Transcript:
6:00 p.m..Scott Roberts- Introduces David Levy
right incredible he and Damien are hard to beat yes
6:02 p.m..David Levy – Intro and Poetry
they are Scott are you still there
I am still here I wonder because
6:15 p.m..The Night Sky Astronomical League with Terry Mann
Kareem reminding me of the Lowell Mars Globe it reminded me of you know I have
that childhood book of LOLs that I acquired would that be something of interest to share sure tonight
before I free I forget every week for the last month so maybe I'll go grab it if you and and maybe we can raise that
6:30 p.m..David Eicher - Dave’s Exotic Sky Objects
quickly and just show it because it's it's strange it's a strange collectible yeah that's right I shall return okay
6:40 p.m..Karim Jaffer - “Montreal Centre Checkin & Ancient Photons”
foreign
7:10 p.m..Gary Palmer - Gary Palmer Astronomy
foreign
[Music] there are some problems in astrophysics
7:30 p.m..Ten Minute Break
that can't be solved on a normal computer [Music]
for this we use a supercomputer
7:40 p.m..Mike Simmons - A New Beginning
[Music]
my name is Ryan Tanner I study active Galactic nuclei and star formation and
how they affect galaxies I have been doing research and computer simulations
8:00 p.m..Conal Richards - "Penn State Eclipse Party”
of Galactic outflows for a number of years now my name is Kim Weaver and I
work at Nasa I've been looking at AGN for a very long time and we just don't
understand how the Jets impact the galaxies in these low Luminosity objects
8:20 p.m..Marcelo Souza - Astronomy Outreach in Brazil
[Music] hen is where you have a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy and
occasionally there's gas or a star or something that gets too close to the
supermassive black hole and it begins to get pulled in by gravity but when it
8:40 p.m..Hrach Hakobyan - Astrophotophy
does that it releases a huge amount of energy there are strong Jets and weak
gems high intensity AGM large Jets have been studied for a long time we've seen they're very obvious you can see them on
the sky you see them bright in the radio emission you see them bright in the optical the largest ones can get several million
9:00 p.m..Cesar Brollo - Cesar’s Universe
light years in size the low Luminosity jets are much harder to find and often
do not even leave their galaxies and are very compact we know some things about the AGM but we don't know everything
it's like a big puzzle piece we're doing a jigsaw puzzle and there's pieces that are missing and there's some that we
9:20 p.m..Adrian Bradley - ‘The Francis C. McMath Telescope’
have fairly well put together but others where we have no idea what's there one of the major puzzle pieces that we're
missing is how these low Luminosity ATMs impact and determine the evolution of
their host galaxies for this problem we have to use super computers
for my research I use a code called Athena it can do anything from planet
formation star formation supernovas and anything in between and I did some
modifications to it in order to tailor it to my exact problem that I have the
process of watching this was impressive because you know there's so much computation going in and there's so much
Focus going into this project and the outcome is going to be something pretty spectacular but it takes time
so Ryan came to me and said I need a super computer and I said okay what what
because I had never helped anybody get super computer time I've seen it I've
been in the room it's amazing you submit a request online in the system you have
to provide a justification for what you're going to use you have to explain the project behind it you have to
explain basically what you expect to get out of it and how you will use those results and that goes to a review
process that can take several months the formal review process can take anywhere between six months and two I've been
told 18 months
basically I can use the supercomputer from anywhere in the world as long as I have a secure connection to it and then
once I'm logged on to it it's as if I'm there using the supercomputer in the actual building where it's housed I can
upload the code that I need to use to run and any data files that need to go
in for inputs and then I can simply use a command to submit a job on the
supercomputer and it puts it in a long queue of different people who have submitted jobs on the supercomputer
foreign [Music]
how things were going he said it's going to be another few days because I have
simulations running so for the paper that we wrote for this particular result it was about
800 000 hours of computational time when I'm actually doing the research and
doing the simulations like I said I don't think too much about it but when I talk to other people and explain what
I'm doing that's what I realized oh this is these are really big simulations and these are there's a lot of stuff going
on here that most people will never see or the amount of computational resources most people will never use in their life
thank you
so using the super computer and getting the simulation data back was a process that just continuously would do it over
several months I would have to run a simulation download the data look at it see if there was doing what I expected
it to do if there was anything that was wrong and I had to go back and figure out what was wrong with the code then I
would make that change to the code on supercomputer run the simulation Again download the data look at it and just
repeat the process over many many months over basically a year fact is sometimes
it can take decades to make things happen but you have to have the patience and that's hopefully that's what most
astronomers have and they need is patience because the universe doesn't always bend
to your will and you have to wait to find out what's going on [Music]
it was one of those things where I didn't know exactly what would come out
of the simulations that's why we were doing it and that's sort of the case as it was
here was We Run The simulations and then something unexpected came out of these
AGM these low power ATMs actually have a very large impact on their host galaxies
the blue collar in the center the blue green colors indicate that the Galaxy
itself and when you see the pink colors that are coming out and the purple that
is the actual jet itself the Jet's going to be split they can be split by a dense
Cloud into streams as they come out of the Galaxy they can be deflected which
is they change direction entirely and in some cases the jet can be entirely
stopped are we seeing star formation that's being created by the Jets impacting the clouds which I think would
be really cool because again that says the black holes are doing something amazing to the galaxies by being there
or we can see that the Jets could be disrupting the star formation and slowing down which is another
possibility and those two things we don't know yet which one was the right answer the two major things to draw out
of this is just how complex these jets are because they interact with their host Galaxy they're not simple they're
not nice smooth outflows the other thing is that these low-powered AGM Jets the
Galaxy determines what the Jets look like to a greater degree than has been assumed before
involved in a project they use a super computer so to me it was a bit of an alien thing and so I was fascinated that
we actually were doing this and yes when I saw the results that came out I was
impressed I was excited just a very exciting thing to study
something that is so incredibly new to everybody [Music]
[Music]
[Music]
hey everyone this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and welcome to the 107th Global
star party we have as usual a great lineup of speakers uh but all of us have
uh got some shocking news some sad news over the weekend that uh Eclipse Chaser
you know the king of eclipse Chasers uh Jay pasikoff from Williams College had
passed away so we want to give a nod to him and thank him for all of his books
and his inspiration and you know all of those uh Eclipse
Expeditions that he led and so he will be missed
but um on any account uh we're glad to have you here uh we already have a nice
audience uh logging in we want to say hello to all of you and
um uh earlier if someone can answer it uh I asked a question in the chat uh who
can tell us the minimum life's lifespan of a photon because this program is
about ancient photons and so anyhow um uh it'll be interesting to see what
you guys come up with uh I will uh I want to turn this over to
uh David Levy uh David also a good friend with Jay pasakoff
um and like Jay um uh uh David Levy has written tons of
books on astronomy about astronomers and he's seen he's also seen a ton of
eclipses himself so uh David um I'm hoping that we get together on
2024 to see the total you know it'll be great to have you there well I hope so certainly hope we're
going to be able to see that one and perhaps the annular in 2023 23.
certainly the total in 2024. and uh I want to add my welcome to this
107th Star Party and 59 years ago today President Kennedy
was assassinated in Dallas and I was going to look up a quotation
from him he talks it's the one he gave at the American University about six months
after the Cuban Missile Crisis where he mentions that we are all mortal
and of course that will be so appropriate now when we think about Jay pasikov but instead I'm going to quote from John
Milton from Paradise Lost did you know that in all of that
massive epic poem that he wrote of all the words all the lines all the
Rhymes everything that he wrote 12 books of poetry he only mentioned one
human being by name anybody know what that was
I do not it was Galileo and uh
in Paradise Lost book one he says throughout the class the Tuscan
artists use that evening from the top of fasoli Oren valdarno to decry new Lambs rivers or
mountains inner Scotty inner spotty globe and then in book five he mentions
Galileo by name as when By Night the glass of Galileo was assured observe
imagined lands and regions in the moons or Pilot from amidst the Cyclades de los
osamos first appearing tens a cloudy spot
and on that note I give it back to you dear Scott well thank you very much thank you I
um I put in a little quote from Albert Einstein you know I I love to of course
I love all these quotations and David uh you know GSP would not be the program
that it is without your commentary or thoughts and uh and the great poems that
you read and sometimes the songs that you sing so we love it all uh but uh this piece I thank you thank
you uh Scotty I appreciate you mentioning that I do want to mention that my latest book is out it is a book
for children and it is called clipper the cosmic Clipper Cosmos
and uh a journey to the Stars and this is a book
about a magic beagle and Magic telescope to take takes a run through the cosmos it is not
available on Amazon just yet but you can get it from the publisher Ron J Kramer
r-o-n-j k-r-a-m-e-r at gmail.com
the cost is twenty dollars if you want to get a copy from him that's all you need to do is write them
and uh the next time I get to your neck of the woods or you get to mine I'd be
glad to autograph it for you Clipper Cosmos and children thank you
and back to you Scott thank you so much David that's great that's great our um our next speaker
will be uh Terry Mann Terry is the secretary for the astronomical league
but she's also a former two-term president of the astronomical League uh
she adds um you know incredible structure to the organization and
um and being also involved in programs that I know that she had a lot of influence on I can tell you
um that uh you know she's put together what I think is was the best ever
astronomical League Alcon event that was at Bryce Canyon um but you know the lead shares uh uh
the uh astronaut the Alcon event and it goes all over the country probably at
one point or another will go all over the world um but uh it's people like tearing me on
that kind of hold it all together and make sure that uh that you know know the the organization gets done what needs to
be done and this makes it possible for them to have things like you know over 80 I think it's over 80 observing
programs uh they have uh tons of recognition Awards and
um uh you know and this is an organization a volunteer organization it's been going on for 75 years you know
so you think of organizations and what it takes to get things done and get things accomplished what it takes is a
lot of dedication and hard work and Terry man has brought it on for a long time with the with the with the
astronomical league so really pleased to have her on honored to have her on
um if you ever get a chance to meet her I think you'll you'll be inspired by her but uh Terry you are on
well thank you Scott oh yeah there we go thank you no you look fine
you're fine okay I need the laptop
okay
you might want to go on with somebody before I figure it out okay just mute your laptop you'll be fine okay
perfect that's perfect yeah yeah technology don't you love it
thank you for that great introduction there are a whole lot of us that were in the league and put everything together
and we just passed 22 000 members wow yeah we are very happy uh it is so
fantastic to be able to work with so many people and to meet them uh we will be having Alcon and uh Baton Rouge which
Dave Iker will be a keynote speaker then we are looking forward to that though at
Scotch you'll be there and we're looking at doing some new things at this Alcon um and it's in the process we're working
on some of the process right now but I'm sure that will be here before we know it it will happen at the end of July I
believe the 28th through the 30th I believe so please join us at Baton Rouge
and that website should probably come online um sometime at the beginning of next
year but for right now you'll see it in our reflector magazine which should hit
everybody's houses around the first week or two of December that is a member and
again thank you we uh we enjoy everybody we work with it's been so great getting
to know so many people I would have never met Kareem you know if I had never been involved in the league it's like
our community gets bigger and bigger the more you know that we get involved so all right I am going to start with the
questions for tonight as you know we always start with our
slide to tell people if you're going to observe the Sun make sure that you have
the correct filters and you actually are aware of you know what you are doing
because it can be dangerous to do but as long as you know you have the correct filter and you know how to operate your
telescope correctly it will always be safe just always check everything out
before you look at the Sun so what I want to start with is the answers from November 15th
question one was what attractive but gem asterism lies tonight immediately below
the great square and above bright Jupiter and that was November 15th and
that answer is the circlet yeah
question two in what constellation does NGC
0001 lie and that was in Pegasus
this is a long one question three the new general catalog begins
is numbering its numbering system with zero zero zero one a dim Galaxy the
first object positioned east of right Ascension zero hours the NGC then
progresses Eastward eventually circuit circling the sky before reaching 24
hours all right Ascension it encompasses 7
840 deep Sky objects why then does the final object NGC 7840
have a right Ascension greater than zero hours
its ra is zero hours eight minutes and the answer is procession since the 1980s
it has moved the ra coordinate right Ascension coordinates Westward
hmm that's pretty interesting really so those are the answers for last week
the names that will be added to the door prize list are Adrian Bradley Cameron or
Cameron Gillis and Andrew corkhill and we will give away the prizes then at
the beginning of next month so here are the questions for tonight and please send your answers to
secretary at astrowleague.org a small asteroid hit the Earth on
November 21st NASA says meteorites may have been scattered along the shoreline
of watt Lake so a small asteroid hit the Earth on November 21st
NASA says meteorites may have been scattered along the shoreline of watt
Lake and again send your answers to secretary at australeg.org
second question on December 8th Mars will be in opposition
seven days later Mars will make its closest approach to Earth how close will
Mars be to Earth At closest approach so how many miles kilometers will Mars be
at its closest point to Earth
the last question why do the sun and moon appear as nearly this same size in
our sky so why do the sun and the moon appear nearly the same size in our sky
and again please send the answers to Astro I'm sorry to secretary at
australeg.org and please join us December 16th we're
gonna do just a little bit of something different I kind of thought it might be nice for everybody to meet the officers
of the astronomical league so I do believe Maynard Pitt and Dre will
probably be sending a recording he is the executive secretary I believe all
the rest of us will be there I know I will be and not only that Bob King will
be joining us uh he is also known as Astro Bob and his topic will be
embracing solar cycle 25 the most exciting years and I have to agree I'm
kind of thinking this sounds pretty exciting coming up too so please join us uh Sunday or Saturday
December 16th at 7 pm Eastern Standard time we look forward to seeing you and
meet all the officers and listen to Bob King give a fantastic talk thank you
Scott thank you Terry that's great well and congratulations to the uh the
the winners um and uh you know it's always worthwhile to kind of dig into those
questions uh you know to you know expose you to
um maybe some new knowledge that that you haven't really dug into before I
find the questions to be sometimes very easy you know and then at other times uh
a little tricky so which is uh which is great all those
questions come from the um uh from the executives of the astronomical League
well up next is uh David icker uh David is
um uh giving his second edition into Dave's exotic Sky objects and uh you
know no one can can do this better than uh than Mr eicher uh he has been
passionate about the Deep Sky objects or just the Deep Sky I think all of his
life and you know what's really cool about uh David is
that you can be in a conversation and somebody will bring up an object let's
just let's pick it some Icy object or NGC object or something and David will
know I mean without missing a beat you know it's distance its size something
interesting about it something current about it and uh so to be able to kind of
weave all that into just a normal conversation that's really a big talent and so we're really happy to have him on
107th Global star party and you're going to learn something tonight I guarantee it all right uh you are on
thank you Scott it's great to be with you as always and uh learning lots and
lots about deep Sky objects in my case I think I can say was the product of a wasted youth but it was lots of fun
um but tonight I'd like to share another strange object I I went through a bunch
of resources and came up with some weird stuff and some of them are we stranger than others uh but but tonight we'll
start visiting some of those early right Ascension objects now for a while coming
up over the next few weeks I hope um and so I will share my screen and I
will choose the right thing to share and I will see if I can start a slideshow
and if you see NASA art of cygnus X1 we're in the right place
so I will go ahead and we'll bypass the art art and talk tonight about the iris
nebula NGC 7023 which is an unusual uh nebula it's a reflection nebula and of
course most of the nebulae in our sky that are uh nice to observe bright
enough to observe our emission nebulae our star-forming regions our ionized gas
that is uh often Contracting down into forming very very slowly new stars but
uh some nebulae in our sky that are much rarer are reflection nebulae and those
are areas of dust that are simply reflecting light from bright stars that
are very close to them toward our line of sight and so they're much more
unusual to to find them uh to be bright in our Sky because they have to be in
the right geometry and also relatively close to us because of the faintness of
the the light coming across such a large distance
it's a good one though the iris nebula it's uh incest it's not far from the
