Astronomical League Live XIII

Transcript:

[Music]
okay
uh
hi matt in case you didn't
uh i did not receive an attachment on the last email uh it should be a link to a google drive
it was too big all right but hopefully nothing will go wrong
i doubt that it will i've got it you're right thank you we got it covered
excellent [Music]
um
[Music]
hey scott yeah um i just realized i haven't heard anything
from david oh
i know he was on my list let me try to fix that okay thank you
i just looked it does come up live on facebook now so oh great okay i was having a hard time
finding it when i was looking uh for the older shows i was having a hard time finding that so that's great yeah it
just pops up looks like yeah okay good we need to get this on you on the
league's youtube channel also
you
[Music]
[Music]
[Music] so
[Music] hello everybody this is scott roberts
from explore scientific and the explore alliance and it is a distinct pleasure
to introduce you to the astronomical league their 13th program uh astronomical
league live terry mann is the uh the coordinator for this whole program
and she is here with me right now uh terry do you want to get uh started make some introductions
sure i can do that i first thing it was so nice to see an eclipse clip it just
brings back so many memories of when we were all in wyoming at casper and just seeing the
eclipse is just gorgeous kind of a reminder what i would like to do
i would like to introduce some of the people we have here some of them you already know and i will do more introductions as the time gets nearer
but one new face we see here is don nab and actually around the league he has
been here for for a while he's not a new face to us but he was the mastermind behind the
alcon website he was the guy that had all the knowledge of how to put that together and so he showed me and i
learned from don and i still have more learning on websites to do with don but he is also the chair of the mid-east
region of the astronomical league and don what states does that cover that is
pennsylvania southern new jersey both virginia's west virginia and regular and d.c and maryland yeah that's
40 clubs that's nice you got a nice sized region yeah you have the largest single club i
think in the league which is novak northern virginia yeah it's like a thousand people i think in that club
wow that is huge yeah and i know usually i can find you guys at starquest down at
um greenbank west virginia during starquest having a meeting i've set in on those meetings a few times
so let's hope we do that again hopefully we can do it this year i hope to see that
the next person you're going to see the other two you see quite often is chuck allen which is the vice president of the
astronomical league and he is he'll be doing some speaking tonight and we've got carol org
which is the president of the astronomical league and then we also yeah
yeah everybody keeps asking are we going to be doing alcon in albuquerque
so i we've all been saying that's something we'll look at as it gets a little bit closer and
decide probably at the beginning of the year i imagine and we'll have a little more information here in just a few minutes oh well that's good then
i won't say anymore and then we have matt penn which i cannot wait to hear back's talk i'm very
excited about that uh i'm really looking forward to it
so scott um oh hi matt
i like your studio it looks it looks like a radio broadcast
well we're all working from home these days and so um we've got more equipment than normal here yeah looks nice you
sound you sound like a radio broadcaster so nice too many zooms
yeah yeah well thank you matt for being here and scott um uh hopefully david will be
on shortly yes um uh david uh just had had to take
care of some things um he'll be on a few minutes uh he wouldn't miss an astronomical league live program
so yeah hey we all get busy and with it being december i think that happens quite often right right yep so but i'm
glad you guys do these programs because you're able to reach people all over the world and you're
able to reach you know of course we started doing these virtual events uh
because of covid uh the cove pandemic and the lockdowns that people are experiencing but uh
what we found uh and we've talked about this before terry what we found was is that there are people that
you know have to stay home because they're taking care of uh you know they're taking care of
someone or they are just for various reasons unable to leave home uh
you know and you know so they do astronomy maybe in their backyards but to experience the astronomical league
live talking to the uh coordinators and seeing uh all that the league can bring
on uh you know really is uh has helped out a lot of people get more involved in
the league's community so i i love that and um you guys do an awesome job
well thank you you do an awesome job too i'm just connecting the wires that's awesome you keep saying that i'm the guy
behind the curtain back here so no back there huh that's right all right i
love it so thank you we all have i think we all have a good time that's something that
every time we come on we meet new people and talk to new people so i think it's a great thing to do and we do appreciate
your help so i guess we will go ahead and start when david gets here we will go back and
talk to david for a few minutes sure so um carol i am going to jump right to you
since you have an update i'm curious what's going on i'm gonna share my screen here
okay
there is that zoom i'm looking to sharing my screen look you know
where is that button again [Laughter]
yeah i i would like to echo what uh terry's already said about uh uh
our having so uh many so much help from scott with keeping this you guys are
being too nice to me so no not really and on top of all the
electronic stuff and all that kind of stuff he also was a major sponsor for the league including the brand new almost
brand new fleming imaging award for young ladies and
also he continues and has been for like lots of years under running the national
young astronomer award the peltaer award and one of many several many of many things
he actually does for the league so we're very appreciative well we are too speaking of alcon 2022
uh i've been in contact a few days ago with the leadership of the convention and so
far they're saying we're still on track for whatever is uh
is needed for to pull alton 2022 off they've been waiting in the wings for
now three years and they've assured me that they are very sure this one's going to work so
we'll see anyway the dates assuming nothing happens at the end are
july 28th through the 30th at embassy suites hotel it's a very nice facility
especially geared for conventions it has a separate area so it's a very outstanding event for that
there is the address down below for the website the website will be available
approximately january the 14th and again it's posted
carol we're not seeing any slides or anything if we're supposed to be yes okay but let's see what's going on
here gary
let's see here sorry about that
what about now nope
in your screen now yeah let's get up here we got it
or about now yep okay so
there's the slide for 2022 it's going to be held embassy suites like i said
earlier and uh so be looking at our webpage around
january the middle of january something like that for more information but we anticipate registration will be
available toward the end of january so that's the goal uh we'll of course check
with the proper officials there the state officials they've been very strict over the course
of this pandemic in the state so the last i heard it's fairly much back to
whatever is normal in this time we're in right now so we'll go with that hopefully
then once we get past 2022 the following year we're going to baton rouge louisiana
and it's appropriate for that part of the world to call it astronomical gumball
because they've assured us that even though the middle of the summer is not exactly
when the natives like to eat gumbo they're going to have it available just for us
so i think uh it's going to be an outstanding event we haven't been in that part of the country for many years
so we're really looking forward to it so hopefully everybody will put it on their calendar
uh we can do more than just put it in pencil hopefully an ink for 2023.
