Astronomical League Live XX

Transcript:

so let's see
hi brad how are you good how are you doing good sounds like you're
blasting between two presentations here yes uh the one with blackwater falls
astronomy weekend that's been playing for several months so it went just a little bit long but it
was a good it's a good presentation yeah are your skies clear down there we're clear but we've got a little bit
of uh the transparency is not that great there's not a cloud in the sky but we got some milky uh some milky hazy
atmosphere right now hey brent uh your video's not on um
i wanna did that on purpose yeah let's let's
i'm in the middle of the mountains right now and the wi-fi here is not fantastic okay so you're just gonna you're gonna
be audio only i guess let me turn the uh video on and see and i'm sitting in front of a window
which is not good this is i'm in black water i'm at black waterfalls
looks nice i mean yeah the skies look milky but yeah they're definitely milky but uh let me let me turn around so i
don't have that background glare at least it's not raining
no no we're gonna have a great weekend weather-wise yeah that's good
hopefully the video stream won't cause uh any
stuttering or anything so far it sounds all right if it starts giving you trouble we just shut off your
video and see if that helps any or you know if you're more comfortable with the video shut off however you want to do it's fine
okay brent uh are you able to put like um some sort of book or books underneath your laptop to
raise it up so we're not getting a uh
looking down at the audience or something like this yeah yeah yeah okay let me go
it's just more it's kinder to the audience that's all
okay we are going to start going live your microphones will be hot so whatever you
say the audience will hear it and um
it's amazing how quiet it gets at this time yeah
carol are you back there somewhere
okay we are live now we are live now so
yeah and we have an audience already beatrice heinz from belgium is here harold locke norm hughes
it's nice to see some of the regulars here yeah
wasn't norm at starmus
uh i don't know that he was oh so with this format will i be able to um
i have some questions i wanted to ask participants will i be able to oh yeah
or how did how was that so what you do molly is if you have a separate computer which is the best way
to do this is you go to um you can go on to the facebook uh
astronomical league live or astronomical league page or better
to go to the explore scientific official page on youtube because you'll see all
the chats coming in from all the different simulcasts including astronomical leagues page
uh and then you can chat with them um uh you won't they're not going to be
talking they'll they'll be chatting with us but they're chatting right now so let me run and grab another one yeah
yeah but you want the audio you want the audio turned off on your um on that other you know microphone and and
speakers so you don't get echoes here so
hi john how are you
hello everybody
[Music]
grant i'd like to be down in black i've never been to blackwater falls star or astronomy weekend
it's not it's a little smaller in scale compared to green bank
but it's a nice location i bet is it up in the is it in the hills is are you in a little more altitude or
not yeah yeah we're higher than uh green bank uh where i am right now we're probably about
3 400 feet uh there's places you can go around here you get up you know 4 100 feet a little
4200 feet and spruce knob is not that far away oh okay which is the darkest location in the
state and it's about 48 4800 feet well i've never been there either i'd like to
do that sometime yeah that's a great place i bet
i've heard nothing but good i've heard nothing but good stuff about both star parties they're both you know
astronomy get-togethers
i was at the blackwater falls star party a number of years ago and it it's really good
the skies are very dark it was cold
it was really cold but uh the skies were excellent yeah there must be already been in the
30s here yeah to me it seemed like it was it was in the minus 30s but you're probably
right there must be places to stay besides just camping then right because brent
you're you're inside so yes the family cabins
okay it's a four bedroom oh yeah it has a nice nicely equipped kitchen
fireplace uh a large main room and then four separate uh bedrooms
and they have a number of these cabins around here at black water and then about 10 miles down the road
is canadian valley resort and they have cabins as well they have a big lodge there's a big lodge of black
water and then camping as well as airbnbs and rentals because
it's a ski it's a ski area is it okay
[Applause]
hi my name is tom stadler and i work at nasa headquarters in washington dc where i'm the program scientist for the dart
mission
the dark mission is humanity's first attempt to change the motion of a celestial body the reason we're doing
this is to test our ability to protect the earth from an impact by an asteroid
if we should ever discover in the future an asteroid that is headed on a collision course
planetary defense is about making sure that a rock from space doesn't send us back to the stone age and the key parts
of planetary defense are first of all finding the asteroids that are potentially hazardous to the earth and
we understand where about 40 of those asteroids are we know that no known
asteroid is a danger to the earth right now but the concerns about the asteroids
we don't know about yet and if we should ever discover an asteroid that's on collision course with
earth we want to be able to discover this years in advance so we can give the asteroid a push not destroy it we
probably wouldn't be able to do that anyway but just prevent that collision and the dart mission the double asteroid
redirection test is our first test of one way of doing that
darth's going to a binary acid a double asteroid for two really good reasons the
little asteroid dimorphose which is in orbit around the big asteroid bitimose that asteroid is about the size of
object that we would we would tend to be concerned about the most abundant asteroids are the small ones and this
one about 160 meters across or about the size of a football stadium is large enough that it really would cause severe
damage if it struck the earth now by impacting by doing our experiment the
kinetic impact experiment on the small movement asteroid we're able to measure
our effectiveness in deflecting the asteroid by watching the change in the orbit of the little asteroid around the
big one it makes that measurement a lot more precise and a lot easier to do with telescopes on earth the other reason
we're doing it is that the presence of a large asteroid there keeps the little one in orbit around it as the pair go
around the sun so that means that this asteroid which is non-dangerous earth now will never become a danger to the
earth because of anything that we do in the dark mission
no asteroid that we know of now is a danger to the earth and the dynamos did
most asteroids that dirt is going to that also is not a danger to the earth and there's nothing that we could do to
it that will make it a danger to the earth but the possibility of an asteroid
large enough that it could affect huge numbers of people uh the likelihood of
that happening during our lifetimes is there it's not a high probability but
we take precautions about low probability events all the time it's a low probability that your house will
burn down for example but you take precautions to make sure that that doesn't happen and you have fire
insurance
anyone who wants to know about dart can follow on social media by using the hashtag dartmission
or by looking at nasa.gov our commission
at the moment of impact with dynorphos dart will be moving at about four miles per second that's about 15 000 miles an
hour
the important thing is how far we move the asteroid is how much we change its speed by so we're going to change the
speed of the asteroid by only a few millimeters per second it's far far smaller than walking speed but the idea
in planetary defense is that if there is a hazardous asteroid a dangerous asteroid and we discover it years in
advance that a change in philosophy that tiny given time to add up given time to
work can make the difference between an impact on earth and a safeness
nasa's planetary defense strategy is to do several things at the same time the most important one is to search for
asteroids because we only know about 40 of the population of asteroids that
could be dangerous and we need to find that other 60 percent trap them establish their orbits around the sun
and figure out which ones could be dangerous to us now or in the future also like in the dark mission we wanted
to develop the technologies for deflecting asteroids mitigating the effects of the asteroid hazard
and then we want to be working with other federal agencies state and local governments and governments worldwide
to understand how the worldwide community can deal with this issue of planetary defense and protect the entire
world share information transmit off other information of the change to the decision makers do what's necessary to
respond to an actual asteroid danger if there is one
is carrying a small cubesat it's called the lychee cube it was contributed by the italian space agency and its job
basically is to watch the impact from a little distance away it's riding along on the dart spacecraft and it's going to
be deployed a few days before the kinetic impact uh it's going to maneuver
and offset itself to the side so that it doesn't run into the same asteroid that dart is running into and it's got two
cameras on it that are going to try to first catch the actual impact of dart on
camera but then more importantly uh see the ejecta the plume of material
that's blown off the surface of the asteroid and how that develops if we're fortunate we'll be able to see the
impact crater you'll be formed by the dart impact and then of course lychee cube is going to do something that dart
can't do that is fly past the asteroid look back and get the full three-dimensional shape of the object
that we hit which we won't know until we actually get there
one of my favorite things about dart is the name it's the double asteroid redirection test and we're going to a
double asteroid it's a binary asteroid but we're also doing a double test dart
is a test of our ability to actually execute a kinetic impact build a spacecraft that can autonomously
autonomously direct itself to to a collision with an asteroid but also we have to
