Transcript:
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I see it coming
[Music]
through crism is our newest EXP xray telescope in space it's a Jackson NASA
collaborative Mission with Isa participation and will revolutionize x-ray observations of the
universe it does this with a one-of-a-kind sensor that captures data with 36 super cooled
pixels Yes you heard that right this groundbreaking detector isn't measured
in megapixels it's a 6x6 grid of 36 pixels but they're unlike any
others although this detector called resolve can create low resolution x-ray
images that is not what makes it unique each pixel in resolve is a micro
calorimeter so it can measure tiny amounts of heat a six-stage system cools
it to 50 Melvin or a fraction of a degree above absolute zero this extreme
low temperature allows resolve to measure how much a pixel warms when absorbs a single X-ray and therefore
measure the energy of that one particle of light it's basically a precise way of
measuring the X-Ray's color as a result kism can create the
most detailed x-ray Spectrum ever for distant objects this spectrum can give a
great deal of useful information like temperature what elements are present and in what quantities and how fast an
object is moving toward or away from us even if we can only see it as a dot in
the sky too distant to resolve details this would be a revolutionary
achievement for a detector with a single Pixel but resolve has 36 this allows
kism to observe extended objects that aren't point source dots and create
Spectrum maps of their different regions that can reveal speed and temperature differences and extremely hot gases
using that information scientists can determine how nebula and Galaxy clusters have evolved and interacted over
time the resolve detector was invented and built at NASA's Goddard space flight
center the detector success in crism will enable Goddard to further the design and follow up with x-ray micro
calorimeters with hundreds or even thousands of pixels so while it may not sound as
impressive as 4K or 50 megapixels the resolve detector onism will be
revolutionized ing our understanding of the large scale high energy universe and
that's pretty amazing for a mere three dozen
pixels well hello everyone this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and I'm reaching out
very far all the way to Arizona from Arkansas to add in David Levy uh who's
uh on with us from veale Arizona from his uh his Observatory and home at the
jarac observatory and he's got his beautiful Questar there with his uh
carnado PST I imagine that you did uh was it clear enough for you to get some
solar observation today David yes indeed I did there were nine groups of 72 spots
and six prominen today I got them with this half of cupid just before I dropped
it and so I'm hoping it'll still be working tomorrow okay well that's great that's
great well we've got a big show uh I sound like Ed Sullivan there really big
shoe um uh today we've got Don NAB from the astronomical League um
uh Seth Shak is uh coming to us from seti so if you don't know who Seth is uh
he is a longtime astronomer at seti and worked with Frank Drake who came up with
the famous Drake equation and all the rest of it Seth's U presentations are
often humorous but uh full of information and I think that his uh his
talk today is is uh going to address maybe some of the uh Congressional
hearings that we've had about UFOs and uaps and you know that kind of stuff
David Iker from astronomy magazine will be on with us I have forgotten how to
pronounce this P this uh catalog name but uh sat
sucha Rasen maybe is the uh it's from this catalog and as far as I know David
there's only one object in that catalog I don't know if this is true or not but uh um but and on any account it'll be
very interesting archello Souza from uh Brazil is to be on with us Chuck Allen
uh president of the astronomical League will also be joining us um Robert Reeves
uh you know our resident Moon expert Dr Daniel bar who hasn't been on for a long
time uh joins us again so it's it's great to have him on uh John Schwarz
also a space artist he's going to be joining us uh Adrien Bradley comes on
and then uh Carlos Hernandez and so maybe not quite in that order but but
that is the group today so we've got about a dozen different presenters and um so uh I think we should probably get
started and we'll do that with uh with you daveid I'm just going to turn it over to
you did you say me I said you okay thank you thank you so much Scott and Welcome
to our hund 62nd Global St party I've been at all of them except
one and uh I I really do look forward to them I sometimes cannot stay till the
end but uh I I do my very best I can this theme today is precious
exploration and the first I heard of exploration was when I was three weeks
old and I was informed that the palar observatory the 200 in was being
dedicated that day when I was three weeks old and I told my parents that I wanted
to fly out there and give a big long speech and they said David you're only 3
weeks old you can't give a big long speech and I said sure I did and I gave a great big long speech in Latin and
translated it into Hebrew and uh everything was fine until
Dave Vier called and said he would not be publishing it in astronomy magazine because of the Latin and the Hebrew but
anyway here here it is uh the poem that I would like to to recite today to
celebrate the theme of exploration was written by none other
none other than Alfred noise they knew how to open a telescope
back then they hired a poet a very famous poet to come over and he offered
to write a poem specifically for the opening and um I think I think you might
enjoy this I'm going to read two stanzas from it Watchers of the sky at noon upon
the Mountain's purple height above the Pine Woods and the clouds it Shone no
larger than the small white Dome of shell left by the fledging ren when
Wings Are Born By Night It joined the company of heaven and with its constant
light became a star a needle point of light minute remote it sent a sub
message through the abyss held more significance for the Seeing Eye than all the darkness that would
bled out yet could not dwarf it tomorrow night so wrote their
Chief we try our great new telescope the 100 inch your Milton's optic tube has
grown in power since Galileo famous blind and old talked with him in that
prison of the sky we creep to Power by
Ines Europe dress her giant 40 still even tonight our own old 60 has his work
to do and now our 100 inch I hardly dare to think what this new muzzle of ours
may find this is such a beautiful poem for
the then largest telescope in the world the 100 in top Mount Wilson it beat off
the Dominion astrophysical Observatory which was the largest telescope for a couple of months
actually a few weeks before the under inch was open and before that it was Lord grass's
great 72inch telescope for decades and decades to be the
largest the interesting thing is that when they did do first night light the
next night it was terrible the images were absolutely awful
and they did whatever they could and it was totally they thought the telescope was a complete an abject failure so they
closed it up and at about 3:00 the following morning still dark they opened the Dome
again and they turned the telescope towards VGA and the telescope gave the most
Sublime image I think even Dave Vier would have loved it that first image for
VGA from the hundred in that began its long career which is still going on of
exploration and with that back to you Scot thanks oh gosh
um David what what do you think they would have done if the scope had really been
defective you think they would just closed yeah just um this happens a lot
when I take a telescope out and it's at the end of a hot day uh the first images
are pretty bad bad enough that I want to take a stone and throw it at the telescope but over the next hour it's a
small telescope I have the improves and gets better and better the largest
telescope I have now is a 12 in from you named
Eureka and uh I think I telescoped just Works
beautifully thank you David thank you well that's great okay well um we are
going to uh go down to Don where do you live by the way we live in Westchester
Pennsylvania it's about 15 20 miles west of Philadelphia Westchester and that's
where QVC is right yes it is yeah yeah i' had to actually appear on QVC and
stuff on before so yes the other side of town from us yeah sure yeah it's a it's
another Universe when you go to QVC oh yeah yeah they often sponsor our Christmas parade oh do they okay yeah
they have have some years yeah yeah Westchester is a very nice town I I enjoy going there it's a great town yeah
Q QVC is a big deal around here yeah I bet I bet well thank you for coming on
to Global star party and um uh your talk
um uh about William hersel is something that I'm really interested in so
um so we're gonna let you take the stage okay let me share my talk about the
astronomical League at the end of your uh presentation sure yeah let me
uh are you seeing my slides there I'll start the slideshow yes okay well um
thanks for having me on uh when I saw the theme of exploration it uh you know
there's way different ways to think about exploration but I immediately jumped to
historical uh I'm certainly not an expert in history of astronomy but I find it very interesting to see how a
lot of the ideas that we have take for granted today how they developed um but
before I get into that i' have to mention that uh we are getting ready for next summer as instead
of being Alcon is Aston in Bryce Canyon uh so I would encourage anybody wants to
go get your room reserved now about onethird of the rooms are already taken and it should be a wonderful event
so go ahead and get signed up I'm already signed up my wife when I were going and several friends from our local
Club so go ahead and get signed up it should be amazing and we have a astronomical lead
live coming up the six when that would be that would be next Friday I think right yeah so um
Scott Harrington will be on we tried to have him on once before there were terrible storms where he lived he was
trying to uh connect by using his phone as a hot spot and it just didn't work so
he will be on December 6 7 PM eastern time so um I think of exploration I
think of who are the explorers that I most admire and uh immediately when I saw the theme will hersel popped into my
mind so I want to talk about him briefly only a couple of his uh discoveries I mean we could spend this entire show and
three or four other shows to talk about everything that uh William hersel did but uh we'll keep it short tonight so so
he was I've always thought of him as William hersel but in fact he was born Wilhelm Frederick wilham hersel in in
Hanover Germany and he was a very respected and accomplished musician uh then he relocated went to
England and from then on he was known as William hersel so this is the book I believe
that when he was the age of 35 he got a copy of it all the references I've looked at called the book astronomy this
is this must be the book it's the only book by Ferguson that has astronomy in the title in this way so this is the
kind of book that I would like it's uh if you read it says principles made easy to those who have not studied
mathematics sounds like a sounds like one that I would enjoy so uh so at 35 he
he really started looking at the stars and he at the time of course
Newton invented his Newtonian telescope about 100 years before but those
telescopes I think Newton's first scope was only about a little over an inch mirror in diameter 1.3 in and even
during that time 3 Ines was considered about you know the average all that would build so herel said this is not
enough for me so he started building telescope mirrors uh this is is a
replica I think this is I couldn't identified but I think it's the 6 in and something I want to point out if you
look up here there is an eyepiece up here which means there must be a a diagonal mirror if you can see he's got
a a whole system of pulleys and and rope and a crank handle to adjust the uh the
right Ascension well the the elevation of the asth and the altitude of the
scope in later telescopes he eliminated the secondary mirror because they were
they didn't reflect well they used a metal called speculum I think speculum which is a tin and copper alloy had to
be polished routinely so he eliminated the mirror uh the secondary mirror and I
suppose he must have eliminated the eyepiece this in I really would love to know more about these telescopes he
built it was became an what they call an off axis design where the mirror instead of being reflecting directly up the
barrel reflected a little bit to the side so I think when this his bigger telescopes he just looked down the
barrel so I'm hoping someone can maybe enlighten me on that but uh here's his polisher this is his that this is a
replica on the left hand side this was his actual mirror polisher on the right it's on display in the Science Museum of
London over the years he built up to 400 mirrors for telescopes
now he sold 60 of them one of which he sold to the king of Spain for what now
would be the equalent of well over a million dollars so he was a really accomplished producer of
telescopes I have one quote here I I'll have to read this because as we'll talk
about a little bit later he worked very closely with his sister Caroline so these are Caroline's words that happened
during when they were pouring the mirror out of metal for the 30 foot length uh
telescope focal telescope so she says a day was set apart for casting and the
metal was in the furnace but unfortunately it began to leak at the moment when ready for pouring and both
my brother and the Castor and his men were obliged to run out at opposite doors for the stone flooring flew about
in all directions as size of ceiling it says my brother fell exhausted with heat
and exhaustion on a heap of brick bats so uh it was high adventure back then uh
this is the scope that he's probably most famous for this is the uh 40 foot
vocal length telescope uh he appealed to King George to cover the cost of this
without without support support from uh the king he would never been able to build it it was a massive
undertaking it's a 49 half inch primary mirror at the bottom you can see the entire assembly is mounted on wheels
that turn tend your mind a little bit of a of the way telescope domes mve today uh you
can see his ladders to get up to the platform this is a viewing platform and from what I can tell all he did was look
down uh it would be focused so that the the image would be at the edge so he his
head didn't block he didn't want to block the incoming light uh this was the
largest scientific instrument that had ever been built at this time this was in
1785 and uh again a Triumph of human perseverance and Zeal for the sublimis
science so the 40 foot was the world's largest telescope for 50 years and then
Lord Ross built his 72in Leviathan at uh Parson toown 1845 and that is pictured
below but the 40 you can imagine having to have having to climb up and down have a crew you can see there are gears and
handles over here that that would uh turn the telescope and lift it up and down a lot of block and tackle here it
was hard to use he really didn't didn't use that often instead he stuck with a a
19-in reflector he used that to discover most of the nebula and nebula I'm using
that term that's the term that they used back then and that really at that time was everything except
Stars you know as we know um now the some of the fuzzy spots we see in the
night sky in our telescopes are galaxies outside of our galaxy but we didn't know
that until Edwin Hubble harl shapley CED that with the help of the 100 in telescope at U at Mount Wilson at the
time they thought all these things all these nebula were in our galaxy so probably what he is most known
for is Uranus so uh this is very Earl this career uh he observed what he thought to
be a comet but found out it was the planet Uranus uh and with this discovery he was
elected to the Royal Society and he could uh stop worrying about his music career because now King
George III gave him an annual Grant and of course then later uh the king paid
for building telescopes so he gave up his career music concentrated on
astronomy uh Uranus was the first planet discovered modern times he did a uh he
did a lot of searching through the skies and he just he found this with a 6 in tonium which I think is the rep
reproduction I showed earlier uh again this Uranus have been seen by many times but everyone thought
of a star hersel named it georgium cus which means the Georgian Planet because
he named it after the guy was paying for his work it makes sense right uh but the other strong they called it hersel
Uranus really just uh was proposed by Bode and it it matched the historical naming of planets from classical
mythology but it really wasn't accepted in common use until 1850 or
so now you can do your own EXP ation of Uranus okay here's the Sky Map uh Uranus
reached opposition mid November so that means it was opposite the Sun so it's being Prime viewing time in the evening
you can really see it all night long uh not e not hard to find at all I could go
out tonight well maybe a little later than this maybe 9 o' or so our rine will be rising in the East and just go up
through the hiades to the pleades and then off to the right will
be Uranus now if you have binoc you can just scan because uros will be a distinct greenish blue color but if
you're using a telescope you want to do what we call Star Hop so you would focus your telescope on the pleaes put them in
the left-and view and focus and and Mark some stars with your eye just take not
of the stars in the right hand and do that across hop from one star to the next until you get to Uranus it will be
uh readily seen as a disc especially in a telescope it's a beautiful blue green color so uh I would encourage you to go
out and look now um hersel did many other things um
before I get into the Milky Way but uh after after Uranus he started observing deeper
into the sky so not long after he discover Uranus the only object in the
sky he had seen was uh the r nebula and as a companion
m43 he had seen M13 and Hercules the global clust and of course and drama the
Galaxy but in 1782 he started a very systematic and extensive search by 1786
he had documented a thousand objects by 1789 another thousand and over the
course of 20 years he had documented catalog 2500 different objects in the sky uh he
studied the the uh the moncky way but uh some of the funny ideas that came out
that I discovered he uh was sure he had evidence of life on the Moon and he compared it to the uh to the English
Countryside uh he didn't uh he theorized about other planets he had an idea that Mars was a was where there was life just
like we have have on Earth I mean this idea went on for a while I remember when I was in grade school in the 50s seeing
pictures in the books of what people speculated was jungles on Venus so uh it
wasn't really until the modern time we know how difficult it would be to have life on these planets but he did study
this Milky Way this is his picture of the Milky Way his model of it based on what he what he saw and measured uh he
did get the shape of a disc of the Milky Way but uh incorrectly assumed the sun was in the center of the
disc so one of my other than Uranus another one of my favorite object that
hsel discovered is the uh the garnet star this is an incredibly beautiful star it mphi is its formal name it's a
red super giant and it's one of the U most mous red super Giants in our galaxy
it's one of the largest and brightest stars visible in the entire M Away Now doesn't appear that bright to us okay
when I say brightest stars it's the actual brightness not the observed brightness so so again it's not a very
bright star for us around fourth magnitude but um our telescopes have shown that it is one of the largest
stars in fact it's so large that professional telescopes actually see the disc of the star which is very unusual
for a star um hersel described it when he saw
the deep red color he described as a very fine deep Garnet color such as the
periodical star oti so the formal name of the star is arus okay but is more
commonly known as helsel's Garnet star and uh that's what I call it and I love to share the view of that during star
parties when during the colder months um when I first heard the word araus I immediately thought of Dune I have the
the uh the novel actually behind me up on the my bookshelf uh but that the star in the
the planet in um Dune was name with an A araus but
uh it certainly reminded me of
Dune so you can explore G hersel Garner star for yourself okay it's it's not
easy it's is easy to find you go out tonight you can look find casapia easy
to find the W in the sky Ursa Miner of course the uh the North Star and in the
middle is sephus okay uh it's only fourth magnitude so it's a little hard to see naked eye in fact I'm not sure I
can see it at all from where I live here too close to Philadelphia uh but binoculars will help and you can zoom in on it so sephus
is a house here's the roof of the house and you can find the garnet star in the foundation underneath the floor of the
main house so uh I would encourage you to go out binoculars are good telescopes even
better now it's hard to talk about William hersel without talking about his sister Caroline uh she spent a lot of
hours polishing mirrors at night when uh when William was observing he would
usually I think with the 20in uh the 20 foot long telescope he's used he would
have to observe come back inside where he had light write things down go back out wait for his eyes to adapt that got
old fast so he had the telescope set up near a window and Caroline would sit
inside sit inside the window and he would call out his observation she would write them down so It sped up the
observations very very quickly so she was with him for many years polishing
mirrors and uh she was an observer of her own in fact um so um
Caroline made her own Discovery she discovered eight comets after William built her her own her own reflector
telescope uh she go sweep the night sky uh she just gave eight comets 14 new
nebula as they call them 14 new deep Sky objects uh when he went William was called to
Winter's Castle to the king and when he presented the comet to the RO family he
called it my sister's Comet so he uh really took great care of his sister uh
that is until he got married once once William got married the uh things were never the same again um Caroline was
very jealous of her her brother's wife and so things weren't as happy from him
on but she continued to serve taking notes while he observed and she was actually given a salary by by King
George and she really was one of the foremost science science females in
England or if not the world the first female in England to be honor with a government position and the first woman
to be given a salary as an astronomer so she was a groundbreaking
uh woman in England the last object I'm going to talk about is going to be double
Stars when he uh when William observed Stars he did an extensive observing of
double Stars by the time he was finished he had cataloged 800 double Stars so I
guess everyone has favorite constellations mine is Leo the Lion why
because Leo the cat it was a wonderful cat we had with us for 12 years but I see Leo in the morning in the spring in
the spring evenings when I see Leo coming up late at night I know that Spring's not far away and the warm observing warm observing months are
coming but uh I really like to see Leo and there's a star that is uh that is
beautiful a double star it doesn't quite compare the double double or to alberia
or the misar and the handle but is this one here Alba okay it's a nice a second magnitude
this was fairly bright uh but it's uh it's in Leo the Lion at his at his
main um so hersel did a lot of work on double stars and at the time astronomers
expected that changes in the appearent separation in the location could tell us
where where the proper motion was and how far away they were by parallx now parallx was a method suggested by
Galileo you can demonstrate that yourself if you hold your finger out at length in front of you close one eye and
see what's behind it then close the other eye shift shift shift shift eyes and the way that the background shifts
against your finger that's the way they were measuring the distance of stars they would do it in one season and then
half a year later when they're on the other side of the sun measure it again so that was developed by galile galile
galile and uh William hersel did a lot of double star
investigations um he determined that this was they were gravitationally
bound and in the television series Cosmos uh Neil degrass Tyson talks about
this discovery and uh by carefully observing Alba hersel was the first one
to make the assertion that gravity that binds us to the Earth also affects also
react with stars what keeps double stars together is gravity he was the first
scientist to make that assertion so um if you ever want to see or hear and see
William hersel brought to life watch the uh watch Osmos of SpaceTime it's in the
fourth episode and uh Patrick Stewart better know as Jean Luke beard of Star Trek he gives the voice to William
hersel and he does a wonderful job of bringing William hersel to life I've watched that that part of the show
probably five times and I'll watch it again it is just wonderful to hear Patrick Stewart bringing William hsel to
life and in the in the episode his son John is with him so John hersel is also
there in the [Music] episode uh the astronomical League does honor William hersel there is a program
called the 400 hersel 400 you know a lot of us and a lot of people who are listening have done the Messier catalog
seeing all0 of those objects but for anyone anything beyond that there was nothing
that ex that existed where do you go next well the uh astronomy club down in
Florida came up with this 400 virtual 400 observing program and it is
challenging I am not working on it it's a bit beyond me but there are many people that do it and uh observe it uh
is an advanced program beyond that there's the hersel too 400 more okay of
the uh four so that be 800 of the 2500 deep Sky objects that uh urel cataloged
so again it's an advanced um program uh of the 400
objects over 300 or galaxies so uh you need to have a pretty good siiz telescope for this there between
magnitude 11113 so I would think a 12in dobsonian or 12-in reflector of
some sort would be what you need to do this program but yeah the astronomical League does honor Hershel's
contributions to the world of astronomy so I found this sculpture when I was
researching for this talk this is of William Caroline and it's called the stargazers is uh sits in a garden wall
near the entrance of the William hersel Museum in England uh it was actually unveiled 198 by P Sir Patrick Moore and
Ron Davies Rod Davies both very famous astronomers if you take a look you can see Caroline here in her Bonnet William
over top looking up to the Stars Carol L with a uh a quill pen taking notes and
there's a small drawing of the uh solar
system here on her on her uh piece of paper it's a beautiful beautiful
sculpture so you know as the most renowned astronomer I would say of his time and of all you know he's one of the
most renowned astronomers of all time he contributed to many things he uh he he
discovered that the uh the ice caps of Mars veryy seasonally
he detected the way Mars spins um he modeled him looky ways we
saw uh and he even talked about the possibility of galaxies beyond our own
external Island universes so he's way ahead of his time and he discovered infrared
light U so on his on his tombstone he has an epar I will ask David um David
leavey to do the correct pronunciation but I will read the um translation he
broke through the barriers of the heavens he was an amazing man so uh thank you for listening these are my
sources of information I spent a lot of time reading for this uh this presentation
so and I will close my window here maybe Scott
you can do that I lost the window can do that let's see
there it okay I found my window again there it is there we go great you got it
I got it okay that's wonderful I lost my window for a moment there yeah I keep on
