Global Star Party 132

Transcript:

foreign
foreign
okay everyone well thank you for tuning in to the 132nd Global star party I can
hardly believe it's that high myself every one of these events has been so uh
interesting and fun to do uh this particular Global star party has a
special guest host from their highsini which I'll introduce but the theme is asteroids unveiled the building blocks
of the solar system so here we go we have
we have a few people already chatting right now and for all of you guys that aren't chatting thank you for tuning in
um but we've got um people from twitch and Facebook and
YouTube already on and thanks very much for tuning in so we're going to go ahead
and get started here thank you
[Music]
[Music]
[Music] [Applause]
thank you
foreign [Music] what makes data visualization a bit
different from other types of Animation is that some component of the visual some aspect of the visual is directly
based on some type of science data so in the case of the tour of asteroid bennu the osiris-rex trajectory is actually
based on Mission data the model itself the asteroid model that is real lidar
data that was collected from the osiris-rex spacecraft the imagery that you're seeing wrapped to the surface of bennu that is actual satellite imagery
taken by the spacecraft and so that's kind of the difference between visualization and animation is we're showing the real data this is the real
asteroid so if we Zoom all the way in on a boulder that's the real Boulder that's that's what it looked like from the perspective of the spacecraft I'm Kel
Elkins and I was the lead data visualizer on the tour of asteroid bennu I'm Dan Gallagher I was the producer and
writer on the tour of asteroid Bano tour of asteroid bennu was inspired by an earlier video that was also made by NASA
scientific visualization studio and that video was called tour of the Moon the visualizer Ernie Wright used elevation
data and high resolution imagery from a NASA spacecraft called the lunar reconnaissance Orbiter and he was able
to fly the camera very close to the lunar surface and show the actual textures Shadows highlights just the way
that they would appear if you were hovering close to the surface of the Moon so we kind of borrowed some of those techniques for the tour of
asteroid bennu really using lighting as a way to help viewers understand the shape of bennu and the shape of of these
different geological features we were zooming in on which was just it really helped the visualization come to life
so a good example of how we use lidar comes about halfway through the video when we take viewers to a boulder called
the gargoyle now the gargoyle has a very complex amorphous shape and it looks
really different when you see it from different angles in two-dimensional photographs but when we finally got a
good 3D model of the gargoyle Kel was able to put a virtual camera down near
the surface of bennu and rotate it around the boulder in a way that we never could with two-dimensional imagery
so something really cool about working on this particular visualization and actually all the visual stations we made
for the osiris-rex mission was as the spacecraft got closer and closer to the asteroid on its way there and as I spent
more time studying the asteroid the models got better and better the data that was collected was getting better and better so some of our early
visualization tests we had this relatively low poly model of the asteroid and we could only push in so far with the camera you can't push in
too far because when you've just seen individual polygons but as we got further and further along we ended up with five centimeter resolution tiles
and you could push all the way into individual Boulders and that's just the nature of how these science missions work the more time you spend with
something more data collect the better the models get missions like osiris-rex take us to places that we haven't been
before literally new worlds that we've never experienced but they show us those
places in ways that can't always be easily seen tour of asteroid benno gives
us a way not only to show the public what these places are like but it almost gives us a remote presence it allows
viewers and even scientists on the mission to see these objects up close
through technology [Music]
hello everyone I'm Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and you're tuning in to the
132nd Global star party with asteroids unveiled the special guest host Tonight
is primbera hyssini pran Vera has always been interested in the Stars since she
was a young child in Kosovo but as a campaign to help transform her
country and young people actually from around the world and not so young people
too pram Vera has made it her mission to share the thrill and adventure of
astronomy and space exploration uh she started a program called called
astronomy Outreach of Kosovo in 2015 uh and I have rarely seen somebody travel
so much and speak so much about uh the uh importance of Science and scientific
literacy now her dream of creating a
science center and and Kosovo is coming true they're building it as we speak and
anyways uh it's my great pleasure to introduce Brian Vero
High CD Fran Vera thanks God thank you very much for
having me here as a host for the global star party I can't believe it's the 132
star party going on I remember uh coming here and when you first started this
program it's awesome um what I love most about this show is
that most star parties that happen in person are usually attended by the people of that country and people cannot
really travel far away but this star party is somehow bringing globally all
astronomers together and every week it allows them to share the most updated
activities and events that they do and research that they're working on or
astrophotography of all kinds in the field of astronomy and that's really really awesome another
um I think what I like about the star body in particular is that we chose the theme to be about the asteroids and
comets in meteorites and the building blocks of the solar system uh the theme was inspired by the very recent
um mission of Cyrus Rex for the sample return uh that landed in Utah on Sunday
and we've been waiting for that mission for a couple years not a couple more than that seven years I believe and
um in 2017 was my first time when I came in United States and I remember going to the osiris-rex office in Tucson in
Arizona and learning all about it and how excited the team was and it's really
amazing now to see that it successfully uh collected the samples and returned
them back and honestly I can't wait to find out what they're going to discover
and learn about the ancient past of the solar system um yeah I am happy to be the host of
this show and I'm mostly happy to have some very very special guests here uh
with me and with for the next 15 minutes I would like for all of them to
introduce yourself and maybe share a few words about how does this osiris-rex
sample return Mission has personally affected you and how are you connected to that somehow and what do you think uh
how much this will be pushing the planetary science uh forward um I will start with David Levy uh
everybody knows David Levy I will make a much more proper introduction about him
when he starts with his talk which is right after this but please feel free to
go ahead and introduce yourself again thank you very much
and there is wonderful to have you hosting the third party today and as
we're celebrating the successful Landing of the osiris-rex mission which was kind
of interesting what the news didn't really tell us about it was that on its way down and stopped at Scotty's house
knocked on the door and said don't forget your Global star party this week and uh remember the plan is going to be
hosting it so don't take up all our time and then it stopped at my place and had
a cup of coffee and then finally landed in Utah and everybody went to to take a
look at it and to take to look at the parts of the asteroids that it had collected but all it got with this was
this poem by Lord Byron and so I'm going to get to read that to
you right now but it did one other thing since it landed on Sunday that turned
out to be the most important night in the Jewish calendar called nidre the
evening of Yom Kippur and it came out with a special message that I will translate now to all of you
and that is may you all be inscribed in The Book of Life for a year of health happiness peace of
mind and everything that you all might wish for and now we get to the poem
by Byron Manfred when the moon is on the wave and the glow worm in the grass and the meteor on
the grave and the wisp on the morass when the falling stars are shooting and
the answer owls are hooting and the silent leaves are still in the shadow of the Hill shall my soul be upon thine
with a power and with a sign and tonight we'd all go out to observe online and
brand back to you thank you so much David thank you for
sharing that uh piece of poetry um so what I I don't think you shared
much about the uh how much do you think this Osiris Rex sample return mission
uh is somehow affected maybe the work you've done in the past and what do you
think how much it's going to help us understand the solar system what are your personal thoughts on that
well yeah in fact the by the very personal thought about this being an asteroid Mission my very first page job
in astronomy was with the planetary Science Institute working with Don Davis
Clark Chapman Stu wydenfilling and others to try to understand rotational
times for about 15 different asteroids and there was a very successful ground-based project another kidbeach
using the point number 2.9 meter telescope which was a lot of fun and I
really enjoyed it and then of course came the idea of the asteroids and the comics we now have asteroids that either turn
into comets or you realize that they were comments All Along there are comets that stopping comments
and turn into asteroids and it's almost like after I go in at night when I'm done with observing
then I will look at the uh I will I will imagine that out there in
the solar system the comets and the asteroids kind of get together and they kind of talk well what time what kind of
day did the world have today did the Earth have today and did the people behave themselves usually not but we put up with it anyway
oh thank you David um as you can all see we have some very uh special guests tonight we have David
eicher from astronomy magazine Carol York from the president of the astronomical League uh David Renkin from
the Catalina Sky survey which is like I love that place and also have gripping
my very dear friend and colleague that we've done a lot of work together on asteroids and a brilliant
astrophotographer uh please this is an open discussion feel free to jump in and
share your thoughts on this osirisrest Mission um I don't want to pick this isn't open
so go ahead okay well I'll I'll take that opportunity I was uh I photographed
the launch of uh osiris-rex back in 2016. I was uh doing up close launch
photography for sky and Telescope magazine at the time and want to get back to that now but uh anyway interest
interestingly enough I spent a fair amount of amount of time with Dr James Green in the media center talking with
him about the mission uh he was in charge NASA's manager in charge of all
of the interplanetary space flights so basically every spacecraft in the solar system was under him at the time and so
I learned a tremendous amount about the mission there they had a model of the scoop and everything that you could
maneuver and see how it worked and uh interestingly enough what I normally do
is set up cameras at the launch pads of the remote cameras that start to trigger
uh with with either a timer if it's a video camera or a sound sensor if it's a
a still camera like a DSLR but for this particular rocket they only used one
strap-on solid booster because that was all the extra thrust that they needed from the normal Atlas rocket and that
provided an offset thrust and if you watch the videos of the rocket going up it kind of crabs its way up a little bit
sideways but what happened is I had one camera right beside the flame trench where I normally place the camera at
that launch site and uh the offset thrust caused the uh the exhaust plume
of the water the cooling water and all the dissolved solids from the solid fuel
booster to uh basically flood my camera Dell use it and uh it it ruined the lens
so I I lost the lens with the with the launch of Osiris but seeing it come back
uh on Sunday morning was just just something else because I saw it go up I
saw it leave this planet and then come back to this plan and it was wonderful
well I would like to say for uh I'm David Rankin from Catalina Sky survey I'd like to say for osiris-rex
uh personally for me it speaks to human Ingenuity and how far we've come
in the last few centuries towards answering the largest questions
we still have today um so that asteroid was chosen for a specific
reason um to see where these compounds came from that helped build life on this planet
and it just blows me away that we have the capability to
launch a spacecraft track down an asteroid and orbit carefully study it
carefully sample it and then return it back to Earth that just that that just
blows me away so I absolutely love it and I agree with you guys I'm Dave
eicher from astronomy magazine and to me it's another completion of a small
chapter in the book of our knowledge about the solar system and as David Levy said the the our understanding now
already of small bodies is very different from the way it was 20 years ago now we know of asteroids and comets
as in some cases interrelated small bodies um and we had the first comet sample
return mission in 2006 Stardust Mission uh in the material that was detected
from vilt 2 uh we had you know evidence of glycine the simplest amino acid we
know of course through spectroscopy that chemistry is essentially uniform throughout the entire universe so and we
know there's all sorts of evidence about how rich the solar system and other
places in the nearby Universe are inorganic compounds and so I think it's
going to be very very interesting to see see in this asteroid sample what uh you
know we'll find as as far as complex compounds that could tell us again about the commonality of some of the things
that we know of as we'd like to think of as building blocks of life in the cosmos
I think this is Carol horse from the astronomical League I think the Golden Age of astronomy and the Golden Age of
space travel continues uh very uh well along our path uh it's amazing what's
we've been able to do as someone's already alluded to uh to think that 30 years ago we could do these kind of
things and we constantly have to change some theories about what we think the universe is all about so I'm really
looking forward to the results from this because I think we're building on what's already gone before
on how this space mission has you know has had an impact in you or like how do
you view this Mission uh I also I was following the comments coming on YouTube
from lots of viewers right now and um from all over the world someone
mentioned uh what is the differences uh from the sample return
from the ryugu or the sample return from bennu now like what's what's the big uh
return difference um which I'm assuming they're going they
mean like what something different would find about the two different asteroids uh first of all uh these are two
different classes of asteroids bennu I believe is the b-type uh class asteroid
and uh their Hayabusa Mission only took two years and a half I believe to go to
the ryugu collect the samples and return them back to Earth whereas venu uh
Mission lasted for seven years and for rayubo I I do a lot of studies
through my PhD program on asteroids and it's amazing because when they compare
ryugu with some of the objects asteroids and between Mars and Jupiter uh ryugu
it's mostly similar to The Asteroids that lay in the outer main belt region
which formed in the very cold regions of the solar system whereas venue it's
thought to have borne much closer than ryugu so there are two different
asteroids they probably have two different formation histories but by of course by studying the samples and the
minerals and the spectroscopy associated with them it will allow us to understand
these processes that occurred in these asteroids long time ago and how come
they formed and hopefully we will be able to also do some isotopic analyzes
of the samples which is some really cool science behind it to understand a lot about the formation and that can tell us
a lot about the solar nebula and the pre-solar system and the compositions
and how everything formed and came together um without further Ado I would like to
officially introduce David eicher as our next speaker David eicher has been with
the astronomy magazine for 36 years he has written about 15 books related to
astronomy and uh I can count how many events uh numerous events and Outreach
talks that he has given across the world um to my knowledge he's also on the the
board of the starmus festival which I had the honor of attending one time in
Surrey it's an amazing event which I encourage all of you to attend at one point in time and today David will talk
about the sailboat cluster NGC 225 and
um other stages here David thanks pran it's good to see you again thanks for
having me and I'm ashamed to say this but it's actually been 41 years now at the magazine
um you know wow just haven't found the exit yet I guess but I will share my
screen and share the right screen and this will actually be a pretty brief
um talk I think here this time because this is a fairly simple object that is
not terribly rich and it's a kind of an average Joe open cluster in the Milky Way but we're working through lots and
lots of objects here so we'll get to energy c225 it's pretty bright it's kind
of a circular pattern of stars it's large enough to be a good little binocular open cluster it's pretty
typical of of kind of uh mid-range open clusters in in the Milky Way it's in in
Northern Cassiopeia so it's fairly close to us sometimes called the sailboat
cluster and and more recently other names and again who knows how people come up with some of these names you
know is all I'll say but bless them for for thinking of those um It's relatively young it's about 150
million years old and it's only a shade more than 2 000 light years away so it's
relatively small relatively young and relatively close which is typical of of
the many open clusters in the nearby arms of the galaxy to us
it's about seventh magnitude overall it spreads over about 12 arc minutes about
a third of the diameter of the Moon um and there's a faint one thing that
makes this cluster interesting is that there's an Associated reflection nebula with some of the stars in the cluster
that's Vandenberg four um and nearby in the same low power field uh if you have a nice dark sky
um you can also see one of the lens dark nebulae which is 1302 which is very
close to the cluster and the associated reflection nebulosity
so there's not a whole lot more to say about this cluster other than you might find it a pretty cluster in a small
telescope or even in binoculars if you have a good dark sky here's the cluster
more or less centered in this you can see it's a pretty rich field of the Cassiopeia Milky Way the center of the
constellation is down there in the lower left gamma cassiopea with its two fairly
bright reflection nebula the ic59 and ic63 you can see there's a whole
scattering of other open clusters in this direction relatively near us in the galaxy and this is one of the nicer ones
in in this field so here it is and you can see the
reflection nebulosity there you can see a sort of a circular Arc and possibly even that's the sail I think and there's
a base of the boat there if you're imaginative you can definitely see the reflection nebelocity in this photo and
the dark nebula which in a in a reasonably long exposure is pretty easy
to see but it may be more difficult the dark nebula under a visual
um aspects so so that's it it's really a very simple uncomplicated object here to
talk about I'll mention that we're still having our 50th anniversary year of astronomy magazine which is by a factor
of two the largest Magazine on our subject that exists and we have this
book that Michael bokich and I have written to try to get kids interested in space exploration
fairly recently and as pran mentioned I'm actually going to Slovakia fairly
soon here because there are some events to announce uh some details of what we're going to hold again next spring in
May thankfully several weeks after the total eclipse uh in Bratislava which will be the seventh starmus festival and
again there'll be many uh Nobel Prize winners in multiple sciences and Astronaut explorers and musicians who
will give us of course again some rock and roll as well as a lot of science so we hope we'll see you at starmus
Bratislava believe it or not if you don't know is a hop skip and a jump away from Vienna so it's actually relatively
easy to get to even for us Americans
so that's it I will stop sharing my screen that's all I have which is a
brief thing tonight thanks again for having me praying it's great to see you haven't seen you since Louisiana but
it's good to see you again I hope you're having fun these days thank you thank you for joining us and for sharing this
amazing information on the NGC object and on starmus and everything and it's amazing to know that starmus is in
Slovakia this upcoming year which is very close to Kosovo I hope I will be
there at the right time I hope so we'd love to have you speak there and thank you David Levy again for the Poetry uh
that was really amazing um our next speaker will be uh Carol
York uh the president of the astronomical League uh Carol has done an
amazing job with the astronomical League especially uh putting uh our con
conference together uh this year I had the honor of being a speaker which was
in Louisiana and it was great to see everybody David eicher was also the
keynote speaker there and uh it was the Fantastic event in Baton Rouge uh
together with the Baton Rouge Astronomical Society but this time Carol will talk about the next Alcon the 2024
where it will be who's gonna be there and how you can participate
thank you so much friend I'm glad to be here and yes that was a fun time and uh
Baton Rouge but now we're ready to turn the pace to Kansas City for next year
and I'm going to share my screen
how come is coming to Kansas City for stars and all that jazz that's our logo
for the event and naturally since uh since uh Kansas City is known for jazz
that made it into the official logo and some of you who are football fans
across the country and perhaps around the world will recognize that logo right
there the Kansas City Chiefs I don't talk about the team to the right of the Kansas City Chiefs because we're not
doing so well on that one however uh we're well known for our Chiefs when they're winning I'm not much of a fan
when they're not uh the dates for that event are July 17th
through 20th it'll be hosted by the Astronomical Society of Kansas City and
we're really looking forward to it uh one of the things that's unique about this one is we're going to be uh uh
carrying it live it would be simulcasting it uh most programs for the entire convention so we're really
looking forward to that the dates again are July 17th through the 20th I can't we will be uh
finalizing the location probably in the next week but it will be in Kansas City
against the area how many of you have heard of the Linda
Hall library of science engineering and Technology several of you have
um it's a very well kept secret for years and years they have had a
tremendously large collection of rare books specifically first editions of
many astronomy books and that is something they are willing to share with the public and it's one of the few
libraries where you can touch rare books with your hands and really see them with
your own eyeballs face to face and that's a really unique situation I have here's one example of what we hope to
show this one here is the harmonia macro
cosmica by Andrew celayas and that was published in 1661 so star Atlas very
nice design on that cover there's several other summer books and we are
planning on bringing several those out for our visitors to see and if that's not enough there's a
couple of other surprises we're going to have but they won't be a surprise after I tell you right now but uh the plan is
that Dr David Levy who's also on this broadcast tonight will be uh sharing his
logs his observing logs that he donated to the Linda Hall Library approximately
five years ago I may be a little off on that David but uh that is a very special uh situation in
addition David's very first telescope has been entrusted with Linda Hall uh to
keep it there for the public to see and so we want to bring that out as well
so I'd really like to invite everybody to put that those dates on your calendar
July 17th through the 20th 2024 if you can't be there in person we're going to
have a streaming live and we think you will really enjoy the situation and have
the opportunity to visit with astronomers from around the world and that's about all I have right now and
back to you privera thank you very much Carol
um has uh is there a lineup of speakers yet that has been analyze or well we
don't have them yet just yet we hope to announce those in the next month uh several of those will be International speakers uh as everybody knows this day
and age we can get uh expand our reach a lot more than when we have solely people
