Transcript:
release it'll give you something to throw about oh
[Music] that's right
hurry up have you ever watched the this
famous comets they see 20 22 E3 yeah uh I know David's been
watching it I have been closed closed out you know because of clouds me too our Observatory
is going to be open I can't say supposedly the odds are 70 of seeing it and then they change to 30 about an hour
ago so who knows oh boy we still have to wait a couple of days
it'll still be good after the moon leaves the uh Sky the full moon leaves
this way by then yes
today I saw a picture with that a guy sharing the Facebook and it has a the
same year that I use with the small lens and you know I I really get shocked
because I always I thought that everyone is taking pictures with a telescope but
with a lens you can see the the two different cells and the empty tail in
front of that coma oh that's cool and you know I I wish and I hope that when
we can see here in the South still having having this magnitude on all this
a colors and shapes you know we have one week ago in front of us
did you know that there are two zcf comments in this car right now yeah and
it nearby the sun there's another one the other ones in Cassiopeia it's a
little bit faint I'm gonna try again after the moon leaves this card but um
it's around 10.6 magnitude
okay I found Clyde's Crow Pond document warning warning Danger
I'll only read two of them with whom does a crow associate
I give up his cronies uh
what do crows use to uh tell time
chronometer you got it nice job a chronometer nice job
okay one more uh when a crow goes berserk what does he become
a raven maniac and David is and Clyde would bean with a
smile after that and everyone else would go oh I heard most of the crow jokes one
morning when Clyde was visiting me yeah and we were having breakfast and
suddenly Clyde started with the crow jokes one after the other and he and uh
Patsy and I were just cracking up
how many Crow jokes can there be I guess it can be a lot well there's a sheet of about 20 of them
the in his handwriting that I have an image of here from Kevin Schindler our palette Lowell yes to me some time ago
when was the importance of of crows discovered Long Ago by Crow Manion man
I mean they just get worse and one after the other you know
that's funny
it's funny
well we got a few people watching right now in the audience
thanks for tuning in you know I'm working with new
programs in fixing site you know they are amazing you know this is how it is
evolving is the outstanding the the things that this program does
now is
I'm still working with the NGC 30 65.
[Music] and the the different convolution that the the blocks Terminator does
it's almost well I never could give that details you know even
with the small galaxies and now it's amazing mm-hmm
I hear the uh dog star barking in the background ah it's me sorry I'll go mute
no no hey Maxie what's up come with us
I miss you man I haven't seen you in a while yeah a couple of months we we didn't talk how's it going man good man
good finally got my scope up and running the astrophysics
yeah I finally after six months of waiting they got the flattener yeah right
guys I'm gonna get a cup of coffee I'll be right back and then we'll we'll um
start a program okay okay
did you test the blue exterminator hold on one second Maxi I'm so I'm
switching over to the speakers hold on one second no problem [Music]
there we go what'd you say Max now if you do a test the blur exterminator
oh yeah yeah absolutely of course I got it like the first week
no I I just got a a couple days ago yeah now and I
it's outstanding yeah oh yeah it's great it's great you know it's he he's been
doing such a great job with putting out all this AI stuff and you know you know
people people are going around and they're like saying ah well I can't say you know your audio is
live so so but it's cheating ba so it's not
cheating it's not cheating and let me fix this so we'll do we'll do
this there we go let's do this so we don't see the back of my room there we go
there we go nice let me get off the
get that off and put the zoom on so I could see everybody
installation failed uh we can see you Daniel all right cool
cool yeah no it was weird that uh that Zoom was giving me an error for an
update I don't know I'm sending here in the some chat there
NGC just finished I think I didn't want to do too many colors but
uh you know all the the field of view of that picture is amazing
yeah yeah let's see I don't I don't see anything in the chat no it's up late
uploading it's oh it's uploading I gotcha yeah let's see and try I gotta get back to
the lives I want to see YouTube YouTube
explore scientific
there we go
come on get in there there we go nice and [Music]
I get it that's um there we go
all right cool so how's everything else going everybody all good here
is that Scott yep I got my hot coffee I'm feeling good there you go what's
going on Scott oh um you know here in Arkansas up in
Northwest Arkansas we had an ice storm uh that uh uh got uh a bunch of ice like
little BBS of ice you know came down um and it looks like snow outside but
it's just built up ice you know and uh very very slippery outside
uh so that came down pretty good yesterday and we got more of it today so
um so it is a uh it's in the 20s outside some something
like that right now 20s let's see what are we we've been in
like it's been weird we've been in like the 40s and 50s on Long Island and it's
kind of weird that is weird you know I mean today was the coldest day we've had in a while and it was like 37.
yeah we just get that that tongue of cold air
that can come down you know and sometimes it collides with warm air over here and you know that's where we get
all of our tornadoes and such but I was just watching off a short video
from Dallas and I guess they're just going nuts down there with their us
wow so Let's uh recognize some of the people
watching this right now we've got Harold Locke um watching on YouTube Billy's Astro
watching on YouTube that is Billy um sentil Naga pan watching on YouTube
and uh what is Billy Billy has a question it looks like uh before we get
started got a question on mirrors versus prisms for long focal length telescopes f-115
maybe F-15 yeah I think um uh they're probably you're probably
talking about the diagonal mirror versus prism I like mirror okay just because more light can get to your eye you know
but the real thing that you want is just a Precision surface you know so if you got a real Precision surface you're
going to get you know a sharp image being delivered to you or at least as sharp as your telescope is
Teton gem Works wanted to know for Scott ice or grapple
we don't call a grapple here but maybe I will start and um
osmosis 007 says wind chill is -18 today that's pretty cold
that's pretty cold oh man I hope that's not Celsius
[Laughter] yeah
all right well it's time to get started guys so here we go all right
foreign
Outburst about 1 billion light years away right here has rocked scientists
understanding of the universe's most powerful events
some of these are the source of heavy elements in the cosmos like gold
for decades scientists have divided these explosions called gamma-ray bursts
into two groups long and short grbs long bursts produce a flare of gamma
rays the highest energy form of light that lasts two or more seconds
[Music] they're thought to be caused by the black holes forming the center of massive collapsing stars and are
followed by Supernova explosions
short bursts on the other hand last less than two seconds and are likely caused by neutron star mergers and are followed
by flares of visible and infrared light called kilenovate
but a recent event has scientists rethinking these categories
on December 11 2021 NASA's Swift and Fermi telescopes observed a 50-second
long gamma-ray burst followed but a clear sign of a kill Anova
it's called grb 21-1211a it was later studied by the Hubble Space
Telescope along with a number of other observatories scientists don't yet know how a burst
caused by a neutron star merger produced gamma rays for so long
maybe instead of two neutron stars one of the objects was a black hole
kill anovae are a known source of heavy elements like iodine which was essential for the development of life on Earth
but a scientist thought that they were only associated with short bursts
grb 211211a shows for the first time that killinova can accompany both long and
short bursts [Music] after 50 years of studying these events
scientists are still learning new things about their effects on the cosmos
[Applause]
[Music] foreign
this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and welcome to the 112th Global Star Party
Afterglow and uh the the theme Afterglow
has to do with things that actually really happen in our universe
you saw some visualizations of gamma-ray bursts
it's known that Jets of from these gamma ray bursts can the grbs if they hit a
dying star can actually create an Afterglow effect but you might also think of after low as
you know I I can't remember how many times people that were ex giving Sky
interpretations might have said you know that a particular star might have already gone
Supernova and is no longer there but we're somehow still seeing it you know
is it is it the Afterglow of light that is still coming to us you know uh you
know the just the the thought of how things change in the universe as it
relates to distance you know the travel of light across
space uh you know for a lot of people especially beginners it's really hard to
wrap your head around some of these Concepts but uh amateur astronomers and
sidewalk astronomers and all these um astronomy Outreach and stem people
that's what they're there for they are there to try to help help you take the
steps towards learning some of these aspects so that you might be inspired to take it to another level and perhaps
make science part of your career somehow so um but those are some of the good things
that I think that that our amateur astronomy uh Community does
aside from just being a great group of people uh tonight we have another great lineup
uh with David Levy uh David eicher from astronomy magazine the president of the
astronomically Carol orge will be with us Stephanie Hawkins who is a educator and
curator of the Las Cruces Nature and Science Museum will be with
us to talk about Pluto Mania that's going to occur next month
um February in Las Cruces New Mexico home of Clyde Tomba who discovered Pluto
uh Maxi filari's is with us uh to show some of his great images we have Daniel
Higgins from AstroWorld TV um Adrian Bradley will be showing us his
incredible nightscapes uh Gary Palmer is supposed to join us all the way from uh
from uh you know the across the pond there Marcelo Souza uh will be with us
tonight and John Schwartz uh you know his with his uh artistic uh ability as
he draws out the universe so uh thank you for joining us tonight and um and
we'll get started with uh our first uh speaker
and poet and dear friend David Levy David thank you for coming on hi Scott
and thank you so much for um for inviting me to come on tonight earlier as we were getting ready
informally some of us were talking about meteorites and how in Chile
it is illegal to buy sell or um
own a meteorite and so I did some research and I found out in the United States it's also illegal extremely
illegal in fact if you're found out with a meteorite they grab you and cuff you
and send you to serve in Congress so um
so we have to be careful yeah you got to be really careful seriously though I do
want to show you on my favorite meteorite right here and uh there we go
show it right there this is actually my wedding ring my wedding band
which I had for so many years well married to Wendy and uh it is a gibeon
that was a very large ancient fall but it is one of the most common meteorites
right now and it is my honor to still be wearing it
anyway from my poem tonight I'm going to read a very brief but a very beautiful
poem that gets more pretty every time I read it it was written by William Blake
one of the most famous Romantic Poets in 1827 it is called simply night
the sun descending in the west the evening star does Shine the birds are
silent in their nest and I must seek for mine the moon like a flower in Heaven's High
Bower with silent Delight sits and smiles on the night
and if you go out tonight and if it's clear you'll all be going out to look at that Comet but you want to wait a few days
till the moon gets out of the evening sky and the comet becomes a lot easier to see
but um anyway just wanted to say to go out and observe
and enjoy the night sky and now back to you Scott and thank you thank you David
thank you in in your observation so the comment David were you able to see any
part of the tale uh from your Observatory visually oh yes
uh I didn't particularly catch the disconnection event
but I did not catch it either the tail looked pretty complex so it might have been what I was seeing
but uh there is a second ztf comment or ztf for those of you in Canada
or anywhere in the Civilized world the second one right now I think is in
Cassiopeia and um it's not as bright as the first one but it's worth a try I haven't seen
it yet myself although I've tried now back to you Scott and thank you thank
you so much as oh wait you're telling us we've got two comets in the northern hemisphere to take a look at
uh that Maxi can't image just yet I'm sorry I have to dig southern
hemisphere with all the beautiful things no I'm sorry but back to you Scott I
just had to do that thank you nah no problem no problem well okay so
um the astronomical league is up next and uh you know uh I always have to say
this because the astronomical league has done so much over 75-year history uh
towards educating um you know Everyday People to learn more about the universe uh you know they
have they deserve like some sort of golden cup award or something okay for
the amount of educational Outreach that they have been involved with and for organizing so many clubs so many amateur
astronomers and this number keeps growing they are they're well over 20
000 members now um they have uh you know I I mentioned
they're observing programs that they have over 80 observing programs they have dozens of recognition award
programs right now um and I think that they are they're accepting uh nominations for some of
those awards at this time uh you um you can't do much better than to either join
a club that's already an astronomical league club or to join as a member at large and you
can do that from anywhere in the world um but the reach of the astronomical
league and their influence on amateur astronomy and Society at
large is uh is something that uh you know is impressive uh beyond words I
think you know the uh past members have included uh uh you know your average uh
everyday amateur astronomer to uh astronomers that are also famous and so
um we are proud to be working with them as much as we can and tonight we have
the president of the astronomical league with us I mean I say something before Carol yes is that okay I've had my hand
up go right ahead
it's going to be a lot of fun to hear you Carol I want to say that I'm looking forward to be attending in person the
league convention this July I really have it on my calendar and I'm all excited about it yes that we're going to
tell you to do it David oh but uh thank you I also want to tell you all that
this Friday I will be giving a big speech at the Tucson amateur astronomy
Association to which you're all invited it'll be at um 6 30 Mountain Standard
Time which is 8 30 Eastern Time 7 30
um Central Time and no time at all if you're in Congress and anyway anyway so
I'll be talking about comments one of the things I wanted to say which I'd forgotten is that a
when they were asking me to give this speech one of the members of this of the club said when you give this talk don't
make it personal just talk as if you're giving course in comments 101 don't tell us any personal
stories what and I thought about that and I thought asking me to do that is
kind of like asking me to give the entire lecture everything I know about comments while standing on one foot
but uh is really more appropriate to say try to
give this lecture while not breathing in or breathing out I can't do it so you'll