my uh on my desk a little hersel telescope here oh that looks just like
the one I showed the replica of yeah that's right the 6 inch I think it's an F14 something like that uh yeah there's
a guy named uh I think uh Kristoff or something like that he he made these
miniature uh models of telescopes that's beautiful it's really cool so yep it's
the same one that I showed the picture of yeah yeah so doesn't have any uh go-to electronics
though so if that's what you're looking for uh you know the hersel did did
astronomy the organic way that's for sure he was a true Explorer he really was that's right uh don thank you so
much for participating and uh we want to U you know extend thanks again to the
astronomical lead for you know being with us on all of these Global star parties and uh I'm looking forward to
the Aston astrocon conference that you guys are doing in Bryce Canyon and um I
think you've already covered some of that stuff but uh if you guys have not if if you're watching the show right now
you have not joined the astronomical League you should do so uh could do so
by joining a club that is a league club and there's plenty of them there's over
300 in in uh in the world and um uh or
you can become a member at large and it costs a little bit more but well worth
it these guys have over 80 observing programs uh they have dozens of awards
to recognize people for various um achievements that they do in astronomy
and uh if you attend one of their Astro uh you know the Alcon events or astrocon
they're sometimes called uh you're gonna meet some really nice people and you're gonna make some new friends so thanks
very much Don thank you thanks Scott thanks for having me my thans as well you obviously did your homework on this
I did a fascinating presentation if you don't mind I'd like to pass on a little
story that happened with me years ago when I was was visiting London to give a lecture in England the host who was
taking me we decided to stop uh at the at the William hersel
Museum which was at the home where he did a lot of his work and uh so we stopped rang the
doorbell and they came to uh the the person in charge opened the door and he
said I want to say that that today we're closed and I'm not going to be able to let anyone in for
Tool and uh the person taking me on the tour said said well this is David Levy
is giving a lecture tonight I was just wondering if we could take a quick look and the director said well I'm very
sorry so we went back to the to her car and we were just sort of sitting there
trying to plan the rest of our trip uh for that day and just as we were about
to leave the director opened the door came rushing out to our car and said the
museum is now open please let me show you around and when I walked in he said
I looked you up on Wikipedia and changed my mind and he showed us the spot in the
backyard where the planet Uranus was discovered and that was such a thrill
I'll never forget wow anyway good lecture and thanks joh you're
welcome great okay all right um uh our
next speaker is uh Seth Shak if you've never seen Seth Shak speak before I
think you're going to be in for a treat he is the senior astronomer uh at The seti Institute uh and a leading voice
for um extraterrestrial for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence I don't
think he's actually the voice for EXT extraterrestrials just yet but uh but um
anyhows known for for his engaging public Outreach and scientific expertise
uh sha explores the possibilities of alien life while advancing se's mission
to detect signals from Advanced civilizations uh he's a great guy if you
ever get a chance to meet him uh very approachable and um uh just uh we're
really happy to have him on global Star Party once again so thank you Seth and let me bring you on here we go
and you are muted how's that is that any better that's better okay to be honest my my
remarks will probably be better if they are muted anyhow I I'd like to Scott
thank Scott for giving me the opportunity to spend the next uh three and a half hours speaking to you about
the effects of inverse Compton scattering on the Forbidden utum lines in the atmospheres of peculiar aype
stars that was the topic that he gave me he said would appeal most mostly or would appeal most of all to the
attendees of This Global star party that's right that's right actually uh I'm going to talk rather briefly because
I don't know I've I don't recall anybody ever asking questions here but I always appreciate when people do ask questions
if I'm giving a talk because I assume those are things they're really interested in as opposed to everything
that I've said previous to their question so uh the the nominal topic of
these uh low- grade remarks is what happens if we actually pick up a signal
as you know SEI has been a an Endeavor since 1960 actually that's a long time
now that's six decades uh trying to yeah Frank Drake did a an initial listening
experiment back in 1960 in Green Bank West Virginia trying to pick up the aliens on the radio and that would not
only prove that the aliens are out there but it might conceivably put us in touch with the aliens and that's something
that everybody would like to do because you know everybody's a graduate of star star Trail uh star star not Star Wars
but Star Trek where we actually interact with the aliens and not as their victims
anyhow let me let me just say a few things about what you can expect because this is what I think may happen in the
next 20 years to begin with I think we're going to pick up a signal I've said that here before and you know you
can you can dismiss that immediately uh as simply wishful thinking and maybe it is but it's simply based on the fact
that our setti experiments are much better than they used to be and we're
going through uh you know nearby star systems at a pretty rapid clip and the
speed at which we're scrutinizing the nearby Cosmos is actually improving it's
increasing so uh that clip uh continues to get Clipper uh if we do pick up a
signal of course the next question and everybody will ask is well what are they saying and they might not be saying
anything it might just be a signal all right just a carrier wave you know just
the kind of squeal you might get on your radio set if you're just tuning between stations and you pick up a squeal you
don't know what the the programming on that station may be but you know there's at least a transmitter somewhere so that
might be the first thing that happens but as Philip Morrison a fairly celebrated physicist at MIT said years
ago uh to me actually but there were other people in the room so he was less hesitant uh he said look the aliens
aren't going to you know just transmit an empty signal of course there will be a message with the signal there will be
modulation on the signal in other words the signal will change in some way right
maybe it'll be pulse code modulation maybe they'll just you know frequency modulation they'll switch between a
couple of tones the way was done down in aasbo when they sent that message to a
nearby globular star cluster actually I don't think any Star clusters are that
nearby but any case uh okay so there will be presumably a signal and you know
the next step would be to well can we decode that signal can we figure out the
encoding are they sending us words are they sending us pictures are they sending us you know dry mathematic what
are they doing and we might be able to do that I mean you'd have you know a lot of people around the world working on
decoding that alien transmission I mean nothing would uh guarantee their Fame quicker than to be the first one to
understand what the aliens are trying to say to us so I think that we might decode the modulation and maybe the
questions are simply you know somewhat innan they're just telling us who they are and where they are and you know and
what they do for a living or you know what their annual income is I don't know what it might be but the the the you
know the the message might be fairly trivial but I don't expect so I think
that if they're going to send a message to potential receivers light years
away right then they're not going to make it a trivial conversation or a monologue because conversation will be
quite hard right if they're 20 light years away and they send us a message we pick it up we decide to respond takes
another 20 years for our response to get to them and if they find that interesting enough to respond to that
another 20 years goes by and so forth so there would be a Temptation it seems to me and to many people that they would
send a lot of stuff the first time right I mean if you if if you can imagine
putting a note in a bottle right in Europe and uh sending it on some current that will reach the Americas as our
their first communication with the Americas right they they probably wouldn't just say hi we're the Europeans
and let it go at that they they might put a particularly good book in there or something so I think that they would if
they're going to transmit anything to us uh it's likely to be something that has high information content and of course
you can hope that it will uh the immediate question of course that will arise here on Earth is well shall we
talk back and they mixed views on that a lot of people think we should talk back I among them not that that matters much
but there are going to be plenty of people who think talking back is maybe not a good idea because you don't know
what these guys are like I mean you know they might be friendly they might be interested in educating Us in all of
physics or whatever but on the other hand they might only be interested in I don't know coming to Earth and taking
our natural resources or you know just killing everybody for the fun of it or who knows so they they would argue
against communication because you don't know anything about the beings that are
you are communicating with all right let's uh consider a little bit about the
question of could we understand a message now I I'm going to assume here that the message comes in either as a
radio signal because that's what you know SEI usually does we we try and pick up radio Transmissions but it could also
be you know a flashing laser and so forth so all those are possible but you
know it's going to consist of the the signal itself the carrier if you will just the the squeal that tells you that
they're on the air and then the modulation which is to say the information that's on top of that signal
and we would have to to understand it we would have to figure out that modulation scheme right are they sending us AM
modulated radio Wes are they sending us FM modulated we need to know uh you know
how they've encoded it that kind of thing and of course you know all those
things are kind of technical things but they would be essential for us to figure out if we're going to understand what
they're saying and of course then you're still left with the fact okay now I've got the modulation but what the heck
does this mean Bob I mean I don't I don't know right so that would be an Endeavor that might take many many years
and uh my personal opinion on that is that you should just make the signal
available just put it on the web make it available to the general public and let them try and figure it out because it
turns out that contrary to your daily uh experience the general public is actually fairly clever and they might in
fact figure some of this out okay um then there are sociological aspects to
the whole matter of uh communicating with the aliens because presumably if
you can figure out what they're saying you might want to reply to it right they might be asking you questions they might
be telling you something that's useful to you and expecting to hear a reply from you simply because they want to
know whether you've got the signal for example and so there is this potential danger there you'd have to make some uh
assessment of how dangerous it is now obviously if the aliens that are getting in touch with you are 30 light years
away I don't think you have to worry too much about the danger they're not going to come here they're a long way off uh
they're not going to threaten your your lifestyle okay but uh there's also the
possibility of trade that's uh something that typified exploration which is I
think the theme of this particular uh get together exploration provided an opportunity for
trade and that was one of the great uh and important consequences of exploration well maybe the same thing
would be true here maybe we could trade uh that's that's occurred occasionally
in movies movies you know the they they they trade I don't know what it was in
uh I'm trying to think of the film where they they had something that they found worthy of exchanging with some other
Society maybe that'll happen that doesn't happen terribly much in science fiction I have to say at least not in
the movies uh or in television shows about it usually the two sides are at
such desperate stages of technical development that trade doesn't really make sense it's like having you trade
with the squirrels in your backyard I mean you could try and initiate that but it turns out the squirrels have rather
little interest in it and beyond that there's not much they can give other than acorns so uh I don't know about
trade maybe there's uh also the entertainment maybe you know what they're saying is their top 40 or maybe
their their their you know the TV shows that play well with the aliens maybe you would find that inter uh interesting I'm
at some level it'd be interesting I'm not sure it'd be very entertaining the last thing they might be trying to do
that I've written down here at least is they might try and educate you they might try and teach you something and
that's a very you know common theme in any discussion of this possibility for
interaction with other societies maybe they would teach us how to I don't know
whatever they they teach us all of physics or they would teach us all of astronomy or they would teach us how to
cure death or disease or whatever maybe they they do that I mean that usually assumes that they're altruistic they're
papers out there about whether the aliens might be altruistic it's not been
our experience terribly often here on Earth that people who find another Society are altruistic I mean the
Europeans came to the Americas and it wasn't that they were really trying to educate the natives here they didn't do
too much about that but you know they found things to trade with them so there was that okay all that being
said I I I really want to open this up to any questions people have because I'm sure you have more interesting aspects
to discuss here than I do but I I think that this is not just a
theoretical problem as I've said on these four of before I do think that within the next couple of decades we
will pick up a signal and there'll be tremendous pressure to send uh communication back in the direction from
which the signal came and consequently it's it's quite conceivable that at some point we'll be talking about
communication between societies now any society we pick up this is
something that the movies get wrong any society that we pick up is going to be more advanced than our own that's not
you know not the way you see it on television Star Trek I mean you you know you can converse with these guys in
colloquial English as seems to be the universal language of the Milky Way uh
you you can do that but they're always more or less at our level of sophistication and that isn't likely to
be the case because obviously the ones that are not as advanced as we are you're not going to hear from those guys
and the the ones that you do hear from are more likely to be maybe millions or billions of years more advanced because
the universe has been around for a long time and the chances that they're you know within a 100 Years of your own development are quite small so you're
going to be suddenly in communication with a society that might be a million years more
advanced and the question is what can you learn from those guys if anything if you can even understand what they're
saying there's uh there is a question here John Ray is watching on Facebook book and he says Seth how did you
process Stephen Hawking stance on communicating with ET he says I believe
he was excited by the idea but fearful of the possible
consequences yeah Hawking made the point that every time at least in human
history here every time a less Advanced civilization comes in contact with a
more advanced civilization it usually doesn't work out terribly well for the less Advanced civilization and the
obvious example was you know the inhabitants of North America in the 15th century getting in contact with the
Europeans the Europeans were more advanced not terribly more advanced it's been estimated that they're they were
maybe 200 years more advanced but that was enough to give the Europeans the upper hand whatever the Europeans wanted
to do in the Americans they could pretty well do and so it didn't work out so well for the natives and what he's
saying is that that could also obtain here that in fact you know we get in touch with these guys and they decide
well they're only interested in us for you know the malib denum or whatever it is that's on our planet and consequently
we're not going to get a whole lot out of that relationship even assuming that they don't simply destroy us because you
know it's just something for the kids to do on the weekend the alien kids um so
it it it it may be that indeed there's some danger here and that has in fact
played a role in at least one aspect of the whole SE Endeavor and that is the
people who are not content to merily listen for signals but who want to broadcast signals to try and encourage
the aliens to get in touch and there have been you know several experiments in which people have picked out a nearby
star system trained a big antenna with a radar transmitter on it and you know
keyed the radar transmitter to send some message usually a picture of some sort to uh that star system in hope that they
might wake the aliens up now that you know that we've we've never heard back from any of these aliens but on the
other hand it has to be said that most of these Societies or at least these putative societies were tens of light
years away so maybe it's not so surprising we haven't heard anything yet maybe we'll never hear
anything yeah did that answer that question I think so I think so you know recently we've had Congressional
hearings about um UAP sightings
uh you know testimony about crashes and crash recovery um this kind of thing and I was
curious I I mean we haven't talked to these guys um uh you know through uh any
of the equipment that you guys have and there there's a question about um about telescopes that Saad uses for their
research but um uh is this complete
Awash in your mind I mean I'm very skeptical myself okay but U um you know
I've always I've long been a UAP UF as as we used to call them UFO uh uh
skeptic and I guess until I shake hands with an alien I'm going to remain a
skeptic so uh uh well Scott I I'll I'll send some Al
all these experts so-called experts or Admirals or whatever that are testifying
that hey we this is real well it's it's not that they so testify so much is that
they hold hearings right and you know there have been surveys more than one in
which the public is asked well do you think that the aliens are out there well
the majority of the public believes the aliens are out there and probably the majority of you believe the aliens are out there but the next question is how
many of you think that they've come to Earth Earth and it's usually 60 or 70% of the respondents who think that
they've come to Earth and uh for what purpose they're a little less clear on but you know obviously I don't believe
that I mean I think if they had come to Earth you know we wouldn't be talking about it because everybody would know
about it you know there would be lots of TV shows showing the aliens walking around Central Park or wherever they're
going to go right I I I think that if the aliens had come here you would know it their response to that of course is
predictable they say oh yeah but the government's going to cover it up and uh
that's that's a frequent explanation for many aspects of this particular subject
uh the government is going to cover it up now as I've said on these panels before I've worked for the federal
government I grew up in the DC area and I had summer jobs working for the government I even had top secret
clearance right uh didn't have anything to do with aliens but the the the project I was working on was something
that we wanted to keep uh secret from the Russians but in any case I had top secret clearance and I would have been
really Keen to know if uh you know the government knew about aliens and was
keeping that quiet having worked for the government it was you know dead obvious to me that the government couldn't keep
something like that quiet right but even if you don't believe that I mean they just didn't have it in them they had no
way to keep it quiet but even if you doubt that right then you have to assume well the aliens are only going to make
themselves noted noticed by the American Federal Government they're not going to
make themselves noticed by I don't know the uh you know the the the the the
belgians or the botswanan or or the Eastern Europeans or anything like that only Americans are favored with uh this
information about the aliens and that's kind of hard to believe anybody who works in science knows that that's not
the way it way it happens so I I don't think that we know about the aliens I don't think the government's covering it
up beyond that I don't think the government would cover it up or could cover it
up yes so so one of the things that you brought up
earlier U uh in our email conversations was uh the consequences of if if we do
if we do find an ET signal what what will be the consequences or has that
been thought out or our response to all of this are we are we is is is are we
going to be tight Li are we gonna cow down or we GNA immediately
respond yeah well uh no I don't think we're going to be tight liit because he couldn't be right if you were to pick up
at a signal tomorrow at your local neighborhood radio telescope that you
could you could prove is coming actually from the sky and there's information on it right so you picked up a signal that
has a message even if you don't know what the message is the first thing you're going to do is call up somebody
at another radio telescope or optical telescope depending on you know the nature of the signal and you're going to
say look here's a right Ascension declination where I'm picking up a signal and uh here's the frequency would
you mind taking a listen or a look as well and so you know within a week this
information is all around the world and many people are going to be looking at it so uh there's no way to keep it
secret and again I don't see any reason to keep it secret I mean you can argue on the basis of maybe security concerns
that you should keep it secret but that doesn't make any sense the aliens don't know that you picked up their signal
they're going to not launch a fleet of you know rocket ships toward Earth and just flatten our planet because you
picked up their signal they don't know that you've done that so all those sorts of concerns are small consequence to my
mind right okay all right so all right let's see if there's any other questions
here let's let's talk a little bit bit about uh the equipment that seti does
use I think that you uh have been involved in the evolution of uh ever
better um radio dishes and um uh you
know Channel you know how many channels you can process simultaneously Etc H
what did it start out with it I guess it just starts out with Frank Drake uh
using a simple maybe single Channel and what is what is s like today yeah well
actually I'm not that involved with the development of the equipment but I can tell you what I know and it's true that
in 1960 when Frank Drake did project osma the first modern seti experiment he
had a receiver it was basically a commercial shortwave receiver that's all it was but he you know he had it
connected up to one of the uh antennas in Green Bank West Virginia and it only
piced listened to one frequency at a time right so it was one channel you had
to hope that the aliens were broadcasting on that frequency or you would miss their call now Frank rigged
up a little bit of a motor with a rubber band or something like it on a shaft
that went around the tuning knob of this receiver so he could sweep up and down the dial with this uh jury rigged s
system and he did so and uh while he didn't hear anything that was clearly extraterrestrial you know he was well
aware of the problem that don't know where to where to search for the signal you don't know where in frequency to
search for the signal but that quickly led to the development of what are called multi-channel uh receivers
spectrometers are really called these days and you know the today's SEI experiments will listen to Millions even
billions of channels and do so mostly simultaneously in other words you don't have to sweep up and down the dial you
can listen to essentially all reasonable frequencies simultaneously
so uh you know this is a good deal I think that the maybe the only reason I mean it's a good question that I get
asked uh you've got all the sophisticated equipment you're listening to millions of frequencies but you still
haven't heard et why is that well we don't know why that is but a few
possibilities one maybe we still haven't listened to the right frequency that's possible second possibility yeah you're
you're tuning to the right frequency in there somewhere but you don't have enough sensitivity
the signal is much weaker than what you can find that's certainly a possibility
I mean you don't know what the power level of the alien transmitters are and the third possibility of course is that
there are no aliens out there but I don't think anybody on this particular call would believe
that what about um if it is true that we have uaps or
UFOs flying around our atmosphere uh wouldn't we pick up some
sort of transmission from these um these guys flying around well maybe it would I
mean you know uh it it depends on whether they had transmitters at frequencies and power levels that you
could pick up but I think that if you had uaps flying around the atmosphere and that's where they most like to fly
around uh if if they were fly flying around as opposed to flying around the
downtown bars of Mountain View California if if they're really flying around the atmosphere yeah I I don't
know that you'd pick up their signals but you would at least see them but you could see them I mean maybe you can't
see them with your eyes maybe you don't see them with your 6in reflector but they're going to be visible to other
things that are scrutinizing the sky there are plenty of military uh telescopes I don't know if I should call
them telescopes but instruments that are scrutinizing the sky and as I think I said last time there's something like
eight th000 satellites in orbit around the Earth that are sending signals back down
to the Earth most of these are you know reconnaissance satellites or military satellites I mean they have a multitude
of uses but in any case uh you know they're they're sending these signals back down and you know so we're fairly
well aware of what's in orbit around the Earth and if there was an alien
spacecraft that was making any sort of noise I think that we would have little difficulty in finding
it okay all right yeah I I want to apologize to the audience I've got some
sort of uh buzzing or something like that going on with my microphone I think
it's probably aliens trying to get through so well that's the usual excuse
yes okay there was also a question about the SE at home project I remember when
it came out a lot of people had SE at home turnning away uh you know uh on
their computers at home and that was contributing to the greater good as kind of a citizen science project is that
still going on or I don't I don't think it is actually Scott uh that was an
initiative of the University of California at Berkeley and those guys did it for quite a number of years you
know uh and and there were s million people as I recall who actually signed
