Transcript:
sustained you know way over mile hour winds yeah and and three feet of water
three feet of water exactly yeah
okay well big thanks to NASA for this uh really cool visualization of Earth with
all the uh you know the orbiting satellites and stuff it's it is amazing how studed the
Earth is today you know I think it's the cause sometimes
for instant alarm when we see something change but um uh but it is it is uh
really amazing what we've learned about you know weather and ocean uh
temperatures and currents and uh you know surface
temperatures pollution dust for a long time I think humans
we're blissfully unaware of things you know the all-important
dust yes the bane of astronomer's existence yeah that's right
okay it's time to get started folks here we
go a balloon Mission from NASA observed rare electric blue clouds these are
polar mesop feric clouds or PNC's they are only visible during
Twilight and form above Earth's polar regions at the upper reaches of the atmosphere as Earth's uppermost clouds
at around 50 Mi high pmcs are composed of ice crystals that glow up bright blue
or white when reflecting sunlight they are extremely sensitive to environmental
factors like water vapor and temperature atmospheric Motions like air flow over mountains or thunderstorms can disturb
the atmosphere and cause waves that can propagate to very high altitudes these waves are known as
gravity waves and although they are invisible they can be seen as they move through
pmc's gravity waves lead to turbulence chaotic movement in the atmosphere that
can influence weather and climate and their predictions but the exact causes and effects of turbulence are not well
understood to better understand this complex process scientists sent a giant balloon to observe gravity waves in
pmc's 1200 minut see you in Canada the cruelest balloon traveled to
50 miles high and floated from Sweden to Canada over 5 days in July
2018 a laser radar on the balloon measured the PMC altitudes and the
atmospheric temperature that affects their formation and brightness and from 6 million camera images captured from
the balloon scientists could see both large and small ripples caused by gravity waves a better understanding of
turbulence can help improve weather forecast models and our understanding of processes around Earth which affect our
satellites and Assets in
[Music]
space well hello everyone this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and you are watching
the 157th Global star party with the theme of Cloudy
Nights uh this theme was uh uh promoted by David Levy uh and I think
it's a great one uh we were lucky enough to get Mike beer uh who heads up the
cloudy nights Community uh and he'll be on uh a little bit later but uh David
thank you for suggesting this and um you know actually the next uh the next theme
Global star party as well I hope that we're hoping to actually also have kind of an in between Global star party where
we are focused on uh Comet A3 and um you know if it's as amazing as what
everybody predicts uh maybe we'll get some live views from around the world but I'll turn it over to you David thank
you well thank you we're all excited about K sushan Sean Atlas coming
around and uh somebody said it's going to be minus 7 you didn't hear that from
me it'll be what it is that's the one thing I've learned from a lifetime of
observing comets is that comets are like cats they both have tails and they both
do precisely what they want and uh I wanted tell you the story
it does relate in a way to the Cloudy Nights theme although after that story there's something that directly up emoji
that directly relates to the uh to the CL ice theme but Wendy and I were in London
England and we were just walking by the shops in downtown London
and I chanced upon a telescope store there and of course I started it's kind
of like I'm gravit gravitationally attracted to it and I started looking in
the windows and there was a quest St in the window and Wendy came and she was with
me and she said doid I need for you to be very honest with me right now because she looked at
the price of the Questar and she said can you tell me honestly that this telescope Questar is
10 times better than the Mei TX that we have and and that's cost about
$700 and I looked at her and I said sweetheart the quest art is better but
there ain't no way it's 10 times better had a chance and uh she she said thank you for
your honesty and about uh six months later
she announced that we were going to have dinner with my our friends from Star Arizona Dean and Donna
con and when we got to the table there was this telescope sitting in a box with
a lovely bow on top of it and she said this is your telescope
if you promised to call it cupid in honor of our love for each
other and I was just overwhelmed and that was like maybe that was around 2000 and
so and uh so I've had it all these years I still use it it's a lovely lovely
telescope and now for our theme of Cloudy Nights uh being born in Montreal and
raised there I'm very familiar with cloudy nights and even here in Southern
Arizona we get cloudy nights but the most famous cloudy
night that that I remember was on March the 23r
of 1993 when the sky began cloudy but then
it started to clear after after desk and we took a couple of images that turned
out you know that turned out interesting in fact the first of the images that I
took on this night that that had partial clouds Jupiter was very close to the
guar and I said I don't know how even got on this because the Reflection from Jupiter is swamping everything in the
eyepiece but I managed to catch the star and they did a good guide on it and uh two days later these clouds
had thickened to the point that there was no snow up at Poore and
I I was I was uh reading email Jean Shoemaker was reading Time Magazine
which he really enjoyed and Carolyn was scaning and suddenly she said I don't know what
I've got but it looks like a squashed Comet and Jean of course wanted to look
at this thing and Carolyn got up and walked towards me and I looked at her and caroly and I love to tease each
other but I looked at her and I said you are joking aren't you she looked back at
me very seriously and she said not this time and that was the opening of the
discovery of comment sh maker leing n taken on a mostly cloudy cloudy night
and now comes the quotation for this cloudy night because even up in northern Arizona
where Clyde Tomball was searching for planet for personal L as Planet X his
search was interrupted Time and Again by CL wer but he finally discovered it on the
18th of of February 19 1930 on images he had taken on the 23rd and the
30th of January of 1930 and uh immediately after he found
the images he knew he had it and he he was he walked across the hall to his
colleague lampland and he told him that he had found the Planet
X and uh as llin was looking
Clyde decided that he better tell the director and VM slier Resto slier was
sitting in his office and so Clyde sort of went to a mirror and did his tie up a little
bit and uh L tried to look a little more human and uh he sort of walked with a
bit of a struck to the director's office and he walked in and he said Dr
slier I have found your planet de and slier actually stood got out of
his chair as if he had been sitting on a spring and he ran to the to the um
stereo comparator and Clyde following him and llin said this looks pretty damn
good anyway Clyde stayed at LEL until the 1940s when on one very sad day slier
fired he said that you know the reason is that we just ran funds but there was a lot of
funds to hire other people they just wanted to get rid of Clyde and he never got over it and we talked and talked and
talked so long about about that and the feelings that he have at L both good and
bad but that leads me to the quote which comes from my biography of Clyde tumble
as as we read how Clyde left the observatory he moved first to albuquer
and into Los Cruses but the final paragraph of that chap chapter is about
the telescope and the feelings of the telescope which I you
know the telescope kly Tombo was finally about to leave stayed at LEL it's long
career not nearly over years later director Arthur hoai
claimed that with its many projects the 13in had become one of the
world's most productive telescopes if it had Consciousness it might have wondered
about what would happen without the man it had shared a life
with a man who had never quite given up search in one more pair of plates for
Hidden Treasure a man who called himself a traveler going over the next Hill with
an eternal hope thank you very much I'm back to you SC thank you very much David you know uh
I can't imagine doing one of these Global star parties without you um you
uh you really set the uh entire pace and tone for these events and we've done now
gosh we've done almost 160 of these okay uh and that um each one is you know a
few hours long so we've got tons of presentations everything from citizen
science to people experiencing astronomy for the first time art poetry uh
everything in between and uh so it's it's always an honor to do it with you David thank you man thank you well thank
you thank you so much Scott one of the things that I remember when I wrote that
paragraph yeah I brought it to Clyde and P's house and showed it to me and so help me if Clyde didn't have a
tear in his eye as he's reading that because like me he believed the telescopes did have
Consciousness and uh they talked to him they showed him things and uh especially
in these disappointing years after the loss of my wife Wendy to go out into the observatory and
to be with those telescopes it's almost like being with people again yeah and I just wanted to
share that yeah yeah yeah well anyone that knows telescopes as well as you do
David I mean they're just a natural extension of you so that's very cool
that's very cool as as they become for many of us that uh uh love our
telescopes and um uh and use them regularly so
whatever telescope you have whether it's a small toy telescope or if you got a nice large instrument uh you know with
uh all kinds of computer capability you know get out and use it and and uh try
to squeeze every last drop out of it you'll be amazed what you can get so yeah okay well thank you David thank
you our next speaker um will be uh from
um uh the astronomical league and it'll be Mr John
Goss and his talk is about the lonliest planet and so here we go yes sir the
loneliest the loneliest Planet thank you thank you no no it's not it's not a sad story
okay that's no no it's it's a good story it's one of those things in which um uh
you um I I I think about a few weeks ago I think we had Scott Harrington on Al
live that's right yeah similar to this and one of the things he likes to say is that uh observing you do observing as
much with your mind as you do with your eyes of course you know and I think what
I have to talk a little bit is U concer some some of that some of that so i' like to Jump Right In okay and uh see
what I can do
here great great before I do let's talk about this
year's upcoming uh astrocon uh which is an Alcon in July oh excuse me I I'll
jump I'll jump ahead with that uh our next Al Live guest speaker will be Barbara Harris and we've hear so much
about these automated telescopes electronic telescopes and so on and she's going to talk about sea star uh
that that's in it's on a lot of amateurs Minds these days there a lot of a lot of talk about this but she's going to talk
about as you can see with the the title doing science with sea star so that'll be on October 25th which is a a Friday
night excellent but uh also want to mention give a beef brief plug for Aston 2025 and Bryce Canyon on June 25th June
25th to the uh 28th and I'll zoom in to tell you one
some some some good things about this um a lot of workshops are going to be featured uh including the about Imaging
which you could imagine also about sketching about how to describe what you see taking journals a little bit about
eyepieces and filters and books and and so on so this is something that that we have provided in the daytime as well as
at night because at nighttime this is another thing I just I was kind of
jotting down some notes on why you would want to go go to astrocon are really to any any dark sky area I list you see I
list I have a dozen so uh reasons why you want to go out at night this place
but I put some reasons for um Bryce Canyon on why you'd want to go in the daytime as well there are some pretty
incredible sites in geography and Hikes and Wildlife and all that at Bryce Canyon so you can do all that in the
daytime as well as vet astronomy vendors little plug for
astrocon so let's just jump right in the the loneliest Planet well I'll just tell you the
loneliest planet is Neptune which going to go to next the astronomical league has at least two observing clubs which
feature Neptune one's the Galileo Club Galileo observed Neptune in
December 1612 but what we would like you to do is
Ju Just to jot it down to say you observed it make sure you can identify it uh with binocular you won't able to
see much with a small telescope you won't be able to see much either but we'll get into that right now
I think a lot of us realized that when we were growing up and learning about the solar system
the order of the planets this is what we saw you know the sun you got Mercury Venus Earth Mars and so on and that's
sort of a beginning but uh as we got a little older we realize no no there's a big spacing to these
things um Earth and Mars are pretty close to the Sun I didn't even represent Mercury and Venus of course but you can
see as you go further out spacing gets greater and greater and greater which sort of leads into why I'm calling
Neptune the loneliest Planet because it's uh roughly 30 times the distance uh
