Global Star Party 140

Transcript:

there we go good okay I love the comment if you're just now logging
in um you are watching the 140th Global star party with the theme of alignment
and we've got some uh presenters backstage right now and we will be getting started here in just a
moment was and Joseph Johnson is watching on
YouTube watch
[Music]
it this is a visualization of the Juno
spacecraft beating up with Jupiter party
stretching the alignments that um are done at NASA JPL with the
spacecraft are just [Music] unbelievable the gravity
assists and uh you know all the strategy and Mathematics and everything
that comes into play with this is just it's crazy to
me got John Ray from Cornish flat New Hampshire watching Mike peoples is
on Mark Drexler Jim
Mosley and all of those people in the background that have not logged in to the chat sure
[Music] and I [Music]
[Music]
CL [Music]
well hello everyone uh with me is uh David Levy David you're out at the uh
chawa Observatory complex is that right yeah I am it's uh we are here tonight
it's just a beautiful beautiful night but I'll let you do all the introductions first and then I'll go on
briefly sure sure well uh this is our 140th
Global star party and um uh we have a great group of people with us uh now
some of our regulars are on vacation but that's okay um uh you know we'll have
Kareem Jaffer from John Abbott College uh joining us uh once again it's
been quite a while uh Kareem Jaffer Professor Kem Jaffer is is also one of
the big Outreach coordinators for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada M
Montreal Center uh which is where David Levy hails from as well originally uh
Russ brick uh be will be on with us from the uh Southern Cross Astronomical
Society talking about the winter Star Party we've got Terry man the secretary of the astronomical League uh talking
about uh uh programs that the league has uh with her aligning with the league uh
presentation Ron breacher who's called the Astro do will be on with us and he's
going to cover alignment in astrophotography Robert Reeves our lunar
expert uh will be on uh with his postcards from the Moon Series this one
is titled lunar alignments we have the young Navin Kumar which will be coming on marello Souza from Brazil and Adrien
Bradley with his chasing dark skies and um I'll turn it over to you David um and
um and then we'll get
started it's all yours David well thank you thank you Dr
Roberts and this is DAV shakes
honorary thank you and this is David Shakespeare and we're going to have our
presentation tonight unfortunately I won't be able to stay with you too long
tonight because the sky here as you can see is absolutely gorgeous and I'd like
to make some introductions of my own tonight first of all we have David
Roser hello everybody Welcome to the astronomy
complex and um in addition to that we have Ed gunur good evening everybody
clear skies and we also have Wendy Gordon I'm just going to go over here so you
can see her Wendy Gordon the great historian at Sunni platsburg hi
everybody hi we are we are here and for my poetic poem tonight I'm going to
introduce you to Samuel Taylor colid who knows all about eclipses and uh he wrote a poem called
alignment and uh the problem is is that I left the poem at home I was going to
quote the entire thing to you tonight and I think I have
it here to quote enti poem uh about uh the rhyme of the Ancient
Mariner and he has a very beautiful line in that poem where he talks about the
horned moon with one bright star within the nether tip and as we read on we look at Samuel
Taylor CID and we say sam you got it wrong you cannot have a uh a crescent
moon with a star within the nether tip it's impossible because any star that
would be there would be blotted out by the moon but that was corrected by another poet lesie C peler who saw an
eclipse of the Sun in 1918 and he changed the poem and that's
going to be my poem for tonight the hornet sun with one bright moon with one
Dark Moon within the nether tip the horned sun with one Dark Moon within the
Heather tip and on that correction of the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner it's
called the rhyme of the modern Sun we go back to alignment and Scotty thank you
very much and back to you okay all right well uh David you guys have a great time
out there in those dark Arizona Skies and um hope you guys see some fantastic
sites out there well thank you very much Scotty and we'll be back next week okay
we'll see you next week okay thanks David well uh uh we will uh get started
uh going up to I think it's a pretty cold is it uh Canadian winter night it's
cold here in Arkansas we had snow here today um but uh our next speaker is
Professor Kareem Jaffer as I mentioned he is from the John College um teaches
astronomy there and uh he is uh a very active participant in the Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada's Montreal Center so uh Karim thank you
for coming on to the 140th Global star party it's a great way to kick off our
uh year this is our I think it's our fourth year of global star parties
exactly I was trying to remember and uh my first introduction to Global star party was GSP 28 when you did the great
conjunction talking about alignment oh that's right yeah my daughter was on that when we actually went around the
world we had uh we had to log in I think it was four or five separate times
because we couldn't stream you know the social media uh platforms wouldn't let
us stream so many they wouldn't let us do a 24-hour stream so I remember and doid stayed on for
pretty much that entire time I think thing I'm still recovering for
that I would like to add my introduction okay oh he muted himself oh
D you're muted at the moment you are muted
David there we go he is there we go there we are here we are he is very active in the Montreal Center which is
my home astronomy club even though I live out here in Arizona now the
Montreal Center is my favorite club and uh kareim you take it over we love
having you up here but I will tell you that for anybody who's wondering why you would move away from Montreal and mooved to Arizona you have these beautiful
clear skies tonight we have snow at the moment ice coming in two hours and then
rain coming first thing in the morning so you get Skies we get weather yeah
yeah what would you rather have exactly I mean we're talking about getting prepared for the total solar eclipse
which passes through Montreal it's the first time we're getting a total solar eclipse since the
1930s and the next time we get one in Montreal is 2106 but the odds of a clear sky are so
low but we still I mean you can't you can't miss it because if it's actually coming through your backyard how dare
you go somewhere else right how dare you go someplace else of course most of our most of our more uh Avid members are
going somewhere else for a better chance at Clear Skies they're going to be joining the uh Rask and the astronomical
League down in Texas and in other places along the path of totality and we're just hoping for Clear Skies up here for
that one so it is lovely to be back with everyone on the global star parties it
has been a short Hiatus unfortunately work has just it's been it's been insane
um and I was telling Scott we've had uh we've had a lot Happening Here in the RC
for the last year and in the Montreal Center and in Montreal in at the education Fields if you've been watching
the news you've kept a breast of it um so it's nice to just come back and talk astronomy and so I thought with the
theme of alignment I wanted to talk a little bit about aligning with modern astronomy when you're teaching an intro
astronomy course because that's one of the things that I really try to Showcase within my course is how how modern
techniques and modern resources and tools are accessible to the beginner to
the student to the general public uh part of it is through my Outreach and you're going to see the
dividends paying off from my work with the rasque for my work with the astronomical league and with explore
Alliance and my work with space audities as well and I've just as I've been missing the global star parties I've
actually been missing the space audities show and just today when they came back from their New Year's break they re they
revealed that we've reached a th000 subscribers for space Oddities we've reached over 60,000 views and so the
weekly show based out of the United Kingdom and Europe is really just
starting to take off and so uh if you are not a fan or if you don't know space audities live please visit us on YouTube
if you don't know rasque Montreal please visit us at our website or on YouTube and we always start off with a a land
and sky and cultural acknowledgement because we feel that it's important to acknowledge that not only are we on
unseated indigenous lands here in the Montreal area and everywhere in the in North America except on the
reservations we're also sharing the sky with all of the cultures and across the
world and all of the ancestors that have come before us and we can see that when we look out at any of the objects that
we see in the night sky they have a story to be told so right now we are in the waning Chief Moon the chief moon is
what it's called by the mkma Indians and by several of the other First Nations tribes they refer to it as a chief or a
spiritual Moon because in the wintertime since the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun The Moon Rises to its
highest altitudes throughout the year and it is up for the longest time because we have our longest nights so
the full Chief Moon this year which fell right around Christmas Day on boxing day was just a gorgeous full moon that kind
of kept the entire night shining brightly and really did kind of give that that Mystic that spiritual aspect
to the night sky and if we're out at night in the winter time of course our attention is drawn towards Orion and
Orion in a lot of the First Nation Star Stories is it's tied into the idea of
winter coming as soon as this is above the Horizon at Sunset and in the oji
Star Stories it's referred to as winter maker because at the start of the fall when the crispiness starts to come you
see Alder brand you see the ples up above the Horizon at Sunset and you know
Winter's on its way but as soon as all of winter maker is above the Horizon you know that you now have winter throughout
the next few months so you have to be prepared for it and I always love talking about Orion in the winter time
because it's one of those constellations where you can see so much if you examine
it with your naked eye if you examine it with binoculars or a small telescope or if you take instrumentation and you
image it over hours and hours and hours and David ier recently shared a gorgeous picture of the entire Orion complex with
the loop with the amazing nebula that are there and the amount of dust and gas
that can be seen in that region and we can see that with the fuzziness of m42
Orion Nebula so one of the ways in which I try to bring modern astronomy into my intro astronomy course is at the stage
where we are talking about the formation of our solar system I show the analog to the solar systems that we the star
system that we see forming in the Orion Nebula which we are studying both with Hubble and other instrumentation in the
past and now with the James Webb Space Telescope but you can examine a lot of this nebulosity yourself with simple
techniques so what I share with them is a set of images taken from the old
rasque robotic telescope that we used to have in California and we did RGB Imaging just a couple of minutes on each
filter and then I showcase to the students how to use something as simple as to try to draw out these details
and I don't try to bias the way in which they draw out the details I show them levels I showed them curves I showed
them exposure brightness contrast Shadows highlights a few of these tools
and then I let them determine where they find the most important parts of this
nebula and so some of them will really try to focus on keeping the trapezium
keeping those Stars visible even to the to the detriment of trying to do all
three of these RGB images fully and they'll try to kind of really focus on
just one or some may decide that they want to show the extreme differences in
where the brightness comes from these three different filters and when doing so they may blow out the center but look
at the amount of structure in the nebulosity that you see all around this
beautiful nebula and then you'll have some students who really kind of focus and try to work very hard on trying not
to lose either of these aspects and they try to capture as much of the nebula as
they can in as close to a true color image as they can by trying to do the same level of processing in all three of
these filtered images this is their introduction to Astro image processing and I try to show
them that working with images is not something that's left to just professionals but it's something that
all hobbyists have access to now we lost the rasque robotic telescope at the
start of 2023 uh for various reasons and so I was worried about this Falls
astronomy class because one of the things I try to do is active research projects and I didn't have a way to take
new uh photometry measurements of exoplanets for example which is one of the things we were trying to do with the
rasque robotic telescope in the past I was able to use some other remote telescopes to get archival data for
image processing but it worried me that I wouldn't be able to do the photometry thankfully I through Scott and through
the Explorer Alliance in these Global star parties I had connected with Jerry Hubble at the msro the mark Slade remote
Observatory and so when I reached out to Jerry and to Myan who runs the msro they
were able to quickly help my students get set up with possible observing Nights from Virginia and we were able to
get exoplanet Transit data and we've been working with them to try to work through a few issues that we had with
the auto guer with some of the cables that they were observing but now it looks like for next year we're going to
have some nice crisp transits and we even have my daughter right now working on a science fa project with them which
is amazing and then while I was talking to them about some of the other projects that I do with my students I mentioned
to them that I like doing spectroscopy using the filter from Tom field and
arpec and he's been on a few of these Global star parties many of you know about the amazing work that he does with
that filter here in Montreal we have such limited number of nights in the fall
where we actually have clear skies to observe and to try to take images of
Spectra well myON said that he's got the sa 100 to put directly in the filter
wheel on the msro telescope and so he was able to get for us a few of these
beautiful Spectra so here's alberio and you can clearly see some of those absorption lines in the brightest of the
two stars and you can see the difference in the color balance even just in these grayscale cooled images so it was really
fantastic to be able to continue with these remote telescope works with trying to do actual photometry actual
measurements of Spectra which is not something that's standard in most intro astronomy courses but helps to connect
what you're see seeing in astronomy with what you've learned in your other core science courses if you've gone through
the Sciences programs now if you really want to get to Modern astronomy resources and
techniques you don't stop there you start using some of the space-based telescopes and the best one that we have
now that's available to us to access the data is the James webspace telescope and
I'm happy to say that the public data from James web can be approached simply
through with the same types of techniques and tools that we were looking at but with layering multiple
images of different wavelengths to try to draw out as much detail as you can so last winter I had a independent research
course student Julian adelstein who worked on trying to look at Stellar birth and Stellar death using the James
Webb Space Telescope he had not taken astronomy he learned as much as he could about the astronomy of the birth and
death of stars about the way in which Imaging works the way in which the James web telescope works works and how image
processing is done with the help of the rasque Montreal astronomers and he won
the research prize at this year's cfta conference at the dval astronomy club
and not only that he also won a door prize of one of the James Webb Space Telescope deep Sky Images so he was just
over over the moon happy with with with the turnout so I I decided to add into this
the option to work with James web Space Telescope data as project for the astronomy students as well and one of
the students uh Lucas actually sent me their first image that they're so proud
I I I love this image this is of course the Eagle Nebula this is processed from
three infrared images uh from the James web Space Telescope they did an
incredible job drawing out the detail you can clearly see the six defraction spikes you can see this is James web
data it was amazing the work that these students put put together just with in
the course framework using the simple techniques in that we saw used for
the Orion Nebula I then had other groups doing other projects and I'll bring some of
these in over future Global star parties but the one that I want to leave you with today is I actually want the