up for C at home and were you know uh looking for signals they got to down
download some data collected by one of the big antennas in the world that was distributed by the fellows at uh at
Berkeley but they've stopped that project not because it was you know
morally offensive or anything like that but simply because it costs money to do that somebody has to be charged with you
know managing the project and they just didn't have the money to do that understood understood well are there any
citizen science projects going on now that s um not that I know of actually
not I I hesitate to say that because you know one of my colleagues may stomp into
my office here and tell me that I misspoke but I often misspoke so maybe
that's not a big deal I don't know somebody like Dave eer might know about citizen science projects that might be
uh relevant here I don't know uh Jeff swick um he said that uh
the first signal aliens would get from us would be radio and TV broadcasts from the early days of the entertainment
entertainment medium I wonder uh would they what they would make up uh what
they would make of they would make for instance of uh what they would think of
uh Laurel and Hardy or the Dark Side of humanity such as Hitler yeah well keep in mind you look
at Hitler and you uh you have you know sort of bad thoughts about the whole thing but that's only because of the
context in which you're watching you know the history of the world in the
1930s and 40s and so you know that he wasn't a good guy but the aliens don't know that and maybe they don't care
right I mean for them it's a it's a it's not their problem kind of thing so they'd only be interested in you know
seeing the the lips on these faces flapping around and trying to determine
whether they could figure out anything from that they could learn anything that was going on but you know the the first
you say that the first uh signals that they're going to get are the ones from the you know the 20s and 30s the early
broadcast that might be but it's unlikely frankly because the early am
and FM transmitters and even TV for that matter the transmitters were not very
powerful right and many of the frequencies that were being used for those Transmissions are frequencies that
would reflect off the ionosphere of Earth's atmosphere wouldn't make it into
space anyhow so I don't think you have to worry too much about that the the signals that do make it into space the
ones that the aliens are most likely to find from Earth are are radars uh I think I mentioned that last
time and The Radars are not so interesting to listen to but you know I mean at least they would know that there
are radars around LaGuardia Airport in New York so maybe that would be of
interest to them then again maybe not M Seth you've been at STi for a long
time uh um and knew Frank Drake very well and so I'm just kind of curious
what was the through your career at seti what was the most exciting moments for
you and um you know how has that shaped your view of uh the search for
extraterrestrials well well you tempt me Scott but I I
think I don't I think that from a scientific point of view the the most exciting things were when we thought we
had picked up a signal and that happened more than once right when we pick up a
signal and when you know I I remember when it happened we were observing using the antennas at the national radio
astronomy observatory in Greenbank West Virginia and sitting there late at night looking at the computer screens and so
forth and this signal came through and we didn't know what it was and it seemed to meet all the
requisite well the requirements of a signal that's being deliberately transmitted from another star system it
was coming from some spot on the sky right uh it wasn't terrestrial interference at least we didn't think so
and uh you know that was pretty exciting because we thought we've done it we finally found
ET however uh even though the media started calling up by the way which shows you that there's no secrecy in
seti I don't know how they knew about it but I I was immediately being called by you know the New York Times and and
stuff like that because they already knew that we had picked up a signal and they wanted to know what the aliens were saying well I don't know what the aliens
were saying but it turned out it wasn't the aliens anyhow this was most likely uh interference very local to where the
antenna was so uh but that was pretty exciting because we thought well you know we've done it and I I'll just
report another exciting moment not that I experienced but that Frank d experience when he did that first SE
experiment back in 1960 right he had picked out two nearby sunlight Stars uh to point the antenna
at and he pointed at the first antenna and he didn't you know he didn't pick up anything then he pointed he swung the
antenna over to the second star system and uh I think it was toti but in any
case he he swung the antenna over to that star system and he immediately picked up uh uh an interesting signal
one that sounded like boing boing Bo you know and he he told me that he his first
thought was well could it really be this easy we we found the aliens on the first go kind of thing and it turned out he
hadn't found the aliens he'd found some uh radar systems at a nearby airport but
it you know that must have been pretty exciting for a while sure kind of like the ligo experiment they flip it on and
they get a they get a hit so yeah uh Adrien Nock uh watching on YouTube uh
once know if you could talk about what was the blc1 the Breakthrough listen candidate one from
uh poor IMA centor in 2020 yeah uh I don't know what it was
and I don't think that the Breakthrough listen guys know what it was either I may be wrong about that but I don't think so they picked up the signal look
keep in mind you're using a big antenna normally right and you've got a receiver
that is listening to hundreds maybe thousands maybe tens of thousands of different channels different frequencies
simultaneously so you shouldn't be too surprised that you pick up signals all the time we couldn't turn on that that
equipment there that we were using in Greenbank West Virginia without picking up a dozen signals right I I I sat there
and figured that we were picking up roughly a dozen signals every minute okay and we checked out as many of them
as we could uh after a while you get swamped but and and they were all you know we were able the ones we were able
to track down they were all due to interference generated here on Earth okay so after a while after you do this
for a couple of nights or a couple of days or a couple of days and nights uh you know you become kind of hardened to
the fact that you're going to pick up signals all the time and you may not pick up ET at all so we became a little
I don't know I don't I wouldn't say that we were jaded but we were more realistic sure
sure so it may take a very very long time before we can uh find uh any kind
of signal like that but you think that we're going to in the next 20 years what what gives what gives you that optimism
well I mean I'm just an optimistic kind of guy Scott but I I think that the the
reason is this I mean it's you know I I've bet people cups of coffee on this
but you know only a cup of coffee I don't bet them a$ thousand dollars or anything like that but it's simply
looking at the rate of improvement of the receiving equipment used for CTI and
that's following Moore's Law as it turns out so you know it's doubling in capability every couple of years and
that's been going on for decades now and will continue to go on for decades there's no reason to think it will you
know slow down and because of that you can just calculate how long will it be before
we've looked at a million St systems and that's within a couple of decades and you know this is
just yeah I mean maybe this is totally unfounded but it seems to me that if you look at a million star systems you have
at least a reasonable chance of hearing ET so that that's why I think that you
know if we haven't heard anything by 2035 or something like that I'll buy you a cup of coffee scut okay I'll be
waiting I think I may be buying you a cup of coffee I hope I am that's great
Seth and Scott yep can can I interpose a question quickly and first of all I have
not heard I'm not aware of any other citizen science type projects of the
type you mentioned but Seth I wonder if um with your expertise if you could address there seems to be very little
differentiation among a lot of astronomy enthusiasts even the difference between
the overwhelming like of course we have evidence of Life on one planet in the
cosmos but the uh understanding of spectroscopy of chemistry of the
uniformity of chemistry of the commonality of organic chemistry of the
numbers of uh several hundred billion stars in the Milky Way of a 100 billion or more galaxies maybe many more in the
universe it seems overwhelming uh that the um you know likelihood for
civilizations would be probably abundantly throughout the Universe but
that tends to be more or less equated by a lot of people um to the ability to
arrive you know as to you know land in Central Park and have dinner at 21 with
us you know the the could you address Seth I hope they're buying
yeah could could you maybe uh uh mention something about the incredibly
enormously large Cosmic distance scale even between the uh uh us and the
nearest stars and the unbelievable amount of energy it would take to move
things with mass I.E a spacecraft filled with our new friends the aliens uh from
place from star system to star system that seems to me to be a very very different gamble than what seems like it
might be much much more uh realistic to communicate to discover and communicate
with other civilizations although it would be a much harder uh
um quest to shake hands with them yeah no I I don't count on shaking hands with
them in particular maybe the aliens don't have hands but maybe you could shake a tentacle or something like that
yeah no you're absolutely right Dave that's that's uh the case I mean
Transportation um is is rather difficult communication is not so difficult right
if you want to actually go to a nearby star system and shake hands or whatever with the alien
you know you can work out for yourself it's just High School physics uh you know how much energy that requires if
you want to get there before you're dead right so and and most people do so yeah
that that's not easy but what is easy is to say hello we're the earthlings and
you know we've got all these uh magazine subscriptions we're interested in selling you or whatever that only
requires a transmitter depending on the size of your antenna that could be a transmitter of 100 Watts 1,000 wats
whatever it's it's something like a couple of light bulbs in your house right so that's relatively easy actually
meeting the aliens I mean you know assuming we don't develop Subspace well
no we don't you know develop the kind of Technology they have in Star Trek where you can actually you know get
transported to another star system I don't know how that works I I actually I actually gave some courses a long time
ago up in San Francisco about the science of Star Trek and this is one of the the tough ones you know how does a
transporter really work how can you actually go from one star SYM to another
without building a very expensive rocket and it turns out we don't have any idea how to do that it may be that there is
no way to do that so uh yeah that that that may be tough but I wouldn't worry too much about it I mean meeting the
aliens would certainly be lovely uh and in particular you know if you thought you could buy them a good dinner and so
forth have a conversation with them all that would be great but even if that's not possible and I kind of doubt that it
is at least being able to communicate with them might be good enough maybe you
could have told the Europeans in 1492 forget this this trip you're about to embark on Chris don't do it you know
we're just going to put notes in bottles and communicate with them back and forth I mean that would be cheaper be cheaper
nobody gets seasick much less dangerous yep much less dangerous
yeah thank you Seth thank you all right so thanks thanks to our audience for all
those interesting questions Seth thank you again for coming on to Global star
party and uh what's your next adventure what what is uh Seth in the company
doing next at well well I think my next adventure is to survive Thanksgiving but
beyond that uh I will as I often do as I always do I'll I'll go east during the
uh Christmas break and uh deal with relatives not that that's particularly fun but they expect it they don't have
any fun either but you know they do expect it so I'll be doing that okay well thank you so much Seth
thank you okay good night okay well our next speaker is none
other than Dave ier uh he is the editor and chief of astronomy magazine he's a
prolific author I have several of his books a passionate advocate for space
science in amateur astronomy um and he has Decades of experience he's inspired stargazers all
the way around the world uh and maybe you know if if they're getting our radio waves out there maybe some a few space
aliens are kind of interested too but the dude's writing his lectures his
dedication his humor uh you know it's uh it's a nice
combination and um he's a great friend too and Dave thank you so much for
coming on to our 162nd Global star party uh to talk about the what it called the
broken engagement ring is that right this is a weird one among weird objects tonight even yes indeed and thank you
Scott for inviting me back despite the fact that you know me you're a brave humanist at heart
[Laughter] clearly especially after bottle of rum or whatever it was that they gave you at
the last sarmis we yeah yeah yeah yeah now we have ideas for next year at
starmus there we go so let me share I will attempt to share my screen I am
sharing will share uh the Exotic um world of whatever it is and uh can you
see that now okay very good and I will see if I
can start a slideshow as well and then we'll be in business and what I'd like to to talk
about tonight briefly um it's not Centaurus a but I'll move on and we've
gotten uh we're still in the northern sky working through everything but
there's good news because if you're engaged recently and then you've broken
it off or your partner to be has there's an important object in the sky just for
you the broken engagement ring great no does that you yeah I'd see a puzzle look
on Scott's face here I'm just trying to be inclusive here okay never got an engagement ring
so it's more than broken it was not
exist okay this is a um the broken engagement ring there's not a lot to say
about this even relative to some of the other objects I've talked about because this is really just an asterism of
reasonably bright stars that makes an interesting and cute shape called the broken engagement ring
it's sakarias in one you know for the purists who want to uh know the catalog
name there and I will tell you that it is really easy to find that's the upside
here because it lies just about a degree that's a very low power telescopic field
even west of one of the bright stars in the bowl of the Big Dipper mirac which
is beta orim maoris that's the bottom right Star as we normally see it in the bowl of the big Dippers so this is easy
to find the broken engagement ring even if they're you know who knows what the memories are associated with it it
contains a relatively bright semicircle of of physically unrelated stars as the
asterisms are chance alignments and true star clusters are physically Associated
stars in fact uh the closest star cluster to us of all of physically
Associated stars um is comprised of many the brightest stars in the Big Dipper so
there we go um very close to this in the sky these Stars however are about 7th to
11th magnitude and spread over a diameter of about 15 arc minutes of this
ring-shaped um splattering of stars so it makes a really nice sight in
binoculars or in low power telescopes um and I just like to use it
because it's a pretty ordinary uh object there's not a lot to say about this other than it looks cute the arrangement
of stars but it reminds us that the sky hides a lot of interesting fields of
view that have nothing to do with the 10,000 or so reasonably bright deep Sky
objects that we can talk about so sometimes if you go out with your telescope and it's a low power uh
instrument sometimes in the old days we call them Richfield telescopes just you know on a really dark night along the
Milky Way and in other areas just scanning the sky and moving around and
seeing what you can discover sometimes uh une Earth really interesting Fields
like the um lovingly titled broken engagement
ring here from Ron Stan's interstellarum deep Sky Atlas is a chart that shows you
where the broken engagement ring is and that's the bright star at the base of the bowl of the of the Big Dipper over
on the the left hand side of this chart and of course there's a a smattering of uh the
usual Ursa Major mgc galaxies in the area but this is a very unusual
object here's a sketch telescopic sketch of the broken engagement ring made by
Richard or um a few years ago and this was uh in a reasonably uh good siiz
refractor uh and you can see it has this sort of C shapee or backwards C shaped depending on how you view it or
arc-shaped uh ring of stars here is an image by David rattled
of the broken engagement ring in the center there as well and so you can see it's just a nice grouping of bright
stars uh very easy to see in practically any telescope and if the sky is clear
and and reasonably dark uh and it's kind of neat seeing these patterns of stars
that's all I have really tonight and I can tell you the December issue of astronomy magazine is out there in which
Marsha bartusiak and her colleagues are arguing uh in the same month that we've
rededicated LOL Observatory here in Flagstaff um that maybe the Hubble
constant should also include uh a little love for VM slier and others who were
involved in the early days of understanding that the universe is expand Landing um before
1923 and some other stories there there's a review of celestron's pretty
hot new product the origin Observatory um is in this issue as well and and a bunch of other
things um and I will mention that next spring now the dates have been adjusted
just a tiny bit it's going to be April 25th through the 29th uh for our next
staris uh that will involve a lot of Talks by Nobel Prize winners and by
astronaut explorers and by scientists in a number of Sciences not just astronomy
and space exploration and of course we'll have some rock and roll and and uh
um surprising interesting concert stuff going on there as well so we hope you
can join us in uh La Palma which hosts the world's largest telescope which is
shown here uh the GTC which edges out the twin ceks in Hawaii uh for the time
being still the largest telescope in the world until the other projects that we
know about are completed and we will have a good time next spring in the Canary Islands so consider tuning in
there or joining us there and you will have the time of your life so Scott
that's all I have tonight I will end the show that's a pretty brief look at uh
just an asterism this time but we'll go back to the normal um more detailed
looks at Deep Sky objects next week David have David i' like to just mention
how much I enjoyed that I'm gonna have to go and look at the broken engagement yeah I have one a broken engagement ring
well there you go you have to go out and look at it absolutely if it ever clears here which it probably will one day but
for a while event we have uh I have a broken
engagement ring it's the second of three that I got with my marriage to Wendy and
so when it broke I went to Stellar vision and they made a third one and I
have it and I'd like to show it with you this one is not broken yeah this is a uh
this is my engagement ring with Wendy my wedding ring I'm still wearing it is
um a meteorite it is a gibian meteorite from
Africa and uh I've still got it if I lose it if it falls off I'm not going to
replace it but for right now I have it and uh it reminds me of 30 years of real
Joy thank you and back to you David and St fantastic thank you David and thank
you Scot I'd like to mention also uh that this uh object is number 36 on the
League's asterism observing program very nice excellent yeah yeah
there's uh there's not a lot about asterisms on the
internet I find something called the world asterism project and they said
that there's something like 270 some odd as known asterisms but uh
you know maybe uh and it seemed like some people were kind of making them up you know a little
bit you know but uh um anyways I I think
that uh it's lovely to find something like the coat hanger and some they're like they're like familiar friends in
the sky you know so uh and I think something that uh uh amateur astronomers
kind of gauge their own eyesight to see if they can see these things and it's Etc so but uh so it doesn't surprise me
though Chuck that there is a observing program for asterisms there so because
you guys have so many our next uh speaker is marchelo Suza marello is in
Brazil uh he is uh uh an amazing uh uh
educator in astronomy he is a a huge Outreach enthusiasts um and he puts
together probably the very best uh astronomy and uh space
exploration um convention in uh in the southern hemisphere um he is always
doing something uh with his students uh he's he's uh tireless in working with
the Lewis cruls Astronomical Society and uh his work at uh as as uh as a
professor at the u university that he is a professor of which I always forget the
name of it but um um you know he is a
very popular uh educator and so and he's very popular with us he is the editor
also of skyup magazine uh which will be published again very soon so let's bring
them
on hi thank you very much for invitation thank you for your kind words thank you
marelo thank you I'll let you on the stage okay I will share my screen I'll
talk about the experience that we have here I think you it's work now this is
our astronomic clubp we have 28 years of activities is everything working
and hi I'm sorry something happened here okay
uh the presentation is not in presentation modes I don't know what's happen one moment
SC I don't know what's happening
sorry okay I'll try again sorry I don't know what's happening when
I try to share
I'll try again can you hear me I'm
sorry I hope it is now it's not your
[Music] working I'm try something different here
on a mon
I'm sorry I'll do something different
okay I hope now it
works I'm sorry because is the best that was possible for me now I show I'm sorry
SP can you hear me SP I don't know what's happening
here I'm sorry can you hear me
S I can't hear you
hi can you hear
me I'm not hear
you what's happening I don't know what's happening can you hear me Martella yes
yes hear we can I can hear you at least I don't know can hear you as well okay
okay thank you I'm sorry for the problems here but I I think that I found
a way to show in few minutes I will show but I will talk about our experience
with the popularization of science here and we had the opportunity to
participate in two special events here the last week and about the astronomy
in schools and at these events we
students produced a amazing
ER experience of the popularization of science for the public I try to show
this I'm changing here my presentation we could see we could see your
presentation yes but for me it was blinking it's blinking I don't know yes I don't
know who I there were like these gray squares in front of it so I'm not sure
that was from I don't know what's happening I try again but I I save in a
different I'm trying to save now in a different format and I think that will
be possible to show but H I don't know what's
happening I'm sorry squat my computer unfortunately sometimes don't sometimes
it doesn't behave yes they don't want to understood you're not alone in the
world that's right we've all had these problems yes I don't know why why
but but I T here for PTF I think that you and today my football team is
playing the most important game also oh okay yes we are trying to
be the Brazilian one Brazilian ER
cup uh I I'm here I have now in PDF I hope that you works I want to
share I'm TR want to show in big screen but I SH now let me see if it work
okay in for you can see not quite yet but let's give it a
minute okay what's happen my internet is okay I
think that's problem with my computer because internet he is
fine and it's not blinking for me there something
good it's still it's coming no not yet I don't know what's happening I'm
sorry oh wait wait here it comes
okay oh something is different here I don't
know perhaps a lot of your countrymen are using the internet to watch the football
match yeah that's what it is maybe maybe is the most important game today it
because this is it's not the last game of the Brazilian Cup but it's the most
important because if my team or the other team wins ER they are almost will
be will win the Brazilian Cup because they are
can you see now uh it's it's white um we can see
some some graphics but I oh now we see it now we see it okay yes let me see
I'll will try to to change the this screen
okay okay let me see if you change what it it is allowing me
to do a this okay Chang this is the Brazilian I begin with the Brazilian
most famous poet that is our Shak in Portuguese it's not a Brazilian it's a
Portuguese his name is Fernando p i here it is in Portuguese by I change now for
a free translation of this part of the this that talk about the universe he he
said that universe is not my idea my IDE of the universe is that is my it is my
idea the night does not grow dark through my eyes my idea of the
night is that it grows dark to my eyes outside of my thinking and of having any
thoughts the night grows dark concretely and the brightness of the star exists as if it had weight he wrote
a famous book book that is someone that take care of the cows and of the animals
and with one of the names that he us is
a and he a most Brazilian uh not Brazilian but
but in Portuguese now I try to show H images of
our events but I know know what's happened because my computer is
blinking I don't know if you can see the the screen the screen is
dark here he is again this is uh the image of Fernando pesoa yes I am try to
change here let me see what happen ah here can see the M this was an event
that participated in our famous school here you our SE and
the they have an observatory there and the observatory we now know that it was
the first one in our region in Brazil it was built in
1960s and they had built the observatory three years
ago and we help them to
er uh know about the history of the observatory and we are working with them
there and this was a ceremony that receive a plate because of our
efforts to uh find all the history about the
observatory in our ReliOn these are the new the students from this
school that likes astronomy they are the new generation of students here that
will be working with you and we had another event that's a very special one
in a school in other seats not in our seat and they had participation for a
lot of students and they organize a day of astronomy there all the students of
the school or they have different
class since from the K Garden until the
last year of the Fundamental school that here is the nine grade they
organized a special events and the they have special rooms for each class and I
had the opportunity to make presentation for them and this is part of the
students and here with Fury gagari they had image of Fury gagari natural size
there and they organized many different rooms to talk about the history of
astrona about astronomy and there was a fantastic experience for me in the
seat you can see here El musk was there also they have maor
fell and also about the history of
astronomy they organize a special this are the home of the T the history of the
telescopes and they put in a big screen here famous astronomers and including the name of
astronomic Cl that is Lou Cruz that's the name of astronom Club is
in honor of L Bru that's why the second director of
the national Observatory here is L Cru there for for
me it was a surprise that he was there they talking about his