border with Draco and it contains this interesting nebula that is not glowing
as I said but is simply reflecting uh toward us it's called the iris nebula by
many because of its resemblance not to an eye but to the iris flower in many people of course you know naming
these things you know is a is an art form all uh to to their own when I was
very young I I published in in astronomy it was actually not deep sky but a name
for a cluster that I thought just struck out really uh squarely at me called the owl cluster NGC 457 and that sort of
caught on and that's then I got out of the naming business and and names have multiplied on deep Sky objects
exponentially over the last 30 years but so there's a name for practically everything now and some of them are
pretty spot on and some of them are a little bit crazy but there are lots of of part of the fun of this uh game of of
looking at all these several thousands of bright objects we have in the sky this is a dust cloud that surrounds a
seventh magnitude star it's Sao 19158 and it's about 1300 light years
away so relatively close to us here and it's about 18 arc minutes across and
glows just a little brighter than the seventh magnitude so this is bright for reflection nebula it's a good one
there's also a faint open cluster that lies on the western edge of this nebula
colander 427 from uh one of the uh lesser known catalogs if you will of
somewhat loose open clusters the colander catalog and there are a number of strange objects that are nearby in this
field uh one of them that's another reflection nebula Vandenberg 141 from
the catalog of nebulae that Sydney Vandenberg put together it's sometimes
called the ghost nebula and there's a nice bright Myra type variable in the
field T cephei and there's a peculiar object and I'd like us all to say this
together at least three times Scott if we can this is
foreign
oh that's so easy it just rolls off your tongue let's say this together again
I I think after 40 years this is the strongest man for a nebula I've ever
seen in my life okay and I'm gonna get back to jail budagians nebula that's got
to be the name that's got to be the name of somebody well we'll get into the biography of this fellow but that's for
another week that's gonna feel at least 20 minutes discussing that okay but
tonight it's just nearby we don't want to worry about it tonight other than the fact that I had to phonetically spell
that out to get it right but tonight we'll just think about the iris nebula which is a much easier thing at least to
pronounce here from uh the great star Atlas uh by the German cartographer uh
uh um oh now oh gosh now I'm gonna forget his name I'm going to bring this Atlas down next week and go through that
too uh shame on me for doing too much uh too quickly here but this is the action
of cepheus and you can see Draco the green constellation border just off to the right upper right there and you can
see the iris nebula and the little cluster that's right next to it here and the bright star that illuminates the
iris and several other strange objects nearby including
Scott
we don't want to forget that already okay that that would be bad so we have
to like record that and play it back you know so we're never gonna I think we're gonna
hear from the descendants of jail I've been hearing it all night in my as I'm
trying to go to sleep you know you're going to be upset with it if you count jail but would find okay yes so anyway this is an
interesting uh uh area of the very northern sky and a good reflection
nebula and here is Chris Shore's uh most recent shot of the iris uh and you've
probably seen this and and it's reasonably popular not so much for visual observers but a lot of Astro
imagers have gone after this uh object that Tony halases and Chris Shores and
Adam blocks and others of this world and there are quite a few nice images of this and this is a pretty recent fairly
deep shot of this um nebula and and you can see that it's in a pretty rich Milky Way
star field and the bright star of course that illuminates it is dead smack in its
Center and there's a little bit of dark nebulosity in there as well so this is a good one it's one to put
down on your observing list if you haven't looked at it already and it's visible most of the year of course
because of its high Northerly declination in the northern hemisphere
um and we will go on all these these will be brief now compared to Scott your
you know there's a sigh of relief from Scott here compared to my going on and on about minerals you know we love all
of your presentations David so well thank you but but these will be brief I'm just throwing the objects out there
and there's a lot more to come I will mention that next year it's going to be the 50th anniversary of astronomy
magazine and we will have a very special January issue everything you've ever wanted to know about comets but we're
afraid to ask and how could we possibly put this issue together that we'll have observing and Astro Imaging the science
of comets from Walt Harris in Tucson there history and lore and Superstition
and myths and so on about comments great comments over the years a great photo gallery of the brightest comets
essentially since the kiyaseki but what special all-time issue on comets would
be complete with out a special two-page introduction by Professor David Levy
thank you so much David that really means a lot to me and I really enjoyed
writing it and I enjoyed the process of it and I think it's going to be an issue
I can't wait to get and to read and to relish I think you'll be very happy with it and
it starts off with a bang right away with David introducing the world of comets to us
and and your personal history which is quite unique uh David with with Discovery and with could we say David
discovering comets and comets in to some degree way back in the day discovering
David if you will as well that's right well thank you it is was really an honor
to do that I had so much fun writing that piece I really really did thank you
well and I think the readers are really really going to enjoy it and I'll very
very quickly uh mention uh my pal Michael bokich and I have a kids book
out as well uh in in there as as a companion with David
um it's a child's introduction to space exploration from Black Dog and Leventhal and it is in bookstores now and we hope
you will enjoy it and perhaps turn a child you know onto the future of space
exploration and with that I will stop screen sharing and we've talked about this a couple times Scott when
beforehand and if you will and I don't think I showed it yet and and this is such a strange thing that I came across
you know so you have to look keep your eyes peeled on what's going on out there
in the world because as astronomers we love looking back in time with telescopes but those of us who have
multiple contagions and diseases of the mind like me also look like to look back
in history on Earth sure and so there's the history of astronomy which is
fascinating and I stumbled across this and and was able to acquire it and
Someday I'm sure I'll give this to Lowell Observatory but this I don't know if you can see that well let me take it
out of the cover it's too reflective here but this is worcester's pronouncing
spelling book that was published in Boston in 1865 just with this paper
board cover just at the end of the American Civil War the last year as that
came to an end this is not like a reproduction this is the really those are their original copy and what
makes it interesting is not that it's not mcguffey's but a different uh kids
educational book of the 19th century but it's Percival Lowell's copy as a child
that he had the founder of Lowell Observatory wow of course and it is
signed by his sister Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Who as a child also with Doodles
and such who went by the name as a child Bessie I don't know if you can see that okay yes um and then the the title page
actually now this would have been when when Percy was 10 years old in Boston there of course so the title page is
signed in pencil in pencil by Percival wow presumably as a 10 year old child
this was his school spelling book when he was a young boy and he used by his
sister and it's annotated heavily throughout in pencil
um here and there and everywhere with marks and little notes and so on in
pencil presumably by Percy and with a strip or two of
addition and multiplication as well oh wow stuck in there by Percy it's like
it's like your hands reaching back into history you know and yeah yeah right and
it's it's kind of neat because of the low con connection and of course all of the story of Lowell and the founding of
the observatory there and the search for uh uh um Martian canals and and the
search for Pluto and so on and if I go back toward the latter part of the book
there's a section on astronomy in this book wow and the constellations and
mythology and so on so you know we don't know and we'll never know but maybe this
was pers young Percival Lowell's first exposure to the subject of astronomy we
don't know so anyway keep your eyes peeled out
there because this stuff is still floating around after more than 150
years so that that's one that eventually will end up I'm sure in the collection center
at Lowell uh but first it's going to be in you might have mentioned this earlier
how did you how did it come into your possession I I actually found it you
know back in the day we had these things and David has been to some of the
important ones with me many many years ago in fact uh which I treasure memories
of but back in the day they were very important rare bookstores now there are
very very few of those that you can go into and look at things and handle them anymore like there used to be and now
essentially everything is online so the stuff that's rare and unusual almost entirely uh is in online auctions and so
on now so this I found in in an online catalog and and so you know we will
never get into this forgive me Scott but but American history and and early
American history in the presidency in the Civil War and all that kind of stuff it's very interesting to me as well so
I've gotten infected from one of the many things that my father got me into was interest in history and collecting
documents and so on as well so I'm always looking for documents of you know
Jefferson and Lincoln and Adams and so on and so forth and looking for stuff like that I stumbled across our boy
Percival so so that was all I came across it but it's quite amazing that this stuff
is still floating around out there and so we thought we'd just share that tonight because it is unusual
absolutely well that's very cool David thank you so much thank you
um up next is uh a our long uh not lost but long uh not with us uh Professor
Karine Jafar uh from uh Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada's Montreal Center and it's great to have
you back on with us uh and you promised to give us a little bit of an update
definitely hi Scott hi everyone it's good to be back it has been way too long
um it's been uh it's been an interesting Journey the last little bit uh since
starmus uh it's been that long since I've been on one of the global star parties uh my son did join a couple of
weeks back before he went to the Canadian undergraduate physics conference so there was a Jaffer on but
it wasn't me and uh he is adamant he's not me and I think that's a good thing he's been uh charting his own path which
is great I wanted to chat a little bit not just about ancient photons but also
some of the questions James Webb is already raising about what happened in
the early days of our universe but to get there I wanted to start with the brief check-in and as I mentioned the
last time I came on was just after it was before starmus and uh I had this
amazing starless adventure and thank you to David and Scott for including me in
the in the Star Party Arrangement but also just letting us know that starmus
is there I I honestly before David started talking about it um early on in the spring was aware of
starmus but didn't know very much about it and it was an eye-opening experience and I got to share it with my wife and
my daughter which was incredible Tara she's 14 and this was a transformative
experience to some degree uh you know just being able to sit there and rub shoulders with astronauts and musicians
and you know eat with Emmanuel behind her chat with Chris Hadfield run a star party and share eyepiece views with the
Youth of Armenia was wonderful in front of the Opera House on the last night
just before we caught the plane back and I got to spend a little bit of time talking about it both on Space Oddities
as well as on a Rask Montreal Center Clubhouse which was a lot of fun we also had one of my former students
Emily laflesche come back to give our Townsend lecture but she didn't come in person she called in from a lunar
simulation analog mission in Poland where she was commanding the mission and
she gave us a walk through on the end of their first day at the lunaris station and they ended with all five of them on
the crew doing a q a with our Rask Montreal public our students and a Girl
Guides true and so they got to ask questions to these analog scientists about what it's like to mimic a moon
simulation without actually being able to go to the moon what the limitations were and what what their background was
to get there and it was really inspirational for a lot of the students which was wonderful to see
that was on International observe the moon day which was October 1st and we wanted to have a wonderful moon party
our first big public Star Party we've been looking forward to this the whole time and so it being Montreal of course the
clouds took over and we didn't get to set up outside with the telescopes but what we did is we moved inside and we
did Crater sketching and then once the crater sketching was done one of our members David Schumann stepped up and
did a talk about the Artemis Mission which has now since launched which was fantastic for all the students to have
learned about the rocketry and what was involved in our human Mission going back to the Moon
at the end of the night at 10 o'clock the sky's cleared so we still ended up doing an hour of a moon party with
whoever was left over at the end of the night but for almost three hours we were up in our Rask uh i.k Williamson Library
enjoying uh talk of the Moon soon after that we had the kafta
telescope and research convention here in Dorval in Quebec and I was honored
that the research prize this year as well as The Beginner's prize this year went to my students the research prize
went for two pro two projects one on sonification of space using data from
Mount Wilson telescope and one on using satellite data to analyze uh the Earth
and specifically forest fire management here in Canada and then the beginners
was actually the Juno project that we do using Juno data from uh parajobs around
Jupiter and the students get to access the data and process it and make their
own images of Jupiter one of our other Rask executive Carl Patrick won the award for building his
own telescope as well as refurbishing one of ours the big bird that you see there in the background of our picture
and then I had the most amazing opportunity come out of the blue uh one of our programs at Concordia University
the first people studies program had arranged for Wilford Buck from the Cree
Nation in Manitoba to come for a couple of nights to Montreal and not only did we get to attend a presentation where he
told us about the stories of Turtle Island and why the stars are so important to the First Nations people
but the following night when it was actually clear I got to run a star party with Warford Buck on the field in the
middle of the city at Loyola campus and so we got to share the night sky with a bunch of the indigenous students that
are studying here in Montreal as well as some of the other public in the Montreal West area
then we have the wonderful lunar eclipse which I was on with the virtual telescope project with Jean Luca Massey
out of Italy and a few of my students stayed up with me and lovely uh picture
that Anthony graciapo got was able to be shared with the world live on the virtual telescope project which was a
lot of fun and then after the fact a few more students have been sending me their photos so we have a compilation of lunar
eclipse photos from the beginning stages all the way up to totality but we couldn't get past totality because it
was too close to the Horizon at that point for us here in Montreal our wonderful event for kids spooky
nights which is run by my students at John Abbott ended up with over the span of two and a half hours almost 200 kids
coming and doing astronomy-based activities in the safe confines of our College the night couple of nights
before Halloween and they all took home treats and uh and a wonderful space
themed toys and uh at our table they picked up star finders and moon gazers
guides and solar system cards and it was just an amazing time had by all
and that actually brings me to this to this amazing honor that just today we
found out about uh our former president Maury portnoff was just uh honored with the naming of a minor planet uh 10.33
portnoth and so he's now got a retirement property he just has to arrange for a ride because it's a little
bit beyond biking distance but uh it's it's a wonderful honor for our society
to be to have now so many people and if you look at that top picture there we
have Maury David and Carl our our recently passed uh friend and secretary
all three of whom have minor planets named after them and Constantine Papa
Cosmos also had a planet named after him and so it really is an honor to have our
our Center so recognized on the international stage that's great
now today's topic is ancient photons and you know it wouldn't be me if I didn't
connect to the topic somehow and again I'm really wondering if Scott has planted bugs and cameras in my classroom
because just today I was talking about our modern theory of cosmology and how
it's gone through different iterations and the last couple of classes have been about determining the distances and the
expansion of the universe and how we know that it's not only expanding but accelerating and so of course that's the
topic that we have for today so I wanted to mention a few things first off it's important to recognize that when we're
talking about determining how long a photon has been traveling before it gets to us here on Earth before we observe it
in our telescopes whether it's at Mount Wilson or whether it's your refractor or reflector in your backyard
the hardest thing for an astronomer to measure is distance we don't have a way to just get a meter
stick and put it out there and determine exactly what the distance is to the Orion Nebula or to the whirlpool Galaxy
or to the iris nebula for that matter we we have to have other tools that we use
and what we use are these tools that are called standard candles because Parallax the shift of the location of an object
with respect to distance objects that works very well for the solar system between one side of our orbit to the
other side of our orbit on the other side of the sun you can get a substantial shift and you can measure really well the distances to the planets
you can measure well the distances to nearby Stars but for further Stars you need another way to do it one is you can
look at the type of star that you're looking at figure out based on its Luminosity or based on its mass how
bright it should be and then based on how bright it is you determine the distance to that object that's called
main sequence fitting for stars like our sun that's really difficult to do but
luckily there's types of stars called cepheid variable stars that vary in intensity in a very regular Sawtooth
fashion so if you can determine the period of variation of the light from
that star you know how bright that star would look if it was a certain distance from Earth
10 parsecs which is what we use to determine the absolute magnitude a parsec ends up being around 206 000
astronomical units an astronomical unit is the distance from us to the sun 150
million kilometers so we are talking substantial distances already when we're talking about cepheid variable stars and
how bright they should appear if the one you're looking at appears brighter it's closer than that 10
parsecs if it appears dimmer it's further than that 10 parsecs and that
