and goblins but the sun probably not but just five years ago in the weeks
surrounding halloween the sun sent us some tricks and treats of its own
the tricks were a series of some of the most powerful solar storms ever measured storms that disrupted power grids
communication lines and satellites but the treats were some extraordinary auroras seen as far south as florida and
texas the effects of these storms on the earth were ghoulish enough that we had to
reroute aircraft it affected satellite systems and communications actually
caused a power outage in sweden for about an hour but i think generally the the public was
very excited to see the ghostly aurora that were created in the night sky the aurora are normally limited to
higher latitudes and so these storms were so powerful that they created aurora that could be seen as far south
as florida so you can imagine seeing these ghostly figures haunting the night sky
in all nearly 17 major flares erupted on the sun during those two weeks in 2003
the result of energy building up in the sun's magnetic field lines until they became strained enough to suddenly snap
like an overstretched rubber band the results were coronal mass ejections the largest explosions in the solar
system able to launch up to 10 billion tons of electrified gas into space and
caused some of the ghoulish effects we felt here on earth these storms were also eerie because
they came at such a surprising time these storms were spooky because of the timing of which they occurred that is to
say that it didn't occur in a stage where most of the activity occurs in fact it occurred about three and a half
years after solar maximum occurred so it was spooky in that respect and it was also spooky in the intensity of the
storms these were some of the largest storms ever observed so can we expect to see any ghostly
looking auroras in the night sky this halloween well i don't think we're going to see uh repeat this halloween on the
five year anniversary because we're at a time where there are very little active regions on the sun however we are going
to be ascending to a greater period of solar activity so you know we may see some large storms in
the next few years still think the sun isn't so scary hopefully this spooky tale will make you
think again
[Music]
you're muted you mean it's got welcome back everyone
welcome back everybody i got you scott i got you what's so scary is that you see my lips moving
nothing's coming out okay so you will up next here's terry mann uh
and uh i think that the uh subject of aurora is quite appropriate so
dario thank you very much scott let me get ready to share here
uh [Music] hmm oops hang on just a minute
i actually shut it after the other one yeah that video is good um i will have
some pictures here i know i at least have one from 2003
and [Music] sorry let me start over again and see if i
can't get yeah there we go it's the ghost in the machine
it is it definitely is and this is going to take just a minute probably to go
where i want it to go [Music] but yeah aurora this time of the year just seems like something well it's
something because it's one of my favorite things to watch one of my favorite things to chase
this time of year it just seems perfect for me so my talk is aurora the soul of the
night and what i want to do i don't really want to go into all the mechanics of
what the aurora is we've all you know heard quite a bit about that and it's pretty easy to find what i
would like to do is look at the imaging end and some of the things that i've learned over the years
that i have imaged it one of the things that i do want to bring up is we are coming out of solar
max they're saying now we should be in our maximum
bit of solar activity between 2024 and 2025.
so if seeing the aurora is something that's really been on your bucket list and you know we have so many people that
have turned to astronomy through the covet situation and people that are watching the sky
that and i've talked to quite a few that said wow i would just love to see this this would be the time i would say that
you need to consider doing this um hopefully
for not from now until 2025 or even beyond definitely beyond
hopefully we will see more aurora this fall has been very active some of the
aurora that i've been watching online has been incredible and the pictures i've seen have been incredible so if
this is on your bucket list stop and give it some thought about what you might want to do to try to see it
because you might have a better chance the more active the sun is
the better off we all are if we want to see aurora one of the first things i always knew to
do was if i was going to go somewhere and see the aurora there also had to be something else for me to do because
there's clouds and there are times just like this night that i was sitting in alaska
conditions are absolutely perfect everything is perfect crystal clear sky
and there is no aurora anywhere to be found uh this happens that you know you cannot
really predict the aurora you can get a feeling of okay we've got a really good chance or yeah it looks like we really
might see it think of how many times you have heard on the news or read in the paper tonight there is going to be
aurora everywhere you know up north i have seen that a few times in a couple
times i ch chased upper michigan and when i got there you know what i saw
nothing it cannot be uh uh exact science it just is not
so always have something else that you can do because this will happen it's part of
chasing aurora and seeing it it's part of the beauty of aurora because you do still have clear skies a lot of the
times now imaging honestly imaging is easy it really depends on what you want to do i
mean on space weather last week or the week before there were cell phone
pictures that were unbelievable of the aurora and what you are going to see here that
i've taken are simple camera and tripod there is nothing really fancy where the
expense gets in is do you want to buy a higher end camera that can hold that can
handle higher iso and faster lenses wide angle lenses that
are faster and so it just really depends on what you want to do this picture was taken
with a simple camera and tripod i shoot with canons right now i have a
6d and a 5d mark iii and i would love to upgrade my cameras if they would get cameras in stock that
i would like to upgrade to and the sony a7s i still have a first generation
because i waited too long to get to three and now i'm just you know i'm sitting back
waiting on equipment that might be available before i go back to alaska
i use fast lenses that's the one thing i use a camera that can handle higher isos
but i use fast wide angle lenses most of them are an f 1.4 or 1.8
um and i've i use a nikon i have a nikon 14 to 24 that i put on my canon camera
that does a good job but it's a 2.8 and for aurora sometimes when it's not
really bright and active but just kind of hanging up there it makes it a lot harder to get the kind
of pictures that i really would like to get honestly my favorite lens is a 20
millimeter f 1.8 and and i do use that a lot it just seems to be a a nice balance
for me but whatever you you can start with whatever you have and that's the whole
point until you get the hang of it or you feel like you really want to invest more money in this and it's kind of like
astronomy you know you can have you can start out with a three inch telescope a
six inch reflector and before long you're wanting the bigger and bigger and
bigger and it's the same way with camera equipment whether it's ccd that you're going to put on a telescope or whether
it's a dslr however you're going to do it your your equipment eventually
makes you want to spend more money i mean that's just the nature i think of astronomy you know once you get used to
what you have you want to do a little bit more to maybe reach a little farther
and again this is just camera and tripod um i like to shoot on the right this i had
went to i was in alaska and i went to the arctic circle with a group of people and we were on the dalton
and we hit a blizzard we hit an unbelievable blizzard um and it bro the blizzard finally on our
way way back we got into clear skies and just for about 45 minutes when the skies
opened up the aurora lit up everything i mean everything lit up it was one of the
most beautiful pictures of visions i even had while i was standing there the yukon river was
just down below us and we were up on a hill and it was just absolutely beautiful
then that's the i like to shoot that way where you can see down to the horizon that's always i always like that but
here i'm at north pole in alaska and it was over the trees and that night
it was so so active i ended up doing time lapse and i just really liked that
and you can see here the big dipper right here in the center in alaska it's pretty high in the sky
um and this also this was the first time that i ever shot in 40 below zero and it
was probably either the first or second time i was in alaska and the first thing you can see here is the aurora that i'm
trying to image is dim it really was dim this is probably about a 30 second
picture and you can tell that because it's a blur and this i really this is
not what i really like to see but sometimes if you want to get the picture that is what you will get because the
aurora is not always active it doesn't always just lively dance around the sky
sometimes it's just a green color in the sky that barely moves
and sometimes when it does brighten up it takes it a while to get bright
as you can see in the middle it had i had taken a long enough exposure where the green had kind of turned to a
lighter green it was beginning to get active or i had shot the picture long
enough that the more active part showed up but it is just something you have to find a balance and you can't always do
that because with aurora it's either moving fast moving slow or
it starts slow then it moves fast then it can really mellow out to a dim green then all of a sudden it can
brighten it's a guessing game you do the best you can do with that but this night at 40 below zero um and
this is a film shot uh i had i think three camera bodies with me and seriously every two or three
pictures my shutter was freezing i was working with a straight you know film camera and i actually turned around one
