Global Star Party 16

Transcript:

i i like to zoom out there that that's uh keeps your attention
yeah it hypnotizes you i'm all about the hypnosis
this is where the embedded explore scientific ads are somewhere
that's right i thought he was gonna start asking for bank account information right here it's
it's actually sucking your money out of your bank account right now right right now
wow
okay let's see
[Music]
yeah that stuff the osiris-rex i don't know how many of you watched that but it was
really cool the big day for asteroid science now all
we have to do is wait two years three years
almost
uh
i thought it was just going to be a simulation you know i didn't know it was
because it was described in something as a simulation
but it was the real deal so
kind of amazing to watch it live
so the way this will go down is um we'll have david's david's on first here and then
uh david eicher i've got two david's here it's going to get confusing
okay then libby will be on then deepti got tom will be on and um uh
i was expecting dustin maybe to be already logged on but that's okay mike simmons is not going to be there so it
goes straight to you john um and then and then i one of the things i thought
was really cool the last the last one we did um is um
uh kelly beede kind of asked this um
you know big question about uh dark skies you know and we had kind of an open panel at the very beginning um
where uh there was some conversation uh between each other and um
you know and also from the audience and and then we went to a 10-minute break okay
so that i'd like to do that again um you know anybody can ask the big question i guess
or big questions and then we can spend um you know 10 or 15 minutes in open discussion
about that before we go to our break um eepty appeared yeah hi
hi deepti how are you all good hello deepti
hello adult odp how are you
oh good i'm fine i'm fine i love it
what so i'm gonna be right back guys okay
uh
this is the quietest green room i've ever heard in my life
well then okay i'll say something deepti back in the
1976 through 1977 my mom
was the united states ambassador to nepal so she was there for
well she was there for three years so it was
i never got a chance to visit her and then actually i wish i had i just couldn't put
the finances together to travel to see her when she was there but
she loves nepal her gift was to in that in that at that time
the king was still the king of nepal what she gave him for her present was a
satellite image of nepal taken from um a satellite and he was
just she said he was totally amazed to see the country from a satellite image back
in the 70s so that was pretty cool that's good
[Laughter] so as long as it was quiet i thought i'd mention that okay that's good
bob who appointed her ambassador harold ford president ford i see
i'm yep sure
[Music]
[Music]
okay hi libby how are you good how are you
i'm good
it's kind of cold here but the sky is clear and the moon looks beautiful
okay oh check out you is logging in already
more clouds just covered me oh yeah hey chuck how you doing
no audio no audio from chuck
i can hear you now hello
hello chuck hey
have a chug hello everyone
hello
so you got some good images of the sun today
i did for about five minutes before the clouds came in
big bright big dark sunspot on the sun today yes i captured it today and i captured it a
few days ago i think it's been there for about six days yeah it's been a while yeah
i think it's only the second spot i've captured all year though this solar minimum is driving me crazy
so chuck like right after we get through the opening
talks john goss will come on at the end of it
and do the door prize questions but
we were supposed to have mike simmons on before him and you can have his spot okay
okay so all right that makes it kind of perfect so sure um so it'll go like this so
it'll be david levy david eicher libby deepti okay
um uh you chuck uh and then john goss
and then we'll have kind of our open panel part of that and then we'll go to a 10 minute break after that
cool
are you exciting excited deep tea yeah i'm very excited that's very cool
[Music] we're excited to have you on
thank you it's exciting having another young person yes
we're going to try deep i think is going to do a three-part series with us so
is that right you'll be on next time and the time after that so you're welcome on anytime
thank you yeah i think you'll find that these are a lot
of fun i really look forward to them yeah we all do
lucas says he loves the es global star parties that's great
people are getting their astro astro cameras they're eating pizza
they're they're watching from
them
as we started to approach bennu from a distance and it started to fill up the camera field of view it looked exactly
like we thought it would with a few boulders sticking out but as we got closer we expected to see a very sandy
surface with maybe a few boulders here and there and what we saw is very little sand and we saw these
mountains we saw boulders we saw rocks and we saw very few areas that had this
sandy surface that we were expecting and what we had designed to
we have never done this before we're actually going to collect a sample and bring it back down to earth for
further examination by scientists in order to achieve that objective the
osiris-rex spacecraft has been navigating around bennu for about the last two years studying it in great
detail and also overcoming a number of challenges that bennu has presented we
were looking for locations on venue that were 50 meters in diameter relatively
flat and covered with fine-grained material and by fine-grained material i mean stuff that's the size of a dime or
smaller we realized that there were no sites on bennu that even came close to meeting this criteria everywhere we
looked was too small and covered with boulders so we actually had to fly a number of additional close passes over
the asteroid and rethink our entire plan for grabbing the sample
in december 2018 after traveling for two years 101 days in over 1.2 billion miles
nasa's osiris-rex spacecraft arrived at its target near-earth asteroid bennu
osiris-rex is the first mission to explore this primitive remnant from the origins of the solar system designed to
study the asteroid and return a sample to earth bennu is a dark diminutive world roughly
the height of a skyscraper and now the smallest body to be orbited by a spacecraft
prior to arrival it was known to have low thermal inertia a characteristic of fine-grained materials like sand
an infrared spectrometer on osiris-rex confirmed this property leading scientists to expect a predominantly
smooth surface but the first close-up views of bennu delivered a major surprise
in exquisite detail the mission's cameras revealed an unrelenting rockscape dominated by boulders
by combining these images from osiris-rex with its laser altimetry data we can take a tour of bennu's remarkable
terrain the first stop is simrig saxon this prominent boulder defines the
asteroids prime meridian and serves as the basis of its coordinate system
in persian mythology the symmerg is a large and benevolent bird and the possessor of all knowledge
saxum is latin for stone to the northeast lies the largest
boulderon bennu measuring over 300 feet in length rock saxon is a colossus
longer than a football field it is also rich in a type of iron oxide called magnetite which was used by
mariners as an early form of magnetic compass in arab folklore the rock is an
enormous bird of prey that can clasp elephants in its talons as well as stranded sailors like the hero sinbad
continuing northeast over the equatorial ridge we arrive at gargoyle saxon
this striking boulder is among the darkest on bennu though it clutches a much brighter rock that is about the
size of a person in medieval legend gargoyles are dragon dragon-like winged monsters that can
breathe fire and that guard cathedrals from evil spirits
our next destination takes us far to the east at the northern end of a small crater
lies acipity saxon a comparatively bright boulder measuring about 33 feet in diameter
oscipide saxon is located near one of three sites where bennu ejected small particles into space in early 2019
displaying its dynamic and evolving nature in greek mythology osipity is one of the
three harpies the half-maiden half-bird personifications of stormwinds who would
carry evildoers away from the earth [Music]
in the creation stories of ancient egypt the universe began as a formless endless
expanse of water from this primordial sea arose the primordial mound ben-bend
it was upon this rock that the god autumn settled in the form of the bennu bird and sent forth the call that shaped
creation the story of benben hearkens to the mounds of fertile silt that once emerged
from the receding flood waters of the nile and it provides a fitting namesake for the tallest boulder on bennu
protruding by over 70 feet benben saxon is so tall that it was first detected
from earth now we can appreciate this monumental feature in detail using data from
osiris-rex the final stop on our tour is a cluster
of exceptionally bright boulders scattered across the southern hemisphere they bear the spectral fingerprint of
pyroxene a mineral found in igneous rock that is unlikely to have formed on bennu
these boulders most likely originated on the large asteroid vesta and were delivered to bennu's parent body through
meteoroid impacts although it is small in size asteroid
bennu has proved to be a fascinating world abundant in geographic features
that have defied our expectations thanks to osiris-rex we can now explore
bennu to uncover its composition its evolution and its ancient memories from
the origins of the solar system
[Music]
these next two videos are don't have audio with them
this one shows the orbit and the point where they tagged
asteroid benna
the visualization stuff that they do at nasa is incredible
wolfgang in germany wants to know why they didn't just bring down the whole asteroid
i put this little video together [Music]
[Applause]
well hello everybody this is scott roberts with explore scientific and this is the
explore alliance presentation of the global star party in
fact this is our 16th global star party and we have um we have a bunch of people already with
us today uh i'll introduce them all here to my right is richard grace also known
as the astro beard he's going to be doing astrophotography we have 10 year old libby and the stars she's with us uh
her talk will be about saturn we have david levy um
he will be opening giving the opening talk and some poetry and doing what only
david levy can do robert uh bob denney is joining us uh bob is uh he he always tells me that
he's he's not one of the astronomers but he's done so much for the astronomical community so
we love to have him on uh david j eichert uh editor-in-chief of
astronomy magazine is with us uh for a 17-part series uh that is going to amaze
and give you a new look at the universe john
goss who is with the astronomical league former president of the astronomical
league will be covering our door prizes and they the
astronomical league is the official sponsor of the explorer alliance in our door prize uh program
deepti gatam she is from nepal she's 16 years old
she is very enthusiastic about astronomy and space exploration and is forming uh or has formed an
astronomy club in her own high school so that's excellent chuck ayub
astrophotographer out making astrophotographs today of the sun and so he's going to show those
share those with us and jerry hubble's with us too we have other people who'll be logging on later but
let's go ahead and get started with uh with david david i'll give you the stage i do want to say um as i always say i'm
we are so fortunate to have him on our program he's been on every one of the global star parties uh
uh and um he is someone that we always love to hear from uh
and he always makes me feel uh the way that uh you should feel before you look
up and explore the cosmos so david i will give you the stage
well thank you scotty and and welcome to the global star party
number 16. we've we have a large number of people here today
some of us are very young and from libby who is only 10
to and uh some of us are very old like me and but we have
just about everybody in between i'd like to welcome you all to our global star
party but unlike any other star party i've been to this one literally took us off the earth
into space out to the asteroid venue where we
watch the actual pickup of a sample of material that will be brought back to
the earth in a couple of years soon people will be able to put their hands on material from the asteroid
venue there's so much that has happened in my time over astronomy it's pretty hard to
to know where to begin but i can begin on 1965 when i saw my first comment which
was kamen akaseki a beautiful beautiful sun grazing comet
discovered discovered by kaoru aka and sanseki and a few weeks after that
isabel williamson told me about a wonderful book that had just arrived in the library and oh i had to read that
and our 11th grade teacher had told us that we are supposed to write a book
report and i thought what a wonderful book to write a report on i'll read
two chapters a night and i'll finish it in two weeks and then i'll be able to write the report in a couple of days and
it'll be done it'll be a nice assignment i sat down started to read it
there was a chill in the autumn air and i was hooked first sentence i was absolutely hooked
i had to sit there and read the entire book in one setting there is so much i could share with you
about that but i think the best way is to remember leslie peltier's feeling
about the night sky time he writes has not lessened the age-old allure of the comets
in some ways their mystery has only deepened with the years and each return a comic brings with it
the questions which were asked when it was here before and as it rounds the sun and backs away
towards the long slow night of its appealing it leaves behind with us those
questions still unanswered no one would think that's all he has to say about that but it isn't
he continues to hunt a speck of moving haze may seem a strange pursuit
but even though we fail the search is still rewarding for no better way can we come face to face
night after night with such a wealth of riches as old crosses never dreamed of
that was a book i've never forgotten i think i've read it many times since then i've used it in the books that i have
written freely quoted from it in books that i've written since then
but it really is such an inspiring book i remember finally getting my dad to
read it and dad could read a book and two or three days because he was a very
rapid reader like president kennedy was and when he finished it he came into my
room holding the book in his hand and he said you've given me a lot of books to show
you how to do astronomy and i've enjoyed them all this one tells you why
and this is the best one and i i wish dad we're here now to be
able to enjoy what we're doing via zoom right now and facebook and
everywhere else to be able to go into space and collect material from an asteroid
two nights ago i was out observing at a st at a remote site with a friend of
mine david rossiter and uh as we were about to close up
i wanted to show him ngc 6709 we moved the telescope over
to ngc 6709 and he looked at it he said yeah i can see it and i said well if you look up
toward the top around oh about one o'clock can you see three stars
and he looks he says yeah i do they're kind of in a straight line although not really a straight line i
said yeah you got him the reason i wanted to show you that david was that 36 years ago
that's where i discovered my first comment right next to ngc 6709
and the night last night i went to another observing site with another friend tim hunter
and i showed him the same the same site it was really been
incredible i've been observing the night sky since 1960
and i'm really pretty good at a number of things but one of the things that i am not good
at is astrophotography i took a picture of mars the other night
that i'm proud very proud not to show you because even though the telescope was an
absolutely perfect focus this the thing that appeared in the camera is absolute smudge
zero detail nothing on it a flop i can do a lot of things but photography
ain't one of them sorry about that i cannot take a picture
but there are some things i can do i can find comets 22 of them so far
and occasionally i can quote prose and poetry so i'm going to end tonight
with um with a quote and it goes like this our fondness for
the stars has touched our souls we all share the feeling of discovery
whether the object we have found is new to all or new only to us
that thrill penetrates our being as we try to describe through drawings
photographs or words how we have been changed by a universe
sharing a secret with us thank you very much and back to you david scott yes thank you thank you very
much all right i
am very pleased to introduce our next speaker this is
someone that's been a friend of mine for i'm sure over 20 years uh maybe maybe
going on 25 years maybe longer um it also you know in in our in our
community uh everything seems to go so quickly we have so many amazing
experiences you know whether we're going to
special programs special star parties uh whether we're
observing uh something amazing in the sky or whatever but uh
you know it's it is uh it is the people that you meet
in the astronomical community that makes such a huge difference i think for all
of us there are very few things that you could get involved with
as an average person and i certainly would consider myself just to be an average person
you get to meet scientists you get to meet astronauts you get to meet
amazing people that have made a huge impact on astronomy and one of these people is david j eiker david
jayaker uh has had this um passion for astronomy and this vision of
of sharing that with the world and he started that um at a fairly young age um
uh going all the way back to 1982. i still consider him he's he's
almost my age but i still consider myself to be young so um
david started with deep sky magazine in 1982 he
made a it was a very successful magazine which eventually i believe got sold
and david then went on in 2002 to become
one of the editors of astronomy magazine he is now editor-in-chief of astronomy magazine
and he has affected millions of people on the planet with his programs his writing
his magazine his 23 books and maybe counting
and uh we're so happy to have him here and i'm so happy to consider him as a friend because uh
uh he is very approachable and uh can explain uh the most uh complex inner
workings of the universe uh to a level that almost anybody can understand it and to me that's a mark of
genius so i'm going to give you the stage david thank you for coming on
thank you scott it's a pleasure to be with you i think it's been even longer than than uh that we've known each other
and and it's good to be with an old friend uh you and also a very old friend
david good to be with you as well and always inspiring all of us so profoundly david
um so i want to talk over the next few weeks about some subjects in astrophysics and this is really a golden
age of astronomy as we saw today uh really astronomy astrophysics cosmology
and planetary science a very big day happened today with planetary science and exploration and
we'll have a sample of this asteroid bennu uh three years from now we hope on
earth this is really kind of symbolic of this age we're in
we're in an age of golden uh discovery i would say and an age when we're really getting the
answers to some of the big big fundamental questions that we've had as people for a long long time about the
universe and what it's about and where we are and why we're here and it goes back really
something like longer than we can almost imagine something like seven million years
i would say to our earliest ancestors the the plains of central africa uh in
in a country that's now chad in the modern world uh seven million years ago
the earliest hominids that we know of walked earth they were the first bipedals
perhaps they were sahilanthrapus as they're called now um
and you have to wonder as they shuffled around hunting moving around going back
to their caves to their shelter at night if they looked upward and saw
the moon and saw the other twinkling lights in the sky and maybe wondered what this was all about and this kind of
search of what we're all about and where we are in the universe has gone on ever
since it's an amazing thing of course for us to wonder about the universe and to
study it and have the last generation of tremendous breakthroughs of understanding the cosmos
because we're made of the cosmos of course as our good pal carl sagan used to say the simplest lightest elements
chemical elements were generated in early in the history of the universe in the
process of big bang nucleosynthesis most all of the heavier atoms that
literally the atoms are that are in your bodies our bodies were made uh in
the explosions in the deaths of massive stars a supernovae and of neutron stars and of
other stellar deaths so we're made of generations of literally the atoms
that came out of this glorious galaxy that we're in and we're beginning to really understand in great detail
um so i'll be talking about some discoveries uh i think uh scott
mentioned 16 of them plus a little introduction tonight over the coming weeks and we'll have a lot of fun i hope
talking about where we are what we really know a lot of people are sort of anxious to leap onto
science fiction if you will so we'll talk about things like can you actually travel through a black hole and
end up in another place in time in the cosmos and all kinds of fun like that
which we actually know a lot about now human knowledge of the heavens though of
course came very very slowly at first it's a difficult a complex
process we had the earliest evidence that we have of astronomy if you will comes from calendars and monuments from
uh history and and into the edge of pre-history the first sort of
evidence of analytical thinking about uh calendars about planting and so on of
course came from the earliest uh farmers so about 12 000
years ago in in what we now call the fertile crescent in the middle east is where people stopped having to
constantly look for food as their daily majority activity they could settle down they
could plant and they could uh build what eventually became communities and cities
and this is when we had time to spend uh this effort with our minds to think
about why we're here so uh some of these earliest and most
famous and most interesting sites that we talk about and think about stonehenge other neolithic
sites bronze age monuments are not really observatories properly
per se but they do convey a knowledge of the heavens and of stellar alignments and so on uh and
well over the last 2 000 years or so essentially we've lived with astronomy
being married to astrology as all of the sciences began to analytical thinking
began to uh be on the rise and eventually leading to what we think of as real science uh
it was mired really of course in intuition in in interpreting dreams and in
uh you know uh shortcuts to a reality and this was true of course of all
the sciences uh uh chemistry and alchemy for example we never found a good way to turn lead
into gold and we never turn found a way to tie uh when people were born to the events
in their lives but eventually going backwards as we've done at times
in history not trying to set you up for a comment about anything that's going on right now
but out of the middle ages which was a very unproductive period of course came this incredible renaissance and we had
this explosion of knowledge a return to some of the wisdom of greek and roman
times and this renaissance of course was centered in florence italy in the 14th century and led to an
explosion to to follow with da vinci and others around europe to thinking
very clearly and analytically about the world around us
that rebirth was really a humanist driven effort it was artistic really uh
predominantly uh it was moneyed it was it was financed in a big way for people
to explore the world around them and to interpret it and it laid
really the foundation for the ideas that would lead to modern science
and we'll jump ahead slightly now to a different city in italy padua
and galileo galilei who many have argued with really was
fundamentally the first modern scientist in the world well he was certainly an
observationalist an experimentalist as well and one night uh he was panicked uh in
the fall of 1609 because he was a teacher he was a mathematician
and a natural philosopher and a physicist if you will and what's common with teachers with
educators everywhere and always has been they need money
so galileo was taking people into his house boarding them in his house
educating them thinking of all the inventions that he could with his incredibly clever mind
and one of the things that he thought about and on for a long time
was using the newfangled lenses that his friends had made to magnify objects
well in the fall of 1609 he was horrified galileo stunned away from his
home city heard that there were simple magnifying telescopes for sale on the
street in paris this was something he wanted to invent and make his fortune with so he was
stunned horrified heard about what these things were like the parisian
instruments rushed back to padua to his workshop and from what he had heard about these
devices independently invented what we know as the galilean telescope in a
weekend in his padua workshop so genius was at play uh coming out of
that renaissance and as we know now at the end of 1609 and early 1610 he
observed the moon and found that it was imperfect with a crazy banged up surface uh he
observed the milky way and saw that it was made of innumerable stars he saw phases of venus
over time which was really uh good evidence for the copernican system
which got him into trouble later on and of course this miniature solar system of moons orbiting jupiter that also was he
felt philosophical evidence for that and he also published all of those of course in his great book the starring messenger
so we had then the birth of modern science that led to newton and maybe the
greatest book ever written the principia mathematica later came herschel the herschels and
others and the era of incredible a widespread discovery in the sky
by the time of the 19th century we had science blossoming to amateurs and the
largest telescope in the world for much of the 19th century was an amateurs
william parsons the third earl of ross in ireland up to the time of mount wilson
and then of course by the end of the 19th century we had the birth of astrophysics
and the discoveries by einstein theoretically of a modern universe and
how the cosmos worked not in a simple newtonian way but in a relativistic
complex way and we also had modern telescopes like the hooker telescope at mount wilson and
hubble and slifer and others making the discoveries of the expansion of the
universe the big bang and so on so that's how we got to where we are uh
it's it's a long story and we need to remember that uh it started out being
very primitive and became more complex science is a self-correcting process we
add more knowledge to it over time we understand things in a more complex way
and we'll explore i hope over coming weeks a lot of interesting subjects and what we know about them now
from how the sun will die to the future of earth to our galaxy in its structure to the
great mysteries of today like dark matter and dark energy and the fate of the universe and all sorts of other
fundamental properties and crazy stuff so thank you scott for the thank you
here that's a very quick run through um how we got to where we are
and we'll explore anything it's amazing it could cover so much history in such a short
amount of time so that's that's um but that's awesome thank you very much david we're looking
forward to uh your your next um talk and uh you know where we continue
on with this voyage to the uh evolution of the universe so very cool
our next our next uh uh speaker is uh ten-year-old libby in the stars libby
how many times have you been on this show so far um
i think it's been around 12 8 12.
