Global Star Party 114

Transcript:

6:02 p.m..David Levy – “Introduction and Poetry”
foreign
6:10 p.m..Carroll Iorg - “The Astronomical League”
hey I'm Scott Roberts I want to thank you personally for tuning in to watch the 114th Global Star Party the concept
of the global star party started during the pandemic as a way for amateur astronomers and just those people
6:35 p.m..Navin Senthil Kumar - “Young Astronomer”
interested in stargazing to interact during the our period of lockdown but
we've also learned that there's a lot of different people in lockdown for different reasons some of it's just
6:35 p.m..Daniel Barth - “The Eratosthenes Project”
geographic location you know they're too remote or whatever to interact with
amateur astronomers in a you know a real-time live fashion
6:50 p.m..Maxi Falieres - “Astrophotography to the Max”
you know there's also people that are you know challenged in different ways
that they're not able to attend a live star parties
but we've had some amazing speakers on from around the world and this is really the only way that you can
7:05 p.m..Ten Minute Break
have a our party in the way that we do it so we get astronomers to join in Via
7:15 p.m..Jon Schwartz - “Drawing Out the Universe”
Zoom we rebroadcast that out we're simulcasting it to several social media
sites including Facebook twitch Twitter and YouTube um but tonight's the 114th event
7:30 p.m..Marcelo Souza - “Astronomy Outreach in Brazil”
and the theme was up is a bump in the dark and we've got of course some great
speakers we have David Levy you know Comet discover David Levy will be on uh
7:45 p.m..Cesar Brollo - “Astronomy from Buenes Aires”
first we have um uh uh Carol orange Carol is the
president of the astronomical League we've got Dave Iker who's
editor-in-chief of astronomy magazine who we'll be talking about his exotic deep Sky objects I think this one will
8:00 p.m..Franck Marchis - “Unistellar Citizen Science - The DART Mission”
be the Cat's Eye Nebula um a young Navin sentel Kumar who uh
gives a nice presentation uh each time he's on it's been a while since he's appeared on global Star Party we're
really happy to have him back Dr Daniel Barth who is heading up an
8:20 p.m..Adrian Bradley - "Chasing Dark Skies"
initiative called the erastones project where people from around the world will
actually do an experiment to measure the circumference of the earth okay this is something you can also participate in I
think you'll find it very interesting uh astrophotographer Maxi filaries who has
shown our viewers how you can do astrophotography on a budget he'll be
broadcasting in live from Argentina we've got uh space artist and astronomer
John Schwartz who's going to show us some of his latest work uh Dr Marcelo
Souza who's the editor of sky's up magazine but he's also a professor in
Brazil and leads a program of astronomy and astrophysics
that is really second to none in the Americas he's just an icon person
following him will be Cesar brolo who will give a presentation from Argentina
as well from Buenos Aires and um uh Frank marches who is
the astronomer from seti but also one of the founders of the unistellar company
that makes the unicellular EV telescope and he also heads up their
um uh their citizen science program so Frank will be talking about how people
with unicellular telescopes actually did contributions to the dart Mission uh
observations and then finally ending up with Adrian Bradley who does beautiful
uh Skyscape uh imagery and so we're going to have a great show for you hope
you stay tuned in and uh it'll be coming up here in a couple of minutes
[Applause] thank you [Music]
Earth is surrounded by asteroids most of them are no threat to us but some are
potentially hazardous in 2021 NASA and Johns Hopkins Applied
Physics laboratory launched the double asteroid redirection test with the goal of smashing a spacecraft into an
asteroid to change its orbit the purpose of Dart is to demonstrate
that we can protect the Earth from impacts from natural objects imagine we
discover an asteroid that is coming towards Earth even giving it a small nudge years in advance will allow it to
change its course sufficiently that it misses Earth Dart would spend 10 months traveling to
its final destination the moonlit asteroid dimorphous using autonomous
smart nav technology and at about two and a half minutes out
and we Coast until we hit the asteroid
two weeks ago NASA made history once again and now the team has confirmed that the
spacecraft's impact altered dimorphous orbit around Diddy monks by
32 minutes for the first time ever
Humanity has changed the orbit of a planetary body
the tail is spectacular and this amount of ejecta that you're seeing and it's continually evolving the observations
are going on in order to fully track and watch that Evolution it really is just the beginning of the analysis of this
tremendously Rich data set and it's very exciting to be in this position to be doing this now
[Music]
well hello everyone this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and uh really excited
to have you here on the 114th Global star party with us I see a lot of our regulars are already in live chat and uh
we have several of our presenters already online ready to go
the theme of the star party is a bump in the night and of course there's lots of
different kinds of bumps in the night in space it's a common uh feature of
planetary formation it is uh you know what we see in uh you
know we were holding up meteorites comparing meteorites and stuff obviously these were collisions of various types
but humans have created a very important collision with the dart Mission and uh
so I think it's one of the most exciting probably one of the most important space
missions that humans have ever done and that is to try to solve the problem of a
direct hit by an asteroid or maybe a comet but we've discovered that we can
actually move it and done correctly we can we can save a huge amount of life
that might otherwise be lost to something like that so it is uh it put a big smile on my face
as I think it did a lot of people our first presenter tonight is David
Levy David is with us uh from Vail Arizona and uh it's great to have him
with us as he always is David thank you for coming on to uh Global Star Party
well thank you thank you Scotty and uh everyone else it's good to meet my old
and new friends here and I really pressure this event when whenever it can take place
very very highly it's way up at the top of my list
um in honor of Tucson tradition the Tucson Festival of books which was just
concluded I was trying to find a uh Things That Go Bump in the night
poem that would be appropriate but it turns out that as educated as most poets are
is very few of them have actually written books about libraries or books
John keeps of course wrote a book about a translation of Homer by George Chapman
one of his most famous sonnets ever couldn't felt I like some Wonder Watcher
of Disguise when a new planet swims into his kin but the one that I found is actually a
children's home which I think is absolutely delightful is by Robert Louis Stevenson
and it goes like this there in the night where none can spy
all in my hunter's Camp I lie and play at books that I have read till it is
time to go to bed these are the hills these are the woods
these are my Starry solitudes and they're The River by his Brink The
Roaring lions come to drink I see the other is far away as if in
Violet camping way and I like to an Indian Scout around their party prowl
about so when my nurse comes in for me and hold my return across the sea and go
to bed with backward looks at my dear land of storybooks thank you and back to
you Scott nice that's very nice thank you very much David
um uh I see that uh we were talking earlier about your uh Acadia shirt and
uh Acadia is where you got your PhD is that right it's where I got my undergraduate degree all I did my
undergraduate degree at Acadia my Master's in Queens in Ontario Canada
and my doctorate I did at the Hebrew University in Israel
so three universities from the three different degrees and I love it but you never stopped learning I know that about
you you're always uh you're always exploring and discovering and and
searching and um you know so it's it's uh it's refreshing
there are sadly a lot of people that figure they get to a certain age and they kind of cut off the learning
but you know well one thing Scott was that I was I was actually visiting uh I
was leading a star party yeah but I'm nearby and I asked the group if any of
them have read a particular book and these were like Teenage Kids and not a single hand went up and then I
said have any of you read anything and no hands went up and I said what are they teaching you in
school today yeah and I asked again somebody or must have read something
and one boy did put up his hand and he said I've read Stephen King's It which
actually is a pretty I haven't read it but I understand it's a pretty pretty
good book he has read that he has read other things as well sure so a group of
25 I found one who had respect for books and that's a pretty sorry for me
well hopefully more people are inspired to read books or or learn in any way
that they can you know I hope so learning is a lovely thing
that's right well David thank you very much thank you thank you yeah uh uh up
next uh we are going to uh the president of the astronomical League Mr Carol
orange and um uh Carol I'll bring you on with me
um you you have you have been with how many years have you been associated with
the astronomical League probably 25 years I don't know exactly I lost count
a few years ago yeah yeah so I remember I remember some of the Early Times
seeing you at uh uh the astronomical League conventions and you were always
involved always very helpful always very cheerful you know so and that is your
that's your personality today you know so um but uh and you have done how many
terms as president now well the original one was four and nine mile halfway through the second one I got called back
so yeah we're on on second and I said I was done the first time but I think this is
for Real well the astronomical league has thrived
under you and uh I know that uh you have a huge uh new membership especially
since the pandemic and it is uh you know it's no wonder I mean
the astronomical league with all of its Awards all of its uh observing programs
uh all of its engagement throughout all the clubs and everything like that you guys have done an amazing job and I
think that your tentacles are going ever further internationally and I think
that's just so cool well thank you Scott and you've been there with us most about that time as
well from a long time ago and we really appreciate it in the background just
cheering you guys on that's what I still do so that's not in the background you're right up there helping yeah
and David it's so nice to hear your poems I always love what you have to add
to the discussion and I can certainly relate to learning curves I seem like
I'm on a new one every day and I thought well this is the last one I need to worry about for a while and here comes another one so yeah thanks to Coleman I
look forward to seeing you in Louisiana this summer yes and we're looking forward to having you and we're going to
have a question here a little bit that uh realized that just a little bit let's see I'll share my screen here
okay everybody see it yes excellent okay this is the usual
warning we have on the first slide if you win some kind of a prize in this
process to make sure that you don't look at the sun directly most of we astronomers know that but we have to be
reminded it's been a while a couple weeks since we had this so here's the answers from February 7th
I'm gonna move this out of the way just a little here we go a full moon shines at magnitude minus 12. what specific
term is used to describe a meteor that reaches at least magnitude minus 14 I.E
at least six times brighter than a full moon and the answer is bolife and
everybody should got 100 on that so all right and now number two from that
one most meteors become visible in what
altitude range the choices were 5 to 20 20 to 50 50 to
80 80 to 120 120 to 200 miles and the answer is C 50. to 800 uh sorry 50 to 80
miles okay then the third one thought uh 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 the answer is John Denver I've seen it raining Fire in the Sky Rocky
Mountain High so that was a very special song
the correct answer to that one were Andrew corkel John Williams Israel
mataroso and Don neb
and here's the questions for tonight number one what do we find at the L1
LaGrange point what do we find at the L1 LaGrange point
and to make sure you send those answers to secretary at astrolig.org
number two Belinda is one of the moons of which planet Belinda is one of the
moons of which planet and again send your answers to secretary
at astrolig.org and finally we finish with this one which of the following are
speakers scheduled for Alcon 2023 in Baton Rouge
a David Ocker B Fred espinac C David Levy and D is All the Above
and again sends your answers to secretary at astrolague.org
this month there will not be an Al live in March but the next one will be held
on April 28th with Michael bakish speaking about the 2024 total solar
eclipse I can't believe we're getting this close to the the angular but we're almost there for the for that
as well so it's it's coming right along and I think that's so right now and I'll
give it back to you Scott okay
let's see from the audience if my audio is better than it was
there we go okay all right so um uh yeah uh Paul uh watching on I think
YouTube Paul burgart um said that my audio sounded like I was distant or far away or something so
let's see if what I've done is changed that but uh thanks very much uh Carol
um uh any any further update on what's going on as far as Alcon itself yes it's
coming on very nicely we hope registration will be available in about three weeks uh approximately the 25th of
March so we're getting very close and we'll publicize that fully when it happens oh one thing I did forget
earlier uh we just uh crossed another threshold with the league we are now 23
000 members just within the line supporters so uh we're still striking the card of people really wanting to get
out under the nice guys and Scott you keep those telescope sales coming so we can continue to get out there
it's great yeah so uh yeah I mean so encouraging to see so many new amateur
astronomers in the field you know the undoubtedly
um you know they are going to uh you know start another wave of Discovery and
uh you know improving techniques and uh even the astrophotography which we think
is so amazing right now I can hardly imagine what it'll be like another 10 years from now there's just so much
creativity that's come about from covert and Beyond uh people are inventing new
ways of handling it all our individual clubs are coming up with new ways of
sharing the nice guy with the public that never even envisioned before this all happened right very good thank you
so much Carol sure thank you all right uh okay so uh uh you know we have the
pleasure of bringing on the editor-in-chief of astronomy Magazine on
this somewhat regular basis which I think is amazing in itself I really
happy to have Mr David eicher on our program uh it's uh it's been great to
get to know him better as well and um uh you know we learned bits and pieces of
the various facets of Iker you know not only is he an expert in astronomy but
you know in uh you know geology and in history as well you know his his
works on the Civil War are uh amazing if you follow him and you should follow him
on Facebook you'll learn lots of different things it's very interesting about our country about our world and of
course about our universe uh David's uh magazine astronomy magazine is the
world's largest publication on astronomy and so uh we're again very very proud to
have him on the 114th Global Star Party thank you so much Scott
um and it's a pleasure to be here as always of course and I'm glad that we're having this again we had a little bit of
a break there with a bunch of special things happening it's nice that we're back and rolling here uh our way towards
Spring uh which is great um and we still haven't worked our way through hundreds of objects that we'll
talk about one by one in a no I hope that's good though not rather than a
threat but but they're we're still way billions trillions of them right
billions trillions we're still way way up North near the North Pole and someday
when we're star cattle again yeah right right right so in in our old age we'll make it to
the South Celestial pool I think maybe you know but uh unless you boot me out
of the you know Cosmos before them but if I if I can pontificate for one
thing David mentioned reading and readers and Young Folks and you know
it's I mean this is universal almost you know thinking that well you want to check something you go and you know you
look at the internet and of course it's very handy and so on but if if I can be so ashamed to say so not
everything on the internet is reliable just a word of caution and anyone who
spent a lot of time in a very large library with books you know these things
that are printed you know with Pages um there is a very very small fraction
of the literature of the world that is on the internet to begin with so I know
that's a you know losing argument but just to mention that if you you know spend you know a couple of years
wandering through the Library of Congress the great majority of important stuff for many topics ain't on the
internet so just the word of caution for the future they're about learning which doesn't seem to be recognized by many
many people in the world right now thank you for saying that David really appreciate it
thanks David um but for now I will will uh step away
from that and share my screen and if I can get the right thing to share uh
we're going to and I'll start a slideshow as well all sorts of things I have to do here so can you see an
illustration of a quasar with jets emanating from the supermassive black
hole in the nucleus of the quasar yes well forget that immediately then
because that's not what we're going to talk about tonight okay instead we're going to talk about we got
a really interesting job there's some stuff we've been wandering through that's really obscure this is a pretty
well-known one even though there are many many faint planetary nebulae in the sky the Cat's Eye Nebula the famous
Cat's Eye Nebula and Draco mgc 6543 it has a very high surface