from the Sun that our own planet is uh what's going on here there we go
now a little bit better representation this is more of a perspective on how things are situated right now the planet
sizes are course course of course greatly grossly enlarged here but the distances are pretty much
proportional that surprisingly right now uh Saturn is closer to Neptune than
Uranus you know in our first depiction of these things you think that okay you got Uranus and then you got Neptune well
not now you got Saturn is closer to Neptune than Uranus um and it's going to remain that
way for quite some time and I think 2032 Jupiter becomes the closest planet to
Neptune kind of weird kind of weird but I'd like to start out really
about discussing a little bit about Neptune and how it was discovered I I mentioned uh a minute ago or so that
Neptune was really first seen by Galileo he didn't realize it uh this is a a
sketch that I drew from what he saw in J on January 27th uh 1613 he saw it a
number of times by some really strange coincidence Jupiter happened to be in
conjunction with Neptune right when Galileo was looking in fact on one of these days I don't remember which one
Jupiter actually ulted Neptune I don't think Galileo saw that event happening
but you know here's sort of a missed opportunity and 1612 1613 wouldn't have
been great if Neptune was discovered as well as the moons of Jupiter that wasn't to be though so let's take a little bit
more of this timeline here go down it one of the 1700s not much happens with Neptune then uh but Uranus was
discovered so that everyone was happy with that Neptune wasn't known about yet um and then finally in uh mid 1800 or
yeah mid 1800s Neptune was discovered uh quickly followed by its large Moon
Triton um again we had another Moon uh nid discovered by Gerard Kyper of course
the famous Voyager to flyby which took some excellent fascinating pictures sent
them back to us which just really sparked a lot of people's imaginations and what it's really like that far
out and finally um what's it a few years ago 12 years ago 13 years ago uh Neptune
had made its first orbit of the sun since it was discovered it just shows
how far out and how long it its orbital period is now let's talk about how to find Neptune uh tonight or in in the
near future when when you can when it's not when it's not cloudy it is cloudy here so how to find Neptune well first
you locate Pegasus find the circlet which is the uh ring of stars of pip
right below Pegasus then you take the uh I draw a line from the top star in that ring
which is Theta to the star on the Lower East Side of the Ring which is Lambda continue that line for the same length
and it lands on just about where Neptune is so in a way it isn't really hard to find you just have to uh um have a a
detailed star map to pick out all the extraneous stars and zero in on
Neptune which is what we're going to do I have a a one one degree field here represented 7.8 magnitude Neptune then
some other field stars around it that's kind of what it looks like uh it does have a little bluish tint to it but it
looks almost starlike but if you look close enough and really pump up the medication you'll see that it is a
little disc and that's all you're really going to see with a small amateur telescope you might be able to see its
large Moon Triton you might not so looking at this I start I started
thinking well GE what I wonder what it's like out where Neptune is so I thought well let's let's go there and see what
happens see what we can do so we're goingon to fly 2.7 billion I believe 2.7 billion
miles out to Neptune what what is it like out there you have the the the blue Neptune and
its large Moon Triton Triton is a little bit smaller than our own moon but in Neptune Sky it's about the same angular
diameter as our moon well if you're orbiting around low
Neptune orbit so to speak looking out in the solar system what are you going to you going to see all these planets are you going to see Saturn and Uranus and
Jupiter and Mars and all this stuff well the answer short answer that's no uh you
might be able to see Jupiter but you're looking towards the sun it's not far angular distance far far from the Sun
but it does have a fairly bright magnitude of being 2.5 it's nothing like the minus 2.5 uh that it is in our sky
so you might be able to see it but it's you are looking towards the Sun but Saturn and Uranus of below six magnitude
so you really aren't going to see them uh Triton you'll see but it'll be a dim object really
because uh uh that far out it only receives 900th the amount of light that
that Earth does so you can imagine that small amount of light reflecting off the moon off Triton in this case it's just
going to be pretty darn dim let's go back to this plot again um
again you have Saturn being closer to Neptune uh in fact um well I'll just leave it at that
Saturn is is the closest for for right now let's look a little bit about
brightness out there since I just mentioned that it's only like one 1900th amount of sunlight falls on Neptune as
the Earth as we get on Earth well it on Earth the Sun is at a magnitude of minus
26.7 obviously pretty darn bright but as you get towards Neptune it it farther
from the Sun its brightness decreases so Neptune's minus1 19.3 magnitude which is again about 900 times dimmer than uh
than what we would see of the sun from here continue down the scale well you
got the full moon up there that's our full moon about minus 12.6 first quarter moon and so on Triton at the full phase
is minus 7 which as you can see it's about 200 times dimmer than our full
moon and TR ni Crescent even more dimmer a bunch of stars in there with which you all recognize from AR turus and so on
Polaris its next biggest moon uh NAD is a magnitude of of two uh at its
maximum um but it's a lot smaller than Triton I think it's just a few minutes in arc minutes in diameter so you really
aren't going to see it and then uh course Jupiter's 2.5 and there we go Saturn and Uranus really 6.8 6.9 you
aren't going to see them so you have these things out there which are just so dim uh po Neptunes alone by itself and
that is why is indeed a lonely place thank
you very good very good thank you John I I love I love all the illustrations that
you always do yeah sometimes I even like making
them some sometimes sometimes I'm wearing a hat because I pulled all my hair out in some of those but uh yeah it
it is is kind of fun making him and I I hope that they do get get the point across because it my real point is to
make you think as what Scott Harrington was saying observing is really just as much with the mind it is as it is with
the eye it's always nice to to have an idea of exactly what you're looking at and and I guess you can see so much more
if you kind of know about it beforehand sure so I appre appreciate you uh bearing with me and all that and I hope
we won't have a cloudy night so we can go out and try to find it right right well um and I I'm I want to give a shout
out um also to the astronomical League uh uh if you watch Global Star Party
you'll notice that uh the um officers of
the organization uh show up at every event uh that we do uh and I you know
Global star party is as much of a um you know astronomical League event as it is
for the Explorer Alliance so I really appreciate all the participation that
you guys do thank um I know it's not always easy to to make this time so uh
very very much appreciated and uh uh love what you do John so I'm a big fan
well what one same here John
I plan to be at Al at Bryce Canyon with I'll meet you there I'll meet you there
but Scott one one thing that I I just want to add to this is something uh that you do that you had just said that what
I like and I I know what the other with the officers the astronomically like is that you Encompass such a great expanse
of astronomy you know it's just it's just not talking about Neptune it's talking about philosophy it's talking
about some poetry tossed in talking about what it means to people talk about the whole facet of of how cloudy nights
fits it yeah there's there's so many aspects of immature astronomy you know
and I know that that's that's why that sustains all of us you know I think so
well remember astronomy is just not a bunch of people standing off reciting facts and figures distances and
brightnesses and masses you know I don't even do that because I think see I don't understand what all that stuff means but
uh it's it's a lot more to it it's a lot more personal and and it's a lot more worldly too so yeah I'll shut up with
that so no I was gonna I was gonna back that up because we had an
interesting uh exchange at Alcon last year during um after the emis discussion
I can I'll go on camera all do
is um the arus uh discussion the vision
um someone in someone came up with a question why should we go back to the
moon at all when there's other stuff to deal with here on Earth um came kind of
out of the blue I know I had I responded to it we choose to go to the Moon it kicks off an interesting discussion a
lot of a lot of different um aspects I guess different things surrounding
astronomy can come up at any time at one of these conferences and yeah nothing
wrong nothing wrong with expressing such sentiments because you with other people very knowledgeable people people and you
just might learn something and they may learn something from you so they were but they were asking those questions
even before uh we step foot on the moon you know should we be spending this money uh to uh uh to put men on the moon
as we did with Apollo 11 you know and we went back again and again um you know
part I I can think of a lot worse ways to spend money tell you that absolutely absolutely yes so but it the
the payback uh from all all of our exploration and efforts to uh build the
technology uh that got us to the moon and back uh has paid off big time and
continues to do so so agreed agreed yeah yeah I would agree with
that yeah I'm near my destination I will stop
jacking being on I'm at the okite tech star party I'm actually going I have a
uh connection with uh Kelly Ricks who's been on global star party I am going to
image from capul volcano tonight very good tell and I sent the picture of the
comment and the uh Crescent Mo I think you got that I will
so go back on mute and the program can carry on all right thank you and thank
you John thank you all right uh well um
David I'm going to bring you on uh and we can uh talk about uh uh the cloudy
nights community and um Mike beer who is uh uh heads up astronomics but also
makes uh makes it possible to have the community of cloudy nights um it is uh I
think by far the largest online community of uh of amateur
astronomers any subject that you want to know about uh you know or any piece of Geer or different types of gear how it's
used uh uh you know a great place to go is the cloudy nights Forum which is at
cloudynights.com I'll put the link in the chat here um but uh Michael beer is
uh has agreed to be on tonight to talk about this a little bit Mike has been in
the telescope industry uh the amateur telescope industry and ALS serving
amateurs and Professionals for over 40 years um and uh that's that's uh you
know it's it's wonderful that uh uh someone like Mike has stayed in for so
long serving uh you know all of us with all of our questions and all of our needs
and our desires I'll tell you from experience that sometimes uh uh it it's
not easy to uh uh give amateur astronomers uh the gear and the
expertise that they need um uh to accomplish some of their goals but uh uh
you know Mike has uh put telescopes and telescopes accessories in the hands of
many many thousands of uh of astronomers and uh as has not only made their dreams
come true but uh has made uh you know as as has way you know made um how do I
want to say this you know a woke Community can I use that term anyways uh
Mike thanks for coming on to uh Global Star Party you want to add anything to that
David yes I do I want to say to Mike because I've been a bad boy because I've
never been much for forums I haven't just haven't participated but I would like to tell
you now that as soon as I get back from an appointment that I'm about to go to
I'm going to log into cloudy nights become a participant and uh enjoy the cloudy nights because
having met you tonight having experienced some of your wisdom before we went
online I can't wait to do that thank you well I I don't know about wisdom I I
appreciate the kind words I'm just I'm just a dude here in Oklahoma doing what
I have to do so that's all right very humble very humble but thank you what part of what
part of Oklahoma I'm in Kenton or near Kenton for that star party oh yeah we've been
in Norman Oklahoma since 1979 so we are right south of Oklahoma
City okay yeah not not quite Panhandle obviously out in the darkness of dark uh
but yeah no we're just just here selling shipping helping yeah doing
being so and really one of the Great
uh telescope uh uh Outfitters out there in the world for sure all right well
we're going to turn this over to you Mike thanks for coming on to our Global star party with the theme of Cloudy
Nights how appropriate could that be perfect it is perfect I guess I mean
you know it's um the thing about cloudy night
in general is that we all have to find something to do with our time
and and we can't always enjoy the hobby that we like in the manner that we want
to enjoy it so we won't always be able to be out Imaging
observing even talking to local astronomy club members or people and
sharing ing the passion uh that we have for this sort of thing so cloudy night serves a a very
distinct role in community we have a lot of astronomers um it's a solitary hobby is
not something that Garners large groups you know so
they need a place to congregate you know and cloudy nights allows like-minded individuals to come