yeah so that's a lot a lot of uh a lot of talks here okay so um i'm gonna give
you the stage uh libby uh when i first met libby she was such an
inspiration uh you know any time that you see someone that is young that is their mind's on fire with uh
interest in science uh and astronomy it gets it gets us all very excited and
it's it's an inspiration to people of all ages and you know so we know that you have uh
you'll have an interesting life ahead of you uh but i'm amazed that you're you're
stepping up to uh share what you know and your enthusiasm that you have
with a with our global audience and uh so i'm going to give you the stage you
you sent me a photograph that we can show at any time so you let me know yeah
so we have i've been doing the seven part series of the solar system
and i'm now on saturn which is surprising i made it so far
um i wanted to talk about saturn because it's the next planet in the solar system it is also
the one of the most interesting ones because it has so many unique qualities
and amazing identities that just defies it from every other planet in our solar system
and i was researching about the rings because i was wondering
what are these made of and i kind of came together to the conclusion
of that jupiter kind of having its own little mini solar system and
i was thinking saturn might have tiny rocks that just make up the rings and
it's in orbit so i was looking at that and um just a second ago we were talking
about the scientist galileo galilei i think that's how you pronounce it his
name is a tongue twister um but he discovered
jupiter and its biggest moon titan which i was also surprised how much nasa has
paid attention to looking at the moon titan because it's obviously going to be part
of saturn's rings and it's saturn's orbit and
i was looking at that and i thought that was amazing because nasa has sent
satellites and i was looking at the chart of flyby missions and they've obviously probably sent more to tied and
then to saturn um jupiter has 82 not
saturn has 82 moons and its own it's almost a little bit
it's more than jupiter so that's surprising because as always like jupiter has so many moons but it's
saturn and i was also researching and and i found this
sound so i found this cool sound and it's of the
auroras on saturn and i showed it to my friend and she said i dare you to listen
to that at the dark so i'm going to try playing it from the computer that's right next to my microphone
[Music]
[Music] so
i found that and i was obviously surprised that was terrifying
and then i thought about if nasa will one day when they send astronauts to
orbit um orbit then i will be terrified honestly
hearing that 24 7 i mean that could scare you and then you
realize that it's just a planet and you're like oh it's all fine it's all fine it's all fine
no horror movie here um so i was looking at the uh auroras
and it is just like our southern lights and northern lights and i was kind of
getting the idea of what it looked like and i found some pictures at the top of
saturn having a little aurora and it was gorgeous and i thought that was like amazing because
any like anytime someone thinks of saturn they're not gonna notice they're gonna notice the rings they're not gonna
be like oh jupiter's not jupiter saturn's aurora is amazing like
it's mind-blowing to think that people don't actually look at it and they just pay attention to the rings all the time
and down on earth we have gravity so when we jump we come down i mean that's obvious
science but on saturn there is more gravity so you come down faster and usually when i
think about space i think about floating mid air but you would actually be stuck to the
ground because there's so much weight pushing down on you and
i was kind of like comparing jupiter and saturn i know i've been doing this like a lot of the talk but i've been
comparing them because also they both have clouds and they're gorgeous
and i have this art piece that i made here and i had lots of fun making it oh wow
it's a picture of saturn and i had lots of fun just making the clouds and everything and i was kind of
thinking of the person who was on there before she had all this pretty arts and it was mythical and magical and some of
it was serious and i was originally gonna do mars and my art teacher said
i don't know what mars looks like and uh i was like who does not know what mars looks like
like the red planet and i was like well my saturn is coming up so i made that
and it was super fun to make let me ask you a question libby uh you
you sent me a photograph of mars uh is this is this first uh is this your first
photo of mars ever or excuse me saturn um
it is not my first photo it is my first photo but it it it's
my first photo of it but i viewed saturn many times before with my small two inch
telescope and i've never and i've been like whoa that's pretty cool but with
this new telescope i put on the smallest lens because i was afraid it would get it out of
picture and i just wanted to get a picture because i was so amazed to be able to see the rings and how kind of
like it had that flat shape to it because of the rings
i'm going to share my screen so that i can show them the image that you did now this is not a high magnification
image um no you really have to look you really have to look huh so let's uh
let me change my view here okay
and um uh let's see
i don't have to share my screen i just have to share but i was so amazed because i'm used to
my 10 inch telescope i'm used to my two inches and when i looked through it i was like whoa
here we go kind of hard to do it backwards but right there there's a little white dot
okay and so i'm going to bring this up more full screen for them all right so um
but what you can see is that this this white dot is a slight oval you can see
the rings of saturn how did you make this image libby so
i know it's not like a high magnification image but out my two inch telescope i looked
for that and all i saw was a dot like no oval just a dot and i thought that was stunning as being
a person like my first telescope and being like wow that's saturn but it
doesn't look like it and then with my ten inch telescope i viewed saturn and i was like whoa that's
amazing i was like that is amazing i was like it's stunning but now that i look
at it and i'm getting like better pictures every day i'm like yeah it could have been more high magnification
well next time so yeah later on in the global star party you'll have to show
people uh beginners how to make their first astrophotographs
with their smartphone so that'll be very cool that'll be very cool uh do you have anything that you
want to wrap up about uh about your talk so i've also found this interesting
um so whenever i take a picture from the phone
like i will uh like there's this little spot of light for the telescope and that's what show
that's what's showing um that is what is showing like the image of it
so like this little light piece and you have to kind of move your camera perfectly
right and you have to slide it up and down up and down and there's this thing called the sunlight slider and you have
to tap you have to tap to start and then you have to slide it down
and it took me a while to learn this but me my mom used to go out at night during
summer and we would chase the moon trying to find good pictures and i learned how to
do the saddle the sunlight slider so i was able to just slide it down and you'll get to see
some of the better like better quality it's not so it kind of takes away from the sunlight
so it's kind of like a star shade but on your phone so you're able to just slide that down
and then you'll get some um i was looking at jupiter one night is
trying to get a good photo and if you slide it down a lot then you're able to see some of
jupiter's clouds like if there's one major red cloud then you're able to see
it thank you so much that's it's harder with a cell phone definitely it's not
professional but it is able to do it if you're an amateur astronomer like me
wonderful awesome thank you very much libby that's great okay um
we are uh we love to have young people um
share their enthusiasm and knowledge about uh about astronomy um
and uh you know we uh occasionally run into someone that's
extraordinary um i was um uh looking over messages in facebook and i
have i have a lot of people that um send me a friendship request and if i see they're
interested in astronomy and space exploration i certainly will uh add them
right away one of those people is deepti gatom and dt uh
is a young astronomer from nepal um
she uh has been interested in astronomy since a very
young age maybe in elementary school uh her her first inspiration were the
planets i think that she has a special affinity for jupiter
and you know sometimes sometimes young people have a fascination for
a short time when they have a fascination that arches over years
you know that this is something that's really having an effect on them and uh is something that uh
is uh giving them as as deepti said a certain kind of power and uh
so i'm um i'm very happy to have her on it's very early in the morning in nepal and uh
uh so we we thank you for coming on you you have our stage now dt
all right and you're you are muted there we go hello everyone i am
a high school student of 16 years high school student from nepal and i am very interested in astronomy
since when i was 9 i just getting interested attraction to others
astronomy when the first first teacher has taught about the planet and i just
want to know more about this planet and i just asked my teachers more about the planet and he just said to me what's the
planet about the earth or the mars about the jupiter but i was just influenced by
the jupiter and i started to imagine the life in the jupiter that i could make it
possible i'm just dreaming that i will go to the jupiter with my my rocket
just making it possible life there by taking a certain number of oxygen certain
number of water and that was my imagination and that just when i remember my imagination when i remember
my imagination it's just it is just one of the part of my strength to be just
working in the field of astronomy it gives me strength so i have prepared
some of this presentation here and i like to share my screen yep go ahead
yeah okay yeah
yes first of all i just want to start it with the astronomy and this i have said
i have the i have i have make this i have get the attraction of the astronomy when i was
nine so i just want to say it is the one of the addiction for me
i just want to introduce it's it's the addiction for me yeah and here talking
to the importance of astronomy we are just familiar about the importance of astronomy but i have presented here some
of the importance of astronomy that i think okay
yeah yes i have mentioned that significance of astronomy just i like it
it's promote the rational thinking in understanding of nature of science yeah
it's understanding nature of science it helps to just mainly concept of physics sources gravitation like spectra and etc
it has significant role in nation development and it helps to promote enthusiasts cozy life and willing to do
something unique like us like us youth people are just want to be involved in
just a unique thing unique things attract the youth and others too
yeah in in context of nepal this nepal is an agricultural country and it is a
small country which is which has lots of lots of mysterious place which hasn't
been explored itself so by the help of astronomy we can improve
the feel of agriculture and by detecting that by the help of satellite we can improve the field of
agriculture in nepal and just i just have said our country has
our country is just small but not explore it completely so we can use for
military purpose detecting the different mysterious places and we can use the astronomy to
protect us protect us from different other countries the support protection we can
use the astronomy and we can detect the disaster early this nepal has lots of
chance of disaster frequently this flood glacier etc so we can detect the
disaster early and make the people a lot and this astronomy is just going to have this
overall development of the nation we the nepal is the developing country so it's helping in the overall development of
nation yeah and just talking to this importance and here are the some of the organizers which are
highly working for the prosperous of the astronomy okay yeah here is
the first i want to talk about the nepal astronomical society nasu which is a nepal astronomical society
which is highly working for this promoting astronomy for the youth people like us
for the teenager like us this is bring the many opportunities to the high school level university level of
students to provide more opportunity and here this next is my for my ambition is
to support astronomy massabes person and bitcoins per size the place of nepal and
here this organization is also working very efficiently and we have the astronomer club nepal and and similarly
we have bipi coidola memoriam with plantation observatory and science museum and it has been on this uh it has
been established just four years ago and this is the first planetarium of nepal
yeah and they're talking about the opportunity we just get in the nepal is this nepal
that is not astronomical impaired this weekend nepal's
nepal astronomical society call it take the examination and take the
uh they examine us and take certain number of people to the international olympiad to participate
and here we have all nepal esther resource campaign this all level is i'm
individually i have participated in this uh campaign for two months continuously for two months it's just it's just very
interesting to finally find this asteroid by using of the software
for us yeah and here we have the nasa space app
channel international space app challenge i have participated in the uh i have participated individually by with
my some of the frame in the translate specific challenge it has given us a very large a very boring idea this is
given all this it makes the people very interesting to all the astronomy about this space about
the it's we are good for this episode and we have collected a lot of information that helped us
very much yeah here is the next program which is
that is solar observation with that a certain number of organization used to uh certain number of organization he
used to uh have used to make the solar observation program for the student like
us to promote more promote astronomy field in nepal
okay in here it is the night sky observation as many people of the the
people certainly now organization used to uh make the program of a night sky
observation and invited a lot of students a lot of high school level student is like me there are all there
are a lot of people who are just interested in astronomy and want to do something
so this organization just they have the program like this to
promote this to know me and here it is here's the first satellite of nepal
which has been which has been launched on 17th april 2019 just been a one a year and
it has it was it was launched to support that country who has never seen their satellite in space and it has for the
other mission that is uh lora demonstration mission imaging missionary and software configurable back plane
mission and altitude determination and controversy and this is the first satellite of nepal which was made by
nepalese scientist uh named afas masque in hariram's register
yeah and here is the ground station of nepal said one nepal that one was made
in the japan institute of technology institute of technology so this is the
picture of the ground station where it is it lies in the japan and it is the
garnish to send that lies into nepal yeah and talking about the first first
planetarium of nepal this here is the picture and here is the summer picture of the cliff of the first
planetarium of nepal that is a pokhara planetarium in science center it
is the first planetarium of nepal and yeah this is the this is the 65
just it indicates the mountain in our flag but here is the planetarium which
is helping you to promote astronomy in nepal
and here are some of the student club which are working for the astronomy and science promoting astronomy and science
and this is my my own organizing astronomy enthusiast in nepal which i have been founding so i'm just
one month ago and we have conducted the uh uh we have contacted the quiz competition uh quiz competition for the
space week world space week and we have conducted we have successfully conducted our first
webinar in the to the uh this uh focusing to the as just to the beginner
to make them interested to our the astronomy we have conducted and fixed initiative of nepal and i am personally
the general member of the physics initiative in nepal and here is the sos astronomic club and my friends are
working very efficiently in the sas astronomic club inviting the mentors inviting the person and who are just
working in the field of astronomy to promote us and to give us some of the knowledge extra noise
yeah and we dreams yeah and it's like personal to explore this space explore
the this and nepal nepal also wants nepal also plan rocket to the moon rocket to
this look into the space they all just want to explore i just and personally i just
want to explore the explore the space i just want to first of all i just want to explore the jupiter
okay and here's some of the pictures that this that's so of our dreams so of
my imagination that you're just thinking about the star moon and the
space exploration that we can do but we if we work like this we can
see early we can start to be successful in this space mission too yeah here here's the here's the photo of
the astronaut and here is the photo of the it's observatory a large observation we just have one planetarium it is not
enough to all the students because i seems personally i seems a person being
interested in astronomy as a large number of students are being interested
in astronomy the sky the twinkling star the moon this
the whole the universe attract a lot of people and at last i just have ended my
presentation by this a very beautiful condition that remember to look up at
the star and not down at your feet try to make sense of what you see and wonder
about what makes the universe exist be curious and however difficult life is
seems there is always something you can do and so it it matters that you don't
just give up and this organize this course just give me the strength to just
look up the sky not with my feet so it's give me the strength not to give
up and according to the nepal nepalese poetry and this he has just said that
what to take as a dream what to take is a dream just take the dream to toss the moon in this sun
so that gives a lot of strength that's that he just give that just imagine that take the dreams of the
high level so you can just go up off of this normal level and just you
can try to toss the sky and that moon in outside in this in the sky and
yeah and here's me thank you wow uh dt uh
our audience is uh very inspired by your um by your
presentation um here let me take there we go uh excellent um
deepti uh this is the first time you've been on our program and um uh
just uh i really we want to thank you very much for for being part of this uh
the uh there are people jeff wise says what passion amazing okay
it is it is wonderful to uh to hear you know your words and and your uh
your level of enthusiasm is incredible i do have a question though
you uh you've been interested in astronomy all this time has most of your knowledge
come from books from other people did you have a mentor
no just uh i'm not interested by the book yeah first of all i just want to say i am
inspired by it by the flavors about the planet yeah but uh i just uh explored
using my social media just i did i did not use much more social media when i was in school level high school level
but this i used to i asked i used to ask the device with my
mother and i just explored i just want to explain the source about the astronomy and gain the knowledge and i
just i just have a lot of plan and i'm just implementing now in the first of all i have just made an
organizations and i will be taking a lot of program for the other people's who just
to promote the astronomy first of all just we have to promote the astronomy beside the thinking or thinking about
especially mission first of all uh we should have to call it our capitals and this we have to
make a balance first of all balance by step to estate so just i have
i have just started my organizations and i will be working like this and i just
hope i can make my dreams successful well we hope it will as well you have started your
own astronomy club in your high school is that right yes
and you belong to a local astronomy club in nepal yeah
what is that club the astronomy enthusiast in nepal and i am the
um and i am to the general member of the uh being that is physics in the state of
nepal which is working very high very efficiently to promote the astronomy uh to attract the youngest
like us and there is i'm the personal member of the izp that is initiative for
girls in physics so i'm working there and i have just uh i'm being a member of
three organizers now and uh just personally i will working
by personally i want this one to work for personally also and for with my
organization along with my friends wonderful wonderful um
do you use a telescope do you have access to a telescope no i didn't have access to the telescope
i just i have the interest in the astrophotography too so i use my
gadget to click the photo the sun rises because the sun rises in the department
is just beautiful it's this a beautiful view in the sunrise of nepal the hills
you know that makes the very interesting so i just take the
photo of this sunrises sunset and the moon blooming in the sky
and this brighter sky brighter star that is when someone's jupiter
pictures saturns i just clicked their photo with my uh mobile and
i yeah i used to click and i haven't i do not have the telescope but uh after this
lockdown i'm just personally going to buy this telescope wow okay well maybe
maybe um with your club and the help of some other people in our
community we can help get make that possible for you so
gosh dp thank you so much for participating uh tonight uh you're welcome to stay
uh uh i think that maybe uh what time is it there now in nepal it is 6 49 a.m 6 49
okay you might have to be getting ready for school i would imagine so no no it's uh
our classes in just in [Music] time one two three okay yeah okay so you you can stay
you can stay with us and watch the rest of these talks and these other presentations we really really do
appreciate it and uh i'm looking forward to having you on next week so that's going to be great
thank you thank you thank you all right so um um our next um uh talk will be
actually presentation talk uh uh experience we'll be with uh chuck ayoo
chuck is uh known throughout the amateur and maybe the professional
astrophotography communities as one of the top astrophotographers around he
uh has run i don't know how many presentations but manny
on youtube and is followed by thousands of people who want to learn astrophotography
chuck lives in detroit he's literally blocks away from downtown detroit and does amazing stuff from his
backyard uh he uh his program is called chuck's astrophotography on youtube you should
watch it uh it's excellent and uh he always throws in some outtakes and some
bloopers and stuff that that are always uh great but um chuck i'm gonna give you the stage
uh i know that you were um making some images of the sun today
yes i was i was hoping to do some imaging tonight but we've had nothing but rain the past few days but at least
uh i had about five minutes of clearing to capture the sun so let me show you what the sun is
looking like today okay if i can share my screen here i just hit this green button
let me see i always that's the green button at the bottom yeah and i just say share
let's see there we go you see my whole screen yep all right well this is my imaging rig
when i do solar and when i want to get close on the sun this is my explorer scientific ar102
and i actually bought this scope from doug screwball you may know doug scott oh yeah for sure
and i have um a daystar quark on the end of it plus an asi 183 camera
and let me show you what the sun was looking like today i wanted to get out and try some imaging
um this is the raw video um there was a massive prominence but very faint yeah i would say this was
about maybe three or four earths high yeah a giant plasma storm that's why i
