Transcript:
you here we're glad to have all of you here yeah it's good to see Kelly again it is and it's good to see you as always yeah I I re I remember my first um I had met David plenty of places but he invited me to his home it must have been the early 80s it was for a conference that Tom Geral was sponsoring and you put me up for a couple of nights and you said stay here because it's the only room that doesn't have cat hair in it yeah yeah I had the two cats back in well it's good to see you Kelly it's good to see all of you tonight you look great David I'm feeling pretty good um I just wanted to say that on December the 17th we're going to have the unveiling ceremony for Wendy's Tombstone at the uh Cemetery oh fabulous I mean it's it's important not fabulous but but yeah that's it's moment dreams finally the Tombstone is there it's ready and uh we're going to have it on the 17th of December which coincidentally is the 58th anniversary of the first time I started to search for comets back in 1965 wow you had any luck with that uh a little bit a little luck a little bit of [Laughter] luck I love the search I just love doing it though and I'll do it tonight there you go you got clear skies huh yes it's clear and beautiful I would love to have clear skies well we had the rain today but it's clearing now that's nice I think I've been under clouds for I don't know how long now I know we have this big solar storm that's been happening all around and I can't see anything but clouds right we're in the same boat not I hope to see all of you at the uh Kansas City um League convention next summer because I'm gonna be there yeah yep we will see you there yeah we might have Kelly will probably have to drag off a cruise right David have you met Diana hanakan from Sky telescope yet no I have not yet so she's have taken the mantle of the amateur engagement I guess for lack of a better word and she's been going to the league meetings for the last couple of years oh then I must have met her last year at D Bon Rouge she she has a she has a lovely um uh English slash Italian slash spish accent because she's a little bit of all those um she's a former research radio astronomer um and and she's she's an amateur astronomer she's her she's still member of her Club in Florida um she's a really well-rounded person who happens to write well and uh yeah you should make it she's she's doing most of the league contact these days and in case nobody told you I'm retired now yeah I I figured that but um it doesn't meet her at B Rouge and I will see her again in Kansas City yeah yeah I think we met her at NE and we met her at uh Albuquerque I believe right and she's been invaluable in working on the uh new astronomy Day program uh she and uh our new astronomy day coordinator they have just really taken it and gone with it so I'm very encouraged about that that's Mike modin yes correct from Oma that's that's really terrific to hear because um it's I apologize I'm I'm gonna have to go get something to drink I have had a cold for a month it's like it's not Co it's not strep it's not RSV I've had a cold but my wife and I keep giving it Cru yeah Cruis thank you thank you Scott you're welcome you're welcome your Echo is still there by the way oh it okay let me that how's that sound I mean Scott we know you like the sound of your own voice but I do I want to continually hear it back and forth and back and forth you know you you took care of it there oh okay I'm gonna go get so uh are we gonna start like momentarily or what or have we started yeah go ahead get a drink Kelly we're live but we're behind the screen here so okay you know I'll be right back just 30 seconds he just just vanished did you notice that great he vanished he just right that was wonderful that was we need to do like somebody beamed him out yeah let's see him come back now that's I love the picture of Stonehenge that is gorgeous courtesy of Wikipedia right there oh yeah mm yeah done good yeah that's pretty and we do have a little featurette about Stonehenge so I was I was there the day before they closed it to the public oh wow really look at him look at him so you can't look at there's Kelly yeah hi Kelly again okay alrighty so you about as everyone ready yeah we're ready okay here we go here we go well if you're watching right now and I see several of you are uh thanks for tuning in this is the 33rd astronomical League live program with uh featuring Jay Kelly Bey and David Levy uh hosted by Terry man and also with special guest Carol or the president of the astronomical League I'm your uh Astro production wizard back here uh Scott Roberts and um uh this is a lot of fun we are really honored to have um the astronomical League join us so much and for us to be able to broadcast the astronomical League live program so uh we're going to take it away now humans have always wanted to learn about the Sun but it's dangerous to stare at it with just our eyes so we built structures to help us study it arist stle had his camera obscura Galileo used a telescope to document sunspots spectrometers came next allowing us to study the spectrum of the Sun's light 100 years later George Ellery hail explored the magnetic nature of the sun with a spectr heliograph next we launched Skylab and it gave us our first high resolution pictures of the sun's surface the Yoko spacecraft took x-rays of the sun then Soho and Hino day sent us even more incredible images Trac delivered the closest ever pictures of the Sun in its magnetic fields sdo images the sun in many wavelengths now with stereo we see the whole sun in 3D never missing an inch who knows what we will see next we will just have to keep looking up [Music] [Music] well hello everyone uh this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific in the Explorer Alliance and to my side here I'm not sure which side you're seeing but is uh Terry man the secretary of the astronomical league and the official host of astronomical League live and I'm going to turn it all over to you Terry well thank you Scott um thank you all for being here I was just complaining to everybody earlier uh we've got all this Aurora happening everywhere and I love the Aurora but Ohio has been totally clouded out I think a lot of the East Coast has been and so I'm curious do me a favor if any of you are able to get on to chat let let me know if you saw it in what state you might be in I'll be a little more jealous but that's okay so tonight as Scott said earlier we have Kelly Bey with us which I it's so nice to have Kelly we haven't seen him for a while so it'll be great to hear his talk on the mysteries of Stonehedge we have D Levy here that will kick us off here in just a minute it is so nice to see your face it's such an honor to have you at every astronomical League live program we really appreciate you being here wonderful to be here thank you well we sure we're sure glad you are and of course we have Carol ore and it's always nice to have Carol here to hear what's going on with the league and it's just nice to see uh people even though we're not face to face exactly uh in person so it is so nice to see everybody here so thank all of you so much and thank everybody else for tuning in uh we have we're gonna have a great time tonight so let's go ahead and start with deid and H how about if you get us started with some of your beautiful poetry well thank you Terry and I'd like to introduce the telescope I brought with me this time it is called opilia and I've had opilia since shortly after I my first practice wife and I got a separation and a jewal divorce and 1979 1978 I've had this telescope since then 1979 actually it's been a long long time and it's still works it's a good telescope for and uh it's really good to see Kelly again it's been a long time it's good to see Carol it's great to see Scotty who actually saved me to by giving me a link so I could join you tonight and um the other thing is that um is that uh I will be at the astronomical League uh Gathering next year in person gathering in Kansas City and I hope to see all of you there as well and uh I'm really looking forward to that and uh looking forward to a 2024 hopefully a better year for all of us my PO tonight is from Robert Frost and Robert Frost was great at very short poems and I think the other person who was really great at short poems was Shakespeare who wrote a whole collection of sonets which he's really famous for but tonight's poetry reading will be very simple by Robert Frost a question a voice said look me in the stars and tell me truly men of earth if all the soul and body scars were not too