Transcript:
6:00 p.m..Scott Roberts- “Introduction”
spinel and then it's sort of a Ruby to purple color translucent crystals of of
6:02 p.m..David Levy – “Introduction and Poetry”
painite yeah family yeah I think it is yeah yeah yeah but
6:10 p.m..Alan Dyer - “Tribute to Terence Dickinson”
but that I think I have that boxed up now I'd have to dig that one out oh that's all right I was just curious I
6:20 p.m..“The Astronomical League with Chuck Allen”
was reading about it the other day by coincidence and thought I'd ask you it is unusual no doubt there's a lot of it
6:35 p.m..David Eicher - “Dave’s Exotic Deep Sky Objects - Cat’s Eye Nebula”
in Tucson right now because the gem Show's going on all the dealers are
there now what is so special about this uh it is
6:35 p.m..Karim Jaffer - “Falling Stars” & “The RASC Report”
it is Jimmy and of a pretty color so it looks like sort of gem crystals but it's
very very rare so there's a small amount of it and and
6:50 p.m..Russell Fralich - “Treasures of Southern Skies: First Time Observing From New Zealand”
there's some people who are mineral collectors who are so nuts that they want everything that comes up as a new
specimen from a new good locality they want a piece of you know so so that
drops the price up on some things sure foreign
7:05 p.m..Ten Minute Break
okay um well uh let's see
7:15 p.m..Cesar Brollo - “Astronomy from Buenes Aires”
um Gary did you want to uh share your
screen and yeah we're just gonna show the world your comment there I will don't let me just give you
7:30 p.m..Daniel Barth - “The Eratosthenes Project”
okay hopefully that's sharing I'm just gonna have to wait a minute or so for
the image to come in I've just moved it and reset it back on nearer Center let's remove that
7:45 p.m..Marcelo Souza - “Astronomy Outreach in Brazil”
so we've got as I said quite a bright moon now tonight so we're not necessarily going to see a lot of the
town just more going to be the the nucleus that we can see and I've got it set up
on the wide system at the moment just because the the close-up system is getting washed out a
8:00 p.m..Adrian Bradley - "Chasing Dark Skies"
bit too much earlier um we have got another system running on it
on the other side just to uh try out but I can't share that screen over very
easier I'm like trying to log that computer in a bit later like that and then we can just have a
8:20 p.m..Jon Schwartz - “Drawing Out the Universe”
look on there but so this is Comet E3 is that right yep that's it
um it's been quite good fun tracking this really it's passing some quite nice objects and
that so I've set it up for two minute images just to give us a bit more detail in it
um it's always the problem um whenever it's clear the moon's out or
it gets foggy or something that occurs here there's something to get in our way um I'm seeing some nice images coming
from other parts of the world where the moon's not so bright um
and it seems really interesting to look at
[Music] absolutely we've been getting some really nice shots
um from people around the world with uh you know they're refractors and such
there we go oh wow yeah you can see that you can see kind
of the Dust tail and I'm like out but the the Moon is just sort of washing out
it's a blue even adjusting it up it's not really making a lot of difference but in the Raw images
um you can bring out a little bit of detail but not as much as what we have been so probably by the weekend I would
say if we give it um four more five more days something like that then the moon would be getting
up later and we'll be able to still get on to the comet early because it's quite high so literally as soon as it's dark
we can get onto it um and that's what I quite like with this comment is it being up higher
um that that really is the thing but I was I think it will share this
that was from last night so you can see there the styles are removed so this
will turn out the same system uh-huh and the Stars will be put back in so we
can just see it finally there but it's not not going to come out massively
um for a few more days yet but they were able to see were you able to see the second comment as well it was close by
the uh 2020. on this system in a little while I'm gonna try and move it down
um and it should be just wide enough to pick up in the top area of the screen but
um I I will have to have a look around and see what I can play with it's on a 65 millimeter but it's an F7
um telescope so it's I could do something a little bit wider probably to get the second comment in but it might
just creep in the top there it's also moving at a different speed which I know was causing a lot of issues to people
when they were trying to process that together yeah most of the images that I've seen have been more single uh shots
of the the two together rather than a combination over a course of time so um
but yeah I think it's uh it's very similar to the the comet over
the line or a few of the comics over the last couple of years it's generated a lot of interest
um and bright Comics too and they bring a lot of amateur people out people who've never imaged before and they're
bringing out a camera and a lens or a phone or whatever it is and trying to get an image so Comics always create a
really good interest um certainly when they're bright and I just think that they're not only are
they beautiful objects to look at they're a challenge every single comment is a challenge to try and capture and to
try and work out and then it will have all of the other objects in the background which are really nice to go
off and and um capture with it as it it sells across the sky
but yeah that's about it for what we can actually get on it tonight it's not going to get any um any better than that
no more amount of time is going to bring anything out because um all it's going to do is bring more
background in from the moon really so but that's it so I'm going to pass it it
was gorgeous yeah that's cool that's cool
so you'll how much longer will you try to image it tonight
and even if we don't get a nice turtle on it we'll get a plot across the sky
um I'll have a look on a couple of the charts in a minute and see whether it's going to run near in anything great and
maybe the other system um we'll see if we can bring that one later
and it's close how how far away is the other comment from this one I can't remember without looking I've
got going to the other chart system but I did see it plotted up um earlier today on a post
on Facebook I think so it's not overly far away I just think
this system might be a bit zoomed in to bring it in
well very good very good okay so if you're watching right now
um or you just tuned in uh this is the 113th Global Star Party
um Gary Palmer in the UK was sharing live views of comic E3 and I actually
looked I thought it looked great so uh the uh the sky looked like this kind of
uh Indigo kind of blue color but uh really I I think that it looks
spectacular and you can see a good tail with it you know dust tail at least so
um we will I guess officially get started with uh Global star party and we've got we've got a good show for you
today and with uh David Levy uh Alan
Dyer did send us a special message today regarding uh uh a tribute to
Terence Dickinson who passed away February 1st uh Chuck Allen from the astronomical
league is with us uh David eicher editoring chief of astronomy Magazine
with more of Dave's exotic deep Sky objects um Professor Kareem Jeff Jaffer and and
uh from John Abbott college and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Montreal Center is back with us Russell
fralick um also of the Royal Astronomical Society but I think he's in New Zealand
now is that right so yeah um just visiting out there he's still he's
visiting oh yeah we may not ever get him back I hear people feeling so uh Caesar
brawla will be coming on Daniel Barth he's got a new project called the erastones project which you'll describe
marchelle Souza will join us as well Adrian Bradley and uh John Schwartz and
his astronomical art so uh we will get started here in just a
moment the late crew will come through as usual
that's right by the way here beautiful image
the beautiful lecture last night at one of my clubs
um I'm looking at this through an iPhone so everyone yes it was uh it moved a lot
of the audience that we thank you yeah
yeah Jason all this watching on Facebook says great pictures uh here in Ohio I still haven't gotten a
chance to see the comment due to many cloudy nights that was also true here in Arkansas you know we had a lot of Cloudy
weather but anyways we get to see it here on global Star Party
yeah thank you for those
what are the signs of spring they're as familiar as a blooming daffodil a songbirded dawn a surprising
shaft of warmth from the afternoon sun and oh yes don't forget the meteors
spring is Fireball season says Bill Coco of NASA's meteoroid environment office for reasons we don't fully understand
the rate of bright meteors comes during the weeks around the vernal equinox in other Seasons a person willing to
watch the sky from Dusk to Dawn could expect to see around 10 random or sporadic fireballs a fireball is a
meteor brighter than the planet Venus Earth is bombarded by them as our planet plows through the Flotsam and Jetsam of
space for example fragments of broken asteroids and decaying comets that litter the inner solar system
in Spring Fireballs are more abundant their nightly rate mysteriously climbs 10 to 30 percent
we've known about this phenomenon for more than 30 years ciscook it is not only firewalls that are affected me here
at Falls space rocks that actually hit the ground are more common in Spring as well meteor expert Peter Brown of the
University of Western Ontario notes that some researchers think there might be an intrinsic variation in the meteoroid
population along Earth's orbit with the peak in big Fireball producing debris around spring and early summer
we probably won't know the answer until we learn more about their orbits to solve this in other puzzles cook is
setting up a network of smart meteor cameras around the country to photograph fireballs and automatically triangulate
their orbits networked observations of spring Fireballs could ultimately reveal their origin
it might take a few years to collect enough data he cautions until then it's a beautiful mystery go out and enjoy the
night sky in his strain after all [Music]
foreign [Music]
hello everyone this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and you are watching the 113th
Global star party with the theme of falling stars I do want to give a shout out to the Lackawanna Astronomical
Society I am virtually giving a talk there tonight as well so but if some of
you are tuning in from that group welcome and we have as I mentioned
earlier a great lineup of of speakers here and we will get started with I think
we've all become great friends and closer friends because of our weekly
exploits here in global star party and I think you're going to enjoy this
these this series of talks there is a sad point though we did lose it really a
uh a Titan in astronomy education and that was Terence Dickinson of Sky News
Magazine and um of the world famous Night Watch book which is really one of
the world's largest selling astronomy books uh you know written in the uh not
in the 80s and so um so anyhow
um let's go ahead and turn this over to David uh David you are you've got the
stage and uh thanks for coming on for another Global Star Party
thank you very very much Scott and it's good to see you it's good to be here it's good to be here Kareem David eicher
all of my friends it's really wonderful to be able to see you tonight I'm going
to do a number of very brief quotations tonight because of the theme of falling
stars and the first one of course comes from John Milton at the very beginning of
Paradise Lost in the almighty power world headlong flaming from the Ethereal
sky a reference to a very bright Fireball we go now to um
Perry Como in 1957 catch a falling star and put it in your pocket save it for a
rainy day no I firmly believe that Perry was right and when writing a song because I think
he can catch a falling stars day
but he's not the only one who advised that another person
was John Dunn and he wrote go and catch a falling star get with child a man
drink group tell me we're all past years are or that's the devil's foot teach me
who to hear mermaid soon or to keep off and these stinging and find what wine
serves to advance and on this one and the final quote will be from
Cervantes himself from Don Quixote with this the night darkened and whites and
more lights began to flit above the wood much as the gaseous capital exhalations
of the Earth lit about the sky and look to us like shooting stars
and on that notice back to you thank you yeah that's good that was great
wonderful wonderful David where is Minerva Minerva is outside
Minerva is outside right now because I'm really starting to use her more often
and instead what we have is Alouette and then the first Alouette I
had when I was at westbound High School had it in my briefcase and I take it out at recess time and do my son observation
with it but then this version of Alouette I got from Edmond scientific when I was at
Acadia in 1970. I remember Roy bishop and I playing around with it this is the
current Alouette and so I thought I'd display that now as a replacement for minimum who is now
outside waiting to see the nice guy that's great so I wonder how many people I'm sure
almost everybody here in our group tonight owns some meteorites and loves
to look at them but I'm curious from the audience how many people are
um our our meteorite collectors or have at least one meteorite
if you have something that you uh if you have a meteorite that you like maybe you
can comment on it and we can we can read those comments but um
yeah let's see it man this is um my wedding ring and it is um it's one
I still wear it and I'm still trying to be careful with it and uh it is a gibeon and it's I
actually is the third one because I lost the first one it's somewhere in the house the second one just fell apart and
this is the third one that Frank Lopez put together for me and I've had oh wow okay just wanted to share it with you
what a handy guy Frank Lopez is of Stellar Vision so it really is there in
Tucson and we built my Observatory ah
and he does that a lot yeah right well for right now we're going to go to
um uh Alan Dyer who uh was kind enough
to record something for us he was not sure if he could make it tonight
um and he may show up later but uh uh we'll bring him on now with his thoughts
on Terence Dickinson foreign well good evening and thank you very
much for the opportunity to speak uh tonight on the sad occasion that it's
been a sad week on the passing of my my good friend dear friend and astronomy colleague Terence Dickinson a dating we
knew was coming because he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's a number of years ago back in 2015 in fact I think
and he knew it would take a toll and so we knew the day was coming and that came February 1st
um a sad day in Canada because he was certainly best known uh
Terence Dickinson for his uh astronomy popularization across the country and of course around
the world and in the United States but particularly here in Canada through his use of almost every medium he and his
disposal uh books of course best known for a lasting Legacy and I'll talk about
that in a moment but um but magazines and I'll mention the Legacy as well uh
but also radio he was a regular on our CBC Network radio network uh Science
Show quirks and quarks which even as a record this is broadcasting it's uh its
show today um celebrating 30 years of its host Bob McDonald's a tenure with the quirks and
quartz radio show but Terry was a regular he was their go-to guy for many years uh Whenever there was an astronomy
story that needed covering uh he was also a raker here in Canada on our Discovery Channel back uh when it was in
his Heyday uh with a nightly science program and again he was their go-to guide for regular astronomy stories on
on television but it was books perhaps that he is best known for in particular
probably best known to to viewers tonight for the book Night Watch which
this year celebrates its 40th anniversary three being in print on the
market and we're hearing from of course all kinds of people the last few days on
Terry's passing people saying that book got them into the Hobby and uh and
really started their their passion and their interests and that was Terry's Talent he just portrayed The Wonder of
the universe and and the Wonder and the magic of looking up yeah he explained the facts
of the figures in a ways people can understand but he just portrayed that sense of wonder you wanted to get out
there and experience that for yourself as well because he portrayed it so well in writing but also in person in talks
and lectures those were great um so it's books that he is perhaps best
known for um I had the opportunity well in the last 40 years as well in 1991 it was
published we worked together and published this first edition of the
backyard astronomers guide and and then in the last two years well it came out
in late 2021 uh that morphed into a fourth edition
um that we worked on starting in late 2019 and finished off in early 2021 the
fourth edition of the book but my last conversation with Terry and over the
years in decades we had a lot of phone calls where we would just go on for
hours chatting about the state of the Hobby and Science and whatever but my
last such phone call with Terry my last conversation with Terry was in September
2019. the disease was taking its toll but it was a good day we had we had a
great conversation it was like old times but that was the last time I was able to speak to him and that was when we were
embarking on the project of the backyard astronomers guide his wife Susan runs a
book packaging company and she was the one really spearhead of the project and put it all together I was the the
co-author on it we brought on Ken Hewitt white on that version of the book as well to guess write some chapters but
Terry even then knew at the time that I would be shouldering the majority of the work in that he would not be able to
contribute so in editing and revising the book of course I've kept as much of his voice and his contributions as
possible but he knew at that time that I would be taking on most of the work and
uh through the next year and a half and so that was our that was our covid project but Terry was kept appraised of
the project through Susan throughout his production process as well and but as I
said the other book that people are are most familiar with would be night watch and uh and it's being worked on in in a
new version as well um and then other than books uh Terry was a
was a master of all kinds in media and he was astronomy magazines very first editor here's the first issue
of astronomy a state biker will know uh came out in August 73. so astronomy Magazine's 50th anniversary is this year
and Terry's in there uh in the very first uh writing the uh you know the sky
tonight Department in the magazine uh here
um and they're very serious Sky Almanac Terrance Dickinson and then it was just the next year that the publisher Stephen
Walter brought on Terry as their first full-time editor in 74 and 75. and and
then um in 1995 uh Terry took over uh and
restarted the Sky News Magazine this is our Canadian astronomy magazine and
taking it from just a newsletter put out by our national museum of science technology at the time and turning it
into a glossy commercial magazine the first issue this is this is from last year but the first issue came out in uh
in in May I think it was 1995 with a with a cover story in fact uh by uh
David Levy I think it was um and and he was editor Terry was
editor of Sky News until 2016 when it was turned over to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada
uh and Gary ceronica's editor because Jerry knew that he had to step down and
and wanted to relinquish his responsibilities with the magazine back in 2016. so
um through radio TV magazines books this is his probably most recent uh uh
original book and sort of first first time was at Hubble's Universe
um kind of produced in conjunction with Ray Villard the Space Telescope Science Institute came out a few years ago and
then again a popular book that I think first came out in 1989 or something like that but again it's gone through many
editions the universe and Beyond instead of a grand tour of the universe uh not a backyard astronomy practical guide like
night watch but a grand tour of the Majesty of the universe the universe and Beyond so that's the other book that is
still in print and people may be familiar with so he's he's left the lasting Legacy for us for certain and
and it's it's a shame to lose any great communicator like that of science we need those people so much these days and
so um it's a great sadness that we uh we uh we more in the loss of of Terence
Dickinson here in Canada and in the U.S and around the world as well so thank you very much for the opportunity to to
listen to me this evening and uh and uh I hope Terry has touched your lives through his Works uh over the years as
well and it's helped you in your growth as amateur astronomers and stargazers uh
it certainly has me so thank you very much this evening
yeah so thank you very much Alan Dyer uh for presenting that
um uh I uh first became aware of Terence Dickinson uh with that book Night Watch
back in the early 80s when I started uh changing uh uh the little camera shop I
was working into until into a telescope shop and really it was one of the best
books out there at the time and just super popular I sold lots and lots of
copies of Night Watch but I've sold during that time too I was I started to
become aware of other writers and uh you know this whole world of amateur
astronomy which is so wonderful you know and certainly Terry made it uh made it
more wonderful with his presence and all the contributions that he made so
uh that's wonderful um our next speaker is Chuck Allen Chuck
was uh recently on astronomical League live uh where God chuck all of Chuck's
presentations when he gives him are mind-blowing you know and uh uh so I I
knew that he was going to do a talk about the distance scale and and the
um you know and the furthest known uh uh celestial objects and I thought well
I've already heard this before but no Chuck had more information
so he's excellent in that regard and always providing uh the best information
he can get his hands on and uh you know the astronomical league is very fortunate to have him uh he has given so
much to the organization itself he is uh he's a lawyer by trade but uh
uh his passion and his uh expertise
I'm sure he's a considerable uh expert in legal Affairs but uh you're going to
be uh it's hard to stump uh uh Chuck Allen when it comes to astronomy so uh
Chuck thanks very much for coming on um and I'm going to give the stage to you
okay thank you very much Scott and I've got something to say about you in just a moment but uh
Let's uh let's start with the uh screen share and we'll go to
okay slideshow from current slide uh we always like to start uh each of these uh
weekly quiz sections with a warning the most important part of any telescope is
the eye that looks through it and you need to protect it those of you out there who are new to astronomy uh there
are some mistakes you can make quite innocently and I know people who've made them uh that can cost you your vision
and observing the sun can be done safely there are people in local astronomy clubs who are experts at it and can give
you some guidance there just make sure you never observe the sun without professionally made solar filters that
are fixed to the front end of the telescope where they prevent the energy from entering the telescope and don't
leave telescopes or binoculars unaided especially during solar observations for
the public because children might try to access the sun using one of those
instruments and if you're using eclipse glasses bear in mind those are to be
used all alone not use them to look through a telescope at the sun they're solely for the purpose of looking
straight at the sun through the eclipse glasses they should be certified as well
and just read These Warnings be careful around solar observing and if you want
to start observing the Sun make sure you contact somebody in a local astronomy club who's got some
experience with it could save you a lot of Heartache later on these are the
answers from January 31st and the first question is what is the
name of the first exoplanet discovered by the James Webb Telescope and the answer to that was LHS 475b
question number two was why does the currently visible comet C 2022 E3 glow
in a green color and the answer is that ultraviolet radiation from the Sun was
absorbed by diatomic carbon in the comet's nucleus
that's two carbon atoms that are fuse together and that reaction emits green light
in question three was in what year was the astronomical League's first horchheimer Award presented I'll mention
something about the Horicon were worse in just a second the answer to that was 1998.