time and i had the remote in my hand and as i turned around the wire just snapped into
i could i've never had that happen before or since but it just snapped right into
so you kind of have to be ready for whatever weather that you happen to be in
things like that can happen so why did i call this the soul of the
night well this picture was what made me call it the soul of the
night this is my backyard in ohio and i believe this was either the 2003
or it was probably the two one of the 2003. um i had woke up at three o'clock in the
morning to get ready to go to work and i had a satellite dish at that time and i turned on the tv and everything
was real staticky and i thought wow they said something about maybe we could see the aurora that night here
and i went out in my backyard and i could see i couldn't see it as clearly as what it is here but i could
see the reds i could definitely see some greens but when i and i was taking pictures got the camera going and then i just kind of
kicked back and just watched and all of a sudden i noticed this white wave that
was within the aurora and i had never seen pulsating aurora before in my life
and if you have or haven't seen it watch for it because it's very it's not
that rare i guess but for me it was very rare and i've only seen it a couple times in alaska but it has
a flow to it and it's like a heartbeat and it was the longer i stood there and
watched it i could time it perfectly it just flowed and i thought wow it's like the sky has
a heart and from that i thought yeah i can see that's the soul of the night and that is
how i see the aurora it's you know some people see rivers of light
and i get that too because when it's really active it does look like rivers of light
to me i always remember that pulsation and i like i said i've seen it about three or four times
and it just seems like it is something it seems like the sky is alive because
it's moving and it it has kind of a rhythm to it and it was just amazing to me to kind of put
that together but you know that's how i looked at it but this this shows it can be seen lower than usual very honestly
in ohio i don't think i've seen it here since 2011 and it was a very dim more or
less a photographic uh aurora this i could see naked eye
and this is more uh pictures and i believe this was i don't know if this was 2003 but i'm thinking it is uh this
is looking south and this mars was in the aurora when i shot that night um so
it was looking south and i had red and this when i walked outside i could see
this green and this green looked like a sparkly
icicle a sparkly green icicles the only thing i can think of it was you could tell it was there it
almost seemed to flash and i'm sure it was the motion of the aurora i couldn't see the red this is a 30 second at least
exposure right here um and so i couldn't really see the red as much as what the
camera did but it was amazing and a lot of people still look at these pictures and say i
can't believe you saw that in ohio believe me this is my backyard when we actually had a huge cme or series of
cmes that were happening and these are film again camera and
tripod now one of the first things i did when i went to alaska was i'd never done time
lapse so what i did was i learned how to shoot time lapse and then figured out how to put it together when i got back
home and so this was my very first time lapse in alaska
watch the ground on the left hand side it was amazing what it would do it
became so active and you can see right there the ground just lights up
and you can see there's pictures all around uh people are around taking pictures but it just
blew up and when it does that the sky the ground will turn colors
at one point i had walked into my room and i have had a big north facing window
and it was like somebody had just shot a flash on a camera and i knew what the
aurora had you know just fired up at that time and my whole room lit up it
was amazing can you play that one more time yeah here we go yeah watch the ground oh my god
yeah and it happens that happens a lot when you get an active display and you have snow in the ground
that happens quite a bit and it just it turns the ground green just for a few minutes and it can turn i
think i've even seen it go slightly red before too but that for me that was amazing that
was my first actual motion of the aurora and so you can do that
with the simplest camera and tripod and just make your own movie that way you do not need to have a high-end video to do
that so you can create your own thing there too now airglow a lot of people confuse
airglow for aurora and this is uh this is in the u.p in minnesota um and they have a lot
of air glow i think bob can probably talk to that too i've seen the reds i've seen the green
but again and this i could see naked eye when i was standing there so a lot of times when there is air glow
i've had people say is that aurora and it it does not it looks green and the aurora can be green but there is a
difference in what you see and how it moves um and so that's something you
know i i like air glow i mean i think that's beautiful too it has its own place i think look at that look at all
the diamonds on that mirror like i know it's incredible you know i've said the
same thing a lot of times i've been in such super dark skies it's like they're diamonds hanging in the sky
and i that's kind of the way i talk about it too because in the water the reflections
were just amazing that was such a still lake and i couldn't even tell you which
there's so many lakes up there what it was but it was an incredible area and the
sky glow was just unbelievable air glow is just unbelievable the position the capture everything about that is really
amazing i love to shoot where there's water i love the reflection because it is so cool to see the stars when you
also see the land how the land is and actually this is lightning that little bit of pink there is lightning there was
a storm building over there but this was way out way out in the middle of nowhere
but yeah so air glow is really cool too very cool now this will be a little confusing
with the aurora a lot of times when you're imaging you you have no idea what you're going to have until you get home
and you can see the pictures that you have taken and if you look really close do you see
the eye another eye the nose and he's yelling or she's yelling whatever yeah yeah and you
can tell this is the ground yeah this is the ground that's scary terry come on
here's a little children watching this program okay well i'll make him feel better well i
don't know maybe it won't two minutes ago two minutes later it uprighted somehow
wow this is a this is a ski lodge on clary summit and then here it is again and you see
the eye the nose the mouth i call this north wind because he's he
or she is facing north and as you can see the aurora was incredible that night
but when you're imaging this you don't see any of this it is moving so fast in so many different directions and
different brightnesses you never know what you have and so it's so it's like a christmas gift you know every time i
shoot one night i start going through the imaging images i never know what i'm gonna find but i'm always surprised
and more shapes i found the arrow pointing at the cabinet you know i didn't i sure didn't see that either
and then this looks like a hand to me it just looks like a hand reaching down um when it is active like that again you
can see the reds yeah reds in there and this is where it was getting brighter where you have the
arrow pointing down at the cabin uh but it is amazing you know i've heard
so many i've heard a few people say you know i've seen the aurora yeah at school but i've seen it once i don't need to
see it again i could watch the aurora every night if i could because
what it's always different always different shapes different motions different intensity everything
is amazing the whole sky dances it is just incredible
but one of the coolest things to do is if you shoot in the mornings before
before the sunrise or sunset you get these reds and you get the purples
and you get so much more color uh because your sky is not completely dark
yet it has the blue tint to it and so different colors seem to show up
and so these are you know with the milky way and you can see clouds but this was
right after sunset and this was at denali
i was there for a few days and trying to get some pictures there and
it just it really just is amazing and you can see some structure with this and
honestly that is what i try to do i want structure in the aurora i don't want
blurs i want to be able to see the strings if i can you can see a little bit here
so this one i was able because it was bright but again then you have that intensity it's bright up here but it's
dim up there it's so hard to judge you just do the best you can and just keep
shooting picture after picture and adjust
and this is one of my favorites can you tell this is where the sun set down here in the orange
and look at these colors look at the reds look i mean it's very subtle but it's beautiful it
is and it's like it's one of those images where you can hear
like uh symphonic sounds you know like these are notes very beautiful
yeah yeah and that's something you know there are people that say they have heard the aurora which i never have they
have never been able to prove that but there are definitely people out there i think that are still trying to and that
would be interesting to know if by some way they could hear aurora
um i i don't know but yeah i tell there is nothing like uh every night when i am
someplace where there will be aurora before it gets dark i am set up and ready to go because you never know it
might already be happening in the daylight you know that you cannot see it yet and as soon as that sky starts
darkening just like this evening all of the colors start up and the milky way and it it is just amazing to watch
and again with a year there was a yurt um and just you can see sunset sun had
just set and still some of the reds a little bit of structure to it but not much it was just actually starting up
and then you get to the night and when you actually have aurora going now the picture on the left again i'm in the u.p
