Transcript:
everyone hello hell how are
you
hi the giant planet Jupiter and all its banded Glory takes the spotlight in
these new images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope that capture both sides of the planet big enough to swallow
Earth the classic Great Red Spot storm stands out out prominently in Jupiter's
atmosphere to its lower right at a more southerly latitude is a feature sometimes dubbed red spot JR this giant
storm called an anticyclone was the result of other storms merging in 1998
and 200000 and it first appeared red in 2006 the source of its red color is
unknown but may involve a range of chemical compounds sulfur phosphorus or
organic material staying in their Lanes but moving in opposite directions red
spot junor passes the Great Red Spot about every 2 years Hubble also captured
Jupiter's volcanic moon IO only slightly larger than Earth's Moon IO is the most
volcanically active body in the solar system Hubble's sensitivity to blue and violet wavelengths clearly reveals
interesting surface features Hubble monitors Jupiter and the other outer solar system planets every year under
the outer Planet atmospheres Legacy program or opal these large worlds are
shrouded in clouds and hazes stirred up by violent winds causing a kaleidoscope
of everchanging weather patterns for Hubble to investigate studying the planets in our solar system helps us
understand our own weather patterns closer to home and allows us to theorize what potential exoplanet weather is like
in other star systems in our universe
[Music]
the giant planet Jupiter in all its banded Glory takes the spotlight in
these new images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope that capture both sides of the planet big enough to swallow
Earth the classic great red spot storm stands out prominently in Jupiter's
atmosphere to its lower right at a more southerly latitude is a feature sometimes dubbed red spot JR this giant
storm called an anticyclone was the result of other storms merging in 1998
and 2000 and it first appeared red in 2006 the source of its red color is
unknown but may involve a range of chemical compounds sulfur phosphorus or
organic material staying in their Lanes but moving in opposite directions red
spot Jr passes the Great Red Spot about every 2 years Hubble also capture
Jupiter's volcanic moon IO only slightly larger than Earth's Moon IO is the most
volcanically active body in the solar system Hubble's sensitivity to blue and violet wavelengths clearly reveals
interesting surface features Hubble monitors Jupiter and the other outer solar system planets every year under
the outer planet atmospheres Legacy program or opal these large worlds are
shrouded in clouds and hazes stirred up by violent winds causing a kaleidoscope
of everchanging weather patterns for Hubble to investigate studying the planets in our solar system helps us
understand our own weather patterns closer to home and allows us to theorize what potential exoplanet weather is like
in other star systems in our universe
[Music]
telescopes generally come into two different flavors you have really powerful big telescopes but the those telescopes see a tiny part of the sky or
telescopes are smaller and so they lack that power but they can see big parts of the sky W first is the best of both
worlds W first is the Widefield infrared survey telescope what I think of w first is doing as building on what were the
two great successes astronomically of the 1990s in the last decade that is the Sloan digital Sky survey and the Hubble
Space Telescope W first is a NASA Observatory that has the top ranking of
the National Academy of Sciences to launch in the 2020s it has the same image precision and power as the hubbles
Space Telescope but with 100 times the area of sky that it views looking at a
large fraction of the sky allows you to get a more complete accounting for example the stars in the large menel
Cloud which is the nearest galaxy to us or the stars in the galactic bulge so you can do a much more complete
accounting in a much shorter amount of time the particular thing I'm interested
in using W for for is to actually do a statistical census of planetary systems in our galaxy and what we're looking for
is gravitational microlensing events these are cases when another star passes in front of our line of sight to a
background star and it makes that background star get a little bit brighter due to the gravity of that foreground star and that allows us to
find planets what w first will do is it will have what we call a coronograph a coronograph lets us image and
characterize really dim planets next to very bright stars no matter how good a
telescope that you build it's always going to have some residual errors it's going to be the first time that we're
going to fly an instrument that contains these high format deformable mirrors that are going to let us correct for
errors in the telescope it's never been done in space before D me first will allow us to potentially make
groundbreaking discoveries finding out what dark energy is so this will tell us
if dark energy is an unknown form of energy or if it's a modification of
generativity single W first images will contain over a million galaxies and we
can't categorize and catalog those galaxies ourselves citizen science allows interested people in the general
public to solve scientific problems and so one of the things that I'm really excited about is enabling this bridge
where the general public can get involved in doing actual science for me
it's really exciting opportunity to play a significant role in a mission that I
think will be one of the most powerful telescopes that we have in the 2020s and
will be some of the most important things our country does in space in that time
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frame [Music]
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what [Music]
[Applause] [Music]
well hello everyone this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and I'm here with my
co-host David Lee uh from veale Arizona uh we're here in Arkansas where it's just uh starting to
clear after kind of a cloudy uh Blustery Day um uh we have a very nice lineup for
you tonight um uh with uh some of our regulars but also some new faces to
Global star party so um and we're less than two weeks away I think yesterday
was exactly two weeks uh to the uh April 8th um total eclipse of the Sun so I
hope that you got your eclipse glasses I hope that you got uh your camera systems
ready if you haven't been out there if you're going to take pictures and you haven't been out there practicing uh uh
you need to do so uh so that by the time you get to the eclipse you've got some
muscle memory going on because uh if you haven't seen a total eclipse before it
is too awe inspiring uh it it messes with your um with your thoughts and your
plan on what to do next and uh um and even if you are a veteran of total solar
eclipses uh you know practice does make
perfect are you out there practicing too David are you g to try to take any
photographs uh no I might take a picture or two okay uh but uh I I think
everybody's going to be taking pictures so I will just enjoy it and watch it almost certainly cry uh both from
happiness to see the eclipse and sadness that I know how badly Wendy really
wanted to see this Eclipse oh and but I'm really looking forward to seeing it
and I'm looking forward to seeing it with explore scientific yeah we've got uh if you guys
didn't already know it um we have a expedition going down to Southern Texas
uh just North I think just north of a little town it looks like it's spelled leaky l e a k e y Texas but it's
pronounced by the locals there as laky so they probably didn't want to live in a town called leaky I don't know uh
there's always these little kind of uh weird niggles when it comes to town names and that kind of thing so um but
I'm excited we're little tired we've been getting ready uh for the eclipse by
selling uh eclipse glasses and uh it's been a little exhausting we had
incredible numbers of orders coming in at the last minute here uh for people
that wanted to get ready for the eclipse we still have inventory if you're looking for it but um uh the closer that
you get the more unsure it is that you'll actually receive your glasses
because uh shipping uh can be a problem uh you know because everybody's trying to ship stuff just
before a total eclipse of the Sun but um anyways I wanted to uh uh introduce our
our next speaker here now normally we would have the astronomical League here this this star part is a little bit
different they they were unable to make it all of the league uh executive officers are out doing something right
now um probably uh uh like Terry man for example she's been going from town to
town to town uh getting uh these towns in Ohio uh ready for uh you know uh you
what to expect you know from a um uh a traffic perspective from a emergency
preparedness perspective these kinds of things and then also explaining what the
you know this incredible phenomena is like uh with the total eclipse but I
David I can't gosh if I think about the most beautiful things that you could ever see in the sky the total eclipse of
the sun has got to be in the number one or number two spot you know what do you
think yeah I think it's in a number one spot I got a letter from a childhood friend the other day who said that he is
on the path of totality in Prince Edward Island in Canada and he's says I'm going
to be very careful I'm going to close my blinds and stay inside and I wrote him back and I said Samy don't you would be
missing one of the most beautiful probably the most beautiful thing that all of nature can provide and that's
saying something yes I mean it's it's absolutely
stunning and uh you don't want to be at a 90 95
99% Eclipse because it's worth it to to travel brave the traffic and travel into
the path of totality because you want to see the entire sun go away and when that moment
happens you take your protective glasses off and you just look up and you see the
atmosphere of the sun and it is absolutely unbelievable and for those of you who are clouded out not to worry
because you will still see the great shadow of the Moon approaching from the
Southwest and coming at you and suddenly engulfing you and um the darkest Eclipse
I've ever seen was the one that was clouded out for me in 1970 I was standing there and I could
not see my fingers in front of my in front in front of me it was that dark so
that's a a benefit for clouds but I hope you'll all get clear sky and a wonderful
thing and uh am I on now for my little quotation yes sir sir yep I'm going to
give you the St I can also represent I can also represent the astronomical league today could you okay thanks yeah
because uh they're they're going to have the astronomical League Alcon it'll be in Kansas City
this summer and uh it's going to be the best and uh uh there's going to be a guy
who's going to give a lecture and he is a um actually he's a cast member of Star
Trek Voyager and I know that got a lot of you going and that's Tim Russ Tim Russ would you like to hear Tim
Russ give a speech about astronomy of all the people in Star Trek especially
Star Trek Voyager how would you imagine when one guy Tim Russ comes with a telescope one
day and wants to show the cast the night sky and the rest of the cast had no idea
about it but they were really pretty impressed as was I to hear about that and so it's
going to be a wonderful a wonderful event and I'd like to invite you all to see it now it comes time for the quote
and since I have a little extra time today I'd like to begin by saying that
I'm going to quote Thomas Hardy at a lunar lunar eclipse and you've all heard that because because I've done this
before but this is really special because this comes a couple of days
after a lunar eclipse not the big solar eclipse of the sun we're going to have
in less than two weeks but the one we had Sunday night there was visible over all of
North America a what we call a penumbral eclipse of the moon the outer shadow of
the earth enveloped the moon and I really wanted to see that and it was
cloudy boy was it ever cloudy and it was raining and I went outside around 10
o'clock and it was not raining hard but drizzling except that the moon was out I
could see the clouds were thin enough that I could easily see the moon and I
had no difficulty from time to time detecting the progress of that Eclipse
it was wonderful and the other thing I'd like to share with my friends here today is that that was Eclipse number 100 of
all the eclipses I've seen wow the first one was was the partial eclipse in
Montreal on October the 2nd 1959 I saw that one with my mom mayew
EST in peace and with my brother my younger brother Jerry who is still with us and
remembered that wonderful day we had to see that eclipse the first Total was in
1963 and you know I had my glasses and everything else and it was nice until
totality and I knew that you didn't need glasses for the actual total eclipse and
so as soon as totality started off went the glasses and I looked at the corona at which point dad just screamed at me
and says David put your glasses back on quickly and I'm not going to argue with
Dad during a total eclipse of the Sun or any other time anyway so I quickly put the glasses back on and turned away from
him and then I took the glasses back on off and look back and enjoy the rest of
the totality afterwards I must have said something like Dad
Mom I love you both dearly I hope to be able to look at you clearly for many
many decades into the future so believe me when I tell you
during the total phase of an eclipse you don't need any glasses and he accepted that he agreed with that he said now
that it's over I agree with you but I'm glad you put them back on so my
quotation is going to be at a lunar eclipse and it's by the poet Thomas
Hardy and I was studying him at Acadia and
uh uh as soon as uh as soon as we started to study his novels of course
there was no question that here is one of the great novelists of English
literature Thomas Hardy the Tess of the Derber vills was one of the
books that I relish reading I was at an aavso meeting years
later and somebody in the uh lectures paper sessions had a lecture about one
of Thomas Hardy's novels the novel I'll bet some of you can guess the name two on a
tower and it's about a guy who sits on top of a tower with a telescope and
observes variable stars and then this girl kind of gets to meet him and she
kind of climbs up the tower to be with him and The Story begins and goes on like that it's a wonderful wonderful
story and uh in the typical Hardy fashion and as he's getting to the end
of it he's describing the story and the moderator notices that his 10 minutes is up and the moderator interrupts him and
says I'm sorry you can't you cannot um go on anymore because your time was up
well would you believe we practically mugged to the moderator the whole group said oh come on you got to let him
finish the story at which point the moderator greedy said you're right finish the story take your time
I and that was a wonderful thing I immediately went ordered the book and read it but as a poet Hardley is
considered a minor Victorian poet and I'd like to argue that point right here and now just as I'd like to change the
subject just a little bit just a little tiny bit um before Scotty throws me off
and um and talk about the movie we just saw that wonderful movie of about from
NASA we saw two movies one we saw twice and the other one we saw once I like the
NASA movies and I would like to make my own NASA movie right now if I may
NASA here is the history of the telescope there was Stonehenge
there were there was Lord Ross with his telescope a little toy that he looked through and George Hillary Hill who
built a little tiny model you put on tabletop the hail telescope but these
weren't telescopes the first telescope that Galileo looked through was the Hubble Space Telescope no astronomy
before the Hubble Space Telescope and now the web telescope and soon this other telescope and the other telescope
is going to be my favorite because do wide field Imaging but come on Mr and Mrs NASA
um you're not the first person to look through a telescope Dave hiker here
right now has a telescope that he looks through and he knows and he enjoys it and he puts it in his driveway throws it
on the street and looks and he lets other people look through it as well so Scotty if we're going to do
another NASA movie that's a knowled that the Hubble Space Telescope was not
Galileo's telescope okay now we go back now let's go back to the
poem um my favorite Thomas Hardy poem is this one at a lunar eclipse but he also
wrote a lovely lovely piece of verse called lines on the the convergence of
the twain it was called lines on the loss of the Titanic and uh although I'm not that
greatly interested in the Titanic there is a Facebook group that everybody is
writing and they all write and they're so beautifully writing and they don't say anything about about anything but
anyway um it's kind of interesting to see some of the trivia about that but it
was I remember my grandfather was alive during the after the sinking so I asked
him to tell me what happened and he said oh the whole world stopped he said that was something that really stopped the
world when that happened and people were talking about nothing else and some people will say they still aren't but
anyway enough of Thomas Hardy's lovely poem the convergence of the twain in
which he actually describes as much of the building of the Titanic at the same
time how the iceberg was growing and finally till the spinner of the Year
said now and consummation comes and jars two hemispheres and I think those two
lines of Hardy's poetry are the strongest
lines of anything that I've read about the Titanic so that leads me to my poem
today at a lunar eclipse and I'm doing this in honor of Sunday's lunar eclipse
Sunday's eclipse of the moon I I actually saw it I enjoyed it it was
great I even took a picture of it there's not much ph but you can see the
shadow mostly on the um lower half of the Moon the uh Southern southern part
of the moon during the middle of that Eclipse where it was closest to the penumbra and it was really great but
here's the poem he wrote it in 1903 after seeing a total eclipse of the of
the Moon in London by Shadow Earth from Pole to
Central sea now steals upon the moon's Meek shine an even monochrome and
curving line of imperturbable Serenity okay we've got the idea that he's going
to write about the eclipse of the moon but he's not he's trying to compare the
eclipse the beautiful lovely Eclipse that we some of us saw on Sunday and the
other one that some of us are hopefully going to see in two weeks from now with the torn troubled form of the Earth and
the Earth right now is going through the same troubles as it was then how shall I link such Suncast symmetry with the torn
troubled form I know as thine th profile Placid as a brow Divine with continents
of moil and misery and can immense mortality but throw so small a shade and
Heaven's High human scheme be hemmed within the coast y on Arc
implies is such the Stellar gauge of Earthly show Nation at war with nation
brains that team Heroes and women fairer than the skies thank you very much and
back to you Scotty robberts wow okay that's nice that's nice well I can hardly wait to see the uh new um uh NASA
video from David Levy I think that's G to be fantastic and probably we'll win an
Oscar so so well okay so let's get started
with our speakers here uh we are going to bring up uh David Aker from astronomy
magazine he is the editor and chief uh I think he's been uh involved with one
magazine or another about astronomy for going on for about 40 years and uh so
which is remarkable because the guy's still only 35 years old so um I think
that uh his uh talk uh this time about the tadpole galaxyy is going to be
pretty interesting I was just reading about the distance of it and um uh and
it is a ARP Galaxy too so David will explain all of this in this next segment
of his deep Sky Treasures or his exotic deep Sky objects so thanks David thank
you Scott and thank you David and are you telling me that I have to follow that that was spectacular do it was yeah
I don't know how I can follow that going on after the beetle you know
when there was just one Beetle you know I'm looking so much forward to
hearing you your presentation and your talk and whenever I listen to it my mind goes back to the
friendship that we had when you were just getting started and uh I think
you're going to do a great job and I'm looking forward to enjoying this next few minutes well thank you David and
thanks many years ago for taking a pity on a dumb kid from Ohio um much
appreciated but uh so tonight I'm going to talk about yet another deep Sky
object we haven't run out of them yet so I will start sharing my screen and I
will see if I can share the right thing on my screen can you see and I'll see if I can start a slideshow can you see um
Centaurus a absolutely okay well forget about that
entirely because it has nothing to do with any talk okay all right just get that completely out of your mind because
tonight that this is perhaps you know if you you know I it's a good thing that
Avi lobe doesn't have any doubters these days right right you know because if you
believe AI then you know eventually you know one day the Milky Way in the Andromeda galaxy may look something like
this and they will I'm just joking about you know extraterrestrial you know never