here's some miscellaneous announcements the first one is we expect our new website to be up approximately january
31st give or take a little bit the other thing is we are a major distributor for the rasc
2022 handbooks they're now available from league sales so if you haven't
ordered yours yet to get on the league website to a link to the store
and get that ordered the other thing we would also encourage you to buy for a christmas present for
someone your family or friend is one of the 2022 al calendars
it's helps provide the funds for alcon jr which is a schedule to debut at alcon
2022 and there's the address for the store store.astrolage.org
and shortly after we have the website up uh we'll have the postings for all the
award information uh to make sure that people have an opportunity to get those
awards submitted in a timely fashion and we're looking forward to it we had a
large amount of submissions last year and thanks to vice president chuck allen and others who really made that happen
and in a meaningful way and so we're looking forward to that again and at that point i will turn it back to
you terry i think i said okay well thank you carol that's exciting to hear that we will probably all be in
albuquerque in july i'm looking forward to that yeah that's that's the plan definitely
david yes terry there you are how are you david
forgetful but i'm here i'm here i'm sorry about that no worries we're just glad to have you how about if i let you
go ahead and start us off officially well thank you um carol thank you for
your wonderful report i have a question can i go to the albuquerque meeting carol
i think you should go now you should go but you must go yeah
why must i go now i understand you did a trial run of albuquerque what a couple
of weeks ago or maybe around thanksgiving yes and so you have prepared it to we're
safe for the rest of us to go right yes stay for the rest of us to go we have to be masked
and uh we have to have uh lots of duct tape around us but i think it's gonna be
safe anyway i'm really looking forward to that meeting and i'm hoping i might be able to say a
few words i have a feeling we could work that in in a meaningful kind of way yes
i would like that very much the other thing i want to mention uh
i do want to apologize for being late uh but as i get older i'm starting to get a
little bit forgetful and i just got turned around and i'm sorry about that and i'm here
and i'm sorry i'm late and scotty thank you so much for calling me and yelling at me
oh yeah i yelled so loud it was crazy anyway
anyway i i'm glad to be here delighted to be here looking forward to the presentation
and i do have a quotation today which i'm going to try to do and i'm going to try to do it better
than i did yesterday i was doing it on a radio program yesterday and the host after i was done said don't quit your
day job so i'm maybe a little better today it is the christmas season
and we have comet leonard in the sky i was able to see it i have i got a
picture of it not as good as the other ones that i've seen are but i do have a
picture and yes it is greenish and in honor of that comment i'm going
to do a slightly rewritten version of a christmas carol for you tonight
and it goes like this said the night wind to the little lamb
do you see what i see way up in the sky little lamb
do you see what i see a comet rising in the morning sky
with a tail all not quite as big as a kite [Music] with a tail as big
as a kite and now back to you terry
couldn't have been that funny it was awesome
that was awesome how did i know comics you're gonna make it into that song it sounds like david just guaranteed us a
decent comment to observe yeah that's right yeah it's official
there's some great images of comet leonard right now so yeah thank you
it's a thanks terry it really it is it's a beautiful comment and i've seen it now three times on
three mornings and uh the third time i saw it in the finder of
my photographic scope couldn't get a picture of it but i did see it in the finder of the
stone so that's really really good that is that's fantastic well thank you that
was that was so original i really enjoyed that well thanks jerry
all right how about if we go to chuck allen now we always talk about chuck now what
we say is okay chuck is currently the vice president of the astronomical league
but i would like to talk tell a little bit more about chuck because his history is really amazing he is the past
president of the league from 1998 to 2002 and he founded the league's
national young astronomer award in 1991. he received the gr right award for
service in 1998 and holds the league master outreach award and its master
observer gold award chuck coordinates three observing
programs and co-chaired alcon 2020 2021 virtual he's the past president of
the louisville louisville louisville louisville excuse me i never
say it right astronomical society and is currently program director of the
evansville astronomical society he is a former league judge
in earth and space science for the international science and engineering fair
chuck is a graduate of duke university and the university of kentucky college
of law and served as a u.s air force officer he was also a partner in
kentucky's largest law firm for 27 years so chuck thank you for being here it's
always a pleasure to see you again so i will let you start your talk okay thank
you terry and thanks uh very much for that introduction which
some of which means i'm just old i think it needs you
yeah so anyway let me go ahead and share a screen now if i may
we're going to talk tonight about unusual stars
and let's see slideshow
current slide everybody see that okay yep now some stars are unusual for reasons
that do not necessarily mean that the stars themselves are unusual for example we
have stars that are unusual simply because of their proximity to us this is not obviously a
three-dimensional image but it does show neighborhood stars stars that are closest to us proxima centauri here
being the closest it orbits two sun-like stars alpha centauri a and b
there are a number of red dwarfs around as you can see that are close to us but the bright stars that we see close by
are stars like sirius at about eight and a half light years um altair out here at 16.7 light years
prescion here at uh 11.4 light years so this is our
neighborhood in the milky way but let's focus a little bit on proxima centauri
this star here is actually two sun-like stars alpha centauri a and b
and the little red dot you see in the middle of this red circle is proxima centauri which orbits the two
sunlight stars up here and it orbits at a distance of two tenths of a light year so it takes 550
000 years for proxima to make a loop around those two brighter stars
interestingly enough proxima has been confirmed this is a close-up taken by the hubble space telescope of
proxima it's a red dwarf star and it has two confirmed exoplanets but
first of all let's look at its size it's really not a whole lot bigger than jupiter and would fit neatly between the
earth and the moon as you can see here the star has about 1.2
times the mass of our sun and earth masses rather
and the i'm sorry i'm talking about the planet now here let me show you first of all
the orbits of the two planets around proxima this is proxima b and proxima c
proxima b is the interesting one it is about the size of the earth just
slightly more massive 1.2 times the earth's mass sorry for the confusion a moment ago and
it interestingly enough lies within the habitable zone of the star proxima
itself which means that water could exist on the surface of
proxima b in liquid form however
as interesting or enticing as that might be unfortunately being a red dwarf star proxima is a flare star
meaning that it has significant ejections that would shower this planet with extreme radiation at times and make
life there probably not feasible but what if we were to visit the alpha
centauri system what if we were to land on proxima b and look back in our direction what would we
see we'd still see cassiopeia looking like it does pretty much from earth but we would see one more star in
the field of view a 0.4 magnitude star right in the vicinity of some nebulosity
and interesting enough if we aim to telescope at this star this yellow star here the sun we would see it embedded in
the middle of the heart and soul nebulae just like this so if there are astrophotographers in the alpha centauri
region undoubtedly this is a major target for them
how long would it take to get there well we know for example that the voyager 2
spacecraft is traveling at about 34 000 miles per hour it took two years to get to jupiter 4 to
saturn 9 to uranus 12 years to pass neptune what if it were headed toward the alpha
centauri system it's not but what if it were how long would it take to travel the 24.7 trillion miles to get there and
the answer is 96 500 years roughly 15 times
the entire length of recorded human history in order to arrive there that gives you some idea of the difficulties
involved in interstellar travel looking at a couple of nearby stars we
see syria sirius is a very interesting star because it's not only the brightest nighttime star but it has a very uh
significant role in our ancient history here on earth for the egyptians the helical rising of sirius its first
appearance in the morning before sunrise hearkened the flooding of the nile which was a very important date
for them in terms of agriculture and also sirius is known as the dog star
it's the brightest star in canis major the large dog and the egyptians refer to it as the dog
star and from this we get something called the dog days of august and what that means is that in mid-august the
egyptians knew that sirius was in the sky somewhere near where the sun was located in the sky and in fact that's
true and they thought that the heat from sirius combined with the heat of the sun to make those days particularly hot so
when you hear the term dog days of august it comes from the star sirius and interestingly the word sirius in
egyptian means scorching so that's the origin of that term
moving out to 79 light years we come to a very interesting slightly larger star called regulus which spins every 16
hours uh its spin axis is relatively perpendicular to our line of sight to
the star and as a result of this the spin rate of regulus is only 15
slower than the rate that would cause the star to fly apart due to centrifugal force
vega 2 is very oblate it rotates every 12 and a half hours and we look down on
its pole so we see it as fairly round at least in terms of studying the star
with professional telescopes we don't really see its disc but it would appear around from our perspective
and so the star seems larger to professional astronomers than it
actually should simply because it's so ablate due to its rapid spin
we come to a larger star still arcturus uh 36 light years away about 25 times
the sun size and very interestingly in 1933 the light from arcturus was used to
start or to eliminate the 1933 chicago world's fair this was done using the 40 inch
refractor at yerkes observatory and a photo multiplier which they're
looking at here in this photo from yarkey's observatory this was in turn converted to an
electric signal which opened the fair by uh turning on the lights at the world's
fair in 1933. so we've looked at a number of stars we get even larger still we look at spica
and virgo and what you're seeing when you look at spike is actually two blue giant stars
uh in a double system system and so when we look at the
