Transcript:
happened i felt very awkward at I was just like
"Oh no." Actually I the way I remembered the story was just that she told you that
and I knew how the two of them met they met they were um hiking together and
they just bumped into each other like that oh that's nice and uh but I think
you've exaggerated things just a just well just just a little bit it was kind
of the facial expression but that's kind of what she said
hello John hi John it's good to see you
well as I got everybody in front of me there is something I'd like to bring up
um the subject of constellation satellites i know that's a dear subject
to all of you i didn't The other night I was out with binoculars and I I saw one
about one a minute maybe two a minute in in binoculars the whole night well for
for a couple hours um you know I I think we are at a juncture of amateur
astronomy right now as you can see I'm kind of upset about this whole thing because I don't
want to see satellites wherever I point my binoculars and uh we've been talking about it for a
couple years now and I can think well for myself I think well we're there and
uh a lot of satellites and there are not that many up there right now actually compared to the final total final
tally but uh something to get you all in the mood here it's also worrisome that
they didn't end up damping the reflection the way they said they would it's just Well the ones I saw were were
seventh I'd say seventh magnitude although I did see a string of recently launched ones that were about three and
a half to fourth magnitude the ones through binoculars were really all seven john when you get to see the string of
the recently launched ones and that every couple of weeks
they're actually pretty beautiful to look at as they're they look like this
long meteoric string in the sky and uh actually I was actually inquiring
since I have to look at these damn satellites all the time so I could switch my internet to Starlink but uh
nobody's giving me any pricing or anything so I guess I'm not
we have a guy here at Explore Scientific that's got the Starlink that you can
roam with on with your RV um and he says it works pretty darn
good so you know but what is he spending on it that's the thing that I need to know
as I recall he's spending for that system which allows you to move around
it costs more than the average i think the average cost is about 100 bucks a month
that's what I think it is not this isn't horrible
um it's not the cheap range but uh not not horrible
uh but to to move around and have that those kinds of internet speeds uh is
really remarkable you know so um well it might it might be remarkable but
philosophically you know everybody whether you're on the Starlink system or not sees these satellites even if you're
in the That's very true in in Mongolia or the Amazon jungles or someplace in
the Pacific everybody sees them whether you're a member of Starling of Elon Musk Starlink or not
well I think we can only expect John that we're going to see other countries
oh yeah and other providers doing this you know so well that's kind of what I
say we're at the juncture right now in which we're seeing the end of amateur astronomy as we have come to know it
with all due respect John it you know we get a lot of the satellites in the first
90 minutes of the night and the last 90 minutes of right on the summer pretty
much all night though that's true but in the rest of the night when it's not in the summer in the summertime you can see
them all in our north but the rest of the night they kind of leave us alone a little bit and uh I think we're going to
manage somehow we're still going to enjoy Saudi and I'd like to with all due
respect disagree that it's not the end of a strong it's just it kind of may add
something to it in a way stuck with it it's not the It's not the
end of amateur astronomy but it's the end of what we have come to know it and
the start of something that's true yeah well you know it's kind of like it's
kind of like when we got the computerized mounts and trackers everybody said that was the end of
amateur wouldn't know the night sky anymore the computers would do everything but we've adapted and changed
our definition of what is amateur astronomy and so I think it's going to be a
question of figuring out what the next leap is to adjust the way in which we approach the night sky yeah there is a
guy uh that is making masking software that uh uses an
algorithm to look for satellite streaks on on images and it masks them out uh
automatically and so you know for astrophotographers I think it's going to be
um it's going to be manageable uh even for the professionals uh in fact that's
what it's being developed for is professional observatories um that usual those kinds of programs usually trickle
down to the amateur world and then you know somebody will tweak those so yeah but when you're looking
Yeah and you see something moving in the field you know a lot of people are going to think
they're UAPs or UFOs or something but you know so yeah well I think we should go
ahead and get started here folks thank you thanks everyone for u joining us in the
audience we got people watching from around uh the country right now maybe in actually and around the world we have uh
some people watching from Argentina um so uh thanks for coming on to the global
star [Music]
party in the past 20 years cosmology has undergone a transition towards precision
science the standard cosmological model has been established and its parameters
are being measured with
accuracy uklit will improve this model's precision and help us unveil the dark
universe by studying the large scale distribution of galaxies and cosmic
structures at 1.5 million km from Earth we witness the stars in the Milky Way
our galaxy observed by Gaia Uklid will impose highly stringent
constraints on the cosmological model that governs our
universe uklid will generate images in the visible and infrared covering onethird of the sky
we have created the largest and most comprehensive virtual galaxy catalog to
date we're going to fly through our simulated universe this is the simulated dark
matter distribution we note it is not randomly distributed but rather forms
clusters filaments and voids in between galaxies are tracers of the dark matter
distribution in this visualization they are shown with fake colors depending on some of their
properties note how different types of galaxies trace the underlying dark matter
distribution there are different types of galaxies they can be red green blue
[Music] uklit's flagship simulation allows us to visualize the universe from different
points of view giving us a better understanding of the evolution of the formation of structure in our universe
over time we have reached the limit of our
simulation however this does not imply that these galaxies do not exist uklid
will explore even further than our simulated universe [Music]
we have observed the universe from Earth from space uklid's flagship simulation
brings the dark universe to life blending observations with our best theoretical model of the dark universe
join Uklid on this extraordinary journey to unlock the mysteries of the universe
[Music]
[Music]
heat heat
[Music]
hello everyone this is Scott Roberts from Explore Scientific and the Explorer Alliance and you're watching the 127th
Global Star Party with um our theme of exploring the cosmic tapestry
um you know our cosmic journey is is a testament to human
curiosity innovation and determination and as we continue our cosmic journey
one thing remains certain we come to know ourselves better
and uh and the universe with all its mysteries and marvels will forever inspire us so I'm glad that you're here
uh we kick off the uh global star party with David Levy david do you want to
take it away yes I do thank you very very much i'm glad to be here exploring
the cosmic tapestry and I'm thinking about this wonderful choice and trying
to connect it with the discussion that I had like a few seconds ago with John
Goss of the Astronomical League at the beginning of our little informal session
Scott Roberts gave us a little sense of some of the things that he said that he probably wishes he hadn't
said and that we we thought that was extremely funny john Goss came in and
gave a very eloquent extremely eloquent uh session
uh explanation of why he's unhappy with the Starling satellites that are blanketing our sky and right away
without thinking I jumped in and pulled a Scotty Roberts and came in with a lot
of other arguments and uh so now that we're starting we have the whole group
together i need to take a lot of that back i think John's argument about all
the satellites is um very very good and
very potent and they are going to be a part of our night sky and uh I agree with
John that it's it's a little bit depressing that there's so many of it all I was trying to say was that when
when they launch a new set and the whole thing looks like this meteor coming down
that just doesn't end and you put your telescope to it and you count the satellites they look kind of pretty in a
way and uh so John when you get to talk about the astronomical league which I
adore I'm really going to look forward to that and uh the cosmic tapestry to me is is
exactly what that movie was trying to explain just now but it is also the
romance the feelings the passion that you get when you're outside under the
night sky whether it's with a space telescope the web telescope or whether
you're just sitting on a lawn chair looking up and you see shooting stars as I did 44 times a couple of weeks
ago for my poem today I'm going back to uh Sarah Williams extremely wonderful
poem that she wrote around 1868 it's called The Old Astronomer to
His People and as you're listening to that as I'm reading it we might think about the uh cosmic
tapestry and the role that that that has been played in that ever since Tik
O'Brien sat down and he said "Reach me down my Toby i would know him when we
meet when I share my lighter science sitting humbly at his feet he may know
the law of all things yet be ignorant of how we are working to completion working
on from then to now pray remember that I leave you all my theory complete liking
only certain data for your adding as is meat and remember men will scorn it as
original and true and the oblquess may fall bitterly from you but
my pupil as my pupil you have learned the worth of scorn you have laughed with
me at pity we have joy to be forlorn what for us are all distractions of
menhip and smiles what for us the goddess pleasure with a meaticrious
smiles and you may tell a German college that their honor comes too late
but they must not waste repentance on the grizzly seance fate though my soul may set in darkness
it will rise in perfect light i have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful
of the night god bless you all thank you and back to Scott yeah I love that
that's great David thank you so much thanks and I like the uh telescope you
got sitting beside you there that looks like a huge Quest star you know it is
it's a small Quest star it's a regular Quest it looks like a 16inch Quest Star
i just have it a little closer to the camera than usual it's awesome thank you
David thanks this is King was given to me 2000
and won or so by Wendy as a as an anniversary present oh I admire it and
uh I also remember the little contest we did with you Scott when I was having a
star party and we had a ETX at low power and Cupid at low
power and Scotty said "Which is better?" And I said "It's a tossup." And Scotty
said "Oh come on." And I said "No at low power it's a tossup at high power it may
not be." Yeah but uh the ETX tire has got superb really
yeah great really wonderful i love that but I'm glad I have my picture here
wonderful thank you David thank you okay all right so um it's been a while uh but
um a good friend and uh someone that has shared so many wonderful insights with
us on global star party is uh professor Kareem Jafar and Kareem uh is a
professor at John Abbott College uh he is an extreme astronomy outreach
enthusiast and uh uh we are always honored to have him on um and uh and
he's with us tonight and so we're really really happy karine thanks for coming on to Global Star Party oh thank you Scott
i'm watching Maxi and Dovid in the background and just waving i'm so happy to be back it's been way too long you
have a a huge crowd here tapping supporting from here i I have to tell
our Canadian friends that Lori Ro from our national EPO committee uh that I sit
on she's here in the background with us as well i'm so glad that she's joined i brought her on the GSPs almost two years
ago now uh from the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory oh I remember yeah and so I'm hoping we can get her
back from the DAO sometime soon to give us another chat and get them onto that
uh that uh wonderful uh uh historic observatories list yes definitely a need
so uh thanks Scott and thanks for the invitation uh I I love getting the emails for the global star parties it's
been frustrating that I haven't been able to join too often over the last uh well over the last eight months or so uh
you know we did the Stararmmiss Festival we came back and we hit a lot of really good global star parties and then things
just kind of piled up and I I wasn't able to free up Tuesday nights for a long time so I'm hoping that I'll be
able to attend a few more this time around i hope so too the topic today you
know it it's funny because whenever whenever Scott chooses his topics I always feel like he has some
sort of either a webcam or a spy satellite or something watching what I'm doing for my class because it almost
always seems to overlap with either the way I'm setting up a class or a specific topic I'm doing in the class and he even
chose the UCLA telescope for the video intro today which is one of the things I'm going to chat about uh in a in a
little bit but for me when it comes to exploring the cosmic tapestry when it
comes to the night sky most of what I do is done through the eyes of either my
family or my students or both and that's why outreach is so important to me and
why I try to stay as connected as I can to the RAC to Explore Alliance to the
Astronomical League my space oddities crew in the UK the University Low Brows in Michigan and of course the Rask
Montreal Center and our global star parties here i always start off with a
land and sky acknowledgement uh we are on unseated indigenous lands here in Montreal but more to the point we share
the night sky we share the cosmic tapestry not just ourselves but with the
first nations and the indigenous peoples here in North America and across the world and with ancient cultures and what
they've seen and how they acknowledge the night sky and I always look to the moon as my starting point or to the star
stories of the constellations the moon right now we are approaching a second full moon in one calendar month which
colloquially we are calling a blue moon even though that wasn't the original definition of a blue moon and yesterday
on space oddities I went through the definition of what a blue moon is what a second full moon is and what the 13
moons of the of the lunar month in the first nations represents and what most
of the first nations tend to do is they acknowledge what's happening in nature
with names for the moons so because August has two full moons we tend to refer to both of these as either the
sturgeon moon for settlers or the berry ripening moon for the east coast or even the grain moon or the or the or the
barley moon for some of the regions around the Great Lakes but we're not quite at the full moon yet we're at a
waxing crescent and we have the first quarter coming up in a couple of days but the waxing crescent I got to share
with a few students today after class because it was so beautifully up in the night in the daytime sky that I decided
I wanted to set up a telescope and show people that you can see it during the daytime as well and I want to just drop
this reminder that the moon isn't just something that you see you know for half the year at sunset or half the month at
sunset and then you kind of wait for it to come around again watch it in the mornings when it's a waning moon watch
it in the late afternoon early evenings pull out binoculars take a small telescope even though the sky is bright
there's still so much to see and so much to enjoy with the moon in our sky here
in Montreal we are focusing right now on getting prepared for eclipses and we
have two amazing eclipse events coming up on October 14th we have the annular
eclipse that's going through the southwest of the US we're going to get a partial view of that and on April 8th of
next year we have the total solar eclipse coming up and I have here a picture from our 2017 partial view of
the eclipse so we are running the events and I'm going to share a few things for Montreal audience and uh for those of
you who aren't in Montreal which is the majority of you I apologize for not being able to do this stuff with you in
person right now hopefully down the road we'll get a chance to do it in person together but we have about a 20% view on
October 14th so we will have a public event for the partial eclipse and then
on April 8th we get totality for 76 seconds so we are looking forward and I
have never seen totality before so I cannot wait and I'm really hoping for clear weather in Montreal for that
day this weekend we have a family day at our local aviation museum and we're
going to be doing solar observing to talk about the eclipse to talk about the sun and what the sun is doing more on
that in a few minutes and we just launched our no novice astronomy courses
here in Montreal we are offering basically an intro to astronomy as
developed by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada centers from across
the country have contributed to this set of curriculum so we are doing an initial
six session outing uh starting on October 16th and there's more
information available at our website if you're in Montreal please join us we'd love to have you there with us now I
start every term with a big amount of information on the partnership that we
have with the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Montreal Center and all the wonderful opportunities that are there
for students who want to do more outside of class but within class what I try to
do for my approach to astronomy is to share what's happening now as current as
possible but grounded in everything we've learned through history through ancient and indigenous cultures and so
our second class that's coming up on Thursday is going to be about ancient and indigenous astronomy today was all
about setting the context for the course and I thought today's topic of exploring the cosmic tapestry was perfect because
when I talk about context I'm talking about all the tools we have to enhance
our understanding of what's happening locally in our Earth moon sun system or just with Earth looking within our solar
system and then looking beyond so I wanted to share with our GSP audience a
little bit of what's happening right now in astronomy so that you can keep up you can watch the the news feeds the the the
X or Twitter or whatever you want to call it now uh or threads or whatever it is that you're following or on Facebook
and follow the new things and the current things that change the way in
which we understand our connection within the solar system or within the cosmos so tomorrow morning the Indian
Chandrean 3 is supposed to do attempt its landing of both its lunar lander as
well as the rover that's within that lander uh and I cannot wait to see this
we're actually streaming it live on space oddities tomorrow morning uh because it's afternoon uh British
standard time and it's evening India time now the Chandrean one is something
that I talk about all the time because it was a double impact study of the moon and what I love about Chandrean 3 is
that not only does it have a laser spectrometer it also has an X-ray spectrometer so we're going to get a lot
more information about the substructure of the surface of the moon where Chandrean 3 is going to be trying to
land the sun the sun is a fascinating object at all times whether it's in
solar minima or solar maxima it's wonderful to look at in all different wavelengths but right now what's really
curious is the amount of solar activity that we are seeing on the sun this is a
picture of the sun taken a couple of days ago by Roger Heyman and Space Oddities one of my colleagues there on
the panel but just today using eclipse glasses and a Samsung telephone one of
my students Lucas Lorino Perez took this picture of the sun and you can see
evidently four really clear sunspots and this was actually the
double one plus another three so this was done just with very simple observing
equipment and you can track these sunspots and see how much more numerous they are than what we were anticipating
at this point in the in the solar cycle now there's recent information out that
the solar cycle matches the behavior of storms on Neptune which is incredible given how
far away Neptune is how little insulation Neptune actually receives and so tracking these changes now and then
following what happens in on Neptune over the next few years will enhance our understanding of this dynamic of the
cloud structures on the ice giant Neptune the James Web Space Telescope
since it launched 13 months ago has been just making us drool with the amount of
information coming out of them this is one of the first deep sky images from James Webb that I have here with the
Hubble image of the same space in the background but what I found incredible is just the other day they published new
images from uh Near Cam and from Merie of the Ring Nebula which is one of my
favorite night sky targets and you look and see the level of detail of the
expansion of the clouds of gas given off by the dying star before it became a
white dwarf at the center and with this extra information one of the things that has been determined is there is models
that show that this structure could only have been created if that's a binary
system at the heart of the Ring Nebula now we already know the Southern Ring Nebula was a binary system and it's
given us a tremendous amount of information to sort through over the last year since those first images from
web came out now we have a whole new planetary nebula to look through look at
our models of how planetary nebula are formed and try to make sure we understand the death of stars similar in
