Global Star Party 161

Transcript:

for
Who We
Are
e there were several of these visualizations of T Corona
Borealis and um know it's a Nova
eruption this is just kind of a a side view I guess
so so here we go
[Music]
astronomers have been observing Jupiter's Great Red Spot a massive storm big enough to swallow Earth for over 150
years however new discoveries continue to emerge especially with NASA's Hubble
Space Telescope taking closeup views Hubble's latest observations gathered
over 90 days from December 2023 to March 2024 four show that the Great Red Spot
is less stable than it seems the data reveal that the Great Red Spot is wobbling like a bowl of gelatin Hubble's
images allowed astronomers to create a time-lapse movie of the storm's squiggly motion while scientist knew the storm's
position changed slightly over time they didn't expect to see its size fluctuate
thanks to Hubble's high resolution they found that the Great Red Spot is squeezing in and out while speeding up
and slowing down Hubble observes Jupiter and the other outer planets yearly through the outer planet atmospheres
Legacy program or opal but these particular images were part of a special
Great Red Spot study the team has been tracking the shrinking Great Red Spot since the opal program began 10 years
ago and predicts it will continue to shrink and eventually take on a more stable less elongated shape researchers
hope that future high resolution images from Hubble might reveal other clues about what's caus cusing the storm's
fluctuations studying the biggest storms in our solar system helps scientists understand hurricane patterns on Earth
and could even apply to weather on planets around other stars
[Music]
[Music]
well hello everyone this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and I'm here with our
co-host David Levy and uh this is the 161st Global star party and so we're
really um pleased to have you watch uh live if you're out there watching live
and if you're watching this in replay you know thanks again for uh tuning in
um we had a very large uh audience in our 160th Global star party with over
75,000 people um uh tuning into the program so uh you know it's a that's a
great uh um number for us to uh to be able to contact people who are
interested in astronomy because that's what we're doing doing we're we're doing astronomy Outreach and uh on a global
scale so um David thanks for uh coming up with the idea of Discovery for the
theme for our this 161st event and uh
you know uh you are someone that's been at the Forefront of comet Discovery and
minor planet Discovery and all the rest of it uh what does it feel like to discover
something no one else has discovered it's very difficult to answer
that question Scotty um um it is partly difficult
because uh I do not consider the discovery of something that no one else has seen strictly the only kind of
Discovery I consider the first time I saw the um the the the uh the uh moons of
Jupiter a discovery a personal Discovery as I will mention later sure and
personal Discovery is to me the most important part of it and so I begin by
doing my traditional quotation of the night which is from my own book my guide
to the night sky which was published a number of decades ago by Cambridge 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 the thrill of Discovery penetrates our being as we try to describe through
drawings photographs or words how we have been changed by the universe
sharing a secret with us I hope that answered your question Scott back to you
well I am uh uh yeah in fact it it does
and uh it reminds me I asked the same question of of one of your dear friends
Carolyn Shoemaker and this was way back um after uh uh Shoemaker ly9 was
discovered um but before it had actually impacted the planet and um I was up on
palar you guys were showing us the 18inch Schmid camera and we were taking
photographs of you and um it was a fun it was a fun visit and I'm glad that we
got to do it um and so but but Carolyn
asked me she said well how did it feel when when you first saw Saturn's rings and I
said you know it was mind-blowing to me you know I almost didn't believe it and
a lot of people had this reaction they see Saturn's rings or the the ring planet Saturn through a telescope and
they they think it's like somebody's holding a a transparency or something in
front of the telescope you know uh I've heard that a hundred times uh but it is
um you know it's a profound moment I think for a lot of people and seeing
something like Saturn or making a personal Discovery like that maybe it could just be the craters on the moon uh
you know uh Moon surrounding Jupiter uh uh for yourself um you know that's the
Tipping Point and I think that those little personal discoveries reframe our
whole view of of what life is all about on Earth and um uh you know for me it it
gives me a sense of uh peace and um uh
you know and and humility and um you know and puts me in a good spot uh
generally it just makes me it it heals whatever is ailing me about the world
you know so um so I think that uh those little personal discoveries are very
important of course I'd be thrilled to have discovered a comet as well but but
uh I didn't have the dedication to it that that you have David I've and and
for you know the audience watching um I'll tell you that David is is very
dedicated to getting up and making his observations in the morning and also
making observations at night and uh uh he loves the search so um so anyhow um David I'm G to turn
this back over to you and uh let you take it for your
presentation well thank you Scott and um
the the key to Discovery and I've had quite a little bit of experience with it
the key to Discovery in my mind is not discovering something that
no one else has seen before and I've had a lot of experience doing that but to discover something for
yourself the rings of Saturn which I think most of you will say is a personal
Discovery second T N I saw the rings of Saturn in 1960 with my first telescope
Echo but uh it was kind of a bit of an afterthought for me because on September the 1 when I the
day I got eeko as a bar mystery present from my uncle and I looked through that
telescope and saw the rings of J the moons of Jupiter I felt that Galileo himself
would have felt no greater thrill when he realized he was looking at Moon's
orbitting Jupiter that night it was it was totally earthshaking for me
solar system shaking for me it was very very important to
me and as my um interest in the night sky went that went on
I got interested in observing Charles Messier uh his um his catalog of
objects and I got interested in other things just about every aspect of
astronomy including solar observations I made my first one
actually on October the 2 1959 going to have to take a uh a little
break here but no because I'm starting to weas a little
bit but I'll be all
right okay so my first solar observation took
place on the on octo on October the 2
1959 there was a total eclipse of the Sun taking place Montreal was not in the
path but if we got up early enough we could have been pretty close to the path
I got up pretty early that morning to see a deck of clouds and I
was having breakfast and I asked my mom if she wouldn't mind driving my brother
Jerry at me to see the eclipse even you know because of the
clouds were there but they were light they might go away and so she agreed to that and uh we
went to the summit of Mount Royal where they
have a lovely pulloff where you can go out and
look at uh the eastern part of Montreal which now includes the Olympic
Stadium anyway we got there and it was cloudy we didn't see anything but I noticed that the clouds
were quite a bit lighter to the west and even though I was only 11 at
the time I looked to Mom and asked her if she
wouldn't mind taking us to the lookout on Westman which was quite a bit closer to
where our home and uh maybe that would be a little bit more
productive and she agreed to do that and when we got there the clouds were breaking up and we got
to see the final part of the eclipse of the sun of October thei
1959 that was the first of 101 eclipses that I have seen in my
lifetime oh wow and each one in a sense has been a discovery each one has been
something very special a holy moment for me and I'm not done with
eclipses I'm planning to see my 102nd Eclipse actually that's not true I have
seen my 102nd Eclipse that was the one last
September from poar Observatory the emotion for me of that day was going
back to what I consider to be a holy Place The poar
Observatory and for my 130 Clips I would like to go back there again next march
and see it from Poore to go there and see it
from this great wonderful Observatory add such a level of
excitement and as sty as you say peace to my life it is so important to be able
to do that as I got more and more interested in
astronomy I began to to look at other things
but years went by and I still had not seen my first com but then in September
of 1965 U AA and
stui discovered I think within an hour of each other a comet in the Eastern Sky
the comet was named to kosaki it turned out right pretty quickly that they realized that that was
a sungrazer and if it survived it's surrounding the Sun
it could become a magnificent Comet I was really incredibly fascinated
with that and I wanted so much to be able to
see that comment I was also getting ready to finish my high school career at West
Mount High School and I think as I said before West Mount High School it's a public high
school in Montreal and I really enjoyed my time there they have a number of well-known
graduates and I think the wellest known of those graduates is none other than kamla Harris Vice President of the
United States and um it looks like we're going to have a
lot more time to uh chat with KLA Harris in the coming
years and uh it's something I would like I would like to do I would like to meet
her and asked her no nothing about politics but I'd like to ask her about West Hound high school did we share any
teachers we weren't in the same class because she was like almost 10 years after me but we might have shared a
teacher or too and I think that would be exciting to share
anyway this was the day I was walking down to school for the matriculation
examination in French and as as we all know those of us who grew up in the province of Quebec
Canada we knew that we would not be able to graduate
high school without some knowledge of French and I knew they were going to ask
me the question what do you want to do as a career I had no idea what I wanted to do
as a career I was interested in astronomy I wanted to be an astronomer
at the time I didn't realize that I was lousy at math and I would never succeed
in that goal but I kept on thinking as I'm walking to school that day about
the perseverance The Stick toess of AA and SEI so that they
discovered the great what became the greatest comet of the 20 Century with the possible exception of comet yakatak
in 1996 and I suddenly thought I want to do what
they're doing not because I might discover a comment because that's hard
discovering is hard but searching that's easy anybody can do
that worried translating it into French which I did I got to school I got to the
boardroom Mr Hutcherson who was the head of the frch department was asking me some
questions and finally he asked what would you like to do as a career I was
so proud of that question I sat straight up in my chair I looked at him and I
said Mr I would like to discover a
comment the man took his glasses off he kind of looked around the room with this puzzled expression and then he looked at
me and he said leing in English he said how the hell do you expect to make any
money doing anything like that and the whole room broke into peels
of laughter at the time it was great from the people in the room from
Mr huderson from me it was so funny and he started
smiling and he said okay leaving I going to give you credit for that answer of
yours if only because of all the years I've done this it's the most unusual
answer I've ever gotten so I'm GNA give you credit but
you'd better find a comment for me within 20 years because if you don't I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna lower your
mark and that was great on the 17th of December of that
year I began my search for comments it is still going on and um it
has resulted in an almost consuming control of my
life as years went by without a discovery I began to take more seriously
the idea I'd like to find just one comment be so ni I got to meet Dave viker just before
I relocated to the Southern Arizona and uh David and I have become
very very good friends over the years in fact I'm going to see you David in a few days at the L
Observatory which is another place of enormous Discovery it is the place where
VM slier discovered the um the evidence of led to
Hubble's Law the red shift using
spectroscopic analysis of galaxies and groups of galaxies in
the sky and how the Spectra that he took of those showed an alarming shift to the
red end of the spectrum Buble waater was able to figure out what that
meant but when I first visited LOL in
1967 uh was my first visit there and slier was still living at the
time I didn't get to meet him but but I was thinking about the
discovery and the process of discovery of which all
Observatory is so much apart and I think I think the most
significant Discovery and still is is Clyde Tom's discovery of Pluto in
1930 I didn't know during my visit 1967 that I would become very close
friends with qu that I would write as biography and we would
just spend a lot of time together over the
years and so I will be seeing you David at in Flagstaff house will in just a few
days anyway [Music] I'm I'm getting more and more
serious about commments not just to look for them but to actually find
one and I made a decision in
1979 to relocate to Southern Arizona stay there only till I found my first
contct and I did that and I got very much more serious
about it spent a lot of time searching and
finally wondering if that would ever
happen I remember I remember talking with John bortle who
himself was a comet hunter and he said he gave me all kinds of excuses for why
he never found a com in fact he was his view was blocked by a tree one morning
and the the new comment was behind the tree and his view was blocked by the same tree and another morning when
comment was also behind the tree but he had a lot of excuses
wonderful excuses as to why he was not finding
comments and uh I guess I didn't think got much of excuses I know Scotty
Houston never did sharing the name of our host Scotty Roberts
today but I remember being uh doing some comment on 1967 two years after I
started at an event we had in Montreal called The Deep Sky Wonder night to
which Scotty Houston was invited and he came to that and uh we were talking and chatting
and I went out and did my thing and then came in to warm up even though it was
summer it was a cold night and I
uh he said David what the hell are you doing
inside I said well I'm just here to warm up a little bit and he said what's the
weather like outside and I said it's beautifully clear it's a lovely lovely night and he
said what the hell are you doing inside and I started to say again I was
trying to warm up but I just laughed and contined my
search on the 13th of November Tuesday November 13
1984 I was having dinner with a girlfriend at the time Lonnie Baker and we've remained
friends until her death a few years ago and still very friendly with her husband
and we've see each other quite often her husband's time
anyway I was having dinner with Lonnie and suddenly I'm noticing that the clouds that are out in me over the city
are starting to break up and the conversation suddenly gets a lot
sparer said you're going to go home aren't you and I said
and she said the sky is clearing isn't it and I said
uh you going to search for comments instead of coming to my lecture AR you
and I went uhuh and she said okay do this way break
to dat but you better find a comment for me tonight on that night I
found was actually on the phone with someone when suddenly I
saw this lovely open cluster NGC
6709 and right a little to the north of it a fuzzy spot which I hadn't noticed
before and I said to myself oh my and
um I I did a little sketch of it and then waited about 15 minutes went onto
other things and checked the sketch I said David you didn't do that very well
this thing is a little bit north of where you put it so I took the pen out and sced and
made made the sketch in a different where it was then and then I went by back to where I
was thinking about and then went back in another 15 20 30 minutes and I said you
still don't have it right it's wait just a minute
and right away it hit me that's a comment it's moving I sent the that was the only
common discovery that I sent a telegram for to Dr Marsden may he rescu peace now
at the Central Bureau for astronomical telegrams and I told him how bright it
was and everything else and uh I Let It Go as a telam
and then I thought oh I have to call Lonnie and tell her about what I
found and I called the planetarium where she was working she picked up the pony
she said did you find a comet for me tonight and I said yes and she laughed
she giggled and laughed and she said well how bright is it and I said about
11 magude where is it in the sky I told her
about where it was and the west high in Fairly high and setting in the west of
western part of the sky and then she said
um and giveing give me its position is it move where is it moving and she's
still laughing and I said it's moving at the rate of about I would guess about
half a degree per day to the northwest
and uh she stopped laughing she said you're serious aren't
you and I said of course I'm serious I wouldn't joke about something like this and boy did she get
excited the next day I got message from the local newspaper in
Tucson they wanted to come into a story about it the story had nothing to do with the Comets I had no interest in the
comet Discovery when what they were interested in was that I broke a date to do it and that is really one of the best
Comet Discovery stories I had and I'm now going to go to another all of them
are interesting and I could regil you all night long with these stories but if I did that David ier and Scott would
probably kill me with an arrow poison poison with something poison TI I
wouldn't be able to tell you anyway so just go to one com in
1989 I began to get in I got very interested in the work that Jean and
carollyn two major were doing and I thought I don't know anything about asop photography I still don't by the way I
love coming to Global star party and I love looking at the uh at all the
photographs you all show now I know nothing about osar photography with
exception that I have taken thousands thousands of
pictures um thousands of pictures of all portions
of the night sky with the 18inch at poar
Observatory and so I started observing with the shoe
makers at the end of [Music] 1989 and that and and we were observing
for a while we found a couple of comics that year and then I was still finding visual
coms okazaki Ley renko was one of them that was my third
Discovery I shared two discoveries with Michael renko and who me and I have become
pretty good friends over the years but this but this but the one we
got with Carolyn turned out to be periodic comments you make her leing
that was the first one we found a second one pretty interesting the same
year and 1990 we found quite a number of them and
1991 we found I think it was seven comments
together seven sh maker we comments goodness and you might think I'm getting used to it becoming oh home about it oh
well found a common and got some popcorn no way each one of them gives me a
thrill second to none and as I'm about to knock my
telescope off the wall I'm going to show you I'm going to interrupt my lecture to
tell you about Cupid the Questar and this is like a commercial I don't think
you can get cute Quest ARS anymore but Wendy and I were in London we were I
think getting ready for an eclipse trip or something and uh we were we had some
time so we were looking through the shop windows and there was a telescope store
of course I looked very carefully through the window at that telescope store and there was a quest are there
and I looked very carefully when he came up to me and she said do I want you to
be very honest with is
this Questar which they are selling for
$7,000 is it 10 times better than the need etx we have which they're selling
for $700 qu magnitude less and I looked at
Wendy and I said sweetheart the Questar is better than
the etx but 10 times better not a chance not even
close she said thank you for being honest about four months
later Wendy announces that we're gonna have dinner with Dean kig and his wife
from Star Arizona which is lovely Tes scho store in tucon when we got to the
dinner there was this lovely box with the with a bow on Top This telescope
inside wheny said it's yours if you agree to name it Cupid after our love
for each other this is Cupid and uh I have the eyepiece that
came with it but yesterday I put this eyepiece in
instead and uh this is the eyepiece I use for a lot of my
comenting right now not all of it but a lot of it and um I dropped it about two
months ago and the lenses got all Mish smashed and I thought well I'll never be
able to use this again I tried to fix them shap them into place didn't seem to
work it wasn't focusing so I put the ipce
away standing on its bottom and just left it there
until the day before yesterday I put the eyepiece back into see if it would fit
into Cupid which it did and the eyepiece works perfectly again it fixed
itself I don't know how it did that I have no idea how it did that but the lenses were in place got a good view of
the sun spots 43 spots today with this telescope and this High piece anyway end
of commercial so we're back at Poore and I am looking at uh
um there's this very cloudy night
and I noticed that these skies are beginning to clear a little bit to the
southwest and we go outside and Jean said David we cannot observe what was just
sucker hole like that and I said why not it's we can
squeeze and just see that and uh K said David every time we
look every time we take a picture every time we load a film into the camera it
cost us $8 course I'm still arguing and I said that's not too bad and then King
said my God David that's say American daughter dollars not that Canadian money
you guys play with and we were kind of laughing about that
when Carolyn said Jee I think David's right that area of sky is cool and I
think maybe we can give it a shot Jean looked I looked and Jean said
let's do it the very next picture we took was the first discovery picture of
Shoemaker at le9 wow the second one when we took about an hour and a half
later because the clouds came in again so we had to wait longer but we were able to get the second one those two
pictures are right on the other side of this desk we not going to get up to show
them to you but they are sitting there and right now I'm looking for a
place to which I could donate them I'm not sure yet where it is or
appropriate spot but I'm thinking about it and one day before I shuffle off this
Mortal coil I hope to do that to donate them to a place that would appreciate
them anyway it's kind of interesting
[Music] to think about that but I remember
guiding those two pictures that night and hoping against hope that I would
never be asked to give a lecture about those two pictures because I could barely see the
GU star to the clouds moving along and everything
else but I got the two pictures it was kind of interesting and kind of
fine and uh we continued on and on but we stopped early
