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January 30th, 2024
Times are in Central Time and UTC
* Transcript:
that's my normal these days uh doid left he'll be back
yeah hey David hey Scott hey Don good to see you everybody howdy
howdy we're at it once again here he yes we are good we we have to keep Scott out
of trouble on Tuesday nights right that's notorious for ripping up the town on Tuesday nights you know that's the
reason why we do go star party at that time out of jail keep
me that's right and doita is repping his Miguel
sweatshirt very nicely yeah I'm trying to get rid of this thing that suddenly
appeared I'm just wondering Scott the cosmic fossils wasn't a dick at all of us
right actually I kept thinking of that going yeah we are we're kind of like Cosmic
fossils ourselves and you know I've been really kind of focused
on uh the atoms that we're built out of you know and how old they
are and how long they'll last after we pass through our you
know our door here so hello Kar they're around they're
around for the long some of them are 133 billion years old
dang hen my name is Judy Ron I'm the deput project scientist on The fmy gamy
Space Telescope I'm here today to watch a video with you of 14 years of
observations collected by the fmy large area telescope or the lat this is the primary instrument on the fmy mission
and it surveys the entire Sky every few hours this allows it to do a lot of really cool things it can look at
sources that vary on time scales from a fraction of a second to years on
end there are two different kinds of maps that we're going to look at one map is in Galactic coordinates that means
that there's a thin band across the middle of the image and that's the Milky Way you've probably seen images of the Milky Way in the
optical the Milky Way in the gamas looks kind of similar except we're looking at a number of different types of objects
we'll also look at the gam sky from another perspective where we're looking up and down out of the Galaxy which
gives us a much better view of the extra Galactic sky and all the sources way outside our galaxy in the distant
Universe in this map of the gam sky where we have blue and red and yellow
tones what we're seeing are actually intensity Maps firmy isn't a an Imaging
instrument like you think of Hubble or web what it is is actually a photon collecting instrument it's a particle
detector in space and we make these maps by adding up all of the photons we collect in this case these are over 4
days the color scheme blue red yellow this is just a way for us to visualize it cuz our eyes don't see gamas those
circular sources that you see in the galactic plane are actually individual objects most of those are pulsars these
are rapidly spinning dense Stellar remnants called neutron stars that are actually varying pulsing on time scales
from hundreds of times per second to several seconds we see sources above and below
the galactic plane those are largely Blazers what that is is a super massive
black hole Millions to billions of times the mass of our sun the center of a galaxy that is active that means that
there's gas and stars falling into it and it produces Jets of emission and
they're very chaotic systems so they're turning on and they're turning off and that's actually the source of a lot of
the variability that we'll see throughout this movie we have a team of dedicated
scientists what we call the flare Advocates their job is to look at data every day that comes from fmy and look
for these flaring sources it's not just so that we we know that they're there and that we catalog them but some
sources are interesting enough that we want to tell our friends other space and groundbased telescopes that they should go look at the same place and collect
multi-wavelength data so that we can better understand these output
firsts you might notice that there are a few odd discontinuities in these images this is a result of holes in the data
that we didn't want to be distracting so we patched those images using frames before or
after if you look carefully you see one source that isn't like the others it's actually moving and sometimes it gets
brighter or fainter that's actually just the sun the sun is an interesting source in the Gamay it's not the brightest
Source in the sky like it is in the optical but it's prominent in its quesence state where we're just seeing
cosmic rays interacting with the solar atmosphere we also see it when there are solar
flares that bright flashlight there was a spectacular solar [Music]
flare you may have noticed a lot of variations in the sky over time it's not the the
Galaxy itself is getting brighter or fainter it's that as fery surveys the sky it doesn't do it completely evenly
over many years we accumulate a very nice even exposure of the sky but when we look at short time scales what we're
seeing are variations in the survey not actual variations in the sky but when you do see individual sources those are
real variations from our own solar system out to the distant universe
[Music]
the sky exposure pattern seems to change a bit starting in about 2018 this was
due to a hardware issue where one of our solar panels stopped rotating it's still fully functional and fmy has enough
power to operate both instruments and the observatory what it means though is that the way we observe the sky and the
time scales in which we survey have changed a bit
[Music]
in our 14-year map there's over 7,000 total sources almost 4,000 of those are
these active galaxies these blazars there's several hundred pulsars and in
total something like 2,000 of these sources are
variable
this video showing the first 14 years of FY observations is just the beginning FY
continues to observe the dynamic Sky every day and we hope it'll continue to do so for many years into the
future
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well hello everyone this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and I have my my uh
co-host here uh David Levy let's bring him on um David it's been uh it's been a
quite a quite a week of uh crazy weather across the country um we had snow we had
rain we had freezing rain uh but uh We've also had some clear nights and and
I've been out every night that I could just to look up at the stars look up at the Moon you know and just kind of
reconnect um you know uh in and I was recently in
Arizona as well um and later not during this Global star party but later we'll
be talking about a new project uh where we have hope to have a astrophotography
or astroimaging Learning Center um in one of the darkest sites in the country
which is close to portal Arizona and Rodeo New Mexico so if you're looking down at your Maps your dark sky maps
you'll see that it is Inky Inky dark so dark that if you look down at your feet
during a new moon you won't see them so um but uh how did your week go
David well it was pretty it was pretty uh good I'm going up and down you know
sometimes missing Wendy a lot more than others and this was one of the weeks that I was missing her a lot but I'm
doing a lot better right now and I wanted to say that uh I wanted to
say I can't remember what I wanted to say but you here's what I wanted to say that the weather here is finally going
to be very cold the temperature tonight is scheduled to go down to 50 degrees
Fahrenheit so I we don't know what we're going to do I went to oh my gosh
University sweaters and chose this one from Mill and uh
uh so I had to wear my University sweater because it's going to get down to 50 tonight oh
maning theeth shattering cold in Arizona oh yeah they're gonna close the city
down and uh we're all gonna lie down outside and look up at the night sky
yeah that's right anyway um I have H something to
quote from you today wonderful number of uh number of years ago I was talking
with my good friend Peter Jedi who sometimes comes to this uh Global star
party and I was telling him we were looking at Andromeda galaxy and I'm
saying that we're looking at it as it appeared when Humanity really was just
starting to appear on the planet Earth and he said oh no no no no we're looking
at it because and he goes into this like like light like Paths of
light as they leave the Galaxy they're going at the street of light so time stops and uh anyway I mean Peter's
probably right but I still told him I said I think you're full of it but
anyway um I have here today a quotation from of all people
Edgar po Edgar alen Poe who wrote some very very famous poetry and Pros in the
19th century and one of them his most famous one was probably the poet poem The
Raven quote The Raven Nevermore that I think we're all familiar with but the quote that I'm going to read today is a
little bit different it is from Eureka a Pros poem that he wrote in 1848 not it
was the last thing he wrote before he died and uh it's kind of an interesting
thing because po decided to get a little bit into
science and the way he did that was that he predicted by more than a century the
successful resolution of oler's paradox oler's paradox is a very interesting
thing essentially it says the night sky is dark therefore life is
possible and he goes on to say that you know with the there are 20 first
magnitude stars in the sky spread about there are several hundred second magnitude Stars several thousand third
hundreds of thousand in fourth and by the time you get to six you got millions of them and then time you get to eighth
and ninth and 10th down to 21st magnitude you get pretty much an
Infinity of stars so much that no matter where you're looking up in the
sky your eyes are going to hit a the surface of a star somewhere which means
the sky nice sky is so bright that every square inch of it is
is as bright as the sun and you go outside and you look up and you die instantly and life is not possible
that's not true you go out at night you look up the night sky relates to our theme about Cosmic
fossils this week is dark and uh um why is that and uh I this
is brings to my quote from Eureka a Pros poem and uh Scotty you gave me a
telescope years ago which I prize like almost nothing else and I named that
Eureka I named the telescope Eureka I thought I was naming it after after aredes expression after he's sitting in
the bathtub washing himself and uh he plays around with a little boat and he
discovers while he's in the bathtub the principal of uh
flotation a principle of flotation that he's been working on for years and he suddenly realizes it he jumps out of the
bathtub and runs outside according to the story he didn't
bother to dry himself off or put on any clothes but in times I think that was
okay back then anyway um that's what I thought I was
naming it after until today I'm naming it after Edgar Po's wonderful article a
pro Eureka AOS poem no astronomical fallacy is more untenable and none has
been more pertinaciously adhered to than that of of the absolute limitation of
the universe of stars the reasons for limitation as I've already assigned them
a priority seem to me unanswerable but not to speak of these observation
assures us that there is in numerous directions around us certainly if not in
all a positive limit or at the very least affords us no basis whatever for
thinking otherwise or the succession of Stars endless then the background of the
sky would present us a uniform Luminosity like that displayed by the
Galaxy since there could be absolutely no point in all that background at which
would not exist a star the only no mode therefore in which under such a state of
affairs we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable
directions would be by supposing the distance of the invisible grr is so
immense that no Ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all that this may be
so who shall venture to deny I maintain simply that we have not even the shadow
of a reason for believing that it is so and he let it go at that uh the back
in the 19th century he was ridiculed for what he wrote he sent it to astronomy
magazine and Dave viker uh totally up ever don't you ever he sent
it K and Kareem said oh you can't say put it in the round file and that was
that was back when I was young s to Alexi and Alexi said no way
I'm going to talk in Montreal and there's no way and they all shunned him
and they said go away and get some Kool-Aid or something and relax start drinking the Kool-Aid exactly the sci
turns out that edrio was right and we now know that the resolution of ur's
paradox is that some of the objects in the universe are so distant in fact most
of the objects in the universe are so distant that their light is not had a chance to reach us yet and I wanted to
share this wonderful quotation Eureka a Pros poem written in 1848 with you thank
you Scotty and back to you thank you David thank you so before we get started
of course uh our next speaker is none other than David Aker um but we should
talk maybe just a minute or two about this effect of you know the further away
we look further back into the time that we see and um when I was putting
together together the uh the theme of cosmic fossils of course you know I
thought of oh yeah now I'm I'm this year I'll be 65 years old and I have become a
cosmic fossil myself but but you know when you look at
ourselves atomically and I was asking Mr ier here just how old our atoms are and
if I got it right David uh most of our atoms in our body are hydrogen right um
is that true plentiful and hydrogen helium and lithium and dyum are very old are are you know the Big Bang
nucleosynthesis produced those in the early days of the cosmos and of course what astronomers and physicist call
Metals all the heavier atoms came later from the deaths essentially mostly all
from the deaths of low mass and high mass stars so more recently but still they go a lot of them first Generations
go back a long way so we're literally made of really old stuff right so we
start up we inherit ancient stuff to begin with and I guess uh you know a lot
of people think that okay when we die that's kind that might be the end of us right okay but it's not our atoms
continue on right the universe is the greatest recycling program that has ever
or ever will existed yeah that's right I'm not saying don't go outside and pick
up the litter around your home or off the side of the streets or you know try to have less air pollution or something
but guess what but they one time it's all going to recycle into something else right that's
right but they've never been in such magical combinations until our lifetimes as the Scott Roberts and David levies
and and the rest of us here in the world maybe not me but the you guys well of course you you so that that's a magic
combination that we've never had even if we have atoms that have been around for a long while comprising us seven
octillion atoms that's a lot of atoms that's a lot of atoms yeah so I asked
our friend who comes on to Global Star Party sometimes uh about um you know if
you took all those Octan atoms and you
placed them one by one one atom wide how far would it stretch and he actually
calculated it because he took the proportions of atoms that are in the average human body and he said that it
this thin line which you couldn't see because it's only one atom wide okay
would stretch three4 of the distance from here to the moon it's a lot lot of
atoms loty tiny little things so yeah yep but uh you've got uh uh your your
next talk here is something I'm really interested in because uh uh here in AR
Aransas we are amongst some battlefields from the Civil War and uh your talk is
astronomy and and the silver war so I'm keenly uh interested in this topic so
well thank you Scott Prairie Grove is one that comes to mind but there in Arkansas right around the corner from us
yeah yeah indeed um and I apologize because I have had a really chaotic week
um you know trying to get things ready to go to Tucson on Thursday um where
where we'll have a star party event coming up this weekend but it's been a crazy week and I thought I had had a
presentation ready with a deep Sky object and I got home and I didn't and I had to run around so I have a talk that
a couple of History groups asked me to do so I figured well I might as well write a story in astronomy about this
astronomy in the Civil War so so I'll give a part of that tonight so I don't go too long okay all right so we
I'll give you the stage here let me share the screen and I'll
see if I can share the correct slide and if you're seeing it and then
I'll see if I can start a slideshow yeah um I see
it not in presentation mode yet but are we there now y Tada yes we've
got a presentation mode yes sir so this is a little bit different than what I
intended and with apologies and but but uh um we'll see where this goes and and
Scott if I go too long here I'm trying to cut this in half but if this is going too long just tell me to shut up
okay and all we'll bring out that cane that they pull people off stage with with around the neck yeah vvill yeah
yeah yeah yep so anyway this is kind of an intersect oh I'm sorry David what said
we are not going to do that we okay we're not going okay all right you know if you watch the great documentary about
Buster Keaton who got his start in Vaudeville you know as a child and his
parents they put a handle into his clothes on his back so they could throw
him across the stage when he was four years old and he would slam into things
and that's why they called him that was called back when he was a child taking a
buster and that's how he got his nickname wow so what next time you see
me if you don't like this you can throw me across the
stage so anyway this is kind of the intersection of a couple of areas when I was young and working on the magazine I
got a whole bunch of stuff from a great great-grandfather given to me who fought for ulyses Grant and William tumpy
Sherman uh in the Union Army during the American Civil War and so I I kind of got going in some history as well as
astronomy and I I thought I'd talk about the intersection a couple of spots in
these talks a couple of them here I'll split it in two I hope of the intersection where astronomy and the
Civil War meet so this is kind of a Civil War era painting that's very famous in the Smithsonian Collection of
a prominent Aurora by Frederick church that was painted near the end of the war here as a kind of a scen Setter um and
I'll talk a little bit forgive me if you know this but I I had to produce this for some astronomy clubs locally here
and also sub so I didn't know you know how much people knew about the Civil War so let me just review a couple basic
things this was of course by far the bloodiest conflict in our history in the United States more than 623,000 were
killed uh after four years on the battlefield and many many more tens of
thousands of course had their lifetime shortened from wounds uh in the years of decades that followed the end of the
Civil War it was fought in 10,000 places from minor skirmishes to Major pitched
battles the federal government termed it an armed Insurrection against the government not really a civil war but an
a a war of the Rebellion uh of individuals who were representing States
who took power and rebelled against the federal government against the Constitution they didn't
recognize factions in the South as legitimate state governments the strategy of the South
was mostly to fight a defensive war and to hold out for time that would Aid them giving the high costs of War both in men
and material to the north for the union the strategy was to cut off the
Confederacy from supplies Vanquish their armies and also occupy enormous
stretches of land Transportation routes and coastlines uh railroads largely as well as frequently
being on the offensive and anybody who's read about military history knows that generally speaking taking the offensive
produces a lot more casualties than defending a ground so that there were all those things that uh the union had
to accomplish that that made the war a long and bloody one of course as you may
know as it started there were many people on both sides who thought this might be a contest of weeks and it
turned out to be much much worse than that for Sumpter to appomatox and the
other surrenders that happened in the trans Mississippi and elsewhere uh lasted slightly more than four years and
the war coincided with an important period in science and astronomy in particular the 1860s witnessed the birth
of astrophysics of measuring the physical properties of the cosmos for
the first time time beginning in 1862 with spectroscopy so the Civil War and
astronomy really emerged in a few ways uh in Crossroads during the same
era well one thing that was interesting to me is that on August 22nd 1863 this
was a few weeks after the twin Northern victories which were a long time coming
of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and the surrender of Vicksburg to Grant in the
in Mississippi along the Mississippi River uh Lincoln made a surprise visit
to the old US Naval Observatory the US Naval Naval Observatory for a long long
time is now on the is the vice president grounds on Massachusetts Avenue in
Washington this is the old Naval Observatory that existed at the time of the Civil War down in the area that was
called Foggy Bottom near the pomac and this is about two blocks north of where the Lincoln Memorial is now the building
is still there and you can visit it by special Arrangement and permission and for me it was pretty special uh I used
to have a pal uh who was a chief historian at the Naval Observatory called Jan Herman and he facilitated a
visit and the group there Abraham Lincoln one of his private secretaries
John Haye and a young astronomer who was 33 at the time ASAP Hall 14 years after
this visit ASAP Hall discovered the two moons of Mars but on this night they
climbed up a wooden ladder that's still there into the observatory Dome and used
the 9.6 in refractor that was there to look at our turus and the moon and a few
other things and I'll tell you in in historical places there's a sense you can really get of the molecular Vibes of
History climbing that same little wooden ladder that Lincoln climbed up is one of
those blazes well um the Naval Observatory
visit as I mentioned uh followed soon after Gettysburg and Vicksburg where it
seemed that the tide of war was beginning finally to turn toward the north but of course as we know um the
year the war went on for two more uh very bloody years much bloodier than the
first two years to uh bring it to a conclusion
this is uh from the Library of Congress collection this is the old US Naval Observatory as it appeared in Lincoln's
time this was taken about 1867 to 69 it's not known precisely the imprint was
Bell and brothers in Washington and there's a very prominent foreground
horse who posed very nicely for this historic picture and you can see the building and the Dome are still
there well of course as we know in the the world of astronomy comets going way back several thousand years in history
often represented Omens of good or of evil uh depending on who you were and
what you were interpreting how optimistic or pessimistic you were two
bright comments appeared in the early months of the American Civil War uh one
of them was in 1861 the so-called Great War Comet and here is in Vanity Fair a
very popular publication at the time uh a public a a an illustration of the uh
very old and very obese Winfield Scott Lieutenant General who was the senior
General in command of the United States Army during the first most of the first year of the Civil War he was around as a
young officer victorious in the War of 1812 and and so for 50 years was around
as as an important General and he was commanding the US Army uh in the early
days of the Civil War until the um problematic George mlen came along and
you can see the tale of the Comet here of Scott is made up of Swords oh
wow um on May 13th 1861 an observer in New South Wales Australia discovered
what came to be called the Great Comet of 1861 by Midsummer the comet moved into
the northern hemisphere and according to astronomer Horus Tuttle you may recognize his name attached to
comets sported a tail uh stretching 106° long wow so this was a remarkable tale
about the same length as we had with yakatak back in uh the mid
1990s um and so it really caused a press s sensation the it was an evening
spectacle in the north and came to be called the war Comet the editors of the
Brooklyn daily Eagle posed the question what means this visit peace or
War uh the great Comet of 1861 faded during the week of the First Battle of
Bull Run the first major land battle leading to vast speculation about the meaning but comets were not done with
the war in 1862 Tuttle discovered another Comet that would rise to
significant brightness another astronomer you may have heard of Lewis Swift also spotted this Comet when that
Comet faded many attached its significance one way or another to the just fought Battle of antium this was in
September 1862 decades later astronomers would identify that Comet of course as the
source of the persad meteor shower during the visibility of the
great Comet of 1861 private Charles Johnson of the 9th New York infantry
recorded thoughts on the visitor in his diary the comet is now tired of his
visit to these regions of space he penned or disgusted it may be with the
appearance of things on this side of the planet for he is now leaving in seemingly greater haste and he came with
his tail between his legs for the unknown regions out
yonder here's a modern view of what came to be known as Comet Swift Tuttle progenitor of the pads in the first
first identified around the time of the battle of antium
another major Omen arrived at Year's End in 1862 coincident with the Battle of
Fredericksburg which as you might know was a major Fiasco for the union under the incompetent Army Commander Major
General Ambrose Burnside this painting depicts the Victorious Commander at Fredericksburg
confederate general Rob Confederate General Robert E Lee writing with his
staff and a brilliant Aurora blazing overhead which appeared on the evening after the
battle the celebrated artillerist Colonel Edward Porter Alexander who
would become famous as James Long Street's chief of artillery at Gettysburg recorded his thoughts on the
unusual and Brilliant show of aural light cries of the Wounded filled the
icy air and Alexander wrote a brilliant Aurora illuminated the night and much
facilitated the work upon the entrenchments
the light show of course was taken as an omen of Victory by the southerners and
many Yankees took it as a sign of Doom in the confederacy's capital the
Richmond Daily Dispatch proposed that the light represented the blood of those
Martyrs who had offered their lives as a sacrifice to their native
land and I think what we'll do Scott is stop there
and I will do the second half and if you don't know how the Civil War turned out don't go looking into any books over the
next week okay okay but I'll but I'll do the second half next week and and there
are some other intersections of astronomy and the Civil War to be discussed but I don't want to go too too
too long tonight yep we have um John Ray is
watching on Facebook and he uh he said wonderful how history and general is entwined with astronomical history
thanks for that perspective David indeed and thank you thanks John I would like
to ask a question yes and story I really did enjoy this and uh partly because I
remember the time you were in Tucson and you and Wendy and I were watching the movie
Lincoln and with John With My Father John we watched it there with you guys and that was a very special night and by
the way if you don't know this I I have nothing to do you know no business connection with Steven Spielberg but the
movie Lincoln is extraordinarily accurately and brilliantly done as a film yeah I think
so too anyway um I've told the story before and I'm going to tell it tonight
but I'm going to end it with a question okay 1862
when excuse me sorry a second it was 1862
when Hall was at the Naval Observatory and he was in a terrible Dreadful
mood and as he was getting his telescope
ready uh he just was not things were not going his way that day and to add insult
injury as he's getting his telescope ready there's a pounding at the door and
he just blew it he thought this is it I'm going to go downstairs and I'm going to open the door and whoever it is I'm
going to punch him out and tell him to get away from me and he goes stomping down the stairs opens the door and there
facing him is President Lincoln and holl is going was this the
same night that he that was my question to you well this
was the visit that's famous that Lincoln made to the Naval Observatory and is on
record having observed a number of objects with Hall was in August
1863 was about six weeks after Gettysburg and Vicksburg and that's very
well documented um in a number of sources all right I'm not sure if this
is the same visit I do know there was more than one visit yes to the naal
observatory that's right and he just said uh sir I'm
so sorry to interrupt you I know you're very busy but I'm was just taking a walk
I'm really depressed and everyone knew that Lincoln was subject to depression
indeed he was and uh I just was hoping that I could drop by and take a look
through your telescope and Hall immediately invited him in they had a
wonderful time together he asked intell questions all at his best answer and as
he's leaving he looks back and like a little boy said can I come back
again Mr President you're welcome here anytime and he came back just a few
nights later with Stanton Secretary of War Stanton but the uh I was wondering if
the famous night in 1863 was the same night as my 1862 story
or not so that you know I think they were different nights and I think Lincoln did make more than one visit and
with different people at different times you know despite the fact that Lincoln was often
Melancholy and you know uh he he was self-educated of course from a very
young age um but he was a brilliant and very interested guy in all sorts of
intellectual subjects he went down he tested new Innovations and Firearms at
the Navy Yard he fired new weapons on the national what's now the National
Mall um you know between the uh Lincoln Memorial and and the Washington Monument
currently he was intensely interested in history in politics and in science and
in technology so I think he made several visits um this one was was very well
documented um and the Naval Observatory was a very interesting institution at the time because the superintendent who
blew out of town and became a a Confederate naval officer was Matthew
Fontaine Mory so you know just as with other institutions the the the
institution there lost quite a number of of officers to the South you know as the
war commenced as as well so so I'll have to look into that further David uh to
see what documentation there is and and I know that Stanton did V who was not a
funny friendly jokey guy but a Gruff guy who was very serious all the time but he
was also a smart guy so so we'll have to look into the documentation of those other visits but I know you're right and
they did happen okay thanks David there is one other thing you did mention that
one can get a tour of the Naval Observatory I did get a tour but more
important than that on July the 16th 1994 I got to spend about 20 minutes
with the resident of the Naval Observatory at that time which was vice
president Al Gore oh yeah yeah yeah we talked it was in the East room of the
White House and we talked for a long time not a word about politics he wanted
to comets about Shaker leing n or discovery of
it how we did it what the story was and uh he was kidding around a little bit
and uh but you know we were reluctant to do that with the vice president of the United States but got into it and it was
something very very special I just wanted to share that with you and now I will go back to you David that's
incredible David and of course he's a smart guy and very interested in science as well and the new Naval Observatory
which which I've also been to but not to the vice president's house um but there you have you also have to specially
arrange things because you have to make sure that your car is inspected going
into those grounds there with you know uh under under body mirrors and
everything so that you're not you know uh working for some bad guys from another uh terroristic country so both
of the observatory components in Washington require special arrangements
to get into uh the old because it's really a closed Museum and the new because the vice president's house is
stands on the grounds as well yeah but what a great story and what a great opportunity you had there David all
right that's right I think that this was a really great talk uh Mr rker um and I
think our audience really enjoyed it and uh so um so you know I know that we're
that we'll get back to those 400 or 500 other objects that we're going to talk
about later but oh yeah but this is a this is a very very interesting diversion so well thank you and we've
we've got 1864 and 65 to go yet next
week you know looking forward to it I'm jumping in really quick because uh from
my point of view I like the fact that even in astronomy you're helping to
preserve some history in a time where we're we're sort of trying to rewrite a
few of these things and right for whatever political reasons which we definitely don't get into on this show
but I for one appreciate that you're this retelling of
History um and you know mixing with astronomy I think was a very important thing so I look forward to hearing more
you know Mr rer is recognized for his knowledge of the Civil War and uh in all
these historical areas in fact when he goes to like we were just at Alcon and I
know he made a trip to go see some historical Civil War sites so well thank
you Adrien and thanks Scott and and you know the old adage of you know if you forget history you're doomed to repeat
it you know there's a lot of Truth in that and and uh yeah you know a lot of
folks who are around today all I'll say is you know they're they're not not all
of them are presenting you know the the facts as they actually happened in American politics today but we shouldn't
go any F farther than that right we will we'll carry on regardless yeah indeed
okay all right well thank you David thanks guys okay well Mr Levy we have
Don NAB from the astronomical League uh coming on next are you uh do you and Don
know each other pretty well we have met online here we've met
online and I believe we met did we not meet in the Baton Rouge last summer no I
didn't make it last summer well I heard of you last summer there was probably
heard about me from Terry man out bet and it was uh it was all very positive and I'm really really glad that you're
on with us today yeah I spent several days with h Terry at StarQuest in Green
Bank Green Bank West Virginia so oh yeah a few weeks before few weeks before
Alcon so we had a lot of time with Terry my wife and I spent time with her so it's a great event excellent well thanks
for thanks for coming on and um uh we look forward to your presentation
tonight okay and I do want to say before I start to David Iker I read the
article in astronomy magazine that your presentation is based on I enjoyed it very much thank you all right let me
share my screen and I'm going to talk
about Messi C 41 okay coming through okay yep
okay so um m41 is called the little beehive and this is a picture from uh I
think this was taken at kit Peak and when you look at mess 41 it won't look
like this in a typical backyard telescope because all these small Points of Light all these stars or galaxies
behind it they're not going to show up in uh in a backyard telescope so it'll it'll pop much more in your fi of view
than you see in this uh this Photograph but this is an amazing photograph shows many of the red giant stars that are in
uh m41 the little beehive so before I go I want to me before I start to mention uh don't
forget astronomical League convention is in July in Kansas City and Terry man's
coming on there she might talk about and it's presented by Astron iCal Society of Kansas City so I don't think we have
another Al live set up yet but we just had that last Friday I don't have a date on that but I'm sure Terry would know
about that so the little beehive again here's the uh this this view is from kit Peak
Arizona amazing facility if you've never been to Kit Peak put it on your bucket list it is an incredible place to visit