brightness and it's so it's really good even in a sort of a Suburban Sky with a smaller telescope it's a satisfying
object to observe it was discovered by William Herschel in 1786 and it was the
first planetary nebula whose Spectrum was observed at the dawn of astrophysics
in the years of you know the Civil War that thing not the coming one but the
first Civil War you know in our country are you guys paying attention there's no
laugh for that even okay okay just kidding
um but in 1864 as astrophy yeah okay as
astrophysics was just beginning William Huggins the British spectroscopist uh
observed this planetary and recorded its spectrum and he demonstrated that planetary nebulae are gaseous of course
it was William Herschel who named planetary nebulae there gave them their name and they have nothing to do
whatsoever with planets of course but they do have disks of course in a telescope that look kind of vaguely
planetary if you're you know tired at least so it's bright the it's an eighth
magnitude object it's small it's about 20 art seconds across but it has a faint outer shell and of course as we've
talked about before on these programs sometimes planetary nebulae sun-like
mass stars as they die as they expire will puff off at low velocity gas as the
star ends its life and then of course higher velocity gas that that creates a
shock front and illuminates in a brighter disc the planetary it's about 3
300 light years away and that corresponds to a diameter of a little less than half a light year so it's a
little smaller than the size of our solar system if you will right now it's a young planetary it's still
working its way toward expanding it's only about a thousand years old uh and
it's shows because of that it's because of its its youth the faint gas that came off of the star originally hasn't
dissipated into the interstellar medium and so it shows the stages of a
planetary pretty well because it's so young it has a complex inner structure we can see the mechanism behind that
which is not very well understood even to this day by Bruce balek and Adam
Frank and everyone else the structural complexity of this nebula can be seen
however at high power by visual observers if the seeing is really good so this is a really good one to go out
and look for in large amateur telescopes uh reveal hints of a kind of an inner
spiral structure of the gas coming off of that bright part which is very visible of course in images made with
Hubble so this is a good one here again is this tiny little section of this uh it's a
handy it's not the most detailed deep Sky Atlas that I have around or program online but it's it's small enough to be
portable in fact it's it's right I can grab this maybe right here on the edge of things
so this is the interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas and you can see it's not super huge but it has a great amount of detail
so this is an atlas that I use a fair amount and here you can see the cat's
eye is plotted as the I hope Scott you're not going to test me on the pronunciation I hope you're the cats and
the canoebel is the Cat's Eye Nebula is that what the cat's eye if you're in
Berlin it's it's the Cat's Eye Nebula yeah yep so this is German for cats Eye
Nebula um so to speak I don't know you know you know German ancestors but they were over in the United States for a
long time so I don't know you know from German but what's interesting here also you can see that the north ecliptic pole
is practically right on top of the cat spy nebula just as a strange coincidence
and there's a little Galaxy there too NGC 65 52. so it's kind of a nice you
know Barren area of Draco to look in and here this is a very wide field so
there you can see the galaxy in the upper left it's a nice Barden spiral and Don Goldman who's one of the great
Imaging is an amateur of course this is a deep shot and you can see that really large outer uh Halo envelope of
nebulosity and down inside the very tiny bright spiral there is what you normally
see in an observatory photo of the cat's eye this is really large this outer
envelope of nebulosity and here we see you may have seen this
many many times this is going back this is the faint uh sorry the bright uh inner spiral envelope of stuff that's
the high velocity material coming off of the uh elderly star here that is in its
late stages uh this Hubble image was very famous and made the cat's eye name very famous for quite a number of years
back in the night starting back in the 90s uh and here is it um I saw a billboard
sign it said it just showed showed an elderly guy on a billboard said old is
hot so in this case of course
I I like that and especially because we're all getting to you know a little
older day by day but it does beat the alternative so we'll take it with all of
the challenges um and here is a multi-spectral a composite of the cat's eye of the very
innermost region and you can see this kind of complex twisting of the gas that
is not super well understood how much of this is you know is physical or a
velocity driven or magnetic or what have you you know but this is a composite from Optical Hubble data and Chandra
x-ray data as as well that is also a very very well image of
course here that you've probably seen quite a few times and I I was going to show this a few weeks ago and I didn't
realize the Intel secret intelligence from Scott that we weren't going to have one of these for a while so this is now
a few weeks old but I just threw in a pretty image of of comet ztf uh which is
uh now uh on its way out but we had a really nice comment there for a while
and there's another bright Comet for next year that's been discovered and there's a comment that will be weekly
naked eye supposedly based on the prediction by the way which we can talk more about in the future that will be
visible during the 2024 total eclipse in the eclipse sky as well which it's a
secret but we'll talk about that in the coming days as well which you know you're not going to spend a lot of time
looking around at planets and you know with binoculars for a fifth magnitude Comet probably during the eclipse uh but
it will be there so that's kind of a cool thing for the eclipse next year
and just to be Shameless here again this is our 50th anniversary year for the magazine we're now working on the August
issue which is the 50th Anniversary issue which will be an oversized issue with all kinds of
cool stuff in other than we have an introductory essay from David Walther who was the the brother of the
Magazine's founder and and the publisher if you will originally of the magazine we have a really neat uh introductory
essay from Annie dream uh the executive producer of Cosmos and the Widow of Carl
Sagan about the 70s and uh what was going on in astronomy and in the space
exploration with the Vikings and the voyagers and all that good stuff at the time we had that really hot you know
pressure cooker of astronomical interest then when the magazine was founded and
lots of other surprises too so so that issue is coming up uh and again I will
mention that Michael buckic and I who have this book out for kids a child's
introduction to space exploration we would be Mighty proud if you saw that in
a bookstore near you awesome so Scott thank you very much
again that that's all I have on the cat's eye and miscellany
tonight and I will stop sharing my screen and it's good to be back and
we're proud and happy to be uh seeing the global Star Party move forward again
Scott yeah me too me too very pleased thank you so much um and um Before I Let You Go is there
uh we did you did talk about the magazine a little bit but uh uh is there
anything uh anything more special or nothing could be more special than the 50th
Anniversary but uh any anything else that uh with the current issue that you
would call astronomers to pay special attention to well we're doing a couple of special
themes this year that are coming a little later we did that Comet issue in January that David wrote the
introductory uh opening Salvo for the whole package that worked very very
nicely and and we have a couple of other surprises coming up later in the year and we're about to which I'll keep as
surprises but one thing that's coming soon this spring will be a very new and
very Dynamic and completely um novel website for the magazine and
you know we have a little shy of a hundred thousand people now who get the print and and they're old people like me
and so they like that print magazine but we have about one and a half million people uh unique visitors each year who
go to the website so it's a large audience and then about 1.6 or so
million people who are in the social media Network so it's a large group of people this new website that we're going
to roll out fairly soon here is going to be exciting because it's going to be much much better than the current
website that you can see now astronomy.com of all inventive places is
where you go to see our website it's not very original but it works well so soon
there will be a new website coming that will be big and uh we we have we're
happy to be involved with the league convention in in Baton Rouge as Carol mentioned will be there and and very
happy and David will be as well and others uh and uh so we'll be really
excited to be a part of that as we always have been uh to support the league and everything that it's doing as
well so thanks Carol for that appreciate it very much David we're looking forward to seeing the gang
without giving my quiz totally away oh no I I don't even know what you're talking about
but I'm looking forward to it David thank you excellent excellent
okay all right so um we always encourage we always encourage youth to be
involved in in amateur astronomy and uh
you know Science Education and sharing their knowledge you know I don't think you can ever start too young
um we're very pleased and happy to have the young Navin uh sentel Kumar on our
program he's been on several times and he always gives a great presentation and
so we're going to get the stage to you David thanks firstly thank you everyone thank you
Scott for having me on the show and firstly you'll want you all might be wondering about my wallpaper what is it
um I'm gonna get that to you in like a couple seconds firstly let me start sharing
um so can you all see see my screen let me
see your screen yeah you might want to bring it into presentation mode all right
thank you so firstly I I have a brand new YouTube
channel called Scarlet astronomy [Music] um so
technically this is my new YouTube channel um I'm gonna share the link like at the end so um yeah
um firstly please like And subscribe and I've posted two videos about the GSP
um so and then now I have an image of Jupiter and its Moon um so it's it's a
72 second exposure by my unicellular EB scope and I took it
from my backyard so I'm pretty proud of this picture
so now let's get to this um the presentation 10 crazy facts about astronomy
hope I blow all of your minds at some point
you always do okay so it's we know less space is like really like
big um it's a very vast area the universe we're still figuring out so
let me blow your minds now first fact number one space is completely silent there is no
atmosphere in space which means sound has medium or no way to travel to be
heard foreign fact number two the hottest play in our
solar system is 450 degrees Celsius so the hottest planet in our solar
system is Venus did you know that Venus is the closest planet to the Sun
isn't the it sorry my bad it isn't the closest planet is some it's actually Mercury but Mercury is but then you'd
think that mercury is the hottest but Mercury actually has no atmosphere which it can't regulate temperature which
means it results in big fluctuations fact number three a full NASA spacesuit
costs 12 million dollars that's a lot of money wow
70 of that cost is literally for the backpack and the control module
however the NASA space suits that it's that that Nasa uses were built in 1974
at least we're priced to today's pricing they would cost an estimated 150 million dollars
wow fact number four the Sun's mass takes up
99.86 of the solar system so literally it accounts for 99.86
that's a lot of space so we're barely nothing and the Sun is mostly made of hydrogen
so three quarters of worth with the rest of its mass made of helium and the sun ever had a voice it would be high and
Squeaky from all that helium fact number five one million Earths can
fit inside the sun the sun is large enough to approximately
1.3 million Earths could fit inside if squashed in
or if the Earth retained their Spirit if their spherical shape then only 960 000
could fit but can you visualize that number seriously that's a big number
okay it's gonna get bigger from now fact number six there are more trees than stars in the Milky Way there's about
three trillion trees on planet Earth and between 100 to 400 billion stars in
approximately in the galaxy the sunset on Mars appears blue
since colors are made more dramatic in sunsets on Earth sunsets on Mars
according to NASA would appear bluesh to human observers watching from the red planet
fine dust makes the blue near the sun's part of the sky much more visible while
normal light makes the red plants familiar Rusty dust color in the most
perceptible to the human eye fact number eight there are more stars
in the universe than grains of sand on the Earth the universe extends far
beyond our galaxy and the Milky Way which is the why the only why scientists can only estimate
how many stars are in space however scientists estimate that the universe contains approximately
a septillion Stars while no one can actually count every single grain of sand on earth the
estimated total from research actors at the University of Hawaii Summer from seven
quintillion to 500 quadrillion grains you want to build a sand castle with
that that's an awfully big sand castle fact number nine
one day on Venus is longer than one year Venus has a slow axis rotation which
takes 243 Earth days to complete its day the orbit of Venus around the Sun is 225
Earth days making a year in Venus 18 days less than a day on Venus
guess what fact number 10 there's a planet made of diamonds
so the planets called super Earth or AKA five five fifty five cancer e which is
likely covered in graphite and diamonds so paying a visit to the planet would
probably pay for the 12 million dollar space suit needed to get there that's it thank you
thank you so much that's great that's great so uh tell us a little bit
more about Skylight astronomy I just shared your YouTube channel I found it on on YouTube search for it's easy to
find and uh but I shared the link uh so that people could subscribe to it
um but uh how did you get the idea and and uh you know what can people find on your
uh YouTube channel so so far I'm just posting videos of the GSP on there
I'm gonna start getting into my own like Astro photo like astrophotography and videos on there so yeah I'm excited for
that I'm probably gonna upload some more videos soon awesome well if there's anything we can
do to help you uh build awareness for Skylight astronomy you know feel free to
get in touch with me and and uh we can brainstorm on ideas of uh getting the
word out so that's great thank you so much thank you so much now we have
um uh our next speaker uh which is um this is our next speaker Dr Daniel
Barth is our next speaker and so uh Daniel uh he came to my office you know
uh it's fun to have Daniel come because he's always full of energy and ideas and
um he uh he was especially excited about
this project called the erastones project Eric Thompson
what's up eratosthenes eratosthenese sorry it's like the worst thing he probably
would have slapped me it's the worst name to try to say it really is that's right that's right so
anyhow but um uh you know it's a project to measure to duplicate his tests okay
or his experiment for measuring the circumference of the world which he I guess did so with
remarkable accuracy wasn't it uh it was about 2 300 years
ago and he came within two and a half percent of the modern value and uh he was
getting the distance between two cities from Maps the Egyptians had been trading up
and down the Nile for many many hundreds thousands of years when eratosthenes was
there and so they knew the distance quite precisely and that allowed him to
measure the Earth and and basically Scott you and you can ask the question all the time when somebody says to you
well what if the Earth's really flat
yeah and so we have a model of a flat Earth here here's a flat piece of clay and I've I've stuck uh two little uh two
little plastic bits in there and essentially if the flatters people are
right when the sun shines down on two vertical sticks on a flat surface they both would make the exact same solar
angle they would show the sun to be the same height off the Horizon and the length of the Shadow compared to the
height of the rod would be the same that ratio between the uh The Gnome on and its shadow or the rod and its shadow
would be the same all over the Earth because the Earth is flat right so all this all these angles are the same but
if the Flat Earth people are wrong what are some of those sneaky astronomer
folks are actually correct what if we now have a curved surface here and so
there's nowhere you can put two sticks and have them exactly pointed in the
same direction they're all pointed directly towards the Earth's center our gravitational field this binds
vertical for us and so when the sun strikes we're going to have different angles different measurements
the trick then as eratosthenes knew is to find the precise distance you are on
a north-south line from another Observer eratosthenes obviously picked two cities
which were almost directly north and south from one another Alexandria and
Aswan that's the modern name when uh eratosthenes was there but uh in these
two cities were chosen because he knew they were on the north-south line so it was easy
we've got GPS thank goodness we've got GPS so what we're asking people to do is
to measure the solar angle and how do you do that well Scott as always
we are fortunate because we are around people who are clever than we are so we have a couple of designs for this you
saw my ungainly one last time with the uh with the tripod this one is something
made by a student and it's just a couple of uh 90 degree
right triangles and some hot glue and a pencil the line goes diagonally across here you
and you would use your uh you would use your compass to go ahead and set your Gadget up so that
the pencil is in the South and the line is pointing North when the shadow crosses that line you just mark on the
