Global Star Party 166

Transcript:

conclusion we've come to from that is that there's a significant spherical apparation appears to be present in the
Optics and that we should be able to fix it in our insurance program with that first service maybe the future of the
entire agency was at stake 11 10 n and
we have a go for main engine start there were people who bailed out they didn't want to have anything more to do with NASA or with Hubble just thinking we
weren't up to doing this job and we have liftoff liftoff of the space shuto Endeavor on an ambitious mission to
service the Hubble Space Telescope [Music]
Hubble and the space shuttle were Blood Brothers from the very beginning the shuttle was designed and built to launch
and service Hubble Space Telescope and Hubble was designed to fit into the payload day of the Space Shuttle and all
of those interactions that led to that commonality between the two took place
in the early 1970s and NASA made a specific decision
to make the Hubble Space Telescope shuttle compatible so that it could be
serviced by having a permanent Observatory at space you can do the same
thing that you do in permanent observatories on the ground on mountain tops keep them up to date keep them
refreshed keep them working at the frontiers of science everybody is really excited to
see the first images see what the universe really does look like but it's crisp and sharp however the problem was
we couldn't focus it try as we may the spacecraft was working fine everything was working fine the instruments were
working fine but somehow the telescope was getting blurry images and after a
lot of trepidation first of all and a lot of public ridicule it just turned out that there had been a manufacturing
aor that had left the primary miror bubble had left it too flat they took off too much glass so by just a fraction
of the width of a human hair actually but that was enough to prevent you from focusing the telescope
was very embarrassing a lot of people didn't want to admit that they worked on Hubble or even that they worked for NASA
emails flew around in within the astronom of community about how inept NASA was and so forth but there was a
core group of people that wouldn't give up because we thought the the dream of putting a large aperture telescope above
the Earth's atmosphere to be able to see the universe as it really is for the first time that dream was worth pursuing
we shouldn't give up on the dream just because we stumbled along the way the primary camera on Hubble when it was
launched was called Whitefield imp planetary camera with p and that was supposed to produce the best imagery
from the telescope Ed Wier who was the program scientist at NASA headquarters had long proposed long pushed for a
backup to whpi let's build a clone a second version so if anything happened
to the original whpi we would have a backup that we could just plug in so whpi two was in the process of being
built at the time Hubble was originally launched all you got to do is reg grind those mirrors to correct for spirital
aberation put them at their original location and they will image the pupil
that is the picture of the primary mirror they'll image that and correct it
so by the time the light gets back to your light sensors the sensors will never know there was spical elaboration
will be a perfectly focused image that's well and good but we got to correct all the instruments five scientific
instruments on boo it's not good enough just to correct one we've got to do all of hom science they came up with a
device called coar corrected optic Space Telescope axial replacement the co-star
had a a Deployable axle with a motor you could deploy it out and it would have on it pairs of little mirrors the largest
was about the size of a cord and these could individually correct spherical elaboration in the beam of the telescope
before the light went into the remaining three axal instruments we had the means
now in hand to correct the through collaboration and because Hubble could be serviced this wasn't a problem this
was not a failure in the end it was a brilliant NASA success I was a part of the Hubble project management team so I
spent the entire servicing mission on duty about 12-hour shifts each day if
anything went wrong and certainly some things did go wrong there were contingencies that arose the manag and
Engineering staff that was together there at Johnson we needed to figure out what to do and uh what what the level of
risk versus game was we monitored what the astronauts were doing Moment by moment during their space walks out into
the payload B show and then when there were you know two or three situations that came up that required management
input uh I was the the scientist part of the team and my job really was just to
keep everybody scientifically honest let's do the right thing to maximize the
science that we we're hoping to get right now it's looking very very good that we've accomplished uh all we needed
to accomplish for the optical correction of of HST and that's uh that's good news
for astronomy and it's good news for NASA uh to get over this little episode
in our history after Shuttle Endeavor landed all of us went home for Christmas
it took a little while took a few weeks but we got the first images down down in the very late December and they were
gorgeous they were spot-on well focused uh beautiful images the best that
engineering could accomplish and that the laws of physics allow for the first
time in all of human history Hubble made it possible to clearly see the universe
and see what it was like unblurred undistorted by the years ends was like
um just opening our eyes for the first time it's just a kid from a far arming
town in Illinois I could go out at night and the sky was so dark I could clearly see the Milky Way and I really loved the
stars and the sky and so from age 10 I wanted to be an astronomer and um I mean
just I think of the different Forks in the road and the path I took and I could have gone here rather than there I was
just so lucky to end up here at this time with the Hubble project basically
just getting started and um I became very devoted to
and I'm very proud of it I'm very proud of all the people I'm very proud of what we accomplished as a large team I think
it's just an honor that somehow in my life I was able to find or somehow led
to something that turned out to be one of the most important things in human history who's going to last longer the
telescope or me and
um I'd like to think that we're going to both last at least a few decades longer
and I think Hub will last at least another
decade yeah we have an unofficial monel in the
hsd project conscious and expectation of the unexpected and I believe it's a very apt
motto I believe that the most exciting things to come from the HST will be those that we can't even describe to you
today but come back in 1990 or 1995 and we'll tell you all about thank you
for
well uh that's um uh brings back a lot of memories on uh Hubble Space Telescope
and um uh you know all the kind of nail biting that happened uh during that time
and um uh I'm sure that uh David Levy and David ier remember it well um as
well as anybody that was uh paying attention to uh space exploration at the
time uh so uh you know I um I'm glad
that uh they were able to fix it you know many of us got to meet story Musgrave who was a uh you know heroic
astronaut who did the uh service the servicing missions and put in the
instrumentation correctly to make it all work and so and I just remember seeing
those first images come through which were just unbelievable but even when the
the telescope was uh producing soft images from spherical
aberration they had invented some software that is still being used by amateur astronomers today to sharpen up
images uh you know I think that the uh it was um initially called maximum
maximum entropy deconvolution me software and uh a Seagal I think put
this software out and uh uh amateur astronomers were able to take
uh make great use of that and it sharpened up uh softened images from Bad
scene conditions maybe some spherical aberration or something in their own
telescopes and um you know and and then you started to see images from amateur
astronomers that has continuously built uh to be uh images that wow even
professional astronomers with the best in instrumentation so um uh we are you know
as AER and I often say we're living in the Golden Age of astronomy and much of it has to do with h what amateur
astronomers can do with relatively inexpensive equipment you know they they
make images that they compare directly to Hubble Space Telescope they find exoplanets they are making all kinds of
discoveries and uh it takes people like uh Mr Lee here who uh is so persistent
in making observations and writing down those observations you know those that
kind of dedication leads to Discovery and so anyways welcome to the 166 Global
star party uh astronomy a unique history
is the theme and uh we've got a great lineup for you uh today and um uh at
this moment uh you know I'm say sitting here with my co-hosts uh uh and we're
about to uh introduce another co-host uh the astronomical league but we're g to
turn it over to David Levy right now well thank you Scotty and this is a very
special um theme we have this week the history of astronomy and as the oldest
of the Sciences I don't think you can do better than studying the history of
astronomy and the because the history of Astron omy is in a way the history of
Humanity's understanding of the night sky and uh it's very very special to be
able to to be here tonight and to uh to be part of this and I know that the
Hubble is a very important part of that history but so is tiob brahi who
discovered a supernova in 1572 and then five years later a great
comet in 157 77 so is the 200 in telescope at poar
for many decades the largest telescope in the world I was invited to give a lecture at
the opening of the 200 in telescope but I couldn't quite make it because I
didn't have my driver's license there uh I was 11 days old at the
opening of the of the uh 200 in telescope but whenever I go buy it right
now there's a tear in my eye because of what that telescope looks like boy is it
a wonderful Masterpiece it may not be the biggest in the world anymore but it's up there for my quotation today I'm
going to go all the way back to 1295 before there were telescopes
before Galileo before Shakespeare all the way to
Dante who in Lavita noova wrote these words in that book which is my memory on
the first page that is the chapter when I first met you appear the words here
begins a new life thank you and back to you Scotty
yeah thank you so much so you always find the the right uh
poem and and you're you're working on a book of uh astronomical poetry is that
right yes that is correct and while you bring up that subject the book that I
finished before this one has just been out let me see if I can uh give it to
you it is called stargazers and it even says stargazers when it's
reversed but it's um finding joy in the night sky it is based on a column that I
write and um it is now available but uh anyway back to you SC well
congratulations that's great and I assume people could buy that on Amazon is that correct yes very good okay I'll
try to find the link and put it into the chat here all right so I know that David
had to run off he's got another uh talk to give to another group but he'll be
back um uh at this moment I'm going to bring on the astronomical league and the
president of the astronomical League Chuck Allen uh they have been with us um for uh
since almost the beginning of the global star party which I was looking up on uh
on our index and uh it has been this August it will be five
years of global star party so so that's it's been a pleasure to do
all these uh and share all of this with all of you and and it's been wonderful to have the astronomical League uh by
our side this entire time so Chuck thank you thank you for coming on well thank
you Scott and obviously it's been wonderful having you by our side all these years uh many of you out there may
not be aware that uh for now about 33 years we've had a program called the
national young astronomer award that recognizes young high school students engaged
in incredible levels of B astronomical research and Discovery and Scott has
been our loyal faithful sponsor for our Awards uh
ever since the second year of those Awards in 1994 and we're deeply deeply
appreciative of that Scott it's just been amazing to see uh the great work
that those young people do so it's uh if you haven't been to an astronomical
league and seen these Awards and met these young people that do this research uh then uh you know you
definitely got to go and you'll have that chance coming up pretty soon at Bryce Canyon and I want to address that
for just a second and I'll start sharing here if I can find the right program
here okay uh our convention at Bryce Canyon
is selling out rather fast as we might expect from such an incredible
location um the convention is being held at Ruby's in right at the entrance to
Bryce Canyon National Park which is a spectacular National Park in southern Utah um where many other national parks
are within easy driving distance and uh I'm told by our
convention chair L lion that we only have a 100 registrations left before we
reach a maximum uh there are just under 100 rooms left in the hotel in the room
block and the room block closes on April 20th and the rooms are released so if you want to go uh we're about three qus
full now so uh you might want to register as soon as possible uh again
this is a a beautiful place to be uh we'll be observing under bordal one skies and it's a great opportunity also
for travel um I'm going to just talk briefly tonight about a topic that I have no
business whatsoever talking about as especially since David Levy was just with us and I've known David for several
decades now and there is no finer astronomer and Comet Discoverer than he
is but I am going to talk a little bit about comets uh many of you recently uh
had an opportunity back in uh October to observe Chin chong Atlas the
comet that uh dominated the news during the fall this is a comet that came from
deep deep space from the or Cloud which we'll talk about in just a moment uh
from a maximum distance that's actually rivaling that of proximus sentor the closest star to the sun it's
uh it'll be back if you missed it just wait 80 million years and you'll have another shot at it uh this uh Comet uh
is uh evidence of history in astronomy because comets have been observed for a
long time and the earliest comets uh that were recorded in history were
recorded about 1,000 BC in China and about 500 years later the Greeks
regarded them as wandering planets uh Aristotle thought they were what he described as exhalations in the upper
atmosphere and for a while comets were thought to be atmospheric phenomena not phenomena coming from space and in the
1200s Thomas aquinus and Roger Bacon um regarded comets as evil Omens associated
with bad things that might occur well since we're talking about history tonight there's certainly a lot
of history here that uh I've already mentioned but uh you can see records of
it in places like beu in France they have a big long tapestry there that was
created very shortly after the Norman invasion in 1066 and depicted in it is
this mment that contains an image of hi's comet uh and again this was
recorded sometime within a few years after the Norman Invasion it was a commissioned work and in
1456 The Apparition of H's Comet ignited European astronomy and this was coming
out of the Renaissance or at the beginning of the Renaissance uh when scientists were more free to come up
with theories without being burned at the stake and in 16 1810 uh Sir William
lower concluded from his studies that comets followed elliptical orbits that
came from far out and came in close to the Sun and sometimes close to the Earth this was about
1610 then in 1682 Edmund Hy uh came along and in 1705 he predicted the
return of the Comet that had appeared in 1682 and he predicted it would return in
1758 and of course this famous Comet did so um the second person to predict the
return of a comet was Johan enk who uh predicted the return of a comet that has
a very short period of 3.3 years Comet 2p enki and uh in the 1860s the first
Spectra were taken of comets by Giovani Donati and William Huggins and detected
uh carbon compounds in comets for the first time but the big year that came was 1950 and
51 when scientists began to conclude that comets were perhaps icy
conglomerates that they were formed from dust and rock and I of various kinds and
from those studies they determined that water carbon dioxide carbon monoxide
nitrogen Cyanogen and other carbon compounds were present in these comets
and that many of them came from deep space from that or Cloud I mentioned earlier and that we will still talk
about in a moment the structure of a comet that you can often see in pictures of course is
the nucleus which is usually Under 12 miles in diameter though not always uh
they're composed of 70% ises and about 25% Rock and dust now the purpose of my
talk tonight is going to be to let you visit the nuclei of comets because we've
done that a number of times so I'll hold off on that and just uh point out some other features of comets that we observe
in the sky which are the uh hydrogen coma front of the Comet uh the hydrogen
envelope that surrounds it the gas tail or plasma tail that always points directly opposite the Sun from the comet
and the dust tail which is being pushed back by solar wind but not quite as
directly from the comet's nucleus as the the lighter gases are and here's another
image showing the direction from which sunlight is coming pushing the gas tail
directly away and pushing the dust tail but not quite as effectively because it's more massive of
course and this is just a diagram of a typical elliptical orbit showing the
comet moving in toward the sun its gas tail always pointing directly away from
the sun and the uh dust tail uh being pushed toward that direction but not
quite as fast again there's also something called an anti tale that I captured in this
Photograph U which was just taken with a 200 millimeter lens and the anti tail has
been dubbed by many people to be an optical illusion as if it were simply a a fan uh draped backwards from the comet
uh of the Dust tail but it's really simply the direction from which the Comet came uh so can imagine the comet
moving along that path uh and leaving dust in its wake uh although there's some debate about this
still um comets come in different periods there are short period comets and long period comets and among the
short period comets that generally return in less than 200 years along
their elliptical orbits you have about 73 so called enky type comets these
orbit well inside Jupiter they come near the and go out almost to Jupiter uh
combat Ani here has a period of just 3.3 years and moves out to roughly the
distance of Jupiter a little bit less then we have Jupiter family comets there are about 8115 of these known here's a
typical one comat 9p temple one um these generally have periods of under 20 years
and have their origins in two locations um and one of the famous uh Jupiter
family comets was of course one that was discovered uh by David Levy Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker in 1993 and that was
com Comet Shoemaker Levy that in 1994 uh rather in
1992 broke apart and then in 1994 slammed into Jupiter um each piece
creating a very significant blemish these would have been practically
extinction level events had they hit the earth so we should be thankful for Jupiter for intercepting it perhaps uh
but Jupiter uh certainly dominates much of what goes on among the Jupiter family
planets uh here is a diagram that shows uh the inner planets out to Saturn
Uranus and Neptune these Green Dots here are called centors there are about 44,000 centors known and some of them
are comets cometary bodies and out further the Kyper belt Beyond Neptune uh
another source for many of the Jupiter family comets however as you move out to Halle
type comets these are comets that have periods between 20 and 200 years and they come from further out they come
from a place called The or Cloud that I've referred to before and if you can imagine the entire solar system being
subsumed in this little tiny box in here you get an idea of just how amazingly large the sword cloud is it extends from
a location about 66 times further than Neptune out to a distance of over three Lighty years and
it's full of icy bodies that can be disrupted uh simply by passing too close
to other icy bodies and fall in toward the Sun and become the Comets we see
there are also long period comets uh such and before I go on here's a side
view sort of a logarithmic scale showing the location of the orc cloud here you
have Neptune at about 30 astronomic units away that's 30 times the distance from the Earth to the sun here you have
Voyager at about 150 astronomical units the or Cloud begins at a thousand astronomical units
and extends all the way out to 100,000 astronomical units so it's a vast Cloud
uh left over from the formation of the solar system well here is a comet 2017 T2 pan
Stars which is one of these long period comets it has a period of seven it reaches uh a distance of 74,000
astronomical units from the Sun uh and that is uh exceptional distance and
therefore it has a very very long period it returns every seven million years very similar to the comet I showed you
at the very beginning we also have occasional visitors that are going too fast and
come from Interstellar space and leave again umu mua in 2017 that created all
of that uh all those news articles about possible visitors from other stars uh
pass through the solar system many believe it's a cometary body from Interstellar space and it won't
return well I told you that we would look at cometary nuclei by the way this
is an artist conception of the shape of amua mua although that too is somewhat
theoretical and here is an image of Comet Halley in 1986 and we sent a probe to visit Comet
haly when it appeared this was not the best Apparition Comet H's ever had certainly but uh we sent a zato probe to
visit it and got this image of its nucleus uh this nucleus is about nine
miles long five miles wide on average and it's an icy conglomerate think of a
rubble pile with I underneath and when solar heat and radiation especially
ultraviolet radiation strikes it the ice is Sublime shoot out from under the rubble and create these gaseous jets
that you see uh here and of course that gives rise to the coma around the
nucleus which then gets pushed backward by the sun's uh solar wind and becomes the tail of the Comet and the tail of
this Comet from this little Nine Mile nucleus was over 60 million miles
long well then in 2001 uh we sent a deep space one probe
to fly by Comet 19p burelli this nucleus was 5 miles by 2 and a half by 2 and a
half uh this Comet uh whips around the Sun every 6.8 years uh and is a Jupiter
family Comet meaning that it moves out to approximately the orbit of Jupiter
before it returns toward the sun then in
2004 uh we sent the Stardust mission to Comet 81p vilt that's how it's
pronounced the German name vilt uh this is another short period 6.4 year period
Comet that moves out to uh roughly 400 million miles before coming back toward
the Sun the stard Stardust Mission actually flew through the coma of the
Comet and returned particles from the Comets coma to a landing in Utah in 2006
and those particles had been studied and they have been found to contain organic molecules stable nitrogen and C
crystalline silicates uh which kind of surprised them because you need a substantial amount of heat to create silicates and
uh that heat either occurred because of some Shock event that occurred in the Comet or perhaps because this Comet had
its origin closer in toward the Sun than is currently expected oxygen and water
were also detected in those particles then in 2005 uh the Deep Impact mission
was sent to Comet 9p Temple 1 this nucleus is about 5 by3 miles in size
this is another Jupiter family Comet that orbits the Sun every 6.5 years and
uh what happened we sent uh this vehicle toward the comet this is the nucleus
from another view but now I'll show you the mission uh after I show you these views
and the mission was this as the spacecraft approached the comet a an
impactor separated and as the impactor moved toward the nucleus the uh main uh
vehicle photograph the comet during this impact and they got this image of the
actual moment of impact on July 4th 2005 and what better day to have a nice
explosion it left a crater by the way about 200 50 m wide and 30 m deep uh on
the comet as photographed by the main vehicle as it flew by we also sent the
Deep Impact space flight onto another Comet after it left Comet Temple it went
on to Comet 103p Harley arriving in 2010 and got within 435 miles of this
nucleus which is 1 mile long by about 3/4 of a mile and here's another image
of that uh showing the gous Jets emanating from under the rubble on the surface uh as the uh heat and radiation
from the Sun sublimes the gases uh the IES underneath perhaps one of the great
missions was a visit to Comet n 67p truma gasam menco this occurred um in
2014 and it contained a Lander called the feli Lander that was going to go
down to the surface of the Comet but here are some views as the spacecraft near the comet it's a
bilobular uh Comet as you can see and you see jets emanating from it to the upper left uh here's another view and
another faint jet emanating from the saddle and here is a view a close-up
view of the surface and another view that I think is
really spectacular looking into the saddle into a canyon on the surface of the of the Comet now the Lander was
supposed to drop down very very slowly because the gravity on this comet is very low and so it had to land very very
slowly and there were some ice screws that were supposed to embed themselves in the surface but they failed and so
the feli Lander bounced a couple of times and took two more hours to come back down to the surface and when it did
it landed in a crack and the crack was in a shadow and so it lost solar energy
pretty quickly and uh a lot of the information that would have been obtained from that was lost but again uh
there was detection of water vapor from Malahide methanol and other organic compounds uh on the comet and it was the
comet was found to have a dust layer about 8 inches thick um and
uh molecular oxygen was found on the surface of the Comet as well which was
interesting here is a an actual image taken of the activity uh that the U Rosetta emission
obtained when it was near the comet you see here a flurry of it looks like snow which is really of course particles
being driven by the Jets off the surface the ice Jets as they Sublime Drive material into space above the comet some
of the streaks I'm told are actually uh the recordings of cosmic rays striking the camera
but then we have an oddball Comet 95p Kiren and this is uh classified as both
a minor planet or asid and as a comet uh and it orbits just uh to just to the
inside of Jupiter's orbit and then back out to approximately Beyond Uranus's
orbit so it doesn't come anywhere near the Sun and this is an image of its
orbit but it's technically regarded as a comet only its size is enormous 75 miles
by 65 by 42 miles vastly larger than most of the other Comet nuclei you've
seen earlier and it even has a ring system which is rather amazing and so
finally uh just comparing some sizes of nuclei here you see a number of the uh
comets that I've talked about tonight 81 vilt in the upper right corner 19p
burelli in the lower right Comet temple one on the left uh 67p shum of gaso in
the upper left and then the much bigger nucleus of H's comet in the middle but
as you can see here second from the left Al's Comet compared to a few other
comets that are much larger including hail Bop which had a whopping 46 mile nucleus and produced an incredible
display the best combet of my lifetime certainly uh uh back in uh the 1990s so
that's it Scott and I'll turn it back over to you
uh Scott sorry
yeah I often turn myself off so I don't make any kind of strange noises in the background but uh uh you did talk about
the astrocon that's coming up at Bryce Canyon I do want to mention also before
we leave with the astronomical League that um it is the world's largest
Federation of astronomy clubs they have over 300 clubs under their umbrella and
I think they're at 25,000 Plus members right now which is uh uh amazing and um
uh you know it is a wonderful organization uh they recognize and
support uh both young and old astronomers uh people who've done
lifetime contributions uh you know with the Leslie Peltier award uh they have the um
Willamina Fleming award which is a an astrophotography award
specifically uh both of which you sponsor well which I sponsor that's true I I love these Awards but uh but they do
many other Awards and you know including web design and all kinds of recognitions
uh for people in astronomy clubs um and individual efforts and that kind of
thing I don't think there's any other organization that comes close to what the league does uh in this regard um so
uh you know it's uh our hats off to the league and uh uh if you're not already a