in person uh so that's to be announced very soon thanks thank you very much
again for sharing all of that and hopefully um a lot of people will be able to
attend it it's a great event I've been part of it for about three times and every time you can learn new things meet
astronomers from all over the place it's it's a great event
in Minnesota perhaps I believe and also the one in the Bahamas
yes yeah that was good um okay so our next speaker will be uh
have Griffin uh have is a very good friend of mine uh we have known each
other since 2017 I believe uh first time I'm not happy in person was at the
Kennedy Space Center when I went there to see the park or solar probe lunch and
that's what happened I connected hap owns his own personal observatory in
South Carolina and he does a lot of astrophotography from there but he does
a lot more than that he also tracks down asteroids and comets and reports them to the minor planet center uh him and I
have been working a lot on a lot of Citizen science programs and we have the
honor of discovering an asteroid together in 2020 um during the pandemic everything was
remote it was um it was a really great uh moment for us and uh tonight he will
uh share with us a little bit more about the work that he does from The Observatory and what he's involved with
currently um have these uh feel free to share your screen if you have slide circus okay all
right thank you pran glad to be here tonight like I said we uh let me see if I can share this
and get this up and running let's see here we go
this is uh a part of a program that brand and I
gave out at the Nebraska star party in July and has been updated just a little bit
um when Pratt comes and visits me uh usually uh once or maybe twice a year
and so we always like to make sure that we schedule some time at the observatory
my Observatory is about 45 minutes from my house I live in South Carolina right in the middle of South Carolina and uh
this is my Observatory it's on a site with nine or excuse me with with four
others we have five observatories on site most of them have two people in them with two telescopes and two peers
um uh I originally had a partner in with mine to help build this and uh he has
since moved on he's living down in South America now so I own this Observatory all to myself and I've got two different
Imaging rigs in it this is the telescope room itself with the roof rolled back
there's two main rooms there there's this room the telescope room and a warm
room that has a kitchen and a bathroom and sleeping facilities and everything so it's basically you could go there and
stay without any problem for several days and I often do as soon as you know because South here in South Carolina
clear skies are just very hard to come by sometimes here's pran a couple years
ago at uh at my main scope which is a plane wave 12 and a half inch uh
telescope and uh the one I do do the asteroid photography with
I'm mostly known as a astrophotographer here's a collage of uh
of uh galaxies and uh and nebulae and
that's really where uh my beginning uh in astrophotography uh lies and still is
in deep space photography but when cran comes around we uh we spend our time looking for asteroid or looking at
asteroids mostly uh and I'll talk to you in a minute about how we discovered a new one but uh we uh we like to find
asteroids particularly her asteroid we call it hers because it's got her name on it and we we really enjoyed tracking
that and anything else that's up in the sky and we actually I'll talk to you a little bit in a minute about a comment
that we provided the final uh information to to uh to make to make it
into a a named comment anyway this is my uh control room here everything is
inside and temperature controlled uh this this tells I mean this Observatory
is built out in the middle of nowhere like I said it's in a very dark sky side of uh South Carolina about 45 minutes
from my home and uh there's a group of uh five of them here and uh recently
I've just added a radio telescope this is a little 1.8 meter uh hydrogen telescope operating it operating at 1.42
gigahertz and I'm currently mapping the the hydrogen in the arms of the Galaxy
and measuring its rotation rate and completing a project that basically
duplicates the science that was done in the 50s and 60s to determine that we live in a spiral galaxy because you
obviously can't see that when you look at at the the Milky Way uh visually but it's easy to come come by that
conclusion if you are measuring the hydrogen clouds anyway here is
um some videos of a um of several asteroids here I can't quite
reach read my screen because it's partially covered up but uh we shoot a lot of these little uh animations I'll
shoot uh maybe two or three minute exposures and space them out by five minutes most asteroids tend to move at
about one or two or three Arc seconds per minute so it really doesn't help to stay on them very long because they'll
move off to another pixel so most of my exposures are maybe two minutes and then I'll move on skip skip five minutes and
move on and get another one um here is you can probably see the labels at the top but I can't read it
because I'm covered up with something here um but it's it's really interesting to to
to take a stack of images and and create a uh an animation
here's a comet that I shot a few years back
here's one that actually uh pran was there when we shot this one sometimes it's easier to see when you uh
reverse the screen and make it black on white instead of white on black
now this is not really an asteroid at all this is the James Webb Space Telescope that I shot about two or three
weeks ago um a lot of people don't realize that it is bright enough uh to see through a
telescope um it has its uh reflective bottom aimed towards us to block out the Sun from the
cold side of the telescope and so it's easy it makes a really reflective object
and most of that motion is our own motion by the way anyway what I like to do is is whenever
I do measure these these uh these these uh asteroids is use a program called
astrometrica to uh provide the data uh positional data to the modern planet
center uh they do require that you have an observatory number uh they they want
to make sure that you know what you're doing when you send them data that your data is accurate so you have to uh spend
a little bit of time sending sending them several test samples and they check that for accuracy and then once they're
satisfied that you know what you're doing they will assign you a uh tell us a uh an observatory number and then you
use that from then on this is uh astrometrica that we use to
um it basically Maps a an image with every pixel being mapped
to a a calibrated right Ascension and declination so that when you click on an object uh since the metadata of the fits
image that that you supply this with has accurate information about the time and
the date it looks in the minor planet centers database to see what should have been there at that time and identifies
if he's either a known asteroid or something potentially new
now when I when I met pran um she told me that she had an asteroid
named after her and so as soon as I got back home that was one of the first things I wanted to do is see if I could
recover that asteroid and this is the first image that I shot over a period of
time and you can see it as a streak there and that was uh trans asteroid its number is four five six eight seven
and um from then on we did a number of measurements on it using astrometrica
and other other uh software this is an animation of it there in the center
of it moving and ironically over to the right side you'll see another asteroid on a parallel path
that is a known asteroid we did check I don't remember which one it was but but pran's asteroid so to speak is the one
in the middle there now here uh one time when she was here we uh had been out all night and uh the
sun was about to come up it was almost a full moon night and so the sky was very bright and uh
we she said well let's let's try something different before we leave and let's look and see what is on the minor
planet uh centers database of objects that need further observations to be
confirmed and we found this Comet uh that was uh it just had it was CK
19y040 at the time that was the nomenclature on it and if you'll notice up here see if I can present it there
anyway the last two observations here the the last three digits is is the
observatory number and 449 is my Observatory number so we provided the last of these two positional datas you
can see down here here is uh the Griffin Hunter Observatory uh with Observer
being friend very high city and and me being the measurer and we sent these in and the very early the next morning I
got a uh a uh a message that said that that
that uh had now been confirmed our data was the last data that they needed to uh
to confirm it and that was Comet C 2019 y4 Atlas And if you remember
um that one started becoming very bright in the uh early in the year 2020 and was
predicted to become visual naked eye by March or April of that year and it was supposed to be the the comet of the
decade well unfortunately when it passed by the sun it broke up and it never became visual but that's our little
little touch with with uh with a famous Comet there and that was a lot of fun
this was an image I took of it before it broke up now what we're doing now is working in
the international astronomical search collaboration or iasc Isaac as it's called for short and what this group
does is that they uh they partner with the pan Stars telescope out in Hawaii
actually there's two of them now and um the first one was a 1.8 meter F 4.4
Richie Crichton uh and they have a huge multi-section camera for 1.4 gigapixel
uh camera that covers a large portion of the sky this is the uh sort of a
schematic diagram of it uh the white spots there are bad pixel sections and
of course we see it in the data but anyway what what they do is they provide these they put together these these
campaigns they call them and invite people from our groups for people from all over the world to uh or individuals
to join in and they send you data groups of data of usually four images that are
taking 10 minutes apart and they'll send you groups of those and you blink those in astrometrica and see if there's
anything new and I think over the years that bran and I have been working on this we've submitted over a hundred uh
unknowns is what we call them um and uh matter of fact we're doing one
right now I submitted two yesterday uh so we'll see what becomes of that but this is this is the kind of image that
they'll send you they'll send you a stack of four of these and then maybe a set of a dozen or 15 of those and
um you go through and measure using astrometric or you measure them here's
one uh from back in 2020 that we measured we give it the name of her
organization A-Okay so we name them A-Okay and then four digits after that as the serial number and this was let me
see if I can make this run this is an animation of four
images and if you look down here to the lower right that asteroid that is moving between one image and another that
turned out to be a brand new asteroid and we were just over the moon when we
received these uh these um plaques a few days later saying that we had made a
provisional discovery of main belt asteroid and it was named 2020 ss13 now
the way it works is the next time it comes around the Sun and if it's picked up again in a in the orbit that they
calculated from our measurements then we get the claim and name it so I'm looking
forward to that and here it is on the JPL small day database small body
database browser here it is already in the ephemera
Service as well so we know where it is unfortunately it's on the other side of
the sun right now this was where it was uh when it was first discovered and if
you look there at the orbit of Earth which is in blue the um SS or 2020 ss13
on the date that it was discovered back in 2020 was basically on the same side
of the Sun as the Earth it was at almost its closest point and at that point it was about magnitude 22 or 23 if I
remember right this is the uh position today you can
see it's coming around the backside and coming towards us again now we'll make one more Revolution before we meet up
with it again and here it is at its close approximation which will be towards the end of next year so I
anticipate that somebody and hopefully me will be able to recover this asteroid
uh at the end of next year when it comes close and we'll get to name it so
um I'll end with this and turn it back over to you pran
uh thank you so much for sharing all of that uh you made a wonderful recap of
all the work that you've done and that I've done I don't think you shared any of your restaurant photography photos in
this presentation um but if anybody is interested just uh
type Pop's name on Facebook and you will go and get amazed with how detailed business photography images are and I
saw his telescopes with all the cables and it looks like a TV station but it's it's really really amazing
so um we'll go on next to our next speaker it's someone very special
someone actually has inspired a lot of things I do today in my career
um David Rankin from Catalina Sky survey uh that uh Observatory uh I think
Catalina Sky survey it's at Mount Lemon in Arizona and I've been there once in
2017 and what's what I love about that place is that
um lots of you know asteroid discover discoveries happen from there almost every other night and also the asteroid
that holds my name was discovered from the very same place and it kind of holds a special place in my heart but David
Rankin has done some amazing work I mean gosh I just go on Facebook and then
there is this post saying that oh I discovered a new one that could be a Potential Threat to our planet or it's
an impactor that it's going to impact two days later it's something very very interesting doing a very hard work I
really really like what he does and I'm very very happy that he was able to join us tonight and I'll pass into you David
um thank you for joining us again yeah Brian yeah it's wonderful to be here I'm
I'm ecstatic that you invited me to be on the show um you know we've been acquainted for a very long time online and I've been
following your progress as well the the Outreach programs and Kosovo and then everything you've been doing in the
United States it's it's very impressive uh great work you've built a great network of people and um yeah keep it up
it's awesome and uh yeah I'm it's wonderful to be here um so today uh what I wanted to talk
about was mainly just the Catalina Sky survey operations and uh how it works
and what we do why we do it and um and you know what the what the results of
that are so I'm gonna attempt to share my screen here real quick
do I have the ability to that's the question there
it is okay I found it all right okay here we go so um yeah start the
slideshow and trusting everyone can see that
so yeah the Catalina Sky survey we uh we were founded in 1998 by Steve Larson
from the University of Arizona with two undergraduate students Tim saffer and uh Carl hergenrother
um it was really a response to the impact of Shoemaker leaving 9 in Jupiter uh and we have David Levy here which is
pretty amazing um so this this comment smacked into Jupiter it kind of raised some eyebrows
and we decided NASA and Congress decided that it was time to start getting
serious about surveying the night sky and looking for more of these asteroids that could cause a threat to Earth and
that kind of kicked off the Catalina Sky survey so we're we're a small operation we're
not huge uh we only have about 16 people and um about half and half day crew and
night crew the day crew being engineers and I.T Specialists and
um data database Engineers um so we have a lot of In-House software
that needs to be updated and maintained and it's all been developed in the house over the years it's really an impressive
feat that's been that's been undertaken and then we have the nighttime staff so we have observers at the telescopes all
night um running the telescopes and Reporting hazardous asteroids or potentially
hazardous asteroids and other asteroids in real time so this job is a Sundown to sun-up job it's
uh it's pretty intense we we are we are there all night so now the Sun up and it's a 100 night schedule and you know
those winter those winter nights get really long it can be you know 13 and 14 hour nights that were we're at the
telescope discovering rocks and and submitting them to the minor planet center in real time at Harvard so they
can be tracked down by by other professional observatories and you know
people like cap in his backyard this is an area where amateur astronomers contribute heavily to to help us track
these asteroids because it's not just about finding them we have to keep track of where they're going or
um the uncertainty can grow so high that it can be really hard to relocate them again um so this is our crew at Catalina's guy
survey and then we have we are we are funded by the planetary defense coordination office at Nasa we have the
official patch to prove it which is cool I really like the patches so um moving forward here
we have um the chart that shows the the asteroids that we've discovered uh well
actually all all programs have discovered since about 95 and what we have is catalding Sky survey is
responsible for about 45 of those asteroids and these are just the near-earth asteroids
um so it's it's a pretty significant percentage of the overall catalog that Catalina has found
um by far the most but we've been in we've been doing this for a while so
I'm gonna unpause for one minute my cats my cat's green come on
sorry about that anyway so yeah we found about 45 of the uh the overall catalog and then
um pan stars of course is they haven't been operating as long but we're not connecting with pan Stars they're our
colleagues in Hawaii and uh they find a lot of really interesting stuff as well um and and you know the survey is really
complement each other in the work that we do so it's a it's a joint effort and
and this this graph is probably going to radically change when when lsst comes online uh in Chile because they're gonna
really um they're going to discover a lot of objects
so where are we we're in Tucson uh just north of Tucson in the Catalina mountains and we have uh two sites one
on Mount Bigelow and one on Mount Lemmon and then we do operate a telescope on
kid Peak part-time the 90-inch block but primarily our operations are in the
Catalina mountains north of Tucson and you can see Mount Bigelow would be the circle on the right and then Mount
Lemmon is a circle on the left and uh they're pretty high up Mount maybe it was about 8 000 feet elevation Mount
Lemon about 9 200 feet elevation so it's it's pretty close to Tucson but
still nestled up in the mountains north of town these are the two telescopes that we run
on Mount Lennon So the one on the right is the one we call g96 that's our 1.5
meter main survey telescope that we discover most of our objects at and the
one on the left is our one meter follow-up telescope that's the MPC code
for that one is i-52 and it does an extraordinary amount of asteroid
follow-up work I think it might be the most prolific follow-up telescope in the world but uh you might need to fact
check me on that but it's a lot we can we can follow up 80 to 100 asteroids a night there on a really busy night
and then here's our two facilities on Mount Bigelow um the facility on the right is v06 it's
a 1.5 meter scope the kuiperscope which is kind of famous and we only operate that one part time also for follow-up
work more faint objects that the larger surveys telescope finds and then the telescope on the left is uh 703 which is
our wide field smaller survey telescope it finds a lot of stuff but it's not quite as much as the as the telescope on
Mount Lemon finds and so this I put these images in here
just to kind of demonstrate how dark the skies are um up on Mount Bigelow and Mount Lemon the shot on the left is Mount Lemon and
mount bigalows on the right um You can see the there is a little bit
of a light Dome from Tucson visible in the left image and you know of course that that's going to impact our survey
operations somewhat but you can also see how prominent the Milky Way kind of emerges out of that at the elevation
that we're at so it uh it's it's really not as bad we still have very dark skies on Mount Lemmon in spite of the fact
we're close to the city um so and Tucson's actually has ordinances on on the books that they'll
dim the entire city lights for the for the observatories around the city uh every night which is really nice and of
course Mount Bigelow has really great Skies as well which is the shot on the right
so this is our main survey telescope the 1.5 meter F 1.6 scope
um it's it's really big and really fast f 1.6 is is very fast for a scope of this size it has custom Optics that give
us about a five square degree field of view which is also fairly large for this type of scope
um and that that really helps us cover the the night sky down to about 20 Mega
222 uh and over the course of about a month we we can cover the sky the entire
Northern Hemisphere that's visible to us and during that course of survey we can find many many asteroids
that are all new and uh these these survey images are 30
seconds so we're doing 12 images of 30 seconds and then we just repeat that four times much like what happened was
showing you from pan Stars we get a set of four images and each one is a 30 second exposure and on a dark night down
to magnet 222 or so and then this is our wide field survey telescope this one is
got a much much wider field of view with the with the same camera 111 megapixel camera it's smaller it's only about 0.7
meters it's f1a and the square the field of view on this telescope is about 19 and a half Square degrees which is
really big we can cover most of the night sky visible to us in
three nights with this telescope which is which is a lie and it gets down to about 19.5 under good conditions
um nowhere near as deep as the larger telescope gets to but it really helps pick up these faster moving brighter
near-earth objects that are that are coming in that might swing by and leave before we
have a chance to discover them at one of the other scopes and this is the workout the Workhorse uh
follow-up telescope i-52 it's a one meter F 2.6 4 megapixels and it it can
get down to mag-22 if we needed to um fairly easily and we we basically
post a rock from one of the other survey telescopes and within about three hours we're targeting it with this robotic
telescope from Tucson so somebody from Tucson is actually running the scope and
it's it's sole purpose is to track down newly found near-earth asteroids that are on the neocp waiting for
confirmation and so that's it's Primo its primary goal is to do that and then
we have a priority tool called neofixer that was released recently which helps
us kind of rank other asteroids that were recently found that also need their their arcs extended because of the
uncertainty on the orbit growing so that that's all this telescope does it's a 100 follow-up telescope
and I just tossed this in here I thought it was kind of neat so we during the summer time we go on a monsoon shutdown
because the monsoon season kicks off in Southern Arizona and we really can't operate because it gets cloudy every night and
and there's thunderstorms and rain so this was the time of year that we do work on the telescope so this was this summer we we pulled the mirror out uh
cleaned it and then we pulled the cameras out to get them serviced so you can see the mirror for the 0.7 meter is is out right there and then you can see
uh there's somebody standing in the tube removing the camera so it's um it's a lot of work we do during a few weeks in
the summer when we shut down to to maintain our scopes
and uh this is kind of a neat image if you're used to CCD cameras or DSLR cameras
um that's the camera and and my colleague Greg Leonard's hands right there and it gives you a really good
idea of how big the the CCD sensors are in these in these cameras they have a lot of surface area for 111 megapixel
camera that's what gives us these really large field of views but these these cameras are just really really gargantuan for uh what you might be used
to if you're coming from like typical amateur setups you know this this camera is is really impressive and then you can
see the camera on the right side is mounted in the the smaller survey telescope and what's visible there is
actually our shutter curtain so that's the curtain that will that will Spin and open and close the shutter as we're
surveying so those are just kind of neat engineering photos from uh from the summertime
and this is uh what I like to call our battle station it's basically where we're staring at
all night um this this is this is our work area and there's a lot going on here
um I'll kind of just start in the top left and give a very quick overview the top left monitor is our Q manager and it
basically is an automated system that was that was created in-house that helps tell the telescope where to go without
us having to constantly give input the we can we can set up a plan for the entire night the survey and then the
software will basically take full control of the telescope and and execute the plan for us so we don't have to
spend a lot of time trying to direct the telescope and tell it where to go we can do that if we need to but for the most
part it's automated which is really nice the center top monitor is our our basically our planetarium software that