mind okay AI likes to have fun I think so anyway tonight we're going to talk
about the tadpole Galaxy as you said Scott this is ugc uh
10,214 um which is we're getting down into the oopsa general catalog of
galaxies here a little bit obscure this is a fairly faint object it's a Bard
spiral in Draco we're still in the Norther extreme Northern Sky working our way very slowly Southward here very
heavily disrupted by tidal interaction which makes it an interesting object because it has a long debris tail um
coming off of the barred spiral disc the bright disc that stretches 280,000 light
years long now you may know that the conventionally agreed upon diameter of
the Milky Way is still about 100,000 Lightyear so this is a long disrupted
tidal tail visually it's a little bit of a
challenge for many observers this is a 14th magnitude Galaxy it's a little less than four arc minutes across so it's
relatively small and faint uh but it's interesting and and it's a great Target
uh for Astro imagers even if not quite so much for visual observers unless you
have maybe you know a really nice dark sky and a 12 16 or 20 or 25 inch scope
it's about 4 400 million light years away roughly this Galaxy and it's an as
I say it's an SB peculiar Bard spiral um it's also known as ARP 188
from Chip arp's famous catalog of disrupted and and active
galaxies and uh what what astronomers believe happened here is that long ago
there was a compact interacting Galaxy that crossed the Galaxy's plane this was
about 100 million years ago or so and you can see it behind the dis of the Galaxy now which we'll see in in a
moment here um and that caused the tidal disruption that we see still going on
today two faint Supernova a little bit brighter than 19th magnitude uh uh
appeared in this galaxy relatively recently and that's the only record of of uh Supernova that we have in this
galaxy so here from Ron Stan's great interstellarum Atlas is the field a
relatively small chunk of Draco here you can see the Tad bow there in the middle couple of other there's another brighter
Galaxy and an Abel Galaxy cluster relatively
nearby and here is the Galaxy now this is a really incredibly remarkable
amateur image of the Galaxy with a plane wave 24 so this is about as
sophisticated as you want to get for a hobbyist Astro imager going after this
thing and of course it looks a little better with the Hubble Space Telescope and if you see the the way this is
oriented here if you look above and just to the left of the uh Hub of this galaxy
here away from the long tidle tail you can see a little compact Galaxy behind
part of the disc of the Galaxy that's the little guy that is believed to have come made a close pass and disrupted the
tadpole and created this tidal tale and of course in a Hubble image the
whole G the whole field is is full of distant galaxies as well in the background so this is an unusual object
it's something that maybe Astro imagers you know I keep screaming at all of my astroimaging friends to stop shooting
the same hundred objects and go out there and shoot you know 10,000 different objects you know so this is
maybe worthy of going after from an astroimaging standpoint and with a large scope visually as
well so if you hadn't heard we have an eclipse coming up in less than two weeks
and I just want to add a little bit to what Scott and David already said and my
recommendation is if you're thinking of photographing the eclipse don't okay
because a hell of a lot of people people are going to photograph this eclipse and probably their images are going to be
better than yours no offense but remember think back to sperling's rule
our old old pal Norm Sperling from Sky Andel you know after it's over every
Eclipse lasts eight seconds so you know this is really a rare opportunity to see
the atmosphere of the Sun the corona soak it in and you know even though many
of us will have four minutes or close to minutes of totality not a bad you know
timing of this Eclipse provided we have clear skies enjoy this visually don't waste
time looking through a viewfinder that's my recommendation um and remember how brief
it will be and after this eclipse in the United States there'll be a not very good Eclipse 21 years later so it's
going to be a long time coming uh to the next one in the United States so I recommend really enjoying this one and
it's quite amazing you know as we were talking about before we started the show tonight you know back to the days of
Johannes Kepler knowing the precise timing of eclipses you know first time
Eclipse viewers it's quite amazing you know somebody who's never seen a total eclipse you know they'll they'll you
know they'll tear up I mean it's really emotional for people to predict down to the second when this is going to happen
and see the bodies of the near solar system come together with such precision
so I recommend enjoying it having a good time and worrying about photography when
you go to the beach the following weekend unless you're in Wisconsin at
which time we probably have three to four months yet until we can go to the beach it's like winter here still um but
anyway a a quick word also about something that several of us are involved with it's coming up in May uh
about a a little five weeks or so after the eclipse coming on the Pike here though the starmus festival and it's my
privilege to be on the board of starmus and involved with a bunch of people working on it we are going to have
incredible speakers at starmus this year this will be the seventh incarnation of starmus we'll have a lot of astronaut
explorers and many Nobel Prize winners in not only astronomy but other Allied
Sciences we also will have a lot of rock and roll with Brian May and Rick Wakeman
and others who are on our board so we really encourage you you know it's actually easy to get you fly to Vienna
Austria you know it's not a big deal to go to Europe here and it's a half hour car ride from Vienna to get to Bros
laava so we hope we'll see you there many of you we should have about 8 to
10, people we think at starmus this time David you're going to come and speak
Scott we hope you'll be there you have a lot going on these days but we'll have a star party involving explo or scientific
as always now so we hope that we'll see many of you there and we won't have to tell you what happened again uh after
the fact because there really is nothing quite like starmus to get close to to
talk to all of these people who are really incredible movers and shakers in the sciences and in the Arts so anyway
Scott that's all I have tonight I'll stop sharing my screen wonderful and thank you again for
the opportunity and that's all I have enjoy the eclipse and let's hope we have a
clear sky and uh we have many many more eclipses to come absolutely absolutely
well thank you very much David so um I really enjoy uh iker's uh
presentations of deep Sky objects and galaxies you know and uh I will plug
he's got a great book on galaxies um that you can find on Amazon
as well as many other David ier Publications so I would like to also add
my thanks I think it was I when you talked about the uh the thrill of seeing
first Contact of the between the Moon and the Sun right when it starts I'll
never forget Dad's reaction on the 1963 eclipse and I told him it was going to
start around uh 2 o'clock in the afternoon and and promptly at the time I
said the eclipse started and dad started to cry and I said are you okay he said I
can't believe that somebody centuries ago predicted that this Eclipse would
start at this particular time and he got it right and this was a really emotional
start to that Eclipse it's quite incredible there are always people in every group we go with
to see an eclipse there are people who are just emot Ally overwhelmed and you know you almost want to you know
apologize and they're you know they're crying you know looking up and you want to say I'm sorry you know this is
traumatized no and they say no this is the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life you know so
yeah good good crying yeah good crying the best part about the eclipse is that
it proves that the solar system isn't just there it's happening things happen
and nothing abolutely an eclipse absolutely right and remember the Moon is moving slightly distantly
more distantly every year so you got to see this now you only have about 600 million years and we won't have eclipses
anymore total eclipses so you got to get on board now
okay that's right and you'll be glad that you did because everybody that's seen a total eclipse wants to see
another one it's like going to a starmist once you've gone to one you really do want to go to as many as you
can so uh it is such an amazing event and
um I we'll have to talk sometime uh David about the uh formation of the
ideas that created starmus because there's a whole story there so it's a
great story sometime when we have nothing else to do yeah yeah yeah nothing else to
do a great topic idea for a future GSP any anytime Scott anytime you like
okay they're great stories okay all right okay well thank you uh Mr rker and
uh we're going to be moving on uh we are heading off to California uh to talk to Dr uh Daniel
paluso and Daniel is with um uh the uh
seti organization uh he has I think relatively recently got his PhD in
astrophysics uh he has um if you search his name uh you'll find out that Daniel
is also a musician and so uh actually I want to
pull uh David AER on and Daniel on at the same time because Daniel's the kind
of guy that would be perfect for going to staris
so David ier are you still there there we go hey
everybody there we go so I promised Daniel that I would introduce him to you
uh uh David and um uh because I was describing staris to him and he says
well I haven't heard of it before and I think that anyone that is an astrophysicist and a musician uh you
know a actual record in artist uh um should know about staris definitely you Scott we'll have
to get you there sometime we have you know our our you know sort of core of Pals includes Brian May and Rick Wakeman
and Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno so it's a good group of you know these are
musicians that's fantastic yeah yeah yeah so I don't think I'll be able to come to the to the one in May that might
be a little too short notice to travel that far but it's definitely going to be on radar for for next year we we'll
probably have them every couple of years maybe year sometimes but at at at worst
they'll be every other year because we the Garrick isra and the guy who organized you know we we want to you
know have them as frequently as we can without killing Garrick if you will all the organizational craziness that goes
on yeah yeah yeah right that's awesome it's great to meet you David good to
meet you sir yeah thank you take care okay all so um uh our topic
our theme this this uh time on the 147th Global star party is Worlds and um of
course uh something that's of intense study is exoplanets and uh but
exoplanets when they were first discovered really was something only in
the realm of professional astronomy and using the latest techniques and the most
advanced telescopes and all the rest of it because to see a world going around in another
star uh is uh uh not easy to do um but
it's become remarkably accessible even with small telescopes and um so uh Daniel's been
very deeply involved in citizen science with uh uh exop Planet work and um
uh he is also with the unistellar team uh and uh so I'd like to uh bring him on
give you the stage thank you very much Daniel for coming on to Global star party thank you Scott for having me and
I love the uh introduction and the great poem that you read too David thank you
for that all right so I'm going to start off
by making sure I can share my screen here sure and do you see my slide titled
yes unistellar exoplanets okay all right um yeah so uh thanks for that great
introduction Scott and um for those of you that aren't as familiar with exoplanets if you're watching out there
in Internet land the these are just planets that orbit around other stars and it turns out that um since we
discovered our first ones in the 1990s we now know that on average just about
every star in our galaxy has at least one exoplanet I think that's something that's pretty inspiring and whenever I
look up at the sky and look at our Stars I think about that that star that I'm looking at it most likely has at least
one exoplanet around it for example could that one have a exoplanet around
it and what what excites me and uh what excites I think many people is could
that planet have intelligent life and I think this is you know something that that motivates and drives and inspires a
lot of us in this field especially when we look for for exoplanets when we talk about the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence at the at the SEI Institute we try to organize our our quest for for
um life elsewhere around this thing called the Drake equation and and one of those parameters is thinking about
planets and because we think planets is probably a good place for life to life to be um and one thing I want to add too
before I move on is I'm also an educator and in my uh PhD work not only did I
work in citizen science with uh exoplanets but also involving teachers and students in this work which has
became an important part of my project so I'll be highlighting some of that too and I bring this up now because the idea
of life elsewhere in the universe this also excites our students because I could tell you one thing talk about uh
bring up the the topic of aliens around youngsters and they get super excited about uh learning about uh space and how
we can do this type of search so uh one of the ways that we
find an exoplanet is through an exoplanet Transit so what a Transit is
is basically uh picking up the the light from a star when a planet orbits in
front of it in just the right orientation or geometry so it blocks out some of the light from that star and if
we collect that light over time then we can see a dip in that brightness which
we call a Transit light curve so this turns out to be one of the most
successful Discovery methods that astronomers have been using to date just
to give you an idea of what our solar system planets would look like if they
all were to Transit the sun uh to scale you can see that in the image in the bottom left so some of the goals uh that
we have for exoplanet uh studies is to understand our solar system structure
and evolution is our solar system typical or is it a Oddball like how does
how do we you know compare to what's out there also as I mentioned where should we look for life and with unistellar
which I'll talk about um a little bit a little bit later uh we want to confirm the existence of newly discovered
exoplanets and also keep track of of known exoplanets and I'll talk about how we do that in a little bit so if you uh
want to find out about the latest discoveries in exoplanets a great place to go is the NASA exoplanet archive and
to date uh we have uh 5,599 confirmed exoplanets and as we can
see here uh that the uh most uh exoplanets are coming from this Transit
method a satellite that um or spacecraft that was launched recently to help with
this whole exoplanet discovery was the transiting exoplanet survey satellite this is a a spacecraft that um
is out there constantly surveying our pretty much our our entire sky and
looking for new stars that uh or new new exoplanets orbiting around stars and
it's predicted that it may find 10,000 new transiting exoplanets in its life time currently there's over 4,400
exoplanet candidates that need groundbased conf information so whenever we first get this I'll just go back a
few slides again real quick um when we first get uh hint of an exoplanet Transit like this um say we get a single
Transit we need to confirm that with additional techniques or additional transits to confirm that that was in
fact an exoplanet and not something else you know science we want to make sure that we're 100% right with what we find
so it's important that we confirm these so that's why we say that some of these are called candidates and that comes uh
to be important in some of the other things I'll bring up in a little bit so with a growing number of of thousands
and thousands of unconfirmed exoplanet candidates um you can imagine that it could be pretty hard for the
professional astronomy Community to keep up with this even with all of our awesome telescopes that we have in space
and our professional observatories on the ground it can be quite a lot and another thing that becomes important
with these exoplanets once we do discover them and we confirm them we actually have to keep things fresh and
there's some pretty great initiatives out there that you might have heard of one of them called NASA's exoplanet
watch and the idea is this is after a certain period of time that Transit time
that mid-transit time which is the time exactly when we you know it's Transit is going to happen uh that will become
still the longer time period that goes by without an additional observation so
if we have these regular re observations by groundbased observatories we can keep keep those orbital parameters fresh and
um that's really important so that when we go to look at these exoplanets again we can find them when it says that we're
supposed to see them and also if we want to uh look at these exoplanets with some
of the current and future space-based telescopes for example the James Webb Space Telescope uh you know might want
to look at an exoplanet and use its spectrometer to peer into its atmosphere to understand what it's made out of we
want to know when that planet's going to Transit so it's important to keep those times fresh uh these follow-ups are also
important to Ru out false positives eclipsing binaries um and they come
important for single and Duo transits so a single Transit is like I said it we just got one Transit so far we've only
captured one and we want to get more to confirm it Duo would be two transits that we've only have two transits so far
so with this large infrastructural challenge um we have found that small telescopes with
off-the-shelf parts have proven capable of Transit science a great example is
the uh first um uh exoplanet uh transit in the 90s with hd209458b
the uh astronomers in fact one of the astronomers on that team Tim Brown actually built a CCD camera attached to
a 10 cm telescope so that's not too big of a telescope so in fact one of the
first exoplanet transits was done with like a kind of a small you know backyard telescope which is pretty amazing and we
have all these um these surveys these professional surveys that have happened
such as hatn net wasp kelt uh lco L cre brce Observatory micro Observatory cter
so a lot of these exop plants you might have heard of like a planet that starts with wasp you know wasp 58b or something
like that right these are named after these surveys that you know were to you know discover the these
planets so we have been using small telescopes to to do this this has been this is not necessarily a new thing um
however until till somewhat recently um you know technology has has been
catching up so more and more people can do this so citizen astronomers and small telescopes can detect exoplanets but
many have had pretty Advanced technical setups and it's pretty amazing what some citizen astronomers and
um are able to do with these these technical setups I I'm Blown Away by
some of the stuff that that they're able to do uh there's a lot of programs out there too that have been around to help
with this exoplanet followup for example exoplanet watch I talked about there's the
aavso um and there's the lasas observatory in Europe there's something called exoc clock which is like the
exoplanet watch equivalent there's the Z Universe citizen science project uh
Planet Hunters Tess as an example so there there's all these efforts okay now
the pro the program and the project that I've been involved with uh through uh through my PhD in fact I I buildt a lot
of my PhD thesis around this um is this new technology with smart digital
telescope such as with the unistellar telescope now I know uh I think the unistellar team has been on in previous
Global star parties and um so you might have heard of this before those of you
that have watched before but just in case um you know you haven't or we have new viewers I'll tell you quickly about
what the what this telescope and this network is so this is a small digital smart telescope and it's really easy to
use it's completely app controlled so um it has all that all those kind of components like that you think that are
on the outside of these more advanced setups but all kind of put into like a nice little package you can just kind of
take it out of the box and use it and it it also simplifies the use so you can actually use a smartphone app to control
it and this is amazing for outreach and education as you can imagine because of the technology we can uh help filter out
light pollution and because there's a digital sensor in it we can do long exposures and do real-time stacking of
images so we can get beautiful images of the sky such as deep space objects like galaxies and star clusters and
nebula but besides all that uh we can do science that's the slow Lan come for the
enhanced Vision day for the science and um with our Network we've we've grown
quite a bit I uh started my PhD in 2019 and um just finished it about a
month ago so I'm in PhD recovery mode so forgive me for any for any errors tonight um but uh as you can see in the
