Global Star Party 18

Transcript:

have have you been traveling anywhere at all no nothing at all uh rarely out of my
house for the last six months everything is running out of here so yeah very used to it i don't ever want
to go back to a build office building again i think at this point oh i bet
you probably get as much work done as whole at home i you know i'll tell you i've the magazine's doing very well on
all the associated things but for the first time in 30 years
i've cleaned and organized my basement this is what it took you know a global crisis
yeah if you could see how my garage looks right now i'm get i'm in the process of doing that right now i can't even get my
car in there i've tore everything out
do you think starbucks is going to happen this year dave boy you know that's a really good question garrick is
really thinking it will it would be uh just about 11 months from now it's
planned for september of next year yeah and it's going to be in armenia in the
capital of armenia the president of armenia believe it or not is a physicist really he is sort of a darling to the
starmus group and he invited the government is offering to fund essentially the the whole thing and so
garrett couldn't really refuse that yeah that's fantastic so we're hoping you know we'll see by
you know spring early summer how things look and then he could always delay it by a few months
right heart of 2022 perhaps as well but but we're hopeful because it would be fun yeah it sounds like it would be i
was looking at the website the other day ah great oh we'd love to have you there yeah i'll tell you i'd love to go i've
never been to one yeah it's great many astronauts and nobel prize winners
and uh very smart people and brian may and others uh doing a little guitar work
yeah oh i bet that would be fun too i'm sure you're playing along no not i i i'm not playing uh with brian
he's got his own guys to play with yeah rick wakeman in his band you know from from the keyboardist from yes
is typically the guy who's running the band really there oh wow it's above my pay grade for rock and
roll you may not be playing with playing music with him but you certainly have
formed a good friendship with him brian and i should be giving a talk if it happens about our nebula book
but um yeah they'll keep me off the drums if they're smart probably
[Laughter] david how are you doing i haven't seen
you in a long time either oh i'm doing i'm doing good i'm doing well
and i've been going to the kansas city meetings oh yeah yeah i've been going there each
month and trying to say a few words to them and i've been quite active with the
royal astronomical society over the pandemic yeah um
but it's the these um these zoom cloud sessions are keeping me pretty darn busy right now yeah that's
great yeah i'd love to see the league and your group get together and do a conference
or something along that line sometime we'd love to come to canada
yeah i think that would be great yeah maybe after this crazy thing is over if it ever oh yeah definitely
definitely
so
okay
um
hmm
kelsey sent me a text i didn't see she wanted to come in at about 7 30.
so that's about let's see if to do that i think i would
have to do that right after uh you david eicher
and uh so let's i don't know why
she needs that but we'll see what happens here should i default to her or should i go
back to you and you would introduce her um you can default to her if you'd like
okay yeah if you'd like to let's see
um
we'll see if she comes in a little bit early
do you guys like the earlier time schedule over what it was david
mr levy i kind of i kind of preferred the the one before but uh later i understand
that as you as you as the sun sets earlier we need to go earlier
right i wonder if at a certain point there's not going to be a uh
okay from one party to the other with the five o'clock show and all
or five o'clock here sorry
uh they're going to stick with the original schedule so
okay
that's so cool you guys are all here i love it you know that i love it
i love it it's kind of special this little group
we have getting together yeah hour before the star party starts is a lot of fun
i agree
a good mixture of old friends and new friends here yeah i think so it's very
well put david
so it's mr levy mr eiker libby after that and then deep t
and then if dustin logs in um
but you're still thinking we'll go to kelsey after me or libby no no no uh kelsey just sent me a text message
saying she's sticking with the original schedule okay so we'll we'll go to kelsey after the
10-minute break okay
dt what time is it in nepal right now
5 43 am 5 00 43 am oh wow sorry
i'm sorry oh it's so early you're gonna send her a gift basketball yeah that's right
complete with some eyepieces and a telescope
dt you should join the uh asian uh edition of the global star party that's
gonna be november 7th okay and it will be in the evening for you
okay so that might be a little bit easier not easier for me i have to wake up at
maybe three o'clock in the morning to get started and drink a bunch of coffee
is coffee popular in nepal yeah it is yeah
coffee tea and tea huh yep
yeah tea is more popular than coffee i would think so
what do you like to drink do you drink coffee or tea i like coffee you like coffee huh
well you'll have to give me your your uh shipping address dt and i'll try to send you a small gift and see how easy you're
difficult to ship something to you okay experiment a little bit
if it's easy to eat things to you then you know there's more possibilities so
it's difficult that makes it difficult
that's a big problem for uh astronomy outreach work uh with people around the
world is when they want to share equipment um sometimes
it's it's not the shipping and it's not the problem that they are making a donation the problem
uh is getting it through customs
sometimes it's very expensive
she
hmm
um
um
scotty will the uh asian star party be a weekly event no
no i don't think so um but
it might go every other week or once a month
it depends a lot on christopher go okay sounds interesting it's a little
bit of work but once he uh suggested the idea lots of
people wanted to join in so we have uh
uh the national astronomical research institute of thailand is joining
so that's like at the government level which is really cool um
we have uh people in singapore and uh
i think maybe hong kong philippines
would be really cool nepal maybe i know this uh young astronomer that's
over there her name's deepti maybe she'll join
tess the transiting exoplanet survey satellite has completed its survey of the southern sky
to do this tess divided the southern sky into 13 sectors and its four cameras
monitored each sector for nearly a month tess was watching for the slight dips in
starlight as distant planets passed in front of their host stars but it also caught other transient events like
comets and supernovae in addition to building a beautiful panoramic picture of the sky
the bright band on the left is the milky way our home galaxy viewed edge on
zooming into the mosaic it's clear how much detail and how many stars tess has captured
at the center is the continuous viewing zone where the view of one test camera overlaps all 13 sectors
within it is the large magellanic cloud one of the closest galaxies to our own
a little farther out is the more distant small magellanic cloud flanked by a ball of stars the bright globular cluster ngc
104
silhouetted by the band of the milky way is the cool sac nebula a scary cloud of
dust in the constellation crux also known as the southern cross
the mosaic also contains
alpha centauri one of our closest neighboring systems and among the brightest stars in the sky
fomalhaut which hosts one of the first directly imaged planets
sirius the brightest star in the night sky and beetlejuice a red supergiant star
that marks one shoulder of the constellation orion
the orion nebula a vast nursery where stars are born was imaged in great detail by the hubble space telescope
this isn't a cosmic object at all it's actually a reflection of rigel the bright star marking one of orion's feet
and it's caused by light scattering off part of the camera system
tess's confirmed exoplanet discoveries are currently distributed all around the southern sky
many of these discoveries are actually multi-planet systems and several are earth-sized
many more candidate exoplanets await confirmation it's easy to see which sectors were
among the first because astronomers have had more time to study them and find potential transits
eventually candidate and confirmed planets will be distributed more evenly around the sky
tess has now turned around and is observing the northern sky using the same strategy
as it does astronomers will continue to sift through roughly 20 terabytes of data from the southern hemisphere as
well as the new incoming information eventually hundreds or even thousands of
distant worlds will owe their discovery to tess
[Music]
hello everybody this is this is scott roberts with explore scientific
and uh this is the explore alliance live presentation of the 18th global star
party and with me we have quite a number of people have already joined um
david levy who has been on every one of our programs joins us richard grace who has been i
think also on every one of our programs astrophotographer david eicher editor-in-chief at astronomy magazine
who's going to be with us for quite a while he's got a number of programs to discuss with us because the
universe is so vast and a lot there's a lot to tell right we have libby and the
stars with us who is giving yet another presentation on uh
another planet in our solar system we have asteroid hunters joining us tonight as
well which is great and i i forgive me i don't know your
name it's mike my name is mike mike mike mike hunter okay we need more asteroid
hunters terry mann from the astronomically joins us um as well and uh deepti
she is from nepal young astronomer so where i was just
mentioning just
kind of uh oh sorry you guys hear me now yes yeah now yeah you got me now okay sorry i touched the
microphone and muted it by accident um i was about to say we were talking a
little while ago and just remarking uh you know how it feels like a family that we have here
and it's certainly something i look forward to every week to do the global star party
and we're also branching out we've done of course european editions we're about to do an asian edition on november 7th
which would be really interesting so that's wha we'll be with co-host christopher go
but i will get started with uh david levy uh you know
you can't i can't say enough nice things about david
he is he and i are kind of like i think of him as my big brother uh he has been a
mentor to me uh he has been uh you know he is uh uh we have
talked about uh philosophically about many things but
david is someone that has taught me to keep
going no matter what it takes you know and he has overcome many obstacles in his life um
and if you've read his book you'll you'll know that uh it hasn't always been easy for david
but he's made a he has made
astronomy special for all of us and you know some of the spectacular events
have been things like comet shoemaker levy 9 which blew all of our minds but
but if you look at the long history of david levy searching for
comets and his love for the night sky it's
i think that's the most important the most important part it hasn't been although his discoveries have been
amazing it really is uh all about david and the friendship and the perseverance that he
uh brings to the table so david i'm going to give you the stage thank you scotty and it's wonderful to
be here except with one exception it is not all about david it is about the night sky
it is about something that i have loved doing ever since i was about 12 years
old and i've had so much fun and looking at all the other people that are here tonight
i'm remembering times that uh that i've spent with them the time with dave iker
before a convention of the astronomical league which terry mann will probably describe later
when we stayed up all night just to see them tear down a uh bridge
and which came down in about a tenth of a second a big huge concrete bridge
never forget that and i'm so glad to be here with the younger people who are
the voices of tomorrow who will be telling us about what astronomy is from their point of
view and particularly what it's going to be like in the next generation that's
deep tea and libby and we also have libby's cat who will probably appear at some point
libby's cat bowie named after a famous singer
and uh here here we are and it's so wonderful to be here
each time that i give these introductions i try to quote from a poem and the poem
comes from my magic book here which used to be very very small
it's this one it used to be very small and thin with just enough poems so that i could
choose a different one for each of the global star parties although sometimes you'll hear a poem that i've read before
but look at it now the poem the book has gotten so big it's gotten so big and so fat
that i can hardly lift it anymore it's your fault scotty
it's your fault we love hearing the poetry from david levy
tell you do you want me to tell you why it's scotty's fault i will okay scotty was visiting wendy and me
once a few years ago and we were sort of talking about comets
and stuff and he said you know why don't you take all of the comments
that you've discovered when you have originally reported them in your uh
in your observing log and uh it's hard to see it this way but um
uh but anyway why did you take from each of the comets that you've discovered and maybe we could put them
together i did that i assembled all of the original
all of the original pages from the comets that i've discovered over the years
session 6684 e on november 13th 1984 that was my first
comment and if any of you know the the
beautiful open cluster ngc 6709 the comet was right next to that cluster
when i found it 1987 there were two comets that year
a third in 88 another in 89 one that became very bright in 1990
was visible throughout the um throughout the world
as a naked eye comet for most of the summer of 1990
there was one in 1991 a very nice periodic comet
and one in 1994 in
april of 1994 and so i've taken all these plus the most recent one
uh the call nidre yom kippur comet of october 2006
plus of course comments that i've discovered over the years with gene and carolyn shoemaker of
which the best known is shoemaker levy 9 which is the comet that collided with
jupiter and in doing that gave us a very interesting lesson on the origin of life
and how when comets collide with planets they can deposit their the simple alphabet of life the
carbon hydrogen oxygen and nitrogen and be able to say quite a few things
so with all of these interesting things it all started for me with a meteor a
shooting star that i saw at a summer camp in 1956
and looking around asking the other kids did you see that shooting star and they said no
and i i then the thought hit me is that was that event just for me
am i supposed to get interested in this stuff well i put it away in my eight year i
put the image of the meteor away in my eight-year-old david brain
where it's kind of let it fester for a while until 1960
when a bicycle accident and a book from a cousin about the planets really got me going
and so i do have a quote from you right now that i hope will inspire you to enjoy
the the wonderful the wonderful wonderful
um darkness of the night sky this quote is from shakespeare it's from
romeo and juliet and if you if you can't find it
i suggest you do one of two things either get a a a shakespeare
um complete works and look up romeo and juliet or
go to the moon and uh there you might see a little plaque
next to a few ashes from gene shoemaker and the plaque actually has
a picture of comet hill bop on it plus the quote i'm about to read you now
and it goes like this come gentle night in those first three words doesn't it
really inspire us that the night is not scary it's not evil it is gentle
come gentle night come loving black proud night
give me my romeo and when he shall die take him and cut him out in little stars
and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love
with night and pay no worship to the garish son
this is what this guy is all about and i really do think that shakespeare says it better than i can back to you
dave scott thank you very much okay that's wonderful
okay well our our next um our next speaker is uh david j eicher i've got uh
as i start the program i i'll i'll say david and i'll say david and and i i realize i need to
like the p p e in high school you need to call everybody by their last name you know when you got so many but um
david eicher is uh uh inspirational uh every time he talks
he um he has um he has this uh
demeanor about him that always for me it always kind of peaks my
curiosity because just the moment of hearing his voice makes me
think about the possibilities of the universe i know that this is a guy who has poured
over uh you know the study of galaxies he has met with uh you know
amazing uh individuals who have uh who have uh
worked so hard to unlock the secrets of of the astrophysics and quantum theory
and all of this stuff and he brings it all down for us in this funnel
and he puts it in a magazine and he puts it into his books and he puts it into his talks
and that's really special to have someone do that for you
and to make it also understandable but it's done with drama it's done with
love it's done with care and you know i'm really happy to have uh
astronomy magazine's editor-in-chief but also our great friend david j
here and i'll give you the stage david thank you so much scott and thank you
david uh for doing this and for inspiring all of us both of you so much
um tonight i'd like to talk i'd like to talk over the next coming weeks over about a number of astrophysical subjects
uh sort of spanning the range of the universe tonight is going to be a little bit
dark in a troubling period of our lives here how the sun will die
is tonight's uplifting topic but it's an important thing to know about
the future of our sun the star without which we wouldn't be here and uh what will happen to our solar
system as the galaxy ages so of course we know that the sun is about 4.6 billion light
years old um it's uh it was born in a star cluster uh
of course as objects orbit the center of our galaxy they're
stripped apart from tidal forces so the sister stars that were
the brethren of our son have dispersed throughout the galaxy it's a nuclear
reactor of course that's what stars do they convert light elements hydrogen
primarily into heavier elements by nuclear fusion and they
emit heat and light as a byproduct of that reaction and that's why we're here
because without the sun we wouldn't be here whether or not we had a good planet at
the right distance from the sun but there will come a day when the sun exhausts its fuel
and that will be long long after all of us are gone of course but i'd like to
talk a little bit about the sun's life and what's upcoming with it well first of all we know that the sun's age
because we believe that the planets formed with the sun from theory of how planetary systems form the
disks of debris around the stars themselves and we know that
rocks the oldest rocks on earth that we know of and are very old and the oldest