of minnesota and i'm on a big lake again and we knew there was going to be aurora
but we didn't know how much and it was one of the most amazing nights in august
uh to be up there and it just the reflection in the water again a very very smooth lake
was just incredible and here big dipper right there you have the big dipper there
yeah it just it's beautiful again though the mirror-like finish of the lake reflecting all of the cosmos
with the aurora it's just it's incredible what a beautiful place to take uh you
know you can't imagine another planet to go and take astrophotography from it would be earth
yeah yeah and i tell you upper minnesota and the u.p my gosh there's so many lakes up
there and a lot of them are just gla crystal glass clear they are smooth and
when the stars come out or the aurora starts up it is incredible to see that reflection
and this one again is uh right outside of fairbanks actually that is fairbanks light pollution that
you see back there and there's times you know in alaska in the wintertime it just looks like a
winter wonderland and the aurora this was probably a couple hours after sunset but you can
see the reds and it just it came out so beautiful and with you know fairbanks in the
background was just something that i liked real well this night this was on the left
i had the light the aurora was like it poured out of one point in the sky and
then fanned out i it was incredible to watch it was so so active
um again with the reds i was fortunate enough not to totally burn out all of the green
on the bottom because up where you see greens at it's not as intense as where it's really light green here
um that's where you start to maybe possibly burn out and i was lucky enough to get the structure
of you know the shapes of everything going on and again it is just a trade-off
and i believe i had this picture on there before i didn't realize that but that is the one through the trees with
breathtaking i mean these two examples right here that i mean this prismatic effect
of of this aurora stretching across the sky diagonally across the sky and then
this thing kind of hugging the the trees cradling it you know with this
beautiful light you know that's incredible yeah i ended up doing a time lapse with
this because like i said normally i don't shoot it through the trees i like seeing the whole thing if i can but i
did a time lapse and it was amazing how fast it was moving through the trees and you can see there is more motion here
over here you have like the blah green aurora but over here there was a whole
lot of motion and it was moving and in so many pictures you have that
yeah yeah you have more quiet aurora to one side and sometimes very very active
aurora to the other um so again it's a trade-off of what you can think you can get and what really
looks the best for what you're trying to shoot and this is coronal aurora and i gotta
tell you this is what i i really like this and it's tough because this is
straight up this is all three in alaska this is straight up the bit if you were looking for the big dipper big dipper's
right here on this one and it's in the middle just about of these two and so you have no foreground you have
nothing to compare it to but that is when everything can be so
active and alive and dance clear across the sky and the colors as you can see
the colors are amazing when you have multiple cmes or a very large cme hit it
is just incredible um so i that is something when it does that
very honestly when i'm in alaska there's snow on the ground and i am dressed like you wouldn't believe how i'm dressed you
wouldn't even know me i just more or less fall back and just lay on the snow and watch because i let the cameras run
and i watch it is incredible wow so what i'm gonna do now this is with my
a7s and i'm going to buzz through some parts here because parts of it will be
slow this is real time this will be real time as soon as i can get this back
um and you're going and as you can see the big dipper what you're going to see is
some of this starting up i'm going to let it at least get a good start and i don't know how bright that is for you
but it will brighten up here in a minute it looks fine okay you can see the detail yeah okay it
starts slow i'm gonna see if i can get it going here just a little bit faster okay i'm gonna it
shows the motion but what's gonna happen is you're going to see coronal aurora actually happen and then you can maybe
understand how those pictures came to be i don't know if it's moving
you haven't hit play there we go there we go yeah oh that's beautiful yeah this is in real time this is real
time and that's what i mean if you are not looking up when this happens you can easily miss it
look at this holy cow was it did it appear that could you miss this yes now
this is shot at 25 000 iso okay with the sony a7s unmodified
so but you see how you can get the pictures of the corona in there the coronal and see how it spins around in
the color uh that is exactly what it looks like and this was an active night i shot oh
my gosh i shot video and images practically the whole night and that's one thing thank you uh when you do this
if you really want to see aurora you have to turn into a third shift worker i mean you can start up cameras and let
them run but i want to see what's going on you know i i like seeing what is up there i
didn't come there to sleep and let my cameras get all see all the good stuff um
that is part of it you know when you're there doesn't that look like a comet
um yeah when you are there it is just incredible
and if i had the sound on you would hear people screaming and yelling it was just
i'm screaming and yelling on the inside yeah there's times when i sit back and watch this i do to see the structure see
the structure that's what i'm after i want to see the streamers i want to see this
in the pictures and look at the color i mean and then it dissipates so fast
sometimes and you go from completely green skies to black very quickly
and it's just amazing when the sky is active when it's a nice big cme if you
get a kp6 up there it's on fire the whole sky's on fire
let me run through a little bit farther
but anyway that that's what i mean when i say coronal um it is just incredible
to watch and the colors it is just something else to see this
terry um how how does this change you by seeing all of this in the sky i mean you've made
many of these trips you've gone out deep into the wilderness you've been you do a lot of stuff alone
i mean what what has happened to your psyche your heart your soul whatever
okay okay to me it is to me honestly it is kind of a spiritual humbling
thing because there's times i feel you know there's times i'm out there and it is so
incredible to be under a completely dark sky with stars that look like diamonds
and i can stand there with nobody else around and just soak that up wow
to to to image the milky way to do the stars no matter what i'm doing
there is a connection i think when you start paying attention to the world around you no matter what it is
you make a connection to nature i mean and to image something like this this is not like putting you know and i
love putting a camera on a telescope and imaging sure but with this you have to work with nature's laws you
are not work you can't pose this picture you have not got time to say okay i need this many images i
got to do this you have to react to aurora instantly because if you don't you're going to miss it all together and
so you kind of work on nature's time and how everything is running you know in the sky
so for me i think i'm more connected to nature
than like you know my i love my sister to death my sister likes the big cities you know she likes
to do things like that sure technically fine i do too that's where all the restaurants are but oh yeah you gotta
eat [Laughter] but to go out and actually this feeds the soul this this the heart
this feeds the psyche thank you yeah and and there are people that understand that and there's other people
who probably think i'm crazy but it does just as people do like molly was saying
it keeps her sane to do astrophotography it's the same type of thing it it gets
you focused and it takes you away from everything else and you just really admire what is right there in front of
you and you didn't even have to pay for that that sky is there every night yeah it's sacred it is you know and it's
something families enjoy so much and i think that's been the way it has been
um since a covid everybody has gotten out and started camping and you notice the stars more
and you know you see something like that and it's just you're awesome i'm sorry you're all struck oh yeah i remember
late i had a bench there and i laid on that bench i don't know how long and just watch this so that is what
corona is and you can see how it happens because it always spins around colorful fast
it is something amazing to see i would recommend seeing that anytime you can do
it it is incredible and when i'm in alaska and even well i can't say that when i'm
home this is the camera i watch this is an aurora camera all the information is right here and
i'm going to start this up this is what it looked like last night at poker flat research range i'm going to get it down
to the dark [Music] so you can watch whether you're in
alaska or at home you can see what's going on with the cameras there and this
is on when it's dark and it's only on i believe you know in the winter months uh for poker flat i'm gonna get past and
you can see clouds i don't know about everybody else i have really fought clouds in any imaging i'm doing this
year it has been pretty tough and when i'm in alaska as i said i watch
this and understand too this is a camera so it might look this bright and this was last night at fairbanks
um it might be this bright on this camera when you walk outside to your naked eye
it will not be that bright um these are longer exposures but look at the reds
look at the curtains i mean the motion there you see exactly what i'm talking about you see the bright white aurora
down here that burns out but yet you have the green up here it it's you know but that was a
fairbanks last night i mean i wish i would have been there last night it's incredible but you can watch this
