Global Star Party 100

Transcript:

7:05 PM.David Levy Commentary/Poetry
grim do you have your keyboard near your microphone
7:20 PM.David Eicher Planet Earth: Water Soluable Minerals
i do that's me doing it
trying to piece together all sorts of things for them i understand
david what's that well this is a new little uh astronomical device i'm going to display
today i did its first light last night it is a jacob's staff
7:45 PM.Molly Wakeling Astronomolly's Universe
oh and i'm going to talk about it a little bit today
fantastic jacob's staff huh yeah i saw the picture
but i don't usually do that
8:10 PM.Daniel Higgins & Simon Lewis Astroworld TV
at these star parties
thank you
8:35 PM.Jason Guenzel The Vast Reaches
i'm just going to test something here let's see [Music]
8:55 PM.Daniel Barth
so
9:40 PM.John Briggs
i think it's been hot everywhere today
9:45 PM.Cesar Brollo
europe and especially england have just had it ridiculous
we were talking about it yesterday on space oddities a few of them were just barely holding together for the hour and
then they had to go find somewhere cool
10:05 PM.Navin Senthil Kumar
it's hot everywhere except here in arizona it's pretty cool today it's the
90s or so so far and it's not that not as hot as
10:20 PM.Carina Letelier Under Chile Skies
it usually is wow is it dry
uh there's some humidity but certainly not as much as you guys have
10:40 PM.Deepti Gautam Astronomy in Nepal
and this is what we call as wendy says monsoon season so it's not dry but it's still
right now the humidity isn't as nearly as much as it is in montreal
10:55 PM.Adrian Bradley Night Scapes
you'd be hard-pressed to get it to this level we had uh we had a bit of a down pork
yesterday and a bit the night before and uh right now it's just sticky outside
which of course means the mosquitoes are having fun with us well that's the other thing we do not
11:15 PM.Micheal Carroll JWST
have very many mosquitoes here if you want some you're happy to take some back with you well yeah maybe we
might i might talk to them this week black flies mosquitoes tick them all
black fly season should be coming to an end yes hopefully by uh next week when you have
the retreat yeah that's i hope so
this is extraordinarily exciting a hundred global star parties we've had
there we go [Music] hey irma all right how are you good you no no thank you
good to see you so am i right to assume you'll be at stellafine in two weeks uh no i won't be
not this year overload with work and i'm already planning to go with uh
the group with roberts at in armenia for the starmas yes planning to go so uh
my time is limited how i understand i understand and i have to choose uh where to go this year and i
would love to go to stellafine it's my favorite place to go every year but this year i will have to skip it
i was talking to ray in toronto at khan and he was saying that constantine must be
you know he's having a tough time but whenever he thinks about the fact that he'll miss stellophane it must be just
that much worse for him at this time that's because he's been going for last 50 years i think or more close to
65. yeah oh wow oh wow amazing yeah constantine's quite a
number [Laughter] yes he's he's stable though which is
which is what's important his okay his health is what's important right now yes
well then especially in these times we've
very first uh yep this is uh the mega global star party 100. just a lot of hundreds
yes it is and my my good friends all of you kareem yeah i heard you talking about
cellophane one day maybe i'll get out there you have to go you have to go to stella yeah yeah
i don't know well that's that's what decided me that's what decided me to really pursue my my career career and as
a telescope makers going there yeah and be inspired by all the other people around and uh just to divide there it's
unreal
well you'll be happy to know i just did some solar outreach and astronomy outreach for a girl scout troop at um
one of our metro parks here in michigan um five different groups girls age probably
five to maybe 14 13 14.
and then their scout leaders all got a chance to see the sun through a solar scope
and have questions answered about astronomy whether solar or otherwise i shared with
them some pictures on my phone yeah of some of the images i'd taken milky way moon
knight shots so it was a hot day but it was a wonderful day for outreach it's a great
experience fantastic it was it was uh the kids loved it i wasn't the montreal
uh planetarium uh at the astronomy day yep and he had asked me to over there to
do a talk and brings a telescope over there there were about 3 000 people all
day long starting mid-afternoon because the moon was already up mid-afternoon so we could
observe the moon in daytime people were amazing how come we can see the moon in daytime well it's it happened
it's there in that time half the month so and then later at night to observe in telstra there was at least 3 000
people that came through the telescope it was just mesmerizing you had like 150
in line at your scope constantly all day yes
long file because the telescope i had brought was uh quite very special and i
built that telescope for a friend of mine about i don't know 15 20 almost 20 years ago it's one of my
most beautiful one made of rosewood and it's very and i borrowed it for him from
him for that day and it's it's a it's i mean i mean it's a crowd pleaser just to look at the telescope itself
and uh to look through it it's nice it's a double take i mean so yeah it was fun it was a great day
it's always great to to uh to share uh with people that never looked through
a telescope or just to see their faces the reaction they have when they they
see the moon so close by and then detailed creators wow i didn't know we could see that to a
telescope like this it's like it's like uh they think that only satellites or nasa can do that you know
yeah yeah and that's yup we had a few girls who hadn't looked through the
telescope before so we had to teach him how yeah and um all of them
saw something whether they saw a bright red orb or they were able to see some of the prominences that were on the sun
while we were looking we had the telescope out the um h a telescope
uh coronado so it was it was great and my tracking worked so i didn't have to move it much
to um get it in line for the next group yeah so it was a wonderful time it is always
all right well good luck gentlemen thanks very much adrian yeah yep i will go on mute and let you all kick this
thing off okay sounds good we will see you later tonight all right yes we will
well we will go ahead and um
hey michael you should have shut up anyways i did
so you said i i thought that you wouldn't be able to come on at all because of uh your you have a
family thing but uh yeah it was uh we have we have like
25 speakers or something like that uh today so it's an awesome line it really
is i wish i could stay for the whole thing yeah well that's good
so um i will i think i will go ahead and and kick this off and uh
but um so here we go
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this year the lunar reconnaissance orbiter celebrates 13 years of orbit around our moon and in that time it has
collected over a petabyte of data the largest volume ever collected by a planetary science mission at nasa
due to its success and continued operational abilities nasa has awarded the spacecraft an additional extended
mission phase so that it can continue gathering critical information on the moon and help pave the way for future
lunar missions going forward the lro mission will have four main areas of focus
[Music] the first is the study of volatiles which are chemicals that easily evaporate or vaporize such as water
in terms of lunar exploration bottles will be useful for things like creating rocket fuel and making oxygen to breathe
so they are a primary resource that future astronauts will depend on having [Music]
lro will continue to provide new data for identifying which areas are rich in volatiles and for clueing us in to how
they may move around the lunar surface current lro data suggests they may be frozen in permanently shadowed craters
in areas that receive some sunlight and may be chemically locked in minerals on the moon
this is helping pave the way for future missions like viper which will send a robotic rover to explore an area near
the lunar south pole and ultimately the astronaut-led artemis missions
the second area of focus is on the moon's interior volcanic features and the tectonics of the moon's surface
because understanding the lunar surface requires knowledge of what's been going on underneath
scientists want to figure out when the moon was last volcanically active and how current geologic processes like
moonquakes could affect the safety of future exploration they'll do these things by studying low
bait scarps as well as deep crustal and mantle composition that are exposed at the surface
studying the moon's history of volcanism and tectonics will also inform us about other planetary bodies in our solar
system and beyond the third area of focus is on the moon's
surface its regolith and impact craters we want to know how impact craters break down and if different ejected materials
might degrade at different rates these studies will give us a better understanding of the mineral and
chemical makeup of the lunar surface and subsurface this information can tell us how the
moon has changed over hundreds of millions or billions of years studying the moon's regolith and impact
craters also informs scientists about space weathering which can help similar studies looking at the earth as well as
on places like mars mercury or even asteroids
the last focus area for lro going forward is support for future missions
nasa has plans for numerous missions to go to the lunar surface during lro's extended phase
sending missions to the lunar surface requires planning not only to build the mission but to find safe and interesting
landing sites lro is in a unique position to directly assist with some of those operations and
science objectives lro can help identify landing sites by making maps that tell us what the
surface is like where there may be hazards to landers and where there are interesting features to explore
lro is also capable of helping landon missions get simultaneous measurements from orbit while they gather data from
the surface [Music] after studying the moon for 13 years lro
has proven to be one of nasa's most valuable tools for advancing lunar science as it continues collecting data the
spacecraft helps lead the way for future exploration of our moon
[Music] okay
this visualization doesn't have audio but it's um it's the bennu uh mission
and uh it's just incredible um the visualization of the
you know the spacecraft coming down uh you know gathering a sample
and coming back up i just really needed to share that with you guys yeah it's nice i think it's beautiful
what really strikes me with this one is that the surface was so different than what we expected and you can see the
burner marks you can see everything when it rises up but if it had not given that little bit
of push back we could have actually had osiris-rex fall straight into bennu's
surface
yeah it's amazing we're getting already a nice
global audience at this point okay hi everyone hello chatting in
yeah
i need to find my mouse forgot my mouse
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so
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well hello everybody this is scott roberts and welcome to the 100th global star party this event will happen in two
parts first part of course starting now the second part will start at 7 pm central
time where we will you know for all of you that can't watch this earlier part of this program
you'll be elite stable to capture the uh the second part live uh we had tremendous uh turnout for
speakers and i just wanted to kind of talk about each one of them just a little bit before we get started
david levy is here uh here doing this double star party with me uh he has uh
he's uh agreed to do the commentary and poetry that that he always does to kick off these programs i'm very very
indebted to him for his friendship and uh his mentorship and all the
inspiration he's given me all all through these years uh after david we'll have uh dr seth
shostak seth is the the lead astronomer for the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence seti program um and uh i've really enjoyed following him
over the decades listening to him give lectures enjoying his humor
he is just such an approachable incredible guy and we're really really happy to have him on the 100th global
star party following seth will be uh bob fugate um
you'll you'll find him on the internet as robert q fugate uh he is
someone that uh has given uh astronomy and i mean he put astronomy
on steroids with uh his work on adaptive optics and um
uh you know but he puts us amateur astronomers on steroids too with his incredible uh personal work he does in
astrophotography so he'll be talking about you know seeing beyond with elts and adaptive optics today
the astronomical league joins us in this first section as well with terry mann she'll be doing the door prizes we're
gonna have some special door prizes instead of the regular door prizes that we that we have
we will be uh upgrading them to some of them to the
ixos 100 mount a computerized go-to equatorial mount that you can put your camera on or
a small telescope it'll be perfect for the upcoming eclipses happening in 2023
and 2024. um terry mann will also have her own program uh with us as well so you'll
want to stick around for that uh kareem jaffer and lou mayo are also joining us
uh kareem is from he's a professor of astronomy john abbott college and lou mayo is at goddard space flight center
so it's wonderful to have them both on tonight um and they'll be talking about their own
perspectives on seeing beyond uh charles ennis the president of the royal astronomical society of canada
will also be uh turning in uh uh you know and letting us all
know about uh about the rasc which which we all love uh marcelo souza joins us from brazil uh
nicholas arias uh you know the amazing astrophotographer who literally pushes his dobsonian by
hand okay and makes deep sky images that will blow your mind so
norman fulham finishes up wraps up the first segment with us on reflections on
music stars and the telescopes that he builds so but uh i'm going to turn this over to my
dear friend uh david levy david thank you so much for
uh helping us put together the 100th global star party
well thank you thank you so much scotty this is uh
this is a let me try to unuse here i'm uh
we can hear you just fine yes okay here you go nobody no no i'm really a music okay
um i remember over a hundred star parties ago getting a phone call late one evening
from scott and he said that he was planning to do what is called a global star party
and would i be interested in coming to the very beginning of each one and doing a little bit of a poetical
reading and i've done that for every one of them except for one that i forgot about but i
think i'm going to make up for it today you're making up for today
one will be now and i will do a second one at the second part of the star party
later on today i wanted to show you something new i have as you know my telescope
minerva right next to me minerva is one of my favorite telescopes and i use it a lot i
really love it but yesterday i built one of these and
this is not a telescope and i'd be very surprised if it was a
telescope because it was invented in the 14th century
by the famous rabbi levi ben gerson
personities and uh it consists is simplicity itself this is a jacob's
staff invented in the 14th century uh there's a
meter long piece of wood here and then a crossbow on the top
and you hold it this way and uh you have you have
you sort of pointed the horizon and then you move this
until you get to the object you're looking for it and you will measure
the uh it'll measure the uh distance in
elevation above the horizon and uh
i had its first light last night as all my telescopes do
on jupiter and it was about
uh at the um at the six meter 6.6 meter
part of the uh thing and i had it like this and
this long-ended part went to the horizon and jupiter is sitting right on top of
this this crossbar anyway i just wanted to share this with
you a little bit and uh with the final thing is that this the long piece is a solid
piece of wood i was wondering if personities would have thought
to hollow out the solo piece a hollow piece of wood and uh put a lens at one end
if he would have invented the telescope in the 14th century but that was not to be
he left that for hans libershi and galileo who first looked at the
telescope and boy did galileo rewrite astronomy and galileo's global star party would
have been something else to see and maybe scotty will be able to get galileo and gersonitis at one of our
future star parties anyway for my quotation for today uh
wendy and i are going to do one together it's by ralph hudson and it's called the song of honor and it
um it begins it is a very long poem but we
are only going to quote the final stanza of it
are you ready wendy i'm ready here we go i stood and stared
the sky was lit the sky was stars all over it i stood i
didn't know why without a wish without a will i stood upon that silent hill and stared
into the sky until my eyes were blind with stars and
still i stared into the sky thank you and back to you scott
wow thank you so much david that was david beautiful
beautiful i'm going to show uh just i'm going to show the audience everybody that's logged in right now uh we have uh
of course david levy uh bob fugate with us kareem jaffer
norman fulham adrian bradley they're driving i i don't know how he does this okay
michael a space artist and an author michael carroll set shot stacks with us and lou mayo i
see him back there so uh and i see bob's monitor whoever that is that maybe that's a lizard or some i
don't know but that's the deal but um
we uh uh you know we we love being together um
and uh it's it's something that uh um gosh i look back on all these star
parties and all the information that's come out of it and all the friendship and everything it's just really been
amazing to me um i uh one of the people that i
very much admire for his ability to uh
you know talk about i think a really tough subject which is uh you know
the search for extraterrestrials the search for life throughout the universe
i've i've attempted it myself i went on television back in
1988 i think on a local television show called stanley tonight
and stanley was kind of a uh i think sort of a uh nearing the
twilight of his career he was a he was a great talk show host in new york city
but he ends up at a little local television station in san diego and he would put together some
i think pretty controversial shows this one that he put together was uh i was
supposed to be on a panel of you of ufo skeptics okay um
and uh uh the uh the opposite side was um
uh a another go a group called the unarian society and the unarians uh
were led by this lady who is dressed up like a princess she drove up with a cadillac that had a ufo with lights on
top of it and all the rest of it and i get to find i find out that
i am in a room of mostly what claimed to be abductees
okay alien abductees there's like 30 of them in the room with me and uh
and i think stanley wants to see a fight or something you know and so um
but uh you know i i had to tell these people that uh you know they
claimed to be scientists and i said well you know what you're practicing after they say some song they sang some songs
to um space brother and they had they had a book and they had all these kind of
ritualistic kind of things uh you know it's not that i don't believe that there's life teeming in the
universe i do believe this okay i think there's life throughout the universe like you know like cockroaches i think
they're everywhere okay uh but i had not yet seen
irrefutable proof okay of of alien life uh or alien spacecraft or
those kinds of things and so uh you know i was there as a an amateur
astronomer amit you know an amateur ufo uh
uh debunker and it was just a very very strange day for me and so i do really uh respect
what seth probably goes through day and day out uh day in day out uh with his um
his work with seti um that's a fascinating story
i wish you all could have been there with me it would have been a lot of fun we want details eventually
i did i did get out with that with my hide intact so uh but you know i always i respect
people and and what they believe and in all the rest of it i do um so i have friends that are very kind
of uh rough and tough when they get in kind of a situation like that but you know i
have to you know keep my mind open that uh you know if life happened here it's probably
happened all over the universe and um so anyways but uh says shaw stack is the
person that uh i i am uh bringing up next and seth has been very very kind
to be at several events that i've been able to put together um
and i know that seth recognizes that i'm an amateur astronomer i'm not even a very polished
uh presenter uh but you know i i describe myself as kind of a cheerleader for
uh for astronomers and astronomy and space exploration and uh
i think it's important that we get the word out and when i when i ran into seth and he told me yeah
i mean this goes back decades now uh yeah i'll come and do a lecture i was absolutely blown away uh i felt like i
had walked up to carl sagan and asked him to do a lecture for me i still feel that way and uh
so uh seth is here with us today i think he's in his office at seti and uh
um seth thank you for coming on to the 100th global star party thanks very much scott how's the audio
can anybody understand this no nobody all right
we've moved into new digs and i still haven't set up my office yet as you can see
but uh scott it was very kind of scott to give me three and a half hours here uh i i am
gonna he doesn't have a topic down for what i'm going to talk about uh i was going to talk about the union's
unfortunate experience with a car wash that they tried to get their car with the you know the saturn on top through
and it didn't work so uh they're kind of out of business i i wanted to say one thing to uh
it's duffy levy i i'm not a personality but that is my first name believe it or
not relatives anyhow all right enough of all that what i'm going to talk about today is something
well scott asked me to talk about the effect of inverse compton scattering on the forbidden transitions of yitrium in the
atmospheres of peculiar a-type stars and he figured all of you would be interested in that but i'm not so i'm
not going to talk about that i'm going to talk about something a little more straightforward namely why haven't we
found the aliens all right so let me see if i can share this screen maybe i can maybe i can't
and all right anybody see it's working
oh well well that's too bad for you and you're in presentation mode it looks very nice well i i'm but i'm not very
presentable okay why haven't we found the aliens i mean i don't have to remind many of you the fact that we've been
looking for a long time from you know that frank drake did his first experiment
in seti in the spring of 1960. now to me 1960 seems like only yesterday
i i was already past middle age in 1960 but for a lot of people that's a long time ago and they may not uh
you know well they may remember it or not but in any case that means it's been 60 years 62 years since that first
experiment and we still haven't turned up a single little green guy and what's the reason for that well i'm just going
to talk to you a little bit about that to begin with there are a lot of people namely one-third of all americans who
think we already have found the aliens now to begin with is the wow signal and this is just some printout from the uh
the telescope at ohio state university known as the big ear
and this thing it sort of out outlived its uh its usefulness to astronomy so
they just sort of parked it at a given declination and they let the sky rotate above it and you know they
would just make observations looking for a signal hoping to find et that way every couple of days resident astronomer
jerry ayman would come into the shack where the line printer was and look through it and see if there was anything
interesting and on this particular date in 1977 he saw a signal that was so strong he
wrote wow next to it now this is the triumph of marketing over uh
well i i guess you could say science there were hundreds of signals that were found in these these
times but this one had wow written next to it and so there you go i mean
if they called it bob or something like that i mean maybe nobody would have noticed but we're calling it now uh wow
is really good now you see on the uh right hand side of the screen here sort of a blow up of that signal cf
sorry 6fquj5 that's just the encoding of the level
the strength of the signal right otherwise they they would be limited from zero to nine but then they could go
to ten they call a and eleven was b and you know and so forth so they could get
more levels encoded in here now i can't tell you i think it's on the order of 50 or 100 emails i've received over the
years by people who spend their weekends and evenings trying to decode
6fquj5 and they all succeed at some level so they say and uh you know there
are interesting things in there such as uh the cure for death or the next lotto numbers or stuff like that
the facts are it's just a method of encoding the strength of the signal but when i write them back they never say oh
thanks for explaining that they just get mad at me anyhow there's the wow signal some people think it was et we don't
know what it was it was never seen again never and many people have looked okay so so much for that uh this is another bit of
evidence if you consider it that that we found the aliens namely they're here in our airspace teasing our top guns uh
this is of course uh gunsight video camera uh footage infrared camera actually from an f-18 hornet
that was being flown by the u.s navy off the coast of san diego and you see that blob in the middle now that could be
klingons come to visit not quite clear why they come to earth maybe it's the fast food nobody knows but you can see
that darkness and that means that something hot and it's been pointed out by many people and in particular mick
west uh has pointed this out several times that that could just be an airplane you know 50 or 100 miles in
front of the hornet right this disorder was at i think like 22 000 feet so the horizon is like 100
miles away even more so you could see uh maybe a twin-engine jet you know just
sort of going away from you at that distance and of course you're looking up the tailpipe of the jets so it makes a
nice black infrared blob all right it could be that or it could be the alien
so you take your choice but the facts are that from the science uh the point of view of the scientists we haven't
found the aliens how do you explain that uh you guys probably don't ever have to
answer that question but you know if i'm sitting next to somebody on a 12-hour
flight to europe and they find out what i do i try and keep that secret but sometimes you know the captain comes
along with a public announcement if they find out what i do they say well wait a minute why haven't you found the aliens
yet what the heck you know it's costing me all these tax dollars well to begin with it's not costing them any tax
dollars because it's all privately funded but beyond that that means i don't get to sleep or read a cheap novel
on the flight we haven't found them but here are some suggestions about why we have this awkward silence at this point
you probably would welcome silence all right how do we explain that well one possibility is that we just haven't
looked at enough of the sky right and if i go out tonight looking for comets something that
david levin would know all about you know and i don't find any and i might come to the conclusion there are no comments but on the other hand i just
haven't looked at the right time at the right spot on the sky personally i think that this is the answer but not
everybody would in the background this is a photo i made of our own allen telescope array there are 42 of these antennas located about
300 miles north of san francisco so if you happen to be in that area of the cascades and you want to go visit i
wouldn't i would commend this to you and go there and you know kick the pillars and make selfies and you know uh other
uh well anyhow just go take a look but that's one possibility it's simple we haven't found them because we haven't
looked enough all right the total number of star systems that we've actually looked at all of seti
olive city since 1960 is only about 5 000. that isn't a huge number right uh i i
note that breakthrough listen which has actual money uh they've looked at about three thousand they're going to look at
more and in the next 10 or 15 years the total will get close to a million but at the moment it's only been 5 000. so
doesn't surprise me we haven't found the aliens uh you know i already just said that so there you go
it could be that we're just looking in all the wrong places like a leisure suit larry we're looking for love in all the
wrong places and that may be we tend to look at star system in the old days we would look at
star systems that for one reason or another we thought had a planet sort of like the earth maybe the same mass right
at the in the habitable zone the goldilocks zone right and you know where
you could expect liquid water on the surface now we don't really bother with that anymore right when planets were
first discovered around other stars in 1995 you know the seti scientists got really excited oh finally we can point
our antennas at a star system that we know has planets but since then uh you know
i don't know the bloom is off the rose in a way because it turns out that essentially all stars have planets right
it's like 80 at least and in astronomy 80 is the same as all
you should not have an astronomer fill in your tax forms because if they get it right within a factor or two
that's good enough but the the bottom line here is that okay all stars have planets and more than
that we now know that maybe half of all stars that are you know g-type stars similar
to the sun have an earth-sized planet in their habitable zone this is a bit of an extrapolation from kepler data but you
know maybe it's wrong by 30 or 50 but i mean you can't argue with the result essentially half of all stars
might have a planet like the earth a cousin of the earth there are lots and lots of cousins of the earth on the
order of 100 billion or more that's a lot of course they could all be sterile
that could be but that would make you very uh very special and i know you like to
think it's special because your parents told you that for the first 20 years of your life but you know anybody who
studied science knows that if you think you're special you're not going to get your paper past the referees so uh you
know with all that with all with all that real estate it would be astounding if we're the only kids on this block all
right now everything i've said up to this point makes an assumption about e.t if you ask astronomers well what does et
look like you know they probably don't even have an answer for you right now i get asked that question fairly frequently because
of consulting for movies right and they always want to know what e.t looks like as if i know
i don't know but there is this i mean they always assume in the movie that e.t is some sort of creature
member of a species that you know cranks out lots of little gray guys with
you know no eyes of whites in their eyes no hair and no clothes and no sense of humor i
mean you know that's your standard alien and it's great for hollywood because if you have an alien like that you don't
need any backstory to explain to the audience this is an alien everybody recognize it but we assume that even in
seti because we're looking in places where we think there might be an earth-like planet but what if the
et's are not actually biological that they've gone beyond that here's what the uh the the plot i like to show in all
such talks this was made a long time ago actually uh before 2000 by a fellow at
carnegie mellon institute in uh in pittsburgh and he just he was a roboticist and he just plotted up the
fastest computers as a function of time so all those red dots are the fastest computers uh with
the dates on the bottom there and the three of you who are still conscious will note that this is a semi log plot
so in fact this is this particular uh set of data it's the the number of or
sorry the speed of computers is going up exponentially it's a heavily overused and incorrectly
used word in the media these days but it is really exponential it's you know you double the speed of the fastest computer
approximately every two years okay now if you look at about 2022 where we are
now it depends a little bit on how you extrapolate that line but either you know for a thousand dollars you can buy
a computer that has the iq of a monkey or has the iq of the guy sitting next to
you that's an astounding thing right and if there's a little doubt that
by 2050 we'll have computers with maybe uh as much compute powers all human
brains put together now that doesn't mean we have generalized artificial intelligence but it does suggest that
it's coming down the pipe so if we're going to invent our successors right i
think it's only reasonable to assume that the aliens have already done this so looking for biological aliens is you
know it that's so old-school right because once you have artificial
intelligence then you don't have to stay on a planet with a lot of water that'll only rust uh rust out your innards right
you can be anywhere you can even be in interstellar space sure starlight is pretty weak but if you have
enough space to put out tremendous you know solar panels or whatever you're using you can get the energy you need to
survive there's no reason why you want to stick on a planet which has plate tectonics and weather and other things
that are detrimental to your uh synthetic lifestyle there are sources of energy everywhere i just point that out
i mean they could be hanging around black holes they could be hanging around the black hole in the center of the galaxy you can get a lot of energy out
of those things and uh you know you're kind of centrally located which is always a good idea so you don't have to mute now the uh the third possibility is
that we haven't found the aliens because we don't have enough sensitivity this guy is a very sensitive guy now let me
just tell you what the sensitivity is if you just consider your
average steady experiment they need to have a lot of power
on the order of 100 trillion watts uh assuming they're 200 light years away i only picked 200 light years because only
the order of a million star systems within that distance but that takes a lot of power if they're just you know
trying to light up the whole galaxy or their part of the galaxy at a level that we could have picked up
in other words unless they're deliberately beaming to us they've got to spend a lot of money on
their electric bills in order to be able to make a signal that we find and maybe that's why we haven't found them because
they say hey look you know those humans they've only had radio for for uh you know
100 years we're going to only talk to the people that have had it for 100 million years or something like that so
they could be just as a sensitivity problem i i i'm going to skip through this because you don't care about that
these are big telescopes or you have this possibility that there really are no aliens
and uh you know that's anathema for anybody working here at the seti institute but you know you might consider it a
good idea because it makes you the smartest things in the universe or
it could be that there's some sort of great filter that applies to all intelligent species
they get to some point in their development where they get wiped out right and i talked to
millennials occasionally and and they're very big on this idea because they think we're going to wipe ourselves out you
know whether it's going to be climate change or pandemics or nuclear war uh any of these things
eventually when anybody gets to our level of technological development we disappear now i've done some back of the envelope
calculations and i hate to disappoint the young folk but the facts are that this is isn't going to happen right you
can't get rid of everybody the worst thing you can do in terms of getting rid of a lot of people is to
let loose all the nuclear weapons right just aim them all at big cities the biggest city like 14 000 nuclear weapons
i believe and it just aimed them at the 14 000 biggest cities and worked out how many people die it's a lot it would be a
bad day right but it doesn't get rid of everybody it only gets rid of about one-third of the
population so there's just no way i i don't think that this can work all right
it could be that the reason we haven't heard from bt is that intelligence is not something that's
particularly favored by nature these guys here now this was a bad day for them but these guys were around for 150
million years that's a long time homo sapiens has been around for 300 000 years so these guys were here for far
longer than we are and they never got smart go to your local library look up the dino literature and you won't find
much so it could be that intelligence you know as attractive as you may find
it in a mate or or somebody sitting across from you at denny's is not in fact favored by nature and we've just
happened to luck out so the bottom line of all those arguments is indeed that you are the
smartest things in the galaxy that you're some sort of miracle here you go the smartest thing in the universe is
just your average joe okay uh the final thing is that indeed as i've said before maybe we're just
looking for the wrong kind of alien this is again a similar plot as what you uh saw before although this
one's by you know ray kurzweil but in any case it's the same thing the fastest
computers are now incredibly fast and their their computer is big enough that
they have more compute power you know operations per second than your brain does so i i think that that that kind of
argument leads to this inevitably the conclusion is that e.t is not a little
grey guy with big eyeballs et is some sort of machine sure
they're you know little guys with big eyeballs but they eventually lead to the machines and the machines have most of
the intelligence in the universe and we may be just looking for the wrong kind of thing
so what do we do well i don't know we could just keep on trucking another suggestion is to
look for artifacts something big that a really smart machine might build maybe it has tremendous energy requirements
and build something like a dyson swarm dyson sphere if you will uh and and we we might find that by just doing
astronomy so uh it's a little unclear but the bottom line is the fact that we haven't found them may be simply due to
the fact that we've been looking for the wrong things okay i'm gonna shut this down
and if any of you are conscious and have a question i think we'd have a few minutes
well the people uh wanted to say congratulations uh to you from columbia
uh that's carlos gagliano on facebook um
and uh there's a question here uh and this is coming from conor bradley uh
he says is it possible a war of the world scenario could happen if
extraterrestrials develop interstellar travel to reach the earth well i i don't know the war of the world
scenario is that they come to earth and flatten los angeles now honestly i live in
northern california and if they want to flat los angeles okay by me but uh sure i i think the real question is
would there be aggression right could they in fact take you know just decide to wipe us out
i mean i i don't know what the motivations of the aliens are but it's hard to think of a reason why they'd go to the expense and it would be quite
expensive to wipe us out what's in it for them uh you know and i was on a
panel many years ago british uh royal society actually panel where we were trying to discuss why would the
aliens even come to earth why are they here as so many people think right what brings them to earth in the movies it's
often things like water but there's water all over the universe you don't need to come to earth there's a lot twice as much water in one of the moons
of jupiter you'll find here so go there you know don't don't bother us here uh it's very unclear why they would come
here there's nothing here that they don't have except for our culture i mean they might come for the rock and roll but i don't know that they've flattened
los angeles in order to get it right right um
go ahead go ahead no i i i agree with uh with uh seth on
um on the uh uh aspect of uh
you know that if we have extraterrestrials that there are machines you know they could i i
personally think you know we also we have artificial intelligence but we also have nano technology things are getting
very very small that can do some pretty amazing things you know i think it would be fairly
inexpensive to send out uh stuff the size of a dust mote okay that may have
like super intelligence out to uh gather information um uh i and i
think that that would be very interesting you know uh you put on a solar sail send it out you know and uh and see what
what comes back eventually you know uh um but uh you know to send a fleshy
to go on that trip in a in a you know something the size of a camper van uh
you know is is going to be tough you know on anyone that that wants to have
generations of uh you know life cycles to get get to uh someplace like earth
you know so um but uh you know i i do hope that uh that
seti is successful in uh uh you know receiving a signal that you
know far exceeds the wow signal and that it's it's repeatable and uh i think it
would be amazing you know uh you know just just to know that there is
someone else is out there you know so i think it would be uh a cognitive
shift moment for us you know for sure to know that something else is out there
did norma are we yes i had a question what about the relics that we already have on earth
here that we just can't explain like the pyramids like the easter island all these relics that
we don't know it was made by these people four or five thousand years ago would it be some kind of a sign that
someone already been there in this lift well norman i hate to disagree with you
here in a public forum but yeah i think we do know how east i've been to easter island i've been to the pyramid several
times yeah and somebody asked me actually i was a talk in australia years ago and at the end of the talk this guy
raises his hand and he says all right my question is who do you think built the pyramids
and you know i said well personally i think it was egyptians right but he didn't like that idea as if
the egyptians were too stupid to have built pointy structures but there's all sorts of evidence
about how they built these things right and in fact you can find other pyramids they built before the the famous ones at
giza where they didn't get the angle right and they had to start over right if they were if
if they were using alien help don't you think they would get it right it turns out if you just take a bunch of limestone and stack it up
right and there's plenty of limestone there i i
yeah don't don't underestimate the egyptians say we're not stupid okay
thank you so so what i heard was that it's more likely that the transformers from michael bay
would be a more realistic scenario than e.t given that they are robots
although they're not necessarily robots yeah they're not necessarily robots
there's a difference between robots and a.i right ai could be a machine that just sits in the corner of your office
it can't serve you coffee or make the bed robots would have ai i suppose you know very
sophisticated robots but the aliens might or might not require you know
being able to walk across the living room i like the dallas train
right or transform into cars yes makes great entertainment though
so thank you so much for coming on to global star party and um i'll uh look forward to the next time we
can do uh program together it's wonderful thanks thank you so much man excellent
excellent presentation i loved it and i did not go comatose
it was a great presentation seth thank you cause peter went come with us
okay so um our next speaker is none other than bob fugate
bob has been on several global star parties uh so far and
he has progressed to talk about not only his amazing
experiences in astrophotography but uh um you know i think the last time he was on
we were he had imaged a galaxy that was several billion light years away and and
and that was from extremely dark skies and then he gets into closer to the city where he lives shooting through light
pollution and still able to record it so it's just you know the ingenuity of the amateur astronomers uh and the processes
of amateur astronomy are incredible to me that they're just as amazing to me as some of the most
advanced science and technical abilities of uh the professional world and
i i think that bob might agree with that as well so
bob thanks for coming on to the 100th global star party it's uh it's awesome to have you
okay thanks scott the first thing i think is i'd really like to congratulate you on
100 global star parties that's just an incredible achievement
and it's um also a testament to all the people that have
participated in all those star parties so i'm a latecomer but uh i've i've learned so much um
in the attending that i've and i've done so far and so i'm very appreciative of
everybody's efforts in doing this so today let me try to share my screen
here
today i want to talk about extremely large telescopes and
um their potential and their synergy with the
web telescope but first i want to uh i want to get started with the little story
let's see if i can get this full screen here
uh every other year spie sponsors a very
large conference on telescopes and instrumentation and about a decade ago they
had the the meet and and every other year they have the meeting in north america or in europe this year
it's actually going on this week in montreal yes it is
yes and it's it's a uh you know i wish i were at it it's it's just become an incredible meeting
for adaptive optics and large telescopes but um when i was at the meeting in
orlando and about a decade ago they had a full-scale mock-up of
jwst in the parking lot and there were two fellows out there from
eso who were working on at the time a 100 meter telescope they
called the owl overwhelmingly large telescope
so they were walking around i i didn't want to get them in the picture in hindsight it would have been a great
thing because it would show the scale better but um i waited till they were
gone before i took my picture the one i'm showing here but they were walking around
looking at the placards and reading it and looking up at it and finally one of them
said to the other one but it's so small i mean
okay folks that's supposed to be a joke um you know they were working on a
telescope that's 100 meters in diameter and here is a six and a half meter one
that they consider to be a really small telescope so the question arises why why are
astronomers wanting bigger and bigger telescopes and the answer is sensitivity when we're
looking back to the edge of the universe things are very dim because they're far away
and getting further away as we speak so if we look at
uh sensitivity and by sensitivity i mean sort of the inverse of the time it takes
to reach a certain signal to noise in your image or in your spectra
so as you as you build a bigger telescope of course there are two there are two conditions seeing limited
or um diffraction limited and if we look at an unresolved source
like a star for seeing the limited conditions limited by the atmosphere
the sensitivity increases as the square of the aperture diameter because it goes as the
area but if we have a diffraction limited telescope it increases as the fourth power because
the image gets also smaller as the square of the diameter
as the diameter increases so if i compare the sensitivity of a 10
meter telescope with the six and a half meter telescope you can see
you can see it's you know better but not significant but as i build bigger and bigger
telescopes especially if i can maintain diffraction limited it's it's an enormous gain
so what this means is i have less integration time to get to the same
same level of quality in my image and as it turns out if we didn't have
adaptive optics and in particular laser guide stars it would not
be worthwhile to build larger and larger telescopes so i think adaptive optics is the key
enabler for you know what what's going on now with extremely large telescopes
so there are four on the horizon i know i've included keck here because they're revamping their adaptive optics
they have 10 meter telescopes so that's nothing to sneeze at but coming online soon will be
a 24 or 25 meter telescope the
giant magellan telescope in northern chile and then probably the next will be the
european extremely large telescope also in chile it's 39 meters
and eventually we hope to see the 30 meter telescope and hopefully on the
island of hawaii and we're not sure what the schedule is there
so i'd like to say a few words first about those and then i'd like to say something about some some advanced
adaptive optics methods that are being used to make these telescopes near diffraction limited
so the giant magellan telescope uses um a technique where they're building seven
8.4 meter apertures these are the ones on the outside that
are all off axis very difficult to make these are being made at the university
of arizona spun cast originally invented by roger angel
and um all of the instruments are below the mirrors this is kind of a cross-section of the
observatory they're they're making good progress on the construction this photograph is a
few years old and you know they're hoping to see first
flight um in a few years bob i think that you're still on the j west model
what's that yeah i think the image that you're showing is still the j west model
oh uh oh really oh my gosh why is it not changing
yeah i'm seeing all of us i'm seeing it too yeah oh boy okay
why is this so hard uh do i need to stop sharing maybe yeah stop sharing and then go back in and
okay let's see i have to find zoom
okay maybe i'm sharing the wrong screen but i don't
i have definitely done that before okay let's try
there we go that's it that's it okay i'm sorry i no problem
the reason i put the reason i put the monitor up was to make sure i was working properly and then i didn't i
failed to look at it okay so here is uh the giant magellan telescope as i said it has seven 8.4
meter mirrors these are being made at the university of arizona it will of course use laser guide stars
and all of the instruments are located below the mirrors uh in the base of the telescope
this is a okay now why didn't it change
i don't know what's going on
oh dear uh maybe i can show it this way
uh you have all those fails
okay so this is um this is the european elt this is the 39
meter telescope in in northern chile and um
let's see if i can just i'll try to minimize this by
slide only here and see if this works and here is a
[Music] rendering of that work primary primary parts
the primary consists of 700 almost 800 1.4 meter segments
and the secondary is up here it's four meters in diameter
and the tertiary is down near the primary and the fourth mirror is actually a
deformable mirror and then there's the relay that gets light into the instrument packages
on the platforms on either side so this is a different configuration
than gmt in that the instruments are up on naismith type platforms
now what i found interesting was this is a rendition of the secondary sorry of the deformable
mirror the deformable mirror on this telescope is 2.4 meters in diameter
so if you have a person standing next to it this is sort of what it's going to look like
um the face sheet of the mirror is in six segments i don't know if you can see the
lines between these segments and it has 5 000 actuators that are voice coils
each one able to move the surface 50 microns and it operates at one kilohertz
so this will this is what will be used along with the laser guide stars to correct for atmospheric turbulence
uh this is the keck this is an old drawing but you see it's very similar to the
european elt in that it has two very large naismith
platforms and its primary is a measly 492
1.4 meter segments i thought it was interesting that
the 30 meter telescope and the eel t both used the same size segments
maybe they're planning to interchange them although all these segments are not the same because this is not a sphere this is a
paraboloid so they have different shapes and different figures
and here's a drawing of the structure of the 30 meter telescope
this is the laser guide star facility for the 30 meter telescope it has nine lasers
and they mount on the structure down below here and they're plumbed up to the
center of the telescope where they come out of a central
aperture to form asterisms in the sky the instrument on the side is called
nefarious um a fellow that used to work with me brent
ellerbrook is the one that came up with the name he he was the principal for the adaptive optics for
tmt until he retired but tmt uses uh two deformable mirrors in what's
called multi multi-conjugate adaptive optics one of these mirrors is images at 11
kilometers above the telescope the other one at the ground and all of these optics are in a minus
30 degree c container in a nearer vacuum
and there's a mirror over here on the side that feeds
instruments that are attached below the adaptive optics component
so they use for the different instruments they use different asterisms in the sky for the laser guide stars
and i thought this chart was very interesting this this was put together by brent actually
and it shows how the 30 meter telescope has a strong synergistic effect with
space telescopes jwst here and alma
over here so you'll see in general if things work as they are planned
um the 30 meter telescope will have
additional capability in terms of angular resolution and a lot more capability in terms of
spectral resolution but they're complementary in that to
kind of fill out these charts for for the science cases
so what i wanted to do briefly then was describe some of the techniques that astronomers have invented
with laser guide star adaptive optics to cover various situations
at the heart of most of what they're going to do with these extremely large telescopes is tomography
the idea is to put up an array of laser guide stars and view the turbulence through different directions
so it's just like mri or ct scan when you when you collect data with diff
from different directions you can reconstruct a three-dimensional model of the turbulence
and this is this will be done at like a thousand times a second
so you need multiple sensors and a very strong computer to do this but we have the computing power that's
generally the thing that um is the least limiting is our is our
ability to do the computations so this has already been shown to work
uh back in 2013 at the um large binocular telescope in
arizona where they used six rayleigh laser guide stars they were only trying to correct the
ground turbulence layer because the rayleigh has a limited altitude
but all the simulations and so forth for the el elt show that sodium laser guide
stars are going to do the job when they're employed