that night because the clouds did come back and uh took even a couple of
pictures the night after and on the 25th of March of
1993 we're all sitting at the 18 inch and Carolyn suddenly stops for
scanning and she looks at Jean who was reading Time Magazine and she looks at
me and she said I don't know what I've got but it looks like a squashed
Comet and Jean right away says I got to look at this and Carolyn gets up and she
walks closer to me Carol and I were always getting around David I think you
would know that that uh Behavior
anyway um I looked at Carolyn I said you are joking aren't you and she very
seriously looked at me and she said no David not this time and then I looked at
the expression on J's face and I believe you've all seen
pictures of the discovery what you make9 and what it looked
like and I think that was the Prime moment of my career in astronomy and in
the night sky the moment that I was able to look at our
discovery of comet sh maker 89 it was absolutely
unbelievable there was a com it was a squash Comet there was
about uh 12 or so commentary condensations thre a little Tail Going
up but the interesting thing was the dust the dust stream that was joining
them and going off in another D in both directions East and
West it turned out that someone with a major larger telescope was able to
detect 23 of those conversations spread out as he said like
a String of Pearls and it became known as The String of Pearls Comet to us
anyway that was the discovery moment but it is
still that was the highlight that was the highlight of my
professional career it was not the highlight of my
life the highlight of my life was leeting Wendy marrying her and missing
her so much as I do now anyway I hope you enjoyed this
little view about What discovery means to me and as each of you can citate on
the discoveries you've made whether they are new to all or new just to your to
you I think you will come with a sense of what the night sky has to offer the
sense of Peace the sense of excitement the sense of
fun that the night sky offers us thank you very much and back to you Scott wow
David uh you you told some stories I thought I'd heard every
story in your compendium of stories that you uh that you tell uh during lectures
but uh the story about your first ever Comet Discovery was really um wonderful
and uh um so thanks for sharing that that's great that's
great well um we have uh more we have more uh Global star party uh to come
here uh Old Man Gaming watching on YouTube says that was awesome David so
and I'm sure that uh Veronica Lane watching on Facebook she said David is such a great Storyteller thank you so uh
let's um let's transition and um we will
uh bring on Lori ansorge she is from She's representing the astronomical
League Lori is uh someone that does an incredible amount of Outreach um and I
think Lori might agree with me that uh the reason that we do Outreach
is maybe a little bit of a selfish one because it is so satisfying to watch
somebody else see the rings of Saturn for the first time or the creators on the moon for the first time uh and to
watch them kind of wake up and realize that they are flying through space on a
little blue planet so yep so Lord thanks for coming on to the global Star Party
it ran a little bit long but you know what I wouldn't have cut David short for
anything that was wonderful that was wonderful so thank you David and Lori
I'm turning it over to you okay well with our theme of
Discovery here we go see if I can make this
work and and Kurt H from wa from wasi is
watching on um online
here he says hello to you I have to fix my screen here let's
see okay
do that goodness not had this problem
before let
me you have two screens I think so how's this uh there
we go it looks like it's it's not sharing on this all right
let me escape out of that
and let me go back to share screen
and I'll do this there you
go and then we will pop this up we think we will pop this up there we
go there we go I'm going to take that into
um presentation mode
there you go perfect okay perfect you know You' never know that I do so much
Zoom training training boy that was an epic
fail but let's see if I can recover that's all right that's all right all right um I love the theme for this U
it's um it speaks to my heart and I love the poster you made Scott because I only
gave you a title based upon the theme and with the poster you kind of read my mind oh good so I'm G to cover uh
discovering the awe and stargazing by telling you a little story uh let's see but first before I
tell you a little story I want to mention what's up with the astronomical league and and in this particular case
um we have Aston which is our Alcon uh convention
convention coming up in June of 2025 in the incredible dark sky area of Bryce
Canyon um I've got my tickets I'm told that they're going to sell out so if
anybody's interested get your tickets soon because I keep hearing that they're going to sell out so um I'm really
looking forward to this event I look forward to the alcons all the time um do
go on to Alcon 225.org and you'll be able to get your registration in I'm
also very excited that in addition to the astronomical leag having a Facebook page that they have also been making uh
on their YouTube channel some very informative videos I strongly recommend
them and whether you're you're a member or not if you have any interest at all in astronomy definitely check out the
astronomical league on YouTube because there's something for everybody there and they are building that
Library so now for my little Story Once Upon a Time I got a telescope
for my ninth birthday and it looked a lot like this looks a little like what we tell people now is your a hobby
killer except nobody told me that it was supposed to be a hobby
killer so I enjoyed putting it together and putting it back in the box and
taking it out and sharing what I saw with folks and before too long after
enjoying pictures of the Moon and being able to see stars I really wanted to
learn to see more life went on I didn't have the wherewithal or the dedication
that doid has um that uh I enjoyed seeing what I could see with my
telescope and I knew that in order to see more I needed to understand more and
learn more fast forward a few decades we won't admit to how many there are to
that and I discovered not too many years ago that there was this astronomical
leak which is fantastic for anybody interested in the hobby of astronomy
because you can find clubs and um click
on the website to do that you can borrow from these clubs and from nearby
libraries Scopes to learn how to U see things and find them in the sky and then
there's this wonderful thing called observe that's on the website and that
observe gives you a chance to go through somewhat of a structured process of
finding things in the sky understanding what they are and really deepening that
sense of Discovery for me from an age that I can't even begin to Fathom how
young I was looking up into the night sky was that um grounding sense of peace
that you've already mentioned on our program I was just always in awe and
always in Wonder of what's up there well from working through some of these
particular observation programs I've gotten to learn more about what's up
there how to find it what it means what it is and in turn be able to share that
with others and yes many times during a star party the most recent of which was
uh this past Saturday night um showing somebody the the rings of Saturn even
though they're kind kind of straight on right now you get that wow and you tell
your your public that's standing in line at your scope yes that's why we do this
so they clearly know too what the joy is well the astronomical league has lots of
programs for people of all different levels of learning and all different
access to equipment so there are things that are for naked
there's uh things for different levels of equipment and I've been kind of
haphazardly um exploring a lot of them and probably have a good eight to 12 of
them going all at once at any one time but that's because something will come
up and I'll discover something and want to learn more and that's okay um so I
got some stories from the process as well uh there was a couple years ago a
globular cluster program uh actually it was a challenge and it got me interested
in going forward to do the whole globular cluster CH program that's also offered
but somewhere around 1:30 that first night that it was open to start I had
this UFO up here in the sky I kind of knew what it was because
we lived near in elementary school school and we also live near a couple of Highways and in our state of Maryland we
also have a pretty awesome um state troopers program with a metac helicopter
and sure enough I heard the helicopter going around the darkened field and then
I heard the sirens coming and luckily with my uh um EAA scope I was able to
scoop things up pretty quickly so by the time the guy and the fireman soup had run over to try and help me get off the
field I had everything in two arms and I was running in another Direction because
it was getting me off the field quicker um and that's what they wanted just so
that it was safe for everybody so um little bit of Adventure there but during that time while I was
collecting pictures of my globular clusters I was also learning about them
I didn't know before I started that most of them that we can see are orbiting our
galaxy and there are some that are floating around that came from a previous Galaxy
merge U who knew and of course that all fits with our understanding now that
we'll probably merge with the Andromeda galaxy but that's another story for
another day taking all these little discoveries and then sharing them with
the astronomy day for which I point out the do was the author of a handbook
that's available for free on the astronomical League's website um very good manual that I've used a couple
times able make made it um enabled me to share this love of the sky with so many
others hundreds and hundreds of girls being able to earn their astronomy badges many Boy Scouts and introducing
many new people to the Hobby of astronomy so that they could enjoy that
same love and and sense of Discovery um a lot of these pictures by the way on
these slides are are some that I've taken with some of my Scopes from uh my
own observations which I still love to have that time to do we're in the middle
of uh solar Max at the moment and what that means is we've had some auroras as
far south as uh Puerto Rico and we have in our area people always asking well
when's the next one well the predictions on on that are not quite like you'd have
for your weather report on cable or wherever you get your your weather
news but uh there is a new program for the they're predicting of that with your
homemade soda bottle magnetometer called the space weather observing program that
joins up with the SunSpider program and hydrogen Alpha solar programs that the
astronom astronomical League offer up and that's just expanded my sense of awe
and Discovery because now we get to take look into our own closest uh star which
of course the league is very adamant about making sure before you do that
that you're very careful to have certified filters protect your eyes
because if you don't they will be forever damaged I've had the honor to be at two
eclipses with David Levy and Scott Roberts um so I'm pretty thrilled to
have seen those in person whereas I've only ever seen the the partial ones um
from where I've been so traveling to see them was a thrill and then of course um
being able to use my Scopes to get the the the the of the plane going across
the Sun you have to have a pretty quick U shutter figure to catch that um but
with the Suns spotter program you get to through uh filters that are safe
examine our closest Stars sunspots which are Magnetic storms and draw what they
are and map out what they are and what they mean and you follow the program and
the number of observations and you leave the program learning Having learned so
much more that when you do a star party that has solar observations you you've got some
knowledge then uh Hal Alpha allows you to look at the flares and get a deeper
sense of the the filaments and what that all means um again uh having the
structure of log sheets and what to look for was very
informative and then getting back to our Coke bottle magnetometer it actually has provided a
means by which we can build our own magnetometer at home and have a sense of
maybe there's that Aurora coming well these pictures are taken with my handheld cell phone why uh because while
I had my DSLR there at members only St party the public just came in a big
traffic jam that night cuz they knew a roar was happening they were trying to get to a darker site we signed up a lot
of members that night by the way and the only thing I had time for in trying to make sure everybody stayed safe was some
handheld pictures as my DSLR dued up because I didn't really have time to put a do heater on but that's that's another
story too so the new space weather observing program is really cool because
it has you do some cut and paste from websites so you learn about what KP
indexes what coronal mass ejections are and a whole bunch of other words that I
had no idea what they meant until now and you get to build this little Coke
bottle thing and it's got a straw and a magnet and it's sitting on your basement
floor away from traffic and you're using your cat's laser pointer toy towards
your sewing measuring tape so that you can plot out what exactly the magnet is
changing to say about what the Earth is feeling in terms of this magnetic stuff
coming at us for whether or not we're going to have an aurora well what fun is
that that presentation to my home Club inspired some folks to or at least one
to go by a magnetometer write some code and now he has a computer monitoring
this all at home um I encouraged him to try the coke bottle too and he just
might so all of these bits and pieces have really led to my personal
discovering of um stargazing and and being in awe and uh I've been a a quite
a lover of comets since hie came through and so my path is kind of gone from um
this 8 in reflector which absolutely has been wonderful um to expanding the
repertoire of binoculars that we have I still use my little 90 mm Mac Cass and
have now added a couple of um electronic Scopes so the Comet here was taken with
my unistellar ev2 my Odyssey Pro took the mo Moon here and my new origin took
this fireworks Galaxy um I kind of like with my background in photography having a
picture what I had instead of the old internet cut and paste into a log book of what I saw in addition to notes just
so I can cover a lot more ground because it's quite an addiction this observation
thing really uh enjoy it and I enjoy experimenting a little
bit too uh with what some of this uh automatic astrophotography stuff will do
I spend enough time at a computer I don't really want to do that processing stuff that I'm in awe of that other
astrophotographers do and in this par particular sequence we have the Running
Man nebula we have 100 seconds 5 minutes 10 minutes 15 25 and 30 and you can see
that more light gathered and stacked together gives you more detailed well
I've visited the Palomar Observatory didn't get to look through that scope I can only imagine what 100 Ines or 200
Ines of mirror could see when you consider that this little mirror was
only 4 and 1 half Ines and what it does from 100 seconds to 300 minutes so the
sense of a keeps building on itself The More You observe the more you learn the
more you want to and the more you want to share it's uh all quite um quite a a
lovely thing I have a astrophotographer friend of mine who took a picture of me out of outside of the uh um Observatory
a couple years ago I've got my glow-in-the-dark star shirt on and some red lights so people don't trip into me
and I'm sitting there capturing some stuff with my little EAA cool picture
really cool I like that and then this is one of my favorite this is the triffid nebula um I love the
fact that I got the blues and the Reds in there so um love the theme um glad that
I got a chance to share that and a chance to share it from the context of
what the astronomical League offers but what it's given me to build on my sense
of stargazing awe and how I've been able to share with others and and help with
their sense of awe it's all a gift that that keeps giving and I'm quite grateful
for it thanks for the chance to share oh that's wonderful thank you thank you
Lori um so when was when was the real
Tipping Point for you as someone that got into astronomy uh where you just go yeah I'm
gonna keep doing this you know well um we got the first 8 inch in
2007 and then in 2017 I found on social media that there
was an opportunity to go to this astronomy camp for girl Scott leaders
that was led by a friend of David ley's Larry lowski and um
also Mr McCarthy and the opportunity was
something that I said clearing my calendar which I did and they accepted
me and hopped on the plane and uh with a roommate of mine from my home counsil
we're looking at all this stuff they're giving us and it was like we can't just bring this back to a troop we have to do
something big with it and so I've done about four or five different astronomy days a lot of them virtual during covid
so I think that my love my Lifelong Love of astronomy found in a very impactful
way uh a means to do something more and bigger with it which then also
introduced me to the fact that there were astronomy clubs which I didn't know before then and that there was this
astronomical league with all it had to offer and it has been like a snowball in
an avalanche I would say the past six seven years and since I've been retired
for three of them uh like I said it's been about all of these programs going
all at once depending upon which way the wind blows or the clouds last night it was the moon a
culting uh 20 Pisces and also Neptune and who knew that you needed a
cloud to reflect Moonlight back to find the edge of the brown moon which is
really Brown so that you could see when it all disappeared to know when it was
going to reappear just wow wow I know I know well that's great
that's great so someone asking about go ahead I wanted to add my thanks to Lor's
wonderful presentation just now I'd like to add that uh I really
like what you had to say about the sun because that's been something since my
first Sunspot count was in March March 1st 1963 and between February and the middle
of September member of this year I didn't miss a single day of sunspot
counts I finally broke that record not because of clouds because I forgot I'm
getting a little elderly and that that happened that day but other than that so far this whole year I've only
missed about five or six days and I just love it and I really enjoyed your
thoughts about this one thank you thank you and I'll just say that if folks U
Love David's stories his book The Night watchman's journey I just finished it a
couple weeks ago and it's awesome it's full of those stories and it's very inspiring from that perspective and it's
very real and authentic you really see the person in there I appreciate that so
much that's great okay chis did somebody else have a question Scott people are
just saying you gave an amazing talk and uh um you know there was an add-on from
uh Chris Larson uh who says uh you've done amazing things here I'm grateful
for this getting me back into astronomy 160 episodes
ago uh Mark Drexler says I joined the astronomical League a few months ago and
started a few observation programs the Messier program uh is the one I'm
currently working on so you know the great work that uh volunteers because it
is an basically an all volunteer organization it's what 75 years old is
that right just over a few years beyond that yeah right so uh full of amazing
people both the members and the organizers and all the rest of it and they're always coming up with something
new so um if you don't already belong to the astronomical League you need to join
uh through through a a league club which is probably the least expensive way to
uh get involved you can be a member at large okay it costs a little bit more but still it's very reasonable and uh
someone asked about the reflector magazine uh which you can get hard copies of if you are a um if you're a
paid member so um but uh yeah it'll be great to see you at Bryce Canyon Lori
and uh uh I don't know if you're planning on coming out to the L Observatory event uh
uh a ribbon cutting event on the 16th but uh uh if not then um uh we'll send
you pictures looking forward to that I won't make that event but it's on my wish list
the state-of-the-art stuff that they have queued up there oh my goodness mindblowing yeah it is really it's it's
the crown jewel of astronomy Outreach I think in the United States right now so
it's very cool stuff okay all right well thank you very much Lori and uh we will
now go to the editor uh in Chief of astronomy magazine and that is none
other than David ier and he told me earlier that he's going to talk about
one of the weirdest of the weird deep Sky objects and I'll let him explain
thank you Scott how are you doing tonight good good much better that you guys are here so yeah this this is a
weird object among weird objects and and uh it's a really good one it's a it's a
challenging one this is very very faint um but it's something that you can go after astrop photographically if not
visually and with a large scope you can see it visually as well so I will start to share my
screen and I will see if I can share the right thing and then I'll see if I can start
the slideshow Y and do you see a familiar Galaxy Centaurus a yes I
do this has nothing to do with that whatsoever but we'll go on to the
relevant part then and talk about uh this is we're still in the very far northern sky uh working our way
Southward so we've got about uh nine years worth of stuff to do I don't want
to scare anyone away from this program but there's a lot lot of stuff to go here uh we're in the far north yet this
is a Galaxy that is uh just south of the bowl of the Big Dipper NGC
3079 and there's a very interesting object that was imaged in 1979 and
recognized for the first time that has its then coordinates prior to Equinox
2000 coordinates with the incredible name 095 7 + 561 so I'll explain as we go here
there are a lot of sort of two for one pairs of objects that happen to lie close to each other in the sky of course
mostly at at very different distances this is one of them and uh as I said this is an edge on
Galaxy NGC 379 it's a b spiral it's pretty nice and reasonably large
considering its distance which is about 50 million Lighty years it's it's unusual and that it consists of a uh it
contains a super massive black hole about 2.4 million solar masses and
unusually it has a bit of a central Super Bubble that's fairly bright that extends up above the plane of the
Galaxy's disc um component about 3,500 light years or so uh above the Galaxy's
bright disc it's believed to have been caused by a starburst event uh in this
galaxy so this is an interesting although relatively ordinary Average Joe
NGC Galaxy if you will uh a little bit brighter than 12th magnitude and and
about eight arc minutes across um so it's a good object in and of itself but
it's much more interesting uh by association because in
1979 astronomers found uh the first gravitationally lensed quazar ever to be
uh found and that is 957 plus 5 561 um it's about 8.7 billion light
years away and it's being lensed by an intervening Galaxy that has maybe the worst catalog designation of any object