at any time that is the web address sport the university of alaska of alaska
fairbanks runs this camera and poker flat had an open house a few years ago and i was so
fortunate to be in alaska at the time and we got to tour everything and i got
to see lidar working which was really cool but i also saw where this camera
was set up and it's just an amazing place that fairbanks in general i think
is an amazing place especially in the winter i think i've been to fairbanks one time
in the summer and it's funny it wasn't the same as in the winter it was i like it a lot better
when the aurora is out and i can't leave without giving you my ghost aurora
uh this one is film this these are huge huge pine trees on top of a hill whoops
um it is amazing what you can see there we go
and i could not see this forming but when i looked at it do you see my ghost with the arms up yes and
its eyes right here this is my award ghost so happy halloween everybody enjoy
it at the end of the month and thank you for watching and i will there we go quit sharing
yeah beatrice hines uh comments she says i've been in laughed at
uh about uh from people uh that that i told them that i love the stars
but i'm glad we're all here crazy hey i'm right with you me too beatrice
has another question she wants to know what kind of lenses you like to use you know is it a brand are there certain uh
lens types uh um i have a variety like i said i buy every once in a while i buy
nikon lenses and put them on my cam canon camera canon okay yeah yeah i have
a cup that i do and i know that uh molly likes to use a minolta
uh molly which which ones is it a 135 i have the rookie slash samyang 135 okay yeah rokinon used
to make lenses for minolta exclusively for a while that was back in the days before you were born so
yeah and i use those too actually i have the 135 and that is the 20 millimeter one i use is rokinon um
yeah i really want i really want their 14 millimeter yeah i want it i want it
they they make a good lens that is not at so expensive um there are other
really great lenses out there uh but yeah and i've got the nikon 14 to
24. if it's an f 2.8 and that's a little bit slow for what i want to do with aurora unless it's super bright but yeah
um and i do i would like to upgrade my camera if you know i get to a point where they actually have some in stock
yeah nice stuff terry thank you bob appreciate it it's great
yeah i love that i've seen all those different forms of aurora here in duluth over the years and
uh the coronal stuff that you captured exactly matches what my impressions were
too and also that great that art that shoots through the northern lights
sometimes just incredible yeah it is and you know i just bought um i got a canon ra and it's modified and i
can't wait to get that up in alaska i've been using that for my deep sky
i've been using that like on heart and soul along with the extreme filter
but um yeah so you know there's a lot you can do with it and believe me it isn't once you see it it's all the same
it every time you see it it's different and it's just as beautiful i love them
yeah i love the scent to me i stick around and i just watch it as they change i you kind of take what nature
gives you and each one is unique and it is yeah it's just a wonderful experience
i think people that have seen it as active is what some of us have it is it's it's very it's a it's amazing
i mean the whole sky just dances and it is truly amazing so i bet you've just one quick thing i bet
you've shouted out loud at least a couple of times when you've seen some of those things because it's involuntary sometimes that's the reaction you can't
help it i when i run my videos i have to shut the sound off
yes yeah i'm sure you've experienced the
same thing oh yeah it's just like somebody squeezes it out of you you're like ah you just
have to react you know oh yeah the first time i saw coronal aurora i swear you'd
have to pick my jaw up off the ground i i was so amazed
but anyway well thank you everybody um next up
is john goss now what could we say about john goss i can say a lot about john um
the announcements that you see for the league um you know for a lot of the things we do
john goss is our media guy he is amazing when it comes to designing announcements
designing anything that we need pins everything we do i say john have you got
a little bit that maybe you can help you know do this john the league would be lost without john
and all the work he's done he is a pastor yes past president
he he has held so many different offices he knows how to do everything how about
that great all-around guy thank you and he is also the master of
lunacy and that was a secret until now so why well we've been saying it all week long
i know that will stick john so i will turn it over to you master of
lunacy alrighty well thanks thank you thank you terry
uh let me describe what's what's going on here um
i think that didn't work for whatever reason
okay the about uh well two years ago in the lead-up to the uh 50th
anniversary of apollo 11 we were producing a trivia question each day for
the moon so i i ended up with about 300 of these things and i've kind of called
them down tonight to pick out some of the more uh the more different ones uh the more interesting ones i'd like to go
through some of these with you right now i think i have two dozen of these and you
people have asked me well how did you come up with three 300 questions
well what i did is just divided it into different categories like art argan culture uh you know we've
all seen the movie uh 2001 space odyssey well there's a number of questions you can ask from that movie
uh there are various paintings from famous artists you can ask questions about that you can ask
questions about the physical nature of the moon you know how far away is the moon well you can ask that a number of different
ways oh how far away is it okay but you can also ask how long does it take to drive a car there how long does
it take light to go from the moon to the earth earth to the moon whatever things of that nature so i was able to
come up with a number of questions so i'm going to go with through with some of these right now
now starting out with a little poem here uh since this is about lunacy
lunacy with a big bright moon a shining astronomers are a whining
mons pico at sunrise lunar x gives a surprise night's mysteries are aligning
so that's what we're going into right now have a question for you
what is wrong with this scene here i i pulled this off off the web off a reputable website this wasn't some crazy
thing it was probably a news organization that released this uh so how can you tell that this is not
buzz aldrin descending uh the apollo 11 lunar module
well one question you keep asking about the moon is the
physical relationship between the earth and the moon where the earth is in the lunar sky
well the the moon from apollo 11 landing site is never excuse me the earth from the apollo 11
landing site is never near the horizon it's pretty much straight overhead
very high in the lunar sky so if somebody inserted that earth i don't know why
so that's the correct answer next one you know i had a number of questions about the apollo program since
that's what the whole thing was about um i found this kind of interesting uh you know how much did the lunar rover weigh
we all like seeing it zip across the lunar surface uh you think it's probably pretty pretty
heavy just by the size of it but um well well
not really it was only about 450 pounds on earth of course on the moon being one-sixth of gravity drops it down to
less than 80 pounds so uh you know you could lift it up and
scoot it out of a a rut if you had to well i guess most people could
this is always an interesting question you know we've all heard and seen the big moon
uh illusion when the moon is fairly close to the horizon it seems to be fairly large
with an hour so later when it's higher it's quite a bit smaller at least you think so what's the cause of this
um and i have read a number of accounts um you know when the moon is close to the horizon it can be compared
to uh the size of an object on the horizon so it seems a little larger
but from what i have really read about this it's kind of a but it's more c it's an unconscious
psychological effect because it occurs over the ocean
it occurs over a desert where there are very few features that you can compare this to but it is you still see it
this is one of my favorite ones because i it's uh what i say isn't really what is true
what i'm going to tell you uh why has been said that the moon is made of green cheese
okay well obviously mice are extra active during the full moon i don't know
but the answer really is is c the green isn't referring to the color
it's referring to an uncured state of recently formed cheese a cheese wheel's appearance in a
reflected pond or pool seems to resemble that of the full moon now no one really knows the answer to
this but this seems to be a plausible explanation of how it came about because obviously no one really believes it's
made of green cheese this is one of my art and culture type
questions i think we've all seen this at some point in our lives the moon over half
dome by enzo adams so question is that where where did it
first appear on the cover of nasa geographic now could be in a drawing by norman rockwell for the
saturday evening post this is right up his alley and see on his son's wedding announcement well of course you picked
the oddest one there it was on his son's wedding announcement that's where it was first published can
you imagine um having a copy that right now pretty nice yeah
so amateur astronomers are always looking at sky scenes and determining their
astronomical accuracy you know this is art you can draw anything you want uh but you know
with this scene of of clouds over a country stream stock highly stylized you know what what would
really drive an amateur astronomer up up the wall on this scene because it's not is that really correct well
you know you've got your crescent moon with a star in the center of it that's physically impossible of course
uh but you see stuff like this now and then especially in um
sunday morning comic strips in the paper they often have depictions like this