students to talk to you about their work it was three students two of which worked with equipment from a library
telescope program that I've started at John Abbott based on the library telescope program that happens through
the astronomical league and we now have these beautiful little virtuoso telescopes on motorized mounts with
solar filters available for borrowing from our John Abbott library and we have
DSLR camera banks that they already had so they put together a video on how to
use the DSLR cameras and an intervalometer or a cell phone app in
order to capture and process star Trails so Scott if you can share that video that would be fantastic we happy to do
that here we go this is from the astronomy guys uh
featuring Matthew and
Christian hey what's going on guys it's Matthew here again with another video for the astronomy guys today we're going
to explain to you guys how you can image star trails at night using equipment that's readily available for you for
rent to borrow at the John AB Library so without further Ado let's get into it so what is a star Trail a star Trail is a
type of Photography which uses the images of the Stars to create patterns using long exposure and various other
settings so we're going to show you guys how to do today is set up a camera DSR camera with a tripod and using some
fancy stuff here which we'll explain over here to get the best images for the night's going all right so what are we
going to need number one we chose to use a Cameron EOS DSLR camera we chose this
camera specifically because of the features it has the customization that it has which we're going to get into a bit later when we start talking about
the best settings to use for your camera we also needed a tripod we'll get to this in a second we needed a computer
and an editing software which we're going to use to then take all the pictures that we took put it on one combine it stack it and create our
beautiful finalized picture so I skipped over this but what is an inter Bomer it's basically a timer remote controller
which you can attach to your Canon camera and it'll allow you to take take pictures on a remote setting so you can
take a picture every 30 seconds with a certain exposure um without having to actually touch your camera if you don't
have access to that you can use the free Cannon app next up we're going to show you guys what is required and what are
the steps that you need to follow in order to get the best shots possible starting with number one setting up the camera we'll show you guys how to get
the best possible settings to get the best shots and we'll show you guys how to set up the intervalometer if you have one then we're going to head outside
we're going to identify plis the North Star and we're going to take some beautiful shots of that you'll observe
that in order to get a perfect star trail of 360° we would have to be outside for 24 hours but we'll show you
guys that you don't have to do that then we're going to start shooting get some good shots and bring it over to the
computer to edit and stack the pictures so this is everything you're going to need you're going to want the tripod laptop DSR camera and intervalometer
let's go ahead and open up the camera to turn it on to the settings that we want so make sure it's set to manual mode so you can affect customize everything you
want make sure that the the shutter speed is set to bulb so the exposure
will stay on the entire time which is going to be helpful for our um intervalometer then we're going to want
to set the aperture to around 5.6 and you can keep the iso at Auto and this should give you a pretty good shot make
sure to set your your um your shooting mode to single shooting and we'll go ahead and take a look at the
intervalometer so go ahead and turn it on step one as you can see in the top we
have the selection screen over here the timer is not really important the bulb is important it's going to be our
exposure so we're going to want to turn that on to about 10
seconds then we're going to want to put our interval on so this is going to be how often it's going to take a
picture after the previous one so we'll say a 10-sec delay lastly how many pictures are we
going to want to take we could set this as high as we want let's say 10 or eight and you go put it down and when you're
ready you're going to hit start and we'll go see you guys outside all right all right guys so now we're outside and we have a beautiful clear winter night
over here we have Polaris the North Star it might be hard to see for you guys there's a bit of clouds in the way but
using our app Sky View light we were able to identify features in this in the sky and we're going to be looking at the
Orion Nebula today which is just positioned right over there about Eastward so now if you head over
here we have our intervalometer set up just like this right right over
here we have the settings the way we want them and we could test it by taking a little
picture like that so see we have the exposure on for
about 10 seconds that's what it's going to look like in the final video in the final picture so let's see what that looks
like so now that we know that our test picture is good we can use the intervalometer right over here and set
it to auto mode so now it's going to count down a timer of 10 seconds and then after 10 seconds once the picture
is taken it will wait for an interval of 10 seconds and then continue the process so if you guys do not have an
intervalometer that's no problem too cuz you can download the app either the Canon app Nikon app or the Sony app and
pair it to the camera right just like this and then what you can do is you can set it up in the same settings that we had but now it's going to connect via
Bluetooth so when when you're ready you take a picture it's going to do the same
process it's going to count down as long as you want the exposure to be so let's say just like before we're going to do
about 10 seconds once you've gotten to 10 seconds you can hit stop it'll take the picture
and just like that you have a picture of the night sky so we have our pictures now a few of them and let's take a look at the settings that we're using
tonight so right now we're using the manual mode with the automatic Focus we found out it was a bit easier for
beginners or on the bulb setting which keeps the exposure uh on open the uh for
as long as it needs to be so for about 10 seconds for us we have the aperture set to about 8 and the iso at 800 and
these are the setting that we found one we're going to be batch
Imaging all of the pictures from that we took from the last video when we left the camera out for like 15 minutes so to
edit multiple pictures at the same time with you are going to have to download a plugin called bimp which
stands for batch image manipulation plugin it's right here it's a very simp simple download you just got to like go
online search up bimp not very difficult I've already got it open here and to make the video a little bit smoother
I've already got my edits done and I'm going to show you guys how to bring in
the pictures bring in your input pictures set up your output folder and get some some crispy looking night sky
pictures guys okay now first thing we're going to do add images I'm going to add
a little folder here so I'm going to be using this folder that I called raw cam pick add beautiful you can you can see
the picture right here and you can also see what it's going to look like there
we go now you see there's quite a big difference you can see a lot more stars there's more contrast and I'll show you
how to get this in one second close well actually first of all I'm just going to show you I'm going to set up my output
folder right here so that the pictures actually go somewhere so
so I've got my output folder ready and edited pcks and right now it's empty but it's not going to be empty soon so first
thing we changed was the color correction this is basically just the brightness and contrast we U the
contrast and we kept the brightness at a really at a relatively nice level
and okay next thing we did is the Shadows so we adjusted the Shadows the
only thing we really changed here is uh we shifted the white point up and that's that's going to bring out
a lot of the colors and uh it's going to like make everything just look a lot more crisp
you know it's going to add that sauce you know what I'm saying same thing again now we took that same procedure
but now we're just changing the exposure of the highlights so we want the highlights to be more exposed right we
want like little bright like little things that are bright like which are stars we want them to be more bright
more exposed so we pump that up and we also expose the Shadows once again just
bringing out some of the qualities and the pictures you know cuz there's a lot of there's a lot of information in the
camera that you don't really see until you bring it out last thing we did is we just added
some Hue saturation so we just saturated it a little bit now this process if you
guys want to copy these exact settings you can but if not it's fine if you just want to like you know change it a little
bit or Do Your Own Thing it's a very creative process and it's about bringing bringing out what you want in the
picture so depending on if you're taking a picture of a galaxy a nebula the night sky whether you're taking a picture with
your DSLR camera like we did or with your phone you know your editing is going to change so now let's just apply
all right guys once it is all exported to our little file here called edited
picks already got it open right here we can see that there's a so much detail
and you can see so many more stars and this is just beautiful guys let's take a second to just look at this and it's
amazing how these pictures were only taking like 20 seconds apart and you can see how much guy moves
already give it a second to render boom look at that
wow anyway now what we're going to do is we're going to use this little
software called star Stacks which is basically made for doing stuff like this with like made for making star Trails so
we're going to go here grab all of our folders
downloads edited picks put them in
order a just drop them in here and I can see we've got all these
pictures in here got all these pictures in here here
ready to go now all we have to do is go to
settings it's going to be in gap filling mode this is very important Gap filling mode because we want to make sure that
the software knows to fill in the gaps if there if there are any to make them to make those nice clear lines that you
see all right so now that we have that the other settings you can leave them on auto we're just going to go on Boom
start processing
[Music] so now the process is done you can see the final product now if you want you
can take this image and go back into and keep editing it to get what you
want and that was their first time doing any Star Trail processing they uh used
Mary McIntyre's uh Outreach videos from space audities to get a few tricks and
uh tips and this is now a resource at our John abot Library made by the students from uh Jack Astro fall
2023 so I think that's a fantastic way to bring Outreach is part of what we do
in inro astronomy and Outreach Of course is now a part of modern astronomy so I think the alignment there comes full
circle Scott that's it for us fact okay thank you so much uh Kareem um uh
looking forward to uh learning more about what's going on with uh rasque Youth and uh you know it's it's been a
while so um uh feel free to you know you
have in the past uh invited uh people uh from the club to come on and I think
it'd be fun to have some some of them give some live presentations as soon as they found out I was coming on a few of
them volunteered to come and do stuff over the next few months so that's and Matthew actually wanted to come tonight
but he's busy working so he said you know can you share the video on my behalf and I said absolutely excellent okay all right well
thanks very much and take care Karim thanks Scot yep okay so um we are
getting ready for the uh uh winter star party that uh gets kicked off here this
February uh and it is a place that you want to go it should be on your bucket
list if you're an amateur astronomer because up here in the northern hemisphere it's getting pretty darn cold
um uh Kareem was sharing with us that he has a friend uh that is is experiencing
something like minus 55 C uh temperatures up there so I mean it's
just it's h brutally cold here even in Arkansas and what's called the Sun Belt
um we had uh we had snow flurries this morning and uh we're beled by ice and
and so anyhow um and I think we're expecting more when wintry weather so
but if you go to the winter star party in February it's not uncommon to have
t-shirt and shorts weather in 80 degree temperatures so oh yeah but I'll let uh
I'll let Russ brick come on and talk all about it it's all yours Russ oh thanks
Scott well um my name is Russ brick I'm the president of Southern Cross Astronomical Society we host the winter
Star Party held on Scout key in the Florida Keys every February uh this year
will be on from February Monday February 5th until Saturday February 10th I guess
11th um we have a good lineup we're we're
hoping to see some really nice weather because we have some cold fronts coming through now and uh usually when a cold
front comes through right afterwards we have some nice clear skies
uh we have a nice lineup of vendors this year um surprisingly uh we have some
people coming back of dis mounts of course Scott will be there with us explore
scientific um pentex eyepieces I don't know if you've heard of Starfield Optics or benro po
asro um astronomy shop uh Tony castanza will be down there
doing some repairs and you know helping out anybody with their lx2 200s uh Gary
hand is supposed to come down with some Choice pieces of equipment to offer and
uh we have a firsttime visitor coming over from England um Nottingham Precision astroengineering
NP Dave saris he's coming to the winter star party for the first time this
year of course you know we'll have some good manufacturers reps uh hopefully
Yuri will be coming but Tech will be there to support their products and also of course you know
Scott and uh there yep Scott will be
there um let's see what else oh we have a good
lineup of speakers uh some Dr Mario Moda uh he actually built
his own OB obervatory and a 32in telescope so he's going to give a talk about that and some of his favorite
objects in the southern Sky uh Martin Caminos who is a member of
our club he'll be back to give his demonstration on Celestial navigation of course Richard Wright get
lucky lucky astronomy lucky Imaging I'm sorry Randy cack he'll be doing his talk on an
introduction to solar astronomy or and improving your solar imag is Charlie
Warren uh Zen and the Art of astronomical Pursuit I think that should
be a rather eclectic one I'm gonna have to take that in uh let's see Mike Lockwood will be
talking about the thermal effect on mirrors John talit setting the right
exposure times and Adventures and imaging the unknown and Peggy Walker
will be talking about some the importance of knowing the culture of astronomy through old school handmade
tools and equipment Generations interesting Scott not quite sure what
you're gonna be talking about yet well well I I will be talking about U um you
know telescope making uh and uh you know why why you know someone would take that
up as a career it's telescope the telescope business is not an easy one uh that's
for sure but um uh you know I've been into it since 1980 uh uh selling and uh
at first selling retail and then uh working in the manufacturing sector since
1986 so I've seen comments come and go uh oppositions come and go and uh
technology change and all the rest of it and we're kind of in a new era right now where we're starting to see the
convergence of all kinds of uh technology in telescopes so um the uh in
fact we're selling some of those products right now like the unistellar uh telescope and the dwarf uh vonis is
also another um you know digital type of telescope so it's it's h the Hobbies
changing a little bit with these kind of fully integrated uh telescopes out there
and more people are able to access astrophotography than ever before so
we'll be talking about some of that um but we should also talk about uh you
know of course we talked about the warm weather um that's down the winter star
party and before you've talked about some of the stuff that you can see uh from that southern uh position you know
like Omega centor and um at Karina that's the big one come down Edina and
the Southern Cross it's amazing normally go to Southern Hemisphere to go see right so
yeah but you're pretty far down south how about the uh accommodations at uh
winter Star Party what what can if you've never been the the part the star party is held
on two camps down on uh West Summerland Key or Scout key uh Camp Sawyer which is
the Boy Scouts and Camp withum key which is the Girl Scout camp traditionally the
star party had always been held on the Girl Scout camp until um I guess it was Hurricane Ian I
think or not Ian the one before that that did really the most damage to the
property oh yeah um piled tons and tons of sand rearranged everything destroyed
the chickies uh it has grown back pretty well um several storms since have you
know eroded a lot of the burm uh it's definitely not the same property on the
Eastern side but the western side you know on