member you can go to astr league.org and join uh as a member at large from
anywhere in the world or you can join one of the member clubs and automatically become a league member so
many benefits um our next speaker is I think
it is I'm sorry I only made the schedule myself it is John Briggs John Briggs is
from the um uh the the astronomical Lum
which is a uh which is a museum like a private Museum uh full of amazing
telescopes and books and artifacts and stuff that John Briggs curates John is
known around the world uh for his ability to uh repair and enhance uh some
of the most historic telescopes that are out there and uh he has uh been past
president of the antique telescope Society he is one of the leaders of the
enchanted Sky star party which is going to happen this October uh he is also
Secret AR of the alliance of historic observatories John thank you very much
for coming on to Global star party again oh it's my my pleasure can you hear me okay we hear you fine that is great um I
uh had some trouble connecting uh from rural internet here in New Mexico and I
I look uh I kind of look like the nucleus to H's Comet at least on my
computer right now so I apologize for the uh question video quality I hope
however that when I play my presentation that I pre-recorded it might come
through more clearly for you and um can um can I share my screen yes and then
try running it for you and then maybe we can have some questions afterwards sure
are you in my right now yes I am I came in from home because I turns out today I
found out I need a new modem at home about three miles
away or router whatever it is DSL yeah I see a share screen button yes do
I press that you press that and then you pick the window that you want to share and then you have to commit to it and is
there a way that I press a button for share yeah share sound there it is
yeah there you go here you begin to see that
yeah thank you for your patience folks because I'm don't do that this
often
slideshow from beginning let's see if it works and it does
oh maybe I forgot to record sound for the introduction uh so I'll say
something then let it let it rip um the um um I this is actually a derivative
presentation for something I did recently for the um Astronomical Society
of the Philippines and I meant for it to um Advance automatically but I am going
to um uh figure out how to there we
go I grew up in rural Massachusetts in New England the nearby City Fall River
was 30 minutes away it was at the height of the Space Race in the
1960s and I was interested enough in grade school to be learning the constellations
and using binoculars but even before I got a book to help me I couldn't help
but notice with amazement and longing something special in this Fall River
Landmark it was the dery high school building dating from the
1880s it was an imposing sight to a little kid passing by in a car but there
it was high up on a mysterious Tower
and I knew what it was an actual Observatory with a big dome how I
wondered what it was like inside what could the telescope show how could I
visit it someday these were big and difficult questions to a grade school
kid who most of the time passing by was being driven to something like a dental
appointment by his mother only some years later did I learn it was an 8in
Clark refractor on a Warner and swayy mounting in time a long time I came to
know it very specifically perhaps better than
anyone another experience that greatly stimulated my curiosity was when driving
outside of Providence Rhode Island my father and I noticed a sign to Seagrave
Observatory I was still just a kid did but we turned and discovered it it was
closed so we could only Wonder but I never forgot it and when I became old
enough to drive I returned it wasn't much farther away than Fall
River I learned that the observatory housed an 8in refracting telescope made
by Elvin Clark and Sons that had been built in 1878 also with it was a solar
spectroscope made by John brownie in London about the same time uh the
telescope was
new probably my biggest lucky break however was after I became a junior
member of a local astronomy club the older guys seemed like Titans of science
to me they had just graduated college I was just out of sixth grade but they let
me and other young members travel with them to the famous weekend camp out in
Vermont the stalhane convention of amateur tall scope making it was an
amazing experience to an impressionable kid like me that year there was a very
special emphasis on history in the program I discovered that science
involved a whole community of interesting people it was social and you
don't don't learn that from homework
problems so the hook for astronomy was set deeply in me at stalhane and I kept
learning what I could from old books and I I would see pictures like this these
old black and white pictures and they were amazing to me pictures of
observatories and telescopes um historical things but the images to me
seemed almost dreamlike um hard to describe but these
images like these uh really make quite an impression here's another famous image
of course of the yuris refractor at yeres Observatory um the sort of image
that just invokes a a certain Wonder Could a place like this still exist
could it still be real when you see pictures only in black and white of course they don't seem quite so real um
it's almost dreamlike books like these uh showed me
those kinds of pictures and made me want to learn more this was a two volume
astronomy textbook that came out in the 1920s and um late later on when I met
astronomy professors some of them said that oh the astronomy textbook by
Russell Dugan and Stewart that was the best one that was ever written at least
from their perspective some of my mentors you could find such things
inexpensively in used bookstores and I I
started collecting them and there'd be little pictures like this inserted uh certainly capturing my
attention often old books are autographed by the previous
owners uh one of those textbooks uh was signed John W Evans only years later did
I come to understand that John Evans was a Harvard educated
astronomer who became a founding director of uh the national solar
Observatory he was a very famous solar
physicist it's funny how signatures can count for a lot when we happen to meet
special people it's so common to want an autograph it's a momento of something we
want to remember but with a special human connection connection nearly 30
years ago I heard that Dr Harrison Schmidt was speaking at an elementary school near eler I bundled my wife and
little kids in the car for the long ride to hear him he's the nicest man he
volunteered a wonderful talk signed autographs and posed for pictures like
this one so here's a man from Apollo 17 who walked on the moon embracing my two
children young Anna maybe didn't get the big deal but my gosh how cool was this imagine
how I feel having the image but jumping back to the kinds of
things that inspired my curiosity so strongly here's another neat old book
recording the early accomplishments of Mount Wilson
Observatory check it out it was written by none other than George Ellery hail
and it's Illustrated with the kinds of images that provoke particular Wonder in my youth I couldn't fully appreciate
then what a hero of 20th century astronomy hail had been but even a young
amateur noticed that the Palomar 200 in was named after
him Saturn on page eight just as today the most seductively engaging object at
a public public Star Party mysterious and complex attachments
to its all scope an odd Observatory appearing much like an egyp Egyptian
pyramid as anything
else an inscrutable solar
telescope finally a grand telescope that is at least recognizable
an astronomer allegedly observing at a monstrous telescope but standing at what
seemed like the end of a dangerous diving board only much later did I
understand how a bent Crain Focus worked perhaps what made these images
especially significant to me was that many images like them and actual
artifacts for Mount Wilson PR practically littered the stalhane observatory Clubhouse a site that was
becoming personally familiar to me it was perhaps distant but I was building
my own experiential connection to Mount
Wilson Anyway by 9th grade I had a chance to experience an observatory that
left an impression I could never forget it was the original but essentially
abandoned 1875 facility of the former Abbot
Academy a girl school in Andover Massachusetts I gained permission at a
key to enter and use it several times it was like stepping into a time
machine the 5-in telescope made by Elvin Clark and Sons was dusty but in working
order the mounting had setting circles with fine scales on Silver read with
verar and magnifiers the Dome rolled on cannonballs in cast iron tracks the
Clockwork had been modified maybe in the 1930s but everything else was exactly as
seen in this image from the early 20th century that I discovered only recently
by day I looked at New England Mill buildings on the horizon and at night
it's a view of Saturn that I remember best using the telescope I I was
alone classic telescopes are often signed like paintings or books or or
other things that are autographed Elvin Clark and Sons
1895 cambridgeport Massachusetts this was a 5 in and the
focusers been uh unscrewed to make it easier to see the
signature and to this 6 and A4 inch from the same year we can consider the
objective to be the heart of a refracting telescope but signatures Like These Are the souls the Hands-On pride
of workmanship from the brilliant makers comes through to touch us personally
from well over a century ago
well it came to pass that as a young man I myself got to live at work at Mount
Wilson operating the 60-in telescope for the long running HK project it involved
using a spectrophotometer to monitor the activity cycles of chromospherically
active Stars finally all the dreamy black and white images I had admired
over the years became a colorful real life
reality this was in the late 1980s and much of Mount Wilson remained
unmodified from its original days for example the Dome Machinery operated by
sparking Frankenstein movie like knife switches and other marvelous features
you had to be careful although I've had many Adventures connecting to astronomical
history I want to finally jump to a description of activities we have going
on now at an informal facility we have in New Mexico called the astronomical
Lum here's inside the building dating from 1936 was originally a local school
gymnasium and Theater now it serves as a combination m Museum Warehouse lab
library and lecture hall it's also an informal headquarters for our local
magdalina astronomical society it's become rather a clutter of telescopes
and related artifacts some of them are very historic
and everything has an Associated story we can only touch on a few now I'm
afraid among the oldest instruments is a 6-in
refractor made Circa 1855 by Henry Fitz of New
York among the most special is a 3-in refractor of a form very similar to the
fits but this 3in is actually quite a bit older and actually U uh set the
example for the morphology of these things
but what makes it so special is its signature pronouncing it in English UT
Schneider and fronhofer in Munich we have undergraduate and graduate students
of astronomy visit the Lum from schools like Austin college and university of V
Virginia any physics or astronomy student has heard of fronhofer and his
pioneering role in the history of SP roscopy it's wonderful allowing them to
see firsthand an actual instrument from fron Hoffer's famous Workshop students
are impressed by experience like this student visits are thus the most
important things accomplished at the Lum students react with surprising
enthusiasm and is very gratifying it's become clear to me how powerful sharing
the quote material culture unquote of science can be educationally to use the
words of current
Specialists going back to our early discussion of signatures and autographs
it's simply neat and somehow especially moving to have evidence of human
connection spanning time we must use our imagination inspired by the image
signature or engraving before us to consider how fronhofer himself was once
in the presence of this artifact as we are now it's an education Beyond what's
possible for a a typical homework
problem we can consider again the examples of a few books here are more of
those old illustrations that seem to have made such an impr ression upon
me there from this volume printed by Warner and suy the great builder of late
19th and early 20th century telescopes this copy was kindly given to
me recently by Perry Rose mentioned before as a student in cua's first
year but look it's autographed
closer it's none other than George Ellery hail the founding director of
yeres and Mount Wilson observatories For Whom the 200 in was named Hill started
with his own backyard 12-in refractor at Kenwood Observatory mounted by Warner
and suy in 1891 and Charles young was the featured speaker at the
dedication only 6 years later hail was in charge of the the mammoth Warner and
suy 40in at yery what an association as they say to have in a
signature let's return to the little book I described before for its dreamy
photograph 10 years
work look it too signed by hail a presentation copy
was proud of his book and what it represented to Thomas a Edison with the
compliments of George E hail October 28th
1915 what a cool book to have and if you're in the American
southwest please consider visiting us at the astronomical Lum if you can tolerate
a more inform Al the normal Museum experience thank you very much for your
attention uh in this
presentation hey and as a PS I want to insert uh this photo that was recorded
inside the Lum just a couple days ago of the big project that we have going on
we're setting up a giant Optical Ben there or Optical rail that came Surplus
from jet propulsion laboratory it's a it's an optical bench made by escania in Germany and it's
about 30 ft long and it's steel it's like it's like a a lathe bed and uh it
was used at JPL for testing camera lenses on many of the space missions
that we that we grew up with uh but we we have it now it was sold at public
auction was essentially given away um but we have it here in New
Mexico to test telescopes and historic Optics and uh we're very excited about
it we've been working on it for a long time and so I look forward to sharing more information uh about how we're
going to try to use this uh resource uh in fun ways here um in New Mexico hey
thanks again for your
attention wow this is yay presentation oh thank you thank you could am I uh I
guess I end the screen screen sharing yeah you can end the screen sharing but uh let's see um oh end it yeah there it
is but there's my yeah there's my email address and and various the Our Star
Party website which uh is going to be uh maybe reactivated soon whatever but
anyway thanks uh and I hope you saw it better than I'm seeing myself right now
no it was great it was wonderful I was I was shocked I mean not shocked but in
awe I've seen that uh that autograph book to Thomas Edison from George El Al
I mean yeah well let me tell you the story
um okay uh briefly but you cut me off know we got to keep an eye on the time
and you know how I could go um the book was given to me um uh by uh the Widow of
an of an astronomer okay and neither she
recently relatively recently neither She nor I realized that it was signed like
that and so I brought the book back home to New Mexico and was very happy to have
it was thumbing through it and bum bumped into that signature and you know nearly blew a gasket um but that you
know if that's not enough let me let me tell the tell you this part so it happens that um more more recently
essentially um I acquired yet another copy of the book and um I'm trying to
make piles of duplicates because a lot of these things are given to me and um
uh in sometimes as part of large Collections and I I actually took this
second copy of 10 years work and had it in my hand to throw in the Box as a
duplicate to eventually sell to because I need bookcases and I need some other
things to maintain this place and I'm working on that I got a lot of duplicates anyway I and but that I
thumbed through it just a little bit more uh than I had had taken the time to do and I realized oh oh my gosh it was
also signed by George Ellery hail but yeah but the but there's more there's
more wait folks there's more yeah thing is it said more than just George Al hail
it said it said to the president now this copy had been in the abso library
like the president well that's just what it said but you know it you know sometimes my wheels turn a little lowly
you know cuz you know it's this is New Mexico things are casual uh the air is thin so I'm thinking well who is the who
is the president of Avo in 1915 but you know they never you really
used the the term president very much then and and now and then I was thinking okay well who is the president of
Caltech or maybe was it through Institute or whatever it was in 1915
when the book was published and finally though finally nothing made sense it occurred to me wait a
second who who was president of the United States I didn't know so I Googled
it and it was woodro Wilson and so then I'm sitting here in the lysium with my cell phone and I type into Google George
aler hail comma woodro Wilson and search and then I hit a big jackpot because at
Caltech or actually it's at Huntington Library there's a big big Archive of
Correspondence between hail and Ro Wilson because hail yeah hail they had
including correspondents about the progress of the observatory and hail was very interested in National Academy of
Sciences and that was being renovated under hail's um supervision so there's
no there's no doubt in my mind that this other copy that was tested for my
duplicate box until I hesitated a minute is actually a copy like to the president
and so you never know what you have investigating these things and um I
could go on with stories but this is these issues these things are the the
storytelling is very very engaging with students and um it's a lot of fun to try
to engage them when they visit and that is why it's important to preserve
astronomical history uh so there yeah well I I I could whole harly agree our
audience is enjoying this very much John thank you so much um and I I know that
this gentleman right here David ier also would uh enjoy going through some of your uh artifacts at the Lum it was so
nice D David and I saw each other very recently at David Levy's House near
Tucson and that was picking up the the Schmid camera the Schmid camera yeah
long time John since we'd seen each other so it was great to see you again and we'll have to head over and hang out
in New Mexico thank you very much well thank you for the opportunity to share I
I don't want to abuse your time limit uh Scott well this is a special program we
haven't really focused too much on astronomical history and I'm so happy
that uh you shared what you know with us so thank you so much okay
thanks all right well uh there I'm not going to say that David AER is living
history but uh uh no no but he this guy has been working on Publications devoted
to astronomy since he was a teenager I think at age like 15 years old he was uh
already publishing something I think called Deep Sky monthly and uh which
became a regular magazine and then then he goes on to work at astronomy
magazine he wrote a bunch of books he's still writing he's still doing uh his
whole life has been steeped in Sharing astronomical knowledge and uh we're very
lucky to have him on so often on global Star Party um David is also uh very
instrumental in organizing uh what I think is probably
the greatest uh astronomy Outreach event in the World which is staris and so not
only is he involved with the the most popular and widely published magazine
which is astronomy magazine but uh this staris event as well so
um David thank you for all that you do well thank you for being here thanks for
having me and boy that's cool stuff from John isn't it it is I was
like I'm glad I fixed I I fixed some of the uh re resolution the video that I broadcast
here I was able to sharpen it up and you could see those signatures pretty clearly so I hope you guys enjoyed that
well and I have that same disease you know that that uh you know handling the things that have been handled by those
great influencers in the past that's the direct molecular connection we have to
those people and to the great events of History so that is a really really cool
stuff that some of their atom have to be like rubbed into the paper I would imagine so there you go and for a guy
who's wasted you know not only did I waste my youth you know writing about astronomy but you know doing a lot of
work later on in the National Archives and so on and going through now everything now of course is digitized
back in the day at the great institutions they would wheel a cart with boxes with the original papers on
them and you would take Lincoln and Washington stuff and things like that up to a zero machine what put him down on a
PL photop them you know that that was back in the even through the mid99s so
that it's incredible how far we come but I mean that you do find things like you know fingerprints in ink of these people
on letter you know it's amazing how close that makes you feel to those of us
who are afflicted with the mental illness of being really excited by history
yeah which I think could qualifies for all of us here so well that's a that's a good illness I think was my father who
was a chemist who historian too who got me involved with all that stuff and if
we get our kids involved with that when they're young and they don't discover dating quite yet that stuff comes back
to you yeah that's a lifelong infection yeah that's right well great well David
thank you so much now I think that you are going to be talking about another historic place which is L Observatory
story and the uh another amazing event called the iHeart Pluto event is that
right yeah and I talked about this a little while ago but we're we're now for T minus 48 hours away from this event
starting and so I thought I should briefly talk about it sure again and I'm going to have the great honor of
escorting Dr David Levy up to this event um so I will if I can I will share my
screen and uh find the right presentation and I'll talk a little bit about this and then uh we'll go on to
other things in future weeks so so I will um see if I can start the slideshow
so this is something that has been done for some years now at L Observatory uh
which is a great institution it's it's almost unique in the world of astronomical observatories in that it
really combines that history and Heritage of course uh with LOL with LOL
himself self uh with the um sort of Investigation of Mars in many ways with
VM and EC slier and the uh Discovery as early as 1912 with vesto slier of the
universal expansion and of course with our old friend who a number of us knew
very well Clyde Tomo in 1930 discovering Pluto so each year lol holds this Pluto
iHeart Pluto Festival uh in Flagstaff and it's going to be uh Thursday through
actually some events going on uh Monday of next week still uh the main event is going to be happening over the weekend
which I'll talk about here so if you're in the area of Arizona or the Southwest you may want to check this out there'll
be a lot of stuff that gets posted after this event as well it's a lot of
fun and um I will talk about this very briefly uh already covered some of this
so it's going to be Thursday the 13th through Monday in Flag Staff and uh on
Saturday night we're going to have a main event uh you know what Clyde did after he discovered Pluto um and it was
the realization of of this was the planet that they had been searching for I'm still calling it a planet in this
group here well he went to the orfium theater in Flagstaff that evening and he
saw Gary Cooper in the Virginia and kind of an early you know and semi-primitive
we would call it now Western but uh so we're going to hold this event in the Orum Theater which is still there um and
usually these days is hosting rock and roll um rather than so many movies but
our good friends will be there I'm going to be hosting this and we're going to be having a long discussion about Clyde
about Pluto and about some other things with David Levy of course David is very well known with the many things that
he's done for being Clyde's biographer um writing that most important uh
biographical book about Clyde Allen Stern who was also a friend of Clyde's
will be there he's going to be talking about the New Horizons Mission and what we discovered of course in the Pluto
system which turned out to be a very surprising system of course from a planetary science angle and we'll also
have a special guest there Adam neoy Leonard Neo's son who's very excited and
interested in astronomy he's going to be talking of course about his father and about growing up uh as the son of
Leonard neoy and the experiences that we have with Star Trek you know I've been
in around this stuff for a long time now um since I was too young to shave and I
think about 90% of everyone who's into astronomy they're trackies too you know
so so I think will be of of interest to people too sorry Scott no I said yes yeah yeah
yeah okay cool cool indeed yeah so that that's going to be fun to hear sort of
the inside story from him he's also going to show a film about his father
and he's written a book of remembrances as well that is out now uh too so it'll be uh quite a lot of fun to hear about
uh the reality of the universe and the solar system and the expansion of the
universe the nature of galaxies and so on and all those dreams that we've had
watching whatever version of Star Trek that we've grown up with and love
you can go to iHeart pluto. Org the entire event is run of course by L
Observatory if you don't know LOL has undergone this past year an enormous
more than $50 million renovation with the building of a new Science Center and
museum and theater and a an outdoor if you will planetarium with seats under
the real sky so it's been a revolutionary year for LOL and they're excited to Host this event of course
once again we'll also have a bunch of other events and this is kind of an internal
shot of the theater it's been reworked a bit and we don't know exactly which seat
um Clyde sat in on that day um but as I said they host a lot of concerts now a
lot of music uh but we'll have a planetarium show at LOL um a pub craw
maybe two of them I think actually around Flagstaff um there's a Pluto themed beer that gets announced a new
theme each year uh from the Mother Road Brewery um which is an exciting thing and on tap uh trivia contest with
astronomers and and other folks there there are a lot of activities going on through the daytime here at LOL up on
the on Mars Hill um and as I mentioned there'll be a talk by Adam NE Moy he's
going to show this documentary that he's made about his father called for the love of Spock then on the Monday the
17th we'll actually have a number of talks as well from astronomers our friend Dean Ras from uh my old stomping
grounds of Cincinnati will be there and some L astronomers including the director of science Gerard van Bell
who's a brilliant guy so it's going to be a fun weekend and we hope that uh if
you can't make it to Flagstaff this weekend these coming days here um you'll follow up on some of the activities that
we report online and consider maybe going to the ihart Pluto Festival one of
these years and when we get on the I'll just
mention them very briefly now but when we get on the other side of Pluto uh in April we're actually going to have two
staris events we're going to have our first staris event in the United States which uh again I'll be hosting that one
at the Kennedy Center in Washington um there's a lot of information about it now at stars.com then we will have the
main staris back now in the Canary Islands and this is going to be this time at La Palma where
until we get things going in Chile uh which is approaching here uh still the largest telescope in the world is the
grand telescopio canarius there which is on llma at the summit there so that's
going to be a lot of stuff a lot of talks from Nobel Prize winners from Astronaut explorers we mentioned some of
them earlier who will be there uh from scientists and other fields um and also
uh some special guests uh who are musicians who will give us some concerts
as well there so and we have a lot of stuff going on with staris now for the future uh that we'll be able to talk
about when we get through April here too so that's all I have Scott for the
moment there's a lot uh going on here I will stop sharing my screen and stop talking oh and I've run
out of uh the Sun is oh yeah it's dark in there sorry about
that yeah i' I I haven't gotten up to turn any light I'll pull my screen in to
light up your face everybody can see you so you know Isaac Newton and you know
Galileo even that the campan El and more recently Albert Einstein they're not
wrong Earth is still rotating so sorry about I'm fading out here it's time for
me to go all right well thank you so much uh
David so uh great to uh hear about all these great events and I know that
you'll have a wonderful time at the iHeart Pluto event um and uh you know
