Global Star Party 168

Transcript:

Adrian good I almost said good morning good morning Adrian Adrian good morning
everybody it's morning somewhere it's morning somewhere you're right Lori constantly D Michael Scott let's see I
think I had to click on something to see all of you there we
go good to see you all how has how has your week been going
it's been going for me it's been going pretty smoothly and I I'm going to tell
you about what I saw with the Eclipse which was fantastic and
uh and the recent Tucson Festival of books which I was at this year oh
nice both wonderful events I I chose to enjoy the eclipse out in the boonies
where the sky is a little darker cuz there's always a little surprise waiting for you once it's eclipsed you look
around and see a sky you normally don't see because the moon's full that I've
done that for a couple of eclipses in a row now and it it's been it's always
fascinating to see the sky come alive and then to see it wash out gradually
yes right everyone else had a wonderful time um wherever at aner
or backyards and they were um you know where they were they got to see the
blood moon but um I wanted to see a little more and try and capture it so
that's what I did oh nice interesting thing um before you came on Adrian we
were watching my cat prance across the U the desktop this particular total
eclipse to me since it was hanging underneath Leo looked like a big cat in
the sky with its young ball oh that's that's a perfect way to put it trying to
remember where I saw it because I remember seeing corvis over there in the
moon so to the left from our view it was under the the hind legs okay so yeah
running over the ball of yarn going that
way yeah I I remember seeing uh the scorpion begin to rise and um signis
coming up over the horizon but where I was it was still a little bright in that
area just from distant lights from a small town but um Milky Way Rising oh
yeah and then it all washed away that big sliver of light came back over the top and I went oh darn it's already
ending so short goes fast it it went faster this year
than I remember maybe it was just the location of where the moon was from my
vantage point in the shadow but um seems like I had a little more time in
2022 H yeah so it just just different but still got to see it that
was that was the goal that's nice and didn't run out of gas on the
way there in back that's another goal it helps always yeah
[Music] right this is a beautiful from uh
lro uh this really incredible stuff
wow it's part of the what they they call the Apollo 13 fly B
[Music]
oh this Robert Reed needs to be here he can
tell us all of these craters are I try to remember but I can't so cool I know
that's a name crater and I don't know which
one that last one was silovsky I think
[Music] okay of course some of this might be on the other side of the moon that would be
cheating welcome to the G visit Center coming to
[Music] explore in addition to engaging inperson
programs presentations and tours The Visitor Center also provides virtual programs to groups on a reservation
basis Tuesdays through Fridays hope to see you soon whether in
person or
virtually although the Moon is a relatively primitive body geologically its Arrested Development provides
insights into the early evolution of other Rocky bodies like Venus Earth and
Mars the lunar Magneto Sounder is a geophysical instrument designed to probe
the moon's deep interior and provide new information on the structure and geological evolution of our companion
World signals that we're looking at from the solar wind and the Earth's magnetosphere have frequency that are
way below what you might be familiar with as radio waves these signals take minutes or even hours to complete a
single cycle the benefit of these very low frequency signals is that they penetrate deeply into the moon this
allows us to determine the temperature and composition of the interior of the Moon the magnetic fields are measured by
a magnetometer the electric fields are measured between four probes that are deployed at 90° angles around the Lander
LMS will be among the first geophysical measurements to assess interior properties of the moon since Apollo LMS
is both simpler to operate and has better performance than these Apollo era experiments its demonstration paves the
way for an even better version on a later e Clips Mission as well as opportunities for other worlds including
Mars our team at Southwest Research Institute Helia space Corporation and NASA Goddard all contributed to this
first extraterrestrial Magneto toic measurement commercial lunar payload Services NASA and American companies
working
[Music] [Applause]
together hello everyone this is Scott Roberts and I'll bring on my
co-host uh David Levy and we are so happy to welcome you to the 168th Global
star party uh with the theme of the Moon our constant companion and maybe the
gateway to you know the future of humanity so that uh that that little
title and that uh theme sparked uh quite a lively discussion between the
presenters before we put the whole program together and um uh so you can uh
if you could have read it all it uh you can see people feel strongly about uh us
exploring our solar system and what it means uh both in uh costs you know real
cost hard currency costs and also uh the cost to humanity to either do or don't
try to do U you know populating other worlds so uh but uh the jumping off spot
uh very probably will be the moon if we do that uh it looks like we will very
very likely um uh you know visit the moon again maybe colonize the moon uh I like
to think of you know a place that might be colonized so that if possible if not
for myself that maybe my grandchildren or my great-grandchildren would actually visit the moon and uh look back on the
beautiful blue planet our Earth what do you think David well I think that would
be be fabulous if we could wouldn't that be something yes but but um I don't
think that's going to happen quite as soon as one would hope but you never know never know lesie peler wrote in
Starlight Nights I know that we're going to get to the moon and this was before Apollo or
while Apollo was just being built and he said I hope it won't happen for a long
long time if Humanity must face a challenge let him face it here on
Earth wonderful wonderful okay um our
first Speaker uh normally is um a representative from the astronomical
league but this time we're bringing on uh a very very gifted space artist and
author uh Michael Carroll and Michael thank you for joining us on GL star
party I I know that you have a tight schedule so you know uh you can take the
time that you want um and we're just uh very uh pleased and honored to have you
thank you do you want to put me on first for my quotation or uh I keep oh okay
let's do the quotation yes GNA do the quotation I think you thought what I said was the quotation I did I thought
well that was short that was short but no I have a quotation
okay and when we get to talking about the moon later I will describe uh my experience with the
eclipse that just happened but uh I want to tell you a little bit about what happened on Sunday
I was at the Tucson Festival of books to launch my latest book which is called
stargazers stargazers came out of uh a poem that Wordsworth wrote in
1806 and I read it while I was working on my ma thesis at
queens and um and I I remember WR writing it there
working on it there and just falling in love with the poem and uh mentioning it on in the
thesis to which my thesis advisor wrote back Wordsworth wrote some wretched
verse and I thought that was hysterical and I was laughing and
laughing and the next time I went to his office which might have been the same day or a day later I walked in still
chuckling and said that was a wonderful piece of humor you put in about
woodsworth into my Master's thesis and he looked at me seriously he
says it was not intended as a joke and I thought that was even funnier and I just
laughed and finally Norman started laughing to her and says I think you're right I think it was pretty
funny anyway um it's kind of a tradition for
me to uh when I'm launching a new book or a friend new book to do a little song
and dance and I did this one which I hope I'm G to get right I'm not sure get the
tune right which is I hope from Dr shivago Lara
song but uh here we go it's called Dreaming of
the sky me me me me would you like a book
that's right from a University of Arizona press when the sky is clear at
night and the book is not a mess a book not tell you how but rather
to end at why the sky beckons us now now to look up and say oh my look up see a
few stars out there perhaps a little Comet or a shooting star we dare a guy
that might be fun to a sky and a Milky Way our hopes and all our dreams are
cure for our go each day thank you very much for that
[Laughter] thank you thank you great well um let's
see if I know how to operate this thing anymore here uh looks like I don't but
I've got a second camera so I'm GNA bring it in here it is there we go okay
um and so at this point uh uh just really happy to bring on Michael Carol
David thank you very much uh for that wonderful poem and that song I like to
hear your voice singing I think it's h it brings Joy so it's awesome it's
awesome Michael how are you doing this evening I'm doing great that's a tough Act of follow I'll tell
you I love the love the lyrics too very nice David yes yeah well uh it's always
always a pleasure to be here guys I I love being part of this this big Global
party of Scots uh I have a a little keynote presentation here and we'll see
if I can share my screen and get it to
work okay there's that
thing okay let's see almost got it all right I'm going
to uh play okay can you all see
that okay good um so uh great to be part
of this discussion uh it is um an interesting
uh interesting subject to me now I can't
I need to get this thing working
here okay there we go so um we've got let me just arrange my
screen better here um going back to the Moon is is a
whole different thing than uh some of the stuff that I hope we'll be talking about tonight a lot of science lunar
science and uh inspiration but um Artemis is certainly something on
everybody's mind uh returning people there uh I've been working on a book
about it which comes out in October and that has been uh really eye openening
and and very fun uh so uh first I want to open with this piece uh which I call
one small step I did it uh in honor of the Apollo moon
landings you know life is hard sometimes and sometimes you you just have to laugh
so here's my little little visual joke for you all um the world today is quite
different than it was back when Apollo started John F Kennedy um challenged the
nation to uh put uh someone on the moon and return the safety to the Earth but
there were a bunch of reasons he did this uh he he thought it would challenge the best and
brightest uh for us it would Infuse our economy with peaceful jobs we were in
the middle of Vietnam uh it would trigger new technology but beyond these Noble ideas
Kennedy wanted to prove that democracy was better than
communism the geopolitical reasons were uh trumped everything else uh initially
in the Apollo program there was a great science done but uh but the the world uh
was a different place as I said and so um while Apollo was uh largely
geopolitical um the uh aremis hopes to have a little bit different approach in
fact there are 36 countries involved in this and they're all making meaningful
contributions not just Financial but technological supervisory it's a it's a
really a cool International uh flavor to this thing uh
so during Apollo International cooperation does not come to mind when
you talk about Apollo it was a a big race that's the way it was framed and
yet um it was a deepest darkest part of the Cold War and there were times when
the politicians were not talking to each other and they had their their fingers
on the big red buttons and the scientists were still communicating the
back doors of communication were still open because of the people who wanted to
do pure science together and so I think that uh science itself helped to uh
defuse some of the most dangerous things during the Cold War uh today uh we still
have some great International uh studies going on on the International Space
Station uh and uh we look forward to more of the same part of the Artemis um
architecture is to preserve some of these historical spots uh and all the
signatories have agreed to not disturb any of the Apollo Landing sites the Luna
sites uh things like that so I think it's a good start start uh for
conservation uh in that way and so Artemis is trying to put a new face on
exploration it comes at a time when we were left through Apollo and the Lunas
with some big mysteries about the moon U the the Apollo program didn't answer
everything in fact uh uh this is a painting I did of Thea impacting the
Earth uh the origin of the moon is uh something that we're understanding more
and more in terms of Dynamics and stuff but the details need to be filled in we
need to we have lots of missing pieces uh rocks from the moon are going to help
uh immensely and uh of course Artemis is planning on bringing samples back that
are geologically very different from the ones uh through the Apollo era um we uh
all the Apollo and Lunas landed essentially across the equator uh the
Chinese are now uh opening up that uh that range with some of the chungu um
missions which have been successful and spectacular um emis promises more uh we
will uh we are intrigued by the magma
Ocean on the moon how deep was it how long did it last when did it start uh V
ISM on the moon is something that we want to know more about as well and so
if you run the clock back a little bit to when people were looking at the moon through their
telescopes uh as they studied the poles where you could just barely see over the
edge they could see mountains sticking up and some of these mountains seem to
stick up far enough that the sun might shine on them all the time early
observers even reported seeing uh some Spectrum across some of these
mountains as if they were reflecting ice now that was probably chromatic aberration or or some other things with
these more primitive telescopes but the idea that people like Camille flam Marian had of these great peaks of
eternal light was probably something like this the Himalayas or the Alps uh
sticking up in that uh beautiful uh sunlight just barely peeking Over the
Horizon with snow on them reflecting back to the Earth of course uh the there
there are mountains of almost Eternal Light we found a couple of places at the south pole that have in the Upper 90
percentage of uh time of Illumination but they're not Peaks like this they are
pumps of Eternal Light uh this is malapart massive uh adjacent to uh
Shackleton crater and this is the primary Landing site where uh we want to
go part of the reason is that not only do you have peaks of Eternal Light
almost you also have permanently shadowed regions that uh contain
volatiles all kinds of ices but primarily water ice and you can use
water for Handy things like uh oxygen for breathing you can use it for rocket
fuel um you can use it to wash your dirty socks it's it's just amazing stuff
so uh so the South Pole is the place to go and uh here are some Artemis
astronauts looking for uh polar deposits of water you can see the Earth is upside
down there Africa is on the left um but
to do this it's going to take some new and revolutionary
um technology uh especially in the suits it is far colder than any of the
shadowed regions visited by the Apollo Astronauts and so axium space is
building the new space suits um they are teaming with Prada which I think is
really interesting uh when you're done with the space you can use it as an oversized purse I think uh but uh no
that's not it um Prada actually is also involved in in carbon fiber for race
cars uh Oakley who is famous for sunglasses they're doing the visor and
so there's all kinds of people uh looking at uh the design of the suits uh
how to keep our poor astronauts warm in that environment and how to keep the
dust off of it which is a a critical thing but the 36 Nations member nations
of emis are not the only ones planning a return uh the Chinese are leading an
International Group to build what they're calling the international lunar research
station uh and uh if you have been watching the Chinese program they have
hit every Milestone they have announced so um I think this is uh going to be an
exciting thing to watch this is the lanua um lunar lander that would carry
four uh tyona down to the surface of the
Moon so uh we have two Landers on Deck
to take people back to the Moon um here is the Apollo lunar lander uh for
comparison these are all to scale uh blue origin is designing the mark 2
crude lunar lander um which can take um
I think they said close to 30 tons to the surface of the Moon Starship uh X
SpaceX Starship hls is going to be able to bring over 70 tons to the lunar
surface uh and so these things will have a a lot of capability uh they're going to have to
be launched on big big boosters uh SLS built by NASA will take Orion up which
is the new version of Apollo uh space BX of course has their starship which will
uh carry their lunar lander and blue origin has new
Glen here's Orion in orbit around the Bahamas but hopefully it'll get further
than that um Orion can carry four people it is a has tremendous improvements over
Apollo it has a lot more room a lot more safety uh you can run it for weeks
rather than uh well for months really rather than just weeks as in Apollo uh
the plan is to rondevo at least in later missions with this the Gateway space
station that will be about a fifth the size of the International Space Station
it'll be in a Halo orbit around the moon and the lunar Landers and Orion will
meet up with this and transfer Crews to head on down to the surface
so uh that's what's in store but what is uh even further in the future um NASA is
looking at all kinds of things to do to make the place safe for a
habitation uh one of those things is of course building burms for landing sites
uh this Art Is by a company called icon in Austin who has been printing 3D
houses uh they have uh houses in Texas in California in Mexico uh several major
subdivisions of 3D printed homes and NASA has uh conscripted them to try to
build uh to use their equipment in the vacuum of the Moon to actually build
structures on the lunar surface the payoff is you don't have to bring anything with you except the equipment
you use lunar regolith and melt it into these uh beads and build structures the
nice thing about uh this process is you don't have to build a box you can do
curv linear walls beautiful skylights uh icon has some very talented
Architects with them but a curved wall is stronger in a vacuum than a boxes and
so this will be a significant Improvement um
near The emis Landing sites the Artemis science region uh there are spectacular
things to see this is a a painting I did for David King of a uh a valley that
comes out of the shring or impact Basin it's two and a half times as deep as the
Grand Canyon uh but you don't get any visual cues because there's no air uh so
at any rate King says if you took this um Canyon uh back to Earth it would be
uh a an international Park definitely just very dramatic uh place on the lunar
surface one of many that we will have to explore people are looking further ahead
to moons of the solar system uh Beyond ours uh Mars has two little moons that
you rondevo with rather than land standing on uh we just got this beautiful photo from Esau of uh of
damos and if you think a little bit further out here is a blue origin
spacecraft adapted for Europa another great moon to visit uh
and of course there are other Galilean satellites out there that we'll want to
explore with astronauts as our technology improves we'll see these
beautiful butlike ice formations on Kalisto gamid and Europa are also
possibilities Europa has some sheltered places in terms of radiation so uh there
are places that we can go Saturn is a much more benign environment here we are
on iapetus a beautiful black and white moon uh that will be very exciting sight
and of of course right next door is Enceladus with its active Geyers and a little bit further out
Titan here is uh Elon musk's lunar lander adapted to going much further
away and of course there are many many moons in the outer solar system Tessy
bonestell did a series of paintings of the moons of Saturn I believe for
Collier's magazine and in them you could see little human figures but one of the
editors when he saw the figures panicked and put in the caption figures are only
there for scale he didn't want anyone to freak out that people might actually be there someday well here's a painting of
Uranus and the figures are not for scale they are because we will be there people
will be moving out into the outer solar system to explore the question before us
tonight is do we go to the Moon first why do that The Visionaries I've talked
to say skip that that's a waste of it's It's a distraction it's not a waste of
time scientifically but it's a distraction if you want to go to the Mars and Mars and Beyond just go but the
engineers who are building the stuff and the astronauts who have been there uh
tend to reply that don't send people out there yet we're going to start killing
people if we try to go to Mars right now we have to learn we have to learn from the Moon how to run our systems and live
in that um very harsh environment long term before we venture out uh to Mars I
don't know which of those uh is a better choice that's above my pay grade I'll leave that to you guys but I want you to
uh depart with this thought the next time we go back to the Moon won't see a scene like this we'll see a scene a
little bit more like this because lots and lots of us will be going together uh
hopefully in Harmony and cooperation and uh engendering Goodwill
among the people of the earth so thank you so much for for having me on tonight
I always enjoy being with all you smart and creative people
Michael I thought that was fantastic I thoroughly thoroughly enjoyed it oh good
and I re and but but the thing that got to me the most was when you went to the
moons of Mars the little moons of Mars fobos and Deus and I'd like to share if you don't
mind a story that I read about that because I remember in this
1862 a S Hall who would eventually discover Phobos and Deus was having a
terrible night at the Naval Observatory in Washington and he nothing was working
the sky was okay but the telescope was out of focus and this was going wrong and I think he had had an argument
with his wife earlier and not going great anyway there's this
suddenly as as there as he's really angry there's a pounding on the door
and um that just blows him up he starts stomping down the stairs he says I'm going to open that door and push whoever
it is into the mud and get him out of my way and he ran down the stairs and he
thrusted open the door and the person at the other side was Abraham
Lincoln he was standing by himself and he said I'm sorry I really
am sorry to interrupt you but I've had a terrible day as you probably
know and I was just taking a walk and I was hoping I could spend a little time
with you Among the Stars and Hall
goes yes you're welcome and he he had the president come in and they talked
and talked and he showed him things in the telescope and at the very end
Lincoln looks at him and said can I go back again can I come back again
and you're welcome here anytime two days later another knock at the door and now
he's kind of ready for it and it was Lincoln again with the Secretary of War
Stanton and they stayed the whole evening and um apparently Paul wrote in
his journals that he was impressed with Lincoln's knowledge of the night sky
that that this guy was not stupid when it came to his knowledge of the nice sky
and despite all the beautiful things you showed in this and your lecture just now
that was my favorite oh that's
great Scott you're muted sorry guys there we go there we go
little muted there guys no I just love seeing your artwork in in your uh presentation you know just there it's so
Majestic and so uh beautiful and um U
Michael and I were having a little conversation uh before the program started about the importance of uh of uh
experiencing awe and um you know I think that uh you know I was just I was going
through uh images that that Michael's done in years past and uh you know some
more recent ones as well and God you just get lost in them they're they're
they're not only highly detailed but they are they draw you into the uh to the
scene and the action and it makes your imagination think about what it would
really look like you know and and uh uh you know for a moment uh you know you
know that that that sense of awe hits you that Majesty of those giant
mountains and craters and and the scale and all the rest of the stuff and uh so
uh you know if you haven't read about uh the necessity for humans to for our for
our minds and our hearts to experience the sense of awe uh just for you know
some some psychologists say that you know you you need this exper experience often regularly uh to prevent yourself
from going crazy you know and uh so uh I I I told Michael that I think he is one
of the architects of awe and uh so um if you're watching the program and you
haven't looked at the page yet of all the speakers the speakers are actually tied into bi biographies about them and
on Michael's page is a example of one of his uh paintings uh and also um uh a
talk that he gave to the sa Institute uh which by the way we will