was there many years ago but never forget it yeah so star clusters we're going to do just the moment on astronomy
101 because maybe some of the people watching don't have the depth of knowledge that everyone does about star
clusters so uh talk about open clusters first which is what m41 is m41 or m41
the little they're really two types open and globular so uh m41 is an open cluster
and that's a group of a few thousand stars and they are buddies in the sky they are formed from the same giant
molecular class and they travel through the cosmos together but they don't last very long
they will disperse typically and they can only survive for you know a few hundred million years sounds like a lot
but when you look at the age of the universe that's only about 1% 1% of the Asian the universe so they don't hang
around too long so here's one of this is my favorite summer or favorite winter
open cluster the plees which I talked about on the show in November and then
tmy cluster in Scorpius this is my favorite summer um open cluster which uh of
course deplete is easily visible open in uh to the naked eye uh M7 tmus cluster
in a good sky like a say cherry Springs or sure in Arizona you can see naked eye
uh most other places where there's any light pollution you have to use a binoculars or a telescope but it is a
beautiful cluster named for tmy uh who had first recorded it in in
history now we'll bring in the cosmic fossils so glob or the Clusters they are
a spidal or a sphere-shaped collection of stars they're Bound by gravity and it
can be tens of thousands to millions of stars and a stable compact formation so
they are the true Cosmic fossils some as old they are the oldest objects in our
in the Galaxy uh even the universe they can be 10 billion years old so that's
only 3 billion years is less than the age of the entire universe and they include some of the oldest stars in the
Milky Way they typically surround the uh the Halo the central Halo of the Milky Way so this time of the year in the
winter time in the northern hemisphere we're looking out away from the center not going to see as many Globs but uh
come summer there's a lot of Globs and uh probably my favorite is uh M13 the
Hercules cluster the great globular cluster in Hercules is called uh it is a site to behold in any telescope so
encourage you look for that one come the summer so a little history messy 41 is
uh open cluster in Candace major the big dog this is Orion's hunting pal uh Canis
Major uh first recorded possibly by Aristotle it's not very certain not not
determined certainly that that he saw this but his writing suggests that he saw in 41 uh but much more concrete and
of course this is uh um Aristotle up top but this fellow
down below Giovani Batista Huda he uh he definitely recorded it in uh 1654 he's
credited with the discovery of of m41 so it lies about 4 degrees almost exactly
south of Sirius Sirius is the brightest star near in our sky and actually Sirius is more than twice as bright as the
second brightest star uh partly because it is inherently a bright star but also
because it's only seven light years away so that's like your next door neighbor in the neighborhood it's very close to
us so um cluster covers about an area the size of the full moon and it's about 100 stars and we could see the re Giant
in the uh the kit Peak photo I showed earlier of course Messier 41 where's
that name com from from Charles Messier of course you know the famous comet hunter he uh listed as number 41 in his
catalog of objects that are like comets but are not comets so these were his
notes from uh 1765 it says I have observed below Sirius and near the star
row of kis major a star cluster when examing it with a night
refractor now I don't know what a night refractor is I've tried I've looked this up and tried to examine what a night
refractor is I can't find that out but messia had about 12 telescopes he had
let's see seven refractors one one of which was 30 ft long he had five reflectors so he looked at it with his
night refractor whatever that was and appeared nebulous like a like a gasc a nebula in space he must have then looked
at it with another telescope because he says instead there's nothing but a cluster of small Stars so if anyone out
there knows what a night refractor is I would love to hear it but I cannot find any any evidence of what that actually
means what he what he quoted there I can give a possible simple answer it's the
refractor he his number one refractor that he would grab at night and he wouldn't use it in the day to spot
anything it was specifically for the night I have a night pair of binoculars that I use for that there may be another
definition I really don't know but uh that was my I wanted to throw that in there yeah i' never heard of that before
but thanks yeah if we are to believe lesie pelure he claims in Starlight
Nights that Messier did most of his work with the uh with a 2in diameter
refractor and if that was the night refractor then it was a small long refractor but I can't confirm that but
it's possible and and that way maybe a 2- in wouldn't actually uh discriminate the individual Stars so it appeared just
like like a nebula his favorite telescope was evely one of his reflectors I'm not sure which one but uh
he had a dozen different telescopes so anyway interesting quote I thought so
so how do we find it how do we find uh m41 so any night you go out look to the
southeast look up and you're going to be confronted very quickly with with Orion he's to see Orion with his belt stars is
holding up his club and uh Beetle Juice Riel and of course the famous Orion
Nebula here and this is one reason I'm writing about m41 you know everyone
writes about m42 the beautiful Ryan nebula but there's other things in the sky this time of year so I wrote about
m41 this time so all we do is drop down from Orion find the brightest star in
the sky which is easy to find and just below and to the right is
m41 uh to observe it with a you can observe it with binoculars or any
telescope really it's a large cluster remember we said earlier it's about the size of the full moon so you have to use
the lowest magnification you have to get the cluster in your eyepiece so for anyone who's new to astronomy that would
be the eyepiece with the highest number typically with a telescope you got a 25 or 24 something like that millimeter
eyepiece use that one that will give you the widest feel of view and one once you're once you're zoomed in on m41 you
can uh go to higher magnification uh to look at the individual Stars uh it is
quite bright and and in the dark sky you can see naked eye not where I live here W of Philadelphia but in a dark sky you
can see it naked eye and uh it's a great Target for urban skies and uh you know
even with the moon you can you can see it through your telescope so it's it's a good Target for an amateur
astronomer why is it called the little beehive well there's another cluster in
the sky called The Beehive and these
images are from stellarium planetarium software and they are at the same
magnification so this is the beehive in m44 in cancer and this is the little
beehive so it is a lot smaller than the official beehive that's why it's called
the little beehive okay so this is this is uh that's the end I will stop my
share and um that's the little beehive story well that's
great that's great so um but if I can just mention to Don that
uh I believe the uh uh the campini refractor might be the one that was the night refractor because it got rid of
the chromatic aberration and uh that was the one that was used to find a lot of the fainter of the night sky objects at
that time oh wow huh it was also the one used by Cassini I believe to start to spot the smaller of Saturn's mood what
what aperture was this refractor uh good question I can try to look it up um I
was on Messier uh history earlier um okay it's Cassini no messia had a
campini refractor of his own it was uh Camp campani sorry campani and it was um
it says the magnification was only 64 times but that it got rid of the chromatic aberration so you could see
more clearly details in the night sky wow but it doesn't say what the aperture was
unfortunately went in advance though that's great yeah he had he had 14 telescopes he used so I don't feel as
bad about the ones that I have I I feel like I'm I'm still behind Messi I'm
okay well you'll get there you'll get there well let's um uh thank you very
much Don uh and um uh welcome back Kareem it's great to have you back on
global star party so we'll be we'll be coming to you here momentarily um but
uh up next is uh Dr Daniel bar let me see if he has logged on at this
point and I don't I do not see Daniel bar so we are
going to go ahead and jump uh to um our next speaker here which will be Ron
breacher Ron uh if you're available um uh when don't we have you go ahead and
log in with your camera
he's probably getting a hot cocoa or something I can see oh he's over he's
over in GF Ontario so it's kind of cold there too that's right that's right well um hi
there Scott oh there he is there he is he ran ran to his microphone that's great I I was watching upstairs with my
wife I thought there was another speaker before me uh there was but uh
apparently occasionally people U will run into a problem where they can't log
in at the last minute there so well yeah so you've been uh you've been
burning up the skies with uh all your beautiful astrophotographs that you keep
sending me I love them and uh thank you uh so uh but tonight you want to talk
about fossil deep Sky ey projects now a lot of us that do astronomy Outreach we
do talk about this concept of you know I it's coined is Look Back Time uh you
know light traveling you know five was it 5.9 4.9 trillion miles a year uh
186,000 miles a second um it is uh uh
you know it's hard to wrap your head around things and it's it's hard to uh think about that the further away
something is the um the further back into time that we're looking you know I
remind people though that if they're just standing right in front of me that there's some space between us and we're
I'm seeing him he's seeing me the briefest fraction of a second ago but not in real time okay so let me expand
on that and blow your mind mind a little bit when you look back in time when you
look at an object the the object isn't two-dimensional it's three-dimensional
so if you look at a Galaxy like the Andromeda galaxy that's 100,000 light years across MH you're not just looking
back at one point in time you're looking back at a whole span of 100,000 years in
time as you look at that Galaxy the Universe I mean it looks flat
but it's not but it's not not all of those photons travel the same distance I know
right but you know that's not I love this I love these aspects about astronomy when I first started and I
started started being told about how far away things were and how big things were
and how small we are and all the rest of it it I went through these phases of uh
of feeling very uh at first very insignificant you know which is kind of
The Humbling aspect that you know that uh I would say that if you're going to
be if you become a a an astronomer or a stargazer this these are things that you
do experience did you go through something similar yeah I I I did but I it's I
didn't I don't think I stopped there like the two the two extremes that I
hear the two points of view that I hear yeah or number one what you just said I feel so
insignificant right but then there's another aspect it's kind of a glass half full thing which is right you're part of
something really big and if we're the only things in it what a waste of space right
yeah we're part of something really huge and we're the only beings we know of
that are watching it all unfold right so so far it's important we
have a role to play I think it's it's it's kind of almost a sacred thing uh in
general um to think of it that way and I would say that um um you know what a
privilege it has been for Humanity to do all of that and you know and then you
look at the rate of discovery and the rate of what we're learning is it's going at a pretty fast clip right now U
and the accessibility people have access to information like they never had
before not that ever body avails themsel of that but even if you were interested
in the past you might not have access to good information now it's at your fingertips
anything you want to ask is at your fingertips that's right with guys like you uh Ron you can learn how to access
it in ways that will blow your mind um the it if this is the first time for you
to see Ron on global star party or the first time to actually see him period uh
you're about to be amazed his astrophotography is breathtaking and uh and he loves the sky as much as anyone I
know so but clouds too many clouds there's too many well this is something
else I remind people you know this is again that class half full half empty I remind people that even the word
Universe just means everything okay not
it doesn't start at the sky okay it doesn't start at out there in space or something is we tend to think out there
in space because hey guys we're in here in space too okay and uh the universe is
contained within our body it's active it's alive uh and it's all intertwined
well my my glass half full says I hope that there's people around me that are
getting fabulous new equipment because we've got the cloud curse that
usually comes with that's true so we'll see anyway I wish the best for them yep well thank you for
coming on oh my pleasure I you know I always read your your writeups that you
send out to the global Star Party presenters um I always look for
inspiration from that for what I'm going to talk about oh thank you Ron this and so I uh well it makes it makes it easy
for me right and it keeps me more or less on point so I'm going to share my
screen with you okay and um let's get to my presentation and start
the slideshow so you were uh you wrote all about fossils Cosmic fossils and so
I I thought about that and and I thought about what are the categories of cosmic fossils and my wife and I sat down and
had a really good chin wag I mean I came up with a couple of obvious ones
but um we expanded on that and uh I have some cool stuff to share with you today
so first of all um let's talk about what is a fossil anyhow and then I'm going to
show you all the categories of cosmic fossils and give you some examples and
really I I just want to show you pretty pictures we don't have to get too technical um I just love looking at
these things they are just so beautiful this is uh a real Rock fossil of an
ancient um snail and uh it looks kind of like a
Galaxy don't you think yes so I I started out by thinking about
what a fossil is because that helps me focus and it's really a remnant of
something very old it doesn't actually have to be static or in you know in living terms it
doesn't have to be dead all it has to be is a remnant of something really old so
a lot of the things I'm going to show you are still uh quote unquote alive
they're still Dynamic systems they're continuing to evolve in really interesting ways so here's the
categories that I thought of and I said I thought of the the easy ones planetary nebula and Supernova remnants but uh
through talking with Gail we came up with a few others that I want to show you some examples of and that includes
comets black holes Tech ties and meteors and some
other Cosmic visitors and uh like I said this is just a tiptoe through some pretty pictures um we have 15 minutes
for these uh for these presentations and uh I can get through
plenty of photos in that time so let's start start out by looking at some planetary nebula and uh this is the Ring
Nebula maybe you haven't seen it this way before I did quite a lot of enhancement of the faint Hal Alpha
hydrogen Alpha shell around the outside but at the very center I think you can see my mouse and
I'm giving you a little highlight at the very center you can see a
star and that star is a white dwarf and it is a remnant of a sunlike
star that has basically used all of its fuel it's not big enough to explode in a
supernova and it's basically coughed off its shell of remaining gas mostly
hydrogen and oxygen and the white dwarf is now
causing that gas to glow and over Cosmic time that white dwarf is going to
gradually get cooler and cooler until it disappears into a cinder and uh the
nebula won't be visible anymore it's just we happen to be here at the right
time the hydrogen is red and the teal colored gas is mostly
oxygen and this is another really famous deep Sky object the dumbbell nebula and
uh I was honored to actually have this photo uh this was my first photo ever on
the cover of Sky telescope my only photo ever on the cover of sky and Telescope
so far and um again there's a white dwarf at the very center of this nebula
causing the gas to Glow this is a beautiful site in an 8 or 10 inch
telescope um you don't see the green Parts you see mostly the red parts and
they look it looks kind of like an apple core is the way I would almost describe it uh
but it's uh just another gorgeous planetary nebula and here's a couple of smaller fainter planetaries that really
show off their Central Star nicely this is Jones emberson one and uh this image was made with
hydrogen Alpha and oxygen filters again the hydrogen is the redder portion
oxygen is The Greener portion and you can see that Central star that it's
Illuminating the nebula and eventually when that Star Fades and dies the nebula
will go with it and here is another beautiful
planetary this one is called sharpless 2- 290 it's a member of the Shar
sharpless catalog of over 300 uh objects faint nebula in the sky and uh this one
is a little bit asymmetrical the main star that's Illuminating the nebula is not in the center um but again you see
that red on the outside green on the inside the of those planetary small
planetaries let's shift to Supernova remnants and I'm in the Northern
Hemisphere and I do not have a regular access to Southern Hemisphere data so um
the Supernova REM that I'm most familiar with are in the Northern Hemisphere and
this is a part of the veil nebula complex and uh the veil is massive it's
it's almost difficult to get it all into a single image um the best images that
I've made of the veil have been mosaics of multiple panels but this is one part
of the veil and here's another part of the veil which you can actually see is on a poster behind me that was used to
advert I the camera and telescope that I was using at the time and um I I told
you I've shot um a mosaic of this here's what the whole thing looks like it is
huge I think it covers something like six widths of the full moon and it
extends both above and below the boundaries of this
slide beautiful object and again in a moderately sized telescope
you can see all of the veil with a good oxygen 3 filter and a nice low power
eyepiece you can really uh get it and this star there's a star right
here that's 52 signi and you can find that with your naked eye so it's not too hard to locate The Veil The Veil nebula
uh was uh exploded about 8,000 years ago
and so this is a an 8,000 year old fossil and it's not being illuminated by
a central star uh rather these are basically uh glowing gas from pressure
from the from the a blast of the Supernova blowing the gas out and over
time as that uh shell gets bigger and more diffuse the nebula will get fainter
and fainter so again aren't we lucky to be here now at this point in time when
we can see such a beautiful thing here's the other Northern Hemisphere Supernova
that's quite famous it's called The Crab Nebula and this one uh the explosion of
the Supernova was actually observed in 1054 and uh it is much smaller right now
than the veil nebula but it is expanding in a previous talk for a global star
party I showed a picture of this nebula from uh the 1950 50s imaged by the
Harvard Observatory and you can really clearly see how it's expanded even in
the last 50 years the first Pulsar that was ever
identified is at the very center the dimmer of these two stars oopsy the
dimmer of these two stars um at the very center of this
slide is uh that pulser p are the crab nibula P are so it's spinning really
really quickly and sending a pulse of radio waves our way every time it does
so very cool and that's what's Illuminating the U The Crab
Nebula comets well they're not really deep Sky objects but they're sure pretty
deep from my point of view and they come in from far away so that we can see them
like this with a nice beautiful tail up close and an nice expanded head um I
imaged this from my driveway with the DSLR in uh 2023 this is Comet
2022 E3 ztf I feel almost embarrassed talking
about comments given who we have hosting the show
tonight hey comments are for everyone comments are for everyone
and uh I may not be the best Comet photographer but boy they are fun to shoot and challenging you got to be at
the right place at the right time you got to have a clear Horizon often and uh
you know comets move at a different speed than the background Stars so making a nice image with uh nice round
stars and a beautiful Comet uh is a technical challenge that that I really
enjoy so this is that's a beautiful shot though off to the left you can see the
uh plasma tail stretching away from the Sun that curved yellowish dust the big
wide swath is it's orbit around the Sun so yeah very cool yeah thank
you and uh this was my first comet shot ever I shot this believe it or not with
a an 11in Schmid Cagan telescope that was not polar aligned uh sorry it was
polar no it wasn't polar aligned it was it was mounted on an ALT asmith Mount so
like a lazy Susan and down like a dub but it was a tracking Mount and so what
I did is I shot uh a series of 10c exposures and uh was able to make this
image so this is my very first comet shot Seven P homes and I must have done
this it must have been around around 2004 or so that I would have made this
image okay so black holes I guess black holes are another
kind of fossil right they're really really old they're a remnant of something
else but we can't or at least I can't take a picture of a black
hole but I can take a picture of the evidence of a black hole so this is The
Centaurus a Galaxy the data came uh generously from Martin Pew and Steve
melato and um you can see these two
little red hydrogen flares coming out of well they they look
like hydrogen but they're not hydrogen they're I guess they're plasma or gas
that's being illuminated by x-rays that are being emitted by the black hole at
the center of this galaxy so how cool is that that is really darn cool in my book
it's a great shot when we were talking Gail reminded me that we have a few samples of uh of
cosmic fossils in our own home and uh these are uh a couple of pieces of
desert glass from Libya and they're techtip and Tech types are formed under the high
heat and pressure of a big meteorite or comet impact and uh so that reminded me of
course that we also have some meteorites in the house so
this is a sample of an iron meteorite from Argentina and so that's my uh that's my
little stroll through my Cosmic fossil collection I hope you've enjoyed it and
uh before we leave the cosmic fossils let's not forget UA mua this artist's
impression and the orbital image both came from the Wikipedia page on this
object but that's another example of something that's really really old it's
a remnant of something from some other place in time and who knows maybe we'll see
something like it again we can all be Cosmic archaeologists that's anyway I'll stop
my share now and thank you all very much thank you so much that's great um uh you
know the comments uh you know Chris Larson is watching on YouTube and Jeff
wise uh they love your images um than you Chris says beautiful any comments
currently available for small telescopes or DSLR what do you think oh yeah
there's there's always comments available just just look them up look them up online one good site you can
look at is telescopius yeah and you can input
information about your Imaging system and it'll help you identify targets and I think comets are in there as well uh
the other thing you can do is um uh I use the skyx and it has a uh comet
ephemeris in it that's what I use for acquisition so lots of good information
out there and check the magazines astronomy magazine yeah astronomy magazine a good source right so that you
get plenty of notice with them too because um there's been a um sort of a
tendency to at least for me to receive these magazines now well in advance
maybe a couple of months or six weeks before the month that they're writing about and in the center of each of those
magazines there's a a whole solar system guide and if there's a good comment to
be seen uh they'll both be writing about it that's right behind me uh you see
some of the kind of Next Generation Um what could be considered
introductory telescopes some some of these especially the unistellar that's behind me is is um is a telescope that's
connected with the science team uh so uh you know Dr Frank marus at said kind of
heads up their uh citizen science program for that um but uh you know I I
brought these behind me we're we're now Distributing all of these products uh for North America and so we have uh this
one right here which is uh the dwarf okay probably the least expensive one
out of that this whole line and then we've got uh the unistellar product there's several models and then vonis
which is another really uh beautiful and stylish looking telescope but uh you can
get started in astrophotography with these uh to do what Ron breacher does uh
you need to step up to some better equipment but this will get you started
so yeah and now those those photos that I showed you I I just want to be clear
that so the the veil nebula for example that was shot with a 4-in
refractor true okay and you can do it with smaller apertures and that
particular that particular image was a mono camera but I've shot the veil with a one shot color camera too and I mean
the the equipment has really improved you know I think it depends uh how much you want to be a
driver and how much you you want to tune the car right right so now equipment is
starting to evolve to the point that you can be a a a Sunday driver you can just
en go enjoy going for a drive you can enjoy how plush the seats
are and how smooth the ride is that's true right but if you want to if you
want to tune the car if you want to get under the hood if you want to see how far you can push it up a hill um you can
do that there's all kinds of options in terms of the equipment that's very true
Y and uh you know so a lot of us as amateur astronomers we like to get our
hands on the equipment and make the adjustments ourselves and stuff but the point you're making
Ron uh I was a little bit shocked when I first started being introduced to professional
astronomers professional astronomers most of them are not allowed to talk to
to mess with the uh big Observatory telescopes they have a technical team
that does it uh and uh if they if the if the uh investigator for that night uh
has a special instrument package they put it on they make it work and the job
of the pro is to collect data you know and uh and to follow up on their uh on
their programs so uh in this way these kinds of telescopes are great data
collectors uh for you and they do a pretty remarkable job and so I'm I'm
really impressed with them yeah and the you know you don't even need to drive
the telescope now you can you can get great data from remote observator so we
uh that's true that's awesome we have masters of pix Insight we do workshops and uh telescope live is one of our
sponsors they have all different kinds of sizes and shapes of telescopes all over the world both
hemispheres um if you've got 3 months a cloud like I have and you're itching to
get a good data set there's all kinds of outfits like that where where you can do
that or you can just write to me and ask me I'll you know I've seen a starving
astronomer before I've been one so I'll gladly throw you a a data set if you
just ask so what's the best way for people to reach you um well let me let
me share my screen one more time um I actually put that on a slide but never
showed it um go to my website that's a good place
to start it's astrod talk.c and um you'll find all my images
are there and they're sorted by category of objects so if you're looking for an example of a planetary nebula you can
find it there um I do do one-on-one teaching and Equipment support so you
can find how to reach me there um I've got pictures of all my equipments give
you ideas for how you can set stuff up including a dual scope setup rolloff
roof Observatory that type of thing and all the Articles I've written
for all the magazines in North America and in Europe they're all in here under
Articles and uh there's more information here as well uh so you know go check out
the website every photo that I post I give a complete processing workflow so I'll tell you about all the equipment
how much data was collected uh and and what I did with it to to make the picture the look the way
it looks so that's probably the best way to reach me astrod
doca uh if you if you want to reach me by email it's at the bottom there but
I'll just read it out RB CER
rogers.com that's the way to reach right all right Ron well thank you very much
and we'll see you next time thank you so much bye everybody I wanted to add my
thanks to Ron's wonderful presentation and uh what I don't know
about comets what I do not know about comets could fill many many books so I'm
really glad that you provided me with some of that tonight good presentation thank you thank you thank
you see you later guys that's great okay all right um uh David we have our next
speaker is none other than Terry man uh both you and I know her well and you
know Terry is um a remarkable person that's been supporting our community for
a long time uh she's uh she always seems to be full of energy and full of great
ideas on how to take astronomy to the next level uh Terry loves uh Aurora you
know we're going to have some Aurora images from uh Alex uh uh later on
tonight which I'm sure she's going to watch um but uh you know the
astronomical League uh gives out many awards I think I saw several of them on
the walls of your home is that right David yes um uh there are a lot of uh
Terry stuff that uh that I have seen that I've enjoyed that I've hung here in
my home and uh Terry is just a wonderful wonderful Observer of the night sky and
I'd like to think that the sky itself feels richer that Terry is one of its great observers
I would agree with that I would agree with that so thank you
both yeah I I enjoy observing just like everybody else I guess so yeah but thank
you both that was very very nice so it is such a pleasure to be here kind of in
a little bit different format um tonight I wanted to talk about the astronomical
League Awards mainly because we have deadlines coming up and we have made a
couple changes along the way that I wanted to get out here as soon as I can
so um let's see if that can't get there we go I wanted to give a quick update on
the awards what's coming up what has been extended for any astronomical League members that might be out there
watching uh these are all of the awards that will be presented in 2024 when
we're in Kansas City uh the first uh what five are Youth Awards the nyaa the
Nia is National young astronomer award any uh youth that is below the age of 19
not in college yet can um apply for this award and all of these I can't go into
detail because there's so much information for all of them you can go to the astronomical League website and
on the very front page if you scroll down a little bit in the middle there's this big oval and it says Awards you can
go there and get all of the information that I won't have the time to give tonight for these Awards but um the H
Parker and the H om and the H Smith and the H Dior is horkheimer uh Jack
horkheimer when he passed away the horkheimer charitable organization had a
amount a certain amount of money that they funded or supported these Awards uh
these will be coming to an end probably after 2024 possibly the league is
looking for sponsors for those Awards because the contract was he would do it for 10 years and they've done it for 12
and after this year that will leave these Awards open so we are looking for
sponsors but all of these deadlines except the horkheimer Parker will end
April 30th because that is an Imaging award now the Web Master which is the
Web Master of your organization or a club there is an award for League members there that deadline is still
March 30th Mabel Sterns is a club newsletter or any type of newsletter if
the museum is a member of The League or or whatever organization and you send
out the newsletter you can have that entered for the Mabel Sterns sketching
um again that's pretty self-explanatory and now we have the f award which explor scientific um does
underwrite and Fleming has been extended till April 30th to because both uh
Imaging Awards they wanted to extend past the April 8th uh solar eclipse so
those Awards will be coming up deadlines coming up in another what just about well you've got a couple of months but
we wanted to get a reminder out to everybody as early as we could now let me talk a little bit about
the Fleming the Fleming is a new award and we thank Scott and explore scientific for supporting that um it is
for women astrop photographers of the league it's just something that you know
if you get a bunch of us women together and we can geek out just as much as all of you guys can too so it's kind of
funny when you get all of us together and talking um it is an award as I said
for women it has been extended until um April
30th and you right here is what when you join when you when you're a woman that
enters this uh competition the very first time you enter they will get this
pen for the Willamina Fleming because she is the one that discovered the horsee head nebula you will get that pen
one time for entering uh the Fleming Award of your uh woman that's in the
astronomical league and an imager and these are the cat atories that we may
include it will depend on entries what we see um so there could be atmospheric
phenomena deep Sky solar system and wide field which all of that covers a wide
variety of Imaging so all of that will be covered all of these um awards that
you're seeing and hearing about you will enter that if you have any questions once you read the uh page on the
astronomical League website you'll see that it they all have their own email address and all of those will go to
Chuck Allen uh the vice president of the league and he has judges that are
judging all of these Awards so please just take a look at that and see what
you think and please enter before April 30th for the Imaging or if you're um
under the age of 19 for the horkheimer Parker award and just take a look at that and
see what you think and I wanted to bring up astronomical League live uh we will be
back on February 16th with Bob King and he's going to be talking about Comet a
comet 12p Pon Brooks the comet with a popcorn personality because it has been
so active uh and you can watch it right here or in the astronomical League
Facebook page YouTube um you can watch it about anywhere please check either
the league Facebook page um or any other
um of these and you will see an announcement come up to remind you that Bob King will be joining us to talk a
little bit about the comet so I'm G to stop sharing there and go back so that
is it for me Scott well that was short and sweet but uh yeah yeah that's
fantastic just wanted to get out a reminder so everybody knew you know what was coming up and yeah what was I know
that uh and I feel that David Levy feels very strongly about this as well um that
uh you know that the astronomical League I mean with all the awards that you guys
give out you probably do more to recognize people uh for their achievements and you know of course we
all love being out looking at the sky and recording our data uh and doing a
lot of things that are already you know part of the uh uh observing programs
that you guys have which I think you guys have 80 or 85 programs somewhere around there
always coming but to be recognized for something especially from such a prestigious and venerable organization
that is the astronomical League you know with this 75y year history and you know
all the amazing characters that have been there to build that organization to