test how a real asteroid responds to that deflection attempt because it's one
thing to take a very expensive spacecraft and smash it to bits on the surface of an asteroid but really the
question we want to answer is how effectively do we move an asteroid when we do that so dart is a double test on a
double asteroid
well hello everyone this is scott roberts from explore scientific and the explore alliance and it's our honor to
introduce terry mann and the executive staff of the astronomical league and david levy
and their special guest brent maynard and molly wasser really excited about this particular uh
episode because this is the 20th astronomical week live turn it over to you terry
thank you for having me on again hey thank you for having us on again scott it's good to see you back
yeah i'm i'm a little wobbly a little woozy but uh
but uh you know it's and we're going to our arizona dark sky star party leaving
tomorrow so that should be another great event to see this city and the village or
township of oracle celebrate their dark skies so um
yep so thank you yep so all right well thank you and
actually i am going to go to david levy next and david you will be at the star party in arizona too won't you
yes i certainly will i won't be able to be there the entire time because i've become a full-time
caretaker in the last few days however i do plan to come for one of the days
and one of the evenings and we just need to decide which one and i'm really looking forward to it
i bet thank you thank you terry and usually what i do at this point is to do my quotation
before i do that i have written approximately 40 books in my lifetime i'd like to introduce you to
book number 40 which came out two days ago wow oh wow here it is
it is called clipper cosmos and children finding the eureka moment it's by me
with our original artwork by joan allen rosenthal so happens to be my sister-in-law and
who is visiting us and helping us care for wendy right now so we're all together
was published by rji publishing in out of new mexico
and the book will be selling for twenty dollars wow excellent
yeah it looks great a couple of hours and read to a child in a few days or if
you're a child and once you do it yourself you can read it in a day or two and i hope you'll enjoy it
oh i'm sure we will i'm sure thank you now for the quotation
and i believe i've done this one before but i think i can think of no more appropriate one right now
because on monday queen elizabeth the late queen elizabeth ii is going to be buried
we have a new king in england king charles iii interesting name he chose to his own
name king charles because charles ii was okay but charles the first had a very rough reign
it ended with girl over cromwell taking over and with him being executed oh in hopes
that charles iii will work happy and successful and long-term
reign over the uh british commonwealth of nations um
william you know i have a number of books in my because i got my doctorate degree on the
night sky and the works of william shakespeare and others and uh
one of the things that the oxford shakespeare says right at the beginning is that some say that shakespeare
partook of the divine and i think a lot of you would be angry to hear that how can any writer apply to
the divine but what i'm going to do in this quote is tell you how and give you an example
um [Music] shakespeare was sitting in his office in
his room with a quill pen either that or he had microsoft word
version minus 50 in which he was trying to write a speech and he's thinking what is
macbeth going to say after he finds out that his wife has died and he can't think of anything he's just
sitting there he's agonizing over this and then there's a tap on his shoulder
and he's wondering now who's disturbing me and he turns around and there standing behind him is god
and god says will i'm here take a break get a cup of coffee have a
beer relax i got this and uh what what shakespeare road
under the guidance of the divine i believe is this speech and a little bit about the speech it is
about space and time and you might say that he's anticipating by four centuries
the concept of space-time and einstein's general relativity so in honor of that i will add one line
to the tv quotation and so the assistant comes up to him and
says the queen my lord is dead and macbeth looks at him
and he looks like he's given up completely and he says she should have died hereafter there
would have been a time for such a word tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
creeps in its petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time
and then is heard no more out
out brief candle life's but a walking shadow a poor player that struts and frets a
tower across across the stage and then is heard no more it is a tale
told by an idiot full of sound and fury but signifying nothing
signifying everything thank you and back to you terry thanks
for letting me do this hey you're welcome anytime david we enjoy you being here thank you very much
we appreciate it give our best to wendy definitely
all right uh how about carol we haven't heard from you in a while and i haven't seen you
since albuquerque uh there's a little time going on and before i start i'd like to
congratulate david on the new book that really sounds exciting i send my regards to wendy as well and
we pray for her soon feeling much better uh
yeah it's been two months since we just concluded all con 2022
and it was a very successful convention had a ton of good speakers
and one of the things we did this time was to have a virtual type convention alongside it
with interviews thanks to scott and explore scientific in addition we
broadcast live the awards banquet which was new territory for us we'd never done that before
and i've gotten quite a bit of feedback from league members uh
within the last couple of weeks about how much they enjoyed it and also how much they would really like the idea
of having a virtual conventions part of it we've talked about this before so i
think the odds are very good provided scott is agreeable that we will uh push that even harder
for of course rouge in 2023 because there is definitely a
need for it uh i received a an email from one of our
members i believe it's in florida saying that uh he has a hearing issue
and crowds really aggravate that situation he says i've never attended an alcon but he says i listened to the
virtual one back in 2021 every word of it and he says i really encourage you to
pursue uh that venture because it's very helpful to on lots of levels to many
people so i think that feedback is very important that we're getting there
another thing that happened at alcon 2022 in albuquerque was uh many things
but i just want to highlight the diversity panel we had uh and that was
to just see what the the membership is thinking as far as are we doing a good job of reaching out to the different
groups of people who maybe are misrepresented or underrepresented in the league and we got some very good
insight on that and i think you'll see some positive developments coming from that and they must have followed
let's see the alcon 2023 committee is hard at work
we've got the loose ends pretty much ready to go and so you'll be hearing
much more about that convention very soon
one thing i would like to mention is that if any of our league members listening tonight
uh have had experience in advertising that they would like to share with the league we are
needing some help we have an opening for an ad representative and we would really like
to talk to you if you have those kind of skills to uh maybe uh volunteer for this
volunteer position anyone out there is interested if you would email me at president
at astrology.org and express your interests and we will follow up on that so
we will get some comments on it and that's about it i know we're getting
we're continuing to get people out there the disguise doing lots of observing and that's always encouraging
our membership continues to stay around 22 000 members and
confidence of the covet and lots of other things but we have really uh
noticed a convergence of uh uh not only increased membership but increased
demand for uh uh telescopes and related instruments so that's all good so
i think the future looks bright for astronomy and the astronomical league and we're looking forward to it and with
that back to you terry thank you carol yeah there were a lot of master observer plaques also we had a
have glad you mentioned that we gave out i think 17 uh 17 master observer badges
of plex uh and of course we teased the local people in albuquerque about uh
having about two-thirds of those uh it's amazing what dark skies can do as far as
your ability to go out there and observe uh on a weekly basis except for the monsoon
that happens occasionally yeah definitely yeah and i think i love
scott's interview with harrison schmidt that that was amazing just to meet him
he was so nice and his wife was just amazingly nice you know it was it was amazing i mean i
can't find another word just sitting at the table talking with them you know at dinner time it it was
something else to i mean they were just like everybody else that you meet and i guess you don't expect that when the man has
walked on the moon you know it's just amazing and what impressed me also was
that he's at a certain age and he is totally uh
current with all that's going on in the field of astronomy and space he's right there so that was very crazy
and his talk was amazing he was our keynote at the banquet and his talk he had such a great sense of humor and just
some of the stuff he showed it was amazing so i i really enjoyed all the speakers uh michael backage did a talk
about the 2024 eclipse uh we had a lot of vendors we really had quite a few vendors which really
made it fun because you always had something to do between the talks so i'm looking forward to baton rouge and see
what we're going to run into there yep i think it'll be good yep i think so well thank you very much
carol and i'm sure we'll be talking soon sure yeah all right john goss are you
just about wound up and ready to go yes okay
i'm gonna i don't know what you're even going to be speaking about tonight john
do you know what you're going to speak that makes that makes two of us
i'll think real fast on this okay no i actually i do i did i have given us some some thought and
i'd like to start in with a powerpoint of course maybe
do i still have it yes i hope everybody can see this
yes um yeah i have i i really have given this
talk some thought except uh for the title um
i just jotted this title down uh just a half hour ago or so but it occurs to me