non-giant northern stars you'll note that these are all familiar stars to you they're the bright stars you see in the
night sky and most all of them are bigger than the sun by a considerable amount that's not
a coincidence there are actually countless stars that are closer to us than these stars that are red dwarfs and
hence faint like proxima which is the closest star to us and you need a telescope to find it and a lot of good
luck and nonetheless these bright ones we do see and they dominate the night sky but
let's reduce this scale right here to this with capella being at the upper end
and look at some larger stars still like aldebaran roger danette betelgeuse
and antares the latter three being red giants roger being a blue giant star
looking at rogel in orion of course we see a star that lies at 860 light years and yet it
shines with tremendous brightness it's 70 times larger than the sun and has a luminosity that ranges somewhere between
or is thought to be somewhere between 80 and 360 thousand times the luminosity of
our sun and it has between 18 and 24 mass solar masses it's actually as a triple star
companion two of the three stars and its companion pair are
easily visible in amateur telescopes as a single second star in the system
now this star amazingly is only between 7 and 9 million years old our sun is 5
billion years old at least this star is burning its fuel so fast that its lifetime will be merely a blip
on the lifetime of the sun deneb in cygnus 2600 light years away
and yet we see it as a first magnitude star in the sky 200 000 times more luminous than our sun
and amazingly 200 times larger but they get larger still this is an actual image
of the disc of the star betelgeuse in orion as you can see
superimposed on the size of the solar system here that this star would
actually extend almost to the orbit of jupiter it's so large but small compared to this
star vy canis majoris a hyper giant lies at a distance of almost 4 000 light
years and is 2100 times larger
than our sun here the scale is the sun earth
distance mars sun distance jupiter sun distance compared with the size of this
incredible star is it the largest one we know of not even close
this star right here in the middle of the screen is called stevenson 218
2-18 why is 1800 excuse me 18 900 light years away
and it has a diameter of 1.8 billion miles it's this much larger than antares
if you want to compare the size of stevenson 2-18 to the earth's orbit around the sun here it
is this distance between the dot and the edge of this disc 93 million miles by
comparison well that's the largest star we know of but what about the largest apparent sized star
which star looks the biggest to us from earth other than the sun of course which extends over half a degree seen from
earth the answer is not better juice but actually our doradus which extends
or subtends an angle across its disk scene from earth of 0.57 seconds of arc
about a 20th of a second of arc and you can see it's actually a little bit larger than mira and betelgeuse both and
i have simply a disc representing how big pluto appears from the earth to give you some idea of how tiny stars do
appear in the sky these are three being the largest apparent angles of any stars we see
they're also very small stars the remnants from
stars that have reached the end of their lives stars below eight solar masses which end their lives by forming
planetary nebulae and leaving white dwarfs behind these are earth-sized stars
the escape velocity at the surface of a typical white dwarf star would be
something on the order of a thousand times higher than the escape velocity from the surface of the earth
but they can get even smaller in the case of supernova explosions they can
cause a neutron star to form at the center these might be only as large as six
miles across and yet have between eight and 25 solar
masses associated with them and again these are left over after a
cataclysmic collapse of a star into a supernova an especially powerful
supernova might actually reduce a neutron star to a quark star
where the neutrons themselves are torn apart leaving only quarks free quarks in a star that might be less
than six miles across this is a hypothetical star although one
has been theoretically detected it's located you can't really see it it's not either of these two dots you
see inside the circle but it's a little smudge in between them and this is called
uh xtej1739 it's 39 000 light years away
and is thought to be approximately seven miles in diameter and believed to be a quark star
obviously we could talk about variable stars all night long and we're not i'll just casually mention that we have
unusual stars because either they are pulsating variables are caused to pulsate by virtue of the fact
that they will collapse cause fusion to increase at their cores and then that radiation pressure will cause them to
expand again we have cataclysmic variables where we have maybe a white dwarf star and a host
star that donates hydrogen to the nearby white dwarf as the hydrogen
accretes around the white dwarf it heats up reaches fusion temperature and causes a flare which we see as a cataclysmic
increase in brightness we have eclipsing binaries like algol where one star eclipses another causing the brightness
of the system to change and we have rotating variables these are stars like
hd12545 seen here which has a peculiarity it has the largest known star spot of any star we've observed
that spot you see there is larger than our sun and it causes a variation in the
brightness of the star as it rotates we know stars have colors we've seen the
categories of colors of stars ranging from red stars like m k class orange stars yellow
g class stars like the sun white stars blue giant stars well
there's something missing here where are the green stars why don't we see any green stars well interestingly
it has to do with us more than anything it has to do with the photoreceptors in our brains within eyes that see
rather blue green and red and what happens when you have a star
that is dominant in the blue the blue dominates over all the other colors and we see a blue star if you
have a star that dominates in the red we see it as red because it dominates over the other colors but when we see a star
whose peak intensity is in the green range we also see heavy
colors on both sides of it blue and red which combine with the green to give us of course what white and so we see white
stars in between we don't see green and that's the reason for this as far as stars that have lots of
planets that we know of we used to be the record holder with r9 but we went and demoted one and so we fell into a
tie for first place with the kepler 90 system which has eight known uh exoplanets orbiting it
and so we blew that record and we move out now
to the furthest star that we've ever observed other than a supernova
and this star if we zoom in between this galactic image here
we see a star here in the lower right uh and this is a blue giant called icarus
and it is nine billion light years away from us it's in a galaxy nine billion
light years away in terms of light travel time that's how long the light took to reach us that is not a supernova
it is simply a blue giant star it's the furthest single star that we've ever
observed to date the fastest spinning star is a pulsar
seen here in this image that spins uh at a rate such that the equator
of the pulsar spinning of 24 percent the speed of light that's 156 million miles
per hour at its equator the hottest known star embedded right
here in the middle of this cocoon is a wolf rayet star 10102 in
sagittarius it has about half the sun's diameter and its surface temperature though runs at about
378 000 degrees fahrenheit most sun-like star
is 18 scorpii and look at how similar it is same mass as the sun same luminosity as the sun
same diameter as the sun virtually the same surface temperature almost identical rotation rate and the
same age so if you want to see a star that looks exactly like the sun
look for 18 scorpio it's easily seen in binoculars and finally the fastest moving star
yet detected lies at the center of our milky way galaxy orbiting
uh the black hole at the center and it's moving at approximately eight percent the speed of light around the unseen
black hole at the core and so those are just some unusual stars that i thought would be interesting for
perhaps people who are new to astronomy and i hope
i covered enough of the range to give you a feel for how different they can be thank you
that's pretty amazing
all right well thank you very much chuck i definitely we appreciate that and that was that was very interesting uh david
we need to go back to you for a minute you wanted to speak about um a project going on
you're muted david yeah hello everyone again
uh i do wanna i first of all wanted to congratulate chuck on a wonderful
presentation the one thing that i found was the distance to deneb so i quickly looked it
up and i found that chuck is absolutely right the distance to denim or from denim is very
difficult to figure out but what chuck said in his presentation is correct for
what we know now chuck thank you very much i really learned a lot from your talk tonight
thanks david but i want to talk very briefly right now about the junior astronomical
league i believe and i've spoken to carol about this and others
that it is a central mission of the astronomical lead
to reach out to the next generation if you go to any almost any of the club
meetings of member societies in the united states a lot of whom are members of the league
you will find a lot of people like me older people
more forgetful people and not a whole lot of young people
i would like to help to change that and uh with the blessing of carol and
uh other people in the astronomical league we are starting the junior astronomical
league it is a part and parcel of the astronomical league right now it's meeting only online
the second sunday of every month which means we met last sunday we're not going to meet in two days from now
but a week from this sunday we will be meeting again i would like to encourage as many of you
to come to that meeting and uh if you're interested in coming and even
more than that if you're interested in bringing young people to this meeting because it's really for
young people would you send a letter to terry an email to terry
and then i will arrange to send you the link for that meeting when i get it
we want to get the next generation interested in the night sky not to become
astronomers but to just sit out and enjoy the night sky
i think that's the most important thing to do look for meteors look at the moon through a telescope
just enjoy it if we can accomplish that i think we've
really we've really hit our stride as a major astronomical group
thank you and back to you terry okay thank you very much david and you are going to see my email
address all over the three questions that i'm going to ask next and i've posted it in chat as well okay
thank you uh scott all right so these are going to be the three
questions for this show and as you can see
the door prize will be a 20 2022 league calendar
and so um answer the questions just as quickly as you can
because in the next by the end of the program i will announce the winners and someone from the astronomical league
will be contacting the winners so here there's my address please send your
answers to secretary astroleague.org here are the questions
for tonight we've been talking a lot about comet leonard what messier object did comet leonard