have one of our speakers tonight is Seth Shak I believe he'll be coming on and um
he is their senior astronomer so it's all coming around full circle guys
so anyhow thank you so much Michael for that thanks Scott it was anything else
you'd like to add David there is I I Echo what you said
about awe and uh actually the word awful the root comes from full of awe
and the night sky is more than anything else it's that feeling of awe that we
get when at the end of a difficult day we go outside and we see the darkening
sky and it makes us feel better and uh
and that feeling of a is everything to me yes
wonderful thank you so much thank you take care and have a good night Michael
take care y uh our next speaker is David is
uh Ron breacher Ron is from uh Canada from your country uh David and uh uh
from Montreal even originally yeah we go that's where I was born yeah to where
were you where what part of Montreal were you live Mount Royal oh yeah my
sister I think was living there and brought up her children there nice I haven't lived there for a long
time though now I'm in uh just north of guant area okay I'm gonna be back in Montreal
in July I think nice wonderful okay well uh
tonight's uh program uh uh presentation from Ron is uh to the moon and Beyond um
if uh you're just now learning about Ron breacher he is one of the uh main uh I
think one of the founders of uh the masters of pix insight and pix Insight
is you know the definitely the go-to platform for serious Astro photographers
but um uh you know don't think that you as a beginner couldn't uh use this
program because they teach you as a newbie just step by step how to get there and start using the powerful
algorithms that are in um that are in pix insight and Ron is a is a uh
educator and a teacher and a fantastic astrophotographer uh so he's going to
show you some of his images right now thank you Ron uh Scott just before I
start the presentation are you seeing just my slides or a whole bunch of other stuff as well I see a lineup of images
of the moon yeah so I'm going to I'm going to um just switch to a slideshow
that should work better sure okay so you gave me a challenge this time Scott
because you know I'm really a deep Sky guy yes uh I'm really a deep sky
astrophotographer and uh people might not know this about me but I uh I do a
lot of visual astronomy and uh when I thought about it
you know the Moon is probably the thing I look at the most so uh you know I like to always put
things in the context of the theme that Scott gives us uh and then I'm going to
talk a little bit just about my perspective on the moon uh nothing really sciency just my
own perspective on the Moon and what it makes me think about and of course then
uh I'll talk about beyond the Moon and what that makes me think
about so here's the theme Scott gave us and I've just highlighted a few
important points so the Moon is a symbol of interconnectedness and balance I
particularly feel that way during um during a lunar eclipse you know half the
planet sees a lunar eclipse a few billion people all getting to see
the same thing at the same time and it's not a rare event but it's not all that
common either so that's kind of cool um the Moon is a universal thread in human
history it's in our language it's in our measurement systems it's everywhere it
Bridges uh both time and space that's generations and
geography uh reminding us of shared existence between the same night
sky it connects our Earthly existence to the infinite Cosmos okay okay again
reflecting on uh how I feel myself when I go outside and I look at the
Moon I just feel like I'm part of something really big it's the
closest thing that that I can see that's really far away
and uh uh it never never fails to amaze me and it's like a stepping stone for me
seeing the Moon it was the first thing I saw through a telescope and it was like a
Gateway observation to my current passion for all everything
astronomy and this idea of Ingenuity and resilience uh if you've ever tried doing
astrophotography graphy you know you need Ingenuity and resilience because if
something can go wrong it will go wrong and you have to fix it on the Fly and of
course the unyielding drive to explore create and grow it's a reminder of what
we're capable of uh when we think about people going to the Moon that's that's
pretty big deal hard to do all
right so these are all my own lunar images now I couldn't tell you what all
the craters are just that they're really really interesting like I said the Moon is my
most often observed object by far visually maybe not photographically but
maybe even photographically because other objects I just shoot them once but I've shot the moon many
times um so my most observed object and it's
visible day or night most of the time it's not too hard to find a night where
you can observe the moon or a daytime where you can observe the
moon with the naked eye it's gorgeous sometimes when you see it like
a big pumpkin sitting on the horizon uh fantastic with the naked eye
but if you put binoculars or a small telescope on it you can see the kind of
detail that you see in in this picture here and in a large telescope even
though you may not be able to see the whole moon it's it's absolutely
breathtaking um I do want to point out that most of us see patterns on the moon
you know some people I think it's the Chinese uh talk about a rabbit and we
hear stories about the Man in the Moon uh this this tendency to see patterns on
moon is called paradia and um I just want to show you
what I see when I look at the Moon maybe you'll never be able to unsee this
now Wilma Flintstone's
Mom it's absolutely her you can see the bun The Bun of the hair and the curl up
in front and here's her eyes and her big nose and a double chin even got a BRI a
broch around her neck so that's what I see when I look at the Moon and it's the first thing I look for is Wilma's
mom you've just given me something new to look at Ron I just wanted to chime in and say that Isn't that cool I will
never un I see it in this image now too oh yeah totally you can see the broch
around her neck much better here yeah oh my
yeah that's that's never going to leave my sight now know probably those that are watching are going to do the same
thing now too there she is Wilma's
mother all right carry on now it's interesting uh when when I look at the
Moon with the naked eye I generally look at it uh when there's Shadows to see so
I don't usually look at the moon when the moon is full um I'll look at it when
the Moon is you know either a crescent moon or a gibbus moon or first quarter
or last quarter um but if you get into photography of the Moon uh and in this
case this was taken with a large like a 6inch refractor and a a seamoss deep Sky
camera using a hydrogen Alpha filter you can then process it and
really enhance the contrast and get some uh real really nice stuff even when the moon is full so this was um July uh in
July a few few years ago um this is a pretty special picture
to me and it reminds me that the moon isn't always the same and that if
you look at the Moon often enough it reveals a lot about the motion of the solar
system about the geom R of the solar system and uh this photo was taken on
February 20th 2008 it was -28°
C I took the picture on the left uh just before the beginning of the partial
phases of the moon so it was penumbral at this point uh I took the picture on
the right right at the point of totality like at the middle of totality and then
everything about my system froze the grease on my Mount froze I
could no longer Focus the camera the battery on the camera died I was just
lucky to get this picture so that's what I was talking about uh how I relate to that notion of
Ingenuity and overcoming adversity and it's it's hard nobody likes to have
problems but it's really fun to solve them when you when you finally get
through them and solve them it's really fun and this picture that I just showed
you ended up on a on a beer label so how good is that blood moon double chocolate
raspberry Imperial Stout and uh I'm being a proof reader I
noticed that raspberry is missing the PE unbelievable hey but you caught uh
problems that I had in my schedule so I really appreciate it no
problem this is another way to see the moon so you I mean I know we're looking
at the sun here uh but it really is another way to see the moon and in particular uh so
these are just a couple of eclipses I've uh imaged using an Hal Alpha filter or H
Alpha telescope and what's really interesting this is a a blowup of the previous
slide you what you're seeing is not the shadow of the moon at lower right it's
the moon in silhouette with the sun behind it and
you can see that the surface of the Moon is not smooth I've got a few arrows
pointing out the surface roughness that that you can capture from your backyard
with a small telescope and a modest camera so that's
really kind of cool okay so let's get to the
Beyond um the speaker after me is Seth
shc interestingly the first time I was on the global Star Party he was on right
before me and boy that was a tough act to follow but uh I made this slide before I
knew Seth was going to be on and when I found out he was going to be on right after me I decided not to
change it because I think it it kind of captures what I feel about the whole
shebang that really there's not anything that
special I mean maybe we're special as individuals but as a place in the
universe our neighborhood looks like a lot of other neighborhoods um this is a pict
of m33 uh this is probably a couple of
degrees across so maybe four times the width of the moon but it contains tens
of billions of stars and some of those stars are going to be like some of the
stars in the Milky Way including our star and some of those stars are going
to have planets and
this shows a cluster of G galaxies this is uh uh Ark
246 and uh I just want to I mean you can
see the the main galaxies here but here's an annotated version I just want
you to see that there's hundreds and hundreds of galaxies in this image some
of these galaxies like the ones marked sdss are
quazars incredibly far away but all of these Galaxies have tens or maybe
hundreds of billions of stars in them again some of those stars are probably
like some of our stars in the Milky Way including our star the Sun
so you know I don't know if we're going to explore the stars in my lifetime I don't know if we're going to colonize
the moon colonize Mar I know it would be an enormous
expenditure of money I'm sure some good would come of it but it's for bigger thinkers than me to figure out whether
that's a good decision I I just feel you know we're
not that special and if we wait sooner or later somebody somewhere in this vast
universe is going to come to us anyway thanks for listening to my musings if
you want to reach me my emails here are breacher rogers.com look for my writing in sky
and Telescope here and there and uh masters of pix insight.com if you're
interested in learning how to process those deep Sky
pictures so that is my talk wonderful talk great well thank you also for me
Ron I thought that was really interesting but would you be too upset
with me if I made a minor disagreement with you no of course not okay when you
quoted Seth uh I thought I thought when you quoted Seth I thought you know what a
wonderful thing to say whenever something says we were we're we're we're
important we were wrong and uh I thought that too of
course I no longer think that because I attended did a lecture decades ago from
uh former Sky telescope editor-in Chief Lea
Robinson and he said the same he started the same theme and uh heast made the point that
with everything there is in the universe the hydrogen the
helium and everything else that there is out there there's really only one of
each of us we are are unique and as this tiny little corner of
the universe undoubtedly there are other civilizations some of them space fairing
civilizations and I'd like to introduce one right now because I've been promoted to become Captain David of the Starship
Enterprise and um there was a scene from the early the
earliest the the original series and the original series when Dr McCoy
said the same thing only one of each of us I think we agreed actually I think I
said that as individuals we're important and we
special but our neighborhood I think looks a lot like other neighborhoods that that I see
around the universe so I guess it just wouldn't surprise me
if we had some neighbors somewhere I I don't think it would surprise me either and I think that's part of The Wonder of
what we see out there the questions which we ask are the same as the
questions the ancient Native Americans asked as they stood and I I I think we got to keep
looking for them I'm not sure how much space flight that involves right
now I think there's other ways to look right now well you know I think you're absolutely
right we should find these things but if we don't we don't but we are still
unique and uh other than that boy when that was wonderful thank
you great okay all right well thank you so much Ron uh and I'm looking forward
to hearing Seth and Seth is with us right now he's backstage um thank you very much Ron
okay see you later yeah so David right now we're going to introduce uh Dr Seth
Shak he is the senior astronomer for seti and that's the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence um I've Had The Good Fortune to see him give several
presentations uh he is uh very informative uh um very humorous and uh
um he's easy to make friends with which is which is great and um uh you know so
I treasure that um Seth is uh with us
coming in now from uh his home in uh in California so thank you very much for
joining us tonight Seth it's terrific uh Scott to be with
you I have to say uh fortunately I guess you gave me a phone call because
otherwise I wouldn't be here so uh it's okay you have uh you're
thinking of the big things out there you know so um and helping uh keep uh uh Ste
on on its tracks so it's a lot I know anyhow wonderful terrific let me
know when you want me to begin uh and uh do you have a language preference because if not I'll just speak Belgian
is nice I think as Belgian well actually belgi Belgian Belgium has two languages
French and and uh you know Dutch really is what it is I speak the Dutch and I
had studied the French but I don't huh espiranto
espiranto yeah that where it comes from is Belgium yeah no
no anyhow you know I can tell you but I don't think you care to hear all right so uh I'm
given to understand uh from Scott that I have to
finish here uh inside of four hours so I'm going to try and do that actually
what I'm going to do I I don't know if it's possible for the audience such as
it is to ask questions after I finish my modest presentation because I always
find that when you take questions at least you get to address things that the audience is actually interested in as
opposed to things that the speaker is interested in but uh is that possible
Scott will that be possible to do you know go ahead and take the four hours
take the four hours okay all right well that would be a torture we' had speakers
go not quite that long but you know well I won't go that long I I I'm told what
I'll do was I will prattle on for about 20 minutes right sounds good 20 30
minutes is very good yeah and then after that I'll take questions and we you know all all you do need to do Scott is give
some sort of you know uh indication that it's over with and that I I've sent a
guy to your house with a hook and he'll just pull you off the screen okay yeah well it's the only club that I'm likely
to ever be admitted to okay all right well look as you've already heard I work
for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence Institute The seti Institute we never call it by its
expanded form the seti Institute and The seti Institute has been around since
1984 uh the idea was in fact originally to kind of Shepherd the NASA seti
program which uh began quite some time ago many decades ago uh it was killed
actually in the 1990s by a a uh senator from Nevada which I find actually
somewhat amusing uh he was just trying to prove to his constituents that he was
addressing government waste and for some reason he thought that looking for aliens was um a waste of government
government money but I I note again he was from Nevada he still is from Nevada
I suppose and uh if there's one state which seems to make a decent living out
of you know encounters with aliens it's Nevada so I I I I must say I find that
interesting anyhow so the whole idea of trying to find the aliens that's an old
idea and uh it goes back more than a hundred years maybe more like 150 years
uh with modern equipment relatively modern equipment so looking for the aliens you know that's that's an old
story but beginning around the time of the second world war it became possible to deploy a new kind of technology to do
that instead of just pointing our ref refractor telescopes in the direction of
mars or wherever it is you think the aliens may be hanging out uh it was
suggested by Frank Drake and others actually that the best thing to do would be to just build a very sensitive Radio
setup and try and EAS drop on Transmissions from the aliens now you
know you might ask well why would the aliens ever want to broadcast their presence and the answer to that is well
we don't know the answer to that I mean you know you could argue that maybe it's just dangerous to tell the rest of the
universe that you exist because after all you don't know what's out there it
could it's like it's been likened to shouting in the jungle never a good idea because you don't know what's out there
and it may be the last shout out they ever ever give but uh you know that was
the beginning of SEI when Frank Drake uses radio antenna and green Bank West
Virginia at the national radio astronomy Observatory uh in the first you know kind of SE experiment he was a postto
actually at nrao as it's called by those who uh who are hired by it and uh they
had just built a new telescope the 140t telescope so-called because it's 140 foot in diameter and uh you know he was
just told by the director of The Observatory Dave hean Frank think of something to do with this antenna so
Frank decided look you know they're not going to fire me they just hired me so I can suggest almost anything and he
suggested why don't we try and point this antenna at some nearby star systems
and see if we can pick up any signals either signals that are deliberately sent our way for whatever reason or just
signals that are emanating from that planet because they've invented radio so that was the beginning of SEI and uh
today it's still being carried out uh the the projects today tend to be sort
of parasitic projects what I mean by that is that they're uh based on other
experiments that are using these big antennas and as a sort of add-on to
those experiments specialized receivers are used to try and tune enough of the radio
dial that you might actually pick up a signal now I'm not going to tell you about all that that's something you can
read about and beside that most of you probably know how done anyhow but I
would like to just talk briefly about what the potential for that kind of an
experiment might be uh in particular we've never picked up any alien signal we' never have but that doesn't mean
that we won't and it may someday occur I've uh rather
infamously bet everyone in my acquaintance a cup of coffee that I
figure will pick up a signal telling us that somebody's out there by the middle of the 2030s so you know maybe another
dozen years from now we may in fact uh find out that there's somebody out there
not just hypothesize about it but actually find the evidence to that um
what would that mean well I mean who knows what it would mean if you could ever understand them if you could
understand what they're saying which you might or might not but if you could then you would be in touch with a society
that's more advanced than our own at least technologically because otherwise they don't have the capability of
building a big enough transmitter for you to pick up pick them up so they're going to be more advanced than we are so
you know they might tell you interesting stuff like how to get along with everybody or or maybe how to cured death
or whatever that kind of thing so uh you know there could be a real inflection
point in the history of homo sapiens if we in fact do pick up a signal from
another Society because uh you know who knows what they may may be able to teach us all right well having done all that
let me just say further what you know what would be the reaction on earth now
you you could say well I mean is isn't there some sort of uh protocol it's a
really a terrible word but protocol as to what should be done if tomorrow night
or next week or whatever we were to pick up a signal that was clearly being deliberately sent uh out into space by
some aliens and uh you know wouldn't that change everything well I think it
probably would change everything uh you know we would we would know something very important even aside from whether
they could teach us anything and presumably they could we would know that we're not the only Kids on the Block and
you know that's philosophically kind of an interesting uh interesting thing to have learned
um the other thing that I think is important is what the protocols say
about how we should react to that right if we were to pick up a signal coming from I mean who knows what maybe some
nearby star system a star system say within 10 or 100 light years away not
terribly far uh what if we were to pick that up what is it that we are obligated
to do are we obligated to do anything and the answer to that is no we're not actually obligated to do anything there
is a protocol that's been agreed upon by uh you know a
fairly substantial number of scientists most of whom are connected with the
American Institute of Aeronautics and astronautics because they like to discuss uh this this possibility and you
know so they they drafted up this protocol I have to say that the people that drafted this up were people who
worked for NASA and people who work for NASA have a great fondness for protocols
and rules and you know that kind of thing uh scientists in general do not
but you know some of these naset types definitely like the idea of having
having some sort of Express plan for what to do if you pick up a signal and
of course it's been written down you can find it online there's nothing secret about it what it says is very simple
says if you pick up a signal that is clearly you know not a natural signal
like it might pick up from the Sun or a planet or something you know not just naturally produced radio emission but a
signal that is for example narrow band in other words it's at one spot on the radio dial if you pick up a signal like
that well that's a signal that's produced by a transmitter it's not produced by a quazar pulsar any any of
those natural radio emitters just a warm body right all of those produce radio
emission you can try it on your kid brother right that might be a warm body that's accessible to you and you would
find that he's emitting radio radiation although he's probably not aware of it okay so I what
what what what do you do about it well the protocol simply says if you find it
first the first thing you have to do is just check it out make sure it's for real that it's not just an artifact of
your equipment that it's just not something that really has nothing to do with aliens but has to do with your own
setup there and then the second thing to do is to tell everybody in other words
don't keep it a secret now in my experience a lot of the American public at least uh is convinced that it would
be kept secret these are people who have never worked for the federal government because if they had they would know that
the federal government is really pretty lousy at keeping things secret I I
worked for the federal government uh for many Summers actually because I grew up in Arlington Virginia just across the
pomac from uh you know Washington DC actually where I grew up was 2 miles
from the Pentagon so most of my neighbors worked at the Pentagon whatever
so if if you I was just looking at Lor's message
kind of distract me I don't I I don't know what to say except that all right if we pick up a signal what is going to
happen well the protocol says just tell everybody that's for sure that would
happen but it also says there one last thing in the protocol that is really the only interesting part of it and that is
it states that don't send any replies without you know sort of
international consultation now I've never know what that means International consultation
whom do you consult you know do you consult the the Belgian chess team for
example since we've been talking about Belgium and that's International consultation it's not quite clear that
that's particularly appli able here but you know what what do you do well the
the the false alarms we've had and we've had quite a number of false alarms in the past where we picked up signals and
thought that they were really the aliens they show that there's just no keeping it quiet and it would be all over the
newspapers and you know people would be talking about it uh the people on this call would probably be invited to go on
talk radio and expound on what they think this means to the future of humanity
um so all right that that might be the case but if we were to pick this up one
of the pressing questions would be immediately well okay we're picking up a
signal that's coming from that star system 30 light years away in that direction do we broadcast a reply you