kind of shows us where each image on our sky is going to be and where our previous coverage has been in the
previous nights so we don't duplicate too much coverage the top right monitor is kind of weather
monitoring and monitoring the the neocp the top bottom left monitor would be uh
the telescope TCS GUI so just kind of showing you information relevant about where the telescope currently is and
then the middle bottom monitor is where the work happens that's where the data is flowing in in real time to The
Observer and then we are validating the data so the software goes through these images and it detects what it thinks are
nearest asteroids and it presents 22 detections out of every four images and
it's our job to go through all 22 detections and to determine if they are actual asteroid if they're just noise or
if it's a star or if there's some other thing happening that way and of course the majority of the time it's not a real
asteroid so our job as observers is to weed through all of these false detections that the software is created
and pick out the real asteroids and then submit them in real time to the minor planet center at Harvard and then the
bottom right monitor just has the email on this not not too exciting
we deal with adverse weather conditions up on Mount Lemon and mount big low so just kind of showing you what the winter
time can be like up there you think of Tucson you think of hot desert saguaros and things like that
um up in the mountains is a very different story uh we can get many feet of snow um during our winter operations and so
yeah it's it's really dramatic swings in the weather and operating conditions
so this is a shot of uh you know our Monsoon shutdown we'll be up there doing work we have dorms on site one of them
is attached to the large survey telescope so we can stay there if needed and then we have a dorm at Mount Bigelow
as well that's my wife standing in the hallway there of the dorm looks kind of like The Shining it's a little freaky a
lot of these facilities were put up in the 60s and 70s so it's it's uh it's very interesting experience
and then we have other threats uh to the to the mountain uh this was a very severe fire that hit in 2020. it was
called the Bighorn fire and it almost brought the observatories down it got very close to the observatory so we had teams of firefighters from all over the
country that came in to help fight this fire and it got really out of control it burnt most of all of the Catalina
mountains and it was started by a lightning strike one single lightning strike and just within weeks it took
over the entire Mountain there were shots of the firefighters at the observatories fighting the fire and there were Flames coming up over the
back of the telescope visible in the background so uh we're really thankful to the to the fire Crews that that
really risk life in the limb to go up there and protect this equipment so we can continue the survey for hazardous
asteroids and that's what it's all about is the Hazardous asteroids so this is a plot of
about 2108 potentially hazardous asteroids these aren't ones that were all found at CSS they're just after each
in the catalog but that's that's kind of mostly that's the main goal is to find these asteroids that are that are the
banners and the hypothesis uh these asteroids that are 140 meter class rocks and they come within you know 19.5 lunar
distances of the Earth's orbit these are the ones that we're primarily interested in finding of course we're not ignoring
any asteroids we find and the interest as we build this potentially hazardous catalog uh to you know right now it's
around 40 complete estimated but as that gets more and more complete NASA's interest is actually shifting
even to smaller rocks which could be considered you know city killers things like that maybe down in the 50 meter
range so there's still a lot of work left to do uh that catalog is maybe one or two percent complete when you get
down to those smaller 50 meter size objects there can be over 100 000 of those out there
um so there's there's much there's so much work left to do when it comes to discovering new near-earth asteroids
there are many many left to find still even a few large ones are still hiding out there and by large I mean that 140
meter to 300 meter class Rock we see some other neat stuff while we're
working um the left image is a shot I got from our Whitefield survey telescope last
year it was a meteor that blew up right in my image as I was surveying so you can you can kind of see the cone from
the uh from the explosion expanding out there um just thought it was really neat to see that happen
and then of course uh we're sole surveyors sitting at the telescope reporting astrometry in real time so uh
when we find a comment if we notice that the comet is active they will actually still credit the comment to the to the
Observer that was working so this is the best comment that I've come across so far uh p2020 V4 ranking I think it got
to maybe magnitude 17 you know it's most the comments we find are these are very
faint compared to the stuff that other people will be talking about today
and then one last story that was pretty fun um November 19th 2022 I was surveying and I came across this object here uh
pretty early in the night coming in from the low West sky and it turned out to be about a one meter impactor that was
coming in about three hours before impact it was I believe the fourth impacter that's been found at Catalina
Sky survey uh the other three were found by our Observer Richard Kowalski he has a knack for finding impactors
um this one came in and pretty quickly we realized it was going to hit somewhere near the east coast and
then we realized it was going to be up around Toronto and one of my colleagues at pan Stars uh
Rob uh Wyrick was uh just lived just happened to live right there and so when
he got the notices that this impactor was coming on to pretty much blow up right over his house he just sent me a
message on Facebook and said hey watch this and he walked out on his front porch and shot this picture of the
impactor coming in uh about three hours after I found it in Catalina us over in
Arizona he shot that picture and uh in Canada so that was that was kind of a
fun story wow that's so cool and that's about all
I got for uh Catalina Sky survey please uh feel free to ask any questions thank you so much uh David wow that is just
really amazing I absolutely adore what you do it's like uh something I really
really value uh however um I do have a question two questions
first up how does someone get involved with Catalina Sky survey like how does
someone have a similar job like you do for instance if you go there and uh you
know do all the surveys and look for these as artists asteroids and my second question is I don't think you mentioned
the number of objects you have discovered I know you have many do you have account number
yeah so we on a busy night with these smaller rocks we can find uh a lot of
rocks in just one night uh there there are observers that curate everything that they find I don't have the patience
for that so they're be a night I mean my busiest night at the survey telescope was uh
over 45 new asteroids so that were considered near-earth potential asteroids so it can be really daunting
to track them all it's been hundreds for sure but I do track the asteroids I find that end up being potentially hazardous
asteroids I think I'm up to about 23 of those now in in four years so those are those 140 meter class rocks that come
fairly close to Earth's orbit so I do kind of keep tabs on on those ones because uh you know they're interesting
and if you want to work for the Catalina Sky survey um we have a wide range of
experience in education and you know uh if you have experience with large
telescopes and are willing to stay up all night you know you're a candidate and um you know we'll take you in
um we will actually have an observer position posted here in the next few weeks probably so keep an eye out on LPL
job postings if you have experience with asteroid work and some and running and larger telescopes you could you could
actually put in for that job and come join us at Catalina Sky survey and discover asteroids new worlds on a
nightly basis awesome that's really really great thank you so much again David for joining us
uh Scott do we have any questions from the audience because I cannot keep track
of actually we do um let's see what uh what we can come up
with here there one of the questions I remember just off the top at what point
you know what's the what is the the boundaries of being from uh an asteroid
down to something much smaller like a meteoroid you know I'm sure there's
gravel and pea-sized things that are out there is there has anybody said hey
these are the categories and this is what they're called
don't know a little bit more about that I don't know exactly where the line is drawn I know that when you get down to
like sub meter around meter class rocks they start referring to them more as meteoroids than asteroids like fragments
of a larger body that broke off maybe um but I mean typically we we just call
them all asteroids when we're working but um we can find very small rocks that that rock that I found uh that hit over
Toronto was you know it wasn't very you know it's it's a small one meter class object you know it was
smaller than the telescope that found it so um we can we do end up finding some small rocks here
um Iron hat I don't know who that is but says I recall that impactor totally cool
thank you for the presentation lots of people uh that are thanking you
for this really great presentation uh David uh if anybody has any other questions for David please feel free to
drop them in the chat and then we will try to answer them for you uh thanks
again uh we will uh go on to our next speaker
um I think our next speaker is Alan Hale um Alan Hale the comment the famous
comment discoverer of the hail Bob comet in 97 when I was only two years old too
bad I don't remember that but I know lots of people say it was very bright you could see it with your naked eye in
the sky but other than that Alan Hill is actually known uh he's a Renault
astronomer known for his expertise in some like stars and on exoplanets and he
also is involved with the global Sky partner program which I think he will be sharing a lot more information about
that today uh so Alan whenever you're ready uh thank you so much again for joining us
I'm very happy to have you as a guest here tonight hi Prince can you hear me everybody hear me all right yeah we can
hear you okay uh I'm going to apologize in advance I have been fighting a cold
for the past few days and my voice is not what it's usually is
so if I have to stop and clear my throat or cough or something like that uh just
please bear with me uh let me go ahead and share my treat uh warning here uh
organization is a word that I am very not familiar with so I have a very unorganized desktop on
my laptop so don't be too afraid when you see it when I do this screen share
so here we go okay I'm gonna share
all right let me why why can I not okay
slideshow
I need to play this why do I want to play uh
bear with me for a second yeah take your time we can see the image
but it's not yet uh maximized okay well maybe I need to
I keep forgetting where do I hit the I think it might be the in that pink bar the slideshow button maybe uh which I
can't see okay slideshow okay from start okay I hit that once and
it didn't seem that's great now we can we we have the full View okay uh
can you see I've seen the pictures of you all do you just see the picture yeah
we were seeing the pictures that you're sharing right now okay uh I guess I feel
the the need to show the obligatory halebot photo uh they can April 1st 1997 which was the
day of bear healing and I took that from the deck of my zen residence and
Cloudcroft New Mexico uh that was a long time ago uh a lot has
happened since then in both my life and then everybody else's life uh in fact if you go to you know talk to
school kids today this may be something in their science book but uh you know that a lot of the you
know this happened well even before they were born so uh I'm going to be spending the book
of the talk to actually talk to you about stuff I've been doing more recently although I will show
this photo this is hillbot taken in July of last year
with the web Space Telescope at that time hellbop was at a
heliocentric distance of 46 AU which is 48 is a 6au Beyond Pluto's
average distance so by far the largest distance at which any comment has ever been recorded
so you don't look didn't look too impressive in that particular picture other than the fact that it it's there
to begin with um as Brett mentioned uh I these days
I'm doing a lot of work with the global Sky Partners which is an educator sport of affiliated with the Las cumbers
Observatory lco has a is a Global Network of telescopes of any with 0.4
meters one meters and also the two point meet two meter foxtel that located in
some of the top Observatory sites around the world we have a McDonald in Texas uh Toledo and Chile sighting Spring New
South Wales Holly alkaline Hawaii uh South Africa
and a couple of other places so it's kind of nice I sit here in my living room and I can order up images with
these telescopes at these sites and take all sorts of wonderful images and do whatever analysis actually I do a lot of
astrometric work that hap was talking about earlier and uh also I do you know morphological
work I try to see I have some interesting phenomena and what I've had my one example I'm going to show that uh
David Rankin was just talking about some of the stuff that they find at Catalina about three or four months ago he posted
on Facebook that one of the objects that there one of their asteroids seemed to be commentary
so I've been taking images of that object for some time and it is definitely a comment
and I was one of several people that filed reports to the minor planet center
on this object commentary nature a 2023 kf3 it was just recently announced as a
comet it has been identified with another apparently asteroidal object that linear found in late 2010 10.
uh it is uh the periodic Comet that will should be
receiving a permanent number in the next batch of minor planet centers circular
minor planet circulars that that should be released almost any day now
I understand you're having this meeting now due to the osiris-rex landing that took
place a couple of days ago this is of Cyrus Rex is now under the mission name
of Cyrus Apex next destination this is the asteroid Apophis
which will be coming extremely close to the Earth in April of 2029 I think most
of you are aware of that hypothesis passed fairly close to Earth about two and a half years ago and I managed to
get some images of it when it was coming by there it is right there
uh I do occasionally observe main belt asteroids and a few years ago I had a
program an educational program on the nearest objects of the solar system the minor bodies shall we say
and I wanted a good example for a good main belt asteroid just to illustrate motion
so what better example than asteroid 4151 Alan Hale
and I have David Levy who's part of the distinguished group here to thank for that
and so I've got two pictures here of Alan Hale that they're taking about three or four hours apart
now I showed these two images without the arrows to my partner Vicki and asked her Can
you spot it in those those images well she didn't Spot It
but she spotted another asteroid passing through the same field of view at the
time and if I had more time I would leave these pictures up here for a while and ask you if you could spot it but we
don't have all that much time so I will just go ahead and show this the blue arrow is Alan Hale
the yellow arrows are Vicky's asteroid which was 75 591 discovered by linear
back in 2000 now since Vicki sort of rediscovered this
asteroid I prevailed on my colleagues at the minor planet center and at this IU
small bodies names committee if they would allow me to name this asteroid after her
and they agreed so I am now introducing asteroid 75591 Stone modes Vicki's last
name was Mosley her mate name is Stone so there's Stone nose and and Alan Hale
so Vicki and I at least for a few hours together on this one night four or so
years ago were passing together in space I think that's a nice story actually
uh I just one more example of that I've been able to Prevail on the small bodies
names committee to name a couple of other asteroids uh you can probably see
the movement right here they're just right here and right here is there images I took a little over a year ago
of asteroid 10505 Johnny Cash
and I actually sent the annotated versions of these images to the Johnny
Cash Museum in Tennessee I don't know what they've done with it but anyway there they are
uh going to shift gears I'll just hear just a little bit uh 2024 is coming up
on us pretty soon and there are some rather interesting comments that are passing through period
next year including not one but two of what I call the classical Hallie type
promise which are comets of older period and vicinity of about 70
years that have been known for several centuries one of them was 12 people honest Brooks
which will be passing very healing in April and should reach about fourth or fifth magnitude at that time uh punch
Brooks in previous returns has been known to have major outbursts on its way
into Perry healing and it did that back in July it had been about 60s magnitude and then Hungarian amateur Sonora
reported that it was almost 12 magnitude in fact it was brighter than that so here are two images of Florence
Brooks this was the night of his report and the Stellar object and then a couple of nights later it's starting the
company was starting to expand and then here are some images I took the one on
the left in early August and I took the one on the right earlier this month Tacoma is now dispersing expanding uh
but the nucleus is still remaining active there has just been reports that there's been a new Outburst in the
nuclear region just within the past couple of days uh doesn't look like it's going to be a major one to just get a new coma like
this but we could get something like that at any time and then by the end of the year the comment itself well it should have
brightened enough that it will be visually detectable the other Halle type comment that's
returning next year is one that I am finding a very deep personal interest and that is Comet overs 13p
discovered in 1815 by 100 Goldbergs in Germany who was one of the preeminent
astronomers of his era among other things he discovered the main belt asteroids Palace and Vesta and
Vesta I have an image up there in the top right that was taken by the Dodge spacecraft when Donnelly's visiting
investor a little over a decade ago and then obers was also known for
formulating what we call Oliver's Paradox he wasn't the first to actually formulated but it's uh he was the one
that really published I did and it's asked the question why is the sky dark at night which may seem rather
obvious when you first think about it but when you start to consider things it's not as obvious as if I say now I
will leave anyone that's interested in checking that out to uh you go check out both the
formulation at the resolution on Wikipedia or someplace like that uh
anyway Oliver's discovered the periodic common name Forum in 1815
it returned in 1887 was picked up by William R Brooks and that is on the left
is a sketch that Brooks made in shortly after he founded in 1887 and then it
returned again in 1956 and on the right is a photograph that was taken by George Van bistrock during
that particular return and had not been seen since 1956 but
it's due to Pastor healing intuitive next year now I began using the Los
Troopers telescopes about a year ago tried to recover it and I was unsuccessful and unsuccessful and
unsuccessful it did one in conjunction with the sun earlier this year began emerging into
the morning sky in June I began attempting it again and then on August 24th I took two pair of images
pardon me one pair of images with one of the one meter telescopes at sliding spring
the Red Dot at the center it was The Wider Planet Center's predicted position the red square up to its upper left is
where I'm going to focus and that's where I happen to find a moving object
you know I'll call attention to that little semi-circle Stars that's there just to the right of Center you if you
look carefully towards its Left End you will see a very tiny and dim moving
object I I'll here I've stacked those two images and you can definitely see the
comment there that is coming over those are the recovery images it's about 20 second magnitude very faint but it is
there I was able to go back and look at images I take in about a week and a half
earlier found it there and then I obtained several follow-up images over the next few nights and
thank you not too long thereafter the minor planet center and the Central Bureau issued formal announcements of
this discovery there's also a press release that lco has recently published
it's on their website and where it gives the kind of the story of the recovery uh hot off the press
this is a image I took of Oliver's about three nights ago the one meter telescope
and sighting spring it's up to about 21st magnitude now so it is brightening
uh there is a a contribution by Elon Musk in this particular image as you can
see so anyway the topic should reach about seventh magnitude I'm looking
forward to following it I feel I really deep connection to some of these genomers the past here as as a result of
recovering this particular comic uh I will finish by
what other comet that is going to be in our skies next year this has come at
2023 A3 comments to change Chad Atlas was discovered in January at Purple
Mountain AKA so cheat shot observatory in China it was that loss but then re-picked up
by the atlas program they're based in Hawaii although it was the atlas survey
telescope in South Africa they found it and then they found to be the same object of purple mountain how it found
the previous month uh this comment does not pass very healing until a year from tomorrow
September 27th and 2024 at 0.4 AU
then it'll pass half an au from Earth between Earth from the Sun
and if there's any dust major dust content we should get lots of forward scattering this could be and I emphasize
could be a very brilliant object we maybe even rivaling that object of
mine from a generation I built we'll have to see that wow geometry conditions are very good uh this is an image I took
of that comment earlier this month just before it went into conjunction with the sun it already has a distinct dust tail
with it even at a distance of five and a half a you so it'll be reappearing in the morning
Sky towards the end of this year it would be very interesting to see what
it looks like then and then to watch it hopefully continue to brighten it as it
approaches Barry Julian and Earth towards the latter part of next year
uh that's really about all I have so he watching us guys for Comics Brad
you'll get your break comment after all I hope thank you so much Alan this was very uh
very nice I I love comments and uh thank you for sharing all of this
um Scott please you let me know if anybody has any question for Alan help
is there any questions because I I cannot keep track of
yeah it's hard to uh to do all to jug all these balls at the same time that's
why I've made every mistake there is to be made in live streaming programs so
um but this is great uh yeah there was a question uh from
someone wanted to know how do you get into uh searching for asteroids what's how do
you break into that uh well I mean uh I don't really search for
asteroids I search for comics for a number of times okay situation is different now than it was a generation
ago when I first started putting for comments I mean at that time uh if you
when I first started you could generally sweet disguise with the visually with
telescope and perhaps over time to discover one or more comments David Levy
can certainly speak to that uh I never found Comics that way I had
to stumble across mine accidentally when I found mine I don't know I did
spend a lot of time money for comments never found anything that I gave up and then I found one
so I don't know if there's any kind of lesson there or not but uh that's just kind of the way it worked for me I mean
I've been visually observing comments ever since I was 11 years old
I saw my first comment uh comic tacos out there Posada in 1970 uh
which by the way happened to be the very first comment ever observed from space uh orbiting Space Telescope O2 detected
the alignment Alpha Cloud that we now know surround those law comics in theater solar
but the the comet Bennett which was a actually great Comet here just a couple
of months later and that's kind of what really got me hooked and I thought wow we had we had two
bright covers that came right in a row there must be great comments coming by all the time well no I just happen to
come at a very fortuitous time like that uh do you have a question I was I was just
going to say that uh probably the easiest way to get into looking for asteroids is with the international
astronomical search collaboration that you and I are working with you don't need equipment or anything uh you
basically form a team with a friend or uh or someone else and uh right you know
get in touch with them and they will uh assign you to a con a campaign and send
you data raw data right off of the pan Stars telescope and you search through it using software on your own computer