together on an extremely large worldwide basis and share their ideas in a some people
say overly moderated for whatever you know our mods and
admins want to keep it friendly Push It Forward not get into Political debates
we want to stay on topic we want people to find the information they want and never feel like they're being belittled
or demeaned I mean it is it's not going your reddits it's not going to be some
of the old Yahoo groups and that sort of thing if that's what you want cloudy
nights is not for you you know but if you want to learn and make friendships with people that you would never ever
have met in your entire life and cloudy kns is definitely a place to go and we do we've got about
200,000 registered members wow and we see 40 million visitors a year and we'll
do 400 million page views a year and the average user spends about 10 minutes a
session online so they're reading turning yeah congregating now we don't
have it's funny because with all the members we have a ton of lurkers more than we have contributors which is great
I mean those are people that are learning they don't necessarily want to dip their toes into the pool but they're
there to to learn a little bit from the knowledge
that's passed down from hundreds of thousands of people
that have posted on cloudy nights and have lent their expertise to it so I it's been great
and whenever Alistair was approached us originally you know oh my gosh 20 years
ago yeah seems like let's learn a little bit about the beginning of cloud sure
yeah so Alistar stclair started the Cloudy it wasn't a
forum though it was purely reviews and he did it just you know out of his
garage essentially because it just did it from his house you know sit there and type up I'm going to do a review on a
telescope and then we're going to do some giveaways and he felt the next step was
to do a forum section he couldn't afford to do the forums uh
it was just too I don't know about too much money it was a lot of time consumption because he
had a special needs child he needed to really spend the time with his family
more than trying to run a board I get that I mean I've got a child who's on
the Spectrum so I mean I understand wanting to to spend time with your family um so he went and he
telescopes.com had shown interest in it uh astromart had shown interest in it and he came to us because he was one of
our customers and he's like look if you can take care of this then uh it would be great and try to keep
it as free to the community as possible make sure that people can use it and
just we'll see what happens I was like okay and we bought it and we' tried to
stay hands off I mean I stay at arms length we have
70 volunteer moderators and 12 admins I think right
now wow that all volunteer-based they spend their own time on the Forum hours
on the Forum making sure everything works every day 24 hours a day and they
do it for zero pay zero
recognition and and they do all the dirty work I mean we some of our moderators actually uh mod they build
the site I mean they are the it side of cloudy nights and we don't go out I I make no money off of Cloudy Nights
realistically I mean sales that come in obviously that helps a little bit but there's no other funding to it so I've
got all these great volunteers that are willing to donate everything and help keep this community because without any
of the posters any of the volunteers anything cloudy nights would not exist I
want to interject something here Mike Sure uh you said you mentioned that you
don't make any money off of it but of course you sell products but I will tell
you that everyone that is in the whole industry let's just name a brand any
brand of telescopes all the way from two guys working in a garage to you know uh
the the top telescope companies out there around the World they too benefit from this and
astronomy clubs benefit from it uh star parties benefit from it so this large of
a community is huge and it's it's been going on for since 79 is that right so
astronomics since 79 uh cloudy nights I think we're at 20
I think Alistair started it 21 maybe even 22 years ago right now so that's
that's when it's I mean that is that is definitely com what I would call commitment you know so you know and I
look if I was in it for the money I would be doing something else right now I mean you know I I would you know
and that's fine I I enjoy this this has been in my blood yeah I've been doing
this since I was seven um and cloudy
nights as long as it can help keep the hobby going and not from
personal gain but just to keep the hobby going so everyone can enjoy the passion
that people get when they discover a telescope they discover Imaging they
discover Community they discover this group then it's a win I mean it's a win
across the board for everybody so I don't know I I am shocked it's got as big as it is
I thought maybe with the come up and of Reddit that we'd see some traffic die
down no it's still growing still getting bigger still seeing lots of traffic
still seeing lots of people so it's I'd like to say there's a lot in
store for cloudy nights but I mean how much in store can a forum be right I just want people to enjoy it use it and
grow it naturally and and get involved so well all the help that comes from the
users of Cloudy Nights is is tremendous I mean you know where else what other
hobby you know I mean if you get into diving is there a community of 200,000
divers that are going to get on to maybe perap who knows right perhaps but
um you know I think that amateur astronomers are some of the most sharing people that there are you
know well and when you go to Google and you look for something you'll find if
not the first maybe even the first 10 comments
you'll see cloudy nights scattered through there with answers to your questions I mean it's just it is indexed
like crazy it has information out the Wazoo dating back for 15 years with
Forum posts and then you know 20 years worth of reviews I mean there is a ton
of information and we would love to have more reviews we would love to have more people turn in reviews on their
equipment but I think a lot of people are afraid that their writing skill isn't this or they they can't do that
well contact us we have editors that will help you get that sort of thing up there you know we would love to have as
much professional use from astronomers around as well whether it's export scientific
coming on and talking about their products on cloudy nights so let's try to set up a a user base so they can talk
about their new origin scope I mean this is that's what we want we want I hate using words like this a
Synergy between it's a good word I know but I mean it's like here's my SAT words
for the day so I we want a Synergy in between the the users and then the rest
of the hobby that they may not get from trying to contact a customer support
help because that doesn't always work sometimes you need people in the field that have run into this problem I've had
customers who have asked me questions I'm like I don't know how to help you I've never run into that problem ever so
one on cloudy nights has the answer for which is awesome right so awesome you know occasionally Mike I I
travel to Asia and will talk to the manufacturers there and they will recite
reviews on cloudy nights you know when they're trying to develop a new product
and uh so it's on so many levels you know that maybe an amateur astronomer
wouldn't see cloudy Knights is supporting now but astronomics pays the
bills of Cloudy Knights and you have for a long time so you have you should be
given some sort of Academy Award for uh you know supporting the community in the
way that you have and so it's it's wonderful it's free um and um you know it's it really uh
creates the uh tone and texture of what amateur astronomy is today and uh so if
you don't belong to the cloudy nights you should definitely join oh for sure you don't know what
you're missing until you get there and then you realize what you've been missing right
right so uh Mike um uh
what have um what have you seen at have you seen any kind of Milestones that
have happened over all these years with cloudy nights anything that you might want to share I
mean you know and and this is me being just ridiculous in it I I literally try
to keep my nose out of it because I have a lot of people like oh hey you're just using cloudy nights to push your agenda
and that's not no not what I'm doing so I I try to just not keep so involved in
it I'm super arms length with it you know I was shocked the other day when I logged into the back end and saw we were
approaching 200,000 registered users it seemed like just last year we were at a 100,000 which I know isn't the case but
time flies and I lose track of time so yeah uh but it's
it it is true that the uh that the community at large of amateur
astronomers is growing we see membership growing in the astronomical League uh we
see you know it is it is the interest in looking up and trying to understand
where we are in the universe is uh Evergreen and um uh and for whatever
reason you know things that have gone on on this planet uh it is uh it's creating
intense interest you know and so uh and I'm I'm grateful that there that you
know that cloudy nights exists well I am too and with this
next batch of kids and I can see it in my kids who function on their computers
or on their phones I mean it's not a lot of inperson meeting a lot of times that's where cloudy nights will help
them that's where cloudy nights is going to be where people go
just like these telescopes are the next revolution of the way astronomy is working so I I hope we see an influx in
here I think the death of astronomy is greatly exaggerated and uh I believe
that it's just going to keep growing and people will get back
into the hobby where it is enjoyable with a group of people whether
it's in person or on the computer I think it's going to be leaning more towards computer Compu I I think cloudy
kns will be there to help them get along in a a safe space whatever you want to
call it safe space you I know I know but yes a place where
they don't feel judge so that's that's great non judgment zone so right that's
true that's true so you know and some of the some of the things I
love to read in Cloudy Nights is when you've got a real new that's coming on you know and you can tell they're a
little timid and go I just want to ask this question and they'll be asking a
question maybe they have a small telescope or something uh you know or a telescope they found in a garage sale or
something like that and they want to know how to get involved in it and I love it because I know that if they
stick with it and start to learn what this community is all about they're they're they're going to stay with it
probably for a lifetime you know and uh um so uh you know if if you are uh you
know someone that's on one of these you know one of these threads that's on cloudy nights you know uh thank you to
all of you that have encouraged people to learn more about this lifestyle that
we have to share you know all the Goodwill that uh that you guys you know dish up
yeah it it's just awesome when someone asks a question that may have been asked a hundred times exactly and you'll get a
poin or to well that that question's been asked and it's answered over here like a lot of forums that that I get
involved in people will take their time it may not be as long a thread or as long as a discussion but you'll get
people that'll take their time they'll answer the question politely they will treat them as an equal and they'll give
them the information they're asking for without being snarky or a pain that's
right so and that's awesome part of nights you know uh out people
that do um uh educational public outre they're very used to being asked a
question a thousand times and answering it a thousand times without saying oh no here you know if you were standing on a
street corner and someone asked you you know can you see the flag on the moon uh
with your telescope and and SC him a piece of paper saying I'm tired of answering that question here here's a
here's an explanation why you can't okay but no they'll they'll they'll explain and that's that is part of carrying uh
you know tenderly for these people that are trying to learn how to explore in a
personal way you know so uh you know it could be the largest astronomy Outreach
organization in the world hypothetically definitely say that if you want to put a tack on it like that then that's kind of
where it falls into at this point that's right well great well
wonderful well uh Mike thank you so much for on tonight uh uh if there's anything
that you want to end with here um but uh um it's wonderful to have you on you've
been on before and we're glad to have you back I just appreciate you doing this sort of thing because it's not like
uh there's a ton of TV shows about astronomy that are out there right now
so it's it's that you're willing to get people all around the world yep put them
in this little box or in the phone in front of our hands yes and we can get
together and and do life you know I mean because this isn't just sales pitches and commercials
I mean it is just straight information and stories from everybody you would never hear so this is really awesome I
mean I appreciate the fact that you put the time and effort into doing oh it's it's it's uh
it's kind of selfish on my part because I love doing it so thank you much oh no
problem thank you Scott I appreciate it all right thanks all right you have a good one okay so um uh our next speaker
uh is Ron breacher Ron is the astrod do uh and um Ron what do you got for us
tonight well you know I you do on a cloudy night oh I've been on cloudy nights I've
been in fact I think I was on cloudy nights today looking for information