um the correct answers to those questions and these names have been added to the door prize list uh are
Andrew korkel Don NAB John Williams Daniel Higgins Cameron Gillis and Adrian Bradley congratulations to them right
this is the Advent of our Awards season in the astronomical league and we have a
very robust series of uh Youth Awards that we give out one is the national
young astronomer award which is now in its 31st year and one of the people most
responsible for that success is pictured on the right here that would be a fellow by the name of Scott Roberts who just uh
gave me a glowing introduction Scott has been there for us providing telescope
prizes and sponsorship of this award and has made it possible for this award to
flourish over this many years you don't have to be a league member to
participate in this just a high school student attending school in the United States or a U.S citizen and the
information on this can be found at
www.astrolique.org on the awards page uh we also have a series of Youth
Service Awards that provide large cash prizes one of them provides an expense paid trip to our annual National
Convention this year being held in Baton Rouge and if you're a league member and
uh you have youth who help you and your club and public activities or
help at local libraries anything having to do with astronomy please nominate them for this one of these Awards we
also have Imaging awards for Youth and we have a journalism award for youth
between the ages of 8 and 14. so if your League members and you have folks who
engage in this sort of activity please nominate their own or encourage them to apply for these Awards the deadline for
all of these Awards is March 31st and here again is the website where you can find an awards page that will detail
eligibility prizes and the applications so the questions for tonight here they
come I think they're topical a full moon shines at magnitude minus
12. what specific term is used to describe a meteor that reaches at least magnitude minus 14 that is at least six
times brighter than a full moon
okay most meteors become visible in what altitude range I'll leave this up for a
few seconds is it 5 to 20 miles above the surface 20 to 50 miles
50 to 80 miles 80 to 120 miles or 120 to 200 miles
leave that up for just a couple more seconds
okay and question number three what famous American singer wrote a hit song
inspired in part by his viewing of the perseid meteor shower during a family
camping trip
and those are the questions for tonight I would invite all of you to join us for
another League live event this coming Friday evening uh just uh three days
from now at 7 pm this will be
uh presented by uh the talk will be given by Professor Kareem Jaffer who's
one of our guests uh speakers here tonight uh and he will be speaking on citizen science and an emphasis on young
participants I think you'll really enjoy his talks they are truly fantastic
and that's it for tonight and I will stop sharing and thank you again Scott for all you do for the astronomical week
over the years thank you it's great to be uh yeah
um friends with you guys and um and to just you know be a part of it it's it's
uh it's kind of like you know I'm like one of those hangers on that uh
that just kind of wants wants to be uh to Glow in the in the warmth of of all
you guys what all you guys do well you glowed on the warmth of a three-day virtual convention in 2021 that we could
not possibly have done without you and uh that kept us before our members of
many new people uh during covet and it was invaluable and we really thank you for that well you guys have worked
really hard to grow your membership and everything and it's and it is happening uh I think you're up over 2200 members
or 20 22 000. members wow and so that's that's great
that's wonderful well thanks very much uh Chuck for uh thank you participating tonight
okay all right so um our next uh speaker is
um uh David icker and David eicher uh you know he is just
not only does he have all this experience not only has been writing about astronomy
almost all of his life but this is a guy who never gets tired of it okay and
there are uh I meet people that uh can do things for
a year a couple of years maybe five years and then they like disappear okay
and you wonder what happened to them and maybe then they come back after a few years to a star party or something and
uh you know uh but they just needed a break you know and uh the people that
do what Dave eicher does day in day out all the
time you know and and try to do more of it and try to uh expand uh upon what
they've already accomplished uh uh those people are really rare and Dave does
this not only in astronomy but he does it with his uh with uh his Civil War
history he's an avid collector of minerals and meteorites and all the rest
of it a very very interesting guy and he's a musician and he is one of the
guys running uh uh one of the biggest astronomy events in the world so uh and
uh they're out there celebrating their 50th Anniversary I think they have a star party going on so uh fancy that so
David eicher I'm going to turn it over to you man thank you Scott so much for having me
again it's always really a pleasure to be uh with you and don't believe what Scott says he's in the center of it all
just as much as as any of us uh is so it's a pleasure to be hanging out with
with him and I'm going to talk about a couple of quick things if I can tonight one of them is another one of these
weird objects because we still haven't made our way through the list of all 434
of them so I'll share my screen and I will see if I can start a slideshow
whoops I started too quickly there this is not one of the objects this is just
an illustration of course of of a quasar of an active Galaxy but tonight we're
going to get to we're working our way sort of from the north Celestial pole slightly downward and uh don't be
intimidated by the amount of text this is a really interesting object the Cat's Eye Nebula we're going to talk about
tonight and it looks exactly like a cat's eye
if you haven't noticed the people who have named a lot of deep Sky objects in
the past over dozens and hundreds of years there may have been a contributing
factor with some of the names for these objects sleep deprivation so anyway it
kind of looks like a cat's eye but maybe not really so much and you'll see it in a moment here but it's a really good
planetary nebula it's in Draco um it has a very high surface brightness so it's pretty easy to see uh in a
moderately dark sky even with a small telescope it was discovered as were many
objects by William Herschel this one was in 1786 and it's also notable because it
was the first planetary nebula whose Spectrum was recorded by William Huggins
and so he therefore demonstrated with this object that planetaries are gaseous
in their composition so it's overall magnitude is about eighth magnitude
but it really consists of a couple of components it has a really small bright disc that you can see at fairly High
magnification it's about 20 Arc seconds across and then an outer shell that's
much much larger and fainter that's about six arc minutes across and this corresponds at its
distance which is a little over 3000 light years of about four tenths of a light year in diameter physically and so
it's about a four-tenths the size of our solar system it's a pretty young uh
planetary nebula maybe about a thousand years old so these planetaries show us
what the sun will have what will happen to the sun eventually in our solar system uh in about six billion years or
so our sun will become a planetary nebula and these objects uh with our
theme of falling stars these enrich the interstellar medium with the material that goes back out into the Galaxy and
and in a couple of different stages so the faint stuff that was the early
material that came off of this object really goes out at a fairly low velocity
it's sort of belched out at the end of the red giant and early planetary nebula
phase of a sun-like star sun-like mass star dying if you will running out of
its normal uh lifespan then there's a higher velocity component that goes off
of the star material gas and dust that runs into the slower older material and
it creates this ionization front and the brighter nebula that we can see that's a
smaller object the cat's eye has a very complex inner structure as you will see momentarily
here it was a very famous Hubble Space Telescope uh image for a long long time
and the mechanism of why the the structure is so complex is really not
well understood yet it has to do with magnetic fields and velocities and so on uh but we really don't know so if you
get out to a dark sky and you can use relatively High magnification uh with a
moonless night in a dark sky if this thing is relatively high up in the sky it's a really good planetary to observe
because you can observe it at High magnifications
this again I am not affiliated with Ron stoyan or Germany or the interstellarum
Deep Sky Atlas but this Atlas does have a really good level of uh detail in a
fairly compact uh package and so you can see this is where uh the Cat's Eye
Nebula is which is NGC 6543 or in German uh cats and the genevil uh I'm going to
take their word um uh that is a tongue twister mint that
capsa Noggin Apple I you know German and with my ancestry is about 300 years ago
so I'm not good with that but and as you can see it it it lies very close to the
north uh ecliptic pole interestingly enough which is another story as well and there are a few other
scattered deep Sky objects but we're here up here at very high latitude still in the northern sky
here it is this is the great Don Goldman uh who produces fantastic filters by the
way among other things uh he is incredible image of the Cat's Eye Nebula and there's a Galaxy nearby NGC 6552 in
the upper left a nice barred spiral there as well moderate distance part spiral but you can see here very very
tiny in the center of this image is the bright component that looks sort of like a spirograph bit here we'll see in a
second and then Don has really really well um recorded this outer faint uh uh sort
of first generation Halo of material that came off of the star so this is really an incredible why more or less
wide field shot if you will by an amateur astronomer then we can go in and see the the the
the close-up uh that's just a tiny central part of this image the central
spirograph image from the Hubble here uh that's the bright part that you would
normally see at moderate to high magnification in an amateur scope and you can see this incredible sort of
radial form and and all kinds of weird Blobs of stuff that has come off uh from
the uh star that is dying that's expiring on its way to becoming a white
dwarf and the if you see sort of at one o'clock and seven o'clock the sort of
orangey spikes in this pattern there those are what uh planetary nebula
astronomers call Flyers that are sort of very late generation High Velocity
bullets of material that come off from the poles of the star and create this
this weird sort of final effect so it's a really complex object you can't see it
this well with an amateur scope regardless of what you have this is the Hubble Space Telescope but you can see
some detail in this inner disc so it's a really interesting object and worthy of
looking at and then here's a composite just to throw this in that has Optical data from Hubble and x-ray from Chandra
as well thrown in there to show you different characteristics of the inner structure of the nebula which is pretty
strange it's about as complex as a planetary nebula inner ring structure
gets so that's pretty cool stuff um
and I had to throw the latest comment image that came to me as well this is from John schumach from a couple days
ago here now of ztf uh the current ztf
uh showing its kind of inner coma and just a little bit of the ion tail there
as well still looks pretty good there beautiful of course we predicted the at
a bright comet would be coming with the first issue of astronomy magazine of our 50th anniversary year no we didn't but
we published a special issue on comets and we have some other special surprises coming in and a very special big issue
of the magazine coming in August which is the actual 50th anniversary of when
Steve Walther founded the magazine a year or two before he brought Terry
Dickinson onto the the staff among others there as well so look out for some special things this
year uh with astronomy Scott did mention this if you're going to be in the area of Tucson this coming weekend we will
have our annual public star party at Pima Community College on Saturday night
the East Campus of Pima there and myself and Michael bakic our contributing
editor who was at the magazine for a long time Alan Goldstein who have who's written for us uh just about as long as
I have uh and perhaps even David Levy has said he will stop out uh and we're
going to give some talks there as well as we'll have nighttime viewing and also daytime viewing of the Sun
so that'll be Saturday in Tucson we'll hope to see you there if you're in the area uh and I will give a quick plug for
the book that Michael and I wrote a child's introduction to space exploration which is out there and is
relatively new as well and if I'm not running over Scott I will stop
sharing my screen and Scott asked me to pull out a couple of things because the
theme is falling stars and we're inside a solar system in which things are
moving around and sometimes these bits of cosmic dust and other debris pieces
of asteroid or even pieces of a couple of other planets or the moon come down and they do fall upon us and so
meteorites uh represent that and that's a cool fun thing to do is to collect
some meteorites too so I won't take these out and belabor things but I'll show them quickly here some examples of
meteorites this is camel donga which is has a very nice dark Fusion crust
Stone meteorite so Stony meteorites represent the mantles the outer parts of
asteroids typically here is another one that you may have heard of in recent times this is a piece of Chelyabinsk the
famous Russian bowl that was captured on so many thankfully you know there are
lots of uh you know criminals in Russia who try to sue people for fake accidents so everybody has a you know a dash cam
in their car we saw lots of good coverage of that um this is one that with the guys of the
local Museum director in Tunisia when we had an astronomy Expedition there we
went and collected pieces of Tatooine which is a an unusual meteorite which
has this greenish iron content um among other things and it's actually a piece of the asteroid Vesta not to
Sidetrack you with all this stuff but we're in the infancy there's a real puzzle going back in time and in space
of trying to figure out what the so-called parent bodies of meteorites are that is one hell of a mess well we
know what the parent bodies are through spectroscopy just of a few small number of meteorites and and Vesta is one of
those contributing parent bodies that we can tell the source from well when you
get down into the cores of asteroids things are more metallic and so the
meteorite escal is a blend of metallic iron and nickel and also a little bit of
Forester right or Peridot is the gemologist would call it of of a a
mineral that is a silicate mineral there that's kind of a green yellow mineral in
there that's closer to the core of asteroids and then the Exotic ones that
I had out here real quickly Daryl Daryl ghani 400 is a piece of the largest
lunar meteorite so unless you break into the Johnson Space Center and try to get
a moon rock and that way I do not recommend that by the way that that'll get you into more trouble than flying a
balloon from China over the United States but but uh this is a piece of a
moon rock which is the easy way to get a moon rock and that is from a lunar meteorite of which there are a few dozen
and then the most exotic way to get a meteorite of any kind is a martian
meteorite this is the county which looks more or less like sidewalk concrete but
this is from Bob Hague the great dean of meteorite uh collectors who who had this
original main mass of zagami which courtesy of the Viking Landers we know
is a piece of Mars because of the oxygen isotopes that are locked up in this rock
so that's a quick sort of survey of a few types more interesting types in some
cases of the rocks that fall down upon us falling stars Falling Rocks falling
pieces of the solar system Cosmic dust pieces of asteroids the moon or even
Mars so Scott I won't belaboring things any more than that other than to say thanks
for having me again and oh my god thank you yep that's great wonderful Scott
while we had date while we had David here since he you know has some foresight can you tell us what the next
issues are of astronomy magazine so we know what to look out for in the night sky well I could my problem is that I'm
thinking of I'm the things that I'm planning Kareem which is the November
and December issues um and and so to think back on the
issues that are going to press the March and April issues it's like ancient history to me trying to remember the
what are the feature articles in them maybe next week I can be a little bit better prepared and without giving away
the the seek house secrets to uh smaller competing magazines God bless them we
love them too uh but uh I I could preview a little bit of the next issue
issue or two that are that are upcoming but the August issue is going to be our big oversized thing that will have all
sorts of special features in it because that's the 50th Anniversary issue so for
those of us who've had minus 40 wind chill and haven't been able to spend too much time with the green Comet when's your next Comet issue so that we can
expect one that we can see boy you know I had to to kidnap and twist the arms of
all the editors who work for me to get them to do one comment that was a big special to do trying to find the best
images of 40 years worth of comets you know they you know they made just about I'm sorry it's an amazing issue thank
you well I nearly got you know kidnapped and killed by the staff for for proposing that but but they pulled it
off very very nicely so so we won't be doing as a comet issue again for a little while I'm afraid
we'll just keep our eyes looking upwards then you bet wonderful thank you guys thank you well
um thanks so much David uh we have um Professor uh
Kareem Jafar with us and he is uh he hasn't been with us for a little while
um he and I spent some time at in Armenia together at the Starman six
event and uh I got to meet his whole family which was wonderful and uh really
enjoyed that I miss my son who was busy at University but uh oh mine is your son
okay all right but we had a blast Armenia was great and uh you know we got to do the the GSP 100 to 110 afterwards
which was a lot of fun but uh yeah it's been it's been a couple of months oh that's right that's right yeah but um uh
you just recently passed on a bio okay to Barry Mann uh and and uh so uh
Kareem's going to be on with the astronomical League live this weekend uh uh you know this Friday at uh I think
it's at 6 00 p.m my time here central time yeah and so he's the teach featured speaker but
he is I'll read some of his bio here he's the public events coordinator for
the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Montreal Center since 2016. he he helped
re-establish the i.k Williamson astronomy library and coordinating uh
coordinating both public events and Outreach activities throughout the Montreal area cultivating Partnerships
with many local and Global institutions uh over the past few years Kareem has
been actively learning and sharing the two-eyed seeing perspective through
presentation and Outreach activities with indigenous people and astronomy communities across the globe as a
frequent presenter of global star party thank you very much Kareem um and an Explorer Alliance Ambassador
it's our honor that you are Kareem was part of astronomist six star party
Outreach team that's true with the past this past September in Armenia in
addition in mentoring several student astronomy clubs and coordinating visits
to Local Schools guides Scouts and libraries Kareem is a member of the
National Royal Astronomical Society of Canada's education and public Outreach
committee and the 2021 recipient of the Charles M good award
