Global Star Party 12

Transcript for Part A:

have you ever met libby who is also online right now yeah i saw
her in the last conference i was like a spectator oh yeah libby is our youngest participant and uh
someone to whom i really look forward to hearing yeah well last time she was talking about
all these things about mars and so on are we only six now or at the moment
oh there'll be more there'll be more there's there's four parts to this star party yeah yeah so
you know the first part is this the talks part and then we do a
arts part and then do the uh live imaging live image processing part
and then we do comment open panel you know free form kind of sharing and
that kind of thing so yeah i have some art this time it's a little
bit more on the sci-fi side but love it
it's good are you enjoying these um doing these uh
star parties libby yes you like it good and libby where are you from which state
arkansas arkansas okay yeah she is in arkansas
oh somebody wants to go outside how arizona
is the weather global star party staff has adopted libby yes yes we have
so david do you still search for comments absolutely not so much
photographically anymore but i but i still do the visual search i
love doing it i probably will never find another comment but i'm still doing it and i
still love it yeah okay i i watched last time a
youtube video about bolisov of course he was in russian but there
was a some google french translation i could understand more or less what he was saying
it's quite impressive the guy i mean the guy doesn't use any software takes his image blinks everything by eye
and doesn't trust uh you know doesn't trust software and so on and so on awesome smart person borisov
he's gotten a lot of good comments too including the first interstellar comet
yeah i observed it several times but uh now it's like in a very very crowded field and i i didn't see it last time
and i tried like a month and a half ago i should try it again
i i love the telescope that tom pickett has in in his background uh
4.5 inch telescope japanese made yes
tom's background there mine is uh a six inch which you probably
saw at palomar it's a six inch uh reflector f4
which i have here i have i have my telescope my dad built
a little roll thingy so i can roll it out my driveway roll it back in
and it has a little tray so i keep all my lenses in the tray so we keep it in the garage and we'll
occasionally some nights we'll just get it out maybe like two times a week and try and
take some photos
i do excuse me everyone i hope that's not coronavirus
i worry that coronavirus can spread over the web
it's kind of funny because since this crisis started i've had a lot of zoom conferences and things like this i never
met so many people then since since christ she started
my teachers are strict on dream calls they're like you better have your camera on at all times you can't leave the room
you have to stay there stay still you can't have any pets in the picture frame you can't be like literally sleeping in
bed not really yeah
well actually on this conference which is not a school conference you have a lot more freedom libby yeah
you can watch your video and you can do a dance whatever you want i look forward to this one more because
my teachers we spend half the time yelling at some kids who won't turn our camera on
[Laughter] turtle we don't practice yelling
well we're not gonna yell we're not gonna yell libby
libby aina she ain't scared she ain't scared
my brother brought his cats over today so i had a lot of fun
one of the interesting things libby is that each time you say more you seem
more relaxed with us and with the group and uh it's just a wonderful miracle to
see you fit in with us so well i'm really really proud of that yeah me too
i mean i've never really met any more people in my life that have been into astronomy like me so
i wrote my class my science class pictures that i took for my telescope
and they were convinced that the moon was cheese
well that's one of the biggest reasons why that i am in astronomy not just for myself but
one of the reasons why that i started my club is i've tried to reach out to kids and
different things to teach them something you know
i like when like i like to show my class photos it's fun
you're like you found that in space i'm like yes i did
box part of it which lasts about an hour okay then there's going to be an arts part of
it which
yeah the guys that are imaging and stuff okay
yeah so that that section section's kind of like why imaging or live image processing or some sort of live
demonstration so you can do that okay all right
see you steve take care bye-bye steve alia from ontario telescopes he's
going to be coming on later
hmm the cumulonimbus nebula yes
here's kelly beatty coming in
horsehead is my favorite nebula i have it on the background of my chromebook
for school this one i can't see because i'm loading gallery
view horse ted it has a
i has it i have it as my uh school background on my computer
my little google background and every time i look at it it's fun i just stayed up till like 5 30 in the
morning last weekend to shoot the uh horse head two nights in a row hi kelly
hello david how are you fine thank you all ready to go
and oh yeah actually i rather enjoyed last week's star party that was just us
it was kind of pleasant actually yes i loved how long the chat kept going
afterwards yeah i kept going i should have just left it going you know so
i didn't realize how much people like to just uh chat in the group you know it's a good group of people isn't it scottie
it is we've got we've already got uh people watching now you know so
let's see hi david how you doing nicholas rocha bergman scooter is watching jeff wise
james the astrophotographer is watching steve malia who's joining us later
let's see dusty haskins dusty i tried to call you but i wasn't able to get through
uh so we'll keep trying kelly letourneau is uh watching and
dr nesper dr nesper if i get the corona from this
party i expect an apologies telescope sent to me
oh man uh linda hicks wise is watching libby is the true joy love it
uh nicholas tomorrow rise to my house
she's probably watching from facebook that's awesome
so nicholas is getting a new eyepiece sad because it's cloudy
but fine otherwise sorry dr nesper and zane landers i joined the zoom
thingy and i haven't gotten an invite or had anything start
hmm i joined the zoom thingy uh zane you are probably
you probably bought a ticket and um so
uh why don't you send me an email send it to us at
explorescientific.com and i will help you okay
hey mike
it's in that email down below yeah
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foreign
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uh
scotty i just wanted to ask you if uh you really plan to start it in four and a half minutes
yes i do oh okay then we're all set all to go i guess
okay sounds good sounds good
actually it is a little bit early isn't it yeah about 15 minutes yeah that's that's that's kind of what i
was driving your attention but uh robert's standard time just that here we
go usually i sleep there the next morning because i have to
wake up at seven for school i usually sleep until eight and i miss
one class so i have to get the assignment turned in later wow libby you have to start doing something
go to bed at seven o'clock in the morning that's a real life okay
all these people nobody wakes up at seven o'clock you're
i only saw sunrises before going to bed yeah exactly right
so you guys pink ones huh yeah
sometimes i'll just walk out of my bedroom tonight and i'll see pink moon
it should rain them sometimes
so we have people from i can tell there's an international audience already
very cool here we go zane landers is coming in
hey libby you said that you like the horses guys yes let me show you
something i shot hello hello
nice to meet you all it's really pretty ooh
i like the color this is the horse head here and this is the orion here
we learned a lot about the orion at space camp there
they were trying to um space camp contacted us and they're trying to know if i knew who the lady
was because they wanted to congratulate her i shot that with just a small tripod a
small mount and a uh a dslr with a 200 millimeter lens on it oh wow this dslr
yeah impressive there's about 300 photos on top of that
yeah that's that's the magic right 300 photos times about eight minutes
each oh wow at iso 200
that would be magic if there was only 10 minutes of processing time i guess there is more oh that was the
same yeah my mom's begging me to see needle juice
in the telescope i'm not sure whether she likes the star
or the musical probably the musical yeah
there is a [Music] comment that i shot comment lovejoy
that's pretty i also shot that with a dslr
i'm trying to get more advanced to my photos and here's a close-up
of the horsehead that's really pretty
that red is gorgeous and the fact that it comes natural too
it's just invisible that's the problem here's my scope
oh wow i like the gold around it
it's extra fancy there's a real close-up one
same scope this this was shot with uh with that scope yes
oh nice you notice that it's not wide anymore it's it's a camera lens too
i have not done astro photography in a while i had i had a rig and then i i ditched it to pay for more dobbs stuff
this is plenties with that school oh that's really pretty that's probably
one of my favorite ones all of these were done with the dslr
this is a one way this is all dslr wow yeah
the canon six uh uh t3i or 600d
that's been modified that's pretty it has like a gold and a
blue this is one of the reasons why that i got started in astronomy was this right here
dipping pot that's really wide i remember doing this type of thing when
at the very beginning of ccd cameras i had put an infrared filter and i could not recognize the constellation because
in infrared that star which is uh you see the tail of the the yeah there's
a red star there and like an m5 and he was like brighter than all the other stars of the constellation and i
was like what is this mess and then you you learn that they are indeed in the infrared some stars are extremely bright
infrared like 0.8 micron or something actually actually what happened with this photo
when i was taking this uh they were burning the cornfields
okay and there was some smoke in the air and that's why you see all these halos around us but it made it look pretty
so you know well some people use filters to get that
effect this is yeah it's even more what happened with a japanese guy named akira fujii still alive
i don't i don't know boy he was awfully good yeah he was doing this type of pictures
with filters and a very nice consolation picture at the you know film epoch
yeah he did some amazing things on film early on
i was looking to see m51 but i can't see it yeah fuji is still alive as far as i
know okay yes yes he is he was born in 1941
okay
i actually got m51 in that collection there that i shot um
there it is beautiful beautiful image wow that is
that is actually too high resolution for my monitor i shot that i shot that with the same
dslr but i used a takahashi fsq60
you know like one of those little 60 millimeter scopes this one is with a q60 yeah wow
i'm impressed by the the level of small details that you're getting in that with a 60. i mean geez
yeah the end of it pretty has like a little burning spot to the end i like the
little tiny ngc galaxy that's just below uh uh what's the right here yeah right
there i actually wasn't sure if that was an artifact or not i remember there's a galaxy right there
they uh when i was talking to william yang the other day
well this was about a year ago but anyway they actually call this the snail
it looks like one yeah but but it only looks like that when you
pick up all this dust that's around it because mostly there's an application made last year on m51 and to the
left on this image normally would be the top or the bottom there is a very very very faint h alpha zone
uh and people you know were i mean you didn't know exactly if it was related to the galaxy or not i would have to look
at the in the ads uh extremely extremely deep uh image and
then you had this uh h alpha zone that people didn't know exactly what it was there for
i mean uh there's another little galaxy right there if you can see it and there are several of them yet very
tiny discs marcelo souza is just uh uh logged on
from brazil
anybody here get a chance to see the moon mars conjunction a couple weeks ago
so the occupation you got it wasn't an occultation for me they got pretty close though well no a
few weeks ago there was an occupation but really the deep south of chile and argentina
but last when was it exactly last month there was one that i shot
i don't remember when tom we're about to start here so i'll have you all right stop sharing
all righty all right really cool images huh uh huh do i
stop it over here or you can stop it over there stop it let's see
uh i'm not familiar with this there's a little green thing it says stop sharing
yeah do that at the bottom of your page
oh here we go i got you off here we go
gary palmer's on
marcelo's on
kelly is this your fifth or sixth uh install uh one moment please
this is this is the fifth fifth all good good we have
love it this is the one that that that i lay awake at night worrying about oh really
the title is why are so many telescopes better than explore scientific oh wait
careful hello marcelo
i just realized everybody can probably see the scientific celestron banners i have in the background no that's cool
this is not a uh this is not a branded show yeah yeah i know i actually don't even own any celestron products anymore
but just celeste on banners i do i got them from this guy fred paulie he was closing he uh he's this
guy from he knew milford connecticut he used to have a big store in danbury i know who fred is yeah yeah yeah i went
and visited him back in january and i bought these posters from him yeah so
they're actually they were in his store probably 30 or 40 years ago i have another still and rolled up in the
packaging that oh yeah i haven't found anywhere to put it's not as cool looking those those two
yeah that's cool tonight we're sponsored by
so libby do you want me to run your video just before your talk or during your talk or after your talk
you can do it before my talk okay all right we'll do that
uh
okay just a couple of minutes left here
um
you're live right now i know okay yeah is is that are you you got people
okay there's nobody in the room right now just that one guy that tyler kit put in chuck's style was trying to get in he
says i'm in a room says it's dated the 18th so that's what they all are just okay but he's not in that room okay
i'll message you because that's what stocks is yeah i just gave him the credentials so
okay it's like groundhog day again and again
here we go
okay
hey guys
how are you doing you're not good oh late here in the morning
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well hello everybody uh this is uh scott roberts and you are at the global star
party 12 and so we've got uh some of our group here already today
and we're real excited we've got a great program we have arts we have poetry we've got
iconic speakers here uh there'll be astro photographers coming on later
and it's going to be a lot of fun so you know we uh we always start off this
program uh with uh with dave david levy um
if you are tuning in for the very first time and you've never heard david levy speak
he is someone that really knows how to pull at the heartstrings and
touch the spirit of what it means to be an astronomer and
what it means to connect with the universe david is um
has been a lifelong friend to so many people including myself
and we all you know when when you get to experience david uh you know that there's something magic happening and
so it's it's really an amazing honor to have david uh come to our star parties
that we're now running once a week i know that he loves sharing all this with you but uh we we
love having him and so i'm gonna give the the the stage to david but uh
let's see let's get me off the stage how about that david how are you today well i'm doing
pretty well we're uh we're all set and i wanted to apologize for uh
star party 10 last week being a little bit less than what we had hoped for i
think the web was playing tricks on us last week or maybe somebody was trying to keep us
from voting or whatever we're not sure but whatever whatever was wrong we were able
to fix it yeah and we're here now and i saw the poem i was planning to read from
last week is the one i will read tonight and it is from uh
i guess i begin with simon and garfunkel a little prayer to the darkness again hello
darkness my old friend i've come to talk with you again an interesting way to start a song one
of their most very famous song the sounds of silence but it is the darkness that we call you
to tonight to be able to go outside and just look up at the stars
in peace and see because the exciting thing about this the night stars sky
and the night stars is that they look at the big picture they don't pay attention to the news of
the day they don't pay attention to a lot of things they look at the big picture
a picture that takes place not over not over days years but over millennia
and over over the life of the entire solar system the galaxy and the universe
my poem tonight is from the lovely shall be choosers one of the books that robert frost published
in uh i guess it was it was in the uh
early part of the uh or the early to middle part of the 20th century
and the poem i'm gonna use is acquainted with the night because i have been one acquainted with
the night i have walked out in rain and back in rain i have out walked the furthest city
light i have looked down the saddest city lane i have passed by the watchman on his
beat and dropped my eyes unwilling to explain interesting story that that brings to
mind excuse me i was
i was observing from my parents home in montreal a long long time ago
1964 i had an eight-inch telescope telescope i still have and they still use
i was looking up at the night sky when i noticed in the front a police car had
pulled up stopped the doors opened two pl burley policemen got out closed the door and they started
marching military style down to where i was and i thought oh my goodness
this is not going to be pleasant and so i just stood by the telescope i was pointing it at jupiter
which at the time was rising over my neighbor's our neighbor's house which itself wasn't an entirely good thing if
a policeman's coming by anyway they marched military style
down the uh pathway and then stopped just as they got right to me
and they said excuse me sir would you mind if a couple of nosy policemen looked through your telescope
what an incredible relief that was and i was able to
show them my favorite planet jupiter why is jupiter my favorite planet simply
because it is the first thing i ever looked at for a telescope on september the 1st 1960 sky was clear i just gotten
a three and a half inch telescope as a bar mitzvah present i pointed it at jupiter
that night and uh showed it to my parents and galileo himself could have been
could have felt no greater thrill than i did that last that night when i saw the
bands the colored belts on jupiter and the four moons eel europa ganymede and callisto
jupiter has come into my life again and again and again most recently
when i watched the movie 2010 which actually has a wonderful scene
when they show
excuse me a marvelous scene when they show a uh very dark marking on the planet jupiter
at the time i was in touch by email with arthur c clarke we got to
be very close email friends during the last years of his life and uh
as you know i saw the movie and i saw the uh lovely black dot on jupiter and i
thought looks exactly like the spots the comet shoemaker levy 9 left on jupiter
and i told him i wrote to him and i stole them that's what it reminds me of and he immediately
wrote back and he said i never noticed that in fact i'm going to watch the movie again for the billionth time just
to see that scene and jupiter as i say has played an enormous
role in this astronomer's life and i've enjoyed it and i enjoyed looking at it
that summer and this summer just passed it's beautifully it's in the sky right
now and uh it's going to be in the sky for another couple of months
as it gets closer to the horizon saturn is going to get closer to it or it will
get closer to saturn and it'll be really quite close
to saturn at the end of the year i think and we'll have more about that i think
when that happens and i dropped my eyes i'm willing to
explain i have stood still and stopped the sound of feet when far away an interrupted cry
came over houses from another street but not to call me back or say goodbye
and further still at an earthly height one luminary clock against the sky and
that luminary clock has got to be the moon there's another story that it reminds me of
there was a penumbral eclipse of the moon you really don't see the starkness of the earth's
shadow on the moon when there's a penumbral eclipse you just see a dull shading
and that's what i was looking for that night but it was cloudy where i was but i did notice a clearing in the sky
toward the west loaded the telescope into the car it turned out to be the same telescope that
i was using back in 1960 i drove all the way to where the sky was clearing pulled over
set it up and i started looking at the moon right away a police car pulled out
pulled up and i walked over to him and i said you probably think i'm nuts
he said well that's one of the possibilities and i i asked him if he'd like to take a look
at the moon i was looking at the moon through the telescope he said i'd love to he gets out of his car he looks through
the telescope and i said now let me ask you something
it's a full moon tonight isn't it he said yeah it is and i said is the moon entirely equally
bright tonight and he said no it's not the left side seems darker than the
right side and i said that's because there is an eclipse going on
it's called a penumbral lunar eclipse so i was able to introduce
this police officer to eclipses of the moon and so that turned out to be a very nice
event then he got into his car i got into mine went back home and that was
the end of a wonderful story and further still at an unearthly height
one luminary clock against the sky proclaim the time was neither wrong nor
right i have been one acquainted with the night thank you and back to you scotty
well thank you so much thank you okay all right so um
up next is uh is uh um kelly beatty now kelly
kelly is uh is someone that you know i always say he's the he's the
voice of sky and telescope magazine he's he's a senior editor at sky telescope he
is uh but you know kelly is much more than any of the
titles that he might have or or any you can't really just associate the guy with just like one of the events that he's
done or something like that because he's done so much and he's done so many and he's been this incredible champion
not only for protecting our dark skies but he's been somebody that is you know if
if astronomy and astronomers was like some sort of garden this is a guy that has cared and tended for this garden for
many many years and that influence will last probably forever so you know uh he is
someone that uh if you met him on the street you didn't know what he did or anything like that
you just met the guy he's one of the nicest guys that you would ever hope to meet and um and somebody you'd like to
be you know friends with and he has many and uh kelly you know
i'm glad to call you my friend and so and now we're at number he's been doing this multi-part
segment on the state of amateur astronomy and uh he's now at part five and so
you've got the stage kelly that's great and and scott thank you again for those those many kind words you know forever
is a long time so we'll see um for those who've just uh started joining
these we've been tracing the path of the development of amateur astronomy week by week a little of the time
from its uh its beginnings in the 1920s and 30s how it got accelerated during
the space race uh how it took a hit thanks to all the light pollution that we have to deal
with and then how things have improved in part because of the availability of
of great telescopes of all kinds and sizes that just weren't
available 20 or 30 years ago that are now commonly available and and pretty affordable so
tonight we're going to talk about the revolution that has gone on in imaging uh something that i know very little
about to be honest with you when i was a youngster in central california um i was
in high school and i tried doing some astrophotography through the telescope i had i had a friend who was owned their
camera shop and he lent me a camera because i didn't have one of my own this was a single lens reflex camera wow and
uh it was it was a big deal so um i after that i went to i went to caltech
with dreams of becoming a professional astronomer and as i was walking through the astronomy building early in that
tenure i was amazed to see on the walls pictures of what we would consider
familiar objects the orion nebula you know the lagoon nebula
in color actual photographs of the night sky in color i'd never seen them before it blew
my mind had been taken with the 200 200 inch telescope on mount palomar
and so um i i'm still very lousy at photography but but um actually uh libby if you're
if you're watching i'm curious to know do you know what this is [Laughter] [Music]
well we'll find out this this is a roll of film but this is not just film boys and girls
this is iso 1000 film and back in the day
you know it was it was a race to get film that was ever and ever faster and of course back then
iso 1000 film or even 400 for that matter uh came with a came with a heavy
penalty it was it was very very grainy and so there came a point
in all of our lives and we abandoned film and we went to digitalogy
the first digital cameras uh started arriving about 20 years ago
uh and and they have steadily ever since and and it's it's so remarkable that that
those cameras just for our everyday use have been um a big boom because up until
that point not only did we have to we astronomers have to suffer with this stuff but we did we bent over backwards
to try to get it more sensitive so that those those little photons of light striking the film
would record with ever better sensitivity um there was a
the rage was hypersensitizing your film involving taking a little canister of
film like this undeveloped and and putting it in a pressurized chamber with
a mixture of of hydrogen and nitrogen gas and then heating the darn thing
uh baking it out to improve the sensitivity so that you could take you know you wouldn't have to take such
incredibly long exposures film had a really bad habit of as you
made a an exposure of two hours length didn't record twice as much stuff as one
of one hour because the the film would slowly sort of wear out and become less
sensitive to light so along come these digital cameras and they really started to revolutionize not
only how we take everyday pictures but also astrophotography and the real innovation came with the
development of something called a charge coupled device or a ccd which
allowed us to record images and combine images and and i i remember well
this notion of stacking all right so it's it's for those who've
not done much photography uh you take multiple pictures of the same object and then you electronically combine them
and it reduces the the noise in in this combined picture and you end up with a
much sharper picture than just one frame will do and and
that innovation really made a big difference another thing that's come along is that
back in the day you couldn't take color digital images you had to painstakingly
take three images uh through a red filter a green filter and a blue filter and then combine those
uh in your computer to create a color image now it's a very different situation because there are many cameras
that are they call them one-shot color cameras they dispense with all of the filters and the filter
wheels and make no mistake lots of people still use filter wheels but as we were seeing earlier this
evening before we came on the air and you'll probably see later on it's possible with just
just a regular camera to take astounding
color images of deep sky objects that that put those ones from the 200-inch telescope to shame
we're in the midst of another revolution digitally and that is those ccd cameras
are actually technologically falling by the wayside they're being replaced by
cmos cameras which is complementary uh metal oxide
this is reconductor semiconductor thank you very much and and you know in they're kind of the same
at first principles because each of them is a is a matrix kind of a checkerboard
of little detectors to to record light but it's the way that the the cmos
detector processes that information after it's taken the image it's much faster it has
especially for video uh it's it's much faster from the standpoint of the complexity of the camera around it it's
it's uh it's much simpler so there will be there will come a day and right now i think only sony continues to
manufacture ccd cameras uh there will come a day in the not distant future when cmos will be the only game in town
and i want to show you just what i mean by how how i want to close with this and
let's see if i can share my screen here and i would like to show you
an image of saturn uh this was taken
by a fellow member of the amateur telescope makers of boston
um it was the first time he'd ever taken an astrophoto with a camera okay
he used his cell phone and it's the first time he ever used a
stacking software in this case registax wow which is good for planetary images
uh he used a a it was a six-inch schmidt cassegrain telescope um
he had the the his uh smartphone up to the eyepiece with an adapter that held
it steady it took a uh of you know about 35 seconds of video
50 images out of that video combined them and this is what he gets and and what's amazing there are several things
i don't know if you can see my cursor you can see the equatorial uh zone of saturn this uh light-colored area that
girds its midsection you can see easily the cassini division in saturn's rings
you can see the shadow of the planet on the rings and right down here at the bottom you can just start to see
the bottom the south pole of saturn peeking out from underneath the rings all that in a
photo by a cell phone and i think that's as great a testimony
to how far we've come with astrophotography obviously you're going to see later tonight some amazing
pictures taken by much better equipment than the cell phone but but for the very same reason that
david was blown away when he first saw jupiter through that three and a half inch telescope and david was that a
gilbert reflector by any chance yeah remember those gilbert
i do kelly it was a sky scope i had the skyscope from 1960 until two
years ago when i donated it to the linda hall library of science and they have it now okay
well you know for for a lot of us and that includes me continuing i i am not still not an
astrophotographer and almost strictly visual uh but i am feeling the uh shame of not
uh not using my cell phone to take fantastic pictures of saturn like this so i think we we can all take part in
that uh no matter what equipment we have chances are uh with with any kind of decent telescope
or even a telephoto lens as you'll see you can take amazing pictures of the cosmos and this is especially
gratifying to those of us who live in light pollution under light pollution we might not be
able to see these objects anymore through our eyepieces or as well as we used to be able to but thanks to digital
photography they are brought to life almost literally before our eyes
so scott that's it for this week and uh next week we're going to talk about um uh the trends in amateur astronomers
the people that fuel this hobby of ours great
okay right so
i did it for you all right so up next is um
uh someone that's uh near and dear to our heart she has woven her way into all the astronomers that are regulars here
on the global star party her name's uh libby and we call her libya and the stars uh libby's um
uh program today will be she's going to talk about a planet that's near and dear to all of us planet earth and so
i think you want me to run a video right now is that right libby yes okay so i'll do that
let's see and we will let's see remove the spotlight off of
kelly and i'll try to roll this here we go
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so
[Music] so
[Music]
okay well that is so let's get the spotlight on you levy
okay
so recently i have been studying for earth apparently
a week ago but that got cancelled because of technical difficulties and in
that time since of all the smoke from the california wildfires i was able to go
out with my telescope and do some astrophotography now it's hard to take pictures of earth
but i got a picture of the moon and i have it printed out on the paper here
and that's one of our orbeez here it is scott edited it and i took it from my
telescope one of the first pictures so i definitely wanted to focus on the moon
a lot too because we know we're playing it a lot too so i mean
it's hard to get a picture of earth with a telescope unless you're in space i mean then you just be taking a picture
of the ground and that wouldn't be that interesting but um
right now there's a lot going on in earth the environment is terrible um in
america probably not over the oceans but america is extremely foggy and i can't see
past my tree because it's so foggy and smoky because of all the wildfires and
ever since the wildfires have started every time i go out to go check the mail it's been
like my throat just feels different it's not right because
all of the environmental changes of the fire is terrible
and i'm on the weather app right now and i'll usually get notifications and
i'll watch videos of the fire every once in a while checking out how it's going
and that it doesn't look too good
and i know some of the people on the call here i think a couple weeks ago one girl said it looked like mars outside
her window so that's one really concerning thing and i'm starting to get really concerned
because i'm afraid it might travel extremely far and i'm concerned for the people also in
the fire but another thing to be concerned about is this year we just got through
hurricane season and it felt like every morning when i waked up to go to
start my virtual school i looked at the tv and they're like guess what there's a new hurricane
and i if space wasn't my passion i had to
say storms have been because i feel like every time it storms
i always get extremely excited because not
i mean i'm scared if it's like a tornado and it's coming to suck me up but
um it's always fun and i like to be out in the storms not as a violent but i
like to play out in the rain and chase the storms down and i have to say if astronomy was not
my passion storms would have to be because
we're kind of close to tornado alley and i don't know what draws me to the storms
but i like playing out in them so i mean it's definitely bad but for me
it's a little bit good i mean i don't want to get further around i don't want people to get hurt
but i love the storms so i mean that's another concerning thing and
a lot of concern another thing is in the past two years a lot of people
have been extremely concerned about uh light pollution and trash
and i think that's oh so bad um i've been trying to be more careful
about that and i like to make sure when it's night i turn off my
lights and i turn off my um i like to turn off stuff and i'm also
kind of sad i love nasa i have a nasty picture behind me then unless they're kind of sad because they're planning to
launch like satellites to just flood our night sky and i'm afraid when i get my telescope
out in 50 years i'll be like is that a star or is that a satellite is that a plane is that a
yes that's a concern that all astronomers have right now so yeah
but though right now my favorite satellite is international space station
and i'll get on nasa's youtube site and there's this astronaut named sunny
williams she's my favorite astronaut and she'll make videos of um
[Music] she will make videos of what it's like living on the international space
station and i have to say that's something i do enjoy during my lunch breaks around school
during our school lunch breaks because i'm doing virtual schools so you can do
anything during lunch break and that's why i decided to do during that time
and um we uh um every time the international space
station comes out one of my friends her grandpa lives just across the street and
sometimes will see him out taking the garbage out at night and we'll be like hey the international
space station is passing over in five minutes it'll come over and we'll watch it and it'll pass over and we and this girl is
walking by at night walking her dog we're like hey there's the international space station she sat there for about
five minutes she was calling her friends just like hey look it's international space station
um my mom signed up for oh thank you um
get notifications on her phone whenever it comes by and um
also about the international space station is one thing back when we had
the cold war with russia i don't i didn't really like that time i was like
that's such a cold war just spying on us and then um now i think nasa's doing a good job
of contributing the space company administration all over the world
and letting people contribute to it and get their country a little bit step
forward to space travel and back at space camp we had hall
like a little hall and it was by our mission training and they had about 500 or so flags just
hanging up there and asked why are there so many flags and they said those are all the um
countries that countries or states that contributed to international space station
and every time we went up into that hall i would look at each and every one and it was amazing
so i i love that nasa is contributing all the countries
and also back when i was at space camp uh
nasa launches a lot of astronauts into space we know um about
that but um an astronaut named hook gibson and
we got to talk to him through a zoom call and shown on a big planetarium
screen that was just flat you just we talked to him my one of my friends at space camp stella got to ask questions
and it was amazing he was on five space channel missions and
he talked about them and that was really inspiring for me um
i'm sure you guys have guys have seen the picture of the astronaut above earth
with uh you can see earth below and the astronauts just floating up above on the
um man maneuvering unit have you guys seen that photo before
um which photo is that again it has an astronaut above earth on the
main maneuvering unit earth below sonic yeah that's a great picture yeah yeah so bruce
um bruce um who gibson took that photo of astronaut bruce
and edited it and i thought that was amazing because i love that photo it's probably been
that ipad background for probably about a year now
it's amazing and i thought that that was one of the most inspiring pictures i've ever seen
because like that guy is not tethered and it that i
was like that guy's not tethered he's not safe but uh turns out is the man-maneuvering unit
also known as the m and the u so i thought that was amazing because um
we saw uh an astronaut on the zoom call and
usually he would fly in or come to us and talk but ever since kron and virus
came i was kind of bummed out because of that um but that was
an astronaut we got to meet he was in the space shuttle program and it was
a lot of fun um so we took a lot of pictures on of the moon
and i showed you that picture but uh recently i started making some pictures
of art um i do art lessons after school and we go we just get a canvas start sketching
and um i was inspired to do some art pictures because um the girl who was on a week ago
or a week ago two weeks ago sent me a postcard of an astronaut and i
was inspired by that so over half americans believe in ufos
so this one's a little bit sci-fi but i drew
it's beautiful it's a little bit sci-fi not there but yeah i really enjoy it it's a
little bit of a party um but i painted that and
i thought that was fun um my dad he sits on the couch sometimes at night and
we'll eat ice cream and we'll and sometimes we like to laugh at the guys who joke about liking like
joke like they pretend that there's like a ghost and we're like i bet they have a string
tied to that chair and sometimes we'll watch uh ufo ones and we'll laugh at them and
they'll be like sometimes it's disney lights and you see these old guys and they're like i told you i saw
a ufo now i would believe in aliens but not
the way that people think of it um you know i talked about venus and how it
might have life and that's a recent study and i do believe that is true but if someone
said there was a alien coming down to earth in the spaceship like this of holographic glitter then
i probably would not believe that um number one where'd they even get the materials
to build their spaceship um but um half americans believe in ufos
i mean i do but not the ones that have rainbow glitter
and lights um so you believe that there's life in the
in the universe yes maybe anybody tiny particles
or like moss that grows particles that live and maybe some water sources on other
planets but uh definitely not ones with uh rainbow
lights coming out the bottom in holographic stars um
that picture inspired me when uh last a couple weeks ago when the girl showed
the photo when i was talking about the international space station having like a hotel on it and me wanting to go to
mars she showed me a picture of two martians on mars and i was like you know
what i could be a little bit wacky with my drawing i made one serious one of saturn that i'll show soon but uh
i decided to go a little bit wacky for that one right right archer is like in
all the years that i've been teaching i've never had anyone draw a picture
of a rainbow flying saucer and i'm like it's definitely out there
but i do believe in aliens i mean this is the only planet that i for sure 100
percent know that we have life on because
i mean back in 1980 manassas
1916 1980 when essa was like thriving they were like
i hadn't asked the tv on whenever i'm doing my homework and a little show will come on and
it plays over and over again because and i don't think they have a lot to play with chronovirus going on
but um it goes over and over again and it was this old film of this massive
worker explaining why there would be life on mars and once i got the news
about venus i'm like you're crazy there's life on venus not mars
and i was like you guys are in the complete wrong direction life is not
mars it's in the complete opposite direction it's in front of us not behind us
but i for sure know this is um the only planet in the goldilocks zone um it's
not too hot and it's not too cold but i'm sure people on venus not people but
so-called aliens on venus are a little bit too hot
because it has venus has a greenhouse effect so it's burning there but um
this is the only planet that we have life on and the only planet that we know of
launching space objects and space travel devices
yes yep and we are we are earth earth people are a
space faring species now you know how does it make you feel to know that
there are astronauts orbiting us in space 24 7. what do you what do you think
about that does that feel normal to you do you think that's amazing do you how do you feel
to be honest it's kind of normal but at the same time i'm amazed i'm like they
are not on this planet i've been on this planet my whole life i am an earth person i'm the earth species i'm a
human species and they're out there living like crazy i'm like they don't have coronavirus they have food i mean
they can't have soda nor pizza which is kind of sad but they do have an awesome
life up there and it kind of amazes me but it's also kind of normal because i
like to watch the launches a lot and videos and like their hair in the videos
they're just sticking up and i'm like that's crazy right they'll be like i'll be up there one day
so libby your your talk was about planet earth what what is so amazing to you
what is so special to you when you think of earth as a planet
well um oh my family we love gardening um my brother likes it and i recently
started growing my own catnip for my cat and i just realized how
amazing it is that i can grow own food for my cat to play with
so i'm like there's soil and we put a seed in there that'll grow then we take the
seeds from that replant it like we can grow like a whole plant of earth but i'm
sad because um every time i use paper i feel bad because i'm like they chopped
down a tree for this but uh we i definitely love to garden
and grow stuff and it's amazing how i can just grow stuff with soil from earth and put
a seed in there will grow with water and sun yes yep can't do that on the moon
can't do that that on venus right it's only here
right now i mean there may be one other planet and like the whole universe or a couple of
them that have soil like earth but i don't know if they figured out seeds
yet or even there's aliens or something i think there's seven of them
well libby there's a lot of people are having very comments about your talk and
uh they're inspired by you and um
and lordos simone says she's a very intelligent woman especially at 10 blows away some people i know
uh and kana lucas says if i ever have children i would like them to have the
same enthusiasm as libby
it's so cool this is from stephen hauser he says it's so cool that libby feels the same exhilaration from showing
someone the iss as i do as i as i do and decidedly old man
you're uh thank you to all the people who commented your grandmother says thanks to libby i
actually saw the international space station amazing actually got a picture of it too
so and there's many more nice comments libby so thank you my computer is shut off
right now uh-huh because i forgot to plug it in but thank you to all the nice people who sent me
nice comments and thank you mr scotty thank you very much thanks libby
all right that's great okay so uh do you mind if i show
let me something that my daughter painted yeah you can go ahead you can be libby
you're gonna be very surprised i got a 14 year old daughter let me show you what she painted
you're gonna be look at that oh yeah another rainbow uh ufo
it's amazing how kids have the same ideas you know what i mean
all right just look at that she sent that to me about a week about two weeks ago that's fine my phone
she took a photo of it so anyway okay
all right so um let's see um
let's see our next uh speaker here will be mike simmons
uh who's going to talk about the one sky chronicles it's a series that we have here um
be able to uh unshare there yeah
how do you do that for you here we go here we go mike um mike simmons uh
is uh someone that is uh good lord how do i even start mike
simmons is someone that has devoted their life really to educational outreach
he has he has championed a vision of one sky
for many decades made many many sacrifices to
uh to travel the globe to bring people together to
do things with on on literally a shoestring uh you know when i hear his stories uh you
know i'm always uh i'm always amazed at what he did he did so much
with so little for so long you know i think there's a joke that goes along with this but um
you know mike is someone that um uh that many people uh look to for
inspiration especially when they think about educational outreach and astronomy and the unifying effect of looking up
and gazing at the stars and so we'll uh i'll let you have the stage there mike thank you for joining us
well uh thank you for the um introduction that i can't possibly live up to scott you do this to me
and i will tell you there are a lot of jokes to go with that and given half a chance i would
i would throw them all out there i think my wife knows him fight her on one time she'll describe me
not be pretty but anyway uh yeah you know i started doing public outreach