about a tri bov mask for cating my telescope so yeah I think I think any
astronomer who knows where to look for information is going to find themselves on cloudy nights regularly y so thank
you Michael for doing that thank you oh no problem I'm just interested in what's
in the cases in the back so I have like six or seven cases in this office on right now so did you see when you were
talking I was noodling I have a I have well I've got a 1978 Martin
D28 okay I've got uh four Emerald guitars from Ireland all carbon fiber so
I've got I've got one electric two acoustic and a beautiful short scale 12
string okay with a mandolin voice hold on I was about to say small I can't talk
like that and not show it to you I I appreciate it sorry I just hijacked it I apologize
no that's cool that's cool you know we've had musicians there's a lot of astronomers
that are into music and sure you know so um right this is my live this is my
little short scale 12 string it's all car it's all carbon fiber wow wow you
can see inside the sound hole all these guitars have this offset sound hole
right and there's the headstock it's beautiful that thing is just massive the
headstock is half the size of the neck basically yeah so and but but listen to the voice it's a mandolin voice I didn't
want to learn how to play mandolin I understand that
mandin anyway that's not what we're here for I
I understand I appreciate you taking the uh the segue for me though thank you very [Laughter]
much okay so Scott what I have here you know I always like to Riff Off Your
themes so uh what I'll do is I'll share my my screen
here and uh Pho slideshow from the beginning so I'm an
astro imager but I'm also a visual Observer and um this talk is about
essential Imaging tasks for cloudy nights and sunny days boy goodness knows we get enough of them one of these days
uh on the global star party I'll give a talk about how many clear nights you're
likely to get as an imager in your lifetime and uh hopefully it doesn't hurt hurt your business Scott because it
can be kind of depressing especially if you don't make every bit of use out of
that time so right so I use the cloudy nights and
the sunny days that we all get so many of um to to do a bunch of things related
to astronomy and although a lot of these tasks uh pertain to Imaging they also
can pertain to visual observing um and so there's something in here for
everybody um so like I said I like to Riff Off the theme so I'm going to talk about that and then I'm going to talk
about how I make the most out of cloudy nights so I I collect calibration frames
and I can't go into the details of it but at my website astrod
O.C you'll find under the Articles tab one of my sky and Telescope articles all
about image calibration I'm also going to talk about tuning your equipment and
other things that you can do so Scott sent us this theme I've
highlighted in yellow some of the things that that really stood out to me uh
first of all this theme was inspired by David Levy we were told um but it's an
opportunity to explore the beauty mystery and inspiration even when the skies are less than ideal and I said we
get a lot of that and um so you you know you can use your cloudy nights for
discoveries Reflections or shared moments um you can analyze your data
learn strategize but what I do is I get ready for the next clear
night so what I want to talk about here really is how can astronomers use cloudy
nights and sunny days to get the most out of their clear moonless nights and
I've already talked a little bit about uh the details so let's talk about calibration frames so I said get
calibration frames calibration frames are used to clean up raw images so if
you're an astrophotographer the images coming out of your camera are going to look kind of
like this thing at top left very speckly in fact this is uh stretched to make it
visible the images themselves look dark with a few white dots on them where the
bright stars are and this is a a close up of this lower right
corner um if you clean it up with the calibration frames I'm talking about it can come out looking like this one on
the right and so what are those calibration frames well there's darks um sorry darks
uh dark current is uh builds up in a digital camera over time and more dark
current at higher temperatures so we want to subtract that that's where most of the speckling comes comes from
there's bias uh bias current which is added to every frame uh electronically
in the camera and that causes these vertical lines you see one right here in
the Raw frame and then there's flat frames that you need so all cameras are uh suffer
from vignetting cameras and telescopes so pictures are darker at the corners and you can also have dust spots and
uneven field illumination Flats fix that and without getting into the math
look how effective it is so this is an uncalibrated frame this is a frame that's been
cleaned up with those three types of cleanup and in particularly if you want
to see the effect of the flat frame look in the upper right corner how it
brightens up to reveal more of the nebula and all
the corners do that so that's really nice so that's image calibration and I said I like to do this during the day or
on a cloudy night when you do it what do you need to do well you need 16 flats
for each filter that you're going to be using minimum of 16 and uh so if you're
using a one shot color camera that's just 16 Flats but if you're shooting
with a mono camera and seven filters well you can do the math it's a lot more
flat frame so 16 per filter then you need 30 dark frames that are going to
match those Flats so try to keep all your exposure times the same for all
your Flats I I always shoot all my flats are 5 Seconds long and I adjust the
intensity of my light so I only need one set of these dark frames to match the
flats and then my light frames are all 300 seconds long 5 minutes I need 30 of
those dark frames to match the lights and with that I can get this beautiful cleanup and this is just one single
image when you then combine a whole bunch of these this might be a five
minute image when you combine hours and hours and hours of this data then you
can produce some really spectacular results so one of the other things I
like to do and I definitely don't want to waste good Imaging time for this is tweaking my equipment so
uh there's a lot more that I could have included here but in the interest of time I'm just going to talk about four
things that a lot of beginners uh maybe don't think about enough maybe
sometimes they think about it too much and the first one is cleaning that's something I think people think about too
much the other three maybe not enough so let's talk about
cleaning number one cleaning needs to be infre quent and number two it needs to be
really gentle those little specks of dirt on your uh corrector plate or your
lens they're not doing any harm while they're sitting there but when you start
moving them around you can scratch the Coatings now the Coatings aren't quite
as soft and as as some manufacturers would have you believe but I would
always rather have dust rather than scratches I just cleaned my
c14 this weekend I hadn't cleaned it in 14 months and it was filthy the
corrector plate was filthy this image was taken in the week before I cleaned
it so you know you may not need to clean every time you think you need to that's
right make sure you follow the manufacturer's instructions concerning what Li IDs or whatever to put on your
Optics and if you're you know never look at your Optics in a bright light because
it doesn't matter how clean they are they'll look dirty really look at the pictures or the
view through the eyepiece and if it's good try to leave those Optics alone for another month or
two balance if you want your Mount to perform properly you have to balance it
properly and believe it or not it's not just just as simple as eyeballing
it especially if you're Imaging if you're using doing visual you just need
to get close but if you're um tracking for the purpose of long exposure
astrophotography there's a right way to balance your Mount and so what you need to do you'll be using an equatorial
Mount most likely unless you have a really really fancy Dancy alt asmith
plane wave Mount or something with a field Rotator then you can safely ignore all of this stuff um but in in uh most
cases you're going to orient the scope this way and adjust the balance in declination first so that's moving the
scope up the front end of the scope up while the back end goes down until you
get Balan correctly and then lock that axis then adjust the counter
weights that's the way to do it you need to balance every time you set
up really important one of the things oh I want to
go back here uh I meant to say you'll notice here that the lens cap is
off you really have to uh do all your balancing with all of your equipment
connected exactly as you will use it under the sky so if you're going to have
a do heater strip like I do here if you're going to have a do heater strip on your telescope it needs to be on when
you balance your equipment all equipment attached all cables attached lens cap
off critical and cable management really
affects balance so um I'm sure we've all seen and most of us have or have had one
of those spaghetti Scopes that have cables dangling Every Which Way off of
everywhere um see if you can figure out a way to manage those cables so that all of the
cabling or as much of it as possible is above the equipment and not able to
dangle down so in this case you'll see over here some of the cable is fixed
with some plastic cable tie uh the cables are sandwiched or tied around in
this case tied around the posts here so
oopsie we really want to try to manage those cables if you don't that will affect the balance of
the mount that we just talked about as being so crucial because as the telescope moves across the
sky the cables will be moved by gravity that will affect your tracking and the
shape of your stars make sure also uh that you secure your cables in a way
that prevents them from getting snagged on some piece of equipment and you coming back uh to your rig in the
morning and finding something in tatters on the ground so that's all I want to say about
fine-tuning equipment although I'm going to come back to it later on one of the most fun things to do when it's cloudy
or during the day is to plan your next session and this applies whether you're visual
or uh an Imaging astronomer uh one of the websites that I really like is
telescopius tocom you can set up a free account there and enter your equipment
so if it's visual you could enter your focal length the eyepiece that you like to use and your latitude longitude and
it'll give you a list of objects and you can filter them you know you can say show me all the open clusters that are
avail ailable tonight that are above 30° between 10 p.m. and
midnight so very uh very cool resource
and we all have our our favorites uh online but this is this is one of my favorites so plan your next session
think about that in advance process your data so this is a
screenshot of uh of another screen that I have open on my computer right now um
I was doing on a cloudy night last night I was doing some colation and I had
enough time to get uh let's see 10 20 uh
30 30 minutes of data on the iris nebula and was just doing a test process before
I came on tonight um so processing your data you can do anytime and
um you know you can do some pretty cool stuff Pro accessing your data by the way
takes about as long as acquiring it so I might spend 40 hours
over five to seven nights acquiring images like this and then I'll spend
probably I don't know 15 20 30 hours processing it that's not all in
one chunk and it's not uh to get exactly what you see here after every every
night I process what I've got so I practice practice practice and then by
the time I'm finished acquisition I'm ready to process it for real and I can do it in a couple of
hours and the last other activity that you can do when you're not actually out
at the telescope or or uh you know working with your Imaging is you can
share this stuff with your friends and this is really why most of us who are
doing doing astrophotography most of us are really Blown Away by the photos that we can
take with our own amateur equipment from our backyard often and um we want to
share it with our friends so that's why we do this and uh you know posting it
online uh on Facebook or like I have a website astrod O.C by the way I
mentioned a little while ago the Articles tab has some really um useful
articles not just for images but visual as well um and so sharing is just a ton of
fun and um there's even other things that you can do obviously I didn't have
time to talk about how to colate your nutonian reflector or your Schmid craan
telescope one thing you can do on a mediocre night so this is a night where you can't image or see faint objects but
uh you you can do some other useful things so one thing is you you can see how long you can guide and still get
round stars because that'll tell you an upper limit on the length of exposure you can shoot when the conditions are
good um I don't care if you think your focals your filters are par focal
they're probably not and it's useful to figure out how different they are and prog program that into the system so you
don't have to focus every time you change filters same with as the temperature change your focus position
is going to change if you can figure that out on a mediocre night you can use that information on every cleared
night um a lot of mounts uh especially if you have a permanently mounted
telescope like I do uh will benefit from a pointing model of a few hundred stars
now my Paramount acquires those automatically when I tell it to it does about five per minute so I can get a 200