size to our sun see linked it to the sun and its increased activity but don't
worry we have 4 billion plus years to go before we have to worry about that there's some time the Uklid telescope
that was talked about I I am so happy to see it completing its calibrations as
some of you know it launched on July 1st so now we're in our threemonth calibration stage and at the end of that
three-month calibration stage Uklid should be exploring the dark universe by looking at these clusters of galaxies
like that video talked to us about keep that in the back of your mind because I want to mention something else to you in
a few moments but first I just want to remind people that there's missions to Venus being developed as well that will
still give us more and more insight into our sister planet the Europa Clipper
mission next year for those in the GSP who like me love the little tidbits that NASA puts together you can put your name
in a bottle on a microchip for the Europa Clipper so go to go.mnasa.govin
/ssageinabottle and put your name in i put my class in immediately as soon as I saw this so make sure to get your name
going to Europa next year there's private missions to space which we can
spend an entire GSP talking about at some point hint hint Scott we might we might want to do that okay and then we
have our Earth observation satellites now longtime watchers of the GSPs will
remember that I did a couple of talks on Earth observation satellites and the way in which we use the data from these
wonderful satellites and I know John Goss was talking about the amount of satellites that we have up there and how
they ruin our view but some of them are so instrumental and I'm not talking Starlink i'm talking things like Geosat
LANCSAT the Radar Sat here in Canada they allow us to track things like the
wildfires on Maui or the wildfires currently approaching Yellow Knife in the Northwest Territories here here in
Canada and we are able to actually work on our emergency response based on the
way in which things like uh th those the fires that you will burn in order to try
to stop wildfires from spreading in a certain direction how successful that is where to drop the most water to try to
in ensure that populated spaces have enough time to evacuate but there's so much more and so
I decided I wanted a few more things to talk to the students about before I ended this first class that I did with
them today and one of the big things is Ingenuity because if you remember early on this summer we lost communications
with Ingenuity and now not only are we back in communications it completed its 55th flight and it's now flown over 12
kilometers on the Mars surface in total for those of us that were there when Percy was launched when everything was
being talked about when Ingenuity did its first flight and we said "Yes this is a success." We're 54 flights later
and we're still getting data and we're still getting images like the shadow of ingenuity on a completely new stretch of
land on the Mars surface so cool we have the Exorism Sat launch happening this
Saturday this is an X-ray satellite and it's going to be studying the X-ray
emissions from galaxy clusters so now let's go back to the Uklid which is going to be studying the gravitational
interactions of these galaxy clusters i cannot wait to see the data correlated
between Xrism and Uklid to really pull out that high energetic behavior and how
it links to those clusters of dark matter and whether or not there's evidence of the way in which those dark
matter clusters hold on or push apart some of the galaxy clusters that we see
in the early universe osiris Rex i was telling my students
today Osiris Rex launched in 2016 my first term teaching astronomy i
watched it arrive at Bennu i watched it orbit Bennu and determine an entire
characterization of the surface at Bennu i got to see it sample asteroid Bennu
and in a couple of well in a month we're going to get to samples coming back to
Earth and so it's a full circle of a full mission to asteroid Bennu that I've
gotten to experience as an astronomy teacher and then of course is the Artemis 2 preparations and we're really
happy to see Jeremy Victor Reed and Christina getting ready and getting into one of the uh sample Orion capsules to
prepare for their mission and their launch next year so there is so much coming up to help us to investigate not
just our local backyard but the cosmic tapestry as a
whole thank you from the Montreal Center back to you Scott thank you so much this
is great uh well I'm going to uh uh take your
challenge seriously Kareem and uh we'll see if we can put together a whole show about all these um planetary missions
and satellites and stuff that um that are out there helping us understand our solar system you know so I think it's a
perspective that's lost sometimes is how valuable some of our satellites are oh
absolutely to the actual Yeah i I you know getting from from here to the next
star party if I didn't have a a GPS system uh I'd be in deep weeds sometimes
so we still are but those are for other reasons but I do have a story about that too but for another global star party
it's me deep weeds cows and the ok star party okay oh thanks thanks for having
me Scott i appreciate it take care thanks okay so um up next is uh Mr john
Goss uh who you've heard so much about here uh this afternoon on the Global Star Party uh he is uh with the
Astronomical League he has been with the Astronomical League for a long time uh he has served two terms as president of
the league he's absolutely devoted to uh helping amateur astronomers everywhere
and just newbies beginners everyone in the astronomical community uh there's
few people like him u I like him
i heard that joke just a joke okay i caught that
no John is a is a great guy and we're so pleased and honored to have you on
Global Star Party thank you oh well thank you Scott yeah um I don't want to
go into what what we were all talking before the the program started but we were talking about constellation
satellites and the joy it's going to bring us all but
anyway um I was thinking about what to say tonight and I I it occurred to me that
you know I haven't I don't know if any of our members really have talked a whole lot about actual observing
programs at the league office uh that's one of them the the the more well-known
things that that the league is known for are are many different observing programs so when Scott came up with this
topic tonight about the cosmic tapestry I started thinking huh how could I work
that in and I I think I did so I'd like to start on on that right right now see
what see what we can come up
with good before I begin though I always have to
give a plug for the Astronomical League a lot of people don't know this but Alcon next year that's the Astronomical
League annual convention will be held in Kansas City on July 17th to the 20th um
it'll be right now it's it's still uh heavily under planning but uh it's we're
aiming to have a a hybrid conference of both virtual and in-person activities so
hopefully we'll see how that works out uh so that's all I can say that's all I
know about it so let's let's get on to something which I um I think you might might like to think
about um Scott let let off um our invitations
to help out with this star party with a quote his quote and I when I read it I
thought you know that's exactly what kind of what I wanted to say but he said the words already so let's go ahead and
and use his about uh discovering what our cosmic journey is all about where it
takes us where it started uh in a way sort of like the journey is more important than the destination of course
the destination is important but that we shouldn't ignore ignore the journey that allowed me to start
thinking a little bit about the history of astron um the league has a program
called the uh Galileo observing program which I want to talk about delve into
tonight um it's a program meant for I won't
necessarily say beginners but for people who want to get out under the stars fairly quickly fairly easily and use uh
binoculars to see certain things in the sky it turns out that binoculars today's
binoculars give a lot better view than what Galileo saw so we have a program
which kind of emulates what Galileo tried to do or what he did way back in6009,610 and so on uh that people
today could could could could try their hand at so we have something called in the
footsteps of Galileo you know up until that point in time everything we saw or everything we
knew about astronomy was gained through uh observations uh unaded eye observations rather careful uh
painstakingly done but still there's only so much you can do with that but when he came along and he pointed the
first telescope towards the heavens or at least to be uh to study the heavens scientifically um that really changed
things quite a bit and it has things have been changing ever since uh teles
of course have gotten bigger better more powerful we see more things with them we we have huge groundbased observatories
we have big platforms in space getting all types of fantastic stuff enough of
that so we'll go on to talk about this this program that uh the Galileo observing program um what it offers to
you and everybody else you know it's a little bit of a history tossed in about what Galileo did and what we can see um
these are some of the activities of this particular program what the Astronomic League has
is a number of observing uh programs and each of them have a set has a set of activities that that that you complete
um and it it helps you give focus on what you're going to see that night or or in the morning or the upcoming nights
or whatever and it's all done with this particular program all done with
binoculars um my wife and I completed this I don't know 10 years ago uh with
with these binoculars right here and there are certain uh activities in this which are really easy to do and there
are certain ones which are are quite quite a bit more difficult what you really need a nice pair of binoculars 10
x50s that's what I use and you it's almost essential that you have to have a
sturdy mount to put these things on because there are many observations which take um you have to have
everything nice and steady uh you have to your your focusing all precisely
sharp so you can see some of these things and I like to talk talk about a few of them um I don't want to run down
all all these right here I think there's the 11 there's actually 13 but You see the bottom two aurora okay that that's
always pretty neat but supernova well I don't know if we're going to be seeing that but you never know oh you can
always keep your fingers crossed about that but there's a number of items on here which I want to talk about because
they may seem to be hard they're not really got to have the right
attitude let's talk about Venus now I want to talk about Venus
simply because um tomorrow morning or maybe that's too soon but in the next week Venus will
start making an appearance in the morning sky um I think half hour 40 minutes before
sunrise and it's a it's a good time to start tracking our sister planet um it
is fairly close to the earth mean which means that it's it's a at its largest angular size in the sky right now so let
me explain this this chart here uh because it's kind of confusing um
obviously uh August 25th the disc of Venus will be 5% illuminated which means
it's a really really thin thin crescent but because the planet is fairly close to the earth in its orbit it also has it
just about its largest angular diameter in the sky which will be about 54 arcseconds that's pretty small
um through a telescope it's no big deal but through a pair of 10 by 10 10 x 50 binoculars it might be so keep this in
mind it if it's 54 arcseconds in diameter if you magnify it 10 times with
your binoculars it has an apparent diameter of of uh what I have 540 seconds which is about nine arc minutes
okay well how big is nine arc minutes in the sky well the full full moon is about
30 ark minutes so if it's nine arc minutes it's about a third the size of
the apparent of their apparent size of of the full moon in the sky so if you have your binoculars trained on Venus
and they're on a nice sturdy mount and sharply focused you ought to be able to see a really thin crescent and as the
dates go on uh Venus is has passed Earth and it's moving farther away so it's getting smaller in the sky so it's going
to be a little bit harder to see but really up until about I think I have November 15th um
you should be able to to see uh some type of a phase shape for Venus through
10 by 50 binoculars okay that's one of the activities another activity is Saturn
well I'll tell you what you're not going to be able to see the rings of Saturn with with your binoculars with 10 by 50
binoculars but you will notice again if you have them mounted on a tripod and
they're focused precisely you will notice that Saturn does not appear starlike at all in fact it looks like a
a little bit elongated dot and that elongation is due to its frames that's
the observation you can make let's move on neptune is another object which is
one of the requirements gale Galileo in a sense he he never observed
Neptune but in a sense he did because unknowingly uh by a
really strange cosmic coincidence Neptune was in the same field of view
when he studied Jupiter and its Galilean moons in 1612 and 1613 just by weird coincidence there was
Jupiter well but uh Neptune was was quite a bit farther behind it so in a sense he did see it although he may not
have known uh the significance of it all but just think about it was something like uh he if he would have realized
this um he would have discovered Neptune 240 years before it was really
discovered so that's that's pretty cool but anyway one one of the um things is
try to find Neptune in and in in binoculars you have to have a good star map to know
exactly where it is which we will which I have something right here which will show you how to find it throughout the
next few months um so you can check that off your list you you've identified
Neptune although you might not know what it was but you identified
it the sun you know the sun's going to be a big deal this year or in the next
12 months or so but uh Galileo um as you know observed the sun much to his
detriment because he didn't realize about uh all the damage he was doing to his eyes he didn't have any of the fancy
filters that we have today he didn't know much about how to do projection and things like that so you know he he
looked at the sun and he he did see sunspots showing that the the face of the sun was not perfect as many
philosophers of the day always said the sun is perfect well no it has spots at
times on it so we we have a a requirement to look at the sun but only
under safe conditions you uh you can use um special
binoculars solar binoculars which have a built-in filter or you can always
purchase these handy filters which fit over the uh front lens of the binoculars
and let's see if I get this up there of course you got to have two of them one for each lens uh that's that's what I use um this
year you'll be seeing all these all around the eclipse glasses uh no
magnification here but large sunspots as uh Kareem was saying earlier you can see
large sunspots uh with it shouldn't say with the unaded eye but with a filtered
unaded eye you can certainly see them another way of doing it is by making a
pinhole box um the problem with this is that the image that it gives is fairly
faint but if you do it right you ought to be able to see large sunspots on the face of the sun essentially it's it's
kind of obvious what you do you put a pinhole at one end of a box pinhole being like size of a pin probably a
little bit less than a 16th of an inch in diameter if the box is 3 feet or longer uh it'll project a nice u maybe a
half inch maybe a larger image of its solar disc at the other end and if it has large sunspots you'll be able to see
them as little dots on on that disc another way of doing this instead of using a box is that you could use a
um fairly long length of PVC piping maybe like a 4 inch pipe and have a a
pinhole at one end a covering at one end with a pinhole in it and have that projected all the way down to the floor
and might work might work for you so keep this in mind we never want people to look directly at the sun you always
have to have some type of filter or use projection method like with with with the pinhole right
here one more I think do I no two
more um a couple of our programs are our activities for this
program involve uh observing and drawing uh certain star clusters or certain
features in the Milky Way galaxy we have the the Pleetes star cluster you're supposed to draw that uh M44 the Pra
star cluster do that one there's also an interesting one called uh Orion's Head
Nebula which isn't a real nebula but in 1610 before people knew what it was it
did it was sort of a fuzzy spot in the sky at the head of the constellation Orion uh just uh north west of
Beetlejuice so he turned his his his spiffy new telescope at it and he found out that no
it was uh a handful of stars all grouped together uh their combined glow kind of
gave his fuzzy nature on my depict on my drawing here you can see the Galileo's depiction looks a lot like what what the
nebula nebula but these stars really do do look like
uh I don't want to think bad about him but he wasn't that good of an artist but still he came up with something fairly
close he could use a few lessons on this but anyway it shows you uh what what you
can do and binoculars this is nice to see it's it's it's a pretty little grouping of
stars one more for you yes
um he looked at the moon and you know he has this when he describes his
activities he wants you to to know for sure that he was the first person to see this so the way he words it about how
you know we all see these dark and white areas on the moon but I saw these little
spots dark spots on the moon lots of them all over he describes it but what the significance of this was
it was showing that the moon is not a perfect surface at all in fact it's more earthlike than it is uh perfect sphere
uh so we have in the program for you to observe the moon with binoculars to see if you can see some of the craters and
draw the maria and see see if you can can picture any any other features on on
the surface itself now on the left hand side of the screen here uh this has nothing to do with Galileo but I thought
I' I'd end with this because to not tomorrow night on Thursday night we have a nice lunar occultation
of Antares depending on where you are in the United States you know at depends what time it
actually happens for me I live in Virginia and I think it's at 10:42 p.m is when it starts here but it'll be
other times at other spots in the United States but that's something to look at too uh with with binoculars you got them
right here that's all you really need uh aim your binoculars at the moon before
the event happens and just keep an eye on it and it's it's interesting to watch the moon cross in front of a star or
front of anything is that it helps demonstrate that the moon really does move from uh west to east in its orbit
around the earth that that demonstrates that really really well um and I gave a
website here just go to the International Occultation Timing Association web page and look around
there and you you'll find a a list of cities and what times this thing starts what times it ends uh if you're
in in the Northeast you're not really going to be able to see it but if you're in the central part of the United States
you you you will if it's clear something to go out and look because it doesn't happen at 3:00 a.m in the morning guess
3:00 a.m is always in the morning sorry does doesn't happen at 3:00 a.m it happens in the late evening uh in fact
the closer you get to the Pacific coast it's uh earlier and earlier in the evening so it might be 7:30 by the time
you reach uh Tucson for instance but it's something to have a look and it's it's another it's another activity
another purpose that that you can use your binoculars for and each time you do
use these binoculars and you're out there looking at these objects that Galileo saw saw in a sense in a sense
you are personally confronting history because this happened 400 years ago and
it's still true today you know the the pleetes still there the M44 the beehive
cluster is still there the moon uh moons of Jupiter which is another activity still there Saturn Neptune so on uh it's
it's been there for people to enjoy and to ponder as they look look through their instrument whether it's a unaded
eye or the binoculars or a really fancy telescope it's so it I encourage people
to go out with their binoculars what it takes you 30 seconds to unpack them and
walk outside and start looking for a few minutes and go back inside and do whatever you want to do
but get out and observe under the stars and that is it for for me i I I
hope I I pushed this enough for you to to really want to go out and and you
don't need much binoculars everybody has binoculars uh something to think about
uh a question I I appreciate that yeah thank you thank you what do What is the
observing guide cost i mean if you were to buy one to do the program do you
recall well on on this particular program there there there is no real guide all the
information you need is on our website and Oh wow that's free so yeah it tells
you exactly what to do where to go all the steps you're supposed to take and you know it helps you out with that so
that's great i remember being at the last Alcon and there there were so many people there that had completed you know
so many of the programs dozens of the programs i think you have over 80 observing programs
uh with the is that correct yeah I won't dispute that there there's so many I can't I can't list them all but yeah oh
and if you're a member of the league and if you complete this you you get a a nifty pin
that's cool if I could add something here um there are two magical organizations on this
continent and I'm sure there are others on other continents but the two on this
continent are what really get close to my heart in Canada it's the Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada and um they have they are divided
into centers and cities across the country i began with the Montreal Center
and I'm still with them as my very favorite astronomy group as Kareem just
noticed and thanks Kareem and it is it is more than magic to me to be involved
with them in the United States the astronomical league is