I've ever seen in my life why G KO W
G1 there's one that we're really going to want to remember gez so the quazar
images of course are very faint they're just a little brighter than 17th magnitude but they been imaged by
backyard astronomers I remember right after this discovery back when I was a teenager uh there was a very uh
prominent Astro imager he lived in Ure Colorado of all things at the time he
was fairly old at the time at least he seemed so to my teenage self Alexander
brownley I don't know if that name rings a bell he was a great black and white Astro imager and he shot this thing a
few months after it was discovered and that was kind of the poster child image of this double quazar by an amateur for
for some years um but it's an interesting really serious challenge object even for imagers and especially
to see visually very faint object uh now in Equinox 2000 it lies if
you're interested at 10 hours one minute 21 seconds and uh 55° North and a little
north of 53 uh minutes so that's that's uh the current coordinates if you want
to go out and photograph this thing or or go after it with a big scope and of course in a dark moonless sky you know a
16 or 20inch scope would be appropriate to go after this object
with so this is the region of these objects uh down below the bowl of the
Dipper um from Ron Stan's interstellarum deep Sky Atlas and you can see there you
know a field of faint galaxies nearby um as well and as one single uh stru double
star uh in there as well here's an image by Edward Van
Bergen um showing the Galaxy you can see it's a nice Edge on bar spiral there in
the center with a a pretty healthy looking dust Lane uh along its uh um
disc component and there are a couple of other interesting galaxies in the field here there's NGC 3073 which is near the
top right edge of this field uh and then PGC 28990 is above Center there but the
interesting thing if you look closely over toward the top left Edge there's
what appears to be a close binary star a couple of Stellar discs Stellar objects
there that's the quazar and it's being gravitationally lensed it's a single quazar as I said that's very distant and
you have to move up to something like the Hubble Space Telescope which we'll do next um to see in the center there
the lensed quazar the two components of it and you can see um in the Hubble
image here the uh disc component of the Galaxy that is acting as the lens and
once again Time After Time After Time After Time After Time proving Einstein
right uh for the gazillion time so this this is obviously Way Beyond the uh
capabilities of amateur telescopes but if you go back to this kind of an image you can see a pretty good approximation
of what you can see with large amateur telescopes of not of course not so much
color um but as you see just from the plate scale here uh the separating the
two components of the quazar and at 16.7 V magnitudes that it's a challenge
object any way you you split it here so that's all I have a really
extreme Challenge this time uh and uh I can mention quickly the November uh
issue of astronomy uh is kind of a Sten Odin wald's story on everything we know
about the sun now of course we've just now passed solar Max and are uh on the
slow declination of solar activity but there's a lot going on on the sun still
and this has a lot of other stories uh including our report on the last staris Festival that we uh held as well
wonderful we will have a starmus coming up next spring in La Palma I hope that
Scott we can get you to be involved in that as well we need to start talking about that pretty soon ER has already
been uh luring me yes indeed we will be uh setting up around the largest
telescope in the world there the gr t scopio canarius if you haven't been to the canaries it's almost exact you could
close your eyes turn around be blindfolded open your eyes again and swear that you're in Hawaii and of
course this is off of the Northwestern coast of Africa and is a very popular uh
Hawaiian analog vacation uh destination if you will for Europeans it's a part of
Spain of course but is out in the in the drink it's very interesting place to to go to and to see and we'll have uh some
nights with all kinds of surprises coming up uh that we'll start to announce relatively soon as far as
speakers and musical guests and all that good stuff so Scott that's really all that I
have uh for tonight a a real extreme Challenge and we're working our way
through that list and I look forward to uh reporting on this weekend uh I think
a number of us are going to be up there in Flagstaff on Friday we have the official uh grand opening of the
astronomy Discovery Center which is the centerpiece of this more than 50 million
doll renovation of LOL Observatory that is uh going to be really spectacular if
you haven't seen photos of this yet and there will be all sorts of people including the distinguished Scott
Roberts and David Levy will be there uh with what's that and David Aker and and
even some you know also rans like me um so so I I'm proud to be on the L board
there and we'll have a lot of fun up there and a lot of stuff to report on and there'll be a digital story uh next
week about the events this weekend and maybe I'll go away from weird galaxies
and quazars and next week talk a little bit about uh lol's rededication and uh reopening uh in a
fairly Grand way um which comes uh a little uh a little a few years after the
uh Centennial of uh persol's death oh so
that that is and I can show you a surprise which I won't show this week I'll show it to you next week um that is
one of his uh earliest possessions that mentions astronomy that is in my
collection as well so we'll have a lot of fun up in Flagstaff and we'll talk about that more next week great David
thank you so much man thank you thank you okay so uh we are uh now going to um uh
to Brazil uh to meet with um marchelo Souza marchelo thank you for hanging in
there and uh uh welcome to the 161st Global star
party uh you're muted there marello
sorry nice to meet you thank you for the invitation it's a great pleasure to be
here nice to meet all of you here and I will talk about the experience that you
have to make the popularization of astronomy for showing how the the blind people H
has difficulty to understand astronomy and we share this with the public I will
show our exper our experience let me see if today it will work well to share my
screen okay I think that
work my computer now doing what I want to do yeah
perfect and I will show now uh let me share
here uh last week I talked about J Bell and the C colors that is the famous
blind astronomer the first one in the world and we had an experience for 40
years here to organize an event where we involved a visually
impaired people include blind people that live here in our seats we organize
an event that we call Z now universe and you have a tent here and
inside the tent you don't have lights and you can see here all the people
useing blind folds blind folds that to say to protect you don't see anything
you put in your eye and you don't see anything and the guides inside the
tent why where blind students from the institution from our seats
then everybody you can see here in in the line they are preparing to enter
inside the the tent here is Pula
that participate in the spirit and yeah you see a lot of people
participate this T is located in the center of the biggest sh biggest shop
shopping center of our city here in compus and and then I show Insight here
you see small group that enter and one of one member of our astronomic
group stayed in sight with with without blindfold to see everything that was
happening and you see here that the guide is a blind students from high
school H for visually impaired people from seats and here we have the
constellations uh that 3D constellations that they can put the fingers and the FI
the constellation H we also had the sounds uh from radio telescopes that you
put inside the tent and here of them with the the guide it has a fantastic
experience you did it one year then they ask you us to repeat this for more three
years another image of this first experience this is a guide that is
student he he was very happy to participate
and an opportunity for all the people feel what the blind people feel when
they try to walk in the streets then it was opportunity I to share how
they feel and this was in another year the
next year we had more support to organize
then have a special place you participate in this one s online we had
a video conference with many people one of them was you you participate
here with us great and the the same image 3D image off constellations they
put the fingers here and the few and ask then if they could identify the
constellation what was constellation you see here people walking here we have the GU that the
students and a member of our astronomic club there
aw and this is a book that that I will show here that's a fantastic educational
material that yeah and we had another opportunity
to organize in another year but it was
not so big structure as the two first years and I hope soon we have another
opportunity to organize again these kinds of events that's
many people participated and they ask us to repeat in other places it has a
fantastic experience for us this is the book I'm here with the
book H tou the Stars written by noring
R that's available in National bride press in oh okay and here I I show you
inside that's something fantastic it is in
Bride you can put the you have the taxi also in Bri and you have the
Maes that you can touch can you see here let me see I'll
show you in the camera it's possible to see yes I see here it's like it's
embossed it looks really cool yes you can put the fingers here here here is
the so the sun here here is the sun no ring R you put the fingers here and you
have many mes here here a
comment this is a fantastic book this was written by norin
gra this is one of the book you have other books here is how is a here is a
Galaxy AAL Galaxy something fantastic but she wrote other books this
is another one this is you have t the sun tou the universe all of them written
by ning Grace this is one of the Fantastic educational material that's
available for blind people also visual impact people that fantastic they need
to know bride but have thees here it's fantastic this
book is a fantastic educational
material and I also uh have also another experience this is
the big astronomy they have outre to to kit for blind and L visual audience that
participation in a planetary session here it's available all the information in the night sky Network
homage then it is something they suggest here a material to be done with the
participation of the public that is also material for the visual imped
people then it's fantastic is a a fantastic experience and
and uh I suggest if someone would like to to know more to look for Mar gra in
internet you'll find many books she wrote and her
experience I'm sharing the link to Amazon to TCH Universe for the Braille
book of astronomy and T the is in the national briy press h yeah
they here no here here National bride press National bra
press yes the stops now I have a second Del the St to
also it's something fantastic this was the first book that I
knew about astronomy for vised people and blind
people okay I had opportunity to talk with her one time and I invited her for
our event here but didn't work I hope one day she she can participate here if
yes that would be wonderful yeah it's available for $35 from National BR press
yes its fifth edition so um you know I think it's wonderful that uh people have
um uh been able to take the universe to the site challenged you know so it's
just uh really incredible to me fantastic this is fantastic material
here is the book again let me show here again if someone wants to have this I
think that all the groups that work with Outreach activities this is a book
that's a fantastic supports to organize special events for all the
public wonderful and yesterday I had the opportunity to go to my university to
take more pictures using the unella and I got this
images wow the moon this is the moon and
m43 that is in the Orion constellation
and you can see here part of the m42 and here
m42 the great nebula in or and here also m43 here and something that for me was
an amazing amaz this is hor head Nea a 10 minutes
shot and the first time that I got an image of the hor head NE and I go I we
will do this again this week and next week to for more minutes to take a
better image and I I didn't process the image like the image that I received
from the UN Stellar telescope I didn't change anything in the
Mage and this is another uh this is look at that I changed the image these I
changed to see the H head neula a small telescope that allow us to
take this image this is the Helix
nebula that is also a fantastic object this is a 6 minutes shot it's not 6
minutes now they stack the mes every four seconds you take amaz every four
seconds then they stack amazing sent to us H process the maze by the system that
you having in telescope The Have Eyes small computer and this is the Fantastic
for me there NGC 6907 it this this
I this Galax is if I'm not wrong
118 million light years far from us wow
180 million lights years is a SP G and I I have this image
taking if from a place with a lot of light pollution around and was possible
to see this this is something that technology is bringing to
us everything is changing here because
uh with our telescopes traditional telescopes I have I never we have the
opportunity to take a picture like this and here is now the planet
jupter it's not so good for planets but is a image of Jupiter and
Saturn then what it it's fantastic because you
can stay in any place you want they have the battery you can use
the telescope for 11 hours 11 hours that's a long time yes it's more than
the battery of my smartphone that is that is how I ask to take theze my my
battery of my Marone finish and the telescope will continue
working now I think that uh L already talk about this this is from the space
where the homage from today we are in the
maximum they imagine that was the prediction was that you begin in 2025
but as our FS felt the sun is very active and
officially in October 15 was announced that the sun
has reached the maximum period then we in the maimum period of
of activities what Sun here's the difference this is from this homepage
from scientific visualization stud and here add difference between the
solar minim the solar maximum that we are living now and the same thing that's
curious is that many people are waiting uh very intense
solar activity because in the space we the home page they ever compare the S
now with the kington events then looking for the size of
[Music] the the uh Sun spot that appear in the
face of the Sun that you re see from the earth here are the
DAT from the number of progression of the sun spot in this solar cycle and we
see here the prediction of the 25 cycle and how that is intense now is more
intense that was predicted and the prediction is that you
have less activ solar activity the cycle but is more intense than the 24
cycle here is the solar cyle SP pression only in the
25 H cycle and you can see here that see this sun is more activ have more
activities than it was predicted s thank you very much
foration this is what I would like to show today and I I I
hope we have many news
soon and as we are working hard here to have news we are working with a new
places here that are taking care about the the mitigation of the light
pollution effects then we have a hotel here that is doing everything to be
certified and have another Reserve that they protect the sea turtles and then
they receive the lead certification that include also the
lights H that they have in all headquarter of the park this Reser and
they they did everything that's possible to didn't affect with the lights the
baby the's baby I was there something fantastic is the
same place that you have the observatory here with the telescope of our sky and
we measure the uh intensity of light 50
m far from the headqu during the night the lights on and was almost zero the
looks Zer looks yes yes because of the kind of lights that
[Music] they it shows you that you can do it you
can have light and darkness too so thank you very much for the Wonder nice to
meet you again yeah thank you so much okay take care marello right okay all right our next
speaker is none other than Ron breacher Ron's uh talk tonight will be the
universe from very own backyard Ron how are you
man you are muted I said I'm doing great that's a
very stylish hoodie that you're wearing Global Star Party
hoodie yeah really nice it's cold here tonight it's G down to minus
5c yeah so I'm getting ready to change my camera to the winter temperature in
the next week or so yeah I heard that when we get to Flagstaff that it will be down in you know below 20 degrees at
night which is wow for us is kind of cold it's not cold for you up in Canada though that's probably t-shirt weather
right we we still feel it yeah I'm still wearing a t-shirt but that's
okay um maybe I will share my screen okay I'll let you have the stage oh
okay so uh I'll I'll just start this as a
slideshow so this is called the universe from my backyard and I always like to Riff Off the the themes that that Scott
puts out there to the presenters ahead of time and um so we'll talk about the
theme of Discovery and then I'm going to basically show you how I do it from my
backyard and I'm going to show you some recent images and work in progress and
then I'm actually G to show you an acquisition in progress right now as we
speak my telescope is shooting so here we go so the theme is Discovery and uh we
got a lot more text than this but I just highlighted some of the really important ideas that that stood out to me the idea
that are exploring the skies from our own backyards like never before the the
um the previous speaker just mentioned how technology has changed things that
amateurs can now see things we've never been able to see before and that allows
us to personally expand our own Horizons and and view of the world and uh the the
other thing that really struck me in what uh Scott sent was the idea that
whether whether it's just my Discovery or the or Theo or I'm the first ever to
see something which hasn't happened yet it's a it's a moment of personal
Discovery for me and it always inspires me I love being out under the sky uh I
love looking at the images and I sometimes image the same things over and over again so here's where I do it this
is the doghouse Observatory and this was by the way if there's any spouses of
astronomers that are watching right now this dogghouse Observatory was a 50th
birthday gift for me from my beautiful wife Gail and it's a sky shed and it has
a pure and a warm room inside and these two pictures show it closed and open so
I got this in 2009 and 15 years later it's still going
strong I've replaced the front door I've replaced the the rails that are outside
the 4x4s but uh everything else is original and going
great and so here's my long-term strategy for how I want to approach deep
Sky Imaging so the first thing I do is I try to unload any equipment that I'm not
using and uh that's not strictly true there's some equipment that I would say
are um uh unique or rare so for example
we have a 50th Anniversary Questar it doesn't get used that much but it's not going to get sold because it would be
hard to replace on the other hand uh you know I've I've bought and sold a lot of
really fine telescopes because they're not that hard to replace so sell my
unused equipment buy a scope or camera in other words change it up and then
image objects that fit in that field for a few years and I'm pretty rigorous
about just choosing objects excuse me just choosing objects
that fit like in the central half of the field and then after a few years after
I've shot everything I can in that size from my location I sell all my unused equipment
change something again always being aware of the law of unforeseen
consequences so if you have a mount That's rated for you know 35 or 40
pounds and you have a telescope and camera setup that's 30 lb and then you
decide to upgrade that to a bigger scope you might find that you need to buy a bigger Mount so when you're upgrading
you really have to think about things and that's why we always tell people when you're putting together a system
get more Mount than you think you need you're probably going to want to change things up in a few years get yourself
the capacity my Mount um is a Paramount MX and I've been using it since 2011
without problems I've also used a lot of different telescopes and and focal
lengths and here's a few of them so attack fsq 106
an aspre 150 from skywatcher in the center and a 10-in ASA reflector on the
right um these pictures are all taken out in the observatory you can see the same Mount has been there throughout and
I'm still using the same Mount now so this is my current setup and most of the photos I'm going to show you in a few
minutes were were made with this setup so it's a Celestron 14in Edge
HD with a with a dou Shield an aluminum do shield and a de heater ring right
against the the corrector plate Primal luche lab uh Eagle for controlling
everything that's the the red box that you see on top of the telescope is actually the
computer uh I used their lowprofile Asad focuser anarco Rotator their geodo flat
panel was the only way I could get good Flats I tried t-shirt flats and Sky Flats I
I just was not successful with those methods but the geodo worked fine um using a qhy600 camera and uh filter
wheel and guide camera and optal filters and again my trusty Paramount MX at the
bottom of the list also at the bottom of the payload it's carrying
everything so this was taken with The Takahashi fsq1 6 the small refractor
that you saw uh it was on the left side of those three images it's a really nice
big field but I just want to show you what we can do at different focal
lengths so for example we can zoom in from that 4in
telescope if I go up to the 14in telescope there's the Lizard Head nebula
I call it that my wife my wife pointed this out to me she said looks like a lizard's head looking out of a
cave and uh ever since that I I can't unsee it so it was one of the first
things that I targeted with the 14in and boy does that ever show some
detail this is um we're we're just going to look at a few pictures now which is the universe
from my backyard all of these were captured recently with that big 14-in
telescope and all the other equipment I told you about so this is sharp lless
2188 uh some people call it the shrimp nebula and I did it in three different
color palettes with six filters so red green blue hydrogen oxygen and sulfur
the two uh the left hand and Center images are narrow band with natural
color stars and the one on the right is natural color enhanced with hydrogen
Alpha this is the c nebula and uh I just think it's one of
the coolest things that I've ever photographed and it re this picture
shows more detail than I ever thought I could reveal and if we look in close in
the core you can see the concentric rings around this that I've seen uh in
professional images but not too often in amateur images so this was a very very
cool one and uh in this image just like in in a lot of the other ones if you look away from the main target you'll
find other little Jewels like this galaxy
here um this is a Widefield picture it was taken with that little Takahashi
telescope again it shows a whole bunch of very cool objects in signus including
the propeller nebula up here at upper right but I want you to look Instead at
these two little blue eyes in the dark