be hearing a pretty personal talk this Friday night and on that notice finally back to you Carol my friendly
astronomical league president thank you so much David we always appreciate your words of wisdom and that sounds like a
fascinating talk this week Scott again thanks for your immeasurable help with the league it's much appreciated over
these many years so in case you guys let me thank you yeah we appreciate it I bring
Tidings on the half of the astronomical League lots of activity going on we're doing lots of reports on this comment
right now in fact in my local club we had a 15 year old just put his cell
phone up to the uh eyepiece and took some beautiful shots and it's one of the
better ones I've seen so far so it's nice that it's getting a lot of involvement from not only astronomers
from and from the General Public now I'm going to share my screen and ask
our questions as as usual
everybody see that yes we can all right excellent here's the answer from the last GSP on January
17th first question the Sun is bright with a
magnitude of minus 26.7 as viewed from Earth what is its magnitude as seen from
the orbit of Neptune the correct answer is about
-19 I guess someone has been on Neptune lately or maybe we've done a wonderful
guesstim of that number two what percentage of stars are members of
a binary or multiple system a surely less than 10 percent nearly a
100 percent C is the correct answer it may be as high as 85 percent or it may
be less than 50 no one will say for sure how's that for a definite answer
hmm and number three a super a super Moon occurs whenever a
full moon is near parody parody when the full Moon occurs near apogee such as the
one on February 5th what is it called and the answer is no official definition
exists hmm and if you look at this list there's a
lot of familiar people we hear from almost every GSP started with Andrew
corkill Don knab Jim Mosley John Williams and Cameron Gillis lots of
Premier names there now I'd like to give the uh or ask the
questions for tonight January 31st and please send your answers to secretary at
astrolague.org question number one what is the name of
the first exoplanet discovered by the web telescope what is
the name of the first exoplanet discovered by the web telescope
question number two why does the current late visible comet C 2020 E3 glow green
why does the currently visible comet C 2022 E3 glow green
and finally number three question number three in what year was
the astronomical League's first horkheimer Award presented
you have you recognized the image of that person the picture oh yeah
and the next event we have is uh from the AL live site is February 10th at 7
pm Eastern Standard Time and for the we don't have the speaker confirmed just
yet but stay tuned through the various social media we will let you know just as soon as we've
confirmed that so I think that's it for now back to you Scott
thank you Carol there we go so
um actually Scott real quick one more um Carol yeah if you've won the door
prize I thought I saw my name a couple months back as winning the door prize do we get in contact with you yes would you
would you put me something in the chat there to remind me to get our national office to get that going to you yeah
I'll do that thank you very much thanks well make sure you get honored for that
major achievement that you went through all the sweating and so on all the sweat tears and Google searches yeah I want it
hey Google searches that's right
sure okay all right so um our next speaker is none other than
Dave Iker uh he's the uh editor-in-chief of astronomy magazine he spent gosh
almost all of his life writing about uh uh the universe and you know from his
early magazine that he did as a teenager and then finally moving over to
astronomy magazine uh he's written I think over 20 books on astronomy and the
universe some of them have been in collaboration with the uh famous uh
Queen guitarist Brian May and um uh but uh his interests are broad uh they range
from uh Civil War history to gems and meteorites of course and into the deep
space deep Sky objects themselves which he's going to talk about tonight on
Dave's exotic deep Sky objects so Dave thanks for coming on to Global star
party again it's nice to have you thank you Scott as always and I have some news
tonight I'll share my screen we're going to talk about every object
that exists in the sky from now until the end of our lives
or you just got to touch on each one lightly and so we can
well you know what they say it gives you something to do you know so tonight we have a different
object that we'll talk about that you probably probably have not seen you probably haven't imaged either some of
the images out there it's the Ursa Minor dwarf Galaxy as we know from many talks
focusing on Galaxies the local group as it was named by Edwin Hubble in his
famous book The Realm of the nebulae our group of galaxies contains at least 55
galaxies maybe as many as a hundred because the dwarfs are hard to see as we'll see when we get to the Ursa
Minor dwarf most of the galaxies in our group and in most Galaxy groups and clusters are dwarfs you know just as
most stars the the most numerous stars are dwarf stars um and one of them is
the Ursa Minor dwarf it was discovered in 1955 of all places at Lowell Observatory by A.G Wilson and it's
typical of dwarf galaxies it's a small Galaxy it's very loose it's a satellite
of our galaxy The Milky Way it's gravitational Center is about 200 000 light years away and it there's not a
whole lot that's known about this galaxy there have been a small handful of papers published but there's a lot of
stuff that we don't know about this object even though it's a relatively close object to us it's still relatively
poorly studied what astronomers do agree on though is it has undergone a burst of
early star formation that lasted for about two billion years and and things had been quiet in this poorly populated
Galaxy observationally it's a very much of a challenge it it's outer extent is about
the same diameter if you can believe it or not as the full moon on our sky but
uh most all of the light from this object is concentrated in about 10 arc
minutes its total magnitude is about 12 but it has what uh deep Sky observers
call a very very low surface brightness so little individual parts of it are extremely dim so it's very hard to see
even with large telescopes this is a real challenge object for the larger
amateur backyard instruments uh and it might be a little bit more of a uh an
achievable challenge for Astro imagers so one to put on that list to go after
here's a region of Sky of of the of the map that I mentioned a couple of times
now Ron stoyan's great Atlas that's a very nice combination of something
that's compact but it's pretty detailed showing the Ursa Minor dwarf here the interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas uh and as
you can see there are a few other scattered uh interesting galaxies around it we're starting close to the north uh
pole here in our sky and working our way Southward so by the time I'm about 75
years old we'll get down to you know the magellanic clouds at this rate but this
is a good place to start and here is the Ursa Minor dwarf as you can see this is
a long exposure by an amateur but a very talented amateur Sky shooter in Italy
and you can see how even a very long exposure how poorly populated this
galaxy is um and here's another representation now
this is a very long exposure nearly 11 hours of exposure here with a four inch
refractor and the Astro imagers can get a good sort of uh you know idea of what
this will show you um and in the top frame that's not labeled you can see that it's not much
richer than the surrounding background Starfield so it is really a a poor
object in terms of the Stellar population which explains why it wasn't discovered until 1955 at an observatory
um of all things so this is really a challenge object and we'll we'll get to some other uh significant challenge
objects in the months to come as well here and there uh but this is a good one
to try to go out and look at if you have a 20 or 25 inch telescope or uh to image
um with a a smaller telescope and lots of exposure time I also thought you know
because tomorrow is the brightest is is the day that will Mark the brightest of
our bright Comet ztf from the zwiki transient facility
um so it'll be at its brightest tomorrow I haven't seen it myself I've seen seen
many many images but it's been you know typically at this time of year you know it's been cloudy for you know about a
month in Milwaukee here so I haven't seen it um but this is a beautiful image that
Chris Shore shot in Arizona and and you can see the you know the dust tail and
and anti-tail very nicely there and of course the eye on tail with this little
disconnection event in the in the gas tail there as well and and it's really
beautiful and and uh you know yes it appears green little bit there's oxygen
in it and so on and but you know it's just another barely naked eye comment so
take about you know eighty percent of those social media posts from the big
media mass media you've seen and throw them out the window because this is a
pretty good but a fairly ordinary dim naked eye Comet you know it ain't the
greatest thing in the world but it's a good naked eye comment but the uh the
anti-tale a lot of people are watching this may not know what an anti-jail is
on a comet of course you can see one two tails you know significantly but then to
the right of that of the comments had there you can see this kind of faint uh uh tale and that is the anti-tail how
how does that happen and that's a an effective geometry and the perspective
of how we're we're looking at the uh the comet relative to its position to Earth
and the Sun it's not uh particles that are Defying Gravity and Isaac Newton
isn't rolling over in his grave in Westminster Abbey right now so it's a perspective effect
um but it's a pretty pronounced one it's a pretty good anti tale here and and it's you know I'm not
trying to demean this Comet it's a you know it's a good bright Comet if you have a dark sky and can get away from City Lights good parabinoculars or a
telescope will show you a very nice comment here but but you know there's been this kind of you know Stampede of
social media that this is the greatest you know it hasn't been here and you know countless years and it's one of the
great comets of all time and you know things get a little carried away with uh
you know believe it or not there's a lot of information that gets shared these days that's not 100 true I don't want to
shock you David gotta be kidding me yeah I thought it was all true
yeah so it you know it's a good but dim naked eye comment and if you get outside of cities so you have a reasonably good
uh some semi-dark sky at least you know you can see it with the naked eye and it'll be pretty good in binoculars and
quite good in the telescope but it's not the brightest Comet that we've had you know in many years it's just not
so but we love comets and do you think that this is a coincidence that this
Comet brightens so dramatically shortly after we published this special
issue uh of course not it was come on David
are you telling me that astronomy magazine might have put that comment up there we know that there's cause and
effect in physics in the universe don't we that's what they say but I'm just
saying just sing okay consider that later tonight anybody could have pulled
this off it's you just sing okay um so that's it for tonight and then
remember uh in addition to David Levy's wonderful kids book which I hope he will
mention again Michael bakach and I your neighbor Michael blockage now and I uh David have
our kids book out about space exploration as well at the dawn of a new
space age so that's all I have tonight I will stop uh sharing my screen and revert back to
you Scott and thank you again uh and I will have yet another weird object that
is a challenge and strange and all that kind of stuff I hope next week yeah now astronomy
magazine is also actively looking for astrophotography of the weird and
strange isn't that true absolutely because you know for years and years and years we've you know been plagued and P
you know Astro imagers love to go out and shoot you know the bright stuff and get good with with it but you know when
you get you you sort of get a little down you know when you get your you know uh 27th image of the Orion Nebula today
you know being submitted you know so so I really do want to kind of uh suggest
to people um that you know although you know you're taking the Pac-Man nebula or the
Crab Nebula or the Andromeda galaxy or uh the Hercules cluster again and
getting a little bit better shot of it there are as I'm trying to demonstrate here over the next I'm going to find you
over the next you know 50 years with this stuff there are probably about 5
000 really good targets that you can go out and image and most imagers aren't shooting about 95 of this stuff so it
would be wonderful if if you would go out and shoot some of the more exotic stuff that's kind of what this little
program is is about here Scott that's right that's right well great well the
gauntlet's been thrown down and all you ask for photographers out there need to be looking at that 95 percent and maybe
it'll be on the cover of astronomy magazine so there's a new one every month foreign
hey Maxie remember I kid you not and David can back me up on this Bart Bak
one of Bart bak's favorites saying all the good stuff is in the southern Sky yeah it's not that much of an
exaggeration you know it's it's pretty much true yep we got too much objects
yeah yeah if you're from Long Island you're not seeing anything anyway so I mean in Wisconsin too Wisconsin yes it's
bad it's been cloudy for about a month here I think and by the way we were talking temperatures earlier you know
what it was when I woke up this morning here this is Fahrenheit scale minus nine
oh that's super cold that's chilly yeah I'm hoping for a heat wave that gets us
back into positive territory here I I have to send you um
to bring you and you can drink hot water with mate that's right absolutely
well thank you again David that was awesome I look forward to more of your exotic
objects here so thanks Scott all right so our next speaker is
Stephanie Hawkins and she is an educator she's a curator for uh and forgive me
Stephanie if I mess this up again but it is the Las Cruces uh Nature and Science Museum
and uh Las Cruces was the home of Clyde Tomba you know we have Among Us right
here at least two uh people that were dear friends of Clyde and um uh so David
Levy and David eichert would you like to say a couple of things about Clyde before we get started with Stephanie
well I thought
you have lost your audio there we go now we can hear you you're back David
uh Clyde was Clyde and I were really very good friends over many many years
and I remembered and also in the sessions that we had the informal
session before we began we all started telling Crow jokes and for me the Crow's joke started when
Clyde and Patsy were staying with me and he we're having we were having breakfast
and suddenly he started with the crow jokes and there was one joke after another and it just wouldn't stop
and Patsy and I were just cracking up and it went on and on probably for
almost an hour uh he and I were very very close near the end of his life started Clyde
started to go on and on about how badly treated he was at Lowell Observatory
and uh it was really very sad to listen to that
and for an observatory with a story to history that we all had
um and in fact that he is being treated so much better now in death than he was
in life by Lowell Observatory but we had a very very good and Rich
friendship for many years and I do miss him and now the other David and he was
really a unique person they're they're People You Meet in this world who you
realize suddenly there's only one person like this in the universe that we know
of and and he was one of those he loved you know I mean and many of the times I
was with Clyde it was with David as well because of David's close friendship with
Clyde and David's writing of Clyde's biography as well and and so you know I
think the three of it most of the times I was with Clyde it was with David including uh in Clyde's backyard
observing in Las Cruces um and you know he but he he was a he