be recognized by that body um is a is a huge highlight and something that uh uh
I think that anyone would treasure you knowt I treasure
mine the history of the league really is amazing uh Chuck Allen is working on a
history page of all the leadership of the league all the presidents through the years and to look finally to connect
to face with the name and look at that and you really realize how many years
you know the league has been around but I tell you with 23 a little over 23,000
members we have some incredible people out there I mean people that it is such
a pleasure to recognize such as David Levy uh and so many others that we have
recognized these people are amazing and it it is so incredible to be able to sit
down and talk to them and to meet with them and the kids think look at the kids you have met and interviewed even like
in Albuquerque Baton Rouge these kids are amazing wow so smart so I mean scary
smart you know so it's unbelievably smart if I would have thought in the way they did in school oh my gosh I was too
busy worrying about you know what else was going on in the world not about studying uh it is amazing I I have
enjoyed every minute of it you know you talk about how many people we've recognized we are so lucky to have
people that are so into this Hobby and enjoy reaching out and sharing with
other people so it is incredible to be in this position and to be able to do
things just like this and talk to everybody that I can't meet face to face with these people all do a lot to bring
astronomy to the community and I think it's incredible so it's a pleasure to be here well put I wish I had recorded all
that wait a minute I did record all that so so I might be uh using it in some of
my future writeups thank you Terry thank you Scott thank you so much okay all
right well that's uh that's uh Terry man from the astronomical league so we had a
double CER today with two people on from the astronomical League um you know two
U uh Executives from the league but many of us actually belong to the league and
you can too uh all you have to do is go to astr league.org and um become a
member at large or to or join up with a club that's already a league club and
there are several hundred of them so it's not they're not hard to find uh actually joining up with a local
astronomy club that is an astronomical league club is uh probably the best way
and least expensive way to go as well so um so uh anyhow uh we were going to have
a 10-minute break but we're just going to just keep on keeping on here on the global star party uh and uh we are going
to introduce um um Professor Kareem jeffar and Kareem is
from um uh from Canada like David is where a lot of super great astronomers
come from and uh uh he is from the Royal Astronomical Society of C Canada the
Montreal Center and David was this your Club I mean were you like um uh from
this club you were president of this club I think I was never president but that's the club I started out with
October the 8th 1960 I first walked into the observatory there and the first
person I met was Isabelle Williamson one of Canada's greatest
astronomers and uh we got to be real terrible enemies over the years we
repaired that and we got to be very very good friends ah over the years for many
many years that's right dream is really following in the wonderful footsteps of
history that the Montreal group has had and I'm just so glad to be a part of it
yeah that's right so um you know Kareem jeffr pretty well uh uh I'll let you do
the introduction okay um kareim is someone who
has caught the spirit of amateur astronomy caught the spirit of the sky
not the science yes he's very good at that he's a First Rate teacher but as
someone who can transmit his love and his passion for the night sky I believe kareim is
has no equal including me I think it's he has inspired so many people to
inherit his passion for the night sky really I would agree with all of
that ah I I don't know how I can go from that that was that was amazing D thank
you David this is probably the first time we've made Kareem almost speechless so um that's great that's great but you
do deserve it all and you are the uh uh astronom educator that uh that many of
us wish that we had so I appreciate that Scott uh this term I'm not getting to
teach astronomy uh at the campus but with the eclipse coming up with the Jack space club and with all the RAS Montreal
events uh I am trying to like uh you know keep keep that part of it going but
but I miss the teaching and the sharing of this love of astronomy and this is where the global Star Party comes in so
amazingly is it gives us a for to share why we love this hobby why why we choose
to spend the extra time sharing it with the world whenever we can and so uh
today's topic is Cosmic fossils and I'm gon to SP I'm gonna just talk briefly about this because what I've done is uh
I have actually brought on one of our newest executive at uh rasque Montreal Alexa WIS and I'm going to introduce him
uh at the end to talk a little bit about a recent adventure of his but also just
so that everybody can get a an an appreciation of this young man who has done so many cool astronomy and space
exploration related uh activities and travels and I I just I I enjoy getting a
chance to chat with him every single time we do and he's now a student at John Abbot College so I actually get to
see him a little more often which is fantastic but I do want to mention you know Scott talked about becoming a
member of one of the member clubs of the astronomical league if you want to be a participant in some of the amazing stuff
that the league does I became a member with my family of the university lowbrow and adrianne's going to be on later the
University of lowbrows because they have some of their meetings online it allows me to still stay connected to that club
even though I'm not in the US and I don't get a chance to visit there very often so I do highly suggest that you
check out some local astronomy clubs and if you can find a local one the University of lowbrows are fantastic um we always start in the
Montreal center with a land and Sky acknowledgement to talk about the fact that we are on unseeded indigenous lands
but for us as astronomers we also share the night sky with indigenous peoples and individuals and ancient cultures
from all over the world I have one of our space Oddities uh friends Kath Elizabeth has recently gotten a sea star
s50 and has been taking some incredible images but she actually in addition to
wonderful nebula and wonderful clusters she also takes these beautiful short stacked images of the moon and so we are
at a waning gibbous moon right now we are just coming out of the January wolf Moon which is what the settlers called
it and given that doid gave me the introduction I have to make a literary
reference and so gim manadu gazis the great spirit Moon of ajibu that we know
from the tale of haata this is the moon that was with us over the last few weeks
and we always do our public events around the full moon this time around we did it on the full moon but we did it as
a live stream with our friends atw physics and anybody who was not able to catch the analog experiences please do
visit our YouTube channel because this was one of my first students uh she was
a undergrad first term student when I first taught astronomy so she couldn't
take the course that term but she realized that I was open to doing more and she came and said there's this
partial solar eclipse coming up next August and I said yeah I know about it August 2017 it's on our first day of
classes she said yeah can we do something for the college and she led a group of Youth to develop our full solar
eclipse event that was just an incredible start to the events that we've had at John Abbott and now with
the April 8th total solar E clips passing through campus and passing through her campus at Purdue getting a
chance to visit with her now that she's a PhD student at Purdue training other
students to become analog astronauts after she led her own lunar uh analog
experience in Poland it was just incredible to see the the the how far
some of these students have reached and she's one of many that I've brought back to talk to students at John
Abbott now last Global Star Party GSP 140 I mentioned some of the work being
done by my students working with the James web Space Telescope and when Scott put out Cosmic fossils I was a little
bit sidetracked and I was thinking you know I might just say something quickly about that but then I have something else I want to share and then I realized
listening to Ron's presentation and talking a little bit ahead of the the event tonight with David ier and others
in the gallery is that really when we're talking about Cosmic fossils it's what
we spent all of our time looking at in the night sky whether it's planetary nebula whether it's the the location
where stars were being born when the signals left to get to us by the time we
get those signals the stars are further along in their evolutionary cycle and so what we are seeing is always the past
it's always fossil behavior that we are now getting a chance to explore and I thought back to these
beautiful pictures because one of the things that I always regret living in Montreal is the third worst light
polluted city in the world per capita because in the winter time snow and ice just reflects the artificial light so
right now when I go outside I just see this ambient Dome of light and it's so disheartening not to get to see the
stars that we want to spend our time with that I love it when my students go
and get inspired by this and then come back to me with their experiences so
from this fall I had talked about one of the individuals who made this uh beautiful Eagle Nebula image The Pillars
of Creation on the side here from this past fall and when we had talked about
this in class you know we had talked about the creation of elements and how exploding Stars versus the big bang
versus uh you know the the the low mass stars giving off their planetary nebula
the high mass stars exploding and then the energy that's left over being able to create the elements even heavier than
iron even though it's no longer a judicious element diffused to form the
fuel that can keep the stars going the rebound energy allows us to create these heavier elements when we talked about
all of this in class one of the things that was difficult was I couldn't take them out that night and show them M1 or
show them the the the veil nebula remnants because there's just too much
like pollution so Lucas lorino Perez one of my students from the fall he grew up
in Uruguay and so for the first two months of this year he had decided to go home and spend spend some time with his
family and when he was home and talking to his uncle about our astronomy course his uncle said well why are we staying
here let's go for a drive to atakama so they drove down to Chile and he got a
chance to experience in the Dark Skies of the atakama desert the a the Milky
Way and all of this amazing night sky that we talk about that we look for in
the northern hemisphere but we miss out on so much of the of the splend and the Glamour and I've had students from New
Zealand and Australia send me back images but there's just something about these images from Chile that are just
breathtaking so I asked Lucas if I can share these on the global star party and he was touched and he said by all means
and so I want to share with you a few of Lucas's experiences secondhand to talk a
little bit about observing these Cosmic fossil with your naked eye so in the
atakama desert we have this beautiful Galactic arm Rising above the desert you can see a bit of the mountain ranges
there in the distance these are from a handheld cell phone camera because he did not have camera or equipment with
him when he went on this trip but look at the portion of the galactic arm with
the K sack nebula and Karina so incredibly visible just with a cell
phone picture in the southern hemisphere wow wow he sent me this at 2 in the
morning a couple of weeks ago just as I was getting stressed out about the back to class and I just stopped and
I was like okay time to stop stressing let's just enjoy this picture you zoom in you look at Karina you get some time
to really just enjoy the magnificence of what the arm of our Milky Way shows us
for these nebula where stars are being born and where the remnants of these destroyed decaying star systems are left
behind and the scale of the Galaxy can be VIs ible when you try to capture this
same type of an image but with a different light setting and you can start to get a feel for depth looking
into the dark Dusty Lanes of these images and then every now and then you
get a little bit of just wisps of clouds especially when you're closer to one of
the settlements or closer to one of the mountain ranges and when you look up at the Zenith you can get some
incredible I I thought of some of adrianne's pictures the minute I saw this one this is such an amazing view of
the Zenith of his experience there in the atakama desert this one took my breath away I at
at first I was sitting there going well you know I got a little wispy and cloudy and then I thought that actually
enhances this picture because even on a slightly cloudy night look at how many
stars he got to see in that pristine desert
Horizon it was just I I I was I was all super dark and when he had talked about going
there one of the things he was really hoping for was a chance to see some of the amazing telescope arrays that we
have down there and he did get a chance to visit and well from a distance get to see the very large telescope so he
shared a little video with me that I'm going to share here with you very short gave this beautiful
picture of the very large telescope and when I was talking to my students in class you know one of the things I
always joke about is that astronomers you know for all the time we spend in our hobby we really don't have that much
imagination when it comes to naming things so we did name the very large telescope which is bigger than the large
telescope but not as big as the extremely large telescope which is being built so he decided to take a picture of
the extremely large telescope being built as well in Chile wow so I was
really happy that with these pictures that he shared with me I got a chance to at least be there vicariously through
the eyes of my students and that's really been kind of an underlying part of my GSP talks is that I experience the
night sky through the Outreach that I do through the educational courses that I teach but it's Through The Eyes of
others seeing some of these things for the very first time so with that I'm going to say thank you from rasque
Montreal thank you I have to make use of this awesome video
you made us a couple of years ago yeah thank you that's and now I'd
love to bring a new montrealer on with us Alexi
okay one thank you guys for having me on uh as you know uh I'm a student at John
Abbot College uh and uh really when I joined the astronomy U group in Montreal
kareim was the first one there to show me um the first constellation I was able
to see which was the Copa and from there my interest just grew and grew and so it
grew to the point where uh group of my friends and I have uh decided to go to
Yellow Knife just to see the aurora borealis uh in the middle of uh the
worst time when it was the coldest in January so I'm going to share if you
remember from our discussion at the last GSP about the temperatures that we were getting up here and I mentioned to you
the temperatures that were happening up in H Northwest Territories in Yukon and Northern Alberta that's where Alexi was
so that's what he's going to share with us crazy so we're all yours all right I
hope uh we see everything well okay so uh without further do this was a shot I
took from Yellow Knife so this is uh Yellow Knife Northwest Territories and uh we'll just begin so
before I start with uh just talking about the trip I want to talk about who was on on it we had four Amazing Friends
uh that I uh knew for either a while or just recently uh through school and
these guys uh uh helped me through thick and thin during this trip they're Jeremy James William and Jonathan all wonderful
people uh this was the trip we took we drove from Montreal to Toronto to Toronto to uh Calgary and then Calgary
to Yellow knife and where we landed uh but before we got there my car surpassed
200,000 kilometers and we all sang Happy Birthday to uh my uh my car and then we
started to uh our journey on the plane and we got to see a nice um picture of the the
the moon uh while I was on the plane and you'll see a little transition where the
moon is going from one phase to another and I went during the best time
um possible when the moon was uh a new moon where it was the darkest nights as
soon as we got there we crashed we were dead tired it was a a long trip um and
so the first night we there was no forecast for the Aurora on that day but
the next days they were come we did do a bit of adventuring just outside basically those buildings right there
that's downtown a Yellow Knife there that's not a very big city um but it was
very cold uh it was ranging around Nega 35 Celsius which is gets pretty cold
um and so this is um we decide you know on the second day we'll go to a nice Pub
relax uh get to know the people around and we have this um website that we
referred to quite often called Aurora Max and we're just scrolling through it
through the live feed that was happening over Yellow knife and we saw this this is not from me this is from the Aurora
Max website and as soon as we saw that we dropped everything we paid our bills
uh of our drinks and uh chicken wings on that night and we ran outside and we were able to
capture our first auroras when I saw this I was just blown
away uh speechless everyone want just there was a moment of silence just kind of just looking above us and just seeing
how amazing it flowed through the night sky and everything uh but it was it was still
cold here's the temperature uh I I was freezing um it was a dry cold though but
as soon as your moisture from your breath sticks to your skin you freeze
immediately so we we didn't stay too long outside we ran back to our Airbnb and then uh took more pictures uh
Dressed even better and this was straight out of our Airbnb we didn't have to go far at all there's a lot of
City Lights um unfortunately but it was still very bright very active it was
like if you had a string on a table and you kind of just wiggled it around that's how it kind of moved but a more
Majestic Way and there's that that's a couple pictures of us next day we you
know what let's have a a good day on on the lake we went to do a little tour and
we did a bit of fishing uh where they kind of had a net already set up for us and we just pulled the net we got like
13 fish and then we ate the fish uh it was nice uh deep fried fish and a a nice
fish soup um on the next day on the on the 10th we
had more pictures this was the original picture I showed you guys this was basically behind our Airbnb there was a
little Hill that was farther away from downtown and we got some really nice pictures it got really cold we started
seeing ice crystals and everything and condensation was uh
forming from the buildings and everything and it it was getting it was on that day it was -40 and4 degre is the
same thing in Fahrenheit it's yeah it's that cold
where Fahrenheit and Celsius mean the same thing atg40 um this was supposed to be our
last supper as you probably uh remember in that first couple weeks of January it
was ne40 in the Prairies and everything so the uh the flights were cancelled the
next day uh but we had a great meal uh at a local P another local pub we watched a Habs game of course they lost
no big surprise there um so yeah the nightmare begun the uh the classic um
cancelled or delayed flights started to pop up on the board and so we decided
you know what we'll go back to the Airbnb the lady was very nice let us let
us stay a extra night there free of charge and this is basically what it looked like outside everything froze
over it was absolutely frigid out there uh just say the least we took that extra
day do a bit of exploring of the city and uh place around there's my friend Jonathan uh we found a random chair
sitting in the middle of the lake uh and he decided to Lounge on it a
bit um next day we went to the airport to get our next flight on it was -44
Fahrenheit that that is in Fahrenheit so it's very cold very cold uh that's the
airport um well from the airport and there's the one of the planes that was
uh being boarded on and of course delayed or was it no it was canceled uh
it was cancelled for the second day in a row now and so we decided we well we didn't
have a place to say so we took over the airport we sat around U we took a corner of the airport basically it was not a
very big airport and we just slept there and we had a bit of fun there did a we
even played some hideand-seek at the airport that's how bored we were um the
13th just as cold uh just a bit warmer one degree warmer as the lowest
temperature uh but it was pretty cold and our flight was once again cancelled
it was going to be cancelled until the 15th so that was we were GNA stay there for five extra days we didn't have a
place to stay but fortunately we were able to get tickets uh we were on WestJet and they
moved us to Air Canada and we were very excited so as you see there's the moon
it's now on a different phase and uh that's from the hotel that
we were fortunately given on the last day because there was not enough crew uh
for that flight and so we started our departure but our adventure did not end there with
the auroras we got to see auror on the plane which was crazy like I I didn't think I
was able to do this this was about 5:00 in the morning um that's incredible yeah
yeah this was from Yellow knife to Vancouver uh British Columbia and here
this is I've uh wanted to go one by one on them and
here as uh this is a closeup of it I was able to actually take a uh um look at a
constellation and I just you know my art is not the greatest but I hope this is
this will suffice this is basically Aus uh I hope I didn't that's fine Aus sorry uh I don't
pronounce it correctly I I do apologize and so that's one of them and on the
west side of the the uh airplane I was able to take two uh captured two of them
in the Aurora uh the first one being which one was it oh yes it was um the origa uh
constellation which is right next to uh the Gemini that was uh was visible
also again I was not expecting this basically what I had to do is because we had those uh screens on the plane so
extra light that we didn't need I took my winter jacket covered myself took my
cell phone this is through cell phone footage also and put it on night mode I just stood there took a picture
and was able to take great pictures in the sky never thought I was able to do
it that's really cool we ended it off with going to Vancouver uh we had a 4H
hour layover roughly and so we left the airport ventured off and that was the
end flight that that is all thank you guys uh thank you for taking uh your time
with me thank you I'm curious about something
I've I've never visited up uh that far north in Canada um I did fly over
Greenland uh one time and was able to see you know amazing auroral displays uh
from the from the plane but um uh is it Yellow Knife must be like a
prime destination to go see Aurora is that correct yes uh there's actually lots of
Tours but we decided not to go with the tours we were we felt more like independent and we wanted to experience
it for ourselves but yes it's actually a quite um Yukon and uh Yellow Knife are
huge huge um uh uh tourist destinations for the
yeah and you have so doid has left but a few years back he had gone as one of the
guest speakers for the Aurora 360 which was an airplane that went through the auroral curtain as part of an experience
in late February that unfortunately during covid that just ended up having
to close down but that wasn't a you know that was out of the Yukon but they flew basically over the border to Northwest
Territories and then back into Yukon yeah wonderful well that's great
and I think you guys were Brave to Brave that um uh extreme cold you know I was
reading about what can happen to the human body at minus 40 and you were got
down to minus 44 it's dangerous actually and uh so um any uh special tips for
staying warm in that kind of weather keep your feet dry ah keep your feet dry
keep everything dry because if not you're going to freeze you're going to freeze and keep some hot pockets with you oh man yeah just thinking about that
has Scott kind of cold and and rubbing his arms there
yeah I Phantom cold feeling Phantom chills so I think we're going to be
hearing more from Alexi because in addition to his space shuttle Journeys he's been working a little bit on some of the Messier and starting his own
observation list so I think we'll be able to follow his journey over the next little bit that's great well I hope to
share it with you yeah you're welcome to be on global star party anytime you're ready so you just let us know thank you
that's great okay folks so uh we are going to move to our next speaker um and that
would be marchelo Souza in Brazil so let me uh let me switch our camera views here take
care Alexi thanks so much you did a great job by the way thank you y
marchello uh how are you hi I'm fine can you hear me uh we hear you better now
yes okay thank you uh I'm I'm sorry because I'm in here in a hotel now we
are a hotel ohel yes in a city of Santa Maria mad where is located your first
like Sky Latin America here oh we are
since Friday visiting different seats here in our
state here janir where we have a dark sky and you have a member of the staff
of dark sky here with us that's Megan I that's a journalist that is she's here
with us and we have the opportunity to visit the first Sky of Latin America
again and also we are visiting other places that in a near future can be uh
next the next dark sky Park here in Brazil and the theot where I am here is
also they also want to be a dark sky loing because it's very dark here here
is part of the a forest here a private Forest yes and
today we were before the beginning here of my participation program we were
outside look to the sky here and we saw the mil way it's so dark here that we
can see the mil way and the uh we were looking for South the South and cross
begin rise it's not in the beginning of the night but a little later it's already
appear in the the sou cross there's a fantastic view here and the measurement
that we make with the skm to measure the quality of the dark
sky here is more than 21 that looks like a a a place that is
very dark at night if lights they turn off all lights and is a fantastic place
here and I think that soon we will have new dark sky places here in
Brazil it's a fantastic experim experience this five days that you visit
five different places yeah and I think we have good news
today today or it has launched the next
the new edition of the dis Sky app
magazine is a wonderful magazine and it's quite I would like to
ask you if you can help me to share sharing the new edition of the magazine
yeah I can't manage it I am going to post the link where it can be read for
Sky Up Magazine uh by the way Sky up is a absolutely free um magazine uh from
the explore Alliance and uh marchel Souza is the editor and uh so we just
publish the latest edition this afternoon so it's fresh off the presses
and uh you know if you clip uh click on the link uh you can you can read it or
download it and is ADD we have something fantastic that we have articles from
people from three different continents we have from Americas from
Europe from sorry sorry from America from Asia from
Africa you have articles fromet from Canada you have Dr de v s
Harts from United States I love it this is great it's great Global Star Party
Global astronomy magazine yes from South South America we have articles from
Brazil I wrote one from Argentina from
Uruguay and the two articles from Argentina and Uruguay is about
experience with dark skies they are directors of the D one is
aland some that is director of dark sky in Argentina and the other is Fernando
that is director of the dark sky in Uruguay they show that experience there
you have an article from Egypt that Dr bash that has experience
with solar observation I have also ah Dr de here hi
I saw nice to meet you h Dr B that's he
works in qat now he's from Egypt now he's in qat and that
isaz and he walks there with solar observation popularization of the solar
observation we do research studying the sun we have also
an article from Pakistan from Yuma that develop
fantastic project fantastic project there Outreach activities teaching
astronomy there and an article from Nepal that is written by
Sur that also he's very active there develop fantastic project there
and he talk about their experiences to
develop astronomy in and also you have a information about
the the next eclipse United States then I I think that I didn't
forget anyone sorry could you could you show the
magazine because I can't share here oh let me do it let me do it okay hold
on [Music]
that is WR a series about the history of astronomy have a
speci a special article from Scot Roberts and is a free
magazine it's fantastic part this magazine thank you very much and yeah
thank you great article by David Levy yes a fantastic article
this is a great companion this Magazine's a great companion for the global Star Party um because of its
Global nature uh and um uh you can see
uh you know some pretty interesting articles from around the world um
there's uh also uh very interesting uh articles or contributions of uh Star
Charts from uh will Tyrion uh so probably the best Celestial
cartographer of our time uh makes the star maps for uh Sky Up
Magazine uh these are this this is great to see artifacts of the Galileo
Museum um uh we uh support in the magazine people that support uh um you
know uh the astronomical community at large and uh Astro te TV is also one of
these great uh uh groups that um uh puts together regular programs with uh Dan
Higgins has been on global Star Party plenty of times to share with us what's going on there I remember I have an
article from Europe I forgot the article that from y h that is the manager of the
Global Science op that the this year and
last year 2023 and this year the them is about astronomy James
telescope and the Global Science shop is a fantastic project uh the director
coordinator participate here one Global St part that is that
being that would be great in a fantastic experience of Global Science here this
article about the experience of the global science and the astronomy in Global
Science that they is a mix they make interaction between science and the Arts
through the music that's a great
experience then this is from David prospect that is
from the night sky NK
and we can is a way this magaz it's wonderful to see all this uh you know
activities in educational Outreach and astronomy you know working with young people and uh you know young people are
naturally interested in uh the stars and you know learning about the universe
that they're part of and the Uma is developed project in Pakistan he's a she's a woman
that develop project in Pakistan and oh from Pakistan uhhuh yeah
wonderful wonderful getting to know our star yeah
this is an act from an Egyptian that okay no he lives now in
qat Works in University in qat he has a PHD in
solar observations and the doar resarch about the Sun and he developed many
Outreach activities there in Qatar but he is from
Egypt yeah images of the solar eclipse that their
h great North American total solar eclipse I love the poster it's
awesome yeah and April I think that everybody United States will be yeah are
you are you coming to Mexico or or to United States for this Eclipse not this
time not this time unfortunately too I mean we are
planning for in the in the in October to see the eclipse
yeah that to be Clos for us so some great um planning information
for the eclipse here we are state by state but
eclipse in the last years in United States because
last last year we have an eclipse and few years ago again 2017 we had a total
eclipse and then we last year we had the annual and of course this year the total in
seven years three eclipse this some yeah this eclipse in 2024 if you
don't already know this will probably be the greatest science event in human in
human history um uh there will be many many millions of people that will
witness this uh this eclipse is going over some of those populous areas of the unit unit States and uh that part of the
United States also has a an incredible network of Highway systems so that you can get to the center line pretty easily
um but you need to make your plans now if you haven't already made them and if you have not already bought eclipse
glasses uh I can tell you that uh the United States is running out of solar
filter material okay by everyone and so this is uh if you if you you're thinking
that well I'll wait you know I'll buy my Eclipse classes four to six weeks before the eclipse you Pro is a high chance you
won't be able to find one except maybe you pay an extremely high price for it
so wow and it's quite in the last edition
of you showed a place where is this
place they saw the eclipse in 2023 and see again in
2024 H where is this this place you remember
uh in 2003 you said yeah is a place
where you can see both Eclipse oh yeah 2023 yeah yeah so this place this is an
event that explore scientific and the explore Alliance is running and this is called the crossroads of the eclipses
star party uh of course it's going to happen during the Dark of the Moon so uh
people will probably start arriving like April 5th I would believe and um it is
at a ranch a private Ranch uh on the center line in southern Texas and so uh
David Levy will be there uh giving talks uh along with h a bunch of other people
that uh are eagerly awaiting to see totality and uh we can't wait for for
this day to arrive it's it is uh it is coming fast and being in the business of
selling eclipse glasses it's it's kind of crazy because people are ordering
heavily right now and uh well it's the kind of business that anyone that's in this in this industry would like to have
but it can get a little overwhelming because of the The Surge that happens
just before an eclipse is is occurring um love this article half the
world happens at night that's right this was written by Alejandro from Argentina
his Argentina okay that's great he has
was there yep some great astronomers all throughout the Americas you know from
South to Central to North so it's it's uh it's awesome that we can highlight
these things in this magazine he's developer fantastic
projects yes and also he's a director of dark
sky some great uh uh images of planetary
nebula from Doug struble Doug has uh his backyard Observatory and he is like
something like six or seven miles away from downtown Detroit extremely light
polluted he has lights that are turned on from his neighbors he's got the city
lights to contend with but he does all this in narrow band Imaging and uh you
know unfortunately you can't really appreciate uh the depth of uh of how
great these images are because we're broadcasting uh you know so there's some
uh data loss but uh if you go online and type in Doug struble uh planetary nebula
uh you are going to see some extraordinary shots
yeah some really wonderful contributions in asro photography and then
uh yeah the final shot there's the Tulip nebula this is uh The Wil tyrian star
maps that I was talking to you about um and uh it's for northern and southern
hemisphere and winter spring and summer sky eyes
so um you helpful reference there very accurate and then this beautiful Parting
Shot I did not see this this is wonderful uh but that's from NASA and
Esa and others at uh Space Science Institute uh or Space Telescope uh
Institute um providing these images so looks like a lot of J West shots so
wonderful wonderful job thank you very much uh marel thank you very much for the
opportunity to contribute for this fantastic magazine I'd like also to thank his Tia for the Fantastic layout
Trisha here does a good job in putting it all together is very beautiful
magazine very thank you very much it's a very pleasure to be here thank you very
much um marello and uh you have a good night uh uh and enjoy your you're on
