Astronomical League Live XIX

Transcript:

let's start the clock again
uh carol we've got the new logos for the
baton rouge have you seen the new logo john just redid it
i saw that with the ring around it looks very nice yeah did you see the one with the gator
yeah is that cool you know i like the colorful the lime green the colors really jump out yeah
they really are they with the rest of it yeah it looks nice
everybody now we've got it's like you know albuquerque's only what a couple weeks
behind us or a week behind we're already uh
yeah yeah scott you did an amazing job i've heard so many people that have watched all your interviews i've heard
so many good comments that's good and the albuquerque people
the people i ran into in the airport all they wanted to do was say how how much they appreciated it they really liked
the meteoritics when they went to the museum because one couple said you know i expected to go to a museum and just look
around and walk around and they said they took them apparently into the lab and actually showed them analyzing
a sample and they said it was incredible so you know hidden gem there apparently
yeah very hands-on and harrison schmidt oh my gosh he was amazing he was cool
he was one of the nicest people in his wife was just amazing that's true
he's totally up with what's going on in the world of space yeah he was really sharp i was
just gonna pull the wool over harrison schmidt up schmidt's eyes that's for sure
that's true no and everybody enjoyed seth's talk too seth oh yeah he always makes you laugh
oh my gosh yeah his timing and everything's just really incredible
yep space weather so this is going to be also a good program for space weather i
think so did you see the thing about beetle battle juice beetlejuice however you want to say it oh my gosh bob must have
read it too that was amazing now we know why it dimmed down
yeah i didn't know any of that until i saw it this morning i mean i haven't seen it i haven't seen
it oh it's amazing they what happened with beetlejuice
however this might be a reason well that's true that's true
but i mean it is amazing i never you know the sun always has cmes but i never really thought about a
different a star having and it wasn't even seen massive eruption
so that was why it dim so much uh could be uh you know it might i don't
know if they know for sure you know this massive stellar eruption the likes of never before seen
according to astronomers so from what they said it wasn't the corona
that erupted it was a part of the what we would call the photosphere that
was ejected and then it went off into a cloud that blocked you know just like
anything else it absorbed the light from beetlejuice and made it dimmer
according to their theory but that was a huge amount of material
so here i have some people tuning in we got to rek from the uae charity rose walker she said i've had a
bit of drink and should remain silent okay all right charity
okay and uh yeah we'll have some more people logging on here in a little bit uh for those of
you who are watching uh please share this program this is uh um outreach from the astronomical league
and uh we got some great speakers on today so
and here we go [Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
well hello everyone this is scott roberts from explore scientific and the explore alliance and we are uh with
another edition of the astronomical league live i'm going to bring terry mann on with me if i could just get my
camera aligned on myself i guess that might help here we go terry how are you
i'm doing fine how about you i'm okay i was racing all day long
getting ready for things but uh i think that i think i was able to do it so
yeah good talking good yeah i love the kind of the backstage chatter that we have uh
before we do these shows so um i guess let me show everyone that's uh
on right now we've got uh uh terry mann uh secretary of the astronomical league
um we have uh bob here with us uh who's gonna give our keynote steve uh carol
org who's the president of the astronomical league and david levy who is on route to somewhere but live with
us now so terry i'm going to turn this over to you all right thank you scott
well it is so good to be back from alcon uh it was an amazing time and it was
great to meet so many people again it's so nice to look people in the eye you know we were i was also down at green
bank for starquest and got to see steve and bob down there but just to be with
people again and talk and just laugh instead of being this is great i'm glad we have zoom but being there in person
is really nice so with that how about david if i go to you and you get us
started off with one of your beautiful quotations well thank you terry and it's wonderful
to be here as brief as it must be because i'm trying to talk the police
officer out of giving me a ticket so no i'm just kidding
anyway uh before i do the quotation which is going to be one you've all heard before from romeo
and juliet i have a couple of announcements and concerning
sad things that have happened one of them is that two days ago
don markholt passed away suddenly from covid and uh in the middle of the night the
and uh he was the leading visual comet discoverer in the world
and it's really a sad thing to lose him but last night we lost constantine baba
cosmos had been in declining health he had a bad stroke and another bad
stroke and we think that he had a third one last night which cost him his life
constantine has attended more cellophanes than anybody else i think in the world i think he's attended like
almost 60 of them so my quotation today is from romeo and juliet
come gentle night come loving black proud knight
give me my romeo and when i shall die take him and cut him out in little stars
and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with
night and pay no worship to the garish sun thank you all very much and terry back
to you thank you david as always we really appreciate you being here um good luck
with everything and you are in our thoughts thank you so with that how about carol if we kind
of touch base with you and you can fill us in on everything that's happened this month well this has been an exciting two
or three weeks for the league we just got back from albuquerque and our convention there uh
i have some news to report uh from the observing award section of the
league and that is that we have two new awards that were approved this year one is called the solar neighborhood
observing program and the other is called the bennett observing program
the bennett observing program uh makes an accommodation for our
south america astronomers uh as far as some of the award programs that they can participate
in as well so we're very appreciative of that and more information be coming shortly on that
one of the important things we did at alcon was honor 13 new master observers
and out of those 13 surprise surprise about three-fourths of those were from
the local uh albuquerque astronomical society it really helps to have those
wonderful dark skies when you can go out most nights and not have to fight plows
like we do in the midwest and other portions of the country so that was a real thrill to get to present that many
master observer awards at the meeting and we had a spectrum of other awards
including one of our newest awards that's the fleming imaging award
sponsored by scott roberts and it's a two-year-old award and it has really
taken off we had a tremendous number of good entries this year and there's
something in the league hierarchy for everybody as far as award so that can be
presumed another new thing we did and we alluded this just a little bit before here and
that was uh thanks to scott roberts uh and explorer alliance we did a
quite a bit of streaming with interviews and that sort of thing and terry said earlier it went over very
well and it got people's attention uh wherever we were as we travel back home
the one thing that the executive committee has been discussing uh after that
is the possibility of having the streaming feature at next year's
alcon 2023 uh for baton rouge louisiana in july and
there's been enough interest expressed that we are thinking about having that
option as far as uh the streaming for the whole convention including the presentations that are given uh
many of our organizations are already doing uh registration for the live event
online as well so uh we're attempting to do both tracks
both the in-person event which is wonderful but sometimes for many reasons
people can't attend our national convention and that's where it comes in real handy if we're able to stream that
and they can have the same benefit uh for a token amount of registration fees so
we'll look at that very carefully another thing that was noteworthy
in addition to the the great job that the local club did in uh hosting outcome they did a wonderful job
uh they were very helpful uh uh to our guests and we appreciate that very much
the other thing we did we had a diversity panel at this
year's alicon and we tried to find what diversity was all about and
we didn't come up with just one definition for diversity
but one of the things we found during the pandemic and even before in many ways is that there are many people in
our country who don't have access to astronomical resources at all
whether it's being in an inner city whether it's in rural areas we have found that we are having we have
a major audience that isn't able to avail themselves of opportunities so we kicked around several ideas at
that panel about ways we might be able to close the gap a little bit and make
those resources more readily available it ran the gamut all the way from
possibly piggybacking on the back of local libraries across the country
that would have access to remote telescopes and
all things in between so we really are looking at many things that might allow us to
make some changes there another thing that we talked about
uh one of the suggestions was this wasn't directly about diversity but it was
the mention that we need to expand our use of the youtube
channel we already have on the league webpage to include maybe some how-to
videos about observing in general and maybe specific
programs maybe some hints on how best to maneuver through those processes so that's i think will be a big plus as
well and let's see
that's about uh all i have as far as uh upcoming programs coming up
as i said earlier next year's convention mark your calendars now for
july 26th through july 29th in baton rouge louisiana they're uh
well under the planning mode there and we've had some meetings just recently and they're
excited to go forward they have some wonderful great trips planned side trips planned
and i think you'll enjoy it so back to you now terry okay thank you carol yeah there's a lot
when we're planning when somebody is planning alcon it takes quite a bit of time actually an effort to get all
everything put together and albuquerque the albuquerque astronomical
society and jim fordyce did a fantastic job so you know we are all extremely
grateful for all of the work they put in and everything they did it was very nice
and a lot of good compliments and i'm sure baton rouge now we move to that and it will be the
same it seems like with every outcome it has its own personality wherever we go
whatever city we're in we see new things we meet new people because people from that area tend to be there and you know
we go to different areas we we meet new people and meet old friends so
as carol said please mark your calendar for the end of july and it is air conditioned there'll be plenty of air
conditioning so we'll be inside and please join us in uh
baton rouge and that's actually our first trip to louisiana for a national convention so yeah
wow we're excited about that we think it'll uh encourage a lot of people uh uh
within several hundred miles to visit so yeah and as my sister pointed out the
beach is only like an hour away i think my sister might be joining me
there so a trip before or after alcon i'm not coming hand to the beach
yes that's my my sister's a beach person so uh yes join us so all right i am going
to uh we always ask three questions and give away three door prizes from the
astronomical league so um i am going to do that in just a
minute um we are going to end up nee we need to discuss something
because we have found with the national office we have had problems