what an honor to host at the Kennedy Center for staris that is incredible so
think about that that is April 1st and 2nd uh and um uh you know uh normally
you'd have to go to Europe or you know uh Halfway Around the World to go to a starus event and now it's coming here to
the United States which is totally cool and there will be more staras in the states I can tell you in the future too
wonderful wonderful great thank you Scot thank you thank you our next uh speaker
is is uh Tommy lease Tommy is um uh a first timer on the global star party uh
from reading his bio he just gets started in uh
astrophotography about six or seven years ago uh and uh he got um he got
hooked by making a photograph of the Milky Way and uh uh I think he's been
doing it ever since he earned an Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA which is a great honor and um so I think
we can expect lots lots of great things from uh Tommy Lee thank you so much for
coming on to Global Star Party yeah thanks for having me Scott I appreciate it it's great to be
here so yeah I decided Well I had to put together a a last minute presentation so
I I AP that's the best kind it's gonna in include a lot of cool
photos and you know how I got started in in astrophotography and astronomy and
just my passion for the night sky so let me go ahead and share my screen
screen here okay and let's start here can you guys
see it yep all right so as Scott said I
am Tommy lease I am a um astrophotography lead with the Denver
Denver Astronomical Society um and I thought I'd share uh
some of my my uh images and how I got started with this so where I started
excuse me so my Astro Journey uh it all started in the mountains of
Colorado um so I started off as a landscape photographer it just it was
all amateur stuff I just really enjoyed you know shooting Landscapes um you know
sunsets the Colorado mountain peaks uh you know we my wife and I really enjoy
camping in the mountain and doing you know four-wheeling so I would bring along my my Nikon and you know my tripod
and just get some cool shots of the mountains and I decided you know one night uh in uray
Colorado I look up at the uh you know the Milky Way and it was just super bright the you know it must have been
bort two bort one bort two sky and you could just you know a moonless night and
you just see that huge Milky Way band and I was like you know what I'm gonna
try to capture this with my C camera you know just my my kit lens and my little
Nikon and you know I pointed it up to the brightest spot in the Milky Way and
snaap my first image of space and you know I I looked at the uh the image on
the camera screen and and my jaw just dropped I I really couldn't believe you
know what I just captured you know I like you could clearly see even though it was only a little
3in uh LCD screen I could see the Milky Way band and I was just
flabbergasted um so you know I I continued capturing images throughout
the night and I still remember this because you know it was getting really cold in the mountains and I I wasn't
really prepared for it but I just I just kept you know taking pictures um trying
different settings uh I hadn't really prepared for it but I had done a a
little bit of research prior to that you know trying to get different you know
exposure settings and and whatnot and I you know I had my SD card I went home
and you know looked at all the images on the computer and I you know I just started processing them in Photoshop and
I was you know I was hooked from there um so we continue this is the the the
first grain Astro photo that I got from my camera just a wide field image of you
know the Milky Way and yeah it was just a single I think it was a 5c image of
with a Widefield roken on 14 millimeter fish
Islands so you know from there you know the AST fire was ignited so to
say good way to put it what's that I said a good way to put
yeah I I I that title came to me I was like you know what that's a great way to put it um so you know after after a
couple more uh camping trips taking Widefield images of the night sky yeah I
wanted to go deeper I wanted to see what I could capture further into space you
know so I started researching this crazy H crazy hobby of astrophotography on the
interwebs um and wow I was in shock on all the different information available
I had no clue where to start um I thought I should join a local astronomy
club so I did I joined the Denver Astronomical Society back in I believe it was
2020 and you know the problem was is right when covid hit so there was no one
meeting up locally um you know and it's not like a you know visual astronomy
where you could just you know plop an eyepiece in a in a in a telescope and start seeing things yeah
astrophotography is a quite a complicated hobby um you know trying to get your camera settings right trying to
get you know your telescope to focus and um all that stuff that comes along with
it you know your your telescope tracking Mount um guiding all that kind of stuff
so um you know I so I I knew if I wanted to pursue this hobby more I'd have to do
it on my own but I found a lot great resources online and I met some friends on Facebook that shared the same passion
for astrophotography um you know after talking with them and and doing a more
researching online I bought my first telescope and tracking Mount um and
funny enough and I was talking to Scott about this is and he didn't know this but I bought the the telescope that I
bought was the uh explore scientific uh ar102 acrat tell
and also an explore scientific iOS 100 tracking M and I paired that
with my Nikon camera and I thought I I dug up an old
photo oh wow here iscope uh and tracking
Mount uh and so you can see sorry let me um let me turn up my volume a little bit
here about that
so let me skip forward just a little bit sorry about that so yeah you could see
the uh the telescope here with the tracking Mount and then you've got the very first image was this uh image of
the little dumbbell nebula you can see it right here where the cursor is not
not the greatest image but I was I was shocked it was just amazing to me that
you know I after all the trials and tribul the uh tracking Mount working and
polar alignment and you know guid or tracking I didn't even have any guiding
uh on the telescope it was just a tracking Mount and and Scott know that
you know this is a this this telescope is way too much for this little Mount but it still
worked wonderful it's great it's a great little advertisement that little little
tracking Mount um you know and then further further down the line I I I got
the the famous you know Orion Nebula a really bright Target in the sky I should
have probably started with Orion but yet know those were my first uh oops my
first two Astro photos um and then we continue on so
we've got uh some more early asro photos you've got the pl on the left and then
Andromeda galaxy on the right so just getting my feet wet um trying to figure
out all the gear and you know the the processing so still very very early on
in my my career so uh you know my love for Astra continued so after taking
these deep space images I was hooked but I knew I could improve I continued my
research on what equipment software I could get to improve my images I went through many different iterations of
telescopes tracking mounts and pieces of software Etc I started improving my
postprocessing of my images and getting better equipment I ended up uh upgrading
my camera to a cooled osc um dedicated astronomy camera and I got a doublet
telescope I also UPG upgraded to a larger capacity tracking mount so this
combination of gear and processing helped improve my images also watching U you know various
YouTube videos and widening my um Astro Circle you know all my my Astro friends
online and not too long after this uh the Denver Astronomical Society started
what's called asig uh the astrophotography special interest group
and this great because it it brought together like-minded people with asop
photography uh you know astr photography is tough uh anyone starting out you know
they they know the uh the issues run into um so you know after
um after that you know they started hosting these Zoom meetings that were
just D dedicated to aser photography and about a year later I actually took over
as the as astrophotography lead teaching uh live image processing
sessions so um you know I just wanted to share kind of the the improvements along
the way as I continued this journey so as you can see the Andromeda galaxy on
the left and80s on the right compared to the previous images and then continued
improving more so Andromeda gall and the plates and this is about the time I
started getting into newtonians uh I was a refractor telescope guy and then you know uh
started getting into newtonians which was a big pain in the butt but I do love
uh the star spikes I'm a big fan so years later my my love for
astrophotography continued so as my skills progress so did the equipment
uh today I currently run two Imaging rigs uh with two telescopes two uh
dedicated monochrome cameras with Filter wheels and fil filter wheels and filters
um and two tracking notes I continue to teach classes at
Das um I host astrophotography star parties um we've got a couple dark sky
locations here in Denver uh that you know all help set up the help people set up their
uh equipment Rigs and their Imaging Rigs and you know teach them how to uh you
know get into this hobby it's something I wish I would have had starting out but you know Co happened and it just wasn't
in the stars for me so to speak so you know I'd love to share this a wonderful
hobby with whoever I can um so I thought I'd just share um share a couple images
so this is my current Imaging rigs uh I say one of because I've got many um many
telescopes actually but this is actually another explore scientific um telescope
this is the ed102 um carbon fiber with with a
guiding Mount or sorry a guiding guide scope on the side here and a a guide
camera and on the back back you can see the uh monochrome camera with the with
the filter wheel and an automatic focuser and then up at the top we've got
some basically a USB hub and a and a power hub and then you've got the the
skywatcher eq6 uh tracking Mount
so um and then I just figured I'd throw in some more images um as I progress
throughout years we got another one of uh the Andromeda
galaxy and the pleades so these are more current images uh this is actually a
wide field image of the pl8s and this was taken out of the dark sky site uh in
Denver sorry east of Denver and then we've got a ultrawide
field image of the Tulip and Crescent nebula so this is actually Tak with a um
it's a a 40 mm aperture 180 mm focal length wide field
lens uh and this was done in uh narrow band so this is the uh sh color palette
so it was taken with um hydrogen Alpha
sulfur and uh oxygen 3 filters and combined and processed to create this
uh really cool color palette and next up we've got the m33
the triangulum Galaxy uh this was actually taken with
that that explore scientific uh
ed102 and I figured I'd throw in so I I got into a solar Imaging as well um this
was a interesting image because this is a uh this is a mosaic taken taken from
nine different panels and stitched together um using postprocessing
software and I I did share another image of uh this is the little the little
Imaging rig that I took that um took that solar image with so this is just a
this is a piggyback on top of one of my Newtonian telescopes and it's just basically a
tiny little lens that 180 mm focal length lens and behind that we actually
have a um a dayar quark solar
filter and then behind that is a monochrome uh basically a guide camera
that allows you know to take images through this uh through this solar
filter so pretty cool little setup uh um that allows you to take some nice solar
images H just some more more images that I've taken uh this is a wide field image
of the California nebula uh taken in lrgb so this is a a natural color
image and here we have a wide field image of the cone and rosette nebula
taken in nrow band and the ho o color palette so this would be um hydrogen
Alpha and oxygen only and then we've got the Flaming star
nebula uh this is also taken in uh natural RGB color sorry
lrgb and one of my latest images of the Great Orion
Nebula and here are some uh notable a OD images so this is the uh Perseus double
cluster and we have the rosette nebula this is a kind of an up close showing
kind of the details of you know B globules and the star cluster in the center uh
this is taken in narrow band sh color
palette and this is an interesting one uh this is a hubbles variable
nebula um so the the star at the center of this I believe and it don't quote me
on this but basically it pulsates and causes this nebula to change its uh
shape and color ever so often um pretty interesting Target
here so that is it for me sorry I did that one a little quickly but does any
anyone have any questions for me
well I love your picture of the variable nebula that was great yeah that's
awesome I'm glad I could share that with you um yeah it's a definitely that that
and that one was an interesting one because I took that image with what was a just actually a guide camera it wasn't
a a fullon Imaging camera so those are pretty cool one
and so I was pretty happy with it
excellent excellent okay well that's great uh Tommy thank you so much for uh
sharing your images I think that um you know I think our audience would like to see a lot more of your work and uh um
I'm glad you're doing uh all the Outreach and education and sharing that you're doing with the Denver
Astronomical Society that's it's a great group and uh um you know we have uh uh
paired up with them at Star parties and uh one of the uh either the current
president or the former president was out there with David Levy and I for this last Eclipse out in Texas so yeah yep so
anyhow thank you so much for uh coming on to Global star party and you're welcome back anytime well thank you for
having me Scott thank you thank you all right uh our next speaker is Mike marada
and Mike is um uh formerly of the
astronomical Association or the American Astronomical Society excuse me that was
uh formed by George Ellery hail himself um and uh Mike uh uh was one of the
editors uh of the publication of that group which is the
historical uh astronomy division of uh theas and his talk is what the
historical astronomy division of theas can do for you so let's uh let's bring
on Mike let me find you
here there you are
oh are there you are Mike hi are you is this your is this your uh uh man cave
yeah this this is me this is where I work it's awesome very good very good
not done a lot I you know something I learned today I didn't know this was um
uh and and you'll have to correct me on what the technical term is but uh uh is
the study of money and um uh I learned today that Isaac Newton may have saved
uh England from bankruptcy um uh or certainly from a lot of financial damage
uh due to his uh his uh determination of the weighing of gold coins so true U so
I found that very interesting you know so uh and he did that work
uh with the U uh the British uh the the British mint for like 30 years or
something like is that right wow he also got a job for Edmund
Holly Hy to one of the branchman but hie didn't like the work and he was happy to
go back to to astronomy very
interesting very interesting well uh Michael thank you for so much for for coming on to Global star party and and
to uh uh it's very appropriate that you're on uh for this particular uh uh
event so thank you so much I'm honored to be here we're honored to have you
before we jump in yeah let me see about sharing the screen and getting everything right I practiced
this and of course it doesn't go well I think you're doing it perfectly
they're closing more things what they'll have to do here this night sharing the
screen you are sharing the screen you just need to take it in presentation mode from
PowerPoint but it's already large enough that the audience can see really I just see me
there's a way to [Music]
change so you can see the main presentation in the thumbnail yeah it's just it's not in presentation mode going
here and I know it's got the little speakers lect turn and when you click on that it's supposed to just do that there you go that's that good that's good
goodness gracious that's I host a zoom meeting every two weeks and it's always
stressful until the first guest shows up and I'm sure that it works yeah you almost need to do it every day
so again good evening to everybody and thanks once more Scott for inviting me
thank you Mike it's really an honor and a privilege to be here and for that reason I really have to begin with an
apology because there are other people who know more about this than I do I was
a member of the historical astronomy division of the American Astronomical Society for four years while I served as
an editor as enthusiastic as I have been my
knowledge base is about one Parc wide and one angstrom deep well given that um
let me try to entertain you with some facts still got some screen stuff going
on maybe you don't see it but I do
Illuminating the stars and following the footsteps you there
Scott [Music] yeah I'm
sorry I found the historical astronomy division of the American as Astronomical
Society to reflect two deep truths first that the stars are pretty at any
magnification it's the understanding of the history of astronomy that gives meaning to to the objects that we View
and second in doing that we are repeating for ourselves the discoveries made by hi parus in Galileo William
hersel Caroline hersel Margaret Huggins Edwin Hubble of course Joselyn B Bernell
and very very many others as we move forward tonight also bear in mind that
all of these resources are open source and that decision was made by the
American Astronomical Society leadership
about two years ago so all of the AAS journals all of the internet content is
open and open source for you perhaps the single greatest gift is
offered by the historical astronomy division in the form of their two literary prizes the osterbach award and
the dogget award there are a lot of good books out there these books have been
vetted by the historians themselves as being the works that they recognize
as being Superior these are these are just three of the recent uh Award
winners from the osterbach prize the book that nobody read by Owen
Gingrich is about copernicus's book on the revolution of heavenly bodies
seemingly nobody read it after the cernic Revolution was accepted in fact a lot of people did but not as many as
wanted to argue about it Stephen J dicks history of the US Naval Observatory
garnered an award in 2006 he continued to work on superlative projects and
we'll look at another one of those in a few minutes I just finished reading the white ages by Seb Faulk The overarching
Narrative is that the Middle Ages were a time of achievement exploration and
Discovery and even even though they were also hallmarked by the virtue of humility Faulk brings them to light for
us by following one man brother John of Westwick who built the device and wrote
a book both of which were wrong wrongly attributed to Jeffrey
chaer my copy of Stephen J dicks more recent book has about 20 Post-it notes
in it as a backyard Stargazer I refer to it often to provide context we too
easily think in terms of a few objects planets clusters faint fuzzies the moon
and the sun in fact there are close to 50 distinct classes of astronomical
objects and the astronomical League by the way has those uh programs for those
who want to pursue them all of this and very much more is
accessible from the homepage of the historical astronomy division you can find it off the AAS homepage you can
find it with the simple browser search and it's easy enough just defined as h a.
a.org from there let me recommend the monthly
columns that celebrate the historical events and the people that made them the
column has been running since July of 2016 there are about 80 col column articles
so far most of them were written by academic astronomers some came from
amateurs amateurs also provided Astro photographs for some of the Articles a
few were written by University students from undergrads to a doctoral candidate
one was written by a high school student who was mentored by a college professor they all cover the people the places the
events the observations the discoveries and of course the great
debates just to take one example of the rediscovered history most people most
astronomers today do not know about the celestial M marvels of the Paris
exposition of 1900 the celestial Globe is about 60 m
in diameter it housed a full restaurant and while people d an artificial Sky
moved around them when he was chair of the historical
astronomy division Kevin Chriss Unis said one could consider that the purpose
of the historical astronomy division is to give credit where credit is due for
discoveries of the past here is an example of that it applies especially to
reestablishing the validity of the work done in the former USSR which in its day
was denigrated and ignored here largely for political reasons of the Cold
War for the May 2017 column Teresa Wilson who was then with the US Naval
Observatory wrote about the women computers at the D Dudley Observatory of
loudenville New York unlike the better known Harvard Observatory which moved
away moved on The Dudley continues today to serve its communities and their
schools with Outreach
programs one of the grand projects of the historical astronomy division is to identify and preserve the artifacts and
records of astronomers the working group on the preservation of astronomical Heritage
coordinates with the antique telescope Society the international glass plates
group and repositories of films plates and log books such as those of the yeres
observatory among the recovered artifacts at yys was a sealed
envelope inside a sealed envelope found in a room that was once the office of
subra Manan Chandra sakar on the inner sealed envelope was written
please do not examine contents thanks s
Chandra sakaro the working group on preservation dealt with the ethical dilemma of
balancing that request against the obvious possibility that the materials
were of Greater historical importance as we come to a close here
please consider exploring two of the ongoing projects the obituaries are just
what they seem biographies mostly of astronomers of the immediate
past Asen is a kind of genealogy project
it attracts doctorates who own them and who they studied
under among the obituaries you'll find an homage to naine Barlo whose specialty
was Mars you'll also find a tribute to Sam
Durance one of the very few professional astronomers who was also a NASA
astronaut the astrogenic tracks careers who studied
with whom it's only a guideline these students of Gerard Kyper
are credited to the University of Chicago and that's fine but they did their actual observing and photo
photographing at the McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas
which UT operates for Chicago and it was there just to note that Carl Sean and
Gerard Kyper waited for the Sandy Skies to clear on both Mars and Texas and
while waiting they discussed the possibility of communicating with intelligent beings on other planets
before we close allow me to draw an analogy between the resources of the historical astronomy division of the AAS
and this photograph of Messier 100 it's easy to see the big pin wheel in fact
there are at least three more grandesign galaxies in this picture and so too
should you take your time stop visit look around read and explore within the
resources PR presented here tonight I could go on all night but
unlike the universe I'm out of time so thank you all and thanks again Scott
over to you Michael that was wonderful and I wanted to say two things first of all
your last picture of messay 101 while Comet hunting on the night of
July 4th it was Independence Day 1966
I chanced upon messay 101 and uh it was just magnificent and
just keeps on getting more magnificent every time I chance upon it the other
thing was the book nobody read I have that book it's in my library right here
and it is wonderful not the book so much that
Cernic's wrote which nobody read because no one believed him that the son was the
center in that Earth but the the book that uh the book that was written about
it uh the book nobody read itself I think it was an excellent excellent wonderful book and I thank you for
including that in your list congratulations Michael good work thanks
again thank you very much happy to help
hello there hi I just unmuted real quick to say hi
Ron we we've crossed paths through the AAS with the the proam Outreach all
right were so now I have a name and a face nice to meet you nice to meet you
great talk Mike thank you how's everybody doing tonight it's
great Scott are you there yeah I'm here I'm here you hear me all right I can I can okay yeah I just wanted to thank uh
uh thank you for coming on to Global star party uh with your talk a short
history of astrophotography I don't know that it's so short it's uh uh but a lot
has happened since 1880 so um with um I
believe it was Henry Draper uh making the first image of the Orion Nebula in
that year so well I'm going to go back a little bit further like maybe 177,000 years
okay and I'm going to I'm going to cover 17,000 years in 15 minutes okay you may
you may ask yourself how I'm going to do that you'll just have to wait and see well I'll watch it that's right let me
uh let me share my screen with you guys and thanks again as always for
having me on I really appreciate it than you um got to find I have to find my
PowerPoint and it's under my zoom control we had some really wonderful presentations in This Global star party
oh yeah this is fun you know these are fun because they're short so you got to
be you got to be Snappy right yeah so how do you do a short history of
astrophotography well I mean I guess it's easier if you start with Henry Draper but I'm not going to as I said
I'm going to cover 177,000 years in probably less than 10 minutes all right
and you know as I always do I'm going to talk about this in the context of the theme that you provided to all the
speakers and I want to give a little a nod of the head to all the all the
things that I'm not going to have time to cover in 10 minutes this by the way is the clown face nebula and I haven't
published this picture yet I was hoping for a clear sky to get more data but I think it might be done pretty nice
image so here's the theme and I've just part of the theme and I've only highlighted part of it but this is what
I what really spoke to me about what you sent Scott first of all that that
astronomy is the key to understanding our place in the universe and Earth isn't the center um but it's just one of
countless planets and I'm going to reiterate that in a minute uh in some
other words and this didn't just start with Henry Draper it started with
ancient civilizations tracking the skies and it gives us you know we we're
going to have a peak into the history of astronomy but of course we could go into
so much detail we could have uh hours of people talking about
this particular topic also one of the other nice things I like about this is you give us a theme Scott and everybody
brings a different take to it that's right I love that part of what you gave us is
this hang on yeah certainly the history of astronomy
shows us that every time we thought we were special we were wrong uh and that's from Seth Shak from
the SEI Institute and you know the first time I was on the global star party I was right after him right after Seth
yeah that was hard Seth will be on the next Global star party so I'm really excited to have him on
cool um so this kind of is another way of saying that point that Earth is not
the center of the cosmos it's just one of countless planets right we're not
really that special but I might push back a little bit and say we're special
in the sense that we are here and we are now looking at the universe right it's
not from a different vantage point in another galaxy like this
m33 and it's not at a different time we're seeing what we see here and now so
maybe we're special in that small way so the reason why I'd have to talk
about 177,000 years of history is that Imaging is more than just asttr
photography some of you might recognize Astro from the Jetson um I thought he deserved a little
nod here so if you if you instead of focusing just on astrophotography think
of Imaging as a likeness capturing a likeness of the sky in any medium now we
have to talk about things like cave art buildings and Landscape star star charts and sketches um uh deero types of course
film photography and digital imaging so all of these are different types of
capturing a likeness of the sky and I've got to go through this quickly I'm sorry for that but let me show you what I
mean so cave art this is from the lasal cave in France it's 177,000 years old
and you can see the ples basically laid out on the wall in
the cave wow above the back of Taurus the
Bull and over here is Orion's Belt on the left side wow okay and here is the
corresponding page from the camb Star outlas there's the
ples Aldean being the eye of the bull and Orion's Belt now I note that Orion's