for narrow field of view systems that are trying to achieve a high stress
the next concept that's being worked is multi-conjugate adaptive optics and this is
as i mentioned for the case of the 30 meter telescope this has already also been demonstrated on gemini south in
chile on the 8 meter telescope there where they have three deformable mirrors
each of which is re-imaged at a different altitude because the
turbulence over paranol or or the turbulence in chile is typically this is not a paranol the but
the turbulence in chile has typically been been known to work in three layers
and so they've picked those layers and the optics to image the dems there
and that produces the wider field of view and in fact they've they're getting really good correction over two arc
minutes and here's an image that i think is point nine arc minutes of a globular
cluster and it's essentially diffraction limited at high strell throughout the field
so this is this is complicated all of this stuff is complicated but
people are willing to sign up for it because they want large aperture diffraction limited telescopes
so another aspect of ao on big telescopes is extreme adaptive eye optics
and the the primary targets here are looking at exoplanets
and in fact doing spectre of their atmospheres and the typical arrangement is to have
two deformable mirrors that act like a woofer and a tweeter so the course mirror corrects all of the
large spatial frequency aberrations caused by turbulence and the fine deformable mirror
which in the case of of the g pi or the gemini planet imager has 4096 actuators
it's a mems type device um it operates on you know very small
uh throw of the actuators because the course smears taking most of the big
aberrations out and so they're achieving straws of 95 to 97 percent
over a very small field of view you know big enough to see the exoplanet
and in this case for instance here is hr 8799 a very famous uh star that has
many planets they've looked at the atmospheres of two of those shown here
and even more more exciting is um they've looked at this star
um showing this this is a uh keck image here it has lower stream you'll notice
the higher quality of the of the g pi image and they basically are seeing uh methane
and water vapor and this is then
h and j bands so in the near ir in the mid-ir
and you know what i'd like to point out is this was done in 2015 actually was done
before that and you don't hear a lot about some of this
stuff but it's it's going on
so uh another aspect that the next generation ao at cac is working on is
multi-object ao and the idea is to put up an array of guide stars in different formats
and in one of them this one um where these blue dots are targets
um they want to do simultaneous measurements on these like specter and so forth
and so their plan is to get the light from each of these onto a deformable mirror
and so here they show you know another target
that has multiple objects in it they pick the light off with an arms
send it to a mems device but in order to do that they they have
an array of guide stars that does the tomography so they know in any given direction to
this uh to this target to this galaxy for instance what the distortion is
every millisecond and so they can open loop command the deformable mirror
looking at that target and that allows them to do simultaneous
corrections on a half a dozen or a dozen targets
at one time and so this this whole
uh system that will allow them to do that is in the works and under construction now
this just shows how they pick off the guide stars the sodium guide star images they have
these articulated arms that move about in the pupil and
sample the guide stars so again all very complicated
but worth the effort so finally i'd like to talk about uh a
new project at nasa i don't know how many of you have heard about this
this is at goddard and um the principles are
eliad perez and john mather john mather and i worked way back
i was actually on some of the early review committees for the webb telescope
and john mather and i are long-time friends but uh the idea here is to put a
low-powered laser in a very high elliptical orbit and use it as a guide star for keck
what this does is it enables keck to operate more toward
the visible at very high stress so
for instance um oh this this just shows angular resolution
here's the web telescope you know this was a sales chart right this was a chart john mather put
together he's trying to sell these programs so he's making it look really good um
here's keck with orca orcas adaptive optics this is 10 billion dollars this
is 35 million now if you put a 15 meter space telescope up he says it would be 15
billion who knows but um if you use orcas with uh
tmt gmt and e elt
uh it's off the chart down toward the bottom and this is the improvement they expect
using this uh laser-borne satellite uh with the ao at keck which only
requires some minor modifications okay so um the other the other point
here is if you can get working in the visible you can actually get better sensitivity
than you might get in space this is a very interesting chart because it shows the great advantage of web being out at
l2 in terms of background you know if you're on the ground you have all this to deal with
in the near ir but in the visible they're more comparable
and the argument goes that you can actually beat the space telescope
in terms of sensitivity if with the 10 meter telescope on the ground if you have this orbiting laser
now it's um it's at about it's way beyond geo it's in like a two-day orbit
and you get about 3 000 seconds of observing
time while it's still in the isoplanatic patch of the turbulence
and it really acts like a um you know a natural guide star in terms
of the ao performance it gets rid of all the issues associated with laser guide stars
from the atmosphere or from the mesosphere okay uh so
that's how i see us seeing beyond with elts and ao in the coming years in this coming
decade i think it's going to be an exciting ride i think so i think so that's amazing
you know these giant telescopes uh i i wonder what what the field of view
will be like uh with with um the adaptive optics uh as compared to like
the field view of j west could you comment on that yeah i don't know i don't know the exact
field of view with all the instruments of the web but it's got to be larger than what
you know an ao corrected uh telescope on the ground is the ao telescopes
i think um 30 meter telescope is like 10 arc minutes oh wow very small field
excellent uh you know every time that we dive into adaptive optics it makes me want to
put one on my telescope so well we should we should talk about that sometime and what uh you know what would
make sense for amateur sized telescopes right yeah fantastic
all right well thank you so much bob that's that's uh that's fascinating i love this stuff
okay thank you for having me and again congratulations to everybody thank you so much thanks for coming on again
that's great well we are going to uh go to um
uh terry mann uh who is here from the astronomical league uh she
uh you know she helps me organize so much of the or
helps keep everybody i think in the league on the same page she's a former two-term president of the
astronomical league she's devoted so much to outreach and astronomy
and you know helping the league reach new heights and membership and uh
and and uh you know they are the world's largest federation of astronomy clubs
but uh she doesn't she doesn't uh exclude other organizations or you know she's not
she's not competing with them but uh um but she is uh uh i think
inclu you know she adopts a philosophy of inclusiveness which i think is wonderful
and um you know i think that that is the the secret to the success of the league
which is largely a volunteer effort and um uh so uh but terry's uh passion also is
uh aurora and um she'll talk about that in some of our future presentations that we do
um but for now she's going to do the door prizes and i mentioned that we will be
upping the uh the uh you know upgrading the the prizes
themselves uh we're not changing the way that we uh do the the door prizes um but for
this particular 100th anniversary we're going to include a ixos 100 this is a
this is a computer-controlled equatorial mount that's wonderful
in its precision and also it's uh it's compactness this
will be i think one of the uh the most desired pieces of equipment for
those of you that aren't don't already have a portable equatorial mount but
want to have something to prepare for these eclipses that are coming up and also for those of you who want to do
nightscape photography and that type of thing or if you have what are called grab and go telescopes
uh everything from about a four inch refractor on down works on these mounts
and so we're happy to offer that in this particular go around we will also be offering a couple of
hundred degree um uh you know explore scientific waterproof eyepieces uh that will be
part of this deal so if you have not participated in
answering the questions from the astronomical league you're going to want to do it this time okay
um terry nan will explain how it all works but uh she is uh she's with us and
um uh you know i'm really happy to have terry on with me here on the 100th global star
party terry thank you for coming on well thank you scott it's always a pleasure to be here and congratulations i can't
believe it's been a hundred it's been a hundred that's right it's hard to believe
yeah maybe technically this would actually be 101 but being that it's happening on the same
day we're having we're calling it part one and part two we had so many people that wanted to talk on the 100th global
star party i'm very grateful to all of them and uh so it's uh it's it's been a huge honor
for me to uh interact with all the people that have been on global star party from our
meager beginnings uh you know uh and the forgiving audience i mean we had
oh my goodness the mistakes i made and learning how to broadcast uh were numerous and huge and uh including
one that where i just had to like throw the towel in and say okay guys we're not doing it tonight but um
but we didn't even count that one so it was called virtual star party when it started uh i quickly changed its name to
global star party as i realized that we could have amateur astronomers and professional astronomers some of them
uh logging in from anywhere in the world and uh and the audience also was
uh watching from around the world so that's that's how it got the name global star party but uh
we will um uh have lots of uh great talks to come uh today and um
uh you know the least not the least of which will be terry mann after she gives this door
prize segment so i'm going to turn it over to you terry thank you thank you scott yeah you know going global though
there's been so much so many people that we have met around the world and it has really been amazing
just to kind of see what it's like somewhere else or when it's dark there we can look at their views
so it has all been amazing
i was going to email kareem and tell him how much i enjoyed his talk the last time on the last global star party i
just sit there in amazements in amazement so you're too kind terry oh you were great
i really enjoyed that so thank you very much for that all right let's go ahead
as we always start we have the warning about if you just bought a telescope be aware never look at the sun without a
filter that is so so important because damage can happen so quick please go to your
local astronomy club or to somebody that is familiar with viewing the sun before
you ever try to look at the sun so what i want to start with are the answers from july 12th
the answers where we were talking we're all about james webb space telescope so
the first question on the 12th was in what constellation
in tonight's sky is a james webb space telescope and the answer is sagittarius
it's always opposite the sun in the sky
second question what is the true field of view for the james webb space telescope primary instrument the near
infrared spectrograph and that is three arc minutes by three
arc minutes last question
the jwst has 18 4.3 foot diameter hexagon shaped mirrors
how much does each beryllium mirror weigh on earth and the answer was about
20 pounds wow so what we do is we award prizes
once a month and so we put everybody's name on a list that has answered that question and that
is what this is uh the next what would be the next global star party we will
all be at alcon so uh for july this this will be the last star party in july so it will be i
believe august 2nd will be the first tuesday so that will be when we will
award all of these prizes plus the ones that scott has mentioned today
so here's the questions for july 19th for today for the 100th global star
party asteroid vesta is going to be at opposition on what date and time in
august so i'm going to slow down for this one because there's some good door prizes
and people say we go too fast with the questions i want time to look at it
so what asp i mean asteroid vesta is going to be at opposition on
what date and time in august
second question what's important about m31
v1 so what is so important about that
and please send your answers to secretary astroleague.org
secretary at astroleague.org
third question what supernova is the oldest recorded supernova and how long was it visible
so what supernova is the oldest recorded supernova and how long was it visible
please send your answers to secretary astro league dot org
and as i just mentioned we're all going to be at after our alcon in
albuquerque new mexico for alcon july 28 through the 30th please come and join us
if you can you're going to find a lot of the people from the league there and hopefully we'll meet some new friends too
so for that scott i'm going to stop that session okay all right
and if it's okay with you i will just kind of continue right on to my next session
perfect as soon as i can there we go now you'll have to bear with me because for
me when i read what what the theme was tonight it was seeing beyond
and you know for me when i think of seeing beyond so many things came to my mind i mean we had
heard some about the james webb space telescope and that is so incredible i
really loved it um and then i thought back you know seeing beyond
means a whole lot of things to me and it mean to me when we see beyond we reach for
possibilities you know everything that i think is amateur astronomers we do
we all understand this but so many people in the general public when you're talking to them don't understand what
astronomy can really be all about what we can learn how it changes and how exciting it gets and how much there is
an astronomical community and we all sit together and we watch what nasa does we
watched the rovers bounce on mars or we waited until we heard everything was okay
think of the first time you ever one of the apollo astronauts landed on the moon
think of a space shuttle launch i mean there's so many things that are so incredible that happen in
astronomy and in amateur astronomy that we all enjoy so much
and every time we watch that we're reaching for a new height you know we're reaching for something new or something
to explore because i really do believe we are made as adventurers you know we
want to go on that adventure we want to explore what's going on but we want to
learn it's a real learning hobby
and so you know something kind of catches our eyes sometimes and once it d oops sorry once it does
it kind of stays in your mind walking up on a view like this this was uh in the u.p up in
the boundary waters yeah minnesota boundary waters there was something so special about that sunset
and it kind of it makes you begin to wonder you know i saw the reflection the
canoe sitting there i don't know it just puts you in the mood for a night where discovery you
know excitement of what is ahead maybe i'll have aurora that night which i did you know it it catches your eye and it
really makes you think and then in that moment i don't know about you but for me it freezes time i look at that and i
think about wow you know why why is this happening or or what can i see here that normally
people don't see a lot of times i think we as astronomers are amateur astronomers we see that
elusive light that so many people really don't understand i love elusive light and to me that
means i see something because i take the time to take an image or i take the time
to really look deeply at something i'm an observer so i look and for that
moment i can freeze it in my mind and then i'm going to go back and i'm going to
want to know the science what made this happen why is this
how did that aurora happen even better how did that moving rock happen now how
can this be that this rock has moved and there's a path here you know or the milky way and some of the old
ruins to me knowing the science and learning about it
is so much a part of our astronomy and then i want to share it you know i've
seen something incredible and it is fantastic if one of you maybe on a bucket list or you ever wondered about
this maybe you can go to some of these places and look at the possibilities so
i just came back from starquest where i was a speaker at green bank and we had a great time there sharing
stories and think that's what alcon will be like we're going to be talking to so many people and sharing so many things
that we have done and i think that's one of the most incredible things about our astronomical
community i would not have known all of you guys and so many more that i have that i do feel like i know without
scott's global star party and that's what's so important about scott doing this he has really
built up the astronomical community and then we all reach for you know those
possibilities every time i go to alaska it's like okay now i need to be here i don't care if
it's 30 below i got to go out and i've got to see if that aurora is going to
happen and when you get a view that starts in like this and you're sitting behind a camera in
this case a video camera i literally once i adjusted things around
fell to the ground and watched this aurora fire up and just just to watch the motion then
all the questions come to mind then all the science comes to mind i like to understand as much as i can of what is
happening here look at the speed it moves watch how fast it fades out look at the
detail look at the structure all of this goes in my mind and i think that's what is so great
about everything we do with astronomy because we get into so many fields so many different ways of looking at things
and our community understands this but when you're doing public outreach it's a little bit tougher sometimes
i get a lot of questions you know about why and how's and i'm sure you guys do
too so it's something that it just exercises the mind
or like this you know we are explorers and it makes you wonder i was this was
in may when i was up at carolyn's gathering for carolyn shoemaker i had
went to canyonlands and i could not believe what i saw in canyonlands i had never
seen the airglow like this and i was shooting the milky way that's what i went after i wanted this is 16 segments
that i have stitched together and i wanted to get the milky way and i took the first shot and this greed came up in
here and i said oh my gosh and as i stood there i could really see a white haze kind of with this shot
but then all this air glow came out and it was just you stand there in awe i did i mean to
me i've never seen anything like this and yeah i've never seen it like that i've
seen it in the sky and around but i've never seen an arch like that just like
the milky way so i immediately just i stood i bet i was there for two hours just watching
this because it was so incredible but again i think as observers we learn to see
beyond i granted now i did not see i saw the milky way but when i took this image i
knew something else was there and then your eyes begin to adjust and you can see what is going on and it was amazing
and again that's what is so amazing about this hobby you never have time to
be bored unless that's your choice i think
and then when i this one i was giving a talk and i had used one of these slides as a background and at a break kind of
in between you know some of the slides somebody yelled out where did you take that and how did you do that
i had never seen a zodiacal light before this was an incredible again a night for
me i'd never seen it and i remember looking at the person next to me and say do you know what that is
i was just blown away and you've got the northern milky way in the northern arch
so it there is so much that we can learn and so many questions
the times that i've worked with the scouts they really they've not seen stuff like this so to
see something like this it makes them want to learn they're excited about it why is that and they'd like to go see it
themselves they're probably telling their parents where they want to go on vacation by now but it's an incredible
thing to see and i i'm sure every one of you can stop and think about this now this is a
hubble shot granted but i was probably eight years old when my dad took me to a college observatory and they had a nice
refactor in that observatory and i looked at saturn and i remember looking at my dad saying it's hanging on velvet
and i was hooked that's what it took you know a gran i took my first astrophoto shortly after
that when i stole my dad's camera and went out and took a picture of the moon and he caught me
but this to me was what it was all about in my mind this is how i saw this as a
child because it was so inky black behind it and the rings just glowed
and it got me wondering and wanting everything i did in school and science fairs was always astronomy
and how about the total eclipse i don't know about you guys but wow last year was first 2017
was great i mean and i'm i love the diamond ring that is something that
always intrigued me uh but the questions when people see
this image or any image about you know a total solar eclipse the questions the
kids excitement uh we're gearing up around ohio because the center line's going to go right over my house but i'm
not going to be here i'm going to be in texas i do believe and so so many questions and that's
great because i think it really encourages the science and the science programs and the teachers and kids and
what can be seen and i'm sure you guys can all all remember back to what you first saw
that got you excited about astronomy because it's it's a big thing or it was to me
but then i started the adventure i started saying every thursday night i was at that observatory that that
college was had open every thursday night my dad would take me to learn the constellations
to learn everything that i could in that short time about astronomy and it is a great adventure
and it doesn't matter if you've got a telescope microscope camera whatever it is
you use whatever has drawn you to your hobby or your career
and you learn so much and you share and i think that's a big part of it learning to share
and learning so much because my dad was a rock hound so when dave iker does his
talks about the rocks you know i'm sitting there because my dad made beautiful jewelry and he would go out
right he'd go about rockhounding and bring back tons of rocks and i mean he would saw him up everything he did just
amazed me so i think you know the adventure or the curiosity that you feel or the passion
that you feel for what it is you do really reflects
uh how about the mercury transit can you find mercury can you tell i had clouds this was a mercury transit from i don't
remember the one before last here's little mercury right here behind the clouds um
yeah at least i got it a little bit are you the belt of venus i mean all of this just the first time i like the
clouds on it though i think it gives some drama to it you know and it filters
it helps filter a little bit and uh you know and look we have a sunspot at least we had one and i'm hoping we have a
whole lot of sunspots for our 2023 annular and 2024 total uh i think that
makes it a little bit more exciting but i don't know the eclipse itself is pretty exciting yeah so it doesn't
matter whatever you do whether it's during the daytime night time or in between if you're like me you're always
searching the skies and i gotta tell you this year in alaska was incredible i
have never seen purples and blues like this i know the purples and blues
will come out in around sunset sunrise that's when they're more prevalent
but this is beautiful and this is light polluted fairbanks right here underneath it
but the i just fell in love with the purples and the blues i got so excited shooting
the stills i had a video camera but i didn't even start it up because i was running everywhere with my camera trying
to get different shots and you know the more you see the more
you want to know or at least that's the way it is with me and the deeper you go into the sky the more you learn
um i remember yeah i was standing here taking this shot and a dad and his
daughter walked up beside me and they're both looking at me and i just smiled and said hi and she put him
for her dad's coat and says what's she doing and she's taking a picture
and she said doesn't she know it does it sleeps at night [Laughter]
he had no idea that it would still do its eruption during the night and i
die i just laughed you know he looked at me and shook his head and he explained how that geyser worked and it was just
amazing just you know out of the mouth of babes and you hear that so many times kids
come up with the most amazing questions and you know hey
it keeps going every day we learn more we reach farther we see beyond every day
and this um in december i went to death valley national park never been there before it was kind of on my bucket list
i love the desert and that was one of the most incredible places i'd ever been to
just as you saw the race track uh the moving rocks on the race track scott
remember the global star party i was on when i said scott i spent saturday night at the racetrack yeah yeah yeah
explain that hopefully not gambling right yeah not gambling watching the rocks so yeah i
spent a night out at the racetrack imaging but it was beautiful and the first time i saw the green flesh
um that's why i was lucky enough to catch it just the little green flash of it
but people that have never seen that are amazed that you can see something like that
you know they didn't even know it would exist and you never know what you're gonna get i took this picture
to me i see the indian i see the headdress i see the eyes the nose the mouth and i
call him the north wind because it's like he's blowing the north wind to the north and what you see down here is huge so
you get an idea of scale this is ski land if you're ever familiar with clary summit and ski land this is ski land
and you know when you take the picture the aurora is moving so fast you have no idea what shape you might see in it and
this was one of the shapes that just jumped out at me and i gotta admit i love a good storm i
lo i you know i've got respect for mother nature but again i think it's maybe it's just the sky
maybe it's nature in general something draws me to all of this and so
you know you never know what interest you will find but when you find it you're gonna know it
and this stefan's quintet i remember the first time i saw it but kareem when you brought this up and
started talking about it you know you just feel your insides going holy cow we have
we have reached another another hurdle and we're going farther and we're seeing so much beyond and
it is just so incredible so i would just like to say thank you for letting me be part of this and thank
you for bringing the league into this scott and all of you that we see all of you every week different ones of us are
here but this adventure is amazing and i think we're all enjoying being on it and
i would just like to say thank you for allowing me to be part we are very very thankful that you are
participating in the way that you do i'm really i'm pumped right now i'm i'm ready to go i want to
forget this i'm going to go outside and look at the sun or something actually so that was just incredible it was like it
was it was breathtaking all the the story and the way you wove together all of those images ah
i gotta go i gotta go roar hunting with you this is now my bucket list hey yeah yes definitely i'd love to you guys have
got some good aurora up there i need to come up your way well lou just brought to my attention that the kp number is
really nice and high tonight and i'm looking out and i'm seeing clouds i'm like no i yeah that's the one thing i think all
of us have set around a campfire or set outside looking at clouds waiting to observe going oh man
you know bring on the s'mores get order a pizza do something yeah but yeah i the
aurora is something that's always attracted me but i really i think like a lot of the sciences
that yeah i definitely want to head to canada sometime anytime you're welcome thank you i'll
take time off from work we'll go out yeah and i'll probably be with you both
terry that's on my bucket list too um i love the way i love the way that
you wove your stories together as someone who does that sort of imaging myself
um i think the one thing when you said point it point the camera north and take a picture because you never know what
you're going to get yeah i have an aurora picture from that i pointed it didn't see anything was
getting bit by mosquitoes i was there to shoot the milky way and i said why not
and the aurora showed up so well thank you that presentation reminds
me why i love to do it and when you're out there immersed in the sky you're just bringing some of it home
with you to remember it by and and you want to go out and do it again
i'm always ready to go do this again yeah it's great yeah thank you terry
thank you okay well um so we are going to um
transition here our next speaker terry again thanks so much for getting us so pumped up here
it was awesome uh our next speaker is uh lou mayo he is
a professor of astronomy at marymount university uh i've met
lou at various events i think maybe the first time i met lou was at an
astronomical league convention and and um i think it was in uh uh
possibly st louis missouri seems seems to that's right yeah is that right sorry yeah yeah and
so um uh but i i had a question for you lou i
i saw someone i mean of course i can only see in the back but
uh you know when joe biden was presenting the first image of the james
west space telescope i saw someone taking pictures and i go is that lou mayo
in the corner taking pictures not you uh no no
you have a doppelganger okay so anyways but being a uh you know i think that
some of that was shot from uh live from goddard um not still not sure of even that but um
but wow what an amazing time and uh definitely i was thinking about
uh i was thinking that you were there so maybe you were in spirit oh in spirit yes yes definitely in spirit great well
that's a beautiful image that you have behind you uh lou and um thanks for
coming on to the 100th global star party uh it's really wonderful so thanks so
much you bet scott yep well let's see um
let me share my screen here
okay and terry i wanted to tell you on those pictures of aurora were stunning
absolutely stunning and reminded me of my trip i think uh
gosh 10 years ago to barrow alaska for first polar sunrise
we got a van it was 30 degrees degrees below just like you quoted terry
and um we went out looking for polar bears at night where you scan the arctic ocean the
frozen arctic ocean with a searchlight looking for the reflectivity in their eyes
we didn't see any polar bears but we saw the most incredible aurora so i got to
check that off my bucket list um today i'm going to talk to you all
about a favorite topic of mine and that is titan saturn's moon titan
i've spent a good portion of my life um studying titan uh from spacecraft observations
and i found it to be the most interesting place in the solar system uh
perhaps beyond earth titan doesn't get much attention
uh as some of the other planets do saturn has its rings jupiter is the largest
venus is the closest in fact venus is often called our sister planet right
it comes the closest to earth it's uh 95 the size of earth it has a an
atmosphere like earth does but i'm going to try to make a case today
that titan should be our sister planet and that the potential for finding life to
kind of tie all this together on titan is um is is significant
uh which is why we have some new missions uh planned to go there so
uh here's a beautiful image from cassini from the um uh imager
of titan they caught it just on the edge on view of saturn's rings you can see
the shadow of the rings on the cloud tops of saturn and you can see titan and even kind of
get a sense of its little bit of its orangish hue which is due to the photochemistry
uh it's a kind of long chain polymer smog that in that envelops the entire moon
in a sense of uh you know size titan is actually bigger than uh than mercury if
it wasn't orbiting saturn it would definitely be a planet uh it has
an atmosphere a nitrogen atmosphere primarily nitrogen it has a tropopause where the
temperature turns over just like on earth it has seasons it has rain it has clouds
it has lakes it has rivers it even has what we will call today prebiotic
uh chemistry so it is an incredible uh place
um a little over a billion kilometers from the sun but you know who's counting back
and i think it would be um widely acknowledged as earth's sister
planet for all the reasons i just gave except that the surface temperature is about 94
kelvin day in day out not much variability between
um the equator and pole because its atmosphere is so thick and extensive
its surface pressure is 50 larger than earth's it is the only moon
in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere so it's really quite an amazing place
so amazing that uh we've set a number of spacecraft and have some planned um to
go to titan uh it's been known since i think the 1940s gerard kuiper discovered methane
in the spectra of titan so we knew that there was methane in the atmosphere which can often be a biomarker
and so pioneer 11 to saturn took some initial images of of titan
the two voyager spacecraft uh took images of titan and in fact
titan was such a high priority item for the voyager mission that voyager 1 was redirected to fly as
close as it could to titan to get very high spatial resolution images uh which um which meant that it couldn't
go on to your innocent neptune but it got some of the most incredible
high-resolution images that were only superseded uh 20 years later by cassini
and of course cassini with its huygens probe built by the europeans that parachuted
down onto the surface of titan which i can't even fathom how you would how you
would um thread that needle over a billion kilometers away and they pinpointed
the landing so from those missions here's a little
bit of an idea of what we got a pioneer 11 had a fairly fuzzy image of titan remember
we're not seeing the surface here the surface is clouded in visible
wavelengths from us by an atmospheric haze
that is built up through the photochemistry uh the photodisassociation of nitrogen
and methane in the upper atmosphere and so we don't see the surface there
hst through the wide field planetary camera took images of titan i remember that i remember the age before we before
cassini where nobody had seen a very good image of the surface of
titan but we figured out that
in the one to two micron range in the infrared there are four methane windows
where the methane absorption is is minimal and you can actually see to the surface
of titan and that is the case with the cassini vims instrument visual and
infrared mapping spectrometer down below in the middle and there we are seeing through one of
those methane windows to the surface and what we're seeing are
lakes uh in the dark dark regions um
probably a methane cloud in the lower left there i remember when we didn't know if there
were methane clouds and we were having a debate at cornell university when bob samuelson and i were making our
presentation and uh carl sagan and his team are making their presentation and a group from
canada who uh his name escaped me now and we were kind of arguing over methane
clouds methane supersaturation and of course now we know the answers to all of this
um in the lower right we see a huygens image from their downward pointing imager as it parachuted to the surface
of titan and this image we see well we call that we used to call them fluvial channels i think we can call
them rivers now um clear evidence of that uh the darkish area on the bottom of the
image covers about half of the three images that are stitched together
there that's uh that's a hydrocarbon lake we now know that's hydrocarbons and the whitish features
we see over the lake are in fact methane clouds um going right up from there back to
voyager you notice that the top portion of that image is different
than the bottom portion the top portion is darker than the bottom portion right northern hemisphere is darker in that
image than the southern hemisphere that is not uh a sun angle effect
that is real um i'm on jupiter we see um
uh six hadley cell circulation centers from equator to pole which result in the
beautiful uh abandoned structure of jupiter on earth we have three badly cells from equator to pole because
our rotation rate is a bit slower than jupiter's titan's rotation rate is very slow and so depending on the season you
have uh half of the titan here you have simple transport
of material from the southern hemisphere to the north and back again so it's a fascinating object
well um here is the closest up image we have
of titan at this point this was taken by the huygens uh
lander as it parachuted to the ground you saw an image from above the surface just a
few moments ago this is now on the ground looking at the surface of titan and we
anticipated that uh because we understood the we we had
been able to model the atmosphere before cassini and we understood that it was raining
on titan that the hydrocarbons and the nitriles were precipitating out and probably
making it to the ground and so the huygens probe was designed so that it could float
if it landed in a hydrocarbon lake or it could survive on the ground
and on the bottom of the probe there was a spring
and as the probe landed that spring compressed and if it hadn't compressed any
we would say okay it's in liquid if it had compressed hard and complete and rapidly we'd say okay it landed on a
very solid surface turns out it had it landed in something of a marshy surface
and what you're seeing in this image here you can see some of the flatter areas
that are liquid on the surface and some of these rocks here which we believe
are a water ice frozen solid remember the surface 95 kelvin
so water is not flowing on the surface covered with phones covered with with prebiotic material nitriles and
hydrocarbons that have the potential as the building blocks
of life so um
i think the thing that makes titan most interesting is is its atmosphere it is a soup it is a
soup of prebiotic chemicals some of them that in fact we know
are building blocks of life such as hydrogen cyanide but we and we have a
nitrogen um chemistry remember this is ultraviolet-like
striking nitrogen and striking methane and forming new chemicals that are that
form new chemicals that form new chemicals and so on so we have methane we have acetylene
we have hydrogen cyanide we have diciano acetylene it means the most incredible
soup of chemicals and that is one of the things that you need to form life right
you need heat you we we believe you need water and you need chemistry so titan
certainly fits the bill with the chemistry
here's a model of the atmosphere of titan that we have made
um h new coming in on the top there that's just ultraviolet light
uh providing the energy for uh photo disassociation
of uh nitrogen and methane you see methane and ethane c2h6 ethane being
formed methane clouds in the troposphere and then rain and
some sort of acquisition of the of this hydrocarbon
rain on the surface the methane then by the way uh evaporates back up to create clouds
and so there's a methane cycle on titan as opposed to a water cycle that we have
on earth so i mentioned water
when we fly by titan we can watch how our spacecraft
trajectory is changed and that tells us about the bulk uh density of titan of
anybody that that you fly by and so it turns out that the bulk density of uh titan is less than two
grams per cubic centimeter and what that means is that there's an awful lot of water
either water ice or liquid water on that planet earth's earth by the way which is
a fairly rocky planet has a mean density of about five and a half grams per cubic
centimeter so titan is less rocky with more
water and the models that we have suggest that somewhere below the surface it is quite
likely that there's a liquid ocean perhaps it is liquid water mixed with hydrocarbons
perhaps at some point is just liquid water but there is a possibility there is a possibility that life exists
below the surface and in aquifers uh on titan
which i think just adds to the you know the interest in this amazing body absolutely
well why am i talking about voyager and cassini my goodness the entire world is
abuzz with james webb space telescope um and what we
generally think of james webb as is a an instrument that's going to show us the beginning of the universe a very very
soon after the beginning of the universe the first galaxies that have formed and how galaxy evolution happened and what
is dark matter and all of these big big questions but in fact
there are scientific objectives for james webb in our own solar system
we recently saw he was an engineering
instrument that took a picture of um uh jupiter in the uh what was it maybe
two to three micron range so um uh what about titan
and it turns out that uh here are the four instruments that um uh
james webb will use uh near cam uh camera which also has
spectroscopy capabilities a near spec near a near infrared spectrometer and a mid-infrared spectrometer and then the
then the engineering or navigation camera
and uh if you looked at the graph down below here you can see each one of these little
squares is a pixel on the g on james webb and so we can get at least eight
depending upon how you define the surface maybe 10 or so pixels across the
disk of titan which means we're going to have spatial resolution
uh titan moves less than six milliarc seconds per second across the sky
james webb can slew at 30 milliarc seconds uh per second so no problem there with a pointing stability of
0.05 arc seconds and uh titan's diameter is uh 0.7 arc
seconds and so um we can get some very nice data from
james webb looking at titan and i'm so excited to see some of the first uh
images and spectra uh to see what james webb can do i i don't know when that's going to occur i haven't heard about
titan being targeted yet but i i know that that will be in the um in the solar system package
well looking a little further into the future uh dragonfly the um uh johns
hopkins university applied physics laboratory uh won the contract to send dragonfly to titan
this is a drone that they're going to land on the surface of titan that's cool they'll use
um parachutes here remember the atmosphere of titan is very thick it's not only
denser at the surface it's much more extended than earth's atmosphere so parachutes make a lot of sense and once
you get to the surface there um this drone will actually fly around
and sample the atmosphere fly to different places sample the surface be able to sample some of the liquid
hydrocarbons on the surface give us a lot more information about that dragonfly is going to launch in
2007 and uh it's going to take about
seven years uh cruise cruise phase until it reaches titan in 2034. so um we have
to be patient but that's going to be an exciting time
and finally i just want to make the point that uh even though titan is very cold right now with an atmospheric haze
that obscures the surface and obscures a lot of the sunlight that does
a little bit of sunlight that does reach the surface at some point in the not too distant
future well six billion years from now our sun will become a red giant after it
uses up all of its hydrogen fuel and and has started converting helium to carbon in
its core and as it does that it will expand you i'm sure many of you all know this and
engulf the um uh the orbits of uh mercury venus earth
and possibly mars so it's gonna be a bad day for us but the ultraviolet flux from the sun
will will uh drop significantly which means the atmosphere of titan will
will clear up the sun will be much larger pumping out photons from a much larger surface area
means that it's going to be much warmer in the outer solar system and i'm thinking uh and here's a this is
a paper by ralph lorenz jonathan lunine and chris mckay back in 1997 titan under a red giant sun perhaps
all of that frozen water on titan will become liquid water at that time
the hydrocarbons and nitriles which exist um can exist in liquid form un under the
cold temperatures we have now they will go back into the atmosphere and maybe oceanfront property is where you want to
be on titan in six billion years if you're interested after the talk
so in summary um i thought i had a
here we go okay earth has poles and polar processes
right seasons lakes rivers lots of water clouds and precipitation smog and biotic chemistry
titan has poles and polar processes uh in fact you can see on this image here
it's slightly darker at about about about the one o'clock position that's called north polar hood
on titan it has seasons lakes rivers lots of water clouds and precipitation smog
biotic in parentheses perhaps prebiotic chemistry so
i think i can i think i hope i've made the case that um titan is not only a fascinating world
with um real opportunities to find life at least
microbial life and is a better sister planet for earth than uh venus and i'll stop there
absolutely yeah it sounds like it's the logical next uh
next great leap you know for us titan ropa mars
very high ticket items which is why we're nasa is spending
millions of your tax dollars to go there right i'm trying to figure out how i can't i
can't plan a vacation in two weeks and lose planning a vacation in several billion years
trying to think ahead that's right well lou thank thank goodness there's people like you who are
thinking ahead and uh you know i think that uh you know a
[Music] a life search mission to tighten is is certainly where i would spend some of my
tax dollars if i could just choose where it goes so um scott i scott i forgot to say i'm
very much looking forward i've got a uh an observer to a backyard observatory
it's going to be delivered in a month or so oh great i'm very much looking forward to putting my five inch explore
scientific evening oh thank you thank you well look at this guy that's
awesome that's awesome well thank you i hope to see a photo of it soon so that's
great i think that every telescope deserves its own uh uh home it's a little observatory
whether it's your you know your balcony or if you are lucky enough to have a backyard where you can build something
uh you know it definitely makes um all astronomers uh much more productive
because the scopes are ready to go you know so right that's that's the whole idea go out push
a button and observe the universe and away it goes lou thanks again thanks for coming on uh
once again to global star party my pleasure scott all right okay so um we
are going to transition to uh professor kareem jeff jaffer from
john abbott college and the royal astronomical society of canada montreal center
i do not know how many global star parties you've been on i should probably start keeping track i'm over 40 now
over 40. wow that's that's great that's great so that's that's quite a few i would say
that uh you're definitely more than a regular at this point so but um
i am turning it over to you and uh thanks for coming on to the 100th global star party thanks scott it's a pleasure
to be here and uh as usual i'm going to try to stick to something sim close to the theme but i'm going to
start off with a few little bits that i wanted to chat about i'm really happy to be here to celebrate
the hundredth uh wow it's been it's been quite the journey and i'm going to talk a little
bit about the journey and a little bit about few of the activities going on but i do want to start with a land and sky
acknowledgement uh we haven't had one yet today so i wanted to take a few moments to mention that here from
montreal i'm on unseated lands from the traditional territories of the mohawk and the algonquin peoples and most of
the gsp audience has heard me in the past talk about some of these two i'd seen stories from indigenous peoples and
right now we are in the waning part of the thunder moon
and i know in a lot of parts of uh the northern hemisphere especially here in
the western world we are craving that uh thunder we need it right now to give us some
respite from the heat wave that we've got in but we are at the waning gibbous this is a picture from roger hyman from
space oddities from yesterday in the uk and we are at the third quarter moon
tomorrow and so it's a wonderful moon to watch but it also gives us the dark skies early in the evening
the other thing for us to keep an eye out for of course is the sun and roger imaged the sun yesterday and the reason
why i want to share this with you is to share with you some awesome news that i've been putting on facebook which is that my son elias is currently at mount
wilson observatory he was one of the nine students chosen for the soar
program the summer observational astrophysics retreat and yesterday he sent me his first
observation which was from the snow solar telescope of the sunspot and they
match so well with a slightly rotated version of what roger had posted earlier in the day so i was just really happy to
see that that he was starting to do that type of observational note taking and he wrote to me last night saying that he
finally understands r.a and dex i asked him to explain it to me when he gets back but it's a lot of fun to hear these
experiences that youth get to have and we got to do a lot of that over these last couple of days adrian gave us
a talk this past saturday and several of my students actually watched the youtube afterwards and sent me questions about
wide field astrophotography and one of them has already gone into the college today and borrowed a dslr camera for a
week so that they can go out and try a few exposures in a few different time settings without a tracker but just to
see what they can get when they go out to dark skies and that's the type of thing we really love to see
and these last few days one of the big things that we've been doing here in canada is we've been supporting shad
canada with outreach from the rasc so the mcgill campus of shad canada
opened up in 2018 and our montreal center has been supporting them since day one with one type of an
observational outing with some informational presentations at the start of the evening and we got out on the
field and we set up telescopes and unfortunately the clouds won but towards the end of the night just as
they were heading back to the bus they got to see the iss pass over top they got to see the summer triangle they got
to see a little bit of the big dipper and then the waning almost full moon
rose just as their bus was leaving the campus and last night i was reached out by uh
shad new brunswick where they had a speaker cancel and they asked if i could do a talk on indigenous astronomy so i
did a two-eyed scene talk for them and it was a lot of fun to hear a little bit of the perspective from the students but
one of the things that we talked about was the role of light pollution in limiting what we can see of the night
sky and i was i was enjoying today i got an email from the organizer there ian that
on their walk back to the campus a lot of the students were looking at the lights on campus and analyzing which
ones were friendly to the observing of the night sky and to the migration of birds and which ones were not and so it
really does start to show you the impact that our outreach can have and a lot of that outreach that we've
been able to do has come from these global star parties now my own
history with the global star party started in december 2020 when i helped my daughter put together her
presentation that i gave a presentation on observing the great conjunction from home and she talked a little bit about
using her telescope in the driveway what she would see and jenna had recruited her as a youth speaker
and since then i've kind of been really enamored with this this venue of
reaching out to a global audience and when i pitched the international astronomy day for gsp 45 scott was
absolutely gung-ho and even kind of gave the reins to myself and russell to just go with it and we ended up with this
amazing eight-hour program that was just wonderful it really just
i mean it it let us showcase a little bit of what makes the montreal center special but it also let us
bring in people from all over the world and even meet so many new friends in the gsp regulars
we followed that up i stayed online from then and i i've stayed a regular participant but as a center we also
hosted the 45 degree star party with dunedin in new zealand and we had such a
wonderful time sharing the 45 degree north and the 45 degrees south skies
but at the same time the youth movement was really taking off in the gsps as well we had so many youth presenters
coming in tara came back on to do the creation station presentation and then
herself along with nicolina along with bella and nathan they started the cosmic
generation which now has the support of the rasc of the astronomical league and
especially of explore scientific in the explore alliance and so when the next skies of issue comes out you're going to
see an entire section by the cosmic generation and so i love seeing that type of a connection with the global
star parties and as terry mentioned last week in the global star parties i talked
about these first five images from the james webb and we talked a little bit about the science of them and i know in the second
section tonight there's going to be a little bit more on a couple of these targets and i'm looking forward as an
observer as a viewer to watching those but the thing that really struck me is
what came out the next day tuesday they presented these five pictures on wednesday morning they
shared infrared images of jupiter and when they shared the infrared images of
jupiter there were a couple of things that really stuck out to me the first was how bright europa was with its
reflection of the heat of the light using that ice surface
and that brightness is really kind of counter-imposed by the
shadow of europa being visible there beside the great red spot and then you can see those rings and
those really thin rings around jupiter are really visible in this mid in this mid infrared mid to low infrared
but this brought back a memory and it's a memory that's rather timely and i'm a little bit sad that david had to log off
right now but i know he'll be on later so i'm hoping we can talk to him about this in the next section because
it reminded me that we've seen jupiter in the infrared before including the rings from the infrared telescope
facility for mauna kea but we also saw jupiter in infrared when
shoemaker levy 9 hit and we saw the infrared heat signatures of those
collisions of the many pieces of shoemaker levy 9 hitting jupiter and
that reminded me that we are at the 28th anniversary of shoemaker levy 9.