gives us a really good gauge and that's actually what Hubble used to determine the distance to the Andromeda galaxy in
other galaxies is identifying cepheid variable stars in the globular clusters around those galaxies
now that works for a short distance but they're individual Stars whose
variation and brightness you're trying to measure when you get far enough away it's really hard to pick out those
individual Stars luckily Tully Fisher relation gives us an idea of how bright a spiral galaxy
should be based on the speed at which it's rotating so again if it's brighter you know how close it is if it's dimmer
you know how far it is and you can use that as a rough gauge but Hubble was able to figure out that
there was a relationship between the shift of the Spectra coming from these distant galaxies to how far away these
galaxies really are and so as you look further and further out into the universe it's important to
recognize that you're looking at the light having left years and years
billions of years sometimes in the past but the Galaxy is no longer where it was
when it gave off that light the Galaxy themselves are continuing to proceed away from us
so when Hubble tried to bring all of this together he used the redshift measurements from vestosliffer investor
slipper had determined the redshift measurements how much a spectral line was shifted to larger and larger
wavelengths and he noticed that distant galaxies appeared to have larger red
shifts but he didn't have accurate measurements of distance so in comes Hubble and Hubble followed by humanson
with him were able to provide distance measurements and correlate them with the
redshift and determined that in fact the universe is expanding and the analogy
that I tend to use with my students is the idea of raisin bread where if the entire universe was a big loaf of raisin
bread and you had raisins which were all the galaxies inside as you proof and then bake the raisin bread it expands
and as it expands for every single one of those raisins every other raisin is
moving further away from it and that distance that it's moving is proportional to how far away it was was
to begin with so as we're looking at these galaxies further and further out
Hubble humansin using bade's determination of Stellar populations to
make a really accurate measurement determine that yes the universe is actually expanding and not only is this
expanding it's expanding at a fair rate and that's why this light coming from
these distant galaxies is shifted now they were able to determine this out to shifts almost equivalent to a source
that might be moving at the speed of light which is called a cosmic redshift of one
Cosmic redshift is the shift in wavelength divided by the original wavelength
as if a source giving off light was moving at the speed of light the light
you would see would double in wavelength that's the idea but it's not actually that the galaxies are moving that fast
it's that the space between us and Them is expanding at such a rate they appear
to be moving at that speed now that was pretty humbling to determine that things are appear to be receding from us that
fast that you would no longer be able to receive any light from those galaxies because they will now have shifted
beyond our Cosmic Horizon because nothing can move faster than the speed of light and if that was the entire story you
would think wow this universe is expanding pretty quickly but just recently the James Webb Space Telescope
published data that set a new record of these Cosmic redshifts Hubble had found
redshifts out close to a factor of 11. James Webb has found a few past 12 and
there's currently 26 observations that are being confirmed that take us to redshifts all the way out past 14. wow
it's incredible because what it means is that you're looking so far back in time
that you're looking very close to the cosmic Dawn the first creation of structure in the universe and in fact
you can create a chart that says based on this Zed how long has the light been traveling to get to us and how far would
the object be now based on the fact that it was already receding from us at that rate
and if you look at something like a z factor of one you're looking at an object that's been the light from it has
been traveling for over seven and a half billion years to get to us that Galaxy is considered con continued
to recede from us it's now over 10 billion light years away
and that's at a sad factor of one we're now talking about Z factors over 10. so
we're now getting close to within 400 million years after the big bang when we
look that far back and the whole time the light's been coming towards us because space is expanding that light is
getting stretched to longer and longer and longer wavelengths which is why we need a tool like the James Webb Space
Telescope that can look into the infrared cost of the visible but not just past
the visible but also looking at extreme energies that have now been shifted all
the way out to the infrared the extreme energies that would have had wavelengths down in the uh picometers would now be
all the way out into the nanometers to micrometers in wavelength so we're
looking at light that was energetically formed over 13 billion years ago now
being received past our visible spectrum and that's what we're looking at when we're looking at these ancient photons
is not only have they been traveling for a very long time they've been stretched along the way
now that's the simplest approach to trying to understand this there's a lot more complications when you bring in
interstellar retining with the dust of space and Quantum fluctuations and things like that we'll save that for
another day for now that just gives you an idea of just how ancient and how part
of a journey these photons have had oh
thanks Scott thank you Kareem excellent presentation thanks that's
wonderful okay uh we are uh coming up oh actually
I just wanted to uh point out that we I I'm looking at people chatting and stuff
and we've got people tuning in from Europe Asia Australia you know from around the world
so you know thank you for joining us on the global star party this is what makes it Global uh you know and this is uh uh
for me in particular you know I call it it's it's a special internet moment for
me okay because uh you know we are using the power of our of uh you know instant
near instant communication uh you know and we're able to do it from our homes from our desktops our laptops our mobile
phones uh and experiences so thanks again right now we're going to go to uh
the UK uh and um uh reach out to uh astrophotographer Gary Palmer who is uh
a great uh astrophotographer a great astronomer and a great teacher through his program
Gary Palmer astronomy which you too can learn from the master of Imaging and
image processing so Gary I'm going to turn it over to you man let's go thanks very much
um nice to see everybody on here and be back on again so quickly
long absence so um yeah I was gonna look at a couple of
different things this evening on the style party first one
um is really around a little bit around the weather
um and with a poor weather you get you end up um a lot of the clear nights uh when the
moon is out so we're Imaging when um the moon's out which is not ideal
um so I've got an image up on here which I'm just going to share and we're just going to run through a bit of basic
processing and see what we can get when the moon's out so hopefully you can see that spring
um quite a straightforward M31 you can see
it's very well bleached out um by the green in there and it's more
or less going into a light blue excuse me and that is called
by the bright moon and we can see that it's over this side yeah in the image you can see it's slightly brighter here
um and slightly darker on the right side the structures there though so
um it's 54 three minute images it's not hours and hours and hours it's a fairly straightforward setup it's not on a
corrected Redcat 71 and a 2600 color
camera first off in picks Insight once you've
got it all stacked and you've got it all set um and integrated like this
um the dynamic background extraction does a fairly good job on this I was correcting it and bringing out the
colors even though the moon's out um one of the key things that you've got to watch is how you space the markers
um and the the points that it picks up on the background and it's very tempting to fill the
screen up with markers but on targets like this and on nebula targets where there's a lot of um uh Dart points in
the image it can cause all sorts of issues and if you're not careful here between the two galaxies you can end up with a
big black trough down the middle of the two galaxies and that causes lots of issues then as you're moving forwards
for the processing it it's really hard to get that back and what people end up
doing is is darkening the background down because they've got that issue so you run into all sorts of problems
so with the dynamic background it extraction the set click on the image and then what we're
going to do is set the tolerance at 1.50 the reason for it being quite high is
because of the green on the background we want it to actually look through that and subtract it the default sample
radius keep it 12 but the samples per row we're only going to run in at six we're not going to run them in too high
and that allows me then to manually place them if I'm from this in let's say 15 samples
per row I'm going to spend hours moving all of these markers around moving them
away from the galaxies and then resposing them so it's easier to start with a lower number so if we generate
those now and I zoom in a bit you'll see these markers here what we need to do is
there's any other near the Galaxy is lower um if you've got an ebler if you're doing a nebular image is to move these
away from it just have a good hunt around the image make sure that you've got another sitting over there and none
over really bright stars so just have a quick look around once
you're sort of happy with the basics of it you can start adding some more in so you can just left click on the mouse to
start bringing these in
some reason it's running a little bit slow this evening but look at the general idea
I'm just going to move that one out a little touch more there and we would go across the whole image
but this adding these in at random places once we're happy with
this just going to add a couple more down in this area just so it's evenly up as this
is the brighter area this is um really where we want to concentrate
on okay go to the Target image correction
and then we're going to select subtraction and then we're just going to click on the tick and apply
a full Sprite now you can see there it's gone a little bit dark so we're going to go back to that we're going to scratch
that one and then we're going to add in some more around here
I'm going to get it to do a bit more of a sampling over this area
right foreign
we could spend some more time on that I've done one earlier as usual
um just to show you that if you do spend the time on it you want to sprout those out just so that we can see
that you're after quite a uniform background on it right the way across got a little bit of a stack line there
so we're going to crop that out straight away so go into the processes just go to Dynamic crop
simply close the other one first and not help
yeah I was just going to crop the stack lines up to the edge neaten everything up tidy it all up yeah okay what's what
is the difference between a dynamic crop and the standard crop tool you can apply
the dynamic crop to multiple images so if you've got I don't know why this come
on um if you've got multiple images there so let me just for instance uh duplicate
this image two or three times what we can do with that
um let's just imagine that this is a analogy and a b yeah from a mono camera
and they're all slightly different you've got different stack lines at different points on the edges
um with rotation with all sorts of other issues with the dynamic crop what you can do is if you go into that
where you can mark off one of the images so if I just take the edge off of this
one foreign and then what we do is we don't apply it there we drag the
um New instance icon down onto the desktop and then we close it
and what that's done is providing that they've all come from the same camera or
the same system you can just apply this to each image
and that would crop each one exactly the same so it's really helpful then that you're
not working on measurements and other things it just saves a lot of time so the dynamic crop has got a lot of
different uses for it um and it's just I prefer using that over the other crop systems on there but
it just means that these images would all overlay exactly the same now
let me just close those other ones because we don't need them
okay what we're going to do now let's just have a look at some of the noise in
the background there we can see the speckling that will come from uh the correction on
the image um so if we just set up and do a bit of noise control on there
so uh multiscal linear transform have this set up on the other monitors
so they're going to come up over there some of these and we're going to apply this and we're going to go three two one
on the settings so we've got a threshold 303 and all of these are going to be
around 50 percent and then we go to the next layer
and we're going to do the same thing again so we're going to go to now I'm going to bring it down
then we're going to go one
again 50 on all of them it's a good idea for this not to go too
now on the last layer here we're going to go half so it's going to be 0.5
and 50 now because the image is not stretched yet we need to make a mask to cover the
actual Target um so if we bring up the histogram
and we're going to bring up spring transfer function okay let's just bring that across
nice and straightforward to make a mask if we click on the image the two battery icons at the top here
click on the left one and it will make a mono mask as it's not stretched it needs
to be stretched to use as a mask otherwise it's not going to protect anything in the image
so if we click on the nuclear icon in the screen transfer function that will
brighten it and then in the histogram we need to select that L image
always reset your histogram before you do anything just in case it's got a previous setting in there now we're
going to drag the process icon and we're going to put it onto the bottom of the histogram that's going to transfer the
settings out of here and I'm going to reset the mouse and just apply it directly to the mask
that now is permanently stretched that means we can use it for anything so we're going to bring it across attach
it underneath the name name bar will go Orange once that's gone orange we get our
Master controls highlight up here and then we can invert it so first one here if you're hover over it says invert the
mask once we've inverted it you can sort of turn off the raid on the mask so it's
still active because it's got the orange in the name bar but we can see what's going on and then what we're going to do
is going to zoom in a little bit and we're going to apply the MLT
and remove the noise out of the background
and there we go so if I go back let's see if it goes all noisy and then if I go forwards it's flattened the
background down so it makes it a lot easier now to work with and the background modernization is really where
you spend a bit of time this is this first part spending the time here
um gives you a nice image we can remove the masks now because there's a couple of ways you can just close the mask and
that will automatically remove it now what we want to do is look at some color calibration on it
um would you we do the simple way on this so we're just going to do alternating just going to do a little
preview box in the background there with no Styles in and then we're going to do alternate again and do another large
preview box over the Galaxy now this is going to use the black
points and the white points in the image and then we just go to color calibration
and we're going to set up our white reference which is the preview too
and we're certain structure detection off now as I'm hovering over the image you'll see down the bottom here the RGB
values come up and we're averaging there 47 across the lgmb so we're going to
come in up here we're going to add in 48. I always go back one zero there so
come back one zero we're gonna one number above 30 47.
I've had 48 in there and then down on our background reference we want the
preview one box and we're gonna drop the upper limit
that's going to come down to 0.01 now I never applied to the image
so apply the screen transfer function to brighten it back up and you'll notice now we've removed most of the green bias
that's out of the image while doing that I can clear our previews out Delete all of them and really then it's down to
stretching the image there's a couple of different ways you can do it you can either do it manually through the histogram if you want to try
and preserve the core and some of the stars then
um you could come in and do another preview called an end
this is all down to personal preference um as to what way you like it
um we could use something like Mile Stretch then that will mask out make it a lot easier for processing up the
the center um retaining the detail
foreign it's nice to go through these image processing routines with you Gary
I I know I know that people come back and re-watch these after
they've been uh preserved on Facebook and YouTube just to kind of follow along
and uh you know do this with their own images so really thank you for helping
so many people out like that I I enjoy doing it it's good fun you've
got to remember that most of these are test images in some way or another they're not um images that are like personal or I've
spent hours and hours and hours doing um work on them these are this would be what we would do if we were testing the
equipment you'd do two or three hours worth of Imaging um with whatever equipment and then you
would just run through a basic process like this um so now we're going to go to uh we go
to the curves transformation just going to bring that up
and we're going to select the image bring up the live preview I'm just going
to give it a little bit of a contrast kick
something like that and then we need to add some color in so
I'm not going to go miles and miles into the processing on there so I'm going to apply that
and then we're going to make another mask and just do some color on it so we're going to delete the preview now
create another mono mask now we don't need to stretch this now
because it's come from a stretch stretched image but what we do need to do is darken it a little fraction so if
it goes to the histogram transformation reset it select the image that we're working on
the DBL and then we're just going to darken it down it's going to bring the black point in
apply that and then we're gonna drag the name bar over and applied to
mask there's no inverse in this time yeah because we're actually covering the
background um reset your curves transformation and
then go to the yes on the end which is the saturation and we're just going to bring that up very very slightly so
really where these first four boxes connect we're going to start to increase that if
I bring on the live preview you'll see it's starting to add the color in now
do it gently and you can apply it a couple of times
but without doing that and starting to go into a lot of other processing that would be around where we would go
there's a couple of other things you can do to bring out more detail in the call but it is showing you that you can go
out an image when the moon is out it's not a night that you just say I'm
not going to get any detail at all um we're not that uh we don't have that
sort of luxury um with the way the weather works it's the case of coming out and doing it but
what I did want to do just very quickly was sort of scrap this for a second now and just have a quick
something that we've been working on um I'm just going to put the projects in
and this was really a discussion over filters some of these filters now are costing a lot of money
um and we've been sitting in the background there doing a lot of work so this has been running since August yeah
um and the image at the top here is just 10 55 minute
uh sorry 55 10 minute images in this one there's 514.