know do we say Hey you know we picked up your signal and we you know have a lot of used cars we'd like to get rid of and
uh can we sell them to you or whatever right would we try and establish contact with them some people think that would
be dangerous you shouldn't do it other people think oh yeah that's great because they could help us with all the
stuff we don't know but that's what the protocol says it says you know let
everybody know and don't broadcast anything back without this International
consultation which never been clear to me exactly what that means I mean if you talk to 20 people who uh you know live
in Europe is that International consultation I don't know but but uh you
know that that that's certainly a possibility um
okay let me just go on here to something slightly different I do think that it's
an interesting experiment because even though Saidi has never made a discovery
we've never picked up any signal that was clearly being broadcast by some sort of
intelligence it seems to me that that's likely to happen in the lifetime of all the people who are you know pretending
to keep their eyeballs open during this soporific presentation right because the
equipment keeps getting better if you look at the the receivers the sensitivity of the receivers the amount
of bandwidth they can cover all these sorts of things you realize that our
search for signals that are deliberately being transmitted has improved tremend
ously in the past 20 or 30 years and it will continue to improve because if you
just you know just make a graph of how sensitive our experiments to try and
pick up signals from other worlds is you find that it follows follows what's called Mo's law which is to say it
improves exponentially it doubles essentially every two years doubles in
sensitivity doubles in the amount of frequency coverage so that's why I bet
that cup of coffee that we'll we'll find something within our lifetime because the equipment keeps getting better the
experiment keeps get getting better all right uh I have another 10
minutes here before I'm going to open this up to Q&A but I I just wanted to
say maybe something else about the fact that maybe there some some of the
cultural aspects of this whole search the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been almost exclusively
an American project right I I lived in Europe for I don't know more than a
Dozen Years actually and Europe Europe is not a slouch when it comes to science
you could say that Europe invented modern science right they they know what they're doing but they don't do this
they don't do seti they don't do SE they don't try and find signals out there
deliberately uh produce signals and when I was living in Europe I you know I
would ask my colleagues I was at a university there I would ask my colleagues you know why is it that you
guys you know do all this science you do a lot of good research but you never
look for signals being sent by other societies why is it you don't do that
and uh what one of the faculty members at the University where I was responded
by saying well you know you said this in Dutch but we were in Holland he said because we're too sober for
that too sober for that so whatever that means I'm glad to hear they were sober
but you know that the Americans are they're just not grounded in some sense
and uh I think that this is one of the great things about the United States actually that we're not quite so sober
that we're willing to go out on a limb that we willing to try and experiment that might or might not uh be successful
but that if it is successful it would upend the future trajectory of homo
sapiens so uh yeah I think that that's a good thing all
right uh let me there was something else I wanted to
say here before I open it up to what you people want to talk
about and that is okay is there any danger in doing any of
this because I get that fairly frequently if I'm giving a public talk and say you guys you know even if you're
not broadcasting something might it not be dangerous to even look right I mean
is there a danger in some sort of knowledge that we otherwise wouldn't have right would it have been dangerous
for example for the Native Americans in the 15th century to uh look for you know
people coming from across the Atlantic that kind of thing well it might have been dangerous so it could it be dangerous for us to
find the aliens would they be capable or have any interest in doing something
that could actually threaten uh either either our existence or our future that
kind of thing and uh that may be you can't you know 100% rule that out but on
the other hand it doesn't seem to me that that's very likely and beyond that
because it's it's hard to imagine what they could do do that would be dangerous to us but uh the other thing is that it
would be extraordinarily interesting if we were to find that we weren't the only Kids on the Block right even aside from
what we might learn it just would be really really interesting to know that there was somebody out there you would
know that homo sapiens is not some sort of Miracle right we're just
another just another kid on the Block right h so uh that that's uh I think
that's something worth learning if it's true if it turns out that in fact you know we're we're not all that special
we're just you know a particular form of life on this planet that developed
enough brain power to uh you know do some science do some research do some
experimenting to find out if there's anybody out there I think that that would really be worth it
candle okay uh um I tell you what I I I think I'm I'm tired of listening to
myself as I'm sure you are as well Scott maybe you could Wrangle the the
questions it looks like questions okay all right I have a question uh and there
are other questions here in in the chat but my question is um you are very
likely one of uh and and maybe perhaps the only one uh in the United States
anyways that will be uh reached out to
to tell the world that you know we have found a
signal and I and I think about that um because not only will you have
to you know make a a giant Gulp and uh
go okay you know and here come the news cameras here comes the media Here Comes everybody and it will be the question of
you know of the world uh you know that you you'll have to uh uh give very
carefully thought through answers um because some people might just go nuts
other people might be jubilant might you know every possible uh emotion will be
uh uh you know brought forth uh I think that's a heavy
responsibility and um you know that very few people in
the world have I mean do you think about that is that something you just go nah
you know I'll just sell them I'm just going to blurt it out okay that that they're out there and uh you
know or are you do you weigh this stuff you know do do you sometimes stay up at
night thinking about that well I I try not to stay up at the night if I can
avoid it Scott uh but no I don't worry too much about this to begin with I I wouldn't overestimate my importance as
far as the media are concerned it's true that I'm probably in a lot of their rolodexes but but but they don't
necessarily I mean it depends on the story of course they will occasionally call me up even here at home they
they'll call me up at any any hour to say look you know did you see this story
what do you think of it that kind of thing I I do get those kinds of calls but in general I don't think that I'm
perceived as being the person who should speak for Homo sapiens if we were to
pick up a signal I mean they might ask me but there a lot of other people they would ask they have big rolodexes and I
think that they you know they I mean look who comes to mind if you they they did this actually years ago when I say
years ago I'm talking about two or three decades ago and they asked the members of the American public if you think in
of astronomy example what names come to mind and there were only a couple and
number one on the list was of course Carl Sean they would call him up and it doesn't mean that whomever they call up
is going to be somebody who's very uh expert in whatever they're asking them but that's not that's not the
requirement from the media's point of view they don't need somebody who is academically uh closely involved or just
happens to be an expert on that particular subject they just want somebody who will be interesting for the
listeners or the viewers that's their primary concern so um you know okay all
right okay let's get to some of the questions here that we have from um from
the uh audience here um when you run out Scotty I have a
question okay well this never runs from Dawn Dawn toown uh in watching on YouTube he says
question for Seth do you think any intelligent species would still be communicating via radio maybe they
should send us a floppy disc or maybe an eight track tape yeah well uh I I don't think I
still have my eight track player here but yeah well you do get this fairly
frequently because people will say radio what are you talking about radio is so old school but keep in mind that radio
encompasses of course things like tele ision and radar you know any form of
electromagnetic communication is considered radio from a technical standpoint and at least as far as we
know the you know the best way to send information bits of information from one
solar system to another solar system is in fact to use electromagnetic radiation
in other words radio right yeah you could perhaps just mail something you
put it all in a rocket and ended somewhere but Rockets don't go anywhere near the speed of light of course so
that's very slow it's also expensive so uh yeah I I I do think that even though
we continue to use radio technology to try and hunt down the aliens there are good reasons for that because it's not
because I happen to like you know listening to top 40 radio it's because in fact it's h you know the cheapest
fastest way to communicate over big distances H very good go ahead David I do have a
question uh you did mention that the first broadcast and said I really did
enjoy what you had to say and was following I was following it very very
closely but you did mention that there was that the first artificially sent
message would be in a very narrow band specific message in the summer of 1977
there was such a such a signal it's called the wow signal and I believe it
was detected by one of the telescopes that said he runs in
Ohio and I know it's been explained but I'm wondering if you would like to address that a little bit The W yeah the
wow signal by the way it's called the wow signal not because it was first recorded by William wow or anything like
that it's it's just because at Ohio State which is where the signal was found they had a big antenna big radio
antenna there it was uh replaced eventually by a tennis court I think anyhow it's gone now but anyhow there is
this big antenna there and uh you know they would just let it run all
night there wasn't anybody there Manning the thing because you know that was expensive they would just let it run all
night and see if they ever picked up anything interesting and once a day or maybe once every couple of days one of
the scientists there working at the Ohio State and in this case it was a guy by
the name of Jerry aan eh Maan he would come in and he would rip off the the
computer printout from from the computers there and see if there were any signals that had been picked up
during the night and he did find one uh in 1977 as you mentioned David and he
was so impressed by the strength of this signal that he wrote wow next to
it so that's how became known as the wow signal now the thing about the wow
signal is yeah it could have been ET you know trying to get in touch but the wow
signal was never picked up again again it was never seen a second time and uh
as everybody on this call well knows if you have a science result but you only get it once and you can't replicate it
it's not very good science so the wow signal has been looked at many times
including by people at Ohio at Ohio State as a matter of fact but it was never seen again and I I talked to uh
well Bob Dixon was the fellow I talked to he was one of the radio astronomers at Ohio State and I asked him during the
course of a phone conversation a number of years ago now I said so Bob you guys had this famous wow signal what do you
think it was was it the Klingons trying to get in touch what was it and he said
well he figures it was probably just you know interference it was technical problem it was technical it was it was
Homo sapiens but it you know it wasn't particularly interesting so uh so much
for the wow signal but I hope that one day we get a wow signal that can be verified right that you can immediately
put it on the worldwide web and have people around the world try and verify that signal because that's what you need
I hope so too very good very good okay uh and um
you know s done uh things to engage the general public uh you know citizen
science types of uh programs or Partnerships uh and there was something called SE at home um is that still
running or is that a a shelv um uh program now um yeah it it is not still
running lamentably Scott and by the way it wasn't a project of The seti Institute uh it was yeah yeah well we I
was frequently uh told that you know gosh that was really a great thing you guys had with said know it it wasn't our
project but it was it was a very good project and because it involved the
public and it gave the public at least the possibility of being the first ones
to find ET what could be more exciting than that sure but unfortunately I mean
it it costs money to run not a whole lot of money uh but it did cost money to run and as a consequence it was was
eventually stopped about 15 years ago I'm not precisely sure how long ago it
was but SE at home is is no more I I just hope that somebody you know has the
energy and the resources to start something like that up again right right
um there was uh this is kind of funny uh this is from uh Ralph wood and watching
on Facebook he said I did some set in 1995 I blinked a flashlight on and off
while pointing it at M13 my message is
0.135 135 135135 14% of the way there he said I'm
just throwing that out there yeah but well I mean what's what's
the fellow's name again uh Ralph wooden Ralph well I I mean Ralph may be uh pleased to know
that if the aliens pick up his signal and decide to flatten the Earth as a consequence Ralph will have
the have the honor of being the person responsible for the destruction of
humanity that's right thanks a lot Ralph
yeah like um but he had another question uh he said actually for a real question
what is the diameter of the space centered on Earth has been searched around set I
think he's just he's asking you know how much of space uh uh you know the sky have we
actually searched in the stud program yeah well the answer to that question is
not easy uh to give because it depends on you know what sensitivity you insist
upon right it's in some sense the entire sky has been looked at you know uh for
very strong signals okay because there have been antennas that have been used for setting but in both hemispheres
northern and southern hemispheres but if you ask well but what fraction of the
sky has been examined you know with very sensitive equipment so that it could
find something well that's much smaller now of course you know how how sensitive
is sensitive um if you it's a pretty simple calculation actually you can work
out how strong would a society or how strong would a signal would a society
that say I don't know 10 light years away what kind of a signal would they
need to wield in order for us to be able to pick it up with the kind of equipment we use for seti and the answer is well
you know it have to be fairly fairly powerful either that or they'd have to have some giant antenna Farm to direct
this signal in our Direction so uh you know when I say pretty powerful it might
have to be hundreds of thousands of Watts or even megawatts millions of Watts now you know millions of
Watts that that's there are transmitters on Earth that can manage that kind of power right so even we only a hundred
years more or less since the invention of radio are able to build equipment
that could in fact send information to our buddies in space and maybe we should
send them some poetry or some of our reality television or whatever it is we
think they would find interesting but we could do it one thing just a footnote to your uh
to your wonderful answer to that is that I do not think that the little flashlight sent out to M13 was the only
signal sent there I read that when the that poor tell late telescope at rbo was
opened they also sent a signal using that telescope for
z13 they did they did uh yes that was the result sorry that was the work of
Frank Drake who was the director of The Observatory at that time and he was trying to think of something that would
appeal to the public and would take advantage of the equipment that they had there keep in mind that the
aasbo uh antenna which is you know it's a th000 feet in diameter or maybe I should say was because it had the bad
form to collapse but uh you know it was designed to do really radar work that
that's why it was built originally and then the people at Cornell figured that we could also use this for radio
astronomy but it had a transmitter because it was intended to do radar work most radio telescopes do not have
transmitters one thing you don't really want at a radio Observatory is some strong transmitter right
for obvious reasons but the you know the airbo antenna did have a transmitter as
I recall it was like two megawatts right that that's a lot of that's a lot of power okay so uh you know it it it could
indeed easily produce a signal that aliens if they're not more than you know a couple of dozen light years away would
be able to pick up if they had a big enough antenna and it wouldn't have to be such a huge antenna we could produce
a signal that they could find which you know might mean the Nobel Prize for one
of these little green
guys well this has been this has been fabulous um uh I think that um you know what one
of the other big questions is is when is the next time you can come on Seth because people love your uh
presentations but you can watch Seth on many um uh programs on YouTube and um uh
and he has a uh you know a um program a regular program with SEI um what was the
name of that again yeah we have a radio show it's called Big Picture science yes
picture science I think that's what you mean yes yes and so
um so uh you know you can join in and uh and follow along with with uh Seth Seth
also gives uh live lectures at uh uh universities and on television and uh
occasionally with programs like the astronomical League um so it's um you
know always a pleasure to have you on Seth and and we appreciate it and you're going to be the first guy I call when I
hear that we have found the aliens so yeah well get out of their way Scott
well great well okay well thank you so much and um up next is uh is Lori uh and
Sorge from the astronomical League Seth thank you very much you bet until next time take
care all right so um David uh you know
Lori and and maybe have known her for a while um uh she was at the uh total
eclipse event that we went to down in Texas and it was a joy to have her down
there and we got to see some of her uh uh good
astrophotography um what would you have to say about Lori I think I think it says a lot about
her accomplishments her passion for the night sky her abilities as a teacher her
abilities as a photographer her abilities as a friend
and someone that I would like to get to know better incidentally I've ordered your Warning Sign from Amazon and it'll
arrive on Friday cost me
$7 well Lor's got uh looks like she has her presentation ready to go here Lori
is there anything you'd want to say before we get into your uh presentation oh I'm just um so thrilled to be here
and um that's the sign that dovid's talking about
further I have it prominently posted on several telescopes so that's right I'm
sure you'll enjoy that right thank you again for coming on and representing the
astronomical leag thank you I'm going to to share a
screen here and soon as I move everybody over
to where they need to be okay um I am thrilled to be here and
thank you for all of your very kind words you guys are are always um so gracious and so fun to work with and I
really enjoy it and I really enjoy these uh these Global star parties so I'm I'm
very thrilled to be part of it so here's uh the latest from the
astronomical league with a little bit on the lunar uh eclipse
uh by the way in 2022 uh I was uh clouded out our club had uh um decided
to have a public Outreach and I was up there dutifully and so were some reporters from The Baltimore Sun and um
we were completely sacked in with clouds and I did hear from them later that they in fact uh uh did get to see the eclipse
about 5 miles away from where we were at so so so it
goes fresh from the league um there are some rooms left for Aston 2025 bordal
one Skies hard to beat that um but do hurry before the rooms get let out and
the opportunity is gone so definitely um
check that out uh see a lot of the folks that uh you have come to hear uh on
these Global star parties at this event too it's a great way to uh meet other
people of like Minds make new friends I certainly have and I really enjoy going
to these as well I'll be there again Lori just wanted to let you know counting on you
Adrien um we'll also be at the Northeast uh as astronomy Forum in New York uh and
a couple weeks if anybody is uh going to be there be sure to stop by the astronomical League table and say hi
fresh on the astronomical League's website too are um a couple of uh
printable handouts but uh um these two pages that uh explain why the
astronomical league is is such a great um organization to be a part of there's a quarterly reflector magazine and in
the back members of The League have their names posted for the observ ation
programs that they have um participated in and accomplished and it's really
great to see the different folks from across the nation that are uh earning
these Awards I really particularly love those Awards too and uh there's the astronomy day
Awards um I've put in for two gotten two with the groups I've been associated
with and uh it's really nice to be able to share those kinds of things with
others of like mine also on the league website I really want to give a shout out to all the fine
work um I think is primarily John Goss who's a prior astronomical league
president but there are a lot of handouts that are printable and they um
encourage you to print them and share them with the public uh this past month
I did something in our what's up basics for our club on magnific ation and
eyepieces for visual astronomy and I in fact used uh some of these handouts that
were uh specific to that but even monthly I know the explore scientific
website has a monthly calendar that speaks to what's up in the night sky
well there's um also something on the astronomical League website uh
navigating the night sky guides where you can download um usually uh don't
miss it this month kind of thing but also and I'll show you an example of this in a minute the monthly night sky
and there's a WhatsApp doc from Dr Aaron clevenson clevenson who um is one of the
coordinators of the observing programs so um I would be remiss if I
didn't mention that um NASA this year for the Hubble 35th anniversary of its
flight around the earth is celebrating with Hubble
challenges and this uh Hub Hubble challenge can be found on the NASA
website if you just uh search um Hubble and challenge you'll find it um so far
they've had uh items posted for January February and March and for March it's uh
The Beehive cluster M48 67 and c48 if you want to know what those uh
mean um do go and click on the great pictures that they have posted that Hubble's taken but wait there's more
from the league there is an ongoing challenge monthly challenge for uh going
and taking your telescope out or and or binoculars and finding these objects and
if you do and draw them and also map out
what part of what you saw was in the Hubble image that's um featured or you
take an image of it and put a box around it and submit it you can get one of the monthly certificates do it all year with
some Outreach and you can earn a pin U so that's pretty exciting stuff I've
been enjoying immensely looking at my observations and comparing them to Hubble which uh on the surface there's
of course no comparison but to actually map out which part of the image that I
took was the part of the sky that Hubble took is a pretty informative uh way to
look at your observations um differently and then here's an example
of the March Sky Map that I was talking about um John gos does these as well
these are particularly useful because if you follow them from month to month
they'll teach you the basics of star hopping so if you're new to astronomy
and want to take your observations a step further star hopping is basically
starting with something that you know for example the Big Dipper and then
using pointer stars to get you to other places so for example in this one um
what they're doing is they're showing you the pointer stars of the outer part of the Big Dipper which is an asterism
of Ursa Major and how that points to Polaris and norstar but then going
backwards can get you to the sickle for Leo then um also following it you can
get from the top of your Dipper to Capella which is in ARA which can then
get you down to where Orion is and Orion has Bal juice that bright red star that