was a bit you know there was a bit of his personality I think it's fair to say David that was impish you know he would
things would slow down a little bit in any the puns would start coming out you
know and and he would just want to see people smile and and be caught off guard
and you would they were so bad you'd have to just go oh claw you know why what what's it what is
a crow's favorite drink you know old old crow uh you know what what you know what
were the earliest you know uh creatures to figure out the true nature of Crow's
Crow Manion men you know I mean they just went on you know
you know you just wince and go cried you know and there was a mixture of just
you're with this heroic man in the history of Science and he had the funniest sense of humor as well and
now going back to Lowell and staying in what was Clyde's apartment you know when
he discovered Pluto you know in the in the in the what's now being converted
into a museum the domed building there you know is really special because I mean you can there are artifacts of
Clyde area and you can just really powerfully sense you know it's as if Clyde is is still with you yeah so I'm
really delighted that you're joining us to talk about uh Pluto tonight Stephanie
and and I mean they broke the mold when they after they made Clyde there was only one person like him
you know I I didn't have an opportunity to meet Clyde himself but I've worked with some of his family members over the
last few years um here at the Museum and Crow jokes uh
are a common theme among the stories maybe more common than any place else in the United States it's almost like that
was more of a defining characteristic than um him as a scientist he was a jokester
and just um like really engaged in the community and just a fun guy to be around so I'm
I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to meet him but it has been really a blessing to be able to know his family
um through through this event and just by being a resident of Las Cruces his name is all over the city uh schools are
named after him observatories are named after him so um he's a big part of this town uh even
after his death one thing that's fantastic to add is that is that um
Clyde Clyde um used to work at White Sand after he left Lowell Observatory and he
was monitoring the launching of one of the V2 rockets and they call that a hanger Queen because it kept on having
to go back to the hangar for delay after delay and finally there was one delay that was
so long that Clyde took up the microphone he said if that missile won't work fire it
okay okay so
um Let's uh let me kind of uh rewind this a little bit
um I I did not give a very proper introduction to Stephanie uh I was I I
have my smartphone on early this morning and I get you know like all of us do we you get notification after notification
but I saw a very interesting notification about Pluto Mania and I was like what you know this is cool and so
um so I I got to the office and started researching it a little bit and I found Stephanie Hawkins and um uh thank
goodness her direct phone line was right there and I could get right through to her this is kind of unusual because uh
most of the time you have to you have to work at it a little bit um but uh Stephanie uh
you have been with the museum for I think we talked a little bit earlier you'd been with the museum for a few
years already right and I can see that you're very involved with the community uh in doing stem and educational
Outreach your your other title art is is that you're a curator at the Museum
um but um how big of an influence has Clyde had on the museum uh you know I
know that you you also do other astronomy events but is this because of
of Clyde Tama and really being at the epicenter of where um uh you know of Clyde the world of
Clyde Tomba uh yeah so I'll have to say the museum opened in its current space and capacity
in 2012 um and I rejoined the team um after well
as from coming from an intern back to being a curator after a little Hiatus in
2017. so um I wasn't around for the development of the exhibits but we do have a permanent display of one of his
telescopes um and refer to him in in the Tomball room and
um refer to him regularly as as a a citizen scientist and uh to inspire kids
to get involved in science and then there's so much space history in New
Mexico and in Las Cruces in particular that it really is his story serves as a
gateway to a lot of the other research and work that's taken place here so I did throw a couple of slides together
we've already talked a lot about his history since we have um yeah
right so hopefully but I did want to kind of just talk a little bit about how we got to this event for Pluto Mania we
used to call it Tom ba day and um as we grow the event and make it a
lot more about planetary science and um
space exploration and contemporary Research In addition to memory
remembering Clyde and his work uh we've kind of geared it towards being more of
a Pluto Mania so we invite all our Pluto Maniacs to come out awesome and participate in Hands-On activities with
our partners so I've got just a couple just to give you an idea of where we are and what we're doing down here in Las
Cruces let me show you a little bit about our building and and how we're connected with this
see if I can get my screen share to pop up
and we still have some good jokes in the chat yeah what what let's see what what is uh
what do you call crows that stick together velcros
sorry
had to do it sorry that's right it's probably throwing um Stephanie off right now no it's all right it's giving me
uh oh let's see if we get I think we've thrown
her off so much okay you're back you're back see that you froze up for a little bit yeah all
right yeah sorry about that okay is my slide up or is it just me not yet no
okay um well we'll see if that pops up or not in the meantime
um you know as we've discussed clay Tombaugh discovered Planet X which was then named Pluto
um while at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona
and we usually try to pick a day in between his birthday and Pluto's Birthday to
um have this event and uh you know while he was there he did a lot more than just
stare at a blank comparator to make this one observation
um you know he found founded uh comets star clusters asteroids cluster galaxies
he was very busy while he was there uh and he moved here to Las Cruces in 1946
and started working at White Sands Missile Range which is an Army Installation just on the other side of the mountain range from Las Cruces uh
where as mentioned earlier he was working with missiles and Optical instruments he designed the intercept
ground Optical recorder which is a missile tracking photographic telescope
um which I think they still use an upgraded version of that today don't
hold me to that though uh in 1955 he started teaching at New
Mexico State University and uh was instrumental in the development and foundation of the
astronomy Department there and also was instrumental in designing
and uh getting funding for the Tortugas Mountain Observatory which is on
Tortugas Mountain here in Las Cruces and you can it's a great hike if you're ever in here and you're a hike in town here
and you're a hiker you hike up to the top of this mountain and there's there's the observatory up there it's a great
view of the city um it's a 24 inch telescope that was first used in 1967 and is still in
service um it's used remotely for the most part by the university and NASA for
um uh just collecting data
huh we lost her well I think Stephanie will come on uh
here in a couple of minutes um if she does we'll we'll pull her in
um but the uh I I was going to show and
I've shown this on the program before but uh one of the things I like to do is to have people sign my star chart and
this is you can see Clyde tomba's signature right there that uh he wrote
right in the middle of my star chart this is probably one of the first signatures that I got there's a lot of
other cool signatures in my sky Atlas 2000 but uh you know uh it was cool to just
to beat the guy and um and to learn more about him I've learned probably most
about him through David Levy um and uh you know his book about Clyde
and also just the you know the the St the many
stories that he has about Clyde but um uh I'm thinking that maybe uh Stephanie
might have had some problems I I do want to tell you uh that um uh the Pluto
Mania program uh is going to be this February and let me get to you
is she back because she can tell you she is back there we go
you are back yeah I always wonder just how long I'm talking to myself when these things happen
[Laughter] uh we have no video for you Stephanie
uh okay let's give it a second sorry my network
is a little slow after hours okay they throttle it back that's okay
Stephanie uh how do people learn about Pluto hear you perfectly yeah we do we
hear you just fine
sorry can you repeat that perfectly yeah we hear you just fine
okay yeah all right where did you lose me that's the question
probably at the beginning huh we'll see now your video's back so all right Daniel pops in and out your audio
stays constant that's right uh where were we
um you were talking about Clyde's influence um uh you were talking about uh
especially like in schools uh and you talked about the Tomba room and all the
rest of it I think you were building up to the event itself yeah so
Focus we have um we have a replica of one of his home-built
telescopes he built multiple telescopes at home using recycled materials ground
his own lenses and so we have a replica of the the gazer Grazer which is a
um hand-built telescope on a lawnmower and you can push that thing around and
look at it you can still observe through it um
foreign exact replica of it which we do have on exhibit and then we have another
original in the Museum's permanent collection that we're hoping to be able to bring out we just got it a couple of
years ago so it's still um going through our collections process but we hope to be able to bring that out
for the event on February 11th um we'll also be partnering with the
NMSU astronomy Department we bring them we invite them out every year to participate with us and and bring their
graduate students out to do activities and solar telescope viewing the
Astronomical Society of Las Cruces is coming out this year again with telescopes and then we invite other
organizations and space Enthusiast groups that are in in the area to
um come out and present whether it's a Hands-On activity or an informational table display something like that to
engage with the community and get them excited about space science so we do always focus on Clyde and Pluto and
asteroids but this year we're also going to be incorporating Artemis and the Mars exploration program and James Wood Space
Telescope so we can get people excited about current events in astronomy and space science
um and the event is always free and admission to the city museums here in Las Cruces is also free so it makes it
really accessible to folks who are interested in coming out and attending the event
and and uh Stephanie what what day and time will this uh Program start so Pluto Mania will be Saturday February
11th uh from 10 a.m to 1 p.m um and it's here at the Museum of Las
Cruces Museum of Nature and Science in Las Cruces we're at 411 North Main Street downtown Las Cruces and
um we're open Tuesday through Saturday and like I said free admission so if you're ever in town visiting come by and
and check us out um there's almost always something going on on the weekends and and February 11th
will be a big one we've got I think eight to ten partners coming to join us with activities for all ages
that's fantastic that's great and and is is February 11th a special date in the
life of clay Tombo um so his birthday I want to say was the eighth of February and the observation
of Pluto was made on the 18th and so we usually try to pick a Saturday in those
10 days you know mid-February to split the difference between his birthday and
Pluto's Birthday excellent I'm sure he would love to uh I'm sure he's going to be there in
spirit but uh he's got to be smiling down from the heavens uh knowing that
you guys are doing this so thank you very much for coming on today and we
wish you guys a fantastic Pluto Mania day so thank you so much and thank you for the invitation sorry my computer
it's quite all right it's quite all right that was a fast exit
anyways not pleased yeah we'll get Stephanie back on again uh in the future
maybe during uh uh regular working hours um uh because uh uh the museum does a
lot of astronomy programs uh throughout the year um so we're we're happy they're doing
that uh education Outreach uh Mr Levy did have you been to this Museum before
in Las Cruces do you know anything about it no I'm afraid I have not I'm looking
forward to seeing you as something to me that's brand new in Las Cruces well Las
Cruces is very uh friendly to me for a number of reasons first that is where Clyde and
Patsy Tomball lived second and now the most important it is
where I met first met Wendy in July of 1992. again a 30-year
relationship and wonderful
daughter and son-in-law and their children live in Albuquerque New Mexico and they
met each other in Las Cruces so that's another that's another point of uh importance of that City
wonderful wonderful City also the lake had an elk on there just a few years ago it's that convention still
stands as the only Alcon we've ever had that we actually had aliens coming out of the bushes so yes wonderful
well our next speaker is on uh is Maxi filari's we're going to go down to
Argentina uh we're going to find out uh more about the reasons why you need to
go to the southern hemisphere to see all those Celestial Treasures down there uh that is that was definitely a bucket
list item for me and I was very happy to be able to accomplish that back in 2019
can't wait really to get back down and really explore those uh those deep Sky
objects for myself I think I could soak in a lot of visual
work down there but uh Maxie is uh is a
astrophotographer he started off showing us how you could take a very inexpensive
telescope and a smartphone that he tore apart to get to the sensor to make his
own Astro cam with a smartphone but he's he's up to his game
step by step and he's going to show us some some of his amazing work so Maxie
you've got the stage well thank you Scott or invite me again
and I hope you guys you you'll be good tonight and well when I want to show you
tonight is what I've been doing last week because uh finally I get my El
extreme filter but also I could upload my pics inside software that
allows me to do some deeply details in the in the structures
of the galaxies and nebulosity and everything so I was being practicing
also with my what I get with the lxtreme filter
so let me share my screen
um okay do you see it
yes yes beautiful Eclipse shot yeah yeah we're all jealous of
it you will have in 2024 one so maybe
yeah and also this year in October and another eclipse
uh so what uh first of all I was
um doing pictures let me share let me find the pictures
of the object in this case was the helm helmet store
I was doing pictures of almost a three minutes
in a bottle of six and seven sky and you can see
this is a single picture and I was taking almost two nights to
get almost a with the best pictures almost 80 frames or lights to stack them
and then process when I took pictures when I stuck I had
this let me find it sorry
it wasn't this Master the
yeah this this is the the Stacked image
let me stretch it and you can see
all oh yeah all is in here but you know this filter
only allows to pass the the H Alpha in seven nanometers and the
O3 in I think six nanometers I don't remember so
that's all because I have like pollution I I was I I don't I didn't have the moon
but anyway I could have all these details and my background is still very
good so when I process my first image I have
to to turn because I like to I don't like this position
I could have this image this is my first one
um my first one process and
I I didn't know how to work with the colors because
this is not like RGB common
and so I still practicing searching some tutorials and then I got this wow yeah
nice so I'm I was still practicing uh I sent
the pictures to my friends you know this is the process number 15.