vacation is that right yes
yes my family is here also that's wonderful five days and then tomorrow
morning very early we go to H Jan because she will take the airplane and
follow her it's a great place to be thank you for yeah well regards to your family
thank you very much marello take care yeah okay um our next speaker uh is
Adrian Bradley Adrien always Wows us with his incredible uh night sky shots
um taken much of it taken in the uh Michigan area Upper Peninsula area uh
but he is he does travel and uh he never hesitates to uh take some wonderful
shots even even even when there's a little bit of adversity like light pollution or clouds uh he makes
Incredible art with it so uh Adrian thank you for coming on to Global star party thank you Scott as always um you
know I decided to try a new webcam and I'm thinking I'm G to have to go back to the old camcorder and make that
work um this one fires up easily but obviously it makes me look like I'm half
of a ghost here but uh but it sits nicely on top of my monitor screen yeah
I've got a yeah probably from the green screen background but yeah well so today
um we were talking about I think we were talked about Origins and um we were
there were so many good presentations um you know the atoms in our body and
you know things of that things of that sort um and I de decided I would
share a uh revamping of a project that I'm doing um which shows RIS fall Milky
Way in the northern hemisphere um and I ended I'm going to
end it with a a quote from the dear D Levy let me get right into this and just
share the uh screen here and um you can see the project here
and you can see there's a poem here by
our esteemed and beloved Dr David D Levy
um I may change the font so that's it's more readable but it's uh your eyes on the sky adaptation to the uh the eyes on
the sparrow poem um and just so that you know
D every time I look at the sky no matter where I am and all of these pictures
that I plan to include um it always grounds me takes
away the anxiety of being someplace where maybe it's really dark um you know
places like this if it shows up where I'm surrounded by a lot of trees wow um
I look up at the sky and immediately feel a sense of warm and comfort so I'm
no longer worried about things that are coming at me and um the Troubles of the
world yes and you might notice this uh I've changed the music for this I had
a uh beautiful um Catholic piece um done by
Fernando Ortega in the original when I originally put the little uh slideshow
together the music was um and drawn a blank on it it's it's one
of my favorites I heard the voice of Jesus was the uh a piano
solo but I remember uh D you always said
that the images were like Mozart and I said well we're gonna pair Mozart with
this so so obviously I won't be playing it but I am GNA try and Rec and have
this record and um and I'll show you exactly what the
all of these images to the Ein klin KN music I think it's
the opening act song so it's one that we've heard
um and so the idea is going to be it's gonna
show and the main character here Orion we
start with an image I took where Ryan the rosette is up here and I have this
um which I may just move right now let's see if we can
um oh we tried but we failed we should be moving the um we shouldn't be moving
the sky here the sky stays constant so we picked the wrong thing to move but we
will put that back um and my machine is not the fastest of machines
so I will have to fix that so the idea
is Orion who starts up here now goes
here and gradually Orion will
set and then as Orion sets we'll jump ahead we'll jump ahead to this picture
with Aurora something else is rising um out of the happens to be
rising out of the Aurora but if you know your milky way you recognize this as a North American nebula so you instantly
know this is denb so you know that this is signis and that
copia is somewhere behind it you know that this is a double cluster here
buried in the Aurora so what that means that to the northern
hemisphere the Sagittarius St Cloud is here to the Northern Hemisphere there's something rising and um these center of
the Galaxy is making its way up and when I get to this
image you see the entire bit of the Galaxy the center of
the Galaxy as we can see it in the Northern Hemisphere and you see some
other renderings from other locations including this location I'll briefly
mention um this cabin um once belonged to uh one of our our priests uh man
Senor Daniel trap and on Friday we learned that he had passed so um sadly I
had some opportunities to take a picture of him and this cabin at night and pass
them by but um great shot it really is That's
So the theme Here of the Milky Way rising and there is
one there is one image that I will be um adding it's a picture of me sitting
there looking or watching um the sky
and that will make its way in that will make its way into this
uh into this image and will likely be the last
picture um so so the idea is you see the galactic
center begin to rise we'll be jumping ahead a little bit to
um you're going to see this standing on its end here I am looking at it um this
could if weren't for the position of the Milky Way this could easily have the poem in
it but uh you know as time goes and let's see this is the yeah so
there's there are photos here um I added some newer ones that I've
taken such as this one the uh storm on the side of Milky Way rising and you
know one of my favorites and I left this one in with a
dark cloud so you can see you know Milky Way is rolling over and all of these
different locations a lot of lower Peninsula Michigan some Upper Peninsula
and you recognize the Fe of these like if we go back to this one you'll recognize that this is a field behind us
is the observing field at uh in Kenton Oklahoma where Oki teex is the okex star
party happens super dark area Yep this is another reasonably dark area and you
can see the Milky Way is rolling over gradually and you can even tell by the
color of the trees here that we're looking at fall and and it continues to it
continues rolling and this
scene I still feel like I didn't do it quite enough Justice the first time I saw this with my own eyes um I was blown
away with this there was another um gentleman who was with us um and looked
over and said what's that and we said it's the signis region of the Milky Way We generally don't see it like that in
Michigan in Michigan we see it like this I see it's the difference in what
there's a North American North American this was a little wider lens but yeah maybe
humidity or that moisture in the atmosphere makes the and darkness it's
not it's the vortal Zone here is just not as dark it was cloudy but over that
at the okite tech Star Party the you know the bordal level the
darkness is a lot you well there's a lot more so so I've added this this is my
most recent photo it ends up here because of the angle of um signis in
this part of the Milky Way yeah so and then this is the final a final
image of it that yep using the uh then of
Galactic material it's awesome yeah and you can see all of it you know even over
this Frozen uh Wasteland of a lake this is where Lake hon and um the sagona bay in
the thumb of um Michigan if you look it up that's looking out over this
area and so what happens we return to
Orion and we um we get near the end of our video watching
Orion return to the night sky and we see gradual this for those
who recall Sky Up Magazine you'll recall that image that's why I left in yeah and
then we continue on zodiacal um zodiacal light is a part of that image the uh
imag jenic clouds would be somewhere just below my screen um below the
Horizon um would love to have southern hemisphere images in here yeah but this
is this is a fairly recent image as you can tell I'm I I'm focusing on the
detail and the ground to the point where this is becoming more more and more of
what you would see with of course enhan enhancements of the hydrogen Alpha that's in the sky all these other
elements are showing colors based on what those elements are in this really bright area
is Port hiron um it's it is very bright and and over here you have
Canada and so then so then here we are we're back to Orion and this
particular is where I'm saying in a year's time the sky returns to where it started and then at the end of course is
is uh D and his poem which
um I don't don't know if I can um play
any of this without this music uh playing it might because I didn't allow
for video but this appears at the end and what will happen there's more of
this song and what will likely happen is I'm going to shrink this and then look for a picture
that I took um of me seated and I believe I can
show you that picture um picture that I want to end with in
this all these pictures there's there's this part of the Milky Way that may end
up making it into the um making it some but the the idea
behind the photos and this one should go in there too from Denver but the idea behind the photos is that
um I want to show this part of the Milky Way from the galactic center rolling
across the sky as the uh you know as the months roll in and there's a few more storm
images that could you know get swapped in in this image which I would love to
include which I probably still will is this uh this is
AT&T you got cell service over here yeah and then you've got
um this I think is is a planet I want to say that this was uh either Saturn or it
may have been Jupiter but it's something we can always look up um of course sharpness you see the
noise reduction sharpness of an of a Milky Way image I always go back to
Barnard's e right here and um right see and tared is the star here
now things seem to be a little blown out because it's not its normal um yellowish
color um Al is here and tared and Barnard's e if it looks kind of like an
e like a disjointed e here you've got a reasonably sharp
image you've got this LDN object in that looks kind of like a plankton character
from SpongeBob if you can see that that's right then you've got a pretty sharp image this uh LDN is in
Hercules and someone mentioned the butterfly well it's not going to show up because this has moved too far along but
M23 shows up really nicely when you have a reasonably sharp
image so it's a very nice image yeah you know um folks if you're looking at these
images and you really like Adrian's work he does uh make it available for
purchase yes and uh I'm sure you can be talked into signing them as well you got
it and I'm gonna this year I'm going to work on making more of these available
for purchase of course I use I use all of these for outreach where I can um but
you know with enough interest in hanging these on your wall I am more especially
this one I think I have this one for sale here but you know we're talking about the progression of the Milky Way
so these images are going to make it in this one in particular um this one in particular
will show up in that project when I find the original
with this Lighthouse that one that's great that's really and that yep and it where it's going to show up is in
between the um once the Milky Way Rises to a certain
point um it'll likely be this one and we may even try and throw this Panorama in
there but again the the idea is you've got the plane of the galaxy moving
across the sky and over the year it lips it rotates from the summer version to
the winter version and again somewhere in here I was
sitting and just observing the winter version here's this
image which may make that may make it as well so I should take notes on some of
the images I'm seeing um this image is in the these two images are a part of the slide of the
slideshow and um as is this one um these are two versions of it this
one is yeah Master this stuff at this point Adrian it's great yeah and and I know
that there are many who do this sort of Imaging and I've run into a few in Michigan that do great
images um you know there's many ways to go about it this image in
particular is is you know it looks like things are on fire over here so not
everything is perfect but you know enjoying the natural world is you know
even with this is a partially e clipped Moon and we're in a civil Dawn and this
moon is just now getting Beyond its uh and I don't know if it'll sharpen up
okay it did so you can see a little detail here this moon is slow slowly
coming out from behind the Earth's shadow in a as a part of a lunar
eclipse um the earlier these are some earlier pictures of it and um this might
make the uh slideshow there's other images I've taken that I want to add to the slideshow to um you know highlight
at Milky Way and this this is the image that will lik L
end the slideshow with me sitting there and this yeah it's it's a Bittersweet
moment because here I am sitting at that same looking out over the lake at Orion
at the same cabin that um my priest who is now passed on yeah um that's his
cabin and he gave me free rain to take images from it and um this was one of
the images that that I took I decided to do a a self-portrait of me looking at the sky
and with the v's words here that's the plan is to end that
slideshow um even though Ryan is in this position Rising
um this will make a good this may make a good beginning or end so I'll decide
where it goes um and you know and then we'll go from
there but um definitely captures the spirit of me
just observing the night sky the spirit that I want to convey in this slideshow
so there's more to go um and as Scott once mentioned sometimes your Sky just
has clouds in it and never hesitate to take photos whenever you get a chance
because you never know look at that yeah you never know what um interesting this
in giant Thunderhead became a really good opportunity for a reflection and
you've got Stars up here but if you're under this part of the clouds out in the
distant Lake you're probably not having a good time and this thing slowly moved
East so it's all temporary yeah y It's All Temporary and so uh with that I will
stop and thanks Adrian yep
yep we're turning it over to someone who does a really good job Robert Reeves who
does a really good job with images like this and even better ones so it is an
honor to hand it over to you well thank you it's a tough act to follow with all
of that that's some phenomenal um um U landscape astronomical landscape
photography and um thank you the the the term for it escapes me at the moment there is a there is a term for that I
think it's nightscapes or landscape photography night nightscape photography nightcap I like calling it like
nightscapes myself yeah yeah that's what um I think that's what bakra fishi the
kind of the instigator of that style of Photography called it and um yeah it's
it's really phenomenal what people are doing nowadays and uh uh it's just growing Lo Topsy the skill level is just
ramping up fiercely and uh yeah um it's really hard to pick who is best
nowadays yes it it is which is why I decided I would just go after what I
like to see in images sometimes I'll take images that reflect exactly how I'm
seeing the sky even if that means the Milky Way is not prominent other times
I'll make the Milky Way prominent because I just want to see it blazing it it just it depends on the purpose of the
image but the one thing I do love to do competing in this space is near impossible because there's it goes from
the you've we've all seen it there are some fantastic images but I think they
may get to the point where if they get to the point where D does not recognize
that Sky then it's not a good image if there's just too much there that's just
and it there are some images that are processed that when noise reduced the nebula are removed that are along the
plane of the Galaxy and I just don't want to do that or some of the small Stars disappear as well yeah those small
Stars a combination of U of good artistic eye and proper image processing
it just uh just blows me away what some people come up with nowadays yes yes
agreed agreed well thank you for coming on Adrien and uh you too Mr Reeves um we
are um excited to uh get our dose of uh
lunar Knowledge from from the real master here so thank you so much for coming on to our show I'm not sure what
happened uh everything just vanished and can you hear me yes uhuh yes we can yeah
all all I see is a big white screen that says Zoom you and Adrian just vanished I'm
not sure what's happened um I I have it just on you right now so don't worry
about that per yeah yeah but I I can't find the share screen anymore uh oh try
hitting alt tab let's see if it just went to the background yeah uh alt tab
yeah hold down on alt and just hit tab nope nothing is happening nothing at
all oh that's weird because I I was sitting there watching you and Adrian and all some pop Zoom pops up just just
this what the heck you can minimize Zoom you don't have to see it uh at at first
and then bring it back and maybe you'll see the uh share screen yeah it sounds
like it's gone full screen for [Music] you uh no that is not working I still
see this Zoom thing oh this is that's I
I've had those issues before but we it's always worth it for when you muddle
through the issues okay I'm staring at myself now this is a good sign I'm going to hit okay there you go share screen
and go to this there you go and oh okay there you are perfect
saved postcards from the Moon is back yeah yes all righty uh let's see if it
actually advances um uh no it doesn't Advance um there a
way we did this before let me um we've had this issue before there
it is all right U all right think the thing tonight um can you see the full moon now did it Advance yes oh good okay
uh well the theme tonight is you know Cosmic fossils uh uh well um I like to
think of the Moon as a gigantic um geologic fossil it's been up
there for about 4.6 billion years just a little bit less than the age of the
Earth itself um well backing up the um the Earth the current earth the earth we are
on now um and the moon are about the same age because they were created by the same uh catastrophic Collision um
but u u the original Earth about 100 million years younger than the moon but
um as we look up at the uh at the moon in the night sky particularly a rising full moon uh we see all these dark Maria
that create the face of the Man in the Moon and these Maria lie within giant basins that were blasted out of the Moon
between about 3.8 3.9 billion years ago so uh everything that we see on the moon
that U happened before these giant Basin creation events we call it the pre
nectarian era that's from when the moon was created up to the time of the
nectarian a which only lasted about 100 million years but that's when the giant basins on the moon were blasted out by a
fierce rain of asteroid impacts and then later these basins the lowest ones below
mean lunar elevations filled up with dark Basalt to create the uh uh the U
the lunar Seas we see today the man and the moon so we can look up at the full moon and see this Cosmic fossil when
this division in time happened uh uh we can see it with our naked eye uh these
these round Maria that form the face of the man and the moon are a Line in the Sand where uh everything after that was
a specific geologic age everything before it was a different geologic age
well tonight we're going to look at craters on the moon that predated the nectarian aoch that were older than
these giant basins that now cradle the the Maria so um
well not going to do a specific tour of them in any U for any particular reason
just kind of drifting from the uh East Side of the Moon over to the W west side and uh looking at these features that
are um more than four billion years old so the first one
um see what happens the first one is
vendelin a crater that is nestled in between uh lrus up on top and petavius
on the bottom those are very familiar craters to uh the moon Watchers petavius and lrus um very classic u u complex
craters with Central Peaks but nestled in between them is this real old guy vendelin is petarian it was there before
the giant basins were formed in fact it was ruined and completely filled in with debris it central Peak covered over its
Terrace walls U swamped with debris by the impacts that created the great basins the storm of debris thrown out by
these impacts ruined all of these pren nectarian craters so they they they're
overlooked a lot of times uh people look right at vindel said don't recognize it
um whoops that's not working I'm trying to
go to my next slide let's do it this way
all righty now um like I said people look right at vendelin and and barely recognize it it doesn't look like your
standard crater filled with debris no Central Peak uh no no U Terrace walls
that give it that unique look but this feature has been around almost as long as the moon itself so this is a true
Cosmic fossil and uh I'm to do this the oldfashioned way
to advance them uh who it's funny how it's advancing sometimes and not others
and uh advancing when I don't want it to all
right another old guy Jansen down in the
southeast part of the uh quadrant of the Moon um Jansen is huge 191 kilometers in
diameter and PR nectarian over 4 billion years old and it's kind of like the uh
um it's the giant elephant in the room but we're blind to it uh we only see
Jansen at Sunrise or Sunset Jansen is almost 200 kmers in diameter yet it's
only about 2 kilometers deep uh we we rate um giant craters uh by uh the size
of them and their General shape by something called the D overd ratio the depth over the diameter ra ratio and um
with most large craters that D overd ratio go well somewhere around 1 over 25
meaning a 100 m km diameter crater be about 4 5 km deep but Jansen has a d
over D ratio of 100 one over 100 it's only about 2 kilometers deep 200
kilometers wide and unless there's very low Sun elevation creating these Deep
Shadows within it it will disappear so
let's go back out advance to the next one make it big again and here is an
example of that where the sun is a little bit higher and unless I hadn't told you that Jansen was right Square in
the middle of the field of view you might Overlook it you might have your eye riveted on um fabricius the more U
well-formed crater within Jansen or you might see Rima Janson the curved reels within it but Jansen itself uh vanishes
under very high Sun as we will see in the next picture trust me Jansen is
there right in the middle of the field of view but you can't see it anymore yet
it's a 200 kilometer wide crater so moving on to another
one up in the uh Northern polar regions up above Mari fioras up above the uh the
man of the Moon Mario Fagor being the man of the moon's eyebrows uh further northward in the polar territory and
almost all of these craters up here are ancient and filled in with debris from
the explosion that created the uh uh uh the massive uh basins and in the
foreground uh if you can see my uh cursor notice a very Square looking
crater uh this particular one is u w Bond uh and uh again very shallow debris
field Central Peak missing um the same with the the uh complex of four
craters dang it I'm hitting the wrong button again back
up there we are this complex of four overlapping craters here meon also
pretorian and uh the interior of it completely filled in with debris that was heed out of basin impacts so all of
these craters up here um almost as old as the moon itself and if they're heavily debris filled you can't see
their Central Peak uh that's a very good indicator that they are pretorian and
very ancient uh moving on a little bit further um we come to Jay
hersel uh you would think that William hersel would have the bigger of the two
craters named in the family well actually carollyn hersel has a a crater named after her as well
uh but no John hersel the sun has the biggest crater um 156 km in diameter it
lies right on the shore the shore of Mari foror just a little bit north of
Plato crater and again you see completely debris filled you can't see the uh Terrace walls the central Peak is
gone another crater that is over 4 billion years old we're looking back
almost to the birth of the solar system
and toward the middle of the Moon down toward the equatorial regions uh we've
got uh stofler oh well back up stofler on one
side maryus on the other U maryus is a little bit younger but stofler is the
old guy uh predian as well and originally a fairly good siiz crater
26 km in diameter but in the melee that followed its creation during the
nectarian aoch when all of these asteroids were bashing into the moon uh
poor stofler got whacked by one two three craters that overlap on top of
themselves and and obliterated its its Western Rim Eastern rim and of course the interior now completely filled in
with debris the central Peak missing um and uh even morea like over here a
little younger U it is a not pre nectarian but you can see that it got be
up in it's uh old age as well in fact uh marus oven older crater protruding out
from underneath maryus so this is a pretty interesting place to be four
billion years ago it was like a a battle Zone I mean just blast after blast creating giant holes in the around and
overlaying each other and uh pushing on to the next
one a fellow named arantius uh same thing here's aanus
right here following my uh my cursor 123 kilms in diameter and the same thing u
prear in settle down for a nice long W's nap and then WAP WAP whap all these
other craters Lana uh Lana's rim uh so kind of a cosmic Shooting Gallery
back then where non-stop action all these these craters piling up on top of each
other and a crater that was just named
within my lifetime um Des landres um you you're probably not going
to recognize it if you don't know exactly where it is and do landre was not recognized as a crater until the
1940s when um Antonia named it after Henry dandas
French astronomer and uh you can see the outline of it here barely um depending
upon how you measure crater diameters um the U next three this and the next two
craters we see all at one time or another uh have been claimed to be the largest is craters on the moon um this
Lander is you can look it up and it'll say that it's 235 km in diameter well
that means it should be the largest crater on the moon but uh then you could look up uh clavus and Shard and it'll
give you figures that are are similar and saying that that one might be the largest so like I said depends upon how
you measure it they're not perfectly round so uh depending upon which way you
cross the oblong uh rim uh we've got three craters here that are
vying for I'm the biggest but U like I said Des Landers um named in the
1940s um but for Deca for centuries it was simply called hell plane and not
because it's a place that's hot as heck um this crater here is Hell crater named
after father maximilan hell a Jesuit astronomer but
uh the crater was not recognized as being a crater until the 20th century
and then finally got its own name B landras and it's fairly easy to spot once once you get find the u u Landmark
Tao crater which we see here uh just a little bit north there it is Boom uh
just tucked off on the eastern shore of uh Marin nubium the sea of
clouds and and moving on
clavus now way look
it um cavies is Big 225 kilometers
according to uh some measurement a little bit different with others but uh
in all of the astronomy text that I had when I was a kid and I'm talking about
before the SP the biggest creater on the moon of course now like I'm saying there's a a little debate over exactly who's who but uh glavius has got a
personality simply because of the um craters on its Rim Rutherford and um and
um I forgot the other one uh these two very
artistically placed craters on its rim and the Arc of progressively smaller
craters sweeping across its interior so uh it's a it's a cat that has a
personality because of past impacts but clus PR nectarian been around about 4
billion years and as you can see it's m around the block of time or twoo with subsequent impacts and uh moving on to another
view here we see clavus on the bottom
and we see Tao on top there's a factor of 40 difference in ages between Tao
crater and glavius and long mananas and maginus
these other uh similar aged crators with with clavius Tao about 108 million years
old and clavus and its neighbors uh four billion four billion or more years old
so like I said a an age difference of about 40 it's like uh Tao is the toddler
and cavus is the grandpa bouncing it on his
knee beautiful
and our final crater Shard um tucked down in the southwest
quadrant of the Moon um the claim is 227 kilom in diameter which puts it in the
running for being one of the largest craters on the near Side of the Moon of course is so close to the limb that it's
highly foreshortened but um the Curiosity of it for me is how it is so
completely filled up with balt uh this isn't all infilled by debris thrown from
a basin impact uh this is actual Basalt uh it has been flooded from from within
by uh by lavas and uh if it were a little bit more um centrally located I
am betting that uh it would have a legacy name of Mari Shard or whatever
name they would apply to it but U it's it's uh U classified as a crater by uh
uh just you know history and time so uh one of the largest craters on the near
Side of the Moon uh very easy to find because it's uh so dark and contrasting
because of all of the uh all of the mult within it I do not have an explanation for the white streak across the middle
it does not look like a crat array uh it is a different color Basalt
and it's not unusual to find multi-hued basalts on the moon uh the titanium
content of the basalt will uh change the Hue of it so um I'm thinking this is
just multiple lava flows over period of time where the composition of the uh the
chemistry of the the lava that came up changed so we end up with a different
color so moving on to my final slide I always like to end
things with this because I love our kitties and uh you don't see Tinker
sometimes crawling around in my lap while I'm trying to trying to talk get on the keyboard and do nasty things but
uh anyway there's much to live on the moon and I consider the moon to Be My Playground and I like you to come join
me me on my playground so uh pay attention to the Moon uh there's lovely
things in the sky and uh granted uh sometimes you can't see them with that
bright moon is out there but the Moon is something you can see from the city as you can see it from your Urban backyard
the moon laughs at light pollution so uh when you can't get out to your dark sky
sight um take your telescope out anyway look at the moon become friends with it
there's marvelous geology there to to be examined and and uh and and study how
things work on the moon but just look at who overlays who the youngest ones are
on top the oldest ones are on the bottom so uh lots lots to play with here so uh
I've enjoyed chatting with you about this and uh I hope you've learned a little bit Yeah and we always do Robert
that's wonderful thank you I wanted to add my thanks to Robert as well I think that was really very terrific I really
did enjoy that and it reminded me lovely mercery rhyme lady moon lady Moon where
are you roving where are you roving or the sea or the sea lady moon lady Moon
who are you loving all that love me all that love me I first read that in
Starlight Nights and it's a beautiful beautiful moving Nursery room uh also I
wanted to point out that your emphasis on clavius really got to me because to
me clavius became famous as the site of the as I'm sure you all know by now of
the site of the moon base that appeared in arth
CLK 2001 and uh but you really pointed
out how clavus and Tio are so related with they're neighbors they're neighbors
and of course the 2001 the tyo magnetic anomaly one just a
hop scop north of of cavus Base where they uh dug it up and U interesting
things happened well yeah anyway thank you so much thank you so
much Robert it really was wonderful I really enjoyed that thank you you look forward to next time our uh our audience
had some comments here Mark Drexler watching on YouTube says one of the the big reasons I enjoy the global star
party is Mr Robert Reed and his presentations so well thank you sir I a
lot of people yeah that's great I do appreciate that yeah uh John Ray says my
daughter presented me he's watching on Facebook my daughter presented me with Robert's book exploring the moon for
Christmas and I'm enjoying it many thanks I'm very pleased thank you yeah a
question uh this is uh from fenor Ruby okay if I got that right
I'm if I ruined I'm sorry uh is it true that the Moon is Cooling and this causes
earthquakes and wrinkles on its surface well it's slowly shrinking yes
the the moon well all of the planets are cooling the moon started off molten uh
about 4 and a half billion years ago and um finally it surfaced solidified and
was able to record impacts that we see today but the interior was uh hot as
evidenced by vulcanism and um it has cooled down to the point where in about
the past uh billion years the volcanism has stopped and like I said Tinker is
trying to be mischievous here and March all over the all over the keyboard um it
cooled down and volcanism has essentially ceased um but it wouldn't surprised me if the interior the core of
the Moon uh was still uh warm and mushy uh but as the world the the the the
planet the moon itself the U does continue to cool down um it there is
shrinkage and of course tidal action between the earth uh and and the moon
the gravitational pull uh kind of shakes things up a little bit and uh things settle and and quiver and shake and T
themselves down so of course the continuous impacts also create seismic shaking which settle
things down as well so it's it's a constant process where U there there's
change going on all the time but uh not at such a rate where you can look up to
the moon and say oh my God that's different than last night U we we wish
we would see something bright and Flash like that but the U the time scale between them are are many many many many
human lifetimes yes okay well Robert thank you so much and I think at this time David
and I will close out the 141st uh Global star party so you have a good night uh
Robert and we look forward to you next time take care very good thank you bye
bye okay so David what did you think of uh the 141st Global star party I enjoyed
it I think uh you need to get someone else to do quotes at the beginning
because uh the quotes are um you know I'm working on a book right now where I'm taking all of the poetical
quotations that I've done over the years and R into a book and uh when I start
selling that book you're not going to want to hear me anymore a I think they'll still want to hear your your
voice giving those uh quotes and poems and you know that's that's you bring them to life and you bring them into to
the context of astronomy uh especially a lot of the Shakespeare uh quotes and
stuff and uh we love your thoughts we love the way your delivery even when you
sing it's awesome so really love it and um I know the audience does too oh
thanks Scott we're getting John Ray says thank you Scott and David another great Global star party looking forward to the
next and with that we want to thank our audience uh we want to thank all of our presenters
um and uh we will be working on the next Global star party uh and I'll get the U
I'll get the theme from David um and uh and we will uh we'll move forward so
keep looking up and uh until that time have a great
night take care okay good night
everybody
good day everyone this is David Levy that's me and I am holding the original
Discovery films of our most important Comet Comet Shaker leing n these films
were taken on the 23rd of March 1993 Carolyn discovered the uh comet on
these Ms 2 days later and uh and on about 16 months after that all
of the fragments of this Comet collided with Jupiter giving Humanity its first
view of what happens when a comet hits a planet and uh and one of the exciting
things about this is that when comets hit planets they don't just drop uh dust
they also drop um organic materials uh carbon hydrogen oxygen and
nitrogen which eventually turn into proteins amino acids RNA and finally on
one magic day DNA comets Comet impacts are really the first step in the origin
of
life I'd like to invite all of you to uh to come to the next Global star party
they are run by Scott Roberts of explore scientific and me we we co-host this
program and uh it's usually done on Tuesdays and uh usually at 6:00 or so
Central Central Time and so I hope to see you all there my name is David Ley
and I hope to see you all at the very next next Global star party thank