much to pay for birth now that is a question and a half and uh I just discovered this poem today added it to my list and I just wanted to say that uh if I could blow the horn of another book for a second that uh I'm writing now my latest book which is the night sky in poetry each there will be all of the poems that I have quoted over the last number of years here and each one will be analyzed and discussed I don't know when that book's going to be out it'll probably be a long time but I'm working on it now anyway Terry back to you and thank you thank you oh and we look forward to seeing you at Alcon uh in Kansas City uh we're looking forward to Alcon for everything that's going on Carol the uh Kansas City group has done just an amazing job with everything that I have seen coming up uh I forget when the website's coming online or is it already online or coming on in another month or two next few weeks it should be up and running yeah okay okay well we're all looking forward to it so Carol what's going on with the league or what's going on anywhere that you'd like to talk about yeah a lot going on there everywh right now but uh uh specifically I'd like to talk a little bit more about Alcon well there's coming along like you say Terry very well and if I can share my screen let's see if I can bring a little more of that up to date here everybody see it yes okay this are these are the dates I'll is coming to KC July 17th through the 20th we'll be meeting at the Double Tree that's the headquarters and as Terry was saying earlier we're going to have the website up fairly soon uh the committee is really they're looking at everything I mean the speakers Galore they I think we've just about got them all set uh there's just so many fine people and let me go to the next screen here the first night and some of you anyone who's a kanen City Chiefs uh football fan knows that this is the place where the team gathers on important events whether it's the uh Super Bowl championship or whatever this is the place they meet we are going to meet there for our first night of Alon at The Godly planetarium it's a Well Done facility that's for Wednesday night the 17th then the next night and this photo by the way is courtesy of lindal Library back in 2016 uh one of our speakers here David ly uh he was uh present for turning over his observing logs to the lindal library that's going to be a feature of our uh convention is being able to see some of those and also his first telescope that is also in Residence at lindal library in addition there'll be a reception to go along with that at the same time so we're really looking forward to that and David thank you so much for uh being available for that really looking forward to it on I'm going to be at um yeah that's going to be fun going to be at the conference in Kansas City and at the Linda Hall Library what could be better than that and I'm really looking forward to that and to seeing all of you there yeah it's gonna be fun on Friday night at our usual uh starbq that we do at each Alcon we're going to have the actual starbq at the Overland Park Arboretum which is about 10 miles uh south of Kansas City and we're going to have our meal there and then we're going to go on down to Pal Observatory just down south of that facility and we'll be having a talk down at the observatory that's one of our nighttime shots from one of our photographers it's a uh we've been in business at pal Observatory since 19 85 uh recently we were uh able to purchase land for uh another facility that will be a little further out in Dark Skies however uh this one is still doing an extremely good job for the public and we've done some very Innovative things since Co forced us to uh really change things how we operate so that's going to be a a good thing to see so i' invite you all to attend that as well on the trip and finally we're going to have star tread actor Tim Russ who played the role of Lieutenant Commander tuac on Star Trek just so happens Tim is also an amateur astronomer musician and writer he's also working with NASA supplying several images of asteroids for their asteroid research uh and rumor has it that if it works out uh he's going to be uh playing with our jazz band which we're probably going to have at the banquet on Saturday night so he's a very talented individual very approachable and he's we're really looking forward to that as well uh one of our members knows him from the Griffith days and he really does an excellent job out there of H doing research with the public as far as astronomy and sharing now but that's uh that's sort of uh where we are right now we've got probably uh yeah we're probably almost full on speaker but we can always use some more but uh we're coming on very nicely and I think that's it for right now uh back to you Terry well thank you Carol that's the first I've seen the slideshow of all this that that is going to be so much fun you will have rates like a couple days ahead or a couple days after for people that want to come early or stay a little bit later and look around that's exactly right we have such events as the World War One Museum that gets a lot of attention uh also we have the uh negro leges uh uh uh exhibit there in Kansas City uh it's interesting they uh sold the rights to the Monarch's baseball not too long ago uh they or I should say they came to an agreement uh for the minor league team in Kansas City to carry that name and so there's a lot of exciting things going and for you street car fans maybe by the time of the convention the construction will be somewhat done where you can actually get away on the street car it's going down Main Street right now so I think that'll be a nice addition as well absolutely free that will be fun that sounds like a great time I am looking forward to it so thank you so much Carol it sounds like committee who's putting it together that s it sure sounds like it thank you and thank them for all the work they're doing that looks incredible so all right Kelly I am it is good to talk to you but don't you start your talk yet because I want to read your bio BEC I'm sure everybody knows who you are but I need to do this anyway um it is so nice to see you it has been wow I think I did see you uh it's been a couple three years ago probably and I can't remember where it had to be at an Alon so um thank you so much for being here that's my pleasure Terry and uh uh you know I I I have to say before you read whatever bio you've got I hope that those of you who are watching appreciate that the five people who are here Scott and Carol and David and Terry and me um these are people who have spent their lifetimes in the furtherance of amateur astronomy and you know amateur is from the French word to love all of us love astronomy we love telling people about astronomy uh stargazing in all of its forms and I can't think of a better group of people to be carrying that flag than the than the ones we have here so thanks for the invitation and thanks for all that the league does well thank you Kelly that's that's really nice so all right let me go ahead Kelly you can get ready and I am going to introduce Jay Kelly B he has been explaining science and The Wonder of astronomy to the public since 1974 when he joined the staff of sky and Telescope an award-winning writer Communicator he specializes in planetary science and space exploration in 2018 after 43 days of pound oh days 43 years of pounding the keyboard he retired from full-time work but remains actively involved in many s sky and Telescope articles tours and other projects Kelly holds a bachelor degree from the California Institute of Technology and a master's degree from Boston University asteroid 2925 beedy was named on the occasion of his marriage in 1983 and he remains on the front line of fighting light pollution locally and nationally and I thank you a lot for that too Kelly you have done a lot and it it's a real honor to have you here tonight well thank you so much Cherry um you know as I have I have a in retirement I'm finding that I'm really able to uh capitalize on all the years I spent at Sky and Telescope but but really go beyond that to uh talk to people especially beginners adult beginners who have always had a curiosity about astronomy but don't understand it and my Mantra is that astronomy can be beautiful it can be technical for sure but it can be just beautiful and so tonight I'm going to be talking about um a a a place on the earth that we all think we know something about and yet we know very little about and this is a talk that I could not have put together even five years ago