map here we we've grown quite a bit there's there's over 10,000 telescopes around the world and we have uh many
people that connect to our slack channel to do actual citizen science and uh the science campaigns
that we have are uh asteroid ulations exoplanets planetary defense comets
Transat and uh one I'm focusing on tonight is with with exoplanets we also had scientific
Partnerships uh with many organizations um such as NASA uh the
Lucy Mission abso test obviously but we're we we are a team so I want to do
highlight the team that that that works on this um and some people that that aren't with the team anymore uh uh AR
aren't pictured here but we we've had other people work on this team uh it's been a small team that has done some
amazing uh science and Outreach led by Dr Fran mares and our current exoplanet
lead is Dr Laurence scow then we have our comment lead Dr gaikowski and uh Tom
S bazito Dr Tom bito actually uh is Transat now and he worked with exoplanets with me near near the
beginning we have a a coder om and uh Dr Ryan Lambert planetary defense and uh
Ian and I have worked mainly with Outreach and education but I've also been working on some of these exoplanet
projects too and the first paper that that I had come out with with exoplanets with the Stellar network uh this
published in the publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific or pasp
and what we did in this paper is kind of um kind of show that our Network can do
this important followup that that needs to be done for exoplanet science such as I mentioned with NASA exoplanet watch
and we showcased in this paper that we were able to update the orbital parameters for test
exoplanets we uh included citizen scientists in this work obviously and we
had 163 citizen scientists co-authors and these came from uh over 21 or from
21 countries and they had over a thousand exoplanet observations so one of the pretty cool things about about
this network and and how how we work is when we we have our citizen scientists contribute any data if that turns into a
publication they become co-authors and these 163 citizen scientists in this uh
unistellar exop Planet campaign paper um those included teachers and students so
there's there are these uh inherent education opportunities to this network which I'll talk a little bit more in
just a moment but we also showcased here the benefits of unistellar Citizen science for exoplanet research and some
of that is just having a large Network around the world that gives us broad geographic distribution enables long
duration observations Beyond a single n or location we can help mitigate localized weather there's a portability
Factor so we can travel um you can still do research in urban light polluted
areas and they're easy to operate so it becomes a little bit more uh accessible
to more people that that have access to them this is just one of those exoplanet
transits from that pasp paper I just spoke of it was for toi 37
99.01% is a uh Transit light curve showing the predict the predicted
Transit start time on the left and then the measured Transit start time uh by
our unicell Network on the right so in January 2022 we learned that the planet did not Transit at Star when we expected
it to and then uh a few months later in March 22 we were to confirm that the planet did orbit slower than originally
thought so this allowed us to update the orbital parameters and update the uh the test science team with this and you know
showcased how we can do this important followup work with our Network another project that we do with
unistellar is unite this is the unistellar network investigating test exop plan it started with a NASA citizen
science seed funding Now supported by NASA xrp uh Dr Lawrence grow leads the
Uno exoplanets in this effort currently this is a specific project to look for more long duration log period transits
so lot of the exoplanets that that we found are these short period hot Jupiters and this this effort is to look
for longer period um and this is to help confirm exoplanets that have only had
one or two transits and it also can help uh with informing future space telescopes
observations to keep those transit times fresh uh we've had over 15 campaigns
since the beginning of this and some notable campaigns include uh toi for
465b tiic um 393 8183 43b and the one
that I don't have to look at um is tiic 13927 665b because that's the one that I
worked on that I'm really excited to to share with you today this is a brand new exoplanet that um our team was able to
uh discover and confirm and uh it's really exciting how this kind of all
came about so the first uh the first Transit that was that was highlighted
this was a single Transit test remember uh this is a test single Transit candidates that the unite program was
trying to go after so this was a single Transit uh that was actually discovered
in the test data by a group of Citizen scientists um unaffiliated with with
unistellar and they they they notified our team and said hey there's there's
this uh you know um this the single Transit test object so we then uh work
together in a small team to follow up on it we followed up on it with a telescope
at Lick Observatory called the automated Planet finder APF which uh uses um uses
a spectrometer so we can collect radio velocity data to look at the stars movement in order to confirm its
existence and we also uh you through that data were able to update the uh uh
the possible orbital period of the planet and have our unistellar network
uh follow up to try to catch that second Transit because we wanted to catch the second Transit so this is where we had
our unisell Network um observed over uh several months of campaigns and this
included 16 high school students and 27 non-student unistellar citizen science
uh exoplanet observers and uh the the
outcome was that you know unfortunately we weren't able to confirm that second Transit um but um we we got pretty close
and we were also able to tell when the transit wasn't happening which informs future observations of how uh uh when to
not look for the planet so we a we were able to narrow down the orbital period which is which is a good thing and we
also learned a lot about how to perform these citizen science campaigns in the future the confirmation of the of the
the planet uh May comes from the radio velocity for this but this is showcasing
how a citizen science Network can be used to uh have uh citizens uh citizen
scientists and teachers and students and just the general public involved and
with this we had a exciting opportunity with the shabos Space and Science Center that's where the 16 high school students
came from and we were doing Outreach with them they were excited about exoplanets we had them use unistellar
telescope just for General observing and I thought well hey let's let's see if we can get them to try to catch the second
Transit and they were super excited about it so they uh worked with me over
the course of several months and learned how to use the telescopes learned about exoplanets and we scheduled an entire
overnight observation we had a we had a party uh for this too so we we were doing observations and uh well the
students were uh after they set the telescopes up and waiting for the next transition to re realign the telescopes
they' go and watch a movie or eat some snacks and talk about what they were learning and then come back and do it it
was a really fun night this is our um our setup at chabo uh we had uh nine EV Scopes set up
eight of them controlled completely by the students one of them controlled by me and students and it's just a
beautiful array of our our telescopes we I think we got like the highest like signal to noise from the combination of
these nine telescopes compared to other campaigns that went for this
exoplanet but uh this was a life-changing experience for the students this is one high schoolers uh
she actually made uh her name is a Hannah she actually made the bullets in the slide and she said that what she
learned was setting up and properly using the EV scope uh provided observing info readjusting EV scopes for intervals
of observation she learned introductory photometry skills techniques used to measure the brightness of stars that's
what PH is and she also learned how to use this astronomical image software called js9 to conduct image
analysis and she got uh added as a co-author on the paper along with our
other citizen scientists and uh we've heard from some other high school students that were really excited about
this and thinking about going into career in astronomy just for being involved in such a project now I will
just showcase um uh quickly here the uh the the main exoplanet discovered here
at tiic 139 9 27665 B we really need to come with shorter names for these things um but
this is uh showcasing in this graph this is comparing the mass on the horizontal
the the radius on the vertical and Jupiter mass and Jupiter radius and then we also have the year length orbital
period in in a color and uh the the neat thing about this planet that we confirm
is it is the densest known Subs Saturn meaning it's smaller than Saturn but
kind of similar in size the densest known Subs Saturn um in the test family
so you can see it's kind of hanging out there a little bit to the right um in
its own kind of little new category which is kind of an exciting thing for us um so I think uh here I'll ask Scott
like uh do you you said do you want me to go for a little bit longer or should I stop here and ask about kind of
time think he might be might be
muted still there Daniel oh I can hear you yeah should I keep going or do you want me to wrap it up yes I think that
it's probably appropriate but uh okay that's a very exciting um data and uh um
you know I think it's uh really exciting for anybody that wants to get involved in citizen science especially with
something as Cutting Edge as as exoplanets I think that that is just um
you know when I started my amateur astronomy career uh that was an impossibility you
know and something you know uh the the first exoplanet had yet to be discovered
um when I when I was getting involved so but anyhow um let's see
yeah just uh just to to finish uh with what you said Scott my entire PhD thesis
was actually called democratizing and enhancing exoplanet research with the unistellar network and I think Fran has
shared this he has shared this slide before and him and I kind of share it together because I just think it kind of
puts into perspective where we're we're going into the future with technology is now you know all of us around the world
you know can be involved in scientific research and I just think that's a you know a really really exciting thing for
exciting place for us to be oh absolutely absolutely you know and it's uh it's great to see people like you
involved in the field and uh you know I watch some of the videos of you before
uh having you on the show and everything I knew you're going to be a fantastic H presenter so oh thanks Scott I really
appreciate you having me yeah that's great okay all right uh let's uh
uh David let's welcome um space artist Michael
Carroll to Global star party now when was David when was the first time that
you saw any Michael Caroll uh artwork was it during Shoemaker le9 back
in 1994 I believe that was then and I think I have a beautiful Michael Carol
painting in my in the main part of my home and I know Wendy and I just loved
it and I think that's when Michael Carol and I got to know each other I think that's right and those paintings are
designed to hide those dirt spots on the wall so that's
great so yeah but um if you if any of you are out there and interested in some
some of the best space art uh that you can find uh you know look up Michael car
uh and you can do Google Images if you want because you're going to see a ton of paintings and illustrations and stuff
but um I love the uh perspective that you give um uh you know they are
Advantage points where you know no telescope could go and no space Explorer
could go and uh but they're quite accurate and that is the um you know
that is the skill of a a great space artist well it's great to be here I I it's
always humbling to be in these meetings because you have so many creative
brilliant uh people it's just really fun to to listen you're one of them Michael
so thank you oh go [Laughter] on so anyhow uh we're gonna give you the
stage but thank you for coming on to our 147th event well thanks so much for
having me and uh Daniel great stuff on exoplanets um one of my uh favorite
subjects certainly um you are looking for things that are similar to Earth and
I'm going to talk about uh the Earth as it was when it wasn't similar to Earth
uh let me get our screen here let me
share share our screen green let's
see I may need to restart my
keynote desktop [Music]
one let's see all
right I'm going to uh stop keynote and restarted because
I think we had to do that earlier sorry about that
okay here we
go we'll see if Zoom will recognize it this time [Music]
around resent planet
Earth okay all right
sh my
screen Okay
no Okay uh let's see can you guys see my uh
you're not quite you're not quite sharing it uh at this point Point okay going down to share screen you need to
pick uh the uh field that you want then you got to commit to it okay confirm
it uh let's [Music]
see allow Zoom to
share
okay
these great images behind you are these paintings and astrophotographs that you made uh these are paintings by friends
of mine I love to surround myself with uh paintings from talented folks yeah
all right um well I don't know why this won't wake up
here let
me okay does that make it can you see that no we just still see you e that's
ugly we don't want to do that
okay to yeah
screen
um
okay oh boy okay it wants me to quit Zoom which
I really don't want to do is it a new computer uh it is uhhuh
okay yeah there are permissions that you have to set up uh is it a Mac it is yeah
yep there's a permission that you have to set up for it uh if you would like we
could go to another speaker and come back to you okay okay sure but you do have to go in your settings and allow uh
Zoom to make a change okay okay I will all right fine that's fine so let's see
who else do we have here do we have Kareem
Jaffer all right I don't see Kareem all right uh we do have Caesar here Caesar
would you like to uh to go on early hi SC how are you I am ready
you're all set okay let's do you need do you need to see something from the south ere I can I can show you something yes
we always need that okay okay let me show I can tell it's clear I can see yes
yes clear miracle miracle I have ready to say goodbye um to our
summer last uh weekend to say goodbye to our summer I took a picture very single
picture of oron just maybe I was listening to David Aker Danielle
puso uh doid and you um I I was really
interested in in the in the presentations uh I was making something
with oreon nebula that now is behind the building the tower uh well first of all
I show you a live image of let me show
you first of all Shel box wow is in the screen very
nice very nice let me change just a little the the
game sorry but this is um uh a complex
of reflecting now you know that it's not easy sometimes I need to make magic and
well let me change something with the red
ones maybe I can I can give you a better
maybe now maybe changing something the green uh it's to
mention you can see the difference of colors well here is that's
okay let me now something that I make is
well is um changing the
exposure maybe we can make more exposure unless the gain to
have yet
7 Seconds this is a beautiful
beautiful cluster maybe I
can show you more
near this looks like a really rich region of the sky yes is a very rich yes
yes
so those of you that are watching in the audience maybe you can chat in but I would like to know how many of you have
seen the southern hemisphere Milky Way I've seen it it's amazing but I was
wondering what your impression of it is like if you've been down south yes yes it's really rich area I
can show you um I can show
you moving a little the telescope beta or
Mimosa star to move the telescope I choose I
choosing to use
a a faster a faster exposure here we have we we still having
the sh box and here we have beta
centri beta sorry not beta crues um the the red one star that is
the the red best star in the
sky let me try to
move okay something that last week I say was that
now we can we can
um uh let me explain we sorry but it's my English that I um making an star
Trail we can see the red one star that is this one
it's so different making a a movement with a telescope I try to show
you okay I need more Expo more
gain because the Stars you are watching in the same color but when you make
this you can see maybe is like a like an
experiment
and maybe with more
gain look at this you can see the the the the red Trail of the this one
compared with other
the trail is totally different it's totally
red you you can see the effect differences between the Stars yes the
the pa the trail is completely red and this is the this is why maybe we
can try with
more with more
gain that do have this this effect sometimes this one is is for is is great
for you know for explain the difference because sometimes maybe um the saturated
quantity of light in in a CCD in a live image you can't see the
difference and sometimes the
trail help you and trying again to make six
yeah something that they have tonight is that the mount is fix it with a a great
a great sorry now I need to to put the the
game where 7 Seconds of exposure
okay and we can
return to the sh
box
now I I moving the telescope again to the J
box sorry that the the exposure are 7
seconds but it's live I move him I remember that I move him with my cell
phone I moving the the mount okay
okay
well we have again in the field sh box m i using
again more game sorry too
much well the the the you can see moving the telescope how different are the
stars especially in the Shel box how you can see the
path of this Stars red
stars you can see the
difference well here do you have do you have a live
image of Shel box it's beautiful yes and I show
you the picture of oron that I took I change the
screen
well this is the picture that I took four minutes of uh wow four minutes
yes it it's a picture without darks and flats it's only with the telescope that
you can see not guided image have a a have a a a a good um polar alignment but
this is something that uh that um practically I I made a less
processing Possible only with a free software called seral
only I can show you I can show you because I have I still have
the stop share and I'll show
you the processing image where I have here I'm still processing this here do
you have the three Channel the three channels red green
blue and the composing of RGB but this the same picture that you are
watching now in in my screen here and I am happy because I
it's a Time to Say Goodbye to to our our summer you are you're saying uh to your
spring time oron is is um when oron yeah
is appear in the Horizon here in theem South emisphere it's uh we are having
happy because is coming summer Christmas you know and sometimes you can you can
feel stressed because it's the end of the year you need to pay taxes but is
oron in our minds have a different sense for for our uh hobby our
activity uh because uh many many times the people say uh the people that make
astronomy H say wow it's oron in the sky come on it's time it's the end of Year
yes that's right yes yes it's our our calendar is it's very interesting for
for people that share the the passion Scot of astronomy yes and is is oron in
the sky for noer um is that
spring spring is coming for us when sorry when the oron is going to the West
earlier or uh for us is when the AUM is coming or when we see to start to see to
watch oron um Orion sorry um we we know that
the summer is is coming and we need to pay all things that because the the
end the end of the year is coming right okay thank you maybe a bad
thing yeah absolutely yeah sometimes it's great but sometimes it's a little
straight that's right yeah okay Cesar thank you so much man thank you thank
you very much to for by invite me and it's a pleasure that you you come
me every week in global SAR thank you very much yeah thanks man thank you okay
all right so uh let's see uh we are moving a little
bit differently from the schedule at this point um but um David uh our next
speaker is uh uh Professor Kareem Jafar uh uh he is at John Abbot College we saw
him a little bit earlier at the beginning before we uh started streaming
uh he was giving a little tour around the John Abbot camp it looks beautiful
um and uh he's a he's definitely become a great friend uh uh to me uh he was
with me at the last staris festival with his whole family which was awesome
amazing yeah was a lot of fun and you and David Levy have known each other but
for a very long time is that right we're yeah we're over eight years now yeah yeah long long time and uh we've been
good friends uh Kareem has been at visiting our adorak astronomy Retreat I hope he'll be
there this year and uh I really prize my
friendship with this man he's brilliant he's absolutely brilliant would agree I
would agree that's great so thank you so much uh you know I think that Kareem is
the astronomy Professor that everyone wishes they had so I don't even know how
to start after that thank thank you so much it's been it's been too long uh it keeps you know I keep missing a few star
parties and then it's it's it's always a joy to come back and and talk to the global Star Party audience see my