with international shipping uh that you have heard me talk about before
so i'm gonna discuss that just a little bit good luck thank you
and there we go all right so tonight's door prize three winners will be drawn
and this isn't like the gsp uh tonight will be we need to answer them as
quickly as possible because i will announce the three winners before the program is over
so uh three winners will receive a 75th anniversary pin and a three inch round
al logo magnet now we are going to temporarily have to stop
international shipping until we figure out the best way to do this um we ran into an issue last time i gave
away the tote bags the tote bag is a 12 value by the time it was shipped to another
country with all of the imports and fees it was between 60 and 70 dollars for the
12 tote bag until we get this figured out uh please i you know
we're sorry to do this but um the cost sometimes goes back to the person that want it and sometimes to the office and
that is just that's not acceptable for what we're doing at this point so the
office right now is trying to find you know a way to ship how to do this
where um you know it's more reasonable because each country apparently has their own
schedule of shipping and taxes and fees so it's getting very confusing for our
national office especially when things comes back in a month or two being rejected so for right now temporarily we
are halting international shipping while we look at this to see what we can do
so i'm sorry but for right now that until we figure it out that's what we're
going to have to do for the office so let me go on i'm going to ask three
questions and like i said please answer these questions in the next 30 minutes if possible
winners will be announced after the last speaker and someone from the astronomical league office will contact
the winner and if we find out it's international you're an international winner the office will probably explain
to you just exactly what i explained uh now so just be aware
so questions for tonight remember please send your answers to secretary
astro league dot org okay first question what is the name of
the curiosity landing site so what name did they give
the landing site where curiosity landed and again secretary at astroly.org
second question in what constellation is comet pan stars
located in on september 15th
and again secretary at astroleague.org please send your answers
there third question when
saturn's rings will be at 14 degrees open at opposition on august 14th
how many years will it be before the rings are open enough to reveal this kind of splendor again
so saturn's rings are open at 14 degrees at opposition on august 14th
how many years will it be before the rings are open enough
to show this kind of beauty again and please send your answers
to secretary at astroleague.org and for right now i'm going to stop that
right there and steve are you about ready to start
yes i am okay steve i'm gonna turn it over to you let me introduce steve a little bit here
first um steve is a double a bso mentor and he is
very active in the astronomical leg he is an advanced master observer a
binocular master observer a master imager citizen science planning committee he's
a program coordinator with the league with the astronomy before the telescope
radio astronomy spectrography and foundations of imaging lead author
and needless to say is hopelessly addicted to the astronomical league observing programs um steve is a very
knowledgeable person that has we've ran into each other on the observing field at starquest many times
and much appreciated uh full of knowledge and that's what we really like
so steve um if you would take it away i make sure i'm sharing the right screen
okay should be that one that's it let me come on get out of the way
slideshow new show i'll start by saying that um if if
anybody out there in the audience wants to to follow along i i've posted online
uh two different links to this powerpoint presentation and the truth is if you would like to download it later
and share it with your local club that's just fine with me feel free to do that edit it i don't have my name in there
anywhere i don't think so you know it's pretty clean and you can take care of it that way uh i would say truthfully that this
powerpoint started live about two months ago um i take care of the uh the observing kind
of things that go on with the local club here the astronomical society of eastern missouri i'm in st louis and um
ultimately i you know in talking with people a lot of times people are afraid to get into doing astronomical league
observing programs just because they don't know how and they don't know what to do and logging is sometimes one of
the the hurdles that they have to go across uh you know they'll go to the website they'll see the requirements but they
don't know what else they need to do so that was the idea behind this powerpoint uh ultimately one of the major questions
you're probably going to ask yourself is you know why should you keep a log and really to me there are two different
reasons why you should do it one is for personal what they're gonna do for me and then obviously another is you know
for what you have to do to do the astronomically program itself uh i'm not gonna insult you by reading out all this
text right here you can read that on the screen but while that's there i'd like to point out i'm approaching 73 years of
age i'm not as sharp as i used to be i used to be able to remember things forever and ever
logging is a good way to in your later age be able to remember things to be
able to go back and say oh well yeah ten years ago i did that i saw that it was
at this location and this is what the weather was like and this was who was here with me logging is a good thing to
do particularly if you have important things you want to remember i'm a
fiddler i like to change hardware i'm a computer person i like to mess with stuff and by logging i can have a way of
going back and looking over and saying well yeah that's how it worked now i know how to do it
and to set it up okay so one way is for personal and truthfully personal logging is like
doing a diary you know and there's people in this world who think doing a diary is the most wonderful thing well
obviously the other way is to keep suffering ale program and that's really what this presentation is about and so i
asked myself well why should you have to log as part of a program well one reason
i'm a retired school teacher and we always wanted kids to be able to document the document to show whatever
it is they're doing and so ultimately i have a feeling that years and years and years ago make it sound long ago last
century when people first started putting together astronomical league observing programs they wanted some kind
of document that would prove that that the people out there in the field were actually doing what they were supposed
to do and so that's the purpose of the law and another truth if you really look at things like messier marathons
you know those aren't in the spirit of doing any astronomical league
program and in truthfully they're just like put a check mark yep they've never done that done done that you know five
minutes is is about all the time you have to do the marathon per object ultimately you should probably look
longer so uh one of the reasons the al has you log is so you can observe detail you know so you can really see things so
you can manage them and do that a truth is a lot of times people think that that down at the bottom here that
all they can put in their log is what the als is and that's not true i mean make it your own put things in there
that you want to have in there that you can remember for later uh i would ask a question of anybody out there who who's
completed an astronomical league observing program would you want to go back after five years and read your log
you know put things in there that make it worthwhile that would make you want to go back and say i want to see what i
did back there when i worked on the pick something the radio astronomy observing approach
steve for just a minute sure are you advancing slides yes ma'am okay you're still
showing as being on the first slide or at least that's what i have is that what that's the same for everybody else
yeah that's just a problem [Music] there you go now you went one yeah
i hate to think i have to do that this way okay so anyway let me point out and say
go back one more slide you can see this right yes can you see slideshow view slideshow
boom did that change no okay we're going to do this a different
way i think i apologize
i'm going to stop sharing and i'm going to try a different way of doing this
go here i apologize i talked to myself
thank you for doing that terry no problem i was just i couldn't quite see the other slides and i wasn't sure if
who meant to advance them yet or not
hey steve were you using the up and down arrows there on your keyboard or are you using your mouse uh i think i was using a combination of
both okay uh but anyway
slideshow where does it say slideshow there's a slideshow right underneath my picture let's try this one
um zoom
okay uh steve you are muted right now you need to unmute yourself
okay we've all done it yeah been there you can you see this screen for the very very first time yes why okay
okay so we're good uh if you were to prowl the astronomical league's web page uh they have a a a
a section in there uh that's devoted to actual the logging kind of process and
i've included here the um url up here at the top of the page if you would like to search for that uh but ultimately they
want they say to us essentially you know what makes a good description and it's got all these kind of reasons down here
below and they're all true they're all things you should really be concerned with it makes you a detailed observer uh
you're looking at it you're not just saying oh yes got it done uh it makes you a better observer if you look uh
you have to practice doing it it's not something that comes natural it it
literally is something that requires effort on everybody's part and ultimately it's what you see and it's
going to make it different versus what uh somebody at the next pad might be doing or something like that okay i'm
going to try to spacebar as you log okay this is for me and these are things that i think are important i
think you should always keep in mind the program's requirements because different programs require different kinds of
things uh admittedly a lot of the observing programs are patterned after uh the messier program where it would be
the time of observation the day uh seeing transparency and that sort of
thing uh and then the verbal description what you're seeing but other programs can require different things and if you
don't read the requirements in advance you may skip something like the shapely sawyer classification for the globular
cluster program are the trumpler classification for open clusters um there are a number of things that that
you need to do with the planetary nebula program uh can you see a central star
you know and those kinds of things so read read read the program's web page to
see what it is that you really should be putting down and the second thought about that is that as you put those
things down you consider about how you were eventually going to report that to
whoever you submit that to whether it's the al program coordinator or there's a local person who you deal with um
ultimately it says it right here you know you plan on doing it by paper you know and you could send it in but that
might require a whole lot of xeroxing do people still see your ex you know on on on your part uh you want to do it
electronically electronically is the way most people i think are doing it now by sending either a pdf or a word document
or even i've seen powerpoint presentations i personally do it in terms of web page but a lot of people
rely on email and there is a problem if your email gets too big and truthfully i had a guy last week who submitted a uh
uh uh a log for uh for the spectroscopy program i think it ran somewhere in the neighborhood of 110
pages long and something like 20 meg or something like that and truthfully if
you just sent that as is an attachment to his email he probably would have had some problems
so consider doing it through some kind of shared online directory uh