so I'm going to share my screen uh optimize I want to share sound for sure share go to that and start the presentation are we good Scott yes sir yes sir all right so um I've had a lifelong fascination with Stonehenge and uh as you'll see it has interwoven itself in my life uh and my and with my wife in in particular and so we had some things happen recently ston henges is this incredible iconic place that uh and I'll say this a couple of times the Builders of Stonehenge left us nothing in the way of explaining why they did it there's no written records there's no you know all we have are bone chips of cremated remains um and so we've had to piece this together over time and so what I hope to talk about tonight is is the why where how and and when of it at all and uh and in particular what has been discovered recently about Stonehenge so let's set the stage here we're talking about a time in history in the Neolithic times that is the new stone age uh you know when you go back this far in time we we gauge the development of of human Civilization by their ability to make various tools and by the middle and late Neolithic they had gone beyond just having you know a a a a big boulder in their hand that they were smashing things with to actually shape tools and so this is the period of time when Stonehenge came about and it didn't come about quickly it was actually over several centuries so this is the period of time we're talking about basically contemporary with the oldest pyramids uh from about 3,000 to 2200 BC now here's an interesting fact that maybe no one has realized in 1903 in the town of cheddar England yes that's the place that cheese comes from and yes they make cheese there uh they found the remains of a um of a h quite old uh human from basically the the just post Ice Age the last ice age and uh they this fellow named cheddar man uh was recently uh analyzed from a DNA perspective sort of uh trying to reconstruct what he might have actually looked like and the researchers involved were surprised to find out that he had a dark fairly dark skin but blue eyes not exactly the kind of person that you associate with um with England and so um I'm gonna try to get rid of a couple things here on my screen hang on for just one second there you go okay um so where did this guy come from where did his civilization come from and we think of the uh the the British Islands as being you know geographically isolated but that's really not true at the end of the last ice age and during the last ice age which is you know roughly 10,000 years ago um a lot of ice was piled up on land and the area between England and the Continental of continent of Europe was dry so there was a land bridge to the United Kingdom and so it's thought that cheddar man and uh the people of that era in the late Neolithic this was the the transition from being uh hunter gatherers to actually being an agrarian society where they stayed put they grew crops and it it appears that a lot of the people who um moved into Southern England at that time were from uh Eastern Mediterranean and in particular the Middle East and they took root there and that might help explain the sort of physical characteristics of cheddar man whatever their origin one of the things that these peoples did in abundance was build stone monuments um there's a lot of stone in England and they made good use of them this is a great website ston circles.org which has mapped all of the stone circles the henges a henge is a circular earthwork with a ditch in the middle and an embankment on the outside and barrows carons and other kinds of piles of stones to commemorate often um you know the burial sites of loved ones now I'm going to show you a few of them that are rather famous throughout the UK for those who've been to Dublin Ireland just north of there by not very 20 or 30 miles uh is a um it's a river called the Bourn River and there is a place called new Grange uh which is alongside that river which is essentially an enormous burial mound you see the picture there you can see the people down there at the lower left corner for scale uh this is an entire burial mound aligned to the sunrise point at at winter susus about where we're at now and now on those days there's a there's a passageway to the central barrier chamber that gets illuminated by the rising Sun's light and it illuminates uh this chamber it's it's a fascinating Place uh I hope you get a chance to see it in the north of the British Isles north of Scotland on the aisle of Lewis is a kind of poor cousin to Stonehenge called The Standing Stones of konish it's not a stone circle per se it's actually in the shape of a cross but it's very if you get to this island it's very easy to access uh there's basically a cow p a cow gate that you go through uh there's no real uh charge or anything you just show up and this is a very interesting place I want you to notice that a lot of these stones are not just uh chunks of rock they're actually shaped and this seems to be characteristic of a lot of these Stone circles in the Great Britain uh also very far north in Scotland in orne is a stone circle called The Ring of brodgar I had a chance to visit there just a year and a half or so ago and uh it's a true Stone Circle um and nearby is a fra a fragment of the stone circle called The Standing Stones of stess interestingly uh you know over the over the Millennia a lot of these Stone monuments uh have as Generations go by their importance uh ceases to be uh emphasized or even remembered and so we we see in these a lot of these that they're a partial stone circle like in this case and that's because a lot of the stones have been repurposed taken away and that's certainly the case here and in fact in this particular case of the town the the uh um historical commissions have had to negotiate with the local farmers because it's on private Farmland to keep them from carrying away any more of the stones that are there well back down in Southern England is this really large uh uh monument and you can see this is a hinge you can see the ditch and the embankment there very clearly but just inside the ditch you can see a ring of Standing Stones this is a very large complex um that that exists today in some sense a larger than Stonehenge but but not nearly as sophisticated and then there's the granddaddy of all of them why we're here tonight which is Stonehenge itself on the Salsbury plane uh and and this is a place about I would say about 40 miles to the southwest of London and as you look across this terrain with stone henge there in the foreground and and you can kind of see the henge part which is much larger than the Stone Circle itself there is nothing about this place that is distinctive it's not like the Confluence of Three Rivers or a Giant mountain range you know with a peak in the middle there's nothing to suggest why it was that this particular place on the plains uh to the southwest of London what is now London was chosen for this Monument whatever the reason it has been occupied and memorialized for 10,000 years this is um right here is the the uh picture on the left of the old parking lot for Stonehenge and when they uh went to remove the asphalt and move it to a new location with a new Visitor Center they discovered that there were some holes in the ground um they are they are what are called tree throws a tree throws imagine that you have a a big tree in your yard and You Yank It Out there's a hole left behind and that's a tree throw um and and they may be naturally occurring they might have been like from a um a post or some kind in any case it indicates that this part of Britain was inhabited at least until about eight uh uh 8,000 BC whatever the reason this particular part of Great Britain is just full of monumental works by the people who that occupied there there's St stonehand of course uh uh I let's see if I can get my cursor to work down here um along the river Avon is something recently discovered called Blue Stone Henge this greater cursus that you see is essentially a long linear henge um uh and we're going to talk about woodhenge and durington walls here for just a minute this is uh the the part at the top here this very large hinge uh area is uh called durington walls it's obviously human-made its origin and and reason for being is a little bit mystical at this point down in the corner here you can see what is called woodhinge it's kind of a counterpart to stonehinge this is what's there today uh there are no there's no wood this this is like holes in the ground into which giant pillars of of wood were inserted the wood is