Transcript for Part A:
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[Music]
that's right so NASA's Parker solar
probe which launched in 2018 has been
using Venus gravity assist to get closer
and closer to the Sun and most recently
it had a Venus Gra gravity assistance so
now it's going to fly within 3.83
million miles of the surface of the sun
which is closer than any human-made
object has ever gone
before that's right even though the sun
is a constant in our Sky the sun is not
constant at all the sun constantly has
magnetic explosions and little bursts of
energy that come out and sometimes big
burst of energy like the solar storms
and by measuring that process as it
happens so close to where it's original
energy source was we can really
understand more about the energization
and the the structures as they evolve
through the solar
system I am so excited about Parker
touch the top edges of the uh Corona the
solar Corona the outer atmosphere of the
Sun and by measuring it in such detail
so close we can combine that with what
we already know about the sun and the
solar system and that that material as
that fills the solar system from our
other spacecraft but by putting all of
these pieces together we can really
learn more about the solar Corona and
that material as it fills our solar
system
so during a total solar eclipse that's
when the moon comes between us here on
the Earth and the Sun and it blocks out
the main bright part of the Sun so that
we can see the solar Corona the outer
atmosphere of the Sun that outer
atmosphere is extremely hot and it flows
outwards filling our solar system and
Parker is flying through the outer
reaches of that solar Corona really
understanding how how that energy is put
into that material in the first
place yeah NASA has a number of cool
missions coming up uh one of the
missions is called punch punch has uh 3D
imaging capabilities so it's going to be
able to see the Corona in three
dimensions the outer atmosphere of the
Sun and watch that Corona as it expands
outwards into the solar system
and codex which is a coronograph that's
on the International Space Station so
that also is going to be looking at the
Corona and measuring the temperature and
the velocity of that um of that material
as it flows outwards which we can
compare directly with what Parker
measures in detail in those outer
reaches of the
corona we have have never had a
human-made object so close to the Sun to
get that close we had to use Venus to
have our gravity assists to slow Parker
down so that it could get that close
also we had to not melt that's why the
Parker has this heat shield that holds
the instruments at room temperature and
keeps the heat of the Sun away and these
are just amazing feats and so it's so
amazing that we are so close and really
getting to measure in detail this
material up close
you can learn more about Parker solar
probe at
nasa.gov Parker and you can also check
us out on NASA Sun
hello everyone this is Scott Roberts
from explore scientific and the explor
alliance and uh uh we've had a uh very
busy uh December month here uh and um I
just wanted to touch base we had our
last Global star party our
163rd but I also wanted to let you know
that we have the 164th Global star party
uh coming up on January 14th at 6:00 p.m
Central
uh the theme of that Global star party
uh will be um the Sun and life and uh so
um this was a topic picked by David Levy
and so I'm excited to bring it about uh
uh with our with our speakers um one of
the speakers that will be coming on is
Dennis Crabtree uh from the Dominion
astrophysical Observatory that'll be
real exciting it'll be his first time on
global Star Party
uh I also wanted to announce that David
AER is officially uh one of the um
co-hosts of the global star party so
they'll be exciting as well um we'll
learn more and more about uh events like
staris and uh of course the astronomical
league is still with us and uh will
continue to go on through the rest of
the year so we got some exciting things
coming up with that out as well so um
it's uh it's
December uh still December 18th and um
so there are if you're looking for
something special uh uh you know for
your your astronomer friend or just for
yourself there's some great deals that
are still to be had um so you can go to
explor scientific.com and check that out
um but uh you know I've got uh we have a
little video here with our AI
intern uh that will um tell you more
about the global Star
Party hello star enthusiasts and Cosmic
explorers I'm Celeste Stargazer your
tireless AI intern here at explore
scientific sleep not for me but let's be
honest if I could sleep I wouldn't dream
of it because I'm far too excited to
invite you to the 16 4 Global star party
and our very first GSP of
2025 the theme for this Stellar kickoff
event the Sun and life a celebration of
our brilliant star The Giver of Light
energy and life itself from fiery solar
flares to the way our sun shapes our
existence here on Earth this event will
ignite your curiosity and Inspire awe
for the cosmos brought to you by explore
scientific and the explore Alliance the
global star party is co-hosted by none
other than David Levy legendary Comet
Discoverer and night sky poet the
executive staff of the astronomical
League champions of astronomy Outreach
David AER editor-in-chief of astronomy
magazine and a Visionary behind staris
the festival where science meets music
and Scott Roberts the founder and
president of explore scientific together
we are uniting stargazers from across
the globe to celebrate our Celestial
neighborhood and deepen our
understanding of the sun's profound role
in Life as We Know It
whether you're a seasoned astronomer a
curious beginner or just someone who
loves gazing at the Stars this Global
star party is for you so grab your
telescope log into explor scientific.com
gsp1 164 bring your passion for the
universe and mark your calendars let's
make the first Global Star Party of 2025
Unforgettable before I go I want to give
a shout out to a Castro whose
magnificent image on astrobin dcom of
the sun behind me was taken with his
explore scientific Ed 127 APO with a
dayar h Alpha filter keep looking up
because the universe awaits see you
there
[Music]
[Music]
Transcript for Part B:
no yeah yeah so but the prompt for for creating that all I said was Jazz that
was a single word prompt and that is what uh stable diffusion created for me
well it's interesting you say that you have that because I have some of some artwork uh of that nature really you do
wow it was inspired by Kinski so well this is stable diffusion generated that
in about 30 seconds so
SC it's it's I mean it's amazing and scary what what it can do
yeah so are we in kind of a waiting room here I'm not just my first time participating in one of these things
you're kind of just hanging backstage with the The Green Room The Green Room that's right backstage with the Stars
that's right the funny thing is sometimes our voices do come through to the audience and sometimes they don't
and we it's okay that way they know it's
really live you know so I was gonna put David ier on the spot and get him to tell us a dirty joke or something
a he's saving them all for starmon DC to get I can tell you some jokes that would
make George Carlin blush but it may the last time I'd be on this program yeah
nonsense you would be like you would be co-hosting with do didn't [Laughter]
Scott okay so here we go
[Music]
guys in 1958 scientists put a vision that we
need to fly spacecraft within the atmosphere of the Sun but it is so challenging extremely difficult to
realize that it took us six decades to build system that can fly safely and
reliably within the atmosphere of star 3 2 1 zero liftoff of the mighty Delta 4
heavy rocket with NASA's Parker solar probe a daring mission to shed light on
the mysteries of our closest star the sun
it look like we had a hit there for a second nick uh I believe we do have a
detection of Beacon tone
one see it there it
is Parker solar probe is 3.8 3.8 3.8 million miles from the surface of the
Sun it is is so incredible to just realize this is the moment that we
designed this mission for 3.8 million miles may not sound that close but if I
put the Sun and the Earth one meter apart Parker solar probe would be 4 cm
from the sun it's the closest human-made object to a star and also the fastest
traveling at 430,000 miles an hour I mean we're flying through the atmosphere
of a star that's not easy to do it's something we've never done
before this is our first close encounter with a star and it's really just amazing
this area that Parker is going into is just so crucial to our understanding of the Sun and its impact on the earth that
solar interaction that space weather those billions of tons of material that the sun can throw at us interacts with
our power grids can interact with our technology so it's really important to understand them at their source and how
they get all that energy when we were about designing a spacecraft to go to some place that had never been before
and it's actually going there to study the Sun and so you're kind of saying what am I designing what are the
environments designing for it has to go from the deepest coldest space to a very
warm area and keep everything working at a little bit above roof temperature it's
designed to go to such an extreme environment you look at it and it doesn't quite look like most other
spacecraft the whole thing is designed such that the heat shield is taking most of the frunt of the heat of the Sun the
heat shield will be at about 1,800 de Fen height and it's protecting the
spacecraft so the spacecraft is actually basically a room temperature this is such a great feed of engineering and it
really shows how capable we are in space this is something that we've been
wanting to do since 1958 when it was first mentioned and the technical
problems that had to be overcome in order to achieve it is just Monumental to be able to get a spacecraft this
close to the Sun to get close to the sun is not easy it looks like from Earth
to the Sun not that far uh the key issue is energy in order for Parker to get
close to the sun we needed to lose a lot of Parker's speed possessed at Earth's
orbit fortunately I was able to create a
trajectory with seven Venus flyby the mission uses Venus in order to actually
change its angular momentum and slow down to actually go closer and closer to the sun over the course of about six
years and the Seven flybys we were able to move closer to the Sun and each time
unraveling a little bit more of the uh Mysteries of the Sun as we get data from places that no spacecraft has ever been
before it's the only star in our galaxy that we can actually go visit and that's
what makes it so magical by flying within the atmosphere of the sun we are basically tracing the Fingerprints of
the physical mechanisms of the sun we now view the sun in a different way when
you look at images from par Sol Pro my goodness they are extremely extremely
complex and that complexity for us it's a new science that we need to
investigate we need to understand the things that we've learned over the years that Parker has been an orbit have been
amazing they've challenged our ideas about how the solar wind is made about how the Sun Works about some of these
fundamental things that are going on there's a lot of Pride and excitement
uh for this closest approach so much effort and so many people have worked on
this I think it really took the teamwork and Synergy of Engineers and scientists
and um administrators and and a lot of different people to think this Mission up
make you think that you can basically overcome any herders so dream big and go
out there and make them
happen well hello everyone this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and the explore Alliance and I'm here with
co-host uh David Levy we're going to bring him on um and David AER I'll bring
him on it as well and John Goss from the astronomical League um we're all here to
uh celebrate our 164th Global star party together and this uh this uh particular
Global Star Party the theme was um the Sun and life um well that would just
about in everything for us you know in our experience but uh uh when you focus on
it and you think about it um uh you know step by step and it's taken a long time
for me to experience this but step by step when I look up at the sky I no
longer see like this Dome with stars that are out there you know I have this
feeling that uh we're on a planet if we were to you know being from a far
distance of course we' see it as just a mere dot if we could see it at all and
uh uh and just to know that we're immersed in our Cosmos like this and uh
so some of the dualism of thinking that that's over there and I'm over here and
we're somehow separate that's starting to fade away step by step and uh I think
that U I think that most astronomers uh understand this on a fundamental BAS
basis um amateur astronomers like myself I think it happens very uh in a very
subtle way you know step by step but um I think it makes us all appreciate our
place in space and um uh I think it's wonderful that we have astronomers uh
both the amateurs and professional uh uh getting together on global Star Party to
share our views and uh some of our skills and our passion with you so uh
thank you very much and David I want to give a special thank you for uh this theme tonight so uh and we'll just get
going here so let's see um David I'll turn it over to you
well thank you very much Scott and it's good to be here I want to wish every one of you a happy New Year have any of you
seen Comet Atlas yet don't all put up your head
you have kareim not uh with my eyes but using uh
space telescopes yes no I mean with your eyes I'm going to try again after sunset
tonight but I imagine in the next few nights as the comet moves into the evening Sky farther and farther from the
Sun we'll get at least a few nights good views of this wonderful wonderful Comet
it is the first time in my life that we've had two great comets within a couple of months of each
other our theme today is the Sun and we're celebrating the sun which
I always considered especially when I was young and getting started I always considered the sun to be kind of a
secondary interest of mine and I wanted to be up late at night
so I could look at the night sky but what about in the daytime what is there up in the daytime well there's the sun
maybe I should take a look at the Sun as well on October the 2nd 1959 my mom took me and my little
brother Jerry out to a parking area on a
mountain nearby our not too far from our home and to try to see a partial eclipse
of the Sun that was completely clouded out but as we were watching it I noticed that there were there was clearing to
the west and I suggested that maybe we try to go to a to the to another lot
that was even closer to our home see if we could see it from there Mom agreed with that and we went there and at the
very end of the eclipse the sky cleared excuse me the sky cleared and I
was and my brother Jerry and me and Mom were able to get a nice view of this
Eclipse I count that now as my first daily check of the behavior of the Sun
in 1960 a year later I was visiting my grandfather and I asked him if he would
like to go up to the roof of his apartment where I had a pair of binoculars and take a look at the
Sun and I didn't have a filter but the sun was there was a hazy sky and the uh
the the sun was getting low so I thought it would be safe and uh I remember looking through that and I saw four
large groups of sunspots I don't remember the number of spots but I do remember that there were four
groups eventually as the years went on I was able to get into daily Sunspot
checks and they have continued from 1959
all the way to the present in fact I just got a reading just about a couple of hours
ago there is a very large spot to is coming on the sun and it'll probably be
a naked eye Sunspot that you could see just by holding the filter between your eye and the
Sun but to the poem there's always some
poetry that one can think about when one is looking at the sun or looking at the night sky and imagining The Beauty And
The Wonder of what is up there whether it's the Parker solar probe that is
actually very close to the sun right now or whether it is you with your eye and a
filter looking up at the Sunspot and seeing that bright or that very dark
Sunspot on the [Music] sun my poetical statement today is going
to be from Tennyson Tennyson you got to write a poem and the one I'm going to
quote from is called ulyses the very end of it the lights to twinkle from the
Rocks the long day waines the slow Moon
climbs and that's exactly what's going to happen tonight the Deep moans round with many
voices come my friends it is not too late to seek a newer World push off and
sitting well in order Smite the sounding furrows for my purpose holds to sail
Beyond The Sunset and the baths of all the Western Stars until I
die it may be that the Gul will wash us down it may be that we shall touch the
happy Isles and see the great Achilles whom we knew though much is taken much
abides and though we are not now that strength which in Old Days moved Earth and Heaven that which we are we are one
equal temper of heroic Hearts made Weak by time and fate but strong in will to
strive to seek to find and not to yield
thank you and back to you Scotty thank you thank you well I wanted to um also
comment that we have um a lot of Canadian astronomers on tonight um
including uh Dennis Crabtree um I think he's from Canada um we we've got um uh
yourself Kareem ja Jafar and uh who else one other I think is coming on tonight
that might be from Canada Ron Brasher yes that's right
so yep so it's uh um I think it's wonderful and uh so you know it just uh
there there's a long list of great astronomers that have come from Canada so
but uh up next uh is uh our
uh representative from the astronomical League this is John Goss uh John creates
all if you ever see any of the astronomical leagues Maps you know of uh
of the sky John actually creates all of those and he's just uh he's fabulous uh
I don't know if he has a background in graphics or not but uh um but uh I've
mentioned it before to me it kind of sets the tone and the feel of uh of
getting acquainted with the night sky I kind of placed John on the same level as
like um wi Tyrion and a couple other I know I wi tyrion's
a God that's sure uh but uh uh your your
work in uh sharing the Sky through those illustrations is absolutely fantastic
John and so thank you I gotta thank you for all that hard work you know thank
you um well it's great being back on uh what it's been five weeks something like
that been a while that's right it's it's C certainly been a while and um I'd like
to jump right right in and start in with whatever I got to say here um let me
see sorry it's nice to see some of uh some
of our regulars watching out there um so Cil nagap pan Pekka Halala John Ray Lori
Anor is watching Tammy Foley and I had a little glitch on the on the chat box so
if you're chatting with us and I don't see you um just keep chatting and I'll see you
again so great um let let me start out uh with a little Prelude to my talk here
couple things uh the astronomic league is partnered with NASA actually it's kind of the other way around NASA is
partnered with us uh to do an observing challenge uh recognizing the 35th anniversary of the Hubble Space
Telescope and if you go on the league website you'll be able to find this it's a uh essentially it's a a series of
activities that you do every month having an outreach program uh looking at
some of the items or objects that the Hubble has observed and uh do a little sketching of each one um and combine all
these together and send them in and you will be uh awarded with a silver certificate or if you do an extra amount
a gold certificate uh go to the league website and see what you can do here it's it's it's pretty interesting
stuff uh as I just said they have a silver and a gold a bu bunch of different Awards there um it's it's
something to um well in January and February sky might be a little cold but the rest of the year ought to be a lot
of fun also I'd like to remind people of the um Alcon that's coming up on Bryce
Canyon in uh end of June of 2025 we call it an astrocon because we hope to have
well you know hope we are going to have a lot of vendors there uh so come enjoy
the night skies um and and participate in some of our workshops and visit our
vendors and other things such as you ask yourself why would I want to
come to Alon I'm not going to read all these lines off to you but there are a number
of things to do in the daytime I mean Bryce Kon Utah is a pretty spe spectacular place in the daytime and
it's also spectacular at night and you can see uh in clear Dark Skies what you
can see from a place like Bryce Canyon so the question is not not really why Aon but why not Alon why why not come in
and see see this stuff for yourself that's this summer that's all I'm going to say about that because I got to get moving along
here relive history um we're going to be considering
Mars you know Mars is in the news our own amateur astronomy news a lot this week it said opposition it was occulted
by the moonl last night but we're going to look at it a little differently and we're to consider it twice a little bit from a historical
perspective um and I hope you can follow along with what I'm going to
say Let's uh come
on I'm having trouble
here there we go oops let's go back
let's go way back okay uh we're going to talk about
finding the distance to Serious to the star serus the brightest star in the night sky without using any uh parallx
measurements this was something that was tried a long time ago uh the year was uh
1668 originally that's 170 years before Parallax reliable Parallax measurements
were taken talk about how to how to do this and to do it I'm going to need your
help James Gregory and the and the distance of Sirus uh you know James Gregory he was the guy who did the G uh
Gregorian telescope as well as some other uh mathematical things and but he devised a way of um estimating the
distance of serus he came really close uh if you give him a break which I'll
show you what I mean by that the idea here is You observe Mars like
tonight you want to observe Mars when it's the same brightness is Sirius and it just so happens that right now over
these next few night nights uh Mars and Sirius will be about the same magnitude about minus
1.38 oneus 1.42 something like that um and this occurs doesn't occur
all the time but it occurs when Mars has an angular diameter of about 16 NC seconds which it does tonight I think
well actually tonight I think it's at 15 but uh this is when when you when you try
this uh Gregory reasoned if Mars reflects 100% of the
sunlight that strikes it and if Mars's brightness matches out of Sirius it's essentially like like looking at a
little tiny spot of the Sun and you can use that by a simple
proportion to find out the distance to Sirius so it's just proportion angular the
angular area of the sun divided by angular area of Mars equals distance to Sun excuse me distance to serus divided
by distance to the Sun that's as mathematical as we're going to get proportion is pretty simple to solve and
we'll just kind of run through that quickly this is basically what I just said you you already know Gregory
already knew the angular area of the Sun and he already knew the angular area of
Mars he knew the distance of the Sun was astronomical unit he may not have had
the correct distance in miles but he knew it was one astronomical unit by definition so he could calculate the
distance to Sirus you plug in all all these numbers in in that proportion and
you come up with a calculated distance to Serius of uh 17,400 astronomic units
or .28 light years well of course that's nowhere close to the correct value
correct value is about 8.6 Lighty years so we're quite a bit off here but as I
said you got to get give this guy a break because Mars doesn't reflect 100% of the
sunlight that strikes it so it's not like looking at a little small portion of of the sun reflects instead about 177%
something like that so if you take that into account the distance of Sirius is figuring out all the mathematical there
comes out to be about 102,000 astronomical units or 1.6 Lighty
years well now now getting closer but it's still nowhere close to the correct value so you got to give him another
break because in his day nobody knew that Sirius is 25 times intrinsically
brighter than our sign so it's a lot brighter um if they were at the same
distance it would be 25 times brighter so you take that into account plug everything back in now you come out to
about about 510,000 astronomic units or approximately 8.1 Lighty years now think
about it that's that's pretty close to the 8.6 light years of today's uh accepted value now that's not bad for
1668 uh be before Parallax 170 years before Parallax some some something to
think about well and I think it'd be neat if we had some imagers out there amateur astronomers
who had uh uh um photometric means who could analyze the brightness of Sirius
and analyze the brightness of mars tonight over the next few nights I'm not talking about wavelengths anything like
that just the actual brightness measure them and see if they are pretty darn close to being the same and if they are
as I said earlier that Mars's um Mars's angular diameter is about 15 arccs so