however you plan on submitting it however you plan on doing it trying to make it easy for the poor person like me
who has to look it over i've got a friend locally here who is the foundation of imaging
coordinator and i know that he's had some stuff where people will submit some parts as a text document but then
they'll have the the images for it somewhere else and to bounce back and forth is really really kind of a problem
so think about making it easy this is a school teacher retired school teacher and me talking
make it easy for me to grade okay if you look at the astronomical league
program's web pages each program has a different way that you can submit it in
some cases you can submit it to the national coordinator directly in some cases there's going to be a local
officer of your club if you're a club member and uh that didn't go to that way
i think by looking on the uh the website there are actually some programs you can submit to someone who's already done the
program so it doesn't have to be the coordinator or somebody locally okay and the truth is don't ever ever ever send
your original paper logs to uh the person who's gonna look at the stuff because in all likelihood they won't be
returned okay now the big time question here is you know when do the log how much do you
log when you do it uh truthfully you know most of our programs are done at night out in the dark frequently in the
cold or the dam and so the question is when you're out there in the field you know
how complete should you be should you take the time to sit down and write it all out by hand or type it all in i will
tell you a somewhat humorous story of a guy in the local club here who uh was really really cold and he decided the
way that he could do it is he could type everything on a computer but his fingers were going to be cold so he had an
electric heater blowing across his computer keyboard he turned away for a few minutes and when he came back it had
melted the keys off his keyboard so you know you got to make sure a little bit about how complete how much do you want
to type how much you want to do right there at the keyboard can you do it in shorthand can you take a little freebie
you know a few notes or something like that uh ultimately how much do you have
to do it doesn't have to be in the front of the you know the final finished copy as you leave that night uh after the
session though you do have to ask yourself how much work do you want to put yourself into one of the guys
locally here and i'll talk about it more on the slide here in just a second but he has one of those little um
dictaphone kind of things for lack of of modern terminology and he dictates all of his notes but that means that he has
to the next day or reasonably soon go through the process of listening and typing and listening and typing and
listening and typing in last century you know that was all set up that's how secretaries did a lot of things but
today it's like and so you have to worry about that uh one of the questions you need to
worry about is how are you going to keep your log physically around the screen there's some pictures and starting the
one o'clock position you can do it with the paper kind of log and paper logs are
good people have used paper logs probably for centuries the only problems with paper logs is they're hard to see
in the dark and what happens if you are in central missouri or arkansas and you
have one of our typical dewey nights after a while your pen won't write on the paper anymore because the paper's
too wet uh you can do it electronically with a little dictation kind of device and i've got that picture there that's really
really good to use with the eyepiece it's not going to spoil your night vision but at the same time that does
usually mean later you've got to listen to all of that and play a sentence type of sentence play a little type a little
play a little so that can be a little inconvenient for you you may want to try to type something
into a document or a spreadsheet i actually will admit that i use a spreadsheet to do that uh ultimately if
you're going to have a cell phone you can you know dictate into a cell phone and sometimes cell phones can do uh
voice detects though voice detects and astronomy words don't always work out uh
somehow i'm not sure that if you would say beetlejuice it would turn up being spelled anywhere close to where it was
supposed to be uh i would tell you that a number of programs can have um
uh logging kinds of features things that you can do sky safari is one that i've used in the past and it does have the
ability to do logs on my android phone their toys to text and so i can actually do some voice to text into it and that
works sort of okay i do have to do a lot of editing the next day
one of the problems is a lot of the new people who are trying to do this always want to figure out what is it that they
should put in the love what do they include uh a first truth that i would say is that that everybody sees
something different if everybody tonight would go out and look at the same object
with the same equipment from the same locations you know everybody's going to see
yeah the object but there's other things that are going to be there so everybody's log should be a little bit
different and so the truth is you can't have and do it exactly the
same way as as everybody else so the astronomical league does make some suggestions about what you can put in
the laws now these are going to be the astronomical league suggestions i've got some i personally use and i'm going to stick those on a little bit here in the
end okay but they would like to know uh is it round or oval or regular you know
if it's oval is it stretched out how much the truth is if you would you're
good and you know what your field of view is you can actually estimate the size of the object based on your field
of view you know if it's a galaxy or a nebula does have sharp edges or does it fade
gradually you know if it's a galaxy does it have a bright core or is it spread out you know
for globular clusters is the centrally large and full we're very pointed that has to do with shapely sawyer which is
something you have to report uh this is the second and final page for this it says for open clusters you know
are there stars of the same magnitude can you kind of guess the number of stars uh i'll throw it in and say you
know is it got a condensed kind of structure is it spread out randomly and that kind of has to do with the
trumpware estimations you have to do for that program uh does the open cluster stand out well and that's a starry background or is it
really hard to pick out a lot of them in an open cluster program are hard to pick out i would testify to
that for the nebula denser lighter areas you know what else do you find in the field
of view that's interesting what else is this cool is there a neat double star is there a neat kind of pattern is there
anything that looks like an asterism you know one of my favorites is did a satellite pass through to this day i
remember probably 2012 working on the binocular double star program i saw a
double satellite a tan of satellite going through the i was going through my binoculars that scared me i didn't know
and then the truth is and i don't know if that bottom line is chopped off it is on my screen but is there anything else
make it yours put in your own observations now these are the kind of things that i sat
down with and i tried to say what possible things could i want to put in a log that i'm gonna submit a log that i'm
gonna keep uh i would truly say anything yellow there is generally gonna be
required by the astronomically they're gonna wanna know the date they're gonna want all the time they're gonna wanna
know the location a lot of times the programs say you know latitude longitude if you put in hey i observed from
romelson park i saw this from brahmos apart you can go on later you know disabled attitude longitude
one thing that they don't ask about is they don't ask about the mount i've got a couple of different telescopes i've got a couple of different mounts some
are equatorial some are um all this if you're going to do start hopping it's going to make a difference which one
you're going to use because you would attack it a different kind of way so include information about your mouth and
the optics and you know what kind of telescope it is if you use any filters
and what different eyepieces and powers uh the astronomical league almost always wants to know the scene and transparency
but that's not so important today with um with uh imaging kind of related programs one of the things they don't
ask about but i think is important is is the moon in the sky can you see it how bright is it is it before first quarter
is it after first quarter you know that makes a difference of what you're going to see and how much detail is going to
be there and then obviously the astronomically wants to know the written kind of things so what can you put in
observations well obviously a picture is worth a thousand words so you can make a sketch of it okay if you do make a
sketch if humanly possible try to label the directions uh north and west is usually what you see
west is easy to figure out if you don't have a tracking telescope which way is the field drifting you just hear it out
west if you've got a tracking telescope turn off your motor for a second you'll know west in north is just grab your
scope and kind of tug it towards polaris you'll find out norfolk um is converted
vision required do you see anything else important in the eyepiece if you're star
hopping where did you start how did you get between the start in your final spot are
there any kind of interesting marker stars along the way that you could use the planet you know did you use
binoculars did it work for binoculars should you plant it with binoculars uh can you see the thing in your finder is
it better at high magnifications or low magnifications the astronomical league gives you a lot of times data on an
object you know like the right essential index the size the uh the object type the brightness one of the things i think
it's important to put down is other names for the item other names for the item because a lot of times astronomical league
to double up you will see the same object in multiple programs but they'll hide it they may hide it by saying oh
that's c80 you know and it's the same thing as omega century and if you know
both names you can kind of you know put those things together uh one thing i think is kind of
important is what were the nighttime observing conditions was it hot was it cold was it miserable you know in
missouri how humid was it was it windy you know is it dewy is it frosty i think
those are important things you could put down effects of filters did you see any culture color excuse me uh how much of
the field of view you know did the object take up it's a good thing to estimate you know
it it it gives you kind of a verification of of did you see everything that you were supposed to see
uh ultimately what are your overall impressions did you like it did you have a good night
that night so these are all things that that i sat down and it took about a half an hour to come up with that list of
things but i think it's kind of you know it gives you a kind of structure to kind of follow
do you have to write down all those things for all your observations no pick
and choose you know make it your own you know some things are going to be important don't arbitrarily go out and
say tonight i have to say did i see the inverted vision with everything only use it when it's appropriate okay
uh only a couple more slides i think one thing that i think is really helpful and i don't know how many people out
there in the world know about it there is something that aaron cleverson has put together now aaron is the i'll say
in charge of the observing division there are other you know people at his level but he's been there the longest
and uh he happens to have i believe a phd and so he has a couple of things that he
calls what's up doc and and there are links to these what's up documents on the astronomical league's webpage
two things in particular and i will tell you that when you go it will take you off the al site and it will go to uh his
observatory site which is in houston for a public school district okay uh two
things one first he's got a thing that's called what's up doc and it's usually a two-page now pdf that tells what's