passed this morning and i've got to tell you that image is from barbara harris from this morning and that's that's
gorgeous yeah from florida so what messier object did comet leonard
pass this morning next question there is a famous
supernova remnant in taurus name that remnant and again
secretary astroleague.org last question
are stars born in groups is that true or is that false
answers to me secretariat afterleague.org
all right i'm going to end this and we are going
to move on to don nab
all right um and again welcome don it is nice to have you here i know you were here um probably
a few shows ago i think you were here and thank you for coming tonight sure
so don's earliest memory of the sky is seeing cassiopeia in cub scouts and he
has loved the starry night ever since he's primary a visual observer but at
times tortures himself with astrophotography he has been a member of the chester
county astronomical society which is about 20 miles west of philadelphia
since 2006 and has served as an officer for most of that time
his favorite observing site is cherry springs state park where he and his wife camp with other
club members he observes with several telescopes but his favorite device is
its 120 millimeter binoculars although he also treasures the view of
orion's nebula and carolyn's rose in their 12-inch dab now don as i mentioned earlier is also
chair of the mid-east region of the astronomical league and he helps set he did set up the website for al-khan
virtual i am pleased to say that don will be joining our rotation for the
astronomical leagues global star parties starting in january
of 2022 so tonight he's going to speak about the constellation hunter observe program
that the mideast region has been encouraging their members to pursue so don thanks again for joining us and i'll
turn this over to you okay well let me share my screen and i will get us going here
can you see my screen yes okay so um
i had a uh zoom talk with uh phil white bloom who's president of the
howard astronomical league of central maryland we talked about what could we do to get new members so many clubs have
new members i think our club has probably grown by like 30 members in the last year that
i'm in i know another local club delaware valley has grown by more than that there are record levels we're at a
record level and i'm here all over the league so we said how can we get these new members to do some of the
the programs the uh that the astronomical league offers so i put this together i've already
presented to a couple of uh a couple of clubs and i have some more lined up
so let me just go through and this is for really aimed at new members because we
have so many so i did a just very short introduction because a lot of people don't even know
what the league is but is composed of 300 societies 21 000 members
this is a picture of the current website soon to be replaced and we are divided into these regions
and the one i am chair of now is this little one over here on the east coast
and it is the mid-east region and so we call it merrell i don't even know what merrell meant a couple of years ago but
then i found out because this guy down here terry trees wonderful man was a chairman and this is from the league
website which is going to be updated soon he uh he did a great job being chairman
and so i i i followed in his footsteps uh al is still a regional representative
we're about 40 clubs delaware dc maryland pennsylvania half new jersey
and the two virginias so a lot of people a lot of new members don't even know what maryland what the astronomical league is so
and most if not every member of these clubs can participate in these observing
programs 60 observing programs and they're a lot of fun so talking with phil we decided that uh
we'd pick one of these to work on throughout throughout the league throughout the the merrell group
and uh you know a great way for people to enjoy astronomy is to learn the night sky
and even more for not just new members but any long time member who doesn't really know the constellations great way
to expand your skills so the constellation hunter program has northern and southern skies of
course we will do the northern and the purpose is to provide an orientation to the sky you know there's
nothing i enjoy nothing better that once you learn the sky you know and and the seasons roll around
when i see uh orion it's like an old friend coming back to visit me for the winter in the springtime when i see leo
the lion it's like hey there's there's leo haven't seen him in a few months it's a really wonderful thing once you
once you get to know it we picked this program because you really need almost not no equipment i
mean there's a couple of things that will help you but all you really need is a sky chart and a reference for the
brightest star names and then the objective objective of the program you know provide a forum to
learn the brighter stars the constellations learn how to navigate
solid solid foundation to go on to the other programs and again it's like i said the constellations become your
friends and it's a it's a really wonderful thing experience so easy to get a sky map
there's this one every every month from skymaps.com there's also another site i think it's called what's out tonight
you can get a sky map every month for free um binoculars may not be required but they
certainly would help in light blue disguise that would certainly help and uh but you only sketch the main
stars we gotta keep this easy it's really not complicated i was out under the stars our club out of the deserting
event and one of our members was working on and she was working way too hard i said you know just get the major stars the
idea is to become familiar not to be an expert and you can get all the information we
need on the uh the uh economically website everything is here
uh this is uh it's not hard to find under observing programs
and here's an example now you can tell this is what you need to do observe and sketch all the northern constellations
obviously you look at my sheet you don't need to be an artist
okay uh dimming flat-rate flashlight would certainly be a lot of help a clipboard would be a lot of help
and uh now it can take a year why because the constellations differ
as we go around the sun but here's another idea you can if you don't mind dressing up warm or find a
warm night in the winter you can capture a lot of these in the winter and i'm going to show you how
so i'm hoping this comes through okay this is a screen capture from stellarium so this is uh on the middle december at
six o'clock okay it's the middle of december it's almost winter so what do we have here we have the summer triangle
summer triangle is still up because the sun is setting so early so you can get all these you may not be
able to get hercules probably dismiss that but you can get so many of these uh delphinius sagitta cygnus you can get
all these summer constellations in december okay and then you go so you go back in to
warm up come out about the same night about nine o'clock right and what do we have here
here are the winter constellations taurus orion see this aries you can get all of these
uh pretty quickly just a matter of making a sketch go back in hot chocolate warm up come
out about midnight and here are our friends our friend leo leaping up from the east
so you just you go from the west to the south to the east and from six o'clock to nine o'clock to midnight that you can
get all these constellations you can probably cover three quarters of the list in december if you really try
so here's a log sheet that you can get from the astronomical lead website okay it can be downloaded
or i made one up that i think is maybe a little bit more more useful it's this one and i'm going to show you how you
can get that okay i did send it out to all the midis region alcors but i'll show you how you
can get this sheet this gets you on two of them on one sheet and has you know these things you just have to circle
circle the uh seeing and transparency make it a little bit easier especially since you're probably going to have gloves on if you're doing this
in december make it easy as possible so 39 constellations
and this is the list you can get it from the astronomical league website
one back up and when you complete it here's what you get you get a uh
[Music] nice certificate a pin you get your name in the reflector and
you probably can't see it this is my this is my certificate from 2009
and i know you can't see this but there's signed by someone called terry mann right there
okay let me show you one other page if i can uh [Music]
i'll switch this and i will show you one other page and that would be
this so here is the mideast region astronomical league website and if you go to the if you search for
merrell astronomy.org and there's a quick link to constellation hunter resources
and here's everything i just told you is here there's the where you get in the reflector and here are
directions and here are the links this is the web page in the al the sky map from sky maps the sky map
from what's out tonight here are log sheets in excel or pdf format and astronomy magazine had a nice
web page and learning constellations so so i know there's several clubs in the in the region that are working on
this and uh it's gonna be fun to see a lot of names in the uh reflector next spring
well thank you don that that's really amazing you know a lot of times i'm well
our club originally started on the messier binocular list and we would all get together out at our local club
observatory and work on that and it's so much fun when you're working with a group of people and you're all working
on the same thing yep now one thing let me show you so a flashlight like this is really helpful this is a dimmable rigel
flashlight and binoculars the best binocular i found for doing this are these two power
binoculars they look pretty goofy uh they don't magnify much but they make your eyes so much bigger you can see all
the faint stars so uh and these are inexpensive a couple people i think they're all made probably in the same
factory but a few people are selling them yeah i just bought those they're great i love them in a short time they're the
greatest thing really yeah they're pretty amazing so thank you that was very informative and hopefully a lot of
people will look at that because it is a great way to learn the sky especially when you're new or if you need to brush
up on the constellations definitely will help you and you can earn a certificate and a pen so that's a great way
great way to make some friends in the sky too yeah yeah i'm like you when i see orion it's like seeing old friends because you
don't see them for so long yep so just seeing the constellations so all right
how about if we take a quick let's just take a five minute break does that sound good
sounds good and we'll come back with matt penn and his talk so we'll just break for five minutes
thank you
well we are back um and uh what do we have next here terry
next we have matt pin matt whoops welcome
um i thought i was muted for a minute when i saw that banner go off
all right matt penn got interested in astronomy when his parents bought him a telescope
while he was in third grade he got his bachelor's degree in astronomy from caltech and worked at caltech's big bear
solar observatory for two summers he was awarded a masters and phd in
astronomy by the university of hawaii and did his dissertation research about
oscillations in sunspot sunspot umbre