elements in the solar system overall are primitive meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites and the oldest
of them is 4.567 billion years old now we know that because the isotopes within those
meteorites are some of them are radioactive and they act like clocks so they're
they're very very old we think the sun is about that age it's slightly older
and not 6 000 years old as bishop bishop usher um
posed we know that the sun fuses about 700
million tons of hydrogen per second that's a ferocious amount of material of
course it's very large it's very massive it's a what astronomers call a g2
v star or f or a a a whitish main sequence star it's on the
main sequence that means it's in the main part of its ordinary life of fusing
hydrogen into heavier elements and it's really a whitish star although
it looks yellow to us it's peaks its spect its spectral output in the yellow
and green parts of the spectrum but by definition solar light sunlight
constitutes overall as a whole what we call white light
um about 7.5 percent of the stars in our neighborhood are g type main sequence
stars so it's not the most common type and a large part of that is the because
there are lots of dwarf stars of course um numerically but some of the well-known g stars in our neighborhood
are alpha centauri a a capella's two brightest stars capella is a multiple star system with
six stars overall and the star that you may have heard of called tau seti that's a relatively
close star is here well we know that we're here on earth because earth formed in what we call the habitable zone of
our star the temperature is right for liquid water and and all that we know about
life uh as we are as we exist requires liquid water
but the sun is a variable star and it's evolving over time and although it's 4.6
billion years old it will change dramatically in the future stars like the sun shine
in some normal way for about 10 to 20 billion years overall
but they don't remain on the main sequence nearly that long so here's the really sad news um
regardless of everything that's happening in our crazy lives this year life will be gone
on this planet in about a billion years or less so if you really want a fact that brings
you down because the sun's radio the sun's
radiation output is increasing over time it's a variable star its so-called
bolometric radiative output is increasing so about a billion years from now the oceans will
boil off of our planet and it will make the weekend really difficult
however it's long after that that things get really interesting for the sun as a
star in about six and a half billion years the sun exhausts its hydrogen
altogether and it'll start a red giant phase and it will swell outward and
earth which will be a sort of a carbon like remnant we think at that point may physically get pushed outward
um in about seven and a half billion years from now the first so-called red giant peak
of of behavior of the of the complexity of what's going on in the sun's atmosphere will uh finish and and that
will really um shrink its its diameter then and its
luminosity after that enlargement well about a hundred thousand years
later not long after that point comes a really interesting moment in the life of
the sun and that's the so-called helium flash and that is when there's an enormous
flash and runaway fusion of helium into carbon begins
inside the sun and that will cast off material off of our star uh first of all at relatively
slow speeds as as a sort of a belch if you will and then there will be higher velocity
material coming off of the star and the collision of those materials will create
a glowing planetary nebula and that's how our star will end up whether it looks like the
ring nebula that you probably know the dumbbell nebula many other kinds of planetaries that we
can observe with scott's great telescopes we don't quite know yet because the shapes of these nebulae and
how they get to be that way are very complicated the modeling on those but we will end up
as a planetary nebula with a white dwarf remnant sun
that used to be our ferociously burning star in its center and for about 50 000
years or so uh other inhabitants around us in the galaxy will be able to see
our solar system as a glowing planetary nebula that will actually glow
um the the energy uh much like a fluorescent bulb does and then
eventually dissipate and will be left with this red white dwarf remnant
so it's not the happiest result in the end of course the happy lives of stars
but of course like people stars are born and they live and they evolve and they die eventually
as well as people so um the good news is that we've got a long long time to go on this planet
uh and much much longer yet before the things get really interesting with our
sun so that's kind of a quick look at the sun and we're in the middle of the sun's life
but where it's going how it will happen and what we know about the sun's
eventual end so thanks so much scott and david it's
great to be with you guys and everyone else to terry i haven't seen you in a long time and now i would like to
introduce if i could i believe next scott the great talented and quite young
libby and the stars who was going to move things farther out into the solar system i
think from earth that's right that's right thank you so much thank you
yeah libby has been commenting in the chat room uh and uh one of the things i
will tell you is is that uh libby is uh very respectful and in awe of all of you
so uh and uh so that's she she knows it's special so
thank you libby well libby um uh
are you uh you're all set to go aren't you yeah you have you have beautiful glasses on uh i like
those and uh nice background but uh i'm a little bit shocked from
that last time yeah i know i know well we don't
actually really end libby we will just transform you know because
all that dust and gas just turns into another star system and more planets and it just
keeps going on and on nothing gets wasted including us
[Music] let me just add something ten more seconds forgive me but but you
mentioning that great point scott let's look at it libby from the reverse direction
and that the atoms in our bodies were made uh the light stuff early on in the
history of the universe but most of the atoms in our bodies the so-called metals heavier than hydrogen and helium were
made in exploding stars in supernovae and in neutron stars literally the atoms
in our bodies so we are made of the stuff of the universe and we can sit here and think
about it and talk about it and we're going to be around here for a long long time to do that so that's the that's the
rever the positive way of looking at it that's right it's almost a miracle
it's it is a miracle thank you thanks david okay libby you have the stage now
i want to tell you i know that that you are you are very um i can tell you're very honored to be
amongst these people and and that uh and all the rest of it but i one of the things that i think is uh
really special about you is that you have determined to give your talks and to
and each time you've given them you've done a better job than the last time so you you're getting
really good at doing presentations and i think that by the time that you're in high school you're going to be quite
professional at doing this so if i would i would encourage you to keep it up uh and to keep exploring uh in the
way that you are so and we'll let you uh continue to tell tell us the story about the solar system
go ahead so i've been doing it ever since i started
i made a whole list on what i wanted to talk about and i started with the solar system so
i've been doing a series where i talk about each planet and it's in order so we're almost about
finished and i'm happy i'm almost finished it's a little bit sad because i wish i could continue talking about our
planets because there's much to talk about planets true but there's way more
awesome nebulas out there and there's a lot of fun stuff to explore definitely
a lot of cool nebulas and stars not with just planets um
but we're in the back of the solar system at uranus where it's really cool
yes i was taking notes and i was like hm i
need to identify what uranus is and i was like oh yeah it's just a huge ice
block floating in space and i was like no it has to be more than that
and uh before we were just talking about how stars and we're made out of stars and
everything and we're talking about the elements hydrogen helium
and that is actually part of what makes uranus blue
and i thought that was pretty cool i'm like why are we not blue
right like we could be planets you could be blue like so i was
fascinated by the color of it it's just so gorgeous it's it's beautiful i mean
mars is beautiful the way that that mars is colored but
i have to say uranus beats it by a little bit but it's beautiful
um it has little hints of green across it too it's beautiful
um we don't really have too much images which i'm kind of disappointed in for
such a beautiful planet the only spacecraft to get close to it
was voyager 2 and the voyagers voyager 1 voyager 2 have been like all
over the solar system they've been everywhere and i was just like
why would nasa said more this is a beautiful planet it's gorgeous it's beautiful
i love the on your notes right now i mean it's gorgeous there i'm
i'm stunned like i was i was like well this is gorgeous
um more people need to do astrophotography on this uh zing king
when i'm older and i do more of my space stuff um
i want to do more uran uranus stuff because it's like
it's so important and nasa's just focusing on mars and i have these moments where
sometimes in my head instead of researching i kind of just put together puzzle pieces
like nasa is looking for water on mars but
i mean this uranus has to have water i mean it's ice and what happens you know i sat to water
and i didn't have to have water the astronauts could like easily take the water like
take the ice burn it up and then like filter it and it'd be good and even taking samples would be amazing
it's just such a beautiful planet and i also wanted to learn more about
magnetic fields um a lot of times on nasa tv they like to talk about some sending balloons up
into space and making sure it runs in the magnetic field and then it kind of
goes out and in out in and i was like this is so cool it's
invisible and i was like uranus is such a beautiful planet i'm
gonna beg nasa when i'm older to just do something you're this means
mm-hmm um it also uh saturn was my last planet and it has
rings and i was wondering i'm like i wonder if this planet has rings so
i figured out that it does and i found a picture and
it's a cartoon picture that shows the rings because you can't actually see them they're so light the rocks are so
tiny and fine grand there's not much of them but they're up and down like this so uranus is in the middle and it's
around yes so i was like that's cool i'm like saturn's so famous for its rings come on
make you're in this famous i'm very passionate for after learning about uranus i was very
passionate about it because i feel like no one pays attention to it anymore it's
just they're just like oh it's neptune's older brother like
no it's a it's a beautiful planet it's has water
and it's a very simple plant to research about because on earth you have volcanoes where lava
is in the middle of earth and it will come out and burn you but when you're in this it's just
rocks rocks and ice and it's all together it's just a big ball of it it's nothing extravagant like earth
now earth is beautiful with its llama and the core but like uranus it's just so simple and i can't
believe people don't research it more and do more things about it because people these
days are always like oh mars and jupiter and like yeah amazing planets
but i don't think uranus gets enough attention and
i was thinking about what makes up the moons and the magnetic
the magnets here and like the rings and everything because i was like what if they were rocks that
happened to come by or just get stuck or i don't know maybe like come off of
uranus and i was also looking at it having 27
natural satellites and when i say natural satellites i basically need moons but they're all not moons
i know some of them might be smaller or tinier so they have moons and everything 27 of
them and it's kind of and i was thinking like it's a mix between jupiter and saturn because it has the rings and it
has the moons and i'm like this is a beautiful planet nasa please do something
and i was like you know i need to get more out of my telescope and astrophotography
and i'm like if i'm that that passionate about learning about uranus um i need to get my telescope out and
look at it so it's been cloudy here so hopefully soon enough we can be able to go outside and
do some amazing pictures of uranus i just i'm so disappointed that people
don't pay enough attention and there needs to be more astrophotography
on uranus it's beautiful i mean it's it's pretty basic
but if you think about it being that pretty gorgeous blue then you're like that's amazing
it is beautiful it's beautiful to look at through the telescope uh i know with your telescope that you
can see it's uh you know the fact that it's a planet and you can see the beautiful color of it
um have you been able to find it yet no um
i have been more focused on saturn and jupiter um whenever i use my telescope
i'll pick one object and until i get like a perfect photography picture and
perfect lens perfect view um i'll move on to the next planet
that's a good way to go saturn and jupiter but i've
after that i'm like okay more attention to uranus i mean
i need to learn where there's a dark enough place because it's so far away in the solar
system that i see in rocky where's a far enough place i can go out and take it
well i know that uh the jet propulsion laboratory has been talking about
uh making spacecraft to these outer planets once again you know and there's a lot to
uh to learn from them and probably by the time that you hit
high school or you're in your young 20s we'll probably have new data on on uranus and neptune
for you to study and i'll i'll definitely treasure that data yeah yes
yes after all this time [Music] thank you so much libby thank you thank
you for letting me speak yeah thank you for
an honor for us nothing other to do i'm like yay finally something yay
thank you so much well our next young astronomer is deepti
gatam and dt is a 16 year old high school student in
nepal and she is formed an astronomy club and
since she gave her first talk last tuesday uh several several of her friends her
colleagues have young colleagues have reached out to me on facebook to talk about their passion
about space exploration and astronomy and uh they seem to be all inspired by
udt so you've done a good job and so
what what will you be bringing to us in this second part of your three-part
uh series today i'm going to present about my
organization that is astronomy enthusiast in nepal very good okay okay
hello everyone it's me nikti gautam this 16 years old high school student from nepal um though i'm
i'm interested in astronomy since i was uh nine years old
but exploring about this to know me and sourcing about the astronomy up to this year
now i thought that it's time to do something it is looking the opportunity looking the lack
of opportunity in nepal astronomy is just astronomy has a lot of scope but there
is a lack of escort in nepal so i want to do something like i want to solve the
people like me who are actually very enthusiastic in astronomy so i have created
uh i have created one organizing student club along with my friends so i'm going to represent i'm going to present my
organization here okay
beautiful yeah
yeah here you can see the logo of our organization that is astronomy enthusiast in nepal and we
have um presented a theme of we have made this logo in the theme of
the to represent the astronomy in nepal here you can see the spiral galaxy in the word e and the
comet trial in the or yan and um in concept of nepal here we have um quitted
the sign of the moon in the star um moon in the sun which is uh
which is actually in our the nepal's flag we have made according to our nepalese
flag yeah here we are the yesterday we have one sort meeting about the
further programs and uh here are the founding members of the astronomy enthusiast and nepal and executive
members actually we have the five founding members uh along with me and
there are five executive members and some of them are not able to attend the meeting due to
the festivals and the board examination etc
uh so yesterday we have done a sort of meeting and here we had some of the seven members from there
yeah and the introducing the astronomy enthusiast in nepal our main principle is to the
connecting people this i aim to solve the many more people's uh for in the
field of astronomy although many people have the interest in astronomy just they are beyond uh of the
opportunity of astronomy they are not getting this um any knowledge about the astronomy so first of all i have focus
first of all astronomy enthusiast in nepal focusing to connecting people and
spreading knowledge and uplifting status in nepal and creating opportunity
wonderful and in on this i'm so um first of all
establishing the organization uh just we have established our organization on october 1 of this 2020 and we have done
the um some of the or we have already completed some of the programs and we
have a lot of plans and a lot of upcoming events uh and
yeah here this is the our first program that is we have conducted
the session about the introduction to the astronomy to the young peoples and many people have joined us and
we have just established we have discussed about the um about the astronomy what is astronomy in
the um we have discussed about the constellation satellite and natural
phenomena like or uh and solar we also include the solar
observation etc in our webinar and it was just fun to
to tease other and we have them some of the mentors here to introduce
about the astronomy more and okay and this is our the second program that is
national quiz competition which we have uh conducted in the
special um in the for the old space week uh so we have gone to the quiz competition um
we have prepared some of the quiz competition and conducted this competition and when people have joined
us they enjoy a lot and get something new
right with cash prizes yes and here is this solar observation
program which was done by the one of the founding member of our organizations he can do it physically because there is a
list uh tons of listings of uh this kovid uh in his area
so he have contacted it physically in one of these uh school that is a visual other school in uh who in science
exhibition he has introduced um about the astronomy and
he had made solar observation to the younger people it's uh this um this god is very
interesting yes yes yeah and uh our uh talking about our
upcoming event um we are since the uh we are going to contact the one
astrophotography system and this is the monis and this is the one of the founder of
the nepal astronomical society and one of esther photographer of nepalese is the member of the women in science women
in astronomy in nepal too and uh she's going to give about this uh introduction
to the astrophotography in the way and she's going to teach us about the astrophotography
and we will going to conduct this in november 5.