Belt here has four stars instead of three but isn't that interesting and
maybe this is ryel maybe that represents rajel so someone was so captivated
uh with all of this imagine I mean they just had to remember the exact positions of these things inside of a cave okay
with maybe a candle or a torch or something and go and paint this thing you know oh yeah now um what you see the
large map that you see here is a a map that my wife made from the work of um
Mary cane but all that work was based on Katherine Maltwood discover y of the glastenbury zodiac in Somerset
it was established around 2600 BC it's really quite large as you can see and
it's all these effigies in the roads path streams and Earthworks and you know some of the place names have names that
correspond to the animals that they're on so uh one of my wife's good friends
lives at wag which is on the tail of the dog effigy
and uh there's a pig Effigy in there and uh there's a place called high
hem so uh this was like I say described in 1925 some people have connected it to
Arthur's Round Table you see the Effigy of Leo uh drawn out if you're interested
in this my wife wrote a book that's related to it malin's prophecy and she
has a website secrets of theil landscape.com but the first printed star
chart if we move away from Landscapes and buildings like the pyramids and so
on the first printed star chart goes back to 1515 so we've jumped ahead what
10,000 years and uh alre juror prepared this
star map doesn't show a lot of differences between the Stars uh later
on so this is now in the 16th century 1551 uh the stars are different sizes
and brightnesses somewhat this is now after the
introduction of the telescope the refractor more detail becomes visible on the moon and the maps get better and the
differentiation of star magnitudes gets better now we're at the end of the 17th
century um this is an 18th century star map and now it's got table added to it
on the right and on the left and some pictures of some really important
observatories by the middle of the 19th century we had uranometria Nova the the
sequel to which is basically still in print called uranometria and that's a a star Atlas
that lots of people still use and of course this is the sky Atlas 2000 this
is a page from Sky Atlas 2000 showing uh the field containing copia
near the bubble nebula and it doesn't show just the magnitude of stars with their brightness but it even indicates
variable Stars so you can see gamma copia the the center star of the
W has an inner black spot and an outer ring that's its range of variability so
these charts start to get pretty sophisticated but not as sophisticated
as you can get on your phone now any day of the week for three bucks for a
lifetime astrophotography for me also includes sketching in fact that's how I
got my start in astrophotography um you don't need any special camera you don't need perfect
conditions you just need a lot of patience believe me I'm not a great Sketcher um you can see how sketching of
Saturn evolved from 1610 to 1676 with the Improvement of Optics and just more
and more experience drawing it so uh By the time Cassini sketched Saturn in 1676
we can see the Cassini division there these are a couple of my planetary
sketches the Mars sketch on the right was made at the Mars close approach in
2003 August 23rd I think it was 2003 and uh Jupiter I sketched in 2009
one night Jupiter's the easiest planet to sketch you can do the ellipse and the
main bands before you go outside and then fill in the
details uh and uh if you want to just get started at sketching give your you
give yourself a try at Jupiter and if you have an H Alpha scope that's also fun to
sketch of course technology changes and you know tip you know tip to through
tiptoe through Memory Lane we start with camera obscura quickly move in 1839 to
glass plates these are film uh uh you know glass plates that contain silver
light sensitive silver particles um but the first moon photo in
1840 required 20 minutes of exposure wow now I get a picture of the Moon in 5
10,000 of a second yeah it's crazy how things have
changed mostly because of the introduction of sensors electronic sensors CCD and camos sens sensors
revolutionized not only professional Imaging but amateur Imaging grocery
shopping almost everything we do this uh is a DSLR camera the 60da it
was one of the first dslrs that was made specifically to do astrophotography they gave it a special
filter that passed H Alpha light that nice pink color that you see in the
Orion Nebula in this image uh and you know then we move to
cooled cameras so the the two cameras this is a couple of my telescopes the camera that has the blue
housing is monochrome so it's a black and white sensor in fact all sensors are
black and white I'll talk about more that more in a moment uh it's a black
and white sensor and then in the big Square black housing are seven filters
red green blue clear hydrogen and oxygen and sulfur uh on the other telescope the
the camera with the red strip you see it doesn't have filter wheel it also has a
black and white sensor but that sensor has a filter array sitting right on top
of the sensor that has red green blue red green
blue red green blue repeating pattern of pixels and it does the conversion to
color uh uh later on in processing so that color camera is very similar in a
sense to the camera in your iPhone and it's similar in a sense to the
cameras that are on space telescopes they're se you know many of them are couse C cameras although they
might be sensitive in a different range and they might use some CCD cameras still as
well and of course now we have things like the sea star these are the latest
thing in the history of astroimaging and it made history for a lot of people at
the eclipse last uh last year this is my wife Gail standing next to the sea star
with an iPad and we were watching this is how we watched the partial phases of the eclipse it was so cool so this is
now part of the history of Imaging these products are evolving really fast and 10
years ago we're not going to remember a time when we didn't have them look how much things have changed
so these are some of the first Agera types 1845 1851
1852 this is the sun uh the the left and Center one and uh the moon uh on the
right here's what we can do now with a webcam and a tiny refractor with an Hal
Alpha filter this is the Venus Transit which was my birthday present in
2012 again we look at 19th and 20th Century images of things like m42 M16 the
fireworks Galaxy NGC 1696 so these are less than a hundred years ago here's
what I can do now wow all of these were taken more than 10 years ago and I can
do better than this now with my current equipment here's another example from
1942 this is uh a wbad p uh took this photo it was published in the
astrophysics Journal it's the Crab Nebula here's my photo from a few years
ago H Alpha RGB and again looking at this now I'd say the Stars here are kind
of soft and why don't I have any Oxygen 3 in here it's all just Hal Alpha and
natural color so you know I could do better on this too because things are
continuing to evolve so that's my Whirlwind tour through the
history of astrophotography um but I just want to give a little nod to the things I didn't
get time to talk about and so there were many many different cultures that
contributed to Imaging the cosmos in the different ways that I talked about
whether it be uh uh you know cave art uh
uh rock art all of these things uh spiral structures on the ground uh
earthw works I didn't talk about any of those I didn't get to talk about how the
process of acquiring an image has changed the old days when we used film
and we guided with a guiding eyepiece that had crosshairs in it MH do
you remember that Scott and if you happen to If you happen to sneeze and bump the I piece you might lose a a 20
minute exposure oh yeah your eye would like start to water up if it was really cold out and and the magnification was
so high on the Crosshair eye piece with no eye relief you know so it was it was
uh very tough to do some at at some point it was it was almost zen-like of
of how you had to really lock in and and really kind of get into the guide and then at other times it was just
torture yeah I you know and I remember for example sometimes when I was using a
film SLR camera yeah single reflex getting to what I thought was the end of
the role of film and going to rewind it and finding out the film had never
been on the sprocket had never moved across the film plane yeah uh I I'm so
happy for digital image and we also didn't talk about data crunching that's really evolved too right oh yeah just
the way we process data and uh that picture that I showed you of m33 I
processed that yesterday um I'm just going to really quickly go back to
it sorry if I'm making you have vertigo here there it is I reprocessed that
yesterday it's a data from 20121 but look at all the detail and just in four
years it's the the the the result that I'm able to get is completely different
yeah so let me quickly Zoom forward again I think I just have one more
slide yeah uh I wanted to mention uh also Imaging beyond the VIS Imaging
beyond the visible spectrum right so that is a new uh part of the
history relatively new we've been doing infrared I guess for while but with the
with the new James web telescope and the GX probe and some of the other things
that are up there we're Imaging in all these other uh parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and that's now
part of Imaging astrophotography history um if you want to see any more
of my stuff find me at astrod do.com doca proudly Canadian yes I've
been at the since about 2006 I love to write and teach so I write for sky and
tell um I teach oneon-one and through masters of piix insight.com
um please uh get in touch if you want to talk to me this is me on a happy day in
the observatory one of my uh best man cave ever I might say and with that I will
stop my share all right and thank you again for having me thank you thank you
thank you so David what do you think of U what
did you think of the uh recent images of Ron breacher thanks thanks Scotty I'm not
hearing you very well but I do want to add my congratulations to a wonderful
presentation that Ron just gave and I really was particularly impressed with
the fact that you went all the way back to cave art that reminded me of a very
major early photograph taken on July the 4th
1054 and it's in the mountains north of Albuquerque New Mexico at chako Canyon
and it shows the um Supernova of
1054 with the moon in the right place the Supernova and the hand for
scale and uh just wanted to point that out and I also wanted to add that that
particular cave art was done exactly to the day 153 years before another two
photographs were taken this one by me and Jean and Carolyn Shoemaker that
revealed the existence of comet Shoemaker le9 that was March 23rd
1993 and I just wanted to thank you good work Onnie awesome
awesome okay yeah I also wanted to point out you uh talked about drawing the
planets and um uh you know in particular Jupiter um that is the subject of our
next uh presenter by Carlos Hernandez Carlos is a space artist um and he was
trained uh to draw planets and other uh celestial objects by uh chick Capen who
is a famous uh planetary astronomer that worked um I believe he worked at L
Observatory uh and uh chick was uh trained by
slier uh who was also you know so this this history and this
apprenticeship continues on you know all the way to uh uh Carlos who of course is
living with us today so Carlos uh pre-recorded presentation and um I will uh I'll take
that away but um uh Ron I want to say uh that um uh there was a nice comment here
from Mark bc1 watching on YouTube and he said fascinating thank you Ron breacher for
insights into astrophotography I'm usually too busy doing it to think about
where it came from there you go okay okay so let's uh let's go to
Carlos and um Carlos if you're watching thank you very much for putting this
together hello my name is Carlos Shades and I have been invited by Scot
Roberts and Explorer scientific to present a lecture on observing the
planet Jupiter
as we all know Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and is
referred to as the king of the
planets Jupiter is in mythology the king of the
Gods Jupiter is the Roman name for the king of the Gods and in Greece in Greek it is
Aus and he was the ruler of all the gods and he had a
powerful lightning bolt that he used to eliminate a lot of
his enemies at the time in mythology juper is the largest planet as
I said a moment ago it is the fifth planet from the Sou Sun it orbits in an
average distance of approximately 484 million miles or 778 million
kilometers which in astronomical units which is equal to 93 million miles or
150,000 150 million kilometers that's one
astronomical unit Jupiter is located at approximately 5.2 astronomical units in
Sun it orbits the Sun in a period of approximately 12 years exactly
11.9 years and therefore it is located within
each zodiacal constellation nearly as its orbit
coincides with the number of zodiacal constellations Jupiter is made up mostly
of hydrogen 90% and helium 10% and Trace elements
including ammonia methane and very little water vapor and
hydrocarbons including ethane and
venzy here we see a slide showing the comparison of Jupiter on the left and
the Earth on the right you could fit almost 12 Earths across the equator of
the planet to Jupiter if you could hollow out Jupiter like a pumpkin you
could fit over 1,300 Earths inside of
it as you can see when you look at Jupiter in a telescope you will notice
light zones and dark belts across the
disc of the planet and these belts and zones have different
names according to their position over the globe of the planet Jupiter on top
we see the north polar region and then we see a succession
of interposing belts and zones and you start with the north
equatorial belt right above the equator and they go up then there's the
north Trump iCal Zone the north tempered belt North tempered zone now when you go
above the north tempered Zone and you see belts and zones then you add another
North or South nen clature to it so the next belt
would be the north North tempered belt with the north North tempered Zone and
this continues all the way up to the North or South po regions of the planet
Jupiter has intense winds or jets that
are located throughout the planet and the greatest winds or jets are located
over the equatorial zone of the planet and as well as the north tropical
Zone then as you go North or South for winds decrease in
velocity now the winds also are located towards the east which considered
prograde Direction and the winds that go Westward are
considered retrograde and they can get up
to 500 miles an hour
this is the diagram that I produced showing the different layers of Jupiter's upper out atmosphere of the
skin of the the planet showing the thermosphere at the top right below is
the stratosphere then the propos spere now
most of the clouds that we see when we look through at Jupiter through the telescope are located within the Copo
sphere and that that contains mostly ammonia ice clouds but also ammonium
hydrosulfide and other compounds that give the different
colors through the clouds and belts of the
planet as you go in towards the core the center of Jupiter the pressure
as noted on the right and the altitude on the left
increases so the lower you go into the planet the temp the temperature and the
pressures increase to the point that at about 10
bars or 100 kilometers below the what's considered the zero point or surface of
the planet is at the point at which you have a
pressure of one bar 100 kilometers below that is where the gases become a liquid
form they transition into a liquid form at approximately this uh altitude in the
atmosphere of the
planet as I mentioned the zones and belts are noticed when you observe
Planet these zones are consisting mostly of ammonia ice clouds that are higher in
elevation and cooler in temperature whereas the zones are devoid of mostly
of ammonia ice clouds and are lower in altitude but are warmer in temperature
so the zones the air rises and in the belts the pool air
sa at times you have different eruptions over different parts of the planet and a
well-known eruption occurs over the South equatorial belt as you can see in
the section of a excellently detailed image by a friend Christopher go you can
see the development of a South equatorial belt disturbance an sebb
disturbance and this occurs periodically and it starts off as either
a white or dark spot that that continues to expand over a per to days to weeks
until it encircles the entire belt and below is a painting that I produced
showing if you were located directly above that White Spot erupting from
below the atmosphere of the planet you could see the the main the main area to
the right and then the leading Cloud to the
left here is a drawing of a South equatorial belt disturbance that I made
on March 19 2019 using my instrument a 9in uh maxoto Cass GRE and you can see
the different parts of the disturbance you can see is it appears in white
clumps within dark areas between them and this is considered a South
equatorial belt or SCB disturbance in 1995 NASA sent a probe
into the atmosphere of Jupiter called Galileo it uh went along with the
Galileo Orbiter that was orbiting Jupiter and this was the first time that
we were able to explore the atmosphere of a gas giant
planet in this case Jupiter and it went into the entry point was located over
the equator of the planet and it descended into the planet and as it
descended it took measurements of the different gases and
temperatures of the planet as it descended it transmitted d data to the
Orbiter above for approximately 57 minutes before it was destroyed by the
extremely high temperatures and pressures within the atmosphere of the
planet and that occurred on December 7th
1995 a diagram showing the entry and Descent of the Galileo atmospheric Probe
on December 7th 19 1995 and it continued to transmit
information all the way down to 140 km below the zero point of the
atmosphere or a pressure of 24
bars the Great Red Spot is well known to most amateur
astronomers and it is an elongated anticyclonic Bo located over the
southern hemisphere of the planet and it measures
approximately a 1,300 kilometers in
width and several hundred kilometers in
right now this is a cyclone or anticyclonic Vortex that has definitely
been documented and observed and recorded since the late 1870s now it may have been visible to
astronomers as early as the mid 1600s but we don't feel sure that it's
been around since the 1870s and it has a period it rotates in
a period of approximately six days and the height of the top of the great red
spot is approximately 5 miles above the cloud tops or 8 kilm but recent Studies
by the Juno orbiting spacecraft show that it extends as far as 500 kilometers
below the top of the r red spot into the atmosphere of the
planet painting that I did with what it would look like if you were above the
top of the atmosphere adjacent to the Great Red Spot and this is what you may witness if
you were an astronaut floating within the atmosphere of the
planet now what we see when we observe the planet is the very outer skin of the
planet and that's accounts for the zones and the belts but as I mentioned earlier
as you descend into the planet the gases become liquid and as you descend you
encounter what's called metallic hydrogen which occurs at extremely high
pressures and temperatures and and this occurs all the way down until you get to the core of
the planet which is about 10 to 20 Earth masses in
size and that is the um insides of
Jupiter and Saturn Uranus and Neptune are somewhat similar to this interior as
well Jupiter also has very faint rings that are not typically visible to the
amateur professionals from the earth unless they image the planet in infrared
wavelengths but the Voyager spacecraft when it flew by the planet and
1979 and 1980 it imaged the faint rings
surrounding the planet and Saturn as we all know with a beautiful ring system
but Uranus and Neptune also has a faint ring system as
well Jupiter has a total of 95 satellites are moons and the largest of
these are called the Galilean satellites named after the Discover Galileo Galilee
when he discovered them orbiting the planet with his primitive refractor telescope on January 7th
1610 and you've got EO on the left extreme left followed by
Europa then ganam on
cisto EO is a fascinating satellite and it's the closest of the Galilean
satellites and it's has over 400 active volcanoes over its surface and here
painting that I did of what it would look like if you were able to stand over
the surface of the planet with a sulfur volcano erupting and the Lava Lake
Al and the reason that it's so it is so volcanically active is that as it orbits
Jupiter the inside is stressed by tidal forces
that heats the interior of the satellite producing this molten lava which then
erupts onto the surface of the
Moon the next satellite is a fascinating one called Europa and we've heard a lot
about Europa that there's a possibility of an a subsurface ocean and uh who
knows what possible life forms if any are present
but uh we are hoping to study this interesting satellite with the
NASA Europa Clipper which was recently launched and will arrive at Jupiter in
2030 followed by the European space agencies juice spacecraft which will
also study EUR opa also ganam and
Kalisto and this is a painting I did showing the eruption of a gazer over the surface of the planet
with Jupiter visible in the background the largest satellite of
Jupiter and the largest satellite in the solar system is ganam and is actually
larger than the planet Mercury so you've got a moon orbiting a planet
that's actually larger than another planet and it is also a very interesting
planet that you see uh Groove and craters and other interesting surface
features and it too may have a subsurface ocean that will be studied by
the esa juice spacecraft in the near
future and it has Aurora the visible Roots hold
as well as you can see that the planet Jupiter has incredible Aurora as
well this is my painting of the surface of Kalisto the outermost of the Galilean
satellites that show is a very heavily cratered Moon and uh this is one of
the surfaces barria within one of the craters of the
Moon Collis and with Jupiter visible in the distance Over the
Horizon Jupiter will arrive at opposition on De 7 7th
2024 and will be located within the constellation of Taurus the
Bull and it will form a bright star in the core in the
center of Taurus and it should be a spectacular site in in many
telescopes the tools that we use to observe Jupiter include instruments such
as a refractor that uses the lens and a reflector that uses a mirror to form
their images now these are two examples of the explore scientific
refractor nle chromat or you can use a triplet also more expensive but l
left color better color correction and the reflector this is a neonian
reflector that uses a parabolic primary mirror and a secondary flat mirror to
produce the
image other instrument designs used to study the planets including Jupiter
include the Schmid Cass green telescope on the left that's my celest Bron
that I actually obtained in 1976 and I've used it well on the
planets and deep Sky objects and it produ this excellent image the one on the right is my current
instrument it's it's a 9in maxutov Crain that employs both a corrector in the
front and mirrors inside the primary large one in the back and then a smaller
secondary over the corrector plate that reflects the images to the back of the
instrument Where You observe different ipce designs are very
useful for observing the planets including the a orthoscopic at the top
that uses four elements and the popular fossil IPS in
the middle that also uses four elements and another well-known IP for
planetary observation is the Brandon I piece at the bottom that uses four
elements as well from my own observations I like to
use high resolution eyepieces and the advantage that I prefer using the export
scientific eyepieces that they are also waterproof besides being of high quality
using sharp contrast images that allow me to see most of the detail on the
planets useful accessories for observing Jupiter and the other planets and Moon
are the color filters Now using the different colors you are able to pick
out subtle features over the planet the red filter might show you
some dark condensation and the belts slightly better as well as
the orange filter the yellow filter can be used to bring out bright features and
some dark features the green is good to
show dark objects uh including the belts and condensations the blue and the Violet
are useful for the belts as well of all these the one ones that'll
bring out the belts and the zones typically the best are the blue and the
blue green filters for observing
Jupiter we are at the mercy of the atmosphere on Earth which is a blessing
that it provides air for us but it also is a blanket that waves at times because
of the difference in temperatures and we are uh affected the images are affected
by turbulence within the atmosphere and this is a scale used to raate the seeing
or the turbulence in the atmosphere that was developed by a Harvard astronomer
William H Pickering it's called the Pickering seeing scale and it's from
zero or one which is the absolute worst to 10 the Absolut perfect steady
image another scale was produced by the France GCO astronomer Eugene
annati and this uses uses scale from one to five with one being a perfect
image two less perfect three average four four than five extremely turbulent
and pretty pretty useless to make an observation
now you can use forms that you can produce your own or obtain from
different organizations including the association of lunar and planetary observers
Alpo the British astronomical Association and the Oriental
astronomical Association as well in order to produce a drawing of what you see what You
observe at the telescope and this is an example of an observation of Jupiter
that I made on March 3rd 2004 using my 9in maxutov Crain at 27x showing a
wealth of detail over the planet and this was made under very good scene conditions and eight out of 10 or two on
the anonna scale and you can see the Great Red Spot located over the central
Meridian the southern hemisphere as the telescopes flips the image with South at
the top and north at the bottom and you can see of the South equatorial belt
North equatorial belt and the different polar regions and other interesting
features including white ovals and dark condensations or spots the image
immediately to the right of the drawing is what what's called an intensity estimate and what you're doing
there is using the scale from 0 to 10 where zero is black
and 10 is the perfect white and here I've graded the different features that
were visible according to how dark I perceived them at the over the planet at
the time below that intensity estimate dra
is a sectional sketch that I focused specifically on the Great Red Spot
region to show the wealth of detail that I was noting over the great red red spot
and surrounding region at the time and below it is numbers indicating
the different longitudes and Jupiter has three longitude
systems it's not a solid object it's a gaseous Planet so the the midsection the
equatorial Zone from 7 degrees north or 7 degrees south is called system one and
that rotates in a period of 9 hours 50 minutes 30
seconds and the regions north and south of the
equatorial zone are called system 2 that rotate in a period of 9 hours 55 minutes
and 45 seconds seconds the third system is called L3
and that's the rotation of the core of the planet and that's considered the
true rotation period which is similar to the system two that with by a couple
seconds a drawing of Jupiter that I made on November 11th 2001 using an 8 inch
pleas off casser graen that produced an excellent image showing the Great Red Spot some blue
Fons of the equatorial Zone and the North and South equatorial
belts and polar regions of the planet at the
time you can also make a sectional sketch of the planet instead of making a full dis
drawing was Jupiter tends to get complicated at times because of the
wealth of detail that you can see over the planet so you don't actually have to make an entire disc drawing you can do
what's called a sectional sketch and that's what I've done here showing
detail within the north equatorial belt on the planet on March 19
2017 sometimes if the seeing is adequately still
adequately uh well stabilized you may be able to detect detail over the largest
satellites of Jupiter and this is a drawing that I made of detail that I noted over ganam on October 2nd
2010 and the image on the right is a
corresponding um simulation using the NASA solar system simulator and can see
very similar alido right and dark features over the
mo that corespond with the simulator so I wasn't able to resolve the detail that
you would see with a spacecraft but I could see that there was differences in brightness and darkness over the dis of
the moon now in
1994 you mankind was treated to a show of commentary impacts over the southern
hemisphere of the planet Jupiter produced by the breakup of a comet that
was once orbiting the planet called Shoemaker le9 and over a period of nearly a week