I like the sound of that it is a good one it is it is I was so touched when
they when they gave up during covet congratulations congratulations that's well deserved well I'm going to turn it
over to you Corrine thank you so much for coming on to Global Star Party thanks Scott it's my pleasure it's good
to be back and uh hi to everyone to all the regular audience uh the new people who are joining us on the gsps and a
special shout out to my dad who's watching uh as Scott and a few others are aware uh my dad had an emergency
surgery back in the fall and he is on the road to recovery so I'm glad to have him online with me since I can't be
there in person I'm just getting over a nasty bout of covid to start the year but uh I'm happy to finally have a voice
again be able to share a bit of astronomy Outreach with you so tonight I'm going to do a quick check in with
the Rask Montreal Center because it has been a little while and then because the topic is falling stars I'm gonna be
chatting a little bit about falling stars but you'll see the little squared emblem there because I'm not going to
hit it just one way I'm going to mention to you two different approaches to talk about falling stars for tonight
um as always with the rest Montreal Center we like to start off with a bit of a land and Sky acknowledgment the
idea being that our land is unseated indigenous territory but the skies are shared with the First Nations people
from across the world so at the moment we are at a waning gibbous moon almost
full just at I believe it's like 95 96 at the moment and the mikma moons uh the
mcmah tribe on the East Coast here of Canada refers to this as the snow blinding Moon now most of the settlers
do refer to the February full moon as either the snow moon or the hunger moon and the snow blinding moon is actually
part of this because February is not only known for the amount of snow and
ice on the ground that reflects the full moon light amplifying it and we know we see this with the light pollution that
we have around us the artificial light that gets Amplified and creates a glow a dome all around the cities here in the
Northeast and in Northern North America here but for the mikma it's an additional aspect
because the blinding is because of the intense driving winds that come with the
February moon that blow the snow directly into your eyes and so oftentimes if you're going out even in
the evening sometimes when the sun is set you'll still be wearing sunglasses because the snow is so blinding and it's
so hard to look through the flying snow as it falls we also can look to the to the stars of
the night sky and see the winter Maker full on in the South throughout the entire evening Orion what we recognize
from Greek and Roman uh constellation stories Western constellation Stories the winter maker for the ojibwes
actually spreads all the way from alderbrand to procyon on the other side so it encompasses a much larger area
than just Orion but what you can see there is in the belt the Orion Nebula represents where the pocket of snow is
that comes out and comes over the land in the winter time and so there's a lot in the stories of the First Nations that
we can see connected to observations of nature that we experience ourselves so there is a lot of Science and natural
connections hidden in within these stories I'm going to come back to this a little bit later towards the end of the evening now the rest Montreal Center we
as everybody who's been watching me on global star parties knows we're a very active Center we tend to have a couple
of events per week not just for members but also public events at least monthly so for members at the moment we are
starting to do a few observing nights out and about when the weather allows the weather unfortunately does not allow
often and in fact our last public event was planned by uh by Russell who's on after me tonight to be a full moon
observing night at a local apple orchard version Labonte and unfortunately the
forecast was initially minus 40 with the wind chill and then it was also cloudy
so we ended up having to postpone it to next month so hopefully on March 4th we'll be out there with the public
sharing with them the full Moon Mars and the stories of the night sky
in January we had a wonderful public event with my friends at Guava physics orbax hosted us and we had Sal who was
one of the researchers who works on the perseverance pixel data to study Martian soil and that was a lot of fun we also
had a public a members event that ended up having to be moved online because of Believe It or Not in Montreal another
snowstorm and Russell is going to share some of his uh night skies from New
Zealand with you tonight uh in about 5-10 minutes our next public event which everybody
will be invited to on Zoom or on YouTube it's going to be by one of our local
researchers and a professor emeritus at University of morale Tony Moffitt he won
the Beatles award from the Canadian Association of astronomers and astrophysicists last year for lifetime
achievement in astrophysics and he's going to share with us his journey into research and specifically the way in
which he uses his intuition to determine what direction to take some of his studies and some of his analysis and
some of his Imaging that he does with telescopes that he has access to across the world so more on that coming up in
the next few weeks we're also very active in Outreach and you can see both Russell and myself here last weekend at
the Canadian space conference which was run by student organizations for students studying in space science
Industry from across the entire country so Russell and I decided to do a workshop on introductory
astrophotography and it was a packed house we had over 150 participants a lot
of them having brought their laptops and downloaded images that Russell and I shared with them and we walked them
through Elementary processing and a little bit of an introduction to Citizen science so those of you who watch on
Friday the astronomical League live we'll see a little bit of some of the stuff that I shared with them and then a little bit more of what I do with my
students in citizen science and if you look really keenly at the far back left of the top left picture there you'll
actually see a few of my honor science students who came in just towards the end of my workshop and they were very
frustrated that I don't do this for the honor science students and it's only something that I teach to the astronomy students so they've asked me to find a
way to do a workshop for them as well this past week I got to go to royalville
school and Royal Vale is a combination high school and Elementary School in the English Montreal School Board and their
vice principal asked me to come and talk to their AP math students their robotics Club students and their SEC five
graduating students who are currently taking physics and talk to them about the Imaging of the black hole at the
center of m87 and then the Imaging of the black hole at the center of our galaxy it was an incredible talk and
afterwards I stayed after and answered questions for a bunch of the students most of them were too shy to get their picture taken but four of them stayed
behind and all of them picked up some of the Rask Outreach material and this is where my first bout of shoot of falling
stars is going to come in because of course when you're talking about black holes kids want to know about spaghettification they want to know
about this whole concept of gravity pulling differently at the feet versus the head of an astronaut falling into a
black hole because this is the way in which it's brought up in pop culture but one of the things we were talking about
because we were talking about galactic black holes and even Stellar black holes that are larger and more massive in
order to detect them you're limited to kind of trying to detect the accretion disk or the Jets of material coming out
because of ionized subatomic particles that are being caught up in the magnetic field mines
this whole concept of spaghettification applies not just to the idea of trying
to investigate a black hole but even to the idea of stars being cannibalized by these black holes because as stars come
close enough that the gravity of the black holes can start to rip apart the
fundamental structure of those Stars pulling off first the gas and then the inner core material they really do
spaghettify they they transform into these density variations as the material
gets pulled in towards this black hole so one of the things that the students really wanted to talk about was
is it right to talk about the black hole sucking things in and my answer to them
was no because the black hole doesn't actively pull things in the black hole is a ripple in space-time that happens
to reach an infinite curvature so that means the way it's felt by masses is
that the gravity becomes more and more intense as you get closer and closer to the event horizon and within the Event
Horizon the gravity is so great that not even light has enough energy to escape it can't reach the Escape speed to be
able to exit that black hole so when you're talking about falling for the
Stars what you're actually talking about is the same thing Earth is doing around the Sun or the sun is doing around the
center of the Milky Way or the Milky Way is doing within our larger supercluster around the localized Center of all of
these galaxies that are interacting gravitationally is everything is always
accelerating towards a gravitational center of the system and so you're Falling Towards the center
but if you have enough velocity in a perpendicular Direction you maintain an
orbit at a constant radius around it so even though you're falling you don't
move any closer so the concept of falling stars in This Way is very much
the idea that unless you lose energy and move closer in you're in a stable orbit
but because stars are not a solid object it is possible for this
spaghettification type of a concept where one side would feel more gravitational pull compared to the other
side that you can reach that imbalance and that loss of energy and start to have stars that come close enough be
pulled in and that's where the idea of the black hole as a vacuum or as something that
sucks material in comes from is the trying to understand that process
so falling stars can rapidly become chaotic spiraling Stars I guess uh in
the presence of these incredibly complex energetic objects but let's be honest that's not what God
intended with this topic but Scott intended with this topic was meteor showers because meteor showers are fun
to look at they're a great thing to go out and see in the night sky and this year we are lucky in the northern
hemisphere because our meteor showers coming up in 2023 as compared to the last couple of years almost every single
one is in a favorable lunar condition where there's not too much Moonlight to
interrupt our viewing of these meteor showers look at the lyric in April it Peaks
right after the new moon so your waxing crescent will set well before you reach
the hours when you want to be trying to watch the meteor shower perseid meteor shower we have a waning crescent the
moon will rise somewhere in the early morning hours and most of us enjoy the meteor showers for the perseids
somewhere around noon till 2 A.M so we're going to have a really wonderful time all through the year going all the
way to the very last the great show of the year the Geminid which Peaks right around December 13th 14th December 13th
is for my religious uh celebrations it's the Sagara christiani and so I always at
the end of that celebration I get to go out late into the night if it's not too cold to see geminine meteor showers I
get to see Nature's fireworks to celebrate and we have a new moon on the 12th so we're going to have very very
dark skies and if there's not early snowfall we're gonna have limited light pollution as well so we're really
anticipating a great meteor season this year in 2023. we don't have to wait for these meteor showers a lot of places
like the uh the video that Scott showed earlier we actually have a lot of locations a lot of countries and even a
lot of provinces here in Canada that are setting up meteor networks here in Quebec we have this Dome Network that's
similar to something that was set up in France that is a set of stations trying to identify Fireballs for possible media
rights those are the rocks that make it through the atmosphere so not meteors but they actually make contact with the
ground like what David eicher was showing us a little bit earlier so just yesterday morning the UK
meteorological network of cameras the UK mon which is now 10 years old saw this
brilliant Fireball now how brilliant was this Fireball it was visible for over
287 kilometers wow which is about 180 miles
so for 180 Mile Stretch everybody in that stretch saw this Fireball
these types of objects not only can you track them you can also try to see if
they managed to get through and they become bullets and you see them become brighter and break the sound
barrier you might be able to determine where they would Land Based on the trajectory that they show
but what's also interesting is if you take lots of these over a long period of time during one of these meteor showers
the radiant really does pop out because On Any Given night there will be meteors
that are just in random directions just particles that interact with their atmosphere and brighten up that you will
get to see but when you have a meteor shower you're passing through a comet's tail debris
that was left behind and the direction that you're passing the stars behind there show the radiant from which those
Stars appeared or those falling stars appear to come towards us so over the year you can actually plot out every
single one captured by one of these mon cameras and you can identify every
different radiant and how bright and how intense one meteor shower is compared to the other
all of this data is now publicly accessible you can go in and you can view it and you can analyze it to your
heart's content and the fact that this is all now right out there and anybody can take an
all-sky camera and connect it to one of these networks and contribute is another area of Citizen science that's just
waiting to Blossom here in North America but in Europe they're already firing out
after this so many of my colleagues on the space Oddities panel have installed these all Sky cameras and participate in
these meteorological networks that's cool so when we go out in the winter time or in
the summertime for one of these meteor showers and we get to sit there and watch as the night sky moves through
even on a cloudy night and you see these occasional meteors come through I want you to think back to the Hoopa Legend
and the Hoopa Legend is of coyote dances with the stars and the legend is as follows coyote one night was lying there
enjoying a well-earned rest and he looks up and he sees the Stars twinkling and he thinks to himself that those stars
look like girls and if they're twinkling and they're beautiful girls I want to go see them so he wanders to the woods
trying to find how to get up into the sky and grandmother spider says I can make you a web but I don't know if it'll
get you high enough the giant Redwood says that's okay all bend down and fire you up into the sky and then you can use
the web to climb the rest of the way so coyote climbs up into the sky and gets closer and closer to these twinkling
stars and realizes that the stars are twinkling they're dancing and he thinks
to himself I'm a good dancer I can can dance with them and he asks can I dance with you ladies and the Stars say no no
you can't keep up with us we dance all the time day and night constantly we
never stop dancing and coyote thinks to himself if they can do it I can do it they're just women I'm a coyote I can
handle this and he says Let Me dance with you please please please let me get any bags any bags and they say you can
dance with us but we do not stop we do not rest twinkling is all we do and so
coyote has come to these Stars close to the Horizon that always twinkle and he talks to these stars and they let him
dance with him and he dances with him the first night goes wonderfully and then the second night he realizes
that he's getting a little bit tired and he's getting a little bit thirsty and he asks can I stop for a drink they say no
you can't stop we told you we dance all the time there's no stopping there's no resting so coyote bucks up and says I
can keep going and then the next night he is starved and he is tired and he is thirsty and he
says please please please can we stop so that I can get a bite to eat and the stars look at me they say you knew the
deal we dance we don't stop and so they drag coyote along with them
and coyote dances with them and dances with them but he gets slower and slower and they're dragging him and finally
coyote Falls and as coyote falls to the ground you see him light up through the
atmosphere and he hits the ground in Northern California there's a wonderful spot marked there where the Hoopa say
coyote landed and it's a crater and in fact some of the times with these craters because the craters create this
Basin for fresh rain water we have animals that are first seen coming out of these and so for example the uh the
Ojibwe I believe it is they they have the name of the Wolverine actually means comes from the shooting star and so
coyote landed in this incredible explosion that created the crater in Northern California so when you go out
into the night and you see these shooting stars think to yourself coyote tried again but he just was not good
enough to keep dancing with those Stars
and that's it for today thank you okay all right so uh gosh Karine thank
you very much you have uh just a a great collection of these Native American or
indigenous um uh stories uh and I just love hearing it
um and um you know I I think that that is a Fascination by a lot of the
audience that uh you bring this um you know to our to our program so
thank you very much for doing that well my pleasure you know Scott I'm very lucky that the elders that I've spoken with from a few different First Nations
as well as from a few different cultures from across the world have have given permission to share the stories when I'm
not an authentic voice for a lot of these stories but they've they recognize the purpose behind the Outreach with the
two-eyed seeing and trying to connect what you see in nature you know the the twinkling of stars and scintillation
goes into so many stories and it is vital for a lot of cultures to know when
there's storms coming for example and so recognize using the need to share this
knowledge when it's culturally appropriate but also when it's time sensitive there's some of these stories
that you can't share at different times of the year because they're not relevant and they're not appropriate to what's in
the night sky and so I I'm lucky that I was you know I've gotten a little bit of
a chance to learn these stories that's awesome that is really incredible well thank you very much Kareem I know that
you've been a very busy guy and uh I'm very happy that you're able to squeeze in some time for this GSP our audience
also very happy to yes and I will see you on Friday so thanks so much
that's great okay so um up next is uh Russell fralick uh
Frolic am I pronouncing that right Russell uh it's fralic yep it's pretty good okay
there we go all right it's been a little while since you've been on global star party uh are you in New Zealand right
now unfortunately not I'm back in the snow and the 20 below or minus 20 so we
go I wish I could be I wish I could all right well I really appreciate you coming on and uh sharing your story with
us so that's great great thanks thanks Scott thanks again uh it's been wonderful to be back uh and
uh just look forward to this this chance to give a little talk about uh my my trip can you see that yep perfect
all right just double checking so uh thanks again for the opportunity Scott wonderful to be back I'm just
going to give a talk for about 10 12 minutes about um my first time observing the night sky
in New Zealand so I'm uh like Kareem I'm a member of the Ross Montreal Center and
uh we're located in Montreal Canada just about an hour flight north of New York City and uh I had an opportunity to go
back to New Zealand uh in December so I had three weeks where I could I had to work remotely but we actually planned