five minute images and this one here has got them all combined together
wow now it's the flying bat and what we should be seeing in there is the squid
now this is used in one of these uh newer dual band filters on the color cameras and I've seen a lot of different
images from different filters we are going to do a longer test on this
with multiple different filters in the filter Wheels but on average UK money
one of these filters is about four to five hundred pounds they are not cheap
um and you're getting lots of different versions so some of these if we split the image for instance on this
particular filter I'm just going to do that with it
and then we're just going to full Sprite in them you're going to see that you can do actually get a blue residue in the
background with some of these filters and we're going to do exactly the same with this one
so you can see the green now and then this one's really heavy in the red
um my issue is and this is up for discussion and something to sort of put out there
that over 500 images
at five minutes that flying squid should be staring me in the face yeah there
should be nothing hidden there and my point that I'm making is that you need to check these filters really really
carefully before you go and spend your money on them yeah because they're they there is so much from manufacturers to
manufacturing out um while basic objects like Orion
um you know Horsehead nebula things like that will come out if you start going after obscure targets you're gonna find
that you're going to get issues and the target's not actually coming out and it's not the fault with the equipment so
last week I just put on an O3 filter on average the spirit will come out in
about somewhere around 20 hours yeah 20 to 26 hours you'll start to get a really
nice one or even with 10 hours data on the equivalent mono camera to this one
and the same telescope we had the full squid out and out so it's showing that
even though you're going to spend sort of four or five hundred pounds on one of these filters you're not necessarily
going to get what you're after they're not the quick fix for a mono camera is where I'm still coming across on these
but that is something that we're working on we are going to put these all into a filter wheel
um an image a Target yeah we pick a Target that we're gonna get enough data from and run sort of 10
hour test on these filters side by side um because they're a lot of money
you know and a lot of people think that they're the magic fix for light polluted areas or other things that are going on
and they're not I'm not going to name the brand though
not at the moment yeah great well thank you very much Gary
that's great what is uh so what's what are your projects that you're coming up
on uh that um we've got all sorts of stuff we're doing the uh system in Spain at the
moment that's going to have a revamp um for the solar stuff uh hence the
stuff's not in here it's uh it's going off uh Thursday um
and we're working on some designs on that uh that multiple cameras on there
because some of the work that I've been doing over the last year is now on this
really working on the sun and I've said it for quite a long time the change in
aperture on telescope is not the way forward because you're getting poorer weather conditions larger aperture it
just amplifies the poor seeing conditions whereas if you have a modest aperture
telescope 90 millimeters something like that and you change the pixel size in on
the camera you have a totally different result so you're still able to get in close but you're using a lot smaller
aperture so the idea now is is on the rotarian system we're going to look at
putting a multiple camera unit on there so we can attach three or four cameras I
see then depending on the seeing conditions you can change whichever
camera here is different I've got the luxury of just picking a telescope off the shelf
um depending on what the day is yeah and what it's like when I open the curtains in the morning
um we've not got that on remote systems um and there seems to be quite a lot of
interest on uh people using these like universities using the solar mix remotely so
um I think there's some interest there with that but it's just working on all
sorts of different things at the moment different people are always asking for me to sort of sit down and work on the
next thing that's coming up so right never a dull moment no there's there's always something going on
but no thanks it's always good fun it was a question uh lubo in China wanted
to know if we're using optilon filters or which filters were you no no for the
um for the uh M31 that was an opto Long
Hill Pro filter but if it was for the FL bat it wasn't the flight back
um it wasn't an option I see and I know that you test a lot of stuff and you're
not obliged to say all the stuff that you're using so much
what we're gonna do is is ready for prime time so yeah we're running a
proper test out on this with multiple filters and then people can make their
own mind up I think right
Mark Ellis from watching on YouTube says I have issues trying to find an O3 filter that doesn't leave me with halos
okay a lot of the Highline and I've I've known people go for Chroma filters yeah
really expensive you know thousand pound that uh filter and still get Halos on it
and a lot of this is down to the game settings on a lot of these CMOS cameras the manufacturers give you a base
guideline so let's just say they say Unity gain of uh 140.
a lot of people are taking that as that's the gospel that you know that is the prime point where you set the gain
on the camera the manufacturer said that and that that's what it is but if you
imagine the manufacturer and you know that you're a manufacturer you don't get enough time to get everything on every
single product Oh there's variability in in everything that's manufactured so if
we now change and we look at most telescopes are now running below F5 they're somewhere around the F5 uh or F
4.5 to F6 is an average that with a reducer on it you're not taken into
account the speed of the telescope so you're keeping the gain up at 140 and
you've increased yeah the amount of light gathering in the telescope and therefore if you jump right the way down
and we went down to say yes 3.2 or S to something like that you've then
increased it so it's a multiplier that means that the game needs to come all the way down and the Halo might normally
be caused by gain issues so I had a customer a while back with chroma
filters and he had the same problem and with half the gain on it and it's perfect so that's great
worth looking at is adjusting that down I run the Anglia filters three nanometer
ones here and I generally run them at somewhere around 80 down on the narrow
band and somewhere around 40 on the lrgb
so great well thank you very much Gary okay
we're gonna we're gonna take a uh 10 minute break here and we're coming back with uh with Mike Simmons who's going to
be talking about some new initiatives and new projects he's working on so uh
stay tuned it's time to get that sandwich or coffee and stretch your legs a little bit
hello Mike Simmons David what a pleasure to see you on here
I'm I'm actually going to leave time so we can talk about stuff too during my
time anything you have to say because you know about the the new stuff that that
uh we're doing now of course yeah I was going to be gone by now but when I saw you appear I thought I need to hear what
Mike has to say that's right to hear your uh your lecture tonight and
um I think it's going to be a lot of fun and I think um I think that uh
really it your organization hits one of the most Central things of all astronomy
and that is it's for everybody it's for the rest of us it's for We the People it's for
you know astronomers can come up and NASA can do all these things but it's when that young person looks
through a telescope for the first time and sees Jupiter or the rings of Saturn thoughts I thought I think is what it's
all about exactly exactly and you know uh it is
for all of us and not everybody gets the opportunity but um
that that's what it's all about and using astronomy for so many different things I don't know if you attend the
ASP meetings but I'm gonna have a a panel and a plenary
session about using astronomy for good stuff and I'll be on it with uh ROM from
the IU's oad office of astronomy for development and
um Anusha Ansari who's now uh you know she was on our board earlier
and she's a good friend but she's the CEO of X prize Foundation now and and you know astronomy was her
First Love before her family convinced her to go into engineering but she
and it's her motivation and so uh yeah so it's but she made it into space
and you know that's that's that astronomy is where it started
so if you're at ASP you want to you want to see that yeah it's going to be hard
for me to get around I'm hoping to get to the league meeting this summer next summer I mean yeah oh the ESP is online
this year yeah it's all virtual oh okay so you just have to make it to your
computer yeah but unfortunately it's not free yeah
it's cheaper than travel though yeah so Gary
um you were talking a lot about the filters in yeah I'm also the um the editor for
Astro gear today I don't know if you know that site but uh we we have uh
reviews of honors it's almost 400 now at different products and filters is a big
thing I mean all the astrophotographers I have writing for it they're getting samples from all of the different
manufacturers some of them haven't hit the stores yet yeah and uh and maybe you
have the connections with with them but you know looking at the I have uh a few
to do I mean it's fascinating seeing the technology asgar's uh color magic is
just coming out and
I tried to do the reviewing a little bit different because everybody's really
yeah it's great it's fantastic you know it's this that and the other um you know if you want to uh test a
Halo on a filter stick it up in the whole set yeah you know that that's the best place
uh in the night sky to find a Halo and that that's what we did and this is what
I look at with a lot of the stuff now that um you have to look at this a little bit
more long term on the reviews and not just as quick as the product comes out and it's all nice and shiny and
everything else because you know some of the stuff we've been working on in here
like that uh flying back that was just the thing there's two questions I have there one is
um I think there's a time limit um of so many hours and then you don't
gain any more data and I would say that's roughly around 20 to 30 hours after that you don't really gain
anything um and I'm not the only one you know a few of us that have been talking about
this are saying the same thing so in a short review you can't really sort of say what you're getting out of that
product well these these aren't just short reviews I mean
they're spending a lot of time uh Alan Dyer is one he's a stickler for getting all the data that he can uh I don't know
if you know Molly wakeley and she's testing a lot of the filters um and in different circumstances and uh
one of the things is we don't hold back you know if if even if it's the sponsor
if if the thing doesn't work it doesn't mind dependence on that and you know that that's one of the reasons why I
stop writing for magazines in a sense or some of the more larger magazines because it's more of an advertising than
it is about the review of the product well they yeah they don't uh they're in a bind when the thing doesn't
work right we just publish whatever it is and and uh we also do comparisons
between the different filters so you've got these shootouts and those I think I really like those because then you can
you know see what I I think you get a good feel for how things work especially
uh if they're testing them on the same object same same equipment and everything uh it's better controlled that way but
you know you could take a look and and uh yeah see what you think too yeah
I know it's um it's an awkward sort of thing you know a lot of the things on YouTube you see at the moment it's just
about it's just about getting the next product I'm not being it's about being nice and kind and polite and
um you know there's nothing ever wrong and you know you're getting the next
product and it's not about that you know I I treat reviewing stuff like I'm paying for it with my own money
yeah yeah well most of the products uh they've bought themselves yeah sometimes
they get them from local stores because they want to sell them I mean test them but the uh the the ones we get from man
it's hard to get them from manufacturers while it had it was when the supply chain was bad because I talked to
you know I know I'm here in Southern California I know Celestron well and we've worked with them and skywatcher
and they they didn't they didn't have the product you know so they didn't it didn't matter but
but uh regardless they're they're the reason this was created was there's a need for
independent Fair unbiased reviews not cloudy nights where people have
never even seen it and they just write something the YouTubers are there to entertain and get advertising yeah and
they can't say anything or they won't get the products anymore but those guys get the review samples before yeah it's
you know I I sit in a little bit of a different place because I'm working on some of the equipment you know so some
of the equipment's here for me to actually work on you know um am I working out about it on it
before anybody even knows it's in existence you know so
um the good thing of working on it is you can iron a lot of the things out that are going to come out in a review
you know um yeah and sort of work from it from there but I agree it's one of those
things now that you know people want to see good
um review some good advice on it yeah well that's the idea I mean you know it's not that game thing you know it's
not about with Scott yeah it You're Gonna Knock a set of chromosils as you
know so it five six thousand dollar set of filters You're Gonna Knock those because you've
got the gun setting up um it's not the manufacturer it's down to the knowledge of how you use in a
product and unfortunately a lot that is misguided as well well that's that's true
in some of the the things especially with the filters you know different people uh in the UK Lee Poland is uh I
don't know if you know Lee but he's doing some reviews and um uh
some of them get reviewed more than once essentially because somebody could do a review but then somebody else would do a
comparison yeah of that with other ones and I think that's valuable too because then you get different you know more
information we don't go into Super depth like uh cloudy nights when somebody publishes a 4 000 word review of
something and you know a lot of those things are just to get noticed yeah you
know I'm not being funny um you know there's only only so many
words you can write about a filter um yeah yeah let's go into the shades of
color of the outside casing and the box and uh it's we don't we don't care some
of the reviews of some products are four or 500 Words it's enough
uh but you know it's it's uh if somebody's got a new harmonic mount with
a uh you know the the latest kind of drive or something like that you got to
go in there's a lot of testing involved and there are a lot of little things that make a big difference so those who
run you know they'll run up towards 2 000 words but I try to keep them short so they're it's quite funny for those
because I said as soon as I saw the first designer one it's not the harmonic Mount it's the tripod
well that's yeah that's a big part of it too and and you can't the reviewers
don't have every piece of equipment you know so uh
uh so you they have to stick to what they they've got and they have to be good enough to identify where the the
problems are so anyway it's I I want to say uh hello to Marcelo here too before
I have bolshea uh no no uh buenoche it's night time there now that's perfect
I I haven't been to Brazil uh for a while so my even my little bit of
Portuguese is bad foreign
thank you
[Music]
so
much [Music]
foreign
[Music]
[Music]
[Applause] [Music] thank you
[Music] well I hope that little break was refreshing our next guest is Mike
Simmons Mike and I have known each other for gosh over 20 years and he has taken
me and many many others in fact the whole world on incredible
educational Outreach programs bringing about awareness and astronomy with you
know a unifying theme of one sky and uh you know so Mike has had many
incarnations but has always always believed in bringing peace people together and kind
of dissolving the boundaries that we think separated us and so
we were talking just a couple of days ago about new projects he's involved in
many of them very exciting and so I'm really happy to have Mike come on
um to uh to tell tell us what's going on in his is his corner of the universe
here Mike hey Scott yeah it was good to catch up
with you you've been a part of a lot of the things that I've been doing and I've been part of what what you've been doing
as well so uh it's uh it I always like to stay in touch we always have a good
time catching up and there's always something new something to go on to and
and you know astronomy it's more than just a hobby
that astronomy is um used for a whole lot of really good things
uh you mentioned connecting people together and that's a big part of it
but it can also be used to to bring science to people a lot of us here do
Outreach uh David of course is the master Communicator Marcelo from Brazil
we're going to have here doing Outreach and I've done it with him when I've been down there
and bringing astronomy to the people on the street so they can understand
something more about science like what Kareem was talking about earlier uh and
also uh into the classrooms is really important in a lot of places where they don't have other uh opportunities so
that's really what I've decided to focus on so I've got a little presentation but
you know Scott we were talking and you said the global star party and I said well
yeah I did a global Star Party once yes you did
and uh yes that was in 2009 in the international year of astronomy when I chaired the 100 hours of astronomy
project and or most of the that part of the project and the the global star party was the
big thing so I want to start off by showing some pictures from there and then I'll get into what uh what the
latest things are sure so sorry I've got a little bit of a you
know okay so the global star party so this was
part of the international year of astronomy and it the 100 hours of astronomy was uh an idea that was
um thought up by some other people but uh eventually I was asked to take it over
and it was all about having 100 hours four days of
astronomy sharing with the public and all the rest of the world um and the big event was a global star
party and this was it was the only project really at least
at the beginning of the year that involved looking through telescopes believe it or not so everybody focused
on it became the biggest project of the year what we did was we had a star putting knot lots of different star
parties all around the world but we had one star party and it was everywhere
obviously not at the same time because Darkness isn't at the same time every place but as
Darkness swept around the world I I estimate that we had at least close to a
million people look through telescopes that night and uh it's it's hard to know for sure
because we can't get the statistics on every Star party but we had every amateur astronomer around the world lots
of them never done Outreach before and and they'd write and say I want to be a part of this what can I do
and I'd say just take your telescope out point it at something and tell people to take a look I mean from then on so uh
let's see so have I got this up now am I sharing is that right yes you are okay
good so I've got a picture up and I'm going on and on but this was in New Zealand I just want to
show a few of these different events that we had uh New Zealand down south that was a probably I think that was
maybe the first uh country one of the first countries uh this is from the
Philippines uh all of these from the same event this is Pakistan