and now let's have a look at them up close with the 14 inch and you'll see there's not two but
three there's the third one up here and uh one of the things I really
love about about this object and this photograph is this little ribbon of
hydrogen that passes in front of the reflection nebula the blue reflection
nebula that's in the background and there's another one of those ribbons over here on the left
side so cool again uh when I can on these on
these really interesting emission targets I shoot with six filters so sulfur hydrogen oxygen red green and
blue and uh the center image again is natural red green blue enhanced with
some hydrogen the left and right images are both narrow band sulfur hydrogen oxygen
with natural color stars but in two different color palettes to reveal
different chemistry I I'm still blown away that I
can do this from my backyard wow you
know I was just look looking at with my eyes crossed a little bit to make it a
3D uh View and it is stunning in when you do that when you merge all those the
left and right image over the center image I'm gonna try that but maybe it's better if I do it after my presentation
okay that's cool um so open clusters often get
overlooked I mean I know the Splashy ones get get photographed like the PES star cluster but um often when I'm
waiting for my main target to rise or after my main target has set and I have
an hour or two left over I'll use it to shoot something like
this and this open cluster completely off my radar but it was well placed and
looked interesting in the pictures that I looked at the Triangular shape so I photographed it a few just a
couple of weeks ago uh but you know you always get these little surprises and so if you look over
here we've got these galaxies that are far far in the distance and I wasn't
even able to get catalog numbers for two of them two of those three so uh you
know there's these beautiful gems everywhere this is the Cocoon nebula
and the Cocoon is uh at one end of a really long
dark um nebula and so I wanted to bring out a lot of the Dust around the Cocoon
so maybe it's brighter than some other images that you've seen but uh I I
really like this aesthetic for this object and similarly I did the same sort
of approach on the iris nebula uh one cool thing about this shot of the iris
is that it shows some pink Hal Alpha regions over
here and up over here that I've seen in some other images
but not too many so I was glad I was able to pull that out I didn't add Hal Alpha to this
image never even heard of this till I found it in a search of a catalog looking for objects to image this is the
crystal ball nebula NGC 1514 and there's lots of images out there but they mostly
show it as green they really don't show that that red hydrogen shell uh that I
was able to capture with a long exposure by the way when I say long exposure
these deep ones are in the range of 30 to 50 hours give or
take sometimes it depends on the weather and the moon this is the bub
nebula uh and again shot with six filters so I could make a few different
variations and uh again the center one is natural color in this case I didn't add any Al Alpha that's just natural RGB
red green blue the two outer images are both made with the natural color stars
but the nebulas shown with sulfur hydrogen and oxygen narrow band filters
and uh I think the one on the right which is called a forax palette is for
me the most attractive palette of the three for this object um well let's say of the narrow
band I'm really partial to the center one I'm very very drawn to that natural
color image um so the universe from my backyard this is a a a Galaxy cluster
taken uh with this setup and it's 300 million Lighty years
away uh as if that's not far enough uh there's all these other
galaxies uh that are shown here but in white are quazars and if you saw David
ier speak earlier this evening he was talking about the double quazar well I
use the mil quas uh catalog to identify all the quazar in this image and then I
started looking up their distances so you can look up the red shift and then use that to calculate the the uh
distance the light travel time and these are uh the top one there you can see
right here in the middle of the crosshairs in this image 9.3 billion
Lighty years away and the other one fainter but I can
still see it I hope you guys can on your screen 12.8 billion light years away so
less than a billion years after the big bang and that's from my
backyard crazy couple of things I got in progress this is another uh going to be
another one of those six filter three pallet images this is the very center of
the heart nebula IC 1805 and uh this is showing what I was
able to get when I had about I I think I had about 7 hours of data and I just
checked before this talk started and I'm now at uh 28 and a half hours so I
should be able to get more detail better color less noise just a a nicer
aesthetic overall and this object uh this is
called the bearclaw nebula and I'm I'm actually Imaging it right now as we speak so so I always I
always do practice processing while I'm acquiring data for an object over a
period of a couple of weeks say um or a month after every night I'll
do all the data and practice processing it so by the time I get to the end I've
done it six or seven times and I really know how to work the data I did this
after two nights of acquisition when I had about 17 hours of data I'm now up to
45 hours of data W and uh after I just
show you this next slide which has information on how to reach me astrod talk.c is my website our breacher
rogers.com is my email and also we have workshops at masters of piix insight.com
but now let me take you into the observatory cool so you're looking at my
you're looking at um my my Imaging system right now and just for a sec I'm
going to go back um just for a second I'm going to go
back to that slide so I can show you what to look
for so you see the smile here the upside down
smile yeah that's what I I want you to look for in the image I'm going to show
you and notice the two main shells are
not they're not centered on the dark spot the dark spot is kind of skewed off
center so here we go back out to the
observatory so here's the upside down smile except in this image it's right
side up because I'm on the other side of the meridian and you maybe you can see maybe
you can't I'm going to try to zoom in a little I don't know if you can see the faint
shell here we're looking just just a hint yeah just barely that's why I have
to shoot so long yeah and that's a hydrogen sub here's
oxygen oxygen you can maybe see a little more of the overall shell M right but
the contrast is pretty weak low yeah and it's a really good night here although
there's a fair bit of Moonlight and uh at the bottom here is my guiding
graph and you can see that my well you probably can't see it but I can see that my guiding error is right around one AR
second right now that's cuz the object is low in the sky it will be higher in
the sky as the night goes on it's going to keep Imaging like this throughout the
night now before I get too long in the tooth I'm going to disconnect from there
I'm going to stop my share and I'm going to thank you very much oh geez I think
that we could have kept looking at your images all night so thanks that's great
um uh we uh uh you know we hope to see
you more often and um Ron you are such a
talented guy in astrophotography I love that you teach people how to do this you know and uh
you know it's it's um uh the way that you describe the sky and um your images
the quality of your images you're a man that absolutely loves this and and I get that and I'm
glad you get to do it uh I don't know how often you're able to do it but uh uh
but I would think that almost every clear night I'm out every clear night uh
I shouldn't say I'm out necessarily my equipment is out every clear night okay but a lot of the time I like I have
binoculars standing by all the time so I'm if it's nice out I'm G to be out if
it's cold I may not stay out long yeah right but I have a homemade 10-inch job
and I have a 20in Obsession I'm embarrassed the 20-inch hasn't been out much it wasn't a good summer for visual
particularly um but my 10-in dub is it's set up in the driveway right now so it's
a two-minute setup awesome and I ground that mirror myself that's kind of cool
looking through a telescope you made yourself very cool very cool anyway
thank you Scott thank you so much all right all right so uh uh thank you Ron
thank you with those images beautiful I mean just stunning you know and uh if
you could have been there to kind of um uh you know Cross Your Eyes a bit at the
that nebula um uh you know it was just it was so 3D looking I I hope that Ron
posts it up that way on his Facebook page so all right I did I did oh you did
okay so go to Ron's Facebook page Ron breacher and uh check it out
so just don't let your eyes stay crossed for too long because they might they won't stick that way don't don't believe
what your mom said it's it's actually easier to find and higher quality if you go to astrod
talk.c there you go there you go and uh maybe consider taking some
classes from Ron uh so that you can get up to the level that you dream to be
so all right um at this point uh we have
um I think Robert Reeves is here with us and Robert are you ready to come on
right now or oh yeah I'm ready to rock and roll ready to rock and roll okay all
right well uh as you guys know if you've been watching Global star party uh
Robert Reeves is not only our resident Moon expert but I think he's probably a
world Moon expert um uh there's uh very very few people that know uh the terrain
as intimately as Robert does his lunar photography is also Second To None uh
you know it almost looks like it was uh um it looks like you know
uh you know like you're seeing uh artificially made craters and stuff
they're just in such high relief you know it's just you know so
anyhow I've learned the art of holding my breath while I open the spacecraft window and hang out to take a
picture yeah well Robert thanks man uh let you take it from here and thanks for
coming on to Global Star Party once again well you bet uh I understand the theme of This Global star party is
Discovery so um I thought I'd talk a little bit about the various stages of
Discovery in the moon uh um know 90 99
probably 99.9% of everything we know about the moon uh We've uh learned since
the early 1960s up through now uh but U the moon has been on
minds of mankind for for centuries and centuries but it wasn't until the Greeks
started thinking about it and uh applying geometry and uh mathematics to it that uh the first little morsels of
information the moon as a separate body were finally divined so let me go
to um get my screen up here uh oh hope I
don't lose you um
where are you I've lost you uh oh I clicked the wrong thing and
now I can't find the zoom screen anymore hold on while I get okay there
I'm back now let me hit share before I do that and then go to this and um we'll
make it work okay I think it says I am sharing you should be seeing a picture of the
moon now yeah all righty well um this is the same Moon that um we've been staring
at as Humanity ever since the caveman and um it's up there in the sky right now a waxing gibus phase uh giving a
little bit of combat with the photography I'm doing with a Celestron origin right now but um and the Moon is
the moon and it's CAU our imagination for ages so U um the first people who
really thought about the moon as a physical body were were the Greeks Aristotle the fifth century BC Applied
Mathematics and figured out the earth size distance to the moon was simple
geometry by looking at the shadow of the earth uh against a u um the moon during
a total lunar eclipse so um it's been about 2500 years since these first
little morsels of information were figured out uh now fast forward to um
through the Dark Ages when nothing was done about anything uh scientific uh to
the first applied the telescope to the moon and uh um although he was not the
first to draw the moon um the there were charts of the Moon drawn by naked
eye about a decade ahead of him but um the um first drawing of the Moon through
a telescope was done by Galileo and you look at it and you wonder well was he looking at the moon this just does not
look familiar but his verbal descriptions of it in in his writings uh
clearly described the moon mountains on the moon valleys on the moon uh craters
on the moon that he described as pits like rust in metal they didn't
understand the the concept of craters at the time but he could clearly see them and see that the moon's face was not uh
a perfectly smooth sphere like a the Greek teachings said it must be the
The Gods Must make the moon a perfect sphere well Buzz Galileo found the moon
was quite different uh fast forward just a very few years and uh one of the first
to try to map the moon was this fellow very stylistically uh uh portrayed in
armor although um he was really a a geographer um Michael Florence van
langren a Flemish Philip known scientifically as a langren was the
first to telescopically chart the moon and uh came up with a chart that vaguely
resembled the moon but all of the names on it were named after royalty and uh um
territorial um regions in Europe uh so U the royalty
in um Germany didn't like the Spanish names the French didn't like the English
names so his names did not stick so a few years later um a u u polish brew
master um known today as hus uh was next to map the moon and he applied his own
name Moon map and again we we look we wonder are these guys even looking at
the same world we call the moon um havas's first real contribution though a
solid contribution was recognizing the north south libration of the Moon thus he presents the map of the Moon as these
overlapping spheres recognize that the moon tips up and down because of libration sometimes you see over the
pole on the North sometimes beyond the pole on the south he had not yet
discovered that there is also an East West liasion uh which shows about an equal amount of territory around the
corners of the moon but again his names U did not have Universal appeal uh the
names on his map and almost all of them are gone now or are applied to different
regions of the Moon uh we jump up to this fellow Giovani rioli a um Italian monk a u a
Jesuit monk uh who studied the Moon with his U um um partner uh Francesco galdi
and he created the first map of the Moon in U 18 know 7 I get right 1653 I think
is what it was U that um shows names on the moon that we use today now reii
decided that these International names uh names based after royalty U would not
have Universal appeal they didn't so uh he named features on the moon uh the
large Maria after uh states of mind or weather phenomena and those were more
neutral uh he named the craters after philosophers and Poets and scientists
and uh then the names he put on the map are still there we recognize Plato
crater on on his map cernus crater Tao crater um these um wellestablished names
that we've known all of our lives uh took root with rioli's map back in
1651 but like I said the map itself very crude and uh you'll also notice the
light colors areas on the moon also have names just as the dark regions have
names that we still use today Oceanus procerum on the left uh uh Mari citus
Mar tranquilatus on the on the right hand side very familiar use but the
light areas also have names um like the U um um land of heat uh the land of cold
the land of uh fertility these light areas um he also Nam named but those
names went out of favor in 1830 so we no longer keep those names but all the
other names of the craters and the dark Maria are preserved we we still use them
the rioli put on the map uh almost 400 years ago
um we think of Christian hyans as the fellow who understood the saturnian ring
system discovered the uh the moon Titan around uh U Saturn but he also U
extensively observed the moon though those huge telescopes those aerial telescopes of the of the year and uh was
the first to observe features like straight wall on the moon and U
um we did not realize that until long after his death when some of his
manuscripts were published and discovered that he was the one who originally discovered some of these not
the later uh lunar observers and uh to this day we still call straight wall
huan's sword and if you look at straight wall the linear dark gash through the
middle of the image here um it does resemble a sword in a way um the dark
shadow of straight wall is the blade uh the hills at the southern end form the U
the handle guard on the sword and then the curved rim of the ghost grater
protruding above the Mari basal just south of straight wall uh we call that uh Staghorn and it's uh uh individually
but that appears as the sword handle and you combine all of these features together and we have hen's sword
honoring his first observations of this region back in the U uh mid
1600s now um the first person to apply science to mapping the moon uh was
Tobias Meer German back in the early 1700s uh he put a micrometer to the
telescope and uh produced the first map where the features were in placed with
um scientific measurements prior to this the maps were freehand and uh the features could be significantly off base
by modern standards looking at a modern map but Tobias Meyer produced the first map where all the features were in place
using scientific measurements and of course back then um the moon was presented South up so the globe looks a
little odd it is upside down uh South is at the top uh we did not abandoned this
uh South up um um concept with lunar
Maps uh until into the Space Age it was 1961 when we inverted the moon map and
put North at the top and west on the uh left side just like terrestrial
maps and another German um Johan maer working with u u beer the same people
who extensively studied Mars they also U produced the first really good accurate
map of the Moon uh In 1832 I believe they published U their
map of the Moon and U this holds up perfectly well today the um positioning
of the features the uh this design of the map the placement of them the uh the
drawing of them is is U very modern yet this map is over almost 200 years old so
um Mir and maer made a big jump in understanding the moon uh in fact they
did such a good job of it in their book that they published about the Moon that lunar studies essentially stopped for
the next half century people assumed we've learned all that we can learn about the moon well this was of course
back in the uh uh 19th century there's always room for uh learning more but uh
at the time we were limited telescopically um photography had not been perfected to the point where it
could be applied to the moon and of course the space program was uh centuries ahead but beer and maer's map
stands the test of time you can use this map today and be perfectly comfortable
navigating the face of the Moon um the next leap in understanding
the moon was not from an astronomer it was from a geologist Carl Grove Gilbert was
the first head geologist of the US Geological Survey now back in the late
1800s the US Geological Survey was created to survey uh the West the Indian
lands the frontier but um Gilbert um also had an interest in other things um
the geology of the Moon and one thing that caus attention was um what was
called konb out in Arizona um very tall
Hill looking structure but if you rode a horse up to it and got to the top of it it wasn't a top it wasn't a flat
mountain it was a gigantic pit that we now know as meteor crater um Gilbert
studied this extensively thinking that it had been U created by what he called
the Collision of a star um of course today we recognize that as a asteroid
strike but um he couldn't find the scientific proofs of it and there were
no other large craters on Earth to U justify the thought that a cosmic C
Collision created this so he made the erroneous um reluctantly made the erroneous assumption that meteor crater
was created by a steam explosion a volcanic steam explosion a feature called a mar but his interest in craters
continued and for three weeks uh in the late 1800s he used the uh great
equatorial refractor at the Naval Observatory in Washington DC the same telescope that ASF Hall used to discover
the moons of Mars and he observed the moon and came understand its geology as
a geologist uh astronomers didn't have the knowhow of geology to put two and
two together and recognize what was happening on the face of the moon but as a geologist U Gilbert did and although
his drawing is extremely crude it established a very basic fact Mar
embrium is surrounded by radial streaks um gouges in the moon we see them easily
in a telescope today we call them the embrium sculpture Gilbert deduced that these were created by debris blasted out
by an impact that created Mari embrium and gouged the moon in all directions
away from Mari embrium this was a correct assumption and this was back in the late
1800s unfortunately his U writings about it were tucked away in an archive in the
US Geological Survey and really not uh discovered until the 1950s by none other
than jeene Shoemaker so uh uh the truth about the moon how the face of the mo
Moon came about through massive impacts was recognized by a geologist in the 1800s but it wasn't until almost the
space age that uh this was rediscovered now one person who helped popularize
that theory um apologize for the tiny picture but I just cannot find a large
picture of Ralph Baldwin now Ralph Baldwin um trained as an astronomer but
actually earned a living as an indust with the Oliver machinery company uh the
company business and this was up near Chicago and um at the beginning of World
War II um uh Baldwin uh went to hear a lecture
at the outler planetarium in uh um Chicago and in the lobby there were
pictures of the Moon transparencies backlit transparencies and they clearly showed this embrium sculpture that uh
Gilbert had described uh a half a century before but Gilbert didn't know about I mean u u Baldwin didn't know
about this he independently rediscovered it um became very interested in the moon
so during World War II Not only was he U working with Oliver Machinery um
perfecting the proximity fuse used by uh the US military during World War II and
raising his two sons he was intently studying the moon and as soon as the war was over he wrote published this book
The Face of the Moon by Ralph uh Baldwin and uh this was the first book that got
it right about the nature of the Moon up to this time uh the uh Bible had been um
the book by uh Carpenter and naith published back in the late 1800s uh the moon considered as a world and a natural
satellite and they were very Pro volcanic for everything and uh that thought stuck until the space age in
fact uh uh some of it didn't get swept away until Apollo Astronauts were Le
literally standing on the moon looking out and seeing not volcanism but uh
debris from impacts so uh that notion died hard but Baldwin got it right and
uh the the face of the moon was created by impacts and uh this book was read by
some very influential people including Harold Yuri Who U went on to um Champion
uh much of the early space program and got the Space Program directed almost
entirely toward a a moon Centric U program especially after Apollo uh took
root when Kennedy uh in May of 1961 declared that we will send men to the
moon and back by the end of the decade so this book was highly highly
influential and um moving on a little further we get into the Space Program we're about to
send men to the Moon in Apollo um but we need to learn or figure out where to
land on the moon safe places to land on the moon you look at the Moon through a telescope it looks like a treacherous