and got ourselves uh uh access to a hike called Milford track and I'll show one
or two pictures of that it's very hard to get into there's an international Lottery and we gave ourselves a very low
probability of winning getting a spot during the year and we got in so all the
spots for the entire hiking season down there were sold out in eight seconds and we got ours six seconds after the start
so we were very lucky we went down with my wife our daughter and her reluctant
boyfriend so to give you an idea of how far away New Zealand is it's really far so from Montreal we flew
to Vancouver that's six hours and then a 14-hour non-stop flight from Vancouver to Auckland
that's pretty far um that's a lot of movies
uh for those of you not familiar with New Zealand it's composed of two major uh principal Islands it's a three hour
flight to the nearest landmass which is Australia it's in the middle of nowhere it's surrounded by a lot of water it's
about five million people um and uh it's really really nice it's our it's actually our fourth trip down
there we really really like it and they give you an ideas of where we went so This Is Us let we've landed in Auckland
and as my wife says why are you taking a picture of this and I said well is this something an astronomer would appreciate
look at that Latitude 37 degrees south oh dear this is going to be great
uh how far are we from home another airport we uh passed by had a little distance so if you're from L.A look how
far away and of course for more than 15 000 kilometers away from home that's
that's really far we felt very a little far away so we arrived on December 9th
in Auckland that's the main the biggest city but it's not the capital the capital is Wellington where they have
all the film studios where they make Lord of the Rings and those kinds of movies
so we flew down immediately to a city called Christchurch and for the US astronomers the interesting thing about
Christchurch is it's 43 degrees south lots of Deuce guy to look at and uh we
got there and we see this big sign so that was a good sign actually it wasn't really for us it was because I had the
city was sort of leveled by an earthquake about 10 years ago so they were really rebuilding but it was very
uncomforting to see that when we arrived um and then the first evening uh it
wasn't a great evening but I couldn't wait so I went outside and this is from uh stelarian of course they didn't have
any name superimposed in the night sky and I looked around and I said I do not recognize anything
towards the South like nothing no patterns nothing I think there's little extra Stars maybe that's the the Milky
Way however if I look and there's some some of the constellations notice uh Sirius
the dog is upside down Beetlejuice is on its or Ryan's on its side things are
very unclear and towards Zenith is a star I've never I've never even heard of
it's It's alpha or ever to eridanae aridini akanar I've never seen it before
so completely lost then I turn north and then okay maybe there's a little bit
more okay here's Taurus here and there's Orion but Ryan's upside down Taurus is
upside down Mars is below aldebarin wow this is super interesting and they're
very low Over the Horizon so that was my first view of a night sky
in New Zealand at 43 degrees south and I was so excited I got my sketch my sketch
notebook out and I drew a quick diagram to notice everything and I was I tried to look at the large magellanic Cloud
which my Star Finder said should be just to the right of cannabis and I couldn't see anything and I
brought my binoculars and I still couldn't see anything so my first night was sort of a bust Beyond this point
oh we didn't stay there long um I managed to convince my wife to make a little pit stop at an international
dark sky site and this is a place called Lake tekapo in the middle of the mountains this is a picture I've taken
from their tourist website this is what they promote it's a astrotourism Mecca so it's an Ida web uh dark sky site with
a professional Observatory run by uh the physics and astronomy Department of the University of Canterbury
and you can book a guided tour with a masters of an astronomy or astrophysics
students who will men or staff they have a whole bunch of these Celestron 9.25s
and Celestron 11s and refractors and a whole bunch of stuff so I knew this
and this and the company that one of the big companies so this is the little town it's a little village and you can see
the observatory Dome there where they have like a six inch refractor and then this is the main entrance it's a private
company called dark sky project which I've been to before and uh the day I was there they were all full
yeah so like okay well I'll do it myself then
uh this is all I was able to squeeze in because the if the main reason for going down was for this uh extended hiking a
four-day hiking trip over 30 35 miles 33 miles and the mountains the rainforest
so I was only able to stuff my uh DSLR uh 10 cheap plastic tripod an
intervalometer and my binoculars and that's all I had and I really wish I'd had more but this is this is what I
could bring um in Lake tekapo we got an Airbnb a cute little cabin
and the the first evening we were there I just aimed by cell phone which is this thing you know a regular little cell
phone put it on their manual mode as long the longest exposure I could do is 10 seconds at high is low 3 200. put it
on a rock and aimed up and this is what I could see yep it's a dark sky area it is super
clear and the altitudes about almost a thousand meters about three thousand
feet oh it must have been awesome and it was just it was so clear so what you I
don't know I didn't know what I was looking at I had to get I had to consult this is the Etta Karina nebula
holy cow so we kept on going in the distances
their Peak so uh lake tekapo is a is a village at the bottom of a lake
surrounded by mountains and here's one of them a little bit further on this is Mount Cook or aoraki there are highest
tallest mountain about 3 700 meters I don't know what that is in feet I'm sorry but
um we kept on going and this was for four days we were at a place called fiordla National Park I'm doing the
Milford track to give you an idea what it is uh this is me hiking uh rockfall
Hazard I think it a little bit behind because there's The Rock too late uh they have ferns that are
three to four meters high uh it's 10 to go into 12 feet something like that
that's right they're they're monsters they're monster ferns uh and there's
Alpine hikes as well and then you go through these rainforest Vistas this is part of the trail I just stopped took a
picture with my cell phone this is pretty nice but we were so tired so each day is seven more than seven hours of
hiking with uh packs my pack was 15 to 17 kilos so I don't know what that is
of winning 30 pounds maybe 35 pounds I don't know
and then we end at a place called Milford Sound which is featured in so many Hollywood movies so I was just starting the beautiful it
was a great hike oh we continued to an island just to the South
uh it's a 48.5 degrees south and the next stop after this point is Antarctica
that's it and uh the reason why again it's a it's a prehistoric reserved
forest and fauna it's been untouched for 60 million years since the landmass
carved off from Australia and it's managed by the National Park Service and the plants and animals are unique to
this one Island it was very cool and it's also an Ida start Dark Skies
Preserve so yep they're all over the place so again and they had a lot of a lot of
Tourism there but we weren't able to stay long enough to take advantage because we had another place to go to which was this place up in the north
island a place called Hawaii beach and we stayed there until Christmas so we spent Christmas at the beach in this
little cabin in a trailer park and it was pretty nice very nice this is
me 5 a.m in the morning 5 a.m because of course it's almost at summer solstice
there but actually it was summer solstice it was the 20th 22nd or 21st so those are some of the other Camper vans
and they have palm trees everywhere which we don't see too many of in in Montreal unless they're indoors and
here's the first evening again with my cell phone just to get things going again a 10 second with a crappy camera
on a cell phone there's that a Karina nebula again and some other interesting things oh look there's a little
upside down cross and two stars I'll get i'll get to those in a moment
so I I'll when I do uh polar alignment at home I use my little app and this time I turn my app on it doesn't show
Polaris it shows the stars and octans and uh okay pretty pretty interesting so
I look where is the cell Celestial pole there's no I took a three minute untracked image with my camera to see if
I could find out where the center of rotation was and I don't see anything so I'm very impressed for people in the
southern hemisphere I don't know how they do the the polar alignment because I don't see anything to align to this
so cell phone I'm looking for the magellanic clouds 10 seconds you can see
them in the sky they are so bright I can't and they're humongous
they're not subtle I must say uh so that's 10 seconds so the LMC and
the smaller magellanic Cloud was like okay so then I started aiming my camera my DSLR with a 50 millimeter lens
nothing fancy and this is what I found wow so this is a hundred so I have no
tracking Mount so I'd use the 500 rule with a crop sensor it's about six seconds per image before things start
trailing I just kept on doing it until I ran out about her
so this is a tarantula nebula it's like there's so much stuff and then while I was taking a picture I had my little 10
by 42 binoculars and I just scanned around for two and a half hours it was amazing
and I knew I'd never seen any of these things before so it was it was super impressive I was super impressed that I
was completely lost looking at the sky and then I was super impressed at what I could see with the little things that I
was able to bring here's the smaller magellanic cloud and then I was like what is that that's
that's uh 47 to Kanai so it's a huge globular cluster and uh my comparison was that in my
binoculars this looked like M13 did in my 80 millimeter refractor it's like oh
geez that's pretty serious uh I just took a random picture of uh
canopus the alpha Karina because I thought oh this is really so prominent I wonder what's around there and I did a plate salt on pix insight to see okay
I've never seen any of these things before oh just for curiosity's sake I wonder what's up there
uh lower the southern Southeast Horizon of course I had to see Omega Centauri and I wanted to see Centaurus a but
Centaurus they hadn't come up over the horizon in the South yet and Omega Centauri was very low but again it's big
it was really big I was very impressed again this is from my DSLR
um here and I just because the night was closing I was getting tired and I didn't
really know what else to look at so I just sort of aimed it randomly and then played salt let's see what did I get so I got this
and uh so it's constellation puppis which is visible from 45 degrees north where vermontreal is but uh below this
line is invisible to us so anything around here I could never
see it here would be just at the Horizon so I'm not going to see it anyways I thought that's pretty interesting hmm I
was curious and here's a dedicated picture of uh Etta Carina and some other stuff again
it's not a long exposure it's only 53 so it's six minutes
with my camera and what a rich region of the Milky Way oh man it's it's it's overwhelming it's really really I was so
impressed and then this is Crux which is like on the flag of New Zealand and Australia
and many others and the coal Sac the dark nebula and the Jewel box cluster there's so much other stuff
and then I also did another picture with Alpha Centauri and and had our beta Centauri I just thought I really needed
a picture of those guys too and my final picture and the sky was something more familiar although it was
on its side and upside down so I thought okay I'll take a picture of Orion why not it's so Ryan's in the Northeast
never seen that location before it's pretty cool and my last picture
um is Christmas morning very sad
because it's so beautiful oh so beautiful very sad to come home thanks
very much for listening and thanks again for the uh the invitation the war welcome Scott always a pleasure oh
anytime anytime that is great uh so would is this a trip that you would make
again back to New Zealand oh one day it was a triple this one was a trip of a lifetime we spent about a year planning
and organizing for it for the hike I had to go to the gym a whole bunch of stuff had to arrange for you know work and
stuff my daughter got permission from her company to work remotely but it's an 18-hour time difference so it was uh oh
yeah lots of jet lag lots of jet lag yeah it took it takes about a week to get normal again and then a week to get
yeah when we came back we didn't really leave the house for about five days it was so dark and crappy and snowy and
yeah just ordered pizzas no no point of leaving no
Russell thank you so much for coming on no no problem thank you that's great we
are going to uh take about a 10 minute break here um and uh so it's perfect time to get a
sandwich take a break stretch your legs uh get a coffee whatever and uh we'll be back with more Global
Star Party great thanks Scott thank you
thank you
foreign [Music]
[Music]
foreign [Music]
that is um uh that was a fascinating creator that I learned about just today
uh the Hiawatha Creator it's a a candidate you know they don't know for a
fact that it was an impact crater but uh everything kind of leads to
um uh you know that that it was something that impacted it probably some sort of a
uh you know a metal asteroid that that may have hit
um there was uh some speculation that it was a younger event than than what
they've determined it to be now some earlier article articles that I saw
about it uh from 2018 indicated that it
would have happened during the time when humans roam the Earth but they now know that it's much older at this point so
um but there are craters uh all over the world and there's probably more yet to
be discovered so but uh our next speaker
um is none other than uh Cesar brawlow uh so we're gonna go down to Argentina
and bring Caesar on uh find out what he's doing on his uh
from his Rooftop in Buenos Aires Caesar are you with us yes of course can
you hear me good can you watch me okay I don't see you yet but uh
let's see you see him yeah he's Frozen in Time
yeah you've got a it's a great picture of you looking at us
without movements without movement okay yeah let me check
I try stop
video and maybe maybe it's too much for my computer
let me check sorry can you hear me we can hear you perfectly okay okay yeah
your audio is good yeah I my idea is have a video too but
it's it's like Adrian say a great picture for of me [Music]
but the problem is that I don't know why sorry I have this problem
totally totally frozen the the image yes I can see the same and I can't change
the camera um maybe if you prefer Scott
um I I you want to try coming on a little bit later
and I return again what one second but yes now it's totally
impossible to change something is is uh my computer is like uh window uses
restarting or okay yeah
that is the live stacking let me check ah yes this this is why this is too much
sorry okay yes yes let me all right Caesar so what
we'll do is we'll uh we'll go to Daniel Barth to talk about yeah after these
project and then we'll come back to you yeah in 15 minutes I return Yes I I check
this Yes sounds good okay okay all right all right
thank you Daniel are you available
you're I think you're muted there
I'm sad is that better that's perfect hey there we go hi everybody and uh
thanks Scott for bringing me on um yeah thank you I've got just the most exciting project going on
um many of you are probably familiar with uh my books star mentor and astronomy for educators
um astronomy for educators really pleased to say is now the uh number one free astronomy lab manual in the world
wow about 9 000 schools in more than 60 countries are using it wow
congratulations one of the uh one of the activities that I wrote in there that I
was like I want to do this someday uh it was called the eratosthenes project eratosthenes of course a Greek
mathematician and Scholar uh from about 2300 years ago uh he did his work in the
3rd Century BC uh he was a Greek so he was living in Egypt which was part of
the Greek Empire at the time under Alexander and he was the first fellow to
successfully measure the circumference of the earth which was very exciting
because the tools he had he had basically uh a stick and a ruler and
that's what he had to measure and his trick was very simple he picked two cities Alexandria and sain which is now
called Aslan by the way uh that are almost directly north south of each other along the Nile
because he was the librarian at the library of Alexander uh Alexandria he's
like one of the most famous Librarians ever he had access to all the maps and the cartography the Egyptians had been
sailing and doing uh Commerce along the Nile for thousands of years by the time he was there and so they knew quite
precisely the north south distance between the port city of Alexandria and the City of scyene in
scyene on the summer solstice it was known there was this wonderful phenomena when the sun was at noon on the solstice
it would shine down into the wells without any Shadow so in other words cyan is on the equator and the sun would
be directly overhead eratosthenes had this brilliant idea if
we go about a thousand kilometers North to Alexandria and on the summer solstice
both cities someone said oh put a vertical rod on the ground and measure
the length of the Shadow from there we can get the outed well we
kind of call the altitude the angle of the sun off the Horizon and because the
Earth is curved these two places on the Earth would have a different solar angle
and the difference in the angle would be the percentage it would be proportional to the angle to the Earth's core and so
biracial and proportion very simple relatively sixth grade math he was able
to go ahead and get the circumference of the earth he was able to do it accurately to within about two and a
half percent of the modern value well I had this great idea G if you're an educator you can have contact another
school in a distant City and you could try this project on your own well so it stood until my friend and
colleague David setterberg who's a professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue he said hey Daniel I'm taking a
group of physicists and physics teachers down to Colombia and I'd like to do this experiment with
you I said that sounds like a brilliant idea you know what would be great if we could get lots of people around the world to
do it with us and I said I know a guy I know Scott Roberts I I have friends
with the global star party and so what we'd like to challenge everyone in the
GSP audience to do is participate with us we're having the international
measure of the earth day it's actually a week March 12 to 18. we made it a week
because we want a chance for everybody to have clear skies and what we're going to ask people to do
is simply take a stick and place it
vertically you might wonder what this little thing is on top of here I'm trying to get this this is a little bubble level
this is a uh you know 99 cent Bubble Level uh you can find them at our found
out you can find them at RV stores which is great because RVs need to be level all the time these little stick-on
levels for about a dollar this is a dowel rod from a home improvement and because we're in America it's 36 inches
long as the yard most of you around the world if you went to a home improvement store would get something that was a meter long but the Brilliance of this
project is that the length of the rod doesn't matter we need to know the length of your Rod
we need to know the length of its shadow and we're going to measure the shadow when the shadow points due north so
you're going to need uh some sort of a compass uh your cell phone would do I use my old-fashioned lens attic Compass
here but you're going to draw a line on the ground that Points North South there's a variety of ways to do that
