Transcript for Part A:
[Music]
this is an image of a galaxy cluster called Abel 2744 it's in the constellation sculptor
it's also been nicknamed Pandora's cluster a bunch of galaxies that are all gravitationally bound
together so you can see all of these sort of yellow fuzzy galaxies here they're all you know very close to each
other and all of these are sort of glued together by their Mutual gravity so the force of gravity is pulling each Galaxy
towards each other Galaxy and really sticking them together you can kind of think of these like almost cities of
galaxies since there are so many of them are living in such close
proximity this cluster was observed as part of the Hubble Frontier Fields Program that program aimed to Image six
Galaxy clusters with some of the deepest Hubble observations of a galaxy cluster that have ever been
taken these are incredibly deep images these are some of the deepest images that we've ever
had overall the goal was to really sort of understand the the deepest physics of
how these Galaxy clusters are acting as gravitational lenses uncover what the Dark Matter Within These Galaxy clusters
are doing and then get a really great look at the galaxies behind the cluster so you can see there are a lot of
galaxies in this image that are sort of stretched into these little blue arcs these are all gravitationally lensed
galaxies so they're being magnified by the gravity of this massive Galaxy cluster and so that gives us a chance to
see sort of smaller fainter objects that would otherwise be completely invisible without the aid of this Cosmic
telescope and just like a Glass Lens it collects a lot more light and focuses it back to our telescopes so we're able to
see much fainter galaxies than we otherwise would be able to without the aid of gravitational lensing this really
gives us a huge boost at being able to see sort of the smallest faintest objects in the distant
Universe with this particular Galaxy cluster you're able to see galaxies that are as far back as about 12 billion
years ago so we're really pushing back to sort of the early days of the universe overall the age of the universe
now is about 13.8 billion years so 12 billion years is sort of the the early
stages of when these galaxies would have been forming
[Music]
well hello everyone this is Scott Roberts and Ron breacher and um uh
tonight uh Ron is our special guest uh co-host of the 156th Global Star Party
um the uh the idea and of the theme eyes in the dark all come from Ron and uh so
he was gracious and allowing us to use the title and to use his image in
promoting this program and so I'm gonna turn it over to Ron thank you so much for doing this Ron thanks Scott for
having me I think you're being uh a bit hard on yourself it was actually your
idea to use to use the uh the image and you came up with it not me and well you
know I came up with the image and came up with the idea of eyes in the dark but it was you that thought about sharing it
oh yeah in this medium and I'm and I'm honored and you know um I actually met
you uh two years ago at NE in Nic two
years ago 2023 and um it was then that you first
talked to me about coming on the global star party yes and since then it's become like a really regular fun thing
for me and I look forward to your emails every week we're always honored to have
you on Ron so thank you very much for doing this I appreciate it take it away from here okay thanks thanks y well I'm
going to uh talk about this image in a little while uh but this is the image that we're talking about it's a region
in signis that's about 6,000 light years away and uh rather than talk about the
actually I guess I'm not sharing my screen with you hang on let me get back to the zoom meeting that's no good is
it okay you should see the image now and uh this is uh the region is NGC
6914 and there's some nice blue vandenbberg nebulas in it and I just
thought when I when I took this photo as you're going to see in a few minutes it was actually rotated
90° but I rotated it this way to put it on my phone and I thought boy does that
ever look like eyes in the dark and that's where the name came from
um to me those blue eyes in the dark um
they're metaphorically looking out at us but literally it was my eyes in the dark and
my camera's eyes in the dark that was looking out at them
and uh so that's that's kind of where the theme of this star party is focused
is how can how can astronomers amateurs and professionals how can we use the the
instruments that we have at our disposal the Fantastic equipment that we have these days to discover new things and
Discovery doesn't Discovery doesn't always have to be meaning the first time somebody sees
something every time I see something for the first time whether or not other people have
seen it or not it's a personal Discovery for me and it makes me want to go out
and and find things out about that object uh so uh I'll talk to you a
little bit later on about how this image uh was made that's going to be the the
subject of my talk today is how I use my equipment to share the beauty of the
cosmos with people but uh I have the privilege the real
privilege to introduce the first Speaker David Levy and uh I've only known David
for a short time but since I was probably in my late teens I've known
about David and uh he really uh became
close in my awareness after Shoemaker leing n hit hit all of us you know and
um so I'm very curious what David has to think has to say about this theme of
eyes in the dark and and what you see in that image well thank you thank you so
much uh that that was a it's a very stunning picture and uh it obviously does appear
like eyes in the dark and as you also say so correctly not just the eyes of
what you're photographing but your eyes as well and I think that's wonderful uh I usually begin each Global
star party with a poetic quotation but today I would like to say
that I am starting a telescope giveaway uh I have reached a certain age
in my life where I do not need to hold on to all the telescopes that I've had over many years and so I am giving them
away and anyone on the global Star Party who is interested in taking one of my
telescopes you have but to come here take a look at what I've got there are a
lot of little telescopes like this um like this etx there's May
etx uh that are hanging around and there's a small refractor and then
they're mediumsized telescopes like a 6in cave which which
is uh for giveaway uh the two biggest three biggest ones there is a Schmid Cas grain
14 inch uh which is in another building and uh then there is my Schmid
camera which is a 12 in but a
16inch uh opening but a 12 in uh
actually um um opening for uh light
to be gathered the Schmid camera does have a uh CCD attached to it it does
need a little work but that is one of the other ones available and the other one is an 8 in
F7 which is by far the highest quality telescope I have that one's named
Pegasus and I got that one in 1964 and uh it comes on a very heavy
equatorial Mount and that's kind of the that and the Schmid C are the two
largest and so if you'd like to if you're interested in any of those let me
know and maybe we can range for a visit my poem today has to do with eyes
in the dark when you're looking in the dark you are looking really for what we
call a perfect night and uh You' think that somebody of
all of the thousands of poets and millions of poems that have been written
over the years would have written one called a perfect night and that's true
he did his name was Charles never Holmes B in 1872 died in
1930 lived in Newton Massachusetts and I'm not certain yet
but I'm pretty sure that Russell Porter knew that man and because I was actually looking
up to see if Russell Porter himself had written any poetry I'm sure he has but I
yet to find one yet but I found this poem a perfect
night which I'd like to share with you right now and I think it is just close
to being a perfect poem as one I've ever seen no moon and not a cloud a perfect
night a cold black sky with gleaming gems of glow a darkling earth when NES
and Dales are white and wrapped in a rment of up trodden snow amidst y firmaments The Spangled
span capella blazes like a Beacon's light above the glare of red Al Dean or
the ples that Glitter small and bright their PR is sparkling all alone
or's Jewels are a gorgeous sight and Sirius is rainning on his throne on
dimmed as years and Cycles take their flight and where the higher Sky gems
gleam and glow there softly shines a golden satellite or snowbound noes and
Dales that sleep below a moon has risen on this perfect
night thank you very much and back to you
hi everybody thank you very much doid our uh our next speaker tonight is Don
NAB from the astronomical League um Scott maybe you could put Don
on the screen with me so we can ask um what are you going to be speaking about
with us tonight well I'm going to talk about maybe the largest eye in the sky
that might be on the program tonight I'm going to talk about Green Bank Observatory and specifically most the
100 meter radio telescope which is the world's largest fully steerable radio
telescope not the largest radio telescope but the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world
so that's a big eye I think that's bigger than a Canadian football
field okay without further Ado over to you Don okay I'm going to share my
screen and I'm going to start the slideshow [Music]
is it coming through looks like it is yeah it is okay so U I have one
introductory slide but I'm am talking about Green Bank National radio Observatory uh it actually I had thought
about doing this earlier in the summer because my wife and I attended an event
called Star Quest Green Bank Star Quest which is held every summer at Greenbank during a week when they're doing mostly
maintenance so we don't interfere with the radio telescope but uh it's a wonderful event I'm not going to talk
about uh Star Quest but I'm going to talk about the place that's being held
uh before I do that I do want to mention that later September we go back into astronomical League live which is going
to be September 20th 7 o'clock eastern daylight time and uh Scott Harrington
will talk about observing it all with binoculars Scott was one of the speakers at this Summer's astronomical Le
convention in Kansas City gave a great presentation so uh encourage everyone to put that one on your calendar to see uh
to see Scott talk and also I'll mention at the bottom the next year's convention um
registrations are now open for a Bryce Canyon uh we're calling it Aston it's
the astronomical DEC convention so they uh you can go the astronomical League we website and find uh how to register it's
going to be a great event so um I have a couple of introductory slides but mostly this is going to be
just a slideshow uh of uh of green Bank
Observatory but um you know this is a uh an amazing facility it was the
Trailblazers of American raid astronomy they called it home starting about 60 years ago and the the site is alive and
well it's in the mountain ranges in Farmland West Virginia when I go when my wife when I go to Greenbank we drive
south from the middle of Pennsylvania and the last 3 hours or so are winding two lane roads but near the end of the
drive and it's about eight hours for us you come round a turn and you see the 100 meter telescope in the distance and
uh I know we've talked in previous gsps about the uh the power of all and you're
just filled with all this entire couple days were there and just always in a of
this telescope and this facility um so so this is where a scientists you know try to discover
answers to the most amazing astounding astronomical questions and this is their
main eye in the dark so their uh their vision is really
to discover black holes and speaking black holes Green Bank was Place who
discovered Sagittarius A the black hole at the center of our galaxy uh quite a few years ago but the research is
ongoing today in Stell their birth pulsars Big Bang Universal expansion
orgin of life every aspect of astronomy this is the night's picture of of the 100 meter telescope in the
fall uh they're here to see the Unseen the harness of power of radio waves and
explore astronomy and they also there to Foster
Innovation curiosity to escape from noise now I'll talk a little bit later about the noise of radio noise green
bank is in uh near the center of the national radio quiet Zone and for about 10 miles around
I mean the entire zone is about 13,000 square miles but for 10 miles around
Greenbank there is no cell service there are no cell towers uh you you cannot
even own a microwave oven near Green Bank unless you put it in a faraday cage
uh so they really try to keep the noise the radio noise down to a whisper
actually less than a whisper because we're detecting only Whispers In fact you can see my shirt is from Green bank
and their uh their tagline is the universe is Whispering to
us so they're also there to educate this is a picture of the science center this
is a wonderfully uh equipped education center uh there's a a whole display
inside of various aspects of radio astronomy and U they really are here to encourage your sense of wonder for the
the beyond the unknown beyond our planet so we go back to 1958 this is
when it started the United States realized that if we didn't invest in radio astronomy we were going to be left
behind and the rest of the world would would leave us behind and the search for
uh astronomical radio sources so they started building in 1958 Green Bank
Observatory and actually that water tower is still there and there's not much else uh we can see photo a lot of
new buildings have been going in since then radioastronomy started really in
1931 at Bell Labs fellow named Carl jansy he had the task of searching for
radio sources that could cause static in a transatlantic phone line that they wanted to put in and he discovered this
mysterious background signal that seemed to be coming from the center of the Milky Way and he didn't know that toy he
had acally created a new field of science radio astronomy so that's his original array you can see from 1931
that he built and you can see it's on Wheels it did rotate uh I think he called it mysterious noise or mysterious
static from the center of the Milky Way and there is now rep replica this is at
the uh the front entrance of green Bank uh they built a replica of Carl jansky's
array and it's it's not the original one but it's a replica it looks just like
it and then uh the next major event in raid astronomy was 1937 fellow named Gro
Reber he built this telescope next to his mother's house okay and uh he was
the world's only radio astronomer for about 10 years here is picture with they
reconstructed the antenna at Green Bank this picture was taken in 1960 and in
fact the telescope is still there this is right at the entrance to Green Bank which we'll see from an aerial view
shortly but uh and green Bank does a great job of Education of course it's one of their Visions they have uh
uh placards throughout the uh the campus there and it's the one that talks all
about the uh the backyard inspiration of the the Reber
telescope uh the first super large dis was the 100 foot dish and uh in 1967
joshuan Bel Bernell discovered the first Pulsar with this dish in fact if you remember back to Virtual astronomical
League conference a few years ago one of our guests was uh Joshua Bernell
and I believe that if I can remember correctly she talked about the discovery of this Pulsar this is groundbreaking
science so this was a huge dish it ran for many years unfortunately it did
collapse in November 1988 and here's the aftermath of the uh the collapse it it was worldwide news at
the time and it uh it caused some unusual responses from the press okay
but yeah the 300t telescope did crash it was a uh a metal gusta plate was warned
actually metal fatigue is the most common cause that is cited but uh there are a lot of theories put out about what
happened and here's one example they said it was Zapped by hostile space
aliens another one that's a lot of fun is that uh they said space aliens
destroyed the radio telescope because they didn't want us ease dropping on them all right so uh a lot of fun in
fact I guess the quality or the u a good indication of what this
newspaper the weekly world news was about look at the bottom of the page crossing your legs during a haircut can
wreck your hair so uh this was some of some of the the headlines that happened when the 300
TS foot telescope crashed and everyone can probably remember the uh the Drake equation Frank
Drake had a longest thing of career he began at Green B Observatory he
discovered the radiation belt of Jupiter uh radio sources the center M away and how can we forget the Drake equation but
in 1960 using the radio telescope at Greenbank he made the first modern search for radio signals a project from
extraterrestrial sources that was called project osma so here's Frank in 1999 in
front of the the uh the radio telescope so today's Green Bank uh when
you drive down the road from uh from up North you enter at the uh uh the campus and if you look down on
the right you can see my mouse there is the uh the jansy array over here on left
that is the Reber telescope here's the science center back here is the building where all the magic happens that is the
uh the research center and I mentioned before there's that water tank still there and in the distance is the 100
meter telescope now another closer view you can see the uh the reaper telescope the
Science Center and of course the mountains in the background with that amazing 100 meter
telescope uh the green Bank Science Center this is where Star Quest holds all their events all the uh the lectures
and all the classes that are held um this is where the magic happens this is
the controls and all the scientists are in here and there's dozens of scientists at any one time working at Green Bank
Observatory and you can take tours there are routin tours year round you can get
a tour of the entire facility and then what's this doing here I was wondered so I talk to people every
year I go I see this blue this is a checker an English Checker and why is this there well this this is what they
used when Green Bank was first built for one reason this is a diesel car all they
use were diesel automobiles because if you have a a regular automotive engine
has spark plugs what do a spark do Sparks emits radiation it puts off radio
signals so they were only using diesel engines cars at Green bank and there's one of them still sitting there tires
are flat now it doesn't run anymore but it's kind of fun to look at in the science center every uh every
decade has a nice plaque so you can walk down the hallway uh starting in the uh
the 30s and walk down and learn everything you need to know about radio astronomy and then of course when green Bank was built you uh you learn about
Green Bank It's a Wonderful facility now you get lectures before every
tour and uh you can get lunch now if you notice the Starlight Cafe they do have a microwave oven and it is in fact inside
a faraday cage so that the emissions from the microwave oven do not go out and disturb any of the science being
done here there's a wonderful uh exhibit of science science um exhibits inside
the Science Center here's one about the uh the green Bank 300 foot dish crashing and if you like
to know what you look like in infrared light you can find out there because that's me an infrared light or you can
see they have some Funhouse mirrors talking about the way light refracts reflects that is me in my Hobbit form
okay and um there's a probably seen a lot of places you can build solar system
a scale model the solar system well green bank has one of the most amazing one I've ever seen and you can make these on your own with uh peas and
tennis balls and pingpong balls but uh Ken bank has one that where one foot of
the model is three billion feet in the real solar system so it's an amazing
amazing scale model uh we start with this sun outside and from the science center and uh you can see down at the
very end there you see Mercury Earth Mars and uh at the very when those people are walking that van that's where
Jupiter is at so you can walk the entire thing take you a while so here's the Earth every planet has a placard
instructional educational placard and uh then you have to to get to Pluto you
have to head out and walk toward the 100 meter telescope so one thing you have to
notice that if you visit Green Bank take a tour or if you walk to the 100 meter dish you can't have any Electronics no
digital cameras no cell phones take your watch off no walkie-talkies nothing because it would disturb the science
that is being done so you'll notice now the uh the quality of this image is is
not as good as other ones that's because I took this the next couple this one the next couple photos with the Disposable
film camera they sell these at the science center that if you do take a walk out or a tour out the to the 100
meter dish you can take pictures then you send it away and you get a disc uh with your pictures but this is the only
way to take a picture anywhere near the 100 meter dish so here uh my wife and I walked out
during Star Quest so this is the Robert C Bird free Bank telescope they call it why because Senator bird was one of the
primary reasons why the funding was approved for the telescope so this is down on the down on
the ground here's another view so here's Bluto you walked all the way out there I forget what it was a mile or something
or two you can look at the placard for Pluto uh this is a shot this one and the next
one are a shot of the track that the telescope rotates on again as I mentioned earlier this is a fully
steerable radio telescope uh some years ago they had to replace the entire track because it wasn't holding up uh this I
can when I when I look at this picture I can almost smell the smell of grease and oil it just animates around the uh
around the telescope it's it's a very characteristic smell when you get anywhere near on the tour
so everything's open great so if you are uh you're afraid of heights it's probably not a good idea to take the
tour uh of course like anything the uh the green Bank telescope needs to be
maintained so it needs to be painted occasionally uh these are painters at work and uh this is the view that a
painter would have when I took a tour at the first star quests we were at I think
was the tour was given by the fellow that was the the uh the manager of the entire facility at
the time and he told a story that he one time asked the painters you know how the
job was going and and the guy told him said well you get used to it and he said you mean you get used to the height said
no no you get used to being constantly terrified out of your mind when you're hanging up there doing the painting So
eight hours of painting being constantly terrified doesn't sound like fun to me so here's another view from further
up this must be from a drone there's see one of the tour buses down down by the
entrance uh this is also must be a drone shot now you can see you can see all of them but there's there are three radar
telescopes lined up that is the interferometer uh setup at Green Bank uh
this was actually the previous to the very large array that is out west but uh
it proved the concept and this is where they did INF inter infer
infometer uh but that's the view from way up above the scope in fact this is a a drone shot that is the Prime Focus
above the 100 met dish and when you take tours you can go all the way up to the
Prime Focus when I did a tour we couldn't get that high the elevator wasn't working but you can get tours to
the very tip top from the tour that I did you can be at the level of the uh
actual telescope um panels and tell it's it's this it's deceptive when you look at it
you know it's a size it's larger than a football field it doesn't look that big until you put someone out in the middle
of it like this picture has it is again the power of all it is just all you're
just all struck being in the presence of this amazing astronomical instrument this eye in the
dark for comparison in height here's the uh Washington Monument and the uh Statue of Liberty they uh they superimposed uh
these three things together they show the size of the telescope it is astounding so they as they draws to a
close there many picture opportunities at Green Bank this is my last sh this is from this summer uh this is not that's
not the 100 meter that another scope but it's a beautiful facility and I would encourage anyone to put it on your on
your bucket list to visit Green Bank someday
okay questions from anybody in the uh Zoom audience here oh that was really
interesting that the perspective of the the panels with the people in the
distance that's really something it it's it's an amazing place and it truly is it
because we're during starcast we camp and it's so nice in the morning to wake up and look get out of the camper and
look and see the 100 meter telescope in the distance so just in terms of scale I
I haven't been to Greenbank but I've been to the um the L
Observatory and they have the uh they have the planets laid out on the path
similar do you have any idea how much bigger it is at Green
Bank no I really don't don't sorry well Green Bank is definitely a
place I want to get to one of these days put on your list it's it's a it's worth the drive and is quite a drive is worth
the drive Observatory the um the planets begin at
The Visitor Center and they reach Pluto at the Pluto Discovery telescope which
is pretty close by so I imagine that the scale at Greenbank would be many times
larger maybe as much as 10 times larger yeah you said it was a couple of miles
to walk out it's a couple miles to walk out there all the way so maybe a hundred times larger wow in any
event listing this wonderful presentation about radio astronomy
brought me back to my days with knowing Bart Bach who was one of the founders of
radio astronomy at Harvard and he got the radio telescope that they had there
for a long time and he knew Grotto Reber very well and I met Grotto Reber once
but that was that was kind of interesting but the reason that I wanted to say something right now is that it's
a very famous quote from Carl Sean and that is if you take all of the
radio emissions that have been collected at all of the radio telescopes all
around the world since the very first signal was
detected the the total energy of all of those signals is less than that of a
single snowflake I just needed to say that wow that I