cardboard here measure height of the pencil length of the Shadow and record your time of day and
you can send it to us uh we had another models
sent To Us by somebody and they said oh well you know those plastic triangles you get with drawing sets all the time
and they said oh just get two of them and you glue them
together so that they they form a right triangle and now you can go ahead and
just line the long one up with the north south line and when the sunlight I'm
trying to get this here so when the sunlight Falls and makes the shadow uh you've got an automatic uh again nice
vertical line everything's straight clean and when the shadow lines up and
the reason why we say when the shadow lines up with the north south line is we want everyone to measure it at local
noon so time zones don't matter when the sun creates a shadow and it
points due north the sun is crossing the Meridian it's Crossing that line that divides the eastern and western
hemispheres in the sky and at that precise moment the shadow of
your pencil or Rod or whatever you're using is going to be as short as it ever gets
as the sun rises in the east as it sets in the west the shadow is going to be longer and at this point when the
Shadows pointing due north it's going to be at shortest length and all we need then is the length of the Shadow and the
height of the rod or stick that you're using and actually we found in testing
that a shorter device something that's the rod is only the uh height of a
pencil actually gives a sharper Shadow when you use a meter Long Rod like I was showing last time by the time that
shadow reaches down here on the ground uh the tip has gotten rather fuzzy so
it's hard to tell its exact position a pencil actually gives you a much nicer Shadow point and then it's just the
length of the pencil and the length of the Shadow give us the solar angle and
with GPS we can figure out very exactly how far north or south you are from a
fellow Observer and so our plan is to go ahead and when people send in their data
we're going to process it all together but we're going to go ahead and offer people probably through a Dropbox or a
Google uh a Google Drive Link probably both actually will have here's a data
set for you to try with your own home measurement so you can compare yours the idea is quite simple
if the Earth is flat everybody will have the same solar angle we don't believe that hypothesis is true we believe the
Earth is a sphere or a spheroid if we want to get really picky but essentially if we measure
the solar angle at one position and another and we know the north-south distance that gives us an angle and we
can say ah that angle is some slice of 360 and so that distance is a similar
piece of 360 and so we can go ahead and we can calculate
there's a spherical measurement the circumference of the earth now what's interesting uh we're going to be
grouping these if we get enough people we're actually opening it up for an entire week March 12th through 18. we
know it's March a lot of people are like I don't get nice weather every day uh
the nice thing is if you have this prepared and you know approximately when the sun crosses the median where you are
uh then taking the measurement takes a minute it's very very quick particularly
if you have one of these uh gadgets hooked up right here and it's all set
and ready to go all you have to do is set it on the ground line it up with a compass and then when your Shadow
touches that North Line mark it off and then measure it later it's very easy to
do uh we have in our chat tonight we have some links we have one where you
can sign up and say yes I'll participate uh we have another which is a Dropbox
folder and the Dropbox folder has video links on here's how this works and how
we do the activity it has worksheets both for younger children say up through
sixth grade and then older folks adults who have had algebra and stuff so
there's there's an elementary and not basically a high school level uh worksheet for this if you're interested
in that as an educator uh or just as a science Outreach person
what's really nice is uh tests we've done so far we've been getting uh
accuracy to less than a one percent error we've been getting our accuracy
down below the one percent uh level which we think is fantastic ideally the
more measurements we have friends and neighbors uh the more data we get the better a view of processing this you
also realize this proves the Earth is spherical not just around in One
Direction because we're taking many many points hopefully all over the surface of the Earth if we're getting the same
circumference in every spot then the only possible shape for the Earth is a sphere
so uh for all the uh gyrating about that the Flat Earth people do this is a
really simple experiment and hey if it's really flat instead of curved on top
then you know what um this experiment should show it this
should if all of us round earth Knuckleheads are wrong this experiment
will slap us down quite quickly and uh no I don't believe in anyone's ability
to manipulate a very large data set obtained over International geophysical
boundaries around the world uh so if we have enough data we're hoping to group
it by day and if we have enough in any given day
we'll maybe try to group these uh by uh their longitude and basically if we can
group longitude groups and we can group day groups then we're getting the sky as
close as possible to the exact same time and the exact same solar setup with the
sun crossing the Meridian that same time of course we're referring to local noon when shadow goes perfectly north south
in Direction so there we go that's that's the pitch folks I hope that you
will all participate that you'll get these links off our chat that you'll go take a look
at this uh I'm doing this with my good friend and partner in crime David setterberg who's a physics professor at
Purdue and he's an astronomy for educators fan he runs a program called Saturday morning astrophysics which if
that doesn't uh that's better than your old Scooby-Doo cartoon so I encourage you to go search him out because he has
fun stuff every weekend and uh he reached out and he said I saw this in your book I want to do it I'm going to
South America with some physicists and some teachers and I want to do this and I said uh I know a bunch of people who'd
love to do this uh so I'm hoping I'm hoping we can get everybody in the uh
Global Star Party audience to give this a try and there's links there for you to
send us your data and all the data we get big set small set we don't know but
uh we're gonna go ahead and publish the entire data set and our our spreadsheet
for doing the analysis so uh we'll share our results we hope to write a paper on
this later but the first part the important part is for all of us and it's
not this week it's next week uh March 12th through 18th uh will be the day look for a sunny
day play have fun with you know cardboard and exacto knives and hot glue
uh remember what your mom said put a bunch of papers or a cutting board uh
and don't Mar up the dining room table she won't thank you for that oh
Daniel do you need to put like uh marks like uh centimeter marks or millimeters no actually actually Scott you do not
all you have to do is uh you're going to take a ruler and measure off the back
side and you'll measure the length of your uh your no mind your stick there and then
you can there's a little bit of error on every ruler but it's known you can put
it back there into the corner and uh you can go ahead and measure out
where you've got the mark for your shadow um you could there would be nothing wrong with going ahead and before you
glue this all up taking a ruler and marking in centimeters there would be nothing wrong with that if I was doing
it in a classroom that's probably how I would do it um but as usual uh it's been midterm week
here at the University and so all my teacher friends are all groaning in
commiseration with me so I just finished midterm week with all the projects and the grading and the uh Ono conferences
right so I just cobbled these together this afternoon
and uh this one uh came David setterberg sent me he said somebody showed me this
I'm like this is brilliant and of course uh I'm I'm taking that I'm I'm showing
it to all my friends because the uh cutting out the little uh right triangles here they uh I just traced
them out with a measure them out and bang There we go we've got a nice
perfect they fit perfectly and a dab of hot glue and there you go
um be careful playing with hot glue gun kids but uh seriously it's this is this
is this is a treat to build it's it's very very simple it's very straightforward you just need a square piece of
cardboard you could literally do this out of a pizza box um cut up the lid of the pizza box and bang
bang you could have this together in no time and uh like I say you don't even
actually need the pencil you could just use the the tip of the two if you want to make it very minimalist just go ahead
and use the uh the tip of the two cardboard triangles because it will make it perfectly level
when when you do uh yes it should be level but again um we're talking something this is about
there's a little less than about 25 centimeters square so about 11 inches so
uh you're gonna have if you've got any place that's relatively flat I mean you
couldn't obviously put it on the hood of your car or anything like that but uh
um any flat pavement or Surface you can set it down on any sidewalk is certainly probably fine and if we're a degree or
two off level here or not perfectly vertical here
um it doesn't make that big of a difference um actually we measured this I did the
experiments and I measured from four or five minutes early to four or five minutes late so I measure the travel to
the shadow but the sun is at its uh at its zenas here
when it crosses the Meridian which means it's not changing altitude very fast it's at the flattest part of its curve
going across the sky so it's traveling practically parallel to the Horizon so over a period of a few
minutes the solar angle changes very little so this is really it's a very
forgiving experiment it's a very forgiving experiment which gives us uh hope that it will be uh
simple and straightforward enough that everybody can give it a try and uh send
in some measurements and all we really we really need we like to know who you are and and where you're at but what we
really need is your GPS latitude and longitude and then the height of your no
month the length of your shadow and the time of day when you took your measurements that say that's a back
check for us because we'll be able to use your location and say oh local noon was at this hour precisely like I said
within a couple of minutes either way it doesn't really matter so I'm hoping
that we will get uh I know we have many of thousands tune in for Global Star
Party each week and God bless you all for that and uh we're so glad for your interest and we hope you will
participate I'd love to see a thousand or more people from Global star parties sending
in numbers uh because I know we reach around the world to places that I I don't personally have contacts there but
Global Star Party does we reach out everybody does that's normal Star Party a lot of people in in South America oh
yes oh yes and uh groups of teachers that I talk to in the
Philippines in Australia and uh across Europe and America and uh I'm I'm
banging this drum on social media as well so I'm hoping we'll get some teachers to go out and go oh kids let's
send in our data and then we'll we'll get results back that we can check ourselves and we'll
also get uh results of how the entire project went so great I'm thrilled I'm
hoping this will be the first of many uh let's let's walk in the footsteps of great scientists how many people uh do
it uh this time around you know when uh when people uh get wind of this project
I think it will build more and more well uh certainly we could uh if this goes
great a bunch of folks say oh I missed it you know what uh David setterberg and
I will be happy to do it again uh and we'll we can try it in uh this summer
over the summer time or maybe next fall when school comes back in session in August or September and uh
um that project and others come out of my works so if you're interested in
teaching astronomy look up astronomy for educators on any search engine and you'll find the download that one's
for free uh this one's to help pay the bills and support all the good work we
do and this is star Mentor published by Springer and more than 50 activities
that you can do many uh many of them are in this this vein uh here's simple stuff
you can find around the home uh cardboard sketching paper uh
construction paper glue and uh you can do fun astronomy projects and get real
data you can also go ahead uh with the star Mentor Book and you can learn how
to use your small telescope and binocular to become more proficient
because this second question everybody asks after can I see the moon is what do
I do next and that's what we try to do that the world is round yes we proved the world is around and uh
you know one in the eye so the people who say the science is settled no I want
to do eratosthenes is resting on his Laurels for too many centuries
yes I think he does I hope serious though about this uh great mathematician
you're an eratosthenes right right okay so this was at the time when the Greeks
ruled Egypt what do you think the reaction was is in his day of of proving that the world
was round or was it just kind of do you just think it was still kind of like this idea this Theory you know maybe
some other well there's an awful lot of things that indicate the world's
sphericity to us among them the shape of the Earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse
Magellan pointed that out that he had more faith in the shadow shape of a shadow on the moon than all the
philosophers on Earth and there are many things that indicate the idea that as we
travel longer distances North and South we start to be able to see different
constellations and stars so there are many things that indicate the world's roundness and at the time of
eratosthenes these World Sailors and uh
you know dominant civilization of their time they had no doubt the world was round
the question was how big is it yeah we know how much we've we've
reached up into Britain we've reached down into Northern Africa and the near
East and uh this is what we consider to be the world and some of the central
part of Europe but how big is it really uh how much of a of a piece do we have
how big a percent what's my percentage as uh the guy in Brooklyn might say yes
so um this was of vital interest how could you do this this is much the same the
the story of uh longitude which was made into a lovely book and a brilliant uh
series on television and tells the story of how do we figure out how far around
the world we are we know about how big it is right but when we're sailing out
of sight of land how do we really measure how far we've gone and you can get your latitude your north-south
position quite precisely and quite easily enough but uh going ahead and getting your East
West position uh for a long time people were advocating we should publish tables
of the positions of the moons of Jupiter so that if you were far across in the
Dutch East Indies and you wanted to know what time it was back in Paris you could look at Jupiter
that night and the position of its moons and because some of them
orbit every 1.6 days or thereabouts they make a fair to middle and clock
but um then people whine about the weather I have a new telescope and now it's cloudy
that's normal now another method was needed and they eventually went to timekeeping and uh they used
the assumption that the Earth is an excellent chronometer that it is precise and regular and we can make a fox that
we can take on board chip that is precise and regular and by the distance the difference from what local noon
would be in Paris or London and what local noon is aboard ship or on land and
a distant Port of Call from that and our reference chronometer we can see oh
we're so many hours and minutes off and so we must be so many miles apart east
west and that's the way it was done for some hundreds of years
so anyway it's lovely to repeat these projects to go ahead and say look at
this ancient bit of scholarship that we take for granted and say no let's not
let's not take it for granted let's get out let's explore let's do it for us let's do it with our kids For Heaven's
Sake yes but just aren't we always striving for I wish I could see that I
wish I could discover that well now's your chance folks be a moment of personal Discovery for yourself that's
right your journey of personal Discovery that's exactly right so I hope you'll
all participate and if anyone has questions the links which are right at the top of
our chat should help you and you're welcome to write to me astronomyforeducators gmail.com
and uh I do answer all inquiries that come my way eventually although I'm not always a
midterm time stinks Scott it's just it's the time monster that just gobbles
everything right well thanks again Daniel thanks for coming on and we hope that all of you uh
uh you know Bill build the uh the the the uh very inexpensive uh instrument and uh
participate in this I think it'll be fun so I'll do it all right thanks Daniel thank you Scott
good night good night okay so we are going to take a few
minutes we're just going to take a break um and we're going to learn more about the dart Mission so uh thanks for tuning
in you are watching the 114th Global Star Party um you know a bump in the night
all right
foreign
foreign
thank you
foreign
ERS or if it's very fine-grained like sand or maybe it's just one big boulder
in space all of those things will cause something different they'll cause a different crater to form they'll cause a
different ejecta curtain that we can see with each cubed and so it can teach us a lot about what it's made of
after the fact the large focus of Dart obviously is the impact yes we're going
to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid but you mentioned a couple of other things here too so I mean what do you
think is the most interesting thing about the dart mission I mean the impact is I think so I'm an
impact nerd so the impact is definitely one of my I think it's gonna be really interesting but my favorite like I said my favorite part about any experiment is
being wrong so I think the most interesting thing is going to be when all of my models turn