Point model in about 40 to 50 minutes let's say I can do that on a night when the
moon is full and transparency is terrible if I can see stars I can
establish a pointing model and that means the next time I go out on a clear night my guiding is going to be
beautiful my pointing is going to be precise and obviously polar alignment
falls into the same category whenever I build a pointing model the first thing I
do is verify that my pointing uh that my polar alignment is good and if I need to
adjust it I adjust it before I establish that new pointing model so I guess what I want to say is don't
sit around moping about those cloudy nights and wishing it was clear you'll make yourself
crazy and I can guarantee you it will clear
eventually eventually you're here so take advantage of the cloudy nights and
especially enjoy the sunny days astronomy isn't just for the
nighttime so that's uh that's what I got have for you tonight excellent excellent thank you Ron you know if you are uh
watching this program live I'm going to recommend that you uh especially if you're into astrophotography that you
come and visit this uh program again and watch uh Ron give all those amazing tips
U because uh you know this is a guy that uh he's truly a master
astrophotographer and um uh you know he uh he does te he does tutor uh you know
if you want to be take your astrophotography to the next level the guys like Ron can can absolutely get you
there and uh and and make great use of your valuable time so you know if you
think oh gez I don't want to spend any anybody any money getting tutored here
uh think again U because you're you're worth it okay and and your your valuable
time is worth it makes a huge difference and you know you can come to me for one on-one just contact me through astrod
talk.c y but if you want to go to workshops or we have a subscription
model very inexpensive at masters of pix insight.com and we're not the Masters
we're trying to make our students the Masters right and we have hundreds of subscribers we have one or two workshops
a month hundreds of little videos that are two to seven minutes long to to
really get you going quickly it's supposed to be fun yeah and it is yeah
it is fun thank you so much Ron thanks for having me yeah yeah and take care
enjoy the rest see you next time y okay our next speaker is we're going
to go down to Brazil uh to talk to marel soua and Marcello thank you for coming
on to Global star party again you are a very loyal uh
participant uh and you are on almost all of the global star parties you are also the editor of our
astronomy magazine our free Global astronomy magazine and uh uh called Sky
up but it's about to get a uh a name upgrade here so um
U you know we are very very pleased and honored to uh uh publish all the
articles that are are given by contributors from around the globe and to make it free and so um it doesn't
replace magazines like astronomy magazine or sky and Telescope that's not the purpose of it but it is uh meant to
give people access to a magazine that's written by some of the experts around
the world World um you know that might not otherwise be able to get one so you
can find it on explore scientific.com Skies up uh marello thank you for coming
on tonight and uh what's been going on in Brazil hi thank you very much for the
invitation SC ever is a great pleasure to be here here in Brazil in the spirit is very difficult
to do observation because have fires in the forest it's very dry
here here here the Jan it's not raining for three months that's you don't have
rain a long time in many in many plac in Brazil more than this then it is you
have the forest is dry then you have fires and then
during uh few days ago which was not here where I live but in parts of Brazil
was very difficult to see something in the sky at night and when I talk about
cloudy nights I I can say about my experience organizing
events uh have the M law that Us in
science and I think that you have a law that you can use in astronomy that a
we have a directly association between Cloud nights and the importance of the events
that you organize and astronomical events that you organize more important these
events it's great the possibility to have clouds nights many events that you
organize it wasn't possible to look to the sky because I have a lot of
clouds last year happen is during the eclipse I have a
lot of people with a I have a thousands of glasses here special glasses so
eclipse glasses to look to the eclipse but it wasn't possible because also
during the day we have the cloudy days man that didn't allow us to
organize observation of the solar eclipse partial solar eclipse for us
tomorrow we have another opportunity to see a partial of solar equips but very
small part of the Sun be covered by the moon but and it
will be near the sunset but we be an opportunity for us then we are going to
talk with the population and I think that tomorrow we have a better the sky will be with a few clouds
and I think that be possible but Cloud nights have are bring problems to us when we
organize events but when after many years organizing events we have opport
options when organize events if you have a cloudy night because we know that is
happens many times this I organizing an important event and you can't look to
this Sky because have a lot of clouds and ever you have an option for
this now you organize dur T night talks organizing invite
people to go to a different place man to know the equipments to talk about
equipments to talk about the plans for the future for the next opportunity then
we can use it to talk about as and make plans and you have new
friendships then we can use this moment for this then ever when we organize an
event we consider that the possibility to have cloudy night is very high is
directly associated with the importance of the event when is very important you have more the possibili
great to have a a cloudy night during the organization of the event but it's
not only the cloud night that are problems for us H another problem is
what happened here last week that I will show you we have now strong
winds the winds are stronger than in the past then these bring problems when we
want to make observations and bring problems to the observator
then have now two problems that you need to take here is the Rings and Cloud
nights three strong rains Cloud nights
and strong winds yes I I will show what happened
with the observatory last week we had I
I share my my screen we had the wi
with the velocity of 80 kilm hour
o 8080 K 80 kilometers per
hour and it what happen what is this let me try to change here this
screen okay here is the observatory now that
where is located we are using the telescopes of the our Sky natur yeah
that's you that responsible for we have this partnership here is the
observatory here inside the observatory we have your
hoof that protects the equipment and it supported until 60 kilomet per hour
everything was fine but last week you have the strongest wins
and this is what happen here is a Hof oh no oh no look what is the observatory
there oh my God I think that move the far away more than 60 M
far from The Observatory wow a very strong from an
airplane that is your Observatory and oh sorry here is inside the
observatory everything was fine the equipment are fine didn't affect the
equipment only the hoof that made a a long
fly he after in the morning when they measure it your almost more than 60
Metter almost one 100 meters far from The Observatory wow
here is the Mage in the moment that Hof
left wow it a very strong wind then now we need to take need to take care of
this and also we are having problem with the
automatic telescopes that you use in the streets the unell telescope don't work
with winds you need to go a place with very few
winds nice because if you have a a stronger not so strong like this but if
you have winds didn't work well and many telescopes now have you need
amount that support this and everything is
changed this is the image of the oh
boy of the ho
yeah it's not moving why what's [Music]
happening on the moment my computer I think that's not working out
and now you can see there we go oh it's broken yeah yes here is located engine
goodness well now we need to we are replace that
building a new roof yes and we hope that support the
strongest wings that soon I don't know what to
happen in the future but you need to be prepared because each year you have a stronger
WS here has the equipment to show that everything is fine after the the
stor well it did it job it did its job it sacrificed
itself so protect the equipment yes everything is fine but we were very
concerned because never happened this not first time that the H had this
problem now we need to protect and we are trying to make stronger enough to
support winds that goes more than 100 kilomet per hour because you don't know
what will happen in the future because we are also waiting strong ranks during
the summer here because you're having three months with without rains we don't
know what will happen in the summer that the period of the rains here then here have to take care of many
things not not only cloudy nights but strong rains and strong winds yes that
can bring problems for us and I show now image of some events that we organiz in
the spirits this in same place where is located The Observatory that's
has we organize an event every
from every 15 days we have one event two events per month that invite people to
walk at the near the forest and there we show the sky show the
constellations tell histories about the constellations and use the telescopes to
show some objects of theep sky and there also planets now we have Venus
Saturn that's a a special moment but this event we had a
cloud night then we
walk inside the forest but it wasn't possible to show the constellation then
I have only histories we talk about show and show Venus that was possible to see
one and here we went to the
forest we have more than 20 20 people most of them kids visiting the observatory or part of
the observatory right we have now and the we go to a dark place is it what's
important because even we can't see the stars we can talk about the importance
of you don't have a light pollution that this can affect the animals then we can
show animals at night talk about the animals that M Night Like Us then we can
use this moments even with cloud and nights we have
[Music] events and this an event during the day observation of the sun tomorrow we try
to to see the eclipse here will be a partial eclipse a very small part of the
Sun that's because by the moon and near the sunsets but we know that many people
want to see we are going to give you a glasses free eclipse glasses we are
going to distribute free more than 500 Eclipse glass for the population
excellent we receive it from Sten HS then from Char bait solar Stone Pro and
here one of the events that you organized so it's very
hot we are living here this way you have a period very hot then we have
clouds not raining and it begins to be cold then we have a period that very
cold then you have after this a period very hot then and no
rains and then an experience of this and then we organize it also in the Public
Square an observation that's great of
Saturn is a what we like to do organize with frequency these events
of Des observation yeah you can see we have a
lot of people involved people that walk in this Public
Square camera F to see the stars and now we have we had now but I
hope that tomorrow it will be possible for me to see the comments yes I didn't
see it but here in our city nobody saw because we had clouds since 207
September 27 that's why when began the period for us to see the comments but I
have a friend in Argentina that took pictures and I
showed pictures that had H in 27 this is how appears if you are looking if a
naked eye it's like something like this this a
picture but he us the Alejandra s from
artina that took this picture and he authorized me to show and he also
authoriz me to show here a picture of his friends that I show after this image
here is with camera Nik and at the same moment he was
in that is located state of AR that's
called Liv there and he had the opportunity to see and took the and
he have this pictures it's a pretty short exposure only five seconds yeah
it's five seconds yeah it's bright but it's not because
it's near the sunrise for us is very near the sunrise
because it begins at night after 4 you can see but near near Horizon then when
sun's coming it's higher but it is almost
day tomorrow I will try to see I I will wake up very early to go there to see
and here fantastic also by David
MOA inaya Argentina that this is the comment
that is possible to see here really cool that's a great in Brazil don't have so
many pictures because as I said you have fire have a lot of particles in the
atmosphere then in the beginning of the the morning is very difficult see some
many places in Brazil and here is a fantastic picture
that davidya from omay look at the L it's great yes I
think that's after October 12 will be better to see and it'll be better for
you that are in the nor hemisphere for me here I don't know I you try because you'll be
near the sunsets you have you probably 15 minutes
20 minutes after the sunset to see the comments then I don't know if it'll be
possible to see but I will try I'll will be there if you have an opportunity to see I tomorrow I'll try in the morning
and they try also uh next after
October 12 to see if it be possible to see something and this is how will appear
for us tomorrow the eclipse ARA it will be fantastic but I I couldn't travel to
artina to see the an eclipse but I'll try tomorrow to see the partial solar
eclipse here but it'll be near the sunset right it'll be near the Horizon