so uh well they were a little time for send these pictures but finally I upload
this one because I really like the colors that I get and the sharpness of
the background let me put it more more bigger
so this was before the uploading the
updating of my software in this case the fix inside
and so I had to practice with the new updates
and this is what I get with that
processing tools you know it's more sharp sharpest
and the details still more in detail without noise so for us the
astrophotographer the noise is the the enemy so in the background uh
you know this is to to to print it and put it on the world you know I really
love the the smoothness of the University I think that we're going to still taking
pictures of this object to capture more hours details but anyway I really love the this update
because I was struggling with the the noise and the
the convolution and the software or the updates was the
the blur exterminator they almost uh entire astrophotographers
hear it and also the the noise exterminator
these are I think that the development is a Russell
yeah and you know I I have to
give a really huge thing thanks to him because uh you know I I started to
process my all images ER that I've been doing in this couple
months ago you know I I want to share you
this is a the NG C 1365
this is what I upload a couple of weeks ago you can see there's some details the
Stars but a friend of mine I send the the Stacked
image and he because I I didn't have the perks Terminator he processed with the
blur and suddenly that that result and it
let me put it here and the when I process the image it was
like this you know in the core you can see more
fine details uh surround the Galaxy and the structures are more smooth less
than this one so when I get a my update I I just send
a couple minutes ago my finally process
of this object and I think
that this one is the finally
because I I have almost known the noise in the background the the details are
still there and also in the small galaxies yeah you can see them for example this one
that's a bright one but there's some faint ones in there too
beautiful you can compare the smoothness and here there is knots and here if I go
with when I did the first you can compare that this this is
incredible this is amazing you know again in this kind of structures really
I don't know where this galaxy galaxy is does but
I can't even imagine so for do this it's
unbelievable really outstanding so what this is all for tonight uh I
have to being working with my mounts because I
was doing some update all day all and also but when I go to some place my Mount
goes off so I have to keep seeing what having the motor's problems
is okay now I'm yeah I'm sweating for
that right well thanks for your take I'll take time out with us today and and
uh showing us that beautiful shot in your progress and image processing so
that's that's wonderful exactly thanks so much thank you Maxie I think you have been on
uh Astro World TV as a guest and uh uh right now we have the uh host of
AstroWorld and creator of AstroWorld TV Dan Higgins Dan you've got the stage man
how's it going everybody and and don't forget Adrian Adrian was on the show
Adrian was on the show that's right that's right on yourself and myself yes
so that's right so yeah and and we have we are actually booked with people all
the way up until April 5th and I'm going through the mall that's every Wednesday until April uh
tomorrow uh tomorrow February 1st that and more importantly that's my birthday so it doesn't matter about anything else
so February happy birthday thank you thank you you're what 27 27 years old
that's nice yeah almost almost reverse numbers and minus two on the seven you
get I think that's right but but um yeah so February 1st tomorrow
we have Wayne Parker coming on uh excellent from uh Sky shed Observatory
he's got you know he's pumping out those Sky shed pod S's and uh he's trying to
you know do some uh promotion on that so he's going to be on February 1st
um for any of you that follow um Sean Nielsen at visible dark
um February 8th he's been doing a lot of work with the um the Starfield Optics
telescopes so Steve Molly is going to be coming on uh from Starfield Optics he's going to be hanging in there
um February 15th we have Richard Wright for his second time coming on he's going
to be live from Winter star party if we could hook it up right so uh we got
we're gonna have feet on the ground at um with the star party so unfortunately
I won't be there that that it goes on the bucket list for another year and uh
you know hopefully next year will be the year and I've been saying that for about 20. so oh you've never been you've never
never I've never been uh Dan the first when you go you will go back again and
again you know it is it is really just uh I can't describe the the feeling of
it but it is uh it is it is something that you'll definitely enjoy and it's
worth being on anyone's bucket list yeah I mean I I was all set you know I wasn't
gonna fly I was gonna drive to because I wanted to bring my stuff with me you know I'm sorry I'm not putting an
astrophysics scope on on the on the on the plane so so
um so that being said I was going to drive to DC or that area take the Auto Train down with my wife
down to the to okay I guess somewhere in Florida it drops you off and then said another five hour drive or so Sanford I
think it's cold I'm not I'm not sure exactly but I was all set I was ready to go and uh some other stuff come came up
and unfortunately it it's now it's now going on the bucket list again so
um so um so Richard decided that he wanted to be on the show again and he's just going to
be happy to be able to Star party so he's going to be there uh doing a live uh I don't know what time so be it could
be any time during the day during the night who knows um February 22nd we got Bob Denny coming on
uh talking about alpaca and March 1st we have the return of Evo
from apt uh so he's going to be coming on talk we haven't had we haven't had him on since February last year when 2.0
came out so he's gonna be talking about um some new stuff upcoming for apt and
then uh we'll move forward to April 5th uh Warren Keller from masters of pics insight and IP for AP will be on
um and this is going to believe believe it or not even with the relationship that we have with masters of picks
insight and Pete and Ron and Warren this is going to be his first time on the show on his own show so so so uh yeah
it's gonna be what a lineup I mean just really a legendary lineup of uh astrophotographers and people who
support that whole community so that's fantastic yeah it's it's totally cool and it's so great that we're getting to
love from all these people you know and everybody a global star party and all
the people on that if the invitations out anybody who wants to come on global
global star party I know Maxie and Adrian and yourself has been on anybody else want to come on hit me up and uh I
will get you on to talk about whatever you want to talk about um one last thing I'd like to talk about
real quick is I know Scott that you've had uh Carlos Aragon on uh just recently
from Reach for the Stars yeah I can get you his contact information if you'd like it oh no he's already been on he
was on the weekend before he was on our show a week before yours okay I think I think he was on January 11th so I'm not
sure yeah just a really an amazing individual so and an amazing program
unbelievable story and then when you were talking about uh stem stem research
and and uh all the types of uh educating and what they do
um is they use astronomy and astrophotography to help people help
younger children with anxiety problems ADHD uh P you know whatever else that
they may have might have in dealing with certain things and they use astronomy and Outreach to help them kind of find a
way through the anxiety that they have and it's really really awesome and we
did a fundraiser for uh them on January 11th and we were able to raise uh over
two thousand dollars wow in cash and Equipment congratulations that's great
in a two and a half hour show and uh awesome not to mention also that
somebody was generous enough to donate their AVX mount right and uh AstroWorld donated a um
actually I still got to send to him it's right here A revolution imager which they say they use just happened so I got
a revolution image or I'm sending them plus about a thousand dollars before YouTube ticks that cut you know right
you know and uh so so it's gonna be he was he was unbelievable he totally forgot it was a uh
um a fundraiser but it was a really nice thing to do and I really felt really like seeing all the donations come
across and everything was unbelievable uh that's great that nearly warms my heart because uh his program is is uh so
special because you know if you guys don't remember um uh you know Aragon uh he uh he came
on to Global star party I think it was about a year or so ago okay and uh
shared his story about being homeless being addicted to uh painkillers dollars
and uh you know and almost dying uh you know stranded behind a supermarket and
um he grabs you know he he turns his life around uh starts off with a
department store telescope and starts gazing at the sky and got addicted in a
good way you know he started exploring this guy and sharing that whole experience with other homeless people
that he had a program to help feed you know so you would sit down with you know
have your you know get your meal and part of that was is that you had to look through a telescope oh darn right so
gosh yeah but you know I think that you know what Dan was conveying here is that
astronomy can change your life and it can change your life for the better you know and uh you know so I think every
amateur astronomer has seen that transformation happen and that is some something you know once you experience
it you see it firsthand you never really want to stop so that's that's that so but
um Dan thank you man thanks for sharing that just one last thing stop by the
AstroWorld Neve table this year at neef um astroworld's gonna be having their
own table we're going to be doing interviews and Scott we're going to get you on the interview date okay I'll be there you know I know I know you'll do
that um and uh Eric's gonna be there I'm going to be there Jesse's gonna be there
uh Pete Myers is going to be there I think five out of six of the of the
presenters um for AstroWorld they're going to be there at the table or roaming around doing interviews and getting wonderful
faces so it's going to be a lot of fun we're going to be there I'm going to be there and are you going to be in the yak or
uh yeah I sure will so all right thank you so much thank you
Dan thanks for coming on thanks for having me appreciate it yeah of course anytime every time
so uh we're going to take a 10 minute break here so you can grab a sandwich or
a cup of coffee or uh maybe uh an adult beverage even um but uh uh we want to thank all the
audiences following us right now and we have more speakers to come including
Adrian Bradley Gary Palmer from the UK uh Marcelo Souza from Brazil and John
Schwartz out there in California so uh stay tuned
foreign
foreign
but
the jet blows through the gas it hits material which creates a series of
expanding bubbles that extend out to at least 500 light years the streams
continue to percolate out of the Milky Way's dense gas disk and the galactic Halo
scientists concluded that the black hole clearly surged in brightness as much as
one million fold in the last million years that would be enough for a jet to punch
into the Halo of material that surrounds the Galaxy this Hubble image of galaxy
ngc106a shows a similar scenario occurring
previous observations by Hubble and other telescopes found evidence that the Milky Way's black hole had now burst
about two to four million years ago that it was energetic enough to create an immense pair of bubbles towering above
our galaxy that glow in gamma rays Hubble was used to see how fast the bubbles were expanding and what they
were made of Hubble later found that the burst was so powerful that it lit up a
gaseous structure as far away as 200 000 light years from the galactic center
called the Magellan extreme seen here in pink this gas is still glowing from that
event even today the residual jet feature is close enough to the black hole that it would become
much more prominent only a few decades after the Milky Way's black hole Powers up again
whenever that does actually end up happening it's sure to be quite a spectacular show
well I hope that you had a decent uh break there and um uh you know it's nice
to see our audience here a lot of our normal and loyal followers are watching
I was sharing some of the data that we have we as far as audience goes for a
global Star Party Global star party is simulcast we we have a couple of
channels on YouTube we share this also on the astronomical leagues Facebook page explore
scientific's Facebook page a number of pages actually on Facebook
and we're also on Twitch and Twitter and we're very grateful to be on the home
page of cloudynites.com and so um but
many people watch uh Global star party after we stream it live
and the the last time that I checked the stats we were at over 50
000 reach with about the same number of viewers of the global Star Party itself
so we want to thank all of you that watch uh Global star party after the run
uh we know that not everyone can take out their Tuesday evening to watch us
live so um but on any account we will get back to our speakers here we
have Adrian Bradley in chasing Dark Skies Adrian thanks for coming on the
112th Global Star Party thank you for having me Scott and um
as always it's it's a pleasure being a part you you all hear my voice when
everyone else is trying to do a presentation and um and I jump in but a lot of it just my
enthusiasm for sharing my thoughts on all things astronomy just comes out
um you know full disclaimer I've been telling any and everyone who asks about
the green Comet AKA Comet C 2022 E3 ztf
um I've been telling them you gotta be a 10 expectations a lot of people ask
where I can find the comment and where it will be well tonight it'll be a
little higher than the North Star um last night it was in between sort of a
little above the line between doobie one of the Stars pointing from the uh from Ursa Major the Big Dipper towards the
Polaris the North Star um because it's been cloudy for 45 days
I don't have many images to share but I will use uh the
platform here chasing Dark Skies to share a
gallery that I've created and I am going to go ahead and share that now you all
are more than welcome I will I'll post the link Scott in chat after I'm done
yeah you are more than welcome to look at this Gallery
um what I'll also do is I'll show everyone um let's see yeah
I'd like everyone to go to this page and you can reach you can buy prints
here you can buy prints you can go I'm just gonna sell some of these
um and put some of these pictures on your wall now of course not just night photos
but um you know also you know they've got other events that
we've turned into um wall art and then as far as the bird watching goes Scott this is for on the
wing there are a few pictures here that may
look good on the wall so so yeah I would like I'd like everyone to check those out you know and and see
what you think but I'll talk about this Gallery is my
journey this is this was it for this is the first Milky Way shot in which I got a part of
the Milky Way um I went ahead and posted that here this one was one of the first that got
some attention from uh my own job um and calendar you'll see a few
different types of night photography and I named it From Dusk Till Dawn because
those are the time periods in which these pictures were taken here's a dusk
picture and you'll see different renderings of
these images and even this image where in um
you know it's got Cloudy Skies but we've got visuals visual observing going on
um visual astronomy is near and dear to my heart and I still try and do it on
occasion just to get the photons to come directly into the um
into the eyes now we've got the Big Dipper Little Dipper here here's Polaris
uh note for those of you hunting the comet it's about here
where the star is right here that comet is in this area tonight uh tomorrow
it'll be further along um but that's the direction that the
comet is traveling in the northern hemisphere Skies southern hemisphere we're sorry but uh we we've taken yet
another comment that you know is uh that happens to be
orbiting kind of circumpo kind of passes by the northern hemisphere
and I did take a few pictures there are some really good pictures out there but
I want to remind everybody of um 2020 when this comment was in the sky and
David eicher earlier if you if you watched talked about how great this