mean that's listening for Whispers right yeah yeah the universe is Whispering to us that's their uh think that's their
that's their theme universe is Whispering to us well thank you very much Don you're welcome our next speaker
tonight is David Iker David is the editorinchief of astronomy magazine and
David I just got a copy of astronomy Magazine with a big picture of Andromeda of mine in it so thank you for yeah so
thank you for publishing that and thank you for letting us publish it too and I hope you bombard us with many other
images in the future and we'll publish countless numbers of thank you how are you enjoying David just moved to Arizona
I'm in Tucson so I am in a early morning to late night festival of pain painting
and thankfully it requires no skill which matches me so I can paint with a roller on flat surfaces like walls and
organizing and setting up and building bookshelves so that's basically a large
part of every day here and I think in a couple of months I'll have my life organized again in tucon excellent so
what are you g to be talking to us about tonight I wanted to talk about another unusual object that is really good for
observers and for Astro IM um aside from the obvious ones that we
all love this is NGC 2685 we're kind of working still in the far northern sky
Southward and this is an unusual uh for three different reasons Galaxy that's
sometimes called the Helix Galaxy so I thought I would talk about it um and should I take it away yeah go
for it excellent so I will share my screen if I can as well let me see where
I am here share screen let me share the right screen and there we go and let me see if
I can start a slideshow and then we will be in
business can you see centaura say that's not the Galaxy I want to talk about tonight but that's another great Galaxy
of course but tonight I want to talk about the Helix Galaxy as I mentioned
NGC 2685 uh it's an unusual G Galaxy for three different reasons it's a
lenticular Galaxy which is somewhat rare lenticular simply means lens
shaped um and it's also quite a rare object because it's a so-called polar
ring Galaxy that has an AIS and a main body like normal galaxies and then at
right angles a polar ring of material around the center of the Galaxy now
that's believed to be from a quite old interaction with a neighbor Galaxy
although the Dynamics of polar ring galaxies are still not magnificently well known the third thing is that it's
also a Seaford Galaxy named after our old pal Carl Seaford in Nashville um and
it has an what what that is is a particular type of a so-called active Galactic nucleus in the Galaxy um and
what it means is it's one of the variety of the zoo um of containing super
massive black hole in its Center and so it's emitting uh energy because of that
so this is a relatively rare object that gives us in all three respects an
unusual look at a Galaxy the rarest of all of the three of course being a polar
ring which is quite a rare object it's about 42 million light years
away it's in Ursa Major as I think I mentioned and it's about 50,000 Lighty years across so it's a reasonably
compact act object it's about half the size of the Milky Way's bright disc so
it's not terribly large um and it's a pretty good distance away it's a little brighter than 11th magnitude and it's
about 4 by two in a fraction arc minutes across so reasonably small as
well uh as I mentioned it has this sort of Triple Play you know it's a lenticular a polar ring and uh an active
Galaxy as well so I just want to encourage you uh each week with a new
and different an object you may not have thought about um and rather than going back and looking at the Orion Nebula and
the Andromeda galaxy again and again and shooting those you know which is okay
you know um but maybe rather than the 50th image of
M31 going after some other objects that people rarely image and rarely observe
unless there sophis iated imagers like Ron who shoots all kinds of wild things
as we've seen many weeks um running here so uh aside from that suggestion here's
the map from Ron Stan's uh great indaram deep Sky Atlas and you can see the Helix
galaxy in the center here it also has an alternative a chip ARP designation of
336 and other galaxies around it that's the bottom of the bowl of the Big Dipper near it there of the green
line and this is a really nice very high-end amateur image shot by Mark
Hansen one of our Pals and you can see this very elongated lenslike shape of
the Galaxy and then also the dust and bright emission as well from Star
forming regions at right angles to the main axis of the disc and then it's in
this ellipsoidal Capsule that's much larger as well so this is an object that
long ago uh had a close encounter with a neighbor in space and has been
significantly distorted which presumably we don't know absolutes here but
presumably created this polar ring shape uh which lasts for a long long time
among galaxies and also fueled the center uh making it its seford active
nucleus this is stepping it up a little bit here in resolution this is with the Gemini North telescope and you can see a
lot more detail here of course and uh really good definition with the dark
Lanes um that are at Cross AIS from the main body of the Galaxy and also not bad
resolution on some background galaxies there as well this is quite a scope of
course for shooting galaxies so anyway that's my suggestion of an object this
week and uh here's astronomy which of features Ron breacher and others as we
just heard and this is our upcoming November issue we have a big story on the sun and other features as well some
of the party at staris and um some other stories and we have an evolution that is
coming down the road with astronomy magazine I've mentioned this I think one or two times before but we were acquired
about three months ago by a larger publisher and uh they're very excited about astronomy so I think it's going to
be a few months yet because we're engineering things but we're going to be uh rolling out an interesting set of
additions to the format that I think will make you very happy if indeed you are an astronomy magazine
reader also um upcoming here we like to party uh uh with the Stars uh around the
world as well and starmus which is Stars and music and Ron has his guitars behind
him here our host uh and there's a Ron breacher lookalike who's a paline uh who
will be there not only giving talks but also playing some rock and roll by the name of Brian May and so we will have
Talks by Nobel Prize winners not only in astronomy but in other Sciences uh we
will have observing under the very dark sky of the Canary Islands there we're going to be uh at this telescope you can
see in the center the image here which is the largest telescope in the world of the GMT and we'll have some rock and
roll with Brian and with uh Rick Wakeman and uh you know many of other of of our
other friends who I'm uh privileged to be on the starmist board along with they
have to let a you know a token American on the board as well with all these truly important people so I'm playing
that rule um so we're going to have another starus next spring we invite you to come it's not bad at all the canaries
of course are a major tourist destination uh there's sort of the Hawaii uh if you will close approach
Hawaii it's very similar to Hawaii uh for Europeans it's easy to get to from Europe and it's not at all bad to get
there from here and staris is made very luxuriant and very affordable um so that
the transportation cost of getting there is really most of the effort there for attendees so there will be we expect at
least five or 6,000 people there at next year and there's a lot of contact and
talking and having a cocktail with and hearing up close a lot of very important
scientists and musicians who care about science so we hope that you'll join us
uh in the Canary Islands and stay tuned for more details over the coming months so that's all I have H tonight I
will end the show thank you Ron for a great introduction we look forward to having many more images in astronomy
magazine in the future and there will be Surprises with the magazine coming in a few months down the road with the new
owner um so I will stop my screen share um uh oh where are we here how do I do
that um nope that's wrong um there we go
sorry guys too many buttons on my screen that was that was great and and I just
have one favor to ask can if you talk to Brian May I haven't met him and I really
want to one day oh you've got to meet Brian but I can be his stunt double his hair stunt double he may think that he's
looking into a mirror Ron you know so he's extremely busy right now because
you may have heard something or maybe not because we're all busy with our own stuff but he's just produced a program
that last week has appeared on the BBC um one of his causes aside from astronomy and music uh stereoscopy is
another one but also animal welfare and he's led a crusade about this tragedy of
what's Happening uh to the badger population in the UK and so he's
incredibly incredibly busy with that but things will calm down in a few weeks and we will mention getting together you'll
have to not only meet him but we'll have a cocktail with him that would be great that would be amazing he's the nicest
guy in the world you'll like him I'm I'm looking forward to it excellent thank you very much thanks so much run and oh
good Seth you're here well as far as I can tell but you know reality is an
illusion so here I'm again I'm going to just say how uh how fun it is for me to
be introducing you because I followed your work for such a long time and you
don't know it but the first time I was on the global star party which was a couple of years well year and a half ago
anyway you were on right after me and I just couldn't believe it I
thought wow this really is a big time show well again I think you're slightly
delusional Ron but okay well I've been called worse I've been called worse so
what are you g to talk to us about today I I think I saw Dark Matter on the program but well that yeah that's what
scheduled dark matter and in order to make it more accessible to the audience I'm going to give the talk in the bosnan
herzegovinian dialect I hope that's okay uh you Scott is shaking his head
affirmatively so that'll be great over to you take it away great okay uh Scott I have four
hours to this right you have four hours that's right so
okay okay I'm going to give you some personal Recollections when I say you I assume that's the audience since
watching this about uh my first encounter with dark matter because in some sense it was the first encounter
with dark matter although one could argue whether that's correct or not but in any case it is somewhat of an
interesting story I told it to my dog and my dog didn't leave the room on the
other hand you know my dog likes to sleep a lot so here was the deal I was
in grad school this was back in the days you know I mean Galileo was still publishing papers it was a long time ago
and uh we were studying as I say galaxies now when I say we I'm referring
to my thesis adviser Dave rockstad and myself uh and we were able to do this
using radio telescopes radio telescopes of course are not terribly much different from ordinary you know mirror
and lens telescopes except they work at much longer wavelengths and consequently they tend to be big things with you know
fairly rough surfaces as compared to your 6in reflector or something like
that so we were studying these galaxies and the idea was simply to you know sort
of map the the neutral gas in the galaxies and how fast they were spinning
and and stuff like that you know just sort of basic astronomy we had a list of half a dozen
of these galaxies all fairly close by spiral galaxies late type spirals they
were and so those of you who like to you know memorize the new general catalog of galaxy gxes might recognize some of
these guys NGC 2403 NGC 4236 ic10
Etc okay so so far this sounds stultifying enough but it developed a a
certain interest as we began to do the actual uh data collection because once
we collected the data and I began to map out you know the rotation curves of these galaxies in other words how fast
were they spinning and not just how fast were they spinning but how fast were
they spinning as a function of radius in other words the inner regions of these galaxies were spinning very quickly we
we knew that from Optical studies that had been done by people like Vera Rubin and others but we were measuring you
know how fast they were spinning also in the outer regions far away from the Luminous disc of these galaxies and
parts of the galaxies that if you just made a photograph you wouldn't see them at all it would be dark because there
was there weren't many stars out there but there was a lot of hydrogen gas and that's what we were measuring okay so
what did we expect I mean I remember one of my thesis advisers and I had three
actually I I think this was a concern on the part of Caltech that you know I
needed three advisors otherwise I wasn't going to do anything that would be publishable I'm not sure I never asked
them that directly but in any case one of the three said to me all right Seth
what do you expect and I wasn't quite sure what he meant by that I mean you know my mom would would occasionally ask
that but what what did that mean what do I expect how do you expect the galaxies will
rotate and what I figured was the conventional point of view at the time
and that was in the central regions the galaxies would be spinning fairly quickly you already had some indication
of that and then once you got farther out into the Galaxy you know the
rotation would kind of slow down and it would you know rotate the same way that
the planets you our solar system do in the sense that you know the Earth takes 365 days to go around the Sun Mars takes
about twice as much time it go to the outer solar system it takes more time still and if you plotted these uh these
rotation times you would find that indeed they just obey very simple
physics High School physics that's what we expected we expected high school
physics which you know was always interesting enough um so
you know we started collecting the data and what I noticed was that in fact that isn't what the galaxies were doing
somehow they didn't get the memo what they were doing was they were spinning a bit too quickly particularly in their
outer regions and this was mysterious at first and in fact I was so
convinced that this was wrong that I remember walking back and forth to the
computer center on the campus there at Caltech uh you know trying to modify my
software that was being used to do all this to find the problem in it because I was sure that I had just made a
programming error and that these galaxies were going to rotate the way we figured they were going to
rotate well I never found any error in the software not to say that there weren't plenty of errors I'm sure there
were but nothing that would account for this unexpected fast rotation in the
outer regions of the Galaxy and so you know what could we do I mean
we were kind of stuck and I you know wrote my thesis on the basis of this work and the galaxies rotated too
quickly now how how could you explain that what was causing the galaxies to rotate too quickly and one possibility
there although you know at the time we didn't give it a whole lot of credence one possibility was that there was more
matter in these galaxies than we figured and the way we figured how much matter there was was to look at you know how
bright the galaxies were we knew how bright individual stars were and you know you could just use that measure of
the brightness of the galaxies to figure out how many stars there were in the Galaxy okay well one possibility was
that we had grossly underestimated the number of stars that probably wasn't the answer in
fact the answer only came up years later after we had done this for many galaxies
and other people had done it as well when we realized there was something in these galaxies that had Mass just like a
star that was causing this fast rotation but we couldn't see it so it was termed
Dark Matter Dark Matter well I mean all that is is an an admission of ignorance
right it's clearly dark otherwise we would have seen it and the fact that it's matter simply accounts for the fact
that it had some effect on the the rotation of the galaxies it had a gravitational uh consequence so we did
all that and you know there just published a half dozen galaxies the datea on a half dozen galaxies showing
that they rotated too quickly now I look back on this whole
episode with a certain amount of regret like so many other things in my life but
a certain amount of regret in that I didn't pursue it as aggressively as I
should because we had actually tripped across something that was very important and uh I was never of a mind to believe
that anything that I St across was going to be important but it was important because it turns out that indeed there
is additional mass in these galaxies it accounts for the fast rotation but we don't know what it is and it you know
eventually became known as dark matter Dark Matter well dark obviously because we couldn't see it and it's matter
because as I say it affected the rotation of the galaxies so that was one of the earliest and perhaps the most
significant of the early indications that there was more to Heaven and Earth
and was you know portrayed in our you know described in our philosophies right
that there was something out there there was more stuff in a galaxy than we knew about dark matter now since that time
many people have done the same sorts of experiments measured the rotation of galaxies and they come up with the same
same results which on the one hand you could say is kind of gratifying I mean
could have been that everything that we were doing was wrong that's that was my first belief actually but in fact it
wasn't wrong the measurements were not wrong but we still didn't know what was causing these galaxies to spin so
quickly dark matter it's still a mystery and it was ultimately joined by an even
deeper mystery called Dark Energy right that was pushing pushing the universe
apart this was a different kind of measurement this just came from measuring how quickly the universe was
expanding I think all of you are well aware of the fact that the universe is expanding um I remember Woody Allen
actually once wrote that he was worried that Brooklyn might be expanding well in some sense Brooklyn is expanding because
it's part of the universe but not maybe the best part oh well I I take that back I I actually like Brooklyn but in any
case uh dark energy which was invoked simply because we didn't know what was
causing the you know unexpected expansion even acceleration was more
than an expansion the expansion was speeding up of the universe overall that
those were two very surprising results that uh came to the four in the' 60s 7s
and 80s okay and it's still a mystery what accounts for these things believe
it or not this is an ongoing story it's one of the more interesting stories I think in astronomy uh you know because
it it's clearly an observed effect right look at my thesis if you dare um but we
don't know what what causes it right we don't know so uh that was in my mind the
most convincing evidence at least at the time of the existence of dark matter and
uh to this day we don't know what it is people still work on it the people who are likely to come up with the best
explanation for what dark matter is is not to say oh well there's just a lot
more gas between the Stars you know that was triy but it just a back of the envelope calculation if you have a lot
of envelopes with the backs that are still free to write on would show you
that it can't be accounted for by things like uh you know unseen stars or
something like that it had to be something if you will that was a little bit more exotic and uh well we we don't
know what it was but as I say the physicists were very inventive in terms
of proposing things that could fill the universe could really clog the universe
with mass that we wouldn't see I mean I suggested maybe bowling balls maybe the
entire universe was you know suffused with bowling balls the thing about bowling balls is that uh you know you're
not going to see them from light years away they're too small right and mostly dark so you but but if you had enough of
them they could account for the dark matter that was causing these galaxies to spin so quickly well other
suggestions have been made the idea of gazillions of bowling balls in space while appealing uh didn't seem to
actually convince convince many scientists but you know they came up with things like uh strange particles
like Axion right Axion it sounds like a laundry detergent but axons were some
sort of exotic particle and if you had enough of them uh they could account for the the uh the rotation of the galaxies
as we were measuring it anyhow uh I I probably prattled too long here I I
think I don't know if we have a discussion about this Scott I don't know what happens next maybe they just uh
translate all of this into that binan dialect and leave it alone but tell me
tell me what I should do next well I I'm I'm curious um uh
is your observation of the rotation speed of galaxies is this among the very first uh
to actually recognize the that the speed was um towards the edges was roughly the
same as towards the center or is it exactly the same yeah it's not well it's not the
same but it doesn't go down very quickly right I see yeah uh was this the first
yes I think it actually was although um this is a story that I probably
shouldn't tell but in any case in my postto position a year or two after all
this my student was uh Vera rubin's daughter oh wow and I had her yeah
looking into this and I I guess she told her mom because pretty soon Vera Rubin was publishing rotation curves of
galaxies and I think that if you ask many astronomers you know when was it first noticed that there had to be extra
mass in galaxies they would say they would you know quote Vera Ruben but in fact we had done it oh wow okay yeah
don't tell Vera but you can't tell ver okay um goodness hopefully she's not
watching tonight well I kind of hope that she is because if she's watching that means she's you know still
metabolizing in some sense that would be a good thing right yeah
terrific and and what other did you do um uh ongoing research based on this
observation or was that kind of the end of it well it wasn't the end of it because it was so puzzling uh after you
know grad school I got a postto this is nothing surprising I suppose but it was
at the national radio astronomy observatory in Charlottesville Virginia using the antennas uh the radio
telescopes in Green Bank West Virginia and I you know followed up on this I I
was able to use those an tennis to try and find out if other galaxies also had
this problem of rotating too fast spinning too fast in their outer regions
and uh they did they did I mean the ones that you know i' had done for my thesis they were
not anomalous they were just typical and what is your feeling about
uh the conclusion that this is dark matter or do you have some alternate
ideas of of what this affect be caused by well I'm not too I'm not good enough
for that Scott I don't have any you know terrific ideas I mean it's still a mystery and I think it's a mystery for
everyone I mean this this is a problem for the physicists I think you know they have to come up with well they don't
have to but I would encourage them to come up with uh some particle right some
subatomic particle an Axion or whatever uh that could be filling space and
account for all this and that would be a very interesting result if true if you
could say you know for all these years we've missed at least 95% of the content
of the universe we think of the universe as being made up of stars and planets and asteroids and all that stuff but if
it turns out that 95% of the mass of the universe is in a form that we still don't understand or know about well I
think that that would be you know that would be good dinner conversation sure sure
um well goodness I you know it it it does it it would be interesting to know
that uh maybe decades from now uh they have to revise the uh discovery of all
this to u to shac and your team um
because uh you know it's I mean it it's it is to me a u
uh not only an interesting story but somewhat of a a little bit of a shocker
because uh we you know as we read about dark matter and stuff and ver Ruben and
and uh you know the thoughts about how dark matter uh pervade the universe and
now it's mostly made up of dark matter and now dark energy is as you described
with the expansion of the universe uh we still don't we still don't have a anything we can actually
put our finger on and so um you know I think that U A lot of times in science
that we always we tend to want to uh U
rely on something that we say is scientific fact and um when in fact uh
you know science is like this ongoing uh battle to understand nature
better and better and better so yeah I think what I'm sorry go ahead I was
gonna say you know during the day I'm a scientist at night I'm an astrophotographer but during the day I'm
a scientist and one of the things that really struck me and that I that I
really uh latch on to in what you were saying is how comfortable you are with
not knowing the answer we don't have to know everything all at once part of the
fun is in the finding out and I I'd rather just admit what I don't know than
make up explanations for which there may not be any evidence yeah you know Ron
that is important I mean I was speaking earlier today with Brian Green who
writes books on cosmology and physics sorry read them all you've read them all
well you should write them and tell them that uh although as as one astronomer who writes
such books said to me once Shak I don't care how many people read read my book
what he cared about was how many people bought his book I bought them all I
bought them all I I don't Brian Green feels the same way but in any case yeah
um it it is interesting as I say it makes an interesting dinner table conversation but it's also something
that a 100 years from now when we have the answers to what all these things imply you know we'll look back on this
time as sort of a bited age in the history of science that
you know you guys had tripped across something that was fundamental about the universe and you didn't know what it was
and you didn't even guess what it was and I suspect that'll be the case that's been the case many times in astronomy so