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you
yeah hey David hey Scott hey Don good to see you everybody howdy
howdy we're at it once again here he yes we are good we we have to keep Scott out
of trouble on Tuesday nights right that's notorious for ripping up the town on Tuesday nights you know that's the
reason why we do go star party at that time out of jail keep
me that's right and doita is repping his Miguel
sweatshirt very nicely yeah I'm trying to get rid of this thing that suddenly
appeared I'm just wondering Scott the cosmic fossils wasn't a dick at all of us
right actually I kept thinking of that going yeah we are we're kind of like Cosmic
fossils ourselves and you know I've been really kind of focused
on uh the atoms that we're built out of you know and how old they
are and how long they'll last after we pass through our you
know our door here so hello Kar they're around they're
around for the long some of them are 133 billion years old
dang hen my name is Judy Ron I'm the deput project scientist on The fmy gamy
Space Telescope I'm here today to watch a video with you of 14 years of
observations collected by the fmy large area telescope or the lat this is the primary instrument on the fmy mission
and it surveys the entire Sky every few hours this allows it to do a lot of really cool things it can look at
sources that vary on time scales from a fraction of a second to years on
end there are two different kinds of maps that we're going to look at one map is in Galactic coordinates that means
that there's a thin band across the middle of the image and that's the Milky Way you've probably seen images of the Milky Way in the
optical the Milky Way in the gamas looks kind of similar except we're looking at a number of different types of objects
we'll also look at the gam sky from another perspective where we're looking up and down out of the Galaxy which
gives us a much better view of the extra Galactic sky and all the sources way outside our galaxy in the distant
Universe in this map of the gam sky where we have blue and red and yellow
tones what we're seeing are actually intensity Maps firmy isn't a an Imaging
instrument like you think of Hubble or web what it is is actually a photon collecting instrument it's a particle
detector in space and we make these maps by adding up all of the photons we collect in this case these are over 4
days the color scheme blue red yellow this is just a way for us to visualize it cuz our eyes don't see gamas those
circular sources that you see in the galactic plane are actually individual objects most of those are pulsars these
are rapidly spinning dense Stellar remnants called neutron stars that are actually varying pulsing on time scales
from hundreds of times per second to several seconds we see sources above and below
the galactic plane those are largely Blazers what that is is a super massive
black hole Millions to billions of times the mass of our sun the center of a galaxy that is active that means that
there's gas and stars falling into it and it produces Jets of emission and
they're very chaotic systems so they're turning on and they're turning off and that's actually the source of a lot of
the variability that we'll see throughout this movie we have a team of dedicated
scientists what we call the flare Advocates their job is to look at data every day that comes from fmy and look
for these flaring sources it's not just so that we we know that they're there and that we catalog them but some
sources are interesting enough that we want to tell our friends other space and groundbased telescopes that they should go look at the same place and collect
multi-wavelength data so that we can better understand these output
firsts you might notice that there are a few odd discontinuities in these images this is a result of holes in the data
that we didn't want to be distracting so we patched those images using frames before or
after if you look carefully you see one source that isn't like the others it's actually moving and sometimes it gets
brighter or fainter that's actually just the sun the sun is an interesting source in the Gamay it's not the brightest
Source in the sky like it is in the optical but it's prominent in its quesence state where we're just seeing
cosmic rays interacting with the solar atmosphere we also see it when there are solar
flares that bright flashlight there was a spectacular solar [Music]
flare you may have noticed a lot of variations in the sky over time it's not the the
Galaxy itself is getting brighter or fainter it's that as fery surveys the sky it doesn't do it completely evenly
over many years we accumulate a very nice even exposure of the sky but when we look at short time scales what we're
seeing are variations in the survey not actual variations in the sky but when you do see individual sources those are
real variations from our own solar system out to the distant universe
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the sky exposure pattern seems to change a bit starting in about 2018 this was
due to a hardware issue where one of our solar panels stopped rotating it's still fully functional and fmy has enough
power to operate both instruments and the observatory what it means though is that the way we observe the sky and the
time scales in which we survey have changed a bit
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in our 14-year map there's over 7,000 total sources almost 4,000 of those are
these active galaxies these blazars there's several hundred pulsars and in
total something like 2,000 of these sources are
variable
this video showing the first 14 years of FY observations is just the beginning FY
continues to observe the dynamic Sky every day and we hope it'll continue to do so for many years into the
future
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well hello everyone this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and I have my my uh
co-host here uh David Levy let's bring him on um David it's been uh it's been a
quite a quite a week of uh crazy weather across the country um we had snow we had
rain we had freezing rain uh but uh We've also had some clear nights and and
I've been out every night that I could just to look up at the stars look up at the Moon you know and just kind of
reconnect um you know uh in and I was recently in
Arizona as well um and later not during this Global star party but later we'll
be talking about a new project uh where we have hope to have a astrophotography
or astroimaging Learning Center um in one of the darkest sites in the country
which is close to portal Arizona and Rodeo New Mexico so if you're looking down at your Maps your dark sky maps
you'll see that it is Inky Inky dark so dark that if you look down at your feet
during a new moon you won't see them so um but uh how did your week go
David well it was pretty it was pretty uh good I'm going up and down you know
sometimes missing Wendy a lot more than others and this was one of the weeks that I was missing her a lot but I'm
doing a lot better right now and I wanted to say that uh I wanted to
say I can't remember what I wanted to say but you here's what I wanted to say that the weather here is finally going
to be very cold the temperature tonight is scheduled to go down to 50 degrees
Fahrenheit so I we don't know what we're going to do I went to oh my gosh
University sweaters and chose this one from Mill and uh
uh so I had to wear my University sweater because it's going to get down to 50 tonight oh
maning theeth shattering cold in Arizona oh yeah they're gonna close the city
down and uh we're all gonna lie down outside and look up at the night sky
yeah that's right anyway um I have H something to
quote from you today wonderful number of uh number of years ago I was talking
with my good friend Peter Jedi who sometimes comes to this uh Global star
party and I was telling him we were looking at Andromeda galaxy and I'm
saying that we're looking at it as it appeared when Humanity really was just
starting to appear on the planet Earth and he said oh no no no no we're looking
at it because and he goes into this like like light like Paths of
light as they leave the Galaxy they're going at the street of light so time stops and uh anyway I mean Peter's
probably right but I still told him I said I think you're full of it but
anyway um I have here today a quotation from of all people
Edgar po Edgar alen Poe who wrote some very very famous poetry and Pros in the
19th century and one of them his most famous one was probably the poet poem The
Raven quote The Raven Nevermore that I think we're all familiar with but the quote that I'm going to read today is a
little bit different it is from Eureka a Pros poem that he wrote in 1848 not it
was the last thing he wrote before he died and uh it's kind of an interesting
thing because po decided to get a little bit into
science and the way he did that was that he predicted by more than a century the
successful resolution of oler's paradox oler's paradox is a very interesting
thing essentially it says the night sky is dark therefore life is
possible and he goes on to say that you know with the there are 20 first
magnitude stars in the sky spread about there are several hundred second magnitude Stars several thousand third
hundreds of thousand in fourth and by the time you get to six you got millions of them and then time you get to eighth
and ninth and 10th down to 21st magnitude you get pretty much an
Infinity of stars so much that no matter where you're looking up in the
sky your eyes are going to hit a the surface of a star somewhere which means
the sky nice sky is so bright that every square inch of it is
is as bright as the sun and you go outside and you look up and you die instantly and life is not possible
that's not true you go out at night you look up the night sky relates to our theme about Cosmic
fossils this week is dark and uh um why is that and uh I this
is brings to my quote from Eureka a Pros poem and uh Scotty you gave me a
telescope years ago which I prize like almost nothing else and I named that
Eureka I named the telescope Eureka I thought I was naming it after after aredes expression after he's sitting in
the bathtub washing himself and uh he plays around with a little boat and he
discovers while he's in the bathtub the principal of uh
flotation a principle of flotation that he's been working on for years and he suddenly realizes it he jumps out of the
bathtub and runs outside according to the story he didn't
bother to dry himself off or put on any clothes but in times I think that was
okay back then anyway um that's what I thought I was
naming it after until today I'm naming it after Edgar Po's wonderful article a
pro Eureka AOS poem no astronomical fallacy is more untenable and none has
been more pertinaciously adhered to than that of of the absolute limitation of
the universe of stars the reasons for limitation as I've already assigned them
a priority seem to me unanswerable but not to speak of these observation
assures us that there is in numerous directions around us certainly if not in
all a positive limit or at the very least affords us no basis whatever for
thinking otherwise or the succession of Stars endless then the background of the
sky would present us a uniform Luminosity like that displayed by the
Galaxy since there could be absolutely no point in all that background at which
would not exist a star the only no mode therefore in which under such a state of
affairs we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable
directions would be by supposing the distance of the invisible grr is so
immense that no Ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all that this may be
so who shall venture to deny I maintain simply that we have not even the shadow
of a reason for believing that it is so and he let it go at that uh the back
in the 19th century he was ridiculed for what he wrote he sent it to astronomy
magazine and Dave viker uh totally up ever don't you ever he sent
it K and Kareem said oh you can't say put it in the round file and that was
that was back when I was young s to Alexi and Alexi said no way
I'm going to talk in Montreal and there's no way and they all shunned him
and they said go away and get some Kool-Aid or something and relax start drinking the Kool-Aid exactly the sci
turns out that edrio was right and we now know that the resolution of ur's
paradox is that some of the objects in the universe are so distant in fact most
of the objects in the universe are so distant that their light is not had a chance to reach us yet and I wanted to
share this wonderful quotation Eureka a Pros poem written in 1848 with you thank
you Scotty and back to you thank you David thank you so before we get started
of course uh our next speaker is none other than David Aker um but we should
talk maybe just a minute or two about this effect of you know the further away
we look further back into the time that we see and um when I was putting
together together the uh the theme of cosmic fossils of course you know I
thought of oh yeah now I'm I'm this year I'll be 65 years old and I have become a
cosmic fossil myself but but you know when you look at
ourselves atomically and I was asking Mr ier here just how old our atoms are and
if I got it right David uh most of our atoms in our body are hydrogen right um
is that true plentiful and hydrogen helium and lithium and dyum are very old are are you know the Big Bang
nucleosynthesis produced those in the early days of the cosmos and of course what astronomers and physicist call
Metals all the heavier atoms came later from the deaths essentially mostly all
from the deaths of low mass and high mass stars so more recently but still they go a lot of them first Generations
go back a long way so we're literally made of really old stuff right so we
start up we inherit ancient stuff to begin with and I guess uh you know a lot
of people think that okay when we die that's kind that might be the end of us right okay but it's not our atoms
continue on right the universe is the greatest recycling program that has ever
or ever will existed yeah that's right I'm not saying don't go outside and pick
up the litter around your home or off the side of the streets or you know try to have less air pollution or something
but guess what but they one time it's all going to recycle into something else right that's
right but they've never been in such magical combinations until our lifetimes as the Scott Roberts and David levies
and and the rest of us here in the world maybe not me but the you guys well of course you you so that that's a magic
combination that we've never had even if we have atoms that have been around for a long while comprising us seven
octillion atoms that's a lot of atoms that's a lot of atoms yeah so I asked
our friend who comes on to Global Star Party sometimes uh about um you know if
you took all those Octan atoms and you
placed them one by one one atom wide how far would it stretch and he actually
calculated it because he took the proportions of atoms that are in the average human body and he said that it
this thin line which you couldn't see because it's only one atom wide okay
would stretch three4 of the distance from here to the moon it's a lot lot of
atoms loty tiny little things so yeah yep but uh you've got uh uh your your
next talk here is something I'm really interested in because uh uh here in AR
Aransas we are amongst some battlefields from the Civil War and uh your talk is
astronomy and and the silver war so I'm keenly uh interested in this topic so
well thank you Scott Prairie Grove is one that comes to mind but there in Arkansas right around the corner from us
yeah yeah indeed um and I apologize because I have had a really chaotic week
um you know trying to get things ready to go to Tucson on Thursday um where
where we'll have a star party event coming up this weekend but it's been a crazy week and I thought I had had a
presentation ready with a deep Sky object and I got home and I didn't and I had to run around so I have a talk that
a couple of History groups asked me to do so I figured well I might as well write a story in astronomy about this
astronomy in the Civil War so so I'll give a part of that tonight so I don't go too long okay all right so we
I'll give you the stage here let me share the screen and I'll
see if I can share the correct slide and if you're seeing it and then
I'll see if I can start a slideshow yeah um I see
it not in presentation mode yet but are we there now y Tada yes we've
got a presentation mode yes sir so this is a little bit different than what I
intended and with apologies and but but uh um we'll see where this goes and and
Scott if I go too long here I'm trying to cut this in half but if this is going too long just tell me to shut up
okay and all we'll bring out that cane that they pull people off stage with with around the neck yeah vvill yeah
yeah yeah yep so anyway this is kind of an intersect oh I'm sorry David what said
we are not going to do that we okay we're not going okay all right you know if you watch the great documentary about
Buster Keaton who got his start in Vaudeville you know as a child and his
parents they put a handle into his clothes on his back so they could throw
him across the stage when he was four years old and he would slam into things
and that's why they called him that was called back when he was a child taking a
buster and that's how he got his nickname wow so what next time you see
me if you don't like this you can throw me across the
stage so anyway this is kind of the intersection of a couple of areas when I was young and working on the magazine I
got a whole bunch of stuff from a great great-grandfather given to me who fought for ulyses Grant and William tumpy
Sherman uh in the Union Army during the American Civil War and so I I kind of got going in some history as well as
astronomy and I I thought I'd talk about the intersection a couple of spots in
these talks a couple of them here I'll split it in two I hope of the intersection where astronomy and the
Civil War meet so this is kind of a Civil War era painting that's very famous in the Smithsonian Collection of
a prominent Aurora by Frederick church that was painted near the end of the war here as a kind of a scen Setter um and
I'll talk a little bit forgive me if you know this but I I had to produce this for some astronomy clubs locally here
and also sub so I didn't know you know how much people knew about the Civil War so let me just review a couple basic
things this was of course by far the bloodiest conflict in our history in the United States more than 623,000 were
killed uh after four years on the battlefield and many many more tens of
thousands of course had their lifetime shortened from wounds uh in the years of decades that followed the end of the
Civil War it was fought in 10,000 places from minor skirmishes to Major pitched
battles the federal government termed it an armed Insurrection against the government not really a civil war but an
a a war of the Rebellion uh of individuals who were representing States
who took power and rebelled against the federal government against the Constitution they didn't
recognize factions in the South as legitimate state governments the strategy of the South
was mostly to fight a defensive war and to hold out for time that would Aid them giving the high costs of War both in men
and material to the north for the union the strategy was to cut off the
Confederacy from supplies Vanquish their armies and also occupy enormous
stretches of land Transportation routes and coastlines uh railroads largely as well as frequently
being on the offensive and anybody who's read about military history knows that generally speaking taking the offensive
produces a lot more casualties than defending a ground so that there were all those things that uh the union had
to accomplish that that made the war a long and bloody one of course as you may
know as it started there were many people on both sides who thought this might be a contest of weeks and it
turned out to be much much worse than that for Sumpter to appomatox and the
other surrenders that happened in the trans Mississippi and elsewhere uh lasted slightly more than four years and
the war coincided with an important period in science and astronomy in particular the 1860s witnessed the birth
of astrophysics of measuring the physical properties of the cosmos for
the first time time beginning in 1862 with spectroscopy so the Civil War and
astronomy really emerged in a few ways uh in Crossroads during the same
era well one thing that was interesting to me is that on August 22nd 1863 this
was a few weeks after the twin Northern victories which were a long time coming
of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and the surrender of Vicksburg to Grant in the
in Mississippi along the Mississippi River uh Lincoln made a surprise visit
to the old US Naval Observatory the US Naval Naval Observatory for a long long
time is now on the is the vice president grounds on Massachusetts Avenue in
Washington this is the old Naval Observatory that existed at the time of the Civil War down in the area that was
called Foggy Bottom near the pomac and this is about two blocks north of where the Lincoln Memorial is now the building
is still there and you can visit it by special Arrangement and permission and for me it was pretty special uh I used
to have a pal uh who was a chief historian at the Naval Observatory called Jan Herman and he facilitated a
visit and the group there Abraham Lincoln one of his private secretaries
John Haye and a young astronomer who was 33 at the time ASAP Hall 14 years after
this visit ASAP Hall discovered the two moons of Mars but on this night they
climbed up a wooden ladder that's still there into the observatory Dome and used
the 9.6 in refractor that was there to look at our turus and the moon and a few
other things and I'll tell you in in historical places there's a sense you can really get of the molecular Vibes of
History climbing that same little wooden ladder that Lincoln climbed up is one of
those blazes well um the Naval Observatory
visit as I mentioned uh followed soon after Gettysburg and Vicksburg where it
seemed that the tide of war was beginning finally to turn toward the north but of course as we know um the
year the war went on for two more uh very bloody years much bloodier than the
first two years to uh bring it to a conclusion
this is uh from the Library of Congress collection this is the old US Naval Observatory as it appeared in Lincoln's
time this was taken about 1867 to 69 it's not known precisely the imprint was
Bell and brothers in Washington and there's a very prominent foreground
horse who posed very nicely for this historic picture and you can see the building and the Dome are still
there well of course as we know in the the world of astronomy comets going way back several thousand years in history
often represented Omens of good or of evil uh depending on who you were and
what you were interpreting how optimistic or pessimistic you were two
bright comments appeared in the early months of the American Civil War uh one
of them was in 1861 the so-called Great War Comet and here is in Vanity Fair a
very popular publication at the time uh a public a a an illustration of the uh
very old and very obese Winfield Scott Lieutenant General who was the senior
General in command of the United States Army during the first most of the first year of the Civil War he was around as a
young officer victorious in the War of 1812 and and so for 50 years was around
as as an important General and he was commanding the US Army uh in the early
days of the Civil War until the um problematic George mlen came along and
you can see the tale of the Comet here of Scott is made up of Swords oh
wow um on May 13th 1861 an observer in New South Wales Australia discovered
what came to be called the Great Comet of 1861 by Midsummer the comet moved into
the northern hemisphere and according to astronomer Horus Tuttle you may recognize his name attached to
comets sported a tail uh stretching 106° long wow so this was a remarkable tale
about the same length as we had with yakatak back in uh the mid
1990s um and so it really caused a press s sensation the it was an evening
spectacle in the north and came to be called the war Comet the editors of the
Brooklyn daily Eagle posed the question what means this visit peace or
War uh the great Comet of 1861 faded during the week of the First Battle of
Bull Run the first major land battle leading to vast speculation about the meaning but comets were not done with
the war in 1862 Tuttle discovered another Comet that would rise to
significant brightness another astronomer you may have heard of Lewis Swift also spotted this Comet when that
Comet faded many attached its significance one way or another to the just fought Battle of antium this was in
September 1862 decades later astronomers would identify that Comet of course as the
source of the persad meteor shower during the visibility of the
great Comet of 1861 private Charles Johnson of the 9th New York infantry
recorded thoughts on the visitor in his diary the comet is now tired of his
visit to these regions of space he penned or disgusted it may be with the
appearance of things on this side of the planet for he is now leaving in seemingly greater haste and he came with
his tail between his legs for the unknown regions out
yonder here's a modern view of what came to be known as Comet Swift Tuttle progenitor of the pads in the first
first identified around the time of the battle of antium
another major Omen arrived at Year's End in 1862 coincident with the Battle of
Fredericksburg which as you might know was a major Fiasco for the union under the incompetent Army Commander Major
General Ambrose Burnside this painting depicts the Victorious Commander at Fredericksburg
confederate general Rob Confederate General Robert E Lee writing with his
staff and a brilliant Aurora blazing overhead which appeared on the evening after the
battle the celebrated artillerist Colonel Edward Porter Alexander who
would become famous as James Long Street's chief of artillery at Gettysburg recorded his thoughts on the
unusual and Brilliant show of aural light cries of the Wounded filled the
icy air and Alexander wrote a brilliant Aurora illuminated the night and much
facilitated the work upon the entrenchments
the light show of course was taken as an omen of Victory by the southerners and
many Yankees took it as a sign of Doom in the confederacy's capital the
Richmond Daily Dispatch proposed that the light represented the blood of those
Martyrs who had offered their lives as a sacrifice to their native
land and I think what we'll do Scott is stop there
and I will do the second half and if you don't know how the Civil War turned out don't go looking into any books over the
next week okay okay but I'll but I'll do the second half next week and and there
are some other intersections of astronomy and the Civil War to be discussed but I don't want to go too too
too long tonight yep we have um John Ray is
watching on Facebook and he uh he said wonderful how history and general is entwined with astronomical history
thanks for that perspective David indeed and thank you thanks John I would like
to ask a question yes and story I really did enjoy this and uh partly because I
remember the time you were in Tucson and you and Wendy and I were watching the movie
Lincoln and with John With My Father John we watched it there with you guys and that was a very special night and by
the way if you don't know this I I have nothing to do you know no business connection with Steven Spielberg but the
movie Lincoln is extraordinarily accurately and brilliantly done as a film yeah I think
so too anyway um I've told the story before and I'm going to tell it tonight
but I'm going to end it with a question okay 1862
when excuse me sorry a second it was 1862
when Hall was at the Naval Observatory and he was in a terrible Dreadful
mood and as he was getting his telescope
ready uh he just was not things were not going his way that day and to add insult
injury as he's getting his telescope ready there's a pounding at the door and
he just blew it he thought this is it I'm going to go downstairs and I'm going to open the door and whoever it is I'm
going to punch him out and tell him to get away from me and he goes stomping down the stairs opens the door and there
facing him is President Lincoln and holl is going was this the
same night that he that was my question to you well this
was the visit that's famous that Lincoln made to the Naval Observatory and is on
record having observed a number of objects with Hall was in August
1863 was about six weeks after Gettysburg and Vicksburg and that's very
well documented um in a number of sources all right I'm not sure if this
is the same visit I do know there was more than one visit yes to the naal
observatory that's right and he just said uh sir I'm
so sorry to interrupt you I know you're very busy but I'm was just taking a walk
I'm really depressed and everyone knew that Lincoln was subject to depression
indeed he was and uh I just was hoping that I could drop by and take a look
through your telescope and Hall immediately invited him in they had a
wonderful time together he asked intell questions all at his best answer and as
he's leaving he looks back and like a little boy said can I come back
again Mr President you're welcome here anytime and he came back just a few
nights later with Stanton Secretary of War Stanton but the uh I was wondering if
the famous night in 1863 was the same night as my 1862 story
or not so that you know I think they were different nights and I think Lincoln did make more than one visit and
with different people at different times you know despite the fact that Lincoln was often
Melancholy and you know uh he he was self-educated of course from a very
young age um but he was a brilliant and very interested guy in all sorts of
intellectual subjects he went down he tested new Innovations and Firearms at
the Navy Yard he fired new weapons on the national what's now the National
Mall um you know between the uh Lincoln Memorial and and the Washington Monument
currently he was intensely interested in history in politics and in science and
in technology so I think he made several visits um this one was was very well
documented um and the Naval Observatory was a very interesting institution at the time because the superintendent who
blew out of town and became a a Confederate naval officer was Matthew
Fontaine Mory so you know just as with other institutions the the the
institution there lost quite a number of of officers to the South you know as the
war commenced as as well so so I'll have to look into that further David uh to
see what documentation there is and and I know that Stanton did V who was not a
funny friendly jokey guy but a Gruff guy who was very serious all the time but he
was also a smart guy so so we'll have to look into the documentation of those other visits but I know you're right and
they did happen okay thanks David there is one other thing you did mention that
one can get a tour of the Naval Observatory I did get a tour but more
important than that on July the 16th 1994 I got to spend about 20 minutes
with the resident of the Naval Observatory at that time which was vice
president Al Gore oh yeah yeah yeah we talked it was in the East room of the
White House and we talked for a long time not a word about politics he wanted
to comets about Shaker leing n or discovery of
it how we did it what the story was and uh he was kidding around a little bit
and uh but you know we were reluctant to do that with the vice president of the United States but got into it and it was
something very very special I just wanted to share that with you and now I will go back to you David that's
incredible David and of course he's a smart guy and very interested in science as well and the new Naval Observatory
which which I've also been to but not to the vice president's house um but there you have you also have to specially
arrange things because you have to make sure that your car is inspected going
into those grounds there with you know uh under under body mirrors and
everything so that you're not you know uh working for some bad guys from another uh terroristic country so both
of the observatory components in Washington require special arrangements
to get into uh the old because it's really a closed Museum and the new because the vice president's house is
stands on the grounds as well yeah but what a great story and what a great opportunity you had there David all
right that's right I think that this was a really great talk uh Mr rker um and I
think our audience really enjoyed it and uh so um so you know I know that we're
that we'll get back to those 400 or 500 other objects that we're going to talk
about later but oh yeah but this is a this is a very very interesting diversion so well thank you and we've
we've got 1864 and 65 to go yet next
week you know looking forward to it I'm jumping in really quick because uh from
my point of view I like the fact that even in astronomy you're helping to
preserve some history in a time where we're we're sort of trying to rewrite a
few of these things and right for whatever political reasons which we definitely don't get into on this show
but I for one appreciate that you're this retelling of
History um and you know mixing with astronomy I think was a very important thing so I look forward to hearing more
you know Mr rer is recognized for his knowledge of the Civil War and uh in all
these historical areas in fact when he goes to like we were just at Alcon and I
know he made a trip to go see some historical Civil War sites so well thank
you Adrien and thanks Scott and and you know the old adage of you know if you forget history you're doomed to repeat
it you know there's a lot of Truth in that and and uh yeah you know a lot of
folks who are around today all I'll say is you know they're they're not not all
of them are presenting you know the the facts as they actually happened in American politics today but we shouldn't
go any F farther than that right we will we'll carry on regardless yeah indeed
okay all right well thank you David thanks guys okay well Mr Levy we have
Don NAB from the astronomical League uh coming on next are you uh do you and Don
know each other pretty well we have met online here we've met
online and I believe we met did we not meet in the Baton Rouge last summer no I
didn't make it last summer well I heard of you last summer there was probably
heard about me from Terry man out bet and it was uh it was all very positive and I'm really really glad that you're
on with us today yeah I spent several days with h Terry at StarQuest in Green
Bank Green Bank West Virginia so oh yeah a few weeks before few weeks before
Alcon so we had a lot of time with Terry my wife and I spent time with her so it's a great event excellent well thanks
for thanks for coming on and um uh we look forward to your presentation
tonight okay and I do want to say before I start to David Iker I read the
article in astronomy magazine that your presentation is based on I enjoyed it very much thank you all right let me
share my screen and I'm going to talk
about Messi C 41 okay coming through okay yep
okay so um m41 is called the little beehive and this is a picture from uh I
think this was taken at kit Peak and when you look at mess 41 it won't look
like this in a typical backyard telescope because all these small Points of Light all these stars or galaxies
behind it they're not going to show up in uh in a backyard telescope so it'll it'll pop much more in your fi of view
than you see in this uh this Photograph but this is an amazing photograph shows many of the red giant stars that are in
uh m41 the little beehive so before I go I want to me before I start to mention uh don't
forget astronomical League convention is in July in Kansas City and Terry man's
coming on there she might talk about and it's presented by Astron iCal Society of Kansas City so I don't think we have
another Al live set up yet but we just had that last Friday I don't have a date on that but I'm sure Terry would know
about that so the little beehive again here's the uh this this view is from kit Peak
Arizona amazing facility if you've never been to Kit Peak put it on your bucket list it is an incredible place to visit