available in the sky every month in terms of astronomical league observing programs uh he will give you
an idea of what meteor showers are where plants are up there he will tell you oh if you're working on the messier program
look at these objects if you're working on the binocular double star program look on these particular options that's
a fun document to read uh if you go to the astronomical league website now this
month he does have a link i do believe that directs you to that thing uh he has
not done that a whole lot and so a lot of times you have to go to that url at the bottom of the page
the second thing he's got is a spreadsheet and admittedly he has not kept up with it a whole lot but still is
a really great document uh you type in your latitude you type in your longitude you type in the time and it will tell
you essentially what's up there in terms of availability for astronomically good
surfing programs for that particular night to me that's a pretty nice feature what's even a better feature is it
contains over 4500 different objects there are parts of various astronomical
league observing programs okay and ultimately it gives you a cross-reference so it will say oh well
this object is on the sca program and this is also in the herschel 400 and it's also in the local galaxy group and
galactic neighborhood program and things like that so that's a really important thing i will also tell you that it's in
a spreadsheet form and as part of the spreadsheet he has columns where you can
say this is the date and this is the time and this is what i observed and this is what this you know seeing in
transparency is and you've got a field there where you can type that information so you physically can use
his spreadsheet to enter that information and to track what you're doing and i think that's a particularly
powerful thing so i would offer you the url down at the bottom go there and you
will get that stuff now i think i have said this already but feel free to share and edit any of those slides
with the members of your club if you would like to do that uh if you got any questions feel free to email me at that
email address and i am the uh program coordinator for those three programs so if you forget my
email address and you want to look it up just go to the observing part of the astronomical
leads webpage and go down to astronomy for the telescope or radio astronomy or spectroscopy and my email address is
right there anybody need to know anything well we don't have a big audience here sitting
live but i would be glad to answer any questions i could and if you're watching this uh
by streaming go ahead and drop me an email and i think i'm done
well steve i'm really glad i did not realize aaron had that on the website
where they had a 4500 object catalog um i think that's pretty
interesting i will check that out because i've never noticed that it's neat oh i guess i could stop
sharing okay so yeah and well you know let's be honest how much of the membership really goes
and visits you know the astronomical league's web page you know and so it's a case where well i'll go look and i'll
see and i drink coffee in the morning and i'll sit in this this very chair in this big open room that i'm in and i'll
just kind of fiddle and i discovered that by fiddling here still well i think you're right too on the
observed programs i've always said you learn with the observed programs but the one thing to
remember is you don't have to start where it's really hard you can start at an easier pace and really get the feel
of it but what i do guarantee you is you will learn something and as steve said
with logging this it helps you retain that you know and even if you don't retain it you have the
record of it but by not just going through and saying yes i saw this and yes i saw that
because you will not remember from that a lot of people won't um and i haven't i've only done a couple uh observing
programs but from that i did learn and it was from the logging and i kept all
my logs and you know it is amazing what you can learn and i
don't know you talk about herschel 400 only thing i know is it is a tough one
you know start with something like the messier binocular something easy get your feet wet get used to it see what
you enjoy uh because this can be as hard as you want these master observers are
called master observers for a reason they know their stuff and they are there to help also
so steve thank you so much let me add one thing and and
one of the burner family expressions is there's a reason why the menu in the restaurant has nine pages everybody
likes different things okay and if we i would quiz all the people here and all the people online and i say well what do
you get out of astronomy i get out of astronomy observing programs i have a friend here who's a very well i'll say
dan crowson he's a photo editor the reflector you know dan's an imager
okay and dan looks through my telescope and says is it that that smudge
everybody does something different we all like different kinds of things there are people out there outreach is their thing
they want to do outreach but a problem to me with outreach people is it so many never learn anything new to show
you know they learn their basic well this is november so november means this month i show these things and they they
don't have a chance to get out and discover new things to show people by looking at astronomically conserving
programs it gives them an opportunity to discover new territory right yeah yeah and that's i think what the
league is really about opening up the sky and giving people choices and ways to learn so steve again thank you that
was very interesting i appreciate it once it started working i apologize no
problem it happens to all of us believe me
all right um scott i do have a question for you when we were at alcon you were talking
about a reopening or an event that you're getting ready to have would you
please tell us about it because i'm curious it's something i wanted to do for a long time uh we
um i have you know redone we did some spring cleaning we we
pulled out everything out of our showroom put stuff back in redecorated patched halls that where we had hung
things up and put up new signage and stuff like that and we decided that we would have a an open house event uh
that's going to be august 26th and 27th let me just double check those
dates yeah and so we're going to we're going to uh hopefully flow this all the way
out into our parking lot here in springdale arkansas and
we're going we're inviting i've already kind of put the word out to some local astronomy clubs but any astronomy clubs
that are listening to this if you want to come down here uh and if you guys have uh
you know maybe some uh equipment that you wanted to trade or swap we're going to let we're going to
allow a swap meet to happen an astronomical swap meet to happen in
our parking lot where you can swap and trade with each other not with us but with each other
uh and um it won't cost you a dime uh you know we'll we'll uh uh we're not going to
take a commission or anything like that so but i thought it would be fun uh kind of
reminiscent of uh if you've ever ever went to the riverside telescope makers conference a big part of that conference
was its swap meet and uh yeah there would be all these astronomical scroungers out
there you know people buying mirrors telescope parts uh all kinds of stuff
because well the telescope makers conference was just that it was about telescope making
and so but you can a lot of times at these swap meets you can find some fantastic deals
people are offloading their older telescope because they want to get a newer telescope or something different
that more or less fits with their observing needs at the time so
anyhow if you're interested in that please get in touch with us you can get directly in touch with me at
s at explorescientific.com uh i did i you know we will be putting it up on
our website it's not up there yet uh because we literally just got permission
to do it so um so that is uh it's gonna be fun
so does that mean the big sale word is there are you going to have
a lot of sales we will bring out our stuff too that uh
you know because uh like every telescope company we all have like seconds and
sure you know sales samples stuff like that yeah we're going to sell that stuff so
yeah i remember i remember standing in line at riverside waiting to get to the tables yeah
and i went home with a lot too from there yeah i've done so i bet so well thank you i'm curious is that a saturday
and a sunday scott or a friday night friday saturday event probably the big day will be saturday yeah big day is
that probably when the slot meet will be on saturday or will it be that it happened both days you know so uh you
know you can come here and get warmed up and you know if you have a pop-up tent or something like that you can you can
erect that uh we have tables that we can bring out there as well so
uh catch yours as well so it'll be fun we're even thinking about getting like a kids jumping gym to
you know trying to make it a family deal so sounds good
that sounds good all right um yeah i'm sitting here looking at myself and everybody's in these nice cool shirts
and i'm sitting here in a sweater now i'm in ohio it's kind of cool yeah it's cooler here and i'm planning on going
out even though there's full moon i'm gonna go sit under the stars tonight and see if i can see any of the perseid
meteor shower i know the moon will take out most of them but i enjoy just
kind of sitting out watching the sky so that is why i look like nanook from the
north here um i'm totally in turtleneck and ready to go out once we get finished
uh it won't even be dark here at that point though so scott how about if if it's okay with bob can we take a 10
minute break here and get everything switched and ready to go and give people a little bit of break and we will come
back with bob anderson sure okay
thank you very much and we will be back very shortly
you
this is richard hollingham for issa at the royal observatory of belgium in brussels for more than a century scientists have
been making observations on this site using telescopes like this still in use
today in fact this is the world data center for the sunspot index now though solar
orbiter is giving us a whole new perspective of our nearest star
solar orbiter was launched from cape canaveral florida in february 2020
the spacecraft has since traveled some two and a half billion kilometers made two passes of venus to get a better view
of the sun's poles and one pass of the earth now it's just made its first close
approach to the sun taking it within the orbit of mercury during temperatures of some 500 degrees
celsius the pitcher's solar orbiters returning show this atomic furnace in
unprecedented detail i was personally blown away by the quality and degree of detail in these
images and clearly as solar physicists we've been looking at images of the sun for many years but by going three times
closer we can get the spatial resolution up by a factor of three and we see
things that we haven't seen before and that's of course the beauty of science to explore the unexplored
these new images were captured by a camera called the extreme ultraviolet imager led by the team based here in
brussels it sometimes happens i get into my office i download the latest data and and i stare for hours and it's so active
addictive actually the images show activity in the outer layers of the solar atmosphere and
reveal a variety of features including something scientists are nicknaming the
hedgehog it has a multitude of spikes of hot gas reaching out in all directions
nobody has ever seen the details of the corona in that much detail before
so every time it's we get an image down it's the first time we see something at that scale and that's really fascinating
it's really discovery space that we're entering the extreme ultraviolet imager is one of
10 science instruments on solar orbiter now all working together for the first
time some are looking at the sun others are measuring the environment around the spacecraft
all this activity is being coordinated at the european space astronomy center in madrid
it's important to have all the instruments working and operating in a coordinated way because one of the main
goals of the mission is to link the sun and its activity with the environment