out to be wrong like I'm actually really excited about that because I think that is when you learn the most yeah right
you think I know what's going to happen I know all of these things and then something totally new happens
to be fair I think we're gonna hit we're going to create a Creator we're going to change the period of dimorphos I think all of that is going to happen I think
maybe the amounts or what we learn about the material properties that we had thought of ahead of time is not going to
be true I mean right who would want a thing too like prove me wrong right but that's the essence of science too I mean be able to
actually try this which made me think about what's the most important aspect what's so important about missions like
Dart and planetary defense to do these so really I think for me it's the scale right we have this lab it's awesome we
can do impact experiments I can simulate them with my models but those are all really small scale things right we
um when we fire projectiles in our gun range they're like a quarter of an inch they're tiny right asteroids are big
they're hundreds of meters they're kilometers and so being able to actually
get that data point that says yes you can go from your experiments in your lab up to reality is really really important
you can only get that by doing these sort of planetary scale space missions
right out of some way to get it off the screen off paper out of the lab and into the Real Environment to actually see it
happen yeah okay so for an impact nerd right from the science aspect of this
what's the most interesting thing about Darter Pat the fact that you're going to have this up close involvement with an
asteroid um so I think it's going to be what it teaches us about the cratering process on asteroids because asteroids are kind
of weird um they you know what we learned when we took samples at Banu and ryuku is like
the surfaces they're not what we thought they were you've got these Boulders you have these spots that are just kind of
Sandy they're really really weak so like you know if you were to walk on them you might
think you know instead of just it's really strange and so I think just understanding how that changes the
impact process is really important because that that then teaches us later on if heaven forbid an asteroid were
actually coming towards the Earth you know it tells us how to better protect ourselves plus it's just cool science
I'm even looking at the pictures behind us here and these are all different asteroids that that we have visited with
spacecraft and they got different each one of them is they're all very different stuff so even to get this one
instance of how one works is incredibly valuable oh yeah um and then and as you say they're all
different and every time we go to a different asteroid we learn something new then this would be another data point
this is going to be one of the smallest ones we've ever visited up close we're going to have these amazing pictures as
Dart comes in of the surface and so that'll be just brand new things that
we've never seen before we've covered a lot here too but is there anything I didn't ask or is it just something you
want to add yeah I mean I just I guess to reiterate you know it's so important to do these
tests um at at scale right it's we've only done this a couple of times we've only
had a couple of other space missions that purposefully impacted things we had Deep Impact we've had L cross and we
learned so much from them um and just having these tests at the real scale that teach us the real physics is so important for science but
also for future planetary defense so Dart is so exciting because it's going to give us that data point that we can
point to if we need it in the future to extrapolate to other potentially hazardous objects or other asteroids
when we're you know working to protect Humanity from space and we're all going to be watching
that too as those keep coming in too so hey thank you and thank you for joining us again I'm Mike Buckley and Angela
stickel and go Dart
foreign
I guess I'm doing everything wrong tonight I I've been having audio problems and so
I've been switching things on and off and stuff and so sorry sorry about that but uh anyways uh I do I do want to
apologize for the audio issues that we had and um uh but uh we have uh we have
uh John uh Schwartz from uh LA on with us tonight
and uh he is already starting to share his screen so John you want to take it
over yep um okay my screen's not there but
how is everybody doing we're all good
let me see what uh happens
little technical difficult there we go there you are okay
one more second a little technical right here all right
so I'm here at Mount Pinos this is my telescope my uh
behind me yeah got a little backwards over here
anyway uh let's share a few pictures that I'm working on
this is um let me introduce you to the audience a little bit John now I've known John for I don't know 15 20 years
now uh he's an extremely enthusiastic amateur astronomer loves to do astronomy
Outreach programs um he was with us at the Starlight festival and Big Bear and he did
electronically assisted astronomy uh really wowing the audience with his
massive Newtonian telescope and uh live near live views coming through his
instrument uh of uh some deep Sky objects right from a parking lot in Big Bear so that was really cool uh he is an
artist uh his uh his family is uh I has
an art background as well uh I think his father actually owns a gallery
there in the LA area and uh um John has worked on movie sets and
he's done all kinds of stuff so it's great to have him on and you won't meet
a more enthusiastic amateur astronomer so there you go John
okay yeah so we've had a few clouds lately as you know Southern California
it's been uh quite cloudy I did have the opportunity to do a nice sketch of the
Venus Jupiter Transit it actually just barely cleared in time
so here we go
so now this is actually a digital painting complete wow I uh used
photograph procreate on my iPad and I meticulously painted these trees after a
while it's almost like scribbling but if you notice when I zoom in the um
Venus this was through my Leica binoculars my superb 10 by 50s I could
actually see the moons in a beautiful red spire on Venus like because it was in the
clouds so that was a pretty good view for me
and a nice sketch very nice
okay I've got uh a couple more to go to
so this is my latest uh I'm working on it's an Orion this is probably my 10th
attempt at this object it's not quite done yet but it's coming along
very proud of this one so this is a complete digital sketch
looking through my 28. of course I I did the original saskatchew it was much less
defined overall But as time goes on I uh just upload it
to my procreate on my iPad and I start reworking it it's funny because I
bouncing back and forth on my phone when I see stuff because I always carry these with me
that's another benefit to digital art and also after you know meticulous hours
of averted vision uh viewing and trying to capture that you know it takes quite some time to get
these to come together and this one's unfinished I'm still working on the star field but look at
the trapezium how that little ghostly dust cloud is just
floating illuminated by the Bright Stars centered in the trapezium wow
so very proud okay moving along
that's been a little hot out here too today you know I've got a little Sun so
it's nice Adrian Bradley is watching Adrian he says he says that's a
beautiful drawing John thank God tell him that is killer I appreciate why can't I hear it excited
to join and tell you personally I missed you
very nice I uh man I love your work I really do it's unbelievable it's just like some of
the stuff I do so you know I walk my dog I see so many
great things every day when I'm down I just look at everything outside and it's just
gorgeous and the sun sets the clouds and even the flowers that I send my mom because I can't bring
him so I send them digitally this is uh one I made this is actually a photograph
but uh cell phone cell phone photo very nice kind of fun I'm not surprised you have a
good picture of that flower another one oh so I'm still in league so I may be going
on mute okay okay it's objective bowling league but I
wanted to come on personally to tell you those things drawing thank you so much
here's a you know I'm gonna do one called the faces of Orion and I'll show you all the different versions but
here's another mock-up I've been working on a little different lighting a little
different feel that looks nice trapezium
you know the more I paint the uh dust cloud in front of the actual uh Stars it gets easier each time
learning how to paint the detail but
so here's a uh another one I really like this one this was um the first entry of
the Mars Transit it was just getting in and my friend Andrew called me and said
John you better look now and I scrambled to get some instruments set up I made it but this is uh my first
original sketch looking through my 16 by 70 superb fujinon binoculars
so Mars was coming you know up to the moon and it would
actually go completely through the moon and reappear on the other side but this is just kind of a wide field
mock-up I did of course drawing of the moon it's a disease man I get on these
things I worked on this for two days I just I lose days on this I mean it's
that involved time just goes away when I do these I got to slow it down I'm
running out of time here but uh I mean yeah this is a drawing
if I zoom in it's a little grainy it didn't the resolution I still have to
figure out how I'm gonna get these tighter but it's pretty cool right you can see
it's a drawing Copernicus look at that Copernicus oh
yeah it's very nice that you know this is cool I mean it's tough to get it exact I need to practice
a lot so but I did do a few craters too I'd like
to show you you know on cloudy nights there's some amazing uh crater guys that they are
just unbelievable and they're not even artists
um you know I did a picture of the wife because she's always mad that I never show her you know I send her flowers too
this was a cool flower that I sent her that I again saw walking my dog look at
the beautiful nature it's just unbelievable how they're all reaching for that light
of the Sun uh the giveth of life you know it's just amazing when you see that
so beautiful and then I promised my wife I'd do a
quick sketch I think she had a different idea but this was the one I did
I'm very lucky man um life's very nice that's awesome
I had her walking uh through you know her Shoe Closet because she loves shoes
um but anyway she didn't like it as much as I did I really did like it because she's very
beautiful I'm very lucky here's a quick Tycho
that I did just to fun real quick mock-up here
so yeah right it's pretty big oh yeah just a
very crude rough quick rendering
you know the Moon is amazing because of course asteroids
and and debris hit it all the time so you're constantly
um you know getting bombarded with stuff
let me uh show you this is descendi
crater so if you look there's actually a
volcanic cinder cone there right next to Keith's Creator it kind of
looks like it's bubbled up a little bit I like the way you kind of have it vignetted like that you know around
these features yeah they they do that uh at the forums they do all these different style um
yeah the way they present the craters and it's it's really cool but it really
draws you into those features and it's cool yeah you couldn't imagine being
there like a Fourth of July celebration watching those asteroids come in oh yeah check this one out this is one of my
better ones uh uh it's called descendi crater I might have cheated a little bit I did
use some lro images but I was able to manipulate it to make it look like it
was coming uh from a spacecraft from from our point of view on Earth you know
not not a skewed but it's okay to uh to uh mix all that stuff uh no problem as
long as you're transparent about it you know like yeah you have to you know that's the thing on uh the forums where
you post yep just have to tell them how how it was composed
and um you know I I want to be able to do better renderings but you know I'd
have to set the 28 inch up and that's quite a task here at home
sure but there's you know there's other Scopes I could use that I'm going to be putting out a lot of good ones
real soon well great so let me uh see if I can get
one more one of these is my my best shot but I'm
not sure which one but I can at least show it um so this is my
actual Transit after it went through the other side
so you can see that how it it traversed through the back of the Moon yeah and
then now it's um on the other side it came out the other side
pretty neat detail here this one has hundreds of hours
to to get that you know and it started from a very simple skeletal type sketch
underneath you know very um simple and just loose but nice shapes like a
skeleton and then uh building layers upon layers over it to
you know make it look more smooth and natural I did use a blue filter on this
as well as a polarizer because um it's so bright when you're trying to look at that detail on Mars
and I used two telescopes um I used one of them was a 12 and a
half inch zambuto portable and then the 18 to get to Mars
because I had to use a lot of power sure yeah because the resolving Mars so
you know Mars was pretty simple it was just a quick you know sketch of and markings of what I have
taking notes and then later I come back and rework that I spend
it's incredible how many let me show you one more that's really cool this was uh
I'm still working on it too it's getting more dimensional so I'll show it again okay
my Archimedes but again I mean that crater so in the
front of it where you see all that wispy stuff those are actually boulders and when the lro flew over that I mean
there are some incredible Boulders in there that that you would see that you can't
see from here on Earth but I mean they're they're big boulders like literally football field size some of
them I don't think that was the actual right one for me to show you
um I'm working on another one actually but anyway so uh
that's uh one more for the road this one was again walking
my dog when I whenever I walk him we always see beautiful stuff and the sun
came out again so we're happy about that
there it was it's a beautiful pine tree you know our
street was lined with these giant probably 100 foot pine trees
and then over the years they just cut them out but these are some of the last three that remain on my street
it's one of my dog's favorite he really loves that tree
but it's a beautiful one well the universe is absolutely everywhere and so you know there's uh
I was commenting to my wife I I like to watch like a lot of us you know I like
to watch um um documentaries about astronomy and the
universe and cosmology and all of that stuff and many documentaries about the
universe so you know they show you know visualizations of black holes and
Supernova explosions and all kinds of stuff or racing across space you know
faster than the speed of light these kinds of things which are I mean still cool but
a lot of documentaries do not include you know uh the live ecosystem uh
uh they don't they don't tie in the live ecosystem of Earth that's here on Earth
with how we experience experience it and and these concepts of the universe and
there's a recent [Music] um um uh show on Netflix I don't know how
new the program is but um uh it's with Morgan Freeman and I think it's called
our universe and if you haven't seen it yet you should watch it because they tie in uh you know the the lies of elephants
and Penguins and all kinds of stuff in the deepest reaches of space it's it's really cool
stuff you know so well this was our trip to Hawaii I'm
still working on this but that was the volcano
and uh it's it's boiling I'll tell you like the sun
but the sun nothing's really going off right now
well thank you very much John John all right Scott everyone
I missed Adrian tonight are he's not on yet or he might not come
on back there he's back there he might he might be able to get away from his bowling tournament it it'll all depend
on when the game ends I think so all right well I wish him luck yeah all right thank you guys have a great
evening okay bye all right so up next is uh Marcelo Souza
in Brazil uh Marcelo is the editor of Skies Up Magazine uh but he's so much
more he is uh an incredible uh educator in
um uh at the University and he uh makes
a special emphasis to get youth involved in astronomy
um and so Marcello uh thanks for coming on today Star Party
thank you very much for the invitations but it's a great place to be here and now that Brazil now we began here
for the year because the carnival finishes in February now is the time
that begins the year for us and the I will show some activities that we
developed here in the spirit I'm Michelle here on my screen
on a moment okay
these are group not a student let me see if you see what
okay and and now I I will show some pictures
that I took yeah using our make experience with this much fun to show
what you can see with naked eye and these are the pictures here
in a region yes and this is the big river that that cross our vision yeah
and here was the major few Venus in Egypt in February 25th
it was great because I had I had the opportunity to
to see Venus and the Egypt there for many days here because
we had in January February many days with clouds but in the beginning of Mars
and at the end of February uh we had the opportunity to make up salvations
this again just now is in February 25
and here again yeah Horizon Max first
this is how appeared for us the conjunction that you from different
places I saw many different pictures in the different positions the planets but
here is how we saw here I think that is almost the same that the this is the
song Argentina [Music]
yes I I don't have the pictures because this day I'm gonna say it was a cloudy
night but yes it's US you told that in different
parts of the planets do you have a little difference yes but yeah it's like yours here
yes yes it's real and in this day we organized an event in
a property Square yeah ever we have the participation most of
the participation kids that's a bring their parents to look at the
telescopes here yes yes
we have a big event here and now in March 4th you see now that's the
as everybody knows and so now he's below Venus
then it says fantastic because we have a few clouds this day and it is possible
to see images like this I'll try to show some image of constellation here I don't know if they