it struck starting on july 16 1994 all the way through to the 22nd so right now
we are right in the window of that anniversary we're not gonna have another global star party until afterwards so i
just wanted to remind people that not only did we get to watch from the comet discovery to the understanding that the
comet had broken up during its previous past by jupiter and then the realization
that the trajectory of the comet was going to bring it back to collide with jupiter the following year
but we were able to then watch the impacts from earth even on the night side of jupiter
and using hubble we could identify the plumes as they happen
and then follow them over months as the actual motion of the clouds and the
storms on jupiter cause those plumes to dissipate and stretch out
this was incredible this was one of the first examples to me of just how incredibly useful it was to look at
dynamic behavior with these space telescopes so what i want to talk to you a little bit about today is this idea
sorry i also wanted to remind everyone that we did we'd lost jean shoemaker before but we
lost carolyn shoemaker this year and i was remembered because i'm going to cellophane this
year that up until the early 2000s the three of them were staples at
stellophane sharing their love of astronomy with all of the not just the telescope makers but also the families
and the enthusiasts that would come out there so what i wanted to mention to you is
realizing what hubble allows us to do in real time and now with james webb up there and all the attention that it's
been getting i wanted to talk about seeing beyond but look at it in terms of seeing beyond
what we can see here on earth but then also the importance of using your own instrumentation and your own naked eyes
here on earth so i thought i'd start off with what my devices are how i do astronomy here at john abbott college
and in my driveway and i have a couple of dobs that i use both a table top as well as a base job a nice truss one
that's a 10 inch mirror and then at home i have an eight inch and a six inch i have a neck star that i can use
including for solar photography like we did for the 2017 partial eclipse and then i have access to a coronado i have
a dslr camera and i have binoculars and bringing all of those things together i can just get out there and enjoy a
little bit of what makes the night sky special and one of the things i love sharing with students is just watching
the moons of jupiter and jupiter itself over the span of a few minutes or a few hours or an entire night
and watch that orientation of the different moons and see it change over time
and then when you start to access larger and better devices and the
institutional knowledge of some of the amateur astronomers who've been doing this for a long period of time you get
better and better at it when mars was in opposition using our telescope there we
were able to actually get this view of mars where you can see structure on the surface of mars over a long
period of time and we can do that for saturn and we can pull out the actual
gaps in the rings we can pull out stripes on the surface and we can watch it and stabilize it learn image
processing techniques to get a nice picture out of this and this is one of the things that i love being able to share with the students that even though
it's a small target and even when you're tracking that small target just because of the wind the vibrations on the ground
it will move around in your field of view there's processing software that can pick out the best frames to use to try
to get an image out of this but it's also just fun to watch and to look at
them whether it's through the eyepiece or whether it's through electronically assisted astronomy
so you teach them image processing and you learn a little bit of the techniques you can use and the different
instrumentation you can use and then if you want to go one step further you start to use robotic telescopes and the
rasc has for us in a robotic telescope that our classrooms can use that's based
out of california and i've shared with the gsp audience before the wonder in the students when they
take that single image and they process the photons and they pull out all the nebulosity all the gas even if they blow
out the trapezium they still see such a spread for the orion nebula and other
targets and seeing their wonder when they start to realize that you can process
these same photons in different ways to pull out different features and then they get access to some of the
wonderful data that's available and you can see these students start to shine and pull out just what they're looking
for and that's one of the things we were able to do this year with astrophotography techniques in our
posters that the students presented at the rasc general assembly
and then you can start to do science you can take images of stars and measure the
photometric data and determine the transit of exoplanets you can also reach
out into solar system probes and using those solar system probes you can identify
not just the cloud structures on jupiter but also zoom in on single storms you can use
other probes and start to examine other objects like mars or saturn or even pluto using the new horizons mission
data so you can really start to see beyond the limitations of what you couldn't otherwise capture with a small
telescope in your driveway and then this year i've been able to go into the national schools observatory as
well as the lco and i've been able to reach out to telescopes all across the world which enables my students to even
look at southern hemisphere targets which otherwise you know we only get to see on the gsps when cesar comes on or
when nico's shares or maxi shares or my channel shares and we get to see their processing of this data now my students
get to access those files and image them and process them themselves and finally this year i got to do a
project to use satellite data and really look down at the earth and see the earth
in a whole other light so this is the gaspe peninsula where my family and i actually vacationed last year for a
couple of nights and we made it all the way out to the coast out here and this is per se rock and it's just incredibly
gorgeous to go out and look but then you get to see the topography and you get to see soil or
moisture levels and you get to see vegetation and all of that and you get to see all of that through
the lens of these different satellites orbiting the earth that's so cool now bring all of that together to seeing
beyond and you ask the students what's your takeaway and for a lot of them it's
still those moments showing the equipment and talking about the moon and sharing it with people
setting up a single telescope yourself just borrowing it taking it to a community center setting it up and you
have people coming out in suits after a wedding and showing them the moon showing them jupiter and saturn and
seeing the kids line up jaws dropped ignoring the ice cream in
their hands because they're getting to see something wonderful and then setting up in the parks with other astronomers
and sharing with an entire community or even just setting up on your own driveway and looking at the moon
yourself and just taking a moment to enjoy astronomy and seeing beyond what
your naked eye can see and that's what really for me the gsps
is sharing this type of feeling this type of experience and this type of of
images that we get to see with the world when you can't be with them in a park together we do it
virtually online and this is what the students walk away with that moment
under the sky with a telescope knowing that there's so much out there to see and experience
so from behalf of the montreal center i want to thank you for a hundred awesome
global star parties and i hope we'll have more than a hundred more scott yeah
well thank you so i'm looking forward to getting to our 200th global star party
as well so um we uh uh will um
transition uh to uh charles ennis uh charles
do i have this right he is the current president of the resc yes he's a long-time board member he was vice
president for the last couple of years and this year at the uh just after the general assembly he was voted in as
president of our board oh wonderful and he is uh apparently an author of like over 20
books is that correct i'll let charles speak to that charles okay all right
charles we're gonna let you come but thank you for uh coming on board and
talking to us um you're on the 100th global star party
and charles i just briefly want to say um i've enjoyed being a part of the rask
since i joined maybe a few seconds ago i think you know it was a month or two and already hitting
the ground running giving talks so um awesome it's a it's been enjoyable just to be a
part of the rask and i recommend it for anyone who can join whether you're from the states
or canada glad that you're with us to share that uh with everybody and uh
i'd like to thank everybody for uh the opportunity to be here tonight and i also want to
congratulate you all on 100 tsp what an amazing accomplishment uh thank you along with all the members of the resc
we wish you the best of a fortune with the next 100 it's uh it's very exciting
thank you very much i have been asked tonight to speak specifically by by karim about something
that we are doing at the rac and i want to share this with you
come on trying to get this to cooperate there we
go okay so it's a project of the
inclusivity and diversity committee and it's the world asterisms project which we started just a little over a year ago
and i want to start first by gratefully acknowledging that i observed and live
on the unc lands of the seashell first nation so what we've done is we've gone out
there to look at all the sky cultures of the world how many so far 400
and how many asterisms we collected in the last year with the help of ethno astronomers all over the world and
various other astronomers out there 9039 including 311 names
of the milky way and this is about whatever is down here is mirrored in the sky this is a great picture by migma
artist gerald and it's about perspectives it's about showing people there's ancient science
out there and it's about inspiration and we're using the concept of two white singing that was created by
enigma elder albert marshall back in 2004 which is all about sharing the
perspectives of the two cultures it's a reconciliation progress process or
halifax that are used with the migraine we're using it in our project this isn't just about
stick figures in the sky some early civilizations did create these kinds of asterisms
but it isn't just stick figures it's about single star asterisms in africa that's a very common thing where you
have each star as a character and a group of stars as an asterism you've got
you know characters all over the sky who are involved in the story it's about dark asterisms which is very common for
cultures in the southern hemisphere where you have them looking into the milky way and looking towards the middle of the galaxy
instead of out of it like we are in the northern hemisphere and you see all of these dust clouds which become
various different things in their sky and so basically
now it's live on the world asterisms page of the royal astronomical society is a handbook
with all of those asterisks in it with descriptions of the cultures and the stars involved it is lists including a
pdf and an excel spreadsheet which gives you the precise location and notes for finding it yourself along with that list
of names in the milky way and it is a cultures resource list that lists all of the cultures tells you
where they are from and then lists all of the written and online and other resources you can use to learn more
about those cultures that's the link or you can just go to the resc website search box for the
world asterisks project enter and it'll take you to list free download if you're a researcher
get a hold of me because we have a google drive where we share this stuff live where we can work on this project
together and this is a living project because we are constantly making partnerships with first nations
and other groups to help them recover their skies and the process of naming skies is ongoing
people are still naming stuff up here this is why inbox looks like just about now and if you have an asterism you'd like
to share since i started this project i've had a number of people get a hold of me and say well you know i was found
disastrous and would you be interested absolutely yes because of all there's a whole big list
of telescopic asterisks it's about five percent of the project
from organizations like the astronomical league we're grateful for them sharing their uh stuff but people all over the
world sharing their views of the sky and if you'd like to be on that list we'd like to put you there
so if you want to contact us astro business project at resc
and that's my email there and i'm just gonna stop right there
this has been a very exciting year for for a whole lot of reasons for the resc i i like to you know
think that we're we're doing everything that we can to try to get as many people out there involved um no matter what the
situation is and this is this project i just mentioned is about celebrating the cultures of the world
and inviting people to to be part of it and this year's board the rdc is the most
diverse in all ways that we've ever had and so we're very excited about the direction
that we're going and we're looking forward to to working with any of you out there that would like to work with us on
projects like that wonderful fantastic
fantastic how many members does the rasc have at this point we have about 5 430
centers right now spreading across canada and um [Music]
we're all very active with our with our outreach many of our centers have
observatories my center is the sunshine coast um which is uh on the west coast of british columbia
but where was spread from coast to coast and karim mentioned our robotic telescope
earlier which we have down in california which allows people all over to view the skies uh we're actively working
on getting some more as well because we've got a lot of people lining up for the eye shadows of the camera
but we're uh very very uh excited about uh
the direction we're going we have a new dorner telescope museum that's going to be opening in the next year which
features uh optics from uh canadian observers
and um we've got all kinds of publications that that will make it easy for
amateur astronomers to view this guy like our observer's handbook which uh which
sells thousands of copies so if you're interested in uh becoming a member or you're interested
in our project do uh give us a shout we'd be happy to help you absolutely absolutely
all right now yes that they would have to know look no further than the rasc website which i think is
resca yep i'll just put that over here there we go
thank you very much thank you so much charles thank you very much scott for letting me uh come here today yeah
please come back on sometime all right so we're going to go from
canada all the way down to brazil uh to uh marcelo souza marcello is
the editor of sky's up magazine he's a powerhouse of uh astronomy education and astronomy
awareness in in the americas uh he's based in brazil
um and he's a very creative guy i mean he's he's done everything from help create
brazil's first dark sky park to uh putting on astronomy events at malls
that look like you're driving into like an astronomy drive-in you know so i think that is so cool
but he inspires people young and old and very very pleased very honored to have
marcelo souza on the 100th global star party marcel it's all up to you thank you very much for the invitation
squad thank you for the kind words and uh i received two
next uh last week uh the information that was fantastic for
us because the experience we have with a driving of astronomy in a shopping center here in brazil was
received a prize as the second best experience in shopping centers in our country
then something fantastic you know that science can win a prize
with outreach achieved in shopping centers
the other prizes very associated with shoppings and the activities that
helped you to sell more things and we received the enterprise to because we
developed a project we're not the shopping center that's insane before that's so awesome
for this project that is something fantastic for us yeah i as it's easy andy congratulations quite
frankie is saying 100. yeah martial everybody keeps
congratulating me but it's it's really all the people that pulled together to make global star party happen you know
so i'm just the guy that connects the wires together so that's who had his possible father
thank you so much and i i have today i wrote i script
to not to be a long presentation and i have a script here okay for helping me and
i'll share my screen okay why don't you illustrate what i'm saying
this is the links for our astronomy group here in brazil
and the since ancient times humans being have been trying to develop
a waste of animals that accurately he viewed their observations of the sky
image of the sky of job seven phenomenon stars recorded for posterity in ancient greece
better already parts of knowledge of the technique for produce producing
images by directing the process of light through a small hole
joryfish's camera obscure however they were amazing on jb 707 the
landscape here is the only illustration that i have for this arab
that is al-hazen her full name is abu aliyah hassan even in
high tone he lived in the 10th century and presented their way
of observing eclipses using a camera obscure in this case the camera obscura consists
of our home with a small hole in the window the amazing form in the world you all
this method allowed the magnification of the image of the sun and a comfortable
and safe observation of the solar eclipse the records of jobs have demise
however were still made through the rounds and paintings
here is galileo galileo galilei is the maze of his observation through
a drawings that way it was possible to get an idea of his observations in the drawers he
made he showed the position of the jupiter moons the face of venus the days of the moon
and saturn he couldn't get enough resolution to observe saturn's rings
and something that's fantastic for me are the unscent maps sky maps
sky map with representation of how different civilizations solved
constellations are required that were left by many people in the us during a
long period great artists were responsible for representing representing the constellation beautiful
maps of the sky very producers works of arts with creative and
beautiful designs for each of the constellations these are some of these
ancient sky maps that were made by fantastic artists
you can see here some of them
and the dream persisted of one day being able to accurately require the observed
celestial image in 1826 the french
josephine nissa for me obtained the first photography that is
this one that i'm showing here it was an image from his window the beginning of a revolution it was
supposed to make a great required of the moments lived he made for
with adults depending on precision techniques and talent of drawing of a
human being in 1840 the american chemistry and photographer
john wieland rape obtain what is considered the first as photography that is this one here he qualified first time
in a photography maze of the moon in 1880
his son angel drape first obtaining as photography of the orion nebula
since that time the equator of image of the sky has been improved to obtain
mages with details that you cannot you can't perceive
with the direct observation of the universe technique is with where is developed
that allows the recording of images of a very tenuous stars
in order to obtain good images of the stars it was necessary to have a photograph or a photographic film of
excellent quality and with a special characteristics i
i am the time that we use these kind of cameras i use many times these manual
cameras to take pictures and i lost many pictures because of the lights when i
opened the camera then it was air for many people young people
they don't know what was the beginning of the photography yeah a long exposure time was necessary
for a photographic film to be sensitized by the faint light captured
due to the rotation of the earth which was necessary at all times to move the telescope so that it continued to face
the star being observed those motors were developed to be coupled to telescopes in order to allow
tracking of the star for a long appeal compensating for the earth rotation
movements nowadays it is used these top cameras to obtain
maze of the universe this is what you have in our daily life yeah and digital's
photography is a new way of obtaining beautiful images of this kind and the
this is uh something fantastic for your material astronomers that they
are making a fantastic contribution in design now everything that i said until now is
because i have a brazilian poetry here that i i i translate to english and i will try to
read then nowadays these every day we are surprised with new
wonderful images of the universe obtained with the use of lives and modern telescopes we now have a newer
and more powerful powerful device for observing the sky the same james webb
space telescope we now observe the sky almost the entire
electromagnetic spectrum where we even heard these stars
and the brazilian poet olav black who wrote one of the most beautiful
and famous poems in the portuguese language the name of department is via
that means milky way i i translate it to english
and as it is a special program i will try to read because it is
fantastic then this is poem now you say hear the stars
right you have lost your sense and i will tell you however
that to hear them i often wake up and i open the windows
pale with a punishment and we talked all night while the milky
way like an open canopy twinkles
and when the sun came longing and weeping i still look for them in the
desert sky you will now say
foolish friends watch conversations with them what sense
do you have what they say when they are with you
and i will say to you love to understand them only those who love you can have
ear able to hear and understand the stars
this is something that i don't know if in english uh sounds like in portuguese but he's a
fantastic poem and now we hear these stars
and the love bellocco wrote it is before the haters there's something fantastic man
and every day we have seven more distant stars located tens hundreds thousands and
millions of light years from life fought on striving on a long journey to
reach us the famous brazilian poet maru quintana who wrote in one of his
poems anduin's passes outside with your memory blank
what he saw he does not even remember and i saw nothing
i can only guess then we just guess what happened to the
universe and formulate theories to unhave unravel
its mysteries [Music] is
i hope one day you have more information about university and each day we know
more about the universe andrew heavy models
more accurate models that help you us to understand what you see what's happening
thank you scott thank you thank you for sharing all the poetry with us it was wonderful very
nice thank you and congratulations for the yeah
congratulations to all the presenters here it's really wonderful so and thank you so much for all that you do marcelo
you're a real real inspiration thank you so much okay it's my pleasure to be here yeah
always a pleasure to have you all right so um we are going to keep uh moving right
along here um uh marcelo uh uh
uh is uh you know you need to watch watch marcelo's websites and also
uh his facebook page uh which is um uh you know uh uh the uh
uh club to astronomy uh and um or excuse me the club
uh remind me martial which one it is it's the uh
astronomers that he came to brazil and was one of the first director of the national
observatory in brazil yeah louis cruz
c-r-u-z yes okay so anyways thank you so much again
um we are moving on from brazil over down to argentina
we have nicolas arias with us he is a musician a drummer
and so we like to call it show hammer time with nico but because he is known as nico the hammer but he is an amazing
amazing astrophotographer and astronomer and it's great to have you on uh global star
party our 100th edition thanks nico hi scott thank you so much
happy 100th csp for for everyone it's a it's really nice to be here with
you and uh this was a from the beginning to now a really nice
gsp and i think that all the presentations uh converging that the the
the main thing that bring us here that is to share the experience
to to show about our equipment uh or the humanity equipments and
and ensure this patient and show how we do the photograph the observations and the
studies everything and and this is really really nice and let
me share my screen
here we go can you see it yes we can
okay okay well uh i think that there was a a lot of things
to to share in these past weeks i i wasn't in the gsp
but the shame web telescope let's move on guys here i am
so i i i will try to share some personal things and and to talk about the change well
at first i i want to share with you that my patio philosophy banfield finally
gets the observatory code from the minor planet center i am really happy with this
a few weeks ago i get the the confirmation so we have a new observatory here in
argentina so this is a really
a really nice thing for me
and as i say i uh with with the
same web desktop images uh one in particular is about italian star
that is the planetary name with ngc 3132 uh
that it's a a beautiful pancake nebula that here in the southern hemisphere uh
we we we have this particular nebula really high in the sky
for the i think that from beginning from the winter here
and this is an observation that i made from my house uh i have a borderline guy here
but with the adoption and using a filter the oxygen tree filter
you can see this nebula is stunning to watch this nebula because as
you see this is a sketch an observable observational sketch i made
you can see that you can watch not only the the main star and the the
ring but you can see some some ring
behind uh like another nebula behind is it's really
really nice to to spend time observing these kind of objects and this nebula in particular
and this is a picture that i take with my adoption
with my hand adoption and making lrcv composition i i mean i
make the the four captures moving my job
the the light with no filter and the energy and b filters with the mono camera
and you can see that you can work something like the sketch obviously
with a better definition and the colors and
this uh with the option and uh
this is a comparison about the same nebula with hubble i mean this is ma this image is
stunning when i watch the nebula i i always remember this habit this habit image and
but now we we reach a new glasses and
we can watch and observe this amazing image
from the james webb telescope and it's
when i when i saw this picture the other day in the live mission of nasa i was
shocked because it's it's amazing not only the the details on
the nebula the the galaxies around the image is
it's stunning and it's really nice that they pick uh objects that
you can observe and you can capture from your house with your small telescope
and and the comparison it i i love to to do the comparison as it okay this is the
stunning image of the james webb scope the heavily mesh telescope and
this is our image at the same object it's really there it's
it's amazing and of course
the other day knight i i get my my saturn bonus track for the csp
and i i want to show this is a video that i captured
from saturn then you can watch the hand packet movement
in uh for every primary capture i need to do uh these videos that one and a half
minutes four times because i have a mono monochromatic camera so i
this shot with no filter and then i make the four extra videos with the air gmb
filter to get these four images
with a a a nice night it wasn't the better night but was really nice you can see
some details in every channel and uh
this is the result when i shine every channel you can see even the a few moons
there and we are about 20 days about the saturn supposition so
it's saturn night from here so
well god this was my my little presentation i know nico thank you so much thank you a lot
of people too yes it's great to have you on and
get your perspective on astronomy wonderful okay
thank you so much all right so our next speaker is we go from argentina back up to canada
to quebec to mr norman fulham who makes the
world's largest telescopes for amateur astronomy with the
the famous uh fulham folded newtonian reflector telescopes and but i think what's even
more amazing is just norman's own life journey and the way that uh he found his
path through music and then by gazing at the stars and finally through making his own
incredible instruments normand um is uh
you know honored it was an honor for me to work with him uh in establishing explore scientific as
the um distributor for uh the optik fulham uh
product line here in the americas and with the exception of canada of course but
but uh uh really i i admire norman i think that he is uh
uh one of the most amazing telescope builders in the world today and uh he's a great friend very friendly and
extremely talented uh both with the skills at making uh telescopes uh making
optics and solving problems but uh he does beautiful music too so norman
thanks for coming on global star party well thank you very much scott for inviting me for the 100
gsp uh i've been part of the gsp a few times in the past and i always
enjoyed the presentation that all the great speakers are coming and sharing
their experience and they're sharing their passion about astronomy uh it's
a very large family around the world that share that love of the universe and the
passion of whatever is out there so the the theme of today's gsb is
seeing beyond and this is kind of an open
open a subject for that can include any anything in life
uh seeing beyond yourself seeing behind your possibility your capability seeing uh past
the the view that we have and we saw james webb's telescope
possibility seeing beyond what we we thought was possible but i would like to
come back to myself seeing beyond myself that's what brought
me to what i'm doing right now today before i will start my it's not a
presentation it's just a talk that i will do about me and what got me to where i am right now
i have to think about my father uh taught me to see beyond what i what i
can do what's possible to do with my two hands uh he was a very very handy man uh
doing all kinds of stuff by himself uh he's he was not a mechanic he was not
a woodworker but he was able to do all those things that we just looked at him and said
how did he know what to do in that situation or this part of the
of a mechanical part of a car or whatever so he always amazed me when and he passed
away many many years ago i was still in my 20s very early 20s but when i was very young like from 10 years old up to
20. that's the part that we was building a new house and i really got to see
how intense it can be it could be and how uh his imagination got him to do
crazy things and very amazing things that you wouldn't think that was possible
so when i think about that i think my inspiration my
the way i see beyond when i first started to make telescopes
was i was thinking about my father he said nothing is impossible he got two
hands like everybody else and if someone makes something he's got two hands too so he can do the same thing
uh before i will i will go any further i would like to well you everybody knows
pretty much that i'm a i'm a music maker i play guitar and i sing i would like to sing a song
for my father for that everybody knows that song
it's a cat stephen song called father and son
so i brought my old 12 strings here today and um
just wanted to know if the sound is good not too loud guitar sound is okay
yeah okay so here it goes [Music]
it's not time to make a change just relax
take it easy you're still young [Music]
there's so much you have to go through
[Music]
i was once like you are now and i know that it's not easy to stay calm
take the time think a lot think of everything you've got for you
will still be here
how could i try to explain cause when i do it turns away again it's
always in the same same old story
from the moment i could talk i was ordered to listen now there's a
way and i know but i have to go away
i know i have to go
do
it's not time [Music]
settle
[Music] all the time that i've cried
keeping all the things i knew inside it's hard but it's harder to ignore it
if they were right i'd agree but it's them they know not me now
there's a way and i know but i have to go away
i know [Music]
wow
yeah so uh my father was a big big influence in my youth and he still is
because uh you know scott
since i've started everything i have made so far in making in my business here
i had to do it myself yes machine build my my focal tester build my tunnel bit everything coding
machine your polishing machines done and people come here and said man you're
crazy you think about those things how to do this i mean it's it's just
i think seeing beyond our possibility okay it's uh i see myself doing stuff
that uh right now that twin ten years ago i wouldn't even dream about doing
doing yeah everything is possible and um and astronomy the same thing the
universe is so immense so there's so many possibilities in the
up there and down here on earth we have everything that we can work with to to
make it uh to make it happen also so when we just look at the of the
uh the advancement in the technology that in the last 10 20 years 30 years it's amazing and what if you're thinking
100 years from now 200 years from now where we'll be where we we will be where will we be what kind of what kind of
science would we develop what kind of of uh rocket or satellite we will be able to
build in 200 300 years from now so seeing beyond it's not just
seeing beyond what's there it's seeing beyond in the future and
my approach like scott now and my approach on astronomy i'm a visual observer i
have the most respect for the astrophotograph for the people that do all the astrophoto i
i bow my head to them it's unbelievable what it can do now but my thing it's always been visual
observing uh to see it with my eyes what's out there through an eyepiece and
and the more the more that i want to see the bigger the telescope has to be so that's that's
just so large telescope that i built and those large telescopes are
mainly built for visual observing the folded newtonian was meant to be
an instrument for large aperture but to be safe first to do the observer instead of
being at 30 20 25 feet off the ground to observe at the eyepiece uh the folded
system makes it much safer to be about eight feet from the ground and you still have the same aperture telescope okay
you you're not doing astrophoto you're not a stacking image to get all the
colors and deep uh texture that you would have in the picture but your imagination when you look at
the eyepiece let's look at m45 n42 in a 42 in a 50 inch telescope by eye
okay and it's like i still have the image here i close my eyes that i can see it
because i was so mesmerized by the depth of the image that i was seeing the detail that i could if i kept looking
and looking looking area of the of the image i could go see details and details and to treat the effect and
it's amazing what the eyes and the the brain can do uh not just looking to it
and then next object next i know if you take time to look at an object visually and you can detect details that you you
wouldn't think that would be it would be visible by the naked eye it is so my vision my experience at telescope is
visual i wish i was able to share my experience more
but lately in the last five ten years i've been so busy developing those big school that i my uh my presence in uh
star bodies and uh gathering or even outreach uh was
was a little less because i had no time there's only 24 hour hours in a day and
uh but i wish i could eventually slow down a bit and then take more time
and observe more than i'm doing right now uh
and i would like to thank scott to make it uh to make my telescope more visible uh
to present my my work uh through his website through
his company to make people know that it's it's feasible it's there it's available on
the market yes in the past and 10 years ago looking for a 40 or 50 inches telescope
that was not possible well impossible but you
know not not very easily obtainable that's right so now it's there and uh
being i know scott that you are passionate about astronomy as much as i am yes you
love to observe visually also yes it's very
heartwarming for me to know that you accepted to be uh my representative it's
uh i don't know how to explain it but it's very yeah yeah but thank you thank you thank you very much you could have
chosen anyone so thank you very much thank you it's an honor yeah i don't have any presentation of
facebook or anything uh to show you guys only uh i want to explain that music
and astronomy for me are just like this they're both together uh
music is vibe sound waves light wave and sound waves are similar
uh i think every where i go in star body i always bring my guitar and i try i
make music because it's part of me and i think people enjoy it because it's so soothing and
goes well with uh observing the the universe so i
i will like to play a second song okay before i go because i told scott i have
a meeting with the zoo meeting with australia right after so we cannot stay in very long australia
it's nine o'clock tomorrow morning it's right that's right wonderful i had to postpone for about an hour at the
meeting but uh to be able to be here uh thank you so much thank you for inviting
me for the 100 winter star another winters over the global star party
yeah yeah yeah thank you so much norman that's a song that i think
star must would like to hear a few months in a month and a half i think yeah that's right
you packed my bag last night
zero [Music]
there's a guy there
i miss the urge so much i miss my wife
it's lonely out in space
[Music]
rocket man burning all the fuse out there alone [Music]
ours ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
in fact it's cold as hell
and there's no one there to raise them
and all that science i don't understand
just my job five days a week
i think it's gonna be a long long time don't don't bring me around yeah
[Music]
and i think it's gonna be a long time
and i think it's gonna be a long time
[Music]
guys thank you i'm observing and uh hopefully
uh we'll see each other live eventually yes yes we will serving together thank you
very much for having me thank you so much thank you norman that was great what a wonderful
way to end the first part one of the global star party
we are going to stay on the air here with you we
you'll see an extended uh intermission period about 45 minutes and then we come back on at seven o'clock and we have um
uh come back on with david levy uh david eicher from astronomy magazine will be on with us molly wakeling um
uh daniel higgins jason ginzel the vast reaches uh daniel barth from how do you
know will be on with us and young connell richards will be on john briggs
uh the uh with the alliance of historic observatories will be with us cesar
brello from argentina uh young navin uh senthil kumar
uh karina lutelier from from chile will be with us deep tea from
nepal uh adrian bradley and um and then we may have some pri
surprises at the very end but uh um do we want to uh
maxie how are we with uh with uh
images you want to show an image before we go
hi everyone well first of all uh good night and well it's a pleasure to
be here in the 100 events and i really enjoyed that kind of music norman it was
very very singing with him right at the very end there yeah you know i played the guitar too
but not like you yeah it's more like a like i do after photography but
i think in the astro is going me well but uh you know i
i really love that sound of that guitar particularly and of course those
songs those yeah songs that you played i know
and i also
when you you play the first one i i
yes it's a really deep sun yeah here in argentina we have another two the last month we have the the parents
day and i i don't sing i play the hr but i asked to my father
that i uh sing with me a particular song is it's a
particularly song here in argentina because it's dedicated to your old man
your viejo for example but well it was like a i i always wanted to do that and well
it was very emotional so well i'm struggling with my network
connection i have my wi-fi going on then go is off and
well i was pointing to [Music] let me share my screen for you for a
moment i think now the connection is stabilized so [Music]
let me okay do you see it
hello hello ah okay now i think because i was sharing the screen the
connection goes off well uh here in this case i was pointing to
[Music] the the the southern ring nebula
and i think i have the the focus because well it's going down
right now but let me see if i can go focus right now because i i have my my
motor and i can do here inside so let me show you how i do it you can
see here is the is very bubble the star
so here in the option of the focuser i do
some steps and then it will go into to get more pointless i
think and let's put it more fast let's see oh
there you go
and a little bit more i think now
yeah uh i was configuring i set up and then the connection goes really bad
but let's see in there i think now it's okay at 0.5 seconds
it's okay so let's stop this and now
we're going to take a a one minute picture of the southern ring nebula
before it goes off in the horizon here so well basically uh now i have my setup
uh in in my bike here in chibiko in argentina
but i'm controlling in this software blue stacks
to to do everything except the polar alignment because i had to be outside
but then to the they go to the guiding the focus
and the the the
here so uh well uh
like i told you more early scots it's a pleasure to be here you know
it's it's a long very long tuesdays that we
passed and it's like it was the last month and seeing that you know 100 events of
course i think i started in the 30 event i i don't remember as well but
oh sorry well here we have but i think the now the
i don't know what happened let's go to another picture but
i think this was the the
yes the motors maybe my dog pass through the one leg of the tripod
i have three outside so maybe that happened and well like i say it was is really an
honor to to be here for a couple of minutes uh i want to do some
live views of some objects that the james webb telescope take
or took sorry and [Music] to compare of
that pictures and what we see here uh in the
natural and normal level of an astrophotographer
particularly but anyway you know i did this particularly
nebula with the with myself and i remember and my my max
was i don't remember the date i don't know what's happening
let me see or maybe the the guiding is not working
very well
now you know is the the guidance system something is wrong could be wind
oh maybe yeah it was it wasn't really too windy i i didn't want in a half an
hour but maybe it's the one here's the the guiding system
is a base in phd 2 and
of course it does the multiple stars following and the principal star that
selects from them and here we have the the graph you know
maybe maybe it's too low and now that the telescope is pushing down maybe that's also two that's
a 30 seconds picture here in the five seconds you know it's a lot of field of view for
that single star and the shape of the ring with that but
do you remember the picture of the james webb tesco and also the picture that nico show you yes
ago so yes it's really stunning to even watch that
picture that has that particular galaxy that remembers the needle galaxy
but it's maybe in there i think
in and i and i couldn't even see it so here we go no no that's not now it's getting very good
so [Music] well i know also if the
[Music] the audience is watching and want to see some
thousand objects right now let me know it and let's see if i can
find it and let's see what we can do okay so scott i i come back to you again
okay okay well we will take a break um so for those of you who are watching um
please um uh you know get some some dinner uh
we've got a whole night ahead of us of of global star party our 100th event uh
you know as i mentioned earlier we're coming up on part two so we've got about
a little over half an hour and we'll be back at 7 p.m central but
we will still be on the air uh here with this intermission so hang in there
maxi did you already look at 47 to connie
and sorry i hope open the
eh do you hear me adrian yes i just unmute it yes i can hear
okay now i have the this issue in the internet
if i can point to 47 to canada let me see but i don't think so because it's really low at the
east right now but let me show let me see if i can find
it no problem
so what's up man how are you going how you doing i am hanging in there uh
did a little outreach today it was fun we had a young girl scout troop um we had five
different groups and we pointed the uh solar scope at the sun
they all got to see it some of them were able to see the prominences and the uh the uh sunspots
that were on there so it was a really good day oh excellent
that's that's really cool because you know also the sun right now is having a
activity that two years ago it was nothing
of course if you have this uh h alpha telescope it's great but
yeah it doesn't it doesn't seem much if you're using a battle filter only
um i'm searching 47 to canada but i think it's really low
now it's it's pointing to the south and maybe it's uh almost
uh 50 degrees above the horizon so
maybe let's see more
more later and now that's okay we can't see it
it'll at i mean at midnight maybe
okay i and i can't even points to the this particular
galaxy cluster i i cannot point to that area but
because it's also it's very low maybe i can go to the carina
and and you will see this region of the
gabriela mitral nebula that also show in the
jeff water scope that sounds good
yeah maybe i think i'm going to there to to see
or maybe some galaxies you know i have omega centauri also two
uh two two points right now um
the m83 well i have this ngc
53 67. i don't know i i couldn't open the um
the youtube i don't know if the audience asked so for some objects too
what's up um let's check it out oh there he is the man
the legend uh what's going on fellas coming from new york city
how are you doing coming from arizona
just as important we have the return of the noble dovid there he is
chat with us hi everybody what's going on and you're very study of the
the the comment that was the a couple days ago for jupiter you know i
i remember that and i say oh i had to to say my greetings to david in the next gsp
yeah and it's uh yesterday was the 25th anniversary
of jean's tragic death teen shoemaker in a car accident in australia
so it's 27 28 years since sn9 since the major
impact took place on july 18 1994
wow okay so i remember that
yeah so a little a little bit of tragedy but also um fond memories i'm sure of
uh discovering the comet and realizing what it was going to do before the rest
of us would see it uh covered and if i'm not mistaken was hubble the
telescope that covered or that was used to see the impact
site hubble was one of the first telescopes to see the impacts
and it was certainly as the best telescope we had at the time the fact that it was
concentrating on jupiter during that entire week was really really something
and we i know a debt of gratitude to nasa for collecting all of this wonderful
information about what a comet can do when it hits the planet
awesome so we we should say to wade prunty who
uh chatted in from facebook how are you doing wade we see we see you out there
yeah it looks like only the facebook is getting the uh the messages tonight
yeah we'll probably get more later on i'm
actually going to step away for a bit because my my presentation is
much much later in the night so i'll be joining in i'll be joining in remote watching all
the uh presentations enjoying the poetry and eating something
i hear you preparing for preparing for the evening finding a few images to
share for the 100th uh this 100 double winged global star
listen i i upload the a picture in in the astro tv
website yeah i saw it uh 253. yeah but i didn't see it in the the last
week i i didn't enter right now but uh
yeah i you know i i i was going to write him but i think you
know that maybe he's really busy so no not really i i know i put it up there
um let me see i'll go in there right now and look because if we switch them
today uh today today once we had so many people we had 22 submissions
oh for um for last night i mean it was it was crazy my website's gonna explode
because it just takes like an hour for the let me see um
let me see astroworld um
do you want to see the the
commentary it's up there now maxie i put it on for this okay so you were in the second
group okay so you're up there now
great so yeah because it was so it was so many pictures i i couldn't do them all once
or else the webpage would never load so uh so this round we have so we're
pitching we're we're picking two pictures of the of the week in this set because
there were just so many entries so so you got one two three four five
six seven eight oh yeah i see it 11 12 13. i got
13 in this round so so right now we have nine votes in and for
this round you can have people vote until friday so get as many votes as you can so
so everybody enter now to astroworldweb.com and go to the picture of the week and
vote for both of you any picture that you like but of course yeah but for me uh there's a lot of good
photos there's your 253 which is by the way is is i voted for it so it's freaking awesome so
uh um thank you dan um and uh [Music]
the uh we have a we have a witch's head nebula we have a spaghetti nebula we have a veil complex we have a couple of
uh a couple of um uh terrestrial i don't know if one of these is yours adrian
um but uh because there was there were a couple of pictures in there without descriptions
uh let's see there's one with a tree and uh and the the milky way going into the tree with
the uh there's a bunch of good pictures yeah that's a lot of i'm watching right
now um [Music]
i think i do have a double with the beach yeah the beach is a double i gotta take that down which does one of them have no votes yeah good okay so one of
them has no votes so i could take that one down without hurting anything but um but yeah so we got to be a lot of
pictures so that was nice to see right right now we just got to get a lot
of people to vote so yeah this is
a well we are publishing right now so the
audience that come to vote for any picture that they like you know
yeah absolutely i gotta figure out one way to make it
just one vote i gotta figure out how to weigh the two yeah because some people are voting twice for that picture yeah i
was gonna ask how many times maxi has voted for his
uh so what i've been doing is i've been going through the ip addresses so if there's any doubles i kick them out
[Laughter] what about what about family members
that share the same ip address yeah well use your phone
so daniel i want i want to get a little bit more into this tag team wrestling that you're doing with
uh with you and sean are you guys uh taking on all takers because uh i hear there's