place but there are smooth areas they had to be properly mapped and scouted out and the lunar orbiter series of
satellites U did that very well um in the late 19 1960s prior to the Apollo
Landings now U lunar orbiters gave us views of the moon like we had never ever
seen before this is kernus crater at a slant from the side cernus from the
earth we see it overhead as a round hole uh in the ground but here we see the
vertical depth of the the walls and the central Peaks and the uh um um the
geology of the interior of cernus something we had never ever seen before
this was a sensation in 1966 and fact the Press called it the picture of the
century and moving the lunar orbiter gave us uh amazing views like the marus
hills we see the Mario's Hill telescope has this collection of bumps and uh look
like dimples on Ocean prum but here we see each one is an individual little
shield volcano and uh lunar helped us understand the geology and the makeup
and the structure of the Moon um another picture that was fascinating when it was released the Alpine Valley um back in
the 1960s late 60s U most amateur telescopes were little refractors um a
4-in reflector was average if you had a 6-in reflector oh you were a God you had
a a hefty telescope but these would show us Alpine Valley just as this little
streak gashing across the the Alps mountains on the moon we had no idea
there were things like this real running of the Alpine Valley and uh
uh professionally it was known yes but as amateurs we did not have the ability
to resolve it and see it and when we saw this at lunar orbiter it was really really fascinating but the key to lunar
orbiter helping us understand the moon came from may have this image of lunar orbiter taken by lunar orbiter 4 uh 1968
I believe um of U Mario Oriental from Earth Mario Oriental bisects is bisected
by the Western limb of the Moon we see it at an extremely slant angle at best
under good libration we can see some of the Mari patch in the middle of mar
Oriental and we see the what look here as concentric impact Rings we see them
as as the Calera and um U Rook mountains
um just this U the basal patch of Oriental but
from Earth we do not get the impression that these
uh it seems that things are frozen here a bit
let's see if Robert will come back there uh here it
was it was obvious that it was a u an impact and uh a massive impact at that
and uh such impacts create these successive Rings these impact Rings each
one 1.4 times further out than the the previous one and since Oriental was the
last one formed no further huge impacts obliterated it so it is preserved and
lunar orbiter let us see this and understand it and come to terms with how the face of the moon was
created now fast forward to the 21st century we have another spacecraft in
orbit about the moon creating or or or giving us even new discoveries now uh we
thought we had the moon pretty figured out with Luna Orbiter but um U the lunar recover
reconnaissance Orbiter not to be confused with lunar orbiter lunar orbiter was 1960s lunar reconnaissance
Orbiter is ongoing now is finding things like these marvelous Skylight pits of
the of various Mari regions on the moon and uh these have created an enormous
amount of lately because they could be the entrances to underground lava tubes
which um when you get away from the polar regions on the moon um we end up
in in regions that have very high solar radiation the the sun beating down on
these um uh equatorial regions where these these pits are um the sun can be
150 times U more powerful than it is on Earth uh constant meteor impacts um
radiation from the Sun not just heat but uh um um actual ionizing radiation that
will kill you um Rains Down on the moon unimpeded so the thought now is in the
equatorial regions um astronauts may actually build shoulders in these lava
tubes to escape these these lunar hazards uh the initial Landings of course are going to be down at the south
pole but once we colonize other regions of the Moon uh these regions are going to become um very important as potential
shelter and lunar reconnaissance Orbiter has found quite a few of these so um
jump up to um now um I've made mention of a number of
maps so forth that have been created over the years that have helped understand the moon um as you um put
together your Christmas lifts for yourself or for another fellow astronomer um please give serious
thought to this book that came out last September um you notice the author up in the upper left hand side yes I am
promoting for phot graphic atlas of the moon so uh if you have uh a good degree
of interest in what I've been saying about the moon not only today but over the past weeks when I have been on U
Global Star Party talking about the moon uh consider um getting this book diving
into it and learning more about the moon on a grander scale so I've appreciated
your attention and uh I hope you've um learned a little bit more about the
jumps and increments and how we've come to understand the face of the man of the
Moon wonderful wonderful thank you very
much I'll stop sharing and turn it back to you okay there we go there we go
great Robert that was absolutely stunning I really enjoyed your lecture
just now oh thank you thank you excellent excellent if you if you H can
uh accompan accompany me Robert because I have a beautiful moon and live Al
through this telescope and this camera maybe you can relate and talk
about much better than me about the lunar surface no you want when Scot told
me I start to to show the moon okay hi David how are
you okay all right so it's the uh the Robert and Caesar show okay yes yes for
me it's so honoring so H because I was totally H
um happy to listen about the history the conception uh of the Moon from the
humanity well I'll share my my screen with the moon and of course that you
um Robert can you can you tell me where
I need to go okay well let's bring your moon up and uh let's start navigating okay okay
I am uh I put a little more saturation here we are yes yeah you are looking at um on
the left hand side is uh marus seratus the round uh large round one on the left
and in the upper right hand corner is Mari chissum now the the feature that U really gets my attention uh on
the bottom shore of Mario Chisum up at the top notice a very bright crater that
has rays that go off at two different angles to the left and to the right uh
this is what we call a butterfly ray pattern and uh this is created by a very
low oblique impact uh it uh these low oblique impacts do not scatter rays in
all directions they uh primarily splatter all off to the sides and down range and none of the ray material
splashes back in the direction the impactor came from so uh this is called procas crater it's a a little under 30
kilometers in diameter and you notice how bright it is it looks like it's almost glowing by its own light procas
is very young the uh uh material inside the crater is still crushed and very
blocky and angular it hasn't been worn down and smoothed by um uh
literally millions of years of space weathering so it is still very reflective and this crater is extremely
bright when the sun is shining yes it is I can see that that I need to adust some
time my gang and my camera again because they are going to Bright so much that ER
explode in white bright and you know it's it's a beautiful uh effect well
procas is naturally bright this this is a very u a natural view of bras
crater yeah um I actually I have a question about how young or old is this
crater bras is a nectar excuse me a a capern aoch crater which means it is
less than a old now we can date crators as being cernic if they have Rays
because rays will fade after about a billion years and the capern aoch began about a billion years ago around the
time cernus crater was formed so any crater that you see with Rays is less
than a billion years old that the Moon is over four billion years old well that automatically drops it into the uh
youngest aoch uh of lunar time so uh U brocas is one of the younger craters on
the moon so I want to drift a little bit South and tell me tell me rer where
where you need that I go let's let's let's drift make the moon drift to the
left and let's go down sou
okay North is here to the left is okay um well we're going we're going drifting
up north keep going in that direction whoops we're going the wrong way yeah keep yeah keep keep the moon going like
you're doing now keep going keep going and uh
now Mari seratus is getting closer to the middle hold it right there um Mario
seratus the round one that's just drifting out of the top now but in the upper uh right hand side Mari
tranquilatus this is where uh down toward the uh um left hand side of it is
where Apollo 11 landed wow is incredible the difference
of colors between this and this area uh the the uh basalts within uh may make
the moon go down a little bit to show uh serenus a little bit
more then we yeah make the moon drift down in the image oops wrong drift the
other way sorry sorry we'll take a look at this region
in a minute but right now we are operating I am the operator of the telescope and we are people
maybe 10,000 miles yeah well everything's backwards in the southern
hemisphere anyway yeah yeah make that downward again yes it's a d or a c yes
okay a little bit more get all of serenus in the field of view there we go okay you can hold it right there now
serenus is the round one round Mario on the left and yes it is two different
colors um notice around the shoreline distinctly darker in the middle uh much
lighter um these uh bals are two distinctly
different compositions um the um there's a distinction between uh titanium rich
and titanium poor B salts the chemistry of it the minerals in it so uh U
depending upon where they erupted from inside of the Moon uh what time when when uh the internal composition of the
moon was melting uh you can get these different compositions of of Basalt so here on on Mars ratanas we we see along
the shoreline distinctly darker basalts than we see in the middle so now make
the moon drift upward and you were about to come into cernus crater and we'll we'll take a look at that one just make
the moon go upward uh there we go in that direction
keep going keep going here it comes there it is okay okay you can stop now
we are looking at cernus Crater the uh the large red crater in the U left hand
side of the field of view and Kepler crater down in the left um it also has a
substantial ray pattern now the uh the klarian uh and cerut Ray systems are so
bright that you can see them as a bright spot on the moon with a naked eye where
during the full moon um the capern race system the second larg just on the moon spans almost a thousand kilometers and
uh U we U looked at that lunar orbiter picture of Copernicus earlier where
we're looking at it a slant across the face of the Moon here from Earth we look straight down in it and uh we see the uh
cernus crater as a classic example of what we call a a complex crater u a
simple crater is a small crater bowl-shaped complex craters larger uh
usually bigger than U about 16 20 km in diameter and have these Terrace walls
that crumble and Tumble down into the crater and they have a central Peak we can clearly see that here in this image
of cernus a classic example of a complex crater um okay make the moon drift to
the right to the right so that we to the right and we'll go up and visit Plato I
hope sorry sir the other right yes there we go okay
uh maybe a little more yes yes okay now
now we need now we okay you're good yeah you're good left right now we need to
make the moon go down a little little bit and uh yeah there they're going the
right way keep going keep going we're almost there Plato is just sticking into the there here it comes okay stop you
got it you got it we're looking at Mar embrium now the Sea of rains and uh Mari
embrium is the second largest of the lunar Seas um from Earth it appears to be the
largest uh just because of the perspective the largest one is procellarum further off in the west
probably still in the shadow of the moon right now but it's twice as big as zimri
but it's so far off to the corner that we really really can't uh see it that well it's foreshortened so embrium U
appears as the largest and one of the landmarks on it is Plato crater the dark
crater at the very top of the image uh about 100 kilometers in diameter um
absolutely flored it looks like like a paved parking lot uh looks like they
went in with asphalt and paved over the crater uh the uh interior of Plato
flooded with lava that flowed up from underneath the crater and filled it from within the dark Basalt you see didn't
spill over the crater walls uh instead it came up from underneath the crater
and uh another one of the largest craters you're going to see on the moon is the um semicircle Horseshoe Bay that
you see on the left hand side of Mari embrium uh this is sinus idum the Bay of
rainbows and uh this is a u Giant impact that carv this huge crater um almost 300
kmers in diameter on the western shore of mar embrium so when the lavas flooded
the embrium Basin they also flowed into the U
um sinus rhm Basin and flooded it too so we end up with this Horseshoe
Bay Let's uh make the moon drift upwards and see we see quick question before we
leave in particular whenever I try and take pictures of the Moon with my meager
camera equipment there's a feature that I think you you called Thor's hammer oh
yeah and below it there's a feature that yeah that I would call
Italy um what are th those features there um um well just below are there
official name for oh yeah yeah there are just below um Plato crater which is
right on the edge of the field of view we see these little white Peaks up through uh the dark BT of mar embrium
these These are literally M Peaks um they have names the uh
um uh let me get my map up here so I won't mispronounce
it um oh yeah yeah just just below Plato uh
the straight line of RI Ridge is mon
recta the straight straight mountains and just immediately to the right of it U
Pico mountains Pico below it mountains Pyon and then uh in that area is Thor's
hammer but it's too tiny to be resolved in this uh view we have right now not
enough magnification but each one of those are are mountain peaks are protruding up from a probably a buried
uh Basin impact ring uh remember when we were looking at U U Mario Oriental and
and during my presentation and we we saw those concentric rings around um the
Oriental Basin U those Rings exist within the embrium Basin as well but
they've been buried by Basalt so uh the mountain peaks the very highest peaks
some of them protrude through the basalt and that's what we see up here that's what forms um the U mons Pico Mon's Pyon
uh Thor's hammer these little Peaks up here yeah I use those if I see enough
detail in those Peaks when I zoom in I consider it a fairly sharp image but
I've always been interested in what they yeah now I can know what they actually are and I'm sure you described them in
past yes totally another here go ahead sayar oh
no no yeah sorry that another thing that we can talk about is that we are making
a live ER video actually and actually I took and I'll stop to here we can see
the the name of frames that I uh recorded in my video and next week I can
show how process this kind of videos I now I'll stop the
recording okay and here the program say where is where is in the computer uh
recorder or or in which uh um in which
uh carpet is is uh uh the recorder the
and later you can process ER the video
in a pictur with more oh a beard with
more um details yeah detail contrast sharp yes sharpest but robertt make the
best I I think that Robert have a satell over the moon because he made impossible
in the in the quality of of the of the L lunar image well Robert where I go
okay you're right well go ahead really quick mention oh I was going to mention Cesar that uh you know
astrophotography sometimes we take the image and we don't know what it is we're
Imaging and you know really appreciate Robert staying on because here I am
talking about a particular feature on the moon and I it's like I'm using it
for sharpness or the the uh colors of the uh you know those uh Mario sertis um
or Sea of Tranquility because I can't think of the U Latin name but I remember
that one of the apods was when somebody decided to turn the saturation all the
way up and they saw some of those colors they they were sort of exaggerated colors but apparently they did um they
showed some of the actual uh some of the elements that were present were
highlighted by the colors that came up so you had um you know rust iron oxide
as showing as red areas and like those places where titanium was were uh blue
okay and um you know here Robert's you're back Robert yeah and we Robert
just told us what was you know the what's really underneath them now it
looks like say are your changing the moon color white balance that's okay um
so yeah it's I like the connection between what's really there and how it formed and so it's no longer just a
simple picture it's like we're floating over the moon and we have you know
Robert's been our guide saying well here's what you're looking at you know okay you got a good good area coming up
stop stop moving now you're looking you're looking at um um um
let me put a little less gain because we are so bright now it's okay uh yeah the
image is good uh now you're looking right in the middle the round one is Mari
humorum the Sea of humidity they call it but the really cool feature is gindy
crater on the upper left um notice how shallow it is and how
it appears to have a roughness to it that not similar to other craters uh
gindi is a classic floor fractured crater the bottom of the crater has been pushed up by volcanism and if you had a
higher magnification view of it you would see that there's this whole network of cracks running across its
floor and um gives it the name floor fractured but it is so rough that when
you look at it up close um I liken it to the appearance of an oatmeal cookie right out of the oven so I call gindi my
oatmeal cookie crater because it looks like uh one of Grandma's oatmeal cookies right out of the oven now um just off to
the right of um Mari humorum um are two of the mo Moon's most elongated craters
and they're not related to each other but they're both um elongated in the same direction um just to the right of
Mor humorum you see a peanut-shaped Hansel a distinctly peanut-shaped crater
and then down a little bit more to the right you see cigar-shaped
Schiller is about 170 kilomet wide but only about
50 k excuse me long but about 100 about 50 kilm wide it's a about three times
longer than it is wide which is very unusual no other crater on the moon like it uh so uh it's just um coincidental
that the two most elongated craters on the moon are in the same field of view at it through high power eyepiece and
then Tao crater drifting in at the upper right um one of the youngest big craters
on the moon um by dating uh uh Apollo samples and the geology U analyzed
brought back by Apollo uh we determined that Tao crater is about 108 million
years old now the 108 million is a blink of an eye in lunar geology time that was
yesterday the dinosaurs were still roaming around on the earth when Tao was blasted out of the Moon and it's got the
largest Ray structure on the moon spans over 2200 kilometers across the southern
uh hemisphere of the Moon and one of the most unusual features of that Ray structure very clear up at the top half
of this image notice the two parallel Ray streaks that are extending almost
out of the field of view at the very top uh we call those the railroad tracks they're parallel they do not converge
back in the middle of Tao like the Rays should and why these rays are parallel
and tangential to the rim of Tao we have no idea I've got theories but nothing uh
concrete so it's just a very unusual odity but um the rest of the territory
down along the uh the Terminator uh the shadow area um
we can move a little I I need to check my wife I hear her she's she's calling
just a minute I'll be right back yes no problem no problem I still moveing this
area this is fun yes really is Fun the most
important yes I I love it that yes I love that uh we have the opportunity to
share the moon with the people with Robert okay I may have to break away
here L okay I may have to break away here my U uh my wife who uh has medical
difficulties need needs my assistance so um I've enjoyed talking about the moon I
didn't mean to take up your your your time Caesar but oh it's it's a honor for
me Robert because ER you enjoy as every
every presentation and for me can bring the a live moon image uh it's a it's a
magic coincidence between the the from the south
hemisphere the moon and your speech that
is really teaching and inspiring and this is that we are inspiring to the
people because the size of this telescope is very commercial normal entry level well um this is the idea
with this uh that invite to people to enjoy astronomy um this is something so
um so uh incredible that today we can share this uh kind of live image and
quality and of course fun fun I must go
take care of my wife now so um it's been fun and we'll catch up with you all next week thank you Robert thank you thank
you very much bye bye thank you bye bye okay all right so if you'd like to
Caesar you can wrap it up and then um ah was an excellent an excellent uh
opportunity to yeah to show to the people and sharing and really it's fly
over the moon with a small telescope with a entrylevel camera and telescope
very good Optics Scot and really in the technical aspects um uh I I consider for
all people um to H say that
that choose a maxut telescope yes in this case my explor scientific telescope
I take one for me because uh really the the final the
final shoots of the Moon H making with this kind of videos uh are amazing
because they are look that it's really fun if um in my screen I think that I
have a moon of one and a half meter diameter because the size of this image
is is incredible um and it's something like like um really
for the people enjoy with the camera enjoy with own cell phone adapted to the
eyepiece or put the the eyes your eyes with a five mm H um more and less uh
ipce focal ipce um you can enjoy this
again and again because the Moon is uh every every
month is for us and is for for enjoy because it's changing every time in the
lunar phases and you have a different aspect of the of the Shadows of the Cs
and the colors and uh while Robert was talking about the the this incredible
aspect of colors uh I move only the saturation of the camera the contrast
and it's perfect to share and to to enjoy and have fun uh from the balcony
from the south mere it's a very good image you've got a got a good thank you thank you very much yes yes I tried H to
to take some pictures uh some sorry some Er short
videos recording for for make uh pictures later because it's I think that
is a it's a a an AC acceptable scene tonight it's okay process up some of
those videos into into SS and show us next week about um the the Improvement
in the the quality of the image when you stack them together totally yes yes yes
it will be excellent for for me and share with the Audi thank you very
much I enjoy this uh uh and sh this moment
uh with the audience thank you very much Scott and you it was fun it was a lot of
fun that's wonderful yeah I hope the audience enjoyed that um uh there is a
question a couple of questions uh directed to Robert um one of them is can
you get an autograph copy of your new book that's from Mark Drexler uh yeah I'll have to contact me
direct so that uh I have I have to get a copy of it I have to actually buy it myself uh so find it and then send it to