and not only the environment close by but also the planets and for that we want to
look at the sun's activity the solar activity with many different telescopes that look at it in different
wavelengths so that means they are looking at different layers in the atmosphere and they can also measure
things like the magnetic fields on the sun the influence of solar activity particularly on the earth is known as
space weather it includes the effects of the stream of charged particles the sun
emits the solar wind and more dramatic events such as solar flares
so do you think that would be a good target for some orbiter to point at this active region as it happens solar
orbiter observed several flares and even a coronal mass ejection all tracked from
here in belgium at esa's space weather coordination center solar orbiter is
basically a research mission but ultimately we want to be able to predict space weather these are energetic events
that could have an impact on high-tech installations on earth gps satellites
power grids and we want to make sure that in the future we can predict geomagnetic storms based on solar
activity and for that we really need to take the sun's temperature and measure the solar wind and connect the two
scientists across europe and esa's partners around the world are now working to interpret the vast amount of
information solar orbiter is sending back and this is just the start of a
mission that promises to transform our understanding of our nearest star
[Music] well i hope you guys enjoyed that little
break um up next uh is um our speaker
bob bob the lesson
anderson it's okay scott i got it
games it just says bob up there so i got this
okay you got this all right here we go that was a very good video
so up next is our keynote speaker his name is bob anderson bob has had an interest in the star in
the stars since childhood i can relate to that i was the same way after working in electric power plants for 24 years as
an engineer he was able to merge his profession with his passion as chief telescope engineer at green
bank radio observatory for 18 years he retired last year and now tries to
observe the sun in both white light and hydrogen alpha light he is a member of the astronomical
league as a member at large and i got to know bob down at starquest he
gave an amazing talk on the sun and i asked him to come on the show and give
the talk about the sun because as i mentioned yesterday on the gsp we've got
two solar eclipses coming up and i think we're going to hear a lot about the sun and a lot about the annular eclipse in
2023 and the total in 2024. so and on
on the al live you'll start seeing some about the sun and helping everybody to get prepared
for viewing the eclipses so bob thank you very much for coming on and agreeing
to talk well i feel a little bit overwhelmed with all of you on here and i'm just a
amateur astronomer that has had a passion for the stars alan shepard was launched
on my sixth birthday you can figure all that out he did a 15-minute sub-orbital fight
over the atlantic i looked for him all day long to fly over the house so but that launched me into
having an interest in space flight and then subsequently into
the stars and everything that was going on and so um
after a while i you know my mom and dad gave me a telescope for christmas one year
and uh the local astronomy club had a telescope workshop after christmas and i
went and visited with them and of course they told me what i could see with my little telescope
and uh gave me a couple of copies back copies of sky and telescope
and then also an application blank and so that launched me into a lot of things
and i have been in different clubs uh down in tennessee uh where i live now in
west virginia is two hours to the closest astronomy club so there's a number of us
that share online and through email the goings-on that
we're involved in i've done a lot of outreach given planetarium talks when i was young
and then halley's comment came along and we did a tremendous amount of outreach
with halley's carmen and then in 1970 there was a partial eclipse that
went over our home in tennessee and uh i went uh and googled in the public
library uh you know how that works and probably more book that um
told uh it gave a chart of when eclipses would come through tennessee again
and so i knew back in 1970 that one was going to come in 2017
and so i've been looking forward to that you know most of my life to see that one and then the follow-up
one that's coming in 2024. uh i've seen actually two total eclipses
two annular and i don't know how many partial solar eclipses
i am interested in the night sky but uh about 25 years ago uh the bays mountain
astronomy club in kingsport tennessee had an active group that did solar observing uh twice
a month uh on sundays and i got into that and
they had a hydrogen alpha filter and i really just got into that and
wound up getting my own second hand one and uh have had it now for 20 something years
using it in conjunction with white light filters as well and so uh
there's a a lot to be said for solar observing it's it's not a replacement
uh for the nice guy but it's complementary and so there's times when you you know get clouded out at night
but you can see during the daytime and it's a whole lot easier to keep your log sheets steve
in the daylight the problem is that the sweat drops off and soaks the paper and
it's just as bad as humidity so i've got some slides to share that uh as
terry said i shared at um
at starquest and my wife's over here listening in the background too so
moral support okay this should work okay so now you should see slides right
yes okay okay so here we go um the nice thing uh that happens is that
it's a daytime event uh and uh you can share it with a lot of people so if you have a
big politician or a corporate executive visit you uh there'll be a
document generated called the 5ws who what when where and why
and so i did that for the starquest people and i'm going to do it for you now why
the sun is dynamic the view changes within 10 minutes uh it is easier for non-astronomers to
see features than uh most nighttime objects you know they show them a
nebula in the eyepiece and they say well where is it you know i can't see it and so but the sun is it's definitely
easier to see another reason is that uh you're doing in the daytime
and this is particularly important with school groups uh teachers you know
they've had enough of our kids uh after eight hours they're they're not willing to come back out students it's
hard to get them out it's hard to get parents interested in bringing their students out for a lot of things and so
but you can go to school and off your you know say hey i can have a an outreach event here with you if
you're interested in you know let me know during the year when it comes up and i'll uh i'll be there and we can go
out and look so that's a big outrage thing if you want to do it
uh who anyone with the proper equipment uh the sun is dangerous uh you don't want to look at it with
your naked eye and stare at it you don't want to turn your telescope toward the sun
without a proper filter and there's lots of people that offer these for sale including
explore scientific and you can and they're relatively inexpensive
when i was young uh i'll get to another part of that in a minute but uh
you could buy mylar film and make your own holder cap and put it over the end
of your telescope and it was fairly flimsy now people are making uh pretty decent
uh caps you know size for your image for your telescope and it has a quality
mylar in it that's pretty durable and it's all cheap well inexpensive
so wind anytime the sun is visible if it's hazy
it's kind of difficult to see the sunspots and other features on the sun
everybody experiences turbulence in the nighttime sky seeing
is can be bad if you're in a windy or a turbulent location same thing with the
sun the best time to look is mid-morning it's hard when you're working it's easier when you're retired or on
weekends to get out you know nine ten o'clock when the sun's up above the horizon but
hasn't started heating the ground around you yet where
uh don't go out in your driveway or next to the street and try to observe there's a lot of turbulence there
and you'll wind up having you know frustrations we're trying to see fine detail
same reason avoid looking over buildings the best area is to look over
grassy fields or down by lakes there's several observatories that are
uh positioned uh near a lake so that they can observe the sun over the lake and that's a
body that it doesn't heat up as fast as grassy fields do even
okay so what are we looking for well uh you can see the first thing is you go out and you look at the sky like
we all do and you can see haze in the sky you can see uh clouds and all that but if you look near
the sun you can see sun dogs you can see pillars
other things that are caused by high altitude clouds in earth's atmosphere and you can notice
those through a telescope with a proper filter you can see sunspots
you can see the surface of the sun which looks sort of like the skin of an orange
through hydrogen alpha light you can see prominences on the edge
and then filaments on the surface and you can see flares and a lot of
detail around the sunspots themselves so what drives the sun everybody
has heard that four uh hydrogen uh
nuclei form one helium nuclei and energy is given off in the process
and so it is nuclear fusion the cycle and and i think this stuff is is kind of
important if you're a lot of people have a solar filter and they'll say hey you want to come look at
the sun and they show them and you know they don't have a whole lot of information other than you know hey there's some sunspots there and so if
you have some you know for curious uh people or children particularly uh
that ask how does this work uh two protons do combine
and in the process they give off a neutrino which is a particle that you've heard of
they also uh cause an electron to have a positive
charge or a positron the resulting uh combination then is a
hydrogen uh proton with a neutron and then it gets whacked by another
uh proton and from that then that reaction gives off a gamma ray
and a gamma ray is the most high energy uh packet of energy that we know
if you start at the other end of the spectrum you have radio waves and then microwaves
and then the infrared and the invisible light the ultraviolet x-rays and then
ultimately gamma rays these gamma rays fly off in this reaction and from that then you get a helium
nucleus which has two protons but it also has this extra neutron
and somewhere in the core nearby is another set of two protons
that are reacting they give off another gamma ray they form another helium nucleus and those
two whack together and if you count all your protons there the little red dots
you'll see that there's too many and two of them fly off and you're left with a helium nucleus that has two protons and
two neutrons now these don't have any electrons because the core has
it's a tremendously hot plasma that
where all this is taking place uh 27 million degrees fahrenheit
uh we have nothing to compare with that here on earth and
uh they're building a facility in france called the iter iter
and it will be a fusion machine they hope and it's going to be even hotter than
that so that they can uh force uh
this fusion reaction to occur and so all this happens in the core all these reactions happen in the core
and then from there out it's just heat transfer the first area is called the radiation zone
uh where energy is being transmitted these gamma rays are trying to work
their way through that uh they go up they go down they go sideways they
change they become x-rays or even cooler and ultimately
some sources say as much as a hundred thousand years it takes for energy to get from the core
uh to the edge of the radiative zone and so from there then
above that is the convection zone and this is kind of what we think of when air is circulating around us that's
convection if you are sitting in front of a heater and
you know trying to do your notes at night then that's generally a radiative heat
sometimes they have convection fans with them as well but the convection is carrying heat up and down
and it's getting cooler along the way the core is at 27 million degrees the
convection zone is gradually cooling and it also has magnetic loops in it