you could possibly figure out the distance to Sirus on your own by by this
setup if if you could actually measure the uh brightness of Sirius and Mars so
think about that that's a that's a little bit of history and uh we do have a a little post on our Facebook page
describing all this essentially what what I what I what I just said uh one thing about tonight we're kind of in a
in a really good spot because Mars is the only planet which can match Sirius
and brightness you know Jupiter Jupiter's always quite a bit brighter than Sirus of course Venus is always brighter but Mars at times at times Mars
is brighter than Sirius but tonight it's pretty darn close to being that same Val so if you got the gumption you got
the technology go ahead and try this and see see if you if you can do it you might come up with something interesting you can re relive your own spot in
history by by doing this now we have a second one uh which I
like to say is an oh wow moment I know everybody who is watching
this has seen Mars through a telescope okay we've all seen Mars through a telescope but have you've ever seen
Phobos or deos it's two moons and now is a chance that you can re relive some
history with that since Mars is at opposition it's uh
it's clo closest to the earth at least closest that it's going to be for quite a while um you might be if you're lucky
you might be able to catch Phobos and deos Mars is so bright but Phobos o Deus
both are Phobos and deos both are so small and can you see them through a
small amateur scope well maybe increase your chances of success uh you want to
do so near our position like right now uh when it's high in the sky which it
will be tonight you'd want to have a telescope that's a 10 in aperture or larger that'd
be nice and you want to have a tracking Mount because it's nice to have that track him out be
because if you have Mars off to the side of out of your field of view of your eyepiece and you're looking at uh
deos it only takes less than three seconds for Mars to drift back into that field of view you don't have much time
to any for any observation and you're just going to go crazy trying to do this so what you want to do something really
tricky here is have an ulting eyepiece this is probably something that
Scott Robert should plug his ears on right now because what I'm going to say is you you're going to be taking apart
your eyepiece uh so you want to have an inexpensive eyepiece because you're messing around with this and you just
might make a big mistake inexpensive eyepiece plal Design's nice uh something
of of a of a low focal length just less than 10 millimeters what you want to do is unscrew the your your your the
polished barrel and identify the field stop which is uh what holds all the lenses in place the inside the the whole
eyepiece um section now what you want to do is cut a
small piece of aluminum foil that fits right into that field stop and you want
to cover up only about half that area and you want to press it against that um
the field stop size as well as you can perhaps even tape it you might want to use tweezers I don't know Screw the
barrel back onto the eyepiece and shove it in your focuser and see what happens s hopefully hopefully what happens is if
you put Mars behind the ulting bar that is behind the aluminum foil on the on the other side of it
sticking out you might be able to see deos uh uh 12 magnitude 13th magnitude
you might be able to see it it's not easy but uh something like this is
pretty easy to make I I made one and I'll show you in a second here it's uh
talk to you about that this is another uh post that that we have had talking about how to do
this but as I say don't do it with an expensive eyepiece because you might make a mistake and uh I don't want to be
I don't want to be uh anyone mad at me for telling you how to do this so anyway that's another thing you can do
about reliving the the history of of astronomy reliving the on seeing Phobos
and demos for the first time it was 1877 in August of 18 1977 Ace of Hall of
the US Naval Observatory with his trusty 26in refractor I know it's not not a
little 10-in it's a 26 in refractor he was able to spot them but you might be able to be uh pretty lucky and be able
to see something like this too so I want you to keep keep that in mind and you know when you're looking up at the night
sky uh try to think of this stuff and and how this this stuff uh just wasn't
uh discovered on its own it took a lot of work a lot of time a lot of Technology advances and so on to find
this but there are some things that you can do out there to uh help help you enjoy the night sky and relive it and
see what they and what they did so with that I'm going to stop my share or yeah
stop my share and I want to show you
something see if I can get this up there my eyepiece go yeah hey it's only like a
$40 ey piece so do not do this at home we are
professionals but you might be able to see it on it there is some because I'm not very good at
this aluminum foil in there blocking off okay this side of this side of the
eyepiece MH and that's all you do put the barrel
back on which I just unscrewed it to show you that got the old I piece ready in and just slide it in your telescope and go
to town see if see if you can do it um it's kind of a challenge I'm giving you
but I'd be interested in knowing if this or how successful others are at doing
this so Scott I'm GNA turn it back over to you unless if you got any questions and and
uh we'll see how this works out I think I think that uh you know I think a lot
of amateur astronomers are going to take you up for the challenge most of us have some extra eyepieces lying around Okay
so so but but you don't want to use your $350 IPS to do this
no take the $40 one well anyhow I think it's a very cool
project and I'm gonna try to make one so we'll see how I turn out so ah good good
happy to hear that yeah that's great John thank you so much now uh the
astronomical League uh before we go on to our next speaker I'll I'll to the astronomical leagues for a little bit it
is the world's largest Federation of astronomy clubs it's the organization is
what 75 years old now is that right uh SE uh this year it'll be SE uh 79 79
okay and I'm probably not supposed to say this s we unplug your ears but we have we have just reached a 25,000
member Mark wow which which is by far the most we've ever had that's great that's great so you didn't hear that
from me you didn't hear that you didn't hear it from him but uh John John would be somebody who would know uh that's for
sure um and if you're not a member of the astronomical League uh it's pretty
easy to join you could go on their website at uh um you know astr
league.org um you can become a member at large no matter where you are in the world or you
can join one of the member clubs that is the least expensive way to join the
astronomical league and just paid regular dues and part of those dues would go for also uh astronomical League
uh membership uh the other thing to look out for is the uh uh I I it's not being
called Alcon this year I think it's being called astrocon but as program
right and it's going to be at Bryce Canyon and uh so that's uh uh when are
the dates for that John uh the 26th to the 28th of June of June
yeah 27 2 it might be the 25th 25th through the 28th if you look up Astro con uh 2025
you're definitely gonna find it and uh it's something you should come to you'll meet many of us we'll be there and um
it's going to be a lot of fun so uh Bryce Canyon has incredibly dark skies
and uh have an incredible lineup of speakers and you'll just be there you
know maybe seeing some old friends but you're definitely going to make some new friends too while you're there yeah this
year is GNA be focused on I like using that word focused on um uh vendors and
workshops there are a whole bunch of workshops from W from Imaging to sketching to recording your results um
things of all of that nature to help you become a better astronomer and remember what I said it's not don't ask yourself
why Alon ask yourself why not Alon that's right that's right yeah how you
like that for a hard sell that's right well John thanks very much oh thank you
and we'll go from here so okay so I'm
curious uh Mr ier or Mr Levy or anybody else that's on line with us right now uh
have any of you tried to make an culting bar IPS before I never have and I have to
confess to something being mostly a deep Sky Observer so the really talented
observers of detail on things I.E the planetary observers probably justifiably
look down toward me so I've had lots of friends who have done it it works really well I know but I've never done it block
out like a really bright star to see something faint or you know right maybe even though last
night the occultation of Mars was fantastic I hope you guys had a chance to see it and many of the viewers too
because that was really a special event to see the to see Mars ulted by the moon yeah it was cool it was a lot of fun
last night one of the few nights here in Arkansas where we didn't have clouds or you know some precipitation or snow you
know so but uh it was it was very good so yeah well thanks
um let's talk a little bit about Dr Dennis Crabtree he uh very kindly agreed
to come on to Global Star Party um he is a distinguished Canadian astronomer
renowned for his pioneering work in astronomical data management uh
this was a u a big focus on uh at the alliance of historic observatories of
which he's a board member of and I had the pleasure of actually being with him at the Vatican Observatory and getting
to know him uh but um you know it
preserving data is uh you know through all the hard work that astronomers do and the incredible instrumentation that
we build and all the rest of it uh you know to not somehow preserve and share
this data I think is is a bit of a crime uh I have uh actually in my cabinet here
uh some I have a plate uh from the 100 inch of Mount Wilson uh that was going
to be thrown away um you know and I I think that's that's uh you know when I
heard that I said well I'll definitely take care of it I'll I'll I'll do the best I can but um there's all kinds of
data that's out there and uh and we have ways now of mining that data you know uh
through the advances of AI and faster computers so but uh uh Dennis is um has
played a pivotal role in ensuring that this data uh from one some of the world's leading telescopes is preserved
and curated and shared with our Global scientific Community uh he is also a longtime
contributor to the National research Council of Canada and he's been closely associated with the Dominion as
astrophysical Observatory uh which is one of the great historical observatories out there and the Canadian
astronomy data center in Victoria British Columbia Dennis thank you so much for coming on to Global star party
uh pleasure to be here yeah it's a real honor to have you and I love that background now now that I can see it
bigger uh that is just an amazing uh piece of artwork behind you so that is a
generator of AI image um can't remember which one but one of the three laws of
thermodynamics is what that represents I see I see and you've been working with
AI generated art for some time you showed us some at uh yes and that was
cool so very cool all very cool stuff all right so I I'll turn this over to you uh
okay so thank you very much Scott for that introduction and again it's wonderful to be here happy New Year from
uh Canada uh unfortunately we didn't see I did not see the occultation last night
uh we had typical West Coast weather uh west coast of Canada winter weather can
be described as 50 Shades of Gray and uh even though if it had been
clear it was the Mars wasn't not ulted in Victoria it but Mars grazed so close
to the Mars surf to the Moon that if it it been clear it would been a really cool cool thing to see
um yeah so uh a little bit more history about myself yeah I'm an astronomer I uh
I worked uh a little bit at the Canada France white telescope before coming to Victoria 1986 uh to sort of start up the
Canadian astronomy data center it was established as one of three archive centers around the world that would hold
a copy of the Hubble data from the Hubble Space Telescope so that was sort of the reason the cadc got started and
uh yeah so we did did that uh initiated archiving data from the Canada franway
telescope um I left the CC mid 1990s and went on to do management of
observatories and other things but uh CDC now is still a world leading in
terms of providing services to the worldwide astronomical Community Cloud
processing you name it they they do some really really interesting stuff um so you know Scott alluded to
the alliance of historical observatories and and we ALS also heard um you know
that um John talk about history historical stuff and you know we all got here from somewhere else right we just
didn't pop into existence and what we're doing today is built upon the legacy of
many other places and people that came before us so the idea one of the ideas behind the alliance of historical
observatories which was only formed about three years ago I believe uh is is
to you know allow us to uh preserve this infrastructure of historic Observatory
so it doesn't just get thrown away the you know some of the
observatories um aren't active I mean many of them are really old and haven't been active research centers for a long
time are not ignored and allowed to just you know drift away and Decay and uh who
knows what will happen to them so the idea is to to build this Alliance of of partner observatories historic
observator stories and we can work together and share strategies um for
preserving and sharing legacies of of these historic telescopes um so we had
some founding members and uh I'll just read out the names of those founding observatories uh Griffith lick LOL Mount
Wilson Palomar yeres and the Vatican I mean anybody that is associated with
astronomy will recognize all those names as very important observatories that
have uh contributed to our knowledge of astronomy astrophysics
over the last hund and some plus years and for the Vatican going back over 450
years so almost 450 years so um so there's there's a lot of of interesting
stuff out there and um the idea behind the alliance is that we can all work together learn from each other on how to
not only preserve the observatories their information their data their stories but share that with the public
uh I think it could be very Illuminating and perhaps uh you
know give people some some insight into how what happened in the past was really important in terms of of what we we know
today um so as Scott indicated we had our last meeting in the Vatican
Observatory uh in October felt very strange being in his
meeting room with the portrait of the Pope overlooking our shoulders and uh you know I was like you okay what's
what's going on here uh but we got to tour some of their fantastic historical uh telescopes the telescope that did the
work in cart D and uh some other really cool things so uh yeah they have a long
history of doing doing AST astronomy and the Jesuit astronomers are uh an
interesting Bunch you know they have a the Vatican advanced technology telescope in uh in Arizona so they moved
away from light polluted Rome environs and and all made it all the way to Mount
Graham in in Arizona um we have we'll have I think we have annual meetings the meeting for for
this year has not been decided where it will be yet I'm hoping it will be at LOL so we can see the great new discovery
center that was opened last year uh so yeah so
um just want to move on now and talk a little bit about uh my my Observatory
the Dominion astrophysical Observatory um so uh it was built in 1918 open in
1918 in Victoria uh perhaps not the greatest place you wouldn't put a telescope today on such a site but back
then uh for Canadian sites it was probably it was the site given the
limitations of the mirror technology at the time because we have very gradual temperature
changes um so it was built by an astronomer called John Stanley plaset um
who um came later in life to become an astronomer he was doing other things a
very gifted mechanical guy and interested in phography and other other areas um and uh it he was at a meeting
of the um people may not know this the precursor to the American Astronomical
Society which was the astronomical and astrophysical Society of
America and that meeting was in somewhere out east of the US and then a
bunch of people got on the train and traveled to Pasadena to the meeting of
the international Union for cooperation and solar research that was hosted by George Ellery
hail so in 1910 uh this uh astrophysics was a
fairly new thing and by astrophysics that was taking Spectra of stars
measuring radial velocities um so one of the areas that was discussed at that media in pad in
1910 was collaboration cooperation to uh share the load of measuring radial veloc
velocities of of all the stars that were visible in the sky to the telescopes and there were too many for one one
Observatory to do so that the work would be shared around the smaller telescopes would do the brighter Stars anyways the
work was all shared around between a few observatories and it was there that plas decided that Canada should contribute a
bit more than what they could with a 15-inch telescope they had an Ottawa so
one thing led to another and um eventually in 1918 we opened the 1.8
meter or as it was KN and then the 72in telescope uh interesting thing about the
mirror the mirror was cast in Belgium in 1914 and was shipped from antp one week
before the first world war opened and the factory was right on the border between Belgium and France and was
destroyed in the first couple of weeks of the war so if the mirr blank had not been shipped to Pittsburgh where John
Brasher figured it um yeah we probably didn't have wouldn't have a telescope in Victoria and who knows what what the
what the future would look like for a Canadian astronomy um yeah so the the telescope
was put together finished in 1916 but the mirror didn't arrive until 1918 it was shipped from Pittsburgh on a special
train a lot arrived in Victoria six days later and a week after that they had their first Spectrum so uh in our plate
Vault we have all the glass Spectra taken with the telescope uh quite an amazing set of
drawers filled with all these little glass plates holding astronomical Spectra um yeah so it it's a it's it's
nice it's preserving data as as Scott mentioned and today we think of Digital Data but glass plates are a great way to
preserve data they're if you don't do anything to them they they don't you
know they they they stay there and you open the drawer and they're still there so it's kind of cool and uh one of the
things uh that happened early in the telescope's life was plaset was looking
at bright stars to see taking radi me you know taking measurements of Spectra
measuring radial velocities and looking for binaries and he observed one particularly bright St relatively bright
star and over the couple of three nights and noticed that the velocity was changing and by the time he acquired all
the data necessary over three weeks or so it was the most massive pair of stars
known at the time and remained so for about 80 years years uh it became known as plasket
star and then you can take those GL little glass plates today take two of them separated by about four or five
days and put them next to each other and you can see that the lines of the star have have shifted um by the way the uh
decision to rename the um the society from the astronomical and astrophysical
Society of America to theas took place at a meeting of the Society in Ottawa
Canada in 1911 and so that was when they decided to be renamed to the American
Astronomical Society um now the work done at the the
the Dao here in Victoria some of the probably the most influential work was in the sort of later part of the 1920s
through early 1930s uh plaset and his colleague there Joseph Al on Pierce measured radio
velocities of a large number eight or 900 bright O and B stars that were at
large distances you know they're bright you can see them at large distances and by studying you know their radial
velocities what their distances might be based on their apparent brightnesses and
such they they they kind of measured out the Motions of the Milky Way galaxy and
determined reasonable numbers for the uh the mass of the Milky Way galaxy where
the sun was located with respect to the center the rotation of the velocity of the of the uh of the of the sun around
the center of the Milky Way and the numbers aren't all that different you know given the the time that when it's
done from what we we accept as today's values very much measuring uh you know
the distance to serus by that method that was described I mean done whenever
it was it's a pretty good number you come up with uh considering the Technologies and whatever we have today
so you know the Dominion astrophysical Observatory really launched Canada onto the modern astrophysical astrophysics uh
scene in the world for a while it was the largest operating telescope in the world uh the Mount Wilson hooker
telescope had opened but it had problems and wasn't working so for about six months our telescope in Victor was the
largest in the world and uh what was really neat about it one way was that it
was accessible the public could come and see it and um at the foot of the Hill a
called the hill it's only about 900 feet above sea level there was a train that ran along the bottom you Urban Railway
and the public could hop on this train in downtown Victoria get off at the observatory stop and and come up and see
the telescope and plaset they ran public viewing nights every Saturday night and
we we still do that during the summer months um and it was it was a amazing
site I'm sure for for people to come up and see the telescope look through the eyepiece see Saturn you know I mean just
you know the usual usual things of what the public loves seeing in the night sky
um in 1929 they logged 39 visitors to this to the telescope which was bigger
than the whole population of the city and people would come from from us and other places to uh to see it and uh yeah
so it's it was a it was not only um a scientific success it was uh it was um
it was also a a means of promoting the tourism in the city getting interest of
the citizens civic pride so it really had a a an impact on all sorts of areas
in in the area Victoria and Canada now I mentioned John Brasher he
um he was the guy that figured and Polished the mirror uh
so we had the the process of course for coating the mirror back then was was silvering the mirror because there was
the technology for putting a coat of aluminum didn't exist silvering is a liquid process you make up this solution
that was developed by Brasher and you put it on the mirror and after a while
you take it off and you got a nice silver coating that tarnishes pretty quickly you have to do it every three or
four months so the government apparently uh was at ask from Ottawa I was asking
why uh why why the observatory in Victoria was ordering a couple of things
that went into this solution and the two ingredients were grain alcohol and rot candy soor was ordering a lot of alcohol
and the bureaucrats in Ottawa wanted to know why now um we have pit we have one of
the things we have is 100 about 158 by10 glass plates of the construction of the
of the observatory and they're just fantastic uh so uh but anyways um John
Brasher came to the opening and during his speech he should said Victoria should be proud in fact all of Canada
should be proud of having the world's best telescope the world's best telescope director and the best
director's wife so he he he was any any person that
works in Optics that I've met has always been a little peculiar and I I think Brasher definitely fit in that uh that
vein he was he was quite the quite the guy though he you know he's from Pittsburgh and he was uh referred to in
Pittsburgh as Uncle John he um he donated money to for to educate women as
science teachers and when he died about 4,000 people 4,000 people came out to to
for his funeral in in Pittsburgh so uh it was he was quite the guy and had an
impact in as strong I mean not only for our telescope but uh for others as well
and uh yeah so you know it's um the history stuff is is it really kind of
lets you understand how you got to where you are and plaset you know was also
really good at building the instruments he designed the telescope in a general sense and he designed the
spectrograph and one of the things we we know we're KNN for in Canada now is we build instrumentation for for our
telescopes and Canadian telescopes and for other telescopes around the world so these Traditions kind of carry on to the
lifeline of an observatory um kind of kind of an interesting thing actually these cultures exist and they stay so uh
yeah so anyway that's a little bit about the alliance of historical observatories and uh we're we're getting new members
uh I forget how many members we're up to now but it's uh it's um you have a look at the web page here attracting a number
of other historic observatories oh yeah yeah there's a question here
um uh the question is how do you see the role of historic observatories evolving
in the modern era of astronomy especially with the rise of space-based telescopes and citizen science