where we usually have Mickey's kitchen and the vendor area that's right still pretty well intact I mean I was really
surprised it's pretty much the same that's right um the boy scout camp now that's well let me digress a little all
of the facilities were destroyed in the hurricane at the Girl Scout Camp so there's no bathrooms and there's no
showers um now we use the facil now we use the facilities on Camp Sawyer and
they have uh 10 showers and 10 bathrooms and it's very well-kept it's a very
clean facility they also have what they call Glam tents and these are metal structure
heavyduty canvas tents that they you they can sleep between 3 to 5 to 7
even nine people depending on how they configure it 10 people um they're so sturdy and so well
made that they're actually air conditioned as well and the Boy Scouts well we call it
glamping they're Glam TS um that's an option for Camp Sawyer
there will also be tent camping on Camp Sawyer as well um
one thing about the boy scout camp is there's no vehicle traffic permitted outside or out on the field so it's not
like over in the Girl Scout camp where you can just drive up to where your campsite is uh they do allow us to roll
out unload and then return your vehicle to the park lot to the parking lot and
then set up your Camp which is a big bonus because the first couple years or
actually the first year they didn't allow any vehicles in all and any everybody had to bring their stuff out
in wheelbarrows it was quite challenging
wheelbarrows yeah wheelbarrows it was quite challenging
uhuh but um what what other kinds of rules are there at winter Star Party
well um we don't allow any pets unless they are registered service dogs and of
course they have to have current pay papers and they have to have sh current shot
records um the other rules are that of course you know as with any Star Party
there's no white lights there's no vehicle traffic either on the Girl Scout camp or boy scout camp after sun down
until sunrise that's a good thing um if you have your trailer your trailer needs to
be red light safe and of course your red light
flashlight yeah other than that um the astronomy Community is really
pretty well behaved we don't really have to uh do too much to enforce the rule of
law so to speak it's a very very friendly accommodating
experience is it safe there I mean is there you have uh I think you always
keep security yes we have a police officer at the gate 24 hours a
day and on the boy scout camp we man the gate during the daytime and then the
gate is locked after Sunset so there's no ve no one can come
in right and uh is this a familyfriendly
kind of event I absolutely we welcome children to come back um for the longest
time actually before Co couple years before Co it started to slow down a little but we always had a program for
the kids called the yakers and we had all sorts of activities for them to do and projects
we had they all they had their own telescopes and eyepieces it was outstanding but slowly but surely
children have I think left astronomy I don't know I can't explain
it well um now are
there you talked about about the speakers and all the rest of it um you
know and I've been to Winter Star Party many times there's a lot of advanced amateur astronomers there but what about
is it a good place for a beginner to go let's say that you really you're a newbie you've just got your first
telescope or maybe you don't even have a telescope is this a good thing to attend do you think absolutely we do not put on
any heirs there at all um personally myself I love it when people come over
to look through my telescope and that's the great thing about winter star party there are so many visual observers and
such a huge variety of telescopes that you can spend all night walking around
the field and not look through the same telescope well that's probably true
that's probably true and I've looked through some small telescopes that are very nice but I've also looked through
some huge aperture uh Newtonian and that's always a delight from such an
incredible viewing site I know well Mike Lockwood will be down there I'm don't
know if John Pratt is coming so but Mike will be bringing I think a 30 with
him so okay 30 inches of aperture under those kind of Sky conditions are great
and it can be very we didn't talk about how still it can get guys are amazing
down there they really are yeah and it's it's uh you know if you live in some
place like uh near Colorado for example near near the Rockies it's really rare that you have
any really still nights you know there's a lot of disruption in the air as the as
the air flow goes over those mountains uh not so when you're at someplace like
the winter star party because the air is so it's just this am laminer flow that
comes right off the ocean right off the ocean and you know what
it's it's kind of funny when you're at the star party though because you know normally in your regular everyday
orientation you're generally pointed north south east and west well when you're on the key when you think you're
looking North you're really looking towards the east and once you get
past I don't know I'm gonna say uh if we went from zero to I just e 90° once you
get past into about around 100° I suppose I don't know M you see the
southern you're into the southern part of the sky and it's out over the jet black ocean it's just awesome until you
come around to that point where you start to pick up the lights from Big Pine
Key but to the north it's very dark yeah to the Northwest it's very dark yeah to
to the South it's very very dark and of course overhead well you've been there
Scott you know it's it's amaz it's breathtaking it's breathtaking so it's
so bright out there the Milky Way will cast a shadow and it does sometimes that's true
that's very true and it's just it's just so lovely to be under it's kind of weird actually to be under winter
constellation skies and wearing a t-shirt okay it's
just that part that kind of stuns you at first you know and you just see people just like hanging out you know not
really doing very serious work on their first uh night there because they're
socializing uh they're having a great time seeing all their old friends uh that that go to Winter star party and
just kind of maybe feeling kind of days like I have been where it's just warm
and and you just you know and you kind of get into that mode of like hey I'm on vacation you know it's h you got that
tropical Vibe going on so another thing I really like about the winter star party is you always know you're G to see
those people that you love you know oh that's true your friends that you've made over the years and you know you're
going to get a chance to see them that's right if it's your first time to go there you're going to make some new
friends so oh yeah it's going to happen quickly right and you're always going to want to come
back yep that's true that's the one thing um it's the best it's the best
value in the keys period a ticket to the winter Star Party
can take you into Key West every single day um yeah you could even probably day
trip out to Fort Jefferson and still be back in time to observe with everybody
you might have to park out on the road but you'd have a full day tra you'd have a full day experience out of Fort
Jefferson that's a really nice trip have you gone out there I've never been to Fort Jefferson
you know it's really nice it's a nice boat ride you know just about three hours and then you know you get to spend
some time on the island it's really pretty nice snorkel or something yeah sure you could go
snorkeling um right you we have always wanted to Charter a boat and plan a trip
out there because you can get special permission to camp out there in certain
places you just everything you bring in you have to take out with you and um
yeah we're we were trying to get permission to run some very small generators out there you know to power
the equipment but we wanted to go out and image from Fort Jefferson I think that would be the
darkest place I had ever
been that's very cool now how many years this is the isn't this the 40th year or
something this is the 40th year for the winter Star Party 40th year yeah so Mike
peoples is watching right now in the audience on Facebook and he says most of the guys I know uh and Miss passed away
over the years uh you're going to experience some of that if if you got an event that's been going on for so long
um but uh yeah we do have people the the found one of the founders Tippy
Doria uh you know he's gone and uh some other beloved astronomers U are gone but
you know when I go there I kind of feel their presence anyways you know and uh
absolutely it's it's sort of like uh in a strange way revisiting them so I like
that um well we talk about we keep Tippy alive
every Friday with the door prizes chaing that's right it was his
favorite that's right well um okay well
Russ thank you so much for encouraging us to uh go back to Winter star party I
encourage you to to go and uh I do too hang out and and visit our booth um and
uh you know uh just just hang out and enjoy uh the night skies with us and um
uh you know we might even bump into each other on down in the Key West which is
also a lot of fun uh to go down to if you've never been you know Key West is kind of sort of like going to uh New
Orleans in a way you know it's got that kind of vibe going on but it's really
tropical you know so oh let me say one more thing before I go scottt sure um if
you were at the star party last year you noticed that Mickey's kitchen wasn't there well they'll be back this year and
this is actually their swan song So if you really want to have the best brownie
you've ever had under the stars ever in your life to the winter star party this
year that's true and that's a tall order because uh uh I've had some very good
brownies the country and uh Mickey's makes hands down the best and everybody
knows it so well that's great Russ thanks so much and thanks to
Astronomical Society all right everybody thank you all right good night all right um uh we
are going to uh talk with Terry man Terry is the secretary of the
astronomical league but she's also a two-term former president of the league League um I don't really know how long
Terry's been uh with the astronomical League itself but uh probably longer
than than her than even her own age so uh because she's she's young at heart
and um uh we love uh we love hearing from Terry especially also for the
astronomical League live programs that she puts on um and I will also tip my at
to Terry because I think that she probably put on the best Alcon event of all time and that was the
one that they did at Bryce Canyon uh and I think I sometimes hear
her grumbling that she's going to do that again so but uh Terry I'm gonna turn it over to you thanks for coming on
to our 140th Global Star Party well thank you Scott yeah LOL Li and I
co-chaired the one at Bryce Canyon and actually we're going to be back at Bryce Canyon in 202 5 and that uh Alcon will
be focusing on Imaging and visual uh all the speakers that will be the theme of
that Alcon so all the speakers will be talking either about Imaging or uh
Visual and uh they've got a starvue planned and it will be in the afternoon because we don't want to waste any Skies
any nighttime sky uh there will be a banquet uh all the everything is falling
into place uh Alcon this year will be in Kansas City and LOL will be there with
information and requests for help at Bryce Canyon and that Alcon I believe is
July 17th through the 20th so everybody get ready for that one it's going to be
another good one um in this one Tim Russ from starre will be one of the people
there uh last I heard I think he is the keynote I believe um so it ought to be a
very interesting uh Alcon please come and join us and then 2025 we'll be at Bryce
Canyon so it should be a whole lot of fun oh yeah yeah the Bryce Canyon event
was also a super dark event oh yeah Russ brick was talking about seeing
the shadow uh from the winter Star Party um if you can see the shadow of
the Milky Way at winter Star Party uh it's like a spotlight then at Price
Canyon because it is so it's so incredibly dark it's one of the darkest places I've ever been it it's just
absolutely beautiful and the really great thing is you can bring the spouse or the non-interested partner um with
you and there is so much to do at Bryce Canyon it will be uh based out of rubies in and there is just so much other
people that are not interested in what's going on in astronomy during the day can go and do and you
know it is just a beautiful place so we're all really looking forward to that so what I am going to talk about is
um aligning with the astronomical league and what brought this up was I thought
we have got so many observe programs uh we're somewhere and I don't even know I've lost count between 85 and 90
observe programs so um I thought well I'm going to go ahead
and get a couple of them together and talk a little bit about our observe programs so I'm G to get started with
that um the first one I'm going to talk about is the analemma because that was
something I really wanted to do when I first started Imaging and I actually did it but it was in the time of film so it
was a little bit harder because I wasn't about to leave a film camera out in the weather all year long so I had to make a
special Mount to put it on and I had a special bottom on the camera that slid
onto two pegs on this Mount so it was always positioned in the same place so we're going to talk just a little bit
about the analemma the one thing I want to say is in order to do the observe programs you need to be a member of the
astronomical League um we have observe programs about everything and the first
thing especially on the analemma that you will see is naturally don't you know
make sure you have the right filters don't do any direct observations of the Sun and most people that are into visual
or even Imaging of the sun we all know what to do but a lot of newcomers might
not know that so we always always touch on you need the correct filter to
anytime you're going to image the Sun and even in this case if I were to image the sun which I did I used to that time
I believe believe I used a 28 mimer lens and I had a filter that went on the
front of that lens so and as I said the introduction here we have a lot of
programs a lot of observing programs on a wide variety of a strong astronomical
stuff anything you'd be interested in I think you'll find it there and a lot of our programs you can buy manuals for um
just like we have the mesier list and there are manuals you can buy for that the hersel clubs we have all kinds of
everything and not that you have to buy the manuals sometimes they'll help and some of the programs don't even have a
manual that will come with it so for the analemma what you're going
to do is monitor the sun's motion and you know really you don't really think about this when you're looking at the
sun I look at the Sun a lot I love doing solar work but you don't really think about the motion and very honestly it's
hard to to quite figure out the motion unless you have something like a stick in the backyard
and you can compare every day I can tell when the sun is Way North or Way South
but that process in between you really don't notice the motion so much so what you will do with this program is create
your own analemma one way or another you will either draw it you will image it um
some way or another you will make an analemma you'll also calculate latitude tilt of the Earth all of this and uh you
will see on our website it will there's information to help you do all of this
the goal of our observing clubs is to help you learn and it doesn't mean it's going to be really easy and a breeze to
go through you can do beginners ones that are a lot easier than the advanced
um the hersel 400 something like that you need you need to be kind of dedicated to what you're doing and you
will learn whatever it is you choose if you really do this program and complete it you will learn something no matter
what it is um this program does have a certificate and a pen so when you get
done you will learn how to log believe me all of these programs you need to
have proof or what you have learned with what you have seen and so you'll learn
how to really keep logs just like we talked a lot about David Levy and all of
his books and everything that he has logged and just it is amazing you will
remember everything that you did and you can go back and look at it and you will
turn it in to the person that is over this observe program and they will go over that log and that is how it will
will be checked and you will earn your pen and certificate now I think on this
one if I'm not mistaken we've got like two levels where you can take a minimum of 50 observations spread out evenly
over a year which is approximately one a week or photographically they want you to do about a hundred observations
spread out evenly throughout the week and if you live in a place like I do you
have clouds as you will see in my image you have clouds and there's going to be days that you are just going to miss
taking that picture and this is it this is this is a
film picture this is a back way back time uh that I took the Ann anal LMA
from I believe it was in May of I forget what year I was in oh here in Ohio and
then I put my analemma in the middle and you can see there are times uh the exposure wasn't right I had clouds but