it turns out many buildings around the world especially schools are built with
the main building quite nicely aligned north south east west thank you very much so if your building is aligned your
sidewalk is aligned so finding a north-south line is very very easy
yeah the experiment is quite forgiving if you're within a degree or two it's
fine it's going to give a good result because the Sun at the top of its Arc doesn't change altitude very much for
several minutes right around local noon so we're all going to measure this one the shadow crosses that north-south line
that means we're essentially all measuring at the same time of day solar
noon right we used to have AM and PM literally anti-meridian the sun is in
the east coast Meridian the sun is in the west and we're all measuring at local solar noon
so all we need then is your latitude and longitude and we're going to be having
uh we're still working on this this project came up rather quickly about 10 days ago but we're going to have a
Google form for everybody to put in uh your name if you'd like or your school that's doing this and to put in your
latitude longitude the length of your measuring Rod the length of your Shadow and uh the time of day and that's all we
need we're going to compare each measurement to everybody else's
one of the interesting things about eratosthenes he used only two cities so he proved the Earth is round along that
north-south line but you can measure the circumference of a potato at the center
and it would be a circle but the potato is not necessarily round we're going to
go beyond what eratosthenes did because if we compare all these measurements to each other and we keep getting a
consistent circumference from the earth which is our hypothesis we're quite certain it's true we're going to not
only prove that we can measure the circumference of the earth accurately we're going to prove the Earth is a
sphere this experiment if the Flat Earth people are right friends this experiment won't
work at all everyone will have the same solar altitude and the solar angle and we won't get any valid result at all but
if we're all getting a very comparable measurement for the circumference of the earth we want to do two things we want
to beat eratostheny's record of being accurate to within two and a half percent and we want to prove the Earth
as a sphere which will be a wonderful experiment and I know we all we all as
astronomers we all hear from people every day the Earth is really flat you can't prove it's round yes we can and
we're going to do it together uh you want as many people across the globe to do this as can and this very
simple uh method of getting your uh your gnome on is what it's called or you're
measuring Rod here vertical is to use a bubble level this requires two people one to hold to stick vertical and one
two measured it's a shadow but a lot of US amateur astronomers are folks who
work by ourselves so I've developed a method for us and it's a one-person
method and all I've taken here I've taken the top of my camera tripod and
I've bolted a ruler to it this is a steel 30 centimeter ruler uh
you could use a stir stick uh you could use anything you want in the United States camera tripods are all quarter 20
I'm assuming that in much of the rest of the world they could be metric fitting but it doesn't matter all you need is
one uh fitting nut here and your ruler why are we doing this because when we go
ahead and we snap this into the top of the tripod what we want here is we want
the rod to be far enough away from the tripod that the shadow of the tripod and the shadow of the measuring Rod don't
interfere with each other and what we've done here we have a a rod with a steel
eye screw you could use a cutbook one of those hooks and what I'm going to do is
I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to this isn't oh this isn't vertical is it no but if I now go ahead and raise my
tripod eventually my rod is swinging free this is now a
pendulum it's a pendulum Bob and when it stops swinging I'm going to lower it down so
it just touches the Earth and we want it touching right on top of that north-south line that we've drawn
on the ground now we have the tripod acting two jobs it's keeping the stick
perfectly level and it's holding it for us so we don't need a partner and now when that shadow
sweeps across the north-south line we can chalk it and we can measure from the base of the rod to the tip of the Shadow
and we can get a very nice result thank you very much I've mentioned a one meter
Rod it doesn't really matter as long as we know the ratio between the
height of your no mon rod and the length of your Shadow as long as we know the accurate ratio of the two we can get the
solar angle quite nicely so although we've used a one meter Rod if you want to use I don't know if you want to use
something that's 30 centimeters long or whatever it'll work just fine uh and again this is a very simple
experiment but I think highly significant because what we're doing friends
is we're Gathering people around the world to do citizen science and we're not just involving you our GSP
friends but I'm also going to be reaching out to a lot of School
colleagues and uh School groups and Science teaching groups that I'm I'm I'm
a member of I don't know 50 or 60 of these groups on various social media so
I'm going to be reaching out to schools but I want a solid citizen scientist
group participating with me and I frankly couldn't think of a better group than the GSP audience oh that's great
because Global star party people are involved we get out and we do stuff the nice thing
about this experiment you know you chalk your north-south line it should be a level Surface by the way
you chalk your north-south line and you go out a couple minutes before noon bang
you chalk where the tip of your Shadow is where the base of the tripod is and
mesh that with a tape measure and I will have a we'll have a Google form available we're
still writing that like I said this is literally just blossomed within the last
10 days uh I do have on my YouTube channel which is astronomy for educators I have a couple of videos for you uh I'm
also putting together a Dropbox where I'll have the links for the videos and
the student worksheet paper which is essentially a how-to but the videos will
guide you through it it's a very short easy experiment to do and I hope you
will join me because I want as many thousand people from as many different countries as we can get I want to make
this a truly Global effort and I want to show that individual citizen scientists
and students can do meaningful powerful science and to get people involved with
this because we've all had somebody come up to us and say oh the Earth is really flat and sometimes you figure that
they're doing it just to poke at you but participating in this we could say oh no
it's round I did the experiment I helped prove it right that I think is a merit badge
worth pursuing absolutely I did it with the stick yes so uh especially uh Caesar
I'm hoping you'll get your your friends uh down in South America we'll have
people in uh in your Coachella and Brazil yeah in Brazil and uh my friend
Dr setterberg will be in Columbia and uh I know we have audience across Europe
and Asia I'd like everybody to give this a shot between March 12 and 18. we need
to know the day the time the length of your measuring Rod the length of your Shadow and your GPS coordinates and
that's all we really need and what we're gonna do unlike eratosthenes who just compared one measurement to the other
we're going to be measuring what we hope will be comparing thousands of measuring
points together with each other we're going to group them by longitude
and we hope this is going to be a great result we'll provide all the data publicly once
we get it all collated and we'll distribute that through explore Alliance
and we'll give you the spreadsheet either filled or blank so you can
manipulate and play with the data yourself and this I think should be
I think it should be exciting for everyone to participate in it's very easy uh and uh we're doing it during the
daytime I don't know if that's your real dedicated hardcore astronomy nut maybe that's anathema to you but I hope you'll
uh you'll stay up at noon and give it a shot but uh I think this is going to be a fascinating project and of course if
you have questions you're welcome to email me at astronomy for educators I'll get materials for Scott to put up on the
explore website uh within a day or two um this is also a busy time of the
semester for me but we're gonna get this done and we're going to have all these materials available for you and we'll be
on a future uh Global Star Party when we can show you all these materials available to download and I'm hoping I
can get everybody here to commit and say yes you've got me saying yes my only problem
is I live in the state of Michigan USA and cloudy for months so we'll hope that
there's enough sun in those six days to cast a shadow I think that you know
um you get a bunch of people in Michigan uh to do it in the same day who are you
know uh at least 100 miles apart north south distance then we can we can use
that data later we'll be happy to add to the database we know that everyone isn't
going to be able to have clear skies on magically on March 12 to 18. we know
some people are going to be clouded out for the week um but we're just hoping we can get lots
of people to say yes to commit to making a a stab at this and basically what are
we asking you for here you need a you need a broomstick right or a shovel handle uh or a closet dollar Rod that
you hang your curtain you hang your uh closer I was gonna use a baseball bat myself a baseball bat would work
uh these these labels they have a little sticky and uh my friend Kent Mart said
well Dan couldn't you stick a level on a baseball bat with a piece of chewing gum I'm like yes you could
so there's really there's really that's the solution a little expense uh
involved in this and most of this stuff we all have oh I have a ruler I have a tripod uh and with a tripod you don't
need the level it levels it's self-leveling because it's a it's a the rod now becomes a pendulum problem and
then all we need is a tape measure and we're solid we're good so it's so easy I
think you're gonna beat um uh Aristotle's record here I think that yeah
I think there will be plenty of astronomy clubs if we present that um this challenge even if all they
want to do is do their part to prove flat earthers wrong they will jump at the chance to do it and um I think this
is going to be an excellent thing you can Count Me In excellent I have all sorts of stuff I got a couple baseball
bats I'll do it I'll figure something out outstanding and uh if you I'll
spread the word if you're a member of an astronomy club reach out to them we're also reaching out to the news media here
we're going to reach out to NPR and some of the local news for hope it's going to be picked up nationally I would be
thrilled if we got uh 10 000 data points uh I'll I'll be excited with a thousand peritosis had two I
uh you know a hundred would be successful a thousand would be glorious
beyond that uh with Sublime miracle and it's going to be some substantial
computer processing power if you have a thousand points and you want to compare each to the other even if you're banding
them by longitude um that's a lot of computer processing power
um but uh we have some people committed to help us with that and uh we are we
are literally working on this uh every day uh David setterberg and I
um and we're going to get the data out to you as soon as we can and I'm just
thrilled Scott heard about this and he was like this
it was like giving him like that first telescope maybe not but he's seriously
friends his eyes just lit up ah this is great better than the first time I can't think of any other project other
than the dark sky initiative where those of us with sqml meters are going around
measuring dark sky yes and sending it through an app on our phone or on a
website saying these skies are not as dark as they were in 2015. I've gone to yep I've gone to
three or four different places with my meter and um I've noticed the numbers are down or
up well down on the sqm meter this is a very similar project and I think uh I
said it before I'll say it again I think there are a lot of astronomers astronomy enthusiasts science you may not
you know you may not be as big an astronomy enthusiasts as myself or anyone you see here but you love science
I think you love this and yes I think this was an excellent idea we're hoping
that we can take a look at some other famous ancient experiments and we can
every six months or so we can do another one of these but we really thought this
was one of the crowning achievements of intellect and astronomy in the ancient
world and we saw what better project to start with and uh we're just we're just
really excited about it and we're gonna we're gonna make this as big as we can make it
um so I are just committed to that uh Dr
cederberg by the way runs a program called uh Saturday morning astrophysics
at Purdue and uh I've been uh very pleased to be a guest there a
couple of times and uh he's become a good friend and a colleague and we just
we just both looked at this and we're like let's jump in so uh we're letting our enthusiasm carry
us along and I hope you're enthused too and um
as you get closer you know with the website and all of that right and we can
do uh maybe just for this one project we do like a little show sure and I I ran
this out in my backyard um this last weekend and measured the
solar angle and then I compared it to what stellarium gave me at my precise uh GPS I got a an error of just 0.7 percent
doing it this way with with the stick and the ruler uh and I was I was like
wow can I get with into an app I got within seven tenths of a percent of an error uh so I was I was so excited I
think we're gonna get great results and it's so easy to do it requires
um we're gonna do all the hard Maths for you the trigonometry will be built into the spreadsheet but this is really stick
in a ruler and that's all all that's required and we're going to break down uh we have a
student worksheet which breaks down the actual math for you if you want to get into that uh and uh like I said that
will be available in the next couple of days on uh on explore Alliance website
and uh I'm just I'm so thrilled with everybody's response here if you have questions friends or you like to know
how to get more people involved you're welcome to email me at astronomyforeducators gmail.com and I
will respond to every query I do respond to every query I get so and if you haven't picked up the astronomy for
educators book it's available free uh just put it into any search engine astronomy for educators comma Daniel
Barth and it will pop up for you uh and uh I would appreciate you download it
and offer it to friends it's free and the new book star mentor of course uh I
hope you'll take a look at that too because that's the guy guide for you experienced folks to teach the Next
Generation and it's the guide for the Next Generation to become tomorrow's experienced amateur
astronomers that we here at the GSP audience so wonderfully represented
anyway Scott thank you so much thank you okay so it looks like we've got a good
video at this point a good connection with Cesar brolo uh Caesar I'm going to
give you the spotlight here there you go yes yes no only unfortunately I I'm
using my reflex reflex camera for streaming but I don't know why maybe
it's too much the the streaming my idea to be to have a better quality
video to show the setup well let's don't work and don't work because uh maybe
it's as much for this computer in the in the balcony um but well I use in my the camera of
the of the laptop now and work and we don't need to change this at this moment
because is it in the way where we have where we have uh some image uh tonight
can you see the comments no no no no no no
um the comment here is really really long yes it's the magnitude of the comet
is really low maybe tomorrow or tonight but I need to go to the raft
with the biggest telescope [Music]
in my apartment my balcony is I have a a
good connection but uh many friends this is a rare moment where something
not visible in the southern sky is high in the northern sky we don't have that
very often yeah we have been basking we usually get beat out yeah it's usually
the other way around that's right no of course and something that that is really
it's a joke that me are talking about falling stars because something is
impossible to see in middle of the city are fighting stars and
um and uh but today today I I'm talking about the the
the setup of my from my balcony I try I try maybe
maybe I can change my camera I try to don't
release everything if not now for you is
you need to find capella and it's between capella and Mars is this yes
right position that you have we have here absolutely yes yes yes maybe I I
maybe I'll I'll lose my my
um my connection of video connection because maybe you can you can hear me good and I can hear you but the problem
that I have tonight is something about the video connection um
and yes I think that maybe in two days
I'll I'll kind of point to the to the
but I think that this maybe tonight is the is the last opportunity
the problem is that um for example a problem where we have
about uh you know about um the the media about the common here
in Argentina all media talking about the green big comments and they confusing to
the people and the people ask to about the the situation of a big comment
where a big green yeah they're expecting a huge comment really bright yeah yes yes
we are sorry we sent our media clippings down to you in Argentina and Brazil
um it would be a good case study in in search engine optimization to see how
this Comet which it's a beautiful nice comment and yes it photographs green
many comments do okay um yeah right and so uh but this has
become the green Comet and it just uh it just caught the attention of uh of the
population and there's really nothing wrong with that you know
um
then we have to answer for that well why you said it was green I didn't say it
well the same thing was true of Ali's comment Adrian yeah a lot of people were
expecting a really super big comment from Hallie and uh you know I was just
honored it did turn out to be a very nice comment uh uh Halley's dead and um
uh but you know nothing like compared to Comet height
or hail Bop you know hail Bop you could see in daylight you know so well even
yeah hail Bop you could see in daylight now even three years ago or two and a
half we had this Comet come along um that we called Comet neowise and that
one turned out to be that was a nice one too very nice fairly easy to photograph yeah so yes you know comparing to
even a recent uh oh do we lose Cesar yeah um yeah well
even compared to neowise this Comet wasn't much to look at you could easily
spot it with a with an eight second image if you just pointed your camera in
the right spot you could see the fuzzy Dot and a lot of astrophotographers got
some really great you know you had uh you had Gary Palmer on earlier who had a
really good shot of it and he the shot that he had before where you could see
the the various Tales I mean there have been some beautiful images that was cool
and uh yesterday so yeah yeah I gave you two live interviews for two different
Brazilian channels so this is my presentation today did when I was in the
library interview were you ever telescopes and I was saying it is
difficult to find it's not to be a a quam so that you can see with naked the
eye you need the equipments but they showed the Maze of the green comments
it was reading Wing comments awesome yeah yeah and that you know these
beautiful images get used you know and I know that our public tends to think
um oh if I look in the sky I'm gonna see this and it's like no you you're gonna see a smudge and and
actually one of the images that I took the um we were selling
celebrating our Martin Luther King day here in the states um I used a wide angle image and I
looked at where M51 and in 101 are and notice that there's a similarity in how
these two galaxies look they're just sort of smudges in my picture and so was
the green Comet they were all smudges and so that taught me well if I'm