as valuable and crucial to ast amateur astronomy in the United States as the
RAC is in Canada and it is very very special group i was just at the Baton
Rouge conference it is um it was wonderful there were lectures there were
dinners there were informal chances to get together and get to meet the other
people that are as passionate about the night sky as we are but the the league
is something ast is something very special and the idea of the synony
synonymity between the astronomical league and the major leagues in baseball
is really not just a coincidence because in the United States for those
of us who have watched Field of Dreams baseball is really magical to the
history of this country and in on the same level the astronomical league is magical to
the idea that thousands of people are passionate about the night sky i suggest
we all think about going to Kansas City next year and I suggest that we all
think about the Astronomical League and become more active with it because it is a holy organization it is wonderful
thanks John oh you're welcome i don't know about us all going to Kansas City because that would be
23,000 i'd be in a lot of trouble okay they can handle that why not but I have to say if I if I can follow Dovid's uh
example there uh I'm going to redefine my absence over the last few months as being on long-term injured reserve and
uh Scott I want back pay okay no problem i'll write you a check in the
morning all right well that's great um so
uh we have uh you know it's cool because uh on this global star party we have a
lot of people returning back to uh presenting with us and um uh our next
speaker is Jason Gonzalez jason is a very talented
astrophotographer and Jason are you uh are you with us
i am here can you hear me i hear you okay all right i think I was next but
maybe you switched the schedule at the last minute here we go Jason
yeah well thanks for see you again yeah it's good to see you too it's been a a long time yes sir
i think the last time I was on here was the 100th so I've missed
27 and you took a quite a long break so so yeah it's good to be back um for
those who don't know me my name is Jason Gunzel i'm an astrophotographer and u got a little presentation um I'll walk
through today just kind of on the basics of astrophotography um I've been involved in
astrophotography in one shape or form for at least 10 years by some counts
maybe 13 14 years but um I really um enjoy it as a form of
um relaxation and I I love sharing it with people and and um that's kind of my
form of outreach so I'll just uh this presentation I put together is just a
general um what astrophotography is all about
and it's uh geared towards a general audience so I hope that um we're not
too general for for the crowd here but let me know when this comes through can you see it all right yes
okay all right let me go into presentation mode um so um if you're not familiar with me
um I introduce myself but I also share a lot of my work um on social media under
the handle the vast reaches so you can find me there also my website
www.thebastreaches.com and uh what I do in general is just uh explore space for my suburban backyard so I don't uh shoot
from the most optimal conditions and I've kind of honed my skills with that
in mind i've dealt with a lot of problems with gear and conditions light
pollution etc but um pretty proud of the results that I've been able to achieve
um from my location and and this every uh slide on this presentation will have
a picture we can talk about um there's a lot of words here but I'm going to go kind of fast so if you have any
questions you can stop me but uh in general um you know astrophotography what is it
it's just taking pictures of things that aren't of this earth so we do this by using specialized equipment to take
pictures of things that are tiny and faint and fuzzy and uh reveal things
that are otherwise hidden to the to the human eye so why do I do it like I said I um I find a a deep relaxation of it um
some form of reflection or it's a nice escape from the crazy world that we live
in um I've got a lot of curiosity about the natural world the things I can find in my images and I I I view it as a form
of of exploration every time I set up and take pictures I'll I'll dig into them um to some extent and look at
things that are in the background that may have otherwise been overlooked and uh as a result found uh you know many
many interesting things and gone down a lot of rabbit holes i u started this
back when I was uh around the age of 10 my parents gifted me a telescope i still have it that's a picture of it there uh
last year I set it up um put the iPhone to the eyepiece and and just uh took a
little video to show yes it still works and actually the views are not terrible for a department store telescope that's
probably around 40 years old
um around 2009 I got a little bit serious about photography and trying to
shoot the night sky so I bought this digital uh SLR camera you see here the C
Canon Rebel T1i and I used it quite extensively for the purpose the pictures on the right are what I consider my
first astro photos where I just kind of pointed up at the sky and and saw what I could do so that's Venus and the
crescent moon rising over northern Michigan sunrise
and I probably shared these pictures here before but I think this is a good um just kind of a good overview of what
you can do with experience in this hobby so these both these pictures on the left and the right were taken with the same
camera it's just some of the gear has changed and I would say 95% of what has
changed is the technique and my ability to to take the the photographs that I
collect and and edit them um bring out details and and reveal what's actually
there um the technique is different as you know I I took a lot more exposure time than the one on the right but
you're looking at two shots of the Andromeda galaxy one with a just a camera and a lens pointed up at the sky
and the the one on the right there is with a telescope on a tripod and um
significantly longer exposure uh it says at the bottom hour and a half of exposure
total and so this is that same view magnified even further using an 8 in SCT
telescope i love this shot because we are actually able to resolve individual
blue super giant stars within the Andromeda galaxy with a just a consumer grade telescope wow this is NGC 206 here
in the center and these are individual stars resolved within within
Andromeda so at a glance uh astrophotography and all these pictures you see in the background these are all
ones that I've taken with my equipment from my backyard um I love taking shots of these galaxy clusters and and looking
deep into the universe it's probably how I got my handle the vast reaches but um
just the sheer enormity of it and um what we're able to see you know from
from any location on Earth really with the right technique um it's just just
amazing to me so I kind of break down astrophotography into these three
categories and and these are what I consider the pillars of
um amateur astrophotography now there's kind of two branches you can go two
roads you can go down you can do a more scientific path where you're looking um purely at scientific data or you you can
take creative photographs and proc process them to your taste and um be creative with how you shoot them how you
frame them how you um filter them and and uh how you edit them so that's kind
of what I do and uh you can see here I break it down into deep sky planetary
and and nightscape so for deep sky astrophotography um it's amazing when
you give a talk to a general group of people um the misunderstanding or or the lack of
understanding of actually how this is done so I put this video together just to show two of my telescope systems and
then me manually controlling a tracking mount over on the right throughout the night here and you can see the
telescopes tracking the sky and me looking super busy trying to shoot the Milky Way
there once we collect all these photographs we postprocess them and um
the essential pieces of gear really are just the telescope the camera and the tracking mount um but as I say in the at
the end there accessories accessories accessories it's it's a money pit if you
let it be a money pit and there's a lot uh involved in in getting a good result
but the more you dig in the more you find the areas that need improvement and the uh more gear you end up acquiring i
think every astrophotographer has a storage bin full of a nest of tangled
cables and discarded
toys i will say that consistency is key in in this whole endeavor and and if you
can find a system that performs reliably and repeatably you'll go a long way so
that's you know people are starting out that's what I tell them to focus on is
really get something consistent that you can put out there and shoot and shoot and shoot and not have to worry about um
micromanaging it or or um being too hands-on with it
obviously you know there are some people that are in it for you know the experience of being out there u more
visually visual astronomy uh geared people and they will want to be out there tinkering and tinkering for me I
know I want to do deep integrations long integrations time long integration time so I set it up to run and I want to be
as hands-off as possible and then uh with image editing
there's always the question of why do we need to do this well uh the images as they come out of the camera are just
black frames and uh we shoot through multiple filters and and handle these different uh images in different ways
and so there's a lot going on behind the scenes to generate the final image uh
just to lay that out pictorially here um I say 65,536 shades of gray um because these
images images are captured um as 16 bit data there's a lot hidden um that is not
discernable to the naked eye that's why a single four-minute raw exposure there
on the left is just a black frame you see a couple pinpoints of light that's what the photograph actually looks like
um so if you want to know what you know if if someone asks you what is the photo what what does it
actually look like that's what it actually looks like not very interesting but if you stretch it which is you take
all the brightness levels and you expand that image so that all the contrast
becomes visible uh you get what you have in in the middle there which is that same shot just stretched and if you
stack up multiple um of these and get a long exposure photograph put together
once you stack it um these the shades of gray just expand um and expand and
expand and so the deeper you go the more faint detail you can see and the more you can stretch the image to reveal
those faint areas of me nebulosity so you can kind of see the progression here
and I've got this laid out in a video on the right hand side so you can kind of see the whole development process it
goes through capture what you see here and then I will show that single
photo and then the overlay of the the stretched here's the single photo i
don't know if the video is playing smoothly for you guys but this is the stretched video uh stretched image and
then the stacked image and then I combine multiple filters to create the full color image
so this was shot through a narrowand filter to get the detail the luminance and then shot through RGB filters to get
more or less true color representation of the flaming star and tapos
nebula all right so moving on um we're covering a lot of ground fast
so I'm sorry if there's questions uh let me know if you want to stop at any point but um I'll just hop through planetary
real quick because it's kind of an entirely different discipline um we go from
capturing faint detail on expansive fields of view to capturing the tiniest of details on bright objects so we
capture those in a little bit different way we take video frames and stack up thousands of frames to uh reveal subtle
details on on these bright objects on the right there you see Venus shot
um in an expanded spectrum near infrared green and ultraviolet and shooting it that way
allows us to see details in the cloud deck that aren't uh available visually so it's an
interesting way we present Venus planetary
astrophotography requires different kind of setups too uh for planetary uh the aperture is king
so we can get detail on these objects by increasing the size of our uh optics and
normally that falls into the more uh reflector type of telescopes like Newtonians or
SCTs and uh long focal lengths are required so we need to add barllos or
power mates to to to our cameras to get the image scale incre to get a better
image scale on the
objects so again there's uh this planetary astrophotography is a lesson
in in uh in attention to detail so so many things have to go right to to
enable the detail on the objects the the you need to be using these large
aperture telescopes that track well perfect focus and and precise
alignment of the optics or columnation and then the wild card in the game is
atmospheric stability or the scene conditions so all those kind of have to align but
every once in a while even from a northern location like mine in Michigan we we can get some brief windows of
stability and um some pretty good outcomes so this is Jupiter shot here with a 12-in Newtonian
telescope and here's just a look at Saturn real time through that same telescope and you
can see here the wobble created by the atmospheric conditions so that's why we take these you know thousands of frames
to to capture the uh brief moments of stability and and and uh basically
exclude everything that's that doesn't make the cut and stack up the best quality
images here's a little pictorial view of that so we get uh on the bottom there we
see a the raw stack which is somewhat blurry still because you're stacking up a wobbling image but there's very good
algorithms these days to sharpen um the image and then I shoot a monochrome
camera so I color combine it at the end i shoot separate RGB frames to render
the final image beautiful and as a side adjunct to to
planetary astrophotography there's also lunar and solar which use similar techniques although solar uses more
dedicated equipment and this is shot through my solar setup which is an AR-152 telescope and a day star quark
and nightcape is a whole another ball game one I really enjoy and that's the only one I do on location not at the
house but I like getting out to these remote locations and shooting the beautiful night sky against the uh the
natural environment mhm i'd say it's probably the easiest entering in the hobby and requires only you know a basic
star tracker and a a camera like a DSLR or mirrorless camera something that many
people have access to already still use long exposure techniques to
eliminate noise um and because I'm shooting long exposures on a tracker I
need to do separate uh exposures for the sky and the ground so this slide here
just kind of walks through that where I'll do uh tracked exposures for the sky so this is three two-minute exposures
for the sky to get that in crisp detail then switch the tracker off and do the
static ground at the same exposure level level and post-processing I'll combine
combine those two images and then boost the contrast and the colors to get the final image you see over here on the
right it is stunning though
so the common questions are how do you get started doing something like this and
um it's a discipline and I underline discipline because it takes a certain type of person to get into this and and
doing it re reliably to the level that you need to to to improve
um useful personality traits I put there curious inquisitive patient persistent
dedicated adaptive you can kind of see what I'm going for there you need to have an an analytical mind and you need
to be stubborn but uh the key here is making mistakes and making mistakes and
making mistakes but understand those mistakes and realize what you need to do to improve and so that's why where the
problem solving comes in but uh as I said it can be an
expensive hobby it doesn't have to be you can start with things you may have access to like a a basic digital SLR
camera um and take shots of the night sky and learn the the basics of how to
stack and process image images uh those are the the fundamental pillars of the of the uh hobby and there's so many
resources out there to learn um everything from having a mentor to looking online YouTube social media
astronomy clubs find the the method that works for you to learn and and just go
after it so uh for me this is kind of wrapping
it up here but uh for me it's science and art so I love the science aspect of it i'm an engineer um I love revealing
these things in the image and learning about the nature of the universe so the technology is just moving at a blistering pace but it's also an art and
it's a creative outlet for me to to find ways to present these in interesting and new fun ways and so I've developed a
unique style and my images and I you know I think they have a certain character about them but I I'll never
stop you know changing up and trying new things and and that's what makes it fun for me so uh that's all I have here i mean
I've got backup slides but I went a little bit over time so if there's any questions let me know but uh thanks for
having me Scott and I hope you enjoyed the presentation it was beautiful the
image that you had of Venus there was um uh really incredible it looked like you
could start to see some surface uh detail on the planet um could you talk
about that a little bit more well it's not circus so much as uh you
know the the cloud deck you can see but yeah cloud detail for sure um and
especially in the ultra ultraviolet bl band which is a very challenging one to shoot because cameras aren't
necessarily sensitive and then ultraviolet and telescope optics are not
optimized for ultraviolet so it's a challenging band to shoot but if you can find a a telescope and a camera that
works you can see in the stacked image the the cloud band detail takes good
conditions you have to shoot it at a certain time because Venus is you know you only get a brief window to shoot
Venus either in the dawn or in the dusk right so you got very high overhead so
Right and you know you want it to be dark enough so it's not washed out the contrast isn't washed out so you got to
find that little little window where you can shoot it but with the right equipment yeah you can definitely pick
up the surface details there are techniques also to get uh sorry cloud details there are techniques to get
surface details if you shoot with a deep uh it's a near infrared filter but
around,000 to,50 nmters there's a brief window where the you the near infrared
can can peer through the cloud deck and you can actually see some surface detail so I've seen some amateurs do that i've
never tried it right very interesting there was there was a question too what
what do you use to uh uh balance the colors are you using Photoshop
uh there's there's a lot of techniques there um and it depends on what you're imaging but for deep sky uh Pix Insight
has some tools for phototric color calibration so it uses quantities in the
in the field that you're shooting to balance the the white and black point um so I generally use that when
shooting deep sky but for the planets especially if you're shooting through color filters there's a little bit of um
adjustment to what looks right to the eye and usually you're looking at an image a known image or an image that's
acceptably correct to try to balance to that
i would like to make make a comment Jason about your um your uh your the uh
pictures that you took that showed the uh the ground and the scene on the earth
as well as night sky as my grandfather would have said they were excellent with
a capital E and a capital T yes and I would those pictures are Mozart they are
wonderful just wanted to say that
yeah I really enjoy getting out and doing that it's difficult though you
know with to balance a life with going out to to these remote locations i mean
um I don't get the opportunity very much i try to take advantage of it when I do have the opportunity but it's it's hard
um to get away from the light pollution for most people um people living out west are a lot more fortunate than
people living east of the Mississippi or um you know I can't speak to other places in the world um how accessible
dark skies are but in the US they're not very accessible around me
wonderful well incredible work as always Jason so thank you again for coming on
to Global Star Party yeah thanks thanks for having me thank you if anybody wants to find my work you can you can find it
there online and I appreciate the time okay it is
still at the um Vast Reaches is that that the Yeah that's uh on on pretty
much every platform that's my my handle and then or you can go to my website and and hop to it from there great thank you
so much Jason yeah thank you till next time thanks
okay all right so we are going back to um uh let me find myself
here here we go um we are going back to
I I messed up the schedule a little bit guys um but uh next coming up next here
we're going down to Argentina to Maxi Falaris uh who is a great
astrophotographer as well um he's down he gets some great southern hemisphere
objects for us uh often show shooting live for us as well and um so Maxi
thanks for coming on to the 127th Global Star Party hello Scott thank you for
inviting me and wait do you hear me well yes because I was changing yesterday
some things in in the microphone the audio and video is very good excellent
so well I think I will we cannot compare my picture from Jason Gansel you know
it's almost too far away from professional for me i only a newbie in
this five almost five years doing this hobby but anyway h what I'm going
to show you is what I've been doing last weekend because we had
um a long weekend but all almost clouds there was uh but in the Friday night I I
saw the the what there was a clear sky and put
my equipment outside but first of all sorry uh was this
um like I showed you on the last GSP I mounted this F 6 8 in on my mount so I
did the same thing but before that I recaliate and
also get some tube rings because those that I got was from the F4 telescope and
it doesn't fit very well so I and also I
try to make more easy when I have to change each telescope on the mount so
this is what I did you know there's here's the the F4 prepared it and here's
the F5 the the F6 sorry with the two rings uh put putting on so it doesn't
bother me that they they have this so I uh unscrew