is part of the winter triangle which includes the large dog Canis Major and
the small dog prion so it's definitely worth a look and they also give you a
little bit of a taste of what to look for for binocular highlights um so pull
out those binoculars and practice a little bit of star hopping to get your appetite wet for some
observing but let me exercise some of my Eclipse ambassadorship here because we
just had a lunar eclipse uh lunar eclipse of course is when the moon passes into the Earth's Shadow and
the moon can of course get darker and may even turn red and if you look at
this illustration here you'll see where you've got the Sun the Earth and the moon all lined up and you've got this
dark part of the Shadow called the Umbra and this lighter part of the Shadow
called the pen Umbra well that blood moon effect happens because you have
light that's going through the atmosphere and that is filtering sort of like a a
murky colored filter onto the moon before it reflects back to the night
side of Earth and then you end up with that reddish color because those wavelengths the warmer wavelengths are
going to um Bend long as opposed to the blue ones you get during the day that
gives you the blue sky but more important to understand when you see pictures like this is that they are
almost never to scale the sun is actually about 109 times uh the diameter
of Earth and um Earth is about four times the size of the moon so I added
this nice little graphic here um I didn't put the sun to scale but I did give you the Earth and the Moon to scale
and the interesting thing in this picture is that the distance from Earth to the Moon is actually 30
widths of the Earth to get to the moon that's quite a bit bigger than what you see in this illustration that's showing
you the the lunar eclipse now we had this uh lunar eclipse
we shared out with folks the the timing of it so if you take a look at um this
uh setup between the Earth and the moon and then you're standing on the dark
side of the Earth at this point looking out into space at the moon and and you see these are the circles that um
represent the penumbra and the Umbra the Umbra being the dark part of the Shadow and those who were paying close
attention would have noticed that the pen Umbra represented a darkening of the
moon but it was hard to tell if you were just looking up periodically um but that is part of the
the shadowing and then of course it became pronounced as it went into the Umbra and all the way across to um the
pen Umbra again A lot of times people will see these UTC designations UTC
stands for universal time coordinated and at least for the continental United States the way to
translate that during Eastern or rather during daylight time is that UTC for
Eastern time is you take the UTC time and you minus four likewise Central is
minus5 Mountain minus 6 Pacific minus 7 and so part of our Outreach uh this
month was reminding people that we had daylight savings time starting in March
9th just to confuse you and then of course um the uh UTC was minus four then
for the eclipse to get what's that for Arizona we do not do
Daylight Time that is correct um and uh ton time is 27 minutes uh past the hour
uh which is a whole another talk we could have sometime about time is relative and it's basically an agreement
but yes Arizona does not do um daylight savings time and hopefully we'll all
come to the good sense of Arizona in my humble opinion at some point that
aside so um there's uh something to uh be said for um why we have these
eclipses and why in fact we don't have eclipses every month when we look out
into the universe we look out um into our solar system at the the dis of the
planets going around the Sun and that dis is represented here with this blue
line called the ecliptic so when you look out and you see the the sun rising
in the East and setting in the West you also have the planets kind of loosely following those lines as well well the
moon's orbits about 5 degrees out of tilt so if you were to create a cup
model that would represent the moon's orbit around the Earth it might look
like this and this little orange thing here is just a a a little push pin so
it's wobbling um at a orbit that's a bit of skew what does that mean in the
greater um thck of things so as we're going around the Sun um we have the moon
taking this orbit at this uh wobbly rate and where the ecliptic and the moon's
orbit intersect it's called a lunar node let me back up a second and just
say that solar eclipse has only happened during a new moon lunar eclipse has only happened during a full moon so you have
to wonder since we have a full moon and a lunar moon rather a a full moon and a
new moon every month why don't we have eclipses every month well the short version is that since the moon isn't on
that same solar disc or on that same ecliptic exactly what happens is that
the Shadows Fall off into space so when
the Moon and the Earth are on this side of the Sun for example the moon could be
too hot and or too low and so its shadow would
fall into space or the Earth Shadow would fall into space however when you
have this node that happens which is where your ecliptic and your moon orbit
are intersecting you have something called an eclipse season and that's when
Goldilocks of Shadows happens and you have the moon or the sun rather the the
moon or the Earth in the exact position needed to have those Shadows Fall in the
right spot so these nodes happen around eclipses or rather equinoxes I'm sorry
um the uh nodes happened during equinoxes and not during solstices and
it's usually plus or minus within a month of those
equinoxes um so that is the short answer on that but I want to get to the fun stuff now and that is um in case you
missed it uh we had this lunar eclipse and I have this little uh GIF I created
with some images that um I took during the eclipse so as it Loops back around we
started off um with h the pen Umbra and then it uh um had the shadow come up
like so and then this was the total eclipse
and then the shadow coming back across and and then lucky me um we started
packing up and then it clouded up but we had a beautiful eclipse for our whole
time and I put together this little uh collage of images um so we started off
with our moon had the Shadows go across um I brightened this one up so
that you could see the features during the um total eclipse and then of course
the Earth Shadow came out of the way and always think it's so interesting too how
with the Earth's Shadow going across it's not like the Terminator line that you get from the actual phases of the
moon it's a very very soft fuzzy line because it's going through um that light's going through all that
atmosphere to create that fuzzy Edge and so I'll pause there and say do
folks have any questions and I I oh I see that Robert's
joining us I have to thank him because in my background here on my other screen are indeed his uh Postcards From the
screen savers there so little plug for him um I really love
them questions I would have a question if that's okay Lori sure question but I
think this might be a good opportunity for me to describe my experience with last week's eclipse of the moon the
weather forecast was horrible horrible here in Tucson horrible for San Diego
where I was going to be I did go out to San Diego and on the morning of the eclipse
I it cleared up enough I was able to get my daily Sunspot observation and I went up to visit my
friend Jean Mueller a very prominent former Observer at palar Observatory
with their Mighty 200 in telescope and uh uh we were uh kind of
watching um this this guy and the forecast never got any better and then
we went outside just to see and there was a hole in the clouds that allowed us
to see the opening penumbral phase and I thought if that's all I get it's still
good it'll be my 130 Clips anyway we went out when the partial was
about to start and there was a huge humongous hole in the clouds through which we saw the
entire eclipse the partial the total and then it started clading over again after
the total ended which was absolutely perfect I am so glad Lori that you got
it these pictures are wonderful and congratulations and
uh that's that's great thank you well we all know who the lucky charm is for
clouds parting and the visibility of eclipses now is and that is doid because
this is the second time in the second Eclipse season that I've known this to happen to him so um glad you got to see
that were there any questions Scott no I think that people I know people enjoyed
your presentation uh but no questions um
I am uh uh you know happy that you came on to the program and um uh you know
gave all that uh worthwhile information about the astronomical league and the
astrocon that's coming up uh are you going to that event yourself oh yes
you'll be okay all right well I'll see you there Scott fantastic yeah Scott can
you hear me I sure can you got a question no no Zoom has crashed I have
audio only I am going to log off and log back we can see you we can see you
nothing is happening on my screen okay all right we'll go and log off and then
I'm gonna go away for a little bit Y no problem no I can see you too robbert
well I've lost everything on my screen so I'm going to do it all over see you in a
minute sometimes when this kind of thing happens you just have to reboot your computer and and go from there so so
we'll uh we'll let Robert do that um uh
but uh uh Lori uh maybe you can describe
uh what that what the U um the path is like when you're uh learning about
astronomy through the league they have so many observing programs how did you I
mean you've been with the league for a long time what has your path been like did it just start off with observing
programs did you volunteer for Stuff how did it go well I've always been a
volunteer for stuff anyway but um I actually got my start thanks to SEI uh
because uh they funded an astronomy camp for girl scoutt leaders out of uh
University of Arizona so um uh boy that gave me a whole bunch of stuff to work
with and then um through them I just discovered that there was an astronomical league and then when that
happened then I discovered there were observing programs and then I couldn't help myself but um every time I turn one
in it feels like I've turned in a term paper but I also feel like I learned something um learned a lot so I've
probably got about 12 or 18 of them going all at one time at any given time
just because of the time of year to capture some of those so I think highly of those programs and I see Robert might
be back yep uh I can see everybody this time so uh it's working again
excellent great okay well thank you so much uh Lori and uh we look forward to
having you on next time take care thank you yep okay so David our next speaker
is uh uh the David atenor of uh of the Moon Robert Reeves a swelled
head I I love I love uh listening to his voice I think that I could probably
spend my whole night looking at the moon listening to Robert's soothing voice you
know uh carefully guiding us through every real and crater and you know uh
lunar sea and uh so it's uh uh I know that our audience never uh gets tired of
hearing about his descriptions of of the Moon and uh hearing his passion of uh of
what all the Moon is so uh he was also U uh the uh he suggested the theme for
tonight's program well thing it is absolutely wonderful
and I call all of your attention to Starlight Nights where he begins the book and ends it with this lovely poem
about lady Moon lady Moon where are you roving where are you
roving and the answer is all that love me all that love me a beautiful
beautiful poem about the moon and I think there's a great lead in to Roberts lecture about the Moon tonight
well thank you yeah the Leslie pilj is a a favorite of us Old-Timers who were
around long enough to remember um Starlight Nights uh the newer younger
generation may not realize what that is but uh it it's h steeped in a lot of history for us
oldtimers um well I'd like to start off tonight with a little bit of good news and a little bit of sad news the good
news is um after you're through watching the U broadcast tonight uh go over to
astronomy.com astronomy Magazine's website and the lead article uh that was
just posted today was my summation of the uh blue ghost landing on the moon
last about two weeks ago the mission wrapped up Sunday um two days ago the
first completely successful commercial landing on the moon the blue Ghost landed with 10 experiments all 10 were
successful and I'm particularly proud of the one uh from here in San Antonio Southwest research uh just on the other
side of town from me U created um or perfected what they called the lunar
Magneto toric uh Sounder and this is a system that deployed four Electric
magnetic sensors um in four different directions a 90 degree angle away from
the uh the Lander and U it's um using the moon's natural electric and magnetic
field to probe down almost 700 miles below the the lunar surface and this
experiment was perfected here in San Antonio and Dr Grim from here in town is is uh the primary um uh investigator on
that I'm very proud that uh Texas is playing a very big role in this um The
Blue Ghost was built in um Austin um Texas just about an hour drive north of
me uh it was controlled from Cedar Park a suburb of Austin um Texas Tech
University in San Marcus about a 45 minute drive away from me uh perfected some of the instruments aboard um of
course SpaceX has a huge Pres here in Texas they launched it to the moon so this is a big big deal for the State of
Texas U Landing The Blue Ghost on the moon and it was 100% successful and uh
my story about it is in uh currently on the astronomy.com uh the the sad news is
um a lot of people have asked me am I going to be at neif and U originally I thought I was but now Family Medical
situation has um dictated that I can no longer go this year so um if you're
planning on meeting me at neif I'm sorry I can't make it this year I have to stay close to the barn and take care of
family so uh with that um let me uh go to screen share and
begin my presentation
hopefully yeah looks like it's going to work my usual introduction post cards
from the Moon and uh I was um um it was heartwarming to hear the previous
speaker uh mentioned that she was using some of my postcards in her in her presentation I'm glad to see that my
work gets spread around that's what I do it for I don't uh um post it to uh to to
to be selfish with it I want it to be spread around and enjoyed by as many people as possible so uh what I'm going
to do tonight is talk about if the slide
advances okay what's going on
here this is very
strange now my uh slide viewing program is frozen up it probably froze the same
time that uh Zoom did earlier let me see if I can restart things I can see your
slide uh yeah but it wouldn't Advance uh so let me go back here and
try to bring the whole thing up
again and go back to zoom where is zoom there and
try screen share again get that back up and now it's advancing yeah I think the
whole thing froze up uh I just didn't realize that uh my slide viewer also failed well I'm going to talk about last
last time I talked about one particular crater um this time I'm going to go into detail with another crater um an unusual
crater that everybody falls in love with whether they're uh new lunar observers
or nov or Old Timers uh that's Plato crater Plato does not look like an
ordinary crater now there's many craters of this field of view we're looking at Mari embrium the man at the moon's left
eye here um um see cernus at the bottom The Arc of the appenine mountains arcing
up uh the right hand side and up over through the Caucasus and then through the Alps and then finally to Plato
crater the dark floid crater at the very top uh notice there's also a similar um dark
florid crater Archimedes out in the middle of um Mari embrium but um we're
going to be discussing primarily Plato and uh Plato is1 kilometers in diameter
it uh was a it's a substantial crater but it just does not look like a normal
crater in fact when telescope the telescope was first applied to the moon
and people began to chart the Moon um even though Giovanni rioli named it or
should I say roli as I was corrected by Brother guy um the um um crater was
called the Great Black Lake because back then they thought the dark reges on the
moon were were water well um Plato is not a lake it's it's a solid Basalt body
like the lunar maria but it's uh very unusual in the entire interior of the
crater looks like it's paved over flatter than a parking lot and uh for
that reason the the the Ancients called it the great Black Lake great Black Lake
but um um when it was first formed over three billion years ago it looked very
much like uh cernus down at the bottom of the U of the field of view a normal
um complex crater Central Peaks collapsed Terrace walls but then as the
volcanism slowly filled Mari embrium uh the same magma chambers that were
flooding Mari embrium with B salt uh also welled up through cracks in the Floor of Plato and filled the crater
from within the lava in it didn't flow over the walls into it it came up from
underneath the crater and uh let's uh Advance a little bit and get a a closer
look at it and here we're we're zooming in out a little bit
um the um floor of Plato if you have the illusion that it might be a little bit
higher than the surrounding Maria you're right it is um the basalt volcanic
pressures push the basalt up so it's actually a half a kilometer higher of
the floor of Plato is half a kilometer higher than the basals out on Mari
imbrium or Mario Fagor nor of it now Plato is very strategically placed as as
a hub to draw your eye to Northern embrium and it's a marvelous place with
all kinds of other features around and U Plato I U use it to kind of Branch out
and go elsewhere and point out other features on the moon uh here of course we've got the river of Mari fioras
running north of it and uh follow my curse and notice a very distinctively Square
crater W Bond you don't see very many square crators on the moon but here we have one contrasting with very round
Plato of course the Alps mountains Arc down in the gash of the Alpine
Valley slash through them and then we drop down to the birds in the shape of Cassini crater Cassini itself uh heavily
modified in a similar fashion The Plato lavas wed up from the floor of the
crater paved it over lavas from embrium lapped up to the rim of Cassini and left
it with this birt nest's appear appearance and then that was punctuated by uh Cassini A and B the two Satellite
craters that look like eggs in the nest so uh moving on a little bit we're
getting closer and closer to Plato and now we're beginning to see U some of the
effects of the volcanism that filled uh PL and paved it over um the rim of Plato
looks like the standard rim of any other crater except the basalt fil hides the Terrace walls and the central Peak that
used to be there uh billions of years ago but um up to about a 100 years ago
features on the rim of craters used to be designated with Greek letters well that concept has been dropped now we
don't do that anymore uh but the uh the term Zeta used to apply to a feature on the
Eastern Rim but that was transferred over to this unusual 14 kmet long block
of material that broke away from the wall of Plato and tried to collapse
inward inside the crater but it's wedged in place by all the basalt fill the lava
that filled up the crater so uh we still refer to this this chunk of breakaway
material as Plato Zeta of course going south we've got the uh U
uh Mountain chains U little mountain peaks protruding up through H uh Mar
embrium mons Pico being a very popular spot and of course we see uh um the gash
of the Alpine re here Alpine Valley and the real runting down the middle of it
um this was fairly unknown to amateurs uh observers until the lunar orbiter
satellites back in the late 1960s photographed it and once we knew it was there and zeroed in on it U when the
seing is extraordinarily good uh you can see this rail it's only half a kilometer long but it runs the entire length of
the Alpine Valley and uh Plato is a good anchor to look at Northern uh imbrium
and Branch over to these features um more evidence of volcanism uh notice the
uh ground surge around Plato the uh um um down slope away from the rim of
the peak um and we have these sinuous reels bursting out here and then sinuous
RS running down through here this is where lavas that weld up into Plato seep
their way through the walls of the crater and started flowing down slope from uh the uh the ground surge away
from Plato
and uh kind of a panorama of the similar area going all the way over to Aristotle
this and udo's crater so put several pictures together here taken on the same
night and gives a rather dramatic perspective of the region and even closer up uh now we see
that uh that uh real bursting through the walls of Plato where where lava
would come up from underneath Plato worm its way through the wall and then molta lava would flow down this re onto
H Mario
fioras and a wider view showing some of the other sites in the region like I said aristois and udoy craters over here
uh in in the uh almost into the sunset Cassini down below um
the U cania mountains here mountains Pico mountains Pyon and then the little
t-shaped creature right here um used to be called python gamma but today I call
it Thor's hammer because it looks exactly like mulier the uh magic hammer wielded by Thor uh the spitsbergen
mountains down here and then um there still his crater and uh
um um aikas crater so a lot of action packed up in this
particular corner of Maria embrium but the rest of Mari embrium is fairly Bland
so uh this is a good region to explore and uh there we go um a view of
approaching Sunset we're getting more and more contrasting Shadows the Alpine Valley is fallen into Shadow no longer
visible um we start to see some of the uh Shadows from the peaks of the rim
around Plato start to streak back out onto the crater floor uh the wrinkle
ridges in Mario f gorus are now showing up uh these wrinkle ridges are where the
basalt buckles up where um sheets of Basalt crushed together as they slump
toward the middle of a a depression and they're no more than a couple hundred meters high but they they can run along
for several uh hundred kilometers in length
and uh looking south from Plato onto Mari embrium uh right after Sunrise more
low Shadow contrast or low Sun High Shadow contrast and uh again we see the
the Shadows of the Peaks uh extending out on the Plato but here we see another
wrinkle Ridge going south dog legging at the spitsberg and mountains and heading off into the sun sunrise uh these this
particular uh Rinko Ridge doesn't have any name many of them are unnamed but uh
it's very prominent at Sunrise and uh again using Plato as an anchor and branching off to all of these different
features on Northern Mari embrium and I put this in here um not so
much to highlight Plato but to go back down to aerosis Crater and under high
Sun notice this little v-shaped streak coming from the crater
floor up over the walls and onto uh see if I can
nope whoops it does work okay hopefully that enlarges it on your
screen too and you see this little v-shaped dark band uh dark dark material
that was blasted out what it was formed by the explosion that created it uh this is very very unusual very few craters
have a feature like this and uh when they do we call him a banded crater uh
this this dark streak of material some some uh heavy concentration of dark
mineral deep within the basalt when the crater was formed got blasted out and
created a dark ray instead of a bright
Ray and Sun's rise on Plato I love the
uh the lengthy Shadows that uh streak out up to Plato now look particularly
let's try that in larger trick again and see if oh yeah here we go um this
particular Shadow here notice it's fairly straight um when these really get long I call them Plato's
daggers and uh they can stretch all the way across the uh uh the crater floor
just at Sunrise or Sunset but this particular one notice that it's straight
let's go to the next slide which was taken under terrible seeing editions but
this is the only time I have ever seen the famous Plato hook that very same
Shadow notice it is now shark fin shaped very curved and that's what we call the
Plato hook it happens very infrequently uh about uh every 17 or 18 years the
lighting conditions are right so that this Shadow will fall on a different sloped elevation on the floor of Plato
and it will create a curved shadow instead of a straight Shadow now Patrick Moore saw it back in the 1950s and
people didn't believe him because they went out and looked and huh look straight to me well come back in 18
years it'll come back and the seeing was terrible that night as you can see the
uh the detail is is horrible in this picture but I wanted to get that Plato
Hook by golly and I did so
um did I go the right well no I went backwards sorry and uh again Plato it's Sunset
these uh Long Shadows beginning to stretch out from the Peaks on the Crater
Rim giving it some a unique personality um the same crater can look completely
different with a sunrise Shadow and a sunset Shadow just because of the the way the Shadows play across the floor
from the rim and uh how how we're used to seeing uh the Moon um late in the evening during the uh the
the first and and waxing gibbis phases but early in the morning most people are
asleep they're not out there like a crazy guy like me looking at the moon at 4:00 in the morning so they're not used
to seeing the reverse Shadows of uh sun set on the moon but it gives the the