so you don't even need a telescope and Paran and I have discovered one asteroid that way
yeah that's true from this um computer um yeah Isaac is actually a program I
don't know how much information have mentioned over Isaac program but it's it's a it's a citizen science uh program
that you can participate for free and you can just email the
um the people that they have on the website they have an email there you can tell them that you're interested to
participate and they will assign you in a campaign which is monthly every month and then you'll receive the data they
sent you through their website you will use the software astrometrica to analyze
it and then report it back to them and then they will report it back to the minor planet center and that's how
happen I did all this work um Alan another question uh are you
using any particular telescopes right now are you still doing any uh hunting for these objects or
I don't do any hunting anymore uh I really thought that a long time ago I
still do visual work not as frequently as I used to uh
unfortunately I've been starting to hang around this planet for a long time parts of my body are starting to complain a
bit and so I'm I do I make visual observations perhaps three or four times
a month um with the large 16 inch telescope that I have here
uh I'm doing it's a lot quite a bit of the Imaging work with dlco telescopes
that's let's say I I sit here in my living room and Order up images it's kind of easy and doing it that way but I
still got under the stars uh from time to time I was just last out there oh
about two or three mornings ago the common Anki is now making it bright appearance in the morning sky
and as I I was out looking at that uh I was still recovering from the cold Vicky
made sure that I heard about this being out there recovered from a cold and I'm out there in a cool damp air and
watching these Heavenly Bodies so and she's listening to this by the way
so she's hearing all this so much for joining for the global star party I'm very be happy that you had the time and
you joined us and shared some awesome presentation with everyone so thank you
again Alan I would like to address a question before we go to the next
speaker someone had a question Steve house or how does one find a particular
named asteroid at any given night um that is not very difficult so if you
know the asteroids name already that's uh it must have a number you can usually just place it in stellarium or any other
Sky program and you can first know if it's going to be up in the in the sky because sometimes there are seasons
during the winter or summer or spring that it's not going to be visible because it appears during the day so
once you understand that it will be visible in the sky during a particular time then what you do you can just go
I'm gonna share my screen very quickly here you can go to the minor planet centered
website and they have uh here the ephemerates where you can get the coordinates for the following nights for
instance I'm just gonna type the asteroid number that my asteroid has four five six eight seven okay
and then you want to choose if you want another coordinates for the following
days or the following hours or minutes um and you can also you know add more
information but usually happen I just go by hours when we want to observe something in particular but for the days
and then you can just I think get the ephemerates and it should give you all
the coordinates where it is in the sky the declination right Ascension the
magnitude how bright it is right now in the sky which looks pretty dim actually
but this is how you know exactly where this guy the asteroid is going to be in
a particular day at a particular time and then all you do is just copy paste
these coordinates for the time being and you place these in your software that
will run your telescope Mount and then the telescope should be able to point in
the right direction and you will be able to image the asteroid if you want to see it
um of course they did run him probably knows a lot more about this than me so if you have any comments on that please
feel free to add oh that was great um that was perfect explanation uh I did want to mention uh
we do have a public citizen design project as well called The Daily Miner planet
so if you're interested in uh if you have any experience with zuniverse uh you can type in the daily minor planet
into Google and it's a web interface you just log in on your computer on Xenoverse and you can actually hunt new objects in our
data uh with that project that was launched by one of our Engineers named Carson fools and it's it's really neat
very popular project that we put out thank you thank you for sharing hot
hot okay so uh I don't think we have other questions but please feel free to drop
your question in the comments and I will be uh trying to address all the
questions to the speakers here in the meantime but uh without further Ado I'm gonna
pass to the next speaker someone very special someone uh we don't see very
often uh people like her in the field of astronomy because she's very young uh uh
this is uh Nicole samayo I hope I'm pronouncing the last name correctly
she's a 10 year old uh uh from Brazil
and uh let me just comment the background oh my goodness look at all of
these Awards and all the pictures that just tells me that you're absolutely obsessed with the field of astronomy but
what's special about Nicole is that she is so young and she has already had
three provisional discoveries of asteroids and she has 53 other
candidates waiting to be confirmed and she's only 10 years old I mean wow I'm
so impressed and today's she's here with a translator Anna Katarina
who is a biologist and she will be translating for Nicole
um so uh I think she will be sharing a presentation about asteroid bennu if I'm
not mistaken but I am very very excited to hear about what she's going to share
with us thank you for joining us questions
so she's gonna share with us and good evening everyone
uh yes we can see it yeah okay
oh hi guys my name is I am 10 years old and
today we're going to talk about Deseret below my name is I am 10 years old I am the
youngest astronomer in all the world and I'm really happy to to have this
opportunity to share and my I'm really happy to share with all of
you my presentation
foreign so she's going to tell us about the origin of the name
uh so please let me know if you can hear me okay right if there's any issues with my audio uh so she mentions that Avenue
is the ancient uh Egyptian god uh that is connected to the sun creation and
rebirth gypsies
and the benue is shown as a royal Heron in ancient Egyptian drawings
so she's going to tell us more about how it was discovered it is
covered in September 11 in 1999 by linear research
near Earth asteroid research located
and it's located in New Mexico hello
uh she mentions that these institution is responsible for more than 24 of discoveries of all of the uh currently
known potentially dangerous asteroids
uh so it's going to tell us about the origin of the name of the asteroid um
so scientists believe that the new came from the Astrid main belt
and it has been let it has separated itself from a larger body larger object
s
so yes the confidence not just in China like I made sure that she uh can uh
um you know that translation okay so she's gonna tell us more about the composition of the asteroid
carbon
so benue is an asteroid of type B meaning that it's rare it's it's a rare type it's primitive and it's carbon rich
technique which can have organic compounds and
um like aquatic minerals like clay
because it is
uh so uh she's talking about size and distance so we know has approximately a half a kilometer wide and 510 kilometers
of diameter I think this is
anyways about 85.5 000 metric tons
period States if and also you can see in this image
how bennu is so much larger than the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building
so it's orbit and rotation is
so bennu spins around the Sun at each 1.2 years and it does a full rotation on
its own axes each 4.3 hours I think foreign
[Music]
gets approximates itself from Earth every six years
and that's going to tell us now about the O series X Rex space mission
is
in September 8th in 2016 um the spatial probe the series Rex was
sent to Beno and arrived there in December 3rd 2018.
we think she studies because it is
and scientists decided to uh approximate bennu because of its size and composition and proximity to Earth
and this is the first image that the osiris-rex probe made of the business
right
and anyone that has been involved in Asteroid hunting has seen images like this and seen how they look like little
dots on the screen
this is
and only in October 20th in 2020 did the probe touch the surface of the middle
asteroid foreign
and it used a pressurized load of nitrogen gas
which agitated the material on the surface and conducted some of it to the collecting chamber
violin that I can't find the numbers [Music]
and it's good to remember that the probe actually didn't land on the asteroid it just approached it and touched it so
that it could suction the suction the material
s
and the probe left a very interesting mark on the surface of the asteroid in
time of its of the collection of the material and the time of its removal
thank you materials
with the material already having been collected the probe began its return to Earth in uh April 7th in 2021.
and the image shows the arm of the probe uh like unleash unlatching from the
surface of the asteroid and some of the leftover material around it
and the image also shows the material being kept in the protective encasing
that would keep the material safe in its return to Earth
is
and the capsule this capsule has arrived on Earth with the samples in September
24th 2023.
and this is a real image of the probe in soil in an area of the Department of
Defense entrainment of the government of Utah messages out to Lake City
uh so near Salt Lake City
now some interesting fun facts about the asteroid they know things
it has a shape that reminds you of us a spinning top I believe it's the correct
term yes so maybe you can see that a little model
that she has uh
and uh the new releases particles of its surface on the on this on space as if
it's losing pieces of itself
and the News reflects only four percent of the light that reaches it it's very
dark also because it's so carbon rich
thank you so much for the opportunity oh my God everybody's clapping we can't
hear everybody
you are adorable great job
nothing is so amazing she should definitely come and give that presentation to our department I've
learned more about bennu from her than I did in recent years wow
so you just I'll make sure that she understands I I mean I'm sure honestly I'm impressed by her English I feel like
I'm happy that I haven't been as needed as I thought I would be needed uh but I
want to make you know make sure that it's clearly yeah
oh thank you I have a question for Nicole uh
how did she get like what is inspiring her why does she like astronomy like how
did she get started like what made her really fall in love with this guy
um
she was very young since she was as far as she can remember she would always loved looking at the sky and she was
always really interested in it so I think it's kind of innate um but actually I have a question too
like it's also my first time really speaking to her and I also I'm curious It's like um how have been I mean for me as well I
had a teacher that really got me into astronomy as well and I'm wondering how has been her uh you know for a few
teachers that she feels that may have been inspiring and what do they do right as well because
um yeah foreign
foreign [Music]
so she mentions uh three teachers uh two women may I add which also makes me
happy um and one of which was the director of the um the course of like Outreach
initiative in this small state in northeastern Brazil where she used to live and so there were a few key people
um including including this one teacher that like helps coordinate this kind of initiative
uh go ahead
okay so she mentions
um
who is a coordinator of the planetarium of Sierra which is another small Northeastern State and um Elio who's
another um another person who works in the area I I may add as well and I also commented
with her that these are areas of Brazil that have disproportionate amount of high quality education despite not
having all the Privileges that people have in the big centers of Rio and Sao Paulo um I have observed as my career as a
scientist in Brazil that often teaches from there and the people are very keen on studying and making good science
wow I am absolutely uh surprised and I
love her confidence I've heard about Nicole because I've read articles
International articles about her but I've never had the chance to communicate
with her and I'm so glad that she it's her first time on the global star party and I got to be the host I'm so happy
yeah um
I also want her to know that there are a lot of people right now viewing this and
everybody sends wishes their people senior amazing you're doing a great job
fantastic you're the future of astronomy and a lot of people are definitely
loving what she's doing and I encourage her to keep this passion uh and to keep
it up and go ahead because I am very confident she will reach the most
maximum you know things in astronomy and she will become a leader and a very
inspiring for the Young Generation and everybody else and thank you for for being on the show and for sharing the
presentation everybody loved it foreign
hmm she says thank you and she's very happy
I I want to add some special thanks to I want to thank uh nikolina's parents for
allowing her to be part of this and to also she is one of our newest Explorer
Alliance ambassadors so she has her own Ambassador page and I want to extend a
special thanks to you Anna for doing this translation we hope to I know you're a biologist we chatted in the
background about having you come on global Star Party yourself so I'm looking forward to that I'm looking
forward to having uh nikolina back and I also want to thank extended special
thanks to Marcelo Souza who helped arrange this connection between uh Anna
and nicolina so this is great and it's been awesome honestly it's just
been like I've been I've done many volunteer translations for astronomy Outreach this has been my favorite all due respect I know if I translated for
you as well as caught but I'm sorry I got it inmate um
okay let's thank again Nicole and Anna thanks for being in the show uh I we do
have a 10 minute break before we go ahead to our next speaker so we will be back in 10 minutes and we'll hear more
about asteroids and minor planets and a lot more about astronomy with special speakers
thank you yep Europe 10 minute break
uh there we go okay so that's it's that time right now
and uh stretch your legs get a sandwich give something to drink
um uh we've had uh a real amazing series of presenters and we've got more coming
up so um I've got a uh a little uh video that we can watch on osiris-rex and
um and then we'll be back with more Global star party so thank you
osiris-rex continues the amazing Legacy of exploring the solar system through Singapore
we started out with the Apollo missions where we had astronauts on the surface of the Moon collecting a wide range of
materials which provided unprecedented insights into the formation of our closest neighbor in space
we've seen Comet dust return from the Stardust Mission and asteroid particles
returned by two Japanese missions Hayabusa and Hayabusa 2. an osiris-rex goes beyond those other missions
especially Stardust and the Hayabusa programs by bringing back a lot of sample we're bringing back we estimate
about 250 grams of material about the size of a coffee cup full of this precious pristine carbonaceous asteroid
sample the osiris-rex spacecraft is currently
on its way back to Earth right now on September 24th 2023 it will release the
sample return capsule and that will land in the Utah desert we will go out into
the field get the sample take some soil samples and air samples for
contamination knowledge and then bring the sample return capsule to a temporary
clean room at the Utah test and training range there we will actually take off the heat shield back shell and some
other components for safety and inside of that is what we call a sample canister sample return capsule is kind
of like a nesting doll we have these multiple layers of protection and then that sample canister will have a
nitrogen flow put on it what we call a nitrogen Purge and with that nitrogen Purge to protect the sample to keep any
incursion of terrestrial atmosphere coming into that canister it will be flown from Utah here to Houston Texas
the astral materials curators and NASA Johnson are the best in the world they
are fantastic at preserving material the samples will be in a special custom
built clean room the samples themselves will be inside of a of a nitrogen-filled glove box and then instead of that
they'll be stored in separate containers for allocation the first samples will come out for the science team to
describe what we've seen and produce a catalog within six months so that researchers around the world can write
their own proposals to request sample I am going to be so excited to see that
sample and see how much we actually brought back from asteroid venue it's
been a really exciting Journey from launch back to sample return that's a
seven year Journey seven year process and at that time I will have been on the mission for about seven years and so
it's it's going to be a wonderful culmination to this adventure of osiris-rex I joined osiris-rex and
became part of the mission about three years ago it's been really incredible for me because I watched this Mission
launch on my cell phone when I was a postdoc I heard about it get selected before I applied for my PhD program and
I remember thinking like you know 12 years it's going to come back I wonder where I'll be and it's so amazing to be
here and be part of it playing a what feels like to me a very important role in it is is really incredible
I've been waiting since 2004 for an asteroid sample return Mission it's been the majority of my career getting ready
for sample return in some ways a blink of an eye since launch happened in other ways it's been a very long time waiting
for this precious sample to come back it's going to be an emotional joyous
gut-wrenching event all at the same time I can't wait
okay um let's get rid of that Echo there there
we are uh I hope you enjoyed that break uh uh I know that pram Vero has been
working hard but I think she's having a great time hosting the 132nd Global star
party uh what's your take on it so far oh wow uh you know how much I like
asteroids and comets and meteorites and all of that and having all the world
experts uh join in one place talk about all of that I mean wow I'm very happy
it's like David Levy Alan Hale David Rankin and now Richard and hop and it's
it's really really amazing thank you for having me as a host because I am very
much having a good time and I hope everybody else is having a good time too and I see there's a lot of people
watching us and asking questions and uh saying thank you to all the speakers
so I will um go ahead to our next speaker um our next speaker will be uh Richard
nautinius uh he's the head of the astronomy Department in cambrilo college
if I'm not mistaken that's in Santa Cruz that's actually where my university is
it because I go to UC Santa Cruz and Richard and I have not yet had the
chance to meet in person but we have talked numerous times he does a lot of asteroid hunting and especially
occultations I have a very special interest in occupation in fact you can
see all my cables here that's all the Iota GPS systems and everything that I'm
still I haven't had the chance to set up everything yet but Rick and Tad Swift
and all his colleagues here in the Bay Area have a really nice group they go
out and look for these asteroids and they do all the measurements and it's something really fascinating and I am
very happy to get to know them and hopefully we'll be able to collaborate with them in some of these projects so
I'm happy that Rick you had the time to join us and share a little bit about your work yeah thank you so
um the mechanics so should I just uh Click Share screen so that people can see my screen and can you hear me okay
yeah we can hear you fine uh you can just share the screen click the page which you want to share and then you hit
share and then we will be able to see your screen
uh here we go share screen and the one that we want is
this one ah perfect it's coming up
yeah now we can see your screen okay and you see it full screen good uh
yes we see the full screen great yeah so I've been doing asteroid occultations for about 40 years I realized I went
back to the first one a long time and they're endlessly fun okay so one of the
things I want to communicate is just how much fun it is to pack your telescope in your car and head out to somewhere maybe
you've never been before to get inside the shadow path of one of these events and knowing that you're going to do good
original science so let's keep going here thanks to the Gaia Mission uh we have
now incredible accuracy on Star positions and that allows us then by
proxy to be able to get really precise asteroid positions and it it is the most
accurate way to get astrometry and you don't need super fancy equipment to do it you don't need a cake telescope all
you need is a little small telescope and the right photometry equipment so we're going to be showing some of
that this is an example here this is an event that I and my former student Kirk Bender Who you'll hear a lot of during
this talk um we did this observation along with a few others and the shading that you see
is due to photometry so when an asteroid spins then the amount of light that it reflects changes and from that you can
throw a bunch of math at it and figure out um what the shape is although that is
subject to the reflectivity which is not not so easy to tell but what we need there for is to get
these asteroids sky plane profiles in order to reduce the degeneracy let's say
of the solution what the asteroid actually is shaped like
so with asteroid occultations you can get the most precise astrometric orbital
positions you can discover new moons if you're really lucky I'll show you three examples of that and you can get high
Precision shape determinations remember that asteroids are generally so small that they're just pinpoints even in the
biggest telescopes but the fact that the asteroid is moving so slowly and that we can we can slice time down
to ten thousandth of a second and get 30 frames a second of recording and then throw again more math and software edit
you can actually determine the shape and position of that asteroid to extraordinary accuracy
now some of the asteroids are are targets of space missions and those are the special high value events that uh I
and Kirk especially try and you know go to extra trouble and extra expense to try and get out there and and get I'm
going to show you a few of those well that's my gear and it looks fairly
um unpretentious but it's a it's a great Celestron telescope okay I love
Celestron Celestron 8se is our eight inch telescope we got a watch camera at
the back end I designed and built AK box occupation box it's got a video time
inserter it connects to a camcorder to record it's got a external video monitor to
watch what's happening got a microphone to record my voice and it's got a battery powered at all
we've got eyepieces and so forth and that's kind of what you're looking at there's a back into my my humble 1997
RAV4 okay so the first special event I wanted to highlight Bayton this is the parent
of the Geminids meteor shower and in the future it's expected will be a danger to
Earth so it's a very high priority object it changes its orbit slightly as
it outgasses and and let's say d rocks Itself by sending out geminine meteors
and uh there was a bright occultation of a seventh magnitude Star by this back in 2019
high priority event astronomers from all over the country came to California to get this
60 tracks were laid out and occupied by people and uh I was lucky I guess because I've
had pretty good record with these things a long time record me and David Dunham go back a long time
I was given a choice track right in the middle of where we thought it was really going to be
so there's a little camp in Carrizo plain National Monument one of my favorite places
and there is our video recording of the occultation so that narrow little deep
Spike is the application that lasted only less than one second
but because the star was so bright we could slice up time down to um to about a hundredth of a second and
that gave us actually pretty good Precision so if you blow up the light curve then you see this and you can see
how the light pretty well monitored and then boom drops to zero
and there's a comparison star in there just for uh comparison if we needed it we didn't
really need it on such a bright star this time but we nailed it we got this
data really well and uh Dave Dunham and the whole team at SWR I was really happy
we had five chords that all were in the shadow path and they got the shape of
the asteroid very well and it's allowed us then to predict future applications with much higher
accuracy my buddy um Kurt Bender he had a Miss but he was a he's he's super reliable he
does great work he's actually the quality of his work she's a little better than mine I gave him a better camera somehow than my own