history and they also this are the teachers and director
of the school and they organize many things from a fantastic exhibition there
and I'll show now the last image that I had opportunity to take using the
lumbridge observatory we are studying comets these are image of the Comet C
2023 A3 from this Observatory this Comet uh
300 tou 3p this is com 29p that had an outburst
last week he's very far from Earth and they detect an outburst that's cool this
is a image that I got from the unella that's a blue flash NE and you can see
that it was only five minutes of is possible to resist this fantastic
object and also the NGC 0 91
891 91 only five minutes but I you take
another picture with a longer Expos and I'll talk something that
talking about Willam hash and the on he
had the opportunity to discover the infrared I don't know if someone talk about this and this is a fantastic
experience a simple experience that he did that he add
the white light and he use a pris or to
separate different wavelengths and use thermometer he noted that the after the
red he also had a high temperature that and
this was fantastic discovery and the in 2009 the
user produced the the space observatory in honor of
H and he was stud universe and the H of the spect or the
infrared these are fantastic image from the space telescope that worked from 20 2009 until
2013 this is is this or neula infrared from
the P Space Telescope this another
galaxy and something that is fantastic to know that we have we had in space an
space obor in honor of William hash that from me is a fantastic astronom and he
also a fantastic musician because until if I'm not wrong he was 405 and four
years old when he begin to work with person before he was a musician and a fantastic
musician and here is my team that has a star this is symbol of my football team
here in Brazil that name is but that called but
fire and the now the owner of my team is
American that is John TX that and now this is the two most
important players of my team and I hope we we win today we now is one zero for
us I hope that you have probably more 30 minutes of game and I hope you will win
and you will be the next win winner of the Brazilian Cup thank you very much
for the invitation squat I apologize for the problems that I had here no it's
okay it's happened to everybody every is a great place to be here to all of us thank you so much thank
you okay all right so um uh David our
next uh speaker is uh Chuck Allen and Chuck um is the
current president of the astronomical League uh I met Chuck years ago at the
at an Alcon event and he was explaining to me uh about the U I think then new um
uh recognition award for the national young astronomers award and um so it was
uh it's been a pleasure to be uh involved with that over the years and I
think that seeing these brilliant young people come forward and do uh really
stunning uh research level type of work is just uh you know when you learn about
what they do uh uh there's really it it it seems that uh just recognizing them
for it is seems to somehow fall short of what you would like to do which is uh
you know uh a for them every opportunity to uh to really excel in their lives uh
because they have so much to offer um and so uh let me uh bring you
on Chuck thank you very much for um coming on to the global Star Party
always a pleasure Scott thank you and uh with regard to that award uh the reason
it's now in its 33rd year is largely because of Scott and explore scientific support of the national young astronomer
award program which Garners 10 plus of the most incredible research projects
that you can imagine coming from high school students um just truly remarkable stuff is my audio okay before I begin
yes probably much better than mine actually yours is okay now okay
okay so let me share a screen here and we'll get started
okay maybe marel is at oh never mind we okay there we
go um I just got back from New Jersey uh I left New Jersey yesterday morning got
home last night uh visiting my lifelong friend Richard God who is a retired
astrophysicist professor ameritus of astrophysics at Princeton University um and Richard is clearly the
most interesting human being I will ever meet in my entire life and uh it was a
great visit uh Richard is a author of multiple books he's working on another one
now uh yeah all of them incredible reads I've had the privilege of doing some
editing for on a couple of these and it's really uh they remarkable Works he
recently uh because he's aware of the element collection I use in many of the
talks on Cosmic origin of elements we had been joking about this 4inch
tungsten Cube that exists and we were always joking about what it would be
like to watch the poor us the UPS driver or FedEx driver arrive with a box no
bigger than one you'd put a softball in that weighs 42 pounds uh and having you
use a dolly to get this Tiny Box up to the door but Richard made sure I had one on the notes to me he decided to give me
one and so this is it it's 4 Ines Square Cube and uh weighs 42 pounds it's as
heavy as my entire Optical tube assembly and its ly plates it's incredible um this is a at pton Hall the
department of astrophysics Princeton this is Richard's map of the universe which is an exponential
rendition of the entire universe from the center of the earth to the cosmic particle Horizon on the other end and
it's on a carpet in the hallway um nearby is Grover's Mill which of course
was the ostensible location of the war of the world's beginning in the famous
Orson Wells 1938 radio broadcast um and M Dr Stein's house of
course at 112 Mercer Street still in excellent shape uh nearby this is a view
you may have seen in the movie Oppenheimer which I took I walked down the hill behind the institute for
advanced study in Princeton beautiful location uh the pond I think they cut
down some of those weeds so you could see the pond in the movie this is old Olden Manor which is right next to the
grounds on which The Institute is located and that's where Dr appenheimer lived when he was director
there um and Richard loves Scale Models
to scale and uh uh it's always a fascinating thing to see some of the
things that he's collected I won't bore you with a lot of that but over on the left there is a 3D chess game and we we
played a six-hour game with that that ended in a draw uh I had an advantage
on a minor exchange I had two Rooks to his one but he had a pawn position that was dangerous and so we we called it a
draw at the end of that but it was a very intense thing to play chess in three dimensions it requires a change in
thinking uh anyway I wanted to talk tonight about the melenic clouds and
this is something uh marello certainly gets to see and most of us don't unless we go to the Southern
Hemisphere and uh this is a view of the clouds seen from eso's panol
Observatory where they have four 1.8 meter reflectors that are separated by
some distance that creates an interferometer which gives these telescopes when they operate together
some 25 times better resolution than any other telescope in the
world the magenic clouds themselves um are pretty tight to the South Celestial
Pole as you can see here they're within 20° of it um for that reason uh you have
to be if you get to the equator at just the right time of year you can see them
very low on the southern Horizon uh but no higher than 20 degrees and only
perhaps in November or December of the year but the further south you go obviously they become visible as
circumpolar objects uh and uh they for the further south you go the better
chance you have well it's interesting first of all to figure out why they're called the
magenic clouds because I think we can safely assume that there were ancients who saw these uh many thousands of years
before mellin did uh in fact in Chile they found petroglyphs with indications
that suggest that they were the melenic clouds uh I Caba in uh Iraq in about 880
ad noted uh something he called the feet of
canopus uh and if you look on this chart here is canopus and he may have been
referring to these as the feet of canopus uh as early again as 880 ad Al
Sufi in his book of fixed stars in 964 also made a record of them the trouble is these ancient sightings and uh
Persian and uh Iraqi sightings were not reported to Europe in those days and
Europe dominated the world of science at that time uh during his voyages from
1499 to 1502 Amero vaspi uh an Italian who sailed for Spain um and who proved
that the uh new world was actually not part of Asia but a fourth continent
actually a fourth and a fifth continent in the world and he wrote a letter after he returned in which he referred to
canipes and it seems likely that he was referring to these objects although again it was just in a private letter
and it didn't get reported uh to the scientific Community however
enter stage left Ferdinand mellan a Portuguese explorer who made
two voyages into the southern hemisphere on behalf of first Portugal and later Spain now that raises an interesting
question because Portugal and Spain were at each other throats quite often and
had to enter into a treaty called the Treaty of tadas in 1494 in which they
basically divided the world into two parts two hemispheres the Portuguese took the part you see on the left here
Africa and Asia and the Spanish took the Pacific and the Americas you'll notice
that the Meridian uh cut off the Brazilian portion of South America which is why
Brazilians speak Portuguese and the rest of South America speak Spanish so mellan
uh financed by King Manuel I first of Portugal sailed on a very lengthy Voyage
from 1505 to 1511 going east through the Portuguese hemisphere to the malucas in
Indonesia The Spice Islands and then he returned by the same route um well he wanted to do a second
voyage he proposed doing a voyage like this uh trying to reach the other side
of the world uh via the Spanish Hemisphere and then returned by the
original route he had taken before and Manuel I didn't want to finance it so
mellan did the unthinkable he went to Charles I in Spain and tried to sell him on financing such a voyage a
circumnavigation he said of the world uh along the Route you see here in black
and yellow and told him that hey maybe we'll find out that the MCAS are
actually in the Spanish Hemisphere and that that pleased Charles I who then financed it predictably Manuel I was not
pleased Manuel seized his properties in Portugal raised some of them he sent
assassins to try to kill him in Spain and even had a fleece Fleet chase him down when he began this Voyage uh
sailing for Spain but he was unsuccessful in Catching him so this second voyage from 1519 to
1521 led him AC across the Pacific and to the Philippines where he tried to
impose Christianity on a number of tribes there some of them were R calcant and some battles resulted and mellan was
killed in 1521 he was stabbed uh the crew however completed the voyage the
circumnavigation along the yellow route you see here and one of the crew members during the crossing of the Pacific had
made an official log note of these clouds in the southern hemisphere sky
and that became part of the official record that was entered into science in Europe and so the clouds ended up being
named the clouds of mellin or the melenic clouds also mellin was credited with the
first circumnavigation because if you put his two voyages together he's been all the way around the world uh
completely so he gets credit for that a little bit later um Bayer in his
uranometria referred to these as necula myor and necula minor and Lai in 1756
referred to them as the large cloud in the small cloud and so the term melenic clouds came into existence John herel uh
in 1847 went to South Africa and began charting objects uh open clusters
globular clusters and um o uh planetary nebula found 919 of them in the large
maelen Cloud seen here and 144 of them in the small
Cloud the distance was determined largely because of the work of Henrietta
Swan levit who in 1912 determined that Sephia variables could be used as
standard candle sort of like knowing if period of a Sephia tells you how bright it is uh intrinsically like a 60 watt
bulb or 100 watt bulb and with that information when seids were found in the small and larg melenic clouds the
distance could be determined and eonar herzsprung in 1913 was the first to use this data to try to
determine the distance to the clouds he came up with 30,000 Lighty years which was short but harlo shapley refined the
sephi had variable information or data that was being used and got correct answers the large cloud is
200 160,000 light years away and the small Cloud 200,000 light years away um
and these were thought to be the closest galaxies to the Milky Way until the
Sagittarius dwarf elliptical galaxy seen here was discovered in
1994 that's just 30 years ago and here is an image of the Sagittarius dwarf
beneath the Milky Way seen here this slightly illuminated oval area and
you'll notice there's a bright dot right in the middle of it and that bright dot is thought to be the core of the
Sagittarius dwarf Galaxy that has been attracted to the Milky Way and guess
what that core is not other whoops than Messier 54 globular cluster on the M
list uh it's thought to be either the core of the old Sagittarius dwarf Galaxy
that approached the Milky Way or to be a globular of the Milky Way that fell into the core of the Sagittarius to phical
either way it's a little bit more interesting than you may have thought before sizewise you see the relative
size of the two clouds here the large clouds about 32,000 Lighty years in diameter that's about a third the width
of the Milky Way the small Cloud smaller at 18,900 light years and that makes
them pretty large in terms of galaxies in the local group Andromeda the Kingpin
Milky Way and m33 come in second and third but the large cloud is the fourth
and the small Cloud the sixth largest galaxy GES out of over 50 in the local
group of galaxies now the interesting question is this are these clouds companion galaxies
to the Milky Way Or Not astronomers long assumed that the clouds orbited us for a
long time but they appear to be too close and they're they look like disrupted barred spiral galaxies and so
there was some debate as to whether they were Companions of the Milky Way and in 2006
Hubble Space Telescope studies found that they seem to be moving a little bit
too fast to be Companions of the Milky Way in other words they're zipping on by
with a speed that would be inconsistent with them orbiting either that where the Milky Way is more massive than we
thought before and they are orbiting therefore in order to stay in orbit they have to move faster if we're more
massive uh it's not clear which is true uh and so this is still a study
subject right now um it is possible these objects are on a first approach to
the Milky Way whether they would be captured or pass on by or whether they are in fact in orbit around a more
massive Milky Way remains to be determined not entirely clear yet what we've discovered since then is
that the large clouds seen here as the bright white spot and the small Cloud have left behind a stream of neutral
hydrogen called the henic Stream was discovered in 1965 and was determined to
be related to the clouds in 1974 and it spans 180 degrees of the sky it's
600,000 Lighty years long uh and if you run back in time it shows you the path
that these two objects have taken which seems to be coming from deep space um
and you can notice that the large Cloud appears to be pulling the small Cloud along with it and the small clouds
giving up gas which is forming this long stream in the back but there's also a leading arm that you see in the upper
right here and the hydrogen in this leading arm that approaches the Milky
Way uh was found by observing the absorption of Spectra from distant
quazars and this leading arm uh comes within 990,000 light years of the Milky
Way um and culminates with a cluster of stars called price whan one which is
90,000 light years away also it appears that the small Cloud as
it's being dragged Along by the large cloud has split into two and behind it
is something called a mini melenic Cloud you can't see it here because it lies
behind the small Cloud um and it's about 15,000 light years further away from us
behind the mag the small magelan cloud from what you see here well there's also Al a fact about
these two clouds that's different from the Milky Way and that is that the stars in these two clouds have much less metal
in them than the stars in the Milky Way they're gasr and so there's a substantial Halo of gas called the
melenic corona around the melenic clouds and it's quite large as you see in this
diagram well focusing first on the large melenic Cloud you can see how it might
be regarded as a disrupted bar spiral in fact it's categorized as an sbm which
means uh spiral barred melenic type uh it has about 20 billion stars in it
shines at magnitude zero uh about 11 times brighter than the small cloud and
its area in the sky is roughly equal to the bowl of the Big Dipper in terms of
size and it rotates about the same speed that the Milky Way does once every 250 million years it lies in the
constellation of d with some of it in Mena uh and its most prominent feature
that you see here is the tarantula nebula and the tarantula nebula is the
most active star forming region in the entire local group of galaxies in fact
if it were moved forward to the distance of the Orion Nebula it would shine at magnitude minus three and cast Shadows
if you can imagine a nebula doing that if you look in the
core of the tarantula nebula it will see a star cluster that is formed from the
gas in that cluster and the radiation from which is now creating a hole in the
nebula uh this is the r136 star cluster there are about 60
globular clusters of 400 planetary nebula and 700 open clusters in the
large Cloud a couple of the uh largest globular clusters are seen here NGC 2210
and NGC 1783 and here's a rich star forming
region in the large Cloud called l63 and here you see two rather
interesting star forming regions one clearly an emission nebula on the right with bright young blue stars uh exciting
the hydrogen gas in the nebula and then this one over here uh which is more of a
reflection nebula with some emission characteristics in the pink you see
there um now the large Cloud produced a show for us in February 24th 1987 it
gave us the brightest Supernova seen from Earth in over four centuries and it
was a blue super giant that exploded and it reached magnitude three and remained
visible in amateur telescopes for over two years even two years afterwards it was shining at magnitude 12 or 13 as you
can see here so that was quite quite an impressive and important Discovery interestingly neutrino detectors around
the world detected the Supernova explosion about two to three hours before the light increase was detected
uh this is caused because the core collapse created the of the star created the neutron the the neutrino flux rather
before the shock wave erupted through the surface to begin increasing the brightness the uh ciae uh nuto detector
in Japan picked up nine neutrinos in 1.9 seconds and three more 9 seconds later
the irine Michigan Brook Haven um detector picked up eight neutrinos and
the boxon Russia detector picked up five neutrinos that doesn't sound like a lot does it but they detected it
nonetheless now the star before it exploded in fact 20,000 years before it
exploded ejected some surface material that expanded out away from the Star and
when the Supernova exploded the shock wave from the Supernova eventually reached that gas uh envelope and caused
it to illuminate brightly like a giant ring and here you see that happening
over a period of several years the resulting image was
spectacular this is one of a moment when it was at its brightest the shock wave
hitting that uh previously ejected sphere of material and here's a better view of it showing
in the center the dust left over from the original explosion now it's not the
only Supernova certainly that's ever gone off in the large Cloud um but when
it went off the light from the Supernova reflected off of the nebula in the background and created these concentric
Rings called light Echoes here is a an older Supernova
Remnant in the large magelan cloud and here years an even older one looks a bit
like the veil nebula or the gum nebula okay well that takes us to the
small magelan Cloud to finish up with and the small cloud is right next to or seems to be right next to the famous
globular star cluster uh 472 County um now that globular cluster 472 count is
actually 15 times closer to us than the small Cloud it's an interesting globular
to say the least it's the second brightest in the sky after Omega centor about 44 minutes of Arc across shines at
magnitude four and may have a black hole in its core now the small cloud is
regarded as a uh a dwarf irregular di class Galaxy but is believed to be a
badly disrupted barred spiral more disrupted than the large Cloud because the large clouds dragging it along and
kind of helping destroy it it only has about three billion stars in it and sh signs at about magnitude plus 2.7 and
would fill about a third of the bowl of the Big Dipper and its brightest nebula that you see at the bottom here is uh
NGC 346 and here's a closer view of of that emission nebula and NGC 376 an open
cluster can also be found in the cloud and so you find this particular Cloud
the small cloud in the constellation of tucana the toucan in the southern hemisphere the combination of these
clouds makes the Milky Way a very complex system indeed we have x-ray
bubbles on either side of the central disc of our galaxy we have the Sagittarius dwarf elliptical that's
whipped around the Galaxy leaving streamers all around we have a host of dwarf galaxies surrounding us and we
have the large and small magelan cloud with its leading arm approaching us and that stream draping behind it for six
100,000 light years now it's entirely possible that the large and small
melenic clouds used to belong to Andromeda and Andromeda passed right by us about 10 billion years ago and it's
possible that we stole these clouds from Andromeda but as we know Andromeda is
making a U-turn and is heading back and will collide with us in about 4 and a
half billion years but it's just possible that Andromeda is coming back because it wants its clouds back in any
event that's something for you to look forward to seeing if you go to the southern hemisphere I certainly
encourage it thank you Scott wonderful wonderful you know the first time I saw the uh
megantic clouds I I was surprised at how big they were in the sky because you see
these kind of wide angle shots and it looks like these two little things out there but when you're standing there
underneath the you know the Milky Way and staring at them they're they look
quite large you know and uh uh that that was um that was my takeaway uh from
observing them from Chile so um but uh I recommend to every astronomer every
amateur astronomer you got to get down to the Southern Hemisphere okay this isn't like
a a wish or a you know a bucket lless kind of thing if you really want to experience the
Milky Way you got to get down there and and see it for yourself because there is
no it defies description it is spectacular beautiful uh and a inspiring
and uh go down there once and you'll know what I'm talking about so anyways to Scotty thank you I just
want to make a comment Chuck your lecture moves me to tear I was was
sitting and as I'm listening to your excellent presentation lecture I went back in time and I found
myself sitting next to henriet El over a hundred years ago as she
was um make measuring the change of magnitudes and the cied
variables and uh developing the period Luminosity relation for which she is now
so famous then I found myself sitting next to Brian Marsen as he turns on his
computer and realizes from a report that there is a supernova in the large magelan
cloud and I just wanted to tell you that you moved me so much with your lecture
Chuck congratulations thank you very much D I really appreciate that coming from you
that's overwhelming thank you well thank you although I don't I I need to tell
you also that um that I am definitely not
infallible last weekend I made a report of a of a star to the north of the Orion
Nebula that had suddenly brightened by a Manus and a half and that was very
exciting till the next night I realized that the star was south of the nebula
and not north of it and so I made a correction to that report and that
worked in until the following night the third night when I realized that that
star was not brightened at all and that I was just careless and i' made a mistake so I had to print a retraction
of the whole thing so uh you know the great day of David L Shakespeare is not
so great that these days but I do think that your lecture was
absolutely memorable I'm going to think about it for a long long time thank you
again I'm deeply moved thank you okay all
right well uh David um our next speaker
U is none other than Robert Reeves Robert is uh for those of you who watch
Global star party you know that Robert is an expert on the moon uh but he's
also a renowned astrophotographer he's written books about it um
and uh um he is uh once you start to see some of his lunar
astrophotography uh you'll understand just how uh am amazingly skilled he is
um he is uh got Decades of experience to share I you know uh to me he's the David
ATO of uh of the Moon and uh that's that's that's my nickname for him
and he inspires all of us uh to uh explore the moon and to understand uh
you know and to learn uh more about uh crater formation uh uh the uh the Seas of the
Moon and and all of its uh amazing structures that you can see and so uh if
you didn't like the moon before uh uh well he'll he'll make you fall in love
with it so so Robert thanks for coming on to Global Star Party you bet and um
um that um little nickname you gave me the David atenor of the Moon um
apparently uh a lot of people watch This Global star party because I am being
introduced at other events as theid bur of the moon so
you're you're your little moniker it's it's stuck true it's true hopefully one day David abro calls you and uh and yeah
with a c and assist letter probably who knows all right it's true
all right thanks so much for coming on to Global star well I traditionally talk
about the moon and uh it's usually peppered with a lot of my photographs but tonight we're really going to see
two of them um we're going to concentrate mainly on a uh on a a moon map created by the uh uh lunar
reconnaissance Orbiter we're going to explore the um emus 3 Landing sites now
uh everybody knows about Tranquility base where um um Neil Armstrong first
set foot on the moon so the Apollo Elite is immortalized in print and in film and
um Ju Just throughout history but soon and no earlier than late to uh
2026 um there will be a seventh Landing site on the moon and um it's going to be near the South
Pole and we're going to explore these areas there's nine candidate sites and
uh Rusty the famous mooncat is sneaking into my field of view over here so she
may be uh making sure that I'm telling the truth everybody um but um um before
we jump in there and explore these emis sites um the 10 Penny commercial of course um if you've if you love The Moon
if you know somebody who who loves the moon and you're wondering what for Christmas I have got to put up my uh U
book photographic atlas of the moon it's available from Firefly books at Brick
and Mortar bookstores and it's also available on Amazon so uh consider that
if you have a moon lover in the family or U Know one that uh you want to
included on your Christmas gift so with that said let me go to share and uh
let's bring up the moon now the 11 no excuse me the
uh this the six Apollo Landing sites Apollo 11 through Apollo 17 um all
concentrated uh on the near Side of the Moon of course in the equatorial region of the Moon and I hope you can see my
cursor moving around um basically in a Broadband Boxed In by uh the you know
Tranquility base of course at uh southern end of the Sea of Tranquility
Paulo 12 over in Ocean proam 13 didn't make it but 14 landed uh uh near
um the northern part of morbium uh 15 of course into Hadley re
up next to Mari embrium uh 16 uh landed just uh north of Dardis craters crater
