Global Star Party 13

Transcript:

i'll be back in a sec guys
Okay
Norman Fulham and uh Mike Simmons have just joined us
I have
Mike you know Gil Clark right gil what are you doing
i've known Gil for what i don't know 30 years No more than
that More than that Yeah You knew him before I
did It's been Oh I was alive before you were a long time A long
time How old are you now Mike uh in a few weeks I'll be 71 Oh young
whippers snapper So you're 10 years old
Yeah but that that's only in chronological age Maturity wise I'm I'm way behind you
Hi everyone Hi
Okay So let me start sharing show here Am I too early Scott
no one's ever too early for this show Actually turned on uh Zoom at about
7 7 p.m So okay at
uh I said 7 central time or California time or Eastern time time Central time
Central time Mhm Cuz right here right now here it's uh
8:42 I have to do a restart So I'm going to have to call back into the call in a couple minutes Good morning I'll watch
for you Thank you
Hey it's funny because some people who are logging in they just pop
in and they don't need me to admit them They just come in and I'm not How rude
Oh god I don't get in anywhere without being frisk Other people ma'am
No I must be on a list Must be I don't think I'm on that list
No No You're too nice
Okay
And I think that we've got a lot of places where it's clear tonight So that's encouraging
Not in Montreal It's been clear all day here Yeah Yeah We're going to see Mars right
Libby yes Yeah It looks like you're on Mars Libby
I took a break from quarantine Good Good
[Music]
Our shows
share Great
How you feel David you feel
good maybe David's taking a break here
No he's right there Feel good David oh yeah I can hear
everybody Good Jerry and I were just chatting together So and I had to talk
to Wendy there for a second but um we're all doing great and we're ready to roll
Awesome Awesome
So Tuesday nights are not only global star party night at Explore Scientific but it's uh clean the offices night So
we have our cleaning crew here Well you Yeah stream that
Yeah On one of those vacuum cleaners
Hey Scott if I share the live feed on from uh Facebook to my page does that
work sure Okay I'm going to give it a try Give it
a whirl Some people have their privacy settings so I can't just willy-nilly go
and share it to your page you know So um so what I do is um I share
it I broadcasted on uh Soccast on Facebook Twitter
Twitch and u we are on two different Twitch channels right now our own and push
network and um and then we're also live on
cloudynits.com and [Music] um we are and whoever else shares you
know So I just I shared it I belong to a bunch of astronomy groups and I just
shared it to a bunch of them I can see that Yeah Yeah Like Facebook Astronomy Club has something like 30 or 40,000
members Um they at least get it on their you know their news feed Uh whether they
watch it or not is kind of up to them but at least they're aware of
it But who who wouldn't want to watch this i mean this is a this has got all
the This is where the cool kids club is
right we have Kelsey from Nova Graphics She's going to be on tonight That's
great Um you know I I feel really uh it's cool
to get some people on for the first time like Gil you know the Clark and uh Mary
might have been able to come on but she got bit by her cat and had to go to the
hospital So wow Oh wow Is her cat a leopard
yeah maneating tiger according to Oh my cat pierced my finger once when I
was giving it treats because it's so hungry But after that it's
remember they're still wild animals you know Cats are
not domesticated Hi Kelly Hi Kelly You're muted but hi It's good
to see I keep I keep hitting the darn button but it stops the Anyway Hi everyone Hi Kelly Kelly
Hi Kelly Good evening Hello Kelly Hello Libby
Hello What kind of fish do you got in the tank
there Kelly oh I have great fish I have uh they're they're freshwater
Um and they're big They're I don't know They average about six or seven inches
long Um and and the thing is that they're also old Uh some are 15 years
old Wow And so people think that like tropical fish
die young and that often happens because they get parasites really easily and get
they get sick and die But if they're taken care of um they will they will live to a ripe old age And if they're in
a big tank like that one that's a 55gallon tank they can get pretty big
Yeah I used to have those fish when I was doing a regular fish
thing Like I had many tanks actually That's pretty big Um
yeah I think the biggest one I mean the biggest one is probably
over the catchable limit
Well you better throw them back Do they have names yes they have names
Yes Um I've got a I've got a big uh uh
bail of shark in there that's called boss Um there's you can maybe see there
a black one with an orange tail right on the edge there That's um
Zoro and so forth I don't remember the names of them but I
had all of those fish You still have them no that No they um
they went to fish heaven a long time ago Fish
Hey I'm going to go grab a cup of coffee I'll be right back Yeah that's what I'm doing right now I have two
glowfish There's a type that you put under like a UV lamp or not a UV lamp but a blue light and then they'll light
up So it's pretty cool Very cool We have here at Explore
Scientific Libby you might remember we have an angel fish and some sort of
uh river fish the little minnow looking type fish Not sure what they're
called It was funny I went out to the lake with my friend once and
uh we got out in the middle of the lake and I my um I kept on looking at my leg
underwater and I thought it was a fish so I was screaming
Hey Gary good to see you Hi David how are you how is everyone right Yeah we're
all good Cool We're all good
Mars is great with the Certis Major right on the face right now Yeah that's
cool I was clouded out last night but had a
few good nights about a week up to about previous seven days but last night
it was clouded out
with all the smoke and stuff you guys had That was kind of tough
Yeah it's been a challenging summer with clouds and smokes and wildfires right close to the observatory here and got
the big wildfire in fact Tucson got to about three miles from us Right Little
exciting There was no fires near you was what there David no not here We did have a
lot of smoke but that is cleared away It's a beautiful night right now
Yeah a little bit of cloud over by the sun hiding the sun a little bit at least up here in Oracle
Well I'm clear out in Louisville and daylight today looked like a panumbal
eclipse
Well here here in Australia the sun is just about at zenith
So while you guys are showing the night skies maybe I can plug in some solar
stuff in a week or two Yeah Do you have any Halpha equipment or
yeah Um I've got packed away an a good Halpha uh filter and
um I'm trying to remember where I have my cameras so I can dig those out All that
stuff got packed up when they shipped to Australia Where where are you in Australia um
right now I'm in Kuna Barabbrand which is over by the Sighting Spring Observatory
Uh we've had zero cases of COVID here Oh wow Um and I also we also have a little
house on the water in Port McQuary Uh and I think they've had eight
cases Uh one family went to Sydney and one of the teenagers brought it back but they were able to contain it quickly
So yeah Yeah Are they still Are they still on strict lockdown in Sydney and Melbourne well what's your def with
curfews one person can go out each day no No No No No No In fact uh they never
stop you from going to the beauty salon or the barber shop Uh schools are in
full session Um the they have procedures for going
into restaurants and things like that And since we're old farts we uh tend not
to go and eat in the restaurants Uh we get our food
takeaway And um it's really not very far from where it
was before the virus Um the time difference between the two
is it's a six-hour drive so we cover quite a bit of area Yeah Going back and
forth between port and here Okay Um he's now suggesting it's it's uh interesting
because in other states it's like in the states the governor sets the rules for
that state and uh over here the minister for that state uh sets
all of the criteria for how they're going to handle it And some of them are very
excessive Uh but for good reason because well they like to play sports together
and if they start to relax it then you see a great big burst of the virus So
it's it's very interesting watching all this It's like here in Montreal we we were in
confinement uh up until about June end of June Uh pretty strict confinement I
mean uh all the restaurant were closed bar was closed uh pretty much everything
except for uh like like for food and like we were restricted one person per
family going to for food and then they lift that uh confinement in July and now
we starting in October we're right back into confinement because people just
take any uh the advice of wearing the mask and being still being careful And now we're back to where we were in
uh in March March and April It's like I don't know You don't see the mask very
often around here You're required to wear it in hospital That's it Uh but I
don't think there's any other places where it's required to be worn If I'm if I'm caught in the in the public area
without a mask I could be fined $1,000
That's a good rule I think I think we got to we still have to take this very seriously Oh yeah
Oh people take it seriously Yesterday in Quebec only we have over a thousand more
cases So like we're back on back in the the wave and going down and up and down
And living in Meville there's planes coming
all the time A huge one just came over I don't know if it's a helicopter or not
Well they that's one thing they've done in Australia They've severely limited uh
any international travel Yeah And if you fly into Australia you're immediately
put into a hotel for two weeks Yeah Yeah And same thing in Canada Yeah
So it's it's not that they're not taking it seriously It's in the areas where
there's no events of it Uh they tend to not wear masks and things like that Uh
they do tell people if you have a sore throat or a cough or anything like that
you have to immediately start wearing a mask
Um and it seems to be pretty effective that way And looking at the school kids
uh none of them are wearing masks Um they say the social distancing is in
effect but when they're coming out from school you see 10 15 of them all grouped together Yeah So but then uh the school
kids are at the lowest level of uh serious effects from it but still they
can't pass it to other ones But it's the school kids who make the flu season what it is So why why would it be any
different for co you know I have a I do virtual school So Google
meets all day every day The the idea that uh children don't get
it as bad as adults has been way overplayed Um absolutely And it's one of
the reasons that uh the by far the greatest number of new cases here in the
US is in young people uh not children but uh children
do get very sick and uh succumb to it
Not that I want to play that up at the moment No that's right We don't know about the long-term effects because there were 24 football players at Ohio
State and five of them uh ended up with myocarditis as a result of it right and
they're not over it yet if ever They probably won't ever be over myocarditis Yeah So it's it's unfortunate that it
was played down but but you know the thing is kids don't live by themselves Uh my wife was a teacher and brought
home all kinds of books [Music]
Well hello everybody Hey this is Scott Roberts from Explore Scientific and this is the Explore Alliance live
presentation of the 13th Global Star Party And uh um we have as usual a uh
very interesting and um uh full uh uh uh
group of uh participants here uh that are uh going to give presentations talks
Um you can expect to see later in the program uh some art Um you would also be
able to uh see some live imaging It looks like we're going to have clear skies in uh many areas of the world
where where uh astrophotographers are set up And u and then at the very last
part of it we're going to have kind of like this open panel where people can talk and share Our start party if you
watched it before goes on sometimes to midnight one o'clock in the morning
sometimes even a little bit later than that So you're welcome to pop in and out as you'd like to Uh but we're happy to
have you here if you're watching So uh this program is also being simoc cast on
uh Clear Skies Network Uh that's on Twitch We have our own Twitch channel Uh
it is on Facebook live YouTube live um and Twitter Uh so um and uh we're real
proud to have everybody participating with us uh uh uh right now You'll see
people kind of pop in and out as the program goes along but these people that
are here right now uh like to be in with the uh the first part of the the group
Um and uh as as usual we have uh David Levy uh giving a talk for us That's
followed up by Kelly Bey who's in I believe your sixth segment Is that right
right Six of seven and then I'll just wing it I mean just a really incredible uh you
know to have Kelly join us so many times I love it Uh Gary Palmer's with us uh in
the UK We got Wade Prunty here with us who is on Clear Skies Network with his own show Uh Norman Fen up in Canada Mike
Simmons in California right now Um Chuck Allen Chuck I forget where you live
Louisville Louisville K Yeah Kentucky Okay And um um uh we have Jerry Hubble
who's in Virginia Um Libby in the Stars who's with me here in Arkansas Um Gil
Clark who's down in Australia Uh maybe I don't know I consider him to be like one
of the fathers of remote uh observatory access and uh he ran the uh NASA's
telescopes and education program for a long time And so um Mike Weezner who has
authored books and uh is a champion of uh smartphone astrophotography and u all
kinds of astronomy you know so a real guru of big influencer Jason Gonzalez
called the vast reaches and and Jason has a huge following on Instagram and social media uh and then uh we come back
to David Levy who's uh again you know I in all of our present presentations I've
taken the opportunity to um tell you about David from my perspective but I
kind of reflected on all the things that people tell me about David Um you know
and I've met hundreds of amateur astronomers who have seen him give talks
lectures read his books um uh you know influenced by him in some way or another
And you know he's also been on u uh you know documentaries and stuff like that
So he literally has touched astronomers around the planet for many many years Uh
and we're so lucky to have him on the show Uh David Levy um how are you how
are you doing today and and um what will you bring to us today
thank you Scotty And uh uh let me begin by uh coming back at you a little bit
Uh can you all see me okay Yes Anyway I I wanted to tell you that uh
Scotty and I have actually been close friends for many many years since the
time he was a vice president at Meet Instruments And uh then when he started
his own company he and I were just driving around one day to a star party
and Scotty asked me a few questions about telescope for a beginner and we talked about it and uh I said "What are
you doing this?" He said "Nothing." And then about a few uh few months later out
came the David H Fleavy uh Comet Hunter telescope which I have
one of here and it's it's just just a beautiful telescope I just uh really
love it This is very special Tuesday nights have become extraordinarily special and emotional for me Scotty
you're one reason Kelly you're another Yes Because Kelly is the voice of Sky
and Telescope Whenever I listen to his talk I think of the first issue I got
when I was 15 years old back in 1963 Oh my goodness that was fun I
remember looking in the pages and realizing that Caoru Aaya had just
discovered his first comet back in 1963 And boy I missed it I didn't get to see
it In fact I wouldn't see my first comet until Aaya's third one Aaya Seki in 1965
Boy did I ever see that one That was really incredible One of the things that I like
to do is to uh
uh no Kelly was not writing I don't think for Skyel in 1963 Um but uh he sure is now and uh may
he be writing for them for the next hundred years Anyway
um I usually do some quotes and I have a couple for you tonight Here's the first
one If the first one if reasons reach transcend the sky why should it then to
earth be bound the rit is wronged and let a mine be married to the ground
There's a very ancient way for a fellow named Robert Record in his book The
Castle of Knowledge to talk about the night sky He wrote that in
1556 and uh I happened to just find it while doing some research
for my PhD thesis number of years ago and uh I still love it
Um the sky has always been very special and very very emotional to
me It it offers peace at the end of a
dark at the end of a dark rainy day and the sky clears or at the end as we get
so much of here in Arizona a sunny day and then the sky is beautifully clear I
get to go out and be at peace with the night sky It is one of the most pleasant
things I can ever imagine doing And one of the things I was going
to I was saying about my friendship with Scotty is that there's a lot of humor with it We're always joking around
There's a lot of laughter However it hasn't always been that way
in my life I used to have a real propensity for depression and especially
when I was a teenager and uh into my early 20s as a student at
Acadia I got into a massive depression and while doing that I happened to light
upon Oscar Wild's book profundice and one of the things he
wrote which really impressed me uh was uh was these words which I'm
about to quote from Dave Profundus he wrote them while he was going through a depression in prison
And one of the wonderful things about depression is that it forces you to look
upon what's important in life You ignore all of the trivia You concentrate on
what's important like this Society as we have constituted it will have no place for me
Has none to offer But nature whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike will
have cliffs in the rocks where I may hide and secret valleys in whose silence
I may weep undisturbed She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk
abroad in the darkness without stumbling and send the wind over my footprints so
that none may track me to my hurt She will cleanse me in great waters and with
bitter herbs make me whole The thing about the sky is the magic of
it the peace that it offers It's almost like okay you're mine now You're going
to look at the stars You're going to see some doubles a galaxy a nebula a comet or something
like that Some anything like that that will really get you off what you're
bothered with and uh onto something else Of course now in recent years instead of
being depressed for weeks or months my depressions now go away within a few
minutes Really does not bother me anymore But I still love the peace and
quiet that the night sky brings I'm going to close with a third quotation
This is from Tennyson And there's a reason that I'm closing with Tennyson
I never knew Alfred Lord Tennyson obviously but I do know his great great
grandson Jonathan Tennyson He is an astronomer at University College of
London and I actually when I was in London I got to meet with him we talked
about in memoriam We talked about some of the poems and he started by saying
that he tries to avoid poetry as much as possible But as soon as I walked into
his office there was a quotation a framed quotation of a couple of lines
out of the memoriam And he looked at me and laughed and said "Well most of the time but this is the quotes that calls
us to the night sky This is from Ulisses The lights begin to
twinkle from the rocks The long day waines The slow moon climbs The deep
moans round with many voices Come my friends It is not too late to seek a
newer world Push off and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows For my
purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars
until I die It may be that the Gulfs will wash us down It may be that we
shall touch the happy isles and see the great Achilles whom we knew Though much
is taken much abides And though we are not now that strength which in old days
moved earth and heaven that which we are we are one equal temper of heroic hearts
made weak by time and fate but strong in will to strive to seek to find and not
to yield Back to you Scotty Oh thank you very much David
Excellent Excellent Um well uh we uh you I was reflecting I
I'm watching all the people coming here on chat and I know that many people are
watching uh in different parts of the world today Uh people that are here at
this star party um are uh you know uh many of them are quite seasoned They've
been to many star parties have interacted with the amateur astronomers for a long time One of the things I can
say about the amateur astronomical community is that it is one of the
greatest fellowships of of all time It it is something something that stretches
back not hundreds of years but thousands of years And uh amateur astronomers can
read the history books and look at the writings and the inspiration from
Hershel and from uh you know Copernicus and and from all of these great
astronomers going all the way back and they can find the threads that start to build up the fabric of what we call
science in uh exploration today And um uh but it is something it's it's it's a
living kind of thing and uh the the
effects of looking out across the universe and this humbling this humb
this humbling that happens understanding that you know once you start to understand the vastness of it all and
the and the amazing processes and all the rest of it uh it is something that
uh makes you feel very small but uh at the same time you realize your mind is
as vast as the universe you can understand And so um I think these two
things uh are important elements in uh building the friendships and the um uh
the bonds that tie all of us that we call those of us that call ourselves
stargazers or astronomers And so um I wish you could meet every one of these
people in person Maybe some of you have um but uh to have them here all at the
global star party is really to me uh kind of like a miracle of the modern age
uh to uh be able for all of us to be in the comforts of our home and to uh uh
share um the camaraderie that we are right now So uh I do thank you all of
you for watching I know you know we've tal talked a little bit about the um pandemic and the ongoing effects of that
but uh hopefully here tonight uh we are giving you a little reprieve from your
feelings of being isolated or quarantined Uh um and uh we can hope
that you can look up and explore And tonight's a great night for it because Mars although it's not at its closest or
at opposition it is apparently at its closest point So um our next speaker is uh and
Scott Scott if I could just say one thing Sure Here and that is just before we go on to Kelly I just wanted to call
to your attention first of all that Curtis Major is right on the front edge of Mars right now if you want to take a
look at Mars tonight It's a beautiful beautiful thing But also uh I remember a lecture from
Leaf Robinson former editor of Sky and Telescope May he rest in peace now But
uh Leaf had said how we all talk about how the universe makes us feel so small
and so insignificant And one of the things I think about when I when I'm listening to what Kelly has
to say is that that's that Leaf said was during a eclipse trip we were on back in
2001 that that's not true There may be
every a lot of little things but in no other spot in the universe have the
advent been put together in such a way to make you and me There is only one
Scotty Roberts in the universe and only one Kelly Bey and only one Mike Simmons
and uh all only one Libby and only one Gary and only one of all the others Yes
Yeah that's right That's right Well Kelly um I'm gonna put I'm
going to give you the stage Let's do that But I also want to
say and now it's great that Kelly has been on with us now for his sixth his
sixth part of his seven-part lecture series If you've watched them all you're
starting to get to know this man And although uh you're just watching him
over over Zoom this is a this is a live program And uh um you know hopefully
you're getting a little bit of the reason why a lot of us instantly like this guy Um he is uh remarkably smart
um in that he knows so much about uh astronomy and the uh culture of
astronomy the history of astronomy Um he is someone that's traveled the world
chasing eclipses He loves sharing uh the the uh experience of personal
exploration personal discovery Uh he is um uh you know I hope that uh one day
you're able to experience an eclipse with this man uh if you can I'm sure he's gonna he's got something planned
for 2023 for the annular eclipse coming up and of course the 2024 eclipse total
eclipse that's going to be uh racing across the United States Um but uh uh
anyways I I I'm really I feel very very fortunate that you've been on with us
for so many nights and um um you know so
I'm I I'm starting to run out of words but Kelly you know how I feel about you so thank you Thank you Thank you Scott
Boy these these intros get gushier every week And and I'm I'm Thank you for those many kind words Um I am the smartest
person in the room right now because all I have is my fish to join me Um but uh
you know we've been talking about the sort of arc of amateur astronomy over the decades And for those who might be
joining for the first time tonight we started out back in the 1920s and 30s made our way through the space age uh
through the through the onset of widespread light pollution and the the
advent of fantastic telescopes a new a new generation of telescopes Last week
we talked a little bit about imaging And um uh I see Mike here the the uh the
guru of smartphone photography Mike I don't think you were here I showed I showed a photo uh taken by a local
amateur astronomer an older guy First time he'd taken photos he used a 6- in
Schmidcast and put his smartphone up on a on a uh an adapter and got this
fabulous image of of Saturn by you know combining he stacked 50 images from a
little video he took he'd never stacked before And this is all at our at our fingertips now And in a lot of ways it
makes up for the deficiencies that we might have as visual astronomers because light pollution has robbed us so many of
us of the ability to see the night sky in all the glory that what it started
out with and still has if you know where to go how to look So um you know tonight we're going
to take a little introspective look at um the the makeup of amateur astronomers
as a whole And I want to hark back to the 1950s and early 60s the advent of
the space program the space race And tens of thousands hundreds of
thousands of people were were fixed with this uh gripping drama of you know who
was going to be first in space to do this or that And we had a renaissance of interest in astronomy And many of the
astronomy clubs that we all belong to now got their starts during the late 50s
and early 60s as a place where people could come and share their interest their newfound passion in
astronomy The makeup of those clubs was almost entirely male Um and it remains
here we are 60 years later it remains almost entirely male taking nothing away
from this great group of people we have amassed here but but uh you know you go
to there there's there this this group of people here is not representative of