then I need to find some place now that's you see the maximum of the
eclipse this sun it will be be in during
the sunset now then I need to find a place here that the Horizon near the
West will be clear from need to try to see something
that but I try I'll be there tomor tomorrow tomorrow I'll try to to see the
comment take pictures and the see at night the beginning of the night until
the end of the afternoon the eclipse but I will talk tomorrow on the TV here they
invited me to talk about the eclipse and because many people knows
that you have an eclipse and you try to to look directly to the
sun then this is a problem I hope that this will be near the Horizon as you
have a lot of particles in the atmosphere this will protect them to look to the Sun Direct
to the sun I hope but see we'll be we'll
try tomorrow then this is what I I prepared
to talk today s wonderful and thank you let let us see
what happen yeah thank you we'll see what happens and good luck on your um you know uh
interview tomorrow um thank you you know I it's it's wonderful that you do so
much astronomy Outreach you know I love to I personally love to be on the street
corner uh or on the street with the telescope and showing you know passer by
uh you know their first views of Saturn or the moon uh you know you get into do
so many interesting conversations and uh it's just fun it
just kind of rejuvenates me you know and makes me uh realize you know that this
is I I why I love what I love you know so to to share wonderful what I like it
to do and something that we do here that people like because ever when a person
looks for the first time to Saturn you'll say that now it a baptism for
astronomy Ah that's a good way to put it yeah now
it's a baptism to astronomy now it first when everybody when see for the first
time you talk with them and make a short ceremony say now we are I don't know how
to say n but we call baptism here in baptism baptism the same that he Us in
church this bap for astronomy
wonderful well thank you very much Scot we'll see you next time and I'll
try to catch up with you around oh yeah let's bring Caesar on
here so Cesar is his hotel room uh and
he's getting the hotel in the in the lob of the hotel and um we are arriving at
maybe 50 minutes ago um the
the Puerto San is small City and it's totally full full of the cupation hotels
and you know homes and um we arrive uh from uh
2,500 kilometers from buid I can show you by car by car totally by car yes wow
wow um Argentina is a very big country Brazil
too and uh and still more and yes and and it's South America
that we have the long distance is normal for us and um and really many people is
going driving to Rio Deo fromes or folis
especially um and we go to the sometimes we to the beach places in in Brazil uh
we love go to Brazil especially in summer
and uh and we went here to Patagonia we are in
maybe 92% of the the ring um and maybe we can
move again uh kilom to the north to have
maybe the center ring but you know maybe we can uh enjoy from here a little and
Center ring as okay but it's we are in the in the place of
totality but of course what is the weather
prediction the the the weather prediction or the prediction for for the
no predition predition I think that is 98 I think yeah we'll be clear we'll be
clear tomorrow yes but as we as you are you have
sorry the the long the longest distance um for
the moon and you have a a
thi ring a uh comparing from the last anular
eclipse from from 27 where we have Ring of Fire
more yes yes but now now H you have a
bigger a bigger ring more yes thicker thi yes a thicker
a thicker yes yes is far from us yeah now yes yes we
are in in how do you say in English PED in English
is a no a in
English and yes the closest point yes
and no not the closest not the longest now the Moon is is in the longest
distance and you have a smaller size SI the
moon but it is wonderful I I would like to be to be with you
I would like to be with you to be with you to see the
eclipse hear can you hear us I think he's uh he's losing his
connection anyway it's remarkable that he was able to get through to us uh from
his location he said he's about 2500 kilometers away from uh from Bren
buen areas right now so is
yes so H how many people are in your group uh Cesar how many people
um maybe do you have um here you can see
my screen no not quite yet give it a moment
here no no it's sharting here we go okay we're good
yes you you can see the map
yes we see it um Let me let me try again no no no
no we see my connection is too unstable for
for my group my group is is around maybe 50 yeah we we could see the map we
could ah okay okay I show you the map again now
here now you can see the map yeah give it a moment
yes well we are here
and we
went to the
South more more
here you can see the map uh right now no
we cannot see
it oh and we lost thear oh too bad I think that he has problems with
connection yes yes he's at the hotel he
he Cesar has uh has shown us um remark
able uh you know things we got to watch a total eclipse of the sun one time from
a very distant location and he was just using his telephone connection to make
it all work but uh but it you know the important thing is marello is that he he uh uh you
know always tries okay oh I think he's back on now I I
think I see him C
maybe the connection is very low yeah maybe okay all right uh we're going to go to a presentation okay okay there he
is okay all right okay the connection is is
is too unstable to to maintain the a
conversation but uh well we see you maybe I I'll send you
tomorrow IM of the eclipse okay good luck good luck Caesar and good luck to
you Marcelo okay thanks thank you we are
going to uh we have a presentation from uh uh from Kareem Jaffer from John Abbot
College uh Kareem has been on global Star Party many times um and I met him
uh along with uh a a partner uh in crime
and astronomy Outreach uh you know the Montreal center for the uh Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada is extremely extremely involved in Outreach
and uh you know we're really happy to have his presentations and uh often he's
able to come on live uh tonight he had another obligation but he did
pre-record uh this uh presentation which I'll run
now hi Scott hi D hi everyone it's great to be back with the gsps I'm sorry I
can't be with you live I'm on my way to uh an event in Quebec City but I wanted
to take this opportunity to chat about cloudy nights because uh cloudy nights in Montreal is a big thing we kind of
joke about the Montreal nebula this Bank of clouds that we always deal with whenever we're observing and really is a
part of our life here uh so I'm going to share a little bit of that with you but before I start as always with the rasque
monreal center we like starting with a land and Sky acknowledgement we not only acknowledge
that we're on unseated territories but also that we share the night sky and we share the sky itself with the First
Nations people and Indigenous peoples matey from all over the world and ancient cultures everywhere right now we
are at the very end of the September Moon the Harvest Moon that we talk about
with the settlers but the mkma call it the mate calling time and we've seen and
heard the calls of the mates we've seen moose runting uh their antlers trying to call the mates and be prepared to have
their gestation period over the winter so that in the spring they can give birth and have their offspring ready for
the following winter in fact the next moon that begins just tomorrow with the
new moon is going to be the M or the animal fattening time so we're going to be seeing some of these animals these
indigenous creatures starting to prepare for the winter that comes in the northern
hemisphere at RAS Montreal we have a bunch of coming members events we've been doing uh some interesting
Wednesdays we've been doing astrophotography workshops with David Schuman our vice president and moongazing nights with our members
liaison Nicole laort and we also have a couple of Library nights coming over over the next two months and and a movie
night because it's fun to share our sci-fi love of space uh with you know our love of old movies uh there's some
interesting ones coming up including 2001 Space Odyssey which will be fun and then we're trying to get out for some
observing nights especially with the comic coming into our evening Skies soon knock on wood uh Comet C 2023 T Atlas we
are really hoping to get a chance to see it and then today I was reading about this awesome uh sungrazer Comet that's
coming through as well that we have a chance to see so there's definitely some reasons to get out there and enjoy the
night sky our upcoming public events we just had our towns and event which I'll
mention in a moment uh we do have a wonderful event coming up at the end of October which we do for young kids and
families it's spooky nights it's run by our John abot College space club that I mentor and they do activities in the
early evening uh Halloween themed but space related so that you know we get to
share again our love and space all things space space exploration with h these young kids we're currently
planning a online event uh with d uh to
share his 100 plus eclipses that he's observed and the 30th anniversary of Shoemaker leaving nine and then we also
have our December geminin meteor shower that we're working towards we just had this past Saturday
our keynote towns and lecture now our towns and lectures featured speakers from uh it started with with Harold
shapley and uh uh Carl Sean has spoken doid has spoken a couple of times as our
town and lecture and we've been really focusing on some of our local talent and so we were really happy to have Jonathan
G he is a researcher with the University of monreal a Prof there and he's the
science consultant for our local Planetarium and he's working with the Gaia data to map out the young Brown
dwarfs and young stars in our local Galaxy neighborhood uh the Milky Way
and so he shared with us a little bit about what they've been discovering the way in which they do the Aging of these
stars and it's really fascinating to see the amount of information they able to collect from the Spectra and the radial
velocity data from Gaia so that was a lot of fun and if anybody wants to watch our YouTube it's on our rasque Montreal
YouTube channel as well now tonight we're talking about cloudy NS and I've made this mention
before and I have the picture of our craphy that we took for six months here in Montreal
and you can just notice the number of sun paths that are blocked by clouds and
this is daytime and normally our day times are clearer than our nights even on the clearest of days you've got some
patches of clouds that come through most of the time here in Montreal we did get lucky you know occasionally in the
summertime with long periods of clear days and clear nights but most of the time we are dealing with these clouds
because we are surrounded by water we are part of the uh St Lawrence Riverway
and a lot of clouds follow along the Water Frontier and pass through the Montreal
area in fact uh this past September when we did the lunar eclipse viewing just a
couple of weeks ago you know we were really looking forward to it really planning and the forecast was partly cloudy the nice thing is though with the
full moon is you could see it through the clouds most of the time we got out on the field and we got to enjoy having
everybody spread out on the field we had 12 different telescopes we had over a hundred people there that night over 70
students but you can see the clouds were constant we could see them could enjoy it with the telescopes but a light layer
of clouds running in front running interference the whole time the interference of the clouds made
for some really spectacular effects especially through the eyepiece and so we had uh two uh young women come and
join us high school student and a local visiting student um they got this
incredible picture of the full moon with the wispy clouds through one of the
telescope eyepieces and so thanks to Annie and Julie for sharing the picture with us even during the actual small umbrell
Shadow phase uh one of my students Lily running a telescope for the first time that night she ran it the entire night a
nextstar adse and she got beautiful pictures of the full moon as well as of
the umbrell phase and that little you know 8% coverage of the Moon surface you
still could see the wispy clouds around it my daughter thought I was playing around a little bit with her telescope
as she was taking images with the DSLR that she's still working on processing some of those a little bit more with the
smartphone through the eyepiece she got some nice views and then she was able to process them to get much more detail on
the moon and I just love the fact that even with the smartphon as long as you use the ipce and smartphones you can
catch the clouds you can catch the features of the Moon you do get a a little bit of that color Distortion but
you expect that when you're really just kind of roughing the the Imaging part of the
process going back a little bit further when we had the waxing gibbus we were out for international observe the
moonight and it was coming through the trees and through the clouds and so I made this little video recording so you
can actually see the clouds and the tree branches as the moon passed through our view
and is you know the the clouds are persistent with us and I don't I don't know what
other way to describe it except that it lends its own Beauty its own ethereal nature to some of our photos this is uh
one of our students L janier from uh our janier from our uh astronomy class this
term who caught the relative conjunction of Venus with the waxing crescent moon
uh just a few weeks before that and in fact I went back through my files and I saw that the previous