a really good tag team there i have the michigan lowbrows adrian uh adrian's got uh got it covered there
yeah yeah so uh you know me and sean uh sean's a good friend of mine um and uh you know we've actually
come on uh the show together um as a group kinda uh him promoting his uh
visible visible dark and i'm being promoting astroworld it's been it's been it's been fun so you know i keep on
inviting him it's a good dynamic between you guys it's it's a lot of fun to see oh yeah yeah me and him you know it's
nice when you have kind of two people with the same kind of sense of humor i guess is what you call
especially from from two different parts of the continent you know so yeah so it's kind of odd that that worked out
but uh it works out pretty well and as a matter of fact in october or maybe not in october that fourth
quarter um i'm putting together something called astropalooza
and um so far i have slated sean nielsen um
um molly wakelin um uh amy astro amy little yeah
and nico carver from nebula photos great nice i got i got one more person i'm
waiting on an answer to before i start getting together on how to kind of put everything together for a date but those
are the those are the four i have so far so far nobody has said no that i've asked so that's a good thing
so you're gonna have to bring them all on to the gsps for like the weeks leading up to it to showcase each of
them in turn absolutely absolutely so hey david
hey guys how are you david how's it going good to see you yeah we ran just a
little bit over time in the first part i'm not totally shocked [Laughter]
i've always said what was it last week i think it was like an hour i think something like that over
i looked at it i was like oh my god one two three weeks ago i think we were like 40 minutes early and then
that last week we were an hour late so i guess we're making up for it i was giving the over under for today's total
program at eight and a half hours wow we're already almost at four
yeah yeah yeah and we've got the largest part of the segment coming up yep yes sir
it's gonna be fun david you missed uh you missed the part of my presentation i dedicated to you and uh the shoemakers
because it's the 28th anniversary of sl9 impact so i wanted to
i wanted to uh mention that and i showed a few pictures thank you kareem i'm really sorry that i
had another obligation to go to for a while completely understandable but i'm i'm
back i even showed a picture of uh of you with uh jean and carolyn at cellophane
2002. i thought
you know i've just the whole seeing jupiter in ir just brought back the
memories right away um yeah
i know these latest pictures are really stunning hi david good to see you
how you doing david pretty good good good 100th anniversary
global star party excellent excellent how's wendy wendy's doing okay she's uh
holding her own good some days are worse than others and uh
but wendy's doing holding her own i love her very very much yeah yeah
well give her our best obviously as as always yeah thank you i will
so kareem what you're saying is don't feel compelled to cut things short
with each talk here that's not for me to say that's for scott and i think he's happily having
some dinner at the moment he's whooping down a slice of pizza or something
but it was really beautiful though so the last segment ended uh with maxie showing some images and before him
normal played a couple of songs and uh talked a little bit about starmus as well just to mention that he's gonna be
there nice that's awesome i can tell you there will
be some announcements of more musicians being there soon as well
great any word on brian may yet uh now that he's had his birthday celebration he's the musician and he did turn 75
yesterday and a little bird tells me that uh we're gonna hear some rock and
roll in armenia you're going to rock literally
yeah yes he's on tour right now right he is yeah yeah so things are crazy at the moment
but uh and then there's a taylor hawkins tribute concert they need to do as well brian and roger and friends so but i
think uh we'll have a good time in armenia that's very good you know i actually i actually sent it i i
attempted to send an email to brian just to see if he would come on the show on my show
and i got a message back from uh from i guess his soapbox i guess
oh he's on tour try fourth quarter yeah this is i it is it's it's a rolling
you know multi-million dollar insane asylum with hundreds of people involved
this is a rough time to get him yeah no i i i didn't even expect a response i don't know
you might be surprised from what i hear he actually does watch some of the uh some of the content for outreach that
comes on the web and he watches some of the shows and i don't know if he watches the gsps but i know he watches some
shows and tries out some new ones and they were saying in the uk that he's reached out to a few of them
individually to say that he's liked some of the things that they've done the the thing that he's closest to is
instagram oh yeah if he let there's a there's a hand he'd like to comment i want to try to get his
eye yeah no there you go thank you
you know and i'll try i'll try very much not to bring up queens so i mean this would be photography so he's not one of
the you know you know many many years ago um uh neil young came to our company and
and he's a our company publishes a bunch of trains magazines believe it or not as
well for real trains and model trains and neil young is a huge model train guy
and there there was sort of a there was a seminar beforehand of his people who came in and said
don't say anything at all about his music at all he'll walk out brian is not
that way at all brian loves talking about music um you know and and stories and freddie
and everything it's just that it's an overwhelming time right now i am sure i'm sure so i looked at his
schedule i was like oh my god yeah you're in the mid 70s too i'm like oh
and that that's you know two and a half hours of running around it's it's i hope i'm doing that when i'm
75. you me as well yeah you know but if you got the energy keep on going
yeah yeah yeah i don't know by 75 i you you missed it earlier but lou was talking about what
titan will be like in a few billion years and i think a property like that if i could find it you know just sit and
enjoy the sky and yeah i'm on to a gsp every tuesday to share a little bit
scott will still be doing those right yup yes you will
as long as my man can talk he's going to be on in front of his camera so you know excellent
so right now i'm pointing to the k2 comet spawn stars so
i i don't know how close is it to m10 right now
how close is it to messier 10 it's it was it just had its conjunction uh a couple of days
ago right yeah two days ago yeah yeah i'm 10 yes i i missed it up i yeah
it's a little bit away now clean skies that the weather says no yeah it's really far uh with my field of view i
couldn't i couldn't take it but well you know maybe next time so another one
let's see if it's centered
what do you mean see if it's scented plates off man come on let's go [Laughter]
okay that there it is let me show the screen
i don't know if i can yeah there you go and there it is
five seconds and let's do well i was taking one minute picture
because it doesn't move really fast but the light pollution here is really bad i
have my lips lights from my neighborhoods and you know
it's really tough and anyway to do some animations and
and do some stacking only with stars is good but this kind of
object is you have to do it in really clear skies
let's see in 30 seconds maybe it's going to see the tail well the here's the coma
and the tail is almost there yeah let's stretch
oh i i want you to rough let's do some 60 seconds
the last time i saw that comment was a couple of months ago
there's a lot fainter and it was traveling through a field of sky next to ngc 6709
and that is the field in which i discovered my first comet in 1984.
oh man wow i think this company was a
particularly really it has an orbit uh
a more periodic but i think it doesn't it's now and then it
goes really far away i i
didn't find some too much info for this let's see
10 seconds
and here we go slow down
yeah it's there
zoom in maybe three three minutes picture is this live
this is live this is right now and i'm taking a three minutes picture
let's see but we can see it you know last week i captured the also the comet
but it was those tiny little galaxies yeah really far away no
but this is k2 this is the k2 yeah
what constellation are we on right now um [Music]
i think well maybe pass away from the fucus um let's
figure it out go here in the in the map i can not i'm sorry it
doesn't show me another place
because here i have this stellarium app in the in the software of the cwo
and you can search the object or maybe if you want to see it
here in the in the the map you can tap in there and then put go
go to but i can go i can not zoom out
here in the computer the cell phone yes sure let's go okay
that's all right so general idea that's good
i prefer to see it look at that the you can see the tail going down it looks like um
actually it looks like a kind of a wide tail doesn't it yeah i don't i don't i
it's so some picture that has two kind of tails yeah yeah one like a little tail and
then then another one to maybe not the other one's a dust tail i suppose
excellent yeah so for all of you that did not see k2 uh
uh here you are with a nice live view and it is enough for you because you're
right you know yeah i found it too all right guys i am going to get a cup
of coffee and i'll be right back and we'll get started with uh part two of the 100th global star party
of course let's let's wait to see in 30 seconds to see how it's going to
the comments and also the audience can tell me
what object that i can go if you want to see it right now
my telescope is yours and also everyone here in the
in the zoom meeting can ask me anything
awesome
okay let's see in three minutes and there you go
there you go now the tail is it's like there
but you know it's it doesn't it has this coma more decisive than this
place it's really really different
from another ones i think and that's good
so well let's establish
okay there you go
i from my work and came to my home and i started to grab my equipment outside
okay so um
i do a quick audio check can you guys hear me oh yeah yes all right good nice
how you doing howdy
um
hey danielle you want to see centaurus a always
and here i am just trying to take a picture of the veil nebula again
and again and again too many too many telescopes too many
cameras too many webcasts too many star parties
oh my god over and over again it's crazy you know i've been taking
pictures of a veil nebula for 20 years and i've yet to be happy
so you know but uh i was i was able to borrow a uh
2600 from a friend of mine from the show and right now it's sitting on the back
of my esprit and just waiting for the sun to go down you know
all right but i was just i was able to procure a
um a astrophysics starfire 130 edf gran
turismo uh turismo that sounds like a sports car uh
that's what they call it well the the earlier version was the gran turismo and then newer version is the gtx the gran
turismo x but um this scope was sitting literally in its original
box original case everything for the past three or four years wow and
been used twice and yeah unfortunately there's too many telescopes like that you know
it's brand well well the re well there's a reason why it's only been used twice the gentleman had two of them
so so so he had the original edf version of the 130 and then he bought and then he
went on the he went on the list he's a personal friend of mine he went on the list to go on the waiting list before
they stopped taking names yeah um he went on the waiting list for the next one and totally forgot they called him
up about three or three years ago or so i say by the way his scopes ready maybe four years ago
and he said your scope's ready and and he's like do you want it he's like yeah i want it and so he put it and he
took it he just loved using the other one he never used the second one
a couple years later i said what do you do with that scope man what are you it's literally just sitting there what do you
do he's like well i'm thinking about offloading i said good you can offload it to me and so i don't so i can't get on a
waiting list i can't do anything i can't get a natural physics scope to save your life because then it's just not taking any more names anymore and uh so he said
sure and he sold he sold it to me so i didn't have to wait on a list and i got it within two weeks
so awesome better than waiting four years for sure
four almost nine or eight it was it was a long long time yeah and uh you know you know so i
called up i called up george over at astrophysics i was like george um how long for the flattener for the 130
gt i'm scared to ask he's like he's like the flattener he's like oh
it's on the shelf yeah oh man it's going to be a long time i said how long george he's like uh like september
i said really he's like yeah he's like we're working on him now he said good put me on the list sure
sure so uh so once the flattener things come to those who wait yeah i'm telling you
so september will have the flattener and then uh i just picked up uh what
the scope comes with the uh 2.7 inch um feather touch
and uh so i'm not going to change that out it's an awesome focuser so i i picked up uh i called up um um
optek and they they're sending me the motor for the focuser so
great okay i think we're gonna play some short video clips here oh we only got
two minutes woohoo yeah i know there we go here's pekka here
hello scott explorer scientific explorer alliances this is becky hautella from she is the
stockholm sweden reporting and i want to give a big
congratulation gratis on nexiullicorn
for the 100 episode of the global star party
it has been really instructive fun and
i hope you will continue forever this is uh
never ending story hopefully bye thanks hello everyone it's bob fugate from
albuquerque new mexico congratulations to the global star party
on achieving 100 exciting episodes please keep up the great work thank you
howdy scott explore alliance astronomical league and esteemed global star party friends this
is cameron from camp astronomy wishing you all a hearty congratulations on our 100th global star party keep looking up
and enjoy the journey cheers
hi everyone dan higgins here from astroworld tv and as one of the newest presenters of gsp i'd like to send the
congratulations to scott explore alliance and all the presenters of
global star party for 100 episodes of the show so outstanding job thank you so
much for having the perseverance of doing this and relaying all the information that everybody does every
week so thank you so much thank you for allowing me to be a part and as always remember to keep imaging keep educating
and clear skies and we'll see you soon i love the fireworks thanks
so [Music]
so [Music]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Laughter] [Applause]
hey everybody scott roberts is back uh with part two of the global star party
our hundredth episode uh i really want to thank all of you who have been
watching uh you know we've been burning up the uh the wires here since about three o'clock
central in the afternoon so we're now uh four hours into broadcasting and we have a whole
second show for you uh and like all of our programs uh we have uh
david levy who starts our programs with uh you know the comm inspiring commentary
uh beautiful poetry and uh but um i want to take a couple of
minutes to thank all the people that were on the part one uh program including david so he he gets he's in
here twice which is great uh we had dr seth schastak from seti on
who uh gave us the latest updates on their search for e.t uh uh it's very interesting the guy's
hilarious and uh you know i love his take on on uh life in the universe uh robert uh fugate
was on with us of course uh the guy is pretty uh
what i would say is modest uh because this guy is the uh father of uh laser-guided adaptive
optics and that technology has really revolutionized professional
observatories uh and he showed us why uh you know that there's a reason to
continue to build ever larger telescopes and it's not because you know that they're all limited by our
atmosphere but the techniques and the equipment that's now used on them allow
them to get you know high straw ratios and uh you know diffraction limited
performance over incredibly large apertures and so uh we are going to see some amazing
stuff through the new elt and other large scale you know hyper uh scale type
of telescopes that are out there so it's really it's really neat to
listen to someone like uh bob tell us kind of the uh you know the backstage process here
uh we had terry mann on from the astronomical league who did door prizes for us we did that
at the beginning of the program we're not doing it in part two because we've already done it but terry gave us a
really inspiring talk uh i hope she repeats that or carries that on as we get closer to
alcon which i'm leaving for next tuesday we're going to albuquerque
and uh we'll be there at el conn and so uh i will be broadcasting live from
there too and so you you'll want to still tune in um we had uh
lou mayo uh on who uh gave us uh a fairly technical talk um
but i think that uh you know it's certainly worth a second watch uh karine jaffer from john abbott college was on
um and i think he's still in the background here somewhere uh but uh anyways uh
karine uh you know gave us kind of an overview of what uh
his experiences with global star party uh he's been on i think almost 40 times
something like that so charles ennis who is the new president of the royal astronomical society of
canada joined us tonight um he's a you know incredible
astronomy author in his own right has devoted much of his life to educational outreach and astronomy and
it is a force in the royal astronomical society of canada dr martillo souza was on he doesn't like
to need to tell people that he's a doctor but he is a he has a doctorate in cosmology and
marcelo's uh uh you know mission in life is to
inspire youth uh through astronomical education and space exploration
education uh the things he has done in uh in brazil and throughout south
america is really remarkable and um you know he's he's just uh and he's just a
wonderful friend so uh nico the hammer nicholas aries was on
earlier as well showing us um you know the things that jay west is
doing for us and talking about his how he has been inspired from the james webb space
telescope as we all are we finished the uh first part with norman fulham who shared a couple of
songs with us shared uh his uh some aspects of his life and why he is
so inspired to build the telescopes that he does you know that guy builds telescopes with
equipment that he made because you know there was no place that made the kind of equipment that he
that he needs for to make his massive telescopes which go up to in production up to 65 inches the guy can make 72-inch
newtonians so if you're looking for a giant telescope you know where to look uh come to explore scientific will help you out for
sure in this program we're going to have david as i mentioned david levy joins us
once again uh david eicher from astronomy magazine will be with us uh
talking about wall water soluble that's a mouthful it's like i got like marbles
in my mouth trying to say water soluble minerals okay which is really cool
molly wakeling astronomy will be joining us uh we've got dan higgins on
uh jason gonzale the vast reaches daniel barth from how do you know young connell
richards will be with us john briggs uh will be sharing an image i think he did
of steven's quintet so everybody's like comparing that image that jay west did you know so
young navin senthil kumar is joining us around 10 o'clock tonight
um i'm not sure if he's uh coming in from india or not he i know
that his family was vacationing there karina latelier from
chile should be joining us deepti gatom from nepal adrian bradley uh from
michigan and um i had michael carroll on there he did he
was backstage with us earlier but had another uh commitment tonight so
so let's go ahead and get started um thank you my friend for coming on i
think that you are officially at really 100 global star parties now yeah
thank you so much thanks so much scott it is an honor to be here and as i look over
my screen i'm seeing friends that i've known for years
and i have interesting and maybe not so interesting stories from almost
all of you and i remember for example david the night that i
saw him that night in 1984 and we watched them
blow up an expressway which was something i will never ever forget david
and uh kareem that i know from montreal and i'm going to be seeing a lot of my friends from montreal
in a couple of days and there's molly and there's adrian
and adrian when i thanks hi molly and adrian
when i look at his pictures only one word comes to mind and it keeps
on coming to mind that word is mozart they're that good is photographs they
are special they are unique adrian thank you for enriching our lives with your beautiful images
um i have here my telescope minerva that is with me and also a new
thing that i introduced at the first part of the star party this is my jacob's staff
that i built just yesterday and last night i took it outside and you know you hold it
let's see you hold it like this and you put the uh you hold it with the horizon
and you bring this back until you get to here
and right up here last night was where jupiter was and then
you used the uh meter markings on the side to give us an idea of how far above the horizon
jupiter was when i did that that was very special the uh jacob staff was
invented by her son of these in the 14th century
and i think most of you are asking is he still living and could we get him to come to the uh
well we could try but if we got him then we'd have to get galileo galileo is definitely here
shakespeare is here and their sanities is here in our hearts and die in our minds and we're looking
at them and now for the quotation i've been agonizing for weeks as to what
quotation i was going to use for the 100th collab 100th global star party
and the one that i chose is from none other than alfred noyes
that he wrote this poem specifically for the opening of the hundred inch on mount
wilson and uh george hillary hale when he was
arranging the first light for the 100 inch he was um
hoping that he'd get a poet and he had to get the best of the time and so he wrote to alfred noyes
and noy said it's interesting you asked me because i'm working on a poem now watchers of the sky
and i'd be honored to come and read and read that poem
and here it is on the 100-inch telescope's opening night tomorrow night so wrote their chief we
try our great new telescope the hundred inch your milton's optic tube has grown in
power since galileo famous blind and old
talked with him in that prison of the sky we creeped to power by inches
europe trusts were giant 40 still even tonight our own old 60 has is work
to do and now our 100 inch i hardly dare to think what this new
muzzle of ours may find and what that muzzle of ours has found is now a part
of history thank you scott and back to you oh thank you so much david that was
very uh i don't know uh i i having just gone to the uh
george ellery hale family reunion of course george wasn't there but he was
in spirit and uh it was wonderful to see so much of his extended family
and to make friends with some of them and to hear some of the inspiring talks
of their own sam hale had really fired up the family
through by taking them to caltech which was of course built by uh or helped founded by
um george hillary hale and uh in the city of pasadena which was partially
built by george ellery hale and and then and then he took him out to mel wilson you know uh which was of course
uh two of the amazing telescopes up there and so uh by george hillary hale so just
the the accomplishments of that guy uh in his short lifespan is just mind-blowing to
me um but he always seemed to be able to find uh the most talented and
driven people of his time to get to get things done and
so i'm not surprised that he got the world's best poet uh to uh be there
during the first light of the hundred inch um i i also think about how nervous the man
must have been before they actually looked at a star uh
and from one i understand it at first it didn't seem to be going so well do you can you tell us that story
david yeah it's um they started in the early evening
and um they got a dreadful picture of a bright
star that really was all over the place it was horrible and uh
hale was thinking well how could this mirror be so awful we put everything we had into it
george ritchie is in a looney bin now because of this mirror and um
you know how how could it be awful but then he remembered that the telescope the dome had been open during
the day and that sunlight had hit the mirror and he thought why don't we let it cool
off for a few hours so they went back to it around three o'clock in the morning
they turned the telescope towards vega and boy was that image heavenly
it was wonderful absolutely pristine and that then they knew that the 100
inch was going to have a long and his illustrious career one of the best parts of the hundred
inch was during the um was during the second world war
when bada got to use it and to help him get better sky
the city of los angeles turned off all their lights of course phone call and just said could you shut
up shut it down they shut down the city all the lights in the city and they actually didn't do that for the sake of
the hundred inch they did that so that the japanese wouldn't know where to bomb if they tried to bomb it
but it sure helped 100 inch and the other thing is if any of you go to
mount wilson you'll see this beautiful side of scotty has seen it that i have seen
and that i hope to see again the site where hale built is 60 inch is 100 inch and of
course the solar telescopes but go to the motor polymer which is nearby
and uh take a look at the 200 inch and as you go in the lobby of the 200 inch you will see a
magnificent not that large bottle relief sculpture and it says underneath the four letters
hail underneath it that they named the 200 inch after him
that is really such a wonderful thing and such a wonderful way to celebrate our 100th global global star party
yes thank you so much david that's great okay
well coming up here in the not too distant future i'll be heading around the world
with one of my great friends david eicher david is
uh you know i've every time that he comes on i want to say something
different about him but uh he is i mean he's absolutely
extremely knowledgeable he is absolutely inspiring
you know he is everything that you would hope that an editor of the leading astronomy magazine the world would be
but uh uh you know he doesn't make it a secret that he's uh
extremely friendly uh extremely down to earth and uh
has an incredible sense of humor and so i love that i love that and you know when you hear that and and uh you know
you get past all the amazing accomplishments of many of these people that are here but you just learn
uh about who they really are you know uh you'll find it you'll find them in their humor in their
insights and the things personal things that they share with you that kind of stuff you know
and um so i have uh you know i'm really looking forward to the trip to uravan where i'll
go to my first starmus event david has been i think to all of them
and he will uh we'll be in yerevan
armenia and we are going to be at this first century a.d
uh pagan temple where we will set up and do a star party with live music under
the stars it's going to be amazing uh and the best part is is that you can go too and it's not it's not so
expensive so but i'm going to turn this over to uh david eiker he has been showing us
amazing stuff that comes from our own planet planet earth uh with the minerals
and crystals in his private collection here we go
thanks scott you know somehow doing our first star party together in a long long time
at a first century pagan temple seems really appropriate doesn't it i
i'm not going to say anything more they look they scoured the planet
you know just if there are stories afterward we'll report on them and maybe we it just needs to all be forgotten i
don't know but anyway we'll see how it turns out that's right so thank you though scott for having me
again and we're working our way through the mineral world and we have not run
out of species quite yet we're getting there but i will see if i can
share my screen and start a slideshow and can you see a mineral
yes okay that is smithsonite from the famous sea green variety
socorro county new mexico the famous kelly mine which is very very close to
the very large array one of our favorite radio telescopes left on this planet now
so tonight we're going to talk about an unusual category but first i'll start off by
quoting one of the founders of this country thomas jefferson i believe in a
divinely ordered universe even before that time talking about structure and analysis and understanding empirically
how the universe works uh isaac newton um said truth is ever to be found in the
simplicity and not in the multi mod not in the multiplicity and confusion of things
the universe is ordered and minerals show us this really well not by supernatural design but by the
principles of physics they demonstrate this because their atoms are assembled in precise
ways by the electrochemical attractions that are inherent in them
that make them come together and guide them into assembling into what mineralogists call a crystal lattice so
we don't need magic as richard dawkins like to say even likes to say even when we talk about life
speaking of star mass speakers by the way scott but he will talk about how we simply
need to understand the principles of science which uh astonishingly enough explain the universe and thankfully
we're getting a better and better you know by a factor of seven resolution and just spectacular quality
we've as you all know entered a new era this last week of uh how we will see the universe we
hope for at least about 30 years to come so this is you know we've talked about how this is an exciting time to be
interested in science and in astronomy specifically and the game has just gotten
even more exciting so this is the the best time we can remember so tonight i'm going to
talk a little bit about uh for a brief time about water soluble minerals
many types of water soluble minerals exist which you need to be careful with
in a place like wisconsin if you're like my friend david in tucson you can be a little more uh
rigorous with them they tend to dissolve if you're not careful um a typical and very well-known
example of this is halite which is a mineralogist's term for the crystals that naturally
occur of sodium chloride you're very familiar with it every day you ingest it every day as table salt of course
it comes from the greek word for sea which comes from the origin as an evaporate from seawater it's often
colorless white yellow red purple or even blue with some impurities that color it in
various ways and it's one of the most familiar minerals to us on the dining room table
so we'll look at a few examples of halide and and some other uh water
soluble minerals tonight and and we still are a few uh rounds away from the end here scott
believe it or not but we're getting there okay so halite is an isometric which is a fancy word for cubic uh
crystal system and it consists of course of sodium and chlorine atoms uh of
course some uh elements are really really dangerous in certain forms and
not others so we eat chlorine you know every day as a solid
but chlorine gas of course can be very dangerous so here's an example of halite
sodium chloride this is from a very well-known uh mine in poland and it's a pretty big
piece it's about eight inches across or so roughly so um you can see that it crystallizes
most ordinarily as a clear cubic crystallization
however it comes in other varieties too and there's a very well known french
site where very uh striking blue halite forms and as a sort of a fibrous
crystallization of imperfect uh cubes um which is an interesting uh
diversionary uh thing there and this is a fairly similar mineral to halite in the
same group but it's potassium magnesium chloride hydrate called carnolite and
this is also from that same french deposit in the alsace region
there and you can see it gets a very uh orangey color here from magnesium
particularly these are lots of uh similar they're not
the best looking minerals in the world a lot of the a lot of the water soluble evaporites um but they are what they are
a lot of them are sort of clear um or whitish color this is silvite which is potassium chloride and it's from a
famous uh potash mine in new mexico and you can see again it sort of looks
at the first approximation fairly similar to to halite not the most incredible
looking specimens but you know if you want to have a tight collection of stuff you gotta have some of these
so this is trona sodium bicarbonate hydrate and it's from another very well-known uh very dry
region where lots of these kinds of minerals come from and that is inyo county california
and you can see it's sort of bladed crystals here yeah epsimite you've heard of epsom salts you
know to in the you know 17th century you put your feet in a soaking bath about
that maybe you still do i don't know um to make your feet feel better well this is epsilon here and this is the origin
of that magnesium sulfate hydrate and it's from a very well-known potash mine
in germany this piece as well which is a reasonably large crystallized plate
this is a fake it's really there it really exists but it's synthetic it's lab grown just as
you know now many diamonds as well as being recycled
from people's diamonds who are no longer around and remounted and sold many
diamonds now can be grown synthetically very well so there are lots of synthetic minerals and gems out there this is a
pretty easy one to grow in a lab it's calcanthite which is copper sulfate hydrate
and this is uh from a lab in poland it's pretty fragile brittle and and uh
um just delicate stuff but but it's uh lots and lots of this stuff is grown
and and sold you know as kind of you know magical you know amazing crystals that
will do all sorts of incredible things for you you know at rock shows um
you know the it's pretty you know just you know sit there and understand but
it ain't gonna do any magic you know sorry to be a bummer but uh this is a very old-time specimen
now that was recycled there was a great collection of minerals in the united states
for many many years it's from parts of it are from the early 19th very early 19th century at the academy of natural
sciences in philadelphia and they sold a lot of the no good specimens
many years ago now about a generation ago so there are lots of these old-time specimens that come from a very famous
mineralogist uh his collection in philadelphia this is one of them it's a
pretty ordinary mineral anhydrite um it's from a famous uh town uh infamous
town in germany berkt has gotten does that ring a bell with anyone see how many world war ii historians are here
okay there was a really raise my hand then no i don't remember a really bad guy
lived in this town well in all of his associates as well you know but that's okay they they
[Music] we bombed and then blew up the rest of his house
but but this piece is from the same town as as that guy who you know tried to overthrow the the world um 75 years ago
but it's an interesting but fairly ordinary specimen here viliamite is sodium fluoride and again
fluorine um is you know very dangerous as a gas but it's inert in essence as a solid here
and this is from an interesting locality in namibia and this is kind of interesting because you can see it's a
little bit gemmy here which for a water soluble mineral is is a little bit
unusual here this is uh sometimes called cuprion although it's really just plain
old melanterite this is super super fragile and almost crumbly this piece
and it gets its uh peacock blue color from from copper atoms but it's iron copper
sulfate hydrate and it comes from a very well known region for this stuff in spain so again this is the kind of stuff
that's very fragile and ideally with these kinds of minerals you're kind of
renting them because you know about after a generation or so unless it's really in
an airtight compartment that is molecularly sealed this stuff will
essentially degenerate uh you know and decompose uh over some years
um david i was reminded when you mentioned florine and this yeah before i
had read an article about the uh that um team of astronomers had
observed that fluorine comes from the explosions from wolf ray at stars and
it's actually kind of rare will fry a stars yeah you know one of the things when i run out of minerals
that's one of the things that is high on my list of 300 astronomical things to
talk about again because we know a lot more now you know in the last 10 to 15 years about the
origins of the elements that's a very good topic scott you know and
many many elements aside from hydrogen and helium big and big bang nucleosynthesis early on
the majority of the heavier elements you know owe them uh cells to the
um deaths either a low mass stars or in many cases supernovae and and the end of by mass
stars or the collisions of high mass stars like neutron stars as well so that's a really you're right
about that and that's an interesting thing to talk about um that i'll horrify you with in some
detail later i hope you know it when i get back to astronomy but that it's amazing you know this era again that
we're in you know 35 years ago we really didn't understand the origins of the
elements except in a very crude way so we were sort of spoiled
these days you know in the in being awash in knowledge that's relatively new
and that's a good one the origins of the elements
this is cronkite which is sodium copper sulfate hydride again getting this
uh you know sky blue color if you will from copper atoms that are spread liberally throughout the crystals this
is from a very famous mine and as you know and can imagine several regions you
know including the atacama as well of course are really good for um really dry
minerals in chile that's a really rich region for this kind of stuff as well
this is super fragile and very very almost hair-like
needle-like crystals here of calcanthite which is the same mineral that i showed
you the synthetic polish crystallized uh version of and this is a
naturally occurring version of this mineral very very fragile stuff from a famous mine called
the planet mine of all things um in arizona and so this stuff is really fragile and very very sensitive to
water molecules decomposing it but it's it's pretty though from thanks to copper
this stuff and that is the colorless you can see there's some sort of modified dodecahedrons here it's a little hard to
see the way this is photographed but of this uh transparent or crystal clear
almost looks like rock uh crystal quartz here um but that's salimoniac which is
an unusual mineral it's ammonium chloride relatively rare and one of the better places to find it is this place
in in area of bohemian in the czech republic so this is a very unusual mineral and
very sensitive again to hydration here's another one that is extremely
sensitive and quite rare and as a recent discovery of only about a decade ago there's a very fairly well-known german
mineral dealer gunner ferber um and he's the discoverer of this mineral and the mineral is not the hunk
of stuff which is halite the the clear stuff but it's this little coppery blue
um contamination on the halide is amino nite and that's copper chloride amine
so that's a very unusual um chemical here and and is a mineral that's only
about a decade old you know there are about 5 000 mineral species as i've mentioned believe it or not you're going
to be stunned that we haven't looked at every one of them this has been going on so long
but but uh there is still quite a number and several dozens typically at least of
new mineral species that are discovered each year which is pretty incredible so the the number is slowly growing
here's another one these are these little uh bluish and greenish bladed crystals eucroit which is a slovakian
specimen here this is a quite an unusual mineral
and here's boothite another california very dry region
san bernardino county copper sulfate hydrate fairly you know not very complex
but it forms these fairly fragile little bluish [Music]
balls if you will that are a little um puffy you know that that are quite fragile here
that stuff and this is what happens to water-soluble minerals when they're not
stored in an airtight container oh this is from dave's collection
this is now called an ex-mineral specimen okay so this is what i meant about
renting these water-soluble minerals because this is about five years in
after having it in what i thought was a fairly tight plastic seal but obviously wasn't
so this this is now powdered dust of epsimite so you know um
it goes to show you you know you kind of live and you learn um what did it look like before was it
like crystal it was nice sort of squarish modified squarish crystals yeah so now it's a
it's a pile of you know dust um so you know these things we all have them for a time
many mineral specimens you know are are and this is another thing that we're on the early not to belabor this forever
but we're in the early days of understanding the crystallization ages
of minerals so we now know that some localities and some kinds of minerals
crystallized say about eight million years ago let's say so here's one that
didn't make it that far you know well this is probably only decades older
crystals because it's an easy thing to make quickly when the when the evaporation happens
and it was killed in my study you know so that that didn't make it that far but
some minerals of course are are millions or many millions or even you
know a billion years old um so so this is a contrast and again scott
we're on the cost now of going and i can't say anything super specifically but i can tell you that there will be
music now and we will be in the company of some rock and roll and some famous
guitarists who i know will be there now oh really so we'll have a star party and we will have us astronaut speakers and
nobel prize winning physicists and chemists and leaders and uh seth's boss jill tarter
will be there um so it's a good thing seth behaved himself today um
and we're gonna have some rock and roll as well so we're gonna have a good time and we will report maybe a little bit scott i don't
know how much we'll be able to do this maybe we'll be able to do a little bit of live reporting from armenia we'll see
yeah we'll certainly try yeah but if not we'll have a lot to report on when we get back in september sure sure
wonderful okay well thanks so much david i'm super excited about all this as you well know so yeah yep great it's going
to be fun we're going to have a blast oh um daniel barth
wanted to ask you a question uh go ahead daniel cute here uh david fascinated i've got a
really cool big halite that a student brought me from death valley but i wanted to know have the rovers
discovered you say six to ten new minerals a year have the rovers discovered mars unique minerals yet
no well no they're on earth the on earth oh yeah
some dozens of minerals you know are being discovered the rovers have discovered uh some
unusual and i think new minerals a few species that are being investigated um
they've also discovered you know and years ago some earlier rovers some
sulfates that that had that are part of the evidence that there was a you know plentiful liquid uh flowing water on the
surface of mars which of course now we know is uh in aquif subsurface aquifers but
there are plentiful sulfates that are analogs to earth sulfates that had to be
you know no pun intended swimming in in flowing water um so you know what that
that you know um story of why did mars go dry you know and why did the
atmosphere globally change still has to be fully answered even though we basically know uh the story and
and maybe the carbon rich atmosphere and the slow drying over billions of years and
then the isolation volcanic tubes i think there's got to be new prizes and new
wonderful stuff waiting for us there's no doubt about it absolutely and and mars is it was for a
long time in the same boat that we're in uh unlike mercury in the moon you know
without plentiful water that the if you go back 2.6 billion years on earth the
great oxygenation event took place when there was suddenly enough free oxygen
from an abundance of microbes that oxygen was freely available in earth's atmosphere
and what does oxygen like to do of course but to combine with everything so that from from about 1500 mineral
species which dry worlds have it probably like the moon
that tripled or quadrupled the number of mineral species on earth when they were oxygenated minerals to the 5000 or so
that we know about so for a long long time mars had that same problem so there
must be many many minerals we don't know about yet on mars that are earth analogs
and maybe others that we don't know of on earth as well so that's going to be exciting in the
future as we also put our dipsticks down into the um you know very very very clean
dipsticks down into the aquifers to see if there are any microbes there right
exciting stuff oh you have a question as well uh just a quick one so i'm wondering how is how is it that
certain um elements produced in supernovae go from being in what i assume to be this kind of uniform
concentration to much larger concentrations on the earth where we can mine down and say this is
where you find gold or zinc or something like that well abundance of of atoms is the the
quick answer and lots of time you know if you have 13.8 billion years
that's a lot of supernova production and a lot of collisions of neutron stars and
it takes a long time you know to successively see the lifespan of a new star dying and
blowing stuff out into the interstellar medium which then gets accreted onto a planet and ends up
in colorado and gets pushed up into the mountains where it's accessible
um and somebody you know finds it in the 1870s you know by chance so
uh you know a tremendous amount of material being produced by stars over an
enormously long time um produces that and remember
some things we think of as rare are not really that rare diamonds if we could find things
kimberlite pipes below ground which we can't easily would be plentiful they were one of the first dozen species to
exist in the solar system uh you know elemental carbon
and if we could extract gold that's dissolved in seawater it would be
worthless there's so much of it that is dissolved in the oceans but we can't you know so so we have to
find it by sheer dumb luck in mountains that you know that get pushed up and make
western movies you know after 100 years you know um so so
you know but uh a tremendous amount of material remember how many stars are in
the universe now we think at least 10 000 billion billion
and an enormously long time gets enough of that heavy stuff into a
planet like earth that's 4.6 billion years old yeah thank you
great okay so we are going to transition to molly wakeling but uh
before we do maxi's got his telescope aimed at a uh beautiful
nebula maxi you want to give us a peek hey guys again how are you and
yes i pointed to the liberty statue nebula but the light pollution is really
really tough so i pointed now to the sun nebula let
me share my screen [Music] okay this is a rough
two minutes and the this is how it looks like you can see here is
the shape but when i do auto stretching you have the
information wow here it's only
yeah it's it's really good i only using 100k at a minus 10
degrees celsius and you can see even because i went outside a couple minutes ago
and i barely could see almost scorpion the southern
cross and maybe arturus that's all the stuff that i can see i think we have a
wind in the up scales on the sky so we have a lot of
dust and this is this is not a really clear night but anyway
i can't see a all these objects
so [Music] again if you want to see something
a from the southern skies well this is from the middle you can see
also in the north end but let me know it and i will point my scope for
the next uh break okay
i guess it's worth mentioning that um in our view if we were to shoot it here in the northern hemisphere that would the
swan sort of shape would look upside down so um
[Music] remember you you can change the fill of view of
the camera so you can rotate and right here the spikes are not
pricely um horizontal and vertical they are more
inclinated but yeah anyway uh i'm using a newtonian and maybe also the
the image is a different like when you see it
so yeah you're using newtonian so they're made so something is flipped so
exactly well thank you maxie thanks for showing us the live view here that's one no
thanks to you okay okay so now we're going to go to uh molly wakeling molly
has been on many global star parties uh she um uh is uh
[Music] i think uh might have been called an amateur scientist before uh but i think that she
is uh getting her uh phd and will be a professional scientist here in the not
too uh distant future maybe she's now working for money now i don't know
i uh passed my candidacy exam today so wow congratulations congratulations yeah
that's perfect you're on your way that's perfect wow very well deserved i really want to give
this talk so excellent molly thanks for coming on to
the 100th global star party yeah thanks for having me back on again scott it's been a while since i've been
on here and then very busy studying so i'm glad to finally be back on here for a
little bit before i dive into writing my objectives um but uh yeah i really want to go on to
100 show and i also want to come on because of course with the release of the champions league space
possible and i want to talk about one in particular and about um what it is like
um and how it's a good example of the kinds of things that we'll be able to learn
as science that's that's a part of the footage right molly your your voice
sounds a little thin uh right now i don't know if there's any thing you can change microphone let me
make sure i have the selected i had the wrong mic selected how's that
way better all right apologies better okay gotcha thank you the the
cooler on my on my cpu cooler on my desktop died yesterday
so i've got my laptop hooked up temporarily and so i'm trying to get all my stuff rewired and uh yeah so yeah never got it
back on my good microphone i'm actually amazed you picked it up at all because the microphone on that
computer is about five feet away underneath my desk it sort of sounded like that it's just kind of
it sounded like you were in a tunnel so yeah apologies all right thanks for thanks for letting
me know um i will share my screen
let's see yeah i'll just do that and then
that yes i also don't have my normal second screen today so hopefully yeah um how's that look is that looking
great looks good cool um yeah so uh i want to talk about that
incredible deep field image the first one that was released of the first few images released from
the jameson space telescope that focuses as pointed at the uh galaxy cluster
smacks0723 uh astronomers are really good at coming up with really funny
shorthand names for things and we really like to name things like