society as a whole and I'm reading a great book uh
called the last stargazer uh by a woman named Emily Levesque who's a young uh a
young astronomy uh professional and she points out that uh you know that when we
talk about having a diverse and inclusive uh membership in this this
global network of amateur astronomy that that we we all share and love Uh she she
points out that right now at least in the United States about 40% of all
degrees uh PhDs are granted to women which is fantastic That's a huge
improvement over say just as little as two decades ago But of those of those uh
women who've gotten PhDs only 4% are Hispanic and only 2% are black Now
that's here in the United States As as Mike Simmons pointed out so wonderfully with his images last
week that's that's not always the case If you go to Iran in particular um the
the the amateur astronomy movement is undeniably young and undeniably female
And I think that's just a fantastic opportunity for them uh to to become
engaged with the stars for young people to be engaged with the stars So So we often ask the question of ourselves as
we talk in our old gray men astronomy clubs where are the young astronomers
where are the libbyies and and and the teenagers and so forth that we remember
welcoming into our clubs so many years ago And I you know it's funny
because just a couple of months ago we had a fantastic visitor from the depths
of the solar system Comet Neoise And it was one of those moments
that really captured the public's attention and their interest and their imagination
uh much as Mars is doing right now I mean there are going to be new stories about Mars tomorrow about how how it's
closer now uh 38 million570,000 miles away from Earth not
particularly close but closer than it will be again until the year 2035 And and we have this opportunity
with comet Neoise and Mars to sort of take that what we call that touch of
interest that is shown by everyday people in astronomy and cement it into
something that's a little bit more longasting and we don't do a good job of that And and there are a lot of reasons
for why Um you know I've I've talked about this
often Amateur astronomy today just astronomy today is very different than
it was uh before in the decades before We have a lot of competition we didn't
have then We have uh the obvious ones like light pollution and we have the
obvious ones like you know the internet is is not distracting but it provides
opportunities for people to learn about astronomy and they don't need us to do it They don't need a amateur astronomer
or a club setting in order to learn about astronomy Um but there are some there's other things that are that are
more subtle and insidious that darn Hubble Space Telescope right has spoiled
it because all those beautiful pictures cannot possibly I don't care how good an
explore scientific telescope you have okay you are not going to see through the eyepiece anything like what even
those fuzzy early I looked at them up uh you know was launched 40 years ago I
looked up some of those early fuzzy images of Mars and and galaxies and stuff even those outdo what we can see
at the eyepiece And so we have a hard time convincing anyone to be uh sort of
permanently uh engaged in in in what we're doing uh because there there there
aren't as many um uh advantages to being in clubs And I mean you know that's an
important thing Clubs are not a thing now It is not the nature of society to
belong to clubs And it's not just astronomy it's bird watching it's anything else you coin collecting
whatever Um but I do want to mention as we as we I
don't want this to be a a totally um despondent moment I I think there are
some ways that we can engage people better It's true and I I think most of us who belong to astronomy clubs uh will
agree that the astronomy clubs membership is actually growing It's
certainly the case in the clubs that I'm associated with I I'm not sure about in Tucson or Arkansas but the number of
people who are members of clubs is growing and that's a good thing But it's not like it was 30 or 40 years ago I'll
just just a snapshot You mentioned Scotty you mentioned Sky and Telescope Um in the late 1970s I did the first
survey of the me of the uh subscribers of of Sky Telescope and we found that the new people coming in to become
subscribers were uh very heavily weighted to being under 30 They were
students They were uh you know in college or high school and this was pre-in basically And so that's that was
there was still that youth movement if you will Now what we find is that it is
deniably undeniably not the younger population Um what it is instead is we
find that new subscribers and I think this is applies to new members of astronomy clubs
are 40somes uh parents of maybe a family a husband
wife who both share a love of the stars or remember how much fun they had with astronomy when they were young They're
older now they have uh their careers are established their kids are are more independent and and babysitting is not
needed Um they have a little more free time and they have more disposable income And these are the people that we
see coming in And I think that is a clue as to why amateur astronomy isn't more
diverse Um it is it is undeniably the case that there are a lot of people who
don't have that disposable income who don't have that free time They're working two jobs three jobs at minimum wage And and astronomy is like the last
thing in their minds you know getting involved in in like looking at the stars or going out to a dark sky site whatever
that might be But I think there's hope And um I I want to offer a couple of
suggestions for those here um who might be listening to if if you if you're
passionate about astronomy and you want to share that passion And you know what amateur astronomers as a group are the
most selfless passionate people about what they do They you all can't wait to show somebody something through a
telescope And amateur comes from the French word to love And it's true that we all love astronomy Uh all of us And
so we want to share that love I think a one great way to do this and to give
people something that they can't get from an app and they can't get from a YouTube video is a program called Globe
at Nightight Globe atnight uh.org globeatnight.org or was started
about 15 years ago uh in Tucson as a kind of educational classroom activity
to uh uh get get families get classes to
go out and do uh approximate uh estimates of the naked eye limiting
magnitude of their sky as a way to gauge how much light pollution they were dealing with and that that sort of
classroom component has kind of faded away because the underlying sponsorship is shifted But it's still a fantastic
way uh for people who have no equipment and no experience at all with the night
sky to suddenly have to look at it and understand something about it
Globeatnight.org I hope all of you after we're done go look at that This is for for big kids and little kids too It's
what's so beautiful about it is that you make this estimate This just a simple you know how many stars do I see does it
match this little chart i go online I log in my location and what I saw and
you become part of a global database that's not just aimless number gathering
It's actually used by lighting researchers around the world who are
trying to figure out uh where light pollution is going the the just as an aside that the current generation of
satellites that study the Earth at night are kind of insensitive to blue light and so they don't give a really accurate
picture of what's actually going on here on the ground And so these researchers use the estimates from Globe at Night to
sort of calibrate what the satellites are using So I encourage you to go see that and and participate and and get
everyone you can in your neighborhood to participate and and it's it's a fantastic opportunity Globe.org The
other one is is uh probably something none of you have ever heard of called Pop Scope P O P Scope It's
a modest movement of young people in a number of cities mostly on the eastern
coast of the United States who are passionate about astronomy but don't know anything about it But that doesn't
stop them from diving into neighborhoods uh in in the middle of cities in the
most light polluted of settings uh urban settings and and uh almost flash mobbing
uh with with I don't know nothing more than a 60 or 80 millimeter telescope showing whoever is there whoever comes
by whatever they might be able whatever they can see Uh it might be the moon it might be uh what' you say and so um I
encourage you to to look into that because I'm working with the Popscope people I believe this could be the beginning of a sort of next wave of
involvement of young people in amateur astronomy We will they will eventually
find you know that young people like Libby who are motivated are going to find it themselves anyway But I think
those people are out there those young people are out there We can find them and their families and engage them in
amateur astronomy and and we'll feel good about it We'll end up with more diverse uh uh spheres for our astronomy
clubs and uh we'll we'll show more people why the sky is such an amazing
thing and they will learn to love it just as we do That's it for tonight Back to you Scotty Great Great Wonderful
Wonderful Okay Uh so um uh we're kind of in the
middle of our first segment of the Global Star Party This is our 13th global star party Um and uh we um uh uh
will have uh coming up is uh next will be Libby living in the stars and uh
Libby will be talking about Mars It kind of rhymes I think that's kind of cool Um
and uh then uh Stuart Parkerson from astronomy technology today has joined us so he's in the room u at this point Uh
and then we go to Mike Simmons We'll talk about his One Sky Chronicles the ongoing stories of global
astronomy And uh Chuck Allen uh will finish up the first segment here before
we go to a 10-minute break Uh Chuck is vice president of the Astronomical League and they are our sponsor for our
door prizes Uh so we have prize partners that have uh including explore
scientific that are giving prizes for people who correctly answer questions
that are emailed not put in chat but emailed to Kent ke
ntexlorescientific.com and I'm going to put that in the chat uh screen here
So if you're listening and you're paying attention you'll know where to send your
answers but don't put them in chat Okay So um
uh uh let me talk a little bit about Libby I've met I met Libby Uh it's now
maybe two months ago maybe I think Um is that right Libby
Yes Yep And uh Libby Libby uh let me bring Libby up
here Here you go And I'll join you for just a minute Uh Libby is
uh he's a 10-year-old which makes you Are you in fifth grade is that right yes
Right Fifth grade So and from what I understand Libby has always been interested in the stars always been
interested in space exploration He is uh someone who cannot get enough of
watching things like NASA television uh uh uh keeping track of satellites
learning about the planets learning about uh uh the uh you know the depths
of space and u she's the only kid I've ever known that read every astronomy
book in her school library Uh so she is intensely interested uh she has joined
uh you know a great group of students here um and they're they all love her uh
and have have been inspired by Liby's uh uh fanity and uh her interest in uh
following through on her I think you gave me 56 episodes that you wanted to
do So um this is uh and how many times have you been on our show already Libby
um I think it's been five times Five times Yeah So you've been on the world
stage five times with some of the one of the great some of the greatest speakers in amateur astronomy you know So and um
you know some professional astronomers are going to say and just astronomy period
Okay So um uh we love that you're here We love that you're sharing your uh
enthusiasm with us and um so I'm going to give the stage to you Okay And your
subject is Mars correct yes Yep Okay So we're going to let you let you have it
and I'll take myself off here There you go
So as Scott said I did make a list of 56
things I wanted to talk about And I don't know if this is a perfect timing
or coincidence but every time it seems that every plant that I chose or there's
new news every time I decide to speak about it So that's always uh great Um the new news for this
week um is that Mars is really close to us It is um
38.6 million miles close And it won't
it'll stay the same for a long time Well it won't be the same for a
long time So uh me and my mom have plans to set
the telescope up and we're going to see maybe we have to take my telescope out
to a field because the um Mars is facing the east
and so we are staying up late for that tonight Um I do want to talk a little
bit about Mars Uh Mars is the fourth planet in our solar system and right now
it's the most important planet in our solar system Um because number one
NASA's been scoping it out for years and decades and they've been planning
all around it and I learned a lot about that at Space Camp Um we had this
project to do um on how to populate Mars and you were supposed to support some
people on Mars So a lot of kids in my um
group were like I'm going to support a million people that'll make me really famous And we had a budget of a million
dollars And let's just say I was under budget and they were
overbudget Um I supported 35 people because honestly you don't need to
support a lot of people Um I would definitely start with a smaller amount of people but um I learned how to make a
Mars base and um they had this Lego
software and we kind of just mapped out where our Mars base would be and we were
like "Okay we should spend money on buying a water a water source and maybe an ice
habitat." And my budget I have it written down here is
$255,000 So that would be really cool Um I was
looking a lot about um the first people going on Mars cuz when I grow up I do
want to be an astronaut and go see Mars because it's just a really pretty planet
Um the carbon oxide makes it a really pretty red color
and it may be extremely far away but um
NASA's just running into a lot of problems they need to face to get to Mars Um if NASA went to the moon and
they've been accomplishing a lot of stuff such as rovers on the moon then
they can definitely get enough materials to uh definitely get some people up on
the moon and Mars And soon they're first going back to the moon to kind of do the
so-called repeat of the Apollo pro program that they did
And now they are doing Orion And I like to tune in to NASA TV every night with
my cat And sometimes they'll repeat stuff but they will give us updates um
on the Orion and NASA's doing interns
with 16 year olds and they'll have like one on every night
and sometimes they'll do live videos on the NASA TV and
um I'll listen to the interns and they'll talk about how they don't have really any knowledge about space that
they get to help build with um the rovers And I um one kid at a couple kids
at Space Camp um in an older group made a rover and they had a little videotape on
top of the rover to um videotape us during the
planetarium and that was amazing I'm like "Send this up to Mars now NASA get
on it." Um but I thought that was amazing and I think that um it'd be
pretty easy to send something up to Mars because the temperature is only minus
80° which that's almost the temperature of Antarctica So if you really think
about it there you don't need to have high quality stuff Maybe it's just like
really cold where you live and that's just like maybe just like some habitat
on Earth Maybe someone lives super cold But um definitely you don't need to have any
durable supplies to go to Mars Um so I was like send this to Mars And I thought
and I thought like it must be so easy to make a rover for Mars because if you
make a rover for Venus that'll probably scorch and die in about two hours But if
you make a rover for Mars it will last there for a long time Um the rovers on
Mars right now are so joiner I think that's how it's pronounced spirit
opportunity and curiosity And if I had a little rover friend I would probably name
it the courage Um okay Yeah Usually when I uh
think of space stuff and they always use those like really nice names for stuff I
usually use courage because it takes a lot of courage to go up into space and be able
to be isolated from friends and family is a big another big part of going to
Mars Um I wouldn't really mind being away from my family but at Space Camp uh
I called my mom and my brother sent me pictures of the kitties and I was super
happy And I think if I was able to connect with some friends and family
during my trip to Mars that would make it a lot easier Um because Mars is so far away
Um it would be a really hard to be away from friends and family being isolated
But if quarantine goes on for over two years then you could
probably be able to go to Mars If you live alone and you're in quarantine for
over two years you can go to Mars Okay Libby that's that's great That's
great Um there I was looking at the chats here uh people responding to you
and people are trying to predict when um uh you know we will have ships on Mars
Uh from your perspective Libby and we have we unfortunately I can't go on too
much longer but uh how how many years do you think it will be before we have
humans on Mars um so I researched that and the next
astronaut which is 18 years old her name is Alyssa Carson and I find that
inspiring as a young astronomer because I'm so young and I'm doing a lot of
stuff in the astronomy community Uh she's 18 years old and she will be the
first human on Mars in 20 I say the time range would be 2020 to
2030 around that time range If nothing goes wrong hopefully it will be uh 2024
is what I'm hoping for But I do find that inspiring that a young person will
be going to space because I'm so young and I'm doing uh star parties and making
waves in the global global star parties and astronomies
Yeah thank you Libby this is Gil Um I've spent a bit of time on
submarines and we would go down for 6 to
10 weeks Um I think the longest I was on was 12
weeks under the water with between 120 and 140 people
And uh one thing people don't consider is the psychological effects of
so many people in a confined area for such an extended period of time So that
might be something you would want to look into Uh it's it's an area that's
going to become of high interest to NASA
Yeah definitely Uh I want to spend my life surrounded by cats I may live with
like a friend or two but um if I can be isolated and quarantined
it's kind of like astronaut training I'm getting ahead I'm getting a early start NASA So you can hire me once
quarantine's over It's my early start I can be isolated No worries
Awesome Awesome Well that's great Um I believe that Dustin Gibson has
joined us Libby thank you so much That was an excellent talk And thank you for
letting me talk That's great Uh Dustin Gibson is joining us from OPT and um
from Gibson Pix and uh we are very happy to have you on Uh thanks for joining us
Dustin You're I think you're muted
No audio [Music]
All right How's that that works That works Yeah It's strange It's strange I think my computer So how have you been
it's It's been a very busy time in in uh in the telescope sales world and uh uh
just the community uh in general It's been very busy You know lots and lots I don't Yeah I don't know if it's ever
been busier You're right Great You know um Yeah it's it's a lot to keep up with
and it's I mean it's crazy We We were in March like the rest of the world bracing
for impact The only conversations we were having at all which I'm sure the same conversations you were were just
this is a global problem How are we going to protect our team like that's it It's all we were thinking I mean every
plan every meeting everything we did all day long was just how do we protect our team from this and then instead you know
um the entire industry goes nuts with manufacturing overseas where several
months of it completely shut down So it uh it created interesting scenarios
That's a euphemism for it Um but you know hey I I feel extremely fortunate I
know that all of us you know working in the industry do that we still get to do what we love and that it carried through
But um man what a mess Yeah Yeah It's it I I you know I feel you because we um
you know we get calls USB and everybody is trying to um
uh give us u uh you know are trying to get more information about what's going
to happen you know is this is this is this uh whole thing that this this
explosion of business this uh this need for getting involved in amateur
astronomy is that going to keep going uh did we get uh a lot of people new people
involved um Um I think that we did you know I think absolutely Uh and and you know we were
Kelly you gave us um a talk about uh the fact that people don't join clubs the
way that they do or the way that they did but he we also do see club membership growing So um you know we uh
all of us whether you're you know selling a telescope you're instructing
people about astronomy or uh you're managing uh an organization that devoted
to astronomy We all have this responsibility to um uh keep people
inspired keep them engaged and um so what been the big challenges at LPT for
that uh keeping up more than anything else you know it's it's heartbreaking
because look I mean I just I just realized we've been so busy for the since March I just realized like two
days ago I messaged Jenny She's the other owner of OPT was like "Do you realize that in a couple months is our
75th anniversary we literally haven't even talked about it." OPT is 75 years
old which is a huge milestone for any company I mean you know like that flag that I have in my office Scott you've
been there I mean it it has 48 stars because that's the original flag that was flying over the original OPT 48
stars on it That's how old the company is And so you know these are things we really want to celebrate as a company
and and have everybody involved and you know do big things throughout the industry We haven't even talked about it
because we have been you know we had customer service problems like crazy I mean people were saying online like
"What happened to OPT's customer service it's been terrible for the last three months." The worst part about all of
those stories is that they were true You know that was the absolute worst part is
that Jenny and I misguided the direction we went when Coronairus happened In
order to keep up what we should have done was multiply our staff by 40 to 50 times right and and obviously we didn't
do that And so you know the c Yeah the calls started coming in literally as a
multiple of a thousand of what we were used to what we had the infrastructure for And so we were like weeks behind
getting back and so we just started hiring like crazy man I mean we doubled the department then tripled it and
quadrupled it and started doubling other departments just to keep up and try to get back ahead of it But it's
devastating because I mean you were part of it You part of your story has been developing
the customer service standard for the industry through OPT And so when that
happened man it was like our entire staff I mean we all lost sleep and we have been since March trying to get
ahead of it Everybody's working constantly But we think we're finally at a point now that we can we're starting
to get all of it back under us But it was uh it was a very real challenge
Something that we I mean felt horrible about And when you see that stuff everything in you wants to be like "Yeah
that's not us." Because it's not how we identify But the truth was like we weren't ready for it at all and it it
crippled our customer service lines for it Uh Dustin it's and it's um it's not
it's not OPT's fault Um everybody in the industry every the industry uh felt this
at the same time because it was literally a tsunami title wave of of uh
of renewed interest um in uh in astronomy Uh so we we had new people
coming in We had people that uh were kind of dormant out there for a long time and uh you know anytime that
there's a you know a monster event and plus we had a great comet and and now
Mars that the closest they'll be until I think the year 2035 or something like that Um so there's intense intense
interest and so keeping it uh is really one of the big challenges of uh of uh
being involved in this in this industry So uh you've always done things in the
best tradition and uh you have spent a ton of time also doing your live
broadcast being out there uh you know uh where you know literally thousands of
people can get at you So uh so and you've been very transparent about the whole thing So I think it's it's very
honorable We're we're trying we're trying very hard We want to maintain the standard that everybody's come to expect
and and we will We absolutely will But it was a setback I mean it was a tremendous setback Um and it was
something that the industry deserves growth It does So on that side of it I'm very excited Um Scott I mean I tell you
every time we talk here and every time we talk off air thank you for everything you're doing You truly are a juggernaut in this I mean you're putting you're
putting these groups together and this whether anybody wanted it to be or not is the modern star party right and it's
only going to grow And then not just having people come on but people with incredible stories and everybody you cut
to is an inspiration Literally every single cut is a new inspiration And I
know that that is going to snowball And we're seeing it on our side You know we measure everything digitally through the
company And we're seeing that more and more it used to be just a lot of repeat
business for most of the industry And we're seeing now people are buying their first telescope Just about every sale
that comes through is like somebody buying their first eyepiece or buying their first telescope which is excellent
Like we want people to find what it is that we've all fallen in love with right
and so I think these new digital vehicles allow us the opportunity to
expand the message to a much broader audience And um you know we've we've
been pushing this like crazy on every platform that OPT has a presence on And
I can't tell you man we were just ecstatic to have you join us on that front you know trying to force this
rapid evolution of growth into it you know Yeah I think I think that uh uh that is
a nice um um or you know very good commentary especially on the heels of
Kelly's talk today So it's uh it's important that people understand uh what
goes on uh uh behind the scenes of of getting people into their gear You know
we're kind of we're the outfitters of of uh this exploration and you know and this personal discovery journey that
people are on So um well if we mess up if if we mess up we become the limiting
factor of everyone or anyone's enjoyment of the thing that we're so passionate
about We can rob people of that excitement or enjoyment if we don't take our job seriously And so it's like it's
devastating I'm telling you man These these last couple months where we had those issues it was just like oh I don't
like what do we do what do we do you know and so we just kept attacking and hiring and doing everything we can man
But it's uh it's it's a challenge It it definitely is There's no way around it Hey Dustin this is Jerry I uh I agree