using the me solar observatory in maui in 26 years of solar physics research
matt worked at solar observatories in new mexico san fernando california and most
recently kit pete near tucson he has published many papers and worked with many excellent students
in 2014 matt developed a citizen kate experiment for the 2017 total solar
eclipse the collaboration involved 286 volunteers and included 117 students
from graduate students students to middle school the results of kate were published in
2020 and now matt is working with friends and colleagues on a follow-up project
entitled the dynamic eclipse broadcast initiative this talk will describe the improvements
being made from the lessons learned in at the 2017 eclipse
the initial results from the dev initial initiative core group and how you can
get involved in the dynamic eclipse broadcast initiative today
welcome matt it is a pleasure to have you here and thank you for speaking with us
tonight this sounds like an amazing opportunity we hope so and uh thank you thank you
for the opportunity to speak um to your group tonight sure
let me uh let me pull up my slides and try to share
and that's not the way to do it
there we go okay
sorry here we go back to slide one all right hopefully you can see the title page now yes excellent
so if i was going to summarize my talk i'd say that i'm going to uh offer two invitations and the first one
is right here on the cover page but to get to the second one you'll have to listen to the whole talk it'll be on
the last page of the talk the last slide so as terry said i'll be talking about
the dynamic eclipse broadcast initiative that a small group of us have started
here's my name and my email hopefully it's pretty straightforward if you wanted to contact me just jot it down
my astronomy affiliation now is with the tucson amateur astronomy association and this cover page is us
an image from kevin cook taken from their dark sky site it's the chirikawa astronomy center
outside of jericho national monument so here's my first invitation that the t aaa
is building several member observatory sites and i'm one of the people who's really excited to build a remote look
site here in the dark skies in southeastern arizona the triple a has a few more
sites available in their master plan and looking for people who might be interested so if you have any interest
in putting a telescope under excellent skies like this and remote controlling it from your house
send me an email or contact the teacher player i can put you in touch with people to write people to contact
okay so now for the second part and there's a little bit of a longer story involved with the second invitation and
if you're snoopy fans you all know that a good story starts out with it was a dark and stormy night
so uh here we have a group of students that i i've
learned to love and and really work closely with from a local high school
here in tucson cienega astronomy club at cienega high school in the vail school district
jack erickson is the lead for the club and david you know jack erickson very well
in this picture he's looking really stressed out he and i had worked with the students
for several months training them to take eclipse data during the total solar eclipse in 2017
and on the day of the eclipse when they got to their site in nebraska
they were greeted with weather like this they had been followed by the discovery channel through all of their training and here
you see the discovery channel filming them under cloudy skies on the day of the eclipse
so he and his students are under some stress and it didn't get any better as time went on that morning about two
hours before totality it started raining and so here you see them huddling over the telescope trying to protect it from
getting wet and uh maybe some dangerous situation with wires and in puddles here
but why did i put these guys through so much torture and why did jack send his students to pawnee city
nebraska from tucson to see the eclipse well i have to get into why um it's useful to study a solar eclipse from the
ground so when we study the the corona of the sun it's about a million times fainter
than the disk of the sun and to do it from the ground we build special telescopes called coronagraphs
now it's a little bit more complicated than this figure that i'm showing but we're basically doing the same thing
that you see on the left hand side if you're sitting in your in your living room and you raise up your thumb and
blot out a light across the room um you get uh get the light blocked from the source
directly but you can see dust particles you can see bright particles as light scatters off of dust in your house
hopefully your house isn't as dirty as this figure but the idea is that when we're blocking off when we're trying to
observe the corona and blocking the disc of the sun from the surface of the earth we get the same effect light scatters off of
molecules of nitrogen or dust molecules in the atmosphere of the earth and we can't really see the corona you can see
the background wall is very well defined but what a total solar eclipse does is
it basically takes your thumb and it moves it into space so the moon obviously is above the atmosphere of the
earth and as it blocks the bright light from the disk of the sun it also creates a shadow and so the atmosphere of the
earth doesn't scatter and it'll light the background is reduced by a factor of about 10 000
over what we can do from a good site with a good coronagraph so solar eclipses are really special and
we wanted to take advantage of this during the 2017 eclipse and we're hoping to do the same thing in 2024
now you know i know you guys are are up on astronomy so you're saying right to yourself right now well doesn't nasa
study the corona from space and the answer is yes but nasa can observe the solar corona on the
disk of the sun and here's an image from the sdo spacecraft the aie instrument and it
images the solar corona which is about 2 million degrees kelvin
in very hot lines the lines in the uv part of the spectrum or the extreme uv euv
and we can see the uh the magnetic field lines on the disc and a little bit off of the the limb of the sun but not very
far another instrument from nasa called on the whole spacecraft called lasco c2
can image the corona but it does so only at three solar radii and further out
here we're looking at in alaska field of view we're looking at the same thing that we see during an eclipse we're looking at light scattered
off of electrons this is white light or broadband emission
and so as you can guess from the flashing box here during a solar eclipse
we get an opportunity to look inside this gap from the ground and here we're showing an image from our indonesian
practice run in 2016 that was taken at the same time as these spacecraft space
data so we don't quite fill in the whole region at least we didn't with 2017
but we're providing some data from an otherwise empty region where there's a gap
so why is it important to study this gap region well a lot of interesting physics happens there maybe it's convenient
when we look at the corona we can see the solar wind and also coronal mass ejections plasma blobs moving out from
the sun but in the lascaux c2 field of view they're moving at a constant velocity they've already achieved their
terminal velocity if you will you know on the disk of the sun that they don't move at all they start from
zero so something happens to accelerate those particles in this region in the lower
corona and you know maybe i'm overemphasizing the point but
everybody in the room accelerated the last time you got onto the freeway right you started about a zero velocity zero
speed at the top of the on-ramp and as you accelerate your car to merge with traffic you go from zero to 75 miles per
hour on the on-ramp so this part of the solar corona is basically the on-ramp to the solar wind
particles start at zero kilometers per second and accelerate up to something like 400 kilometers per second sometimes
even higher or faster exactly how that happens um we don't
really know and we have very few measurements and so one of the goals for the kate experiment in 17 and also for the deb experiment in
2024 is to measure acceleration in this part of the corona
to do that it's difficult to do from one spot in the eclipse an eclipse can last
well up to seven minutes but in 2017 it only lasted about two and a half minutes at one location
and so what we did is we established a network of sites 70 sites across the country
from oregon to south carolina and the idea was that if we had data from all of those sites and stitched
them together we would get 90 minutes of continuous observations of the inner corona and that would allow us to
measure velocities and accelerations um here's an image from you know the day
of the eclipse it's not quite as bad as it looked we had some sirius in the west western
states and our heroes from cienega are under this big blob of clouds in pawnee city
nebraska so we had another blob of clouds in the middle of the cape
string i'll get back to them in a little bit
what do we do to prepare for 17 and how is it how are we going to sort of replicate that for 24
this is a really basic schematic way to look at it about a thousand days before the eclipse
in 17 there was an eclipse in the faroe islands in 2015
and we had an experiment run to test some real initial ideas that we had
for the 17 eclipse at that time then we had a more involved practice run in
2016 which was about 500 days before the eclipse in 2017. so we had these two
windows to practice and to define our instrumentation and our procedure
uh that's summarized in the next slide in 2015 when we were just getting started
excuse me fred ispringer from uh carbondale illinois
let us know that he was going to the pharaoh islands on his vacation to see the total eclipse
so i remember asking fred if um he'd be allow us to ship two
suitcases of equipment to him and if he'd be willing to take some data during the eclipse and he agreed
as i'll talk later fred has agreed to do a lot of work i'm not sure what what is wrong with the man but uh
maybe he enjoys um the torture that we're providing to him so
um you can see uh fred and his uh colleague here carrying the uh the two suitcases that
we shipped the day of the eclipse was not great but here they had set up the telescope
and they were looking at some control software and in between clouds fred managed to
capture images of the solar corona so this was a proof of concept fred had never
taken an image he was not an astro imager before this we sent the equipment to illinois and
bob baer from southern illinois university carbondale had worked with fred to train him for several weeks
and then fred was able to to take data under really poor conditions
and i have to be honest this was sort of poor equipment at the time um
so we came out of this thinking that we had achieved a major milestone and in fact that's how a lot
of people responded as well things started really moving after we're able to get this proof of concept data
so then in 2016 fred was also taking data on a cruise ship in
indonesia but we engaged four academic partners siu in carbondale university of wyoming
western kentucky university and also south carolina state university and here we tested out the idea of
having a mini network so we had five locations across the path of totality in
indonesia and at each spot we had a faculty mentor and a student an undergraduate student
with a set of equipment similar well improved from what fred used in 2015.