was in a hurry to get out there in an image before the clouds came yeah that was pretty big and let me show
you beautiful yeah but it was very faint and i couldn't really get the detail on it but that was still getting hazed but
this is my attempt at trying to process it but i i just couldn't get a clear enough picture of it so
maybe it will still be there tomorrow maybe i'll have a few minutes of clear skies so it still looks amazing i like that
that's so much fun it's always fun seeing something live that's my new thing lately
you have to sort of go for hours or days but when you're doing solar system objects you get that live look
right and right here there's also a sunspot this is another live view of the sunspot
right here and that's been lingering on the sun for about six days now yeah and i saw it when it was way over
on the edge and it's just working its way across the sun
and it looks like the sun's getting step-by-step more active i hope so because i tell you the truth
this has been the worst year yet since i've been doing solar imaging for the past three years so it's gotten worse but i hope we're
coming out of it yeah i hope so too and this is the same sunspot um i captured a
few days ago and there's a close-up view oh there's some that's nice look at that so it's
just fun when there's something happening and um i was playing around
with my es127 and i did some uh lunar imaging which i
i don't do a lot of but uh let me let me zoom in on this it's really uh i think this is one of my
most detailed shots of the moon yet i love seeing those craters i like the
color the moon too yeah i was playing around with the color in pixel setting yeah
yeah and that's all i've got to share i wish i was doing some live stuff but i have
nothing well it had a lot you had a lot that's that's beautiful i mean
you know you gave us the sun and the moon today so yeah and
the images of that prominence were really incredible so
it was fun to see today i wish it was a little bit more clear to get a better more crisp view of it right right well
well next time okay next time that's great thank you chuck that's correct
okay so um um our uh our next uh uh guest here is uh
is uh john goss and john is uh former president maybe have you been
more than one-time president john you are muted
no i just i was president from uh when 2014 to 2018
2000 so that's two terms i guess i have been president twice right you uh uh but you've been around the
league for a very long time uh doing all kinds of things i remember many astronomical league conferences you
were always there and you know i know that you are someone
that is always very supportive very enthusiastic about anything
that helps to diffuse more information about astronomy you take
the awards programs and the recognition programs very seriously with the with
the league and you're always someone that uh
you know i always found to be uh you know a rock of dependability okay at the
league as well so now if that i don't know if that means that you didn't want to leave or what but i i
would tell you that uh you know my own personal observation of
you and the league is that uh uh you're someone that is uh critical to the uh inner workings of the
of the of the organization and um you know and you're still
still there so it's it's great and i'm glad that you're on tonight thank you what can you tell us currently
about about the astronomical uh well
before i do that i want to thank you for that the nice introduction you make me sound pretty serious and i'm not really
that serious i know you have a good sense of humor
um go ahead
that's all see you're not too serious either that's good no no no
that's true yeah i i i've been around with the astronomical league since about 2001
and uh i i found to be a very rewarding activity because you you you get to jump
right into amateur astronomy and learn all about the hobby and along the way along the journey you
get to meet all types of people which i think i think half the people that you have here tonight
i've bumped into and we've had our paths cross at some time or one another but uh
yeah it's an it's an interesting uh organization to belong to because it's it's covers all about astronomy um i
don't want to give a long lecture about the astronomical league but it does uh encompass quite a few aspects of our
hobby um i like breaking it down by saying that we like talk about the science of astronomy which is what a lot
of you a lot of the the people you have on like talking about the science of astronomy pretty interesting stuff but we also
like to talk about the the art of observing how it's it's it's really a skill to learn the more observing you do
the more practice you do at it the better you are the more you get out of it um we also like talking about our gear the
equipment we have and i don't have to tell you this scott but you know it's it's some of the coolest stuff around
and we like that precision well-crafted equipment that that's something that's uh that tugs at us all i think
and then the final thing that we like talking about and doing is the
joy of reach now showing people the stars what's up in the sky uh i noticed
that starting out with uh um david he was talking about uh uh
les leslie peltier was talking about the why we do these things and i think
that's just as important as the how and the and the what it's the why in the inside of us which makes us go out and
look at the stars and what we actually get out of it you know some of us can can talk about
this rather poetically but i think whether you can or not you still feel it
inside you so we like like addressing the the why we go out under
the stars and the astronomically gets it for that and uh we try to convey that
those feelings that information to our members and to the public too now i could go on for the next half hour
and talk about the astronomical league like this right of course um anyway um
well the league i'd like to all i'd like to say is it really is directed more towards libby
um in astronomy oh
we like talking about the the physics the the science and the math of the hobby but to do really well at it you
have to have good communication skills and i think having libby on today really helps that for her
yes she gets to do some public speaking and expressing herself learning how to do a little bit better each time
learning how to convey what she wants to say to people that's an important skill to learn and it's good to learn that at
such a young age so i applaud her for for doing that yeah um
okay what am i supposed to do here oh yeah um door prize questions i think yes
that's right so i can stream astronomical league is the official sponsor of our door prizes
um we um we have added a new
aspect to the door prizes in that because we're simulcasting
it apparently was pointed out to us that some simulcasts repeat faster than
others okay so for instance maybe youtube lags behind uh the twitch
website that we're simulcasting to or to the uh facebook page so
when you answer okay these these questions uh you're going to send your questions i'm
going to put it in uh in the chat you're going to send it to explore alliance at
explorescientific.com you're not going to answer these questions in chat here okay so you're going to
email them to this to this email address
we will then take the answers that have come in and we will
randomize uh the pick okay just because there you know you could
get in because the uh the webcast is happening quicker than
another site so we're going to we're going to even the odds here that's really the only change and that
in the email address that we were sending them to so uh do you want to start with the answers
to the last um global star party scott i gotta i just
got a quick comment about that yeah on the randomized at do you have a specific date and time that you're gonna pick to
pick the winner that is decided by uh the league so so
any emails that get back any emails that come by that time will be included yeah
okay okay okay so scott you have the the answers
to last week's last star parties question uh maybe i do and if i don't i'll i'll i'll
i'll uh they may have been sent to me by terry i hope so if that we'll get creative
we'll get creative that's right that's right but go ahead and ask the uh the
questions for i can go ahead and screen share then okay
maybe there we go you can all see this i hope yes
okay well as scott was saying that uh
your answers should be uh emailed to the address that he's providing okay
question number one um you know one of the things we like doing is is thinking about our actual position in
space and what's going on around us so question number one um takes up this this this idea
in three parts uh what what planet is closest to the earth right now
tonight and tomorrow night for a little bit at least so what the
planet is the closest to earth uh what planet comes closest to earth
i have to be careful here because i i may inadvertently give the answers be careful
yeah don't you know that such and such says uh when what planet is closest to earth
most often uh these are three different planets by the way that's only hit
so what is the closest planet to earth right now right now what planet comes closest to earth
and what planet is closest to earth the most often right okay so you're going to send that your
answers to explore alliance at explorescientific.com
so this was a three-part question this isn't all all three questions right the three-part question is
question number one all right and i do have the answers from the last star party so i'll go on and
and read those off after you already okay
question number two which was sort of addressed a little bit earlier this evening uh by mr eiker uh
the first first to use a telescope to study the moon in a scientific manner was galileo
in 1609 and 1610 why were his observations considered to be so important even revolutionary
okay so he was studying the moon a he found that the silvery orb was not
perfectly smooth as had been taught by ancient astronomers and philosophers throwing doubt on their earth-centered
model of the universe okay b he found that the moon had seas
containing life just like on earth c he found good landing areas for the
apollo program so this is multiple choice multiple a b
or c and i'm trying not to laugh all right so the first person to use a telescope to study the moon in a
scientific manner was galileo in 1609 in 1610 why were his observations considered to
be so important even revolutionary and a so multiple choice
a he found that the silvery orb was not perfectly smooth as had been taught by ancient astronomers and philosophers
throwing doubt on their earth-centered model of the universe or b
he found that the moon had seas containing life just like on earth or c he found good landing areas for the
apollo program okay he was ahead of his time yes he was
okay that's all i'm gonna say all right okay now question number three question
number three is um about the astronomical league a lot of you know that we have a
lot of different observing certificates our first observing certificate program was the messier observing program and
started in 1967 so about how many astronomical league messier
observing program certificates have been earned so far right okay
great that's an easy one to find that actually if you're a member of the league you can look at the latest issue of the reflector and get a good idea
what the answer is but i didn't tell you that that's cheating
somehow all right great okay so i have the
i have the answers for the um for the last star party and i will read
those off um so uh the
the first question at our last star party uh was um uh
name the crater whose rays extend a third of the way around the moon
the answer was tycho and the winner is urletta dergudi
scott yes i'm curious at where the winners are located
uh that's a good question they could be anywhere in the world
yeah we have a global audience so they can be from anywhere in the world i just have the uh i just have the names there
so uh next time i will ask terry to put the
uh location of where they are okay that's a good a good idea okay
so number two the question is pluto heiress
haumea and makimaki are four of the five dwarf planets recognized by
the international astronomical union what is the fifth and smallest one
you know the answer to this i think so what do you think it is john
series you're right the largest asteroid is series and the winner is gm heisman okay
so congratulations all right and uh let's see
and number three um in what constellation can you find the
three leaps of the gazelle
any any guess three leaps of the gazelle
i would not know this one is it a circumpolar constellation
yes okay yep and the answer is ursa major
and the winner is matthew walsh okay and so
the way that this works so the prizes are provided by our prize partners and
by explore scientific and so our prize partners include uh
uh gary palmer astronomy uh you can have sessions with gary palmer
where you can learn more about image processing or aspects of astrophotography it's one-on-one
tutoring he does this professionally and so this is this is one of the the prizes
um another prize is from the mark slade remote observatory or
ms science and they and you would win a session uh with training on uh the mark
slade remote observatory and uh they do all kind you can do you can learn about
just making a a beautiful image or you can learn about uh getting involved in science they do
and they do photometry and they specialize in exoplanet hunting so
they are involved with the test program and uh so if you want to get involved with science the msro is one of the one
of the great programs that's out there uh and of course explore scientific we
offer uh uh several prizes uh that would also include uh explore alliance
membership and uh that that has gifts inside of it uh which are
very appealing so um so as you win uh we're allowing uh uh
from this mix of prizes uh you can choose uh from any one of the prize plot partners if you are the winner so
we we are randomizing the selection of uh those that are chosen and um and you
get to select prizes based off of the prize partners hey scott
yeah i got a comment about series uh minor planet series it's also
a dwarf planet it's the only dwarf planet that's inside the orbit of neptune
okay i did not know that no i did not know that okay so before we go to our we're going
to take a 10-minute break here in a moment but i did want to kind of go to like a an open piano session here
we have joined with us uh elaine mari he's down at the
down at the attack desert in chile he runs a astronomy tourism
program down there which is amazing uh this is not just your normal astro
tourism program i used to run oh you used to run
well no more choice what he has down there now is a 45 inch telescope that uh that you can
experience and so it's
pretty amazing and you're just ally and you are just coming back from los angeles is that right well in fact i'm
in santiago in quarantine so uh came back yesterday
then i had to take a test this morning the result will come tomorrow and if the
results are negative then we get an authorization and then i can fly back home oh goodness but i don't average it was
quite an experience to travel in airplane right now because when we left there were like 50 people
in the airplane so a lot of people were taking the three seats and so on all right
arriving in uh in los angeles there were basically no control at all no more than usual i
would say uh coming back to chile the things were a little bit more
serious so for right now i mean yes i mean my sister-in-law's house if you want to
know and so hopefully tomorrow the day after or in three four days we might go back
to the observatory yeah it's uh i have uh i have yet to
travel myself uh since the pandemic happened um yeah uh
the um you know thank goodness for um the internet um
uh you know platforms like zoom and uh the ability to broadcast all over the world um
it's a great way for all of us to get back in touch with each other and share our experiences yeah well except in
december we have a total solar eclipse and i guess we only the chilean people will be able
chilean and argentinian will be able to to watch it i mean the the last year there was an eclipse where i don't know
like a million people came it was crazy uh this year it's going to be very quiet
unfortunately i think it will be i was in chile at ctio for the um
for the last eclipse and it was beautiful you know and i found that the people in chile were
very warm and friendly and i really enjoyed it so and i was hoping to get to argentina
with cesar brolo who's joining us cesar you want to uh hi how are you good night uh yes we we
are in the same in the same situation in argentina
actually we expect to go to the eclipse area like the first the first condition
because uh [Music] any in this in this moment we have a
better situation uh inside in the area of metropolitan area of societies
but the province outside buenos aires uh they have now
the numbers uh that we had in the past they are going the cure um they are
and we are hope that they resolve this so fast as possible because
we need to go and we if they have the closest their their
roads uh of course that we are in a in a big in a very big travel in
in in the this was in the last two weeks because maybe two weeks ago we
had a better a better landscape about the the situation
but now uh it's you know every every week do you
have a different a different uh situation um
we are hope that they have a better better situation maybe
two weeks or one month more but the eclipse is really near
and we know to know that
that well you know we we need to have a real
real news about about this while we are preparing all i'm preparing
my equipment we are talking with a tv local tv in rio negro
about transmit how transmit how to use filters last
year our company make a lot of mylar filters for
tv cameras for the different parts of the world because many of this
they used an nd filter but in a number that was not safe
and we change it um you know using polymer or glass filter
uh in order to have a safe a safe uh
filter for for the tv cameras yes
it's it's interesting that uh our people that we are in astronomy we know more
about filters and for the for the people from the tv was something was something something
new about how many you do you need filtering i said oh yes you're doing it
a lot but let me let me check your sensor or you know
but they was amazing how uh we
know a lot about this and when this uh starting to to get the the
sun they watch it in the in the monitor uh they can believe it the the quality and
the colors you know and uh we hope about the the last the
next eclipse you know we are preparing all about
the the trip to go to uh rio negro province and
we we are ready every more about this of course
you know yes okay yes so it's a big challenge um you know
uh absolutely a big challenge with um with kovid and uh the pandemic uh
recently in north northwest arkansas there was a star party
uh that uh that did happen this was a different star party then than what you
would normally experience it was a music festival that
included astronomers and the
the people there they wanted to have an astronomy kind of theme to it so there was about 500
people at this event and uh uh they uh worked very hard to
have people you know be sterilized you know be
uh socially distanced the right distance and and all of that so
um but uh uh you know i
i still recommend that people be very careful during this time you know so
that's that's my that's my personal recommendation uh we have the tools to share our knowledge and experience and
uh and enjoyment of astronomy uh right from the comfort of our homes and
so i i do recommend to engage yourself as m in as many of those things as possible
the deepti what is your
what you have a lot of astronomers here okay what is your what are your big do you have a big question do you have uh
something that you would like like to uh to ask this group
uh um to me sorry because yes i i i couldn't understand i
understood the the last well it's it's the group is is
amazing let me know if you ask me about who is my my question to to astronomers
of the group or i was asking but you can also ask it's open panel ah
yes okay let's uh i was curious if dt is new to our group
and i was curious if you had a had a a question a big question that you wanted to ask
okay thank you for that and first of all my question is that this i said i have the organization so you can recommend or
recommend me a unique program that i can which will help us to boost this to know
me in nepal okay a unique program to help you uh with astronomy in nepal yeah which is
which has not been um just implementing a pilot
what do you guys think what kind of program would help uh
dt and her astronomy club you know further their knowledge what what other kind of programs can they get involved
with do you think on a international level
uh yes i don't know uh is
if it's about educational educational program that you
yeah um of course that that i i i don't know because if this is for
professional astronomy or or astronomy the
years old and it's a high school astronomy club excellent excellent i i think that the
the first thing for for young people uh in argentina we have a a growth that is
in the in the west area where is the mountains the the part of argentina looks like
uh uh swedish or northwest swiss switzerland because it's very large and
they have they have an excellent growth and it's very important that
form a growth uh with profes not professional astronomers if
not lecturers and
go to the to the classroom to find the people interested in astronomy they have
um this is very interesting because they they have an association huge in this area uh in the cities that
is the they live in in in the west uh uh
near to the andes sorry and um they uh every year not this year unfortunately
go to the another part of the country to know another a
another young people because they are all students or students and it's something that
here the the name is encuentros the joveness astronomers
young astronomers in this idea and this is very important the first
the first thing to to when you don't have a club is former
one and this one is a good example if if uh of course that i can uh give you the
contact for for this these kids because they are their
students my son our team started with with this group and
actually well here he is 23 years old now but any time that
he can go like more like lecturer because he loves to teach uh
astrophotography to to the students um it's
very nice because every year do you have new a new team of students
and you can encourage if you if you have a
professors in your school that that you think that they can do this
because you know you you need to go to another part of your tree you need uh or if you if you live in a
city and you need to go to an open area uh to
with clear sky uh here we have the same problem um and
of course that where you have 15 years old you cannot go lonely
and but if if you found or maybe you need to make
a new one club and start to start to
to to get an experience to share with kids of your of your right
yep i don't know if she has she has already started an astronomy club she has a excellent
excellent program in high school um i just sent uh from the chat uh deepti you
can read um there was uh someone who says i recommend that you check on the efforts of india i
isro beautiful yeah wow
utkarsh misra was a is a young astronomy picture of the day winner
lives pretty close to nepal so that's a good connection i would also say that there are international
programs like astronomers without borders uh that is uh another program like that
and i can give you uh that information there is if you're interested in solar
work there's the charlie bates program which is very famous
and then the astronomical league so john goss who is just on they have an international program i'm
sure they would love to have you and your club become a league organization so
i if i may uh intervene yes i'm just going to share my screen for a short
time sure there it is do you see my screen no you don't
actually not but now you're going to okay here we go
he's a nepalese astronomer he works at mit right now
and here is his webpage he recently discovered an exoplanet which we call the p pi planet because
it's rotating in 3.14 159 days around its star
and these are really completely unable to read but
maybe you can and i think he goes to he goes back to nepal from time to time so this is the
type of person you should try to get in contact with and when you get the you know the