that's exactly what this whole night is about it's about the moon and and the
the fall skies you know fall is a really good time for getting out to observe you have the
earlier sunset of course but a lot of parts of the country you finally have the
sweltering summer humidity swept away and you have nice clear crisp skies
and i'm glad to say that that's pretty much occurring where i am right now and i bet you that brent maynard who's on
the screen also he's probably seeing some pretty good skies right right now we've had a whole of four five six days of really really
clear weather and this is a a great time to look at the moon especially
right at the end of september first part of october and i'd like to jump into a little bit about that um
first of all well last of all uh we're going to be talking about the
international observe the moon night i'm not going to say much about that but we do have a speaker who will
but i'd like to start off by talking about the international library telescope observing week which is the
last week of september and some of you may not know what the library telescope
is and what what's this all about i'll briefly describe it since this talk
really isn't about this program the idea is that a that an astronomy club
um sponsors a small telescope to be posted placed in their local library
people can check out the telescope patrons can check it out just as they do books you know for a week or two i don't know
what what the circulation rules are for that particular library but for a week or two take it home
it's highly portable easy to use uh it it's small but it is large enough
for the newcomer to get some pretty good views of the heavens uh one of those views is the moon which
we'll talk about here in just another minute or so uh of course you can see saturn and moons of jupiter and so on
and when the patron's done with it they return it and move on it goes on to the next person but this is a great way for
kids and uh to get interested in amateur astronomy with uh little or no cost themselves you know if they like the
hobby they can go out buy their own telescope you know call up scott roberts and he'll take care of him then
yeah he'll do it he'll do his best but really i know this works uh the the club that i belong to the one in roanoke
virginia one of our members um a young man got started this way
i don't know two or three years ago and maybe four four years ago or so now and i think now he has moved on to an eight
inch dumpster and he is really interested in amateur astronomy he saw a neptune for the first time a couple
years ago and to him that was a really big deal and it was he was pretty excited about it so this is a great
great way to get in and do the hobby that's enough i'm going to say i would say about that except that we do have a
special week at the end of september to look at the moon with with this telescope if
your library has one and doesn't have a program for looking at the moon uh bug them bug them about this because this is
a great time of year to do that so
the moon on october 1st what what what can you see
well you know of course we could spend two hours talking about what's what you can see but we're just going to briefly go over some of this stuff uh maria okay
these these are the the flat plains uh a whole bunch of craters mountains the
apollo landing apollo 11 landing site which everyone wants to see to see where
it all started that you'd be able to see on october 1st
the league is pretty interested in in spotlighting the moon too it has a number of observing programs
uh everything from the from the beginner to the more advanced to uh
kind of putting it all together we have a lunar evolution program which i'm i personally am working on on right now
and i'm enjoying it a lot tying all this stuff together and learning about about the moon we offer a
here's a shameless ad for you we're offering a new manual called uh cart carpe lu carpe luna which describes
these lunar programs and some activities in those uh to get you going and i'm
gonna be talking about one one of those in just a moment but this is a great way to get started
so on october 1st you know what's one of the things you can see well what i decided to prepare
um i was talking about the creator of theophilus you know it's a nice looking creator
it's easy to see it'll be easy to see on october 1st and uh i thought we'd talk about a
little bit before we go any further you can see that the sketch i have on there is by cindy crash
that's the first place sketching award for this past year and she did an excellent job so good so good
that none other that sky and telescope has it featured on their september cover
and when i got it in the mail and i looked at that i thought what no one i've seen i've seen that before
and thank you cindy that that was a great job a great sketch
in a way i don't like showing sketches like this because it may discourage people because this is very good
but uh you'd be surprised it was just a little bit of effort um as far as sketching goes uh the type of product
that that you can produce so you might might to give it a chance
so let's talk about theophilus and how it was formed
when i get the moon um you know we've all seen in the craters and so on
um but i like thinking about how this stuff really happened how it was formed what it all means how it all came to be
well a crater like theophilus uh suffered an impact uh you know four billion years ago by an
asteroid or a meteoroid that was so let's say 10 kilometers in diameter smacked into it pretty good excavated
the surface tossed out all a lot of stuff all over the place short time later like a minute
later the mantle underneath the uh the crust rebounded popping up a mountain this central
mountain and a lot of times if these asteroids were big enough they left giant cracks in the crater
that later day filled at some time in the in the future filled with magma
so that's pretty much how a crater like a theophilus came into being and you can see some of this stuff when
we look at the picture here in just a few minutes one thing
these craters or mountains or whatever feature on the moon it kind of
begs you to think about how tall they are how high the the crater walls are how
tall the individual uh peaks are in the mountain range and you think gosh you know what that
seems to be pretty easy to fix to figure out figure out well how would
you go about doing that you know if you know a little bit of a simple high school trigonometry and i'm talking simple a little bit on figuring
out cosines and tangents that's really all we're getting into you can do this
but there's a big problem um conceptually it seems pretty easy
but what you need to know is that the effects of lunar vibration do not um
linden lend themselves to easy calculations here simply because the the center of the
lunar disk is not at the zero degrees longitude zero degrees
latitude point on the disk and that affects the solar angle uh of
i might be getting more into than what i want to talk about right here but into the to the uh sub solar point of the
disk which is where you want the sun to be to find that length of the shadows and i'm going to skip all this
because we're going to go on this so i'll show you how to do it so we got to have a strategy
really when you talk about uh tangents of an angle you have to know how high something is and how far away it is
well it just so happens by by a nice a nice coincidence here
at the terminator the angle of the sun above the horizon is zero because that's the night day
horizon line right there that's that it's zero so what you want to do is be able to
figure out the surface distance uh right at the terminator um for each
degree longitude and there's a simple formula to do that which i've given here that it's the cosine of the latitude
which we'll we'll talk about here in a moment times pi times the diameter of the moon divided
by 360 degrees it's a pretty simple formula once you have it and you can figure that out
then then you want to find the shadows length distance
and that's pretty easy to do because you just compare this length with that of a nearby crater the diameter of a nearby
crater which you already know the distance of you can look that up pretty easily so let's let's just briefly go go
through this i'm not going to go through everything here but i think you'll get the idea of it
you have a theophilus which is this crater here nice looking crater in fact you can see
there's a central peak in the center of it and you can see the shadow of its
eastern wall and the diameter of the crater and you can measure how far it is to the terminator
the most difficult or the largest degree of in accuracy in this procedure is figuring out where the
terminator terminator line really is you gotta guess i could be you know i could move this over left to right just
a little bit just just by guessing in a different way but this is what i chose so the
coordinates of theophilus is uh
i don't know what i have 11.4 uh degrees actually i have north here but it's really south makes
no difference in the formula and you can figure out that the uh surface longitude
distance is 29.7 kilometers per degree great that's going to help you in just a
moment knowing that theophilus is is 100 mil uh millimeters 100 kilometers wide you can
figure out easily that its distance from the terminator is about one two and a half times that distance
uh three times the distance so 324 kilometers from the eastern wall all the
way over to the terminator and you can keep proceeding like this judging figuring out the proportional distances
by just knowing the diameter of theophilus by doing all this
you can come up with with doing all the formulas which all by the way which is this explained very well in this this
book that everybody's got to have uh doing that repeatedly you'll be able
to find that the the depth of the crater floor that is this depth right here
is about 3.1 kilometers by what i just did
the publish value is 3.2 kilometers now i think this is pretty good considering that
here i am this is my photograph taken on my iphone through my 8 inch telescope
i'm 240 000 miles away and yet i can tell i can measure the
distance or excuse me the elevations of certain lunar features this wall i came
up with 3.1 but actually is 3.2 kilometers i think that's pretty good for
you know this is a pretty crummy picture that i took but you can still get to get some interesting information off of it
i repeat all this stuff what i just said you can figure the central peak
the height of the central peak i came up with 2.97