locally uh l.a area uh in the 70s and i always ended up sort of
being in charge of things and and running the la astronomical society and
then building the observatory even though i knew nothing about building and and so on but
you know in the last 15 years or so i i it's expanded and now
it's just like everything i mean i just don't you know it it's i don't see the reason
to do a star party that's in one city or one continent you know let's do it everywhere and you know last so those
who were here last time saw about the 100 hours of astronomy global star party and i'm and i'm glad that uh there's a
different era and and scott's doing different things with it and turning this into something that's really cool
so i said well you know i can share what's going on around there one of the things i'm involved with too
is the book called the overview effect and many of you here may know it authored by frank white who interviewed
astronauts on the impact the cognitive shift they had being out in space and
looking at earth and not seeing it as the ground but seeing it as a planet
with stars around it i mean one described um he was outside
outside you know in space and and he's working on some things and when he looked down he would see stars between
his legs you know it's not it's three-dimensional it's real it looks like a globe and that overview effect
really brings home everything um and and i and i have said to frank and and uh
uh many others that are involved in that that i think astronomy is the overview effect for the rest of us and so
i'm going to bring some uh
people doing astronomy and things and and as you can see last time they all began to look the same after a
while different clothes different color skin and so on so what i want to do and oh i need to make
sure that i keep myself to 10 minutes or so or scott will just yank
me by the cane and stage i don't think we have that that loop and it's quite that long but oh
there's probably a plug-in for that and uh but given half a chance i'll go
on for hours and frequently do so what i want to do here is share my whole screen
there and you know one of the things that brings us to
uh different places this is how it started for me my first total solar eclipse was in 1979
i traveled all the way to washington state from southern california that was a pretty big trip for me then but after
that it was mexico and then bolivia and then in 1999 it was iran and that's what
really started things off this one is 2008 over the great wall of china the western
end of it before it goes out across the gobi desert and
so this is my one and only apod astronomy picture of the day we're having a little side chat there
about how i i'm not even going to try and compete with these guys that are on here i'll leave this stuff to them but
you know when we go to other places for eclipses just like everybody you want to share
what you're doing you're passionate about it you're excited about it and i wonder if anybody can figure out who the
visitor is here give you a clue just look at the legs uh
so there's one guy that is not like the other and he's showing the partial eclipse and we're sharing
eclipse glasses we always take extras and these two were in i think this was
2006 i was in turkey but these were in africa so this is one way that
we get started traveling eclipse chasers know the world really well because those
of us who do that i do it as much as i can but not as much as many others i know i know people have been to more
than 30 total solar eclipses which means you got to go to every one
while you're an adult uh everybody gets into the act like here
i shared some glasses with his dog in uh oh
and um here is somebody that some of you know babak taffer she had in a total solar
eclipse in antarctica realizing he needed to bring more eclipse glasses because he's uh
got more locals than he expected right but
so i i decided to put in a little maps because what i'm talking about today is astronomy in places that you don't
expect and when i say you i'm talking about north america primarily uh scott i hope you have viewers from
all over the world and they're gonna say well of course we have astronomy here but i started with uh connecting
amateur astronomers in the us and iran at a very difficult time when
people-to-people was just fantastic wonderful
and so much in common and the governments are trying to mess it all up so
this is iran in the middle east and i was there in 1999 i had a little
uh it's actually a spotting scope for birding um put a filter on it and others were
viewing the eclipse as it progressed and i traveled around iran for the first time then this is one of the pictures
that i took it's at an educational observatory in northern tehran well
so first maybe you wouldn't expect iran to be completely astronomy crazy like it is
but what's also unexpected is that this picture is entirely representative of amateur astronomers
there it's not old white guys like me in the us
it is young women uh and i realized after i took this picture i saw it later that there is one
young boy in there so this is typical there it's a very young population they
have star parties there's a public star party in espahan uh the country's second biggest city on top of a building
and uh they won a prize for astronomy day one year so look these
they're very creative very enthusiastic people and uh this was a crowd at a
presentation on astronomy day this is in tehran they have wizards doing
activities astronomy activities for the kids including painting their faces
and this was typical this is my wife you can tell
which one i've sent my wife there i'm sure and uh with the scarf almost falling off
and she was being greeted with this was a girls school they're not all separated but many are this is a small town so
it's more conservative and they were so thrilled to meet her they're thrilled to meet americans they
love american things this sign here that's not pepsi cola that's parsi cola
which is almost into afghanistan very unexpected so this is this is kind
of like all surprises here so from iran we're just going to hop over to right next door to iraq
now what do you expect in a war zone well this is one thing that you expect this is actually not recent this was for
during the iran-iraq war in the 1980s
saddam invaded iran after the revolution they had there they came back
and this is these holes in this telescope dome are caused both by
u.s forces later in the first gulf war and um iranian forces earlier
this is on mount cork about 30 miles from the iranian border and it looked like a communications facility domes
become targets because they looked like communications facilities so i was there doing an article for scientific american
about the possible rebuilding of this and possibly a story for new york times as well
and you can see that the missiles ripped through now fortunately the telescope itself which was a three and a half
meter this is in the early eighties three and a half meter uh zeiss uh equatorial massive thing would have
been one of the world's biggest telescopes was in storage in at the university of baghdad
uh unfortunately it's still in storage in the university of baghdad it's just it's a behemoth now so it's probably
nothing will ever be done with it you know for its size so that's what took me there
um this is in the wrong okay well this is out of order this is
actually what do i got here this is actually in iran this is pastor
guard this is the tomb of king cyrus the great 2500 years
ago they were taking part in global astronomy month in the er one of the early ones that was
a follow-up 200 hours of astronomy that i talked about last week and we continue
that in astronomers without borders uh and it was it was a big thing for
them there so this is back to iraq this is kurdistan and um this is where that observatory
was these are the telescopes that this outreach and education group had one of the lenses was broken
so i put out the call and i took with me 200 kilograms it's over 400 pounds of gear
they had a very small budget and uh i took this in addition to a
whole lot of other stuff and cash that we raised for them and here they are taking a look at it
some of the things that they had here uh i got 3d stuff from rainbow symphony
that you everybody knows for their eclipse glasses with a bunch of materials uh there's with some big
binoculars donated cameras uh coronado pst which he is
holding just like an ar uh ak-47 which i saw a lot on the streets
there but i looked at it later and said wow does he think he's going to shoot somebody with that what is it okay and
then um they took part in the hundred hours of astronomy it was a
couple years later with this telescope and i think i might have showed that picture last time
but doing outreach and this is what's similar this is places where
you know this is a war zone and uh kurdistan was not really that dangerous
it wasn't like baghdad but this is the reactions that you get from the people that it shouldn't be you
i think you put a photo inside the telescope that's saturn and uh how many of us haven't heard that
multiple times and uh you know i've been looking at the sky i'm 50 years old
you guys gave me the chance to do it for the first time it's it's memories so this is this exactly the same thing that
happens to us when we do outreach in the us or anywhere else
um unforgettable view and uh he he talks here about
it doesn't matter who you are whether you're doctor lawyer pharmacist worker regardless of age
uh young or old you'll net your you never forget saturn's
viewing saturn it's engraved in your mind that's what it's all about so that is really exactly the same thing
we do now scott should i go to another country
sure sure here we go so we'll hop over from iraq they're all in this area right
here but very different from iraq we'll hop over to afghanistan fly over iran into
afghanistan you what do you expect to be happening there well you know there is
even during the invasion where bombs were falling there was one amateur is written up in sky and telescope in
baghdad who got his telescope out on the roof he just had to make sure nobody saw him because they would think
that it was a rifle and they would shoot him but you know so this is a typical picture
that we want to do right star trails it happens to be over historic place where they're they're a
soft rock i think this is close to i don't know if it is at or close to bamiyan where the
uh buddhist statues were blown up by the taliban right i know that uh when i was
going to visit there uh my friend there said yeah we'll take you to bamiyan we can't we have to fly
because the road's too dangerous but once we get there it's okay and
so it you know this is one of their attempts and we everybody sees this i mean it's the
same thing everywhere in the northern hemisphere here is doing astronomy to school eunice
bakshi right here is the man leading all of this he's handing out eclipse glasses now he's had a section of a book written
about him a newsweek article about what he does he eventually
he is very very careful not to upset the fundamentalists who take
the religious teachings very literally but eventually it became dangerous and
he had to move out and he left it to others and there are other younger people who are doing it now
i love the pictures of the girls doing it because they get to do everything that the guys
do at least in these circumstances
this is the venus uh transit of 2012 and there were some glasses sent over there
i don't remember if i sent them over or who sent them over but what i like about this
is that these are in the afghan forces and these are two american army soldiers
and they were working together and they were up here and the glasses that came from the us ended up
on the faces of these soldiers in fact i worked with somebody who wanted to get glasses over to the middle east in
different countries specifically for the soldiers who are there
now they published a book they got help from the u.n eunice worked at the u.n at the time
and this is mercury and we can tell what they're talking about we i can't read this stuff but yeah you know this is
about the gravity is less about what it's made of what its size is what the surface looks like where it is we we we
know this stuff and um this is a ceremony where they're handing
out the books in uh and this is panshir i believe this is up in the mountains in
the northeast and so it's very traditional and you see these people wearing these things the
only people you ever see on the news wearing this stuff is taliban well
that's very few people this is just the way they dress this is the way they look they're reading the book
going through it so this is being handed over to a school a big pile of them you can see here and he's talking about it
so this is no different than taking them to a school district in some other town in the us
or germany or brazil or anything else but it sure evokes a different feeling
when you see it because it's afghanistan but this is normal and they they did a
great job of getting that book out there and i love this they're all all looking over to this one guys page
here and uh that's afghanistan
okay so uh you want me to save the rest for next time let's let's say you got more
countries i know and we got more star parties coming in so i've got more and this is all about places that you
wouldn't have expected it right and uh there are more you wouldn't expect it and then we'll get to some of
the amazing young people that do amazing things in other
countries not just libby here but in other places too so i i want to try and show the story
that you know what you guys are doing i mean you may be the best but you're part of a big
big community we're all in this together for sure great thank you very much
okay so up next we're going to have carol org from the astronomical league
joining us he's been waiting in the wings here
carol is is president of the astronomical league
he's also a former president of the astronomical league someone i've known for a very very long time
this guy has devoted himself to maintaining the world's largest i think
it is the world's largest federation of astronomical clubs with now today almost 20 000 members and
growing the there's a special emphasis now on taking the organization international
and with a membership at large with the astronomical league and you can find that at astroleague.org
you can join from anywhere on the planet and and take part in in
what the astronomical league has to offer they are our official door price sponsor
um and um carol uh
i'm going to have you read off the questions um we have three questions and i will also
announce after you read those questions you the winners were of the last star party i don't have the prizes that they
won but i do have the winners and uh they would have been uh
contacted or will be contacted soon so uh what do you got here carol let me
share my screen here okay and thank you scott for that wonderful
introduction and it's so interesting uh hearing everybody on here again i'm learning so much
myself yeah question number one what is the name for the boundary
around the black hole beyond which events cannot affect the observer
okay you want to share your screen too i follow sharing it maybe not
share and then you find the little window that you want to share and click on that
it's kind of a two-step process a green button down button on the bottom
shares share screen
now you'll want to answer this not in a chat you're going to want to answer this question by sending your answers to
kent at explorescientific.com um and the first one to do that is uh is
the winner are you getting it um yeah is it showing now scott not yet no
we'll work with you full screen share screen
and then you'll you click on the window that you want to share and then there's another button that
says share screen there you go you're doing it now well now we're good all right okay
look that's the first one uh everybody get that what is the name of the for the boundary around the black hole beyond
which events cannot affect the observer that's number one okay number one then number two
on what date did apollo 11 astronauts neil armstrong and buzz aldrin land their apollo
lunar module eagle in the sea of tranquility brings back some good memories right
sure and then number three what discovery was made by william
pickering in august of 1898.
what discovery was made by william pickering in 1898. okay that's a good question
all right yes one thing i might mention before we go further uh we're uh correcting the
way the prizes are awarded just a little bit i would just want to read a sentence or
two here there will be three questions at the star party which we've had you can win one door prize per night if you
have the first correct answer on one of the questions and have answered another question correctly we will go to the
next person who answered the question correctly and award that person the door prize in essence i would just want to
make sure we uh stretch the door prizes as widely as we can okay well that's only fair so you can
only win one door prize a night is that correct that is correct okay all right well that's that's straight from the
president of the astronomical league so we have to heed that okay [Laughter]
it's a good one it's a good rule all right um let's see i'm gonna
uh we're gonna stop the sharing there and i'm gonna take us back down to gallery view and i will read off um
i will read off the let me see if i can get a view of
myself again here here we go how's that okay
um the question from the last star party question number one was what well-known
star has likely never been observed through a telescope when it was at the zenith this is a hard question you know
so the answer what do you guys think it is
polaris cat what well-known stars likely never been observed through a telescope when it was
at the zenith yeah i think it's polaris it's polaris that's right that's the end that's the
correct answer and the tricky one though neil cox was the winner of that so congratulations neil
number two what was the smallest body in the solar system that can be viewed with the unaided eye sorry meteors don't
count hmm what was the smallest body in the solar system that can be viewed with the
unaided eye meteors don't count
brett blake said i think on the the first question was the sun
what's that can we answer you could of course would be vista
that's right vesta at 300 miles 480 kilometers in diameter
so um you have to have good eyes yep now neil is coming in under the wire okay on
this one he's actually won twice so we now have new rules where you can't win twice during the same
night but but he did so so we're gonna let that one go and number three what was the first
astronomical league messier observing program
certificate awarded what was the first astronomical league necessary messier
observing program certificate awarded what year was that
i'll bet no one here knows except maybe one guy
that guy is on the program i thought tonight [Laughter] 88.
uh this was 1967 and by choc star who's actually visiting us tonight so he's with us and
and we'll be on our program later um so the congratulations to you uh
shailendra sharma is his real name so he goes by the nickname of jack stock but
it is 1967 that was the first year that the astronomical league messi observing
program was uh was uh certified certificate was awarded so now we're up
to over 70 so there's something for everyone that's great that's great and so you know these observing programs
is another reason why you want to uh join up with the astronomical league
you have you you mentioned how many observing programs now over 70. over 70.
my goodness so yeah if you if you complete over 70 observing programs they have a special award for that i think
it's called master observer and some people have done it they spent a lot of time under the stars that's for sure
yeah you would know the sky like the back of your hand if you completed it so one thing we're sending out to each
prize winner uh you'll be getting a note from me and also you'll be getting an application a member at large
application if you would like to consider being a member of the astronomical league
right excellent excellent all right so let's um we're gonna move
on to our next speaker um our next speaker
is uh from brazil he is a professor of uh physics and astronomy um
and uh someone that has been a uh really a long time
champion of of educational outreach and space exploration
and astronomy he's known all over south south america um
and around the world uh it's dr marcelo souza uh he is uh he also runs a
uh regular program uh interviewing cosmologists astrophysicists
people involved in astronomy and he's also become senior editor of sky's up magazine which will be published soon
so we're real excited about that and so i'm going to give
marcelo i'm going to give you the stage
and you are muted you are muted sorry thank you very much it's god it is a
great pleasure to be here the great toronto thank you you're honored thank you
it's wonderful to meet you to meet mike simons i am that's a friend thank you
have a great pleasure dr dave levy and all the people that are here
thank you yes it's a great pleasure yes and i i we organized
last week friday and saturday uh innovative activity here in our seat
then i would like to to share what we did here that is astronomy
driving that organized here in our city that you call in portuguese i don't know if it's the same
thing in english but it is uh an activity in a parking
in a shopping center in our city i also know my screen
okay this is a scientific driving that you
call here in brazil that is a cinema in a for cars
here then they decided because of the virus to organize a public activity
for to observe the moon observe observe and show
image of jupiter and saturn and the reorganizing the parking of the
biggest shopping center of your seats but before we did this we tried one time
organizing one experience before that is this one uh i'm trying to
run a month
okay here first we organized a driving to observe
the new wise then but it didn't work well because you see a lot of people
they left their cars and they come near us to to look at the telescope
but we project the maze in this place that you which shows a place that that
is located far from downtown and is a good place to look
near your horizons here is a tv report about the activities
that you organized this happened in july
24th this year then we have the tv channels there to
see them but we didn't see the comments i will show what happened
here is the place that really shows that it is a old church
here the the cars for the driving into all we will project the maze
here i have a lot of cars here in the position to to look
and he we tried but it wasn't possible to see the comets but was the first time you organize a
driving activity here and we had more than
15 cars that participated in this event then
we talked with the groups that are responsible for the shopping center
and they supported the activity that we were planning to organize
everybody looking for the comments but it wasn't possible to see
actually the video is coming over very well marcelo yes ugly
the part of our sonoma group member of our sonoma club
the sound is loud because a lot of people that
if we had more people that registered for the event then was possible
due to security reasons then they allowed the arizona to have a 15 cars
because of the virus ah in this event
then this was the first event we organized as a driving and we projected is amazing
it's a big screen yes and this was the first experience in
july that you organized in july then we
it was a big success everybody have many people send a message to us
asking about it when we are we organize our new events
they tried to find the comments but why not possible right
well at least we all got you got them to look all up at the sky so
yes doing that for many many years this party was shared all
in our country here that there was the only group that organized this kind of event here
then then they they asked us when do you organize a new event
don't let me show the new event that you organize
now they're they're sad because they didn't see this it was the horizon there was
wonderful far from our city but it wasn't possible to see the opponent and the indie shopping that was a big
shocking the biggest shopping of our seats we generally organize events there
this is one of the biggest events that organize that that's why is uh
are now universe that you organize a place for the visually impaired people
helping us to show to everybody the defectors defectives
they have in their life then we have inside this place they need
to put i don't know how to say in english i forgot to do it they put something to protect the eyes
then people can't see and inside they the guides
uh very visually impaired people they help and then they can touch in the
materials to see how the constellations
and the this was first time it was a big success in the shopping and
the other year we had to organize again an event like this
you see people pouching the 3d mazes of the constellations
then we ever have in support of this shopping center to organize events
and then we thought now we can try to organize the
new driving event in the shopping center and they also he did this one that we
have this giant mars map from buzzy audrey
that he sent to us and we organized this event in this shopping center
and this is our dr scientific driving now the shopping organized a place in
the parking of the shopping and we had the participation of 45 cars
with more than 107 people inside the cars i love this this is great
that was a big event yes i never imagined here you see your
telescope that you donated to us you used to just image we used a
camera digital camera in one of the telescopes in the other telescope we share image
using this smartphone directly to the computer
without internet connection and here you see the cars in the parking
the telescopes yes and here the big screen that we have there
yes another telescope here we are preparing for the event
we make a presentation for one hour and during the presentation we showed
the images videos live images of the moon jupiter and saturn
histories and thought histories about the
legends about the demon here are the cars and the parking
we have security
they ask us some securities cash that you had
during the event that the cars needed to be separated and the
here are outcasts in the right position
here is a live image of the moon my dare to show during the event
uh and as we know i think that was the first time in this period that
we had a kind of scientific event like this
this was amazing and most important at the end of the event
here this is a this is the end of the event we had this
we not had claps
that's great look at that parking lot's full
yes watch five cars great
what a great way to spend the evening and uh it's awesome that you're sharing science and you're giving people
an opportunity to still gather but safely during this time of
social distancing congratulations thank you it was a success because they asked
us to do other events then this thursday we will
have another event in the parking another drive scientific driving and because you have the full moon
everybody asked us to to organize again then we have again and the something that i
didn't believe is that uh five days before we begin the events
audi vets were full nobody can participate because they were full they made registrations
and they didn't have any place to to to have more cars in the event then we will go
to organize one event this thursday and another event in october 12th
that is the kids day here in brazil then they asked the others again to organize a new event
there that's it was the first time here in brazil i went like this i don't know in
all the world but i didn't see any other scientific no i i think you have the very first
uh scientific drive-in amartello it's awesome
it's wonderful very very creative very innovative and uh uh you know if there was a special
mention or an oscar to be given for somebody that does educational outreach you certainly deserve one so that's
that's awesome congratulations okay and then only to remember because
this week we are receiving the contributions for the sky's up magazine
yes that's right if someone would like to send an article and when contribution will be a value
outcome yeah articles astrophotography um
all are welcome like that so yep
thank you very much thank you very much thank you very much dr souza thank you
that's great okay so uh at this point uh
we are going to take a 10 minute break okay and
we'll come back with some um some uh a poem by
uh miss nadine frosh who um uh
was someone that had a great hardship in her life um and
i remember months ago she she called me up and talked about this and we we talked about it for i don't know
maybe half an hour about uh
you know i won't go into the personal details of this but uh what i will tell you is that um
what gave her a fresh perspective on life and and something that really uplifted her spirits
was looking into a telescope and seeing saturn for the first time and she wrote a poem about it later
she sends me this this text uh this this beautiful poem and uh you know i um
and i thought i i looked at this poem again uh just about a week ago and i said you know i need to get her to
record her voice and um and that so we can share it on the global star party so we're going to
do that next uh and then mike simmons is going to return with uh
some uh artistic and
you know things of uh maybe poetry maybe artwork maybe uh
photography uh but in his uh series called visions of space and um and then
after mike we will take another short break and then we're going to come back with the astronomers who will be doing
live imaging live image processing and sharing uh what they have with their telescope so
stay tuned and we'll be back in 10. if i can only figure out where the two
minute break is here we go
foreign
um
so
everything's good how about you good
okay how you guys doing out there
not too bad it's gotten you good you guys getting some clear skies yeah clear skies i got some
images from a cell phone that i want to share with you tomorrow that my kids took with the moon okay awesome
isn't that amazing how much you can do with a cell phone camera yeah it's just our first light series
right yeah right well you've been doing a good job with
those videos tyler so i gotta keep pushing them out everybody wants more hey hey tyler i i thought
there was a rule about commercial advertising on these shows right i don't know what you're talking
about steven the only rule is no politics no religion yeah oh oh okay yeah no politics
astronomy is a religion isn't it
scott what else do you have to do to get yours up and running remotely you know
i have to figure out the power management on it and um
uh the cable management too so i want to have you know i got this
powered usb hub which was recommended to me by somebody actually on this forum and so
i think uh jenny shelley uh recommended it to me so i bought that one and so you know a lot of great advice
and uh um i think i need a field flattener
i know of a good company that can sell you a good one really yeah i'll have to check into that
what kind of setup it's a ed102 um
cd100 mounted on a lasamandy g11 with our pmc8 go-to system
so it's all being set up for remote access so that i can let people who are watching these star parties
access it remotely [Music]
and you put it where close to your house
what's that where did you put it where will you put it right here at explore scientific
i'm in the office right now i'm here a lot so
yep gonna put a dome on the roof we have a place where we can put a dumb
in fact i have a i have a 20-foot observation in the back that used to belong to a company i
worked for um so and we hope to rebuild that but we're
also now becoming the distributor for a fiberglass dome company called pulsar
domes so yeah
and then we've got the portable observation but i'm extremely uh interested in the
portable observer tanks i go camping for long periods of time yeah
well let me know when that's uh available oh yeah i'll do a
pre-announcement on one of these daily shows so
what hey let me find oh hold on did i hear something about a portable observing tent
yes you heard it here first scott i'll call you tomorrow okay
but i'm happy to leave [Music]
now this next part here is a poem by nadine frosh and she
texted me this poem a long time ago and i encourage her to record her voice
and and this is the the poem here it's about it's about
her experience and the feelings that she had when she saw saturn through the eyepiece of a telescope for the first
time after suffering a major blow in her life and
so here we go
what is my saturn there in the light cloaked in darkness
oh so bright in the heavens your rings around
round and round truth abounds dance
dance beckons your light my life my eyes stretch to see
your radiance profounds the small bits of me connect me
connect me to your greater light i look
i see soul dances with delight
saturn saturn you're there if one wants to see
profound profound small larger than me
i've seen you there quietly a mirror for me waiting
waiting that i might see i made the choice
see to see i felt i felt
feeling to see so small you are
your largeness there my bigness sunk your grandness there
saturn saturn your quietness so bright
i looked i saw your mirror
my light
well i hope you're beautiful hope you enjoyed that that was uh
by nadine frosh and called my saturn so
um but uh up next uh we bring back um mike simmons
again and um this is about visions of space
well yeah and uh scott mentioned this to me earlier that
there is going to be this poem and we always have david and i wish david was here but the thing is that
there's a lot of stuff here about gear in about processes and you know
i mentioned last time i'll mention it again this is a quick plug astro gear today is a site that was started by me
and a partner it's all about the gear it's all about the industry the news
reviews and things like that but it's not why we do it i bet you every
one of you guys out there takes these incredible pictures it's all about the feelings you get when you put them together you put so much into it and the
return is so great for me it's been public outreach and education and sharing it with others and
you do that too so you know there's a step farther there are other ways that people enjoy
astronomy and uh share it with others too
and you know i think probably everybody here has seen this
we had this i don't know if it was the original but at griffith observatory and it well could have been when i worked
there in the 1970s it was on display this is justly bonsall uh a painting
that he did one of the most famous of all space uh painters
and this is the view of saturn from titan now
this beautiful poem that was just recited and beautifully recited too
is all about this what if you were standing there you see it through telescopes we've had
close-ups of it but this is how jesley bonstall shares his vision of saturn
and this is before the spacecraft before space telescopes so this is the best you could
do now you didn't always get it right but it doesn't really matter that much
uh chesley was um someone who showed us the future in fact if anybody
that doesn't know about it there is a documentary about chesley bonstall and i can't remember the name of it
maybe i can look it up or somebody else will know about it it's really wonderful and you should see
about how he really showed us what our future in space would look like
well here's another one and this one is enceladus looking at saturn
this may be even more realistic although this was done a while ago but this is actually
jessie bonsell was a an artist and designer who did astronomy this one
is an astronomer who does art this is by um william hartman a famous planetary
scientist i used his book in in in college when i was an astronomy major
and so there are different ways that we see this and for the most part he was
doing the science but he had this other part of his brain that wanted to
show what he felt things were probably like and this is by david hardy a
famous um space artist in the uk
the reason i love this one is because because i want to go there
i mean these things they show us things that we can't see but right
what how you could read by the light of this other galaxy there of course he'd probably be sucked into
it and killed but yeah what a way to go
and there's a youtube link on there did you actually put in the youtube link for the
chesley vonstall movie somebody or is that something else uh i did not see the link but
youtube someone else yeah yeah anyway um yeah it's definitely worth uh worth
seeing so uh this is a vision of what could be what other what other worlds
could be so this is the way that now there is the international uh association of uh
astronomy artists i believe it's called the iaa a lot of great people who do very
different things i've met a lot of them and seen their work it's really astonishing and they're all very different
this is the idea that we all have different brands i mean we see things in different ways and i'll get to more of that later
what is the name of this artist again this one here is david hardy
david hardy h-a-r-d-e-y uh d-y
okay it was a question you know another one that i don't have in here that i really love look her up lucy west she's
in the uh in the us uh i was looking at her stuff i didn't throw any of it in here but lucy west
does some really imaginative stuff that blows me away there they're just a lot of good people that do things like this
yes and this is a blank slide that i think had to do with the transition for this one
so this is the other way we do art it's photography but it's art you guys that are taking pictures
of the planets and so on and processing them forever that's art it's it's not
just geekiness it's you know it it really is art and it's a skill and it is
art because you compose it you frame it you
uh you process it and then there are all the arguments about how it should be processed and what's real and what's not
you know what sometimes it doesn't matter so this is the milky way and this is as
seen from the top of mauna kea in hawaii um which is a great show this is wally
pahulka who's who's a fantastic oh yeah astrophotographer yeah and and wally
caught this one of the galaxy uh just sort of lying on the horizon you
can just see it it's not a big arc like it is in most of the ones it's just going straight across this panorama so
there is our galaxy that we're looking at and because everybody loves these things
i'll show more this is all also wally you can see his name down below is astropix.com
do yourself a favor if you like this stuff and go see wally's stuff uh magellanic clouds milky way easter
island and the same thing twice how did i do that i
guess i like that one a lot uh this one is babak tafrashi who a lot of people
know um very good friend from iran now in the
u.s and this is magellan clouds over the um iguazu falls in south america
so we all love these kinds of things because they show us and there's art involved in this they're
showing us show us what what it's like i like uh um
dang now i can't remember his name he's up in oregon and he does these things this was actually lay down in the middle
of the night and somebody snapped his picture uh this is the end of the night this is what it's like uh crater lake in oregon
um then i can't remember yeah look at the reflections of the stars on the water
yeah this is just i mean this is one of my favorite pictures because i love having us
in the picture people in the picture to me it makes it relevant you know it puts it in context
well here's another way of doing it so this is artist luca saracini and i love what he does you'll see that he has got
lights that make the constellation but for scale you can see over on the right side this
is a street with cars going by this is not a little installation he's made in much bigger ones and you walk between
them and there is audio for each one of these so this is his artwork and in a way it's performance artwork because you
walk through it you pick up an old telephone and a recording tells you something about it
and uh it's just a very different way of of doing these things uh we had a beautiful poem here harley
white is a regular contributor to the astra poetry blog and astronomers without
borders this is from quite a while ago and uh about the hubble deep field there
are so many things that are inspiring this is um
i should write names down because they don't stick in my brain very well anymore
i'm gonna end up having to tattoo my name on my arm so i won't um giovanni
as much as i can get he's italian he does the cosmic concert for global astronomy month
every year this is a live performance part part composed part
improv with videos and images behind and this is the way
he expresses his feelings about it through music in conjunction
with the the video behind and speaking of video
you know there have been movies forever and of course the books that go with it uh here uh the silent film uh george
miller i believe it is and uh a trip to the moon and that's just after
landing here if you guys haven't seen it you got to look it up and see it because it is wacky
uh it's wonderful and there's a wonderful documentary about him too starring ben kingsley
about what he went through making these things so this is in the first couple decades of the 20th century then of
course 2001 which is a tour de force and then e.t
which to me was just silly but you know a lot of people it was fun it was fun
and uh then there's star wars and in star trek and everybody falls on one
side or the other and battle each other and so there these things go on forever
uh then we have science fiction movies from the the sublime
this is war of the worlds one of my favorites ever fantastic film that's michael
rennie in the in the weird space suit there a great british actor to the ridiculous
uh this is robot monster maybe 1953. and she's looking at him like
you expect me to get it for you um oh yeah here we go yeah there's
a little action going there i grew up during this time watching
these hokey things modern things here it says oh my goodness i can't remember
their names now and that's really terrible but an italian artist and
she is from kazakhstan living in in italy and doing um
jerry hubbell says i thought that was the day the earth stood still i said the wrong thing didn't i jerry
i was looking at too many of the things of course that was the day the earth just yeah book davey
corrected us so thank you very much for correcting me jerry uh that was ridic
war of the worlds was good but this is a very profound philosophical one that i think is relevant to today too so thank
you jerry my apologies for the goof and um
they did this uh performance of music and video
for the rosetta project that uh visiting a comet
and uh it was a very important one of course by esa and uh it was it was a fabulous thing
and i know it's archived and could be seen this is somebody i'm going to see if nicole wants to come on here nicole
stott it was an engineer by training worked at uh uh kennedy space center
and saw the astronauts going in and out and said yeah i can do that and um
so she applied and became an astronaut but she's also an artist and there she is with
what i believe is a photograph that she took from the space station and
here is her painting that she did on the space station she did the first oil
painting i think alexa lenov did some drawings but she did an actual oil painting on the space station and
had to uh do some special things with paint to make sure it didn't float around
and i love her work and i have been looking at pictures of space since the
first ones since the 1950s and
i love her paintings because they give the impression of what she's seeing
it's sort of more real the photographs are static and they're they're drier so this is a famous one she did called the
wave um alan bean walked on the moon
allen was an artist he spent the rest of his life uh painting
and i like his stuff and i particularly like this one because this is something you'll never see in a photograph
there are always two guys on the moon and one guy still in orbit right he did this portrait of all three
of them together on the moon that's cool that's and and i love that because it's
expressing the way they felt he was there with them in a sense we had a project this was done by
daniella de paulus who started the astro arts program in
astronomers without borders and i had met uh charlie duke in brazil
i go to marcelo's uh thing an annual thing in brazil quite often and
this year he had charlie duke there charlie walked on the moon and somebody will remember better than me
if i say it i'll probably get corrected it was 15 or 16. i don't remember which
and he um he took a picture of his family and that's it on the left and he
left it on the moon took a picture of it there on the surface with his footprint his foot in the in the
in the view so i contacted him and said uh we have this person who sends uh
images to the moon and then gets the reflection and reconstruction that constructs them i want to send your picture to the moon
and this with your family this time bring it back and so he said he had to scan a new
version of it because the one in the public domain is too small and this is it's particularly noisy not usually this
bad but this is the reflected picture reconstructed so this time they made it back
so i think that's all i have to share but just an overview just an idea there are so many different ways of looking
at space and astronomy nicole and i had wonderful um because
we're both kind of both sides of the brain can't make up our mind and
how it's just different ways of seeing the same thing so if you take a picture of it that's one way of doing it i've
always been a visual observer because that's what i just love uh and i'd love to share it and some
people love to draw it and some people write these beautiful poems like we just heard
and they're just all different ways for us to to enjoy the same thing
thank you thank you mike that's awesome yeah i look i really look forward to seeing more of this kind of thing so
uh you know the um the artistic and the aesthetic
appreciation of the night sky is something that's really important and conveys
feelings and interpretation that um wow you could you can't get any other
way you need an artist uh to convey that and uh thank goodness they're there so it's
like what carl sagan wrote in contact the movie's good if you haven't read the book read the book it's even better
and and uh ellie looking at this and they should have sent a poet
because you know how do you how do you convey that we all have our own ways to do it you've got masters of of
one way of doing it on this show here i i think it's interesting just to interject here for a second that elon
musk is that that investor that is going to fly around the moon in 2023 in the
starship with artists to fly around the moon and to bring that back
that's great interesting he chose to bring artists because he knows he's not
going to be able to i mean if you've seen a total solar eclipse you know i'd been trying for 40 years to explain it
to people it's not possible it's an experience and you guys are all having creative experiences and you can show them but
you can't you know you do the best you can that's a really good point jerry i'm going to be part of that thank you
okay so the next part of our program is going to be live imaging
live image processing um and for all of you that wanted to uh you know interact
with the astrophotographers uh we've got several people here that uh
that do this and so uh we're gonna do a little transition and be back with uh in about 10 minutes
we'll let that poetry and art soak in and and then we're going to come back with
with some live images i'm going to let the group decide who goes first so you guys can vote amongst yourselves
figure it out and and we'll we'll uh we'll go like that all right so
um be back in 10.