initiatives well I think you know now well space observatories for sure but
even modern modern groundbased observatories there on remote mountains in Chile and Hawaii
that most people can't get to and I think historic observatories are places
people can visit um and it can see a telescope I mean people when they see
our telescope are still amazed by it right it's just like really amazed um I
can't imagine what people in 1918 thought but it's still an impressive machine and it it helps them you know
just kind of appreciate that you know well if this was what they had 1920 man what they have today must be
really crazy and crazy Advanced because this is really impressive and so if you have great stories to tell and uh for us
of course it's local history it's Canadian history but it but it gives you you know gives people you have a chance
to talk to people in a in a situation where you have a telescope or you have
as you know glass plates or you have whatever U that helps them put in context what you're talking about um so
I think so I think they have a real role to play in in a public education um and uh you know we we still
we we have well we the government doesn't run it anymore it's it's a nonprofit that runs our our Visitor
Center called center of the universe and gives the tours and everything but you know it's just it's just the U the
Saturday nights when the public comes up you just sense the excitement it's just a great star party for people to to
participate in and they just all love looking through through or looking at and seeing images from our telescope um
we had a very famous visitor 1922 and that was Agatha Christie oh Agatha
Christie visited our observatory in 1922 um she wasn't quite famous then and she
was on a a delegation that Britain had sent out to the Empire countries to
promote a an exposition that was going to be happening in London in 1924 and
she was her husband was part of that delegation and so she uh she came to our Observatory which was kind of cool very
cool very cool well thank you Dennis and welcome yeah uh again uh really
interesting presentation and uh uh it's an honor to have you on and we hope that
you uh can come back sometime and uh let us more know more about uh uh what's
going on in the universe of Dennis Crabtree so yeah happy to do that and uh
hopefully I can tell people next maybe in a while after the next meeting of the alliance of historical observatories a
little bit more about what's happening there very cool okay thank you than Scott yeah good night good night good
night okay uh that was cool um our uh
our next speaker is uh David ier uh you
know David's been on regularly and David is now one of the co-hosts of global
Star Party uh and uh it's always a pleasure to have him on he's on early we uh we'll crack
jokes uh you know we do some uh backstage uh banter uh as we get started
for Global star party which is always fun um if you ever meet him uh you go to
one of the astronomy Magazine Star parties that they do in Arizona or if uh
you happen to go to a staris event and bump into Avid ier uh you know you will
you're going to learn a lot about uh some aspect of uh astronomy or music or
uh even the Civil War okay which uh David Aker is an expert on and so it's
kind of cool because he's just a multifaceted kind of guy and uh
he always has some knowledge about people places history and now it all
sort of fits together uh and often with a u you know the um through the lens of
uh of astronomy and so I just I love uh hanging out with the guy he's become a
great friend and uh so we're gonna bring David on and he has yet another kind of
obscure deep Sky object to talk about you know what Scott thank you and you're
very kind and right back at you pal but I saw staris listed in your early
preliminary schedule so I Nix the object I'll hang out with that for next week
and I thought would talk about we have a special event that we just announcing now oh for starmus so I thought i' talk
a little bit about that and Scott knows about it because we're conspiring with Scott to be involved in various ways
with this but uh we have starmus coming to America so I thought I would talk a
little bit about that tonight very briefly all right I'll let you take it away that's okay thank you sir so I will
share my screen and I will share I hope the right
screen and I hope that you can see that now and I will start that show perhaps
if I can where am I there we go okay um
okay so I'm not not going to talk about Centaurus a or another even weirder
object we'll talk about that next week I hope um Scott but but uh because we had
some sort of breaking news happen with staris starmus is coming to America for
the first time and it's a long time coming and there are lots of complications that we have going but
we're going to have a two-day event at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC this
is going to be April 1st and 2nd of this year and we'll have some new things
happening there that we've never done before at any storis and this is actually preceding later in the month of
April we will have a staris uh in the Canary Islands as well at laala um where
the which is the site of the world's largest telescope uh for the time being still and other things so I'll talk
about that later but for the moment here let's talk about the starmus uh event that we're going to have in Washington
we certainly hope that you will join us there because it's going to be very exciting we'll have talks uh primarily
the program will consist of Talks by Nobel Prize laurates in several Sciences
although mostly heavily focused on astronomy uh for this event and some
astronauts uh who you will recognize as well and the bad news is I'll be the
host for this so if you can put up with that you may have a good time at this
event if not it's going to be rough okay but uh so we'll have an quite a number
of people Garrick is raan the founder of starmus the director of starmus will be
there of course Chris Hadfield very well-known astronaut Canadian will be
there black hole expert Kip Thorne the world's leading expert on black holes
now the Nobel prize winning biochemist Jack zostac Nicole stot who's been a great
friend and an astronaut speaker at a number of events uh here in recent years with us um the astrophysicist Mario
Livio who has done a lot with the Space Telescope uh at the Hubble Space Telescope um and uh Marsha mcnut oh my
dear oh dear um her name uh vanished apparently here but Marsha mcnut will be
there as well and she's the president of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States so that'll be sort of the
uh major featured speakers uh and then we will have some other surprise Rises as well that will come up at this event
we also have some musicians of course because as uh the founders of starus Garrick and Brian May uh who's an
astronomer and he also has a day job you know playing guitar so their idea is
that uh you know we need to exercise both hemispheres of our brain both
analytically with the sciences and creatively with with music as well so
we'll have a bunch of musicians here and the ones we're announcing right now um we're leaning a little bit more if
you'll permit the term Scott on your esteemed program toward metal here this
time just um so we've got bumblefoot the very famous uh guitarist who's exceptionally
talented he's a veteran of Guns and Roses we've got Derek very nice guy too
and a super super the funniest guy in the in the world and just a real sweet
guy too uh Derek sherinian great keyboardist he's done a lot with a lot
of different groups Including Alice Cooper and Billy Idol their bands Tony Franklin who's played with Jimmy Page
Paul Rogers of course who was involved with Queen for a while there and then if you know the great drummer Carmen aacy
well his younger brother Vinnie will be our drummer here this time he's blend
with some lighter uh AER groups like Dio and Black Sabbath you know so we're
we're leaning a little metal but this is going to be a a straight rock and roll
show a series of shows this time in Washington we also have artist uh the
artist the creative artist Leah Holleran she works in conjunction uh with Kip
Thorn she's done this Illustrated this great book that Kip has done on black holes and also our pal the English
London comedian David zambuka who's a lot of fun always to watch entertaining
the crowd so this will be uh the group that is there at this staris American event and then also some special
surprises that we will have coming as well so we hope that you'll join us uh
here and this is a page uh from the Kennedy if you go to the Kennedy center.org see all of the listings for
the events that are going to happen on April 1st and 2nd this is just a screenshot of just one of the events
we'll also be showing our film uh that we created in armania uh with staris uh
that will be uh shown there as well but there there are a number of events and it's a pretty uh inexpensive couple of
days here um for starmus and celebrating science and music in the states I think
that it's very likely we this will sort of open some doors the Kennedy Center wants to partner with us on an ongoing
basis so and other places as well this will establish I think starmus doing
more things in the United States of America in the coming
years so there will also be however at the site of this little Dome here which
houses the largest telescope in the world until a couple of projects get things going uh in Hawaii and in Chile
uh but this is the um 10.4 meter uh telescope of course at La Palma which
edges out the twin keks still just by a little bit so April 25th through the
29th we will have our normal staris here in the Canary Islands which if you go to
the Canary Islands and you close your eyes and you turn around twice and you say an incantation and open your eyes
you could swear you're in Hawaii it's an absolute analog to the Hawaiian Islands
uh they just off the Northwestern coast of Africa and of course is a huge uh
tourist destination because of the weather and and the beaches and the setting and so on for European
so it's easy to get over there sort of jumping a flight um from the states and
you can see complete info which I will talk about at a later date uh on
star.com about the main starus that is coming up at the end of April which will
be very exciting and have a lot of stuff happening there in the canaries as
well oh my gosh I guess that was it I guess I didn't depend
well we got to talk about the magazine here a little bit I truncated that a bit yes so we have an exciting time with
with astronomy magazine happening here as well um and I will stop sharing my
screen you know I think some of you know this but many of you probably haven't heard but we were acquired by a much
larger publishing company that's based in Chattanooga and we have people working all over the globe now and we've
made a couple of big Acquisitions with fir Crown our parent company now since
they bought astronomy even uh in the very early summer here uh that threw me
out to Tucson Arizona to have a dark sky for the first time at home after 42
years so that's nice to be able to work uh on the magazine from Arizona now uh
and we have a lot of things going on in the future here um with a sort of a an
expansion and a redesign of the magazine which will be coming in a few months as well with all kinds of things that we're
going to add in there it turns out that the fellow who owns fir Crown has been reading astronomy magazine among his
other magazines and interests for many many years and so he loves the magazine
and will be growing with all sorts of special events and things and pages and
paper and all kinds of things we're going to have coming up here in the next few months so keep your eyes open we
will have a an historical year for astronomy magazine coming here oh that's
great that's great well uh you know there's been just uh already I mean just
kicking off this station of Mars by the moon you nice Comet out there and
everything uh you know there's no lack of really exciting stuff for amateur
astronomers to get involved with uh I also see on the horizon um you know from
ourselves and from other telescope makers out there uh you know I'll tooth
their for too because they're all doing great work and providing amateur astronomers with some of the most
incredible equipment of all time and so uh if you're into science you're into
just taking nice pictures uh this is your year so absolutely and maybe you
could say this at a lot of times in history you know because generally things improve over time but this is the
right time to be alive and interested in a astronomy because not only do we have
an explosive set of research and discoveries going on with professional
astronomy at a pace like we've never had before it is astonishing um but Scott as
you said with telescope it's so much easier now to get into astronomy and
sometimes in the newsletter that I do every week for astronomy now I I harp on
you know getting out there and seeing what you see with live photons with your
your own eyes and drawing them but boy you know Imaging wise it is easier than
ever before now with equipment Scott you make much of it yourself to go out and
capture your own images of the cosmos much much easier than it ever has been
before and much much more quickly you know I remember when I was a teenager just starting out you had an illuminated
retical eyepiece you know a manual camera locked open the back of a telescope you sat there and guided you
know this was before cold cameras even sat there and guided you know for an hour you know with keeping that star on
the it was like being if you messed up I mean so now it is so much now in minutes
you can capture a really wonderful image that's much much better and much deeper
and more colorful than anything anybody could do a couple decades ago even let
alone 40 years years ago yeah because pick up some old astronomy magazines and see the film images that were I mean
really Cutting Edge at the time you know and the difference now we are no pun
intended light years beyond what we could do in this hobby you know TW 10 20
years ago let alone 40 so Scott because of your telescopes and and others this
is this capability is happening it is an explosive revolu uary time to be in
there whether you're observing and especially if you want to capture your own images of the sky it's an incredible
time to be involved with this universe of ours yeah yeah if you're just starting and and uh want to get wanting
to get into this astrophotography I'll just go ahead and uh talk about some of
the smart telescopes that are out there there's of course a brand called unistellar that uh was one of the uh
leaders along with vonis um there's this little baby telescope called a dwarf
which is kind of cool uh very very portable sub portable kind of instrument
uh and then zwo came out with something called the sea star and they broke some
price barriers and stuff like that and I know I'm talking about you know uh stuff that we carry but also our
competition uh this new genre of telescopes that's out there is just
really amazing and and so uh if you haven't tried it before I'm going to recommend that you do so thank much
incredible it's an incredible time Scott and hats off to you for all that you've done for the community of astronomy and
the who are we talking to we're talking to David ier who's been doing this since
he was a teenager right he's writing his magazines and sharing his love for the
sky and um you know bringing together talented people from all over the world so
yeah so thanks okay all right uh let's
move on to our next speaker this would be from the astronomical or excuse me
the association of lunar and planetary observers this is Brian cudnik uh Brian
uh is a um an expert on uh uh the moon
he loves the moon and he loves he's going to correct me on this but
meteoroid impacts okay on the moon correct is that right y all right well
very cool um this is the first time for Brian to be on we're so honored that
you're here we're honored that the Alpo is participating uh on a continuous basis
this is great and uh uh what a cool uh mancave you got going on back there with
all your astronomy books and stuff but uh uh thank thank you for coming on to Global star party and I'll let you take
it away with your presentation okay well my apologies I just learned about this a few hours ago
that I was doing this and I didn't really have a chance to um make a presentation but I'll take this opportunity to share a little bit about
what I do and what Alpo does and and so forth um this year is a special year in
many ways um this marks 50 years since I got interested in astronomy and March
marks 45 years since I first subscribed to astronomy magazine and I am still
getting astronomy Magazine on a monthly basis I just renewed um and it's also going to Mark 25 years since I took over
the um being the head the the coordinator of the lunar meteoritic
impact search section of Alpo um so my interest was actually more of planetary
well actually it still is planetary astronomy um but my interest in the moon was literally sparked by a meteoroid
impact on no nober 18th 1999 universal time when I had the privilege of
observing a Leonid meteor impact the moon um David Dunham and people from
Iota coordinated an effort to observe the moon during that time because it was
expected that it was going to pass through a dense stream of Leonid meteors and the chances of us being able to see
an impact um was greatly increased because of that um that was in 1999 when
we were expecting a a storm here on Earth but it didn't turn out to be as uh
much of a storm as they were um originally predicting although the 2001 um display was pretty good and 98
offered Fireballs but 99 the moon um received most of the The Lion Share pun
intended of the Leonid meteors and so that allowed us to observe um actually
we recorded a half a dozen um I observed visually with a 14in Schmid cigra at my
club's Dark Side Observatory just outside of Columbus Texas which is about an hour and a half Drive West of Houston
Texas so I live just outside of Houston Texas I'm originally from Northeast Ohio and so I've lived in Texas for about 26
years now um and so we observed I observed this visually because I didn't
have any video cameras um but I was actually rather skeptical as to whether we would actually see anything made by a
piece of dust or piece of stone um from a quar million miles away but I lo
behold I did see one it was so bright that I knew 100% certain that I saw something but it was so quick that it
was surreal so I did report it um the next day and then it was ultimately confirmed by David Dunham and they also
looked for looked at um their vide tapes and found five others so um The
Association of lunar lunar and planetary observers decided to resurrect a program for looking for lunar meteors they
actually had a couple of programs in the 50s and 60s but but they didn't really produce anything conclusive and so I
took took the um I took the coordinatorship program in February of 2000 as an interim coordinator of the
Alpo lunar meteoric imp impact search um section and so it's part of the uh Suite
of lunar programs within Alpo that observe different things on the moon such as domes and eclipses and craters
and also other forms of ltp so um meteoroid impacts a form of ltp they had
been documented for centuries literally as a matter of fact in 1178 ad a group
of monks in in England um documented they uh recorded what they thought was an explosion on the moon um and that's
still something that the jury is out because something of the size of what the monks had seen should have produced
impacts and um um storms of meteors on Earth but nothing was recorded um but to
make the long story short people people have observed what looked like meteoroid impacts for centuries but the thing is
is that these were single observers or observers that were um using the same telescope they didn't have the um
independent confirmation of two telescopes separated by at least uh 20 miles or so in order to to um um confirm
that this is actually something that has um impacted the moon um and so we
started the program in '99 and the technology um developed enough to where where we can use um um lowl light video
cameras to monitor the moon and also um software was developed um to um go
through the frames of uh videos in 1999 we had to go through the videos manually
but not not long after that Luna scan was developed I can't remember the name of the guy um but anyway um he developed
Luna scan um to help um automatically detect the um um impact events so fast
forward a little bit NASA Marshall space flight Center um has the uh meteoroid in
the meteoroid environment office and they started a program to monitor the moon on a regular basis um for meteoroid
impacts and they've been doing that since 2005 um their first impacts which was were confirmed impacts of from the
TD stream of meteor uh meteoroids um that was in November of 2005 and since
then they have observed and confirmed um hundreds of meteoroid impacts on the moon um in fact there's a number of
different groups around the world that are doing the same thing Nell Iota and Greece is a group that um started a few
years ago in there um using um professional setups to document impacts
invisible and infrared light so they're able to determine not only how bright they are but what the temperature is of
these impacts um and also there's another group in Spain um Jose Maro um
has a group that observes the moon for meteoroid impacts um and so there's uh that and then um other groups around the
world um so primarily um 25 years later I'm primarily in the administrative role
um what I do is I um encourage people to observe the moon um on a monthly basis
we have two um we have two um sessions um the first session is the evening
session where the moon a waxing crescent we encourage people to observe the dark part of the moon for meteoroid impacts
during that time and then we do the same thing for the waning phases of the moon this is modeled on the Marshall spa
space flight center um program that they've been doing since 2005 um and so
we have that and also I have special announcements that I put out for um when
stronger meteor showers like the um Geminids and the perseids are are active
I encourage people to observe the moon then if the moon is favorably placed um
and so I'm um so I basically coordinate um in that area um in the process I work at a university
and at the University we're in the process of preparing for another semester that begins next week so I've been kind of busy with that today but we
do have an observatory and the observatory is uh we have one telescope that's dedicated to daily solar
observations um and so one of my roles at the observatory besides teaching astronomy and physical science classes
is to u i single-handedly maintain a uh observing program um with the um 16inch
me telescope um in the East Dome of the Prairie View Observatory um so I have
observed a number of beautiful flares over the years I actually started this in 1999 um when I um started working for
Prairie View as senior Observer of the solar Observatory and then my roles changed over the years so um to boil to
make this long story short I am uh actually involved in three broad areas
um solar observations um at work I do variable Stars I have about 61,000
visual variable Stars observations that I've made for the American Association of variable star observers since 1992
and then I do the um of course I do the coordinating of the um um lunar meteoritic impact search program um so I
do a little bit of sun moon and star um activity um when I can one of the things
that I really would like to get involved in um since 2009 there's been close to a dozen videos of meteors burning up in
Jupiter's atmosphere and I want to get a um um systematic Patrol of telescopes
watching Jupiter um as continuous as possible for meteors that enter the atmosphere so um that's something that's
kind of in the early stages right now but I'd like to get um people coordinated to keep an eye on Jupiter
with videotape uh videotape Jupiter over extended periods of time to um look for
the uh occasional meteor that uh burns up in its atmosphere um also Venus is
getting close to it will have uh it will pass to inferior conjunction later in
March and what I'm what I'd like to try to do here is to look for meteor meteors
on in Venus's atmosphere um within a couple of weeks either side of inferior
conjunction so right now Venus is well placed in the evening sky in in a few
weeks it will be large enough and the Crescent will be thin enough to where if we can monitor the dark part of Venus
using tools and techniques similar to what we use with lunar meteor observations uh want to be able to um
observe U meteors and Venus's atmosphere and that is that is doable it's just a matter of um dedicating the time and the
resources to do that so that's what I'll be encouraging people to do um in about a month or so when Venus becomes more
favorably placed especially in the evening Apparition when it's going to be high in the sky um before it um plunges
for its inferior conjunction so those are some of the things that I've been up to and I did get a look at that Comet uh
G3 yesterday and about um 2 minutes before noon through a 5-in Takahashi
telescope beautiful little Comet I got a picture of it if I would have thought about it I would have put it up but was able to see that was able to see the