wonderful yeah in further our upcoming plan in session talking about our upcoming plans in
session uh we have astrophotography system the sci talk and we have the state light station um inviting one of
the of this i have said introduce already introduced that uh we have just launched
um one satellite first satellite of nepal uh just one year ago
so we'll be uh we'll be welcoming this first
the we have created the that is abbas maske uh we have created this satellite and
launched the satellite along with his friends and we will have that uh ava's mass caster for our upcoming event of
satellite session and we will be we are planning to have online courses about the astronomy uh to give the
introduction of astronomy and others and okay and we have the open discussion
session and general talks like this will be inviting the young people and we'll
we'll planning to know about the prospect of the astronomy what the things are the
astronomy and we will be organizing the sc contest uh debate art competition and monthly quiz etc and monthly quiz is
going uh always happen uh 10th of the month
yeah you know we have focus in the um though we have
this we have organized our we have organized our student club we have created establish our student
student club i'm just in october one it needs to be a more time uh so we are
just we have a lot of plan to work out and here are some of the organization which
you know some of the plans on the event which we can conduct um physically after this kobe after the end here we have
instrument making session and competition where we will focus the um local people for the young peoples uh to
create to make the telescope and um other instruments related to the
astronomy and we will going to um organize solar observation in many area
in in nepal first of all we have focus uh to make our outreach to the all part of
the nepal first ever and for that we have the seventh provincial state in our nepal
so we are from different provincial states so we are going to divide our work in
along with our organization we will be working personally to make uh to
increase the outreach of the astronomy who will conduct the night sky observation in a local information and
talk program in um study we have just planned to have one of the um soft
student club substance that saw school club to make more outreach of our programs and
to introduce the opportunity that we have created to the other peoples to the
young people young people like us and at last we will be working to the team
that is lit explode together yes i love that yes unity has the power
and let's explore together so we will be coming off from all the seven provinces
and working very efficiently uh we'll be organizing a different program so you will be uh taking a lot of unique
programs uh to the all peoples and we will be teasing others by learning
ourselves wonderful thank you thank you i think that you have a
a growing fan club here with the uh the global uh
astronomy uh program so uh keep up the good work we're i'm looking
forward to your uh final installment uh next tuesday it's going to be great and
i have mentioned i think i mentioned earlier that we are going to have a our first asian edition of the global star
party and of course you're invited to that as well so that will be a little bit
more normal time for you because it's quite early where you are in nepal so but thank you very much it's awesome
uh i think someone did ask if you could accept international members into your
club is that possible yeah yeah okay all right so
we'll have to maybe uh you can give me a uh
some sort of uh website or something where people can find out more and i'll post it onto the chat
thanks deepti that's wonderful that's wonderful okay so where are we at right now we are
um we're coming up close on our first 10-minute break here
we are going to switch to terry mann
terry if you don't know about terry she has been a force in the amateur astronomy world um
much of it uh with the astronomical league and
she i i don't know how many years she's been involved with it but she is a she's
served as president twice for the astronomical league the league itself is um
60 years old maybe something like that um 75 75 okay
all right so there you go um uh but uh certainly you weren't around
at that time yeah i know how to i know how to play this so
but uh i've long admired terry uh she has a great sense of humor she is uh
someone that always makes you feel at ease but uh she's very knowledgeable about astronomy she has been working
tirelessly to involve other people from all over the country and now all over
the world as the astronomical league goes international and
so the league is our official sponsor of our door prizes that we do each week
sometimes twice a week and she will be reading uh
the questions and answers from our last global star party but uh and
then asking questions for you to answer and when you answer these questions you
will send them by email to explore alliance i'm going to put this into the
chat at explorescientific.com
uh the way that these uh prizes work uh we know that uh since we're
simulcasting uh there is a little bit different delay from one simulcast to
the other and so we will take all the answers that are coming in
for each each question and we will pick at random
the person that answers that question so um why don't you go ahead and
get started terry thank you thank you for going on thank you scott and thank you to the
league you know let me get this started okay
uh first we always like to have a warning um about
if you're viewing the sun there we go just to make sure that you
watch what you're doing uh you don't want to have you don't want to look at the sun without any filter
uh so that's something we just like to remind people especially with the sun coming a
little bit more alive with solar cycle 25. that's right yeah there's some sunspots today yeah i know some really
good stuff going on finally nice aurora in alaska too if it was clear
um question one from last week and these will be the answers how much would a
hundred pound person weigh on the planet mars and the answer was around 77 i'm sorry
37.9 pounds oh and the winner was tom
destrup dastrap uh-huh congratulations tom yeah congratulations
and funny libby would mention uranus yeah the question was what is the planet
what is the planet uranus's closest moon the answer is cordelia
cordelia and the winner is electr urletta
they're goodie thank you very much they're goodies i think no i might have also gotten that wrong
i just wanted to mention that atletico derguti is from kosovo and that's nice to see that
very good congratulations your laptop yes
the third question is how do red giant stars get their name the answer is the name comes from the
cools the stars cool temperature that causes it to grow red and its enormous
size and the winner of that is dale beasley congratulations dale excellent
excellent and so now we're gonna go with this week's questions uh what sky event
is the highlight of december this is this is the closest event of this type
since what year okay
okay send your email with your answer to explore alliance at explorescientific.com
and here we go talking about the rings of saturn what is the origin of saturn's
e ring hmm
yep question three what is the date and the year
of the first photograph taken of the moon's far side and by what space probe
wow good question good questions for this week good
question yeah now terry how are these questions picked
we all as we rotate uh we pick our own questions okay
the everybody like these are the questions i chose the ones above me i believe was from carol orange okay so we
all make up our own questions our own answers well we don't make up the answer make up answers
[Laughter] so you have to be a mind reader of the astronomical league to win you know
that's simple yeah we try yeah no you guys are very knowledgeable
so that's those are excellent questions and uh we love it so that's wonderful
thank you scott appreciate it thank you okay so uh we have um
we have more guests that will be coming on and we have uh we still need
to get some to some guests uh mike uh before we go to our 10 minute break um uh why don't you introduce
yourself and talk just for a few minutes about asteroid hunters
all right can you hear me there yep okay uh well thanks again scott for uh having
us having us on uh it's an honor to be uh amongst uh some some great individuals here uh
we are we are honored and blessed to be here uh yeah my name is mike forsland uh
with the uh asteroid hunters uh this uh really is a uh um as many of
many of you may know already this started with as a father-son adventure uh our our little project here and it's
just uh gone gone completely haywire uh but uh about about a year and a half ago
um um my 15 year old son and i were spending time setting up our eight inch
sct out in the out in the driveway and we had our burnham's celestial
handbooks out and we were looking through them looking through the eyepiece during that time we were
custom building computers um as this you can see maybe behind us or behind me uh
this this machine was built by my son right behind me for for us um so uh but
we were doing this and and through that it we started talking about doing some
actual science work uh that involved computers and those kinds of things and uh asteroids came up
on the list and uh for me it was kind of like okay i you know we were just trying to figure
out how to um how to image these things and do these things but uh
essentially it it took us a little while uh because as you may know there's there's very
little information on the internet on how to uh image and uh measure and take observations of asteroids and these
kinds of things so um we we were spending quite a bit of time learning and and and doing this stuff and uh we
eventually uh got some great help from some individuals uh david rankin and some other people online that were kind
enough to uh help guide us through uh um we've we've had some other great help
uh scott you and i have a great friend in daniel mounsey we're located 35 miles north of los angeles so uh
daniel mounds he's been a really good friend of ours for a lot of years helped us with a lot of different things but um just just through just through a lot
of help and stuff it uh progressed into us being able to take uh actual images
and measurements of the asteroids so we ended up getting our um official observatory code through the minor
planet center about uh well just over a year ago and uh we really haven't looked back
since so um we've we've progressed we have a full-on streaming channel that we stream and show people how to take
measurements on observations and uh it's really a father-son adventure uh
that this has progressed into now we have actually grown uh into doing full
sky surveys uh we have a fully automated system that i would love to show you later uh we're still waiting for the sun
to go down um that uh does a complete uh images full full sections of the sky
does everything um automation in the background does all the uh analyzation of the images of the fields looking for
potential new objects as well as capturing existing objects and those kinds of things um
we uh we about uh five five months ago uh got with uh opt
and uh they were kind enough to uh supply a raza 14 for us uh which we have in our backyard
observatory and uh so we utilize that with a full-frame uh zwo 6200 camera but
um we have you know my system that we have here is as you can probably see it's pretty insane that we have going on
everything is we have many custom built computers so we have uh you know i have uh this
red box you see on the other side is a system that's running running all the telescope stuff all the automation that
we have uh my computer while you guys were talking is actually going it was was going out and creating the schedule
for tonight for the full sky search um but uh we my son and i custom built all these machines uh the machine that you
had behind me is actually running the big 49 inch ultra wide but those of us those of you that may follow
us on our live stream twitch.tv asteroid underscore hunters we have a lot of a lot of followers but
we stream every sunday on this we also just started a full asteroid search streaming channel that goes four
days a week that shows our live um okay our live automation of our search that
happens every night and uh you can it runs for it'll run all night long so our automation starts from about uh you know
right at sun sunset and goes all the way to sunrise and it's fully set set up
system just i hit a button it just goes and does a thing and i just sit and collect the data as it comes in through
this we are also doing full uh transient searches uh uh supernova
as well as um variable stars uh as well and uh and i can show you
guys that as uh as we as we start tonight but uh but this really started as a labor of love for as a father son
just spending time together in this uh in this hobby and uh you know i i had a lot of experience uh some
experience about 15 years ago uh trying to do some imaging uh with a with an
eight-inch uh telescope and my canon 40d and i and it was a horrible experience and i ended up walking away from it for
a while and it was very difficult but uh but now that technology has progressed so much
yeah um we're we are able to do legitimate scientific work right out of our backyard our whole system is right
here our garage is converted so what you guys are seeing is our full-on garage uh our control center we have a an outdoor
observatory that we built we constructed and our raza sits out there so i control
everything from out there but we are doing everything from our backyard in bortle five skies
and uh we have uh we have imaged thousands of asteroids over the course of last year and just in the actually
just in the last three days three or four days uh right before we had a little bit of weather this weekend we
imaged 1300 uh known asteroids and uh and all that data was sent to the
minor planet center through our sky survey so uh we we are one of very few people aside from the big sky surveys
that are doing this in the world right now uh that are doing this full automated search that we do uh on a
nightly basis and uh like i said this literally was a um a father-son thing that i
we just had somebody in the chat to say oh i'm your biggest fan i'm like wow i'm just i can't believe my my son and i so
bad we just can't believe it you know i just uh we're just honored to be able to show you guys the stuff that we've we've
learned that we've accomplished and uh we were fortunate we also have uh some friends uh we're part of the worldwide
variable star hunters uh they have a 24 inch plane wave in abu dhabi and uh they
they run kind of a research team out there we're part of that and uh we're fortunate they do a lot of test observations and we were par a part of a
big test uh uh toi 1726 they discovered a couple of uh neptune-sized planets uh
around the white dwarf so we were actually uh controlling the telescope remotely from here do that so um we have
we have uh this thing has just progressed uh tremendously in a very short period of time
and uh but uh but we um we just uh we love being part of it you know and uh
we're just gonna keep riding this train as long as we can and uh but it's uh it's just it's a lot of
fun so there it is yeah thank you thank you yeah that is in a very important way
yeah um uh okay well mike thank you very much hopefully you hang around we're going to
take a 10 minute break okay and people can uh uh
get get some refreshment or or take uh stretch their legs or whatever
and we'll be back uh we've got dave ing here uh from california richard grace
um and uh we will have others joining us as well pranvara is with us tonight she's
just kind of hanging out with us and and uh and listening in so it's awesome to have her uh
it was kind of cool that we had a winner from kosovo right so uh with the door prizes
that we ship our door prizes worldwide so uh okay so we will see you in 10 minutes
and we'll be right back
well david that was pretty interesting i think is a start for the star party
um
um
you
hi are you uh are you guys ready to go on
that's okay sure yeah i think we're
i think so yeah we had some people that didn't show so okay yeah we'll see in half an hour then
that's great all right thanks bye-bye bye
so
well we're back um it was nice to take a short little break there
really fascinating to learn more about asteroid hunters and what's going on with those guys
you know who would have thought that a bunch of amateur astronomers could get together and make such a huge difference in uh
astronomical research but it's been done actually been done again and again and again and it'll be
continue to be done because amateur astronomers are undaunted you know uh i would have thought uh after
the first exoplanets were discovered that amateur astronomers would never be able to do it
because it took what i thought were huge instruments to do that
now you have people that are doing it with very small instruments and you know and working uh in pro-am
projects like with the test team for example so um
we have uh with us uh gary palmer uh in the uk
cesar brollo in argentina who's been setting up i know he has a little presentation uh
mike will you have your uh will you be doing uh something live for
us tonight do you think yeah i could be for sure um we got about another what time is my uh
my my schedule my automation schedule software so i'll start about 702 so i got about 40 minutes on about 10 minutes
i'll go out i'll go out and i'll uh i'll uh um i got to go out and just focus the instrument and everything but yeah we
will absolutely be able to show you guys perfect yeah kelsey poor and and uh
and chris will be coming on uh to discuss space art here in about half an hour so i just got an update of that
um but let's uh let's uh start with uh let's start with cesar brollo in
argentina how are you how are you can you hear me yes
well i i have in this moment i have a a live jupiter image in a windy night
on a windy night okay yes we have a i can show you a
monochrome uh jupiter jupiter um
if you are if you are agreeable i i can yes i can show you
okay absolutely [Music]
it's too too windy now oh yeah but you can see the belt yes yes i try into two optics
because you know every in my balcony every every night that i make astronomy
i have a different optics on our center repair to test
because you know sometimes you adjust and calibrate and collimate optics but
i prefer try it because it's fun
yes it is fun yes and tonight we are trying two different
things uh for for the same
for the same growth that later i'll show you
a couple of pictures of my last visit
last week to a solar observatory very historic solar
observatory and uh well we can maybe you can see to
um they are worried by the wind but
you can have here two different uh subtle dials of jupiter
right one of this is very near another one oh sorry
when i talk the wind is stronger yes yes it settles down i like right now
it's settling down you know and you can see the banding and uh some of
the questions and this is an and let me check
what are the the i think that are
europe europe is the is the the near one
okay let's let it calm down and see what we got yes but it is the same it's not it's it's
not it's a transit it's not a reputation yes now now in the yes and you have the most
interesting thing when you have or to talk with somebody that
is new in astronomy is talking about the the velocity of the light
about how you can see in the programs the position of the satellite satellite
and how you can see in a real image
yes eo is this another one and
and um they they're the
the gray red uh [Music]
the grape red uh yeah the great red spider very invisible yes
yes but we have a little of clouds but well okay now yeah we'll take it
yeah we'll take it yes so i'm curious about this caesar do
you um are you sometimes repairing somebody's telescope and then
you take it to your uh balcony and test it this way
many times many times many times yeah because the people the people is um
so sometimes don't can as uh don't explain who is the
problem right and for example this c5
is a schmidt cassette yes but that
the customers tried to collimate in their home because he thought about
i it's a typical thing you know i i i saw tesla by
30 years and um i i have a lot of telescopes
maybe i sold this telescope this ota in i don't know maybe
2004 and every time i can see return
many products to to to repair sometimes sometimes only to
clean and when i have some dudes i have some
um you know uh when i'm not sure if in the laboratory with the
artificial stars yes if they show yes if the
focal test or artificial artificial stars
don't show me all the wall problem yes i
i have permission to drive here from the balcony from the garden
yes and now this is this is a very special service um
most most companies rarely will repair a telescope and then test it
for real yeah the night sky so that is uh that is that is going uh extra for the
customers that's very good that's excellent that's excellent sure when somebody