um and personally he had a Miss on this one but uh you know sometimes it's the other way around
there's my fat on site so I'm just wanting to get across how beautiful it is to be out under the night sky and
getting good science at the same time so our next Target was um quawar
and of course this was the first um Kuiper Belt object discovered and it
was recently discovered to have not one but two rings and what's more amazing is that both of
those rings are outside of the Roche limit where we thought Rings would not be stable
so why does this have rings what's going on here are they brand new is it are
they really unstable and they're just going to you know they're only there because they're brand new what's her as
a mutual structure or the uniform in density these are all questions we don't have answers to qualar is going through the scudum star
Cloud right now which you nighttime observers will know is like a really Dense Star feel actually it's so dense
it's almost too much but uh it's good because that allows us to get more than one occultation there's
been two or three of these in the last few years that I've been able to participate in so there's the predicted Shadow path
for the event in May of this year and notice that the predicted Shadow path
was going to miss uh where I live here in Santa Cruz just below San Francisco
and also Monterey Institute for research and astronomy but the star was really dim 15th
magnitude and our eight inch telescopes were not going to be able to do it so I called up the monetary Institute and I
suggested look we could come up and we could use your telescope and we could get great data and it would help you to
get good science out of your instrument and help you with um with the work that you do and and spreading your
um scientific expertise and it would help us get great data on these new rings and
they were Overjoyed they were super happy to accommodate and they invited us up and we got two nights on the
telescope so the shadow due to qualware itself was
going to miss us so we expected that but we hope to get occultations by the
two rings we didn't know what to expect because they're brand new discovered and the density of the Rings is unknown at
the locations that we saw them we hoped we would be able to see detectable dips but we were prepared that we might not
it was incredible though it was a great two nights what a great adventure the the mirror telescope's a 36 inch
Casa green telescope it's on a giant roll-off building two stories high
and uh there's my buddy Kirk Bender well I gave him the choice position on the 36
inch telescope because again his equipment's just a little bit better than mine and then I took the lower
position down on the new 14-inch plane wave telescope
and uh now so how do you reduce these things there is just two pieces of
software that you need at least for the rigs that I've set up for us one of them
is called Pie movie and it was written by Bob Anderson and the international occupation timing Association
and what you do is you just click on Stars you want to use as comparisons or and your target star
and also it's good to just pick a piece of black sky and then how you're going to do the
photometry and there's now a whole choice of different ways to do that and you can see the target star there
down below and the little aperture that is set around it and it counts all the light there and counts light surrounding
it is a subtraction and you get the photometry then you send
that to another program called piyo and these are freeware programs you can download from the Iota site they're not
that big they download pretty quick they do need python but that's easy to
download as well there's all instructions for that and there's our light curve for Quad War
and you're looking and looking and saying I don't see any dips yeah
there were no dips that we could tell sometimes that happens
but that's at least good upper limits on the density of the Ring where we saw it
and we had the biggest telescope inside the path for this one so we we did have good data at least
and these produce uh papers so you can write scientific papers participate in the in the writing of these papers and
they're sent off in this case to astronomy and astrophysics
anybody who gets data gets to be co-author on these papers
um now we were lucky because there was another asteroid occultation during those two nights it was the night before
and it was by the big main belt asteroid called eunomia and it was really nice because this is a
this was a difficult event also because the target star was very dim and so the dip in brightness was only going to be
one tenth of one magnitude certainly not visible to just watching it
but you can see that the 36 inch telescope and pretty much with the 14 inch that I was on as well
it's easily detectable and we got good data these also became the uh the feature
article in the the Mira newsletter which they send out to all their donors so it's actually been a great thing all
the way around okay and then the other great thing that
we participated in was the euripides occultation so euripides is the main
target of the Lucy Mission which actually has a number of targets they're all in the centaurs that are orbiting
out there with Jupiter and we have not sent any close-up we haven't sent any spacecraft to the centaurs we don't have
any close-up images we don't know what they're they're all about and what they're like so this is our first chance to find out
we want to know in particular does the do any of these have moons if they have
moons you got to be careful because you don't want your spacecraft to get smashed and if they have moons of course
it's it's good because then you can use Kepler's Law and figure out the masses of the objects that'd be great
so there was this occultation that passed California and unfortunately on this day we had a
storm coming in and everywhere to the west of the Sierras it was raining and
terrible and so I I was going back and forth and back and forth should we do this can we
do this I don't know the weather forecast doesn't look that good and I also had a class to teach that
night and was I going to Welsh out on my class and I'll tell you what I did I welched out of my class okay I said you guys we
got big science go home early nobody complained too much I said Kirk meet me at my place we call them Captain Kurt by
the way and uh we'll throw your gear in my car and we're gonna drive over Yosemite and we're gonna go to Mono Lake and we're
going to get on this and we're going to get data I just know it release will try
so there's a group called The Recon group and they are arrayed from the
southern end of California all the way up into Oregon and those Choice observers in there have been given
telescopes by the Southwest Research Institute specifically to do asteroid alcohol patients and occupation fence to
get high priority events in a reasonably clear part of the country and some of those were already assigned
but there was a couple that weren't and Kirk and I took two of them
there I am setting Kirk up at the Mono Lake Visitor Center at 2 A.M after driving all night
there I am at my site I'm at an old west Cemetery which I hope was not going to be a
Telltale thing um
pardon but telescope what what type is that how big is it it is a Celestron
nexstar a-s-e oh my God that's the same one I have I know hi sunny I was
hoping you were gonna like jump up and down with glue when I told you told everybody the first time yeah it's a
it's a Celestron I love Celestron Scopes and nobody paid me to say that we had me
telescopes in the old days but their Electronics is not wasn't very reliable I've never had any trouble with my uh
Celestron it does two star alignment really well Focus as well um it's been great
so um there's the light curve so it was
drama there was high drama on this one because there was a race a race between a big fat Cloud coming over and there
was lots of them coming over but as we got really down to crunch time I could see and look up and say oh my
God there's a giant cloud and it's coming in the occupation is going to happen in 30 seconds is it going to make it
just barely the star got occulted by euripides one second before the cloud
hit it and that was all the data that we got actually was my station Kirk got clouded
out unfortunately and the reappearance of my station got clouded out but the data we got was crucial because that's
my track down at the bottom and that was the only track that we got that was south of the star and it therefore
allowed us to get a good Central position in a really precise orbital measurement astrometry before that start
you can see a couple of observers elsewhere got misses so we celebrated uh the next morning we
got up and did some photography that's some Aspens near June Lake there's Kirk
and me and we're looking at uh texts from the other team members uh while I enjoyed a beard
getting home was a little more dramatic we did have the first storm of the Season we had to climb over those Hills
uh tiger pass but we made it
um now binary asteroids so that is the other big deal if you can find an asteroid that has a moon then what you
can see is the orbital period and the sizes in the orbital period if you throw
it into Kepler's Third Law gives you the masses of the two asteroids and if you've got the masses and you got the
sizes you got the density you've already got a big handle on what it's made of what kind of stuff has that
sort of density so finding uh moons of asteroids is a
big deal and Kirk and I have been lucky enough to be participating in three of those
um and the first Adventure was in 2021 Dave Galt and Peter nosworthy and
Australia discovered that the asteroid Arecibo ahead of moon and their data looked a
little bit similar to what you're seeing here this is my data from another occupation that happened just three
weeks later so after Galton knows where the announcer Discovery then it kind of
became hot news on the Iota boards and Dave Dunham uh said you know announces
well hey you know what there's another occupation and it's coming up soon it's coming up in June June 9th and it went
right through Central California it was a little bit of a drive and it was 3 A.M and it was on a weekday
I only hesitated for about five seconds though and I said we've got to do this Kurt and Kirk was up for it so we jumped
the car we drove all the way down past Paso Robles and we got it
the weather was clear and look at that there's two occultations Kirk's data was very similar to this and that was the
confirmation needed and now they could announce and this was a new discovery of a new moon there's not very many
asteroids known to have moons okay perhaps even more important than
Arecibo though which is just a main belt asteroid was the dart Mission so the dart mission was testing our ability to
deflect asteroids if there's one coming at us and we got to deflect it you know we don't want to have
any of those movies scenes going on okay so the dart Mission launched and it sent
an impactor onto the moon dimorphos which is the moon of the asteroid
didymus and they're both very tiny asteroids even didymus the main belt or the main
asteroid is only a kilometer across and dimorphous is much smaller just just 100 meters or so across
and the impact was successful and so now the goal was how much of the energy went into just scattering debris how much of
it went into um soft impact that stayed with the asteroid and helped deflect its orbit
so there is an apportionment of the energy of the impact and we didn't know what that would be and so this was our
chance to find out how that would work with the real asteroid so it turns out there was an asteroid
application of an 11th magnitude star which by our standards is actually pretty bright we like that
and it went across the California desert it went through a great place Mojave National Reserve and I thought Kirk we
got to do this so Kirk was game as always and uh we got Cabrillo van even to do
this and we drove all the way out spent all night driving from Santa Cruz out to
almost Arizona and uh I got a campsite that was at the perfect spot that we needed
and lo and behold we got it we had we had clear skies again it was the clouds
were a little weird but they were moving in the correct direction and we thought you know what I think by the time we get there the clouds are going to have moved
into Arizona and we'll be okay and that's what happened so there's the occupation
it lasted all of 0.24 seconds
I mean it was barely long enough that I could watch the star do that
but as soon as it did that I knew yes we got it um
and there's the data down below as well that the accuracies are already calculated this is from piote again this
is software that actually from the photometry will then go through and do a Monte Carlo simulation of 50 000 trials
and and find what is the best assignment of the D and the r time
to um to get the diameter of the asteroid at that that chord it can even do more
fancy stuff like suppose there's fresnel diffraction involved so you get a spike and then a drop and then little Wiggles
and the light curve due to fresnel diffraction you can include that there's all kinds
of options the software keeps growing Bob Anderson's done a great job in designing the software
so together our team was the first to get high Precision simultaneous astrometry of the post-dart mission
orbits of these important objects because one of The Observers in the team
um took the risk of going out away from the main asteroid where we had a little more confidence we would get it it went
out to where they thought the moon would be a little dimorphous Moon and he got
it so there it is there's both of them and this really helped in then doing further
predictions to try and get more which we haven't quite got yet frankly but we almost that we will probably not this
year but next year okay and then the latest is Kurt Bender
may have a satellite Discovery and I have to stress may we don't want to be premature but this is the asteroid
um uh rep solder 906 rep sold out and it occulted in January of this year
and the light curve on the left you can see the main asteroid and it's a pretty solid pretty bomber
and then I've got a little Peg there moonlight and it might not look like much there
but if you zoom in on it you can find that there was actually quite a few data points that were all consistently low
and when you ran it through the filter that asked what are the odds that that's
just random noise it did pass the random noise test less than one chance in 50 000 that it
was an error however we're still not sure what we need is somebody else to see it as well
and so we're waiting for that nobody else has gotten a rep sold to occultation since then but uh but we're
hoping okay what about our equipment so let's do that real quick to wrap up so I love
our Celestron 8se Scopes we have a watec 910 HX video camera
they're the most sensitive video camera still that we know of for doing these events the more sensitive the camera the
smaller the telescope you can get away with they
do a pretty good job they're not super high resolution but then you don't really want super high resolution
because what you want to get as much light on one single Pixel as possible to get your signal up really strong and we
can do 14th magnitude Stars uh with our eight inch telescope
um with that rig if the conditions are good I still use many DB camcorders to
actually record the feed of uh that's coming out of the camera most Iota occult people are using
laptops and direct to disk recording um I don't want to come down one way or
another I'm used to the mini DV recorders and I don't like bringing computers out into the interlands so I'm
happy with what we got and Kirk's gotten great data as well we've had 27 successful occupation
observations so far in 2023 way more than 2022 which is also more than any
other year so things are are really going well
there's the gear that I use and total it all up it's about three thousand dollars
which I guess is a lot but um hey what else are you going to spend it
on food rent who needs that thank you so if you're interested in this and you
want to get into this there's always more need because there aren't enough people who are getting enough cords to
get you the precise astrometry that you really want they're fun they're a nice Breakaway
gets you out of the house go off to somewhere you've probably never been you have to telescope you have the night sky
I I've never regretted any of these Expeditions that I've done even if I come back empty-handed
maybe you guys have some questions I'm happy to take questions now I think I've probably used up most of my time maybe
all of it thank you thank you so much Richard uh this is uh this was very uh
informative uh I know a lot of people uh don't probably know a lot about occultations and how much we can learn
about asteroids uh just through these events and it's also amazing to see that you can accomplish so much with just so
much you know just a few equipment which I actually have which means that next
time you guys go somewhere you should let me know I'm definitely down to join you guys Well we'd love to have you uh
Caravan with us and go out and get another cord on these things we do them pretty regularly several times a month
yeah well keep me updated and uh let's see you're in Kosovo or you're in Paris
or you know your globetrotting thank you again Richard uh if I see any
questions from the audience I will definitely address it to you um uh since we're a little bit behind on
the schedule I'm gonna go ahead and introduce our next speaker uh our next speaker will be Dr Frank
marches who is actually the EXO who runs the exoplanet division at the Carl Sagan
Institute of the Sate Institute he is the uh Chief scientific officer and the
founder of the Eunice Stellar telescopes and today he will share with us how much
um uh about the unit Stellar citizen science program and how much astronomers
have been contributing to Citizen science in particular to asteroid
research with these super nice awesome telescopes uh thank you friend for
joining us um how are you everybody thank you for
having me thank you Scott for inviting me too um yeah I'm gonna talk about the unistail network and research we have
acquired recently in the field of um uh fly rocks asteroids so you see my
screen yeah yeah we can hear this uh good of course just when I started
talking in the sun then came through my windows and I'm emulate I can see my screen but I can see the Sun but that's
okay okay so this is a talk um is this kind of a summary of the work we have done uh with uh my colleagues
Ryan Lambert who lead the planetary defense program Arya groposki with the
comet programs and user direct and user hanush from the child University but I
also should mention that we have more than 1800 citizen astronomers from the network who have been contributed to
this to this world so um I may need to introduce the unicella
network at least the unicella telescope so this is one of them in the back here I'm right now in the office of unistella
Corporation in San Francisco the telescope has been designed has been built to democratize astronomy to make
astronomy easy and accessible to everybody so we built a telescope which is a digital smart robotic telescope
that you can use even if you don't know anything about astronomy for fun to
observe Galaxy in everyday from new house for education to teach students what a tsunami is all about show them
Galaxy nebulae comets and so on but it's also telescope which is useful for scientific investigation we created the
network of Citizen astronauts for this we partner with the city Institute the search for a statistical
intelligence in Mountain View California and the city Institute is the scientific
branch of unity is a for-profit corporation and City Institute is a
non-profit organization so we have partners with we have partnered with a
lot of different institutions around the world including NASA tests NASA Lucy
aavso and as well Iota group and observator De Paris and Charles
University well we have an additional partner in Europe in Europe uh the association
Frances the tsunami AFA which is our partner scientific partner for citizen
science in France specifically and I'm going to show a few results to get as well with them
um so this movie here showed the distribution of our telescopes between 2019 and 2023 so you can see there is a
grow in number of telescopes we have now more than 10 000 telescopes capable of
observing the dark sky anywhere on this planet you can see that we started in
Europe United States Japan and now we're expanding in Australia New Zealand but
also India um and South America and Africa so it's really making a network of telescope
which is international worldwide so people everywhere in the world can enjoy the dark sky and
contributes meaningfully to scientific investigation I am now going to talk about all the
campaigns today we talk about asteroids only and I did not true I'm not gonna give you a review of everything we have
done because it will take hours but let's I just decided to focus on a few key results
so in planetary defense the program led by Ryan Lambert uh we uh we basically
the goal here is to characterize near Earth asteroids that could potentially impact our planet we know more than 34
000 of them orbiting in our inner part of our solar system the goal is to have
every month a campaign to code our citizen swimmers to observe using the
digital telescope those are steroids and the goal is to derive the shape size and
the position of this asteroid monitoring the orbit over a long period of time to know whether or not they could impact
our planets in the future and if and also knowing their shape which will
could be useful if you want to mitigate or to deflect them for instance
so this is the kind of report we send to our citizens astronomers you can see
here oh sorry those animations I was supposed to be animation I don't know if it's not running showing oh it's running
sorry so you can see the asteroid moving with respect to the field of view so this is kind of what we sent to our user
after they are collecting data and this is a report which summarize uh information about the asteroid in this
case in 1999 ja which is a festival that will observe last year in July but more
than 35 citizen astronomers so from this data we
derived the position we send into we send a position to MPC so they can use the data to refine the orbit we have
derived as well the variation of light the light curve from
combined by combining all those observations we publish this result regularly so in the case of 1990 9j in
1989 ja it's a style pastel Road at roughly one kilometer in diameter the
pale was unknown and using our observation with a rather period of 2.5 hours we published this uh quite
recently in the minor planet bulletin and what is important for our network is
that we want our citizen astronomers to be part of the scientific process so they observe we keep them aware of
what's going on with the data what has been done in terms of analysis and then
we write a paper and they have access to the paper the draft they can also contribute to the paper learn add some
information that they they mean to be useful for the for the readers so we really Embark our citizen astronomers
into the scientific process so that do astronomy where they learn about
astronomy and then they write their own papers as well in the future so the
one of the key results we got in planetary defense is that is the spin the the we derived the pole spin period
and shape of one of the astrological 1999 ap10 and this was combined in 26 uh
Observer observation from 26 it is an astronomer from seven different countries and that's the first time we
derived the shape of this asteroid for instance so this is a paper that we are on about to publish uh using once again
with the contribution of our citizens another Technique we use is occultation
so Rick gave a very good review I was changing my slide while he was talking removing some of the slides that I think
will not be useful since you have you know a lot now about us about reputation thanks to to him and his explain his
wonderful talk so computation is that basically we're measuring the shadow of
a nasty what is passing between us and the bright star with the goal of deriving the position of the esteroid
the shape the size and finding companion around this asteroid um those are observation that's been
taken by our citizens numbers it is in New Zealand here we have one positive
detection what is this one Washman with two position two positive uh this is
what we see in our telescope basically on my speed up this so
nothing no quotation no quotation still no obligation and accreditation there is
very short this one was very brief I think it lasted less than one one second we speed up the video here so you don't
have to wait hours to see that but you can see the occupation live in on the telescope while you're acrossing the
data and that's one of the reasons people love uh this kind of observation as well
so Rick mentioned the
the nasalusi mission and that's really a key mission of NASA uh we launched two
years ago if I remember properly he's gonna visit seven uh six Trojan asteroid
and fly by two men belt um one of the targets is uribatis which
is been mentioned already it's a very important mission for for astronomers
because this is the first time we're gonna get some high angular resolution observation of children are steroids if
the color of the surface derive the ages and and so on of this interesting