Mars event last night The Disappearance was clouded out because of these unexpected clouds that came in but I was
able to get the reappearance and video most of that um and you were talking
about the uh ease of astronomical imaging we do have a sear telescope at work and I've been using that quite a
bit to image comets and other objects in the sky and so I've been using those in my astronomy and geology classes um so
that's basically the um summary of the uh program of monitoring lunar meteor or
uh meteors um what we want to do is we want to expand that to observe meteors on other planets specifically Jupiter
and Venus so be open for any questions or discussions at this point gosh I I
just you're the first person that I've talked to that has uh seen a you know
Med right impact on the moon and so I just think that that is just
amazing do you think that I mean how many years did you uh observe the moon
before you saw anything like that well I was just a casual Observer just looking at surface features and such uh looking
at eclipses I really enjoy observing lunar eclipses of all types um and so I try to whenever there's lunar eclipse
that's available to observe I want to get out and observe it from start to finish um by the way there's one is all
know there's one coming up in just a couple of couple of months March 13th 14th um and that will be an also also an
excellent time to look for lunar meteor meteoroid impacts is during totality in
fact in uh 2019 that January 2019 total eclipse there was a meteoroid impact
that was observed by quite a few people um I didn't see it because I wasn't looking through the telescope at the
moment that it occurred but um a number of people saw it so that is possible for
things like that to happen yeah yeah that's awesome that is awesome David
Levy um have you uh you've you've spent so much time looking at celestial
objects have you seen a meteorite impact on the moon before yourself uh no I have
not um I've looked especially with Montreal when the Montreal Center was
doing the lunar media program in the early 1960s I spent a little bit of time
doing that as well but I've never seeing an impact on another Celestial body yeah
we know it happens I'm really proud that Brian was able to see one that's really very interesting and exciting to hear
yes absolutely and also we video recorded one ained meteor in December of
2010 and that was confirmed by a couple of people if people want to see some of these videos and stuff is it on the Alpo
website or how do you get to them um basically right now what we have on the Alpo website is highlights of recent
images that people have um made um of lunar meteors but um I'm in the process
of organizing a um catalog of all the observations that we've collected over the last 25 years that's one of the
things I want to do kind of observing the 25 year anniversary of this effort um so I want to be able to do that and
also um maybe collect some of these best images and videos and post those to Alpo
um so that people can access them easily because the way that the way the website is set up right now um it's set up to
where the monthly or the uh every quarter I update the um particulars for the monthly um observing program the
observing interval and any meteor showers that are active during that interval and then I also um highlight um
observations that people have sent me um requesting confirmation a lot of these observations are actually isolated
events that people have observed which unfortunately other people haven't confirmed but um we do we do get um a
lot of um confirmations from time to time as well so when people observe an
event that um is coincidental with the Marshall um meteoroid environment um
program or another program then that's where we get the um um
confirmations very cool okay so uh I'm putting a link into the chat where
people can go and join uh the Alpo um but they have all these
different SE so if you're interested in the moon or if you're interested in Mars or you know uh picket you know something
in our solar system uh I know that uh the Alpo has been considered kind of the
Watchdogs of the solar system but you guys do so much more I mean you know the
most of us as you described yourself before kind of being a casual astronomer
you know and you'd see a beautiful view of a planet the air would get really still or something and maybe you had
subarc second seeing or something and saw some amazing detail but you're going
quite a bit beyond that and showing people how to do research how to collect data and how to see some amazing stuff
that um man you'd remember that for the rest of your life so yeah I'm big about
professional amateur collaboration that um I don't remember a time I don't remember a time you know
right now and recently where ordinary citizens can do real science and there's
a number of websites that people can log we're in a golden age of that so that's
really great and yeah comments are one of my favorite things to observe in fact hail Bop was my Master's thesis project
uh I was observing it during the time of the heaven Heaven's Gates cult um and I was this was at San Diego State where I
was attending school for my masters and um most of the people in that department did Stellar type research work and so I
was pretty much the only one that was doing a planetary type project so anybody that had questions about hail
Bop um or other objects of the solar system they directed the calls to me and there was one guy that called asking
about the UFO that follows that's following hail Bop and I politely told
him that I'm studying this Comet I've not seen um any evidence for such an object within this Comet um I don't
think there's anything like that happening and he said thank you very much goodbye and then he called back a little while later with the the same
question I gave him the same answer and then he responded with a question he said he asked why is the President
issued an executive order for the media not to talk about the UFO behind hail Bop and then he hung up I had a bad I
had I had a bad feeling that something was going to happen and shortly after that was when the heavens Gates cult
members committed suicide yeah you know there's uh uh you
know many of us uh had some sort of uh way that we were touched by that tragic
uh time you know so uh I've talked about it on the show before but U uh our
company sold uh the telescope um to a retailer that I used to work at that
sold the heavensgate 10-in telescope you know so that they returned because they
said it didn't work because they couldn't see the companions right in the Comets tail so but uh
uh they needed uh they needed people like yourself and David Levy to kind of set them on the straight and narrow I
think but U anyhow um never a dull moment in astronomy yeah this is
true but I've never discovered a comet although it did come close I worked with the uh shoemakers well David Levy knows
about this the the Palomar asteroid and Comet survey in the early 1990s When I Was An undergraduate at Northern Arizona
University I went with Henry H and a couple of other students to the Palomar 18in and I had my opportunity to do
guiding with the guide star and the reticle and all that um and then we uh found a comet that was unknown and so we
went to report the comet but it turned out that it was reported couple of weeks earlier by Elanor Helen um who was also
using the um so what we would do what they would do is they would use it for one week before New Moon and then our
group would use it one week after New Moon to do the Imaging looking for asteroids and and comets and
so and of course David Levy was very much involved in this absolutely absolutely well Brian
thank you so much and uh we want to thank the Alpo for uh you know uh
supporting uh the global star party and sharing uh the excitement of uh you know
exploring our solar system so wonderful Brian I hope that you're back on uh and
uh take a look again at uh your bio page that we created for you and uh okay I'd
like to expand on it and uh provide some additional links so okay I could do that
and I can also provide a website where I post the daily solar observations um that I take in Al Alpha right now we're
not observing because the Hal Alpha filters in the shop getting refurbished but once we get that back then we'll be
back on back on on track with that wonderful okay sounds good thank you so
much ran all right thank you well David uh pretty interesting
stuff you know to uh uh to know that we've got amateur astronomers out there
uh able to uh detect uh meteorite impacts on on the moon it's just when he
said that my jaw almost dropped so yeah well great um we will move on uh
at this point to uh another Canadian astronomer Ron breacher Ron uh I'm gonna
bring you on with David and I here we go and uh why is it there's so
many Great Canadian astronomers I have no idea I mean the
skies are may be a little darker up here I don't know nights are longer that's for sure the nights are longer that's
true true it's true and you do have an an incredible Legacy of astronomy up
there so yeah nice to see the Dominion Observatory represented here um back in
uh I think it was in in 2017 Warren Keller and I taught a
workshop at the Dominion Observatory oh wow Royal Dominion Observatory and it is
really quite a place we drove up there and at the top of the Drive you're in
the morning at least we were above the clouds uh and you know in part in areas
where the clouds parted you could see the lake and the trees down there it was really quite beautiful wow yeah very
cool so what do you have for us tonight here here on well you you always create
great opportunities for me I look forward to seeing the themes of these things and uh I got to say when I saw
this one about the Sun and life I thought maybe it's a bit outside my
wheelhouse but you know one of the best ways to learn about something is to try to explain it to somebody else that's
right so uh I spent some time that's why David came up with this theme so that we would do yeah well I spent some time
thinking about this and uh I'm I'm GNA start with a with a really simple
question let me share my screen okay and uh I'll bring up my slides and can you
just confirm for me that you see the slide it's full screen great so there's the question where's
the Sun and um here's how I'm going to talk about
that I'm going to basically put it in the context of our theme the Sun and life because some of that really um
really made me think and then I'm going to explore where is the Sun and you're
going to see that that really depends on the Conta that we look at and we'll expand the view to the sort of cosmic
neighborhood and then talk about a really big question which is life in the cosmos and uh any conversation about
life the universe and everything would be incomplete without some quotes from
Douglas Adams if you don't know who Douglas Adams is he's the author of The
Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy right the restaurant at the end of the universe
and one of my favorites so long and thanks for all the
fish so here's the theme that Scott presented us tonight um it was talking
about the connection between the lifegiving Sun and the flourishing of
life on Earth and uh you quoted Scott you quoted Carl
Sean um the idea that the sun is an ordinary star really sticks out to me
because you know for a long time as I'm going to show you in a minute we all thought the sun was really special and
in a way it is in a Sentimental way it is you know the way your house is
special to you it's a special place but really in the context of the universe is
it really special I don't know maybe it's like Carl said its Destiny is
typical of the billions of others that are scattered across the Val fastness of the Milky Way it's
ordinary so these are some ideas I'm going to want to explore so here's here's the question
where is the sun this is a a photo I took of an eclipse in in uh October
2014 and uh here the sun was behind the
Moon from our line of sight I bet you can't see it on a small screen but I can
see that this dark part of the Moon
that's projecting onto the sun is not smooth it's all bumpy because of the
mountains on the moon this isn't a silhouette this is one body passing in front of another and that's pretty
cool so here's the first Douglas Adams quote that I thought I would bring up and it's I refuse to answer that
question on the grounds that I don't know the answer well sometimes we don't know the whole
answer and we still have to think about the question sometimes thinking about questions is more important than knowing
the answer maybe we'll get the answers One Day by the way the 42 in the background if you know Douglas answer uh
Douglas Adams that's the answer to life the universe and
everything so where is the sun when I was thinking about this it occurs to me that it depends on who you ask and it
really depends when you ask ask and the context is is really important and in a
15minute talk of which I've already spent probably five minutes I can't
cover 10,000 years of human history in putting the sun in context but we can
talk about a couple of Big Ideas um and the top one
shows uh what's often thought to be an earlier model of the solar system where
the Earth is at the Center that's the blue ball and all the planets go around
uh the Earth the moon also goes around the Earth and the Sun the yellow uh dot
in the top dry is also going around the earth so the Earth is literally the
center of the universe the other main model heliocentrism puts the Sun at the center
of the solar system all the planets go around it and you can still see that the Moon is still going around the earth the
way it was in the other model so this is a a diagram from 15 or
a picture from 1568 uh by Bartholomew valo and at that
time in 1568 so mid 16th century the Earth was still literally at the center
of the universe as far as people were concerned but still in the middle of the
the 15th or 16th century we had this shift in Paradigm to the capern model of
the universe where the Suns at the center so uh this is called the cernic
revolution in some of the stuff that I was reading but it turns out that it was
actually first proposed much earlier it was proposed in the 3 Century by arist
starus of Samos but it never caught on
until 12 centuries later 13 centuries
later so where's the sun now I'm trying to just sort of synthesize my
understanding and I I think it would correlate well with most people who are
studied experts in the field I've gained a lot of my knowledge um by osmosis and
reading and and learning what I had to because like I said I'm I'm often expected to to teach but I think here's
some big picture stuff that we could probably agree on first of all the sun is near the center of the solar system
it's not right at the center because there's the whole Berry Center thing that the planets pull on the Sun as much
as the sun pulls on the plan or not as much but uh in opposition to the sun
pulling on the planet so they all move around a Common Center the sun is
similar to many other stars in the Milky Way and it also o came from a star
cluster whose members have dissipated over eons of time we can't really
identify those members anymore with a lot of accuracy but there is that um um
hypothesis I guess it is that the sun was one of several stars born in a
cluster the sun's not at the center of the universe or even at the center of the Galaxy in fact it doesn't
necessarily make a whole lot of sense to talk about the center of the universe we might be
at the center of the observable universe but that's a different thing um there's
a lot of galaxies in the observable universe we're coming up to another Douglas Adams quote you know so there's
a lot of galaxies in the observable universe and you know our sun isn't
going to live forever one day it's going to become a beautiful planetary nebula now I'm going to tell you all
this stuff in different way so let's start with Douglas
Adams space is Big you won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is
I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemists but that's just peanuts to space so that's what I
was saying Space is really really huge and there's a a lot of stuff in it
there's a lot of stars just like ours and you know this is we're going to have to talk about the big question soon
about life elsewhere in the universe where is the sun well maybe it
came from a star cluster like the PES you know we only see the ples like this
because we're looking at it now in thousands of years those Stars
will have separated they'll have drifted apart and the dust that they are
Illuminating won't be it it won't be reflecting as brightly so gradually this
will just fade from sight where is the
sun well the sun is part of the Milky Way galaxy and the Milky Way galaxy has
some similarities to this other big Galaxy in our local group The Andromeda
galaxy and our sun isn't even in the middle of our galaxy it's often a spiral
arm partway to the edge and orbiting around the
center and of course our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are not the only
galaxies out there so where is the sun our galaxy is part of the Virgo
cluster of galaxies which is part of a supercluster of galaxies this is a
picture of the Perseus Galaxy cluster I shot it just a few weeks ago on the only clear night that I had clear couple of
nights I had in December and it's yeah it's about 300
and some million light years away and you can see all kinds of detail
in these galaxies and each of these galaxies could be as big as our Milky
Way and have as many sunlike stars as our galaxy has in it so where's the Sun
and you know I talked about I talked about the fact that our son isn't going to live
forever one day our sun is the right size that one day it's probably going to
become a planetary nebula and these are all planetary nebula that I've imaged in the last year
year or two maybe and they all at the heart of them
have a star a star that was something like our
sun that ran out of fuel and sort of coughed off this shell
of gas mostly hydrogen and oxygen some suer
2 uh and now the leftover star you can see it very clearly at the center of of
the dumbbell sorry of the uh Al nebula in the upper right you can see that
Central Star really clearly um that star the energy from
that star is Illuminating the gas and as that star cools and becomes a
cinder these nebulas are going to Fade Into Obscurity and you'll never see them
again so where's the sun this is what's going to happen to
our sun far far into the future so let's get to the question of is there
life in the universe and you know I could talk for an hour about the Drake equation and I wrote a cool article a
while ago where I took the form of the Drake equation but I applied it to a different question so instead of asking
about how many planets are there with intelligent life I calculated the number
of productive nights that an amateur astronomer could expect to get Imaging
given on ter weather however the Drake equation was
developed by John Drake as a way of thinking
about how many other planets like ours with intelligent life there could be
just in the Milky Way and that last thing I said is really important the
Drake equation just talks about the number of planets in our
galaxy with intelligent life we just looked at a huge Galaxy cluster of a
thousand galaxies and it's just one of millions of clusters of galaxies
so here's our last Douglas atom's quote there's no point in using the word
impossible to describe something that has clearly happened right we know life can
develop it developed here with the help of the Sun
so it can happen elsewhere I'm waiting for the evidence I
want to see the evidence but I believe it's worth continuing to look for it because I
think we'll find it it's it's worth pursuing so we might
not have all the answers now but don't let don't let not having
the answers stop you from talking about the question so where's the sun it's in all kinds of
places depending on your context and uh I hope I've given you a few things to think about if you ever
want to find me look for my articles in sky and Telescope you can find me at
astrod talk.c I teach workshops with my friend Warren Keller at masters of pix
insight.com and you can reach me by email at AR breacher rogers.com and Scott
thank you for having me on I love the way you make me think about stuff so
thank you well you think deeply about this stuff it's awesome I really do yeah
I appreciate it too Ron and you reminded me that another
opportunity has come up Sean Walker I believe uh is one of the editors at Sky
and Telescope um he he saw the art I wrote for astronomy magazine or something but
asked that I put together a little something for sky and Telescope about my Milky Way Photography so I may be
joining you as uh a writer in sky and Telescope I'm looking forward to reading
it I'll be looking forward to seeing your work yeah I'm you know there's lots that
I still want to write for astronomy magazine and David out there who may be listening
um I have to be careful to keep the themes from cross the streams from
Crossing um I definitely don't believe in regurgitating work that was
handcrafted for one and then putting it into the other um but as vast as the
universe is I'm pretty sure there will be enough for us to write about for
years yeah with every new thing that happened s um ironically I have I have a thought for
an article see if someone picks it up we've talked about planetary alignment and we've talked about the occultation
of Mars it turns out both also happened in 2022 and that's when I have images of
it it was too cloudy to get him this year so of course I posted those on
social media but uh but yeah there's there's plenty of ideas around and um
know I enjoyed how deeply you how you presented the uh the Sun and
not as just an orb but its Origins and where it is and you know where it will
end up and where we may end up um that's
uh you I really enjoyed the uh listening to that so uh so yeah um great
presentation um as always Scott I will be dropping back into Shadows cuz
otherwise I'll drown out everyone I'll drown out Professor uh Jaffer Kareem for
being able to give his presentation because I'll talk forever but good to
see you again Rob we will let you uh introduce him so thank you very much I
will do my best all right you want to introduce it's been a professor I will I'll do I'll start the introduction and
then I'll have you fill in details Scott but uh I know Kareem as a fellow
University lowbrow astronomer uh when he joined I also know him as a fellow Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada member he was one of the uh gentlemen instrumental
in uh pushing me over the edge to become a rasque member I like the pushing you
over the edge part that that's that's a good that's a good uh visual yeah go do it and north of the
Border it was pushing you north of the Border yeah and I've I've got trips to Canada
that I have to take because of this so um I have to prepare but um yeah Kareem
has uh given several talks I know your professor I think Montreal University is
where you teach if I got that right University of Montreal no John APPA College Don abot College okay see Scott
this is where you're going to be coming in to make some corrections but uh but yeah a good friend of mine anytime
there's an astronomical event and I'm able to um take images or partake of it or
even when I was at Alcon we stay in contact and um I post things online and
Kareem is there Professor Kareem is there to uh both encourage and critique
and support uh work that I have done and the work that he has done of course over the
years far surpasses the few years I've had in the field of astronomy so
um with no further Ado coming from all right well I'll say something
about Kareem ja Jafar the reason why we
all want him to be our professor of astronomy is he it is said that he has a
unique student directed teaching
method is that uh is that something that you developed over the years or is this
just did this come natural to you I I think this might actually be a completely separate uh presentation at
some point but it it was how I started this particular course is I decided from the start that
there's so much happening all the time so many discoveries so many tools and it's so Dynamic the universe
the night sky the whole area of astronomy and astrophysics that it made no sense to have a static course and if
you're going to have a dynamic course then you should have the students have a say in where you go what depth you go
what order you go which things they want to have a little bit of control on and
exploration of and which part they want you to deliver lecture style or lab
style and it felt natural for this particular area of study to make it as
unique or as student directed as possible and then it just turned out nobody else has done this so then I had
to develop the tools myself for most of it that's wonderful yeah it's described
as just in time and uh uh student directed it just
sounds like it'd be such a thrill to actually be in the class and and be involved you know it must be very
empowering for those students I think I hope so I mean we find a lot of the students even if they don't go on in
astronomy or space science they still come back out to Rask events to share
the night sky so it stays with many of them right and that's kind of what you want you want them to look up and have a