and uh sometimes it's kind of funny
another art and culture question if you like watching murder mysteries on
tv oftentimes they will have the the moon in the background as a murder is
about or has just happened to take place um so how can you use the full moon as a
as a clock to determine when this murder is taking place um so on this picture with the moon i guess
i have it pointed kind of straight up and down uh north and south and straight up and down on the moon so would this be taken
at uh or with this crime occurred at the as evening darkness fell would it be uh occurred at around
midnight or would it be really no no way of of really knowing
well it's at midnight because midnight uh the north-south axis of the
moon is pointing straight up and down closer to sunrise or sunset this the axis would be much more
tilted excuse me about my voice
earth shadow what's going on here well
the moon dark is doing a total lunar eclipse uh which i noticed we had a question here earlier tonight about the
the upcoming eclipse in in november uh so what caught what's the cause of the
darkness on the night portion of the crescent moon is it the earth shadow is it the moon
shadow or is it a special perpetual night on the moon's far side
which is not really the same as its dark side well it's the moon's shadow it's the
same as on the earth you're standing uh the sun goes below the horizon things
get dark out well you're standing in the earth's shadow you just have to be within the first five feet of it
uh while during a lunar eclipse the moon is 240 000 miles away from it so it's uh
it's the same shadow but for the for the crescent moon uh the night side of the moon is the moon's
shadow then i started talking about some of the
physical features on the moon that you can see the the creator of focus is really
interesting to see because it has a fan shaped
uh spray coming out from the the spray kind of goes to the lower left from from the crater in this picture
what causes that is it a an asteroid impacting the lunar surface at a low angle is it a volcano explosively disrupted
or something else that we haven't been able to quite figure out well it is believed to be
occurred during the impact from an asteroid at a low angle causing a spray
like that you see it in some other craters on the moon also
what makes a valley and we have lots of valleys on earth well the longest valley on the moon is
246 miles long but it's unlike anything that that's that's on earth
uh was it how was it formed was it formed from uh from ancient glaciers
you know some people really believe that uh is it really a giant crack in the lunar surface or was it formed by a
combined excavation of a line of meteor strikes well i think we can all guess that one it has to be c it's resolved
from from meteor impacts perhaps there were several of them coming right in a row that hit the
surface at just about the same time carving out a a linear almost linear crater
it was one of the more oddball questions at what temperature does what does water
boil on the moon uh you know at earth water boils at 212
fahrenheit or 100 degrees uh centigrade well how about on on the moon
any questions any answers there okay it boils as soon as as soon as the
ice melts uh since there's no atmosphere at zero air pressure it boils right when it
melts at 32 degrees fahrenheit or center of zero degrees centigrade so kind of a
trick question now here's one of the questions on how
far away is the moon so there you are you got your car that can drive straight
up into space how long would it take you to get there driving at freeway speeds now come on
that's about 70 miles an hour so but uh took the astronauts about a
little less than three days to get there so it was about one week [Music]
just when you get sick appearing from the back seat when are we going to get there i think it's b you think it's that was probably
how it was after the one millionth time that you
heard you're gonna say are we almost there yet it should only take five minutes
so here it is 143 days and that's that's constant
constant driving no bathroom breaks no bathroom breaks nothing that's that's day and night
that's some vacation and then you got to come home my dad used to drive
so you know it's a question like this is really designed to show you how how big
space is you know the moon's the closest thing to the earth but yet it's still 143 days to get there
growing up i think some of those older people remember seeing books of the moon with
artists renditions of how certain scenes would look
so that here you have a large crater let's call it copernicus or tycho does it really
look like this well of course in a book from 1960 it might but the answer
is no no that the crater walls aren't sure drops you know they're they're more gentle slumped
slopes and which is a reason for all that but a scene like this no you wouldn't really
see looks cool but that's not cool
okay now this is a one people i think some people would have trouble with because they just don't
quite understand about how uh what you can see on the moon and what you can't but only during a new moon the
moon's dark far side faces the earth you know because this new moon you can't see it so it's got to be facing earth
well of course not you know the far side of the moon never faces the earth never ever faces the
earth so keep that in mind
oh yeah um believe it or not you had
and they're not too distant past you had some pretty learned people some pretty smart people
who uh really really wanted to believe life existed on the moon
even though there was absolutely no evidence for that uh
here is one uh um there uh i think it's pronounced linnae
was was studied quite a bit in in the uh in the 1800s is it because some astronomers thought
it had vanished and then it reappeared that could be some astronomers thought it was about to
erupt or other observers thought they saw strange artificial structures within the
crater now the correct answer is a and a lot of uh professional astronomers
uh were convinced that it had disappeared and then it reappeared
uh it just shows you what what some people see or what they don't see i don't know
so we're now we're talking in 1953 here now that's that's pretty recent people
knew that there was no atmosphere in the middle that there was no life on the moon um but anyway uh the new york herald
tribune science editor john o'neill reported that he observed
something strange was this a canal he
he observed a bridge or a road but a 12 mile long thing
remember this is 1953 and some people saw the same thing
and other people saw nothing [Music] but he believed he saw a bridge kind of
like uh um um are at arches national park you have some some natural formations of
huge bridges but these this is 12 miles long this isn't like 300 feet so
strange people saw this but here's a guy
who um a professional astronomer i don't know
where he was coming from uh but what unusual lunar viewpoints did william
pickering have a earth has a second moon okay b the moon has weather events such as
fog and snow storms remember people knew that there was there was no atmosphere
uh see the moon harbors life so which one did he believe did he say
claim to be true oh my god this guy yeah he was into it the whole way
okay what an amazing astronomer and to uh kind of miss the mark on all these things yeah well there's other
amazing astronomers too out there right so here's here's william trickering
again and this is more than really just one crater he talked about but uh theophilus
the uh the central peak what did he observe there this he did this with many other craters as well artificial lights
smoke or a snowstorm and uh
well he saw a lot of snow storms on the moon okay
okay yeah oh here he is again
uh uh uh observing uh an indistinct dark areas an alphonsus crater floor which is
a nice relatively flat crater floor but they see changing vegetation
sunlight playing tricks on him which is probably the truth yeah uh or the
remains of an ancient sea well of course didn't want to disappoint anybody so
it's a changing vegetation now this was in the 1800s people knew
that there was no atmosphere on the moon i don't know i don't quite get this well here's
another one wow the varian observer franz von paula
screw up the name bruce thusun was an early proponent of the belief that that meteor impacts formed luna craters okay
check that one out he's right he also remembered for seeing something in 1822 in sinus astrum that was very
remarkable he with other people doing the same thing claimed that he saw a a large walled
city b a large reservoir b a volcanic eruption
and d a meteor strike well and let's go with the weirdest one
a large walled city and he wasn't the only person supposedly
he had some some backup
okay just have a few few more of these when the moon is about seven and a half
days old an unusual feature becomes apparent one that observers like pointing out and i've tried to find this
myself a few times is visible for a few hours each month when the lunar when the moon's terminator passes it this feature
is called the lunar plus and the letter x or the lunar cross so
you can kind of see that there's a plus cross x formation that you can spot
which is just a confluence of several craters coming together with the light striking it just right
well it's come to be known as the lunar x um it is interesting to see
it only lasts for a few hours and the sun rises high enough
yeah a couple more of these things uh the maiden on the moon
it's uh it's an interesting feature to see it's uh is i just as you can see it was in the late 1600s when it was first
noticed no one actually thought it was made down the moon but they just saw it saw the resemblance and you can see it
um actually tomorrow tonight and tomorrow night there'll be uh good times to view this and then
really the best way to see it is if it's slightly out of focus or if the sky is fairly hazy if you get too sharp of a
focus it the resemblance goes away so where is it is this is uh
the ballast uh albus which is the alpine valley uh moans pico or promotorium heraclitus
well this is off us sinus rhythm and it's the promontorium
it's something to look at if you have a chance uh go go out and give that a look so i said if it's in sharp focus you
really won't see this