they are okay to be sure here is I I don't think I don't know if he's
supposed to see here it is a oriole and here we have
erode and Mars have a triangle here with better Shields
and the mass three red stars in the sky that's something beautiful that's a show
to everybody in the spirit that is fantastic because we
we are in a place here again man Orion and here we have the triangle here
that's bitter Hills and the Mars here they are not to write
in the picture but we handle you see with Nick behind their rights
and this is the Southern Cross in the place that you rewell here is
Southern Cross oh yeah
red sat on Cross which is the latitude Marcelo in 21
places 21 South 21 South wait do you know yes
so amazing this was not in the beginning of night this I think that is seven
thirds something like this because this is how we see the Southern Cross in the
beginning of the Fall the autumn it is his position well in the beginning
of the night in the in the beginning of the Autumn on the form here
it will load the seasons by the position of the Southern Cross in the beginning of the night then this is positioned in
the beginning of the Autumn here four then in the winter is in the vertical
position and in the beginning of the winter in the spring is in the other
side the same positional side let's see how we know the seasons here and this is a
very special place that we are now has a partnership that is a protection region
is a forest near the ocean is different from rain uh rainforest well it's with
very small trees that is near the ocean I don't know how to say in English but in Portuguese we call resting that is
something that is near the ocean man and it is protective region they have a 40
kilometers Square yeah a fair area it's a very big place and do
we organize an event there is the first event of our partnership the name is
a protection protection region there is a private protection region
uh private protect I don't know how to say in English but say is an environment
protective something like this in English that's near the ocean mentally
protected region yeah yes is that private environment protect the region
because it is uh it belongs to a Portia
here's the name of the we call Heather in Portuguese and the name is
a Brazilian indigenous name and we don't have lights inside only
in the headquarter that is located in front of the ocean
yeah this is the red squat you see here do you you have a lagoon here
a very large Lagoon they have a 40 14 kilometers
I feel like here is the red Squat and the here is
the ocean in front of the headquarter you see the vegetation here that is you
have only small trees because you have sense
one question is in this area of residence more to the South or more near
to Rio de tornado
it's amazing because it's different because you have Pines in near to the
ocean yes but but it's not a nature or from Brazil no yes I understand yes yes
we have only yes but our exotic species
and here in Brazil they develop fast then in Australia
to make a paper here sorry yes yes absolutely the same in the
north of Argentina at the center yeah and here is the the protect region all
of these are protectorism now we are we will begin to develop astronomy activities here
we are going inside this region to make observations at night and I will show how it looks at night
here here this was the first activity in this in this right part right and you
reorganizing now a walks inside the first at night to see the sky
yeah you have a lot of people there and you see they have a special lights
artificial lights there to preserve the the dark sky
allow how it looks at night and here you can see Venus and the
Jupiter here up to the building
this is how much for and they have a few lights
in the very we want the likes only turn your own when someone
pass there oh it's kind of a smart lighting where yes sensor to yes
so beautiful place to make a third party yes
yeah yeah now you see here
scientific we need to make it very nice
yeah here is the group that was there this is the first time that was
organized uh astronomy activity that wow
excellent okay this is a picture of the moon our group my wife here
um now it's something that's for me why is the most important this is my youngest
daughter and you see for the first time was using the telescope to show to the
people the moon she was responsible to to put the telescope in the right
position and showed you move to everyone not for me this was a unique experience
now I know that someone here likes restaurant me also yes yes seriously I
don't know how old is she excellent
now in February in February was his neighbor said oh wow
see here she's got a good teacher I hope so I hope so
first time that she was using alone in telescopes and now I have another one to to
organize the activity here yeah that's great did she enjoy the uh you know
showing people the yes yes I left her alone with the people
and you see here we have people here and the COS put into the right position for
people to look at the telescope wonderful this for me was most fantastic in this
world yes and how we organize the International meet our international
meeting here we already have invited to speak with confirmed Gabe Gabriel you'll
be here yes
remember here it's easy responsible for the Global Science Shopper in the nice Global Services will be about the James
Webb Telescope Association
Alejandro Summers here
as I know I know he oh yeah you're over here I hope you can visit us too
Allison is a one time you come to visit us to Sir pariva Grande in San Rafael
Mendoza thank you
yes and I have here one from the muffin of Brazil That's responsible for
planetariums for Brazil and he in his State he was responsible to build three
planetariums
yeah foreign
[Music] if everyone wants to read it is available it's a fantastic edition of
the sky's app magazine participate
much that's great okay all right so um it gives me great pleasure to bring
on uh um Cesar brolo uh uh
Cesar you have uh uh kindly come on live we were trying to do a pre-recorded
um uh thing but I think that you got very busy you know Caesars his company
uh Sirocco uh Optica is uh expanding
quite a bit okay and so he's he was showing me today kind of live views
through the showroom down there and uh but how many locations will uh Sirocco
have in let's say the next year and now we have a fight
um fight is that craziness because yes
um we changed to four to five and you
know it's Sunset when you have two kids and when they have three kids you know
this was the same because we need to change it yeah yes I'm fine yes is it
yes I don't have more more hands to to to give my kids well this is this is the
Sensation that we have now because we change the the machines of the laboratory for our style mix
um it's great it's a craziness because in between of town makes um my area
telescopes and I have some big politics too and we are improving uh the a lot of
things for this year fortunately we are in a in a one way
um our government is a specialist to make these all things very difficult but
we we could fight against the system and and have a
a great a great project for this year uh our new store is one of this
um like a center of distribution for for our e-commerce
um you know on a place where this story in micro in microcentro in
downtown let me show you I think that I have some pictures
and in my presentation and start let me
I changed the sorry I changed the it's
you have the person you watch the presentation mode okay okay no see
because the San Juan and the TV ah yes thank you okay yes
I thought that I show you only the well this is part of the store that you can
see um you can see in the screen uh uh can't
and you we are we are working yes trying the TV
system we are we are watching who is the best place for the screen to show to the
people you told me today that of course that more screened and more special
small things to show products and pictures and something that that for
example we show in the screen is our Global Star Party many many times I put
four three five Global surprise for the entire day
um the people say ah you are you're you yes I'm Marcelo you well a lot Adrian
yes for all people told me ask me about who is this people who is that they work
ah this is you for example uh it's very nice because it's it's a
optic store but most of the middle uh at three quarters dedicated to
astronomy the complete Warehouse dedicated to astronomy to
equipment gear stormy gears
um it will be very very very interesting for us I'm sorry I I
returning
the trip to San Juan was not for astronomy if not that worse for an idea
of my father 84 years old that his dream
is uh drive a drive
uh I don't know the name in English we call it Carlo it's a it's like uh you
know like a car with a with a sale with a
uh is to to to uh drive with the wind oh yeah yeah yeah
so it has wheels right it has wheels yes three wheels yeah there's a sale and so yeah yeah
over the sand dunes yes yes the beach or something I never was so sweet sometimes
really high speed I really was scared because my father said okay this guy my
father is going to to to to crash I don't know no no he really was totally
crazy and happy driving one hour uh with
a with a you know maybe around
50 25 knots of winds uh let me say craziness and and well I say okay if we
if you like go uh with you um one of my brothers to San Juan I have friends in
San Juan because my you know my business is astronomy and I call to to Eddie
Gonzalez Eddie Gonzalez tell me yes of course come with me to the to astronomy astronomer house in the observatory and
we went of course to with Eddie Gonzalez
that Eric have have their their uh their time to observation in the observatory
in the same time because it was I choose of course a new womb and we went all
together because it's the same area it's only at no more than five kilometers between the mountains and the flood area
later I show you a couple of videos of my father driving
my brother Herman I have another brother in Italy Eddie Gonzalez you know him
because he's an astronomer yes uh San Juan is somewhere well it's a
place that is amazing this is La Papa leoncito this flat area
is not water if not this is the the the Dry Lagoon very very yeah yeah dry lake
yes it's dry lake sorry no no Lagoon lake is that right Lake uh of uh 10
kilometers by what four
and this is the this is in the top not the top but it's part of the mountain of the
hill where where the house uh of the of the astronomer
here is is the facilities uh for the tool facilities uh you know
uh where all people make people make uh
parts for the for the observatory and now is out of service the machines are
very well functioned but they don't they don't find people to teach to the
Young The Young Ones to work with these machines the entire Observatory says
the entire Observatory says God it's an observatory that was willed by American
astronomers that came to make this Observatory complete blister masses
happen in the 60s it's an amazing installation
um something that I took the picture of my father with Eric is that my father is
starting to explain all about each machine because he worked
uh with many many of these machines he's a technician engineer a mechanical
engineer um he worked in the 60s in Port Chester
near New York to to to have a you know no treatment
about mechanics and he for my father was amazing because he
felt like in his own house um he told with a lot of people about
the machines the quality of the machine you know um well
later we went to the cesco um telescope that is a astrograph
that I showed you three weeks ago
um it's a telescope here is Eric do you have here two different
views of the of the telescope it's around it's around an F10
two refractors the
and um it's very interesting because it's it's a not is that too that rap
two different telescopes of a half meter each 50 54 centimeters
one two measures in the yellow color and another one take measures of photometry
in blue color the the another two telescope inside the
the main tube are two 10 inches telescope one for uh for lighter lesser
yeah another one for for guiding it's very interesting because it's a dealer's goal that is for example
the size of a sensor is like uh you know like maybe it's around five by five
inches the size of the sensor is now they are repairing and they are
collecting phones for to buy the new the
new tube with the gas to refrigerate refrigerate
the the CCD they working with another CCD to take measures but the main CCD
actually is out of service um they are not only the the owner of the
The Observatory is the Public University of San Juan of course that in our
country actually the funds for for astronomy and especially a
university of this kind in the organization don't have
enough phones with enough money to to buy a quickly
and this kind of of years but our idea
is is helping making an install party especially start party
up and how do you say a special or VIP
guest uh programs like you tell me a program uh
very it's very good idea for for increased foundations
um donations uh to to buy this kind of things they receive visitors they
receive tourists um this is a great this is a great
um form of money but they need more things
because you know all the time they need not only the fact the the the money from
the the rice from from the University if not they need uh money for foundations for any
anything that that they can help because it's a Observatory of complete time
where Eric and another of astronomers were completed time it's not
for for one it's not for turns for example not turns
but if not times for each astronomer if not is a completed time Observatory for
a special dedication for the University
here my father is yes my father is really
curious I say okay I can see the lenses will say okay sure and Eric is was
totally amazing with my father because my father told him about things about
mechanics you know mechanics from the 60s the 70s the 80s and you know that
this is the kind of people that need to to see everything and was fantastic
um show show him the the lenses
here you can see the two 54 centimeters
main for for for each color and here
here you can see the the two inches sorry the 10 inches refractors for
guiding and lighter or another thing that you need
um I took some pictures with cell phone uh we have many with Eric we
unfortunately we don't have the main CCD but I put this telescope this apocryphic
work hmm yes I say okay and we we have fun
um for a man we haven't we have an uh Apple gccd to watch some galaxies and
make some some measures of photometry uh that for me
for me um we have an eye in a professional telescope it was it's an it's like a
Disneyland you know for YouTube for any one of us yes
here is the area where they receive they receive the the visitors they have to to
meet telescope of 10 inches that they go in the 90s
um they received all all kind of people they teach how take pictures from with a
cell phone with a reflex camera it's a it's a a team so kind with the people
that is amazing here do you have Taurus um maybe
more here it's Orion here sorry that the the pictures that I
took was only with the cell phone because I was so amazing Caesar with
this yeah yes yes the the Southern Cross
here and the and the coast in English
that's all right yeah it's amazing place for making a
star party uh only for 36 invite people and our
idea is make a expensive VIP star party for people that can
donate money for for um change the the gas refrigeration
system that is great I I love that the amateur restaurant will say okay how I
how I can donate and this is great because it's it's something that that
the people participate in this and don't forget only the money uh from the
University or you know is
well here we decided the the biggest reflector uh in Argentina is this one is
the two matters two meters uh 15 centimeters
and it's a a telescope that worked from the
80s uh was was involved in the 60s but is is in
functions from the from the 85 I don't remember 83 or 1980s yes 1985. it's a great
telescope here you can see technicians working in the in the um
uh sorry in the filter wheel of the photometer yeah I took I took with this
guys and said Hi how are you I have auditioned too yes uh we start to talk about the
problems and the things about cleaning as well really really happy
my father and the observatory this telescope is from is is a proper
property of the University of Cordoba La Plata and San Juan that are the three
astronomy universities in Argentina
here here you can see very very um how do you say very high end
here massive size of that mountain sure yes yes and and this is this is this is
not my bound it's the amount of the people of the observatory and they are interested in about more by more to
teach to the people to make photography uh yes yes they have and they love it
and they tell me and I use it for teach more
tricks about how you do use and you know um and was very I was very happy to use
this I I put the I have an APO of 80 millimeters
here is my father here you can see the two mid 10 inches telescope for the
visitors um I took a few pictures only two
maybe three this one is Yota Yota centauris with a Galaxy that is very
near in the same line um
here is ETA karinai
is it's the southern nebula that only Marcelo and me and
people from Australia you know or New Zealand Canada I can't enjoy [Laughter]
yes yes this is a beautiful nebula only uh I took I made this only with a EXs
100 uh small I have the same I
um Adrian Bradley and me we have the same year the same small 8 80 a b millimeter
telescope the problem is that I have one of these it's another brand but because
I saw okay all all 80s millimeters of often exports and Fifi next time keep
one for me because the premise yes yes no no that's a beautiful shot thank you
scissor thank you yes no it's a pleasure and this is the last of my presentation the
the quotation of who Peter this is near to the to the quotation and
this is the preparation of of who Peter very very low in the in
the and here is
is a video where
we we make the the transmission for the
public for the public TV because we I know to these people
um they started going to to observatorio San Miguel and they came to my Rooftop
in my home um
my son preparing an excellent transmission of image for for them
um for the people watching watching this let me show you here yeah that's that's
a great way to do astronomy Outreach isn't it yes yes this is the same that all people in TV watch
from my rooftop it was a revolution yes yes it was a revolution because
uh was something that you know sometimes uh is Magic that for for us is something