indonesia wasn't particularly good weather so we have one
site that collected data and here's another view of some of the images that they
achieved but we again consider this a success because now what
we had was a set of undergraduate students that had on the job training
and the plan was then to use these students and employ them to train the rest of the volunteers
which you know is over 200 volunteers for the 2017 eclipse
so we did that but also along the path of totality we were still trying to figure out how
to set up sites and where the best locations would be you know we knew that we wanted sites
about 50 miles apart so that as the lunar shadow left one site it would cover the next
site and we could get continuous data but for instance i know nothing about oregon i've been there twice or three
times so i wasn't able to pick out the best locations to
observe so what we did is we established a network of state coordinators in the states where the path of totality
crossed so mike conley from oregon lynn powers from idaho mike pierce from wyoming
mariana lazarova in nebraska joe wright and david young from missouri
bob baird illinois uh richard gelderman in kentucky mary kidd in tennessee and don walter in south carolina acted as
these uh these local experts and they engaged either the local
academic communities or the high schools or the local amateur astronomy groups and really helped us figure out the
details of where each observing site would be and who would be there not only that but we had
training programs and each of these state coordinators worked in conjunction with the students to to run the training programs
uh here's a list of our collaborators it's an eye chart i apologize but it still
makes me happy to see we had 27 universities joining 22 high schools
uh you know eight informal science ed museum groups and then we had people from national
labs uh joining in and so
um like i mentioned before these uh groups uh were assigned observing locations or
worked in collaboration with the state coordinators to to determine their observing locations
and then we distributed equipment to them during the training sessions so
here's just a few snapshots of the training sessions that we held across the country where i am working with the senega
students in tucson and it was about 110 degrees that day and then in wyoming there is still snow
on the ground so i think the training sessions also acted as sort of an environmental test
for the equipment that we were we're running but the idea again was that uh the site
um observers attended these workshops this is where we gave them their equipment uh we had about a two or sometimes one
and a half day training workshop and then they drove off with their telescope and their computers and mounts and then
they practiced so here we see one of the results from a practice
session here we had 32 sites
which had varying degrees of success um some sites had overexposed images of the the sunspot uh some focus problems and
some clouds um and then camera orientation difficulties
um but uh as we kept these undergraduates in the program with summer
funding summer salary they were working with the state coordinators and then interacting with
each of the site observing teams and giving them feedback letting them know that yeah you'll need to rotate
your camera another 45 degrees or cut down on the exposure time and so in the
maybe four months before the eclipse in 2017 we had several of these joint
observing practice sessions and we had our teams converging on being
able to take excellent data with their with their devices
so on the day of the eclipse we had sites that had a there was a real cross-section of america right it has to
be grew up on mountaintops in eastern oregon in the plains in nebraska with nobody
around hopefully they got permission from the farmer uh south carolina
had a site um some of these are very empty but then we also had sites that were in the
middle of stadiums where the team was surrounded by 30 000 screaming people
and trying to collect data so you can imagine that that added a little bit of excitement to the group
but again we had 70 locations and 280 not 260 volunteers but 117 students
involved in the project not only did we you know we're focusing
on getting the scientific results but we also tried to do some outreach and we had a good team working on this
measuring the impact of the outreach is difficult but what we are estimating is that well
before the eclipse we know exactly that we had some events at our sites and we impacted about 17 000 people
with the idea of trying to get them to prepare for the totality for the eclipse and understand what it would be like and
uh and get their plans in order excuse me but on the day of the eclipse
it's a little bit difficult to uh to get numbers because there are a lot of things going on
um what i know from my own experience is that i went to weezer idaho and uh with uh working with the school
district for several months in weezer beforehand they started brainstorming and came up with
ideas for camping near the high school and for having a festival down in town
with food and crafts so i think a lot of our kate sites sort of acted as nucleuses for
events in small towns and i think we had at least a 300 000
person impact maybe more so that was that was really satisfying to
see that so many people were excited about the eclipse even in weezer idaho
and hopefully we had a big input on that in terms of
media we had a big footprint in print and radio and tv um the nasa edge folks
uh based their broadcast that day from uh carbondale and so sarah kovac and bob baer were an integral part
of that um cbs this morning did a little video clip on uh
kate site 17 which had some students from montana observing in wyoming
and then about a month after the eclipse uh dr heidi hamill and myself were invited
to testify at congress so around c-span and and got some attention from our our elected officials
so i hope this works what i'd like to do is for that testimony we did a sort of a
smaller condensed version of the cbs story and i'd like to show that here
so let me exit out of this oops i already have it queued up
colleague here matt penn developed an ambitious eclipse program to combine
public engagement with science and i'd like to share a video about several young people in dr penn's citizen kate
program when an alexis cochran are from a native
american reservation school in montana they took a road trip with their science teacher janet jorgensen to watch and
study the eclipse it's just an amazing opportunity for the kids because this is real life science and it helps them be
exposed to what kind of opportunities there might be in the future these students are one of 68
who participated in an amateur science experiment called citizen kate we're trying to get pictures of the solar
eclipse but the moment finally arrived darkness descended on the town of gm and the site
they've been waiting for revealed itself a total solar eclipse
so those of you who you know have experienced the solar eclipse know that it's a a powerful
experience and uh clearly uh rebecca felt that way and um that was sort of our goal was to
get uh people and particularly students out there seeing the solar eclipse for themselves
and to then associate the the feelings that they got with the citizen science that they were doing to
have a sort of a positive connection there you know across
this is one side across our 70 sites i know that was a common experience and
we're happy about that with our other team
from cienega their persistence paid off it turned out that
about uh i know five minutes before totality the skies cleared totally and they were able to get about a minute of
data which filled in a really important gap in in our coverage so here's an idea
here's an image from their site it's been filtered a little bit um to show you the sort of quality and
here i uh really filtered it to bring out the edges this is with the syllable
processing so they again uh were dedicated through
the rain and came out the the end of the tunnel there with with some great data
i'm going to show you a little movie sequence of the sobel data but also
um i'll get uh to what we've what i've got now um
you know i've had a career change and so i'm an amateur astronomer now and it's a challenge to reduce
over a terabyte of data in your spare time as i'm sure some of you know so
i'm still working on the movie but i'll show you what we have to date
uh this has been done with a lot of help from uh phillip cesaret in poland and
alexandra hart so again let me try to exit this
oh where did and go
plan these movies and again i apologize because um
they're animated gifs and across zoom there's probably not
a whole lot of quality but this is what we
this is what i had been able to make about a month after the eclipse you can tell that the cameras have
slightly different angles so you can see the edges of the frame going in different
different directions but if you look closely down here on the south west limb you can see an outflow of
material turns out that there is a coronal mass ejection before the eclipse and this is the remnant outflow
you can also see some flowing material from the polar region but then a lot of the corona looks at
this scale looks pretty stable for the 90 minutes of totality
so in the more recent version of this movie
and this will take a little bit longer to load um i haven't really
done as heavy a spatial filtering
but again in this in the southwest uh quadrant you can see well first of all we can see stars now
now that we've co-added enough for the images here's a star moving through the frame
as the sun moves against the background stars but now you can see some material this
is also going forward and backwards through the data whereas the other one was just a loop
going forward through it you can see some material moving out as remnants of this coronal mass
ejection on the south pole again you can see this
filament and it evolves really quickly or perhaps there's an outflow
uh still raising a lot of questions and then a brief little um
transient event here at the poll there are some interesting prominences but if if you look at the sun uh often
you'll know that there are things called h alpha surges where you can see a little prominence material from h alpha
going up and then just disappearing or ending we found out and the idea was that the
material is heated up to 2 million degrees there's no more hydrogen it's ionized so it can't form h alpha
but here we see an example a different example of that this is an h alpha surge at the limb
and again i apologize for the quality of the movie but you can see some surges
through the corona as well and you can trace the material as it goes from h alpha temperature a few