with you in terms of we really love what we do We we love the products We try to
do the best we can for our customers And I'm you know I'm particularly sensitive
to that because of this the work that I get to do for Explore Scientific and for Scott I just want everybody to not have
a problem with PMC8 I just it hate I hate it when somebody complains about it
right because I take it personally Yeah As you should Yeah you should I
mean it's it's our job to be that conduit to make sure that this stuff
that we're we're creating access to the universe for people and the rest of our
job is to get out of the way right like create that access and just get out of the way Let people enjoy the hobby Be
there when they need information Be there when they need resources or equipment or or whatever but when not
needed don't have people having to call you Don't be in the way of their enjoyment And that's that's our mission
And so that and I know with absolute certainty man I I truly believe we have the best team in the universe I
absolutely adore my team Um but you know it's it's been the greatest challenge I
think OPT has ever faced is keeping up with the expansion of the industry that
no one saw coming And it's not just expansion I mean it was an explosion in
the industry that just nobody saw coming That's right Hey Dustin I I got a question Did you get a measurable You
and Scott both Did you get a measurable bump in sales because of Comet Neoise
for us it was a little hard to tell because there might have been an explosion within an explosion Okay Uh I
I I know that um you know during people
calling up both dealers and consumers saying "Gosh you know why are you guys
out of stock why you know uh you know when are you getting more equipment in we can you know it's it was it was kind
of like throwing the Mars opposition." uh maybe some of the eclipse the great
eclipse in there and then you know and then this weird pandemic we're in Okay
Um it was tough to tell It gave people certainly a focal
point to rally around Okay Yeah and we're burning in the images and um uh
and there was a lot of talk about comet Neoise but it wasn't like it was like this and the comet Neoise and there was
a spike It's like boom and uh you know we could still we could hear a little
bit of the explosion from comet Neoise too So that was my perspective What what
do you think Dustin yeah So um I mean people were at home So in March people
were at home and we everybody everybody freaked out at the same time for good reason And that lasted about 10 days and
then after that everything just went through the roof Um everything I mean when I say that I mean calls would go
from you know a few hundred to several thousand within a couple of days right
um and that would that immediately like following that was obviously greater
orders everything going out to all manufacturers But the manufacturers got their hands in the air because they're
just like we we're shut down We're shut down in you know four different countries right now We can't make
anything Everyone else is like but people want things like what do you do you know and so that was all kind of
happening And then Neoise hit And what Neoise did is it made it the influencers of the world So we have a we have a very
large um affiliate network and so the influencers there I mean one influencer
can reach eight or 900,000 people right and so they that is a target for them
that can reach mass audiences very very quickly because it's relevant right it's
um kind of like if you're not going to pay attention now there's that loss of privilege like you you're not going to get to so that really exploded on social
media and It's something that we saw the interest in astronomy spiking at a time
where the interest in things to do at home was already spiking And so it's really kind of hard because you're
measuring the ocean right you're you're measuring this rise in the ocean but you also have the waves to contend with And
that was one of the bigger waves but it's really hard to tell where it fit in with the the total rise just because it
all happened at once Um and and there have been a lot of things like that I mean the digital presence of just about
everybody including explore scientific um has just gone through the roof uh
through all of this because out of necessity it's like nobody wants to let this interest die We don't want to let
these conversations die This is the best part of astronomy is sharing it with
each other and you know having this community So nobody's going to let that go So you know we we took to these
platforms to try to keep that alive But what it did instead was added even more
to what what was going on So yeah it's a positive feedback loop that has been
feeding um you know the industry in a gigantic way but also causing some
problems that have rippled and and given some people some frustration So I think the frustrations will settle out and
ultimately the net benefit is going to be one that everybody's very thankful for that loves astronomy Honestly that's that's where it's going All right great
Dustin thanks for joining us Hey always happy to thank you again for what you're doing and for everybody here participating Uh it makes the night so
much better for everybody that I know loves astronomy Thank you all for being here So you know you guys need to visit
Clear Skies Network There's a lot of other great program about astronomy there Need to visit Gibson Pix on Twitch
uh where uh Dustin gives his show When do you run that show um uh Thursdays and
Fridays I do streaming live streaming on Twitch Uh when we don't have you know smoke or ash in the sky we do uh
streaming with the telescopes remote telescopes Uh we have another one going up in Texas in just like two weeks now
three weeks now So um those will be up and running again soon And we train people to run them yourself So any of
you that want to you can run uh our telescopes for free and you know get data of your own we'll show you how and
make sure you have fun with it So that's what we do on Clear Skies Network and a lot of other programs there too A lot of
great programs So definitely a good place to go on Twitch if you want astronomy conversations every single day
Great Great Thank you Thank you very much Yes sir So So up next is going to
be um Stuart Parkerton Uh Sewart is um uh the uh chief editor uh creator of um
of astronomy technology today Um I know he's in the room Uh so uh Stuart are you
uh are you able to join us right now i am Can you uh hear me we can hear you Uh
we don't see you yet What what do we need to do to do that at the bottom of your Zoom panel there
you'll see a a video camera there Yep On that you can turn on your video camera
I'm clicking it
Well it's not participating Okay that's okay Stuart I'm hitting start
video and it's giving me uh a lot of uh failed to start failed to start Failed to start So I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm
gonna be a ghost today Well that's fine You can be you can be the the uh voice behind the scenes
of um uh Stuart and I are both going to be on uh Friday evening uh at 7:30 with
the Austin Astronomical Society We've been invited to uh uh give a talk together So that's going to be pretty
cool But Stuart uh just uh so that the audience is uh more familiar uh tell us
about astronomy technology uh today magazine how it got started and um and
and who contributes to it We uh started in 2007
uh which was actually uh very close to when Explore Scientific started Um and
uh so we've kind of the stars aligned in that and it's been enjoyable to work with you through the years And we were
print until 2017 And then we found out that virtually 99% of everyone were reading
the uh magazine online So we went to digital uh publishing only And so we
have hundreds of issues online and um we publish monthly And so we cover the
astronomy products industry and um I was listening to Dustin talk and uh it is
it's hard following Libby because that's um I'm gonna next time I come on I I want to be before Libby because she's
fantastic But uh she really is and and and listen to uh Dustin Um we've
experienced the same thing We've seen a huge increase in subscriptions and web traffic to our site and uh people that
um are new wanting to learn more and and people that are been in the uh uh the
hobby but wanting to find out what's out there they can get today So um you know
it's it's unfortunate what we're going through but I think it's great for all of us in that we're uh expanding who
gets to enjoy what we're doing and um it's it's I think we'll see some great long-term effects from that That's great
That's great Uh Stuart came to me about a month ago or so and talked to me about an idea of
of uh uh giving magazines uh you know free subscriptions to uh explore
alliance members and so we're very grateful for that um uh Stuart So u the
um the magazine has tons of reviews on gear So if you are you're going through
the process of trying to build out your uh astronomical imaging system or you're
trying to figure out uh the latest uh gadget to add to your system uh uh you
know you you're going to find something in in the pages of astronomy technology today about it So um Stuart is there is
there anything that you'd like to to add before we go on to the next uh we go on to Mike Simmons who would be up next
well I'd like to say hi to Mike and and and hi to everyone that's uh here tonight and I think this is great what
you're doing Um the uh go to our website if you're interested and we've got uh we
we've had probably since we we changed our website and updated it in 2018 We
have uh over 200 uh news items Uh we we focus on everything within the industry
So there's a lot of things that aren't mainstream Uh small manufacturers you
may not have heard of Um you know we have uh big companies like Explore Scientific that are have fullline
products but there's so much out there Um it's just an amazing time from a software and hardware standpoint Um the
uh it's it's really something uh that uh I think we're seeing things free up uh
with manufacturers this winter I think we're going to see a lot of uh opportunities for people to get the gear
they want So um it's a great time It's too bad what we're going through but
it's great that we're that that we have a hobby that so many people can do at
home and share with their families and and share online and do all the things you can do today And I'm I'm so grateful
to all of you that are here right now that you're spending your time to share that with the uh with this audience You
know um I know that they love it and uh we the the comments if you're watching
the chat right now uh you know you can see that they're interested in each other They're interested in what you
guys have to say And uh I think that the uh that that they're getting inspired to
go out and stargaze which is what it's all about So Stuart thank you very much
Thank you So if anybody is interested you go to astronomytechnologytoday.com you know
check out what's going on and um thank you for having me tonight Thanks Stuart We'll have you on again Thanks Good
Thank you Okay so um uh up next is uh Mike Simmons
Mike is uh uh you know again a longtime friend Uh uh Mike and I have had many
sessions together where um where we would uh brainstorm We'd s literally
been you know in in hotel lobbies where we were at conferences or uh you know I
was in town in LA or uh you know you know there would be these these
wonderful u uh you know hours where we would uh sit down and brainstorm about
what it is that's going to you know affect a global audience And I think that I have to hand it to to Mike
because he I mean he's my inspiration for trying to share it with the global audience He is someone that um made me
realize uh you know in a very vivid way Okay Not not just a conceptual way
but you know a real way that that uh that everyone enjoys the sky and
everyone wonders about the mysteries of the universe and everyone wonders where we came from and where we're going And
uh it's these things that uh um these binding moments that and they cross
cultures ages uh time uh and um you know
so uh you know I asked Mike to um take
some of his memories from his travels around the globe uh because he's experienced astronomy in communities
where they had virtually no telescopes no resources
um and um and was able to uh share his knowledge and inspiration Uh but but I
think that he was the one that was most inspired out of all this Um right you you got that right It's
just it's just amazing I mean uh my daughter said on uh and she said this
before I started all the international astronomy So it tells you something about me my epitap and my tombstone will
be well that was fun Let's do it again Let's do it again
And you know what is so if I am up on the screen here and I'm the one talking
so I guess I've got it You see over my that's my right shoulder I guess Uh see
this island that looks like a fish Yes I went to a star party there a few
years ago off the one that is the straight of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf It's part of
Iran It's called Gash Island And it's the dustiest place I've ever been And that's saying a lot for an old
mountaineer Uh and this is it's interesting that this area here that
we're flying over right now this is Ali Ran here which is far more mountainous than people realize Um is where I was
focusing on last um last week By the way we aren't Scott We aren't going to talk
about the uh the the um the fuel for those uh brainstorming sessions all the
alcohol and so on are we i think we'll leave that alone Did Scott go away
Yeah He was afraid of what I might say Tell him Anyway so uh so we're
flying over Iran now and I'm going to share some things So I started uh sort
of part one There are so many different stories and they're all amazing And I like to start off talks by sort of
shocking people and saying you know knocking them out of their usual just sort of kick them out of the the
the easy chair you know so they're open to what's what's in front of them So I'm
doing two parts of this with uh astronomy in an unexpected places And
last week uh we were in Afghanistan Um no I'm sorry Geez lost my
geography already This is Iran and then we just went sideways over to Iraq and then to Afghanistan If anybody wants to
see these places well I'll do them in more detail in the future but you know it's on last week's
program This week you skip down a little into Africa That's Ethiopia You know when people think about
Ethiopia they do not think about science They think about famine
and all these things that happened a long time ago But in fact this is the
um Ethiopian Space Science and
Technology Institute where I visited These are all pictures I took uh I think it was last year Uh fascinating country
And there it is I got it close up so I could tell what it said because I can't read the first line there I got to tell
you Um and they do an awful lot of this This is basically the idea of uh
astronomy for development It's for diversity It's for getting more people into the sciences Astronomy does this
for us uh and this is uh one of the um
workshops that they had in Addis Ababa Uh this gentleman's from South Africa
from the office of astronomy for development of the IAU And this is these are typical sorts
of things This is the Ethiopian space science society which is associated with the space science um institute So it's
sort of like the amateur wing and they have all kinds of different presentations and things like
this is very all normal looking Up here is World Space Week and star parties They're out there
showing the kids things through telescopes Well this is all the usual but they go a little bit bigger time So
this is one of two domes which house one meter telescopes I heard about these
when I was in South Africa for a meeting from the person who started all this He had this idea that astronomy could be
used astronomy and space science could be used to introduce technology in a big
way because everybody's interested in it You heard me you know I'm a proitizer for that And and that's true So the this
was what I heard they were going to have one of these They actually have two of them uh I didn't have a wide enough lens
to take a picture of the whole thing from inside but if you ever seen a 1- meter telescope it's rather you know
ordinary in that respect But they've gone farther than that Uh they just launched um I believe
it was late last year their first satellite Now Ethiopia is not the first space fairing uh um country I remember
meeting a former minister of um space agency or something like that
in Algeria one time Nigeria has five satellites So there are a lot of
satellites up there and this was an international meeting that I was attending and you can
see this is quite varied and in fact there's only one person from Ethiopia uh
well too actually Person on the left here he's Ethiopian She is Serbian but
she's been living in Africa most of her life and actually is one of the principles in running things I'm here uh
Katherine Coenberg from Netherlands I believe And then this
young man taking the picture and this young lady are from Sudan They are
astronomy students in Sudan in cartoon And so just meeting them was kind of
interesting So from Ethiopia I want to jump over to Nigeria where there's a lot going on
there too So look this is a shipping container The reason it's being used in
a building is because it is an IDP internally displaced people It's a refugee camp These are families that
have been displaced by the dangers posed by Boo Haram an extreme really extreme
fundamentalist sect Very dangerous And that's in the northeast
part of the country And this is inside where they have turned it into a STEM center for the children who are now
living in this refugee camp That is amazing It it it is really an
astonishing thing And look at this picture This picture is inside of a shipping container in northern
Nigeria of of kids who have no home And
you know you look at this they're just fascinated by what they're seeing This could be a classroom in the US or
anything else This is the mindset This is this is what astronomy does And so
they are having a good day there and they were left behind um whole bunch of equipment and things to do It's got
solar panels on the roof because there's probably nowhere in the country you can depend on electricity and especially
there Uh of course you get um solar
glasses and hand them out to everybody so they can look at the sun Something that most people don't realize I didn't
realize you know I I use the I hand out the eclipse glasses when I go to eclipses So you can see the partial
phase of the eclipse but people have never seen the sun I mean you don't just
go outside and stare up at the sun Well I think I did when I was a kid but you know it wasn't that bright And u so they
see the sun for the first time It's like looking through a telescope at something I mean it really is an
experience Kids love it Here is the team In the middle here is Oleink Fagamiro
This is when when Scott talks about being inspired by the things you do that lead to these other things She's an
inspiration for me and everybody else She is wonderful I recognize some of the
others on her team here that I have uh talked with I've met Alena a couple times in person but the others only
remotely Um they're all volunteers and they have to spend their own money to to get the stuff up to that part of the
country I'm going to help them raise some some funds here Everybody wants to help them and just getting the funds over there is hard And look this scene
doesn't look any different than any place else It's just happens to be in a
refugee camp Wow
Now this is now the uh camps they do in Abuja the country's largest city
And um these are members of the the uh most of the people on the team or many of
them work at the Nigerian Space Agency Um and they want to show many of them
are women and in this patriarchal society most uh girls um in high school
like these wouldn't consider going into STEM fields because they don't know it's possible It's just not a consideration
And they're showing them that and they're using astronomy to do it So here they're doing some optic stuff with
looks like Galileoscopes Yeah And looks like a hot glue gun and
they're making something They've never done this in their whole lives So that is Nigeria I'm going to
talk about them in more detail Hope to have a link on or do an interview with her Uh bring him bring her on here Now
from there I want to go to one more place Okay All right Um at that after
that we need to move on to uh Chuck Allen from the Astronomical League because he's got uh questions he needs
to ask for the door prizes Okay You want me to hold it for next time or should I
run through it go ahead and run through it Okay Well you don't know what you're saying but Well you should know You know
me better than that but I'll do the best I can This is a dark
world There is no map for this Let me explain that here This looks like any other star party Somebody helping
somebody look through a telescope But what you don't realize is that person is legally blind She can see a little bit
but she is looking through a telescope and being able to see craters on the moon and things like that when she can't
see people in front of her face It's high contrast stuff She has just a little bit This is not unusual that
people are blind but you know it's 95% blind And this is a called Project
Brightar It's a project done by uh the Pomona Valley Astronomical Society near
near where I am and they're helping somebody else here So this is when we
say different places and different people you know it isn't just geographic It isn't political It isn't cultural
There are many types of things here They are feeling the arc of the edge of the
sun compared to the size of the planets that are in front of them So they're
getting a hands-on demonstration of that Of course there are braille things This is not Pomona I don't remember where
this is from This is a planetarium dome Let me show you Blind people sit in the
planetarium There could be something on the ceiling but there is a narration and I and I produced the the English
narration for this uh with some friends in the entertainment industry and it gives them directions about what to feel
and they can experience it And this is what might be seen for those others like
this gentleman down here who can actually see the ceiling So they can enjoy it together This is uh in India a tactile
moon uh braille of course you can learn the constellations and read them read about
them This little thing in here that these kids are feeling are
constellations but they are in 3D because they're different heights So they're they're getting the idea of how
those are This is uh to see how the sun shines on one side of the earth and you
know they're getting to understand things that we take for granted Uh Norin
Grace you can do astronomy I'm going to run her through her stuff in just real quick here Scott but she is the guru
She's here She's um put things on the underside of a tent to make a tactile
planetarium Hands-on models She has a whole bunch of books How to make Saturn out of junk line around the home How to
explain eclipses with hula hoops These are all tactile And she's she's done all of these books Noren Grace you can do
astronomy.com Uh it's a good place to start There are ways that you can print out things so that you can actually
convert images into tactile images There is sign language for astronomy terms for
the deaf There weren't any up until a few years ago but now there are in different
languages And then there are people who have disabilities Now she managed to get up to the telescope but here they really
needed to extend it for this child to get there Astronomy is the most
inclusive and diverse thing that can exist But we need to make it that way
And that with that I will stop my share and let you get on to uh free things
Yeah free things which is what everybody wants So I won't hold you up Mike you
are very very inspiring uh the chats and the um the comments both in the in our
in our internal chat here uh and also the people watching the watching audience are really inspired by what
you've done Uh it is um it's amazing uh to see the inclusiveness of astronomy u
you know to see the photographs you know uh these are things that uh many
Americans have not really been exposed to too much so This is why you know
Kelly herang I herang him and others and say "But just look outside of this
country We're the exception We're not the rule." Us old gay-haired guys that came on years ago Um that's not what
that's not what most of the world is I'm going to show you that too All right Well okay And you're going to be back on
here in our next segment Uh but for right now we are going to Chuck Allen
I'm going to give you the stage uh Chuck and um Chuck is uh the vice president of
the astronomical league I probably have mentioned before that I met Chuck uh
early on um with uh him and Bob G as they were telling me about the National
Young Astronomers Award and why u why you know we should get involved in that
and support it and um uh that has been at least 20 years is that right uh we
started it up in 1993 93 Okay So so it's it's um uh you know
and and I was being asked by Kelly Bey uh if the league u uh because there was
no um ELCON uh this year but there was still the National Young Astronomers
award given and uh we are still supporting that um and um and also the
Leslie Pelty award as well So yeah the league programs and awards and
recognition continue on no matter what's being thrown at it So u the group of
volunteers uh that run that organization are super dedicated Um and uh you know
uh it is it is a an organization that has formalized observing programs
formalized um interaction between clubs uh formalize a uh support system that
keeps uh 20,000 nearly 20,000 amateur astronomers going strong uh all over the
United States and around the world So it's it's wonderful to be uh uh you know
working with you as much as we can and uh I have always gotten great
inspiration from the league So and you are a great steward of the organization
Thank you Thank you very much Scott I really appreciate that and of course all of your support for us over the years um
you really helped kickstart uh the National Young Astronomer Award program with your support and that program um
has garnered incredible projects over the last few years And uh we started
comparing notes with the international science and engineering fair which I used to judge back around the turn of
the century and um we discovered that quite a few of our
NYA winners were also winners at the international science and engineering fair So we're getting really high quality stuff uh from these kids and
it's just amazing work that they do Um can I share a screen now we'll get to these questions Absolutely All right
let's see here Okay this is we're going to do the answers I guess from the
previous GSP number 12 Um the question that Carol or asked
was what is the name of the boundary around a black hole beyond which events cannot affect the observer outside the
answer was event horizon and the winner was David Ing Great Congratulations David
Okay And the second question that was asked um was on what date did Apollo 11
astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldron land their Apollo lunar module Eagle in the Sea of Tranquility and the