and we see that because the sun is spinning uh quite rapidly
the diameter of the sun is about 880 000 miles
and it orbits uh it rotates once uh in 27 days or so depending on you
know the latitude and so the magnetic field of the sun gets twisted
and you wind up with these loops there in the convective zone so finally the gas
the energy cools enough to where it gets back into the light realm where we can actually see it out of the uh x-ray and
ultraviolet and uh gamma rays back to the visible light
and that point it's not a true surface but it's where light becomes visible it's called the
photosphere and that's where sunspots reside
and above that then is the chromosphere where uh you can view
uh features in hydrogen alpha light uh amateurs generally cannot see the
corona except at um solar eclipses
i was part of a project back in 2017 that 68 of us 68 stations
from coast to coast made a video of the corona and so that was a very fun thing to be
part of but under normal circumstances amateurs don't have x-ray telescopes or
other uh means to see the corona so i didn't include that in this
okay sunspots they lie in the photosphere as i said they are dark because they're cooler
than the surrounding gas you can also see uh granulation which is
uh that mottled uh skin of an orange type feature
uh and you or some people say it looks like grains of rice if you uh up the magnification enough
these sunspots are big some of the ones that are on the surface of the sun if you go to
spaceweather.com today most of those are fairly small but some of them can become bigger than the
planet jupiter for comparison most of the ones that you can see with a decent sized telescope or
earth-sized so how does this occur uh this the
surface of the sun has cooled from 27 million degrees in the in the core it
cools to about uh 11 000 fahrenheit or 5800 kelvin
a sunspot is a thousand degrees or so cooler and so if you were to if we didn't have
the photosphere the surface of the sun to look at if you were just looking at a sunspot it'd be very bright in the sky
and so but by comparison with the photosphere it's
dark and shows up that way they're caused by the magnetic fields getting twisted you can see in this
uh illustration that the magnetic field is coming out through
uh one hole if you will in the photosphere and going back in another
sometimes they just come out through a hole and they connect somewhere else out in the
corona so it's difficult to you can see single spots you can see
uh pairs of spots so this one has a north and a south pole
and it's called bipolar and so you can have a unipolar one which
would be just one spot
okay so the equipment that you need are to just see sunspots and the surface of the sun is a white light filter
these are caps they can be made out of metal or plastic some of them are
fabricated out of cardboard and coated this filters out the dangerous
rays and also reduces the brightness a white light filter has just taken the
whole amount of light and suppressing it downward and also cutting out the
ultraviolet and the infrared they can be made most of the ones now are made out of plastic out of mylar
there's a few glass ones out there still but it's hard to get a piece of quality
glass big enough to go over the front of a telescope so they're kind of expensive so the mylar
quality is just in the past 40 years or more has just improved greatly
uh it covers the front telescope lens now you can get them to fit a refractor
you can get them to cover a reflector they'd be much bigger for a reflector
they are plastic they can get scratched uh if you live out in the midwest i hear
it's pretty humid out there according to you guys and you get moisture on your
uh filter you have dust blowing around
and pretty soon you get some caustic or acidic uh particles that will
uh cause uh pinholes to occur if that happens you just need to
buy a new one i've heard of people trying to to cover them with something
to cover the little pinholes but i would feel that it's not worth the risk
for that uh they're available for cameras you can buy
two to go on a pair of binoculars you can buy single ones to go over a camera you just have to know your outside
barrel diameter okay never ever ever ever use that
little filter there on the right they are they still make these they still sell
these they put them in with little refractors that you buy at department stores or walmart or wherever they screw
onto the back end of your eyepiece the problem is that the objective lens is bringing all the light
including the infrared to focus and that
filter and i've seen uh one of these ages ago
that was overheated and shattered
and so you know fortunately that guy said nobody was looking through it at the time
and so if you find one of those encourage the owner to throw it away or smash it with a hammer
or both and get rid of it so you want to use things that are made specifically to look uh
at the sun don't try to do it with sunglasses particularly when looking through a telescope
in the old days we would take welding glass the number 14
or welding glass and use that hold it over the eyepiece you can still do that
anybody remembers what film is they would take it and over expose it
and make a filter out of that but and somebody else said that they would take
microscope slides and hold them over a flame until they got soot on them but you can
imagine how variable the quality of that would be and so you know
the filters are inexpensive enough now that let's go get one and use it instead
but don't use any you know there's a lot of different types of mylar don't use any of this not
made specifically you go to a telescope dealer and get something that's specifically
made for solar observing okay another method
is the projection method you can make a camera out of shoebox
i've seen that work there are special sunspotter instruments the one on the lower right there has a
hole there's a mirror at the right hand side of it it bounces it up and reflects
it through a lens that projects it on that flat stage there you can put a sheet of paper on there
you can have people uh draw sunspots on there as they see them and or you can make a
log yourself from that i don't uh other than those two methods
i don't recommend using uh a telescope and an eyepiece
to project uh onto a sheet of paper or something like that
there's a lot of risk there uh older eyepieces
had a lot of glued elements particularly in the field lenses the
pieces of glass would be glued together i've somebody else brought one one time that
they'd been using that and it popped uh and there's no getting that back
together again i don't know how modern eyepieces are as far as the glue and all goes
but uh i just don't recommend that um and some people will
uh counter that and say well it helps you to be able to show uh a lot a large group of people uh the sun
and you know i've had filters i uh have people you know and and you have
to be able to talk to people uh as they're you know as one person's looking through you you tell them and you
describe what they're seeing i take a a visual aid a poster of the sun
and uh explain to people what they're seeing as they're waiting their turn to look uh i'm not had any problem with having
people look through a telescope and see sunspots or hydrogen alpha
features um there's just too much risk you know i've had kids and others you know they see the
light coming out of the eyepiece and they try to look through it you know that's kind of dangerous too
so i just don't recommend doing that it's too easy if you really want to do it
then and show a group all together and talk then get a a planetary imager and use it and you
know display it on a computer screen if you want to do that you never
ever use a reflecting telescope to for projection because the secondary
mirror can uh become overheated and shatter as well
and maybe some pushback in the comments on that but that's you know i i just don't recommend there's too many other
ways to do it there's also a device called a herschel wedge it's
named after william herschel that just uses an un
coated piece of glass to reflect sun's light uh
into an eyepiece the rest of the heat and light goes out the back end and you can see
uh one on the right there these are being manufactured more lately now over
in europe there's several people over there that are using you still have to have additional
filters such as several neutral density and an infrared blocking filter
in conjunction with that you just simply can't use it because it's still even with just
an uncoated un aluminized piece of glass the amount of sunlight
that's coming off of that surface is just tremendous again you don't use that with a
reflecting telescope here in the united states i don't know about over in europe but here in the
united states solar filters are less expensive and unless you're just doing high quality
uh photography they're just as good they're certainly solar filters are just as good for
visual observing so what can you see in sunspots you'll
see a dark area that's the center of it that's called the umbra and then surrounding that is a lighter
area called the penumbra they're usually grouped there'll be a positive
sunspot and a negative where the magnetic field is coming out and going back in
there are light bridges where you can which is a little bit of the white there that you can see
if you can see my cursor or not but this is a light bridge going across this umbra here
and then around it uh or other features
so now i'm i'm not a paid uh spokesman for the astronomical league
but uh there are two solar observing programs one is the sun spotter which is
white light and the other is the hydrogen alpha which you have to have a hydrogen alpha filter for
and so the sunspotter program gets you familiar with the with the sun you have to observe it for
several weeks or i can't remember exactly how many observations you have to make
but it may take a couple of months to be able to do that you sketch
the sunspots you have to classify them uh and i'll tell you a little bit about
that in a little bit artistic ability is not required it says that in the program you submit copies of
your observations and you're an opinion certificate and you know you've become more familiar with the sun and personal
satisfaction uh sunspot cycles you know everyone knows that we're going uh into a maximum
uh should be a very interesting eclipse if we can see it at sunspot maximum
so uh classifying these uh there's uh information in the sunspotter program
webpage that tells you how to classify them these are
real they're used by professional astronomers you can go to
solarmonitor.org and after you make your classifications you can compare it to what they say
and you know if you want to look in the back of the book for the answer that's sort of like what you're doing there
okay so i've taken the sunspotter sheet and the
hydrogen alpha sheet and i kind of combined them a little bit so that i could collect the information
for the way i observe but there is a specific log sheet for each program
and as steve said earlier there's a lot of information you have to uh pile about transparency and seeing
a lot of times you can see the sun through haze but if it gets too
thick then you lose track of that and can't
uh on spaceweather.com there is a
sunspot number and that is called is actually called the wolf number
uh you count the number of groups of sunspots and then you count the individual sunspots
you take the groups and you multiply by ten and then you add the number of sunspots and
that gives a number and so you can compare your number then to what
spaceweather.org has you also put down the carrington cycle richard carrington was a astronomer that
lived in the early 1800s he uh identified the sunspot
cycle and he started with cycle number one and right now i think we're up to
22.60 if i remember correctly this is my log sheet from uh the first day of summer uh june 21st
and it shows both sunspots and hydrogen alpha features like prominences
and then later that day i through another telescope took a white light
image and i i'm a visual astronomer i dabble a little bit with photography uh being an
engineer i'm a gear head as well uh but that's the three different flavors of amateur astronomers
and professional astronomers are the same way having worked at an observatory i know that some of them are just focused on developing equipment you know