you can still see the motion of the Sun and I did this with a year over a year
with a Pentax k1000 put on a special mount in the yard that I'd made and it once I saw it you
know and unwinding it trying to unwind film when it has been in that camera for a year is real treat too um but you can
see here this is the pen you will earn isn't it yeah and you do you can see
their motion depending on where you're at in the world and you know it how your
analemma actually comes out looking but that was something I always wanted to do and it I came home every day at 3:30 I
got off of work at 3: I was home by 3:30 and I was ready to get that camera on the mount take the picture you know at
every day or every I did it every 12 days I believe was my goal and sometimes I had to adjust that a little bit but it
is really cool when you do this and now that you can do it digit that will make a big difference it will help a whole
lot because with film you never knew if your exposure was right if you were shooting through some clouds or some
Thin clouds or heavy clouds you took your best guess maybe it worked maybe it didn't and you couldn't pull it out and
look at it had to sit there for a year but this is an incredible program and you talk about alignments this is really
cool you can make your own figure eight just by watching the Sun the next one I wanted to talk about
was the asterism observing program and you know this is really this is fun this
is really fun I mean we've got big Dippers Su are triangle and you know the number 37 cluster in Orion I really
never thought about that or knew about that until Don NAB talked about it and I looked at that and I thought number 37
and if you look at the stars it looks like 37 it is an incredible thing to see
an image um so there are so many asterisms we have then the southern
hemisphere we've got the northern class cross I forgot the n and the Southern Cross um you know and those are two more
asterisms but this is another program that is just a lot of fun because the
asterism is something that you can make out of in the sky it's not the constellation it's not okay here's
copia now here's Sagittarius okay here's Sagittarius but to me I see that teapot
and I see the Milky Way streaming out of the teapot and to me you know uh
Scorpius here and the teapot you know and the Big Dipper everything that we
come up with there are so many asterism the coat hanger beautiful colorful
little coat hanger down at the base of the northern cross just beautiful but
this time we will not look at constellations we're going to look at the as isms uh what what they look like
you know maybe they this doesn't look like Sagittarius to me this looks like a teapot and so you know people kind of
relate better to that and it helps them learn the constellations I think a quick
requirement it's pretty easy to do it does have a certificate oops and a pin
um and you again you're going to log everything date time where you're at Sky
conditions equipment name of the asterism and a simple sketch believe me you don't have to be an artist to do
this um you can just draw a very simple sketch for things like this uh
observation requirements again you're going to uh look at the object name and
this is pretty much what will be in your log as you finish with that asterism all
of this information uh and if you go to our website and you look under observe and
then you'll have a drop-- down menu it will say observe programs listed alphabetically it will show you all the
programs and it will show you the pin that you can earn with each program and it really looks pretty cool and this is
the asterism PIN uh and it is a coat hanger and it that is so beautiful to me
it's very simple but it's very beautiful the stars are just so colorful and next we don't want to align
with an asteroid observing program but I thought it was still pretty interesting that um you know we can learn more about
asteroids too uh there are two levels with this you earn you earn a
certificate and a pin with the 100 item or the 100 asteroid requirement which is
gold or the regular you'll just earn a certificate you can do this with a 4in telescope for the 25 asteroids required
or the hundred you need a 6 in and again I'm just barely touching on these
because there's so much information for each one of these programs that's why I say go back to the astronomical
league.org website and you will find all of this information and a whole lot more
um the techniques you're going to use you're gonna U just look photometry
timing of asteroid occultations you will learn a lot about asteroids and I think
there's a great interest in that too I mean there's always been an interest in asteroids and this just looks like a
real interesting program to me um again the quick view of requirements you'll
use your eyes you can look at eye pieces you can use remote telescopes which are allowed visual or Imaging um just pretty
much anything that you can do to make that asteroid clearer and believe me
you're going to learn a lot from this program from what I have read it just looks incredible it looks like a nice
challenge but yet have the learn learning you know the th things you can learn about what is traveling through
the sky and to me that that is amazing I mean it really is especially after ly shoe maker ly n you know you realize
that stuff like this is real and it can really do damage and a lot of times they don't find asteroids until they're
fairly close passing by or going by um the bigger ones they know they have a
pretty good idea where they're at and this is your asteroid pin um and it's
not the best of pictures I take it we've had this one for a while but it is really a cool pen that you can earn the
certificate and the pen if you do a 100 asteroids so look all of those up
because it is really it it's fun it's a lot of fun and just things that you can
learn and so uh Scott had mentioned the astronomical League live program please
join us January 26th at 7 p.m. we're g to have Alan Dyer on uh talking about
photographing the 2024 solar eclipse joining us also will be Carol ore who is
the president of the league Scott will be there and David Levy and we will have
a lot of fun and learn quite a bit about Imaging the upcoming Eclipse that
everybody is getting ready for uh here are where you can watch this live and it
is always recorded just like the GSP so you can come back and watch it at any
point so please join us January 26 and Scott I'm going to turn it all back over
to you oh yeah I thought you were going to go through all 90 or 85 well you know
I thought about it but you only gave me 15 minutes I thought I can't even talk that fast believe it or
[Laughter] not we'll record it okay where you go
through and I think it'll probably take you about 10 hours of recording or so
and I will give that thought yeah yeah I'll work
that okay okay well that's great um let's see
I will take there there we go there we go there's that pretty lady and um yeah
I love the background where you're at where you got all your radio dishes all out of tension there so yeah I enjoy
many times yeah I enjoy being there because it's just out in the middle of nowhere
it's so beautiful and at nighttime I've been out Imaging out around there at night and it is just gorgeous you can
see cars coming from Miles Away beautiful area yeah and green Bank also
Greenbank Star Quest that's another one in West Virginia definitely a really cool place to
visit right right that's great okay all right well Terry thank you so much um
thank you our next speaker is uh uh the Astro do himself Ron breach
and Ron uh thank you for coming on to the 140th Global star party now Ron is
always sending I love this he's sending uh in my email and I look for it I look
forward to it every time but he always sends me some sort of mind-blowing deep Sky object usually it's a Galaxy I think
he loves galaxies I I do too or maybe he just knows that I like them but uh uh I
love seeing his work uh and um you know he is uh someone that teaches people how
to use uh pix Insight he's one of the so-called Masters or maybe the master of
pix insight and uh and that's not an easy program to use um but it's
something that you should know about because they'll really help you get dig out all the data out of your images and
remove um all The Unwanted stuff you know so I've seen some pretty amazing
things happen to images you know going from raw to final process in pixs
Insight so but uh uh Ron thank you so much for coming on I like your astrod do
shirt and thank you very much thank you very much little free
advertising yeah I was um you know one of the things I don't know if you've
experienced this much um Ron but when you're talking to people about the
universe a lot of people think that the Universe just kind of starts and stops at the sky you know they don't think
about that the universe come I mean is part of everything and part of us and all the
rest of it I was reading about the number of atoms that are in our bodies
just in our bodies there's about I didn't count them all okay but there's about seven billion
billion billion I don't know how many zeros that is but one of you guys out there in the
audience might know this but that's how many about how many atoms were in your body okay and these atoms were formed
where in Stars so you know they're all from the Stars yeah yeah everything is
from the stars out of the universe looking everything goes back everything goes back recycling I
everything it's a giant recycling right yeah so we're in this uh phase right now
where we can uh lay our hands on a telescope and uh look through it or take
images with it and uh and sit here and talk about it so I think it's so cool
but uh Ron I will turn this over to you thanks for coming on to our Global star party thank you for having me uh let me
share my screen with you uh and I'm gonna just start with a a presentation
here umang on a
second there we go so uh one of the things that
I've liked about all the presentations I hear is everybody's got a different take on alignment in astronomy like we just
heard Terry man talking about aligning with the astronomical leag and um when I
was thinking about what to talk about today I looked back at what I've presented so far and all of it has been
pretty deep sky pictures the kind that Scott was just describing and I do love
galaxies but I also I mean I don't I don't have favorites I guess I uh I love
whatever I happened to be shooting and processing at the time um but I've only
ever talked on the global star party I've only shown the the final result of
what I do and I thought it would be interesting tonight to talk on the more
technical side of how alignment comes into astrophotography and I just really
wanted to talk about three critical things where alignment is important and
the first one is polar alignment the second one is colation and the third one is star
alignment during processing so I'm GNA do this as a flyover if you're a
beginner or intermediate astrophotographer this is uh critical
that you master some of these techniques if you're more advanced I
might be able to give you some mathematics and tools that can help you do this even better than you're already
doing it so polar alignment is an absolute must for long exposure deep Sky
photography unless you happen to be shooting star Trails if you're shooting star Trails you don't really need to
worry about alignment you're going to get nice uh arcs but of course if you're
trying to avoid that you need to have your telescope work like a big clock
that's turning exactly opposite to the Earth and at exactly the same speed and
so you need to align it the way it's shown on this image here so you can see
my telescope is mounted on the earth somewhere uh and the polar axis of the
telescope the axis that the telescope and the counterweight go around has to
be perfectly parallel to the polar axis of the Earth the axis that the Earth rotates around
you can get pretty close by eye um getting near Polaris if you're in the
northern hemisphere it's a little more challenging in the southern hemisphere
luckily there's all kinds of software and tools um one of the most popular and
I've seen it used and it took two minutes was the qhy pole Master it shown
on the lower left here uh but you sometimes you can use a through the mount polar scope or software like I
have shown here on the bottom right so how good is good enough don't worry if you don't want to look at the math you
can close your eyes right now it's not necessary but I thought this was a good
question to ask for the people that are more advanced how good is good enough well that depends on how much star
trailing you're willing to tolerate so it's all a matter of what you're willing
to tolerate so in this example if I'm shooting M45 with a 4in telescope at
f3.5 and I want to track for 10 m 10 minutes and my pixels are six
microns um I've got all of this information here the acceptable length
of my star Trail one pixel and so on and I know how good is good enough 4.2 AR
minutes that's how close I have to be to achieve round Stars that's good
enough but here's the real bottom line just get polar aligned as well as you can and don't worry about the math use
the tools that I showed you either the hardware tools pole master or if you're
using acquisition software like Nina use the plugin for three star polar alignment and get as close as you can
good enough is good enough you don't have to be perfect if you can get round start stars in the length of exposure
that you're shooting that's good enough and a little bit of misalignment in
declination can actually improve your guiding because you're always correcting in the same direction so don't sweat it
too much get as close as you can if you still see some field rotation shorten
your sub exposure length or go back and do some more polar alignment also if
you're autog guiding pick a star to autog guide on that's near the center of this field of your main camera that'll
avoid uh any um star trailing due to um
guiding being off okay colation is a fancy word for
alignment but this time we're talking about aligning the Optics of your telescope with the mechanics of your
telescope and if you're misaligned misc columnated in other words it's going to affect how much
detail your picture pictures will show and it's going to affect the shape of your stars they can look really terrible
I've seen that myself with misc columnated Schmid casr telescopes and
fast Scopes in particular are extremely sensitive to misolation and they need to be checked
off often so this this is important if you're a beginner because it's a
consideration in picking your telescope so if you don't want to cumate if you
don't think you're handy and you're just getting started consider a small refractor to get started they almost
never need adjustment and if they do you'd want to get it done at the factory
and uh there's a lot of good small refractors out there including explore scientific small refractors don't need
cination if you're using a Newtonian a Schmid cagin a regular cigr classical
cigan or a Richie cretan telescope you're going to need to cumate regularly
and accurately in order to get good results you when you're doing a Schmid
Cagan that's a a common amateur telescope uh you can do this visually
with a high power eyepiece on a bright star just look at it out of focus at
high power and adjust the secondary mirror the three screws so that you get the center uh the dark hole uh so that
it looks like a doughnut perfect colation shown on the right if you're
doing a Newtonian you have to go back and forth between two mirrors and it's helpful to use a tool like a laser cator
or a cating tool set laser cators aren't expensive you can probably get one for
$50 just make sure that your cator is columnated roll it along a flat surface
pointed at the wall and make sure it traces out a straight line instead of a sine wave if it's got a sine wave then
the cator is not aligned properly adjust the secondary first and then the primary
go back and forth until your outer Focus star looks like the image on the
right if you're um cating um a more complex system like a c telescope or a
Richie creta you might want to use a specialized tool this figure shows the
hotch cator for Crain telescopes I've used this tool on a Schmid cogram you
have to be very exacting in setting up and using it following the directions exactly but it does do an excellent
job there's also software tools some AI based tools are already on the market
there's a company called Innovation foresight they have a product called sky
wave their website is here www.in foresight tocom and it uh can
really help out with critical colation for Imaging it's easy with the right tools
if you're using a Newtonian especially a fast one you're going to be cating regularly for for other uh scopes with
mirrors check regularly cumate when you need to make small adjustments I've made
the mistake of making big adjustments and having trouble getting back to where I
started and uh you can do this on a mediocre night just use an outof Focus
start to check colation you to do really fine colation you do need good seeing so
wait for a night where you both have access to a bright star and good seeing
so the last type of alignment I want to show you is star alignment so here I'm
going to take you you under the hood into pix insight and show you um a
technique that that I developed well I say I developed really I just refined it
for my own use all the tools were already there for me um but for about