long since rotted away what you see there now are sort of concrete proxies for where the these pillars totems would have stood but in a Heyday woodhenge might have looked something like this and this was contemporary with the later stages of Stonehenge so in that vicinity interestingly the scale of woodhenge and Stonehenge is pretty comparable um the wood hen is actually six concentric circles of um of uh giant wooden poles stuck into the ground and uh you can see the henge part around it this seemed to be a a common construction can technique for these Monumental developments there would be a hent around the outside maybe it was for fortification maybe it was ceremonial who knows uh with whatever the the the U main feature the main attraction was in the center so our knowledge of Stonehenge is actually pretty fragmentary over the ages um this is a a um watercolor from the late 1500s I think it's a little bit fanciful it shows first of all it shows the the stone circle that we're familiar with as much more complete notice how you can see the hinge there around the outside uh it's much closer in this depiction to the Stone Circle than than is actually the case this is a little bit more realistic it's from 1797 and we know that this had to be painted before that year because in 1797 this Trio of giant Stones here called the trilon fell over and so um we know that it had to have been painted before then well the point is that throughout history as we know it Stonehenge was always on private land and it came to pass that in the late 1800s it was owned by a family called antrobus and the um uh this is a a a vintage photograph from that time the early 1900s the last surviving Heir was killed in World War I and so they had to um uh get rid of the estate they had a they had a giant estate sale and there was a man in that vicinity who lived in the area named sir cesil chub and his wife Mary you see them there in this picture uh and there during there was going to be an auction of a lot of the Holdings from the anbus estate and Sir cile went down there uh with an eye toward seeing what he might pick up and it's it's rumored that his wife Mary said oh cile dear could you please be a darling and pick me up some curtains for our paror and so he went down to the auction he did not come back with curtains but he did come back with the ownership of Stonehenge which he bought for 6600 pounds at the time roughly a million dollars in current currency and then because he recognized the its value as a historical and archaeological treasure turned over to the British government just three years later now just a few days ago if you can believe it this purchase of Stonehenge was the Final Jeopardy question answer uh on November 29th and let's see if we can play this this is what we like to see a tight game going into Final Jeopardy the category is a bit of Britain players here's your clue in disarray it was sold at auction in 19 15 to a local Wiltshire man who would donate it to the British government 3 years later 30 seconds good [Music] luck so you notice the blank Expressions on all their faces there none of them got it right by the way U the a couple of them did Stone of scone but that was wrong anyway once it was turned over to the British government uh an effort was made to sort of gston Heng a facelift it really was in disarray and it was turned over to the British equivalent of the Army Corps of Engineers a led by Lieutenant Colonel William Holly who did a lot of work over an eight-year period it was quite a protracted uh renovation drew a lot of attention national uh nationally and internationally this is a a uh um a a reproduction from the Richmond Virginia Times Dispatch about uh how the ruins are being rebuilt and uh after that excuse me during that they they they accomplished several things um many of these the very large stones that you see are called sarsens and so they re-erected many of them although not exactly where maybe they were originally and they importantly they excavated down to the through the turf to the real surf surface of this area now this is Southern England and and the the basement rock here is actually chalk and if you think of the White Cliffs of do it makes a little bit of sense so they excavated down I want you to notice that there is a roadway here that goes right by this large Stone which is called the heel stone this stone is very important in the Solar sols the summer solstice alignment which we'll talk about later but you know the point is that people were just driving by this thing all the time uh there was a much more uh extensive renovation that took place in the late 1950s they re-erected that trilon that had fallen uh in 1797 and some other things and and importantly they stabilized a lot of these sarsens these huge stones in concrete so they wouldn't fall over again and they reset some of the blue stones now we we think of Stonehenge as these giant stones that you see there in the uh in the picture but one of the one the facets of it are these little stones that you see right here that are called blue stones um and and this is one of the blue stones right here um that are much smaller than the sarsens so all of this work and the work since then has led archaeologists to understand that Stonehenge was built over a number of centuries and in four distinct stages and here's the first stage this is the oldest part and there's nothing there uh except basically this big henge which is about 100 meters across and there are four Stones uh you can see them here uh they're labeled um and there's an entrance way in the in the northeast corner uh that that allows you to get through the hinge and the uh the ditch and the embankment and I want you to notice those holes they're labeled Aubrey holes they play an important role in stonan the important part here is they these holes were part of the original construction there now mind you this is at a period of time it's the Stone Age uh there these people whoever they were they had no metal tools they had no horses they had no wheels so everything they did was by Brute Force Labor uh the best they had available to them were were antler picks for for um for tools these Aubrey holes which were first recognized actually in the 17th century and rediscovered by Holly when Holly did his work in the early uh 1900 uh 1900s he was not the most careful of archaeologists in many of the stones he found cremated remains and so what he did was he gathered up all the cremated remains from all of the holes and he put them in one hole not a very good smart thing to do from an archaeological point of view but these Aubrey holes are about a meter across they're 56 of them and uh they're they're they they do indeed contain a lot of uh cremated remains of of of humans probably burial sites but there are some rock chips in the bottom of them that are consistent uh with being from very far away from Wales and we'll get to that in just a moment but you get to see this is the picture on the left there is from an excavation about roughly a decade ago when they really uh dug down and and tried to find out what was going on so the second stage uh still there's no big sarsens yet the the blue stones these mediumsized Stones really took to the four and you there were a couple of semicircles of these Stones very importantly these blue stones are ous rock they are not from anywhere near Stonehenge itself and for almost a century uh uh geologists have realized that the most likely place they could have come from is from uh certain sites in Wales to the West uh where these these Stones exist as outcrops they're as I said they're mediumsized here you see a picture with a typical science writer for scale um and they're IGN they're called blue stones because when they get wet or when you have a fresh surface they do have a sort of bluish tinge to them so they must have come from Wales but where exactly has remained a mystery until 2019 that's when I came across this article in the uh Journal Antiquity from a team of Geo geologists and archa archaeologists led by Michael Parker Pearson in in the U in the in the UK who had identified a specific outcrop in Wales that's a Wales there at the in the in the map that you see there uh where they had found a kind of Blu stone called spotted doite which matched What was seen at Stonehenge and so this is a blow up of that the Red Square here shows a blowup of this area and in particular there there are several outcrops of this of this blue stone like material but uh Parker Pearson and his team identified this spoted doite as coming from one outcrop here