23 fragments from the
comet impacted the southern region of the planet and producing uh huge
explosions that extended into the the space above Jupiter and
the remnant of the debris the scars of these impacts was visable to astronomer
for weeks and months afterwards a painting that I did of the
uh eruption the explosion after an impact of one of the commentary fragments if you're able to be in a
spacecraft floating above the layer Cloud top layers at the
time I was able to observe the impacts with my friends shown in this image with
Tibby diaria next to his
telescope and Jeff bash which was the owner and producer of
that telescope as well a 16inch F7 Newtonian that produced excellent
images and allowed us to see a lot of the impact sites over a period of a week
in July of 1994 these are drawings that I made
sectional sketches of the Southern Hemisphere and the impact sites produced
by the comet F fragments over that seven week uh 7 day period um in July of
1994 and if You observe the impact sites over a period of weeks you would note uh
the evolution or the spreading out of the material from the impacts and It
produced different shapes and it was very
interesting now we have a spacecraft at this time orbiting Jupiter obtaining
measurements of the planet and this is the Juno spacecraft orbiting the polar
region and you can see the spectacular Aurora over the polar region while it's
flying overhead uh this is a painting that I produce of what it would look
like if you were above the spacecraft orbiting the polar region at the
time as I mentioned earlier the NASA is sending a spacecraft called the Europa
flipper that will be orbit Jupiter but it's going to be making
close flybys of the uh Moon Europa in order to
determine that if it does have a subsurface ocean how extens of the ocean is and
other characteristics of this fascinating Moon that theoretically but
not proven uh could Harbor some form of life very basic life but this is
something that needs to be further evaluated and that's why we're sending the spacecraft to explore this and other
Galilean moves and with that I finish my lecture
and if you have any questions please contact Scot Roberts and expore
scientific and I will be happy to answer whatever questions I may be addressed
have a good evening thank
you well thank you very much uh Carlos uh I think Carlos is actually online
with us right now um got yeah and so thank you very much for putting that all
that together very informative um we uh didn't have a lot of questions but I
know a lot of people learn quite a bit about uh uh observing uh Jupiter and and
observing planets in general um it was very nice to see that photograph of
Tippy Dior and Jeff be uh Jeff B um both
have now passed on so um you are uh one
of the uh last of that group of uh of
you know planetary uh astronomers uh doing that kind of work and I'm glad you still do
it so anyways um I want to thank you for
putting that whole thing together and uh we will uh make sure that that
particular uh video is still available uh on Carlos's uh um page that
we are putting together um on explor scientific.com do you have any final uh words uh
Carlos well uh I'm glad GL that the presentation described the planet well
uh the thing about Jupiter is that what makes it difficult is that they're typically a wealth of detail that makes
it hard to focus on just on the whole planet and usually that's why sometimes
I recommend the sectional sketches instead of trying to draw the whole thing but um Jupiter is always a
fascinating object to observe and especially when there's U transits of
the Galilean satellites and U if you're lucky like like we were and David's part
of the conversation uh we were able to witness uh the impacts of Shoemaker le9
and that's a a great U historic event and it was truly fascinating that's
right that's right well thank you so much Carlos our next speaker will be
Robert Reeves who is uh um who loves to uh share with us all the details of our
of our closest world that orbits us and um uh Robert thank you for coming on to
the 166 Global Star Party my
pleasure can you hear me okay I can hear you fine oh great okay wasn't sure well
um yeah we running a little late tonight so I may have to speed this up but uh um
for the past two Global star parties I've and um basically just um going
through this um folder of um computer monitor screen savers that I use on my
uh on my main desktop computer uh it's 40 some OD images of the moon that I've
taken over the past years and they cycle through um using the windows um um um
screen saver U movie sequencer so another one pops up about every minute
and I find it very useful sometimes I'm just sitting here at my desk with really not much going on
and I'm just pondering what is on the screen and it helps me see details
sometimes that I have missed for years in some of these images and um I've um
offered uh these this package of screen savers to anybody who wants them uh just
drop me an email and uh um tell me U where to send them and I'd be happy to
afford them it takes about about three separate emails to uh send all 40 OD images and um like I said past two weeks
we've gone through first onethird of them and then the second or third and this week let's wrap it up and look at
the final third of them uh so let me go to screen share and um bring
up hopefully you are seeing the initial slide I showed that U has my email on it
lunar screen saver package these are for 120 um pixels across screen resolution
and they will be sent as three separate emails to whoever request them so uh if
you've enjoyed these quite a few of you have contacted them if you enjoy these
uh jot this email address down it's easy to remember my name Robert Reeves 400 at
the ubiquitous Gmail that everybody knows so uh uh let's Advance quickly through
these um slides and get up to where we left
off um last week and uh these are the ones that we
discussed the first week and uh now we're getting into the ones that we
discussed during the last Global star party and getting up to where we left
off
not yet not yet here we go I believe it was posidonia crater um that massive floor
fractured crater up on the northeastern Shoreline of uh of
[Music] um Mar serenus sea of Serenity
um this this Shoreline is interesting for two things uh I wish the image went a little bit further south because it
would also include the Apollo 17 Landing site but uh didn't quite make it on this
particular picture but posidonius itself well started out oh probably 3 and a
half billion years ago looking very much like a a classic um um complex crater
like very similar to cernus for instance collapsed Terrace walls tumbling down
into the center of the the crater u a complex of central Peaks protruding up
but uh being near the rim or the edge Shoreline of the serenus Basin um a lot
of volcanism going on here the volcanism that filled the Basin with Basalt to
create Mario serenus which forms the man in the moon's right eye um lots of
volcanic activity so the impact that created posidon is fractured the surface
so much that it tapped down uh fractures tapped into the magma Chambers under the
surface that were feeding these volcanic eruptions so lava float upward into
posidonius uh not by spilling over its walls but by welling up from underneath
through these fractures and that uplifted the floor and raised it up and
flooded it with with Basalt from the inside and as the basal cooled and subsided uh it created this series of of
reals and ridges so any crater that has this effect we call him a floor
fractured crater and posidonius is one of the larger ones a very classic example of it also along
the shoreline here I like to point out the Horseshoe Bay about Midway down right Square in the middle um that is a
lonier crater and um it doesn't really have any serious claim to fame except
that is the uh Luna 21 landing area where in
1973 the U the Russians landed the lunod 2 lunar rover that crawled around lion
creater for about four months um covered a considerable distance I forget the
exact figure but it's it's close to 30 kilometers that it traveled around uh
investigating probing photographing um rather Grand
exploration so this is all on the eastern shore of Mario seratus uh the
next slide is a sequence of five images that I took one night as Sunrise was
crossing U the center of the Moon the the the first quarter moon um the round
crater is tus uh almost right Square in the center of the visible disc of the Moon and people think the Moon is so
static and unchanging uh this sequence of pictures showing the effect of
Sunrise was taken over a period of just two hours so U bidone is just barely
cracking into the the interior just cracking into the sunrise and then um a few minutes later uh the shadows of
noticeably receded and then a little bit more and a little bit more and finally uh we see a little ammonia crater
popping out from the uh the shadows in the upper right hand corner uh ammonius
being about 9 kilm in diameter uh the only sub large substantial crater within
uh the floor of posidonius but we also see another effect here look all the way over on the left hand image and you'll
see the center of uh the crater floor is illuminated by the sun peeking over the
uh the rim of the crater uh creater walls but there's a ring of Darkness
around the inner part uh the inner ring of the uh the Creator's Rim uh that's
because the Moon is small enough that its curvature is so pronounced that the
center of of um polyus crater bulges up
and protrudes into the sun Sunrise before the edges of the Interior see the
sunrise um the that's an effect we call the clar Obscure effect and uh quite a
few craters on the moon will do that flat floored Basalt filled craters and
it's particularly noticeable on tus because it's right in the middle of the Moon uh it's
easy U during the first quarter
and this shot is basically Northern uh Mar tranquilatus the Sea of uh
Tranquility um on the opposite side from where Apollo 11 landed but U I
particularly enjoy the shot for the circumstances that it was taken I remember the morning early early one
morning before Dawn I went up push the observatory open um I just pointed
blindly pointed a telescope at the Moon turned the camera on and this is the
scene that I saw on my computer monitor I didn't focus it I didn't deliberately point it at a specific Target it was a
pure accident that the telescope was still in focus from the last time I used it and it landed on this marvelous scene
of Rima rupis couchi on the upper upper right and these little
shield volcanoes these volcanic domes underneath see the the little tiny volcanic Dome with the little Caldera
pit in the middle another one here U you can see a couple at the very top of the picture um this this picture and one at
the end of rupes couchi as well right there this picture is sheer accident it
just landed at the right place at the right time and by a sheer chance I didn't have to touch the focus I said
I'm going to take this picture without touching it because it appears appears to be so good I'm afraid
of messing it up if I if I deliberately try to focus it and uh got a lot of mileage out of this picture it's uh it's
served me well over the years and a wider view of the Southern
Highlands the uh you look up at the full moon and we can easily see the the dark
Mario that form the face of the man on the moon but we also notice these extremely bright areas and uh the these
are the ter the highlands and the the Southern Highlands are particularly
bright um not uh modeled by any uh dark
patches of Basalt this is the original crust of the Moon that has been modified
by volcanic eruptions this part of the moon is higher elevation so it escaped
the volcanic modification that created uh the Maria and the face of the man and the moon so we're also looking at some
of the oldest territory um the a lot of you will recognize Tao
crater U one of the youngest creators on the moon but the territory surrounding it is some of the oldest on the moon Tao
thing you think it's about 108 million years old but the craters around it are
almost 40 times older almost 4 billion years old and if I remember right the next one
gets a little closer yeah we're looking at a swath of the uh uh Southern Highlands along the southern U
Terminator and there's almost too much to talk about in this picture I could probably do a a whole presentation on
what's in here but uh um toward the right hand side of it we'll notice the
two elongated craters Schiller and hayel the two of the most elongated appearing
creators on the moon um are within same telescopic view um a good high power
eyepiece will show both of these together and it's pure coincidence that they're both aimed in the same direction
uh that's not a a common cause in fact Hansel at
the top is actually two round craters merge together and it appears penis
shaped simply because it's far south on the moon and our our perspect our perspective is is slanted but hanel I
mean excuse me Shiller down here um is actually one huge elongated crater uh
it's very unique no other crater on the moon looks like this and instead of a central Peak look at the central Ridge
here my theory is that the the impactor that created Schiller arrived from the
West plowed in the subsurface shock rebounded created that Ridge in a very
similar fashion that circular craters have the U Central Peaks that were
created by the shock rebound and then the impactor traveling at a very very
slant angle plowed out the rest of the crater it's almost 170 km long and uh
put the size of that in perspective I like to tell people that if the length of Schiller was translated into the
diameter of a crater Schiller would then be one of the 10 largest craters on the
moon um Shard over here another curious one Basalt filled but not floor
fractured crater um it almost looks like a small Maria and uh the exact reason
for the two-tone B Sals within it not quite sure the white area lighter area
is not a crater Ray structure um it's U not an elevated or a depressed area uh
it's simply a different color and moving on
hopefully moving on come on let's go there we go um a u another view of the
uh Southern Highlands uh concentrating more toward the middle of the Moon we're
looking at the eastern shore of Marin nubium and earlier I'd mentioned that tus crater being circled by my uh cursor
very near the center of the moon so here we're we're looking for the middle of the Moon down toward um Tao crater down
here and uh the straight wall right in the middle straight wall on the eastern
shore of Marin nubium and uh
um okay senior moment I know my craters but uh the name of this one just popped
out of my head and vanished so we'll just uh uh move over next door and look
at another curiosity uh this huge huge crater here deser crater so big
it's actually bigger than glaus crater which we used to think was the largest crater on the near side of the moon so
big that it wasn't even recognized as a crater until 1946 so uh um I was already born by the
time they figured out U this feature is the geologic structure of it is a crater
U one of the largest of the near Side of the Moon uh originally it was simply called hell plain named after after the
Creator hell right here named after father maximilan hell a very famous
astronomer from the 18th century but uh uh and old charts
um 19th century turn of the centur charts this is called Hill plain
nowadays uh we call it deslandres after Henry deslandres the French
astronomer moving on uh the detail in this
picture um I took this maybe 15 years ago using my Celestron 8 uh the same
Celestron 8 that I bought in 1975 I still have it it's 50 years old
and it still works just as good as the day I got it but um I took this picture
using a 2.5 U power um Power 2.5x Power Mate uh
telev viw Power Mate and an obsolete camera that's not manufactured anymore because frankly there's a lot better
ones now but I look at this picture particularly blowups of it 13 by1 19
prints and I am still staggered by the detail that my Celestron at sucked out
of the moon on this picture the uh the tiny tiny craterlets just showering across the whole field the secondary
craters the detail within um cus and uh
cathina down here and the up uh at the top uh it just still
catches me by surprise and U I've been looking at this picture now like I said 15 years and I'm still amazed by
it and a close-up of Tao now we're drilling down to the the details on this
this uh crater one of the youngest large craters on the moon 108 million years old and uh last in the
field of some of the most ancient creaters on the moon but uh we see Tao very fresh very crisp and a territory
around it very ruined uh worn down from age and we'll move on to the next slide
so now we can uh uh examine the effect Tao had on the surrounding territory
I've shown this picture many times and I keep coming back to it because the uh
the the stunning detail in this uh again a picture taken with my Celestron 8 an 8
in off the shelf Schmid craine 50 years old still still trucking along but um
here we see in the territory all around Tao these hundreds and hundreds of tiny
little pits the secondary craters uh created by the material blasted out from
Tao and we see how it's degraded the uh territory around it the further out you
go the less pitted it is and we're looking at the the
original surface of the Moon or the preo surface of the Moon ancient worn but
free of all the hundreds of little pits that you can see surrounding Tao U you get out uh uh pretty far they
taper off to almost nothing and continuing our love affair
with Tao here we uh we see it nested down in the Southern Highlands again uh
this time in the third quarter mode uh approaching Sunset and the Shadows give
it a different perspective a different personality because the Shadows are in the opposite direction so uh our
standard first quarter view of the Moon that we we're so used to in the evening Sky uh begins to look a little alien but
uh still a magnificent fresh new crater in this ocean of ancient some of the
most oldest craters on the moon and a little repetitious but now
we're jumping back to our first quarter view of it shadows in the other direction and uh getting down to the end
of the stack of screen savers a series of Crescent moons and uh this particular
one um uh we see sunet just approaching
Kepler crater uh just approaching gassendi another one of my favorite
floor fractured craters the sunset has already occurred on uh the Horseshoe Bay
of sinus rhm up here Oceanus prum the only lunar Seas or well actually Oceanus
prum is the only uh lunar Mario call an ocean so I won't call it a sea well
let's call it what it is the only lunar Ocean and the only uh Maria is still
visible the the rest are all in Shadow and uh we can begin to get a little bit
of perspective on procerum now uh during the full
moon the rest of the Maria are so noticeable even though they're smaller
they create the character the face of the man and the moon but proelium double the size of the next largest uh lunar
maria over 2 million square kilometers but it's so close to the limb of the Moon the Western limb that it really
doesn't contribute to the um caricature of the face of the Man in the Moon but here we've got the moon bisected by
the Terminator we don't see the other Maria so we can appreciate procellarum on his own merits the largest of the
lunar maria and uh next slide should have been in opposite order because where phases
are going backwards but uh still uh now we see the HHO Bay of sinus arhm uh the
mountain peaks of uh the Sea of islands Maran
solarum you can tell it's almost my bedtime I'm beginning to have trouble remembering names and jumping over to
the U um uh waxing crescent moon uh the uh
evening Crescent Moon I call it the chesher cat Moon because it's hovering just above the Eastern Horizon and looks
like the smile of the ches cat the fabled cat and the tales of Alison
Wonderland who who could disappear and the only thing left was the curve of his smile reminds me of these Crescent moons
and uh this series of two pictures we'll jump back and forth here look along the
limb of the Moon the Eastern side of the moon see how Mari Chisum jumps back and
forth how some craters appear and disappear here we're getting a real good
example Le of the libration of the Moon because of the
moon's elliptical orbit sometimes we can see a little bit around one side of the moon whoops too
far around one side of the moon other times a little bit further around the other side of the moon so in in effect
we get to see 59% of the Moon uh the actual hidden part of the Moon never
seen from the earth only 41% but here we see the effect of libration uh very uh very strongly we go
back to the uh previous ones these were only taken one night apart you see almost no rotation of features along the
limb the only thing we see moving is The Terminator itself but uh these were
taken months apart so the moon presents an entirely different
orientation and I think this is Yep this is my last
one getting back to a a a more familiar phase the uh waxing gibbis moon where
it's it's one of my favorite regions uh or phases of the moon because the first
quarter yeah uh you show us a lot of detail right along the Terminator splits
the moon right in half I prefer uh the waxing crescent phase because now we got
more U details like Kepler crater cernus crater uh we see all of Mari embrium uh
lots of detail up in the polar area in the southern regions uh in in those
Highlands and the Moon is higher and stays in the sky longer uh during this
particular phase so I prefer this one over the uh the typical uh
recommendation of uh you know start looking at the moon during the during the first quarter when we have detail
along the Terminator this one's my favorite uh more more of the Moon to
look at it's in the sky a little bit longer in the evening gives you a chance to get
out and uh play with it after dinner time so like I said these um all of
these pictures I freely give them away to anybody who wants them uh they're
presented as a screen saver stack uh so you set Windows to rotate through them
at whatever sequence speed you want and uh I find it quite delightful just to
just to ponder them from time to time so if anybody wants them shoot me an email
they're all they're on their way to you that's great that's great I got uh I
sent an email to you Robert so you want those pictures I want those pictures
that's right well we'll make it happen okay all right well that's great thank you so much um we are uh yeah we are
running a little bit over but uh we've had some great present ations our next uh speaker is marchel Souza from down in
Brazil and so we will head head down that way thank you very much Robert and
have a good night very good thank you I appreciate you having me on thank you we appreciate it too thanks okay um Marcelo
Souza is uh uh often on global Star Party he is a professor of uh of physics
and astronomy uh down in Brazil and he does incredible uh Outreach events uh
with the Lewis cruls uh astronomy club he's an ambassador for several astronomy
organizations he puts together probably the largest uh astronomy event in South
America and uh uh it's a pleasure to call him our friend he is also the
editor of skyup magazine uh in international free magazine for
astronomy and and um marello thank you for coming on to Global star
party I think your audio maybe you're M can you hear there we go now we can hear
you okay now I'm testing a new computer I don't know if that's okay yeah there's
a couple of new computers in this group other computer it's not working well
then I need to to change the computer some f is not to working well with
the I don't know with the com but let me only make it the last
adjustment here understand what's happening
here I think that this is the best I have for today I'm sorry but I try to
yeah it's okay fix the camera I don't know what's happen no it's fine
something is a new computer first time that I'm using for video conference I'm
sharing my screen I'll talk about what we are doing we
are here in Brazil is different from United States from Europe because our
holidays we're having holidays in January then in the spirit we are
everything isern slowly because soon we will have the
carnival here in brail Carnival Happ at the end of February then the schools are
beginning classes now but they will stop at the end of February you stop for one
week and then that things will begin here in Brazil in reality that it will
be in second week of March that we will begin year for this I will share my
now but even with this long holiday and this Spirit we are developing activities
here today uh we began a partnership with a
technical school here is a technical high school I don't
know how if you have the same in other countries but we have two kinds of high
school here in Brazil That's a traditional high school that prepare for
the universities and you have a technical high school for someone that
wants to work after the high school and we make a partnership we are beginning
to develop the development of satellites small satellites good sites in this
school and here the first event to we are looking for
talents the students and you had the opportunity to
also to look the sun with the special glass and was a fantastic experience at
this school I have many volunteers to join our astronom
club and uh at the end of the last week
because in this perod you have another problem because I have many clouds in the sky because the period of the rains
here in this you and but yes this is period of RS from
December until March they have stronger RS here storms but many many states here
they had the storms strong storms here
and for last week I had the opportunity to have three days without without clouds in the
sky that's very difficult at this moment and I here I am at my University with theun
Stella and I had the opportunity to take some pictures there and this is a this
all the pictures are without without Edition this is the
jup as you say portuges and this is V with the face of the very
nice that is something that when we show for the people when you have event
everybody H first say that they are see the moon
but I we talk with them how that you are see the moon because the Moon is the
other position not this direction and the we talk about the Galileo
and the first first observation of the pH of the V and how this something that
help to change the model that you use to for the solar system because with
the model is easy to explain the pH of
it's possible to explain using gent mod but is very complicated have many cycles
and different things to to show this kind
of view the moon we using that's a fantastic
beautiful and this is something fantastic that this SM ring in
m46 is very small here you can see here this
here and they're very short I use only five minutes
here something from our hemisphere that you can see here in Brazil that is the
Kino nebula and there something that is very easy to find this guy here is one of the
most beautiful objects here in sou hemisphere in my opinion these and the
Omega Cent Ro black West this is M1
I now taking Imes of the objects of the
miss this is M1 the C with the 10
minutes here is the best image that I think that I had opportunity to take
in this year that is M51 using the bo telescope North
in Hawai two M Periscope that is M51 I
had the opportunity to take this this ma that and I also we are also here working
with students to edit this Mage you have in three colors and now we are producing
color Imes if these three different M different fils this for me is one of the most
beautiful image that I had the opportunity to take and now new image
that in February this is
m33 m66 this something that is amazing and
now we have opportunity to use since I think I began to use two years ago and
the last num Observatory and now we have another project with them that allow us
to use live to make live observations using the telescope in Hawaii you have
30 minutes almost one hour per month to
use to take live ma this
m64 M65
and this was the last IM that is m61 for me was something fantastic to
take almost all the galaxies that that you can take that you can see that is in
M catalog information that out event that
you organize everybody ask us is about the total number of of the moons in the
solar system because they when look at the internet you have different
informations from different place and this is the last list of nature of
satellites of the of the planet and as we know we have Saturn now
we have a lot of moons that recognized there that have 146
Mo of B juper 95 Uranus 28 NE
16 M and me a total of
288 natural satellites of the PLS there is a lot of satellites most of them are
very small but is a h number and we also have
nature of satellites in G planets and now we consider in the last I think that
is the most complete information we have a total of
369 ER graph plants recognized recognize nine plants and we have a total of 12
sat natural satellites and if Pluto as you know we know that we know five
and you have a lot of mes Orting
asteroids and pres objects then we have many Moes that you can consider in syst
one of them that few years ago I was analyzing was
the aid silia silia has two Mo of the
asteroids very small and this is something that all the
events that organize people ask us about the moons of the planets and now you