uh i should have had some examples handy but uh like like uh assassin for example
is the name of a survey that looks for things like comets [Laughter]
and sometimes the acronyms are stretched quite thin um
the image i can't look at it enough it's one of those ones that you really ought to go download the original
uncompressed tiff file just the biggest size one that you can go download from the nasa website
and just like zoom in really far and just start kind of looking around because there's so much detail in here
and so many incredible things to look at so let me point out some of kind of the
main features of the things going on in this image so first we have foreground stars very
much like we were used to seeing in hubble images they're obvious by their diffraction
spikes and in the case of the james webb telescope it has six diffraction spikes
instead of the normal four that we're used to because of the hexagonal shape of the mirror and then the horizontal uh
uh diffraction spike in the middle is the one that's actually from the straps i thought it was the other way around
but i went and looked that up and yeah so that horizontal one is is from the strut that's holding the secondary and
then the um hexagonal spikes are from the hexagonal shape of the primary mirror
so expect to expect that to be a uh an identifying feature of james of
images from here on out so in addition to the foreground stars we have lots of background galaxies
everything from ones that are easy to spot with really cool spiral shapes
uh when the image is zoomed out all the way to really tiny dots and really a lot like
just like the hubble deep field that that really kind of moved me to get into physics in the first place
every single dot of light in this image that's not one of the foreground stars
is a galaxy when you zoom in really far and you see a little fuzzy dot
that's a galaxy that is really far away and so it's really incredible to see
just the depth that that james webb was able to go to in this one image
um now the target of the image is uh smacks uh shorthand smacks uh seven
zero seven two three but the full long name is j0723.3-7327
ways of cataloging all these things that there's too many to name uh so um the light travel time is the
number is the number that you've been hearing a lot for the distance for this galaxy cluster
of 4.6 billion light years its proper distance is 5.12 billion light years
and that has to do with the way that space between us and that galaxy cluster
has stretched since the light has left so it's proper distance is actually farther away than the light travel time
and i'm gonna dig a little more into that when i talk about cosmological redshift later on
uh in addition to that we have if you looked around the galaxies you might notice that some have very odd shapes
these really stretched out looking galaxies those are actually gravitationally lensed galaxies that are
being lensed by this heavy galactic cluster in the middle the smacks cluster
i'm going to talk about what that is and actually what that can do for us scientifically as well
so first drawback to freshy the nightscape imager put up this really great video on his instagram showing
where exactly this deep field image is taken so uh we have a shot of the southern sky
we can see large magellanic cloud and briefly to the left of the magellanic cloud it showed two arrows um so look to
the left and zoom in on that little box that is the area of this deep field
it's it's the equivalent of holding a grain of sand out at arm's
length and that's the area on the sky that this deep field covers and in that
deep field we can see thousands of galaxies in just that
extremely tiny area of sky so the really kind of chilling reminder just how
unimaginably enormous the universe is yeah
um so let's talk about how it compares to the hubble space telescope and how it's a successor
to hubble as opposed to a replacement so uh first of all as we all know it has a much larger mirror than the hubble
which has a 2.4 meter mirror with james webb having six and a half meters
and this larger size allows it to be 270 percent sharper because that that larger
size allows us to have higher space resolution and 730 percent more light gathering power
and we actually end up being able to get even more like gathering power than that because of the instruments that are on
it and and the quality of those instruments that's kind of the value from from the mirror alone
uh in terms of that deep field it would take hubble weeks to capture
that same deep field that james webb was able to catch in 12 and a half hours of exposure time
if you all remember the the hubble deep fields that came out in the 90s and 2000s that got progressively longer
exposure times those were exposure times of weeks and we were able to probe deeper already
with just 12 and a half hours of exposure time on the james webb telescope so it's just just a glimpse at
what we're going to be able to do with it and it's truly incredible
um so uh here's actually a comparison image of hubble imaging the same field
that james webb imaged and the hubble image is a shorter exposure time it's about three and a half hours total
exposure time um compared to james club's 12 but you can see already the
difference uh not only and of course the amount of light gathered but the quality
of the image we have newer cameras on james webb with lower noise and we have a lot higher spatial resolution and so
if you were to zoom in on the hubble image a lot of the galaxies get kind of fuzzy where they become sharp in the james webb image
um so in addition to uh to those things it uh the json space telescope is in a
totally different orbit than than hubble so hubble's in an earth orbit uh and
that actually limits its exposure time on any particular target because it can only image one spot on the sky 50 of the
time because then it goes around behind the earth and it's blocked from view and then it
has to reorient when it comes back around to look at that target again but with james webb we can sit on the same target
for an arbitrary amount of time and we can see any target in the sky at any time with the exception of things
that are right behind the sun and the earth due to the fact that it's in the slick ranch two-point orbit
out behind the earth at a further out orbit that gravit
because of uh some nulls in the gravitational field ends up moving at the same speed
as earth so we'll always be roughly that position from us
so that allows us to see a lot more things for longer periods of time without having to go behind the earth
the other important key difference and why james was really a successor as opposed to a replacement for hubble is
james webb is focused on the infrared spectrum so hubble was really focused on the optical and the near ultraviolet and the
near infrared whereas james webb covers a very tiny amount of red but really
kind of starts right in the infrared and goes down into into the mid infrared
and uh a part of the reason for that is one of james webb's main missions is to look at
the first galaxies galaxies that are over 13 billion light years away in light travel time and because the
cosmological redshift which again i'm going to talk about in a second um that light from those galaxies has actually
shifted into the infrared so we need to be able to use an infrared telescope to be able to see those distant galaxies
now having that infrared capability allows us to do some other things such as seeing through dust that includes
both dust in our galaxy to see to the core of our galaxy as well as dust and
other galaxies so the image i have here at the bottom is a comparison the hubble image of stefan's quintet is
on the left and the james webb infrared image is on the right and you can see that that it's the same
that kind of have the same shapes of the galaxies but you can see much different kinds of detail
in the jameson image not only because it's a sharper instrument but because it's looking at a different frequency of
light and it's able to peer in past that yellow glowing and dark glowing dust and see what's all the
star forming activity that's going on inside of it all right so let's talk about
gravitational lensing so the thing that causes this lensing is when you have a large distribution of
matter in this case a galaxy cluster between a distant light source such as a galaxy and an observer which is us which
bends the light from that light source around that
that source of mass that galaxy cluster as it travels towards us this effect was
actually predicted by general relativity before we were able to observe it um
principally with with with einstein really cementing in that theory of general relativity
and one of the outcomes of that light bending around the gravitational field
of the of the galaxy cluster that it can stretch the image of the galaxy and it
can also make multiple images so um i think the one shown here the one on
the right side of the galaxy cluster um that i'm not showing is definitely the same galaxy showed twice i think this
one is also where it's a very stretched out image of the galaxy but uh i might be wrong about
this but this might be the same galaxy that we're seeing two images of um because of the way the light bends
around it crazy so um there's a neat little video from eso that uh the european southern
observatory that shows this effect so um we have a foreground galaxy and in
the blue the background galaxy in the red and the image at the back is what it looks like to us so the light rays
coming from that background galaxy get bent around the foreground galaxy and it makes the image appear to be
this ring or uh sometimes it rings sometimes multiple images around the um
uh the the galaxy in the center so um it's similar to optics but with some
different um characteristics of how the the light is bent because the fact that there's no focal length of this kind of
quote-unquote optics system um but uh yes that's the effect that uh
a foreground if you will still billion light years away a galaxy cluster with a
lot of mass can bend the light from the galaxies behind it
so what what can so besides looking really cool what can we learn from gravitational
lensing from that effect so for one thing we can learn about how the matter is distributed in the lensing
object so in that smacks galaxy cluster because that will affect how the light
is bent around it and whether you get a ring or multiple images or whether those how those multiple images are distorted
this is the example i was talking about where this um i don't know if you can see my mouse but the um
uh the lower kind of stretched out galaxy and the upper one are really the
same galaxy with the images distorted and doubled it's very cool
um we can actually learn about the distribution of dark matter from this as well because we understand the effects
of gravity and we can look at the amount of light coming from that that uh that
cluster of galaxies and if the way that the light is bent doesn't match up with the amount of mass then we can surmise
that the mass that there's the additional mass that is there is from dark matter and we can probe the
distribution of the dark matter as well lensing also amplifies the light from the distant galaxies that are being
lensed which allows us to see more distant galaxies than we would be able to see without that gravitational lens
there um and there's actually an example of an image from hubble where we were able
to see a supernova so a single star from a galaxy some billions of light
years away that you wouldn't otherwise have been able to see because it was it's too dim to have been spotted by
hubble but because it was gravitationally lens the light's actually been amplified we were able to
see the light from that distant supernova which gave us some really cool science on uh
on those on those kind of earlier star supernova um and some of the galaxies that are
lens in this image are 13 billion light years away which is just an incredible number and
getting back really toward the first galaxies which is one of the main missions of james webb
so on the topic of looking back to the first galaxies let's talk a little bit about the timeline of the expansion of
the universe so um so hubble or james webb is looking is
hoping to be able to look back um to these first galaxies if you look in the right image
they're hoping to look all the way back to a period of time known as as hydrogen re-ionization
um so so kind of the the order of events here is so after the big bang after
inflation um there was uh a soup of hydrogen and helium and a
little bit of lithium and um but the universe was was still quite hot and light was not actually
able to really move around it which is constantly getting absorbed and re-emitted by
the um uh by the ionized hydrogen and helium
but as the universe expanded it also cooled in the same way that uh expanding gas in in the same volume of a bottle
will make the bottle colder um so about 379 000 years after
the big bang we have a period called recombination which uh the universe had cooled to
about 3000 degrees kelvin which is about the surface temperature of the sun which is cool enough where
the light is no longer getting absorbed constantly um and the
it was cool enough for those hydrogen helium atoms to be able to capture electrons because before it
was so hot that the electrons any electrons that got captured were immediately released because they had too much energy to stay bound but at
this point you're able to capture the electrons which is what finally allowed the light to start passing through the
universe became transparent and that is the cosmic microwave background that's
the kind of the moment in time when it was produced this was the last light before
um the universe became transparent and so at that time that light so 3000
degrees kelvin is approximately um like uh like a like a red
section of kind of a red area of light but as the universe has expanded that red light has dropped has been stretched
now to be microwave wavelengths so um hence the cosmic microwave background
now um there was a period some there's period later on we don't know exactly how much
later on that's one thing that we're hoping to discover where uh some some in the first
hundreds of millions of years when the gas clouds uh of now the um the
neutral hydrogen and helium because they all had their electrons became hot enough that
that they re-ionized so there was enough energy in these in these condensing hot clouds of gas to
once again release electrons from them to liberate those electrons
and start to radiate light again uh just like how
in when we look at hydrogen alpha clouds like um like the lagoon nebula
and the rosette nebula we see that red glowing light that um is is is the light from hydrogen
um so that's the period of re-ionization that james i was hoping to be able to see back to because that's the period of
the first of the formation of the first stars the early stars were about 30 to 300
times more massive than the sun there was only hydrogen and helium around there weren't any of the um
of uh anything that was heavier than that like the oxygen and the carbon the
nitrogen that makes our red giants these days and because of that these stars only
lasted uh a few um a few million years and they were
also millions of times more luminous than the sun and then they exploded in massive
supernova which became black holes and then those black holes began to start
merging with each other over time and creating more material to make eventually make supermassive black holes
around which the first galaxies would have formed so we're hoping to see some of that
process with james webb
yeah okay um so uh looking at looking at the the most
distant galaxies in this image the i've zoomed in on another portion of that deep field
where um and again i want to emphasize these little dots of light here
and here and here those are a whole galaxy yeah
i mean galaxies like like the size god has billions of stars and trillions of planets
yeah yeah exactly and and they just appear as barely discernible dots of light because they're so far away and
they're as old as some as some 13 billion years when um
we were far enough in past the big bang for the stars and the black holes to start to form
now um as i mentioned earlier the light from those earliest most distant galaxies has
been redshifted by the expansion of the universe moving it into the infrared
um so what is what is that redshift so there's two types of redshift that that
we talk about and uh the two are often confused there is a redshift due to the
doppler effect and there's cosmological redshift so redshift due to to the doppler effect
is caused by the motion of the object so um for example we use uh we use doppler
redshift as a way to look at um like a binary star system for instance
and uh be able to and see how those two stars are moving around each other how
much they pull on each other so we can estimate their masses and we also use this technique for observing exoplanets
especially the larger ones that that have larger poles on their stars so in a very similar way that a
when a train goes by you the sound is is kind of a higher pitch and as it
goes away goes [Music] drops pitch just like a like a train or
like an ambulance it's it's the same effect but for light so if the object is
moving toward us that the the peaks and troughs of the of the
light are going to be bunched closer together and will appear slightly shifted blue
word whereas when the star is moving away from us then that light gets stretched out when it's emitted because
of that motion it becomes a little bit shifted toward the red and what i'm in particular i mean the emission lines and
absorption lines of that star which are characteristic of particular elements so
for example hydrogen has an emission line of 626 nanometers which is that
hydrogen alpha light that we see in all these gorgeous astronomy images
um so those that will that exact wavelength of light will get shifted a bit around that point depending on
whether the object that's emitting it is moving closer or further away from us so
that's doppler shift
now uh cosmological redshift is due to the actual expansion of space-time the
expansion of the universe and the light that was originally emitted at a particular wavelength gets
stretched by that expansion and i was trying to find a good gif for this and i couldn't really find one that was
satisfactory but then i came across this one here where somebody's stretching some elastic and it's really just
perfect that's right because like um
as you when you're when you're stretching the elastic your um the the actual s space that that um that
that elastic is taking up lengthwise in this case gets stretched out which
causes the wavelength of the light to stretch out so um
cosmological redshift is due to the expansion of the universe another picture here that kind of using the
balloon metaphor where if you drew some galaxies on the surface of a balloon and then inflated it they're all moving away
from each other um and there's there's no center that this expansion is happening from it
appears the same from any point in the universe so to a to a galaxy 13 billion
light years away if they had a james webb space telescope that was looking in our direction the milky way galaxy would
appear to be shifted into the infrared so this this happens uh the the same
this looks the same from any point in the universe and uh the the equation that i put here
that uh i think is the only equation i have in this in this slideshow is uh we measure red we we kind of categorize
redshift in terms of this number z that that you might see occasionally listed with a uh instead of listing a
galaxy's distance we'll list his redshift instead and that's because um
the uh it has to do with a couple of things so so the h naught
the h zero value there is the hubble constant which is a measure of the expansion rate of the universe which is
approximately 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec so uh so mega so parsec
being um what is it it's like um uh i'm gonna get this backwards i think it's four like 3.7 parsecs in a light
year i think the parsec is the smaller one um
anyway it's a measure of distance like a light year is and uh so the further out you look the faster that expansion rate
appears because for every megaparsec you for further out you look you have an additional 70 kilometers per second of
apparent expansion speed away from us uh d is the co-moving distance which is
the distance that that that the object we're looking at is away from us factoring out the expansion of the
universe um which uh is equivalent to
um the proper distance at the present moment in time things get a little weird
um and and so that as you look further out that expansion
rate can appear to be faster than the speed of light but of course those galaxies aren't actually moving at the
speed of light uh so we're not violating any any laws of physics here
but because things appear to be moving faster the further away they are they can appear to moving away faster than
the speed of light even though they're not physically moving that fast
so um that kind of brings us to what what is the size of the observable universe how
far back can we see and because of the expansion of the universe there is actually a limit to
how far back it is possible to see even if we had a telescope the size of the sun
uh we would only be able to see so far out from here
because of because of light because because light has a finite travel speed so if light was emitted from a galaxy in
the early universe and it was much smaller and it was maybe on the other side of
this smaller universe then then then we are it's now moving away faster than its
light can can can kind of keep up with so um
the light from that distant galaxy will actually never reach us because where that light is located in the universe as
it makes its way toward us is continually being moved back and expanded by the expansion rate of the
universe so that light will literally never make it to us um so
the the cosmic microwave background is 45 billion light years away which if you
know that the universe is 13.8 billion years old might not really make sense but you have to remember that because
it's expanding at an accelerating rate um it will it the actual point of
recombination when that light was emitted is now 45 billion light years away because the galaxy the universe was
so much smaller when it was emitted but it still only occurred um 13.4
billion years ago yeah so um with all of that all that taken
into account the diameter of the diameter of the observable universe estimated to be about 93 billion light
years so that's the picture that's shown here the diameter is 93 meaning the radius is 46
and um but based on characteristics of the kha'zik microwave background and what we know about the
big bang and inflation uh we can estimate the size the actual size of the universe which is unknown
and may be infinite but um some estimates based on what we know about
the early universe put it at 23 trillion light years
it might as well be infinite it might as well be infinite there's actually there's some really interesting theories that um are not
they're not fringe theories even they're they're um depending on the geometry of
the universe it's possible that we're kind of in this in this hyper hyper um
what's it called this hyperbola where if we were able to look back to look far
enough out we would actually see ourselves again uh because it wraps around sort of like
uh like if you walk around on the 2d surface imagine you were an aunt
living on the surface of a sphere and you're imagining you're a two dimensional ant and so you don't know
about up and down you only know about left and right and you uh are walking around and you you
think you're walking in a straight line and then after you walk a really long time you end up back at the point where
you started because it the the space that you live in is a dimension higher than the space that you
experience so it's kind of this 4d hyperbola idea where we might actually be able to see our own
milky way galaxy billions of years ago if we can look far enough back which um is the the geometry
of the universe is something that is under active research but it's a cool kind of it's a cool theory
um yes so getting toward the end here um what are some questions the jss based telescope will be able to answer for us
so we'll be able to see the first galaxies and stars and be able to actually measure
uh the conditions of those first galaxies of those first stars but we've only been able to
conjecture with models before we'll be able to understand galaxy evolution because we'll be able to see
those early galaxies and then closer to us galaxies at a later point in evolution and then closer to us is an
even later point of evolution we can actually watch the timeline of formation of galaxies from our singular point in time because
we can look back in time by looking further out in space
because of its infrared capability we can peer through clouds and watch stars form where we can't look through those
clouds with our optical telescopes so we'll learn more about star formation
and something that i'm really excited about we'll be able to probe the composition of exoplanet atmospheres
so we can do infrared spectroscopy on these exoplanet atmospheres where we
can look at uh basically it's like taking a picture but with every different
wavelength of light being its own image instead of red green and blue we have for every
um let's say every nanometer of wavelength of light we get a different image so you can and you can see where
the emission lines and the absorption lines are that are characteristic of elements and gases and compounds so we
can actually look and see what's in the atmospheres of these exoplanets so one of the uh one of the first images
produced was actually this plot here of wasp um i should write down the number
wasp 69b i think or something like that where we were able to observe there's water in the atmosphere so uh where
there's water there's chemistry uh of the biological type and um so there
could be interesting things happening on that world and lots of others that will be able to probe
so um yeah it's gonna be an incredible capability uh scientists are already crying about
how amazing it is and how it succeeded every expectation that it was designed for
and giving us even better views than than we could have hoped and um we're where we where we went wrong with hubble
in the optics the first time it was put up everything just went right with james webb the launch was textbook the orbital
assertion was textbook the unfolding had a few glitches but we got those worked out and everybody's just like crying
happy tears of amazingness so are there any questions uh
i've got one but if there's someone from the stream they read that one first
let's see and i'll go i'll go hop on the chat uh after this and then go answer some
questions and chat too uh on the youtube chat
i am not seeing it uh you want to read it off adrian well no i i just had my own question i
wasn't looking i wasn't looking at the chat i remember that
james webb did get hit with like a microscopic yes space rock um
do you recall how they corrected for that because i thought that was really interesting that they
they were able to account for the you know the very slight bombardment that it might
get being out there in space and still be able to produce the beautiful images um i'm trying to remember what i read
about it um i think instead of um i think it's something that that they kind of assessed and
realized wasn't going to be a problem as opposed to something they corrected for but i might be wrong
um uh yeah i have to go read about that again because i can't remember what the
what it ended up being my brain's been flooded with uh with this exams
that's understandable you've got something important but this was a great this is a wonderful presentation and yes
we were very we were all excited about james webb when it when it uh especially when those images
uh came up i was happy just hearing that the
every target that it reached it got into its point it made it here there everything was
everything went well and it didn't unfold inside of a rocket that didn't let it go or something tragic
yeah exactly you know that's yeah
that's right yeah and i think these so even though um these are infrared images which i was kind of afraid we're gonna
look a bit like the spitzer images that have really weird color palettes that
just don't look good like they've it looks like that they're actually choosing color palettes that
make it look more like the optical images we're used to seeing out of hubble even though these are infrared
images and i'm really glad that they're doing that at least for the for the images that
that we all get to look at um because hubble hubble did for my generation what the
apollo 11 launch did for for the generation before me and james webb is
going to do for the current generation what hubble did for me which was inspire me to get into physics in the first
place so um those images like um i mean there's a lot of science science that's going on in the
unpredicted version of those images but the release of those in a kind of a prettified false colored format is so
important and uh for that public outreach bit and
for inspiring both people who might eventually become scientists and just the general public
to think about what's out there outside of our little our little home universes
so um yeah it's we're just it's all just we're at the beginning it's all just getting started yeah i think i agree and
i think what you just said helps me to realize kind of the outreach of what jwst is doing
you do have folks that that are content that are content producers who see the images and then
sort of liken it to jwst a big fat camera in the sky as if
someone shot out a sony alpha one on steroids and took pictures of space
but then again the outreach far
i guess exceeds the maybe the thought that it's just a camera and it really isn't it's a
science instrument but that's still reaching a group of people who otherwise may not
care about the science that james webb would do so thank you thank you
on yeah nasa and esa understand that really well and in fact um the the juno mission
to jupiter one of its cameras one of its instruments is solely for public
outreach it has no scientific uh purpose although science has been has been done
with it uh because the images that come from that aren't are so incredible all those images that you see
from juno of jupiter with its highly detailed clouds and yeah that's from a camera that was designed
for public outreach explicitly and so so nasa and esa deeply understand how
important having public-facing pretty images is to having people stay
interested in in science to grow the next generation of scientists but also to get
money so they can keep making yeah that's right tax dollars fired at work so that's right yeah
yeah i i uh there was lots of um controversy and arguments about the
billions of dollars that it took to keep hubble and good working order and to produce the kind of images that it did
but when you you know you you spread that out over uh the uh 300 million people that live
in the united states it ended up being something like the cost of a movie ticket or something
you know you couldn't even get popcorn in a coke you know yeah yeah and and highly worth it even just
for for keeping the public inspired and inspiring future scientists
but we got so much science out of hubble and there's a there's a lot of things
that that we want to learn for the sake of understanding them there's also a lot of things that uh when we look out to
these other galaxies and these other and these exoplanets and even within our own our own galaxy and our own solar system
then we can learn about the formation of our own planet and i think that that's
really important for us to to understand and also to look at the evolution of planets that are like ours and kind of
get a glimpse of what different possible futures are um and
and maybe start to clue in a little bit about how life was able to take root on this planet which i think is a question
that everybody is interested in in in one way or another um so it's not all
just kind of pie in the sky like we want to we want to see that galaxy because it's there which is part of it but
the things that we learn will teach us about ourselves and in addition
the technology that is used not only for things like james webb but for the whole
space program percolate down to everyday life lots of nasa technology used in the in
the apollo program and all the subsequent programs are now everyday parts of our existence that we take for
granted nasa actually publishes a report every couple years about how their technology has has percolated out to the
masses so it really it really pays dividends uh
even if it feels like a big expense for having a big camera in the sky sometimes right be on the lookout i i've heard or
read from an astrophysicist from the uk um dr becky smothers she shared the next
targets that uh jwst are coming out messier 74 will be one of
those targets so we're getting an open face galaxy as a part of our next
uh science target so looking forward to that excellent yeah um and we're just gonna
be seeing these images for the next 30 years it's uh it's it's it's fantastic um
so yeah you can't say enough about james there is a question uh
you were talking about an expanding universe um ansel prairie is watching on facebook he says is the universe always
expanding like cookie dough in the oven um
that is an interesting analogy um well so the cookie dough in the oven it expands but it actually like it it gets
faster and then it starts to slow down as you get toward as it starts to solidify
and there are some models of of the universe that
that kind of uh where it's um a closed universe where we expand for a time but
then eventually we reach a size where gravity and dark energy start to be
balanced and then we start collapsing back in um this has actually
been largely not discounted but it's looking less and less likely uh the more we we
probe what dark energy is and um look at how the universe has expanded over the past how it's expanding now
um uh so sort of if it's a good model of a closed universe where like uh we would
expand and then kind of sort of stop and start to come back a little bit um but
as it stands it looks like we're going to continue to expand the prevailing idea is that we're kind of a flat
universe where we kind of expand and at some point they continue to
expand but at a less increasing rate it's also possible that we live in an open universe where
we continue to expand at an increasing rate of expansion and eventually that
expansion becomes so fast and so large that it starts to dissociate atoms and
nuclei and then we just have a big dark empty universe
i don't know if we can have that anyway molly thank you so with that
happy thought i'll let you guys that's right that's right
for that okay all right so up next is uh daniel higgins thanks again molly that was
awesome you're welcome yeah daniel higgins uh astroworld tv uh
uh let's find him here where are you daniel
there you are great good to be on the same stream with you [Laughter]
oh we'll be on the same stream real soon again yeah yeah we're we're arch competitors
here we got the astro imaging channel we've got astroworld tv you know
there he is how you doing guys [Laughter]
hey all i'm gonna say is we have 13 000 subscribers on the astro imaging channel so just
[Laughter]
oh man what a day wonderful yeah glad to have you guys on today thank you for
joining the 100th global star party thanks a lot thank you thank you congratulations on the 100th global star
party that's fantastic thank you yeah it's a it's a it's a milestone but
it seemed to actually happen so quickly so when did the uh the first global star party happen when did you actually get
this idea what was the what's the background to it yeah i think we're going back about two years i think it
was august 4th uh is when we did the first event and it was called virtual star
party uh back then uh i didn't really know quite what to call it at that point um
you know people said well is it gonna be a real star party is it a virtual one i said okay virtual because we can't
get together because of covid right so um and i really i
i kept hearing uh amateur astronomers lamenting about how they couldn't go out
they couldn't do anything you know and i said well good lord we have all the technology
right here you know amateur astronomers and astronomers in general have been the early adopters of
i think all the you know uh technologies i mean certainly in uh technical drawings um uh
photography you know innovators there uh innovators of digital uh imaging um
image processing uh you know the refined precision in mechanics and electronics
you know so it all uh went through the crucible of astronomy and trying to
you know as molly said you know it it it's a way for us to know ourselves
better you know so as carl sagan said we're we're a way to uh to for the universe to know itself so
you know being that we're all made out of star stuff as uh david eicher's pointing out
with all his minerals and everything uh you know it's uh
it's amazing just to have eyes and senses and the ability to make the
equipment that we do so that we can go and look out through our amazing windows and experience the
ride you know so absolutely well you're doing a fantastic job with this and everybody involved with the global star
party is just fantastic it's amazing and congratulations to you yeah it's all about it's all about the presenters
though and all about our audience too that watches global star party absolutely absolutely the support you
have out there is is amazing so i mean keep up the great work and and this is
just that you said before you just put you know you put the spokes in the wheelchair yeah i just like assembled
this and you know tighten up the nuts and you know i plugged it all in and bam you
know then it happened so yeah but there was a learning curve for sure but uh
you know uh but i was i'm very thankful to uh you know the the guy the makers of all
the software that i use you know to to make it happen so uh and i'm very thankful to all of my
audience and said that said hey scott your audio is crap you know
why don't you do this or do that and so i got a lot of tips a lot of help along the way so really appreciate it from all
of you awesome that's great yeah well uh dan and i don't really have much of a presentation following molly so
we're just gonna do our comedy going on right so scott you know i gotta say you
know when i said hey just remember we're on the east coast and you know put us at a decent hour yes i didn't really think
you're gonna you know make us trying to hit a home run after that grand slam by molly because
yeah yeah yeah dan and i are texting and we're going oh my god we gotta follow
molly i don't know if you can feel the love but really we really do uh
you know everyone's honored to be on uh programs uh with you and uh
absolutely i think that yeah a lot of your time to uh you know the community at large you know
through all the programs that you do i'm i'm really impressed and i know it's a lot of work and i know
how hard you're studying for your phd and and uh you know a little bit i know
about professional researchers and professional astronomers and physicists it's kind of a
sausage factory i mean the scientists are really tough on each other you know and uh you know you really have to work
hard to get the little bit of funds and stuff from uh you know the grants and
stuff that are out there and well you're expected to uh produce you know in this way so it's
it's uh my hat's off to you and uh but again we're in the golden age of
astronomy and discovery and exploration we have this incredible beautiful
j west telescope you know without and still have you know the amazing hubble
space telescope that's still generating uh incredible data and you know all the
all the productive telescopes including some telescopes that somebody told me once about 15 years ago that the 200
inch palomar was like an antique you know it was uh you know
and it was somebody at when i was on mauna kea told me that and i go i don't
think so you know because like you know amateur astronomers you know we're always putting better
instrumentation on our little telescopes okay so you know
those super narrow band filters and and line filters and stuff like that i
mean my goodness you know i would have never expected to see the kind of images that we see coming from
the hearts of downtown cities you know tons of light pollution and all the rest of it you know and uh
all three of you know this very well because uh you you've all been faced with this and and uh you're
you're living the cutting edge of uh amateur astrophotography and
you know if you take i think if they if professional astronomers take the ideas the creative ideas that amateurs have
and apply it you know can you imagine if they had like giant narrowband filters for the 200-inch telescope and
and uh you know do all the the techniques that amateurs
do you know like 100 hour exposures with the 200 inch telescope amateurs wonder what you would get
participate in a lot of a lot of science that is being done even with our pretty modest instruments yeah absolutely i've
i know i've talked on here before about um and on the astro imaging channel and some other places about uh variable star
observations and uh and also a lot of supernovae and a lot of comets are discovered by
amateurs and then reported and then there's follow-up observations on the big telescopes because we have our eyes
on the sky on a much larger portion of the sky on our own time schedules whenever we want
as opposed to the big telescopes that have um you know every every minute of time is is called is claimed uh as by
people trying to do research on those so yeah we're still discovering things all the time i was reading a paper recently
about um these uh hydrogen kind of jets that are coming off of um
uh the um uh of the centaurus
uh the hamburger galaxy i think centaurus a yeah um that were
i think first actually noticed or at least like photographed in narrowband by an amateur astronomer and
there was observations done in uh in the paper was mostly about the radio observations done but they actually
included his image in the paper that's so cool uh i tried to remember who who it was um uh um i can't remember but i
yeah and then one of one of my other friends terry robeson actually also imaged those and they've been imaged by
very few people but it is possible with amateur gear to observe these really dim
features um it was a talk at the 2019 advanced imaging conference about an amateur
astronomer who was imaging the uh tidal streams coming off of galaxies
because he had a nice dark spot and a nice big telescope and actually was in a lot of papers uh contributing to to that
research so uh yeah astronomy is one of those incredible places where amateurs can contribute a huge amount to the
science uh alongside the professionals and actually somebody who's a professional astronomer
can also be an amateur astronomer so uh yeah it makes it really unique yes absolutely and you know that that's
something that i talk about quite a bit on the show with my other co-hosts that
you know you don't have to have a 200-inch telescope to do
science and to do legitimate stuff with your with your with the stuff that you have
um you know you could sit there and you could go buy a you know 80 millimeter scope and start doing some
variable star observations or or spend a little extra money and start doing like occultation imaging and all
that kind of stuff all this stuff that we could do um because the technology
has gotten so much better and the learning curve isn't as frightening i guess it's a little bit of
you know you know it used to be frightening that oh my god i can't do this it takes forever i can't you know
it you know it takes 30 years to learn but you know people are starting to do real science with less time invested now
than ever before right that's right it's really yeah and there's more and more pro-am projects going on too
absolutely never before so uh you know we've got um you know not only uh seasoned amateur
astronomers can get started but uh young people like nicolina uh nine years old
you know who's got all these you know asteroid candidates uh from her work you
know uh in in research science so it's uh it's awesome you know
um it's fantastic yeah we're just really in it
no matter what level you want to get started no matter how far you want to take it uh there's really no barriers
you know so yeah and i think that's always existed in astronomy you know someone um uh uh
gave a little prodding uh uh to david about um the fact that he
was an amateur astronomer uh working at palomar you know uh but i see david is
kind of like um you know his uh you know his his distant cousin being uh
you know not literally but uh hummison you know milton hummelson up at matt
wilson you know uh he only had four you know at 14 years of
age i think he stopped going to school okay and uh became one of the world's
greatest astronomers you know so um
i remember you know when i was young and how i got started in astronomy and it's just fascinating to me how things have
progressed and like we were talking about that the technology um i got started my dad had a little pirate scope
it was uh i think it was like a 30 millimeter tasco or something like that yeah it was yeah yeah and i i would
actually look at the moon um from the kitchen through the window i would look at the moon and it just fascinated me
and i i started reading about the planets and the moon and they bought me my first real telescope
which was a four and a half inch reflector and i started building my own telescopes at
that point an eight inch and a 14-inch reflector i actually imported
for the 14-inch mount i imported for the the 14-inch reflector i imported
a mount from tucson arizona which i when i was calling i don't know
if anyone remembers dude do you remember the bigfoot mounts they were wooden yes i remember they were wearing those i
imported one of those pillar bearings and yeah yeah yeah i had
one of those two or three inch steel shaft or something yeah it was it was an amazing mount and it carried the it
carried the 14 inch reflector really nicely um i remember calling down this to the states though i was you know got
to remember i was a young you know teenager and i didn't know tucson was pronounced tucson i was trying to get
through to someone in touch [Laughter]
right you know and and they had uh books i remember i still have a book actually from way back in the 80s um that
is about micro computer control of telescopes and it gave you little bits of code that you could you know i i
can't remember what code it was using it was a book about yeah there was a whole book on how to do it there was a whole book about how to do it and stuff and
now i'll maybe published it something like that yeah i can't remember who published it i'd have to pull it and have a look but um i'm just fascinated
thinking back to where i started and where we are today in the technology i have now i've got a telescope in the
backyard that i control through a computer inside the house and i can pre-program the imaging run
for all the targets i want to image for the night go to bed wake up and just you know there's a treasure trove of uh of
data there waiting for me and it's it's fantastic and i think amateur astronomer is almost becoming you know a thing of
the past in terms of a phrase because we're we're getting so advanced we're we're rivaling
some of these that's all you know yeah that's the difference yeah yeah exactly that's true that's true it's amazing
it's one of the only um you know i i constantly remind people it's one of the only sciences that you can actually be
working interacting with professional researchers you know none of us could be amateur they just won't let us be
amateur brain scientists or you know we can't be director
you know we can't uh if you were really into gems you could never
touch or direct you know you're you're you couldn't find the hope diamond you know there's no hope of holding the hope
diamond you know but we get to look at the same galaxies do the same research if we want okay and
really interact with uh with the professional community um and have our name actually appear on
science papers yeah yeah yeah absolutely and and and interact with the general public too with the outreach like a show
like this does which is fantastic uh to get people interested in astronomy and astrophotography and and you know the
space that's out there the cosmos and um you know it puts a different perspective on life i think if you take the time to
look up at the stars and and think about what you're looking at you know the past and um that's just fascinating stuff and i
like to convey that to people i like to talk about it um don't ever get me drunk i'll never shut up about it
with me because that's all i talk about is that right astronomy reframes your
whole view it does absolutely and if if you're worried about some
crazy stupid little problem that you got like okay maybe you got a a a tax issue
or somebody said something that embarrassed you or you know you feel they got your coffee wrong come on yeah
don't mess with the coffee nothing yeah don't mess up the coffee because that's just it that's the end of the world
the universe is over even molly can't save it how do you think i'm surviving grad school it's
astrophotography
so anyways the show has to keep moving on we have uh jason gonzalez waiting in the wings for us
is there anything else that you guys went to uh i just wanted to be a part of this i i think it's a a
fantastic uh momentous occasion and i wanted to be part of it and congratulate everyone that's involved and and you
know the the viewership as well thanks very much absolutely yeah thank you so much for uh inviting the both of
us thank you so much oh thanks so much guys take care yep thanks
okay so let's go ahead and bring on jason
gonzales you to the spotlight here and then we are going to say goodbye to molly goodbye
he's taking my hair off bye-bye get some sleep molly um
and there's jason with a beautiful i know you did that image so it's uh yeah all right jason thank you no wrong way
there we go yeah there you go that is the view from the summit of
haleakala and maui wow yeah let's talk about that earlier oh you were on mauna
kea you can see monica in the distance [Music] all right yeah so i was over there for
the 1991 eclipse and and uh this is beautiful
the thing that was amazing was just how transparent the sky is up there it's incredible you know the full moon can be
out and you can still see the milky way yeah this image you can see it was shot at dawn and um you can see the
dawn's early light coming up over over the big island hawaii but you could still see the milky way pretty clearly
i'm trying to get out of the way here yeah yeah yeah we can see it my jealousy grows each time
that's a beautiful image that's i've tried to do stuff like that in michigan and
the milky way washes out get up you know a couple degrees above the
horizon and the milky way just watches completely out so um maybe at okee text this year i might