in the Presley Hills area of of whales and so I I got in contact with him I sent him an email and I said you know I've had I work for Sky telescope I've got this long uh fascination with Stonehenge can you tell me more than what's in your article and I got an auto reply saying hi this is uh Professor Pearson I'm on medical leave I probably won't get your email for three months goodbye I went oh darn but then the next day I got another email from that same account hello this is Mrs Parker Pearson how lovely of you to write uh Michael would be uh greatly please to know of your interest in Stonehenge let me tell you how to find this outcrop uh you need such and such a map go talk to Farmer so and so and by the way at the end of the road there's a lovely Pub well great so I turned to my wife Cheryl and I said sweetie how'd you like to go to Wales and to Wales we went uh and and of course we had to go through London uh first and we got a chance to visit Stonehenge more on that in a second this is uh Professor Parker Pearson and um this is the outcrop I I found the outcrop following the directions and it's just a pile of stones it's not a sacred site or anything like that um and so as a consequence I'm there and I said wow I really need a momento of this occasion now this out crop has been used by the locals for all kinds of stuff mailbox post and all kinds so it so I didn't feel bad taking a piece of it with me uh but it was a little bit of an ordeal you can see that all these stones are pretty welded into the turf I do have a piece of it so getting back to our Stonehenge Story how did they get them from the Presley Hills in Wales to the Stonehenge site on the Salsbury plane and more importantly why why what was the what did did the people in Wales know about Stonehenge do the people in Stonehenge know about whales who knows but it turns out that the key seems to be a a a monument not far from that site here it's the same map again called wine mountain and it is there that's a partial circle of stones there's only four left only one is standing the other three are are falling down and Parker Pearson was convinced that there was a link between you can see that it's a blue stone it's this it's this you know it's this ignest rock and he was convinced that there was a uh there was more to it than that so in about five years ago he took a team and and you can see up here these are the the the existing stones and he continued around what would have been the circle looking for other evidence that there might have been other stones in the past now there are no Stones there now but any of you who have ever dug a hole in your backyard you know that once you dig that hole you've Disturbed the surface and you might fill that hole back in and you might Tamp it down but from a geological point of view you've left a mark that can be rediscovered people later on will be able to figure out where your hole was and so it was with this excavation that they found other holes in the shape of a circle where stones used to be but are no longer and I highly recommend that you go to um um PBS or just YouTube and check out this uh documentary called The Law Circle revealed which is just a couple of years old this I have a couple of clips from that that are are are very instructive and here's the first of those as one hole after another was Unearthed the shape of the circle was revealed and its Dimensions got the team excited it diameter 110 M was exactly the same as the Outer Perimeter around Stonehenge the chances of the two having exactly the same dimensions are really very slim wine man could be the predecessor for Stonehenge but they needed more proof could they find evidence of a direct connection between the two monuments an odd shaped Stone hole provided an opportunity to once again use photogrammetry we could see the exact shape of the base of each stone that had stood in them and one of them was very unusual because it had a slightly kind of pentagonal crosssection and what was interesting was that there was one at Stonehenge which had a very similar form could they match the shape of the wine M hole to the stone at Stonehenge it fitted like a key in a lock but this evidence alone was not conclusive they still didn't know when the circle was constructed and so to answer that question they used a of techniques radiocarbon dating you've probably heard of optically stimulated luminescence you probably have not heard of it's It's a a uh a characteristic of quartz grains in particular that when they're exposed to sunlight uh they retain a latent energy and if they haven't been exposed to sunlight since then you can actually determine uh how long ago that exposure took place and so they use this these techniques to determine that the holes at wine Mound uh the the when the the stones were removed had to have been earlier than the earliest Stone circles at at Stonehenge and so the chronology is consistent it appears that for whatever reason the Stone Circle existed at wine Mound not far from the quarrying site in Wales and then all of those stones were removed and taken to the Salsbury plane Parker Pearson explains a little more when Stonehenge started out it looked very different to how it looks [Music] now The Monuments we see today dates to around 2,500 BC but Mike's team confirmed the existence of numerous empty Stone holes evidence that the stones have been rearranged multiple times the original configuration dating from around 3,000 BC was an enormous Circle made entirely of blue [Music] stones and I want to fixate on that picture for just a second those are the stones that occupied the Aubrey holes and so the Aubrey holes were never in intended to be cremation sites they are the holes that had the original ring of stones at Stonehenge and so that part of the mystery became clear now those blue stones got moved around a lot there are lots of holes on the Stonehenge site uh that are empty of stones right now representing multiple configurations of those blue stones over the centuries this is when the sarson circle was added roughly about uh 2500 BC 2400 BC and and by then uh this was a fairly um uh sophisticated and and well-developed mature site if you will and and you see there that in this uh upper upper right hand corner toward the Northeast there were some sort of cere ceremonial Stones set out and all kinds of holes left over from previous previous iterations you know there's a um uh I just want to take a pause here uh this notion that these Stones came from so far away uh there's no real proof other than their geochemistry but in English lore from the 1100s there is a story that Stonehenge was built by Merlin remember Merlin um as an homage to English dead soldiers and he had these Stones brought from Ireland um back in those days the notion of Ireland and Wales being synonymous was was U uh common and that once they got the stones back to England he had a a a a a team of giants assemble them into Stonehenge and that's obviously very fanciful but there are grains of Truth in there in terms of the distance that these Stones came from well Stonehenge as we think of it today is really an incomplete work the original sarson Circle the 30 the big Stones uh were there were 30 of them and many of them are missing lots of holes lots of pieces but but archaeologists have taken very great care to to ascertain everything those 30 Standing Stones were enormous uh they were up to 25 tons each uh they had a unique construction that I'll mention in a second they were much much bigger than the than the blue stones and in particular they had a different composition they're married from a kind of sandstone which was quarried from not far away from like 20 miles away to the North in a place called Westwoods and you can see this is a piece of stone there now in the Westwoods to to show what the source was like but still they managed to shape and move these stones with the crudest of tools um there's been lots of speculation over the years on how these Stones got moved these 20 miles the the original thought is well you know they just got logs and they rolled them on the logs but they weighed so much that they would have pressed the logs into the turf more likely uh uh archaeologists now think is that the they use sleds now maybe they use the sleds on top of a kind of set of rails like you see here's a little animation from National Geographic the truth is we really have no idea how they move these stones what we know is that they didn't have a lot of uh technology no wheels no horses to to do the work for them nor do we really understand how they