have also consider the D planets and as we have a
few uh days to organize the the event we are making we are begin we will begin in
February 14 our comp campign by the observation of the total L GPS that we
have the opportunity to observe [Music]
in from March 13 to March 14 during the
night then what is the problem for us here in Brazil because the carnival will
finish in the beginning of March then one week later we have the total solar
equip total L Eclipse then we have a few days to after the carnival to organize
everything then we are beginning the organization now we are asking to close
one of the bridge of our seats and we are going to be there with our telescope
we did this one year we had the participation of 10,000 people almost 10,000 people that to observe the the
lunar eclipse and this year we yeah I don't know if we have so many
people because it will be after 2 a.m. from 2 A.M until the beginning
of until the sunrise here I have here the information about the the EC I don't
know it will be possible to see United States I don't know but I think that only part of the
eclipse that be possible to see not total eclipse here in our city we are
going to see all total eclipse we are going to lose only the end of the
partial eclipse because you have the sunrise here are the information of B
City I think that I show this into last program here in Brazil for
us uh we the partial eclipse will begin 2 9
a.m. the full eclip the total eclipse will begin
326 a.m. and we finish 4 31 a.m. and the
paral eclipse will finish 547 but it will be near the Horizon and
the probably this sun will be in the sky already in Sky
because in this summer very early that to have
then we are trying to organize a special events even at this time and you are
beginning to visit the schools as I did today to talk about the
clips to organize the event I I'm asking everybody that has telescope here in our
region in Brazil [Music] to come with us to our event organize
events in six different seats and I think that until the day of the eclipse
we will be in 10 seats with telescopes to make your observations of the
eclipse let you see what are going to happen because for us here it will be if
you don't have any surprise during the year will be the most important astronomical event of the for by the
popularization of the astronomy here I don't know what will happen these days
I hope it it appear to have a lot of RS I hope that we have clear sky this day
that's aot and I have the opportunity to see this from last
even and now before I finish I only make the announcement again of our intern AAL
event that will have will happen from April 10th to
12th everybody's invited to be here if someone wants to visit us we have
conditions to offer hotel and meals During the period of the event only to
arrive here in the city of Jan meet you at the thereport and come with you to our city and then return with you to the
city of J our city is located 270 km
from City of and you have confirmed participation of Gab griel Alejandra from Le cell from
Costa Rica that is one of the pioneers
of from Guatemala Guatemala aleandra from artina
he the director of the dark sky shter in Argentina
Fabi that is from Uruguay he director of
the dark sky chter in Uruguay and Daniel Brito that is is
experting exop planet we be making a presentation about exop planets here and
jul FIS that is a cosmologist that will be here we are
organizing from May May and June a special course of of cosmology in our
city here in partnership with the group of
and we are waiting more confirmation of participation at this
event everybody will be very welcome here thank you very much excellent for
thank you so much thank you I hope I hope one day I can fix the camera here
yes me too me too thank thank you very much to thank you so much thank you
marel okay our next speaker is um Tom
minini uh Tom is um uh a
uh is uh someone that's been associated with Mount Wilson for a very long time he's a
good friend uh he um is uh uh the uh
former uh director of Mount Wilson Observatory and uh but I think he's
there all the time he's given so much Outreach work and uh uh so much of
himself to educate the public uh uh with a you know an amazingly historic
instrument uh instruments excuse me that which include all the uh amazing and
venerable telescopes of Mount Wilson Observatory um
Tom has I think started his interest in astronomy as a child and um uh you know
it's he's made it a lifelong ambition to uh not only um uh help the observatory
through education but uh financially he's a he's a financial expert as well
and um uh has helped them in so many ways Tom thank you so much for coming on
to Global star party and thanks for your patience it's been a kind of a long drawn out Global star party but no no
there's there's a long story to tell here with the uh unque history of astronomy so well I I don't want to keep
everybody up past midnight if I were to do it but I like uh my role is you've
done it before though you do it with the telescopes often that's it's it's not
really it's not really work it's a oh if you want if it's a labor it's a labor of love I really really enjoy working with
people and with the telescopes it's a um well it's it's a unique place in the world uh historically uh very very
important um it uh uh like you said I've been
looking up since about 1957 I think y uh and I've built a few
Scopes and uh I've dabbled in it you've had careers I had to drop it for a while
to earn a living but I've always always come back to it but um uh my new role I'm going to just
going to cut to the chase here the um my newest role is just uh dealing with the
telescopes uh as the uh director of telescope operations um last spring we
completed the realumination of the 100in Optics of the primary
secondary and tertiary mirrors um next time I'm on here I might have a little um video well not video but
little pictorial uh stage of progress of the various phases of doing that process
which I think is would be fascinating uh since it was a two-e job I think you were there for the previous one weren't
you Scott you were there for part of it yeah uh you guys were um you were
showing me how the mirror was removed and and all the rest just to see the infrastructure
of uh you know the the 100in telescope like that was really amazing to me um
you know it's uh I you know it's one of the great instruments of the world it uh
um you know expanded our uh knowledge of the Universe um and uh so many wonderful
uh and and and and you know legendary astronomers worked on it so um well
Mount Wilson was the who's who of astronomy for yes half a century so
anybody who was anybody came to do work at Mount Wilson if they were serious um but uh now it's you know kind
of uh kind of long in the tooth uh it's been surpassed in size but I I've always
a beautiful instrument though it is just to look at it it's still different it's still one of the few defraction limited
pieces of Optics in the world so um it is a it is a magnificent scope and uh
it's um in working with it or working on it um it's kind of this is you you think
this this is irreplaceable you know we're lifting up a a 9,000 PB mirror U
by squeezing it from the outside and holding it just by the edges right by the edges and uh uh there's no bit no
Superior way of doing this I would have thought they would have come up with one but but no uh it's kind it is frightening and
everybody holds their breath when we pick up the mirrors especially the primary um but what I've concentrated on
doing now is um is getting it back to science we've uh uh with instar and
Stellar groups uh that Russ J has put together uh we are doing student science
on the 100 in and 60 in uh bringing up high school students to uh help uh uh
capture data for for closely spaced uh binary stars um uh basically speckle
interferometry is what they're using and uh they doing data reduction and uh
publishing papers uh which I think is fantastic you know if I were a high school student and could credit uh a
published paper or even jointly published paper I think that would be get me in anywhere absolutely I hope so
that's kind of what I'm looking for now and to um actually optimize the 100 in for that
process which is uh well 2 and 1 12 M uh we have two ports uh we're using one for
optical and we we're do we're piggybacking instruments on it but
there's a South Crain Port that um at F-16 uh all by itself would be a
wonderful instrument spot where we can put heavy instruments on it um we're
going to try and get a spectr photometer for it we want to we're going to apply for Grants to get a spectr photometer
don't know if we'll do it but that's that's the plan well you let us know if uh if you guys launch something like
that we'll spread the word and try to get some some funds going that way so we know the local local colleges and JC's
are interested in in participating uh a few people at JPL have been after this
for years and years and um I hope to get it together in the next 2 or 3 years but um basically that's that's my my role
right now and um uh I'm U going up right now well actually when
it stops raining and stops snowing and stops burning um we I'm going to I'm going to go back up this Frid right now
the I mean the instruments are still safe right I mean they safe they are safe we all watched uh fires and the
webcams at Mount Wilson uh uh you know you could see flames and and fire kind
of silhouetting some of the domes and right it was uh scary so well actually
we were pred disaster IED by the prior fire the Bobcat fire right it burnt
everything up to the edge of the observatory on on three sides the one
side it didn't burn was where the broadcasters were and that's where it came up that time and where they had
only one front to uh to fight so we we were unscathed by the whole thing
although we had like 300 firefighters up there I don't know how many units but they used us as a base
because uh we put in a water supply a sistern actually for of 530,000 gallons
of water for that purpose and so they were they had that available to use and it was it was great it was a um a good
asset for disaster like this and uh uh a good investment absolutely but uh but that's
that's what I'm doing now um I enjoy it uh we still have I'm training operators
uh training session directors dosant and so forth we have some new offerings we
have our our uh engineers said you know we'd like to try uh do a special tour
for people who are so inclined to engineering tour so and they got together put together a program uh it's
very it's only like 10 12 people can go but um it's the engineering tour and
they sell out usually in two hours when we have them they they're they're just amazing amazing things it's the nuts and
bolts you crawl in under the the bellies of the beasts uh go all through them and
it's it's a fantastic program uh we're going to try and do more of that uh it's too bad but it's limited in how many
people you can squeeze through a place so uh but uh it's very enjoyable we're trying
uh new things we have our concert series of course and our lectures uh that's that's our standard Fair uh it's very
successful it has um kind of put us on the map because we're now getting into
the cultural scientific and uh all other aspects of the community even though
we're we're a bit of a drive as you know but we're not uh it's it's right there
at the you know right at the foot of Pasadena so if you go to Mount Wilson you can just
have an incredible lifechanging amazing experience up there on the mountain and
then you can hang out in Pasadena you know a day or so later if you uh if you
so choose and uh just have an incredible uh time you know with h all the culinary
experience that's there and the culture that's in Pasadena uh it's it's just fantastic you
know so uh I see Mount Wilson especially with the rise of
astrotourism the way that is just exploding right now I mean if you don't put Mount Wilson on your bucket list of
places to be at you're you're really missing out because uh you know this is
this is one of the hail's great a achievements is putting these telescopes up on Mount Wilson uh Hubble was there b
was there I mean we could probably go down this list of all
yeah right yeah it's quite a list so right now also at Mount Wilson this is
where we had the first meeting of the alliance of historic observatories and uh that is a growing uh organization now
I was at the last General Assembly meeting at the Vatican Observatory and there are historic
observatories around the world that are inspired by this organization inspired by what Mount Wilson uh started and uh
uh it's growing and we're helping each other out and so there's like a there's a dosent meeting I think happening at
McDonald Observatory there's uh another uh General Assembly meeting if you
couldn't go to the one in Europe you can go to one in the United States and uh you know if you're you know you'll want
to go if you're part of a historic Observatory or you support a historic
Observatory uh you're going to want to be part of this these observatories still serve
their communities they are inspirational uh uh they're not you know they're not
just in mothballs or at least we're trying to keep them not in mothballs but return them back to uh doing science
like they are at Mount Wilson uh uh Tom touched on that they're doing specle
interferometry I mean they the speckle and aerometer that they have are this
whole system is built by amateurs with software you know custom designed by
amateur astronomers but they're bringing bringing the telescope back to life you know and doing some really cool stuff
you know so um well so we're we're going to expand it to daytime too we are uh
going to get the 150t solar tower back up to Snuff getting its okay getting it
all of its scanning capabilities uh we had some purists that said oh we want to do it the way we did it you know uh 500
years ago we want the same stuff and I said we can do this I said why we can do
it with a Raspberry Pi we could eliminate all that stuff so we've uh
We've we've breached that um impass and we're going to go with modern equipment
but we'll be using the the old um uh the Babcock gradings in that and everything
else which are fantastic resolution and so we might might get science going in on on the 150 foot2 I'd love to see that
as well very very cool so Tom if someone you know just wants to get involved with
this or support Mount Wilson where do they go how do they sign up what do they do well our website is Mt Mount
wilson.edu Mt wilson.edu uh they're are
various tabs and pages that you can go in you can donate you can sign up um You
can reserve a scop for viewing uh when we get the calendar up for for 2025 um
it's a it's a multi-functional port not not 100% but covers most of the
bases yes yeah uh Dan uh Garrett watching live on Facebook says wants to
remind us that lick observatories another historic observatory in California and they are one of the
founding members as well of the uh Alliance of historic Observatory so uh
you can uh search Alliance of historic observatories on Google and go straight
to their website and and learn what's going on with that organization but um
but Mel Wilson is near and dear to my heart uh and um I uh for a while uh
maintained one of the telescopes up there the little 16inch that was that was installed by Meat instruments and so
and on occasion they would let me sit in on uh some of the observing runs that
they were doing on the 100 inch I think it was called the HK project as somebody alluded to earlier yes it was it was
yeah both 60 in and 100 in uh the 16inch is going to be uh joined by a plane wave
uh very okay very good so it's going to be H we don't know if it's a 20 it's I
think it's going to be a 24inch plane wave is what uh uh lumbres is going to put in there we're going to be become
part of the lumbres observatory network uh but we've uh uh asked that we have uh
30% of the time for handson student science where you can actually go up to the scope and touch the stuff and push
the buttons um yeah because I I don't know I I don't think everybody can learn
with Nintendo astronomy you know on a computer uh I think hands on going up to the instrument and and nothing like it
that's excellent reinforcement for the right for for any student I I believe
anyway because you know what can go wrong uh um otherwise
you you know what can go wrong yes so uh yeah it's something I still love and uh
I'll do it as long as I can um climb stairs and drive up to the observatory so um yes I think I think you'll be
doing it for a while I hope so Tom okay thank you so much thank you you much
coming on to Global Star Party All right we hope hope we have you this summer maybe at the observatory to come up with
I hope so I hope so we got to uh you know the covid speed bump uh caused a
lot of things to happen but we're we're getting back in in gear here with the events and uh we've done events at Mount
Wilson uh uh and uh you know I want to get back to it so thank you so much good
okay well thank you and uh missed you for a long time and uh it's nice to nice to meet up with you again you too you
too Tom thanks okay thanks all right okay all right uh our next speaker is uh
Maxi FIS Maxi is in Argentina uh he's a fantastic cop photographer when Maxi
first came onto our program he had like um he had like a uh 4 and A2 inch new
Onan telescope and he had made an astrocam out of a mobile phone okay like
a smartphone where he took the lens out and just had the sensor on there and was blowing us all away by these amazing
images that he did with this setup and um anyways he has since um you know uh
gotten more Advanced Equipment but Maxi is the kind of guy that squeezes every
last drop out of the equipment that he has and uh you you can't say that about a lot of people that buy um uh nice gear
they don't they don't push it as hard as they can uh Maxi's the exception and if
you're so inspired uh you can always contact Maxi and he can give you ideas
on how to get there Maxi thank you so much for coming on to Global star party
thank you to you for inviting me again Scott and I'm glad to be here for I was
missing for a while uh but well thank you for the presentation uh yes I ER put out the
lens of an old smartphone ER Samsung
S4 Mini S4 of 2014 ER 2014 sorry uh
so that's why it it was an oldest ER smartphone but so to get a practice to
do some as photo ER to start it was a good one then I did the the same thing
with the Huawei P10 plus and and and now
unfortunately that cell phone doesn't work anymore for a program absence you
know but anyway I that that's why I started to do some asttr
photos or today I I knew Tommy talking about he how he started years ago uh and
and and I was watching myself you know
ER in in the way of how I started to do this how I why why what was my
objectives my ER dreams to do you know I always wonder to take pictures like h
space telescope or something like that and and I I I I I I was always a amazing
for those pictures so and and I was wondering how they do that so anyway
I I start in in a single way with some
advice from people from Cesar is a friend of us Cesar bro and and of course
a lot of friends in here in Argentina and and other parts of the world you
know ER because this community cross borders cross lands H Nations because we
are on under the the same Sky well not in
this part of of the of the Earth because
I I have my Milky Way Sky yeah yes but anyway we have the
Milky Way too so we can share it um so
well what I'm going to talk about ER well in by I think my last presentation
was talking about my trip to the
G Asom leono is in the national
park in San Juan Province hello let me share my screen how are
you uh who's talking oh here I think Tom yeah Tom
just has a visitor it's okay okay do you see uh my screen yep
with that amazing Eclipse shot I so familiar with yeah this is my epic photo
that I was I always wanted to to take and of course is this is my
screen in my in my my uh TV
so what I'm going to talk is the trip that I did with some friends ER Astro
friends ER that invite me to to go to the observatory
in h San Juan that and like I say uh let
me how I there there we go let me put it
on the map so you can find it
um anyway let's I have some pictures of this trip
H we have a lots you know this is the the view of the road
that we have to do this is my car and this is the Diego truck a Toyota and we
stopped to watch the the full view sorry that wasn't the picture uh of the
andless mountains in this in that time of the year uh you know I was amazed because
this this day it was I think the first time that I see with details the and the
mountains and with snow because now that they have they they still have snow but
anyway is the freezing so watch this the
clear sky the clouds you know watching the this forms reminds me for example
the the the helmets the the St helmets nebula because of the clouds that it has
and and compare with the asop photos and H when we arrived you know
uh we have the the partial H solar
eclipse in October here's me with the sunglasses and the the gears that we
have this is Herman preparing the gear too and we have then a trip inside of
this building this is the oh wow the observatory of the of
gleo uh this is a very huge telescope uh we we stayed here for three
nights H there was the the first one was good but and the next two was very very
good so we we went to to do some tour
you know I ER take picture of this this is the
where they put the aluminum on the mirror because every five years they
do they have to re aluminize the mirror so they explain us how they do it ER you
know we feel like very ner to because
there were some tourist with us in in this tour and you know they was oh good
oh they don't even really realize what what was happening you
know it was a uncredible because in this place they burn the mirror with t St and
and put aluminum on there is the [Music]
um be we say it but
it's it's Unique in Argentina H because there's I think
Cesar if you can help me maybe there's another one in Cordova or in La
Plata um but no no no any this is the
the biggest vacuum chamber in chamber yes yes it's the biggest bakum
chamber in Argentina uh because um the another ones in La Plata or in Cordova
are smaller um we we talk um we uh we was um
thinking in how we can start to use for for
um er manufactur meal mirror or simply
Alum um aluminium uh covering uh you know uh for for the amateur astronomers
for their mirrors but this so complicated because you need a lot of
mirrors to use a lot of yes it's very expensive yes yes as you tell that they
use for for each um yes I love this play
I went two years ago with my father and my brother and oh wow it's amazing
believe me do you feel do you feel tiny and believe me I was smiling
you you know me guys I always but the weather is so is so dry
that my lips cracks you know I can even smile here because it's very dry yeah I
understand I understand your your emotion no I I can't I can't even
talk I I was amazing by this you know watching all the instruments the cameras
H you know watching this like a guide in scope this is a a big CH go for me but this
was and and you know the the tourist that was that this was Ros she was the
our our guiding and the tourist that came with us or the to do this tour
H they oh wow it's big oh you know you don't even realize what is this you know
we have this the same thing or some kind of this
ER like amateur with very smaller you know H you
can you can see here this the the for to
calibrate the white balance and this is the how they charge
the mirror you know when they put it in the ER under floor to put it in the
vacuum chamber no this was incredible and of course h
watching these cameras uh the sensors I when I saw this out coolant
and in coolant you know I I don't know what I I thought it was water but then
the guy says no it's nitrogen to to freeze the sensor and I'm using a p you
know it's incredible so anyway way I I was ER I
was I I I feel I was feeling like a a child you know this is the plate in the
the in the base of the telescope because the name is Jor in recognizing of his ER
re on support and progress of the investigation in the astronomic science
13 of December of 1996 and you know
I put I I took a picture of this because this is the the clock that still working
right now um the programs or or things to
control the the telescope but this is still working because if that doesn't work anymore this is could replace
it do you do you do you hear me yes okay so this is
the cons yeah yes bance U manufacturer of professional
equipment back in the day I don't know if Bower and shiven still exist but um
no I I think not and we have in the area
this is the what h 2 m and 15
cm is almost 84 Ines telescope and in
the region here is the biggest one of this this kind they explain us so the
console is very old but still working you know this danger do not touch
electricity and oh I see right for of course they have the
the sen the telescope the ation uh the latitude of the
Caso is is the place uh no you know it was incredible and also I visited this
they they gave us opportunity to visit a solar a radio telescope that study the
the sun the sun spots and every day is working on this this is a Brazilian
telescope that they they use it um remotely but is in this
place too it it was incredible and of course we have the
here with the guys here's me here's Diego from Mendoza the pro next me and
here's Herman bakaro and Gabriel puso the all the three guys invite me to to
do this travel to this place you can see is Desert only desert but very high
altitude very dry so to do astrophotography is very good you can
see there's more equipment than persons you know so the the night was was freezing
but okay because we are nearby the the endes
and uh here's the guys then the when we finish the tour
and some pictures of the observatory at night you can see the large mag gen cloud and the smaller with the
observatory um I think they were watching TV because the lights goes on and off sometimes uh here's the National
Park El leonito or the little lion National Park
Administration so uh this is the in the end of this road behind this mountains
you know it was very hot day but it was still snow some in some places
so this is another picture that we did because almost nobody was traveling so
we had the background of the enders in this road and well of course I had I been for
three days so I was a doing some
processing uh first of all let me show you where is the well
doesn't work the internet very good let's go do let's go to the to the
photos uh this is the comet tan Atlas in October at the ER
dawn of the sunrise and it was very good to see it look at
that that's a nice com yeah this is the first time that I see it a com it with
my own eyes and it was incredible beautiful uh
then of course we had the solar eclipse but it was partial this is almost at the
at the end but anyway you can see all the on the sun oh yeah great that's
right and the the edge of the of the Moon and of course the
sun uh and of course the player
is today Ron bisher was showing this one it was a very good picture H and and I
did this where I I was trying to do it not to going very rough with the colors
and of course with the the lights of the of the Stars but I I was focused on the shapes of the
clouds that's nearby the the star cluster
so of course I did the Anda Galaxy because this is a really good one to to
capture at that Latitude in that time of the year because we have it very low at
the Horizon but with a um with smaller H
Feld of view you can you can capture it but also I did with a 8 in telescope this
galaxy uh this is NGC 10 97 this is a close the beautiful
spiral of the
Galaxy I really love to to to process
this the the core the arms the clouds amazing and of course the background the
another galaxies you know was beautiful it was a really really good
one uh then I came back well uh I did
this also in in in San Juan In This Place uh this is a cus a and NGC
1055 with this brightest star you know yeah but I really love the the process
that I get with this one because I almost process 10 times I don't really
and and the finished work I didn't like it but in this time yeah because I love
the the The Bluest and the purple places
you know I I I really like the the balance of the colors and of course this
is the in our nearby Galaxy NGC
300 this is my last latest work that I did on
processing and I really love the the core that I get with the the fine
details of the clouds and the small brightest nebulas that has it inside of
this Galaxy and even those Galaxy clusters there was a a
lot a lot of galaxy in the background and but anyway to do this I was a
448 pictures of one minute it it took me I think two nights because the first one
I I didn't take pictures then when I came back to my my
city poo thees I did this one for only 45
minutes you know this like the running man neula right
yes well now here in Argentina we're trying to to change
that because you can see the running man but no we don't see anymore The Running
Man we see the deu Martinez our goalkeeper of the national selection
at the very good at the final final kick of
col that he saves with his leg and you can see there is the leg and the star
and to to accomplish our champion we put on in our Jersey the star of the world
champion that we won so we won three and how many star that we have here three so