uh China they had a hundred uh telescopes for 100 hours where else
would you find 100 telescopes lined up together like that this is the biggest telescope I know of it was in the UK
someplace I don't remember where this telescope an eight-inch uh Mead is
actually one I took to Northern Iraq myself I've been doing a lot of traveling that's why I was able to
connect people like this I've done a lot more since uh this was one that was uh
not sold relatively inexpensively and and with a whole lot of other stuff to
the amateur Club there they couldn't get telescopes so that's what they did this was down in Baghdad
um and uh this was during the War I was there just before the Invasion the U.S
invasion uh Bangladesh they made a big thing they had their own t-shirts and everything
else I don't remember which country there is this is it looks like uh South
uh southeast Asia could be Indonesia or something else in a classroom uh Nepal
as his Kathmandu uh in India uh in Iran uh place I've
been many times a uh the same telescope the same kind of
telescope in either Peru or Bolivia I forget which with one of the indigenous
people looking through it uh lone solar uh astronomer doing Outreach in
California not far from me and then a big crowd down in Argentina
we also had uh other things that went on then this was in Oman on on Sunday and
uh some place in the Sahara North Africa I don't remember where it's been a while
uh and More in in Pakistan now these are just images uh in
general uh Philippines one of the things you learn really quickly is amateur astronomers around the world are mostly
young uh 30 35 year olds you don't see
them much it's a really a young person's thing just like this Romania
uh this is this is why we do Outreach right I mean this is this is it when you
get a view like this that is the reason this could be anywhere in the world and
it just happens to be I believe this was Romania uh and in Brazil where Marcelo is going
to be on is from I don't remember if this is in his area but everybody wants to share
so Scott that is a real Global star yes it is I'm delighted with what you do and
and I'm glad to be a part of it because as you've always said there's enough room for everybody I mean we've got
eight billion people here John Johnson used to say if we had a million telescope telescopes distributed around
the world everybody could look through one and uh we did our best there and but you're carrying it on you're continuing
to do it in one one week after another and that's fantastic so thanks
uh look at this you know line events like these do still occur
um uh you know and uh one of the guys that's been putting together some large events that's on with us tonight is
Marcello I mean he's uh he he his programs I mean attract hundreds and
thousands of people um you've seen it firsthand by attending
some of his events I've been down there once and witnessed the fervor and the
interest in astronomy uh when I went to Armenia it was the same thing so it's
really interesting uh that the more developed countries
uh are not as interested in science or participating in Hands-On science as
some of the other countries are you know so and I haven't quite figured that out yet
yeah well the other thing that's really exciting is that you don't need a telescope at all
that's true absolutely that's very true that's the
good news you know I've been to uh for example in uh North uh North East Iran
uh not far from Afghanistan and and
um another stand I can't remember at the moment Kazakhstan I guess uh and they
were really really active there but they didn't have a telescope and that's not that unusual they are doing astronomy
Outreach they've never looked through a telescope themselves it's all about what it is and what it's about
and uh the other thing is that most of the world first of all most people never
look through a telescope and they don't realize what a huge opportunity is what
it can be life-changing in other places they don't get these opportunities so yeah when you go to a place where they
just hear about stuff going on that that is normal to us
they jump at the opportunity and and here let me bring that one back up because this is a lineup in Nepal and
um am I sharing no no I didn't share yet okay
I mean look at this it goes all the way back here and then out here this is uh
and Kathmandu and they're waiting for hours uh to get a chance to view most
people like I say have never looked at it they don't you know as far as looking up I mean David's right you don't need a
telescope but people don't know what stars are I mean why would they be interested they don't know you can see
this the the planet's naked eye and so that's part of the Outreach that we need
to do so it is everywhere this is uh some
students in uh Afghanistan looking at the sun with some solar glasses I know
people doing uh astronomy there and I'm talking to one uh young woman who's they
can't do it anymore because of the situation there um and I've seen that before you know
check this out this was a star party this happens to be in southern Iran uh Southeastern it's along sort of a drug
route there coming from Pakistan and so it's a little dicey so you know the
government provided a a little bit of a guard there who was good enough to stand
still while somebody took a picture um and this I have this I showed that
one already so here for here's an example this is a
picture I took on my first visit to Iran which was for the total solar eclipse in 1999 and I only realized later that
there was only one boy in this these are students at a at a student observatory
in Tehran uh it is highly dominated by
women astronomy in particular the science is in general
um the the gender complaints of gender bias are from the men because they're
outnumbered by 50 by the women in universities these are things you realize uh when you
uh when you you connect with these places and realize the stereotypes don't
really work um so this was an eye-opener on my first trip to Iran and a place I went many
times they they had almost no telescopes at all the time uh they do now but they
were extraordinarily enthusiastic and we're not talking about just going out and observing there it's public Outreach
and uh fares with games for the kids and face painting and just it's like a a
festival they have festivals so this is a classroom in Rwanda where
it looks like he's got a globe of Neptune I'm not sure what it is exactly
but there are people doing astronomy in these places in fact I'm communication
with somebody in Uganda right now and I've helped people in Nigeria who use astronomy because there's no other
science classroom is not that bad looks like they have a floor they have a Blackboard
that's decent for a rural School in central Africa
but they don't have a bio lab or a chem lab or a physics lab they don't have any of those things
but Gary was talking about light uh light pollution filters and so on
if you go outside of this classroom at night they've got a much better astronomy lab than we do because it's
not full of uh artificial light it's accessible to everybody and everybody's
interest is what makes it just such a an incredible uh way to bring science and
uh engineering and so on to the people this is uh in Ethiopia this is an astro
bus they they've got the bus in the background they take astronomy out to the uh the people in rural areas because
they can't come into to and Ethiopia is actually I was there a few years ago they're extremely active in space
science and astronomy and they are using it to boost the all the stem Fields
because astronomy touches on all the sciences and technology engineering mathematics and so on and the Astro bus
that goes into the classrooms and so on this is a stem Center
that is for children using astronomy
and this is the location you see this container in the back that's got a window cut in it that's the stem Center
this is a refugee camp in Northern Nigeria those children smiling here
are internally displaced people the Boko Haram has chased them out of their uh
home Villages uh and so they're living in this camp now and look the faces are
no different that everybody's fascinated it's no different than anywhere else they just happen to be in a refugee camp
but the sky is the same what about this this is something I'm doing now there's other ones the refugee
camp for uh is something I've helped with uh an incredibly good group there
uh of mostly women in a paternalistic society which is cool
um this is astronomy for the blind most people don't get this but this is a tactile Moon they're able to feel what
what the moon feels like other tactile ins uh resources like this there are
there's also audio and here's the thing you know those images that what Gary
talked about this kind of stuff too um I think because no it was Kareem and
he talked about the wavelengths that Jay West uh uh images with we can't see
infrared ourselves when we look at those pictures we're looking at pictures of things representations of things we
can't really see but they can be represented in other ways they don't have to be pictures in this case they're
tactile here's a planetarium program also a legacy project of the international year of astronomy the in
this case the planetarium Dome is held in their lab and I I had some friends in
the entertainment industry here do the English version of this because it was created in uh in Spain again for the
international year of astronomy and so there's a narration and they're guided through the constellations this way and
you know I just learned so I've been doing things with astronomy for the blind for many years and I just learned
something I didn't realize blind people don't realize because there's no reason
there's no way they would know that the sky looks like a dome to us they get these representations of things and
they're flat but we don't see it that way so there are planetarium you know
just like a tactical Sky they can sit under and feel and feel how this the sky
goes down to the Horizon along with seeing what the stars are like we just did this this is a club in Libya
an incredible Club Libya they they've had Wars uh Isis political unrest so
these these uh students have been through a lot these are middle schools in uh Libya that have an incredible uh
astronomy organization Nationwide they have 700 000 followers on Facebook
how many people have that in Arabic and the ministry of uh education support but
they couldn't get telescopes so we raised money for them to get telescopes and they are on their way now uh being
shipped by sea because you know we got six inch Dobbs they're
sending them by air would cost a fortune but they've never had an opportunity to
look through a telescope before and they are doing workshops and lectures and all
kinds of things uh you can see some artwork in the background they do things like that
um and here they are posing this actually was posed after um uh I arranged for uh an astronaut
Nicole Stott particularly wondered woman because again you can see these are mostly girls
and uh so I got a female astronaut to talk to them
on by Zoom uh that I was told that this is the
first time they've ever met in at the Met an astronaut online or in person
since Yuri Gagarin visited the country so you know we we uh someone was talking
earlier about starmus and hanging out with the uh astronauts and so I know a lot of astronauts you know and it's a
big deal but it's not as big a deal as it is to them so these are ways in which this can be
used now these students may not go into astronomy uh but it doesn't matter because they are
likely to go into science or engineering or something else and all of these
things are needed we did a I was I'm involved in a program in Tanzania
and uh we were raising money and somebody said I think they need food more than they need telescopes and I
said they need scientists they need Engineers they need technologists they need all of these people they need the
education and the they say in Tanzania education
is the path to a bright future and it's true so it's used for
development for in many different ways and let's see oh yeah I just stopped the
share there so here I am so and I'm going to show you real quick I'm going to share because I don't run run over so
Scott knows I can run on forever um if given the opportunity so
I'm going to and forgive me I'm staring off on the other monitor this is our
website for the new projects astronomy for equity and I you know looking at it I just wanted to show you that we have
super luminary uh people like David Levy
uh sharing a blog post and things like that here's a letter from one of the
students uh you can see you know getting a telescope would be a dream that's in Libya uh I don't even remember what all
these things oh that's I think that might be from David I don't know so we have a lot of really short blog posts
and I think you know looking at this I thought you know what this is interesting stuff there's Nicole Stott
this is uh the uh Zoom meeting uh between the astronaut and the students
there this she's just wonderful um and so there's a lot of stuff there
that uh I think a lot of people will find interesting and the thing that I
want to really draw your attention to is the Donate button
because this is a startup and Scott you know what that's like um
and Scott will be on our our team page here very soon but we have a lot of
other people there's Nicole Frank White the overview effect uh I've been working with Franken on the overview of effect
stuff for a long time David uh during the breaks that just really gave the
idea of this that this is um astronomy is the overview effect for the
rest of us you know you're not going to make it into space to be able to see the the Earth Among the Stars it just
changes the way you see the Earth but these things do here's a blind uh specialist uh consultant as David Levy
and there are a bunch more people to go on here and Scott will be up there soon thankfully because I have always valued
Scott's advice and participation and connections and so on so all right thanks thank you that is the new stuff
yeah that's the new stuff so so how do how do if somebody is out there wanting
to get involved in one of your programs what's the best way well because it's new we don't have a lot of ways to get
to participate there's not it's not a membership organization uh there is a
newsletter subscription I'm not sure that we've even sent out anything there
yet but you can sign up for it and we'll send out news and we've got to get that going I mean there's so many many things
to do and this is the reason why doing non-profit stuff is I I call it being a
professional beggar because and people tell me no you're wrong you're giving people an opportunity
that's right to help other people and I know you say that Scott but from my standpoint to someone who's does not
like asking for money that's what it feels like so um but you know we need money for
operations just for people I need to get somebody to coordinate the Blind and Visually Impaired a community Hub that
we've started we have people from NASA uh Chandra and Space Telescope Science
Institute who make 3D um 3D printed uh
objects you know based on the pictures of the big telescopes take but they don't reach the Outreach community and
the Outreach Community doesn't know it I think Marcelo has done this stuff for the uh Blind and Visually Impaired
before but he figured it out himself you know there are resources out there and the things I do it's not about inventing
something new these things are going on the experts are there the resources are there and I know from going around the
world and talking to clubs they want to do this but there's no connection there's no
distribution so that's what we do and that's that's where people can really really help right now
um and then you know and hopefully in the new year when we're in a better position we'll be able to get people
more involved in uh in that itself but just take a look people can write to me
anytime um what's a good email address for them to contact you I would say right to Mike
at Astro for number four equity.org that's our website so for
okay right Astro the number four equity.org
okay and there's there's a lot more going on it's just more than I can talk about this time because yeah well next
time next time next time there's more to know so okay yeah but uh this is this is
important stuff and uh although you know I've been in Mike's position uh working
with non-profits and asking people for money but the thing is is that when you
get involved in these things you become an active piece of of the Machinery that
really does make a difference in the world and uh uh yes uh you know you can
think of one way that yeah we need to send food all over the world well we we already know how to do this all right
but making someone inspired about taking the next steps into and becoming
scientifically more literate not only changes them but it can change their whole community
and um and that Community can be maybe just a few people but it could be their
entire country you know so you never know I always say this you never know where the next Einstein is going to come
from the next Stephen Hawking is going to come from you know the next Sandra Faber is going to come from you know
the turning people on to science through the Gateway of astronomy uh is is
important you know they they you know we're now uh faced with huge uh
challenges to the human race uh not only population but in resources all kinds of
things and these things can be solved but we need the scientists to do it you
know this is not going to be solved without science and so we need your help well even more than that Scott it you
know everybody says we're all in this together people don't act like it because that's intellectual they don't really see the
Earth that way the astronauts like Nicole she's got a new book uh out
um back to earthers returning to Earth or something like that about exactly that and how it changes their view well
astronomy does that too and I've done a lot of things connecting people around the world like the global Star Party
and you really do get a feel for it when you're looking at the sky from one place and other people are looking from
another place and you know you realize you're looking out different windows and spaceship earth going through space
together I can I'll talk about the overview effect another time when we sure you're in astronomy for development
because that is a big topic that's used a lot Scott so I've got I've got a lot
to talk about you know just you just have to to you know turn me on and and
then shut me off when it's time no problem no problem well you think
you've been talking about this all your life and I consider you'll be doing it for the rest of your life so uh yeah I
don't see any reason to stop I mean and I think you feel the same way you know I do you if you can make a difference then
you do it you just do it it's like an obligation the number of times Kareem was talking about Mount Wilson
Observatory and you know I was involved there for decades and when somebody come by and say you know oh I love this and I
really want to see the 60-inch telescope well I've got the keys why would I not do it I've got you know
what there's a blog post I put on uh on our website about inspiration
and the things that I've learned where I had no idea
that I made just change somebody's life right and it's shocking to me
but you never know and I know brilliant people out there who who will be the
next Stephen Hawking or something I wrote another blog post about a refugee from Syria
self-taught it knows more physics than I do Advanced
physics and stuff so you never know and it really is important and this is a way to make a
difference yeah okay so thank you Scott well on that note thank you very much Mike
um our next speaker was supposed to be Connell Richards I think he's just running a little bit late here uh so we
will bring on Marcelo Souza down in Brazil uh Marcelo thank you for coming
on to Global star party and updating us on your activities
thank you it's my pleasure thank you for the invitation it's a great pleasure to be
here and let me organize here share my screen