green Comet was supposed to be and it's only been two maybe three years
this is 2023. this was in 2020 um
as the world was going through covid Comet neowise visited us and Comet
neowise had a lot of feature to the point that with the camera
you know around the time it got close to Earth almost everybody could image with the
ion tail the dust tail and there's the green I won't give away
why the uh green because it was an answer for this week's uh astronomical league
but um you can look it up and get the elements that glow green
um I'll leave it at that but all comments have when you image the when you image
the comment it has that greenish glow yes I took pictures
when I was in San Francisco there's a few Stars here um but back to the point of comets
and Milky Way Photography all of these things improve over time as you get used
to the type of vision that you want and as the type of
images that you're looking for so as you can see these images started to I
started to get more detail in these Milky Way shots and here's a sunrise
I didn't do much with but I thought it was really cool it almost blinds your eyes looking at it you almost feel like
you need to look away it also almost feels like the sun is sitting on top of this Cloud layer
so there's some of these images the perspectives can be really really interesting we know the sun is one
astronomical unit away but here in a photo it appears as if it's just sitting
there right in front of me it's sunrise and this is another view of it
so I like to take pictures you know of all facets of Nature and of all I wanted
to also not just this part of the Milky Way here but all regions of it yeah this
is a good another if it loads if not we'll move on because I want to get back to the
comment really quickly so this isn't loading very there it goes so this image same place you'll notice I
go to similar places to get these images so we're going to fast forward you're
welcome to look at these there's Aurora here eclipses beautiful lighthouses yeah
this cool picture that uh John I remember talking about this last week
yeah you know trying to get mine up I'm gonna maybe pull mine up and show you
yeah I wasn't ready for this one though yeah yep you you've drawn images like
this and um you know there's there's plenty of whether you take the
pictures of them they can look like drawings sometimes when you when you
finish processing Moonlight this is about how much Moonlight we're going to be getting as this Comet comes close
it's not gonna be as easy to see
but let's go ahead and drift all the way down
so take a look at the um you can take a look at this archive and
any pictures that you like just let me know Cloudy Skies
I've talked about it in past you have to keep working on your
techniques even when it's cloudy because once it clears up any new techniques
that you learn you might be able to apply to a night shot
and um so so let's talk about this comment this
was last night and it doesn't look much to look at and it doesn't even have that characteristic
green color it's a little more green than everything else here this wasn't
the best image um kind of a lucky one because I aimed in the general direction where I felt
the time it would be took a shot and noticed this blurry kind of fuzzy patch
when you look at the comet in um
you look at the comment in binoculars or in a telescope you're looking for this
sort of fuzzy patch and it's the reason if you think about the objects that um
Charles Messier wanted to catalog and say no they're not comets the reason he
had to do that was because um
let's see if I could oh I can't get any closer to the fuzzy you see this fuzzy
thing right here and notice how much it has
until you go deeper notice how much this fuzzy little patch
has in common with fuzzy little patch of the comet
this object doesn't move in the sky but this is from
this is from um let's see one I forget the date 119 it's over here
January 16th not 1916. and this object is now
well beyond this particular picture it's off the screen
so the only way comment Hunters like um Messier could tell if it was a common
or not was to see if it moved in the sky from day to day when he saw this in 101 it didn't move
so he said this object is not a comet um if he were comment hunting today he'd
say this object is a comet because of course it's moved to the point where
you know it's higher in the sky I don't have the I do have the image that I took but um
you know it was an 85 millimeter image not a 35 millimeter image like this one
was and meanwhile while everyone is sort of in fervor for the comet we did have
another um occultation I'll call it a conjunction because here in the northern
part of um the northern latitudes we didn't see Mars go behind the moon
again this time we saw it earlier and I I do believe I have a picture of it in this gallery
but um here you have the moon and Mars so it looking up and seeing the moon and
Mars nearby each other I thought it felt it worth to take this picture and so you have once again a
planet in the Moon you know kind of in the same line of sight which is normally
a pretty big deal um but you know the comet has sort of
captured everyone's imagination now as a final reminder here's what this comment
looked like when I took a picture and you know of it
tomorrow being its closest approach way back here
I take a picture of the comet the next day was its closest approach
look at the difference and then when I did my close-up there is a huge difference sometimes we
forget that only two three years ago we already had a really nice comic come
through and then in the late 90s we had hail Bach um I want to say late 90s yeah I think
it's like 97 if you all can correct me I if you can look it up so
you know your ex our expectations for how amazing things in space are well we
love objects in space they are always amazing you know and capturing it is
something I enjoy doing I enjoy going to these dark sites and I enjoy capturing
even when there's very little star you can barely see any stars the
sheer amount of stars you see in between these sucker holes if you've never been somewhere give you an idea of just how
you know how Starry and night it can be at that location so then the next time
you go it doesn't surprise you to see all of
these stars and to see the detail in the Milky Way if it's up
it doesn't surprise you when you go back to that location and the night is full of stars so
if you go to if you have a good site try try again and sometimes you never know what you'll
see when you go to that site you know you may end up being able to
work on your skills because you may end up being able to capture something truly amazing and you want to be ready
to do that you want to be able to do your panoramas you want to be able to
um you know capture if I were to reprocess this I would probably take a little bit
of the purple out of the actual sky and um keep all of your images you may
see another version of this image that looks a little closer to
the sky that I saw but um that's the beauty of cloud on cloudy nights
you are always welcome to go back and reprocess images that um
didn't turn out quite the same and there's nothing wrong with the Sun
um if nothing else you see a bunch of clouds in the Horizon capture sunrises
sunsets capture anything that moves you and um when
then when something does happen that's pretty amazing you're ready to capture that as well
so that will be it for my presentation Scott thank you once again thank you
and uh we'll see what this week brings we'll probably have there are plenty of
great pictures out there um uh I don't know Gary have you been able
to uh have a break in the clouds and have a go at uh Comet E3 yep
I did so uh about four or five days ago
okay and then it started clouding back up again and tonight I was hoping
uh to jump onto it but we're getting a lot of high clouds come through so it's
not really going to work um I can see it but you can't really grab anything and we've got a really bright moon now so
to be honest it's going to be the best part of another week before we get anything good on it
um but yeah it's just a case of um yeah get it when you can you know these
things move really fast so having four or five days off when you're surprised how how far across the sky it's gone
yeah um yeah it's been good fun I always like chasing Comics anyway they're uh
they're not easy yeah well this is a perfect segue I think Scott to uh give uh Gary the floor
let him uh absolutely so uh thank you all and um
Gary let's see what you got man cool hi everyone I've been a while since I've been I've
been really busy um over the last whatever with all sorts of stuff so
um yeah as we're saying um Tracy in the comment around uh lots of nice pictures coming in
everywhere at the moment um and I think a lot of it is on location and Clarity of Skype
um if you're getting high Cloud up there or bright moon you're going to struggle um with getting the the data but I do
get quite a lot of questions on it um first one is is how what's the best
way to capture it and that really depends on what equipment you're using but if you are using a tracking Mount
and you're um you're off after guiding
um there's a couple of different ways of doing it um one is to work out the time of the Comet
um and it's speed and sort of run along on those guidelines so that May's guide
in a little bit easier if you can do that and what I generally say for most Comics
um a good ball Pilot Speed is around 90 seconds something like that you can play around
with your going software is very good at removing noise now so you can increase the gain or increase the iso quite a bit
to capture more of the Thailand if you want a guide on the actual Comet
itself that again depends on your equipment lots of people get different problems
with different pieces of software depending on the amount so some Mounts work really well with PhD too other
mounts work better with PhD one when guiding on the comet but if you get the
comment into the guide scope there's no reason why you can't select that you have to increase the exposure
normally run it up to five seconds something like that and then again stick around that 90
seconds to sort of two and a half minutes somewhere around there that generally works pretty well
um software that that's a whole different host really at the end of the day it does
work well to have a full calibration Dosa set so
um you know running through your dark shift Flats um and so on that works quite well
cleans up the background and as you'll see in a minute when we look at one of the images here I had to change cameras
halfway through what I was doing so we didn't get a good set of flats so there are dust marks in there and they've all
got to be edited out um otherwise you're going to get problems with the the final image but
I'm going to share a screen over anyway I'm just going to move the other screen here
so this is an image of the Comet um it's guided on the comic so we've got
a nicer tile and again uh there'll be 90 second images and the Styles have been
removed now you can do this in a couple of different ways I generally quite like
these days to remove the stars from the raw files so I would actually comment align the
images because we kept the exposure times down the stars are fairly round so
you're not going to get too much trailing in that um another thing to bear in mind in
capture as well is maybe leaving a gap if you've got clear skies for a good period of time is
to maybe capture the comet for two minutes leave it for another say four minutes capture it again and do a
process of that over a sort of 30-40 minutes that means when you do align the comet
in the software these trailing stars are going to have gaps in them and it makes it a lot easier to remove the the
residual background that's there but if we look at this this is a single three
minute image we can see the Galaxy up in there so we'll just do a quick process
on this um first thing we need to do is de-buyer the image so we're going to go in go to
detail and then you're going to select the relevant pattern for your particular
camera so this one's rggb and then we're going to apply an image
and then we're just going to close the one up it's in the backgrounds there and then we're gonna brighten this one up
and then we're gonna dbe it we're gonna remove the green so we go in processes again Dynamic
background extraction click on the image because we've got quite a lot of residual green now normally run the
tolerance up to about 1.5 and then if we go to sample generation
somewhere for me around 12 for the sample radius and always keep the sample
per row down to about six the reason for that is is it gets really tedious
removing the amount of samples that will go on here so if we generate these you'll see
that there are any that are in the tail move these out to one side and any around the cover of the Comet same here
we've got the towel running down the back
um when you've got nice clear skies and you haven't got problems with clouds you can do a lot more things like frame in
the comet and things like that some of these get quite rushed we're just going to add in a few more now because
in areas not too close to Stars let's move that out there there we go
and then we're going to set it to subtract
great delete the background not worried about that and we're going to close
the background extractor and then we're gonna brighten this up and see what we've got
okay okay so let's see what's going on quite
well there there's no dark subtracted on this it is literally just a raw image from the
camera so the next thing to do is color calibrate the image a little bit if you
want um if you want to keep the comet more green then don't worry too much on this
it's really what's going to occur with your stars but to get the comic tile in
and everything else in quite often you have to raise the games your styles are not going to have a mass amount of color
in them anyway so it's a really it's a bit of a balance here but you could for
instance use um the result and then I'm going to do a little bit of a preview on the
background there and then we use alternate again
used the actual comment itself okay you know it's a color calibration
[Music] you're going to get some quite High values here when we roll the mouse over
the image you'll see the highlighted numbers here for your RGB values they're going to be up in the sort of 60s for
this um because it's not calibrated against any calibration frames so for preview
two and use that for the white balance
and we're going to come in on the lower level I'm going to go for that value of around 60 so we're going to remove two
of the zeros in 60 turn off structure detection and we're going to use the
background crazy one okay and then drop the upper limit down
to that 0.1 applied to the image so you can see
there you've got a little bit red on doing it like this so there is a little
bit of a balance on playing around there is another way that you can do this which would probably work better on this
image and that is to create lots of previews [Music] across the image just do this quickly
what we're actually going to do is base it on the stars for the white balance
really at the end of the day a lot this depends on whether you want a green Comet or a blue comment as to what way
you actually attack this at this point remembering that you're not going to have a lot of color in this image
so we've got all of the preview boxes in there if we go to the scripts go to utilities and then go to preview
aggregator I'm going to go to create preview okay
that's it just puts that to one side now we're going to change our reference image to that preview aggregator
aggregated and then we're going to switch on structure detection now and try that
okay that's slightly better
there we go a little more neutral balance in the Galaxy there as well now so we can delete all of the previews
next thing to do is to do some noise control on the image so everybody now create a mask
we're gonna need to stretch that mask to use it so we want to be ill just out
reset the histogram I'm going to go to the screen transfer function click on the image so it's blue
and then apply the screen transfer function to the histogram reset that and then apply the histogram
to the mask and that's permanently stretched that means we can use it as a masked now so if we attach the name
so the name bar underneath and then we're going to invert it and
just switch the viewing off it's still active because it's orange on the side there and then we're going to go in and
use the multiscal linear transform
pretty straightforward we're going to run down these four values here and just go three two one so the first one's at
three all of these are going to be at 50 percent go to the next layer
notice it so
same again all at 50.