and 17 the final one um at the Taurus lro Valley on the other
side of the Sea of Serenity Now all of these lunar Landing sites that Apollo
visited are are pretty much below main lunar elevation with the exception of
Apollo 16 the Apollo 16 site at DEC cared craters um basically at lunar sea
level mean lunar elevation all the others were significantly below mean
lunar elevation uh but the emus sites uh we're going to touch down near
the Moon South Pole um first one going down going to be a SpaceX Starship um
like I said no earlier than the late uh 2026 more than likely a little later uh
SpaceX is making good progress getting this thing to fly but uh it's got a ways to go we've got to make it utterly
utterly reliable for human beings so uh there's there's a lot to be done uh
prior to the uh emus 3 Landing site but once we do get to the moon and land near
the South Pole um The Landing site locations are kind of hard to see from the earth the lunar
South Pole is a difficult Target in a telescope um the
um um best way to find the actual lunar cell go to moretus Crater very
well-known um large um cernus lookalike down along the southern H uh the
southern limb and then uh there's a whole series of Newton and Newton ABC D
craters that extend south from it and the the combined rim of these Newton
craters points more or less toward the South Pole and when the libration is
right that is when the Moon South Pole is tipped toward us uh we can just begin to see the lunar South Pole and this
little sliver floating against the darkness here is malapert mif that's one
of the artamus landing site uh candidate locations uh the others are all uh
nearby but are extremely foreshortened view of this region of the moon from the
earth makes it extremely hard see on a telescope um the wherever emis 3 lands
we're not going to be able to point our telescope directly at it like we do to any other apoll sites and show them off
at Star parties and say that is where men landed on the moon um it's going to
be U tough finding these emis sites South Pole emis sites in a telescope but
let's take a look at this map uh composite images from the lunar Recon
orbit all around the lunar South Pole the we see these various Landing sites
all around um they differ significantly from the Apollo Landing sites in their
elevation these are some of the highest places on the moon whereas Apollo landed in some of the lowest regions um just by
chance because they were flat uh uh on the Mario where uh it was a safe landing
Zone um aremis is going to the South Pole NE necessarily um um for the idea
that in this region it will be in Perpetual sunlight you notice a a lot of
these high peaks are very brightly lit next to a very shadowed area that's because these Peaks protrude high enough
that no matter where the sun is along the horizon it's still shining uh Perpetual sunlight at the um um South
Pole lunar base is one of the key features of the landing sites but let's
take a look at some of these the peak near subas B this one here U this
territory Rises 6 kilometers over a 30 kilom span changing an elevation from
about 2900 Metter uh below uh U uh mean
lunar elevation to about 3,850 meters above and U the site is about 120 U well
excuse me about 200 kilometers from the South Pole and it's one of the most distant from the southern pole uh of all
of the emis sites um howorth uh seeing here in this box this
particular site um uh features a peak rising from um 2900 M below mean
elevation up to 5,400 M uh um excuse me I'm reading the feet not the The Meters
um we have a very International audience so I want to stick with meters to 1650 meters above and this location provides
Perpetual sunlight um Mal um the little sliver that we saw in
the picture that I had taken from my own backyard U that little sliver is this U
illuminated Ridge and maler mif is mentioned often as a uh emus 3 Landing
site but uh I am betting that uh uh we're going to land somewhere else and I'll I'll tell you about it in a minute
but anyway malapart m is a broad region that rises about 500 me 5,000 meters and
provides Perpetual sunlight but it also descends 8,000 meters toward the pole
toward permanently shadowed regions now these permanently shadowed regions are
where we hope uh to find ice on the moon and uh Ice uh in addition to Perpetual
sunlight are two key elements that uh future moon bases need um the ice to
create oxygen and water uh the U Perpetual sunlight to provide Power um
the man muton plateau uh that's this large region here
this is where I'm betting emus 3 will touch down now this is the widest and overall flattest the AIS sites varying
between uh um 5,000 and 6,000 m in
elevation and across a 60 kilom span now the plateau is high enough to receive
Perpetual sunlight and Broad enough to allow expanded Explorations with the Artemis 4 and five missions where
they'll be using longrange Rovers so uh the broad expans is fairly flat is
what's attracting me so uh I gives a much broader area to explore instead of
being a mountain climber you can uh you can Rove over large regions with relative
safety U mans muton uh right on the rim of this uh uh
Plateau it's a peak that rises 600 uh excuse me 6,000 meters and then descends
um 5,000 m toward the South Pole uh again uh access to ice access to
perpetual sunlight um Noel Rim one noile crater
here Noel Rim one uh the uh um Northwestern uh excuse me
Southwestern you have to remember that everything is inverted here because the South Pole is here and uh
we're not located the North Pole but the South Pole but anyway the um
um Southwestern rim Rises about 3 3,000 M so uh again Perpetual sunlight and
then Rim number two same crater um uh again Rises
um up into Perpetual sunlight but it's the second lowest elevation of the emus
candidate Landing sites uh actually being uh 14400 meters below uh meaning L
elevation um deash Rim number two uh the eighth candidate Landing site
it's the closest to the pole only uh 50 kilometers from the true pole and uh it
rises about 3,000 meters uh so again a Perpetual sunlight then the uh final um
aremis candidate Landing site the Slater plane uh it is the lowest elevation of
all of the uh aremis sites with Rolling Hills descending from uh east to west um
from about minus 18800 M to uh- 300 M so
um sometime in the next three years we are hoping that one of these sites will
host the next man landing on the moon and uh probably a a multiple returns to
the same region um plan is that Artemis will attempt to
fly a landing Mission about once every year once things get going so assuming
uh the budget holds up so uh very soon one of these sites will be joining the U
six Apollo sites that everybody knows about and uh let me see if I didn't skip
a slide apparently I do not remember
showing did I show that slide yes I did I did I I kind of skipped over it a
little bit and um the um one of the
primary safety things is of course it must be a fairly flat area where they
touch down um I am crazy about all of the designs that we see for the Starship
U human Landing system the um in my thinking U yes it's going to weigh more
but my thinking is those foot pads should be spread out more uh I mean this is landing yeah this is landing a
skyscraper Landing a pencil on this this tiny um foot pad uh pattern compared to
the size of the vehicle one thing that concerns me is that there's evidence
that near the South Pole there may be moonquakes and uh if this place rocks
and rolls uh we've got to have a pretty stable base underneath those Starships so um I am thinking that eventually by
the time this thing touches down on the moon that Landing uh leg configuration is going to be a little bit bigger I
mean let's face it even the uh uh Falcon 9s that come down and land on the ocean on their barges nowadays have a more
robust appearing Landing legs than this one does it's landing on the moon so uh
the basic configuration will stay but I am betting we'll see a larger landing gear on this thing by the time
uh our boys make it up to the moon now the size of this thing it's staggering
bear in mind uh this thing is about 6 160 ft long uh this is like putting a 16
story high building on the moon or or Landing it on the moon um right around
the uh uh lower part of the black Bandit area at the top is the airlock and
elevator uh when they open the door to get on the elevator to descend to the lunar surface they are 100 ft above the
moon my gosh when Apollo was Landing they were still breaking they were still under power they were still trying to
slow down at 100 feet so uh this is a significant jump in uh in architecture
but um it's going to happen soon and I'm
um happy to see that it might indeed happen while I'm still around I'm uh I'm
78 and I'm think I'm in pretty good shape I expect to be around when uh Artemis 3 touches down and I'll see our
Return To The Moon after almost well well over half a century but it's going to be at uh one of these nine sites and
uh as we get closer the uh site selection will be refined and we will
know where the seventh man landing on the moon will occur so it's been fun I
hope I've showed you a part of the Moon you haven't seen before mainly because our slant angle from
Earth we we simply can't see this region in a telescope but we're going to become very familiar with it when emus finally
lands on the moon so let me unshare and go back to
coms um Robert thank you very much on this lecture I do have a question I'm
wondering if you could talk a little bit about the uh Shoemaker impact structure
near the South Pole we formerly call the South Pole aens aens
Basin yeah well uh it is the largest impact Basin in the solar system and it
is so big that when we ma the moon back in the 1960s with the lunar orbiter
program uh in preparation for Apollo um lunar orbiters uh four and five U Were
dedicated to uh uh uh science mapping and they pretty much mapped almost all
of The Far Side a certain percentage of it wasn't but we got a a good enough view that we thought we understood the
back side of the moon but it wasn't until the Galileo probe went uh by the
moon on the way to Jupiter and look back at the Moon that they discovered the South Pole Atkin Basin it had been
staring Us in the face all along so big that they didn't realize it and now that
we've got uh lunar reconnaissance Orbiter up there and um the uh Japanese
kaguya satellite uh did Las laser altimetry um
um the Clementine Mission uh in the late 90s did a laser altimetry and of course
uh lunar reconnaissance Orbiter has refined that tremendously U millions of
laser sounding uh altitude readings all over the moon and now we we can profile
this massive massive Basin on the far side of the Moon that literally extends from The Far Side lunar equator all the
way down to the South Pole and uh like I said it it hid in plain sight even after
we had very fastidiously mapped the entire Moon and it wasn't seen until we
we looked at the Moon from afar uh with a spacecraft going off to another planet
so um it's so big that it hosts many other basins on the moon the Apollo
Basin uh like within uh the South Pole Atkin Basin and
that's where the changu 6 uh farside sample return Mission uh landed last
summer and uh the uh current online edition of astronomy magazine at
astronomy.com has my article about the scientific results of the analysis of
the basalts at that um Far Side location in the southern Apollo Basin and U I've
been discussing the arttic program I should mention that the next issue print
issue of astronomy magazine will have a 10-page uh review of my uh uh discussion
about the Artemis program and the complexities of the Artemis program and
uh what we're facing to the the the technology challenges and the convoluted
plan that uh I do not agree with to return people to the Moon uh uh
my my my personal feeling is the lunar can be done away with my personal
feeling is the SLS the two billion doll a copy rocket that is just going to be a
taxi to take astronauts to lunar orbit that could be done away with a falcon
heavy with a a beefed up uh u u capsule
similar to what we um fa astronauts of the space station had could transport uh
our astronauts to lunar orbit to rendevu with the Starship so uh a very complex
layer of of stuff that must succeed is being piled on top of each other uh to
create the emis program and I'm not in agreement with it but um Robert Reeves
has no say at Nasa so we're going to sit back and watch the show and hope that it
works but like I said check the next pry of astronomy um for my 10-page article
detailing how we're going to do this that's great uh there is uh Mark
Drexler uh was um watching on YouTube and he just said that he's mesmorized by
your presentations and he wants to thank you for autographing uh your book uh for
him yes that was a pleasure yeah and uh you know he says for anyone that's
interested in in the Moon they should they should definitely get your book um
I agree that's right um Matt OT is watching and he says uh
Perpetual sunlight does that mean elevated temperatures as you know all the Apollo Landings took place just
after lunar Sunrise I would assume that NASA will develop the new space suits
that will have the ability to keep the astronauts cool with more thermal control
capability well the um SPAC suit being um developed for the emis program not
only has to keep them cool it has to keep them warm remember they're going to be exploring shadowed regions looking
for ice the emis space suit um lunar suit uh must uh be able to uh operate
for two hours in a perpetually shadowed region on the moon and these are some of
the coldest places in the solar system uh there are uh regions on the lunar
poles that never receive sunlight that are actually colder than the planet Pluto so uh the the the uh the
engineering challenges are imense but U um ax a Aerospace in Houston is
producing these suits and uh recently they uh teamed up with uh Believe It or
Not Prada the uh fashion accessory company to um help create these suits
and um Prada does bring some expertise to this that uh uh
U axm doesn't have in that they are used to working with exotic materials they're
used to fine Stitchery they're F used to creating a quality uh stitched garment
so U this is actually a good marriage um plus axium Aerospace was uh um
encountering financial difficulties so the cash infusion From Prada didn't U
didn't hurt the situation any so uh whenever uh they step foot on the moon
here uh in the next three years it would not surprise me if there wasn't a very
uh distinct uh BR emblem on the sleeve of the spacit as well yeah very good
very good uh lastly uh someone's asking is there a good way to reach out to
you uh well if you're on Facebook you can personal message me and um if not uh
well I'll just tell you my email address it's fairly simple Robert Reeves 400 all
one word at gmail you know very ubiquitous uh email platform Robert
Reeves 400 U drop me a line if you uh uh if I can help you great thanks so much
thanks Robert my pleasure all right take care all right so um our next speaker is
Dr Daniel bar he's an accomplished astronomer he is a a educator author um
you know he's known for his engaging approach to um making complex
astronomical Concepts accessible to almost anyone uh he has a passion for
science Outreach he inspires curiosity about about the cosmos and our place within it uh and uh he also shared his
knowledge with a series of inexpensive uh
demonstration uh um tools uh so that teachers could better educate their
students about uh the universe the moon uh you know the the difficult Concepts
that uh that take a while to try to wrap your head around the these things so uh
he made this series uh uh called H um you know how do you know and those are
actually on this page if you're going to look at the speaker schedule you'll see
a link to each one of the speakers and to their Pages uh Daniel Bar's um uh
links go to his how do you know Series so she give it a watch but uh Daniel
thanks for uh your patience and coming on to the uh Global star party uh once
again it's great to see you it's nice to be back yeah and I know that you're building an observatory I am uh um and
that you're having a great time so uh thanks thanks once again uh thanks Scott
uh yeah I I just uh I retired last June uh from my uh from my uh
professional astronomy work and uh We've bought a new place in the Wata mountains in Western AR Arkansas and uh yesterday
I cast the slab for uh my new Observatory so that will be uh coming
online in the coming weeks and I hope some evening I will post uh I will come
on to Global Star Party from my Observatory uh here and uh it's it's
quite it's quite interesting lots of fun and I don't do things like anybody else so of course I I I considered a dome I
considered a clamshell I considered a roll off and I said no and designed my
own kind of Observatory and maybe we'll we'll uh join Global Star Party from my
new Observatory when we get it all finished but uh it's moving forward we're very
excited and uh you know I love attending Global star
party and I love listening to all of the people talking about
new discoveries but I'm gonna kind
of take a left turn here Discovery we often think of what do you
know now what have you discovered what have you learned what's excuse me what's
new the interesting thing is uh there's also a group of people who say oh the
science on this or that is now settled nothing could be farther from the
truth and science is something that's ongoing that's always
changing and sometimes Discovery isn't a Eureka
moment sometimes Discovery takes years decades
centuries we're reminded of cernus brilliant idea the sun is in the
center no proof for that occurred during his
lifetime Galileo figured it out uh almost 70 years after Cernic's was gone
and we think about discoveries Newton and newon and his theory of gravitation and I often
tell students why is Einstein famous because he was the first guy in 300 years to make any correction to
Newton and you think about that relativity is a correction to Newtonian grait ation
Theory when you fly to the moon when the emis program flies when we go to Mars
we're using not Einstein but Isaac Newton uh one of the Apollo Astronauts
when they asked him uh on live television well who's flying the ship
and he kind of shrugged and said Isaac Newton's driving right now U because their craft was in freef fall on its way
to the Moon Discovery takes sometimes a long time because sometimes Gathering
evidence is hard and uh what I wanted to talk about today Scott was life beyond Earth uh we talked
about we don't call them UFOs anymore we call them U uaps right yeah unexplained
aerial phenomenon so we look at this and we say gee um sometimes even the old language isn't
sufficient have we discovered life beyond the Earth well the answer is yes and no uh
Dr Gilbert Levan who uh we lost in 2021 he was 97 I think um he was the
principal investigator along with Patricia Strait for the labeled release experiment on the Viking
Lander and uh his detection experiment met every criteria set before Viking
launched for a successful detection of microbial life on the Martian
surface gor an awful lot of people stepped in and said no no no that can't be
right there's no water there's too much radiation the soil is too salty and uh no life that we know of
could exist in such conditions and over the decades since Viking landed in
1976 uh and we're now coming up on what the uh we coming up on the 50th anniversary
of Viking in a couple of years here that's right and uh what have we seeing we're seeing
that gee every time we say life can't do
that it can't exist in that much radiation it can't exist in that low of atmospheric pressure it can't exist in
environments that's salty it can exist in environments that have that much radiation it can exist in uh areas of
extreme cold and yet as we continue to explore our planet
we find extremophiles things like the I'm going to try to say this right
psycho files psyr files it mean cold loving organisms we found organisms in
Antarctica living in the ice intuned they've been intuned in glacial ice for
perhaps millions of years uh in darkness they still survive there at temperatures
down as low Asus 20 centigrade and you say oh well the
Martian surface yes but underground in Mars it's much more Clement we know
there are caves and lava tubes on Mars which are not as harsh as a surface environment um and when we talk about
uh gee the surface environment is too hard too harsh too uh too irradiated we
go to the AMA desert very high very dry dry uh very
cold uh gets a lot of since there's no cloud cover essentially ever uh gets a
lot of radiation and where does life live there in the veins in Quartz in
rocks rocks on the surface covered with a biofilm and organisms
living the light gets conducted in along the veins of quartz it filters out the
UV uh you're talking micro radiation event causing you know a few molecules of
water to liquefy and oh there you go and now we can have a chemical reaction and now we're in suspended animation again
is it life yes it is would we recognize it only with the most sophisticated
equipment and really taking a look what we find on Mars with the
Curiosity and perseverance Rovers we find things like mudstones these are
fossil ized rocks made of very fine grain material capable on Earth of
preserving bacterial traces fossilized millions of years ago we find carbonates
we find sulfates the most recent discovery rocks with these Bullseye
shaped marks where you've got iron hematite reacting with
phosphates and this kind of reaction bacter caus it on Earth and
every time somebody says oh well that's an organic reaction somebody else one of
our very clever uh geology chemist comes along and says aha I found an inorganic
way to do that okay um how many of these things do you have before you say gosh
are they allanic and something I've always asked my astronomy students over the decades
how hard do you think it would be to sterilize a planet how hard do you ever fear you go
in to have dental procedure or surgical procedure and they wear masks and they
sterilize the room and they take all why because life is hard to exterminate it's
really really difficult to sterilize something did Mars have a warm wet
period long enough to generate life all the research over the preceding
decades has shown that traces of Life on on Earth have we push it back earlier
and earlier what are we realizing life formed on Earth as soon as the conditions were favorable within a
couple of million years after the conditions were favorable bang autobiog Genesis life self assembles out of
lifelessness when the conditions and the materials are there was Mars warm and wet at any one
time yes was it warm and wet long enough the evidence continues to suggest that
long enough isn't very long enough at all uh that autobiog Genesis occurs quite quickly and if life is established
and conditions get awful like in the Antarctic which was once a tropical place like in the okama
which has suffered from the uplift of the Andes chain and become gradually more inhospitable over the Millennia
that life adapts life moves underground we now think that two3 maybe 9/10 of the
bacteria on earth live below the surface and you have symbiotes some that
produce oxygen not through photosynthesis but through other uh
geochemical means and so you have both aerobic and anerobic forms living below
the surface of the Earth where they never receive the sun's energy where you've got heat energy and chemical
energy from decomposition of rocks uh we find life on the Earth's surface beneath
glaciers miles of ice on top how do they live geothermal heat heat from friction
of the glaciers sliding creates liquid water creates an
environment Scott there's a place in Antarctica called The Blood Falls well what happens
there every once in a while water erupts out of the ice and it's bloody r why
because it's very salty and full of iron it's full of iron that's oxidized and we think this is seawater
from the pine five million years ago that was inomed under the
glacier and heat and pressure make it periodically erupt onto the surface
where it promply freezes GE is there bacteria there yeah is it hypine yeah
could any surface bacteria or Flora or fauna live on that stuff no no no
absolutely not so we tend to be very biased we go out and we mow our lawn and
we see birds and squirrels and uh you know reptiles and amphibians in our
property and around when we walk and we hike we explore and we think oh
life but frankly most of life on earth is not mobile most of the life on Earth is
not photosynthetic uh most of the life on Earth is bacterial uh bacterial are by
far the dominant and most highly successful form of life and uh this you
know these little Wiggly creatures that run around and talk and host uh interesting shows on the web we're very
very much in the minority and I found it interesting listening to the talk earlier uh about
uh perhaps we'll see somebody who's more advanced than we are uh listen to
podcast from Brian Cox who's of course a professor I believe at Oxford and he's
very famous fellow and he says well look it takes a long time
for current population one stars to
form and it takes a long time for planetary systems to form and takes a
long time for bacterial life to evolve into sentient life and he says you know
the universe is only 13 billion years old it takes about five billion years to get a solar
system get the conditions right for you know solid planets in the solar system
another five billion years to get intelligent life the universe is only 13 billion years old maybe we're one of the
first maybe the firmy Paradox why aren't we hearing our neighbors is because maybe we're one of the first perhaps
we're much more likely to meet a peer than a mentor when SE gets that phone
call and we think about the pace of
Discovery this whole thing about is can we confirm these ideas the autobiog
Genesis idea Gilbert Levens Discovery uh and he like many many many scientists
before him passed away before his discovery was either confirmed or just
proven but I'm firmly uh with Dr Levan I
think his evidence is highly persuasive uh his book Mars The Living Planet I
think you can probably still find it somewhere on the web fascinating reading he goes into all his
data and the idea of are we going to detect life and then we look at the the
great moons of Jupiter and Saturn which we know have liquid water underneath the
surface uh I probably will not live long enough but I imagine one day we will
have a probe which gets very hot we sense something powered by by plutonium
it gets very hot and it sinks through the ice and eventually breaks through into free water and probably something
will swim by that will be a great day that will
not be bacteria that will be un equivocal evidence um will we be able to confirm
the idea of Life on Mars uh yes we will
when we put boots on the ground uh someone else pointed out to me that
somewhere on the moon undoubtedly there are
fossils from earthlife when the big meteor struck
chickaloo and what's now the Yucatan Peninsula and what's now Mexico that was
an impact sufficient to blast chunks of rock from deep within the Earth out into
space where do they fall to if they don't land on Earth if they escape our gravity chances are they fell to the
moon and we know that there are Earth meteorites on Mars and on the moon we
know there are pieces of the Moon and Mars that come Earth from similar strikes chances are somewhere on the
moon there's a rock with Earth FL in it you think about that you think about
G um bacteria become encapsulated and those encapsulated
bacteria are extraordinarily resistant to damage they survive vacuum they
survive radiation could life be transported from one planet to another after a meteoroid strike uh that was
massive enough yeah possibly you know these things are not
so far-fetched as they once seemed what was Scott you're you and I are basically
the same age what was science fiction when we were kids is not so fantastic
anymore yeah yeah I mean black holes were for example absolutely pure science fiction I mean yes they were the
monsters of the universe and and Kip Thorne and stepen Hawking had a famous
bet about whether or not they would be discovered and now of course we talk about oh of course they are and what