too many significant digits there i know okay 2.0 kilometers and the published height is two kilometers pretty pretty
darn pretty darn good uh this is a two-part screen this is the
bottom part so when i drew everything out proportionally you can see how the
offices really looks it has a crater up on the left excuse me right hand side dips down pretty flat floor you got the
region in the center of the central peak flat floor again then back up the other
side so you can see that the central peak isn't quite as high doesn't reach quite
as as high as as the walls this is true of all the craters
so this is pretty good you can see that the lunar orbiter picture below just to compare it go yeah yeah yeah i see what
you're talking about and again i think what is really amazing here i am with my crummy little iphone
and my eight-inch telescope from 240 000 miles away confirming what nasa spent
you know 3.9 billion dollars to figure out right there and it took me 500 bucks
to figure it out so you know i'm kidding of course but that i think that's that's pretty amazing
that is what i like about astronomy doing stuff on your own kind of confirming all this stuff
um yeah confirming that so you know it's true what people have said and found out
yeah it all makes makes a lot of sense so the whole idea especially in this in
the september first part of october when the moon is ideally situated go out go outside explore the moon i know you've
all seen it but go back and look a little bit closer to see what all this stuff really is explore the moon and try
to understand what you see and that really all comes out that you're able to see more and uh get more
out of the hobby appreciate your time under the stars it's pretty cool pretty cool
there you got it thank you john that
that is pretty cool when you figure you just used an iphone to take your picture i mean
well and that that's something you got to do really people say well i don't you know i just draw it
you know you know the way you draw things you're gonna be off a little bit so you should have a picture but and it's just an iphone holding it up to the
eyepiece there is no fancy mechanism here i'm just holding it up the eyepiece you know click a few pictures toss out some and
use the best there you go yeah that is pretty amazing i wouldn't
even thought you could have gotten that close um me neither
who would have thought you know 15 20 years ago that you could use a telephone to take astronomical images and do
science with it yeah yeah yeah so yeah i i think it's pretty amazing and
you know you're at a star party uh and there's a line of people they all want to see the moon or that well you
know show them you got everybody has their camera you know hold the camera up get a picture of the lunar surface and
then they'll see them texting it off to their buddies you know look what i just saw anyway it's a lot of fun so thank you
thank you for having me on for sharing my enthusiasm well thank you for being here john we
can always count on you for your enthusiasm and we definitely do appreciate it you bring a lot of really
interesting projects to us so thank you again and some of us even true so that's pretty cool
i appreciate that one all right
um next up will be molly wasser oh molly is the deputy director of
international observe the moon night she is the digital media lead at nasa
goddard's solar system exploration division in maryland where she works on
lucy osiris-rex lunar reconnaissance orbiter and davinci
missions she leads content development for moon.nasa.gov
at nasa moon social media accounts and co-leads
at nasa solar system social media accounts her favorite moon fact is that
the moon has one of the coldest measured places in our solar system
and that is hermetic traitor at north pole is
oh my a negative 410 degrees fahrenheit which is a
negative 250 degrees celsius oh my gosh that's cold
it's very cold yeah i'm you're probably aware the moon has at the poles um craters that just
haven't seen sunlight for billions of years because of the moon's orientation relative to the sun
so it's really really cold in there well welcome molly we're glad to have
you here thank you so much for coming on thank you terry thank you so much for having me um i really appreciate
the astronomical league inviting me here today and especially john thank you so
much for giving that talk i learned i did not realize you could do that um so i learned something new about the
moon um and also for convincing everyone here why
the fall is a wonderful time to observe the moon so you did part of my job for
me i appreciate it um so i'm going to also pull up a presentation
let's see
so uh it's i think can you all see my slides
yes um so terry thank you for the introduction i also um just want to
acknowledge the other members of the international observe the moonlight coordinating committee you may recognize
some names on there i know many of these folks are very involved in
the observing community and have worked with the astronomical league in the past
so um i actually want to start off and i have a second computer over here so i
can see the chat but just um if people could just type into the chat have anyone participated in international
observe the moonlight before and i know there's a little bit of a
delay so i'll wait a little
scott roberts has i know he he um led our global moon party last year which
was a fantastic program very appreciate that
um so it looks like some people have some people haven't so um i that's great
either way um so uh international observe them i hope i
can convince you to participate this year um if john hasn't already convinced you to look at the moon on october 1st
so um first i wanted to share this graphic which is also the graphic behind me
and um i think i'll again i'll ask you and i'll we'll
deal with that little awkward uh silence as we wait for the chat to load
um but i was wondering what this image evokes to you about international
observe the moon night what are some things that you think of just by looking at this image that tell
you about the program
if any of the fellow panelists would like to jump in as well go ahead
maybe state the question again molly oh okay so the question is um by looking
at this graphic what does that make you think of um what are some of the feelings that
you get about international observe the moon night uh does it make you think of anything
i i i think it means to me this is john goss speaking it means to me that it's
for anybody any place uh looking at looking at the moon uh or even the even the stars mean you have a
a young i guess it's a young boy with a pair of binoculars he can see the moon you have the eiffel tower or anyway all
these structures out there are recognizable from around the world so this is something that you can do
anyplace and maybe some animals can recognize the moon too
and enjoy nature you know go outside get some fresh air look around
look at what's around you and just kind of kick back relax and enjoy
this kind of thing also unites people around the world and dissolves their differences you know so
uh in a in the troubled world that we have today you know that's such an important message
okay well thank you that's it no but um you all uh definitely
um i'm very pleased to hear that this graphic evoked uh those those thoughts
for you because those are the major goals of our program so um
as john said this international observe the moon night is for everyone everywhere
the moon as we know is the brightest object in our night sky
um the it's accessible to um people who live in really light polluted areas you know so
much of sky watching you have to be in a dark sky environment but with the moon you can see it from times square
um and uh it's also you know the young children look at the moon they
start to notice that it changes they start to observe noticing the world around them looking up um so it kind of
leads you on a path of scientific inquiry um we hope and that's what we um
one of our goals of international observation moonlight is to use the moon as a stepping stone to learn about
uh the astronomy other planetary science other space science science in general
um so uh you all said that very well um
and then as scott mentioned it's you know a global event um so
uh where we all have our one planet has one moon one
satellite so uh we have the opportunity to look at it together on international
observe the moon night and then as terry mentioned um you know getting out in nature
um exploring getting to experience that is definitely an important part of the
program as well so
uh what is international observatory night it's um one day
each year um in september or october where um we encourage people around the
world to observe the moon together so the program started
with events being event-based um so you can see here pictures from events
from all around the world people getting together looking at the moon together you know
just setting up telescopes looking up um we have some
obviously with the pandemic we've started having virtual events we've also encouraged people
to observe with friends and family at home and even just to observe on their own so
we've really expanded what international observation night is during the panda make it so that people can observe the
moon safely oops
so this is a photograph of the moon from one of our international observant
participants and um a lot of audiences not this audience
because i think you know why but a lot of audiences ask why we don't have an international observant
night on a full moon and obviously a first quarter moon um
makes for really beautiful lunar observing john pointed that out earlier but that line
along the terminator you can see the really stunning views of the lunar
craters lunar land forms and of course it's not as bright so you can
[Music] get and you know it's a little bit easier to look at those features and
then um a first quarter moon is high in the sky in the evening which is much
nicer for observing than many other things that you have to stay up all night for
so we interpret um observe really broadly for international
service of midnight and this again is a way to make it accessible to all um types of people
so we all know clouds pesky clouds really can get in the way of observing
the sky but we still celebrate international observation moon night
just you can listen to some moon music you can watch a movie movie
you can explore data of the moon we offer we have 3d prints
um so you can for those who can't actually see they can feel the moon they can feel what lunar craters feel like um