so what do you guys think who should go first you got rain so not me
not you huh i don't know how many people even have clear skies right now i have uh in the screen i have saturn
yes how about you gary are you uh clouded out or clear yeah i'm clouded out i'm
gonna be on for about another hour it's 4 00 a.m here so you could go through a
couple of the people live views or whatever you want and um then i'll do a bit of image processing
if you want great okay all right who else is alive right now how about you
tom yeah i'm here right now taking images outside
i'm sitting right here listening to you i can control all of it from right here
too great uh i've got it all all running and when i when i get ready to talk about it i'll
share my screen and i'll show you all all of it running okay and at the same time that we're
talking i'm processing an image okay we're going to keep the uh
we'll we'll keep the segments to about 10 minutes at a time
so everybody uh gets a shot at uh making their presentation um elaine you have uh do you have
anything live there yes yes yes awesome great all the way down in
in chile so that's gonna be excellent and caesar's down in argentina and uh
um got davey entering in the room right now so
um i'm clouded out here
are you all right yeah yeah yeah and then i'm gonna i'm gonna probably jump off soon as well because
i've got a meeting in four and a half hours which i hope i get up for
all right chelan joining us thank you hey hey scott yeah
i'm gonna have to drop off i won't be able to do anything tonight sorry okay all right
well thanks for joining us uh steve yep have a good night everyone or
morning wherever we are morning good night hey jerry i i'm gonna give
you a call tomorrow okay sure i have something i wanted to uh talk to you about based on our recording
from last night okay great i look forward to it thanks all right goodbye
okay guys yeah well we don't have to go the full 10
minute break here either so we can if you guys like how as soon as the imaging discussion started the rain here
just like started pouring it's just it's just a reminder oh it's cloudy not that i'm missing much you
know full moon but right i don't even image but i just found that funny i'm gonna have to it's dinner time
here i'm the farthest west i think but i wanted to ask uh cesar you're in argentina are you or anybody you know
doing a live stream of the eclipse in december sorry sorry um
let me check if i i have my my phone my microphone open yes yeah
well this last time uh i heard
a different news from the last week where i told that
they thought in in still to be with
with all clothes the the plan now is
is go to open november 15 because the understanding that
the these provinces of rio negro now can they talk with the central
government and say that come on we cannot still
close because we have a very huge event a very huge
and the things are coming to to to change now because our numbers
come on are are bad but our government is
an opposite to another country to say no here is disaster you know
and they told us that that the numbers are terrible and
you know it's a politician fighting between populism
and liberalism and um i know it well yeah
yes but here is it's opposite for example maybe in brazil the president say no it's
nothing not here say no this is terrible i say okay it's terrible but our numbers
are so terrible like in the rest of the world we have maybe today 15
000 that's but in the entire time where do
you have maybe more than six months of lockdown
and people say okay we need to stop the lockdown because we have now another
epidemic because it's our very huge economical problems and
people from the province say okay we need to to move the economy because
they they think that i'm i think the same because the epitome here is
is of course that is a big problem but if you see to the rest of the world the
people is going to to move the to move the tourism the the business and
here really the people need to work and receive uh
serve money from the tourists and uh i'm actually i'm
in our company we are manufacturing uh the the
solar solar shades and filters we import from united states unlock material
and i am going maybe to donate some some material for for the school i need to
to to take some contact with choosing the most the
the schools that you know maybe in the rural and farm areas
maybe they don't have uh money and they can do it at
filters you know with the material that we can donate because we have
a part of of the mylar that we don't use
and they can make a small
filters uh you know to to and make the experience to to
make something yeah that's good i know somebody in south africa who actually had a program
one time a project in africa and they made them i can contact her and she can tell you how they did it uh they made
hundreds of thousands and they sold them it was a way for them to do it themselves and and make money at the
same time and uh i'd be interested in what you're doing mostly yes most of the tours
coming from north america have been canceled now including the one and the company that i
was going to do things we're going to run out of time you want to talk another time maybe
about what you're doing i'm do you want to talk another time uh about what you're doing maybe i can
uh connect some people and help yes yes actually the problem is that we
we could we couldn't make something at this time because always outside you
know if you if you call to a school it's anybody in a school and uh for example and
it's the promise that today we don't have the authorities are very very concerned
in the epitome and you know but maybe we
will uh we can uh changes and this type of actions
in the last maybe in the last month maybe in november very fast very quickly
and um we are having an idea of how to work
because our idea is if if we are successful selling
soda solar shades it's in english solar shades or yeah so
um our idea is is earned to to candidate
because in our business we have a huge problem too about the economy
it's very unfortunately the the time well i he's gonna go live here in a
second cesar if you're interested in talking i might be able to help you have some experience from what we had in 2017
here and i've helped it with eclipses and glasses around the world so i might be able to help but i'd also be
interested in finding out and bringing you the eclipse community so yeah i'm going to have to go but but there's my
email address i'm want to talk just [Music]
okay well we're back now and um uh we have uh
astrophotographers uh with live images through their
telescopes right now tom what do you have in your telescope we'll go we'll go to each one and
and just get a brief idea of just say where you are what time it is and what what you've got
going on i am in texas and uh
let me share my screen here well before you share your screen tom we're just going to do a quick
introduction and okay yeah just discuss what we're what we're doing tonight i'm out there
you know right now taking some images and it's all running okay and you'll be able to see that once
the introductions are over okay all right all right let's go over to richard grace here uh
where have you got where are you at uh tonight and uh i'm in annapolis maryland uh in the
middle of the rainstorm and the good part is is that it's going to rain for a little while longer so i don't have to
worry about whether i'm going to set up or not it's not iffy one way or the other it's uh it's bad it's raining uh
we got cumulonimbus uh nebula image but that's not gonna work so uh i do have some things to share
from the uh the cancelled star party uh last week but uh while everybody's got stuff that's live uh worry about them
and i'll be around okay all right next up is alan mari and uh
uh all the way down in chile um you're i think you're muted ally
no i'm not nope okay near me we hear you now yes exactly
yeah so yes i'm in the atacama desert and uh it's not raining
like 15 millimeter of rain every every year right and i have a one tesco pointed on an object
that i'd like to to describe okay okay if i can be a bit longer you know
remember at the beginning uh david levy talked with his about his interaction with cops
i had an interaction one time with a parking clerk i wanted to go home
uh and i arrived in front of my house and there was a guy who told me no you
cannot go in you know go sideways no i said no i want to go there no you cannot you remember who that guy was
and probably me exactly exactly
i lived at the time at palomar observatory and scott had organized a star party and i
came back from shopping like at nine o'clock and i arrived with my car and i wanted to go in it would be no you don't
go to the observatory i see yes i go it's my place and scott was no no you have to park there no i want to go there
you cannot go yeah i live there okay and then we talk some more you know sometimes you
have people you're forgetting you know yeah forbidding you to to do things anyway okay so
i didn't hear you i said i was trying to be good and protect the observatories
yeah it was like 1986 or something yes it was yesterday yeah we were young and beautiful that's
right and now we're just beautiful yeah you're still a handsome guy so yeah yeah sure
all right and gary palmer uh gary's in the uk what what time is it you said
it's about four a.m is that right yeah it's just coming up to cool to pass
four okay all right so show some live imaging there so we're
going to we are going to show a couple of live images through telescopes we're going to come right back to you
uh jerry um uh what's going on there tonight it's uh it's it's cold and dry here on
mars uh it's really uh pretty cold it's hard to breathe
no it's actually rainy just like uh astro beard says pouring down rain here in virginia and uh it's about uh it's 11
15 here in virginia okay all right and cesar brolo
says our you are in argentina uh what time is it getting down there
is god uh here are the twelve warriors
um uh twelve and quarter or fifteen just after midnight and um
well yes me yes midnight and
this night we'll choose plants i am crying
that they don't appear this night because you remember two
two weeks ago we need to the the two
the microphone because the the wind was so strong we feel you know in a bowl or
something or in the top of the mountain but i think that this night is is a really nice is here here and we have uh saturn
capital is near to behind the the and um
we have saturn and uh mars and mars yeah so we have
mars up high here in our test uh yes yes uh brett blake says cesar
will image from the center of a tornado so
i think yes yes that's right all right and dave daving you are in california that's
right yes i'm in southern california mm-hmm about a quarter after 8 p.m here
and i just you know just got dark enough about an hour ago where i set up and i've been trying to um
do something a little different what i wanted to do was test out my asi errors
live stacking function okay what i want to do is i want to be able to take this out to a star party
and practice social distancing by setting it up on a monitor or something let it do live stacking and then you
know people don't need to won't be touching the eyepiece sure we can do it that way
um i found out um right now or a little while ago that uh my images are really blurry and
it helps if you don't forget to turn on auto guiding so right
right now i'm uh i'm setting it up i don't have anything to show just yet but i probably will
we'll come back to you okay all right and zayn uh you are new to the program here uh i i i haven't imaged in
like a year i i don't have the budget or the i i can't do it unless i unless i had a
good space at home and i really can't do it for my yard i gave up on that i have i have image so i do actually
have i mean i could show you two the two whopping two good deep sky photos that i've ever taken okay maybe three uh
okay yeah let me just we will we will zane will come back to you yeah no problem and uh we are going
to uh show live to who is the first uh amongst
yourselves uh uh who who is uh going to go on first for the live imaging
i don't i don't hear any takers here but i'm not quite ready yet sorry you're not quite ready
well okay uh i'm up and running here
maybe 30 seconds we'll let tom go first then all right
here we go go ahead tom you've got it i'm uh let me turn on my screen
now let's introduce you a little bit okay tom tom pickett is the
president of the facebook astronomy club with uh you mentioned something like 40 or 50
000 members is that yeah i got 40 let me i got 40 something
44 000 actually i should have have about around eighty thousand but what they've been
doing is facebook the people that are not active they just start
they talk they take them off because i had 45 000 about four years ago
and it gets up to a point and then it levels off and then some of them
it goes down and goes up and goes down goes up so yeah and i found out that it's not just
happening to me though it's happening to all of the all the groups yeah all the groups in
there once they get to a certain amount uh facebook's just comes in there and starts taking over
and they decide what happens to your members i guess so okay so what do they do exactly
they may they start managing the group for you no they're not actually managing the group and they're not telling me
but what's happening is i've had some of my members text me and say tom how come i'm not a
member of the group anymore and i've had this happen to me about oh
hundreds of times and i've ended up having to add them back because facebook i guess they just
they zap people from lack of activity or something yes yes yes i'm trying to save money i'm trying
to save money and i have to build equipment yeah and it kind of it kind of makes me angry
because a lot of people that come in there they just want to read
they just want to look they don't want to [Music] they don't want to comment or
you know there's kind of like in the background and i kind of want that because
that's what i made it for is for people to come there and you know if they want to comment they
could comment so yeah i think facebook's algorithm hates that
that's probably the issue okay yeah so so uh what do you got what do you got
in the scope there tom let me uh show you guys something before i do that let me go over here and uh
show you the group that i'm running here
facebook okay let me go over here now and share
my screen and you're a baylor man it appears
yeah all right okay you guys see that
sure do facebook astronomy club and there's the membership count there
44.3 k and uh i got some rules when you come in
here i don't like i don't like politics and a bunch of other stuff i just want to talk astronomy
this is one of my latest images that i shot right here beautiful what
is that uh trying to remember here i can click on it
let me go uh okay yeah well let's see here let me move this over
ngc 6820 the 6820 and ngg 6823
i do i do so many images that i can't remember numbers oh wow this is a neat little
nebula you know what i like about this it's got
a lot of uh this is a planet forming or a uh
a solar system forming region you can see little bubbles right here and then in the end
of those little bubbles these little solar systems it really has a sense of depth too yeah with the those little things you
can tell you can almost tell if they're in front of the star cluster which looks kind of
behind it it's got a very three-dimensional look to it yeah it's really nice okay let me uh go out
of this and this is one of the images that i took when i was
back in 2015 but uh let me go over here to my uh
right now i'm shooting lbn 438 it's this little bitty
little bitty cloud right here and this this yeah uh this yellow circle is the mount
where the mount is actually actually looking right now
so uh then when i click on this one
this one gives me this is the mouth this is what's controlling the mouth this is the uh
control center or you know the driver and then over here
this is of course the tracker that's tracking the image on a star
you know that i've got located and then i'm using apt
this was the last image that i took and right now i'm on number two
and i'm shooting 30 minute exposures
and that's and that right there is in h alpha this looks faint so i can see why you'd
have to go that long yeah yeah it really shows up in dss i see the
stars and the crosshairs i don't know any nebulosity coming out yet at all how
long would you think you'll have to shoot on this object oh by the time i get done with this i'll
probably have about 120 hours wow wow
that's a lot this right here let me show you this uh
oh this is 60 hours right here just in the blue
of that same object right yeah wow
uh-huh this is just the blue channel so you've moved on from blue and you're
shooting in which channel right now i i got the other day i was going after my
red and i've got half of my red done and then all of a sudden the moon you
know it's coming up so i can't do the moon so what i did is i switched over to h alpha
i'm shooting narrowband now to where i don't the moon's not a problem so sure
and i've got uh let's see how many of those i've got so far i got it right
let me here go over here
let me click on this something like that right now i have
right now i have 45 images of h alpha if you can see it right there in the
stacker as i finish them as i finish them i put them over into a folder i can download
them right off the stick outside and move them in in here just
using my wi-fi and then i'm moving me into here and once i get them into here
there was my first one right so i just go over here to my deep stacker
over here and uh go to my h alpha go to 0.929 there's that first image and
then i'll go down and hold on let me see where it is
there it is right there and what i'll do is i'll is i'll just run
i'll just run the uh a quick scan on it and it will tell me what it is
and uh that's basically what i'm doing right now okay
all right okay so let's uh let's move on to the next guy and uh
we'll come back to you uh tom that's great let me show you one more thing okay
one thing i do too is i've got security cameras all around
that's what's outside right now i see
right that's where the scope is pointed and if anybody comes around there the
intercom will come on and it will automatically say i just took your picture and the video
is running and the police have been called
i kid you because i've already had i've already had one of my rigs stolen so
yeah that's hard i lost fifteen thousand dollars that day so yeah
yeah yeah but uh i do know too that uh uh people came to uh to your aid on that
too so that was oh my god uh dustin gibson
yeah of course i've got 44 000 people in there and uh what happened was my
my cat was having kittens and i was outside shooting jupiter
you know with a uh uh a a 5x uh what was that
uh i forget what that is anyway
uh i went back there to check on her and then as i was walking down the hall
i heard heard somebody peeling out and leaving and i ran outside and
oh my god i was in tears i was in tears and
i called the police and they told me they said don't get on social media and tell nobody
about this give us about five months and we can see if we can find these guys
you know so after about four months i kind of rolled out of bed i said tom i'm tired of
giving all of my friends excuses why i'm not imaging because i was i was putting out an image every single day
you know what i mean just every day every day every day and then all of a sudden you just stop right and uh i rode out of bed and
wrote up a little post you know to put on facebook and i put that on facebook
and then immediately everybody said tom you need to set up a go fund me
i said i don't know how to do that and i don't i don't want to do that and everybody got mad at me and said yeah
i'm time you need to do that so what i did is i just gave them my you know my paypal uh you know
id and within a couple hours i opened that
thing up and i had two thousand dollars and i said you gotta be kidding me and tears started rolling down my eyes again
right because i couldn't believe all the all the blessings you know that i was getting
yeah and then dustin gibson calls me over from opt
he says tom give me a call at this telephone number and i pick up the phone and he says tom we are going to replace
your rig man i said you got to be kidding me that is awesome he said
everybody told me since tom for about the last six years you've been running the facebook astronomy club
and you've been teaching everybody about astronomy and you've never asked anybody for a
nickel that says and you showed us your images and you taught us how to do this with a
dslr and says it's time for you man you know
so it's a it's a it's a awesome story of of uh yeah i was uh whoa so
well see a lot of people don't understand is i have a condition called
called i got inner ear problems yeah and i get to where i can't walk because the room
is spinning all around so i'm sort of like disabled a little bit so uh
that's basically all i had left in my life was my telescope and
uh astronomy because i couldn't work you know and do
some things so when they stole that telescope out of my yard it was it was heartbreaking you know because
i thought now my telescope's gone you know yeah you know
so and it makes me sad to think
that the drug that my scope ended up in the hands of some drug needle that was going to sell it for a little bit or
nothing you know yeah so excellent
excellent but anyway okay all right well anyway i got cameras all over my
gear now and and i'm way out in the middle of nowhere nobody knows where i'm at
and yeah i've moved out of that area and now i live in 2.5 brothel skies
i've got two skies here so it's it's dark so okay i'm in heaven here
all right let's let's uh give someone else a chance here and we'll go on to uh uh see what's going on
let's go on to alain marie okay yeah and um
uh let's see well
let's see what's going on down there i love that story i i even forgot that story
what's that what about my rig no i stopped i stopped alain from going
home he live you know he's a professional astronomer he was doing uh the
sky survey two i think at that time at uh the schmidt camera at palomar and uh i i used to run a picture you
know i had an astronomy club and i saw this guy driving up to the fence you know a lot of people try to
sneak onto observatory property you know uh at night and when that would happen
i'd say hey you really can't come up here and i've turned away many people well here you know this guy
actually lived and worked up there so that's how i got to meet alain
a long time ago yeah let me share my screen okay show you a couple of pictures
okay and maybe tell us a little bit about um your astro tourism
yeah let me see is that the one yes okay so this i don't need
ah yeah before that i wanted to show you a couple of pictures uh one of them
where i got it here is this one i was looking yeah this picture
um you know kelly talked about uh high personalization and all these type
of things um there is a guy here bill miller william miller he was the photographic
scientist at paloma observatory in the 70s and he is the one who made the color
pictures the first color pictures of the sky because before that all the pictures have been made uh in black and white
is not a very well known person men for example later david malin in australia
became very well known by amateurs but this is the person who made first the
first color pictures of the sky with uh he used like onsco chrome
things and ecta color whatever the you know 200 eso type picture with the 48
inch he also made picture with a 200 inch and he also impulsed a new way of
doing astrophotography which at the time had a lot of impact on the eso schmidt telescope
the uk uh you know the australian schmidt telescope that made the survey and so on
and so on he is the father of uh hypersensitization and all these
processes so i wanted to show you this uh this image there is another image that i wanted to
show you but i lost it now there it is uh this is my place i mean not exactly
you know either and you see there are two lot of roofs we're going to use one uh the one there
it belongs to an panamian amateur astronomer and also dear friend who is
joaquin fabrega and all these telescopes are remotely controlled telescopes
this is a telescope farm that we have we have also in the back lodges and the main activities are of course
tours uh in the last like 17 years we may have received something like 250 000 people
uh san pedro de tacoma is a very touristic place i mean it used to be a very touristic place
but now it's kind of like the desert again and so all these telescopes are remote
remotely operated they are a russian dome there is a polish one
uh panamian two from belgium canada united states
and panama of course and a few domes are mined i have my own telescopes and you know starting a an asteroid survey
what i wanted to show you is there there they are yes
this is my latest baby and so if you look in the back of tom pickett's image he has a 4.5 inch
telescope so in france we would say telescope the sun has a telescope of 115
and so this is also 115 but it's not millimeter it's centimeter and so that's a 45 inch telescope
which so far i use only visually but it's you know it's really giving me very very very
beautiful pictures so what i want to show you is this screen now uh i've pointed the telescope in a zone
that of course i zoomed enough so that you don't recognize i want to shoot
a 30 second exposure sorry i made a mistake
i pressed twice on the button i shouldn't have okay start again
sorry now it's doing 30 seconds i'm not going to take too much of your time okay
and this is one of the most famous austral thousand sky objects
as all the people who have observed from the southern hemisphere know this is where the real objects in the sky are
located big objects the brightest nebulae the brightest galaxy the brightest clusters and so on i want to
show you this one so you know four seconds it's reading the image out so it's a raw image raise the moon not too
far okay here is the image there is a lot of gradient and i could have cared a little
bit more about there it is okay you see the gradient
because of the moon the object the very bright globular cluster is 47 toucan
but i know this is a globular cluster in our galaxy it's 15 000 light years away but
you see there is a star here i don't know if you see my cursor i'm going to zoom on that thing
yeah there it is oh yeah the focus has changed i should have checked before this object is
called ngc 121 i don't know if you see it but it's a globular cluster in the small magellanic
cloud oh wow i mean in the same picture you have a globular cluster in our galaxy
and a globular cluster in another galaxy so one is 15 000 light years away the other is 220 000 light years away oh my
goodness so it must be huge that almost looks like a planetary
nebula yeah no but you can resolve it i mean with the 45 inch you start to see the
first stars and that the big globular cluster the 47
toucan is like three times the size of m13 it's really a very very big object
so yeah that's what i wanted to show you you know we there be more opportunities to show you
more objects okay okay okay all right okay so now let's go to uh gary palmer
we promised we'd go there um to uh so that he can get to bed
so gary here we go we're going to give you uh uh
the stage and uh thank you very much elaine thank you
hi everyone um what i thought we would do is because we missed out on the last
star party um that we would catch up with a little bit of processing when we sort of running
through some processes on here so um we've done the background neutralization
and dynamic background and talked about the initial loading up of the calibration
files these are two images from last friday night star party um they are both stacks
they're both up to the the area but what i wanted to look at was color calibration because this is where
a lot of people get lost in the software and
if we zoom in we can see there's some quite good detail on this considering we still had a bright moon
stars went a little bit out of focus on uh m33 but there's three types of color
calibration that we can use so if we set up the
color calibration module we can create two preview boxes one for the background
and one for the target on the settings for the background
um sorry on the settings for the the bright point the uh the white reference
really what we've got to do is look down the bottom here and as i scroll over the image you'll see the rgb values come up
so we're looking at a pretty good calibration there already they're fairly well matched here so
i've stuck in um an eight just before the last zero we turn the structure detection off
and then coming down for the um preview on the background
and then we run this slider here all the way down to 0.1
0.01 and then we just apply it to the image that's the quickest way so if we zoom in
a little bit more we can see the difference in the color calibration so you're removing the green
bias and you're bringing your blues and your rates up and starting to match everything
that's the one of the simplest ways of doing it i'm going to close that one
now quite often you might have an object where the
um like a nebula or something like that we're just using this as a reference image really
where there isn't a bright object to look at and to take a color reference from for your white point
so here we can make what we call an aggregated preview and that's to make lots of preview boxes
all the way around the actual object itself okay and then if we go
sorry wait a second there we go if we go up to the scripts we can come down to
utilities and there's preview aggregator there and that will create me
an aggregated preview drawing all of those boxes together and we can now use that on this one
so instead of having preview box 2 we're going to change that now
to the aggregated preview i'm going to use the same reference in
here but we're going to turn on structure detection and it's going to take the white reference off the stars
now so there's lots of different ways some ways work in some ways don't and it's because of
having a few different ideas and a few different trolls but the same thing
it to the image after and this really helps on balancing
everything out with the images quite often uh we struggle with image color and
getting the correct colors for an image so you can see that that didn't actually work that well on
it yeah it's turned the background quite red and it's also
um hit off on the actual target itself and that's basically because the target is
quite bright so if we were doing this on a nebula it would work but because we're using a bright target
but this is what really happens when it all starts to go wrong because people are not really seeing this in the image
and not really paying a lot of interest and then then going on and processing through and you start to get a mismatch
in all the colors and when you get into the final points it's very hard to change anything
one of the new things that's in pixel inside now is
photometric color calibration just need to find the other box which is here somewhere
i will have hit it there it is okay this actually references the object
and it works a lot better um let's close that down
so what we can do from here uh the two critical points are making sure that you get your focal
length of the telescope correct and the pixel ratio to the camera
so needs to change the pixel ratio into zero on this one
and then we're going to search for the target you will need your internet connection for this
so it's not something to be done out in the field search for the target we get the target data
and then we acquire the time from the image once that's done
just literally apply it to the image and this is probably the most precise way of doing color calibration in any
software now i have had it on some images where it didn't quite get
the pixel size into the camera correct and then it will cause a problem but in
general it gives you the most precise way a couple of seconds and it'll be done
and then we'll get a reference chart that comes up and it will show you the matching to your
image and the mesh into the data that's stored online
you make this look so easy gary um yeah i wouldn't go that far
it is handy because i i actually tried this on um the
andromeda image and some reason i just could not get it to run on there so if
we just reset that back up so that's now got the correct color calibration for that image
and you can see the pinks that are sitting in the background and this is ready to sort of
push on further with the processing um so it's quite a nice clean image and
also we can see that we've got a lot of the outer dust lane around the spirals on
this galaxy which are actually quite hard on this target it's not an easy one there's only a couple of instruments
that have managed to get those spirals around the edge yeah this is one hour's worth of test data that's all it is so
it was literally um all new equipment all thrown up last friday night and we these were running
while we were doing the star party so there's some pretty good data there and we go on and process them but
eventually we want it to look something like that yeah that's not quite finished yet it was just a quick run through to
say that that's what we're going to actually be looking at getting um over the next
week or so when we do these on the star parties yeah great
there you go probably one of the reasons why you're having problems uh with andromeda
is i've ran into this problem myself uh the dynamic range
is so wide on that because you got this bright center you know and then the rest of it yeah
it's just off of this new camera it's literally uh all of the other images are processing that fine
uh even uh images that we took the same camera a couple of those before they processed that fine
so it will be something to do with the pixels ties in on the camera or the focal length
but sometimes it can be the rotation of the object can just upset it and it just doesn't like it
okay so we're going to move on to cesar uh we missed uh we missed jupiter um
but uh but he's got uh i think he got saturn in there right now is that right
yep uh you are muted suzaku
now you can hear me now we can hear yes okay okay well i
clear we lose jupiter but we have now sat
of course that maybe sometimes this is maybe for us
is is uh common or normal for but follow
have a a real magic and sometimes when you let me
[Music] yes screen screen
let me share a screen and and show you now
today i started to use a carducciel connected with the exos 100 and what is
an excellent an excellent support for me
first of all before to make zoom over the image
i central i i'll center
here the image
of saturn and
i've got a question has the ixs 100 been working for you under the in the southern hemisphere has been working
well and yes jerry it wasn't um
i don't need to to try nina software oh well sorry but by the wind
let me check i'll try to to change the parameters of
the camera let me see where is the
panel here this is fun because you know i i lost behind the
the panel of of the of the zoom i lose the panel of of the
camera in my screen wow quite a long focal length what focal length
yes yes i have a not windy
night but now is the problem that i have yeah
yeah
whoa i can't believe that because sorry i don't have i don't have this this uh
win we can try if
because maybe i need to make something of focus but the problem is that
oh high above the horizon is saturn for you right now i would imagine it's pretty low now right
yeah yeah yeah it is low you can see the angle of this telescope yeah yeah it's something
it's something that we we talked when the when we show to the people the
people that never seen before
by telescope is one of the most awesome objects in the sky because
the people don't imagine the first time when they can see the the rings of saturn
and well sorry by the wind the wind
that's just one of the small things that we have to deal with as an astrophotographer yeah
yeah i'll tell you what though among the hundreds of things yeah that's not too bad of an image though
for what he's got there that's pretty good yeah and you can see the division between the
the uh you know the actual planet and the in between the rings that's pretty good
yeah when it settles out yeah yeah maybe sometimes
it's easy to see the the cassini division but now yeah maybe more for the wind that
because this thing of course that is is uh if if you have wind of course the scene
is very is very bad but you know it's not a a video that
is good for processing because look this is a little of of
you you can see my behind two weeks ago we really we had a a more
strong win but maybe at this time is he's going from the north i don't know
well you need one you need one of our tests that scott introduced to our community
what's that you need you need to send uh caesar uh one of our tents that we've
got oh a tent yeah an observatory tent that we have yeah yes yes my idea my idea is is make
a remote observatory with a a very small something like a box
that i can remotely er opening and with a ccd but with the same moment
my idea is my project now is not now of course but in this year and
next year is make a small observatory with the exos and maybe of course
a wide open telescope maybe a telescope that scott
sometimes told me about that have something for me okay no problem
excellent yeah yes well sorry but by the movements of saturn it's okay we're
seeing it you know and the thing is is that uh i mean this goes back to uh people uh being affected by just
observing saturn you know uh um you know the
the impression a lot of people get uh and and kelly beatty mentioned it at the
first part of our program is how the contrast of of saturn against the
against the sky a lot of people do really feel that it's like there's something in front of the
telescope not not that they're looking you know 900 million miles onto space
but that maybe like a an image in the eyepiece itself you know
like artificially they they they see the image and see you and say
it's real right exactly i think that is a worldwide impression that's right
that's right okay all right so let's um
let's uh let's come back to um our group here and uh um
we i think that we had uh uh we have uh david ing
dave do you have uh yes something live in your and your telescope you want to share i do um but before i do that i kind of
wanted to do a real quick uh uh display of how i set it up if that's
okay so just a couple of slides here all right
screen share and i think you can see the uh the star
right yeah the bat mask image star right when i first set up
i i do an alignment a quick alignment then i just slew to a bright star in
this case it was arcturus and i put on my baton off mask and i do a focus
so after the focus i do a polar alignment um and i got it pretty close and i was
kind of in a hurry i recently changed from a dslr
which had live view on it so it was really easy with the live view but now i'm using an astro camera so now i get
to download my pictures to my tablet to see if it's actually aligned
move it download another picture move it so it's a little bit harder and takes
longer that's one thing i miss about the dslr is the live view but after i've i've got it polar aligned
i connect my telescope i'm sorry my mount turn it on
and then i do a go to uh in this case i chose m33
okay and it does a plate solve by itself and it's and it actually centers it
and that's what this screen is so this is all like a script or something that's built into the system
um the well you gotta push a couple of buttons but pretty much um you just tell it that you want to do a plate solve an
automatic plate saw when you do a go-to okay so let me stop sharing that one
and let me share out my tablet let's see
and share and
share the screen [Music]
okay there we go so now this is actually looking through my telescope right now
live um yeah live and it's at m33
and what i'm doing is i'm capturing one minute shots and stacking them right
now there's about 50 stacked and it is centered you can't really see it but let me do an auto stretch
and we can see a little bit of it and i can even do a little bit more of a stretch on that
and let's bring down the black a little oops that's too much
let's see there you go so you can kind of see it in the center
there and i can even hide the uh histogram so they're starting to come up
so that's what we're looking at in my scope right now okay
all right this is all with the the asi air app
any questions on on this no i don't think so
yeah i just want to show you hey asi here but yes it is so
uh let me stop sharing this screen stop and let me reshare this screen
okay and actually from last week um
i i was already set up and we had those technical difficulties yeah but i shot n33 last week
this was the result oh my goodness it's beautiful thank you
so that was with the same setup total 48 uh subs of uh three minutes
each oh my goodness it's like almost two and a half hours beautiful image
and let's see what else what the nose have here oh yeah it was um
it was actually clear skies considering um you know the fires are still going in
california so well it's also amazing uh considering the light pollution you have in your
backyard yeah and i didn't have my filter either i had to send out my spectacular it
really is i mean no one would believe uh you know 10
years ago that you could have gotten an image like this from your backyard yeah and not i'm not talking about people's
backyards in general i'm talking about dave's backyard okay he has a lot of light pollution
but he's still cutting through it he's still making amazing images and so that should be encouragement for anybody
today to get out there and do imaging from their backyard because it can be done
and it can be stunning so i think that that talks to the dynamic
uh process that goes on with with astrophotographers and amateur astronomers and you know no matter what
obstacle is thrown up you know yeah skype uh you know hi
light pollution all this stuff we still find a way to cut through it and develop tools and instruments to cut through it
that's the same way it's going to be with the starlink satellites now people are scared that the sterling satellites
are going to be ruining the sky but we'll overcome that we're going to we already overcome it when i shot that
lights already going across our images when i shot this last week i had i think three or four subs that actually had
streaks across them yeah they process out it was no big deal right all that
stuff's gonna be processed out it's not as bad as what people think it's gonna be um
there's a way around this stuff there's always a way around it we just have to be innovative and think about it and to
solve the problem yeah nice work one way that i've used to get
rid of satellites is using my campus sigma you know clipping in my uh you know my
dss and if if that one trail is not in the same
place on all of the images it takes an average and it will it will you know just get
rid of it yeah i use fixed insight to process this and it does uh those different um uh algorithms
either the the kappa sigma or the windsor or the average yeah the median combined the median combine also does
that beautiful
thank you thank you i've got an image of uh the orion nebula just one single image
and i've got when i was imaging that i was over at my
old place and for some reason the airplanes like to
you know fly right across that air right across that area where that was and uh i
probably had about maybe four or five different streaks on there and each image had four or five
different streaks but because all of them were in a different location you know what i mean on the image it
just it just tossed them all out right right
well we got dustin gibson in the room today so uh dustin thank you thank you again for
letting us uh broadcast on the clear skies network it's awesome happy you're doing it happy you're doing
it yeah you know i saw this schedule and i saw hey i'm supposed to be there at 9
and i thought i wonder if that's arkansas time so if i'm two hours late right now i
apologize man well i i i i go well something's that
must be cooked in uh in california so and then hopefully it wasn't california itself so
no no i think i just and i lived by my calendar but it when it populated for nine i was like uh maybe that was wrong
that's all right yeah we've been busy got uh we've got a telescope release party tomorrow we've been working on a
partnership with uh trevor jones astro backyard good friend of mine
um for a telescope release with radiant so we've been uh very very busy with that getting it ready for tomorrow but
but excited to be hanging out here i saw my butt here what's up tom how are you doing hey
hey dustin i told everybody about the episode between you and i and
uh episode i don't know if it was an episode man hey bad things yeah
it was uh you know and just like i was telling everybody i got cameras all over
all over my new setup in my observatory now so i'm good good good well scott man um i know that
you've been doing these every week thank you for continuing this and making it happen um you are a juggernaut
oh that you know i i i i just go for the ride you know it's all these people that
come onto the program and and uh share their expertise and their inspiration and stuff so
um you know like on the podcast to tell this story i think more people need to know about this
uh they need to know that this exists all the time because the collection people here always every time i log in
i'm like man you just draw like you draw the best crowds to come on here and participate and uh we need to just let's do another
podcast together the last one was fun yeah it was fun that's fun it's awesome
and you're doing a great job too dustin i i admire what you're doing and uh wish you all on your uh telescope release
that's coming up so how can people find out more about that uh yes so it will be tomorrow at three
is my audio breaking about just a little bit okay yeah i got some issues here with my
internet um but tomorrow three o'clock uh eastern and twelve o'clock pacific we
will be uh watching live as trevor uh astro backyard so if you follow him on youtube
you can see him do the first review ever of the radian raptor 61 astrograph
um so nobody has the details yet so all of the details that will be where they are released but uh i'm super excited
but i haven't even seen the video myself yet and so he's kind of making fun of me he's like
no pressure man you just put in all the weight here you know let me run with it but it's going to be fun man which is super cool
and it's going to serve the imaging community well so we're really excited about it super super
well looks like we have chuck lewis who was uh on with us earlier today
uh joining us as well chuck they gave a check gave a great uh talk on uh his
work on skylab and uh you know he did a big science and little
science uh today it was a great great uh uh conversation and uh
enlightening as is uh you know someone that uh uh was very involved with um you know the
success of the skylab mission and uh also inspiring that uh you know
he gets involved in the amateur world as well so i was on our open go to community
program earlier today yeah yeah so look for that on youtube and and our facebook
page absolutely yeah i think you're gonna settle down here for us um you know hopefully pretty soon and you know now
that this release is gonna be done and we really wanna start pointing people to this content i think that what you're