friends uh he from Cesar was fantastic cuz I don't get to see the South American sky so I get to see them
through Cesar through Maxi through all of our friends South of the Border and south of the Equator and Daniel I loved
hearing uh you plugging the unistellar for the exoplanet transits I've been in the past doing EX plan of transits with
our rasque robotic telescope that we had in California and last year we tried to do it with the msro but we were having
some issues with some of the data taking but we have an EV scope we just haven't had clear skies in Montreal so we
haven't had a chance to play around with it yet for exoplanet transits but it's definitely in order to do soon so today
I wanted to chat with you about the ISS mimic team that we have here in Canada
and this is the ISS mimic is a very cool
scale model it's 1 to 100 model of the International Space Station that
downloads Telemetry data and adjusts the positions of the solar panels according to what the ISS is doing at that instant
in time it was developed by a group of NASA engineers and what they've done since then is they've created the mimic
mini and the mimic mini is an educational model that can then be brought into the classrooms and used for
outreach and so outside of the US they've now started bringing the mimic mini into a few different countries and
we had the opportunity this year uh just in the last couple of months to help build the first one in Canada so I want
to share with you a little bit of that but before we do we always start here in the Montreal center with a land and Sky
acknowledgement so we acknowledge that we are on First Nations unseated lands that have they have taken care of the
lands and the waters we also recognize that we share the night sky with them and whether that's the full moon which
is just passed which was the first spring full moon which is called the sugar Moon by the mkma of the east coast
in the ojibway it's also called The Eagle Moon by the Korean if you watch right now you can see the Majestic Birds
entering back into the lands and we also recognize at this point the eclipse
stories that a lot of our first Nations a lot of our ancient cultures have
incredible amounts of observation in their Eclipse stories and I'm mentioning this because I always talk a little bit
about what we're doing at the Montreal center of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada and right now our ENT entire
Focus has of course been on the eclipse so it's important to recognize why the
total solar eclipse is right now so important for us passing through Montreal and for me it's passing through
my college it's passing through John abot which is just fantastic to see so
the last total solar eclipse through the eastern part of Canada through Frederick to New Brunswick which gets totality
this time was all the way back in the first Millennia the last total solar eclipse that passed through Montreal was
in 1932 and we're not going to get another one passing anywhere in Quebec until
2106 so that's 82 years from now I'm I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be around anymore I think some of my students are
also not sure if they're going to be around so we've been working really hard to plan a big solar eclipse event here
at John abot college campus we have partnered with our Migel McDonald campus next door with MDA space is going to be
there with us we're going to have a speaker from the Canadian space agency and we're going to have in ton of
different activities available we're GNA have of course our solar projection we're going to have this
amazing idea that came up from our Arts and Sciences program where they built a
pinhole projection room and they're hoping to build several of these for the public to be able to go in and
experience the sun indirectly in a really dark exposed area so they can
really get to enjoy spot the sunspots with how active the sun has been seeing
it on these small projectors is one thing seeing it projected on on a wall is another one and then building your
own pinhole projectors building your old you know putting your name with a thumb tack and having it Shine through with
the crescent and the partial phases all of that is just going to be fantastic but what really drives us is totality
and so in a week and I'm week and a day on Wednesday April 3rd at 8:00 P.M I'm
actually running a zoom with some of our students from the John abbit space club and we're going to be sharing what is
the total solar eclipse why is this one speci for us here in Montreal and how do we safely observe it and anybody who's
interested can join us uh it's bit.ly Eclipse 2024 info to register and yeah
we'd love to have you we're also going to Montreal YouTube channel what I'm
here to talk to you the most about today is ISS mimic mini and our team Canada and I have four of them here with Diana
who was our mentor and I'm going to share with you a little bit about what we've done here but this was brought on
by Diana who is one of the space Outreach Educators here in Montreal who just goes above and beyond she works in
the Indigenous classroom she works in classrooms outside of the province she travels down to seek every year giving
workshops bringing in new ideas she's also the education rep or the education
facilitator at the Montreal Aviation Museum next door so I've been doing Outreach with her for several years now
and her group science your no G's about it runs a bunch of different activities for kids of all ages who are interested
in in Steam where our goal is with this ISS mimic mini is to have a display
ready by the time the eclipse comes out where the display will constantly shift according to this orientation of the
solar panels and then we can add in more bells and whistles as the project goes on so on day one when Diana came in to
talk to the students about this this was on February 26 this was right before their study break we got a group of five
students who were interested in participating in this and you can see there's one little bin that she managed
to carry through customs and that was just the Envy of all the Custom Security agents they all came to find out what
this cool thing was that she was carrying through and everything was in tiny little packs you had to put this
together and unlike Ikea the instructions were not quite so straightforward uh we were lucky to have
Amy Medina from the Johnson Space Center helping us out and calling in remotely the next work period was that
same week towards the end of the week the students said we want to get together one more time and we want to figure out the scale of what the work is
going to be and so she brought in all of her supplies we open up the workshop room and you can see them at work hard
at work these five individuals but it also has to be a little bit of play as well right so here's Luca telling us
about what he's building with the
trust hello this is ISS mimics structural frame built at John abot
College in we could not keep a straight face for any of the videos that we did at the very
start after that during the reading week so during study break if you picture you know reading week study break whatever
you want to call it in your local wherever you went to school most students want nothing to do with school
these guys came in on the Thursday for the entire day along with two other
groups of students also from honor science who worked on projects that had
nothing no evaluation component to it nothing to do with any of their actual uh marks courses that they are currently
taking just projects that they put themselves out for and wanted to help out with and by the end of that day we
got the model to this point now when we started working through this we had a few different
things we wanted to share but the internet connection at work wasn't going very well and on top of that I couldn't
get all the videos to upload properly into PowerPoint so I want to share with you now and Scott stop me if you can't
hear it or if it's not if it's lagging at all but I want you to hear directly from the five students
okay so hello Global Star Party audience I want to introduce you to the ISS mimic
Team Canada from right to left we have William we have Alex we have Quenton we
have Luca we have faram and then we have their mentor and the brains behind all of this Diana Phillips who is one of the
teacher Trainers for the Space Foundation as well as the head of science yourself no G's about it so
gentlemen what what is this what is it this is the ISS mimic
it's a project that we were taking part of here in Canada and uh basically what
it is is basically making a a a model copy of the ISS um in a much smaller
setting and much more scaled down setting uh yeah there a project we've been working on for a little bit now and
uh we're glad to say we finally finished it almost almost we're getting there uh
just putting putting on the finishing touches here and uh yeah it's been really good it's been long so you built
this from the kit from the Johnson Space Center and what is Alex doing over there
what what are you what are you connecting here is this how it runs I'm connecting it to Raspberry Pi and uh
right now I should set it up soon no worries we'll see it in action in a few
moments so faram I know you've got a ton of ISS knowledge you want to show off some of it you want to tell us what all
these different modules are uh right in the back here we have the Russian segment of the ISS and then you can see
in the front here this is the American segment that's connected to Russian segment uh and then on the American
segment there should you should be able to see the Japanese lab should be around
here and then uh you can see there's multiple um transport Vehicles attached
you have dragon modules and so on the Russian segment and uh you have all the solar
panels on it too and they all move around according to uh the actual position of the real ISS so you're going
to be getting Telemetry data directly from the International Space Station to run this yes exactly the in real time
data I show exactly how it is in space in real time so Diana what's the plan with this in terms of Outreach what do
you plan to do with the ISS mimic so first of all I just want to say that this is the Canada Canada's first this
team um they are spectacular what they're doing they are such bright lights and the connective tissue between
them has been extremely positive we want to thank um the creators of ISS mimic
for giving us this opportunity here in Canada so the Outreach is going to be
beyond the limits there is no limit so the itial for this is to be able to take it not just to festivals but also to
classrooms across Quebec and we will be taking it to the festival in Ontario the
an Goa Festival but we have no limits we are really looking forward to taking it
to the Montreal Aviation Museum in the fall so what we want to do is we want to use this as a teaching tool and help
children and youth understand the ISS mimic and what it can do and look at
space a little further and get excited and get really really really super super Keen
about space and space education wonderful so Diana came from the seek conference with this beautiful kit just
just under a month ago and we've only had I think four working periods of
small amounts of time and we've already got it together to the testing phase thanks in huge part to these five
individuals right here any last words you guys want to say to the global audience uh just been a really cool
opportunity really happy to be part of this project part of my crew
here it's been a cool project so all five of these young men are part of the
John Abbott College science programs honor science program I should know better than to say that and it's been a
privilege to work with them so far and we can't wait to see what the final product shows see you in a few moments
so here's what we had for the final product today tell us what's going on here is it
set up now to show Telemetry yes it is currently it should be following exactly what it looks like in space you just saw
that move a bit uh yeah it should be fully working these are keyword should
be yeah I mean these these whatever when when will it be where will
it be next wonderful and right now we're checking to see exactly what the Telemetry should be to compare to where
we are at so that the solar panels can be adjusted but y there it goes it's just a very short very small movements
which will keep it from flying apart hopefully and farum keep the Russian section from exploding
exploded great job to come off and walk around on his own so so during the
testing phase that actually was happening it was flying all over the place if you can see the speed at which
it was moving when we were testing it back oh what did you unplug
it that would make sense [Music] no it was like going off the weird time
is it so I
think 100
100 yeah I mean yeah is this that's exactly past 90° that's wonderful what
happened to this guy so the debugging and the testing period has gone amazing and we reached
the point now where we have working Telemetry data going directly into the Raspberry Pi directly into the solar
panels we're able to make sure that they're oriented correctly and now we're designing a display for them for the
eclipse event week and then it will be a display that can be taken to high
schools and elementary schools across tobec at least but also hopefully across the country so that's our ISS team mimic
mini and uh Scott back to you wow okay well that's pretty awesome uh I want to I would love to
have uh one of these in my office you know just hanging out on my desk I think it'd be so cool I can I'll put a word in
for you we'll talk to Amy and see if we can get you one that's great um so uh uh
Karine thank you so much for for doing this do your students often engage in I
mean these relatively creative uh projects if I can find projects to bring
in we always have students signing up so I actually part of the reason why I had so much trouble getting in and getting
on was because we had another group of three students who are taking part in an engineering challenge and they heard
that I was going to be working tonight so they wanted to stay in the workshop as long as they could to work on their model for that design and then we had
another group uh earlier in the afternoon that are participating in the beam line challenge by CERN and they're
coming in tomorrow evening to work between the end of my lab and the start of our library night so at some point if
I don't put a limit on I think the students would stay there as long as I normally do but uh that's what we want to see I I I the fact that they're this
engaged that they're this passionate oh yeah tells me that I'm doing the right things absolutely absolutely I I'm sure
you have many stories too of students that have gone on to uh continue their studies and maybe take up a professional
life in science so that's great my pleasure thank you K I just wanted to
add my thanks I thought that was brilliant it was wonderful and if you need anybody on April the 3 to do a
little poetry and just to say a few words I'm available because I me to it I was about to ask you I don't leave for
the for the eclipse till Friday the 5th so the third I'm gonna be here and ready
to roll I'm sending you the link you're going to be a panelist with myself and Evelyn one of our exec from the space
Club wonderful I accept and I'm looking forward to it yay great okay all right again thanks
Kareem and pleasure see you again soon hopefully next time okay all right so um
we are were able to get uh Michael Caroll back um uh you know and I I uh
totally feel for Michael on on getting started with something like this because you get a new computer and then
everything's got to be configured so you know and things rarely automatically
just work so want to give it a shot again Michael I will give it a shot um
okay let's see here get out of I'll stay on with you so you're not so lonely that
would be great okay I'm gonna hit share screen and we'll
see what happens here oh looks like it's working working now that's the
desktop okay presentation okay let me get
this I like the title it's in presentation mode okay okay so are we
ready are we good we are ready and you can Let It Rock all right uh what I'm
gonna talk about tonight uh a little more briefly than we planned is uh the
many alien Earths that have come before us um our planet is not the world that
it was and it's not the world that it will be in the future uh it's gone through all kinds of strange uh and
wondrous stages at one point we were a bit more like Venus with more uh
atmosphere more carbon dioxide higher temperatures um we were a bit like Mars
at one point we've gone through snowball epics uh where things were cold the air
was thinner and so we'll we'll see some features on Mars that we find on Earth
that uh Echo those uh Saturn's Great Moon Titan even has some uh similarities
and this this may seem strange at first but if you look at the chemistry going
on on the earth pre-biotic chemistry before life began uh some similar things
are going on in the atmosphere of Titan and so we'll look at that a bit but
first to Venus one of my personal favorite planets uh same size as the
Earth uh there are not only parallels uh between Venus and Earth but also a bit
with uh Mercury uh oddly enough because like every other place in the solar
system we have been battered by rocks falling from the sky asteroids comets
meteors dogs and cats living together uh this is a painting of mercury early on
when it was uh volcanically active uh volcanoes in a vacuum have an umbrella
shape like that you can see the solar Corona uh stretching up above the
Horizon there because the sun is just uh set um at the same time right here on
Earth in the hadan era uh we had a whole lot of stuff
coming in lots and lots of craters uh forming volcanism uh covering the ground
with molten rock magma uh and so interesting parallels
there with the early Earth versus um not only Mercury but also
Venus uh but things did settle down for a while and fact we developed uh
probably developed a water cycle there was a lot of volcanism uh no platech
tonics yet and then one day of course there was this event uh this thing is
called Thea uh informally it was about the size of Mars possibly even a little
bit larger and uh one very bad day it came up and and blammed into the side of
the Earth kind of a glancing blow uh recent work indicates that it may have
been uh following Earth for some time at one of the L graian points but Gravity
from Venus or Jupiter Disturbed it and it came barreling in and peeled off most
of the outer layers of the earth made two uh big blobs of molten stuff
orbiting each other but uh fairly rapidly within just uh hundreds of
thousands of years the Moon coalesced from that ring of debris uh and so we
had the new moon and essentially A New Earth an earth that was given a facelift
um and then the water cycle started again and um eventually we had some uh
plate tectonics and things that we recognize today um but Venus continues
to be uh a a fascinating Place uh with a
lot of parallels of the earth of course it's a twin in size uh but there's some
interesting and bizarre and mysterious things going on there at about 12 and a half kilometers
altitude um a whole bunch of spacecraft including the Soviet venas uh the
Pioneer Venus probes um they all lost their little Minds um as they pass
through this altitude uh the majority of space not all of them but the majority um had uh
systemwide resets they lost their way um the uh information coming back from all
the all the probes all the data on the experiments was crazy and then they
settled down again now NASA did a study of some of the American probes and
concluded that the problem was with some insulating uh tape that was on the
spacecraft that at that temperature uh kind of melted but this does not explain
why the Soviet probes did the same thing at about the same altitude not all of
them but most of them so uh one possibility that's really intriguing
showed up in the mellin uh radar images and that is there are bright bright uh
radar bright spots on some of the highlands of Venus these look just like
a radar signature of metal and so it may be that on the mountains of Venus uh
down down at their base we have metals that actually vaporize it's so hot that
metallic Vapor moves up the mountain side and just like right here in my backyard in the Rocky Mountains uh with
water as it goes up the mountain uh it cools down and it rain or snows back to
the surface so in fact there may be Iron pyate covering the mountaintops on Venus
and wouldn't that be an amazing thing to see now we head out to Mars right quick
uh to talk about um some of the snowball Earth epics uh Mars is a a place that is
locked in the Deep Freeze now it used to be much warmer uh and it's in fact has
glaciers very much like this one this is a rock glacier in Canada uh but uh on
Mars we find what may be still active Rock glaciers there glaciers with ice
locked away under the the surface material and uh so we see evidence of
these all over the place not only on Earth but on Mars now here is how that
ties into the p pass on the earth we seem to be missing something in fact we're missing a billion somethings a
billion years of uh stratification uh seem to be gone from
the record of the Earth's rocks um we call this the great unconformity you can
see it beautifully in the Grand Canyon here I've put a green line across so you
can see uh where there there is a nice even up above but then there's a gap and