population it's kind of the Forgotten population because when they were discovered in the in the 70s and then we
found out there is a lot of them in the 80s we also discovered late very quickly the existence of transition objects so
people focus on the Transit Union object and kind of forgot about the Trojan population so now we're going back to
that because we believe that the Trojan population is kind of a vacuum cleaner
of the of the solar system when you open a vacuum cleaner bag and you look in the
bag you can see who lives in the house if there is dogs if there is babies kids
Etc by simply looking at the degrees you have into the vacuum cleaner bag well
certain population is a bit like that too because of the migration of the of
the giant planets the Trojan population is composed of bodies from the transit Indian population from the main belt as
well and others we don't really understand yet why there is such a beautiful population we don't know why
the L4 are more asteroid than the L5 so there is a lot of theory about this but
we finally probably we're gonna get an answer about that by visiting those
disasters of course we're not going to be able to see the Thousand Trojan asteroids population asteroids we have
the the NASA has been defining a few of them that we are going to visit
this is going to be a flyby meaning that the spacecraft is going to pass at 20
kilometer per second take a lot of pictures and be done so we need to know
a little bit more about those asteroids beforehand like the size the shape and
whether or not they have moons Etc occupation as mentioned by Rick is the
best way to do this it's really the best way to uh to do to prepare as a mission
space mission so to know where to point with the camera with the spacecraft where to look where to find a creator of
for instance where to kind of get the spectroscopy the color of fresh material or fresher material on the surface of
the asteroid so that's the reason we have this campaign of observation of reputation and that's the reason we're
trying to gather information right now about those disaster to prepare for this mission
so in October 23 2022 we had an amazing reputation in Europe
of 8.6 magnitude style it happened at 4 00 am local time and this is a very rare
opportunity this kind of opportunity happened every five to ten years and the candidate the the curtain asteroid was
Yuri batas at the time and this is this is the pass of the occupation the
predicted pass by Mark Bui and um Lucky Star at The Observer to other parents
so he was crossing uh Spain France and the Scandinavian country of Sweden
so we prepare and upset we prepare a campaign with the alpha the uh Association Francis
uh we ask people to uh we train the people how to do a quotation uh they
could do it by Naked Eyes uh using binocular using an eviscope I mentioned
the digital camera astrophotographic instruments or even
professional instruments meaning like what tricks show is in my mind a professional instrument uh a large
aperture telescope with this kind of fast camera which costs roughly 3 000 US
dollar to give you an idea that the eviscope is more or less the same the same cost but you can do way more
science with this instrument so unfortunately the weather was complicated
this is the satellite map showing the I think it's a movie showing the the cloud
coverage in Europe at the time and as you can see we we have a large part of
our observers that basically miss the occupation because they were allocated they could not see the star because of
the clouds Ed and that's very important and Rick
mentioned that the more we Observer we have the more likely you're gonna get positive or
negative observations okay uh that's one thing we're trying to emphasize every time we do we motivate people to do
application is that do not trust weather forecast
if you want to observe an accreditation the only way you're going to be able to do it is by waking up at 3am and setting
up your telescope because you can have a gap in the clouds and be able to have the Gap exactly at the time of the
occupation and we did have that so I don't know if you can be able to see uh
to hear the music but it's very loud for me so so this is
a movie that we put together with the uh I say that the shadow of Yuri batas
passing above the island of uh
I forgot I'm sorry suddenly um Canary Island Here and Now above Spain
so the white dots are basically weather Observer Nissan application because it
was cloudy the blue one is negative and the green one are positive occupations and as you
can see we have a lot of Observer that did not see anything because of the clouds but we still have those green
dots we have 14 of 18 of them 18 positive the last one was located in
Sweden that reported The Disappearance of the
star that lasted a few seconds and this is the chords of the occupation
their category category one is Naked Eyes Category 2 is eviscope
ETC category five is professional instrument category three is um camera
digital camera and four is astrophotographic instrument
so we have enough chords to be able to distinguish the silhouette of the asteroid or uribatis and I think
this is in my knowledge the best the best occultation
taken for this for this body with that mini club 18 costs we have a Mass state 14 but it's 18 codes
and we have a lot of participants um because of the because of the campaign that the IFA run in Europe in
France specifically a lot of people have tried this occupation for the first first time they are never tried an
application before they just learn with us how to do this we emphasize the
importance of this application for for NASA and for the scientific return as
well so there'll be some very interesting things here that I want to mention is
that we have a very complex shape I mean the asteroid is not a sphere or an
ellipsoid it has this kind of weird shape and there is one chord which is particularly interesting this one here
this is what we call a grazing event and of course I don't have the video for
some reasons but no what we will see if I have shown you the video we have seen
the star disappearing and reappearing for a few seconds and
then disappearing again for a few tenths of a second and then disappearing again this grazing event
uh observed by a Navy scope will we were lucky is in fact uh an indicates an
indication that there were there is a very large greater um on The View about this and that's
very important for NASA so now they know the shape of this steroid they have an
idea of its shape and the size they know where to pawn the camera and now we know
that there is a large crater on this on this asteroid this is an artistic view
of the asteroid is not a real observation of course but that's kind of what we expect we will see probably when
the Lucy Mission will fly by Yuri batas in four years or five years
so that's all I wanted to talk about I mean there is a lot of results we also
observe uh ddimos and dimorphous the moon we have a positive coming from Italy we have a lot
of observations taken with the eviscope network because we are more than 10 000 telescopes distributed on this planet
what's important here is that a lot of those observers are beginners people who
have never done astronomy before never try and never thought that they will be able to contribute meaningfully to the
scientific knowledge and for instance observe an occupation uh of which would
be useful for NASA Mission we simplify as much as possible the process I mean
we you can visit our website at unity.com you will find out how we how
we find out the list of computations and you will see that we just need to click on a button to send the coordinate
automatically to the telescope then press go to and the telescope will flew to the right direction and then you have
a table then you want to start to press record and you do your application like that I mean the goal here is really to
make to to make people do accreditation or observation of fast steroids without having them to go to multiple website
learn how to do the data processing Etc we do that as well they can learn how to
do it themselves but we also have an automatic pipeline that will analyze the data for the for for people so they
receive a report less than 24 less than 48 hours after doing the observation
so thanks to the uni Stellar Network I will say that anybody can become a planetary we can protect our planets
against asteroid impact or can become those Shadow enters that we call
um uh to detect an application we have a lot of new development in progress one
of them is to make our predictions available to everybody so you can enter your address the software is working the
webpage is working we're testing it at the moment you will you enter your address and you will get all the
application observable in the next 10 days from your site so this is useful for unicella network but also for
everybody who wants to contribute meaningfully to astronomy and finally we
submitted recently a NASA proposal to the planetary defense program so we can get alerts when there is a new a new
asteroid Discoverer and when we need to basically monitor this new steroid and derive the shape and derive the position
of the festival without losing it and this is something important because most of the time we detect not steroids but
then there is there is not enough observation later Taken taken quickly after like I will say a few hours later
so we can have a good estimate of the orbit of the S7 and that's something we
want to do with the unisa network thank you very much and that's all for me today
implantation a longer version of something similar you did at neef and I was amazed how much you can do with a
telescope like UV scope yeah someone uh here in the comments
said I'm learning that studying asteroids seems like a lot of work
uh that's true but I mean friend just shared something that can make it much simpler so you have to do a lot of work
but indeed it's a lot of work a lot of dedication um and it's been amazing tonight having
everybody talk a lot about uh asteroids from different point of views they
talked about composition about uh occultations about discovering and
hunting for them and also comets and this is really really great and thank you again Frank for joining us and
sharing that um thank you very much a question for Frank uh please feel free to just speak
up uh in the meantime uh we are going to switch gears here a little bit and we
will uh pass on to the next speaker Dr Ron brescher from Ontario Canada uh Ron
is a uh a brilliant Astro photographer and also an Explorer scientific
um explore Alliance Ambassador and today he will be talking a about under imaged
deep Sky object and that is something uh that I'm very curious to learn more
about we can't hear you I think you're muted
great to see you friend yeah likewise thanks for joining us uh
one of the things that I personally love so much about astronomy is how many different facets there are to the Hobby
uh I'm a scientist during the day at night not so much I'm more uh pretty pictures guy that
night but it's been really cool listening to the the scientific uh
papers and all the discovery work and planetary Defense work
um I that's just a part of the hobby that I'm not involved in but find really
fascinating um I wanted to talk a little bit tonight about what I love to do which is deep
Sky Imaging but with a slightly different perspective so let me um let
me just share my screen with you and
you should see it now um so I want to talk about under image
deep Sky objects starting with uh this nebula which has a the
undistinguished name of the rotting fish nebula LDN 1251
um so I love to image I said I like to make pretty pictures at night but um
one of the things that I like to do is go after targets that maybe other people
don't shoot so much so maybe things that are either lost in the glare or something else
um or off by themselves somewhere so let me walk you through some of my favorite
under imaged objects before I do that I thought I should talk
about um what did we you what do we usually go after and I usually go after these
objects these are my photos we like things that are big and bright and easy to find things that
are famous are really good like the Pelican nebula and uh also I find that the most common
Imaging targets are targets that you can see through the eyepiece with quite
modest equipment things like the Orion Nebula so that's the showpiece targets so what
are the things that I really love to go after the the under image stuff well
let's start with things that are lost in the glare and before you look at the object in the center have a look at the
lower right corner the lower right corner is the Andromeda Galaxy
and nobody ever pays much attention to this little satellite Galaxy which is
Messier 110 but if you look carefully in the center here you can actually see
some dark Lanes right at the very center of that Galaxy it's almost like a cocoon
here's another thing that's lost in the glare quite literally so gamma Cassiopeia
is the bright star at the center of the w
asterism in Cassiopeia and that's the bright blue star you see in this image
and uh we have ic59 and ic63 those guys don't get too
much love because they're so close to this bright star
I love the uh open clusters and images but a lot of deep Sky imagers prefer
extended objects like nebulos and galaxies and they don't go after these open clusters but
they tell you so much about space so M35 at the center of this image is much
closer than NGC 2158 at the lower left they're just along the same line of
sight and so NGC 2158 is much further away so
it looks more densely packed and it looks redder
and then some of the overlooked objects are just out by themselves this is the
intergalactic Wanderer it's a globular cluster one of the furthest away
maybe it is the furthest away I'm not sure about that of the Milky Ways globulars
um its catalog number is NGC 2419 but it's out there just looking lonely all
by itself and there's so many bright splashy globular cross clusters to
choose from but this one just doesn't get imaged very often
here's another uh interesting object that reminds me of being held in the
cold this is um I think it's the largest sphere that we know of
it's a perfect sphere a pretty much perfect sphere measuring two and a half
light years in diameter and it's able 39 and although you
probably can't see it well at this scale I can see that through the get through
the nebula there's galaxies in the background far far in the background
so this is Abel 39 out in the cold
this is another planetary nebula it's much much larger
but it doesn't get imaged very often I'm not sure why I suppose because it's
fairly faint but it's um it's very beautiful this was imaged with hydrogen
and oxygen filters and then uh natural Broadband color filters for the for the
Stars some
really really faint objects out there uh the the flying bat at nebula the red
portion of this image is very well known um people have been Imaging it for a
long time and it's sharpless 129 but the green structure there is the squid
ou4 and it was only discovered in the last 20 years so by uh Nicholas uders
and I had to shoot 34 hours through the oxygen filter to pull this structure out
of this image so um unlike your grazing on quotations
which might last a quarter of a second I might come back to an object like this
10 or 15 nights in a row to accumulate the data that I need to make it visible
in in my photos here's another really cool dim Delight
I'm going to see if I can stop it for a second oh no I guess I can't
um but you'll see it blinking on and off with the addition of hydrogen Alpha and
the structure in the center is the soap bubble nebula it's in sickness it's not
far from the very well-known Crescent nebula and it's practically invisible
unless you add lots of hydrogen Alpha right to it and again virtually perfect
sphere out there in the cosmos or gas bubble
so another thing that can make something overlooked is that it's really really small
and um Celestron Vera I know you're a Celestron team
member now you know that they were kind enough to loan me a 14 inch Edge uh HD
and I just got it going at the beginning of September and so it's giving me
access to a bunch of objects that I've always overlooked before because they're
so so small uh this is NGC 7008 it's a planetary
nebula glowing in red mostly from hydrogen and in teal mostly from oxygen
and it's only 1.4 arc minutes in the long dimension
right so that is uh let's see that's about a 20th of the
width of the Moon of the full moon in the long dimension
so very very small but really beautiful shows so much
structure and here's another little tiny treat this is NGC 40. uh it's called the
bow tie nebula the long Dimension is only 37 Arc seconds long
and you can see there's all kinds of detail in the center uh it uh
it just looks like a lava lamp or something in the center with the red and the and the teal and you can clearly see
that Central Star and only 37 by 35 arc
minutes so if you're interested in chasing down
some under imaged objects yourself there's a few good websites I know that
you can uh look these up or that you'll be able to see these on the recording of
the of the star party tonight so the sharpless catalog uh I've given
you an excellent website that gives pictures and dimensions and imaging
ideas for many different sharpless objects and similarly for the Vandenberg
catalog there's a website called telescopius that I sometimes use to find
good targets and you can customize that to your own latitude and longitude and
the type of equipment that you use and of course most software has good
um soft has good um features for for choosing targets I use stellarium the
sky ax which I I used to control my telescope and Nina and the graphic here
shows the Neenah uh uh framing wizard which helps you frame these overlooked
objects that you might not be able to see in the camera and with that thank
you again Scott for having me Brian great to see you and
uh hop I know you're out there somewhere [Music] talk to you soon Ron thank you so much
that was uh really amazing thank you Ron uh wow spectacular stock photography is
already in your backyard or is it somewhere you access remotely no it's in
my it's in my uh on my property so we live just north of a city of about a
hundred thousand people an hour from Toronto my Skies aren't great four to six not bad
um but uh good enough definitely good enough if you plan your sessions
properly that's awesome thanks again for joining and I see a lot of people are commenting
on your work uh uh they love it everybody's adoring your
astrophotography thanks again for joining us uh feel free to go to the comments section you can read all of
these uh and everybody's sending you uh special thanks for this talk uh thank
you and Barry Allen and Cesar brolo a
lot of people thank you very much and thanks for having me on I know it's a little bit
off the Beaten Track on uh on a night where we're talking mostly about asteroids so thanks for Fitness it's
still space we love anything about this guys so I don't even worry about that
um we will um go to our next speaker uh thanks again Ron uh our next speaker is uh
Marcelo salsa a cosmologist and a professor of physics from Brazil uh I
was actually curious because ever since I started doing Outreach in astronomy I
know Marcelo and he's been on my Facebook with his outrageous Outreach
activities and I was checking it out we've been friends since 2011 12 years
that's a long time and I've known him mostly through Charlie paid so it's not
a new project Steven ramsden has supported his outreach program in Brazil
same like he did with our outreach program in Kosovo and that we were kind of all connected through the Charlie
Bates and I'm very happy to welcome here uh him tonight he's I think a regular
here at the global star party but he's joining us again and tonight uh thank you for coming Marcelo
hi nice to meet you bring a blender now that I say in the united parties nice to
meet you I only know you in Facebook you know yeah
nice to meet you nice to meet you all of you thank you for the invitation Squad
is a great pleasure to be here nice to meet you awesome I I I will make a uh
I'll tell some histories are about to and I still write that fell near us and
it's all right that was found in the United and about
the because you now we these weekends we
had the recovery of samples that came from restaurant but it was not the first one that was recovered and then I only
remember these two moments today and I try to share my screen
uh yeah I will tell a short history here about a
special moment here in our region this happened in 2010 in June 2010. I was
into my seat then I began to receive a lot of message and many people call me because they saw
a big fighter ball that crossed many seats here near across my city here in
the North to the state of region here in Brazil and it means it's is here then during the week
I was invited to visit many TV channels here to talk about what happened and I
imagine that in some places here uh amateur Amity right it will be found
and then I asked them to look to if they saw something different and one with one
week later the this man here Mr chairman
Channel and they hit those fantastic history
he was in his house so he was he was during the World Cup
uh he was seeing a game and then he left his house to to saw
something outside and then when he looked to the sky she saw a bright light
and that sounds and the I think that's 10 meters in front of him
fell a meteorite and his son but it was in the beginning
of the night and he begins to be afraid he imagined
that he was Sami ET that you arrived and then she is it was dark he she he waited
until the next day to see what's happening
during the day and what he found the this heart that is in his hands that he
is a meteorite that he found and then after he he made contact in TV channel
talked with me I visited the seats and I confirmed that he was a meteorites and
then the seats that had in now the city has 10 000 people living there it's very
small City and in 2010 less than 8 000 people then they received a lot of
people visiting the city trying to find the meteorites there right and I will
show a video this is a meteorite that he found almost 600 grams natural
reservates and here is a conduit and he was very famous is about his side
material rights later I found in 2010 and I show a historical video
sounds years
it's it is a very simple man not that found the meteorite
I showed you additional video I was there I visited hey this is Mr
here with the meteorite in his hands
I was visiting and he will show where he found it
geometry right was near in front of a tree of banana
yeah I I was showing the material right this is your original material right
and it ex now he is explaining how he found meteorites he was looking
this direction in the sky then the sold the lights in the sky
and then something fell in front of him
showing well he found
this place that he found the hawk there in this direction in front of
these three of banana we found it there was that in this small hole
there was something fantastic that's happened here near us until today people
visit the city to see the meteorites he sold the meteorite for the city and with
the money that he received he bought his his house that he lives in two today
there lucky guy
um house man this is meteorites
as the meteorite has been uh
here is Mr chairman with his material rights uh someone said something because
sorry I was listening I was just curious to know the meteorite
that that would did anybody do analysis of the meteorite yes yes you're having in
catalog with this is a conduit it's 100 that's the same English
so contrite with iron on the right yes the correct this converter but you have
the other the composition of the meteorites if you're looking for a vacation I met your rights
it's very famous in Brazil because it is the last one that was found
I think that is very difficult to find someone in the world that saw material
writes fell in front of him no no it's
sort of a banana tree yes yes
that is almost unbelievable history but happiness because I know him I visited
him yeah and I touched the material writing and another you always have you
always have the best stories that you do you've had so many interesting people
and another thing that I want to remember now because now we have
we are have the opportunities to see
[Music] the sample of female rights of asteroid sorry of an asteroid and but
it wasn't the first one the first one we covered was F from Joshua well a
Japanese [Music] they saw they sent a spacecraft called
ayabusa through the asteroid itokawa
was launched in 2003 wasn't the first
space
on an asteroids the first one was the near Shoemaker that's landed the in you
think I have to date here I control the sense into the face of it foreign
[Music]
capture happiness on November 2005 but
what is fantastic is how they capture the samples I don't know if you remember
what happened they may just shut the spacecraft made a shot
like a girl it to the surface of the eye steroids
and then they capture particles and they brought to these particles
I have a short video here I stop sharing here I try to share this that I think
that something is fantastic to remember this moment I let me share here a short
video I have time to share a short video final moments
and here this yayabusa here
for me something fantastic also they have a Minerva that he was uh however
that they use a fantastic model that's the Jehovah it doesn't have the roads
they jump in surface of diasteroids this is a moment that it was
uh meat in the asteroids I go further here and this is just a