lives near to my home i invite to the roof
and and they they are astonished with the the view of the roof
in the 37th floor and we can we can try together
the the telescope and sometimes i can explain how to use a
telescope of my customers yes it's an extra services
it's only when you work in the same that you love because it's not it's
you don't you don't take the risk of make this
actually uh when i was in argentina i had the opportunity to visit that
very nice view in the balcony and i visited caesar he took me out oh wow
okay in the sky also so yeah i can imagine
yeah yes yes bram we have with pran and james we had an
excellent excellent times in in buenos aires yes
yes really we miss this uh this is opportunity um
having an eclipse too near in argentina again i thought a lot of time that
all my friends returned to argentina but you know that's so this
this is the things of the destiny and but uh i really really
uh we had an excellent times with bram and james in buenos aires which really
was a a pleasure received for me and my family
my friends and yes the frown know
absolutely the roof because brown you you can see you can talk that it's real
yeah definitely it was really nice and it was it was a nice view of the city as
well from up there because it's in downtown buenos aires so it was really awesome and we had a very nice view of
the solar eclipse last year so oh yes yes i'm trying to
in next opportunities by train how to transmit from the roof
because the problem is about the internet but i let me make something for for next or
maybe one or two weeks more i can try
excellent okay i can stop sharing okay
all right my tonight we will
have a an excellent moon maybe i i'll be i'll
have clear from my balcony in maybe one hour more
yes yes and when i wear more i can show you the the moon
and i pry for less wine let's win sorry
and last one no never less wine yeah yes maybe more
wine no yes maybe more wine yes yes
and and i prepare my i i
prepare [Music]
to try to this computer my my presentation about presentation the pictures but yeah
because it's very very interesting the all the things about the this solar
observatory really we are in a group that will
recover recuperate recover recovery recover and
restore an uh an historic observatory
yeah normally in argentina we use all the old ones we are using completely we don't have
this is the only one abandoned observatory that we have
uh but now we are working we start to work
in in recover of this yes i remember seeing the pictures on facebook that you showed
to me and uh yeah it's nice that you're trying to preserve the historic observatories that down there yeah it's
wonderful you know yes yes great great okay all right so
um let's see who else here we have uh oh kelsey and uh and chris have just joined
us okay so that's that's great um why don't we um
uh uh go we'll go to richard grace for a moment and uh
and then um we will come back to you kelsey and chris and you can uh show us
your amazing work chris i've been i took a little peek at uh at some of your work online it's really
amazing so thank you yeah really cool stuff all right
so uh richard what do you have to share with us tonight well let's see uh to start off with it's
uh extremely cloudy outside is it i uh i did dig up a little bit of data from
the end of september uh right before the uh the show to check
a 15 minute edit to it real fast and then i realized that the show was uh
10 minutes early so it's more like a five minute edit okay but uh that still works
we have uh the running man nebula uh right next to the orion nebula uh and if
it weren't right next to the orion nebula it would probably be shot a lot more often because it's pretty awesome
yeah i i definitely love it you got orion just overshadowing from the side here
but uh yeah that's uh pretty much let's see there is one other
thing um let me see if i can snap this over there uh because
we were just talking about this earlier see did that go in
over there yeah there we go um that's my uh my best work at uranus
um i got two moons out here uh i managed to see uh some other ones over in here at one point in time but uh
not during not the way this turned out but uh because jaredes is going to be uh
as close to um us as possible here on halloween uh i know libby would love if uh any
astrophotographers out there would take some pictures this was taken with the comet hunter at only 714 731 millimeters
of focal length so i say it doesn't take a huge instrument to do it that's for sure but uh i'd like to get one of my
longer focal length instruments uh guiding good enough to be able to give a better shot at it
i figured i'd uh i'd share that just because richard that shot that shot are those
moons next next to the planet or the do you think those are reflections no those are absolutely moons um
okay uh when we had it in um hold on i'll put it back up here yeah hold on that's not
the one i want to put up hold on you can see let's do this one
okay here we have like all the stars around it okay and when you zoom in you can kind of
tell that it's check that out and they were both um they were both lined up
exactly like that in solarium um the other two were right in here and of
course i've blown this out this is like a i think this was a 40 second exposure
okay and when i was trying it with the with the schmidt i was doing like two-minute exposures
to try and get it out like that yeah um then that's where again i was just losing it due to being able to actually
guide it that focal length because i'm not even set up to do that yet um but yeah i'm sure that there's a lot
of people out there in the coming days that can probably at least get a really nice shot with four moons and i'd love to see it so
post them up there we we'd love to see it wow very cool see you stop sharing it i
think libby likes that so i don't really have a whole bunch uh else uh going on
here i might uh tease a little something uh later on in the show if you get a chance to come back to me if not all
right oh of course of course yeah we're going we're going to go to kelsey poor she
um she's at uh i i had mistakenly because i remembered nova
graphics okay back in the day and made a poster an announcement poster
he had nova graphics on there uh kelsey was kind enough to point it out to me that it's novaspace.com
which is uh very appropriate but kelsey uh what do you have to share with
us today i know that you have this uh fabulous space artist here but um
yes i have chris wade with us tonight and i made some notes about chris if i
can read them for you real quick introduction notes so chris is one of the youngest members
to join the iaa which is the international association of astronomical artists
um he won a chesley award and after he won a chest the award for his art
i convinced him to come to space fest 10 last year and he ended up being one of the best
sellers so we're very excited to have him with us he can turn anything into a spacecraft
that's what he's known for okay he has an online store called ethereal
geometry and he also sells with no space so i'll
put a link up so you guys can see it beautiful okay and without further ado i
present chris wade beautiful great all right chris you have the stage
all right thank you for joining us bye anyways thanks for having me um yeah
um okay so uh we're gonna start let's see
um okay so i've been i've been doing art my whole life um
but i didn't really have any kind of uh idea of what to paint until
until i started until i started drawing and painting little pictures of like
the images i would see when i would with the music i would write um because i synthesia as well
and so i got into surrealism that way and then
after a conversation with my professor about doing things that would
represent how like events in my life had affected me i realized i had been having dreams
nonstop dreams for several years about finding abandoned rockets
and uh you know yeah and i live in a i live in a cool town um
huntsville alabama you know we got marshall space flight center out here and yeah a bunch of
you know we had space and rocket center i mean i grew up like five minutes from there and i would have strange dreams about
huntsville as well um and they always felt so like
strange and eerie and cool and fascinating and kind of adventurous and
like you know the world felt post-apocalyptic but more
alive if that makes sense and um in these dreams
you know it was kind of like a realization of it felt like finding or rediscovering
parts of myself that i'd forgotten and uh rediscovering potential that had been
long since abandoned um [Music] and so i started this uh i started a series of
paintings huh before you get too much further here
uh sin synthesia okay explain what that is okay because i i i
know the the description of it but some of our listeners may not be fully aware of what that is
well basically like where you can hear sounds and you might see colors and for me i would see colors i
would see places i would see i would get a sense of a scenario or i could
feel like you know different types of weather based on based on chord changes or
uh even just guitar tones or synth tones or just
you know just different mozart mozart had this and from what i understand and some
some other amazing musicians and uh so i've never actually talked to anyone that's experienced this
uh directly so that's very interesting to me yeah it makes life complicated
music i feel so extremely sensitive to what i listen to it it affects my mood
like crazy yeah but it also heavily inspires my artwork as well
right so you you channel this for a creative out creatively and
wow okay that's really very interesting yeah and um so one of
the ones i did you know i did this for my senior show in school here's a print of it you know just the
saturn one with the challenge through it honestly yeah saturn one's always been my
favorite rocket you know they used to hang christmas lights from it at christmas time and um so to me it was like this sense of i
mean i was angry when i drew it but at the same time like the whole series kind of evolved into being
kind of a mix between [Music] um you know highlighting
internal like the conditions of like who we are inside um our true nature you know the
internal uh condition of us collectively and individually and
also adding you know so it ended up being kind of dark you know surrealism i mean it tends to be dark anyway
but but they want to add that i wanted to add that um that childlike
side to it because i you know really honestly at heart i'm like while i feel the sense of damage from
the things i've been through you know all through childhood and how it affected me as an adult i mean you know who hasn't um while i feel that
i also feel like like a kid that never grew up you know like so i'm adding the
humor and everything and but at the same time when i when people see my work not only do they feel that sense of
that you know serious you know eerie side of it that really
appeals to a lot of sci-fi fans honestly yeah they also get the sense of
that childlike excitement again you know so when they look at my work i want them to feel like i want them to feel in
touch with that childlike side of them that they kind of forgot about you know in adulthood you know
and you know the the dystopian stuff that you talk about
i think that a lot of times in in when it's artistically expressed that uh
there's always that um kind of something is being born out of
it you know and it's that starkness that kind of monochromatic dystopian feeling or whatever you know
that uh these these um um you know the uh the the rebirth and the regeneration
of life and especially you know for a child of course they're going to add
humor to to this and uh and they're going to play with it yeah you know so
to have some creative control over that is really amazing and that must be
uh what is so intriguing about your work right yeah i mean
i guess ever since uh since i was a kid a lot of the music i'd listened to was very kind of on the
dark and serious side i mean my favorite band's always been rush you know um
and [Music] you know but then the older i've gotten the more i've gotten into music that
would make me feel like i was coming alive and like i was taken to another world you know and so it's that
combination of um where we currently are versus who we cur
who we don't realize we actually are versus where we want to go and
all the mystery and adventure that's out there and it it can be scary but
at the same time there's just you know so much potential for what we don't realize is there and i mean
i don't know how to describe it anymore than that i know how i want people to feel but
i mean you know so i so i take these abandoned rockets you know a little more about my art i guess
i'll take these abandoned rockets and i would eventually i worked them into where i
was making treehouse cities out of them thinking back to when i passed this rocket on the
state line um you know on the way to tennessee i thought well i've been having streams what if i
actually found one of these rockets yeah you know what would i do with it i'd have to invite all my friends i
built a tree house out of this and in a way it kind of looks it kind of feels like
exploring that inner world of memory lane that is
overgrown and abandoned and then decide we're going to be kids about it
we're going to be kids and forget who we thought we were and just explore and then past that um
[Music] you know i've gotten more into space probes and uh
ufos you know on a whimsical side of it you know and then i mean like let's see
i'll show you two examples right quick there's a one i did with the uh luna i
saw this one yeah i saw this one online it's called lunacy as in uh you know kind of play on
the word lunacy i like this one which i'm doing sequels to it by the way
and i'm gonna make a whole series involving the russian space probes just because it honestly everything
this series got me fascinated with aerospace uh more than i already was and everything the russians make is just so
aesthetically beautiful you ever notice that yeah um almost on a dystopian dreamy kind of way right
then here's uh one that i call the fungal book okay ufo stuck in a mushroom patch
beautiful yeah um you know real quick before i forget to show you
um you know i also do more surreal ethereal type stuff as well dna yeah and
then that got used for the tennessee valley interstellar workshop um and
bought by one of the astrophysicists that's a lot of s syllables in that word
um yes who uh but this guy named john rather uh astrophysics up in tennessee
and um but you know i'm just continuing to explore these ideas and you know during
the shutdown i got i ended up doing what i said i'd never do which was painting pet portraits
except these pet portraits they are seriously goofy oh yeah and there's a
couple more kelsey wants me to show you oh yeah okay i call that the final judgment
uh guy's cat he wanted her to be an egyptian goddess pushing a beer off the table very cool
two cats in a in a spaceship hangar i like that one i think libby would love this one yeah yeah i just make him as
goofy as i possibly can yeah it's fun and then
for uh you know arizona product placement um oh i like this kelsey really likes this
one so i like this too i call it stuck you know at the time when i did it i felt like i was stuck
where i was you know kind of a desert void of creativity until i realized how much huntsville
actually was a gold mine for artistic inspiration for me yeah yeah
and then one more that captures the uh that sense of innocence and adventure yeah the kid in his homemade spacesuit
are finding saturn one in the woods it was beautiful thank you
and i mean really i could go on you know if you've got any questions or anything uh chris i i'm i'm curious also
you mentioned something about dreams that you have are you in your dreams do you see these visions
do you do you see the paintings or the artworks before you create them sometimes um you know
i would say about three of the paintings in the whole series
were um were based on dreams the whole series was inspired by the fact that i was
having those recurring dreams and so i'd come up with ideas and i'd make them feel like my dreams whereas
you know one of them where there's a saturn 1b that's you know kind of split in half of the tree growing through it
and you just kind of see this close-up i call it separation anxiety um you see this close-up
with the landscape you know this the rockets like off the side and then the landscape in the distance with the sunset and the lens flare
um that was from a dream and then one where i'm up on this clearing up on the mountain which later i found out von
braun lived in that area um yeah as well as homer hickam um
and but i'm seeing everybody's looking at these rockets at night time and then i
see off in the distance this holographic saturn one as if this was an idea that had not yet
been built made and you know to me it was about going so far all they had was
missiles sending capsules into space and so to me what that dream meant it was uh you know
it's like this feeling of god taking me from a place of living in response to fear to living in response to
you know that dream within me who who i really am you know and uh
you know so it was one of those dreams that left me waking up feeling
excited inspired almost feeling like i just got back from another world you know like i got a glimpse into
somewhere else you know and so i really want my art and my music to feel like
glimpses into other worlds almost like when i look at them i'm taken there for a minute you know yeah and uh is really
really interesting it really is i'm i'm on um
you know sometimes i i tell people you know because we have we have our
appliances now flying in interstellar space we have voyager 1 and voyager 2 they're already
out of the solar system we have 20 some odd
spacecraft wandering around our solar system we have
people living in space 24 7. we are a space-faring species now
and i'm curious i mean i'm curious if you kind of see humanity as
kind of already crossed over that way i mean our sphere of influence is now our solar system it's not
just earth anymore we we often just concentrate on earth and and uh you know the the the
armor or you know trying to save the earth or whatever but we are we have been very busy
exploring our solar system and uh it's it started you know
a few decades ago and and i'm curious uh i'm curious how how you
see yourself in all of this you know you're you're kind of uh channeling
some of the vision of of this and the feelings of this creatively in your paintings
uh and maybe in your music i haven't heard your music but uh when i first saw your paintings i was really struck by
them and uh so i i'm i'm pretty curious as to
how you how you see yourself in this and all of this well
um while we try so hard and put so many trillions and trillions and
you know dollars of you know into just getting things into space and getting humans
into space i think we overlook a huge key component and the key component has to do with
realizing that as humanity and as individuals we
we are capable of infinitely so much more than we believe and once we start to realize who we are as people
and start to forget about you know the things that distract us you know elections you know
all the all the all the things that divide us when we start to forget about those things and
start focusing on who we really are and and starting to realize the potential we have
um [Music] you know
i i mean just take that where you want it but right um but at the same time where
i see myself is i want to inspire people not only to be not only to
you know i want to be able to use my work to inspire countless people you're doing that you
are definitely believing themselves especially kids i want to inspire kids especially
i want to inspire adults to be kids again and i want to inspire kids to know who they truly are and what they're
worth and you know i would love to i'd love for my
stuff to inspire people to look beyond where they're at and and at the same time like
i want to feel i want to know that i am
that i'm that i'm causing people to see who they really
truly are and and to feel empowered by that and
i want them to i want us i want to cause my work i want my work to cause us as a society to
dream of something deeper and and
it's hard to describe yeah but you know i want to cause us to
i don't know i guess just to realize our true identity and our potential and
you know even if it comes by way of people looking at goofy pictures i've drawn or you know
cause them to to really feel like you know whether the colors i use or
yeah images i do just to you know transport them into another world
you know even for a few moments you know like in the same way that
listening to certain songs will take me away and make me long for a
world that seemingly doesn't exist you know all right that's what i want my my art to do
yeah i think that you're well on your way thank you i think you're well on your way that's really really cool
chris thank you for uh sharing so much about yourself and uh you know to to