this um claps I don't know and put it
again on the mounts so that night I I
tried to capture uh the M20 Triffy Nebula this is with the F6 but I want to
show you the compressation of the same camera but with the F4 telescope uh
taking the same time of of exposure this was only 1 minute 60 seconds and you can
see here is a a quarter of this field of
view so basically is outstanding for me because I always want to grab some
details and this is only a single picture and if I go to one to one I
almost have a little of coma on the corners so honestly this is doesn't
bother me h if I want to do planetary nebulas and
also galaxies because here on the center
the the stars are pretty much rounded so for me it's okay and and the difference
here if I go to one to one we can uh
sorry here and one to one this is the difference
between each one of the field of view okay so uh well I stack this almost 80
pictures and I get this it's more it's more sharpen it so when I process this I
only did a single process because I was working with planetary capturing and then this is what I get
for that night uh you know even the light pollution in my city I could get
this beautiful colors this beautiful shapes and the nights it wasn't uh a
five points only it was clear sky only but anyway I really love the the spikes
of these stars the the stars rounded the colors of the stars and the shapes of
this nebula that has this little antennas that that I always want to
capture so you know I really love to to
practice with this and well h this is what I get
from this kind imaging from that night and then I tried to capture Saturn you know the
that night it wasn't really good but I did almost 45 minutes of
videos of two 22,000 frames per video
and I only stuck between the 2% or maybe
the the 5% of those videos frames and
each video it has 1.5 gigabytes of data and
and I have almost 30 so I I was talking
with Nico because he helped me too much from gets from the rotation and all this
software stuff and the the the post-processing and well I was
practicing and doing again and see what I could what I could do and the result
of that night it was uh this one for example you know
uh but I I did again this spectacular
thank you you know I I was searching this results and even the night it was it wasn't really good I could get a lot
of details on the rings and and the shape of the surface and the colors so
um I reprocess this And what I get was
almost this uh you know I I put it in the different
position because this is how you see it from the north hemisphere but here we
see it like this because the south is here so basically it's pointed up from
where I am uh so well um this is what I've been doing
i'm still practicing you know I tried to did Jupiter more later but uh you know
here in the southern hemisphere we have it pretty low and it's almost impossible
to get some details but Saturn is almost at the Senate here and well this is what
I've been doing from this week i hope I can continue i
try to to get from the the the opposition that's going to be in a
couple of days and see the difference differences and see what what I get
doing with this equipment so let's keep going for that yeah beautiful beautiful
yeah that's that's really great what would you give as far as tips to anybody just getting started in astrophotography
Maxi well basically uh when you do you start to do this uh
you you expect to get a lot of results in a pretty short time so
you try not to you know you you have your your little spark inside you that says "Go on
keep going keep going you can do it but sometimes you maybe oh no I I didn't I
don't like this or try to get a lot but
depends of the equipment that you have but anyway you have to remember that you're doing with maybe a a modest
equipment or you have the the chance that you start with everything but
doesn't that doesn't guarantee you that you're going to get that uh information
that you want in that pretty short time so like Jason says h you have to get a
path on experiences and mistakes that that will help you to uh take a base
from your knowledge so this is my my little my little
um sorry um I don't know how to say it um advice sorry yeah yeah for those sure
who want to start this course yes
say something there's something about your picture of Saturn that really gets to me and
uh I think all of us here tonight remember the first look we had of Saturn
and its rings oh yeah uh wagons would have held no greater thrill than we do
when we first get to see it's magic it's not it's not just something that's
absolutely magic and while I have the floor I was able to take my telescope and bring it
back to being a three and a half inch telescope oh yeah i see that it did shrink a little bit
nice work Max well thank you i I I'm glad to to
to I I'm glad to hear you David and I'm really grateful for your support and the
support of everyone that's you know ask me something or maybe wants to
share some advice or maybe they ask me some advice and
I open book for of my little knowledge to give
Thank you that's great thanks to you guys all right okay so um thanks again
and um I expect to see uh even more amazing shots from Maxi and all the guys
that come on to Global Star Party with their astrophotographs i I'm I'm always
uh transported like uh David was expressing here you know and certainly
Saturn uh for many many people that is the tipping point you see Saturn for the
first time and it almost looks like science fiction i mean you're just you just can't believe it you know so um and
I think u I think Michael Carol will agree with that um Michael you are up
next and uh it's great to have you on i I've seen some paintings that you've
done some illustrations you've done with um uh with Saturn and many other planets
uh and um you know you transport us and so thank you very much for all the great
work you do well thanks for having me on you know uh to me one of the planets
that gets the shortest shrift is Mercury it's a very difficult object obviously
um and uh Dave Iker could not be here tonight so I'm going to give a quick
plug for for his magazine Astronomy but this is also a plug for Mercury uh I did
an article uh this uh September issue uh on Mercury's hollows if anybody is
interested in taking a peek at that uh my talk is a little bit brief tonight uh
let me open up my keynote and share my
screen okay let's see if
Okay there we
go okay can you all see that yes sir all right here we go then exploring the
cosmic tapestry or how I and others got into this in the first place um this
will be a bit on the personal level because I've had some some questions lately from from uh folks um you know
the the sky is something that I love and I I come to that honestly my grandfather
was a general in the Air Force and uh responsible at one time for the uh
experimental aircraft uh my dad was a an engineer at what's now Loheed Martin for
32 years and he designed some of the very first designs for planetary probes
uh this is a cartoon he did making fun of all the instruments that they were
planning on uh proposing to put on this uh Venus probe the interesting thing is
as the the probe was finally designed they had more experiments on it than he
had in his cartoon so uh but one night he took me into his bedroom and he scred
around in his closet and dragged out some loose leaf pages from some old beat
up magazine i think it was uh look and uh in this magazine were these paintings
that just blew me away paintings by Chesley Bonestelle of the uh the birth
of the universe and uh the development of the earth uh Bonestelle went on to
paint a a lot of images that in fact have inspired an entire generation of
engineers if you talk to anyone on the Voyager uh project for example just
about all of them will say that Bonestelle is who got them into uh space
exploration so um wondrous things that that art can do for us people have been
of course depicting uh objects in the sky for a a very long time uh this is a
series of drawings of Mars and um people
uh like Lucien Rudau took it to the next level rudau was the director of the
Mudon Observatory in Paris France and he was also an oil painter he sat at the
telescope and without trying to jump to any conclusions tried to paint exactly
what he saw and what the the science behind that indicated was going on this
is a a painting of Mars seen from Deemos and the if if you take the the human uh
vision uh of about 40 degrees field of view uh Mars is just the right size in
the sky for Deemos he was very careful well the next step was dad bought us a
telescope my sister and me and uh we stuck it in the backyard and of course
in Colorado usually the best things to see happen in the dead of winter i don't
know if all of you have uh experienced that but it's it's very sad i don't know why the cosmos works that way uh but uh
the first thing I wanted to see was Mars now all of you with telescopes know what
a mistake this is mars is not an easy object it's it's a very difficult to see
and it was disappointing but what was not was what we have just been talking
about i loved all this talk about Saturn breathtaking in the telescope now we can
see cloud bands and moons and all those things from uh missions like
Cassini but seeing it in an eyepiece with your eye you you have a connection
to that object looking at the sky live uh there's nothing like it and and
Saturn definitely uh was an inspiration to me it was a heavy time uh the Soviets
uh returned the first images from the surface of the moon in 1966 uh two years before that a year and
a half about um Mariner 4 coasted by Mars and sent back
22 fuzzy images of uh the Martian surface um and it was uh it was a shock
uh people were not expecting craters although there there were some claims uh
by some astronomers that they had seen craters along the terminator of Mars um
but this made me get a little more serious of course about uh depicting things and and time went on and I
started to uh participate in studies of uh uh Mars settlements and and various
other things and we began to learn uh in
depth about how other planets worked and one thing we figured out was the that
the oblquity of Mars the the tilt of the Martian axis uh is pretty wild it tips
way over and this has a tremendous impact on the Martian climate this is
something this is one reason that we study the planets comparative
planettology the changing climate of Mars has given us insights into climate
change on Earth itself and so this is very very uh important uh axiom for uh
planetary science so uh the Viking and Mariner orbiters showed us uh bits of
hints of climate change on Mars big dried out flood planes and things and
and the theory in about 1976 to8 was that Mars's climate would
begin to warm again uh water would come up from the inside the climate would
completely change and if there was any dormant life it would come back and so this is a painting I did of uh the
Viking lander long in the future being used as nesting material by a Martian
bird that has come back as Mars warmed up highly scientifically accurate
obviously um we have now of course seen Mars up close uh and personal on the
surface with our uh beautiful rovers and landers and and we're able now to make a
little bit better guess as to what some of the shifts the changes in the history
of Martian climate uh have brought there's evidence of glaciation on Mars
of rock glaciers that may in fact be uh still active today uh obviously there
has been standing water we can see it morphologically but we can also see it
chemically by some of the data coming back from the rover so it's very
exciting to uh to see where Mars has been we're also of course learning about
the outer solar system here is uh one of my favorite spots Io from Galileo seen
by the Galileo spacecraft um but uh we're learning more and more about the
geology of other planets and moons and so we can look at geology on the earth
and uh make some uh draw some parallels here's a a volcanic crater Ubi Hei in
Death Valley uh and here is Io uh with ubi used as a uh caldera now uh from Io
Jupiter is spectacular um if uh if we take the painting as a a normal uh
typical 40deree field of view to the human eye jupiter is 19 a half degrees
that is 38 full moons 39 full moons across just spectacular you wouldn't
enjoy it for long the radiation will kill you in a couple hours but you would go out happy I think
so uh I have had the privilege of painting lots of different things for
for NASA and magazines and books and uh but it always always points me back to
the magnificence of the cosmos uh in in all its splendor all its glory
um the cosmos calls us out of ourselves and uh there is a spiritual dimension to
it uh for example the pillars of creation uh is named after a sermon that
was given in 1875 by Charles Spurgeon um about how uh
the the power of the divine holds together and sculpts the universe
beautiful beautiful idea um so here we are off to the ends of the
universe as uh as our travels take us not only uh across great distances but
across uh great spans of time we now have really good images of the central
hub of the Milky Way galaxy uh enough that I can make a pretty good guess as
to what it would look like from a nucleus of a comet passing by but we see
other things too things deeper in space and time uh the the entire universe
mapped uh across uh uh using cosmic rays and and various other things different
spectra um and to me uh this stuff all comes down
to something quite interesting uh there's something in science called
AAM's razor and basically what that says is if it waddles like a duck and quacks
like a duck it's probably not a kangaroo it's probably a duck
well the universe seems to uh waddle as if it has
been crafted it uh quacks as if it is in delicate balance in adjustment and so uh
we're left with uh wondering how that can be and of course there are many conclusions that can be drawn from that
people have been writing about it for thousands and thousands of years wherever you come down on the uh
spectrum of spirituality whether you're a um a skeptic or a person of faith uh
the universe calls us to look not only up and out but also to look in where did
we come from what are we doing here what is all this all about uh these are questions that are great to ponder uh
it's good to look out and to look in and the universe inspires us to do all those
things if you're interested in seeing a little more astronomical art or if you are interested in becoming a space
artist I'd encourage you to drop by the International Association of Astronomical
Artsa.org and I love to talk about this stuff there's a link to my email uh on
my website at carolspaceart.com love to have more
conversations uh scientific or spiritual so hope you can stop by and uh thank you
Scott so much for the opportunity and to explore scientific
all right thank you that was very kind thank you very much that's great
well um you know we have a couple of eclipses coming uh lot of astronomy if I
could interrupt for a second sure to to speak about what Michael has just
brought up and the the passion that he has for his astronomical art has just made me want to say that I
believe this is by far the finest global star party I've ever been to it is
emotional it is passionate it's driving me even further into the night sky and it's the
best thank you Scotty wow thank you thank you there's been some great global
star parties i And that that's a big compliment thank you very much David
thank you well okay so we are going to um we are going to uh talk to the person
that heads up the night sky network and the night sky network is an amazing organization that uh joins together very
similar to how the astronomical league ties together so many clubs the night sky network also ties together so many
amateur astronomers but also they're woven into programs with NASA as well uh
and Vivian is uh I can't think of a better uh person to lead that program uh
and she is with us tonight uh to talk about the eclipses and the eclipse
ambassador program that night sky network has so Vivian you got the uh you
got the stage a thanks so much for having me y'all it is so good to see your faces again i see um a lot of folks
I just saw at the Astronomical League convention not that long ago oh so what a treat to see you again and David Levy
you inspired so many people at the Astronomical League Convention you made me cry a couple of times in your talk um
speaking of astronomical inspiration that was just astounding thank you
thanks Vivian i have no poetry tonight but I just wanted to tell you a little bit about um
the Night Sky Network let me just share some screen here i think I can do this
for a slideshow let's see um I've been working at the night sky
network for um almost 20 years now uh
actually sorry no 18 years um and uh the night sky network however has been
around for 20 this year um and we work with amateur astronomy clubs all across
the US we are um NASA's uh connection to the amateur astronomy world and um I
work for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in San Francisco California i'm joining you from Berkeley this evening
from my kitchen um where dinner is cooking and um I'm having a lovely uh
time just listening to y'all so I'll tell you a little bit about what we do and I love questions so Scott or anyone
please feel free to interrupt at any point um and I'll I'll share some of what we're doing sure um my inspiration
for um loving on the night sky is I uh I was
I grew up in Nashville Tennessee and I was never expected to go to college that
was not my career path i grew up with a an amazing single mom who worked really hard to raise a couple of us and um when
I got out of high school just barely I um I went on and uh waited tables for a
long time and and um my only memory as a child of the
night sky was um in the car watching the moon follow us home and um thinking that
it was following just us like it was it was following us wherever we went it seemed like in the night sky and it's so
interesting um in my work today I have heard that exact story from um Tibetan
monks on horseback riding through the Himalayas i've heard that um from people
all over the world that they thought the moon was following just them home as a kid and I love that connecting um
thought that happens to kids all over the world which surprises me um I
eventually didn't have any kind of math and I was reading about physics and astronomy and um thought "Oh I should
probably go learn a little math and went to community college and just took an algebra course and fell in love um
started taking physics courses and astronomy courses and ended up getting a degree in astronomy from San Francisco
State University um here in San Francisco but um quite a bit later in
life and uh it has been the best decision I ever made i would not have
made that decision if if I were going to college at 18 i would have definitely probably chosen archaeology actually
which is another thing I really thought was interesting but wasn't calling to me at the time so um
I uh fell in love with the night sky for real when I joined an astronomy club
while I was in uh college and the San Francisco amateur astronomers were such
an inspiration to me and took me under their wing and um and I observed with
them from many locations all over California from Yusede they showed me dark skies and I still to this day do
not have my own telescope i borrow telescopes um from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific who who luckily
has quite a few that I can borrow um and from the East Bay Astronomical Society and the San Francisco amateur
astronomers so luckily I love astronomy clubs because I get to try out all different kinds of telescopes um many
astronomy clubs have loner programs so if you are um in an astronomy club or
near one I encourage you to check them out so that's kind of my story is of how I became inspired um and now I have what
I think is the best job in the whole wide world um I get to work uh the night
sky network which brings together astronomy clubs all across the US um and
uh let's see i'll tell you a little about them if this will Yeah so just a little about the night sky network we
like I said were established in 2004 um and we have almost 400 astronomy
clubs in the network all across the country you can see um about 11,000
amateur astronomers get our regular updates and um over the last 20 years
we've had almost 7 million visitors um who the astronomy clubs have told us they have interacted with we know this
is a much smaller number than it actually is we're estimating 10 to 20% we hear about but um we know that many
clubs are using the night sky network materials and I'll tell you a little about what we
offer um so we have these monthly astronomy webinars and I encourage you
they are um freely available on YouTube i'll throw some links in the chat in a little bit um uh there's a couple of
upcoming ones this week and next uh I just put those on there because I thought about it um if you look up night
NASA Night Sky Network on YouTube you can find us there and there's a lot of upcoming webinars um we also have uh the
clubs put up many many events that they're holding so if you were ever traveling somewhere in the US and you
think "Oh I bet there's an astronomy club around," you're probably right and also you might be able to find something
um that uh an event coming up while you're traveling which is really fun um
this is also how a lot of um the public are finding clubs these days there are a few different um lists out there but
because we have the clubs themselves update all of their events pretty regularly um it's a pretty good list of
upcoming clubs upcoming events that are happening um around the world we have you know 15 to 20 events on there every
day on average so quite a few events if you're looking for things also has all the major star parties and and things
like that on there um if you want to add We have a widget yeah that's on there too um we also
offer really good planner for anything that you plan to do in the night sky this is especially good for folks who
are new to astronomy who are looking for what to look for in the night sky or how to engage um what everything from
weather to um let's see uh you know what to see look for this week this tonight
this month um and uh and they're all kind of collected in one place so that's one of our most popular parts of our
website and is used quite a bit uh we also have a monthly article that we put out that's uh we have a lot of guest
writers who come and write for us this is an article that can be used in astronomy club newsletters so you're