then the layers of rock beneath are doing something else what could wipe out
rock like that well it's possible that uh during two different periods on Earth
we had uh what they're calling the snowball Earth events um this one uh is
a painting I did of the supercontinent rodinia which was during one of these
epics and the idea is the theory is that the
planet was basically covered in ice um there may have been some uh Open Water
toward the equator but there wasn't much and um this was due to uh changes in
obliquity and in our orbital pure um uh Dynamics and so all that ice ground away
just like those Rock glaciers at the um surrounding had uh layers of uh geologic
record and wiped it out and so that's what may be uh the cause for all that
missing mysterious missing history uh at about that time uh there still wasn't
much oxygen in the air um but there was a lot of iron in the ocean and that iron
because it was not oxidizing would have turned the uh the Seas a brilliant
brilliant green it would have been uh pretty dramatic plate tectonics had not
uh begun uh at uh this time this was a several billion years ago uh but uh the
land masses were basically remnants of volcanoes and uh rims of impact craters
uh we have a nice record of this period when life was kind of just getting
started by banded iron uh that we find in the Rocks where there was some ox
iation taking place and by things like stromatolites very very ancient life
forms on the earth so our planet has left us with clues about uh its past on
those remember that the Earth is the the weirdo in this group it's the anomaly
Venus is ruled in its atmosphere by carbon dioxide as is Mars the Earth is
the only terrestrial planet that has mostly nitrogen and a whole lot of ox
oxygen uh that oxygen of course is due to um life here that has transformed our
atmosphere and that life may have Arisen in conditions that we find
today uh similar to conditions on Saturn's moon Titan the big difference
of course is that Titan is really really cold uh however it's got a lot of really
cool chemistry going on photochemicals dropping from the sky organic material
falling into hydrocarbon Seas oceans of liquid methane which uh essentially is
what we heat our homes with here so cold out there that uh the methane in the
skies turns to rain and falls down into lakes and seas and so of course we
wonder about life what about life there today is it possible um there are things
on Titan that are actually good building blocks for living cells and there are
localized spots on Titan where it gets warm for a while so it's possible that
liquid water may be uh freed for long enough for at least Prebiotic chemistry
to take place uh some estimates say that if you have a big impact on the surface
you might have a liquid Lake of water for as much as a thousand years um
that nobody knows how long it takes for life to get going life is the one of the
greatest mysteries of science still but we have found uh something called vinyl
cyanide if you say this to an exobiologist they will be thrilled they're very excited about vinyl cyanide
because it naturally occurs on Titan and it would make a great cell wall uh so uh
astrobiologists look for things like this chemical traces that could um be
related to the living systems that we're familiar with here on Earth today and of
course we'll know much more soon when we send uh the dragonfly in
2027 uh a souped up uh drone to the Skies of Titan so we look back and we
see that the Earth has gone through many different phases it seems to have been a
an alien very alien world at different times and uh the temperature has
fluctuated we've had a global uh cooling global warming but here's the difference
uh if we look at Trends today uh global warming is much more abrupt right now
than it ever has been throughout the history of this planet and so there is some cause for alarm um things are
happening here that we need to pay attention to but uh I have great hope
for our planet and for us as a species um there are the greatest Minds on this
world working on the the uh problems that our planet has today are we uh we
went from Hell To Paradise will we go back again to a venus-like place uh
let's hope not I I think the uh I think there's room for a lot of Hope um we are
uh looking at energy we're looking at sequestering carbon dioxide um we even are looking at new
types of um nuclear power that doesn't have the same kind of um output of nasty
stuff that uh conventional places do Fusion of course is the Holy Grail and
we hope to uh we're making progress with Fusion which which has no nuclear
fallout basically um nothing nasty to haunt future Generations so um I think
as we look to the Future um we we have a great deal to be optimistic about and um
uh looking back into history it's uh it's exciting to see all the different
stages that our world has been through and compare them to some of the
exoplanets that we're uh finding today I have a book out um called planet Earth
past and present if you're interested in digging into some of this a little bit
more all right and thank you so much Scott and of course explore
scientific thank you Michael you are welcome sorry for for all the mess
earlier that's okay that's okay we we've all endured this ourselves so uh but
that's part of uh of uh doing these kind of online presentations um okay so I can unshare
your screen for you thank okay there you go and what is your next adventure what
do you uh up to here in the near future well I am actually working on a book for
Springer about the Artemis project and uh Humanity's Return To The Moon uh but
the book goes beyond that it's about human exploration of all the moons of the solar system so I'm excited about
that wonderful okay all right thanks so much Michael you bet um okay let me
bring uh Mr levy
on if I can bring him on here we
go he is here here know they have something for
share no problem okay here we go so David um our next speaker will be uh
Kelly Ricks Kelly is a also an artist very creative artist and uh she is an
amazing Sky interpreter I've there are videos of her um uh talking about
astronomy uh she's been on global star party before for and uh I think that
she's just absolutely fabulous and um so Kelly I'm going to bring you in you are
you still at the U uh the volcano uh uh
State Park uh yes I I work in the bookstore at capul Volcano National
Monument so National Monument okay all right yes all right so um and capulin is
in some super super dark skies like I think it's bordal one out there yes
right and so uh crazy dark this is also pretty close to where the okite tech
star party is and black Mesa state park is out there where a lot of amateur
astronomers uh go to to uh you know uh really bathe in that Milky Way light so
thank Kelly thanks for coming back on again and U we're going to give you the stage Okay so yeah I'm a I'm a little
flattered to to be going right after Michael a great space artist I like to call myself an artist but you know work
uh right next to someone who's been a professional for so many years and has done so much wonderful work um it's
pretty amazing for me um I have a presentation to share so I am hoping
that my screen sharing will work okay see if I
can bring that up uh so I should
have do you see my presentation not yet okay let's try
this did it come up no shoot watch Michael and I will have had
the same problem it's only the artist to have problems you know let's see the
sign of an artist yes great artist you are welcome if you have problem with
sharing screen yes it's our our is our tra here our right of passage I did
fine last time um that's true happened there's a little green button at the
bottom of the uh Zoom application share screen share
screen um share screen yep I'm clicking it okay I'll tell you if it's yes there
we go here we go we see that beautiful picture all right let's see
file and you can bring that present mode if you want there you go yes okay here we go wonderful not too much time well
first I have to brag just a little bit um I just completed my very first Messier Marathon two weeks ago last New
Moon uh this is a photo I took on that night I this was from capulin Volcano
National Monument I did have a volcano looming on my e or yes Eastern Horizon so I did miss a few
objects in the morning um but you know 100 out of 110 for a first timer I would
like to say is pretty good very good um what was that yeah very good thank you I got 40
so you got me beat by a long shot we all got to start somewhere um
but uh so I got my start with the parks working in and around Parks back in 2014
at Bryce Canyon which has another extremely wonderful Sky um so great that
while I was there you may not know this I discovered a world um and I just to
show you some of the quality of our seeing out there here's one of my photographs this is taken with my camera
it is a real photograph it's not AI we didn't have ai back then um here's another one can see interesting I don't
know maybe Signs of Life there maybe there's some interesting water flow um another I mean look at the bottom there
we've got heck what is that maybe some some structures coming out of the surface of this world uh before you all
kick me off for being a crackpot I will own up this is a world it is not a new
world it is our world and in fact it's what happens when limestone roads off of
hudo collects in the bottom of a stream bed and then has it nice clay texture
and raindrops fall into that clay texture and make something that looks very much like the surface of an alien
world I remember sharing this with some of my friends while I was at Bryce Canyon they were absolutely astounded
that I could see the surface of Mars that way that well but anyway so kind of a joke but you
know Bryce is a place that I definitely learned to see our world a little bit differently kind of like one of these
little moments of Discovery with the raindrops in the clay and I'm not alone
in that um I believe that a lot of the visitors who came to Bryce they used this word
otherworldly to describe it as though they were on another planet and thinking
about this word I some part of me thinks it short changes Earth just a little bit
you we get so used to our our daytoday going shopping going to school going to work whatever and we forget that we're
on a planet um we think of other worlds as these places of intrigue far out in
the universe while we are in that universe as well and this is part of the world that
I started to think about a little bit differently when I was at Bryce Canyon
um such a beautiful place and it's one reason that why in my own art I like to
to incorporate aspects of our world in a context of the larger universe um how we
see ourselves within that Universe um and so when the the topic of
Worlds came up for tonight's star party I thought I'd take a little bit of a creative approach add some art into my
program little did I know I would be following an artist who had nothing but art in his program uh but I I'm also a
musician and so talking about the discovery of Worlds it's always fun to bring up William hersel uh who actually
made his living as a musician he was an organist a violinist an OBO player well
enough that he performed his own concertos his sister Caroline who was also a wonderful astronomer and helped
uh with his observations was a soprano as well also a musician and of course
Hershel discovered Uranus um so artists are are making an impact but we're going
to go back to visual art and I have heard some people
describe um space art Astron astronomical art as similar to art that was done by
early white explorers of the American West now of course indigenous people have been there for thousands of years
they knew these Landscapes well they were sacred Landscapes to them but somebody who had recently immigrated
from Europe or had lived on the east coast of the United States for many years going to a place like the Grand
Canyon that there was nothing to relate to it was for all intents and purposes a
new world a new planet um some of the artists that would go on Expeditions they would be so
overcome by the beauty that they would encounter the difficult things to describe to depict that you would have
some of their paintings kind of a mish mash of all the amazing things they saw like this one from beat where he
Incorporated aspects of yosity with the High Sierra lots and lots of waterfalls
just everything sort of crammed together like we see in like we see in AI today
oddly um but think about if you were going to a place like Yellowstone for
the first time how would you describe that um how could people back home
believe you and not think that you were telling Tall Tales um an artist uh
Thomas Moran went on one of the first expeditions to that region um and filled
a Sketchbook with drawings of these strange Landscapes eventually uh refined
them into pictures that became part of the motivation for creating the national
park system um one thing I love about a lot of these pictures as well as you
always see these little tiny figures observing the pictures giving giving
observing the Landscapes giving them a sense of scale for how huge and how vast
another analog to how we experience our view of the
universe now of course we can jump right from that to our unending um need to
explore what Carl Sean termed uh what did he say I wrote this down because I
knew I would forget it an everlasting itch for things remote um Carl Sean said
he didn't know what other worlds looked like until he saw Chesley bonas's paintings of the solar system this is
one of uh satn as hypothetically seen seen from the surface of the Moon
mimus and here we have and I don't know if all the I think all of you can see
the whole picture on this screen of course a Cassini image of Saturn with
the moon mimus and teus um there's there's a relationship here there's a
connection here between this imagination that that Spurs our exploration and the
exploration itself that we are enjoying back here on
Earth and as we have explored we have always found a way to look back home
we've got a solar Clips coming up as we all know and so I thought it'd be fun to show this image um mid
1800s an artist imagining what it would be like to watch a solar eclipse from
the Moon and of course it would be the Earth covering up the Sun and I guess in
in this um this light extending from the side was not supposed to be the solar
Corona it was actually meant to represent the zodiacal light so dust particles um in the plane of the solar
system reflected reflecting sunlight in just such a way um but without
imagination like this without the urge to explore we may never have seen our
planet with our own eyes as a planet uh was taken the Earth rice photo from
Apollo 8 uh Bill Anders who took the photo said we went to the moon to learn
about the moon but what we really ended up discovering was was was Earth and
that's often been the case um if we didn't have imagination and drive to
explore Mars we might never have gotten a picture of Earth seen from the surface
of Mars seen by the eyes of a rover Curiosity in this case who looked back
towards us and said hello um without imagination and the drive to explore we
may never have seen our world uh from Beyond the orbit of Neptune suspended in
a sun Sunbeam the only world we have ever known of course the pale blue
dot um and finally uh with this imagination with this urge to explore we
are going places that we have currently no capability of even sending a
spacecraft to we can go places like trapist 1e which I'm taking this poster
from the exoplanet travel Bureau by NASA which is a wonderful website to explore
and in this uh depiction of of visitors to trapist one you see all of the other
planets that orbit very very close in to the little H Red Dwarf star up here and
zooming in to this area we see the constellation Leo looks different
because from that star uh the the other stars would be oriented slightly differently than they are from our view
and this little yellow star which is our son so always always looking
back oh there it is yes I forgot I had that so not all of us I like
this so this uh this was I took this Photograph a couple months ago I drove
about a quarter a mile down my street the moon was just precisely placed thank you photographers ephemeris and uh you
know not all of us and not all my life have I been had the opportunity to live in a place that you know looks
otherworldly that looks exotic and sparkly and full of intrigue I mean this
Volcan volcanic field that I live in uh the astronauts for the Apollo program
came to train to learn some geology um from the area we have a big volcanic
field they were thinking maybe they would run into some similar things on the moon so you know this this is a pretty
special place to be but I think even in all of our day-to-day lives we can take a moment to look around and recognize
that of all the things that we've discovered in the universe this is the only place that we've found life this is
the only place that we' that we can see um the Wonders around us it sounds a
little cliche but uh I think somewhere out in the universe there would be somebody on another planet looking
towards ours saying how how amazing how otherworldly how inspiring how much they
need to explore um yeah so that's that's
it wow that was a great that was a great presentation as well beautiful beautiful
work thank you yeah I really wanted to to say that you have captured a part of
our planet that is so rarely seen nowadays we I often like to ask people
what do you think of the world and they start talking about the political world
but uh and of course we we are having such such difficulties right now and
such um such unfortunate things happening all the time but you have
shown us a different world a world that has seen from the national parks I
remember seeing the program on PBS years ago America's greatest idea it was a
documentary about the national parks and it's was absolutely wonderful and Kelly
thank you for sharing your take with this today thank you yeah and and I'd
like to add that uh you remind me that one of my goals is to sit right
alongside you and do an image uh Milky Way Imaging at culan uh National Park I
don't know if I'll get the shot again this year but I I've been there during the daytime and I can only imagine what
it's like at night I imagine it is a very beautiful place and uh I hope to get that shot this year we are coming
down for the okite tech star party so um I will look you let me know and and come
say hello that'd be great I will and excellent presentation
both art and pictures um David Levy
already that was that was an excellent summary David this the star party always
pulls us away from some of the the things that we deal with in everyday news and reminds us to keep looking up
so with that I'll be listening in um till it's my turn Kelly excellent and uh
Scott I need to quit taking over this Global star party so back to you well it's hard not to want to
comment because I I think this last uh uh you know seeing the uh the world from
an artist perspective is fantastic so uh I couldn't I mean this was kind of
accidental that uh all these um this art came to this uh Global star party uh but
a happy accident I think and uh um it's so wonderful to um you know see it
Through The Eyes of uh of a much different perspective you know so thanks for bringing all the Beauty and the
imagination to this and uh you know making great art is hard work and so uh
thank you thanks for what you guys do it's beautiful okay um our next uh speaker
will be um Robert Reeves uh uh Astro you know lunar
astrophotographer extraordinaire and uh so Robert thank you for coming on to our
147th event I'm glad to be here uh well um I hate to wish bad
things on people but I'm I'm kind of almost halfway relieved to find that I'm
not the only person that has trouble screen sharing uh it's it's it's been a running
joke with my screen share ever since I've tried to be on global Star Party it never quite works but we managed to get
a picture up there even though it's not quite what I want it to be so we're going to try that once again um the
theme tonight of course the worlds worlds uh of course I present the moon
the world that is in our backyard uh close enough that we can almost Reach Out And Touch it uh so U let's do the
great experiment and see if my screen share works and uh bring that up and uh
my screen share is loading yay finally it works okay well
then let's uh I said let's Advance why are you not Advance there it goes taking his time
today um well the moon you know the the closest world to us and U when we deal
with other worlds we're talking about planets millions of miles away we're talking about other worlds around other
solar systems uh uh U light years away but the Moon is only a quar Million
Miles Away um not very many zeros in the
distance number A lot of people are are surprised to find you can see more detail on the moon with the parab
binoculars than you can see on any Planet through the best telescope you can get so the moon offers an enormous
amount of uh things to see geology to explore or U the artwork of the phases
and the shadows and and just how the moon presents itself changing Night by
night so U I like to U say these things about the Moon shows us a world that is
rugged yet Serene harsh yet beautiful alien yet
appealing tortured yet calm and strange
yet friendly we're used to the friendly face of the rising full moon smiling on
us uh lighting up our cold winter night or accompanying fireflies in the summertime so the Moon is something
we're used to it is our friend already and U uh once we put a telescope