four years I was shooting with the system that you see here this is a 6-in refractor that's on the bottom uh with a
monochrome camera with small pixels gives me nice high resolution
and then sitting on top of it is a smaller 4in refractor with about half
the focal length and a color camera so what I'm doing is shooting the color
with the top scope and at the same time high resolution monochrome with the big scope but the
problem is how do you align and combine them well I'm going to show you so I'm
just going to switch over to pixel insight and um I don't think I've ever
gone into PX Insight in a global Star Party presentation so this is a first for me let me tell you what you're
looking at so um you're looking at the globular cluster M12 and on the left is the oneshot color
image that was acquired with The Takahashi the small telescope that was on top Ron it's still showing your
Observatory yeah oh I'm sorry hang on give me one second
here that should be better not yet better there you go you
got it you got it okay so the picture at left with the little green uh square on
it that's the one shot color picture taken with the smaller telescope and you see it has a humongous
gigantic field the large scope with the the monochrome camera has quite a small
field and I'd like to put these one on top of the other and I can show you that
that's not really that straightforward if I put them
both to uh a one to
five magnification and I hover one over the other you can see they're very different in
scale so uh let me show you this star
here and the one to its right keep an eye on those when I
hover you see the corresponding stars in the other image they don't line up so
what am I going to do well I'm going to line them up so I'll
use star alignment to do that and I'm going to select the black
and white high resolution image as my reference and just apply star alignment
onto the ones shot color image and it's going to quickly generate a new image for me a new color image that's a
perfect match for the monochrome black and
white and here it comes there it is so I'm going to put
the original color image away and now I'm going to show you uh
both of these images at the same magnification so I'll just
drag this over here and now I can show you that when I
drag one over the other they align
perfectly oh wow and so now now I can do something really cool this image on the
left contains brightness and color information the image on the right just
contains brightness information I'm going to replace the brightness of the left side image with
the brightness from the right side image and the details of how I do that
don't really matter for this presentation I'm just going to do that
sub institution and watch what happens to the picture wow so that's after
before after before and if I zoom
in this is before and after wow
before and after such a nice result and and there's something really cool that I
want to show you I'm going to go back to the before State and I'm going to zoom in right here do you see that little
smear this little smear right here
galaxies yeah watch what happens when I substitute the luminance boom
wow very cool and there's more I mean there's galaxies throughout this image there's a
little one here I don't know if you can see it um there's several uh more
towards the bottom there's one here and you know until I did that substitution
you can barely spot him but boom and this little smear right
here in reality it's a group of three stars they just weren't resolved in the
low resolution color so that is a look under the hood
at alignment in astrophotography so all of those things are necessary to make
all those pretty pictures that I like to
make they're fantastic that's it for me Scott fantastic thank you so much thank
you so what is your next Target um that you're going after I mean I think you're
always doing astrophotography yeah I I am now the weather's been diabolical lucky I got to
go to um the Nightfall star party in California and I had cleared nights
every night while I was there but other than that I've had nothing since October
however I'll show you um I have to share my screen one more
time uh screen and I'll just um open for
you something that I'm working on right now so we need to go into my temporary
folder because they're not finalized yet
and these are the two images oh my goodness this is IC
417 yeah also known as the spider it's in or and um I've shot this at low
resolution before but I've never shot it with a A for 18inch scope like I did
here this is essentially uncropped this is completely filling the
field and um you can see uh in the natural color image on the right it's
got these lovely blue nebulosity features that are common throughout
things in or so i405 the tadpole nebula
uh sorry IC 45 is the Flaming star has that beautiful purple shock and the
tadpole nebula has some of these IC 417 has them and then here on the left this
is a Hubble palette version um I'm not sure which one I like more this one shows more of the
Stinger right I think you see a little more of the stinger and the one on the left but uh I love these blue patches of
nebulosity that shows so well in the image on the right so this is just uh
I'm showing you my drafts these still need work but uh but they're close you might
see one in your email in the next couple of days and Galaxy season is
coming yeah right yeah I I just posted a I just posted a um a really interesting
Galaxy recently L it was this guy here
ic10 which is an irregular very unusual I didn't find
many images of this Galaxy no ic10 and cassia but but I read an article about
it in sky and telescope and I thought gee I need to go out and shoot
that yeah you should turn that back into the mag okay that's great that's wonderful thank
you for having me thank you thank you Ron okay see you later all right see you next time take
care yeah uh let's go uh to our next speaker our next speaker is uh probably
the man on our program that knows more about the moon than anyone uh Robert
Reeves he has uh put out a great book about exploring the moon with Robert
Reeves and uh a lot of our reader readers are our listeners our Watchers
have been buying the book and so it's kind of fun to look in chat you know because actually I saw some uh mentions
in chat on this uh uh particular show you know where they uh they' gotten the
book for Christmas or they' bought it for themselves but um it's uh it's on
Amazon and Robert can tell you more about it but uh if you guys have questions about the Moon while you're
watching his presentation uh you know let it rip and I'll I'll be happy to ask him if there's
a lot of them we'll have to save him for another show but um but let's have
Robert come on uh Robert is also very involved with the uh Texas Star Party um
and uh he is uh I don't know what his official capacity is right now but uh he
certainly is always encouraging people to go uh that is another super dark star
party and uh uh great place to go to uh if you're in that uh General vicinity
you know um so um Robert you were uh you
have uh your presentation is alignments lunar alignments correct um yep uh
little areas of the Moon where things point to other things or line up in a row I wanted to stay kind of within your
theme of alignments so on the moon there are some things it kind of Stack Up in the same direction so I wanted to talk
about that uh the Texas Star Party you mentioned being a dark sky location uh
this year um Texas Star Party is taking a zigzag because of the eclipse it's
going to be held at lantham Springs U south of Waco directly on the center
line of the eclipse uh the center line of the eclipse goes right through the facility that is hosting the Texas Star
Party so uh uh dard no you know we'll have a little bit of urban glow this
year but next year we hope to be back out at the prud ranch uh you had mentioned uh my book yes I'm very
pleased that over the holidays people have uh
been picking up on this thing uh Amazon gives me a very nice graph of uh what's
selling and whatnot and uh I very much deeply appreciate the uptick in in sales
and uh uh it's gotten off a very good launch for 2024 um yes indeed uh talking about
alignment I am in the crosshairs of the eclipse here in San Antonio uh the big X on the map of Texas um this year I'm
going to be at the Museum of uh no the Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas for the eclipse um the Celestron team is
going to be up there partnering with the Weather Channel so if you're watch the eclipse on the Weather Channel it will
be being broadcast through the telescope that I am tending so um hope it all
works out so let's go to screen share and pray that I can make everything work
here um I'm using a different laptop this
time the company laptop because my normal laptop is steering the telescope
right now on the cave nebula so um you can see it everything's okay
yes sir got my title slide up yes
sir great okay well postcards from the Moon is the general title of everything
that I do uh including my my Facebook posts so u i carry it over here and um
oops that's not supposed to happen come on there um same slide that I show at
the beginning of every Moon presentation to remind everybody that there are only only two primary landscape forming
processes on the moon everything we see on the moon including everything we're going to look at tonight was created by
either an impact by an asteroid giant meteor comet or by subsequent volcanism
that modify um in the theme of alignments the first thing we're going
to look at here is a series of craters that I call the Stepping Stones because they look like stepping stones leading
off to some adventur some place uh we're we're trailing North from Mari Chisum we
can see uh the Sea of crisis in the very bottom of the image and then the next big crater up is cleomedes
then above that smaller birkart above that geminus and then above it uh the
big really ruined one the oldest one in the bunch uh PR nectarian uh crater
Masala and uh if you're a person person of my age and U I'll admit to pushing
almost 80 now uh the very name Masala probably brings visions of a very
classic movie from the 1950s called Ben her as the the hero of that movie uh
Judah Ben her his Pro protagonist the entire uh thing was uh a fellow named
Masala so every time I look at the this area of the Moon I think of the movie Ben
her and moving on um down in the Southeast corner of the Moon um the
Rough and Tumble Southern Highlands we've got this fingerlike
uh R of Valley it just points like a finger directly at uh Mari arral the
Southern Sea which kind of hugs the limb of the Moon Mario arrell wraps around
The Far Side of the Moon half of it we can't see from the earth the other half we can but uh this Raa
Valley 500 km long this gouge ripped out of the lunar Surface by something back
of the nectarian period that came tumbling across the face of the Moon after an impact and uh notice that uh
that it kind of dog legs to the West at Mallet crater and um there's a train of
thought that this may be two separate features the upper part by by uh uh
raate a crater yes the raate of Valley but um I'm in favor of calling the bottom half of it the Mallet Valley
because I believe they are two separate features and again showing how the raate
of Valley points like a finger straight to
marial and then moving on to other things that line up um a serpentine
Ridge there uh a twisted ropey uh wrinkle Ridge on the
Eastern area of near the Eastern Shoreline of the mar serenitas the Sea
of Serenity um this is actually a combination of two separate wrinkle ridges the upper part is um dors of smof
the bottom part where it kind of twists and almost goes hand in hand is a a
dorsal lisst now these two wrinkle ridges create the singular
formation we call the serpentine Ridge it was named by johanes schroer back in
the early uh 19th century and the name stuck it's a popular name it's not an
official name they're known as two different features dorsa smurov and
dorsa liser but we call it the serpentine Ridge for an obvious reason so uh two features on the moon that are
aligned with each other together and combine and form this rather beautiful wrinkle Ridge now it maybe one of the
longer features on the Moon being uh hundreds of kilometers long but bear in mind that wrinkle ridges um they're
rarely more than several hundred meters in elevation so uh we only see these things at very low Sun elevations like
we here is just past Sunrise so even though it's only several hundred meters elevation it does cast enough shadow
that we can see it now several days after this phase it will vanish no Shadows you won't be able to see it so
they're very elusive features uh another alignment one of my
favorite cluster of craters on the Easter the western shore
of uh Mari nectaris theopus crater at the top then
cath then CIS crater and then uh below that
cathina um h I'm being told my internet
connection is unstable I hope you're seeing me okay yeah we still see you um anyway these three craters they're oh
good okay they're all lined up basically in a around the uh uh Northwestern
quadrant of Mario nectaris and U what I like about him is there study in how
craters uh degrade with age now all three of these creaters about the same
size and they're about the same age they're all over uh three three billion
years old but cathine at the bottom formed first and then cus in the middle
formed and the seismic shock and ejecta thrown out from cus degraded cathina and
then Along came theopus and popped down overlaid cis's uh Northeastern rim and
degraded it so last man standing is always always the freshest looking crater because all the others around are
going to be degraded by the seismic shock and the shower of debris thrown out by the last crater
formed and moving along to the same cluster um they really make a striking
pair of Sunrise just as Sunrise is breaking across their Rim Illuminating
The Far Side the interior of the crater still in deep Shadow it's very dramatic
and it's it's a beautiful thing to watch uh moving on to the center of the
Moon um there's um various types of volcanic
rules on the on the moon uh some are formed by uh uh the U splitting of the
Surface by a volcanic Dy that pushed up from the core of the Moon uh others are
uh created by the collapse of land between parallel faults others are
formed by volcanism like the one in the middle now with in the very center of
the Moon almost dead center uh like a bullseye Target uh here on Mari vaporum
and the adjoining sinus Medi the middle middle middle Bay we have the trees
Necker reals on the on the right kind of almost k-shaped in a way uh just east of
trees Neer crater and uh then up uh in the middle we've got uh right
hyginus uh very volcanic you can see these volcanic collapse bits dotting the
interior of the gowing form of Ryah hyginus and right Square in the middle
of hyginus notice the 8 kilometer wide crater that's kind of a pivot between
the two gos that is the largest non-impact crater on the moon uh it's a
volcanic collapse pit then moving a little bit further to the east um Rama aradas almost looks
like uh somebody excavated uh Highway cut for an interstate highway through the through the Hills uh very straight
um the land collapsed between two parallel faults so this is slumping of land in between these faults and uh
typically these type of faults uh reals are very straight now the Curious Thing
If my cursor shows I believe these are all linked in some way notice this real
branching between aradus and henus and then move up
oh this picture almost can't see it but there's also U reals linking hygienist with
trees Necker so this entire area was fiercely volcanic and uh although these
are three separate features there's enough volcanism M subsurface volcanism that that created links between them and
moving on a little bit further west uh the triple alignment of tus crater at
the top uh alonsus crater at the bottom and arzachel at the in the middle and
arzachel at the bottom and well there's a dusting of
other you say something I thought somebody called my name um
now there's a dusting of other alignments in this picture as well up at the top of tus follow my cursor and you
see the straight alignment of all of these Craters of katana Mueller uh Katana is
the Latin name that we give crater chains all formed by the sequential
impact of the same object that broke up and also we notice these lengthy gouges
ripped into the face of the Moon much like cat scratches we can see them all
the way across multiple areas here these align with
uh Mari embrium the U the Sea of rains and these
are streaks that were created by material blown out from the impact that
created the embrium Basin that now cradles Mor embrium and this debris scattered out across the moon tumbled
across the moon and gouged out these these deep um
valleys and G like this one glinton Valley another one here another one here
uh these are easily visible to the eye and a small telescope and there are
graphic evidence of the ferocity of the blast that created the embrium Basin
that later filled with lava and became a Mari embrium uh moving on southern part of
Mari embrium um the outer rim of the embrium Basin is uh various Mountain
chains and in this case on the Southeast Corner uh the uh um appenine mountains U
form the uh the the rim of the emban Basin there and I've always said if
there is any reason at all for the appenine mountains to be placed on the moon it was to point like a finger