it was perfectly on this
particular object that says you know guys say again the new name of that the
new name of that um nebula after this uh after your star player what I I I I'd
like to to call it deu Martinez because
h duu is is like a um a draw but draw is deo but D is
shter of the draw and Martinez is his last name because his name is Emiliano
Martinez so emilano deu is like a cartoon character more exactly
yeah well we will I will I will try and uh propagate this
um so I'll be sure when I share my image I will call it the debu Martinez
nebula no longer the running man I will try and spread that in States
neighbor Adrian yes the football the socer
buted finally United States
yeah we will our best talking yeah with the Scott about Messi and yes yes yeah
he was in the NFL my wife is a huge fan of uh football and soccer football and uh
yeah she was so uh pleased her she's from Honduras and Messi had visited
Honduras recently so created quite an excitement so
but send my regard to your wife yeah I will so well what I what I'm doing right
now you know I'm not doing very ER I don't have too much time to do
astrophotography but what I'm doing is a kind of a job but I don't see it like
that because now I'm unemployed but anyway H in my free time I'm going I'm
going to H um a place where people
sells things and objects and go tourist so they
can if they want to collaborate with money of course I will be a grateful but
if they not ER there no problem too so I
can er um show you there the plan planets
the moon uh for all the ages you know uh and this give me very good gratitudes ER
because at I started with this a month and a half and in this time three people
you know they started to cry when they saw the moon for the first time oh yeah
you know they they told me yeah they told me oh my God I I'm I'm sorry I'm
crying I I can't believe it you know and I was shocked because of course if it's
the first time of course you will blown up but to the point of cry is very deep
and this give me that uh strength to
continue to do this because we have the moon every single month but we don't see
it like a with a telescope that you have that you can touch it almost you know so
doing this h a guy from here that do tourist to the people that come to this
place a told me that he want
to take my service with a telescope and invite me to a
place it's a Salt Lake dry hidden Louis
so we went to this place it's very very dry you can see the we are
here about a mountain of salt you know yes
and I put in my my equipment take care for the salt and everything
and you know I did this picture of the Comet here at the West
with my cell phone I put it on the
ground and I didn't even use a tripod I only put it a to my chair hold it so it
don't it doesn't fall and start to do some pictures you know and then ER
I tell a guy you know put on there and don't move so with a flashlight that
another person point oh wow I didn't tell that's a great shot that is a great shot they took a big picture you know
this is a unique photo yes so when I sent this to him it was very grateful
sure and and of there a little
video of the sunset of the place you know
and a couple of days ago I tried to do
with shortless people to you know ER tell them they can they can go to a
place a private place to do a chat of astronomy to do some astrop
photo observing of course H this is a a place of my father that has in the in
this in the middle of this town where I live and you can see there's
nobody but you have a a very P A panoramical View you can see that there
was the moon and this is another picture I took
with a telescope before they they come there I did this video like the
sun I don't I don't know if you can hear this the the sound no of the video no oh no
it's very quiet on the Wind some birds very quiet and we did hear
it and when the the people came this is my
car yeah a a person that was ER want wanted to to
be in this H very it was almost three hours of this
encounter so in this case they give me money to do this
particularly um Talk ER about astronomy about this me
celestian mechanical so er they was very very
happy to uh before the the the the the the dark
comes up we we talk about the the planets you know there was a kid that
always er ask me the everything but in a way that I couldn't believe it that he
was at that age he was a very fanatic of astronomy and he was very very happy
when saw Venus when they saw Saturn when they saw
Jupiter Mars there was mindblowing then when they saw the moon of course it was
better but more um then
more later ER we tried to capture
m42 and everyone want to capture m42 and they could it with the cell phone you
know I have a the to grab on the the ocular and they
was very very happy to do that my objective is to they have the principles
of astronomy in the region of here in in in the South ER what they they are
watching stand understand what they're watching and then finally let's do pictures
there's no problem but first of all you have to see it and you have to
understand it so here's the final picture that I did
will when we finished the the chat they was all very very happy so yes you know
this is now my job you know but I don't see it like a job it could be your job it could be your job there are people
now uh doing astr tourism fulltime so
yeah here there's a lot of people of course there there's a lot of Envy
there people say oh why you are robbing no I'm showing astronomy in another in a
private way and if they want to learn they want to be there you know we have
here in in um nearby my city an
observatory of launa but in this H time of the year with this
kind of tourist they only open two nights every week
and no then they do morning shift and that's
all we know depends of the the government that have it if they give
opportunities or not but in this case when I go to this fa
ER the people passing by they ask me how much cost and I say First Watch then you
decide you know because H ER if you can
I I will be grateful if you not that's no problem you can see anyway even the
the the the Childs even the the the the the the grownup
people uh you know even I there are there are people very
old they never saw the moon with the
very big you know yeah and that's it's like kind of approach the
astronomy to the people that never couldn't see it or feel it right you
know so it's what I'm doing right now and my wife that's wonderful it's wonderful
she I hope that you can Maxi I hope that you can uh uh you know I know this is
your passion your dream your energy all of this you know so if if you are able
to support yourself you know this is not something that will make someone rich
but uh no no it is something but it it is something that you could earn a
living doing you know so there's nothing wrong with that you know I mean think of musicians and stuff that support
themselves and artists that support themselves most of them are not wealthy rich people okay but they are doing
something that comes from the heart and is appreciated by other people and um
you know it makes uh makes life uh nice so that's what I can sayk thank you for
your words guys this so I encourage you I I know other
people who do it so and there's there's absolutely nothing wrong with making a
living doing this so that's great thank you so much well thank you for my
presentation for your time I hope you not to be late and and I'm seeing you
are freezing right now you have your jacket I just feel a little you know it's it's uh a little cold in my office
for some reason but I'm kind of brown or burning like with the sun because we are
in summer here and yesterday we had almost 40 degrees celsius so oh yeah it
was very very cut but yeah all right today it's okay well thank you guys
thank you we'll be in touch all right
okay good to see you again Maxi all right
so our next speaker is Adrien Bradley uh Adrian is um uh you know one of the
Fantastic landscape photographers out there but he does incredible night sky
work and his images of the Milky Way are stunning um and we always love to have
him on to as he takes us through the Milky Way uh similar to like Robert
Reeves who knows the moon like the back of his can Adrian's starting to really learn about the structure of the Milky
Way and stuff from his night sky photography and uh he shares his passion
and his knowledge and uh we're always glad to have him on global star party so thank you for coming on I've always glad
to be here even though I think my connection's not so good um can you hear
me okay Scott am I coming through yeah I hear you okay well that's good so I got
the slideshow prepared my machine is running slow cuz I've not rebooted it in
about a month but I'm going to do the best that I can um we were talking about
history and even if I don't get to pull this off because of the slowness of my
machine the message I wanted to give Scott and to the rest of uh Global star party is it's we take it for granted but
every single time you look up at the night sky you're looking into the past
um we know that time moves along and all it takes is 5 Seconds and something is
five seconds ago Maxi's presentation is now history it was 10 seconds ago um you
know the P the time just keeps moving and but when we look at the night sky
you know it's so vast that time appears to be unchanging and uh so with that what I'm
going to do is just show my slide deck I will share my screen and I'm just going to share the
desktop um I'm going to click through the slide deck um you can see it it's
the presentation I tried to run the presentation while Maxi was going and it
seemed to move slow and I didn't want to risk uh but you should still be able to
see the uh slides that are in my back uh looking into the past and the things
that I want to you know the things that I'm going to cover other than the affiliations are
here I have this poem whenever I'm tempted wherever clouds arise when songs
give way to signing when hope within me dies I draw I draw closer to the sky
from carot sets me free my eyes on the sky and I Know It watches me my eyes on
the sky and I Know It watches me this poem was adapted from our beloved deid
from the eyes on the sparrow those that you may recognize that this word was was
Sparrow um you know and whether you're talking about the sky or the sparrow in
which case this is a Redwing Blackbird if you're talking about any of these you
know it you can look at any of those objects and feel you know I'm at peace
um but when you look up at the sky you not only feel at peace but you're looking
into the past the presentation um discusses you know the fact that
though we have Earthly history here with these Footprints we also have a history
in the sky and so when we look up um we see instantly see the past we
instantly see far into the past when you're looking at the planet Jupiter which you can you can
still see in our night sky near Ryan this picture was taken last year
September the sky hasn't changed too much Jupiter has moved a little further
off of Orion and a little taller more near Orga
um I believe but uh you're looking at Jupiter 43 minutes after the light
bounced off of the sun and heading towards you um for the Ryan nebula over
here and the horse head which in this particular picture you don't see very well this belt region these objects are
over thir 1,300 years away at the speed
of light so their distance in miles um you do the calculation it's
quite far and you're looking at something that you can see
but you can't reach in your lifetime um I have this article here
that I found which I thought was a pretty good article about how far away the artics are the uh objects are deep
space objects um Brian overline wrote it and I used it to get a couple of those
numbers there's so many other things you know the distance to Bal juice here the distance to rigel that we could
discuss um this is the where I say from year to year the night sky does not
change much and no matter what part of black Masa or Kinton Oklahoma I took
these pictures there you see the very similar structure with the um stars of
the night sky here this bright one happens to be uh serious and then
there's pran as it can be pronounced and this is is the
Beehive something that you generally see um in Dark Skies along with the
zodiacal light around September um slightly different time of
night but very similar Skies um here the Beehive is within the
zodiacal light right but um I look forward to this view because of the
timing of the okite tech party this view is typically in the sky early in the
morning some 2: a.m. 3:00 a.m. you have to get you have to stay up really really
late to see a Ryan rising and now this part of the Milky
Way here there's a North American this is signus here's the same thing what I'm
bringing out here is your own history of capturing the night sky or of where
you've been you capture these images and they become
your own historical um documents of where you've traveled and what you have
seen and looking back at the images doesn't have to be so much about how
pretty the images are as in the significance what you felt when you took
those images what you were looking at um noticing the same if you use your
processing techniques right this this place is not as dark as this place in
terms of um or not as transparent the darkness meter readings were they were a
little less here in Northern lower Michigan this is Kenton Oklahoma the
transparency is more here the sky reaches a different color the sky glow
prevented the sky from being even darker but you could still pick up with very
similar techniques you pick up a little more detail here but that those are the sort of things that you lock away in
your mind when you're thinking about history of places and it it also helps
you to you understand the differences in the places where you image and in some
places Earth's history you know is more on display you see structures here that are
older that are undisturbed as opposed to this particular location may have
changed as the river if this River has changed course over the years due to
man-made Town structures this uh this is the mighty asabo River the northern
lower part of Michigan and so we tell so you're doing
Outreach and we tell people you're looking you know back in time when you look how
far back in time can you see it might blow people away when you point at this
smudge right here and say you're looking roughly 2.5 million years in time back
in time to see this Andromeda galaxy which is a small little smudge in this
image but that is the that is the Andromeda galaxy we missed um the pin
wheel Galaxy but this one is further away and of course it's coming right for
us um I forget the amount of time but it's
uh pretty sure you may not you won't have a front row seat alive here on
Earth it's up to your beliefs and mind whether we'll get to see it um way in
the future uh depending on again depending on beliefs but uh I sure hope
I see it but you know that is uh while I'm around take the picture and enjoy it and
that's part of uh not only are we looking at the past you're also looking at the present when you look at all the
sky glow which you may not have seen in previous pictures so you're getting kind of a history of how active the sun is um
this year real quick I'll mention this year a lot lot of imager night sky imagers notice these greens and these
Reds there may be crown of Aurora down here too that particular color red looks
more like the crown of Aurora so this would be the second time I've accidentally imaged Aurora um but the uh
imagers were noticing the greens and the Reds and they were wondering if they should uh you know take that out of
their images because it you you know it don't know what it is it's an artifact well
with the sun being active um more sky glow is appearing in the night sky and
with all the folks doing night sky Imaging more people were capturing it and just kind of wondering what it was
and perfect example in a couple of slides I'm going to have a picture I
took in 2022 of the Milky Way even though it wasn't as dark as sight
you notice that this sort of Sky glow is absent so looking back in history
there's another perspective we can take we know that the moon
formed um there are different theories on its formation but it has been around
since the uh age of the dinosaurs and I and much earlier than that but when you
see now if you were here for Robert Reeves you know all about everything
that we're seeing here he described this crater he described um the mar here and
you know every time I listen to Robert I swear I'm G to remember and yeah Mar
embrium I believe is this I know this is uh cernus aist starus over here and Tao
I up the saturation of this it was a popular thing to you know make a this is
sort of a mineral moon this isn't the mineral Moon that you've seen from other astrophotographers and I remember
NASA um putting it you know there there was an apod site that had a few years
ago used the mineral Moon as dep picture of the day because the correlation between the colors and actual minerals
on that on the moon there was a correlation there so we you know even
though the imager just raised the saturation and thought it looked cool there was actual scientific value in
that image so um the mineral Moon became
a popular way to um do it I did not push to saturation much in my moon picture
but um I leave all of the Moon history DET detail to Robert Reeves were
indebted to him for his vast knowledge and with all of these craters that he's
discussed and told us about and this history it's actually a history of the planet Earth too planet Earth received
the same amount of bombardment but because of the
geology uh I said geology geography it's my bedtime too Scott um I'm G to be
wrapping it up shortly yes but because of the way the Earth is we don't see as
many of those craters now I do have a picture of one of those
craters and I'm going to skip out of presentation mode and go there's that
crater right there um I got a chance finally to see meteor crater and if it
wants to load we can see it up close let's just do that okay it did load and
there's meteor crater this is history the impact the impactor came from this
side slammed right into this part of Arizona left this huge crater which when
I saw it for real I realized you could fit you you see it in pictures and you
think I wonder how big it is compared to Michigan Stadium or your favorite large
Arena I'm pretty sure you can fit I'll go look it up and Google but it's defin
defitely more than one of your Arena probably about a hundred of those Arenas could fit in meteor crater and if you
were standing around at the time that this thing hit you would not be standing
around you'd pretty much be vaporized oh yeah so far away you know seeing things
happen in history um you know when you when you're told the direction that the meteor came
from you look up into that direction and you kind of imagine how that whole scene
went down the best thing to do is to not be around when that happens so let's
finish um so some of the slides here this is an interesting one I'm a member
of University lowbrow astronomers as well as a few other uh clubs this Francis C McMath telescope um this is a
picture of it early at the McMath hbert um Observatory that Observatory is no
longer active and I'm not even sure it's stand in it was uh it was no longer
being used by the club that was meeting there but this um this particular
telescope has been refitted from a solar to a night scope and the university
lowra astronomers use this telescope it's one of the more underrated you know we just had a great talk about uh Mount
Wilson and that very famous telescope that was built there this one was a an
unsung hero in that it was built some of I think some of the McMath uh Scopes
built one of them I think went to Mount Wilson Scott if you can you may have to correct me or Tom is still there I
believe something did move um maybe it was kit Peak Observatory where
um some of the instruments that were built in the McMath Observatory ended up
getting transported um to either kit Peak or um I don't
think it was Mountain Wilson now that I think of it I think it was kit Peak and that's something that that's homework
for me and for those of you out there listening um or talk to a low BR
astronomer because I we have a few club members that know the history of this
telescope I've operated this 24inch telescope and you get some great views
of the night sky it's been converted to look at the night sky and this image
that I took at our Observatory here we have this same telescope now outfitted
for night skyw work looking at something and from the angle this may have been
towards Saturn at the time know Saturn's been over near this quadrant for a while
and we like pointing at Saturn with this telescope so
more history to discuss the Comets anytime the Comets come in they bring
their past with them and um you're seeing there's many theories many
um thoughts that it was these things that brought the water to planet Earth
by bombarding it and um with many of the comets and
asteroids things that brought the water um over that period of the great
bombardment nowadays we don't want the any of these comets to bombard us we're
content to see them in the night sky and see their uh Beauty now this was Comet
suchin Shan which not the most recent Comet um Maxi imaged the uh most recent
Comet to visit us another Comet Atlas um so you saw Maxi's presentation you saw
the next comet in line after this one that um ended up being bright it was
mostly a southern hemisphere object so those of us here in the states did not
get to see it so finally we may never we talk about building a time machine in
the movies and you've you know you could go back into time and see things that
happened um there are ways using the night sky as your guide
and going to places that preserve the past um you can essentially
recreate a scene from the past by just looking up and these stars that have
been there for so long this galactic center likely would not have changed
much from the time that these tracks were laid down um I'm pretty sure I
discussed at the last Global Star Party how if you really did go back in time to
when these tracks were laid down you either better have a huge defense kit on
you or snap your fingers and say it's no place like home cuz you know you
wouldn't want to deal with these animals in real life um Hunters they
probably wouldn't want to deal with us either there's some uh speculation that
we as the our current homo sapiens in our current state would likely wipe
all the dinosaurs out but there's a lot of speculation these are us and our
these tracks are separated by 150 million years it's fascinating enough to
see and maybe imagine what the allosaur was doing I'd read somewhere that it may
have had a limp because of the way the tracks were spaced so not only do we
look in our past when we go to places that Pres preserve the past every single
night you look up in the night sky you're looking at a well preserved past
and with these images that I'm just sort of scrolling through are images that
highlight areas of my past including the time I saw the full moon rise at Yankee
Stadium this meteor this Comet neowise Light
Pillars and then all the way to seeing the Milky Way seeing Aurora seeing the
um the zodiacal light and then seeing it again first trip I go to okek seeing the
um signis region like I'd never seen it before being able to capture nebula on
this side of the Milky Way in a not so dark location catching Earth shine here
catching Sky glow this was 22 and there there was a lot of Sky glow on this
night reenacting my viewing of the Milky Way um doing weddings and then having
the Aurora crash the wedding so we take the picture of it and um here we're back
seeing the Milky Way once again at okit teex this is a wistfully historical
picture because this is the front yard of my priest who had passed away earlier
last year in 2024 I'd go to his cabin and take pictures often so this picture
of signis it was an unusually dark night um pretty transparent and I was very
happy with the results I got on that one another lunar eclipse is coming um I'll
use this image to let people know which day in March is it Scott is it the uh I
think it's the 16th of March that you'll get your chance to take this picture
I don't know if the moon will be near Uranus which is where this is pointing but there will be another if you're in
the Americas you will get to see a total lunar eclipse in March so we'll get
another shot taking this picture now this was a Transit of 13th and 14th
thank you for that correction clan for the 13th and
14th um so it's another it's another late night early morning eclipse this
one was a very early morning eclipse this was um as the sun was Rising the eclipse was
finally ending um here you have the transit of Mars in
22 we of course had another one in 24 as well as a planetary we had a planetary
alignment in 22 as well the picture isn't here um anytime I get a chance to
take a picture in transparent Skies where you can see this bulge of the Milky Way starting to show
up I take pictures there's a night bow storm Milky Way emerging through we're
going to get to that picture this is Cleveland so I took this because light
pollution really can do a number you see that picture of Orion at a dark sky you
see all of this in point peely in Canada you see Cleveland the light Dome of Cleveland is
fantastic it is uh you can see just how big a city it is the star serus barely
shines through the giant light Dome of Cleveland Ohio this of course the total
solar eclipse Maxi my total solar eclipse picture is not as good as yours
I admit but I still did get some prominences it was still a wonderful
sight to see and it was my second time this picture is what happens when
the Aurora the auroral curtain is so close to you it shines a light and you think
it's a flashlight but you turn around and look up and it's the Aurora itself it was that bright and that is a picture
I captured from that moment and then there was more Aurora on May 10th this
of course is the meteor finally getting to see it this smudgy picture is Omega
sentor I finally got to see that this picture is the Southern Cross that theid
got to see I always includeed because that's what started me in this entire
journey of night sky Imaging we had more Aurora and this was the first time I saw
what was known as a sar it's uh it's I can never remember the
initials for it I think auroral is the A Part what it is is it's not you don't
see this naked eye but a camera of course picks it up and it's a different
phenomenon from Steve which I believe Alan Dyer is credited for being first to
image it's not quite a Steve and Steve comes with different color and forms in
a different region SARS t to form closer to the actual Aurora and then they
stretch all the way across the sky in this condensed um image you see it
stretched all the way to the South where the Milky Way was this is the galactic center so this um it stretched quite a
ways and the perseids you may not be able to see it at home or on your
smartphone there's a little meteor in there yeah there's Comet suchin Shen and
the thin Crescent waning moon nice that was I
wanted that image the story behind it really quickly is a a friend and fellow
astronomer of mine was observing this Comet we got up at 6 we got out here I
started taking pictures didn't see it looked at the picture and saw the comet was there said it's out there he got it
on his Porta ball and he he looked at that Comet and observed it we were there
for about an hour before the sunlight finally overtook it it was uh it was a wonderful time and I still have yet to
write about that but that's one of the images that commemorates that this you
know this image Scott we were talking about capulin we caught a meteor while
on capulin volcano and all the other Peaks over here to the South but uh we
remember seeing this um at my last trip to the New Mexico Oklahoma
area and um I also saw this this bright light I took a picture just to remind
myself of how quickly we can lose even our remote night skies if we're not
careful with how what we do with our Bright Lights even though this is a red light it's
excessive and uh it just reminds us we you know not to give up last few images
there's the image of the Allosaurus that I love this was another rock
formation image it was uh fun taking playing around with composition with the
Milky Way with this we had another auroral outburst in October I managed to
catch some of the signis region poking through it over this uh landscape here
which normally has a lot of light pollution but the Aurora got intense again and overpowered the um light
pollution in this area area when it's a truly those of you that want to see the Northern Lights if we get any more
outbursts before the sun leaves its solar maximum there will be no mistaking
it when it is a big Outburst you will get to see it
and there will be you the colors do show up they are a little
fainter um than the camera can pick up but there's pulsing you see the lights
flowing and any picture that you take you pretty much
capture you know shimmering there's a comment this was the sun on my birthday I made it a
historical marker with the sun spots going and then my the last long image I've taken was in
December of 24 which I showed in during the presentation that was an awful long