okay I'm trying to are you so what you we are
doing what you planning to do for next year we are making plans for next year
and let's be honest okay I can shut them up and the one thing that we have
planned to do is again to developing activities for blind people
the screen I can't see I found here sorry
all right now I think that's actually this is our astronomy group
and today is something that we are doing is this yeah
we are here at the end of the year and an hour we uh receive me a lot of invitations to talk
with his students in schools this happened today earlier
with the kids from kindergarten Here in Brazil and we are talking about
astronomy with with them then something that motivates his eyes
to to develop the projects here new generations that you have here in
Brazil you have the astronauts here have people here with fantasies about it to be ended
in Brazilian uh what's up there we are we hope we will do your soccer World Cup
very happy these students already using the shirts the Brazilian official
t-shirt from the soccer team national soccer team man everybody now is
preparing because the first he gave me will happen this Thursday for Brazil and
it was everything that we have here uh we have problems with Argentina with
football and then as I think China lost the game today a lot of people celebrated here in Brazil it's something
that you motivated people in this field and we are using these moments house to
talk about astronomy as we live we are talking about the balls and we live in a
bowl there is something that you ever used to talk about astronomy in this
moment this is a project that you we are developing for blind people
you see here in this wow we use the at the small glues but that
you use to put it below the furnitures I don't know if I think that you have
United States Disney something that you use the below differentials to protect and then it shows is easy to move
different juice then we bought a lot of these a small sequels there that you have
rules and with the strings we connect them
and we have the 3G constellations here and we invite people to touch
the constellations these eyes are big it's not now but we
are planning another exhibition like it is for next year is the bigger one you can see here we
the people use this a blind I don't know how to spell in English I forgot the
name that used to protect the eyes you can't see then they enter here and we
have also guide that blindly people that are the guides then they touch
um the panels here and they tie they try to identify the constellations then we
did this many times here this is another one another bigger one that you organized here and we are now preparing
for the next year we are preparing to uh organize again we call this exhibition
and now universe Portuguese is anniversity space
and another thing that we are doing is we are beginning to build an
animation values in every place here near the beach because
in Brazil and the December January and the beginning of February our holidays
here in Brazil summer holidays then is the most important holidays that you
have during the year that in the spirit begins before the Christmas and go until the
beginning of February that the schools are closed everybody travels have
travels heavy activities near the beach and we are preparing to build the big
analimatic sundials near the beach and for this we developed many years ago a
software that happens in formations has out informations to build in sundials this
is the anonymous you have a version in Portuguese anyone in East in this the
software and they allow us to build the sunlight how that the software's work
like it easily this is Portuguese version now is the English version and
you need to include the value of this semi major X the value of your local latitude
and then the software make his out calculations right and we also produce a
timing table to add them to use an ERG the sundial
and these are with these informations that you have here this is that you need
to to put in the screen here you see our information here has information about
the software what is an animatic somebody that you have somebody with the human interaction this information that
you saw there as a position where the people need to stay in
all the days during the year for each day we have a different position right it's based in Indiana dilemma
and here we talk with us the students before they
visit the anonymatics of that because you talk about the uh the movements of
the Sun during the year parents movement that you saw and here we have our deformation and how
to build this sunlight medicinal thematic scenario that is a fantastic
tool educational tool and there are also that motivates people yeah
here you have here the draw of your Ellipsis ellipse
and how to build this thing yeah how he
can see how to draw the ellipses and they are also have the information the table of the
angles for the time and here how to build general pneumatics and direct
information of the angles and now we put the position of the
genome that it will be the person that will be a walk in different days of the
year here where you can see here and if this information is possible to
build this anonymity and you made that we made a lot of
tests here is one of my students that was producing a master Affairs about the
the user phonological educational use of an element what we did is we produce a model
of the solo is here is almost the same latitude that we have visited with this
model is easy to build in every place in schools rather than revised they use
this to help to uh you have the positions of the time
and then we ask for the students to build an animation die of other people
and they have a contests this in one school a contest and the
students make the draws that they would like to see in the Sundial here is
Samara is her name is a teacher and they hear the students
a draw yeah each time each hour
the doubt that you'd like to have there and they could produce where Anonymous
in that school and now we have a software for the
smartphone as a an app for smartphone in Portuguese and in English
here with the same information that I showed now with the software
here you see in Portuguese this queens of the and the same thing works in the
same way I will show here is a video that show how it works this the app
we are producing many apps now here in English are you having a the
same thing is information about China limits then
you'll know what is another I'll talk about Channel Amos and the audio information that you need to understand
what is an element about the genome
and the movements of the some apparent movements of the Sun
in different moments of Technology Associates here we have information about Donald Trump
here is information how to build again and the same information that I show results in the software we now have
in a app that you can use you have all the steps to build the
genomatic survive we need to find the position of the North in the north
hemisphere here foreign
[Music]
foreign
it's important to have the timetable that correct the longitudes the
difference longitude and the movement of the Sun during the year then with this
information is possible to do many things and I think that this is uh are
very important educational tool because you don't need the money to build you
want to need to be creative well because you can build it in any
place you need only a big a place without the with the sunlight
during the day then you can producing in any place now we are bringing this to the beach near
the beach I hope that people during day during the holidays now they have the
opportunity to see this near the beach I hear the same version in Portuguese
but now in Portuguese then it's a a we are planning how to use
in the spirit here at in Brazil and the rebuilt is small like this but now we
are planning to build it big ones but because the beach you can build the Lash
sometimes man then we are planning to build the analytics
Horizons four different kinds of
some diets to to have this near the beach and to help us to talk about the
astronomy with the people in these holidays then this is Christ thank you very much
and now this is my birthday Refugee though
there's Mike said Thank you guys ever
now you have organizing Audi 15 International media Festival in in the
astronautical big events and a big event that will happen next year April 27 29 and the will be fantastic
if we all of you can visit us to participate you you'll be for us ever it
is a moment that we organize to have the opportunity to talk
with friends and to allow the population the students and the teachers to have
contacts with the people that developed Australian projects and to do astronomy
around the world thank you very much again for the invitation thank you very
much or tell you we're doing an amazing job as usual
um you know and uh I really I appreciate you coming on as often as you do you
know you you are you know you give so much to
the community and it's wonderful to have you so thank you thank you very much
I think that soon we have a new edition of the sky's app magazine
that's right thank you very much for all the support and the help response thank
you very much thank you so much okay so uh we are now going up to Canada from
Brazil to harachuk Jacobian is that am I pronouncing your last name correctly yes
it's correct sounds good I usually ruin people's names so but uh
I met heroch at um at the starmus event in Armenia and he was taking he took
part in the uh astrophotography uh class that was a workshop that went on there
uh he was on earlier today um with uh the space shop 42 group they
did an astrophotography workshop and uh he was a participant actually one of the
uh people that just joined um but I asked him if he would come on tonight and give a presentation uh Raj was uh uh
you know he was a little bit shy saying gosh you know I'm just you know I'm still learning the ropes and uh uh but
you know that is the practice of everyone that's in astronomy you know no matter where you're starting where you
know what level you're at um uh that's the Fantastic part about being involved in astronomy and
astrophotography is that you're constantly able to learn new things and so
um so I think it's it's important especially uh people that consider themselves to be beginners to share the
experience uh you know to give people that are also starting uh you know some
encouragement to see you know what that path looks like you know because there's an awful lot of people out there that
think about astronomy and they you know they they read about it and they they're
they're on the websites and and blogs and reading the magazines and stuff like
that but they really haven't got up and started getting active and
getting active is what it's all about and so crotch will share his experiences
with us and uh I'm looking forward to this presentation here we go Raj
thank you Scott so uh yeah my name is haraj and I'm originally from Armenia
but uh I have moved to Canada around 10 days ago
uh I had a great pleasure to meet Scott David uh and Kareem during the storms
Festival which was uh how in Armenia Yerevan the capital of Armenia Yerevan and the first date of September and it
was a really great experience because besides uh like bit
providing a great uh science and tastes of science and art
including a lot of renowned scientists and musicians and artists it also
brought together a lot of people who were really interested in science in astrophotography and astronomy but who
didn't know about existence of each other before the sermons and that's that's a great thing because I mean for
instance Scott mentions spatial 42 I haven't heard about them before the
storm was meeting and uh we sell a boom of interest in this in uh
a boom of Interest over the space so was the astronomy and the straw photography after the Star Wars festival and uh
today I wanted to share a bit of my experience as a complete beginner in
this field uh yes so uh by the way being an Armenian also uh
it's a great luck that I was invited to this uh Global Star Party happy to have
you yes because today earlier today baby the cremations
about mentioned about uh I don't remember exactly how he spelled the
nebula name I I suspect it was like I'm
gonna have to re-watch or something like this so
being an Armenian I would like to elaborate on that because actually this
object was named after an Armenian uh astrophysicist Dr Armen gilbadarian who discovered this
object in uh 1977 uh yes and he is a specialist in burakan
Astra observatory in Armenia I don't know if you had a chance to visit it I did not
there was just no time at starmus we were so busy going from uh speaker
engagement to speaker engagement you know it was uh and I wanted to go but uh
but uh you know I was glad that many of us did get to go and check it out so
Yeah so basically the story was that he was searching for some new herbic horror
objects and in 1977 and he discovered this nebula and it is a really tricky
thing to see it because it changes its uh Luminosity multiple times over the
years so I mean probably there was a good chance that someone else could discover this object and then it's
possible that the naming would either be much easier to pronounce or or even
harder depends on where from what is the society who discovered it yeah so just a
small remark from me and uh I have pre I have like prepared a small presentation
today uh let me maybe show my screen and sure
go through it
okay I hope that you can see it
yeah if you put that in presentation mode it'll go full screen
so yeah perfect perfect so as I mentioned my name is Raj and I'm
originally from a country called Armenia if you haven't heard about this country
you can see it's in this illustrative map it's so it's a pretty small country
a post-soviet country which recently has uh
well I've seen a boom in interest in Science and
Space Technologies and astronomy in in particular so I also I just would like
to uh elaborate on what Mike Simon said about developing developing countries
showing interest in uh in science I can
say that this is exactly the same in Armenia so as a post-soviet country which had like a huge economic crisis
after the collapse of Soviet Union when a lot of scientific Heritage a lot of
institutions were lost uh in the recent years we've started noticing that after
after some path of development after the country is developed is getting up from
its like economic uh crisis situation there is always a boom in uh interest in
science in technology and that's why Armenia currently has uh very developed
I.T industry and a lot of uh technological companies which are developing uh space related technology
and uh software and hardware and even we recently uh with cooperation with
Partners who launched the first uh satellite operated by Armenia and there
is a plan to launch another one and recently uh so just a couple of days ago
there was another program where a device made by students in one of armenian's
Armenia schools was launched into low earth orbit uh which uh was supposed to
be there for like five seven minutes to take measurements and uh
calculations and then it of course it returns uh returned to Earth uh return
to Earth I burned it in in the atmosphere but I mean uh the fact that
Armenian students have started doing this kind of uh projects is really inspiring
so let's a short uh about my the country
and the scientific interest in in Armenia so
yeah so as I said I moved to Toronto Canada [Music] just 10 days ago and I'm very interested
excited because I know that there are a lot of astronomers and astrophotographers
like located here one of uh the greatest of photographers who is
partially the reason I started doing this is also located here so uh Astro
backyard so yeah I I watched a lot of his videos yeah and uh
how I got how I hooked up to space so basically uh in late 90s like early
2000s when I was uh 10 years ago I first saw these pictures uh picture of Pillars
of Creation taken by Hubble Space Telescope and I immediately like got hooked up and since then like I've been
uh involved I've been interested in space in astronomy uh in Sci-Fi movies
and so on uh unfortunately I didn't have a chance to look through a telescope until I was
like in uh 30 years old like if I remember that
correctly and the first time I had a chance to look through a telescope and
view Jupiter and Saturn was A Moment Like A A of a great joy and
even uh and excitement so because I dreamed about it for a long time but
since uh the country was still recovering after economic crisis and
several other uh situations bad situations we didn't have much
chance to uh there weren't there wasn't much interest in in astronomy there were
not there were basically no astronomy clubs or telescopes that you could go and look through uh so yes uh
I wanted to share a bit of my experience as a complete beginner and some things
that I uh had to learn the hard way during my uh start of of uh of the hobby
as an astrophotographer so first thing is manage your expectations
because uh during the summer star party uh Star
Wars festival uh I had a chance to help explore scientific and spatial for you
to organizing the gardening uh star party and also we held a couple of other
uh stargazing events uh in one of the
regions of Armenia for local children and local residents so basically a lot
of people do not uh don't know what to expect when they are
look through a telescope so they basically expect that they are going to see a huge uh a star up close or maybe
uh Jupiter up close like a photo taken from a large telescope or maybe even
some uh or maybe even Hubble Space Telescope so but but I mean uh one of
the things that can be frustrating for a beginner astrophotographer astronomer is
um is when you have wrong expectations so when purchasing your first telescope
when first getting into this you need to understand that uh
understand that there is a lot of things you still need to learn there is a lot
of uh uh levels of Hardware that you can use so basically buying the your first
telescope isn't going to give you views like on the left picture here so mostly
most times as a beginner you are going to get photos like on the right here so
I mean and it's always important to remember that this is just the beginning
and you will get better over time and over time so I mean this is a hobby of
trial and error and there are a lot of variables like weather conditions
location uh yeah Hardware your camera and everything but
there is endless possibility to get better I mean uh the second most important thing is to
be patient uh I'm an impatient person myself and uh uh astrophotography gives
me this it actually teaches me it makes you be patient
so three important steps three important topics uh are first start small
just it's not necessary to get the best telescope than the that costs multi
thousand dollars or has the highest magnification because the
the better Hardware you get as a beginner the more frustration it is going to give you if you use it wrong I
mean first get a small telescope right if we talk about deep Sky astrophotography you don't need to get a
like 127 or 152 millimeters or they are a thousand millimeters focal length of
telescope because for that you will need to have an appropriate Mount you will not have to have a
point on Guiding and the cost of error is much much much higher and this kind
of Hardware is much less forgiving than a smaller telescope like uh to 250 300
350 millimeters or up up to 500 millimeters so it's much much more
forgiving to have to start with a small smaller telescope because you can have a lighter cheaper Mount
which uh you don't need to have such a pinpoint uh accurate guiding and it it
can uh and you can choose more uh cameras because uh with a higher level
higher uh level of Hardware you will need to specifically uh choose a camera
targeted for your specific setup so but on this lower focal lens uh it's it's
much easier to precise it's much easier to capture it's uh it gives you the
basic understanding and and actually you can always use your smaller telescope as
a guide scope later when you're much more mature much better photographer and
you have like 80 millimeter telescope then you upgrade to 152 or 127