doing is is not only you know amplifying the interest in you know people's love
for the hobby but you're bringing people i mean look at the look at the crew here right now you know it's getting
everybody in one room in one place where it's the conversation is this accessible
it's just hats off to everybody here thank you all for participating thank you for what you're doing because it truly is a tremendous thing and it's
something we very much appreciated opt that that you're giving giving your time your energy and scott man i know you're
you're part of the opt family so i don't i don't have to say it but um you know it it couldn't be uh it couldn't be
something we appreciate more man thank you you really are a juggernaut thanks dustin you too man thank you
guys especially scott who apparently doesn't sleep at all no never
yeah i i don't get how you get sleep doing these if you're up till you know one or two he does this guy doesn't sleep
yeah being an astronomer right so we're night owls a lot of us so
yeah hey dave that's the reason why that i do this exactly what you just said uh
whenever i take my images and like my facebook astronomy club i've
given everybody the chance to share everybody the chance to look and the for
new people you know they come in there i try to tell them when we're taking
these images you're talking about a little postage stamp size
image and you're seeing millions of stars in there and it just it just boggles the
mind and you ask yourself there's no way that we could be alone
you know i mean with all that going on and we're talking about just a small part of the sky i mean
yeah you know true yeah to me half the fun of this hobby is just getting people
excited about space and looking up and taking and seeing things for themselves and taking their own pictures yeah i
agree a lot of people though are just not aware because they live in these big cities and all they see is a half a
dozen stars and they don't have a clue
it it's up to us it's up to us to show this to them to where they can get interested in or
otherwise they're not you know so very true very true last year at
halloween i dragged my telescope out front when the kids came by to get candy they also got a chance to look at some
of the planets and i thought that was really cool oh that's a great that is great idea a lot of gas is a great idea
wow and that's that really does it for me i'm thinking of something like that this year
this telescope right here behind me was one that i
bought from a friend when i was 14 you know years old
and i went to a school event when i was in school and we looked at haley's comment through
it and uh i never will forget that day i must have 300 people behind this
telescope so uh and of course there's a story behind this telescope about how i
i came to finding it and [Music] anyway that's a whole nother topic
right right so um are we does anyone else have
anything live to share at this point uh actually i'm gonna dive out man i've
got to finish this project but uh thank you for letting me pop say hi thanks for coming in can you take care of yourself
there dave i need to hop on a plane come see you hey any all of you you're always from
here at opt come come hang out we live we love this conversation so uh thank
you guys for continuing and caring uh you know carrying the torch i'm actually not that far from you about
45 minutes well then there's no excuse yeah
yeah give me a shout out at any time love to get love to give you a tour show you everything going on oh thank you
yeah happy too justin you guys take care and tell all the the staff at opt i said hello
yeah well they still look you spend a lot of time at opt they still consider you part of opt man so you can always
tell them yourself too we'll have you any time next time i'm in california i'll i'll
definitely stop by thanks good to see you all take care bye-bye bye
that's what's so great about this this is this is all family it's just all family yeah that's true that's true you
know what one thing that's kind of that's a blessing about astronomy
that i've learned about oh about starting my club that's got forty thousand i got 44 000 people in there
from all over the world oh yeah and it doesn't matter what religion
doesn't matter what politics it doesn't matter we're all
amateur astronomers in the club and that's what we're interested in and it brings everybody together
and to me i had no idea that when i started this club when i first started in back
2012 it was i thought well i'm going to have about 200 people in there
yeah and then all of a sudden man it just went boom and i had people from i got i got people in
there from every continent from every country everybody in in there
and occasionally i'll get somebody you know that that gets kind of crazy and we'll have to put him out of there
you know what i mean but i don't really have too much of a problem with it you know so
well you know there's a lot of characters in astronomy i i guess i'm one of them but
you know for the most part i would say that amateurs
you know men women you know adult family you know
there's a there's this there's this connectiveness that that we have this connective tissue and this goes way back
you know you can you can trace the lineage of some amateur astronomers like
carlos fernandez for example uh has kind of this lineage from percival lowell okay
uh personal lowell taught uh i guess it was uh how to draw out the eye piece okay
slifer uh taught um i think chick cape and chick cape and taught him okay
he's uh so it's you know there's very few people that know how to uh to to to do these technical type of
drawings at the at the eyepiece and in the in this way so it's it's really
interesting and uh you know you do you read
uh writings from rehearsal or any of the astronomers and stuff and you can see kind of the inspiration and the feeling
of discovery that that they're experiencing and and uh but there's also many unusual stories
that are involved in the in the world of astronomy so but uh well there's something
you know that i have seen when i see kids and they've seen saturn
in a book yeah or at or at the library
it's a static image in a book and they can't really grasp it you get them up to the eyepiece and they
look through a telescope it's analog it's right there
yeah and in in all of its glory and they go oh my god it is real that's real
that's a reality it is yeah that's reality because it's analog there's no
you don't have to explain it they know now they see it you know
so yeah i think especially when when we live in this world nowadays where so
much time is spent looking at screens and things that can easily be faked and manipulated that i i actually think
people are even more astounded that you can see these things through telescope because to them the idea doesn't the idea of
just anything that cool being a being something that's not this
is a foreign concept especially to a lot of young people like i was out
the other night observing and there were a couple people there were a couple people at uh at this park i was at and they i was
like you want to see saturn they were like you can see saturn and the guy had actually been taking photos of the sky with his dslr he'd
been trying to to do astrophotography and he was trying to shoot saturn with this 80 millimeter focal length telephoto lens and he had no idea that
any telescope could show you the rings even for a reasonable price he was amazed
and you know i i think that that peop there's this disconnect i think between perception reality of a lot of people if
you know how hard this is how costly it is or even just the fact what you can do no matter where you are with what equip
or no matter how simple or cheap the equipment some people are amazed that you can just
get a small telescope and do this when back in their minds when they're reading them they think you've got to have
something at palomar you know or you could just pull something right out of the back of your truck and you know
just set it up real quick and they're going wow i can't i'd never knew that you could do that you know so
yeah okay so um just checking in with the group here do
we have any more live images coming down
uh yes and in a few minutes i have the moon that is huge this night
yes but like accidentally i just i reconnected
all the game because touching my my computer i turn off
accidentally sorry okay yeah all right well you can get it back
how about you yes you you can saw the yes the the the wasabi and say okay
i'll return a few minutes i recommend it all and
but my experience tonight i never used the exodus 100
with a computer and really is
yes it's great yes yes okay in
two minutes i i need to connect only the camera and maybe that
two minutes to see the moon okay all right elaine
i got a really nice image that just came down while ago my third image of the night i'm shooting 30 minute exposure so
okay within an hour i've only got two images so this one here man the stars are really nice on it
maybe i can show it to you okay go ahead let me go ahead and share your screen
right now is uh kind of a good time to look at those pinpoint stars oh yeah
that's a 30 minute exposure beautiful the sighting has to be perfect yeah
single exposure 30 minutes very yeah yeah one thing i like to do too then i'd
like to give somebody some advice some people like to go real cold on their cameras
yeah i usually like to keep it about around minus 5c i mean it will go a lot lower but but i
don't like to put a lot of stress on my camera you know just it's uh you know 5c that's 23 degrees
fahrenheit that's plenty cold i mean it's below freezing so
what i try to do is i try to use my equipment uh and kind of manage it to where i'm
not putting a lot of stress on it and there's a lot of things with the is that
a cmos camera there's it's already a low noise camera so a lot of times you don't have to go as cold as what what it can
actually do i've i've always heard that you know if you can go down to uh minus
20 degrees celsius that's about as far as you actually need to go uh and in the winter time i can go down
with the cooler on the qhy cameras i have you can sometimes go down to minus 40
degrees celsius but you hit the point of diminishing returns and it's not really necessary
especially with the low noise cameras that we have today but what i'm doing is
i am setting my gain to zero and i'm doing a 30 minute exposure
but the deal is i'm doing 60 frames at 30 minutes each
so what happens is and and i'm also gathering them so
they're getting gathered all over the place so not only am i losing some noise
because i've got it down to minus 5c but i'm also losing a lot of noise
you know because i'm gathering and then when i do a uh a meridian flip
the sensor gets turned to 180 degrees so the pattern on this on the sensor is
different and then when you shoot a bundle of those and you add them to the stack
that's another way of gathering it kind of smooths the whole thing out so
i don't know if anybody's ever thought about that but i keep i keep the camera i keep the
camera you know stationary and then whenever i do a meridian flip
it turns the frame 180 degrees and deep sky stacker knows that when it
goes to you know measure the stars it will turn all those other capital strings yeah
yep excellent all right i think alain has something to
share at this point here
elaine you got uh very first i need to put the microphone then
share screen share screen and i would say okay
and that's the screen okay what i'm doing now uh the rest of the night in fact
is a light curve of an asteroid so the telescope hiking stereoscope is
here so you can see it's a big 16 inch asa with an fli camera
the mount is a french nova 120 mount right so you just
let it go you don't have to track there is no autoguider on that on that telescope you see the roof is open the
um the telescope and so on uh so it's doing exposures like that for
two minutes even though there is the moon but we have enough signal and what i wanted to show you
is this let's see
normally the asteroid should be close to the center
let's what am i doing okay
now the images are slightly defocused you see the asteroid moving below the the center
yeah okay so that's the thing this one is very likely a double asteroid and so that's
why we are following it so it's a part of a group from europe and and of course well when they stop
observing i still can continue because we have like five five hours of difference
and sometimes it's been very important because what happened is that if the asteroid has the bad idea of rotating in
a multiple of 24 hours you observe every night but you get exactly the same part of the light curve and you really need
other observers on in other longitude uh in order to follow the
the object so here it's only the motion in 10 minutes uh really at the end of the night it has moved a lot more so we
do aperture photometry and in this case it's better if the images are slightly
blurry because then you average the the pixels so that's what this telescope is going
to do now the rest of the night and at the end of the night of course he will close down and close the roof and
i'll be in bed you might be interested in uh the work
i'm doing with exoplanets and also asteroid light curves with the with the diffuser uh system are
we i've done some work over the last couple years using a an instrument called an engineering
diffuser that basically spreads the light out like a defocus except it
actually does a much better job of minimizing the scintillation noise and uh
i'll put a link to the paper in the uh chat on the zoom chat and you can take a look
at that if you're interested he's getting millie mag
precision on uh on his light curves for okay that
that's a very hard level to reach on average it's like a hundredth of a magnitude with a ccd if you do some you
know basic processing you can get it no problem the magnetic field is like much
harder yeah it's down to like two to three millimag is what i'm getting results yeah and that's what you need if you
want to do uh exoplanets right that's the thing that's uh there's
a small galaxy below but of course a lot of light because of the moon but
well at least you can do that even though there is the moon elaine you have discovered uh asteroids
and comets does it feel like to discover a comet
uh well you fly uh like one meter above the ground for a week [Laughter]
the thing is uh well the the very first comment uh was at palomar
uh i was uh you know
let me see maybe i should stop sharing the screen
yeah uh uh on the schmidt telescope the the plate
is curved like that okay yeah of course they are very they wear very thin for a
few plates if there is a small grain of sand you will break the plate so it was
covered by a coat of neoprene uh the very old ones that were used uh you know
a long time ago uh on the on the palomar schmidt were worn out and so we put new neoprene but
we had a lot of problems with static electricity so when you would remove the plate there would be a lot of
you know small electro static electricity that would make like a lot of defects and i was looking at this and
i was like wow all these defects and then they were ah look there is another one on the other side and i looked and oh it was a comet
and of course when you see a comet you go like at the time it looked like a trailed object with like some fuzzy part
on one side and so i was like wow that's a comment it must be a known one you know and so i
i called charlie cole uh a very famous observer at caltech and i told him you
know i have a comment on display can you check which one it is and
then he called me back and he said no it's a new comment and i will say oh yes and i realized wow i found a comment
yeah that's awesome so after that i found another one that one was like a parabolic orbit so
never came back the third one i found was
when i came back to france we were working on a 36-inch schmidt telescope
doing scans of the sky with a ccd very very early ccd to it was
a 4k to 2000 by 2000 pixels and there was a night where it has been
cloudy and cloudy and cloudy and i say okay five o'clock i'm going to close i
went to close and then you know the sky was nice and i said i can use you know i can do a scan for half an hour i made
that scan and i was like tired wanted to go to bed and i looked and
that's a comet you know and so it was a ccd discovery but it was also quite
exciting and so right now we're putting a system with four rasa telescopes
and a very very nice software called tyco tracker so you can go to tyco dash
tracker.com it uses gpu boards you need a really very very
fast computer and the the software was
written by a young guy but very very bright guy you know when you talk to a computer guy
you very very quickly understand the guys like
very very good okay because programming these boards is not very easy
what it does you make with a cmos camera we make you make very short exposures
and you know you basically do a shift and add you know so the asteroid moves
and you you add your images like that or the only problem is that when you
want to look for a new asteroid you don't know if the asteroid goes this way that way this way which speed and so on
and so the the program does like you know 100 000 adds
in different direction and find if there are like [Music] uh know
stellar objects and so we're we're setting up all this thing and so maybe i could you know in
one future edition uh present a little bit all these are these things but with uh with this the
raza 11 inch so 28 centimeter we've detected objects up down to about
20.7 magnitude which is very good uh the other game-changing thing of the
the raza itself is a like a schmidt telescope except it uses a flat detector
uh very fast uh what is very very nice is also the the zvo camera the last
the 6200 which is a 60 megapixel camera and so with
four detectors we put them vertically okay we have a band of 13 degrees high
and we scan the sky like that and so the images i mean you need a lot of hard
disks okay yeah images are so each individual image is 120
megabytes that mean one shot with the four cameras is
480 almost half a gigabyte per image and then that's critically sampled
you're critically sampled with your image scale and everything on that big huge yeah yeah yeah
that's awesome basically 1.2 seconds yes the sharpest images are around two two
arc seconds or so right so that's that's a large field of view and so in during the night we make quite
a lot of gigabytes of images uh and uh so right now we're you know we
have one pc we're going to buy another one uh the whole thing depends of how the
flight are going because of course these are not the things you want to buy in chile because the price is like two
and a half the price you have in the united states so i'm normally the 10th of october we should
be able to fly to la and then i'll bring all the stuff back
but it's quite impressive because i was telling you about the discoveries with the ccd at the time it was a 4 megapixel
and now the camera will be 240 megapixel it's a thin cmos so very very sensitive it reads in
like half a second you know finish the exposure bloom and then if you want to play with the image on the very last screen you move
like that and like this it's a huge 2.2 by 3.3 second
degrees on the sky uh it's really i mean to me it's really a revolution in
astrophotography because uh yeah i mean it brings things to a level that you could not reach before
with the 36 inch schmitt with the ccd when we were getting to about 20th magnitude we were happy
now with an 11 inch you go to 20.7 in about 15 minutes of exposure time so
it's something i mean well hopefully if we do that in a month we'll have already a few a few discoveries but we already
followed a few uh you know there is a neocp so near subject confirmation page
then you can see which objects have been discovered recently and you can observe them and
of course the interest of the method is that if the object moves very fast if you do 10 second exposure it doesn't
move that much it can you can follow it and you can detect very faint objects
which go very fast because normally that was not the case because if the object is very fast it trails and so it stays
only a very short time on each pixel and you don't see it so we will talk about this maybe in another
edition yeah great i have something to show here uh
you know scott i want to ask anybody if they've ever seen this before i found this uh
here back in 2015 i was looking at some images of mine
and i was looking at it and said what is that so i zoomed i took a 150 millimeter lens and parked it on
betelgeuse and uh let me share my screen here
there is this bell shape around beetlejuice but
i've heard about this uh mel bartels has a has a drawing of it actually observed it
visually it's this dark dust lane i think look at this yeah uh i think i think what it is it's uh
and everybody told me they've never seen it before so everybody started calling it pick and spell so that's what i've
put there on the end of it but anyway it's beautiful huh yeah that is that's that's actually
there and i think what's happened is beetlejuice over hundreds of thousands of years been
shedding off its flares and i think that's what this is i think that's where it's coming it's kind of
like a a shockwave that's coming out from the star you know that's what it looks like to me
i wonder if that's some uh you know if um uh you know they were talking about
possibly some dark dust being around beetlejuice when uh it dimmed down but i
think that they finally determined that sunspots or something like that or star spots
uh as we might uh characterize them but um
but you could you can you know if this dust is from beetlejuice itself then
and not just something uh left over from its formation then uh
yeah i don't know what do you think what do you guys think out there with the the uh the group what do you think this
is i think it's a coincidence i just i just looked it up it's a actually a barnard
they're cataloged as barnard dark nebulae at least parts of it are yeah he he's only got parts of it that
i've noticed but he doesn't have the whole the whole object name so uh
uh one of the reasons why nobody has ever seen this is because everybody's been imaging
beetlejuice real close up and they never shot it at a 180 degree
field of view or uh 180 millimeters and just focused it on there and uh
it really came out nice i was really surprised yeah that's like five degree the bell is like five degrees wide right
yeah yeah that's huge it's real big really interesting remember reading
about pickett's bell i didn't realize that was you yeah very nice really
yeah that's me interesting
so i think that uh i think um uh cesar has uh the moon uh in his scope
at this point cesar you want to give a share you want
we're going to enjoy them all now yes yes let me
share in the screen
i got to do it and flip it i'm gonna do it from right here okay
oh yeah
yes we we tried to show you the
i used in spanish i used the our the area of the show we stayed
terminated where you
the area of the shadow between the the light and the dark in the moon we
call this terminator now of course that is uh we um
the terminator [Music]
what is it acceptable image tonight
yes nice oh that's nice it's nice
yes this i'm proud because i didn't assemble entirely these updates because
um um this is off of tomorrow
um he the the ota
need to have a barbecue and the optics was entirely
uh full of you know of fat was impossible to remove
from from the mirror from the from the plate
[Music] i needed one week to remove and clear this optics
and assembly again and collimate and uh well this
these are working again
something that was very bad it was for our alignment
and the problem is that [Music]
when you use the a program like carbosil
yes you need to make a good border alignment but i use i put the telescope within koni
only at um i don't have a
a polar line like those times the last night in the
the last uh global parties but it's okay
but you know i need to to put in the center of the image
but it's a uh too nice on the first okay
nice yes something that ever ever enjoy mom again
after see the the incredible incredible pictures of tom pickett
okay i have only the moon but it's not only it's the moon
you know uh i have a funny story for you about the moon and palomar observatory
um ellie and you'll remember the uh the 60-inch telescope at palomar
occasionally they would have amateur observing night on it and so you
could actually look through this amazing instrument that they have there and you know i've had many beautiful
views of that telescope but they turned they turned the telescope onto the moon
and this the san diego astronomy club was there and i don't know there was 30 or 40 club members there and they were
all afraid to look at the moon through this telescope for fear of maybe
wiping out their eye or something because they could see how strong the light was coming i would believe that a 60 inch scope
and i i told him i said get out of my way
and i will tell you the view and we had yeah palomar can often get really good seeing conditions
i mean super seeing conditions and it must have been close to one or two arc
seconds maybe closer to one arc second that night and what i saw through the 60-inch
telescope of the moon was the where like these undulating hills and just
beautiful uh incredible amazing detail of the moon
it's it's still burned into my memory you know how long was it literally burned into your eye for half an hour
no one else would look all the time i wanted on this telescope to look at them so it was great and then they later they
turned they turned the telescope i can't remember which planetary it was but this planetary nebula at 60 inches of
aperture you see it's like technicolor you can see reds greens you know it's
amazing you know so yeah what was funny when we those were with the reuben h fleet
museum in san diego yeah they're coming by bus and so people were observing there and i would you
know i lived four years on the mountain and so i would join you know and uh
that night they would not do anything else so people would go down around midnight and then i was trying to bribe
the night assistant in order to stay and observe some more so indeed there were a lot of very beautiful planetary nebulae
and the moon in the big telescope i mean you know the moon is like you know metric 384 000 kilometer
away if you magnify 1000 times which is like still cool for
a telescope like that uh it's like if you were 384 kilometers above the mountain the moon basically
it's it's the view you have is the view you would have you would you'd be like on the space shuttle
yeah yeah i did you see the terrain incredible incredible very impressive
thing i've had the same experience also at the media observatory i also worked there
and uh at the time it was the end of photography the beginning of ccd they didn't have ccds on small telescope
telescope was available and i remember spending quite a lot of night you know flying over the moon like that and it is
really some you know those are images which are uh you know still engraved i mean indeed
when you see some fantastic thing like this oh yeah yeah so i i
anytime i see images of the moon i i i flash back to moments like that you know and uh
is you know incredible and you know again you you think of also
eclipses and seeing bailey's beads and stuff like that so you know our relationship to the moon is as
astronomers is uh very special and uh you know you can never say it's just the moon
because it's really amazing you always see different things that's right that's right so um
chuck you chuck lewis you've been uh very patient waiting there you you gave this great talk about skylab and
and uh you had some other comments you wanted to make yeah and i think they're appropriate um
this of all the star parties i've i've been associated with in a lurking mode
i think this is special because i'm i'm hearing the kind of excitement tonight that i
that i think is greater than what we've seen in the past at least for me anyway so i've got i've got a couple of uh of
things to talk about kind of a follow-up to this morning or this afternoon but also
related um to the the excitement of discovery and uh
and if we could let me share my screen now sure i'll share that with you sure
i'll be back in a moment everyone okay okay so can you see my screen everybody
yes we can sure okay so this this afternoon we were talking about skylab
and uh and this is a little bit different this is space lab it came a little bit later
about 10 years later it was a it was a short-term
um space station i guess you could call it but what i wanted to share today was uh
a period uh in the beginning of the ten day mission this was these were short missions using the shuttle
and um a short laboratory in the payload bay of the shuttle one of the one of the experiments on that particular mission
was a grill spectrometer it was it was intended to
take a look at some trace elements in the upper atmosphere using
ir from the sun as a source looking at um
at a specter of a number of trace elements
a lot of this stuff has never been done before and the interesting thing about all of this we're talking about uh the joy of
discovery if you remember years ago the uh the television program wide world of
sports and they started out with uh the joy of victory and the agony of defeat yeah defeat right yeah the first
two or three days of uh space lab one which was sts-9 uh you could probably characterize as
the the uh the agony of defeat we were we were losing uh payloads about as fast as we were
bringing them on and i guess that's to be expected in things where you're doing things for the
first time anyway this particular experiment was having
major difficulty there were there were power issues there were issues with as i recall rebooting
experiment computers all the kinds of things that that we we find um
that happen to us when we're doing our backyard astronomy sure anyway uh
the uh the the principal investigators there were uh i guess half a dozen of them big
big bunch from uh from france and they were coming through the control room
down in houston i guess two or three times a day with huge long faces
and uh and i was in that in that area i was i was the science capcom for that mission
so i didn't have much to do other than communicating with the crew but um
about three days into the mission uh dr ackermann oh let's see here's this i
already told you about this this is an absorption spectra using a mercury cadmium telluride sensor real
spectrometer so doctor oh and here's here's a picture of the guys inside space lab just to give you an idea of
what it looks like i forgot i had that picture now all right so dr actor ackerman comes in the in the
control room and he's he's waving this uh this piece of paper in his hand
and the tears are coming down his cheek and he put that in front of every one of us
and got us all to sign it this was the first spectrum that uh that he had seen from his uh
from his experiment um and and if you to put this in perspective these these were
were career uh sensitive kinds of things in a lot of cases some of these guys had been told
by their colleagues that um putting experiment in a nasa spacecraft was a kiss of death
and uh and i'm sure this was in the back of his mind during those first three days but here you are with uh
this is the joy of discovery and the joy of victory after uh after a pretty dark period
but it does it does follow on the the excitement that i heard from elaine
about discovering a comet and a lot of the rest of you and it's an example of how even big
science can can inspire you and uh that it takes a lot of people some of
whom you see signing this thing on the bottom here's another picture this is n2o i believe
um again it's absorption at the sunset uh the first time anybody had gotten any
any spectra of those kinds of trace elements and uh and that was it i just wanted to
share that with you because it was it was appropriate for what what was yeah what we were doing tonight just it's
awesome that's great beautiful so i'm gonna
stop sharing that and back all right sounds good
so how about you uh richard grace what's going on out there what's happening
it is still raining um but i do have a couple of images to show from the uh
last week's star party that uh never happened okay let me uh share some screen here
that's the cool thing about imaging is you can keep those images and share them later
so are we on a triangulum picture that's a beautiful image of triangulum yeah
right on i um i didn't get the uh the wispy outer lanes
and uh i had a problem last weekend it was a great uh weekend for imaging
but my uh my deuce shield was on a little crooked and i didn't check it all weekend
or or monday or tuesday but uh we managed to pull out uh quite a
quite a lot of these nebulous regions and that's one reason i love the triangulum galaxy unlike andromeda which
is so bright and uh this just uh gives a little something different and
it's still close enough that you know guys with uh wider field instruments can get a good
good portion of it in their field so um let's see that was the uh the
first one and uh this was all done on the comet hunter which i got guiding for the first time
last weekend um so we went from two minute unguided exposures for the
first ten months of my astrophotography career uh straight to five minute exposures and that way i only had to do
one set of darks for the whole uh couple of days let me
pull this up here um
where is it
uh that's not it
here we go and this was also shot with the comet hunter
oh wow and that is uranus and that's what i thought that was those
are two of the moons for sure yeah and i'm pretty sure one's up here but
you might be diffractiony i'm not sure when i was watching the video for hours
on end you could see more than two of the moons and i was pretty blown away this was treated more like a deep sky
object this was a like a 30 or 40 second exposure um at a 4 8 so but at the same time 730
millimeters of focal length that's within the reaches of almost anyone and
i didn't realize that so this was kind of almost like seeing jupiter's moons for
the first time for me you know what i mean i i was i was pretty pretty floored by that
um let's see and back here
and i swung and missed the horse head last year couldn't even find it in the
screen i i was doing all sorts of things wrong but uh at five minutes in
i'm very happy i love the flame nebula more than the horse head personally
i'm gonna go back soon and i'm gonna shoot the flame as the the main target i
love how you can get some of the blue to come out in the background of it i mean it's
it's just an amazing target and um
i mean everybody else has been talking of course you know the uh the community
awesome um you know any any way anybody can can fit in help out answer questions
um you know um liking sharing subscribing
all the stuff you know what i mean uh it just helps the more you participate the more you learn um
no matter where it is that uh that you're from um also i wanted to say that i am
a hundred feet from an led street lamp really i am in a city
okay so anybody who thinks you can't do it from a city i beg to differ
that's about all i got to say if you live in a city you think you can't do it try it you can do it
um you might have to pay a couple extra dollars for some filters here or there but it it definitely works out just fine
are you using a lpro oh that is no pro oh i nailed it didn't i i knew exactly what it was well i shot
for the lpro because of triangulum and then i just ran the el pro for the rest of the the rest of the weekend on
everything including the uranus shot it was it was all on the same thing i tried to get as much as i could
uh through tuesday night and it's been cloudy since so you know
hopefully the clear skies come back after the moon goes away haha yeah try no no try the l pro with the moon out it
will it will actually darken it actually works
oh yeah it does yeah is that color or mono
uh it's all color uh it's all with a uh the 183 uh i'm over sampling i know
that's uh not proper but it's also the was or is the uh the cheapest
astrophotography camera that's cool that you can get your hands on and i use it with every scope that i put it on anyway
so you know uh hopefully going to be uh getting a hold of one of the uh
the zwa zwo 2600s with that aps-c sensor
that will pretty much pair up perfectly with the common hunter um and some other future scopes that i'm
hopefully going to be getting a hold of sometime in the coming years so i'm also planning on moving uh so i'm moving from
the city to portal 4 uh in the spring and it's going to be awesome and we're going to get a good
streaming setup up there and uh it's going to be a lot nicer than it is here but i'm looking forward to it and i'm
going to be with you all uh as long as i can and hang out i got something for you next week hope
the clouds go away that's great that's great hopefully you're moving to where
less cloudy skies too so um we're still gonna be east coast uh we're
we're moving close to gettysburg if um as far as a famous location we're gonna
be moving close to there and uh in a pretty secluded area uh it's where everybody i know is is that pretty much
so uh looking forward to it yeah gettysburg it's beautiful i've been out there
great yeah it's a nice place dave do you got anything uh your scope at this point
um i have a dot i tried pointing at mars i love dots my
my uh my system's really not set up for planetary imaging um
i i can share the dot look at the delay it's just a dot uh
let's see if i can share myself yeah jeffrey looks at dots all the time
that's right yeah yep dots can have a lot of information in them that's right
and there it is that's supposed to be mars
and i turn the gain down to zero and and uh there it is right a second
that is a yellowish looking dot why is it yellow maybe slightly red what's your exposure time
a thousandth of a second that's a short yeah that's yeah that's uh
yeah you're filming it's probably properly exposing it that's probably it looks kind of reddish i also played
with the histogram trying to get detail the show but it's not showing up so i reset it
no you don't have the pixel resolution to show anything really yeah
that that's what i know you might be able to tease out the polar cap if you were to
stack it maybe if you had a bunch of them i don't know it depends the um the uh si error can't do
the stack i tried live stacking on this and it just doesn't find enough data to stack no you'd have to use registex or
astro stackers to try to do it but then it could be very tiny i mean it'd be very small yeah
there is a new um version of the software coming out that'll let you do video
capture with this application so that'll be better suited for planetary
but that's all i've got right now i've actually i've actually done
lunar with astro cameras with single frame astra cameras
you know like 500 frames and the key thing that you get with an astro camera
that you don't get with the video is you get a higher dynamic range which really will pull out a lot of
subtle details when you stack you know it takes like i would do like 30 minutes worth of imaging on the moon
uh with to get 500 frames because the download rate was so slow
you know or a thousand frames and then stack it or using registax and then it would pull
out a lot of good detail because of the dynamic range uh that you don't get normally with a
with a video that's an all that's that's something that i've i've done a few times and it
seems to work out pretty well kind of a pain because instead of a 30
second video you gotta wait a half an hour for all your images
oops what am i doing here okay
so yeah that's all i had scott right now and actually i need to probably run outside and make sure that my scope is going to tip over
okay good idea we have uh we have seen m33 would you all like to
see m31 sure we would sure let me uh share my screen here
uh this is uh this is m31 at 200 millimeters shot with
the canon 200 millimeter f 2.8
not too bad and then uh very nice
yeah let me see if i got the other one here it's a really wide field that's like eight degrees isn't it yeah
and then i got another one here uh this thing kind of keeps me from uh
oh not that way there's one at 300 millimeters
that is uh i i shot this with an
that's a very nice image i love it i i shot that with the canon 300 millimeter f 2.8 i shot it at f4
and it's not the white lens it's the one that they made back in 1974 that when
they first came out with their first fluoride oh wow
it's black anodized aluminum very expensive
actually i had two lenses side by side when i shot this
i had two two cameras running and two uh
two lenses running at the same time so i could get data
let me see if i can find the how long was the exposure uh five minutes each
i'll have to i'll have to go over here and look here here's the what was the total time
here is the description on it
there's the information on it
the total time is 15 hours and 48 minutes
five minutes at iso 400 with my dual 300 millimeter setup
i got it set at f4 and then this other one
i did the same thing but i was using that l pro
because i had the moon out that night [Music] and what i did is i just combined them
together
same lens
that's the information right there and one thing that i've noticed about the uh
a uh a cmos chip it's got a bare matrix over it
darks and bias frames don't do you any good and what i have found that actually
takes away the noise is jittery because when you go to stretch your field you've got all these
green yellow purple dots all over the place and if you take if you take every single
image and you move them up down back and forth what happens is instead of uh
instead of the image staying stationary you got a blue on top of blue on top of blue you got a blue on top of yellow on top
of red on top of a green and it cancels it out it cancels that uh
it cancels that color noise out and you you'll end up with a gray background
but you also have to get a lot of frame if you notice here it's 125 frames
and this is 103 so right so it's it's the combination of doing
the dithering and getting a lot of photos and what i have noticed
uh you actually have to have that color model in there because that color model
is actually creating the color that's in the image the problem with it is uh
trying to balance it out and what happens is when you use darks when you use darts
the darks will subtract some of that some of that color model out of there in other words
it's not only getting rid of the noise that you want to get rid of but it's also taking part
of your image away right
i don't know if you guys understand that or not but i've worked with the with colored sea mosses for about four
years it'd be interesting to talk to gary palmer about that yeah i got to a point
to where i just stopped using darks and bias and just started dinnering i think a lot of people are doing away
with doing darks and biases with cmos cameras because they're so low noise
now the cmos uh the model cameras they're a completely
different animal than the one that's got the bare matrix over it you have to use darks
on the mono cameras because the mono cameras doesn't produce the color model
because because there's no bare matrix over it it it it's it's acting just like a ccd
would so when you go to put that bare
that bare matrix over there that creates the color model and you need the color model to create
the color in in the image but at the same time you're creating color noise
and the only way to get rid of the color noise is like i said dithering it moves
the frames around to where because see all the color noise on on the sensor is in the same place every
single time it doesn't move it's there so when you're gathering you're moving
it around so you get the colors overlapping one another
and then it's sort of like when you add red green and blue you end up with gray right when you have
even numbers so that's basically what you're doing
and and then of course on top of i'm i'm flipping i'm keeping my camera angle
you know the same whenever i do a meridian flip so it turns the chip 180 degrees
and then i'm getting that too so it's just it's just a process of cleaning um
cleaning and that's the results that you get right there in that image yeah
great but it took a long time for me to figure that out
oh sure took a lot of hard work you know yeah it took years to figure how to use a
cmos game this is the camera right here hey tom i got a question for
you what is the most difficult image you've made i mean if there's one
most difficult most difficult the most or the longest
the greatest effort that you've had to put into an image right now
that i'm using a uh a model camera
that takes a lot of effort but i have to go i have to get out of
digital and go into
the old color images where you had to look through a uh
one of these you know you know the hand paddle in in your hand and you were making
the you were making the corrections manually on on film
right and you and it was 15 degrees
yes it was 15 degrees fahrenheit and you're looking through this thing right with the reticle on it and your
breeze is bouncing off the lens right into your eyeball and then sometimes you thought your eyeball was going to get froze to the to
the eyepiece you know [Music] [Laughter]
that's the way those are the hardest days that i don't want to go back
it's doing real astronomy right yeah this thing is this is a dinosaur
yeah one of those two i got one right here in my uh
somewhere i have one i have one is it too i use it
i use it for drift aligning yep
it also comes with the barlow because you got to put a bar on it so you can zoom the star in that you're
going to guide on right oh this is a 3x barlow yeah it screws on the end of it so
that was made by vixen yes i think that thing was about 400 bucks
at the time back then it was expensive do you remember that yeah
right uh this is this is the camera that i was using for all those images i actually
got two of these and just like a friend of mine was saying the live view is real easy to get
focused with the live view on one of these cameras sure this is one of the lenses
the old that lens was made back in the 70s oh i see
and man they really knew how to make lenses back then oh yeah really put a lot of they put no plastic in them
okay so does anyone else have uh have anything to share here
so uh dry and cold on mars here it's just uh i'm trying to stay warm but you know how
it is you should wear it more than just like a short sleeve shirt when you're on mars
you know yeah well this is a window behind me i'm inside actually it's not quite as cold as it is out there but
it's it's still cold well you know you got chuck lewis he's out in the cold of he's in the vacuum of
space out there so right right that's right and so
so i should wait we should wave at each other jerry that's right can you see me over yeah
over the over the uh the miles and miles of space right
i i failed to mention during this uh uh program that we do have uh prize partners that are involved in
uh the um uh the global star party uh there is a uh gary palmer's uh
uh company where he teaches people how to do image processing and stuff
it'll also help you with your gear or whatever that that you want gary gary does a lot of
product reviews and he works with a lot of manufacturers on on
you know testing their products and stuff like that so uh just really one of these super users
that's out there and you can ask him about almost any brand any type of telescope he's he's
had some experience with it so uh you know just a a great independent