welcome to use any of those um you can edit copy paste it comes with um
pictures it usually connects something that you see in the night sky with something that NASA's doing it's kind of
how we structure those but something that's fairly easy to see for a new for a beginner um and then we'll add in some
telescopic um treats as well in those so those are some about what we do we also
support um clubs we Oh wait this was not No this was at NE i was going to say oh
do I have a picture of us uh just recently at the Astronomical League Convention but that was the one before
um we support public engagement and we really try to um recognize public engagement as part
of what makes an astronomy club and many clubs have this in their charter but um
about well when I first started doing um amateur astronomy it didn't feel like
this was as valued as the observing piece of it or as um now as
astrophotography these are amazing images but this piece about getting the word out
to your community didn't seem like there was any way to kind of um uh value and uh give
um some sort of recognition to the people who were doing this so we created um some different pins that you can get
the Astronomical League now has a great outreach program i encourage you to also join that we by no means are boguarding
any of the um pins um but we have um pins that people are collecting they
have they show up to the astronomical league convention but they're whole um they have their astronomical league pins
on one side and all their night sky network pins on the other side and I am like the proudest uh person you could
ever imagine this kind of tells you of course during COVID it we took a hit because um because it kind of stopped
the public engagement for many places stopped and then it got really creative and I'm going to talk for a second about
that um uh but first maybe I can um tell
you about our newest program we have going on um this is the eclipse ambassador program and I'm really
excited about this one um so for NASA uh to engage folks along for the eclipse
most of the work that's being done is of course on the path of totality even on the path of annularity there's quite a
lot going on we have two eclipses coming up and I'll show you some about those in a moment that are going to be
crisscrossing the US in the next nine months I believe um we're getting really
close but the eclipse ambassador program is so exciting because this allows us to engage our communities before we skip
town for the eclipses so this is um getting our communities prepared because
we all know if you were um watching eclipses in 2017 we all know that um
about a week before it happens everybody calls you up and is like "Hey what is this i hear about an eclipse." Right um
and uh so and by that time we are all like packing for the road hopefully
going somewhere exciting or we have big plans um with ourselves our families or
um even some of the clubs were staying behind and showing off during the during
their telescopes during the partial phases but this eclipse ambassadors program is designed specifically to
engage your community before you the eclipses so um we partner amateur
astronomers or eclipse enthusiasts of any stripe with undergraduate students and this has to do with something that
we've also been hearing in the amateur astronomy world about how to you know we are graying as um a
community i've been here for 20 years and I'm getting so gray already um we are uh you know the amateur
astronomy community is in general older and whiter and maler than the average population and um and it's not because
we're not welcoming we have been we are incredibly welcoming as a community that is what brought me into amateur
astronomy in my mid20s um just the kindness and helpfulness of the the
community so we are um trying to bring in some more younger faces into our
favorite hobby so this is part of that so we partner Eclipse Enthusiasts with undergraduate students we give you all
the training you might need give you all the classes and activities that you can do um and we get you set up to reach out
to your community before the eclipses so I encourage you all if you have any interest um it's a it's not a heavy lift
and it's a really fun community of uh eclipse enthusiasts so please join us
it's eclipse ambassadors.org it's easy to find um and we have a goal of
reaching a thousand people um signing up a thousand people we have about uh half of that
currently so we are looking for as many of you who are interested we'd love to have you um you can go to I'll also
throw in the chat our uh link to the map where you can see if there's maybe an
undergraduate near you who could use um a partner who knows a little about eclipses and might want to mentor them
um the amateur astronomers are also being mentored by the undergraduates it's been a really cool uh experience to
watch the how they've been teaching each other about all the different um things
a lot of the amateur astronomers are uh for example um learning about you know
what it's like to be an undergraduate student a lot of these students have just come out of COVID so they don't
have a lot of experience doing public engagement and it's been pretty interesting to watch them get to experience the oo and a's of that for
the first time so it's pretty exciting it's a it's a pretty cool campaign so I encourage you I'm going to hop out of
here and see if I can share um is there anybody okay go and no questions yet i
was just going to show you some of the cool things that we did uh
during the pandemic because this is one of my favorites so we put out um uh toolkits
for amateur astronomers this is through the NASA Night Sky Network and we put out toolkits that help you explain
common things that you happen to be talking about tonight for example like all of the different filters that you're
using or or the different ways in which we use filters to talk about light and
how we combine different filters to make different kinds of um images so this is a really fun one and if you have your
phone available it's worth trying this out um it's not just for kids um when we
do this in person we have actual filters um that you can see on the bottom left here they're little handheld filters
that you can look at these images with because we are not in person I encourage
you to take your phone if you haven't used a QR code before usually you can just hit your um uh the camera and try
and take a picture of this QR code i'll give you just a minute to get started um this was part of a toolkit that we put
out in 2020 um terrible timing for hands-on activities because uh we
couldn't use them but we made this virtual adaptation so that you could use it in presentations just like this one
so if I'll give you another maybe 30 seconds and um tell you about the big
astronomy project this was one of our projects we did with the night sky network and this has to do with all of the big telescopes in Chile and um talks
about how they use uh different kinds of light in order to um get this amazing uh
the images that they get uh from these big telescopes so is everybody ready anybody have a give me a thumbs up you
want to see did anybody get to download this it's a it's a pretty I got it i got it just say yes to whatever it's asking
yes yes yes great all right so you might want to take your phone right now you
see these pictures right here and we've got um just a color wheel on the right
and on the left we have the spectra of Vega um and we use those color wheels to
talk about you can just kind of take some time to explore if you have filters you can just do that too if you have any of your filters for your eyepiece you
can use that um but on this you can see what the different filters are doing and
this just kind of allows anyone to play around with what So what do filters do
um and if I could see the chat I would uh feel free to type things in or talk
about what you're seeing when you use a red filter or a green filter or a blue filter you can even just start with
those but then there's the extra one where you can get a little crazy i would start with the red green and blue all of
these uh slides are available i'll show you where to find them um and now
um so we talk about here how filters can be used to decode the
universe so you try that red green and blue filter that you just pulled up on your phone and see if you can I like
that find the hidden message i'm not gonna tell them don't tell
anyone no no don't tell anybody take your time um but so filters help us
decode they they tell us about what's happening at different wavelengths we can go into all sorts of
detail there so I don't think that I have very neat find it oh
um and then we talk about how we actually use different colors to representational colors when we have uh
images that are taken in wavelengths that our eyes can't see so this one here um is taken in radio and infrared
optical ultraviolet x-ray and we can see by using those filters which um of these
are uh being highlighted and how there's a great um website from uh I believe
it's from NO called coloring the universe and don't quote me on that i I'll look
it up when I'm done um that allows you to make these beautiful pictures from all the different wavelengths um put
together so I think that was Oh yeah oh here it is national radio astronomy Observatory so it's just
public.no.edu/color great i'm glad I had that on there but it allows you to kind of play with it like u like you would do
it's a very simple entry into some of the bigger concepts that you use uh when you're
doing the astrophotography and it's very fun to play with you can make all sorts of different pictures and they've got like the Whirlpool Galaxy they've got
lots of nebula that that look pretty amazing and I think that was this is from a larger I'm just grabbing a bunch
of different presentations I've given hold on let me see i was going to show you that because that was really fun
yeah that was fun how much time do I have Scott you can cut me off at any point
uh we are at 8:05 right now we have been running a little bit behind but um
that's fine it's fascinating hours you have hours left don't tempt me
David i could talk all night um I uh just encourage you all to enjoy um
talking to the public even if perhaps they're not um as knowledgeable as you might hope oh
we have Oh great we got lots of questions um uh so a lot of people are coming at astronomy from a place of
curiosity from a place of we don't often teach astronomy in school right so a lot
of people come to this on their own and there's a lot of misconceptions out there and there's a lot of um you know
YouTube channels that are not actually real astronomy so be gentle with the
people who have heard many different things about astronomy or who are excited about astrology even and don't
know the difference or um you know come to you and think maybe they saw a UFO
they're coming to you with curiosity i encourage you to to really try and bring
them into the fold as opposed to making them feel really silly because it's very easy to do when you do know um as much
as many of you know uh about astronomy so I I just um want to put that plug in
because I really love to watch the curiosity bloom and I think that we have this unique position to do that as
amateur astronomers so thanks y'all great advice that is great advice any uh
comments from our other presenters here yeah I have one as usual i've just This
is actually my first acquaintance with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in about 15 years since I used to be on
their board but Vivian you have helped capture the magic of why groups like the
ASB are so important yes but while I've got the floor I'd like to say so one other thing about
Michael which preceded your presentation and he mentioned uh archaeology as being an interest of his
and if we go back into history into the early part of the 20th century Harlo Shapley was trying to
figure out what he wanted to take in college and he had no idea so he looked up everything
in the um in the uh calendar that that Harlo had put out as to what courses they had
first thing he came up with is archaeology harlo could not pronounce it so he went to the second thing which was
astronomy and he said "Okay I can pronounce that that's what I'm going to do." And I just thought I'd share that
with you but back to the uh I think the ASB is one of the great organizations
in the in astronomy these days and uh I understand it was founded for an eclipse
of the sun was in the United States in the late 19th century and uh really grew up into the
wonderful organization that it is today excellent presentation
david thank you so much it is such a pleasure to work with you all get to see you all the time
great okay well thank you thanks again it's a real honor to have you Vivian and
um uh you know we encourage everybody out there to become an eclipse ambassador you know because this is your
chance to get out there and really uh engage the um the general public in a
very important way so uh our next speaker is uh Leon
Garcia and Leon uh has been on a couple of times uh he is he is um not not new
to uh uh astronomy and astronomy and astrophysics but uh I think he's really
coming on the scene here uh for us as u amateur astronomers and students of
astronomy and so Leon thank you very very much for coming on to Global Star
Party again um and I'm going to turn it over to you man
well thank you so much for having me back on uh before I begin my presentation I'd just like to say these
have been uh phenomenal presentations that I I I've seen today and
uh it's it's been really nice to see what everybody's put together and Vivian that was wonderful and I I'm definitely
going to try and get involved with the night sky network and also uh for the earlier presentation that uh talked
about putting the message in the bottle on the Europa clipper I went right to the website and put my name right in
there so that I could uh be be a small part of that and um I I hope to convince you uh
you all tonight to join just uh one more scientific effort or at least to have
some interest in maybe something that you haven't seen before um
you are muted Leon there we go okay i I'm
sure all right
so today I'm uh going to talk about a research group that I was a part of uh
and have been a part of for the past two years known as Nanogra or the North American Nanohertz Observatory for
gravitational waves uh but nanogra is a cooler and shorter name that stands in
its place and um what nanograph's purpose is is to form a uh galaxywide
gravitational wave detector or a pulsar timing array and they work together with
a bunch of other international organizations in order to do this on a global scale and uh before I get into
that I'd like to talk about what a gravitational wave is first a gravitational wave is uh one of the key
predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity which is that uh spaceime can is is not a stagnant thing
it's something that can ripple and be bent by objects that are massive and
that accelerate rapidly and uh produce imperfections in spaceime which uh
propagate at the speed of light much in the same way that light waves do except
they uh fundamentally disrupt to the fabric of space as we know it so they're really cool and uh we uh know about a
couple different things uh from our existing experiments uh that produce gravitational waves um not cosmic
strings that's more of a theoretical prediction which I'll get to a little bit later um which are black hole
binaries which are these massive black holes that are uh inspiring or circling
each other until they merge and then when they merge they release immense amounts of gravitational waves in all
directions in spiraling neutron stars which are dead collapsed stars that are so dense that uh a teaspoon of their
matter would uh be as heavy as Mount Everest and are only the size of the
city uh they collide together in some of the most massive explosions in the
universe that are uh releasing more energy than the sun does in its entire
lifetime in a matter of seconds and these explosions are violent enough uh to create gravitational waves that reach
across uh galaxies and we're able to detect here on Earth and uh these
particular types of dead stars also have imperfections where when they rotate some do so so violently that they
release gravitational waves in all directions uh and finally these cosmic
strings are a prediction of uh our earliest theories of how the universe
formed uh by inflating rapidly and this caused potential breaks in the super
symmetry of spaceime and create long lines of uh protonsized matter that uh
extend almost on galactic scales and I I I noticed that there was some commotion
uh out and if somebody has a question feel free to interrupt me during the presentation because I can't see the the
zoom okay but uh much like light
gravitational waves have different frequencies and that's why we have a bunch of different experiments to kind
of get at different parts of this gravitational wave spectrum so we have terrestrial inner vererometers like LIGO
Virgo and Kagra to get out um lower uh or higher frequency gravitational waves
coming from uh neutron stars supernova and merging black holes we have
space-based intererometers planned like LISA that are supposed to detect lower
frequency gravitational waves um and that mission is going to go up in 2037
hopefully and uh we also have ways of looking at the universe in its earliest
stages like the cosmic microwave background uh to determine how gravitational waves interacted with one
another in the early universe and the talk today uh is is about pulsar timing
arrays which is pointing radio telescopes up at uh very reliable cosmic clocks called pulsars um that have a way
of telling us if a gravitational wave has shifted uh the fabric of spaceime in between us and them
the first of uh the experiments that I discussed was uh the LIGO Virgo Kagra uh
collaboration and basic basically what LIGO is is it's a large scale
interpherometer on Earth which is uh physics speak for shooting a laser
through a beam splitter down long tubes uh bouncing the laser back and forth over 300 times and uh determining if the
space between the laser at the front or in this building and the mirror at the
end has shifted in some very small way uh o over the time that the laser took
to uh travel down this vacuum tube and this allows us to uh not only sense a
gravitational wave it also uh allows us to sense gravitational waves in the surroundings which is uh one of the
tasks of the engineers at these sites is to eliminate background noise from many of the processes on Earth that create
gravitational noise that disrupts these detectors and um we had the privilege at
Elcon of visiting LIGO Livingston where there's frequent log logging operations
in the area that cause uh rumbling that can affect the sensitivity of the gravitational wave detectors
there but these detectors are across the globe there's one in uh Hanford
Washington one in Louisiana one in Pisa Italy and then one under a mountain in
Japan um and there's also one planned for India using the same components that
were used to build Hanford and Livingston and that one's uh planned for
a state in the west of India that would situate it perfectly uh to build a
global network of gravitational wave detectors where if you use them all in tandem operating at the same time that
allows us to uh have a better way of localizing on the sky where a
gravitational wave signal is coming from so if it passes through one detector slightly before another it allows us to
determine where on the Earth or on our sky that gravitational wave is coming from which is really really cool and why
we should constantly be investing in more gravitational wave infrastructure because these things tell us a lot about
how the universe formed that we weren't getting 40 years ago or even 10 years ago because the first gravitational wave
detection from uh LIGO Hanford and Livingston was uh only back in about
2015 where there was a merger of two uh large black holes that was detected
simultaneously and provided um strong evidence in support of Einstein's theory
of relativity um and that was over 100 years later which is really cool in
physics to to have a theory that stands unproven for a very long time and then a
hundred years later gets proven by an experiment which it's cool costs billions of dollars to
build and I've had the privilege this summer of touring two out of four of G
Earth's gravitational wave detector and uh it looks like I did it wearing the exact same shirt so you can't really
tell that it's in two different locations but uh maybe I could wear this
shirt uh to LIGO India when that opens up uh but I did have a really great time uh
uh viewing all of these really complex instruments that uh do various things to the beams of light that they shoot down
the tubes uh to detect gravitational waves and it it's a really cool
experience and everybody uh if they're in the area of one of these gravitational wave detectors should go
on uh one of the free tours that they offer to the public because they're really great with their public outreach
and um taking a little bit uh of time off Earth uh to our our future
space-based uh gravitational wave detector LISA we uh recently uh sent up
a Pathfinder mission or our initial kind of probe to look at a location where we're planning on putting Lisa which is
going to be basically LIGO but with three arms uh arranged in a triangle
over much longer distances ligo is LIGO's arms each are about um 2 and a
half kilome kilometers uh to the midpoint so four kilometers uh to 5 km
long and these are millions of kilometers uh in in scale so they're
able to detect a different frequency a lower frequency of gravitational waves that pass through them and uh this this
GIF at the left kind of shows how the this the warping of spaceime would
affect uh the laser's path or uh the arrival t time of the signals between
these different observing stations that would allow us to detect uh both where a gravitational wave is coming from and
that one one has actually passed through the detector and I think it's worth
saying that this is a little bit of an exaggeration of what's going on because uh space is uh many times stronger than
steel so it's very brittle and gravitational waves are not as extreme as this is
showing but the the mechanism that they're using to detect the gravitational wave in this planned