size they are and super massive and are there intermediate Siz ones and sure uh
but no question that they exist no question at all and yet no one's touched one no one's lassoed one and put it in
the jar of course even one of the little could we have a pet subatomic black hole
um no probably not it would if we brought one here it would fall into the Earth's core and it wouldn't be a
problem if it was one it was the size of nickel that would never affect Earth in the lifetime of the sun it just uh the
surface is its mouth and it's not big enough to consume anything fast enough to gobble up a whole
planet yeah um extreme files were something that were relatively unknown
when we were children you know that's true that's true uh I was taught by a
professor that uh continental drift was impossible oh really
wow oh yes oh yes I was in one of my science classes one of my professors talked about
uh the idea of the uh self assembling bacterial membrane was not possible and
then he that was what he was taught in His science classes and he said now
here's how it works and he shows an animation of the assembling of phospholipids with the hydrophobic and
hydrophilic and how they assemble into Gia cell wall
the thing is excuse me it was at the time that we were born that even like the idea that I
mean where it was proven uh beyond a shadow of a doubt that Earth had actually been hit by
asteroids and oh yes oh yes meteor crater was confirmed In Our Lifetime to
be a crater well they could bring they could bring material here and biologics as well and and um bacteria that may
have been out in the goldi log Zone hanging inside an asteroid that had Sun
heat in it with water in there just waiting and boom it's on Earth and then it had water and oceans and there you go
the uh Osiris Rex probe that brought back stuff from asteroid benu and they're like wow this could have been uh
from a water-bearing planet um I would not be shocked if I heard them say gee
we found evidence of what appears to be biological materials in the sample I
know I I know that if that happened there would be uh dozens of people who
immediately stood up to shout no no it's not true um every new idea was resisted
and as Ein ran one said the fellow who invented fire was probably burned at the
stake with torches he had taught his brothers to light
um it's it's Discovery is not usually an instantaneous process that's
why the story of Newton and the Apple fascinates us that's why the idea of
cernus being thunderstuck by the sun is in the center and the Earth is a planet
uh why Galileo discovering moons of Jupiter realizing everything doesn't orbit the earth um this is why these
thunder strike lightning strike lightning in a bottle of moments Fascinate us but Discovery is often
glacially slow but no less worthwhile for all of
that so I just going to counsel everybody keep looking up enjoy the sky
and be patient and uh you know embrace the ambiguity because it's it's
fascinating and it's ambiguity is often much more fun than certainty that's for
sure all right well Daniel thank you so much we look forward to seeing you on uh
hopefully the next Global star party so yes I'll be back more often now that uh
uh My Little My TurnKey house turned out to be a huge fixer upper and I've been
immersed in repairs for the last six months but things are getting under control and the observatory is coming
together so I I will be back and uh like I said I want to I want to join GSP from
my new Observatory when we get it all up and rolling very good very good okay well
thanks so much Daniel have a have a good night and um uh we'll be in touch
soon okay our next uh speaker is John Schwarz he's a talented amateur
astronomer I've known him for oh maybe 20 25 years now uh an incredible space
artist he Blends his love for the cosmos with artistic creativity to bring the
wonders of space to life his work um has also inspired others to explore the
universe through both science and Imagination and uh um I think that uh
we've had some really interesting uh presentations from John in the past um
uh he is uh someone that is tirelessly uh trying to exceed the
bounds of uh what he can do uh with his telescopes through astrophotography
through electronic assisted astronomy and um uh here he is
now hello everybody good to be in his Purple Haze
a little chilly out here in the vacuum of space it's Chile here in the vacuum
of Arkansas dude so I bet boy that was an interesting conversation you know I
was I wanted to say things but every time I thought about it he called it you know like the Moon Jupiter I'm almost
sure there's life in there you know they're warm and under there from the friction of Jupiter tugging on them and
as far as radiation I think they're shielded but you know some creatures can handle radiation if they're yes they can
conceived within that you know sort of condition I mean they say if the world
here you can't get rid of Life roaches Will Survive everybody they said but I'm not sure about that I don't know I mean
there kind of immune to a lot of my mom tried to wipe out roaches uh in a when
we were base housing and it was just like impossible you know so yeah it's
tough and you know I don't like to kill things anymore um just because it's a
life sure but black widows and flies are two that you know they're they're still
on your list yeah the black widows are pretty deadly for the pets and then flies you know they carry disease and
all that sure but um you know again most stuff I'll just put it outside and try to save
it let it go away that's what I do so yes I don't know if you all saw the
comet because um you know they say oh there's comets here and and I've seen some in the past and they were not as
spectacular as I was hoping but the minute pretty good this one to me was
one of the best I I've seen um and it really was good for for
me because I've been very busy with other stuff right now and um you know
just having the ability uh to explore from your backyard and and get the result and be
able to satisfy yourself astronomically you know it's it's amazing you're still
doing it and then with the art it keeps me going so you can do it all the time you know not just going to dark sky
sites and taking all your equipment it's a lot of work you know and you stay up for days at a time so it
can be very taxing on you but I'm going to get this thing going because I know
we're on a bit of a limit so everybody's been good um on
your neck of the woods it's not too bad I know they had some horrible storms back East uh some people the tornadoes
and hurricanes have been brutal but not near you in Arkansas it's
been pretty calm uh uh well we've had uh some fairly severe weather not too long
ago we had a tornado that kind of ripped up uh uh the city of Rogers actually
started in in U bville and kind of scooted across and wiped out a lot of
yards a bunch of beautiful old trees got knocked down uh so we get our share of
of of weather here but uh um you know
thankfully uh you know you know not too many uh uh big injuries happening
so you know when I when I came out to California is like
people here they say you know our weather is not that bad but you know when they get a little rain it's bad but
back east as you know lightning and tornadoes when you've seen a tornado up close and you you know the power of that
tornado inside that area you're you're done there's I don't know
I've been in I've been in one it was an F2 and uh they're painful they are I
mean but earthquakes on the other hand let me tell you they're no picnic either you know when the ground starts shifting
and the buildings moving you're like oh no I gotta jump but you know hurricanes they're
they're all bad but just think about being out you know in the universe and some of the things that they deal with
as far as the size of explosions of gamma ray burst or supernova even a
planetary nebula it's it's amazing that we survive I know it's just incredible
goes on it's true we're so blessed here uh protected by our Jupiter sort of and
um yeah you know we're we're in good shape we had the time to be able to
evolve from those U microbi logical things and come out of the ocean and
look where we're at today I mean you know exploration has been in every
person since Humanity conceived the idea of you know getting in a ship and going
across the ocean to find a better land and um you know that's the search
we always be looking uh to understand but anyway let me move it so you know if
you've ever been out in a forest standing there looking out at the sky you you often wonder you know what's out
there and really the way to explore it from here is you have to get a telescope and um you know there's been
many times I've stood over the valley and seen the Milky Way and and just sat
there and just wondered man wow this is a miracle I don't even see how this is
possible we're on this rock floating in space and um but you know we know we're
part of that Universe where all of our elements within us are formed from the
universe from stars exploding and all the you know elements that come from it
then eventually it forms into life which is a miracle but I think it's abundant
throughout the cosmos you know I I think it's a common um it's a lot of chances you know boss
wonders too he likes to go because I always take him in my trailer and bring
him with me because he doesn't want to be left behind and he wants one thing
always is those baby bacon boss burgers that I make them special with the 98%
lean as lean as I can get it that's my new portable barbecue you can see him
waiting in the background he's hungry always
hungry anyway there's many instruments that um you can use to explore with and
you know Scott that's one thing I love about um explore scientific is I mean you
literally put the X in explore because your line of Scopes range from stuff for
little kids and uh even young children very young children all the way up to uh
teenagers adults and the public and then you know you get into the professionals I mean your equipment takes care of it
all and um you know it gives everyone the opportunity to explore on their own
and that's what's so beautiful about astronomy in the community is everybody shares and is helpful and you know you
start getting the fever the scope fever I call it where you know you start you
want this you see that you just it's like it's like buying nice cars if
that's what you're into but I I really like to travel at the speed of light and absorb the photons you know the photons
help with manifestation and usually I try to upgrade my instruments along the
way so this is a typical Star Party we're out this is the big do I showed
this one before right to left merco 32 inch Jerry 202 inch beorn 24 and my 28
and we are all had a wonderful night of observing that night exploring and comparing and just pondering at how the
things come together you know you can look at a lot of great targets with these big instruments and it really
opens up the um resolution and and gives you you know a much better view but
again you know these things are traveling hundreds of thousands of years to get to us the light and um you know
literally you have a time machine I I don't know of anything else that you
could do that you can go back in time you know and that's the beauty of
it because some of these galaxies they're not even there and the light is still coming so I mean that
just alone is hard to Fathom you know this is looking up and had a great star
party and just had some incredible nights you know with that instrument in
certain locations it's unbelievable but that you know doesn't stop you you can do it
anywhere as I was saying before you have the disease of aperture fever of course
um this this is my new instrument it's called the Leviathan it's a 30in F5
slipstream very big unit uh very awesome to to see these uh things and explore
you know the solar system as well as the deep space you know Stars you can go way
out to quazar this Su um first light my little buddy came with me as I always
take him because he really really likes going up there and hanging out with me
and all the nice people there it is uh looking North at
Mount Pinos very nice instrument so most of the uh pictures I
have I've created uh with this instrument the ones on this particular GSP 62 162 wow 162 already Scott amazing
I know now in this you'll notice the Leviathan is so big that I couldn't look
at Zenith at the time because I only had the8 foot ladder so I recently got the
um 10 foot ladder from tall man ladders which is back in Action making the
astronomy ladder 8 inch rungs which was really cool and if you look in the background you can see Andromeda so that
was first light under the stars with um Andromeda right in the
background and you could see m33 too in another shot but um this was a picture I
created using uh my cell phone shot a little bit but it you know I had to really work on a lot of the coloring and
stuff it wasn't like that when you looked at the picture not even close you know when you get back home
things to look at and explore you can always do lunar even through the
clouds you know yeah these are neat little moments I go outside with my
binocular and I take a look or you know moon coming out of the
clouds who would everything think there's been many times where people didn't go out and observe because the
clouds were there but sometimes the clouds add a bit of color or effect
and some you know magical quality to the
image this one was the clouds were just all thin hazy clouds but the sun was
Illuminating them like a pink like a pastel pink and the moon was just
embedded in that and it was worth see most people wouldn't even have looked but look at what I created from
it love the moon and then it clears and then you can look you know more
close and that's what's uh really great about exploring is the Moon I mean you
know sunrise on the moon certain craters cast these amazing sh Shadows that you
normally never see um even looking at Mars you can explore to Mars you have to wait for it
to get closer to be able to resolve you know some detail on the surface but you
know it actually shows you quite a bit of detail if you uh get it at
opposition Jupiter again you know having the bigger instrument you can explore
the belts and see the red spot sometimes you're lucky enough to
resolve um IO you know you can see surface detail on that and maybe a
little on some of the other moons Saturn I mean wow can you imagine
when they explored uh how how many how many people turned to amateur astronomy
for a lifetime uh upon seeing Saturn through a telescope I mean it's it is yeah it's so
addictive and and you know it really is um when you're doing viewing real
through the eyepiece I mean there are photons coming and and they do interact with you
believe it or not you know I call it uh manifestation
power and I you know I kind of wanted to win the lottery and so I could do some
programs and really do you know kick up my Outreach and they brought me the
telescope the 30 in so I took it I'm happy it's an amazing
gift you know that's a once in a-lifetime scope to get because you know they're very expensive and and you don't
come across those but again you know I I wanted it for the
ability to get people closer and show people I just I might need to get an
insurance policy though so this uh you know a liability so nobody gets hurt
because man that ladder it's 14 feet tall when standing up the the scope it's
a monster this was uh I was looking at Saturn and talking to merco and um he
was doing a star party at a uh big you know one of those resorts in Palace
Verdes and they were looking at Saturn and uh the moon I think it was Boy your
16 was really excelling there I mean other people were shutting down and the
views through his 16 which is the explore scientific 16 are they're
absolutely amazing I just I was blown away that that tell it's like a zambuto
mirror almost I mean it was it's that good it's mind-blowing this picture I was working
on he was so nice to send me a cell phone snapshot of um Saturn through a
nine and a quarter telescope and I want to give him the credit because it gave me a great uh
point it was monochromatic of course so I had to take it to the next
level so I gave it some color and uh this is what it's looking
like now and eventually the Rings are going to rotate uh next year you won't see them
you'll just see a line across there which is really incredible thing to see
so you know even a small scope will show you the Rings like an 80 millimeter you
know to a 90 somewhere in there you could see it with a good Optics and some
magnification now right now some guys on cloudy nights were drawing Saturn and they showed that the transits were on
the top of the globe so you could see the planets uh Titan Shadow and a couple
others three dots on top of the planet it's just incredible to see that and you
know if you're out exploring it and looking at it you're going to see it and that's the beauty is you got to get out
you know the more you look the more you see so this is uh these are all new ones
from the 30inch that I was able to view um last year through the few star
parties I did which was very few compared to usual but I really had to
you know drive to Arizona to get that scope and that took some time and took a few days so I was really saving myself
for the trip this is NGC 40 planetary nebula that actually it looks uh
colorful like a bluish pink almost red maybe you can see depending
on your how you see red and you do need some aperture but it's an incredible
planetary nebula the structure NGC
40 now this was amazing I have to tell you we were looking at the Saturn nebula
that's what this is NGC 709 okay and when I put the power and I
was running over a thousand power on this thing and there was another
Sketcher from Cloudy Knights Andrew and he was blown away because we were seeing
the inner details of of the structure of this planetary nebula and then outside
you could see that the actual exploded material around it you know
being um illuminated you know like like a fluorescent light you know it's
getting ionized from the um energy from that so the gas is glowing in this Eerie
green and the uh little tendrils on the sides that's why they call it the Saturn
nebula because every planetary nebula is different when they explode they create
a different shape and um that's what what's so unique about these stars and
you know exploring the different types of uh shapes and and looks of these you
know some of them that Hubble took the eye of God and The Hourglass I mean
incredible detail spiral graphic and um structure you know symmetry in there
that you don't see but if you get those good nights where the seeing's incredible transparency everything
aligns you see stuff you've never seen before this was one of those views I mean it
was incredible so this is actually a sketch from a sketch I was trying to
depict exactly how it looked kind of got it I don't know look
at this star in the middle it's it was like an eerie greenish
white this one is a one I've painted many times this is um the Blue Snowball
NGC 7662 what's nice in the big scope again you do see a bluish green color but you also
notice the star color that red star it's always so noticeable right next to you
know the Blue Snowball and that's I think that's an Andromeda I tried a little new technique
you see the the C like the little lines emanating out it just gives it that
blast effect the streamers of uh material that blew out from this
thing and the internal structure that ring is so pronounced and you could see
the Central Star now on this planetary it's usually much fainter most Scopes
you will not see that Central Star it's shrouded in a lot of um gas in front of
it um also it's super small and faint in comparison to the nebula so you really
need a good night to get that you know of course clusters
M13 you can't go wrong with the big dog you know you work your way out uh with
solar system you can start you know early on if the moon's up and it's getting ready to set and then you can
work your way from the solar system outward you know clusters
nebulas all kinds of different stars and and um there's many different objects to
look at along the way this was a a Galaxy
m63 this was the new sketch through the 30 again I was starting to see a little
bit of a structure in a in a dust Lane but you know you have to look at these a
long time and and they're very faint I don't think we're bort one or even bort
two there at Pinos maybe bort three
m106 that was incredible to see you know a lot of these galaxies are
real far away now uh the next set is the Comets I'm uh getting ready to wrap this up I
know I'm running a little long I wanted to do a lot more but I had to delete a
lot of pictures because the time limit anyway this was uh the first night I
looked they said oh no you can't see the comma and so he said John you got to get out now I go out oh my gosh when you see
the tail on that com went on the 11th of October that tail you know was very low
in the sky uh in between Venus and Urus the tail literally was like 20 degrees
you know the the nucleus from setting maybe 30 and then the tail went almost all the way to Zenith and I think it was
magnitude zero so this is the initial black and white rough I've looked at it
through binoculars I've looked at it through uh several different types of big
Newtonian I've looked at it through the refractor and I have to say Scott that
refractor I don't know why for comets the refractor seems like maybe the best
tool to do it to explore the the you know wide range Power but lots of and
then you go in with the 9mm 120 you want your mind blown I'm going
to tell you right now that IP piece has shown me a couple views I've never been able to to
repeat it's just an incredible eyepiece yeah you know I probably couldn't repeat it again because every night the comet
got dimmer and dimmer and dimmer yeah here it is in color so I made a color
version nice there's another night I mean I literally did it every night I
would make time because it's early in the evening it's not past my bedtime 8:00 um 8:00 well when when I live my
normal life I work on those hours when I become an astronomer yeah I probably
take years off my life because I stay up for days I refuse to and then in the
daytime you can't sleep because every you're energized all the photons and and the people in The Hobby
talking about the views we had and you know we always talk about how do you
think that that formed like that or or that it was able to you know do what it does when you look at you know it's just
incredible stuff we always just discuss um what we see and we have a group of
people it's really fun to do and some of the lists that you get in objects you
know there's so many things even today I'm still looking at stuff I've never seen before so one of the nights I think this
was with the 12 and a half so I had them both about the 12 and a half zambuto
portter ball tracking and I was able to get in a little on the core and and get some of the detail you know on the front
of the Comet there was some weird stuff going on little streamers coming out and even
on the side uh you know you have the ion tail and the gas tail but there was
another tail that would form because bits of material were breaking off of the nucleus and they were it was like
Shoemaker Levy 9 when you see the comet beads lining up the fragments this had
similar fragments but they were broken off and they were emitting a greenish
glow that I could clearly see in the eyepiece and and it had little Points of
Light which were chunks and and this only lasted for a couple maybe an hour
you know while I viewed it and you don't have that much time to watch it because it sets before and it gets too low but
that was incredible this was later much later um when you would not even think
to look at the comet but if you were you know had the will and the scope and you
were ready to get out there and do it you could see it again and it's still impressive even today I think it's in um
Aquilla right now I'm not sure yeah David Levy was looking at it um just
recently so said he saw an outburst this is the instrument of
choice for my Surgical and um solar
lunar Comet and planetary work this is an incredible scope I mean I have some
very elegant Scopes and um they won't show me that you know field I can't see
the the true essence of that object because I'm too zoomed in so this is a 6
inch uh trip carbon fiber this is the one you got me Scott and I got to tell
you it's a masterpiece right so through the whole thing when I was looking at the
comet this was the best view through this telescope believe it or not with
the one I used the 120 I used a wide range of ipieces telev you and explore scientific mostly uh even the Nikon nav
but um you know it's more about the Optics and the quality of the build and
the ease of use it's it's a great scope so here it is this is my baby right here
the next one of course that's the carbon fiber shine you know I put probably 30 coats
of caruba on there because I really don't want to uh harm the finish on this
thing it's absolutely gorgeous and there it is and this was
the comet um I would say it was midway through probably three or four days
after maybe 15th or 16th but it it was amazing The View I
was getting look at the the detail in the core and you can see that
little the one on the left where the material was coming out and then it also
had like literally looked like a headlight now I don't know what that is if anybody explain that how does it
shoot a beam like straight out I've never I don't understand you know the
comet had an anti-il um which uh was pretty um
visible and uh certainly showed up in photographs uh quite easily um I was
getting hints of it yeah I mean it was very clear here yeah because the tail is
just kind of wrapped around you know and it's we're seeing it from the other side of its you know kind of a curled uh
orbit you know so um I could see like the gas coming out
of it the the releasing the oxygen and the moisture yeah um in those chunks
I've never I couldn't believe I could actually see you know it's like when you look at a solar flare they don't change
before your eyes but this thing definitely started to change over on hours period and then it was gone yeah
that's very cool so I don't know if anybody else saw that or recorded that but that was really cool and and I
attribute that to the killer Optics and you know good seeing a good astronomer
you know well trained eye too John so it it's tough to to find it I had looked at
it so long I mean I literally once I saw it I was blown away I was just there
until it set boss was right there with me you know and what was nice I could
just go inside pick the scope up put it in the shed still pretty heavy on a G11
but I'm okay you know I still got a little left in
me so again I always close with um you know a little flower I didn't get many
flower shots lately but this is one I always liked very nice just amazing you
know and if you have a microscope you can explore even further in you
know and I would like to say Happy Thanksgiving to everybody from my
friends at out in the solar system they're on the moon it's a little cold there but you know they're underground
they're okay they all right yeah likey aren't they have hanging on the wall
there so well they're very fond of cubism and and modern art as as I ah as
I created this picture so this is what I'm going to send all my friends and family for Thanksgiving uh this
picture you know what they eat good over there they don't eat turkeys
but that might be uh like an octopus or
something but you know exploration is critical and uh you know every human on
this planet has an Explorer inside you know you look all the Expeditions
Everest and in Antarctica even the oceans finding new
lands you know and eventually you have to go outward once you there's still a
lot of exploration left here on the planet there's caves underground stuff and you know in the ocean the least
explored place of all so I think uh we're blessed to have
uh the Technologies we do today and the abilities to share knowledge and data
and major breakthroughs and eventually you learn
so much about everything that you have to go outward to find new stuff and you
know that's the obvious thing right I mean that's why we're exploring space