uh type of tech support guy his uh his website is called astro
courses dot co dot uk and uh
i'll put that down here aster courses and so he is uh actually some of the
door prizes um are um you know free um
uh you know an hour tutorial with him so uh and you know so really great and then
another uh prize partner is a company called the vacuum of space where they have uh astro
gifts that they offer and so there's um you know you can get a uh
one of the prizes is a custom t-shirt with your name on it if you want it so um
so there's uh really cool designs and stuff that they do um
but uh you know i think that we're kind of towards the end of our program i want
i want to say something to chuck uh it's it's great to to meet you and talk to
you chuck because back in the early 70s when i was a early teenager i used to write nasa to
get photographs remember the things they used to send out pictures of and i skylab pictures i i have a few of
those that i got they used to put out that had the information on the back about skylab image and everything and i
used to write and get all these images from nasa and sometimes you could get the crew to just to autograph them for
you yeah i didn't know that at the time but i you you know back then you had to mail for everything any kind of
information you had i used to mail the u.s geological survey for landsat images
and other things like that back in the 70s but that was kind of cool i just remember the the skylab
images i got from nasa at that time that's terrific
yeah that's awesome before we go i wanted to show you guys that dual imaging system i
found the picture of it all right and uh you guys will see now
this is the one this is the setup that i use to shoot the large andromeda
that you just seen where is the thing here at
it's rolling oh there it is
trying to figure out where i'm at here
there it is right there [Music]
what those are two
300 millimeter f 2.8 lenses made back in the 1970s
they're they're fluoride lenses fluorite lenses okay so
all the data in the same amount of action exactly exactly and
it wasn't i still have my uh i still had those lenses
that night when i was shooting you know jupiter i had my uh i had my william octoscope on it but
i don't have this mount anymore that was this mount got stolen with it and everything that you see there with it
except for the lenses thank god right
but that's my rig that's what i used to set up to shoot it with
excellent and uh i didn't shoot it at 2.8 it's it it's an
f4 that way i can get really good tight
stars you know was that the sweet spot for that lens was f4 yeah yeah
and it was a sweet and uh that time at iso 400 was the sweet spot
for those cameras too
yeah it's just two dslrs
and i got a mind up and
pretty simple awesome so before we go tom how do people join
the facebook astronomy club you just over there just go over and actually if you want to
you guys can text me and i can let you come in there
okay yep great okay anything else gentlemen are we uh
sounds like that's it huh heck of a party scout as always well thank you very much guys
hey scott i really appreciate you inviting me on here i wasn't expecting that and uh
oh really i really enjoyed this uh this talk because it really helps for us to all get
together and be and it's not so much that it's just we're learning from each other too
you know what i mean i mean we're sharing our ideas and things and that's what it's all about and sharing
yeah it was really cool to see what everybody is up to and yeah i i don't know a lot of the people here all admit
uh but it was it was really neat seeing that was nice what he's working on to hear your comments though zane you you
are uh tell us a little bit more about yourself before oh okay so
uh i've i've been in astronomy for five years since i was like 12 and uh i build
i build jobs uh for the most part that's mostly what i do i and i i do a lot of uh
uh astronomy outreach and uh i i do have a little i have a little power
point here i have i have some stuff but well you should share see uh
i've had way too many commercial scopes i've also built a lot of scopes and i do a lot of outreach here's just some some
photos here sure i have this 13-inch coulter dob that i that i keep around oh my god i've seen
millions of those really they're great with kids because they're basically indestructible i have a 14.7 inch that i
made that weighs a third as much and takes up a quarter of the space but the kids but kids love the coulter
and they can run straight into it at full speed and not tip it over that's right the focus is
yeah it actually works really well it's just the the tube there's no ventilation behind the mirror and the tube has
currents so it it can take a while to cool and that etx there that's actually at my uncle's wedding i flew i flew with
that thing in a in my school backpack and i had crammed clothes all around it and i i brought it uh to the wedding
reception and set it up on a little glass table uh i got swarmed once at uh while i was
just observing by a bunch of uh college students who were there for an astronomy course i'd set up a stem stuff i've been
doing sidewalk astronomy i live in stanford connecticut i've been doing sidewalk astronomy downtown that's where
these photos with the coulter are from uh i built the city oh culture you used
to make a uh a blue one too that was in 16 yeah those are even more terrifying to move around
now and uh they i don't think they look as cool
um they're a beast i ground a six-inch mirror and made a dab out of it and
got in time magazine once and i actually i still have the mirror it's in a drawer i i thought it was too small and i i
haven't really done anything with it and i can't figure out a way to build it into a scope that i would actually use because i actually have a five inch
explorer scientific apo and the c925 and uh some other stuff i built a 16 inch
top i tried to make the mirror it didn't go so well uh it underwent uh a few modifications and
i scrapped it i built a couple of other scopes these are all six inch f8 dobs uh this one on the bottom left never
actually got finished this ten inch i got rid of the two on the right uh are
in the hands of people now that i made them with i built a 20-incher 20 and a half actually cat stop it my cat has decided
now he's now it's time to annoy me right as i'm i'm actually talking uh i i got the mirror uh for free and it
actually had a really bad figure i didn't know that so it didn't work well at anything over about 150 power but i
spray silvered it with chemicals and i threw it into a dab and uh it was fun on
really faint on really faint stuff you could actually go down to 18th magnitude from my yard which was pretty good
and i measured that on uh small globular clusters and how faint the stars on the outer edges i
could resolve i built a 12-inch i tried to sell custom scopes at neaf didn't didn't go very
well i wasn't very good at it this bottom right was a prototype for a production version on a cnc that i had a guy do
i got rid of that and uh this is some stuff uh i i did a presentation at uh
club i'm in on f3 telescopes and how coma characters and 100 degree eyepieces really enable them i'm a bit tired so i
can't go over all how it works but uh i built a 10 10-inch f3 with a mirror made by a guy from australia holy smoke
i loved it it would have been a fun astrograph i i i scrapped it though i didn't i didn't like it on the gym it
was really unmanageable why um and uh it gave some really nice views
though and what i what i really wanted to do was build a large
large-ish f3 dab and so that's what i did uh also there's just a photo through the 10-inch with an
eye with an iphone through the eyepiece so there's a kind of a myth that you know fast scopes are just these light
buckets that are only good for you know imaging applications or for wide field low power viewing
and i went and split a 0.5 arc second double with that 10 inch so i i think it
was pretty good uh it was paying to get collimated but uh i i figured that out with the 14. i
built the 14 uh if you notice this first version was actually built from leftovers from the 12 that's why parts
look kind of familiar i actually just shoved a bigger mirror in the same uh housing uh
here's a field of view comparison so here's a c14 with a reducer about the maximum feel you're going to get uh
and there's you know your average 14 and 14 and a half inch top and then the 14.7 i made gets about 1.7
degrees at a level chain isn't it yeah it's marcarian's chain um
and so you get a really wide field which is really great for visual and uh i i
then i didn't like the original version of the 14. so i went and rebuilt it i used a drum
shell for the upper tube assembly uh i i made my own upper truss brackets uh and
i i did some other stuff it has these really huge bearings to help with balance uh and uh center of gravity
stuff and my face is bigger than the the eyepiece is bigger than the scope yeah
it's it's pretty ridiculous uh but that's why it has the large bearing so the center of mass doesn't shift too
much between eyepieces and so i could keep the mirror box that's awesome and uh here it is with your average uh
six foot tall person that's that's one of my friends uh pointed really low at the moon so it is really designed for
use while seated i actually have an equatorial platform coming for it that's going to raise the height up and give it
tracking which is pretty awesome uh and uh i changed out these edge supports to rollers which helped with
astigmatism i made a shroud for it that i sewed myself uh i added a i changed the focus route
for a moonlight and i actually you couldn't fit both knobs because the thing's so compact i have wiring for the dew controller uh
i added light baffles uh there's gonna be integrated power and cooling on the next version and it's
gonna be on an eq platform and it still only is gonna weigh about 50 pounds for all of that
which is what i'm which is really great and the the newest version actually has magnets i put magnets on
the upper tube assembly so that it will latch onto the lower tube assembly and you can carry the whole thing in one
piece and you don't have to worry about it the upper tube is simply sliding off or scratching anything and i have to tilt it to get it in my car because my
trunk has a kind of an angle on the on the end of it and so it doesn't slide off when i do that they were just these
cheap magnets i got off amazon i don't know why more people don't and they don't put these on their scope because it's it's
really great with a trust stop and uh yeah there's going to be more cooling i
have an equatorial platform that i bought so it can track and uh you know i've seen galileo region gate i
mean i'm not an imager i'm a visual guy uh i've seen galileo regional and gaming which is this brown spot in the upper
and the northern hemisphere uh i can see the ankeny division in saturn's rings uh i've actually seen the heart and soul
nebulae visually from a portal 3 site with an h beta filter that is stuff
really hard to do uh i've seen two yeah that's much finer than the veil
oh yeah veil looks amazing you can see the full five degrees of it pickering's triangle all of it uh it's ridiculous
looks like the pictures just desaturated a color uh m57 is like bright blue globular start to get colors and this is
still only a you know 14 inch scope i've seen g1 and g2 in android g1 looks kind
of fuzzy g2 barely visible and uh individual h2 regions you know
the brighter spiral galaxies which is pretty cool uh an m51 actually looks kind of blue which i thought was
interesting uh some coloring globulars especially m4 uh and i've seen the north america at
pelican nebulae and the pac-man and the butterfly
uh basically name in h2 region or a dark nebula i've probably seen it with this
scope i've had it out for close to 100 nights this year just this telescope uh
trying to even when it's not great conditions i just try to use it as much as possible because the more you're out there with
your with your gear the better the faster you get setting it up and collimating it and the more things you learn so this is still kind of this
thing's still kind of in development i'm constantly i make a change almost every time i use it uh because there's always
some new idea i come up with or some issue i find and i keep modifying it like the other day i found out i i was aligning my
secondary incorrectly and uh then i and that i really needed a contrast
booster filter which i actually use an old fld from a camera and uh i've i i
pointed at mars for the first time and i was like i was blown away it was doing almost as well as my five inch eight bow
wow uh that's great and i'm working on a 24 inch
i really am and uh so that the 24 is kind of a funny
story because i didn't really ever think i was going to build a 24. i drive a ford c-max which is not a big car
uh and uh you know i it's i'm a bit of a waste from saving up for for a minivan
or anything and it gets less good mileage so i was thinking i was gonna do a 20 or 22 to fit in the car and because
you know even a 20 is a good 20 inch now with a random bad mirror that i got for free
uh was going to be a real undertaking especially if i wanted to be at f3 so i thought that was the most i was going to
do and i got a call from uh steve dodds for nova optical he's the guy who made my 14-inch mirror forgot to mention the
14 is a three-quarter inch thick fused quartz so the mirror is only about eight pounds and it cools in about 20 minutes
even when the temperature is freezing with no fans uh which is pretty cool um so he called
me and he told me he had this 24 inch f3 and a half mirror that had a 1 by 3 inch chip come off it
and he said i could would i take it for 500 shipped and i said yes
and then i realized oh my god i'm building a 24-incher how am i going to fit this in the car so there are a lot
of weird uh design quirks that i've done such as the bearings actually have a cut
off they're uh they have the top 15 degrees cut off so you can't actually point this thing within 15 degrees of the horizon
which was a concession i had to make because uh if i gave it that extra 15 degrees
yeah sure i'd be able to catch the planets a little earlier and look at stuff really low to the south but i'd also be adding about three
inches of height to those bearings and that would be the difference between them fitting in the car easily and or not it has to go up harbor freight
loading ramps and i don't have a good picture of it but i actually welded the entire steel tailgate i've uh the only
woodworking i've ever done is is for telescopes i've made a i've made a coffee table in a nightstand but that
was after telescopes i'd never done metal working or working with steel welding drilling tapping machining any
of that so uh the mirror cell is uh welded uh steel steel bars and uh
drilled and tapped i actually for the for the collimation bolts i just welded on t-nuts because they had more thread
travel and uh there's a cable sling and i've i've worked with a lot of different people for help on designing and and
fabricating it i'm still i actually had to throw out most the rocker box because i cut the curves
wrong um but i'm still working on it but um the idea is it's got to fit in the
hatchback it's got to be it's got to be able to be set up by one person because i observed by myself
and i drive typically about an hour and a half to my dark sky location up in litchfield connecticut a couple times a
week and uh i wanted it also so i could sit in my observing chair and not need a
ladder so my observing chair brings me up by about two or three inches above standing height so it it's like being
six four six five i'm six one uh and believe it or not unless you're
pointing straight up at the zenith uh a 24 inch f three and a half is short enough that
if you're you're equivalent to being six three six four you basically don't need a ladder ever
which is pretty awesome because you know when you're standing on top of a ladder you know you feel the breeze
uh you get colder quicker and also you know i found that when you're standing to observe especially on a ladder you're
subconsciously always devoted to parting your brain devoting part of your brain to just standing up and balance
especially when you're looking through an eyepiece and it throws your brain off because it has no frame of reference anymore you're you have some people i've
seen actually get like legs that are like jello if they stand on the ladder looking through a scope too long so i really wanted to avoid that and that's
why that's part of why i went with a 3.5 well then you know that was the mirror i happened to get i would have done an f4
if i got an f4 but i wouldn't have been as happy um and i'm i'm hoping i can have this
done by the end of the year i don't know mostly because i keep working on the 14-inch and uh because
i'm working on college applications and things but um wow really exciting project and how over
how many years did you build these scopes uh so
so the uh six inch uh i ground the mirror for this in 2017 uh
it took i made the whole mirror from start to finish in about three weeks uh i was bored
um the 16 inch i made in uh about three months um a lot of that was working on
the mirror which i ended up doing a really bad job i basically forgot astigmatism exists
and uh i made a good mirror just one with lots of astigmatism um
and uh then i built a structure and the structure was really bad and basically on the verge of falling apart the spider
i had no understanding of mechanical tension so the spider there uh the secondary was just hanging on it
basically so it would move back and forth based on altitude it also wasn't centered um and i there were a lot of
issues with that and then these six inchers i built in 2018 all all four all three of those this one
on the bottom left i built i built recently and then i got rid of the 10 inch i built in 2018 a friend wanted a
10. and i built him the 10 he was like this thing is terrible it was uh that nice coulter mirror in it though
uh i built the 20 inch in late 2018 it was pretty quick also pretty bad the
mirror cell especially that i made for it was really really bad but this the mirror was already so bad that my bad
edge supports basically didn't matter they might have actually canceled out some of the astigmatism that was in this mirror
uh one of the good things i see uh that you're doing is you're using a tail red
yes yes i'll hail the tail right there no yeah
fighters better on the 14. uh the 12 i built that spring in like a month great telescopes
and and and he's working through the problems of making a telescope yeah uh well you know last fall
you've got to fall down and well look he's not gonna scrape the dust off
and get back up and keep going you know i mean i want to i want to be 17 years old again
yeah the thing that i i'm not study i'm planning on studying probably communications because i really enjoy
like uh writing and bringing this stuff to the public but you know i'm a bit of an amateur engineer and i think the
thing that you i think the thing a lot of telescope makers like to do is they sit and they go and they spend years
working on a perfect working on a perfect design purely on paper and then they go build it and then often it's not
as perfect as they want it anyway and to me i i i don't i don't even make plans i just build
uh which is part of a which can be a problem um but
you know you learn something and the great thing is that you know at the end of the day when as long as the mirror the optics are
acceptable which they weren't in a lot of these early ones but you know ultimately this stuff is just plywood
and you know you can reuse most the expensive parts over and over so if you don't like what you've built it's pretty
easy to just completely throw it out and start over which is what i've done and zayn it's it's shade tree engineering
and and yeah engineers need to be able to do that and i i also i found that the the best
way to learn is the best ways to learn are not to to read all day and whatnot but
to go out and look at other people's projects and to just just try random different ideas like i
i looked at i was um i was looking at doing a 16 inch f3
and i i was thinking about doing a string telescope where you actually make the trusses it's so thin they're
incapable of supporting themselves and you have basically
what's the word you have like these little tiny steel and and fat thread wires that actually brace
it and i changed my mind on that but um there have been a lot of ideas i pursued that ultimately went nowhere
like uh what's a good one um this really tall drum shell i thought it would help
better with light baffling it really didn't uh i found that it was equally effective to just get rid of all that
and just have this little piece of kydex that pokes out um and i found also that
uh you know these uh with the really fast mirrors you gotta be really good at
supporting them not just with flotation points but on the edges because when the depth of the curve is a third
of the thickness of the mirror uh it'll it'll do weird things and uh collimating
these super collimating these scopes is still something i'm learning but i can do it pretty fast
now that i have gotten used to it i can collimate this thing it's f 2.9 i can get it pretty close in about a minute i can get
it dead on on a star in about three minutes i've timed it um and you know stuff like the magnets
um and now i'm doing i'm gonna put this on a platform and i have no idea i've never
actually used an equatorial platform i might really hate it i don't know uh i actually went and bought one
because i i felt too intimidated by making it but to me it's just it's just a process i
think it's also i really like being able to say to people that i made this but also that i
had no idea what i was doing because truth be told i still don't no one in my family is a woodworker no one in my
family even knows how to use power tools i don't i've learned most this stuff online i get the occasional
uh help in person with a little thing here or there but for the most part it really is just me
doing this and i i hope that i hope that it's inspiring because if somebody with if somebody with uh
a shop full of 50 year old tools that mayor that don't really work and no
woodworking knowledge besides you know having made a a coffee table once that turned out okay
uh can make a bunch of big telescopes that you know everybody really likes the views through
at least i i think that that that says a lot for you know adults making telescopes or
just you know any sort of diy project and i think also the the thing is that there's always
still these new frontiers to be discovered in in amateur astronomy with with equipment
with uh doing stuff yourself with observing with imaging
i'd actually like to show you one of my friends was really inspired by my tennis f3
and uh my i had another friend make the mirror for the attention f3 and he went and made this six inch f 2.9 astrograph
he ground the mirror himself he's uh 18. um and uh i have a better image of the
bubble nebula that he sent me but these are um this veil image here
is a 60 second sub during a full moon
uh with no processing i if i recall correctly and uh
the he's still working on the mirror cell and getting it he had to swap it out for a better one to hold collimation because you know
with imaging you know visual i if i lose collimation when i move the scope i can just tweak it real
fast i actually i don't anymore with the fourteen zane yeah i mean we don't see that photograph you were showing it to
oh whoops i have no idea why that would be wait uh
did i turn off screen sharing oh no we still see your presentation oh let
me see uh there we go there it is sorry about that uh so this
is a veil this i know it looks terrible because he's just holding his phone up to the monitor uh and the scope was not very
well collimated but um this is a 60-second sub uh with an asi 1600
through i believe an h beta filter is that a comet right there
no that's the veil no i mean up at the top up in the top there i think that's just
glare off yeah that's glare of a light office monitor he goes to oh okay he goes to a college
looks like a comet doesn't it a this is this is where he has to image
so uh and this this is andromeda again you know it's like holding phone up to
monitor here but this is again a this is a two no it says 120 i believe this was either a
60 or 90 second sub and i mean i know it's it doesn't look the greatest
because there's a screen cap but the amount of detail that you're getting in one exposure here is ridiculous he uh he
actually works on the assassin supernova hunting project and he's also one of the
developers for the free astrophotography tool mina um
and uh he wants to he wants to be able to capture supernova go uh go and hunt for
supernovae with this and for and for comets and you said this guy's 18 years old
yeah wow yeah um and
um he's uh yeah he's working on he's working on a bunch of upgrades to the scope and he's gonna get a new qhy cam
that has some sort of crop sensor capability i i he's explained it to me it's like having two cams in one it's
gonna come out next month uh and um he thinks he can get down to his goal is
that he can get down to about 20th or 21st magnitude in two or three hours
and uh to and then and he wants to be able to pick up uh pretty much any supernova
that's brighter than that um and hopefully discover some he's actually discovered
at least one supernova and he's confirmed like independently three or four uh with
just his little refractor that he has um but you know i i feel i i got him
i'll admit i really pushed him on this project he was he almost uh quitted quit working on the mirror at one point and i
was like oh you know look at what look at what i'm doing with the f3 even with just just for visual and
i i i helped push him through this project and i mean i'm really he's really happy with the results i feel i
feel really glad that i inspired somebody to do that and um i'm inspired that a young man at
your age is doing this oh yeah you know
thank you people you know
telescope once i mean you have been through many of refining something so it's it's
really impressive yeah it's it's been a long it's been a lot of it's been a lot of challenges i i really there have been
times where i have wondered why i do all this and then you know i i've set up the the
14 and i've you know i pointed my favor my favorite thing with the 14 inch is the
double cluster because my scope has a curved spider so there's no diffraction spikes and it's and then i'm like wow this is like looking
through a big apo but the stars have more color because i got way more light gathering or i pointed at the veil and i
could see all the veil and pickering's triangle and i it and it's not this super cramped field
and or i or i take the coulter 13 out and do some sidewalk astronomy and then
i'm like yeah that's why i that's why i spend all my time and money on this instead of you know like a car
right well mark uh see cesar is telling me he's got mars in his telescopes i
think he wants to share that yes thank you thank you guys thank you zane thank you
amazing pictures of sane excellence yes very young is like my son maybe
czar is also a telescope maker and and uh really an expert at
making telescope optics oh wow you've done some pretty exotic optical designs
i take it or just yes i'll share pictures next uh oh okay off
of uh a size a size telescope from 1910
that i am disassembling my laboratory and it's in a chromatic refractor from
near to 110 years old oh wow the oldest working school everything is a working
repairing telescope yes oh yeah i love that too i've uh i've restored a lot of like vintage
vintage scopes i love just i love looking at the the machinery of the older stuff it's just a it's just so
amazing what they did especially when you read about the kind of compromises they had to make
when they were building these things just because they were limited by the tech of their time and
it's it's it's a great way to learn too about how to design at least even the philosophy of how to
design a working modern system and uh i've also owned a lot of modern immersion scopes and i actually write
reviews of them for a big website which is how i pay for all this yeah excellent amazing amazing
you make a great word really because you're really young well i have
uh here mars now i have a less
wind and we can show you i can show you sorry let me
we can show screen share while here
we can center in the field
i'm using the the same camera that have um oh i forget the name
the guy that that have the canon t3i okay what yes yes that they have
well it is the same the abcm let me here okay
oh hey the the same camera that have tom
don't pick it sorry i can just see some d is the up yeah i can see the ice
cap on the left yeah yeah i can just
about let me i'm going to open stellarium i want to see what it yes with a little imagination with sometimes
from my let balcony see what's it
what is that yes yes okay that's um
yeah i'm not imagining it those dark areas are real no but the ice cap is is
really yes i i can tell you that the the ice cap is real it's a really i can
see some surfaces yeah i can see kind of the yes some people say the x
of mars yeah it's kind of like an exit it's going like uh from one o'clock to maybe eight o'clock there's kind of a
dark marking yes but you know the
i think that this is the best focus that i can i can get
right what's your focal ratio you shoot that is this f10
you prefer that i can try no problem
here is a live you can see my hand i don't have the focuser
it's a hang focuser yeah is this an f10 you have a barlow on there or not yeah
i hate the casing rings to make focus you know i need to put here a refractor
but it's okay it's in focus it's the best the best that i can do it
this uh eight inch it's a five inch uh schmidt
oh it's a five inch okay oh it looks bigger it looks bigger on the mount yes is it is it the telescope that i saved
from the barbecue the entire completely what's the the um
is the telescope that i saved from from there it was entirely cover of uh
of uh fat from the barbecue from a barbecue in in
a place it was incredible yeah that's the the reason the amount looks big is because i access 100 and
it's actually modeled after a larger amount yeah that's bigger than what it is i
gotta say for a five years that's pretty good because i love this this month yes
it's mark 25 arc seconds is that right jerry yeah i think the biggest it's going to
be is like 26 and i at the uh in two weeks or something is how big it gets
right so we're near october 1st right now so maybe it's about 24
24 25 maybe even yeah it's big for this for this moment this telescope
is nothing maybe i um i'm not sure to use at eight inches schmidt casserone
over this mount for visual propose i think that work
okay but five or six inches is perfect for for this mode
or a a apochromatic of 8 80 millimeters yeah some people have run
a 102 on it actually uh people have loaded that mount up quite a bit
if you get on the forum the pmc8 forum it's amazing what people have loaded the iaxos 100 mount up to
they put extra weights they've actually put four weights on the counterweight bar
and loaded up to like like over 20 pounds of equipment
yes and it works it works for them there's probably a lot of
you know if you tap it it would vibrate a lot and take a while to damp but it still works
yes yes and the problem with the wave of this is that i need to adjust the
the oh i'm sorry the name of in english of the worm
um i need to to add just a little uh the worm from from the
well maybe the last yeah because i have a little of backlash
and that's why if i adjust this because it's easy because i i found the
the how to make this uh in internet and
from explore scientific of course and i think that i have more
better work when you have
subtle a win because maybe the problem with the win is
that i have a little of backlash uh yeah yeah yeah
yeah and it's it's really easy because it's the the the system is very easy to
for for everybody you know it's not always really popped out there for a second yes
only do you need remove for screw and it's very easy
all right well i'm gonna head out guys it's almost 2 a.m
thank you everyone i'll definitely be back next time yeah thank you
i love this good night guys take care good night take care
there's a uh dual system yeah
those lenses in the front are 106 millimeters each
awesome awesome whoa yeah there are florida
excellent yes those are expensive lenses yes
all uh all anodized aluminum yeah more plastic in there
yep no so
yeah all right gentlemen thank you very much this is a great star party i think uh
people enjoyed uh uh spending time with us uh a gentleman named uh
or someone with ghosts by the name of arions said that mars is
22.4 arc seconds in diameter right now so that's uh
okay growing and growing so so you want to get out and check out mars while you can and
we will be back again for another global star party uh certainly next tuesday
and uh we'll be planning on a european edition star party with gary palmer
probably coming up another week from now so um i want to thank everyone thanks for
participating uh tom thank you very much uh i hope that uh
you enjoyed it uh dave thanks thanks to you and uh you know for hanging out with
us and showing us some great images there cesar thank you for you know being
our trooper out there in argentina showing us the planets from your balcony it's great
richard um you know uh again thanks thanks a lot for
chiming in and showing your great images from last uh global star party and jerry
jerry did you get clouded out this time yeah it was raining it's raining today
all right like just like maryland yeah on mars that's right mars
and chuck thank you thanks for participating on our daily show and uh your program and
all your your experiences and stuff like that sharing those with us is really you
know amazing so you guys have a great night
and as jack horkheimer always said keep looking up and uh we'll
be back we'll see you tomorrow again on our our daily program with the explore
alliance live hey can we do this again what's up can we do this again of course
you reveal i really enjoyed it absolutely absolutely
yeah i want to tell my little story about this about this baby how i came to have this one
okay all right next show you guys save something for the next show yeah that's great
all right so uh yeah take care take care and uh we will
burn down here we go
that was great
[Music]
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
wow [Music]
the black flag that's right
thanks everybody thanks uh thanks to you spots yeah good nerd everybody this was great
wasn't it i

Transcript for Part B:

let's see if i got this set up right here yeah we had our first proper frost last night that was
um like a nice ring outside here yeah at 12 o'clock just down to about minus
two that's start the season in it yep john
how you guys doing well good things yourself very good
excellent you weren't affected by any wildfires
were you mike uh not not this time a couple years ago most
about a third of the houses around us burned down are you based out of mike well we're
northwest of um los angeles in the santa monica mountains
gotcha yeah yeah i'm up in montana oh that's nice are you
are you most of the state probably has really good skies i would guess yeah um you know right now
we've got some some smoke and a little bit of weather but uh you know this for unfortunately for
us the the fire season's been pretty mild compared to last year like we had over a million acres burned in
the state well california is not doing doing too
well in that regard our fire season has become all year
oh i gotta go check something here
did you get any further on that scope gary
[Music] on that so i just don't have time
and then it literally as soon as it was dark it was just checking everything it was in focus
and the field flatteners were working so yeah
the cm40 is worse than the last one
joys of i was going to say joys of chinese gear but it caught all chinese gear and it lasted yeah the
uh the guider on it the uh pattern on the screen is like stressful
so there's no amount of dull so i'm going to clear that out of the equation
yeah the other one was just light this one's a chessboard so i'll try a couple of other things
tomorrow but it looks like it might be a batch of these that have got a problem
could be bring back the old classic lx 200 that's what i say
yeah but you couldn't do what i've done tonight and literally it's right on and pogo align it and it's guiding and i've
got round stars yeah spend the week with an lx200 and
still not get round [Laughter]
never knock an lx200 yeah it's amazing how how well some of
those things really work the problem is they're out of fashion now rather than anything else isn't it
things go in fashions with astronomy i think as well as that it's weather climate change not being funny we notice
it here there's a lot more high cloud yeah um [Music] probably for about the last three years
so you are seeing the changes with this now um
large scts are not really the way forward that's true and especially as camera
gear gets more sensitive it highlights it makes everything harder doesn't it yeah that is the problem
we're uh climate is completely different here i'm in southern california i
have been my whole life we're talking about we're gonna have to get out of here you know it's getting ridiculously hot
i mean it was you know temperature was like 45 in one place not far from us
and we're getting humidity and what i like about it here is it's dry so yeah and then the fires
that makes it more dry yeah yeah turns everything up that's right i'm in
a wasteland here can you hear me i can hear you okay good joy just checking
hey simon how you doing i'm good it's gotten a little bit windy
here so i had to switch scopes to go down um in aperture size so it's not so
blurring mess
right well the technology has come along so
long so far that [Music] like the cameras mainly is the thing that drives it but the refractors that
are available today are amazing uh yeah yeah
yeah i mean we just did a pretty full night of testing and stuff
on our remote telescope that we're setting up for future global star parties
uh but it's uh is really uh uh amazing what it was capturing of
uh m31 what was that exposure was it like two minutes jerry no it was no i was doing 30 seconds
first and 60 seconds i mean it really looks beautiful at 30 seconds yeah and we've got i got
mercury lights flooding right into the scope you know we had and also the cooler
wasn't working remember our battery power was dying on the cooler yep so so who else do we have we got
mark with anybody
yeah hi there that said he didn't tell me
great we got a nice group here yeah and uh pram vera's gonna be coming
on i guess huh yeah she i think she's in a meeting to start with and then we'll come on
as soon as she's free great great
awesome
we already got a nice little group of people watching chatting excellent mm-hmm
how many usually uh tune in scott you know i don't get huge crowds to tune
in during the live stuff i think the most has been a hundred-ish it's after we broadcast that thousands
watch it yeah that's great well it's that's the usual in my experience but
you know even 100 is pretty good for live it's not bad i mean it's you see some live programs
where thousands are watching at the same time you know that's cool
oh wow i can see simon's got uh the sun live there that's good yeah i'm not gonna chase the seeing
though because it is really fluttering it's a flattering day huh
it was rock solid this morning was it yeah yeah i mean for where i am here in
california uh in la there's very specific times where i have the best times
so it usually happens between seven and ten and it can happen again from
five onwards but i can't see over there because my house blocks it the mountains block it and probably some
guys standing there blocking it too it matches uh when we get it mount
wilson too libby star says hello to all you guys
yeah so we've got let's see i can i can tell you who's watching right or
at least chatting um we've got rondelle vo
brett blake chuck star is he joining us um
[Music] i don't know uh rr dipto
uh uh it sounds like a variable star he's from bangladesh okay he's watching from
bangladesh brett blake was one of our winners he said he was floored that he had won
well we're happy you did richard grace
and cesar brolo from argentina is watching and uh chuck lewis who's going to join
us for the first time next tuesday to be cool um wolfgang says good evening together
from germany [Music] brian fanning says hello i'm not sure
where brian's from i think libby's probably still in school
because libby's mom says she says hello so that's great uh marco
polo happy friday that's right it's happy friday um and mike says he's watching for a few
minutes and um kanan lucas is watching
nice to see you again and i i'm not sure if kanan was on with us last night or not
we were up so late uh dodie reagan's with us um rob morgan from florida
um you know chox is in the uk uh brian fanning's in new jersey jessica
roberts my daughter is watching that's great okay uh suhil amete from kosovo is watching
uh dodie reagan from dallas kanan lucas is in chile uh uh and uh raj
raj canary uh from edinburgh so very cool nice little global audience
here very nice
and milton keynes from the uk
libby's out of school i'm getting a message here but she was up late last night so she's recovering
today yeah she might have been out under the stars with her new telescope
cecilia cortez so beautiful um gracias por uh
the magnificent moment thank you thank you cecilia
watching from castleford uh uk and uh that's paul wright and julie
waters walker excuse me joining from clancy montana so i think we have another
montanan uh here i think uh ryan hannahos in montana
jeff wise says hello kanan says i love explore scientific global parties
we learn so much well thank you kanan that's awesome we got some cool stuff to share with you
tonight so tonight in uh what is tonight in europe
right now
and we're down to the last 30 seconds before we have some of our intros
now it's kind of stopped wiggling for a second wind just stopped briefly did it yeah it looks a lot better now
[Music]
well here we are um hello everybody uh this is the 11th global star party
um it's friday and uh really happy to be here with you today
and we've got a great group of people uh let me um just do a quick
introduction with everybody we have to my right david levy who's going to give our keynote talk here
just a moment gary palmer of course who helped organize uh does actually more than help
he really does a lot of the heavy lifting for this uh european edition of the global star party
jerry hubbell who's in virginia john goss from uh the astronomical league uh who'll be
reading off questions for the door prizes ryan hannahoe someone i've known for a long time uh
you know he was uh very involved with the astronomical league i think when he was still a teenager so
it's we've known each other a long time and he's a friend to many here andreas nilsson uh andreas is um
from sweden uh we got steve collingwood from pulsar observatories in the uk mike
simmons in the you know la region of california
simon tang who is a solar astronomy expert uh he does
broadcasting like this as well he's uh i think that's his real profession and uh um
but he also does a lot of work with um woodland hills cameron telescopes and mark drazy mark i
don't know much about you but we're gonna find out more okay so um let's get started with uh
david first and um uh we will uh
let's um let me unpin myself here here we go
and we will go into speaker mode and here we go
and david you're on okay you have the stage hello everybody and uh welcome to
global star party number 11 where uh scotty and the others are expanding this
every every week it's getting bigger and bigger and better and we're really all having a good time and
nice work scotty thank you david anyway each time i i give a little talk i brief talk
during these events i always try to quote from a poem and the poem today is from robert
frost's book the lovely shall be choosers and probably his most famous poem from
that book acquainted with the night and the way i'm going to do it i'm going to read the poem
but i will interrupt it with personal stories about my own enjoyment of the night sky even though
as you'll see the night that frost is talking about is not a clear night so far
i have been one acquainted with the night i have walked out in rain and back in rain i have out walked the
furthest city light i have looked down the saddest city lane i have
passed by the watchman on his beat and dropped my eyes unwilling to explain there are a couple of
incidents i had i've had with policemen and police officers and considering what's
going on in the united states these days it really is uh kind of appropriate
but mine have been generally a lot more pleasant in fact when i was a teenager in 1964
i i was i had my eight-inch telescope out named pegasus and all of a sudden a
police car came up and jammed on his brakes right in front of our house and i looked and i said oh my
this is not going to be pleasant and the doors opened and the two policemen got out too burly
policemen got out of the car and slammed their doors and they started walking military style down the path towards my
telescope and they got closer and closer and i was
sort of looking at them terrified by this time and then they stopped and one of them
looked at me and said excuse me sir would you mind if a couple of nosy policemen looked through your telescope
and i was so relieved we had a wonderful wonderful session it turned out i had
the telescope pointed at jupiter but jupiter was just rising over our neighbor's house
and they could have said are you looking inside your neighbor's house which would have been difficult because
my neighbor's house is like 50 feet away and jupiter is like 500
million miles away and came into perfect focus with the telescope
you could see gorgeous clouds covering the planet and the full moon zio europa ganymede
and callisto jupiter has always been my favorite planet it's my favorite planet for a
number of reasons the primary reason of course is that it's the first thing i looked at through
a telescope on september the 1st 1960 my parents and i were outside and i
looked at jupiter and i was able to see jupiter for the first time and i will never forget that
so many decades ago i have stood still and stopped the sound
defeat when far away an interrupted cry came over houses
from another street there's another little police story as i was
getting up one early one morning to observe a penumbral eclipse of the moon and it was totally cloudy where i was
but i noticed there seemed to be a break in the clouds toward the west so i got in the car with my telescope
and i drove all the way out there about maybe oh i'd say about 25 miles and i pulled
over by the side of the road and set up my telescope and right away a police car
stops now this is in the united states not in canada so i didn't know what kind of reception i'd get so i walked over
and i said good evening sir you probably think i'm nuts and he said well i hope not and i said
i'm just setting up my telescope to look at the moon would you like to take a look and the guy said i'd love to and he gets
out of the car and he looks through the telescope and i said it's a and he said it's a full moon
tonight and i said yeah it is but is the entire moon equally bright all