landscape a completely different personality it's worth looking at and
then finally uh a um goodbye view again emphasizing not
all craters are round Plato looks very round uh it's one of the roundest
craters it looks slightly elongated because we're seeing it at a slant it's up at the northern latitudes uh mid
latitudes and then we have Mari F gorus Crossing north of it and then it's the
polar regions north of that and uh again look contrasting round Plato with square
W Bond so uh the moon has all kinds of interesting geology and uh just take
time to look take time to understand and uh if you don't quite uh understand you
know what's going on with a particular feature how it was created uh there's many resources to uh U get information
about it um my own two books being the ones I would recommend but uh uh lots
and lots of references out there and and the Moon is a place you can
explore every night for an entire month and not see everything that there is to
see on it so uh don't pass up the Moon the Moon is in our Sky the moon every
almost every night uh the moon laughs at light pollution it is a city object it's
something to observe from the city uh when you can't do your dark sky outings
uh it's a very fun way to keep up with astronomy keep up with uh modern space
science because we're going back to the Moon We've Got U the recently completed Blue Ghost unfortunately uh um intutive
machines too tripped on of shoelaces and fell over uh the Japanese have a
spacecraft on the way to the moon now it's taking a longer route it won't land until June but uh um be aware lunarians
the Earth men are coming so uh keep keep an eye on it there's things happening on
the moon so uh let me stop sharing
here and get back to Maya my face and uh any questions that
anybody has Robert that was wonderful thank you go ahead deid I was
just gonna say the same thing you did it is always wonderful to uh see the um the
various places on the moon and you can you can look at it up look at it all
your life and not know exactly what you're looking at I took notes on a region that you talked about the uh Mont
spitsbergen the spitsbergen mountains um the reason that particular
region as well as Thor's Hammer as you name it and I call it the same thing um
it's a region I look at to evaluate how sharp my images are on the moon if I've
got separation in some of the mountains and some clarity and I can see the shape
of Thor's hammer in my close-ups I know I have a sharp image of the Moon the rest you can have good images of the
larger crater larger craters but those features will smear out if it's not
quite exact so those are two features you taught me about and I use those as a
litmus test as to whether I've actually snap the sharp image with a camera and a
600 millimeter lens so uh thank you for that I wanted to mention that um and
there's going to be more that I'm going to need to learn from going back through and I do have your slide your uh
slideshow set and they're beautiful images so thank you want to mention that um I'll probably mention that again
later on Theon night when we finally get to the uh end of the presentations and I get to come up but um that's uh that's
something new that learned I think either this year or last thanks to your uh some of your postcards so glad to
hear that now I didn't want to run along so I didn't mention but the the four
craterlets on the floor of Plato are a test of good seeing as well and of
course if you can see that real running down the Alpine Valley oh you've got some extraordinary seeing going on enjoy
the night so thank you it's been fun
there we are um wonderful our our next speaker uh Robert is um Caesar brolo
Caesar had a a little bit of a glitch there but um but he is uh up on top of
the roof okay yes it's a real a real situation
here in the rooftop okay okay well great all right
we'll turn it over to you um s yes I have I having the honor to share
the my my lunar view I I write you Scott
because you can see the moon now oh it's right there is a little more yes yes
well I share my live view telescope of the Moon of course if uh Rober ribs can
have a little of time of uh some comments hor for me
totally okay I'm back all right we'll have Robert on with
you here then this is gonna be a treat um because it last time you two did this
I enjoyed uh the live views and and your commentary Robert and
Cesar take control and upside down Moon you must be in the southern hemisphere
yes yes I can I can turn for for you if you like I can turn the camera uh up a
clo uh um clo wise uh
188 degrees if you like no it's fine it's fine where the Moon looks very
alien this
way but sorry about the scene because it's too low in the
Horizon that doesn't look bad
yeah I'm try to to appoint an area of some kind of
CRS actually uh Cesar where you are right now um this region of the
Moon um who's it Ron breacher earlier in
a uh in his presentation pointed out features in this area and said it looks like the
character uh the mom of Wilma Flinstone in that region and um I wish I
could describe it like he did but you're in that you're kind of in that region
now with her hair and her nose but of course everything's upside down but it
that's what he called it if you go back and watch his presentation you'll see what he means and you you may never
unsee it again I can pick that part out and Robert you may have to see his
presentation too to see what he's referring to yeah I gotta go back and and see the replay go back and check it
out yes no problem of course that for me is so so special that Robert is watching
the same Moon that I watch him that and tonight is a is a beautiful night but
it's a it's a little it's a you can see the a mix of uh clouds but for the moon
the beautiful thing is that the people don't um don't uh miss the opportunity
uh to for example now it's impossible to see stars but the Moon is is really
great at the telescope in the same way that uh watching the moon or making the
this image um and I use him first of all I I I choose
a game because I have a game my own uh explor scientific 80 mm Apple because
the another one the another one called I get with the same with the same uh setup
in Mendoza in the same place in only for robotic use uh maybe in April I'll be
having working in a remote uh area uh from
buenosaires and this is for my for my balcony I have two um two equipment H uh
how do you sayos or twins twins twins telescopes for for uh using now one in
Mendoza at 1,000 kilom 6600 miles uh
maybe around and here in Buenos for the rooftop and of course H
my or my balcony
um sorry Robert that I I don't use more
um magnification for the camera well you've got a lot of detail there right the right above the center of the image
notice the curved Dark Shadow that's the Tha scarp it's the outer rim of the
nectaris impact Basin and then arcing down from whoops it went away there we go oh
sorry sorry I I choose no only only I choose smaller part of of the but I I I
return sorry sorry I return again no problem same feel yep uh you see that
the shadow that remember that I am the instrument man you are the The Specialist I'm not I only move
the well of course uh we we're seeing the that curved shadow of the Altis
scarp and it arcs to the left in this image and uh there's three similar siiz
craters and theophilis craters beginning to enter into the Sha the Shadow and
part of its Interiors yeah right there very heavily shadowed and of course uh Tao over on on the uh upper right we can
see its Ray system splattered across the whole Southern Hemisphere and U I'm try to put more
light in in the in the termin the yeah the shallow area uhhuh yeah it's showing
up well maybe too much for yes yes it's looking good the Terminator yes yes yes we use the same
word we call it Terminator is the same Terminator yeah it's not the Terminator
of the movies of course yeah yes for shadow
line if you raise the moon up in the field of view I'll bet you we can get over to
where we were talking about earlier with Plato crater the saturation is is really high
we can try to to make a live
live um you know Min that looks like green
cheese yeah I was going to say you put the green cheese filter on there sayar sure sure I thought we I thought
we uh dispelled that some years ago that it was not in fact made of green cheese
well he had a blue moon for a little while there yeah yes yes I'm trying I'm
trying to make some mineral Mo but is a little yes trick of the
astrophotographers where I think I honestly think we lucked out into
something where if we boosted the saturation the colors we got actually
corresponded to the colors of elements that were present in those areas on the
moon yeah that's the that's a theory I see every now and then a bird flying in front of the Moon uh I see that a lot
here in in Texas and a lot of bats too uh we have a large Batcave North of San
Antonio uh maybe 100 million bats and uh you can see them drifting across the
moon because they they look very different than a bird a bird will gracefully soar but the bat has the
jerky motion and uh I see them quite a bit consider the Moon is
like 40,000 of the area of the sky and you see so many of them in front of the
Moon it tells you there are thousands of bats in the sky above San andon every
W and and here here at this in the rooftop of the tower we have BS in in
the in some places here because and actually they are rebuilding the the the
rooftop the the deck because in the past they had we use a small pool you know um
but actually in in in a small closet that is for for tools
um it it's full of of BS sometimes I go to connect my and plug my my equipment
and okay but all people that that I know that have Observatory or um is near to
astronomy is friendly with the bats because I I remember maybe you too that
um beside that you see a lot crossing the moon and it's like a you tell that
that are so different um um if you have a a d maybe you have a
bat turns it into a go inside yes many many times I went to the
observatory and three met down me and V flying
but many people tell me the same say okay I again the B they won't bother
you yes in in Spain I I I heard that
they in 20 years ago or more 30 years ago they use uh for study the migration
of birds how many how many birds was cross
in the moon and they the the birds Association that study the the the birds
migrations they talk to the people that that are mat
astronomers count the numbers of birds Crossing the the the the Moon m h
to have a some you know some aage or a
an idea of number of uh of birds flying
like a migration between two different places uh this was very interesting I I
I I remember that I I I
um wrote this in a in an biologic ER Spain from Spain
magazine very interesting I I never suspect because they had of course they
had the number uh of beers of birds sorry in the day but how you can see the
birds in the night with the full moon and through the telescope of course but
now late earlier I see some some birds but now
not birs or what as you told me really yeah in this view you can you
could easily spot Plato that we were talking about earlier because it's so distinctly dark and round and not crater
likee and in this view it's down um just below the the center of the image uh on
the on the uh lower shore of Mari embrium there now we're showing it a
little bit better and you can see why why the uh U early telescopic
astronomers called it the great Black Lake very very distinct very unique very
different wow yes this it's incredible here here
you can see a bir no it's a vat this was a vat you can see that
yeah they have very different uh flying patterns so the yes it's real that you tell Robert
because it's is totally different the the flying how how the Moon is not so high
in the sky I think that if you have the the the in the sky in top of the sky
near to the C it you can see more birds if you are in a in a migration time that
V but in this angle I think that you can see the moon here I think that that is
the this the you know is the how do you say the altitude of the rooftop an
average rooftop top in Buenos maybe a little more and this is the how we can
see more we can watch more bats that birs maybe yeah they like to they like to
roost in the roofs of tall building and turn them into bat roosts a lot of them downtown in San in
the buildings downtown in San Antonio because uh like I said there's a huge Batcave North of San Antonio um has
something like 100 million bats in it the Bracken Batcave it got more bats than uh the Carl's bat Cavern uh bat
cave so uh we're used to bats here in San Antonio and uh glad of it because
they eat mosquitoes and there are lots of mosquitoes yes yes and I I know I
have a friend that Liv in Argentina he's American actually and actually is my my
English profession my professor sorry and he's is from Texas um from Houston
and he tell me this that in for many years they have a like a box open in the
in the base H in many many places to to keep a bats because they they are so
important for for eating mosquitoes especially yep yeah we're familiar with
that boxes um yeah it's getting to where I need to run upstairs to my Observatory
and start it tonight uh it's it's gotten dark enough that uh I need to um start
doing some real astronomy so it's been fun and U I've enjoyed um chatting with
you but uh I'm going to have to sign off and uh go up to my Observatory now so uh
okay it's been fun all right well this might be a nice transition to um to uh
bring on Tom managin from Mount Wilson Observatory uh Tom has been patiently
waiting there and uh um I know they're all dying to hear what's going on out
there in California Caesar thank you very much oh thank you thank you for
your live views thank you so much uh and was a PR sure share with the moment with
robbert r with the all audience um well this was my telescope yeah it's great to
have a wonderful narrator like that yes yes thank you very much it looks like a
looks like an explore scientific ed80 there is that right right yes yes the
APO this is the first light for this telescope because it's new I received today yes we received today the the
order the the the shipment H maybe can tell you that yes he for another place
but unfortunately yes we keep the the shipment for for for woes and well we
this is the first L I have this is for me not for sale we have a lot for for
sale telling for the people that enjoy the this telescope because this telescope with this
mod look work very very well small for a for a backpack and you have a go-to
telescope in a in a small place thing that I have now for me
one is the dwarf tree but I like more the I'm more
classic I like more this and for planetary image especially and the quality of of course of deep Sky image
the telescope is amazing but the I'm uh going to try um the darf maybe not to
tonight but maybe tomorrow and okay I'll send you some yes wonderful wonderful I
appreciate it thank you thank you again for me good thank you and well all right
and if you're in Buenos Aries you need to go to uh uh optica sraco
um and meet Caesar in person and uh U uh
and pick up a some new telescope gear so thank you very much take care thank you
Scott thank to bye bye bye okay so
um Tom uh manini is waiting backstage here and um uh you know he has been with
Mount Wilson Observatory I think maybe 20 years something like that uh
Tom can correct me on that but um uh he is uh fantastic uh in what he does for
the observatory and for the for the public at large he helps run
programs uh ranging from musical concerts under the the Dome of the 100
in to uh you know amazing nights under the stars with the 60 and the 100 in
where you can actually put your eye to the eyepiece he's also recently been uh
involved in uh promoting um uh you know scientific inquiry with these telescopes
I think that they have revived uh a speckle interferometry program with the
100in telescope where they can actually get uh uh great detail on Stars uh with
that amazing instrument and it's just real nice to see um this telescope uh uh
come back to doing what it was originally intended to do which is to do science so uh Tom thank you very much
for coming on and um I'll uh I'll turn this over to you thank you my pleasure
everybody hearing and seeing me okay y it all looks good right good so I have
to admit I'm a bit of a lite with uh I'm I'm usually a um uh a watcher rather
than a presenter on these forums so I've um made up a little slideshow little uh
PowerPoint presentation of our the last aluminization we did which was oh up
just about a year ago to wonderful to the week um so uh I am going to try and
share my screen and get over to that let's see if I can
share and here we go I'm going to do this screen one
okay screen one share okay there you go I can tell it's starting all right so
you go we can all see that great I'm going to run it from the menu because
there may be some operations I need to I need to grab controls in here sure I did get a chance to test it on this type of
form before okay all right problem so I've um entitled this uh a Heart of
Glass which is uh which is the 100in mirror in the um the hooker telescope at Mount
Wilson Observatory of course it was used by Edwin Hubble most famously it um
basically in the early part of the 20th century Mount Wilson was the place to go
was uh if you were anybody in astronomy you went to Mount Wilson and worked with them work with the instruments up there
so uh many discoveries done there uh uh Michaelson did the U speed of light
experiment up there but not on a telescope but he had his own design um
other is harlo shapley on the 60 in um um measured the size of the Milky Way
and our position in the Milky Way itself and then of course Edwin Hubble most
famously for you know discovering the seid variable in androma nebula to to
determine it was outside of the milkyway thereby discovering the universe as we like to say and further on looking at
the at the um blue ships and other galaxies in our local group determining
that the uh Universe was expanding so um it was a great uh it's a great place and
uh up to the time about 1948 Palomar came in line online it uh we we became
the the second large well actually probably yeah the second largest telescope in
California um but okay but uh we move on uh I've been uh with Mount Wilson now 20
oh going on 23 years my God how time flies so I'm going to start out with our
process of aluminization which we did um which this is a beast of a telescope let
me just start on right here okay so um come on go away please okay thank you
um so the hooker telescope was named uh uh everybody thought would be named
after Carnegie but uh was named after John hooker who was a local businessman I think he owned hardware stores in the
Los Angeles area he paid for the mirror casting uh and therefore got to name the telescope at Hubble I'm sorry uh hail uh
named at the Hubble telescope and it is uh it uh even though it's now by nowaday
standards it is a a beast of a telescope really to stand stand by it I know the
Palomar is more impressive but uh for 1917 construction uh the moving weight
there is about 100 tons and it's supported by uh on the North pier in the
south is tanks of mercury that it's uh the toroids are floating
into boy uh about 95% of the weight of the telescope itself and uh works very
smoothly um Crews and volunteers have kept this uh mechanically very sound
we're we're we're proud that it's still working and we we work hard to maintain it um in operating condition uh for both
public programs and more and more now if I have my way more and more science so
uh little tour here um so we've made this um optically friendly because it
was never intended to look through it was just designed to use uh glass plates
for photography and that's how they recorded science at Carnegie there's probably a quar million uh glass plates
of various sizes um archiving work down at Mount Wilson and probably a few other
Carnegie observatories but you see the pickoff uh there's a tery over here
light comes through and hits a hits a um diagonal Mirror cating Mirror about
right here and then down to another prism I'm sorry diagonal and into
uh a a refractor uh which happens to be a uh explore scientific that's is it a
127 or 130 Scott I I can't keep it it is a 127 okay and it's it's now at um which
is the scope is usually F16 at Crain focus and with this relay optic system
it's f11.2 but um it's delightful to everybody looks for it it's views are
great they'll blow your socks off so wear a couple pairs when you come up there um to uh
really luminize everything uh we can't truck it down there it's just too big uh
to move it the glass itself weighs 9,000 lb um in
1934 um one of the first vacuum Chambers aluminization Chambers was uh was made
and brought up to Mount Wilson and um since that time uh they they abandoned
the uh deposition chemical deposition of silver on the surface which tarnished
very quickly um substituted for aluminum which was uh had better longevity you
know months maybe a little more worth uh for the because they used it every night
they used it a lot so it degraded but um this was a big T to astronomy because
they had more more working days more productive days than with silver so um
and we move on um so our challenge uh now that we have no active science uh
programs going on up here um we have a staff of not uh astronomers and not
Engineers but we have uh uh maintenance people and a lot of volunteer
technicians some of them are our Engineers electrical mechanical um we have uh Architects we
have lawyers we have accountants and we have uh a lot of a lot of individuals
who are who are amateurs or love astronomy or love old equipment and all
of us work together um to keep this telescope maintained what you're seeing
here is the the bottom of the mirror uh you can see the pad supporting part of
the mirror with a counterweight uh from another pad and you see the bubbles in there that's our champagne glass um when
it was cast um at sangoan Factory uh in France they couldn't pour a full Ladle
of 9,000 lbs of glass in one poure so they had to do it in three successive
pores and each one uh trapped uh bubbles in the in the in the glass and uh this
particular one has a lot of bubbles and uh it was shipped to to Mount Wilson and
the chief optician George Richie rejected it fearing that the bubbles
would cause the glass to either crack or if a bubble cavity uh was at the surface
and he was figuring it that he would expose a cavity and and uh make the
Surface imperfect but uh it turns out that wasn't the case so as it turns out
sango tried six more times uh to cast uh
100 in mirror glass and they all broke U
this particular one we have is the second uh attempt and so this is the
Survivor of eight attempts to pour 100 inch mirror and I have a theory that the bubbles in this glass actually probably
kept it stable and and that's why we still have it so uh as we move along
here so we have to take the whole telescope apart virtually I mean at least the optical components the first
one is the top which is the C grain cage uh the top section is removable and we
have the we receive the Newtonian cage back from uh the Smithsonian we have it
there I don't think we're going to put it on the telescope at least I'm not going to try for a while and then we
have the coup day for spectroscopy so here you see the lifting fixture which is suspended from the crane in the dome
and uh uh JT over there on the left and myself on the right are are fastening
the fixture to uh you know how space it is
sorry okay anyway so we're getting fixed to lift that off um which we'll see
right here I'm going to try and run this guy right here oh let's see This Is Us lifting it off with a crane I hope this
runs yeah
well it's trying to run it's uh frame by frame but frame by
we can see yep frame by frame can slowly see that moving up so it is working so
we picked it off the top and then uh this crane is on Rails there are rails on either side of the Dome slit and that
rolls back down and uh we set it uh we could set it down on another level below
us to work on the uh extracting the mirror itself um then uh the next part
is uh removing the main mirror so we have this fixture that was made that has
uh synchronous jacks on four sides that we lift up and grab on to uh a bearing
Point here and on the other side and unbolt from this level here and then
lower it um you see it's unbolting it here um and we also have uh they're hard to
see but there's a a rod right here that's actually stabilizing the whole
uh whole whole telescope the whole uh truss and Telescope to keep it from
tipping east or west but now we're we're actually getting everything out of the
scope and um where am I
here I've lost my way okay all right so here's the fixture and we it's on Wheels
of course and we can only move it left and right angles we have to go zigzag we
can't go diagonally so we have to kind of walk this across the floor here to
get it out from under the telescope so uh this is where we'll work on it further to extract the mirror itself
from the cell which is a another completely uh job
completely difficult job so here we are with the mirror covered uh we're lowering a device called a Whiffle tree
which is suspended by this hook right here it's hard to see this is a wood and steel construct and it's made to evenly
distribute the pole around the circumference of the mirror once it's clamped on I think we have a better
picture here yeah okay you'll see this uh device
here it's a a series of yolks and rods um I call this an Act of Faith um really
because what this device does is we clamp this around and tension it