thousand kelvin up to the two million degree temperature in the corona the big prominence
on the limb that many of you saw if you're at the eclipse looks really pretty stable throughout the 90 minutes
as does this coronal streamer there's another star here
it's a little bit fainter or harder to see moving back and forth in our field of view
and then finally one stop at the north pole you can see some of these um
transient events or short-lived chanting events near the limb of the moon and then there's a little bit of an
eruption looks like going out through this kernel streamer
so that's a 60-second tour of our data there's a lot of science in there um
[Music] and that was one of the goals of our project was to get
citizen science done so in 2020 i worked with colleagues and we analyzed
the outflows from that coronal mass ejection and published the paper it's open access so you can all download a copy if you
like in publications of the astronomical society of the pacific and we do see acceleration so
again here's the lasko version at three solar radii the lasco measurements show
a constant velocity at about 250 kilometers per second and down here near the limb of the sun
we see very little speed very little outflow but our measurements at higher heights
show an increase it's not not very nice
what we're hoping of course is that you know here's a constant acceleration curve
if it followed a curve like this then there would be a 15 meter per second squared acceleration on the material and
it's certainly not that it doesn't even form a straight line and this is some ad
straight line that doesn't really have a physical meaning um so things are more complicated and
that's the good thing about science or often the bad thing about science is that when you make measurements you
uh open up more questions than you answer but anyway i was proud and happy to get
this paper published with 286 of my closest friends as co-authors
check it out if you have time finally but no not quite finally but as
follow-up we hoped to have several projects going on the idea was of course that after the eclipse
the site volunteers kept their equipment we had i'll talk about funding in the next slide we have generous funding that
allowed us to do that and so after the eclipse we wanted people to engage in in other science programs with their
equipment mike conley the oregon state coordinator did an excellent job here's an exoplanet
transit using his telescope and the camera he took over 2000 measurements
during this transit and his result was published in 2020
we had some uh site observers looking at lunar occultations and so here's a sequence of
three images as the star reappears off of the dark side of the of the moon
and then i worked and several other people worked with students high school students uh in this case
from vail we got several prize awards in the local arizona
science fair so there was some follow-up but perhaps not as much as we were
hoping and then finally what was the funding like it was a mix of private
corporate and federal funds so it was very unusual in terms of a
science project and just a joy to work with with these people so here's the overall budget for the entire work that
we did which included some summer salary for the faculty as well as the undergraduate
students the breakout here is shows the equipment budget and the rest of it the education
part was funded by nasa through a generous grant that we were awarded
if we look at the details of the equipment we see that daystar celestron mathworks
and a little group called colormaker contributed very generously daystar provided 60
telescopes and celestron provided 60 equatorial amounts it's
just amazing and i'm still grateful that they stepped in and did this
then we also had some private donations from people who who felt that they wanted to support the
project and some funding from education as well education groups
so in general we had 70 sites and each site equipment cost about
five hundred dollars that was the rough estimate
okay so those are the successes that i think we had um but what could we do better is the next
part and the motivation for our next work um i remember i remember looking at some
webcasts i mean youtube is is wonderful but it's also provides you a reminder about what you
have said in the past and i remember saying several times that we hoped to have a movie of the eclipse
that we could broadcast that night and so you know no one has really taken
data like this before with 70 sites and i didn't realize at the time that the corollary to that is that no one has
reduced data like this before and uh even though i resisted the
celebratory wine and champagne and everyone was partying in in the house where i was staying i was at my computer
trying to get it done it just was beyond my abilities so we failed uh to provide a broadcast
pseudo-real-time broadcast in 17 and that's that's the goal i think for this one is and that's where the name comes
from is to provide a dynamic eclipse broadcast uh during the 2024 eclipse
and i'll get into details for each of these as we move through the slides
also in terms of history the continental astronomy
telescope eclipse experiment continental america telescope eclipse experiment the kate experiment
you can guess what my daughter's name is from that experiment and uh with the dynamic eclipse
broadcast you all know what my wife's name is so uh we uh
we're i'm happy to be able to work that into it as well
for another goal in 2024 we'd like to have cheaper equipment um
turned out that 3 500 was you know relatively cheap for science equipment but not as cheap as
you know not cheap enough so that someone would go out and buy the equipment just for the eclipse so we're looking at raspberry pi cameras
and experimenting with those and we think we have some solutions to to get there
in 17 we only had people participating from the path of totality and that's something we'd like to change
i mean it's it's really important to get to the path of a total solar eclipse as you all know a solar
eclipse total solar eclipse is much different from a partial solar eclipse and
it's worth the effort but realistically not everybody can do that so we'd like to have participation from
people who are seeing a partial eclipse in 2024
and to make the follow-up work easier one of the problems that we ran into is that the amount is a little bit
beyond a lot of people's skill level especially beginners in the field so
we're looking at go-to mounts again inexpensive go-to mounts to try to make the follow-up work after the
eclipse easier here's our plan and i'll talk about
these two events uh again we're about a thousand days out so we've got three events planned um we looked at two lunar
eclipses and then in about seven hours uh fred espinder is in antarctica with
one of our cameras and we'll see how how his luck is this time around
we got some events again roughly 500 days in advance of 2024 eclipse two
lunar eclipses and then a partial eclipse in europe and we hope to get our equipment
finalized at that point and some people are looking at the annular eclipse in 2023 as a way to
practice for 2024 but it's only six months in advance of the total eclipse and so that's not
enough time to make any changes for instance in the equipment or in the software so that's going to be a bonus
uh object for us and that's something that we're going to try to learn kind of try to have everything done before then
so for the may eclipse we had two sites i talked my friend claude plymate into trying to observe it
with me and he had partly cloudy skies but in tucson
uh i was completely clouded out it's sometimes my luck with the weather
but the idea was that we had two pi cameras we had a baseline of 500 miles and if we had simultaneous data from
those two two cameras we could make a stereoscopic image of the lunar eclipse
we had roughly the same setups 50 millimeter cameras on the pi high
quality camera and we're able to sync just uh with normal network time to a tenth of a
second which is more than accurate enough but the weather messed us up for that
one a few weeks ago we had a larger group uh this time eight people
taking images of the november lunar eclipse we had some clouds mike connolly was being rained on and caster fruit in
san francisco got just a few images before the rain started there but along the southern part of the
country cloud plymate into hatcher p had some good clear skies
i had cirrus again unfortunately but uh bill klepping in greenville texas
had some excellent skies there and then bob berry in carbondale was was using a different setup but also
achieved some excellent results so during the eclipse what we were doing is uploading uh data from each site uh
in a one minute cadence and so each of us could see how the other person was faring and that's something that we're hoping
to do for 2024 is to have a regular upload sequence but looking at the images from two sites
from tehachapian from greenville um we hope to do a 3d projection and so
um here's here are the two of them here's from tehachapi i've really
reduced the intensity of the lunar disc so the stars are brought out here
but and then because it was only a partial eclipse you can see an asymmetric glare around the moon
and then claude had some light series and perhaps you can see that as well
the data from greenville texas is here at the same time the image is taken within 10
seconds or so again asymmetric glare i've
rotated it because bill is using a 105 millimeter camera or lens to feed the camera and
claudia is using 135 millimeters but you can clearly see that there's some parallax from images taken at the same
time in different locations the moon is in a different spot so here's our 3d image and
i should have warned people to get your 3d glasses out but uh if i use 3d glasses to look at this i
have a little bit of a hard time merging them because i think the 1200 mile baseline is a
little bit too much to make a good 3d image this will be on our website so
you'll be able to look at it at your leisure later but we achieved both of our goals getting simultaneous data from
at least two sites and then having a real-time upload to a cloud server
so this past november was a was a success and we're hoping to expand our network for the next lunar eclipse in
may but in seven hours again fred espiner who was our very first volunteer is
still volunteering he's on a national geographic boat called the endurance
someplace in off of antarctica right now my wife and i had journeyed to alaska in
october and i'd never seen the aurora but was able to take a time sequence with this little pie camera of the
aurora and then we sent it to illinois and fred learned how to do it and you can see
it's very different from the two suitcases right it's in a tupperware container now