straight down to osines and cernus craters uh very artistic
arrangement and um moving on to the end um another
alignment crater rays are the splash of material blasted out by a crater and
draped off across the moon uh radially from the center of the explosion uh
crater Rays fade after about a billion years uh so there's not very many of
them left on the moon otherwise the moon would be just a solid white homogeneous mass of Ray on top of Ray but the ones
that survive of the tonian ray system aroundon Tao is among the most dramatic stretches halfway across the face of the
moon but there's also these curious parallel rays going U up toward the
Northwest uh these do not converge at the center of Tao like you would expect
from the middle of the explosion they're parallel
um and they're actually almost tangential to the rim of Tao so another
strange alignment where these rays are parallel instead of diverging from the
middle and moving on to our last alignment um it's very
curious the two of the uh most elongated craters on the moon are in the same
eyepiece field of view look down on the southwestern uh corner of the uh U
Southern Highlands and you'll see at the bottom cigar shaped Schiller which spans
almost 170 km in length up above it another very elongated peanut-shaped
crater hanel now hanyel is very easily explained it is actually two overlapping
circular round the craters and and uh our slanted perspective from Earth makes
it look a little bit more elliptical than it really is but uh that's an easily explained Double Impact Shiller
on the other hand very unusual it's a single impact it's very unique there are no
other creators on the moon like it and uh created apparently by the
glancing uh impact of very low inclination of a rather large large
object uh billions of years ago and uh I think it's very U um artistic that both
of these extremely elongated craters are aligned in the same direction by sheer
chance so I uh conclude with my usual
slide that there is much to love on the moon and uh the Moon is my playground
and I invite you to come out and play with me so thanks a lot Scott
um ah there we go want to make sure I wasn't muted myself um and uh you know
the thanks to the audience uh for all the uh interesting remarks about your
fantastic lunar images um uh I had a
question uh about the moon itself I I've I've seen actual lunar soil and um
uh during one of my trips to the Jeff propulsion laboratory and um there's a lot of
interesting aspects about lunar soil but how is lunar soil made um it's the result of meteor
impacts now um the U original basaltic crust of the Moon solidified of course
after it cooled down but the the constant constant infall of meteorites
um now we look up in this night sky and on a good night uh we can see maybe six
metors per hour now bear in mind uh we're seeing those six meteors in a
fairly small area of the Earth uh multiply that out around the world and
there are thousands of meteorites falling meteors falling all the time burning up in the atmosphere but on the
moon uh there is no atmosphere to slow them down they slam into the surface at
Cosmic velocities uh uh velocities of up to 100,000 kilometers per hour and uh they
pulverize the lunar surface and this process is been going on for billions of
years and uh that's a very tough number to wrap your head around but when you
multiply this constant influx of microm meteors or and large meteors uh over
years decades centuries Millennia billions of years eventually these
impacts grind the dust down into a fine powder and uh we could see that when the
astronauts Apollo Astronauts were walking on the moon they shuffle along and kind of skip and you can see the
dust puff up ahead of their boots when they they kicked into the dust of course
there's no air on the moon so it Fells straight back down like like a a beach
sand not suspended in the air but it's actually U very very fine some of it
almost like talcum powder if that were on on Earth Earth on the surface of the Earth it would be drifting around in the
air as we kick it but on the moon no atmosphere so it just falls back down
and is beaten up by more impacts now to tell you how show how small these
impacts go um a u microscopic glass bead
volcanic glass bead I think it was something like a um a fourth of a
millimeter in diameter was analyzed under a micron microscope and it had a
crater on it something that tiny was struck
by yeah something that tiny was struck by something even smaller and blasted a
crater into it so uh you multiply this process out by literally billions of
years uh pretty soon you've got a very dusty lunar surface wow that's that's amazing um
John Ray watching on Facebook he's asking is there any evidence of current volcanic activity on the
moon there's evidence of um recent volcanic activity in the form of uh
within the last billion years but as far as flowing lava on the moon no U now
bear in mind the like crater rays will be erased after a billion years so will Dark volcanic ash deposits be churned up
and be hard to see now remember back when we looked at uh let's see if I can
do this without a major disaster and uh go back to this
view uh nope the sun is too low we can't see it but uh at the 9:00 position noon
3:00 down here about 530 uh on alon's Crater under high Sun there are are
volcanic ash deposits that uh show up very well they're dark uh they're very
evident and these have to have happened um relatively recently in the moon's
geologic history uh the sun level elevation or illumination is just too slanted in this particular image to see
them I'm sorry I don't have another handy picture of alonsus but within alonsus yes we we see this oh oh there
it is right there just see it darker area the darker area these are volcanic
ash deposits blown out from volcanic Vents and the fact that you can still see them says that it it happened after
the traditional vulcanism on the moon had
subsided very interesting okay thank you so much thank you we learned so much
about the Moon from you and uh some of our audience is quite inspire
ired to look at the Moon from just watching your program so thank you very much Robert already already my pleasure
take care okay byebye byebye okay all right folks uh it's been a while but um
a young naving uh uh Cel Kumar is coming on to give another
presentation uh naine when was the last time you were on global star party it's
been I think about three or four months may you longer uh yeah because school caught up
to me you know because I'm a freshman in high school right now yeah um voice actually changed it's changed since the
LA when you were on last so it's a voice crack don't worry it happen it's
great it's awesome well we're gonna turn it over to
you man thank you thanks for coming on to the and H firstly I want to say happy
New Year everyone um and Scott I'd actually like to ask you a question um okay what is
your New Year's resol resolution what is a New Year's resolution what is your my New Year
resolution what is yours mine mine is um
uh is to spend more time in the gym I I do go to the gym regularly but I plan to
I have this goal you know I'll be 65 this summer and I have this goal that
when I by the time I hit 65 that'll be the strongest I've ever been in my life
and so that's that is the that's the goal all
right all right good I got ways to go I'm about uh I'm about I think about
two-thirds there now so that's a very bold goal to be
honest um so speaking of that oh mine first I want to spend more time
with astronomy and my telescope because I lately I haven't really been like much like taking much photos which I really
love to um cuz School caught up to me and all that stuff so like I want to spend more
time with my telescope um you know spending more time with the hobby that I love so yeah and um that's about it and
so this gsp's theme is about alignment and my topic that I'm going to talk
about is planetary alignment something very related to this topic so without
further Ado let's dive in um let me firstly start my screen share give me a second hope this
works uh let's go can everyone see my screen yep you just need to go
to mod there we go there we go perfect so so firstly everyone please subscri
subscribe to my YouTube channel skylet astronomy um hopefully this presentation
will be um posted on there so please take a look and so I'm going to talk
about planetary alignment and yeah so the first thing we need to know is what
is planetary alignment um So currently like whenever you like look up at the
night sky like for example like the planet's dancing it's like constant like super constant like a ballet for example
and occasionally we sometimes get like a spark of curiosity because of like the patterns that it
creates and as the case of when the plan line in the night sky and so to get like
a background about this for a lot of centuries like the site of multiple planets appearing super close together
in the night sky has fueled many sorts of myths Legends prophecies but like we
really need to know what it means astronomically speaking so the question is in the
planets line when can we expect to see the planets next and just to like summarize this
image um the four planets in the sky were Mercury Venus Mars and
Jupiter and they were joined by the Crescent Moon to create this wonderful
photo opportunity of a planetary conjunction um and this is currently
from like an observatory from a telescope taken with
descriptions from I think Chile I think in
parol from the esa or european South Observatory so yeah and it has all these
planets labeled over here Moon Mars Jupiter Mercury and Venus so
yeah okay um next slide so we really need to know like what the meaning of
planetary alignment is now that we got a brief kind of background about it so let me just clear some common
misunderstandings about this topic first is that the planets don't really
line in like a perfect exact straight line space but like what we're referring to is like a Celestial event where
multiple planets appear close together as seen from the night sky on Earth this
is otherwise known as a conjunction that we all know as um the alignments that
are visible to us are based on like our line of sight so for example let's give
Mars and Venus appear close together in like a sky they will still be separated
by millions of miles in space to get a good idea of
it it is kind of like standing on a hill for example and seeing two far trees in
the distance even though they are separated
like a little bit from the L by the landscape so to summarize this
image this is an image next to the European South observatory's very large
telescope or known as BLT observatory in P in parol
Chile and taken by the eso um by why
Bloody yeah so we need know why planet
alignments happen so the planets orbit the Sun at like different speeds
distances so which really means that they're frequently identical to each other in the night sky but like
occasionally sometimes when like their Pats cross seeming seeming to lead to like a conjunction or an example would
be like Jupiter for example which takes around 12 years to revolve around the sun while Mars takes
around doesn't take around 12 years sorry while Mars takes around a year
also like Earth Mars and Jupiter are positioned in a way that they appear super close to each other in like the
night sky creating like a temporary conjunction although the planets don't really orbit the sun like the same plane
or area it is relatively rare for like more than two planets at once although
it does sometimes happen um so to summarize this image
Jupiter and Saturn at their closest approach during the Great conjunction hopefully many of you saw on Monday
evening December 21st hopefully I don't know what that was yeah but um yeah this
image and the next topic we're going to go to is what do planetary mean for
astronomers um for specifically like us I guess planetary conjunctions are not
really just like beautiful truly remarkable events for stargazers but they also have a lot of practical
implications um so like for example PL alignments can also service
like key reference points for like many astrophotographers for calibrating astronic astronomical instruments such
as telescopes and all that stuff um but like when planets like do
truly align in 3D space like exploration missions such as like that particularly those that
involve flybys or gravitational assist right might also leverage positions so
like for example NASA's Voyager 2 mission took advantage of a rare planetary alignment of four outer
planets during the late 1970s and early 80s which such an
alignment only occurs like every 175 years which is a long time and this
allowed the mission to Fu fuele efficiently explore the out of reaches of the solar system which is very insane
taking advantage of such an event and this this is just like an image from NASA saying um the two the
latest two full-frame images of the dwarf planet like out outside like or near like our like near the end of our
solar system like Pluto and and its largest moon were collected separately
by the New Horizon spacecraft during its approach and yeah and like the next
topic like we need to know when the planets will actually line again even
though conjunctions between two planets are Rel L common um given the orbital periods of
each planet in align in full alignments like where many planets all seem super
close together and stuff are rather kind of rare and in the near future which is
this month actually on January 27th actually 2024 Mars Venus Mercury and
Saturn will actually align all in the morning Sky which is very crazy but like one of the most awaited events will
actually occur in like the 2040s this event will actually Focus Mars
Jupiter Venus Mercury and Saturn which will all be visible within like a small segment of the night sky
next to like a a crescent moon and to summarize this image Southern hamare
only Eastern Sky specifically this it was like in the early morning it was
like a rare close opportunity to watch for um four worlds Mercury Venus and
Jupiter and the closest planetary grouping yeah we've ever seen the century so far the rare event is
happening when these four planets aligned together in like a a straight rope right guess like a rope and this
was taken in um Australia in brisban in the Southern Hemisphere and this was a
planetary conjunction photographed in on May 13 2011 Jupiter Venus and Mercury so
yeah that's that and then let's talk about like the historical impact of planetary alignments
so historically like overall planetary alignments have held immense
significance in like the past for like a variety of different um Civilizations for example ancient cultures often
related these celestial events with like myths Omen prophecies like I talked about earlier like like while today like
we currently like understand like the reason behind these alignments like looking back of the past like for us
provides an interesting perspective on human culture and our early connection with the cosmos like generally um for
example let's get the mines the mines were actually very keen astronomers they
strenuously tracked the movements of the planets and had a
very unique calendar system intricately that intricately interwove Planetary
Cycles which like inbuilt inside their calendar system which is very interesting and eclipses in alignments
were Dean very powerful in their civilization and that was powerful
enough to influence like terrestrial events like warranting close observing and recordkeeping in general actually
and just to summarize this image also um this is like a planetary alignment scene
from France on June 18 2022 showcasing Mercury below the
Horizon Venus Uranus um which is actually invisible to
the naked eye and Mars Jupiter Neptune also um invisible to the naked eye
Saturn um Pluto and yeah that's a lot of planets to actually
see um that's that and just some memes just to like laugh at because like I
personally like memes hope everyone here also likes memes so like yeah so this
meme would be like if the planets would line that would be great because this guy actually really means
it and this other one would be planetary
alignments they Inspire Universal peace through the creation of Swords able to
blast apart entire worlds which is very powerful um so yeah that's the memes and
I just want to talk about some Astro photos I took so the first photo actually is from
my inter Celler um e scope Equinox that I took in my backyard and took a photo of the Eastern ve nebula which was a
10-minute exposure um on November 4th actually
last year very good and the next one but like keep in mind these are like all
onpressed yeah they still have a lot of work to do um the next one is a very common
Target M31 the Andromeda galaxy actually um this one's a 13-minute
exposure see the dust LAN looks good uh yeah I could definitely do
better um I can say that um another one's also very common
um M27 the dumbbell nebula also a 13-minute exposure um that's that and then we also
have the M13 Hercules clober cluster also but this one's a very short 3
minute exposure um taken on August 27th um another one would be a very um
cool one especially M16 the Eagle Nebula this is a longer exposure comparatively
68 minutes um this is also on August 27th you couldn't really see The Pillars
of Creation but like yeah this is what you can get for this exposure and the next one is um M8 the lagon nebula this
is a very short TW minute exposure also taken on August 27th and just some Outreach photos this