sense of at least a reference point a place to look for Where is the son right
something something to work from and that's something that a lot of us didn't have growing up right we we were
struggling to find that that's right we were all taught to go work in factories is what we were taught to do I I'll say
that you know you had Dennis on earlier and you and I have talked about this and Ian and I as well of the alliance of
historic observatories yeah I think this is actually really crucial because that
was the bit of a link that many of us had in the early stages was knowing that
there's immense centuries Millennia of history behind the understanding that we
have and that it has evolved over time as Ron was pointing out but the tools
that you used in the 1700s that were used in the you know 5,000 BC can still
be used now to gain some appreciation of the night sky that's right that's right
oh that's very cool all right so I'll let you uh now you came on to talk about
the Sun and all of its wavelengths and uh uh so I'll let you get to that but
thanks for coming on global star party and making this special my pleasure Scott and thanks as always uh to you for
putting it together but to doid as well for being the inspiration that sets us off um I am really happy uh to be on
again this year and uh Happy New Year to everyone was nice to be on for the last one of
2024 and it's kind of unique coming on and talking about the sun in life as the
sun is going through the maximum of its solar cycle and we've had a chance over
this last year to see a total solar eclipse to see Aurora to see incredible
flares and then to see the Parker space probe kiss the surface or the the the
atmosphere of the Sun at proximity that many of us didn't think would actually be able to happen um I pondered for a
bit doing a talk on Parker but I decided not to and I'm glad I did because that video at the start was perfect um I
wanted to speak a little bit about the Sun but I always like starting off with
a bit of an acknowledgement that as I mentioned we are not the only ones to look at the sky or to appreciate the sky
or to observe the sky and not only is this the first GSP of 2025 we just had
yesterday the first full moon of 2025 and the settlers called it the wolf Moon
and you know I belong to several Outreach groups and in one of my Outreach groups somebody actually was
very dismissive of the idea of the names of the Moon and I kind of take the names
of the Moon to heart because I can understand what's happening in nature by looking at these names right the wolf
Moon we know that the settlers would hear the cries of the wolf on the long cold nights in the middle of winter when
they were hungry and there was no prey to be found because everybody was burrowed in for those cold nights and
then you know that in the winter time for us in the northern hemisphere the Moon is not only up for these longer
Nights from Sunset to Sunrise up to 18 hours for some of us
and all night for others uh north of the Arctic Circle you're seeing it at a high
altitude that you typically wouldn't see the moon at in the summertime so the
idea of the Moon conveying this spirit guide for the night that's captured in
poetry by Longfellow and captured in a lot of the First Nation stories also
matches what you would expect to see when you see this first full moon and
then for yesterday we had the Mars occultation which everybody was really excited about now in Montreal we had no
view of the Moon we had nothing but clouds and snow all yesterday night and
a part of me wants to be very miserable and complain about that and a part of me says look we got comets we got a total
solar eclipse we got an aurora there's got to be a buffer to not complain for a little while so I'm happy to vicariously
live through my fellow astronomy Outreach people from all over the world who shared their views of the Mars
occultation and that was very much appreciated on Saturday night we hosted a talk that was the other direction that
I thought I might go which is something that Ron alluded to with the Drake equation which is the idea of searching
for life and what we look for when we try to understand how life could exist
in the universe in places other than here on Earth and we hosted Dr Michael
Wong uh he is the Carnegie fellow for astrophysics in Washington DC and he was
incredible the talk was great he's a Star Trek uh aici afficionado is like
not even anywhere close to a strong enough word he runs a podcast Strange New World he talks lower decks he talks
the history of Star Trek he even talked about how the Drake equation was used by Jee Roddenberry and I'm not going to
spoil it but if you want to know more about what this talk was and The Incredible Journey he took us through
his journey into astrobiology and the work that he is currently doing
the YouTube link is here on the screen and you can always find our our different public events at
youtube.com/ Rask monreal but the topic for today is the Sun and when we're talking about the Sun
the first thing that pops into my mind is a song and it's a song that I play
for my kids even before I got into astronomy as a profession and it's a
song They Might Be Giants and it's called why does the sun shine and the song starts off the sun is a massive
incandescent gas and it's incredibly catchy this song and we would play it
again and again with a bunch of other science songs and kids songs and they absolutely adored this song and every
time I talk the sun it pops into my mind I have a little sun buddy at school and whenever I look at it as I walk into my
office the refrain from this song pops into my mind and they published this song in
1998 now I was starting my uh my grad well I was in my graduate career at that
time so I didn't actually even know this song had come out I didn't know the group very well I knew there you know
Istanbul was Constantinople song and uh I knew their philosopher song but I didn't know this
one I didn't have the audience for it once I had the audience for it I fell in love with the idea a of making science
so accessible to little kids and then I found out in 2009 that they published a
reversal of the song to correct some of the factual errors and what they put in
this CD and DVD compilation called here comes science is why does the sun really
shine and the first part of the refrain instead of the sun is a mass of
incandescent gas cuz that's wrong it's the sun is a miasma of incandescent
plasma and in the lyrics of the song they go on to correct a few of the
misconceptions that they had actually embraced in the first song and identified that the science that they
were sharing was fantastic and it got people really infused and understanding and appreciating the
Sun but there were mistakes as we understood more as we
learn more about the sun are understanding has to change but also what we teach has to change and evolve
and that's why in my course I start off the very first week with this picture of
the Sun and this picture of the sun is used both specifically to talk about the
Sun and to talk about astronomy as a whole and so I talk about the sun in
different wavelengths and how each wavelength of light from ultraviolet even going to X-ray and gamma ray
through the visible spect and then going into infrared brings different bits of information because it
highlights different energy signatures and each one gives you a window to different processes and different parts
of the sun's structure and we talk about how you can use you know narrow bound wavelength like hydrogen Alpha
specifically to focus on just some parts of the sun's behavior and be able to see
the prominences and even sometimes see beautiful filaments curling and see some of the granularity of the Photosphere
and then you can use X-ray and gamma ray to really see the energy coming out through the
corona but then I also talked to them about how once you bring in all of these
different views all these different perspectives it's only then that you can have a full picture of the Sun and in a
similar way all of these 40 students coming from different backgrounds
different physics courses they've taken different understandings of what
astronomy is what space science is what astrophysics is different books read different movies watched different songs
listened to going off in different career paths they all add a perspective that
when we bring everybody's view together our understanding of the topic will become richer and then towards the end
of the course we connect that to professional astronom using space telescopes groundbased telescopes
bringing in citizen science and amateur astronomy and hobbyists and artists and
how once you bring in all of those different perspectives then you truly start to
feel like you're connecting with the subject matter and so I use this picture of the sun across different
wavelengths as a way to set the stage for why my course is set up the way it
is but also why Outreach and the way in which we do citizen science is so
valuable these days in the way in which we've moved forward with astronomy and astrophysics but then the question still
is there is why the sun why do we pay so much attention to this relatively middle
not even middle it's actually kind of a on the smaller end of a yellowish dwarf star you know it's it there's it's not
very giant or great and it's fairly calm compared to many other stars and when we
look within our solar system it we can understand the importance of the sun because all of the planets together make
up such a small portion less than 1% of the total mass of the entire solar
system everything else is in that sun and of the rest of all of the planets
and all of the other solar system objects meteors comets moons all of
those barely match the mass of Jupiter which is nothing compared to the match of the Sun so when we look at the sun in
our context of course it's what we have to study it's the largest influence it
gives off all of this energy which provides us with the source of life here on Earth but then when you compare the
Sun to the other stars that we see in the night sky especially in this winter night
sky the sun is minuscule the little soul it's smaller than Syria
it's tiny compared to arct tus we teach the students using the Big Dipper to Arc to AR and then we've been examining and
watching Beetle juu over the last few years as it seemed to dim but not quite and maybe it has a doughnut of gas and
dust around it then you have beautiful antaris which is huge and bright and these aren't even the largest stars in
our local neighborhood so when we start talking about the Stars
why wouldn't we study these instead and in the video and in some of the comments
and some of the discussions that we've had already tonight it's come up a few times that the sun is the only one that
we can currently go and try to visit which the Parker space probe is doing
now but it's also the one that we can get the most data on the most
information on with the least amount of dissipation of the light the dissipation
of the information and the shifting of some of the light rays from the distances and the speeds and the motion
of all these different stars that we would be identifying and because it's a
relatively good main sequence star relatively calm if we understand our
star and then compare it to these other stars we learn more about Stellar
processes as a whole based on our understanding of our sun and Cecilia pay started us off in that direction by
characterizing the composition of the Sun by being able to examine the Spectra of the sun using those glass plates that
the Harvard computers those amazing women were able to analyze back in the
earlier 1900s but they didn't start looking at the sun you and I going out looking at
sunspots doid tracking sunspots we're building on knowledge that was even done
by Galileo in 1612 in fact you can actually see Sunspot observations in some of the old
works of the Arab scientists like Ian hyam and even in some of the manuscripts
and Scrolls in ancient China you can see that they identified either through
camera obscura or through pinhole projections they were able to identify these behaviors of something some sort
of a blemish on the sun surface so one of the things I discussed
with my students is what tools can we use now to better examine the Sun and my
favorite tool is the sdo the Solar Dynamics Observatory and this is why I told Scott you know what I really want
to come on tonight to talk about the sdo because in late November the pipe one of the water pipes
at the Stanford lab the data center that collects the data from the sdo and
Soho it burst and it destroyed some of the computer Banks and as a result all
of the data from the sdo was offline from November 26th I believe was the
last date that we have data from all the way up to now just last week sdo came
back online so now we can go back through and this is a picture from earlier today of the Sun and that's that
Sunspot cluster that doid referred to all the way back at the start of our Global star party tonight that's just
coming around the limb that we can now watch and enjoy over the next little bit
and using the sdo and this was done back on November 1st before this whole pipe
burst you can actually track over the span of a day the movement of these
sunspots from morning to night you can do this over the span of multiple days
and I sometimes have students do this as a project or I have them use all of the
different filters that are available to examine the sun in all of those different wavelengths and start to
understand how the features relate to the energy involved and use those specific wavelength signatures to
understand the chemical signature that they're actually seeing everything from
looking in very very uh far ultraviolet the 94 angstroms going in toward 1600 angstrom
so now we're approaching visible light you can see a difference in the behavior that is highlighted and these were all
taken today at the same time and you can actually see up here in the left top
left corner that Sunspot group coming around and so you can see that that's
not the only behavior on the surface of the Sun but on that previous picture that's kind of the thing that was
standing out to us then you can learn to compile and bring those images together and
highlight multiple different wavelengths to really start to see the dynamic
processes and then we kind of connect that to some of the magnetic field behavior and we connect that a little
bit to some of the actual energy coming out in either flares or projections or the coronal holes that we can see open
up when flares come towards Earth and then we can connect it to Aurora that you are seeing as well but what
sometimes is also interesting is to use other types of tools than EM wave and we
can actually examine the magnetogram connected into one emwave picture and
together now start to see some of the surface Behavior compared to where the
magnetic field is actually strong and active and so this is some of the
richness that is now available to everyone anybody no matter your
background can go on the Solar Dynamics Observatory site and start to play
around with these look at these images learn from these images and start to understand the Sun
and when you start to look at it there's different things you can do I will have students some years who are if they show
a real interest in solar astronomy I will have them go back
through a year and look for a sunspot that goes from the Western limb all the
way around and see if they can identify the fact that the rotation
speed of the sun depends on the latitude where it is is versus the equator and so
they have to track how long it takes that Sunspot to cross over the visible
surface of the sun which would be 180° with the rotation of the Sun in our
perspective they also can see the sunspots always happening in pairs and
then they can start to count the sunspots and they could even try to create one of the butterfly diagrams
that shows where the actual positions of the sunspots change over the span of
each of these 11year cycles that the Sun goes through now connecting that into the
actual what's happening below the surface and creating all this tension in the magnetic field that causes the
actual flipping of the magnetic poles that's beyond the students being
able to do on their own at the introductory college level but using these tools to just be able to measure
or count or ident identify behavior of the individual Sunspot pairs well within
their goal and so then they can compare to models and they can see that most years are models showing both that
11-year cycle and a couple of longer cycles that change the amplitude of the
solar maximum we've been fitting very nicely to those curves for well over 70
years and it's just this current cycle 25 that seems to have flipped much much
higher than our initial expectation and so we have
other models that we are now employing to try to figure out if we had the wrong
model all along this model from um the predictions that we had that were
shifted from the NOA and NASA and in fact we actually need to use a new
treatment that was put to forward about a year and a half ago uh by Macintosh at
all and they've put together an idea and it's an interesting idea that uh the
larger cycle skips every now and then and so we're going to see whether or not this matches with cycle 26 and cycle 27
so now over the next 25 30 years we're going to see whether we understand the
sun better now whether there's an anomaly in the current cycle or whether
we are actually missing something much more deep in what's happening under the surface of the
Sun one of the neatest things that we did and I had found an image like this a
few years back of a set of solar images all taken in the same wavelength all
taken on the exact same date year after year to show the difference in the sun's
Behavior as you go through solar maximum and I found this incredibly astonishing
so I I've had students recreate this for different solar cycles and it's just beautiful to see how visibly the sun's
surface being disturbed at solar maximum versus solar minimum is visible to the
to the students with data that is cleanly and freely
accessible and then the partner uh Observatory Soho I love using Soho specifically for
certain types of animations so I thought to end today I'm going to show you and
so I'm just going to share my screen one more time I want to show you a specific tool so that if you want to play with it
at home you can I'm going to remove us out of the slideshow I'm just going to open up the Soho website and if you go
into data and archive and you go into the movie theater you can choose
different types of images and different date segments so if I pick C3
and I go for just this last week January 8th to today and I generate out a video
of the sun under this image what it gives me is it gives me a coronograph
image of the Sun for one week and so if I press play what you're going to see is
you see the solar wind coming out you see the occasional little outbursts come
out from different sides a little bit of gas and then you see the comet that we were talking about and it's peeking in
right now cuz it's so close to the Sun so even if I'm stuck in clouds and I'm
stuck here in the northern hemisphere where I don't have a great view of this Comet using these Space Telescope
tools safely I can get to enjoy how bright and beautiful this comet is in a
completely different fashion so that's my view on the sun tonight Scott back to
you wonderful wonderful uh I really love that
visualization of all those uh images of the Sun from uh you know solar minimum
to solar maximum it's kind of like something you just want to have hanging on your wall you know exactly I actually
I I I talked to a student and I suggested to them because they were talking about making a t-shirt for the
space Club a couple of years ago and I said you know that should be your T-shirt and so what they were thinking
is they're planning a big alumni thing for some of the space club members from a few years ago because during Co they
couldn't get together in person they're thinking of doing that as kind of a little gift to each other wow see if it
happen very cool very cool one thing that I would like to say is that Kareem
I think that was the best lecture I have ever heard you give I was really moved by it thank you doid it reminded me back
to when I first was starting in astronomy and I saw that crazy eclipse on October the 2nd
1959 and I kept on thinking well I'm going to be observing stuff at night the
planets the moon and the stars what about in the daytime maybe I
should be looking at the sun and I started looking at the sun and uh on
March the 1st 1963 I made the decision to try to make weekly observations of
the sun when I got back from Denver and back in Montreal I changed that to daily
observations that I've been doing ever since anyway I was giving a lecture at
the uh Denver Astronomical
Society and one of the uh Advanced members there overheard me saying that I
had been observing the sun pretty much daily since 1962 and occasionally since
as early as 1959 and he wrote to me and we started a correspondence and he said if that is
true you are now the aavso premier lifetime Observer of
sunspots you have beaten her Bluff Y and so he gave me some homework to do I had
to come out with a lifetime record of my observations of the Sun that is
stretched from 1959 all the way to today and he's got that now but it took
me about six weeks to do to prepare the archive and I'm still doing it and uh
but the archive itself is finished but I'm still doing the daily solar observations so are the solar
observations part of the observing notes of yours that have been archived now yeah yeah in fact I use the archived
observing logs to get the uh like to get the solar data from each
day and it actually took a little while to figure it out but I was pretty
consistent over the course of my life and uh I'm I kind of enjoy doing
that it was kind of fun but anyway anyway Kareem wonderful inspiring
beautiful lecture thank you and congratulations my pleasure thank you do and I just wanted to say because you
brought up the idea like the lifetime of of observations one of the things that
always stuns me and you and I have talked about this a couple of times is the historical
observations the tools that they had versus the Precision that was used is
incredible and that's one of the things that it's very difficult to communicate
that or to Showcase that to students these days is how difficult it was to
make these observations in a detailed fashion and so bringing forward those images from Galileo or you know the the
Galilean Moon images from early observers and understanding how precise
the angular measurements were that they used and the references that they used
and I show them excerpts of some of your observing notes that you have in our rasque Montreal Library collection uh
when they come up so that they can see that it is possible in this day and age to stay that detail and to capture that
level of precision so that when you look back at it that's actually what you saw with your eyes it's not just a sketch or
an approximation it's as close to what your eyes visually saw I want to tell you that your notes
and your your your your handwritten observations that we have we're still we're still
using well thank you thank you Karim anyway thanks I just wanted to say that
my pleasure well I'm just kind of standing in the
glow of this so anyhow thank you so much uh Kareem
and uh looking forward to having you on uh many more future Global star parties
that's great happy too thanks thanks thank you so much well David our next speaker is the
u i I always call him the David aturo of the Moon uh uh and that is uh our friend
Robert Reeves uh you know a lot of people don't know that uh Robert
um was a um you know a popularizer and
teacher of astrophotography he's written books about it uh and this guy like you
uh has devoted his life to astronomy and uh sharing that knowledge so uh Robert
thank you for coming on global star party and my pleasure yeah it's great to have you
on well before uh um Karim uh disappears
if he has to leave for any reason I wanted to tell tell you that uh regarding the Solar Dynamics Observatory
yeah we notice that it's been offline for a while and just recently popped up but I wanted you to know that U every
day um I take images from the solar Dynamic um laboratory regarding the sun
particularly sunspots and also information about Aurora and I uploaded to the International Space Station oh
wonderful yeah Don petett up there who's one of the crew member up there is very
interested in observing the Sun from the space station uh he does this on his own
it's not a not a NASA program it's something he does on his free time and uh he also is very involved in
photographing Aurora and everybody um seen the amazing um um animations that
they beam down from space of the Aurora well these are are mostly created by Dawn
um I alert him when when and where for Aurora and when and where for
interesting things on the Sun so we're real happy to see that uh Stanford finally got their water leak fixed and
uh got things back online because we were having to use the gong image for a while instead of the uh the other image
it's not as versatile and honestly like that those Aurora pictures from the space station on January 1st were just