was there many years ago but never forget it yeah so star clusters we're going to do just the moment on astronomy
101 because maybe some of the people watching don't have the depth of knowledge that everyone does about star
clusters so uh talk about open clusters first which is what m41 is m41 or m41
the little they're really two types open and globular so uh m41 is an open cluster
and that's a group of a few thousand stars and they are buddies in the sky they are formed from the same giant
molecular class and they travel through the cosmos together but they don't last very long
they will disperse typically and they can only survive for you know a few hundred million years sounds like a lot
but when you look at the age of the universe that's only about 1% 1% of the Asian the universe so they don't hang
around too long so here's one of this is my favorite summer or favorite winter
open cluster the plees which I talked about on the show in November and then
tmy cluster in Scorpius this is my favorite summer um open cluster which uh of
course deplete is easily visible open in uh to the naked eye uh M7 tmus cluster
in a good sky like a say cherry Springs or sure in Arizona you can see naked eye
uh most other places where there's any light pollution you have to use a binoculars or a telescope but it is a
beautiful cluster named for tmy uh who had first recorded it in in
history now we'll bring in the cosmic fossils so glob or the Clusters they are
a spidal or a sphere-shaped collection of stars they're Bound by gravity and it
can be tens of thousands to millions of stars and a stable compact formation so
they are the true Cosmic fossils some as old they are the oldest objects in our
in the Galaxy uh even the universe they can be 10 billion years old so that's
only 3 billion years is less than the age of the entire universe and they include some of the oldest stars in the
Milky Way they typically surround the uh the Halo the central Halo of the Milky Way so this time of the year in the
winter time in the northern hemisphere we're looking out away from the center not going to see as many Globs but uh
come summer there's a lot of Globs and uh probably my favorite is uh M13 the
Hercules cluster the great globular cluster in Hercules is called uh it is a site to behold in any telescope so
encourage you look for that one come the summer so a little history messy 41 is
uh open cluster in Candace major the big dog this is Orion's hunting pal uh Canis
Major uh first recorded possibly by Aristotle it's not very certain not not
determined certainly that that he saw this but his writing suggests that he saw in 41 uh but much more concrete and
of course this is uh um Aristotle up top but this fellow
down below Giovani Batista Huda he uh he definitely recorded it in uh 1654 he's
credited with the discovery of of m41 so it lies about 4 degrees almost exactly
south of Sirius Sirius is the brightest star near in our sky and actually Sirius is more than twice as bright as the
second brightest star uh partly because it is inherently a bright star but also
because it's only seven light years away so that's like your next door neighbor in the neighborhood it's very close to
us so um cluster covers about an area the size of the full moon and it's about 100 stars and we could see the re Giant
in the uh the kit Peak photo I showed earlier of course Messier 41 where's
that name com from from Charles Messier of course you know the famous comet hunter he uh listed as number 41 in his
catalog of objects that are like comets but are not comets so these were his
notes from uh 1765 it says I have observed below Sirius and near the star
row of kis major a star cluster when examing it with a night
refractor now I don't know what a night refractor is I've tried I've looked this up and tried to examine what a night
refractor is I can't find that out but messia had about 12 telescopes he had
let's see seven refractors one one of which was 30 ft long he had five reflectors so he looked at it with his
night refractor whatever that was and appeared nebulous like a like a gasc a nebula in space he must have then looked
at it with another telescope because he says instead there's nothing but a cluster of small Stars so if anyone out
there knows what a night refractor is I would love to hear it but I cannot find any any evidence of what that actually
means what he what he quoted there I can give a possible simple answer it's the
refractor he his number one refractor that he would grab at night and he wouldn't use it in the day to spot
anything it was specifically for the night I have a night pair of binoculars that I use for that there may be another
definition I really don't know but uh that was my I wanted to throw that in there yeah i' never heard of that before
but thanks yeah if we are to believe lesie pelure he claims in Starlight
Nights that Messier did most of his work with the uh with a 2in diameter
refractor and if that was the night refractor then it was a small long refractor but I can't confirm that but
it's possible and and that way maybe a 2- in wouldn't actually uh discriminate the individual Stars so it appeared just
like like a nebula his favorite telescope was evely one of his reflectors I'm not sure which one but uh
he had a dozen different telescopes so anyway interesting quote I thought so
so how do we find it how do we find uh m41 so any night you go out look to the
southeast look up and you're going to be confronted very quickly with with Orion he's to see Orion with his belt stars is
holding up his club and uh Beetle Juice Riel and of course the famous Orion
Nebula here and this is one reason I'm writing about m41 you know everyone
writes about m42 the beautiful Ryan nebula but there's other things in the sky this time of year so I wrote about
m41 this time so all we do is drop down from Orion find the brightest star in
the sky which is easy to find and just below and to the right is
m41 uh to observe it with a you can observe it with binoculars or any
telescope really it's a large cluster remember we said earlier it's about the size of the full moon so you have to use
the lowest magnification you have to get the cluster in your eyepiece so for anyone who's new to astronomy that would
be the eyepiece with the highest number typically with a telescope you got a 25 or 24 something like that millimeter
eyepiece use that one that will give you the widest feel of view and one once you're once you're zoomed in on m41 you
can uh go to higher magnification uh to look at the individual Stars uh it is
quite bright and and in the dark sky you can see naked eye not where I live here W of Philadelphia but in a dark sky you
can see it naked eye and uh it's a great Target for urban skies and uh you know
even with the moon you can you can see it through your telescope so it's it's a good Target for an amateur
astronomer why is it called the little beehive well there's another cluster in
the sky called The Beehive and these
images are from stellarium planetarium software and they are at the same
magnification so this is the beehive in m44 in cancer and this is the little
beehive so it is a lot smaller than the official beehive that's why it's called
the little beehive okay so this is this is uh that's the end I will stop my
share and um that's the little beehive story well that's
great that's great so um but if I can just mention to Don that
uh I believe the uh uh the campini refractor might be the one that was the night refractor because it got rid of
the chromatic aberration and uh that was the one that was used to find a lot of the fainter of the night sky objects at
that time oh wow huh it was also the one used by Cassini I believe to start to spot the smaller of Saturn's mood what
what aperture was this refractor uh good question I can try to look it up um I
was on Messier uh history earlier um okay it's Cassini no messia had a
campini refractor of his own it was uh Camp campani sorry campani and it was um
it says the magnification was only 64 times but that it got rid of the chromatic aberration so you could see
more clearly details in the night sky wow but it doesn't say what the aperture was
unfortunately went in advance though that's great yeah he had he had 14 telescopes he used so I don't feel as
bad about the ones that I have I I feel like I'm I'm still behind Messi I'm
okay well you'll get there you'll get there well let's um uh thank you very
much Don uh and um uh welcome back Kareem it's great to have you back on
global star party so we'll be we'll be coming to you here momentarily um but
uh up next is uh Dr Daniel bar let me see if he has logged on at this
point and I don't I do not see Daniel bar so we are
going to go ahead and jump uh to um our next speaker here which will be Ron
breacher Ron uh if you're available um uh when don't we have you go ahead and
log in with your camera
he's probably getting a hot cocoa or something I can see oh he's over he's
over in GF Ontario so it's kind of cold there too that's right that's right well um hi
there Scott oh there he is there he is he ran ran to his microphone that's great I I was watching upstairs with my
wife I thought there was another speaker before me uh there was but uh
apparently occasionally people U will run into a problem where they can't log
in at the last minute there so well yeah so you've been uh you've been
burning up the skies with uh all your beautiful astrophotographs that you keep
sending me I love them and uh thank you uh so uh but tonight you want to talk
about fossil deep Sky ey projects now a lot of us that do astronomy Outreach we
do talk about this concept of you know I it's coined is Look Back Time uh you
know light traveling you know five was it 5.9 4.9 trillion miles a year uh
186,000 miles a second um it is uh uh
you know it's hard to wrap your head around things and it's it's hard to uh think about that the further away
something is the um the further back into time that we're looking you know I
remind people though that if they're just standing right in front of me that there's some space between us and we're
I'm seeing him he's seeing me the briefest fraction of a second ago but not in real time okay so let me expand
on that and blow your mind mind a little bit when you look back in time when you
look at an object the the object isn't two-dimensional it's three-dimensional
so if you look at a Galaxy like the Andromeda galaxy that's 100,000 light years across MH you're not just looking
back at one point in time you're looking back at a whole span of 100,000 years in
time as you look at that Galaxy the Universe I mean it looks flat
but it's not but it's not not all of those photons travel the same distance I know
right but you know that's not I love this I love these aspects about astronomy when I first started and I
started started being told about how far away things were and how big things were
and how small we are and all the rest of it it I went through these phases of uh
of feeling very uh at first very insignificant you know which is kind of
The Humbling aspect that you know that uh I would say that if you're going to
be if you become a a an astronomer or a stargazer this these are things that you
do experience did you go through something similar yeah I I I did but I it's I
didn't I don't think I stopped there like the two the two extremes that I
hear the two points of view that I hear yeah or number one what you just said I feel so
insignificant right but then there's another aspect it's kind of a glass half full thing which is right you're part of
something really big and if we're the only things in it what a waste of space right
yeah we're part of something really huge and we're the only beings we know of
that are watching it all unfold right so so far it's important we
have a role to play I think it's it's it's kind of almost a sacred thing uh in
general um to think of it that way and I would say that um um you know what a
privilege it has been for Humanity to do all of that and you know and then you
look at the rate of discovery and the rate of what we're learning is it's going at a pretty fast clip right now U
and the accessibility people have access to information like they never had
before not that ever body avails themsel of that but even if you were interested
in the past you might not have access to good information now it's at your fingertips
anything you want to ask is at your fingertips that's right with guys like you uh Ron you can learn how to access
it in ways that will blow your mind um the it if this is the first time for you
to see Ron on global star party or the first time to actually see him period uh
you're about to be amazed his astrophotography is breathtaking and uh and he loves the sky as much as anyone I
know so but clouds too many clouds there's too many well this is something
else I remind people you know this is again that class half full half empty I remind people that even the word
Universe just means everything okay not
it doesn't start at the sky okay it doesn't start at out there in space or something is we tend to think out there
in space because hey guys we're in here in space too okay and uh the universe is
contained within our body it's active it's alive uh and it's all intertwined
well my my glass half full says I hope that there's people around me that are
getting fabulous new equipment because we've got the cloud curse that
usually comes with that's true so we'll see anyway I wish the best for them yep well thank you for
coming on oh my pleasure I you know I always read your your writeups that you
send out to the global Star Party presenters um I always look for
inspiration from that for what I'm going to talk about oh thank you Ron this and so I uh well it makes it makes it easy
for me right and it keeps me more or less on point so I'm going to share my
screen with you okay and um let's get to my presentation and start
the slideshow so you were uh you wrote all about fossils Cosmic fossils and so
I I thought about that and and I thought about what are the categories of cosmic fossils and my wife and I sat down and
had a really good chin wag I mean I came up with a couple of obvious ones
but um we expanded on that and uh I have some cool stuff to share with you today
so first of all um let's talk about what is a fossil anyhow and then I'm going to
show you all the categories of cosmic fossils and give you some examples and
really I I just want to show you pretty pictures we don't have to get too technical um I just love looking at
these things they are just so beautiful this is uh a real Rock fossil of an
ancient um snail and uh it looks kind of like a
Galaxy don't you think yes so I I started out by thinking about
what a fossil is because that helps me focus and it's really a remnant of
something very old it doesn't actually have to be static or in you know in living terms it
doesn't have to be dead all it has to be is a remnant of something really old so
a lot of the things I'm going to show you are still uh quote unquote alive
they're still Dynamic systems they're continuing to evolve in really interesting ways so here's the
categories that I thought of and I said I thought of the the easy ones planetary nebula and Supernova remnants but uh
through talking with Gail we came up with a few others that I want to show you some examples of and that includes
comets black holes Tech ties and meteors and some
other Cosmic visitors and uh like I said this is just a tiptoe through some pretty pictures um we have 15 minutes
for these uh for these presentations and uh I can get through
plenty of photos in that time so let's start start out by looking at some planetary nebula and uh this is the Ring
Nebula maybe you haven't seen it this way before I did quite a lot of enhancement of the faint Hal Alpha
hydrogen Alpha shell around the outside but at the very center I think you can see my mouse and
I'm giving you a little highlight at the very center you can see a
star and that star is a white dwarf and it is a remnant of a sunlike
star that has basically used all of its fuel it's not big enough to explode in a
supernova and it's basically coughed off its shell of remaining gas mostly
hydrogen and oxygen and the white dwarf is now
causing that gas to glow and over Cosmic time that white dwarf is going to
gradually get cooler and cooler until it disappears into a cinder and uh the
nebula won't be visible anymore it's just we happen to be here at the right
time the hydrogen is red and the teal colored gas is mostly
oxygen and this is another really famous deep Sky object the dumbbell nebula and
uh I was honored to actually have this photo uh this was my first photo ever on
the cover of Sky telescope my only photo ever on the cover of sky and Telescope
so far and um again there's a white dwarf at the very center of this nebula
causing the gas to Glow this is a beautiful site in an 8 or 10 inch
telescope um you don't see the green Parts you see mostly the red parts and
they look it looks kind of like an apple core is the way I would almost describe it uh
but it's uh just another gorgeous planetary nebula and here's a couple of smaller fainter planetaries that really
show off their Central Star nicely this is Jones emberson one and uh this image was made with
hydrogen Alpha and oxygen filters again the hydrogen is the redder portion
oxygen is The Greener portion and you can see that Central star that it's
Illuminating the nebula and eventually when that Star Fades and dies the nebula
will go with it and here is another beautiful
planetary this one is called sharpless 2- 290 it's a member of the Shar
sharpless catalog of over 300 uh objects faint nebula in the sky and uh this one
is a little bit asymmetrical the main star that's Illuminating the nebula is not in the center um but again you see
that red on the outside green on the inside the of those planetary small
planetaries let's shift to Supernova remnants and I'm in the Northern
Hemisphere and I do not have a regular access to Southern Hemisphere data so um
the Supernova REM that I'm most familiar with are in the Northern Hemisphere and
this is a part of the veil nebula complex and uh the veil is massive it's
it's almost difficult to get it all into a single image um the best images that
I've made of the veil have been mosaics of multiple panels but this is one part
of the veil and here's another part of the veil which you can actually see is on a poster behind me that was used to
advert I the camera and telescope that I was using at the time and um I I told
you I've shot um a mosaic of this here's what the whole thing looks like it is
huge I think it covers something like six widths of the full moon and it
extends both above and below the boundaries of this
slide beautiful object and again in a moderately sized telescope
you can see all of the veil with a good oxygen 3 filter and a nice low power
eyepiece you can really uh get it and this star there's a star right
here that's 52 signi and you can find that with your naked eye so it's not too hard to locate The Veil The Veil nebula
uh was uh exploded about 8,000 years ago
and so this is a an 8,000 year old fossil and it's not being illuminated by
a central star uh rather these are basically uh glowing gas from pressure
from the from the a blast of the Supernova blowing the gas out and over
time as that uh shell gets bigger and more diffuse the nebula will get fainter
and fainter so again aren't we lucky to be here now at this point in time when
we can see such a beautiful thing here's the other Northern Hemisphere Supernova
that's quite famous it's called The Crab Nebula and this one uh the explosion of
the Supernova was actually observed in 1054 and uh it is much smaller right now
than the veil nebula but it is expanding in a previous talk for a global star
party I showed a picture of this nebula from uh the 1950 50s imaged by the
Harvard Observatory and you can really clearly see how it's expanded even in
the last 50 years the first Pulsar that was ever
identified is at the very center the dimmer of these two stars oopsy the
dimmer of these two stars um at the very center of this
slide is uh that pulser p are the crab nibula P are so it's spinning really
really quickly and sending a pulse of radio waves our way every time it does
so very cool and that's what's Illuminating the U The Crab
Nebula comets well they're not really deep Sky objects but they're sure pretty
deep from my point of view and they come in from far away so that we can see them
like this with a nice beautiful tail up close and an nice expanded head um I
imaged this from my driveway with the DSLR in uh 2023 this is Comet
2022 E3 ztf I feel almost embarrassed talking
about comments given who we have hosting the show
tonight hey comments are for everyone comments are for everyone
and uh I may not be the best Comet photographer but boy they are fun to shoot and challenging you got to be at
the right place at the right time you got to have a clear Horizon often and uh
you know comets move at a different speed than the background Stars so making a nice image with uh nice round
stars and a beautiful Comet uh is a technical challenge that that I really
enjoy so this is that's a beautiful shot though off to the left you can see the
uh plasma tail stretching away from the Sun that curved yellowish dust the big
wide swath is it's orbit around the Sun so yeah very cool yeah thank
you and uh this was my first comet shot ever I shot this believe it or not with
a an 11in Schmid Cagan telescope that was not polar aligned uh sorry it was
polar no it wasn't polar aligned it was it was mounted on an ALT asmith Mount so
like a lazy Susan and down like a dub but it was a tracking Mount and so what
I did is I shot uh a series of 10c exposures and uh was able to make this
image so this is my very first comet shot Seven P homes and I must have done
this it must have been around around 2004 or so that I would have made this
image okay so black holes I guess black holes are another
kind of fossil right they're really really old they're a remnant of something
else but we can't or at least I can't take a picture of a black
hole but I can take a picture of the evidence of a black hole so this is The
Centaurus a Galaxy the data came uh generously from Martin Pew and Steve
melato and um you can see these two
little red hydrogen flares coming out of well they they look
like hydrogen but they're not hydrogen they're I guess they're plasma or gas
that's being illuminated by x-rays that are being emitted by the black hole at
the center of this galaxy so how cool is that that is really darn cool in my book
it's a great shot when we were talking Gail reminded me that we have a few samples of uh of
cosmic fossils in our own home and uh these are uh a couple of pieces of
desert glass from Libya and they're techtip and Tech types are formed under the high
heat and pressure of a big meteorite or comet impact and uh so that reminded me of
course that we also have some meteorites in the house so
this is a sample of an iron meteorite from Argentina and so that's my uh that's my
little stroll through my Cosmic fossil collection I hope you've enjoyed it and
uh before we leave the cosmic fossils let's not forget UA mua this artist's
impression and the orbital image both came from the Wikipedia page on this
object but that's another example of something that's really really old it's
a remnant of something from some other place in time and who knows maybe we'll see
something like it again we can all be Cosmic archaeologists that's anyway I'll stop
my share now and thank you all very much thank you so much that's great um uh you
know the comments uh you know Chris Larson is watching on YouTube and Jeff
wise uh they love your images um than you Chris says beautiful any comments
currently available for small telescopes or DSLR what do you think oh yeah
there's there's always comments available just just look them up look them up online one good site you can
look at is telescopius yeah and you can input
information about your Imaging system and it'll help you identify targets and I think comets are in there as well uh
the other thing you can do is um uh I use the skyx and it has a uh comet
ephemeris in it that's what I use for acquisition so lots of good information
out there and check the magazines astronomy magazine yeah astronomy magazine a good source right so that you
get plenty of notice with them too because um there's been a um sort of a
tendency to at least for me to receive these magazines now well in advance
maybe a couple of months or six weeks before the month that they're writing about and in the center of each of those
magazines there's a a whole solar system guide and if there's a good comment to
be seen uh they'll both be writing about it that's right behind me uh you see
some of the kind of Next Generation Um what could be considered
introductory telescopes some some of these especially the unistellar that's behind me is is um is a telescope that's
connected with the science team uh so uh you know Dr Frank marus at said kind of
heads up their uh citizen science program for that um but uh you know I I
brought these behind me we're we're now Distributing all of these products uh for North America and so we have uh this
one right here which is uh the dwarf okay probably the least expensive one
out of that this whole line and then we've got uh the unistellar product there's several models and then vonis
which is another really uh beautiful and stylish looking telescope but uh you can
get started in astrophotography with these uh to do what Ron breacher does uh
you need to step up to some better equipment but this will get you started
so yeah and now those those photos that I showed you I I just want to be clear
that so the the veil nebula for example that was shot with a 4-in
refractor true okay and you can do it with smaller apertures and that
particular that particular image was a mono camera but I've shot the veil with a one shot color camera too and I mean
the the equipment has really improved you know I think it depends uh how much you want to be a
driver and how much you you want to tune the car right right so now equipment is
starting to evolve to the point that you can be a a a Sunday driver you can just
en go enjoy going for a drive you can enjoy how plush the seats
are and how smooth the ride is that's true right but if you want to if you
want to tune the car if you want to get under the hood if you want to see how far you can push it up a hill um you can
do that there's all kinds of options in terms of the equipment that's very true
Y and uh you know so a lot of us as amateur astronomers we like to get our
hands on the equipment and make the adjustments ourselves and stuff but the point you're making
Ron uh I was a little bit shocked when I first started being introduced to professional
astronomers professional astronomers most of them are not allowed to talk to
to mess with the uh big Observatory telescopes they have a technical team
that does it uh and uh if they if the if the uh investigator for that night uh
has a special instrument package they put it on they make it work and the job
of the pro is to collect data you know and uh and to follow up on their uh on
their programs so uh in this way these kinds of telescopes are great data
collectors uh for you and they do a pretty remarkable job and so I'm I'm
really impressed with them yeah and the you know you don't even need to drive
the telescope now you can you can get great data from remote observator so we
uh that's true that's awesome we have masters of pix Insight we do workshops and uh telescope live is one of our
sponsors they have all different kinds of sizes and shapes of telescopes all over the world both
hemispheres um if you've got 3 months a cloud like I have and you're itching to
get a good data set there's all kinds of outfits like that where where you can do
that or you can just write to me and ask me I'll you know I've seen a starving
astronomer before I've been one so I'll gladly throw you a a data set if you
just ask so what's the best way for people to reach you um well let me let
me share my screen one more time um I actually put that on a slide but never
showed it um go to my website that's a good place
to start it's astrod talk.c and um you'll find all my images
are there and they're sorted by category of objects so if you're looking for an example of a planetary nebula you can
find it there um I do do one-on-one teaching and Equipment support so you
can find how to reach me there um I've got pictures of all my equipments give
you ideas for how you can set stuff up including a dual scope setup rolloff
roof Observatory that type of thing and all the Articles I've written
for all the magazines in North America and in Europe they're all in here under
Articles and uh there's more information here as well uh so you know go check out
the website every photo that I post I give a complete processing workflow so I'll tell you about all the equipment
how much data was collected uh and and what I did with it to to make the picture the look the way
it looks so that's probably the best way to reach me astrod
doca uh if you if you want to reach me by email it's at the bottom there but
I'll just read it out RB CER
rogers.com that's the way to reach right all right Ron well thank you very much
and we'll see you next time thank you so much bye everybody I wanted to add my
thanks to Ron's wonderful presentation and uh what I don't know
about comets what I do not know about comets could fill many many books so I'm
really glad that you provided me with some of that tonight good presentation thank you thank you thank
you see you later guys that's great okay all right um uh David we have our next
speaker is none other than Terry man uh both you and I know her well and you
know Terry is um a remarkable person that's been supporting our community for
a long time uh she's uh she always seems to be full of energy and full of great
ideas on how to take astronomy to the next level uh Terry loves uh Aurora you
know we're going to have some Aurora images from uh Alex uh uh later on
tonight which I'm sure she's going to watch um but uh you know the
astronomical League uh gives out many awards I think I saw several of them on
the walls of your home is that right David yes um uh there are a lot of uh
Terry stuff that uh that I have seen that I've enjoyed that I've hung here in
my home and uh Terry is just a wonderful wonderful Observer of the night sky and
I'd like to think that the sky itself feels richer that Terry is one of its great observers
I would agree with that I would agree with that so thank you
both yeah I I enjoy observing just like everybody else I guess so yeah but thank
you both that was very very nice so it is such a pleasure to be here kind of in
a little bit different format um tonight I wanted to talk about the astronomical
League Awards mainly because we have deadlines coming up and we have made a
couple changes along the way that I wanted to get out here as soon as I can
so um let's see if that can't get there we go I wanted to give a quick update on
the awards what's coming up what has been extended for any astronomical League members that might be out there
watching uh these are all of the awards that will be presented in 2024 when
we're in Kansas City uh the first uh what five are Youth Awards the nyaa the
Nia is National young astronomer award any uh youth that is below the age of 19
not in college yet can um apply for this award and all of these I can't go into
detail because there's so much information for all of them you can go to the astronomical League website and
on the very front page if you scroll down a little bit in the middle there's this big oval and it says Awards you can
go there and get all of the information that I won't have the time to give tonight for these Awards but um the H
Parker and the H om and the H Smith and the H Dior is horkheimer uh Jack
horkheimer when he passed away the horkheimer charitable organization had a
amount a certain amount of money that they funded or supported these Awards uh
these will be coming to an end probably after 2024 possibly the league is
looking for sponsors for those Awards because the contract was he would do it for 10 years and they've done it for 12
and after this year that will leave these Awards open so we are looking for
sponsors but all of these deadlines except the horkheimer Parker will end
April 30th because that is an Imaging award now the Web Master which is the
Web Master of your organization or a club there is an award for League members there that deadline is still
March 30th Mabel Sterns is a club newsletter or any type of newsletter if
the museum is a member of The League or or whatever organization and you send
out the newsletter you can have that entered for the Mabel Sterns sketching
um again that's pretty self-explanatory and now we have the f award which explor scientific um does
underwrite and Fleming has been extended till April 30th to because both uh
Imaging Awards they wanted to extend past the April 8th uh solar eclipse so
those Awards will be coming up deadlines coming up in another what just about well you've got a couple of months but
we wanted to get a reminder out to everybody as early as we could now let me talk a little bit about
the Fleming the Fleming is a new award and we thank Scott and explore scientific for supporting that um it is
for women astrop photographers of the league it's just something that you know
if you get a bunch of us women together and we can geek out just as much as all of you guys can too so it's kind of
funny when you get all of us together and talking um it is an award as I said
for women it has been extended until um April
30th and you right here is what when you join when you when you're a woman that
enters this uh competition the very first time you enter they will get this
pen for the Willamina Fleming because she is the one that discovered the horsee head nebula you will get that pen
one time for entering uh the Fleming Award of your uh woman that's in the
astronomical league and an imager and these are the cat atories that we may
include it will depend on entries what we see um so there could be atmospheric
phenomena deep Sky solar system and wide field which all of that covers a wide
variety of Imaging so all of that will be covered all of these um awards that
you're seeing and hearing about you will enter that if you have any questions once you read the uh page on the
astronomical League website you'll see that it they all have their own email address and all of those will go to
Chuck Allen uh the vice president of the league and he has judges that are
judging all of these Awards so please just take a look at that and see what
you think and please enter before April 30th for the Imaging or if you're um
under the age of 19 for the horkheimer Parker award and just take a look at that and
see what you think and I wanted to bring up astronomical League live uh we will be
back on February 16th with Bob King and he's going to be talking about Comet a
comet 12p Pon Brooks the comet with a popcorn personality because it has been
so active uh and you can watch it right here or in the astronomical League
Facebook page YouTube um you can watch it about anywhere please check either
the league Facebook page um or any other
um of these and you will see an announcement come up to remind you that Bob King will be joining us to talk a
little bit about the comet so I'm G to stop sharing there and go back so that
is it for me Scott well that was short and sweet but uh yeah yeah that's
fantastic just wanted to get out a reminder so everybody knew you know what was coming up and yeah what was I know
that uh and I feel that David Levy feels very strongly about this as well um that
uh you know that the astronomical League I mean with all the awards that you guys
give out you probably do more to recognize people uh for their achievements and you know of course we
all love being out looking at the sky and recording our data uh and doing a
lot of things that are already you know part of the uh uh observing programs
that you guys have which I think you guys have 80 or 85 programs somewhere around there
always coming but to be recognized for something especially from such a prestigious and venerable organization
that is the astronomical League you know with this 75y year history and you know
all the amazing characters that have been there to build that organization to
be recognized by that body um is a is a huge highlight and something that uh uh