over from one side to the other and that was the key question and he said i don't think so no the left side is a
little bit darker and i said officer you are looking at an eclipse of the moon
and where you're not seeing the main part of the earth's shadow but you're seeing a part of it and it's
just causing some shading and he and i were really excited that we got to look at it together
and then i it was getting pretty late by now it was around 4am i put the telescope back in the car
and headed back home again came over houses from another street but
not to call me back or say goodbye but by now in the palm the sky is
cleared and further still at an unearthly height one luminary clock against the sky
proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right i have been one acquainted with the night so robert
frost i think more than almost any other poem poet knew the magic of the night whether it's
raining or whether it's clear he knew how to go outside and enjoy the night sky which is what i
hope and my goal is for all of you to just go out there and really enjoy the night sky
thank you and now back to scott oh okay thank you so much david you know um
i don't know how you do it david every star party every gathering you know exactly what to say you know
how to uh bring the spirit of uh of uh stargazing uh to a level that
you know not very many people have so you know i'm i'm really honored uh
to know you and to have you participate in the global star party every time
and um so it's it's really great but uh uh now we are going to go to
gary palmer uh my partner in crime uh for this uh this um
particular um uh event and um let me bring you to full
stage here so gary how you doing today i want to scott um thank you david for opening
this show and thanks to everybody else for coming on to the uh the show live with us this evening um
it always feels a bit of an honor in a sense when you in these rooms with all of these different people
uh from all walks of life and lots of these people i've never met but i know they've known
a long time online and it it's quite weird in a sense um
but it's a very good thing uh it brings us all together we see what other people are doing on other sides of the world what their
conditions are like or their equipment right and what their outlook so they're part
of astronomy is and that's what's really quite interesting um you know watching andreas a few weeks
back and the images he takes off of the balcony things that we probably wouldn't
necessarily think of doing in the uk um or in other parts of the world so
it's always quite an honor to sit here and look at everybody and watch what they're
about to say today in the uk we have got some clear skies so we've got a live imaging
system up and running hopefully that lasts for most of the event but really it's a case of everybody have
a good time and enjoy it and also thanks for the comments as well lots of people is really about the people who are watching
this show oh yeah and some of those comments that are coming in uh really sort of make your evening as
you're running along doing these sorts of shows right right well i think that uh
gary i think that you uh touched on a lot of really important points about
us being able to work together and uh experience astronomy together
even even um in a a climate of this pandemic
and um but you know we take it to you know astronomers amateur astronomers
especially never take it to like one level they just keep going to multiple levels so you know
if you can if you could uh talk or chat with someone uh across your country well why not all
over the world so and that's what we're doing here today and um you know you have to remember
that um you have to remember that uh astronomers
are you know they are the early adopters of the internet they are
uh the early adopters of email the early adopters of online shopping
um you know sharing data uh this kind of thing so um you know i i i can remember uh
using um uh you know unix command language to get my email
and uh who was there it was uh doctors and lawyers and scientists and astronomers
a lot of them and so it was really cool and it still is it just keeps getting better all the time so um
right now we have a you're what you're going to see during the program today is we're going to have people coming in
and leaving as the program runs on okay um
i will you you've already heard from david levy uh you've heard from gary palmer
gary what else will you be doing tonight do you have uh live images coming down now yep we we've got some live images i'm
currently on m31 which i seem to be on quite a lot at the moment but we have some equipment up and running so
it's nice easy to target nice and high at the moment so we'll have a look at some other
things and we'll probably catch up with a little bit of image processing
we've got some to run through that's sitting in the background there great okay and to my right here is jerry
hubbell jerry um uh is on with me every day uh doing broadcasting uh
with the uh alliance live program and our open go to community
he was up with me until the wee hours last night uh giving a shakedown of our
of our uh remote telescope project so what will you be sharing with us
today jerry well unfortunately i'm in virginia fredericksburg virginia
and the weather's it's raining off and on it's going to be cloudy for the next few
days so i can show the inside of the msro observatory and some
of the things i may dig up some information i've done
previously on presentations i've done to share i have to look around and see what i want to do but
generally i'm just here to enjoy everybody else's work yeah and talking in their experiences
excellent and then we got john goss john why don't you take a minute to
well i can introduce you your former president at least one term maybe two terms of the
astronomical league you have been with the astronomical league for decades
and someone has been very involved in outreach and organizing events and stuff like that
with uh you know with the league and the league is the largest federation of astronomy clubs i think in
the world um with nearly 20 000 members so they are uh growing all the time it used to be
just a usa-based organization but now they're going international
john where are you in particular and what time is it there
you're you're muted there john
still muted here let's see if we can get you unmuted here here we go ah there we go oh well
obsessed uh okay you asked a lot of questions there where am i well i'm in roanoke
virginia so that's about 6 15 620 here right right now
and as uh jerry hubbell was saying it's raining in fact i think this is the remnants of um tropical storm beta oh yeah
yeah probably so it's all beta right yeah well we'll see if we've reached gamma or not
but uh yeah it's um the weather's been horrible here basically for the past month
but anyway um i'd like to say a few words to all of you and i'm probably not going to say
anything new to you but i'd like to bring it up just for some uh personal reflection about who we are
and why we do what what we do you know we we're amateur astronomers we like looking at the sky and people
kind of look questioningly at uh sometimes when we tell them that but you know when when you look at our avocation of
what we do there is no other allocation like amateur astronomy
there are we are the people who see the universe firsthand we are the people who see
planets whose atmospheres and surfaces are nothing like our own planet we're the one who see we're the ones who
see stars uh residing in giant star cities uh no
one else sees this stuff we're the ones that see uh galaxies that lie so far away that
the light we see left before humans walk on earth now we we see all this and no
one else does you know we see the four corners of the universe for what it really is there's really no
no other group of people who can truly say this and i i i for one find that special
yes uh kind of humbling yeah awe inspiring you know you're out there under the stars
whether you have a telescope or binoculars or or just had a blanket which you're looking upwards now you start seeing
this stuff you you see all this stuff and it it affects you personally inside and it gives you
i think especially in these times which i don't want to go talk about these times but it does give you a sense of personal
satisfaction inner peace and contentment and all that but it really
affects you in a very positive way and i'll just give a slight plug for the astronaut league and i think a lot of
our members realize this and we as an organization try to bring astronomy
make it make it enjoyable for everyone uh to uh get out under the stars and see what's up there see what they think
of it um excellent that's my speech you know
we'll let you elaborate more as this as the star party goes on but next up here andreas why don't you
take a minute and reintroduce yourself this is your second uh global star party um and um
you know tell tell our audience where you are uh give them a sense of what time it is and um and what you're gonna share
here in sweden is 26 minutes past 11 and i'm from sweden stockholm
and i'm going to share some pictures from my earlier astronomy when i started the
planet recording and share some newer pictures of the latest picture and
some insight where i shoot from my bottles guys i have uh printed
out a map where exactly exactly where i live so i'm going to share that with you
and also exposure with my hyperstar system one minutes exposure and uh and a
picture of more some some stuff like that very cool very cool okay all right
and next up here is ryan hannahoe ryan are you with us
and i don't see him he may be taking a break here ryan you're coming okay all right
i've got something to drink ryan why don't you i know that uh many people have known
you uh over the decades here you know you grew up uh being very involved in
astronomy uh you were still very involved um and uh you know so i think a lot of
people uh give you know owe you a debt of gratitude for inspiring them
you know and continuing on so it's it's uh really awesome to see um you know a younger
generation doing that and um so um but uh where where are you and and uh
what time is it and and what are you gonna share tonight yeah you bet thanks so much for having me scott and everybody else
it's currently about 3 30 in the afternoon here in hella montana um it is during the day so
i'm not going to show you anything at night but i i will um go over
kind of my setup up at the lake at our observatory with the montana learning center i'll
talk about some of the equipment that i use and then also go over some processing depending how many
how much time we have and uh like i have the elephant trunk behind me um that's kind of the example data set
that i kind of want to go through and how to process moonshot color images very cool very cool okay and then next
up here is uh thanks thanks ryan uh next up is steve collingwood
steve is from pulsar observatories but he has a long history in our industry and uh
he has a passion for historical instruments so steve why don't you let people know
where you are what time it is and uh tell us a little bit about yourself too all right evening so i'm
i don't know what time it is at the minute it is half past 10 in the uk on the other side of the uk from gary
and um it's currently i'm getting his bad weather as it comes across great we were hoping
to be live imaging from the observatory um but yeah as scott said my background is in um
telescope engineering and in particular the restoration and historical telescopes i i own a company
called broadhurst clarkson and fuller which is the oldest one of the oldest telescope companies in
the world um they were manufacturing traditional brass telescopes from the 1750s
wow and we painted the draw tube method of brass tubes we we actually designed the modern
microscope and various various other bizarre little
um nuggets like that and um been rather lucky to have worked in the
industry for however long it's been um it's been a while
i think on and off i must have known you for 20 years scott oh sure on the phone
but yeah but it's funny and i i don't know how much i'll share i might drop up later but you know
picking up on what uh john was saying a bit earlier um it's really easy to get really
focused on equipment on these sorts of things and we're going to talk about telescopes and remote
imaging and cameras and pixel depths and all sorts and whilst that's our day-to-day
background that's what we do for for a living some of us um
i must admit i'm a bit of a luddite in that respect i love the night i like the moon i like looking
at the moon through an eyepiece and a telescope there's nothing there's nothing that compares to that
for me and you can have all the equipment you like give me a hundred year old bit of brass
with glass at each end and the moon and it's just a wonderfully tactile
and it it really does put into its perspective much like john was suggesting you know
it sort of puts your place it gives you a sense of perspective of your place in the universe
it's a wonderful reset and um that could be said with any target
really you know double stars of planets but i think the moon holds a special place and if anyone ever says they're
bored of the moon they're not an amateur astronomer no yeah i could i could go
on that's right about the moon but i won't we'll have to talk to steve stark's team because that's my favorite object also good man
a favorite for many of us here well i had a lucky start in it i was trained
but my passion for the moon started the day i got a telescope but later on i became good friends with sir
patrick moore who showed me how to use appreciate the moon properly
yeah and uh yeah i i'm very passionate about the moon very cool thanks steve all right and now
up next is mike simmons mike simmons uh uh has done many amazing
uh things especially when it comes to connecting people in different countries and bring them
all under one vision one mission and that that for him he summed up uh in two words which was
uh one sky and uh uh you know i've known mike for a very long
time uh uh involved with him uh in events and um uh
you know in sitting on the board of his organization astronomers without borders
which you know he was executive director for a very long time uh but one of the really hallmark things
that he did and kind of a theme uh for for this program is the
uh this is really the father of the global star party right here mike simmons he he organized a hundred hours of
astronomy and uh got a million people to look through a telescope over that hundred hours for the
international year of astronomy and so mike why don't you
give a little bit deeper introduction of yourself and where you
are and what you're going to share with us tonight well thank you scott yeah we've known
each other for a long time i guess long enough that we don't want to give her away our age by saying how long it's
been it's been a long time and it's always a delight to do things with you scott
because scott is one of the most beloved people in the astronomy industry
for sure and always has been um so yeah anything that scott does it's
just a matter of telling me where to show up and what to do and i'll do it um i like the comments from everybody
that we've had so far because something like this
really isn't about us as as somebody said and i'm gonna i'm not gonna name names because i can't remember who said
what but uh it's about people are watching it's about people looking through telescopes and i've been organizing
uh events and organizations for 45 years or so and
just a way of amplifying what a pleasure it is to share the universe with other people
um i'm in southern california no i'm sorry i'm on the international space station and uh but i wave when i fly over
southern california where i live out in the santa monica mountains where i can actually see the milky way on good
nights which is a pleasure because i'm not that far from from the city in between light domes and
yeah i'm going to share something about the first global star party for real
and this is kind of sacrilege because scott roberts said well this is the first real
global star party and i had to say wait a minute
not really right not really hear that but uh
yeah the uh global star party during uh the international year of astronomy
that um i led that effort in 100 hours of astronomy and i i want to share some of
that uh it's a lot easier now it was tough then but it shows the passion it shows the
interest it shows the connection that's really what to me astronomy is all about i started looking
at started out looking at the moon and still love it and i will be tonight with a seven-year-old and
but that really has become what what my passion has been
great great thank you thank you very much mike very nice okay so up next is uh
simon tang and simon is representing himself with a live view of the sun that
he's got going on here and so um he uh he was on with us
at least once before maybe twice twice yeah okay so it's very cool and he is um
uh you know he's got a great rig for doing solar observation um uh tell us a little bit more about
yourself simon and what you're going to share you've already started sharing so that's cool
yeah um so for those of you who don't know who i am i've only been doing astronomy for about four years
um i initially just got started into just regular deep sky stuff and then what kind of happened was is there was
the um something called an eclipse that happened here in the us
and my big thing was i didn't want to just see the eclipse i wanted to have a unique perspective on it so what i ended up
doing was i went somewhere which was exactly the halfway between point between um los angeles and san
francisco place called kettleman city and i shot the um the um
the eclipse but the unique part was it was also a transit with the iss
uh submitted that into uh nasa's eight pod and i actually won for that particular time so
i actually got an apod for that and that's kind of what spurred me into doing solar more frequently so most of my stuff
now even though i still do a lot of night sky stuff is all pretty much solar driven i own several
scopes for doing this but nothing specifically dedicated if that makes sense the headline is
but not the actual scope i've had previous scopes like that before
yes so um obviously i have a live view of the sun right now um the temperature out here is kind of
climbing quite drastically so i may have to stop this depending on how hot this all gets because
it's obviously too hot and everything will shut off yeah yeah it's not good for the
equipment to get too hot that's for sure okay all right so uh thanks simon um
i'm gonna come back to gary and uh gary um why don't we have you
take some time to share what you've got right now and
and and i'll let you help me co co-host this
by picking the next person okay yes so uh quickly i just wanted to mention that as
we were talking about the moon it is uh international observe the moon night tomorrow night
so uh that is an international event you can look up online uh details of different
um societies and groups that might be doing things online
but it's certainly worth a look at and if not then it's clear outside so let's go out and just have a look
yeah it's all good fun um just quickly i will share
what we've got coming in live at the moment so hopefully that will share over
hopefully everyone can see that um we've got andromeda coming in at the
moment i'll just shrink back a little bit on that and that's coming in life we're imaging
that now so as well as imaging it live we're sort of testing the equipment um
so the next person we go to is it's going to be he's going to be up later than everybody else i think will probably be
andreas yeah because uh i know when we were talking we were discussing the
the hours and the differences of the time zones and um when andreas thought that it might be
the american times it was like no that's going to be really too late for me so i'm really glad andres can join us on
this show so i'll pass you straight over to him okay sounds good all right so let's uh
let me find andreas well it's great to be back on the show
and yeah i can't resist an invitation from gary palmer so it's a pleasure to be on the show
again and tonight i'm going to show some previous picture from
my early photography timeline and some picture of my
bright sky in the summer and some new pictures of uh i took last week of
mars on pleiades i'm going to share a little timeline from my early photography when i'm started
about uh two years ago with
astrophotography so i'm going to
there we go great so hope i'll share the correct screen this
time takes practice this is my portal zone
this is stockholm there's uh there where i live so it's uh very happy wordpress zone
here in stockholm it's eight or nine i don't know if this uh is very challenging to get
real good data but i have i tried to figure out what the
diminishing return is how much integration i need to shoot
to get decent data i started my first
planet photography i did i did on i shot jupiter it was
middle of 2018 i saw a video of dillon o'donnell who filmed the planet
and i followed his instruction on well jupiter it became
and then i started the bottom explorer scientific and in the late couple of months later
i took that explore scientific and piggy back it on my uh next door sc it was an alt-s
mount so i took my first baby steps in astrophotography this is
my first stacked uh picture of ryan this is 2.5 minutes so
this is my starting my baby steps in astronomy and uh then i moved on to get uh more
uh more equipment as it goes uh i progressed and got unhealthy got done
uh real astronomy mountain avx mount and then story zone
yeah they wonder if i can share with how i shoot my pictures and i told them
i'm shooting from a balcony and they didn't i didn't believe that so i took a
picture here is my balcony let's shoot from so this is my main issue from the south
so i have so this is uh so i have uh from the 15 degrees up to
about 55 degrees so i have a limited time every
every night i shoot so i have two to three uh clear nights every month so it's a
really challenge yeah when it's um
somewhere to get very bright we got all this mlc clouds and i can share this
is how bright is became in the in the summer with mlc clouds
this is the middle of the night this is very bright and this is also it's becoming very
bright with uh with this lsc clouds it was very much in this summer
so i think it was because of the weather
and uh and uh i figured out how much
time on it so uh last summer i bought uh new solarstone scope
with uh hyperstarships and from starzona and i figure out i need a very fast scope with uh to
collect as much data as fast as possible due to my location i have figured that out so
this is one minute from from my location from portal 8 9 skies
so that is so you can see a lot of data from
it's coming through so it's working really well for me and
last week i shot the players this is three hours of integration
so we get a lot of detail but all the faint detail out of the play this you don't get because
of the light pollution and when you process it it all disappears it's sad but
that's reality i can do astronomy as well and uh also last week i shot
mars with some blue clouds and some polarized caps this is my best
yet from next my cellstone hd with two-inch powermate from
teleview and this is shot by uh 174 mm with a filter wheel and i have uh
integrated i have aligned the
oh all the charms in uh photocopy and then processed and in
lightroom so this is uh some picture i haven't shared
and um hopefully i'm going back to uh also showed in my native mode
this 14 14 22 millimeters with my uh cellular mount
so this is my first triangle it was you know one year ago so this was pretty succe
m13 hercules cluster so this is uh some picture i wanted to
share with you guys too tonight that's awesome that's awesome it's
inspiring to because i mean you're the challenges that you have uh are you know most people would
definitely say that uh you know this is not a place to
do astronomy and um um you know this is uh and and maybe a lot of people would just
give up and say i love the stars but i can't do astronomy here you know i just have that much sky and it's light
polluted like crazy and i only get two or three clear nights a month okay so a lot of people wouldn't
do it you know but i i really loved astronomers so i figured out
i have to buy the best equipment i could get um then i have to figure out the maximum integration time with my
skies um and then i figure out what equipment with the
uh the perfect filter would work for me so i i correct filter with the correct camera
and uh will optimize your your sky time and the new uh
2600 pros set of camera they they talk they
that you can shoot only for only 20 seconds to get the noise free image but i like it
i like push the limit so i always see dino donald from uh
australia always push the limit with his equipment so i am a little like that and all i also
love what shock is vader's and he also pushes the limit with his stuff so it's
really inspiring to learn from other people and what they're doing and to incorporate that
yes i don't have any uh oh when i can put my scope in the north
balcony and then i can see polaris but in the south i have to learn a drift alignment i know
i have to learn everything to uh got so i can really polar alignment but it
was a little challenge from the beginning but i have to break up astronomy on many parts and
learn it step by step and that was my approach to it so you can't learn
everything yeah directly as you have to break it apart yes take small steps that's right that
has been my oh i think this has been uh
the success i think for myself to do astronomy in this poor weather and cloudy
conditions because also the light pollutions
interferes with my guiding if i if i um if you look at all my pictures
i have poor guiding and everything so if i so if i had uh
oh if i'll not keep that that wouldn't be in the picture so oh so i i always like uh
uh astra backyard said the one told me that the picture should uh
tell the picture the story and not if you don't to get pinpoint storage
that doesn't matter if i i have to try to do my best so it's
getting better and better but light pollution is one problem and uh and there's a wobbly sky here in this
like uk skies they're very wobbly and very unpredictable yes do you find air
pollution causes you a problem in the city yeah light pollution is one problem it's
effects guiding i i lose
guide scope closes the store sometimes and my old all the x rig that's became
where if it loses story it did own stuff and i have to
replace it with a cdx and now when i lose a store the
rig tracks on its own so it's better options for me here in sweden and
it stays on target so that was also a game changer to have a real astronomic rig when i shoot
the other thing i was quite interested in with your images is the not losing clouds because you're further north so you look
like you're a lot closer to those clouds than what we see them in the uk we see them quite distant on the horizon
um in the middle of the summer but you look like you're quite close a lot of detail within those yeah i
am in sweden is 1959's parallel so i think is uh if you go
very to the northern uh uk or as high as you came then you'll
be at the same level as swede stockholm i think
this is uh oh when you got opera in the summer then you can experience
cold mid summer sun and then sun never sets and that's a funny thing happens when
you go up north in the summer but in the mid-summer it's
just sets over uh over the horizon and it became very bright and you can't
see in the stars for a couple of months yeah we get it where it's uh it does set
here but the sky has still got a slight bit of blue in it so it's not as dark as um
as normal winter time so you still get the problem of that june julyish area where there
is no real dark proper dark sky well that's the explore scientific
comments that i bought uh the solar equipment so i can do uh
some summer astronomers i can always do astronomy but because i love
it so i have to learn how to uh use the equipment with
the sun i saw a shark video he did with his pro his experience scientific again i copy that
and it's worked out pretty well because it's yeah it's a learning step
both processing and capturing and uh in the summer the scopes get topped and
equipments get hot and it shuts down but um that's how it is
yeah it also gets dusty a lot of people don't think about that when we do solar imaging that your
equipment's out in the daytime then when it's really really dusty you bring a lot of the equipment
in and it really is covered you have to give it a proper clean off um and be very careful sort of opening
cameras up and putting another camera on as to how much dust you get into the system yeah
i shoot with a reducer and i use higher cut filters so i i have to protect my equipment as
much as possible and uh in the future i probably will have an energy reduction
filter because in the summer my tubes got 48 degrees and
my equipment shut down from time to time so i think it's on the oh
it's on the oh it's very hot for the semester
on the all of the cameras to tell us the actual temperature of the the sensor and before we never really
used to paint the interest of it we just used to put the camera on an image away with it and now you look at your camera and it's
running at 38 degrees um and you're thinking like really that needs cooling
you know it needs a shade in front of it to cut the heat down on it so
there are things there that you don't really think about the technologies brought along and suddenly bring into your mind now
okay okay so um who uh who should be up next here gary i
think steve because steve's probably the next one in line for going to bed time-wise right
here we go you're muted there steve it's well parked my bedtime mate
um i am actually theoretically live or was live a minute ago on m13
um i'm just gonna try and get it back up because it's there's a lot of cloud
blowing in at the minute and uh i'm having to do a bit of messing around but
that's the way it is when you go to present something something's got to go wrong well the thing is jerry i start from the
point of it's not going to work and then um it can only get better can't
it that's right well what good that's a great attitude that's a great question let's just well you know i've
worked for me of a long time so um let's have a quick look at this and
then if it looks like it's gonna work then i'll share the screen if not oh okay so i click on there
if i i will i'll attempt to share the screen you have to remember that the internet
in the uk is basically a piece of string and two cups okay
um so it might all crash but let's have a let's have a go
um looks good steve ah here we go there you
go there you go so i it literally has only just fired up but this is actually the first time i've ever used
my gear remotely why because i thought to show how easy
it is yeah i would do it live on the internet right
so here we are in the world that's right yeah so i mean i've got a lot of high
cloud blown through um let's just increase that exposure a little bit just in the hope we get a little bit more
recognizable just preview it i'm not actually imaging but um
second exposure steve i'm glad that that particular one was 10 seconds
okay i'm just pushing it up to 30 just in the hope of bringing something
recognizable because you know um there's all sorts of compression going on
but to be honest i i i there's that there's a lesson here i
think for me as much as anything else where you you have these ideas of
operating things remotely and you know being all technical it's really
easy to overthink it and overcomplicate it and i admittedly i'm using nebulosity as
my imaging platform but as far as control goes you can do it with freeware software yes
i like freeware software you shouldn't really have to buy an expensive piece of equipment and
then have to um spend hundreds of pounds or dollars or whatever on software to get the best out of it so um
at the minute i'm running nebulosity which is a cheap program but then i can also
bring up gotta see that that is that's basically the pulsar control
for your dome this is for the dome um i don't think i can make it much bigger without freaking everything out but
it really is to keep it as easy as possible so i can the red x is to stop all operations
okay home sends it to the home position park is pretty much the same thing you
have home and park much like on scope i can nudge the dome left and right
i can change the sidereal tracking rate and i can close the shutter
it tells me down here the shutter's open and i've got a green battery which says all is good
we should be fine if i have a power interruption to the observatory it will automatically shut
the lid and override everything and again if i tell it to go home it
will switch off the tracking automatically and do all that and also if i come out
of that and open up both hub which others will be far more familiar
with than me probably because i don't use it very often but um we can connect
with dome and scope if i go to
uh where is it it'll set up that will show the parameters so if
you've done any remote imaging before you'll be familiar with needing to know your scope position east west
north south jerry will always certainly be very familiar with this operating a dome
remotely um and i've learned that the gem axis offset is the magic number
oh yes that's a that's a key thing yeah that's exactly right um and again there's spreadsheets
available that do it all for you it's brilliant in it oh yeah you got to get that right otherwise it won't your slip will not
will be in the way you'll have diffraction spikes along the edge of the slit and all that stuff
yeah um and there's a little bit of uh playing around i've moved over to an off-axis guider to make life a little
easier which actually works really well um i have to say
the scope i'm using the don't believe the quality of the image i'm using an fsq106 i just have a habit
of making it look terrible so it's i always say that i always say
that you can you can have the most expensive equipment in the world and still make crappy images
i've made a career of it jerry um i'm quite well known for it over here
actually because imaging is not really my thing but yeah
it just shows it can be done relatively easily i'm using freeware to do it and yeah i'm imaging right now
technically what you should do there steve is you see right up the top where it says auto on the nebulosity volts
yeah yes if you uncheck that yeah i know i to be honest it's i
haven't touched it yet because just drag it across a little bit yeah there you go
there you go and of course the images will be in black and white it's a single shot color camera um but of course you have to extract the
color data later on in processing unless you use starlight live because i
use a starlight express camera um but it's just it's just magic really you can see the makings of the
propeller there though yeah um and considering it's blowing a gale
outside it it really is windy outside um i'm i'm having no buffeting issues
um that's the beauty of the dome the guiding is relatively stable yeah
look at that um because i'm out of the wind
so it's it can be done you can do it it looks like you've got the focus
pretty good i mean you nailed the focus um that's a big part of getting quality images also that people don't understand
when they first get into it the how important a focuser is a precision focuser
uh is mandatory i think you know it's funny you say that because
for most of my working life i've been collimating refractors and collimating schmitz and aligning
triplet lenses and things and um i got a ccd camera lent to me and
couldn't focus it the amount of images i took that just weren't quite
i thought they were in focus until i processed the pictures afterwards and they were never and it just seems
that with modern cameras and decent telescopes when you when you're spot on the whole field illuminates
it brings the whole picture to life you can be nearly focused and have a reasonable image
but if you're spot on everything just lights up and um yeah it's i
i must i don't know about anyone else but i enjoy the chase as much as the result
yeah my mind's the actual connecting the equipment together and getting the images the processing's irrelevant even though
i do it it's actually getting all of the different equipment working and talking together and then
getting the images come down um exactly what i'm doing tonight looking at the screen there and i'm
going that's pretty good considering that was all chucked up out of a box late this afternoon that that's going pretty well so you've
achieved that i think you need speaking personally i
suppose you need a you need a focus no pun intended you need a focus for this sort of hobby
so you know you need you need to know what you're taking images for to a point are you taking images for
your own enjoyment purely and the chase of getting everything to work and getting the data and round stars
are you taking them to put them on the internet and make yourself look good and impress other people or you know i
must admit what's done it for me especially with solar imaging is my village that i live in has a little
facebook group and i i post my astro pictures on there
to people that don't do astronomy and it's i've it's given me a new lease
of life yeah and isn't it strange you post a picture of the moon on the internet
and the amount of people that go wow i've never seen that before and they walk past it you know they it's
they're under it but they don't look up you see a photograph of a tree and you think
that's a fantastic looking tree you don't actually notice the ones in your backyard
in the same way so these pictures uh are really good at diverting attention to bigger things i suppose
and a little bit of a respite from the crap that's going on in the world at the minute it's a little bit of escapism as well
um and it just reminds you that yes there's stuff to look at that will just blow your mind and it
it's more accessible to everybody than ever before very true that's the thing isn't it you
go back 100 years and astronomy was the preserve of the upper class
yeah a very elitist situation i must admit though there is something
about that that i not that i think you should be elitist but
we're really lucky to be able to own a telescope yeah and it doesn't matter if it's a
three-inch reflector or a takahashi or whatever it's easy to
forget how lucky we are to be able to do this yes
we get caught up in the equipment i mean we all work in it i work in it gary works in it you work in it
and you don't need all this stuff to enjoy astronomy no no some of the some of the most basic
equipment is more fun sometimes it's actually it's quite nice and i think when you do
imaging especially you end up targeting one or two or three
objects over at night depending on what you're particularly doing but you're missing
99.9 of what's going on and when you do put an eyepiece in you
forget about the imaging and you just go wandering off around the night sky looking at what's there but generally
you're missing all of that all the time yeah so we put a camera in and forget what is actually
out there and what's going on and the joys of hunting things down you know going after
it the target yeah i still think that as a new user and i can still remember back
to that picking the target and actually finding it in the eyepiece it might take me an hour to get it in
the eyepiece but once you've actually got it there and you're looking through the telescope at that target as a new person there's no real feeling
like that i i distinctly remember the first time i
looked through through a telescope at the moon was a three inch reflector on a little yoke mount that i bought
this sounds like i was a kid i was 20 when i bought my first telescope i had binoculars before that
and i had other things going on in life shall we say and i found that i found the moon
and i can i took a picture with my little digital camera of the moon with one of the first
digital cameras that you could buy i worked in a camera dealer we had them and
comparing that to a picture i took to a moon map and actually saying oh actually that's
that crater and it became real rather than a pretty picture and then
took me three weeks to find saturn i knew where it was but i wasn't used to the postage stamp
size field of view because you go thinking through and then
to act the magic of finding it you know i i was i was so excited and
that that sort of set me off on a path to you know be in it more but i think it is one of those things that's
a little bit lost now because with the advent of go-to telescopes and
the internet and the information that's there there isn't an object that you can't find some information about about or
where it is and its location so it does take a little bit of the challenge out of the hump
for that object as all of a sudden you know it might take you a couple of evenings to locate something when you're first getting into
this and you know just understanding you know maybe 20 of the brightest stars
in the sky certainly in the city area that might only be you know six or seven of the brightest stars
but a lot of that i think's lost now um and as we're pushing along you know this
mount that i've got up and running at the moment he's got a camera in there for polar guiding the camera in there for
i'm sorry for a polar alignment the camera in there for guiding and you're thinking like really the next
thing it's going to do is put the kettle on well we've had telescopes near that
before but we won't go into that but the the thing is it's also another
important factor in all this that's tied in with it which is people will assume that i can't do
astronomy from where i am i've got light pollution i've got street lights i've got you know and i thought when i got into
telescopes i lived above canterbury cathedral
which was floodlit and below canterbury university which was floodlit and i had a
streetlight at the end of my drive and that didn't i just went out and
the amount of things i saw didn't dampen my enthusiasm at all
i saw occultation to the moon with saturn i saw orion i saw the ring nebula you can do
it yeah it's easy to to miss the fact you know don't think you can't see this stuff
i mean when i moved to a darker site i walked out in the garden to see where to put my observatory because that was one
of the things to do and i thought oh no it's clouding over it was actually the milky way but i'd
never seen it that's very cool it doesn't do anything
to to harm your enthusiasm does it right
a lot of the problem is is um some of the information like that is old
school it comes from older books it comes from um you know what went on 20 30 years ago
but you know it's what we've been saying the equipment now it is um and what we've got available at
costs yeah um it's um phenomenal really because
it's allowing us to do a lot of this you know from like losing cities from really
like andreas off the balconies and things like that anything's possible it's just um
thinking outside the box a little bit and not necessarily taking all of the information on that you read everywhere um because
there's a lot of people that are put off by that i live in a city i can't do astronomy you can
yeah i mean i used to live on the edge of london um and then spent years doing it there
um and that was probably bought away or something um where i was so it's just a matter of
finding different filters or different other things that suit you yeah um and
there's a books are actually quite good for this sort of thing gentlemen john goss has to leave in
about 10 minutes so he has uh he has some door prize questions he needs to ask
and um uh we will um and then we're after he asks those
questions we're going to take a 10 minute break and come back so let's uh
let's have you john
go ahead and you've got the stage there and you're
muted i think
right there you go
okay okay well can you all see this yes and let me describe to the audience
how they participate in this the astronomical league is our sponsor for door prizes
um they develop the questions for the door prizes
the answers are sent by email not in chat okay you don't want to
answer them in chat you want to send your your ques your answers to these questions
to kent at explorescientific.com
and i'm putting that in the chat there and uh the way that it works is the first
person to answer the question correctly is the winner the the door prizes we have
three questions um typically and uh um then you know the league
executives then verify the winners and send
announcements out to the winners themselves and later we get information
back of who won it we send out the prizes for them and um and then we announce these uh
winners on to the show so uh so go ahead john okay well our first question
it's uh it seems like it's a trick question but it's not really and it is something that i i heard a few
years ago and a lot of people couldn't really answer it but it's a there's an obvious answer
um so consider that what well-known star has likely never been observed through a
telescope when it was at the zenith and i don't mean that the telescope's at the zenith
i mean the star is at the cena thank you all right all ready
you got that good question all right right okay okay let's go
and get to question number two number two um what is the smallest body of the
solar system that can be viewed by the unaided eye
now i don't want to get into meteors because that's something entirely different but what body of the solar system
can be viewed by the unaided eye the smallest body yeah you know that one
not being able to see things well if you're in a dark area there are a lot of things that that you can pick out if you know exactly where to look and um
this is one of them so again okay i know the answer to that it's it's
the answer is actually scott roberts that's a body you can see with the united eye
now play nicely here [Laughter] not that small it was in seventh
eighth grade ninth grade tenth grade even i was a little guy okay and the final question is for you
people who know something about the astronomical league we have um uh i think right now
close to 70 different observing programs our first observing program was the messier
uh in what year did it was the first astronomical league messier observing programs
awarded wow okay it's been a while a few years ago we had a significant
anniversary of this um i guess that's all i can say otherwise i'd end up giving it away
you're gonna give it away but uh i was in seventh grade so that's that's
how long it's been so just go ahead and as scott said uh send the uh
your answers in and um astronomically officers will be looking at this and i appreciate you thinking about this
i think my favorite question is number one is what star uh has never been viewed
at the zenith and there are more than one star but stars but there's a well-known
significant star that has never been viewed at the zenith huh
okay okay great all right um so at this point uh
we are going to uh we're going to take a 10 minute break okay we've been on for a couple hours
already and um uh we will uh come back
and um and we'll look at more live images and hear from
more astronomers and i think we have more people checking in soon so um thanks very much and um
let me see i will add a pin there we go make sure i'm doing this all
correctly here and we'll be back in 10.