I be and in many other fields too as well yes yes indeed indeed wonderful
well uh Seth you also uh you you do a uh regular radio program and stuff and of
course you are uh you know perhaps the lead astronomer at SEI uh do you want to talk about SEI
a little bit and um yeah I can talk I I I don't know that I'm the lead astronomer I wouldn't say that outside
of my office here but uh it's true that I do work at the SEI Institute and uh
while there are many many research programs at The seti Institute obviously
the one that everybody knows about and the one that was the motivation to found this place was to try and ease drop on
signals radio signals mostly although we look for flashing lasers as well you
know coming from other star systems that would prove that well we're not the only Kids on the Block that there there are
aliens out there aliens that are clever enough to build a radio transmitter or a a laser and in fact having said that I
uh have difficulty refraining from pointing out that you know we are looking SE is a search for
extraterrestrial intelligence and when I tell people that and I occasionally do they'll say well
wait a minute what do you mean by intelligence you know is a squid intelligent I mean I
is wait it's a mysterious message here that I just won the California Lottery
well that's not so important anyhow what do we mean by intelligence
and the answer to that question is from the standpoint of SEI scientists if you
can build a radio transmitter you're intelligent that's it okay because that way we can find you and uh so I normally
encourage uh anybody I speak to to ask themselves or you know ask their their
acquaintances hey can you build a radio telescope a radio transmitter and if the
answer is no I recommend that you you know don't go to dinner with them anymore because after all they're
obvious they're not intelligent but but this is you know kind of a narrow definition of intelligence uh I I think
it's worth pointing out something that everybody watching this knows the universe has been around for three times
as much time as our solar system has been around so most of the locals in the
universe that might have biology or intelligence even
nonbiological intelligence most of those are much older societies than ours right
when I say much older what do I mean well they've had billions of extra years
right maybe a 10 billion years in some cases that's a long time and so you know
when you uh watch Star Trek if you do or you know go to the movies and see some
other uh story which involves aliens notice that the aliens I mean they may
be ugly or whatever but on the other hand a lot of my neighbors are not so attractive they're they're they're in to
begin with they're interested in us usually only for for destroying us or maybe breeding with us those are the uh
the interests the aliens seem to have neither one of which would be either comfortable or attractive but you know
they the point to keep in mind I'm trying to make a point here but you know I keep getting lost um is that the the
universe is very old yes and the Earth is not so old the consequence most of
the intelligence in the cosmos is going to be far in advance of what we have and
I don't know how you want to look at that but um you know that that might
lead to some very interesting
scenarios well there's there is some um a lot of talk these days about artificial intelligence and um you know
what will happen in the next decade a lot of people are wondering if their job is going to be displaced by AI but um as
AI goes along and if it does actually uh reach a state of what we might call
Consciousness uh I have heard that um we will never know uh when it hits that
point because of the speed of which it could uh calculate things and think
about things and um and we would not even begin to understand them so if we
have aliens out there that are so much more Advanced would we even know that
they were there or could we even understand what they were all about well that's I mean that's the brief that's
given to you know Endeavors like seti right we're looking for extraterrestrial intelligence and the fact that as you
just said Scott it's likely that the majority of that intelligence is going to be synthetic intelligence which is
you know not the synthetic intelligence that you might have ascribed to the kid sitting next to you in eth grade the
synthetic intelligence in terms of something that was built it's a machine the smartest things in the universe I'm
willing to bet you any amount of money the smartest things in the universe are not soft and Squishy creatures right
with green complexions and sort of dower outlooks and no sense of humor I mean
the smartest things in the universe are going to be synthetic intelligence and we don't have much of that around now
but you know there are people who build machines that can do some sort of some
cognitive things and thousand years from now well where will we be with that
right the machines will be running Earth you can be be pretty sure of that and the big advantage of the Machines of
machine intelligence is that it's easily expandable right I mean if you want more
memory for example I'd love to have more memory well there's not much I can do about it but if you have a synthetic
intelligence you have a machine sitting in the next room and you want more memory for it you know you just wire it
up and plug it in right so there's such uh an advantage to being machine
intelligence compared to being biological intelligence that I can hardly believe that most or not believe
that most of the intelligence in the cosmos is synthetic and that if we meet the aliens I'm all for meeting the
aliens if we were to meet the aliens you know don't be disappointed if they're just you know machines in a room
somewhere and not little green guys running around trying to having trying to have breeding experiments with a
local I don't think that's but but who built the machines well there there's always that you can say yeah those machines
well they were probably built by other machines but you're quite right eventually you have to go back to somebody who built the first machines
and that's likely to be biological intelligence okay that's great but that
doesn't gainsay the fact that the majority and certainly the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably
not soft and Squishy uh with a lifestyle that's you know or a life that's very
finite and not necessarily fulfilling right wow that's a lot to
think about holy moly yeah absolutely yeah I tend to think um I
tend to think it will be artificially intelligent and I think that it may be
very small you know the if you go to the nanotech area JPL you see some very
small things doing some really amazing uh feats and um uh certainly would be uh cost a
lot less to spread out you know millions or billions of AI intelligent uh things
about the size of a grain of salt out there or less you know uh given enough
time to become smaller and smaller well I I I don't dispute that Scott I'm I'm sure you can put a lot of intelligence
into something the size of a sand grain or salt grain or something like that I going take what I know in my my own
brain you know so much less than that you could put it you could put you know a human brain in
there along with the Library of Congress and you know have it think about things yeah but there are some disadvantages to
making them so small I mean the only Advantage I can think of is that you know you might find it easier to spread
out because it doesn't take very much energy to send you to some other part of the cosmos yes that's true but on the
other hand you know if a there's a hail storm and you get hit by a
yeah a bit of hail that's the end of you whereas if you're a little bit bigger you might have a greater chance to survive some of these very common
natural phenomena so I I you know aliens that are the size of sand grains might
be something for the Twilight Zone but seems to me that there's an advantage in being a little bit
bigger and I'm working on that you're working on it right now that's great and so um uh the program that you do uh uh
each week um you want to talk about that just a bit before we go on to the next
speaker sure yeah once a week we make a uh one hour radio show called Big
pictures science and it's carried by I don't even know it's like 130 140 radio
stations but I suspect that the majority of people who listen to Big Picture science do so via the Internet because
then you can listen at any time um and we take on various subjects it's not all
about aliens anything like that even though you know the origin of the show
was really The seti Institute here uh we we we talk about well artificial
intelligence we talk about new discoveries and science uh as I said I talked this morning with our guest for
this week's show Brian Green and when you talk to Brian Green you talk about String Theory because that's what he
does and it's very interesting so yeah we do that um and you know
sometimes people will ask why do you do it and I give these sort of ideological replies that well we're
just trying to spread knowledge of Science and get people interested in the
work of researchers and stuff like that all of that is true but it doesn't convince anybody because people figure
that you know we really do it because somehow it's going to give us an in with a California lottery or something like
that but we actually do just because science is interesting yes it is well you're very
interesting um Seth and I always find your talks fascinating and um full of
humor as well but I think that that's what uh makes it easy to to U dwell on
it and um you're such a gifted individual and I really really
appreciate you coming on to Global star party again thank you Scott my pleasure really it was and anytime you want me
back if you're if you're I don't know sadistic enough
to want me on again just please let me know thank you so much one thing that I would like to add is that I thoroughly
enjoyed your sense of humor self I really really got on that and I and I
really enjoyed what you had to say well thank you thank you David I yeah my sense of humor uh people sometimes ask
about it I never think about it myself to be honest but um it you know it's
just something that came with the territory my my father and my mother both had very good senses of humor and I
suspect that's where it came from nothing that I did
wonderful okay well thank you so much um all right all right uh Ron uh our next H
speaker is uh is you and so um uh you
know I'd like to uh turn this program over to you you are going to talk about eyes in the dark and um uh the image
that you made which is uh you know just absolutely uh tantalizing the the more you stare into
it the you know it's it it's sort of uh
looks like something out of a uh out of a spectre movie or a demon movie or
something at first but then you just start looking at through it looks like you're looking through holes of H2
region at a background of blue nebulosity it's absolutely beautiful and uh you know
congratulations on putting that together that it has a really
three-dimensional uh quality to it anyway I don't usually uh you know
usually I show people the pictures I don't show uh people how how I make the
pictures but I thought uh today it would be fun to do that so let me let me share
my screen with you and uh I'm going to start with a
with the slideshow so um this is this is a picture eyes in the
dark and I just shot it uh very recently August First 1st to 15th and um you know
before I go any further I really just want to reiterate Scott thank you I'm really honored a that you uh that you
got stuck in this image like I did I think it's got a real mesmerizing pulls you in sort of
quality but uh but for asking to use it uh as the basically the basis for the
theme of the Star Party quite an honor for for me thank you um so you know I
always like to talk about your themes that's where I kind of get I riff off that and so I'm going to just share that
with the with the audience tonight then I'm I'm going to show you the equipment I used to talk about how I gathered the
light for this picture show you very quickly some processing and then tell
you uh how I share my photos and and where you can uh find them yourself so
the theme is eyes in the dark and uh Scott wrote that it's
capturing the essence of how astronomers use telescopes and cameras as tools to
explore the night sky so here's the telescope that I'm using
to explore the night sky this is the um this is the uh rig that I imaged eyes in
the dark with and so the telescope is a 14inch Celestron Edge HD telescope and
it's got a hard dou shield on it and oh you can't see it but inside the dou shield there's a ring just underneath
the corrector plate that uh applies a little bit of heat and keeps the dew off
it gets really really wet here particularly these fall nights when I
get up in the morning there's a puddle underneath the do Shield where it's been parked for a few hours um I'm using a
primal luche sadow focuser and Rotator and so I can automatically adjust the
focus as the temperature changes and the whole thing is being controlled by um
this little red box up top of the telescope is an eagle 4 Windows computer
computer that I just log into from my phone or my iPad uh the camera is a
monochrome camera that's just a fancy way of saying black and white and I use
filters um there there's seven of them clear which I really mainly use just for
focusing and framing but then I have red green and blue for natural color and
hydrogen oxygen and sulfur for narrow band Imaging all of those filters are optal filter
I guide with an off axis guider you can see it just sticking out over here it's got a separate camera and the mount I'm
kind of holding on to the counterweight shaft the mount is a Paramount MX from software Beast I bought that in 2011 and
it has if you're thinking of a mount I can highly recommend this Mount based on my own experience and I'm standing in
the best main cave ever it's a skyshed rolloff roof Observatory that my wife
gave me for my 50th birthday back in 19 uh sorry in
2009 so I gathered all the light here between August 1st and 15th and
obviously in a two- week period you can expect that the moon phase is going to change from from night to night I was
lucky I had average or better transparency and the seeing was okay as well I ended up uh I I always acquire in
five minute chunks so I ended up with a a total of about 38 hours of uh light
and you can see how it's broken down there by filter the hydrogen Alpha the last filter
there this one here that's to give some boost to the red uh in this image and
you'll see how I use that the image scale uh is4 arccs per pixel and to help
you put that in perspective um the moon is
1,800 arcs wide so it's about 1/ 14,000
of the Moon per pixel and the whole field of view would take about a half
moon to fill it so I did all the processing in pix
insight and we're going to go there in a second um one thing I want to show you here that I'm probably not going to
discuss there because I don't have time but sitting on top of my big scope that took the picture on the right that's the
theme of tonight's star party I have a little scope I have a 60 mm refractor
and when the conditions aren't great for the big scope I use it and for this picture I simultaneously imaged with
both Scopes so you can see where the eyes in the dark are set they're set in
a gigantic field of nebulosity about 6,000 light years away
in the constellation of signis the swamp one this is right in the heart of the northern summer Milky Way and uh as you
can see it's pretty good Target for just about any size of
telescope um so I'll come back to uh sharing in a second but for now I want
to switch over to pix insight and um this is where we
start this is a color image what I did is I combined the red the green and the
blue data all into a single color master and this is what it looks like coming
out of the camera it looks pretty much black with a few white dots in it and
without being funny uh the reason for that is that it's dark at
night most pixels in my images are very
very dark they're they're they're almost black but they're not quite black
and it is possible with the right tool to make the data in here become
visible so I can show you that there's stuff in
there it was just hidden because almost all the pixels are black so what I have
to do is called stretching the image to make some of those pixels brighter so
that we can see the signal in between the Stars so this
is a combination of the red the green and the blue right here and nothing's been done to this image so I did quite a
lot to this image to make to make this picture so let's uh start and have a
look at what I did to this image step by step so the first thing you're going to
notice is there's kind of a kind of a gradient
the corners are a little bit dark and it's not really smooth so the first thing I did is I cleaned up that gradi
in made everything kind of equally bright and then I corrected the
colors I have to just put another stretch now you can see the colors look
a lot nicer still have a little bit of green here I might want to deal
with at this point I just changed the name so right now it's called 7 which
doesn't really help me remember 5 years from now uh what this was so I just
changed the name to RGB now I know it's a red green blue tricolor image and then
I started using some fantastic artificial intelligence-based tools to bring out detail and clean up
the Stars so I'm going to zoom in so you can see how dramatic this is
before after you can really overdo it with these tools but I don't think this has
overdone it at all and then because I like to process my stars separately I used another artificial
intelligence-based tools tool to find and remove all the
stars they're saved over here in a separate image
and I can put them back later meanwhile I get to clean up this
image without stars in it stars are really easy to damage in processing so
it's really helpful to take the stars out and the first thing I'd like to do here is take out this noise you see this
fine grained noise so that's what I did next I used a tool called noise
exterminator to blast that noise before
after I'll zoom in even closer I know it might be hard to see um but before you can see it's got a
lot of speckle in it after that's all
gone and uh at this
point I made a temporary image that just made this a little little bit darker
let's see the whole thing again made the whole thing a little bit
darker made it darker again and then I cleaned up some problems that you might
not have noticed but let's see if I can find them
um it's hard even for me to find them you know they were very subtle and
I can't find right now but there were some little blemishes that I fixed uh at this
point I darkened it down a little bit more and then I made I stretched it for
real so all of this so far the stretching has been temporary I can turn
it off I haven't really changed the data yet but now I'm going to change it for
real and for permanent oops see boom so now I'm going
to go forward with this image what I did is I started with this
image and I added in my hydrogen Alpha now my hydrogen
Alpha again started out as a linear image almost completely black but
there's the hydrogen in it notice how the blue feed features are
missing that's because this is really just letting through a narrow band of red light so again I cleaned this
picture up I got out some extra detail took out the Stars took out the noise to
make it nice and smooth made a permanent stretch so there's my permanent image I
changed its name to ha so I remember what it is
and now I'm going to put those two together so here's our RGB red green
blue here's our hydrogen Alpha and I want to merge them together
somehow how do I do that well I use the narrow band combination script and what
it gave me is this
image and then I did a whole bunch of stuff to this picture so I
enhanced the the brightness a little bit dump just DED it down a
little then I boosted the color in
here did you see that little blemish disappear so if you look right up
here right up here there's that there's a star just outside the field whose light is coming in
just that little uh that gone took out more noise
defraction Spike or is it like a spill over no that was just a a a bright star
causing a reflection off something outside my
field uh and then here's here's where I did a secondary stretch to make it boost
a little bit in the center now we're going for details and here so find
detail first did you see that change before oh yeah look at that now we're
going to add a little course detail so no
detail fine detail coarse detail it just keeps getting better and now a little bit of
Sharpening at the edges now some more color changes I have
to zoom back out so you you can see the whole thing so that was just a little color
change so here I thought it looked a little too Orange in these lower red
regions I just made it a little more like bubble gum which is really the color of H Alpha and a little bit more
blue more of the
eyes and a little more and darken down the darks to boost the
contrast so before after a little more
contrast put the stars back cool I worked on the Stars separately and made
them really nice and colorful but now they can go back in and this is where I
thought I don't really like this rotation let's make it eyes in the dark
mhm and I rotated it and
then I just enhanced the dark regions a little bit and I changed the colors a little
bit did you see that brighten up brighten up kind of dull there yeah and now
we brighten it up a little bit and finally the last step in the process ICC
profile transformation is what allows me to share my images
with you because when I save this as a JPEG it's going to embed in the file
information about how I want your computer to display my
picture and that's going to help you see it with the colors that I intend for you
to see so let's go back to sharing because really that's maybe the most
important important part of all of this so uh I told you how I processed where I
do a lot of my sharing is on my website and if you haven't been there please check it
out I don't think there's anything on that website that you have to pay
for um you the pictures are all free to download in high quality and with every
with every post that I make let me see if I've got it open yeah I do with every
post that I make I'll give you full resolution photos sometimes more than one
palet I'll give you information about the object and what I was thinking about
when I shot it but for those of you who want to learn how to make these pictures I give
you the whole workflow every process and script that I used most of the settings that I used
and you know I'm I'm avail ailable for for one-on-one lessons or for workshops
so do check out check out the website if if you want to see more the other way I
share oops the other way that I share is um let's get back to the
slides is that I have um people come out to my house for cycling tours so there's
a a nearby company called hidden gears Advent U changing gears Adventures and
they organize cycling tours and my Observatory is one of the stops on their tour and they come and we make them hot
chocolate show them the moon and the planets and a few bright objects and send them on their way and um I love to
go to Star parties and and talk and so on so that's the eyes in the dark
looking back at us but also we're looking out at them and if you're able
to take pictures like this share them there the the universe is amazing I just
love it I've got it on the top of my website here the sky is just full of
amazing beautiful things and I'm going to just stop there and thank you again
for inviting me to co-host with you Scott thank you very much thank you it
was wonderful to have you and uh uh you know I look forward to seeing more of
your images you know uh I'm very I'm honored that I'm on your mailing list um you know to uh uh you
know get those images uh it's about once a week you send them out it seems like so you want a little sneak peek of of
what I'm working on next sure I got I've got three on the go right now okay and
uh and I'll just show you uh preliminary jpegs I keep them in a temporary folder
for just the these sorts of occasions so um the Cocoon
nebula oh wow I'm shooting that so this is 14 hours and 5 minutes I want to get
it up to 30 hours or so and uh while I was shooting it with the big scope I was
shooting it with the little scope same object different
telescope now do you ever embed uh a higher resolution image into the White feel
much like I saw Russ jedler do I do I do yeah but really the wi field shot is
meant to be seen I present it the way I want you to look at it I know a lot of people pixel
peep I probably do it myself sometimes I definitely do it myself sometimes but in
general I want people to look at images the way I present them you know wonderful so that's the
Cocoon then I got Messier 6 that I kind of captured in in a time when I was
waiting for something else to rise or set or whatever yeah and the last one
is the elephant's trunk which I've got 40 hours on now
this is narrow band but I've got Broadband I'll be doing probably three or four versions of
this had you done elephant's trunk previously I seem to remember showing one of yours in a previous here yes but
not uh I've done IC 1396 the gigantic nebula which the elephant's trunk is
embedded in and I have shot the elephant's trunk with uh where it was
kind of off to the side with some of the dark nebula right around it but I've
never shot the elephant's trunk at high magnification like this and of course uh
I don't think I I don't think I have a a pi of it to show you but I'm
shooting this in Widefield as well at the same time
so I'm GNA have another good Widefield shot of it I think I'm up to 20
something hours on this in the Widefield Scott I think you're gonna have to have rot on every week
eh I try to I try to be here often come on you know there's a there's actually a
lot of things in in the astronomy world that seem to happen on Tuesday evenings all of our masters of pix Insight
workshops are on Tuesdays um so I I can't attend when
those happen but I I really love these events I can't always be here for the whole thing so I'm often asking Scott if
he can put me on early um but uh but I love coming to these it's fun yeah we
love seeing them thank you Scott Ron thank you very much
David do you uh do you want to say a couple of words before we move on or oh
I just I have nothing but gratitude I just want to thank you it's it's always a it's always fun to be on these and uh