be able to see something where because it gets dark enough for the milky way to stay in the sky a
little longer so i'll have to play around with that uh when i go this year but uh
no that what i like about the image is where you're at you see both sides of the bulge you've got crux
down there near the corner and that's one of the uh constellations that's on my bucket list image for myself
yeah ever unfortunately every astrophotographer has embarrassing moments and mine
my one of my crowning achievements was going up here in the middle of the night and my first
hour of images when it was really dark out were all out of focus because i bumped the camera at some point and
didn't notice it so finally recognized it by the time the sun was coming up
happens to all of us that's right maybe next time well the view that you got i'm sure
is that's buried in your mind forever the view that you got there
yeah i stayed up there for the sunrises this was just past february so not that long ago
but yeah it's hard to follow i thought molly did an excellent presentation on the james woods space telescope i was
going to talk a bit about it too um but i haven't been here in a while so i was
just going to show some of my most recent images and for those that don't know me i'm
deep deep sky astrophotographer mostly um but i do get into like nightscape and
planetary stuff so i have some of that stuff to show you here we'll flip through that stuff and then i
wanted to talk a little bit about james what space telescope also so we'll hop into that so let me share my screen
screen one
share let me know if this comes through yes wow
all right so this is um i'm gonna show some james webb stuff
later but this is um this is an homage to what you can do with the backyard telescope and um
going on a decade of experience now with uh shooting deep sky objects for my back patio
this is the cocoon galaxy um which is just setting in the west these days but
um it's a beautiful galaxy and what really drew me to it is i had the moon up one night and i decided to shoot some
hydrogen alpha subs um on a galaxy and this one kind of popped in my head
because i had seen it before and it's got quite a bit as you can see
but the interesting thing with this image is i shot it separately with lrgb
which is um you know natural light image the true color image
here that you see and then i also shot it with the narrowband filter in hydrogen alpha
and that that right here is the hydrogen alpha data for the galaxy isolated
so these are indications of all the star forming regions within the galaxy itself
and you can see that there's almost a bridge forming between these two and if i turn on now
the natural light image with that hydrogen overlaid you can really see oh wow yeah the gas cluster is just uh
basically clinging on to the outside of these these two galaxies which had just passed through each other in recent
history by cosmological standards but the nice thing about isolating these
wavelengths like this is you can kind of turn them on and off at will
to really visualize the contribution of the the um oh yeah hydrogen alpha light
to the really the beauty of the galaxy i think it looks it adds so much to
aesthetically to the image just to add those pops of color in there right
you know and there's lots of galaxies in the background i can also see yeah it's it's pretty well littered with
uh galaxies not none very huge in this field but there is a big cluster
now where is it here maybe i'm thinking of a different image
but yeah most of these fuzzy dots are our background galaxies and smudges and
things like that this is shot from the backyard through an 8-inch sct
telescope amazing really and then uh also working on uh
getting back into planetary imaging for the summer and this was my best shot at jupiter this season so
far wow and now this is through a 12-inch newtonian telescope world i was
pretty pleased with the clarity yeah planetary is tough especially for northern
latitudes and with smaller telescopes
so this was shot in near infrared which helps calm down some of the atmospheric
turbulence for the luminance layer and then colored in rgb shot with a monochrome camera you can
just see the great red spot here peeking around the corner that's what i was going to say that's a unique view
of the great red spot just appearing oh yeah right on the edge that's cool it's uh it's on its way
rotating into view an interesting thing about viewing jupiter during this season
is we don't see ever see jupiter in phases but we do see the shadows creep in
when we view it from an angle it's what we're seeing here on the on the right hand side you get the darkening because
of the the sun is illuminating it from the left in this image
so i got a couple other views um i shot on different nights and these are
animations and uh this was shot with a one shot
color camera so the clarity is not as good and you can see as i shot it as the dawn was
was a brightening so this is the
rotation of jupiter over the span of just over an hour it gives you an idea how fast jupiter
rotates and that's a challenge when you image it because you're trying to to take um
a lot of frames and the longer you expose for the more frames you take
the more the rotation becomes a factor
but there's software for everything so you can uh you can correct for this rotation effect
if you so choose but sometimes it's fun just to play the pull to see it backwards
rotation that's right i got another one here that i shot
into the dawn
this one was set up as a social media post so it's got some verbage on it
but here i time lapsed the um the image of jupiter as i shot it in the telescope so you can see
i was shooting this in the middle of broad daylight wow and the interesting thing here is you
can really see the quality drop off as the video progresses and that's happens just as the sunlight
lands on the telescope tube and starts to expand the tube pushes the focus out and messes with the
combination that's an issue you don't have to deal with during the night time yeah
that's the moon io transiting in from the planet
all right so i promised we'd talk a little bit about james webb space telescope and uh molly i can't really uh compete with
that presentation she gave regarding the telescope but i've got a little bit of a different angle on it
because a lot of people in this room are astronomy enthusiasts and or astrophotographers
i wanted to talk a little bit about how to get a good look at this data
outside of the mainstream releases that they make to the public because this telescope data
as far as i can tell is uh i had thought that there was going to be science embargoes on a lot of this data
but they're they've released 40 terabytes of raw data now to the general public and anybody can go in and access
this stuff and i just poked around just a little bit and uh there's some amazing
targets and data out there and uh it really hasn't seen the light of day i know adrian you mentioned
m74 that data's out there right now for anybody to grab they've already shot it then okay
yeah it's um it hasn't been there's not been a mainstream release that i saw the
of the images but yeah you can go in there and pick apart the data so i wanted to show
people just how you can go in and look at this stuff [Music] really the home base for everything jwst
is the space telescope science institute and this website manages data from
pretty much the telescopes we have in space but mainly the hubble data and
the james webb space telescope data is all searchable here so if you go over on the right hand
side and you click on james webb space
telescope it'll take you this landing page it's got all kinds of information about the
jameson space telescope press releases
user documentation which i'll show that's pretty interesting and the
data here is mostly stored in
you see if i can find it now
where did she go
all right well that was a bust
i swear i just looked at it it was here but so that the images are all stored on a
platform called the mast portal you know um
i know that there's a link in this this uh this
here it is okay it's quite short for the mick kohlskis archive for space
telescopes mask so if you click on mast you can see here it's got uh
submission highlights you can click on each one of
these and see a little bit it's got some high level science projects
products which are more polished material you can look at what i'm going to show here is the mask
portal okay now if i click on this if you don't have an account
it will ask you to it won't show you all the information so you got to go in and create an account
and if you don't already have an account it'll be over here where my mouse is hovering
um to create account well there's a number of different ways to search through here um
and the significant cost for that for what the account or is it free no no
it's not free so i mean if you paid taxes actually if you don't pay us taxes you
can still get it it's less than free yeah um
so there's a number of different ways to go in here and search okay and and it can get pretty overwhelming because
there's probably millions of uh database files in here
but one one quick way to go in here and look is the the jwst instrument keywords
that allows you to pick an instrument the main imaging cameras on at least for pretty pictures on jwstr
this near infrared cam the near cam and then the miri which is the mid-infrared
instrument near cam though is
is what most of the most of the published images come out of
so if you click on search there you can um you get this splash page that pulls up
um and i don't want this to get too complicated but down here on this target
name thing there's there's a bunch of ways to search for targets but this
just shows a list of 105 targets that jwst is imaged um
so i'll just click on one of these and i know from already searching through this the ngc
7320 is part of stefan's quintet so if we go on there we'll see the stefan's quintet
[Music] so you click on search it pulls up
these are basically all the files available for that target shows over here on the right
it shows a graphical overlay of each one of the frames that the jwst took and where it sits over top of stefan's
quintet you can see the galaxy cluster in the background so you can see they pretty much carpet
on this entire area with pictures well what you really want to see here um
are the fully calibrated images and those are images you can take and open up in a in an image viewer and they're
already fully calibrated they're already basically ready to go ready to process
and those are product level three two b is not a fully calibrated image so
you can sort this column here to see the level three images so that took the list down from
whatever it's whatever i said 105 down to just 3m
a handful of level 3 images
and these all these images are shot through different filters okay so the
number here after f is the filter number so you can look at each filter that
these images were shot through when i was on this other page and i
pointed out that jfwst user documentation i'm going to go in here and show everybody a little bit about
that camera so you can get an understanding of what files you may want to pull down
okay so now i drill down into near-infrared camera and i'm going to look at filters here and this is going to show us all
the filters that are installed on the jwst near-infrared camera and it's really all
shown in this chart here so the the sensors are divided into two
um separate detectors there's a short wavelength channel and a long wavelength channel and you can see all these filter
names um their name naming convention is based on the wave the center wavelength
of the filter so this these are infrared filters and microns the visual spectrum ends right
about 7.7 microns so right about here so all these filters
to select from are all infrared so you can see the way they color-coded them from the red end of the spectrum
the further infrared end of the spectrum to the closer infrared end of the spectrum and it shows you
basically how they colorize these images essentially is when they select from these filters
um they map the colors to rgb for a visual presentation that's um
in the same order as they appear in the visual spectrum that's pretty common unless there are some narrow band images
where they do false colors but i'm going to hop back now to this and
show you and i've already looked into this as far as what
these two files mean you can ignore this segm file
the one that has this tail that's i2d is what you want so this
right here is a 4.4 micron image
that's what the f44 means now don't download that it's a fitz file
if you do astrophotography you have no problem opening fits if you don't
there's uh nasa sells nut cells nasa provides some free
converters to go from fits to like a tiff file or something you can open
and that's called a fits liberator for anybody who's interested in
downloading that fitzliberator has been around for a long time yeah yeah it still still works
all right so for some reason my downloads going real slow i've got things open here and uh
inside fix insight that we can look at since i was just downloading this
question i have uh is it better to use a pc running windows to get a bunch of
this stuff and to use a lot of the i don't think it matters i mean it's all web-based so i think
as long as you've got a viewer capable of looking at fits files right you should be good
so anyway i've already done the slow downward work download work and um
these are the files i pulled down from stefan's quintet so this is with the near cam
this image here this is a 3.56 micron
near infrared image so this gives you a sense of the data that these images were constructed
from [Music] and you can see in this large galaxy
if we zoom in it's resolved individual stars within this galaxy it's just remarkable
and this is a near-infrared camera picture you can also do the same type of
searches for the mid-infrared and these are the mid-infrared images this is a smaller detector
so you can see that if you assemble these kind of images you have to mosaic them together
but they kind of fit right here if i overlay them so you can see that stefan's quintet this is
7.7 microns so this is deep into the mid infrared now and you can see all the dust within this
galaxy these are kind of oriented the same
i say wow you can just see all the dust lanes that pop out in the mid-infrared
so now the images were released and i'm noticing i think the the whole thing was flipped
around was that to was that so that the view that they
presented to the public was matched a direct face on view if you were to
if you were to use your superman eyes and go look at it yourself the galaxies would appear
at a certain place and not not where they appear in these uh in this data
well i mean there's a couple things that happen here i mean once one one aspect is is the uh the jwst
like like a lot of reflective telescopes presents an image or like a lot of
telescopes with complicated optic optics presents an image that's not
upright or image correct so i think the jwst raw data needs to be
flipped looks like it just needs to be flipped horizontally to yeah i think it's kind
of mad i'll flip flip vertically like this
yeah it was probably presented like this and then rotated one 180. but anyway something made yeah
yeah i mean there's a set of transforms you need to go through to get it correct to the appearance in the sky
yeah and that and that makes sense but i can show you here then this is um
this is that m76 data i just pulled down while we were talking actually
um and this is uh three color channels overlaid
and infrared so you can see again individual stars resolved in the
galaxy and some nice i think these are hydrogen regions here
out towards the wings oh yeah like you can almost see dust lanes in some of those regions
yep so this is just a quick combine on that um
yeah i recognize uh there was like one six-pointed star somewhere in the middle and the rest of
that was the rest of that was what we're gonna so
so we're basically we're getting a sneak preview of if they release this image to the public
there's the star that i would i would suspect is in the milky way
that six point at one yeah right here he's these galaxies here
background this data is released to the public they're they're releasing the data as soon as they get it true
yeah the uh which is another direction you know or the the finished
processed image like the five that have been shared
um you know i wonder where you know we'll see something
similar but just looking at the raw data and seeing you put it together for
yourself um jason it's you know it's just really cool to kind of see
we're seeing even more of what jwst is already imaged so
yeah one thing that surprised me and i i think anybody who goes in and pokes around at this
data it's not for the faint of heart uh if you look at how actually messy this is from a from an
imaging standpoint um with this banding and um
you know patchwork quilt of assembling frames it's it's a challenge to work with
now i have to give a lot of credit a lot of credit to that science team for putting out images as beautiful as
they did because it is a ton of work to get uh this data into shape that that's uh
presentable in that format and i don't know if that's more because this you know these are more designed to
be science and instruments and these little defects don't matter as much but i was a
little bit surprised at how rough the calibration looked on some of this data
yeah i i think that might be it and just coming from an amateur myself who shoots
way wide field but um i imagine that the data
is being poured over you know for scientific reasons
but you still have that science team like you talked about that cleans that data up for public
consumption yeah so it's like there's two different two different things that
nasa wants to do as jwst gets more images continue to
drive the public interest in it even if the public thinks that it's just a one-shot
color sony cam on steroids it still gets them interested in objects in space
and [Music] you know it's uh it's it's an exciting
time and i think someone mentioned it also drives up the willingness to
spend money for even more missions like this by seeing the uh beautiful pictures alone can sometimes
do things like that yeah so this is one of those uh images i pulled down and did a
just a quick edit on um by edit i mean take the files
combine the color bands and present a um
you know full color image kind of like the the uh the smacks galaxy cluster the
initial release this one is abell two seven four four it's one that hubble has imaged before also
but it's just a just basically a deep field it's there's not many uh gravitational lensing
instances here it's just galaxies and galaxies on top of galaxies as far as you can see
some real beautiful spirals and uh you know like this one with the nice
hydrogen alpha regions highlighted just some twisted messes of galaxies
[Music] but i i didn't see that this one was even released to the uh public as a as a
finished image so i just kind of grabbed it and put a quick edit on it but i was pretty pleased with the outcome here
uh it looks good you know i was looking at the uh
the mast um website and it's it is the barbara a mikulski uh
archive and she was a politician and
apparently really championed the hubble space telescope as a politician so that's
the background there so one more cool thing with the james one space telescope is they can do
planets too and um the image that they released to jupiter
i thought was stunning not i don't know it just wasn't
uh it wasn't balanced as far as the exposure like the the center band of the
planet was blown out and when i went in there and looked at the data i was
pretty happy to see that the original image from the telescope was properly exposed and so i
went in there and i grabbed a few of these and not all of them were properly exposed but
these two narrow band channels were this is 2.12 microns and 3.23 microns
so i grabbed both of these they look dramatically different these two channels
[Music] um the 212 is super sharp and this other one is
just kind of funny looking but the um cool thing about this is you can see the ring of jupiter within these images
and i believe this is ganymede here um in front and it's got a mask over it so
you can't see the the face of it itself but you can't see its shadow here which is landing next to the great red spot
i think that other that other one showed aurora yeah i don't know if is that showing aurora at
the polls on jupiter or is it there's definitely a glow i don't i don't know if it's aurora or not
um but i took these two color channels and combined them [Music]
you know just using those two channels into into um color information
here's kind of a colorized look at um you can see now both channels at once
and you get a better sense of how they interplay
and i pulled down this other channel which um was a a wideband channel and this
oh there are the rings yeah this exposure really showed the rings nicely oh it sure does but it was taken at a
different time i think even on a different day so this is a different moon in a different orientation
so i kind of hacked my way through this and i lifted the ring out of that picture and inserted it on this one
so now it's kind of a composite but now you can see that the color mix and then the
and then you're wearing the ring also so i haven't seen the public release of
the jupiter data but i imagine the uh if the image of jupiter
with those channels is released they will probably do something similar
having showing jupiter with its ring is gonna have that would have a
pretty big impact on seeing jupiter kind of in a different light yeah
and i wouldn't be surprised if what you've already done with the data isn't something that's going to be
publicly released if nasa scientists get on it and kind of do their version of what you're
doing and then colorize it that's very well the image very well will look something
like this yeah i mean it's completely false color image but the the point of doing this is
to kind of get that color contrast um so your eyes can see those different features
i i you know honestly i mean whether you look at it like this or you look at it like this i mean the black
and white is a really nice view of it yeah
yeah beautiful i really like the i like seeing it with the rings
has the rings but i think it's been a while since we've looked at it and you know
with its little thin ring around it yeah yeah i thought it's cool you know the
the exposure is such with this
you know you can see how much just to extract that ring out of the glare of the planet is pretty tough
because the james bond space telescope has got some crazy diffraction spikes and then you throw an extended object like
jupiter in the middle and it's just lines going every direction yeah it's
really hard to get back to something clean but
amateur astrophotographers deal with a lot of bad data so we've got tricks
yeah it's it almost it almost begs the question um of being hired by nasa to do this for
money because you already know the tricks to get that little ring out of all of that
data and then recombine it with other data so i'm
well scott thanks for having me on i really appreciate it congratulations on making it to 100 and um yeah thank you
so much thanks for opening the door for a lot of uh for our audience who did not
know that you could get at this data um and showing them yeah i mean i i hope it
wasn't a mind-numbing um you know look at the the bowels of the the archive but really
my main point is you can yeah anybody who makes an account right now has
access to this and it's really phenomenal to look at and to have such immediate access on it i mean the
dates on that m74 data um i think was just
those observations were very recent so they're pretty much handing it right off to the public which is pretty cool that is very
cool yeah there's going to be some libraries i have a question for jason yeah go
ahead hi this is bob um how dark is your backyard you showed that first picture
from your backyard so i'm just wondering how bright your sky is yeah mine's portal
five six depends on the season really but yeah i generally pack a ton of exposure
on images okay all right thanks yeah that cocoon galaxy is probably
probably got 20 out more than 20 hours of exposure on it okay
that's how i deal with the noise excellent
thank you jason that's great that's great um
okay so we are going to uh bring on uh daniel barth daniel uh is a science
educator has been for decades uh daniel and i met each other
uh decades ago at um at the uh uh at scope city which was a retailer uh
i had several shops in in uh california one of them in in nevada but uh daniel
lived in california at that time and then he went off to become an
educator teacher and lo and behold he moved out here to arkansas
and walked into our shop here at explore scientific and we meet again so it was so cool
um but daniel has been doing a great program called how do you know
and his uh his uh programs uh teach science you
know to uh to anyone that wants to learn it you know and um uh
you know i i think that the premise of the show you know we conceptually know a lot of things like the earth is
round instead of flat and you know that the moon is round instead of flat
but he gives us kind of the tools and the steps to actually prove it okay so
which is really cool uh he's written some books uh one of them is called star
mentor which is a springer book uh that you can get right now it's it's brand
new and has many of the hands-on projects which
really just cost a few dollars to uh uh you know an expense to demonstrate uh
many of the concepts of science and astronomy um so i think that's a
wonderful thing and uh it's great that you're here daniel to celebrate our 100th mobile
star party thanks thanks scott so uh your 100th star party our uh
30 years or so as as astronomy bounce which is really
astonishing you know i i just want to say as as an educator
i love seeing the glee on everyone's face tonight everyone
showing images from the web from their backyard from their
their own telescopes and everyone else just the smiles light up
this is what we do as people who reach out it's
part of the nature of discovery we all want to participate in it people who
weren't there kind of wonder how in the world did they get a billion people to watch uh neil
armstrong and buzz aldrin step out of the capsule on the limb and walk on the
moon how do they do that everybody wants to participate in the discovery we think of discovery scientific
discovery is one person somewhere in a laboratory out in the jungle or out in the dark with a
telescope going aha eureka but it's a much more social process than that
and i see this i see this with all the people tonight i heard it when molly was talking about
and hubble excited me so much it changed my life it's changed
the path of my life i decided to study science and astronomy this kind of thing scott
is true of all of us and whether we had a mechanical mentor like hubble
or we had an actual person who mentored us who said yeah sure come have a go at our telescope
what they were doing is they were giving us an opportunity to discover for ourselves
as an educator as someone who does outreach and that's really my life is what i do
really what we want to do i i use a fishing metaphor or we want to set the hook hard like we just snagged a trout
in the stream with a fly rod we want to set the hook it was it was done for me the title of my book star
mentor uh i got that from my very first star mentor who was a local village
priest and he had uh he had a 60 by 900 millimeter tasco telescope on an
equatorial mountain in his office i bugged him relentlessly can we please father can we please can we please can
we look at the moon can we try the telescope please please i was i don't know why he didn't reach for a
mallet i'm sure it was horribly annoying but when he said sure and he called all the parents and i said bring the kids
over we're going to take the telescope out in back of the rectory and we saw the moon and we saw some different
colored stars and after a while a lot of people drifted away but he and i were out there and i
said ooh what's the yellow one and he said okay go ahead and move it you know how and it was saturn
and the rings and it was glorious and for me that
hour that that man took out of his life with his telescope to say sure come on up here's the eyepiece here's the
focuser have a go discover for yourself that event changed the course of my life
entire web is doing that right now for millions of people
that's right and i have to i have to agree disagree slightly with one of the things molly said
she said oh there's an instrument on the juno spacecraft that has no
scientific value it's just there for outreach god bless you ma'am but you're wrong
that camera that's only for outreach that is maybe not discovering anything
new about jupiter but that's not what it's for it's discovering new scientists and
astronomers here on earth from a billion miles away that's pretty awesome
and that's always been my point in astronomy and we talk about
i i my hats off and i really i found i'm just i'm astonished by some of the
imagery some people and some of the folks here bring to it just stuns me
uh some of you may remember the movie 2010. the year we made contact with roy
scheider was released in 1984 five and it was about going to jupiter and they
had images of jupiter if you go look at the movie and you look at the
these images of jupiter you go geez why did they use such crappy imagery i could do better than that with my
telescope in my backyard and my sony my sony alpha camera and yes we can the
technology you have to realize scott that
the methodology for gathering and focusing light really hasn't changed
since galileo and newton's day well we've gotten bigger you know newton's reflector
was oh about a two and a half or three inch mirror galileo's first refractor
the first astronomical telescope had a diameter of less than 30
millimeters it was tiny compared to even the the basic toy stuff we have
today for kids right the fact is tremendous discoveries
tremendous discoveries have been made with people at the eyepiece pen and pencil no camera modest telescope
tremendous number of discoveries have been made and for me as an educator i've seen my job
take students out in the dark introduce them to a telescope
and start anew in them set their hearts a fire for astronomy
for the process of discovery there's nothing like the feeling that you get
the first time you look through the telescope and for me it was saturn for many people it's the moon i've had
students out oh have you ever used a telescope before no this is my first time okay we're looking at the first
quarter moon tonight and there we go it's focused for you just have a look i've had i've had
students burst into tears it's just like you see some of these
videos on the web where some little kid gets a puppy and just bursts into tears with happiness seen the same thing at
the eyepiece of a telescope yes that's right as marvelous as the discovery process is
with webb for me i'm not out in the dark with a
magnificent instrument looking for new things out in space i'm here out in the dark with modest
instruments setting hearts of fire searching for new astronomers
making new enthusiasts and you know casting the flying setting the hook
that's that's what we're doing here and some of the most marvelous things and we're starting to see it come out
somebody talked about uh i'm looking for my share button now here we go somebody was talking about uh
there we go somebody was talking about m74 and here's the web image here's the web
image of m74 oh my god i know it's unrecognizable
it is it is and we take a look and we go oh well that's m74 well i'm kind of used
to this hubble image of m74 and it's going to be up for us uh late september and
through october and early november we'll be able to see pisces and look up with our small telescopes and we'll be able
to see as many did m74 we're not going to get this view
but it's going to be photons from that galaxy into my eye and it's going to be
setting me just a light with giggles and smiles and
people look in and we've talked about this scott they come up to the eyepiece it's a party in a box you set up your telescope unless
you're somewhere really remote people will find you they come up and they go ooh is that a telescope yes wow
what are you looking at uh it's m74 what's that it's a galaxy and this guy
discovered it and it's not a comet but it kind of looks like one can i have a go sure
they step up to the eyepiece and the first question is now what am i looking at explain this to me and now they have
their eye on the eyepiece you can't see what they're seeing
but they're asking you the experience astronomer what am i seeing help me interpret this help me
understand the knowledge we give them makes the experience richer
deeper more delightful more intriguing and if we do our job right
they're not happy they're not happy because they want more
like here's a crouton would you like a turkey dinner you know we we give them a taste and we go oh well of course
there's more wow can i operate a telescope like this where can i get one can i do it with binoculars i have some
at home in the garage and you you start them off and
everyone here tonight this this marvelous adventure the 100th global
star party and i just that that makes me smile every time i say it everyone here
had someone take them out in the dark and say here have a go have a go at the
eyepiece here's the focuser turn it this way tell me what you see now here's what you're looking at
and it's it's like standing on top of a big hill and throwing rocks and hoping to
start an avalanche and we do and we do and webb
is a huge rock rolling downhill and it's going to start its own avalanche
the apollo moon landings had an avalanche effect they brought
millions of people into amateur astronomy the hubble telescope comet hail bob all
of these momentous things that we've seen in the sky the jupiter saturn conjunction we had a couple of years ago
uh i was trying to go out and watch iapetus transit saturn it was cloudy here i couldn't get it but every time i
bring people out i say oh this guy tonight you won't see this again in your
lifetime here are some things here's what makes it interesting here's why this is a snapshot now if we come out again over
the weeks over the months people are with me for a semester class or a year class and the sky changes and they're
like wow i never knew i never knew the sky changed i thought it was eternal and in a sense it is
but we view the sky from this lovely rapidly spinning
platform called earth that's orbiting a dwarf star
and the view we have every night is a bit different and the planets are moving and comets and asteroids
pass across our field of view was out looking for k2 i won't see that
again in my lifetime either and people say but you you can only see it once or twice and then it's gone
something new is always coming along this thirst
i have i understand how people like
edmund hillary climbing to the top of mount everest like scott looking for the pole
like balboa seeing the pacific for the first time i understand their joy and
delight because i share in their experience every time i go out at night
and look up and when i have a pair of binoculars or a telescope my experience is deeper and
richer and every time i get to participate as galileo did as copernicus did as can
you imagine how newton felt the first time he put his eye to his little reflector and found out that it worked
i mean for him that probably wasn't that unusual everything he played it was like
the midas touch as a scientist newton was golden everything he touched kind of boom came out right
and but all of us going out and seeing these things and discovering for ourselves
and realizing that we participate in a science
that is easily a hundred thousand years old we've talked on my show i've talked with scott many times how we have these
odd terms in like moon and planet he did a show one time and had a stack of astronomy
and physics textbooks about two feet high and i said hey scott you know what these all have in common these go back
to like the 1960s they said none of them have a definition for the words moon or planet and scott was like what wait is
gullible in the dictionary that can't be true some of these terms we have are so ancient
that what we understand about these objects has gone through revolutionary
transformations we think about the moon and we thought oh we knew the moon in the 50s and 60s
when scott and i were boys we were taught oh well the moon was created when one big blob of material that was
forming the earth and it spun too fast and a piece of it ripped away the fission theory and all those craters are
volcanic continents drip that's nonsense what could move a continent
oh and all the volcanic craters on the moon and then like people like james shoemaker come along and they go um
they're not they're impacts what rocks from space how silly you realize
you realize it was the mid 90s when the idea that a comet or an
asteroid impact might have killed off the dinosaurs became commonly accepted
that is our lifetime sort of stuff that's crazy the people growing up now
the kids growing up now are not going to remember a time
before web and before hubble for them well of course you can photograph
the rings around jupiter and i've talked for decades oh if you want to see the rings around jupiter you gotta fly there
no the process collecting focusing refracting
reflecting light gathering it bringing it to a point that hasn't
changed what's changed is our ability to interpret that light that we gather
the imaging technology my eye and a sketching pen
oh my eye and a cheap camera just held at the eyepiece
oh my eye and wow a digital camera really i don't have to use film and hyper it with
chemicals so it's more sensitive no i can oh yeah sure i can turn my digital camera up to 16 000 iso why not
um these things that we take for granted the the camera technology that i have in
my my new galaxy smartphone oh my god you couldn't have bought that for love or money 10 years ago
and the things we put into the hands of people how many people really understand how
powerful an imaging instrument they have in their pocket that they used to call their friends and
fam they know this is a cool camera wow look i can get a great
picture of my dog but to say oh here hold it up to the eyepiece of a
telescope and take a picture of the moon really i can do that oh yes
there's so many things we could do with instruments that are not grand
that are not expensive that are not uncommon that are not rare
my last program scott we talked about the discovery of neptune the two principal guys in our story john adams
who later became astronomer royal and urban le verrier the french fellow who
headed up the paris observatory and became their equivalent of an astronomer royal these
two guys when they figured out where neptune was they had no telescopes available they didn't have anyone where
they could say excuse me the way thomas uh
bob did and oh can i borrow your telescope these guys
back in that day in the 18 mid 1800s they didn't have access to a telescope
and they asked people they worked in observatories can you look at this i think there's a new planet there go away
kid you bother me this telescope time is rare and expensive these instruments are rare and expensive do you know how much
these cost are we gonna point this at your crazy idea go away kid yeah they were right and in the
variation okay he got his revenge he became director of the observatory and fired
all his detractors but today if somebody has an idea who i'd like to
look at you don't have to go very far to find a telescope or a nice pair of binoculars there are astronomy clubs all
over and we're reinvigorating and meeting in person again for the first time in a couple years
post govind and people can come out and you can go oh can i try this can i see the moon i've heard about this thing
called rays and craters can we see that are there really mountains and craters can you see the sunrise can you see the
sun light up one side of like a range of mountains and it's really the rim of a crater and the other side's in darkness
and i heard galileo found the height of a mountain looking at can i do that
and my answer is sure you can step up to the eyepiece ready set and it's kind of like putting
somebody on the very top of one of those crazy olympic ski jumps right if that was me you'd have to handcuff me and
give me a shove but these these olympic guys they get up and off they go down the hill and that's
what we do scott yeah we bring people up to the edge of the hill come on here's
the eyepiece and we give them a shove and we unleash
a torrent of emotions and delight and joy and by helping teach them and train
them and helping them to understand what they're seeing you know how many people saw neptune
scott and didn't know what they saw right i didn't get any credit right back to galileo
right and before that it's naked eye visible if you've got really good skies we know that people had been seeing
neptune for centuries before it was discovered but it's understanding
the classic question we get from beginners all the time now what am i looking at
and when we light that fire when we say sure
first one's free telescopes they're not that expensive don't worry about that now here's the eyepiece have a look
it's amazing and then we see someone go wow i did a couple of whiles tonight with
some of the images when when someone bursts into tears it's so beautiful yes it is
yes it is it's a grand glorious adventure and we give people a shove
we send them off down this accelerating adventure of discovery and delight
we light hearts of fire and actually that's the subtitle i wanted for my book i said i said i want
to call it star mentor setting hearts of fire for astronomy they said no no no that's too obscure i'm like you don't
know me yet and they won they got a different more prosaic uh after title hands-on projects
and lessons in observational astronomy for beginners which i suppose is more descriptive but a lot less fun
i'm an instigator i'm an instigator i'm a subversive i'm
somebody who says oh you don't know what excites you you don't know what delights you you're not sure what you
want to do with your life have i got a show for you no no it's
right in there go ahead and look tell me what you see and this is what we do and for my money
as an educator to someone who is concerned for how the public
views our place in space for someone who's concerned about
helping people to understand how science is interpreted how we know
what we know this will be the legacy of hubble and web
beyond my lifetime i'm sure beyond my lifetime i'm certain
and the wonderful thing we're starting to see now people are starting to combine the images oh here's an x-ray
image from the chandra observatory here's a visible light image from hubble here's an infrared image from web
oh let's mush them all together and you get this amazing view
that has so much more information in detail it is seen with new eyes we've all seen these
memes where they show side by side uh here's what the hubble sees here's what the web sees wow how much better g
that old thing it's an antique now well maybe still pretty badass if you ask me but
we are literally looking anew at the universe and
creating day by day a new understanding and bringing to the public
an amazing appreciation for how we know what we know when we do that
we help we help develop interest in science somebody said are you trying to get
people to trust the science i said no science isn't about trust or belief it's
about data but people have to understand if somebody says how do you know
the real scientists will give you an answer and the limitations of it i know within
these parameters here's what we're seeing here's what we don't know here's the uncertain part and some people are
you mean you're not sure and we need to help people understand
science isn't sure science isn't done the science isn't settled
that that's that's a boundary that's a fraud that's that's the nigerian nobleman trying to
get you to help him with a financial transaction the science is settled no webb should tell us all the science has
never settled we can always look a little deeper find a little more
and we say oh what we know all these things so well uh there have been a number of times when people have come out and said um
physics is finished all we're going to do is being adding a few decimal places
and you young people in physics that's i think it was helmholtz who said that oh man was he wrong
that was right on the the dawn of the quantum revolution science is always going to be
revolutionized because our understanding and our understanding is imperfect
webb can be a tool not just for the scientists but for the everyday man and woman in the street
to come to delight and to understand how we know what we know
what the limitations are and to learn what real science looks and
feels like somebody's sure they're not a scientist if somebody's
certain they're not really playing fair with the data if somebody says oh absolutely
correct this is the true fact and you know the i'm contra positive that here's
the secret stuff they don't want you to know well you know what
we armor people against that kind of flim flam suitable uh pseudoscience and you know phony
astronomy we armor them by delighting them by engaging them
by helping them improve their understanding all of us can become better astronomers
all of us can look into the eyepiece and fall in
as into a well and we can dive a little deeper i'm sorry if i'm mixing my my
metaphors here excuse my joy i'm delight but i am so excited and you
know what this fall i start my 46th year in the classroom i still love my job
and events like this with people like these remind me every time
of what kind of experience and delight and joy i'm trying to bring to my
students and uh i i think it's just as much a special
talent to be able to take stuff from web and hubble and take it to
a brand new astronomer a brand new citizen scientist and say here's what you here's
the essentials to be able to give them an honest and fair
introduction without watering down without distorting without
phoning up what we're absolutely sure of to help wet the appetite
this is what i do as an educator and it's my joy and delight and i'm not done
yet i'm not done yet
so i i just my hat's off to everyone here and by golly i i
love coming to these things because for me it's a chance for me to be a student again
and wow you all rev me up so i'm going to turn it back over to you
scott thank you daniel congratulations on 100 starbucks thank you so much well daniel i want to rev
you up even further because you're gonna love to know you're gonna love know a couple of things and i'm gonna go into
it more when i finally close this down but um you reminded me of just today
the uh five-year-old girl scouts that were among a group of girls between
age five and maybe 15 and then all the girl scout mentors as well
that all got to see a uh all got to see the sun today from a
solar telescope um the a coronado and um
i saw some of that excitement on their faces even better is the excitement on the faces when we uh the moon was out
for a brief period and some of them got to see it through uh a spotting scope
and still others got to ask questions and i was able to use images that i had
taken to explain some of the answers this is what we know this is what this image is showing and i
was thinking to myself how many of us take these beautiful
images of the milky way or landscape and we post them on social media and we
look to see how many likes and uh things that we get so how grand does it feel that i'm
actually using my images to share astronomy with
young girls and try and get them excited about taking the next step and it was a
profound moment to realize okay now i'm extending an image beyond just
is it a pretty image that i can post online so a lot of what you were saying
reminded me of that and and the final part was we have a new
older astronomer or a new older member of our astronomy group that instantly wanted to
come out and help and so i invited her out so she was there
basically newly minted astronomy member older woman who was there with the girl
scouts very first time out doing outreach so it was uh it was a good day for me even
though my foot my left foot hurts but it was all worth it bring the equipment out and share it
with those uh with those girl scouts on on a really beautiful day and all of them got a chance to see the
sun through that telescope so uh so your your words resonate with
what i was able to do today and then jump right on global start that's where i was scott i jumped on
global star party on the way home from that event yeah yeah so um great so
thank you for for reinforcing in me and perhaps all of us the real reason for
our enjoyment of astronomy passing it forward and i told those little five year those
five-year-olds the young daisies i said you all are going to be the next
scientists in line to help figure things out and um
you know they of course they looked around looked at each other but i said don't worry you'll
get it as you get older so yeah um so yeah thank you for for that inspiring
uh straight from the heart no there was no scripture
you just came from you came from how you felt so thank you for that great that's great thank you daniel thanks
again thanks for your comments there adrian okay our next speaker is uh
connell richards uh connell has been how many global star parties has it been now
connell do you remember uh it's been quite a few i want to say we're up to maybe 17 or 18 that i've been on i
remember the first one i was on was the 51st oh okay here we are
uh quite a bit later on and i have to thank you for putting together not just today's program but uh the several dozen
star parties that have come before this it's really been a wonderful program yeah it's it's been a lot of fun and and
i i really enjoy the uh the communication that goes on between
the the people that participate uh in global star party a lot of you have become friends and foreign bonds
and stuff like that shared a lot of great information with each other um
you know uh just just here on this side of the uh the broadcast so
but uh uh everybody is excited that you uh contribute to global star party
connell you have a very polished uh demeanor and you know your stuff and you
are inspired uh so we all get that and so thanks thanks again for making
global star party what it is thank you very much it's been a great pleasure doing these programs i hope to do many
more yeah we'll be here all right all right it's all yours i'll get started here
um can you see everything okay is my audio good yep audio is good there you go
all right you're in presentation mode looks really nice yeah good
i still have the zoom window here and let me minimize that uh all right well i think it's
interesting that dr barth brought up just a moment ago um how so many discoveries have been made through small
telescopes and people just scanning the skies in their backyards some of those discoveries have been
personal milestones they've changed one person's view of things some of those have changed the face of
astronomy and cosmology there's really quite a big spectrum there of how influential these instruments can be