managed to get them upright and stacked as they did uh th this remains just a an area of pure speculation one thing we do know however is that these Stones were interlocking they were very sophisticated a combination of tongue and groove construction and mortise and Tenon and they are not found on any other Monument of this age anywhere in the world so whoever built Stonehenge really knew what they were doing now we associate the outer stone circle with modern Stonehenge and you can see an aerial photo here but I want to call your attention especially to these five trios of stone that create a horseshoe shape on the inside these are trons and there are five of them these are even bigger Stones they're up to 24 feet tall uh the the the largest of them weigh weigh um you know 35 tons and they are the one of these trons is what fell in 1797 so this is a a sort of horseshoe shape within the outer Stone Circle still the the question is how did they muster the manpower to make all this happen well the BBC uh explained 2 miles from Stonehenge lies durington walls the largest Neolithic site ever discovered in Britain at a time when settlements were rarely more than a house or two it was a temporary home for thousands a popup town full of Builders around 2,500 BC they constructed a huge wooden Circle woodhenge the Blu Stone Circle was repositioned and the huge Sasson stones that now Define it were added Salsbury plane now had two complimentary sacred monuments so the the question remains why was Stonehenge built we know it was built but why what was it what was special about the Salsberry plane that Drew all of this attention and um the clue probably came from this excavation about a decade ago they went again went down to the chalk paint but this time they you can see they're a little bit farther away and they discovered grooves in the chalk surface remember this whole area was glaciated during the last ice age and Glaciers as they move across the ground they pick up rocks and those rocks gouge out uh grooves in the in the terrain below as the glaciers move along so in this terrain here the chalk which is a very soft rock got this impressive set of aligned grooves that you can see there the thing is those grooves align to the position of the summer solstice Sunrise you can see there here's the heal Stone here's the Stone Circle everything is in alignment here so in it it seems that that these ancient peoples were drawn to the Salsbury plane because of its uh mystical alignment with the motion of the sun now this will be familiar to many of you but guess what the Earth has a tilted axis and as we go around the Sun that tilt is primarily responsible for our Seasons we have uh equinoxes in March and September we have solstices in June and December and during those times uh the the the position of the Suns rising and setting along the horizon shifts in the summertime it's farthest north at the equ oxes it's due east and west and at the solstice in December it's farth the South we're coming up on that ladder now um and so for whatever reason this summer solstice alignment became very important to these ancient peoples there's that heel stone I was telling you about and you can see the sun rising behind it I was fascinated by this this whole notion and so in 1981 uh my uh my girlfriend and I Cheryl made a trek to England around the time of the summer solstice I used my uh skying telescope cred to get into the inner circle of the stones for this Sunrise now the the the this ceremony that you see all these people here and and believe me it it attracts a wide assortment of people um has been sort of taken over by The Druids as a kind of uh ceremonial ual uh event and and The Druids are there when we were there uh the it was cloudy we didn't get to see the sunrise but my my Cheryl was so impressed that I had gone to all this trouble to get her into this into the Stone Circle at sunrise on summer solsis I could only have done this for one reason and of course that was to propose to her which I didn't I had no clue that I was supposed to do that and my poor Cheryl went away I'm sure very disappointed on that day but all right let's back up to the astronomy here for a second uh you might remember that at the time of the solstice which is an ancient Latin word meaning sun stands still the true motion of the sun along the horizon at Sunrise is very slight this is from stellarium you can see the calendar clicking off here and the sun moves just a fraction of its diameter day by day so the notion that these ancient peoples had used you know Stonehenge to Mark the exact date of the summer solsis was probably just an approximation they might have used it for a ceremonial thing and also you know it was the middle of summer and and it was a time to celebrate but I want to take you back to this very first graphic that I showed you of the site and remember those four Stones the Barrow stones the station Stones they also happen to be aligned to the summer solstice and in fact if you think about it all I need is two stakes in the ground to align the summer salces I don't need to build you know this giant stone monument so it would seem that from its outset Solstice played the summer solstice played an important role in in in um in Stonehenge for both for the sunrise at Midsummer and the sun set as this picture shows in midwinter they're parallels uh uh events so they Mark the passage of the sun North and South along the horizon now I want to turn your attention to the moon and its orbit for a second here as this animation shows and as most of you know um the moon's orbit is inclined about five degrees with respect to the Earth's orbit the ecliptic the ecliptic plane and also it's the case that due to perturbations from the Sun the that lunar orbital plane precesses around the earth with a period of about 19 years and so what that means is that at various times the moon can be a little bit higher or lower in the sky uh over this uh 19 year 16 point uh 18.6 year period This has a lot to do with the SAR cycle for eclipses and a lot of people have speculated that maybe you know maybe Stonehenge was established as an eclipse predictor but that's never really been demonstrated what is true is that from Solstice just like the sun has a farthest north rise and a farthest South rise the moon would as well but because of the procession of the moon's orbit there's a kind of plus or minus five degree slop there and so back in the 1960s a guy named Gerald Hawkins imagined that Stonehenge was more than just a sunrise indicator it was actually some kind of exotic lunar calendar and you can see here all of the alignments that he um purported there to exist at Stonehenge now some of these are to actual holes as opposed to Stones no one has really taken Hawkins seriously but it did get people thinking a lot about uh why Stonehenge was was actually created why did people go to all this trouble you know and you if you think about it when else in human history has somebody decided to do something that took centuries to to accomplish um and the answer is several of the great cathedrals in Europe took several centuries to build some Bishop at one point would say you know I'm gonna have a cathedral built and many generations later uh it was finally accomplished well here's a new wrinkle on Stonehenge and why it exists maybe it was just a giant calendar uh a researcher named Timothy darville who's part of of the uh Parker Pearson team noticed that some of the sarsens are skinnier than all the rest of them so this one on the left here that you see is much narrower in size than the fat one to its right now the spaces between them are pretty constant but the sizes of the sarsens the width their actual width here's here's a plot uh these are not of height but actually of the width of the sarson and you see that there's one here number 11 and another one here number 21 that are abnormally smaller than the rest and so what darville said was well maybe there's something to this sort of decade of 10 thing going on there are 30 sarsens Al together can be divided by three into three sets of 10 now 30 is kind of an important number in Celestial terms it's the roughly the length of the lunar phase cycle uh also the roughly the length of a woman's menstrual cycle and there were 30 sarsens erected at stonehinge and what darville said in his in his writeup was maybe those sarsens were used to count off days of the month of a month and so if you did 30 times 12 uh broken into uh uh uh sets of 10 because we've got 10 fingers and 10 toes um uh maybe it was used as a calendar and so 20 I