ride to a cow has 330 meters if I'm not around the luggage size and
now they will show how they capture the samples from the from disaster rides
let me touch wolf further here at the moment that capture here
how they capture this major shots
um a little more this was not shot then they show here
now they made a shot a ball as a ball they send their ball
to impact two if it is surface of diasteroid then they capture particles and then hit them dispatchables to Earth
there's something a fantastic idea
and the rockets because the the
this sample will turn it to Earth in 2010
and it was confirmed that he departures found in the sample
was from the asteroid then it was a fantastic
for me X projects made by the Joshua
and today we organize uh we are organized here or his events
to the preparation for the eclipse partial eclipse observation solar
eclipse that you we can you see from our history in Brazil this is more
information about the capsule and here is the events that you organize today
with a 300 students that participate during the day with us we have a mobile
planetary VRC and this preparation for the students to go inside the mobile
planetary and they also had the opportunity to uh
give glass for the safe observation
of the Sun as a preparation for the partial eclipse
solar eclipse that you see here this day is fantastic and it is as kids look into
the sun with protection then they know that they needs to to be careful
and with the Coronado here that was donated by
Stephen Hamilton the choice also the glass was the major vegetables
and be organized and we are doing activities during this week our days we
reorganize active in different seats and the for the eclipse we will be
have activities in 20 different seats at the same time I don't know how better
manage this but I hope everything works well we did 20 different cities for more
than 3 million people involved moving seats I don't know but this was the
biggest the events about to organize involved so many different seats and so many
different people helping us to organize this group service I hope that in this
day you don't have clouds in the sky and they can organize everything thank you very much
this is what I would like to to show today you're most welcome and thank you
for sharing all the amazing story behind the meteorite that was actually quite fascinating and uh thank you for all the
Outreach events you do I see you are doing activities all the time every time
I open Facebook you're probably the first to show up if you've been doing that for for decades so thank you for
your work and you're inspiring many many generations thank you foreign
and lots of people are also sending wishes and greetings to you over in the
chat um we will go to our next speaker uh
Robert Reeves the famous lunar Explorer uh Robert has been
um exploring the moon since 1958 that's what he told me last time and uh he has
multiple books written the latest one I just received a couple days ago in fact
I forgot to show a photo of it and I looked through it the other day and it was really really really nice it I
didn't expect it to be that thick lots of photography of the Moon that he takes are from his own Observatory that he had
in his backyard which I actually had the chance to visit he operates a c14 uh
telescope which he uses to shoot lunar pictures and I'm not talking about these
pictures of the Moon that you see every day on Facebook with an iPhone or something I'm talking about deep down
details in the surface of the Moon and if you look at the photography of Robert
Reeves that he's done over the years you can tell that it's taken from the lunar orbit or if it's taken from his own
backyard it's that remarkable and Robert Reeves it's also an ambassador for the
explore Alliance and also an ambassador for the team Celestron and I'm very
happy to have him here as a guest thank you Robert well thank you pran I'm
looking forward to seeing you here in San Antonio in a couple of weeks for the annular eclipse the event we're having
at the scoby planetarium downtown um well the theme of the uh uh
presentation this this uh Global star party is the uh is asteroids and of
course uh uh asteroids played a big role in the formation of what we see on the
moon today the very face of the Man in the Moon was created by asteroids and
now we're going to do our weekly adventure and pray that my screen share actually works
and uh we'll see what happens here first up do you see
do you see the um yes yeah the ad for the book that you just mentioned I've
got to throw that up there of course because I have to mention that if you enjoy my presentations uh about the moon
if you enjoy my uh Facebook posts 300 uh my uh postcards from the Moon
um go to Amazon and look for exploring the moon with Robert Reeves the title
very pretentiously has my name in it specifically to uh uh separated from the other books out
there also titled exploring the moon but uh hopefully we will nope it's not
advancing yeah we're having the same problem we always have
slides will not Advance or go backwards how did we do this last time I believe
it's the blue arrows on top oh
like try those yeah nothing is happening
or maybe when you shared your page you only shared one particular page
and not like the entire screen well let's try it again though and use the
arrow keys on your channel I I did nothing happened on the menu then
um at the top at the top at the top right above where it says available now right
above the word now are two arrows not on my screen I saw them last time we did
this we discovered those two arrows and they were at the bottom of my screen today I see don't see those anymore uh
trying the forward and back arrows nothing happens what do you have do you have your
maybe you should yeah you should probably hear the entire screen not just a particular window
I'm trying to figure out how to do that okay stop share let's go back and try
this again maybe don't make that window so big on your monitor
um I'm not quite sure over here okay let me uh
light this one up get it full screen and then I can't go back to
zoom this is very irritating so it's a it's
strange how some days it works great other days it doesn't do anything
and I'm getting really tired of this
man still nothing you can jump back and forth between
images you've done that before yeah it's kind of a dumb way of doing it I didn't
see your mouse if you pull it Pull It Away up I want to see if you go over those errors all the way okay now I see
it's disappearing when you hit the upper portion that's why you cannot click on
the blue arrows did it advance that time now it actually
worked okay well I'm advancing it within the program Earth and view that I use as
my slide viewer what the heck I'm not going to argue with success
Oh Lordy uh there must be a thousand ways for this and every day we find a different way anyway my basic
presentation that I'm doing here over a series of weeks on the global star particle postcards from the Moon uh kind
of a uh a kick back to the uh uh every day or so post that I do on Facebook where I I detail a new uh lunar scene
and describe it a little bit try and bring people a little bit of information about a interesting part on the moon so
uh uh reminding people of how
features on the moon came about there are two primary landscape forming processes on the moon either volcanism
or impact cratering and like I said the uh the very face of the Man in the Moon that we see in this image of the round
uh Maria the round lunar Seas like imbrium and serenitis and
chrysium nectarus they're all round these are
lunar seas that were formed in an impact Basin a giant crater on the moon that
was formed by the impact of an asteroid almost four billion years ago during the
late heavy bombardment during the uh nectarian apoc on the moon so uh the
cool theme of the uh of This Global star party is asteroids well it carries over very well because we wouldn't have a man
in the moon if it weren't for massive asteroid bombardment on the moon uh several billion years ago
so moving on what we're dealing with today is continuing a series of
sentimental lunar favorites on the moon and uh well let's go full screen without I'm
afraid to do anything uh on my screen this is only showing up as a a partial
screen but uh I'm afraid to touch anything because we've got it at least where it advances it looks good it looks
okay okay yeah all righty well then I'm not going to argue with success anyway so continuing on with a series of
sentimental lunar favorites now moving on with that theme we're looking at ptolemais Alphonsus and ours actual
craters which are almost in the very center of the disk of the moon when we when we look at the moon so these
features these craters show up right at first quarter when the the Terminator is
bisecting the moon uh and uh will we get enormous detail with the uh the Shadows
that sweep across there at Sunrise uh here uh just after Sunrise you can see the sunrise Terminator is just kissing
the left side of the uh the field of view here but looking on Broad ptolemaeus
um you notice the floor is very flat doesn't have a central Peak on it like uh or is agile at the bottom or or a hit
of the central Peak like uh Alphonsus in the middle uh this crater formed prior
to the massive asteroid impacts that created those basins on the moon that later filled with lava to create the
dark regions we see as the face of the man on the moon but when those basins
were created a huge amount of ejector was blasted across the face of the Moon
the pre-existing normal looking crater that was ptolemyus
at the time was filled in with this huge Deluge of debris thrown out from The
Umbreon Basin impact completely filled it in covered over the floor covered over the central Peak paved it over
um or is agile and Alphonsus formed a little bit later obviously our sagittal
at the bottom formed well after this it has no evidence of this uh massive Deluge of debris falling into it it was
formed after the big rate basins on the moon were formed so uh advancing a
little bit further here looking deeper into the uh face of ptolemaeus and
we see how remarkably smooth it is for a crater this is a debris fill that fell
into the crater this isn't lava flows that flooded it like uh like perhaps
with Plato um if you look real close uh you see gentle this shaped
depressions particularly above the singular crater ammonius in the upper right hand corner uh see the little dish
shape Dent right above ammonia so that's what we call a saucer it is not quite a
crater in the truest sense but at one time it was or when ptolemyus was originally
created its floor was indented with smaller craters and then this debris
filled it in but so we still see it with the debris draped across it we can still see the faint indentations of the
pre-existing craters that have been filled up so uh they create these saucers and then over the billions of
years since the small uh secondary craters have peppered the
whole surface of it most of these are secondary craters created by uh blocks
of materials thrown out by other nearby impacts creating other large craters and of course that stuff showers out falls
back down on the moon and creates smaller secondary craters and moving down to Alphonsus just below
ptolemax um this looks a little bit more like a a conventional crater but it's been
volcanically modified after the impact it created Alfonso's subsequent volcanic uh
eruptions from below pushed up the craters floor partially filled it with
lava created the reels that we see circulating near the
uh the rim and the most obvious evidence of past volcanism is notice that about
the nine o'clock the three o'clock and then around the 5 30 uh positions just inside the rim uh notice very dark spots
on the floor of Alphonsus this is volcanic ash that was blown out of
volcanic vents over a billion years ago and of course there's no no weather on
the moon no uh nothing to extensively modify it so this uh these dark markings
have remained uh pretty much untouched for billions of for over a billion years
and moving a little bit further south um uh horizontal is the third of the uh
the triple craters that we see there in the center of the moon's disk also a
floor factored crater because you can see the real system arcing around the left side um if a indicative of volcanic uh uplift
that pushed up the floor of the bottom of the crater now the central peak of the residual is offset
it's a off to the West a little bit but nature provided a little bit of balance
and uh created that small impact crater on the right hand side of the Florida to give it give it a little artistic
balance stay to the end and looking at the region just at
Sunrise you can see how how Sunrise Shadows emphasize the uh the uh what we
call the saucers in the Floor of Alphonsus on top excuse me ptolemyus on top uh
um or is agile and Alfonso is still a deep Shadow but uh uh ptolemais is fully
exposed to the Sun and we can see the the depressions caused by the the saucers in its surface
and moving on here we've got a sunset on the same region two weeks later
um or as agile has already completely deeply shadowed all we see is the rim uh
the Alphonsus the uh the central part
um the raised Ridge in the middle there was volcanic lift uplifted still protruding into the Sun and notice how a
gap in the Western Wall of ptolemais is letting the last shafts of sunroof set
stream onto the floor of the crater and uh illuminate part of it through a gap in the wall
and finally we've got uh this view of ptolemyus
at sunrise this is taken over a span of only two
hours watching the sunrise Shadows slowly recede across ptolemais and finally
expose ammonious crater uh the tiny well not it's not tiny but the small crater
the only real crater on the floor of Palomas
and kicking over to another sentimental lunar favorite straight walled is a a non-crater feature it's a feature called
a grabbing a geologic feature called a grub and where land on one side of a
of a fault has slumped down so uh straight wall extends about 100
kilometers north south Sunrise it will cast a dark shadow
because uh this uh um it's not a cliff in the true sense of
the word it's just a very steep slope but it descends about 400 kilometers from one side to the other of this fault
line so at Sunrise we'll get a dark shadow and then it's sunset if I kick
over to the next slide it becomes a white line feature as the face of the slope is brightly
illuminated by the uh by the Setting Sun now imagine
standing on the crest of straight wall
and sunset you're there in your spacesuit all bundled up and join the view the sun's
going down on the horizon the sun is just touched the Horizon like it does on the earth as we watch the sun go down
and the Shadows are advancing across the uh Mario nubium
across the base of of a straight wall uh
on Earth the Sun goes down in two minutes
it just touches the Horizon then the ball of the sun slowly sinks and finally it's gone it takes two minutes on the
moon that process would take one hour because the moon rotates a lot slower than the earth does Sun set on the moon
uh lasts almost 30 times longer
and moving on Plato crater um a very
um popular sentimental lunar favorite because Plato just doesn't look like your standard crater it does not have a
central Peak most of its terraced collapse stair-step walls are gone the
floor of it is completely paved over with Basalt um now Plato didn't flood with lavas from
the outside spilling over the crater wall instead of they weld up from underneath the crater and pushed upward
and completely flooded the interior paved it over as flat as a grocery store parking lot except for some very small
craterlets probably secondary craters the four largest of them were easily
seen in this picture and if you could spot those in a telescope uh you've got
a pretty good couldn't got a good night going the seeing is excellent moving over across the Alps mountains to
the Alpine Valley another grabbing that is slashing through the Alps mountains
we see the um real running down the middle of the
Alpine Valley if you can spot that snaking real linear reel running down
the middle of the valley again like I said you've got an extraordinary night of good seeing so I cherish it
um they're real as prominent as it is in the middle of the Alpine Valley uh
strangely it does not have a name there are hundreds of features on the
moon that are prominent that do not have a name but if it were to be named it
would probably be called rametry of a lot named after the largest nearby named
crater so a dribelot crater um big on the edge of the Alpine Valley
would be the candidate name and another view of Plato this one is
more emphasizing the chunk of Plato's Western Wall that cracked and fell away
and only the basalt fill within the interior of Plato kept this chunk uh
over I think it's about 17 kilometers long from completely collapsing into Plato it's wedged in place now uh that
uh 100 years ago it was a common practice to name features on the rims of craters
with Greek letters in this case this particular wedge-shaped chunk was called
Plato Zeta we still call it Plato's Zeta out of tradition even though all most of the
other things other features on Crater rims are no longer referred to by Greek
letters now look at the shadow
on the uh there's a a shark tooth like or shark fin like Shadow protruding
um Eastward or excuse me Westward from the East Side East wall uh
you know this is an example of the famous Plato hook this is cast The Shadow is cast by a
peak on of the rim of Plato's wall and
it is very irregular that the shadow will have a curve to it it takes a
particular set of lighting and a particular tilt of the Moon it infrequently lands on a uneven part
of the floor of Plato and creates this hook it was first pointed out by Patrick
Moore back in the 1950s and um it's not a repeating feature it takes
time for the circumstances to come back again and show it and I was very lucky
to capture it the uh this particular night now um
more traditionally this is what the same shadow looks like here it looks very
straight very dagger-like straight but before we saw it was a definite hook shape so uh like I said not everything
on the moon is a cookie cutter repetition there are Adventures to be had and of course if you get up early in
the morning and look at the Moon as it's rising past third quarter uh the Shadows
are from the other direction so here we see another set of Adventures on Plato as the Ragged dagger-like Shadows stab
across the floor from the other direction yeah and any trip near Plato of course you've
got to head south down along the Alps mountains until you run into a Cassini crater
Cassini is very unusual in that it also flooded with Basalt on the inside uh
basalts from Mario and lapped up to the very rim of the crater erased its um
exterior structure the interior was flooded with salts erasing its interior
structure and then I was struck by these two impacts later in this lifetime creating
this distinctive snake eye appearance so uh Cassini has been both volcanically
modified and impact modified it got the full treatment
and lastly we'll examine Tycho crater one of the youngest large graders on the
moon We Believe Tycho is only 106 million years old with an M uh not the
usual b word but the million of these dates were um
established by examining uh um materials brought back by the Apollo
missions it's by no means definitive but that's our best guess at the moment and
there is no doubt that Tycho is extremely young it is over 40 times
younger than the other craters in its immediate area the surrounding area is
extremely old some of the early earliest Highlands on the moon that wasn't
flooded by by lava flooding these regions of the Moon are over 4
billion years old and here comes Tycho 106 million years old and just
completely redecorates the the whole whole territory uh Tycho has the largest
race system on the moon spreading 2 200 kilometers across the face of the Moon covering almost the entire southern
hemisphere and uh a closer look at Tycho we see two
unusual things extra streaming up to the upper upper left toward the Northwest we see
parallel rays this is very unusual Rays traditionally
converge at the center of the impact um the railroad tracks as we call them do
not and heading south west there's another very unusual Rogue Ray that is
tangential to the rim of Tycho now this is counter to the traditional thinking
uh the crater Rays radiate out from the point of impact
also notice the dark donut around the rim of Tycho
actually that donut is not darker than normal that is the normal
um tone of the surface around there what uh
we're really saying is the contrast between the original surface and the Rays spreading out further out that
donut was an area where ejecta arced over that area and didn't pepper it with
with the material that created the Rays and secondary craters so there's a Zone
around the immediate rim of Tycho that escaped some of the uh the terrific blast of material washed outwards and it
has a more or less a similar tone to what it had prior to tycho's impact it's
the outer Rays away from it that create the contrast and moving in a Little Closer
here we don't see the Rays anymore because of the very low Sun illumination rays are only
um seen very well when the sun is high and it's
uh allowing a sunlight to reflect back toward the source uh from uh reflecting
off the Rays back toward the source and during the full moon the rays are brightest because the Earth is in line
between the Moon and the Sun so uh the Reflection from the Rays is is very brilliant here at Sunrise we don't see
the Rays but we do see the Shadows from the thousands and thousands of tiny
secondary craters made by the debris thrown out from the tyconian impact
this area hasn't been weathered down by space weather which is the billions of
years a continuous meteoric bombardment and erosion by coronal mass ejections from the Sun so
uh the secondary craters are still very evident and finally it will Zero in a little
closer on Tycho and see more of these tiny secondary craters but notice the
streams of secondary craters extending at a chain up toward the uh the Northwest
these follow the railroad tracks now this this is the source of the railroad
tracks the streams of ejecta flying out from Tycho but they do not converge at
the center of daiko so if you can figure out why the railroad tracks and why the Rogue
Ray to the Southwest do not line up with Tycho and come up with a good explanation you got your name on a
research paper somewhere so moving on to the last I like to
emphasize at the ending of each one of my presentations there is much to love
on the moon and I ask you to come join me out on my playground the moon so uh I
hope you've picked up a little bit of interesting stuff and I'll stop share
and let bran take on with the show thank you so much Robert thanks for
sharing that and since we're here that's the book and you can actually
order it on Amazon if you go search it uh Robert sent this one to me and oh
look how thick it is and it has a lot of photography of very very detailed
explanations on the lunar topography and despite that Robert talked about the
moon you could see that a lot of features actually happen in the service because of the meteorite bombardment and
asteroids so you can see how much important is to know where these uh
wonders are going in the solar system and we don't want the same fate for our planet so thank you Robert again for
sharing that and we are going to move to our next speaker
uh which will be Adrian Bradley from Michigan USA
um Adrian is a dedicated amateur astronomer and also uh a very passionate
Enthusiast on why build astrophotography uh and except for his day job as the
Linux engineer he likes to share his passion a lot with people in the field
of astronomy and here's uh today with us that probably will share a lot of his
work so you're welcome oh thank you for that introduction and
um the series that I usually talk about chasing dark skies because with wide
field astrophotography you hope to get dark skies and lots to take pictures of
um our theme being asteroids it's very very rare that
you'll see an asteroid when you're trying to do wide Fields photography so
I thought I would take a few minutes and uh since we're coming close to the end
of a global star party it's myself and uh Mr Schwartz over there in the hoodie
oh yeah I decided to bring us back together the uh the Bros
in global star party there have been so many wonderful talks um I listened to some of them earlier
tonight on um all things to do with asteroids and I
even got interested in Asteroid occultations I got a chance to listen to that
um so the only other rare thing I can think of doing is talking about an experience
that I had in Oklahoma of chasing a storm that happened to pass
by the sky got clear as the storm disappeared and I took pictures
and I'm going to show a couple of pictures of how I try to handle the
lightning in a storm with a Milky Way Photography so let me share let's see it
be this screen and you all should be able to see my screen now
and what you're seeing is my Lightroom um catalog with a Thunderhead that I
took a picture of now briefly
I will very Shadows and let's see if anything happens okay
not very much here um if I raise highlights
and that blows out so this is one picture I took
and then I took a subsequent picture here's the Milky Way and here's this
Thunderhead but a lot of that data is blown out if I
bring this in um you see there's really there's not
much data maybe a few bolts here so the
question is well how do we combine these two images
and going back to Okie text I have a similar