I think that anyone would treasure you knowt I treasure
mine the history of the league really is amazing uh Chuck Allen is working on a
history page of all the leadership of the league all the presidents through the years and to look finally to connect
to face with the name and look at that and you really realize how many years
you know the league has been around but I tell you with 23 a little over 23,000
members we have some incredible people out there I mean people that it is such
a pleasure to recognize such as David Levy uh and so many others that we have
recognized these people are amazing and it it is so incredible to be able to sit
down and talk to them and to meet with them and the kids think look at the kids you have met and interviewed even like
in Albuquerque Baton Rouge these kids are amazing wow so smart so I mean scary
smart you know so it's unbelievably smart if I would have thought in the way they did in school oh my gosh I was too
busy worrying about you know what else was going on in the world not about studying uh it is amazing I I have
enjoyed every minute of it you know you talk about how many people we've recognized we are so lucky to have
people that are so into this Hobby and enjoy reaching out and sharing with
other people so it is incredible to be in this position and to be able to do
things just like this and talk to everybody that I can't meet face to face with these people all do a lot to bring
astronomy to the community and I think it's incredible so it's a pleasure to be here well put I wish I had recorded all
that wait a minute I did record all that so so I might be uh using it in some of
my future writeups thank you Terry thank you Scott thank you so much okay all
right well that's uh that's uh Terry man from the astronomical league so we had a
double CER today with two people on from the astronomical League um you know two
U uh Executives from the league but many of us actually belong to the league and
you can too uh all you have to do is go to astr league.org and um become a
member at large or to or join up with a club that's already a league club and
there are several hundred of them so it's not they're not hard to find uh actually joining up with a local
astronomy club that is an astronomical league club is uh probably the best way
and least expensive way to go as well so um so uh anyhow uh we were going to have
a 10-minute break but we're just going to just keep on keeping on here on the global star party uh and uh we are going
to introduce um um Professor Kareem jeffar and Kareem is
from um uh from Canada like David is where a lot of super great astronomers
come from and uh uh he is from the Royal Astronomical Society of C Canada the
Montreal Center and David was this your Club I mean were you like um uh from
this club you were president of this club I think I was never president but that's the club I started out with
October the 8th 1960 I first walked into the observatory there and the first
person I met was Isabelle Williamson one of Canada's greatest
astronomers and uh we got to be real terrible enemies over the years we
repaired that and we got to be very very good friends ah over the years for many
many years that's right dream is really following in the wonderful footsteps of
history that the Montreal group has had and I'm just so glad to be a part of it
yeah that's right so um you know Kareem jeffr pretty well uh uh I'll let you do
the introduction okay um kareim is someone who
has caught the spirit of amateur astronomy caught the spirit of the sky
not the science yes he's very good at that he's a First Rate teacher but as
someone who can transmit his love and his passion for the night sky I believe kareim is
has no equal including me I think it's he has inspired so many people to
inherit his passion for the night sky really I would agree with all of
that ah I I don't know how I can go from that that was that was amazing D thank
you David this is probably the first time we've made Kareem almost speechless so um that's great that's great but you
do deserve it all and you are the uh uh astronom educator that uh that many of
us wish that we had so I appreciate that Scott uh this term I'm not getting to
teach astronomy uh at the campus but with the eclipse coming up with the Jack space club and with all the RAS Montreal
events uh I am trying to like uh you know keep keep that part of it going but
but I miss the teaching and the sharing of this love of astronomy and this is where the global Star Party comes in so
amazingly is it gives us a for to share why we love this hobby why why we choose
to spend the extra time sharing it with the world whenever we can and so uh
today's topic is Cosmic fossils and I'm gon to SP I'm gonna just talk briefly about this because what I've done is uh
I have actually brought on one of our newest executive at uh rasque Montreal Alexa WIS and I'm going to introduce him
uh at the end to talk a little bit about a recent adventure of his but also just
so that everybody can get a an an appreciation of this young man who has done so many cool astronomy and space
exploration related uh activities and travels and I I just I I enjoy getting a
chance to chat with him every single time we do and he's now a student at John Abbot College so I actually get to
see him a little more often which is fantastic but I do want to mention you know Scott talked about becoming a
member of one of the member clubs of the astronomical league if you want to be a participant in some of the amazing stuff
that the league does I became a member with my family of the university lowbrow and adrianne's going to be on later the
University of lowbrows because they have some of their meetings online it allows me to still stay connected to that club
even though I'm not in the US and I don't get a chance to visit there very often so I do highly suggest that you
check out some local astronomy clubs and if you can find a local one the University of lowbrows are fantastic um we always start in the
Montreal center with a land and Sky acknowledgement to talk about the fact that we are on unseeded indigenous lands
but for us as astronomers we also share the night sky with indigenous peoples and individuals and ancient cultures
from all over the world I have one of our space Oddities uh friends Kath Elizabeth has recently gotten a sea star
s50 and has been taking some incredible images but she actually in addition to
wonderful nebula and wonderful clusters she also takes these beautiful short stacked images of the moon and so we are
at a waning gibbous moon right now we are just coming out of the January wolf Moon which is what the settlers called
it and given that doid gave me the introduction I have to make a literary
reference and so gim manadu gazis the great spirit Moon of ajibu that we know
from the tale of haata this is the moon that was with us over the last few weeks
and we always do our public events around the full moon this time around we did it on the full moon but we did it as
a live stream with our friends atw physics and anybody who was not able to catch the analog experiences please do
visit our YouTube channel because this was one of my first students uh she was
a undergrad first term student when I first taught astronomy so she couldn't
take the course that term but she realized that I was open to doing more and she came and said there's this
partial solar eclipse coming up next August and I said yeah I know about it August 2017 it's on our first day of
classes she said yeah can we do something for the college and she led a group of Youth to develop our full solar
eclipse event that was just an incredible start to the events that we've had at John Abbott and now with
the April 8th total solar E clips passing through campus and passing through her campus at Purdue getting a
chance to visit with her now that she's a PhD student at Purdue training other
students to become analog astronauts after she led her own lunar uh analog
experience in Poland it was just incredible to see the the the how far
some of these students have reached and she's one of many that I've brought back to talk to students at John
Abbott now last Global Star Party GSP 140 I mentioned some of the work being
done by my students working with the James web Space Telescope and when Scott put out Cosmic fossils I was a little
bit sidetracked and I was thinking you know I might just say something quickly about that but then I have something else I want to share and then I realized
listening to Ron's presentation and talking a little bit ahead of the the event tonight with David ier and others
in the gallery is that really when we're talking about Cosmic fossils it's what
we spent all of our time looking at in the night sky whether it's planetary nebula whether it's the the location
where stars were being born when the signals left to get to us by the time we
get those signals the stars are further along in their evolutionary cycle and so what we are seeing is always the past
it's always fossil behavior that we are now getting a chance to explore and I thought back to these
beautiful pictures because one of the things that I always regret living in Montreal is the third worst light
polluted city in the world per capita because in the winter time snow and ice just reflects the artificial light so
right now when I go outside I just see this ambient Dome of light and it's so disheartening not to get to see the
stars that we want to spend our time with that I love it when my students go
and get inspired by this and then come back to me with their experiences so
from this fall I had talked about one of the individuals who made this uh beautiful Eagle Nebula image The Pillars
of Creation on the side here from this past fall and when we had talked about
this in class you know we had talked about the creation of elements and how exploding Stars versus the big bang
versus uh you know the the the low mass stars giving off their planetary nebula
the high mass stars exploding and then the energy that's left over being able to create the elements even heavier than
iron even though it's no longer a judicious element diffused to form the
fuel that can keep the stars going the rebound energy allows us to create these heavier elements when we talked about
all of this in class one of the things that was difficult was I couldn't take them out that night and show them M1 or
show them the the the veil nebula remnants because there's just too much
like pollution so Lucas lorino Perez one of my students from the fall he grew up
in Uruguay and so for the first two months of this year he had decided to go home and spend spend some time with his
family and when he was home and talking to his uncle about our astronomy course his uncle said well why are we staying
here let's go for a drive to atakama so they drove down to Chile and he got a
chance to experience in the Dark Skies of the atakama desert the a the Milky
Way and all of this amazing night sky that we talk about that we look for in
the northern hemisphere but we miss out on so much of the of the splend and the Glamour and I've had students from New
Zealand and Australia send me back images but there's just something about these images from Chile that are just
breathtaking so I asked Lucas if I can share these on the global star party and he was touched and he said by all means
and so I want to share with you a few of Lucas's experiences secondhand to talk a
little bit about observing these Cosmic fossil with your naked eye so in the
atakama desert we have this beautiful Galactic arm Rising above the desert you can see a bit of the mountain ranges
there in the distance these are from a handheld cell phone camera because he did not have camera or equipment with
him when he went on this trip but look at the portion of the galactic arm with
the K sack nebula and Karina so incredibly visible just with a cell
phone picture in the southern hemisphere wow wow he sent me this at 2 in the
morning a couple of weeks ago just as I was getting stressed out about the back to class and I just stopped and
I was like okay time to stop stressing let's just enjoy this picture you zoom in you look at Karina you get some time
to really just enjoy the magnificence of what the arm of our Milky Way shows us
for these nebula where stars are being born and where the remnants of these destroyed decaying star systems are left
behind and the scale of the Galaxy can be VIs ible when you try to capture this
same type of an image but with a different light setting and you can start to get a feel for depth looking
into the dark Dusty Lanes of these images and then every now and then you
get a little bit of just wisps of clouds especially when you're closer to one of
the settlements or closer to one of the mountain ranges and when you look up at the Zenith you can get some
incredible I I thought of some of adrianne's pictures the minute I saw this one this is such an amazing view of
the Zenith of his experience there in the atakama desert this one took my breath away I at
at first I was sitting there going well you know I got a little wispy and cloudy and then I thought that actually
enhances this picture because even on a slightly cloudy night look at how many
stars he got to see in that pristine desert
Horizon it was just I I I was I was all super dark and when he had talked about going
there one of the things he was really hoping for was a chance to see some of the amazing telescope arrays that we
have down there and he did get a chance to visit and well from a distance get to see the very large telescope so he
shared a little video with me that I'm going to share here with you very short gave this beautiful
picture of the very large telescope and when I was talking to my students in class you know one of the things I
always joke about is that astronomers you know for all the time we spend in our hobby we really don't have that much
imagination when it comes to naming things so we did name the very large telescope which is bigger than the large
telescope but not as big as the extremely large telescope which is being built so he decided to take a picture of
the extremely large telescope being built as well in Chile wow so I was
really happy that with these pictures that he shared with me I got a chance to at least be there vicariously through
the eyes of my students and that's really been kind of an underlying part of my GSP talks is that I experience the
night sky through the Outreach that I do through the educational courses that I teach but it's Through The Eyes of
others seeing some of these things for the very first time so with that I'm going to say thank you from rasque
Montreal thank you I have to make use of this awesome video
you made us a couple of years ago yeah thank you that's and now I'd
love to bring a new montrealer on with us Alexi
okay one thank you guys for having me on uh as you know uh I'm a student at John
Abbot College uh and uh really when I joined the astronomy U group in Montreal
kareim was the first one there to show me um the first constellation I was able
to see which was the Copa and from there my interest just grew and grew and so it
grew to the point where uh group of my friends and I have uh decided to go to
Yellow Knife just to see the aurora borealis uh in the middle of uh the
worst time when it was the coldest in January so I'm going to share if you
remember from our discussion at the last GSP about the temperatures that we were getting up here and I mentioned to you
the temperatures that were happening up in H Northwest Territories in Yukon and Northern Alberta that's where Alexi was
so that's what he's going to share with us crazy so we're all yours all right I
hope uh we see everything well okay so uh without further do this was a shot I
took from Yellow Knife so this is uh Yellow Knife Northwest Territories and uh we'll just begin so
before I start with uh just talking about the trip I want to talk about who was on on it we had four Amazing Friends
uh that I uh knew for either a while or just recently uh through school and
these guys uh uh helped me through thick and thin during this trip they're Jeremy James William and Jonathan all wonderful
people uh this was the trip we took we drove from Montreal to Toronto to Toronto to uh Calgary and then Calgary
to Yellow knife and where we landed uh but before we got there my car surpassed
200,000 kilometers and we all sang Happy Birthday to uh my uh my car and then we
started to uh our journey on the plane and we got to see a nice um picture of the the
the moon uh while I was on the plane and you'll see a little transition where the
moon is going from one phase to another and I went during the best time
um possible when the moon was uh a new moon where it was the darkest nights as
soon as we got there we crashed we were dead tired it was a a long trip um and
so the first night we there was no forecast for the Aurora on that day but
the next days they were come we did do a bit of adventuring just outside basically those buildings right there
that's downtown a Yellow Knife there that's not a very big city um but it was
very cold uh it was ranging around Nega 35 Celsius which is gets pretty cold
um and so this is um we decide you know on the second day we'll go to a nice Pub
relax uh get to know the people around and we have this um website that we
referred to quite often called Aurora Max and we're just scrolling through it
through the live feed that was happening over Yellow knife and we saw this this is not from me this is from the Aurora
Max website and as soon as we saw that we dropped everything we paid our bills
uh of our drinks and uh chicken wings on that night and we ran outside and we were able to
capture our first auroras when I saw this I was just blown
away uh speechless everyone want just there was a moment of silence just kind of just looking above us and just seeing
how amazing it flowed through the night sky and everything uh but it was it was still
cold here's the temperature uh I I was freezing um it was a dry cold though but
as soon as your moisture from your breath sticks to your skin you freeze
immediately so we we didn't stay too long outside we ran back to our Airbnb and then uh took more pictures uh
Dressed even better and this was straight out of our Airbnb we didn't have to go far at all there's a lot of
City Lights um unfortunately but it was still very bright very active it was
like if you had a string on a table and you kind of just wiggled it around that's how it kind of moved but a more
Majestic Way and there's that that's a couple pictures of us next day we you
know what let's have a a good day on on the lake we went to do a little tour and
we did a bit of fishing uh where they kind of had a net already set up for us and we just pulled the net we got like
13 fish and then we ate the fish uh it was nice uh deep fried fish and a a nice
fish soup um on the next day on the on the 10th we
had more pictures this was the original picture I showed you guys this was basically behind our Airbnb there was a
little Hill that was farther away from downtown and we got some really nice pictures it got really cold we started
seeing ice crystals and everything and condensation was uh
forming from the buildings and everything and it it was getting it was on that day it was -40 and4 degre is the
same thing in Fahrenheit it's yeah it's that cold
where Fahrenheit and Celsius mean the same thing atg40 um this was supposed to be our
last supper as you probably uh remember in that first couple weeks of January it
was ne40 in the Prairies and everything so the uh the flights were cancelled the
next day uh but we had a great meal uh at a local P another local pub we watched a Habs game of course they lost
no big surprise there um so yeah the nightmare begun the uh the classic um
cancelled or delayed flights started to pop up on the board and so we decided
you know what we'll go back to the Airbnb the lady was very nice let us let
us stay a extra night there free of charge and this is basically what it looked like outside everything froze
over it was absolutely frigid out there uh just say the least we took that extra
day do a bit of exploring of the city and uh place around there's my friend Jonathan uh we found a random chair
sitting in the middle of the lake uh and he decided to Lounge on it a
bit um next day we went to the airport to get our next flight on it was -44
Fahrenheit that that is in Fahrenheit so it's very cold very cold uh that's the
airport um well from the airport and there's the one of the planes that was
uh being boarded on and of course delayed or was it no it was canceled uh
it was cancelled for the second day in a row now and so we decided we well we didn't
have a place to say so we took over the airport we sat around U we took a corner of the airport basically it was not a
very big airport and we just slept there and we had a bit of fun there did a we
even played some hideand-seek at the airport that's how bored we were um the
13th just as cold uh just a bit warmer one degree warmer as the lowest
temperature uh but it was pretty cold and our flight was once again cancelled
it was going to be cancelled until the 15th so that was we were GNA stay there for five extra days we didn't have a
place to stay but fortunately we were able to get tickets uh we were on WestJet and they
moved us to Air Canada and we were very excited so as you see there's the moon
it's now on a different phase and uh that's from the hotel that
we were fortunately given on the last day because there was not enough crew uh
for that flight and so we started our departure but our adventure did not end there with
the auroras we got to see auror on the plane which was crazy like I I didn't think I
was able to do this this was about 5:00 in the morning um that's incredible yeah
yeah this was from Yellow knife to Vancouver uh British Columbia and here
this is I've uh wanted to go one by one on them and
here as uh this is a closeup of it I was able to actually take a uh um look at a
constellation and I just you know my art is not the greatest but I hope this is
this will suffice this is basically Aus uh I hope I didn't that's fine Aus sorry uh I don't
pronounce it correctly I I do apologize and so that's one of them and on the
west side of the the uh airplane I was able to take two uh captured two of them
in the Aurora uh the first one being which one was it oh yes it was um the origa uh
constellation which is right next to uh the Gemini that was uh was visible
also again I was not expecting this basically what I had to do is because we had those uh screens on the plane so
extra light that we didn't need I took my winter jacket covered myself took my
cell phone this is through cell phone footage also and put it on night mode I just stood there took a picture
and was able to take great pictures in the sky never thought I was able to do
it that's really cool we ended it off with going to Vancouver uh we had a 4H
hour layover roughly and so we left the airport ventured off and that was the
end flight that that is all thank you guys uh thank you for taking uh your time
with me thank you I'm curious about something
I've I've never visited up uh that far north in Canada um I did fly over
Greenland uh one time and was able to see you know amazing auroral displays uh
from the from the plane but um uh is it Yellow Knife must be like a
prime destination to go see Aurora is that correct yes uh there's actually lots of
Tours but we decided not to go with the tours we were we felt more like independent and we wanted to experience
it for ourselves but yes it's actually a quite um Yukon and uh Yellow Knife are
huge huge um uh uh tourist destinations for the
yeah and you have so doid has left but a few years back he had gone as one of the
guest speakers for the Aurora 360 which was an airplane that went through the auroral curtain as part of an experience
in late February that unfortunately during covid that just ended up having
to close down but that wasn't a you know that was out of the Yukon but they flew basically over the border to Northwest
Territories and then back into Yukon yeah wonderful well that's great
and I think you guys were Brave to Brave that um uh extreme cold you know I was
reading about what can happen to the human body at minus 40 and you were got
down to minus 44 it's dangerous actually and uh so um any uh special tips for
staying warm in that kind of weather keep your feet dry ah keep your feet dry
keep everything dry because if not you're going to freeze you're going to freeze and keep some hot pockets with you oh man yeah just thinking about that
has Scott kind of cold and and rubbing his arms there
yeah I Phantom cold feeling Phantom chills so I think we're going to be
hearing more from Alexi because in addition to his space shuttle Journeys he's been working a little bit on some of the Messier and starting his own
observation list so I think we'll be able to follow his journey over the next little bit that's great well I hope to
share it with you yeah you're welcome to be on global star party anytime you're ready so you just let us know thank you
that's great okay folks so uh we are going to move to our next speaker um and that
would be marchelo Souza in Brazil so let me uh let me switch our camera views here take
care Alexi thanks so much you did a great job by the way thank you y
marchello uh how are you hi I'm fine can you hear me uh we hear you better now
yes okay thank you uh I'm I'm sorry because I'm in here in a hotel now we
are a hotel ohel yes in a city of Santa Maria mad where is located your first
like Sky Latin America here oh we are
since Friday visiting different seats here in our
state here janir where we have a dark sky and you have a member of the staff
of dark sky here with us that's Megan I that's a journalist that is she's here
with us and we have the opportunity to visit the first Sky of Latin America
again and also we are visiting other places that in a near future can be uh
next the next dark sky Park here in Brazil and the theot where I am here is
also they also want to be a dark sky loing because it's very dark here here
is part of the a forest here a private Forest yes and
today we were before the beginning here of my participation program we were
outside look to the sky here and we saw the mil way it's so dark here that we
can see the mil way and the uh we were looking for South the South and cross
begin rise it's not in the beginning of the night but a little later it's already
appear in the the sou cross there's a fantastic view here and the measurement
that we make with the skm to measure the quality of the dark
sky here is more than 21 that looks like a a a place that is
very dark at night if lights they turn off all lights and is a fantastic place
here and I think that soon we will have new dark sky places here in
Brazil it's a fantastic experim experience this five days that you visit
five different places yeah and I think we have good news
today today or it has launched the next
the new edition of the dis Sky app
magazine is a wonderful magazine and it's quite I would like to
ask you if you can help me to share sharing the new edition of the magazine
yeah I can't manage it I am going to post the link where it can be read for
Sky Up Magazine uh by the way Sky up is a absolutely free um magazine uh from
the explore Alliance and uh marchel Souza is the editor and uh so we just
publish the latest edition this afternoon so it's fresh off the presses
and uh you know if you clip uh click on the link uh you can you can read it or
download it and is ADD we have something fantastic that we have articles from
people from three different continents we have from Americas from
Europe from sorry sorry from America from Asia from
Africa you have articles fromet from Canada you have Dr de v s
Harts from United States I love it this is great it's great Global Star Party
Global astronomy magazine yes from South South America we have articles from
Brazil I wrote one from Argentina from
Uruguay and the two articles from Argentina and Uruguay is about
experience with dark skies they are directors of the D one is
aland some that is director of dark sky in Argentina and the other is Fernando
that is director of the dark sky in Uruguay they show that experience there
you have an article from Egypt that Dr bash that has experience
with solar observation I have also ah Dr de here hi
I saw nice to meet you h Dr B that's he
works in qat now he's from Egypt now he's in qat and that
isaz and he walks there with solar observation popularization of the solar
observation we do research studying the sun we have also
an article from Pakistan from Yuma that develop
fantastic project fantastic project there Outreach activities teaching
astronomy there and an article from Nepal that is written by
Sur that also he's very active there develop fantastic project there
and he talk about their experiences to
develop astronomy in and also you have a information about
the the next eclipse United States then I I think that I didn't
forget anyone sorry could you could you show the
magazine because I can't share here oh let me do it let me do it okay hold
on [Music]
that is WR a series about the history of astronomy have a
speci a special article from Scot Roberts and is a free
magazine it's fantastic part this magazine thank you very much and yeah
thank you great article by David Levy yes a fantastic article
this is a great companion this Magazine's a great companion for the global Star Party um because of its
Global nature uh and um uh you can see
uh you know some pretty interesting articles from around the world um
there's uh also uh very interesting uh articles or contributions of uh Star
Charts from uh will Tyrion uh so probably the best Celestial
cartographer of our time uh makes the star maps for uh Sky Up
Magazine uh these are this this is great to see artifacts of the Galileo
Museum um uh we uh support in the magazine people that support uh um you
know uh the astronomical community at large and uh Astro te TV is also one of
these great uh uh groups that um uh puts together regular programs with uh Dan
Higgins has been on global Star Party plenty of times to share with us what's going on there I remember I have an
article from Europe I forgot the article that from y h that is the manager of the
Global Science op that the this year and
last year 2023 and this year the them is about astronomy James
telescope and the Global Science shop is a fantastic project uh the director
coordinator participate here one Global St part that is that
being that would be great in a fantastic experience of Global Science here this
article about the experience of the global science and the astronomy in Global
Science that they is a mix they make interaction between science and the Arts
through the music that's a great
experience then this is from David prospect that is
from the night sky NK
and we can is a way this magaz it's wonderful to see all this uh you know
activities in educational Outreach and astronomy you know working with young people and uh you know young people are
naturally interested in uh the stars and you know learning about the universe
that they're part of and the Uma is developed project in Pakistan he's a she's a woman
that develop project in Pakistan and oh from Pakistan uhhuh yeah
wonderful wonderful getting to know our star yeah
this is an act from an Egyptian that okay no he lives now in
qat Works in University in qat he has a PHD in
solar observations and the doar resarch about the Sun and he developed many
Outreach activities there in Qatar but he is from
Egypt yeah images of the solar eclipse that their
h great North American total solar eclipse I love the poster it's
awesome yeah and April I think that everybody United States will be yeah are
you are you coming to Mexico or or to United States for this Eclipse not this
time not this time unfortunately too I mean we are
planning for in the in the in October to see the eclipse
yeah that to be Clos for us so some great um planning information
for the eclipse here we are state by state but
eclipse in the last years in United States because
last last year we have an eclipse and few years ago again 2017 we had a total
eclipse and then we last year we had the annual and of course this year the total in
seven years three eclipse this some yeah this eclipse in 2024 if you
don't already know this will probably be the greatest science event in human in
human history um uh there will be many many millions of people that will
witness this uh this eclipse is going over some of those populous areas of the unit unit States and uh that part of the
United States also has a an incredible network of Highway systems so that you can get to the center line pretty easily
um but you need to make your plans now if you haven't already made them and if you have not already bought eclipse
glasses uh I can tell you that uh the United States is running out of solar
filter material okay by everyone and so this is uh if you if you you're thinking
that well I'll wait you know I'll buy my Eclipse classes four to six weeks before the eclipse you Pro is a high chance you
won't be able to find one except maybe you pay an extremely high price for it
so wow and it's quite in the last edition
of you showed a place where is this
place they saw the eclipse in 2023 and see again in
2024 H where is this this place you remember
uh in 2003 you said yeah is a place
where you can see both Eclipse oh yeah 2023 yeah yeah so this place this is an
event that explore scientific and the explore Alliance is running and this is called the crossroads of the eclipses
star party uh of course it's going to happen during the Dark of the Moon so uh
people will probably start arriving like April 5th I would believe and um it is
at a ranch a private Ranch uh on the center line in southern Texas and so uh
David Levy will be there uh giving talks uh along with h a bunch of other people
that uh are eagerly awaiting to see totality and uh we can't wait for for
this day to arrive it's it is uh it is coming fast and being in the business of
selling eclipse glasses it's it's kind of crazy because people are ordering
heavily right now and uh well it's the kind of business that anyone that's in this in this industry would like to have
but it can get a little overwhelming because of the The Surge that happens
just before an eclipse is is occurring um love this article half the
world happens at night that's right this was written by Alejandro from Argentina
his Argentina okay that's great he has
was there yep some great astronomers all throughout the Americas you know from
South to Central to North so it's it's uh it's awesome that we can highlight
these things in this magazine he's developer fantastic
projects yes and also he's a director of dark
sky some great uh uh images of planetary
nebula from Doug struble Doug has uh his backyard Observatory and he is like
something like six or seven miles away from downtown Detroit extremely light
polluted he has lights that are turned on from his neighbors he's got the city
lights to contend with but he does all this in narrow band Imaging and uh you
know unfortunately you can't really appreciate uh the depth of uh of how
great these images are because we're broadcasting uh you know so there's some
uh data loss but uh if you go online and type in Doug struble uh planetary nebula
uh you are going to see some extraordinary shots
yeah some really wonderful contributions in asro photography and then
uh yeah the final shot there's the Tulip nebula this is uh The Wil tyrian star
maps that I was talking to you about um and uh it's for northern and southern
hemisphere and winter spring and summer sky eyes
so um you helpful reference there very accurate and then this beautiful Parting
Shot I did not see this this is wonderful uh but that's from NASA and
Esa and others at uh Space Science Institute uh or Space Telescope uh
Institute um providing these images so looks like a lot of J West shots so
wonderful wonderful job thank you very much uh marel thank you very much for the
opportunity to contribute for this fantastic magazine I'd like also to thank his Tia for the Fantastic layout
Trisha here does a good job in putting it all together is very beautiful
magazine very thank you very much it's a very pleasure to be here thank you very
much um marello and uh you have a good night uh uh and enjoy your you're on
vacation is that right yes