so okay here we go who was the first person to smell the moon
i mean is that possible what does luna regolith does the dirt smell like does it smell like uh this is
a two-part question obviously does it smell like tobacco smell like a nice spring rain
or gum powder well the first think about it first people who actually smelled the moon
well it had to be uh either neil armstrong or buzz aldrin the first two people who walked on the moon
that no they couldn't smell it while they were walking on the moon but when they got done with their their eva and they crawled back on their lunar module
they take their helmets off uh to dust themselves off well they're going to be smelling the dust all over
them and they and the other uh later astronauts said the same thing kind of a burnt
gunpowder smell but after a few hours being exposed to the oxygen in the lunar module
or lunar lander rather it uh went away subsided
everybody's favorite copy flat earth okay if the earth were flat like a coin
or a cylinder well since the earth is flat like a coin or a
cylinder see i should approach this differently uh moonrise were occurred at the same time for any point on earth
okay for a total lunar eclipse as we're coming up this this coming month uh just
after sunset the earth's shadow casts on the moon would not be round the long thin oval similar to the outline of a
coin scene edge on or everyone on earth would see at the same
time the moon in the sky is this what we see i mean since the earth is flat like
a coin we must see this well of course no we don't see any of these things
and so if you have a model which states this um that model has to
take into account all these deficiencies in it and of course it's kind of hard to explain away some of these very obvious
things which i know but it gets people laughing but you know it really gets people talking if if if
you do people like saying stuff like this but if you do talk to them about it in a forthright manner
uh to try to get them to see that no that is not what you see so
what's going on okay i have one more which isn't a question but to show you what i've been
doing or trying to do something called ghost craters
halloween here ghost craters uh uh over the past year so i have
been spending a lot of time observing the moon something i i i really like the the guy up in the uh up in the upper
left is the last one i want to mention but there are three uh there are a number of ghost craters now a ghost
crater is one that's been it was our normally formed crater
that many years after it was formed was flooded probably by basaltic lava for
some some reason and buried or almost buried when that lava had subside cooled and
subsided you could see the outline of features just below the surface or just
poking above the surface and that's what these craters are there's one called stadius which uh the two prominent uh
craters you see in the upper right are copernicus and erythostones well stadius is kind of between them and you have to
have a really low sun at sun angle to find these things because they don't rise very high above
the surface if they do um lamont there on the lower lower right
that's uh an interesting one because that happened to be right near the apollo 11 landing
site and if you get a very low sun angle you can see it fairly easily with a small
telescope lambert r's this is a picture i took about a couple weeks ago
and it is just north of copernicus again it's a you can just barely see it on a
low sun obviously it's a low sun angle there because the terminator is right there now for the upper left
that this is one i'm particularly interested in uh it can be seen well i believe on sunday night so i'm
looking forward to clear weather which is forecast for here on sunday night um
it's been nicknamed the the cheerio crater and it happens to be right next to a
small crater called angstrom which isn't that hard to see but um can you see the little cheerio
next to it and i think that looks really weird so i hopefully be able to see it
obviously i got the apollo 15 photograph of it but um from earth well i'd like to
see what it would what it really looks like you know so some of these questions i i
i want people to get thinking about the moon what causes certain things what people have seen in the past you know
why did these people believe that they kept seeing signs of life
and believe me i i could have doubled the length of this presentation
with with more of that stuff there are a lot of people who believe they had evidence proof for life
strange uh you know when you know at the same time
people knew that the moon had no atmosphere or a very very tenuous atmosphere
couldn't couldn't support life plus the physical nature of the moon the relationship between the earth and
the moon with the moon from the moon's point of view the earth is always in the same
part of the sky almost i don't want to get in the vibration but there's a slight wobbling around but the moon is in the same part
of the sky it's it's it's always going to be there so you're never going to have that apollo 11 picture of the moon excuse me of the
earth rising from the apollo 11 landing site because the moon never
rises it's always in the same part of the sky the moon is uh far from the earth a series of questions
which are i think were always interesting where what does the moonlight look like from
another planet if you were on a spaceship orbiting venus could you see the moon
could you separate the moon and the earth well yes yes you can pretty easily same for mars you can separate it pretty
easily um and i think i think you can also separate it if you
were happy to be somehow standing on the surface of the sun
because the moon is 240 000 miles away and the angular separation is enough for you to
to see all that stuff okay on that happy note i will stop
sharing
and any questions on any of this here well let's see
uh there's a there's a comment here harold lock watching on youtube says i thought early from my poor focus
i saw structures on the moon um well
maybe that's the reason it could be it could be could be could be but i encourage you all to get out
and look at the moon when you can it's an interesting object it's a it's really the only other world besides
earth that you can view up close firsthand you can see mountains craters and all that stuff you can't see that on
any of the planets so give it a shot thank you thank you
all right thank you john that was really interesting now we know who to go to when we need questions for our questions
at the global star parties we have a supply that's right
yes thank you very much appreciate it john you're welcome next we're gonna go to mary adams now mary adam i i listened
to her at aurora summit she is amazing uh i love the folklore the history
she is going to bring us to a whole different level so
so uh she is a star-lore historian and author hosts a weekly public radio show
and podcast the storytellers night sky her book the the star tales of mother's
goose is a whimsical example of how we reach the stars through the humanities
mary led the initiative to establish the ninth international dark sky park
worldwide which was achieved at headlands in 2011 in her home state of michigan
and mary you did an amazing job with the dark sky park i i was there that was the first place
that i did meet you i think was up in headlands when there was a speaker there and you you
were amazing you i love listening to you so without further ado uh
please go ahead and thank you very much terry for inviting me and for that
i don't want to thank you for setting the bar so high but i do want to say that i'm honored to be joining such an
illustrious group and we've been with molly took us to the nebula and bob through the black holes and terry those
aurora pictures were amazing and john i liked all of that stuff about
the moon and then also i want to say thank you to scott for pointing out that part of the reason
we talk about the dead at this time of year is because we're drawing close to the cross quarter or the halfway point
between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice and so i'm going to
bring us all the way back down to the earth and we're going to have to rely on
our own imaginations because the tale that i'm going to tell comes from a time
before there were telescopes before there was a machine technology that we could use
for deep space imaging and the kind of science that we have now to figure out some of these fabulous mysteries that
surround us and continue to boggle the mind and i'm kind of
i think heartened in the fact that you start with david levy and he started by
reciting a poem so we're going to end with a fairy tale and also i think bob you mentioned to
einstein and i think it's a really wonderful story that i've heard about him and i'm i'm not sure when jack zipes
told this story if he was bending it to make it true for him or if this is really how the exchange happened but
jags ips is a a scholar of wonder literature
and he told the tale of his grandmother speaking to albert einstein and asking
him how could she ensure that her grandson would grow up to be an intelligent young man and albert
einstein said to him read him fairy tales and she said okay thank you very much dr
einstein what else and he said more fairy tales and so what i understood what i
understand from that story is that a healthy imagination is a very important thing when it comes to doing
any kind of scientific research and imagination not just because we have to have a make-believe but we
have to have a healthy openness to things not always being what they seem
i think we just got a really good example of that with the the questions that john shared with us and some of the things that people have
believed along the way kind of crazy all right so i'll share my screen for just a moment but we're not going to see
pictures of the beautiful some of the beautiful images that we've seen but i just want to point out the part of the
sky that i want to talk about and that is going to be saying just a
minute that's going to be the region where uh this is actually a star map that
comes from michigan state university abrams planetarium and this is their september map so even though we're