what
it's still still streaming out
uh
oh
that you heavy breathing in the background scott yes it's me heavy breathing
because i huffed and puffed all the way back in here you can't be
that old come on yeah yeah yeah so pravera hycini has
joined us that's great hi everyone hi
we're just taking a few minutes break here so this is a good time for you to uh to
check in you watching the program to know when to
log in or uh actually no uh but i had a meeting with my
university and i couldn't join in time because i was talking to gary and i just finished that
and i just decided to join now it's perfect timing it really is because we went to a break
and here you are things here you are
am i the only crazy person sitting outside frying in the heat yes yes yes you are
you need like one of those little uh cooler fans you know that you hang around your neck and it
blows uh misty water you know up around your face and i thought about that and
then i realized that you're just gonna get this constant you know whirring sound i mean the guy with the leaf blow in the
background doesn't help well they have those you've seen like those uh desert hats like those sahara
uh or uh you know whatever kind of the hats you would see um guys going on um
well they've got these things that come out like antlers with fans attached to them yeah yeah it or the thing that holds two beer
cans you know and then you can drink ice cold beer but yeah that's been baking in the sun that's a great idea
you know what i thought of a new use for it scott what we could do is when we're doing observing we can have one of those hats and then we can have
the uh the 90 degree eyepieces 12 and 17 in either side okay filled with beer or argon gas
yeah exactly okay don't don't drift away from having the beer you need to have the beer if you're
observing it's not entertaining any loss of beer here people
oh yeah you're welcome to pop out of reassignment it's pushing down to one
degree mm-hmm mate i think i would rather deal with one degree than
what is it right now 30 33 is it really those sort of temperatures
are mythical in the uk i don't even think my target that's hot
richard gray says it so it's going to be that kind of party
that's right no it's always that kind of party
actually when you're at show and you've got um the airstream pulled up and you're cooler on the side and you start mixing
cocktails i know what you like scott i don't do that but i know people who do
stories gary and i could tell oh yes yeah yeah there is a party
in many star parties that's true so it's a lot of fun that's a lot of yeah
it's a lot of hard work as well when you've actually got to get out from work the next day because a lot of people forget that they're
there for the style party and the enjoyment and quite often where they're working in some capacity so uh yeah when it pushes
three or four o'clock in the morning um i can still remember pictures of me
when we did the sober attempt and yes i i i looked like i've been
dragged through a hedge but we'd actually got to sleep at about past four in the morning
there was a fair bit of drinking going on as well yeah
bring us back here i'm gonna keep myself muted for now because um this guy is driving me nuts with a leaf blower
oh yeah what has he got going on back there uh well either he's cutting down a tree or the tree's trying to cut him
down one or the two [Music] okay all right i'm rooting for the tree
you're rooting for the tree okay gary so who's not who's up next here um i was actually gonna say that we
would wander over to simon and have a look at the sun because if the scene varies a bit then it'd be
quite nice to have a look around and see what's happening today okay let's do that all right so
uh i guess we are gonna have to can you guys hear this guy with leaf blower [Music]
yeah i guarantee you he'll stop when you guys cycle rounds do you want to cycle around to somebody else
um yeah i don't mind um whoever really um i'm here for
the whole event so there's no rush to me mike simmons here he's been waiting
patiently oh yeah yeah i've been listening to everybody this is fun you know
and it's hard for me not i don't know if i should just jump in in the middle of everything or not but i
as you know scott i always have things to say and lots of comments you know so but some of the things uh steve was
talking about in gary as well you know my daughter grew up around telescopes from
little from little binoculars to two and a half meters and he's looked through a lot of
telescopes and when she grew up and she learned her friends had never looked through a telescope she was
shocked she didn't realize that was normal in fact very few people
ever have john dobson you know he said well the first time he looked at through a
telescope he said well everybody's got to see this and you know where that went but he told me once you know if we had a
a million telescopes we get everybody in the world look through a telescope and it makes a
big difference instead of meeting talking about this with somebody earlier yeah
you know it's the astronomy is not just about the gear or the photography or just looking or
whatever everybody has a different way of doing it and astronomers without borders we had an astro arts program um
that's the way a lot of people see it but in the end astronomy is really about
discovery it's about exploring and public outreach is a way to share that and i'm going to
show some things there but you know i i'm with steve you know i've always just loved to put my eye to the glass
and i've had a chance to look through telescopes up to five meters you know and
that would seem that it would make me really jaded but you know i've i've looked through
people's like 80 millimeter refractors at jupiter and it's just a marvel every
time it just doesn't make any difference anymore it's like taking a trip there yeah yeah stephen even i are on the the
same page as far as that goes so i want to in fact you know what i'll
i'll show this but uh there's a there's a short movie that everybody's i won't show the movie but
everybody needs to see it it's called a new view of the moon and yeah it's amazing it is the only
thing i've ever seen in 50 years of amateur astronomy that gives any idea what it's like to share that view with
people for the first time and that's why we do it because you get to relive seeing these things for the first time
so in fact you know with all those things i've looked through the most exciting observation i think i have ever made
with naked eye we see an m31 for the first time my own eyes without binoculars
knowing that it was i don't know what the latest number is one and a half million light years away whatever it doesn't matter it's like
it's long it's a long ways away and the fact that i could see that and
that my neighborhood had expanded to that size
it's like galileo looking at jupiter's moons for the first time or something it's just an astonishing thing
so uh and then then i want to comment like gary uh
talked about star hopping finding things yourself and steve too well i'll tell you steve you know my first telescope i spent 45 minutes
trying to get the moon in it it seems like it shouldn't be that hard but it didn't occur to me
the finder couldn't just be plopped in there it had to be aligned with the main telescope which i discovered as soon as i finally
wandered on you know started seeing a whole bunch of light in the eyepiece and realized well that's where it is something's wrong
and fixed it another exciting discovery was i was observing with my four and a half inch
tasco reflector in the early 1970s and and i picked it up and went into the
house about 3am and walked past the kitchen window and looked out towards the east and saw a
real bright object what the heck is that so i went out set
it up again and discovered jupiter i mean that's what it was like
and its moon so the i mean it's just such an exciting thing so i want to share with you guys
astronomy around the world and as i said earlier the first global star party
i'm going to share am i allowed to share here i can share yeah okay so let me
uh start this okay here we go so i'm going to share my
screen here and i'm going to go real quickly through some of these introductory things the
international year of astronomy i think most people will probably remember that you guys have been around a while and
uh let me set this up there we go okay and so we this is our task group
for the hundred hours of astronomy cornerstone project this was set up by other people it's supposed to be four days and i was
asked to to take it over in 2008. we are um mike we're seeing email you're seeing
email that's the wrong thing yeah man oh you're going to see all my secret communications that's right
so you go to share screen you're given options to what to focus on there you go you know that yeah i'm
sorry about that well you would have seen something there about astronomy education in iran i mean
you know this is most of my stuff is is out there so uh and we have people around the world
but it was a small group and we were tasked with filling this time and i'll just go real
quickly some of the things that were done well we had 2 300 register events i know there was way more than this
because this became the main thing that countries around the world were taking part in because of all the cornerstone projects it was
the only one that involved looking through a telescope i
don't ask me why but so everybody said oh we can do this we got amateur astronomers there had to be at least 10 000 events
but the countries were registering themselves so we couldn't capture them all but you can see oh one of my
favorite ones is right here you see the one here uh you can see my cursor right yeah yeah
number one that was in an island that has something like six permanent residents it's a research station and
nobody else lives there nobody else would live there i wouldn't live there it's in the middle of the south atlantic
it's just i i don't even think there are penguins there and they took part it was very cool so
there was somebody there had a telescope and he made the other people look through it and that they had a star party um
well now remember this is 2009 so this is in the dark ages of the internet
so internet usage is a big deal in fact it cost a lot of money we had to set up
our own service and everything uh you know now you could just
do this with a wix website or something it's no big deal but you know we had a hundred thousand
unique visitors on one day but it wasn't all about what was happening there the um the one thing that i didn't do
was done by douglas pierce price at eso he did eso did around the world in 80
telescopes um it was 80 observatories around the world they had a 24 hour
live stream which had to be done on ustream and somebody had to pay like tens of thousands of dollars for
the bandwidth oh my goodness there's no youtube you know i mean and now it's free but it was a
big deal then and it was fantastic and they had uh their center here at eso and they had
observatories around the world there's somebody speaking from subaru i mean this is like you know you do this
every day scott but there's something like this back then yeah i know it was expensive it was
yeah it was a really big deal it's fantastic now when did this happen when did the 80 hour or the 80 telescope
it was one of the four days you know originally it was going to be 24 hours of astronomy and they expanded
it into 100 hours of astronomy and the people who were came up with the ideas and i
i remember at least one of them's a good friend but they just never made it happen so
um this was one of those days and i don't remember what the schedule was i know that saturday
was reserved saturday night was the global star party sunday was sun day and i'll show you a
pic from that too uh there was remote observing now this is 2009
not like you guys are doing now but there were companies you know and they contacted us and said well this is
big how can we do this i said give away time they gave away time to people to do remote observing themselves
wow more than 10 years ago so it was it was a thing here is sunday and
so this this is one of my favorite pictures because it shows why we do this yeah
and it doesn't make any difference where this boy is he happens to be in romania but it doesn't matter because this is
what happens this is why we do it um and then there was the global star
party so that global star party went around the world as the as
darkness spread and it was 24 hours it started off over new
zealand i guess and then ended up in vanuatu or something like
that you know so the places in the pacific were on different different ends of it i don't remember which this
this southeast asia i don't remember exactly where it was my memory is a little hazy from that far back this is pakistan
um which is very active by the way i can mention some of these no number of people active in pakistan
this is new zealand i like it free telescope viewing yep that's what it was all about
and uh this is austria this was the biggest telescope i know of
that was out there for viewing this happens okay here is somebody uh
for whom the gear means a lot just look at that ladder there yeah how many people would go up that
thing ridiculous yeah and
uh this is in northern iraq and that telescope actually i took there um this is kurdistan or bill the capital
of that area i'd been to uh baghdad before a little before
the invasion happened and i and i visited here a few years later and i took that telescope they had a
budget they had money they there's no way for them to uh get a telescope no credit cards
if you manage to order something and they send it to you it's stolen mail somewhere along the way or customs
would make you pay thousands of dollars that they pocket you know it's just right it's not
so the isolation is way more than people realize it's the difficulty of making things happen so
i this was um john hoot who a number of people here know and
have worked with i'm sure offered his lx 200 8-inch
they didn't expect to get anything as big as this but for their measly budget it was probably half what it was worth
and john being a media engineer had fixed it up so this could have been the best 8-inch lx 200 in the world maybe
and i took it along along with binoculars and cameras and just all kinds of stuff
um three giant boxes that miraculously showed up on uh
in the same place i did um now this was an event they called 100
telescopes for 100 hours it could only be one place it's in china uh
it was unusual at the time for china to be taking part in international things but everybody
wanted in on this this is baghdad at a time when i would
not i knew people who went back there then i wouldn't go they had a gathering this is during the worst part of it 2009.
i actually did a story i met a new york times photographer in kurdistan who flew up to visit the
national observatory there was a war victim there to do an article ended up in scientific america
and uh he said you know every morning he was he was a new york times photographer every morning you wake up and there are
bodies in the street and um crowds were targets and they said we're doing this
i don't care and so they had 500 people out there standing in the crowd of 500 people the
time in baghdad was like very very risky and here they are and here they are the big screen
watching the 80 hours um 80 telescopes around the world whatever it was
that's how passionate people were they made their own t-shirts and banners in bangladesh
uh this one i keep forgetting where this came from but is that what's that is that cepedy
no no this isn't iran this is you can tell it's you know maybe indonesia okay there are
way in the same things here i don't remember i think it's asia uh but i love the hijab here that's got stars on it oh
yeah i just love this picture and it's all girls of course yeah uh another some of the events here
and this is my introduction to it but i've been involved a lot since then is astronomy for the blind now this
is in puerto rico and undoubtedly it happened because of uh wanda diaz merced who some of you
probably know who is an astrophysicist who is blind and she's somebody i've worked with and
i had the opportunity to go to puerto rico after the hurricanes and take 20 telescopes for some poor you really disadvantaged schools
that that have been hurt even more by the hurricanes so this is a real thing astronomy for
the blind we kind of you know sounds like a joke but it is a way all of these things show the diversity
everybody is interested everybody has a different perspective and doing this
around the world the idea is to engage everybody there are people who do um star parties in prisons hospitals
you know these people are isolated too why shouldn't they their their crew members on spaceship
earth along with us and they're that the universe belongs to them too
uh another one of my favorites this one's in kathmandu in nepal uh this is india
after a while you realize man these are all the same picture people look a little different this is
iran a place that i've been many times was going to go again this year but
and is really the start of astronomers without borders my connections between and eclipse chasing who was there was
something oh simon was talking about eclipses simon traveled for the eclipse and
didn't see totality i'm going to scold him severely but he's got another chance in a few years
and they're nuts about astronomy um and sharing that view through the
eyepiece this is my favorite this is in brazil she's making sure that the dolly gets a
chance to see uh this is a darvish or what
we know of as werleen dervish in uh in iran i've met this guy a couple times
i didn't take this pic um you know there's there's face painting they do things in a big way in
iran fantastic there's a telescope just like the one i
took to kurdistan in this case it's peru or bolivia i don't remember which one
um this is an opportunity to you know this is what we call a teachable moment
um and it is not in a developing country where people don't have education this is in munich um
but you know just goes to show who as it was talking to steve again i think it was uh i think we're we're we're com
compadres they're talking about people never noticing never looking up how would anybody know
where to look for your test nobody does why would they this is normal to us but it's not to other people
oops the earth just disappeared behind me uh this was a sunday
um in romania
i don't remember where this is no idea there's english on the t-shirt but i cannot remember
things for kids all over the place this art exhibition um was or exhibition was in
some place in the u.s northern midwest i don't remember exactly where but it was
u.s this was not us this was india and uh this shows people just wanted to
be a part of this he said well what what are we gonna do well what have we got well we got a
camel okay let's do astronomy with the camel i mean too much
i i will say too as far as the uniting nature of astronomy a friend of mine in this
area of india said that they they had telescopes out and had a very old guy who came up and he said this is the
third worldwide event that i've experienced the first was
lindbergh crossing the atlantic by himself in 1927. wow the second was apollo 11 landing on
the moon and the third was 100 hours of astronomy and this
this global star party really was a sense that we were all doing this together and there's nothing
else that can unite people that way because we're all looking at the same thing we're all doing the same thing that's what astronomers without borders
is why i created it was to to get that across um i've forgotten
where this was and you know what i left in the sponsor
slide even though it's kind of old because explore scientific was there and uh scott has always been there scott
has been you know a supporter of everything for so long and uh so i wanted to share that
now let me also get out of that okay and a nice comment here um uh
let's see kane and lucas um uh wanted to uh point out let's see if i
can scroll this here uh cain lucas points out he says mike's work is truly admirable
the world crusade that he carried out is outstanding it shows true passion well passion okay so
you know it started like saying the devil made me do it i mean i i had a a short meeting with somebody
who lasted almost two hours this earlier today she's in her 30s she's done all kinds of things came from a bad
background we talked because we're passionate and
that's what we talked about yeah is what drives people to do things like this so you know i i i i appreciate
it i really do and i'm not without an ego but it's what it's you know it's like you're made to do it
and if i have the ability to i have new projects that i'm going to be doing in and because i can and how can i not so
um that's just the way life is developed for me and uh i i it's not about me
like was said earlier it's about people all the people out there who are doing these things and you know when i'm involved at mount
wilson observatory or griffith observatory and somebody comes by and they say they
they'd love to see the 60-inch telescope well you know i've got a key it's going to take 10 minutes out of my life
it's normal to me but it's going to be a big deal to somebody else and i remember when i was a kid
when somebody took me in there the first time yeah i could not believe it what an
opportunity that was i was so excited so you know how can you not pay it back
you know we all of us here have been so so fortunate that how can you not pay it
back like i can't be that selfish uh a couple of quick things to share here
this everybody needs to see this i'm not kidding this is you know this is the best thing
i've ever seen on public outreach and it really conveys it and it's a
very hard thing to do but i have met people whose lives have changed
because of that first look through a telescope and you can see the impact it has on people
and uh scott had uh told me to go ahead and do this
too i want to mention this is one thing it's uh you know this is a it this is a commercial thing it's not a non-profit
thing like i've been doing forever but it really is a service uh both the
astronomy industry and the consumers it's a place where we're going to put together all the reviews
the news and everything um stuff is scattered out there all over the internet i've worked with so many
beginners people trying to buy the telescope for the first time i've had people my son-in-law bought a
telescope without but without consulting with me i couldn't make it work
it was impossible the amount was just i could have done better with popsicle
sticks yeah and so for his next birthday i bought him an eight inch dab um and so it's confusing
it's it's hard those of us here are experts in this stuff and we can do all this stuff like
there's nothing to it but like steve said in like my stories about it it is hard to get started and then
if you're experts like some of you guys here you might not hear about a new product or
you've heard about something you don't know anything about it so this is what it's for now this is not just for the
common good we're going to have advertising explore scientific uh reserve to the space for explore
scientific scott thank you i wanted to have a monster
well but um it is we're not going to sell anything
and it's all going to be fair reviews and we have a little a lot of good stuff that is uh
populating it news and reviews and [Music] you know astro gear how to citizen
science beginner's guide stuff like that so that's astigatorg astrogear today.com
and that's i just wanted a little feel a little sheepish putting in
a plug but yeah absolutely thank you thank you mike
thank you very much all right gary well who's up next um i think
we will go over to simon i want to have a look at this son he's got it clearer than what i have all
right we did i did see it earlier but i don't know whether he's uh sitting there listening in the background or he's just
i'm here he's always the man behind the curtain or the tent so what i'm going to do is i'm going to
screen share obviously because when you're doing it through the life button thing that i'm doing uh it's nowhere near as
sharp so you hold a one second
sure [Music] so here we are we're looking at the sun
live wow so right now there is actually an active
region um unfortunately it's actually dying down but in the last
hour i have literally just watched uh can you see my cursor okay i have
literally just watched this little area here um flare up now there was no flare
happening at that time i just went to a check just not so long ago to see what was going on because that changed
drastically in the last 30 minutes and contrary to belief a lot of people don't
realize this but people think the sun moves really slowly or it doesn't
change as much as people think reality states is if you were actually to directly
observe it of course it's like watching paint dry the paint's never going to dry but when you turn your back on it for five minutes and look back it's changed
so much that it's almost unrecognizable and this bright spot here literally just popped
up so the really dark patch right to the left of it um i wouldn't call it sunspot it's hardly a
sunspot but it is a dark little dot in there somewhere i mean this is the only
interesting active region in the entire sun to be honest today
well there's a lot of detail though um it's it's kind of up and down right
now uh seeing is actually going downhill which is not a surprise um at this time of day
for my part of town if we'd have done this earlier on in the morning oh my god it was crystal clear
but just to give you an idea of how clear it can get is that's what we're looking at when you
process an image so you can kind of see what's going on right
look at that and then we can see that this patch here um is the same bit of
plasma but more importantly i mean when you when you guys were talking kind of missed it is it kind of formed a bit of a loop
and then jumped back down again so you can kind of make out that there was an arc
which is here but it was really obvious a moment ago uh and again it changes so fast
that i could i didn't really hit record because it was just so bad i mean the wind was really going for it
right and that's getting on the swimmers afternoon
yeah i wouldn't turn around and say this was great seeing um it's it's average probably at best uh i still have a
little bit of transparency issues because we still have smoke lingering here in california from all the fires because
technically the fires are still active so yeah i can't just ignore it if i was to go i don't know
40 miles that direction i will probably be setting my hair on fire because that's where the fire is where
are you simon um i'm in los angeles
do you know where canyon country is yeah yeah i'm i'm in your area just wondering if you were over there at
woodland hills or what but yeah oh no no no no no no no i'm in canyon country which um if you were looking at a map uh by
freeway 14 um and then you run along it's the entire los angeles national
um forest and the actual crest itself so my view is i can see the beginning of
the actual ridge and i can follow it all the way through so if i drive over the hill and
i've got this perfect view i can see everything that goes on over there but yeah so i rely heavily on that
mountain to give me the seeing that i need in order to do solar imaging because i've noticed that if i go other places i
have to relearn the weather pattern i have to figure out what's going on and i've been here for so long and i
just got used to it i know what's going to happen the minute i wake up look at the trees and if i see any
movement then i can kind of ascertain if it's going to be good or bad sure
i missed that what was that i'm saying i've got very similar to that here in the mountains the only thing is is
we've got the jet stream moving around quite erratically this week so that's dropped out of moving stuff in
across and there's no real control on that so it can look lovely and clear and
until you get the telescope set up and actually look through it you can't work out what's happening yeah i i mean we're lucky here in
southern california that the jet stream seldom drops down although this year it's been pretty rough for us
uh because the jet stream usually starts up at alaska through canada and then loops back up and then across the east
coast but for some strange reason this side of the year it actually came all the way down to southern california and just
made the right pig's dinner out of everything yeah i do uh solar um teach solar stuff at mount wilson
observatory and it sounds like your weather pattern is very similar on the other side of the mountains and i
was going to mention to you there by the way that the um uh talking about
using old equipment very basic i i use a snow telescope solar telescope to teach people and
you're you're inside of it i mean it's just it's over 100 years old you're inside the telescope that's true
it's over 100 years old and you you can see everything so yeah it is great yeah i
just just had a plane go past because i saw the jet wash or sorry the uh the the ripple from the jet go rippling
through the screen there i just saw it um i don't know if i'm allowed to plug my event tomorrow scott am i allowed to
sure sure so tomorrow um i am also doing a live stream um and
we're doing one specifically about solar and then gary's going to be in it um i have clyde
uh clyde flyweight from the big bear solar observatory so if you guys know who he is he's so worth watching and then uh jen
winters from daystar instruments will also be joining us for that particular one so very cool so what is the where do they
go see this event i'll put the the uh um you can just go to telescopes.net and click on the big
banner or scroll down to the bottom look for the blog and it will have the link that gets to our youtube page otherwise just
search at telescopes.net on youtube and we're bound to show up
okay all right so yeah i mean there are a couple that's
tomorrow tomorrow at 12 o'clock pacific standard time 12 p.m pacific
okay all right hopefully gary's not going to be completely worn out
i think it's 8 pm networks uh here something like that anyway yeah i did that on purpose because i was like
thinking like if i go any later it'll be like whatever o'clock and you'll be like
it's a beautiful image thank you so much for sharing simon no worries i'll keep this up obviously
for everybody okay all right we are going to
we're going to go to
other people here uh gary who who is uh who do you choose to be up next i don't
know whether um ryan's sitting around in the background there there we go there we go all right
yeah um kind of let me uh share my screen a little bit here
um and i have a few slides that i prepared for us okay can you see that okay
yeah we can see it just fine oh perfect okay and so um
you know i do a lot of my imaging at the montana learning center which is located on a lake in montana
and the observatory is nestled on a peninsula so it reminds me a lot of big bear um
solar observatory and in terms of like the the seeing that you can have in
certain times of the day where you get that lake effect to seeing and so um unfortunately in this talk i
won't share any of my solar images but i i do have a daystar setup that i use
and um we measure the seeing and during you know there are special times of the
day uh just like simon was saying um you know where you can get sub works i second seeing from that site and take
some really outstanding shots but the the learning center i'm the executive director of the montana
learning center and we um our main programming is we offer summer learning camps for kids
we do have a high school astronomy program but we do a number of aerospace and earth and space science
programs for younger kids too we're a nasa partner in montana we're
one of two we're paired up with the university in bozeman and uh we work with kids all over the
state um you know i've jeez i've been in astronomy for over 20 years now
i i've known scott for at least 20 years and uh you know i got interested in
astronomy when i was a kid and uh you know what better way to get kids excited about science
than sharing that love for first base um and i'm still doing that and so here's a
look at our observatory uh so we have two roll-off roofs um one's a 16-foot building and the
other one's a 24. um for our our summer campers
uh we've got a 14-inch hyperstar in the smaller building and then uh if you guys are familiar
with new mexico skies at all back in the day they used to do a guest observing program where you can
you know stay and run a 25-inch job and a couple of years ago mike and lynn
donated that 25-inch dab and i had it fully restored and that's housed
in this building but uh you know if you're ever interested
and you want to see a live view of the sky now granted uh this is just a screen
capture that i took um not when the milky way's up but at least you can get a nice view
of our sky and it's you know we're about 15-20 minutes outside of helena the capital of montana and it gets
pretty dark pretty quick but you do see a little bit of a light dome
here in the southwest portion of the image but if you ever want to go to our website or at least our all sky camera
it's mlc all sky dot org and uh you know you can look at the sky
right now if you want to during the day or at night um you can see all all different types of videos
um you know i keep everything cataloged on there typically when i'm not up up there at
the observatory at night you can see our our lights that we have on because we have a cul-de-sac
with uh it's a 10 acre property with 15 cottages and so when we're running four summer
camps at once it gets pretty hopping pretty fast inside the observatory i have a couple
of of my setups and the brand ambassador for takahashi
and i've got a four inch talk at f3 in the one corner and then that's kind
of my white field setup and then i've got a cca250 um in the other corner and so this is
the uh the fsq and um right now i'm testing a uh product from software
abyss called the fusion and so i've got that running and uh you know
i i'm uh i use the sky um to operate the telescope like control
the camera the focuser the guiding everything and it's just so nice to have something
all in one unit and you don't have to have a laptop in there because you know there are often times
when i'm working with kids and i can just let it run so it's a ton of fun um
the other scope i just finished setting this up a few weeks ago is our cca250 and that's set up currently at f5
i'm gonna put a focal reducer flattener on it and so that takes it down the f 3.6 and so your
your image is um twice as bright so it cuts your exposure time in half and so right now at f5
i'm doing five minute sub frames um and i'll show you some examples in a little quick and in a little bit
but here on the fsq um i've got the the same camera or
i think gary's testing the 2400 but i have the asi 2600 so it's a 26 megapixel
camera with four micron size pixels um on the back of that setup um you know
for years i used to do um monochrome work uh when i worked for an observatory uh
new mexico skies and um you know now i just i love how
quick and easy um one shot color imaging and processing is and so this is the the cca250
and i've got the asi 2400 on the back and that's got six micron pixels so the
two cameras are matched really well to the scopes and and you'll see an example pretty quick
and so here's here's my current field of view uh the yellow is the fsq so nice and
wide and then i'm getting a little bit up close um with the cca250 it'll get larger
when i put that the focal reducer flattener in there but i i like to image um when i can
and so i've got two scopes running at once and once the wide field and one's a narrow field
and so um here's a recent shot that i did with the fsq so this is the
wide field and that's what the asi 2600 and this is just um
30 frames at five minutes or 35 frames of five minutes stacked
and you can get a really nice field of view and then the up close version
of the elephant trunk nebula this is with the cca250
and then that's also 35 five minute frames stacked too i really
love one shot color cameras um they make it easy and it makes it you know you don't have
to you know shoot through different filters and stack everything
you know i used to spend weeks working on one image and now i can do
two or three at night it's actually pretty sweet um you know the kids use our
hyperstar and they're cracking out images like that we have a 14 inch
hyperstar and um you know it's a great experience for the kids
so what i wanted to do if we've got time is show um some of the programs that i use for
like aligning and stacking and processing and so um you know if the viewers are familiar uh
app is great it's very easy to use and uh you can get a free 30-day trial um
and some things that i've done um or that i do within app is just
alignment and stacking and normalizing the background and so with a one shot color
camera you have to force the pattern um in particular with one shot color
so it's a bayer filter matrix um so if you're thinking of two by two pixels that essentially
represents one color pixel so you've got in this case one red two green
two blue to make that one color pixel so i force that um click on four spare and then i've
already loaded my frames but what i want to do is select all of them
and you know there's so much that you could do in this program um but i don't do a lot um you know i
used to take calibration frames like darks fl biases and flat frames i don't do any of
that anymore um i mean that's one of the great things about cmos chips is
you can get away with a lot um and it's a lot of fun and so um you know i skip a lot of those
steps because i don't have to do reductions and i go to integrate um
i you know i'll do an average when i integrate my data and um you know you start out with a
good frame that you select and um i always do like a sigma rejection
and then i'll you know compares the frames and let's say if you've got a a plane flying for uh through or a
satellite it'll just take it right out no problem um but you can you know i just hit integrate and then
from in in here um you know it'll just uh
it'll just run and depending on how your machine is um it depends how long
it takes sort of thing um but i already have it done where it's like going through
it's analyzing all the stars in the image it's aligning stacking um i mean it'll
do this over the period of time like right now it's just analyzing all the images
it's assigning uh what they call a quality score um looking at how sharp the stars are
and it just does all that and then at the end which i love there's a nice little bell or gum and
then you could just save um save it as a tiff and
take it into photoshop so let's say that's all done right and um you know i've got it in the
photoshop so here's the stack um of 35 uh
frames by five minutes uh the first thing i do is i'll use a plugin and
i'm sure you guys you that use this or heard of it before uh it's made by pro digital software
astro flat pro and you know i'll go in and you know these are like settings and you
know the great thing about um deep sky photography is it's all in the eye of the beholder
and so you know what looks good to you um might not look good to someone else
but you know it doesn't matter it's just as long as it looks good to you that's what matters right and so you can see the difference
just by doing you know one thing in photoshop um and then i also will go through and
uh rba um wrote this plugin called also lavista green
and i'll generally run either a medium or strong and what that does um you know when
you're zooming in is it'll take i don't know how well you can see that on the zoom
but it'll take the green out of the image or help reduce it and so just really
quick um you can get a really nice result fast and then there are
these great plugins that you can get or photoshop actions i should say and
this is an action suite that you load and there's different things where it's like
everything is preset and that way you don't have to recreate the wheel because
you know in astronomy people have done all the work they've done all the programming and whatnot and they saved their work and you know
because of of things like actions you know i could do you know something really simple um like
this one down here where it says light only deep spike space object and dim stars
you run that um you know it's gonna run everything in the background and in a few seconds uh you get a result
and so just by running that plug-in you know we're starting to bring out a lot of
that dustiness in the image and so i'll i'll go through and do a number of different things
sometimes i'll step down to the enhanced deep space object and just
run that too and it's just really quick and easy that's why i love um one shot color cameras once you have
it once you have everything set up very cool very cool ryan thank you thank you go
ahead that was a uh that was uh years of uh experience crushed down in just just a
few minutes so that was good yeah any time i realized that i'm
really limited to time so um any time you'd like me to come back and do some processing or imaging
to be happy to do it anytime anytime thank you that's great um
okay so um uh at this point uh gary where where are we
heading off to at this at this time remember we um have a chat with provera thanks very much for that
right it was really interesting to see that up and running she came in like at the exact right time you know
we decided to we were running long and we decided to have a break a 10-minute break and she pops in right
at the five-minute mark you know so uh and she said she didn't plan that so i i'm
uh i'm pretty impressed with uh with her timing so that's
thanks really cool us for having me back again i'm very happy to see you all so
last time i was here i spoke a little bit about the aok program the astronomy outreach of
kosovo and some of the activities that we do in kosovo and i'm sure that
all of you already uh know that you've been following me on social media for for quite a while and also i spoke a
little bit about slu a platform that is really cool that you can use the telescopes from anywhere
and today i actually would like to speak about another activity that i'm involved
with recently that is the asteroid uh the international asteroid search
campaign so this is a science citizen program that allows uh
people from all around the world to participate and actually contribute in making discoveries of
minor planets so this program is run by a dr patrick
miller and it it gives the opportunity to all the schools and everybody around the
world it's kind of like the the work that mike simmons does but he goes there in person and
then shows all the telescopes to these people with this uh campaign it's a little
easier probably because you don't have to go there in person but the participants that wants to
participate here at least needs to to know how to use a software that is called
astrometrica which is used to do all the measurements of the image data that they will provide
you so uh this uh collaboration actually um provides data by the institute of
astronomy at the university of hawaii so uh right now i am participating in
this for the first time and it's really amazing because every week i get images that are provided by the
pan stars telescope in hawaii which is a 1.8 meter
telescope is very big and of course pan stars and catalina sky survey they are like
the biggest service in the world for discovering asteroids so when you get the opportunity to
analyze their data and you're the first person that you're submitting that data and that
will be sent to the minor planet center and there's like a really high chance
that you will get something in that image that nobody has seen it before
so my friend happ and i have formed a team of two people and we're participating in that
and i would um i would like to share the screen here just so i can show you very quickly what
i'm talking about so for example they are providing a data set of four different images that
are taken within a little a little short of time so again this is about almost a two
meter telescope and it has a very narrow field of view so this program called astrometric guide
allows you to to blink images to do measurements to find the positions
and you will see if actually there is something moving in this image of course if you zoom in and if we
go slowly like in each square so for example here yeah we have
something moving in this object and if we click with this software in this image
usually the software will recognize it because you will download all the
orbits from the minor planet center of all the objects that have been discovered before
so if the software doesn't recognize this one that means that it could be a new
asteroid it could be something that nobody has seen before so the good thing is that you'll report
it and of course it doesn't count as a discovery immediately it is like a
preliminary you know discovery it goes in the list and it has to wait six months until it
gets verified by other observatories because we need multiple observations to make sure that
that particular object was never reported before and was never confirmed before
so so far my friend happ and i we have got four uh on unidentified objects
and we're waiting for them to be verified uh fingers crossed they could be new ones so we'll get credit for the
discovery if that happens that would be amazing but the cool thing is that uh you see
like in this program uh where that other website is if i can find it
yeah here like if you just see those images they're like kids like 10 years old from schools from
places that actually have discovered asteroids like if you tell that to somebody they will
say like oh no there is no chance that you can discover something only professionals do
actually no this this science program allows you to to participate
and to use the software and to analyze all the data by yourself and that's
that's really amazing because um you know you don't have to have your own equipment you don't have to spend
you don't have to to stay up late at night and it's really great because you have all the
data provided to you and so far since 2006 that this
program exists there have been over 1500 discoveries and 60 of them have been
actually numbered by the minor planet center and of course some of them have been named
after the people after these organizations around the world that they have made the discoveries
so very much you know looking forward to this it's very exciting to work with it
it's kind of a break from all the studies and everything that you do it's very nice so i would encourage like
all of you who's watching like the young people to actually participate in that it's a free thing to
do it's it's really great it allows you to do amazing things so that's just uh
something i wanted to share with all of you thank you so much scott and gary i i can
endorse that friend vera we've uh had isaac is a part of uh global astronomy
month in awb for for many years patrick is is fantastic and it's a great opportunity it's just
hands-on science for kids and it's real science yeah that's really a great program i'm very excited for
this i i've seen one school in nicaragua that i know uh discovered an asteroid in a small
town they were it was such a big deal that they got money from the government to build an
observatory at their school i mean these things make a real difference
it's a good one yep lucas thibaud from the chat is uh asking is there a
survey program that where we can join our force with our observatories i imagine that same program would accept
anyone is that right rambara well actually in that program when you
participate you're only allowed to work with the data that it's provided by the
pan starrs telescope from the university of hawaii so you will have to work with that data
but if you can actually get the the coordinates of the objects that you
report afterwards probably you can do like follow-up observations from your observatory
depending how big your telescope is if you can actually see that object because remember if we're looking at something
with a two meter telescope we're talking about objects that are about 20 magnitude or 21 so sometimes
wheat amateurs are limited in the in the size of the telescopes that how far and
you know how bright objects we can see so yeah that's
wow okay all right that's that's excellent okay um i think the only person we
haven't talked to so far is jerry hubble uh jerry what's going on out there in
virginia it's uh it's dark and it's rainy it's dark
the dark part is fine you know it's just the rainy part that's not so good right um i i did want to share if we've
got a few minutes before another break uh i wanted to share some of the construction that we did
on the mark slade remote observatory okay i'm sure several of you have already heard me talk about the market
remote observatory or a local astronomy group that formed
back five years ago to honor the legacy of mark slade who was a
it was a rappahannock astronomy club uh member and he passed away
unfortunately and he passed his equipment on for us to to do what we were going to do is
basically sell it off for his for his widow but uh then we decided to suggest that maybe we should build his
observatory and his using his equipment he had gathered over the years to do that he wasn't able
to do that so that's what we did that's very nice um so i'm going to
start i guess i'll share my screen and then i'll i'll go to this uh presentation
this is a presentation i gave at the american astronomical society earlier
i'm just going to show a little bit of it just the construction
part of it really uh do you see that pop up there it goes all right
so that's just a little bit about me this is that my stuff in a way probably
so can you see this is where i am from that's my location in virginia i'm about
15 miles uh west of fredericksburg virginia and
then the observatory is about three miles as the crow flies from my house
and that's this is what it looks like we've changed the instruments over the years this is early on this is like two
years ago we've got the uh explorer scientific and explorer scientific is a great sponsor
for our observatory and i take advantage of it for doing testing on the equipment that we build
also but we've got a yes 165 on there right now which is a great awesome scope
yeah so this is this is mark slade's original on the left there the uh meat
lx200 that we had to deform because the uh
the fork mount control system failed on us so we mounted it on the g11 that we have and we use that scope
for a long time for about two years uh and then we mounted the uh we had a
one i had a 152 that i mounted i trade that in for the 165
that we have on there now and uh so this is just an overview of some of the pictures
of course my dogs have to bark when i'm giving a presentation of course so this is what the i don't think
they're real yeah this is what the observatory looked like in myron's garage we built the
this was in december of 2015.