and when i think of these outreach events and i usually reflect on how i felt
about astronomy and what my experience was and probably the first year or two i was engaged in the hobby
and i had a lot of questions of course as many beginners do all kinds of things i wanted to know
and i tried to think about what some of my my biggest questions were and what some of the
uh biggest resources i would have wanted to know about there and hopefully some answers to some of those
questions now as a beginner a lot of that relates to smaller apertures binoculars and small
telescopes that so many of us use there's a picture of me there observing the total solar eclipse of 2017 with a solar
filter on my six-inch newtonian and that's been the telescope i've used for over six years now for just about
everything i've done and it's been quite a great instrument and along with using that my skills have
grown advance here
oops here we go so i'll bring you back to my first night under the stars
which was april 16th of 2016 and i remember all these things very well i
was so pumped up for it i'd just taken my telescope out of the box a couple of days earlier and i was ready to get it
out under the sky and and see some some new targets and kind of expand my own horizons so the picture on the right
here you can just barely see a first quarter moon maybe about 30 or 40 degrees off the
horizon there and the telescope ready to go and look at that cool and
the night before i remember i thought i had this black cover on the back and i i
don't remember why but i thought i needed to take that off so these three screws here i turned all
of those as much as i could and pulled them in and out and when i got my telescope under the
stars to start using it i'd look at the moon and it was impossible to see anything
and of course i didn't know this then i know this now i'd messed up the collimation completely and had wondered
how i would get that back into order so i i figured something out for the next night and uh the the show went on
and i was able to see the moon and some of the planets well enough and a couple targets as well
but i really had to set my expectations that was important at that time there were so many
beautiful hubble images out of course they still are and now they're being joined by the great infrared images from
uh james webb it's successor it's very hard to see those images
and anticipate what you're going to see in the telescope and there are a couple of books and resources that do that well
but i didn't really understand what i would be seeing at the time i just knew that i could see some things in the
telescope and i kind of left the details of that to whatever i might find i kind of made it
a discovery you might say and after that i wrote some of my first observing lists i have one of them on
the next slide and it's it's kind of interesting to see what i wanted to see what i was really
excited to see what i thought was the limit of what i could observe there were some things i was right about
some things i was wrong about and i think that might be a common theme with many beginners kind of setting your
expectations and knowing what you can look at and after i looked at this for some time of course i remember the date it was
april 16th i started keeping a journal and it was really i think it's been a very valuable tool
for me to journal and sketch and photograph so many of the objects and phenomena that i've seen
they serve as a wonderful record of my observations and i'm sure everyone else in this program and many of the audience
members would attest to this keeping notes of your observations whatever that might mean maybe it's
details of the structure you saw who you were with what equipment you used all of those can
be very valuable uh tools in not only documenting your observations
but it's also simply fun to just go back and see what you were doing at the time and in making this presentation i was
able to do that and it's it was certainly a fun exercise and with keeping my own documentation i
really wanted to share with others and astrophotography is of course a great way to do that but it's very challenging
to get into when you're new to astronomy in fact you can see in the image here
i didn't even have binoculars at that point here i was using an equatorial newtonian telescope which i now love and
of course use very frequently uh but it kind of steepens the learning curve for new observers and i would encourage
those who were in my position at that time to go back and start with binoculars and work their way up to telescopes and then once they've
mastered the visual side of things they can work more with cameras and sharing it with others
and that can happen through either photography or outreach events i'll talk about some of the ones i've been working on later
both with high school outreach and younger people as well i'm working on our program right now for
kids 7 to 11 that's been a really fun program to do and it's kind of fun to
really see this the scope of people's interest in astronomy what they want to see what they want to do
and being able to guide them into this hobby and helping them enjoy the night sky a little bit more
there was a great tool i came across when i was first starting out there's a wonderful book called the
backyard astronomers guide by terence dickinson and alan dyer i think they just came out with a new addition but
for for so many years that's been a great introductory book for this hobby
and i remember i had it was a 1992 edition i think and i read it cover to cover and it talked a little bit about
film cameras in the astrophotography section but just about everything else was pretty relevant to what i was doing
and in the first chapter this is the thing i remember the most they had something called the ah factor that they
outlined and the authors essentially said when you're going out doing any kind of observing
uh you might look at the things you see on a scale of one to ten one being i
suppose that the simple pleasures and ten being the biggest events with the wow factor so you see one here is a
faint meteor that's an example they gave with 10 being a total solar eclipse and something in the middle would be
something like seeing surface detail on mars and i've now had all three of those experiences and many more and regardless
of where they fall on that scale they are very pleasant experiences and i finally remember them
but going back to my first night this is what i saw i remember the first object i pointed at in the sky was
jupiter and that was actually the first thing i'd seen through a telescope a few years ago
i was on this cub scouts trip to a local observatory that had a 10-inch clark refractor
and i'm sure i'd love to look through that instrument now it has to be a wonderful instrument on the planets but
i remember the view on the left is pretty much what i saw i remember the moons the most four little dots two on
each side and the the big disc in the middle of jupiter and of course i had to go back to that
and see the bands and and kind of work in some filters and spend some more time with it and develop
my skill and equipment to see how much i could pull out of jupiter but i think that makes a great first target for many
telescopes as well as the moon here on the right you can see copernicus that's just
falling on the right side of the terminator uh still a little bit in shadow there's clavius down at the
bottom tycho a bunch of the really famous craters and the moon is a really fun tool to start to learn uh one very
tiny piece of the sky and get more acquainted with this hobby
now i talked a little bit earlier about my observing list if you remember april 16th was my first light for that
telescope and about a week later i was already working up things that i wanted to see
and here is word for word a list that i had written down of
what i thought were some of the best and brightest targets in the night sky and many of them are it's a
it's a great list of highlights but i thought of many of these as challenging objects whereas now i see
them as more routine objects some of the ones in the messier catalog uh maybe like the ring nebula i remember
that the ring nebula m13 i had the hardest time finding them i didn't know the sky very well i was still trying to
learn that and tracking those objects down proved very satisfying the first time and now i can go back to them in in
just a matter of minutes and enjoy them all over again on the left here you see i i wanted to
see the eagle nebula and i actually saw that in my telescope for the first time
i want to say it was two or three weeks ago though i'd seen it in binoculars much earlier than that and i i wrote on the side there that i
wanted to see the pillars of creation which in a six-inch newtonian telescope from suburban skies visually
is a very very challenging feat i'm not sure if anyone's done that and i don't know if anyone will
so that was kind of out of bounds for my expectations but at the same time i thought it'd be really cool to see
jupiter in its moons in saturn's rings and those of course delivered very well and i always go back to them as
favorites and in the middle there you see a couple deep sky objects alberio is a visual double star the andromeda
galaxy little did i know i'd also be able to see the two dwarf galaxies there which are quite bright
other things like the pleiades m13 they were all some fantastic objects
that were challenging for me at first but i think they made some great targets in the end as i was starting out
and on the right there is a picture of a project i've been working on recently for the astronomical league it's one of
their observing programs for globular clusters and the observing list looks completely different on the left i have a couple of
uh targets highlighted and scratched out as i selected and observed them according to what my telescope could
uh could handle uh some some clusters in the 8th and 9th and maybe even 10th magnitude those were
pretty dim i recall but on the left here i have messier objects and then i'm getting into the
ngc catalog a little bit more some of the herschel objects and i think it's kind of fun to notice that i was using
the same telescope all along but my skills and experience were developing alongside that
i'll go to the next slide here and like i said it's really important to keep a record of your observations not
just for very practical aspects of seeing what you observed and looking at times and dates and what equipment you used for
future reference but it is really fun to go back and just
read documents about what you saw and on the left this picture of a
description i wrote about saturn was the first written description of of any object in the night sky i ever created
and on the on the right in that picture there's a little sketch of saturn uh no cassini division in there at all just
the rings and the the ball of saturn i had a couple reference stars nearby that
i must have seen on some astronomy program and titan as well that was quite exciting and unexpected
and just a brief note that i saw things were getting a little bit dimmer in the night sky as the moon was rising at that
time and on the right i have a sketch of mars it was the first dedicated sketch of any
object in the night sky i made a couple of years later during one of its oppositions
and uh it's a little bit rough around the edges it looks kind of like a pen sketch i was using some pencil kind of
scribbling things in to see what surface features i could reference later but this sketch i think falls in a
really nice um uh metaphor for how my
um experience in amateur astronomy has progressed because i remember in 2016 i set up my
telescope on on the deck of the house and i was waiting to see that opposition of mars in in may of 16. i was really
excited for it but i didn't know what to expect or what i was doing and i thought i know magnification is
the key and it didn't quite work out that way because i got this four millimeter possible four millimeters
and the experience of looking at the night sky through that eyepiece is kind of like trying to study the grand canyon
through a soda straw it really didn't work out too well i remember straining my eye and all i could see was this red
ball that was floating back and forth in the atmosphere it wasn't steady it wasn't very crisp and later on i
upgraded a couple of eyepieces i was also a much more skilled observer and i saw the sketch you see on the right and
then later on in 2020 another two years later 26 months i was able to make a series of other sketches which i shared
in other talks on this program of mars in much more detail
and here is one of my favorite highlights i finally hit 10 on that scale that i referenced from the
book earlier there was a really nice side by side of the 2017
eclipse you can see on the left here the horizon's all dark i'm looking at the sun and i don't seem to be complaining
too much so it must have been during totality or at least near it before i took that
solar filter off and on the right was a picture i got just through my phone held it up to the eyepiece and there it was
and i could finally share that experience with people i live in pennsylvania and we took this
road trip down to a rural part of georgia the band of totality passed right in that northeast uh part of the
part of the state and it was oh i want to say 21 22 hours
in the car each way the traffic was ridiculous with that event i'm sure we all have
our own little stories from that eclipse but it's a memory i'll cherish for a long time uh certainly one of my
favorite moments in my developing experience in astronomy and the reason i share all these is i
want other people to understand what they can expect going into things there is a certain progression from
looking at that first uh view of jupiter or the moon and then going to see an eclipse then
learning how to use a telescope instead of binoculars there's a nice progression uh that that you can lay out for
yourself to kind of make that learning curve less frightening and and really get into the hobby without much trouble
and enjoy it a lot more i think uh now we were talking earlier about how
much the the cosmos is changing especially our solar system we see it as a very eternal and static thing but
that's not always the case and i have a series of images here that uh certainly represent that uh the top
one at the center is is the most recent lunar eclipse in the clouds and i
remember taking that image i guess you could say live on a global star party when we did the eclipse
special i was running in and out of the house and sticking my card in out of the computer and pulling those images off
and that was the final processed image of the shadow starting to leave the moon as some clouds were coming in and it
adds a lot of drama to that image i think and there it is uh framed by some images of sunspots a partial solar
eclipse comet eois on the bottom here is the conjunction of saturn and jupiter and then a meteor i
was fortunate enough to catch on the right so they all highlight how our cosmos and our solar system are changing
places and you can observe these with very modest equipment uh pretty much everything here you can see in
binoculars of course i should note with the solar observations you should use the proper protection and
solar filters in those cases but they're all very visible and readily apparent to those who are looking to get
out and and see what the night sky or even daytime sky has to offer
after some experience with my own telescope i wanted to push those boundaries a little bit i remember my
first trip to a dark sky site which was cherry spring state park and it's in north central pa which is
one of the darkest parts of of the country for sure but they say it's the darkest place east
of the mississippi portal two skies it's about two thousand feet of elevation and
that night we had some clouds rolling away just in time uh for a night sky to clear up it was
during the pearson meteor shower in 2018 and that was a very memorable night
and it's a long story but i wasn't able to bring my telescope that night so i had some binoculars with me
and i thought oh you know i'm kind of complaining i can't bring my telescope out to this dark sky site and it turned
out to be one of the best things to ever happen to me because it was one of the best nights of observing i ever had i
saw the eagle nebula for the first time triffid uh the lagoon nebula was stunning i saw all these meteors from
the pierces flying overhead even though it was august i was even able to see the zodiacal light with the
naked eye it was just incredible observing with very modest equipment and it's certainly something i'd suggest to
any new observer looking to get into the hobby and i think it was also fun to look at some of the history of of astronomy on
the left is a picture of a telescope called the leviathan of parson town and i was fortunate enough to visit that
telescope it's in the middle of ireland and as many of us know it was built by the third earl of ross who was trying to
figure out the structure of what at that time they called the spiral nebulae in the sky they were face on spiral
galaxies and he made some very famous sketches of m51 and m101
with the telescope you see there it looks like this giant barrel cannon kind of thing
and he was able to move it in terms of azimuth about 10 degrees and of course he had the full span of
altitude and all these works and scaffolding on the sides of
those stone walls to get up to it so it kind of shows how far people are willing to go to
extend their own experiences of discovery but all you need like the the picture on
the right suggests is some good dark skies in your naked eye or maybe even a pair of binoculars you can see
quite a lot with that and have a wonderful night of observing and what would observing be without
sharing it with others a couple of years ago uh i started this high school
astronomy club at my at my school and it was one of the only junior societies within the astronomical league
as an astronomy club so i think high school students are a really important group to reach right now as they're
going off to college they're looking at their futures they're learning new hobbies they have this time
it's it's a great opportunity to share astronomy with people and get them involved and you can see there's a sky
chart in the middle of the projector there and some of the students who are with me who are interested in it
we really had a great time doing that program and on the right here is a program for a much younger audience this
is one i started recently at the local library and there's a chart of what the phases of the moon look like and you can
see it looks a little unconventional for what those charts look like you might just see a half lit moon orbiting around
the earth in different positions but the reason i made the chart like this is i first instructed the kids okay
here's where the new moon happens here's where first quarter happens here's where waxing gibbous happens and so on
and when i shut off the lights i held up a flashlight next to that orange cutout for the sun
and i had this uh rubber model of the moon and i moved it around the earth while shining the flashlight on it and
they were able to see that the moon remained half lit no matter where it was but it matched the paper cutouts you see
on the poster and that really helped them to understand uh what the lunar phases look like and
after that program this girl came up to me and she had a shoe box that she made this little craft and inside was a
a hanging styrofoam ball of the moon and there were uh holes cut into the side of this shoe
box and you could look in and shine a light in one end and see what the phases looked like depending on where in the
shoe box you were looking she was like i made this moon box and she had all these decorations and stars on it and she was
really excited to share that so i think kids really find an interest in this stuff they like the solar system the moon they
want to know everything about it and there's a lot of joy in bringing it not just to adults and high school students
but also younger audiences as well and there are a number of ways you can do this on the left here is an article i
wrote for the league's reflector and that was meant for a lot of people in the amateur
astronomy community who were kind of wondering how they could reach high school students and use the new
technologies that we have now and use that to their advantage for outreach and on the right is an instagram page it's
one of many uh social media platforms i utilized especially throughout the pandemic for sharing my
outreach in astronomy i talked about the images from pluto that came back from new horizons
anniversaries of certain events like yuri gagarin becoming the first person in space and it also worked out as a
good avenue for communicating club information and finally i come to
a project i'm very excited to share right now which is a star party at the local library
they recently acquired a telescope that you see on the left and i'll be using that for some lunar observing showing
kids craters and rays on the moon and mountains for the first time and i've actually never been to a star
party i'm looking forward to getting around to some very soon but i'm looking forward even more to
running this and seeing the books on people's faces especially the kids as they see the moon through the telescope
for the first time i think that'll be a really special experience that they'll remember and i certainly hope to inspire
more of that younger audience and people new to the hobby to continue and keep pushing the boundaries
and discovering even more and as much as i want to encourage the new people in the hobby i would suggest
to the more experienced amateur astronomers that they take these lessons of sharing outreach and sharing that passion for
discovery with new people and being able to uh create a lot of communication in the
hobby and a lot of openness that hopefully brings even more of the public um into
some scientific interest and and that really uh we're able to capture uh their
curiosity for what the world has to offer and with james webb going up so recently and coming online i think
that'll provide a lot of that inspiration uh with the efforts we have here in global star party i think that'll help a lot as well but i'd
encourage everyone to to get out under the stars as much as they can whether uh that be with outreach events or on
their own uh there's certainly a lot to be discovered so thank you for letting me share that tonight
thank you i wish you all the best in your discovery thank you very much thank you so much that's great
that's great well okay so um another great
presentation from connell richards um we are uh now
uh up to the point where we can bring on john briggs john briggs is currently the
acting secretary of the alliance of historic observatories but if you've been to any of the uh
the beautiful old observatories or been in the antique telescope society or just hung around
uh amateur astronomers uh when you bring up the name of john briggs usually a big smile goes across
people's faces because uh you know john is uh
definitely someone that is uh
his passion uh for astronomy and instrumentation and what it does and the
people behind it and the history of all that just you know it comes across so uh forceful
and uh um but in a way that uh just really inspires you and wants you to learn more
you know anybody that's hung around john briggs could easily occupy hours of his time uh just asking him
question after question and uh of you know how and why it happened and you
know the virtually the story of the unfolding of the universe itself to uh humanity so
john um it's great to have you on global star party um
thanks for joining us i i hope you can you hear me okay i can hear you just fine great yeah well
what you're saying is another way of whoops that's not what i want can't i cancel uh that i'm getting uh long in
the tooth and that is true and i'm proud of it i'm
not the only one and um and i have a lot of fun like everybody else
so it's a great pleasure to be a part of your 100th and thank you so much a lot
of fun now i just have uh something very quick to share here
and uh because let's see the theme was seeing beyond and um that
uh and that combined with the fact that we are all uh celebrating
the web uh images um uh then the theme made me think of
something i wanted to share very briefly um uh an experience
with my backyard observatory but it was a collaboration with friends um but it
really was a representation of seeing beyond uh just from one's own backyard
now let's see if i'm gonna do a share screen and let's see if i do this right
um that's this i think is the way i wanted to do it
and um i'm going to try to make this small so can you see the picture there scott
yes sir good um i actually wanted to uh bring up the
uh the web um uh wide field of the galaxy cluster
with the gravitational lens images and we were fortunate that molly
and jason uh both spoke so much about the web and including that particular
image but to the way it's pulled up i i i i'm not gonna get out of this mode to
return to it but what a spectacular image that was wasn't it and as molly pointed out it represented seeing an
angular part of the sky that corresponded to not much bigger than a grain of sand at arm's length
okay uh but yet uh so many galaxies in that uh
field of view well uh bob fugate and i are lucky to live here in new mexico
and where there's a lot of space there's still a fair bit of dark sky
and as i've shown once or twice before on these events proudly this is my
backyard i have a hilltop in the backyard and i call it full on a hill
observatory foa observatory um but it's just a picture i'm just
trying to lead up to a picture that i want to show you that we secured with uh instrumentation here all the healthy
facilities up here are on wheels it's government surplus stuff both of the
domes were surplus missile cracking domes off nearby white sands missile range here in new
mexico and it's see see the wheels and um uh they're ten foot domes they're
awesome with very wide slits they house cine theodolites originally and that's
me on the left and a friend of mine who's passed away i fear now named rick
thurman and he was a fellow member of the albuquerque astronomical society
but um rick uh was an avid astrophotographer
and he had purchased this instrument it's an italian wide field astrograph and um uh
he had uh more or less exhausted his his uh evident possibilities for using
this portable astrograph on the tripod up around albuquerque in the brighter
skies and his health was was fading he didn't have the strength
to move it around but i when i heard about this i said rick i've got a spare dome that even has this
white pillar uh built into it if you want move it down here to magdalena we could do some
stuff together and the people in the background are mainly of mutual friends
from albuquerque astronomical society who helped rick move this
equipment uh down to this dome in my backyard and uh it's it's as i said it's a it's
about an f3 uh very wide field astrographa and on an
astrophysics mountain this was rick's equipment uh but it's still here uh in magdalene
and new mexico and um it's very good for taking uh beautiful pictures of the
milky way and this is the sort of thing i want to be able to show off because showing the pictures live i can zoom in
on them and i'm and it's great because you can see how sharp
the the the stars are and as i've um i'm lucky to be
uh so so closely acquainted with bob fugate one of the things he says
he says john you know i like photo with a lot of stars
and that's what he gets with many of his lenses but this astrograph is capable of that too this is m46 and m47
by the way and uh then the m46 open star clusters in the winter sky there's this
beautiful little planetary planetary nebula lined up with that cluster but isn't
that cool the field corresponds to about three and a half degrees
in other words let's see seven times the diameter of the full moon in width and height but anyway i should keep moving
on now because this is not really even the picture i want to share now let's see why where's my arrows there should
be an arrow to make me oh there it is yeah and so that this here
is the picture that rick really wanted to get with this equipment and dark skies
and so it was the first thing that we worked on together um uh uh the spaghetti nebula
and i think there were maybe five nights of exposure time with different filters
but many many exposures spread out over at least four and possibly five nights and
rick who was expert with the processing assembled this image whereas and he was
operating the telescope remotely and i was basically the technician on site because i'm an instrument a guy and come
on let's see how do you advance how do you advance there should be an air oh there it is
there it is but in any case the picture that i really wanted to show you with that uh setup
was um one like this it so the first
one i got of this particular field i took all by myself and you know it
looks just like a star cluster doesn't it sort of a boring star cluster this
particular view of it though was recorded by bob fugate using the equipment over the
internet with my assistants here in magdalena but it it it it matches one
that i had done myself but when i was telling bob what i wanted to do tonight he said john don't you
remember we've we worked on that same field together and maybe the shots i've
got in the can here are better to illustrate what you want to show and so everybody in the audience maybe is
thinking well gee what is it just another star cluster but if you really go in closely
you could say wait there's a galaxy there and that's a little too fuzzy to be a
star that's too fuzzy to be a star these are not stars or those maybe it's a
galaxy cluster it's the coma cluster okay but what
really um takes the cake as far as i'm concerned
is that there is a function in a pic's insight
uh that rick thurman uh demonstrated to me on my first
version of this image and bob was quite familiar with it too so he took his
image here which he just emailed me tonight so we could show you the best we've got and with the simple press of one button
on that same frame the software will identify every galaxy in the field of view
but the kick is is this i think being able to zoom in because
only when you zoom in and you see what's going on
that for example let's see um uh pgc44533
is that little galaxy right there and that stands for what is it a principal galaxy catalog the larger and brighter
galaxies have ngc numbers or uh index catalog numbers but the
fainter ones going down to something like magnitude 18 or the million or so
uh galaxies that are in the principal galaxy catalog but man when you
automatically turn on these ana these this annotation
for galaxies with the magic of modern software that'll operate upon your own
relatively simply recorded backyard image recorded with an eight inch tall
scope and you dramatized how the coma cluster is so
uh detectable from your own backyard now this isn't the web telescope but when we looked at
that spectacular web image of course with gravitational lensing and everything else and all the little faint
galaxies in the background the field of view that's pretty good but you expect a lot for 10 billion dollars or whatever
it costs this rig did not cost 10 billion dollars after all it was only
eight inch aperture but for heaven's sake look what you could do if you tune into it uh from your own
backyard we do have the advantage of new mexico and all that but um but it's one heck of a lot of fun
i think bob fugate is um online as well bob do you care to add anything since
you actually process this particular image uh john you've done an incredible job
and there's absolutely nothing i can add to your brilliance
bob that i'm i'm i'm nothing but a reflection nebula in your company man
oh gee you know i'll be let me okay folks maybe some people are actually still listening this is here's a bob
fugate story so bob bob you know we were on the phone earlier tonight when i told him what i wanted to
share you know the annotated shot of the of the coma cluster and uh bob said well wait a second you
know i think i've got an even better one because he sent me one first
but via email while other people were talking and then suddenly he he texted me again
he said it was actually a phone call he said you know i think it's i've got an even better one i'll email it to you and
you tell me what you think folks when bob fugate tells me he's got an
even better image i don't i don't have to look at it nobody said it's true
anyway uh the sun is setting in this shot on um uh uh
foa observatory and so uh friends like bob say that you shouldn't call it full
on a hill now you should call it friends on a hill whatever acronym you want to
use i don't care but we have a lot of fun uh with this equipment we miss the late rick thurmond uh he has made uh uh
some so much of this possible for me and bob and other folks uh so thank you for
your attention folks i wanted just to share something short and sweet
thanks very much john that's great i love it thank you very much
okay you bet man let me try oh there stop share there's something real quick
so john and bob i am instantly envious of where you all live
just wondering are you just coming out there yeah come and visit
i'm that it's on the list along with five other places thanks to the global star party
that i now have to visit so uh so yeah that that location looks
beautiful great bob does fantastic mind-blowing things from his backyard
but as often as he can he is escapes down in our direction here magdalena
including into the gila national forest and uh we sure have enjoyed uh seeing
his results everywhere excellent wonderful okay we're going to uh transition over
to uh cesar brolo down in buenos aires but before we do maxi's got an image that he'd like to
share with us maxie you want to show what you got in the scope
okay let's let's share my screen so
what i got here this is the 47 to canada
wow the globe star is beautiful
yeah it's an entirely full of view practically and
let me stretch and reset the the histogram you can see only those
stars but when you go to stretch there's a lot of one wow
so a single shadow of 60 seconds
and [Music] well i i was i i want to point to this
place because adrian as they asked me more earlier because
now do you see the stellarium
yeah i see it and it's it's finally risen high enough for you to be able to
image at it definitely a beautiful globular cluster
it's a really good one and now i think i'm going to some galaxies that are here in
sculpture to to find out but uh i think that's
will be all for tonight because it's it's a rough night i have some kind
of wind and some pictures there struggling with the stars
so well thank you for for watching thank you and yeah i will be online but
uh calling it a night okay no i i think i will be safe but
let's see maybe more later i will if i find something some another place
uh i will show
a globular star cluster for those of you who don't uh you know who are just watching and don't
know what this kind of object is this is one of the most massive global globular star clusters in the sky you have to be
in the southern hemisphere to see it uh where maxie is and
it you know has millions of stars again about 15 000 light years away so
thanks very much maxie for showing that now you're welcome thank you
okay so uh cesar brolo you are up next thank you for coming on
a global star party it's called argentina right
uh yes actually not so cold not so horrible it's 12 12
degrees centigrade centigrades okay 12 degrees
for this night is okay but all the time that we talk about
about astronomers we are sometimes quiet or stay
uh without movement and when we remember that we
uh we can when we can remember that it's late is it yeah i froze yes it is a
typical thing yes um tonight i have
in my balcony an entry level optical tube assembly very very
entry-level optical tube assembly is the national geographic
explorer scientific national graphic uh 114
millimeters
yes the focal razor is only um 500 millimeters oh sorry the
land and the focal razor is uh 4.30
a the number of focal razor is very light it's very really very
light very fast and actually i'm using uh with a planetary camera a tractor camera
with a big size pixel it's an excellent and it's over the
100 exos 100 month um
this is working really nice and it's a it's a
telescope that a kid can afford and use and the camera is cheap the telescope is cheap the
mount is of the cheapest in the in the market uh because it's amount that
actually work you know i talking about the amount that you create but yes and uh yeah one of the amounts
that we're giving away and the door prize uh for this uh global star party so
yeah yes uh well maybe you can you can uh
see that the moon with the the telescope the telstra normally is
is over you know over a very
amount that is only for hand bundle and use in
right left and up and down and it's very easy to use and the same optical to
assembly can be assembly over a cultural mode in in this in this
opportunities uh go to mall go to montes that can can go to the
follow the stairs and can reach the stars and reach planets and everything that
find planets find galaxies find nebulas but here
i can show you the live image now
first of all i'm showing you now antares
uh with a single exposure of uh [Music]
i think that is a five four four here you can see the exposure for point
uh 69 seconds in this moment uh i am
i know i i don't have any any cluster i have a mf m4 but
but but let me stop this
here well here was and that is now appointing with the telescope but
i can show you the picture that i took just a minute ago
while maxi pointed to parenthesis cluster
i point to the omega centauri cluster
let me show you you just had the one up here man cesar
yeah you get the biggest one yes i choose the big the biggest one
here this is the picture 50 pictures with the telescope that
full of stars that's certainly massive
yes here you can see the the
now you can see you can watch different stairs
yes was it really magic it's magical with this telescope make this
i use it i used 50 takes of five seconds each and the 20 darks
and all with this telescope and the the planetarium camera
nothing more that's it nothing more yes nothing more yes
it's something that that is a very star 17 11 equipment
um i have a really really a lot of fun uh this night i can show you
the we can show you the the individual takes
sorry that i i can't i can show you now the live image of of uh
omega centauri because it's behind the the buildings but in the entire night i have i had the you
had the live one yes i had but i took the pictures
let me show you another one okay
well here is i i took a a very
very fast process without you know
without the typical things that that of a
very very entry-level programs all completely easy to make
and of course that that that despite the the limitation of the keeper man and camera oh it's a
great it's a great experience and i think that
the idea that we we talk every time is
encouraging to the people and especially with very very um
starting level entry-level telescope look that this this telescope you can
see something i don't know the name of this one do you have something
uh well this this this optical tier of assembly um
had an accident in the in the shipping with the shipping carrier
despite this work properly and i
of course that normally the people that sell telescopes sometimes it's not a uh
an amateur astronomer but i mean i i am but i say okay don't worry this this
optical tube assembly is for for home and work really very very good i learned
but i only made a little did it arrive
did it did it drive damage to you like this it was the the only one yes yes was
we found it in the in the in the box um
you know i can see the quantity
sometimes yeah no the problem is sometimes when when with the customer say why why they send
you one free no it's no more it's more problem that say okay i can repair
no bro don't worry don't worry scott now yes yes this is for for use and maybe
maybe later we we donate this for a school no problem i
can repair this it's very easy it's really very easy because it's a fiber
carbon fiber and with a little of hot air um
it will be a pleasure okay it's something to show is the people sometimes turn crazy with this kind of
things and say don't worry still working and
and of course if you broke a mirror it's a drama because it's the hair
telescope yes but but you can i can use the with a bum
telescope that of course that i i'll name it again and it's it's with a lesser collimation
but despite this the the optics work
the finest way work properly um
i can in the 100 edition of global third party i like to make
something that is encouraging to the people to work and make images
like this image of of uh i show again because i improved because this is it's here
yeah yeah yeah yeah approve the game yeah um
you can make this in your home from from your home in the city without problems
right it's so big this cluster
yes it's so big this cluster that is considered a galaxy
is like a proto galaxy have a have a uh
inside inside the omega cluster you have you have
a one medium size black hole
one or two maybe and it's over
it is i don't know if it's three million of stars it's impossible to determine but
but have three type three types of of stars maybe this one are the red ones
in this area and do you have three types of of stars uh
it's very interesting it's very very interesting cluster really huge really huge and is
in maybe it's it's a nucleus nucleus the core of an old galaxy
oh i see it's incredible it's incredible sometimes it says that there's even a possible
central black hole in uh in this conflict as well yes yes
yes maybe two and have uh is like a ghost galaxy because you can
see only the skeleton only the the core the center he lost the arms
it's a small galaxy that lost his the arms it ends
it's very interesting and we can make this with this
no more camera planetary camera with a with a sensor
sony 290 that is very common in many brands of
cameras for to make planets have a and do you have a very very
very low a very short story telescope without barlows and this is that is very
interesting to the people that i say all time choose the shorter
newtonian without barlow lens
is this is why in your company you sell the most of
newtonian without barlow blends without because you are people that know about
optics knows about astronomy
and i'm proud of of your yes very interesting because
you choose very very very in very smart in a very smart way
your designs this is great it's all for for tonight yeah that's
great thank you scott thank you scott for showing us millions of stars and one field of views it's wonderful yeah you
know so yes absolutely and i i i need to say you thank you very much uh
to give me a a opportunity many many many global subparty to share with the people
yes what's up everybody anyone that can withstand 100 mile per hour winds doing astronauts yeah
and take us to an eclipse and and uh patagonia you know so i have a big
thanks to you yeah thank you yeah yeah yeah
really it's a pleasure scott thank you very much thanks very much well patiently waiting in the wings here
is young navin santel kumar and uh nathan where are you
tonight currently i'm in um india on my house
excellent so how are your skies out there in india not the best and most of
the nights we've had here were overcast um but at least one night we were lucky to
capture something well that's good that's good all right the sky is the skies uh relatively dark
yeah they're relatively light dark but having some light motion it's like a mortal core skill
oh that's right thank going through all this trouble to uh
join us on global star party what time is it in india right now
it's currently about 9 26 in the morning in the morning okay all right hopefully you had some good breakfast
and you're all set to go that's great thanks again we have we have just 15 minutes different time
in india we have just a 50 minute time difference
okay so i'm not sure about what i've been up to like this summer in astronomy
sure okay so let me shut my screen
okay do you see my screen yeah it's coming up
give it a moment here
there we go okay so this is this is what i'm i'm going to share about some of my um clearing some
some what i've been doing in india and then i've also i also went to the uk
someone heard about the new
okay so the first thing here is that uh at my hometown we uh had like
one good night and at least we were able to i would there at the beginning of july we um
had six stars lined up six planets actually yeah six planets lined up and we were only
able to capture two which was jupiter and mars and then the other picture
is the same thing jupiter and mars down here and then
okay yeah so
um so this is so i i was all i was i'm showing my grandpa my my um
my family here in india some sunspots some sunshots
like live through an eyepiece currently like sunspots yeah so soon my grandpa right here
and then the next one was my cousin going through okay now i'm going to show about what
i've been doing in the uk so i actually went to royal the royal observatory in london in greenwich
so i thought i could i could share my experience with you there so this is william herschel's telescope
um this is the one i'm standing right next to and then
yeah this is the marker showing william versus tesco
then this is telescope right here okay so this is the front entrance there's a
statin room there's a statue right here and then we're about to enter the flamsteed house
that's cool so this is the flamsteed house you can see these were some astronomers and they
each had one assistant and now i'm gonna show you the market so this was these were the astronomers
agreed like these were all there were ten astronomers who in the living flame seas between between
1676-1948 but before then usually before the 19th
century each astronomer royal astronomer worked alone a single
but their task was an intense hard task and their attack and their attacks
and they people the people who depended on them were other astronomers like performers and navigators
as time went the astronomers were astronomers were supported by a growing
team of specialists who were from the local area last astronomer to live in in the
flamsty house was harold spencer jones who left in 1948 when the observatory
work was work moved to a different place in sussex
okay so let's talk about navigation if you see right here
this is this is uh so people depended on um the stars to like navigate
and um orient their way around the world and that was also the gilded age for exploration and
finding new land and territory in conquest
okay so this is the flamsty house that the marker here
okay these were five other astronomers john paul william christie harold
spencer jones frank dyson george biddle area
and there was tom and then these were also some um
astronomer like assistants right here thomas earnshaw caroline herschel
margaret laflate i think um william marshall of course and
son i don't know what that yeah now we're gonna see about their life
currently so they you should see some china right
here and then yeah you can see this was this was their menu
like this was a traditional dinner planning back then
okay let's talk about navigation this was a globe back then and then
these are some models and then you could see and then these were like
pictures i think yeah this was a solar system model
this was a book on astronomy called pleasures of astronomy yeah
and this is a closer view of the globe of how it runs beautiful globe look at that
global power that would be worth a lot of money because that's all high quality quality material
and then this okay now this is the pleasures of
astronomy this book was published in the 18th century it's actually a board game okay
it's a board game okay yeah in a race to reach the flamsteed house
and become astronomer world from the 18th century
okay so this we're going to talk about clocks now
this was just on the storage bucket trash chest from background
and then this is a clock this was george this was neville's
alarm clock to wake himself up for observing the stars wow
predecessor james bradley who who bought it from a really prestigious london clockmaker called
george graham this clock was a quite tip that allows a good night's sleep
so this is a special book okay so this one these were some homemade remedies or medicines
tobacco honey lemons rosemary and ginger and a
lot of other herbs so now we're going to look at the mascarene family bedroom
okay so this is the this one roll in the family bedroom called music london
this was london's outer back then in 1778
you see saint alfie just church in greenwich and
westminster abbey and saint paul's cathedral on the horizon
okay so you can see a telescope
um constellation model a globe
yeah steel sphere it looks like electrophilia and then you could see some directions
right here this was a photo taken in the 1860s by
that shows the entire area family the other surviving daughter gets sits
with their parents on a white bench with anna osmond crystal hubert and wilford
who sit on the grass so this was a book
yeah it was this was a book on observe observing records see right here
and then we move on to this stuff
so we you see some gifts right here
pot right here um yeah and then a couple other stuff
and then you see sir george biddle airy whose statue is right here
so this is the erie family parlor
so this is george biddle aries wife richard de airy
she waited six years for her father's consent to marry george once married the couple were devoted to
each other and wrote letter the daily one apart in 1870 richardson suffered a stroke that made her disabled
george was devastated
so this was a photo picture in the fit in the parlor and then
okay so now we're gonna go to the over over room
you can see this is a telescope right here that was
this was big this was made by an unknown maker in 1992
the telescope was from about 1750 but this is a replica oh yeah this is the octagon one
astronomers at the time struggled with color distortion chromatic aberration when using telescopes one solution was
to increase separation between the lenses but this created long telescope rules
which were awkward to use opticians later deviced a new type of lens to correct this problem
so this is a panorama view of the overall of the oval room wow sorry the octagon room
so they were observing through windows i suppose huh this is the top of the octagon room
and then the telescope right there again and then
yeah oh yeah this is a pendant this is a pen this is a clock right here
i know and then this is a quadrant that people use to measure
yeah so this is the marker for the pendulum block the most accurate animal clocks of their
time were based on pendulum technology thomas tompion made two
clocks that were fitted into these panels in here in 1676
a huge wig kept the clocks running for a whole year this 13 feet this four meter
pendulums were suspended above the movement and swung backwards and forwards in the window
above the dial john john flimsy found the clock so good so
so he he called him correspondence in the heaven that he used in the proof the earth rotated at a constant rate
okay now let's talk about the quadrant by john berg about 1750.