yeah for to get on the moon you could actually have a telescope on the dark
side or you could have a platform to launch from where we could get most of
the material we need from the Moon and the water that they recently found they
have so much water on the moon that there's like lakes in that those South craters there's literally so many
gallons of water there uh a lot of them are trapped in those beads those little beads that when they melt there's water
in inside the glass from the impacts there's trapped water in there you know
that's those are the elements so I believe there's probably Frozen life in
on the moon you know microbiological from the earth I mean if it came to the Earth through an asteroid or accomodate
could certainly go to another planet like Mars or the moon you
know who knows even um like the moons of Jupiter sat pattern they potentially
could have life as well you just don't know until you get the um ability to get
there and see it you know so right now it's robots and Rovers
and stuff like that because we can't handle the the harshness of space and
and do those things like they can so we've been very fortunate I think with
our technology and all the things we have to explore with now
so get ready all the new discoveries are coming and I am waiting for um
confirmation you know I don't think I'd want to go to M51 if you know they could take you
somewhere but maybe they could take you out and see
um Alpha centuri let's see if let's see if there is life there you know on those planets that
they have around the exoplanet I mean there's many possibilities right you never
know anyway that's my presentation I appreciate everybody uh coming on
tonight and it's very good to be back and I look forward to doing some more
yeah Harold lock is wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving so Happy Thanksgiving
everybody don't eat too much turkey you know what happens you get tired Crypt
toan tired oh yeah that's right yeah all right is that Adrian did I hear
an Adrian adri Adrian Happy Thanksgiving my old buddy John yes
sir yeah I I popped in because it's uh yeah we're getting close to
10 there may be another presentation before me but um I'm returning no that's okay it was
it was it was great looking listening and and if I took the opportunity to peek at some of the images you had and I
loved what you were saying at the end about exploration and in fact I think you helped me with uh the segment that I
want to do at the end um you know which will likely be more or less a quick
discussion on just some things that I've seen when it comes to the spirit of
exploration versus some of the things that we've had to deal with you know starting from the pandemic
2020 and just some Tendencies um tendencies that I'm seeing and just
wanted to quickly discuss those um and you know talk about the merits of
exploration versus preservation which is I'm seeing a lot
of preservation and not wanting to take these Giant Steps um especially on
social media Outlets but I'll figure that out while the next presentation goes on because I think we've got a
we've got a good one that we've been waiting on um
for yeah that's right yes thank you again I apologize for going over I could
have went for another hour but you know what John you you have too much energy
and love for this you're not going to you stop when you're ready the love
is always there because you know this is uh this hobby
it's all about love I mean who doesn't love this Hobby and and the companionship and just the camaraderie
when you're there I mean you don't even really need to look at stars you can just be happy talking about you know all
the stuff you've discovered in in your experiences and you know look at your
workload man it doesn't happen easy you really have to figure this stuff out to get it to the level that you have and
it's a lot of time and dedication time yep okay I'm going CL let's get started with thank you with
our next speaker thanks very much John and have a good night and if thank you so much look forward to seeing you Happy
Thanksgiving yeah keep looking up always that's right our next speaker is Carlos
hernandes uh he's a renowned planetary ex expert uh space artist and and he
celebrated for his detailed astronomical sketches and deep knowledge of the solar
system uh I think that uh some of the images that I've seen from uh Carlos
with uh uh his unique perspective of uh uh space spacecraft missions uh you know
views of uh you know uh moons around uh the planets um uh you know you know his
uh uh his images and sketches that he sends me are often uh very much timed
with what's currently going on so something will be on the news about uh space exploration or something they
found on another planet and Carlos will be right there with an with a uh
illustration or you know his his um digital paintings that he does and uh so
uh here he's going to share with us his knowledge about Jupiter uh you're going
to be learning uh some stuff from uh true master of uh of planetary
observations so let me bring this on
and here we go from
Carlos hello my name is Carlos Shades and I have been invited by SC
Roberts and explore scientific to present a lecture on observing the
planet Jupiter as we all know Jupiter is the
largest planet in the solar system and it's referred to as the king of the planets
Jupiter is in mythology the king of the Gods Jupiter is the Roman name for the
king of the Gods and in Greece in Greek it is
Aus and he was the ruler of all the gods and he had a
powerful lightning bolt that he used to eliminate a lot of
his enemies at the time time in mythology Jupiter is the largest planet
as I said a moment ago it is the fifth planet from the sun that orbits in an
average distance of approximately 484 million miles or 778 million
kilometers which in astronomical units which is equal to 93 million miles or
150,000 150 million ion kilometers that's one astronomical unit Jupiter is
located at approximately 5.2 astronomical units in the sun it
orbits the Sun in a period of approximately 12 years exactly
11.9 years and therefore it is located within
each zodiacal constellation yearly as its orbit coincides with the
number of theal constellations Jupiter is made up mostly
of hydrogen 90% and helium 10% and Trace
elements including ammonia methane formed very little water vapor
and hydrocarbons including athane and
benzine here we see a slide showing the comparison of Jupiter on the left and
the Earth on the right you could fit almost 12 Earths across the equator of
the planet Jupiter if you could hollow out Jupiter like a pumpkin you could fit
over 1,300 Earths inside of
it as you can see when you look at juper in a telescope you will notice light
zones and dark belts across the dis of the planet and these belts and zones
have different names according to their position over the globe of the planet
Jupiter on top we see the north polar region and then we see a succession
of interposing belts and zones and you start with the north
equatorial belt right above the equator and they go up then there's the
north tropical Zone the north tempered belt North tempered zone now when you go
above the north tempered Zone and you see belts and zones then you add another
North or South nomenclature to it so the next
belt would be the nor North North tempered belt with a North North tempered Zone and this continues all the
way up to the North or South polar regions of the
planet Jupiter has intense winds or jets
that are located throughout the planet and the greatest winds or jets are
located over the equatorial zone of the planet and as well as the north tropical
Zone then as you go north or south the
winds decrease in velocity now the winds also are located
towards the east which considered prograde Direction and
the winds that go Westward are considered
retrograde and they can get up to 500 miles an
hour this is the diagram that I produced showing the different layers of Jupiter's upper atmosphere of the skin
of the the planet showing the thermosphere at the top right below is
the stratosphere then the propo sphere now
most of the clouds that we see when we look through at Jupiter through the telescope are located within the propo
spere and that contains mostly ammonia
ice clouds but also ammonium hydrosulfide
and other compounds that give the different
colors to the clouds and belts of the
planet as you go in towards the core the center of Jupiter the pressures as noted
on the right and the altitude on the left
increases so the lower you go into the planet the temp the temperature and the
pressures increase to the point that at about
about 10 bars or 100 kilometers below the what's considered the zero point or
surface of the planet is at the point at which you have a pressure of one bar 100
kilometers below that is where the gases
become a liquid form they transition into a liquid form at approximately this
uh altitude in the atmosphere of the
planet as I mentioned the zones and belts are noticed when you observe
Planet these zones are consisting mostly of ammonia ice clouds that are higher in
elevation and cooler in temperature whereas the zones are devoid of mostly
of ammonia ice clouds and are lower in altitude but are warmer in temperature
so the zones the air rises and in the belts the pool air
sink at times you have different eruptions over different parts of the
planet and a well-known eruption occurs over the
South equatorial belt as you can see in the section of a
excellently detailed image by a friend Christopher go you can see the
development of a South equatorial belt disturbance an sebb disturbance and this
occurs periodically and it starts off as either a white or dark spot that can that
continues to expand over a period of days to weeks until it encircles the
entire belt and below is a painting that I produced showing if you were located directly
above that White Spot erupting from below the atmosphere of the planet you
could see the the main the main area to the right and then the leading
Cloud to the left here is a drawing of a South
equatorial belt disturbance that I made on March 19 2019 using my instrument a
9in uh maxoto cigra and you can see the
different parts of the disturbance you can see is it it dis appears in white
clumps within dark areas between them and this is considered a South
equatorial belt or SCB disturbance in 1995 NASA sent a probe
into the atmosphere of Jupiter called Galileo it uh went along with the
Galileo Orbiter that was orbiting Jupiter and this was the first time that
we were able to explore the atmosphere of a gas giant
planet in this case Jupiter and it went into the entry point was located over
the equator of the planet and it descended into the planet and as it
descended it took measures me ments of the different gases and temperatures of
the planet as it descended it transmitted data to the orbit or above
for approximately 57 minutes before it was destroyed by the extremely high
temperatures and pressures within the atmosphere of the planet and that occurred on December 7th
1995 a diagram showing the entry and Descent
of the Galileo atmospheric Probe on DEC 7th
1995 and it continued to transmit information all the way down
to 140 kilom below the zero point of the
atmosphere or a pressure of 24 bars
the Great Red Spot is well known to most amateur astronomers and it is an elongated
anticyclonic Vortex located over the southern hemisphere of the planet and it
measures approximately a 1,300 kilometers in
width and several hundred kilometers in
he now this is a cyclone or anticyclonic
Vortex that has definitely been documented and observed and recorded
since the late 1870s now it may have been visible to
astronomers as early as the mid 1600s but we don't feel sure that it's
been around since the 1870s and it has period it rotates in a
period of approximately six days and the height of the top of the Great Red Spot
is approximately five miles above the cloud tops or 8 kilometers but recent
Studies by the Juno orbiting spacecraft show that it extends as far as 500
kilometers below the top of the r red spot into the atmosphere of the
planet the painting that I did with what it would look like if you were above the
top of the atmosphere adjacent to the Great Red Spot and this is what you may witness if
you were an astronaut floating within the atmosphere of the
planet now what we see when we observe the planet
is the very outer skin of the planet and that's accounts for the zones and the
belts but as I mentioned earlier as you descend into the planet the gases become
liquid and as you descend you encounter what's called metallic
hydrogen which occurs at extremely high pressures and temperatures and and this occurs all the
way down until you get to the core of the planet which is about 10 to 20 Earth masses in
size and that is the um insides of
Jupiter and Saturn Uranus and Neptune are somewhat similar to this interior as
well Jupiter also has very faint rings that are not typically visible to the
amateur professionals from the Earth unless they image the planet in infrared
wavelengths but the Voyager spacecraft when it flew by the planet in
1979 and 1980 it image these faint rings
surrounding the planet and Saturn as we all know with a beautiful ring system
but Uranus and Neptune also has a faint rain system as well
Jupiter has a total of 95 satellites or moons and the largest of these are
called the Galilean satellites named after the discoverer Galileo Galilee
when he discovered them orbiting the planet with his primitive refractor telescope on January 7th
1610 and you've got eio on the left extreme left followed by
Europa then ganam on the
listo EO is a fascinating satellite and it's the closest of the Galilean
satellites and it's has over 400 active volcanoes over its surface and here
painting that I did of what it would look like if you were able to stand over
the surface of the planet with a sulfur volcano erupting and the AA Lake
alow and the reason that it's so it is so volcanically active is that as it
orbits Jupiter the inside is stressed by tidal forces that heats the interior of
the satellite producing this molten lava which then erupts onto the surface of
the Moon the next satellite is a fascinating
one called Europa and we've heard a lot about Europa that there's a possibility
of an a subsurface ocean and uh who knows what
possible life forms if any are present but uh we are hoping to study this
interesting satellite with the NASA Europa Clipper which was recently
launched and will arrive at Jupiter in 2030 followed by the European space
agency's juice spacecraft which will also study euroba but also gamed and
Kalisto and this is a painting I did showing the eruption of a gazer over the surface of the planet
with Jupiter visible in the background the largest satellite of
Jupiter and the largest satellite in the solar system is ganam and is actually
larger than the planet Mercury so you've got a moon orbiting a planet that's
actually larger than another planet and it is also a very interesting planet
that you see uh Groove and craters and other interesting surface features and
it too may have a subsurface ocean that will be studied by the
Esa juice spacecraft in the near future and it has Aurora that visible
Roots H as well as you can see that the planet Jupiter has incredible Aurora as
well what medium is this is my painting of the surface of Kalisto the outermost
of the gallan satellites that show is a very heavily
cratered Moon and uh this is one of the surfac
barrier within one of the crators of the Moon Kalisto and with Jupiter visible in
the distance Over the
Horizon Jupiter will arrive at opposition on De 7 7th
2024 and will be located within the constellation of Taurus the Bull
and it will form a bright star in the core in the
center of Taurus and it should be a spectacular site in many
telescopes the tools that we use to observe Jupiter include instruments such
as a refractor that uses the lens and a reflector that uses a mirror to form
their images now these are two examples of the explore scientific refractor an APO
chomat or you can use a triplet also more expensive but left a left color
better color correction and the reflector this is a neonian reflector
that uses a parabolic primary mirror and a secondary flat mirror to produce the
image other instruments designs used to study the planets including Jupiter
include the Schmid C graen telescope on the left that's my Celestron 8 in P I
actually obtained in 1976 and I've used it well um the
planets and deep Sky objects and It produced this excellent image the one on the right is my current
instrument it's a 9in maxutov c GR that employs both a corrector in the front
and mirrors inside the primary large one in the back and then a smaller secondary
over the corrector plate that reflects the images to the back of the instrument
Where You observe different I piece designs are
very useful for observing the planets including the ab or scopic at the top
that uses four elements and the popular glossal IPS in
the middle that also uses four elements and another well-known IP for
plantary observation is the brandon9 piece at the bottom that uses four
elements as well for my own observations I like to
use high resolution ey pieces and the advantage that I prefer using the export
scientific eye pieces is that they are also waterproof besides being of high
quality producing sharp contrast images that uh allow me to see most of the
detail on the planets useful accessories for observing
Jupiter and the other planets and Moon are the color filters Now using the
different colors you are able to pick out subtle features over the
planet the red filter might show you some dark
condensations and the belts slightly better as well as the orange filter the
yellow filter can be used to bring out bright features and some dark features
the green is good to show dark objects uh including the belts
and condensations the blue and the Violet are useful for the belts as
well of all these the ones that'll bring out the belts and the zones typically
the best are the blue and the blue green filters for observing
Jupiter no polarizer we are at the mercy of the atmosphere on Earth which is a
blessing that it provides Air Force but it also is a blanket that waves at times
because of the difference in temperatures and we are U affected the
images are affected by turbulence within the atmosphere and this is a scale used
to grade the seeing or the turbulence in the atmosphere that was developed by a
Harvard astronomer William H Pickering it's called the Pickering seeing scale
and it's from zero or one which is the absolute worst
to 10 the Absolut perfect steady image another scale was produced by the
France Greco astronomer Eugene annati and this uses uses scale from one
to five with one being a perfect image two less perfect three average
four four and five extremely turbulent and pretty pretty usess to make an
observation now you can use forms that you can produce your own or obtain from
different organizations including the association of lunar and planetary observers
Alpo the British astronomical Association and the Oriental
astronomical Association as well in order to produce a drawing of what you see what You
observe at the telescope this is an example of an observation of Jupiter
that I made on March 3rd 2004 using my 9in maxutov Crain at 257 X showing a
wealth of detail over the planet and this was made under very good scene conditions and eight out of 10 or two on
the annati scale and you can see the Great Red Spot located over the central
Meridian in the southern hemisphere as the telescope flips the image with South
at the top and north at the boot and you can see of the South equatorial belt
North equatorial belt and the different polar regions and other interesting feur
including white ovals and dark condensations or spots the image to
immediately to the right of the drawing is what's called an intensity estimate and what you're doing there is
using the scale from 0 to 10 where zero is black
and 10 is the perfect white and here I've graded the different features that
were visible according to how dark I perceive them at the over the planet at
the time below that intensity estimate uh
drawing is a sectional sketch that I focused specifically on the Great Red
Spot region to show the wealth of detail that I was noting over the great red red
spot and surrounding region at the time and below it is numbers indicating
the different longitudes and Jupiter has three
longitude systems and it's not a solid object it's a gaseous Planet so the
midsection the equatorial Zone from 7 degrees north or 7 degrees south it's
called system one and that rotates in a period of 9 hours 50 minutes 30
seconds and the regions North and South
of the equatorial zone are called system two that rotate in a period of 9 hours
55 minutes and 45 seconds the third system is called L3
and that's the rotation of the core of the planet and that's considered the
true rotation period which is similar to the system 2 that's with by a couple
seconds
a drawing of Jupiter that I made on November 11th 2001 using an 8
in pleas off casser grein that produced an excellent image
showing the Great Red Spot some blue Fons of the equatorial Zone and the
North and South equatorial belts and polar regions of the planet at
the time you can also make a sectional sketch of
the planet instead of making a full disc drawing as Jupiter tends to get
complicated at times because of the wealth of detail that you can see over the planet so you don't actually have to
make an entire disc drawing you can do what's called a sectional sketch and that's what I've done here showing
detail within the north equatorial belt on the planet on March 19
2017 sometimes if the seeing is adequately still adequately uh well stabilized you
may be able to detect detail over the largest satellites of Jupiter and this
is a drawing that I made of detail that I noted over ganam on October 2nd
2010 and the image on the right is a
corresponding um simulation using the NASA solar system simulator and you can
see very similar albo right and dark features over the
one that correspond with the simulator so I wasn't able to resolve the detail
that you would see with a spacecraft but I could see that there was differences in brightness and darkness
over the dis of the moon now in
1994 you mankind was treated to a show of commentary impacts over the southern
hemisphere of the planet Jupiter produced by the breakup of a comet that
was once orbiting the planet called Shoemaker le9 and over a period of nearly a week
23 fragments from the
comet impacted the southern region of the planet and producing uh huge
explosions that extended into the the space above Jupiter and
the remnant of the debris the scars of these impacts was visable to astronomer
for weeks and months afterwards a painting that I did of the uh eruption
the explosion after an impact of one of the commentary fragments if you're able
to be in a spacecraft floating above the layer Cloud top layers at the
time I was able to observe the impacts with my friends shown in this image with
the Tibby Dior next to his
telescope and Jeff bash which was the owner and producer of
that telescope as well a 16inch F7 Newtonian that produced
excellent images and allowed us to see a lot of the impact sites over a period of
a week in July of
1994 these are drawings that I made sectional sketches of the southern hemisphere and the impact sites produced
by the comet uh frag fragments over that seven week 7 day period um in July of
1994 and if You observe the impact sites over a period of weeks you would note
the evolution or the spreading out of the material from the impacts and It
produced different shapes and it was very interesting
now we have a spacecraft at this time orbiting Jupiter obtaining measurements
of the planet and this is the Juno spacecraft orbiting the polar region and
you can see a spectacular Aurora over the polar region while it's flying
overhead uh this is a painting that I produce of what it would look like if you were above the Bas craft orbiting
the polar region at the time as I mentioned earlier the NASA is
sending a spacecraft called the Europa Clipper will be
orbiting Jupiter but it's going to be making close flybys of the uh Moon
Europa in order to determine that if it does have a
subsurface ocean how extensive the ocean is and
other characteristics of this fascinating Moon that theoretically but
not proven uh could Harbor some form of life
a very basic life but this is something that needs to be further evaluated and
that's why we're sending the spacecraft to explore this and other Galilean
moves and with that I finished my lecture and if you have any questions
please contact Scott Roberts it's more scientific and I will be happy to answer
whatever questions I may be addressed have a good evening thank
you now Scott I think you're on mute that's right Carlos I I wanted to
thank you for uh putting together that pre-recorded uh presentation
and uh uh I think that you were out there in the audience watching it so uh
very good job excellent work and lots of great information about Jupiter um next up is Adrien Bradley uh
Adrian is a uh he's of course a regular on the global star party and he's anlaan
night sky photographer and just a great photographer landscape photographer as
well and he occas us shows me images of wildlife like birds and stuff like that
that uh that he takes but he has a he has a great eye uh uh he's very U tuned
to um uh you know very uh uh balanced U
um you know perspective on um uh you know what draws you into an image uh Vis
that image and uh so uh you know just a few moments of
staring into one of his Landscapes that he shoots on the upper peninsula with
the Milky Way in the background will spell out everything that you need to know about Adrien Bradley's Talent so
Adrien thanks for coming on to Global star party and uh uh I guess you just
bold a uh uh just bold that's why got you see me with a
bowling league shirt on but uh yeah and iot my name in case anyone forgot name's
Adrian but um yeah so yeah we're talking about the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan so so I was so one of the things I wanted to do because I
know we're we're getting late and I wanted to close down our Global Star
Party by talking about you know we're talking talking about exploration in this whole Global star party and um you
know that's I'll go ahead and share as always my second desktop here um let me
share that and you should see so Scott um
brought me in talking about um you know what it's like to see the Milky
Way um when I took this photo and I've shared this photo on Global Star Party a number of times if you
haven't um you been to Global Star Party to see any work you're going to notice some
of it's similar to uh my buddy John and what he showed during his presentation
but the Milky Way itself is there for everyone to see and to
explore and you know things like uh if I
click on this and see if I can zoom in um one of the articles that will be
coming out in um astronomy magazine soon um the
February issue I've got something where I wrote an article on
um the uh Treasures of the Milky Way and that's what this is and I wrote about
little things like this little dark nebula Barnard Z here um these two I wrote about these
two um clusters open clusters seeing them in binoculars and what I learned is
the darker your Sky the more that these pop out if you're not in a very dark sky
you don't actually see these naked eye when you see the Milky Way um a lot of
what you're seeing in here was naked eye it was a really good night and it was naked eye when I was out at U in the
upper peninsula up until seeing this
um that was my uh you know it was sort of the
Revelation like wow it can get that good um until and then I you know
until um I went to a darker location um other thing that I like to
do is challenge Norms Milky Way Photography was typically what you the
kind that you see where it's dark and now the the foreground is usually a lot more interesting than this
this is just kind of a Barren Wasteland in the middle of a a giant national forest and um the sky just opened up um
this is a very another it's another similar rendering of that
um but if you go now you can you can see where I went and what I was attempting
to do clouds came in um you're going to see a lot of photos