this was extra special I'll remember it for a long time great all right thank
you Ron thank you bye all right so um our next speaker uh is we're going up to
Canada uh to uh Professor Kareem Jaffer and uh
uh Kareem is the professor that I think everybody wishes that they had in
astronomy uh he a uh you know brings
each point uh uh to uh a very easy to
understand uh you know uh description of I mean some of the most complex things
out there in the universe uh I know his students love him uh and uh I got to
spend time with him at uh a two stares ago uh and it was just meeting his
family his kids and all the rest of it and being there at starus was just
wonderful and so I'm really happy that you're able to get a little bit of time
away from uh uh the school I think that you're uh T getting a little bit of a
break and um very very pleased that you're on this Global star party thank
you thanks so much Scott and asmus I was actually just talking about staris briefly uh today to the students and
telling them about the dinner that we had uh just outside of the CH outside of the huge Temple where we set up the star
party and talked to them a little bit about who the audience was and how incredible it was to be able to share
the night sky with such esteemed laurates and astronauts and and then
this what what I loved about that experience was getting to work with the
space shop 42 kids from yavan right getting them up and running with the
telescopes and getting the university kids running telescopes and seeing things and then sharing the stories of
how we see the night sky with what they get to see it was just it was what an experience that was well you'll be happy
to know that the space shop 42 that that would be vchic and and that group uh are
still going on they just finished doing a kind of a massive star party uh I
hooked them up with Frank marchus of uh unistellar and Frank is also at Sati and
so they just had a fabulous time and so that buzz of that was started at staris
is still going on and I can't tell you how gratifying that is to me and I'm sure it is to you um you know when you
do Outreach and you see that uh it develops a life of its own and it keeps
going you know that uh um you know to to be able to have a uh you know the
ability to have a little push in that is so cool so definitely do Outreach know
about this so and I've been following them on Facebook and just seeing the crowds that they gather yeah whether
they're in the city or whether they're doing the uh outside uh rural outings it's just it's lovely to see that the
energy has stayed yes that's right and so I wanted to thank uh you Scott and
thank Ron for uh hosting today's star party Ron actually teaches at my old
Alma moer University of gal and so I've had a chance to meet him uh in the past and I share some of his astrod do
materials with my students at times and so when I see his photos coming out and
I see him coming into astronomy magazine and I even see you know some of his pixs Insight workshops adver ized I it just I
wish I had more time to spend on astrophotography cuz I'd love to be able to get to this level um what I wanted to
share today it's the start of the school year for a lot of us uh for us actually here at John Abbott we're already two
weeks in uh which is kind of nuts cuz we just hit September but I wanted to share
a little bit about those first moments you get with the students starting them on their astronomical journey and how we
can open their eyes to the dark to the wonders of Space Science and to the wonders of astronomy and the Wonders
also not just of the academic pursuit of astronomy but understanding what the
hobby side of astronomy is which is where most of us find we get the most impact of space in our lives is from the
hobby side I enjoy sharing with them a little bit of what the global star parties are
all about what our space audities live is all about and I unfortunately you know the last year has been the last
almost two years has been difficult for me to fit in as much Outreach as I wanted to but it's been great to still
be part of these different Outreach initiatives you know explore Alliance brings so many of us together in a way
that allows us to benefit from each other's experiences I was actually typing with maxi and mentioning that I
was watching a lot of gsps from afar you know middle of the night or the next day
in between classes I would watch a half hour an hour of a GSP i' watch a couple
of sessions and a couple of walkthroughs of the images Adrien takes or Maxi or
Cesar sharing some of his uh telescope views from the Southern Hemisphere and we tend to be able to
benefit from each other's Journeys but also each other's time and energy that they have
to share and that's what makes the GSP such a wonderful platform now here at the Montreal Center we always start with
a land and Sky acknowledgement and we acknowledge not only are we on unseated indigenous lands but we share the night
sky with both the First Nations the indigenist the mate te and cultures from across the world and we are just now
starting the Harvest Moon as the settlers called it our moon our full moon that will be closest to the
autumnal equinox and we tend to call it the Harvest Moon because close to the
full Moon close to the Equinox moonrise stops being 40 to 50 minutes apart but
for those couple of days it'll be about 20 minutes apart which gives the farmers more time to commit their fall Harvest
to get them ready for the winter in the First Nations they tend to associate it
more with what they see happening in nature around them and it's called The Mating Moon because the Moose for
example go through the ritual of ruding their antlers to try to attract mates
and so when we look at some of these Star Stories and some of the ways in which the night sky is observed from
across different cultures it's really interesting to watch as the progression
of those Legends and those stories and those observations change throughout the
year the Moon that we are at right now is a really special one uh for a couple of reasons first off it is the full moon
that will be closest to the autumnal equinox it also happens to be when we observe International observe the
moonight which is just between the first qu quar in the full moon uh on September
14th and that will be events across the world to celebrate our nearest companion
the moon at the rasque Montreal Center we'll be having a talk on space
exploration by David Schuman who's our resident expert when it comes to All Things space exploration uh Rockets uh
missions and probe satellites you name it David's our expert um we also will be
sharing a hopefully observing night on the field both for the moon as well as for Saturn and some deep Sky objects we
hope to do that but of course weather is always an issue and uh Ron was
mentioning earlier that there is a little bit of smoke in the air still for us still here with wildfires happening still in the western part of Canada um
but if we actually end up with cloudy weather we're actually going to be doing a moon sketching workshop and I've LED
through one of those before for one of the global star parties and I might even do that again in the near future cuz I
love the sketching side of observing the moon the rasque Montreal Center is one
of my biggest resources when it comes to teaching my students but also when it comes to sharing our love of the night
sky with the public and on the member side of things aside from the public events we're starting to do some
workshops this fall both with moon gazing and identifying different targets on the moon throughout the fall
hopefully starting to work on some of our moon observing certifications but also an astro
photography Workshop starting tomorrow night and we have good weather forecaster for tomorrow night n on wood
so I'm hoping to finally get a night under the stars with my students now when the semester started
we were just going through the occultation of Saturn by the moon we had
the early morning conjunction of Jupiter and Mars we had the perc's meteor shower
starting to wne and we had the occasional Aurora with the sun being so
active so that's where I started my students Journey was sharing with them some of the phenomena that we can see
that separate what's happening right now in the night sky with what happens long term and one of the neat things about
that is to show what we expect to see like this series of images that we could get out of something like
stellarium versus what we actually can see and since the moon occultation of
Saturn is not something that we were able to see from here in North America
my colleagues in space Oddities uh Roger Heyman in the UK was able to catch this beautiful picture of Saturn coming away
from the Moon and another rasque member later on when the Sun finally set here
in North America for us was able to catch this picture of Saturn a little bit further distance away Adrien had
shared this picture a week before my classes started of both the Aurora and a
perc its meteor captured a in his night sky in Michigan and so I used these
images to start to get the students to understand why they benefit from looking
up why they benefit from keeping an eye on what's happening in the night sky and
contrary to a lot of other astronomy courses where there's a specific set curriculum that you have to kind of go
through I try to let my class be as organic as possible so that when there's
something interesting happening in the night sky we can pull it in because the one thing that I recognize because I'm
teaching at the college level these are not necessarily students who will go on to major in astronomy or astrophysics or
in space sciences and any of the other fields associated with it some of them will some of them will go in that
direction but for all of them this is more of a tour of the science associated
with astronomy and as such the more current
relevant impact ful astronomy that we can tie in the more impactful space
science that's happening today that they would read about if they're you know cursing through Reddit or watching you
know on Facebook a few videos on YouTube going on Instagram the things that they
hear about they should be able to connect to and start to understand by the end of this course so I spend a fair
amount of the first week sharing with them what's happening now in astronomy so we can talk about the sun talk about
about the solar activity and talk about Aurora and start to connect those phenomena and then at the same time we
can start to introduce them to the idea of modeling and of taking data over hundreds of years and using that data to
try to model out what you expect to see in terms of solar activity and right now
we're not on the curve of expectations we are off of the curve of expectations
and we have been now for about the past two years which is why you know we've had some incredible opportunities to
observe Aurora here in North America in Europe in uh Northern Asia over the past
little while and even down south when you talk about Australia seeing some incredible Aurora and this is not
something that we would normally expect to see to the amount and to the range that we've been expecting to see it in
Montreal we've not been able to see all the Aurora that would have been visible at our latitude because of unfortunately
Cloudy Skies but we want to try to have the students
understand that when there's an aural forecast they want to look up they want to go out and they want to try we talk
about astronomy missions and the juice mission is on its way to the Jupiter icy moons and the Europa Clipper will be
launching later this term so we've got our Jack Astro as part of the uh
beautiful Message in a Bottle initiative that NASA put together and we are going to be on the launch of of Europa and
it's interesting to read the news and see the scientific studies of Europa of
the icy moons and starting to understand that even with the mission having been designed and in its final stages before
launch our expectations of the mission are constantly being adjusted as we learn and we know
more private missions to space you know with everything happening with Boeing Starliner and even the the interesting
little uh sound feedback that we had this past Saturday it's important to
recognize that it is really exploration there is this element of the unknown in
terms of whether or not things will work so we've been keeping our eye on the whole Saga of the Starliner and the two
astronauts that are currently at the ISS and will turn an 8-day Mission into an 8-month Mission but we're also excitedly
waiting Polaris Dawn's launch and seeing the first private space walk and seeing
the data that they collect moving through the magnetic field and going near the poles of the Earth for the
first time we can use our Earth observation satellites to track that Wildfire smoke that Ron and I were
talking about earlier and then with Saturn's opposition coming up it's a great chance to talk to the students
about perspective and about the changing angles at which we see the planets and
how the planets themselves move through our night sky and right now the the Rings are almost dead on it's 8 months
from now that the Rings will be exactly dead on and we'll lose them for a short amount of time unfortunately Saturn will
be Incredibly Close to the sun when that happens so we're not really going to get a chance to see those Rings disappear
this time around we're going to have to wait another 13 years for that phenomena to be seen
again and once you have them started to be interested in what's happening in
astronomy now the best way to get them to start looking up and orienting
themselves is with our most dominant neighbor the moon and it would be great to be able to see all the different
parts of the Moon see the far side and the near side but the while the Mars or
with whe while the lunar reconnaissance Orbiter can see all of that we can't from here on Earth so that gives us a
talking point to start talking about orbits and forces and the interaction at play between the Earth and the moon then
we can talk about phases and get the students to start to understand that the Moon Rises and sets at different time
that whole good night Moon book that they read when they were little kids is a gorgeous book but it's not exactly
accurate cuz the Moon is very visible during the daytime and its waning phases and so these last two weeks with the
waning phases I've had the students trying to look for the moon when they drive into school or when they take the
bus into school in the mornings and that's a different phenomena than having them go and try to look at the Moon in
the night time when you can see more detail tell in the daytime if you pick out the moon you start to recognize just
how bright it must be if you can see it during the daytime so from there we start talking about the moon we start
talking about humans connection to the moon and one of the best things to do is to ask the kids if they actually can see
the man on the moon and this is something that we do during our public events as well is we try to point out
the uh parelia when you try to see the different features or the different shapes and object in the night sky the
man on the moon is one of the first things that I was able to see and I love seeing it during the waxing giv when
still part of the Moon isn't completely visible but the man on the moon starts shining down and then with the full moon
it's so incredibly bright and so those darker Mar really start to stand out a
few years back one of our members showed me that you could actually visually see
instead of the man on the moon Wilma Flintstone and you could just kind of make out the eyes you can just kind of
make out the hair shape you can make out a little bit of the mouth and even a
little bit of the pearls around the crater Tao others would told me that they
actually see Betty not Wilma and I think maybe that's just a little matter of
perspective you know who was your favorite growing up in the cartoons but
in other cultures when you see the moon and other orientations more often in the evening time when you go out for your
walks you'll see other objects like the rabbit which is often seen in the southern hemisphere but the important
thing to share with the students is that the Moon that you see is the moon seen in all parts of the world who are
experiencing night at the same time which helps them to start to understand why trying to observe the lunar eclipse
coming up in a couple of weeks will be an interesting way for them to get out and try to observe that Moon so what I
have the students do with the Moon is I have them sketch and identify the phases I have them try to see what features
they can identify so they start to become familiar with the moon and those sketches can range in quality they can
take pictures and use the pictures to sketch from I don't mind at all the sketch can be just a complete blob and
that's fine too the important part is to get them looking up and as they look up
at the Moon they start to recognize more of it that will stay with them after the
class is finished and they're out for their night walks or they're out with hopefully down the road their kids or
their grandkids sharing the moon becomes something that can be can connect you to
the night sky so we talk about why the moon isn't there all the time with the different
phases of the moon and then we talk about how the sky itself changes through
the night and through the year so through the night we talk about the Earth's rotation we talk about the way
in which the Stars seem to move around the North Pole and we even discuss how to take STAR trails and then the star
Trails can be used to try to determine the length of the day by measuring the arc that you get for a certain amount of
exposure for a certain amount of time and that's one of the possible projects that the students will have available to
them down the road we discussed the Earth's movement in its orbit and where
the zodiac constellations came from and this is just a first cursory pass uh
tomorrow actually in lab they're going to be doing a stellarium exercise and in that stellarium exercise one of the
things I do is I actually show them why the horoscopes for zodiac constellations
don't actually match the zodiac constellations anymore and for some students that's a bit devastating for
some students it becomes something they can bring up at Thanksgiving or at Christmas time and you know get their
grandmother or Aunt or Uncle really really angry because they're saying astrology is real but we make sure every
student leaves with a starfinder so that when they go out at night they can start to orient themselves depending on what
time of year and what time of night they go out and then we teach them a little bit about star hopping using the Big
Dipper to find the North Star identifying all the stars and the circumpolar constellations moving around
that North Star using the Arc of the handle of the Big Dipper to take you to
Arc tourist to take you to spika to try to understand where the summer
triangle is and we have them identify how to measure objects in the night sky
so they can identify the altitude for example of the North Star and then see
if it matches using simple your hand extended as far out as you can with the
bottom of your fist for the first movement being parallel to the Horizon
so that's 0° top of your fist being 10° and working your way up the North Star
always matches your latitude and you ask them in terms of where's the latitude
when they are at the North Pole where is the North Star and they start to
identify that it really does match the latitude then we take them back to this
circumpolar View and we start to identify specific objects that they are
going to have a chance to see if they come out to any these optional observing nights this summer so the first one that
we would try to do is the Andromeda galaxy so we showed them how to use copia to find the Andromeda galaxy what
it might look like through a simple set of binoculars in a dark sky and
then eventually in a lab later in September they're going to get to stack
a very Elementary set of images with a few calibration frames to start to
understand how astrophotography works and this is where we start to look at
what it means to be an astronomer in 2024 what tools and techniques you have
available to you that enhance your ability to enjoy the night sky and to
observe some of the dimmer photons and that means being able to identify where in the night sky these objects are
because we don't want the students to Simply rely on computerized uh go-to mounts we want
them to be able to start to identify when they're asked about an object or when they're looking at the picture of
an object where that might that object be and how could you find your way to it if you had a dobsonian for example with
you so we start with circumpolar constellations and then we move to the
most dominant set of constellations that they'll see if they go out that very night which would then be the summer
triangle so we talk about finding Vega denb and Al we talk about looking at the
line from alter to Vega and I share with them one of these images of the Ring Nebula and we use that to start to talk
about what our sun will look like down the road when our sun finally runs out
of fuel so they start to get an idea that we are going to delve into the life
cycle of stars we are going to delve into what happens in different stages of
stars and we've done at an early point we try to also talk about the Scale of the Universe and talk a little bit about
galaxies but it's early in the course so we want them to look for things where they can visually spot them so we look
for the Andromeda galaxy we look for the summer triangle we show them what the Ring Nebula would look like and when
they come out to an observing night we try to show them through a telescope that really you can see a little bit of
that color a little bit of that blue a little bit of that red we showed them a globular cluster and my favorite is M13
and I know m113 a lot of people say it's overdone but what I love about it is you can see the cluster like Arrangement
even with binoculars in the middle of a of a Suburban uh development so I will
spend time in the evening sometime in my driveway with binoculars finding the
summer triangle finding Hercules and then saying good night to the Hercules globular
cluster so once I get student to start to understand how to look for these
things I then give them the next step of looking up which is going out and
identifying if they can see these from near their home and this is our first
attempted citizen science we go out and they look for signis they look for the
summer triangle and as part of globe at night they identify do they only see the
three brightest stars do they see the three brightest stars with a few others so that you can start to make out the
shape of the signis the swan do they see a lot of other stars where they start to
have difficulty figuring out which one is Alter and which one is denb and they
can even start to potentially see a little bit of the double star Albero or
do they have a really really dark sky and none of our students do at the moment but when they go out further out
to a dark sky to a rural environment they would have a chance to see this and that we correlate to the bort scale and
we talk to them a little bit about what it means to have light pollution because Montreal is such a bad City for light
pollution World year round but it's mainly biased because of our winter
times because we're on an island surrounded by what ends up being ice and snow which reflects all of our
artificial light it makes the city Dome so much brighter so once we've got them
looking at looking for the moon and the phases of the moon identifying where the
planets would be identifying which circumpolar constellations they can see and where they are looking for the
summer triangle trying to identify where they are they're now looking up they're
now turning their eyes to the dark the other side of it is to get them to
recognize that the daytime Sky gives us a ton of information as well about the
motion and the behavior of of our Earth Moon Sun system so I talked about
getting them to look for the moon as they drive in or as they take the bus in in the mornings but the lab that we do
the very first lab which we did last Wednesday involves trying to use the
daylight hours and the amount of altitude that the Sun reaches when it
passes the Meridian the north south line to try to identify certain features and
the features they can identify are the length of the day the length of the year the tilt of the Earth's axis and the
latitude they're observing from so we use a database timeanddate.com and the
students start to plot out first off the length of daylight and they see that the daylight is at its longest in the
summertime in Midsummer at its shortest in midwinter well winter solstice and
then at its strongest again when the next June Solstice comes around and so
they can use that to determine average length of the day they can use that to determine the length of the year and
then they can plot out the altitude of the Sun and start to realize that the sun isn't actually just at the same
place all year round and this I'm sharing with you data from one of our
students who's already submitted their lab which is due tomorrow Matteo and Matteo gave me permission to share his
data because he made it through a slightly revised lab this year so I want to share with you the revision that I
did because I'm really happy that this worked out and I wasn't 100% sure until
I did it myself before the semester started and I'm really excited to share this with you because this part of it
I've shared once a couple of years ago on a global star party I actually think it was all the way back in like 2021
that I shared what we do with time and dat.com but here's the neat thing after
doing this and getting the students to see that Sunrise happens at different places and at different times we start
to identify the the path of the sun that could be traced from any place in the
northern hemisphere is going to look different at different times of the year and I share with them a picture of
craphy this is the Tracks Of The Sun throughout the year from one specific spot now this is a picture that was
taken in Venice many many years ago by one of the solar can uh representatives
and I created a solar can set up on the roof of our College Science Building