answer of course July 20th 1969 And the winner was Nicholas
Rockia Hope I'm pronouncing that correctly A regular a regular on our
programs as well Watches almost every one of them Great Fantastic
And the third question was what discovery was made by William Pickering in August 1898 the answer was the
discovery of Saturn's moon Phoebe And the winner of this was Timothy Meyers
Congratulations Timothy That's great Awesome Okay so now we'll move on to our
questions for tonight Global Star Party 13 And the first question we have is
there are 88 constellations in the sky official ones and only one of those
split into two separate parts What constellation is
it and you're going to want to send your answers to kent
explorescientific.com Okay Uh not not here in chat Okay Okay Move on
All right Question number two What planet has moons whose names in Greek
mean fear and panic okay
And third I hope I'm not moving too fast Third question what was the name of
the unmanned space mission that took this photo oh that's a good one
It's a good one All
right And that'll do it for tonight All right And thank you all for
participating Chuck before you go Yes sir just give us
an update Any uh any uh league news or anything like that well I I was going to
comment earlier Uh let me unshare here Um there we go I was going to comment
earlier that the effect on the league has been largely what you're experiencing uh and uh what Dustin's
experiencing Uh we're almost ramping back up to the largest membership we've had in our history because of the COVID
crisis Uh and it's because of the COVID crisis we've
been doing Zoom meetings I I was invited to speak at eight different clubs in the month of September alone So we and I'm
just one person in the league that's had that experience And so what's happening is we're in a lot more contact with our
members than ever before It's crazy uh before you had to spread these out because you were traveling to do the
programs and and so it's had a really if a negative of this magnitude
can have a positive effect it certainly seems to be having a global effect on
astronomy and and the league is uh a a beneficiary of that I guess it's
an ill wind that blows no one to good as Shakespeare said So um and this is truly
an L wind but we've had a lot of increased activity We've had a lot more
volunteerism in the league Uh people are coming to us wanting to work on committees and we have plenty of work
for people to do and new ideas coming up such as the Zoom speakers bureau and
things like this that we're working on right now Wonderful Wonderful Okay Well I think
that you're seeing a lot of the the same same activity that uh that the um those
of us that are selling equipment So it kind of goes hand in hand That's one Can
I Can I ask a question Scott just it won't take 10 seconds but I was reading articles that suggested that the
increase in demand for products was something on the order of 300% And I don't want to get into proprietary
information but is that is that an order of magnitude that's accurate there was a
spike where we had uh uh dealers you know manufacturers uh you know it wasn't
300% for everything but that there were there were dealers that were reporting
increases anywhere from you know 60% overall growth to 400% overall growth in
you know when they were comparing uh that that uh it was like in the April May period Okay Now the the sales are
still way up there and you know if I can talk about demographics for a little bit
uh it was largely new people as Dustin also
mentioned uh so uh you know when you when you are outfitting uh an astronomer
with their first set of gear uh it's it's kind of an onboarding process and
you want to make that good Okay Yeah And so uh it's a real challenge because
you're trying to work quickly because there's there's people waiting and uh at the same time you're looking at your
inventory and your inventory is just shrinking really fast you know and the manufacturers can't keep up you know
because the the because it went like that I mean you know it's just impossible to hire more people
Telescopes are all made by hand Boy telescopes are high-end telescopes are
They're all made by hand Okay no machines assembling these things Um there's no real automation Okay Um so
and a lot of people don't understand this So when you're when you're buying an instrument whether that instrument's
$50 or it's $50,000 okay uh someone has has human
hands have touched it put it together And um so that's uh you know the the to
hire more people that know how to do that That's tough you know that's tough
Uh uh when you have people joining a manufacturer and they're going to build
telescopes they kind of go through this apprenticeship type of process
especially when it comes to the lenses you know you start them off you know doing some of the simplest parts of this
you know and uh to get to the final polished product is uh is quite a deal
you know and um you know those of us that are really into the hobby and we love these real high-end highly figured
optics uh when you talk to someone who has made you know
maybe 10 mirrors or something like that that's super high-end high quality and
then You ask that same person to make 25,000 Okay
Yeah Not so high quality you know Yeah Vision but high precision anyway Still
within a fraction of a wavelength of light They all the blood drains from their face you know they're just so it
can be done Uh but uh it is a different process Um but that's that's the that's
the let me just say this It's never a dull moment in the in our industry you know and it's never a dull moment in uh
the community either because there's always something super cool going on you know Well I hope that answers some of
the questions It it did Thank you Thanks Scott Okay so uh where are we right now
we are I think we're very close to uh our first break Um and we are up next
after our break We're going to take a 10-minute break and Kelsey Poor who has joined us from Nova Space Galleries uh
uh is uh is with us and he's going to talk about um faith art and um uh we
will have after after we have um um
Norman Fulham who's joining us Uh you know Normand is he's like one of the most amazing
telescope builders artist musician you know he's he's a renaissance man He
really is And so and uh just one of the nicest guys Um and then Mike's going to
come back and talk to us about visions of space uh his interaction with space
art and uh uh you know things that uh the creative element that uh comes out
when people are inspired by exploring space you know whether it's uh astronauts making painting or or people
making abstracts um in any any of the medium that they might uh uh uh you know
find that can help them express that um uh you know it is um
It is something that is universal You're going to find uh people have been inspired across time and around the
world by this kind of stuff And so we think it's an important element to have this creative element of being part of
the global star party So let's take 10 minutes and um I will
uh let me see put this on me and then
we'll go to our first break segment and we'll be back in 10 minutes
It's all going exceedingly quiet on
here I'm not sure if we're broadcasting our sound or not I'm going to turn up my YouTube and see if I can hear myself
I don't have all of it running otherwise uh I can't do processing at the same time Yep Yep It's broadcast Our
conversations are broadcast Yeah
I end up with a computer freezing somewhere
Gary did you attend Hands on the Sun one of the things that me did
No that that might be there is a US Gary Palmer who used to do stuff for NASA and
a couple of the other companies um out that side and everybody used to
get us mixed up Certainly when I came on to the scene I think he was just sort of
coming out of it Yeah Well apparently people are still
getting you mixed up because I just did it Yeah I um I always say he was better
looking but my imagining is better Well that's priorities there You know there
is I just got asked today if I ever worked at this place that I never worked at because there is another Mike Simmons
in astronomy that um I have been mixed up with uh
for I don't know what is it I think I first met him like 40 years ago
Yeah it it is quite a common thing uh with the solar side of things and I I've
had it for a long time In actual fact I've made some very good friends through the mixup uh over the years So
um yeah uh it's probably been going on a decade now Um which I always find it
quite funny Yeah But we I think he was asked uh whether he would we would do
something together at some point um for some event some big charity event um a
few years back and um he went all a little bit superstitious about it Yeah And um just
disappeared and I haven't heard anything from him uh ever So I can't answer any
further really Well the other Mike Simmons people are always looking for I
don't ask why but um he really did kind of disappear and and wanted to Um not
because people were looking for him but he just kind of you know he's a certain personality I
guess that a little suspicious of been some famous people over the years who've done
that that the uh the attention doesn't really suit them and just uh die away
into the background when they've been quite talented in whatever they're doing
Yeah it's a good question Well I you know for I've done stuff in astronomy
organizing things my whole life I never wanted to be out in front and all that stuff I I avoided it and I resisted it
in astronomers outboard and I finally realized that you know it's it's like turning
down the best telescope You you got to use the tools that you have So
I just messed myself up there I mean I just I've always looked at it on here I
mean I I've always gathered a quite a large following on social media Um I
interact with a lot of the people on there I have a lot of fun with the people on there Um but you know you post
an image up and if it gets one like it gets one like If it gets a thousand it gets a thousand It's not about what it
actually gets As long as somebody enjoys looking at it or you know some of the
images they're shared hundreds of times and they go all over the world and you know um you can't keep track about how
many times they're shared around Um but that's the point It's about having a bit of fun It's about the enjoyment and
trying to keep it all simple Yeah And I love to share things with others I've had opportunities you know when I'm at
Mount Wilson Observatory Somebody wants to see inside one of the telescopes Yeah Absolutely Because I remember the first
time somebody did that for me Why wouldn't I do it for somebody else and things like that And
I I've been doing public outreach pretty much my whole life And uh I love sharing
this stuff with people And you know I've always been into the deep
sky side of things but solar really took off for me about probably about nine 10
years ago now Um and that was being asked to do it for an event Um they wanted it up color on big screens um and
to be able to see the sun in color And a decade ago everybody everywhere you went said "No you can't do that That's not
possible." um has to be in mono you know and so on So just sat down with a couple of basic
solar telescopes and some cameras and just worked through them all until we found something that worked
Um and we had it up at the event But from my point of view it sort of showed
me something quite different and it just sort of went from there And then I just
get the natural bug of I want to be on the sun I want to walk you across the surface of the sun Yeah Yeah And that's
where it went And the equipment then was really hard It's very easy to do that now Um but then using some of the
equipment it was quite archaic The cameras were quite bad Um so to to come
up with some of the images I look at them now and still wonder how I did it Um you know they were quite cutting edge
at the time for getting that close in on the sun Um and even now I'm still working on
things in the background to change that dynamic give people a different view Um
and you know sort of work from there But it's just getting a little bit harder really more with weather conditions to
be honest getting you know getting the 152s and the big scopes out on the sun Those days are getting fewer and fewer
each year Um even though the equipment's getting better and better Uh so that
that's been the the problem But I I still enjoy solar imaging as much as I
like deep sky imaging Yeah Um it's that fun of walking out the door in the
morning and finding what's new on the sun Not necessarily looking it up on the you know the websites and the Soho uh
images that are coming in of the day It's uh actually going out there and finding it yourself Yeah Yeah Uh that's
uh well you know I was always um I never got into astrophotography I
knew others would always be better than me And this is back in the film days and and so on I just couldn't see spending
that time But I I had a chance to use some bigger telescopes and I did visual observing and was a thrill for me to
chase down the faint fuzzies Then I got involved with an educational program at
Mount Wilson after I think it'd been there 20 years or so and they needed somebody to join in and I ended up
gravitating towards the solar side of it and using this 100-year-old solar
telescope that everybody just falls in love with You know you can like a telescope because it's really good but
this is something that people really love and u it's just you're inside of it
It's got you know the beams going past you and and um it's complete change from
being a night person to a day person Yeah But uh it it's so different I
really enjoy the change over I I have found it hard at times when we
get a block of clear days come through and you got a lot of stuff that
you in the [Music] background stuff that you're doing as
well energy [Music]
Um looks like looks like we're going out again There we go Oh
okay We're back Um that's that's pretty fancy intro there Scott Pretty fancy
I was looking for something like uh Universal Studios or something I guess I don't know Anyways this game play with
that stuff Um up next is Kelsey Core
Kelty is someone I think has grown up in the space art world Uh she is um uh in
heavily involved in marketing and uh uh and also the brand community marketing
of uh of Metalist Space Galleries Um her father was is Kim Poor uh world famous
face artist and uh uh she has uh she's going to share with us um what no face
is all about and um and the uh events that she puts on So let me find her and
we will get her to stage here There she is Kelsey how are you hi
Scott Thank you for having me Yeah great to have you Um you had Michelle on last
time and uh um great artist that looked like she was having a good time being on
the show Um and um so uh we'll uh we'll
let you uh spend uh some time here with our audience to talk about Nova Space
All right Well um I love space art I grew up around it My father did space
art for a living He was a professional illustrator Has been in Carl Sean books
Astronomy Magazine um Omni Magazine all that classic stuff
Um so where's space art now well it didn't really ever leave And I don't
know if anybody's paying attention but space art is everywhere And it's more prominent now um now that we have space
travel again because we haven't in a while And uh the promise of going to
Mars So um with space art you have two
different kinds predominantly two different kinds Now you have the um scientific space art where every
everything is considered when painting the picture What the air is like what the atmosphere is like what the rock
shapes are like Everything is very scientific Um and then you have the more whimsical stuff Um I personally like
both Now for 20 years when Nova Space first started my father was very
scientific and he predominantly only chose scientific art to be shown in our
gallery but that's not that's not the place for it anymore I think we we can
expand on that Now um just to remind you guys I don't know
if you know um the 10th of October is going to be the deadline to send in
things you want signed by Frank Borman So we're having a private signing
with Frank Borman from Gemini 7 and Apollo 8 And uh he'll be in this month
and we're doing a signing with him We do have signings pretty often but CO has
kind of put a damper on that Um so if you'd like to be notified you can follow
us on social media or you can go to our website and fill out the little boxes at
the bottom to join our newsletter I put together the newsletter myself So hope you like it
Um what's that said how could we not like it yeah Yeah It's a lot of work but and we
we put it out every week So my father started Space um
Spacefest in 2007 And Spacefest is kind of a mixture of everything we do So we have um a huge
space art show and we have astronauts signing autographs Tons and tons of
astronauts signing autographs So if you have a favorite mission um there's obviously some people we can't get um
that are that won't sign but um for the most part the astronauts love
it and they love talking to everybody and it's a very personable place to be Um you can mingle I think um Scott Kelly
and Gabby Gfords came a few years ago just to drop in We always say anything can happen at Spacefest So um if you are
interested in joining us it's a very familyike atmosphere It's very fun The
energy is great We have guest speakers We have STEAM which is STEM including
the arts because arts are important to us for the kids Um the talks that we
have are done by important people in the space um scientific community industry
So I always try and uh choose people that you would want to listen to that I would want to listen to So we have a
good mixture of um space travel and astronomy and um we have a big auction
So we do um a banquet on the Saturday night of Spacefest and we have a auction
that benefits the National Itaxia Foundation We are a for-profit company
so it's hard to um do the things a nonprofit company would do nonprofit
events but um we are very proud that we raised so much money for that National Ataxia Foundation which is ultimately
what my father ended up passing away from from complications from ataxia So
it's close to our hearts and um we're actually going to start auctioning off
stuff not auctioning off stuff but selling stuff with a donation to National Tax Day Foundation through our
our newsletter soon because we have some stuff we haven't sold yet
Wonderful Wonderful uh you know uh with uh you and I uh did
an email exchange a little bit earlier today and I was asking you about uh the gallery and you mentioned it's being
renovated and uh what are the new things that's going to be happening in the gallery
well um side note 15 years ago we expanded our company from just Nova
Space to Astronaut Central which is where we handled all the signings and
astronaut autograph sales Um just recently we put it back together
again So Astronaut Central is out of the picture We've put Nova Space back together again and we've expanded our
shop Um with that expansion I would like to
focus more on space art again and um
that should go without saying that I want a gallery again So we're expanding
our shop in Tucson Arizona to accommodate a gallery and I want to design it I think that will be really
fun I think it'll be amazing So you're always welcome to come back here Kelly
and um uh tell us what's new that's going on the gallery and uh uh to keep
our audience uh informed and and uh let them know the important activities going on with your your organization
um your company your gallery U there are probably very very few places in the
world that uh have the DNA of Nova Space So um uh maybe nowhere else on on the
planet Yeah we're the only ones that sell space art Uh primarily space art We don't sell
any other kind of art Very interesting Very interesting I I
feel uh I feel bad that I've never been to the gallery uh from a long time ago I
should have I should have uh made the effort to be at one of your festivals Um but I I will plan to be at one the next
one that you do So yes you should come Scott It's so much fun
All right Okay So um at this point um do you have anything more that you'd like
to say or add Kelsey not this week I mean I have tons of stuff to say but I I
you know I'm I'm just winging it I'm off the cuff It's what what I do best I guess
It's what well it's definitely what I do So it's what I do I have no script that
I'm reading except that I do have a little schedule here that I'm looking at So I really do appreciate it Uh up next
is um uh I'm calling it the universe of Norman Fulham Uh Norman um is uh he's
been on our program at least twice and uh he is just really an amazing
individual Um he took us through his u his um uh his factory and he uh uh shows
how he makes these giant um uh telescopes Um he I think when I called
him today he was coding a a large optic So that that was uh you know I felt I
felt a little uh get off the phone I when I answered the phone I was looking
through the uh the the window into the vacuum chamber to looking at the glow
inside Oh yeah By the way I'm coding a 24 inch right now 24 inch Yeah So that's
great That's great But you make huge optics You make what like what's the biggest optic you make 1.5 meters 1.5
About 65 inches diameters Huge That's huge So you know it's there's some lucky
amateur astronomers in the world out there with 65 inch topsonians Okay So
it's uh really incredible Okay Well thank you Scott for having me uh on your
global story Thank you for joining us Enjoy it Uh like you were saying last time I was I gave you guys u a tour of
the of the shop uh what I'm doing right now So today what I'm going to do is
telling tell you about my journey to get to this point Uh how I became uh a
telescope maker and uh and I wasn't always a telescope maker all my life
It's been what about 25 years now and I'm not 26 years old I'm I'm 20 21 with 40 years of
experience Yes So uh I I I fell in love with astronomy
very young uh about 8 10 years old about uh I lived in east part of Montreal
called Point and uh we had a neighbor called Mr LSR and he had a telescope a
small refrator and well for me at that time it looked pretty
good for for a six years old 8 years old kid is always a big telescope So and
once in a while he would invite us over to look at the planets and the moon and uh I was so blown away by what I was
seeing I said it's always stayed in my mind that I will they have a telescope
one day and um all my youth I always kept uh tagged on astronomy news all the
time buying some magazines or always uh looking at TV show talking about
astronomy or and in my my youth at in
school uh my goal was to be a biologist that's always in my mind that if I
wanted to be a biologist I love animals I always look at National Geographic uh
uh TV show and then always was fascinated and once in a while they were
doing a show on astronomy and I I I remembered that oh yeah that's true I really enjoy astronomy too So
and stretch uh we if we fast forward about 10 years after that when I late
late teens um I fell in love with music that was
my my downside that I I started to play guitar I was about 10 years old too at
the same time that I I um I kind of learned how to play guitar with my
brother my brother took lessons and everything but I just learned to play guitar by looking at him And I I fell in
love with music And I played in a rock band when I was the between 15 18 years
old And then moved to to uh Vancouver from Montreal at some point with the
band trying to to make some ends meet to uh with doing some shows around Canada
Uh it never worked Uh we already had we we were too many there was too many
people in the band and um the band kind of split and um but I always kept
playing music and music uh kept me going pretty much for the next 20 years after
that Uh I was working in hotels and clubs and bars
and got a lot involved into a bad bad experience So um at one point when I
reached about 30 35 years old I came back to Quebec and I met my wife uh I
was a cook and I was I had a concession for a kitchen concession in the in Montreal and she was one of my customer
and I met my wife and uh eventually we got together lived together and then we
had a kid the first kids and I was 34 35 five and I had problem problem
with addiction because I worked with in bars all my life and I was
into the the situation when involved in alcohol and drugs and and um I took a
decision at 35 years old to stop everything uh to become clean and wow I
went to a cure and Um it's been what today it's almost 31 years that I'm
clean and sober But what helped me to get out of it is astronomy
Um I had just bought a house in Hudson with my wife a young uh one-year-old kid
I was working 40 hours a week in color car paint uh company making color
for cars car paint And I was working nights also on delivering pizza to make ends meet
And I remember about astronomy He said "I love astronomy Why don't I try to get
involved into astronomy?" But I needed a telescope for that And um I look I went
to the store in Montreal to buy a telescope and it was very very expensive for my I didn't have enough money to buy
a telescope what I want So I said and the guy proposed to me well you can always buy parts and build it I said oh
yeah that's interesting So he sold me a book uh on how to make parabolic mirror
to start with and said if you're interested we sell blanks and abressive
and all the kits that you if you want to grind your mirror and stuff like that So I really got this wouldn't be
interesting So about six months later after I've read the books about three
times and got new books other books to to learn how to do it I said "Okay asked
my wife first can I spend the uh the amount of money to buy the blanks and the the equipment and the the stuff that
I need to make it and see how it goes." She accepted and uh it was quite a lot
of money for that time for me at that situation about $600 And that was a lot of money for us
then So I took my time I grinded my
first 12 and a half inch to a f7.1 uh on on my in my basement and I have a
I have very very small basement 10 by 120 square feet to work in and grinding
the mirror and then polishing the mirror and then um it was the beginning of the
uh internet okay at that time So I was trying to look at how do I do I test my
mirror how do I finish the mirror i know I have to polish it but I have to measure it and see if it's good So I got
the plans from uh for a fold tester on the internet So I built my own fold
tester and then uh it's a F7 12 and a half So it was a
long way to do the testing It's 14 ft long So I had to put my football tester
on the kitchen table and the the bench that hold the mirror in the in the living room and I tell the the kids and
my wife to not move because the the floor would move and I couldn't make my measurements So that was all all kind of
problem and they have to to make measurement and and just the just being
able to do a reading with a fukol tester for someone that never used it It's it's a kind of a a
mystery Okay What what should I see what can I see and what should I look for and
how can I measure it and how do and in those days the way that I was making my
my windows to do the measurement There was no computer program to just run in
the data and then tell me what have to be done and how good my mirror is I had to all do the computation by hand