him and then he pays me back so uh that's a process I've done many times so uh um if you want to share my email
address with him that's fine with me okay all right um yeah Mark uh you can
reach me at s explorien ific tocom okay and I'll I'll be happy to uh get you
hooked up here um another question was um what is
uh I wonder if the asteroid that caused Tao killed off all the moon all the moon
dinosaurs I there's no dinosaurs there so maybe no it's a
mi no I don't I don't think there were Moon dinosaurs but so okay all right now
the uh the the chickaloo impact uh was U
um oh let me think about this perhaps 5050 to 60 million years after the Tao
impact so minia T-Rex was startled by the flash on the moon of the creation of
Tao but U the uh the um Extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs or at least
that's one of the theories right now uh didn't occur until many millions of years later I'll share a little more of the
Moon because it's more interested than my image in the in the Global
Safar okay and another question Robert uh what lunar Mysteries do you hope to
see resolved In Our Lifetime H Mysteries we don't have very
many Mysteries left except to uh establish yes or no is the uh is lunar
ice a uh usable resource that will allow us to colonize the moon is it
transporting water from Earth very expensive if we can get it on the moon and use that uh resource to break it
down into hydrogen and oxygen to create Rocket Fuel uh we have a a means of
expanding our reach into the solar system so is this ice real is it in
sufficient quantities uh to be uh extracted and and utilized so I think
that's that's one of the uh the major U Mysteries right now related to the Mand
exploration of the Moon um as far as the moon itself oh there are there's little
minor Mysteries like uh what created Rainer gamma the mysterious tadpole over
on Oceanus procerum um it's not a not a indentation nor a mountain it's just a
albo feature just has a different color and we think it is because of regional magnetic fields yet the moon does not
have a magnetic field of its own so a little Regional Mysteries like that we're going to be solving fairly soon I
hope because um some folks I know over at Southwest research here in San Antonio are building the instruments
that are going to be landed on the moon to study these features so we we're chipping away at it little by little
wonderful well I think these next uh these next Landings on the moon will
teach us a lot so that's great um okay so I think at this point we will
move to Adrien Bradley uh he's there patiently waiting Cesar thank you very
much for that great to you and the audience and Robert especially
because a luxury luxury speak care for for my presentation because it's the
best way to to share the things and very interesting things that that you told
about you know a lot about this my pleasure too thank you very much
thank you bye okay okay all right so um
uh so we are I don't know how I'd be able to top that one but I will say
Cesar the irony in the image of the Moon that you presented is that that's how
the moon appears to us in the northern hemisphere you were going up it's looking upside down to you yes in
southern hemisphere but that's how we see it in the northern hemisphere so um those of us in the northern hemisphere
were just looking at it like oh it's just the Boon he's going there it's down south he's going north but to you Tao is
a northern part yes or but it's and not totally but you know
you have a um all about the all through the telescope if you rotate the
camera 100 80 degrees it's the same then it's direct it's it's as you see it
yeah we we resolve fastly but you know I I remember resolve it if you have to yes
yes you can see my my my you can't imagine my my uh face when I start to
see the sky in Atlanta Georgia in my first Glo um store party in United
States and you know that oron horon outside but in the
real yes not upside the nor it's okay because they
have the arm you call them yeah the arm is up like this and you can't see it because I decided to use Virtual
background but um totally yeah I know exactly what you're saying if you come
here and say why where are the the Stars the the opposite situation is is Magic
is crazy right all right so this is my first time
working with a uh with my MacBook and I am going
to share my screen can everyone see it uh we see your desktop it looks
like okay are you seeing a picture of a
white disc the moon the stadium yep that's Yankee stadium in
2017 and what I decided to do and as usual I'm always chasing dark skies and
chasing things the theme was Discovery um I see my good friend Dev is still
here and there had to be lots of great presentations which I could go back um
and view so what I decided I would do is essentially talk
about discovery with images that I've taken and I've added a few images some
good some bad and some surprises um starting with this one in
Yankee Stadium because um and my Yankees lost to the Dodgers in the World Series
this was from 2017 and there I saw the moon rising
over right field the rafter and I took my iPhone and tried to capture it so
I've been trying to capture Moon pictures since 2017 and only once I got to using you
know a larger sensor camera and a larger lens was I able to get any features but
for a lot of people this was it we just went through a great series of discovery
about all of the things that are on this moon but yet if you try and take a picture of it with the wrong equipment
all you get is this overblown white disc and I thought it was really interesting
because this is a historic look to Yankee Stadium over the years um they
combined it with the lights and so the freeze looks like this the old freeze
was just this kind of this bridge looking area but we're here to talk astronomy and not Yankee
Stadium um so I've talked about this before the chance meteor that I saw
where right after I saw one go just under the signis region I turned my
camera back towards the uh core took a picture did not see this meteor
personally but saw that it was captured um on I'll say on film even
though it's digital um first time I went after a
daytime Comet was Comet neowise and this was it was worth seeing
this both naked eye and and getting it in binoculars and a picture and it looks
really similar to the there's a similarity I think to the comet that we
suchin Shan that we just got done um
seeing because of the timing of uh Comet neowise we were able to take pictures
like this you know the the pictures were open to a lot more than you know the few
photographers that were able to just barely catch great pictures of comet
suchin Shan it was a little easier to get uh neowise and just about everyone
could take the picture but this I took this image also reminding me of comet
hail Bop and how beautiful it looked I happened to be in a plane one time and I saw the tail stretch across the entire
length of the sky I seem to remember ory being a part of that picture too so um
Comet hail Bop Comet neowise and suchin Shan
Atlas um of course there were some others so this was the first time that I
realized what Light Pillars look like not Aurora but it has to be cold it has
to be a certain condition this is where manmade lights are refracted up into the
sky like this so there's you've got lights from a dist town and they whatever color they
are that's the color of light that ends up being refracted by ice crystals so
it's cold I was standing on a frozen pond here and shooting across towards the
town and you've got Ayan and friends as sort of a topper for this
image first time those of us that have seen the Milky Way naked and seen detail
in it um this of course this image hey you look at this this is just a rough
clearing in a forest in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan um I saw most of this now when
I took a minute long exposure I was able to this is the first
time I was able to start getting details of the Dust Lane that creates that bulge
that surrounds the galactic core of course the galactic core is around here here the you know the super massive
black hole at our galaxy Center runs roughly about here this
area um this region is the sweets region where there was a survey done for
exoplanets it's notice it's bright um it's free of a lot of the Dust the Rifts
and the debris that come when it comes to the center of the Galaxy it's it's a
rare area and a chance to peer into the busyness of the Galaxy Center our galaxy
Center so here we've got some Aurora by this Tower it was I don't mind Imaging
in cold weather um I was there to image the Milky Way and this Aurora came out so I
captured some of it and it was the first time since about 2003 and the first time
I was able to capture pictures of it and it was in the distance so this is the
best that I thought Michigan could produce for Aurora boy was I
wrong but we'll get to that later first time seeing the zodiacal light this was
the Spring zodiacal Light here's oryan um Taurus
plees then let's see yeah that would be the
Andromeda galaxy oh yeah I think that is that's the way the kind of the way that
I did this image um because I would say that that's a
double cluster so um wide field image for sure because I've got an Andromeda over here and then
you've got a Ryan and now I see how I did it the Milky Way is as Orion sets
this part of the Milky Way Is Up top so you've out the copia region
here uh or off maybe just a little off screen um percus there's double
cluster and then there's uh this
is um I think this is the mot mot 120
and then you get into this region here where ran is but first time seeing the Z the light
second time seeing the zodiacal light and realizing just how much more we could see with this part of the winter
Milky Way in Orion this was Rising um you know and I have some a
caption here um I haven't signed an image like this in a while just because
the captions the metadata keeps all of your
information and you know you have to you'd have to do some tips and tricks
to remove that from your image but uh here you've got the Beehive seeing all a
lot of this I saw naked eye now I use a modified camera so Barnard's Loop and all of the uh all of these ha regions
here you may not see but just about everything else is visible including the zodiacal light so another early picture
and from that same first time I saw Sky glow um this would be back in
2021 and the first time I saw the brightness of the signis region um from
from Michigan this region is not that bright and even with the cloud cover
this was it was an amazing site and it's one that I would continue to try and
capture even today I try and capture that region of the Milky Way uh whenever
I'm in Kinton or black Mesa so I discovered see if I can I
might be able to zoom in so I discovered that uh this little
thing the cat's paw was reachable there it goes this was
actually reachable from our area to the north this is uh um
you know this is like this is Lake Hudson in Michigan it's the southern part it's not as dark as some of those
other regions I showed yet with a two-minute exposure you can still get
detail like this um you know check out the Lagoon
that look at the little triet right here you can see some of the shape of that and there's it
M22 so there's the butter fly so this was one of the first images where I got
the Focus right it was hazy so we lost some of the detail here these uh dark
nebula here but you can still see the uh the Dark Horse of the Crazy Horse they
call it um this was one of my uh first kind
of deep images of what our Galactic core looks
like so let's jump through here getting Earth shine this was one of the first
times I managed to get Earth shine now we just talked about some of these regions on the moon you we can see Tao
here we can see cernus here believe this is aist starus and um I can't see some
of the other regions that we just discussed but with Good Earth shine um it's possible to expose those
regions now the tough part is you know this you expose for the Earth
shined region and you blow out the region that's lit by the Sun so there
would be more to do this was just another discovery that there can be so much Sky glow that it can cover you know
it can cover the sky now there are clouds here too and then there's dark clouds but um a lot of what was in this
sky is real this looks like I just sort of painted things but it was real and it was a bit of surprise
now behind me was also real Aurora um I didn't I ended up not
including that image but maybe I will in a future version of this but turning
around there's Aurora so this is an important Discovery because it's me reenacting the first
time I viewed the Milky Way naked eye I didn't see any any of this I pretty sure
I saw a plane and it probably wasn't this plane but this is what started it
all as me coming out and just looking for it and even with all of this light
glow of milin in the distance I was able to see just a faint what we would call A
Milk River I couldn't see any shape I saw
Sagittarius and my interest was peaked from that point on so this was a recreation of
that moment I discovered I could do a wedding photo with Aurora in it my good friend
Ryan's daughter and her new husband and there was Aurora that night and so I did
a composite with them both this was wanting I think there are even meteors
here this is where the uh Big Dipper is Ursa Major this was one of those where
wouldn't it be great if we could get you to together everything just sort of lined up and I did what I could and I
ended up with this photo which I still think the couple has to this day um this represents dusk seeing the
Milky Way at dusk for the first time um dusk meaning uh nautical twilight about
the middle of nautical twilight and that's something if you're at a dark area the Milky Way comes out during
nautical twilight you don't have to wait until it's completely dark if you're waiting until it's completely dark your
area may not be as dark as it gets this was could I get fall tree
colors in the Milky Way um my priest to his past this is his property um back
when he was alive I did some Imaging on his property and the sky was transparent
that night can I get the Moon while it's lunar eclip it and a bunch of Stars can
I get a Starfield behind it this happens to be Uranus although the color does not
show up very well here it was kind of blown out in the exposure time but there
you go I was able to get the moon hanging in the night sky with all the
stars while it was eclipsed of course a lunar eclipse and that turned out to be the
planet Uranus here you have
clouds you have the moon but it was when uh it when Mars passed behind it or I
should say it passed in front of Mars and there's Mars this was taken with a
600 millimeter uh camera lens and my Sony Alpha 7 R4 and I was able to
get that tiny little planet of Mars to show up coming out from behind the moon
that's something that a lot of real good telescope photography and photography using a telescope can do but I was just
happy to get anything at all with just my camera considering how cloudy it was
that night so I didn't miss the occultation here you've got this looks
like another one of these ordinary images that I do you Milky Ways Rising Above This is Sagen Bay what I remember
about this is I looked at this and saw a lot of this color and structure and
thought wow I'm seeing a whole lot um for a region that it's not supposed to
be as dark as it is west of the Mississippi this is when I realized the longer you study the night sky the more
you may end up seeing than you realize it's like you get used to you start to
recognize things in the sky even if it's not as dark and with this image
here we have sharpless uh believe it's 127 this region in ukas started to come
out and you can see this color here I believe that's a little meteor that
showed up meteors show up in all the images now and so they haven't I haven't
seen one quite as bright as that first one all right so let's uh we'll keep
pushing through rainbows at night this did did not see any of this color
but uh you had a moon about the size of tonight's moon casting over Lake hon and
this bow at Sea and here's a uh beautiful ship yeah and it was a surprise I looked
at it and said wow that's a bow at night I believe this was the start of another one if you look
here maybe the second one it just barely see some color here yeah so it surprised
me because the moon wasn't even fully and I didn't have any tracking that's why you see the stars shaped the way
they are but I was still happy with what I got oh yeah see the B wants to do that
there's a question Adrian Wayne yosa is watching on
Facebook he wants to know what kind of equipment you're using to capture these images so a lot of what you're seeing
there is being done with a Sony A7 R4 and these l is this lens would have
been I would have to look up the information really quick for that's not
where I want to look um information so this was an EOS 6D I used
two cameras Canon eos6d 16 mm 16
to35 um F28 this one was a 32nd image right here because I wanted to capture
the Milky Way coming out of this giant storm cloud overexpose the ground a
little bit but you can see the lightning here that image that we were just so it
looks like I used my 6D again for this one so must have uh it's modified for
Astro so I must have modified the white balance for it
um and that 60c exposure um same thing here this this is
my primary nighttime camera and here we go Sony ic7 rm4 is
the A7 R4 that I use to handhold this
Moon picture and and that's what I did when I uh
wanted to capture the occultation of Mars so those are my two main um cameras that I use I put them on
tripods or sometimes if it's the moon I try and handhold it
um 600 mm lens for closeups I have a 24 millim
f1.4 that I like to use with that Sony if that's what I use for images but if
I'm using a Canon most of the time it's a 16 to 35 millimeter
F28 here and I'll leave this on the screen so you can see some of the
setting this discovery wasn't such a good one that's the city of
Cleveland and here you've got a Ryan you've got a something streaking
through and this is pointing at Aion but it's also the backdrop is giant city of
Cleveland this was my discovery about how badly light glow can um affect a
night sky this represents anytime I've seen a total
solar eclipse which is two times and um you can see the settings
that I used to capture this moment I think right as we're at totality you can
still see some of the ridges in the moon here and you see the prominences off of the sun and the corona coming
out this discovery here was the A7 R4 24
millimeter lens that I talked about wide open with three
seconds this was right on top of me and this is the Aurora picture to end all of
my Aurora pictures because I thought someone was shining a flashlight on me
and I'm saying please stop shining that flashlight because I need to take Aurora
pictures I looked up the light was coming from this curtain display now you
see curtains and I'll have a picture of a curtain that yeah this is what you're used to seeing for curtains oh that's
beautiful yeah look at that yeah and this was maybe four hours into the display too yeah over Lake Kiron that's
really great imagine this is what it looks like when you're underneath one of those curtains when it's directly on top
of you so it's beautiful to look out but like if you're underneath this curtain
mhm that and that is I believe that's a view that
Iceland um Alaska you know all these Northern climbs promises that you see
something like this we saw it in lamden Shores ontaria which is actually south
of the thumb of Michigan region it's this was May 10th
when a lot of people saw a brilliant display of Aurora
we talked about media crater I wanted to uh show my picture of it for Robert if he's still watching he talked about um
you know seeing media crater and this was a panorama of me seeing media crater for the first time yeah and so it's a
beautiful place and I was able to see a picture of our beloved deid with uh the
the shoemakers uh carollyn and Eugene Shoemaker there is a picture in the uh
gift shop and museum that uh is next to this crater and so it was uh it was very
nice to see that picture when they were
here so this crude picture is my first attempt at Omega centor I had crude
equipment but I ended up in Tombstone Arizona and I got my chance to image in
the blotch down here is omega centur
here's D's picture that started it all I always add to it smoke was rising and he
tried and he focused on the Southern Cross he showed the image in one of his presentations at the University of
Michigan and it so inspired me to go catch Starlight that I've taken all of
the pictures you've seen with Starlight in them are because of this one that the V kindly shared and and I remember it
because uh you know both uh D Wendy was
with us um when you shared this photo it came from the both of
you this is the first time I've seen a sar I tried to put together a panorama
look at this now is this is this aable Aurora go ahead is this a
um you know two different images mixed together or it is okay and the you had
of the um the uh Milky Way and the uh and the thunderstorm earlier was that
also a a mixed image or was that one shot no that was a single image that's
what made that that was a single 30 second image that's pretty cool and yeah
that you don't see those two together the you know this part of the Milky Way was edging out of
um was edging out of that storm and I see I've got a few more to go but
it's it's back here where'd it go I lost
it there yeah this was a single image um friends of mine were watching the
lightning go and I was realizing at this very moment I said o so I've taken more
images of this with the Milky Way fully out of this cloud this one has a little
bit of a you know one there's a big bolt of lightning that I ended up capturing
as a part of it yeah you know more of the storm is here and you it just sort
of Reveals All of the Stars behind it and it reveals the
galactic core right here and I in the end I just that's you know that was one
of the more beautiful images so
time yeah second time I imaged Comet there's that thin Crescent Allan Dyer
wanted this shot in the clouds denied it to him I ended up being able to get it there's that thin cressent and there's
Comet suchin scent when it was a morning Comet so the second time I imaged a
comet in the morning and meanwhile on
capulin there's both a good and a bad Discovery one the second bright meteor
came through this image and I was able to include it you see the peaks of the volcanoes we're on the side of the
capulin volcano um Kelly Ricks who has been in global star party as well but this was
not a very good Discovery this torch light here is real town of capul is yeah
and of capulin is just glowing with a lot of light and both Kelly and I were a
little disappointed even this Tower here this is a uh cell tower yeah so even in
a dark place like capula New Mexico there are sources of light you know that
show the signs of a civilization threatening to you know Mar the night
sky a bit is it darkest by All Me I mean still dark but by other there's signs
that we need to make make a problem regulated it yeah and I think I sent you the image
that you were you sent it to uh Kelly I think with your support for wanting to
regulate this Scott and uh I've got another image this is sometimes it it
can just take uh writing a letter to the right person you know uh I mean directly um there was
a once upon a time that the Discovery Channel network I'm talking about the network guys uh they were building a new
building and um um and their new building was going to
have a a light that was going to aim straight up and could be seen from space