is from like the eclipse actually this is like a shadow of a tree which I took was very cool and you could see like
some small Crescent beams of light from the eclipse actually um that's that and it's very
cool and interesting like a tree in my front yard and something related to outreaches some little kids from my
neighborhood actually looking at the telescope that I set up in the front um looking at the eclipse through like the
um explore scientific telescope actually so yeah thank you thank you for having
me on the show and yeah hopefully I can come on
soon okay all right well thank you very much naine uh I think that uh your
astrophotography you know you should probably start learning some of the uh techniques for from maybe Ron breacher
on uh pixs insight and uh really dig out some more data because I think you'll be
blown away by what uh what you'll grab there so it's
fantastic um I am um uh ready to bring
on our next speaker but uh navine is there anything else you'd like to share with us is there any events that you're
going to um you know what do you see on the horizon here in
2024 I don't know there's a lot to look forward to I'm just trying to figure out my year right now and uh
yeah um thank you that's all I have to say oh thank you very much okay that's
great well thanks for coming on all right um our our next speaker is
marchelo Souza from Brazil marchello is the editor of skyp magazine uh we're
getting very close to delivering our next issue so you'll be uh looking out
for that um marello uh thanks for coming on to the 40th Global Star
Party nice to meet you and thank you for invitation first of all wish a new year
with peace health and joy for everybody and because you need peace in you you
have so many conflicts now I hope this year we have a better moment for
everyone sent to your maail a short presentation point to
you show presentation because I am far from my seat now because here is the
period of holidays here in Brazil we are time oh you sent did you send me a
presentation yes by by Ma I sent to you I sent you
earlier okay hold on for a moment
because it's something that is changing for us here here now is
that the traditional activities that we realize in public places now are
changing because of the technology that you have available for us then I I will show some pictures
about showing what is changing for us and I think that
I don't know what will happen in the future how will be the
activities because we have so many ER new technologies available that the
traditional moment I don't know if the in the near
future we have people motivated to to look in the ices in
telescopes I I will continue organizing activities
traditional activities but you had the opportunity to
use uh new technology that is not expensive and Chang many
things did you receive uh I did get the link but let me
see if I can get it's a Google doc sometimes I have problems but I don't have a problem this time so I've got
it um and uh let's
see I can I'll share my screen so you can talk over the screen thank you okay
and I used this I can't share
here can you share it as well I can't share I
can't share you can't share okay all right let me do it let me do
it okay let me take you off I'm a noty
my computer here it's okay I'm in front of the beat
here it's very hard to hear brail now is it oh
[Music] yeah and then I I will
show something that for me I was waiting
only in two three years that you're are going to use this but
I let me see if I can take that
into
this was the an event that you organized I think that's the best I can do for right now I don't know how to take it
into presentation mode from the platform but we got it okay okay I I I this was
an event that we organize in December 2023 in the last two weeks of December
one before the Christmas and the other between the Christmas and the New Year
in a Public Square in our city here in Brazil here you can see the team that
organiz the event here is our team and the traditional activity that you
organize in the next slide can okay yes here is a traditional one
that we do we are doing for 26 years
here in our 26 27 years next year 28
years of our stre activities but now he use a different kind of er
resource in the next I think that's in next
slide yes this one you see everybody around me
but nobody's looking in the IP of the
telescope I know that have it now many telescop see
stars different ones that you you don't have an IP but this is something
different because is a mix between the traditional one and the new technology
that we have and the next
one that the traditional one they are looking at the telescope I think that the next one that have the new
technology that it's something very sheap we we had the opportunity to buy
one of the syst could you change this
like this one here is see everybody here you have a small screen with the moon
there is a electronic I piece with ice
cream this is a 5 in screen and is enough for us to show the
moon and show The Sun Also during the
day and they change everything for us because it's not
expensive H we bought it for less than
$100 $100 okay this is not expensive well and it is was possible
for us to use in a public scare the next one to
the here here is the screen and this change everything because many many
people said to to me H I had problems to look in the ey piece because of the
focus of the image because the difference from me and with this one it
was possible everybody to see the same thing and I was imagine that was a we
used already in a presentation we put in a big screen right using a projector
then put in a big screen and show but this is a small screen that you have an
ni piece in this small screen and you can use this and this change you can
share the images they have Wi-Fi then you can share the Mage live for the smartphone
of the people that are around the us then they don't need to take the
picture of me they receiving there is my one the next one you see here this
one this something fantastic I I I don't know if
it's something that I used for before
used here in Brazil but first time that it was used in Brazil I don't know in
other countries but here in Brazil I the first time that a group used in Brazil
and this something is simp system it's not sophisticated that the
new one telescopes that you have but you see that something that is shiy and the
groups of can buy to use and the next one I have more images showing the
people in this you can change the
image next one here you are there traditional
telescope with this big small screen
next ah here is the system it's something amazing it's a
simple system and I think that will help many
groups because now the new telescopes are very
expensive for us to buy these new telescopes digital telescop and this kind of system
can use incl PR square and you have two Imes here of these
event you can change for years
but here and have one more
then can here team as small team and this my
is my question now I don't know what will happen this next
me what will be the future of J reach activities we use this kind of
technology or as the people will continue to be motivated to look in IP s
a telescope with this new techn techologies that appearing that you have
you can take Imes of galaxy everything using small
telescope and the image is digital and the same system you can see in your
smartphone or C project big another example is the next one this
was an event that we participate also in the beginning of
December I I already show it here and it could show the next
one is here we were in a school and we had the opportunity to use in real time
a telescope with two a diameter of two met in Hawaii wow to take images in the
F project and all the the students here in the
next we have we had a a room with a lot of
students there and we were taking live images of
galaxies using telescope in ha Very cool and H this is the future I don't
know I don't know if is a that's far from us or is a near
future this kind of activities we are we organize an activity like this for the
general public next week that we invite the people that are
near the beach a city near the beach here in
summer and I invite the people to go to
a special place to see the Maes live
from telescope in Hawaii yeah yeah I don't know that that used that used to
be just for the elite that was only for you know 20 years ago that was only
for the elite researcher you know that they could be in their office or be at
their University and operate a telescope in Hawaii okay uh now almost anyone can
do it you know and uh uh your students are able to do it and um some of these
programs you have to pay for but a lot of the programs are free or very low cost you know so
it's it is absolutely possible and even amateur astronomers can share their telescopes and views from their
telescopes uh all over the world it's been done on global star party so he
something that I don't know what happen because in the next I I I show one of
the image that we could could you change
here is room and the next one have a Galaxy here oh wow so that's the image
that you guys were getting yes like we took seven M of gall we had minutes we
had 30 minutes to use telescope wow 30 minutes 30 minutes think
that three years ago I didn't imagine that was possible right then things
very fast in astronomy I I I saw that I read that a company Now launch I think
that sellers La a telescope like unella and they have the C stars there
are Chinese one then it's changing very quickly and it's very expensive now I
think that in I don't know if few months or a few years I can buy one of them I
don't know if we continue to organize activ people looking in an i in
telescope this is my doubts now what will be the future of the activ of
Outreach astronomy Outreach activity there I I made a have mes here
what we did at in the same day in this school after this
we uh invite the student to go outside and the next image
please we show them just some it a
traditional H system that we did for so many years if
you can change the image here please what the next
image and I I asked the students what the prefer if the to look the Mage inside
your home or to go outside to look to the sky and they yet don't know what to
answer because something new for them then they really don't know what's
happening because we know what happening but they don't know still are they don't
know yet of technology for and in the last here I
put the two experience that I had in December together the first one was in a
this small system for Moon and Sun in a small in a
screen in a public square and the other one you uh using the uh real time ER in
real time telescop is in Hawaii and now I compare with the traditional one that
we did in the same places and what you be to I don't know
what is I don't know because what we know
that you are going to try to get more this one the small ones to use to look
at the the moon because the people love many of them because we don't know the
focus for each person that look at the telescope this was a problem that you
ever had we imag that everybody see the same thing that we see
but this is is not what happened and if this is small screen we know what
everybody everybody see the same thing see the moon as we see I don't know but
I think future iny out to activities I
really I'm shocked because I the first time that I saw this camera was in
November my one I don't know if they used before but I saw the sh
one spren with an I pce only November
2023 I don't know if old system I don't know but something new for
us and this is my doubts I don't know what will happen in our future of F
activities now but I'm happy one
Technologies yes one thing that has stayed the same is the interest in astronomy you can see that many people
are are still the students are interested exploring the universe uh in
all different kinds of ways so that that will that will
continue I believe thank you very much for thank
you much thank you for taking time to show today your and I think that this
week probably we be launch the new edition of the sky up if not this week
is very soon very soon that's right yeah the articles are all together now and so
we're just getting the final production done and I have an article too that I have to finish so but I I will be
finished very soon too so thank you so much thank you marello thank you you're on vacation
right now right yes yes I for for wa for my family for summer
days here oh next s our regards to your family and tell them thank you for
letting you participate on global star party thank you so much
thanks okay all right so um our next speaker is Adrian Bradley and Adrian is
joining up with us after well I can't remember if you were on the last Global star party or not was that I think I be
I barely made that one you barely made okay yeah it was uh so we skipped a week
uh because of uh holidays you know holidays and all the rest of it but um
we're back and um and it's good to have you back on Adrian so yeah it's good to
be here Moon image behind you yeah this dramatic looking yep the um if I move
out of the way um every once in a while I'll hold my picture at the the
camera and I'll get some re pretty good detail of the Moon A lot of times if you're just using
a wildlife 600 millimeter camera it gets fuzzy but there is a region on the moon
that Robert Reeves had discussed now it's not the subject for today it may be
a subject for next time there's a region up here that that uh Robert termed
Thor's hammer it's a uh it's a feature in this part of
the Moon if you see that feature if you zoom in to your moon picture and you see
the uh that feature that Thor's hammer feature you can barely get it sharp with
a 600 millimeter lens handholding or putting it on a tripod um and if you use a larger
instrument you typically get it pretty sharp but if if you take a sub sharp sub
if you just miss it that feature just becomes a blob so I use that as a way to
tell if I've got a sharp Moon photo or not um yeah and maybe I'll go through
that in in another Global Star Party um that that's uh so my brief presentation
for today I'm just going to share my screen and
so I caught nav's presentation um yes and you know
Wonderful presentation on um alignments and so what I had to do was show a
picture of my own a picture I took of an alignment oh W look at that from June
21st 2022 now the Pluto is of and over here but as you
can see we're we're maybe half no we're maybe an hour before sunrise here maybe
less I think we're approaching civil Dawn and these planets faded fast I did
highlight them I brightened them just a little and
Mercury I would not be surprised yeah if Mercury there it goes barely visible I
couldn't pick it up in binoculars I had look for this Dot and then I brightened it a little bit in the uh you know when
I processed it and put all the uh words in and I tried to lay in the moon the
way that looked um to see Pluto you would have to come this is maybe an hour
before um maybe a couple hours before because that's the Moon Rising I didn't get much you um feature in it but the
alignment was still there he still had Saturn roughly here Jupiter is over here by the moon so
I would say this I believe this is actually the star fomo Saturn and then you have the moon and Jupiter's yet to
be visible here but this was moonrise um Milky Way was still visible
this Panorama was going on so you know with our theme of alignment um every once in
a while we'll get it on the news that there's an alignment of the planets you
know there's an alignment that you you definitely want to catch uh but the
times can be prohibitive you may have to get up like this was a five o'clock in the morning shot and I was there all
night and I don't recall if I had to work but in order to get this shot over Lake hon here I had to wait for it and I
had to take the pck once it was time and Mercury Rose I basically had 15 minutes
before you'd lose mercury in the glowing sunlight Sun's below Horizon over here somewhere and you'd begin losing all the
rest of the uh Stars they still have falo was bright enough to show up but
um it was not it was not very easy capturing
um you can take pictures but the actual
getting yourself to the location and having a sky to imagine becomes the
issue and so aligning yourself to be able to get
out and get images like this is what my real Focus was going to
be on aligning yourself with uh Starry skies in a especially if you live in a
state that uh is cloudy most of the time so we'll jump to the final image
this was the final image and we had a
clearing the sky showed up I didn't bring my um
normal camera that I usually use to image I brought the daytime camera to
pick up essentially a what I'll call a as I saw it night sky
photo um the moon was going to rise 15 minutes from this scene and as it rises
it starts to wash out the sky the camera catches that wash out effect even if the
uh even if your eyes don't quite see it uh but the camera does the uh sky does
begin to wash out and that you end up with a uh a sky
that's not as brilliant in a Milky Way that isn't as brilliant and a little more light that
the camera catches but on this day it was cloudy everywhere else in
Michigan and I caught this hole opening up so the question is well how do you do
that well I'll tell you how you do it you have to use your astronomy tools
that predict cloud cover and this one is a very good one Astros
sperical there's smoke information whenever the Wildfire smoke happens it
will cut the transparency down it'll show you that this shows you