circumferentially uh to just hold the mirror very very tightly and there's a rubber uh rubber gasket in between the
metal and the glass but you can see there's nothing nothing supporting the
bottom so this this is uh this is just hugging it very tightly and I I'm
I'm defitely afraid of this and we uh we never say we're lowering we never say
we're dropping the mirror below we say we say we're lowering drop is not a word
we use and maybe this maybe this one will work a little better here there's no flange that holds the
bottom of that no nothing there's little tabs right there right there right there
I think those are for psychological purposes they would never pychological now it is this like terrifying to do I
mean oh my God I bring a rosary with me what's the replacement cost on an
optic of that IR it's Irreplaceable it's IR it's Irreplaceable
how many decades of the Rosary do you do I can do I can do three quickly so if
this if the 100in telescope was a an explore scientific telescope okay if you
did drop the mirror we would replace it Norm would do it right or yeah we
would replace it I haven't checked with Sango I don't know so we can get more
scientific written on the side of the 100 in telescope there's probably lot of estimated time it would to replace such
a mirror I don't know that we could I I don't know that we could I I thought about it and and maybe we'd say well you
know 100in mirror uh uh if we had it you know made out of fused quartz what it
would it cost and uh it would be much lighter than this we' have to we'd have to weight it overweight something you
know to keep the scope balanced because this this is 9,000 lb uh so it's it's
it's considerable weight at the end of the tube there um 9,000 PBS I heard joh
I heard John lifts that as a warm up Tom if you need a hand I'm always available
oh okay that's his warm-up weight that's your warm goes up from there all right
well well buddy we can put you to work no no problem okay uh so that's that's
the that's the extraction part and uh um what am I going next here so we lower it
down to our ground level and uh this is a rinse and wash rinse and wash process
Larry Webster is here uh he's our our Chief I'll call him optician uh he
doesn't make things but he cleans and resurfaces everything he's in charge of
all the operations for the for the seven Chara telescopes the their 1 meter
telescopes uh um our our T our 100 in here our 60 in in all their mirrors plus
the solar telescope so he's busy busy all year long at least all all the time
it's warm when there's snow we can't we can't do anything because it's too too wet and too cold for the aluminize
aluminization process to be successful so so here he is with soaping up the
mirror this is orva soap this is horse soap and and this is before we strip the
the aluminum off he's actually uses his hands to dislodge anything that's stuck
onto the aluminum surface um so it won't so if he slides a um something coarse or
or later a rag or or text wipe is what he has in his hand there it won't
scratch the mirror surface so it's a very you can actually feel any any kind of grit that's on there and you can you
can remove it very quickly so you have to have really long arms though so
that's because I I I I only think a few basketball players can reach that um
middle without some type of a border extension to lay over it and so this is
the glass uh over here um as you can see you can see the casting levels the first
layer second layer third layer um third layer seem to have no bubbles in it but
there's kind of waves and everything else that's trapped in the lower levels but you can see the pattern in the glass
now that it's clear and um and probably can appreciate why why George Richie uh
rejected it well our next job of course is to take that Whiffle tree and um pick
it up off of the out of the tub here that we washed it with and put it on the
surface of the aluminization chamber and I tried to I got one more little movie
here and we took a a little movie of uh the viewing Port inside the uh chamber
itself when it was flashing so it uh it may be disappointing because it doesn't play at the right speed
but um it's all dark until it it isn't so there's the
Flash and uh in about 2 seconds all of the electro deposition is done that's it
that's all that's as long as it takes it takes us two weeks to do this operation and that's the that's the quickest part
and probably the most critical uh so one more mirror left we
did the secondary we've done the primary and now we have the third mirror the tertiary this is the one that sends it
out this is the top of the uh relay Optics and we have another port to the
South which I'm trying to activate for for instruments like the speckle cameras
and and maybe a spectro something a good end um a
high-end CCD in fact I we were donated a um sbig uh
STX 60386 I think it said 16038 um CCD with
a uh Adaptive Optics and a filter wheel so that's a good place to try it on here
we are compared to the other mirrors this is wimpy but uh that's that's the size of the uh of the tertiary
mirror how many inches is that I'm sorry how many inches is that Mir uh I would
say it's probably around 22 in wow yeah it's it's it's it's a good scope on its
own but it's it's it's totally flat so we I I I can't use it so when we we have
a mezzanine level in the dome uh where we have our work work area set up and uh
this is where we remove the um mirrors here from the uh secondary cage uh we
have to lower it down onto a dolly and kind of lift up the rest of the cage and
then move it out so that we can uh pull it out of the its cell uh the same with
the terer Mir which is which is much smaller ha but we can uh we can work on it and get it prepped and crated and
then lift and send it down on on another crane with uh um in a in a in a skiff
and get it down to the aluminization chamber they'll be put in together if there's any other mirrors that need
aluminize they'll be put in there because there's lots of room in there and we we don't like to uh uh we like to
utilize all of it so uh all right now that the uh 100in mirrus is successfully
aluminized and the reverse process was used to bring it back up and set it back in the cell here same same operation in
reverse and let me just try and uh uh he puts Larry puts text wipes on the mirror
surface to keep it from you know accidentally getting touched or braided whatever and so I I I said well I'm not
going to try and reach and pull off every text wipe so I did this
instead so I took our CO2 gun that you clean the mirror with that's smart no
debris and I I said well this is this is the safest way and I I can reach it
all I'll clean it up a little bit this I should get one of those from my scope
I'm sorry I say I use a blower a cordless me Makita blower but okay well
CO2 is kind of you kind of get little crystals and they they sparkle and kind
of Pop things off which is which is a part of the principle that's very cool um here's one I have a things you don't
see usually on the telescope so I thought this was worthwhile putting out here and this is the underside of the
mirror cover which we we never get to see with the mirror there because we can't uh we can't look through the glass
itself and then down below on the other side of the mirror the actual mirror supports um there's these are all
counterweighted and made to um balance as the as the mirror um you know Moves
In in deck or or ra what do they call that they're little candle leers on the
actual pads of the cell they we we call them little pads but these are pads and they they have a linen linen cloth on
top of them uh so they so they won't you know AB braid the mirror they won't be
metal to Glass contact um it's it's a insulation if you will friction
insulation between the glass and the m and the pad itself but you'll see on the
Edge Edge ends of each one of them is a counterweight right so this that presses
back right when it back exactly so it balances all around as the as the uh as
the mirror changes it it shifts weight from one side to the other and inside
here are um pads that push and actually hold it keep it from you know basically
shifting inside the uh cell itself um these These are they eight eight of
these sections around here that we uh that are terrible things to take apart and put back together they're full of uh
18 ball bearings that roll around plate um if you if if you you accidentally
lose your grip on one you have you have a whole bunch of ball bearings that chase around underneath the the scope
which which we don't like it really much so so U well and that's um not quite
putting it together but uh uh we have about we had about 18 people on this job
um it took us two weeks we worked probably uh eight eight days solid to do
all of this but uh there's a lot of little jobs um a lot of these operations
are performed simultaneously so there's always something happening but um we
have a great group of volunteers we find them as we ask do you like telescopes and do you you have any mechanical and
we find some wonderful people um who know what they're doing people who worked on heavy equipment and elevators
and Machinery all kinds of equipment and they're they just love this old stuff
and I do too um so uh that is it and uh
and thank you for watching uh that's myself down there trying to uh un loosen
the cam lock to get the top cage off but I I appreciate the chance to show you
our wonderful telescope and if you like it I'll I have I have uh hundreds more
pictures so uh thank you Scott for the opportunity yeah for sure we'll have to
have you back on and uh and talk about that what is Tom what's going on at
Mount Wilson right now you guys have always have programs going on we have we
have snow right now we have sorry to interrupt snow we have snow we're waiting to illuminize the 60 in and I'm
waiting for the weather uh so so right now the campus is a big ice skating rink
because we've had very wet snow it melted it refero and the whole place is
a rink and and uh I don't want people out there it's dangerous and then uh sure if it warms up this week a little
bit next uh we'll go up and disassemble the 60 inch and and do the same
operation very good do you have to do that every year oh hell no oh good
sorry don't just no hell no hell no we
do this we do this as as seldom as possible and uh you know I I I guess we
we may do it overdo it but we wait uh we can tell when it's degraded because if
you look if we point the scope to the moon and look at the bottom of the
glasses we can see the moon through little little chips in the in the surface we know it's time to luminize so
that's basically our first clue but it usually is 5 to seven years is when we
uh we do it it's a beautiful scope I've had the
pleasure of looking through there and boy I got to get back I missed it this
year the weather yeah it killed us October yeah um and not to mention the
fire yeah that was course of course that was a close call that was too so yeah
we've had uh We've have it we've had an exciting few years we got a little Frozen here yeah so what happened
there we are okay you got it there we are okay all right so thank you very
much and um uh Tom we'll we'll have you back on again uh there's so much to
learn about Mount Wilson you know uh you know even now um
uh because of the the uh uh the ongoing uh uh Outreach activities they do the uh
current science that they're doing uh which is I think all being done conducted by uh you know probably some
amateurs but maybe proam people you know and uh uh uh you know I think the
speckle and aerometer um research that's going up there is some of the most fascinating to
me personally um because it was their speckled
interferometer that they were using was all built from
it just puts a giant smile on my face but um well we have we have the likes of
uh Russ Jana who's spearheading this with yes and Russ Russ is the the proam
guy that I was we have we have David we have David row who's an absolute genius
yeah all of this stuff I mean in in programming in in scientific application
so It's a Wonderful group and I like what they're doing because uh uh the
people who are reducing the data are students uh high school and college
students that uh are helping to take the data and then reducing it to uh uh you
know with um they have they they've developed their own software to do this
to do the for you transform to to produce an object and they were they were separating objects
0.027 Arc Seconds Apart 0270 0.027 arccs with 100 crazy yeah it
is crazy and that's crazy this year we'll have fresh aluminum and I'm hoping
that they'll get do even better uh SNR uh that uh it'll help them get look even
deeper and separate more objects but I'd like to do a feature on that um and and
kind of show their operation what they're doing and maybe have you may you might have one of those guys present too
yeah that would be really cool that would be good okay okay all right thanks so much Tom take care all right all
right yep uh I also want to mention that uh Mount Wilson Observatory is one of the
founding members of The Alliance of historic observatories and uh if you just search
that uh Alliance historic observatories you'll run into the web website um and
learn more about that organization that's that's uh um put putting these
observatories historic observatories from around the world together uh to uh
support each other and um you know to prevent things like uh you know possible
closures of some of the these uh uh beautiful and uh still
amazingly uh high performance instruments so okay um our next speaker is uh John
Schwarz John uh you want to come on with us and yes I'm I'm almost here I'm out
at the beach today you're on the beach today okay all right well it's a
beautiful moon uhhuh and I'm out at the ocean can hear the waves crashing
there's been some big waves can you hear them
I see wow look at that Moon yes there's the waves now let me
for those of you who have never um seen John Schwarz before he is a he's a space
artist he's an artist in his own right and uh comes from a family I think of
people that uh his father a gallery owner um and uh you know so John's
always been involved somehow in the creative aspect uh and um but he loves astronomy he
loves looking through big telescopes uh he's very much an Outreach
Enthusiast as well and uh I just love uh John's enthusiasm and his Drive uh to
always try to do better uh no matter what he's doing so John I'm gonna turn
this over to you thank you for coming on yeah so you might not believe it but you
you know these drawings I've been doing they almost have
become you know three-dimensional and I'm actually within
them this is actually a drawing that I did I just thought it was cool for the
background you know very nice anyway so let me put my thing so you know that
Wilson was a terrible scare uh we were really worried because that fire was
extremely close and uh I know that everybody was really
worried about that you know it was um could you imagine losing that historical
telescope that would be pretty terrible I don't think you could ever replace it
but so we've been uh getting a lot of rain as well which is good we need it
put the fires out and everything's kind of getting back to normal out here in
California hopefully you know people can get their lives back in order and
everything will be a okay for everyone gotta wish for the best
anyway so of course you know we're from planet Earth this is our home
planet and we're very lucky to have the Moon that we have because it stabilizes
our planet and keeps it uh very you know normal the weather
patterns and not so chaotic and gives us a bit of
stability you know there's our moon floating in space goes around our Earth
and keeps it stable and for thousands of years people have looked at that and you know they were
the ancient people were very intrigued by the moon they thought it might bring bad luck or even different events you
know the crops growing in different times of the year creating the pyramids for the solstice to line up and just
amazing technology back in those ancient days that they
had but moving forward you know our moon is essential for the eclipses we would
never have these eclipses if we didn't have this Moon which exactly fits
perfectly in the front of the Sun to block it out so you can see the corona which is amazing again back in the day
they were thought that was a omen a sign of something bad to come but then it
would pass and everyone would realize hey that was not bad after
all now this is a picture that merco took I wanted to show the importance of
the moon for us as a humanity and a race of people people the moon would give us a lot of
things like elements and water perhaps and helium three different
elements rare Moon minerals that could power future
spaceships and even give us water to drink and build habitations just have everything you
need and if you look at the colors in that Moon you can see there's different elements that's actually a real color
picture of the Moon that merco took it's very nice picture that he let me show
you tonight it's very pleased to see it excellent color so
detailed okay so now I'm going to move forward to the eclipse we've had this wonderful lunar eclipse I don't know if
uh anybody experienced that Eclipse I did but I was locked and loaded with the
explore scientific 80mm triplet and it was the perfect scope for
this I got to say it it just was nice and easy for me to use and I had it
preet up thank God because it happened earlier than what I had thought it would
according to the time I read I must have read the wrong one but this picture represents the
first Contact you can see where the Shadows just starting to touch that's
the Earth shadow Shadow right there and as it progresses you know I step back to the
Widefield this is more of a naked eye and you can see the clouds because I was
fighting them all night long but I did get lucky because I got to see the whole
event you can see myh neighbor's satellite dish in the lower right
corner they don't even use it I should have them take it off but it is interesting
and then this one is actually moving forward from the first Contact getting
closer to totality this was a very hard sketch to
get exact um the illumination on the moon it was killing me for I just
couldn't get it right and I hope I did still kind of not perfect but it's I
like it then of course we're slipping away now it was almost gone there's just so
little of that Moon left and and just before that thing goes away it just boom
it goes to red and uh this is a cloud Widefield view that I had this is more
of the naked eye I think I was using a small pair of 8 by 25 binoculars I wanted to try to do the
Widefield image um to portray it you know in the different ways you see it
when you're looking at it it was kind of muted due to the clouds but it had a
weird glow this time uh the ones I remember before that brighter light was
on the bottom so I guess it's just the position of the Earth in um where the shadow hits but
that's actually our atmosphere that's causing that glow now we zoom in a little closer
again the muted look it's very um
like kind of masked by the clouds so it didn't allow the the intricate details
of the lunar cratering to show through because that scope really shows great detail um perfect field too by the way
the size I used a 16 MIM ey
piece another version now I go back to uh this was an
older work I did I remastered it because I'm getting better so I repainted every Star I wipe the
field clean and then I repainted every Star and I rework the clouds a little bit and and the moon to get a
three-dimensional effect I I just love to paint clouds I
love astronomy you know when you're out and you think you can't do astronomy because there's clouds you really can
because the Moon is your savior it'll uh give you some spectacular moments where
it pops through those clouds and see those moments and they just give you
that fulfillment you know that hey wow I can't believe I'm seeing
this and notice the clouds of the Milky Way in the
background this is all a conceptual piece more or less I didn't really try
to paint the Milky Way okay this was warm-ups these were my
actual practice um sketches three nights in a row I took the better of the three
um but this one it was opening up it was cloudy and rainy and we just got the
rain just left and I literally went out at 3:00 a.m. and I saw it breaking up so
I sat out with a little pair of 8 by 32 binoculars and got this view so I
managed to get a nice sketch I'm working on getting the illumination it's hard it's hard to get
the illumination of the clouds it's just something that nature
has a much more oh yeah subtle hand yeah
can you hear me okay yes I can hear you fine there are times you get really quiet
but talking I hear you fine these are some rough studies I kind of could go
further with them but I just you know it just gives you an idea again when the clouds out you got a nice little 80 mm
let me tell you you can really take advantage or a camera
Adrian uh this was a cool one have you ever seen like a moon Ray ever
before I have I don't think I've captured it in camera you've captured it
well with your sketch I have seen it um yeah I didn't get the illumination quite
right U but it's getting there no that's that's what I recall
it's you got all the clouds and then the moon Peaks through it this was uh I had
a dream I got lost out in uh way out in the middle of nowhere and when I woke up
this was what I was looking at when I went outside the fog it was just like an
eerie fogged Moon and so I managed to get a sketch off which I really like
this one it's you know reminiscent of life and when you're lost and you're in
the fog and you just don't see a path and everything's just like just a float
a drift in your mind and you can't pin it down and just know that that fog's
going to clear and you're going to get through it man and and it's going to clear up and reveal a super beautiful
sharp moon in the morning a crystal blue day and you're going to greet that day
head on with with a with passion
right boom there's the morning Moon I told you it would
clear look at that Earth shine just gives you back you know knowing that our
planet is reflecting the light the life back onto the moon it gives it that just
a feeling of it's alive you
know who knows maybe there is microbiological
Frozen this is another one way I'm working on these like my eyes aren't
what they used to be but when I use the binoculars I can actually get more detail on the moon and incorporate it in
my wide field shots so I've been having a lot of fun with these I'm gonna pick
it up because I think I'm dragging this was the wife and I we went back to Colorado to the Garden of the
Gods Adrian you must go everybody you must go and see this it's the most
amazing thing it's almost like a Chelsea bonss wall painting did I pronounce that
right I hope uhuh the moon artist just yeah it's unbelievable and look at
how clear the moon in the background I mean yeah and that's the wife and
I yeah that was our day together we had my brother-in-law had passed I don't want to talk about that I'm trying to
keep this but yeah you but no you all went out together and enjoyed right
absolutely that's best way to handle it spent the day with with my wife and we
just had an amazing day that day it we even played miniature golf and that was
a lot of fun but this was my picture from the so what we did is we went on a
turnout it's crazy because you can't get a parking spot there so there's a little turnout that looks across this big
canyon and that that was my view right there so I had a couple cell phone shots
to work out later but these weren't exactly anywhere near what the cell
phone looked like you but um I'm very proud of this this
one it's a very I feel like I'm getting better at the
illumination you know it's tough the light and dark the shadow line between the two just a a beautiful amazing view
that I was there to capture with my wife
unbelievable you know I do these sketches um this was I got a little C90
that somebody just gave to me the Universe I say and um I took it out and
I looked and I couldn't believe how beautiful The View was that I was getting again there's a lot of clouds
around lately um but you know that doesn't detour me no you captured it
perfectly this is uh now we're moving up uh for some magnification crater views
this is a sketch as well um that Playdoh yes it is good eye yeah we we've been
talking about uh Plato crater um Robert Reeves highlighted it um in his segment
yeah and I recognize the uh Jagged uh Shadows there thank you um you know the
uh in the PLS of it the inside the crater there's actually craters if you get a good seeing you'll
see those in the 28 they pop in and and they're amazing you know the whole floor
is just peppered with mini craters little meteoroids just teeny ones that
you know yeah well preserved too
Archimedes another one beautiful this is amazing when the lro flies in and hits
that Rubble field those Boulders are like football field even bigger size um
just amazing detail these were all done with the big
scope key crater there's actually a volcanic cinder cone in there I see it yeah
there's right in the middle this is one I posted on cloudy
nights um you know they they have some amazing Moon Sketchers there I'm just learning how but these guys they're
Masters they the way they frame their little shape of the crater section that
they're doing it's real talent to get it amazing you should check it out sometime
a lot of De they a lot detail I think you're on your way there I mean well
I've been there for years this is a a you know again our