okay as like a monument to this media Empire you know so Discovery Channel and
I wrote a letter even brighter I wrote a letter to John Hendricks who was the uh
founder of Discovery Channel and I put it in a Next Day Air envelope okay so I
knew you know a lot of times when he sends something the next day a you know the top guy you know address to him you
know or her they have you they're gonna open it right or their their private secretary
is gonna open it and uh and show it to and you know basically I said look
you're the Discovery Channel and I and I knew that John Hendricks was an amateur astronomer as well and I said you can't
be known for having something that's destroying uh you know doing light
pollution like this and destroying the night sky um and they
killed they got back with the architect and killed that whole uh uh you know
bright light scar just off of a letter one letter you know so yeah I thought that was great so you
know don't don't think there isn't anything you can do about things you know okay because this like it's great
to be able to have sales service in a remote area like this but you know this
bright red light here I am standing there and just about total darkness and I open up on
the signus region here but this bright light and this is visible from the okite
tech the okite tech star party is behind like down in here and you see there's
another light where cars are coming out that's where the okite tech star
party is this is Bright Now this area and know we'll go
ahead and move these are Allosaurus tracks and you see the
Allosaurus cool this area you
know combining two of my loves love of dinosaurs and love of night sky and I
had to do it at a low angle to get an equal amount of both and I did brighten
this a bit so you know there's a little bit of overexposure on this Mesa back here but
I'll take it because uh this is there's even some Sky glow here I'd love to come
back and you know take some take a longer image of the ground the sky and
really get details of both this is a stacked image of about 40 10 second
images here and uh the creek bed was still full of water behind me it had
just drained enough so that these tracks were visible again and I was fortunate enough to see him and I'd been dreaming
of this shot for 2 years since I first saw these petrified tracks I looked them
up to find out what animal it left them in that's when I found out it was an Allosaurus the points are aimed in this
Direction you don't see them very well here but they are aimed so that the animal would have been running in
veering which suggests to me that it saw something that got its attention and
heading in that direction and it turned so it may have been turning after prey it may have been stalking and you know
on the attack when this happened you know anything that causes an animal to
Veer onto a different core so you know it's it's interesting and and it's very
dark because unlike that last image where you can see signs of human existence in this little Ravine this
little creek you do not see any sign of human existence the meses are too tall
all human light is blocked anything you any semblance the only thing you have is
your car which is you pull into this area and you park over here everything
else you know it's it's all nature so so Scott let me Zoom through
these Milky Way and more Aurora this was the first time I actually got it to work
over one of my favorite trees in this Bridgewater County which is just a rural area the Aurora was pulsing here wasn't
as colorful as May 10th but it was still quite a sight and then finally on my
53rd birthday which was November 8th I decided I'd go ahead and take a picture
of the face of the sun right around the time my mom says I was born around
937 Nashville time so so at 9:37 Nashville time I fired away with a uh
White Light filter and this is what the sun looked like um at the moment 53
years around it 53 years around the Sun and this was the face that Shone towards me when I
made it that far so happy birthday I used it yeah
happy yep I used it to Mark the moment that I had completed my 53rd trip around
the sun on Earth and wanted to know what it was what was facing me from that sun and this is it
so happy round to the to the sun yeah yeah y so that's what it was when I got
around the Sun 53rd time this is3 fac 53 yes ah you are younger than
me yes yeah we are young I'm younger than all the I am
57 57 years you both are four years my
senior I hear that all the time brother you looks like younger than
us well I do the best I can to keep just
feeling young doing things discovering things um you know there's always something to discover in the night sky
or sometimes even the daytime Sky it's you know when we tell folks I think when we tell people to keep looking up you
know we we have to mean it we we have to say yeah because you never know what
will come streaking across the sky or what you might capture when you're Imaging and um you know these things
they draw us back again and again even if we've taken five million images of
something we um we've got five million more to try and
experience and hopefully my dear friend deid is able to uh hear and um enjoyed
seeing some of those images even if for a second or third time um you know the love of the night
sky really left an impression on me a long time back in 2017 maybe
2017 kind of around the time I took that picture at Yankee Stadium or maybe it
was earlier um I'll have to look at that I think that there's a picture of
the and I need to put it in one of these archives but I have a picture of us de
um when I did the uh I don't think I can show it now because I uh I don't know maybe I you
know what let's uh I'm not sharing but I'm
going to look and I think I have a when I first yes
I'm gonna share I'm G to share a picture and I don't know if uh my dear
deid will ever remember this picture but
uh let's share my screen one more
time
desktop oh do you remember this
photo you probably don't yes I do I
absolutely excellent here I was the young lowbrow
astronomer with there's Charlie and I forget the gentleman behind me I think
he either was that's Peter J Peter jaty was there this was Saturday
morning physics at the University of Michigan and um you were there and you made this
wonderful presentation and that is when you shared that image um that I talked about um where it
inspired me to do night sky photography and
um I was uh this was just me going I should probably capture the
moment and I was glad that I did I also
first met brother guy kumano when I was there so this was a
this was a very nice Saturday morning physics and you know I took many
photos see what else uh yeah brother Don has has agreed to
come on to our program uh this winter excellent yeah excellent I look forward
to that I'll yeah me too I will read introduce myself to him so so some of
the lowbrows here Jack brisman talking to and you gave me his name
I it split my mind again but this was Saturday morning physics
um in 2017 so that's when
everything yep and here I am
I actually believe well I may have been less heavy back then and I remember this
particular uh this here you have a couple of uh I
think Jesuits I remember his talk on Galaxies what did your Galaxy have for
dinner it was a very insightful talk about um that other guy looks like Halos
on your I think that's Paul gabber from the Vatican okay Observatory iniz it
would be yeah the Vatican Observatory the members came to visit
us and so this was uh and Bob trimley who's now the uh so this particular
picture there's a little bit of bittersweetness here because this is Bob Trimble who is he's a member of the
Vatican Observatory he's now the president of the Warren as iCal Society
huh this is John coslin we lost John coslin maybe uh I think this that same
year uh later in the year we ended up losing John cosland
and you know I I take the picture and he happens to have his eyes closed I I
don't think it was foreshadowing anything it was just he went to afternoon physics so often we'd go to
his house to observe um he had a reasonably dark sky and we' observed
there and uh somewhere around here I think there's pictures so this was oh and I did
include the picture so this was the picture I've shown it and that was the uh the day I saw
this picture and said I want to capture Starlight and so later on in life I
would uh I would have that opportunity and so it was
um you know 2017 to now um that desire
still hasn't gone anywhere so and you have the picture that I chose
from my background um I don't consider any of my pictures
better than others so much as marking moments where I saw something that I
thought was amazing and just wanted to capture it the best way that I could um
you might be seeing some of those there will be a February issue of astronomy
magazine in which I talk about Treasures of the Milky Way different things you
can image from all different kinds of uh Imaging from wide angle to viewing it
through Cesar's telescope viewing it through a bigger telescope viewing it if
you're going to do uh ser astrop photography deep space objects what deep
space objects might you want to go after that are off of the beaten path and then what off-beaten path objects might you
want to get in this region and it's this region of the Milky Way behind me um
there's this region this ha region in ucus that's difficult to get I don't
have it here there's another um at a certain
time that the um catspaw nebula Rises I think I included that um there's an
object dresler 29 which is a fairly new object that a friend of mine an
astrophotographer Carl Burton Jr you won't know his name but he imaged
it and um we submitted it to be in this article in February so so that's coming
out and we're working on some images my experience with Aurora hunting or not
Aurora hunting Cesar because the Aurora keeps coming on top of me and I just try
and capture it so yeah if you I've been fortunate enough to see the aurora a
number of times so um you know the excitement about the chase just isn't
there anymore yes and you have the art of the Landscapes and Milky Way but your
pictures of um of a big field of you with nebulas are amazing too um this is
uh you manag so well the the the pictures of
Ling nebulas in big field of view that I really enjoy and invite to the people ER
to to see your social networks where you show a the high H resolution IM image of
Adrian because they are totally uh uh amazing because sometimes in the in our
in a global sub party the the the resolution is no
so detail but I I really when I have ER
the opportunity to see your pictures um uh
in Social in your social networks or flick or I I I don't remember how many
different ER places were and I uh ason
me again say wow the the the um
something that you told about the the the the the the picture where do
have this floor like foots of dinosaurs on the Milky
Way or today that we told about the time of the CRS that they came from the time
of dinosaurs uh I remember yes the HP
lcraft that when I wrote I wrote the the book of I don't remember the book where
they say ER is lcraft say something like the so
dramatic but it describ so well ER not the maybe
in the time of of uh lcraft ER the people thought in the in
the biblic uh times of maybe 5,000 years
talking about one hand well unfortunately today people thinking
Bible it's yeah everything is 5,000 6,000
years old we we go through that sure but we don't you know but but he describes
something so so sorry sorry sorry but but by by talking me but
he describing a moment talking about a monster that came from the
deepest the deepest aism that you can imagine it in the time to describe
millions and millions of years because um I I took
the of course that I wrote this in in in in in Spanish but I trying to to
translate but because maybe they described this part of the book talking
about this kind of of creatures came from the
the the aism from the t is from something that only you can describe
watch in the sky and the foot of dinosaurs together or or
the this Lely in the moon with a CR that
you say this is is it still there but still there after what uh so 150 5
million years I basically it's like stepping back in time looking at this photo takes me back to standing there
and it you know if I wasn't as concerned with the dark I may have given it more
realization I've just gone back 155 million years if I imagined in my mind's
eye when those tracks would have been created you know the allosaur would have come from over there and it would have
run over me or it might have stopped to look at me and decided if it wants to
eat me and then it goes you know if I were to walk to where you see the tracks
turn it would Veer right towards me it's like the imagination could put you back and would
the the sky would look very very similar if it were nighttime oh yeah it's like
you're looking almost at the same Sky it doesn't 155 million years some Stars may
be in a slightly different location but yeah slight lar Sky it'd be slightly so
you know your Milky Way that Milky Way looks just like that with an allosaur
running 155 million years ago so it's like it connects you with past time
periods when you go to places like this yeah so many and you know I'll mention so many images we take of the Milky Way
you know us that you know do a lot of Milky Way Photography there's bright
lights not far from us there's a sign that there's human there are human
beings on the planet in almost all of our images the distant lighting shows
okay that's the light of a town um you know really when you take a picture if
you go to some place that's really dark and you take a picture you're taking a
picture of something that may have looked that way for quite a long time
and especially out west out the photon that that came flying by the space from
millions and millions of years and sometimes took in your in your retina in
your yes ins the moment I stood there you know this this allosaur that you
can't see the tracks because of where I'm sitting um but uh this allosaur that
Photon left when it ran and that Photon that left part of the
Milky Way or something out here hit me square in the eye by the time it reached
this location and that that is an awesome way to look at it it's like it the photon
itself is the bridge between me standing there looking up at the sky over
petrified Footprints and the animal that created you know the the animal that created the
footprints and um that's uh when you describe it like
that it it really I think it really does pull people in and um I've you know I've
mentioned you you mention seeing a Galaxy and you say you know that Galaxy
is so many millions of light years away and the photon when the photon left so
many millions of years ago and you just by you looking in this telescope your
eyes became the final resting place of that Photon people that want to be cool about
it go oh wow that's yes the significance of that really hits him totally and this
is something that we need to tell to the kids to our ER students is something
that teachers need to talk and say to the PE to to their students especially
or parents to their kids because in the time of um we are me or or Scot that we
are in the in the telescope industry sales and um in the time of smart
telescopes um we need to repeat again that is not easy it's it's really
something like a gift living the time where the technology can bring us all
the the the the the the the the the the for example the a
bright Milky Way in a picture or the moon as
we watched tonight uh where in the past this was
was totally impossible but only 50 years ago when you b or me when we warn in the
60s we uh yes the men go goes to the to
the moon but for the normal people uh take their own image of the
Moon uh was only to see something in in um in your books and maybe maybe the
quality of this picture are not so H detailed like Rober ribs books for
example only 50 years ago maybe a a a a a so um big detailed pictures was only
for the NASA um taking pictures with is with a very
big telescope working a lot because in the in the analogic picture you you you
couldn't have um the fastly um Pro that we have in digital
image um really uh we we talk maybe in English it's the same we live on
shoulder of giant yes ah thank you I don't know we
was translated the the idea but really I I I feel so so um Greatful that live in
this time um because it's it's amazing it's it's amazing to make this or or or
your pictures when you're um when the
auroras um the nebulas um really of
course that you know how make this but
um we have the tools and we have the the
opportunity to use it in in the right directions uh um the opportunity to
teach to kids students you know oh absolutely well you you are a lecturer
professor and this is great because H I know that you all times are um I'm
really happy that people that like you that you're a professor you can give uh
this every time to your students this is great yeah I I know Ron Breer was on
earlier and he does the same thing with his images we we try and teach through
the images as opposed to you the the tendency sometimes Cesar Scott de is a
beautiful image will get made the image will be mentioned like yeah this is the
Pac-Man nebula and then you spend so much time talking about how it was made
I know there was a question toight about the uh you know what did I use to pick up these images and and there's nothing
wrong with asking that question because if you've got similar equipment and you're like I want to get an image like
that you know that you can but to me the turning point was I need to try and
shoot with a purpose so when you you see though you saw those settings that I left there in some of those images and
sometimes the settings do do or don't work but like you're saying Sayes are we try and teach well what's the
significance of this thing that's in my photo the significance isn't just well
it's a pretty picture the significance is this was an a inspiring uh moment
where I took this photo and said I just I just stood somewhere that you know
looks roughly you know does it look the way it did 155 ion years ago a lot of
this is probably not there I don't know if the Mesa would look the exact the same but um you know you're
uncovering you know evidence that an animal had been here a long long time ago and that
sky looking very similar it's like you and the animal essentially saw the same
thing and like you were saying teaching it's important to talk about what's in
the photos the if you had Robert Reeves voice I was thinking if you had Robert
Reeves voice telling you what you were looking at if you had your own your own
sea star your own Moon you're looking at the moon through images and you say what
am I looking at or you know and Robert ree's voice comes on and says this is
you know Mari Mari chrism I think is one of the mar Mari embrium you had you have
your voice Rober telling them what uh they're looking at I me that would be it
would be an awesome addendum to you know having one of these
instruments these smart telescopes looking at the moon they're hitting a
button to say I want to look at this region and they're your voices telling them this is what you're looking at and
that would be that would be an awesome so now you're using the tech ology to teach and you're not just you know look
at this close the David ateno of the Moon yes I
I thought the same Scott I thought the same I was talking David
David yes yes no for me thank you Robert I'm sorry that we we keep I'm
Adan talk the same and that that we keep more time I'm sorry me too because what
something so H surprisingly because I thought in one second and say I need to
say to Robert because um is infinitely
much better than me to explain the things in the moon I'm only technician
that I like move my telescope but the information the the not L that you bring
us about for example the color I put I thought in the say okay I need to put
the the most saturation of of colors as possible in the video uh to
to uh to give you the the the the the the the tools to explain about the the
the components in the lunar surface and well they were good images that was a
good video this is a good video yeah you had a you had a nice clear video despite any
turbulence and uh we're going to have to work on that uh Scott we're going to have to have the uh the moon
Explorer and uh you going have to record uh Robert's voice with various parts and
you're gonna have we have to tie it together somehow so that there's an you
know you sorry to your wife to your wife Rob yeah yeah we tell her we appreciate
her for letting you come back on Joy all right so Scott's got Scott's
brought a cannon yeah Contra okay okay so let's see let's see
what you got this telescope right here oh I love that this is Buzz alen's
telescope that he asked me to watch for him okay wow it has a plaque on there it
says buz Aldren Moon Explorer and in his mask you can see it's kind of dark you see kind of a dark
spot there I was given lunar meteor
meteoritic material by Mike before he passed away I crushed it up and put it
in the face mask so oh nice so there's only one in
the world and it's this one yeah so don't drop it set it up and uh we can do uh
some lunar Exploration with it but he's he has used this telescope and um I have
a photograph it uh in his uh his condo
at the time so I wonder how that feels for him because he's been there it's like he's just looking he's looking at
something where he's a place where he's been the rest of us are looking at it wishing we could go I me I've had the
opportunity to moongaze with him a couple of times and uh you know
he you know it's it's does he does describe what it's like to be on the
moon and physically what it's like but he will add that uh he told me one time
that they should have sent poets and artists to the Moon uh to describe it
you know because he said everything that they did there was so much muscle memory
in the Apollo uh 11 program you know that they just kind of knew that they
were going to do this next and that next and all the rest of it that he did
not although he describes his uh the Moon is magnificent
desolation uh I don't think he got to fully absorb you
know two and half hours enough time it's not very long yeah it was he had to look
up see it and then go right to the mission I can imagine he just yeah you
know meanwhile a near emergency in landing they had a near emergency in taking off you know so
yeah it's the first time on camera and you know so just trying to get it
exactly right you know and yeah they had alive you know and uh yeah and you know
I've often wondered you know what kind of image you know would we get would it
even be possible to frame Milky Way
Earth and you from some spot in the moon how beautiful that would look but also
what could we you know what could we discern from that because with the moon with no atmosphere oh would it even work
with the type of cameras we have because would the Earth do the same thing that the moon does blow the image out even
though you know there's no uh Raleigh scattering you know there's no light
pollution at least not you know not until we colonize the moon you just have to take it when the earth is in the new
phase as seen from the Moon there you go and uh that way it's illuminated by reflected Moonlight and it will it will
show up as long as well as The Milky we yeah that's a that's a very good point
now I have to live long enough to make a a Jeff bezos's Moonlight special only
,000 we'll get you to the moon and back it'll be cheaper don't take off your mask
$200,000 I hope so may you can go as a uh a lunar photography uh specialist you
know so teach people how to get I gotta try and get myself in line yeah I have