calculation by hand and it took forever to make a mirror that those days and my
first end result was pretty good I I it's one of my it's a real good mirror
for uh for the first one F7 planetary mirror But I had the mirror but I had no
scope I had to again to uh learn the trade of
how to build a telescope So I bought a books again and then you know you know the story of trust tube telescope with
plywood and the ground So I've built my first telescope uh from the beginning of grinding the mirror to the first uh
first light of the telescope was about a year and a half for the first telescope
And uh I have to say that I was very very very proud of myself when I first
saw the ring of Saturn and Jupiter and uh the nebula M42 or any galaxy that I
could see It was just mesmerizing for me to see to tell myself that I just came
out from a very hard time I find a way to
uh a reason okay to uh to keep going really a passion I found a passion to do
uh but not only the observing but the making of it So after that I convinced
my six-year-old son then that he really needed a telescope too not only me So
because mine he was very long it was dangerous for him to go up the ladder build you a small telescope for
you Of course I didn't tell my wife but he he sure agreed agreed with me So
I built a 7in uh mirror for I made a seven-inch mirror and a small telescope wooden telescope for him Uh the the
house that we had bought it was a very old house and the guy that lived there before was working wood So he had left
all kind of woods in the shed So I did I took some wood out of shad and then said
let's make the tube out of wood and the mount out of wood and see how it goes
So I ended up doing a very very fancy maple tube and then uh I bought some
tools and books on how to work woods of course but uh wow a while but the first
wooden telescope that I built was a 7 in f4.5 and uh I have to say it was a very
very beautiful it is still a beautiful telescope and uh I still have it here
and at that point I was not much involved into astronomy club I only went
to one of the club it was about half an hour drive from where I live and um I
had started my own small astronomy club in my town because I didn't want to go
all over the place So we called ourselves the the lunatics of Hudson So
it really matched my my philosophy I'm very lunatic guy That's why my wife tells me and um so the guy
at the other clubs uh they were u familiar with telephone telescope
competition in the states and they said well normally you build a very beautiful
12 and 7 inch wooden telescope why don't you present it at stellophane stellopane what is that so I
was I didn't know much about it so he said well it's a competition it's been going on since early 1920 or
And every year people bring amateur bring telescope there and they judge by the optics and structure craftsmanship
and stuff So and that year happened a weekend that I was
working so I couldn't go So the club said we're going to bring your telescope
over there I'm going to present it for you Said okay sure no problem So they brought my telescope to Stallopane and
presented it and they called me up on Saturday night said "Hey Norm you just
won the first place award for craftsmanship." Wow Wow Okay That was that was a
surprise because I wasn't expecting anything at all I said "Well those those
places it was really really a shock for me that uh to be recognized for my
work." So I said maybe I should build another one Build another wooden telescope and
the third and the fourth and the fifth and I was making all my optics also So
uh it took a lot of time out of my time of like I said I was working 40 hours a
week uh delivering pizza still at night and then making optics and telescope weekends and uh I didn't have a social
life anymore And the time off that I had I was in my backyard observing So I was
really a lunatics completely separate from the from the world No social life at all
So I uh at that point I said okay I have I have to make a decision Do I just keep
it as a hobby and kind of slow down the production and then just enjoy
astronomy but in deep down inside of me it was a passion I said no I can't stop
that I I just have to every time I finished a mirror I was thinking about a
second one then the next one and the next one So we said "Why don't I try to
live out of it have a have a make a living of it." So I talked to my wife and said "Yeah sure You can do it
but I want you to take lessons on how to start a business You never been in business before You don't want to just
jump in there and then don't know what to do and then try try I had a house and
family to to uh to work for." So I say "Okay." So I took two years of nights
courses once once and sometime twice a week on how to start a business and make
a business plan and then everything that that involved or how to to start a new business and
especially making telescope when when I first went to the
bank said I I got a a business plan here and um I want to start a business
building telescope but wooden telescope Oh yeah Oh yeah Okay man You should have
seen the the face of the guy at the bank when I told him
that But anyway after many attempt I succeeded to get some help financial
help to to start uh my business So at one point I had a lot of inquiries for
larger and larger mirror and telescope I said "Okay I'm gonna just quit my job and uh rented a a
workshop I was still working my in downstairs where I had two grinding
machine downstairs and I was doing the woodwork also out there in downstairs Every time I was going to work on one
tools I had to put away everything else and then it was a nightmare So when I first rented my my first workshop I had
something like 800 square feet It was paradise I had room to put all my tools
all my bench everything was at hand So I didn't have to move everything when I
wanted to use it So over the years well the demand was
again to more larger and larger telescope larger optics and that's how
it it became what it became today that that I did some research and some R&D
with the universities around here on how to make larger optics and uh build my
own grinding machine my old polisher my vacuum chamber everything homemade here
but with the help of uh every everybody around me like like
when I was uh taking my lessons on how to uh build and start a business He said
the only way the easiest way is to surround yourself with competent people
So that's what I did when I really started my business to have a a good um
good person around me to help me to build my company And today
like the Scott was saying I'm making very big telescope Okay I don't have the same type of business that Scott has Uh
I don't do uh large amount of telescope mini I do custom telescope So each
telescope is built for a customer right now or for a project that will become a
custom telescope And right now we're working for also working for a satellite telescope with
the Toronto University with ABB with different company sense also and all kind of
people are getting into interest in astronomy right now
probably the COVID helped a lot uh but not as much as you guys for me because
like I said I got a lot more uh telephone calls about customer asking me
that they wanted to buy a beginner's scope I don't do better scope I mean I
build telescope for either professional so my professional or uh someone that
wants to buy a unique telescope so um it it's not my it didn't bring more more
business to me but I I feel the interest is growing and I have more contacts from
research group university that wants to get more involved in astronomy and get bigger instrument and bigger telescopes
It does I have a question I want to ask you You you you uh you were healed by
astronomy You were healed by creating your business and you were healed
by you know you started out I I uh
and uh right I he kind of um lightning and bulb in my head said uh like I said
with the first time I observe uh Saturn or Jupiter or the galaxy in an
instrument that I made with my hand Yeah It changed me completely Not only the
the the the work to get there it was fun It was interesting That's why I still
enjoy it the the the work of doing an optic But the the end result
uh saved me I mean it's like wow That's that's a that's a it's a miracle
story It really is It really really gave me a purpose
And you see the love in your telescopes you know So that's anyone that's seen one of your
woodcrafted telescopes or Yeah in one of your large your large telescopes It's I
am I'm stunned I really am And uh it's a work of love It's a work of uh of
passion of ast about astronomy about what's up there I mean and in all those years uh I always played my guitar after
a night session of astronomy and I or in in star party I always have my guitar and I think music and astronomy goes so
wells together It's like it's made it's meant to be together I mean to and um
like I promised to you this afternoon I will play a song for you Okay All right
Because uh Mars is really in the news right now I thought
about a song that talks about Mars a little bit Oh really
Okay Well your music's been I'm sure all the all you guys know the song because
it's we're all about the same age was an Elton John uh
song She packed my bag last
night Zero power
90 and I going to be [Music] high as a kite by
[Music] then I miss the herd so much I miss my
wife It's lonely and out in space
on such a [Music] time
bless and I think it's going to be a long long time dreaming and get to not the man
they think I am my own I'm a rocket
man Rocking man burning all the fuel out there
alone I think it's going to be a long long
time Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your
kids In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them if you
live And all that science I don't
understand Just my job five days a week A rocket man
[Music] Rocking
man and I think it's going to be a long long time Don't bring me home yet I'm
not the man they think I am at home Oh no no I'm a rocking
man Rocking man burning auto fuse out there
alone And I think it's going to be a long long
time And I think it's going to be a long long
time And I think it's going to be a long long
time And I think it's going to be a long time
Wow that was beautiful That was beautiful
Well done Beautiful Wonderful Okay Wow Hope you enjoy
[Laughter] Amazing Uh Norman thank you so much Very
welcome And I look forward to the next time that you're on And um I you know
thank you for sharing uh your story of your life with us and the the honesty
that you shared with us Um it's it's really it is amazing and um you know I
don't pretend to be anybody else So I I'm just me It's like I do my best I do my best to to
accomplish a dream and everybody else's dream also because I know when someone
asks me for a telescope or a large mirror that it's their dream I try I
help them to accomplish So uh and I know that when they do put the eye of the
eyepiece and they have the first light of their telescope I hope they enjoy it as much as I do Yeah I know they do I
know they do Thank you so much Thank you Well folks
uh up next is um Mike Simmons He's coming back uh for um you know to share
more about uh visions of space with us and um uh so let me bring you back on to
the stage Thanks again Norman and we will see you next time Thank you All
right Uh so um last time you were on uh
to talk about uh space art and the astrophotography and all the stuff you
experienced as you went around the world uh Mike that you're still experiencing uh we saw some amazing stuff and and uh
I know that there's so much of it and uh so we're we're just going to make this a regular thing to have you uh share as
much as as you can So I don't think you need it I mean Norman
just did it That that is space art I mean seriously there are people that do
movies There are people that sing songs that was that was space art It's based
on space stuff So you know Elton John a lot of people get into it It's poetry
You had uh Kelly Poor Kim Poor uh her father was very famous artist Yeah they
all have their own styles But Norman man that was great Good break here
Really enjoyed it But next time you know you really got to wear like you know a pink boa and all this other stuff
I don't think he likes my idea but I think about it Okay Okay good enough
So but it's one of those things that art about space is everywhere around us and
we don't realize it You know space is part of everything And uh
you know if you're on Yelp you give a fivestar review to a restaurant or something Well you know if we didn't see
space we wouldn't have these stars I actually there's a great movie called Acquainted with the Night Uh title taken
from a poem that David read uh last week I think about people that do different
things at night Uh most of them is working but some of them was astronomy
for fun followed uh someone you know Bob Taffy and I think someone else to Catman
do and they were doing some master photography and the film was in the Palm
Springs film festival So I went there and sat with the the producer director
of it and I was talking about this and I said well look even at the beginning of
your film you had a background for the credits or something that was stars and he said I did he didn't realize So
uh you know it's there's a lot of it there But anyway um I want to So let's
see I I now Kelly talked about her
father and some other things And by coincidence I chose one of my favorites
who happens to be an astronaut to talk about tonight And I'm going to make it pretty brief
because well actually I'm probably lying because I always say I'll be brief and I
never manage to do it I know I can't lie to you Scott You know me too long I
try And uh this is Nicole Scott This is someone I know and really like Now
Nicole and I have had the best conversations about how and I mentioned
this last time so I won't go too much into it about how we just see the universe in
different ways And she represents the two common sides She's an
engineer she's an astronaut she's an artist and she's taken photographs in
space and done paintings from them And I think it's absolutely fantastic because when you're creating something
if you're an artist that includes you know art includes writing I mean we think of paint but it includes writing
It includes film making In the Astro Arts program and astronomers without borders we had people of all different
kinds performance artists and she represents different
ways of doing this And everybody has their own style So this is Nicole astronaut
uh artist earthling and this is one of
her famous paintings which I absolutely love and she took a picture from the
space shuttle She'd been in space five times and did different paintings of it
I've and I think I mentioned this last time I've been looking at pictures of Earth from space since the early 60s
when they started taking them And um the paintings are different
because the photographs are flat They show you details but they don't con
necessarily convey the feelings And when you interpret it through some form of art you convey the feelings And that
includes storytelling So this is Nicole on the on the International Space
Station and she uh is holding the picture uh that she had taken and uh and
a painting This is an oil painting that she made there on the International Space Station So it's the first maybe
not the first drawing but the first oil painting in space
Um these are this is the the image and some of the paintings that she's made
and they're different impressions because you know how many times you go out and you look at something the
lighting's a little bit different and it makes a difference and it gives you a different feeling or just how you happen
to be taking it So she's done a a whole series of things uh based on what she calls the wave This is one of my
favorites Sometimes I don't know if it's a photograph or a painting but then I
recognize that it's you know it's this this one's a painting and it's realistic but it's
done with the the sense of it Now this is part of a series
of paintings that are sunrise and sunset on the International Space Station When
you're orbiting at 17,000 miles an hour um then you go around the Earth in about
90 minutes you get I think it's 16 sunrises and sunsets uh um every uh
every day But this is another and it's look at the difference here This is just the
feeling of the colors and it gives you one sense But here is another that she
did and it includes a poem Uh and these are some things posted in the astrotart
section of astronomers without borders Andy Sherwood uh one of the staff members wrote the the the poem there
just to give a sense And uh so here you can tell what's
what and you can compare the two So this is Soyos over South Africa So we have a
photograph on the left and it's not a super sharp contrasty image but it gives
a kind of impression and and you know the camera doesn't capture what the eye sees You can see the warmer colors that
she uses and the impression of uh South Africa here How how it felt how it
looked to the eye Um and it's different Uh I love these This was uh
sixth anniversary of the Discovery 128 launch which was her um
her first trip to space And this almost looks I you know the the
the texture on it and everything gives an entirely different feeling But I guess you'd feel differently if you were
on that spacecraft Uh this I love that We've seen pictures like this I've seen
a lot of pictures like this of the space shuttle after leaving ISS and they take a picture of it before it heads down But
they don't feel like this You know they're astonishing pictures This is not better There isn't
any better It's not worse It's not better It's different If you're watching
this you're going to get feelings that um photograph might not convey Okay so
here's a special project And you know I really really really like using astronomy to make things good things
happen And this is a great example uh the MD Anderson Children's Cancer
Center in Houston near uh Kennedy Space Center and
uh they support them quite a bit There are art projects being done for the children that are staying at the
hospital undergoing uh treatment for cancer And this is one of the things that they did And uh this one doesn't
have to do with space but um the idea that did was this the um
let's see let me get this right Spaceuit art project I think it is This is put
together by paintings by the kids the patients
Here is one of the patients I guess this is astronaut uh
Kate Rubin's another one of the patient and they're working on these things and they're stitched together into this
spaceacuit Wow And after it is finished and one is
this one's called Courage and there have been I think three of them It's flown to the space station and here is Kate
Rubin's wearing it Totally cool And these kids now have created this spacuit
that she is wearing in space And she is on the phone there talking to one of the
the patients who is at Kennedy Space Center on the phone talking to her live
Wow And there are videos of this Oh man
And there's Nicole um with them And you really and there's one of the other uh
space suits behind uh if this touches you at all you got to
look this up The space suit uh art project I think it's called It's on Nicole's uh
Nicole.st on her website You'll find it or write to me And this was the one of the suits
called Hope That's the mission patch for it So um that's it as far as what I was
going to show about Nicole's work Now um there are other
astronauts as Kelly pointed out that uh do art as well One that uh Nicole has
some pictures of with her is Ellen Bean who did some really fabulous art after
coming back from the moon He spent the rest of his life doing art And remember the guys that went to the moon they
didn't choose them They didn't go to art schools to find these astronauts You know these are
like the like uh flight uh test pilots and uh really high-powered
guys But a lot of them have that creative urge and this is the way they did it And many of them do other things
that are very very creative as well So now as far as astro art goes
uh Gary shar shared a a picture he was working on of the pletes um during the
break Why is that not art i mean that's as much art as anything else And you
notice that people keep taking photos of the same images and they process them differently and they show what they want
to show You can't say one's better than the other You just can't It's our mind's
eye It's not reality So uh I hope to share some more
things but dang Scott you're getting a a a good bunch of people on here to do
stuff Yes Yes We have astronomers waiting in the wings there We're going
to take a um we're going to break for 10 minutes and then we're going to switch to uh the astrophotographers and the
image processors Uh we've got a few guys here that are are ready to roll Um so uh
Mike thanks very much for sharing I know there's more stories to tell So I have I've got stories Yeah Yeah But I'm I'd
love to share them People should know this stuff I feel like John Dobson the first time he looked through a telescope
and he said "Everybody's got to see this." And you know as long as people are interested I'll tell the stories
That's right Excellent Thank you Mike That's great Love it Okay Um so let's see I will uh
I'll take the the stage here And um we are going to you know we're now uh going
into our um second break and into part three of the global star party Um uh
where uh we will do some live image processing Hopefully some live imaging
uh tonight And um uh you guys uh come back in 10 minutes and uh we'll be we'll
be right back with
you I was very interested What thank you Was that Was that Gary yeah
Yeah Yeah Oh good I'm glad you like it I see I see you guys as being the geeks and I don't know how you you know you
you you going to like it but it at the same time you guys are doing the same thing You're telling your own stories with your own art
The the funny thing with that image that I sent over is it's really how bad the raw image is
to start with because of all sorts of problems and people don't really see that uh when the images come out they
don't see what we how bad the data is or how bad something is So I actually looked at that image and rerunning some
other processes on it now that have come to mind as I was looking at the image
after it's finished Um and there there's a a million and one
things but the one thing I can say is is I quite often look at an image and don't like it afterwards Yeah there there's
things that you see in it and and all sorts of things but that's one of the problems when you're testing equipment
that it very rarely all works on the first night Yeah Um you you have to go
through quite a few different processes to get it up and running Well I'm I'm glad for people like you
that have the patience to do that or the passion to do that But I mean you really
got to be kind of obsessed to go I think there's a lot more people more obsessed
in the world than me I I actually hate image processing A lot of people think I love it I I hate it My My thing is
getting the equipment all hooked together and getting the images on the screen there in front of you But those
actual raw images don't show a lot Nobody's interested in them Raw images
Yeah So you have to process them So I'm always looking at different ways to
speed up that process or cut out some of the um the time involved cuz I I don't
have 20 hours in a week to go through an image and sit there and go back to it each night and adjust a little bit It's
got to be out for a magazine or it's got to be out for somebody else Fairly quick Yeah Um and that's the
thing So I probably found a lot of the shortcuts in software to get around these
problems Um but then that comes back in because a lot of the problems that you're dealing with are removing maybe
light pollution removing other artifacts from the images which everybody would be
getting on a daily basis in their in their normal run of things So it works quite well
Interesting So one of the things that comes to mind remember I mentioned how
much how good this is compared to telescopes
um very you know the biggest telescopes in the world in the film days and there
was very little processing you could do with them The data was in there It's in
the film there You just didn't have the ability to do anything with it But and the rule for a photographer
was that you you can't look at a print and tell if it's a good photograph You
have to look at the negative and see if you really captured what you need to And this goes along with research Um my son
is in the entertainment industry here He's a cameraman and you know they talk
about stuff all the time We'll fix it in post Well you know this drives me crazy as a scientist because you can't fix
what you didn't capture and you can make it better but you can do so much with it
that and I see this all the time people saying posting pictures and say the
scene was mediocre Well it's if it's mediocre then why you you could do better Wait
till the scene's good But it obviously there's so much you can do So what is it
as big a deal as it was before i it's funny I've done a lot of talks out in
the US certainly on solar when I've been out there and there seems to be a different perception um because of the
clarity of weather So with different countries having clearer skies than the
UK um people pick and choose when they go out to image Um whereas in the UK and
a good example was um August August we had one of the worst August for probably
a decade and I think I actually got one night's imaging out of the whole of
August So you learn to work around a lot of the issues and if there is high cloud
there you just have to go out and image That's it there there's no sort of saying I'm going to leave it till next
week or the week after because there might not be any clear nights the next week or the week after And that works the same in solar
Um a lot of the imaging I do will be um with with gaps in clouds So you'll get
the blue coming through and that then works around the speed of the camera and the speed of your capture and getting
everything set for that um so that you are grabbing the images Otherwise you
you'll just go for weeks and weeks and weeks where you're not really getting anything that that's worth publishing or
putting out Um and as you know if you're you're writing for people you got deadlines there You can extend the
deadline by then um you know we've got something to work with So a lot of the
art of this over here now is is probably shorter captured on deep sky objects So
maybe an hour's worth of data and that might work around people's time that
they've actually got that evening because of work commitments or other things It might work around weather
There's 101 different reasons Mhm But this is where a lot of the modern equipment has come in So CMOS cameras
allow you to capture that data in and out Um and the processing software there
allows you to manipulate the image quite a lot to to get the data u and get
something that's reasonable You know that image that I posted up I know every single error in the image there but I
also know that it was imaged in an hour and it was image through high cloud with bounce back on the filters Um so it's
got every single thing going wrong in it but you still managed to recover something out of it And that's what I'm
trying to get across that a lot of this is not all lost There's a lot that you can do now to
recover stuff Um Gary I just wanted to interject also the thing the work that I