talk about those kinds of things and and things that deeply matter to you are that's um
it's a vulnerability um uh to really share like that most people
don't okay and is is i'm really happy that you have with us so thank you
very much that's great that's great okay well good lord um kelsey thank you
for bringing on such an interesting artist and guest and i'm like i'm like a proud mom right now he's so yeah
it's really cool i'm not that young really cool
wow okay wonderful okay so
uh i don't know i just i think i need to let that soak in for a little bit um
and it will for a while thank you very much chris i'm gonna be i'm gonna be looking at your work more and uh i i
hope in the future you can come back on and show more of what about what you're doing that'll be awesome yeah thank you
i tell people to find me on instagram at ethereal geometry is that okay yeah absolutely find me on instagram at
ethereal geometry ethereal
geometry okay
all right very cool thanks thanks so much thanks kelsey great meeting you reported this again
okay so we have um gary palmer uh i'll ask him to
to unmute and to reveal himself uh he's over in the uk i know it's late over
there and then after gary we're going to go to rodrigo down in chile but
take care chris bye-bye thanks man
so gary how are you man i'm good thanks good good i'm i'm like i'm
[Music] i'm like in another space right now after looking at this stuff and talking
with chris it's awesome yeah it's good it's looking at all different aspects yeah everybody has
a different vision uh really really interesting very
interesting you know um and again you know these sort of
shows are bringing that out yeah this is the key thing you know
probably most of us on here wouldn't uh come across it you know what means and lots of other
topics that we've right touched on over the course of the uh that's right
so yeah eventually i'll dig out of each one of you what what's in your heart and in your mind about all this because we
are you know i think about us uh you know flying on this little blue planet so
fast through space and you know i always tell people when
it's late enough you know and they they stop with their pretenses and
and they they start to ask me they they want to ask me you know the questions that are really important to them you
know when they look up at the milky way and they see the stars and they're out there i call it being star drunk okay
but um at that point they'll ask me i the the hint that i'll get is that they'll say
scott can i ask you a stupid question and i know that the real question is coming
okay the real question that they want to know you know a lot it may be
do you think something else is out there do you think you know the big questions in their mind that they don't quite know
how to ask yet you know but unless they do this this is an important tipping point you know
i think any of us in this do get asked that a lot um and that's probably a way of people
who've got an interest broaching the subject with you yeah um you know they're not sure
whether you're approachable or you know yeah you're going to judge them
somehow yeah that's it man i think that's a real easy question for somebody to ask you know do you
think there's life out there and even some of the the you know the wise lads yeah they've got a little bit of
interest there or they've got questions there but that'd be the first thing they're asked you know so so what life
do you reckons out there or do you think something lives out there you know and that'd be their introduction
and generally after you're talking for five minutes they've actually got quite a hidden interest there it's just they'd
never voice it um and that's really the sort of key to it
but you know everybody has a different thing i think
astrophotographers are always trying to improve on themselves yeah and there's a couple of different
you know sides to that um probably mine is is to get as close as
possible to an object yeah that's always my key thing and that goes back to quite a few years ago with
people saying no you can't do that you know and as soon as that word you can't all those words you can't do come
in that's got me hooked then because i'm after the answer to do that and that
that's where the solo came from really it was just people being negative with it and looking
inside the box all the time and not willing to step outside that box and go
well maybe if you did this or maybe if you looked at it it was always a negative yes
and that's what gets your hooks done yeah and then you sort of transfer things so
things from deep sky that i was doing then i was using to get closer to the sun yeah yeah knowledge on that and now
i use that knowledge from getting close to the sun on other objects in deep sky
because they're becoming very very similar with the cameras that we're using now and the equipment so
you know you can use your um your standard deep sky telescope your
standard refractor with a cork now then you're into solo you're using more or less the same cameras
yes the equipment's tying up quite a bit in the way that we do it um but i
do think there's still a lot of negativity in some of this and
that's the the key thing is to break away from that and i think my biggest piece of advice to somebody is is to
say if you think that you've got an idea and you can do it go ahead and try it yeah
you know that really in this way in this way i mean you're also very creative in
how you approach uh some of these problems and in trying to get close and intimate
with uh what what you are uh what you're imitating you know and uh
so and i i think that i think this intimacy is something that all astrophotographers and all
astronomers uh seek you know that for me it was visually seeing as far away as i
possibly could so i i wanted to look to the largest telescopes i possibly could get access
to you know and i'm i'm very i'm blessed to be able to look all the way up to the 200-inch palomar telescope you know to
see see through that instrument and see as far away as i possibly could look you
know and and it's just um i wish there was a way to to do it further and really now i'm
realizing that the way to move this needle further is with astrophotography
you know it's a funny thing because you you can look at something and i i think it is
that same thing whether you're visual whether you're an astrophotographer you you get an ob
an object to come up might be a supernova or something and you you image that
and or you know before or after you'll be looking up the details on
you know the galaxy that it's in and and you know so on or the area of the sky
and it sort of dawns on you then you know that it's 200 million light years
away that you're imaging this supernova and you know the time frames that are
involved with that um and that i think that's always the problem when uh new people come in they
think that the um understanding the figures is everything and it's not
you know you don't have to understand the figures about this they just that's all they do they just get you
thinking you know you you you're looking at an object and you think it's taken that amount of time for the light to get
here yeah um you know when we're converting into uh astronomical units and all of the
other measurements and things really as an amateur yes they are there but they're not something
that you have to be bubbled over with it's the enjoyment of actually seeing the object or capturing the object
that's right and i think that's the big thing is keeping it simple you know simple is getting the enjoyment
from it and that's really what it's all about and it's always good fun
you know way of doing this right so even if it's
a meteor shower it doesn't matter it's just the the choice the capture
yeah whether that's visual or whether that's in a photograph it's the same thing it's
the actual capture of the object to the eye yeah right
right great so what what uh what is happening
tonight in in uh your part of the world um it's cloudy well it has been clear i
have got some uh mars and some moon which i'm just working on just running a
process through on it so in a little while i was gonna just run through some processing on it yeah
so we've done a couple of captures but they're all off of relatively small equipment so one's off an 85 millimeter
refractor and the others offer 115 millimeter refractor and i can promise that the sky is really
really bad here today so we've still actually got some quite good results out of it
and that's really the point that i'm sort of coming across with is um
it might look bad out there but you can still get something yeah that's right you can still get something
yeah a lot of guys would not do anything with some clouds like that right yeah that's it and you know i know that i've
traveled around a lot and i have a lot of people say to me oh we only go out when it's blue or we only you know well
it's really really clear and um or i'm not gonna image that because i've only got an 85 ml telescope or an
18 millimeter telescope it's possible to get stuff yes it's not going to be an award-winning winning
picture but it's still something and it's still you know an enjoyment out of it it's
that chase again using a different piece of equipment so today's conditions if we put out
an sct or an rc or something like that yeah we wouldn't get anything you know
you will you're going to chuck the data straight away and i keep saying this that when the conditions are poor a
smaller aperture will cut straight through those poor conditions and and that's really what we're after
so if i just share a screen notebook one that i'm working on
hopefully you can see that at the moment oh yeah very nice so i'm just going to
come into the other software now i've already stacked this anyway
because this will take a long time there was uh 44 000 frames on this
um and if i run the video through you can see how bad it was
oh wow look at that so most people would just give up and say no you're not going
to get anything i can't get anything out of this you know it's bouncing around too much so anyway it's been been stacked it's
been running to [Music] ready stacks okay yeah so that's the the later one
that i stacked just to recheck it so we're just gonna do is there's a little bit of wavelets in there
yeah a little bit too much look at that yeah and then
we'll play around um i had played around a little bit earlier that's what i was doing that's why i wasn't on
so if we go into told weather is saved which is that one
we're ending up with that coming out of it
and we can still do more to that that's the key issue with this so bringing it into
pics inside we can balance the colors up so we can just split this off as an rgb
image and there we go you'll see the differences between
the channels the brightness so what we want to do is try and even them out a little bit so using linear fit
we can go in there yeah select the red channel because that's the best quality one if you're
looking at the contrast and everything else and then apply that
to the blue and the green and then we just recombine them so we
just bring them back together
okay and then all we do is just a little bit of contrast on it it's never going to be
perfectly clear because of those conditions so we can just use the curves transformation on it and apply that i've
already got it set in there from what i used before so
there we go you can cover it up a little bit more and play around with it a little bit more but it's just sort of proving the
point that you know that time i think you can get some detail there even when it's poor
sure the luna um really sort of starts off in
photoshop so the first thing we've got to do is stack the images so we stack them as
normal and auto stacker and do a little bit of wavelets in there but we've done this as a mosaic so the the
first key thing that we want to do if we look back in the history to when it opened is you see the stack lines at
the top here yeah and the bottom we need to remove those so the first thing is is to open each
image in photoshop and crop those lines off there are other ways of doing it but you
generally find that they um they deteriorate the image somewhere along the combination line so you're
better off just cropping the images once they're cropped and saved into a
file we can open up file and go into scripts and then go down to
load files into stack and then browse for them they're already be where i've saved them in the crop
files to just select all three of them okay load them in and then we tell it to automatically
align source images great give it a couple of seconds and
away to go okay so there's our moon image all put together yeah now there are separate
images at the moment we can see this in the layers here so what we're going to do is is select
all the layers and then we're going to tell it to
under edit we're going to come down and tell it to auto blend the layers
now what's good in the new photoshop is if you do seamless tones and colors and content aware
any areas where you've had to move the telescope and you've got the black here yeah this was always really really hard
to patch in the black you could use paint bucket and all sorts of things but what you don't actually see is is
there's a massive contrast difference between near the moon and the edge on the screen
it doesn't look like it but when we blend these together it comes out massively but now if you select that and
select panorama and just go okay yeah it will work away for a couple of
seconds and come up with an image that's a complete
image so these black and this that's it i see
wow so now all we do is we just right click on one of the layers and we tell it to
flatten the image so it's a complete image now and then we can just deselect
that and that's our complete image but again we've used the one shot color camera so we've got the green in it um
so what we're going to do is just save the file back out
and we save it to that crop folder just so i know where it is and i'm going to save it as a tiff
yeah just so i'm holding as much information as possible okay
and then we're going to bring that image
wherever i put it that was it was in there
we're going to bring that image into pics inside okay i'm going to use the same process so we're just going to
close these other ones down as we've seen what we did with those close this out the way
and lots of people like to see the different colors the blues and the
um sort of iron colors the coppery colors in these so what we're going to do here
same again split these into the three channels and you can see straight away how dark
the blue is yeah so we want to get these back together yeah um all the same sort
of uh values uh again
select the um green channel this time and that's because our original image here
has got the highest value in green yeah so we're going to get the red and the blue to balance back up to the green
and that's caused by the color camera having two um green pixels for every red and blue
so yeah we just set up the green channel drop that onto the blue
and then drop it onto the red and this is really the simplest way of
doing it but you can do this in photoshop but what you'll find
is that you're getting mismatched on the colors as you bring the uh saturation up
and that's where the problem goes so and then we just recombine the image together so even though that looks black
and white it's not you're just going to get rid of these so they're out of the way
don't get confused then i'm just going to open the image up a
little bit make it a bit larger and then what we're going to do is go
into curves transformation again
there we go i'm going to reset the curves click on the image so the outline is
blue and then we're going to stick up the live preview box reset everything
and then we're going to turn it to saturation the end box on the right all the lines around the outside will go
purple we're just gradually going to introduce some color to the image
first pass on this will be quite harsh just to bring the color back in and the second one
you can be a little bit more sensible so just reset it and then just bring it into a level that
looks nice right
and there's your colored moon you can play around with your brightness same again you could do a little bit
here you could just brighten it up a fraction and just put the live preview back on
so you can make it a bit lighter and darker the background around play around to your heart's content but that's how
you would do a mosaic and that was done earlier this evening
yeah beautiful there you go gary thank you i problem
you know to watch you again to watch you do image processing is just uh you just flow through it so nicely and
every time i watch you i learn more i really do so that moon image was taken on an 85
millimeter telescope so you're in fairly close in the poor conditions you know so it's
making the most of it it's trying to get a little bit closer and by doing the mosaic
you'll be able to get a little bit more detail in there and that means you can crop in a bit closer
yeah fantastic that's great that's great well we have rodrigo zaleda with us
rodrigo is in la serena chile he is the owner of north optics
he's a great astrophotographer as well and he does these uh wonderful images of the southern hemisphere treasures uh
he was on our show very recently i think today actually talking about the tarantula nebula and
uh rodrigo i'm going to give you the stage
hi scott hi hello hello
today is chloe in las vegas but i prepared my
my hip image for astrophotographer okay okay but and
two nights ago i take a picture for the tarantula nebula in the small
club magayani is a galaxy [Music]
satellite the satellite galaxy milky way
and this is a um a great nebula is a amazing nebula in
another galaxy and i share with you my stream
okay i i shared
two pictures okay
okay you see my screen uh almost
almost it says uh it says you started screen sharing but we don't see
any data yet there it is okay the first image this
is the tarantula nebula i
shopped this uh in my life with the explore scientific apple um
four inch the night of the sunday last sunday
it's um four hours or a stacking image the for five minutes
five minutes frames and
i [Music] stake four hours of
the tarantula nebula
how big is the field how many degrees is this field
[Music] i
don't know now this the field but it's um [Music]
the the the camera the sensor is um watch a294 is a large
sensor like um
this is the the complete photograph for the tarantula nebula this is the the
principal uh sector of the nebula and this is another a
sector of the the or another nebula in the galaxy the tarantula nebula is
an enable uh a more big look
look for the earth is a
more big than the other nebula and
this another picture
is a white file why why view for the
magazine okay this is the galaxy cloud yes
yes and this this sector is tarantula nebula
and this is just that little area in the bottom is the tarantula nebula right yes oh okay oh
uh-huh i say see uh
okay i say now i know where it is
yes the sector is is in the
the picture with the telescope and this this photo is for a camera lens
millimeters the focal length and uh the same camera with the quache
294a camera right it's uh
amazing uh yeah it's an amazing white field view um
and this sector is an another nebula and i in the future i i shot this to this
nebula for a more more picture
but this this picture is i like very very much
beautiful great it's beautiful can i ask if that's a color camera or is
that a monochrome camera you thought it's a color camera very nice color for one shot color yeah
yeah and i work with the uh there i
serena is a city and
light pollution is in a low in la serena but
i work for the dual narrowband filter for a capture this nebula
the the dual narrowband filter work in the hc alpha and oxygen free
and this photo is uh only with a pollution filter
i have a question for you rodrigo uh if an amateur astronomer wanted to
travel to la serena and to do astrophotography
could they meet with you to uh to arrange a trip or how would they
how would they have an astronomy vacation in los angeles in your area
yes in in this area many
amateur astronomers come coming in the holidays and vacations
for the rest of the chile santiago
is the many visitors and the another parts of the world
in the elky ballet he offers the the tours and
yeah some observatories observatory for an astronomer
uh a mateo which a telescope like uh adopts on the 28 inch and
this is um he's a
very quantity of the amateur observatory la serena and el
kikibari right and
if i go to the up de la la serena about
50 minutes the the sky is dark
yes it's amazing it's amazing sky in this area 15 minutes drive right 15 minutes wow
10 minutes 15 minutes yes in the dark skies very dark skies
yes about is you go more way yeah one hours
yes completely dark wow
wonderful wonderful yeah i know that there's a lot of astro tourism uh in your area and i know that
la serena and your country treasures its night sky
heritage so it's it's wonderful it's wonderful that's
it's no accident there is some of the biggest and best observatories and some of the best astronomers in the world