conjunction of the Venus with the waning moon back in November when they were
really really close together November of last year we were able to get this image and
you can see that it's entirely through the clouds but you can capture Venus
nice and bright you can even see slightly that gib a shape that we had in that early morning with the waning
crescent moon now this past summer my daughter and I went to Mom G antic Observatory to
help them with their starfest and to set up a telescope to share the views and the day looked somewhat promising
initially you know uh was clear spots to the skies and as the sun set we started
to see these incredible huge thick clouds come through so we still set up
our equipment we got ready you know we were a little bit actually drenched just with the moisture at that high altitude
but that the sunset was just absolutely phenomenal you could see just these
beautiful uh textures through the sky the cloud formations the sun coming in
and out of layers of the clouds and then once we had actual crowd that night we
were able to pull in a fair amount to see just a couple of targets and up
above us there was a clear sky window so because our mtic Observatory is known for the spectroscopic data I always take
my uh my rspec filter with me and so we got the this beautiful uh filtered image
of the Spectra of Vega directly above us and we had a 10minute window where we
were able to grab onto Vega get the filter in show the Spectra to a crowd of
20 people and that was it for the night that was all of our observing for the entire weekend actually that's all we
were able to see back in may we were blessed with some incredible Aurora and we did an
event afterwards where everybody shared their pictures of the Aurora and there was this Bank of clouds that you can see
here that just followed through every single picture it was just moving through our view as the Aurora did and
it kind of LED this this connectivity to everybody's images with each other which
was just wonderful to see going back to the total solar eclipse April 8th 2024 you can see the
amount of clouds in the sky but even with the clouds the eclipse phases were
beautiful to witness and they Halo of the sun through the ice crystals in the upper atmosphere and then when totality
hits we were able to see that beautiful Corona even through the clouds and it
was a little bit difficult to capture but we were able to get a lot of it which was just wonderful to
see Mars occultation last well two two years ago in December
2022 uh again it was through the clouds and because it was a full moon occultation we had such an amazing
amount of light that we captured multiple images before during and this
is just after Mars peaked out from behind the moon we had a lunar eclipse just that
and the total lunar eclipse you know we captured as many of the phases as I could that early morning down by the
riverfront with a huge cold wind it knocked over my DSLR camera like three times which uh thankfully no damage at
that time that I could tell but as we were enjoying that you you know the the
clouds kept coming in and they kept obscuring there was even at one point where the clouds kind of took over and
for a while I couldn't see the moon at all and this is the moment just before that so the clouds thickness varied
quite a bit that night and my wife was watching through the windows at home and managed to catch an opening between the
windows when the full umbrell Shadow seemed to be on the moon and we got this beautiful blood red moon that
night the summer during the covid when we had the incredible annular partial
eclipse visible for us you know we we went out to the Waterfront to catch Sunrise with the eclipse already
happening and you can see the clouds through every one of these pictures but
honestly like it was windy it was cloudy but it was incredible because you could
see more features and even the the there were only a couple of sunspots but
watching them come in and out of the clouds became kind of a game to see how they came
through and when you use the clouds and you use something like Photo pills to really plan your photo our uh Ras
current uh head for our national office Jenna Hines got this picture in
Toronto you can see the clouds you can see the annular Moon and you can see the CN Tower and it's just an incredibly
gorgeous picture that she managed to capture this past year with uh the
students they've really been taking a lot of images of the moon for part of the globe at night work that I've been
having them do in the moon sketching and so one of the things that they asked is how can they stack pictures and I saw
the quality of some of their pictures and you know they're a little bit grainy there's a lot of cloud formation going in and out so I went back through and I
found from October 2020 a group of pictures that I had taken of the first quarter moon and the clouds moving
through the view so I just want to show you a few of these so there's nine of these pictures and you can see the
clouds moving
through this isn't happening as smooth as I was hoping
from the international observe the moon night and then I decided for the first time that I wanted to try the mineral
moon now with it's different than with Photoshop because with Photoshop you can work with the luminance as well
as the saturation in there's no direct luminance function so you have to play around a little bit with the
temperature of the image you have to play a little bit with the saturation and you have to work a little bit with
the brightness contrast levels as you play around with the saturation and the
intensity of the saturation anyway it took a long time but I was thankful Roger Heyman from the UK was giving me a
little bit of advice in my early stages and I managed to get the mineral Moon where you could really see the titanium
rich areas of the mares and you can even see a little bit of the reddish brown Hues showing the iron rich regions so
this was my first mineral Moon and my daughter actually was the one who had brought up the idea of mineral moons I'm
waiting to see what she ends up putting together for her first mineral Moon and then I'll play around with this a little
bit more and maybe create a second layer to that Moon lab where they start with the rough images and then they can play
around with a little bit sharper so again uh cloudy nights is something that we work with all the time here in
Montreal and uh I don't think that's a bad thing I think that's actually you know that brings us to a little bit more
creativity when we work and uh when we image and it also allows us to
appreciate sometimes a little bit more of nature when you get to battle with those clouds to get just the right
picture that picture kind of hold a little bit more meaning to us at times so I know that wasn't exactly what Scott
was looking for with the Cloudy Nights theme with uh you know what we do indoors on cloudy nights I did share one
of those but I think for us here in Montreal you know the Montreal nebula is a fact of life for us so we we work with
it rather than uh you know try to avoid it all together so with that I thank you and I hope to see you live on one of the
upcoming gsps especially I hope if we get a chance to see the upcoming Comet
or two uh visible to us in the night sky thanks everyone back to you
Scott well that was great Kareem uh you might be watching this but uh and I hope
that you are um but that was a great uh angle on the cloudy nights uh uh theme
uh you know all of us that are amateure astronomers have uh been clouded out or
um you know have experienced clouds uh in various ways and thought that you
know that was kind of the end of the observing uhh situation I've told this
story before on on global star party but um uh during during the H's Comet uh
Apparition of 1985 and 1986 uh I remember going out at what
would have been considered the peak of uh of hi's comet and we'd had some great
weather in California where I was living at the time leading up to this but then the weather started to get threatening
and in fact it started raining and uh I had decided that you know
no matter what I was going to go out and observe uh this Comet and at the time I
had a 13inch dob sonian telescope uh you know 13inch aperture telescope and I
used to mount this thing on top of my car with Surf Racks okay because I the
telescope was so big I couldn't put it in the back seat and there was no hatch on this particular vehicle so I would
put this thing on top of the car it looked like a uh it looked like some sort of jet engine
attached to the to the car itself and uh um and so often to the rain I go you
know I had I remove the mirror I put the mirror in the back seat of the car and I'm driving through the rain and I get
out as far east as I can but it's still raining and I'm racing uh the time when
the sun is going to be coming up and and uh so I go you know the heck with it I'm
going to to set up my telescope and I think it was a morning
uh uh situation and uh uh anyways I throw the mirror into
the telescope water's running down the tube uh the The Mirror's getting wet um
and uh you know my eye piece is getting soaked uh and I'm getting soaked and I
have two friends with me and we start looking up and guess what happens the
sky Parts just for a couple of minutes it makes a hole in the sky and it's CRA
it's it's it's framing H's Comet and I was able to see it of course it was some
blurry you know Distortion and stuff like that because of the water but I still see it and I think that that is
one of the most memorable cloudy night um uh or cloudy day uh uh apparitions
that uh that I can relate to you because um you know it was uh
um you know Against All Odds so I say get out there no matter what uh if if
you got an important observation to make and don't don't try to play it too
safe um I have um another uh video I'd
like to show you uh from now NASA let's talk about fossils not the
dinosaur remnants here on Earth but the galactic kind scientists recently found
one that's helping them understand Galactic Evolution just 13 million light
years from here is a Galaxy called NGC
4945 at its Center is a super massive black
hole it's surrounded by both a disc of gas emitting a lot of light and a bunch
of dust blocking much of that light the Galaxy is also in a phase of
evolution called Starburst where a lot of stars are being born near its
[Music] Center recently using
x-rays Isa xmm Newton telescope spotted a cloud of old gas in NGC
4945 the gas expands light years beyond the central part of the Galaxy and pokes
out into Intergalactic [Music] space NASA's chantra x-ray Observatory
helped study it too by looking at individual bright sources of x-rays within that
[Music]
cloud scientists think that the area of cold gas is a fossil of an eruption from
a black hole that happened about 5 million years ago that eruption may have caused the
Galaxy's burst of star formation studying Galactic change is
hard because it happens over such long time scales but by looking at lots of
examples scientists can piece together how galaxies like ngz 4945 and our Milky
Way of [Music]
fall so I just love the the videos and stuff that NASA produces um I think they
do just a amazing educational Outreach and a service to us all um I am uh
reading some of the chats uh that you guys are sharing uh uh live here with us
and uh uh Armando Lee is um uh watching
from uh the Philippines right now from Laguna Province and Luzan Island um but
uh uh marello who is our editor of Sky Up Magazine says that he wrote up a
fantastic article for this upcoming edition of Sky up so we'll have to give
that a nice read um I want to thank all of you that have been uh tuning in
tonight um I have uh another video here now this one is from the European Space Agency
about uh Jews
[Music]
[Music] we're looking at the flag control team
do their job so just just trying to analyze our faces
you know so as long as we don't see any ugly fa we're good four minutes and then
we will reconnect with the space trop after half an
hour the juice is right yeah just behind it's cool
huh actually it's right behind yeah yeah and then it's coming I think it on the
left side is coming weird to
imagine that's right there that I'm looking at it we okay not yet but in a few
[Music]
minutes 14 14
[Music]
om juice spon we can confirm we have [Music]
the set
[Music]
when you're in space and very busy after launch we check that the the spacecraft
and the payload were working nominally and during the cruise phase we checked that the the instrument are working
normally we check every six
months since the launch there have been several operations uh ongoing with the the payload in particular because this
is what we are really focusing on uh in the science Operation Center so we had the near Earth commissioning phase with
the instrument so just checking that all the instrument were running uh smoothly
and this lasted for like three months and then uh there have been some let's say more quiet phase uh in terms of
payload activities where the team has been starting to prepare the first payload checkout which is an activity
that takes place roughly twice a year where we check one by one that all the payload instrument are actually
performing nominally so the first one took place in January this year uh and
the second one is about to happen in uh the beginning of July so the first one went very smoothly and uh so we we we
spend the first part of let's say this year uh preparing for for the second one
that will take place now next
week so you have to imagine that we have a a suite of instruments and they're all
fighting for the resources of the spacecraft they all want to do uh their science uh they all want to use the