that you that I took after that partial eclipses um this is a picture that's
after John schwarz's own heart love that covered with uh you've drawn this a few
times yeah you'll see some of the getting images of these pictures is much
harder than to draw them and you John does a good job of that but keeping with
the theme of explor ation all of these pictures that you see I decided to go
out you know this is 3 hours from where I live and I decided to go out and take
these photos largely because I just wanted to see what I could create with that and as
you can see here I'm shooting right at the sun it's low on the horizon and I'm
shooting right at it now I think there was smoke in the air at the time of this particular sunset but uh you know
shooting right at the sun you it there's always the don't look at the sun
directly um you know we we do recommend that but if you do this enough times
there are some times where you can go ahead and take a picture of the sun you
you just have to know you got cloud cover you have low on the horizon about
the set are some times that you can you can shoot right at the sun um that one
looks beautiful which one the Milky Way in the Setting Sun that's
incredible uh let's see I think that one so I don't think it's a Setting Sun
here's yeah unfortunately a lot of misconception about this and I think I do
have I'm trying to think if I do have a I do have a Milky Way and a Setting Sun but the sun's not in the picture but
it's in the middle of sun it's like it's uh is it uh not nautical twilight there
are only certain places you can see it this is like this is glow from a distant Town it looks like Sunset GL from town
and then you got a meteor here you know if you you do this enough you capture
meteors all the time and I leave that color in I I used to mask it out
but I leave it in because I want the images to show you know just what type
of light is going on whatever I capture I want it to wow
present and in this particular case you have a chance you know bowl of lightning from a
distant Thunderhead here and a meteor scaming over yep right over the center
and I've got a couple of times where I've had a meteor um you know photo bomb some
images and you with my photography the explor exploration side wants to get
images that aren't often always sought after like when the moon is up and
you've got kind of a the whole scene is kind of this bluish thing where you've got some Stars
here and you've got the Moon and you've got it in a way you try and process it
so that it looks the way that your eyes saw it now there may be a bit more blue
in this image than normal but you keep trying you know you keep trying and you keep
pushing here's the sunset in the Milky Way image John this is wow this is one
where so the sun is behind it's everything's brightened a little bit the sun is behind the Mesa
and and down it's this is nautical twilight starlight's just coming out
there's still some clouds Milky Way is here right Cloudy Skies you can explore
and try and take images um yeah one thing I one thing I
was going to discuss in using some of these images as a backdrop um such as
going here and seeing this Orion inside of the Milky Way and zodiacal
light um that's just not something you see every day east of the Mississippi
you can you can detect it you can see it but you know you need a you need an
exceptional night out in the western part of the United States it's you know it's a lot it's a
little bit easier to get this sort of uh image
um I had put together some notes on coming to a global star coming
to a star party like this um and being able to take images like this and you
know just um lately someone posted to the okite tech site that they weren't
going to come anymore because they had captured a virus while they were out here and they didn't want to you know
they had such a bad experience going home and not being able to go in um they
considered it you know viruses just running rampant and um just didn't you know the
experience it wasn't enough for him to see these dark skies or you know
observe in he just he decided he'd had enough of the big
star parties because of the uh propensity to catch disease and we're
we're in an era now where since 2020 we're faced with making decisions
of you know do I isolate you know shelter in place
because I don't want to capture a disease that could be life-threatening
to me or do I go out there and let's
we're going to skim through a lot of the do I go out there and look for some of these whether the skies are dark or not
so dark at all such as this image same image of Orion in the winter milkyway as taken from a less darker
site but it is in Michigan and you know with certain technique you can still get
um this is over the lake you can still get some of the same things just not quite as much detail the darker your
skies to better and um these are older images
this is one I really really like because it was stacked and it was over this beautiful Lake um and I still
want to improve a bit on it but you come down to having to make decisions here's
your bird picture by the way Scott there you go heing in the light very nice
um decisions to come out you you know a lot of these I went out on my own and
you know others here I'm in Vegas but a lot of these images I'm out I'm out of my
own I'm you know I'm choosing to go out some
of these images I'm out with others or out my uh priest who has
passed since passed away he was with us oh how nice and we took this picture
this was his car this was this was his old cabin there's a uh you know there's a cross that now sits in front of my
house it used to sit right here and you know what I did is I tried to capture the rising Milky Way through that Gap
right over the cabin uh he's it sits on that same Lake um someone else now owns
it and has changed it around but you know this was beautiful shot Adrian yeah
it was a moment in time when wow that really has a feel was with us yep it's
it's C in the cabin in the uh it's a lower Peninsula but it's in a beautiful
area not far from this area here this sort of Beach area
um so and in more Upper Peninsula Aurora
so bringing it back coming out by yourself to see this is nice but is it
nicer to share with others and in a and in the world we're living in we're we're
being challenged to face there's many who may love
astronomy but they're facing challenges to their health
and you want to be able to you know you want to preserve your health you want to
you know you don't want to get sick and you make the you know you decide that well being around people is how you get
sick so you know what do we do um it becomes a tougher it it becomes
a tougher choice now than it used to be before 2020 you just came out and you
went to the doctor if you got sick you got your antibi you know your antibiotics and you fought what you
fought off whatever you had now there's just a greater it feels like there's a
greater concern for do you want to go to these parties at all and you know sort
of a greater disdain for being sick in general
and you know having what having someone post that they don't want to come out to
the okite tech star party anymore um you know this becomes this becomes
your astronomy life and this you you can see this image in the uh in the June
issue 2024 of astronomy magazine me looking at the Milky we by
myself I've gone out on my own and I I don't think I was on my own when I took
this I was with a cooworker who happened to be out there and while I'm taking these
images um she was from China and she talked about the signis rift I don't
think I took a picture of it at the time but she talked about the kind of the difference in the stories from China
versus the US on what the signis rift which would be way up there um you know
they he had two lovers on across the river she says that the uh man was too lazy to
build the bridge and only wanted to see the woman until you know when the bridge
was being built for by the swine so they cast a uh cast a side eye on the uh male
figure in that um you know in that story and I found that pretty interesting but
you know here you have another of my my attempts at capturing what it's like to be at a
star party there are a lot of people there's a lot of telescopes there's an imager right here you know it's to me
this is a beautiful scene but you've got folks willing to give up that sort of
scene and strike out on their own because um we're more concerned about
thee so I think there's and I've always attempted I've tried to do this image
every single time I go back and we can and capture different
parts of the Milky Way I've I've tried this scene again and
again and then then I come home to this it's not as dark but you can still make
things beautiful you know if you figure out how
to how to do that and um
so so guess what I'm saying here through you know recycling I recycle a lot of
images I haven't been able to take new ones I'm going to slowly scroll through
these we'll stop at couple of ones that I've Loved but I have haven't really done much with but your typical Panorama
These are nice images to get if you're you know to kind of you want to create a
you want to create a beautiful image um you put the elements together you can
get them in 30 seconds if it's dark enough even
if even if you have an image like this wow you know this is a challenge get the
the moon's very bright what kind of image can you get if you if you take a
picture this is where I stopped there no filter no filter
oh man I generally don't shoot with filters I'll do some things in post like uh
masking I use more I use masking rather than filters to lower if I want to lower
some of the lighter or I'll you know SL lower some exposure and
Sliders yeah that helps bring out the contrast yeah the light yep that's what
I do and so even if the Boon is out in the
daytime I see what kind of images I can get with panoramas there you have the
moon my goal was always shoot what I see and so sometimes I don't try and
isolate the moon I just take a quick photo because the scene looks pretty you
know it looks pretty to me and you know that's essentially a shoot what I see photo
sometimes you don't see it and I've I've shown this one before Scott you remember seeing this rainbow image here oh yeah
yep nighttime Rainbow Moon which turns out it was not
a full moon and then this I don't know if I showed this one so much me trying
to get the signis region and you can kind of see where I used a uh mask and I
ended up creating a line that didn't really exist in the sky there um
trying to see if I could get any semblance of sess there
so so yeah as we go through these photos and you can see me trying a bunch of
different things um there's the
people for me I like being in this situation I like being there's people
around looking up to me there's and there's three meteors
this was a percat night I believe or I forget what night was this a this was
not a I don't think this was a gimin itss night had there's Perseus you know double clusters is over
here and Perseus is here so this is a percus uh perc's night at an observing
site here this sort of thing to me is what makes astronomy worthwhile sharing
it with others you know having having people come out and see it and
describing what you see in the night sky it is just
about the night sky itself it's about being there even if
there isn't much to look at in the night sky I'm aiming directly towards these
stars that I'm pointing out are the stars of Ursa Major the Big Dipper the
plow they just melt in there with the rest of these Stars there's so many when
you take an image that always blows me away that there are so many stars that you can pick
up and uh more bird pictures I'm going
to skim down to couple more scenes things you
don't see up north or where I am seeing the Milky Way
tilt that far and still yet being able to see the core is a memorable
experience seeing a storm and the Milky Way coming out is a
memorable experience much clouds back there it's all it's cloudy huh a lot of times know it's cloudy well when you got
a major storm cell coming through with all this
lightning um you got two things you normally don't see together and uh even when it's
cloudy I still try and take a take some images here and then
[Music] Denver and then we're going to scroll through
to that's funny it looks it looks like I'm looking at my own work yeah most
most of us got the same type of images
um and then I went ahead and tried and get kind of a wide angle view wow what
this guy looks like that's a
killer even in an image like this you're working on things this was a poor comp
this is look at all the stars in the sky this was an exceptional night there was a lot of haze and there was actually
some Aurora there there's my buddy working and there's some Aurora behind
those trees yeah in this uh in this field now you
might look at that and say that's a beautiful image then this happened wow so one
other thing that I was concerned about is and if you go to social media we had a lot of auroral outbursts
and they got as far south I think you I think all of us those of us still
watching may have seen a Aurora this is up close this is the Aurora curtain is
over your head when you see it like this most of you we've seen Aurora even if
it's blazing and it's going but it's in a distance you know pardon the dust
bunnies here in the image but you see these curtains and we you see those curtains a lot folks go that shot
amazing yeah looking up above and you see it and so people will question and
they'll say is this real they'll go to social media and they're somehow they
decide that well you're only supposed to see something like this in an Arctic
area like Norway Iceland or whatever you're North you're Way North well this
was a little further south this was in Canada but it's an area further south on
Lake hon yes we're up north I actually like this because you have
the photographer taking the photos as the Aurora is going on um you know this
is this was one of the outbursts of Aurora that we had it was
beautiful um and you have folks that are like well someone's putting up
projectors because it's only supposed to happen um you know this is only supposed
to happen in certain places to the north and I would just say don't
believe a lot of what's being said on social media
exploration is what leads us to be able to see if we didn't get in those cars
that night and drive out here we wouldn't have seen any of these lights and this this was one of the biggest
displays I'd ever seen it basically it basically blew me here's
the Panorama of the whole thing those were huge flares that that set those off
that's you remember it JN do yeah this is and it was
seen it was a it was a beautiful event to
watch um and then it you know the skepticism really plays
into thinking of preservation because you all of a sudden someone suggests to
you that well maybe this is actually dangerous well the only the danger in
these big displays of Aurora come with the stress and the power grid from the
you know the magnetic material that plays havoc with the um
you know with anything you know power grids and Power
in general now the the thing about this particular Outburst is that there was not not a
major to my knowledge we didn't have like any major blackouts happening while
this was going on and um then we learned that the Carrington event was actually
even even bigger than this um the it was
more of a direct hit and you know the uh scientist Carrington's in drawing he saw the
flares aimed right at aimed right at Earth um
these flares did come to Earth and they they did Pelt us um I don't know that I
don't think they were of quite the same intensity but um any of this that I'm
doing um this was a real cool one too you like that one John look at that wow
that was beautiful and I I wanted the shoreline to be devoid of people for
this one because I just wanted to take it it looks like a painting almost yeah
and it it looked like a painting in real life looking at it that this is what you
saw you with the clouds here too yeah this is this is what makes it worth
going out at night you know that I invite everyone to fight their fears and
to put aside the need for preservation come outside you know come
see things like this drive out out you know see some light SK see some light
towers and jez go to your favorite Parks you know you may not see the Milky Way
like this in certain areas um you know the
thunderstorms take pictures of them look at that from a distance it's a
beautiful thing now if you were right around the area where this struck you wouldn't be worried so much about beauty
you'd be you'd be upset at the loud noise that was being generated afterwards but over a lake that's one of
the things I'd always wanted to get looking straight up at the sky at signis at the time and do that with a you know
with a modified camera and you start wondering what's all of this stuff I'm seeing here
and there's the veil there's a NGC object there's
there's so much there's so much to explore in your own pictures if you take a deep enough
picture speaking of exploration once again it comes down to the
people you know in this hastily drawn picture you've got people asking
questions and your in your learned astronomer telling them about what
they're looking at and um it's a I think it's an integral part of um
it's an integral part of what we do we aren't just about the beautiful pictures
which if you can get beautiful pictures it's a wonderful thing I love this one because big bright meteor I don't this
may be another one this may be a plane but that's an unmistakably a bright meteor that shot through that image
right oversea um these are and that's Omega centory my first time seeing
it um you can see it from your la oh I had to go to I was in Tombstone Arizona when I
saw okay Omega centor this is in22 these are more Aurora Pictures and
I tried to stretch them into panoramas where you could see this SAR I think
it's called reaching towards the Milky Way over here this was a Percy at night and
it was upstaged by all of that another outburst this led to it leads to weird
things like people saying that there's projectors out there and that there's you know that what you're seeing is not
true but you know my buddies got shut down that night they went to go viewing
at Amboy crater and they were like I think I'm seeing red and the next thing
you know the whole sky went red and lit up yeah and they were happy that they got skunked because it was Aurora that
you've never seen you know know so it's perfect yep absolutely it's
[Music] um yeah it's worth seeing and ignoring
some of the theories we'll call them about why it's there when when folks are
not used to seeing these things or they're told that it's a rare event you
generally don't see it then the you know some of these conspiracies come out and
uh you uh you start hearing of them and if you
know if you're science-minded you might your first thought is to you sort of laugh it off but the the real challenge
is when somebody decides they want to come out and see
things um they want to see the night sky somebody's got to be there to be ready
to help them um get through it now this was a this was that once one chance shot of the Comet
over here and this you know very thin waning crescent moon rising before the
sun I was so happy I got it this that was early morning huh when it was just coming yep it was when it was an early
morning this is the full image right here and and then it rounded the son
yeah it did amazing my images of the Comet at after it rounded the sun
weren't as good this was the final time coming out
and I will I'll end on this one because it's become my favorite background and
this is Preservation Allosaurus Footprints Allosaurus doing its thing
millions millions of years ago and its path was
preserved petrified you you think you could come here and dig these out but you really can't you you really you'd
have to try at it and you'd be defacing a National Monument basically they this is It's preserved but it's not there's
no signage there's no um you know it's not built up as a as
an attra ction like some of the dinosaur tracks are you know further um heading towards Clayton New
Mexico there's dinosaur tracks out there that are built up into a full attraction
these are just sitting there as they were you know just out of nature there's
nothing there but you and those dinosaur tracks and you really have to have a spirit of
exploration in order to want to come out here cuz it there's no human there's no
idea you have no idea that humans are around in a PL where these tracks are
where is that dark it's Eerie it's black Mesa Oklahoma okay and um you know it's
beautiful out there it wasn't fully dark when I chose to take the picture I just
decided I'm taking this picture and I'm going to hop into a car that I drove up
here I'm going to get out of here but this was one of the uh shots i' always wanted to take when I learned of these
tracks like I want to take the dinosaur track image and this is my latest attempted it
combining my love of Milky Way Photography there is some Sky glow here that's why you see these colors I leave
it in and just the camera is low where you
can see some of the footprints going this way of the Allosaurus there's only a few left most of them are covered
buried um they may have even been eroded but these are what's left of
those Footprints those those dinosaur tracks and um you know this is to me it's the
epitome of wanting to explore things like going to the Moon things like going
to Mars you know just wanting to wanting to see what's out there
and what goes go against it the spirit of preservation is not wanting to send
human beings to Mars at all not even sure if the you know should we be
spending money on doing these uh doing this exploration when there's problems we
have back on Earth and um you know not believing that it's really time for us
as humans to be exploring space you know we should be we should take that much
and just simply look for near Earth asteroid collisions and make sure we protect this home this planet and um I
grapple with that for a while uh because it I don't see a problem with it in
terms of that's not a bad idea to you know make sure we protect the
home that we have but at the same time and like you've said a number of times
Scott the things that we learn through exploration
are are things that can help us down the road I mean there there's very there's
very important stuff that we learn and um oh yeah it is the way that we learn
it's yeah you know I just learned I want a
pair of binoculars to explore this image you just put up because you know I could get l lost in there oh yeah if you go
there just go there and stand there and hopefully the creek beds the rest of the
like take a pair of our we have this um uh they're available by special order
but I'd like to have a pair for myself they're 6 inch Ed binoculars and you're
making 6 inch now we we can get 6 inch yeah and they're they're very nice
they're very nice so my rock formation images need a little
bit of work when I denoise them bort one Skies you know yeah these These are bort
one bort two Skies so yeah when you take your images you know all you have to do is
figure out what's the right combination to show the rock formation in front of
it and I experimented with a number of different ways to do it and each and
every time I thought to my myself I should have just done some long
exposures because that may have worked out a little bit better but uh some of my single images of course you know
processing those this is I'm standing over the edge of a small Cliff if we if I go this away
I'm G to fall I like Imaging over things like that the most black mes is a beautiful
place to visit and you I didn't see this mes
when I stopped on the side of the road to take the photo once your eyes are used to the bright lights you don't see
anything at all when it's in a place this dark and so so with that um just
different images that I've went gone and processed over the last few days and
I've still got more for my trip you know a lot more to go
through this uh look at how this
Cloud covered the Milky Way there's the comet
yeah a cool shot it's a cool shot
unfortunately you know it there's the Milky Way we all know and love and those
clouds sort of did a weird job of masking the Milky Way they came over and
it's they where they settled in on this image it was just kind of weird how it worked
and the moon began to rise behind me and uh that's still a beautiful shot
I mean to get the all three it's
amazing well gentlemen yeah we gonna have to yeah we're gonna have to close it down so I'm gonna stop
caring and uh I appreciate it yeah and thank you very much I was no problem
yeah yep en for tuning in we had a nice Global audience as well and um uh if
you're watching this in uh you know in rerun um you know you have any questions
uh you know feel free to uh ask us uh you can contact our explore scientific's
customer service department and we can field questions for you um or you can
wait for the 163rd Global star party and save up your questions for that so
anyhow Adrien thanks very much H John Schwarz for having me good night guys
still there in the background somewhere but I wanted to see Adrian's presentation and that last guy D David
was or no Carlos Carlos he did a really great job that was I felt like I was my
presentation was remedial after that great lineup today yeah excellent night
I would very good stuff lot of fun all right thanks very much and till we see
you next time I'll try to make it yeah I did it awesome still got it yep live long Prosper Prosper my
friend until Global Star Party 163 keep looking up even if it's cloudy
thank you thanks
hi I'm Tom essinger Hilman I'm an astrophysicist at NASA's GED space
flight center and the observational cosmology laboratory I use sensitive microwave
telescopes to try to understand the composition Origins and history of our
universe this image is our first baby picture of the universe taken by the
cosmic background Explorer or Kobe satellite really I think what's so
interesting about this is it it gives you an idea of what you would see if you
looked out at the sky with microwave eyes we look out at the sky and we see a bunch of stars maybe we see our galaxy
but if you had the ability to look out at microwave wavelengths this is the sort of image that you would see see a
very uniform sky with these slight bright and dim patches you'd be looking
back to some of the earliest moments in the history of our universe Kobe operated from 1989 to
1993 and Kobe revolutionized our understanding of the universe by observing the cosmic microwave
background that you're seeing here the CMB the CMB is Remnant light from just
380,000 years after the big bang when the universe was transitioning from a
hot dense plasma to a cooler neutral gas of predominantly hydrogen and helium at
this early time galaxies and stars hadn't formed what we're seeing in this
image of the CMB is the seeds of future galaxies the red and blue patches in
this map of the sky represent more and less dense regions in that early
universe and the more dense regions Clump together to form the galaxies that we see in the universe today
this was a first ofit kind measurement of tiny fluctuations in the microwave brightness of the sky the DMR instrument
very precisely measured these tiny differences at wavelengths from 3 to 10
mm that's around where your cell phone operates the CNB is remarkably uniform
these fluctuations are just one part in 100,000 of the overall 2.7 Kelvin
temperature of the CMB and they're on very large angular scales and very large
physical scales in our universe future measurements were able to look at this
map of the sky in Greater detail and with greater angular
resolution the universe when this was emitted was about a thousand times smaller and about a thousand times
hotter so when the cosmic microwave background was emitted this light peaked
up in the visible the universe as a whole has been expanding and Cooling and the cosmic
microwave background has been cooling along with it the light has shifted to longer wavelengths into the microwave
and closer to the radio part of the spectrum the idea that you can answer fundamental questions about the history
of our universe with a map like this that we're seeing here is just amazing [Music]
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