Messier and I'm looking for comets and I run across a Galaxy
I think it's a comment because it certainly looks like it could be one until I come back tomorrow and it
doesn't move from its location whereas a comet can move within a span of a couple of hours
so it allowed me to it allowed me to think well this is what it must have been like
to hunt comets you know if you're and I don't want to get his first name wrong Charles Messier I believe
um Scott or Marcello yeah so he's hunting comets
these are they're these fuzzy balls that um move in the sky as opposed to
everything else that's a fuzzy ball that doesn't move right of course and then we put the telescopes on them but um so you
did your part Marcelo to try and uh stem the tide I will show you the expectation in my
presentation I will show the video we'll see what's crazy they did okay all right
well um Marcella why don't we go ahead and um uh
start with your presentation and uh we'll give uh Caesar a few more minutes
uh so that he can uh finish his um his segment behind the big old Comet
yeah right no we're we are kidding he's uh he will
show us he will show us some other things stage marchella thank you
I will show here let's see we are doing
yeah yeah I will show first we organize it too how to reach achieve this one in
a very in a community far from here that she was organized by one of the members
of the groups and what is fantastic you have a lot of kids that participate this
was the experience in this in a Public Square very far from downtown
and she organized an activity with a lot of kids there yeah it easy is the girl
that was responsible her name is Stefan he was there with a lot of kids for them
right the first time that they looked the wow in telescopes
we organized in a Public Square here downtown right and a lot of people
participate is your telescope that we are using but
thank you thank you and a lot of people always there participate in this
experience that you had there again we recognized Friday and Saturday
and Monday three days being sequence this is a wonderful
picture that oh yeah that is a fantastic experience because you see that the
family is participate right and what is most important that the kids that brings
your parents to see because they first arrived the kids and
later in the parents here is the position of the Comet for us here
in our region Brazil well I think that's almost the same for a season it is loud
for him probably then whatever and we try it yesterday and I will show one of
the like I gave two live interviews one in during
and the other it was a live present alive during our activity to find the
comet at night is this one here that you show
green comments I said that you can't see it by naked
the eye by today
also wearing green clothes yes [Applause]
you see the pictures that they they showed when I was saying that was
difficult to find because we had clouds also in these guys
alive [Music]
I I was talking about it how to find the department and there was
an experience many people here but it's raining a lot here today is raining yesterday you had
you had clouds and the prediction is that you have about the image that they
showed I I was talking about how to find this kind of show this amazing I was saying
that's why it's difficult to find these economists
this is something that today it's wonderful though that they are
giving attention to um to the sky and learning astronomy you
know as they they gave they ever they invited us to participate in life
presentations and then they show you see the pictures that they showed but it's important is
that to us possible that I could talk about how to find departments so if you
belong class of with telescopes and the features to find the by Nicki and that's
probably will be impossible
here is and now I will talk a little about this
one that is a Country Concrete that's saying English upon the rights the name
of the meteorite it's conduit in English I don't know it's correct word in
English for the meteorites yeah it's a contrite right on the right yeah Android yes what's happening diesel man he was
he lives very far from downtown and in 2010
and 19 of June 2010 yeah we have a game
in the world cup and he was watching the game and he lives in a very simple house
very fast over here and we everybody here in the region saw a big variable
that back yeah Passing Sky from Main seed salt and
during one week I participating the TV in many programs
interview and I ask people if they found because there was a big Fireball have a
big explosion and the one week later here uh
it's here near where he lives they they have a high school and he with this
to the teacher and said that he she he saw coming from the space
wow it's so he saw the meteorites falling yeah I think that I will show
you 10 10 meters far from him 10 meters yeah 10 meters
very near very near yeah I was here I I will show now this is a
TV Report with him let him receive uh why is not too Worthy in the mornings
what's happening oh all right there you go
all right here we go here what's happening
he's saying there's a fireball everybody was talking about the fighting ball here
after one week he is
in a very small house
that he found
is it
I had the opportunity to meet him soon he founded he announced that he found
a fantastic moment where he lives only having 10 000 people
living there are watching he saw he saw Delights in front of him
and then his son and then he saw something
he falls
in the same day he was afraid because he saw something coming from space he was
afraid something like this yeah yes
that is amazing that is an amazing story Marcello yeah he's a full-time Sky I
figured that to have a few people that saw a little rights falling in front of
me yeah it looks like it's um
that one that one side you can see the uh the Stony interior
I'm trying to change the representation
then you have a many journalists that arrived here we imagine
a Siege of 10 000 people that live is there very small seats Audi hotels were full they received the
people from different many counts of the world uh his name is the guy the person that
found is he gave interview for a Japanese TVs
[Applause] and the city are full of people trying
to find these material rights there and here is the meteorites yeah they they know now as the vahi side
meteorites because he was found there I think that you have few persons in the
century like the because I think that from 20th century into entrance Center I
think that you can count in our fingers the numbers of the people that saw a
meteorite falling in front of them and it was very near man it's something
finger I almost see if he I didn't talk with him it was difficult to believe
that this happened then I he was very happy because he he I
helped him to sell the meteorites because many people tried to get meteorites from him and I said that he
can get a lot of money with the material rights if you want to to sell and then with the money that he received he
bought a new house for him oh that's great money from Heaven
if you say that the look for him came from the sky
that's right and now the news is that too on them I don't know if everybody knew about snow
they discovered two new moons in Egypt there now has 92 moons there's a planetary
with muscles in the solar system 92 moons 92 Saturn has 83 now moons
14. [Music] and we're here with one yeah and we with
one 92 months in Egypt it's it's a lot
of moves most of them are very small but almonds
and again yeah the illustration is open for our
international meeting in 27 29 April I hope all of you can
visit us here participate you'll be very welcome here in Brazil we have a place for everybody that is coming you'll be
fine I just got my passport so I can actually come now you could go
we have hotels here every kind of logistics support we meet you at today
and bring you to our city
Adrian they will take very very good care of you I've had this experience it's wonderful
I will begin to save my pennies now that's right
wonderful and this is the magazine Sky's app that's it is a is is on the this
Edition is fantastic
we are waiting your articles for the magazine it would be very well yes yes
yes I really I like to collaborate really yes maybe it's okay
telescope techniques and apps wow fantastic it'll be fantastic yes Optics
yep I have some ideas to put to pin and um we'll have to send a couple your way
so I um yeah I will be doing some writing this year
I I want to do more writing and sharing of the experiences I've had running
around state of Michigan and Beyond trying to uh as a you know the theme
that I settled on chasing Dark Skies I'm kind of using that theme as a uh yeah
kind of uh calling card for the you know type of uh type of landscape photography
I like to do thank you thank you very much thank you
Marcelo thank you that's great well I'll see you sorry
hey John uh Cesar are you uh are you Imaging right now do you have something
yeah absolutely absolutely I am imagine in black and white
um because I am using this camera um I was uh the first thing that I um
you know I am ever ever in danger because my idea to to make a live image
are a little crazy in in a in a show I think I I expect that the people can
pardon me pardon me the the my
you know it's a live image and sometimes the things are in a in a way where not
all function very well the first thing that is very important for a setup
um in summer uh it's something that unexpected for the people because you are thinking all
the time in you in Winter okay you have
um in summer uh you normally
um forgot forget sorry totally the problem of the view in the Optics
or in the sensor of cameras in summer because Summer normally is hot weather
dry but if you something that I experiment
tonight is that I use the higher air conditioner of my apartment very high
very strong very cold I'm all my equipment
uh was very very cold when I put I get outside to the
balcony tonight is a very very warm and
humid night and the first thing the third problem
that we have I sorry that I have is that my refractor Optics
was totally forget because condensing
because it was called and you know and I forget totally the
situation because you never expect this in summer
okay and uh while when you
have this problem I I was lucky to have another tool to change in the moment
over my my ex's 100
and of course here I I show you
the setup of my ex's 100
that is my mode and something tonight well of course that I change my
refractor to 80 millimeters to this natural graphic
one um four and a half inches
or 114 millimeters
with race with focal razor of
4.38 and this is this is work very well for tonight because I have the problem
of condensation but in the opposite of winter in Winter you go to the humid and
cold night from inside and condensate of all over your your uh neuro Optics and
your tube yes about the the viewpoint of the night but tonight I I
received the result thing my all my equipment was very cold when I go outside okay
I condensed a lot of humid over the sensor the tube and the Optics
but now I can show you
now I'm this is you can see now
yes yes we can the beginning of the Orion Nebula yeah
talking pictures of only uh eight seconds I'm using a planetary
camera today the the in this times the planetary cameras
normally have a big time Big size of a big cell and are more sensitive and
uh most of the of the cameras work very
well for enabled us especially in this short tubes uh and this is very very
good because I haven't found so much better than uh
than uh a cell phone is more easy to use are cheaper
um have an excellent utilities for guiding for the people
that make guiding for nebulance live view of nebulas in your computer or uh
to make of course planetary image and this is very interesting because do you
have in cheaper cameras in the market you have a lot of different cameras and
you have the opportunity to have a small Observatory with other reflex camera
very liked um you know with the opportunity to to
make from the city or of course in much better if you are in the rural Farm
areas or direct Sky areas do you have the opportunity to to make uh good
pictures for example with this I took I took it in in black and white now but
um maybe I can show you next week how icon process
I can process these pictures and we can get a beautiful color image of Oreo
nebula in another way something that tonight I'm is the premiere for me
looked up people is that the
the beta version for cell phones we drive
the exos mount with BSM
months and I'm really happy because works very very well I'm I'm impressive
with the better version because works it's very very intuitive very easy to to
to use uh work perfectly in my in my cell phone my cell
phone is a medium Android medium level Android cell phone and work properly without
glitches without you know problems and
is something sorry that I don't know if you you can see this yes sharing yes I
was sharing the the screen but I don't know if if you can see the questions here yes
yes I'm really happy uh if this is the beta version I think that that this is
great it's easy to use um very very as I tell you very
sensitive individual yeah I'm um really
it's a part of the setup very interesting because you know it's so handling your cell phone
um I started to use the the Wi-Fi version not not the app the not yet the
Bluetooth version but I'm happy really really and this is
something that uh it's um is a very important part of the setup
um really the possibility to to make something like uh
nebula from the city to show to the to the to the people
uh next week I was in the in the beach area of Buenos Aires and same image of
Orion that I showed you today to tonight was incredible different level like a
picture each each brain was like a amazing picture of Orion
very low polluted area in a farm area near to the beach very
nice and um another family that came with us in
the house the kids was totally amazed first of all I showed with the same
telescope with Ibis here and they say okay it's great and you know when you
show a nebula for a kid or for a third fever or a weaver of of a water of the
sky from the first view of a nebula you need to explain
you need to explain it that you can see something like a ghost like a a between
the Stars like like um you know like a cloud something cloudy between the Stars you need to
explain and people say okay but but when you show in in a screen
they told me come on I can't believe that it's incredible and this is very important and you know this is all set
up that that you need
the moon tripod and a small tube very small too
with a camera or with your eyepiece
and come on the sky here is you know that is impossible this is kind
you do a lot of astrophotography in the impossible though yes yes mostly
yes yes mostly of our astrophotography is are from here from from the city
um do you when you finish the the pictures I know that most most of
of times I use um I use in pigs inside or cereal to
make maybe do you have you need more work to finish your picture to process
your picture but yes it's something that is great because the the final results
in European in your city let's say come on I can see maybe now I can count I can
count maybe one two three four six maybe with it in the part of the sky like I
can see maybe 15 stars tonight no more than 15 Stars
yes yes and maybe nine one time I I take
a measure of of uh the level of important sky and was
9.3 another time it was nine two nine feet and five all times over nine
that's wonderful well Cesar thank you for sharing uh your uh rooftop astronomy with us and uh
Pleasures I look forward to seeing the final processed image of that Orion Nebula absolutely yes yes last week I
I'll show you the the final dresses thanks a lot have a good night thank you thank you good night okay okay so uh
Adrian you are up yep I um and I'm ready and you're ready
I yep I put together um because the theme that we have is uh falling stars
um so I modified my um
I just can't get over that uh that guy saw a meteor fall 30 feet away from him
okay
I I wonder if one of those nights I would get that opportunity yeah yeah to
uh see because it I'd be more worried about it hitting something and uh yeah
it's coming it's coming down cars and people yeah I was down pretty fast so
yeah I I want it to be a fun occasion not you know you know take this picture right
here if this thing if it's not moving at all in the sky and it's just getting brighter yeah and then you go okay this
might be something coming to me and then you finally see the streak and it splashes down in the water
do I go try and find it and get it or do I just call somebody and say there's a
meteor over here and uh and wait for the wait for the more yeah
I think I personally would go and find it you know whether or not I got to keep it that's a different story but uh yeah
I would like to be the guy that um I'd like to try to get it you know it would be uh it'd be interesting you go into
this murky water and yeah that might be that that could be it might be prohibitive but it you know it might be
cold yeah depending on the time I think this this is obviously there were still
thunderstorms going on and and I'll explain the uh the luck of the image
um yeah I like using my initial slide for chasing dark skies and adapting it
to you know if we have a different theme where the word Dark Skies may not quite
fit but I'm still chasing something and in this in this episode of chasing Dark
Skies we're chasing meteors though falling star so I am going to
focus primarily on capturing them we've um we've had explanations of what
meteors are the meteorites that can sometimes hit Earth sometimes 30
kilometers what was it 30 what was it's got 30 meters third not
very far from yes there's a gentleman yeah 10 meters anyways 10 meters yeah
walked over picked it up and and made the news and um so my focus is going to
be how we if I want to take an image of a meteor you know during meteor showers a lot of
folks will tell me make sure you capture your images of meteors well that can be easier said than done but
it is possible now the story behind this meteor where you get really lucky you
just happen to see then to this day I think this is the brightest meteor that I've captured on
digital and it's early on in my Milky Way Imaging um
I caught the meteor but first I saw one go under the cygnus
region I was looking at the cygnus region I was Imaging towards the cygnus
region and the frame that I imaged was just above where the meteor
streaked across the sky so frustrated because I didn't catch her at that time I simply turned the camera back towards
the core the galactic center here and just started firing a few more shots
and um a gentleman that was with me says
wait did you see that meteor that was in the sky and I go where was it and I think I heard my camera stop the
exposure and he pointed towards the area where my camera was when I looked at the back of
my camera to um see what I had I saw that bright streak
next to the Milky Way so in that instance I
simply got really lucky because I didn't plan on shooting this was during it was July of
I want to say 2018 or 2019. and I do believe
perseids or Aquarius one of those meteors and and most likely Percy it was
rather bright and now if you go to a dark site this is
kitten Oklahoma where you can see the
um zodiacal light if you go in September you know during fall and
you can see the zodiacal light making an X with the Orion side of the Milky Way
interestingly enough we we learned earlier during Global Star Party about
the southern half now if you can imagine this is serious
which was visible in New Zealand if you go and this is 37 North
if you go about equidistant you would see cannabis through the ground and if
you go about equidistant to where Orion is in this picture on that side you
would begin to see the magellanic clouds but you would be staring directly through the ground in order to see those
um but in this image you can see I've got a couple of streaks here now I don't know whether or not this is
a plane I'll explain you know planes and you know do you know you have a meteor
sometimes you're not sure if you caught a meteor but if you look at this one where it's brighter in this part of the
line and then dimmer here that's a sure tell Telltale sign that you have a meteor in
your photo and when you go to a dark site you have a better chance of catching a meteor you