do in the science area with exoplanet You know everybody's got backyard telescopes and the skies are
not that great in a lot of areas Everybody's it's not like we're on top of a mountain But so we developed tools
and techniques to overcome that and to be able to do effective work in your
backyard that you used to have to be on top of a mountain to do Yeah Especially
the work that I do with exoplanets the high precision photometry down to one or two millimes compared to what it
typically used to be The standard was you know 1% or 10 millime mags right i'm
getting about five times better than that And that's uh you you you know to me it
sounds like if you've got any sort of a haze drifting through that's going to
vary if you have any seeing issues it's going to kill your ability to reach that
But it sounds like you're saying you can do it No you can do it It's it's it's
all technique and and skill and knowledge about what you're doing That's what it is and and also capturing more
more data That's the the thing and most people don't know the term stacking comes from the film age when you
actually stacked the negatives Uh one on top of the other and shine light through
them but yeah you're actually capturing more data And Gary on the the snow solar
tells us do you ever get out here to California Gary i haven't yet It's something that I uh keep meaning to do
Um I've talked with a few people out there and it is something that I need to
um really get on with and do And there there were quite a few things sort of sitting in the background that we were
looking at doing over sort of this next um 18 months but the the pandemic sort
of put that on hold everywhere Well yeah it's put the kibash on everything for
now but if you get out here I'll open up the the old solar telescope for you And it's got a a little CCD on it just a a
planetary imaging camera and it stacks the images in real time and everything And just you know when I started in the
program we were still using film I don't think we had any glass plates left So
what a difference And now we can do stuff that they could never have dreamed of And it's just such a great
demonstration I think this is the thing you you know people are living in that world now
where you can do anything any anything's possible with the equipment that's there and even some of the most basic
equipment is really good now oh yeah and that's the key I mean I just
look at sort of basic cameras you know camera that's around you know the two to
300 No [Music]
Well I um what Jerry was talking about there I didn't think I'd live long
enough to hear of exoplanets and he's doing it in his backyard
[Music] It's crazy Well um we are back uh for the third
part of our global star party which uh now involves uh the astrophotographers
image processors Um so let's uh let's show our our gallery of uh of
astronomers that are with us uh right now Uh we have uh Jason Gonzalez The
vast reaches uh uh Jason's in Michigan Minnesota
Michigan Yes Okay All right I knew it was an N state Yes Yes Cello down in
Argentina joining us We have Rodrigo Zela in Chile Um Mike I don't see your
last name there Mike and it's kind of dark Um not sure which mic we have here but uh um but you can introduce yourself
a little bit later Here we have Richard uh Grace um also known as the Afrobeard
uh who's on many of our programs and follows us on on many of our shows Gary
Palmer from the UK is with us We got Jerry Hubble in Virginia Um and uh who
else wade Prunty I can see him out there He's got his telescope set up So that's kind of cool Um so uh let's let each one
of you spend a minute to uh talk about what what it is you're going to share
with us tonight U Dr Are you going to uh are you uh able to share anything with
us or I'm not sure if he heard me Okay All
right All right So how about you Wayey
hey how you doing can you hear me yeah we can hear you Yes Tell us where you're at what time it
is and what you're going to show us tonight All right So um I am uh if you
see that little glow on my screen Um just above the roof line that's the DFW
airport in Dallas Texas Okay So um in fact uh here I'll show you something
pretty interesting Um let's take off
uh that's how bright it is at um where I am right now Okay So uh
sitting in a lot of light pollution here Yeah And um so anyway uh yeah So I am uh
just uh I've got a couple scopes up One I'm testing out and fact um it's uh the
Astronomical League uh helped me uh acquire that scope because I won it
on a previous Star Party So um that's the uh 102 And um I
actually won a couple of those Uh and I I did not know I won two of them And so
the mount that it is sitting on was uh used from store credit um to get that
mount So that whole system is a virtual star party system right there There you
go That's great So um so anyway uh yeah So um I'm testing that one out But here
I've got um let's see I can bring just right now
I've got Mars up in the screen And um that's it's uh
2350 millimeter focal length So um that's a that's a you know in in my eyes
that's a pretty big scope And you see what it takes This is the actual um Yeah you can see details on
there That's awesome This is the actual image with that scope So uh I really
need uh for Mars I really need some type of barlo or something on there to get even closer but uh that's what I've got
up right now And um Okay So yeah All right Great So we'll go on to uh uh how
about you Rodrigo uh tell the audience where you are what time it is and and what you'll be sharing tonight
Hello You've grown a mustache and a beard since I saw you last Yes
In uh 1:00 in the morning One o'clock in the morning Okay Yes
Um the the sky is clear
and I observing the m the Mars Mars Okay
All right Yes I take a little picture with the H
refractor explore scientific Apple Oh wonderful Okay All right That's great
Okay So next up will be uh Richard Grace Um what do you uh where are
you what is it and uh what do you got to share it's 11:55 almost midnight Uh I'm
here in Annapolis Maryland Okay Uh nowhere near as uh bad light pollution as Wade's got it Um but uh we're still
in a city here and at this actual moment everything is actually working I had to
play musical cables and uh hubs and all sorts of fun stuff Uh and it all ended
up after doing another restart It just works Anyway uh so I am uh guiding and
tracking on M33 the triangulum galaxy because I'm trying to get some more data
on that before um I get my wide field scope uh back and go for Andromeda to
try and get a whole bunch of data on that So that's what I'm working on on the night that everybody's probably looking at Mars
looking at that and uh I'll keep working on that till we go through the next go round I imagine Okay All right And uh
we've got uh we have Mike here I can see him working it looks like on a hand
controller or a pad Uh Mike I I don't see I I can't see what your last name is
Why don't you introduce yourself to the audience
can you hear us he's muted He is muted Let me ask mask to unmute Okay I should
be okay now Yeah Mike Uh I just see Mike I don't see any other name here on the
Yeah that's um Mike Weezner out here in Arizona Okay All right So what you are so so just really
quickly as uh Scott has probably noted on various events and and Kelly actually
mentioned earlier in his talk I'm kind of the guy who does a lot of smartphone
astrophotography I've been doing that since Apple uh released the I the
original iPhone back in 2007 I started doing the first astro photograph that I
took with an iPhone uh was actually through an ETX70 refractor
Um just sort of handheld over the eyepiece picture of the moon Uh since
then I've gone and gotten a little crazy with what I've been doing with iPhone
astrophotography and uh so I don't know if uh if you're seeing this uh screen
full size or not um because I'm not but um I'm sitting out here in
southern Arizona and it's coming up on nine o'clock here in the evening I'm looking
at Saturn on the iPhone I'm using an app right now uh that's called Night Cap
Camera and that's really the app that I use for doing deep sky
astrophotography Uh but it's a nice one to use also for planetary single frame
imaging Um because you can adjust everything about the exposure the ISO setting shutter speed uh focus It gives
you full manual control over the camera on the iPhone Uh there are similar apps
over on the Android side Uh but I don't think there's anything that quite does what this one does When I'm doing uh
imaging of DSOs deep sky objects I use this app and put it into what's called
long exposure mode And typically for nebuli or galaxies or star clusters
u I'll set an appropriate ISO and do a one minute exposure And what the app
does is it actually stacks uh each one of the individual one second images um
you know in on the device So you can do a one minute two minute five minute however long you want to run your
exposure for I've found that about one minute is sort of the sweet spot for most uh very faint objects If you go up
on to my Cassiopia Observatory website look in the photo album uh you'll you scroll
down that page and you'll see one of the cataloges that's there is actually all
of the Messier catalog objects uh photographed with an iPhone And uh
everybody does M42 That one's pretty easy the Ryan Nebula But you'll see some
other more intriguing objects in the Messier catalog Uh such as M4
M82 the Seagar galaxy Uh you you want to take a look at that image because you
can actually see the colors You can see uh some of the structure of that galaxy
taken with an iPhone So it's pretty impressive Um All right So I'm going to
cut you off right there We're gonna we're gonna just do some introductions here and then uh we're going to uh give
uh a 10-minute segment to I think the person that's up the latest is maybe Gary Palmer uh in the UK right now So we
don't want him to be up too late Um but uh we'll be back to you Mike Okay Okay
Well um we've already talked to a uh the Astro Beard talk to Wade Fronty Um uh
let's talk to uh uh Jerry Hubble
Yeah I was wondering when I was going to get around to it I'm always last That's because I'm with
That's because I'm on with you all the time And we still have a couple more guys to get through here So uh I'm in
I'm in Freshburg Virginia It's got we got clear skies tonight So I'm going to be showing you some spectroscopy at the
MSRO the Mark Slade Remote Observatory I've been doing some different stars I
did Vega earlier and so I'll be showing you how we take spectra with the uh at
the MSRO Awesome Awesome Okay And Gates and Genzel the vast reaches um uh in
Michigan Uh uh what time is it there at this point oh it's just after midnight
now Just after midnight All right And um uh did you get clear skies or cloud um
it's in and out It's in and out But um yeah I've got a telescope up on Mars and
I thought you were going to Gary because he's up uh Oh I am I'm I'm
just right now So I just You can go to him I I don't need to keep him awake but
but yeah Fine No we're we're we're just doing real short introductions here Next
up is Tyler Bowman Tyler um do you want to unmute there and there you go
Yeah I just Go ahead Scott A little bit after 11 o'clock So are you doing some imaging tonight i I just got done
imaging and I was stacking while um Mr Simmons was talking again and it's kind
of a rough stack I gotta get here to my screen share real quick All right I'll
have you share your screen here in a little while Oh that's fine I mean that's totally fine All right All right
Tyler and Caesar Bro you're down in Argentina Uh you said it's about 1
o'clock in the morning Is that right yes Yes One o'clock wilder tree in the
morning Yes Yes All right And what's doing tonight Cesar well I I had in the
screen I had Jupiter Saturn I lost them because it's they are uh right now Mars
Yeah Well yes Like every day like every Thursday but and um and I'm pointing to
Mars but now it's mostly cloudy and unfortunately Yes Okay All right So what
we'll do for right now is we'll go to Gary Palmer since he's he's at the latest What What time is it there Gary
hi Scott It's uh just gone five o'clock in the morning Five o'clock in the morning Oh my goodness
We're ticking on quite well at the moment You for uh being with us and uh you were
going to do some image processing for us Yeah Um I know we sort of put out um on
the chat about what we were going to do tonight and a lot of people are asking for planetary processing So what we're
going to do is on the next star party we set up and do some planetary uh
processing right the way through Um one of the main reasons for that is having
uh good data which is what I in the UK So um probably going to get somebody on
who's a good friend of mine who can do some good planetary processing Though I can do it I haven't got really much good
data here from this year Um it's sort of hiding away So um a couple of people
were talking about light pollution and um problems with images So I thought
we'd have a look at um what goes wrong and how we can recover it which is
really the uh the main sort of thing So um if I share up my main
screen and hopefully we've got it right this time So you should be seeing that now
Hopefully That's right Um this is an hour's worth of data on M45 where um
most things have gone wrong Um there's serious vignetting on the
system There's also um problems with the filter that's in front of the camera and
that's created um artifacts in here So we're getting uh offaxis light coming
through and we're getting all sorts of problems So you can see there's quite a lot there Um so there there is a choice
there Do we chuck the data away or do we have a go at processing it and see what we can come up with Um and my thought
was uh process it and see what we can come up with Um and just see how good we
can uh get that data back So most of these processes I've already run through
in the show Um but I will go through them Um first thing would be a dynamic background extraction That would remove
the green um off of here and it would start to stabilize the image You do have two
options then One is are you going to work with the full image or are you going to recover the data from the
center of the image as it's a fullframe camera So if you were going to recover
the data from the center of the image then you might crop it so that we're actually only working on the center part
that does give you a good bit of playing around with because you're removing the vignetting from the sifter right um so
if we look at the two images there's the port frame one You can see the beignetting around uh right around the
outside and you can also see this bounce back off of the filter that's there
Um once we run through that we would run through the uh color calibration Sorry
moving around the wrong images there um work on a little bit of noise control
in the background and then sort of start separating out the stars and working on
the individual parts of the image which is really where that's come from Um and
where this has come from here So we're just working on this and trying to get out as much data as possible but trying
not to increase the problems with the uh vignetting on the system
When we've got to the end of really the processing in here the rest of the image recovery is done in Photoshop There's
only so much that you can do in Pix Insight when the images are quite bad So
if we go over to Photoshop I've opened this up as to where I got it to um and then sort of
going to run through some processes So there are a couple of add-ons in
Photoshop that really make this sort of thing quite easy to start recovering One of the first one is um RC Astros
gradient exterminator and that is the main one to use for light pollution Um if you're um
not into pixight and you want to use things like Big Sky Stacker and other stacking programs gradient exterminator
is probably the the be all and end all of removing light pollution in the background Um and it's really simple You
just lasso around the object Um select it as an inverse So
it's working on the background there And then you run the gradient exterminator app And you'll see it's starting to
balance out the background straight away This is quite severe in this image You
know this isn't your average everyday image with just a little bit of light pollution in So the other app that we
have here is from Pro Digital Software the Astro Flat and we can start to run
that So we deselect it And I've just readjusted the levels because I'm still
trying to keep as much of the data in the center of the image Otherwise if we run these processes just straight
through we lose all of the data there If we run the Astro Flat Pro you can see
there it's really starting to pull the background back now and keep the data there Mhm Um and then it's just a little
bit of exposure and levels and playing around that we're balancing this background out In the image that I sent
over earlier I did work on the uh crop of this and that was where I really got to with the crop So considering how bad
it was there's plenty of things that you can do in the software there to recover
the data back and you could still work on this more and more and more So it
while Pix Insight's a very very good program it really likes clean data running through it That's the key thing
And sometimes it's actually better to come out of Pix Insight and do some work on these in Photoshop and then send them
back into Pix Insight So you could remove a lot of the light pollution the
gradient problems um maybe vignetting issues in Photoshop and then send them
back in And some people actually do that with color calibration They really struggle with the color calibration in
pixight because of different problems like a um flat integration has caused
the problem or filters have caused the problem And this allows you then a different way around it So really for an
an image that was really really bad Um if we start going through this now on
this process and I just zoom in a little bit you start to see um I've gone
through with the spot healing brush that's actually using this here and what this does is this mimics the background
that's going on or anything next to the image and then we're removing the offaxis light issues So we're just going
right the way through the image And we're just adding in So if we look here you can see just in there I zoom in a
little bit closer So you can see the offaxis light
coming in here And as we go through the image we're gradually removing all of these out in the different points of the
image And you'll see that I've had to do quite a lot in there Um then we've gone through duplicated
the lay done some blending changes and then we're running through with the hue and
saturation once we get to the end of
this That one I actually missed out there So I can do that one now We're just going to come in here and gradually
flatten that back And then if we take the image
back that's what we ended up with afterwards So from an image that most
people would chuck away and running through a few of these processes that that's what we tried to do with it Um
and that might be the only image in a month that we've got because of weather because of some of the problems that go
on So not everything works um really really clearly um and really really uh
nicely according to plan So it's recovery more than um you know having the perfect skies and
the perfect everything else Right Right
So it's it's making uh it's maximizing the the the uh you know the your your
image data to uh get something that you're I mean I would be very proud to
show an image like that So the issue is is is do you chuck the data away and
that that's the the the question that you have a lot of the time Um you know
things don't always run smoothly even when you know what you're doing Yeah you can put things together and you can
answer a million questions but until you actually start using the equipment So that was probably the first image off of
that camera with a filter in front of it So we didn't have any idea what would be happening We could see the raw data
coming in Once you stack the images then you start to see the problems that are there in the background
Um yeah if I everything worked fine you wouldn't be doing half the work on it but you still managed to recover
something out of it rather than just throw it in the bin No that's excellent Yeah the the I can
see from the chats here they're all very um uh impressed and uh and thanking you
for for showing them some of these tips So that's awesome If you guys want to
learn more about image processing uh I can give no better recommendation than
to uh attend uh some of Gary Palmer's uh
uh classes uh that he runs through astrocourses.to.uk I did put a link in
chat here Um uh he is also one of the prize partners on uh with our program
And so one of the prizes tonight will be uh an hour with uh Gary Palmer So you're
one-on-one with him uh to work on one of your images I guess So uh or a sample
image that he might have you uh work on to improve your skills So anyhow uh
thanks Gary That's awesome And uh we will move to the next astronomer here
And so it was about 1:00 in the morning getting to be one o'clock in the morning
for I think a couple of you guys Uh um Rodrigo what time is it there
scott here is um 1:00 by 15 minutes 1:15 Yeah So let's let's
give you the stage for 10 minutes and and you can show people what uh what
you've got going on Yes I I chart my my picture with I take
the images for Mars uh with the scientific upper part 4 in
refractor Mhm Mhm And I process the the
machine in registax Okay
And okay So you have a you have a telescope shop called North Optics in
Laserena Tilly Yes Yes
You see my picture yes The photograph of Mars Oh so this was an
image made you made tonight Yes Wow That's awesome That's great Tonight
is a imagine of 10 minutes of video on
the explore scientific upper refractor Yes
with five five power barlo
Five power Okay Okay And little
camera 5 It's my favorite camera for planetary
Right I have one of those cameras too I never got an image that good of Mars So that's
see the the scene in this moment is is very bad I
in 11:00 I take this picture now
in is it's bad Okay But what look at that that detail
So you have a nice polar cap and tons of detail on that's beautiful
I can share with you this moment in real time real time photo
[Music]
Okay Is this shark okay This is the real time photo
in chap Okay Yes Um when I take the picture uh the
scene is is better that now But
uh with the process I um select the the
the best frames for the for the stack
Right Still uh pretty impressive There are moments where you can see a lot of detail there That's great So are you in
your backyard where where are you set up where my my setup yeah I mean where are
you are you at home or uh in the mountains or where are you uh in the
city in I in Laserena in my my house in the backyard Okay
Excellent Excellent Thank you so much Thank you so
much All right Rodrigo Excellent work man Okay so uh and who do we got up next
who is uh I think you're up at uh you're at the one o'clock hour right Jason
uh yeah 1219 But 1219 we're getting there You're getting That's right Okay
Yeah So I uh like everybody else it seems like have been uh trained on Mars
Um it's a good time for it because it's as big as it's going to get for many
many years But um I've had some clouds dancing in and out So I'll
uh share my screen here
Is my screen coming through oh oh my god Yeah Um so this is the live view of Mars
Um my seeing today is um I would rate as poor Um is the video
coming through all right Yes Uhhuh All right So this is a mono look at um Mars
And just to give you a look here this is the uh telescope I'm
shooting through I just stepped outside and shot this picture but um this is a
12-in Newtonian um with a monochrome ASI 183 camera and
a filter wheel on there and uh on a Skyatcher EQ6R mount So that's kind of
what the setup looks like And uh there's just a zoom in of the the camera
It's uh it's interesting how you place the camera uh down kind of at a uh you know at the
lock position uh towards the mount Yeah I mean I So when I mount up the the
scope the focuser points straight down and that's just that helps with the balance to keep everything on the same
axis Although with a Newtonian it's always a challenge because no matter where you point there's always a offc
center waiting So that's kind of the best you can do But
right you don't see accessories much anymore where the uh where you this guy
this guy was out there when I was hanging the counterwe look at those they're huge
little frog He's a tiny little guy That's a that's like a 4 inch paver So he's Oh yeah
Um yeah So this is the live view through the scope Like I said I'm getting getting clouds in and out but right now
actually um I don't seem to have a cloud in front of it But you can see how much the image
is dancing around So the scene is quite bad And if I take off the stabilization
you can see how much it's fluttering around
Oh yeah Nice thing about using this this is this software here is called fire capture But the nice thing about this
software is it's got some stabilization options and some autog guiding options for planetary imaging So
by clicking on this auto align here um you can prevent the planet from floating
all over the field of view and it kind of centers it you know kind of locks it in the center
tends to help the stacking program too create a stable
image But yeah so I I've been stacking up um these images as I get them Um and
this is kind of a view of Mars here um that I've captured live
tonight So this is a monochrome image through an infrared filter And the
reason I'm using an infrared filter here is it helps [Music] um it's a more uh stable frequency band
to shoot through the atmosphere Um if you shoot through visible light like red
green and blue progressively the images get less sharp as they're more affected by the the uh atmospheric stability So
when you shoot through an infrared filter you can get a lot more clarity in the image So that's what you're seeing here is just a monochrome shot
of the infrared band Beautiful But you still get you know plenty of detail into
the into the planet And um I think you saw when I clicked in this um I took a
full color image which I shot yesterday actually this morning
Yesterday morning Um so this is the infrared um luminance data with the red green and
blue filters overlaid Um and so this is
I would say this is one of the more crisp shots I've ever gotten of of Mars
It's really difficult to get surface detail on Mars at any point other than opposition So these few weeks is when
you can really start to get um a good view of the planet because it gets so much larger and you can see the
surface details But um yeah definitely happy with how this turned out Yeah Um
you know I I noticed even as I've been imaging it um as we've walked up to the
opposition here that the polar ice camp has been shrinking on the on the South Pole And this is definitely the tiniest
it's been since um since we've had a good season for Mars Um but also
interesting thing here is you start to see the blues of the um the cloud deck
Yeah Of the planet shining through So you see something you know some some
clouds up around or some atmospheric haze up around the north pole and also on the limb of the planet
here I've I've gotten an infrared filter or sorry sorry an ultraviolet filter
also uh to shoot Venus and Mars and and the ultraviolet filter really shows the