mission is fundamentally the same as what they they're doing at LIGO right now which is shooting lasers and
determining arrival times and this uh this method can also be um or excuse me
I shouldn't get to that slide yet but this uh this method allows us to uh to
look at a different frequency of gravitational waves and also um this
orbiter is going to be completely undisturbed of the gravitational waves
that uh kind of influence our everyday life on Earth like trucks passing nearby
by um groundbased detectors that could disrupt uh daily operations and having
it in the middle of space in in Earthleading orbit at Lrange 0.1 which is basically uh a parking spot in space
that allows it to orbit from a constant distance uh in front of Earth allows us
to uh have a more sensitive gravitational wave detector and another way that we've uh
been able to indirectly detect gravitational waves is by looking at the
cosmic microwave background which is uh leftover radiation from the big bang and
this radiation was shaped by many forces in the early universe um including dark
matter which I I talked about in uh my last talk two talks on here uh but it
was also shaped by gravitational waves um which it have contributed to the the
various shapes that we see uh in terms of uniform temperature and density um
when we look way back in spaceime and we can precisely determine the effects of
gravitational waves by using these vector operations um which are are kind
of illustrated here but are a little bit complex to go into in this particular
talk but when we point telescopes uh at this uh this leftover radiation we can
actually really accurately determine the effects of gravitational waves in the early universe and for more on that uh
you can look at this website uh the Harvard cosmic microwave background group has uh great research on this
particular effect of gravitational waves and that's uh the cosmic microwave
background is like using a universewide gravitational wave detector and uh
LISA's like using a or the laser interferometer space antenna is like
using um kind of much greater than the length of a planet
and LIGO is like using uh a couple football fields worth of arm length but
uh what this presentation is about is uh pulsar timing rays which is using a
galaxywide gravitational wave detector which allows us to reach into the nanohertz frequency which has a lot of
really cool and interesting phenomena that we've been missing by uh solely focusing on other gravitational wave
frequencies and we build this gravitation uh this
gravitational wave detector that's a ga uh as wide as our galaxy using these
things called pulsars which are collapsed dead stars that are so dense
that um that if you stood on their surface you would be um basically turned into a
puddle by their gravity not not by their temperature and uh they're only about
the size of a city they're formed but when super massive stars collapse and uh
push neutrons protons and electrons uh together to form this neutron-based
matter and they conserve angular momentum meaning that they're they're a large uh slowly rotating object that
quickly collapses to a small fastly ro quickly rotating object which uh allows
them to uh rotate very quickly and occasionally they emit beams of uh radio
waves out from their magnetic north and south poles which sweep across Earth and
act like lighouses or these cosmic clocks which are incredibly accurate and
precise and um allow us to both determine the location of the pulsar and
um keep a very detailed account of how space is shifting in between the pulsar
and us and um we we form arrays uh by
discovering more and more of these pulsars and keeping accurate data on the
arrival time of their pulses so th this allows us to lengthen our arms of our
gravitational wave detector out onto galactic scale and uh we use a bunch of
radio telescopes keep them pointed at these pulsars and potentially discover more which means that we have a lot of
data which I'll get to a little bit later that that needs to be sorted through uh by citizen scientists and we
add more pulsars to the array uh keep accurate data and um we determine our
observed versus expected arrival time of these pulses to get gradual ripple
effects across our galaxy that can be attributed to gravitational waves and
those are um computed by summing up all the resid res residuals of uh the pulse
arrival times and um aggregating them so that we get a better picture of how space is
moving and uh nanorav is the North American section of that pulsar timing
array so each each kind of section of the sky is reserved to a different collaboration there's the European
pulsar timing ray the Eurasian pulsar timing ray and uh several others across
the world that each have their section of the sky and their radio telescopes pointed at their pulsars and gather data
independently share it with one another and um it can can form a great picture
of how our galaxy is uh having
gravity pass is the North American version of that it's funded by the NSF and it has
these four uh telescopes now now only three after the collapse of Aerosibo observatory um which gave us a lot of
data and it's very unfortunate that we're not able to keep it open but this is the Chime observatory in Canada which
is uh the newest of these three that are currently operational the VA in New
Mexico and the Greenbank uh 200 meter telescope in uh Greenbank West Virginia
and uh the culmination of uh all of nanograph's efforts uh came this summer
uh in the form of the 15-year data set which is uh 15 years of data on 67
pulsars which um made massive strides towards a uh confident detection of uh
gravitational wave background which is basically if we're in a room and there's
uh and I'm having a conversation with you that's more like LIGO and uh and
Lisa what what's being detected but there's a lot of other conversations or murmurss that are going on in the
background that we aren't able to tease out at our given wavelengths because we're not honed in on it but
um we can ultimately uh hone in on it by looking at uh pulsar timing array in
theory however we haven't um quite reached the detection threshold but we are gain aining significant evidence
from the 15-year data set um we're just a.3 sigma off from our desired uh
detection threshold which is five sigma or five standard deviations above the norm so we are very close but um we
still need more pulsars for the pulsar timing array and more data to make a definitive um a definitive detection of
this gravitational wave background which would tell us about how the universe was behaving immediately after the big bang
and the ripples that were produced from it potentially isolate cosmic uh the
effects of cosmic strings and rips in the fabric of intergalactic space that came with rapid inflation in the early
universe and mergers of super massive black holes uh at the centers of galaxies which are critical to the
formation and evolution of uh the early universe telling us how many galaxies were merging at a given stage of
universal development um all of this we could learn from this stochcastic background and we can think of it like a
I I have a lot of metaphors for this because this was covered a lot in the news um recently and it was described in
at great length for the general public where LIGO's kind of like the violins in the orchestra they get to play the
melody and Lisa will be the violist in the future and and the bass players are more like the background of of all this
this uh this is what we want to isolate and um these three and other
phenomen quite an impact uh in popular media it was surprising to me uh how how
much this was picked up by major news outlets like the New York Times Washington Post uh and pretty much every
every other major news outlet earlier this summer and uh they interviewed two
uh many of them interviewed two professors who are at the university in my town uh and who I've been involved uh
with their group um and Jeff Hasbun and Jav Seammens who both contributed
immense amounts of their uh time and career to this entire effort and um it's
it's been really great to see this pay off and and what it's it's done for Oregon State which hosted the the Global
Nanograph Conference earlier this year and um it and now you're probably wondering
what you can do to get involved with this um massive groundbreaking effort and um I'm happy to say that there's a a
lot of ways where you can sort um pulsar timing data and also sort pulsar
candidate data uh with with just a little bit of training you can get um
trained in uh in access to large data sets where uh they're relatively easy to
decipher they just require pattern recognition and um access to a computer
and stable internet service and the pulsar search collaboratory is one example of this there are others
um which are aiming at broadening access to this exciting new uh new field of
gravitational wave astronomy and uh also there are nanograph chapters all across
the US and there are more opening up every day so uh I I welcome you all to
uh look at look at these resources and to um get involved with this effort
thank you so much thank you very much uh Liam that's great uh really fascinating
and quickly what is that website again for the pulsar
the the pulsar science collaboratory.nav I'll just drop it in
the chat yeah drop it in the chat and I'll paste it into the U all right Leon thank you so much uh we
are going to move on to um Daniel Bar who's been uh waiting here with with us
um Daniel thank you for coming on to Global Star Party tonight
you are thank you Scott there you go anyway uh thank you Leon enjoyed it not
to throw any shade on LIGO my friend i think you'll find the first person to prove distortion of spaceime was in 1919
Arthur Edington the eclipse expedition to the island of Prince Seep and he
showed that the stars were actually out of position due to the sun's gravitation but LGO did it on the
century mark which was awesome anyway uh I wanted to just I wanted to I I saw so
much of my talk going by um this evening and people were talking about Saturn and
I'm hoping um this is uh my notes book from uh a while back and yes I still go
out and I sketch and uh let's see I had another one bookmarked here oh dear i'll
let that go anyway um I think about how I got started in
astronomy i was like other people said I was a boy of about 10 uh didn't have a
dad around at my house for a lot of my childhood but my best friend's dad was the uh Episcopalian priest in town and
Father Bet had a telescope which I thought was just enormous uh I saw it
years later um uh my pal inherited it from his dad it was one of these uh I
think it was a Tasco um and it was an F15 uh 60 millimeter 900 millimeter
focal length and an equatorial mount with a little windup clock drive it was a 1960s special and the glass was quite
good um but when I saw that I just started bugging Father Bet can we try
your telescope can we can we can we and um some of you know me and you know 10
year olds picture me as a 10-year-old i was a nightmare and finally one night um the
the father said "Yes of course um let me call parents in the neighborhood and we'll go out." And it was a nice summer
night we went out in the yard by the rectory and the moon was out we looked at the moon and I don't know there were
about 20 people there to start with in about half an hour it was me and and
father and we looked at the moon we looked at different things what's that yellow one and he says "Well you can
operate it now i've shown you how go ahead and find it." And it was Saturn
and you set the hook you set the hook for life and my life changed entire that
night i didn't know it as a kid i didn't know it he didn't know
it i told him about it years later when he was in his 90s made him very happy but you know so
many times we go out and somebody I've often called any telescope is a party in
a box if you set it up where anybody can see it people will wander over to you and you know the first thing I ask is
"What are you looking at can I have a go?" And well sure those interactions are never
wasted never never never and you you throw that seed out and you have no idea
if it's going to grow if when and I've had thousands of people come through my classroom to take an astronomy class
with me over the years i've heard from some of those people but I got to think that for a lot of people I dropped a
seed maybe that would come back and bloom for them later in life so I want to just encourage everybody continue
with that outreach don't just set up your telescope you know in a lonely
observatory but sometimes take a small grab and go and you know go have a
dinner at a beastro patio restaurant and then whip out your binocular on your
tripod and look at the moon and draw a crowd because you never know you never
know that one little kid who needs a chair to stand on can I have a look sure we'll get a chair for you how does it
look the kid just goes "Wow." Yeah i've had students cry when I showed them
Saturn they they wept because they realized "I'm really seeing it and it's
really there and it's that one and I'm seeing it and the rings are real."
So go forth my friends and uh spread the joy okay take your next time sometime
sometime before the summer is over take your telescope out where other people can get to you yes you know uh don't be
unsafe take a friend but by all means take your telescope out and just set it
up on a street corner one day when you can see the moon set it up in a parking lot and uh have a go draw a crowd have
some fun anyway thanks everybody thank you Daniel thank you very much all right
um our next speaker is uh Nicholas Aras and Nico
um you have got the stage here thank you for coming on to the
127th Global Star Party hi Scott hi everyone i was really missing the that
GSP nights and I'm really happy to be to be back and I was thinking about what
Daniel says about Saturn and I I think that from the beginning of this GSP we
go on back with the Saturn observation changes uh and everyone
remembers the first time you observe Saturn on the telescope is stunning
well let me share my screen
okay okay is there yes sir
okay well uh tonight I I will I I like to to talk about uh what can I do what
can everyone's do with a when you have any telescope in my case I really enjoy
and love making astronomy with adopsonian and as I say no new track
telescope and um I think that it's really amazing not
only for observation but uh to think that what can I do
uh that might photography or planetary imaging or lunar imaging but also uh you can do
some science with any telescope not not need to be a dosonian telescope it could
be an equatorial mount with no tracking or with motors or with any scope uh but
I I center in what kind of uh things that I can do with my tenish
dosonian and uh I found that not only you can do some observation or imaging
planets and lunar or the sun with the right filters but you can do astrometry as I
talk many times about the double stars that I
measure sometimes with asteroids but also you can do some astrophotography
not at the that kind of astrophotography with long exposures because the the
obvious movement and rotation but you can do a lot of
astrophotography and also I am making new test on photometry with the with my
dosonian and I think that the the the the most important thing is to know your
setup you to to to try and make test and
and go and to find the limits of your scope and the camera that you are using
h for example for astrometry or photo of photo photometry you need to know about
uh the focal length and the camera to know how much field of view you can use
and how much exposure times you you can do a a very short exposures but to find
the the right h the right setup for getting the best
results And well as I show in many presentations
uh I really love to to do planetary imaging with my moving the scope with my hand this is
a those are amazing a few planetars imaging from the the few past
weeks you can you can see Saturn with tis that little dot right there
uh well Jupiter that here uh we have a very low altitude it's really really
difficult to to get uh some details this year but uh I hope to to get some good
seeing nights or mornings and this is Venus a few weeks ago uh and this uh
particularly machine of Venus was taken on daylight about uh 3 p.m on the
afternoon uh it was very difficult to find it because I was blocking the the
sunlight with a with a with a wall in my in my yard
but uh this is one kind of thing that you can do with any scope and you need no
tracking you keep recording videos and keep moving the setup and then you can
use a lot of uh free softwares to center the the the frames when the planet are
the the planet is in the in the screen and you can stack and get this kind of
images uh well you can do as I said before some photography this was uh
using the SB Bony uh SB 3005
uh that is a color uh camera and this is all using the same technique that we can
use for lunar or planetary that is called lucky imaging that is you set up
the camera in very short exposure times maybe 100 milescs for 100 and a half and
you record a lot of images and then try to align and stack with you can use the
today there is a lot of uh free softwares uh to to do this this alignment and
stacking and uh well this was taken with the with QY fiber camera this is a
monochromatic camera uh you can you can see the the small field of view because the the the
focal length this is a a globular cluster and the planetary nebula
NGC6818 this was all with the same technique using really short
exposures and stack maybe 300 or 400
frames to get this this kind of images and as I say I was moving on on
how to do some photometry with with a with
good information on the images and I found that with that short exposures in
Sharkup you can do some live stacking so this this image is a five 15 seconds
live stacking with subs of 100 milesc is really really short
exposures and this h this is the the core of the galaxy NGC
6684 in Pavo constellation and I was making some test
to see what kind of of data I get from that live stack
and I found that you can do uh really nice measures
for stars with magnitudes from 9 to maybe 14 magnitude
you can see this is a a capture of the the the information of that star
that use using the SE plot that is a a free software to to get
the stars informations to to make the the comparison of the photometry this is
this green dot is that star and I was using them to use like a
calibration star for reference star and I was making this kind of of
testing i I can get the the magnitude with a little difference of magnitude
maybe decimal difference and so this is a comparison start of 10th
magnitude and I make the the successfully measure of the the core of
the galaxy that was a magnitude of
12.3 you can see it's not a perfect precise measure but if
this is only one image on a random night
so I will keep looking the how to to make a a better photometry with the with
the dosonian so what is next uh I I will
start uh making my my list of object objectives uh making my my observational
plans and try to measure some eclipsing binaries and I will return with the
observation of asteroids so to to make a a lot
of the photometry but that is a field that I
I do not do it a lot in that field but
you can so uh this is the the end of the
presentation and this is a another thing that I I found that you can do with the
the non-tracking dosonian that's absolutely awesome you know I
think so many people are so inspired that you are able to do so much with uh
this system you know and uh we recognize you as a master of being
able to push your telescope and doing this so it's there's some skill involved here uh for sure it's a it's really fun
because you are working all the time with the the scope you you are not right
making the plan of capture just run away you got to be there right i I really I
really get fun with this and is that's the the main idea that to to show
everyone that no matter what what is the scope that you can get there is always
something that you can do uh so you you need to to learn and and keep working
wonderful wonderful well I as you u as you get more into photometry and stuff
it'll be great to have uh I think a presentation just on that so yes yes yes
i that is my my intent to to make progress on that and update this and I
like your little logo here life's too short for small apertures yes that is I
will make a shirt for the next GSP excellent okay thank you everyone thanks
have a good night Nico okay our next speaker is um Marello Souza marello is a
professor of physics in Brazil uh and he is also the editor of Sky's Up magazine
um it's great to have you on yet again you've been on almost every Global Star
Party Marello thank you so much for being part of this one too thank you very much for the invitation it's quite
ever it's a great pleasure to be here nice to meet all of you thank you i I
I'll talk now about the Brazilian constellations let me share my screen if
my computer work well today everything I can show
everything here yeah here is the major i will begin
with this image of our events because here you can see the southern
cross behind us and I will talk about
this how part of the
Brazilians saw the constellations in the sky then here is the region where you
have scorpios the southern cross su then
in this region that they saw many different two different constellation here but before I talk about then I talk
about the history we have this person that was respons responsible for the
first book that he he bought what the Brazilian
engines saw in the sky and his name is a
a French priest cloud devil he wrote this book the history of the
mission of the capin i forgot here to put here in
this history of the mission of the capin fathers on the island of Marina yeah
Maron i stayed here in Brazil because the capital of Maron is is an Iceland
and neighboring lands and he talk with the indigenous that he lived there and
he has a major catalog with 30
constellations and I I knew the now this was in six 16 12 the first edition of
the book then we have now a Brazilian physicist that's his name
Bruno he's not more ref but he came from
his grandparents was indigenous and then he
turned the work to know more about the
constellations from a part of the Brazilian indigenous most of them live in the south region of Brazil in his
work and then what they saw they saw This this is the most famous
constellation from the what is the difference between what this indigenous
saw and what how that we see the constellations they here is the