building and made this beautiful craphy picture that only caught kind of half
the year in full but you can see that the position of sunrise and sunset is
much further south in the winter time when the Sun reaches a lower altitude and moves past the 180° view of this
picture during the summertime when you have longer days and the sun rises in the Northeast and sets in the Northwest
so it encompasses a larger part of of the sky then I introduced the students to
anmas and anemas are pictures of the Sun at the same
time at the same position or from the same location throughout the year and if
you look at anmas in the northern hemisphere they have this really cool phenomena where they have smaller loops on top larger loops on the bottom and
it's completely vertical at noon now we have daylight savings time in Montreal which means that if if you're staying
the same time of the year it actually shifts for a few months every year so I
had the students do this at two different times one in the morning and one in the
afternoon and this is the results that they get they actually got to see the anemas at 11:00 a.m. eastern daylight
time so 10:00 a.m. eastern standard time and at 3:00 p.m. eastern Daylight time which ended up being 2:00 p.m. Eastern
Standard Time and as long as they do that shift partway through the year they get to see these beautiful analemma
Behavior if I had a pinhole camera that I could open and close at only specific times myography could have that analemma
behavior I don't have that so we're able to do it using timeand dat.com so now
all of a sudden they start to understand the complexity of actually viewing the sun it's not as straightforward so in a
couple of weeks when I introduced them to archo astronomy and some of the amazing observations taken by the
Ancients of the behavior of the sun it's so much more impactful when they realize
how complex that behavior really is and even something as simple as what we're going to be doing in a couple of weeks
which is measuring the planet size using the shadow at local noon allows them to
recognize the achievements of ancient astronomy now if the Ancients could do it if first nations were observing these
things then our students should be able to have these similar types of wow
moments these similar types of observations so that when they go out away from this course after December
when they've finished when they've graduated from this specific part of their
program they should still be able to look up at the day Sky look up at the night sky and have an idea of what
they're seeing how their view changes throughout the year and when they read
those articles of what's happening in space science they will have a starting point as long
as we get them to start opening their eyes to the dark so from that I say thank you for Ras Montreal thank you
very much well that's great um I I feel like
we got a uh we got a a a lesson right
you know right here at uh Global star party it's awesome it's I love that that
um uh the image that you made where it shows the path of the sun going across
that's the campus at John Abbott College that's the campus at John Abbot and I highly suggest everybody in the audience
if you have a chance to look up solar can it's little pinhole cameras and they
have photographic paper and you set them up for you can set them up for just a
couple of days in some location if you just want to catch the curve of the Sun during that time of year but what I did
is I set it up from December 25th 1st to June 21st of one year so I set it up
from winter solstice to Summer Solstice to try to catch the entire path as it changes through half of the year so you
just leave the P the the printing paper in there and it just and the pin hole open yep and it lits in so little light
that you only catch that path of the sun with any real Clarity but because it's
constantly reflecting in off of all of the buildings and all of the surroundings over this span of a few
weeks the background starts to become clearer and clearer oh wow that's very very cool very cool great well yeah may
maybe some of you out there will do that awesome okay so um I
will uh join you here for a moment uh Kareem and Kareem I noticed that I was
like doing some uh internet searching about you and and uh uhoh you know which
was very cool uh you know and I noticed that you also have an asteroid named
after you is that right no I don't oh you unfortunately no I don't it says you
do really you do yeah not that I know of unless somebody's planning on surprising
me might have done that okay all right well no we have a few other members an
asteroid to give I would name it after you for sure okay thank you SC all right
thanks all right um our next speaker is uh
marchelo Souza marello is a uh very well-known astronomy Outreach uh
educator and professor of astronomy and physics down in Brazil and uh he is also
the editor of skyup magazine and um he's been waiting patiently back there so
thank you for coming on to Global Star Party Marcello
and you are
muted I think now it's working there we go okay all right thank you much for for
for the invitations but it's a great pleasure to be here and we have some news I will talk
about but the here on Earth
uh during the night the dark sky places because I have news about this it's
something that is almost unbelievable for us
because uh the Brazilian TV channel the most important Brazilian TV channel
produced a report about the first dark sky Park in
Latin America and to has transmitted to all Brazil and I share here this experience
that it was a special program about the protection of the nature in
Parks here in Brazil I don't know if it
shared theage yes yes and here h i is a
screenshot from the TV and I was using
one of the telescope was your telescope explor scienti that's a
Max here I screenshot from the TV I will show the
report now this is what happened I I don't know if you can hear the sound is
this let me see if it work
this this is the region in Brazil is a special program about the
connection with the nature here in Brazil and one of the
places is this that is dark sky Park here near us the first dark sky
Park in Latin America that I was responsible for the astronomy with the
team that are responsible for the recognition of the first dark sky part in Latin America that is near us located
near us is a
we have a lot of mountains and the park have many
mountains and many beautiful places there now we are going to
show this is the park this guy there it's fantastic
guy wow that's dark uh the
milkway look at that this is the park inside the
park and the name of the city is Santa Maria madalen
here's the reion this is the
par gab was there
awesome you have a uh a Hall of Fame there some of the people that visit the
it is in the Hall of the fame and gave it gave it to this girl they bought I st
for her that is a commercial hom page that offers this and
she is very happy with this and she works with the popularization of
astronomy in the city she participates in our astronomy club
and now we are going to show the telescop
that now the telescopes your telescope here is quite in the Brazilian
TV here
wonderful now I show I will talking about the dark sky
it is super dark out there and this was a fantastic opportunity to popularize
astronomy here in Brazil now many people want to visit the
bar and this is the park and we also organize event in other
I bring here can you hear me let me change
here yeah can he yes I hope you can hear me
this is the other partk part of the park is also another place inside the
park where we organize activities at
night this is the group that was visited
there this happened happened two weeks
ago this is a is a wonderful place with without artificial lights this is a
member of our astronomy club that was organized in the event of the sky
observation there
and is a fantastic Place very beautiful place and very dark El because you don't
have artificial lights there inside the park you don't have artificial lights this is one of the
observations this is another place this is the observatory that we are using
with a remote telescope from our sky and now we organize two times
month one night we visitors that we walk
inside the the park on inside the forest and then we show The Observatory and
show the suit constellations and talk about about the constellation for the
people that visiting the planets and what possible to see some Sky objects
also yeah we have a place to make
presentations and now I hope that
in many places in the world it will be possible to see the comet C 2023 A3
appol that see now in the October
12 they com to be near the Earth and after pass near this some and it will be
a good moment to observe the com for us here will be very difficult because the
it will be in constellation of vle and it will be below the Horizon in the beginning of the night and here October
12 that is the prediction is that will be possible to see by naked eye the
comment for us here will be very difficult because in on October 12th you
be near speaker and the speaker will be below the Horizon for us in the
beginning of the night I don't know if in other place of the world will be
possible to see but the predictions that it will be probably if the comment
didn't disintegrate when pass near the sun will reach Min three in magnitudes
you'll be a fantastic observation oh yeah a few for a few minutes and I hope
he we have places in the world that will be possible to see for us here I think
that will be very difficult because vehicle will be below the Horizon in the beginning of the night but maybe if it
will be Min three maybe we can see before the
the sunrise the sun the sun set and this was for me one of the most
H special moments that I was invited to make presentations for very special
people right here and my daughter helped me at this experience about first time
that I I did this and was something that
was an experience and unique experience for
me and I hope now we have more people
that likes astronomy and they participate and they
will be involved with group now in Sky observations
here it was a very different experience first time with very special
people and now we have we are receiving many uh big support from the Press here
and uh maybe because of the TV now that show for all Brazil the experience that
had in Santa Maria madalen this is the observatory that's located the sky
telescope that is in the observatory in the city of
s this is my report squ we have now we are doing many new activities
here and we are preparing now uh our program for the last three months of the
year we we are going to do many new activities here from middle of September
until middle of December will be three months of many activities we are going
to organize a new AR tourist C because many people here are
talking about AR tourism here because they are receiving many contacts from
people that want to visit these special places that you have uh Dark Skies there
thank you very much for the invitation thank you is a great pleasure to be here
thank you so much okay that's great yep uh you know um also I want to
call attention to skyep magazine which is uh um edited by uh uh professor sua
and um you can get a free copy by going to explor scientific.com
Skies up and that Sky up spelled skyss up okay uh it's a global astronomy
magazine absolutely free so um our next speaker is Maxie FIS and uh Maxie is uh
down in h Argentina and uh uh he makes
fantastic uh deep Sky uh astrophotographs he came on originally
to Global Star Party showing images he had made with a smartphone camera where
he tore the lens out and just had the the sensor um uh you know aimed at the
uh light path and just really blew us away with his talent and skill and uh
and also his friendly demeanor so Maxi thanks for coming on to Global Star
Party well thank you Scott for inviting me again uh I it's a pleaseure to to be
here like every time that I could be so well uh thanks for the presentation yes
it is it's been a while since I was doing astrophotography with a cell phone
ER those was my starting year uh and really helped me to continue learning
and and about the the taking pictures and processing
and ER looking forward the the sky objects in my sky atmosphere so well uh
first of all what I want to show you is uh what I've been doing last week and a
couple days ago because uh I was
um practicing on what object that I could use and also was practicing with
the small gear H to be prepared if I want to go go to another place more with
more Dark Skies here in what I'm where I'm leaving uh okay er do you see the
main screen
yes great so Scott ER in this case I was
working with the exos 100 and this this is my backyard right
now in St Louis and here what I got is my
ascar 200 ASL and the cwo 5
33 and well the ASR plus and everything you know I couldn't ER
work together the the ASR plus and the mount but working separately goes okay
ER you know I I I could figure out for now
so I want to do some practicing so doing
some goto objects and see if the the field of view goes okay the movement and
everything with the Mount And The Guiding so the the first object that I want to
capture was the the section of m66 and m67
16 and 67 sorry and this is the F of view that I got with this small gear you
know for a little small equipment you got a lot of
information uh let me be clear this is not the same pictures that a more early
run show us ER to us but uh it's kind of
that I hope someday I could learn and get all of that data to
work so anyway I like I said this was only I think it was one and a half hour
stacking uh I have a lot of objects in this field of view of course the the main is
M16 16 and 70 is the the swan nebula or Omega
nebula uh and a lot of this hydrogen
places small um and then more later I went
to see the small magga gen Cloud because
when I simulated on the ER Sky portal uh with the F of view
of my camera it fits almost in Char the a
small magenic Cloud so let me put it one on
one you can see there are a lot of neocities in this small
Galaxy and a lot and of course a lot of stars that
ER you you going to be my blowing H and of course there's a lot of
H Global clust small Global clusters also uh nearby this place is a 4 to gai
but in the field of view it it doesn't ER fit for the sensor that I got I don't
know if you are resuming me okay because my Wi-Fi is yes yes kind of yeah
everything coming across audio and images yeah
excellent so I I was doing this a week ago I was talking with
Cesar about this objects of what I was ER preparing
for ER you know going to a darker Place ER here in in this
region uh so so I really like I hope that I in couple weeks my objective is
capture the Andromeda galaxy because in this field of view fits en the enire
Galaxy so but in I will have it almost
50 ER degrees above the Horizon so it's very low so I have to capture it a
couple nights so and uh this is all
the my my two equipments that I have you can see this is the small one and the
big one is this the 8 in F4
um I was practicing last Sunday I the
the weather say that I will have a little more stability to working with
a you know uh ER with higher resolution
and get more h fine details so I was practicing to see what object that I
could get and I go again with
the this place that's called the quartet of gr or quartet
OFA and this is the oneon-one picture that I get you know I have a lot of details on
this galaxies because I really love to capture galaxies but I kept I compare
with my another camera and that I the picture that I took I think two years
ago but I have more details in the another one than this so the sky the
wasn't very very good it was very poor for a good
see but anyway H this is only
a a practice what I have with the if the four galaxies fits on the field of view
and you know there's a lot of smaller or smaller not beyond galaxies far far away
so I think this is going to be my next ER go to capture for to to bring a lot
and a lot of hours so I'm glad that I get all these colors in my portal five
you know uh so maybe I I will get more
data will come because now the the groups I will have it the entire night
almost in the couple in the next month ER now ER about the six 60 degrees is
where I start to capturing but when I do this I will have it
almost uh 1100 p.m. or 12 p.m. so it's almost all night long and
anyway wow look at all I hope that you
enjoy yeah there's a lots of so many here there are twoo in they're
everywhere there are too many it's you know I I
also went to NGC 300 this the that was called the pin
wheel Southern pin wheel Galaxy um also there are lots of Galaxy
change sorry Galaxy chain ER in the background so like like this one you
know yeah this this is a Galaxy chain spacular you can see
and yes it is uh the feel of view of this place is very rich of galaxies H
there's another one here's another one and uh every every place that you
look it is going to be is going to have a Galaxy so uh I will give practice on
this pH of view uh giv more and more and more data and this is was only 40
minutes stacking of two hours that I had to put out ER so that wasn't a very good night
the weather here is very clear for now
but the scene and the res solution is very poor so I will have to maybe
contining working with this a smaller gear to get more practice
so uh well I hope you enjoy my
presentation
was a lot so we told something about about the this this is small
[Laughter] Mount it's yes is is a small year work
better with how are you hi Maxi sorry that I connected really late there to
tonight I had a a very very long day um yes um I uh tonight I I was
cooking pizza for my family um just I finished but I don't I don't finish my
my uh stacking of pictures because I I took three hours of M8 ER
nebula but last week um the problem is that Maxi knows that we had a a storm
that we call it Santa Rosa storm um this year fall in the day that is thir August
30 um was a huge storm in in the center
of the country maybe not in St Louis not Maxi that you you don't have in the same
day the the storms no it was very windy but no not not much yes it's it's fun
because it's it's a it's a five between materal and people that have have
religious um Catholic um people that
have fight about about this and is is a
fun a fun coincidence and uh something that we
people that we love astronomy all we talk about all time we are talking about
weather um Cloud conditions or as Maxi
says a for example you have the level of light pollution now is lower but the the
hot the hot air in the mountains from the day maybe make us some complications
about about Sin Maxi is that is the the area maybe to have more
SE by the M no no I no how do you relate no I I think do you
relate because a new place for you for me too well I I I I I don't know for me
it's very my my when it is because it's t tonight for example was going to
be by the weather report to be a clear night but
no yeah it would say here two but uh no maybe
tomorrow uh but I think the is the humidity that's and of course
the the layer of the altitude that I now I'm almost 1,000 MERS from from the
level of the sea and you are 10 meters from the level of the SE yes maybe a
little more but H so so the humidity that you have nearby the
the rear Place ER I I'm not having here you know yesterday yes yes in very yes a
very very summer day in Winter um a lot
of windy day today was was a summer day two nights
ago how many how many yesterday yesterday it was almost
28 27 wow
wow 27 de I am the conversion to the fahrenheit
because it's 27 it's is a really a warm
temperature and we are in winter
yes here here more than 30
degrees in marel in okay okay how many
degrees oh yes we we are in winter you
always and nobody nobody knows so
hot the we are in two in so different so
different environments marello me and now Maxi because Maxi in in chilco in in
in your old house we have we are in the same environment or a I don't know in
English but maybe um well it's the area
because it's the P pass I am maybe I had a little more humid because I am in the
in the in the zone of river play that is more
an stario ER I don't know if in English is
stario but I think that it's it's a similar word um like a b or like a
story yeah um but it's now you are you are between
the last sieras and a Pampa that is like a
desert and the next mountains are the Andes and something that last week we
was talking with maxi I have a picture from 300 kilometers from the place where
Maxi from the same city um and in clear days you can see
the Corda de los the mountains in the Andes at 300
kilometers 3 yes yes is it only in the in the sunset because the sunset cut the
shape of the mountains and you can see if not is impossible and only in clear
days because 300 kilometers is is in is
incredible uh to see something at at that distance um this is really
really something s surprising that that
because the the place where Maxi now
is ma Maxi live is amazing because let me share a little
bit this this this is how my sunsets ER let me
share ah he is ready right now yeah this is my Sunset right
now wow wow I think that you know I have I have to go 10 kilometers and I have
these sunsets you can see it's this this desert yes it's a desert that you don't
have anything going to the to the end
this maybe well maybe do you have because you you are you are
watching yes Cordon de losandes yes do you you have Mendoza in the middle menoa
have B um and Winery and yes you technically
you are watching the the vine yards the wine yards but you you can see
that the only thing that you can see because maybe something is crazy because
I see that and I was thinking the Cure of the earth and you're watching
something so so at so long distance uh
and for me was magic was incredible the people of of the University of launa
show me that because they said okay watch the now and was that day without clouds and was wow what's amazing maybe
I have the pictures in some place I need to to to uh uh search the the picture
that I have in some in some uh maybe in some um I don't know how you
say in some you know that look at look at this show show show
us look look at this this was yesterday
show us the sunsets whoa happy man now this
River wow you know I'm really this is your
neighborhood the weather there was really hot no this is almost 70
kilom okay of the north but in
Cordova I went to this River yeah no no no no no no not too much
no no offenses no offenses yeah no no no no from laun you you have
to go k North yes so it's very
near and I I went to this place is very very good here in the background is my
car and wow we have a really good Max
sorry refreshing wow is going for to Merlo or
not no let's we need to see a map
in AR it's not it's
not excellent excellent well I I will send you the the
location my internet is very bad but but maybe maybe you you you can share a
map yeah but ER
I will share
this no I cannot take this picture because my internet is not well but it's
okay maybe another day I will sh yeah yes thank
you friend well CES it's all yours the time so you got for me no problem
because I I couldn't I couldn't finish my my stacking is for the next Global
sari because I have senta Laguna lagun
nebula I make a lot of different object from the balcony but um I I I couldn't
have the enough time to to to make the
the ah how do you say the the the process the stacking and process actually I I have my another computer
stacking the the nebula but the hour I I
received the the the the WhatsApp from Scott and say yes I'm cooking a pizza
and a picture at the same time I the the pizza four pizzas was
ready but not the the the the pictures something that the people need to know
that pictures in astronomy it's a fun it's a fun work but but it's a lot of
work um smart telescope that the marello have is a great solution but the but uh
the the crazy thing is that that er um
we love we still love make uh process um
it's a fun thing but we need time and I had I had a lot of time I'm starting my
day in a total different way because I have my saor license today at morning
and started to to take the exam for for my license to to sailing my sailing
license really it's a what I I started in in a crazy way because five fin
finally I have my license because I took the exam I was approved and I happy um
but ER the day was very very buy um I I
couldn't uh work early in in my pictures sometimes a it's okay it's okay well we
know that you're down I say thanks to to the support of Maxi join and marello
because I don't have anything to to to show tonight this happens at Star
parties so yes yes so Dennis Martinez is
saying uhh hello from Argentina oh yes thenis thenis work in
[Music] inia pagonia great pictures andas yes yes
wonderful wonderful I I
saw that his
his that we made and they they are making their glass I
made his glasses for Adrian no um yes because I made glasses for my
my customer of telescope too because I am optician of course of course I have I
think ever I think that is the the Finish sorry Mar no sorry I'm disturbing you I
have here I found a video with the Andes Mountains in your
caat wow wow yes in your in your Eclipse uh it I I will share here you I think
that this that that's it was amazing for me I don't
know if you oh
yeah
mus so great wow is it music froma yes is is is the the yes the as
the visitor center of
yes cafa is is a great a great this
is I don't know many many think that may be changed
there but this is the lake Artin yes this is in the west near to
the Andes have there Artin yes is amazing
the place why is why is in the afternoon wow I needed to go to the
mountains to see the eclipse yes I know that that haime
Garcia went to the same place because I know that you you know you know to H my
my friend H and we are going to the to the SE side in the in the East this year
and uh we are going uh we we are going
driving um I I'll send you the contact of the the secet Secor uh how do you say
minister of Tourism of the neighborhood of the of the town of
um umer s jul yes I I'll send you marello
the contact for the woman that because this yester yesterday I I I talk with
her and um I'll send you the contact wow
was was similar like San Juan yes over the and here's the anders and mon here
amazing amazing wow it's so much over the ends Mountain
the eclipses I I had the opportunity to to to see something similar over the
ends in San Juan and and was really amazing calafat is it's a great
place excellent amazing to see the mountains
beautiful yeah something that I I can share tonight it's a one of our uh
Facebook site H I'll show you let me share only two
two um two minutes