working in chile so yes and in the valley if uh
[Music] for a gigantic observatory uh
yes
right many of our uh the people on the chat want to move to chile
and to do their astronomy so yes in the northeast a paranal
with telescope and the alma project with the radio astronomy
right yes it's a very intense area we love it it's wonderful
rodrigo thank you for sharing with us thank you very much thanks
thank you thanks for coming on tonight okay
uh so um uh dave uh what have you got to show us
over there in temecula well let me share my desktop and uh
let's see where is the screen share button there it is and share
okay what we have here is a picture of a failure
i uh i pulled the guide camera out of my imaging rig and put it on my 8-inch
sct and i was trying to capture some planetary images i've never done planetary
and i keep getting this disconnected error message i'm using asi cap
and for a long time i couldn't even connect to the camera and then i it started to connect and
then it just started getting all kinds of weird error messages behind the image behind there i started
to look at the moon focus and get some uh some gain settings and stuff but and
i'm using team viewer i have another laptop outside so unfortunately i don't have anything
live to show i can share some images that i've taken uh over the past couple of months
yeah this one's the elephant trunk nebula
the witch's broom yes very good and m33 the triangulum beautiful
beautiful all shot from your backyard correct shot from my backyard yeah daving's backyard is very very light
polluted and uh so he does uh he does a remarkable job i
mean you look at that m33 shot right there and uh
you know it's it would seem impossible that you would get that kind of an image from your backyard
yeah a tomato in general is not going to go about it but i have a street light that i'm
shooting over and that's that actually makes it worse right yeah so i think um
i think i might kind of maybe forgo planetary for now and stick with the
young objects i seem to have better luck with that
planetary's uh difficult it really is because it takes a lot of patience
maybe thousands of images uh to start to get the sequence of uh
you know capturing those planets with the sharpest focus and the best seeing you know
and uh so it's uh and then the processing as as you've
already seen with wavelet processing and all the rest of it there's lots of
advanced things that you can do um but what is always stunning to me is what
you know images i saw five years or ten years ago and to see the astrophotographers
continue to pull out more deep details and more data you know both in deep sky
and in planets so it just it never seems to stop it's it's uh it's fantastic what amateur astronomers
do um you know from their backyards you know with uh
amateur level processing uh programs which are
actually really truly professional level processing programs i i'm pretty happy with the images i've
been getting lately and i think you know compared to my first uh few images i think i'm
getting better a little bit better um i i do plan to meet with gary uh pretty soon
and hopefully get some more uh a little bit of insight into well that's a pun into pics inside right and maybe even uh
get better at this so uh unfortunately that's all i have to share tonight
and uh it's good though maybe during the night so i'll go set up my other imaging rig and see if i can do some
deep sky okay okay wonderful thanks for sharing with us
very good all right so we i think we've talked to
everyone so far uh uh maybe we could uh maybe if mike's
still there although he may be getting a uh i think he's um up his uh his ghosts
he's going to brothers broadcast something okay yeah we've talked to everybody but you
right uh prime vera um i know that you came just to kind of hang out um
but uh and you've been really busy with your classes and all of the rest of that
um what what is it that has been happening uh
in astronomy for you in your life well i am dealing now also with
astronomy all the time because you know finally i got a degree that i have to have it part of my life which is what i
wanted so i had like my midterms and all of that so it was quite a busy week but you
know now i'm finished with that part so i decided to just come and hang out with you guys it's awesome to hear from all
of the different talented people here and whatever they share
so um yeah i don't have anything to share i'll just leave whoever wants to go ahead
all your friends are here so all of your friends you know so that's good this is a great show yeah
and deepti uh what what is going on in your astronomy club these days
um this day we have festival in nepal so
no problem everyone is busy now and this uh high
school the ending of high school level that board exam is going to be conduct so everyone is busy for the preparation
i say okay and mike should we uh are you uh
did you want to show something now or do you want us to take a ten minute break or well if you have time i mean i could i
can walk you guys through what what i'm doing right now so you guys can see this process let's do it um okay
so as i had shared before uh you know when we we started this we obviously do a lot of uh we were doing a lot of
follow-up observations of known asteroids so uh we would kind of go through the minor planet center and look for stuff that
needed follow-up observations stuff coming from atlas and in the sky surveys and we did that for for uh quite a while
as we got our observatory code and then continued on um but about uh
oh five months ago um we were we were approached by uh a gentleman named uh
leonardo emerald who's out of brazil who just happened to see uh one of our social media channels and started
talking to me about and he he does work with sonair which is another big uh sky survey down in brazil
and uh he started talking to me about you know hunting asteroids what do you do you know and he was telling showing
me the stuff that he's doing so he was you he's been utilizing the software called sky sift
skysift was developed by a gentleman named paulo uh hulversum out of brazil
uh just a guy that's been doing um basically the field of asteroids for 25
years uh just unbelievable in this field and uh extremely well known and uh he basically
wrote this this software called skysift and uh what it's do what it does is it primer primarily you feed it feed it
images and it goes through and starts to to um look for look for asteroids um so what
we started to do is we got into this whole like let's start doing sky surveys right out of our backyard let's start
searching for new known neos let's uh let's start doing this so i started work with apollo he would remote into our
computer and started installing the software this custom software that took uh a long time to install and get going
because we would put it in then we'd run tests on our equipment it's all kind of configured for our for our observatory
this software is very much the same class that all the big sky surveys are using uh atlas uh catalina any of these
guys this is the same kind of thing that they're doing their algorithms may be a little bit different but basically we're
doing the same thing that they are we're one of very few people around the planet that are using utilizing this sonar out
of brazil who does a lot of great work jocks and those guys out there they they use the exact same setup same software
that we're using here tonight so um but i'll show you guys basically everything's fully automated um i don't
i don't do anything so i will uh i'm going to kind of walk you through here so you guys can see and you can see we
have a raza 14 as our as our telescope and our backyard observatory that's what you see above my head there so
essentially what happens is every every day about four o'clock my system will automatically do the do the
configuration for the night search and it'll do stuff in opposition over the milky way uh stuff in low elongation
anywhere you see these white boxes uh that are in here is where it's going to be looking
for that night and then it'll just calculate basically where the moon is and those kind of things you see this gray dot with the orange circle
you can see this right here let me scoot that over that's the moon okay so obviously that br that circle will get
brighter as the moon gets brighter it's pretty bright out there now so we try to we will you know try to
search somewhat close to it if we can um and and it's really is it is a challenge
for us because we are sitting in between we're in southern california uh we're 35 miles we're in dave's neck of the woods
we're 35 miles north of los angeles um i'm sitting in between atlas
uh you know catalina uh pan stars three of the biggest sky surveys on the planet how do i compete so
so we're uh we're we're definitely have some some areas in play that we're searching and
and we're doing some some things in there to to try to compete to try to to find uh known objects so but basically
the system will go out there and go okay here's where we're gonna search tonight and it'll create these maps and and all that gets pre-programmed um so then uh
what i will do is i will go out and i will essentially um you know fire up the telescope i'll load the uh the script
into acp which is this uh uh automated observatory control and uh it'll run that script that you
saw of based on those those fields that were found and what it's going to do is it's going to take images field images
so it's going to take a 30 second exposure we're running 30 seconds basically is what we're doing with the raza so we do a 36 second exposure of a
field it'll go to another field image image image another field it'll come back to that same field again okay it'll
image image again and then it'll come back again and it what it does is it needs three of the same field it'll
stack them up and then that what it'll do is start analyzing that data and looking for any motion in the in those
images automatically is the stacking so you can get fainter objects or is it
just look for movement it's looking we're looking for asteroids i'm looking for neos asteroids comets we're looking for
anything that's got movement on it so it'll go through and go okay it'll what it'll do is plate solve the image and
it'll stack them up and it'll start analyzing the data now every day my system goes out to the minor planet
center automatically pulls in the database for the day okay and it'll it'll automatically pull in any kind of
ephemeris that's been updated on anything and it'll so what it'll also do is through this through this because
we're remember we're looking through a vast amount of sky sometimes we get in areas where we know there's a lot of
known asteroids right you could be you could be doing a mosaic of an area and there's a lot of asteroids well the system will
automatically if it captures it it's going to say okay here's this asteroid based on its motion
its position angle oh it's this known asteroid okay here's here's the information on it it'll catalog that and
then at the end of the night i i will i will basically have those observations of those known asteroids i can send all
that data to the minor planet center automatically with one click of the button we're talking like hundreds and
hundreds the other night we did 560 known asteroids and and it did all it did all the observational
data on it so it took it took observations of each three positions of each three fields and it looked at that
goes okay here's here's the information i send that to the minor planet center so we're assisting with all that data we're sending that to help out with the
orbits of these uh to calculate this stuff we um the other day you guys are crushing it you're just crushing
asteroid laboratory that's just exactly so here's here's the other night all the other night this is all the
known asteroids we we delivered all the data of their orbits uh the other night that we captured this is over 600
objects yeah in one night that we captured right here wow and it just list keeps going and going and going so
so through that we're capturing known stuff but we are looking we are looking for unknown objects okay so what happens
is i just sit back and as the as the image comes in let me go to here so these are these are the live images
coming in right now um from the uh from the raza itself it's shooting uh we're kind of shooting the
milky way the other thing that we can do with skysift is what it'll do is stack the images and then it'll actually in in
really high star fields like a lot of times 10 years ago the sky surveys had a real hard time looking through this
milky way because there's a it's a huge amount of star field it's really hard to track asteroids right so this software
what it'll do is do image subtraction so it'll stack them up these stars are
are um they don't have any movement on them it'll subtract those out of the image it will not subtract anything that
has motion so now we can look we can find and try to track asteroids within the milky way
or within any heavy star field regions sure it allows us to do that so you see an image came in it automatically
calibrates it i have the i have the flat field the black uh the dark subtraction
the bias frames are already already put in there as soon as the field comes in it automatically calibrates it and then
you can see over here this black this black script box that's running right here yeah um there that's skysift so it
gets the image and it goes okay uh here's we're gonna we're gonna plate solve it it's just plate solves it based
on it found 76 000 stars in that image the rosa 14 is unbelievable by the way uh
it's uh it's uh an incredible instrument so yeah what it does just a 30 second
exposure on a razor 14 is uh is as disgusting as you can tell and we're in portal 5 skies so uh
76 000 so it'll plate solve it and then what i'll do is as soon as it puts it away and it goes okay as soon as i get
that third that third field then i'll go back and start processing so i sit there and i just wait i wait and i wait and as
soon as it starts processing then what it'll do is start filling out this this left this left side this this
yellow side box it'll start it'll start populating it with what it what it three classifications
like identified objects okay unidentified which is which is what we
want to potentially find and then anything we may have missed so sometimes you know
we get we're getting about 18 close to 18 magnitude with a 30 second exposure
anything there's some in here that were 19 magnitude so we missed them but it's going to tell you hey by the way based
on this field this position the sky these asteroids should be here you might want to go back and just take a look and
see if there's anything in here that we may have missed and it tells you that so what i do is i go okay i have this
data and we you had the uh the developer uh gentleman uh last week uh that did uh
visual pinpoint uh i believe bob danny so so it's utilizing visual
pinpoint in the background and it's also we're obviously using uh acp as our observatory control so
okay so i will i'll look at the the data uh that we just collected here just a
second ago but i just want to show you guys here's a few asteroids that we that we found last night just just just
throughout if i blink these through uh and i kind of you uh kind of hover over you can see there's an asteroid
right there in the image so are these discoveries these are these are just already known objects basically but
again i'm taking measurements on them even though they're known i'm still going to take measurements on them and i'm still going to submit that data okay
minor planet center wants you to get everything that's in your field of view so so we have i mean we have gobs of data
coming out of our our our search every night so here's another one that we we saw you know and you think some of them
are pretty bright some are pretty dim just based on their position um okay so
so what i'll do is i'll look at this and i'll say okay this is uh we have some a three
four three ident unidentified so let me load those in there real quick and i'm gonna go to tonight's search 28
uh we're under the opposition here unidentified and we just kind of and all
you do is as you go through you just start blinking through the images right we're just blinking through you're just
blinking to look is all you're doing and i can invert the image color wise look you see that there's crosshairs on there
if you can see that hopefully you can yeah and the crosshairs are telling you what it might think is a potential
object now majority time it's noise it's stars it's those kinds of i mean it's you know
it it's a lot of different variances so you just start clicking through them and you're just looking
you're just looking it's all you're doing you're looking now sometimes you might get an object you still need you
still need although you've got candidates here right yes you still need some human eyes to actually you need
human eyes to take a look okay so so you just click through them and you're looking and you're just trying to see
now here's an image that was subtracted it doesn't it has kind of a bright star in it uh but if i if i
you can see that you see how there's like a gray glob around this star yeah so there's this is a really bright star
so it's what it's trying to do is subtract those images out of there now here's what's really cool this is what
makes uh skysift really awesome say it's like well i'm not sure what that is is there is
there some stars in there what am i what am i looking at right here well wonderful paulo has put in
aladine light you go to you go to actual the field we're looking at and we can look at the dss star field or star map
uh and the in the gaia catalog and take a direct look at exactly what we're seeing right here
and uh and zoom in and take a look the the red circles are our three positions where where it thinks that are but we
can look in there we can pull up any information on these stars that are around their magnitudes their positions
anything around them but it gives us a visual of of an actual dss map to be able to see hey what am i
really looking at there because sometimes you get some weird stuff where stars are really close together and you might get a little tracking error in
your mouth and it thinks it's motion and you you pull it up you're like no those are stars i can see them on the map yeah
but but i can go right to those positions and pull them up so it allows us to really be able to double check
kind of our kind of our workflow as we go through if that makes sense so we just basically blink three of
these and then you just essentially are waiting we just keep you know we blink through them and we just wait for the
data to come in now we do have an identified object in here it says identified okay it says it's uh
dora nina by the way it's there's nothing there's nothing more fun than capturing like hundreds of asteroids and
then pulling up this data and looking at all the names there's so many there's so many russian names that are so difficult
to pronounce because there's been a lot that have been discovered in russia right so but you start looking at the names and it's like wow you know it's uh
oh there's there's there's an asteroid handle there's i mean it's like it's unbelievable the amount of names that
are just all these random names you know uh as you know so you have a question uh you started this program when
we started we really started this only two weeks ago officially now we started
we started installing this about two months ago okay now we had what now you know scott
we had wildfires we had all kinds of crazy stuff here in southern california so we had to shut down there was a point
we couldn't do anything for weeks so we got behind we literally just started fully doing from sunset to sun up full
searches two weeks ago now let me show you wow by the way at the end of every how many discoveries do you have in two
weeks we don't we don't we don't we haven't discovered anything new but we have we have thousands of asteroids that
we've taken observational data on and sent to the minor planet center now
the other thing that we do there's a couple other things here we also do transient searches so what the system
will do is it'll take a catalog of so you have your three your three fields right so it'll take a
one one field to catalog and it'll store that image now i come back to this place later time
say it's a year from now six months from now next week tomorrow as soon as i come back it's going to pull that library
image and it's going to go oh here's that same spot let me pull the library image it's going to stack it it's going to look for supernova it's going to look
for variable stars oh wow okay and as we build our catalog it's we are literally doing transient searches at the same
time we're doing asteroid searches the other night i ran for four hours because it got
cloudy it was right when we got a little weather this last week and i ran for four hours and it was an area i'd been in before i captured 40
known variable stars wow four hours time in my catalog 40.