to it we see if my screen thing advances oh yeah
my usual slide I always put this in every Pres presentation because I want people to understand no matter what
we're looking at on the moon they were created all the features were only created by two forces either impacts or
subsequent volcanism so uh once you understand these World building
processes on the moon uh makes it a lot easier to understand what you're looking at in the eyepiece so um as we
uh sweep our telescope across the face of the Moon and just enjoy what we're seeing we we we see these these
wonderful uh views that we can't see on any other world any we can't magnify
another planet at us but the Moon is right there in our face so we get to see wonderful things like Tao crater and the
Magnificent railroad tracks the uh the twin parallel rays extending off to the Northwest um the the almost snowflake
snowflake like quality of the uh race structures around kernus Crater and
Kepler crater and aristarchus crater um whoops going too fast um amazing sites
like uh the dark floors of uh Basalt covered craters and the
ribbons of Basalt around U Mario Oriental on the western limb of the Moon
um or uh reals like Hadley re at the center of the image of the landing site
of the Apollo 15 Explorations um backing up a little bit the uh marrium the Sea of rains and
uh the the Magnificent sweep of the appenine mountains that are the rim of
the uh uh embrium Basin which the Mari embrium lies within um other amazing
sites as the picture loads uh cernus crater at sundown uh the Carpathian
Mountains um above it separating um the Sea of islands uh next to cernus from
Mari embrium to the north um the craters um aristois at the
top right UD doxis and Cassini on the lower left I like in cassinia looking
like a bird's nest with two eggs in it and sweeping along the southern part
of the moon alien Landscapes like um Bailey crater which is actually Bailey
Basin now because we've reclassified it is a basin since it's uh in excess of
300 km in diameter and uh we see cigar shaped Schiller up at the top and
between Bailey the large oval at the bottom just above the uh the limb and
and Shiller rather blank circular area another Basin on the moon that never
filled up with Basalt the the Schiller zius Basin and getting up toward the middle
of the Moon the Apollo 16 Landing site uh just north of discarded
crater um another view of the little volcanic dimples the the uh to the
southwest of cernus crater you see the little uh field of small tiny shield
volcanoes some with of all with a Caldera on top or right in the middle
wow and uh looking up at the all-time favorite on the moon everybody Lov Plato
crater it just doesn't look like a standard crater because it's filled in with balt right at the top
the Ark of the Alps mountains north of Mari embrium got the the river of Balta
above it Mario F gorus and then streaming further north the heavily cratered Northern U Highlands the polar
regions then go south U Tao crater in the Southern Highlands uh with its
splash of rays um one of my faite favorite twin
craters Palace and merchison uh just north of sinus midi we're real close to
the center of the Moon center of the moon's visible disc uh looking closer at
Plato and the Alps mountains and the the gash of the Alpine Valley uh cutting
through it and uh we see the sinuous R of Rima Plato uh descending the slopes
of the Alps mountains and emptying out onto Mario F gorus uh again and the center of the
moon's visible disc the Magnificent real structures of the trees Necker RS the
hygienist RS the Aras rules um all of these all of these Landscapes just await
your your glance through a modest telescope you don't need a powerful telescope you don't need an expensive
telescope you can enjoy the world of the Moon in your backyard any time uh
anytime it's visible of course and then a final look at the Moon um not all
craters around I like to show W Bond crater because it's distinctly Square so
uh just uh banish that thought that all craters are around because they're not
but I strongly suspect that um there may be no Global star party next week
because of all the preparations for the eclipse so I'm going to talk a little bit about the eclipse this time because
we may not have not have another chance before the eclipse but the Moon is a significant supporting actor in this
eclipse solar eclipse business I mean let's face it if uh if the moon wasn't there we wouldn't have any eclipses so U
hopefully in 13 days uh if you are lucky enough to have traveled to the center
line the skies will cooperate and you see something like this so um a little
bit about the circumstances of how the moon and the sun interact uh to create
an eclipse well um visually as we look up in the sky the sun and the moon appear to be about the same size but uh
we know the Moon is much smaller than the Sun so why the size comparison well
the Moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun but it's also uh the sun is 400 times farther away so uh they balance
out and uh the U um the amazing Coincidence of that
happening uh I'll talk about a little bit later uh because early on in the moon's history
it was much closer to the Earth and U I'll let the cat out of a bag this is a
um a little bit of artwork that will appear in my next book about the Moon that will be out later this year uh it
shows a hypothetical early Moon very close to the Earth shortly after its creation the Earth is still molten still
volcanic still a place that life can't exist yet but back then the moon was
probably no further away than the geosynchronous satellites that orbit the earth now and give us our our television
broadcast and our weather forecasts but the Moon is slowly spiraling away from the earth and um right now it happens to
be just far enough away that when it's at perige it does cover the entire face of the Moon uh at abig it's a little bit
smaller 14% smaller uh the perig it's about an average of uh 362,000
kilometers away at ape it's about 40,000 kilm further away and at that distance
it's just slightly smaller than the disc of the moon so we get an annular Eclipse like we had last October so uh this this
little graphic summarizes that when the moon is at perige and closest to us it
is large enough to cover the entire Sun we see the corona but if it's at apigy
um it doesn't cover the entire sun and we get the eclipse like the the practice
Eclipse we had last October so uh last October we got a view
like this the moon slipping in front of the sun we still needed solar glasses to
view it of course because anytime the visible disc of the sun is showing that
will damage your eyes if you do not have proper filtration but the total solar
eclipse where the moon completely blocks the Sun and only the corona shows then
you take those solar glasses off and you drink in what you can see with your own
eyes if you have never seen a total solar eclipse um my advice is don't wait yourself down
with a heavy photography program that's that's going to take your your attention away from just looking uh on your second
Eclipse maybe you can Tinker with a camera there's going to be plenty of other people taking pictures uh if if
this is your first time just look and remember it will burn into your soul for
the rest of your life trust me so uh well put well put Robert that's
great so uh I'm talking about an early Moon being very close to the Earth and
now the Moon is just the right distance away that an eclipse will happen um now
um billions of years ago uh the moon was too close we couldn't have a solar eclipse the the moon would cover up the
entire Corona as well a billion years from now the moon will be too far away
all solar eclipses will be either annular or uh finally degrade into uh a
simple transit where the ball of the shadow of the Moon crosses the face of the Sun but right now just when humanity
is on the earth just when we have the imagination to look up and figure out what's happening up there in the sky the
moon is just the right distance away to create a solar eclipse well what's
making the moon slowly Drift Away um since the Apollo missions we've been able to put laser reflectors on the moon
and uh measure the drift of the Moon away from us within a kitten's whisker
we know the moon now recedes 3.8 cm per year just a little bit less than two
inches so if you think about that uh remember back when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and uh jump forward to
today well the Moon is about two yards further away than it was when Neil did
his one small step for mankind so uh multiply that out by millions of years
and billions pretty soon the Moon is too far away for eclipses to happen but what
is pushing the Moon away from the Earth uh it's actually our ocean tides just as
the moon attracts the ocean tides and creates the Bulge of water toward the
moon and away from it on the opposite side of the earth um um the Earth's
rotation also pushes that tidal bulge offset from the Earth Moon line between
the Earth and the moon so it's it's uh trailing uh the Earth Moon line by just
a little bit and we see in the next slide what happens is the gravity of the
tides the water bulging up toward the Moon by the moon's gravity the gravity
Mutual gravity of that water on the moon is also attracting the moon and because that tidal BS is slightly offset it's
dragging the moon gravitationally dragging the moon a little bit faster every time it goes around the Earth
every time the ocean tides swing around because of the Moon and uh given time
that's enough to push the moon out uh 3.8 cm per year so um our own ocean
tides play a great deal in uh the fact that we are able to have a total solar
eclipse in our when during when when humanity is on this planet and uh I've
always thought that to be a a quite an astounding thing to think about uh
because if if we had evolved earlier um we'd have this curiosity of this sun
going out and the corona not being seen because the Moon is too close or if we had evolved a little bit later and the
Earth still survived and uh we Humanity was here uh much later we would never
know what a total solar eclipse is so uh uh what's going to happen in 13 days it
is extremely special and I pray that you are going to be in the right place at the right time to see it
so um there's also the question of why isn't there an eclipse every month the
moon goes around the around the earth and uh um why doesn't it pass in front
of the Sun every time why don't we have this This Magnificent spectacle every month instead of um um sometimes um um a
year or more uh it's because the lunar orbit is inclined to Earth's orbit um
the plane of the Earth's orbit inclined we see these these little rectangles we so we see how the plane of the orbit is
tipped up so that on the left and right hand sides um the plane of the Earth orbit of moon's orbit
around the Earth the shadow misses the Earth it passes above us or below us um
the not only can we not have a solar eclipse we also can't have a lunar eclipse because the moon will not pass through Earth's Shadow but when the
nodes of the lunar orbit align with the Sun that is the point where the
inclined orbit of the moon inter the orbit of the earth if that is
aligned with the sun then we can have an eclipse the uh moon will pass between
Earth and the Sun we'll have a solar eclipse uh or the moon can pass behind Earth and we'll have a lunar eclipse so
U the we're not going to have an eclipse every month uh uh in fact the way it all
works out uh any one particular spot on the earth uh will not repeat a solar
eclipse for almost 350 years so um those of us here in Texas in San Antonio or up
in Dallas where I'll be with the uh Celestron people um this region won't
get another eclipse for another 350 years but if you are not near the center
line and you um um don't have any uh uh
means of getting to uh see the eclipse live I urge you to turn into tune into
the Weather Channel because the telescope that I am setting up at the U
uh Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas Texas at Love Field will be used by The Weather Channel to broadcast their live
uh video of the solar eclipse so uh if you tune in to the Weather Channel enjoy
the eclipse because you're looking through my telescope so uh I hope it I hope it
works out for you and uh in the meantime um look up there at that that that big
bright world it's at our own backyard like I said you can see more detail on it with a pair of binoculars than you
can see on any of the planets in the solar system with the finest of
telescope available so I always say there's much to love on the moon and I
asked you to come join me on my playground and enjoy and and enjoy what
we see so thank you very much and I'll back out of screen sharing
here Robert that was I think the the best of your lectures that I've ever heard it moved me to tears
oh the Romance of the moon and the crators is something that I share every
every night I'm out there and uh I just wanted to thank you for sharing your wisdom imagination and heart with us
tonight well I appreciate the the the commentary very very much especially
coming from from somebody as imminent in the field as you are um I enjoy talking
about the it is my my passion and uh I guess it shows through so I do
appreciate the opportunity and I look forward to doing this again yep that's great okay all right
well thank you so much Robert um uh David our next speaker is uh marchelo
Souza down in Brazil uh where he's preparing for his international meeting
um and uh marello thank you for coming on to Global star party I'll add you on
here and um what will be your presentation tonight hi nice to be here thank you for
the invitation scat thank you Dr de every is a great pleasure to be here I
share my screen on moment and let me see if I do every I did
everything right today okay I think my computer today is
working well yes uh excellent that's me first I I
show some image because the climate change uh changing everything in the
world we had the H last week and the
this is also happening this week the predictions for this week you have Flo
here and have places here in our city
that raining 6 600
mm and it's a lot of water and this
is we had here in some places here near us and the prediction is that we are
going to have rains again tomorrow then you need to do something
about this because it it was very hot few days ago and then began a prediction
of a strong cles in all the state of H janiro and this happen and we saw so
many water that we didn't see years ago
they have many places underwater now unfortunately you see here they are
leaving from the hoof because you have a the water is
very high and this is part of the regions here and tomorrow have predictions of
strong rains again and tomorrow we will begin also H
one of the biggest it's not the biggest heart of Brazil but one of the most important
holidays in Brazil that is the I I don't know how to say how say in
English but is H is The Passion of Christ that the holiday begins
tomorrow and the date is associated with
astronomy for this holiday because we use the Easter as a reference
for all the Christianity holidays in Brazil the most important that is the
carnival and also Corpus that is after and for we
find when will happen the Easter every year we need to know
when will be the first full moon after de no then you'll
find the first full moon after the eox then the Sunday after the full moon
after the eox is the Easter and this will happen this
Sunday H from the period April 2 28 we will will be celebrating the
international dark sky week that organized by the dark sky
International and this year uh the period will be the same of the
eclipse the total solar eclipse in United States and Mexico and for those we can't see the
eclipse then we be celebrate the dark skies and we are now with an opportunity
to see a no maybe it happen the spirits from the
predictions that probably will happen until September from now until September
we possible to see a NOA in the constellation of Corona
Borealis H this no it Corona B and they
are predict now it's almost the magnitude 10 and the the the predictions
that it will go until the magnitude to
then it'll be very easy to see in the sky you be possible to see by naked eye
and this is a graphic that shows why they uh the prediction is that this will
happen last time that happened was in 1946 and you can see here in March
1945 H they have a pre-eruption Jeep and [Music]
then the magnitude goes down and then after this
they have the eruption and then and uh there is a binary system I
have two stars rotate around and you see from March then they saw in March
1946 now they the same thing happened in March April last year
2023 then if the same behavior probably will happen again from
now is when happened in 1946 that's one year after the pr
eruption deep then from now but something UNC because you have only this
data from then we imagine that is near
to happen this novel now many people is looking every day to Corona V here we
can see not so high near the Horizons in the
north Direction and here is the position where
you find the corona Boreal here near Thea it's not so far from the alpha of
the constellation Corona balis and the NOA will be with the same almost the
same magnitude of the alpha that is almost two in the corona bore then you
see you see a new star here near the of
the constellation and and they used here something that can make confusion here
you see this is a fantastic graphic from the astronomical and here you can see
the P from but it's not the Spy is not from
the serpent because the constellation is the serpent
head because you have the separate head separate tail and your fucus that for us
here is part of put the the serpent inside and here you you have a in
serpent red you have here the Alpha and the P of the serpent heads
near the corona Borealis here and then this SP here is not from the
constellation of Corona Borealis is from the constellation of the serpent
heads and happen in the corona Bard here have serpent caput seent heads and the
pie is is here oh something happened in my computer here can you see the hey
something happen oh yeah we can oh something happened here let me see what
I did do wrong here ah it's okay it's same amazing for
you for me it's stand in the Maze H sorry I will close this
presentation here okay I don't know what's
happening well thank you I enjoy this thoroughly and I'm so glad that you were
the only one so far to bring up T Corona borealis I wanted to tell you my friend that I've
been watching it almost every night this year since it started rise in reasonable
hours and since I'm a night owl I've been watching it like around 1 or two in the morning and it'll get to be earlier
and earlier and uh I keep on thinking of Starlight Nights when I think of T
Corona Borealis lesie peltier's book and if I think it's a wonderful book it's t
times better when he describes T Corona Borealis he talked about full 80 years
has had passed since T Corona Borealis last shattered the symmetry of the
northern Crown the beautiful alliteration in the writing that he does and then he says and where was I
that morning I was asleep he said he he said his alarm went off he got up and he sneezed a couple of
times he thought well maybe I'm coming down with a cold I think I'm going to skip it tonight and go back to sleep and
then he says and that was how I missed the night of nights in the life of T
coronai he said I still watch it every night but it is with a weary eye there
is no Wars between us there is no warrant between us anymore and the fact that he considered
tarona Borealis as a personal friend really is so rare and so
wonderful and I'm so glad Mar that you did as well tonight thank you for telling us about this wonderful
wonderful variable story I thank you thank you and let me try here to show
something here is for you have other Corona that is
easy to see that is the Corona a that is located near
sarius and for us is a fantastic to see the
corona during the winter because it's very easy to see in the beginning of the night here in
Brazil I think that the same for you in the summer probably not so high as we
see here in the sky but Corona St is EAS for us Corona B for me is a little
difficult because it's near the Horizon but we have another Corona that
you can see in the sky that's Corona strong and I also have here the opport I
think that for you in the north hemisphere will be better to see the com
12p and during the eclipse it'll be fantastic to take pictures of the com
12p I I I was I participate in a group that studies comets uh from the fal
telescope project and coordinate by his sorry I forgot his
name that work in in in United Kingdom
and we took many picture of the Comet 12p now the telescopes that belongs to
the fox uh telescope project don't allow us to take pictures because it's not so
high in the sky uh but it would be fantastic to have picture of the com of
P the eclipse and the exoplanets that's see we
have almost this is the last information that I have from M that you have confirmed
5,640 exoplanets from
4,155 planetary systems and we have as you see you have
more exoplanets than planetary systems then this means that you have many
planetary system that they found more than one exoplanets
orbiting and this is the old pictures let see the first one that I saw that
having many doubts about is if it tce exop plant because look is like a
brown star but the confir one is this one that's why take by the very large
telescope that you have here from constellation ofer of either in Brazil and is a juper