mean sorry 30 * 12 is 360 which is roughly the length of a year and I can hear you screaming at me saying Kelly there's 365 days in the year and you would be right and at that point darville says well look there are five sets of trons on the interior that's 360 that is 20 time 30 I 30 time 12 sorry and plus these three trons equals 365 oh you're again screaming at me saying Kelly the actual length of the year is 365 and a quarter days and every four years we have to have a leap year you're right and so I brought your attention to these four initial stones that were the the uh the ones that are out on the outer periphery so here you have in a sense a complete calendar you have a way to count off 365 days and to keep track of the four years that lead to a leap year is darville right it's just a supposition again we have no evidence to support this but it's I think it's a very interesting uh uh reason for the stones being where they are okay that's all the history let's talk about Stonehenge today you can go there you can visit it 800,000 people a year visit Stonehenge you're looking at the uh the main road in the area uh which is uh uh the uh area Road 303 this uh ditch here is the a former road that used to connect with it that's been abandoned at this point um and Stonehenge is easily visible from this road in fact there's a very controversial plan to try to bury this road underneath to keep the area pristin I won't really get into that but this is what Stonehenge looks like today from above the visitor center is way off to the right I'm sorry to the upper left sorry and here you can see this roadway that's been abandoned the roadway now ends here this is where the buses will drop you off you get to walk around this uh uh dirt passageway you can see this is the original hinge here on the outside you don't get to go inside the stones I'm sorry it's just not 800,000 people go away disappointed because they don't get to so go see the stones but if any of you have a chance to go visit Stonehenge here's a an Insider tip two bus loads of people at the beginning and end of each day paying a little bit extra about $60 a person can walk inside the stones you're under scrutiny you're not allowed to Chisel your name in the stones but you actually get to go inside ston hedge and so that's what I did with Cheryl A couple of years ago and you know you pick up the aura of these these stones have been there for up to 5,000 years there's something just weird and mystical and spooky about it but I did remember ladies and gentlemen that back in 1981 which was the last time that Cheryl and I had been there I had blown it on the marriage proposal this time I wasn't going to screw it up I gave her this beautiful Celtic pendant uh with an amethyst which is her birth stone in the middle you can see those stones of Stonehenge behind her she went away a happy camper and so did I and with that I think I'm going to return uh the control here to you Scott and uh maybe we can take some questions uh I'm not sure how you handle questions Terry thank you very much for the invitation uh this has been a labor of love and I hope you've enjoyed it definitely enjoyed it that's someplace I have always wanted to go because one of my questions was going to be what is it like going to Stonehenge today I had heard you could not get near The Stone so that Insider tip is a real good one yeah that's right and uh and you know that it's right at sunrise and sunset the uh um and you can book it you have to book it well in advance I must say but if you think you're ever going to go there it's definitely doable and um uh you know you you get a a a very intimate feeling for the place bet I bet so so Scott are there any questions there's no questions but H Kelly you did mentioned something yeah I have a question though you well you mentioned something about the aura that you feel and I know that I know that you go you know you go to like I go to for example Mount Wilson or y's Observatory and I can feel you can feel the history there yeah there is this undeniable um uh feeling of that kind of thing what how did you feel as it feel well so so the thing is what what overwhelmed me is that here was a construction uh a very simple material but obviously sophisticated um that took centuries to complete thousands of people to complete uh and the dedication that they must have what what you know the shamans or whatever they had that drove them to complete this Monument um uh it's just staggering to think of there is a thought that in that period of time in England we're talking about you know two to three thousand years BC that there were actually several cultures extending outward Westward to Wales that had a kind of loose Confederation they knew about each other they communicated and maybe that had something to do with the the uh uh migration of those Blu stones from Wales to England but whatever the reasons Scott um the fact that so many people worked so hard so long ago and and you can it's there for you to appreciate and Ponder today you know it hasn't gone away it's still there there there stones now some of those stones have um carvings in them you know from people over the last hundred years or so that left their initials or little little heroglyph or whatever but but basically um uh and and some of the stones that those giant sarson have they've not all been re-erected some of them are just lying there on the ground um and and so um you know the they they want to preserve this uh for a for the ages to come as a reminder and boy it always it always busts my chops when somebody says well Stonehenge obviously had to be uh with the aid of aliens you know because no nobody that long ago would have been smart enough to do it on their own that's just bull I I think I I just aliens can move big things you know well they can yeah they can but you think they would have left you know their business card or something um I I just uh over a month a month ago uh we were in the Yucatan for the annular eclipse and we saw all the amazing Maya ruins and of course the Maya left very dedicated uh very detailed records of their history and their and their knowledge their knowledge of of mathematics and and astronomy was amazing and they are contemporary in a lot of ways with what was going on in Stonehenge so I'm sorry I think prehistoric peoples they might not have had cell phones you know but they they they understood their world and they um they honored it yeah that's cool it is cool question yes I have a comment actually regarding the aura that Scott suggested I have felt the aura of Stonehenge three times in my life the first time was when I attended Gerald Hawkins lecture in Montreal called Stone stoned decoded his book had just come out and he t talked about Stonehenge not just being a calendar but a predictor of eclipses and I thought I've never that's never left me and every time I see an eclipse I think of Stonehenge the other the the second Aura was when I actually visited Stonehenge in December of 1976 and I was one of the very last people to actually walk right on the site go right up to the stones and uh I thought that was really quite something and the third Aura was just now when I heard my second lecture from M Kelly on Stonehenge and I just loved it thank you so much thank you David that's that's a High Praise indeed I'm glad you felt the weeb jeebies just like I did yeah is it is it a kind of a spooky feeling or how would you you know you so so scottt one of the things is that we don't know how they erected these this you know the giant sarson Circle yeah with with most the most rudimentary of tools they had ropes you know they had levers uh working on it and and you just stand there and the pictures don't do justice to how enormous these Stones actually are and you wonder how the heck did they move them and get them into place and they I'm reading they weighed I mean I don't know how many tons each Stone 25 tons there the the trons are up to 35 tons man and and by the way they're standing upright and by the way they've got a Capstone on top of them go figure that's pretty amazing well we're all speechless speechless yeah I just want the alien thing in there because that's probably what it was oh all right so now now I get to show you this is my piece of blueone piece of the rock literally it's literally a piece of the rock so I I not from Stonehenge though right this is from that outcrop in Wales and when I got there I said well I'm not going home without a momento right but there were there were no small pieces like that lying around and so I did what any enterprising