scars ding capacity that we have they want to use the scars uh Power uh that
we that we have as well in Jupiter so we need to make up a timeline of activities
and observations of the instruments so the main task when we are um around
Jupiter and and ganid will be to actually create these timelines in order to optimize the science Return of the
mission as much as possible and have everyone and every single scientist happy at the end
the Jupiter Tour is extremely complex not only from a spacecraft operations point of view but really from a science
operations point of view there is a lot of constraints that will uh be there when we'll be uh at Jupiter we have a
limited power available we have limited uh uh capacity to send data to to Earth
we have also radiation constraints we have pointing constraints so all of this
we need to to to to think about it already now so that we we are ready when
we arrived at Jupiter to operate all those 10 instrument together so we've been looking at uh where and how uh the
science opportunities actually distribute over the tour uh and try to understand which science objectiv should
have priority along the entire duration of the tour and uh based on this we also
check uh at a more detailed refined level that uh the operations of the
instrument to address those science objective are actually compliant with with with the constraints so this is a
very uh long and uh and time time consuming activities and more than
anything I think one very important aspect is that we need to learn to work together not only the science Operation
Center but the mission Operation Center in dad and also all the individual instrument teams so we need to learn how
to make concession because not all instruments will be able to work together at the same time and this is
something which is really a learning curve which takes a long time so I think the the the more than eight years of
cruise will will be uh will be good for
that so we're going to close to Theos to the uh estra ground
station and uh which is in the middle of the uh Countryside and there we we're
going to see the uh 35 meter dish of the main antenna in separators
I think I will have to go out of the
car I think okay they opening the
gate soon as we open the window
this picture is about the ISA tracking Station Network estra here currently we
are in seos gr station which is part of this network this is one of the deep
space gr stations the the other ones are in noria here in Australia and in Mal in
Argentina
it's also interesting to realize that it's really one of the part of the huge puzzle of the juice Mission so basically
it's not only the science Operation Center the mission Operation Center but it's also here I mean everything also go
through here so it's just the realization of uh what we think is
theoretical is like the fact that juic is a huge Mission which involves many many groups and many many places like
this one we move files around we we we work with
digital products and this is where actually those digital products become something physical and there's uh you
know in this in this Digital Signal it gets Uplink or down link there's traces
of the work that you know hundreds of people do including us and that's that's very nice I think it's a very good
reminder from time to time to you know uh get out of the box that we usually are in on our day-to-day routine work
we're going to start receiving the the Monitor and Camera images as well and
then after images so hoping hoping that that will go well
we looked at the the times where we had the best opportunities to have the most
interesting contextual images of the of the Moon because um so the the other
cameras the navcam the navigation camera and Janus the high resolution camera uh
the resolution is so high and we are restricted by how we can point the spacecraft in such a way that uh with
the higher resolution uh cameras we don't get a Conta of the fly we only see a tiny portion of the of the moon like
we see a tree in the forest whereas these monitoring cameras they have a a bigger feel of view and we see the
context better so we will be able to see almost the whole Moon also with the parts of the spacecraft so we're looking
forward seeing those hello and welcome to this live
stream from the European Space Agency my name is Josh and I'll will be your host this
evening where e says Europe space Operation Center in damat Germany and
we're excited to share the next roughly 30 minutes with you as our Jupiter icy moons Explorer spacecraft or juice for
short flies past Earth's moon it's returned to Earth this week to
carry out the first of the gravity assist Maneuvers that will give it the boosts it needs to make the
journey but this isn't just any ordinary gravity assist this is a special one juice isn't just getting a boost from a
planet it's getting a double boost from a moon and then a planet our moon and
our planet Earth right now as we speak juice has just passed its closest point to the
moon and we have begun to downlink images that it took as it passed from our deep space antenna in SOS Spain not
so far from
Madrid on the left of your screen uh you will see an animation that depicts where the juice spacecraft
is at this moment I'm joined this evening by ignasio the juice spacecraft
operations manager hi ignasio hi good evening Josh good evening you work here
at ESO indeed and you and your team fly juice is is a I'm the leader of the flight control team that's right so I
organize and coordinate the team that takes care of uplinking all the activities to the spacecraft monitoring
the Telemetry following up on on the execution of all activities on board that's right cool thank you we also have
Nico uh the juice Mission manager with us this evening yeah hi everyone so I'm Nico toell I'm working as a mission
manager of juice so this is a role when I try to take care of the entire Mission and making sure that everyone can do his
best job in the best conditions and finally last but not least we have Mark who is one of the
juice science operations Engineers good evening good after afternoon good morning wherever you
you're watching this from yeah thanks for the for the introduction in our team what we do is that we conduct science
operations and we facilitate the instruments to reach their science objectives and uh during the cruise
phase we're developing the systems uh that will end up implementing that during the nominal phase cool thank you
very much and thank you all for joining us this evening ignasio I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what
the juice flight control team will be doing this evening and then maybe also tomorrow evening just flight past us
okay so the flight control team first task is to ensure that the spacecraft is
safe and that it's able to perform all required activities so in during this
phase which is consider highly critical the main purpose of the flight control
team is to be ready to deal with any contingency and to react immediately so
we have been training for this uh event for months now and we have developed
special Pro procedures including uh very fast ways to recover the spacecraft
which are not the usual ways in which we would deal with a contingency but rather
accelerated timelines for contingency recovery that would allow us to bring the spacecraft back to a condition in
which it would be ready for example to perform an emergency trajectory correction if it was
necessary yes so we have uh um the first jmc2 image um on the screen and uh so we
still do not see um the moon which is expected uh for the acquisition time of this image and what you can see here
covering uh almost half of the image is the actual spacecraft these are monitoring cameras they they so their
focus was to actually monitor the spacecraft so half of the of what we will see in these images of jmc2 is
actually um the spacecraft we've got an an update so this is the first jmc1
image uh as expected it's also dark and actually I am not no no we can actually
see the moon already yeah that's the first time that we can see the moon uh with with juice so maybe Nico um if you
could run us through the primary science objectives of juice at Jupiter and it's
mysterious icy moons absolutely so we we are going back to to Jupiter so there were missions in the past going to
Jupiter but um ju is actually the first one that will not only go to Jupiter it
will orbit Jupiter for a few years and then become the first Orbiter of the N
Moon G and that's the first time we have um man-made object that will be orbiting
a moon which is not our own Moon the one that you're seeing tonight um and the
main objective of Jews in term of science is um I say first to study the iyon in their Global context of the
Jupiter environment um because what we want to understand is how those objects
that are made of a picture of ice and rocks um could evolve on a way that is so different from one another although
they were born in the same conditions and um by sending a spacecraft there we
will be able to um study at length with different instruments we have 10 instrument on board we'll be able to
study the different aspect of how the moon are composed um what is their
interior made of at gim will be able to make the real graphy of interor and
always always in relationship with the rest of the environment so to understand
Evolution I think we have nice images coming again see what we
got it will it might either be an nacam or a j JMC one so as you can see this is
the next image in sequence from what we had before so we're seeing more of the
Moon and I'm guessing that now images will be coming rapidly this is so what we see here is the last
image that we managed to get down on the new Nora station before hand over to SOS
of
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yes
that's same see one two that's one sorry
then yeah I mean you already see normal mode
yeah yeah no critic events nothing there only this Thal line which is a bit um cold very happy very surprised also
because it went super well and don't see anything it's like a normal pass like
nothing happened really seriously no events critical events no fail commands
no out of limits um we very well like like any other operation it's difficult
to imagine a more complicated uh gravity assist
because we had everything we have star trucker blindings and we had an eclipse and we had the the moon occultation
right before the closest approach and the the super tight um navigation
requirements so everything was just stocked up and in the end the spacecraft has been
incredibly well behaved super quiet flying you know super precise so it's
outstanding I'm really happy with the results
the overall flyby phase was about minus one months to plus one months with respect to the closest approach to Earth
so even though we see that we have very dense operation activities near um the moon minus one hour to plus one hour and
then near Earth so we started a few hours before Clos approach but actually operation extend up to three days the
instrument operations and then we will still have an opportunity to look at the
Earth in the moon on the 9th of of September saying Farwell until next time
and we will then officially close this phase around the 17th of September uh
when we switch off the uh ssmm memory and we go back to cruise phase
configuration um until the next event
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well that pretty much wraps it up for tonight uh thanks for tuning in to our
uh program for the global star party uh the cloudy nights Edition and uh we will
be back with more Global star parties our next one that we kind of have planned it's not completely all sorted
out yet but um we've got this uh bright Comet uh coming around uh as it rounds
the Sun and uh comet A3 I like to call it because it's easy to pronounce um but
um uh that will be for the Northern Hemisphere so we'll see it in the a in
the evening skies and I expect that we'll see you know if it doesn't get uh
uh damaged on its H close encounter with the sun um we've got a great chance of a
very very bright Comet so you want to get ready uh get those cameras out get
your telescopes out get your ban out and starting on October uh about
October 12th uh you know you can uh uh see uh some great views get some clear
skies uh so you can see towards the Western Horizon and um um you know you
can go to explor scientific.com comets and uh learn more about comets
and how to uh get a good view so uh thanks very much and you guys have a
great night and until next
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time e
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good day everyone this is David Levy that's me and I am holding the original
Discovery films of our most important comet Comet to make her leading nine
these films were taken on the 23rd of March 1993 Carolyn discovered the uh comet on
these films two days later and uh and done about 16 months
after that all of the fragments of this Comet collided with Jupiter giving
Humanity its first view of what happens when a comet hits a planet and uh
and one of the exciting things about this is that when comets hit planets they don't just drop uh dust they also
drop um organic materials uh carbon hydrogen oxygen and
nitrogen which eventually turn into proteins amino acids RNA and finally on
one magic day DNA comets Comet impacts are really the first step in the origin
of
life I'd like to invite all of you to uh to come to the next Global star party
they are run by Scott Roberts of the store scientific and me we we co-host this
program and uh it's usually done on Tuesdays and uh usually at six o'clock
or so Central Central Time and so I hope to
see you all there my name is David Ley I hope to see you all at the very
next Global Star Party
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