next one at one and the last one is going to be a half so
0.500 I love that little Galaxy that's off to the left there yeah I've got a couple that I've had
over the last couple of weeks with galaxies in if they're a little bit small the unfortunate thing is is they
get removed so I'm going to apply that to the image now that's going to flatten down the
background it's going to smooth everything now
okay so we can remove the mask and close that down so we don't need it
and then we're going to stretch the image so if we reset everything on the image
right I'm just gonna bring up a stretch and apply it
right next thing is is to add a bit more coloring so we won't need to stretch a mask now
um we can create one
and we're just going to darken the background down with the histogram
uh not the curves transformation
reset that click on the image and then we're going to go to saturation
on the image there
you make this Look So Easy Gary I'm rushing this a bit I would say a lot
more time yeah you know you can do a lot of smart things with this software now
um I set up a thing uh two things here
um these are all the images that a comet aligned yeah they are so they're all
registered and then comment aligned and then I set up a process here and that goes off and removes all of the stars
from The Raw images so that then it makes it a lot easier to go in and clean up the background like
this so you can clean all the background up and then add the Styles back in afterwards yeah look at that that's how we're doing
that uh it's literally to uh do this but our main image here
um that's one three minute image you know you can play around with it some more yeah you could do a little bit more
curves on it um basically just go like that and then go back to our RGB value
and then we could darken the background down a little bit and bring out a bit more in the Comet or whatever way we
want to go yeah um you might want to lighten the background to bring out more of the towel so there's 101 different ways but
then the biggest thing is is don't be scared to stretch an image
like this here and then take it off into Photoshop photoshop's really really good
at repairing backgrounds um it's far better than the Clone stamp
that's in picks Insight while the Clone stem works well it just seems to take
forever to do it um if we go into Photoshop
and give me two seconds I'll just drag an image in there
I always have some of the best moods that I'll ever see um are still mosaics that you do with
those or was this a single shot um that there was uh tonight in actual
facts that was a few hours it was still light when I did that so it's about sort of five o'clock somewhere around there
okay um but the mosaics yeah I still like doing those but I don't seem to have
imaged the moon for months you know you just go forever and ever without Imaging yeah just got a
um yeah it's been that way over here in the
states in my uh Locale too about 45 days every once in a while I get a glimpse of
the sky I just I take my wide angle lens and capture it I have like four shots from the last 31
days right so this would be the image with the Stars removed and you can see the
malts there but I'll just show you very quickly if you um save it as a tiff if it picks inside
yeah don't change any colors or anything and then what you can do on this is
don't crop it or anything it's going to match exactly that star removal that you did on this yeah if you start with um
changing it it's not going to fit back together but what you can do in here yeah is the spot healing brush is
brilliant because you can just open it up hmm don't go too mad on the hardness
yeah and then these areas here you can just go in there
and you can blur these out and then you can shrink it down and go into the comet towel and remove any stars that are
traveling in there any dust spots that you might have messed up not that the flat frame's on you can run right the
way around this image and sit there and correct it if you get a problem on it then go into content aware yeah
sometimes that will work better on the background and as you can see here within a couple of minutes
yeah I can remove any of this um hardened streaks that are in the background they're out
and then all I would do is just save this as a V2 bring it back into pixie
insight and add the stars back into it it's all nice and clean and that's how one of the easiest ways of getting a
nice clean background but even this little area here is not unrepairable all
you need to do is just shrink the size down so if we run that down all the way down to a smaller size a little bit
bigger than that somewhere like that and play here is just try which one works best so that
one's not doing too bad
and the same here in between the two tiles you can just go in there and Patch
it in basically and remove the trail Styles out and it will come out absolutely
perfect you're end up with um let me just get rid of that
you'll end up with it looking like this so
there's a little bit on comic processing excellent that's great how timely
yeah yeah I just got done saying the comment wasn't much to view and you show us
though when you take an image of it just like a lot of deep space objects they
can be quite beautiful um again just tempering expectations you have to have the you have to have the
right gear but it's more than just gear that gets you you know to really pull out all those details that you're able
to pull out of that comment it's really your approach to actually Imaging it you
know really I always say the first night with a comment you lose most of that night because you're trying to find the
best sort of times and how fast it's moving um if you're really wide field that
doesn't come in too much but if you like getting in up and close and you know grabbing a couple of galaxies next to it
then um really that first night is about just working out those times but it's a good
ballpark figure somewhere around 90 seconds where it's quite well um and you're going to bring out a lot
of detail and don't forget you know the noises and the iso noise has changed
dramatically on a lot of these cameras now um so you don't have to worry about raising it up you know the old days have
not going above sort of 1600 are out the window now you can really push the cameras up quite happily you know 3000
isos something like that and if you haven't got a tracking Mount then drop it down to 60 Seconds
you know um it it's all good fun it's just applying the usual things you know if
you are using a camera on a tripod make sure you're using a trigger with it yeah and not actually you know
um touching the camera those sorts of things but your other thing as well is is getting your focus so if you're not
sure on the focus yeah you use the bright star that's your key thing and
try and use the live view if you're using a DSLR don't use the viewfinder remember that yeah most cameras has got
a focus adjuster for your eyesight yeah absolutely we usually have a few planets in the sky
and whenever those are in the sky I use those in the winter the star Sirius is a
great star to focus on and you want to make sure that same
thing just take a little bit of time and don't rush it and everything comes out quite well it's the same even when we're
really experienced if we brush it we're going to get the problems you know
um and that is the key thing and it is tempting with the comics to rush them because you
know you might only have that sort of couple of hours clearing the sky yeah sure
excellent excellent thank you very much Gary uh now if if
you want to learn if you want to learn more about uh the processes that uh Gary
uh shows on our program uh I've I've given a link to his Ambassador page from
there you can go to links for Gary Palmer astronomy or you can just do a
Google search for Gary Palmer astronomy um are you Gary are you like backed up
right now do you have I mean down now so we're just really clear
enough um we were busy the last couple of weeks and we're just clearing off some of the
um people from Christmas you know about the sorts of things um got a show coming up Thursday so
we'll be at that Astra Fest in London okay so I'm there for a few days but in
general you know we can get people in within a week or two
and then give us a shout when you're struggling excellent excellent all right well
thanks again for coming on and uh hope to see you uh soon uh it was uh it was a
long period with no Gary Palmer so anyhow thanks again all right so up next
is uh we're gonna go from the UK to uh Brazil uh to Marcelo Souza who will be
uh telling us more news about the astronomy Outreach that goes down in South America so Marcelo thanks for
coming on to Global Star Party hi thank you for the invitation spots and
the old friends here ever is a great pleasure to be here and this night
we had the opportunity to organize a how to reach activity here I will show the
the Maze of these activities let's say before they are I would like to say that
congratulates Gary and the ad hey there are fantastic news is wonderful well the
major of the comments and together shows is fantastic great and we can't see here
in Brazil I hope after after the
the full moon we have an opportunity to see here I don't know it is what we were
waiting for and let me share my screen
okay easy this is our group of astronomy here
and the this moment we had we have the
opportunity I think that how the world can see now yeah the mass
of the baron little juice three heads dots in the sky there is a fantastic
moment for us to show these three red dots near and they showed the
configuration of real summer here in Brazil and I I I took a picture with my
it's much fun to show what we see I don't know if it's possible to see but
here Orion and the algebra here
how we we see here in Brazil
yeah and the today we have the opportunity to show to a lot of people in this configuration that is the most
famous configuration of our summer and it is three stars here from the Orion
Bell if we call Brazil the three marriage is a famous three matters here
in Portuguese is tradition ideas that is the three stars it is everybody
knows about this everybody knows because they can Southern and southern hemisphere that's truth yes and Andy we
see we can see during the summer then everybody's outside and they see it up
to their heads in the beginning of Night of the night the Oriole and the they
don't know the name of consolation how is constellation but they know about the three stars one of the three Metals
that's a very famous here in Brazil and to have histories about also these three
stars from Argentina uh I don't know if you summarize in China now but I can I
can't that was his history next time and here in Brazil we also have the
Constellations by a tribe of the Indians here the the difference what they
how that they see the constellation the sky because they also use different
uh positions in the Milky Way we have a
dark Parts in the Midway light spots in Midway and then they use this to
build the constellation this is the constellation of your ability here let's
call M and the the user here the
Co bag and how to say in Portuguese here
in the Southern Cross as the right of the birds
and the Alpha and the better from Centaurus are Jews that he is here in
the birds and the Scorpius is the last part of the bird here
and I also have here in Taurus this they saw this but any players
is located here in the birds this is the kind of
isaola tribe here but I'm talking about this because of the Southern Cross
because we use the Southern Cross to help us to find the
give yourself Celestial food but during the summer we can't use the
Southern Cross in the beginning of the night because in the beginning of the night we can't see during the summer the
southern press and here is the position of Southern Cross during the year
in the summer it's below the Horizon we can't see in the beginning of the night and when is
bringing the Autumn here at fall we see the Southern Cross in this position number one here in the winter in the
beginning of the night the Southern Cross in this position 2 is up to us right you to find it yourself you need
on two points in the direction of the desire that you know the direction and
the in during is in the other position three here but how that we find the
the South Direction here using the
Southern Cross we that need to find when
we outside we have here a popular way to find the the South the usages we measure
with our fingers the size of this patch of the Southern Cross which is lining
the big line here and you measure four times and they have in the direction that is
they upon pointing here four times in the house in this position we then we
find the soft Celestial pool and here is the direction of the subject
then we use this every time you find iOS talk about this because we are very
organized an activity in a Public Square today this is a picture from today
earlier will you heard that
yes I have a videos here from the people that show us that that just they I
recorded program here and we need to find the South the the South but we
didn't see the Southern Cross because in the sun in the beginning of the night you can see but as we know the direction
we have the condition these two points is very correct reaction here you have a
lot of kids there you have a lot of lights in this Public Square and we were looking to the Moon
and to Gupta and the today Mars
is is located near the Moon then until it's possible to show the
configuration of the summer that's famous here here you can see a lot of people participate
with us today and here members of our astronomy club
here and they are okay the sounds to show the video I don't
know if you here is a video I only only a moment that's it I'll try to
put it loud the sound that's okay let me see if it's possible is that member of our group
s [Music]
observations and I'm happy to be here as always great A great experience with
people around I think it is
and here is a special moment in Korean they
the parents are with the kids here to look at the telescope every is a
special moments for us now [Music]