transparency the Bluer it is the better we're looking at Thursday of this week
at the location that I took um well location I took this
photo let's go see now where is that that's up here near Alcona Park and if I get that
forecast you could see that Thursday of this week this is where we are
now there's some promise for Fairly
transparent uh skies in that location this is
the top if I do this should be a combination let's see
what we got okay we've got so this is the default screen and it
just shows you if there's a hole in the sky you can see it here you can see in
Wisconsin where David Aker lives I think over here you see it's uh you know it's
cloudy but over in Green Bay it's clear and
so we're here on Tuesday Wednesday absolutely covered Thursday
8:00 P.M you know the whole and you can see it
approaching this is this is a prediction that we go from this to here so I would
have to try and arrive at 800m and this tells
me okay we're near New Moon so we've
got the uh sun rising at 810 and the moon rising at
850 so we're close the sun and the moon set together three minutes apart so the
moon's going down Sun's going down 515 518
so astronomical Darkness being roughly an hour and a half after that that means
at 8 o'clock that region is going to look something like this
maybe even darker um I did take some pictures of
it during astronomical Darkness I'm going to flip through until I find them
which is up here and that's some more test
shots there's the same location that was um this is a similar
location it's not far from there this was during the total solar eclipse this
region is a nice very dark bort 4 close to bordal 3
region so Imaging here and just being out under the stars is a fun thing to
do now okay this was one of the last times I was
here um this is during the summer this particular region looking
the other way now this I wasn't on the ground I do intend to take a photo like this at that
other location as you can tell you know the uh
difference as I've tried to progress you can see my sky is nice and detailed but
my ground isn't and with some techniques that I'm
attempting to learn I'm attempting to get clearer
ground photos the painting look is nice sometimes but we we want to try and get
these pictures to be a little clear so here you've got that same region here's
that same tree no one has cut it down yet this is me overlooking the bridge
this is that same location and
we're near this time period where this part of Andromeda comes over there was a
lot more snow on the ground this is I think a couple of years ago and it
flooded over there's ice but comparing this
image to what I'm going for
now which is a lot clearer this is the the goal is to get
more info in the sky but pair it with a nice clear image where you can see
detail you know it's it's very marshy down there and it's it would be a uh bit
of a risk to go down and you know without falling through or something but
I would have to test that so I'm attempting to add just as much detail in
my ground images as the sky images and in order to figure out when to go out
there it all has to do with figuring out when a hole in the sky is
predicted you know once you if you're there a little too long your Sky gets
washed out and then your cloud cover comes back but it's really quick relying
on one source is probably not a good idea spotwx is also a good idea so I'll
astrospheres for free if you decide to um um support support them by paying a
dollar a month you get more features such as the smoke satellite
visible you can click on that and you know this is and here's your
satellite view of what's going on
and and I believe satellite visible is pretty much what the satellite sees now
so it's really nice and that's the satellite but you also want to use
another source this is a great uh spot WX is a great source because you've got
all of these forecasts so you've got some that come in from Canada and then some that
originate here in the states and a good idea is to combine F both look at the
times they were taken so this one was a two-day forecast taken
um in the morning and then this rdps which is one
of the ones that Astros feric uses um taken at 1 pm so it' be a good
forecast to look at we'll click on it right quick so you say how does this
relate to alignment well we're aligning ourselves with good weather and clear
skies and clouds and we're seeking to get out
there and and um take advantage when there's a clearing now notice that this
forecast Thursday January 11 does not look very good you know here we've got 39% cloud
cover it's still daytime 800 PM which is when the plans were to go out it
predicts at in this County that there will be 89% cloud
cover so no that doesn't match what we you know what we were
supposedly seeing here so that means you're taking more of
a risk by going out because forecasts aren't lining up let's look
at the na three and a half day forecast and what do they say
precipitation and clouds they get out to 8:00 pm and they're saying there's 100%
cloud cover 98 it's they're saying the whole thing will be covered up so these
predictions do update by the day but two days out they
begin to stabilize we're here we have Wednesday so if things
change you know then Thursday then this may change as well usually by the time
we get to a couple of days within those forecasts
stabilized and whatever is predicted for the following day on
Wednesday usually I won't well won't say comes
true because I've had times where it either wasn't supposed to come
true and it did or it did come true or it yeah the forecast did come true and I
doubted it um or I went out there to
take a photo and the sky disappeared uh good example of that and before we close
down the uh this is the 140th Global star party right Scott that's right yes
y so before before we close down number 140 I'll talk about these two imag
so here's that this is that same signus region and this time I did use my uh
I'll call it the Astro camera um within 30 seconds you see this
Haze here and these clouds within 30 seconds of me taking that image those
colls overtook this part of the sky oh wow yeah it happened fast I did a four
minute exposure of this region which I believe this to be a lot of ha happening around
Orion um along this beach clouds stayed away long enough for
a 4minute exposure so that I could capture some features like Barnard's
Loop here um Lambda orionis um if you look real close
there's the rosette um there's something here
this I for I don't know that this would be where the monkey head is I know the
monkey head isn't far there your favorite winter targets for all you astrophotographers out there are all in
here miniaturized there's barely a tough of ha this is a very favorite Target
among you uh deep uh deep Sky objects
there is m44 the Beehive and if you don't believe me
let's see if we can zoom in there's that triangle of the Beehive a lot of those
Stars won't be visible oh yeah there's a ro you could see the shape of the rosette now right
here there's Barnard's lo you can even see the a bit of horse head a little bit Yeah you can
see a little bit of that anyways the flame up there yeah right here there's
the flame kind of sticking out of alet back where the the other horse head is
it's probably a little too small you've got the Orion Nebula blown out here
you've got a little bit of nebulosity where the Running Man is but you need a closer image to you know a lot more
and one thing that always eludes me there's this region right here which I
do believe belongs to the witch head but it's not very very well
defined whenever I take this image you can see some of that here but it's never
as defined as I would like it and that could just be me needing to find this
you know where this uh shape the subtle shape is and darken it or you know
process it a little more but even in low bort Force guys which are that
the scale goes up to about 21.0 on an sqm meter you can still get
this but I was there for roughly 15 minutes and the sky was
cloudy and I knew that was coming because right it told by the time I got
there which was this area over here
um I was these clouds were on their way I had something like this spot over it
between 8 and nine o'clock predicted and then the predictions were that in some
cases it would be cloudy but where you see this bright Dash here that's because
one of the sources says oh no it's going to be fully clouded over the forecast
was very much like this but for you know for Albert sleeper so what happens is
you end up getting lucky enough to see the night sky uh try and
observe I was able to observe m33 and binoculars just before the cloud Haze
came over and this is Lake Erie for those of you in Canada there's the same scene but
over a different country so travel and using your use your if you
want to align yourself with clear skies so that you can view an image if you're on the road
you're traveling and you're doing um you know what we term landscape
astrophotography nightscapes and you looking for Clear Dark Skies which is
always my theme um of my talks um you have to use these tools and then you
have to be prepared to go a lot of
Aurora Hunters do things like this and you know this KP number here they even
include this KP forecast for those when this gets up to kp5 in Michigan Aurora
starts to become visible on the horizon and then you have to look at some other like space weather you spaceweather.com
combine some of the other magnetometer readings and then go out and see if you
can get some Aurora or or just be like me and be lucky and happen to want to go
image and happen to be there when a you know X1 or X2 class storm and
they're coming you'll get your you'll get your shot you know if you're working a
wedding and there's Aurora have your camera ready because you may be able to get an amazing shot of uh newly wed
couple with Aurora going behind it of course it had died down Co yeah this is they still tell me
it's one of their favorite images um I can definitely see why this
is myar from the from the Big Dipper which made a uh you can hardly see it
but the plow for those of you in uh Great Britain or the UK I think it's
properly called you the uh plow is right here or oek is uh known in
uh you know in the certain regions in Canada where the indigenous people I
think it's oek the uh yeah this uh
constellation represents uh and Kareem is not here to help correct me but uh
oek is summoned to go get Summer and by the time he goes and gets summer he's high
in the air and uh Summer's here but by the time
um he grabs summer um there's something to do with
his death it's like he falls to his death and so when when the uh Dipper scrapes the Ursa Major scrapes low on
the horizon um that's oek died
buried in the ground the scene repeats of course because the north um you know
goes you know rotates polar Circle so the scene repeats as summer
Fades um the whole this whole scene just starts over oek Rises on the side where
you have copia and goes up reaches out to go get
Summer we see an's return we see the center of the um Milky Way galaxy in the
northern hemisphere return it was an indigenous uh description of the events
going on in the night sky and uh you know and repeat it
basically explaining the mo the motion of the Stars through uh stories and
tales and uh you know the meteors here interesting touch to this uh final scene
there was more there was more I don't know very many wedding shots you
know where where you have an aurora in them so that's very cool right oh and I
teased the whole uh this region right
here this little and I'm looking for it's one of these two little dots the
clearer a moonshot the uh more this little region is
prominent and like I said I'll hold on to that for next time because I know I've got a couple of those images of the
moon in here you know Moon detail is tough so
that's still that's also a work in progress uh Moon and sky and I've seen
some folks who do a very good job of it so this point Scott I will go ahead and
stop sharing and we can bring thank you yep we can bring the 140th Global Star
Party to a close always a pleasure to image or to present and uh and bring
things down it's always a pleasure knowing that there are a lot of you out there sharing your own stories of um how
you image the night sky be if you do Milky Way Photography sharing your
thoughts sharing uh sharing things that you've done and ideas
that's what it's all about all of us have a particular a particular way that we like
to see the night sky and we've got reasons we do it mine I like to use I
use the images to set up for the next ones I use them for outreach and every
once in a while I'll capture an image like that planetary alignment I'll capture it as a challenge to see if I
can do it and um you know when it when everything turns out out well and it's a
it's a good time indeed Scott that's right that's right well great well thank
you so much um and uh uh want to we want to thank our audience for tuning in to
Global star party if you're watching it live thank you very very much if you're watching and rerun uh of course uh uh
you know I often watch things after they've been broadcast too but there's a few things I like to see live and um
Global star party is a good one to do that in because you can you can uh exchange your views and thoughts and
questions with other people in the chat or with us and um but uh on any account
uh we will be back uh with the next 141st Global star party so look for that
one and until that time keep looking up and uh any closing comment there Adrian
yes astronomical League that they tell you when uh when when and where Alcon would be I'll reiterate there's going to
be in Kansas and that's actually I think going I'm
looking at that I I have to get my pennies together but I yeah I do want to
go I have a lot of places I want to go so I have to uh I gotta balance some
things and make some choices go to the uh to the library that's down there so
that's uh um you know this is where David Levy's uh Diaries and stuff I've
seen those in person of course I've known him for a very long time and watched him filling in observations on
his observing books and stuff like that but uh to go and see uh you know the
other famous astronomers you know like cernus and Isaac Newton and and actually
see their um writings and stuff I think that would be just so cool so we will be
doing that with the as astronomical leagues Alcon event um this year so
that's that'll be my first time so that sounds interesting so yeah I may I may
be able to uh if I get my family to come there and say hey this is when our family reunion should be and it just
it's down in Kansas City so they've got they've got an incredible mall that's there it's I think one of the oldest
malls in the country and it's an outdoor mall it's beautiful um so you know if
you're a family yeah I think I know where our when and where our next family reunion is going to
coincide yeah just might be during Alcon that's right so uh that's uh I'm I'm
scheming on that GNA Kansas City Blues they got Kansas City Barbecue that would
absolutely work for me and I'm sure it's within a pretty good driving distance I'll have to check the map but uh that's
true yeah that's that just might happen thank you for uh finding it that Scott
thanks Adrian all right okay uh we will close 140th Global star party thank you
very much uh and until next time take
care good day everyone this is David Levy that's me and I am holding the
original Discovery films of our most important Comet Comet Shaker
le9 these films were taken on the 23rd of March 1993 Carolyn discovered the uh comet on
these films two days later and uh and on about 16 months after that all
of the fragments of this Comet collided with Jupiter giving Humanity its first
View of what happens when a comet hits a planet and uh and one of the exciting
things about this is that when comets hit planets they don't just drop uh dust
they also drop um organic materials uh carbon hydrogen oxygen and
nitrogen which eventually turn into proteins amino acids RNA and finally on
one magic day DNA comments Comet impacts are really the first step in the origin
of
life I'd like to invite all of you to uh to come to the next Global star party
they are run by Scott Roberts of explore scientific and me we we co-host this
program and uh it's usually done on Tuesdays and uh usually at 6:00 or so Central
Central Time and so I hope to see you all there my name is David ly and I hope
to see you all at the very next Global star party thank
you come one come all to the Southern Cross astronomical society's 2024 winter
Star 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 Eda Karina the jewel box the Southern Cross Centaurus a and of course the
Magnificent Omega centuri tickets will go on sale onon or about October 1 2023
at sc.org see you
[Music]
there
[Music]
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
Cliffs glasses have any marks or scratches on them don't use them if you have older eclipse glasses from a
previous Eclipse give them the check to make sure they haven't been damaged scratched all safe eclipse glasses will
meet the iso 12312 D2 standard it's best to store 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
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
Targus is on a mission to create smart sustainable accessories to empower you
to do more by using [Music] less 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 dreaming bigger and using less introducing the EOS smart 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 [Music]
this how