presentation Scott we got to move on we've got some special move on that's right that want to share their uh
photography so I will stop sharing okay thank you Scott Cesar Maxi good to see
you again I'm heading to bed all take care and uh I will be uh watching later
um to see how the other presentation uh went out I'm interested to see even more beautiful astr
photographies coming up and Cesar it is your turn to wow the crowd Take Care
thank you thank you there wow it's a beautiful shot of the
Comet there Cesar yes in the city but it's um really something that I tell uh
I told to the people that um I don't know if you can see some willing in the
picture later I can show you the the complete picture but it's um looks like
um open wide in the sky but it's not because
it's is with a 100 mm er obic and you have a small Zone and
very invisible Comet without the the nucleo and um but what was much better
that another comets that the media say oh the comet of the century and nothing
but of course that this Comet Atlas um in the
area yes where Maxi live you can you can watch at maybe a little single single
view or a binoculars uh but uh of course that um
you know the the opportunity to take this picture in in the sunset was great
um in the city from the rooftop uh was great uh it's not easy but something
that I I I told the people that no you you don't lost the comet the comet was
practically and impossible to see to the nakad ey really
and um see but photography it looks very nice sure and
okay and uh well tonight I um I um I
presenting um the history of the last years in the
recuperation the recovering uh restoration of the um San Miguel solar f
physics Observatory and I let me share the
screen the typical problem of our let me yeah for those of you that
are just watching this and don't know Caesars he is he is um uh works at
Optica srao in Buenos Aries and uh in
Argentina and he often goes to the to Patagonia and uh to do uh astronomy
with his friends in super dark skies out there so and you know Caesar's taken us
to eclipses he's taken us uh uh to you know uh to learn more about the historic
uh aspects of astronomy in Argentina so it's very
cool well I start presenting this let me
check if um
presentation you can see the presentation yes okay
well perfect okay the first thing um is
that uh we uh started to go to go in
uh 2019 July uh to in the first the first visit
that we made uh was to know the opportunity for the government the
government of the the of San Miguel to uh have um to to be
the owner of this area and uh we them that yes was an
excellent it was an excellent opportunity they so they started to make
the all legal things to to be um to to
make the the change from the uh space force
to ER San Miguel s
Miguel government or uh you know that that samil is a city around
buenos in the metropolitan area of Bueno and it's a government
that it's uh his mayor was interested uh the mayor of s Miguel was
interested in recovering and owning the the the
observatory and work and Recovery the uh uh the all things
about the solar Spectrum the telescopes um um me and Santiago
maesi uh we went with the these guys of
the government to re to work the area
and uh we found uh things like at these mirrors
the 12 in is mirror uh from the solar spectrometer
Tower and uh actually is the first thing that we are going to to repair to
restorate here is it's me and
the secet Secretary of uh education in
the in from the the San Miguel the San Miguel mayor cities the
government here more pictures of the Dome and and one of the
mirrors this is the first visit where H H we visit visited the things uh
ER after not after if not but before they was B the the all things was
b b banalized those uh was destroyed and
the things now are re really worse you can see later in another
pictures in our second visits but is this is this is the the window how you
found it oh wow yeah yes it is how we found yes we found it just seems a shame
that uh something such as this be neglected for so long you know yes
fortunately uh um despite the disaster ER we can do it we can recover
a lot of pieces and very different things but in our first
recogniz we found this in a in a so so
uh state but no disaster this is the the vacuum the
vacuum pump MH this is the size
telescope wow yes 10 in size refractor 10 in size
refractor what an amazing instrument yes beautiful you can see the complete
equat month and later you can see how uh Thief baliz um robber and kit
parts of the of the instruments especially all the all this
part was robber was was a vandalizing and quit all the all the entire back
focus this was totally out oh disappear
yeah because it's this Dome is is crossing the street
and in this moment in that moment they don't have
ah security perimeter MH this is the
Lot H H Al hren Alpha telescope hydrogen
hydrogen Alpha telescope wow yes we can do it something with this
we we are today um what's great that you told
me Scott H why don't present again San Miguel Observatory yeah was a great
casuality great um moment because ER
today we was talking with with the director that is Santiago May Santiago
with Santiago we planning today like a schedule of
recovering H different restoring and recovering the different things ER along
the year the this year and it's a great moment to to start to to to make a this
historic observatory in something ER working each
time more uh with the people well in in our second visit we
found pring instruments instruments vandalizer and pieces
stolen look the difference in the in the between the first picture and and
now how we we found in 2020 the things comparing with 29 with n
with 19 in one year that we can we could
return we um found a disaster but we never say
okay don't we don't we don't be interested now no of course that that
now we have three times more uh works and cost and money to
spend in this sure look that well we the first thing that when
we return we take the all Priceless um
instruments like this this um you can see the the I don't know if if you can
see my my uh um Arrow showing the we can
see okay um and this is the the this uh
filter wheel the the electric filter you know all the right we need to change
this um um of course that is a disaster look that with
pigeons yes well we have a lot a lot of works
this the the well the book store the
the um but it's it's really look that
how they stole the parts the back focus is here is empty
now the OB Pi fortunately is complete we found
complete the the OB pi and they they stole a lot of pieces
of bronze uh to S only to s yes only
is for for for few for by few pesos
nothing right destroy the the the the electric
filter this is a view now is totally different because uh
every day they cut the grass they
er the mountains mountains M the m m in
English is well every day they keep the things totally different but this is the
the worst ER time for The Observatory er er
before we start to go every day look
that this a very complicated machine from the 70s or 60s yes impossible to to
understand everything that the money this is another telescope like a like a
dobsonian telescope but with a precise mechanism maybe it's
a it's a 16 in telescope this is the we T many times
this is another telescope and this is the obsidiana filter it's a solar gustaff hien
telescope from the end of the 19th century 19th
century this telescope work completely now we recover and restore it and we
um we fabric we make new parts in bronze
to put new size ey pieces for
one4 Ines 2 in uh photographic camera
modern photographic cameras and CCD for this telescope this is a a refractor uh
her the the the her wedge for for uh uh
solar um this make the uh reduce the the
solar uh transmutation so this this is another filter
wheel we recover a lot of different uh
instruments in April 2021 we were able to visit the city permanently and began
to restore the well the
1890 15 mm Bo refractor that currently
we use has obsidian solar fi H filter and a
second 100 mm telescope with a photographic PL hole ER this is very
interesting because we found in this in this uh moment with a W spider webs you
know to totally ADV and now actually we use this telescope a lot for the public
it's me the first day that I started to use a
reflex camera it was the first time in a lot of
years to use something digital digital uh instrument inside uh 100e
telescopes right this the first time and uh this is the plate holder for
photographic and this is very interesting because it's all actually is
working oh that's cool we are yes we are talking H maybe this year we uh are uh
take taking pictures uh with um people from The
Amigos the astronomia in Buenos that they they made their own plate
photographic plates like uh 100 years ago you're right and we are interested
in use look that the the Canon te ring
in the in the uh in the telescope
right all that now is it's like is in the same yeah we are
using all time this uh for visit of public or take pictures of the sun our
idea is take a picture by day and put in the in the website that we are working
in the website connecting with a live view of the Sun every day what
we decided remove remove the size objective look
the the side of the this size wow objetive refractor oh yeah we
work a lot with Santiago May entire day to remove yes yeah 100 years screw and
very was a a very very uh how do you say h very delicate work
yes we found an a um nest of uh
um well I don't remember the this thing uh not the Beast the another one inside
the two well a lot of disasters here Santiago
ma after removing a I took the picture because we
we really was happy to remove the and keep the
objective here's a picture outside the tube now we keep the the the objective
and as we are in this area Total Security we are going to assembly again
this telescope look that car size the number
um look the the size of yeah
254 CM 10 inches
God yeah yes yes a chromatic
Resto yes the when you took it in your hands is that very big thing yes
and well the the first time where Santiago and Austine mayz and me we went
to recover the area Santiago every day start to to to work in in all things and
fortunately the government and San Miguel started to you know cut the grass
um and well prepare all everything to start 20
in in in in 22 uh his a rosanski that is a genius of
uh and he work in the in the old time of of the observatory in the 60s and70s
um and er look that it was in the time of pandemic ER the pandemia pandemic
time MH uh we started to receive people in a open area to this is the collection
of meteoritos of Jorge and um we started to
to make visit for the people to the public visits in in
20 21 22 and actually
this is the the same time um actually we still make
this with telescope well um yes this is
the the last uh news Nicolas Val is the director but of
the museum um Museum of the observatory and um
Santiago um Nas um part of of the people
and Nicolas was working recovering the photographic plates of
the Sun and er it's very important because it's working
for um to have uh more than
um 5,000 5,000 um photographic solar plates um
this is very interesting and they told to the NASA because um because it's very
interesting in the time that they had a this very important collection of PL
solar plates ER maybe 40 years ago or
more um it's very interesting because is recovering um all solar image of the Sun
and have a very important very important uh scientific
value of course because all that is recovering this is part of the
work how how they they can
um uh re re uh will the solar yes the
solar mhm the the solar the Sunspot image from maybe I don't know
9050 um you know and they Nicolas and Santiago mayz Sano May
is are there working in in this project of recover recovering uh all pictures
well this is uh maybe you know to Maxi
and Nico and me in the observatory yes
yes the observatory is very important because it's a it's a point of now we
are working with Santiago and the and the and the team atin uh we are working to receive um to
receive uh more people people um to be an
Metropolitan a metropolitan uh point of um to to to
meet the people that interested that is interested in astronomy and uh the idea
is in every opportunity next time is the
March 8 Saturday um we are going to make more
more meetings reunions star parties um
work uh you know that if you invite to the people to the kids and make more
things you are going to to work more with the things recover and restoring
restoring the the equipment and this is the idea actually is is the best is the
best way that we have for this um well this is the my entire
presentation and you it's a pleasure it's a pleasure
thank you well wonderful thank you yeah I'm so glad to see that someone is uh protecting uh
that equipment and uh trying to restore it in the best way that you know how so
sure can be sometimes when I show this picture H can
can be like something depressing but it's not a little bit I
mean as as an astronomer you're feel some pain seeing equipment like that
sure I know I know but I say to the people say okay we know that this is
Destroyer but it's totally um is totally
recoverable um it's possible to restore to to put them in work again um we are
going every for example with the gust Heen telescope we found it like a with
not so destroyed like a size telescope but
we M start to make a the the parts and
you have a telescope that now you can put your reflex camera your CCD you can
make a a tracking uh with a a system uh
that is totally 150 years ago with with the clock system for tracking and the
people know a lot that hob astronomy was in the in the 19th century and it's
totally the telecope is totally usable um there's got to be some pride too in
that uh you know to restore this uh these scientific instruments and uh and
to give inspiration and joy to people absolutely um and the work of the museum
inside the observatory that that is working Nicolas valvin in in this line
of work is amazing because you are having uh a the register of all Sunspot
maybe for example you have a sunspot taken in I don't know maybe in 1936 for
example because the register of this is a is a
piece of a in invaluable piece of of
History yes yes well I wish you all the luck so thank you so muchar thank you
it's a pleasure thanks by invite me Scott was a pleasure talk today it's late there what time is it now
H 2:30 am in the morning yes okay all
right so sorry for keeping you up so late all right no problem problem no problem huh that's great thank you it's
a pleasure really it's a pleasure if not I'm here because a pleasure good night
yeah okay our our last uh uh speakers are um Natalie and Mark Jones and they
are uh a very special couple that um were inspired to uh build something
called the planetarium treeh house now we've talked a little bit about astrotourism and uh you know and I've been to this
place I think it's very inspirational uh but I'm going to let Natalie and Mark uh
Jones talk about this and uh maybe maybe inspire you to take the trip to Arkansas
to stay the weekend in this very special spot thank you yeah I'm sorry it's late
guys and uh we had a very long um Global star party but uh uh it's great to have
you in uh in our program tonight thank you for inviting us yeah thank you for
having us so I'm Natalie this is my husband um um I I have a little
presentation that I prepared I'll let you guys take it away now I before you
starting your presentation I do want to disclose that uh you know I did visit uh
uh the planetarium Treehouse I I found it very uh not only fun and interesting
to be there but I love the story of how you designed it on like a napkin and uh
you know I know that you're going to talk about uh the yeah this is something you can rent as an Airbnb but this is
really special this is really cool stuff so um go ahead all righty let me switch
to sharing screens okay are you seeing the right
Google Slides okay [Music] great hold on go to the beginning
Okay so this is a little bit about um astrotourism and so Mark and I are the
owners and managers of a little vacation rental called to the Planetarium
Treehouse and a little bit about that and about us first is um so we are based
in Springdale Arkansas uh we moved here just um from California in
2020 and when we first moved here we uh were looking at potentially running in
Airbnb and we happen to find our first Airbnb property which we call Lake View
Haven it's a an A-frame and it's located
in a pretty cool spot that overlooks uh the lake which is called Beaver Lake it's a popular area for boating and
fishing and pretty good touristy spot people come to Arkansas to go to Beaver Lake so we bought that in 2022 and
renovated the inside um and around
2023 well actually early in 2022 um when we were just finishing up
renovating the A-frame we saw a little thing uh from Airbnb they were putting
out like this contest called the Airbnb OMG fund and we looked into it yeah so the
OMG fund was this thing where Airbnb wanted to promote more of their unique stay
categories on their website and so they opened it up to anyone who maybe had a
interesting idea uh for a very unique stay what they would put in OMG category
on the website because it would it's called OMG because it's just something
so weird and wacky that like there's no other way to describe it like there's apron categories there's like
um a giant camera or something here so yeah so I grabbed a few photos of some
of the other winners that have completed their um their unique property just to
show the variety of it but basically you enter the contest with a really crazy
idea of what would probably be a cool stay and if Airbnb liked you they would
select a 100 people around the world and give you $100,000 to go towards building
your vision and so we obviously want
with our and just it just so happens that we did have an idea before the contest yeah was doodling one day while
at work in my office and on a posted note I actually Drew this planetarium
Treehouse yeah on a posted note thinking you what's going to attract gas what's going to be more than just a place to
stay I want to be a true experience an experience exactly and I wanted people to be able to sleep under the stars but
yet still be inside yeah because the thing about the AP when we bought it we had extra Parcels of land surrounding it
and out there at night and it's like in the forest and it gets pretty dark out there
and you're like this would be a really good place for stargazing and so that's kind of where the idea of like a
planetarium Treehouse came in and Treehouse because it's on a slope it's not really quite buildable land it's
amongst the trees though yeah it is amongst the trees the whole thing is up on stilts right I mean it's off the
ground so so uh I'll get to like the construction of it
and everything but um yeah so we won this contest Airbnb gave us $100,000 in
like three separate phases we had to prove to them like several things that like we owned actual land that we could
build on we had the correct permits and like there was no HOA that was going to
come after us um we had actual engineers and planning going
into it and so it was our first time building something from the ground up
and the funny thing about this contest is it was even though there were a
hundred other people that won a lot of them like us had never constructed anything before in their life
so um I guess the result today there's still people that haven't even finished
their project um I see yeah yeah I would guess that maybe half finished half were
still working yeah really oh yeah okay yeah did they give a timeline to when
you should be or they did yeah they said so they started it they started
dispersing the money in December 2022 and then they said we hope that you
finish before August 2023 and we're like yeah we could do
that and actually we ended up finishing con Construction in November of 2023 so
we were a few months late but at least we're not a few years late probably working very hard to get it all done
because night and day architecturally I mean there's a lot of detail in
this yeah I'm gon to skip ahead to just the and we didn't physically build it ourselves we did partner with natural
state treeh houses they're a local company based in Arkansas that just focuses solely building on building tree
houses but we are the project managers you know we manage every sort of utility
water electrical everything that goes subcontractors subcontracting everything that goes into towards the end uh we
were definitely running out of money and had to put in some of our own labor yes
sure um but yeah all this on top of like working our full-time jobs as well
that's crazy a lot of late nights and nights without sleep as well yeah so St up this lady is no
problem for you no we're used to it so yeah this took us uh pretty much a
whole year to build I have a little video um that
goes just because I don't want problems with the music this is a video we posted on
Instagram of the build process like creating the retaining wall for parking
the foundation with the stilts and the deck um yeah you can see the still
holding it up and ordering the geodesic dome so
there's two domes there's like a solid Dome and a clear Dome that you can see right it's fun to be inside the clear
Dome you know we were in there with binoculars and uh you know it's uh
amazingly just I mean you could see the stars really well through it and um you
know in a wide field of view like a pair of binoculars is just perfect for it and of course you have decking around there
uh so you can get out the Scopes and and get you know clear sharp views of the sky so I'll have to come back out there
with one of the uh smart telescopes like a we have unistellar and we have the
Vespa and uh a little telescope called the dwarf and uh these are all like
little computerized telescopes and we'll we'll have to try it out and see what the results are like from that location
so but I think it'll be good yeah that'll be fun so yes we did have Scott
out there um Scott and explore scientific were very generous to provide
some explore scientific telescopes for our guests to use in the clear uh
Observatory Dome yes and um yeah we filmed a few videos together and did
like a little giveaway which was fun um it's been pretty fun project and a
lot of so the winner of that giveaway they are when do they when are they planning to uh
stay so I told them like let me know whenever um you what date you pick and
so I think they're still planning it out they haven't specifically chosen a date yet they mentioned it was H for their
kids birthday so I'm assuming that's going to be coming up and they'll reach out again for that are they local are
they across country or something or I think they're in Kansas yeah yeah oh not
too far away okay yeah that's good I mean it's a few hour drive but yeah
that's cool wonderful and we just so happened it's funny that we like build this
project because when we were building it only in the middle of the construction
process we realized that explore scientific is also located in Springdale
Arkansas and that's just a crazy coin I I somebody came into my office and said
Scott they're building this thing out you know look there's this uh planetarium thing out there and I go
we'll have to uh one day get together and and check it out so and and I'm glad
we did so it's it's really fantastic I folks I've been there I wholeheartedly
recommend it it's called the planetarium Treehouse you'll find it on Airbnb uh I imagine it's probably book
out but um uh you know you might want to you know if you're into astronomy into
stargazing you know even if you're not like a super serious amateur astronomer but you still love the Stars uh you're
going to want to do this if you are into the Stars you're going to find it fascinating and so um yeah uh you know
it's a great gift uh to give to any Stargazer and uh you're going to have a
fun and peaceful time out there so and and when you get you know when
when you're when you're done be meditating under the stars out there you can come over here to explore scientific
and uh load up on some gear so yep
exactly yeah you don't have to be a super intense astronomer we get a lot of
uh families taking their small kids there a now how many people can sleep
here okay so we sleep um up to five people okay there's the you can see it
in this there's like the main Loft area so that's the main spot um you I don't
have it in this photo but this couch pulls out to another bed that's about
queen size and then there's also a foldable twin mattress that you can take
out and what a lot of people do is they'll just put like the mattress on the floor of our
Observatory Tower and just literally sleep under the stars that's
cool that's great yeah and I like the little hallway with the Spectrum lights and stuff like
that that was kind of cool very insirational we call it like the the warp speed hallway because it's kind of
like you know when in Star Wars they go like to war speed or light speed it it
kind of looks like that when you're walking through it and it does you're right yep it's kind of the hallway is
actually what connects I saw is like a kind of a you know a spectrum science experiment as I was walking through I
thought it was very well done you know so yeah well thank you yeah so you guys
thought about this and pulled it off and it's next to the lake you can kind of see the lake over here in this
photo um there's a little balcony so you could it's actually a better View
a clearer view if you take the telescopes out to the balcony to like look at some really detailed uh shots of
the stars um I think the clear Dome it's made of polycarbonate so it's great for
like looking out with your like naked eye um there is a little bit of distortion when it comes to using some
high- powerered telescopes so yeah but with binoc and I tested it with binoculars it still gives a nice view of
the stars with binoculars and you know with a pair of like um you know 8 by 42s
or 7 by 50s uh something like that I think we use some 56 millimeter
binoculars out there you could see uh some star clusters I know that you could
see some nebula and of course you'd be able to spot the Andromeda galaxy through the through the clear Dome so
definitely something you want to try and if it's a cloudy day and you happen to
book while it's raining or snowing and there's no stars out we call it the planetarium trios because we do have a
little projector in this main Loft area you can actually see on this little nightstand over here so this has several
slides that you can project onto the Dome ceiling and you can like this is one of the slides up in this corner
stars and yeah so we tell people like if it's cloudy just use that
that's right well it's so peaceful there I mean that's that's the that's the main part
to me I mean it's inspirational everywhere that you look inside the planetarium Treehouse but it's peaceful
it's quiet you know if you need to decompress okay and and be still
inspired by you know the universe this is a this is definitely a place to go
you know and I'm not being tongue and cheek about this this is uh uh something
that um you know if you need you need uh some pampering and some wellness and
some Stillness uh this is this is definitely a place to come
to thank you you yeah the The Observatory Tower is a pretty neat place
um we actually have these like floor lounge chairs that you can fold out and
like pretty much lay on the floor and look up there is a LED light strip around the
dome but in order to see the stars like it's pretty cool even just turning off the light strip yeah yeah and just
turning off all the lights and being in complete darkness and you can see out pretty clearly Under the
Dome beautiful well thank you thank you for
sharing um and um you know we'll uh we'll revisit the planetarium Treehouse
here in the future so thank you very much and thank being on our 166 Global
star party uh we'll have our next we'll have our next Global star party in about
two weeks you guys are welcome to come on anytime that you want and uh um and
uh you know uh you know until then uh
you know keep looking up so and if you want to follow the
planetarium Treehouse or even like our A-frame like VI Haven you can um visit
our Instagram and Facebook I'll put it here in chat what is it it's Mystic Ozark
Adventures Mystic Ozark
Adventures I could just TI right yeah it's a DOT as well there we
go yeah and you can book it on Airbnb and verbo and we are also working on a
direct booking website as well that's coming soon very good all right you guys have a
good night thanks again for staying up so late and doing this thank you for having us Y and um it's
uh it's a pleasure you know i' had a little bit of interaction with Mark and
Natalie they're very nice people and if you stay at the uh planetarian Treehouse
you'll really enjoy it so that's a guarantee you guys have a good night and
we will be in touch soon take care thank you take care take care bye
bye all right well thank you very much everyone for hanging in there with us uh
um you know we've got uh people watching from all the way out in the Philippines to uh South America to North America to
probably out there somewhere in Europe uh you guys all have a great night uh if
you can get out under the stars it's good for you and um uh again you know as
as my friend Jack horkheimer always used to say keep looking up take care
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