the latest receiver and so uh i like to do a little bit of all three
and i think many uh amateur astronomers are the same way
okay now let's go to hydrogen alpha for hydrogen alpha
you're looking at the chromosphere which is a very thin layer remember i said that the sun is 880 000 miles in
diameter the chromosphere is only 1200 miles thick
it is visible in the light emitted by a
hydrogen atom as one of its electrons loses energy
and drops to a lower energy level that energy is given off as light
and it is centered on a wavelength uh in the red part of the spectrum that
it's not invisible but there's a whole lot of other light in the background that uh wipes us out and we can't see it
unless we have a special filter so it's
the visible spectrum goes from like 400
or 4 000 uh angstroms which is uh ten to the minus ten
uh meters that goes from four thousand at the in the violet
uh to about seven thousand in the red and that's the visible range and you say
the hydrogen alpha wavelength is centered right at 6562
so that's very close to the edge of what we can see so a hydrogen alpha filter is
manufactured they take either two pieces of glass or one slice of high quality mica
and they do elect electrical depositing of a thin coating on both sides of the
mica or on one side each of a piece of glass and then they
put them together there's spacers in there and so the light actually is going
between the grains of the of the coating and once it gets inside there it bounces
off the other and bounces back and forth and the light then will cancel out some wavelengths and
reinforce the others and so this is a an interference filter this positive and
negative uh interference that builds or it tears down
and so the ultimate product is light that comes out through the grains in the other coating
and we see that at the infrared or near the infrared at
the hydrogen alpha wavelength there's always a way to tune these
the there's several different manufacturers i guess the oldest is the daystar filters
they heat this optic package to a set temperature that allows the
hydrogen alpha light to come through there are other designs that actually tilt one of the pieces of glass
that allows the light to come through and that's how you tune it there's a third method where they
have a pressure cavity uh and they you're just by turning the knob on the side of the eyepiece or
filter uh it's adjusting the pressure of the cavity and and allows the spacing
uh of the glass to change okay so
here's an illustration uh i drew this on the board at starquest but i couldn't do that for you guys
so the wavelength of hydrogen alpha is 6562.8 that's that center line
and the filter then gives a area
around that wavelength that um
passes the light through it's not a straight uh shape and so there's a trimming filter that's
uh put on there to cut off the bottom part of it and what you're actually doing is cutting out light from the photosphere
and so if you can cut that out then you can see the uh features in the chromosphere
above it uh they'll call that uh with the the either the bandwidth or the
bandpass the technical name is the full width half max
value and so if the light coming through the filter is 100 you measure this
at the 50 level which is the full width half maximum
uh width and i'll get to that in just a second how that works uh in addition to
just the the glass etalons that are the interference part of it you have
that trimming filter that cuts off those feet you have a blocking filter also and
maybe two blocking filters that remove everything else and the ultraviolet and
the infrared that can damage your eyes
okay this knob or buttons on the side of the filter you're adjusting the tilt the
pressure or the temperature of the filter and you're actually sliding
the filtering pass to the left or the right either towards
the red or towards the blue and this allows you to do a couple of different things one your filter is going to heat
up your telescope's going to heat up and the it's going to get off wavelength and so
you have to adjust that as time goes by the other aspect is that that 880 000
diameter sun if you look at the very edge at the east or the west limb
you either you have features moving at you tremendously fast or moving away from you tremendously fast and so you
can tune your filter to actually bring the limbs depending on which way which limb you're
looking at into focus other aspect is that
if you are if you tune it to where you're looking more down into the red
you're looking deeper into the chromosphere near the surface of the
sun the photosphere if you tune it towards the blue it's uh you're looking towards the top
of the photosphere or chromosphere and so you can kind of see different features uh that uh we'll talk about
that in just a second but uh you can depending on where you're looking on the sun you can see vertically or you can
see uh better to the to the limb
okay so prominences sometimes people call these flares uh but the technical
name is a prominence they appear on the limb of the sun that is hot gas that is following the
magnetic field lines uh from one spot to another on the on the sun
and so they stand out starkly uh from the sun
they're very easy to see in the hydrogen alpha
you if you want to see the prominences you only need that bandwidth to be about one
angstrom one 10 to the minus 10th meter if you want to see granulation the
surface near the photosphere you have to get it down to 0.5 or 0.3
angstroms the problem is that you're cutting out more light and so the prominences tend to look fainter
and so a good uh compromise is uh usually about 0.7 or 0.8 and you'll see manufacturers making
filters to that bandpass and that gives you uh a good view of
both the prominences and the surface uh stuff that you see
the sunspots the very small ones particularly get tuned out because
you're looking at almost you remember this is kind of like you know the atmosphere you're actually seeing clouds
of gas over the sunspots and they get kind of masked
so who makes these uh the daystar company makes heated filters you have to have a electrical source uh
mine is pretty old it has to run on 120 volts
uh the newer ones i think run on uh five volts and can actually be
powered by a usb uh cord the tilting filters are made by coronado
lunt orion orions is only for prominences the coronado and lunt filters
are actually you can see surface features as well one also makes that pressure adjusted
filter they all make dedicated solar telescopes and these are telescopes that cannot be
used for nighttime observing because those different interference filter and blocking filter
and trimming filters are all made into the barrel of the telescope or even into
the diagonal on the back end of the telescope so they are solely for
solar observing all right steve i'm having trouble
there okay so what can you see uh a prominence is on the
limb of the sun the filaments or prominences that you're seeing on the surface of the sun just
looking straight down on them plage is the french word for beaches and these
are the areas around sunspots and you can certainly see those uh very well they'll be brighter around the
sunspot you can also see these bright areas away from the sunspots
flares are short-lived bright spots you'll see an eruption
where all these magnetic field lines will get twisted and they'll snap
and you know some gas will uh shoot up out of the surface of the sun and that's a flare
and then you can also see connections between sunspots the the dark filaments
and also the brighter areas and it's just stuff changes so fast on the sun
the only other uh object in the sky that changes that much is jupiter you know you can see changes
over hours on jupiter you can see rotation in just a little bit but the sun is far more dynamic than jupiter
there is a another observing program called the hydrogen alpha observing program
again you have to observe for several weeks and make sketches or photographs
you have to submit copies of your observations and i really enjoyed both of these programs
and going through those almost as much as i did the messier program
okay now how do i observe now remember i have an older day star and i have to plug it in to warm it up
you can do the same thing with the other manufacturer's filters but you have to
uh tune them off and on to wavelength so first thing i do in the morning is
you know look at the news look at the weather and i go to spaceweather.com and
to see what they're seeing now these images that they post and the sunspots
that they illustrate are hours old by the time i get out mid-morning or later in the day
to observe uh the sun's changed and so uh sunspots disappear sunspots
up here and they also uh move as the sun rotates
so then i go out and look at the sky i do not look directly at the sun i block it with my hand
or a tree or the building or whatever and just look to see what uh earth's atmosphere is doing around the sun
and then i view the sun in white light i sketch it i count the sun i don't count
the sun spots directly from the sun i mark them on my piece of paper
on my form and then i count them on the form and then i'll go back to the sign and
i'll look again see if i you know invariably i've missed some and i'll go
back and fill them in and then i fill in the all the log information that's required
for that and so one thing that steve mentioned was logging the time to
the minute i generally log the time i begin
my observation others may log the time that they end or somewhere in the middle but i
generally log it when i begin
then i turn on the hydrogen alpha filter it takes about 10 or 15 minutes for that to warm up and while i'm doing that i
refer back to the sunspotter program information and i classify the sunspots
and that takes a little bit of time to do that and then once the hydrogen alpha filter
comes on wavelength i start with the prominences because they really you can
see a prominence change in 10 minutes and so uh i sketch those and then i go
to the filaments over the surface of the sun the sunspots uh you know trying to
illustrate applause the bright areas around those and then after i get all that done and close my
observatory back up i go back in and go to sellermonitor.org and look and see how they classified the
uh sunspots as well okay there's a number of good books out
there uh one that's and several of these are out of print now like observe and understand
the sun but uh it's been copied and it's on the sunspotter
program if you look at the reference material in the sunspotter program it's there and you can
download that particularly the classification sheets and the observing condition sheets and take
those to the telescope with you that's very helpful a very big illustration of what the sunspots are
supposed to look like jamie jenkins wrote a book in 2009 called the sun and how to observe it you
can get it through springer i don't know if you can get it through the league bookstore or not
the observer's handbook is very useful it has a big solar section in it you can
use it to get the carrington cycle number as well as a listing of features
and happenings that are coming up and then a later one that has just come
out in the past couple of years is solar astronomy it was uh written in french originally it's a
good many of european observers and this book is like
getting a sip of water from a fire hose it has a tremendous amount of information
about not only the sun but also on the equipment on how filters are made
and quality conditions for those how to build a dedicated solar telescope
and uh it's just really good it's expensive it was reviewed in sky and telescope and
i think it was the august edition and uh the guy
was very uh glowing in his praise for that but solar obser solar astronomy if you're really wanting
to get into it that's the book you uh ought to get and then of course the
the sunspotter and the hydrogen alpha observing programs are also very good uh have a lot of information uh about
the sun you can also go to daystar filters has a good website very good website
spaceweather.com and then solarmonitor.org are also very good
very good all right and so then is terry alluded uh-oh
in 2024 we have the opportunity for another eclipse uh this one
goes at almost right angles to the one in 2017 it starts uh out in the ocean