facebook page and see that when he comes back he can make you a conference about uh the work he's doing at mit
uh i think that would be uh interesting for you okay thank you okay okay all right it's
a good guy used to work at uh act which is a radio telescope up close
to to alma let's see how do i stop sharing my
screen i
all right uh so we're gonna at this point we're gonna take a ten minute break and we'll come back um
to uh share uh what the astronomers have to share and um
i thank you all for being on with us david eicher thank you so much for
participating and uh is there any anything you want to add before we uh go to our 10-minute break
i i don't believe so i think the answers to that question were terrific and i was going to suggest the league
and reaching out to as many other clubs of young people elsewhere as possible
and i think the the other guests here did a fantastic job of providing some good leads there
yeah yeah great okay okay all right so um uh i'll take the
stage here and we will go to
a little 10 minute break we'll be right back after this and
thank you okay
so jerry do you have uh is the you got clear skies out that way
yeah i've actually uh started an observing run on an exoplanet transit
uh that i can talk about um with the msro
right so we don't have a it doesn't look like we have a bunch of astronomers uh
uh shailendra sharma had internet problems tonight
mike simmons was he he had two segments on the program
but was unable uh due to uh you know health issue but uh he's okay
you know so but he wanted to take a break tonight which is fine um
and so we're we're uh you know you'll have more time uh if
you're doing uh astrophotography tonight uh you know uh please by all means uh
uh share and uh chuck if you wanna show some some of your images uh or anything like that uh
you're certainly welcome so but i'll be back in a few minutes okay
okay okay
you
you
you
you
you
[Applause] so uh we are back um
and uh we have our group of uh of astronomers with us um
and uh we are um i think ready to look at some things up
in the sky what do you what do you have normally jerry you don't go on first so we're going to let you we're going to
let you uh share your scope and so we can see what's up there
so you're gonna let me on first tonight that's good first for the first time [Laughter]
for the first time yeah i just i just got back to break just in time right
so yeah let me uh i'm going to share my screen okay and uh
i'm going to share the mark slade remote observatory
we were founded in uh 2015
and uh let me see where can i move my i don't want this video to get in the
way here i guess i can stick it over here for now so what i'm doing
i'm observing an exoplanet let me see here
i need to change size for a minute do i have the uh
oh it's on my other uh i'm gonna have to share my whole desktop to get my other
so this is what our sky looks like right now this is tonight and it says there's some clouds in this one
but the other other cloud cover projection says there's not really much it's going to be a little bit
but right now you can see the image looks pretty good
let me uh i'm gonna now to observe an exoplanet
um with high precision you have to spread the light out across more pixels than
what you would normally do with a normal deep sky beautiful image view of the stars
you want nice pinpoint stars for that but for doing measurements you want to be able to gather as much light as you
can over as many pixels as you can to get good data
so there's a couple ways we do that the the exoplanet star that
i'm observing tonight is pretty dim so there's one method i would normally use
to get high precision but this method that i'm limited to since the star is so damn is uh
is a defocus method so i've defocused the stars that's why they look kind of blobby there so if you zoom up you can
see they look like pretty big blobs that's not normally what they look like when it's focused
and the other thing that that's kind of tough with this exoplanet stars it's a it's basically like a
optical binary star um
and so they're they're overlapping basically you can see here in this graph
the uh the relationship between the two stars
and how they're really close to each other so it's hard to you have to discern one of the star
light you have to measure the star um brightness of just one of these peaks
not both of them together you can see they're very close with this defocus they're very close together so
we're kind of limited in this measurement but one of the things i wanted to show you i'm going to stop my share and
reshare um i'll share the whole screen so i can
bring up my other page i would
uh see this one so this is this is called the uh
transit finder all right and this is this is basically
information about the transit and a year ago
bart dr bart ballard and i at the msro observed this exoplanet about a year ago
and now it's come back in season and we're able to observe it tonight
so that's what this this entry is right here
it's got a fairly deep it's 13.3 uh parts per thousand or about 14.5
millimag drop and the depth so it's a fairly easy
target to measure the depth but it's a it's a it's an 11th magnitude
star so it's really dim so it's challenging for our our system
that way um but
overall it's it's uh it's doable and we can get some good data for it so
the main the main goal tonight with this exoplanet the re-observation of it is to
measure the midpoint time of the transit and that determines that basically
determines the orbital period of this of this planet and what we're looking for we want to
measure this every so often as often as we can to make sure that
we keep uh track of this planet we know that it's that its orbital period is fairly
precise so that we can predict the future transits and see them and then the other thing is
that we want to refine that number also so we do more observations of the exoplanet uh transit to uh
to refine that number and so that's what my goal is tonight with this with this observation
so how much focal length which is this uh
we've got the 165 millimeter uh fpl 53 telescope the six and a half
inch telescope uh that uh and it's uh we got the 0.7 times vocal
reducer field flattener so it's 851 millimeter is the focal okay
thanks so i can show you what this field looks like let me do that show you what the
field looks like i need to get rid of this this camera this uh zoom
stuff so i'm gonna um let's see where is it at okay so i stood
that a few seconds i'm gonna open up this this uh previous image i took
so this is what it looks like focused okay you can see the two stars there
okay and then you can see here is where i blobbed it out
uh to get a more precise measurement you got more pixels to measure the light for each of those stars so that gives you a
more precise value and i actually did a
diffuser that's the other way that i'm i've been trying to evangelize the use
of the diffuser to very high precision photometry and
it required for this six and a half inch scope it requires a pretty bright star uh
from six to eight magnitude is really the sweet spot even
so six to nine we can do the diffuser but i'm gonna open up the diffused image
here and show you what that looks like and it's uh
pretty blobby that's not it that's it right there open
so you can see here how blobby it is and that's this is what
that diffused profile looks like and you can see it's pretty the light is
spread out so it doesn't really give you
a good profile i mean you can measure that but it's very noisy it's not enough light basically and this is a
this is a two minute exposure so that gives you an idea of what
what the diffuser will do now on a brighter star like here
see that's a nice profile to be able to measure that light [Music] uh even this star right here
you can see there you've got a lots of uh light but again that's not even near the top this is only 6 400 counts
the top of the range on this is 65 000 counts so these stars are
are still not bright enough to really get you you know the best measurement
so you need to get a star around but brighter than eighth magnitude to really get a good measurement uh using
the diffused diffuser from the chat uh jerry there are people
talking about um you know uh steve hauser made a comment he says i
often like to think about the number of exoplanets whose orbital plane does not match ours
which we'll never be able to find with this methodology right right jeff weiss is lucky for us there are
billions of possibilities um yeah so the number is actually around
two to three percent if uh of the planet of the stars out there
that have planetary uh discs that are lined up with us basically that are
in our line of sight so uh depending on how many stars that you
believe are in the milky way um that's a lot
yeah so exactly it is a lot for a while right so uh
so basically for every every candidate every confirmed exoplanet there are
uh at least uh 50 times probably 50 times that number that are out there
that were detected with the transit method i should say you know there's other methods spectroscopy can
use a doppler shift method that's uh but you need very large telescopes for that
right uh keane and luke just wants to know how many exoplanets your team has
discovered or uh i wouldn't say not really discovered we've we've uh
we've observed quite a few exoplanets we this is the one actually that we actually verified okay it was an odd it
was a it was an exoplanet that was a candidate and we lucked out and were able to
validate it and verify that it was an exoplanet uh so that's that's true
that's just one so far and we were kind of lucky to do that
because because tess that after four years of the test mission
there's been there's haven't even been 15 there's about 15 to 1600 that have been
verified as planet as planets and uh we managed to get one
yeah that's amazing that you got one
well that's an interesting image you see what happened there there's a little shift in the image during the exposure
so just to give you an idea of what we're using uh and why we're using uh
a g11 i don't know if you'll be able to see it very well this is with the inside of the uh
the observatory i i don't know what happened to the camera something changed on the camera where
the contrast is really high now so it's harder to see the telescope but you can see the teles this is the
counterweight bar here sticking out this way and the telescope's pointing
uh it's in it's in the western sky and it's getting further west so so it's starting
to move this way basically the way my mouse is moving towards the west
the west is this way okay and the east is this way
uh you can also see this tree line that's right up
that's really high to the north so we have blockage to the north
um from the tree line i can actually show that on our chart here okay
um back out here all right this is the equatorial view
let me go to the azimuth view and i'll show you what our field of view looks like so that's our sky
it's a little little piece of sky it's pieces of sky you can see this is the blockage to the north this is the north
right here and uh and we're shooting to the west northwest
into this little sliver of sky that's available to us right now
that's what it looks like uh at the msro and uh let me bring up
real quickly i'm going to bring up the mark slade remote observatory um
web website it's actually run by we created a non-profit called msro science
and we're giving away the prize one of the prizes
a prize package which is basically an observing run about an hour
uh an hour and a half or so introduction to the uh mark slade remote observatory
and it's msroscience.org and
we provide outreach training and research opportunities
is what our goal what's our main uh those are our main
missions basically
i think i've got oh our mission statement you can see our mission statement and our vision is to bring the wonders of the universe to the general
public through personal discovery
and what else can i show you
this is what the observatory looks like right here this is station one we have three we have three stations at the observatory this is station one
which we're observing with right now and uh you can see it's a remotely operated observatory i'm actually five
miles from the site so i'm sitting comfortably in my living
room running the observatory five miles away right
and this is mark slade he was a member of our local astronomy club and he passed away in 2015
and he uh his estate uh he had collected a lot of equipment in
the observatory dome and everything else and so his goal was to build an observatory but
unfortunately he passed away in 2015 and we decided to go ahead and build the observatory for him
so that and and keep his legacy alive basically
uh we do have a uh just just for everybody's
just to let everybody know we do take donations and if you go to our donate page there's
a uh easy button there to donate via paypal
but anything um anybody's interested and uh
if you've got questions about the msro how we built it how it's how it's run just let me know and i'll be pleased to
tell you all about it that's awesome that's a good shot at the telescope too
yeah yeah compared to the live shot right right exactly it's like there's
something bright shining right into the camera there so but very cool excellent yeah excellent
so um okay uh why don't we uh
uh let's move on to uh uh
someone else that has a live image do we are you got something in there richard or
no not tonight huh uh for me no not tonight because uh we
have a um uh southeast wind and
i have a layers of of clouds um was impossible to me
put equipment this time in the balcony unfortunately normally you know i have
my last week i had very problems uh very high parents to connect me but in the
future that i connect me change the the image of the cell phone
of my cell phone i send you an image of mars but
tonight unfortunately we we have a
layer of clouds because this type of of uh we normally
have this problem maybe later but the problem is that i i could
uh i couldn't put my my equipment in the balcony tonight yeah this night sure
unfortunately yeah right you know i i'm suffering with when i like
yes right you know in the in the last week i i had at least the the the cell
phone that was very fun because we i used the cell phone to the to the zoom and using the same
cell phone to to show mars but tonight i i couldn't make
this um but i have uh images from last week's star
party but nothing live tonight okay how about you alain do you have uh live images
yeah i don't have life images uh as far as you know telescope being running and
everything yeah but i can show you uh what we're trying to do now with uh you
know asteroid detection okay great and i know that dt has uh she wants to connect with you
so um uh i uh maybe you can privately message your
email address to her okay okay and uh yeah she's very interested in what
you're doing so okay so uh the situation is that uh
well in in the long past like the 1970s 80s
measuring the position of an asteroid was quite a long process because you have to take a photographic plate first identify the
object then measure with you know one star after the other
so it took a lot of time and basically at the time people only uh you know followed the very interesting objects
uh like comets fast-moving objects nearer subject and so on and so on uh
then we started to have ccds so the whole thing started with uh you know tom garasse jim scotty and so
on at space watch they were the first one to write an automatic
asteroid detection program and then other came and then after that
you had several programs like uh linear loneliness
neat at palomar and so on and so on which started to really you know increase the number of known asteroids
basically when i started to observe uh like 1982 something like this
there were 3 000 known asteroids and well recently we are
we we went through 1 million okay so same thing for the earth crossing asteroids there used to be like
23 in 70 something and now we are at 22 000
or 24 000. uh the problem is of course now the you have like a catalina which uses a 1.5
meter telescope you have a pan star which uses two telescopes of 1.8 meter and these guys
find you know magnitude 22 asteroids which are really
really not easy for for us amateurs i would say uh recently as you know uh celestron came
out with the rasa telescope so which are like a modern version of the schmidt telescope
zvo came out with very interesting cameras which are the zvo 6200 so they
are like 60 megapixel cameras and so together with a french friend called
named george atar and david daniel parrot
we have started we are starting a program to to find asteroids so what i'd like to show you
is a little bit the the software that daniel has
has written okay the the program is called taiko so
you can find that on taiko.tracker.com and it uses a very interesting approach
that really was not doable a few years ago
typically what people do is like they do three or four or five exposures on the same field
except of course you want the objects to move during the exposure so what you do you typically take like five images so i
don't know if you see my hands like one two three four five and then you redo that and then you redo that and so on
each field you have uh three or four images taken with 20
minutes interval and then you run a program that first looks for all the things which have not
moved like the stars or galaxies and then among the rest try to find things that
have moved linearly so that was a typical way of doing it and in fact
catalina and others are still using the same technique the the synthetic tracking is a new
technique that was uh first started with a person an astronomer called mike xiao at
jpl it takes advantages of the fact that the cmos cameras have a very short read out
of time if you remember the venerable i would say as big
stl 11 000 it took like 40 40 seconds about 40 minutes 40 seconds to read an
image and if you do one you know one minute exposure basically you're losing
almost half of your time reading the images uh the cmos cameras read like in half a
second it's very very fast uh they also have very very low noise and very high sensitivity which means
that you can do you know i think you you see the image this is a composite of a 30
no 36 30 second exposure and the idea is that if you do that and
you re-center the stars then the asteroid moves like crazy and you don't see it
but if you recenter on the asteroid then as you can see on the image the the stars are trailed you have like 36 dots
and the asteroid barely visible is at the center so it's a very very efficient technique
mostly for very fast moving objects the only slight problem is that when you
are searching for an asteroid you don't know if the asteroid moves like this like this like this like that
in which direction it moves and how fast is moving and so what we do now using uh graphic
boards uh gpus or graphic processing units we can indeed
you know do this type of calculation the the computing
business is driven by the the market and the market right now is driven by uh
i would say idiots who like to kill monsters uh so today uh the graphic boards are
much more powerful and you know the gpu is much more powerful than the cpu um we are using uh
now old uh nvidia boards which are 2080 ti
nvidia came out with a newer one which are the 30 series or 30 70 30 80 30 90
except they announced it and then they were sold in like half a second and apparently they will not be
available before next february so anyway for now we're using these boards which have only
uh 5 000 cores and basically with that you run about 100 times faster than with a regular pc
and so the the software is used in such a way you load the images
then you launch the tracker well not really first you
there is a first step where you align all the images you also calculate the position on the
sky then you launch the tracker and let me see i have another example here
this one maybe yeah but this was on the field on the ecliptic you know and once
you have run the tracker it gets something like this so here detected 26 objects
with various uh level of confidence it's also calculating the you know
if the 30 images are well aligned and relatively regular in order not to detect you know false detection like
you can have like hot spots you can have very different things like this it also calculates which objects are already
known as you can see object object names all these objects are already well known
and so for example if we take this one let's see okay
and let me see where is where are the images they are here
yeah you need a very large screen for this type of software uh and then you select more images
okay and then you start to see the object in the middle okay so you can do that for each of these
objects you can measure them once you are happy with a given object basically
you say create observation whoops okay no you have to load the
catalog before
sorry okay now you see the blue stars the blue squares are the stars which the software
identified okay let's see this one for example
okay uh it shoots everything yeah and now once
you have the object so just the thresholds are not correct you say add observations
say you call it uh yeah this one say okay
and then you say report and then it generates the report for the mpc
okay so that's really a very very nice software
it's still being improved and so on and so on but this is the typical data that you would see that you would send to the
minor planet center it's really a very
different ways of working of course if you are just you know look
for example on the neocp let's see so the near earth object confirmation
page those are all the nearest objects which have been discovered recently and
not yet confirmed some of them were sent to the pccp so
probable comment confirmation page and as you can see most of the magnitude like like are
not for us okay you need at least a 50 centimeter telescope to to find them there are a few that you can eventually
follow then for example if we take you know this one okay you say get fm reads
okay and then you get the fm read and you get the speed you see this one is moving like crazy uh basically the the
diameter of jupiter every minute uh so this is very good for the you know
the synthetic tracking uh because if you do short exposures during this short exposure the object will not be trailed
so you don't lose it because normally the if you if you expose for example one
minute it will leave a 43 second trail it will it will stay on the same pixel for like two three seconds
uh so you take you can for example follow this type of object you can of course look for new objects in which
case uh well you need a lot of luck but in our case with like
uh 18 minute exposure we can detect objects which are magnitude 20.5 if the seeing
is good i mean sometimes you know there is wind there is haze you know but with
good conditions which we normally have you know quite a lot of them in the atacama desert uh we can reach about 20
20.5 with the c-11 the ceiling the raza but it's 28 it's
eight inches only yeah and so this leaves us a chance of finding things that some professionals have not found
yet uh there is of course another very important uh thing let's see
let me go back there
this so this is the sky coverage so you can
see what the other guys have done in the recent times
and you see these are all the fields which have been covered by the people who search for asteroids
and so first you see a i don't know if you see my cursor there's a black gap here which is the milky way where
nobody goes but as you can see right now all the nasa's team are working in the north and nobody
is searching in the deep south so that's why i think that with the rasa and
the fact that we have this guy basically available we might in the next future i still have
to automatize a lot of things uh i work right now on writing software that will
make the that the telescopes uh follow you know track automatically the the sky without
me having to re-point every field and so on and so on uh then there is uh george in france he's
doing the the scripts because uh well i showed you tico
manually but there is also a way to use this with scripts and basically when i finish a
series of objects i send a file on the the pc which has a gpu
for reduction and then the script uh realized that this this file is there it tells you that there is a new series of
objects to to reduce and so we synchronize everything and normally very quickly we
should be able to uh to fill out all this gap where nobody is observing well that's roughly you know