already in october october this year they didn't populate the star field as much so i wanted to pick up the
september map because i want to talk about the region of pegasus so pegasus is just uh midway on the left hand side
and you'll see the pegasus as the the winged horse he's uh north of the aquarius water urn
and um just a little bit west or north also of the of the fish of pisces um we have the
southern fish there also so we have this kind of watery region going on and it's interesting in ancient mythologies to me
particularly coming out of the greek culture that the the horse was considered the offspring
of poseidon the god of the waters and in fact they the greeks at a certain
point went so far as to say that pegasus was the son of poseidon and medusa
and that when perseus slayed the medusa and her blood the blood from her being decapitated fell into the ocean i mean
here's a gruesome halloween image that out of this union of the the blood of
the head of the medusa with poseidon the winged white horse pegasus appeared
and so this is the region of the sky that i wanted to talk about with my subject which was passing between the
worlds under october skies because the horse also shows up in a lot of tales about crossing over
the boundary from this world into the next world and also horses figure pretty consistently
in traditions of celebrating funeral ceremonies and funeral rites and there are in many many places around the world
there are grave sites where there will be great warriors that were buried together with
their horses a horse that would be fully saddled and um so this idea that it's a horse that
takes us across the threshold from from life and to death or even from that other world back into this world so the
horse has this really marvelous mystery that's wrapped around it and in welsh tradition um it's the goddess rihanna
who rides this horse and actually she's kind of chained to the horse she's being punished but what she ultimately becomes
is this guardian goddess that can take dead souls back into the afterlife but the
tale that i want to tell actually comes from the russian and i was telling my daughter earlier today about this she's
an mfa candidate at the university of virginia in poetry and she wrote a
little poem today with this line that i particularly liked that a constellation is a poem
made of stars and so with tipping my hat to to david and to
edgar allan poe and then also now to the poets and the writers of fairy tales and
to all of those who all of us and our rich imaginations now i'll bring us back down to earth with this once upon a time
and the story is called ivan and the chestnut horse and it goes like this
so once upon a time there was an old old man and he had three sons and he taught
them everything that he could as best he could the way a good father should so that they would grow up to be very
responsible and caring young men and unfortunately because he was at the end
of the life soon he knew he would die and as he was dying he said to his sons
you must promise me one thing do not forget he said do not forget to come and
read the prayers over my grave and then he died
now the three brothers the two older ones were very strong and very brave men and they were crying and crying and
their younger brother ivan he was kind of still young very uh thin and and
didn't look like he had much vitality in himself and he just stood very quietly in the corner as his father
died and his eyes filled with bright wonder at this at this site um but he
kind of kept to himself and after they uh had the funeral service then they uh
they buried their father and then later that same evening ivan went out and
prayed over his father's grave and on his way back into the town a
mighty horse came galloping by with a messenger on it and with a big silver
trumpet pronouncing that the king was issuing a proclamation because his
daughter the princess helena the fair had commanded to be built a temple with 12 columns and 12 beams and she was
going to place herself on a high throne in this temple and whosoever could on
his horse jump high enough to kiss her as she leaned forward from her throne
would then be made her husband and ideally they would live happily ever after well you
can imagine that this news spread like wildfire throughout the kingdom and all the young men got very excited about how
they were going to prepare themselves for this great jump to win this marvelous beauty as their own
well the three brothers got together and the two older brothers were really excitedly talking about this but the youngest brother ivan said but wait a
minute our primary task is to be sure to say the prayers over
the grave of our father and the oldest brother said well
that's all well and good but i really need to take care of the farm that he left to me so i can't be the first to do
it and the second brother said and i need to settle the affairs of the state so i'm not available to do it either so
the youngest brother ivan said all right i will go i will take care of saying the prayers
over our father's grave so he did this for the first seven days and then he met
up with his brothers again and he noticed that their hair had been trimmed and they had dyed their
mustaches and they're looking a little bit more muscular because they had secretly gone off to their respective
places to get prepared for this mighty jump to win the princess unbeknownst to ivan and unbeknownst to
one another well so they had this meeting and the oldest brother said you know i still have a bit more work to do so i'm not
able to to do the prayers yet this week and the second brother said the same thing so ivan said all right
i'll say the prayers again so another seven days went by and then ivan held a council he said
surely by now you both should be ready to do your turn but no they didn't have chance yet ivan said the prayers for one
more week and then when he tried to have a meeting with his brothers again they didn't even show up
well pretty soon this contest was going to happen where now all the men in the
kingdom would come on their horses to try to make this jump to kiss helena the
helena the fair and so the older brothers they felt a little twinge of conscience that maybe
ivan should be invited to come and see this competition and also they had found out that each other was also uh complete
going to compete to do this and there was a little bit of jealousy going on but they decided that ivan was so
scrawny and he was so young that it might be an embarrassment to have him there so they decided that they would go
without announcing to him that they were going to participate in this competition so the competition went on all day and
several of the men tried more than once but none of them could jump high enough to meet the luscious lips of the
princess now at this time ivan was doing his evening prayers over his father's
grave and at that moment something seized hold of him a tremendous longing
to see the face of the beautiful princess and he was so overcome with
longing that he fell down on the earth and cried deep deep tears that fell down into the
earth and actually made their way into the coffin of ivan's father
while ivan's father shook from his coffin and stood up and shook the earth
off of him and stood before ivan who was terrified at seeing his dead father there and he said no no my son
don't be afraid for i have heard your wish and i can help you i know that you long to see the face of the beautiful
helena the fair and i can make that happen and before ivan could say anything his dead father made a loud
loud call that went thundering through the world and as it faded the echo of it
sounded as though it was like the hooves of a horse and then his dead father made a second
loud call and now ivan was certain he heard the naying of a horse and then at the third loud call
of his dead father sure enough this beautiful chestnut horse appeared before
him with an arched neck and a flowing mane and tail and it had fire coming from its nostrils and through its mouth
and the horse went three times around ivan and his father and then it stood
still and said whatever is your will i take that as my command
well ivan was trembling a bit he's standing there with his dead father and now he's seen his very spirited horse
and his father said don't be afraid he took him by the hand and led him over to the horse
and he said pass through the right ear and come out the left
and then you will be able to command this horse so ivan decided he had nothing to lose
he entered through the right ear of the horse and when he emerged on the left side he was no longer a young shivering
boy but he was tall upright and looked very much to be a man
of the world and mounting on the horse they took off toward the temple that had
been built with the 12 columns and the 12 beams by the princess helena the fair
well she was at this point pretty disconsolate because nobody had been able to uh achieve this
this challenge that she had placed before them and the older brothers were there and everyone was getting ready to
leave when they heard the thundering hubs of this chestnut horse come riding in
and the ivan mounted on this horse they jumped up once
but they missed the lips of the princess they jumped a second time they got so close that ivan and helena could smell
one another's breath and a third time the horse jumped and seemed to pause and
they lingered in a long kiss of first love and then as the horse a lit back on the
ground it took off and ivan disappeared just as quickly as he had had shown up but the princess fell back into her
temple she was so overcome with this kiss she knew that this was her true
beloved ivan on his part was also so distracted by
the the power of this kiss that he kind of let go of the reins of the horse and the horse took him back to the site of
his father's grave and ivan got off the horse and the horse galloped away he saw
a beautiful rainbow bridge appear and the horse seemed to go up across the
rainbow and be gathered into the folds of the great beyond and then ivan looked toward his father's
grave and there his father stood once again and he said ivan
you have fulfilled my last wish of saying the prayers over my grave but i have that was my dying wish i have