maybe sometimes normal but uh you know for for the common of the people
they they ask uh how is possible and you know but and this is really magic it's it's
amazing wonderful yes and well here of course
a little more and
the variation here Maxi took a beautiful picture of this
but for many many people was impossible to watch because
um was really low in the in the was really low in the in the
in the Horizon yes here because in my the rooftop of this building is uh 126
meters um you know
sure well thank you so much I I know it's late there uh Cesar and uh I know that
you're exhausted because you've been working all day yeah but but it's a pleasure really thank you very much
thank you thank you very much to you thought that to have given me the
opportunity to show this and of course next time I'll prepare much further a
video we'll be here next Tuesday okay so yes yes it says 115th
floor party next Tuesday on March 14th so absolutely all right yes I thank you very much okay all right
so uh up next we have Dr Frank marches he is the founder one of the founders of
unisteller he's also uh an astronomer at seti you know the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence um and uh he is
live with us now from California uh it's great to have you on Frank thank you
um you've been busy uh with the citizen science pro project uh with uniceller
and um I I saw briefly in email some excitement about the dart Mission and uh
what can you tell us about what's been going on yeah thank you Scott yeah it's been a very busy time for us
and City Institute because we published last week a paper
in nature describing the the result of the analysis
of observation collected by the unistral network of the dark impact before and
after as well so I I have a few slides that Ariel because he works in my group
prepare and I want to mention to describe a bit more in with some visuals
what we did great so in short the dark impact happened in September 26 if I remember
at 2 am in Europe and this impact was visible from the
southern tip of Africa South Africa Namibia um renion Islands Madagascar and so what
we did we mobilized our network of unicella telescopes I remind you that
those are small telescope now normally have one behind me but today for some reasons I don't have it but you have one
on the screen uh those are digital smart telescopes that's the relatively easy to
use and Powerful they work in cities they work in the in the countryside and
so we memorize our Network and we uh we thought of a network about this event and um ask some of our users to observe
it live during the impact as well so some of you may have seen the live show
we did at City Institute for like two and a half hour where I invited scientists to work on
the project including the pi of the dot Mission and the chain we talk about the
event and what they were expecting and then we followed the impact as it was happening and at the same time from
raynian Island close to Africa one of our users um
Patrice show live the the event and we saw the
impact and I'm gonna show you that I'm gonna tell you a bit more about what we did what we derive so those uh this is
the unistella network that contributed to uh to the observation of the NASA dark impact so we have
um in this paper we have nine professionals a scientists who participated to the to the analysis
mostly the one that we need Stella and the city Institute plus some additional scientists from elsewhere we have 31
cities and astronomers around the world from our Network so you can see we have contribution from every continent in the
US in in Europe in adventure in Africa
um Asia Australia New Zealand so we combine those observations
together to get to derive to understand really what we were observing let me just go full screen here
all right so um Suzanne murabbana and the team of the
traveling telescope organized an Outreach event uh during the impact and
this is some picture that they sent us shortly after and they observe it live from Kenya we have a telescope
um with people around and we need to connect to appreciate the importance of
observing um an event which is extremely rare I mean this is the first time humanity try
to divert uh an asteroid body we have not done that yet so that was very an
interesting event to witness and they managed to do it together with four other uh three other team and this is a
video of the observation collected by Bruno Bruno Island
so you can see the demos on the Right Moving and you see wow this is the path of the
explosion wow is extraordinary really
yeah that's regulations that's extraordinary frankly I mean people know me I was
speechless when we saw that yeah and I was not expecting something that
impressive I knew something would happen the diffuse the material blowing off
there and uh the ejecta and the and the material you're going on so this tiny dot is not
the more first only is is didimos the primary and which is 400 kilometer diameter and
demorphos the moon which is 100 kilometers 100 meters or as if that's meter 400 meter 400 meter so this has a
relative this is a relatively small body impacted by a mission which uh as a
relative velocity of 22 22 000 kilometer per hour so we really try this is an
impact of a small body with another large asteroid and you see the impact you see already there how impressive it
was just by watching it so we put together the the observation this is some snapshot of the observation
and you clearly see a change of brightness between the between the observation before and after the impact
before the and practice 2311 UTC and after the impact is the time that I
cannot read because I have my um window on it but you can read on the top on the middle this is at the time of the impact
and then you see the ejector here that's just incredible and uh and I basically
spread a row but that's not all in fact we monitor later on over over the the 26
days after the impact the evolution of the demos and we saw the brightening
reduce slowly and we also saw the creation of a tail the new tail appear
very famous like 10 000 kilometers long yes 10 000 kilometer land
and this is a tell which is uh almost um it's is located in the opposite
direction to the Sun so that's implied that those grains here of material is extremely small because they push by the
solar wind basically that's the same interaction that pushed these tiny grains of of
of material produced by the ejector so those that are I am really amazed and so
is our audience you can see there's there's uh comments here in chat um I think everybody is blown away
yeah this is coming from observation with those with this uh 12 centimeter
4.5 4.5 inch aperture telescope I mean the technology evolves so much
that we are now able to see things like this with those with uh the detector we have and this and this technology so
that was very impressive the impact was impressive the aftermath of the of the
of the impact was also impressive and frankly it took a lot of us by surprise but luckily
I had just High Ariel gracowski who is a commentary
um commentary activity um scientist she has to do comets over the
past five years with Dave J with a UCLA and she joined our group as a commentary
specialist so she basically quickly understood that what we have done here is to create a
comment right right so you could use all the knowledge she had about comets
to derive meaningful information about uh this impact I'm glad I'm not gonna
give you all the details because it's a scientific paper in nature but I'm going to show you this this is very cool
because those are three observations from rayyan Island close to uh Madagascar we have multiple users over
there region island is an island this which is part of France the same way that our is part of the us uh and that's
where I'm from by the way so that's one of the reasons I've really I'm very happy to see this this real scientific
result coming from from the country of my of my mother which is kind of a
personal successful you see something I really wanted to do so we you can see the the
increase in magnitude is 2.5 uh magnitude increase factor of eight to nine roughly in brightness
shortly after the impact and you can see the decrease as well over time
so this is the same diagram but in this case we OBS we observed for 27 days so
you see the contribution of people around the world from the Seychelles from the US from Australia Japan Asia
Etc and you can see this the slow decrease linear decrease in in magnitude
of of dimorphos so what happened here is that after the impact we have probably a
cocoon of material around the morphos and then slowly these materials went
back onto the uh onto the asteroid all got ejected by the interaction with the
solar wind so slowly clear out basically and that's what you see where it took 27
days for the asteroid to lose this coconut fragments around it wow
so combining this is so cool Frank I I am a
you know it's it's startling to realize that you know you can take a telescope as
easy to use as the interstellar is you know uh but you are doing high level
science with it and uh those images are I mean
you know my jaw just dropped when you showed this I have not seen those images before
you know Frank Frank and I occasionally email uh each other but I had not looked
at this data before and so I'm just uh I am blown away I really am good I'm glad to still here that you've
run away I was as well I would say you know we made bets if that's also
live in the in the Institute about what will happen and that was the most
optimistic I said we're gonna have an increase of factor of two in magnitude yeah right well even my optimism got
there got low lower than what we were expecting it's been
it's been an interesting time for us to get this data and to analyze them and to put together a coherent analysis as well
because from that from those diagrams and so on we basically confirmed the
amount of energy that was transferred from the impact to the moon and we have
the same order in energy that what was calculated by the other team that published paper in the same nature uh in
the same nature um at the same time so we have the same result in fact using
our small telescope that people got with the likia um or the urban Space Telescope or the
observation continuous observation of the transit we derived at the efficiency of the of the deflection was higher than
was expected so what is important here is that we we
believe now that we have validated the kinetic impactor as a way to deflect an asteroid so if some fat
comes to us in the future we know we can use this technology to deflect the asteroid and this has been done using
data coming from citizen astronomers you know to me Frank this is
this is as important of I think any
space mission that Humanity's ever done I really I'm not saying that as a kind
of tongue-in-cheek kind of thing this is this is something that uh quite possibly
would save Humanity uh and and anything else above the ground okay yeah in case
of a large uh asteroid strike and so uh well there's no guarantees there was
absolutely nothing in place I I mentioned it earlier in this in this show uh some of us might remember when
um uh the international astronomical Union said that the minor planet Apophis
would indeed strike the Earth at one point I think Landing somewhere
off the coast I don't know how many miles off the coast of California and
they describe the impact and how catastrophic it would be and they said it's going to happen and
there's at that time there was nothing in place you know nothing we could do okay to prevent a strike and um so to
see this happen is uh uh one of the great things of uh of humanity to
accomplish yeah brighter with defense is truly the it's an application of a tsunami
to serve a problem that could be you have a huge consequences on the future of our civilization yes so
it's not only astronomy maybe it's more than that it's beyond it's basically a survival of a species which is being uh
being tested by this kind of experiment so I like the final validated the kinetic
impactor for multiple reasons I mean we we have this idea of sending nuclear uh
nukes to explore the asteroid and so on but these we have so many complications because just sending putting nuclear
nuclear bombs into a rocket it's already a problem politically speaking so here
we have validated a technology to mitigate to deflect an asteroid that
will not need this complicated politically speaking um technology this is easier to do in a
way we will we will be able to launch us a spacecraft to deflect in a steroid if
we know well in advance if this impact will happen so
we also have some weird things I don't I'm not going to go through all of it because we have some interesting
observations like we have seen a reddening and we saw that live too in fact with
the unistail network you can see colors as you Pro you know because we have a detector which is a color the sensitive
detector so during the live suddenly we saw this color changed after the impact
the the the the asteroid become redder we don't know what this is why this is
coming from if it's coming from the dust itself some kind of geometry or if we
have excavated the interior of the asteroid and make and reveal the the
true color of the asteroid which is rather than the surface so that's what this diagrams shows basically and the
line is the the the time of the impact and um and the curve should the difference
of color B minus G blue and green or blue and red
so I'm not going through the detail of that because we don't have an explanation yet but that's an interesting things which uh we need to
we need to understand right now we don't have yet an explanation and I would like to mention that we are the only group
who published the result of the impact life able Space
Telescope missed it jwst missed it with if we succeeded in observing it
that's awesome and the reason is because we have a network of people citizen
astronomers motivated enough to stay until 3 4 AM to do these observations sure there is there will be always
always said there will be always a starry night in the uni Stellar Network there will be always someone observing
if something happened in the sky and that's a clear validation of uh of the
fact that we have telescopes everywhere so now and this is something sorely needed by
the professional yeah Community as well right yeah it's um I mean that's the
reason City Institute partnered with uni steta we we knew that this network has a
huge potential to be able to observe um any part of the sky at any time
so I want to mention some of the people who contributed to this because I mean
as I mentioned those cities and astronomers they stay awake until three four a.m job serve they send us the data
uh they help us as well doing the analysis because we often need some information from them so Patricia from
Rainier Island this is what he mentioned the feeling he had after you observed this uh emotional moment for him and he
sees rain on island in the background you see the pitondo LA Fones which is an active volcano over there
um so we obviously Patrice Patrick is a
community college instructor he's one of the we have a program at City Institute where we deliver a unicella telescope to
community colleges and we train the teachers the instructor to use them with
their students so Patrick Earth is one of them and he has been using his
telescope with his students and he observe the dim office and the dark and the the dark
After the Dark impact in his classroom and this is Ian Svenson from New Zealand
who are also contributed significantly to this to these observations uh Darren
rivet from Australia was observable as well uh from his um uh from um I forgot
the name of the city but in his Southern Queensland in Australia so yeah we have
this network of people motivated to observe that guy and to do observations
to enjoy observing those galaxies and nebulae and comets but you also to do meaningful science and now I want to
emphasize that we are not only using the data of people at the unicellular
Network we are involving them into the data analysis and their code as well so
those researcher those citizen astronomers are risk author of the nature paper and some of them are
extremely proud to be to be part of the of such an amazing uh scientific
Adventure absolutely absolutely and that's all I wanted to say I mean I could talk forever about that
Frank I I do want to say something here you know there are uh I know that there
have been Advanced amateur astronomers that look that did not give
enough credibility and I I'm guilty of this myself to the unit Stellar
telescope okay I'm going oh it's only four and a half inches and it's this and it's that however
I will tell you that seeing this data okay and knowing that this is something
that um that you could do on you know occultations on
Comet outbursts on this amazing Dart Mission okay
uh it's historic and it is uh uh you know it puts this telescope I think as a
Forefront tool to people who actually really want to do science because
scientists need the equipment to almost be invisible they need to concentrate on
the moment okay they need to be there and the uniceller lets them do this okay
and so that is that is incredibly important and um you
know many people they own many many many of you know maybe tens of thousands of
dollars worth of gear um but uh rarely do they do science with
such an instrument this thing allows you to throw it in a backpack go to anywhere
at a moment's notice okay and get data you know and that is that is very
important and uh having being able to join a Global Science team led by you
know Frank and the people at seti I think is just nothing short of
breathtaking and amazing it's brilliant and uh you know I'm definitely one of
the converted thank you Scott wow that's the truth I hope we're recording
this but I will tell you I am I am I I am
just I'm just dumbstruck by by the results and it's just incredible so
well thank you thanks for coming on too I I know that uh you you've been extremely busy and um you know you
didn't have much notice uh for tonight but uh uh it's uh really really amazing
and um so anyways I'll let you go but uh thank you very much thank you everybody
thanks again all right so um okay so up next uh is uh somebody
just finished a uh night of uh of yeah
yep astronomers should stay busy um exercise this is part of my exercise
is bowling unfortunately it means giving up a beautiful night the uh late full
moon is up now um the worm Moon um very bright and the sky is still
probably about 98 Scott is it about 98.