you can do art projects activities all about the moon so we are really
invested in expanding the way that you can observe
so um if you visit our website moon.nasa.gov observe
um you'll get access to all types of resources
you can find an event to attend if you'd like to attend an event
um if you'd like to host an event we have a lot of resources for you
including um materials to publicize your event and it
also um you know photography guides all sorts of things
and we also offer the opportunity to register so by registering your event on our website
um if you're hosting an event for the public either in person or virtual
you can um it's enough you know it advertises the event it goes on our website so the people can find it you
can also register just your participation as a private
private event or individual observer and by registering you actually will
gain access to um a lunar reconnaissance orbiter image
that has not been published yet so um early access if that's enticing to you
it is in our downloaded data archive if you know how to access the lro archives but
most people don't so um that's an a fun opportunity
so last year um and here's an example of our event map so i can't tell you the amount of time
that i've spent playing with this map looking at the little dots seeing where people are observing from it's
astounding to me i that this event this is now our 13th year
um that was just started by some folks working on the lro and uh
mission of you know 13 years ago um thought hey let's let's get people
together to observe the moon and now it's um in i think 147 countries all seven
continents we had an event at the south pole the past two years which is amazing
um and they're continuing to observe the moon from down there um and
so we had close to 4 000 registrants either hosts event hosts or
just observers and um it's this is yeah i'm
i find this very powerful um just to see that people all over the world are interested in lunar observing
um for this group i also wanted to let you know that um and this relates to
what john was talking about as well but we have moon maps so this is
specifically for october 1st these maps are created by brian day
um who works at nasa ames and is an avid observer
um so he uh creates these maps um and offers a variety
of locations for you to observe both with the naked eye and
the little pink triangles we call telescopic treats um so those are some exciting things to
look at um john pointed out the law phil theophilus cyrillus and catharina craters
those will be visible on october 1st so
those these moon maps are available on the website
um and then i also wanted to let you know we do have an international observe the moonlight astronomical league
observing challenge so we worked with aaron clevenson to set this up and um
so you can um if you uh i think
he has a few more challenging sites that you can look for on the moon
and then um you'll get an official international instead of the moon night certificate in addition to
some of the astronomical league um accolades that you'd get anyway so i
definitely wanted to let this group know about that
um another way to observe we are having an official broadcast on nasa tv
on october 1st at 7 00 p.m um so obviously this may
if that i would encourage you to watch it if it's cloudy where you are otherwise go outside um but this uh
broadcast uh will showcase some of the latest in lunar science and exploration
there's so much happening at nasa in lunar exploration right now so we have talks from scientists
we have some videos all about the artemis program um and then
videos from people around the world and how they celebrate
and of course you heard at the beginning that i do social media social media is a
great way to connect our hashtag is observe the moon
um and uh you can find information about
international observer the moon night on nasa moon on twitter and then facebook
the page is international observe the moon night um but people share all sorts of things about how they're celebrating
international observe the midnight on social media you can share your images
what you're up to that night and we also have a flicker gallery which
is where a lot of these images that i have shown in this presentation come from um so this is
where people can upload their pictures from their events and
this is um yeah again it's just really powerful to see how people in mozambique
are observing the moon people in calcutta are observing the moon um
i remember a few years ago uh i saw an event in syria right when there was all
this bombing in syria and i was like wow these people still got together to look at the moon it was very moving
so um and i know i'm sure there's some uh astrophotographers in this group so
it's a place where you can upload your photos as well we please like me if you do upload your
photos um add your name um so that people know where you are and who took the photo and
we actually used some of these photos on uh the nasa website
so if that's interesting appealing to you um make sure to visit the flickr gallery
and then um an appeal to this group we uh as a you know clouds um so we do live
stream the moon so we have a few live streams that we're sharing on
our website um if you are planning to live stream the moon that evening if
that's something that you enjoy doing um you can fill out this form i can
put the link in the chat um a little bit uh
just to let us know that you're interested in live streaming the moon and then nasa is also looking for live
streams of the november 8th total lunar eclipse so if that happens to be in your plans
um just let us know and i put my email down here so you can uh let me know
so after international observation moon night it's very important that um we celebrate uh this this accomplishment so
we have certificates you can print your own certificate there's a special astronomical lead version of the
certificate um if you complete the observing challenge and then um
we uh also evaluation is very important part of our
program so i have a qr code here on the bottom left
for surveys we take our survey data very seriously we're
constantly working to make sure that we are providing resources um that you would like as a participant
of international observation midnight so um i if you do plan to participate i urge you to also complete the survey
and then bonus you'll get another exclusive image from the lunar reconnaissance orbiter um early access
if um that is enticing to you again
um so this year's international observatory moon night is october 1st
the date does change every year um we have the future dates on our website but
obviously we don't use a lunar calendar but it's always in late september early
october and uh that's it for me so thank you so much
well thank you molly that's really interesting to see how the other countries you know to see how many
people were out and observing uh it's amazing really how much astronomy
too i think in the last couple of years since covet we've seen a jump in membership and i'm sure a lot of people
you know are fairly new to astronomy or at least that's what i've seen some um
that they're very interested and don't really know how to go about you know to
learn more about astronomy and i think starting with the moon is probably one of the best ways to do it because it's
something people relate to they all have seen it with their own eyes now they can look through a telescope or however i
think then it enhances the whole experience yeah i agree this summer i was out in um
rural california and there was this 11 year old boy that had just gotten a telescope but it
we were having trouble he was like oh you know how to use a telescope can you help me and it turned out it was
actually built for lunar observing and so he wanted me to help him set up
the the telescope for the moon but it was very close to a new moon and i was like
i'm so sorry the moon isn't really up right now and he said oh
and he got so mad he stood up and he walked out and he said i've never made someone so angry by telling them the
moon phase before you know it was he was very excited
to look at the mood with his telescope and so that's that's our goal is really to
to use the moon to uh to to eventually get people to wear um you all are in
terms of observing you know and i was on outreach and we
had a refractor set up and it was so amazing the there was a tiny little girl i don't
know how little she was but she she maybe four years old little blonde girl and her dad was a big man and she wanted
to look through the refractor and you know she couldn't see so her dad lifts her up to look at the moon and she
gets her eye up there and she goes oh daddy potholes and then the whole place came unglued
she related that to potholes the craters to potholes but to hear that little girl say that oh my gosh we were rolling it
was it's amazing what people see and how they inher interpret or you know little
kids or even big i mean people who have never seen this before how they really interpret what they're seeing
and seeing with their own eyes yeah that's such a great story i yeah
um i mean she was relating they are kind of potholes in a way they're holes
you're a kid yeah i mean she was it was just such an ex surprised
expression just the way she said it and she was just so amazed she kind of grabbed the eyepiece and we're all going
no no no you know you can't but it was adorable you know and it was her first time she had ever seen through a
telescope and seen the move the first time her father had ever seen the moon through the telescope so you know it was
a pretty big deal you know it kind of gets people excited because they can see
something that they have seen with their eyes they they could actually now maybe look down into a crater or maybe see
something like the lunar x you know something out there that they didn't really know
about so it really i think it fires people up
so all right molly thank you so much for coming we really do appreciate it thank you so
much for having me sure uh scott you had put in the questions that someone asked about the
new website and i think oh there's carol do you want to answer it or do you want me to answer
it yes you're muted
heard that term before you're muted yes yeah uh as any of you who have worked on
a brand new website knows sometimes it takes a little bit longer than you and
your wildest dream imagined and that's kind of where we are with the astronomical leak we're 90 done with the
process and now we're going through very carefully and making sure the data is as
current as we can get it and that it's uh uh we call that so