milkway and here near the southern cross the alpha of southern cross you have the
I don't know how to say in English in Portuguese something a bag of kof is is
something like this cosac cosac in English yes yes the reason that is dark
here and they use the different brightness of the
milkway to build the constellations in the sky then this region is the red of a
bird a big bird in Brazil that is the same like that you have in Australia that is we call here
and the alpha and beta from
San eggs that this bird was eating and
the scorpus here was the bottom part of the the birds and here is a
another Brazilian animal i will show here that is easy
with the milk here you see the red of this bird here in this region where you
have the southern cross i will return to the southern
cross because we have a clock you can use the southern cross as a clock and I
will show how that we use this and and I am showing again each region we have the
southern cross of beta centers here is the different regions of the milkway
here and then this b is here is is a different way to to see
constellations in the sky that this Brazilian Indian used Here is also uh
this region you have to ta here the players and here al they s here and the
play is here but what is something that's different from us because they
saw two constellations in this region two different one here is a bird but I
will show one that have a history about this at the same region but here have
the Orion here Taurus played and here is one of
the most famous that's the old man here they have a different history
about him I have here they they the history is about the this contriation
represents a man whose wife was interested his brother to be with her
brother-in-law the wife of his man killed her her husband
cutting off his leg the gods took pit on her husband and turn him into a
constellation and here what you see here is that the bit of juice that's a red
star is the region where they she cut the leg of the man that is the old man
and here the players is a the bees nest is a lot here
they saw a lot of bees here where you have the be the the players that is I
had the the red of the old man here i I have a best this a better illustration
what they saw something different from what we see
here different here
see part of something that the old man used to fight that's not they didn't
draw here but this is constellation and here is southern cross and a friend sent
to me this yesterday this clock that you can use you can print and use this
southern cross to know the time the exact time how that this work you have
three parts here this one you have the months here you have the hours then this
circle here you can see my my mouse no you can see my mouse i'll
change it here to see if it's possible to show my mouse but can you see my
mouse i will say yes okay here you have the this second one see you put in front
of this one and this arrow here you put in position the day and the month and
this one here you put in front of this one and here you have the line of the
hours you put this draw in the same position that you see the southern hand
cross in the sky then is this here like this here is in August and then you put
this one here in almost the same position of the southern cross and here
this line gives you time then is something very useful for
us and we are printing a lot of this to
give to the students now I saved this yesterday this different
clock and only in the beginning of the summer that will not work because you
can't see the southern cross here in Brazil in the beginning of the summer then but in almost all the year you can
use in the beginning of the night it's cold something
different and I show now a video that He he called a a member of our astronomy
club during the night saw the sky with different colors and you need to to
organize an investigation here to know what's happened let me see if you know
what's happened here i'm showing here the video is the
entrance of the city this is almost 300 a.m in the morning here is the entrance
of the city you see the the sky we have this color five
times have another time that you have the the sky blue
moment you see again the sky blue again yes
and we we had we tried many things to understand what happened
here we try it's very difficult to be a m but who
knows and we try to find an explanation for this why this guy so blue so many
times five times anyone know what happened
we we know we know now we know because the same thing happened in United
States in New York this that happened to understand what happened and then
we made an investigation and we have an official answer about what happened and
unfortunately is not something from space
yeah if you see in your city I will share here a
video and I show my screen i share my screen you'll see what's
happening okay here on a
moment I'm sharing my screen okay I share the screen here is this what
happened and something curious this is is reason that I'm showing
um what happened that I can't wait a moment because I don't know what's
happen ah here I found okay yeah can you see it's coming
i'll move you here
am in New York happen the same thing there was a transform explosion in New
York that did this here then when we saw this we made contact with the power
company of our seats and they said that was why not
transform explosion like what's happening in New York but something that
happened with the power station here that we have the same results here you
see the sky blue what's happening here
it's not this sorry it's not this they changed the video i don't know what happened it's
another video but was a power explosion you can
see this is in New York time you only need to to put in blue sky in New York
is the same that you saw [Music] here this is what I'd like to to show
today thank you very much for the invitation thank you very much thank you sometimes
what happened didn't come from from the space that's true well we're in space
right i mean yes it's still from space I guess
so um uh Marello could you put into the chat uh a link where people could
download the um uh the uh Southern Crossfinder um yes I I I
I because in my email I I don't have it online okay but
since I soon I have it's online I send to you the link okay sounds good okay
thank you so much okay my pleasure to be here all right so we are staying down in
the southern hemisphere and uh we are going to um visit down in Argentina
again and I think we have u Cesar cesar did
you get some clear skies
uh no no because you can see the
Oh it clouded up on you okay fortunately yes I have something in the
screen let me show you okay a live image
is ever ever a live image is okay it's something that Let me put the image only
to one second is much better maybe for
centering let me check
here and that
[Music] We can see your screen sharing pretty good uh your Yeah internet speed is not
real fast today but uh the screen looks great yes
yes you can see you can see the image yes i don't know why let me put
again in the center because was tracking very very well you know but now
is a typical thing when you need that the things when you need it to work when
you need it to work i've been there many times yes yeah sure let me let me use the
Yeah I first of all we can to Okay I I'm centering again
maybe check the right ascension lock and make sure it's locked it looks like Yes is the sound of
M M4 yes yes now it's not tracking i don't know why because I use a lot of
different pictures and and I took a lot of exposures of
of but now I don't know why well Nico has shown us that we don't
need tracking yes yes nico made magic in in the in her
hands but it's another if for another Sure
it's from another another you know this from another
world he made something magical with their hands now it's tracking okay
and let me Well this is a this is live alive this is how the people use the
telescope i I try I
try center again because I don't know
if I can put again the antarist star in the center but we
can we can try
okay maybe yes I moving the telescope maybe it's
it's it's great this for to show to the people not for for for us that normally
we use telescope we know about the the group
of they me many times with you know the the things
Yeah Cesar it's u freezing the internet's freezing up
here i'm
But me or the telescope or the image h
uh you the image is fine ah and we lost him let's give it a
couple of minutes and see if we can get him back
here he is back
i lost the Yes I I lost the connection now oh my god okay it looks good now okay
maybe you can see ah okay you can you can see again
we can see you and the telescope yes okay okay i I share screen again
okay and this is where I was when I lost the site
now I'm centering centering antaris now
okay okay it's working again
antares is one of the largest known stars and several hundred times the
diameter of the sun and 10,000 times brighter than the sun
look the quantity of stars that Here we go yes
where each of one stars are suns and look the difference between Antares of
course that you can see stars that are in a very high
distance than Antares but that is have a huge huge size and maybe one of the
stars are in a similar distance this is
amazing tonight we're we are talking we are thinking in in this kind
of scales and all about the the how we enjoy it and we are amazed by the by the
cosmos is something that is magic is something that we
um I never I never uh stop stop to me uh
um to to be amazed by by my astronomical
observation pictures you know it's it's something that is it's so great it's so
magic i think in this group here in our
audience that you're in good company and in complete agreement with all that is
magic yes absolutely i love this of in the
city where we don't have the possibilities to have a great
image at the Nike eye the this electronics the the cameras um last week
you told me that if I can explain the setup the the gears and for the audience
I can see that here I have the the cool camera is the same that the same sensor
that you have in your reflex camera in your cell phone in a different
size uh but uh of course that this is for for the audience people that that
people that ask about the first day that he go to to the store to ask about the
telescopes um very many very many times many many times I told with the people that that
uh see the the the telescopes in the window and when I
start to to listen to talk with them about
about the possibilities that tonight today do you have tonight is okay um do
you have to that you can work with your small telescope from the city from the
rural from the farm areas clear it's a polluted skies light polluted skies yes
um or clear sky uh very dark skies but you
have many many options to hold to make your setup for your telescope
here I use camera telescope the the focal the focal length
of of the telescope is a system of lenses three three lenses
apocramic apocromic objective that that make the image in the focal in
the focal uh plane and the important thing to do is is the
mode that is tracking the movement of the sky and have of course to today
mostly of the mounts are go to and have the possibility of searching different
teles different object in the sky uh and tracking h only we put uh only
using a cell phone where you can you can find different options in the sky let me
try if I can put M4 in the field
okay this is very interesting cluster i think that is let me
um I need to to think that is is
upper under uh left I think if
somebody can but this is the mic s is an
opposite if Not is great only for to make a a a little a little fly by the
sky in this area this is very
rich maybe Nico that have a goto software in their brain can you
guide me you need to use your hands Caesar yes
yes but I don't Yes yes sorry i have this but this is something that Yes as
as say Nico uh it's a pocket telescope
you know you have a a great resolution there is a a really nice field of view
yes yes i'm using now I am using you can see some clouds crossing the the field
of view yes yes it's going across fast yes and this area is full of open
asterism and full of open clusters i don't know if
I sorry I think you you had you got M4 down there
down there i think that not here if not in the
opposite this is something that is it's fun well with the doson you make this
you you um make the same but visually
yes yes the the start star starting yeah h this is an star absolutely a star
shampling but visually I can make I I can make nothing tonight by the finder
of of the telescope because it's it's really cloudy it's something that
sometimes the people tell me do you have telescope for for cloudy nights and
maybe this is a telescope a system for cloudy nights because we are watching the stars and you can see the clouds
well you know the there are many people who do shoot
between clouds you know and uh yes uh for instance a lot of the
astrophotographers and uh in Britain uh England they get a lot of cloudy nights
you know and so guys like Gary Palmer you know he'll be out there uh waiting
for you know a hole in the sky you know to shoot in in there for a little while
collect some data and then you know so with the advent of tracking and stacking
um you know you can do some amazing stuff and still get data you know versus
the old film days of taking a long continuous exposure
yes yes there actually we are we are feeling more British people in
Buenocides because we are not lucky with the sky in the last time you know that
that Nico and Maxi and me only we are um
lucky to have in the in the in the last weeks maybe we have I don't know Nico
maybe four four nights three three or four nights four nights only yes the the weather was
really really bad here yes yes you can suffer with us Scott you
can see the clouds we get plenty of clouds here in Arkansas
too so is to share to share the clouds yes yes i return I return to the
universe right so yes yes but I I I think that this is so
so you know make this kind of of
um of traveling by the sky by by the the
the in Spanish but the the the title of of
the of of tonight global s party is
something that you can enjoy And really is full of magic you can you
know maybe you stop in a in a part of the sky and this is the same when you
put your your uh you know where you can see more
stars everywhere everywhere is full of stars
and we are watching in you know in a cloudy night in a cloudy sky
yes this it's incredible it's something that ah here here's I don't remember the
name of this cluster here we have a cluster maybe yes yes let me stop there we can Yes if
you like we can uh center yes i centering mhm i think that this is M4
and this is an opposite
because you know Nico maybe maybe I I think that
I I searching in the opposite yes yes you you have that three stars the down
that when you see on the telescope we we see it up we head down and that that are the
the three stars that I I used to find that yes
now we have the cluster
Beautiful cluster m4 m4 for sure yes let
me We can see it in the northern hemisphere as well no problem yes yes yes i can use more
more gain with the CCD because it's full of clouds uhhuh but we are we can expect
and a small open small small open open sky you
know oh my god it's not easy tonight but well okay it's part
of of the fun you know it's a it's a cluster with a very different Look at
all the colors color stars yes yes yes despite the the
cloudy the cloudly night you can see different colors yes
sorry by the audience about the the situation but I sometimes I
prefer I prefer show more things in in a live image in a live situation that
is it's it's magic because it's it's um it's something that that have the
magic the more similar to show to show sorry but oh my god look the the clouds
but you can see in both the scale in the sky now and you know
right look that yes yes this was was something that we was expecting because
it's are clouds moving from from in this
uh in this moment are moving from the west exactly from from the west but
because here you have the south and you can see and a small movement
yes yes coming from from the from the west you know it's and something that I
have I can show you something that I took earlier a
video let me to show something uh much
better than only clouds i can show you quickly
let me show you and video from from
tonight
and oh I can let me share
okay here you can see oh it's a a video that
I took I
took me
uh well I I have a video that I can I can uh
um process later sure um well this I took this this mo this uh
image of this video of of the of the
moon [Music] here and I I took you can see the moon
yes okay the video um this one is for processing a picture
because I don't have Saturn or Puper in my field of view
and uh I took a lot of um short uh lights of
um another another object that I I I can show you
next week but processing of course okay thank you Suzak no it's a pleasure
here I can show you completely the equipment the mount and uh complete the telescope you
know and here I can show you very portable little setup very nice ah absolutely yes yes and I use only the
the a cell phone it's not a new cell phone it's a a regular one and I can
show you how I can move the the telescope
and use for example the settings again parking
yes it's a it's a very portable and very easy to mount and use the Yes yes it's
great really really is something that I love i I love uh using this uh because
my back is is uh is in that pain is very important and you know it's something
that that really I enjoy have something that I put from the living room to the
balcony completely assemble it and only I see you just pick I only plug I see
sure only only I plug the I plug only
the the the connections and nothing more
right it's really is really for enjoyment okay thank you so much man ah thank you
thank you all right good night to everyone good night okay well up next
and our final presenter is Ron Breacher uh I met Ron at the Northeast Astronomy
Forum uh he is uh a very friendly guy and uh very um uh accomplished
astrophotographer and uh so um and he's also a musician so I uh he he checks off
all the boxes as far as uh u uh guys that should be going to Stararmmas which
I hope that he is able to uh to attend the next one that comes up here so um
Ron I'm going to turn this over to you thanks for coming on to Global Star Party oh this is fun for me thank you
very much for having me and uh I'm just going to share my screen with you
and Scott can you just confirm that you see my screen absolutely yeah looks good
okay so u my talk is called promises promises and it's about getting good results with a new scope and uh the
title actually came from the notion of that feeling of promise that we all feel
when we get a new telescope or any new amazing toy but you know we're here for
astronomy so the the toys that we get are telescopes and cameras and things like that but that promise of a new telescope
doesn't always match with the reality right away and um I kind of put this
talk together for beginners who might be getting a new telescope and for another
reason as well my wife always says I need to write down all the problems that I run into as I go through my astronomy
journey so that I can help other people avoid them and one of the ways I write them down is by putting them into
slideshows and so this just seemed really opportune so I'm going to talk to
you today about the promise of a new scope I've just finished setting up it's a
C14 uh so a 14in Schmidt Casin Edge HD
by Celestron and um I want to talk a little bit about data acquisition
challenges in general but then specifically some of the ones that we all need to deal with and that I had to
deal with and then show you how the promise of this scope seems to be
fulfilled so this is me standing with this gigantic scope now I've used a lot
of scopes in my time this Paramount MX that's carrying everything will hold 90
pounds so uh my last setup was a 6-in refractor and a 4inch refractor together
and um I've given a talk showing some photos from that setup but this is the new setup so just to summarize the main
new stuff is the 14-in telescope and uh Celestron
uh also provided a de shield a de heater ring which is right on the corrector
plate and a controller for that and a focal reducer um Caluche Lab threw in a
lowprofile asado focuser and an arco rotator and the Eagle Pro computer is
sitting up on the top of the telescope you can see it it's the little red box i'm using a QHY600 mono camera filter
wheel and off-axis guider i'm not really going to talk about those much because I've been using them for years so
they're not their promise is already known i know they work well same with the Optalong filters and same with the
Paramount so the focus really is going to be on the the big new tube
so this is sort of a laundry list of data acquisition challenges we all face
all the time framing the target we have to deal with light pollution um but
really when you're setting up a new piece of equipment the challenge is just
getting small round stars and really that depends on the optics the mount the
setup where you're shooting in the sky uh and you really want to solve this
problem of getting small round stars before you go too far gathering data to
make pretty pictures otherwise you're never going to be happy with the stars this is the kind of star image
that we aspire to small round stars nice defraction spikes if that's appropriate
unfortunately this is what we may get fat bloated out of focus
stars or I call these this nose and foot doubles this is where you were guiding
by hand and your nose bump the guide scope made of those yeah anybody who's
guided by hand has had a nose and foot double before and then this is just like oblong eggy
nasty looking stars and so the the main things that affect that are in two
categories mechanical and optical we need good polar alignment and good balance on the mechanical side on the
optical side you have to columnate if your optics are misaligned your stars won't ever look good focusing of course
bloats the stars and reduces detail if you're out of focus and optical
aberrations are important too we're going to talk a lot about that in a minute cores are corner stars are
usually most affected but I had an another interesting challenge with this new
telescope so uh if you if you're not experienced with polar alignment I I wanted to include some fairly technical
stuff because I know these videos are available after the fact and you can
stop and look at this slide for as long as you need to to understand it but this really shows what polar alignment is
it's where the axis of rotation of the telescope the right ascension axis is