moon gives us a rare opportunity to have occultations right now that's how it
looked through the scope right when you were yes this is my hyper realistic view
um I prefer to present those because they resonate better but I have some
more loose versions but um this was a tough one again you know because it's so bright
and and that's what the beauty is is when I sketch I can take that sketch into the um my tablet or using Photoshop
Express and I can create dim it bring it up I can accentuate features so I work
hand inand with the painting when I do these you know yeah in side by side mode when I go photo real I have to because I
you know it won't look real if you don't so right that's a real good this is uh
my Mars my latest and greatest I would say it's really good yeah that this Mars
night we were looking at the ice cap at probably 800 or a th000 power I had the
bino viewers and and what was happening it was just after the sun was just starting to come up like astronomical
Twilight and I was catching it looked like swiss cheese I could see divisions
in like like liter like glacial like structures in that thing because I had
it zooked up and of course it would wash in and out but when it would snap I could see that and I actually saw a
couple tiny craters pop in and out which I've never seen but that that was an amazing night
I got to tell you one of one of those nights you know one in the morning too I
stayed on the ladder till about 10 o'clock looking at Venus and then my leg cramped up and I couldn't walk literally
because my hip you know I'm too hip anyway I go back to my dog in the end
because my little buddy believe it or not he is the best observing
partner he will not leave my side this is a a few weeks before we
were going to go of course and then there we are doing our
moon I'm sketching it he's there with me right there hanging with Dad that's
bosow by the way and then the problem is the next day when I go to take him on a
walk he's not feeling too good he's had a rough night you can tell
he's likei not going on a walk you're taking me inside and giving me a
treat and that's what I do because we don't argue with him now I'd like to um for in closing I
always like to do some little flowers and a little something special for all of you uh I really appreciate you being
here and checking out all the presentations and this is what really drives me to create my work and gives me
such a positive of reinforcement uh can give back and and
this is how I like to do it you know through my work and and star parties and
public Outreach and any way I can make a difference I'm I'm up and ready for it
so these are dreamy ones because I want you all to dream of a beautiful week
ahead the skies are clearing and Rainbows are Over the
Horizon and you know what the gift that's all you need this wonderful gift
that we have no matter how bad the world is we all need to come together and the
threat is really outside the world like an asteroid or a comet you know very true that's what we
need to focus on I mean you look at the Drone technology come on we can develop a better system to protect this uh
beautiful planet in our moon that we live you know
have very important stuff so everybody needs to buy telescopes too eyes in the
sky the more you have the more chances somebody will see it and that's my final the moon
painting of the Roses beautiful B nicely done John thank you so much I'm
really happy to be this one was a special one for me as you all know I love the moon Adrien I'm excited see
what you got going here well yeah I will uh don't know if I can quite follow it
as well but you bring out a pretty good point um that I wanted to piggyback on
before going into my presentation because you mentioned you keeping an eye
on the sky um one of the things that can happen that chellin taught us is if a if an
asteroid's coming in the direction of the Sun the question is whether or not we're going to catch it in time to be
able to do anything about it I know that there were some um things that were supposed to be
in flight to you know start figuring out how to look in the sun's
Direction um a lot of the space telescopes can't look directly you know
if you're looking towards the sun everything's washed out so there is I think there's some work there to do when
we think about uh we think about protecting Earth's home which I'll I'll get into a little in my
presentation um there's kind of uh should we spend our resources going into
the space flight or should we take those resources towards challenges that we
have here at home one of the worthwhile challenges um is looking for the near
Earth asteroids that you were talking about that can uh you know well you can
Harvest uh asteroids too I mean if you're on the moon you can get out there and get some minerals and stuff you know
right that's one of the things you can do with um so space travel and then do
you send man space travel or do you send the robots those are robots probably
those are the question your answers robots there's a gentleman whose name I'll mention live Ken Burton from Warren
Astronomical Society whose answer is uh robots as well and he similar um
reasoning um as you can see my face is melting but that's that's the way it is
um is that the desert you're in that makes it hot I am in Oklahoma with this picture and behind me if I move the
right way and out of the way you'll see 150 milliony Old allosaur tracks and in
the background you've got an even older longer you know core of the Milky Way
you know this is there was no in this image there was no sign of human presence and it was really an eerie
feeling it there's a feeling of being alone and subject to the
elements yeah much like being on the moon probably yeah if you're on a you're on a different plan it there's no
Comforts of home yeah visible it it may it does something to
you it's like okay how do I get home so you know you can it's an interesting thing I want to go back there and try
some other angles um but uh that
is those are the typ of types of images you go for when you're okay well I
better let you get to yours um yeah I will I will jump in I know Scott I think
ear yeah he's got what is yeah you may end up being a part of it anyway I think
he'll jump back in and try and okay there I go um I am going to jump into
Scott but first if you want to go ahead and we can do the intro now that you're
back um yeah I for some reason my zoom platform keeps freezing up and it's uh
very strange because I know the meeting is still going on yeah but my the whole you missed my whole thing oh man no I
didn't miss your whole thing I I heard him in the background yeah but anyhow uh
yeah so um Adrien Bradley's been with us for gosh I don't know how many Global
star parties now it's I think he's nearing 100 Global star parties or maybe
surpassed it uh we got to see Adrian's
uh Adrian you lost your background ability I took it out because I was tired of my face melting sorry this is
the real basement where there's just real everywhere and uh but my face is no
longer melting that's good good got very involved in astronomy clubs and with the league and
also with h the Royal Astronomical Society he does some fantastic night sky
photography um he's just a good photographer as well a landscape
photographer and I know he does other kinds of work I can appreciate that I have a photography background myself so
uh I know when someone has a good eye and C ly Adrien has it um and he he also
is very good with technique um and so it's uh it's nice and uh you know Adrian
also shares what he knows how to do and so if you have uh an inclination to do
start doing night sky photography yourself probably look no further than uh Adrien Bradley he could give you a
lot of pointers and get started um so Adrian I'm gonna turn it over to you man
thank you so much all right thanks Scott and um sir yeah I appreciate the uh the
kind words as always for me Imaging isn't necessarily a set series of steps
or a set it's not a set grouping of uh
what is it the settings on your camera your gear you get it for a specific
purpose you're what you're doing is you're adjusting to the night sky and
your settings have everything to do with what's going on at that very moment in
the night sky and what it is you want to capture so just to kind of tail from
what Scott was saying the way that I do my night sky photography and the way that I try and do it is look at what it
is I'm trying to capture and continue to try and perfect ways to be be agile at
it we don't force ourselves into a specific setting well it's the night
time so my iso's got to be here and my aperture got to be here and you know and
this is the best way I don't Advocate shortcuts with uh your Imaging I
advocate knowing what each and every part of your settings and your camera
and why it does the way it does so that you can gather the best images for
yourself and even if you don't want to call them best images I try not to call them best but I call them this is what I
want it to display this is what I want it to show and uh we're going to be talking about Moon
images with um with tonight's theme so I'm gonna go find my desktop and share
it and here we go I'm going to do the same thing
um and oh I forget your name um here let me put the gallery up Tom you did this
where you just shared the screen as opposed to doing a slideshow
that's because I've I want to move around and share some of the images and
some of the thinking behind it because the moon was a huge part of what I tried
to do when I first this is getting started in
2016 holding a a inch telescope up and taking a picture with a smartphone or in
this case this was a Canon 30d and I managed to somehow get you
know back in 2016 Earth shine and then I would struggle to get that again for
wait a minute wait a minute that was a handheld 8 inch telescope this was let's see so 8
telescope right here um
and I handheld a um smartphone over this thing
and popped the picture there was a nearby tree beautiful I did something with it I
think I put I use editing tools right on the phone right try and bring out detail
now we can get better than this but this was uh this is the moon you know this is
um where I started and as you can these meager attempts at um except this one
turned out pretty good as far as as photography the owl cluster NGC 457 yes
um yeah that one turned out good but copia right uh yep it's uh in one of
it's very near copia it's uh it makes for a good binocular object too it looks
like ET is what people used to tell me and here's where you learn why I went in
the landscape astrophotography we're going to get back to the moon in the minute but let's
talk this was me trying to do this through a camera and I downloaded the
Hubble Legacy data of this same region and I gave up that's exactly I I said no
I can't do it like this you know there here's another is that 81
Galaxy M B's right here yeah yeah you know that
Saturn couldn't do Saturn Justice there are some very good planetary images
supposed to be M22 51's 51's table that's pretty good yeah s focus a little
bit soft focus but but exposure was good that's a good I call
this big telescope a big telescope view right here if you kind of see this if
you're observing through a good telescope it it resembles this maybe a little bit sharper depending on your
eyes this is kind of what you see the first time you actually detect spiral arms in M51 with real with really dark
skies though too because has to be really dark skies yeah and so I started
to try and stack Moon pictures and ended up with this which wasn't too bad but
we're going to get yep we we have Fascination now notice
this line there is an astrophotographer Gary Palmer that came on and describe if you if your uh
sharpening gets to be a bit excessive you create this little line right around your moon images so your goal is to try
and not do that um presentation here let's just uh real quick because I think
we're going to go back to those photos so the Moon and how to capture it I put
some of these things in when you're using your settings you can move them around to make sure you're getting
everything that you want this is a composite because the moon's too
bright you want to you take an image of the the sea area out here and you've got
some stars and then you have to lower you have to lower your exposure enough to
get detail on the moon you put the two together and then you end up with and
you you end up with a composite that looks something like this and so and you
want to look for features on the moon as well um and it said listen to Robert
Reeves um and now it's time to go show what I mean so here we are Yankee
Stadium I couldn't get any features on the moon because it was so bright um
Yankees would defeat Houston on this night but this was 2017 and Houston got the last laugh in
that particular uh season and then so here's here's an
example of capturing the moon with the size that it truly is and this is
remniscent of uh some of the work you do John where you've got the moon and you
got the clouds you know above the Treetops here taking this picture um the
idea is at this wide of an angle the Moon is not super huge you know we if we
try and go in um let's leave the info out there let's see if I can
zoom I want to zoom in that looks like a bird or something flying towards the
moon on the bottom coming up out of the corner paradia you know I see things
yeah oh you see it right here yeah it's another Cloud but you can see a bird through it heading towards the
moon yeah so yeah I don't see my zoom but that's okay we can the overall
picture and so we're going to go so detailed pictures of the Moon
um we're starting to come along and what I want to do is I want to skip
down nice here's how when you zoom in on this is a Canon and I forget which
Cannon this is I think this is an old 30 this is my old 30d wow and I was still
trying to take pictures of the Moon using it so this is uh there was a bit
of history in that one and then this was the first reasonably sharp image of the
waning gibbus [Music] moon but it does get
sharper some of the things I wanted to talk about in the presentation uh we'll probably just
gloss over this um I remember when I was younger now here's your mineral moon
right here where you've got all the colors that represent elements that are
present in those areas on the moon and I've got a larger picture of this um
some of the things I wanted to leave everyone with is that you know part of
that discussion that we had that Scott talked about at the beginning of global Star Party there's a number of
things to think about when it comes to space travel the Moon being our closest
neighbor um is a logical place to land
and with Humanity going back there um we've got more robots there humanity is
going back there there's of course the argument should we spend our time doing this should we even fund space fairing
missions when we need the money for things at home
and my answer is what stops us from doing
both and to say if you if your focus is more on things affecting our ability to
live on Earth because Earth itself is going to be fine I don't know that we can blow Earth up with any even with all
the technology we have we can certainly make it inhabitable for for ourselves so
the question is more or less not save the Earth it's more or less make it put things in place so
that if we want Earth to be habitable by us we do things to try and preserve it
so that it's at a certain temperature at a you know at a certain um level so that
we can all continue to live on it for years years and years to come and we have to think of it in terms beyond our
lifetimes um I think in order and we want to explore space we also have to
think beyond our lifetimes we have a limited amount of technology that we can
use it just doesn't seem feasible you know there's death that can occur it
didn't you know it didn't happen here with the moon you know as risky as things were there was the um the Apollo
one tragedy that did happen um you know with um the the fire that took the three
lives of the as the astronauts and from that point on no one was lost in space you know we
didn't have a tragedy where you know Apollo 13 sailed off into the universe
you know with the three men aboard we were able to avert that tragedy so we
have human willpower to preserve Life As We explore space it's just a question of
making sure the planning and uh for those who have our rosaries time maybe a little Divine help
does you get to the moon get get to the moon but the Moon being our closest
neighbor bringing samples back to Earth working on using that regolith while on
Earth and controlled environments as opposed to going to the moon and and doing all the experiments there some
kind of combination might not be a bad idea so this is where Scott's talking
about you know I do photography I don't I try not to limit myself to how do you
make this great capture it it's not just about the photons in my camera it's
about the subject as with all good photographers be interested in your subject and how it works and here
tonight's Global Star Party we're talking about the moon and ways to get there we're talking about what happens
when uh the eclipses happen and how the look of the Moon changes in the
photography sense it's about how much detail can you get and this
coloration I've noticed how it's more prominent in the darker the skies you go
the more prominent that darker color Yes of the uh Moon you vouch for that John
you see more of that reddish auburn color uh as
the Earth are going over it image like this where you say well the Earth isn't
that quite that pumpkin shape or that pumpkin color it is it it does get there um and
when you when you're dark adapted and you're looking at it hanging out in
space with all the stars around it this is not a view of the Moon that you normally see no the moon washes out all
of the Starlight um now when you you know here here's a
picture j o paint even better than this this love that I didn't realize I was
attempting to do a John Schwarz image but I want to jump to moon with stars in
it here's what you normally get a moon a couple of stars here or there and that's
that's even with the moon not being um so those are composits is that how you
managed to to create these beautiful Scapes as you composite well you this
was a single image oh wow that's the goal here and I I'll go back to this one in particular so that's hard look at the
aperture 9.5 37 seconds wow pretty sure this was done on a Tracker and it
started to lean a little bit I can even see the Crescent it's pretty good shot
yeah trackers help you follow the moon um now this you know what back when
I was doing this I do not believe that I was doing composits um right you know so
37 seconds it's still a short enough time to not move your landscape as
much you can see the stars are moving here and it's really good yeah
so I do I have to think about because this is back in
2018 I do believe I had a small tracker back then but
uh you know maybe not now this one of course you know same sort of
shot so here we are learning how to capture the moon and then I
put one thing we didn't really talk about were the landing spots on the moon
these are all the Apollo Landing spots you see um the the Apollo 14 landing
spot that's where Apollo 13 was going to land and so they had Apollo 14 land
there um when they came around they came to the Moon Apollo 16 we came back this
way so let's go to moon and stars is
something I want to cover as you can see we're we've got some pretty good shots of the Moon and some other features of
space here a lot of that have seen these images in global Star Party have seen me show those images but I want to go to a
couple sometimes I don't quite get it right you know the glow from taking a
long image that covered the sea here this is like here on um moon
rising and then you can you can tell that this wasn't quite what you visually
see with your eyes but I kept on trying and I would try these little tricks
where you have a tower sometimes pull it off it's really tough right it's tough
to pull it off because these are two different this is a composite I guarantee you it is a composite of this
Tower the moon was in this spot when I took it so I took the two shots um that
giant glow is the glow of the full moon which is why you don't see any stars in
those photos and it's that's been my hardest thing to do is to merge uh so you know
you you look at a Widefield shot and then you want the the thing something like this yeah this would be a beautiful
moon photo but it was a single photo and the moon then ends up like that a lot of
moon images in order to really get what you're looking at you have to shoot at
certain times here we've got the moon um I do believe this is moonrise
nice this is something you'd absolutely kill John you yeah it looks like a sunrise almost it looks like a sunrise
that's crazy here's your here's image and when you take a long enough image on
a Tracker you know you smooth out the sea here but your
moon blows blows out it it's not really that
big no this is coming let's let's do segue partial solar
at the end of this month it's a sunrise Eclipse just like this one was it'll look something like this so go
out and capture it I have settings over here that's those that are looking
that's why I'm doing it this way these are settings to give you an idea of what I came up with but what I typically do
the uh higher the number here for aperture the more detail I'm trying to capture you know from distance
um shutter speed combined with whatever ISO setting
I use here to get this overall exposure it's it isn't about a formula
for this it's more of a I'm combining this yeah I'm combining
this uh speed and shutter speed with you know
it's a 400 mimer shot I'm trying it at f8 and I'm you know ISO
800 um I'm set I'm putting those settings in taking a photo and seeing
how it looks and it turns out great I won't change much um using a tripod is
always a good idea and you know again talking about
composits here I am trying to get better at capturing composits moon
with over the tree which by the way no longer looks like this but to create a
scene my goal is always to say well what do I see when I look up at the Moon
here's oh yes I almost are you sure that's not mine I'm not even kidding you
this is you've Drew you you independently Drew something that looked
like this I was gonna put it on tonight and I didn't because I had to keep it shorter you know yeah so in order to
capture this you have to figure out how to lock in the moon for your autofocus
or you know set your you know set a Focus manual be manual to be on the moon
and then take your photo then you end up because it's very hard the clouds are in front of the Moon that's crazy Auto your
camera wants to lock on that does not want to lock on the moon so let's let's
quickly go I see D is here let's quickly go to a couple of images I want it to
highlight that's an eclipsing Moon yeah this is
what it looked like on in 2021 as we were going to go to
97% as compared with the lunar X and lunar V Moon which is the straight
Terminator I think uh I forget who talked about I think Ron breacher talked about it look at the differences in the
curvature of the Shadow covering the moon as opposed to a straight Terminator with features
that become visible at certain times lunar X and lunar V is a challenge for
Moon shooters that do closeups when you're if you don't do a
composite you can get the stars with the moon but you blow the moon out we're
going to we're going to look at that here's the 97% Moon the color was just now coming
this these are artifacts of me trying trying to sharpen this right so so one
of the goals as I went are okay the next time I want Stars I tried this now
there's a beautiful picture oh yeah of the plees in the moon this is a
composite because I took the picture and and end putting at that
Mount Everest yeah I know this was someone's
yard when I took that photo that is to see that view you would literally have to be way clear dark dark sky yeah that
was a trct image deid I heard you there thank you I think you were you were
giving a compliment that I wanted to take in oh that that gorgeous
picture and the reason that I miss part of your presentation your lecture is
that I was outside doing some observing just now and I got the plees with my
manura telescope just before coming in awesome so this is what you saw you may
have seen some of the yep you may have seen some of the uh the tale of the plees here you may have seen a little
bit of the nebulosity from these bright stars and uh yeah observing the plees is
always a wonderful thing now I've seen Mars come through here this is when we
talk about the ecliptic you know here we have the path of the ecliptic because Mars will show up here
Jupiter will show up here right around the plees is always above in the northern hemisphere it's above the
ecliptic and you know anything that's along and of course because the moon's
being eclipsed you know we're at those nodes that you heard about in um maybe
it was Lor's presentation and so that means it's along the lines of the
ecliptic where everything else um goes so let's keep going and let's look
at a couple of let's see this isn't the one although it is a pretty clear shot
and those are the settings you can see these
features okay I can zoom into this one you can see some of these features here
the um I wrote it down uh spitsen mountain chain and the feature known as
Thor's hammer this was these were two of the things that I used to say hey if I
have a good Moon a nice sharp Moon then those features show up and so that's one of