conundrum here which I take a four minute exposure
this is at on the okey text grounds these are the mesa's here and it's uh so this is an image
taken to freeze the ground and if you look up here 240 seconds I found that I
could take a four minute exposure here's a whole bunch of stars so I'm going to show some of the process
that I use to handle this so here you're seeing in Photoshop
you're seeing a couple things so if I go here here's that original image process to
bring the Milky Way out now I know there's a lot of pink we're going to handle that a little bit later
and here you've got layers where if I take this off there's that
stormy cloud and what I've done is lay on
layers of the layer with the Milky Way and combine them to make
an image one thing I like to do is make stars smaller
so that all of these Bright Stars and we'll see if this works because I
forgot to merge these I wanted to merge these layers together while on air
um and I'll do that we'll go to layer we'll go ahead and we'll flatten the image
so we what I did is blend it so that you could still see some of these lightning bolts and you can see milky way here
and now I can run this routine where we make the Stars a little bit smaller not necessarily to
get rid of the stars but to make them smaller and if it works which I don't know if it
did this time but what it does is it makes the Milky Way stand out once we're
done and because I can't really see my screen we can close this and we can
save it we can go back to this image we can
close it without saving so these images
will close up now what about these two you've got a great Sky fuzzy ground
you've got a great ground fuzzy sky with all sorts of satellites planes coming through
interesting star Trails this picture alone might be an interesting picture on
its own what we do is we select the sky this is masking for those that are
interested in this sort of Photography there's masking that is being done now
to where the software figures out the difference between sky and ground
and it does a pretty good job of it so we're gonna see
there it goes it's picked the sky and what I do is I go inverse
and then I'll add I'll expand the selection
um you may not see it but I'm gonna go three more pixels
and that just ensures them getting you know more of the trees that are here the Mesa so I'm selecting it
so copy go over here
and paste and there's our ground now we've got a good Sky we've got a
good ground let's go ahead and flatten it
this is our image and I've done some processing where I made the star smaller I processed the Milky Way it enhances
the object so now I go in here and I save
I click on this and I go ahead and I close it without saving
because we just used it for raw materials so
this is an image I did not get to try again on
um if you got a chance to see it Alan Dyer who also does wide field Imaging he's
from Canada and he does a great job Alan Dyer caught this for 2023. in 2023 Venus
is sitting here between Cancer where m44
is in Leo which Rises um the morning before
um on New Moon you can see the zodiacal light make this
x with this winter part of the Milky Way and there's Orion sitting there
um at that crossroads it's a beautiful thing to see let alone try and get an
image of as you can see there's just a ton of stars there's I will very likely attempt to reprocess
this to make it even more natural looking than what I was able to do here
but going back to Lightroom let's quickly
do a couple of things first of all you may notice that this is shot with a modified camera
I came up with a user preset click and now the colors are more
natural there's still some red lighting here that we could go but if you notice the
sky color change these colors that you see are more natural
and so are the colors of the mesas here so if we
we'll do a little bit of um
selecting the sky we'll we'll invert it and we'll
we'll raise the Shadows of the ground a bit so I'll do the invert and I'll raise the
Shadows of the ground a bit what this does is create
a sort of it's a it's sort of an HDR look it's your eyes can adjust and see
detail in some of these distant mountains when you're standing here you can see that
there's telescopes it gives a bit of a range to an image even though when you
first look at the sky everything below looks dark um this gives you
it gives you targets the foreground that shows you what's actually here and if you are careful about how you do
it you know your realism can come out the other thing to consider
is that you want your image to be able
to print you have to make sure you're stretching as smart as you can
um stretching your histogram so that you've got enough data here so the other thing we would do
with this is um let's see if this allows me to invert
back to the sky the other thing you do is
you can do some slight alterations so that a little less
of the AHA you these are just little tweaks you can do
with the sky here and um we'll move on after I do
just a couple more and we want to darken the sky the light that is emanating from
this part of the Milky Way in a border one zone is really there and that's because we're doing a long exposure
that's what we're capturing and so as a result we have an image that highlights dust Lanes in
this part of the Milky Way and it also highlights the foreground so if you you're ever at the Oaky Tech star party
and you look to the West as The Milky Way's rolling past this Mesa this is
what you see and so what about that storm I was chasing earlier that was the next night
let's go see what we got there um let's find it so I've got this is an
earlier image that I combined as you can see that
grouping of lightning didn't change and this was the resulting image there let's see if we can find
the image that we had in Photoshop and this looks like it's it right here
and let's work on it a little bit we'll we'll do a quick
edit there's the colors this is slightly
tilted so we will automatically straighten it out
we're going to go in here because we want to see a little more of this
lightning so we go in our mask let's go ahead and bring a brush in
and let's let's see about masking just this area
we'll do a rough mask and let's see what happens if we
cut some highlights a bit and let's see what happens if we
behaves oh we're starting to get so as you can see we we have to be careful
how we play with that region to try and keep it looking as realistic
as we can without uh losing some of the you know
losing some of the details this storm is still over here
Let's uh let's create
a new Sky mask and invert
and we'll we'll turn it back over to uh shorts who's waiting in the wings of the
show is beautiful Imaging um we will invert and we'll bring the
Shadows up and here we've exposed the field
it may not be quite enough so we'll lift the exposure a little bit now one thing that I always do
with these images is to noise reduce I'll pass something into noise reduction
and what that does is if you notice there's a ton of noise
here even in the Milky Way itself you'll see a little bit
of the noise so I have a couple of tools that I use for that so in finishing this
image I would go ahead and edit this in topaz
dinos AI and from there you'll end up with a final image what
you're seeing on your screen is close to the final combination of a storm and the Milky Way
it basically takes a couple of different exposures um you have to expose for the lightning
and then don't move your camera exposed for the Milky Way and take the two
images and layer them together in Photoshop
and then once you have the layers put together you bring out what you want seeing and
you you start doing some of your uh photo editing of the photons you've got
and your end result will end up being a uh
photo and I stopped sharing my screen I actually did have I'll do one more quick
before I uh just to point out that your time slot
has kind of gone further than the we have one more last speaker
so if you could wrap it up uh that would be great sorry no that's okay
do you process the uh composite after you combine the images or do you do some
processing on each image to get them close and then merge the images
I'll do a little bit of both I'll I will process the sky image
then combine it and then I'll process the final image if my if my combination
brought out a little less of this lightning then that's amazing I'll bring
it up yeah this is an image I I've finished and noise reduced and everything and ended up with this so I
took several different shots of that receding Thunderhead as The Milky Way
appeared um somewhere over here there's an earlier shot where here you know the
Milky Way in the clouds and
you always try and work on different ways to show what's going on this one I
like because you barely see the Milky Way emerging it's an earlier shot and
here's this Thunderhead here so let's move on um so
sorry for the overtime but that's my presentation and I hope it was
informative um and gives a little insight into some of the things I like to do when um
putting images together that I get when I'm out and uh and taking shots so thank
you go back to you thank you very much and that was actually really cool because I am not a nice photographer but
I do have a nice DSLR camera and when I was a Texas Star Party I took some nice
images even that I didn't have any experience in processing them uh they were kind of
worthless but this was a nice uh nice informative uh presentation maybe I
should try the same software and do something similar that he just showed thank you again for sharing that and we
will move on to our next and the last speaker for the show for tonight and
this is John Schwartz hello
just in case the asteroid falls on us okay there's a big one right behind me
it they're gonna Harvest all the precious metals off of it yeah thank you for joining and uh just
for you please watching John as an award-winning space artist and also a
very uh dedicated Outreach astronomy Outreach Enthusiast and today he will be
talking about drawing out the universe so there you go John
okay yeah so this is um asteroid bennu right there
I did a little composite myself it's pretty big it's bigger than the
Empire State Building I would make a big crater I'm sure
um but it's amazing that the asteroids and the Comets when they Collide of course
there's complete destruction but they deposit the building blocks of life
amino acids and even potentially microbiological
life but anyway let me get started with my presentation
how's everybody doing tonight uh doing great it's been a fantastic
evening with lots of speakers lots of different presentations amazing
awesome okay so I'm just gonna load up my
presentation really quick I did uh quite a few lunar ones
just to stay in line with the asteroid
theme [Music] I always like to finish with a few um
flowers and pictures of my pup okay here we go
all right so there's bennu cruising through the Milky Way
out in space I uh created this one that's a another
huge asteroid bennu it would be very bad if it hit
here's another angle it's flying by cruising away we're safe
it's a good thing this is gusendi
um I use the yellow row and did a lot of work to get this to
look good it's uh an amazing crater you could see
tremendous detail on the crater floor and again from a nice asteroid impact
this is a sketch of the Moon I did uh looking through a very sharp explore
scientific triplet carbon fiber APL
it's a very nice uh telescope for lunar work solar planetary
clusters I mean it does everything pretty good but I especially like to use it on the planets in the Moon
so this is actually a sketch took uh quite some time I did it in the
side by side mode on procreating so I had a good cell phone snapshot to work
from so I could correct all the imperfections
and so I'm pretty pleased this is a
uh Keith's crater so there's an actual volcanic sindo cone
uh right next to that crater on the left and you can see
the the Dome it's like raised up like a bump that's actually a volcanic cinder
cone from the time when the moon was still active many eons ago this is also a sketch
I couldn't not post this one this is one of my favorites it's like my first real
digital sketch I did of the moon and the clouds and the Milky Way so I was pretty happy it was uh
cloudy and I couldn't see anything and then I looked out the moon was coming up
through the clouds of course uh light pollution kills the Milky Way so you
don't ever really see that unless you're way up in uh the mountains like Mount Everest you'd probably see
something like that this is uh a moon in the sea of clouds
just came through peeked through for a split second and the clouds were really
amazing translucent and they had a bluish cast to them
so I thought I'd uh do a sketch this is my latest one this is uh the
other night again the moon was in the clouds and um it it's like mac you know Mac the
moon you can see the face and uh so it's a really cool shot of the Moon I work
from a cell phone photograph of course but um it doesn't show you anything like that this is a lot of work involved uh
digital sketching with uh airbrush and procreate and different tools
but I thought it was a pretty cool look different you know a lot of people don't think you
can do stuff when it's cloudy and um you know if you just get outside and look you'd be surprised what you can get
sometimes you see the most amazing clouds and and Vistas with the sun and
the moon just absolutely gorgeous views that you can see in the sunrise
and sunset in the morning and night this I've been working on all day
and uh probably about a couple weeks this was uh from the Star
party at Mount Pinos last month this is the Ring Nebula this is a sketch this is very hard to
get this to look the way it looks believe me I mean you
would think you could draw the ring and it's pretty simple but you know the details within the structures
I was uh really amazed with the structure that I could see in my 28 inch
and um I like the view without a filter because it's crisp and clear
and it really pops out when you have the aperture so I was very happy with this
um I man enter this in cloudy nights I'm not sure yet I just I'm not quite done
but I'm getting there so M57 the Ring Nebula an exploded star
this is another one uh the first time I've shown it this is NGC 7814 again
another catch from the last month's star party this is uh in Pegasus
it's a very very faint Galaxy Edge on and even in the 28th you
know you're barely gonna get uh this is as good as it'll get I also had
the assist of Mallon cam so that was very helpful in getting uh
an image that I could work on for later when I came home and it has a reddish glow to it like a
orange Hue to it I'm not sure if that's the distance or just the the color of the Stars within
it but um it's a really neat Galaxy to look at that dust Lane is incredibly
dark and defined and the core is just diffused and it's Gotta Have a huge
massive black hole in there to create that kind of light
it's almost like a sombrero or NGC 4565
Edge on they exhibit similar features in a
similar look this is a segment of my Orion I'm
working on uh this is just a close-up of the trapezium
and uh this is probably years of work to get to where I'm at and
I've actually taken it a little further so I'm not showing that one yet because I want to um
save that one for later but I have uh more work to do these works you can work
on for years um with digital you have uh unlimited
library of them that store basically on your phone or on your computer so you
can always revisit and add the views that you've been getting through bigger
telescopes or just better nights of observing where the seeing is tremendous
we stayed up till daylight and looked at the Orion Nebula with the lumicon gen
303 filter in the daytime it was literally the sun was coming up
at six o'clock to seven o'clock we are observing and I saw some details that
I've never seen it was absolutely incredible um
unbelievable you never would think you could do that in the daytime but you can with the lumicon O3 gen 3 filter
this is another version an older one that I did of the Orion Nebula
concentrating on the trapezium it's a different attempt
I kind of liked it I I've never shown it so I thought I'd show it tonight
no the Orion nebulous magnificent nebula that we're blessed to have in the
northern hemisphere the southern hemisphere has so many Treasures of delightful objects you know
some of the best and uh this is one of ours in the northern is the great Orion Nebula
absolutely one of my favorite targets to look at
this is a Milky Way shot and uh the fireflies came out
to uh join the heavens I actually created this you know there's
the jar of fireflies I collected afterwards I wish we had those here
um they're usually back East they're amazing to see um when we were children we used to
catch them and put them in jars and they were just magical one of the great
things of um living back East where you have seasons and these grow their I
don't think they grow in Arizona or California I've never seen them but I sure wish they did
that's a dolly painting I did uh Salvador Dali it's a 30 by 40 acrylic
on canvas and uh took me quite a long time to do
that sorry about that I didn't know I had that in there and I always like to close with some
flowers these are flowers from a neighbor they
brought me into their Paradise their backyard and it was just hidden from everywhere and when you went back there
you just vanished into a beautiful scene of a waterfall like a little sprinkler
and beautiful flowers and a trellis these were growing there
you know always looking at Nature's Beauty looking at the flowers and the
clouds the sunsets Stars the Moon
always paying attention to the beauty of nature
it's absolutely amazing that's another one from their backyard
they had a gorgeous backyard and um they just sit back there and relax and have
teeth they were English so they liked tea this was my um photo
through the 28 inch telescope of the Eagle Nebula from Mount Pinos California
I was stunned to see that we could get this kind of a result
considering you know Hubble Is a much bigger instrument plus it resides
in space this was taken on Earth right here and um
absolutely amazing what you can do with the technology that we have today this
is a zwo camera my friend merko took the shot
and uh very proud of it and if you see that little guy on the right that's my
dog bomb scope he's in see
here he is again smelling the flowers he always goes with me on walks and he
loves flowers too this is our new friend we got a bunny
rabbit and I've been teaching him to be kind and gentle with other animals and he's
actually very nice um I think he thinks it's a Pez dispenser because He follows it around
and eats the candies so that is my presentation
thank you John thank you you can see a lot of patience and
dedication to all the artwork that you've done it's spectacular and it's also amazing that how all of us are
trying to share our passion in different ways either through photography or art
or or music I know how this you know plays the guitar and all of that or you
know tonight somebody gonna play the guitar tonight
um maybe next time I will give us a show but again I would like to give you a
special thanks for joining and thank you but everybody all the speakers it's been
an amazing show I had a lot of fun uh talking to all of you I've learned a lot
um and I hope to see you again maybe another time I know Scott does This
Global star party every other Tuesday and I would like to thank Scott for
having me as a host for this show so thank you Scott for pulling this together and thank you everyone
thank you happy Tuesday hey John I wanna I wanna give my comment
a couple of those Milky Way images you had were absolutely stunning thank you
for drawing you you nailed a lot of features in the Milky Way that even imagers
gloss over when they process so hats off you you've been you've been doing some
work over there well you've inspired me I'll tell you um your work is Standalone it's just
magical to see your work and um well yeah it's it's inspired now now you got
to put some lightning in one that's your that's your next challenge how about the ring did you like that
ring that ring was great that I mean I almost maybe wish I'd look through a telescope with that much aperture to see
something like that but uh yeah I mean it's just amazing my telescope is uh so
good and um you know all my instruments are and and
it helps when you have a variety of instruments but when you're doing deep space it's always better to use large
aperture newtonians and um we had clouds that came in again the
coastal valleys were covered with Marine layer it was an epic night I was
rewarded by the universe once again and I've got some great stuff to share and
and I did public work I did a star party for all the people that were up there they came to my scope and they were just
loving it that's what we do when we go up there it's about sharing the views you know
and yeah absolutely so Premiere my apologies John and I haven't uh closed
the star party in a while so I had to uh
you know so we we know you're you're looking to uh close so we'll do that
with John until next time
something I think it's yeah 10 30 here in Arkansas yeah oh okay so it's 11 30
Years also at about 10 30. yeah that's probably time man
John's got four more hours of observing to do tonight he's over there and it's
fairly dark but it moves out the Valley Times
I have more uh that I started you know my friend
Andrew Clark comes up there he's an amazing Sketcher and um he stays up all
night and sketches so hopefully I can get him to come on here he's absolutely amazing
um just to see someone sketch with pastel powder in the dark with a red
light on black paper it's amazing that he gets these results
and um you know it's an honor to to be a part of it with him and hang out and you
know we we met on cloudy nights he posts a lot of work on there won a lot of contests too on there so he's an
exceptional guy and it's there's just great people in this hobby you know when you do this you find that everybody up
there is uh they're just awesome people so giving uh helpful if anyone is in crisis
they just come to your Aid they got screws bolts tools tail rats
you know and always let me say this when you go to a star party make sure you do
a checklist because every time you don't you're gonna forget critical parts that's true
I I carry it like five of each of everything so I'm helpful for people
like I had to loan out two telrads um but you know some things I don't want to
loan out like the the good telescopes all right guys and thank you so much we
have to wrap this up yes yes uh growling and yeah dinner I didn't I would also
like to thank everybody for watching us over on YouTube Facebook and other social media uh thanks Scott again and
everybody have a great evening yeah thank you so much and happy I couldn't forget about you thank you as
well you're you're sitting here closing it down with us so so good to meet you good night everybody
it is officially 11 34 on the East Adrian thank you so much good to see you my
friend good seeing you again John and excellent job in hosting tonight
from Vera oh yeah she did a wonderful job thank you all right thanks everyone
keep looking up keep looking up that's right yes yes good night we will see you uh next
Tuesday
come on come all to the Southern Cross astronomical society's 2024 winter start
party celebrating 40 Years of stargazing happening from February 5 through the
11th 2024 on Scout key in the beautiful Florida Keys get away from the cold and
adjust your latitude underneath the pristine Skies of Southern Florida with breathtaking views of Anna Karina the
jewel box the Southern Cross Centaurus a and of course the
Magnificent Omega Centauri tickets will go on sale under about October 1 2023 at
scaz.org see you there
Targus is on a mission to create smart sustainable accessories to empower you
to do more by using glass [Music] thank you
sustainability shouldn't be a barrier to Tech it should be seamlessly integrated
with how we work play and live that's why we're on a journey to create
a suite of tech accessories where smart design and sustainability are inextricably linked
we're doing more designing smarter training bigger and using less
introducing the EcoSmart range of bags and accessories a collection of products
that not only puts the planet and people first by using a host of eco-friendly Innovations and materials but enables
you to do more with your device while protecting and empowering your future
it's our planet your future together with Targus you've got this
are your eclipse glasses safe for looking at the sun let's check to see if your eclipse glasses can handle the heat
or if they need to stay inside first off never check your eclipse glasses with
the sun that's a good way to injure your eyes take your eclipse glasses and find a bright light like a lamp or a
flashlight hold your eclipse glasses up to the light and look through them the light will appear extremely dim or
not appear at all when looking through the glasses for example you should only be able to see the filament of a light
bulb but not the glow surrounding the bulb also if your eclipse glasses have any marks or scratches on them don't use
them if you have older eclipse glasses from a previous Eclipse give them a check to make sure they haven't been
damaged or scratched all safe eclipse glasses will meet the iso 12312-2 standard
eclipse glasses in a safe place where they won't become scratched or punctured remember never look at the sun without
eclipse glasses or a solar filter be safe and happy Sun viewing everyone
foreign
foreign
foreign [Music]
thank you