yes my family is here also that's wonderful five days and then tomorrow
morning very early we go to H Jan because she will take the airplane and
follow her it's a great place to be thank you for yeah well regards to your family
thank you very much marello take care yeah okay um our next speaker uh is
Adrian Bradley Adrien always Wows us with his incredible uh night sky shots
um taken much of it taken in the uh Michigan area Upper Peninsula area uh
but he is he does travel and uh he never hesitates to uh take some wonderful
shots even even even when there's a little bit of adversity like light pollution or clouds uh he makes
Incredible art with it so uh Adrian thank you for coming on to Global star party thank you Scott as always um you
know I decided to try a new webcam and I'm thinking I'm G to have to go back to the old camcorder and make that
work um this one fires up easily but obviously it makes me look like I'm half
of a ghost here but uh but it sits nicely on top of my monitor screen yeah
I've got a yeah probably from the green screen background but yeah well so today
um we were talking about I think we were talked about Origins and um we were
there were so many good presentations um you know the atoms in our body and
you know things of that things of that sort um and I de decided I would
share a uh revamping of a project that I'm doing um which shows RIS fall Milky
Way in the northern hemisphere um and I ended I'm going to
end it with a a quote from the dear D Levy let me get right into this and just
share the uh screen here and um you can see the project here
and you can see there's a poem here by
our esteemed and beloved Dr David D Levy
um I may change the font so that's it's more readable but it's uh your eyes on the sky adaptation to the uh the eyes on
the sparrow poem um and just so that you know
D every time I look at the sky no matter where I am and all of these pictures
that I plan to include um it always grounds me takes
away the anxiety of being someplace where maybe it's really dark um you know
places like this if it shows up where I'm surrounded by a lot of trees wow um
I look up at the sky and immediately feel a sense of warm and comfort so I'm
no longer worried about things that are coming at me and um the Troubles of the
world yes and you might notice this uh I've changed the music for this I had
a uh beautiful um Catholic piece um done by
Fernando Ortega in the original when I originally put the little uh slideshow
together the music was um and drawn a blank on it it's it's one
of my favorites I heard the voice of Jesus was the uh a piano
solo but I remember uh D you always said
that the images were like Mozart and I said well we're gonna pair Mozart with
this so so obviously I won't be playing it but I am GNA try and Rec and have
this record and um and I'll show you exactly what the
all of these images to the Ein klin KN music I think it's
the opening act song so it's one that we've heard
um and so the idea is going to be it's gonna
show and the main character here Orion we
start with an image I took where Ryan the rosette is up here and I have this
um which I may just move right now let's see if we can
um oh we tried but we failed we should be moving the um we shouldn't be moving
the sky here the sky stays constant so we picked the wrong thing to move but we
will put that back um and my machine is not the fastest of machines
so I will have to fix that so the idea
is Orion who starts up here now goes
here and gradually Orion will
set and then as Orion sets we'll jump ahead we'll jump ahead to this picture
with Aurora something else is rising um out of the happens to be
rising out of the Aurora but if you know your milky way you recognize this as a North American nebula so you instantly
know this is denb so you know that this is signis and that
copia is somewhere behind it you know that this is a double cluster here
buried in the Aurora so what that means that to the northern
hemisphere the Sagittarius St Cloud is here to the Northern Hemisphere there's something rising and um these center of
the Galaxy is making its way up and when I get to this
image you see the entire bit of the Galaxy the center of
the Galaxy as we can see it in the Northern Hemisphere and you see some
other renderings from other locations including this location I'll briefly
mention um this cabin um once belonged to uh one of our our priests uh man
Senor Daniel trap and on Friday we learned that he had passed so um sadly I
had some opportunities to take a picture of him and this cabin at night and pass
them by but um great shot it really is That's
So the theme Here of the Milky Way rising and there is
one there is one image that I will be um adding it's a picture of me sitting
there looking or watching um the sky
and that will make its way in that will make its way into this
uh into this image and will likely be the last
picture um so so the idea is you see the galactic
center begin to rise we'll be jumping ahead a little bit to
um you're going to see this standing on its end here I am looking at it um this
could if weren't for the position of the Milky Way this could easily have the poem in
it but uh you know as time goes and let's see this is the yeah so
there's there are photos here um I added some newer ones that I've
taken such as this one the uh storm on the side of Milky Way rising and you
know one of my favorites and I left this one in with a
dark cloud so you can see you know Milky Way is rolling over and all of these
different locations a lot of lower Peninsula Michigan some Upper Peninsula
and you recognize the Fe of these like if we go back to this one you'll recognize that this is a field behind us
is the observing field at uh in Kenton Oklahoma where Oki teex is the okex star
party happens super dark area Yep this is another reasonably dark area and you
can see the Milky Way is rolling over gradually and you can even tell by the
color of the trees here that we're looking at fall and and it continues to it
continues rolling and this
scene I still feel like I didn't do it quite enough Justice the first time I saw this with my own eyes um I was blown
away with this there was another um gentleman who was with us um and looked
over and said what's that and we said it's the signis region of the Milky Way We generally don't see it like that in
Michigan in Michigan we see it like this I see it's the difference in what
there's a North American North American this was a little wider lens but yeah maybe
humidity or that moisture in the atmosphere makes the and darkness it's
not it's the vortal Zone here is just not as dark it was cloudy but over that
at the okite tech Star Party the you know the bordal level the
darkness is a lot you well there's a lot more so so I've added this this is my
most recent photo it ends up here because of the angle of um signis in
this part of the Milky Way yeah so and then this is the final a final
image of it that yep using the uh then of
Galactic material it's awesome yeah and you can see all of it you know even over
this Frozen uh Wasteland of a lake this is where Lake hon and um the sagona bay in
the thumb of um Michigan if you look it up that's looking out over this
area and so what happens we return to
Orion and we um we get near the end of our video watching
Orion return to the night sky and we see gradual this for those
who recall Sky Up Magazine you'll recall that image that's why I left in yeah and
then we continue on zodiacal um zodiacal light is a part of that image the uh
imag jenic clouds would be somewhere just below my screen um below the
Horizon um would love to have southern hemisphere images in here yeah but this
is this is a fairly recent image as you can tell I'm I I'm focusing on the
detail and the ground to the point where this is becoming more more and more of
what you would see with of course enhan enhancements of the hydrogen Alpha that's in the sky all these other
elements are showing colors based on what those elements are in this really bright area
is Port hiron um it's it is very bright and and over here you have
Canada and so then so then here we are we're back to Orion and this
particular is where I'm saying in a year's time the sky returns to where it started and then at the end of course is
is uh D and his poem which
um I don't don't know if I can um play
any of this without this music uh playing it might because I didn't allow
for video but this appears at the end and what will happen there's more of
this song and what will likely happen is I'm going to shrink this and then look for a picture
that I took um of me seated and I believe I can
show you that picture um picture that I want to end with in
this all these pictures there's there's this part of the Milky Way that may end
up making it into the um making it some but the the idea
behind the photos and this one should go in there too from Denver but the idea behind the photos is that
um I want to show this part of the Milky Way from the galactic center rolling
across the sky as the uh you know as the months roll in and there's a few more storm
images that could you know get swapped in in this image which I would love to
include which I probably still will is this uh this is
AT&T you got cell service over here yeah and then you've got
um this I think is is a planet I want to say that this was uh either Saturn or it
may have been Jupiter but it's something we can always look up um of course sharpness you see the
noise reduction sharpness of an of a Milky Way image I always go back to
Barnard's e right here and um right see and tared is the star here
now things seem to be a little blown out because it's not its normal um yellowish
color um Al is here and tared and Barnard's e if it looks kind of like an
e like a disjointed e here you've got a reasonably sharp
image you've got this LDN object in that looks kind of like a plankton character
from SpongeBob if you can see that that's right then you've got a pretty sharp image this uh LDN is in
Hercules and someone mentioned the butterfly well it's not going to show up because this has moved too far along but
M23 shows up really nicely when you have a reasonably sharp
image so it's a very nice image yeah you know um folks if you're looking at these
images and you really like Adrian's work he does uh make it available for
purchase yes and uh I'm sure you can be talked into signing them as well you got
it and I'm gonna this year I'm going to work on making more of these available
for purchase of course I use I use all of these for outreach where I can um but
you know with enough interest in hanging these on your wall I am more especially
this one I think I have this one for sale here but you know we're talking about the progression of the Milky Way
so these images are going to make it in this one in particular um this one in particular
will show up in that project when I find the original
with this Lighthouse that one that's great that's really and that yep and it where it's going to show up is in
between the um once the Milky Way Rises to a certain
point um it'll likely be this one and we may even try and throw this Panorama in
there but again the the idea is you've got the plane of the galaxy moving
across the sky and over the year it lips it rotates from the summer version to
the winter version and again somewhere in here I was
sitting and just observing the winter version here's this
image which may make that may make it as well so I should take notes on some of
the images I'm seeing um this image is in the these two images are a part of the slide of the
slideshow and um as is this one um these are two versions of it this
one is yeah Master this stuff at this point Adrian it's great yeah and and I know
that there are many who do this sort of Imaging and I've run into a few in Michigan that do great
images um you know there's many ways to go about it this image in
particular is is you know it looks like things are on fire over here so not
everything is perfect but you know enjoying the natural world is you know
even with this is a partially e clipped Moon and we're in a civil Dawn and this
moon is just now getting Beyond its uh and I don't know if it'll sharpen up
okay it did so you can see a little detail here this moon is slow slowly
coming out from behind the Earth's shadow in a as a part of a lunar
eclipse um the earlier these are some earlier pictures of it and um this might
make the uh slideshow there's other images I've taken that I want to add to the slideshow to um you know highlight
at Milky Way and this this is the image that will lik L
end the slideshow with me sitting there and this yeah it's it's a Bittersweet
moment because here I am sitting at that same looking out over the lake at Orion
at the same cabin that um my priest who is now passed on yeah um that's his
cabin and he gave me free rain to take images from it and um this was one of
the images that that I took I decided to do a a self-portrait of me looking at the sky
and with the v's words here that's the plan is to end that
slideshow um even though Ryan is in this position Rising
um this will make a good this may make a good beginning or end so I'll decide
where it goes um and you know and then we'll go from
there but um definitely captures the spirit of me
just observing the night sky the spirit that I want to convey in this slideshow
so there's more to go um and as Scott once mentioned sometimes your Sky just
has clouds in it and never hesitate to take photos whenever you get a chance
because you never know look at that yeah you never know what um interesting this
in giant Thunderhead became a really good opportunity for a reflection and
you've got Stars up here but if you're under this part of the clouds out in the
distant Lake you're probably not having a good time and this thing slowly moved
East so it's all temporary yeah y It's All Temporary and so uh with that I will
stop and thanks Adrian yep
yep we're turning it over to someone who does a really good job Robert Reeves who
does a really good job with images like this and even better ones so it is an
honor to hand it over to you well thank you it's a tough act to follow with all
of that that's some phenomenal um um U landscape astronomical landscape
photography and um thank you the the the term for it escapes me at the moment there is a there is a term for that I
think it's nightscapes or landscape photography night nightscape photography nightcap I like calling it like
nightscapes myself yeah yeah that's what um I think that's what bakra fishi the
kind of the instigator of that style of Photography called it and um yeah it's
it's really phenomenal what people are doing nowadays and uh uh it's just growing Lo Topsy the skill level is just
ramping up fiercely and uh yeah um it's really hard to pick who is best
nowadays yes it it is which is why I decided I would just go after what I
like to see in images sometimes I'll take images that reflect exactly how I'm
seeing the sky even if that means the Milky Way is not prominent other times
I'll make the Milky Way prominent because I just want to see it blazing it it just it depends on the purpose of the
image but the one thing I do love to do competing in this space is near impossible because there's it goes from
the you've we've all seen it there are some fantastic images but I think they
may get to the point where if they get to the point where D does not recognize
that Sky then it's not a good image if there's just too much there that's just
and it there are some images that are processed that when noise reduced the nebula are removed that are along the
plane of the Galaxy and I just don't want to do that or some of the small Stars disappear as well yeah those small
Stars a combination of U of good artistic eye and proper image processing
it just uh just blows me away what some people come up with nowadays yes yes
agreed agreed well thank you for coming on Adrien and uh you too Mr Reeves um we
are um excited to uh get our dose of uh
lunar Knowledge from from the real master here so thank you so much for coming on to our show I'm not sure what
happened uh everything just vanished and can you hear me yes uhuh yes we can yeah
all all I see is a big white screen that says Zoom you and Adrian just vanished I'm
not sure what's happened um I I have it just on you right now so don't worry
about that per yeah yeah but I I can't find the share screen anymore uh oh try
hitting alt tab let's see if it just went to the background yeah uh alt tab
yeah hold down on alt and just hit tab nope nothing is happening nothing at
all oh that's weird because I I was sitting there watching you and Adrian and all some pop Zoom pops up just just
this what the heck you can minimize Zoom you don't have to see it uh at at first
and then bring it back and maybe you'll see the uh share screen yeah it sounds
like it's gone full screen for [Music] you uh no that is not working I still
see this Zoom thing oh this is that's I
I've had those issues before but we it's always worth it for when you muddle
through the issues okay I'm staring at myself now this is a good sign I'm going to hit okay there you go share screen
and go to this there you go and oh okay there you are perfect
saved postcards from the Moon is back yeah yes all righty uh let's see if it
actually advances um uh no it doesn't Advance um there a
way we did this before let me um we've had this issue before there
it is all right U all right think the thing tonight um can you see the full moon now did it Advance yes oh good okay
uh well the theme tonight is you know Cosmic fossils uh uh well um I like to
think of the Moon as a gigantic um geologic fossil it's been up
there for about 4.6 billion years just a little bit less than the age of the
Earth itself um well backing up the um the Earth the current earth the earth we are
on now um and the moon are about the same age because they were created by the same uh catastrophic Collision um
but u u the original Earth about 100 million years younger than the moon but
um as we look up at the uh at the moon in the night sky particularly a rising full moon uh we see all these dark Maria
that create the face of the Man in the Moon and these Maria lie within giant basins that were blasted out of the Moon
between about 3.8 3.9 billion years ago so uh everything that we see on the moon
that U happened before these giant Basin creation events we call it the pre
nectarian era that's from when the moon was created up to the time of the
nectarian a which only lasted about 100 million years but that's when the giant basins on the moon were blasted out by a
fierce rain of asteroid impacts and then later these basins the lowest ones below
mean lunar elevations filled up with dark Basalt to create the uh uh the U
the lunar Seas we see today the man and the moon so we can look up at the full moon and see this Cosmic fossil when
this division in time happened uh uh we can see it with our naked eye uh these
these round Maria that form the face of the man and the moon are a Line in the Sand where uh everything after that was
a specific geologic age everything before it was a different geologic age
well tonight we're going to look at craters on the moon that predated the nectarian aoch that were older than
these giant basins that now cradle the the Maria so um
well not going to do a specific tour of them in any U for any particular reason
just kind of drifting from the uh East Side of the Moon over to the W west side and uh looking at these features that
are um more than four billion years old so the first one
um see what happens the first one is
vendelin a crater that is nestled in between uh lrus up on top and petavius
on the bottom those are very familiar craters to uh the moon Watchers petavius and lrus um very classic u u complex
craters with Central Peaks but nestled in between them is this real old guy vendelin is petarian it was there before
the giant basins were formed in fact it was ruined and completely filled in with debris it central Peak covered over its
Terrace walls U swamped with debris by the impacts that created the great basins the storm of debris thrown out by
these impacts ruined all of these pren nectarian craters so they they they're
overlooked a lot of times uh people look right at vindel said don't recognize it
um whoops that's not working I'm trying to
go to my next slide let's do it this way
all righty now um like I said people look right at vendelin and and barely recognize it it doesn't look like your
standard crater filled with debris no Central Peak uh no no U Terrace walls
that give it that unique look but this feature has been around almost as long as the moon itself so this is a true
Cosmic fossil and uh I'm to do this the oldfashioned way
to advance them uh who it's funny how it's advancing sometimes and not others
and uh advancing when I don't want it to all
right another old guy Jansen down in the
southeast part of the uh quadrant of the Moon um Jansen is huge 191 kilometers in
diameter and PR nectarian over 4 billion years old and it's kind of like the uh
um it's the giant elephant in the room but we're blind to it uh we only see
Jansen at Sunrise or Sunset Jansen is almost 200 kmers in diameter yet it's
only about 2 kilometers deep uh we we rate um giant craters uh by uh the size
of them and their General shape by something called the D overd ratio the depth over the diameter ra ratio and um
with most large craters that D overd ratio go well somewhere around 1 over 25
meaning a 100 m km diameter crater be about 4 5 km deep but Jansen has a d
over D ratio of 100 one over 100 it's only about 2 kilometers deep 200
kilometers wide and unless there's very low Sun elevation creating these Deep
Shadows within it it will disappear so
let's go back out advance to the next one make it big again and here is an
example of that where the sun is a little bit higher and unless I hadn't told you that Jansen was right Square in
the middle of the field of view you might Overlook it you might have your eye riveted on um fabricius the more U
well-formed crater within Jansen or you might see Rima Janson the curved reels within it but Jansen itself uh vanishes
under very high Sun as we will see in the next picture trust me Jansen is
there right in the middle of the field of view but you can't see it anymore yet
it's a 200 kilometer wide crater so moving on to another
one up in the uh Northern polar regions up above Mari fioras up above the uh the
man of the Moon Mario Fagor being the man of the moon's eyebrows uh further northward in the polar territory and
almost all of these craters up here are ancient and filled in with debris from
the explosion that created the uh uh uh the massive uh basins and in the
foreground uh if you can see my uh cursor notice a very Square looking
crater uh this particular one is u w Bond uh and uh again very shallow debris
field Central Peak missing um the same with the the uh complex of four
craters dang it I'm hitting the wrong button again back
up there we are this complex of four overlapping craters here meon also
pretorian and uh the interior of it completely filled in with debris that was heed out of basin impacts so all of
these craters up here um almost as old as the moon itself and if they're heavily debris filled you can't see
their Central Peak uh that's a very good indicator that they are pretorian and
very ancient uh moving on a little bit further um we come to Jay
hersel uh you would think that William hersel would have the bigger of the two
craters named in the family well actually carollyn hersel has a a crater named after her as well
uh but no John hersel the sun has the biggest crater um 156 km in diameter it
lies right on the shore the shore of Mari foror just a little bit north of
Plato crater and again you see completely debris filled you can't see the uh Terrace walls the central Peak is
gone another crater that is over 4 billion years old we're looking back
almost to the birth of the solar system
and toward the middle of the Moon down toward the equatorial regions uh we've
got uh stofler oh well back up stofler on one
side maryus on the other U maryus is a little bit younger but stofler is the
old guy uh predian as well and originally a fairly good siiz crater
26 km in diameter but in the melee that followed its creation during the
nectarian aoch when all of these asteroids were bashing into the moon uh
poor stofler got whacked by one two three craters that overlap on top of
themselves and and obliterated its its Western Rim Eastern rim and of course the interior now completely filled in
with debris the central Peak missing um and uh even morea like over here a
little younger U it is a not pre nectarian but you can see that it got be
up in it's uh old age as well in fact uh marus oven older crater protruding out
from underneath maryus so this is a pretty interesting place to be four
billion years ago it was like a a battle Zone I mean just blast after blast creating giant holes in the around and
overlaying each other and uh pushing on to the next
one a fellow named arantius uh same thing here's aanus
right here following my uh my cursor 123 kilms in diameter and the same thing u
prear in settle down for a nice long W's nap and then WAP WAP whap all these
other craters Lana uh Lana's rim uh so kind of a cosmic Shooting Gallery
back then where non-stop action all these these craters piling up on top of each
other and a crater that was just named
within my lifetime um Des landres um you you're probably not going
to recognize it if you don't know exactly where it is and do landre was not recognized as a crater until the
1940s when um Antonia named it after Henry dandas
French astronomer and uh you can see the outline of it here barely um depending
upon how you measure crater diameters um the U next three this and the next two
craters we see all at one time or another uh have been claimed to be the largest is craters on the moon um this
Lander is you can look it up and it'll say that it's 235 km in diameter well
that means it should be the largest crater on the moon but uh then you could look up uh clavus and Shard and it'll
give you figures that are are similar and saying that that one might be the largest so like I said depends upon how
you measure it they're not perfectly round so uh depending upon which way you
cross the oblong uh rim uh we've got three craters here that are
vying for I'm the biggest but U like I said Des Landers um named in the
1940s um but for Deca for centuries it was simply called hell plane and not
because it's a place that's hot as heck um this crater here is Hell crater named
after father maximilan hell a Jesuit astronomer but
uh the crater was not recognized as being a crater until the 20th century
and then finally got its own name B landras and it's fairly easy to spot once once you get find the u u Landmark
Tao crater which we see here uh just a little bit north there it is Boom uh
just tucked off on the eastern shore of uh Marin nubium the sea of
clouds and and moving on
clavus now way look
it um cavies is Big 225 kilometers
according to uh some measurement a little bit different with others but uh
in all of the astronomy text that I had when I was a kid and I'm talking about
before the SP the biggest creater on the moon of course now like I'm saying there's a a little debate over exactly who's who but uh glavius has got a
personality simply because of the um craters on its Rim Rutherford and um and
um I forgot the other one uh these two very
artistically placed craters on its rim and the Arc of progressively smaller
craters sweeping across its interior so uh it's a it's a cat that has a
personality because of past impacts but clus PR nectarian been around about 4
billion years and as you can see it's m around the block of time or twoo with subsequent impacts and uh moving on to another
view here we see clavus on the bottom
and we see Tao on top there's a factor of 40 difference in ages between Tao
crater and glavius and long mananas and maginus
these other uh similar aged crators with with clavius Tao about 108 million years
old and clavus and its neighbors uh four billion four billion or more years old
so like I said a an age difference of about 40 it's like uh Tao is the toddler
and cavus is the grandpa bouncing it on his
knee beautiful
and our final crater Shard um tucked down in the southwest
quadrant of the Moon um the claim is 227 kilom in diameter which puts it in the
running for being one of the largest craters on the near Side of the Moon of course is so close to the limb that it's
highly foreshortened but um the Curiosity of it for me is how it is so
completely filled up with balt uh this isn't all infilled by debris thrown from
a basin impact uh this is actual Basalt uh it has been flooded from from within
by uh by lavas and uh if it were a little bit more um centrally located I
am betting that uh it would have a legacy name of Mari Shard or whatever
name they would apply to it but U it's it's uh U classified as a crater by uh
uh just you know history and time so uh one of the largest craters on the near
Side of the Moon uh very easy to find because it's uh so dark and contrasting
because of all of the uh all of the mult within it I do not have an explanation for the white streak across the middle
it does not look like a crat array uh it is a different color Basalt
and it's not unusual to find multi-hued basalts on the moon uh the titanium
content of the basalt will uh change the Hue of it so um I'm thinking this is
just multiple lava flows over period of time where the composition of the uh the
chemistry of the the lava that came up changed so we end up with a different
color so moving on to my final slide I always like to end
things with this because I love our kitties and uh you don't see Tinker
sometimes crawling around in my lap while I'm trying to trying to talk get on the keyboard and do nasty things but
uh anyway there's much to live on the moon and I consider the moon to Be My Playground and I like you to come join
me me on my playground so uh pay attention to the Moon uh there's lovely
things in the sky and uh granted uh sometimes you can't see them with that
bright moon is out there but the Moon is something you can see from the city as you can see it from your Urban backyard
the moon laughs at light pollution so uh when you can't get out to your dark sky
sight um take your telescope out anyway look at the moon become friends with it
there's marvelous geology there to to be examined and and uh and and study how
things work on the moon but just look at who overlays who the youngest ones are
on top the oldest ones are on the bottom so uh lots lots to play with here so uh
I've enjoyed chatting with you about this and uh I hope you've learned a little bit Yeah and we always do Robert
that's wonderful thank you I wanted to add my thanks to Robert as well I think that was really very terrific I really
did enjoy that and it reminded me lovely mercery rhyme lady moon lady Moon where
are you roving where are you roving or the sea or the sea lady moon lady Moon
who are you loving all that love me all that love me I first read that in
Starlight Nights and it's a beautiful beautiful moving Nursery room uh also I
wanted to point out that your emphasis on clavius really got to me because to
me clavius became famous as the site of the as I'm sure you all know by now of
the site of the moon base that appeared in arth
CLK 2001 and uh but you really pointed
out how clavus and Tio are so related with they're neighbors they're neighbors
and of course the 2001 the tyo magnetic anomaly one just a
hop scop north of of cavus Base where they uh dug it up and U interesting
things happened well yeah anyway thank you so much thank you so
much Robert it really was wonderful I really enjoyed that thank you you look forward to next time our uh our audience
had some comments here Mark Drexler watching on YouTube says one of the the big reasons I enjoy the global star
party is Mr Robert Reed and his presentations so well thank you sir I a
lot of people yeah that's great I do appreciate that yeah uh John Ray says my
daughter presented me he's watching on Facebook my daughter presented me with Robert's book exploring the moon for
Christmas and I'm enjoying it many thanks I'm very pleased thank you yeah a
question uh this is uh from fenor Ruby okay if I got that right
I'm if I ruined I'm sorry uh is it true that the Moon is Cooling and this causes
earthquakes and wrinkles on its surface well it's slowly shrinking yes
the the moon well all of the planets are cooling the moon started off molten uh
about 4 and a half billion years ago and um finally it surfaced solidified and
was able to record impacts that we see today but the interior was uh hot as
evidenced by vulcanism and um it has cooled down to the point where in about
the past uh billion years the volcanism has stopped and like I said Tinker is
trying to be mischievous here and March all over the all over the keyboard um it
cooled down and volcanism has essentially ceased um but it wouldn't surprised me if the interior the core of
the Moon uh was still uh warm and mushy uh but as the world the the the the
planet the moon itself the U does continue to cool down um it there is
shrinkage and of course tidal action between the earth uh and and the moon
the gravitational pull uh kind of shakes things up a little bit and uh things settle and and quiver and shake and T
themselves down so of course the continuous impacts also create seismic shaking which settle
things down as well so it's it's a constant process where U there there's
change going on all the time but uh not at such a rate where you can look up to
the moon and say oh my God that's different than last night U we we wish
we would see something bright and Flash like that but the U the time scale between them are are many many many many
human lifetimes yes okay well Robert thank you so much and I think at this time David
and I will close out the 141st uh Global star party so you have a good night uh
Robert and we look forward to you next time take care very good thank you bye
bye okay so David what did you think of uh the 141st Global star party I enjoyed
it I think uh you need to get someone else to do quotes at the beginning
because uh the quotes are um you know I'm working on a book right now where I'm taking all of the poetical
quotations that I've done over the years and R into a book and uh when I start
selling that book you're not going to want to hear me anymore a I think they'll still want to hear your your
voice giving those uh quotes and poems and you know that's that's you bring them to life and you bring them into to
the context of astronomy uh especially a lot of the Shakespeare uh quotes and
stuff and uh we love your thoughts we love the way your delivery even when you
sing it's awesome so really love it and um I know the audience does too oh
thanks Scott we're getting John Ray says thank you Scott and David another great Global star party looking forward to the
next and with that we want to thank our audience uh we want to thank all of our presenters
um and uh we will be working on the next Global star party uh and I'll get the U
I'll get the theme from David um and uh and we will uh we'll move forward so
keep looking up and uh until that time have a great
night take care okay good night
everybody
good day everyone this is David Levy that's me and I am holding the original
Discovery films of our most important Comet Comet Shaker leing n these films
were taken on the 23rd of March 1993 Carolyn discovered the uh comet on
these Ms 2 days later and uh and on about 16 months after that all
of the fragments of this Comet collided with Jupiter giving Humanity its first
view of what happens when a comet hits a planet and uh and one of the exciting
things about this is that when comets hit planets they don't just drop uh dust
they also drop um organic materials uh carbon hydrogen oxygen and
nitrogen which eventually turn into proteins amino acids RNA and finally on
one magic day DNA comets Comet impacts are really the first step in the origin
of
life I'd like to invite all of you to uh to come to the next Global star party
they are run by Scott Roberts of explore scientific and me we we co-host this
program and uh it's usually done on Tuesdays and uh usually at 6:00 or so
Central Central Time and so I hope to see you all there my name is David Ley
and I hope to see you all at the very next next Global star party thank
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you