so we have we have an um an excessive amount of data coming
out of our our backyard observatory um but let me let me just look at this uh i just want
to show you this uh um i'm gonna just pull this over here real quick so you can see i want to look at this identified object
here just so we maybe we could see it um and then and it catalogs everything so
we just go to our id section here and we hit open we're just gonna hit go and
take a look and and there's the asteroid right there you just see it oh wow sure right there so
it's it just captured that uh it gives its name it's information it's a main belter coming in
uh you know position angle 87 degrees but we can look at every one of these and and zoom in on them and and take a
look and and see them that's our three images that are that are blinking through so uh but there it is so but what's nice
about that like i said is that that catalogs that i don't do anything i that
that all happens in the background so at the end of the day like tomorrow morning sure i get up in the morning when i'm
drinking my coffee i go oh i wonder how many asteroids we observed oh 600. oh let me send all that
data to the minor planet center one button click sent done so this is exactly what the sky surveys do right so
they're doing the same thing as you see in the minor planet center periodical there's
when you see the the amount of observations you see the sky surveys usually have pages right they have pages
this is why they have pages exactly why because they're doing massive searches and they're cataloging all stuff now
guess who else is going to have pages baby yeah all right we're going to pay you change is coming out so
this is what we've done in uh two weeks uh right here this is this is sent to
the minor planet center uh this is our coverage area in just two weeks of running wow uh and this is
directly from the minor planet center itself on our observatory okay uh the amount of search just in just in the two
weeks that we had this thing up and going so incredibly productive it's amazing yes amazing what you're doing
you know uh you know hey let us let us know if you're hiring for an assistant okay at the bottom
well it's funny you say that uh panamera because here's here's one of the challenges so
um sonar in brazil by the way that does amazing work they find comets they find neos
they do incredible work uh jocks they have a raza 11 on a paramount mx plus that's what we're
running and paramount mx plus a rasa 11 they make discoveries but here's what they do
they have a now remember we're we're doing we're doing fields for those that don't know the big thing about asteroids
is cadence of of of the time in between your images to capture motion
okay we're chasing race cars that are flying through our solar system so some of them are kind of barely scooting
along because they look like they're scooting along because they're really far off in the distance some of them that get closer look like they're really
moving out pretty fast so but the idea is to have spacing in between those images five minutes 10
minutes so you can see the motion what sonair does is they'll do a 30 second exposure with like two minutes in
between you go oh my gosh what are they doing you know what they're doing they're tracking fast movers they're looking for
fast movers because the sky surveys have a little bit harder time tracking fast movers sure okay but
with which is something we've talked about doing but here's where i wanted my point panavera is that a fast mover
remember i'm sitting here waiting for this data to come in okay and i see that thing come on
the point it's very easy to lose it unless i do a follow-up observation right now i mean
you gotta you gotta be on those things if they're moving so my point is that i have a full-time job
i can't stay up all night and do this we generally let i'll let this run till one in the morning then i go to sleep and i get up in the morning and i look through
the rest of the data as it's coming i let the telescope run but uh but i can't do it so one of our things we're talking
about is is okay you know these guys all have teams of people uh including the sky service that are looking at these
blinks uh throughout the night because you got to be on top of the data when it comes to because you don't want to lose
an object right uh and that's that's the that's the funny part about is that okay this can really grow into something even
more for us down the road uh which is pretty crazy but uh uh but yeah it's uh it's it's
been an interesting run scott and i gotta tell you i i never thought we would ever get here but uh uh but it is
a lot of fun right now and it's a lot yeah yeah you built it and you know you know where your car is
but you know the other thing we have that's nice is because we're part of the worldwide
variable star hunters they we have a we have 24 inch plane wave in abu dhabi
and uh so i i'm work i with them they have a whole we were talking the other day it's like okay now that i'm
i'm creating all this data if i get up in the morning at six a.m and i'm drinking my coffee
and i blink through and i see it i see something sure all i gotta do is get on the horn with them and they can do a follow-up for me right now at that time
of the day i now have the other side of the other side of the planet covered
for us so the talks we're having now is how do we build uh more uh observatories around the world
the other thing the software will do is i i have it set for we're just looking at new objects right now
um just just just trying to find new objects what else what the other thing we can do is
this thing is going out every 15 minutes and looking for at the neo cp page which is all the objects that are brand new
coming in off of the sky surveys that need follow-up immediately and i could set this thing if i wanted
to to only do follow-up all night long only off of anything coming off of that neocp page i could program the script
hit run and sit back and this thing will just spit the data to me just like it is but only doing follow-up on all those
objects so now our talk is how do we get another observatory uh around i think we
you know i know dustin's got his observatory going to texas i've been talking somebody about setting that up
in uh and and having a system that just does that just those complete follow-up off
of that um we are one of about four people on the planet that are utilizing this uh software system and doing what
we're doing on this level we are literally doing what the sky survey is doing on a uh on a backyard level is
what we're doing right now it's fantastic i mean it's very professional that is so
cool yeah right right wonderful wonderful uh i'm stunned
really and and those those that don't know we do you can see my i mean on the on the
on the uh uh the zoom here we stream this stuff we have a we have a streaming channel on
twitch asteroid underscore hunters so you can we stream every sunday night but the other thing we just we just started
last week is if you look at twitch.tv slash asteroid search asteroid search all one word i am live
streaming this right here uh every night that we're running and i don't talk i just let music play and you
just sit back and watch the sky survey go down and you watch me collect data and i blink through images and that's
that's that uh stream will go for like 10 hours because i don't stop it until the part that scope parks itself at six
in the morning and i'll just let it run all night and we've had you know we get 100 people or something watching all night long
so it's just one of those those put in the background but but you get to see you get to see it in action and i'm and
i'm you know i'm super grateful my son and i we talked about we really talked about doing this we really wanted to bring this to
to you know the community we want people out there that are astronomy that love the stuff that hey man you can do
science out of your backyard you don't have to have this crazy elaborate setup we started out with a uh eight-inch um
edge with a hyperstar that's what on a cgx mount i still have that telescope sitting right here next to us that's how
we got our observatory code we we used that i had somebody the other day i taught him he has a rasa eight he uh he
took some observations on an asteroid submitted the data uh you know scott this the last 10 years have just been
incredible with the cameras and the capability it's like now all of a sudden you can do these things that you could
never do before uh unless you had massive budgets and you could only had to be you know set up in chile or hawaii
or these other places no man we're doing this right out of our backyard and we're doing it with consumer grade yeah
you know right out of la is where we're doing we're we're literally 35 miles north of la
in bortle five we're kind of on the edge of portal five portal four uh but we have some transparency out here we do
pretty good i mean you can see you know you can see what the raza does uh you know i mean that that instrument
as you know is just unbelievable we are shooting with a full-frame zwo 6200 camera
um so we're we're and we're bins i mean we're you know this is a 60 megapixel camera but i for the file sizes i have
to bend down because it's like they're just astronomical so um but uh but yeah this is this is what
we're doing my son and i this is our little problem
so there it is do you think that you'll ever hit burnout stage i mean you're you're probably i'm sure some you never
know but what's happening is that we've had such great response from people around the world we have we have a full
discord by the way those of you man join the discord we we have guys we have uh we're um
i'm really good friends with sam dean who uh is my 19 year old phenom uh he was uh he's studying to be an
astrophysicist he does uh neo research on the on the side um he's he actually
he's in our discord and he has i have a little channel in there for him you know what he does that's so cool you guys
will love this he does recovery of lost objects well how does he do that you know what
he does is he'll go and find and say okay there's an object that was found 10 years ago that they tracked for maybe a
week or two and they lost he'll look at those calculations on that orbit and he'll go you know what i think it's
going to be over here he will pull he'll predict well you'll predict he'll pull the images from the sky surveys all these
images for these big sky surveys guys are available online from a lot of these big telescopes around the world so he
pulls these these images and he starts searching and he finds stuff and he recovers
asteroids this guy does this guy's done tons of tons of asteroid research doesn't even own a telescope
he doesn't own a telescope so he's just doing the research he's just online pulling the images stacking them up
looking at him going hey and he finds stuff man the other day he found a new moon on uh a new uh moon around jupiter
as well we've got a lot of stuff going on in our discord i my whole thing is scott going around jupiter yes uh trojan
moon uh that they discovered so um and he's he's been searching through images he's he's discovered comments all
kinds of stuff because he's searching through these images he's 19 years old i love this kid because it's like he's
inspiring um inspiring my whole my our whole thing my son and i is like we're trying to surround
ourselves with people that that know that you know look i mean we've been doing this for a year and a half okay yeah
i you know uh but i i will i will not claim to know everything in the room you know at all so i i try to find the guys
that do we get them on our on our team and we get and we do this stuff so what we are doing is we're building we're
building kind of a brand building building this out we we're in the in the process of putting together the asteroid
hunter science center uh website and uh through that you're gonna be able to uh we have uh links where you can search
through asteroids it pulls information from the minor planet center database we're going to have stories and all
kinds of stuff we have i'm going to have people like paulo who have 25 years experience he's going
to be in there posting articles doing things that he does because you know i'm just trying to i'm
trying to branch out to find people that are doing the stuff and kind of get them in the same room together to say hey uh
show us what you're doing and uh this is this is kind of the science and we we want to harbor that and and let people
see we want people to see it i'm the only one in the world showing a sky survey on stream guys the only one
i want you're going to want pran vera on your team she's defenseless exactly yeah exactly well i i i know the work i
see the work she's done on facebook it's amazing stuff she's doing so uh but that's exactly right we want to find
people that are that are into it but like i said our big goal is to bring it bring it to the masses but you know we
have you know we have uh we have our own you've seen uh astro beard uh you know he's had our our
stickers and stuff we have oh yeah we have mugs and t-shirts shirts and mouse pads
we have a whole brand going on over here guys very cool a whole merchandise line as well
so we are we are but we're we're we're all about this science you know we also as i've said we do stuff uh with that 24
inch plenty we've done some test work as well uh we have confirmed some supernova uh right out of our backyard here for
assassin uh we do follow up work for them as well so um a lot of stuff that we have going on
but our whole thing is i'm just trying to build this you know we have this system now that's just creating data it's just like it's out there capturing
data it's capturing images it's so now it's like we're feeding the machine and we're building it yes
you do all the follow-up observation and report them to the minor planet center but uh have you tried to do any uh like
astrometry like photometry also on the asteroids like to according to the light
to learn the period rotations and we we haven't done any of that so where we
started was we started in the astrometrica world and then now you know we do follow up we just do tyco tracker
so we're all about position and speed that's what we're doing we're just trying to figure out these uh these are these things i've done none of that uh
kind of light curve stuff but that that's the kind of stuff that we would love to have if if you're
into those things in our discord showing this because our discord we're really trying to build this community out for people to see it and we want all aspects
of the science um because what i found and and part of what's driving this is what i found is that we started this
year and a half ago you know how this is you guys when you want to learn something where do you go
you go to youtube you go to the internet and you try to find i couldn't find anything man it was like
oh it was so difficult and what i did find was you know you'd find you'd find um
uh you know institute studies from colleges and things going on where the where the big boys are playing like and they're and it's awesome but but it's
like really hard to to try to understand that when uh when we're when we're trying to learn this from kind of kind
of a bare bones deal so um i had a couple of guys that had posted some videos
uh on youtube david rankin was one of them um and and and they had shown some
stuff and i just got enough to be like okay i can kind of get started and we started submitting data and and it
wasn't good it wasn't good to start um and with the minor planet center as you probably know
you have to you have to prove yourself you can't just like oh i'm going to get my observatory code here's a few things
of data it's like no they want to see you giving data they want to see it consistent they want to see you do a
good job so i started submitting it and i was having problems and i was very fortunate
i i'm you know david rankin who who uh was just kind enough to say hey send me your images and i sent them to him and
he says oh here's what you got to do do this this then he kind of gave me a list and i went through the list and next
thing you know it was like okay you know and then and then within a month or so it's like boom here's your observatory
code uh we got to know some people at the minor planet center peter vargas uh down there at the minor planet center
knows us very well and peter shout out to you man uh i think i think they like our story being a father-son
doing these things because uh they respond to us and uh he's he's given me feedback on some stuff and uh which from
what i understand is very rare uh it's kind of unheard of those guys are super busy down there and it's really
difficult to get them to respond because they're you know look i mean think about the amount of uh observatories around
the world that are sending them data on a daily basis it's thousands and thousands of observatories so um but i just
found some kind people to help you know what's that i have one question which software you
are using recently for student sourcing so right now right now for for the
search there's about seven pieces of software that are running right now um so before when we were doing fall and
you don't need seven pieces of software for follow-up observations uh when we started we used um sharp cap which i
believe is free uh we captured images of sharp cap and we used astrometrica which is only twenty five dollars i'm recently
using estimation okay so you can literally take observations you can measure take uh observation measurements
on that and you can submit that data and you can you can do real science with that work um we progressed
as as we got a better camera and certain things we got into tyco tracker which is only fifty dollars which you guys have
shown on this channel you're showing one of your gentleman was showing it last week phenomenal software for 50 bucks uh
daniel parrott who wrote that just those guys amazing work that they did that software is
is incredible for what you get for fifty dollars again you could use sharp cap to image
what we're using now is we use maxim dl because apollo wrote the software for
maxim we're using skyx obviously because we have our paramount mount running so
we utilize the pointing model out of skyx we're using acp for observatory control
that runs the actual script uh that is developed for that um so i have that we have skysift running in the
background that's doing all the processing of everything spits the date out and then we have visual pinpoint
running as well uh on top of it so there's there's a lot of aspects that are going on there's a
there's another two piece of software sky scheduler that schedules everything remember i showed you guys the maps yeah
so that's a piece that's a custom piece of software and then tau which uh basically takes the uh and and
sends the control data to to uh um acp and kind of the kind of a
control system so it's it's running as well so we have we have a lot of stuff here and i
you know i mean you guys i showed you the um our crazy setup here so my son and i
have custom built our computers and they're no slouch computers we have uh that's one thing we do
and i have the ryzen 3 900x 64 gigs of ram with 2080
super cards and all kinds of stuff going on so we've custom built our machines to handle all
this um and uh and and run the streams and do all the stuff that we have going on here
so um so we have definitely expanded out but you don't you don't
need all that it's just something that we are doing and and it is it does take a lot involved to uh to get to to do
this kind of work you know you gotta mentioned i mentioned earlier in the chat that your office looks kind of like
the nasa mission control center it does well you know you know it's funny uh uh
there's a lot and again we stream remember we stream on twitch right so so my son and i i i'm actually uh i'm in
television post production i i mix i'm an audio mixer i mix uh tv shows i've been doing it for 25 years uh i'm
currently working on alaska the last frontier on discovery channel if you guys haven't seen that uh check that out
it premiered last sunday i mixed that show uh but uh i've been i've been kind of in film and television for 20 plus
years so i'm kind of like okay i have a lot of knowledge about cameras and all this kind of stuff um so when we started
our stream it was kind of like what are we going to show because there's people out there that are showing beautiful
images like uh you know like we saw earlier the moon and these beautiful images we're just showing like
star fields in black and white
and it's like uh and then people get to see a white when they see a uh asteroid they
see a white dot moving it's like okay that's not super fun
well you know what let's make the channel look awesome so then people want to will want to come to see the
aesthetics of it so part of it is that we kind of built it out to be like science is awesome
it is awesome so so yeah that was a little bit of the thinking behind that
sorry i'm taking up all your time no that's cool i think you got everybody kind of
charged up here so that's great that's wonderful wow that was amazing thank you you're very
inspiring thank you thank you yeah yeah we love it and we love it it's uh it's a
lot of fun that's for sure well uh who who else has something to
share tonight hey scott this is dave sure what uh one picture i'd like to
share okay um it's space related it's not you know per se uh astronomy related but
um okay let me well everything eventually is astronomy related yeah
yeah essentially okay let's see my zoom out of the way
just in case people uh don't believe in aliens alien abduction yes
i figure since it's halloween it's appropriate [Laughter] oh yeah that's me being abducted yeah
that's a big alien that's right that's funny
you know a lot of people do have done educational outreach during halloween and
you know so they would set up their telescope outside the kids would come by to you know trick-or-treat or whatever
and they could get a peek through a telescope and it was a great way uh to do educational outreach and
uh you know i was starting to think you know how are we going to do that during
uh this pandemic you know so um i think that uh you know people will
still celebrate uh this this holiday somehow
and i think that some astronomers will do maybe some electronically assisted
you know astronomy and you know for people to come by and see
it or something like that or maybe drive by i have no idea but uh what
do you have any thoughts on that at all i did that last year i just set it up in
my front porch and as kids came by trick-or-treating they got to look through my telescope
right it's really rewarding you hear kids for the first time looking through it and going wow that's cool
that's kind of stuff i live for as far as during covid19
part of what i was trying to set up tonight was to do it electronically i was planning on setting up a monitor