this instrument was similar to the one originally situated in this room astronomers used quadrants quarter
circles to determine time by measuring the height of the sun and certain stars above the horizon the outer scale was
originally engraved into 96 units because it was easier to continuously divide it using a pair
of compasses the astronomers then used it use tables to convert the readings into
degrees so this is the side view of the pendulum clock you see the gears
and you see the pendulum down there and then you see the quadrant right there
and then now we're going to look at some navigational tools so this was a
star chart or something like that and then this is like this was a compass back
then and this was a map with patagonia
and then this was a picture of someone from that time yeah
so this is i don't know whose picture this is but this is um someone
so let's talk about the shovel disaster you know on october 1707 four royal navy
ships struck the crushers structures ghost stone ledges off the isles of sicily
admiral search chat cloudsley shovel and 1 300 of his men died
for fleet without accurate navigational technique charts or instruments the shovel disaster was
an incident waiting to happen nevertheless the nation was shocked so this is what happens when you don't
have proper navigational tools oh yeah can you see a picture of the shovel
disaster right here yeah how terrible
let's talk about timekeepers this time keeper was good but not good
enough to work at see a longitude timekeeper needed to be both accurate and portable
but the early 18th century watches were not at all accurate and clocks were not portable so that was a problem
okay so you could see this was like a ship painting back here
so this was something about pendulum clocks at sea it's just an exhibit so yeah so this is a pendulum clock you see the
pendulum right right here and then you see some more chimes right here
then so the pendulum swings back and forth with the weight and then the clocks up
so this is just a globe right here about time around the world
so where am i at see navigation is a matter of life or death out of
out of sea or land can you tell where you are by 1700 skilled seamen could find their
position north or south but their latitude but still act
accurate instruments or methods to calculate their east-west position or known as longitude
so that was the group the growing international trade
it more became more valuable and vulnerable that cargoes and lost shipwrecks were
solving this longitude problem urgent for all seagull nations this gap was
okay so yeah let's talk about star charts
they were accurate but not accurate enough by the early 18th century mapping and measuring stars was an advanced
skill cultures around the world developed their own astronomical charts and instruments and then however was
sufficiently accurate to determine longitude at sea
so this was a telescope and then you could see
and then you could see um a clock right here and then you could see like some spears navigational
spheres right there so these were all celestial globes and these were
astronomical models these were islamic celestial globes
from the islamic world
these are more economic celestial globes and then
this was also a celestial globe that helped navigate
same for this and these clothes are so uh elaborate
you know beautiful this was like an illustration on
practical navigation or introduction that the whole art to that
whole art let's talk about the navigator's toolkit
so the they had a couple stuff right here which is a co um
a pair of something and then an astro lab
uh a com something um a knock down or something on the new compass
so this was something about the longitude problem a lot of similar disasters happened like
that the 17th centuries many ships were
wrecked because of navigational techniques that were inaccurate so maritime nations like britain and
france and the netherlands and spain so were offered rewards to anyone who discovered a
successful way of finding longitudes at sea and back then there were
dangerous coasts so that means a lot of ships could get wrecked
back then so this was a ship
from england so now let's talk about time and
longitude this was a similar disaster that happened
and there were a lot of lost lives but thanks to longitude not proper long not proper longitude
so now let's talk about this clock harrison's first time keeper
you could see this is the mechanism it works on in this clip
so this timekeeper took about five years to build in 1736 it was tested on the sea voyage to
lisbon back in portugal harrison was very seasick with the time people worked it was most accurate c
stop c clock then so he he was able to get a twenty thousand pound reward
this harrison right here and some of his notes and
this is just a book okay john flamsteed he was by appointed by king charles the
second and sixties in 1675 knowing
yeah john flamstein was the first astronomer his main task was to improve the
accuracy of the british star charts
the astronomers royal were part of a world of rational science based on a measurement experiment and explanation
but in the 18th century older ideas about magic and astrology still existed and some people thought these
little ideas could be used to find mountains you can find more about these different ideas behind the doors
you can see another pendulum clock right here called george ii
and you can see it's made of solid gold and you could see it's how it worked
see the back of the clock and the springs and the gears and everything those mechanism
and you can see the side which had a lot of stuff
and then that wasn't out and you could be used to the up and down and that's that looks like an
elevator and this is harrison's third time keeper
[Music] so this is another pendulum clock
right here this is george graham right here
and then the royal observatory in the com and the cronometer
so this is the crop quantum meter right here tells the temperature
um and then you could see some notes right here
yeah so this was a map used on chronometers so you could see
these were some chartered some charts on voyages that were made
oh this is thomas earnshaw he was a talented watchmaker and also a businessman
but he wasn't as successful as his rival john arnold his contribution made to the development of the marine chronometer
was to show the mechanism could be standardized and produced in large numbers
okay this is john arnold the longitude active set making longitude work as long as you have at
the 1714 inspired makers to come up with new designs and for timekeepers and
observing the treatments these were both needed for fighting longitude at
this is okay let's talk about harrison's fourth
time keeper this was his fourth time keeper it was a pretty it was it was a small pen it was
a small clock which finally was accurate and portable
measuring longitude see by the late 18th century determining longitude was practical tax
that could be it was easier now and could be carried out by any well-trained navigator
the availability of astronomical data observational instruments and robot reliable timekeeper data
made the lunar distance method of viable technique for accurate navigation
you can see a book right here and then you can see some of their instruments they used
then you could see notes and then this was a clock
for a timer this was a clock
and then this was used to find a lunar distance that was an instrument
clockmaker's device mechanical models for wealthy patrons interested in astronomy and that charles
well fourth earl of ori this instrument shows the tilt of the
moon's orbit in relation to the earth and can be used to demonstrate lunar and
solar eclipses
fascinating even what did you think about all of this i mean this is uh you're seeing all the
instruments the people uh the uh you know the effort that it took to
determine time and position on earth and how important all that was
what what what were your what were your over overall thoughts i mean now you have gps on your telephone
and and um yeah so this is all impressive that was
it was pretty impressive to see but how time went but
[Music]
sorry one second
sorry about that um time no this is the green with meridian line right here that i'm
standing on right
meantime from 1833 astronomers made a daily signal to mariners from the thames river
at 1 pm 1 300 hours by racing and dropping the time ball at the flo on
the flamsteed house in 1852 electrical technology enabled them to send time to
the nation by my telegraph visitors to greenwich park to could also
get time without disturbing the astronomers outside the observatory
see this is the middle and you can see the coordinates right here of each city
this is the meridian line right here isn't that amazing yeah
so use edmond holly right here this is a statue of him
um this is one of them is an observing instrument right here
and this is bradley transit room
right here was the dome right here the observatory zone and now i'm going to show you the telescope
so this is the observatory telescope right here a reflector
it's an equatorial amount
so you can see some views of it the bottom eye eyepiece in the mechanism
[Music]
so this was a good
from the observatory
all right nevin thank you very much for your presentation
thank you thank you very much how much longer will you be in india
i'll be here until the 11th of august okay all right will you enjoy and uh thank you again
for contributing to global star party um we will not have a
global star party next week as we'll be broadcasting live from the astronomical
lee convention but um really pleased that you were able to
make it uh to to this event up next is uh dt gautam uh we're going
from india to nepal and uh dt thank you uh for um
for patiently waiting for us your uncles 100th episode
hello everyone well did you draw this behind you is that it is that something that you made yes yes
i made it myself yeah i love it that's great
uh it's kind of give me the give me the hope and kind of represent my dream
[Laughter] wonderful
so what is your presentation uh today i'm talking about the uh
formation of the star okay and different phases of star uh so like as we know the star is
an astronomical object uh comprising a luminous stefanite of plasma held together by its gravity and the nearest
star to earth is sun and many other stars are visible to the naked eyes at night but
immense distance from the earth makes them appear as fixed point of light
right and all star life cycles are determined by mass and the larger it must started its life cycle
stem mass is determined by the amount of matters that is available in this nebula and designed flower of gas and dust from
which it was born over time the hydrogen gas in the nebula is pulled together by gravity and it's
beginning to spin as the gas spin faster it hits off become a pro star
eventually the temperature reaches a very high degree and nuclear fusions occur in the cloud force and the cloud
begin to glow brightly contract a little and we can stables it is now our main sequence star and
will remain in this stage uh signing for millions uh two billion of year to come
and this is the stage our sun is at right now in is the main sequence star
close or hydrogen errors code is converted into helium by nuclear fluid
when the hydrogen supply in the core begin to run out and the star is no longer generating heat by nuclear
fusions the core become unstable and contract the average cells of the star which is
uh still mostly hydrogen start to expand and as it expands it cools uh and glow
rates uh the star has now reached the red zion phase and it is uh red because
it is cooler than it was in the main sequence surface uh easter stage and it is designed
because the outer cell was in the main star stage uh and it designed because i
like was explained in the core of the resilient helium fuses into carbon called star evolved the same way after
the red zion phase and the amount of mass of star has determines which of the falling lifestyle path it has uh take
from there and star comes in a variety of masses and must determines how radiantly the star will sign and how it
dies like massive star transform into supernova neutral star black holes so
with every star like this one and in life is a white dot or surrounded by a
separate planetary club in all stars in our irrespective of their size
follow the same seven stress cycles uh they start as a gas cloud in india's
star remnant and like uh talking about the giant gas flower a star originates from a large cloud of
gas and the temperature in the cloud is low enough for the synthesis of molecules and the orient cloud complex
in the orient system is an example of a star in the sisters of life and talking of the second phase uh there
is a footstar when the gas particles in the molecular cloud drawn into each other's heat energy is produced and the
result in the formation of a warm clump of molecules uh refers to the two as a protestant and the creation of
protesters can be seen through infrared visions as the protesters are warmer than other
materials in the molecular clouds and several protostars can be formed in one cloud depending on the size of the
molecular class and talking about the tea tower phase that is the taurus star begin when
materials stop falling into the protester and release tremendous amount of energy and the mean temperature of
the third star isn't enough to support a nuclear reaction and as it's code and uh
there's another phase that is a main sequence and or what we just i was talking about and the main sequence of
phase in stage is the development of where the cold temperatures reaches uh the point for the fusion to commence uh
in this process the protein of hydrogens are converted atoms of helium and the
reaction is exothermic and it gives a of more heat than it requires and so the
core of the main sequence start release a tremendous amount of errors and we're talking about the red zion uh
resigned is another phase of the information star and the star converts the hydrogen's atom into the helium over
its course of its all life its course eventually the hydrogen's uh fuel drain
out or run outs and the internal reaction stops and without the reaction occurring at the core or star contract
are inward through a gravity and causing it to the expand as it expands uh the
star first become a sub giant star and then a red giant and red zion have
cooler surface than the main sequence star and because of this uh they appear red than aldo and the talking about the
fusions of heavier elements a helium molecule surprises at the core and as
the star expand and the energy of this reaction uh prevent the core from
collapsing and the coarse ring and begin fusing scarf or using carbons and once
the helium fuses are in and this process repeats until the iron appears at the
core and the iron through this reaction absorb energy now which cause the core to collapse and the ex implosion are
transformed massive star into supernova while smaller star like the sun contract into white trough
and as we know our sun is uh predicted to be uh white drops very soon but not
now like and talking about the supernova and planetary nebula now most of the star materials is blasted away in this
space where the core implores into a nuclear star or a singularity known as the black
holes and this massive star i don't explore their post contract instead in instead into a tiny what is star known
as the white drops and while the outer material uh exit away star
tinier the sun got enough mass to bond with anything but a red glow during the main sequence
and these red dots are difficult scores and but uh this may be the most common
star that can be that can bond for trillions of years and therefore uh where the fire seven ministers which are
talking about of life cycles whether big or small or young or worse one beautiful and lyrical object in all
the creation and next time you look up at the start remember this how they were created and how they will die
and uh today is the 20th july are in nepal in here and it's
uh international moon day and uh personally uh moon is my favorite part
of like in interest so i have prepared some
video okay i'll like just so that
are you able to see nice you can see the moon yeah okay so is uh
today is the um international moon day uh it's 20th july already here and it's
morning time here and uh i've made some video of the collection of moon i captured
very nice unfortunately i
love to capture the moment where i was fishing to the moon and uh take that off
candid photos and i love the dollars
i like that shot
these are real good and uh like uh whenever the weather is a
bad or something else but uh rather i will take my telescope out and just
kept at the moment with my telescope and looking to the star or just uh i love to capture those uh kind
of photos like um whenever i feel uh like uh
it gives me different kind of motivations and it's really it's really need to motivate ourselves uh like to be
in our dreams and because uh there's a long way to go and of course uh so uh this kind of
photos are makes me weird and frustrationally uh moon is my favorite to capture it all with my telescope uh
so today's special day uh it's the indonesians moon day so happy international monday to you all and okay
it's been 19 july there but um uh i was earlier uh because it's already
out until july and morning 10 a.m here and
i just i looked back on scott and uh i i realized that um i joined the
globalisation party in like uh 18th global party the 16th global star party yeah right i
remember i found you on facebook and you were talking about some something to do with astronomy and uh
uh it inspired me to reach out and uh see if you'd like to present a global
star party and this uh just yesterday okay this yesterday i was looking uh at
the first party the poster of possible party and i uh keep it uh very securely and uh when
i see this of 16th global star party and uh tomorrow i'm uh like i'm
taking 100 global suspects wow and uh like i was doing this from the beginning
and it was very good to join with you all like uh with you adrian and many
more mexi players and cesar barlow and for motivating me and also that i also
remember the leaving star and she was the reality person uh like yeah and uh like i think she's busy this day
in her academic on or anything else uh but um now sometimes uh i used to talk
with her and i see her posterior textbook too like she's doing progress and she's doing good
and uh like uh realizing everything uh global party has
given a lot of things uh like after joining the global party like life has
been drastically sensed and the way of people perspective looking us and like
are coming with us and saying that
they have given the uh closest party somewhat the identity uh to us uh through the astronomy
and it's feel like i like to give the uh presentation and it looks great
and let's give this who it is in the profile too and somewhere uh group study mainly means to
be learning a new things and i have learned a lot of things like um i was just starting or when i joined a global
party but uh i have come a lot of way and a lot a lot of things
so thanks for everything uh now and uh we'll be we'll be joining a lot of global party and uh eagerly waiting to
learn more things yeah we will be on more dt thank you thank you so much thank you so much
again i really love your illustration behind you it's really great so thank you you should write you should
write a book um a book for young people on how to
observe the stars i think that you can for sure i was planning for that uh so i would do
this great okay well thank you so much and you have a good day
take care awesome to you good night for you yeah bye-bye okay
uh so we've had uh you know an incredible um
lineup of speakers today uh a couple of them had to drop out but um
uh which is okay we we've been broadcasting now for over eight hours um
but uh so far we've had david levy come on again david eicher from astronomy
magazine molly wakeling with an incredible presentation on the james west space
telescope uh daniel higgins and simon lewis um astrophotographers from master world tv
uh jason gonzalez showing us how you can use the data from the mast
archive and you know to access directly access james west's
james webb space telescope data that probably goes up as soon as they
download it because it's really fresh data that you can get get direct access
to daniel barth from how do you know program you know educator
in science um here in uh in arkansas uh connell richards uh was
on john briggs uh sharing uh his uh images uh from
magdalena new mexico really dark skies cesar barolo was with us naveen sintel
kumar joined us from india and
of course deepti gatam in nepal and now we are to adrian bradley
uh who will end the 100th global star party with this incredible nightscape images
adrian you've got it all thank you for watching
i put my face into a global star party since it began yesterday at 3 30
right after coming from an outreach event so yeah i i was able to get the
day off and today has generally been i immersed myself in
doing the work of amateur astronomy yeah that's awesome yeah
it feels good which is why the first image that i'm going to share
is not so much of a nightscape it's girl scouts now there was a clause that
a lot of the girl scouts could not be photographed but i had permission to photograph some of
the scout leaders here sure and uh so i wanted at least one image
of them looking through the uh the coronado there the reason there's two
power um power things is because one of them was actually out
but i had the other one handy and the tracking on this this mount scott you
might recognize that mount yes i recognize that mount it recognized to
adrian yeah yeah and it played a huge part in being able
to show all of the girl scouts there were five different troops of about 20 or so
uh girl scouts and they were all able to see the sun once i was able to put the
sun into the scope it tracked very well i used a compass on
my apple watch to aim the um scope north and
with only minor corrections for declination um it tracked very well and all the
girls got to look through and see the um
see the sun through the scope so it was a wonderful time
i also was able to use images that i had taken is a form of outreach so questions about
the milky way came up questions about um the planets questions about
stars um all sorts of things that the girls asked and i was able to use images
to help answer those questions i had my camera set up there as well
and so it was uh so it was a wonderful day um i did take a picture of the sun and you
can see how active it was in the uh in that uh hydrogen alpha
scope you saw a little more detail there was a prominence
about here on the sun that was very visible i didn't uh hook i
haven't hooked it up the camera up to that uh h alpha scope that's on the to-do list
well at the same time the moon was also out so some of the girls got to see the moon
through i had a spotting scope out there and i also took a picture of that so
here we are at last quarter in a cloudy sky and i took this picture
some of the girls got to see the moon although it was a little fainter than this
um but i was able to track it um using the other i have a i had
another little tracker and a small spotting scope and so for a while there were two objects we
were able to look at so so it was a wonderful time
it was worth it one of the pictures i shared was this image of the distant aurora
that i know i've shared here oh yeah a little star party in the past this beautiful
pillars and some of the colors that i think we talked about on global star party um
terry mann way back in the first uh the the first uh half of
the night's global star party showed us beautiful aurora images from
where she is well sometimes if you're stuck in michigan or you're stuck somewhere where you can't quite get all
the way to alaska but the aurora borealis is still
big enough to image even if from a distance so so you don't have to miss out even if uh
space might uh different different parts of the globe
bring their different um bring different beauty different perspectives different perspectives so
so this was the image that i was uh fortunate enough to be awarded a first
place uh finish in the light pollution which i think we need more it needed more entries i was
one and i'm disclosing this i was one of five entries for this category and um
now i didn't hear the full explanation but you can see a couple different types of light pollution you can see it caught
by these thin clouds here and you can see the difference in the colors and so you can see bl above this
you can see a part of the milky way below it you see a couple stars here but that's
it and all of the detail in the milky way gets washed out
not sure what this was but i had chalked it up to an artifact looks like a sprite
but um you know it could have been a sprite but
it's that would i would be very surprised if if i got lucky enough to catch a sprite
and that could explain they could explain why this image won because that is a very rare thing to
catch indeed but it's i wonder if it's also just an artifact so
so it looking at the image a couple weeks later there are still some things that
um you know that are that are interesting in the image and as i was saying before
i think more more images that leave light pollution in have a chance to be used
um not just to make a pretty picture but to describe what the effects of light pollution are
and i think that's why there are a few contests that are looking that have started a light pollution category
for these nightscape images so so it isn't
um you know 100th global star party and i've been able to take the images i've
been able to capture and thanks to you scott and everyone that's been a part of it i've given these talks online and even
in person for a few of my uh the astronomy groups that i'm a part of and
more talks are planned my own uh the sarnia center has me planned for
october after i come back from okie text so um
so you've put me into the high a ball class of uh you know traveling
presentations yeah you don't get to the majors until you're doing things
in the likes of uh john briggs is still here um daniel hit
daniel higgins started his um work i would say that he's gotten up to about double a ball
um he's doing really good work you know that if you liking it to baseball
um you know any and that that just goes to show you that anyone
who dares you know take pictures of the night sky or your
love of the night sky can be rewarded um immensely in astronomy no matter
whether you're a visual astronomer or you like to do images the community
is absolutely outstanding and um even if you haven't had sleep you
just it it fills you up this picture by the way that you keep seeing
um and i have it as a background because in the winter it's my favorite place to image
um and you can see older image there now this image i used um with the girl
scouts and i said i've zoomed it all the way in here
and on my phone and i said see if you can find a butterfly see if you can find a
cat's paw and when we pointed it out they go oh yeah
that's what it looks like that's what it looks like yeah it's like it does look kind of like a
cat's balls like that they most of them instantly pointed out the butterfly cluster over here
and um to me that was the ability to use an image of mine
and make it kind of uh see if you can find this or that
on my iphone was um i would call it kind of a a testament to
what i try to achieve um taking a runner up in the rask general
landscape astrophotography category means that this composite which i would
say i could have done a little better job of putting the ground together
but the detail that i got in the milky way is what they said
won or got me up to that round that uh runners-up
uh mode and the winner was a beautiful milky way over a mountainous region
which most of the time that always wins it's uh if you're in a beautiful location
as long as you have any kind of detail at all in the milky way you will have a beautiful picture but
i've always been a proponent of detail as opposed to taking images
and you can take your images you can post them online i post mine and um see how many likes you get see
how many people enjoy seeing the images but more and more like i told uh
dr daniel bart barth the feeling of actually taking the
images and doing outreach with them surpasses the whole internet likes and
notoriety and that that really it humbles me and it grounds me which is why instead of being upset
or you know thinking well if i'd have made this cleaner i would have won first
place right no they this is what they like and this is what
i like um yeah adrian i mean when i when i think of uh
george ellery hale he understood that astrophotography was what was going to
keep funding going and interest going to build big observatories and so
he hired a guy named pease uh who was an expert on the moon and
pease used the 100 inch telescope to photograph the moonlit you know and so
those photographs appeared and were able to be reproduced in uh newspapers and
and that type of thing and you know this is going back to the 1920s so uh
you know astrophotography had come a long ways but still was done on glass
plates you know it was a laborious process still and um
yeah he he he knew it was overkill to kind of use a 100-inch telescope to photograph the
moon with but but he was he was trying to uh uh get uh you know uh interest and uh
you know in in his observatories he was trying to get the 200 inch built actually it started working i think on a
300 inch telescope there's a model of it at the at the uh mount wilson observatory but i think they finally
settled on a 200 inch at the top 300 which is too much but uh what you're doing with um your
photography and outreach is a is a tradition that goes back quite a
ways now so that's uh it's good to know because interestingly enough
really just really quickly i've had people that wanted me to
take paint you know photos for graduation and for other events based on seeing
astrophoto work and i find it interesting because it's a little different they're different
animals but it's given me the opportunity to take people pictures which
um before i did that the night before um
and a lot of them would see the portfolio of images like this and we were talking about shooting
at the moon and this was the first time i was able to get the earth shine
data making this look almost like there's a full moon with a bright limb on it as opposed to
just a crescent moon here but um but yeah you the point that you bring up
you know sits with me and it's those images are more than just
a you know a sign of well the photographer must be so great they pulled off the
wonderful image and it's something that i've struggled with and global star party helps me
realize well there's more your images can do more than just look pretty
and you know draw in response um
they can inspire others to want to take these types of images
and to want to try them for themselves so
so real briefly this place here and this when
when they're smoking the atmosphere as i think there was a threat that that may have happened again there were some
wildfires but when they really ran out of control the year before or i think this may have been 2020 i
would have to look but imaging the milky way became tough
and um so it's like sometimes you don't even take your skies for granted
another thing photographers tend to look at little things like these power lines that are
going along and you know they would say the power lines take them out in photoshop or something
like that to me this was just this is what it looks like
where i was standing our observing hill for one of my astronomy groups lowbrow
astronomers is right behind us up a winding road i saw this it looked pretty clear
put the camera to it for 30 seconds and produced a single image
and have no problems at all using it to show the effects of light
pollution this is a rural town you can get pretty a pretty good image
but you see what happens just like the other image that i had submitted for rask
this image shows the same thing there's a lot more data that could be
here but all of that like and i left it in all of
that light pollution just takes out this much
more of the milky way that could be seen
had this had this been a darker site or had there not been the light pollution so
so it gets to where it's an honor to be able to just share images this is this rough image is where
it all started i happened to catch this bright meteor and that image made a calendar at my job
but more importantly my decision to leave light pollution in
came with that image and um ever since even if i've
worked on processing techniques you you saw that one image that had a whole bunch of detail it was at this same park
that i took that other image um so you know this is jupiter here saturn
somewhere over here so a few years ago but
this is where i began learning how to
process better images and that's where i started leaving light pollution in so
i had been i'd been told how to take light pollution out and you know clean up the image
but the decision to leave it in led to the ability to show
what's really out there and that became my purpose the images are a reflection of what i see in the
night sky and it's what i want to share with others
so you know processing gets a little bit better look how clear the stars are a little better
but you you know the following year when jupiter and saturn were here heading for
the conjunction and so now let's move real quickly through these
this image was an older image before that meteor one um
the meteor image let me know that you could catch lightning in a bottle my attempts my feeble attempts we've
seen so many great planetary images um on global star party
and this little image was my attempt through a through my uh 11 inch telescope
my attempt to capture a little bit of history for myself and what i did capture
was jupiter's fifth galilean moon as it was referred to and i don't know scott
if you remember the license plate of that star but um there was that one day
when that star was in line visually with jupiter's moons
and um this would have been around the um well i think it was either 20 i
think it was 2021 this it was december 2021 or december 2020 i forget
but um yeah i've actually done around
50 global star parties because i in one of my folders where i look it up
um i would take the global star parties
and i would just name them based on the number and
i've got a global star party folder that shows
gsp 45 and i know i didn't they're not all
sequential i missed a few but um the one that i have 97 that was
actually the 98th global star party oh okay yeah and the 99th one i kind of winged
it so there's no folder so
so here now we fast forward you i love this one yeah this
sky glow yeah a lot of sky glow just like uh again terry mann
saw sky glow and saw how beautiful it was this is in the upper peninsula of michigan
and the lighting here is an oncoming car behind me so after taking this photo i made sure
to hightail it off of that road so um
so real quickly and you know scott i love sharing these um
and there's a memory behind each one sure david said he really loved the way
that this photo was was set up and although i've taken some slightly clearer
pictures of orion in the past i was moved by
david's words when he sees this picture and it just encouraged me to keep right
on doing the type of landscape astrophotography that i do now
i'm hoping to improve on this image when i get to okie tex and
i should see a very similar site because i think when we're going to be there the
zodiacal light will be present and this part of the milky way when
orion rises in the morning um my plan is to um
do at least one all-nighter so i can watch the sky roll ahead and roll behind me that would be cool it'd
be nice to see some movies or time lapse stuff yeah and i do want to do a couple
of time lapses i've yeah i've been encouraged to do a couple
i'd love to do a shot like this at okitex where the skies are even darker
see how long i can get a milky way shot with this nautical and then civil dawn
approaching and um similar to jason gwenzel's image
he was able to get you know in hawaii um he had such a detailed
core of the milky way and you know he was able to get both bulges um both sides of the bulge
and the sun was rising i think he was i would say he was probably nearing civil dawn
and could still see all of that data so i'm looking forward to taking an image like that as well
um this image sorry about that i probably should have
muted but um this image um is proof that
if you just aim north if you're far enough north to see the northern lights aim north
and see what you'll get all i was doing was deciding that okay
it's time to view the big dipper i at least want the big and the little dipper and a photo and when i looked at
it i realized i had other colors in here and i this was with
one of my cameras and i took the same picture with the unmodded camera to make sure it wasn't just picking up other sky
glow and we looked at it and said nope that is aurora
so the other neat thing is this eagle which
yeah i was going to use a different bird image to close it out but the eagles
snuck in um oh you snuck in yeah yeah i would have to what i'll do is
i'll just keep going here but um let's we'll go with the slanted milky way
shots that tended to be my uh something that i kept working on um
i ended up getting light from m51 in that other photo and it's amazing to see
light from galaxies that far away with a 16 millimeter lens
sure and um so the evolution
of the slanted photos will will start going we'll go through
that that was also the portal 2 site this was at a portal 3
4 site and a lot of milky way photos are done
even shooting the other side and this was an honor scott when
marcelo chose one of my images to be the headline
here's one kind of a cooler version of pleasant
yes and so here's this one's a subtle image
i wanted to shoot the milky way here and have it come up here in the dark
with the uh waterfall notice it's winter so pretty harsh conditions
well this started to happen when i got right to the spot that i wanted to start shooting
and the light changed on me all because i chose to take this shot
early as i was traveling i was 30 minutes away from that site i got out and i looked around and i was
floored by um what i was seeing um i talked about this
the barnard's and the code hanger are two i two objects that i'd like to
see if i got whenever i do a milky way just to see do i what kind of precision
i actually have um so let's we're getting close to
the end of my presentation we were just showing i tend to shoot the
galactic center and the northern part of the bulge a lot at that angle
between april may and june i also this is the first time i saw the
zodiacal light this was the spring before i went to okeetex where it
went the other way and i noticed that orion taurus pleiades always
somewhere orion is always somewhere near the zodiacal light which well it makes sense because
that's where the ecliptic is so then
the uh the angles don't stop this is a most
recent picture and you may recognize it if you are in the rask and you saw the talk
that i gave for kareem in the montreal uh center
on sleepless summer nights this was a night this i imaged this
and later on i would image this that next that that
morning no sleep i was down there earlier imaging that other
image and then i was there the sun is about to rise yeah and i
imaged the planets there's mercury and i i highlighted them because it was very hard to see
yeah but yep i got them all
and even saturn over here and even fomolo a
was bright enough so this is what i was looking at
after a few hours after taking that image and so that leaves me with
the final once again now the precision isn't as good but the
goal was to get the light of the full moon and the milky way in the same shot
and um that was more or less accomplished
later i was told that there is a beautiful spot along another part of the beach so
last shot i took that evening and i left the moon as just a bright glowing orb
this would be it would be a good place to take a sunrise shot and it would look very similar
except you can see kind of the out of focus stars in the sky because i focused
on the rocks every once in a while i will do i like that foreground shot that's nice yep
yeah every once in a while i will take a picture photo that i know is a pretty
photo but it all has to do with um
let's see what else i have these are yeah there were a couple of others
i i don't mind showing this one because my goal was how much milky way could i get
as the moon's rising and this was a little bit cleaner image
and you can see the milky way is just disappearing you can still see some stars here the glow of the moon
this was more of the i'll call it the scientific discovery
image where you've got the bright moon coming up and i think yeah i wanted to share that
that was my that's my best composite image of what the moon looks like to the naked eye over
as it's rising over the lake so really like that one
and um so this is
i'll end with an on the wing of a great blue heron in shadow
and nice this may be considered a good image
you can't always see what's there i think this is a good analogy for where
we've come amateur astronomers learning new techniques to see more of
what's there where we've come from hubble to now james webb
we start out seeing this and knowing we know it's a heron we know the shape
and we know that's a tree but with a little bit better instrumentation
you actually see more detail of the hearing and the tree
now if we if i acquire the data better then
then it gets even better than that but um i use those two pictures just to
illustrate that this is what astro imaging
would uh imaging what science imaging what all of the things that we do
in science are to get at more detail about what's really going on
with the objects that we see and um
you know that scott i'd like to say it's been a wonderful long day of
the 100th global star party those that are still hanging on thank you all
yeah thank you and uh listening in and um
right i think that's gonna do it scott it's probably time to
say goodnight everyone yeah caesar daniel john i think you're all still
behind the screen here so uh we'll say uh goodnight to our audience uh we had a great audience
tonight um again a worldwide audience and uh
i see kareem is actually uh chatting with people uh in our audience here
i want to thank everyone for tuning in to the 100th global star party
next week we will be and albert will be in albuquerque new mexico uh and doing
live interviews with people from the astronomical league at elkon so it's
their first time to get back together in years due to the pandemic situation and
so i'm really looking forward to that and we'll be back of course with more global
star parties after after uh a couple of weeks off so
but um we uh we want to thank you again and uh like uh our good friend uh jack horkheimer
always used to say keep looking up and thanks again
good night everyone
hello everyone i would like to congratulate scott roberts and all the other participants of the
global star party on this 800th global star party
i think this is a wonderful achievement on may the next 100 be just as impressive as the first
hundred has been as william bray lake wrote to see the world in a grain
of sand and i have it in a wild flower hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour
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