millimeter you can always use it as a guy score for your bigger setup so I mean it's not uh wasted money it's
always good to start from uh it's all this good to start small
uh another thing is uh being patient also uh
refers to the fact that you do not need to process your image images on the same day as as capturing because I know it's
exciting I know everyone wants to get their results as fast as possible as
soon as possible because they want to see the results of their efforts and time and maybe they have been sitting in
a cold weather for for a long time for hours capturing their first Andromeda
galaxy or Horsehead nebula image and they want to see the results as fast as possible but that's the wrong thing to
do because uh speeding up is going to make you mess things up so basically yeah yeah
so after you have ended your capturing session close your laptop go get a good
sleep go uh have a coffee on the next morning and and start processing your
image and it may take you hours it make takes you take your days do not rush because
rushing will always degrade your end result so just right you're learning a
skill and a craft and it does take time yes and uh the third thing always take
your dark and flat frames I know a lot of people do not do this because they
will don't want to again they want to see their results as fast as possible
and there is uh a lot of people just skip taking this dark and platforms and
then they they get frustrated because they don't get the end result they've
expected or meanwhile they have like uh followed some kind of a YouTube tutorial
or uh website tutorial and they have
the same amount of Lights captured the same exposure the same camera the same
setup but the end result is not good why because they haven't taken the dark and flat frame so always remember I know
it's time consuming I know it requires some additional effort and time I know you might be wanting to go to sleep but
always take your dark and flat frames and the most important I had to learn
this hard way and I cannot State how important is it
always make sure that you have backed up your work at every step because when the thing on the right
happens it's uh it's uh okay I mean
losing your uh hours and hours of work is not a pleasant thing always make sure
that you have backed up then back it up again yes yeah so
actually uh I wanted to show uh some of the gear and some of the uh images that
I've taken as a beginner so I've started small uh my first
telescope for planetary imaging has been uh rather small and cheap Celestron
nexar 127 this it's a Max suit of Castle grain telescope it has uh 1 500
millimeters of focal length which gives me uh it was a pretty decent view of uh
of Jupiter Saturn sometime Moon and Sun
uh I have a camera before buying my first Astro camera I use smartphone to
capture uh planets like either holding it with hands before buying a specific
adapter near the eyepiece later I bought a bought an eyepiece then I just uh
bought my first uh dedicated astronomy camera which was
zwosi 224mc and the tripod that the
telescope came with was the factory service from SLT altitude estimate
bound so it's a nice little scope for visual and uh
Visual and uh you and photography purposes
and I have a another setup for my deep Sky Imaging so this is the scope that
you probably recognize Scott you uh oh yes yes uh I you've also seen this uh
during the storm as astrophotography that's right this is an 80 millimeter Ed
airspace triplet yes it is a great little scope uh a a great place to start
uh and uh a great uh no one of the good things in this scope
is that it is quite uh light so you don't need to have a a big sturdy and
expensive Mount that can uh that you can use with this uh with this telescope and
it also uh is future proof because if you in five or ten years when you're
good enough astrophotographer you can upgrade to a 127 or 152 millimeters uh
tablet replayed telescopes and then you can use this 80 millimeter as a as a
guide scope in fact so and you will also have two setups for wide field
astrophotography and for more to punch in uh through uh to those smaller
galaxies and nebulas out there uh on top of the 8080 I have a small 30 millimeter
seibony uh 30 millibits or a 120 millimeters of
focal length guide scope and I am kidding here and use my planetary ASI to
24 as a planetary as a guide guide camera but I know that this is not the
optimal thing I just wanted to try it out before buying a dedicated uh guiding camera and uh for my main
camera I use ZW ASI 294 MC Pro so uh
since I am a complete beginner I wanted to start with a One-Shot color color camera because it requires less effort
and less knowledge and less time let's be obvious to capture an image uh although not that spectacular and nice
as using a monochrome camera with a dedicated astronomy filters but still a
pretty decent camera uh and so there I have also a field flat
Turner it's also explore scientific field flattener for uh F5 to F7
telescopes uh and the mount is eye option cm26 uh
uh pretty like a good starter Mount as
well uh I haven't uh based any serious issues with it
uh yeah so and uh for controlling uh I first I started using my laptop
obviously kind of hooking my uh Mount and my cameras to my laptop uh when
using software such as Nina for capturing uh then I uh bought the ZW ASR
plus which is a great level device try allowing uh which is a good thing for a
learner uh a straw photographer because it allows uh it helps with the polar
alignment it helps with the guiding framing it helps with finding the appropriate Target it's and if you don't
have much time to spend near uh your telescope right at the spot you can
basically use your smartphone or tablet to automate a lot of pro a lot of the processes it will help you to take your
darks bias frames light frames it will help you to uh even
preview stack the images not as a final result but to preview the approximate
result you you may get so just a great little device that helps me a lot
uh yeah this is my deep Sky setup uh here are a couple of uh examples of uh
my uh planetary Moon and solar photography uh the results that I've got
so um this is the image of Jupiter I managed to take so it's not the best one
because I lived in a city with with a not a great uh seeing conditions
uh not the best atmosphere and also I mean obviously I'm still a learner so I
didn't expect to get much but being able to see the cloud bands in details like this with my telescope
which is not the biggest and uh biggest telescope out
there that other astrophotographers may use and using one of the cheapest zwo
cameras for uh planetary photography I was able to get this result although you
can probably see some progress down when I moved to Saturn because here I was the
seeing conditions were better and I was better in learned a bit more about
processing of planetary images so again here I use
my Celestron an extra 127 with zwasi 24
and here you can see more details in Saturn uh we got cassini's division yes
I can't have enki's division um uh so and also nice tonal range in
the Rings including that that inner part you know it's kind of faint and um uh
very nice you know blend darkening is easy to see here
I I would be pleased with such an image myself exactly I was because uh this is the
first time I was able to get a pretty decent image of a planet and uh after
and the enjoy enjoyment and the joy of the fact that I've spent a lot of time
reading and trying and trying and trying and finally getting the this image was
uh is probably the is probably the this feeling of uh the
feeling I got after seeing this image is probably the reason I uh started uh my
astrophotography hobby because that's what it's all about like
when you see the results of your efforts yeah try uh then I tried uh shooting here is an
example of my moon one of the Moon shots so this is actually made with multiple
images obviously I used several multiple images one was
focused and uh corrected for uh lighter part of the
Moon and there was another photo taken for the darker side of the moon which
then I were combined and stacked together so I got the final image so
again here I used my Celestron 127 max out of and the camera
I used my dedicated planetary camera for this one because I could get a wider
view than my zwo ASI 224 even with the
zero five focal reducer that I had I couldn't still fit the whole uh
Moon into in the frame because of the sheer focal length my telescope head uh
and an example of sun image so uh I use nostromania 140 solar
millimeter solar filters and I
use the technique again as with the planets and moon I call use the
technical lucky Imaging where I took a video and then extracted the frames
stacked them post processed and color graded added the contrast and I was
really really surprised that I could see some details on the sun
using a just a regular I believe it's called White Light filter white light
filter but look at all the granulation so this is um this is uh you know
perfect Focus um but also very very good seeing conditions in order to get the such
details like this yes so uh I was really surprised because
my expectation was that it wouldn't be possible to see any of the granulations using a white light filter but it
appears that it is possible if you take a long enough video and you have enough
data to work with and you really uh dialing those settings when processing
the the image and I mean it's it's a matter of trial in there or this was the
final it was one of the better white light solar images I've seen
and here is another one uh more zoomed in on the sunspots so it's also possible
to see some of these smaller details on the sun using uh pretty uh cheap
telescope with a chip camera and a solar filter basic solar filter so even you
even seeing this this kind of details it means that you don't actually need to
invest a lot of money and a lot of things you can basically use uh even
cheaper telescopes even cheaper cameras even a smartphone to to to use this kind of details so
just another uh another reason to to get into a
astrophotography you don't need a expensive and expensive
gear to start and this is one of the most recent
images so this was taken during the partial solar eclipse on October 25
2022 and a fun fact about this image that I wasn't conducting the
Imaging session myself I mean it was automated because I had to go to work
and this partial solar eclipse happened when I was going to be in the office and
that's why I programmed the asir pro that's uh to to start the shooting
sequence when I was in the office and I when I
got home I just grabbed the footage from the device and I was able to process
those again here you see you again can see some details and granulation on the
Sun which is pretty spectacular with using uh White Light solar solar
filter absolutely and a couple of examples from my deep
Sky photography so I have less examples because I have just recently started uh
deep sky astrophotography and I also had an accident which ruins uh the data of
couple of my photos my Horsehead nebula photo uh was ruined yes I lost the data but I
was able to download some of a couple of my photos from social media because I
had sent them to my friends so that's why I stated that this is very important
backup Backup backup if you have like two hard drives external hard drives
to pick up those two times three times because it's the most precious thing
uh this verse image is of a rosette nebula actually this was taken uh using
uh remote control telescope this was still the time which I when I didn't
have a telescope myself and I was interested is it for me can I do this should I buy a telescope
and I was researching what camera should I buy what telescope should I use
or even is is this hobby for me like and then one of my friends in Germany who
was actually uh into astrophotography had a William Optics Redcat 71 telescope and he hooked
it up to his laptop I asked him to Polar align the mount I believe it was uh
haq 6 if I remember correctly or five I don't remember uh correctly and he also
had ASI 1600 mono camera with a filter wheel with narrow band filters so uh
basically he polar aligned the telescope the mount uh placed the filters and then
I was using TeamViewer to remotely take capture the photos and then he sent me
the uh the the exposures which I uh processed using astral pixel processor
and pixel inside but that does and I consider this to be uh probably my best
image even though it wasn't taken on my gear but still there are a lot of
details on a lot of color here maybe a bit a little bit over processed and this
is uh one of the things that uh Lerner astrophotographer probably should
remember I haven't mastered it myself yet a lot of beginners usually overdo their
processing uh they eat to the point when it starts to look unnatural and I you
can see this it with this image there is too much probably a saturation too many details a bit too much of sharpening but
I mean I'm learning well I I would be thrilled with such an
image myself and I think it's beautiful so thank you
and the second image that I managed to save at the moment is my first image of
Andromeda Galaxy excellent this was taken using explore
scientific ed80 telescope and my uh camera uh zwsi 294 MC Pro this is one
shot color color camera and I used a light pollution filter optolunk L Pro LL
Pro here uh it was I used if I remember correctly it was
there were 50 200 seconds of exposures uh stacked
together uh I used Astro pixel processor for stacking and picks inside for processing
although at this point my my basic workflow is more I don't have a
system yet so I'm still learning the software I'm still trying to understand the process here so basically my process
is push the button and hope for a good result so that's yeah so that's a good
thing that I'm not into Nuclear Physics because this approach would be probably not the best
I don't think you've given yourself enough credit here these are nice images uh rash and um uh you know I I think
that our audience would agree thank you thank you very much and again
here I can after like uh processing it and after some time has passed you start
to notice that maybe this image is also a bit over processed so this is again a
part of a learning curve when you start to understand how much is enough how
much is too much and how much is not enough so basically it's a it's again a
matter of trial and error and uh again I cannot say this enough uh you are going
to do a lot of mistakes you are going to have a lot of nights when you don't want
to do this anymore because you're PC crushed your end result is a is a
disaster it's okay so just you just need determination and patience and
everything will uh will be okay especially because we live in the time
when there are a lot of resources a lot of YouTube videos a lot of Articles
teaching how to take photos and we have the best
year so far in the history of astronomy because today a beginner Astro
photographer can take images and see things in space which were out of the
reach of professional astronomers even like 20 30 years ago
just the beginner gear here is much much better than the professional gears half
a century ago or even less and being able to do professional great astronomy
and even like an image amateur photographer can contribute to real
science because I don't think that there are a lot of telescopes which are
pointing to planets uh all the time I mean probably NASA isn't spending
millions and millions of dollars to have a 24 7 view of Jupiter and there is a
lot of things that can happen during these periods during these times and if I remember correctly uh one of the
instances uh when when a huge uh asteroid hit Jupiter
if I remember correctly there was a there was a amateur astrophotographer
who was able to capture this moment yeah probably I don't know if my
knowledge is correct but uh there is a lot of things happening on on Jupiter at
every every second there are these storms Cloud Banks bands constantly changing evolving uh and by being by
shooting as many pictures of planets as you can you can contribute to real
science and maybe someday collaborate with some somewhere
someone from NASA and get a paper with a name with your name on it so it's
completely possible that's right you know this is why uh even images that you
might think are not worthwhile okay maybe there's some uh you know problem
with guiding or even a focus issue if
it's not that bad okay it still can be scientifically useful you know you might
capture supernova you might there's exactly all kinds of things that data that might be there and so you should
hang on to every image that you take and organize them you know by Night by time
uh you know and um you know because uh you know they're the the eyes there are
many more eyes on the sky with the amateur astronomers than there are professional astronomers and uh
sometimes there's something that they want to get the help uh and you know
enlist uh amateur astronomers to get uh to look at their older data and their
new newer data you know once the discovery is made so
yes and it's important it's really important to have Global coverage so the
more people are involved in in planetary and deep Sky Imaging uh the the better
side the more scientific data uh we will we will have because obviously it's not
possible to to observe the planets uh or objects deep Sky objects uh 24 hour 24 7
from the single location so and a lot of things may be happening during this period so
oh yes it's really important to have Global coverage so that was it from my sides I hope this
was interesting uh or into training thank you very important good
information Raj and uh we look forward to having you on uh Global star party
again thank you thank you thank you Scott for inviting me and uh hope to be
here again it was a really nice next time
okay Cesar uh great to see you um and uh uh you are are you on your
balcony once again yes yes I am in my own by Connie because uh sometimes uh
it's up for uh for this telescope it's more easy using uh the rooftop of the
welding and the the funny thing that was that the last week I was thinking in
take a picture of tarantula nebula and do you remember that is my idea of
course that this show Southern heavy for
options but the key of the of the side of the
part of the rooftop that that is the side of the
of the south west is the biggest part the best part for
where you can go to put your telescope and you have a lot of of Commodities you
know uh was totally broken the the key the the keyhole and this well we can we
can use this and we change the plans quickly and I call to the hotel
please help me to to change everything to go to the another small rooftop
that is is far is uh his face is facing
uh the East uh to the river uh plagues
Rio de La Plata um what I have in this park that I
showed you last week uh the audience Over the Horizon you know in this part
of in this time of the year um with a great experience because all
your nebula is an easy pictures easy pictures to take uh it's great because
it's full of of information because it's so big so big it's I I call it the queen
of of Summer uh Skies here in southern emefer because it's it's a amazing I
never never felt guided to take a picture of Orion it was a great
experience and as harach say I of course
that I don't process in the same night first of all that I am all and I feel
very very excited to to processing and things in the same night that I took the
pictures um I I choose uh to take
a very very takes of high of one minute
each so half hour totally more flats and darks
um well first of all let me
let me
you can see the screen now my screen yes okay yes we can hi hi Adrian how are you hey Adrian
doing well thanks to you I have a chance to rush home
I'd be able to give a full presentation after you are done so please take your
time we will enjoy as long as you would like to be on
the first of all that is that I I have in my in my screen I hope you don't like
image but actually is is in back of the
building unfortunately but uh let me show you
one sound one of the likes that they took the
first one here is the same pictures that I showed
you uh last week here is is the all of
uh individual takes where do you have a great uh details