wasn't it full last night yeah it was full last night and uh a few people
yeah it warmed my heart actually what I'll do is I'll see if I can find a picture okay my daughter took a
picture of the Moon and shared it with me let me see if I can
I'll I'll share this one let me save this to my
um oops oh here we go save photo
uh showing photos okay let me uh I'll go ahead and do a quick
presentation I think we won points I think I won two out of three of my matches
um but we're here for astronomy so I want to share photos and
I am going to I guess I can add a few of these
um I'll add four photos that I'll share
from since the last time we did a global Star Party
so hopefully Scott you're seeing the picture my daughter took yeah on her way just on her way to school
she uh probably their cell phone and no she captured the Moon
yeah I keep hearing this you know I'm sorry that this image is only taken with
a cell phone and I'm looking at amazing
um it's really coming the cell phones are getting a dynamic range that's allowing it to capture
um when you zoom in you see some detail on the moon is it the best well
you know but it's really good now this is with my camera before the
moon got full I actually did a video um I have an SV Boney uh 102 Ed
refractor and I mounted it on in ixos 100 uh from explore scientific so it was
uh it was nice to use it and so but before I went ahead
and took a handheld photo of the Moon and I don't know of zooming in if you're
able to see yeah so this is what I was able to do with a camera
and then when I hooked it up to the telescope this is what I did with the telescope
so a little bit more detail a little different
um a little bit different exposure Cynthia watching on YouTube wants to
know what cell phone was used I don't well I do believe my daughter
has an iPhone okay yeah so this is definitely not a this
was both of these the camera yeah yeah this was a Sony a7r4 mirrorless camera
connected to this was connected to a 600 millimeter camera lens this is connected
to the 102 Ed refractor and this is my uh contribution to the
conjunction that happened over the past few days of uh Jupiter and Venus Venus
being the brighter of the two so so these were the four
things I basically did get out and take some pictures
um let's see where's my stop share and you can hear there's some of the noise in the background so I won't be able to
present too long everyone's just getting done with their bowling but um
but yeah so I was able to get a couple of pictures and um you know I did enjoy getting those so
the plan is to uh now I have to wait out the moon and once the once we go darker
the moon again I'll try and get back out get some images um for those who consider Milky Way
season the time when the core Rises that time is now early in the morning three
four five in the morning um and I think that includes daylight
savings time coming up um so if you get out there three in the morning four in the morning
Before Sunrise couple hours before Sunrise you will see the core of the um
Milky Way rise and the I'll show I'll see if I can share one
more set of images I have here they go um
I should be able to do this let me let me share
um let's see it wants me to pick something
so I'll pick the screen and
uh start the broadcast let's see what happens
okay so now it is sharing screen so here
is an image I took and when you do Moon images
um and you have stars with them the actual size yep there's the halo
around the Moon I was able to capture it it was almost yeah
and um and then you see Taurus over here actually so this was done with two
images one to expose for the moon one to expose for the entire area including the
Halos and um the actual size of the Moon in photos
like this when you do a wider angle it can kind of stun you that is a true to
life size of the moon against the rest of the night sky it looks bigger and a lot of times
in Composites it's made to be bigger but it really isn't it's uh
it's a small tiny little thing um let's see this is the picture I like
one of the pictures that I like I may have shown this at the last Global star party yeah this was three weeks ago I
believe I shared this one that was my farewell to the comment yeah and that
the little spot right in the middle was my farewell
here's there's the comment right there some folks are still getting pictures of e3
it hasn't left us yet so yeah so I have
I do have a full moon I think this is the state the Moon is in now if I'm not mistaken it's uh
it's in this state this is a waning gibbous um just like the Moon is now which I
like to call the late full moon because it rises late you know after Sunset I
have a question for you Adrian yeah I see the full moon like that do you in the dark the dark Maria and
all the rest of it do you see a man in the moon do you see a woman in the Moon
or do you see I see I generally just see the Mario it's
boring I I become bored I just see Copernicus I see yeah there's darkest
and if I you know do the saturation trick then that goes blue
um I do when I see the Moon upside down as in the let me see I might be able to
do a quick little I can't do an edit here but if you flip
this upside down I do see the bunny rabbit in the moon there we go yeah I see the bunny rabbit in the moon
whenever yeah I can't it's upside down you know you know yeah
you flip it around I think there's a uh the cartoon of Wilma okay in there now
I'm looking yeah like somebody wearing sunglasses I don't know yeah I think the Mind makes you
you know yeah this area here these areas here often become puff balls for
whatever shape yeah that you want to see this is a fuller Moon from I think last
month this was the 99.8 full moon
taken with a camera and yeah the the Mari that we get to see you know you may
think the um the The Other Side of the Moon would be intriguing
but in fact I'm thinking you know it may be boring because there's very little Mari on that side there's just the one
little Mari and the big crater if we did see the other side of the moon
all the time we may not you know it may be less exciting I mean it would be more of
a huge Discovery once we were able to go around and take pictures from the other side if things were flipped of course we
know physics generally doesn't allow for that but um If This Were The Far Side of the Moon
we would be amazed once we finally got to see it I actually think that the uh
the near Side of the Moon is a uh
you know it's a great side to look at so
um as a reminder this part of the Milky Way I consider Milky Way season
any season at all every season this little few wave season somewhere in here
I have a uh this is what it's going to look like so all you know Milky Way Shooters out there it's gonna rise just
like this around between three to four in the morning I think that was around the time I took this shot I came out and
I got those photos somewhere around here though I think I have
a picture of all of the uh okay here we go I have a picture of
all sides of the Milky Way and I think I did a presentation on it um this region which brings Andromeda
and m33 that little speck right there and that's a NGC object that's the
section that everyone loves and and a plane interrupts it you just have to take another picture it's the brightest
region in the northern hemisphere that's the next brightest region the
sickness region and a lot of Sky globe and then this region is under it's under
image Scott it's the it's the Orion region it's it's a
beautiful region full of dust Plains all of these nebulae that are here they're
the subject of individual shots but there's so much here yeah there's so
much here that's the that's the rosette we know the rosette nebula wins a lot of
titles in in deep space uh deep Sky object astrophotography but here you can
see compared to the rest of the the rest of this whole area it's just a speck I mean this this area is massive
California nebula up here the Pleiades and a little bitty Boyd that kind of
goes around there's a little dark region but what we when people image they'll see the dark
region the gases and everything or the dusty regions and they'll be like that's interesting well if you
these are dust Lanes in the Milky Way going in between them so it's often
interesting that you know when you when you shoot all four regions of the Milky
Way that we can see now the other two regions we can't see below Orion and I think if I shoot this
okay so here we've got with the zodiacal light there's Orion below Orion
all the way if you go kind of equal above the
Horizon if you go that distance equally below
yeah it does the magellanic clouds are below Horizon
if we could see through the Horizon we would see the large and the small magnetic cloud and I believe they would
be on the same side as Orion in this picture um with the Galactic core
if we could see below equal sides of the Horizon we we of course would see
um but we see we would see um I think Alpha and beta Centauri we would see Crux the
coal Sac we would see Ada Karen a and we you know that that whole Rich region
of the Milky Way that shows up in the South that is all below Horizon here and
then that leads into the other region where cannipus and the large magellanic Cloud
the small magellanic cloud and then it circles back to Orion
and so those are the two regions of the Milky Way I need to get in order to complete the Milky Way Circle a couple
of photographers were able to do it it's pretty amazing they image the entire Milky Way as visible from Earth and it's
a big circle that goes through the four regions you see here and then the two
from the southern hemisphere I call them I call them the two regions
um so but you know the part that we can't see here in the northern hemisphere so
that's a goal I do have a passport so I will try and get those other two weeks you gotta use it that's right I gotta
use that password absolutely yeah so I'll stop my uh screen broadcasting
here and um go back so so yeah I've been busy with my I'm busy
with some other Hobbies we had some rough weather we're finally getting some clearing of course when the moon is out and uh but anytime you can get out here
and enjoy the night sky it's go out there and enjoy it and then if
it's if you can get some exercise go get some exercise indulge in some of that but
don't forget to get back out there in the night sky because it is a great stress reliever when you can go out
there and um I it relieved more stress for me than bowling does although I'm getting back
into it so you have to be well-rounded enjoy nature
and each other and have fun you know so that's that's the whole name of the game
is to enjoy yourself and love what you do love you know just you know Seize the
Day man so yeah and do some science now I found it interesting that because and
you can give me your take on this guy we didn't have a lot of media coverage with Jupiter and Venus Drew close together
into night sky so you know behold the internet there were a lot of there was I
saw a lot of talk of aliens in UFOs because you had two bright objects near each other yeah and there's always a lot
of conversation about this I mean certainly um you know one of the
I think really compelling things is that we know life here on Earth is pervasive
I mean I've I've even had um uh I think it was Seth shostak uh who actually did
some uh has some scientific data that if all the atomic bombs that the entire
Supply the entire Arsenal right off was let go okay and uh that humans would
still I mean it wouldn't wipe out all humanity and it wouldn't wipe out all life on
Earth okay it would be nasty and it would be horrible okay but but life is
so pervasive here okay so yeah it's pervasive evasive here
then out of the trillions of planets that probably just inhabit our own Galaxy and then I don't know how many
galaxies there are but take that number and just keep multiplying it yeah gotta
be there's God there's got to be another place out there where there's some you
know flora and fauna and uh so you know uh I don't personally I I'm I'm still
very skeptical about uh uh you know uh UFO UAP from Alien sources uh
I mean and I I will be until you know I shake hands with a yeah and there's
three other people around me doing it at the same time okay it's not just me okay
so uh and that's just me okay but do I believe that there's life elsewhere in
the universe yes I do and I think most people believe that I have heard that the that the number of
people that uh are believers in that we have been visited by alien beings okay
and I'm talking about from other planets other stars galaxies whatever uh is
somewhere in the sixty two percent or seventy percent range something like
that and so you know uh yeah and I have I have friends that have
had experiences and this kind of thing I just I just personally be one of the
guys that is skeptical okay so I'm not going to call people liars I'm not gonna
you know I'm not gonna do that because
well we can say that they have a a vibrant and active imagination and two
we you know you know so I can just you know my own personal yeah that's my personal
take I think it's a good personal to take and you know of course we can only you know come up with things based on
our own experiences that's right and what that tells me is that the average person
you know maybe there's something about the movies that we've seen that you know
explore some of these things that are ringing a little too true in the minds
of the moviegoers yeah it's one of the things one of the things that
um that I think that you might uh think about is uh you know there are some
cosmologists uh that you know they they I think that some
some cosmologists believe that if it can be imagined
that somewhere out there it's happening okay now yeah the Star Wars the Black
Culture Star Wars Star Trek the Masters of the Universe just pure science fiction to us and now we've got we've
got an image or two of black holes um we've got uh compelling evidence that
there's black holes um the uh you know the Navy release of
the of what they're calling you APS you know I'm in the Navy you know uh yeah
you know the military is saying that okay these are things that we can't explain but um
um but we're working on it but we're working on it
came to be true I would be I would be personally very excited about that but
yeah but there's there's still that skep that skepticism I have you know I don't
know if you'd call it healthy skepticism or not but I am skeptical uh about these
things and uh I just need more uh evidence yeah you know so that's all
yeah I agree well being science-minded I think we tend to want to see the
evidence a little more you know the movies are the movies may be plausible but
we're you know we're more likely to question
things a little more I think the average person like you said that 60 or so
um cease sees it and that's all that's needed yeah and that's the majority this
includes my parents okay parents have claimed to have seen UFOs
oh yeah well they were very disappointed I have a brother-in-law that to this day swore that you saw when we were coming
out of a restaurant and he said did you see that you know something with wings that was
silent and I was scanning the Winner's Circle to see how much of it I could see
in that area and he says did you see it there was a you know there was some
weird crap there and I didn't doubt him one bit I didn't get a I didn't see it
and I didn't look at it to see sure you know was it sometimes craft can you
planes can zoom in and out of clouds and so it gives a weird look because it all
of a sudden the plane appears and all of a sudden it disappears you know and then the light you know sort of is the last
thing to go but you know it's nothing I worry too much about but right well it
looks like they're about to close down the bowling alley so I was glad I could make it I'm glad you stretched out
Global Star Party those of you that are watching later or watching now you know
even if it's bowling night and I have to sub for somebody I generally don't want to miss
um Global star party so here I am and hopefully I'll have I did make a video
maybe if I take the audio out I'll just play the video okay um you know at some point in the future
and I do hope to make a couple other other just video shorts and
you know do things um just showing some of the some of the
stuff that I do hopefully get some videos of me at some of these darker
excuse me some of these darker places so uh looking forward to figuring that out
and uh trying to keep it simple and as always um I'll say it for you Scott for those
of you that watch we're glad to be back for the 114th Global Star Party
um I know you heard from some Heavy Hitters a couple of my friends David eicher David Levy David you heard from