and uh we built it in his garage and then we carted it out and put it on the deck that he had that
had been we refurbished the deck and built the and built the uh
seven by seven foot building basically it's seven by seven foot cube because we wanted a full-size door for
security and we want we have a tall pier you'll see in a minute that uh holds the
instrument way up inside the dumb so we can walk around in that building and have room to do things um
so that's this is what the init the pier looked like initially and we had the wedge on there for the uh
mead and then we made this extension to get the telescope up into the dome area and you and that's
that that pier is seven foot tall wow there
that's kind of a layout drawing of all the equipment that we have so here's here's what it looks like this
is the computer system that we have and on the mounted on the wall there is a dome control system
digital dome works that dome is about a 20 year old dome it's made by technical innovations but it works fine we've had
to do a lot of repair on it we've had to replace the cabling the way it works is through a series of
uh cables and a winch system to drive the shutter and to rotate the dome uh
we've got a weather system on it which is right here the display system for it's a davis weather
system here's what it looked like when we had the uh mead 12 inch up there
and this is a picture on the right of the pmc8 control system on the g11 which i developed
at for explorer scientific over the last few years
there's uh the laws many g11 we have a telescope drive master right ascension high resolution encoder
system for to correct the drive system and uh let's see what else there's a
moonlight focuser we have on the system it's the controller for it there's a telst telescope drive master
control in the center there and then you can see the picture of the observatory computer and we accessed the
observatory over the internet it's all completely remotely operated we used we did use teamviewer for a
while but uh with the licensing issues they have sometimes it drove us crazy so now we use a free
open source system called titanbnc and this is just showing some of the little details we've got qhy cameras on
the system there's the uh up in the upper right is the uh gps receiver for our time
that's our time standard we control the time on the computer to around one millisecond so it's a very
accurate system this is kind of what the desktop looked like back then
when you were processing uh gathering data and then um what else there's a picture
of our webcam that's a webcam picture close-up of the telescope when you're sitting at the desk so
that's about that's this is this is what it looks like up in the dome and uh that's about all i
wanted to show just just the construction i i think uh it's cool that we were able to put this system or this
building together for about a thousand dollars oh wow and uh
so that's what we spent on it yeah yeah i just want to share that a
little bit some of the details on the construction okay so we're going to take about another 10
minute break i did want to uh uh go over some of the uh questions and
answers from the last uh door prize uh uh you know from the last
uh um star party which was september 15th unfortunately our 10th star party had a
big uh went out with a murmur because i had a a
i had a technical problem where i couldn't broadcast so i guess i was told everybody told me
that this happens to everyone but suddenly i felt like it only happened to me so
anyhow but um question one um was um let's see
oh it's kind of phrased like this i have a milk dipper have an alpha star that is only my 16th
brightest and in mythology i am poised to avenge the slaying of orion what constellation
am i and the winner was jim hendrickson by answering correctly the constellation
sagittarius question two was who was the first
person known to have sketched and noted the movement of the planet neptune
what do you do you guys does anyone in our group know
no one's raising their hand no fair shot i think i know but i i was in on the
joke so i don't know all right so jim hendrickson again okay so he won two prizes it was galileo
he was first person to sketch a note of the movement of the planet neptune okay and um
the third question was who is the first person to propose a method used by jerome the land in 1769 to measure the
distance to the sun who is the first person to propose a method used by jerome lalanne in 1769
to measure the distance of the sun um this is a really cool um that would i
mean that would be a cool project for anybody uh to accomplish but it was done in 1769.
the guy's name uh um or the person uh was uh uh
hallie brett i guess and the the correct answer was james gregory so great questions from terry mann at
the astronomical league who came up with these questions and uh congratulations to the winners
and we will they will be getting back to you if they haven't already with information about your prizes so um
i do also want to mention that we have a couple of new prize partners that will be working with
us and one of them is of course gary palmer with astro courses so he will be on
future events we'll be giving away
short sessions but one hour sessions to learn how to use your equipment or to do
astrophotography so a few people on the planet have all the experience that gary has had
from testing and reviewing products so you can really get a lot of expertise from gary
the other one is a space themed t-shirt company called vacuum of space
and so they offer original art and their latest creation is called the ring
of fire in celebration of the 2023 annular eclipse that's going to be racing across
the united states so they're already starting to put out some original art on that and we'll we'll show that at the next star
party but um for now let's take a let's take a short 10 minute break and then
we'll come back with a wrap up of whatever anyone wants to share um we'll leave it uh hollywood squares
style here and and people can share as they wish until people just fall over
at that point so give us 10 and we'll be right back
so how did you get on jerry for the uh live broadcast last night because it was way too late for me um
it went all right we were we were probably on for about two hours we were actually an hour and a half i think it was but we were had two hours of time
before then getting everything set up tweaked and we had to get we had to find the focus position we had to actually
add four uh extenders on the scope to get the focus
with the focuser only seven millimeters out uh we wanted to make sure we drove the
focuser in you know uh most of the way
but so we worked that we worked the camera problem we had power issues uh scott's still working out how to
provide power to all the different pieces of equipment he's got this one nice lithium i think it's a lipo battery
it's a really a large i think it's like 50 000 or 50 uh amp hour battery
and it's only like the size of a book i mean it's pretty small so we were working through the those
power issues the the cooling system on the camera he's using a separate battery for that and it
that that didn't charge that didn't last very long so we didn't get we got some first images and
uh we had some problems with the qhy driver on we we installed nina
so this is the first time i had looked at nina or seen it was yesterday or day before yesterday
when we installed it on his neck and then we operated it last night and i had to
you know the new program you have to hunt peck and find stuff uh you're not used to where things are
at so we spent a fair amount of time doing that getting things configured but overall it
worked the equipment worked pretty well and uh other than the power problems and
we broadcast for about an hour and a half showing showing our some of our fumbling around
cool yeah i think i i finished about a.m 10 past four something like that
yeah and i hadn't seen the live broadcast go up so it must have been yeah it was it was right after that it
was probably right after that because um it was actually after midnight our time so it was probably
five hours after or right after you signed off maybe so uh-huh
cool right i'm just gonna grab a drink on the actual week
okay what were you doing yesterday was it yesterday you were talking about this
jerry yeah right it was uh last evening uh we were setting up we're building
scott's uh remote ac telescope system and we're integrating all the pieces
we've been doing shows every day this past week adding different parts to the system and
then last night was our first under the light under the stars when we add all the pieces together
uh we we demonstrated the auto guiding we demonstrated the camera until the the cooling system ran out of
juice and then you know we pointed we did plate solves and stuff like that so we
were able to do quite a bit of stuff for the first night
i think a lot of this technology is fairly new to scott in terms of running it
i'm going to say this jerry you know there's a beeping sound in the background that you get
oh i know that i know exactly what it is and it drives me crazy
yeah it drives a couple other people crazy to you i don't i had a friend of mine who's uh
they were in their apartment and they just could not figure out what that infernal beeping was until i
explained it to them i said like it means that one of your smoke detectors or their batteries running out so
if you're watching and you hear that one single beep that's what it is replace the battery
i only remember that because you were talking about batteries and it's running out of power and stuff like that
yeah right all right i'm gonna take a break also for a minute all right you do your thing
so
oh you can tell scott's back yep or can
you i changed into one of my vacuum of space shirts
oh okay yeah yeah i'm gonna lose the sun in about
oh yeah i'm gonna look at the shadow because that's the only way i can tell probably about 20 30 minutes and i'm
going to lose it okay well you'll have time
you'll have time well like i said there's really not that much happening right now
wow relative well if you're standing on the sun you'd probably feel like something was going on
if you can stand on it yes get the proverbial hot foot
uh there is a prom but i mean it's not exciting
actually i say there's a prom there's actually quite a few there's one two three four five
six six of them that are visible but they're kind of long and stringy so they're kind of boring
yeah yeah when we go into solar maxim i'm going to tell you now if we do this
during solar maximum we're not going to know what to look at it's going to be just like what the hell's going on it's going to be crazy that's absolutely
mad when that happens um i normally run a smaller rig so that i can keep an eye on
anything that's uh taking off and otherwise you just can't see it in the
main imaging rig you're looking at one object and then something else is taken off
and you have no idea yeah you just fly all over the sun so i normally use a smaller rig just to look at
uh keep an eye on things hey simon uh some people here on the
chat really want to see your rig so uh that's uh [Applause]
it's possible um i'd have to reshuffle the camera slightly then yeah and uh
oh there's a question on there as well wasn't there um yeah what's the best time to observe the
sun i think basically yeah right um really the best time in the uk
is uh really late spring to middleton and the reason for that is
the sun is high so if we go into the wintertime the sun gets very low so
we're looking through the lower part of the atmosphere and it just makes for horsey and
what the images really
right i think you're going to take us off our break here it's just a few of us right now so you
can see my beautiful uh it's the grand tour shirt that's on vacuumspace.com so
that's pretty cool like that shirt a lot and i also wanted to since it's just the
the few of us here too i wanted to give a shout out for uh to uh targus uh the company that makes
uh computer bags but they also make these really cool um uh
you know uh powered uh uh display hubs and usb
and stuff like that so if you guys are uh putting together uh lots of gear for astrophotography you
might wanna take a look at this this is their this is i guess their top model here and then they sent me this
more compact model which might ride a little bit better on your telescope if you're writing
computers like like i have a nuk computer there on my ed-102 but i wanted to thank uh
targus and andrew corkhill who sent these out to us so very cool
i haven't heard of targets in ages oh yeah they're very they're a big deal at this point so
yeah i don't think we've seen those in the uk i haven't seen them in the uk anyway okay this was pretty damn big in
the uk at one point what time is it over there andreas
it's uh 1 45 1 45 15 minutes to bed time
is the answer no hanging in there that's good that's about the time
what's that that's about the time we stopped last night wasn't it yeah yeah yeah that's right
i've switched the target so we're now capturing on m45 is that what you're imaging right
now yeah that's coming in live now so that's running oh that's cool uh that's on the 102.
let's see what other kind of comments we're getting here let's see uh oh
barbara david mike simmons you mentioned that a lot of people never looked through a telescope until much later in life i took my very
first look at 35 years old at a star party in the anza borrego desert led by scott roberts when he ran the
oceanside photo and telescope astronomical society it changed my life well good lord thank
you barbara um i enrolled in astronomy classes back then and now
have run the coal creek canyon sky watchers astronomy group west of denver at 9 000
feet for six years thank you so much scott barbara thank you so much you know it was great uh uh to uh
get to know you and everything i i remember uh when you were really getting into it and it was just like you know seeing the
light bulb go off and you know any of us that do that kind of astronomy where we're
uh helping people out or or you know doing astronomy outreach uh uh
to me it's like seeing somebody have a moment of enlightenment really because they realize there's some
really amazing things that they understand almost immediately and then exploration starts to happen
and people's lives change i mean andrea's told me you know privately his story of his life
changing you know simon uh the same you know gary you have the same you know we all do and that is what um
that is that is the recurring thing that's that's the message that we keep trying to uh get out in this global star
party every every time we do it so ah i see the housing
from the horizon or the fence or the tree are you at this point simon uh for the sun
yeah uh well it's actually the top of my house um we're getting
about 10-15 minutes left like i said i can only tell by looking at the shadow
on how it catches up with the scope so as soon as i see it above the counterweight shaft
that's it i'm done basically that's why you'll notice it's starting to get dimmer now
but strangely enough like i said earlier on seeing um actually got better at this time
because it's almost five o'clock so if i ran to the other side of the house it would actually look
you know i would actually have a clear view again for at least another hour but as you can see even from my camera
standpoint i'm starting to lose light because of the way the light's coming through but yeah seeing has actually gotten a
little bit better again all of a sudden i'm not gonna record because i've got too much data already
yeah but um we did notice that somebody was asking um
they wanted to see what my rig looks like so what i'll do is as soon as the sun disappears i can move the canopy out of the way all
right and then we can then look at the uh the setup because then at least that way i'm not blasting it in the sunlight
otherwise we won't see anything but flare
barbara says thanks for reading my comments you are such an inspiration you are too barbara
that's awesome uh let's see lucas thibault says uh when i first
looked into a dobsonian it was magical and changed my life as well
it was an explore scientific ultralight that i bought second hand
right after actually that's great lucas thank you it's you know that's
really cool if you're in the business of making telescopes and uh you know making the
gear that all these amateurs used and stuff uh the experiences that they have with the
stuff that you build that's a huge reward you know and being and being in this business is just knowing that people are are
you know seeing things and exploring and discovering things all on their own you know that personal uh discovery
personal exploit exploration is uh is life changing it really is i i want to add to this um
because obviously i work in retail with in in the telescope business and one of
the things that really gets my nerves with some people is expectation and
when i out sit down and i talk with them because i don't just sell you a telescope just for the sake of a sale i kind of want to get to know the
individual and if i discover that you've never looked through a telescope or owned one and you might have gone to a
star party nine times out of ten and i'm saying this because i want you guys out there
who've never owned a telescope before is before you get into it go to a star party if you can if they still happen
with all this stuff going on and when you're ready to buy one buy a dobsonian to begin with
and there's a very specific reason why we start with the dobsonian is it's the one that is going to give you
the most bang for your buck and probably give you that visual image of what you're expecting
compared to a very very small refractor or some other random telescope that you might find the way i look at it
is is the bigger the aperture the better it gets in some ways and there's nothing that beats the dobs
there really isn't and don't just jump into this and start trying to do imaging
without having any information or any knowledge start with a scope do visual go through the whole process
and then decide what you want to do from then uh going forward that is
rambera's coming back oh i am i wanted to share over something on
here as it goes because it's actually quite interesting we we spend a long time playing around with
this equipment and moaning about the equipment and um
forever after perfection is probably the easiest way of putting it
but i wanted to share the guiding on this and the i had some other issues earlier on
in the evening so i just switched over to a quick guide scope on the top so nothing is
absolutely perfect but hopefully that's going to share now
there we go so you'll see the guidecraft is pretty much all over the place yeah and there's a couple of reasons for that and that is
really i've not had enough time just to sit down and run through and program it up but
when we actually look at the stars in the background bearing in mind this is a full frame camera
run in here they're pretty round and they're pretty straight uh running through so spending a lot of
time sometimes running after that perfection is a waste of time yeah it can eat up a lot of your night
just trying to get that guy together absolutely perfect and i've also seen a lot of these guy
crafts which are dead flat but actually the stars are elongated and moving in one direction
where it's not pulsing correctly so just because you've got a flat graph doesn't necessarily mean to say
that everything's running fine but it was just quite interesting looking at this at how far off the graph was
running but yet how round the styles are in the images so it's just really making a point on
that you know the thing here is though i think people misunderstand what guiding
actually does it all it does it just corrects for error of drift that's all i mean if i don't see corrections then i
ain't that good at polar aligning put it that way so i expect to see some level of movement well there's
another side of this too what gary's talking to about is i call
margin and also balancing error terms across the whole system instead of just
focusing on correcting one piece of the system and letting other pieces go because it
gets that little piece that you're focusing on will be overshadowed by other things that affect
your image and focus is a big thing that's why i always talk about focus as something the primary
thing that beginners ought to ought to you know no pun intended focus on uh because you know that's something
that they can get a feel for much easier than auto guiding and getting instead of getting one one
arc second or 1.2 arc seconds rms on your right ascension you get down to 0.8 arc seconds rms yeah it's it
you know your sky is only going to give you so much so you're chasing a dream when you try to do this perfection on
your auto guiding when you're sky seeing is maybe it's two to three three arc seconds
yeah you know you're not going to see any significant difference in your images is what it comes down to this is a massive thing in solar
and a lot of people don't uh really realize this but certainly in the uk having the jet
stream edging on you all the time so it's somewhere around us and it's pushing something in through
um the changing conditions and here you can end up focusing you know all the time i
actually sit at the back of the telescope when i do so yeah i don't run it on a remote focuser
or auto focuses i sit there manually focusing and it you have to work this out the
temperature changes on the telescopes whether it's nighttime more solar they make a massive difference to
the focus and i keep saying to people if you change your object so even on the sun if you
change from one side of the sun to the other refocus it if you're changing an object
at a night time so this system when i disappeared a couple of minutes ago i did just recheck
focus and the reason for that is is the temperature strength we've dropped about six or seven degrees here
since we started imaging so the focus is going to be pulling out um and then you're gonna get in and you
know get up the next morning and have a look at your images and the first half of the in focus and the rest of them
i think people forget the moon and the sun when you're doing those two
two things is it's a 3d object it's not a flat image people forget that you know when
you're looking at the center of the moon or the sun the point of where it comes to focus is going to be different from the edge
because my perspective is you know it's back here people forget how big the damn sun
actually is that's it the sun at the end of the day when you're looking at one of the prominences and certainly one of the
faint ones you've actually got to realize how far behind the edge of the disc that you can see
that maybe yeah and there's a reason it's faint the reason is you know it's another 150
200 000 miles around the back of the sun you're just seeing the tip of it yeah in the equipment so the focus in
moving across the sun is really really important a lot even a penny for the amount of times
i focus in a of solar imaging hey guys i wanted to take a moment to
touch base here with uh with pranavera uh i've been chatting with her offline
asking about what's going on in kosovo you know with astronomy outreach in kosovo and although she's over here and in the
states going to schools she's uh in constant communication with those guys back there
and uh they're they're struggling to get an observatory built so maybe prem
vera can share uh the effort and let people know how they can help
uh yes scott thank you uh it's been quite sad that i had to move
here because i had to leave all the group behind but you know i'm trying to get my ties
into the science and have a professional background into planetary science that's why i moved here into santa cruz
but aok is actually doing very well of course the country was shut down for
most part of this year due to covet 19 and they had to stop all the activities in person with the
telescopes but of course they're starting to uh right now to start
doing activities and yeah of course applying safety features and
all that and of course we're uh searching for funds to build the first observatory in kosovo uh we don't have
an observatory and that's a really sad part we were hoping for uh the government to
help us uh but the political things in kosovo right now are not very well
and we have not been able yet to convince the government so we are asking for private donations
we have a gofundme page and if any of you wants to actually uh help us out it's a very nice
construction it includes the observatory the planetarium and some hulls it's gonna be kind of like a small
science center that our country never had before and not to mention that the largest telescope in our country is an
eight-inch newtonian so i mean that's that's quite a sad and you know i've got all this
opportunity to come over here and meet with all these astronomers and visit you know observatories and
observe from large telescopes but when i go back home and um i see all
these folks that don't have the same opportunity it's very sad and heartbreaking and i'm
trying to really work hard with my team to make this possible to to also have an
observatory and to give a hope to these young folks that they can look at the sky they can
be inspired they can learn about that all and we have been struggling a little bit
also with the construction because nobody has ever built an observatory in kosovo like
how are we gonna make the dome like how were we gonna make it to be you know to rotate and all that so
yeah we have been working with professional architects and all that also celestron has donated a c14
inch telescope that will be installed in the observatory once it's built and there
are also some other folks jack dunn and the hub griffin that have been donating the
projector for the planetarium and also the sound system and some other things that will be installed in
the planetarium but of course any donations even if it's not you know
uh money it can you know it could be computers that you don't use or eyepieces or a
mount or whatever it is of course everything would be very much appreciated because we're trying to
basically uh make something for that country we're trying to rebuild that country that has been
destroyed by the war 20 years ago and we're just trying to give some hope to these young people so
uh scott and i will be posting the go fund me link and if any of you wants to donate who
will very much appreciate that thank you very much scott yeah can you share the page now
can you show that yeah i will i'll just have to find it so somebody else can go ahead and no
problem and uh something did cross my mind that we could do
a special uh webcast of astronomy in kosovo and so if you can
organize that i would be happy to broadcast it you know yeah that would be amazing and
as i said just right now they are starting back with the activities again because the government is allowing now
and we can also talk a little bit more about the observatory we can also share all the photos of the constructions and
everything right now they're like somewhere in my you know folders hidden so i can't find
because i don't have them ready right now but definitely we can do something like that so we can give a clue to the people
what we're actually planning to do there it's not a huge you know construction is
something just to start with and you know uh it's just something that we want to have that we never had before
and that could be something very simple that probably americans have it just you know privately in their backyard it's
just so normal to have a dome here that that's not common in our country and we're just trying to have
like a very first one yeah yeah so yeah maybe we can give
more awareness to make that happen i really hope so yeah and you've worked on this for so
many years now um so to uh to get uh this far this close uh you know it needs to
happen needs to happen okay
so simon you want to show your uh you want to show your rig yeah so uh since it's pretty much game
over um i'm on my laptop webcam but i've got my other camera sitting at the scope now so switch over
to that so on the left hand side is obviously the camera and then it's
the actual blocking filter itself in this particular case it's a daystar gemini uh sorry daystar quark
gemini okay and a bunch of extension tubes because i have to
right then i have an esprit 100 in this particular case because when seeing is not as good as it should
be um i go for a smaller aperture otherwise i'll go for like a 150 or something and then i'll just drop down
and then the mount uh but more importantly is if you look at the tube very
carefully you'll see this little sole finder and that's actually what i'm using to find the sun in the first place other than looking at
the shadows on the ground right and then obviously the mass of
tangling wires that are drifting around everywhere i very seldom create a tidy setup for solar because this thing gets
torn down every single day so it's not worth creating a semi-permanent setup
it's just too much work so that gives you guys an idea of some
of the things that i use in order to do solar
beautiful well it does a beautiful job yeah i mean well anything with a smaller
aperture in general is always going to be pretty damn good regardless of what happens um if i had the 150 out i can guarantee
you we'd have been struggling most of that time because the wind was kind of harsh at around about three four
o'clock and of course it's coming into the evening it's dying down which tonight um i'm actually going to be pulling out
the 12-inch uh newtonian to go after mars because this is the first time i've seen mars
this high up like in one o'clock in the morning i'm almost looking right up out there that's right yeah that's right
and it's like again uh you know the opposition is in october sometime but uh
it's not going to be this big again for i think it's like a decade so this is an important time if you
want to observe mars and see details on mars um you know you want to get uh the right uh
observing equipment the right filters you know and if you want to learn how to
photograph mars this is this is a grand opportunity for any planetary photographer or if you
want to learn how to do planetary imaging uh why not mars and uh you know so you can check in
and give uh uh get in touch directly with simon tang and he can hook you up so
i mean don't forget opposition occurs like every two years uh with mars that's true but it's not
going to be this close yeah it's not this exactly and on top of that right and on top of that it's also uh
hasn't been in this position for us here in the us or at least here in california anyway further north you go it's different
it hasn't been this high up usually it's like hovering 30 40 degrees above the horizon if
you're lucky right right well great
so is there anything else that anyone wants to add andreas brender i would like to add
something about the page of the go found me because since go found me doesn't recognize our country
and i am not the u.s citizen so i do not have a social security number we have to
find a person here who's a trusted person and that it could be a beneficiary to the go found me
and then at the end when we collect all the funds would withdraw the funds and then personally
bring them to aok so uh we have uh james wayner who's actually uh the person
and i am the organizer of the go found me and uh we can see everybody who uh who's making
a donation and all of that just so somebody even when they see it they don't get confused we just had to
avoid all these um policies that gofundme has with our country so and i also sent you
the link if you want to you didn't have i've already posted it twice in the chat so so it's there but um
yeah that's uh that's the deal and uh you know if you need any references for prem vera
she has maybe i don't know a million different references out there she's she's a trusted person so
so you can you can count on she's doing the right thing richard grace says if you're out imaging
mars uranus is right behind it take a long 20 to 30 second exposure and see
a couple of moons or more that's cool that's very cool all right
pranvara thank you thank you for uh letting us know more about that
it's been a pleasure and thanks for having me here it's it's very nice to talk to you all the time and see you all yeah yeah and you're
welcome back anytime fran vera anything else we want to share
um okay i literally just donated it just to prove to everybody that it's
absolutely safe good man and hopefully everybody else
it's my real name so my real name's not really simon it's a fake name that i use just let me know
just so you know okay some random person with an asian looking name yet that really is me
thank you very much we really appreciate that no problem so hopefully we'll get the ball rolling with everybody else so
they'll do the same thing oh and one one fact that i also forgot to mention
is that everybody who's gonna donate um to our campaign um
everybody who donates over a hundred dollars it's that how are you saying who will have a brick
unnamed uh with the name of the person that will actually be in the observatory construction and
everybody who will come there they will see the name of the person who actually gave contribution to build that
building and it's going to be the first one and it's going to be really exciting for us so just saying that very cool very cool
good move yeah now you tell me after i donate [Laughter]
you're gonna have two or three bricks there right yeah i'm gonna have to now [Laughter]
i want a whole wall that spells my name out if you actually follow it that's right mm-hmm
excellent anything else you want to add gary no no i think it's been very good
tonight listening to all the different people and um
thank you to everybody who's come on you know and they've given up their time yeah yeah um you know it's a friday
night um normally and like that you you know you're off doing other things so it's
very nice for everybody to convert their time yeah okay well great it's only seven
o'clock for scott in the evening so he's got plenty of time to go out and do things oh yeah yeah it's only just hit five
o'clock for me two hours of sleep folks so i got up i was i couldn't go to sleep
till five in the morning and then i had to wake up at seven so there you go and when i woke up man it
was like you know let's put the toothpicks in there and hold those eyelids open but i
i get a lot of energy of course out of um interacting with astronomers and talking
about astronomy and and the outreach and the big changes that it makes in people's lives
so thanks again for tuning in uh we will hold the next global star party
next tuesday it will happen at 8 00 pm central time and that would be 10 p.m universal time
so i hope you tune back in and watch this we've got lydia and the stars will be
joining us we have a number of other people that
are joining for the first time as well so it's going to be a lot of fun and in the meantime
do what my friend jack horkheimer always said to do and that is to keep
looking up and you know i hope you have clear skies and stay safe out there you guys and
that's going to do it so good night
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