i hate to say an absolute date but we are on the ending part of that and
um i hope you'll hang with us just a little while longer it is coming thank you terry
thank you carol i tell you what scott let's take about a 10 minute break and
then we're going to come back to brett is that okay with you brett
yep that's fine okay we'll be back then in about 10 minutes with brent maynard
okay here we go
[Music]
hmm
perfect
uh
okay
you
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um
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uh
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[Music]
well hello everybody i hope you enjoyed that little uh break there um and uh you know the uh that
visualization from nasa and hubble so um i'll turn this back over to terry mann
but you're watching the 20th uh astronomical league live program so with
uh terry mann thank you so much thank you so much scott maynard before we start with you i
forgot to ask the questions for the door prize so i'm gonna ask some questions real
quick after i share the screen the right way there we go
so this week's door prize will be an astronomical league 75th anniversary pin
and an astronomical league sticker oh it's a magnet three-inch round magnet so
three people will win this i did want to announce one more time we
are having trouble with international shipping so we're temporarily stopping international shipping because when we
use this as a door price the tote bags value was 12 but when we had to ship it out of the
country it it went up because of taxes duties custom fees everything it went up
to between 60 to dollars before the person finally received it and either
they had to pay it or we had to pay it which seemed ridiculous for a twelve dollar tote bag so for right now until
we figure out some kind of solution to this we will not be shipping internationally anymore so
as much as we'd love to have you you can answer the questions but if you win a door prize it will not be shipped at
this point but we are working on so send your answers in the next 30
minutes because i will announce winners right after brent's talk and someone from the
astronomical league will contact the winners and you will send your answers
to these questions to secretary at astroleague.org so here's the questions for tonight
tonight we have heard about the international observe the moon night now this is a true or false questions
is one of the activities everyone can do sketching the moon together true or
false one of the activities that everybody can do is sketch the moon together
true or false answers to secretary at astroleague.org
brent maynard's topic for tonight is preparing for a night of image capture
there's a beautiful galaxy and triangulum that's at its best in the fall what galaxy is it
so tell me what galaxy and triangulum that is at the best in the fall tell me what galaxy it is
and brent's going to get us ready for going out and imaging or viewing the false night sky
now this answer already came up so we'll see if you were listening what is the date of the total lunar
eclipse in november it's been a long time since i've seen a total lunar eclipse it's always been
clouded out so hopefully we'll get to see this one so what is the date for the total lunar eclipse
in november and that is the questions for right now and please send your answers in right
away because i will give the answers right after
um brent's talk so thank you and from this
we are going to go to brent maynard now brent maynard was a senior i.t director
at marshall he retired in january of 2022 and he's still teaching in computer
science department as an adjunct faculty member brett began his astronomy and
astrophotography hobby when he purchased his first telescope a c8 in 1989
imaging planetary and deep sky objects is his favorite pastime and he
enjoys dabbling with the astronomical gear setup over the years he tries to
keep his imaging gear simple and at a reasonable cost he likes to tinker with technology and has modified multiple
cameras to make them more sensitive to the h alpha emission line
brent lives in the and correct me if i'm wrong cheese valley
thank you of west virginia and likes to get to the mountains of west virginia where there are some of the darkest
skies east of the mississippi and actually i think you are there now and some of the darkest skies aren't you
yes i'm in blackwater falls state park yeah that i think we all wish we were there with you
so brent if you would take it away okay what i'm gonna start by doing is uh
shutting down my video i'm a little bit banned with constraints i don't want that to compete with the
presentation and i'll pop it back up in just a few minutes
so i'm going to start sharing my screen and jump into a powerpoint presentation i'll kind of bounce out to some images
and stuff and if uh i'll i want to thank terry for inviting me to the uh to the
presentation this evening and if you have any questions i don't have the ability to seek the questions
but uh somebody on the zoom call wants to relay those to me i'd be more than
happy to try to answer those so [Music]
with the ceremony screen
okay let me know if that's coming up okay yes it is i had to go through the mac setup and
allowing zoom to share my screen
and can you see the first slide yes okay good so uh my name is brent maynard uh thanks
again to terry and the astronomical league for inviting tonight's call
feel free to uh email me at brent.maynard marshall.edu
i recently retired from marshall university but i'm still doing adjunct
uh teaching so i still have my active email address which is my primary way of
communicating with people across email
so what i want to do first is just talk about some of the images i take and then how i prepare
for a night's imaging so i'm going to jump out just real quick to
a gallery and then [Music] i added just just recently just a few
minutes ago when we started talking about the international observer of the moon night i took this image a few years ago from my driveway
down in tays valley west virginia that's on the western part of the state and it was a really good night
so i pulled my gear out and this was with the c8 and a
just a canon dslr camera just it was a really good night for imaging
the moon but typically probably about 80 of the time
i'm going after typically wide field deep sky objects
and about the 20 of my time i'll pull out my c8 and do
planetary imaging or galaxy imaging but i really like doing uh wide field
deep sky imaging just because of the the the vast array of
objects and colors and dust and nebula and all kinds of great stuff that you
can that you can capture so i'm just going to go quickly through some of the images these are all within
the past 12 to 18 months all taken here in west virginia at a
variety of dark sky locations uh all different focal lengths uh different types of lenses i typically
use uh lenses for my imaging except for you know going for planetary or galaxy
uh when i'll pull out the c8 this is my most recent jupiter from
about a month ago we had a really good night which is rare around here with a nice steady scene
so that was a rare opportunity to capture jupiter and i was able to get that we had a clear night wow
just more wide field this is with a 85 millimeter telephoto
lens uh this is with the c8 uh globular cluster
this is uh m8 again but instead of a 85 millimeter this is at 1200 millimeter
through the c8 with the focal reducer lagoon nebula
m16 the eagle nebula also with the c8 with the focal reducer
n51 this was over about three nights i imaged three nights in a row i had a
string of good uh good nights and i've captured about six hours total worth of data
to get this particular image and this was all from my my driveway
you know it's likely i was using some filters to help mitigate light pollution which i'm going to talk about here in just a minute
m81 m82 m101
and here's the more wide field using telephoto lenses the north american and pelican nebula
uh some more galaxies i'm going to go through these real quick um just a couple more this is one that i want to
talk about a little bit just because uh of the detail available in this image
can only be captured at a really dark sky location and this was captured at spruce knob
back in july of 2020 during the pandemic it was a we had a great evening up there and this is just
a total of two hours with the data one one hour for each panel and getting to a dark sky location
uh with nice clear skies is it makes the whole imaging process
that much easier because you're getting a good data set uh as uh to work with
let's just jump out of this get back into the presentation
and speaking of uh finding a dark side location so one of the first things you want to try to do
is get to a dark sky location and this is the light pollution map of the united states and as you can see
east of the mississippi is pretty challenging to find a good dark sky location out west you know they're kind
of all over the place but here on the east where we are it's a bit of a challenge
i am currently as i mentioned i'm in blackwater falls state park it's right there in the middle of the
monongahela national forest in the mountains of west virginia and if you zoom in if you have a light
pollution map viewer you can look around the east coast and there's just a few handful of
places where you actually have some nice dark skies and as you can see this dark areas where
spruce knobs located canadian valley uh blackwater falls where i i'm currently located and these are bortle
two skies and at spruce knob it's just right on the edge of bortle one uh very very dark location
in the summertime with the milky way up you can walk around talk see people you can almost read things off the paper
just from the the glow of the milky way the milky way is so bright that it it light
lights up the whole area so that's that's pretty uh pretty fantastic to get under a dark sky
location over to the right you can actually see uh washington dc the washington dc metro
that's about three hours three and a half hours away from this dark sky location so it's um the state of west virginia
some of the state parks and some of the county park systems are starting to leverage the dark sky
attribute uh and they're starting to promote that so we've had a couple of state parks uh get named to the dark sky
uh locations uh recognized as dark sky mitigating light pollution and so it
seems to be a growing um effort in in this part of the state to
preserve the dark skies which i hope that we can keep this little black hole
here forever so let's get to the