to get myself in line with her that because that would be I don't care if
I'm 67 I'd still go you'll do it you know however long takes by the time they get there I'll be
82 but I could get in line you could get in line too no you you you'd be holding
tours right on the moon say and this you know from Earth it
looks like this but here we are in the middle of it that would be I'm sure you would enjoy the experience Robert oh
absolutely and Cesar you'll sell you'll sell you'll go instantly say where's the
Southern Hemisphere Park and s and go right down to what we would consider the
southern hemisphere of the Moon and and enjoy it and um you seeing the other
side of the moon or being it just even being able to see the other side for ourselves I'm sure you know even better
than pictures um of course that has to be in sunlight and what'll happen the
you know the Earth will be blocked so it'll be an unfettered view you know as
dark as night can get um on that side so lots of interesting thoughts
imaginations I'm sure anyone still watching has their own views of you know
if I were able to go to the moon this is what I would do we hear a lot of folks that you know maybe don't believe that
humans can achieve something like this or however to say we never made it to
the moon or you know they're sort of stuck in their own experiences and
and I don't I personally don't worry so much about it I mean
it's I think that's one thing astronomy space the theme being Discovery is you
discover something outside of your own experience you might not be be able to
explain it but you know there are certainly a lot of people who've studied
these things in the universe and have you know have given it a go
and it's to the point and I know deid you'll understand this it's to the point
that no matter where you're standing on Earth you may not know the terrain or know any like this place I was standing
where it was very dark but looking up at the sky gave me uh Solace because once I
looked at the sky I was able to orient myself in terms of okay I know where I
am that's South that's north east west this is so I know where I'm at in the
sky I know the directions and now I can just wait for this camera
to finish taking the photo so I can get out of here that's basically how it went when I was down at uh at this location
behind me but um I always get Solace if you know whatever anxiet is going on
looking up at the sky even if there's only a few Stars I can see it's like looking at a familiar friend and oh yeah
that's how the sky is to me that's why I image it um you know I think
that that helps you know keep me centered
um and you know that that's the best way I can end my thoughts um for this
particular Global star party is uh you know we have to keep looking up we have to be open to new discoveries
I you know I feel that there's there's a part of us that may not like change as
much but when you love astronomy change is just something you you learn to go
with we change at what we know about black holes we Marvel at what we can see
with our naked eye and the more we get used to it the more we're able to
see and it can come as quite a surprise that I'm not at a dark sight but yet I'm
seeing you know the rift the Great signis Rift and I I wasn't able to see
it from the site before so or seeing the comet I should have put that on my P
when I saw the comet naked eye uh suchin Shan I didn't think I'd see it and I
look at the picture in my camera and I looked up and went oh there it
goes there it is you know it finally got to some place dark enough and there it
is hanging out in the sky just like that so it's uh what one day
Adrian I really I hope that you came here ER to
Argentina um we can go to the open landscape with maxi too of course
um to take this this kind of pictures because uh really I I I really hope that
when they came to yeah I thinking I thinking go I
thinking in go because I start to talk with Scott if if
um explor scientific is going to have a big stand of course that deserve this in
L in the is usually I start talking to go this year yes I prefer n oh that
would be so now I see now I have to I have to add that to the plan and uh
you're going to be by yeah I'll have to drop by and see you yeah you know I was thinking of you
I was thinking of you when I saw that Comet and uh you know D I said this one
is not the comet that's come to take him from us he's got more time to go before
the comet that comes to uh take him would be away and that I often imagine
on that particular comment will be his beloved Wendy driving and his friends Eugene and
Carolyn Shoemaker and uh and when they go away the comment that comes to take
theid will be a fantastic one indeed and it will he will finally be able to see
some of the things that uh we wish to see and um just a poetic moment looking at that
Comet and glad that uh you know the there's the the mythology that comets
come to take people away and I said well I'm this one isn't coming for me so
I'm good and I you know I think of all of you and say I'm glad this isn't the comet that's come to take us all away
it's well let's wait a while before we you know before we see that one so um
so at any rate I I've done enough babbling as always this time it was great to be home I didn't have to turn
around and throw a bowling ball so it was good to be able to have a great uh conversation with you all thanks for
adding me at the last second Scott I uh thought I might be bowling but I gave my
spot to another sub this week so next week I'll probably um I may be doing some bowling
I may not but uh anytime there's Global star party I really try and make room to
uh give any sort of presentation big or small and do what I can so definitely
love coming on here thanks and thank you all for having me thank you Adrian I'll
and a great picture of the Moon Cesar well it was only the that
y yeah that Scott I think we need to let you take us out all right
thank you thanks to all the presenters that were on tonight and um it was um as
always a a great pleasure uh you know to be on and to present the global Star
Party to our Global audience so uh I'll
end this with a uh a couple of little videos from NASA and um and I will call
it a night uh and as our friend Jack cimer always used
to say keep looking up so
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the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has established a technology utilization program for the
rapid dissemination of information on technological developments which appear to be useful in Industry medicine or
other fields from a variety of sources including NASA research centers and NASA
contractors space related technology is collected and screened and that which has potential value to others is made
generally available the following film sequences show some specific examples of
the transfer of such technology to non Aerospace
users for several years jet propulsion laboratory has used computers to enhance
the quality of moon and Mars pict from spacecraft surveyor one radioed to Earth
more than 11,000 close-up pictures of the moon this picture for example shows a moon rock about 20 in across a part of
the photo is hazy but you see a much Sharper Image after computer processing note how the
fractures become clearer as do the rock fragments in the background here you see the original
picture at the top and the computer enhanced version below an investigation has begun to
apply this enhancement technique to clarifying medical x-rays by increasing the contrast of only certain details the
enhancement process emphasizes features or areas of a picture which provide critical information permitting
detection of problem areas that might otherwise go unnoticed here you see an original x-ray of a human skull after
computer processing here you see a much Sharper Image here is the same original picture
now we want to bring out the blood vessels in the highly exposed frontal port of the skull indicated by the arrow
you see that the computer technique recovers those frontal blood vessels permitting better diagnosis of patient
problems again the before and after enhancement photographs the enhancement process adds nothing that was not
originally photographed but it brings out critical details which are otherwise not visible in another example here you
see on the left an enhancement of a photograph of the retina of an eye shown at right the blood vessels are much
sharper the purpose of this work has been to demonstrate the capability of the digital computer to sharpen medical
photographs the next step is to transfer these techniques to specific clinical problems a task that NASA and medical
research institutes are now
pursuing results of research at the NASA Langley Research Center into causes of aircraft and later automobile Tire
hydroplaning have been widely disseminated to auto companies tire manufacturers safety engineers and
others these pictures of aircraft landing and skitting on wet runways show
the results of Tire hydroplaning and were the impetus for the NASA research at Langley meanwhile research on the
same subject was conducted in England now you'll see the test track at Langley on which the experimentation was
performed to learn the causes of this serious skidding problem Langley found
that tire hydroplaning results from the same effect that keeps a speed boat skimming on the water at high speeds
water is wedged between the ground and the tire and the for exerted by the layer of water lifts the tire from the
ground with the tire riding on the water layer of course brakes are no longer
effective you lose control of your car from below the effect of partial
hydroplaning is shown by the dark spot which is the part of the tire in contact with the
ground at higher speed you will see that even less of the tire is in contact with the ground added weight on tires does
not prevent this type of skidding good tread acts to disperse the water layer while smooth tires skim more
easily you can see automobile Tire hydroplaning in these pictures taken at Langley Research Center as part of a
joint Nessa Bureau of public roads project the first car negotiates the turn easily however the second and third
cars approach the turn at higher speeds and skidding is induced the skidding was caused by unfavorable combinations of
tire pressure tread speed and other factors
now we shall see the results of experimental work conducted by the state of California this machine was built to
put grooves in highways the grooves are generally 1/8 in deep and 3/4 of an inch
apart incidentally runways at 10 airports are also being grooved the
serrating technique has proven to be not only simple and fast but remarkably economical results to date of the
California experiment indicate that pavement serration costs much less than other approaches aimed at avoiding
similar accidents now to the results shown on this chart test periods for the five
Highway sections vary from 7 months to 2 years the five test sections are
identified at the side of the chart taking them one at a time you see that the number of accidents under rainy or
wet conditions on the first section was reduced from 15 to4 a 74%
reduction this shows the results of achieved on the second test section A considerably greater percentage
reduction 92% in this strip accidents were reduced from 28 to 1 over a stretch extending
for more than 1/2 Mile a 96% reduction this modified section of the
SATA Ana freeway resulted in a 98% reduction the final test section shows a
100% reduction in accidents where there had been nine in the 2 years immediately prior to Highway grooving no accident
were reported for the 2-year test period during rainy or wet conditions in terms of numbers accidents overall were
reduced from4 to 8 a reduction of 93.5% the number of injuries and deaths
were likewise reduced dramatically at least five other states are now experimenting with the results of this
hydroplaning research and the Bureau of public roads with the help of NASA has produced an educational motion picture
to alert drivers to ways they can avoid hydroplaning accidents
to detect micrometeorites in space am Research Center developed the momentum transducer it's based on a crystal that
twists slightly on impact and sets up an electrical signal this test rig contains such a
crystal when deflected by a slight movement it transmits a signal it's so sensitive that a grain of sand dropped
only 1 cimeter will be detected the principle of this device is the basis for a new kind of medical Di
diagnostic tool that will accurately measure subtle postural reflexes or muscle Tremors you'll see how it can be
used in diagnosis to detect the existence of ailments affecting muscle control the tool shown here can be taped
to a patient's finger to record lateral movement or to the fingertip to measure vertical movement for this film the
device is demonstrated by a normal person here he faces straight ahead while extending and relaxing his arms
his arms move involuntarily a muscle reflex he pulls them back they move again involuntarily the patterns are
measured and recorded the subject assumes the second
position with his head turned to his left while the right arm remains relatively stationary the left arm is
moved involuntarily by a muscle reflex and a completely different pattern of movement results the device is being
evaluated for possible routine clinical use in the early detection of neurological ailments including
Parkinson's disease
if our eyes had the resolution of a field ion microscope and could see the arrangements of atoms within a piece of
metal we would find two patterns predominant a cubic crystal structure and a hexagonal crystal structure
engineers at the NASA Lewis Research Center have examined the significance of these structures to the life and
reliability of ball bearings seals gears and other wear surfaces while the purpose of their work
was to solve the very difficult problems of operating bearings in a vacuum of space space they have come upon a basic
Discovery with widespread implications here on Earth they found that bearing materials should have hexagonal not
cubic Crystal structures bearings often fail because the parts literally weld
together and then explode creating costly downtime and repair the NASA Engineers have learned
that strength is not the most important factor where lubrication problems exist with a cubic structured metal surfaces
weld together and bearing sale a hexagonal metal structure is far
less likely to weld or explode in the absence of lubrication three patents have been
filed on the work at Lewis one alloy of cobalt and malanum shows potential for
use in artificial human hip joints and is being tested for capability with living tissue the alloy ey widely used
in prosthetic devices has a cubic crystal structure the new alloy offers more freedom of movement at longer life
human joints bearings seals many important products may be improved due to this basic NASA materials Discovery
metal producers manufacturers of bearings designers of prosthetic devices and users of bearings from those making
farm equipment to those making machine tools and aircraft are being kept up to date on this work through the NASA
technology utilization
program a small company housed in this barn-like Factory grows and sells single crystals it became a member of a NASA
supported Regional dissemination Center which provides technical information to Private Industry the RDC provided
information on the design of improved flame Fusion crystal growing furnaces then this document uncovered by
the RDC computer retrieval service presented designs and data for a furnace capable of growing single Crystal Ruby
rods of suitable quality for use in lasers in another case a NASA docu
showed how to modify this furnace shown growing a calcium tungstate Crystal another research report enabled the
company to grow large single crystals of cadmium sulfide cadmium selenide and zinc
toride this report helped to broaden the company's capability to grow crystals of burum oxide shown
here another document also provided through the Nessa system Ena the company to improve its production of itum iron
garnets this company's experience demonstrates
the many ways in which a regional dissemination Center can be helpful the company reports that nearly $100,000 in
sales of new products is directly traceable to RDC services in all the RDC
provided the company with 38 different documents last year that specifically help it broaden its product line and
improve its production
processes a radio station in North Carolina has been using Multiplex transmission for several years over its
FM station FM Multiplex transmission has several useful functions including FM
stereo broadcasting and broadcasting of Commercial background music the equipment presently available for
Multiplex transmission like the subcarrier generator shown here is very complex requires considerable space and
large amounts of power a regional dissemination Center provided the radio station with a NASA
Tech brief describing a solid state FM oscillator used in space Telemetry further information on the
Innovation was provided by Nessa and the electronic circuit was adapted to an improved FM subcarrier generator which
in comparison takes up only one tenth of the space needed by the former unit it
is also a more reliable piece of equipment and requires far less maintenance and very importantly the cost of the equipment as you will see in
this table was reduced from $900 to $75 even more importantly power consumption
is slashed from 500 watts to 1
watt inorganic paints are the products of several years of research at Gard space flight center to develop a very
durable coating for spacecraft the Coatings are a family of silicate based inorganic paints for testing paint is
sprayed on small metal plaques other inorganic paints must be baked on this
paint is very easy to apply a small plaque is being scratched with a stylus applied at a pressure of 50,000
lb per square inch epoxy one of the hardiest paints available is left with a
deep scratch while the new silicate paint is hardly marred by the stylus a plaque is dipped in
concentrated sulfuric acid which would corrode an ordinary coating on the silicate paint the acid has no effect a
silicate painted plaque is taken from a 1300° f height oven and plunged into
liquid nitrogen temperature minus 320° F you can see the
durability a steel plaque with silicate paint on one side is being subjected to a 4,000 de fah Flame the mirror in the
back reflects the bare steel and the torch is being directed to the painted surface only you can see that the steel
substrate is becoming white hot while the painted side shows hardly a sign of the intense Heat
Nessa has granted 24 licenses for the manufacturer of this paint a Chicago
company now has it on the market at least 30 other companies are experimenting with it its durability
ease of application and adhesion properties make it a superior coating adaptable to many civilian
uses a remotely operated instrument carrier was designed to meet a NASA requirement for use in un Dem
exploration of lunar and planetary surfaces the Prototype you see here is
able to negotiate uneven Rocky terrain with relative ease by remote control the
lunar Walker can be steered in any direction it has the capability of traveling up an incline and small
obstacles do not halt the vehicle this proposal was not funded by Nessa but a
technology utilization officer saw the possibilities of adapting the vehicle to a totally different f
function here you see the adaptation here the adaptation of the lunar Walker negotiates a curb a
handicapped person in such a chair is able to navigate in a manner never possible in an ordinary wheelchair a
Sandy Beach presents no obstacle to The Walking Chair incidentally the little girl is piloting the chair with a chin
strapped control indicating how a paraplegic might use it this adaptation is the product of
cooperation among NASA UCLA and the department of health education and Welfare is now being tested on crippled
children at a rehabilitation center in Southern California and is expected to be on the market soon
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Tom uh it's been almost a year um since we were here last time and the uh 100in
mirror was out of the telescope we were saying on a kind of a wobbly scaffolding right it was very stable it was just
narrow but we had hard hats on yeah we were safe yeah we were safe that's right
and you were starting to explain to me how uh you do your public observing program
but you use explore scientific equipment to make that possible so tell me how
this this whole system works well well it's um it's not complicated just follow
the light uh we have the 100in mirror which is right above me here uh we were
just inside the telescope where where we saw the secondary mirror way at the top
a tertiary mirror sending it out to to this relay optic system and then uh
following the light path down to your explore scientific in7 oh great so
behind us here we've got the ed127 airospace triplet this is a 4in
Starlight focuser that has a custom adapter to attach to this telescope and then we've got a 3-in diagonal and a 3in
30 mm eyepiece Tom what's the focal length of the telescope again about 33,000 millimet 33,000 mm so with this
eyepiece we're going to get over 1,000 power 11 magnification so with 100 degree app parent field it's about five
and a half Ark minutes true field of view so that's uh that is a great view
through a very high powerered telescope and how many people do you
have coming through to do your educational Outreach programs well we have the educational Outreach as well as
the public nights and our client nights so we've probably done about um 800
people this year through this well it's I mean it's just a great honor for us to have uh our equipment used on the 100
inch I know it's used on the 60inch telescope I've used it on the 60 myself and the 40 inch so you know we got a
sort of a trifecta with the uh with George Ellery Hale's telescope and so if
someone wanted to rent this telescope um
uh what do they do they go under what's the website that they would go to Mt wilson.edu and we have uh pages for both
a 60 in and 100 in that you can make reservations and it has all the information uh for that process on our
website that's fantastic all right well that's
great by the way this is also used on the 40inch refractor at Uris so they use
a whole slew of ey pieces but you got a ton of focal link here what's the focal length of the
scope I forget the calculation is big it's way longer okay we'll do this again
okay here we go a 101 one it's 101 inch it's not bigger bigger than they
advertise you knew you know yeah uh time 12.6 or
you 32,00 it's 32,300 millimeters
okay long that's long right so 32,000 so
what's the what's the magnification gonna be 32,000 divided by 30
32,000 that is crazy it's about, power
more 30 32,000 or 35,000
32,300 24
177 magnification so 1100 power
100 107 is
0.09 it's five and a half Arc seconds or arc minutes arc minutes five and a half
AR that's that's impressive bad that's impressive okay so five and a half okay
all right so now we know the numbers let's hide our calculator here
so nobody knows Che on that's right we could do this in our head
right what's the falink of the telescope again about 33,000 millimeters 33,000
millimeters so with this eyepiece we're going to get over th000 power 11 th magnifications so that would work out
with 100 degree appearent fueld it's about 5 and half AR minutes true Field view so that's uh that is a great
view a very high powerered view through a very high powered telescope
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