this happened two hours ago two hours ago it's great I
feel like we're at the Star Party and I have no words to describe how I
felt when I looked at the moon and when I saw this
planet what I saw only when I studied only when
I was in the inside
and it was the first time that she looked at the telescope right
first time that she saw the Moon looking at a telescope she was very
happy it was wonderful hi this is live here
but to show we're having new groups that are arriving
they are trying to take pictures with the smartphone telescope
and it was a great experience again for us and we are doing now is uh we have a
June in January many nights with that rain here in Brazil heavy rains in
Brazil but now it is clear this week will be fantastic for us because we have
the full moon during the weekend
you'll see a lot of lights there but it was possible to see the moon and the
yeah I don't know if it's possible to see here in this video Mars
[Music]
in the other direction but even with lights we go to the Public Square to
have to show the the sky for the people this is our thing that he was there in
here is a girl that was first time that she saw telescope
[Music] far as ever is a fantastic moment you
see the kids there I'm serving Andy we are going to to make again tomorrow and
that during the weekend every every month that you have the
opportunity we go to with the telescopes to a Public Square to show this guy
hello big smile on my face Marcelo that that's it's so great to see all those people
enjoying the sky as it's fun it's a fantastic moment it's a fantastic moment yeah so what I like
to do and now we recognize our international
meeting now is the period is correct here is April 27 29-29
we're here in our city in Brazil I hope you can participate but you'll be very welcome Adrian girl everybody that wants
to come here to Brazil will be very welcome here we have a place to to everybody to stay here yeah we'll be
very welcome here I hope you you can visit us thank you
and I will show now the new magazines guys up that is
wonderful he saved his message from many people I shared some of them refused by
yes in Facebook okay they enjoying these magazine I I'm
stopped here to show to show your magazine now I shared the
homepage with the magazine uh here is a magazine
the sky's up sky's up is an absolutely free uh uh
publication uh and has contributors from around the world
um uh Marcelo is the uh editor-in-chief of the magazine and uh he does a great
job in getting people uh to put together all kinds of articles including
um we also now have a children's section which um our cello can show
and it and the delay out you're having an expected that is wonderful that is
Tricia thank you for our support because
she organized our fantastic magazine
here a part of that because we have an article from here from Canada from Pierre package
have you hear from Woodstone from Ozzy that he's talking about adjectives that
they develop in Wichita some pictures that they took there in Iraq
they have here from and that's kinda to work David prosper
amazes our poetry that's something fantastic done by
Valentin grigory from Romania he also has a TV program about astronomy for our
Homan and his ever shows the magazine there in his program
here is a special article that is governed from Stephen edberg and that is
a fantastic article about the James Webb
wonderful here is our experience here in Brazil from Young start of tomorrow
here is an article from a guy uh he is in the high school in India
and Bengali if I said big daddy if I said foreign
you have a special article here from Brazil it's about the string theory here
in Brazil here is also about he's an article from
Hassan from Morocco about a festival that they
have in Morocco the time frame Festival that's a fantastic first of all about astronomy
there from a Dimitri or anything from Romania
a new idea that he has about and here Ash photographies and here is the
special section that is Cosmic review uh I I forgot to do sorry the name of
the the person that is responsible uh he participate here and it's quite to help
me oh yeah uh I am having a brain fade right now
but anyways he's a great guy yes and uh um I apologize reading the uh Cosmic uh
you know the cosmic view section here so if with your students that's it right to
the Articles here yeah I'll find his name here hold on
here is also from the students there this is the magazine it's a free
magazine and then I hope we receive new contributions Adrian you
could I hope you one day you can send a contribution for us here in the magazine yes that's right Adrian you're over
there yeah I need to send you some more images you saw the gallery I've got plenty that I need to uh share not only
you should be in good shape and not only that
um I'm at the point where I'm writing articles for local newsletters and I
could stand to write an article for sky's up um absolutely you know it's it's not
easy sometimes being out there in 12 degree weather trying to get a nice Skyscape so I've got plenty of stories I
could try and put together for you so that's that's on my list as of now to put write an article specifically for uh
sky's up and then I'll present it to you too when I have it done yeah so thank you that section that section the cosmic
view is put together by Isabella Grant Nathan helner messelman who I think that
you were thinking of Marcello uh uh Tara Jaffer and uh uh Delight dalali and I'm
gonna mess this up here uh but I think it's pronounced nicosian so anyways uh
we want to thank those young people for putting together this section uh they will be
doing work on every Sky's app uh from here on out so
how wonderful a wonderful one yeah it was awesome so we'll have to have uh
we'll have to have some of your young astronomers do a section uh in Skies Up
Magazine I think that would be good so thank you very much opportunity
yeah thank you so much Marcelo thank you um okay so we are moving on uh and
our next speaker is um uh John Schwartz out in California
uh John thanks for coming on to Global star party and um uh sharing your
incredible work with us I've known John gosh I don't know 20 years something
like that and uh he's a very enthusiastic astronomer he loves big
Scopes but he loves all different kinds of telescopes he's got refractors reflectors uh he was with me at uh Our
Big Bear event called Starlight Festival uh and he did electronically assisted astronomy
showing a huge crowd of people the sky and near real time imagery so but he's
also an artist and he does fantastic work and so he's going to share some of
that work with us tonight thank you for coming on John thank you hello everyone
Adrian good to see you again so good to see you I got a new shirt for
Christmas I wanted to show everybody huge telescope [Laughter]
[Music] so uh it takes a lot of power to lift these telescopes I must admit um yeah
some of them the big ones so uh what I was gonna do is uh show you
a picture of my telescope
so there's my rig it's a 28 inch
go-to beautiful one of one of them but uh so this is the one I like to use for
a lot of the you know deep space sketches with uh galaxies and such
and just aperture really helps and uh sketching actually helps you see a lot
of uh a lot more detail so if you can see it averted you can add
it you know but you have to study it make sure you can see it so
so moving along I'll show you a couple other
galaxies the other day we had a horrible rainstorm you know and uh the sun came out and I
was like I've gotta go look and I looked and lo and behold
this is what I saw
a beautiful rainbow an incredible rainbow you know like Adrian said when you're
there at the right moment you just if you have anything to capture it you're ready to go
so absolute example yeah that was I sent that one to my mom
because she really needed some cheering up I apologize about my hands uh
after he's expensing your iPad iPad yes
so some of you guys want to do uh presentations on global star party if
you got an iPad even an iPhone you can do it so yeah it's actually really amazing
so there's that let's uh Move Along here I've got quite a few so let's see the
other night I it cleared finally which was a great thing so I was able to uh
get this little weird sketch out you'll like it different
so it's a contrail in the Moonlight and then you can see Earth's a major
just the handle of the cup right there so I thought it was pretty cool
yeah I see it that's a procreate sketch that's my new platform I've been using
uh jumping up to the procreate and the iPad so it's a little different it's
taking me some time to learn but I'm having fun that's the good part
absolutely okay so um you know I had the pleasure of going to Mount Wilson with
Scott and that was a great trip uh we did look at Mars this time but there was another
trip I went that it was even better so I'd like to show this one this is um
Mars sketched looking through the Mount Wilson 60 inch
so that's pretty cool yeah that v-shaped region has a name I don't ever remember
the names of the features on Mars but I remember circus Majoris I'm not quite
sure yeah which one I lose track yeah very beautiful sketch thank you so
um also you know Scott said they were on cloudy nights so I've been um doing some sketches that
I post in Cloudy Nights actually so this was one that I did
that was uh M51 and that was kept looking through a 32
inch and a 28 inch telescope wow so you know the the basic General
structure and and star plotting is done on the first night and then you know
from there you just continually work on it I'm getting to the point where I don't even really even look at pictures
I just kind of fill it in and if you don't like it you just press the back button and try it again you know it's
takes quite a few tries to get them right but uh it's very rewarding so this is my
most recent that uh I'm doing for cloudy nights
this is uh sombrero
hmm so that's you know very reminiscent of an eyepiece type sketch
which is what what they prefer you know because yeah sketching forum is about
sketching so but this is all digital um I did the basic uh 80 of it on my
cell phone looking at the eyepiece if you can believe that
oh that I've seen I've seen a good Sombrero through a 24
and that all that does is bring back memories of what I saw it's yeah it's
pretty well spot on thank you um yeah it was a great night it was 20
degrees so you know what that does freezes you
so uh these are a couple we've had a lot of rain as you were saying you know and
it's really a bummer when you can't get out and do anything so I do these quick ones these are quick uh Moon and Jupiter
conjunction did you see it the other night I did I missed it when the 25th they
were that close yeah I caught the moon in Mars you may have seen that but Jupiter yeah that's Jupiter and and the
moon and so I'm I kind of like how this is just a wild sketch of the Moon you
know just rough very quick but effective when you get back at it even because I know there's detail in
Jupiter I try to put little bands in it it's more noticeable on the darker one I
did yeah no that's uh they're fine
yeah I mean there's always an opportunity to get another shot at it and that's what I do and here's the uh
later version that was 5 40 p.m and this is 8 40 p.m you know and I can do these
really quick so now it's starting to set and you can see again the Earth shine on
the moon there's some coolers trying to and I get I just do that out of my head you know I
just kind of keep playing with it till it looks sort of good uh some of the faces that come out I
have to delete them they're not very nice um on the dark side you look at Jupiter you could see just a
hint of a band I know it's there so I don't you know
but um you know speaking of conjunctions you do remember the great conjunction
that we did the star party yeah I remastered my night I took my image
I I remastered it and there it is in all its Glory nice that's beautiful yeah
that was so incredible to actually see that in one a single eyepiece field you
know it's just uh yeah that's a sketch by the way and I I
used a screenshot of the video to assist my positioning sure but again I just you
know go to work and and I can just man I can even paint Jupiter Mars you know
Saturn now I don't even need to look at a planet anymore it's kind of it may take weeks to get it to where I want it
but I'll get it eventually you know it really helps again uh
improve your detail sorry about this hand thing I've got to get it figured out all right
so um moving along let's go to um this was a great picture uh you know my
dog is always follows me around so I I put him it's not at one of my
best pictures here but so this is a scene I created again when you're out
and about and you see these things you want to take advantage of it to be honest this was actually a sunset
that I converted into a moon uh picture and every time I do my pictures I have
my little friend Bosco who's right here right now I'll hold him up and show you guys in a minute but if you look to the
right of the um where the Dark Cloud is you'll see that little see my little buddy I put him
right in there I noticed that right away yeah and then
I got it that's cool I got him down here see him he's a Yorkie down at the bottom
of the Moon by the to the right of the Moon you can see his coloring no okay
yeah so I I've been having fun doing stuff you know like Dolly putting in Hidden
content and and I've been doing this with a lot of my pictures uh so it makes it a lot of fun you know
but every time I go out and do something he's right there as he is right now chomping on my leg
wanting to get in the photobomb yeah I'm gonna lift him up and introduce
you all do you take your dog to astronomy events yes I do I I take them
to Mount Pinos and enough I've taken the choo choo party he loves
to go with me yeah he'll he just sits yeah but you know he loves being out and
walking and and meeting other people he's a really mellow he's almost like a man uh like a person you know a little
person he's just very quiet and and uh like bonded it's amazing how keyed in we