uh in the pacific goes across mexico comes up through texas and ultimately winds up
out over uh the atlantic over canada it goes over across
a good portion of the united states so all of us that lined up east west
for the last one now have to line up south to north
and look for a good spot to observe from and so i would encourage you you know
after uh 2017 i don't think the media has gotten a hold of 2024 yet but when they do then
uh places are going to get booked up to travel to campgrounds hotels
uh everywhere so you need to kind of you know start now staking out a spot
where you're you know look at the weather look at the conditions this is in april april is
notorious the further north you go you might get snow for the south you go you may get uh rain
so you have to be kind of careful as to where you choose but you need to start thinking about it now
it's only two years away so
that concludes what i have to show
and i hope that was helpful i i hope you get out and
observe the sun yourself but also share it with others that you can actually go out and see
what's going on
there we go thank you bob uh that was amazing um yeah i think you know one
thing that does worry me with the 2024 coming up and scott and i and a bunch of
us have discussed this sometimes even when you reserve a hotel airbnb whatever
it is way out ahead once they realize realize they could have gotten three or four times the
money they can cancel on you and then up the price um and that is one
thing that kind of concerns me uh doing that but one other thing is scott and explore scientific
have created um the expedition crossroads expedition why don't you talk
a little bit about that scott the uh
this expedition uh is going to happen in hill country and texas so we have
secured a private ranch uh that that both eclipses the 2023 and the
2024 you know the 2023 annular eclipse and the 2024 total eclipse will cross
and so we'll be posting uh prices and stuff i
what i can tell you right now is that uh mickey from mickey's kitchen uh who
supplies uh culinary treats for uh the winter star party is actually
gonna make the trip all the way out to texas and uh and set up out there we are
uh arranging for uh you know beca this place is out in the middle of nowhere so this is going to be
a dark sky star party both of them okay and a solar eclipse okay so
uh you'll be able to enjoy uh you know uh low bortles skies i think it's bortle
too out there uh you can see the milky way extremely well uh from from our
location and um uh it is uh it's about as far south as
you can get without going into mexico uh so where you know we will expect in the 2024
eclipse well actually both eclipses i think it's over four minutes of duration and uh
so uh you know i'm really uh i have not seen successfully seen a
annular eclipse but i'm looking forward to it because you know uh it is a good
chance to really examine bailey's beads you can see bailey's beads even on a total but
with an annular you just got a little bit more time to really check them out um
you know of course during an annular eclipse you're going to be using filters the entire time you know so
you're going to see all those guys out there with their h alpha telescopes imaging this and just getting
spectacular results you know of course for the total uh a different experience
people use h alpha they use white light to observe it and uh and then when they
get to totality all the filters come off so practicing uh
for your solar photography is a big deal you can do that of course anytime the sun is out
but the uh you'll you're gonna what want to watch videos by people who are
experienced and doing uh total eclipse photography you know so just to kind of
get this all in your mind and everything of how to do it it's real easy to forget
okay what you're supposed to do when totality happens because
this experience is it makes sense shift in people they see it it's
beautiful i've seen professional astronomers i was out with um in 1991 i
was on mauna kea uh right in front of the cfht observatory and i watched pros
run outside okay totally ignoring their their their uh
equipment ran outside just so they could see it and their jaws were dropped and everything
um you know so it's staying on on on on the mark and and doing what you're supposed
to do is uh real important especially if you're going to make astro photographs if you're not uh just
watching it visually is a beautiful treat and so trying to do both is
like more more difficult than chewing gum and walking at the same time that's for sure
my wife and i have seen two uh solar eclipse we've seen two annular eclipses
and we've seen two total eclipses okay and i would echo the advice that somebody else
gave and that is for your first eclipse for your first total eclipse don't try to do photography just watch it just
watch it and then that's a pretty good advice you know participating in the citizen
kate uh project they drilled that into us and hey you need to
you know you've had experience you know seeing one you need to focus and you need to do this and so yeah
we wound up with i guess an hour and a half or so of uh corona
uh video from coast to coast with all of us doing that yeah we looked you know
it's a an amazing event to see but i was focused on doing that a lot of
people around me hooping and hollering and you have to watch the time to make sure that you get your filter back on
your telescope when just ahead of when bailey's speeds start
yeah that's right that's yeah um go ahead terry i was gonna say can i ask
him a quick question you've already looked bob how often have you seen a light bridge i have never seen a light bridge
and i would like to uh i see them in white light
okay and you're actually you can kind of see them grow most of the ones i've seen
were already in place and then they would dissipate
but um it depends on how often you go out and look okay i'm trying to go out every day
i don't make it every day but for you know whether or personal reasons but
just about every day you can see a light bridge if you watch long enough and and my observations take about an hour
okay and that's that's with a white light filter correct
yes okay okay thank you okay a little harder to see a little harder to see in
the hydrogen alpha because you know you're kind of looking down through the chromosphere's haze and
fog over the center okay all right thank you
so uh pekka how tall watching from stockholm sweden on facebook he says uh
he wants to know about the lunt uh hab600 telescope i'm not sure how much
you know about this particular instrument bob but he says do does additional ir uv
cutoff filter after h alpha filtering make any visible change
when imaging uh
i would say that that filter probably already has
internal uh blocking filters in ir and uv
i don't know that they require one in addition to that
i usually some people will put a neutral density filter behind that
but um if if he were to go to the manufacturer's
website and you know go to the contact page and ask they would probably tell them what
would he needs to tell them specifically what his telescope is and what filter modeling he has like you
just did and then see what they say as to what the best way and tell them what their camera is
too okay he also has a question he says uh are prominences and perturbances the
same if not what's the difference uh i'm not sure where the word perturbance
comes uh protrusion maybe but prominence is is what you know this
the professionals call the uh either the pillars
or the loops that are on the limb of the sun and then looking down uh on top of them
they're they're called filaments and the filament can be a small thin
line or it can be a kind of a hazy long
jet stream looking event on the surface of the sun
okay everybody else is saying thank you for this great presentation so
definitely all right um does okay anybody in here on the
with us have any questions steve or carol or anybody just ask bob if he recognizes the
picture behind me no yeah
yeah i do it's a green bank i put that up just for you
all right that looks like the uh the 40 foot isn't it yeah that's the 40 foot yeah i spent two nights in there
once yeah great presentation bob well done thank you thank you thank you very much
very well done um what i would like to do now then is let's see
i'm going to announce the winners i'm going to finish with the questions and one thing i would like to say thanks
everyone i there was a lot of very nice compliments in the answer emails today
they have been really enjoying the presentation and thank explore
scientific and the astronomical league for doing this and the amazing presenters that we have
had tonight so thank you for all the kind compliments that i received about this program tonight about everybody
involved so we all i think i can speak for all of us to say we all enjoy what
we do um and we're just really glad that you are enjoying it too so thank you very much
so let's go let's go back where i'm supposed to be uh the answers for tonight
saturn's rings will be 14 degrees open at opposition on august 14th how many
years will it be before the rings are opening enough to reveal the splendor again and that is about five years and
josh kovac got the correct answer i think i skipped my first question uh
what is the name of the landing site of the curiosity landing site well yeah it is gail craig crater but they have kind
of nicknamed it bradberry landing after ray bradbury though
yeah i i was surprised to see that too irene nester has got that
last question what constellation is comet pan stars located in on september 15th and that
would be scorpius and that would the people that answered it right was paul and kathy anderson so
if you are one of those three people somebody from the astronomical league will be contacting you
and i didn't share my screen did i scott no ma'am i did not let me go just do a real quick
so you can see i got carried away well kathy anderson live here in
northwest arkansas so oh do they yeah yeah that's nice
now you know okay so i'm not going to read them all again but here are our winners again
um and then yeah paul so somebody from the astronomical league office will be
contacting you in the next few days and thank you very much again for all of
the answers and i would also like to thank bob anderson
steve berner david levy scott roberts carol org all of you for hanging out
with us tonight and listening to our talks and listening to us and answering the questions and again
all the nice compliments i i have never received so many compliments so
guys you did a great job tonight thank you very much and thank you to everybody that's watching um we couldn't do this
without you and we really hope someday we can meet you in person and see you at
an alcon or at a star party if we're ever at a star party please come up to any one of us and introduce yourself and
you know tell us who you are and that you're interested in astronomy
so the last thing uh next month after
thanksgiving astronomical league live will be next month and my date should be behind the
bar here there we go september 16th and we're gonna have brett maynard i thought
you know fall is coming up and i don't know about you guys but finally it's gonna be cool the nights hopefully will
be clearer um hopefully we'll be out get doing more imaging so i invited brett maynard and
he is going to take us through preparing for a night of image capture so please join us
september 16th at 7 pm edt for that and
i think that ends what i have got that's it okay anybody
else got anything that they would like to say before we sign off
well this is the most quiet everybody
okay brett maynard's a great guy he will do everybody well yes bret brent is an excellent imager
unbelievably good yes so i'm a good joke about the sun it says the sun is the real star of our
lives because it's the sole reason why life on earth exists
nice good job thank you scott
what a great way to end this in a solar program [Music]
[Laughter] thanks everyone it was fun tonight thank
you very much thank you scott thank you carol steve and bob i appreciate you being here and
all of your expertise so with that unless somebody has got something to add we will go ahead and
sign off okay all right not everyone no
here we go all righty thanks again everyone
thanks scott hey derek bob see you next summer
yeah count us in scott all right
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