it's a you know six years makes makes a difference in technology
um and here he is uh practicing with uh with his uh travel partner alan cuomo uh
focusing getting a focus for the solar image on board this was a few days ago
near south georgia and i think the cruise ship has moved along this direction to get into the
path of totality tomorrow or you know in a few hours and the last email i saw was that he was
optimistic about getting a clear spot so we'll see we'll see if you can get a picture of the corona
with with this setup um
so we're trying to reduce the cost like i said before and and using the pi camera
or something similar we'll be able to reduce the cost significantly at least a third cheaper
or two-thirds cheaper so only 33 percent of the cost of 2017
but if you're sitting in your home and you have your own mount and you're interested in helping out with
the eclipse but you don't want to get involved in any follow-up projects then buying the pi camera and the lens and
some mounting hardware is probably only going to cost you 400 so we've got a staged sort of uh
schedule for people who are interested in volunteering and so i think that these are reasonable
amounts that people on their own could could afford or maybe a group of people and a club
could get together and buy some equipment um again we're still working on this we're
still a thousand days out but i think we're gonna move in this direction having a low and it's kind of the way nasa is working
now too right a low swap camera system size weight and power
making it very small and miniaturized and you know i don't take very good nighttime pictures but even i
could take pictures of m51 and orion with the equipment that we're
looking at uh here's here's a 100 millimeter f4 uh newtonian
and then on the other side of this mount we've got a 50 mm lens and for my backyard i could get the horse head it
doesn't show up here very well but a wide field of view and some nice nebula
in orion so we're hoping that the follow-up projects which would likely be
occultations or variable star observations or other types of observations would certainly be
a lot easier with a go-to mount and some equipment like this
for the partial phase we haven't really defined our science uh particularly well but i like to think of
of this figure from the annular eclipse in china i'm being calling this a bailey bedogram
you know bailey beads are these bright dots at the limb of the sun as the moon
uh mountains and valleys show uh parts of the sun or black parts of the sun so i think the photographer
in this case took images every two seconds and combine them into this type of format to show you the mountains and the
valleys on the on the moon very in dramatic fashion our guess is that if we took these types
of bailey beetograms from different locations again having a baseline a thousand mile baseline between sites
that we'd be able to see some interesting differences or maybe during a three-hour partial
eclipse maybe we could see some temporal evolution as the moon does its vibration
but again we're hoping or we're planning to have people from outside of the past totality participate
so again april 4th 2024 hopefully is marked on your calendar here's the path of totality but the
entire country will see a partial solar eclipse at least and what we're hoping to do is to provide you with a website that looks
something like this that you'll be able to see partial phases where the eclipse is partial
totality obviously in the path of totality in something like real time and uh
and we'd like you to be part of this so here's my second invitation is how can you get involved uh with us
as i mentioned before we've got a sort of a tiered um sort of structure where we have a core
team a group of us now looking at these lunar eclipses and trying to figure out what hardware and software works the
best we have state coordinators who are expert in their local geography and have
ties to the local astronomy community and and high school groups as well
and then we have site observers people who are just interested in taking data and being part of the science results
that come out of it so hopefully you're interested in one of these levels um
and the way to to start working with us is just to send me an email at
my pen 2015 or else you can use our group email deb dash initiative gmail.com
and i don't have a good website now so i won't show you but we have a placeholder website at least
deb initiative.org and we'll be expanding that very soon
right so that's all i had um hopefully there's some questions that i can answer or
comments uh most of the comments is you know most
impressive uh you know this is so cool um
no comments in particular questions in particular but uh
you know actually it was that was the first time that was the first time for me to see um
the such data from citizen kate it was beautiful stuff and um you know i can
imagine what the the full movie will look like once it's all done but
you know all of that image data takes a long time to deal with and as one person did comment that these are
very difficult to process like that so you know but uh good exactly
great work and and congratulations to you and you know the whole team that that participated in that it's just
incredible uh citizen science i think thank you and obviously there's no way i
could have done it without the help from all those people uh it is really cool um it was a lot of fun and and a lot of
work so um the more people that get involved we can we can just delegate and distribute
the workload more evenly and uh and i'm looking forward to uh to working with
this group and others who join us uh over the coming years uh there is one question though uh does
anybody do this in h alpha that was from tim burris on facebook
um again uh not as far as i know there have been some small networks of of groups uh maybe
three or four people but a large age alpha network would look really cool
especially from places that have partial eclipses you know i've said that we're trying to balance the cost with the with the
impact uh and h alpha brings us up a level but uh
yes i'd love to see a set of h alpha observations from partial eclipses
right i think that's an amazing educational tool to watch those kids i mean for
everybody involved the excitement i mean to me that's what that's one of the things this would be about too i mean
the science part definitely but watching what the kids i mean to enthuse the kids and to see this and
actually achieve results and to have a paper written i think that's an incredible project
uh and it's the first time i've seen anything you know seen that the end result of what you did
yeah unfortunately i had a little career change right at the end and so
uh yeah you would have seen results much faster if i'd been uh you know employed with my former employer
uh but a lot of people these days are emphasizing uh sending people into orbit
right go up into low earth orbit and you see the earth as a as a planetary body and you get a sort of a different
awareness right we can't do that with everybody but the eclipse obviously has a big impact it
has a huge effect on on a lot of people me in particular so getting people involved in a project
like this you know enables that um sort of different awareness uh in in
a much more effective way i think yeah and the detail in your pic in the images was just incredible even though
you know they're gifs and they're jumping around it was incredible to see that to actually see the remnants of
that solar mass ejection you know i i i'm an aurora person and i love looking at the sun
and it was amazing to actually see that so you know even to me somebody that might know a little bit about it it's
still very exciting i think that's an incredibly insight exciting project
it is uh you know um one of the first times that this has been done in terms of white light so
i think there are three other papers that have looked at the acceleration but they've used particular
temperature plasma to try to trace the motions but here with an eclipse we look at all of the plasma at every
temperature because it's electrons just electrons scattering the light so um yeah it's wonderful that we had
that opportunity you can't really count on a cme you know they're very irregular right possible to predict but we had the
remnants in 2017 you know fingers crossed for 2024. definitely yeah and
you'll have a different path and need different people from different areas so that opens up the whole field even again
so i would encourage anybody that has an interest in this to contact matt i think it would be an incredible project to be
part of and so much fun work yes but fun yeah
all right thank you yeah anybody else got any questions
uh harold locke says thanks matt awesome body of work so he's watching on youtube
yep excellent all right well matt thank you so much i
i really like that i think that will be incredible to see and maybe be a part of that it
makes you think about what's possible so all right i am going to share my
screen and go back and we'll give the answers to the questions
and let's see my screen always takes a few minutes to
get there so all right the first question what messier object did comet leonard passed by this morning
it was m3 globular cluster the winner is andrew corkhill and barbara harris
that's a beautiful picture if you're watching question two there is a famous supernova
remnant in taurus name the remnant and that was the crab nebula and josh kobach
is the winner of that one the last question stars are born in
groups right well yeah that's true and rich crailing has won a calendar also so
all three of you will be winning an astronomical league 2022
calendar and somebody from the league will be contacting you about that
and i would like to thank everybody scott david carol chuck don matt it's been an incredible
night a lot of good information a lot of fun i always learn so much from everybody
that's speaking so thank you all again for being here
and scott and i just set the dates for next year um i'll be working on january
21st program coming up and as soon as we get the information lined up we will
definitely be sharing that with you and i think that's the end of what i have
i would like to thank everybody that's out there watching and thank the speakers again uh
it's been a lot of fun so if anybody else has anything they would like to
share or add this is the time
all right you're all quiet yeah i know when it's that quiet we're done
so scott what thank you again greatly appreciate it we'll be back in january and everybody
have happy holidays safe times stay safe hopefully next year we'll be much better and we will see you
in albuquerque all right sounds good thanks bye everybody
thank you everyone bye-bye
so
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