core of the topic you know how do we how do i get set up for a for a night of imaging
and i just want to talk about my gear what i what i currently use uh i
i'm you know all my gear is pretty moderate uh you know i don't have really a lot of
high-end stuff i do have a couple of nice lenses but most of my gear has either been
purchased off ebay or used or i've modified it myself so i try to keep
things uh because i like to tinker that's one of my other hobbies other than astrophotography is just kind of
tinkering around with things but i have a orion series mount which is equivalent
to the heq5 series of mounts i self-modified a canon rp camera that's
my primary imaging camera right now and i have a collection of lenses all kinds of lenses
and my go-to lens is the 94 180 millimeter um
prime manual focus lens from the early 90s it's a great lens it's f 2.8
and also i've recently acquired some sigma lenses for fantastic wide field that one
image i showed the two panels of the fukius region into the core of the milky
way that was done with that 85 millimeter sigma lens and of course terry mentioned in the in
the bio about my first telescope with the c8 which i purchased back in 1989 i still
use it it's a great uh it's a great piece of equipment and still produces good images
um the other thing tonight which is you know some important things you know battery tanks battery packs uh
technology now is great with the lithium iron phosphate technology uh they're not very heavy they last
forever so having those in the field instead of lugging around you know lead acid or gel cell batteries
like we used to have to do to keep power on things is a good thing
technology keeps on advancing helping us with our image capturing uh
capability and one of those advances in technology and i've been a heavy user recently in
the past few years of the asi air from zwo which helps with
controlling the mount doing image capture image planning polar alignment plate solving it's a nice
little raspberry pi based device
this is my typical gear that i would take out to the dark sky location right now this is all sitting in the back of
my car because i just got up here this afternoon and so i after this talk i'm actually going to go
outside and start setting up
uh some additional uh gear and some of these are a little bit uh tongue-in-cheek but they they happen
um make sure you have a good good sturdy tripod even if you just want to do time lapse uh you know not guiding or
anything uh something that can hold your your gear your camera your lenses
and um the other thing don't forget your weights i don't know how many times a couple of times i
forgot i forgot to pack my weights with me or brought them with me so what do you do well i just go get some water bottles
and tape them to my mouth to try to balance my mouth i've done that before
of course bringing things like duct tape masking or vapor tape to help assist when you need that
things like taping water bottles to your your mouth keep your
ear in balance don't forget the batteries and chargers memory cards uh make sure your memory
cards are not uh too full when i was at blackwater falls i don't know was it
greenbank we had a star party uh this summer at greenbank terry was that john was that
the i was doing some imaging and i forgot to check the status of my memory cards and i filled up a card and i probably lost
about two hours worth of images because the card was full and i just wasn't paying attention i was too busy talking
cables power hand warmers i don't use powered
dew mitigation i use hand warmers i just
tape or rubber band hand warmers to my lenses or my c8 to keep the deal with and use new fields i
try to keep the power requirements at a minimum especially when i'm out in a remote place
and it's harder to recharge your battery packs and of course always bring a toolbox
with just a bunch of stuff filming because you never know one of my fellow
astrophotographers photographers we went down to the winter star party and he forgot some of the key bolts that
were he required to attach his mount to his tripod
and we just happened to have some seat clamps so we were able to use c-clamps to fasten his gear together because he
forgot the the bolts so it's always good to just bring some stuff with you in the event that you need something
because some of those dark sky locations that i go to here in the state there's nothing around for a couple of
hours you have to drive two or three hours to get to like a walmart or a
significantly sized box fort to where you might be able to find things you need
now getting ready to set up you know during the daytime you find your way which way is north you can use a
compass on your phone you can use a regular compass you might have on your mount and just kind of generally get it uh
pointing north so you're you know you're ready when it gets dark to kind of fine-tune that
uh also for astrophotography you want to make sure that your
mouse is balanced that you're that your optical train is not too heavy on one side and putting too much stress on the
string on the gears or the belt or even just the mouth
structure that it's not causing any issues uh but you don't want to have perfect balance you want to actually have a
little bit of alabama out of balance to one side or the other so that it's not
too good and you have a little bit of gear slop it'll sit there and cog back and forth between the gears and
cause your stars to not be uh nice little round dots that might get some elongated stars
if uh if you actually have your mount balanced too well deuce polar alignment if you have a
bowler's code um and i use an app on my smartphone called ps align it tells me
uh what the current power angle is you know where does where do i need to put polaris in the polar scopes that's a
nice little act if um if you don't have that and so you can do kind of a rough polar
alignment or to get as close as you as you need to the better you can do polar alignment the better your image data is going to
be down the road especially if you're wanting to take uh long exposure you're getting up into
the four five even ten minute exposures you need to have pretty good polar alignment
uh keep an eye on your cables don't make you know you don't want cables binding you know getting
you know dragging around getting stuck on something on your mouth because that'll cause issues as well with tracking
and after you get your polar alignment if you're using a go-to mount with a hand controller go through the star alignment process that just helps the
mount uh understand where it is and it'll help it with this go-to's
when you're going looking for your targets i've already mentioned to do prevention i use hand warmers they work great over
the years and then the primary reason is i just don't want to have to worry about
more power out in the field try to keep that as a at a minimum
through the night as the temperature changes and you're taking your images your focus will change things cool down
that your focus will adjust your optical training changes you know physically
has you know changes um size and stuff as it gets cooler so
focus image a while check your focus refocus and you can image some more to
make sure that you keep your images nice and sharp
if you don't i've had this happen to me where i just forgot or just didn't do it
and the first part of the images were really nice but towards the end you can see where things started getting out of
focus and the data was not as good
as i mentioned earlier make sure you have plenty of space on your memory cards with these high
megapixel cameras these days the images uh you know typically 30 40 even 50
megabytes per image and if you're going to be taking you know maybe 150 or 200 or even more
images during the night or you're doing time lapse where you might be taking upwards of a thousand images to do a
long time lapse of the milky way transiting then you got to be careful of not
running out of space also double check and make sure that you
are shooting your image data in raw mode do not use jpeg jpeg
is a compressed image format and you're losing data you
do not want the camera doing that compression for you and because you're you're actually it's
throwing away good image tape so always make sure you have raw enabled if you're using a dslr
another one i've done this multiple times i'm taking uh sample shots you know 15
second shot or 30 second shot but you're ultimately wanting to take a two minute exposure
don't forget to put your camera in bulk mode after you've done some test shots i've
done this before where i'll have it set at 30 seconds on my camera
and then i will start my intervalometer or you know whatever i'm using to
control the image i capture and i'll set it to two minutes and i come back and i have a 30 second
exposure with a minute and 60 seconds where nothing happens until the next
exposure and then i get another 30 second exposure just make sure if you're going to be doing long
exposure you know minute two minutes or longer make sure you put your camera back in the bulb mode if you were doing any type
of test damages at a shorter exposure time
use some type of intervalometer uh just to help with the process i'm using the asi air now from zwo which controls my
camera and so it'll do all the exposure settings and you know however i want to
set those up or you can just use a regular handheld intervalometer for your camera
type i'll plug it in and set that up and just
make sure that everything's ready to go i've already mentioned the thing about refocusing over time
to make sure you're still getting nice sharp images uh routinely check your batteries make
sure especially when it's cold where i live and i do a lot of the imaging in the wintertime
and it will get down into the teens uh regularly throughout the winter time
and the batteries do not last nearly as long when they start getting cold
so you might need to change your batteries often during the winter time just because of
the power draw you can also get camera battery
adapter packs which you can plug into like your power bank you know if you have a
celestron or meat or whatever power tank that you can plug into you can get these
uh battery packs that plug into your camera and so you can have power all night long
so that's another that's another alternative and uh also if you're going to be doing
guiding uh just make sure that your uh guy scope is generally pointing in the
same direction that your imaging
optical train is pointing you know it can be off just a little bit but you don't want to be too far off because you'll get some might get some round