what i wanted to to explain uh it used to be like in the year 2000 a lot of the matters were
searching and finding new asteroids uh right now if you find an asteroid
which is magnitude 19 which has not yet been observed you're extremely lucky
uh you really need to go much further so you know basically what we would need is like a one meter wide rasa type
telescope with very very large cmos cameras and so on and huge computing power
but uh already with the four razan the four 6200 camera we have a the equivalent of a 240
megapixel camera which is uh you're already reasonable i would say the only thing is
of course if we could have like much more diameter would be happier we would be happier but already with this
we should be able to find things uh also finding searching for things which are low on the
on the on the horizon at the beginning of the night and the end of the night also where you see the surveys don't get
very very close to the sun so that's just to give you some information about what we're trying to
achieve right now excellent okay excellent very interesting
very interesting i i think they're people are getting a a good um uh you know session here on asteroids it's
awesome okay uh especially with uh and very uh on topic uh especially since we're
trying to get uh material back from one so no no we did get material back
that's true i think it worked i think it worked i believe it worked too i certainly hope so i think they'll know
uh pretty soon so yeah it was quite exciting to watch the the live right this afternoon
right well gary palmer has joined us uh gary i i it was a surprise i thought
that you know that you would be teaching someone some image processing
tonight so um hi everyone hi scott um yeah i finished
that so i've got an hour to spare so uh i thought i'd jump on and then upset the
party great so yeah really yeah
cool um so yeah i'm uh sitting here watching in the background and i'll come up with something to run their own image
process um as we're all cloudy here at the moment
yeah and uh richard gray sent me a message saying my friends asteroid hunters would like to
participate in the show next week absolutely richard that'd be great
yep
we were all very astronautical we're all just thinking about it the global star party
i was muted i wanted i wanted to uh i wanted to show i don't know if i showed the last last star party was uh
was on opposition night yeah and i took a picture of mars with
the with the camera configuration set up for deep sky not for planetary at all
and i wanted to pop that image up real quick and show people okay what even with even with uh
a short focal length 800 it was f 5.1 850 millimeter focal length you can get
a fairly decent image of mars uh i thought it was pretty good so let me
uh let me share my screen and
i guess i'll just show my whole thing here all right so
here it is oh it's a cute little mice
actually it's not bad not bad
that's what that's what that's with yeah f5 right uh well i i never processed my videos
with my cell phone i don't know what is that but your picture is excellent yeah
that's great yeah hey scott yeah
as long as alain is still here may i add a historical
tag to what he put on there and make a comment absolutely
okay ella i don't know if you know who i am but um i'm the original author of
pinpoint um the reason i bring that up is that i started
my astronomy software career by a visit with jim scotty at spacewatch and came
home and started from there for three or four years
that's all i focused on was asteroid hunting they had the minor planet meetings and i went to those and
um the guy named kwang yoo-jung from hong kong had four how you know him
yeah i know of him okay well
he had four centurion telescopes that he had on tracks
and a motor home well actually a toy hauler he sat
in southern arizona with those four telescopes and did nothing but shoot images excuse me
sorry shoot images of stars and then fed them into my visual pinpoint system which was an automatic asteroid detector
of this type that you mentioned which takes four images and searches
i'm sorry anyway he was the first person to be designated by the mpc as a survey outside of the
professionals bill young was so it's near and dear to my heart i have to
tell you looking at your presentation it was fantastic i'm it's amazing what you guys
did with the technology and how you're able to dig deep
and use the power of what's out there now one other thing oh and i really mean
that it i was fascinated one of the things scott and i
that the very first time anyone saw my software taking images to detect softwares was in
to detect um asteroids was in the mead tent at rtmc in what 1999 or something
it was running automated going from place to place taking series
of images as you pointed out and then looking for the motion and finding the asteroids in there
so gosh of things i'm i'm just fascinated i love i have to
contact you and find out more it's really interesting thank you for for having me here scott and thank you it
was really good to see thank you for all that you've done you know the your work with um
ascom pinpoint uh alpaca all of those things you've brought you brought
a level of technology and and professional support that's unmatched you know so and i know
that it took you many years to accomplish all the things that you did and many obstacles so uh i'm glad that
that was interesting in the old days yeah just to
just to comment on this uh we're talking about the rtmc uh i i was four years in the united states
and so of course the the asteroid detection at the time
was uh when uh don mcholz uh found a comet during the rtmc but visually you
know with a tesco that was 1986 or seven there was one
comment discovered that like that uh and of course uh your introduction was kind of fun
because i mean if you're an amateur astronomer and you you don't know bob danny
then you're not an amateur astronomer i'm not an astronomer i tell you i i i
will say that over and over again i'm a technologist i'm the guy who designs the race cars
and gives them to the driver and then say go out and win a race if you have a car normally it uses has
come so you know bob danny is the carroll thank you
astronomy yeah i know it's really nice but uh indeed i mean if
we use the classical technique with a small telescope right now it's very very very hard
to detect anything so you have people like gennady borisov who is actually
i don't know if he's optician or whatever but he has like a 65 centimeter f 1.5
okay uh and then you start to talk uh if you have a c11
you lose your time but it would be interesting of course to follow the nearest object which has been this which
have been discovered uh bill young i believe so he i
what i understand okay is that his father died and he had to go back to hong kong to take care of the
business yes and since he has invested in some 70 centimeter telescope but i don't see
much results so i don't i don't think he has the time to go after after it anymore but yeah he discovered i mean
discovered recovered one of the apollo rockets uh
and you know a lot of very interesting objects at the time he flooded the the mpc with observations
from these four telescopes and then i wrote the visual pinpoint the automatic discovery thing for him and because of
the centurion was a newtonian and it had severe optical distortion so when
solving plates i would get a match star match in concentric rings it would had
such bad sine over x over x distortion so i had to build in the automatic
distortion correction so you get edge to edge accuracy actually scientific astron
you know astronomy accuracy edge to edge and that that was it it pushed me to
make the thing better so i have a a lot of uh i have to thank him and i have to
thank jim scotty and i have to thank scott roberts in the early days so but seeing what
you've done is just fantastic it really really really is i i can't tell you how
wonderful it was to see that well you know put a gpu in your pc and your
if you can go i think you're going to see in video gpus inside camera bodies i think we're
going to see super smart cmos cameras that stack on board and that produce the
pretty much the final image without any traceable for science you know
that's good enough that a science project can trace the accuracy of the photons all the way through to the image
but all the work is going to be done inside the uh the camera itself i think
i don't think you're going to have to send a million giant images from the camera to the cpu and then grind on it
with the gpu over there i think we're going to see even more amazing things yeah one of the things that i didn't
mention but i should have pointed it out each image is megabytes
uh we take 36 of them so in 18 minutes we get like 4.3 gigabytes
that means we get about 16 gigabytes per hour or 160 gigabytes per night
and so you have to have some real uh serious computing power to to reduce all
these and so on and so on uh if you if yeah if you were able to to stack those
as they're being acquired and then transfer the image after it's done
the thing is you do like uh up to ten thousand different stacks uh with different speed different right
so you can there's there's a lot of image processing capabilities there and
i know it's not everything can be done that way but i think a lot of it can anyway yeah
well the future is you know clearly in the gpu domain and if you don't have in
the camera you'll be able to steal the one that you will have in your car because of course
the automatic driving is going to be done with gpus as well it's obvious
it's the way of the future anyway let's go back to real astronomy what do you have to say
but one thing that bob is that um for the capture to stack inside the camera you'd
have to bring in something like sigma clip in now so that when each image is
captured it's uh click back and that would remove any of the satellites because we'll get more and more objects
up in the sky they would need removing so when we remove them in software now
you would need to remove that in the software on the camera and that's going to be the the stumbling block as we make
i understand i understand that no not really
i made the you know there was a comment uh in 2018 u6 and so on i had to shoot it very
low on the horizon and they were like a very crazy number of satellites and it's going to get worse of course
uh one of the things i didn't really really show you how it works but one of the first steps when you're about to run
the tico tracker you put a threshold and then it basically blackens out all the
parts that you don't need and the bright satellites at least will be ignored
but all the trails will be also also ignored because it's very unlikely that they that they match so luckily
it seems we will not be so affected and you're just basically doing the same
thing as having the image the the shutter open for the entire time
so it's just it's the same thing anyway the problem with the satellites
is not really the arm that they do to amaterasu is the fact that very quickly
there will be a kessler effect and then everything will be destroyed
it's kind of weird you're talented very weird yeah it's crazy
anyway okay i didn't hope i didn't take up too much time scott no no no that's that was
very interesting seeing what i had to say um you know
it's great to um to hear you uh your perspective on all the stuff so yeah um
that's great gary you were going to show us uh perhaps some image processing uh yeah it's a little bit rushed because i
i didn't come on really to run through anything but as usual we've always got something running on the screen or
working on something so we're just jumping to where i am now i'm in the uh on the processing run at the moment so
okay if i share up the screen um [Music]
yeah we're gonna need that screen now that's it
hopefully you can all see that at the moment yes so m31 um
there's quite a few images in the background here because this was running tests um over the last two weeks
so we actually used this for some image processing work online earlier
but this shows you the difference in detail between one hour and two hours so that's one hour's data there let's start
remove um this is two hours data it's had
the modifications done to it and uh added in and what i'm actually doing now
if i just lose that image because we don't need it i'm adding some coloring to specific
points so with the styles separate what i'm not going to do is over bloat the stars i'm trying to keep the styles out of the way
of this and it's not clean enough data to start really running through the background of the image
so a lot of people will start running into here and they will start um
really blending out the the bloats on the styles at the back here and for this
amount of data it just doesn't work out worth it because when we add the styles in you won't even see that it's there
you can create a problem that if you take out too much of this style detail here
that your styles look um odd shaped and really it sort of works from there
so all i'm doing is is picking off colors so if we zoom in at the moment i mean in
this area here on the pinks and what i'm doing is just bringing up some more of the hydrogen alpha in there
just so that it stands off and that way we're not actually adding in these colors into the the image for the
styles on so we're just going to do one more pass on that and then we'll have a look at the
yellowy colors and doing this all of the time
uh on this image we can start to see them coming out here now so we might done one two minute there so just going
to take the live view off and drop back and probably take that one back
just one fraction and then we come back into the image and we want to pull out some of this color
here in the dust lines so bring the live preview up reset
the color saturation and then if we click on this area you'll see the cross point comes up on
the color shot so i can pick an exact color right the way through and just adjust that cover
and that gives me a lot of control in the image that's what i'm really after so easiest thing
yeah is to scroll around on the main image itself because the actual preview box is really
hard to expand up you end up covering the whole screen to get this large whereas
if we expand up just using the wheel on the mouse we can come right into the image pick one color and then just
adjust the amount of saturation we want on that color so if we look we're going to go for somewhere there
and we need to put some holder points in so that we're not adjusting the other colors
and that's not as easy as what it looks because the mouse moves all over the place while you're doing this
it's really now we're just going to put one holding and then we can bring this up
i'm just going to bring another holder point in there just because it's tipping down underneath the main line
and then we turn this into a bell shape and what that does by bringing it into a bell shape
is it blends into the color next to it it's a little bit too harsh for that one
there we go and then we can move that one down there and we're just bringing it in a little bit at a time so you can see it's
enhancing it in the live preview there and if we zoom back out on this and apply it
there we go so we're not going too mad i can add more color to this in a little bit
saturation later all we're doing is boosting local colors so the the actual object starts to stand
out otherwise if we do a general saturation we adjust every single color right the
way across the image and that's where the problem comes but now we need
to add the stars back in so that's our style mask um and again
we're going to use simple pixel maths in there so we run up the pixel maths
process and then we need to set a couple of things in the um expression editor so we open that up
sorry need to set a couple of things in the destination so it's late at night here
so just coming up to 4am so we wanted to create a new image so that if we do make
any mistakes here we've still got our images in the background to go back to and work on
um i'm going to set this up as a rgb color space because we're working with
color images and then we're going to open up the expression editor and this is really
simple so we take the name off of this image here yeah which is image 17
we just double click on it and then we add the plus
and if we go to the bottom of the list here is our style mask double click on that
and then we run it and there's the styles back in the image
so it's a little bit harsh on this this was a little bit course on some of the stuff that i did
earlier um and as you can see we've got a little bit of an issue up here yeah with one of the stars that's
probably caused by higher clouds because most of the imaging runs we've been doing recently we've had quite a
disruption in the uh upper atmosphere but in general that's for two hours at
the moment and this would then run into photoshop and start doing some other work on it so the detail in the dust
lens is uh is quite impressive really and that's off the fcd-102
um going on to jerry's uh thing with miles on the
refractor this was a mars from [Music] last week and that was done on 102 mil
refractor so it does show that you don't need the big telescope to get detail in it
it's never going to be the best image in the world but it does show a lot of detail
you can see um all of the cloud structures in there and um the polar cap on it and so on and
these game were just quick processes so just to see what we were getting off of one of the cameras but it wasn't clear
enough to use one of the large telescopes what what was the focal link was this just a deep sky image also
setting from f5 heavy on this
it was uh f uh 11.9 okay so that was about twice
what i was running yeah 102 and then it had a
four times oh sorry no this was with the um one one five so that would have been an f7
sorry mistake on that i was just thinking back it was the uh 115 f7
um with the four times teleview on it oh that's nice yeah so that's the f28 it's all right you know for a
replaced image it's okay um you're not gonna get masses of detail as
we were saying on one of the other shows but you're getting something there you know
that's really what it's um it's all about and it's just playing around with it this was
30 000 frames recorded to get that amount of detail so it was quite a long run about five
minute capture uh on the system but it's just showing that you don't need to have
in sets or you know um rc's to do this if that's all you've got then you can
play around with this and the choice on cameras now is phenomenal um all of these new cameras that are
coming out this camera when we moved it into roi it was running around 220 frames a second
so that's right that's a fair jump coming in um and that's what's quite nice now could
just do it with some clearer weather but there isn't a lot more to really sort of show at the moment um when we do
the next show i'll run this into photoshop and show what adjustments we do on the the final image
um on the hours worth of data i think it's open that's what it got to
so that was as good as i could get it out of the hours worth of data still a lot of color in it um
but you're missing the central detail here
right and there you go well thank you very much uh deep teeth this is um
thank you very much gary uh it's i know it's so late there so um dt this is a telescope
um right here that uh will become available and could become available to your
astronomy group the telescope is fully robotic
and can be accessed over zoom or some sort of uh sharing program and uh
um so it's got uh you know it's it's got a uh a nice camera on it uh auto guiding
system um the telescope has uh is controlled
um with uh you know a nut computer here and uh
so this is uh you know until you guys get your own uh telescope system this is something
that we can work with together and um and make available for you to do some
observations um and um you know there may be possibilities to get on a larger
instrument later but uh but that's that's what i wanted to show you today
um had i known it was going to clear out tonight i might have chanced actually
setting it up and and uh you know getting some images tonight with it it rained all day
and then i was just thinking we were toast and then it cleared off
thank you so there you go uh
scott just talking about mars yeah you know that there are some
observatories in france one of them is the peak du midi yes and they got one of
the best image i've seen of this uh opposition
uh let me show you just the image oh my god whoa oh
my god that's my goal you see very very very tiny details and
so on and so on it's uh oh my god it's quite i can't believe it's incredible oh
it's tiara is also another good friend
and jean-luc did the processing uh the guy has a very very good experience
with a lot of software like auto stackart and yes unfortunately he doesn't speak english
but he has a lot of a youtube video explaining what he does but it's in
french i think there are some which are in english subtitle uh but see i mean the first thing is to
get very good raw images and then to know a lot about processing and image the convolution and so on and
so on and if you look at the tiny spots there they are like in the 0.2 arc second resolution
so just you know just because i i was uh very impressed by this image so i wanted to share it
with you yeah i can understand why and it's been a long time since i've seen thierry so we'll have to get him
onto the global star party to show you know his latest collection of high-resolution images
yeah he he made some interesting occupation of mars as well
uh recently you can go on his website which i believe is astrophotography.fr or something like
this anyway just to let you show you to share this image which is uh to me like wow one of the best image
i've ever done it's one of the best mars images i've ever seen uh
that wasn't a spacecraft except except for the yeah except for the herbert anyway
that's that's the kind of image that uh people say that mars is looks like the moon is as big as the moon
yeah yeah in 2003 so mars is gonna you can see it so it looks like the moon or as big as the
moon well the thing is uh i have a 45-inch telescope right now it's not butter
right so it's like a very big dobsonian and on mars you can really put quite a
high level of magnification and so i was observing at one thousand
times he was okay still a little bit bright and i would i went to two thousand times and just for the fun uh i
have a power mate 5x or something like this just yeah crazy thing it was not very
beautiful but i observed that four thousand times and basically at the field of view and mars was like that
it was crazy but at a lower magnification at one thousand times you can re by moment you can see a
lot of very very impressive details it's a nice planet and it uh it accepts a lot of magnification i mean twice the
diameter is you know something you can do quite easily on mars not on the other objects anyway
excellent excellent so richard uh you you wanted to also
share some images right i'm not sure anymore
[Laughter]
[Music] i mean i know what the other guys complain about now i mean i i got an m31
image and i'm following gary palmer and then i got my mars image from last week
i saw this image it's very good it's very good yeah okay
let's see it all right let's see is this thing on
i think it is so that's that's um the best uh that i've ever got
out of andromeda and it's actually still test footage at this point uh i plan to
get actually like a few days worth of data on it but uh i'm trying to get my
backspacing for my field flattener exactly perfect because
i learned recently uh watching a video on youtube that your
filters will add a slight bit of distance to your backspace requirements so you know if
you're if you're screwing the filter to the front of the field flattener so what but if you've got a filter drawer or
a filter wheel or something like that it will make it a little bit longer and i've been progressively moving little
steps of a millimeter uh and uh yeah i mean like most of the the spacers
you know don't come much uh smaller than a five millimeter you know i've seen threes i need to get a three but that
might be too much and uh you know i got some shims and uh i gotta get a few more so i'm trying to
get it absolutely perfect before i actually put in you know the the real work because uh
you know you get to the corners and well we all uh we're all our worst critics i'm pretty
sure so uh this is what we got from mars uh with the uh the eight inch sct
and i must say that i definitely saw a whole lot more olympus mons out of that uh that explore scientific 102.