um Facebook page yes yes no problem wow amazing the ring the diamond ring wow
ring with diamond at the end of the eclipse and was fantastic the city of
kalafat with all the light is on
beautiful wow CF in the in the in the down uh yes
at the at at the basement of the mountain yes and you are in the
top wow beautiful really beautiful this was
a fantastic experience for me and to see the mountains the this mountains in front why is
amazing yeah excellent I I'll share uh an an small uh
Facebook a Facebook group to invite to everyone that ER like to to be a part of
this Facebook group and uh let me
[Music] first of all I opening here
okay guys I had to go or I have to go to the end so all right thank you very much
Maxi thank you before the Maxi yeah Maxi thank you and have a good night we are
we are running a little overtime right now and we should probably move on to the next speaker
um uh but there's one last thing you'd like to show uh
Cesar yes yes I show you something one minute okay it's it's our to invite curo
astronomia amateur is our our site of uh astronom is is a site of of
our company Sako um is small grow prev grow um well
Maxi Adrian ER pish uh pish uh pictures in
our group this is a picture of this week of of we call it la Mona de Plata this
galaxy of from ju Pao Pacho pictures of the
sun H many many peop this is from Ricardo Ricardo
Sanchez and uh really we are happy to to
receive the collaborations every day from people from Argentina and
another another another places um well Scott sometimes you you uh share
something in the group too and we are uh really happy to to share with the people
and invite to to the people to participate uh about uh to to share
pictures and of course talk about different uh you know
you can put uh different uh um information about Expeditions and
astronomy H events store parties everything wonderful it's a it's a
very yes it's a great and our customers uh work um um uh share a lot
of pictures um really they are they are making an excellent excellent um
contributions for example this man kelon volador is a man that I know that he
have 85 years old and every
week he put this name but this not of course his real name I think that he's
from Colombia I I I don't remember now and every week this men with eight 86
years old collaborate with different uh astronomy
notes and of of course that many many people for example pikas put um she to
pictures with a cell phone with a small telescope and she collect the different different H view
of the Saturn rain Rings it's it's a great really it's a great grow and uh
you know it's we are happy that that ER we have this kind of of
community it's really something that yes I I was thank happy to show uh because
it's it's a great Community many of us we know each other um in person and we
went together H um we go together to
some parties uh well it's it's a it's a great Community um with another person
that live in another countries of course that we are H friends in distance yes
well this is all for tonight uh next week next or next Global Safari I show
you the new pictures that I I processing now but okay well no problem yes my another
computer is is making is making popcorn because it's so hot working
stacking you know yes I I can hear the the the the
noise of yes the noise of of the like like a plane yeah well very good Cesar
thank you so much welcome participating okay thank you so much all
right our our next speaker is Robert Reeves uh Robert is uh our um not only
the global star party's expert on the moon but I think he is uh recognized
worldwide for his knowledge of lunar terrain uh his images of the moon or
in my mind second to none and uh uh we're honored to have him on again here
at the global Star Party well I'm glad to be here Scott and uh it is an interesting time
for you know pardon the cat butt behind me Olivia's decided to all right park on
my on the back of my chair for that matter I think uh Rusty is around the
corner there the famous mooncat she's uh sacked out on my dresser there but uh
nonetheless uh they uh helped me along while I do my work here I said it's an exciting time for um the moon be for two
reasons this month uh on Thursday um science mag Science magazine is going to
do a major announcement about volcanism on the moon about how recent it has been
but I can't go into details because the article is embargoed until uh Thursday and I am in the process as we speak
papers on my desk uh writing up this uh Discovery for um um astronomy Magazine's
online website so we can release that on Thursday when the Embargo is up but um U
basically the Chinese changu five lunar lander that landed on oceanis procerum
uh a few years ago has uh made a really exciting Discovery and U it's going to
be it's going to be um hdden a lot of media here pretty quick and I'm glad to be part of it another thing that's uh
interesting is on September 1st um Firefly books up in Canada released my
new book about the Moon it is now available um it is not only available on
Amazon but it's available in uh brick and uh brick and mortar bookstores as well uh Barnes & Noble and the like half
congratulations Robert photographic atlas of the Moon and you mentioned my Moon pictures if I can keep from ripping
my headset off while I open the book um fire fly has done an absolutely stunning
job of reprinting reproducing I don't know how they're coming across on the
screen but uh let me just say that the uh printed page in this book equals the
U quality of the print that I'm getting off of my Canon wide format printer wow
the U the U print technology just the very past few years
has advanced tremendously I just couldn't believe it when I when I saw this book and um I'm really delighted
with the results fantastic um today today I'm going to do a two-parter um I've been
talking about how various things on the moon came into being and so forth and uh a little bit about the geology of them
and uh uh so forth but uh uh for the next two um Global star parties I'll be
talking about what to look for on the moon in a modest telescope uh you don't
need a big telescope even a pair of binoculars will show many popular features on the moon so uh let me try to
get into screen share and uh bring up my slops there it is you are
screen sharing Perfect all righty my uh title of my show for the next two weeks follow the shadow because U the
Terminator the shadow line between sunrise and sunet on the moon is where the Shadows are deepest longest and
provide the greatest relief to see features on the moon uh close to the
Terminator um a small telescope will show you these features when they're very highly flatly lit by a high Sun the
Shadows disappear and the features also fade from view so uh follow the Shadow
and we're going to be coming up on the uh the Crescent Moon here the I think we already are in the cret moon if we if I
remember right it's been cloudy and rainy here so long that uh I've lost track of the lunar phase but we'll start
off with uh the uh um Crescent if my Advance will work
maybe hello I'm GNA have to do it this way
okay there we go finally Crescent Moon um just hovering above the west east
excuse me Western Horizon just after Sunset we see this Crescent Moon kind of
reminds me of a of a smile up in the up in the sky but at this early phase you're really
only going to see a couple of features at this point the most obvious Mari
Chisum the Sea of crises the first lunar sea to emerge uh from the shadow as the
Crescent advances and um I've always thought of Mari Chum as this unwinking
eye keeping an eye on Earth you know you're kind of like Santa making sure everybody's not naughty and they've been
been nice but U crater wise the crater lrus and bavius some of the oldest on
the moon and fortunately some of the largest um they will be uh coming in at
130 and 177 kilometers in diameter and we'll see a closeup of them
here langris at the top petavius at the lower left in between the more heavily
ruined crater vindas but it doesn't show up so well because it's it's degraded
but uh petavius up on top um I mean excuse me languinis on top petavius on
the bottom U these you can even spot in a pair of binoculars so uh it doesn't take a whole lot of telescopic power to
see these of course if you do have a telescope with reasonable power then
we begin to see detail in these craters and we see that like langu is here is a
a classic what we call complex creater instead of just being a a hole in the
ground like you took a giant ice cream scoop and scooped out that did it in the moon uh instead we see the uh middle we
have this raised Central Peak and around the rim the um walls of the crater are
so huge and so tall that they can't support themselves and they collapse and Tumble down into the crater so we call
this type of crater a complex crater and moving on to a uh bavius uh we also see
an additional feature in here notice the real structure U the the the grooves
extending to the left and up above the fork RS extending upward both of those
are actually the part of the same uh real structure what you can't see very well in the shadows of the central Peak
is but it is one continuous Channel but combined they uh give bavius the
appearance of a clock reading about a quarter to 12 and moving on a little bit as the
waxing moon continues um we begin to pick up the two
lunar strong men Hercules and Atlas the U Roman and Greek mythological strong
men from uh ancient times and then down in the south of the Moon I like to highlight
Jansen uh 200 kilometers in diameter 2011 kilometers in diameter but so
shallow that unless you have these Sunrise Shadows like we see now Jansen
is going to disappear it uh you can look straight at it and it'll be hiding in plain side so uh let's move on here and
uh pushing the button come on go there we go finally um Hercules on the left
Atlas on the right um not quite the same age there are about a billion years
difference between them and U I'll let you guess that Atlas on the right is the
older one because it's got more extensive volcanism to modify its interior um like petavius just a few
minutes ago with the real structures radiating through it um we we call this
type of crater a floor fractured crater because volcanism has modified the
impact structure of the crater um Hercules on the left little smaller uh a
little deeper because it hasn't been as extensively Modified by volcanism but both of them up there are
the upper um Northeastern qu quadrant of the Moon and uh appear as the Crescent
Moon begins to advance and here's a Sundown view of
them to show how the uh lunar surface changes personality uh the difference
between sunrise and this are sun set on this area the Shadows provide a dynamic
that completely Alters the personality of these craters same set of craters we just saw but uh in literally in a
different light and uh putting a little more context in it here we see a Hercules and
Atlas u in the foreground indon crater the big
Plato lookalike uh halfway up to the Horizon basal fil crater fairly large
over 100 km in diameter and then on the horizon itself an even bigger Basalt
patch this is one of the limb hugging lunar seas that uh is difficult for us
to see this particular one Mari holam named after U Humbolt the German
Explorer from the early 18th or early 19th century but U just another one of
the broad patches of the Sal on the moon that are the lunar Seas but this one hugs right on the limb so uh we see it
at a very oblique angle instead of more face on like the classic Mario that
create the the classic face of the man and the moon moving on to
Jansen um here we see it's a it's a considerable crater uh many people
recognize uh the crater within it uh the more enhanced fabricius crater got the
deeper shadow in it uh many people see it before they recognize Jansen itself of course Jansen has that Scimitar
shaped reel running through it so it's very distinctive but um like I said this
is primarily visible at very low sound elevation it's it's a shallow crater only about 2 kilometers deep versus its
2011 kilometer width so it's got a depth over diameter ratio of one and 100 which
means it's very shallow it's not crater like at all it's not even as deep relatively as a pipan so uh when the sun
is high overhead as in this view we see Jansen
quickly Blends into the surrounding territory and uh again fabricius laying
within it is a more prominent feature even though it is a smaller crater
inside of Jansen and off to the uh east of Jansen notice the u u gouge of the
valley running down um okay I'm the looter expert and now
I'm having name difficulties um I forget the name of the darn thing um it'll come to me in a minute but U the bottom half
of it you notice it dog legs a little bit and goes to the left so uh I tend to
think that the bottom half of this um is a separate feature of don't think they
are the same thing uh the bottom one uh dog legs at the crater Mallet so I think
this should be the bottom part only should be called the Mallet Valley whereas the upper part uh is goes by a
different name which is still escaping me for some silly reason I'm getting to be of the age where when I introduce my
wife at a party I'm terrified I'm going to remember not remember her name either because the older you get names are what
vanishes from your memory uh you can remember remember things that happened 50 years ago but uh not a name so this
one is going to drift away I'm not going to remember it in time so here we are at
first quarter moon we see exactly half of the moon it's high in the above the
well for the Northern Hemisphere high above the southern Horizon at sundown U
perfectly located for observing for the rest of the evening uh because it'll sit shortly after midnight uh which means
this going to be in the sky a good long time where we can enjoy these things so now we're getting a variety of other
features um edonia crator the serpentine Ridge a non- crater feature the
hygienist and aradas reals again non- crater features then the very popular
triple combination of Theophilus cus and Catherina craters and then the Altis
scarp a large cliff on the moon which also not a crater but very popular
observing Target whoops hit the button too hard now first up theopus in the
upper right cus right beside it cathina down toward the middle uh left um these
are three similar size craters that aren't that different in age um but uh
there's the distinct difference in their appearance and this I'd like to present as a classic study of the age
degradation of craters on the moon uh the older ones have been beat up by
ejecta and seismic shaking from later impacts so the last one that occurred is
going to be the freshest looking one and the first one is going to be degraded by
ejective thrown from other impacts or the seismic shock or earthquake of the
impact of subsequent impacts uh craters being formed in this case Catherina
formed first on the eastern shore of Mario nectaris that actually formed before Mario nectaris in fact it's PR
nectarian and then cus formed uh and then subsequently Theophilus formed the
freshest of them because nothing has altered its appearance and you see how it overlay the rim of cus and crunched
the interior of of cus and the heavy seismic shock shook down the uh Central
Peak and muted it so each succeeding crater ruins the adjacent one next to it
uh to a greater degree and these are easily visible in binoculars on the
western shore of mar nectaris so you will have no difficulty finding this
triple crater combination in the moon southern hemisphere uh as the moon
approaches the first quarter and they uh Sunrise view of it
Katherina is still in deep Shadow sarus and Theophilus just
catching the Rays of sunshine uh Sunrise breaking across their rims and the central Peaks are just poking up into
the Sun and moving on to a higher Sun view
of it uh here we see territory to the West as well as U The Plains of Marin
nectaris so we see the the theophilos Cy cathina right on the
shoreline of Mor necturus but moving over to the to the West uh hopefully my
cursor is visible and orbiting the flat floored crater
abeta and uh ABA in itself is not necessarily remarkable for anything
except the string of craters extending from the bottom part this 200 kilometer
long train of craters chain of craters we call crater chains on the Moon by the
name of Katen and this is Katen abeta and it stretches about 200 kilometers
each one of these impacts in this chain were created by an a common an object
from a common uh U interloper that got
too close to the moon and and the Earth's gravity system and broke up and instead of hitting the Moon in one piece
it broke up and rained down in a chain of impacts now moving up north we
see the ruined form of decart crater excuse me and above it uh kind of a
light patch now drift a little bit to the East and you see these two craters
right here right in between it is where Apollo 16 landed so uh I take particular
Delight in showing that off because Charlie Duke lunar module pilot on on that one now General Duke uh lives you
know about 30 Mi up Interstate 35 from me but uh he and I joke when we meet at
uh U conventions that uh he is never there he's always on the road U
traveling and talking about his his experiences so uh even though he's almost a neighbor he's never
there and moving up into U Mor tranquil
uh Mor the Sea of Serenity further north um here we've got posidonius crater another
of these lovely Flor fractured craters have been modified by volcanism and the serpentine Ridge this wrinkle Ridge in
the basalt fields of serenus buckled up by uh the shifting basalts as they slump
toward the middle of the uh depressed uh center of the Basin and this particular
case dorsa liser and dorsa smov kind of twist together and create what we call
the serpentine Ridge and moving up to posidonius it's
definitely worth a look in the higher power eyepiece uh the real structure is
quite intriguing and the vulcanism in it you can see where it's buckled up a false inner wall on the crater Rises
almost a kilometer and this is from volcanic pressure pushing up from the bottom of the crater floor and uh
making it Rise um the Altis scarp one of the longest Cliff structures on the moon um
stretches from the base of H or near Catherina crater here all the way down
to Piccolo mini crater here and piccolomini kind of acts like a cork and
stops the flow of the uh the Arc of the Alti scarp but the Altis scarp is
actually the outer the surviving portion of the outer impact ring for the
nectaris Basin and let me see if my last slide
here whoop now um several more to go uh here we see sunet approaching on the
alai and how the cliff is throwing Shadows a saw to a shadow some of these
Cliff structures are about 2 kilometers high wow and uh I think yep I'm coming
up in about 20 minutes here so I will uh um call it quits here after this slide
and pick up the U the West rest of the waxing gibbus moon next week so that uh
I can show you features that will be uh visible as the moon evolve phase evolves
next week but uh for the final one here you know we we put a lot of features together here we've got uh Mari nectaris
laying within the nectaris Basin the center of it uh Theophilus and cus and
cathina craters which we uh saw earlier and the alai scarp and here we can see
how the Arc of the alai scarp is actually the outer rim that completely
circles uh Mari necturus except the rest of it over here has been obliterated by
subsequent impacts over the past four billion years now the inner impact ring
is the shoreline of Mari nectaris it's it's cradling the basalt field of mar
nectaris you know like a bowl of soup uh the middle impact ring you can just
begin to pick it up by connecting the dots on ridges right in the middle this Arc
through here and then the outer ring the Altis scarp uh which in the Mind's Eye
you can complete the circle all the way around nectaris and see how big that
original impact Basin really was so um at this point uh we've gone from the
Crescent Moon up through first quarter which will if you have clear skies that'll give you
some targets to play with over the next few days uh take your telescope out and
look for these things uh the Moon is a um Target that laughs at light pollution
uh it doesn't M care if you're looking at it the city or or or or dark location
it's just as easy to see just as easy to find in the sky just as easy to observe
so uh take some time to uh to look at it it's uh right there in your own backyard
and then next week uh we'll pick up and get the western side of the moon and see
what kind of playground we have there so thank you for your attention and uh look for my book at your favorite bookstore
uh Atlas photographic atlas of the mo thank you very much Robert that's great
you bet that's great yeah one of the comments here was that uh um you know
your images of the Moon are sharper than my eyes can can
see yeah well my eyes are getting older and older of course I'm
um knocking on 80 so U I'm I'm really appreciative of comments like that
because shows I'm doing something right you are yeah absolutely well thank you
so much thanks for sharing again we'll see you next time okay thanks thanks you're bet byee okay so um
possibly our last speaker tonight is Adrien Bradley Adrien how are you well I uh
came in from bowling league so I have on the bowling
shirt I threw the astronomy patch that over here and uh kept on the Yankees cap
because there's a pennant race going on um even though I do hail from the
Detroit region I the Yankees for some time and so um so tonight I was planning
on doing just sort of a quick little uh rundown of some of the stuff that I had
been Gathering and taking pictures of I had I've started uh Dr David Levy's book
and I re I highly recommend getting the books um the love of the night sky that
uh theid has comes out in the the book I
I bought the book starry night and I have PL Scott to um take some of the
images that I've gathered that make me feel the way that the Poetry is in that
book that's a great idea put my own image to it he's uh he laid out star KN
in such a way that there's an image there there's a poem it starts out with
uh you know a lot of his his own pictures and pictures that he got from
other places and I wanted to I wanted to add some of mine to that work and just
just where where I had very similar feelings about seeing the night sky I know the theme is eyes in the dark and
what I will do is um I'm going to share the screen I'm
looking at now so you're GNA you're going to see my head turn because I'm gonna I'm G to switch
screens because the better to me the better screen is the uh other one over
here I'm going to I don't know if it'll matter to those of you out there but
here we go um let's do
that all right so we are now looking at some images and we happen to
be yeah we're so we talk eyes in the dark well it's not very dark when some
of your best spots are here by a lighthouse
but um as we know lighthouses are always a uh you know a beacon of light when
you're out and a lot of people love to come here to do night sky Imaging and you see even with these Bright Lights
you can see the North American nebula showing itself in the Seda region in
this image that I took with the Milky Way at least the signis part of the
Milky Way hovering behind the lighthouse and then of course I was at meteor
crater we covered this in a previous uh when I went on this trip we covered in a previous episode of global Star Party
sure in the dark looking for you know getting rid of this dust patch and all
these scratches but to me this was the important thing seeing this very large
dwarf Galaxy when I I think I started 10 or 15 years ago it was still considered
just the the largest globular cluster um that we had in any Skies
North or South Omega centor and uh even if even though I have
crude pictures of it it was still a thrill just to get any pictures at all
um I certainly didn't have my astronomy rigs that I was able to use in later
images um keeping eyes in the dark as a theme
and one thing that there's another picture of megga centor one thing that
highlights that theme as we scroll down here we're going to get or pass some of
these Aurora pictures um starting with lowbrow
astronomers uh good friends of mine Jim here Jeff and I do believe Charlie um
who is our president and this is Jeff uh coot Manis uh Charlie neelson Jim
Forster and a sunset at an airport doesn't get super dark here but
one of the things we do and the reasons that you all are watching Global star party is because we reach out to the
people to talk about our own Journeys through uh astronomy through the night
sky and you know our eyes had to get adjusted to the dark in order to go
through this journey to the point that we get used to darker
skies and um you know we we begin to enjoy being out in the
dark so that's right yep sometimes
structures are in the dark quote unquote and I'll get into that here's uh so this
you say this may not be the best picture of the Milky Way that I've taken but the Fantastic thing about it is no one could
see this structure I barely picked up naked eye bits of the uh small
Sagittarius cloud and bits of the structure here by this dark nebula I
barely saw any of that at um past astronomical Twilight there was smoke in
the air and it was so soupy but I showed people on screen on my my
phone um phone on my camera and if I had used my computer I would have shown him on the
computer um this is there we just because we
can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there and um it often surprises people you
know really takes people AB back that are not used to being in the dark and looking
up you we we go through a progression where we go to One location and we say
that's the darkest I've ever been then we go to another location and we say that's darker than the darkest
place I've ever been now this is the darkest place then we go to an even another location and it just it keeps
going on and on right Scott you that's right this is the darkest place I've been until you go somewhere darker and
you after a while you're like well if I ever get I hope I ever get into space
because that'll be the truly darkest place that or get the image from the Moon and
you realize that there's so many levels to Darkness and you know being
accustomed to it and and I invite you know astronomers don't uh
like when I took this picture um at a at our observing field
uh Peach Mountain um which is you it's not a very
I would say bordal five for those that know the bordal scale or you know kind of have an idea of what the darkness a
better would be um let's see magnitudes