odd shaped stars because of the way that the optics aren't pointing at the same part of the
sky
so some other key things to uh to do as you're imaging
through the knife and even if you're using uh do mitigation even if you're using do
zappers or do strips or hand warmers if you get into
like we have around this part of the country in the eastern part of the united states
during the summertime we can have uh heavy dew and it can overwhelm
your due system so you also want to make sure that your lenses or your
telescope objective lenses are not getting dude over and it'll start gradually
and then within just a few minutes you'll go from having a nice clear optics to completely being dude over
and so keep an eye on on that as well especially if you're in a humid
environment like in the um on the east coast of western east coast united states especially here
even in the mountains we get some significant do so just be careful with that
one other resource i wanted to show i showed some [Music] snapshots
of the light pollution map so this is just the light solution
map.info you can just google this flight solution map and it'll get you to this link it's a nice
interactive environment where you can zoom in and see the different locations i'm zooming into
where we are currently located here in the mountains of west virginia and you can kind of go around and
click on a location and you get this little uh bubble pop-up it tells you what the
sky brightness is for this location and you can see this is where i clicked as a class two
uh portal uh size so what does that mean these portal numbers four to one through seven
um you can uh click on that little link there and what you would get is this uh
scale that describes what each portal number means mortal one is is the best uh we
we don't have any immortal one sites in the state of west virginia but we're very close you can see the magnitude
here which is 21.99 to 22.0 zero is the uh
criteria for border one spruce mob is like 21.95
so it's really really close to being border one and then uh portal 2 which is
where we are which where i am right now is an average dark sky and it talks
about what you can see um in these types of environments um
can you see in 33 m31 of course is visible here the
milky way casts shadows you can see there's the diagonal light in a board on one type sky
air glow is a bearing you can see um see lots of very good i have some images from a place fairly close by where i had
a lot of nice green you know tint and some of my images from
the air glow typically where i live i'm in the portal 5 bortles
6 range so i'm in the suburban bright suburban area which is very challenging
to do imaging uh with this is nice this is a nice utility especially if you're wanting to get
interested in astrophotography and you're looking for a good place to go
image your do some of your images any of these you know really bright spots like you know
the dc area the metro northeast all the way up you know through boston it's just you know it's
just almost impossible but there's some good sights also up in pennsylvania cherry springs
um it's up in this area in pennsylvania and it is a um
another good dark sky location and then you get down into georgia there's
there's a few places uh that are not too bad and then you get down into
you know parts of florida so it's but it is a challenge here on the
east out west you know it's it's easy to find at the dark sky location but this is a nice
utility to help you at least find a general direction to go to uh to get to
a dark sky location
and that's what i have as far as what you typically would do to prepare for
a night of imaging and this is this is my typical gear setup and
as i mentioned probably 80 percent of my images are done with lenses and nikon or sigma type lenses
with a modified dslr when i want to go small to small objects you know galaxies
or planetary that's when i pull the celestron c8 out and start using it as
as my optical terrain
so terry do you see any questions that have popped up
scott i'll let you look but maynard i have a couple questions for you and looking at your pictures you showed in
the beginning are you using any types of filters no nice thing about going to dark sky
location uh a lot of those images were taken at either green bank or that spruce
model okay so i don't need to worry about filters i do have some images that i didn't have in that gallery
that i have taken at home
portal 5 world 6 guys and i used a duo band filter
from sct so it's got a narrow relatively narrow band on the o3
line and a relatively narrow band on hydrogen alpha and it's a it really does
a good job of mitigating light pollution okay what about processing i i know at green
bank you i don't remember if you were even dabbling with pigs in sight i know you were using some other programs what
would you say is the program you use most for processing
right now i'm using astropixel processor which is similar to pixel sign i've never
jumped into the site ocean i i know that it's a
fairly steep learning curve and um astropixel processor is fairly easy to
use it has lots of features so you can dig down and
and really do some additional things whether but i just i've started going down that
that path for now someday i might look at this insight but i've been happy with what i get out of
pixel astro pixel processor before that i used uh freeware shareware
uh deep sky stack yeah yeah the the limiting factor with
deep sky stacker is that it is windows only and i'm more
of a mac user these days an astrophysical processor works on both platforms as does fix inside
okay and also use photoshop for the final tweaking and
okay so when you stack your images how do you decide if your exposure is right
when you're taking the single images and you know you're going to stack it later how do you know if your picture is
overexposed too much when you stack or underexpose so it does not show up very
well so when i when i take my set of test images in the beginning and i start
trying to get to that state and what i want to try to do is i look at the histogram of a
single image i want that histogram to be right around fifty percent uh for a astrophotography image you'll
have a nice sharp peak instead of a histogram that goes all the way from left to right so it'll actually
have a nice sharp right and you can move that right or left within the histogram you know
shorten your exposure it goes to the left increase your exposure it goes to the right and if the balance of that
along with the iso settings and with the camera that i'm currently using i'm setting the iso at 2 000.
1600 2000 is what i typically shoot the iso settings up with my canon icons will
be a little bit different or other camera types will be a little bit different but i'm i'm trying to get that histogram
right in the middle and maybe just a little bit to the right if it's way to the right i'm overexposing if it's to
the left i'm underexposing that's what i look for is to get my histogram in the modal
okay thank you that's all i have scott do you have anything
well i um i just wanted to mention you know people enjoyed uh
brent's um astrophotography norm hughes uh really enjoyed their rho opacious
uh region and beatrice you know definitely a moon lover
beatrice heinz out of belgium's a beautiful beautiful moon image so thank you thanks
for sharing those yeah all right uh does anyone else oh wait i better
finish the questions and answers so grant thank you so much
i hate to get out there and go outside and say oh man i forgot to give the answers
brent thank you very much i really enjoyed that and i'm sure everyone else did too your images are absolutely
beautiful well thank you very much and thank you everyone for having me
we're glad you came tonight so all right i am going to give the answers to the questions
as soon as i find them again and
all right so here are the answers uh tonight we heard about the international observed the moon night is
it true or false one of the activities everyone can do together is sketch the moon together and yes that is true
andrew corkill answered that right next one brent maynard's topic for
tonight is preparing for a night of image capture beautiful galaxy and triangulum is at its best in the fall
what galaxy is it and that would be m33 the pinwheel galaxy and that would the
answer for that came from barbara brown
what date is the total lunar eclipse in november and that will be uh monday november 7th
through the 8th depending on where you are at so um everybody watch out for that and
marilyn wright gave that answer hopefully we'll be able to see it the last couple i've been clouded out here
so hopefully so thank you everybody for answering and i would like to thank brent
uh for that nice presentation and those beautiful pictures and molly uh we will catch
molly wiser the next time and david levy we always enjoy david we do hope wendy
gets to feeling a lot better scott roberts the founder and ceo of explore scientific and carol org the
astronomical league president thank you and i do not want to forget john goss because i didn't put him on here
apparently we always appreciate john goss he brings some really exciting
stuff and he just does a great job along with everybody else we couldn't do this
without everybody that appears on this and we sure couldn't do it without everyone watching
so we do thank everyone that has tuned in and always does our next ao live will
be on yeah we change the date um on the 28th
of october we're gonna have another annual halloween party we had a blast
last year uh we bring in multiple guests and we'll still do a two hour like seven
to nine and uh we're gonna tell astronomy related halloween stories and they get
pretty good we'll have door prizes so be prepared to be amazed and terrified
so please please join in carol what are you laughing at
i like your style terry please join us on the 28th and we will
announce uh what guests i think we had six or seven different guests last year
and that's what we'll plan on doing this year so we will be announcing all the guests probably
um let's see oh wow next month we'll announce it on the gsp scott
so we'll and we'll be announcing it there so all right if nobody else has
anything else they would like to share um if you do speak up now
no thank you again to brent and molly and carol and scott and john if i david
thanks to everyone and thank you out there watching we hope you join us for a halloween party it will be a good time
so we will see you in october thank you
thanks bye bye bye
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