amateur astronomer would have done I grabbed a big one and I smashed it on the ground until it broke into pieces small enough for me to take away and you flew that home I did I absolutely did oh my God okay that added a little weight to the luggage I'm sure just just a bit just a bit just a bit it also but but I I want to show you I want to show you hold on a second okay I think you can see you see the white specs in there yeah that's the spottedness of this what's called spotted doite which was the key to making the link between stones that Stonehenge and this particular outcrop in Wales oh so they know for a fact that those St Stones came from there yes it's CSI geology you know it it was it's a great story a great story that is amazing that is amazing yeah definitely 40 kilometers away I me it's just nuts it is so you're that's why it feels so amazing stand there very apt title you know but you know obviously you know humans made it you know so unless it was aliens right right you imagine the creativity the brute force of this I mean the brute force of it and and Terry and to your point the the sarson were were very late to the game as we all know you know I can put two stakes in the ground and line up with the summer solsis and I'll have a fairly accurate reading on that depending on how far away the stakes are from each other I didn't need 30 20 ton stones in a circle you know to to make that point and so there came a a there there there must have been this an inflection point a decision point in the development of Stonehenge um where somebody says oh the blue stones aren't enough we really need something really big here and profound and yeah Carol just you know like we need we need something bigger and better uh and and so you wonder what the multi-generational chain of command must have been was there a family of shamans who like passed from like father to son you know over a hundreds over hundreds of years this knowledge if it was a calendar who kept track you know was there was there a team of scribes who were off on the side keeping track of the days as was H that's what kind of what happened in in Maya culture and we just don't no the Maya left us a lot of Clues the Builders of Stonehenge left us NADA just incredible that that momentum could keep on happening over centuries and just keep on the Baton so-call being passed yeah exactly that just incredible and keep the same interest level up are there people buried at Stonehenge um well so that's really good question Scott um there were discovered especially um 10 years ago when they when they did a lot of um uh really careful excavations you remember Holly back uh uh you know 110 years ago took all of the cremated remains and he dumped them all in one hole really stupid thing to do but at least they were all there and so um I think that those remains have been removed I don't know this for a fact I I don't think they just left them there and you know buried them they would have taken them away for forensic studies for example somebody asked me when I gave this lecture um how do you know whether these were like people who willingly built the monument versus were they slaves very good question right and so it it seems to be from these um from these uh these chips of bone that we have that whoever the people were at that time buried uh they had a diet that was that was very uh Rich it was a rich diet there were a lot of protein and stuff like that and so the implication from that is that you know these weren't slaves on the verge of starvation it was a a race of people who collectively were wellfed they took care of each other and they built these monuments collectively well that's pretty interesting it's amazing what they've discovered I'm I'm since all through history everything that has changed yeah it's amazing I can't imagine what it feels like just to stand there I I see why you would feel the way you would oh ABS it's just it's it's overwhelming you you you just stand there open mouth at the immensity of it of the complexity of it and trying to understand the justification for it um it was it was a great experience for me and I hope you get there someday I do too that's gonna have to be going closer to the top of my bucket list there are a lot of us that are watching and and Us in this group here that have done and enjoy doing educational Outreach uh what what is the I understand there's volunteers at Stonehenge and they do the interpretation of Stonehenge what's the quality of that like what would you say well let's see um when when I went there um two or three years ago the the dosens did not spend a lot of time explaining Stonehenge to us um where you will find all the good information Scott is the overarching arm of the British government that handles these Antiquities is called English Heritage and so if you go to the English heritage site you will find a lot a really good explanatory um detail about the construction techniques the you know the the um the geological State the comparison of Stonehenge with other areas uh why why we're so sure about the the origin of the blue stones and so forth and so sorry I should have had a list of of uh sites to go to but English Heritage is the organization that oversees this um and uh and you can find it if you just Google Stonehenge English Heritage you'll land on the site that also is a site by the way Terry where you make your reservations to go visit thank you that will help all right has anybody else got any questions all right Kelly well if nobody has anything else Kelly thank you that was amazing hey you're very welcome I I I love uh I always love engaging with the the league it's such an important organization um as as you all certainly know but maybe some of the audience doesn't um the linkage and the formative linguage between the league and sky and Telescope goes back to its earliest days to its very DNA and uh and so we've always had a soft spot for each other and that will continue indefinitely I'm sure thank you again for the invitation thank you Kelly we appreciate it and we love working with we with you and I hope we see you soon okay that's a deal it's all right anybody else Carol Scott I'm all good all right good let me just say happy holidays to everybody and thank you so much for joining us and I'm going to turn it back over to Scott and you can close it up okay all right so I will do that um I want to thank uh the audience that uh tuned in today and uh um you know uh extend our thanks to the astronomical league for you know all their um selfless work that they do uh and uh and for putting together this monthly program called astronomical League live um Terry we probably you already have I think you already have the next date already picked out is that right yes January 19th we're getting the 2024 dates set up uh for next month it will be the 19th of January okay and can I give a uh uh uh have Kelly give a Shameless plug for the astronomical Retreat program yes you can go right ahead well okay so um every summer uh I and and a couple of others Venture into the dark woods of Maine you know one of the darkest I for those of you who live west of the Mississippi you know that there are vast areas of the Rocky Mountains that are super dark here on the East Coast we have to pick carefully and it turns out that Maine is one of those that is still very dark we have been fortunate to connect with a husband and wife team who own um a parcel of land in Central Maine with a limiting magnitude to 6.3 and during the summer each each summer we uh set aside a week for what we call an astronomy Retreat uh um uh the main astronomy Retreat and symposia Mars for short and it's limited to about 45 people it's not a big it's sort of the anti- stellane if you will um and uh so if you want more information you bring your telescope you set it up you leave it set up all week You observe all night and sleep all day what what else is there right all the meals and everything are uh cared for uh you're in very comfortable cabins and if you want more information just go to astronomy retreat.com thank you very much Scott appreciate that thank you thank you okay thank you Kelly that sounds like a great time all right well uh Scott I will turn it back over to you then okay well again thank you everyone I I took the uh initiative to create a little uh promo video for the uh astronomical Retreat we'll play that next and um and we will see you uh next month take care thanks so much thanks a lot see you Carol see you Terry and see you good to see you all again [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] w