what is it MP SAS is the number like 20 21 Point 3
21.6 magnitudes per squared arcc um is a good way to measure and the
numbers I was getting here were somewhere around 20.2
magnitudes per square Arc second when you're in 22 the number 22 magnitudes
per square AR second you are looking at a truly dark sky no light pollution at all most real
dark areas range from 21.3 believe it or not I took a I took a
reading at black Mesa State Park 21.3 but it goes all the way up it can
go up to 21 9 UM and then 22 magnitudes for square
Arc second so if you have a number anything over
21 is a is an It's a Sky you look up and you see a number of stars that's you
know to me that's how it looks and so when you're processing you might have
some you might try and pull a little too much out of it you get the streaks detail clouds covering your Target and
you get some interesting things but you also let's see if this will let me zoom
in yeah that I began getting some detail in the lagoon but there's more to do
here because as you can see the uh the way that this processed not so great
same with sickness region I gave that another try and and there's just a lot of stars
so I know a lot of you that process and do deep Sky objects I see why you get
rid of a lot of the stars now these are all so looking at this you can look at it a
different way the greenish glow here could be Sky glow all of these if all of these are
stars and there's that many more in this region here's a star
cluster depending on the type of St Stars we're seeing here there could be
planets orbiting them there could be lots of Worlds there's a lot going on in
the Galaxy that we don't see or think about and if you look down here you can
see the outline of the veil nebula and you see how large the structure is in
comparison with other structures when you do it at a wide field and you've even got dark nebula that evoke
different thoughts different things that we see and it looks like something to us
that's on Earth this is Barnard's e now of course there's there isn't a dark
nebula here but the whole thing appears to be shaped like an e roughly it's one
of my favorite things to image when I get the chance and then we move up
here there's another little star cluster that I enjoy those of you that have been
in this area probably know where I'm look what I'm looking for and I actually cannot
find it it's the coat hanger cluster this is it right
here there's the curve of the coat hanger there's Stars you can kind of see
that there's more stars to the cluster but this is the basic cluster here so there's a lot going
on and one of the best ways to present
it is to thin out the population of stars
but what's interesting about it is you could be thinning out a world or two that's much like Earth for the sake of
your image so it's you know it's about
what purpose you have for the image and and it's also if you actually look at it
it can be amazing what sort of things you can see in those images and then of
course here we have me attempting you ba a basic image with
trees here and with this part of the Milky Way Barnard Z once again showing up but
barely right over here and you can barely see it so this was and this was me trying to
use uh something called EOS backyard and re really trying to dial in
the focus of the Stars so all the stars are nice and round but um it does it
gives a bit of a different look so there's Barnard e again we've
got kind of a checkerboard pattern but there's Barnard's e and there's a Cod hanger all of these are Works in
progress and now for the last couple minutes we'll talk about in the dark
eyes in the dark if you look up at Cassie you might see a plane fly through and
you you know you end up with a plane in your image I brightened the main star so that you could
see and this this would be a really good
view now chances are you'd see a little more of the Milky Way if you're in a dark area you know you wouldn't just
see um you'd see a bunch of stars this way but you'd see a little more of kind of the
cloudiness of the Milky Way But as we know there's a whole lot more
there good luck finding cassieopia now same picture but exposed to show
which I believe this to be Caroline's rows over here this region which I believe the bubble's one of
these um there's there are a number of things
here there's even even one of my favorite little clusters shows up here
the owl is actually right here you can barely see it looks kind of
like a little owl from here this is the it's upside down but this is the uh the
owl or the ET cluster actually showing up in a 855
millimeter lens a portrait lens with four with stacked
20 frames four minutes each stacked and revealing a lot of detail a
lot of stars there's there's some cleanup that could be done here and
some you know there's some there's some processing techniques I could use to reduce some of the Stars to show more
of the structure but you the talking about I in the dark
this is all we see and this is what's really there that
could be a that could be a mindblowing thing when you use your astrophotography to actually see just how extensive a
region is and that's the same if you're you're somewhere dark I've got these
pictures here but I want to go show them compared to because I recently put
so this is a iPhone picture this crummy picture here there's my rig looking at
the sky and I tried to handhold this picture and there we are looking out
there's clouds here you know it's not the darkest
but that was an iPhone picture here's an iPhone picture there's the pley rising
nice yeah wow let do an iPhone that's pretty good yeah looks almost like a
painting like someone painted Nightfall over Lake hiron and I think I've got this
one Nightfall over Lake hon there's the hies there's jupitor rizon and I think
this is Mars you know it looks like a you it
looks like something that a work of art that sits on its own you've got the
the it almost feels like uh it it took a picture that could be mistaken
for a a painting on a on an old canvas
which it gives it that interesting feel and you know we're this is my shadow as
I'm taking this picture we're a little spoiled because our imaginations don't get to run
there's a Dipper right there I thought I'd take this picture our imaginations can
be rather spoiled because we see so
many beautiful pictures online and the the pictures take on a
little more you know of a realistic tone this is a single image I went to try and
process that's a boat over there so all in this session with
saying if you put your you put your mind to it and you say I want this in the
image I want that in the image you can collect it you've got winter Milky Way
Rising plees heidis Jupiter Mars behind
clouds and you've got everything in or the the
charioteer all of these regions here and if you zoom
in with the composite picture you just barely get the shape of a boat the light
was a little too bright here but with some
work I don't see why it's not possible to take an image that contains all of
the elements and contains all of them you know as crispy as you can is this a
you know is this image have flaws of course it does with the noise reduction it introduces a lot of patchiness
so there's always a bar to set my my goal is freighter at Sea that
actually look like freighter at Sea and you could say well just take a
picture of blue hour and then you've got you know you've got enough light and then come back to the exact same spot
but you know that's making an image it you could end up making an image to look
just like this but I've always been a fan of taking the real image because
this light shining underneath the clouds here and some of the other some of the
other features that happen in real time I just don't know if you're going to get that um if you take the pictures too far
apart you you end up with what looks like two separate pictures meld it together so that you know they they look
nice and they look pretty but yeah you know the the images as they happen are
some is something I like to do and it you know our eyes are definitely in the dark when it comes to things in deep
space when we um when we image them whether we're wide angle Imaging or deep
Sky Imaging we're opening our eyes to more seeing a lot more of what's
there and and you know we're all the better for it and um then we're able to
share with others and hopefully by doing so we will help people understand why
it's important to preserve the night so that uh we
can we can um continue to share these uh share these
beautiful discoveries we continue to do science it's not just about the images so much as it's about going
to places or you using the big telescopes telescopes that are um you
that are out in space to get more information our pursuit of the
cosmos can only be heightened by showing how beautiful it is and it it stands on
its own without the cosmos we have we really don't have much damage we we're back to you know taking pictures of
flowers and so it's uh you know that the
The Humble message here is without taking your eyes and putting
them in the dark um you know what will you have and we owe all of our images to
the uh night sky and being the feeling we get when we see a star night
sky uh Scott I know you still even years and years of doing this and you still
that you never you never get enough you know so um it is
um you know it the thing is is that looking up at the night sky and that
that humbled feeling that you get and that sense of awe that you get is uh is
something that actually you you need okay uh there's lots of different ways
you can experience the you know the without sound done it here the
experience of a um uh you know the but uh
uh I read somewhere that you need psychologists think that you need to
have a uh full-blown experience of awe about every week or two okay just for
your own sanity okay um it it is uh uh
and if you really let it impact you uh you know you really take it in it humbles you you talk about that a lot
Adrian yeah and uh um you know it's really easy to get wrapped up and in
just thinking about your little world you know and are you doing good enough are you you know are you measuring up
and you know but you don't need to measure up you are we're already
part of everything in the universe you know and uh you have already measured up
and uh uh the universe is exactly perfect with you in it and um uh so uh
but uh uh you need to be humbled to be reminded of that you need to have this
deep experience of awe uh to also be reminded of this and uh it kind of
resets you it makes you feel good okay um you know and and just almost
completely erases your anxieties that you might have so this is really important stuff uh for everyone and
being under dark skies and seeing the Milky Way and spending as much time as Adrien does uh contemplating the Milky
Way is is uh deep and profound you know so um absolutely we really appreciate uh
uh all the images that you bring of the sky uh for us and uh I thank the
audience for tuning in today I want to thank all of our presenters uh it was a
uh pleasure to have uh you know some of the uh uh people that haven't been on
for a while like uh Kareem Jeffer and uh SES aak um you know so um uh you know
and I learned some stuff today I didn't know really uh Seth was explaining his
uh his uh first uh thesis paper and getting his PhD and he did one of the
very early observations of uh of observing uh GA Galactic rotations he
was measuring hydrogen clouds and he didn't you know he wasn't uh the one
that put the uh uh or postulate the idea that dark matter was responsible for
making the edges of a galaxy rotate roughly the same speed as the center of a galaxy and uh you know that went to
Vera Rubin but uh he kind of gave us a little clue that he called he called ver Ruben's daughter I
guess to maybe uh talk with Vera and U
uh and then that's when this whole idea of Dark Matter came about so um yeah of
course we have we have those that uh it's neat these kind and you know of course you've got
those that are wanting to give the credit to uh Fritz Wiki and you know his daughter is still around to let everyone
know but differences are one thing but the I
think it's just important that both of them came to that conclusion Vera ruin
got credit and many others do give credit to uh Fritz Wiki for his
discoveries it depends on oh sure where they're talking there were many of which there are yeah and world of professional
science is highly competitive you know they that it's not it's not big pay um
it takes a lifetime of dedication and learning uh you know and the kind of learning that
requires Brilliance you know and uh yeah um it's uh and you've got a lot of big
bigname astronomers that are doing podcasts to try and share um with their
that's that's our that's our tendency to want to um share the uh scientific
knowledge and improve scientific literacy you know but that's that's something most of us as amateur
astronomers like to do I certainly get a big charge out of it and um but yeah and
I think it's I think Scott it's almost more important now than ever that we share our experiences those of us that
are really out there because we have a huge crowd that uh is online it's
reached by media um we're hearing word of the Comet that could be one of the
best comets in in the world or in the century and right we get a lot of so the
sensationalism if I could talk real quickly sometimes we're okay with the
sensationalism of things that relate to astronomy because without it we may not
get enough people coming to us to talk to us even if they get it wrong even if they get it wrong you know I think I
I've had people uh other amateur astronomer friends really win because they know that sometimes the media gets
it wrong and they're they're describing it the media might get it wrong 95%
social media you know and that's what I'll tell each and I'll look at the camera and say each and every one of you
that does you know you're a part of a an astronomy club you love science you love
to the point these media events are your opportunity to talk to friends people
people that come up to you are trusting you to say I you know they said that be
that inter big as a full moon that's right you can rather than go and complain to the masses that oh the media
got it wrong and you know the gruff astronomer pose that we've seen so much
it's an opportunity to tell them why you know I'll I'll drop a couple of names like David Aker who was on earlier Tom
pacis Allan Dyer to Gentlemen even the great imager Damen Peach and uh they
I've seen some of their posts and they do what they can to fight things like
artificial intelligence generated images that can be these fantasy things but they share the science behind what's
going on in the image and they um you know they share the science behind
whatever it is they are posting online and it's I think it's a great thing
because it's not just about beauty is one thing and that's why we need apod
because it you know their goal is Outreach too everyone's goal is to
augment or gently correct what's in the media you know what someone posts online
and says this is you the butterfly nebula looks like a butterfly we can
gently correct it we don't have to be the gruff astronomer that have to
slam them down we don't have to slam them down because what that does I think Scott is it gives people the impression
well they're full of themselves I'll just go to another sourcer they could
actually they could be wrong um you know we just are we we need patience in the
area where a little bit of knowledge and I fall for it too sometimes I feel like
I have a little bit of knowledge and I want to pontificate to the world you start pontificating you start telling
people this is how is and um no it takes a lot more patience because uh and we're
you know as we as as you know uh the astronomers and physicists really
unravel the universe more you know because it's a constant unraveling probably will never stop okay that will
probably you know all the great theories that we you know think are the cornerstones of of uh understanding
today you know like uh maybe like Einstein's ideas on gravity or thinking
the same thing which have yet to be proven wrong but there are narcissists
who are doing their darnest to try to try to prove him wrong you know that's
just part of it you know so the Sciences to me are a handed down type of thing we
if we and we know we you know a lot of people seek greatness it's like I'm great but I think the beauty of science
is that it's a generational thing it it has
to be passed down sure or any you know any of the knowledge about what's going
on behind me and any of this part of our galactic center can
disappear rather quickly if information isn't handed down
and when you're doing science you aren't necessarily doing it
for yourself even if you're doing citizen science which there's plenty of opportunities for us to do citizen
science we're we're setting it up for who knows how many generations down the
road they theid said what if the aliens come and they look at my picture to know
what the center of our galaxy looks like from Earth it's uh you know depending on
what you believe as far as life or Soul after death you know it's nothing that you can it's
nothing you can deal with but how Grand would that be if that were to come true
so it's it's an unself it's an unselfish pursuit to do science because it only
gets better as the Next Generation technology improves you know we're here
we are online chatting about it from different
parts of the United States you know every this sort of technology I would say people take for advant you know
probably take uh for granted now oh yeah but prior to Adrian when we were kids I
mean this this was this was St science fiction yeah this is science fiction I
can actually talk to and the Jetson predicted it because remember it was people were talking into the
screen um I don't remember geordan remembery I guess George
and telling telling uh telling George what to get from the store that's right
from uh with the big picture of her face on there and now it's for real you can if you want to do that you're you know
people can can show their face and tell you what to go get from the store now so
a lot of that imagination becoming a real a real thing you know is a part of
you could think as deeply as you want to about that you know we're we're made up of the stuff of the universe maybe
that's why things like music and things that come out of our minds have some
sort of analog somewhere in the universe yeah yeah it's not all those things aren't separate from the universe the
universe is all everything yeah you're imagin includes or whatever you know
this is this is all you know you start trying to separate you go okay well gosh
if my wildest imagination is somehow separate from the
universe you know then that kind of creates a wall and we don't have a right
interchange of you know so it just doesn't work everything has to be interconnected
interrelated you know and uh anyways we can go on and on about this
right I want to thank you guys for tuning in Adrien thank you for tuning in
it's time for me to wind it up and uh get started on a new day and um I hope
you guys are uh uh taking time to look up and uh whether it's if you got clear
skies tonight or maybe you can see a beautiful sunrise in the morning but contemplate your uh you know the fact
that you're going around this sun at incredible speeds around the uh ran arm
of our galaxy also at even faster speeds and our whole Galaxy's moving at a what
is it a million and a half miles per hour to the Andromeda galaxy to a new
part of space we've never been to before all the time okay so uh you know don't
get dizzy uh just enjoy the ride and we'll see you next time on the next
Global Star Party take care farewell everyone see you later
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byebye 3 2 1 B engent start a mission
and the St
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Transcript for Part B:
has got um plenty of things going on for him too so you know trying to sit with
Scott and try to get with Bob and see what I could work out um if Scott's willing to talk to me about it then we
will but we'll start there hey I'm always happy to talk to you I can barely
hear you Scott Roberts how about that oh I hear you now yeah there you are um always happy
to talk to you ter okay let me I know you're busy tonight and with it being the weekend
um I still might try can I call you sometime tomorrow or a little bit later on after this are you busy when's better
tomorrow's good okay let me see if I can't reach you early tomorrow well if you're up early in the
afternoon we'll see how it goes okay well if I don't reach I'll leave
you a voicemail then you can call me back sure you know Terry I want to say
something you have had some really amazing speakers on your shows you know
and uh and not and then and then you guys you know break you know really the
boundaries when you on Alcon I mean you just go all out and you know
so uh yeah you know if you want to hear great speakers or whatever definitely
get hooked up with the astronomical League uh because they've they're
they're in touch with some of the greatest astronomers on the planet
so thank you yeah we there are quite a few of them out there and quite a few of
them have came on tonight just like Scott Harrington and John gos and David
D ly we can't forget him because he's always doing an amazing job right so and
Scott Roberts you're pretty good too I've heard you speak a few times too normally you're behind the scenes but
when you come out and you do give a talk you are really good speaker too am I yes
you are about a year ago Scott Roberts wrote a really really good essay on
essentially why we like astronomy why why we do what we do yeah remember that
yeah time to time I just really get inspired to to try to do convey that
feeling you know because uh uh for all of us that do astronomy Outreach you
know there's um you know it it is really a transformative experience and you a
lot of people throw that word around you know so it's kind of somewhat cheapened
by you know how often it's used on you know how that's a transformative experience or how this is or whatever
but astronomy and understanding your place in the universe is uh uh really
uh foundational and when when you get the experience you know maybe you see
Saturn's rings for the first time or whatever uh and you just see you could
see it happen on their face and in their eyes you know and uh uh that feeling is
uh is hard to describe it's hard to articulate you know and I from time to time I try so um but I appreciate your
thoughts on that John that means a lot coming from
you okay uh I think that it's uh six o'clock so here yes it is yes it is okay
so here we [Music]
are well hello everyone this is SC Roberts and Terry man uh uh I'm with the
uh astronomy U or the astronomical league as their behind the scenes guy
but I'm also from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and uh we are
really really honored and proud to be a part of the astronomical League's
programming uh and uh it's just a real honor to uh be on with Terry man and
David leevy and John Goss that are here especially also our featured uh guest
here Scott Harrington so you're you're going to hear some amazing stuff about uh uh how to use modest equipment to
explore the universe and do it well so uh I'll turn it over to you Terry thank
you well thank you Scott it's a pleasure to be here and it's so good to see
everybody again uh welcome everyone thank you for tuning in we've got a really great group here tonight so I
would like to start off with DED Levy and let him start our night off as
perfectly as he normally does so deid take it away well thank you very much
Terry and I wanted to thank Kyle for that wonderful Jupiter Globe you can see
it shining behind me there and uh the reason I forgot to write him was that I
could not find his email address but um anyway I am delighted to
have it and uh thank you I have two poems to share with you today the first
one is Thomas Hardy's out of lunar eclipse because I was able to see it on
Tuesday night from palar Mountain Observatory I was there with Jean
Mueller Jean Mueller has discovered 15 comets and
107 supern noi so from our Solar system to all over the universe Gina has been
an outstanding contributor and here is my
poem by Thomas Hardy thy Shadow Earth from Pole to Central sea now steals
along the moon's Meek shine an even monochrome and curving line of
imperturbable Serenity how shall I link such Suncast symmetry with the born
troubled form I know is thine that profile plaed as a brow Divine with
continence of moil and misery and can ense mortality but throw so small a
shade in Heaven's High human scheme be hemmed within the coasts y AR
PL is such the Stellar gauge of Earthly show nation of war with nation reins the
team Heroes and women fairer than the
guys I did say I had a second phone and the second one is very
personal and that one is because the uh is to
Sunday is going to be the 23rd of December of September which marks two years since I
lost my sweet Wendy and uh you say I'm trying to get
used to it but I don't think I ever will and I really don't want to here is my
poem each day I awake today is the day I look towards her she is not there my
heart goes on but do I care well anything anything let in some way the
night is dark it is dark as cold the sky is stars from west to east from south to
North just like a feast a pill Heaven Sent to come on my soul a telescope
stands it stands and waits for my eye it asks just one brief look forward through
space like an open book and backward Through Time open wide the gates I see a
star why is it there lapis philosoph form philosopher storm that strikes the
night it ushers me home as part of a pattern to learn I did but Reason Not
General relativity gravity's geometry no Speck of thought no idea Works no system
bought the space time crash to save she's part of me a beam of light
Among the Stars in the Sky of PL not there but there my soul and chance from
grief to Joy all through the mind thank you very much and back to
you well thank you de de it just wouldn't be the same if you didn't get
us started every night we appreciate you being here thank you so all right from
there how about John Goss how are you doing it's been a while since I've actually talked to
you oh I I I I'm fine I haven't had covid you know so I've been pretty good
yeah I'm kind rubbing into until last month and that's the first time I had it and I do not want to have it again that