know all of these streaks over here I would say are satellites and this looks to be a plane color streaks with color
in them are often the lights of planes that are dashed lines too you know yeah and if
you get bad lines yeah yeah so um okay so this image turns out before I
put it here it turns out it's some of it some of everything satellites planes and meteors when you're in a place that's
dark um and you do this sort of wide angle nightscape
you contend with all three all the time um now when you know you're Imaging
during a meteor shower and you see the meteor streaking you know one after another as you're
Imaging then even if you've got a straight line like this if you saw it
streak across the sky and disappear then you you know you know that you captured
a meteor it may not look quite like a meteor if someone wasn't there but
you know rest assured it is and here's a here's a rare case where you've got like
two streaks parallel to each other um again it was uh it was a Percy it's
this zone is a high portal four Zone in uh Alcona County and we were treated a
friend of mine Dr uh Brian Adam which uh Scott I'd love to have do one of his
presentations on this show I'll have to talk to you about bringing them on sure and um he was there with me we just sat
and observed and we had our cameras going um he did a time lapse and of course I
did Stills and in all the Stills I got a lot of streaks from the meteors
um going through so it was it was amazing to watch and
it's also easier to capture these streaks in your photos if you are
you're setting your camera to go and you're doing during a very busy meteor
shower chances are a lot higher that you're going to catch something but if you're in some place dark
um I just noticed that every if you're not looking for the meteors every one or two you know you get one or
two meteors every half hour to an hour um they streak across the sky when you
least expect it if you're looking for a meteor chances are you will look into
place and the meteor will streak behind you then you'll turn around because someone will say ooh a meteor and then
you'll turn around and then another one will streak in the location where you were looking so meteors are best just
seen focus on one spot in the sky if you're gonna do it visually focus on one
spot in the sky near the radiant of if it's a meteor shower and you should see
them if you want to image them aim the camera there and you should get
a meteor so as this um slide shows some objects
streaking through the sky just aren't meteors so here's another one of my
based on the motivational poster Scott where you got it yeah
yeah so satellites and I do believe it's misspelled it should be one t but they
are everywhere and if you notice where I put the words you've got satellites
satellites everywhere there's a geosynchronous one I think they're all
geosynchronous those are dotted line ones right when you get the geosynchronous it's dotted
like this one cool and um yeah they they all
they are basically um the line is as long as your exposure
if you take a longer exposure the geosynchronous satellites become longer
in streaks in your uh with the pixel Insight might have
something you can take a whole lot of images and stack right the stacking software will get rid of because those
those don't show up in all of your images uh so it'll you know it'll basically
remove those streaks from your final image but this is a single image
that's really if you're not and uh yeah the place is where it's dark you can your camera
and a large 400 millimeter lens might be enough to get decent photos and
it's also enough to get satellites well what about wide field wide Scapes like
this oh you've got South you know Southwest bound
um whichever flight this is leaving a trail there's the dash lines but and as it
turns in you know our point of view the solid line ends up uh showing more
towards us and your beautiful Milky Way photo
gets interrupted or photobombed so what do you do you either take another one
which I won't show I won't show in this image but or in this
um presentation but you can just actually I can I'll
or maybe maybe not to let me see if I do this um somewhere
so all the pictures these are online it's my gallery yeah I love that Moon one I I brought it
mine in tonight I found it ah the one that looks like yours stop at that again
on the way out I want to show you yeah let me we'll do that so so here I am
sidetracking my presentation by looking for my Oklahoma stuff okay here we go
so so a tale of two pictures here's what here's that picture again
and you see the plane went through it so what did I do I took another exposure and now no
playing nice but this is a this isn't the same image processed it's just
another image so that's that's the answer to planes
sometimes is to just take another image and there you go just paint them out
yeah yeah sometimes
sometimes a pure image is one that you don't have to do any editing on yes uh
you know you oh there's something still there's a streak right here but uh it's this could be an artifact that um
that you you know from the noise reduction and things like that so so let's go back to
the presentation here's another thing you know this may be the plane are those
lightning bugs those are lightning bugs oh yeah yeah those are everywhere yeah
lightning bugs are everywhere I'm going to do my lightning bug picture one of
these days yeah and a lot of people love the picture
I think almost more so for the lightning bugs is that your home or Nebraska this
is not Nebraska this is near my home in Ann Arbor Michigan yeah when there was
this thing in the sky that um it was predicted to be underwhelming
back in 2020 but then it got brighter and brighter and brighter and it never
received a uh it never received a name other than
just the name of the sky survey that found it it was known as comet neo-wise
and um it got bright enough to easily image uh the green comet
according to Media Outlets you almost thought you'd see a repeat of this
but instead you know it'd be more like one of those it'd be a faint
this dot right here that faint fuzzy Dot or even better this faint fuzzy Dot
was that smaller well this is not an actual comment right
but it's as close to the appearance of the green comet in the sky just like
this yeah so for comparison the green comet
appeared in Knights games about this faint maybe even Vayner whereas neowise
was rather bright and very easy to spot so
you know am I taking shots at like Scott said and I like how you put it Scott the
talking around the comic got a lot of people to want to go outside to want to look up
um you know as you know a season amateur astronomers it wasn't it easy it
was it was not an easy yeah but we were always ready to temper expectations but
we do like the enthusiasm that people went after trying to see this green
Comet and unfortunately I think it it caused the fervor that just sort of
had people forget that we you know just three years ago we had a beautiful
common in the sky maybe not to the level of a hail Bop which was visible in the daytime
uh High Comet how you take was visible um kataki hi kataki thank you are you
kataki yeah I know it's the best comment ever it
went all the way across the sky yeah I I pronounced it the way America pronounces
it so it's hayakitaki I'm gonna try and put
that in what about homes homes turned on I had heard about Comet Holmes it was a good comment
um hail Bop Rings well in my mind because I was on a plane flight and got a chance
to see hail Bob above this you know above no you know high up above
um you know the ground so I saw the tail go that tail extended from The Horizon
to Horizon but the Bioshock wave was that amazing up
there it was I mean yeah the like full yeah the full
view of the comment was there on display I don't remember seeing the eye on tail
naked eye um I I'm pretty sure it was there and I'm pretty sure had I been into night
photography I would have had a picture to show everybody what I saw but
it remains in my memory but I do have a picture of this which is
one of these is more rare to catch I believe now unless you know what you're doing about thunderstorms Sprites
well Sprites and I think I I have one in a picture it's just a real small one but
um just the lightning itself the Sprites are even your right the Sprites are even more
um rare um all of them are harder to capture than meteors but capturing them at the
same time can be very difficult how long of an exposure is that that looks like an
atomic bomb went off that cloud it's uh 30 second exposure there are lots of
lightning though right that's a lot and then you've got a power yep and then you happen to have
a streaking meteor at the time that I took this exposure so and then you can tell to meteor just
by the way it brightens and then dims again as it goes down so so you got a
meteor you got this lightning bolt distant storm um
had a taken a you know less noisy or shot I don't know that I could do much
better I do have the image data and I may play around now that I know how to
mask and bring up this if I got enough if I have enough data here I could actually have a little
detail on those trees as well so this is an image I may go back and play around with
now this was my final slide where basically keep taking images and get
lucky I didn't know that that meteor was coming this I believe
a planer satellite and during the exposure the line curved and I think
it's just point of view where the plane or in this case you know was it a
was it the ISS um probably not because this is this is South
um I forgot to include in this presentation a picture where the ISS shows up it's just a streak
um but you know sometimes you're
you're just you're a little you're more lucky with your Imaging than good because you set the
camera to go um it's dusk still it's it's um
this is nautical twilight heading to astronomical Twilight I started the camera going for the 30
second exposure I turned around to look at the look toward the North and when I
heard the click I turned around and I saw that uh this Sprite meteor had
come right through the core I also noticed there are some streaks
there's a streak here too so you know is there a chance there's another or any other meteors was it uh
you know satellites going through this bright one was a no doubter and
um it was on the it was on the anniversary of the passing of one of our low brow
uh friends uh John causlin a year to the day that I stood out there
and so I looked up to the sky and I said John if
you're out there if you could send a meteor that would be great that I could have a copy you know I wanted to catch a
meteor in one of my images and I forget how long between
just asking and then turning around and seems like it was a couple of images
that I took and like just two images after I asked that I ended up catching
that meteor so so that one's named after John coslin now what I didn't capture
but enjoyed seeing a fireball streaks across the sky not long after this
just straight in the sky where it is like you saw you know it was a huge
streak um wasn't as big as the one that uh Marcello's friend found but um that came
all the way to the Earth but it was very impressive Fireball and I said well that one was just for me to
see I I caught something on camera so I'm happy with what I got the fact
that I didn't you know capture this huge bright one sometimes obviously it's just fun to see
those meteors when as we get into meteor season um Professor Kareem Jaffer showed you
all of the uh you know all of the times and the uh meteor showers and so there
will be plenty of opportunity to try and catch these streaks they may move fast they may be faint
um I have pictures of meteors that um that I captured that were faint
within the plane of the Milky Way or um you know just somewhere else I was I
was Imaging and um is it cold out there it is not not not according 36 is not
cold no we're in a heat wave um when I took that picture it wasn't
cold but um when uh like right now
trying to go outside last week we were we were routinely into single digits of
course we were opposite of you Cesar because you're you're turning on air conditioning we're turning on the heat
and we're bundling up so we will be switching again here soon though we're
this is February and in March we're going to start yeah the humidity
yeah we're going to start switching up again and then uh you all will get the Milky Way High overhead and we're going
to be seeing you with jackets if you're gonna have jackets on and you'll still be out there it'll be cold
and windy and you'll still go out you'll still be Imaging
um which true um astronomer
yeah so the cold will look forward to that camera right doesn't it help yes
thermal noise which right for the most part um the Astro cooled cameras you know
they always run at zero if you're running at zero Celsius
um you know so you're out there Imaging your camera doesn't emit as much thermal
noise it will after it'll still get warm you know the more frigid it is the you
know that at least that thermal noise but you still have to expose properly and you still got to get focused but at
least one source of noise doesn't going you know you can eliminate that as far as your images
um but then you got to keep your fingers and toes warm too so so there's some trade-offs
so that's it Scott okay don't forget your moon Adrian oh yeah
I promise I mean yours is definitely better but uh
this was an old shot well you know what I'm going to share my what I do okay
share screen to John there he's like in the cosmos well I you know I talked to a
few people um so here's a here's a moon I didn't show earlier
that's beautiful that's man what a shimmer yep now this was oh man
but you notice this this is a typical way to shoot the moon a single shot You
Gotta Be You know you lay your camera down on the rocks on the rocky Beach and you fire right at the Moon you get this
you get this wonderful shot and you get things that are out of focus here in the
sky and it's still a beautiful mood shot you say I want the moon to be in Focus
well this is a composite image to this is two images you know slapped together
and processed together yeah that's beautiful nice work and then but the immaculate shot now
this one is just um yeah this is what happens look at the
Earth sign on that yeah you you exposed for the Earth shine you get some stars and you try to make it a uh oh that's
beautiful I love that this is something you you would draw um that shape something like that
yeah there's uh astrophysicists Dr uh Becky
Smathers from the UK who sends tells her followers send me your toenail Moon
pictures I sent her this one and she loved it but the the immaculate
picture this one didn't come out as good as I was pretty close
yeah that yeah if I if I were to put the contrail in front of the Moon it would
have been even more realistic but um I wanted I went for
you know I did get some detail here and I wanted to go for what did I see when I was standing up you know look
overlooking this Lake here and it's hard to replicate Mother Nature's beautiful
work I mean absolutely is the certain glow the clouds passing through it it
really takes a lot of practice for me there it is there's so this is the one
that you're talking right dude I swear these are identical you're gonna trip
that is amazing we can um yeah if we want to so now you're seeing a picture
of the Moon with the clouds coming over front right in front and now you're
about to see what someone can do when they draw the image so uh John uh nice
uh turnovers oh thank you I'll turn it over to uh John if he's got that copy of
the uh image I just showed but the drawn version of it I'm curious to see how it
turned out so yes I'm in the cosmos this evening I
had a little time to get ready so you were on here Scott yeah I was I said I
think that both of you are drawn to the universe there's uh [Laughter]
sorry guys that might be a title for the for one of
the upcoming gsps drawn to the universe drawn to the universe that's right there's a blight up bright planetoid off
somebody that's why I'm getting the cool illumination it's uh field of view but
and then I'm sitting by my nice warm area so I can present there you go but
anyway so let's uh start it up tonight I have a couple
you know photos from different things uh that I took but I also have cell phone
photos hang on
so how is uh everything out there very nice in your neck of the woods raining
it's been raining all day wow all day we just had you know we just had uh quite a
bit of ice you know oh yeah and then uh and then we had some warm nights it was
last night it was you know after being you know in the 20s or even below 20 it was 61 degrees so
this giant temperature swing and all the snow melted it saturated the ground
and so I thought okay well if it stays clear for a while it's going to be out it's like a copy look at this
that's exactly like I think you and Adrian are like uh I don't know you know what is a mind uh melding or something
awesome you know the Vulcans were very um inquisitive but
so yeah that was uh why it was like amazed uh you know because it was so
close to yours it's like we have yeah so that's uh yeah we had the same idea
I wish we could share screens at the same time because if you um send me a pic I have
share screen yeah you know that's what's nice about the iPad is it allows you so that was
the cool um picture though and I did a couple drawings from that session my son had
told me dad you got to go out and look and I ran out and I was like Blown Away
I mean you know now that the weather's cleared here I just wanted to show you
this one I put together I'll wait wrong one all right it's still a good one not
really I didn't clip it I combined my photos for that one but I'm getting better
so here's some nice comments here some comments um talking about the lightning shot Adrian
that said it's a pod worthy uh beautiful images Adrian masterful nightscape
photography yo thank you Adrian sorry I couldn't resist everything evening
so this is a composite of my um like daytime Moon sketch
and and then the weather cleared so guys I added my rainbow because it was a
you know for hope that will get good clear skies and good seeing again and it
seems to have worked really for you guys too
I was surprised to walk home and see the winter uh hexagon and it was supposed to
be cloudy all day but uh really quick what is your email address I'm sending you the photo so you
can it's um star Crusader at gmail.com
that's s-t-a-r -kru S8 that's why I didn't come out
number eight and the r so star Crusader
gmail.com all right looks like it found you
beautiful so um you know with all these cameras and
stuff the old-fashioned pinhole camera Will Never Let You Down
this was a drawing I did of the Sun with my handmade
pinhole camera there you go so when you're hearing a solar eclipse
oh yeah that's what I I yeah that's beautiful I'll explain the drawing here so you can see the texture right that
was actually when I was gesturing it like dirt my dog kicked dirt into my
thing and I was like oh man and then it was like wait a minute this could be
like concrete so I just painted in around the chunks of rock and add it a little and then I
did my painting so this was really actually the view of my hand and then I
put the cool and the warm you know Hue on each side to give it a little feel like a chromatic aberration you know
which yeah
but you know that was a comment they said oh yeah you won't see much here and then when you look in the shadows of the
trees you see millions of solar discs you know little comets or um
yeah Comas uh because you see that through the trees then I ran and got my scope
but at first I just did this using my uh cell phone you know to capture it so I
could work off of it I like it because I can't paint with one hand you know
maybe I could but you don't want to get stuff on your
canvas you know like all the artists have a little stick with a little ball that they rest in her arm and with
digital painting you can have the same issues hmm so let's move forward I
wanted to share a few cell phone snapshots now these are some amazing
shots to to say the least that you could even get this these are what the
probably the most latest uh Android phones and then the iPhones work as well
too so let's go with number one will be the
dumbbell nebula through the 30 inch at Mount Pinos
cell phone snapshot nice cell phone snapshot yes it is 30 inches
of aperture so you're already 32.