cloud details pop out Let me see if I have that up here I thought I had it Yeah So this
this is shot through a ultraviolet filter and you can see that the details are a lot less sharp but you can see a
lot of definition or a lot of differentiation in the clouds you know
around the limb of the planet up through the North Pole and and out to the other limb
And so this is just another shot from last night Wow Of Mars
Wow It's spectacular Yeah Yeah It's a it's been a great season for planetary imaging And um this is a one from just a
couple weeks ago of Venus And again this is shot through infrared green and ultraviolet
filters So you get an expanded spectrum on the planet and you can begin to see
the cloud details in Venus too So yeah I shot this the day the news came out about finding phosphine in the
atmosphere of Venus Right And um I just happened to shoot it that morning and that news broke during the day So I
processed this image and um you know kind of had some unique meaning that day
because um you know the indications are that you know the the
phosphine could be a potential indicator of life right i know or or some natural
process we don't understand But it's kind of a cool uh thought to think about that
It's very intriging Is there anything alive in there i don't know anybody out there And it looks like you can see the
dark side feature as well Um yeah Yeah So I um I've actually done this where
I've imaged it in infrared and there is a slight glow in the infrared spectrum
and that happens around a thousand nanometer Um and it's an emission from
the surface It's a heat emission So you can actually image the dark side of Venus that way I've done that a few
times Um the star background is just a artsy like you know because we're doing
art so why not um you know put it in a scene but yeah you can definitely see the the dark side of the planet if
you're imaging it correctly and I've I've done that several times now It's very cool I wouldn't say correctly but
with the right technique or with the right filters So right not saying what I do is right but you know it's just not
wrong not wrong Very cool Beautiful Yeah So that's that Thanks Yeah Thank you
Thank you Thanks Jason Yeah All right Okay So let's see Where are we going to
next here um we've got
uh we got Jerry Hubble U Jerry why don't you uh why don't you show what you're
doing now you're going to show a couple of things So I'll come back Let's do one and then and we'll come back and do the
other You're talking to me I'm talking to you
Yeah I wanted to show the spectroscopy that I'm working on I uh
miss this going [Music]
Oh the skies tonight over Virginia Is it They're clear They're clear It's
clear So so let me uh actually I got this stupid thing here I got to get this
window out of the way All right So you can see the uh
telescope there in the picture right mhm And uh so I'm going to take an image
right now I'm on a I'm on a alpha pegasus uh let's see
here I think it's Alpha Pegasus
Pegasus Right So just to demonstrate taking the
photograph Um I just loaded I can't get this window
out of the way Get over there So this is this is what it looks like
I'm going to take another image And right now I put a new filter wheel in and put the had to change the filters
and put them in there And one of the things that we do at the uh with the
spect spectrometer with the spectral grading is we rotate it so that the
right now you see that the spectrum is horizontal but when we take the photograph it's actually
um supposed to be vertical because the vertical axis is the deck axis Okay And
we don't have any so you don't really have any drift in deck okay to smear the
lines So that's how we that's how we configure the spectral grading to uh
keep the lines nice and sharp in the spectrum But uh we haven't gone back I
just started testing the spectral grading and we have to go back and reorient it a little bit You can see
it's off axis a little bit It's actually um about 30 degrees
off So what I So it's pretty close I mean it's it's pretty good but uh it
needs to be lined up vertically so that the when when the lines get uh lines
don't get smeared in the deck axis So what I do is I basically rotate this
thing horizontal and then uh Oops Then I can show you
this I'm using Max and DL to take the photographs and to do this graph Right Okay
So this is what the lines on the spectra look like Now they're not depending on
uh which star it is Uh you'll get different different lines right so for
example in alpha and Vega which I did earlier you can see the lines are a
little sharper Yeah it depends on the uh it depends on the star and and other
things like that But let me see what the star type is here So alpha pegasy is
actually um it's an alpha it's an a a star just like Vega is So the line
should be very similar but the but the magnitude is a little bit less so there's more
noise Uh of course Vega's pretty much you know near the brightest as the stars
like Siri but uh so let me what I use is another program called RSpec which Tom
Field wrote I don't know how many of you guys know Tom Field He's a great guy But he wrote this program to measure to uh
process spectra And uh this is what get this
stuff out of the way So this is the image right here You
can see it And one of the things you can
do get this over here is is you first you calibrate the
image the uh wavelength uh you calibrate it for wavelength Okay So what what
we're showing here is this in the image you've got the stars right here You see
that and then you have the spectra that gets off to the side The star position
is called the zero order So that's a reference point for the calibration Okay
So when I calibrate this image it'll up for the zero order You have to basically
click on which pixel is a zero order Okay
And then and then what you have to do is you have to pick out one of the lines in your spectra and say you have to know
what line that is and that'll scale the that'll scale it so that you get all these
um you got the correct scaling for wavelength on the spectra Yeah Right now
you've seen you probably seen spectra that look different than this where it's it starts out high and then it slopes
down like a like a slope That's what a truly calibrated image because there's two there's two calibrations One is for
wavelength and the other one is for instrument response Okay So the CCD camera is not sensitive the same all
across the wavelengths right it's it starts out in the uh uh in the in the ultraviolet down way
down here and then it gets more sensitive as you get up into the green You can see the colors right here Okay
As you get into the blue you get more sensitive green is the most sensitive and then it starts to taper off into the
red in the infrared So this is the this overall curve shape is the instrument
response basically and it has not been normalized for that So but you can still
pick out the the the uh uh absorption lines So let me let me uh let me close
that and then uh let me I'll zoom up on these absorption lines Okay So I've
picked out uh a few lines uh which I've got keeps
hiding behind that thing So we've got the hydrogen hydrogen bomber lines We've
also got helium nitrogen You can I don't know if you can read this list It's
really small but helium carbon nitrogen So if I if I move my cursor if I zoom up
here so this is the hydrogen beta line Okay that's what
this big dip is right here It's got like a a descriptor there Yeah that's a
descriptor That's a That's the hydrogen beta absorption line And then uh down
here is the uh hydrogen gamma line You can see that dip right there Wow And
then and then uh you got a couple other lines which are kind of interesting here You got this big dip right here Right
Right Which is uh that's carbon Carbon 4 Wow So we're detecting carbon in that
star Yes Uh
right there There's other other So let's see what else we got here So we got this right
here Right Let's Let's see what this little dip is here That's
uh hydrogen Is that what it says let me see I can't quite see it Can't get it to
come up here Let's see what's on the list
Hydrogen Delta And what else is here let's see what else is here It's probably the
silicon Silicon 4 is there also maybe So you're seeing
all these great I mean incredible elements that make up this star
right and uh based on once once if if I had normalized this spectra to the
instrument response then you can start really determining what type of star it is based on its shape uh is what it
comes down to Uh but uh that takes a little bit more work I have I haven't
done any of this in a while So I'm just getting back into it after I change the
filter wheel out and testing it So that we have to do that alignment But but basically you can see how the images
look Uh let me show you I don't know if let me take an image I'm going to make a I'm going to make it
really a long image so that you can see all the other stars in there Um I'm
going to do a 30 second image right and then you can see what it
looks like as a raw
image You can already see a couple of stars right here But this was just a one second image
So even at one second you can see how sensitive of detail this is
right and you'll see it when I when I bring it up here it'll be blown out
actually first when you know I think a lot of amateur astronomers who love to see the beautiful photographs and all
the rest of it they look at a spectra and it's a little maybe it's a little boring to them but once you start I
mining you know uh data mining the the spectra itself
uh it's uh it's very interesting you know because now you're starting to peel
away um you know just what you see and and being able to get at what you can't
otherwise see And this is what this is what spectroscopy does for you All right
So here's another one Here's another star that's a little a lot dimmer Yeah you can still see these same lines here
I don't know I have to I would have to identify the star to see what type it is but And then there's a really dim
star right here I don't even know if you can see it see a little bit of Oh yeah
Um and then here's the main It's you can see it's saturated Yes
Uh so that's that's kind of what what we get here with the spectra
Um that's that's I've been messing around with that some Uh and then uh
we'll come back and I'll talk about the other tool that I use for doing exoplanet work Okay great Okay thanks
Jerry Uh uh I think you promised Jeff Wise that uh you would try to have a
bigger uh mouse pointer Oh yeah Right All right Yeah You you
know maybe you can switch Okay Yeah I see I'll work on that Okay All right And
uh uh between Astro Beard and Caesar Brolo right now who's got a live image
did you get a clap do you have Do you have a live image
uh no Uh I have an storage of image old image but not nothing now because it's I
I have a clouds Okay Of Mars Okay All
right Let's go over to Richard Grace Yes Okay All
right Oh let's see For enjoy only
Okay Great to be at the star party once again
Yeah See I'm going to share some screen here Yeah
Now the first time uh Richard came on our program for the first global star party it rained on him So he's been uh
but he's good He's come back almost every time In fact maybe every star party we've had and uh he's been sharing
his uh his images and his telescope and his expertise So you got this is M33 is
that right this is M33 uh as shot currently uh from the backyard in uh
Annapolis City and um I'm using this uh uh screen stretch because I just
upgraded to Sharp Cap Pro So I can reset that and that's that's what I'm getting
But uh got a little auto stretch feature and it it brings out the blue But this uh filter uh shows a strong blue cast
It's the Optalong LPro Uh works very good for galaxies at least for me with
uh all the light pollution around and everything And uh let's see here Let's
drop that Can we see this let's see if it There we go I took that this week uh
with Comet Hunter Uh it's my best shot yet on the Ring Nebula Uh it was on the other side uh from the full moon So I
did that and I shot that with the uh the 130 Nude
Oh wow That's nice I'll be uh I'll be working with that some more It was kind of just another test shot but uh I
wanted to throw that out there I I kind of like the uh the sixpoint defraction spike and it's kind of fun So we'll be
we'll be working with that one some more especially as the moon goes away Yeah lots of detail in the nebula there
Beautiful All right I'm gonna stop my sharing Should be good Great Okay All
right Well that was that was uh that was quick So uh usually I'm pretty quick with that Okay Thanks No scientific
explanation Just uh what I'm working with and on with the show That's right Okay All right And
um uh how about you Tyler do you have a live image there
i don't have a live image Um I packed up I'm getting kind of tired Um but I do
have Scott works me to death So I gotta get sleep when I can That's right That's
right So but I got a little quick process on what I've shot today or last
night and the night before Okay Um y'all able to see that little
pardon so I've been shooting that with the Explore Scientific 115 um
FPL53 um with a 08 reducer
that I'm testing out Um now if I go back on some of this has just been cropped in
an automatic background extraction and a DBE and that was the initial image and I
gota I got to figure out the stacking on this one So I'm going probably have to get with Gary since he's the expert of
Pixon site Um not bad all in all for just maybe
four hours of capturing lights Yeah
And that's about it for me All right Looking good Good Get some rest It's
gonna be a long Yeah All right See y'all later Thanks for everything that y'all
are doing Tyler take care See y'all How about um let's see Let's go to uh about Wade
Hey you got me yeah I got you So I've got the uh the Death Star up right now
Yes you do Um so yeah she's uh big and bright right
now and screwing up everything else so I figured I'd uh
spend a little time on her This is a live feed so um I'm I'm fairly new to
live feeds with this so but hey I wanted to uh show you something too
Um so uh last week Gary did a um little tutorial
on the new Staret uh feature in um Pix
Insight and and and Staret's been there for a while but um it was a third-party
process and it was called Staret++ and it worked a little different and they they um I guess So
many people I I remember looking at the forum because uh there were some issues with uh with it working on the Mac You
had to turn off uh the system integrity on the Mac to get it to install um or
run it through terminal and uh not a lot of people like to do that So um but uh I
remember being being on the forum and the uh there's just so many people that wanted that to work and so I guess that
is why um they built it into the actual Pix Insight now So it's a native process
now and it and it works a little different So um so I I I image and
process a lot of nebula Um galaxies are are tougher for me Really thick
starfields are tougher for me Um so um I have you know Andromeda is
one of my one of my favorite uh galaxies you know to to look at to look at images
on and I took an image of that and uh I didn't really like the results Well when
Gary started showing a Staret um last week it was one of those
um kind of aha moments you know and um
so I uh I mean I was actually on while he's going through it I've got Pix
Inside on another monitor and I'm just I'm just going at it And so um I really
appreciate that He we we probably should send him a check uh for that because uh
I definitely got something out of it But um so I wanted to show that off Um
so Staret will pull the stars out of an image and and it also used to give you
the option to create just a star mask and just a a different way of creating a
star mask Well now it will pull the stars out but when you select create a star mask it actually creates the stars
I mean it it separates the stars It's not just white mask It's the actual
stars So you can actually work on the nebula and then go work on the stars and
then combine them back together Oh I see
So yes So this is So I'll bring let me uh uh I have to
you probably have to unchare and then go back and just have to exit full screen
out of that and then I can pull this over And so this is my There we go This is my just the
nebula out of it and no stars No stars And then here's
my star field There's actually like a billion stars there Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah
Billions And then this is my final image on
that So um to me this is one of the this is one of the
better this is really the best um Andromeda that I've that I've processed
and and I I wouldn't have been able to do that um um without you know Gary
helping I had just imaged this and tried to process it and just didn't like the results And so um so I thought about it
and I was like you know there's one other one that has a huge amount of
stars in it that it just it baffles me when I'm trying to process it and that's the uh the Signis
Loop So you know the the Veil Nebula the uh Pickering Triangle all of that stuff
And so here
is my the starless image on that
And so um we have what we're what the new generation of astrophotographers is
calling the Joker Nebula over here on the left Oh right because once you see the Joker in it you can't ever unsee it
Yes that's right And then um I and so I scaled back on the stars on this and
then brought them and then brought them back And so here is my with
my the stars back into it That's very good So anyway I just wanted to you know
these these really aren't the the greatest Um uh I didn't spend a whole
lot of I didn't have a lot of data I need a lot more data for these uh both of these But my point was to brag on
Gary a little bit because um I was having a real problem uh processing this
before he gave that tutorial last week and it uh it made a big difference with me
Great They look really good They do And I I suffer with the same thing I never
have enough data I never have enough hours in the day to grab the data So all
of these modern tools that are coming out now that are helping everyone um that's the way forward you know this
is what it does and I'm the same I can look at an image and just think I'll work on that later and that might be six
months time just because I don't like the process that's actually running through with it for some reason Right
These newer tools uh really work well So I'm glad you're finding it useful Yeah
Well I really appreciate that No no problem Excellent And and uh Scott will send you
the check for that We'll take up a collection
No Gary Gary Gary's classes I think are worth every penny that he charges So and
um uh he uh you know I I think you probably have
students from around the world but uh uh he will absolutely maximize uh u you
know the the uh give you a crash course on how to take your images to the next
level So I I'd like to say too Gary um I I uh the reason I was asking you what
your Instagram uh handle was is because I tagged you on an image in there that I
posted on there Um you might want to go in and add your uh your website to your profile Yeah Yeah I really don't use it
a lot That's the reason why That's true But I never enough hours in the day
because I was telling people that you know that that you that you do that you teach it and uh they should if they're
needing help they should uh you know they should hit you up and and do one of your classes Cool Thanks I'll uh I will
wander into it tomorrow when I uh wake up for later today Yeah Cheers
Right Okay All right So who's up next here i think we've got uh Mike
Mike Weezner you got something live going on
there mike you
there maybe he's getting a drink or something Okay All right Uh who else can
we go to here um how about you Cesar you wanted to show some of your emit this
year uh well what was impossible have a
clear sky tonight Um but uh we can talk
about about the possibilities in this the skies uh about what type of
equipment is able to use uh in in the middle of the city Yes Well you know
that we try in in the global parties to to make something in the sky Um we we
tried uh um uh we can we could uh take
pictures I say we because you companion Gary and you and the end of the global
party Yes we maybe two weeks ago
Yes absolutely And and yes and of course that that in in in the middle of the
city really where do you have a border
scale eight or nine it's it's difficult but not impossible to make
astrophotography um also with small telescope or uh
teleobjectives in cameras and um we can try a lot of different uh
pictures of course that here with a uh I tried with um APO 800
uh sorry 880 um telescope uh with
Ala asimut mount similar like a nextter mount
orimot mount We I I I took pictures of
uh of a very a very popular nebula in
south in in south hemisphere that is karina and I use it Let me show you
maybe if I have I don't know where because normally I don't I don't use this
computer but if uh if it's possible I can
take I'm not sure of of um of I have in
in in my art my desktop uh this picture
but it's it's normally using uh oxygen 3 filter
or CLS Maybe my here in my sky my my formula is
using uh middle of text
of without filter and another the another part
50% take with the oxygen tree or CLS
um cls filter and combining monochrome mode in the C reflex camera is you have
the the option don't use the the the buyer um the buyer screen or the buyer how do
you say by well you know yes and and combining this work very very well
uh despite the the light pollution is you have more tools tools
to to work with the picture Um but I I'll I'll find the the the
picture in 30 seconds if you like I advise you
if I have the pictures the picture of the ETA that I took here from Bible Okay
Wasn't in this April
But you can you can talk with another one because maybe I don't need
Okay I'll let you find your answer Sorry Sorry Scott I'm back This is Mike Hey Mike How
are you man i couldn't get the mute to unmute So so you want to do me or
something uh perhaps uh let's let's give you the let's give you the stage here
All right here we go It's all you Mike Okie
dokie So I'm here in southern Arizona And what you're seeing on the screen I
hope is a live view of Saturn on an iPhone through a 12-in
telescope And it is live If I zoom in a little bit here you kind of see it wiggling around
just a little bit Unfortunately Saturn's getting a little low and there's some clouds getting up near it So it's not
quite as nice a view as I had earlier when it was more towards the meridian but that's there Uh this is an app
called Night Cap Camera which is an app that I use mostly for doing uh galaxies
and nebuli uh and star clusters What I will use for planets uh when I want to
stack a bunch of videos is I'll use the the iPhone camera app and I will go to
the slow mo video mode and on the later models of the iPhone you can actually do
240 frames per second Oh wow So in just a so in just a few seconds you can
actually get a lot of video recorded with a lot of frames and you can adjust the exposure uh by just you know sliding
over here and you can do all kinds of different things there Get out of that
mode So there's all kinds of different things you can do Whoops Get back here So that's how you can do uh videos and
getting a lot of stuff a lot of frames Like I say you can get you know several thousand video frames in just a few
minutes a few seconds that you can then stack in your favorite stacking program
But mostly when I'm doing astrophotography uh I'm using night cap camera Night
camera gives you full control over all of the exposure settings focus Right now
you can see it's auto uh bumping up the ISO You can go all the way up to
12,500 on the the later model iPhones You can do 1 second exposures all the
way down to uh just a few uh t of a second or hundreds of a second or
thousandth of a second depending on what you want to image Uh you can use all the different cameras on the phones but
there's also a whole bunch of different special modes I'll just briefly talk about I know the angle is kind of backwards here Uh kind of tilted on the
screen That's just the way the iPhone's mounted right now But you can do long exposure which is what I use for doing
uh the deep sky objects I will turn that on and typically I will use a one minute
exposure And what the app does then it takes a whole bunch of 1 second
exposures which is the maximum uh shutter speed the slowest and it stacks
all those images right on the device Uh so in one minute you can get a lot of frames and they get automatically
stacked You can also do some star trails You can there's a special ISS mode So
you mount the the phone on a tripod It'll do all the neat auto exposure stuff to give you a nice streak across
the sky as the space station goes across There's this thing this little star symbol right oops Little star symbol
right there That's called light boost That just adds even more gain without creating a lot more noise Uh so you can
really do the faint stuff So um very briefly that's you know what the iPhone
looks like Now if I can so so what you were seeing is the I my iPad is looking
at the iPhone screen but let me see if I can share my screen I've never tried
this on the iPad So if I say share what can I share my screen not sure Uh let's see if it
lets me share Safari Oh it won't let me share Safari
Oh rats That's unfortunate Um because I
don't really have anything else there Okay so now how do I get get out of that mode um so but if you go up to my
website which is www.wezner.com
weezner.com/co or just do a Google search for Cassiopia Observatory named
after the constellation because that's my initials MW up in the sky That's what
I learned when I was six years old back in the 1950s Uh just search for Cassop
Observatory and there's a menu across the top Just click on the photos tab and
scroll down that page and look for the Messier catalog that's uh done on the
iPhone Every object in the Messier catalog I have photographed with an
iPhone And of course everybody can do M42 That's a pretty easy bright object
to do on a smartphone But as you look through those images uh you'll see
things like uh you know some faint galaxies M104 One of the ones that I'm
most proud of though is the M82 Seagar Galaxy Uh you can see the structure of
that galaxy very nicely You see the collars Uh you see the dark area Uh all
done with a smartphone So there's quite a bit that you can actually photograph uh with some experience And I've been
doing this since like I said earlier since 2007 Um and today's software today's smartphones are pretty darn on
amazing for doing astrophotography So uh since I couldn't share my screen I don't really have a
much more to say tonight U one of the nice things about living out here in this rural area in southern Arizona is
my dark skies One of the bad things is I don't have very good internet access that's not expensive
So so I need to probably drop off here I'm eating up a ton of data tonight Uh
my expensive LTE data So uh any questions out there Scott uh you know I
think that uh you went through it fairly quickly but um uh people wanted to know what what app you were using which you
said was Nightcap and um I was able to put your website up there in chat so
people can go to.comco Uh you were trying to lead them
to your photos is that right yeah if you go to the photos tab up there um there's
all the photos that I've done I I tell everybody I just play it doing astrophotography Uh so there's a lot of