one living wish and here's how you can fulfill it there will be a great gathering tomorrow
because the princess seeks to find the one who was able to achieve her challenge and you must go but you must
stay in the shadow and speak not a word and watch what happens so sure enough
the very next day there was this meeting ivan went and his brothers went and the
whole community went and the princess looked around and passed by the brothers
like they were so much dirt and looked everywhere she never could she couldn't see anywhere her true beloved
because although love is blind it can yet see the truth
and pretty soon she made her way into the corner where ivan was hiding and she
saw him and realized this was her one true beloved so they were married and they
lived happily ever after so i like this story out of the russian
folk tales because i imagine that the horse that makes this great jump that comes from the far far reaches that's
called by somebody who's already died and is across the threshold could be related to pegasus
and that the princess could be related to andromeda and perhaps the star alpha rods were these two constellations the
star that they have in common could be imagined either as ivan or as the place
where their lips meet in true love but also what i love about a fairy tale is that it's not just that the
there's always a woman in distress that needs to be rescued by a man that really it came out of a time when it was
believed that the human being needed strong moral imaginations to understand the language of the soul and to
understand how to free that higher greater understanding and i think
how to touch that place like what you were showing terry in your beautiful imagery of the knights of the aurora
borealis something begins to move in us and in a time before we had telescopes before humanity
had cameras for taking night sky photography before there was a certain set of um
scientific ideas about how to understand these phenomena that we see there were fairy tales there were mythologies there
were these ideas that were populated with creatures of of the other world
that we might laugh at now but it was really trying to give expression to the living nature the living quality of the
human being in relationship to the environment so just wanted to show a picture that comes out of the russian
tradition that shows ivan on his chestnut horse at the moment that he's kissing helena the fair because it's
just this beautiful imagination i think that together with all of the other wonderful pictures that we saw tonight
to uh end our evening with a happily ever after that we may all find our our
true love and what um i think is also important in this experience of the um
let me see stop screen share and thinking about the wisdom that comes out of fairy tales
is that uh like einstein said that it nourishes the soul and just like we eat food to
nourish the body a fairy tale nourishes the soul and long after we've experienced it it continues to do it its
work and i think it lends itself to the sense of awe and wonder we can have when we see the phenomena in the night sky
comets falling stars the crescent moon next to venus the northern lights and to even contemplate
something like a nebula or a black hole i mean these are awesome awesome images that
i think the ancients knew some of that stuff you know talking about how cetus was born from the pontus region of
the black sea which was this swirling black region where mons devouring monsters were born and you didn't want
to go near it because you couldn't escape sounds a little bit like a black hole so
that's the story that i have to share for us and if anybody's interested in any has any questions about fairy tales
or about how to find them in relation to the night sky i'm happy to answer that but also just to say thank
you terry for asking me to join sure thank you that was beautiful yeah i think
everyone's stunned yes i've been in the chestnut horse
i'll remember that it was amazing that was thank you so much
yeah thanks mary i like alpharett's being the kiss yeah perfect it's just serious it's good to
have those things in the right place yeah and also just the horses
is coming up at this time of the year and it comes to its highest place as we celebrate
this season of honoring loved ones who have died and the role of the horse in this moving across the threshold from
life into death it's not happen stance that this is the season that ancient and
indigenous cultures practice these things because they really were trying to live in harmony with the cosmos
yeah you know i thought when i first saw your topic i thought you might
that you might have we're going to talk about the pleiades and halloween and that sort of being a transition from the dark world into the
living world it was a pleasant surprise oh good i'm
glad that i was able to surprise you yeah well totally yeah i don't know much i mean i know basic mythology stuff you
know from studying the constellations but that was uh that was a great story and i usually i know them from the greek
tradition you know greek and rome yeah you know what i do when you when you and you have to have a
lot of star names in your back pocket right like you have to know the names of the stars in order to then start to look
for them in other things right and because i i had four children i read them a lot of fairy tales and so
i have a lot of star names and a lot of fairy tales at a certain point they kind of all just come together like
oh you know it's not too far-fetched to say that this fairy tale about this
horse jumping through the sky connecting to this woman could be like pegasus and andromeda
you know maybe that's not what the greeks were saying but is this where that story is coming from so i allow myself to
imagine those things and then it's it's like new worlds open up just in the
world of wonder literature it's really exciting i think there's so much symbology in
things i mean you horses represent things and maybe there's a commonality of that symbol
among different cultures too in different cultures it's it's really prevalent this idea that the horse
is the guardian that takes us across that threshold is really as you said really prevalent yeah so that's a good
time for that story i hope i find my horse when we're ready to hop into that black hole
i'm not going any other way than on horseback have you ever been barnstormed have you
ever been riding in a horse when it wanted to get back to the barn no matter where you thought you were going no i haven't no yeah well it's a little bit
like going toward a black hole
you're not turning you're just going in one place and it's up to the horse where barnstorming comes from
yeah i think so yeah maybe you never knew that another word for event horizon
yeah well anything i can find to work in i usually will try so
[Laughter] well thank you so much
that was amazing yeah it's fun to share a story bring us all back down to earth and then send us
out you look at everything a little bit differently with something like that
that and then that's what we need we need to get our mind open up a little bit and thinking in different ways too
so thank you that was exercise the imagination right yes definitely
all right i am going to announce the winners um of the door prizes
so let me get this started
i was listening to everything and all of a sudden i realized oh my gosh i'm running out of time
all right here is the answer the we have a lunar eclipse coming up friday november 19th it is not a total lunar
eclipse the answer is false at mid eclipse it will be 97
of the moon will be covered by the earth's umbra it's going to be pretty darn close
mike naper had that correct answer
what telescope just took a 16 day ocean voyage that covered 5 800 miles
it's the james webb space telescope and rich crayling had the correct answer for that
and what date does an uh orionid meteor shower peak october 21st
and beatrice heinz had the correct answer for that so congratulations to all three winners
uh somebody from the astronomical league will be contacting you in the next few days
so for tonight i would like to thank all of our speakers my gosh scott thank you
you are the master controller tonight your controller master cylinder
[Laughter] david levy did an amazing job on his reading carol orange president of the
league always great we get some fantastic updates on what's going on
molly wakeling love your stuff love the talk thank you for your spooky nebulae
talk of the night that was amazing astro bob you you're just as
great as ever thank you so much for the black hole talk john goss boy he is
going to be the master of the lunacy i can see the next banquet of the league we're gonna have to have fun with that
and mary adams that was amazing um that was different honestly than what we've
probably ever heard and i think that is a great thing to do because it was just amazing thank you i have to
tell you it's a little bit daunting to step into the space that all of you prepared and then say once upon a time
i thought it was perfect it was a variety at these things yes and we need variety and tonight we
had just that we had a variety of everything so um next
uh blah and alive will be november 15th that will be the astronomical league's
75th anniversary we are working on that show now um
it will be full of surprises i'm sure i don't know just what surprises yet but
that's part of the fun so beyond that i think it's time to wrap up unless
anybody has anything else they would like to say all right thank you all for being here
you all did an amazing job and it's so good to see everybody again hopefully sometime we'll be able to see each other
in person thank you all for everything all the talks they were great
thank you mary thank you terry i really appreciate it thank you mary thank you
all right gary molly molly and scott and everybody so yeah thanks so much it was really a pleasure
well it's a pleasure to have you here thank you so much for speaking and we will see everybody hopefully in person
sometime next year we're lucky or bob i guess i'll see you at aurora summit as long as you're there yeah
i plan on it see you there thanks everybody good night thank you
good night good night good night
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Applause] [Music]
to [Music]
wow