lined up with the Earth's axis of rotation so your mount is like a big
clock going in the opposite direction to the Earth so the question then sorry to
scare you with the math you don't actually have to do the math again I just wanted to include it the real
question is how good does your polar alignment have to be for the telescope that you're using and it turns out it
depends on um how long star how long a star trail you're willing to accept
where the target is in the sky how long your exposures are the focal length of your telescope of course long focal
lengths are much less forgiving and this is a very long focal length telescope
and the angle between your guide star and the object and I just solved that for my telescope so I'm binning my
pixels 7.5 microns and I've just plugged in the numbers and I only needed to be within
about 1 and a half arcsec polar alignment and that's not
that hard to do that's with a 3,900 focal length telescope if you're using
480 mm or 600 mm you don't need really
to be that perfectly polar aligned you can still get nice stars there's a lot
of ways to polar align you can buy hardware like the QHY polem um you can
uh use uh through the mount polar scope like I have on my EQ6 or you can use
software like you see in the window on the right and that's the method I use with my par power par power bottom line
just get polar aligned as well as you can try to get an accuracy of two or three arc minutes and uh you know good
enough is good enough sometimes the enemy of good is better a little bit of
misalignment in the deck axis can actually make guiding a bit easier because your corrections are always
going to be in the same direction and if you do see some trailing that you don't like shorten your subs or do a better
polar alignment okay payload
balance there's backlash in most mounts not all mounts uh but that can cause
uneven tracking and elongated or double stars you really need to balance uh in
both axes and there is a proper way to do this that seems to work better than
any other way first of all you want to remember to balance the deck deck axis
first i'm going to show you how to do that and remember to take off your lens caps connect all your cables make sure
the scope is exactly the way you're going to use it um if you have some
backlash in your mount make the east side slightly heavy that will make sure
that you're always uh lifting the gears are always lifting the telescope and it
will smooth out the guiding okay so I said I was going to show you
how to do the deck axis first so the first thing you want to do is put the
equipment like I've shown it here so that the counterwes are sticking out to the side and the tube is um level then
unlock the declination axis and balance in deck that's the far right so you'll
be tipping the tube up and down do that first when you get it perfectly balanced
by moving uh the weight forward or back in the saddle lock the deck axis then you uh
repeat that for the counterweights the right ascension axis uh which is the
well you can see the counterweights remember it's really important to take off the lens cap um have your do straps
on have all your wires connected okay columnation it was really
it was pretty easy for me to balance my payload um no trouble there uh
columnation polar alignment was easy too calumation that was a little harder so
first of all what is cumation well it's the alignment it's making sure that the telescope's optics and mechanical axis
are perfectly aligned so that the the maximum brightness of the light hits the
center of the field on axis it affects detail and star shapes the faster the
scope the more sensitive to misolation the scope I'm using is f11 with a
reducer it's f7.7 not all that sensitive to misolonation um because it's a reflector
I'm going to have to get used to the fact that I might need to columnate it regularly my refractors never needed columnation
the M cigar grains are the same they generally just don't need adjustment so uh in a Schmidt cagrin
calcope which is what I'm using a perfectly columnated out of focus star
looks like the image on the right so it's kind of like a donut the hole is perfectly centered there whereas if you
look at the image on the left that shows an out of columnation star and uh I actually took
a picture of an out of focus star here uh you can see it's very jaggedy and so
on but it's very well columnated so that's what you want to do
you want to adjust the secondary there's three little screws you just turn by by a very small amount and get good
columnation um very very important i haven't columnated this scope yet because it
looked so good uh I'm going to tweak it maybe when the moon is full uh but for
now it's good enough to use focusing of course is important you can do that
manually using a bat knob mask as you move in or out of focus these line this
center spike will move from left to right or right to left uh the mask looks
like this image on the left you put it in front of the aperture and uh here's a
little animation of a star out of focus through a mask and coming into
focus and back there you
go you have to focus regularly when you change filters or when the temperature
drops i use an electronic focuser so you can get an add-on in this case I'm using
a primal lab focuser and I didn't have any
trouble with that either so I'm not going to talk about that too much
um optical aberration so that's basically uh that can be due to the
shape of the glass or how it's positioned in the tube uh or how things
are connected to each other and if if all the optics aren't perfectly square to each other the quality of focus isn't
going to be the same everywhere in the image so you might focus in one part of the image and have the rest look
terrible some common causes uh that can put things out of
square camera at the end of the train that's so heavy that it makes the focuser sag so you need a really
welldesigned uh focuser uh sometimes the sensor is not
properly square inside the camera that's a tougher problem to fix you probably
have to go back to the manufacturer um often times there's an optical defect uh
and that can be uh just related to how the mirrors or lenses are aligned or
columnated and so here's what this is what I saw when I took my first images with this scope you can see there's some
really nice stars on the left the Ring Nebula is well resolved but if you look at the right side of the image there's
kind of fat elongated stars that just turn into streaks on the right hand side
and um I tried and tried to columnate this and I I just was not successful i
couldn't it looks like a columnation problem but since I couldn't columnate it I reasoned it was a some kind of a
till problem and I started worrying about my camera um it turns out it wasn't the camera at
all it was uh a misaligned lens in the focal reducer it's going to be replaced
and I should say I don't care which brand of equipment you use uh it doesn't matter
which scope which reducer which camera you use they all occasionally have
problems so the question for me is not whether your equipment will ever have a problem it's how will the vendor how
will the manufacturer help you resolve the problem and Celestron was
outstanding uh I contacted uh their technical support manager Chris their
technical manager Chris Hendren and um he told me that he thought it looked
like a misaligned optic in uh the reducer he gave me an experiment that he
wanted me to do i did the experiment we confirmed it and a new reducer is on its
way to me and will be back in the optical train eventually so and that's
you know that's not my first good experience with Celestron my first real telescope was a Celestron and I've had
nothing uh but positive experiences with those scopes
um here's another weird one this is an unusual but equally annoying cause of optical
aberrations they gave me a D-ring and I was putting too much power to it uh one
of the I'm a manual reader but one of the technical guys at Celestron asked me
whether I had read a certain part of the manual and I had to admit that I had not
i was putting too much power to the de to the de heater the glass was getting
too hot and giving me these crazy spikes on all my stars so it took about a month to
diagnose all of that but here the promise is fulfilled i want to show you
three images taken in the last week with this telescope that's just operating
beautifully right now so this is the Ring Nebula and a beautiful nearby 15th
magnitude spiral galaxy beautiful this is the ET cluster the owl cluster
sharp uh NGC457 and look at the beautiful colors in those stars i hope it comes across
well yes in in what you see on Zoom and my favorite of all and this was really
the the real first light image is the Crescent Nebula that I had
on the title slide so I guess my message to to folks is
uh when you get your new stuff and you've got all that excitement and that promise don't get frustrated if you have
a little bit of trouble getting things going look for the obvious look for the
not so obvious don't be afraid to contact technical support to get the
help you need and you will have the promise of your new equipment fulfilled
and Scott thank you very much for having me here tonight thank you so much Ron thank you beautiful images uh this image
I think I just saw on um Facebook today is that right yeah I just posted it it
was my first first light image with the scope and this is under 10 hours and I
should say this was shot without the focal reducer that's why the stars look so nice the new one will go in when it
arrives terrific that's great i love I love to hear the
the uh uh success stories but I also love to hear um you know when uh you
know people what what people do when things go wrong you know so and well
sometimes sometimes I go get a beer [Laughter]
but usually usually I I doubt myself you know i doubt myself i think I've done
something wrong or like you've done something wrong i find that's usually
not the case with pretty experienced amateur astronomers um you know there I
I tend to you know I mean being on this side of of uh of manufacturing and
everything I tend to look first at the equipment and u because I you know I've
been doing this for a long time have been selling telescopes u uh retail or
you know working for the manufacturing side since 1980 and uh um and I've seen
everything go wrong just as you say you know with all brands of equipment so and I you know these are complicated systems
yes most of us use multiple different brands that all have to play nice
together thanky for uh askcom and alpaca and you sure all that good stuff not
only from the software side but the hardware side and the different objects and it's complex and it's a really
interesting puzzle to put together uh it's a big part of this hobby is to do
that and uh and then once you have it really uh playing nicely it's a it's a
feeling of great accomplishment i think it really is and uh the main the main thing I've always found out because I've
had I've had issues setting up every system I've set up um they're all
different but it takes a while you know don't be afraid to call technical support like really get to know them
right right because they really want to help and they will help sure they will
sure norm Hughes is uh chiming in here he says "When I got my new setup I was
so excited i played for six months before I even checked columnation uh polar etc i was just happy to be able to
do this stuff finally I said enough and fixed it." So yeah so if if you've got a
system that's performing well wait for a full moon or
a mediocre night to check columnation right or to tweak it at least if columnation is acceptable but maybe you
can get it better don't give up a good night for them
right excellent ron thank you so much thank you thanks for having me all right
and I want to thank our audience for um uh being uh hanging in there with us uh
through the night and um um we have uh we'll have more Global Star Party coming
uh starting next Tuesday so uh look for our announcements and um uh you know if
any of you out there would like to participate on global star party please get in touch with me here at
explorescientific my email is easy it's just the letter
sexplorescientific.com so anyways good night and um keep doing what my friend Jack
Harkimer always used to say is to keep looking up good night thanks
again at first glance this single bright source this smudge this grouping doesn't
look like much images like these are translated for our eyes and it's because our eyes
only can perceive a small region of all the frequencies of light
astrophysics is much more than just capturing different wavelengths of light many objects or phenomenon are simply
too far away to directly image a lot of data comes from pixelsized point sources and those
points provide astrophysicists with a powerful window into what makes up the
universe even now most of what scientists learn about the cosmos comes
from studying light astronomers can work out distances
speeds sizes temperatures and the composition of elements because matter
behaves in predictable and consistent ways they do this by literally prying
these photons apart this is spectroscopy
explained spectroscopy is a study of how matter interacts with light and it all
began with a prism like this one light entering one side of the prism
bends or refracts as it passes through the triangle shape and exits out the other
side all of the wavelengths enter together but they exit as a rainbow-like
spread of colors what's happening is that the shorter more energetic wavelengths like blue and
violet bend a little more than the longer lower energy light like red and
orange because they bend at slightly different angles the wavelengths separate fanning out into a band of
colors nasa has a whole fleet of telescopes
that can split and study a wide range of light on the electromagnetic spectrum not just the light that our eyes can
detect so Hubble can detect through the visible spectrum but also a bit into the
infrared and the ultraviolet web is just infrared and can
look at the light that is emitted from billions of years ago and of course the images from web are really spectacular
but this is what flutters the hearts of scientists this spectrum shows the light
that penetrated the atmosphere of a planet called WASP 96b the light being measured comes from
the planet's host star some of which skims through the
atmosphere humans are a long way from directly imaging exoplanets so telescopes like WEB will use
spectroscopy to find those chemicals that could support life in their atmospheres which is why WEB's first
spectra is so amazing you're actually seeing bumps and wiggles that indicate
the presence of water vapor in the atmosphere of this exoplanet incredible
but it's one thing to identify single elements or simple molecules but
deciphering whole foreign bodies like Dr oawwak
oh my god it took us a very long time to figure this out it really took us many many decades and it took us many many
fantastic new instruments if all of our astrophysical objects or anything that
we're looking at we're made up of one element this would just be so easy but we don't so we have to do
experiments on Earth like this to prove what we're looking at looks like what we
are thinking we're looking at so in here is argon if we turn it on
here it glows this really pretty purple and then if we look at it with a
spectroscope it shows us a very specific fingerprint to argon these are called
spectral tubes my bounty of tubes they contain the gas of one element and the
box runs a voltage through the tube when I turn on the switch the charged gas
turns to plasma and emits a color that is unique to that one element it also
makes unique lines when you look through the spectroscope and this one is helium
this same process happens in a star or a hot region of gas so we use tubes like this to verify
what we see in space [Music]
if you do a quick search for spectroscopy data there are numerous ways that the data can appear those
variations are based on the source of the cosmic light there are three types of spectra that we can use continuous
emission and absorption light from a hot dense source
like the sun produces a continuous spectrum
when that light passes through cooler gases on its way to us the gases take away or absorb some of that energy dark
lines appear where specific colors are missing and when thin gases glow
themselves we see only their characteristic colors kind of like a cosmic barcode
these are the emission spectra from pure elements that were given a voltage to glow just like my spectra tube but way
better like all data there is an art to analyzing spectra scientists like Dr
ojawak use computers to calculate and tease out clear signals comparing them
then to models that are already known there you go many scientists in the labs
on Earth they try to recreate the same conditions and and measure basically what these um kind of as you said
fingerprints of those different transitions for different elements are okay so we're always comparing to sort
of the fingerprint of what we have and then if it has deviated from that that is the new information from what we're
looking at correct for Anna spectra unveiled the structures of black holes
the swirling winds that surround them and those big jets of particles that
come out of them when you look at a black hole yes
this is what you see yes where where's the accretion disc where are the winds
so all of this is mostly accretion disc at this level it's just different parts of it we can zoom in right and we see
all of the absorption lines right all of these lines are also shifted a lot so they come from this wind that we saw in
the in the first picture so that's how we know that there is winds blowing around black
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holes the same principles apply no matter the wavelength of light but each
wavelength of light tells us a little something different about each character we find in the
universe it's pretty wild how different the universe looks to our eyes and how
it presents to our telescopes and that's precisely why we need to observe in
different wavelengths of light modern astronomy is built upon spectroscopy so
with every stream of light we gather we further understand what the universe is made of all we need to do is pry open
its contents
so it's a beautiful sunny day and uh we have uh you know our refractor out and
I've got my eclipse glasses on and I've got my safe solar filter of course the eclipse is not here yet but um I wanted
to take a few minutes just to show you some things about uh solar filter safety uh the filters that we use the highest
uh ISO standards um and uh indep actually independently tested by us as
well so just to make sure that those standards are met so if you're going to
use a telescope to look at the partial phases and part the let me underline partial phases to you you use eclipse
glasses to observe the sun in partial phases when it's uh in total if you're
going to be on the path of totality you can take the glasses off and only during that time can you directly look up at
where the sun is because it's completely blocked out you'll see the corona you'll see you know lots of really cool effects
that will they'll leave you speechless but during all the partial phases you have to have safe solar filtration so
how do you do it uh properly uh let me show you first off let's show you what you shouldn't do what you shouldn't do
is put on eclipse glasses and look through the telescope that's unfiltered
and I'll show you exactly why here we're going to point the telescope directly at the
sun and right now we have sunlight coming right through the eyepiece um
turn that up a little bit if you use solar glasses and look right at the filter material you see it's already
burning it's burning a hole right through the solar filter material that is how powerful a telescope is you can
now see that there is a hole through there and that could be your eye so this is what can happen if you think that you
can use eclipse glasses to look through unfiltered telescopes or binoculars if
you do that uh the sun's energy is going to burn right through the filter and burn right into your eye so if you're
going to use a telescope or a pair of binoculars to watch the partial phases of a total eclipse or just to observe
the sun to look for sunspots or something like that uh make sure that you are using an over the lens solar
filter that has the uh proper ISO safety rating and all of that and so what I'm
going to do is I'm going to put this filter on it's uh you can see how snugly it's fitting here this is not about to
come off um uh but uh you know if you have a loose fitting filter use tape do
anything that you can to make sure that the filter is not going to come off um
and then the the other thing is too is that finder scopes um uh optical finder
scopes are like little telescopes and they need to be filtered as well in this case I just have a red dot finder there
is no um magnifying power to it so I'm not going to use it to sight the sun in
the way I'm going to sight in the sun is literally is I'm I'm going to look down at the shadow and align the scope up so
I'm getting the smallest shadow possible of the telescope as it's hitting the ground and now I can safely look at the
sun and comfort look at sunspots and if we have
partial phases going on in the eclipse I'll see them all
are your eclipse glasses safe for looking at the sun let's check to see if your eclipse glasses can handle the heat
or if they need to stay inside first off never check your
eclipse glasses with the sun that's a good way to injure your eyes take your eclipse glasses and find a bright light
like a lamp or a flashlight hold your eclipse glasses up to the light and look through them the light will appear
extremely dim or not appear at all when looking through the glasses for example you should only be able to see the
filament of a light bulb but not the glow surrounding the bulb also if your eclipse glasses have any marks or
scratches on them don't use them if you have older eclipse glasses from a previous eclipse give them a check to
make sure they haven't been damaged or scratched all safe eclipse glasses will meet the
ISO12312-2 standard it's best to store eclipse glasses in a safe place where they won't become scratched or punctured
remember never look at the sun without eclipse glasses or a solar filter be safe and happy sun viewing everyone
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