DSLR pictures uh as well as the iPhone stuff but there's a special album for
the iPhone Messier catalog objects which I think pretty is pretty impressive If
you click on the videos uh tab up there at the top down near the bottom of that
page is a link to the video that Scott and I did several months ago on
smartphone astrophotography And that goes into all of the details uh lots of
pictures lots of products that I use uh the apps the smartphone adapters uh goes
into quite a bit of detail So if you want to watch that video runs about an hour or something Uh lots of information
there And since I mentioned the videos page there's another link down there at the bottom of that videos page that is
actually called the universe of images Uh about three years ago uh the local
PBS station interviewed me uh for a story that they aired and that story got
nominated for an Emmy award back in 2018 So it didn't win but it was really cool
to get to be nominated Oh yeah That's awesome That's awesome I put up those
links uh for the photos and also for the videos Um so we'll have to have you on
for uh another regular show like we did before And uh we can follow up on maybe
some more advanced uh uh use of a smartphone uh with your uh with your
telescope Because for all you guys that don't have uh astro imaging cameras you probably have one You probably have a
smartphone So uh and and you can get started there So Yep Absolutely Thank
you And uh actually you got a a very nice very clean uh connection out there
So uh that's excellent Sorry it cost so much to uh to have it run but uh thanks
for sharing Yeah glad glad to be here Glad to help anybody My email is up on the website So if anybody's got any
questions about doing smartphone astrophotography they can always drop me an email
Great Okay Thank you very much 99 all All right Take care
Well uh we are getting down to uh the last part of our show here Uh Jerry I
think that you had um you wanted to show um some more uh at the Mark Play remote
observatory Yeah So that's right So let me uh I'm going to go ahead and uh I'm
going to share my desktop this time Um I wanted to I wanted to do this
real quick Uh of course it's never where where I
expect it to be All right So I just want to go through a
couple of Do you see that okay Yeah I don't stupid thing Get this video out of
the way All right So I'm one of the things we do at the Mark Slade Remote
Observatory is to do exoplanet observing Okay And
uh this is a talk I gave this past weekend at the ALPO conference And
basically what we're doing is a high precision photometry to do exoplanet where we can measure the
[Music] um measure the magnitude down to like 0.001
0.01 magnitude or or 0.1% basically is what it comes down to And
um just to get a quick shot this is what the MSRO looks like inside the
observatory Um so I discovered this this paper back
in uh 2018 that was written in in October of 2017 And it talks about this
new instrument called a a beamshaping diffuser Okay And what it
is it's this it's this thing that looks like a filter except it spreads the
light out to be able to minimize the uh c the shot noise That's a big part of
the noise uh in your in your measurement And so then all you get left is the
centilation noise What does shot noise mean shot noise is a natural noise
That's it's a statistical type noise That's that's uh basically part of the
natural part of what it when you measure uh a radiation source Okay not all the
photons come in at the same time It's not a steady rate of photons It's a random rate of photons Okay Okay So you
collect these random photons and so as you accumulate them the so if you were
to take an average or if you were to take the total number of photons that you're collecting the amount of
precision in that count is equal to this basically the square root of the total
number of photons you collected Okay So that means if you get so for uh 10,000
photons uh you're plus or minus 100 off your count
Okay if you're getting a million photons you're much you're much less than that You're only like 10 photons off your
count because you got you got much more much more data basically It's a
statistical type of measurement So one so one of the ways to increase your
precision in shot noise is to collect a lot more photons and the way you do that with a camera without expo without
overexposing the pixel is to spread the light out right so you have more sensors
that you collect the light so you accumulate all that all those photons you have much more photons you have
better statistics on the shot noise and therefore the that that noise term goes
way down okay two pixels you've got what 20 pixels now Well so typically you
would have 15 to 20 pixels on a normal or even less on a normal focus star Okay
it might be 10 pixels So uh but on the diffuser the way it
diffuses the data it spreads the light out across a lot more pixels You can see in this top and it's a top hat shape
okay versus a normal gauian point spread function
Um and this is kind of what it looks like over on the left This is it looks like a blobby star
U but it's a very special shape that makes that allows you to measure the light the total amount of photons very
accurately or I should say very precisely Yeah So one of the things that you can do
um is you take these images of the exoplanet star over time and you do
differential astro uh photometry where you compare the light the difference
between the target star and the comparison stars So the target star is here in the green and the comparisons
are in the red So you're looking for changes okay between these You're
assuming that these comparison stars are fixed and that you actually have a transit going on with the target star
You assume there's going to be a change there But the these rest the comparison stars are the reference basically All
right So you have a reference and then you have the target And so you compare the target to the reference and look for
any changes in the target Uh and you assume that the reference is steady
Um so that's the basis for the the precision photometry
Um and this uh this is the one we happened
to on November 11 2018 This is the uh exoplanet we observed hat
P16b during our Facebook broadcast I was showing how the MSRO work doing this
work Yeah Yeah And this shows so if you look at um these this is this red curve is the
model for the shape of the transit Okay And from this shape you can determine a
lot of different parameters You can see how small this each one of these things here is a uh I didn't raise my
u I I I increased the cursor size on the MSRO So I'll get to that in a minute I didn't do it on my own machine here Okay
But uh right here yes you can see how the samples the error bars are very small
That's the shot noise error But the scatter is the centilation noise Okay
The scatter in all these samples is a centilation noise So the shot noise precision was around 1 millime or 0.1%
Okay Where the the total precision was
2.27% or 2.7 millime All right So
uh these are the model values that we're we're calculating based on that I don't want to get into that too much I'll just
show it here for a second You can look at that Um so I I just wanted to show
that Uh let's see if I can get out of this I want to show that just to give you an
idea of what we're doing here Uh with the diffuser I wanted to take an
image Uh let's see I'm pointed at a fairly
bright star Alpha Okay Um Alpha
Andromeda which is a second magnitude
star We can do these measurements up to up to about 10th magnitude
Um All right So this is what this is what it looks like All
right
Um and you can see it's kind of flat This doesn't show it quite as well as this other plot uh which is a little
uh a little better So you can see it kind of slopes up and then flattens off here
at the top Um that's what that's what the star
looks like a big blobby star basically And you can see how many pixels it is So that's 50 and this is at about 80 So
it's about 30 pixels wide 30 to 35 pixels wide is how big this blob is
basically Okay Um so that's what it looks like when you take an image with the diffuser Okay So let me I'm So I'm
going to change the filter to the to the none so you can see what this actually looks like Um what the actual Okay image
looks like with it with Oops without the diffuser And you focus
it So you don't have to defocus the star or do anything You just focus it normally and then you put the diffuser
in place and it spreads the light out for you [Music]
Um all right So one of the things we're dealing with see all this brightness that's the moon
So let me show you Look how bright the sky is here in the uh observatory right
you see that yes You see how big I made the cursor
big now So you look look it looks like daytime Yes That's the moon That's how and
that's what all this is So you can see here you can see all the stars when it's focused Okay
Jerry some of the people are uh watching this and and they're going you know this is this is over my head you know Um
but uh the MSRO science group is a prize partner with
with us and um one of the prizes is um uh you know uh a session um to learn
this So yes I think that u so if you've never done this kind of work before
you've never done photometry um and and you want to learn it okay uh
you know uh Jerry and his team can take you step by step and teach you you know
what what this stuff is you know for us to go over it just in a few minutes Okay Yeah And if you've never done it before
it's Yeah it's it's tough Yeah It's it's it's hard to explain It's hard to explain without a lot of words too and
pictures So and even you know I mean you look up uh the definition of shot noise
in Wikipedia and it's I mean Jerry just basically uh said you know exactly what
you read in Wikipedia about shot noise Okay So you have to understand uh statistical uh uh you know uh
information uh statistical data and uh you know so but once you start working
with it then you can get it okay and and once you gain that knowledge then you're
you're taking some stepping stones to the methods of science and uh it it's
possible for anybody and so right you know I recommend that uh hopefully you
know if participating in our in our prize program uh then uh maybe you'll
win one of these prizes But other than that I'd recommend that you probably join the RAP the uh Rapahhanic Astronomy
Club where you uh go to MSRO science I'm going to put in the website here Yeah do
that I wanted to show this picture real quick I did this early yes this morning
Yesterday morning I guess Nice This is a This is the moon with a deep sky camera
that's not with only 800 and some u millimeters of focal length 850
millimeters of focal length It's not set up for planetary lunar imaging at all yet I was able to get pretty good
resolution So let me I'm going to zoom up on this thing and show you what I got Uh in terms of resolution you can see
craters like these little spots
here are about 7 miles six miles The little hints of craters the little
lighter spots those are like five to four miles in diameter So even with a
deep sky camera on a wide field and this this this uh field of view is one and a half by
about one degree right is how big this this field of view on this camera is And
uh you know this looks like what you normally see looking up But then you know you can see here how much detail
you get on this image And uh this is just I think this
was a stack of 40 40 of the images The problem with the deep sky camera is it
takes forever It's not like a video It takes forever to bring down a bunch of images So it took like 20 minutes to get
you know a thousand images which isn't like you get a thousand images in a video in about 30
seconds you know or less you know So that's that's kind of what uh I wanted
to share that a little bit of one of the things I did this morning So that's and
you can see capernicus right there You can you can see a little bit of detail And then
Kepler over here You can see the rays This is cool You can see all the ray pattern off of Capernicus and off of
Kepler right actually actually off of Tao too You can see Tao here Uh you can
see all the ray systems coming off of that That's pretty cool Imagine impact
look like Yeah Right So yeah if you want to So I was going to give away
introductory lesson on the MSRO right uh tonight but I haven't thought
about it on how to how to go about going giving that away I guess I got to come up with a question
Well we'll use one of the questions that the astronomical league um asked Yeah
Yeah Do that pick a question and then the second person that answers it will
give them an hour uh I think it's like an hourong introduction to the MSRO
um one- on-one learning how it works and how to operate it
right we'll do that very cool okay so uh let's see did you find
uh did you find your image
I think you're still muted Cesar Oh I'm sorry
Well I I have a couple of of uh old and new pictures that I took uh mostly in
from this balcony of the roof of the tower Sure Um
Let me see if I
can Well this is this is the ah sorry I am I'm not sharing the not yet not yet
yeah here yes are all the things that are
uh share
screen You can see there we go Okay This is this is the
the the the picture of of the small cloud of Maganes of the small area Yes A
small cloud Here do you have two little um in in the in the in the another cloud
of Marashanis the big one do you have the tarantula nebula but here you have
two little u mix of nebula and
clusters Let me check if I can show you
[Music]
[Music] I need to [Music]
go I don't know why Ah
okay
Here this is Oh sorry This is the an individual shot of Orion Nebula here in
H from the from the roof of the tower here in the same building
in Buenosiris Yes But yes we we have some advantage here in Buenocidis
Sorry Monosirus in the in this tower because uh we we have the roof uh the
roof is open to the people that live in the tower only and it's a nice place
where you have a solar in summer you know and this is in the 37 floor I
invited I remember that I I invited to to watch um the the view is amazing
because we have the airport H you you can see the the roof of the airport
uh the the roof sorry of the airplanes when they are going and this is 47 to
look at that another yes this is the another cluster is part of the picture
that we took three weeks ago Wow I like this wide field view because you can
really see Yes when you use a telescope here in Buenosis is you know you need a
lot of different um how do you say
um
sorry you you still see my my screen Yes
you're still on 472 Canon Yes This is the the the final picture of
Orion from the from the roof of of the
Okay We're not seeing that picture yet
Yes Yes When you use filters or maybe one filter
[Music] um you you have a lot of options uh
to to to work from a from a a sky that
sometimes looks like something missing of possibilities Uh
but this is the thing that we talk with the for many many customers that came to
the our store to say okay but why I need a telescope in the middle of the city
and I say okay no really you can use a a telescope in middle of the city of
course that is like to buy a Ferrari maybe you you can use inside the city
you know with the red legs and sure you can enjoy or you can Yes experimented
the sensation to have a a Ferrari Maybe if you can go an open area as well The
telescope is the same Yes Uh but you can feel something of astronomy from the
city from from the places where you have um light pollution because many many
days are have good conditions to to work in
especially in image the change the things changed with
the DSR the the old digital cameras
uh because maybe in the city you can't see something more that also
also the telescope you can see a galaxy but you
can take a picture of the galaxy from the city that's true that's very true
excellent She's Thank you for sharing that Ah so you're welcome It's it's the only thing
that I can share tonight That's good All right Well we're kind of
towards the end of the program here I can tell Um uh does anyone have anything
else they'd like to share or discuss
or I do have another live image all
right there we go Oh wow Okay we got the Pleaides like uh
somewhere around 10 degrees from the moon and the filter seems to be working It is working That's true Um let me hit
the What's this there's the stretch button there It's not really working too well but
No but Yep So we'll stack those up at some point in time and gather some more
data Right Where's my stop sharing button there it is
I'll be up for the rest of the night I think I'll wait up till Orion comes up and mess around with that some more Sure
Sure How about you Jason
can you hear me okay Sorry I was trying to get off um a mute No I'm just uh
still making an effort with Mars here but it's not necessarily panning out Um
but I can show something here I um just had recently finished an
image and I thought it was interesting
Um so this here can you see my screen yeah This here is a um was shot through
my 8 in SCT telescope but this is a galaxy cluster Um it's called AEL 2218
And I first became familiar with this because um there's a Hubble shot of the area um
which is very interesting because this this area this galaxy cluster
contains a um a lot of gravitationally lensed galaxies Uh so I wanted to see if
I could actually capture that with a backyard telescope Um so this image I
mean just looking at it just looks like a bunch of stars right but if you actually zoom in on here um this whole
cluster in the middle is actually um comprised of galaxies Um so as you
zoom into this image you start to see that these are large elliptical galaxies here in the
center And there are actually gravitational lensed galaxies arcs around these
galaxies This was one here This is probably the most prominent one I could point out other ones but um they become
fainter and fainter but I thought this was pretty interesting Um and it's a the
first time I've actually captured gravitational arcs Um and for I guess
anybody listening that doesn't know um what actually happens here let me see if
I can zoom back out and go to the next image in this set Not that one I'm I'm reading about typing and what this ael
Yeah So this is I I actually annotated Where did it go all right I actually
annotated this image here Um just to explain a little bit you know the depth
of the image you kind of lose it when you when you start zooming in here You can't tell what's a star what's a galaxy
but um so this right here is a foreground galaxy It's
um you know due to the red shift they've calculated it out to be over 300 million
lighty years away Um but this entire galaxy cluster here which is labeled um
AEL 2218 is 2.1 billion light years away And
then these lensed galaxies um so the the physical mass of these
galaxies actually is enough to bend the
light behind the galaxy So you actually uh you can see objects behind this
galaxy cluster due to the way that the the gravity bends the light as it passes
through the cluster Right So you can see these distant objects they become um
lensed which means their light is concentrated and/or distorted enough to where it becomes visible to us And this
arc here which is just one of them I've called out is 11 billion There's a
galaxy 11 billion lighty years away And that is hard to wrap I mean
just to wrap your head around that you know Yeah I mean so conventional wisdom
big bang theory puts the age of the universe at like 13 to 14 billion years
Right So this is these are galaxies that were formed in the infancy of the
universe Right And this cluster I couldn't capture it here um because I'm
trying to compare myself to Hubble teles space telescope but there's actually a um a galaxy here which is the
furthest as of the early 2000s They might have found a a more recent one but
is one of the most distant objects ever photographed at um one of the most
distant galaxy objects ever photographed at over 13 billion lightyear is within
this cluster but obviously I don't have the technology to to pull that one out
Um but I pulled up the an article here which maybe I can
show Um yeah the Wikipedia object explains
that And then I think yeah this is the Hubble shot which shows that
object only visible in infrared light as the uh it's just a faint smudge but due
to the red shift is like a red shift of 7.5 which is um an incredibly distant
object was was distanced at over 13 billion lighty years
So anyway I yeah you can go you can see the Hubble you know the Hubble image of
that area is just incredible with all these arcs um you know
surrounding the cluster Wow
that's amazing I love that I you know the whole reason do astronomy the way I did is
because of reading Timothy Ferris's book the red limit and this was uh
astronomers um using you know trying to figure out the distance of the distance
scale of the universe and uh just just the fact that you can see you know
fossil light through an eyepiece and image you know such distant things
through a a backyard telescope is just it blows my mind It really it still does
you know and this is just a spectac your images are just a spectacular example of
that Jason So yeah thanks Awesome Awesome Well I I certainly enjoy the
same thing you know Um you know part of the the journey with astrophotography for me at least is not just making the
pretty pictures It's like you know actually contemplating what you're looking at And you know the depth in
this image is incredible when you start thinking about it You know these these large stars you know around the
perimeter they're probably you know a thousand light years away You know the
galaxies get into hundreds of millions of light years away And then
that galaxy cluster you start talking about billions And then the most distant objects captured in here are you know
tens of billions of uh or at least 10 billion lighty years away
Yeah you can't even fathom those numbers I mean to wrap your head around it is is just I mean one lightyear is 5.9
trillion miles you know and now we're into billions of light years And it's
just a the distance is just it's it's crazy trying to contemplate the national
debt Yeah Right It's about the same magnitude right no it's less Um
but yeah that you know what what gets me is to think that that light can travel
that far unimpeded makes you realize how empty space really is You know that you can
just from my backyard I can look up and see that that distance
Yeah is pure nothingness And you and you put that photon that terminated its life
in your eyeball after traveling that far
or in your camera Yeah The other the other interesting thing to think about and maybe an astrophysicist would have a
different spin on it but um you know I think
that you know as you approach the speed of light right the the the experience of
time slows down for for you So you know from the point of view of the photons
leaving there leaving this galaxy cluster say for example you know that triple to my camera sensor was
instantaneous right that's something I can't wrap my head
around yet But the thing is too is that you know the this light that's coming across here I mean these photons were
crouched in the middle of these stars It's it's the original photons It's not
like some sort of copy or some sort of reflection you know and that there's
somehow even though they are this incredibly vast distance it's not like it's separate from us you know So I mean
you couldn't you couldn't capture it if it was you know So it's it is uh it is mind-blowing
These kinds of images really really stretch uh you
know just everything that you can imagine about the universe when you see stuff like this Yeah
Anyway that's kind of you know that that's the origin of my username on all these platforms is the vast reaches
because I this is what I really love is just kind of you know looking out there and seeing what you can see Yes it's
beautiful That's beautiful Wow Well I think that we've
had a pretty good star party We had some beautiful music We had some you know we had some art Um had
some great lectures Libby and the stars did you know she did a very good job today Um yeah she did a great job in
talking about Mars and uh yeah I'm so uh I feel really blessed that
uh that we had all these astronomers with us today to kind of peel back the
universe for us and that was the perfect ending Jason So yeah thanks Wonderful
Wonderful Gary thank you very much um uh for sharing the science with us and uh
Caesar thank you for showing us what's possible from your backyard even in you
know a big city You know it's it's uh you know encouraging people to look up and explore with uh you know affordable
equipment Um yes encouraging encouraging the people to to make something with
affordable Yes you say this Yeah I have Mars in the screen now live All right
Let's see it If you like If you like only only seconds Yeah no problem No
problem If you like Well we can get out
It's only for sure
Yes a lot of seeing because it's a mix of of clouds
and and sim but we had a better Mars
last week where we we can saw the the polar
um the ice polar uh uh wide but uh today
I think that this words like the and don't worry about the mount is it's not
the the EUS 100 today the mount it's an an old next
uh altacimoot uh mount that have this
um have this problem of tracking and uh
in in a in a time of of uh in in a
period make a a a movement to up but it's it's really maybe a a
a month from the 2004 It's really old month
Um the the EXUS 100 uh uh don't have
this problem but it's it's a yes you can
see this this um this how do you say this
sham well this is was Mars shamping
Yes Uh this is the setup So that's great Yeah Some comments here
Matthew W it looks like is how you pronounce that He says "Wow I was
wondering if gravitational arcs were capable of being captured in a backyard scope." And there it is
Unreal Uh people are blown away Jason That's that's great Um
uh Ms Roer said "Great program Thanks Love your eyepieces." Thank you That's
great Jeff Weise says "I am looking at Mars." So 14 millimeter explore
scientific underderee eyepiece right now Glad you're out there looking Jeff That's great Pen Myers my exos 2 with
sharp cap and CDC held Mars dead center for about an hour tonight Fantastic Now
good I'm glad it's all working for you guys Um you know
uh it's uh it's awesome to have uh you know people watching from around the
world and uh you know we had a great group tonight
Um no thank you I thank you very much Got any anything more to add there
Richard no Always a good time Looking forward to next time All right Thank you
everybody for coming out you know uh share like subscribe and all that good stuff That's right We have uh we'll do
this again uh this Saturday but it'll be the European edition Uh Gary Palmer is
is rallying up uh astronomers uh in Europe And uh we will start that program
at 4:00 Central uh this weekend And um so we'll probably run from about four
o'clock to 8 o'clock central uh for that show I'll be putting out uh uh you know
announcement posters for that and uh if you're interested in joining by all
means um uh please do so and I'll be I'll be uh sending out login credentials
for that But I think that we are I think we're ready to close the show and uh
thanks very much everyone Have a good night and um thanks Scott Yeah Thanks
Scott Thanks for having me Thank you Thank Thank you Thank you to everyone
Yeah Yeah Awesome
Okay And here we go
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