them let's keep going to Earth shine moon with Earth shine you can
there are some composits that show the detail in this lit part of the Moon
here I just did it where I've got detail in the uh earthshine area where
you can see even though they're fuzzy you can see some of the craters here so Gathering pictures it's all about what
you want to present and in this one I wanted a nice Sharp Photo I pushed the
saturation a little bit and if we zoom in you we can see some of those features
again um from the mov see if I can pull you know the more detail the
features the better a shot you had steady you have to have a steady uh sky
in order to get a nice steady shot and then you they call this the Golden Horn even though it doesn't look golden in
this image because I pushed the saturation a bit it's the mineral Moon
um depending on how you look at it whether it's important to see those extra
colors or you prefer to look at the Moon more or less the way you see it with
your eyes once again we have artifacts here those aren't real stars although the real stars would probably
resemble these dots these artifacts um it wasn't
intentional you know real stars behind it or what I'm always after so a couple
more pictures before we um in the presentation because we're going
the November 8th birthday lunar eclipse more artifacts
here but first time I was able during totality to capture the real stars wow
that's this would be the planet Uranus now it wasn't the last time we're
going to skip down the other thing I captured was the winter Milky Way during
totality wow what interests me because the things you can see during a total
lunar eclipse the sky comes alive you go to a dark s side and see lunar eclipse
you'll see more than just the blood moon and so this this was the place that I
went to um I swear that these look exactly like some of the shops I have yeah you I
know you love drawing the moon in clouds there's the that's so beautiful right from
2022 awesome shot yeah and so let's let's show this picture because
here we have another picture of what a wide angle view of this park that I was
at and that's the actual uh size the Moon is in this
particular um wide angle looks like other one is that there's two I see one
that's stellar and the other one's diffused which one in this photo yes
this is a this is a um I want to say this is a planet or a star that's
glowing I'd have to do another yeah that's not the moon there that's the actual moon in the phase that it was in
this was a large starus out it may have been a planet yeah because of the clouds
right um no filter needed because the clouds themselves are a filter larger Stars larger objects in space their
light begins to Glow as if you using a filter you can see that here where we've
got the plees and we've got you know the larger stars and I believe this is uh
Jupiter um you can see that they're kind of fuzzing out right um so that
techniques that you use if you want to put them together with other images so now let's get to
three more imagescope that was not through a telescope this is actual tube is a
telescope so another example for photographers out there when it's cloudy um go see if you can capture
exactly what you're seeing in the sky here's how the Moon looked as it peered
through the clouds as I was looking up at this Lighthouse um the number here is 1857
the challenge was to do a composite that looks the way the eye sees it and that
was pretty close that's that's how the Moon looks to the
naked eye we've got some more full moons here this is the image I wanted to
share I'm not sure if I did this through a telescope or through my trusty lens
because the data that I see here does not include the lens so this
may have been through a refractor that I got take a look at the
detail of um the mountain chain Thor's Thor's hammer and spitsberg and Mont
spitsberg and the spitsbergen mountains I actually got detail
here in the real I would I would have Robert Reeves go through this image
probably the best Moon image in terms of detail that I've ever gotten
was this one and I do believe I used a telescope to get it um compared to this
which I know I may have used a uh
camera it looks nice but you see how these are sort of fuzzed out that's why I use them to determine
whether I really nailed a photo or not and now
we will skip all the way to more moon with Earth shine let's skip all the way to the
eclipse that we took smoke moon right here difference between a smoke moon
when there's a lot of smoke in the atmosphere and the moon sort of glows
orange that's a smoke Moon not an eclipse that's a smoke moon man I have
somewhere I was able to capture a Rising Moon this is a hard Moon to capture oh
for you aspiring photographers capturing a Rising Moon
wow it does warp and deform this is blown out but otherwise this is what it
looks like coming up over the lake magical that is as close as I could get
that's to be trying to do composite this was a single shot now I don't say that
to say I did it in a single shot no I found that the single photo
was the best way with these settings to capture this
scene using using a camera that I think I didn't know I used my largest camera
for that one and I was able to capture that scene and then of course here Moon
Rising lights off a freighter using a smaller
lens but capturing the Rising Moon here so
eclipses are what we are about so we're going to end with an image that is going
to be near and dear to your H your heart uh remember your image you took of the
eclipse very similar but no CL you were very similar and here are all the stars
a little bit of an artifact here from the glow there is still a glow coming off of the Moon it looks more turned
yeah that's amazing with the Stars that's that's hard to do those the actual Stars huh yep and that's how it
looked and this was one of my first few shots where I decided to shoot at ISO
base and use these this was on a Tracker and this is why I say if you're going to
do space images and you want to capture what you see get a
Tracker and get your focus correct and then you know you use your tools to edit
like Lightroom so that you can bring out the Stars more that's why they're all blown out these should be there should
be some color to these St but uh you've got yeah this is what
you drew right you know I could paint those um the Photoshop Express airbrush
tool is amazing for that yep not so good but this is as it
was uh coming in quality-wise not so good but that's what you saw if you were
looking at it um naked eye you you saw that um last bit so as it it went in
order of this image and then as always I like to do Widefield images because it's
not just about the eclipse in a dark area it's what happens to the rest of
the area it turns into stars are out here's corvis um Lori talked about Leo well
here's Leo yeah I can see the whole constellation yep and there's the
eclipse you can see the constellations Virgo's over here over here was
that is that our Eclipse that that was our eclipse from just recently 13 14
that's Inc this area looked like there's corvis right there craters over here
spika and Virgo there's there are the stars of Virgo right here and Leo can
you get there it can I get Omega no not this high up not unless I I
think it rises just above the Horizon to the South here but as you can see with
all of this that would be very hard you have to have a pristine Horizon um to NAB Omega centor I had to
go to Arizona to see it it's almost ready it's uh up at about yeah it's almost coming I know yeah I'm like
getting ready for bedroom window I'm on a polar align on a spot on my wall oh
looking forward to it and although de you didn't see the pleaes like these um
you also didn't see triangle Stars so when it comes to upclose Imaging I'm
still working with this medium is actually here but I didn't image long
enough to get any more detail um with this with Orion Orion's
going away so all you deep sky imagers this is the last chance to get some of
these very famous um nebula that are in
the belt of Orion you you won't have much time left before those go away um
the core is g to start Rising again and with that Scott I think I've talked
enough for the for the uh March 18th Global Star Party 168 all right the moon
AR I love that could you do the other one the one to the right of it the larger one yes I wanted to oh wow that
is amazing that's a I like the other one I like the the smaller one it just it's
hanging in the sky ball just floating out there you know that's the that's
what I loved seeing when it was total like this I love seeing it just hang out
in the sky you could see some of those Stars cameras pulled out more of the you
know the 12th magnitude 13th magnitude stars but you that's what you saw that's
so funny it's like just like the one I did but I had clouds yeah exact I was I
was waiting on you to notice that I said oh I've got an image crazy so so there you have it the um the
moon um the bridge it's the bridge to
getting out you know I mean it makes sense right closer than Mars yeah yes to
starting uh yep I was trying to look at it we called it Earth's companion Humanity's
Gateway and uh one way I I looked at it as Earth's companion it's one of the few
things that you know everyone's looking at it at the same time when uh when it's
up there it's large enough in sorts it's it's sort of a glue to
humanity all over the globe because it's large enough to be seen all
over the globe at the same time no matter what you're what time it is on
your clock the moon you know is um is still
visible once it's full moon you know it's full moon all around the globe it's
a quarter moon you know every everyone sees what happens um as far as where the
Moon is which phase it's in and um it's something we all see together as
humanity and uh hopefully we hopefully we as Humanity can think Beyond
ourselves and lay the groundwork for the future so that we don't have to do it
all while we're alive but we lay enough groundwork so that if we're going to do space exploration we leave the Next
Generation the next few Generations a blueprint to follow there something they
can learn from so that they can expand on that as technology grows human man
space flight may become like the Jetson you or we may get there one day but it
may take a lot longer than any of us can imagine for humans to get to that point
we were talking about Adrian if you think of it this way uh you know the uh from the time
that they think that humans picked up the first bones to make tools to you
know and then racing ahead to where we have space flight I mean my grandmother
was alive okay when the right Brothers uh flew the first plane and then in
1969 were on the Moon I mean that is just unbelievable you know
the acceleration of technology and now we have the acceleration of Technology
with um uh Computing and these quantum computers uh there're uh I'm reading
about quantum computer right now built by China that could solve a problem that
would take a supercomput the world's best supercomputer
a billion years to solve and it did it like in seconds wow yeah so that's yeah
that's a huge there's an acceleration that's going on and and uh so it's
really it we're we're going through another uh incredible phase of
Technology increase and um you know it's uh it's
hard to grasp uh you know what all means you know in the long run but um but it's
it's not going to stop I mean it's it's uh no now I think the fears are that you
know Humanity with the politics and everything is what slows it down but
just you know what you mentioned about China developing this quantum computer
oh well it kind of goes like this we develop ours they develop I wonder if they could apply that to asteroid
hunting if you could they Pro there's it's Computing so because give it the
right parameters you give it the right parameters and you give it good data to start and what it sounds like is the
speed at which it can compute yeah um blows away you know like Scott said the
supercomputers I mean those are if you go on the street and put a microphone to somebody and you say what's the fastest
type of computer most everyone will say a supercomputer and and uh you know the
sky wrong yeah so you know having everybody with the telescope I mean I
don't know how David you could ever discover as many comments as you could I just I've never even really discovered
anything like that but it's absolutely amazing uh the Keen Eye that you have
and and it's a gift I mean you know it takes incredible amount of time to find
these things and and um you have have to really be gifted to be able to do something like that I think but we're
blessed you know to have that for sure y Captain de is truly a gift um y
the memory I have uh D of you I walked out with you during Aston last year to
watch you kneel on the sidewalk and count I think you came up with 80
sunspots I through that scope and I came up with seven or eight so I said I am an
amateur a rank amateur at Sunspot hunting but I said
that's right use of being able to
understand the St any Stellar object be it the Sun be it the moon be it the
pleades and want to know more I think that's we talk about photography Scott
to me some things on the internet talk about technique or they talk about settings or
we talk about gear like I need better gear in order to get quality and to me oh more
about pushing yourself right do it's about using that gear I have you know it
I have some lenses that were not cheap but it's the what I'm able to do with
the lenses that's more important than to just say well you know I use this gear
and it out pop some great shots you really have to love what you're taking an image of and you have to want to know
you have to want to use your photography to know more about what it is you're trying to gather and when you run into
an impass because there's there's limitations on what cameras can do if
you run into an pass you figure out what's the best way to get over that impass so that I can present an image
that I want people to see and that's where the learning comes in and that's where the discovery and it's
where you don't limit yourself to you know I can do this and it doesn't
take a Tracker or I can do this and I don't need to have this or that
knowledge of space and time and I I beg to differ with it you can get great
images but if you truly want to know you know you TR you learn about what the
night sky is you talk to you talk to any of you about the night sky and you
develop a love for it then that the images are the images speak to your love
of whatever it is you're capturing so night sky or if you're doing Event Photography landscape you really love
how pretty it looks looks um you try and capture that landscape or that sky or
how they work together um you're you're not necessarily capturing photons just
so you can go Scott on the internet and you know this is Scott Roberts and this
is a cool picture I need you to like And subscribe so that I can put more of this out for you here are my technical
settings and you you know you learn very little of what you actually took the picture of
so you know that's I call for you want to do great photography you know become
an astronomer if you want to do night sky stuff learn from these gentlemen on
the screen sat how this works turn anybody into an astronomer if you saw the rings of Saturn for the first time
but you know fragment G on Jupiter was almost as spectacular for me oh wow with
a Parks 6in f Newtonian and when I I couldn't believe I was seeing like that
what it did to Jupiter it blew my mind that's I wonder how well that had
to be a really so we we talk about gear that had to be a really good mirror but
you probably had some steady seeing and transparency to be able to you know and
and a good eyepiece in order to be able to see all that and your Keen eyesight
Parks come on yeah they they they make good they apparently make pretty good
mirrors um interesting enough I came back from okex where um you know it's
nice and dark and I go to some of my old places and I'm looking in the sky and realizing that I'm seeing the Milky Way
from Horizon to Horizon and I never saw it like that at those those locations
aren't as dark and I realize either my brain is filling it in or because I recog ize what it looks like now I'm
seeing it in even lesser darker areas and so you know your visual Acuity grows
with that and um I think that's a real thing the more you look at the night sky
the more you go to different places but you recognize the same night sky that
you've seen in Darker places and um it's
uh it's been a thrill to be on this journey no doubt that you get better and better at seeing something uh that's
faint and diffuse um even under challenging lighting conditions um so
David I wanted to ask you how's your eyes holding up it now are you still
able to see as good as you could in your prior years or is it affecting no I'm
not able to see as well yeah and uh but uh not too bad um partly the sky isn't
as good as it was in past years and partly my eyes aren't as good but right
but I'm still enjoying it as much and I still they're good enough my eyes are good enough I can still get a lot of joy
out of looking through a telescope awesome that's great I imagine I mean
you counted 80 sunspots that one day yeah I would imagine a great Observer
yeah you're
to visualize and see things that are there that you've seen a number of times
it may be a far-fetched idea but I would love for one more comment to hit your
eyes before it hits anything else that would be that would be awesome um have you discover one more
comment that you could put the name ly behind and well I would like to but I don't think that's going to happen I'm
still search still enjoying the maybe on the global Star Party
you'll find one like you could come in and go you'll never guess I just got one
that would be the best oh even better John if he comes in and says it looks like something
squashed it like a pancake he tells us about that that'll
be that would be amazing sunspots to see more sunspots as I did you may want to
start by counting the groups because you were probably just counting the groups yeah inside each group there are a lot
of spots so I start by counting the groups then count the spots and then finally at the end
counting the prominences around the edge okay that's good to know I I always made
that mistake myself is just counting the group as one big sunspot
yeah it means I further uh need to look a little deeper into the Sunspot and you
know observe a little deeper than uh just seeing I see a little spot that's a
sun spot no it doesn't sound like that's the case well that's what I would recommend
anyway but um I wasn't really ever planning that the sun would be a big
part of my observing life you know I just started it because I thought uh I I
started it because I thought that I needed something to look at when the stars weren't out and so I spent a few
minutes each day looking at the sun and over the days and the months and the years and the decades and now I've been
looking at the sun virtually certainly every clear day since
1963 and almost every clear day since October 1959 which I just found out makes me the
a avo's top solar Observer so recently solar observing has become a big thing
with me and so I'm taking it very seriously yeah I uh oh congratulations
with that I understand the sentiment the reason I started taking pictures of the Moon and pictures of clouds with the
moon peeking through it and just pictures of anything other than the Milky Way because sometimes it's cloudy
sometimes like right now the Milky Way goes below Horizon in the Northern
Hemisphere and there's not much of it there and but there's always something
to try in its place and then when it does rise again you know turning and
looking around and seeing what's on the other side of the sky so uh so yeah
there's it I it sometimes the first thing that we
wanted to image isn't in the sky instead of just is going inside and finding
something else to do there's always something else to observe and um that's
where I've begun to find more joy in doing photography capturing what I'm
seeing um or trying to capture the Milky Way at different Twilights astronomical
Twilight nautical twilight um the Milky Way is still there um it's so can I
capture it where the sky colors is changing and so a lot of those
challenges led me to getting different images and not just sticking with one
particular type of image it's there's more to capture and uh each night out
teaches you something different or something new about um about the ne you know for the next time that you capture
you know maybe I'll try this technique when I capture this or that so it's uh
it's always a learning experience I try and remain as humble as I can and remember without the night sky or the
Sun or the moon what is it we would take a picture of you know what would we draw
and um you know try and remain humble and be able to use these images to share
with others so that even when I'm gone somebody's taking a picture of the Milky Way
because you know whether they're fascinated with it they believe it's a beautiful thing
you know I want others to be able to do it I don't want to just you know these are my secrets and I'm going to take
them to the Grave with me no I'm going to share as much as I can and not just about you know here are the settings I
use I want to try and get the process of looking at the sky and having that
dictate how I put my settings in because it's it's different from place to place
and from you know from uh night to night even depend transparency can change how
you choose to take an image you know all about what you're trying to capture and
as uh as a uh famous Dr deid Levy told me one time years ago if you don't write
it down it's not an observation and uh taking notes Maybe take a picture of
it that'll be my observation so but I I haven't forgotten you write it down
otherwise it's not an observation I had a solar picture I
wanted to show but I kept it all lunar because I wanted to keep the timeline you know I think I hope we're not
killing you Scott I think we are but well I am starting to fade and I have a
big day tomorrow guys okay but uh I was I was chatting with um our uh viewers
that are that are watching and uh uh somebody wanted to know when we're going to have future
programs uh so what's coming up next uh with explore scientific is that um uh
you know if you're into astronomy uh you're going to see us uh definitely at the Northeast astronomy
Forum um and um uh we we will be trying to do some live streaming from The Forum
uh from the event itself uh then we will go to Canada uh to the David Dunlap
Observatory and we're working with Kareem Jaffer um uh who's been on lots
of global star parties but uh we'll be with the uh rasque you know Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada and uh and do an event with them you know from
the David Dunlap Observatory it's going to be cool um uh we're kind of having a grand
reopening of our uh presence for explore Scientifics presence in Canada uh so
we're putting in U some uh you know additional resources and stuff there so
that we can better serve uh you know our our uh Canadian uh customers and so
um and you can just continue to expect more Global star parties
in general um so um I think it's the best way or one
of the best ways for us to stay in touch with our uh customers our community you
know whether you own one of our telescopes or not we don't really care about that we we are uh uh you know
our we want to show our support and uh
appreciation of the community that supports us so um you know I don't know how else to
say that but um but anyhow yes I'm fading a little bit uh was a lot of fun
seeing all you guys and um it's really late for Caesar he's what time is it in
Argentina Caesar uh no no now we are we are more close because we are now at two
hours only two hours later two hours so it's uh
12:38 hello yes
yeah no sure but the thing is that we are going next week uh our star party in
Mendoza okay 600 miles from buenos um we
are preparing the old ER technical things um we are ER we are having
uh we are preparing the this year two different uh
times in the year this time for we are having this in
April and another one ER in the same place in October and we are preparing
everything about this yes the October Ser October weather in Argentina must be
nice I would think so oh the SK are are really in the Moses where we are going
is really a is an skyp for Adrian for enjoying landscape
mountains and yes it's amazing amazing beautiful country Argentina thank you
John I've been there with my father to see you again Crystal Clear there and uh
blue skies with marbor country thank you thank you yeah it's a
cowboy hats included sure sure it's a it's a big country very different
Landscapes um David I didn't know that you had you have a Star Trek
shirt that yeah I can see that it's so cool I saw it I saw it yep captain
deid of the uh the
Enterprise yeah yeah I can all right gentlemen well
we're going to wrap it up so thank you very much uh thank you thank you Scott
thank you David for co-hosting this and um uh we want to thank the audience uh
from tuning in from all over the world if you're going to watch our program in
rerun uh and you have questions you can always uh reach out to us at explore
scientific .c and just jump on live chat or call us
um uh we're always happy to help you uh thanks to everybody and as my dear old
friend Jack horkheimer always used to say keep looking up good night good night all thank you
everybody good night everyone thank you
thank you David have a good night thank you David
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