Kareem Jaffer you heard from the astronomical league and uh who else did we have on the A-list got from uh
everybody's on the A-list uh David Levy Carol orange uh you know president of
the astronomical League of course you mentioned David eichert Naveen sentel Kumar you know
uh Daniel uh from University and uh we miss Maxie filaries he
couldn't make it this time oh John Schwartz who you were commenting
is my good buddy he's uh he makes some very good drawings and is just he's on
fire for astronomy and if there's if there's ever an evangelist for astronomy
John Schwartz is the leader of the church I mean that's the Church of astronomy
he doesn't like for me to call him doctor but that he doesn't have a PhD he has a PhD
he has one um Cesar brolo you know from uh
Sirocco yeah Dr Frank marches from seti was on you know uh showing the yeah
Stellar telescope you know the there's citizen Science Program which is just amazing and this guy called Adrian
Bradley who does all these amazing uh dark sky uh nightscape shots so yeah I
already liked the he should focus on that instead of all this bowling he's trying to do that's because he wants to go to Reno
for the national uh at the national bowling Stadium there's a tournaments every year I go with the co-worker and
several friends and that's from there I joined the global star party I think
last year to year before to submit a photo of the lunar eclipse as it was
happening I barely caught it before we had the bowl so I didn't do so well but
I felt complete because I got to see the total lunar eclipse from uh roof parking
garage Rooftop in Vegas so yeah we bowling ever Trump's astronomy if we
can't do one or the other we do them both at the same time right so uh that's that's how we do it
so uh hopefully those of you out there enjoyed the global star party enjoyed the banner the uh the presentations and
I guess Scott will find out if we're able to do it again next week we will do it again next week it's the 115th Global
star party with the theme of Attraction okay so okay
that's gonna be interesting that'll be an interesting one to think about the law of attraction you said
or contraction just attraction it is a major Force so yes it is yep
all right all righty so I I kind of screwed up earlier in the global star party I was showing this uh really
interesting video uh from the people that put together the dart Mission and
so I'm going to replay that video um thanks again for making the time Adrian
thank you as always I will take off those of you watching uh enjoy the video
Scott thank you for just having me on global Star Party even if I'm coming in wearing a bowling shirt no that's cool I
think my final series was somewhere close to I think I averaged somewhere around 190 pins a game so it's like a
190. so it wasn't too bad today that's really good yeah I'm throwing gutter
balls all the time so we'll just have to keep having fun and we just have fun and keep after
bowling's over just go outside and look up you'll always feel better that's right that's my that's my advice for all
those still watching and thank you all for joining us and we'll see you next week all right take care alrighty
welcome to another installment of inside the dart Mission I'm Mike Buckley from APL Communications and we are at the
planetary impact Lab at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics laboratory in Laurel Maryland and I'm with APL
planetary scientist Angela stickle Angela I guess welcome and uh you know
first let's even just start right away with what's your role on the dart mission I am the impact modeling working group
lead for Dart so I lead up all of the simulations of the actual impact to try to understand what will happen after we
hit demorphos Okay so we're talking about impacts talking about impact is there a better place to talk about impacts than in the planetary impact lab
tell us what happens here so in this lab we have a couple of different things we
study impact processes around the entire solar system so we have a vertical gun range where we can test impacts into
different types of targets so we can use Sands or ices or different types of rocks to mimic planets and asteroids and
try to understand what happens when in Asteroid or something like Dart hits them to understand the cratering process
sorry Jack to catapult so it's the second main part of our lab and it is uh designed to mimic uh all of the debris
that gets thrown up in an impact crater as it travels away from the crater and hits the surface so we have a catapult
here and you can load materials of sand or we
like to use aquarium gravel actually the bright colors make it easy to track on
to this you pull it back and then you throw it so we're literally throwing dirt across the room to see how it moves
through the air and to see how it interacts on the surface so why is that so important I mean why do we need to
know that information so impacts happen all over the solar system and they happen all the time they're sort of the most prevalent
process that we see on planetary bodies and they happen really really fast it's not something that you can just walk
around and see and so it's hard to understand the physics of what goes on and so you need to have Laboratories
like this specialized cameras and specialized equipment so you can actually understand the physics of what
happens to understand the geology that we see but also to predict things now we see things in movies a lot of times they
say it happens too fast right in movies it's all slow right we're watching these big things come flying in and it hits
this big impact but you're talking about impacts of all different sizes maybe that just larger ones but even smaller
ones tiny ones that you seem to make sure what happens on the surface when something hits yeah so small things like
pieces of dust or small like pieces of paint from spacecraft or something like that can cause damage that can cause
impact craters if they hit like the space station or they hit a satellite and create creators just like we see on
planets with the big stuff so it's important to understand this sort of at all sizes why is modeling and simulation
then so important for the dart Mission so for a couple of reasons so Dart is the first planetary defense Mission
that's ever been flown and it's really a test right it's right in the name double asteroid redirection test we don't
actually know for sure exactly what's going to happen because we've never done it before and so modeling gives us sort
of that best picture of what to expect it lets us design the mission in a way
so that we can be successful so we did a lot of simulation early on to understand kind of what size the spacecraft might
you need or what you know what velocities might you need to hit at we also don't know a lot about dimorphos
right every time we go to a new asteroid it's different than all of the other asteroids that we've been to and so
um depending on what dimorphous looks like the results of Dart could be different and so modeling lets us see kind of all
of those different options sort of a better sense of what to expect and also then to back out
what happened afterwards it tells us you know if we see X and the model tells us
in order to get X you had to have a b and c happen it lets us know what happened when we can't be there in
person to watch it so it sounds like we're trying to learn a few things from the dark Mission I mean it's not just
you know what happens with the spacecraft when it hits an asteroid but even the properties of an asteroid too it sounds like there's a couple of things we're trying to learn from this
message absolutely so Dart obviously its primary purpose is to teach us about planetary defense and the effectiveness
of this technique of call the kinetic impactor and so daughter is going to teach us a lot about that we think we
know what's going to happen but my favorite part of experiments is you know when you think you know what's going to happen and then it doesn't happen
exactly that way you learn something but yeah I also get in just about the asteroid so depending on what
dimorphosis is made of depending on if we see lots of Boulders or if it's very fine-grained like sand or maybe it's
just one big boulder in space all of those things will cause something different they'll cause a different
crater to form they'll cause a different ejecta curtain that we can see with licha cubed in so it can teach us a lot
about what it's made of after the fact I mean the large focus of Dart obviously
is the impact everyone we're gonna crash the spacecraft into an asteroid but you've mentioned a couple of other things here
too so I mean what do you think is the most interesting thing about the dart mission I mean the impact is I think so I'm an
impact parent so the impact is definitely one of my I think it's gonna be really interesting but my favorite like I said my favorite part about any
experiment is being wrong so I think the most interesting thing is going to be when all of my models turn
out to be wrong like I'm actually really excited about that because I think that is when you learn the most yeah right
you think I know what's going to happen I know all of these things and then something totally new happens
to be fair I think we're gonna have we're going to create a Creator we're going to change the period of dimorphous I think all of that is going to happen but I think
maybe the amounts or what we learn about the material properties that we had thought of ahead of time is not going to
be true yeah I mean right who would want to think too like prove me wrong right but that's the essence of science too I
mean be able to actually try this which made me think about what's the most important aspect what's so important
about missions like Dart and planetary defense to do these so really I think for me it's the scale right we have this
lab it's awesome we can do impact experiments I can simulate them with my models but those are all really small
scale things right we um when we fire projectiles in our gun range they're like a quarter of an inch
they're tiny right asteroids are big they're hundreds of meters they're kilometers and so being able to actually
get that data point that says yes you can go from your experiments in your lab up to reality is really really important
you can only get that by doing these sort of planetary scale space missions
right had a Subway to get it off the screen off paper out of the lab and into the Real Environment to actually see it
happen yeah okay so for an impact nerd right from the science aspect of this
what's the most interesting thing about Darter pet the fact that you're going to have this up close involvement with an
asteroid um so I think it's going to be what it teaches us about the cratering process on asteroids because asteroids are kind
of weird um they you know what we learned when we took samples at Banu and ryugu is like
the surfaces they're not what we thought they were you've got these Boulders you have these
spots that are just kind of Sandy they're really really weak so like you know
if you were to walk on them you might think you know instead of just it's really strange and so I think just
understanding how that changes the impact process is really important because that that then teaches us later
on if heaven forbid an asteroid were actually coming towards the Earth you know it tells us how to better protect
ourselves plus it's just cool science I'm even looking at the pictures behind us here these are all different asteroids that that we have visited with
spacecraft and that got different each one of them is they're all very different stuff so even to get this one
instance of how one works is incredibly valuable oh yeah um and then and as you say they're all
different and every time we go to a different asteroid we learn something new and then this would be another data point this is going to be one of the
smallest ones we've ever visited up close we're going to have these amazing pictures as Dart comes in of the surface
and so that'll be just brand new things that we've never seen before we've covered a lot here too but is there
anything I didn't ask or is it just something you want to add yeah I mean I just I guess to reiterate
you know it's so important to do these tests um at at scale right it's we've only
done this a couple of times we've only had a couple of other space missions that purposefully impacted things we had
Deep Impact we've had L cross and we learned so much from them and just having these tests at the real scale
that teach us the real physics is so important for science but also for future planetary defense so Dart is so
exciting because it's going to give us that data point that we can point to if we need it in the future to extrapolate
to other potentially hazardous objects or other asteroids when we're you know
working to protect Humanity from space and we're all going to be watching that too as those I keep coming in too
so well hey thank you and thank you for joining us again I'm Mike Buckley and Angela stickel go dark
and thank you again to our audience uh for any of the presenters that are still
watching out there thank you very much and tune in next week next Tuesday uh
the 14th of March at 6 PM Central uh for the 115th Global star party with the
theme of Attraction so uh until that time keep looking up and we'll talk to
you soon
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sunny day and we have uh you know our
refractor out and I've got my close glasses on and I've got my safe solar filter of course the eclipse is not here
yet but um I wanted to take a few minutes just to show you some things about solar
filter safety the filters that we use is the Thousand Oaks material it is rated
to the highest ISO standards and actually independently tested by us as
well so just to make sure that those standards are met so if you're going to
use a telescope to look at the partial phases and part the let me underline partial phases to you you use the clips
glasses to observe the sun in partial phases when it's uh in total if you're going to
be on the path of totality you can take the glasses off and only during that time which is going to be roughly two
minutes this time on August 21st only during that time can you directly look up at where the sun is because it's
completely blocked out you'll see the corona you'll see you know lots of really cool effects that will they'll
leave you speechless but during all the partial phases you have to have safe solar filtration so how do you do it uh
properly let me show you first off let's show you what you shouldn't do what you shouldn't do is put on eclipse glasses
and look through the telescope that's unfiltered and I'll show you exactly why here we're going to point the telescope
directly at the Sun and right now we have sunlight coming
right through the eyepiece and turn that up a little bit if you use solar glasses and look right at the
filter material you see it's already burning burning a hole right through the
solar filter material that is how powerful a telescope is so this is
definitely something you don't want to do you can now see that there is a hole through there and that could be your eye
so this is what can happen if you think that you can use eclipse glasses to look through unfiltered telescopes or
binoculars if you do that the sun's energy is going to burn right through the filter and burn right into your eye
so if you're going to use a telescope or a pair of binoculars to watch the partial phases of a total eclipse or
just to observe the sun to look for sun spots or something like that make sure that you are using an over the lens
solar filter that has the proper ISO safety rating and all of that and so
what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this filter on it's uh you can see how snuggly it's fitting here this is not about to come
off but you know if you have a loose fitting filter use tape do anything that you can
to make sure that the filter is not going to come off and then the the other thing is too is
that finder Scopes Optical finder Scopes are like little telescopes and they need to be filtered
as well in this case I just have a red dot finder there is no magnifying power to it so I'm not going
to use it to sight the sun in the way I'm going to sight in the sun is literally as I'm going to look down at
the shadow and align the scope up so I'm getting the smallest Shadow possible of the
telescope as it's hitting the ground and now I can safely look at the Sun
and comfort and look at sunspots and if we have partial phases going on at the eclipse
I'll see them all