incredible like I loved that that was that was fantastic yeah we have a lot of fun with that uh um I'm very privileged
to be allowed to have direct contact with the space station right here from my desk here at
home and another thing you were mentioning about the different rotation speeds of sunspots yeah many years ago
my son's 40 now but when he was in grade school I encouraged him to do a science fair project uh where he uh he U traced
out the sunspots on solar projection and U saw the various rot speeds of them and
uh um he did well on that science fair project so um I know exactly what you
were talking about there you should if you haven't already you should either yourself or with your son publish that
in one of the astronomical League newsletters so that people see that you know this is something that you can do
as citizen science because one of the things that I don't know if you've seen the paper but they're they're asking
whether there's a change in rotation speeds right before the magnetic pole
flip and this was a proposal as a possible model
explanation of what's Happening below the surface when the magnetic poles flip
it was written up I believe about 14 years ago but it has not actually been
studied or verified and so it came back up in our discussion groups under the uh
the astronomy Outreach Educators and a few of us are like okay you know what let's let's actually start seeing this
if we can plot near the equatorial band what the Sunspot rotation rate appears
to be and see if we can get this over the next 20 years but also let's go
backwards let's see if we can pull out the old data off of sdo and start plotting those old ones out yeah
checking the uh the difference in the hysteresis of the magnetic fields that come up and make the uh the sunspots
interesting project yeah well okay um well I I talk about that other
big bright light in the sky the Moon instead of the Sun but uh um uh having a
um conversation with myself what to talk about about the Moon tonight because we've been doing this for so long Global
star party I'm beginning to forget what I've already talked about I don't want to repeat myself and then I'm looking at
my U main desktop he it again yeah well um I'm looking at my
main dustop monitor the one over on the other side of my desk and uh suddenly it struck me well
it's right there in front of me I have this series of about 45 46 images of the
moon that U very very high resolution but I scale them all down to a a 1920 uh
resolution which is the resolution of most computer screens and um I use them as sequential screen savers on my U my
computer once a minute it'll Loop into a different image of the Moon uh every now and then I offer these to people who
want them and um all they have to do is send me their email and I send them all of these images in three batches of
email um they're like I said they're sized 1920 horizontal resolution and uh
anybody wants to load them up in um a file in their computer and use them as a
rotating screen saver um I let them let them have them so let me go to my screen
share and uh bring up this slide which I will show first
which has my email address now we're going to go through these until um Scott
says okay time's up we'll carry on next month but U anyway like I said the lunar
screen saver package sized for 1920 screen resolution uh send us three separate emails request them from me
Robert re 400 at gmail.com I'd be happy to forward them to you so uh let me uh
briefly scroll through each one at about two seconds a piece so you can see what they are and then we're going to go
explore them one by one and see what the details are in them so you understand
what the geology is in this this package of images that I will freely give
away kind of a random tour around the and I didn't specifically pick them for any reason other than the fact that
there are ones that uh were higher resolution some of these um three 5,000
pixels um across in resolution and um um
U chose those and then scale them back down because U they did have very great
detail in them get my cursor out of the way
and just taking lazy orbits around the Moon taking a look out the port window and taking a snap with a Hasselblad
every now and then and uh beaming it back to
Earth now all of these pictures were really taken from my backyard um with various telescopes Celestron 8 Celestron
11 uh skywatcher 180 back skywatcher 20 at stops on end um I am not sure if any
from my c14 are in this batch I think I put all these together before I got the
c14 but um I said if you're interested in these as your that's cool screen
saver just give me a shout and they'll be
yours how many hours of work do you think are in this set um or would you
even guess between the uh taking the images and processing the images uh
easily hundreds um Tony Hallows once told me that it takes him longer to process a
deep Sky image than it does to take it you know and the long exposures and everything most the same with the moon
picture um takes whoops back to the beginning takes um a considerable amount
of time to process a good Moon image because the uh stacking process and the uh uh
um um conse subsequent enhancement of it creates artifacts and um makes things in
the pictures that aren't real and you have to go through and separate out what's real and not real enhance what is
real get rid of what is not real so U you have to understand what the moon actually looks like before you uh really
get down and hammer on these things but U once you have a good idea of what
lunar J ology is really like uh it's not that hard it's just a process it just
you know getting down and grinding on it with Photoshop U getting rid of things
like the false Grays and shadows there are no gray Shadows on the moon they're
black U small craters less than 10 miles in diameter um the stacking process
often creates a false Central peak in the middle of them but the crater that small they don't have Central Peaks so
that you know that little artifact has to go away so uh it's just a process that it
just takes time and over the years about 15 year past 15 years I've got thousands
of hours tied up in this because I literally have a library of several thousand lunar images that's how I was
able to do both of my lunar books uh exploring the moon with Robert Reeves and the uh photographic atlas of the
Moon um just dipping into my library and uh bringing up images uh first one the
quarter moon uh one of the most popular phases of the moon because it's well
placed in the evening sky high enough that the it's not going to set right away it's not so bright that it blinds
you um it's not way over Rising on the western horiz eastern Horizon just at
sundown and you have to wait for it to get up and U interfere with bedtime or anything and uh the quarter phase
puts the uh uh Sunrise right in the middle where there's these contrasting Shadows that let you see uh enormous
detail along the Terminator and U if you know how to U do a little bit of basic
Photoshop work the rest of the Moon you can get good detail out of also even though there are no contrasting Shadows
now what I like about this particular image is the libration of the moon was
such that the moon was rolled all the way to the left now if you're familiar with how the moon
orbits the earth it's it's has an elliptical orbit and because of that elliptical orbit the it creates
a an effect called libration where the moon rocks back and forth and nods up
and down ever so slightly so we don't know for over a period of time we don't just see the 50% of the near Side of the
Moon we can actually see 59% of the Moon some of the far side will creep end of
The View on one side or the other or above the pole or below below the South
Pole in this case we have a good Eastern elong uh favorable Eastern um libration
and we see and hopefully my uh cursor is visible up here this little elliptical
uh Mari patch Mari holum and then here uh
Mari marinus the Border sea here marus Smith ey and then down here uh the model
patch of Mario ell these hug the Horizon on the moon the uh the limb and uh
sometimes pulum marinus and Smith ey Disappear Completely the moon rolls the
other way and we no longer see them um australa is big enough that we never lose sight of it but sometimes we see
more of it sometimes we see less orral completely wraps around to The Far Side of the Moon uh we only say half of it
the rest of it is completely hidden on the far side of the moon or at least hidden from us but uh it's a good
favorable Eastern um libration uh we see these four Maria that are normally
hidden and out of our field of view so uh we uh pay lots of attention like here
we've got serenitas tranquilatus Chum fundus um um
H I knew one of them would disappear out of my uh out of my head um ni yeah nict
darus uh the get to my age sometimes names
just go away for a few minutes and then they pop right back but anyway um we pay attention to all these near side Baria
but uh at uh watch at the favorable vibrations and
see what pops up along the limit of the Moon because these normally you don't see holum named after the German
Explorer 18th century 19th century explorer Alexander Von homol and then
Mari smithi uh named after the English astronomer Smith uh the U beer and
maider in the early uh 18th 19th century named him bolum and then in the mid u u
19th century um Bert and Lee um countered by naming another lunar sea
after an English astronomer little bit of 19th century
Space Race going on uh the northern region of the Moon uh
U the um creers aristotelis and eudoxus right at
Sunset and um one thing I like about this uh this image got real good Shadows
up here that show the square shape of the crater W Bond uh almost looks like U
Earth and embankments of the fortification out in the desert you can almost visualize the uh French Foreign
Legion hold up in this this Fortress in the desert because the the walls appear
so Square uh also up in the northeastern
part of the Moon the craters um Atlas and uh or Hercules and Atlas the two
lunar strong men the uh mythological Greek and ATL uh Greek and
Roman strong strong men the Hercules and Atlas uh Hercules on the on the
uh left here uh deeply shadowed um Atlas almost completely gone in the uh in the
sunset now Atlas is a flua crater and we'll get a better view of it later on
and uh uh see some of the structure of the floor of this particular crater uh moving toward the center of
the Moon North the northern part um Cassini crater reminds me very much of a
bird's nest uh the uh territory around Cassini flooded with with Basalt and uh
the the lava lapped right up to the edge of the crater and later on uh factors in
the Floor of Cassini let Basalt well up from under the crater and fill it from the inside so we have the interior
smoothed out we have the U territory around it smoothed out uh the secondary
craters and crater Rays obliterated by these lava flows and then Cassini a and
be the two craters within it Formed later and they look like eggs nested in
a bird's nest and then U further down here
aerosus crater UD doxis I mean not Udo excuse me that was previous slide um
aoas craters and uh the Caucasus Mountains streaming down here and here
we have the beginnings of the appenine mountains and these are the uh the Eastern Shoreline of Mari embrium the uh
that forms the man of the moon's left eye and here we have a low spot so we have this straight that joins portions
of Mari uh embrium the Sea of rains with uh the Sea of Serenity Mario
serenitas uh moving a little bit further west um we've got aristois and UD doxis
again you for oh almost 50 years I misread the name UD doxis for almost my
entire life I thought that was Exodus and I was quite shocked about 15 years
ago to to discover my uh my self-deception that every time I read that name I translated UD doxis into
Exodus so uh the mind can play tricks but U here's Cassini again our little
birds nest up up in the lunar Alps mountains the rough territory here we see the uh the gash of the Alpine Valley
uh streaming through it and running down the very middle of it this real sinuous
re running down the middle of the valley that real is was only about a half a mile wide and uh that uh theoretically
exceeds the U resolution limits of Earthbound telescopes but uh linear
objects show up very well even though they're small it's the same thing as H
looking off in the distance and seeing telephone wires in the distance you can see the telephone wire because it's long
and linear but if you were looking at an individual tiny object the same
wi you will never find it it's like trying to trying to spot a BB at 100 yards but that telephone wire the same
diameter as that BB you can easily see it so it's the same principle on the moon we can easily see these long narrow
linear features that are smaller than the theoretical resolution limits of our
telescope uh continue in the same area I love this picture I got many many
requests for large prints of this framed print a very popular Christmas gift Cassini
again um um the um uh AOS stillus and
aoas uh very popular region I'm going the wrong way aren't I
there we go um this is what I was meaning um again Cassini um arus Auto
now we've got um Archimedes crater creeping in here sunrises just beginning
to show the the rim of Archimedes and the area in between these three craters
is now name known as sinus lunus the Bay of lunic because in 1959 September of
1959 this is the region where Luna 2 struck the moon the first spacecraft
from Earth to reach the moon foretold that less than 10 years
later Neil Armstrong would set foot on the moon wow yeah uh going north notice
this little Hammer shaped mountain range here I call that Thor's
hammer and U officially it's called python T I believe no no excuse me
python gamma Bon gamma but um Nobody Knows It by that name so I threw a
nickname on it Thor's hammer and I hope it sticks clavus when I was uh young we
thought this was the larg crater on the moon 235 um miles across kilometers across
235 kilometers a huge crater by any standards now it's actually the third
largest on the near side because we're able to take better measurements but U
Down to the lower right of it moretus crater and then from redus it's a hop
skip and a jump down to the South Pole which is going to be interesting region here pretty soon because we're getting
ready to send more moon probes uh in fact we're we're launching tomorrow uh
sending up uh uh two more unmanned spacecraft to explore the moon ahead of
the Artemis program then U down south of glavius we've got blanas grater and uh
claproth and then casadas down below it and these WRA down so close to the uh uh
lower limb fores shorten so much people ignore them but uh they're really fascinating craters in their own right
they're huge they're they're bigger than most of the uh near side craters that we pay attention to like uh Plato cernus
Tao oops wrong way and speaking of cernus
um has the second largest Ray structure on the moon uh we're looking straight
down on it from Earth our perspective is a direct overhead view of cernus so it gives us this marvelous view of what we
call a comp Le Lex crater a crater large enough that the Dynamics of the impact
uh rebound the the subsurface Rock and pushes it up as a central Peak and at
the same time the uh the crater is so big that the strength of the uh uh lunar
crust isn't sufficient uh to hold the crater walls up so they collapse and
Tumble down into the crater into a series of of benches but um highlighting
cernic is of course the second largest Ray structure on the moon uh just splattered out in all directions a lot
of it scattered across Mari embrium to the north down across Oceanus proelium
to the South so it uh contrasts very nicely against the uh dark Luna
Maria and U this this Ray structure um earned cernus the name the monarch of
the Moon back when the telescope was first U applied to the moon and uh cerus
maintains a good bit of character even at low Sun elevation when the uh Ray structures are not easily seen uh the
ray structures are main SE seen mainly under hon elevation but here we see how
um the U mountain ranges uh separate cernus from the uh Plains of Marriam to the
north and uh we can easily see the reating streams of secondary craters
spreading out from from cernus ah um I was saying later on we'll
be able to see the interior of Atlas crater which was earlier shown in in deep deep Shadow here at the bottom
again Hercules and Atlas the two lunar strong men and we see a atlas itself
kind of looks like a like one of Grandma's oatmeal cookies the interior has been pushed up by lava uh
subsurface lava pressure forces the the floor up and partially flooded the
interior of the crater almost covering its Central Peak and uh as the floor Rises it crumbles and cracks and creates
a series of of reals within the crater then up above it uh this Plato lookalike
indon crater completely flooded with lava itself no longer see the central Peak most of the chist walls is hidden
and then go off to the Horizon here's that Mari hulum that we saw earlier here the
libration is tipped it so it's right on the limb in the previous picture we saw it completely separated from the limb as
an ellipse but here it's rolling around the Horizon and uh extending onto The
Far Side a view of two very familiar craters
but the sunset Shadows have uh disguise them to where um people um
don't recognize them if they if they take a quick peek in the telescope the one up at the
top is fracastorius crater which is on the southern shore
of Marin narus and then uh uh along the bottom the other deeply shadowed one
Piccolo Mei which is at the uh Far Eastern end of the alai scarp which arcs
around Mario narus I am particularly fond of this
full moon shot because it is one of the first lunar pictures that I
electronically took uh before I'd been using a Nikon film camera and every
picture that I took with film can be thrown in the trash because it just doesn't cut it compared to our our
modern Digital Imaging but this is the first one I took with one of the old to you Phillips Phillips to few webcams
gosh over 20 years ago uh this is actually a 40f frame Mosaic that to you
came had a very small image sensor and when you put it on the Prime Focus of a
ceston 8 you're looking at like about 140th of the lunar surface so this is a
rather elaborate Mosaic I took one night and pieced it all together in Photoshop before I ever discovered um cute things
like Photo merge and all those other things that we can easily make mosaics with nowadays but the detail in this was
was shocking to me and it's what got me uh really interested in um pursuing
lunar photography again uh electronically and uh along the U
Eastern side we can see it's not quite full moon so we see the shadows of uh uh
the Cordillera Mountains and the u u Rook mountains that surround Mari
Oriental it almost looks like there's a slight dent on the circular Side of the
Moon and this is the orienti Basin and another shot of the same area
but um not as good a libration marori andal has rolled around to the far side
but we can see lacis Veris and um um
like asomia the U rib of balt um lacis verus
the lake of spring lacis atomia the lake of of autumn U that uh Arc around the
U Oriental Basin but like I said the libration is poor here so the actual
Mario orientalis is hidden in this case a Grimaldi crater up here uh big dark
spot uh classically called a crater today we know it is actually a small
Basin uh it's a double ring Basin in fact so uh Grimaldi mapped for 400 years
as a crater actually now has a dual personality we we we regard it as a crater and uh uh various other small
smaller craters down here completely flooded with with mult the crater Billy
for instance they're Plato lookalikes but slightly
smaller ordinary crators that have been flooded from inside from underneath with
Basalt flows completely obliterated their
interior um the uhu Eastern Shoreline of Marin nectaris
this Mario nectaris out over here uh the crater Gutenberg up here another floor fractured crater you can see the reals
crisscrossing the interior and then the same with bonenberger down here you can
see the interior has been raised up by volcanic pressure and fractured and U
the Interiors cracked uh with
riddles and the nectaris excuse me humorum Mari humorum
on the southwestern Side of the Moon
uh the crater gendi up on its northern Shore one of the most classic of the
floor come on most classic of the floor fractured craters and then vello and
Doppel Meer down the bottom Doppel Meer with its strange almost pyramid looking Central Peak and uh vello also a Flor
fractured crater you can see the circular arcs of the r around the central Peak and
the the almost catch Bratch like triple real system of yeah yeah the Mari Hol
excuse Mari ralis arcing around Mari
humorum these reels formed um by the land stretching on the shore as as the
uh center of the the humoron Basin basically a giant crater filled up with
Basalt the mass of the basalt depressed the center of the Basin and the U as as
the basol slumped toward the middle it stretched the short line and pulled open
these reels these curved reels that follow the same form as the
shoreline and the same view except this time it's Sundown previous View of
Sunrise so uh we see the same details but uh in a different light and uh
sometimes it enhances some of the details we we had trouble seeing before um you said Scott you said one of
your um following Troopers uh was able to make it and I could go long but I
don't know how long I can go so so feel free to say let's pick it up later uh
almost to the other end of his talk so okay I I don't I don't want to overshoot
so uh feel feel free to jump in there and tell me okay let's cut it right now I've
got I'll take no offense one of the things I'll say I mean that cat scratch feat feature that you were talking about
is something yeah Robert if you had not described this to us okay or at
least to me uh you know I would have never known you know about the the way
that the basalt uh was slumping the center of that feature and and then uh
causing that expansion effect so well the uh the same U same slumping of the
basalt toward the middle of the humor and Basin also created the three parallel arcing wringle ridges here as
the bassal slumps toward the center uh the sheets of Basalt buckle up against
each other and push up these ridges so uh the same process on the shoreline
created the the the RS and within the mar created the Regal
ridges well some of our audience here want you to continue on why don't you go on for another five minutes and then
will uh we'll pull the cour on to the next speaker okay all righty uh here we're looking almost square at the
center of the disc of the Moon and uh the main features that I enjoy showing
people uh the uh uh k-shaped formation
of RS here the trees Necker RS the gwing shape um hygienist re and the linear re
of RMA aradus and uh all three of these are created by the same process or
volcanism u in this case it's a grabin uh the land slumped between two parallel
faults here we have a series of volcanic vents you can see the little dots in
along the U the re these are volcanic vents that once spewed Ash and uh just
north of it we see this heart-shaped dark region um I call it the heart of
the Moon because it's very close to the middle of the Moon uh very dark compared to the surrounding territory
volcanic ash erupted out of these Vents and uh dusted these these Hills over
here creating this effect and further up we see Julius Caesar crater the only
crater on the moon named after a military figure um it is uh against the
rules to name craters after military figures but Julius Caesar um also
instituted um um calendar reform and social forms that um as a Statesman um
he made the cut but the Curious Thing about Julius Caesar crater is notice how smeared it is it's a whoops wrong
direction how smeared it is it it seems to have a flow down to the lower right a
lower yeah lower right um and the same with the other of the elongated craters
here and this almost smeared appearance uh up above it uh that was all caused by
the wave of debris blasted out of the embrium Basin that washed across the the
northern part of the Moon um buried some features obliterated them U some of them
heavily modified it but um the smeared appearance as a result of the uh the
creation of the embrium Basin about uh around 3.8 billion years ago by a giant
asteroid impact and today we see a uh this region as um the as Mari
the man of the moon's left eye but the effect that it had on the rest of the territory we can see how how smeared and
damaged and washed this this region is and U we probably won't get to my
individual picture of Lamont crater so um I will point out this big spider-like
um Apparition over here uh just north of the Apollo 11 Landing site which is
right where my curs Rec circling um Lamont crater is a ghost crater um one
that formed on the floor of U the U tranquilatus Basin before the lava flows
filled it in so when the lava um started flowing it buried this crater and now we
only see it uh as wrinkle ridges uh pushed up by the rim of the crater but
uh now that we know a little bit more about the moon we know more about its geology how it evolved we now recognize
Lamont as a ghost Basin because it is a double ring Basin we see evidence of
this oh yeah you can see it yeah so uh if it's got more than one ring we're going to call it a basin even though the