yeah I see that's a wonderful combination look at how sharp and and
that track it was a perfect picture that's what that 32 the extra light really pulls these uh nebulas in
and and the cell phone thing is amazing we had a group of people up there like a
star party of people that showed up yeah and so I started showing every I knew what I had to do right away I was on
call so I had to entertain the star party because that's what we do when
when people want to look we want to share the views and I had some people seeing actually both stars in The Ring
Nebula this is a mom with two boys and never even saw The Ring Nebula so when
he yelled out the kid I see two stars I was like oh this is a good night you know and and
then I I had everybody doing their cell phones I was gave them a little seminar in the dark and everybody was taking
pictures and they were coming up to me and showing me how great and I was so happy to be able to you know share with
everybody and uh you know from this is our quick location I'll show you that's where we
were at Mount Pinos that's a general star party looking at the Milky picture I like that thank you
yeah that was a guy that was sitting next to me you can actually I think see me neck in the background but that's my
28 and uh you can see how tall it is but it's a great spot you know Mount Pinos
that's our Proving Grounds I call it our best seeing
almost 9 000 feet then moving forward this is the eagle
taken through the same 32-inch telescope and this one is a stunner to say the
least cell phone snapshot you got all of that that is amazing
amazing yeah it's so everybody has a that pretty much has an astro camera in
their pocket these days yeah and all you need is 32 inches of aperture well even
the 28 and and then you know some of these have like a pro the pro part of it
and you can do up to I think 30 second exposures I mean it's amazing so if you can play with the ISO
studying and and the other settings you know then you can get a pretty
decent image but that's pretty good right for uh South oh that's excellent first shot yeah for yeah it I guess it
speaks to the cell phone is capturing what's in front of it and
um all of that light bouncing off of that 28 inch mirror I would have been curious if Orion at that time you were
shooting at the galactic center so Orion wouldn't be up to go see what you could
do with some of those dark nebula Thor's helmet you know go at going after the
horse head I would be I'd be curious to see cell phone shots of those because
yeah that takes a lot more um work you have to
you know with the cell phone you have to make sure it's really and I a lot of these I just held it there so I might
try for like an hour sometimes to get a perfect shot and you know you're on the
ladder in my legs I mean one time I literally got like a charlie horse and I could barely walk and everybody's John
are you okay like I just need a minute to sit down you know because it's up and
down the ladder all night long and you're when you're fixed on those photons you don't budge you're like you
don't want to share it's so good but you have to you know so this is um I started this looking
through my 28 and using the 32 inch and then we were blessed again for another
trip to Wilson Scott thank you so and I had a couple
more but you know uh I was able to tease out a little bit more detail and I added
those those like inner rings yeah and and there's a little creative mind at work there too you know I kind
of try to make them look like you're actually there and you know with the Cat's Eye Nebula there's a nebula
surrounding the core nebula and and in those long exposure photographs it
really comes out is this like huge explosion that rock you know
way further out that your eye can't see because you don't see in that wavelength of light but even when you look at it in
the 28 or the 32 it just it looks like hazy almost and that's that outer Cloud
you're peering through so you get that you know you really need
good seeing for it to open up or a 60 inch telescope for that matter
is with good seeing is even better oh yeah if you get one of those guys
you got to build yourself a Space Telescope Just Launch it yeah well get
someone to fund it and get it up there and try not the night vision will help
it's a real time you know I just love the moon and the clouds let me just segue fast just to get these off so I
don't lag here gotta watch this uh button Pusher you
know I'm getting better at this thing I have to say you know it takes a little bit of uh
work but this was like one of my first real cell phone Creations from
uh I painted this whole thing from scratch pretty much oh that's pretty it
reminds me of one of my airbrush projects in college you know the way it has that feel and that's the beauty of
digital um this is done monochromatic yeah this
is well that's my cell phone Samsung Photo Editor that's what I paint with in
hours to get it smooth like that like when I first was doing them I can't see
real good and I'm still fighting glasses but I like send pictures and then I'll
see them zoomed in and I'll go oh no there's like marks that I didn't so this
I made sure you know the Milky Way was fun it was very easy to paint that you
know that's a that's one like if you're up in the plane you would see something like that but or in the mountains you know
I just wanted to show that I liked that one it was beautiful it was a pivotal moment for my cell phone you know
artwork cell phone Artistry yep and and uh you know another good thing is like
constellation stuff we do and and you know each constellation has uh you know
iconic guy or woman or a lion or you know whatever it is but yeah fun one
from this this is called the sword of Ryan
very proud of this one too love it
let me see oh that's cool so you see the sword and I see what you did yeah yeah the uh
kind of that winged area became the right the the um candles the protectors
right yeah and it was just a wonderful it took me a while to get it just right
but I was able to do it I thought you know I thought it was a cool idea and it's fun yeah it is it's that is a very
unique way to do it I'll have to call probably the first
time yeah I think it's the first time I've actually seen that depicted as a sword an actual sword
well I mean I know it's usually the constellation but I I just changed it up
a little something a little fresh very unique a little you saw mine if you saw in my presentation yeah I had the the
sword the way that we look at it which is right it's just the
uh so many times that I'm actually kind of getting better at
it I really like the running man you could see the Running Man in there
very good so uh let me flash back to this one so this was the Frankenstein one I'm still
working on it um we saw it last time but it's a pretty cool idea yeah I mean when I'm finished
I'm gonna tell you it's gonna look amazing but again so that see the top the top
part of that was the cell phone so I used all three images and I used mine as the middle and then and then the
outer body was done with the 32 so it's frankensteined into uh you know
it's just it's a beautiful composite dramatic yeah I mean it really uh you
know my my 28 is extremely sharp if you look at the detail on that and I got a little carried away
on some of the processing and a little bit of the painting that I did uh over painting but um and that that's
my dog Bosco the little one he's always in it okay that's my little
buddy Harry uh that's very creative you yeah well from what I understand your
dog the nebula that you used your dog to be a part of is actually the closer one
and not the one with the crop of hair I always thought that that
large that tallest one kind of had the shape of a horse's head as well yeah
um you know but what I understand is that your dog Bosco
is actually the closest pillar to us even though optically it sort of looks
like the other right so I always found that fascinating this is um another Mount Wilson
you know Blue Snowball yeah the Blue Snowball which it it has a green issue
too um you know even a 60 inch that's an amazing amount of detail I don't think
our seeing was that good um again this is sketched uh this
particular one is is done using the cell phone snapshot and you know sometimes
you can get some good result just raw from the scope but usually it's going to take a lot of work on some of them
and then others I just repaint you know now that I have the procreate
it's such a fine you know ability to paint thin lines and
and different effects and I'm just learning now how to use it but um
I mean I'll be able to paint some amazing stuff with this that that doesn't even look
like it's not a photograph you know what I'm saying it's hard to tell right and
it takes a lot of time and then you know also when you're when you're studying these things and trying to tease out the
detail you know you use your averted of vision a lot you you try to just
remember those points where it is if if you can keep it in your head which I can do pretty good at least till I get to my
phone and then I can start sketching on there and getting you know the little shapes like the sides those two little
side things those were prominent you know maybe not quite as popped out
as that but I always like to go a little further as if you're there
and um you know I got maybe yeah those uh those nuances you know the shading and just
the effect of it where it looks like it's glowing you know yeah the digital
it's part of it that's got to be hard to do it's a lot easier when you have you know
tools that that you have um to be able to do that with
and that's what I do I use the tools and the paint tools
I think I showed you this one already yep for those yeah this is a good one
for those that weren't here last week to just realize that this is drawn
um using your digital tools but it's still very impressive yeah I mean there's a lot of dots there and
it it's pretty close basically you start with you know the the brighter Stars you want
to get uh the layout and get everything like the marker star setup
and then it's just kind of a random thing I mean it's not exact but
you know the the stars that are there that are supposed to be there give it the feel that it is exact you know
um I downloaded that one's my favorite it really is well I I put um I was
organizing some and I I put M2 I have another one
that an M15 that I wanted to show you but I don't know why they didn't upload to here wait maybe that's it no
let's see this one if you don't see them they'll be great for next week's Star
Party when we yeah what was the theme that we came up there it is there's Adam
15. so it's just like when I see it in the IP nice
this one was done um through the 24 from uh Frazier Park
and it was cold yeah it's worth it you know how 15 has
that dense core it kind of looks almost pinkish or purple I was trying to show that it's warm you know it has a warm
feel to it so the showpiece Globs are like M13 M5 M15 M2 M3 m53 these are you
know the ones you want to look at that are really good you know I would love to
see you draw 47 to Connie yeah yeah what an impressive you want an
impressive cluster I wish to see that naked eye or just with binoculars that's
him too yes 47 tucana are here is one of the
most beautiful uh Global cluster yeah I yeah I saw it
when I was there in um Chile I went oh you had a chance to see that yeah yes
and I got greedy I wanted Omega to come higher up because I wanted to see it
straight up like I saw it in the morning and it was getting light out and I could still see it I was upset because I had
to go fishing and I didn't want to blow the trip so I had to go to sleep and but
I got 47 in my up 12 I brought it oh no and I had the Hubble optic up 12 the
transport one and I it was I'm gonna say is better than any globular I've seen
from here through my 28 you know it literally in a 12 inch is like what we
see here through a real big job it it's just spectacular and the sky there the
tarantula the coal sack the magellanic clouds all that stuff in the jewel by
the southern Jewel box wow that is a beautiful cluster I mean I feel like
I've got a half a life waiting for me if I can just get out there and um live
there or stay there for a month or two you know with the best seeing around in
the Chilean beef and the bread from Argentina I mean we could make sandwiches and view all night yeah
I think you're speaking Cesar's language you are invited I I can make a variety
for everyone no problem man what about vegetarians no no no problem my daughter is
vegetarian okay my family all right but you know when you when you have uh these
crazy people that are vegetarian no problem because barbecue different things different
vegetables and you say okay people you have vegetables in the barbecue
um normal yeah the grilled vegetables normal people you have meat in the barbecue
here I'll make the disclaimer for you Scott Global star party does not
necessarily um have the same opinions no matter how
true they may be opinions
yes as variable as the stars that we like to look at in the sky yes there's
no problem I can put a lot of vegetarian vegetables
in in the barbecue that are beautiful flavors yeah oh yeah and and of course
that that well we are making the the our
our next surprise in April in uh in uh San Rafael Mendoza it's uh it's a
safari that maybe next week I can present all that we are organizing for
for this and I I can show you and send you invitations uh because it's a
special occasions um where are we okay okay do you have getting ready to travel ready yes and
I'll uh as we are attending for April I
think that is 15 16 and 17 is in the middle of the of the of the month of
April and we are working a lot um I am happy because uh today Jaime
Garcia that have their uh their uh small observatories in in their own
Vineyard he he have a one year one year solid sorry
um today he can put in functions he's
um his new exos to Genie
with a 11 inches fiber carbon
um Celestron telescope it's called
um work much further that with the oh with the older Mount
and he started to work with this in the in hair acts as xiaomi cell phone and
work properly too I was was something fun because he told
me uh oh the the the beta version for cell phone
worked really good and do you have the you no please
where is I say okay he told me yes I he said he sent me the the link and I'm I'm
download the application for for my cell phone I started tonight to use
and and he's working with uh with um
variable Stars uh he are using his Observatory one of the the principal
mounts uh it's are the the exos 2gp
wonderful yes and this is the same place where we will make the Safari this year
so you guys can have a starbecue as well yes absolutely yeah right and and the
vegetables so what is uh your hometown so I say Chilean beef because they're
known for that and then in Argentina they have the most wonderful bread that I've ever tasted it was
unbelievable um mostly of of uh meat and producers
with cows you know are in the farm areas um exist a really huge huge uh
huge tradition of production genetic mix you know
um between uh cows that at this incredible because when you
choose actually I I eat meat and yes in Argentina maybe we have learned more
than a little of salt because it is every every week you can you come
uh Buy in the market different flavors of different cows or different different
uh you know producers and this present something that but of course that I
don't eat meat all the time I do yeah sometimes you're sleeping no
yes sometimes you're sleeping no astronomy sure I'm kidding I always I
know you know I'm going to I'm going to sign off wow it says Adrian Adrian I
would love to talk to you more about that I'm waiting for you yeah we will go
shopping for the meat that would be a mistake either let me tell you
um yeah it sounds excellent yeah yeah my
brother-in-law will probably come down and he'll be he'll want to eat some of that John an excellent uh drawings as
always thank you Adrian some more um I can't wait all of the aperture all
the aperture that you use those views to your eyes must be spectacular before you
even put them to pin I'm uh you know overwhelmed by the
photons the the connection of actually seeing it you know that's the beauty of the hobby
you can never lose the connection of the actual photons and seeing it the way you
know yeah that people saw it when there was no electricity and you know we have
such great instruments today and and uh so many people that get it out to others
and it's a good time for astronomy yeah very good time
before I leave I just make mention you know the the night sky itself is the star the the
star you're the images are canvas you know the canvas you're putting them
almost the you know the sort of the the Bob Ross thing he he was a good painter
but what he painted were things that he just remembered seeing so a lot of his paintings had very similar themes to him
you know the night sky provides his Beauty it's just in how we capture it
um I think sometimes it's astrophotographers no matter what type of astrophotography we do we have two
choices we can either try and make our images stand apart from
others it's the same yeah image that's how I feel we are you making them stand
apart we draw more towards ourselves or
we can show the we show the beauty the way that we see it and we present it to
people and say this is what I see now is it more than you can see naked eye it
might be and in your case though um John you're seeing most of this yeah
because of your aperture um but it's amazing
yeah we're presenting how amazing the night sky is and the objects in the night sky you know there are people that
looked at the jwst images and asked is this real actual life well yeah it is
it's just it's not centered around you so you may not you know realize that all
of these wonderful things are out there and that's one of the one of the greatest Thrills of doing astronomy no
matter how you present it it takes people out of their everyday
life it may be centered around what you're doing what you're planning on
doing the next day um and you see something that's beautiful that you may have you may not
have had a part in making but when you realize that we're made of star stuff you realize that well there's elements
in that that are also in me and then you there's a connection there's a connection to something so that's right
it's the frequency the frequency of everything it vibrates
in Harmony and and when you see it and the photons are there and you're experiencing it you're become part of it
and there's a connection you know and it's it's amazing what it's done for me I
mean I don't even need to go to sleep I'm so like just wound up the next morning and I guess
I'm gonna sleep but yeah I know what it's like to be up all night I've done
that I've I've stayed up through watching sunrise and was just giddy with
excitement during that time uh when we had the planets all in a row oh yeah I
stayed up from like 9 00 p.m all the way through to six or seven a.m and I called
myself getting up to go to work the next morning it was already the next morning so yeah we chased the planets into the
daylight and you know in the early morning that good seeing it and we're looking at the ice cap at like almost a
thousand power on Mars and I could when it would snap in it would you could see
like it was dry ice it looked like swiss cheese there was a huge giant chunk like
that was out in front and uh that's only for a split second of micro seeing with
those bino viewers in the 28 and and the most ultimate seeing and then the sun
comes up a minute later yep yeah yeah that for those who
are into astrophotography or into the process of
getting images what you're hearing described is it Harkens back to actually seeing the
object with your naked eyes and there's there in my opinion there is no
substitute for it and um even if you're looking through a smaller telescope you're making direct eye contact with
something that's millions of miles away um you know the sea structure that far
away um and then so then it blows your mind even more when you go to a dark site and
you look up and you can see structure and color in the Milky Way and that's 30 000 light years away and you can see it
as if it's just right there that's a time machine you actually are there
back in time thirty thousand years into the past at the speed of light how far is that
that is a long way away yeah probably probably further than it is from
wherever you are to LAX or yeah healing where the gentleman went
you know saw that wonderful sky in New Zealand or yeah from here to where Cesar
is sitting sitting on the uh on the balcony getting ready to get some
images in it looks like you can touch when when you bring him in that good when they come in and you just can keep
reaching forever and ever and you'll never quite get there but it's just you're almost there you know so
yeah it's really a great thing and I just love showing people and that's what I'm missing is is the
summer because then when everyone comes up you know they all come running to the biggest scope which sometimes isn't good
for what they're gonna do that's why I'm glad mercal got the bigger one but
mine's taller so they still run at mine but large Scopes are a big yeah with
those star parties I I would be wanting to look at it too I mean maybe wait the Globs everyone gets her unbelievable
clusters look beautiful is extremely sharp my Explorer depending
on where you are that's my surgical scope for lunar and planetary work
um okay I've had some amazing and I'll be doing some sketches from those so
as soon as I can get some clear weather I'm going to get them up and running but thank you thank you everybody thank
you thanks guys thank you thank you good night hi everybody
yeah and uh thank you to um our audience and uh you know it's uh
it's great uh to have all of you guys join uh with us together I do want to
let everyone know that we will not have a global star party next Tuesday because it's Valentine's Day here in the United
States and maybe elsewhere um but uh so we're going to give a
little break and then we'll plan the 114th Global star party so
thanks again and as uh Jack horkheimer always used to say keep looking up oh
yeah everybody take care that's fine
here we go have a safe trip thanks man we'll see
you
[Music]
[Music] thank you
foreign [Music]
foreign [Music]
foreign [Music]
[Music]
[Applause] [Music]
foreign
[Music]
[Music]
thank you
[Music]
foreign [Music]
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
foreign [Music]