like planets five time more massive than jup because I before I saw this image I
I was making presentations talking about the process that they use
to to choose the candidates where was possible to see H an exop plant due due to the
perturbation of the star and also about the eclipse of the star when you look
from here that looks that some some fer was near that affects the
the star and also when you have some kind of delight of the star that you
see comes loud for a period then turn then something passing in front of the
star then was possible to see H that was caused by a planet and
now everything will be easier because we have now telescopes that take pictures
of jaop PL the James web took the first picture of an exoplanet and you have me this is
something fantastic that we can see here the exop plans of biting and
star this is the process now now they put something to reduce the light of the
star then you can take pictures of the objects that around this St then can
have this not not a moveie this is a sequence of pictures taken in this
around this star that and this is something fantastic you see objects of B
and star exop planets it's not something theoretical now you can see these
objects it's something fantastic so the technology now is fantastic technology
that you have the new resource that you have that Humanity has and I think that
we have a lot of pictures of Exel PLS in the next years with these new telescopes
that see you're having from James RB from telescopes here earth when they
they begin to they are building the LT that should be a fantastic a giant that
isope here in Chile and you see many object that in the past you needed to
imagine if this object Exist by what happen with these Stars that's something
that is changing quickly
oh now sorry this is a international meeting from 25 to to 27 April is almost
near and we are in honor of this the Batista who Begins the astronomy here in
our region Brazil in the beginnings of 20th century and this is the sky app magazine
we are receiving H articles for the new edition of the magazine then everyone
that can send that would like to send an article will be very welcome
because yeah producing now the next magazine thank you very much Scot thank
you very much Dave David nice to meet all of you here people here and every is a great
pleasure to be here thank you thank you so much marello that's great okay well it's it's uh you know
marchello does such an amazing job uh in South America uh
he's of course known around the world for all of his Outreach work um I think
his list of Ambassador titles goes on for quite a ways in education and
Science Education and astronomy education space exploration and and the
such but he's also just to be with him he's so um God he's just like one of
those guys that just makes you uh uh feel so positive about life and so
marello thank you so much for coming on to our program thank you thank you for
kind is a great pleasure to be here thank you very much thank you that's great okay all right uh David our next
uh speaker is Adrien Bradley now you introduced Adrian to me originally uh
because you were so um taken by his uh his milk way shots and uh um he has uh
turned out some amazing work Adrian are you uh are you now
available I can be available I'm uh actually doing one of my
many uh different things that I do photography and that's uh capturing the
an arbor Film Festival oh coming to you from the catacombs of uh the film
festival to give a brief presentation on how I plan to handle
solar total solar eclipse but before I do that I need to first of all this is my
past so I not only do astronomy I do regular photography and we're c i was
capturing a Q&A session I'm stepping away to um give a quick presentation
first on the the theme of Worlds and I'm looking at the background John schwarz's
beautiful Milky Way Photography I want to
share my screen really quickly and
um and explain what it's all about
now so a lot of a lot of what I like to
do is um photography night photography of places
that I enjoy this is where my priest who had passed away a week before I took
this photo this was a cabin he would let me uh take photos in this cabin and it
turns out the skies are pretty dark the motion sensor usually comes on but you
can explain to me why it went off and it stayed off for a duration of me taking a
couple of more photos Orion happened to be situated above the chapel above his
house depending on perspective this was a beautiful place and when we talk about worlds there's a
definition of astronomy that ignores the planet Earth anything off of Earth you
know Heavenly Bodies deep space objects things that you can find in
Orion you know you're fascinated with space I began doing this sort of night
photograph graphy because I wanted to highlight the fact that we live in a
beautiful world and that we have a unique position of seeing the universe
from our world whether it's the Corona commercial find your beach and you
you'll see some of these pictures I've shown on global star party before but notice
there's sort of a repetition and some of that repetition can you know give us Comfort whether
we're looking at the moon here's a partially Eclipse Sun but where I plan to go is to see the fully Eclipse sun
when I saw it in 2017 I didn't take a good picture of it so I hope to rectify
that those of you taking pictures of the eclipse use your settings for a full or
almost full moon and you should get a pretty good shot even if you handhold it you should be able to take
pictures um you know try a couple different settings my plan is
to go with a couple of instruments but if the instruments don't work I'm just
going to watch and enjoy it I'm going to go I'm going to try and find a place um
where it's not going to be cloudy I'm going to check the weather forecast starting a week out and then couple days
I'll pick a spot whether it's Ohio Canada or further south and then I'll go
and um you know and the one of the things that I like to
highlight with my images and that I want to highlight when I try and get a picture of the total solar eclipse is
the world around it um I think this image speaks for
itself this sums up where I'll be September SL October Yoki Tech star
party where the skies are dark this is similar it's close to maybe 50 miles
away from capulin where um Kelly gave that great presentation and the Milky Way is just as brilliant sitting over
that volcano as it is sitting over the Mesa and even the other sides of the Milky Way we're speaking about worlds
imagine how many worlds are in this little Glick of um of space happens to
be the Andromeda galaxy think of about how many worlds might exist in this even
tinier blip that you may see in the center of the screen yeah that's Messa
33 and of course all of the stars along the plane of the Galaxy in the copia
perus region when you go somewhere dark you see if you happen to be somewhere
dark during the total solar eclipse you might be able to see a lot more detail you might be able to see part of the
Milky Way galaxy that's near the Sun son that would be an amazing picture I don't
know if I'll get it this year but I think I'll have to try and survive 30 more years before I can get such a photo
like that but um so the the whole idea behind my photos and behind you know
capturing the spirit of the night sky no matter where I am is I call it a
Synergy of Earth along with the sky we are a part of the universe we ourselves
are the universe trying to figure itself out so it's quite natural to see a
lighthouse next to the center of our galaxy because there is an actual
connection between the two um that connection can mean different things for
different people seeing the Sun and the Moon come together and hopefully I'll be able to show those pictures if I get
good ones but if not I'll just keep taking photos I'll remind those of you
um who are Milky Way shooters that this scene happens from now if you want to
get up at 4: or 5 in the morning feel free to do so but you can also wait till May and
June and get up a little later June or July is when I took these photos and um
you can certainly get good Rising Milky Way photos in July if you have have much
earlier bedtime so um you know keep looking up if you want
practice at getting photos of the total solar eclipse look no farther than any
setting that you might use for the Setting Sun itself use the sun to test
your eclipse glasses if you can look directly into the sun with the eclipse glasses you can look at it during an
eclipse and as long as as it's a partial phase keep those glasses on as long as
it's a total phase you can take the glasses off ironically it's much like
once the sun dips below the Horizon you can then look in its direction safely
all of these photos were taken behind narrow apertures on a camera with the
sun going down even if you look at the sun with um without eclipse glasses it can still
be dangerous even in this phase when it's setting so with that I'm going to turn
this quick presentation back over to you Scott enjoy nature wherever you are try
and catch a glimpse you've heard all our presenters tell you try and catch a glimpse of the total solar eclipse when
you can and um keep looking up I'm going to go back up and get a few more photos
of the uh question an answer session and as always Scott thank you for having me
on global Star Party David thank you for sharing my images with Scott as you know
David I take a page from your book I like to see the sky the way that our I
see it and simply capture it it's not about myself or my processing skills
it's about what we see up there and if I can bring the spirit of the universe down in my photos that better than
having a great image that looks good on Instagram or looks good on Facebook or
other social media I want people to be interested in seeing the sky for themselves through my photography that's
my ultimate goal well thank you Adrien I I there's something magical happening at
tonight's star party I think all of the presentations are at a different higher level than they've been lately and
they're really emotional and you're sharing your your passion with all of us
tonight and I'm really just having so much fun with this Adrien I hope that
when you go to the okex you may also visit David in Arizona uh this coming
fall if I'm here I'd love to see you in person again I will do my best to get
there but I'll tell you what D if you are going to be at Alcon in uh in Kansas
City I have already cleared it with the wife I will be there great so I look
forward to seeing you all it'll be my first time to meet you in person Adrian excellent looking
forward to it all right I gotta go John okay gotta take us home gotta go to work
okay take us home take care all right take care all right um our David our last H
presenter is John Schwarz uh it's been a while since John has been on uh but John
is also a uh artist uh space artist and uh he makes amazing work uh something
that a lot of you may not know but if you follow John uh he comes from a
family of artists you know and and uh I believe his father uh uh operated a
wonderful Art Gallery in uh in LA area and um John is uh John not only makes
art but uh he also has made um uh you know uh constructed things for
the uh uh for feature movies and that kind of thing so he has a lot of imagination a ton of
enthusiasm and uh it's great to have you back on global Star Party John thank you Scott it's good to be
back uh thank you everybody for tuning in tonight on the global Star Party the
147th so really good to be back you know we've been having a lot of rain lately
out here so I haven't had much time to see the sky not as much as I'd like to
but you know the sky did open up recently and it's been giving me glorious views that's awesome with my
with my little buddy my little viewing partner Bosco he's always there and helps me
stay up at night so I'm gonna get this thing going so how's everybody been pretty
good it's been good uh the presentations have been amazing and um uh you know
it's uh it's not over yet um uh after your presentation we have a special NASA
video presentation as well so boy it's really hard to believe we're
on number 147 right I know I
know it's gone by so quickly I've got these in order I haven't uh done too
many but the ones I have done I'm very proud of because I've really taken my
time and um you know the other night I went out to see the
comet it's just the clouds are always in the way for some reason I don't know
why but when I looked up and I noticed I could not believe what I saw
in my 16 by 70 binoculars I saw the plees the Seven
Sisters with the moon paired and it was spiritual for me I've
never seen that before absolutely amazing I have uh my drawing of that
that's taken me a long time I just barely got it done this is the clouds
party um they finally opened up to present a glorious
sky and beautiful rainbows
oh w a double rainbow as a matter of fact I've been so blessed to see these I
don't always get to but for some reason whenever I go outside I see them and uh
just so beautiful to see nature and the earth and the atmosphere and the sunlight everything
come together to make these beautiful spectral rainbows just gives you hope and you
know that we're blessed to have this life so I took my scope out one of 25
I've just recently got three more I hate to say that I haven't seen uh two more
new solar Scopes uh lunch a 50 and a 60
because soon I'll be 70 but no um and I'm working on a 20in f 3.3 new moon
with the osta housei optic so this is a 10-in F6 light holder that I uh put
together the Cradle I made out of Woodwork and it's just a Sono tube on one of those old equatorial mounts I
don't think it was at parks but perhaps a
Criterion so we set up the other night to look at the comet and again I got skunked so I went to the moon and this
is actually eyepiece projection using the old 14 me
ultrawide from Japan amazing eyepiece and I projected it onto one of my
receipts that's all I had but as you can see it was a beautiful moon that night
and the stars in the background even with a moon it's almost full then I thought I'd take a cell
phone snapshot so I held my new cell phone Samsung s24 up and
look at the detail that I was able to obtain with just a
cell phone it's pretty amazing pretty
good you know and then uh your scope is absolutely amazing here's a picture of
my buddy my observing partner when the clouds broke open we were out and he was there with me I created this picture
because he's my best little buddy always
there this was U take from McCoy cross in SEI Valley looking East as the moon
came up and we were all there outside and uh I decided to try to put together a
sketch and this is what I saw it's a beautiful
moonrise just really makes you appreciate life when you see
these this is a nice concept that I put together it's uh the moon a drift in the
sea of clouds it's almost like waves crashing on the beach and you can see
the moon just beautifully crisp floating in the
clouds it's a very very special moment to see that so I captured
it of course this is me with um your absolutely
amazing 6 inch triplet carbon fiber APO I have to tell you this is almost it's
probably the sharpest scope I got I'd have to say one of them you know defraction limited I have
many of them as I collect but this is a one of my favorite scopes for lunar imp
planetary and this is what I created from yours wow that was a cell phone snapshot
and then I put it into procreate in the side by side mode so I could literally
see see both on the screen so my eyes don't have to go as far to get the detail and I also use the grid to get
proper orientation this took an amazing amount of time to get
done but it it uh really has a nice feel to it very
subtle soft the regolith with the beautiful Terminator the
craters another magical KN that Apo is sharp Scott I have to
thank you again it's really one of my best Scopes thank you this was Saturn um
at opposition last year through my 28 this is a freehand sketch if you can
believe that and I can tell you it took a lot of work to get it that correct procreate
helps because if you draw circles and hold it it gives you a perfect Arc so
you don't have that jiggle from your hand I mean it's so hard to get a perfect line with your hand but the
tools that I have in procreate are absolutely amazing it's really taken my work to a whole new
level so that's opposition Saturn last year
beautiful this was my winning sketch I've never gotten to show it uh other
than here but that's my 51 and it is another world there's probably many
other worlds like our galaxy has with all the planets you know there's probably
life a very nice Galaxy to look at this is one of my latest this is one
of the hardest ones I've really done due to the low surface brightness of this galaxy it's called the fireworks Galaxy
NGC 69 46 I believe and um this one almost killed me
trying to get it right because it's so subtle and you need an ultra transparent
KN to really take advantage of it and if you do a real super wide field there's
an open cluster that resides quite close so it's one of those special objects
where you can see two for one if you have a Widefield High piece much like
your 30 that uh big eyepiece it's a beautiful eyepiece you could probably get them
paired this is just a side by side comparison of Ip sketch of the eagle I
had the um pencil drawing but I had to cut it down a little bit so that's the
Black and White Version and then I after inversion and then I in procreate I
colorize it and give it the view as the filter would show you and that would be
the lumicron 03 gen 3 filter as well as the DGM npb filter which are two amazing
filters for the Eagle Nebula and this is an actual view that I could see in my um
telescope in my 28 inch f4.3
slipstream this is my most proud creation to date this was through the
16x 70 Fuji non the pl
which is also known as the Seven Sisters You know the most pronounced Stars you see are the seven but in the fujinon it
was just after the storm we had those high winds and it was so transparent the
wind shut off like I said I went to see the comet but there were clouds on the horizon so I couldn't see it I did see
Andromeda but when I looked up and I I panned up from Jupiter to Uranus to the
in the moon and this was a moment I mean to see this in for real
it's just magical to see the pairing like that this sketch I'm so proud of
the earth shine as you know what the Earth Shrine is is our beautiful planet
is illuminated by the sun and the oceans as our planet is so much water it
reflects the beautiful blue oceans to the dark side of the moon and that's
what illuminates it and it just gives it a surreal feeling to see this and the
Terminator was just wispy uh tendrils of you know little
crater like rims that were just they almost looked like little hooks it was just beautiful I tried to capture it the
best I could and get the color of the plees you know the plees are
spectacular it's such a wonderful cluster to look at and if you zoom in with a high power but a wide field a big
scope you can see a lot of stars there are a lot so I estimate that I was at
probably with two eyes maybe at 7.1 magnitude we had super transparent Sky
it's really one of the best vies I've ever had now I'm going to shift to a
planetary nebulas you know when the stars blow up they die when they're small not like Beetle Juice of course
but smaller ones like our sun they'll create what's called a planetary nebula
so this is after inversion again I keep them uh I can't show you all of them because they'll take too long now we go
to color so this is through my 28 inch this is the clown nebula and I'm not joking
here um this is the clown or the Eskimo it's in Gemini real close to Castor and
Pollock wonderful object to look at um it's kind of a different shape for a
planetary nebula you know depending how they blow up if they blow out of the poles or whatever they do it forms a
different shell around it so that inner ring is basically we would be inside of
that incinerated but we have a long time to go so don't
worry this was the ring another version uh again this is a magical object to
look at a famous one I could see the two stars and I could actually see hints of
color this was through my 28 this is my latest
version this scot I'll tell you this is a nice this is a so much I mean it looks
so um perfect to the actual visual view you know thank you um this is through
the 28 with your 9 mimer 20° I've never seen it like this but through that
eyepiece and yeah I call it the wings uh you know it's an angel the star died and
it went to heaven and it has wings just like the movie cast away when he had the
box with the wings on it right you know it just reminded me of that and it's so
symbolic of the death of a star and you know New Life comes out of that star too
the elements it forms other things you know that's what it takes so that
eyepiece was amazing I've never seen the wings like that it just blew my
mind anyway thank you again for that high piece I love your equipment it's
some of my best it really is Scott that's very kind thank you very much I'm just telling you it's my surgical grade
instrumentation now this is um the 28 my latest version of the nebula so this is
the original pencil after I brought it into procreate and I softened it up a
little took away the little hatch marks to give it a smooth quality now we go to procreate and we
invert to black and white of course I have to play with it a little bit sure
and now we we're ready to go from monochromatic to color so now B bam
color just like the eyepiece view it's like the ipce view ex I tried to emanate