which is right here but uh it was definitely in better detail but that's what we got from the star party last
week and uh i uh i was doing andromeda with the uh
with the uh the 80 millimeter refractor and i did want to say that that uh that andromeda shots with a 80 millimeter
refractor um and uh i ended up changing out to the um
the sct because uh in the middle of the night i there wasn't a lot of uh i expected a
lot more competition on mars opposition we'll just put it that way and while i had the uh the ed80 out
again we messed around with some of this and it's pretty noisy actually and there's
how it's doing that thing again where it's like putting out the tiles
i see i'm not sure you guys probably see that thing like tiling like that it's kind of weird actually
i don't i i can't see it here in the screen but it's still like building in
the image and filling in anything i see yeah it is kind of odd um
i think that was just a a bad picture when that came down to it um so yeah that's pretty much what what
uh what i have to uh show there i just lost the
we'll put that back up before us i think that's something to be proud of
right there that's very nice yeah i mean it's only one night's data i mean not
even a night's data like at all actually it was you know coming up towards the um
um the meridian and here because i got the city uh to the west and north of me once
i go past the meridian i start losing gradients on like anything i'm shooting like other than if i'm going um you know
with an l enhance on a nebula i can push it a little further towards where the the city glow is but uh i'm surrounded
on three sides by water so if i'm facing east i actually have a uh a fairly good um
you know uh dark sky except for that's where the led street lamp is that's only
100 feet away from where i image um so i'm doing i'm doing what i can and uh
officially at the beginning of next month will be my one year anniversary from taking my first uh
ever uh deep sky image or i mean anything i i got a cold astrophotography camera
before i got a dslr so i mean you know it it definitely doesn't take uh
you know a whole lot of experience but it definitely does take experience to get to the points where you know where
everything's working and um jeffrey horn just asked my border
ratings portal six so it says but uh you know again i got a uh
uh led street lamp 100 feet away so my areas border ratings board
portal six but well you know we'll we'll see how that goes but um
i mean i i've heard many people say uh you know uh going down the rabbit hole
but uh i was thinking about it and i was like man i've seen where they like cast ant
nests you know and they got all these different little paths and crevices that all go off to different places you know
and like some of us just want to take pretty pictures and you know show them to others or you know jerry is doing um
you know uh exoplanet you know research you know tonight live on the air uh we got guys uh you
know who are gonna be on next week asteroid hunters who are you know they're doing sky surveys and you know
finding you know um asteroids you know things that you know yeah there's professionals doing it
but there's also amateurs doing it you got guys doing supernova research and i mean there's so many different branches
that you can go down it's like i'm going to get a telescope and that leads to so many different things that's just
absolutely incredible and a great community of people and i
am glad to be a part of it yeah that's pretty much what i can say about that so deepti uh
just showed me uh i don't know if it's her first astrophoto but she did make an image of
the moon uh with her iphone and one of the things that i
we have i mean we have like some of the best imagers in the world participating on our show
uh but um there's also a beginning aspect and um you know so a lot of
people might uh you know i just want people to know out there if you're watching the show okay that
you know you can start with astrophotography with your smartphone you can
start to pick up very simple aspects of
capturing images and it can be done with very simple equipment
you know and and this is how you start and i know this is something that caesar is always talking about uh
yes but uh let's let deepti show her image of uh of the moon here
uh yes um about uh so sorry that
sometimes i i i couldn't understand if i need to i i talk now me okay
no no i i listen good yes yes i like to to to listen to deepti not
to me but you're next caesar so you're next
yes you're next okay i'm saying this screen okay
yeah just this this is the
picture i have captured the studios before of the moon with my iphone with your
iphone okay yeah yeah and
this is the this is a picture i have capsules i remember one month ago
and as i said i just love to capture the sunlight sunset too and yeah
it's sunrise and here's the picture of sunset [Music]
yeah and this is the picture capture them that is the moon when it is a
cloudy day okay so what we're going to do deepti is uh
uh jerry hubble and i will collaborate on this and we will get you connected
to this this telescope that i just showed you uh which is which is this this telescope
here and uh we're going to let you take your first uh image of whatever it is that you want
to take a picture of okay so that would be a lot of fun and uh if you want to do that as an astronomy
if you want to do that as an astronomy club project um we're very happy to
make that happen and uh perhaps uh you can get some tips from elaine on um
uh capturing asteroid data and uh and then making uh you know your first
mpc yeah i have one question to the emir ellen i just um i engaged in the estuary
sourcing for two months and uh some of the data are given to us
uh to measure sir to make the mpc report that you have talking frequently
so i i was wondering that how what how do you work out after the
getting the mpc report that we have seen through the website
right you have to say yes can you hear me yes yes you have to send it to a given uh
page there is a on the mp mpc page there is a quite a lot of information about
how to start your astrology program etc etc let me let me share my screen
and i'll show you in real time i'm still there
just a second then you can know which opera i was
listening to here here
okay so try to make a screen copy of this address because then you have all the information and then here you have
how to report astrometric observations uh you have guide to minor planet
astrometry and so basically when you have your mpc report then you should you send it by email to
ops at if i remember correctly cfa
let me see don't remember it's ups.cfa.harvard.edu
and and then they process your data
uh and eventually they send you back a report uh basically you
when you create your observation you give it uh your local uh number okay
uh like uh dt dpi
one zero zero one whatever and then they identify to eventually a known object which is normally the case
now and i'll see if it's a known object they give you the designation of the object and they put a parenthesis in the front
that tells you this object is already known if you have uh one of your object which has no
parenthesis then you discovered an asteroid and you need to follow it up uh in order to uh eventually get uh get its
uh late years later to get to name it eventually but it's
getting harder and harder now you really need to be very well equipped with very big
telescopes and so on and so on but you can be lucky er also you can be lucky that's right yeah okay
i i wanted to comment on the the issue of field collectors
uh the first thing is that the values that the makers give might or might not be very precise
okay if the value is 62 millimeter it's indeed worth trying 6 60 61 62 63 64.
uh when i of course i i try to go to the united states once a year
just for shopping because well in chile you don't have much choice of equipment and the prices are about
double the the price so i go shopping and i came back with a better ring so bader is making a ring
that can be adapted from 29 to 36 and it's very very precise so you can you
can if you can use this type of adapter it costs like 79 i know because i paid it like three days
ago then you can play and test your values and so on uh and
other than that i like your m31 image better than the former one
uh i'm talking what's your name astro beard thank you
it's richard grace richard okay uh
you know if you look at the red star like beetlejuice you will realize beetlejuice is orange if you look at the
blue star like vega or sirius you will see that it's pure white it's not really blue and so very often
people tend to make images of galaxies where the the the center is red and the
outskirts are blue and it really doesn't correspond to the reality
m31 is a greyish brownish galaxy it has not really a lot of blues and green so
your image was indeed to me at least pretty good everybody of course you know
has its own taste as far as colors and so on and so on anyway that's what i wanted to
tell you there's this adapter ring you can go by half millimeter or a third of a millimeter if you want to yeah i have
the uh the ones that are um that actually came with like the zwo camera they're um you know uh in third
millimeter increments or something like that i think they're a little different um they got a nice snack
all right that's not me uh anyway they've got one of these uh nice stacks of m48 spacers um from
explore scientific and uh they're great um they go down to five millimeter um
and just having something that's slightly in between besides a um
essentially a big stack of washers and i know that they're out there i just don't have them yet
but uh as far as the uh the adjustable uh thing um
hold on
here he goes so
this is the one that i would have to basically adjust because finding a female to female m42
hold on that would probably work a little better yeah sorry um so i gotta change out this spacer because from here
back they say uh 56 plus or minus four which i'll echo the sediments earlier
that uh if it's right awesome but uh it wasn't and it's longer than it's supposed to be
uh plus you're adding a filter so you're adding i believe it's a third of the thickness of the glass of the filter to
your your distance so getting something to replace this 20
i switched it around anyway uh to replace this one and have it be adjustable might be kind of hard
because i'm running the filter drawer in there so
oh oh yeah
and thank you scott you're welcome you're welcome
i like one one like this yeah these are we are to
we are to you now you wanted to share some some images
uh yes i i i thought sure i i thought in share the the old
one powerpoint that was the first one that in the first conversation that we
had in the first time of this year to show to the people uh who how is the
our uh our relationship with astronomy education in argentina and
uh you know our business and and i think that
let me check
i have all open you know
sorry
well this is you maybe scott you you remember this yes
yes yeah this is presentation yes it's my my presentation of course for for people
that maybe i never i never show uh these pictures of how i use the telescope from
the city normally normally uh we don't use the balcony but you know in the in
the last surprise global safaris we used the balcony
um because the the roof the roof that you can see in the in the picture is this
the in my home in the tower is the 37 floor and it's very very nice sometimes when
you don't have a wind to make astrophotography because in in
the in the in this altitude that of course that is not more that
120 meters um do you have a lower low pollution
and something that that was an advantage in buenos aires was that
the entire illumination of the street turned to the land and
in the past we have um a mix of
mercury and sodium and you know was really difficult to to filtering
and now is incredible but it's more easy when we
have um the sorry the we we use the
the or we make pictures in in our skies in buenos aires in the last maybe five
years this changed a lot the quality of the pictures of all people that that trying to take to make pictures
from the city uh was incredibly was
to to be a a a really good quality of course thinking in a city
very you you can see you can't see any stars here
you know but um and well we encouraged the people to to
to make pictures from the city and well this is actually my my shop from
30 years we sell telescope but and we
at all time we are repairing calibrating you know actually i have
uh an old um size
size telescope from germany from from 90 10
telesco with 110 years old and i'm i'm cleaning the optics
this is a w2 lenses and it's very interesting because i needed to found
the important old books or all information how to
trade this type of glass because in you know you don't
you don't like to scratch or or attack chemically something
um because it's very important know who is the glass especially in the very old
telescopes and well another another work that i make is
i'm sometimes because in argentina of course normally the people
have the telescope without only the use in backyard but
many many people every time are using
[Music] a dome or a roof uh
don't remember the name in in english of the the when you have the roof that that can
opening well uh to make it their own batteries in their
own backyards well this is a dome that we made
in i don't remember maybe 10 years ago
um was very interesting because was is in a ski resort
uh in bariloche area where is the people of of the astronomy club for young people
that i i tell to
uh and this is where our our showrooms and
i i i love this this um how do you say this combination
and actually maybe next week we we
are going to their customers two of the um
because we are importing uh this one of this uh two of this that we
have in our warehouse in miami and uh our our one of my favorites uh works
of course is isen sponsor
i made this from from 1994. this these pictures are of of the
this and these are pictures of an edition ah these two an edition where
we had the the thing of uh people from the
american um variable star
stations uh and was an amazing this was an edition
of 2010 and uh well this is
our our our pictures in in the in the red light like all astronomers
armor have pictures with the red light and the people knows why do you have all
pictures in breath of life well okay for us for us
no yes only only astronomers know why yes [Laughter]
our red face i mean here this is was this is very interesting because this is
a um a wolf of salt this is a
salt flat area and saline or as well salt i don't remember
many many words in english when the place where the people get the salt and this is a wall of made
of egg egg metals tall with the salt
and we project uh quarantine city turkana in the world
this is a projection of maybe uh five meters tall by
uh [Music] six or seven meters wide
because it's a it's a this is was impressive normally and of course that is a
projection not of the picture if not was a live projection for for the people you know normally
my work in star parties is show to the people
in image alive and projected with a very low light
and you know when we have maybe 400 students
you can not enough telescope uh to show to the people
all the things together but uh we resolved this projecting the the
live image of of this of the different uh objects of the sky of course
and this is very interesting because i think that in the future this with
this will be more um more uh reverend because uh by the
by the pandemia you need to make
some solutions for for the when you have more people of course this one was the
last year with this was was uh with another group
and you you can uh you can recognize this
there are the same group of telescope that we use in in in san juan
for the eclipse with the filters
this is a picture of hecta carina that we took in the in uh bashar grandestar party last year
we used one of the uh all this is every time we have more white telescope
of a brand that is explored scientific of course in our staff and
customers that coming with us to the third parties this was a group
in the last year really we we miss uh this uh of to be people enjoying
together but you know yeah and this is when i have like something
like a lecturer of course that but i'm not but i tried to here to
explain to the kids how the lesser and optics work
and they was very very smarts the kids the students to make to
resolve this like a labyrinth of life where they can use
they can use the the things that i told i told them about the reflection
refraction uh limit of reflection in a prison um
um this was their lectures uh that
they they couldn't resolve of course they the smart kids resolved more faster
like like their professors and was very funny and
this is something like we really i love to make this is actually this is uh one
of the of the meeting of uh encuentro de jones
astronomers the young meeting uh young meeting uh jonathan meeting sorry
and this is uh every year um we we
go and sponsor it and work together with the these professors
and really we love to make this and this is it's very important and this is
of course the eclipse with explore scientific fire light feels like last year
um we have of course the the all put in the in the our planes to make the same
in in patagonia this year but of course that i don't know we don't know
this was was an amazing and amazing uh
experience with a our core observation
yes yes we when the people with
the local police uh um taking an idea of number of people uh watching the cars um
you know and they told us that we have in this place observation only
this place more that 5 000 people only in this place because
this is only a part of the area this was a very giant square
and very very uh big area and this was only a corner
where we was uh to to invite the people to to watch and use their their cell
phone to take a picture of the sun of course also the the filters put in the telescopes
was a very very interesting very interesting um
experience was amazing yeah thank you this is the group uh it was
sorry that maybe i was too long no no thank you
this is this is when i was i i saw the the
the background that the uh deepti is is a genius really and of
course that sorry that i say okay you need to make a glow no our club in
they need to know you because you're a genius and yeah yes
you're a very good example of of a young astronomer really and
and i'll i'll get um connection with
carlos colaso and another people that make photo photometry in asteroids to
to see the shape of the asteroids in argentina and of course that i can
give you uh the the connection the email address all that you need no problem because
they are friends and they will be uh crazy to to know your work and you know
okay thank you thank you thank you right
so uh bob uh we were chatting kind of offline here a little bit
and you know i know that many people today that have
some experience in amateur astronomy are very keen on learning more about remote
observatories and remote astronomy [Music] jerry hobble's written a book about it
but you are the guy that helped make much of this possible
what's your perspective or what what uh you know you you've seen you've seen
this go from almost no one being able to do it to now
thousands of people able to do it yeah it's been
a lot of my focus um over the years what what you see behind me is the great basin observatory
it's the first um permanent observatory in a u.s national
uh park that was really it's really cool they they uh
one of our customers uh was originally used acp with a
special script that he wrote and backpacked his system up into the mountains all over in different parks
around the us to measure the night's sky brightness we met him at the first
the dedication of gbo and um it's it is a 100 remote
observatory no one goes in there no one even gets to it there are no visitors
uh the scope is 27-inch plane wave and just barely fits in there anyway
excuse me it's used by several colleges around the west they put the money in along with some um
corporate donors and so forth anyway to get back to remote observatory observing i think it was this thing that
caused scott to ask me to say something that's all i've done for 20 years pretty
much this point in the direction of remote observing we saw the um mark slade remote observatory
and that's a pretty typical one where people do remote desktop or teamviewer or whatever and they just
remote into the uh but they're basically taking themselves
into the observatory where they're physically present and they're dialing the dials and pushing the buttons and
you saw him working maxim and setting up you know sequences and all of that
and that wouldn't work in this environment here because you have students and you
don't want to let the students have access to your observatory computer it would turn to dust in no time at all
plus you would have to train them on all of the software and train them on how to
avoid making adjustments that would render the system unusable and all sorts of things
so it needs a layer of simplicity added to the top of it and
that's really where i've tried to focus over the last i'll say 10 years is
making that bulletproof for people and as simple as possible
um i don't want to turn this into an ad but i i just want to show you what i
mean by simple if if i can can i
yes i can share this all right let's try this share
wrong screen it it showed a picture of what i oh maybe maybe it can you see a
web browser here it looks like that says red mountain 663 yes okay good
all right so this is what you get even whether you're in the in the observatory or a thousand miles away you work with
this this is the interface to the whole thing um so
to take an image one single image you just fill this form out
name coordinates if you have a rotator how long your image is
and at what filter and then boom you hit the button and it does it
for a series with colors you can set it up here and add as many of these as you know red
green blue h alpha whatever and
fill this out push the button that's it so there's no fiddling with um
uh anything you know the the actual behind the scenes software at all
and this is also true if you're in the observatory so this is what my focus has been for
remote observing is to make it really easy and totally automatic no recalibrating guiders no worrying
about your rotator none of that sort of thing no fiddling with pushing buttons on cameras downloading
images where do they go and if you set this up right you can have your images
delivered to you by dropbox if you're remote and they just pop up on your desktop and they're in dropbox
just to give you an idea to open the shutter on the dome you would click this now it says opening opening the shutter
you see what i'm getting at right i'm not going to bother you too much all of these controls are right here
where you can get to them and you can see the weather here it is safe and here's the stuff
uh your clear sky chart whatever that's great base and i put that in there as kind of a joke it's this is not great
basin that i'm showing you but anyway that's the idea so without believing