the classic description of a basin is a crater larger than 300 kilometers but
now we're finding basins that are smaller Grimaldi I mentioned earlier smaller than 300 kilometers but
definitely a basin um dandras um um Lamont many many uh
recognized longstanding craters are now turning out to be
basins and U uh it's been about five minutes we'll make this the last one so
we can move on to your next one but uh just a uh a pleasing view of Mari
embrium itself uh the the Sea of rains the uh the man of the moon's left eye so
uh all of the action is compacted on the Eastern Shore We've Got U Archimedes and
Cassini and Tao I mean U Plato up here U the Alps mountains and the appenines
all on the Eastern Shore and then it gets fairly blank out in the middle so
U just a a very um pleasant high altitude view of this feature that
everybody loves in a telescope like I said U um if you're interested in
getting these screen savers uh rewind the tape when the U um Global
star party is over go back to the beginning of my presentation and uh get my email address Robert Rees 400 drop me
a note I'll be happy to send you this whole stack that's great that's great it's like Mona Lisa you know for free so
yeah well we'll pick up this uh next time it's been fun that's great okay um Adrian we not Adrian I'm
sorry uh Robert we have a question uh Dean badar is watching on YouTube and he
wants to know your thoughts on TLP or was it transient lunar phenomena
transient lunar phenomena yeah it's a um they mostly appear in the aristarchus
region they have been spotted in alfonsus alonsus uh has a number of
volcanic vents on it we can easily see in a telescope because uh if you look
inside of alphonsa's crater very near the middle of the Moon the moon's disc U you can see at then 9:00 3:00 about 5:30
position there's these dark blotches just inside the Crater Rim these
are volcanic ash from old uh volcanic eruptions and U very convincing U um
data gather Ed U by Nikolai ker of U Crimean Observatory back
19589 I forget the exact date but the spectroscopic evidence of some sort of
gas venting from alonsus uh haven't seen it since but uh uh something was
happening uh the same with the aarkus area up on the arist starus plateau lots
of uh transient phenomena observed there and uh of course that's another U region
that was highly volcanic so are we seeing residual burps of volcanic gas we
could possibly um but um I don't think that has been happening recently because
spacecraft that we have in orbit around the Moon uh can analyze the U the
composition of the very rarified very rarified gas near the moon and we're not
seeing any activity like that right now but I'm not going to rule out that it didn't happen U 50 60 years ago um when
the Heyday of the lunar transient phenomenon was what happening of course there's also the alternate theory that
suddenly the Moon is becoming a very interesting object because the space program has evolved and we're sending
spaceships to the moon and soon Apollo Astronauts will travel to the Moon so a lot of people were looking at the moon
for the first time and perhaps not understanding what they were seeing and
uh and misinterpreting things because nowadays you don't see nearly as many
reports of transient lunar phenomena as you did back in the 1960s so uh it could be just a matter of
education do we understand what we're looking at it's uh like like I say about
why why don't U astronomers ever report seeing UFOs in the sky because we know
what the heck we're looking at so uh it's the same with the moon uh once
you understand it uh you you may interpret things
differently very cool well thank you so much Robert that's awesome and uh I want
to call some attention also you mentioned your friend Don Pettit uh he
just recently um uh uh shared an image
of the Cities racing across you know he's he's still up there on the space
station I guess but the city across in in a longer exposure where you can see
the Milky Way You Can See Stars you can see so you know uh many features in the
atmosphere and stuff like that it's got to be an image right up there with the pale blue dot you know I think it's just
incredible so yeah I'm very proud to have uh been one of the ones that
originally before he made his first flight um Expedition 6 when he was selected for Expedition six I'm very proud to have
suggested to him that why don't you try as photography from the space station and uh he took it to a whole new level
oh yes he did yeah that's awesome it's awesome stuff I think I was reading too he made like a barn door tracker and uh
yeah back then me his original one was made from leftover pieces from an IMAX camera mount uh the one that he's got up
there now um not mentioning Brandon Nam but it's a commercial commercial star
tracker that has been modified to run much faster yeah and yeah we we've been
tinkering with that u u on and off for a number of years getting it ready for him
so uh uh it's pretty much a a team effort by a lot of people very cool very
cool Robert thank you so much man thank you later all right well we're going to
uh through the magic of uh Zoom and the internet we are going to go down to
Argentina um and meet up with Caesar Baro uh Caesar is going to uh share his
uh views and thoughts on eclipses that he's seen so here we
go Cesar it's all yours Wella
sayar and you are muted you are on mute you are
muted he's still muted yeah he's not here we go no Z thank you so much man
thanks for coming on to uh where are you right now well I I am tonight I am the
rooftop um yes and um I'm taking some pictures
of oron okay um I have some leave image
maybe uh but let me show you okay okay I need
to park again my telescope but I have I have uh pictures wait wait me a minute that I
turn on a light wait a minute mhm
okay now it's much better yes but the problem with the lights here okay
well let me try again I
share the pictures that I took and we can talk about the Sun and uh the
experience uh of some trips in in Buenos from buenosaires going to another Parts
in Argentina the the trips to the eclipse we we was talking about about the Sun
and uh well uh the
idea is going
to uh to talk about the Sun the the the connection of the life and when you go
to the eclipses of course that you have the opportunity of uh of be um a part of
of this exper to watching directly the sun with Filter
of course um is a life experience ER that
connect um or take some special concerns
about about the the sound but first I I work connecting a g my telescope that
work perfectly taking pictures but I I uh took sound something and if you like
I can process my my the my typical work I I can show to the people a typical
after after photography night because it's live and uh I'm talk I'm connected
with my telescope and now I
opening I think it's been a while since we've seen the live nights the clouds is usually ruined yes time
but now you finally get to do this live so yeah let's looking forward to it yes
and this is something that is so so so fresh that I can show you how I can work
with the T sorry that I don't have more light here
but here is is the telescope and now I'm connecting
with my cell phone and I'm going to connect with oron
with first of course first of all I connect him with the the
application going choosing in this cast in
this that is the Explorer star app isn't it yes oron
we're trying is a
live all can be worse
but well this is typical some nights everything just works great other nights it doesn't work
at all in the Middle where you make it and when you when you need that the things
work don't work they don't work demonstration syndrome
yes we've seen you operate with this system many times before though
yes okay connected okay now I'm
connecting with my
there ah okay
okay are I preparing oh yes we can see it moving
yeah perfect now I'm connecting the
I think it's worth stating that where you are um
Argentina yes your view of Orion or Oran um is very different from those of
us in the northern hemisphere to us we would think he was upside down yes
yes it is it is very interesting to think about how much different the sky
looks totally that now or is going first of all better juice is H
it's now in the back because uh now um
is yes B juice is is uh Dum side here in
Argentina um and this is why you have the Orum the the the
warrior in the with the with the head
down and um let me show you the pictures that I took
just now
in
share because I put I put the pictures let me let me uh know if you
can see the the picture now yes we can see your screen we see thumbnails not not
only okay yeah okay not not only the the thumbnails I'm assuming is you can see
that okay yeah all we can see are the thumbnails right now ah okay okay sorry sorry I I can share this no no no
no I can share yes the the this one other
screen yes okay well like this it's a CR2
image look like it's oh there we go there we go yeah there's are new
there there to now they they have only three
minutes yeah beautiful left no no this is not this is
yes this is the pictures now yeah
more yes adding more data yes of course um I try that looks
like you got some Sky glow cutting through the uh cutting through the image those green
lines would be of course that that this is the the the the single pictures with
a lot of uh now I'm I'm using again my old reflex camera I used the exos 100
mon no exos 100 sorry the exos 2 I don't know okay yes I can show you
much better here and this is an excellent option for
this kind of of uh photography and I try to use
this uh for guiding uh my son Austin is coming to the rooftop with a guiding
camera now to change the the the telescope guider to use like
a like not like a finder if not like a out guider scope
and um yes a a good this is a good uh this is all pictur that I took minutes
ago it's a I I I try a different
positions and and uh ISO numbers and it's normal that when you
put in uh in this display the CR2 image the raw image um you know
that you sometimes with uh some uh um Windows uh
displays you have the that where you first the the picture is okay and turn
lighter because it's a raw image but of course that it's not sorry it's not the
the idea of uh more than pictures that we can try only and well this is this is
the the things about it's like they are like a like a live image of
course this is great to be a
single position yes it's like you say Adrian
the night is great and we have a lot of information I think that we can do it a
great picture of or uh tonight because uh but we need to put uh some guiding
and maybe we can use this number of exposition that is no more than 10
seconds but we if uh we are guiding we
can use 400 ISO uh because for this uh
all cameras they have the the the effect of banding and noise
um when you put the the iso very low for
this old cameras for example I use I took a pictur that uh the idea is is um
um make a again with the same with the same camera uh we was talking with my
son that we can repeat the our idea is repeating the um the same number of 400
ISO um with more time of exposition because our guiding camera now is much
further we using we use uh uh actually a
CCD camera but um we recover our our
older camera um because we you know sometimes you you put in the in the in
some place and you forget the the old years and like it's a beautiful feel of
view for Ryan is great because you you need this kind of of uh of um how do you
say of feel of view feel the feel that you can enjoy more the the the
size for this and for example this telescope my this to show know if you
can you can see now it's a 20 cm 8 in re
telescope carbon fiber now yeah here's a message from John Ray
Caesar uh John Ray is watching on Facebook says thank you for showing the Orion Nebula Caesar I'm going to have
cataract surgery in the coming weeks and I'm looking forward to better stargazing ahead
so thank you thank you very much is the idea for for 2025 is is coming more to
the rooftop um share with the audience more objects yes um in my back we have the
the the South emisphere um we are preparing um some
telescope uh with a big field maybe three degrees to show
fastly the the Southern Southern Hemisphere
objects and well or Orion Orion is not a a nebula from the south only it's a
nebula that we share is the the queen of Summer here or the queen of winter in in
in United States or in the northern emisphere it's a beautiful beautiful uh Nebula full of of uh of
interesting interesting uh how do you say interesting
[Music]
um active ities that are going on in that thing the star
formation um all sorts of things I wonder says are you still there are you
frozen now Scott I think Cesar froze up here let's give him a couple of minutes
yep oh wow we're waiting yeah that well see
okay well yeah really quick that region we lost he'll be I know he'll be back
yeah let's segue to you uh Adrien um okay yeah if he's back then he can wrap
up the end of the program we wrap up yeah well I'll I'll make my
presentation as brief as I can and that's means I can't I never can make
but um first first of I want to say
congratulations to you I mean this is awesome you know you're in the top 10
magazine and it's awesome so yep February's issue if I get closer it'll stay and if
you read it you'll see I'll give you some uh
background on this image and those of you who are readers of astronomy
magazine I will leave it to you to read the article and please send me
feedback um you can send your feedback to I don't know if my email address is
in here but Scott you can put um let's see I'll send to
everyone I'm send it to me and I can I can post it I right there um I put it in ch in our
chat for our Zoom um yeah feel free to you can send feedback um and send it
into astronomy magazine as well um if the you know the topic that I chose um
Treasures of the Milky Way and the goal of that was to share not only you know
the common things that we see whenever you see you know the area around the of
the Galaxy but the idea was also to share some uncommon things that lurk
around the center the Galaxy so it's the region that's right behind me I'll move if you notice my background picture this
is one of the images that um I took in my last trip to uh Kinton Oklahoma
that's just the that's the part of the Milky Way that I wrote about which everyone May recognize the galactic
center if I move this way you can see the dinosaur tracks this is
um black Mesa Oklahoma and coming there at night away
from um basically away from civilization was a uh it was a wonderful
experience but it was also a little bit I'll say I was anxious because I'm out
there by myself at night and it is it is dark it's very dark on the ground the
sky was uh um the sky was familiar to me so I could see it and it a lot of Sky
glowing Haze covered the sky it's still a little more transparent than back home
but you know this is an area devoid of light and of human you know human uh
life really there's you have to go a little ways before you get to some of the um bed and breakfast is where people
are staying and it you know it is nice and dark and animal life roams free so
when you do go out to do night sky photography do be careful um I will go ahead and share
let's see my desktop and hopefully you all can see
it so um this picture the our theme tonight has been about the Sun and you
know the lifegiving Sun and I I just decided for my birthday
November 8th that I would go ahead and take a picture of the sun now the
significance of this picture aside from all the sunspots and everything is my
mother told me my time of birth 9:39
a.m. um or was it 9:37 let me get information
I think I verified it with my mom before before I went out and this happens to be
3 minutes past um right around 9:37 I just started firing away
at the Sun and this is one of the clearer images that I was able to get I thought it'd be nice to Chronicle the 53
years of life on the planet by getting a look at what the sun looked like now I
don't have a picture of what the sun looked like 53 years ago but I do have a picture of what it looked like the
moment that I was born 53 years away so
I thought it was a a really interesting way to connect the sun um you know some
a part of our solar system you know part of basically this ginormous orb that
helps all of our processes go
um and I said this would be a good way to kind of capture the moment and so with
that the last time I aimed at the Sun and we'll get into the Aurora later last
time I aimed at the sun it was before the okiek trip and
before Moon here I was see going to perisburg
because eventually we'll get through all these colorful photos
and oh and there Cesar Cesar is back so we got here
um couldn't see but a few the Bailey's beads of the Sun the moon which we've
learned so much about from uh Robert
Reeves decided to interrupt our view of the Sun and for me it's a magical time
when the two come together um I don't have a very elaborate picture of the corona a
lot of the uh astrophotographers that went to where there was four minutes of
totality were able to see a lot more but
one image I did want to share was this totality this pre- totality image when
you have that sort of weird sepia tone that occurs when the sun and the moon
are blocking the shadow of the moon is on its way and the light is
diminishing and I have to tell you Adrian this picture of yours on your
website is something that can be ordered I am in love with this I'm trying to figure out exactly where I would put it
but this is gorgeous yeah I appreciate that yeah it's it's a rare it's a rare
image because a lot of a lot of the totality pictures focus on this right
they focus on the actual Sun Moon and it's a beautiful thing or they focus on
the diamond ring this I am not you know going this particular image
it's very similar on purpose I tried to
use that other image which is more authentic I tried to use it to simulate what it's
like with actual totality but I would have rather remembered to take the actual photo during totality and get an
authentic image whereas this one and you can even see here this one was more
authentic so that's the one that and then I put it on my site so that's
actually a great segue um something that sorry sorry that
because lo my connection I lost my connection after but this is very
interesting because I I have a picture this year in October when we went to the
anular eclipse ER yeah and the clouds make the make visible the the ring
Eclipse uh to The Naked Eyes um for the people they feel like a total eclipse
because they uh they had the illusion we I have the illusion too that we was
watching the the crown the the real
Corona yes yes the corona sorry we say Corona in Spanish and
Corona is yes because it's a yes have sense because it's a um how do you say
um um a word that is a Latin word Corona yes yes
if if you like that the the the the last that I I when I lost my connection I was
taking a a live picture in the moment of of Orion if you like only half minute
and you can continue in the the the presentation so yeah I'm
showing I'm showing on my site what uh kareim was um saying so I've got a
couple of products here where you can get a canvas for that image I may as well shamelessly sell it and then this
is beautiful a I do believe it's a metal
wow in canas and a couple yeah oh beautiful
Adrian yeah here's a that's the metal print version so a couple of different
canvas Styles and then and was going to talk about these things
too um Aurora and its presence last year
and you know the highlighting just how busy the sun was and what difference it can make um Cesar go ahead and let's see
your image of um Orion that you're taking and I will queue up some of the
Aurora pictures that's my site um I'll put that in the chat too um and I'd just
like everybody to explore it I put some new products up there
um here we go Scott I put it in in our Zoom chat um okay and you can yeah sayar
go ahead and show us the image you know now that you're back you look like you have a good
connection um I'll queue up my final thoughts on all the Aurora that we've
had that we had in 2024 and in hopes that we get to see some more of it in
2025 no you're you have gone on mute oh you're
muted I'm okay there you go h i i i was not able to to talk because I was muted
well um I returned my telescope to the oron nebula and we are processing
now I show the screen entire screen is the best way the there
screen
okay now the first thing that I opening is this we are
here and now oh okay yeah I'm looking to if okay I
can see your hereen now sure and here there go
there go the Stars totally totally this is a little out
ofation [Music] yes the trapesium exactly exactly yeah
for visual astronomers this is uh trying to get I believe you can get six on a
very good night and some even have managed to pull out eight stars under
really dark sky conditions I think we were we were doing that at o at the OK Tech star party this year I put I I took
a picture of um 15 minutes maybe it's as
I am not guiding now uh it will be with a little tracking yes but it's not
horrible oh that's it's not bad it's okay it's okay yeah a little I it's not
bad yes yes I I like to to make a real
picture in in the moment in the right now right now something that we can talk about is
um the magic that this moment have because we are impressing something from maybe 15 15 um
15 thousand light years yeah it's like 1500
light years I believe yes yes yes and this is the 500
sure yeah that light left with try 500 light years ago yes in in the shows that
in our start parties sometimes earlier when the people don't have problems with
uh uh with be h blinded by by by the lights uh you know we can uh put in the
in a screen in in a we project the canyon and we make a a show
with the earlier objects maybe after
dinner sorry before go to dinner um uh
we ER project in in in screen
um uh practi size of uh of uh take photography astrophotography with the
the the ear object in the sky of course later the people don't like to
project anything because we need to to have our eyes connected with the
darkness and but is is yes and is is something like is H is
u fun when kids that see the show in the moment
they start to say hey put more ISO or less or the the kids especially start to
participate of this how many time and they start to understand so fast so fast
the the technique features that this is is fun
because I say okay they they understood everything in 10
seconds okay we can try now this will be a lot of noise
but I I have a um CLS uh picture in CLS
filter sorry put in the
okay ah okay is is but it's not yeah
the yes yes but it's because my son coming
walking yeah once you establish that you get the GU we can try another one and
maybe we have yes but it's full of noise full of noise so qu yeah and you know if
you get enough you there there's ways to handle that now when you guide how
long how long in a time do you like to
go with your image do you do you go like four minutes five minutes is there when
you is there a time that you like to spend of course Adrian when we when we
guide we use for this camera at four 400 is so
maybe is that I tell you this is a very high ISO 3
3,200 for a refx camera you don't have a refrigeration system a cooler system and
the all the electronic noise ER you know that is the problem
for for this kind of cameras the Sim sensor have this kind of problem
but this a lot that what made the Canon 6D
so remarkable is that it's one of the cameras out there that you turn up the
iso or ESO as you're calling it and you get it up there to
3200 it's still with a you know a shorter
exposure still gets decent signal the noise more so than your other cameras do
it was kind of it was a remarkable camera and a lot of a lot of astr photographers went to get that the the
mark one not the Mark I um they went to go get that camera so yes yes that's the
one I have totally this is a very regular camera the name is
ti5 it's a regular um yeah it's it's one of the old
EOS yes capture your uh memories at the party oh
there's your son how you doing up guys hola hello
um yeah yes we we say okay after the show we are going to guide to to guide
with the telescope and take a good picture oh we should try good take a take a lot of uh longer exposures yeah
you gave me the idea Cesar um with my my uh Milky Way Photography
I'm actually able to get it unguided I've gotten up to five
minutes um I go I st go down four uh polar alignment um just uh
using the most I got uh without guiding here with the uh with with the mount
with the uh the I exos 100 it was one
minute without guiding just po align like just doing a a very fine tuning
with uh with with my hand which is funny because you know the the first Mount doesn't have the the
the uh deck correction with the knobs yeah and then maybe that's part of the
yeah I use that um isos 1002 and that's about as long as I was getting I've
there are a few images that I got where I tracked I actually got two minutes on
my I OS 100 but then again keep in mind I'm also using Widefield cameras so okay
you have a little bit of forgiveness when you're going 16 mm or 24
mm um you know you're tracking your apparent stars are not you know as
when I when I got to one minute it it was using a 480 mm uh focal length
telescope so yeah that's actually pretty very short yeah yeah you don't have much
signal yeah no right now we are using a an RC which has
1,000 uh yeah now now we older camera but you're still the sensor can still