the the blue color that you get from those brilliant stars in the trapezium
they're absolutely massive stars that have burned a hole right in the center of that you know molecular cloud of gas
and they are big powerful Blue Giant stars and as you can see it illuminates
all that dust and gas and and that one cloud in front of of it it it's like you
know contrast you because it's just dark obscuring dust and you can't see through
it so it creates that like Wing effect like a like the bird of paradise flying
in I really like this one I'm hoping uh to post this in the contest cloudy
nights I probably shouldn't say that right now but I'm going to do it I've already put two in and I lost so I hope
this is winner CU third 's the charm this is another version that I've
created and this one's very good view um I've also used Marco's 32inch F 3.3
slipstream telescope to get a little bit more light and um a different feel you know Al
together the the faster Scopes give you etendue which you know your eye has 26
to 25 magnitude noise in it inherently so with the faster scope you get a giant
exit pupil and you can see a lot more detailed things pop out that you don't
normally see much like um the plasma coming out of M82 I call it Coral when
we were in New Mexico we could actually see hints of coral it stood out you know
from the background as a little bit lighter gray color because of the etendue you know it didn't cancel out so
it's an amazing thing and that's what prompted me to get a new the new moon
telescope the F 3.3 so hopefully I can experience that we'll go to flowers because we
always need to look at nature as you said and the beauty of Nature and just
realize when you walk around you just open your eyes and you can see so much
beautiful things that you normally don't look at but if you tune into it and key
in it really helps you connect yourself to the universe and and it's soothing
and very very calming and you know you can smell the flowers and you see birds
and it's just something I do when I walk my dog every night I just I'm grateful
you know I look up and I see the most beautiful skies and Vistas and the air
is so pure and blue it's just really really helps you get through
it you know flowers are amazing they they reach for the sun because it gives
them life and they give us oxygen and you know it's so important that we
preserve our nature and take care of this planet because it's taking care of
us and when you look at the beauty of it it just fulfills you deep you know nothing is
ever wrong when you realize the gift you just it just washes away all your pain
and all your sorrow there's nothing to feel bad about you know just having this
wonderful gift it's it's amazing and I love
it you know boss likes it too my little buddy he's there with me he always loves
the flowers he tries to water them too but I tell him boss that's not the kind of water they
like so we got ebikes and I ride him to this new park and we did six laps he's
been walking a lot you know we go strutting like John Travolta and I'll tell you that poor boy was he got really
really overheated because he needed his haircut so I got him a haircut and then
it was cold because you know it's been cold out here in Southern California
so I took him home laid on the carpet and that was it he went to bed and we
were done so there's my presentation thank you very much John
thank you thank you that's great it's always nice to have that
observing partner you know oh yeah yeah yeah I'd like to add my thanks to your
presentation John I really did enjoy it before we go to the NASA film and I certainly hope
this one doesn't also claim that Galileo was the first person to use the Hubble Space Telescope because nobody used any
Grand Blaze telescopes I want to show you a picture of my own and since I cannot use I I
have more trouble than any of you with sharing screen so I could just take a
picture Wendy and I were on a cruise and I got a beautiful beautiful picture of
Mount vvus and we were docked in Naples and then we were docked in Israel and we
got a I got a beautiful beautiful picture of the Western Wall and uh then we got a beautiful
beautiful picture of our ship of the uh stern of our ship as we were sailing
anyway then then my camera this this camera yeah this CA fell and it fell all
over the ship and broke oh and uh but it didn't break I was able to kind of take
things out and what I got was a very rare U multiple exposure on one frame
that I'd like to share with you and you see Mount vvus at the top oh
yeah in the middle and the uh stern of our ship in the middle also Western Wall
at the bottom all in one exposure and uh oh un
usual I just thought I'd show that to you very
cool and this is what happened D and you drop things and you drop
things that's great well David thank you uh thank you for um co-hosting
uh yet another Global star party and uh um you know I look forward to seeing you
uh you know face to face uh at the Alcon event in NE and uh possibly even
starmist as well so I'm looking forward to that and of course our Eclipse so uh
you know David is like a big brother to me and U uh really enjoy his company and
our conversations that we have you know so um and you know he is the kind of guy
that if you go to some event he will spend time with you and talk of you know
of things that uh uh especially if it has to do with astronomy uh so he's he
is a very giving in that way so it's wonderful um I want to thank all of our
audience for tuning in uh we had a global audience as we always do for
Global star party and um um I want to thank all of the uh all all the
presenters let me bring them all on let's see if I can do that let's see I'm
gonna remove my Spotlight here and remove David's Spotlight there and there
we are um uh those of us that are left but uh I I can see that Dave ier and
Kelly are watching in the background John Schwarz is there and uh of course
Michael Carroll David Levy and myself so
uh you know we want to thank uh the audience and um uh we are going to take some time
off we've got an eclipse coming we've got NE coming uh so we plan to broadcast
live from the eclipse in Texas and we plan to broadcast live um also from NE
so that'll be a lot of fun H if you guys are heading towards the Northeast astronomy Forum make sure you come back
uh by the booth and say Hello uh it' be great to see you uh in person as well um
and uh you have to go to an Alcon if you've never been to the astronomical League conference uh this is going to be
a great one it's going to be in Kansas City and uh we will be going to uh
um uh I am having a brain fade right now what is the museum name David uh uh
Kansas City it is called the Linda Hall Library Linda Hall Library yeah so it is
probably the finest really you know the world yes that's right so so many uh
precious um uh books and stuff from astronomers from Antiquity uh to now so
um including David Levy's works and Diaries and and uh his telescope is
there as well so uh you got to go and um uh we look forward to seeing you there
uh um so uh stay tuned there is still more of the global star party this our
theme was worlds and I think I found uh the perfect NASA video for uh our
presentation so let me bring this on here and
um here we are and here we
go
when considering the possibility of life beyond Earth we look for three main ingredients the first one is key
elements such as carbon hydrogen oxygen and sulfur the second is a source of
energy and the third and perhaps most important is the existence of liquid water water is a necessary solvent in
all chemical reactions that have to do with life energy is required to drive these chemical reaction reactions and
organic matter is the material from which all life that we know of is made Life as we know it requires liquid water
scientists believe that life on earth started in our oceans now through our exploration of the solar system we've
realized that the moons around the giant planets have the right conditions that there could be liquid water underneath
their surfaces so that really sort of expands our whole concept of where you could have a habitat where we might find
life water is fairly common in the universe we've seen traces of water in large
molecular clouds between Stars we've seen traces of water in protoplanetary diss we've also seen traces of water as
water vapor in the atmospheres of giant planets around other stars and we know that water is in the atmospheres and
Interiors of our solar systems giant planets so we know that water is ubiquitous throughout the universe as
far as liquid water that's a little less common Earth is the only planet in the solar system where we see liquid liid
water at our surface moons such as incus and Europa may have liquid water beneath layers of ice we're really expanding our
understanding of what makes a place habitable instead of just looking for an earthlike terrestrial planet that's a
very specific distance from its star we're learning that there can be hidden habitats that are underneath icy layers
and they can be a lot further out from the Sun so we believe icy moons in the solar system actually Harbor kilometers
thick oceans underneath their icy surfaces these icy moons and their
subsurface oceans may be some of the best places to search for life elsewhere in our solar
system Enceladus is one of Saturn's many moons and it's a very small Moon that
people tend to kind of ignore CU it's so small about 500 km in diameter but decades ago in the 1980s from
groundbased observing we found out that the location of Enceladus relative to Saturn happened to coincide nicely with
Saturn's e-ring and so we were thinking that Enceladus had something to do with the e-ring particulates the icy material
but we weren't sure what we later find from Cassini was that we directly determined that there are indeed plumes
jetting out of the South polar region from cracks in the South Pole of Enceladus in the crust and it's
dominantly water-rich material just jetting out into space and so the way we saw it Cassini happened to be located
where Enceladus with backlit from the Sun and so you saw this curtain of beautiful diffus material jetting out of
the South polar region quite breathtaking actually even more we're able to use the different complements of
instruments on board Cassini to go after the chemical composition of the plumes and that's where things got really
interesting so number one that's because of liquid water there's definitely a liquid water reservoir it's subsurface
below the icy Crest but that is there number two the chemical composition of the plumes told us that there's a lot of
Organics things that make up amino acid and things on life that are very interesting and number three what we are
really looking for as a source of energy on Enceladus photons from the Sun aren't going to work because you can't
penetrate the tens of kilometers of icy crust to get down to where the liquid water reservoir is but what Enceladus
does have is hydrothermal vents it's very hot into liquid water that has a
lot of analogies with the ocean floor where we have a form of releasing chemical energy via something called
serpentinization and so we think that Enceladus might have that potential to have an energy source being chemical not
sunlight and so you put all that together and Enceladus has all the ingredients or most of what we need for
life that makes it a very astrobiological interesting object to
study you're is one of the largest moons of Jupiter and we believe that Europa
has a subsurface ocean tens to hundreds of kilometers thick and so this ocean
may be one of the best places to search for life in the solar system there's been three space missions that had
provided evidence for Europa harboring liquid water the first one is Voyager in
the late '70s the second one is the Galileo mission in the late '90s and
most recently how which detected like uh emission from hydrogen and oxygen which
is closely related to the existence of water beneath its surface these plumes
may be directly ejected through cracks in the surface of the Moon and therefore what we're seeing in water vapor plumes
is the actual ocean water from the subsurface of the Moon as these plume
particles are ejected to space solar radiation is going to excite these water particles creating vibrational modes now
this vibration modes are signatures that can be detected at infrared wavelength
by the K Observatory so we observe Europa on 17 days what we found is that
the majority of observations have no presence of water however on one of
those dates we detected water we detected H2O in the past hav provided indirect
measurements of Water by detecting hydrogen and oxygen but now we have directly detected Water For the First
Time both the web telescope and the Europa Clipper Mission will give us a much more detailed picture of the
surface of Europa its cracks and crevices detailed pictures of the water vapor as well as other molecules that
may also be emanating from the subsurface of Europa so both of these missions will give us a great picture of
whether Europa is truly
habitable
Titan is a moon of Saturn it's the second largest moon in the solar system
and it is about two times larger than Earth's moon and actually bigger than the planet Mercury and Titan is also
interesting it's the only moon in our solar system with an atmosphere it's surrounded by sort of an envelope of
gaseous nitrogen just like our own Earth is Titan was first discovered by telescope observation back in the mid
1600s the first spacecraft observations were made of Titan during flybys through the outer solar system that was in the
late 7s and in the 80s but we really were able to explore Titan in depth with the Cassini hyan Mission the hyan probe
was dropped into the atmosphere of Titan and it made measurements of chemistry and it took images as it fell to the
surface and that was back in 2005 and since then the Cassini orbiter made over
100 close flybys of Titan Cassini in its design with the different instruments we purposely picking instruments that could
go into longer wavelengths into the infrared so we could really understand the moon we were able to basically peel
back the layers of Titan to really see what was below and it was remarkable
very earthlike the landscape is similar to Earth's in many many ways but with a
little bit of a Twist so on Titan you can find Dunes you find Lakes there are
river channels the atmosphere is very dense and you can get clouds and and Smog and you even get rain we saw winds
we saw seasons and one really important thing we saw was liquids pooling in the
polar regions on the surface a lot of it but because Titan is so cold those features are all made of uh very exotic
materials compared to what we would find on Earth so the lakes and the rain are made of liquid methane the crust that
forms the surface of Titan is actually water ice but it's so cold that it's as hard as rock and in the atmosphere we
get this organic chemistry that forms large organic molecules and particulates they fall down to the surface and then
behave like dust or like sand does so it makes us want to go back to really understand the complex organic
environment of that surface and what it means for either past life or maybe future
life dragonfly is a mission that was just selected by NASA to fly to Titan
and arrive in the mid 2030s dragonfly is going to make a whole bunch of measurements to help us understand the
environment on Titan and its potential for habitability we'll be taking measurements of the atmosphere that
includes things like pressure temperature winds we'll probe the surface to try to understand what
materials the surface made out of we also be drilling into the surface to look for the types of organic molecules
that are present and to try to see if we can find any examples of compounds that mimic the types of building blocks we
know we need for life on Earth we don't really know how life started on Earth we don't exactly know what the chemical
environment of Earth was like before life started so with Tian we have this really unique opportunity there are
times in Titan's past where there could be liquid water on the surface impact craters can generate impact melt and
there's a potential for a possible Crow vulcanism to erupt some liquid water onto the surface and so we know that
there's a rich organic chemistry going on in the atmosphere we know that's depositing to the surface if there were
times where those Organics and the liquid water environments were mixing then there may be some really interesting ing chemistry taking place
when you have these processes operating for hundreds of millions of years how far can they get you down that path of
chemical complexity and can we see reactions and molecules that start to look something like what we think of as
essential elements for our biochemistry for life on Earth in the future looking
forward as opposed to looking back and thinking about Titan as a chemical laboratory for the Prebiotic Earth I
like to look forward thinking about what's going to happen when the sun evolves and warms up in the habitable
zone actually moves out to where Titan is and it will you have all the Organics you're going to have a source of energy
all we have to do is melt the frozen water and we're going to have a pool of Organics just embedded in liquid Titan
might actually have a chance at that point to haror
life so when we think about ocean worlds it's good to compare them to what we know about Earth in total proportion
Earth is about .1% water an ocean world is a body that has in proportion about
10 times more water than Earth does and when we think of the trapis planets those planets have about 50 times more
water in proportion to what Earth does ocean worlds do appear to be common in our galaxy as far back as the early
2000s we had astronomers some of them still here at Nasa that suggested that we would have ocean worlds orbiting low
mass stars recently we've looked at about 52 exoplanets and these are low
mass exoplanets and what we found is of these 52 planets one out of every four
may be an ocean planet and when it comes to these ocean planets over half of them
may be ice covered ocean worlds and so encel and Europa may serve as small scale analoges of these planets so there
are a number of different ways to search for life on planets around other stars
but the key uh method is the study of the atmospheres we can search for signs of Life bio signatures we call them
things like oxygen water vapor carbon dioxide even more on usual bio signatures things like
chlorofluorocarbons or other things that are only produced by intelligent life by looking for these key constituents of
planetary atmospheres that signal life we can discover life forms on other planets that we could never actually
visit in our life time so this is very analogous to how we study the atmospheres of moons and planets in our
own solar system and really makes the connection between studying the plumes of Europa and the atmospheres of planets
around other stars what I would like to see is the definition of a habitable zone expanded we don't want to keep
thinking too narrowed about liquid on the surface but broaden the scope and really try to embrace other worlds that
might seem too far from the host star and frozen out when they really aren't Frozen at all at Great depths they
Harbor a warm hydrothermal driven liquid water [Music]
environment
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did you know that you can participate in solar eclipse science with NASA NASA's
citizen science projects are collaborations between scientists and members of the public no matter your
citizenship the general public is best suited for these kinds of projects because they will be on the ground over
the whole path and that really can be kind of a force multiplier for how many
observations you can take several volunteer science projects are gearing up for the 2024 total solar eclipse that
you can join there are many Mysteries that come about during a total solar eclipse ranging from the part of the Sun
that we can very rarely see the Corona and the birth of the solar wind really
close to the surface of the Sun as well as the effects on Earth using telescopes
and cameras that are safe for viewing the sun volunteer scientists across North America will capture images of the
total solar eclipse scientists will study these images in detail tracking how plumes of solar material move
through the sun's atmosphere but be careful without proper tools and techniques you can damage your eyes and
your camera amateur or ham radio operators will send radio messages to
one another during the eclipse to see how changes in the upper atmosphere distort radio signals the opportunity to
conduct research and participate in citizen science during the upcoming total solar eclipse is really special
the sun is always changing so we don't know what it's going to be doing right at that time as the moon blocks one
portion of the sun it can make other portions easier to see working with local scientists at an observatory in
Southern California participants will observe magnetic hotpots on the Sun as the moon passes over them revealing
details they normally can't detect we have a public who's interested in different aspects of heliophysics and
can actually contribute to our science and so we really invite people to participate and we need all hands on
deck for that follow D NASA science on X and Facebook to see how you can get
involved in NASA citizen
science [Music]
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