as i say i don't want to make this look like an advertisement the idea is you can go all the way from remote desktop
which is you're in the observatory right right all the way to
uh a system like this which can handle a thousand people each with their own data
and no one can get to the observatory to play with it or make adjustments they just put their requests in and get them
back so that's that's the range i will say a few things that i've learned over the years
about remote observing the number one biggest pain in the neck
period is domes and roofs that's where all the problems are and the
number one most painful consideration for remote observing is a
dome that has to have the scope parked before it can close there are so many flavors of clap trap
crazy sensors and safety switches and everything for that and that's just more
stuff to go wrong and i've you know all it takes is one
you just you know more points of failure and if for some reason the scope doesn't
park now everything gets wet or sandy or on snow or whatever so
the the observatories where you have a rolloff roof that has to have the scope first parked
those are bad news and of course if you have more than one telescope in your little building then it's totally
impossible if you have a low hanging roof like that so the trick is to build to have an
architectural solution to that not a a fancy sensor based ir whatever thing
magnetic switches just build a building with that can
roll over your scopes no matter where they are that's the key um great basin has the clamshell which
is a very simple system um and that thing has run there now for
several years and never had a problem and it just opens and there's a lot of snow and ice
they put a little heating stuff on the inside to make the ice um break off
and it just works so there's a lot to be learned i will also say that
everyone underestimates the cost of remote true remote observing and one
more thing and then i won't bore you anymore there's no such thing as an unattended remote observatory the idea
of putting the observatory 10 000 miles away on a snowy peak and then running it from your
um tropical island get it it's not that ain't gonna
there's a big thing that i talk i've talked to several groups that want to build a remote observatory and the biggest advice i give them is build it
next year next to where you are make sure everything works every stinking thing works
and is configured and then carted out to the remote spot that's right if you
try to build it out at the remote spot it'll take you forever well
the the nature of amateur astronomy equipment is it's not bulletproof
you end up having to babysit it in some way or another until you get everything clicking and
even then 90 days six months later boom something
breaks things and maybe it's just a cable the cable wraps that's a big one
um especially german equatorial you you never know and
next thing you know you've ripped a cable out of something or you've torn something else out
uh yeah it it you've got to have somebody around to manage the observatory you also have to be able to
recover from when the telescope points at the ground yes i've done well i've done that
remotely i've been able to manage that several times you know three or four times over the life of this system which
is five years now well my software just to put things into perspective will do that
hands off if your telescope's pointed to the ground if you can get it anywhere in
near the sky then start observing it will figure out it's pointing here it will
figure that out sink the scope and put itself back together and uh it just has
to not be pointed at the floor you just have to get it to point at the sky and then everything after that's normal so
right that's that's exactly what i do with the weapon that's why it's important to have a webcam in there just so you can see the scope and what you're
doing right and uh but it doesn't always point at the ground it just it can be 60
degrees off or whatever of course there are the more expensive scopes but you don't ever have that
problem so that's just money you know money
higher higher dollars equals more data per unit time higher data rate
for higher dollars that's kind of how it works so yeah bob just described the story of
my life i i maintained a robotic telescope since
2005 and when i have a lot of work
and of course murphy's law makes that when one telescope fails then very soon another one another one other one
sometimes it can be two three months not having nothing to do and then you have failures which can be very simple indeed
first thing connection the cables usb ports should be prohibited in astronomy they're made for printers not
for telescopes but anyway most people now have usb ports when it's more serious power
supplies and then sometimes some real seriously
serious damage but uh of course here all the securities and things and the fact to have somebody on the spot
is also very very important and indeed a few years back i've had a guy it was
snowing i've been in the atacama desert for 20 years at least at my place 17 years it has
snowed twice and it was snowing and we were watching the snow and i heard a dome opening and
i went like so run close the telescope yeah that the guy and so on and so on
and now we have rain sensors and things and so it's rather safe but
about the equipment the last phrase is also correct if you buy a cheap telescope
it's not made for remote okay you have to have a minimum level and the
first thing is of course the quality of the mount the optics are yes are less important if
you have a lousy amount even with the best optics forget about it and so there is a lot of tricks that you
need to to to know and indeed as jerry said
you test your telescope at your house you have it running for a couple of months even if the sky is not good blah
blah blah then you can send it on a mountain top and you hope that on the mountain top there is somebody there i
mean my case i live like 50 meters from the telescope but not today i have a workshop with lays milling
machine i can do rings i can do adapters i can do things i i know how to control
optics and so on and so on uh remote telescope 100 alone will never work
right i mean period talk to talk to people who know about it like him like
bob uh it's really you know every single phrase he said i say yes yes yes yes he's right
there's a reason as satellites cost a lot of money because you can't get at them
that's what this that's what this remote telescope system is like a satellite
even if that's a good way to look at it that's right martin eastburn in the chat says the
scopes in chile have attendance working and attending hardware no telling what might happen a bird might fly in the
dome and you are toast you know so yeah uh
i think a lot of people have tried uh have tried setting up their amateur telescopes remotely
um and they they do go through all this this whole process of uh
of trying to gain control over the instrument there's sort of this dream
especially amongst people that have a lot of money and think of the telescope as almost a novelty
uh where they go well we'll just set up the telescope out back and uh we'll control it on my widescreen television
in the house and uh and it'll just be turnkey you know uh you can have
experiences like that and i've seen people have them but eventually something is going to fail
and you need to know how to address it so obviously right we call them the rgb
the rgt's what does that mean rich guy telescope and they're the
rgt's or the things where they want all their friends to sit around and sit martinis by the fire and play pictures
of of uh beautiful pictures of um of messier objects on their tv
click oh look at this man this is my telescope yeah right okay
i've had i had such a guy like that the main camera i was using was the cam showing
the telescope okay
yeah sometimes uh well the typical case is you have a guy who
wants to install a telescope what kind of telescope i would like to have a like 16-inch rc telescope with an
astrophysics man i mean you know you know the guy is already 40 000 and then i want to put an fsq or
whatever refractor if the guy asks you to put two telescope it means he doesn't know what he's going to do right
so that tells you the guy has no scientific program no goal in life he doesn't know yet what to do he has the
money okay but doesn't know what to do with the telescope so that was also a typical
case where people put two telescopes you know like no that's not going to work
well that's you know i have probably right now
400 total remote observing customers which i think is probably more than anybody else maybe
more than everybody put together yeah so i get and i tech i spent all week
either programming or doing tech support and so i i hear everything
and two telescopes on one mount i tell people why right right by two mounts
yeah bob do you how about the sloo telescope program are you very familiar with that
i am not real familiar with it but um that's a different model that's kind of a
you know we have a few do you know about telescopes.live
they're our newest big high large-scale uh uh
service that that use our software to provide their service but it's telescopes.live
they're um marco roshetto out of university college london um and a team of people in bulgaria have
put this thing together and there are 12 i think scopes eye telescopes that's another one
they've used our software since 2004 and have just kept customizing it and
again providing the forms based and scheduled stuff
slu is a different model they basically mostly go where they go and then you can
watch or buy their stuff so and we have a few customers who sell images to people also they
they take images and then they sell the data not the time on the telescope so that people don't
and we have a scheduling system that figures out what it can do at what time and under what conditions and you can
put requests in based on the conditions and not the time and then it just grinds away and
gets data and most people find that their observatories triple in their productivity when they do that but most
people the people who do but the most people can't conceive of that so it's been a disappointment for us we
only have probably 100 maybe 80 to 100 people using the scheduler after 10
years so oh well people who do great basins all scheduled
that this does not have people they don't sign people up for slots because
sometimes the weather's not good then you've got to have somebody who manages well i had the time now and i wanted it later and then they sit there and they
fiddle around for their time slot and don't get data because that's their time and well this is great i own the
telescope now but they're not getting data whereas if they just put their requests in
and let the scope grind away whenever it can doing whatever it can
they get data in better conditions because it knows that it wants to work toward you know up high and low air mass
and they don't have people fiddling around pushing buttons and wasting time so
it's a productivity enhancer but it's not that popular because people don't have that concept i
do like to control the telescope right and that's fine i mean we can
but that's remote observing in a nutshell is from from my point of view interesting though it is
it is well okay so um [Music]
any other comments from our group here
no it's getting late here yeah um and listening to everybody else and and
taking all the all of the different comments and information in it's quite enjoyable yeah this is great
right always a good time how about you jerry you've been collecting some data what's been going on over there yeah i'm still
um i'm still collecting my data i've got probably
almost a couple hours to go yet this is a long observation run it's about four hours a little over four hours for the
transit um i'm gonna go ahead and share my desktop real quick okay
i've been making lots of promises to deep d about um you and i uh helping her get some uh
nice astrology photographs yeah right we're gonna let her control the telescope
so yeah it'll be fun so i hope that i guess i'm looking up at
the feed i don't see it blocking all right so what i wanted to just say real quick the way uh
i use maxim dl's information window it's a tool to be able to get data
from the image and one of the things that you can do is create this aperture
and annulus that's what this is this so the center circle is an aperture and the outer ring is an annulus that
measures the background the sky background so it basically takes a measurement of the star
in in raw counts and sums it and i'll i'll click on like for
this is these are the two stars all right that are real close to each other and and this is actually this star
right here the denver star is actually the exoplanet star okay so an individual measurement would
be like this where i measure the some of the light in the
aperture and then subtract the uh value that's in the annulus
let me re-center that i don't have i don't have perfect
uh i've got a little tiny bit of declination drift uh that's something about a low-cost observatory right you
don't have you know i mean i've got a very nice uh polar alignment but it's still not perfect it drifts a little bit
but anyway uh so this is the measurement so you've got the information when i'm not sure how big the tech let me see i can make
it it's does that look better um yeah that's fine so
the intensity the the goal here is to get the actually that looks terrible
somebody's asking a question is this the same target from the other night no this is a different target okay this
is one that i haven't observed for a year this is a year ago i observed the
exoplanet so here for example you can see the total counts the total
intensity is is one million basically one times ten to the sixth and the signal-to-noise ratio on this
measurement is 1165. now the snr in this in this uh and the
meaning of this is basically a measure of the shot noise snr meaning a signal-to-noise
ratio okay so that's basically a measurement of the shot noise or the randomness of the measurement how precise the
measurement is in this particular measurement so this gives me an indication that
uh if you take one over the snr and uh one over let's say it's one over
a thousand that's equivalent to about one one part per thousand right which is a little over one millimag
precision on this particular measurement now there are other factors involved
with that so it's not really truly that that that by itself there's other factors
involved with calculating the true uh uh millimag precision
that has to do with the long term there's two terms there's the shot noise and then there's of course
scintillation um which adds into the noise so the total noise is made up of shot noise and the
long term and short-term scintillation and so that's that's basically it
uh the short-term scintillation deals with how uh
how precise you keep the star on the same pixels the calibration um
how much uh so over time you know there's scintillation so the
brightest part of the star will move around like this over them this is a two minute period so
some some uh sometimes you'll get the brightest part will be right here where the crosshair
is sometimes you'll get the bright brightest part of this image is over here so each
even with the best calibration you got variation in the values okay over time so that's kind of like the
scintillation error uh and then there's long-term scintillation which is dealing with the clouds over over several
minutes to an hour you'll have long-term drift in uh differential
uh measurement so you do one single star measurement that's not the whole measurement you do a differential so you
measure another star like this one and you you basically do a
difference between that star and this star and what you do is you assume that this
star is constant okay it's not changing but you know this star is going to change in some way whether
it's a variable star or an exoplanet transit so you basically compare this star to this star and watch for this one
to change or this difference to change and that and that's how you know that you've seen an
exoplanet that's basically how it works
are you measuring by the snr or by the magnitude in the maxim information
window so this this is just a gross measurement
of the signal noise ratio right here in maximum all right um
that's that's it's it'd be a relative so you could take you could do two types of magnitude
measurement well three types really but if you were to take this this raw count
and convert it you know do the equation two and a half times the log of the of the magnet of the sen the signal then
that would give you an instrument magnitude value okay it would be a large value
and then so you do see if you do that magnitude calculation and subtract it from this magnitude
value then you would have a differential magnitude value basically that's how that would work
so when you put the annulus i'm sorry the the aperture over
the one there okay and then that reads 10.151 magnitudes and you go over the other one
it's 12 something oh yeah so this is a different measurement this is a so what i've done is i've actually previously
i've i've done imaging this is not relative because this is first i've scaled this so what you do is you
look up you look up a star magnitude right and then you do the measurement and then you say okay this
is a this is a 120 second image and you tell it what was the magnitude
and then you extract it and it says okay this intensity is equal to this magnitude gotcha and from then on it
it'll it'll measure that it'll calculate a magnitude based on that but again to be accurate you have
to be if you use a visual magnitude you have to use a v-band filter to be able to do
that right precisely cool
so i continue to crank let it run yeah
when will it be finished jerry it'll be uh well right now it's uh
three minutes to midnight it'll be another two hours or so an hour and a half to two hours before i'm done
you just drink red bull or something until yeah so
yeah exactly so it's tuesday night right so i get to get up early and go to work and talk to you in the morning right
yeah i'm gonna call you early in the morning
yeah can i show a picture for 10 seconds absolutely this this part of the program is pretty
free for him anybody can share anything they want talk about anything they want
do you see a picture of a cell phone in a window yes
look what's on the cell phone that's the acp and it's being run on a japanese bull
train so i just happen to remember i had that picture from paul gardner and
that's he's actually running this uh that's what he's that's the observatory that he's logged into so wow
that's cool now who anybody who's there who is the like the knight assistant or whatever do
they have a team that uh kind of cares for the scope and can there are um national park service
people that that were trained okay that can do basic stuff and then if uh if there's something that
needs deeper maintenance yeah um they'll fly somebody up from plane wave or
they'll send somebody from one of the colleges uh you know that kind of thing i see so
they have two levels actually probably three i'll say factory support
uh highly technical support and then the simple stuff like looking for um cables but it's been designed in such
a way that um you know no german equatorial mound none of that i mean it's so it's it's really
industrial strength the way it's put together i should mention that paul gardner was
one of the engineers on that and it went from um
groundbreaking literally to first light in five weeks
wow
getting images right with everything working the automation and everything that is incredible
yeah projects like that i mean i mean i've been working on this telescope for five weeks a lot longer
than that actually two months you know so yeah it took us up two months to get
the not the first light but to get it operational for ourselves for the msro that's right
i have a story about that uh in chile there was a group that was searching for supernovae with
photographic films and then they got a grant in order to buy a mount with a telescope and a camera and so on and so
on yeah and so since they were professionals they hired a guy to develop a telescope
control program in linux and the guy worked for a year then found another job somewhere else he left
then another guy was hired same thing he worked for a year and it was still going
nowhere and so on there was a belgian amateur in uh well he he died a few years ago
daniel vershadzi and he got in contact with the pi of the of the project and he said but you know
now you can get all the software uh you know of the shelf and so on you know let me try and so he came at the beginning
of the an afternoon at cerro tololo he installed the software like at five o'clock he called the guy and said you
have a list of supernova that you want to photograph you say why to observe tonight
right so the telescope was ready in like a few hours and up and running and so on and
so on and so of course it's really a big big change we have different software like that that allow you to uh to
automatize the telescope and so on so here at my observatory i have several several
type of software you have of course acp you have a
ccd autopilot you have ccd commander you have prism so now there is a lot of
variety of software that do basically all the same thing with different philosophy and so on and so on but it's
really a big change compared to what was available you know 20 years ago 20 years ago was spray story
basically we get a lot of customers and i'm sure the others do as well i know the guys
that at main sequence that writes sequence generator pro we share a lot of uh we i talk with them and we we get a
lot of people who appear at our companies in desperation after
having the it's trivial i can do it in a weekend crowd the linux people
burn out and leave or they have software that was written for them that was free grad student where i call
it and um then the guy goes somewhere else and nobody knows anything about it it's unmaintainable
um and so then what then that the observatory falls into disuse
and then someone comes along and says why aren't you using this well you know we got this free software
and boom so yeah it's it's a common story free software costs a lot of money yep
and it's a software's a relationship not a product it's a it's a
service business not a product business right
something similar when i sell a telescope uh it is great well because
maybe it's got say the same one not one
maybe five of my best friends actually was uh actually
was customers that's that they invited me telescopes
many years ago and sometimes i forget this and it's a relationship
with the customers too like software right i'm not sure astronomers never
wanted to pay for software one thing that's that's true it was software
outside of astronomy too it's um if you can't touch it it doesn't exist
they spend 10k on the telescope and uh want to spend zero on the software
and that's that's where the problem is well richard richard stallman