that is it's really okay for to to have uh a situation where do you have an
individual pictures uh do you have a great details it's a
neighborhood so brag that you can show in the first in one individual pictures
do you have colors you know it's it's really beautiful
um well I can show you the big ones
first of all maybe it's got I I send you in the in
last week I send you a the same picture by
by uh yes uh by by WhatsApp and it's a
full of details this is really full of it's don't look like a picture
from the CP really it's uh it's not a perfect picture but it's incredible that
it's I I show it's excellent you you see nebulosity everywhere everywhere with
details where you can you can travel by by the picture with a lot of
of details and also detail like the Maxi Valerie's
picture of Orion that was amazing but look this part
and this is from the city it's really amazing and I presented with the pigs
inside I learned a lot more to use pigs inside for for the pictures really I
need the the helping of picks inside for them pictures in the city because it's so complicated take the best of a
picture in in this kind of of the Skies where you have um
94.3 barcode level where they have uh it's a bright option but the problem is
that you really make a lot of of uh magic magic tricks to have a decent
picture um but the color of this of the stars all work properly working properly in
the processing to have a beautiful a beautiful uh picture
um something like this here in this corner you can see the the patterns of
of the spiders um really is it's a nice it's a what's a
nice result unfortunately uh tonight I have a a
little clouds crossing the sky and what's not so good to to try uh with
tarantula nebula but it's something that I'll reserve for tomorrow in the night
[Music]
Galaxy because we tonight we are talking about the Asian lights on the uh you
know uh unfortunately I don't have because this one Orion Nebula is is
comparing with the acid lines or from galaxies or supernovas you know that
it's a it's a nearest option that we know um but of course that it's is it still
amazing that nearest option have maybe six thousand years to corrupt the the
universe the part of the Galaxy to to to
not hear my retina and this is something that that all time is smashing for for
our scale in human scale of course that is is something
difficult to understood uh just only 6 000 years it's amazing
when you start to think in a galaxy that have a millions of millions of years uh
the the live traveling in the space is well come on
it's totally totally uh over over
whelming or you know it's incredible and well this is this is all the results
of of the from the last week Something Beautiful is what is really I make the the
pictures while I was in the global Safari and this is the result that we
we obtain I am time China
uh processing the pictures um you know was a great A great
experience this is all
perfect I I don't know if I no it's good it's
good that's good so into enough it surprised me to see most of the
detail that you showed when I was in some Dark Skies
and I looked at through my little uh 90 millimeter uh spotting scope at the
Orion Nebula and borderline Skies a lot of the detail I didn't get the color but
I got a lot of the detail that you showed in that picture that you you had
more deep you had just a bit more detail than I could see but a lot of the
structure including some of that structure above the dark nebula that's in the
center some of that showed up so it was a bit of surprise I could even see the
center the central star in m73 um not 73 I'm 43 43 23. yeah yeah yes do
that pretty well it was it was pretty amazing we had a couple of nights where
you know everything is flashing in place yes yes
of all pieces is nice it's nice and the first of all that that
is something that you can you like to to reserve is to be to have a visible the
profession the four stars um is something that fortunately many
programs not only pigs inside if not for example cereal or a dedicated uh three
three fortunately exists free free software uh for processing of a very
very good quality actually I I was interested in in learn
more about it's inside um my son told me why do you you can use
well okay I I really I processing myself my first Orient totally
um really enjoy it uh in this in the technology of these programs the process
something that for example something that that you are talking is don't don't
over expose her the the center part of the nebula and don't lose the sales like
a traditional stars because it's something that you can see but when you
when you um stretch the the curves
normally you lose for me many many times I lose the the
central limit because it's totally white because I need to see more details in
the borders but today is the the systems for for
um for processing processing it's our gray because you can show everything in
your picture but of course my the processing for me is learning every time
and um really is uh is this
um I'm in in this business 30 years old um I was all mostly of the time in my
work is I just the telescopes of my customers or talking because maybe
people that love that believe in I don't know 1
000 miles away from Buenos Aires and I need to to to
give support uh to the distance you know uh for
example um a girl a woman that she went to
Brazil to show to the people with her telescopes
um to show to the people in Morrow this some Pablo I don't remember exactly the
name and she she goes to talk with the people and show uh
you know show the Stars the people or so all about astronomy and something that
that was very very good uh uh was something that she have a problem
in her telescope and I can help about
about how to collimate again you know
and this is something that is very very great for me but it's a lot of work and it's my work
and yes we have time for me to to enjoy
something in my telescope it's it's a great moment
um it's my my time for me is my processing of learning and enjoying my my own telescopes it's
something that normally not all people that work every day with some kind of
hobbies really enjoy the same hobby but for me in in the past of the years is is
one of my favorite my favorite hobbies my favorites
activities yes yes well it offers those of us that work in
this industry still uh you know a chance to uh you
know have those moments of of uh Solitude and reflection you know over
what we do and what we're looking at you know and what we're experiencing and uh
you know to help support that with your customers who are still trying to learn
their way um it is a great feeling you know so uh
uh you know I I agree I love it too and um uh Cesar you and I are lucky uh to be
in this industry and to participate in the way that we can it's uh it's an
activity a job a work a job especially that give uh that give you friends this
is incredible I I have friends from friends that actually that many times I
I'm talking about this that I my actually friends many of them are people
that maybe 20 years ago they brought me a telescope
um with the time I forget that he he
started uh having uh
and he was a customer but you know
many times people say okay can you explain me I think gay I can give you a
barbecue for you and they are the people that invited to
their home and yeah yes they make it nice they do absolutely absolutely well
this was my my president thank you thank you I I could show something
real that I I can make other people can make with a smaller Telescope yes
and it's amazing what amateurs can do today with with fairly modest equipment
the best equipment in the world uh was used to take images the very first
images of the Orion Nebula in 1880 so it's been it's been well over
a hundred years um since uh the uh Orion Nebula has been
photographed and uh you know if you look at the progression it's interesting because you can go back and see Henry
Draper's image and it's just of the trapezium it's a very small region you
know but at the time uh it and there's some guiding error in the shot and
everything but you can imagine how slow the film was how difficult it was to get
that image you know and then to present this image but I it was seen it amazed
scientists at the time to capture this nebulosity on film and uh open the door
to allow people to see the universe in a new way and uh
um you know and then there were really rapid improvements in in imaging and
photography and and these improvements with film emulsions chemix chemistry
technology and stuff you can you can draw a parallel curve of of our
improvements in technology along with the improvements that
scientists who were pushing the boundaries you know to uh to capture and
go deeper and deeper so absolutely let's go something that that was for me
I showed the pictures to my father um in my parents homes I have
my all books of astronomy and in a
moment I have in one of the groups uh a picture of Oreo taken by the mon Palomar
telescope um looks similar you know right
this is a great one this is how maybe in 50 years do you have uh something that
in your own home home you can make something that that really was the same
that they say about about this is
today any telescope is much
available to make a great image with a scientific quality uh like uh 50 years
ago not only 100 years ago maybe 50 years
ago is incredible right well thank you very much Cesar all
right you're welcome Adrian are you uh are you ready to come on
I wanted to be at home where my presentation would be but I can actually
share the video there's no music for it um so there shouldn't be a copyright
issue we're going to talk more Adrian no problem yes okay yeah we have many many
so I I will be able to share the video okay the opening and operating the
McMath telescope okay that's cool telescope
um used to be in the McMath Holbert Observatory um see I'm pulling over like I did once
upon a time a few star parties ago I actually did what I'm doing here is
where I pulled over and um gave a presentation straight from the
phone and um the presentation I was going to end our start party with
tonight was going to be the McMath um about the McMath telescope the Francis C
McMahon telescope sure so what I will attempt to do here because I should have
a pretty good um connection is I will share
my uh screen let's see if this shows yeah I'll share
my screen okay and see if this works I'll play the YouTube video
and uh hopefully you all will enjoy let
me uh yeah looks like it's working okay there we go
let me know if you can hear the audio yes we can all right good wow
did we just lose the screen you just lost it yeah okay here we go
it is on break fours on design eight is on deep bed off
so this is me opening up our Observatory of the University lowbrow astronomers
here in Michigan red lights I have to turn all the switches on okay
next turn that on turn on the hand controller and that is
the uh the drive motors for the McMahon the McMath can track
used to be used for solar you hear that sound that is the sound of the drive engaging
so the McMath is Now tracking how old is this telescope hey wolf
um it's in my original presentation but I believe it was it's from
1934. all right
cool to the temperature that's out here the switch is
we put that on to keep the mirror from um forward you'll notice open up shop
there's the secondary mirror is right there okay the primary the light path
I'll show you the light path in a second I have to get that off I'll just tell
you about it while I'm doing this so the light passes goes through the secondary which is like
right in front of us shoot right through that tube here to the eye the eye it's
an original cast of brain design a classic design mirror and there's the mirror 24 inch
mirror bounces into the secondary mirror which
has a cap right there the combination of the mirrors focuses
the light goes straight through that gold length I think I had calculated at
one time the actual number but uh like 5 000 classic Castle Green
Design works this is a classic Casa green telescope
amazing amazing beautiful really amazing
that's the moon so you're looking at one of the mare on the moon I think I think
what he did is he adapted his iPhone or something to capture a video we had been
smart enough of that Moon and this is the Mari that oh there's another image
we had a crescent moon that days you saw when we rolled mirror back but look how steady it is I mean you can
see little ripples now and then but yeah pretty pretty steady seeing
my hair was our shot of Saturn now to look at Saturn through the scope
is very impressive we um I should have numbers as far as power
but we get over 300 power pretty easily in this scope and um
the view is pretty amazing like this um that's a it was a live view
even in this blurry view you could see the um
you could see some of the Bands so you're out cancel that and I'll stop sharing if I'm smart enough
okay stop sharing there we go there we are so so there we are a quick little
firing up an ancient telescope not that old not that old the point is that uh
you know telescopes you know as long as they're cared for okay can still perform
can keep going you know often schools and universities will try to take the
direction of replacing installations like that um but uh you know as Caesar can tell
you uh you know he's working on neglected telescopes right now out of
their you know their National observatories and uh you know when
they're all when they are all uh put back into good condition Edition they
can still do remarkable work you know so absolutely yeah and part of the uh part
of the slideshow I'm working on shows a few images of the telescope you know
during when it's being used to observe from and not long ago we actually had
someone bring in an astronomical camera and we hooked it up to the McMath to do
some um to do some astrophotography with it and there are plans to do more
astrophotography you know as we go we're we're done the particular astronomy club
I should mention University lowbra astronomers some of them might be watching this and giggling right now
well or later when they watch the replay but um it's the it's been the under the care
of the University lowbrow astronomers for some time um president Charlie Nielsen the direct
The Observatory directors Jack grisman and um he's the primary caretaker of the
McMath there are a few that know how to operate it it is a very heavy instrument
it's well balanced but if you're not careful and you try to swing that thing
especially on a Meridian flip he will bang it against the side of something
you know it's Unthinkable no one has done it yet to my knowledge
um but we we try not to damage that scope I mean it's flipping around yeah a couple things worth mentioning we
had a member name who built a few extra
parts you may have seen a couple of Finders on that scope we have a six inch finder and like a binocular like a small
binocular finder um as well as a telrad and those are
some of the things we've added to the scope to hey make it easier to find things
because that's such a narrow field of view in the actual eyepiece and then to
those those six inches is a beautiful refractor um we often point at objects that are
too large for the main scope to show but it'll show up really well in the
refractor so when we do our open houses we use the um we use different parts of
the telescope visually and most of the time Jupiter and Saturn when it's you
know during during the times when those are up those get the most oohs and eyes out of all the crowd because of the the
detail we can get most often in Saturn you know you'll see seven or eight moons
of Saturn um when looking through that through the McMath so um
so yeah it's quite an instrument and again the low brows were gifted from the University of Michigan to care for it so
a number of I think the mirror has been cleaned the uh there's still work on it
to you know continually try and get it even more accurate it's
pushed to you can imagine if that were go-to it would be amazing to watch but
it's pushed to we have an Argo Nevis and uh skyfi unit so we can connect to it
via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and Scott using Sky Safari when we do an
align we doing an alignment and then Sky Safari will show you where the telescope
is pointing in the sky we can use that as a guide so we're going to look for something you know a little off of the
beaten path we can look down at our phones or tablets and why watches it
follows along where the telescope's looking and usually within a degree or
two degrees it's pretty accurate as far as where we're looking so we're like looking at
inmate inmate will appear within the
towel rat circles on the uh on the tablet it'll show that you're either close
sometimes it's spot on it shows what you're exactly looking at so it helps us
locate things that we don't already you know some of us we can just point to tell rad right at the part of the sky
and boom it's right there and the more you know about the sky but for things
that we're not sure about we're able to use you know we're able to follow along
with the um tablet and the Argo navis controls or navies I
think is pronounced controls where the scope is and you know it tries to map the nice guy to
it so so there you are okay quick presentation
on the Francis C McMath telescope um amazing
yeah I do have some data that I dug up that I
put on some slides so maybe at a later date I'll do the actual slideshow deck as well but um battle I've actually got
a few things to edit for that anyways before I bring that up but that was the video it was taken by a relatively new
low brow named Dimitri uh last name starts with a T Dimitri if you're
watching this or at any point I'm sorry I cannot pronounce your last name but
you did a great job recording that video I think we we're gonna have him try and
do more videos like that of our events for the low brows yeah that's cool
that's cool yeah so that was I thought it was a great idea and I can now now
his video has been seen by whomever is still watching all around the world so
they know of our uh Observatory Peach Mountain Observatory in Dexter slash
Pinckney it's somewhere um that part of Michigan lower Peninsula
um USA and with that Scott I think uh all right
thank you thank you for wrapping up uh the uh Global Star Party we'll be back
on next uh Tuesday uh of course we're going to be celebrating uh Thanksgiving holidays here in the USA
um but um and and just probably celebrate it all with people around the
world the the world is getting so uh uh that uh we have uh people from all
different countries living in all different other countries so that you know it's nice you know that we can see
uh cultures mix and uh things celebrated around the world like that
um my own my own uh appreciation of Thanksgiving is uh being able to spend
time with families so really enjoy that uh Raj thank you for uh being on with us
um as well Adrian uh and Caesar um the rest of the uh presenters have
already left uh to have their dinner we want to thank all the people that watch
from around the world uh for a global star party thank you very much tomorrow we will have
um our our fourth install of eclipse experience we're bringing on Edwin and
Imelda Joseph and they are uh you know uh Eclipse Chasers extraordinaire from
the Philippines um and they they they live in the United States now but they were
very connected to Sky and Telescope magazine uh as uh
astrophotographer editors and also um uh you know uh you know the the
written word in in many uh Sky telescope articles uh Edwin and Imelda were a
force of uh educational Outreach in the Philippines itself and uh I was invited
to be part of the program with the astronomical League of the Philippines
just recently so very enthusiastic group it was a real pleasure to be involved
the time zone changed it was a little challenging because I had to get up very early in the morning uh to be part of it
but that's okay um and uh um so that program will be on at four
o'clock Central tomorrow and so thanks again thanks to all of you and uh and
have a good night and as my my friend uh um
um my friends always say is you know keep looking up and we'll see you next time
[Music] foreign
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music] foreign