was no fun at all well actually I did have it I had it over uh last Thanksgiving uh which certainly messed
up the holiday but about it goes yeah you do what you got to do huh John yes
sir and before we start i' I'd like to say something to uh to David you know I
I am I'm sorry about Wendy and I'm I'm sorry about now you have to associate this with the ainal equino so I think he
said September 23rd there but you know that'll give you a little bit different meaning to it all and it it may actually
be be comforting somewhat that's that's a it's a good day you know well thank
you for also your one of your poems you said it was by Thomas
Hardy yes that was the first the second I I'm glad you read that because he's he
might be my favorite author so know I like well there's 150 years ago but you
know he's his words still hold up fine so but anyway um so what are we
doing is one of the greatest BS of all with literature one of yeah you know I went by delphus Ohio
um I was in Michigan a few days ago and went by delphus and I got to thinking about lesle Peltier or Peltier whichever
way it seems like the pronunciation of names changes over the years um and I
think his was one of them that has but I think about him every time I go through there because I love B the book
Starlight Nights it has got to be one of my favorite books to sit down and read
and every time I see delus I think about that but anyway Terry did you read the part about
ton I Borealis oh a yeah I know what you're
gonna say I know what you're gonna say yeah yeah it is absolutely magnificent because it's kind of sad though Lesley a
little bit like me uh treats the stars as personal friends and he said that he wrote that t
coroni and he were friends for many years in the early part of the 20th
century he was watching it every night as it tossed turned and then on the
night of February something 194 I think it was February 9
1946 the star rolled over threw off its covers
and r and where was I he I was
asleep he said that he uh we woke up that night to observe and he was
thinking oh I'm not and I will go back to sleep and he
says thus I miss the night in the wife of Tona he said I still watch it every
night but it is a wary eye there is no warmth between us
anymore this got a wondrous things
for y all right John H would you like to
take it away well I I'll see what I can do
here excellent I hope you're all cool with this okay good well as you know we're on
astronomical League live tonight and I'd like to give a short
presentation on why the September third quarter moon is
special uh it's something that you may not have thought about before or at least not thought about much but uh
let's let's dive into this and see what happens okay this September comes up
what do we all think about you know we think about the automo leak when rocks that's there every September 22nd or the
23rd it you know rain or shine it's going to happen and we also hear about the Harvest Moon
which is the full moon closest to the um ainal Equinox and there are some special reasons which I'm not going to go into
because that would be a three times as long as my Talk's going to be uh but it's that's an interesting thing to look
into and this year we had the big super moon on the uh on the full moon on
Tuesday night that's the full moon I didn't see because I was under the uh cloud cover
from the unnamed tropical storm which came in off the coast from the Carolinas
and also that night we had a partial umbral eclipse in the moon that's that's pretty cool but there's it's a really
another point to to the Moon which you might want to think about every September or perhaps even into early
October but first but first I like you all to think about what the Earth and
the moon look like it's viewed from the Sun viewed from the Sun the the Earth
and the moon are always a full phase that's the only phase that the sun can see of any of the planets any of the
moons any of the asteroids anything out there it's always full phase so think
about that um on Tuesday night we had a full moon well from the sun it's it's
always a full moon the Earth is also tilted 23 degrees
uh on its axis and I'll get to that right now what I really mean by
that maybe not
there we go okay we have a third quarter moon coming up on I think it's Tuesday night
on the 24th and 25th depending on where you are actually I think it happens at
just after midnight on the on the 25th so this gives a little representation of the the layout of the
Earth Moon and Sun on several days uh along this month uh back in September
3rd we had the moon the new moon first quarter September 11th 17th saw the full
moon but on this coming Tuesday we're going to have the third quarter moon what that really means is that this the
third quarter moon happens to lie in the Earth's orbit at the spot that the Earth is hit
it um and the the Earth is tilted towards that orbital motion so we were
most tilted towards towards the third quarter moon is and the third quarter moon is exactly in the same direction in
the sky of that we are heading in our in our orbit and that's uh you know it's about 240,000 miles well that means that
the Earth takes about 3.6 I'm trying to get the figure straight 3.6 hours to travel that
240,000 miles to get from where we are to where the moon will be on the 25th of
uh September now oppositely where we have come from whence we have come um first
quarter moon on September 11th if you looked at that as as the sun went down looked at the first quarter moon on
September 11th or the first quarter moon in September you will be looking in the direction of where we have
come uh so I think this is it's it's pretty amazing that that that the third quarter moon can be considered kind of
special because it shows us where we are headed in
space now when this is some more details to the whole thing about the uh about
the full moon the full moon uh on Tuesday night was actually moving in the sky in the same direction that
where we're headed in space um that's the way full moons are
so something to keep in mind when you look at the first quarter moon the full moon and the third quarter moon uh what
what it all really means in the sky uh to us we're on a planet we're traveling
in the direction of the third quarter
moon so to review uh the September uh Harvest
full moon leans into our planet's direction of travel around the Sun leans most that 23 degrees on its actual tilt
leans into our our planet's direction of travel and the position of the third quarter moon is the direction of our
planet's travel and whether we like it or not we're going to be there in three
3 hours and 36 minutes so that is why the third quarter moon is so special
good thank you thank you for sitting through that and think about these things the next time you're out there looking at the moon that uh it really
does mean something in the sky and for the Earth and our relationship to
it thank you thank you John yeah you know I gave a talk uh last Saturday and
I talked about um how fast the Earth is rotating how we're uh the orbit around
the Sun and how the Milky Way all the miles per hour and everybody just kind of sat back and went oh my God you know
you forget things like that uh to think about how fast we are moving right now
it's the most incredible ride you could have on Earth and yet we don't even we sense we don't sense it yeah it would be
like w my hair should be blowing back well we're always in motion we're always in motion so yeah yeah but it's
amazing because you you don't think about it you know we all sit here we look at the stars where behind a
telescope or whatever but my gosh what the way we are traveling and how we're
moving is just amazing to me so thank you very much John that was really
interesting because I never really looked at it that way thank you for having me on sure you're welcome anytime
so what I would like to do uh Chuck Allen could not be with us tonight um hopefully he will be on the next AO live
and what I would like to do Scott I'm G to share just a small PowerPoint that I
put together um because I'd like to let people know a couple of things and
hopefully yeah it should be there um one other thing I would like to let
everybody know too um we're so used to seeing Carol ore here and you probably heard me say on the last show um as
president he had ran to full terms so he could not run anymore so currently we
have new officers um Chuck Allen will now be president of the astronomical
League we have a new member called named Mike cookie that will be our new
Treasurer Aon clevenson will be stepping in uh as secretary for the next year
mayard Pitt Andre is our exact secretary and I am now the vice
president of the astronomical league so our officers have changed and we're all getting together and getting to know
each other and going over what we want to do and what the council had directed
us to do in our last council meeting so it's been you know a lot of fun and
Carol we will definitely miss you too um I've told him he can come back to a live
anytime he wants just to let me know um and there's other things going on in the league too but I'm going to
let Chuck Allen tell you more about it when he comes on next month one of the
things we've got coming up and because our host which um the person hosting
Aston 2025 will be lol lion is LOL lion he has the Mars region helping him with
putting on astrocon at Bryce Canyon next year and we have um also the Bryce
Canyon I think it's called the astronomy Festival will be running in conjunction next year with astrocon and I believe
the Rocky Mount not Rocky Mountain the uh Grand Canyon star party will also be
running the week before so we have a whole lot of stuff going on that you can
come one time if you drive up or fly in you can go to the um the Grand Canyon
then you can head out to Bryce Canyon and check out astrocon and the astronomy
Festival so there is a lot going on and as you can see uh Bryce Canyon will be
June 25th through 28th and thank you to Scott Roberts for making our QR codes on
the Fly here uh we have QR codes that you can check but we did Bryce Canyon in
2011 and I'm telling you it is fantastic there will be Workshop well I'll go to
the next slide there's a lot going on as you can see in the leand corner there will be Digital Imaging workshops for
novice and advanced um there'll be personal programming and journaling
observing tips ideas I mean there is a lot of things going on including a
sketching Workshop so there will be mostly workshops and a lot of time to
try try to get some rest before you go out at night and do your visual or Imaging at Bryce Canyon I believe most
nights the schedule the talks will stop about 4 o'clock a couple of nights we're
going to have there will be a talk from 4 to 5 on a couple of nights um this
will all be really interesting a lot of fun the really cool thing is you can bring the family whether the spouse
interested in astronomy is the male or female uh there will be a bus system
running that will take the family out into the park while whoever is at Alcon
listening to the talks the family can take a bus ride through the park go see different things there is so much you
can do uh the site also has a nice restaurant in inside and it has a fast
food restaurant and the parking lot you have a choice of food even though you are at Bryce Canyon you will have a
choice of food the one thing I can tell you is already we have there are
275 rooms reserved blocked off for this already 75 rooms are already reserved
jump in there if you are going to do this scan this QR code or go to this
website get registered um last time uh when we were out there in 2011 we had to
cut it off at 400 this time I think the cut off point is somewhere around 500 so
we've got a few more rooms but please if you're going to do this register early
um there will be a full page ad I do believe in the December reflector and
they will at that point the rooms are going to probably be flying so please if
you're going to come seriously get registered once you are registered then
you will get the link to reserve your room but really consider this it will be
a lot of fun and nice dark skies and one of the 500 people who will be there is
me yay we're will'll be glad to see you there it wouldn't be the same without
you deid so we have uh oh I just noticed our speaker has dropped off the line so
I guess I get to keep talking until Scott comes back um on October 25th Dr Barb Harris
will be on and she is going to talk about doing science with the sea star
now she is a very very talented lady she does a lot of work double abso a lot of
variable Stars she has been working with the sea star and put out some incredible
stuff so Barbara Harris will be with us at 7 pm on October
25th and that will really be something to look forward to because I was amazed
at um Alcon this year in Kansas City we had processing workshops and they were
showing how they were processing images off the sea star and I'm telling you I
was shocked after that talk everybody made a bee line for the vendors and they were selling sea star right and left and
I have to admit I bought one and trying to Imaging the moon or the sun it's one
of the easiest things you'll ever do 20 minutes top you take that out there you set it up you take pictures you take it
back in the house and you have got pictures for the day if you do lunar solar and it does other deep Sky Imaging
too so there is a lot there to think about and what you can do so that was
all I was going to do I'll stop sharing here um but it looks like our speaker
must have lost connection I don't see him here I'm sure he's trying to get back
on um so any so Terry we have I have a
video that we can show uh feature video and um uh perhaps uh you can give him a
uh call or something like that and we can see what we can do sometimes this is the internet is a
live show I know it's not unusual this stuff always happens Scott you've got an
event going on there tonight don't you we do we do we have we're celebrating moonfest so I think that most people
celebrated on um on the 14th of this month and they're Scott right now he got
back on yep so let's see if his video is going to come up but yeah we've got
today and tomorrow uh we've got uh telescopes out there of course you know
we sell telescopes so we've got like incredible deals out in the parking lot
um you know we're trying to recreate uh kind of the experience of the Riverside
telescope makers conference at least from like the swap meet part of it and that used to drive a lot of people to
come to that event so um oh yeah I can remember standing in line at the vendors
waiting you know they would they would only let 10 into one of these booze I stood in line I don't know how long
waiting and hoping the stuff didn't sell out before I got there that wasn't already gone by the time you got there
right oh yeah yeah but I I came home with some good stuff from there so all
right um whoops okay yeah okay oh we're
yeah Scott's going in and out right now he's having some internet issues so
Terry I'm going to run this video and we'll come back and see if we've got uh Mr Harrington back okay okay do that I'm
going to call Scott if I'm not here just go ahead and keep talking for a minute
okay okay so this is um this is a short feature from NASA about uh activity on
the sun which I think you'll enjoy
solar flares may seem like far away events but they can damage satellites and even groundbased Technologies and
power grids every 11 years as the Sun reaches its maximum activity they become
bigger and more common and that increases the chances that one will significantly affect Earth so what are
these solar eruptions a solar flare is basically an explosion on the surface of the Sun
ranging from minutes to hours in length large flares can release enough energy to power the entire United States for a
million years flares happen when the powerful magnetic fields in and around
the Sun reconnect they're usually associated with active regions often
seen as sun spots where the magnetic fields are strongest flares are classified according to their strength
the smallest ones are B Class followed by c m and X the largest similar to the
RoR scale for earthquakes each letter represents a 10-fold increase in energy output so an X is 10 times an m and 100
times a c within each letter class there's a finer scale from 1 to
9 C-Class flares are too weak to noticeably affect Earth mclass flers can
cause brief radio blackouts at the poles and minor radiation storms that might endanger
astronauts it's the x-class flares that are the real juggernaut although X is the last letter there are
flares more than 10 times the power of an X1 so x-class flares can go higher than nine the most powerful flare on
record was in 2003 during the last solar maximum it was so powerful that it
overloaded the sensors measuring it they cut out an X17 and the flare was later estimated to be about
x45 a powerful x-class flare like that can create long-lasting radiation storms which can harm satellites and even give
airline passengers flying near the poles small radiation doses XF flares also
have the potential to create Global transmission problems and worldwide blackouts the seriousness of an x-class
flare pointed at Earth is why NASA and Noah constantly monitor the sun NASA's
heloh physics Fleet of spacecraft can now see the Sun from every side and in many different
wavelengths this unprecedented coverage is enabling scientists to predict and detect space weather events like flares
and CMEs with ever greater accuracy with advanced warning
governments and companies can take steps to protect their technological infrastructure so that the worst scenarios will never
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happen well I think that that was pretty interesting so uh you know a lot of
people wake up in the morning you know look at that alarm clock think about you know how fast they got to get to work
and the dog and and you know what bills he might have to pay or
whatever and just outside their window is our nearest
star and this thing is given us life giving us everything you know and a lot
of people a lot of people don't pause to really think about that and so um you
know you can be kind of tongue and cheek about it George Carlin made a whole comedy routine about it you know about
worshiping the Sun but uh I would say that uh you know if you're not into
worshiping worshiping the sun you should at least be into giving some gratitude
to the thing that actually keeps us going and keeps us alive and makes all life possible here on Earth you know all
the things and all the bad things um you know it's uh it's something that we need
to uh definitely take into account but looks like Scott Harrington is back and
um no Scott is going to need to re we're gon to have to resched him he has a very
a severe thunderstorm going through out there yeah he was showing he was showing these yeah I saw all the red um he what
we saw there I was talking to him is his phone and he said he could bar he could
talk through the phone but then he wouldn't have any slides so we are going to have to reschedule Scott okay so
we're we're kind of uh going to have a very short program tonight
okay sometimes like you said that happens it's kind it's out of everybody's control it's just the
weather it does sometimes happen so um I have H you know I can make an
announcement that we have our next Global Star Party um and uh it is about
cloudy nights and so the guy that uh coordinates Cloudy Nights website uh or
the um uh the community is going to actually be on the program That's Mike
beer who also happens to run the uh uh company astronomics which is one of the
oldest uh telescope retailers around um uh you know of course David Levy will be
there I'll be there uh others will be there so we're looking forward to that that's October 1st at
6m uh we're going to talk uh part of that is uh just kind of talking about um
you know why cloudy nights I mean this is part of the the
theme a lot of us as amateur astronomers in fact almost all of us as amateur astronomers are super disappointed when
the night's cloudy and we want to be out observing right but think about those
nights where uh okay maybe it is it's cloudy and stuff but you start to
contemplate all the good times and all the amazing times that experienced with your telescope uh whether it was at an
observatory or you know uh an astronomy meet or you know uh watching a program
like this with astronomical League live um uh both Terry man and I were
communicating with h Barbara Harris and Barbara I mean she lives by astronomy
she's up all night long and uh um probably sleeping all day long so uh it
was kind of fun to be because I was awake Terry I was up up at like 3:00 am or something and I go I wonder if
Barbara Harris Harris is up up and it she was clouded out at the
time so we had time to chat and so uh you know uh we talked about uh T she
calls it t cor bore you know T Corona bore Al and yeah she is amazing yeah
other stuff and you mentioned the sea star she bought one of those stars as well and she showed me a science that
she was doing with it where you could see a variable star and then she had her you know the field is so wide on that
telescope like a lot of these um uh smart telescopes we sell some of them too but uh they're wide enough so that
you can get a standard star in the field of you at the same time so she had she
had the the graph showing the Sanders star and it just looked like pretty much steady you know and she got into the
variable star and you could see this you know so look for pretty incredible that does everything for like 500 bucks and
she's cranking out science with it I was pretty impressed so anyways that's one of those cloudy night stories um that we
just had so uh but I'm going to play this little video uh called electric
blue clouds this is a phenomena that uh has been recently discovered uh NASA
made a very nice uh video about it and so I'm just going to roll that just
before you start I'd like to make two comments number one uh the sky at palore on the 25th of
March 1993 was cloudy and snowing when Carolyn discovered Comet maker 9 on our
films that we had taken two nights earlier the other thing I wanted to say
is about the Sun and I wanted to say that this particulars the current cycle
is by far the strongest cycle I have ever seen in my life yeah it's amazing
isn't it the X flares oh my gosh it's like every week or so we have a big
Sunspot coming around that's fairly active you know and people like me that like the Aurora it's it is so nice
because I can remember when we had zero sunspots on the sun I didn't think they were ever going to come back so I've
been enjoying this yeah they were calling it the second wander minimum or something so yeah it's I tell you it it
is pretty cool right I mean it's nice to see the activity and it's nice to be able to see such big sunspots uh and one
thing too now we've got uh they said the comet um Atlas T Atlas has uh rounded
the Sun and it's in one piece so that is more good news so hopefully will have
hopefully as David said comets are like cats or you can say it better than I can
David you're muted David comets comets are like cats they are both they both
have tails and they both do precisely what they want
exactly perfect yeah okay all right so
um let me wrap up with this and we'll come back to you Terry and you can uh
close our program okay okay thanks Scott okay
go and here's NASA in those electric blue clouds a balloon Mission from NASA
observed rare electric blue clouds these are polar mesopic clouds or
pmc's they are only visible during Twilight and form a above Earth's polar regions at the upper reaches of the
atmosphere as Earth's uppermost clouds at around 50 m high pmc's are composed
of ice crystals that glow bright blue or white when reflecting sunlight they are
extremely sensitive to environmental factors like water vapor and temperature atmospheric Motions like air flow over
mountains or thunderstorms can disturb the atmosphere and cause waves that can propagate to very high
altitudes these waves are known as gravity waves and although they are invisible they can be seen as they move
through pmc's gravity waves lead to turbulence chaotic movement in the atmosphere that
can influence weather and climate and their predictions but the exact causes and effects of turbulence are not well
understood to better understand this complex process scientists sent a giant Bloon to observe gravity waves in
pmcs see you in Canada the cruess balloon traveled to 50 mil
high and floated from Sweden to Canada over 5 days in July 2018 a laser radar on the balloon
measured the PMC altitudes and the atmospheric temperature that affects their formation and brightness and from
6 million camera images captured from the balloon scientists could see both large and small ripples caused by
gravity waves a better understanding of turbulence can help improve weather
forecast models and our understanding of processes around Earth which affect our
satellites and Assets in
space uh you must be muted Scott yeah I was thinking
something's the matter that I can't hear you okay how about there we go Nick
you're just trying to mess with me aren't you f oh all right thank you for that
Scott and thank you you guys have a great event tonight and thank you everybody out there that's watching
we're sorry that we have to cut it short but the weather is definitely affecting Scott's Scott Harrington's internet he
cannot present uh his talk at this time so again let me remind you please tune
in on October 25th for Dr Barb Harris on doing science with the sea star and we
would love to see you then and everybody have a great weekend and Scott I'm gonna go back to you okay thanks Terry thanks
okay so uh we are going to close out um you know we want to thank uh you know
David Levy and Terry man for putting on this program also a special thanks to Scott Harrington who gave it his all uh
to be here tonight but uh uh there is some very nasty weather that frankly
often happens here in Arkansas so uh his he had a starlink and it really could
not handle the uh uh you know all the lightning and the Thunder that was happening so um make sure that you guys
uh sign up uh for the uh astrocon uh we often call it Alcon but at this time
it's called astrocon at Bryce canion so just um uh uh get get signed up because
it is going to be a really special event so all right and I think that is it um
let me find where I am and uh we are going to do a little
promo for for one of David Levy's books and sign out thank you
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