was an evil force for software he was the guy who said all software should be free it shouldn't be anything and i got
into a big i don't know if you guys have ever heard of o'reilly media or riley and associates the book publisher
tim o'reilly and i started a company this is in my previous career o'reilly software i'm the guy who wrote the first
web server for windows pre-microsoft and tim o'reilly and i started o'reilly
software we sold website professional as an o'reilly product for seven years
and in the end the reason we shut it down was twofold one microsoft came out with
iis which was free and therefore put us pretty much out of business but the other one is tim got into a situation
where people said why why what are you doing with a money grubbing
software business when you're all about open source well open source and free aren't exactly the same but it was that
that finally he kept having to answer that question and he said you know what forget it we don't need to be in the
software business and so and i agreed with him so we shut the business down after seven years but it was that whole
thing of anyway i got stallman um adventures
other stallman adventures yes uh to tell you about it
it's just it hurt and you know tim's selling books right what's the difference between
writing a book and writing software what's the difference none it's an artistic piece of it's an artistic work
in both cases yet the books should be free i'm sorry the software should be free the books it's okay to sell books
so there's a disconnect there and anyway that yeah you could tell i'm a little
passionate about works of art and and and um the intellectual property of things bob
it might be that that more people can write software than can write books they think they can
if you spell something wrong in a book right exactly right exactly anyway we can feel the the pain
[Laughter] and it's a living document too which makes it even more difficult it's the
main thing i get every day of the week i don't want to pay for photoshop i don't want to pay for pigs inside
it's like well yeah um carry on then see what you get out of your equipment you know
well the thing is people don't people don't understand their time is worth money and they they don't understand
that good software saves them time and uh plus the fact the people who are
doing it have a lifetime of learning it's like buying a great painting
you know you buy a great painting because or you listen to music that somebody has spent a million hours
pounding on the keyboard to get good enough to make you happy well that million hours that's not you
know you can't just sit down and play music so you know it's worth it's worth it so
anyway they don't see the value in art in inspiration
in logical thinking all of that adds up to a value
and then you what would you do without pix picks insight it's a fabulous piece of work
it's unbelievable you know everybody everybody thinks because i work with it
that i got mine free i paid for my five years ago six years old whenever it came out
and i'm happy to pay for it i keep waiting for them to say right
we're charging for the next installment because for the last five or six years all of the updates have been free
yeah so we and we charge for both maintenance what they
get is they get direct access to me i work here all week every week and they
also get all the updates so we we have a yearly maintenance fee your software will never
stop working but i do have that and that's how we keep how i would i'm able to continue to
to pay my grocery bills and my house payments you know that's it that's my job right
that's right you know but as scott and i have said about photoshop you know we've paid
fortunes for folks and now it costs eight dollars
and you get all of the upgrades free i mean that that um
you know you have a cute huge customer base but used to cost i remember paying
thousands for photoshop you know um and uh you know it was it was what you
had to have and and if you're doing professional work you needed professional tools so you
paid for it you know and the thing was with that is really
after two years it was going to be updated and you knew that you were going to pay for the upgrade you know they had your hook line and
sync but once you were using it and you were comfortable with it the upgrade was coming you know and you
either stuck with your old version or you upgraded it it would cost you a full tune for the upgrade so what they charge the monthly now is
nothing compared to what we used to pay right we pay so it's a service business not a
product business design stuff so another expensive program but definitely worth
it you know okay yeah i remember i used to use cold draw
right years ago coral draw was the program i used um oh
my gosh i remember that yeah and it was very good at the time
you know at that particular time and it did take me ages to transition over to
photoshop no different it's on the ages to transition into a victim so
i remember when i first opened it up i thought i'd deal with that in a couple of weeks time
you know and you do you you come away from it and then you come back in with the attitude to learn what's going on
and adjust it and pick up everything that's happening but it's never a five minute process
i think the software life picks inside you every day with it
right interesting i think uh caesar is uh trying to set up
a telescope so we can see mars
he said he got some clear sky yes yes i have clear sky i prepare
all now because i have all inside and maybe i can get a record
a guinness record to to put in the station telescope yeah i have
i have oh this is okay yes yeah yes i i used a celestron
14 inches 80 80 82 degrees yeah and i'll put this
in the ultra smooth telescope and i'll connect with the cell phone and
i'll show mars if i can make this
you've set a record you said iraq yes yes what i say
yes i tell you 15 minutes i have all 12 now okay this is all technically remote
astronomy now yes high speed at high speed that's right
but we have our knight assistant there too so
cool i wonder what it looks like before he puts it in the telescope
by the way uh richard um your friends uh asteroid hunters were watching the
program and uh they were giving nice comments about uh bob denny's software
oh yeah really they've definitely been uh messing around with the software a lot they had to custom do a whole bunch
of stuff um they're they they got it to the point where it's um i mean it's in their
driveway compared to their house so it's not on a mountaintop uh and i'm sure as everybody has said that you know the
little problems that creep up but uh you know they have it where they uh just basically hit a button and it
does all the uh skystuffed search uh over the grid that they have it
pre-programmed out to do and then the next day i think they hit one button and it mails everything to the minor planet center that's cool and
i mean and and and they're amateurs you know what i mean they've been doing that like about as long as i've been
doing astrophotography um so i'm i'm looking forward to having them on
uh next week it'll be really cool that's neat
all right gary you're gonna go it's 5 15 in the morning you need sleep dude yeah we're doing
gary you need some late one here so i'm gonna make a move and um we'll catch
up with everybody on friday okay yeah so um all right
you take care go from there take care and i'll speak to everybody soon okay thanks gary
there you are i just read the comment it says uh we imaged and took data on 400
asteroids in the last three nights of imaging and all the data was sent to the minor planet center oh that's great
that's cool yeah that's great and we use 1400 visual pinpoint
that's uh does anybody remember tim puckett no of course
remember him yeah yeah yeah mr supernova hunter mr super yeah
that was his thing he had quite a system put together for
that you have those baker none schmidt cameras right for a while
uh he built his own 24 inch from the ground up and then he had several other
amateurs in a network that he would send each night shooting lists to yeah
and then all of them were running acp so he just sent an observing plan a textual observing plan they'd feed it in and it
would sit there and go all night and then the images would go back to him and then he had a whole bunch of other
people to whom he would send packages of images to manually blink them yeah i was
part of that team for a while really yeah i did the blinking and stuff i learned how to do that and that's cool
and jack newton still does that work doesn't he doesn't you scott yep he's got who's that jack newton you know him
uh yes i do yeah i don't know if he does or not i i don't know about that yeah uh
i know that he was he did work with tim for a long time and uh not sure if he's still doing that or
not but he got many supernova discoveries to his credit uh out of that program
oh gosh yes um dick post got really into it and i think he still
is um he got a different he got um who was the guy that wrote ccd navigator
uh i know you're talking about uh down uh steve uh steve a former bell system
fellow actually right steve
i'll remember his last name anyway i i i could recognize him in an instant he got
steve to write him a supernova automatic automated supernova detector
and it worked okay but i know the guys up at berkeley wrote the classifiers
for that for the bait berkeley automated telescope what was that supernova search
they were doing that there and they spent years trying to do it and you know that's a
tough program because the really difficult ones the ones you have to get are embedded of course in galaxies and
you it's just one little thing just a tiny little bit brighter than everything else around it
it's tough yeah that's why they used humans to do that right they're the best detectors of them all right that's what
yeah it was it's i was doing that for a few months and i never i never
discovered one so yeah i get it i got i did it for the
experience i i mean i was hoping i would be able to find something but i was it was a big learning thing for me it was
early it was like in 2014 2015 when i was doing this
alain was mentoring mentioning jim scotty as one of the pioneers of supernova hunting and the space watch
program i found my old picture of him um there he is
at the old telescope that was automated that was the thing that inspired me to
get into automation okay can you see him yeah right yes yeah
okay so it looks like caesar's
i hear something he's out there rumbling in the back well you see here a vacuum cleaner behind me
oh the grinding of a go-to telescope yeah
got it i thought it was maybe the servo system or something no no no no the servo system of the vacuum
cleaner yeah the coffee grinder a coffee grinder yeah
so yeah i don't know why they picked or why i picked tuesday nights to be the
global star party because actually i started that before they got the new cleaning crew who said
they could pick us up on on tuesday nights so here they are oh boy
it's all right jeff playing behind me but um
yeah what else can i pick up here
i can change my background to match jerry's [Music]
yeah i always like this shot somebody said you need an on-air light you can get those at him radio suppliers
they know i'm here broadcasting so my room echoes too much
there we go consume your microphone sounds great though bob
your voice sounds good i don't know how mine i don't know how mine sounds but yours sounds good it sounds fine i i just uh you know i i
don't know i i made so many videos i just decided your voice sounding nice and warm is a
good thing so yeah sounds great
richard you got something no i just lost connection for a split
second and i lost my chat so i never uh got answers from the last thing
maybe other otherwise no otherwise okay
right no just uh the the chat's gone and um it dropped out for a second i was watching
zoom i mean i'm sorry i was watching twitch and i noticed myself wasn't moving
oh i see like freeze yeah so deep deepti let me ask you a question
um uh uh yeah you are using um uh your
uh computer is a windows based computer is that right
yeah it's a laptop um there is uh i3 [Music]
i3 laptop okay all right so when uh jerry and i get you set up
he'll recommend uh some um uh you know we can either use zoom or
what kind of you like to use type dnc right height b and c is to get logged in
directly into the observatory uh but it's just a zoom can be used also
i i'm just with type b c you get excellent image quality it's just as if you're sitting there at the computer
uh there's no compression artifacts or anything like that but i'm not sure how
zoom seems to work pretty well for that also i guess yeah well you saw when i shared my screen how clear it was i
guess it was okay yeah so okay it looks like caesar's got uh mars
going on here yeah i like i like bob's background that's cool i like that i know look at
that i'm i'm channeling jerry i dug up the image of when their um apollo 11
limb extraction you have to do one thing bob you have to drop your saturation to zero on your
video oh yes that's right i don't know how to do that
it's obvious that i'm not in the room with deep on your camera jerry hubble's still back i don't have that control i don't
like zoom doesn't give me access to the camera um controls i don't know i i start up
skype i start up skype and use the camera control there that's where it gives it to you oh i see well it's too
late for me to do that now the zoom doesn't give me that um level of control let's see settings i don't think
no i don't think he doesn't no it starts skype up at the same time though and just adjust your picture yeah
that sounds straight hijacked my audio one time [Laughter]
anyway this is good enough no i like that picture that's a nice picture
all right so slurred my background too so it looks like i'm in focus in the rest of it yes i see that's cool
focus here on caesar it's all yeah get out of here pin there we go
all right caesar you got it man yes yes i i have it um
let me share the screen of my phone okay oh my boy got a phone
all right i'll mute myself sorry let me see it's all right
um no it's not the camera is the share the screen
let me sorry
um
it's like we're inside his phone looking at him yeah we are yeah
i don't remember the last time up screen screen sorry
okay okay there you go
does link go away i don't know looks like it froze here yep
caesar if you're uh if you can hear us uh the
your screen's frozen sorry sorry okay
for later i i have it in the screen
let me check now
doesn't seem to be working here caesar
hmm
it's out yeah
i don't know
i've seen you do it before
well you're working with that caesar um
i see you coming back in you're muted you're muted
i don't know why when i'm start to to screen to share the screen yes
because if you like i can try again sorry but no problem
i i think it's okay i think it's okay it's okay i go to the balcony we can try
again you want to try one more time okay try it one more time yeah yes sorry
okay
somebody said asteroid hunters has the best streaming setup for anyone who's doing astronomy
that's great
this one is really good especially with the with the bots that um
you know interchange the comments it's amazing yeah yeah yeah this is uh this service
is uh restream restream okay works pretty good
reasonably priced i got the pro version and yes i pay for it
of course you like teamviewer we we're a commercial team viewer we send a little stub thing
out with all our software so i can just get right in and drag and drop files and all the good stuff so it's worth it one
thing i had a problem with teamviewer bob i'll relate this story i i don't like stream very very much because i bought a license to be able to support
our customers and explore scientific customers and the msro observatory was a
non-commercial system okay and we have several users that use
teamviewer with the private use you know the the non-commercial use to get in the observatory
this is before we incorporated or anything this was just a group of guys that put together an observatory to use
right so i started getting on the observatory with my licensed version of teamviewer
and then after a while all of a sudden it decided that the computer and the observatory was a
commercial system and started to force everybody to get a commercial life to use yeah you don't
you don't want to do that that's no no i talked to them i said this is what's going on this is a
private use observatory it's not commercial please turn this off so we can use the
teamviewer and they did and it lasted about three weeks and then it came back on again so i was
pissed and so i just yeah i don't blame you i'm not using teamviewer anymore i'm using tight b and c
and i've got too many other solutions out there yeah i talk bad about teamviewer every chance i get
well we use it within our within their terms of use and it is absolutely
invaluable for me well it's a great program i liked it i liked it a lot it does a lot of great great stuff i i just
for support it's wonderful it has a lot of features for for
providing support to customers it's just great so and we have a commercial
little stub team viewer that we ship with our software so when they start our remote assistance tool that's the other
half of teamviewer and it's on our license and everything works that's great that's great i'm sure yeah
i'm sure if uh are you ready to uh start suzanne we're
gonna try again we're gonna try again try again all right yeah
share screen from argentina yeah that's when i see um
scott instead yes it says a video was paused during
some function something yeah video esta
derante la function
it just isn't working that's all there is to it darn it
i think it's frozen up on caesar here yeah not working
yeah i don't know if you if you just
you can see mars but the the connection is no no
no we can only see me it showed scott it showed me
and then it had an error it had an error message yeah yeah it showed me and then gave an
error message here brett blake says scott in space that's right
mm-hmm well okay um
gentlemen i think that it's been a great night of observing um uh does anybody have any any last uh
comments any anything they want to share with uh before we call it a night
always a good time scott you throw a great party oh thank you yes it was wonderful thank you yep love background
now bob you've got the uh yeah yeah i'm just playing around yeah that's
awesome that's what we're here for i appreciate seeing bob uh talking to him about stuff that's cool
oh yeah yeah that was great well thank you i feel like an outsider here so thank you for making me feel like i'm
not an outsider you're an insider so very much so very much so deepti thank you you stayed
on for the whole party thank you yes wonderful to listening you all yeah it was great it was great deepti i
tried to find a picture of my mom but for her whole life after she was in
nepal she had 10 little earrings in her ear here that she got
yeah i have but i just she had 10 of them
i don't know which i think it was her right ear maybe anyway she had them yeah we have originals we
have rituals too of piracy the year
yeah lots of prayer flags in the house she just loved it she really did
that's great we really thank you for appearing on the show
you know and having uh dave eiker david levy of course um
you know we the we always get um great speakers it's it's
bob it's awesome to have you on the program you know you are uh i i like it hear what you have done
in the astronomical community and uh uh richard you've been on every one of our
star parties you've been a great supporter i really appreciate that jerry you are um
you're you're always a trooper you know i have him every day on live broadcasting so
um like for one day i guess um before so
i've i've only taken two three days off i think this whole time for four months we've been doing this right three days
now up to almost 100 episodes on the uh yeah we got to come up with a good prize
yeah yeah we got to come up with a good prize um maybe we'll uh uh
you know free trip to nepal and uh you know yes look at the uh
um what's going on astronomically i have a question for you though deep
yeah are there ancient are there ancient astronomy sites in nepal
uh it has not been explored yeah just um i don't know that much about the
history i'm just uh i'm just doing research now i'm starting
my research in the two topic that is uh say importance of satellite and i'm going to
post my i'm going to take my research paper very soon uh in this one two years and i'm just
starting my research on the this is for that topic great
right well if you want to sometime bring your we can do a special show if you'd like
uh we can bring your whole club onto uh one of our programs um
you can see how easy it is on zoom so uh and uh it can all be about uh
astronomy and nepal you know so many of my friends are the participant
of the national olympiad astronomical empire and i collaborated with them and i just
yesterday i just introduced you my my friend and uh me along with him along with me
and discuss about this uh organizing the one organization and
working in the field of astronomy wonderful it's great
hey deepti two seconds i'm i i've found this i've been looking for it for the whole night
that's my mom
what's her name yeah it's in the our hanumandoka
you recognize the place then yeah it's the temple of the famous temple of the nepal
oh okay anyway what's the name
wow beautiful beautiful
yeah okay all right well thank you everyone thank you good night thank you thank you
good night thank you at all okay everybody
thank you very much bob that's great we're all welcome thank you okay uh you've been watching the 16th
global star party uh we are uh wrapping up um
you can watch this on explorescientific.com forward slash live
uh of course it's uh it will uh rebroadcast uh momentarily after we stop
this live broadcast it will continue to be up and you can watch it
if you have questions for any of these people you can send your questions over to service at
explorescientific.com we would field those questions for you and uh get you answers uh and uh our
next star party well the 17th global star party will be a european edition it
will happen this friday uh four o'clock central um and uh
gary palmer is helping me to coordinate that on november 7th we have um
the first asian edition of the global star party and that will be
co-hosted by christopher go who's a world-famous planetary astrophotographer
makes incredible images of the planets and so we're hoping to get
astronomers all the way from china down to australia down through the philippines uh thailand
so it should be really really interesting dt you might want to get involved in that one too because
your time zone area i think a little bit um so
but uh i know it's a big sacrifice for you to wake up so early in the morning dt too
you're a real trooper thank you thank you all right uh thanks everyone and um
uh wherever you are in the world have a we hope you have clear skies and steady skies and starlit skies
so good night to you all good night it's a pleasure good night
it's just 10 10 30 am here and we are in the 21st
yep [Music]
so [Applause]
so [Music]
[Music]
wow [Music]