are together you know so yeah so I've been putting him in a lot of my pictures I'll I'll get a few more out and then
we'll move forward this is um another one from Wilson
the Blue Snowball oh yeah yeah and it looks like it really does
look just like that through the 16 inch telescope like you know again Adrian you
were saying about green you know it's we know what that is I mean it's uh the way
our eye sees in in wavelength what we're you know able to see naturally it's more
of a green or a blue depending on your uh retina I guess you know yeah it just
depends on depends on your own personal equipment
so this is a pretty good view I mean you know what at Mount Wilson those planetaries are unraveled they just come
you can see all the inner structure and yeah and the Central Star it's even with
the moon out it's just amazing oh yeah planetaries just pop through that was amazing with color yeah that's right
well that's great John let me uh let me do one more what's going on this one I'm
working on this is a a prototype but I've been using three separate images to
work from oh wow and this is my Eagle Nebula and of course the center part is
done with my 28. and I was so shocked that my buddy was able to get this with
the zwo camera and and with that 28 I
mean I know my Optics are really good and so I used the 32 inch as well and I
used a cell phone snapshot if you can believe it I've got the eagle on my cell
phone on a cell phone that that's amazing I'll I'll show that next time I
mean it's it's almost exactly like this but you know it's a cell phone snapshot sure but I was just blown away with what
I was able to achieve with a little bit of a Samsung Photo Editor Photoshop
Express it's not even the real Photoshop and then uh and then I've been using the
procreate to um get merge some of my images you know to get a composition
in NH Alpha but fantastic yeah that's very nicely done let me do
the closing photo because the closing photo we have a drum roll somewhere it's
a task of if I should show the raccoon moon or m53 what do you guys think
yeah let's see it moon or m53 it's a glob a nice glob it's a sketch too oh
okay I love gloves okay we'll do the glob I'll save the raccoon moon for next
time next time it's pretty cool it's a hidden it's again it's a hidden thing
so yeah there's my 53. wow I want to tell you it's beautiful I did this on my
cell phone it took like two weeks I would like that on my ceiling you know you know but
blown up about 20 by 20. I used my thumb I didn't even have a
stylus and like my hand was cramping a couple times it's just because you're
doing you have to do different color different size and they diffuse out so
the you know the colors are uh fading as well as the spacing of the Stars so it
it takes quite a bit of work to get it to look like that well it's breathtaking it's really beautiful thank you so much
really well done m53 you know you guys yeah drawn now you
know this is this is you know photography is one thing of course many beautiful astrophotographs of things
like this but to draw a globular star cluster I mean yeah how many stars do
you did you draw there I mean I like I said I was doing it for my wife was
ready to shoot me she was like are you kidding I she came home I was in the
dark because I can see better yeah you're right and it's digital so I mean literally
when I got up I couldn't walk my both legs were frozen oh man no circulation I
mean it's beautiful it's just really cool it's just the
definition of passion right there yeah man or Insanity
always alive
threw away a few uh Renditions trust me this is this took me a couple years to
get right probably the best drawn uh cluster I've ever seen ever yeah are you
guys killing me thanks that is as good as you know I'd love to I'd love to see you draw 47 to Kane that might be a very
well I'll tell you they're trying to kill the guy that's for real that I
might have to take a month out for that one yeah you know I just wanted to send you a
photo we saw that in um we went to Patagonia my father and I on a fishing trip and
I've never seen a globular like that it looked like literally like
M5 in my eight uh 28 inch you know and it was a 12 and a half inch
portable stroke so yeah so in other words it was that big yeah
it was it was so it was easy to spot I mean people in Brazil
they got it made because that southern hemisphere is it's just amazing I've
never seen anything like it I was lost in space literally when I looked up oh yeah
the moon's in the north which is a freaky thing to see yeah and then it was
all flipped around the ghost of Jupiter I was able to find it I was upside down though I had to stand on my head to find
it because you know everything's flipped upside down yeah looking from the southern part of the
earth so yeah but wow what a what a wonderful sky with
all that that house down there so I gotta get back there one of these days I made it a bucket
list item to get down there for the first time yeah yeah I figured out that
the magellanic clouds are near to Orion so from where we are
in really into the magellanic clouds are below Horizon
um about the same distance below Horizon that Orion is above Horizon 43 North
right so it's uh it's like man they're there but there's no way you're gonna be
able to see him but it's like it if you could only pull Orion up a little
further you know but at that point you're messing with space and physics and you should probably yeah all that alone
you'd have to go way high up gotta go way down yeah
you know um this guy said we could see the Southern Cross we were at Sentinel stargaze in Arizona he goes all we got
to do is hike over that Ridge and it's night time and just something told me it's not a good idea so we didn't do it
when I woke up the next day there was like 20 Scorpions on the Rocks right
where we were standing oh wow I'm like those are those bark scorpions I mean that could have been fatal boy did I
make the right choice uh you followed your instincts you know whatever whatever told you not to do it yeah
don't do it that was good yeah that's right yeah yeah well it was a great trip though um Omega Centauri was absolutely
amazing from there even larger
yep wonderful well thank you thank you John thank you yeah thank you appreciate
it excellent images well I appreciate that nice to see everyone as well Gary beautiful work
um everyone else I came in a little late but nice to see you all and thank you
for presenting yeah thank you you got it yeah I think Gary came right on time
with his uh his rendition of the comment you know for those of us who you know
it's been tough to see because of all the cloudiness but uh you see what kind of work Gary once you've been doing it
for such a long time and it's your profession you know that it's fast to
get that um extraction and the processing done like he does yeah it takes time you have to you know keep
running different you know Styles the way you do it until you get the right
one trying different things you know it I think I learned from him I always do
the masking things in uh Adobe Lightroom but seeing how he cleaned up the comet
using the uh the healing mask in um Photoshop Photoshop yeah you know maybe
it's a little bit better tool for that because he cleaned he just scribbled
right on top of it and cleaned that Comet up I have many times where I have that Milky Way photo where a plane
travels through it but I got like great stars and a great exposure so now it's
like yeah if I want to painstakingly get rid of that plane I should think about doing that yeah that's it I I always just take
another exposure this is like well if I did it once I can do it again so I yeah she's trying to take another shot of it
without the plane coming through some that you know yeah it is it allows you a
lot like removing those stars like that and then you put them in on another layer then your stars aren't all wrecked
they're tight yeah your pinpoints so it's a real knowledge
um to learn how to get that stuff it takes years it's worth it's worth having somebody
tutor you you know to absolutely absolutely yeah and I know what I do is rather unique
because I don't always have the same amount of time to stack but I have been working looking at doing that and um you
know a couple of tools for the Mac that I've played with for stacking um I actually did I think about a nine one
minute image stack of Milky Way um and then put a foreground with it the
sky itself didn't turn out bad at all and um it's something that I'm gonna look more into doing with my Composites
you have to blend uh blend each uh yeah
if you all don't mind me really quick I'll show you where that is
um you know some of the a lot of these are you know single shot balloons when
you're somewhere dark you end up with something like this you know that's a single shot
yeah that's that's I think a minute or so this was third this was like how many
seconds uh the eight seconds when it's dark enough you can get all that in eight
seconds that's amazing that's out you're out at you know borderline border one
Skies that's just a whole different animal out here in Michigan
you just get destroyed you just shoot the moon because of that but I'll show you the picture that I'm talking about
it is right here and this was like 30 seconds 30 seconds
30 seconds because I wanted to get out of this road here is the stack wow and that's what I did I ended up
with some data here and this was with a lens that didn't if you look we focus on
the sky the ground could have used the you know the river is beautiful right you know there's things I could do to
make the river a lot crisper and in fact um but if you look at this
compared to some of those shots that I took in the Milky Way in a border one
site um here you go I mean here's you know this is I'm getting similar
results um with the stacking that I get when I
shoot you know yeah that's probably the best how astrophotographers
shoot from the city you know yeah
filters and stacking yeah yeah and if you keeping processes similar you get
you know some differences in how the skies look when you stack it
it's this is you know akin to a portal High Portal 2 border one looking
Milky Way sitting in a portal four zone so you start to skew some of the uh you
know the Optics a bit yeah but you still have you know you still make it you get
some real beautiful images so it really depends this Zone here
is and you know this was done without a modified camera this is a true bortle 3
Zone when I get when I get back there and hit the sqm meter I'm gonna check
that out now you know what I'm sitting here showing Milky Way shots John have you ever tried to draw parts of the
Milky Way or you like to focus on other areas I want to do one um you know I'm trying
to allocate the time with the wife I have to take a few months off to do that one yeah because it some some of these
shots you take them and you get out of there I'm looking for one I took recently where I took it and I just got
out of there um I mean the wide field shots for anybody starting out that's probably the
best way to do it yeah yeah it's I think I'm getting closer this
the Ausable River always a lovely shot um but I don't see the
one that I did that um
yeah this one it's it's a little bit Bright Now notice the difference in the detail that I got
this is that same section of that River that I took I was standing here before
and I fired out over because that's where the you know the Milky Way was
coming I'm able to get more detail of that part
of the river so I'm combining so as it turns out I'm trying to combine some of
the things you know there's a it's always a learning you know it's a
learning uh curve not only for getting certain detail in certain areas where I
want it but you know also you know combining the
level of Sky detail I want with the level of ground detail and I like shooting very ordinary places
I you know the if I if I'm on Easter Island I would absolutely you would draw
your drawings would be beautiful on Easter Island and you know I'm sure we could pull some images but you know it's
amazing wherever you go yeah much to be taken it's just crazy and it's beautiful
if you have just the time and go out during sunsets and sunrises you see
stuff yeah absolutely yep I would no I would agree with that
so all right I think we need to give you back
I appreciate it guys I appreciate it um uh it is uh uh it is
getting to um uh uh get a little bit later here uh and we've got a lot of ice
on the road so I'm gonna be driving slowly back home yeah yeah yeah yeah so
please be careful be careful I sure will guys but uh I want to thank everybody all the presenters uh all of our uh live
audience uh that's watching right now um uh you know I also want to thank all
the people who will watch Global star party and rerun not everybody as I mentioned earlier can watch it on
Tuesday nights when we uh broadcast live but we have a tremendous audience that
watches it in replay um so um I'm already kind of working up the
next Global star party which is estimated to be on February 6th
um which is the next uh Tuesday from now and um we have some suggestions by uh our
presenters uh to uh you know focus on a theme of falling stars so we'll see if
we can put together a program about meteors and falling stars uh in that
presentation um if not you know if I can't get a tall gel then of course there's many other
aspects about the universe that we can focus on but uh but it has been a a kind
of a pet uh uh project of mine to have something about meteors and falling stars I love meteors I uh I think I
might have shown this a little bit earlier but this is a new project that I'm working on right now called the
meteorite capsule and this right here is a beautiful piece of nickel iron called
the semchan meteorite from Russia and uh you know I've I've often on have delved
in making meteorite kits and stuff like that to inspire people to kind of be
able to touch a piece of space so um and to kind of have that connection
anyways thanks thanks again guys uh have a good night and uh uh until next time
take care see you soon good night everybody bye
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