get that data from the Orion Nebula you've got m43 building up in there yeah I mean you would say
that the city is kind of very much polluted but you can actually get a very
decent picture right with without filters right uh yeah even without right now we
have one CLS but
photos yep no that's still that's still really good without the
filters I mean know images I take Whitefield images where there's longer
exposures um you know that when it's dark enough you you go to a dark site then you
you've got kind of the advantage of you know yeah not having the everyone every
astrophotographer wishes yes I tried 25 minutes it's going
to have a star traal but h second second no techn second
yes yeah then you start stacking them yeah let's see if I can find the idea is
how many how many information of the nebula we can we can see we can watch
but really we need to guide because my my polar alignment was a little r
yeah okay completely understand we are moving to and the floor with
1,00 1, 900 millimet of focus this is really
very very sensitive but 10 seconds is for Ang in U
guided uh pictures for this big telescope of course that is okay but
well we are trying we are go to guiding yes and we start to make a picture of or
next store party we can show you maybe final that would be that would be fun to
show like okay how how do we end up that would be that would be we actually did uh some
Orion photos with this same setup uh like a few years ago yes it went it uh
it turned out it turned out pretty pretty decent yes it it also took
bunch of hours of processing but I mean it's still
good yeah yes we can we can try tonight the telescope does half of the work you
know night but we have full moon or not full
moon tonight is not the full moon I don't know 80% maybe tonight the
the the pH the fastest is around is
90% I think it's it was 100% full tonight CU last night unless last night
it was yes 100% yes I don't remember
if okay I fine let me see I know it's considered full magnitude 118 I think this is
the yeah I'm looking now to see the next full moon is yeah this is the full
phase tonight because it's saying the next time it'll I
think to make to make a picture of or yeah you've got you've got some
competition it's over in Leo I think oh it's in cancer so it's not quite in Leo
yet so yeah that's even closer it says 98.1 so no it's not fully look SC I'm
using the the application yeah yeah yeah it in sou hemisphere function much
better than in the north we we uh with many many cell phones espe old ones and
new ones yes some people say no don't work it's a beta beta application blah
blah blah and no I I can tell it is yeah here I don't know why uh mostly the
people have more cell phones that the tablets because the quality of the
tablet that yes the some uh the people don't
use iPhone in Argentina uh or use but a few number most is Android I guess
everyone exist yes everyone use um Samsung
Galaxies um yes and it's more stable with the exos 2 that the the ex exos 100
but um mostly of the of the um older and new
Android number Android Android no
14 the how do you
say Android versions no all one all on news
yes of course that is a version beta application it's not for for all use but
mostly work very very well in cell phones the BET
application um of course that in Android the Android 11 10 yeah n 10 and 11 work
very well in tablets here in Android and in in I use a um iPad and work very very
well but this is a little surprise because it's a it's a beta version that it's
popular with our EXs 100 here H it's not perfect but work and I'm working now
with this yeah so Scott I would like to
surprise uh Cesar what is your name what is your son's name what is your name
a yes yes yeah I'd like to I give you
all a surprise you've seen all of the Milky Way images but once upon a time I
tried to image the irion nebula with a wide field shot and uh this was the this was the
result and yeah I've got to go find the original file for this because with the
this was I think this was a single image and if I were to do this the right way
there's looks like you have a very nice Sky yeah I had a very good sky at night
so here I this is where I originally got the image from or what I did I think
what I did is I zoomed in so like this one yeah 180 so this was the Widefield
shot I had a a larger lens tracking and so you can see all the
noise because uh you know this was I was shooting at a high ISO with my Canon 6D
and so you know at this wide angle you could you could just make out the horse
head but I blew everything out here um what I would do is see that's a
different is I would shoot with a larger focal length 400
mm this was 62 seconds so basically a minute now this sky was a very nice guy
about a you know a bort I would say a a high bort
four and you know it was it was nice already
very good yeah and then I got you know I was able to get reasonably round Stars so
this was only one image so that there's so much stuff here how many time how
many I basically stopped somewhere seconds yes yeah that's
actually pretty good 6 seconds yeah so you know did you say so
60 seconds but with a a mount with a yeah with a mount it was a track it was
the skywatcher mount camera and a just a big you know camera L you were you were
doing like uh default Trucking with the the the the default Trucking the mount dust yeah and you got one minute yeah
that's awesome yeah and it it I attribute it to the darker Skies that were out there I
mean the it if you had this is what would show up in your one minute image
in your you know on your came TOA and bring you
and we can go to with maxi or with to mendosa I'll send you I'll send you the
all directions uh for our St party in End the the ER the weekend sorry the yes
the last weekend of March we are making the party in Los Moses Argentina party
Grande and well it will be very very
yes like last year yes yes I'll send you all all data
about Yep this image one of these two images is on sale at the site those that
haven't seen Light Pillars before yeah it has to be really cold but wow they uh
you know this is all man-made light being refracted up into the atmosphere by flat ice crystals
and when the clouds aren't there Light Pillars just shoot right up into into the sky here and you recognize
that this is Aion in the northern hemisphere um if I flip this thing
around I wonder yeah really quick Let's
uh where is the oops moon
rise might have done a better job with this this has been a beautiful moonrise picture but let's go uh actually you
know what we can do so later in life I would I would take a picture of
Orion um when I went out west
um let's see if I can find it it's not yeah this was earlier so I played around and I took
pictures of Orion and there's
the dinosaur pictures
huh yeah I can never find these pictures when I need them they skip my vision see
this is into the Aurora we had another auroral lers here's a picture of Ryan that I had and it it'll cut in yeah lot
of stars the Barnard's Loop yep the Barnard's Loop Loop Lambda
orus incredible that might be the monkey head that's something I want to do
sometime the Barnard slop yeah the full I even have a little bit of the witch's
head it's not perfect but you can see here cut back in this with with a bunch
more of exposure I think you could get it yeah with more time this was stack of
20 um I think what I do this oh it's a stack called okay I think it's a stack
let's see this is yeah that that tells me that I stacked um a number of 4minute exposures
but minut it nice yeah about 20 minut yeah 20 minutes now if I get an
hour and then I Pro then I have to use the processing techniques to you know get rid of yeah the
stars is just it's just there's so many they they say plugin in uh um pixon
sight that does the shop pix and sight that yeah I would have to get involved
in pixon sight because I I use Photoshop right now and I mostly I mostly do just
landbased but every once in a while I'll aim right at the uh this is an 85 mm no
it's a I think
expensive yeah it's a problem now this okay here we go so what I want to do for
the people was to simulate what Oran looks like let me go to the crop let's
see if I can rotate um is this Oh you mean for the other
hemisphere yeah no I want to rotate it I want to flip this upside down
and show the show everyone upside down Orion for us right side up for you but
I'm not seeing I think if you Dr the no I think you can drag the the
bottom the bottom circle with the numbers oh here we go yeah yeah it won't
go oh but doesn't get as far yeah it's cropping it as it goes
yeah yeah um I got to do we go just reset right here the
clumsiest yep I'd have to go to a different uh tool let's
see yeah on I upload to Google to save
them I usually don't do many edits here so you know the tools aren't even
available um see this say it'll crop and it'll rotate but yeah it
only it can only go so far I can't I'd have to flip the
entire image okay here we go this B let you
exactly there you go yep there's a r this is Southern Hemisphere
Ryan there you go yeah that's that's exactly how we see it yep if you see it like this so if you
were so when I go to the southern hemisphere I have to get used to looking at it and
everything everything I'm looking for like Taurus if I keep rotating Taurus is
this way but um yeah it rises it it's diff it is completely
different um when you get to the Southern Hemisphere and that's something
I didn't you know I actually forget to realize sometimes is that uh you know it
is a lot different um some of the areas that we share look a lot different and instead
of aurora borealis which we had a lot of last year you have aona AUST I think
Aurora Australia uh what is it what is it called yeah but I don't remember the
name yeah Aurora
it's uh yeah instead of Bor which is
north austral that refers austral or auroras I think
auroras australas it will be yeah and then instead of this signis
region you get the uh galactic center going through through the
Aurora closest we got this yeah so like the part of the Milky Way that can go
through it the closest we got if I skip through is
here um we actually had and this so this uh composite image I tried to put
together is just sort of an illustration of it I tried to connect with a panorama
but you have there's the galactic center the SAR we had a sar region in
s shoot over the sky and then we had the regular Aurora raging over here um this
was put together two images put together in a panorama to try and demonstrate how that looked now it isn't
perfect there's some artifacts here and there but you get a great you get a real sense of Ni just how this was the
October Outburst um there were so many uh due to
just how active the sun was um you know there you know there's
just it this Aurora upstaged the percat this was perc at night on August this
was the August outburst and it upstaged the percan here's a meteor
screaming through but all of this is going on this the sky turning purple
with the upper is of the Aurora so that
was August then you know you saw the October one because I was showing more
of those we had a it was a partial lunar eclipse where we were and then here was
my attempt at capturing that there were so many things going on in
2024 um to image and but all at the same time
we also tried to take some time to do Outreach this image um lowbrow
astronomers here I'm also a member of the Warren Astronomical Society and Ras uh Royal Astronomical Society of
Canada but uh the big one that I'm writing about is
this um and you may see you may not see this particular
photo but if you just look at all the activity going on I'm writing
articles that I'm writing now are about how big that May 10th storm was this
geomagnetic storm we were seeing things that we normally that people take trips
to Iceland so they can see this and it was it was intense and it was all the
way down to our latitude 4241 north latitude and those who have
never seen the Aurora this close before um if you get that opportunity it
is well worth seeing the colors are here the colors
show up a little fainter to the naked eye but you can definitely detect those
colors uh good example is now there some of the colors that are in this image um
there's the moon so I tried to make this exactly the way the naked eye sees it we
see more of the greens the pinks you know a little bit of the the
whites that are here the blues some of the darker purples and you know some of the mixed
the deeper Hues are harder for us we we generally don't see them as well um but
we see the sky when it's a geomagnetic storm like this the sky is absolutely a
wash in color and there's a picture I'm going to I'll give a shout out to my buddy Brian
Autumn we were here you can take a 10 sec I think I took this sec in uh 13
seconds I said okay we're going to stand still for 13 seconds and all the gear
here and the Aurora just does its part and um he took a really cool photo
behind here with the Aurora so he he's putting that in his calendar another photographer this is a this was an
iPhone picture of me so that's a smartphone picture and then I turned
around and tried to take it you know tried to do another composite with the
uh with my regular camera it was beginning to die down this is the Aurora
beginning to die down and it's just a lot here um this
is um earthshine Moon and it there's all these all this Aurora and the clouds
were coming that's a picture I don't show as much so the difference between a
smartphone image this was a smartphone image and if it kicks in it's not a bad
smartphone image it gives you the idea it just the sky was a washing
color here's a true to life image I I pride I prided myself on getting this
image because I went and I sat down and I just let the camera go this is a 4
second shot and I did this to show
exactly what the ey saw and this is this is true to what the eye really sees or
really saw um I'm sitting there looking at this and when I looked at the picture
I compared to what was going on underneath this cap here and said was it
close I said yes it was maybe a few more stars picked up you know shooting at uh
F2 ISO 1600 and I ended up
with a replica of what the naked eye was seeing and um if only maybe a little
brightened but you had the clouds coming in that's why I like this picture the
only other pictures I like from that May 10th Outburst I like this one a lot and I showed it earlier I like this one
too you there's here's your this was a 5-second image so this
is this is more or less a true to life shot too very similar but with a
uh yeah F28 and with a different um lens
so when when the sun decides to Pelt us with geomagnetic
activity um you had no we had no indication this is before nautical
twilight we had zero indication that any of this was going on but it was already going
on at that point let's see if I have a yeah here I am taking a test shot at the
moon and look back you can see there's enough light outside to get a quick
shot at a you know with a real fast lens so I got some stars to
appear um you've got waves in the water and you've got Aurora going that's how big that
storm was this wasn't naked eye visible but fact that it was showing itself
even in nautical twilight 8:53 p.m. nautical twilight back then and uh it
was already coming out so the the issue of astronomy magazine I'll go ahead and
stop sharing because I think we're yeah we're pretty late but um this issue has
as one of its top 10 that may storm where I just shared some of my
uh you know experiences great and uh yeah it's
it's a great honor it's a great honor to have uh David say yeah and we many more
you know that we're looking forward to I just sent off a uh I wrote
story about these images and why it you
know how I feel about the Aurora chasing that goes on and some of the
some of the good and the bad that I think uh you know plagues us when it comes to being interested in things like
this um you have your you have your naysayers kind of the knowt alls you
have the folks that have seen a of Aurora and then you
have the folk that have experienced it similar to the way that we experienced it in May 10th they may have made the
over to Iceland or they've gone to some places where Aurora comes down on top of
them and each and every time they go out it's just a thrill and so they're
they're encouraging everyone else and you people love to chase but then you
have some that you know are more well self the self-absorption
kind that'll they'll post negative things about you know the uh people have post
negative things they're I don't know they're not busy
enough that's or busy posting and it happens in all Hobbies I mean this is something
that has happened forever there's always kind of been the the naysayer but you
know these days they has a has a larger platform with which to express those
opinions and are free to do so but um yeah the the idea is to chase whatever
it is that really interests you right I've just gotten very fortunate with the
Aurora I've been able to see you know from the in storms to the
distant Imes it's because you and you showed up and you you you know
you kept so you know I'll give a shout out to um Dr Brian AUM everyone knows
that you have talent you know you're a talented guy and uh you know I was I was
uh uh learning photography from 12 years old you know and as a
teenager was uh schooled a little bit by anel Adams you know I used to car
respond with him and send pictures and he would you know tell me what I was doing right what I was doing wrong and
stuff like that he was just that kind of guy you know so I recognize uh a great
photographic talent and you have it you know so yeah that's no definitely appreciate
it and yeah and yeah anel Adams from he'd be worth the study for me because
his uh approach the one thing about it that I felt
like you know important for me to think about it he had a vision for what he wanted his photographs to do to say that
that was something that that he worked on for many many years you know so yeah
right I can imagine and that and it's something I kind of picked up as you're
learning you can get caught in a bit of the minutia with your photos you know is
everything lined up according to the rules of competition and
eventually I started go like being a musician you know you're never quite satisfied with you know even if you're a
pro and and you're a recording artist you know you're I remember you can John
Len not right redo all the Beatles scks you know just redo them yeah you know
and re-record them yeah that that strive for perfectionism is in it's in the the
great it's the but so is the humility um you know having Medan Adams I think you
you could probably I never met the guy but I used to I used to write him so you
know write back you could probably you could probably detect the love for the
type of Photography that he does and that's oh sure I think that's just a huge sure it's a huge part of it if you
love what you're doing you're going to go out there and do it again you're going to try different things you're
going to try different processes and and really you can kind of see what it is
that each Astro photographer each photographer loves
about photography astrophotography you'll see an image and
it'll say this is image so and so and you see a huge write up of the technical
details that it Tak well this one this person loves the process of creating an
image and loves to share it and there's nothing wrong with that it's great he needed a subject and he loves the
process of pulling out detail in the image and might not know how old it is
how long that's been in the universe what caused it where it's going what
constellation it's even in it you know none of that may matter on the other
hand there are those who it does matter so they're write up talks about what the
object is and that comes first and then the technical details that you hit the
you know after a nice lengthy write up of what the article is then you get your
technical details yeah I took a few frames about 10 minutes each or whatever
and and those that and because there are a lot of people interested in those details especially if they're looking
for a way to Ed their own flows well maybe I need to take long exposures if I want to get detail like that so well
there's out there that will you I know you share how to do it and so that's uh
yeah that's great I try to share why to do it too I mean it it I will I will
sign off I'm GNA share one more time um just because I wanted to put this
image um yeah I've got all of these but this is these two images my new my
current favorites because they're the last two that I took in 2024 and I've yet to get some images in 2025 the
planetary alignment um would be a great one and maybe tomorrow if it's still clear again
I'll try and get but this image is a bit of a mess but it was me returning the
camera to the sky and it was a nice clear night for when I in a while you
know and there's tracks this is just the it's a dark place in up in Northern
lower Michigan in the forest on a along side of road and you know this is a uh
this turns out to be a rifle range here um just stopped and took picture but it
wasn't the image I wanted but I wanted to gather some photons from part of the Milky Way that
I could see I end up turning around and looking at Ryan Rising didn't take any
pictures this time but I saw it and then I found this Outpost and got an image
that I wanted of this our beautiful River up north in Michigan the Assa River and this is the
landing and here we got the same sickness region coming down and Sky glob but this is uh
this was my last image on my mom's birthday so it it's uh yeah I I love
doing images like this and I want to you know these some of these artifacts here you I'm working on I'm working on the
trees because trees are a very difficult um object to blend and most of the
automatic discovery of ground and sky is getting better at getting in and around
all these branches when you do a shot like this you you have to account for all the
Treetops um things like mountainous regions defined Horizons are easier for
software to work with because it because it's defined ridges and lines and
things um you know comp there's more trees here but uh
composits with round and these were stacked Imes but one of these is a composite
that I no there oh going into stacked images to where you have this definitive
line it can all it can be easier to do composite with it as well but um know we
talked about these images before but uh so anyhow that's um great love of photo
yep love of Photography love of astronomy and you'll want to you'll want to work at it all night but uh Scott I'm
pretty sure you're tired and you're ready to go I got a big tomorrow as usual so but uh I appreciate you uh
being on global Star Party Adrian and again congratulations on your achievements
so yeah and looking forward to doing some more writing and uh thank you to
all of those that are watching um still watching live and watch this late we
appreciate you all for supporting Global Star Party Scott has watched this grow
from the three or four people to the people around the world those who have
been on global Star Party in the past yeah um just watching this thing grow
even though we could say we're out of covid but you know this this will
continue on kinds of different kinds of lockdown you know I mean uh yeah I
started noticing and I've talked about it before but uh you know there are people that uh take care of you elderly
parents you know that uh there are people that live too far away from other
like-minded people you know that want to do astronomy so they're kind of a little bit isolated you know this is an outlet
this is a yeah it's a very important us to get on together and share our views
and share our work and it's cool so I'm
thank people appreciate you do it yeah appreciate you and deid for um bringing
me aboard and uh we'll keep doing this as long as we can long as we physically can do it and as long as there's an
internet connection so uh all right Scott I will head out and let you take
him out thank you so much again and looking forward to the next Global star
party all right dude you take care so yeah have a good night Scott have a good
night okay um I want to thank the audience for tuning in from around the
world uh if you're watching this live thank you very much if you are watching
us and rerun on one of our channels uh YouTube or Facebook um I want to thank
the astronomical league for uh coming on to Global Star Party David Levy of
course David ier from astronomy magazine I'm losing my voice a little bit uh the
association of lunar planetary observers I I want to thank them uh I want to thank all the presenters uh you know for
for the work that they do and the energy that they give this uh program and U you
know but it is uh you know the uh any
any kind of presentation uh scenario it's a symbiotic relationship between audience
and presenters so um so thank you very much and uh you guys have a great week
uh we'll be announcing the 165th Global star party as soon as we
get our uh theme figured out and um uh until that time uh you guys keep looking
up I will because Mars was uh uh you
know recently in the news and there was a beautiful occultation of the Moon from
on you know over Mars um you know which I was able to get a you know a nice view
of because we had remarkably a very clear night last night here in Arkansas
so um but there is a little video I'll share with you about Mars so before we
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