outside my front and just kind of letting them walk by and see something see what it is right
now my club um actually still does um star parties at one of the local
temecula wineries and active star parties right now okay
and what they do is they just uh you know clean everything in between people making sure that they're masked and
everyone and does social distancing i see i say yeah i would like to mention uh my
friend have griffin who i uh partner with asteroid hunting he's in south carolina uh every halloween he likes to
do kind of an outreach event in his backyard he's very big into astrophotography he's really really good
at that and he's very much into like building tesla
coils okay pronouncing that direction yeah you're pronouncing it right that's all that stuff with electricity which is pretty
cool for children and he does it in the backyard and he's like big lightning bolts and stuff yeah and this halloween
so probably i should tell him to come up in the show and talk about it yeah that
would be interesting that would be very interesting um we should
plan something near the halloween period if not halloween itself
and it's coming up speaking of electricity so that's saturday
oh do you mind if i show you real quick yeah please
so i've been working on this this is a
big old 32 amp hour lithium iron phosphate so my gosh put together myself
and i love it i could run a car off of this i think um
every two like these two these two these two yeah you can put these packs together any way
you want i made it this shape so i could put this battery management system here
i see and this basically connects with two wires between the negative terminal
and where the negative uh output would be and then on the bottom like an rc car
you got these little jacks that has like five wires that come out of it that basically hooks to every little
part in between allowing you to build yourself your own lithium iron phosphate pack at whatever
size or that you might want to be able to use um i'm probably going to do a little
presentation on this sometime soon so i just kind of wanted to tease it a little bit
sure this is also what they call a super capacitor bank uh and that's what you take a uh
you got a bunch of protection board on the back of that right there but uh basically
this will go up to 14 and some volts and this will go up to the same so they're pretty much safe to run together
um these cells are actually capable of 200 amps of discharge
each uh they're four in series to make a 12
volt system but they're also four in parallel to go from the eight amp hours of each individual cell
up to the 32 amp hour capacity that i'm looking for anybody who's interested in these cells they're made
by a company called headway uh and their size are 38 120 so they're 38
millimeters in diameter 120 millimeters long so inch and 5 8 by
5 inches give or take a bit but uh just something i'm putting together and i'm going to be using it as
it's smaller than my portable command center which weighs about 70 pounds sometimes if you gotta
take the whole telescope gear all the way up a hill in a field or something it's a little more than i feel like carrying
uh so putting this one together to kind of do that in the middle and also wanted to be powerful enough to jump start a
car if i ever needed it to be yes at the very least i overkill things when
it comes to electricity because i mean think about it this way these
cells can go a thousand cycles and still have a hundred percent of their rated capacity
they can go 2 000 cycles and still have 80 percent of their rating capacity that's going to take me a long time but
you know because they are more expensive than lead acid you have to justify it some way and you know a lot of acid
battery you can only lug down so much of it lithium you can take a lot more out of it and uh they're a lot more
forgiving as long as you have a battery management system or you really keep an eye on what's going on
sure i'm not gonna get into that too much but at some point soon i'm going to be putting together a little presentation on that and uh showing off
the finished product and probably it working everything and awesome well power management is very important to
all amateur astronomers you know especially those of us who work remotely so
absolutely right excellent
so rodrigo what are you doing over there i see a telescope i see you looking into the camera every once in a while
maybe just has the camera running it's good
all right there you are yes did you did you get clear skies
hey no there okay yes uh cloudy
determined cloudy tonight and um i
um up the temperature of the camera
okay yes all right
close the telescope sure sure okay all right
how about you gary do you have anything else to share tonight yeah can do i've been working on a
image in the background so okay as usual um wasting my time just playing
around with things and generally going from there so i think we
did some processing on this um or we saw the capture of it it's only
about 30 minutes of data so we've taken it through all of the stages here um
got the color into the image and then we split the image split the styles off
brought some more data in an illuminance channel and then recombined those back up to get
the color um and then it's about there at the moment so it's
about 30 minutes worth of data um of the fcd
102. great wow
so yeah it's just a test image it was just literally testing uh one of the field flatteners we were using on it
which seems to be working pretty well uh very well right yeah
it looks like sand you know there's so many stars that that's always something that you
look at on these wide-field images um you know
you you do you look at them and then you you know as i've said before you look at things that
jerry and other people are doing and they're hunting planets down around these stars and you look at an image
like that and just go well if there was just one planet around each of those stars
all right that gives you something to think about yeah certainly when you get these these deep style filled areas
um but they take a lot more work in the processing to look after the styles it's
very very easy to just blow the styles out of propulsion um so you you're trying to keep hold of
the the detail in the stars and some of the color that that's what really
sets your image off is if you've got some color in the styles and it's very easy to over expose them
and that's one of the easiest things to do on any of the the targets is to overexpose so it's a
balance of keeping that but as we said you know everybody's saying the technology the cameras
that are coming out at the moment um you know the software it
it's the heyday for doing this sort of thing you know it's making them hands yes anybody's thinking about getting
into astrophotography now's the time yeah i mean compared to what we were
trying to do in photoshop even six years ago you know um separating out stars and all
those sorts of things um and you know i'm looking forward to another
good comment that comes through and stays with us for a while and then we can remove the styles out of that image
and have a real good look at what's going on right there's the add-ons in pics insight and
uh things like starnet enabling you to do that so easy now um
whereas it was a real ball to get a star mask in there you might be adding two or three images
together to create a good star mask to cover all of the different styles so areas like uh orion where you've got
a lot of large styles in there or the halls nebula they're always a pain to cover you know in any software
and try and preserve those while you're um you're bringing out the detail and the
rest of the image so yeah it's good fun at the moment um
but it does take a lot of work working it all out and going through processes and scrapping stuff and then coming back
to it with a new lot and changing the way that we're moving forward that's the
fun bit yeah okay
we're gonna post um the uh discord link for uh asteroid hunters
onto our chat give me a moment here
thank you scott thank you scott thank you
there we go there we go okay great
cesar do you have any more um any more things to show us tonight
uh yes um first of all i i need to know if if you
can hear me with the wind because last time that here in the balcony was really windy the
noise in on the microphone was horrible but can you hear me good
we can hear you yes it's okay okay okay well um
[Music] later i i have the moon but if if you
like i can show you some pictures instead of uh
today to the solar observatory let me
share the screen one minute
[Music] wow
okay now i can share okay
well this is
this is the the solar observatory of san miguel san miguel is a
it's a a city near buenos aires no more than
25 30 kilometers and here you can see the dome where is the
celosta celeste where do you have the system with two mirrors
and here here you have the vacuum chamber the vacuum tank
and all the system that i'll show you okay
this is an another view of the tower this is a big complex maybe are
more that four or f six blocks
uh square blocks wow this is
this is a video where i can show you the the vacuum chamber
i will show you two uh a draw of this to
understand look this okay this that
like the tower yes it's yes it's the first floor
is is the vacuum chamber where here let me show you
it is possible in the base
yes inside this do you have two mirrors
and i will show you well this is part of of in this in the
first in the second floor what is the the
the superior part let me check
because it's i have a lot of different image but here is the complex
here is is the the will of the of the solar observatory
so see sir is this complex still active or not not active no no no no
okay yes this is the second floor wow where you can see yes
now now where we start to to reveal this to re recover to
restore is in the words because maybe you can see
you can see um that
[Music] sorry i
know the things of windows are horrible
yes sorry
i'll start from here okay
you can see the screen well this is a this is for another instrument uh a refractor
burial refractor maybe from the 1920s this is one meter of the cellostates in
the top of the welding fortunately the mirrors are
how do you say our comps are without problem or or big scratches
of course that i don't touch this okay
what i
yeah caesar i i don't know that we're looking at the
there we go no yes it's okay yes okay
let me let me know if you can show the the screen now it's okay
yes no you're not sharing right now okay let me
this oh no okay
okay okay now he's okay no yes i see a bunch of small images okay
yes yeah what there we go okay here we are yes
well this is the the the diameter of the of the
observatories uh 12 inches maybe the
the we are watching with the characters because many many
a lot of information was and we are working
to recover information yeah you know this is the always the part of the celeste the
celeste that i think that this is in english in spain we say celebtato the
two mirrors right um of course yes
bringing the the image of the sun because the telescope is only a ver uh
it's uh it's not with movements that the telescope that we know
here this is a picture that we took one year ago and you can saw another picture
the the with the most uh abandoned uh situation now
and we're starting yes with a worse situation that my last pictures
one year ago this is the part where here you have a cover and from here the
the this sunlight is coming it's incoming okay it's going to the to the vacuum chamber
going to here sorry first going to the to the main
mirror the system is um as a system out of axis
is very interesting the because it is from the maybe from the
30s 1930 1936
this is now that one of things here do you have a
the dichroic mirror or filter yeah here do you have a
h alpha chamber we of course that will be uh
we will be changing that's a film camera right there yes we we are
changing this to digital systems sure
well we lost this part now we can't because a lot of parts from these
pictures to the new pictures are lost you know we are what is happening are people
stealing parts
yes not in this in this part [Music]
was a [Music] they disassembling furnitures and
touch a lot of things yeah you know because well it's very very large
very very long history
now is do you remember the pictures yes here the reflex camera is not more anymore
fun we don't have yes we start to to work a lot
when i say we um this is a part of the government of san miguel was very very
interested to have the property of the observatory to recover
and i am a part of a global club and astronomy local cloud astronomy uh yeah
the um that with santiago mayes
and a lot of amateur astronomers work uh are working to
to recover this fortunately the government of this small city of san miguel
have the keys of this and they are really really interested in
making investments of course that they they need receive all of helping the nation finance the
nations uh you know because um we are working a lot uh
in recover this and uh i have a lot of work here
cleaning optics of course but we need we are recovering first of all the
information unfortunately we are recovering good information look this is the
spectrometer spectrometer right you can see all is full of pigeons
oh much further well you know pop off pigeons
yes right yes yes
the souls is like a fishing club is horrible we are going next week with
a special specificity people that of course um
when you have a problem of of rats pigeons you know yes they
the the government of uh of this uh the major you know
are very concerned about this and first of all we need to go out
uh the pigeons because it's it's a black it's terrible right to clean
yes especially for people that came to this book is coming to clean
this week and we can start to to remove all
and you know for for example this decry you you remember the first pictures from
now this is the last week and um well this is a
it's a very very bad state of the things but come on we can recover this
look this is incredible we are in a pro here you have
the the the top of the tank the vacuum thumb
over the top you have the spectrometer we don't know how many things work and
how many things are broken but fortunately the mirrors
that i inspect last week are okay um maybe we can
put this in in functions next next year
now we are in a process of recovering first of all clean
and search part of instruments
uh fortunately we have a lot of support from uh anime
astronomy argentinian astronomy association the dissensation of of uh professional
astronomers we are recovering a lot of information
uh with a works that many people make in the solar observatory we don't
know if this is of course that is now when we recover this maybe this is not for the
first line of investigation but it's very interesting for um astronomers
students of astronomers church and dealer and i think that
that maybe we can um think in
work to make a very very fine and good quality image of sun spots but in the
line of calcium and because when you have a very
the the precision of the of the mirrors uh i
found that in in in a in a paper are
lambda over 10 the whole system is lambda over
nine eight nine it's it's really precise very nice yeah yes yes well the the
complex have a lot a lot of things to store this is a card size
yeah uh i i remember that is six inches per side uh people
uh carl's eyes curl size square size wow okay
yes unfortunately people came to still
stole bronze parts that they maybe they'll only
sell in market well wow the objective
is okay this part the back focus is entirely lows
it's horrible but well we we are thinking to
reveal the same because i i come all the information about this
this model or the back focus how we can reveal um
it's welcome because we love to reveal in the same with the same uh you know
sketch or or design of the old style
in argentina we have another another instrument maybe we can copy
the back focus do you remember the system with the yes uh
all in bronze is an art of well there is a uh there is a very nice
uh zeiss telescope in uh i believe it's zeiss
in uruguay at the high school the historic high
school that's there and it's kept in perfect condition perfect and maybe
maybe you can see some photographs or maybe you can visit there absolutely yeah yes yeah yes
here is part of the complex here okay it's another car size smaller with a
solar filter here it's a monochromic uh spectrometer
and in this in this dome we don't have nothing i say we are thinking to make to
put another telescope sure and it's a it's a it's not a rural area
but for solar observation it's excellent sure is and of course that for
for all astronomy is is okay well this is the state of the of the main mirror now i prefer
and put the the yes is weeks in this you know
a broken solar filter for the nether telescope but this is entire this telescope is okay but i need only change
this this filter yeah i think that yes and all in the
system of filters i don't know but you know it this is very very nice this
is another telescope and this is complement here you can see let me show you
[Music] how is how is the system do you remember here
yes is it celestial [Music]
oh wow is the platform do you remember here yes do you have the
the vacuum tank okay it's one of the people that say who
because it's at an unusual telescope this this system yeah with the vacuum uh
chamber so is this to keep uh air currents to
yes absolutely no air currents at all and uh and to have the extreme high resolution
i guess in the final yes absolutely and i think that that i i i love to recover in this area
because this area of the camera yeah prefer have a very high resolution um
of course thinking in the diameter the limits of the fraction uh they are these
and two i prefer in the calcium line have a big uh image of sunspot so high image scale
i see yes yes maybe it's the idea today to have a more you know because maybe the
spectrum is not so interesting like uh like the work over sunspot in the calcium line
right even though well of course that we are starting to recover this
uh like a historic place and we really love to make
this to work again how that only how old is the observatory caesar
i think that this i have this this this is from the 94
1942 the the uh
period okay no more than 1942 but the another things
i have are from the 1920s
and this was a this was uh installed by the government or by the university or
who was original from a college uh was from the air force too
okay and from the air force now the air force is is abandoned the
place yeah and now is for the local government not for the state government only for for the san
miguel government no yes this is for a small town i say
wow i really the the best part is that really they
they uh really love to keep this for for the community
oh yeah absolutely and
really this have have future because when the government say okay
we keep for us we we keep and we care we we are interested to care
is the best part of this right of course
our company seraco is like a little sponsor for this but really we need more uh
conventions or you need financial support right yes not for astronomy if not you
know coca-cola bizarre
if people watching this program want to donate money towards uh helping you preserve this uh
astronomical facility in argentina where would they send money to
well in this at this moment um i don't have idea because we are
starting with this but i think that uh with visha vista kopmos
have an account maybe in your time or
no maybe maybe the first that we need is helping in
every part of the world people that have the same have the same
system because it's very old and yeah the best part
is the information where people that have okay here or i don't know united states in
europe yeah people that have one of this
with the same system in different size you know to recover the information and
have an idea how how to make something um
you know digital [Music] with uh improve the the functions of this because the
best part of this is is make something that it is it's
known for a museum it's for for use again to
to to bring again to the light yes i i know of someone that may be able
to help with
the [Music] you know with the telescope and that that would be the antique telescope
society uh in the united states and the gentleman that comes to mind
is john briggs john w briggs and he may be a wealth of information for
you uh and may be able to help you uh get this
thank you very much because yes i know that you are you are you work the look of in recover uh
uh years yards observatory chiropractor i'm i just tried to bring attention to
the problem that's all you know so uh but they have a very capable uh
uh organization now that's uh getting the money and the facilities and
everything back online for that very historic refractor you know so
that's that is uh uh it's special you know world's largest
refractor still working today you know yes so yeah still working today
astronomy yeah can can happen maybe 100 years but
they'll still this thing's still working because it's still working
telescopes don't go bad really they just need to be cared for yes
yeah that's right well thank you thank you very much
thank you thank you for showing that to me i will email you john briggs's contact
information okay thank you so much yeah whenever you have something to do
people that love like to deny something of course that i i make another presentation with
maybe with uh the new things that we are working you know
yep there's there's another group also that may uh
help you and they they do they have just finished working on uh lowell observatory
uh and their new outreach center where they're literally getting millions of dollars in
to fix uh this new uh outreach center um
so the money's there the money's there and the interest is there so uh it's just a matter of making it
happen so yeah yep the first thing is
how we choose the things that we need to you
know to restore to work because
it's is have a program of work
to have an idea about how to reveal this and of course we have a lot of
information but every the first the first side is
how to think and people that say okay i have we have the same the same instrument or we have these
problems that we you know yes this is the best the best thing
calcium is not easy to image is it caesar it's very very hard yeah
it's um you get one one good shot every
two or three years that really blows your breath away but it's one of the hardest areas to image
um on the on the sun all of the other areas are easy yeah
yeah yeah gary you should uh you should get involved with that uh solar observatory i think they could
they would i think i posted an image in the chat there but i'll share this over there i've only ever had two really good
images um in calcium that's one of them um wow it's beautiful
that was really hard they're not easy these it's certainly from the uk they're one every
three years four years something like that um and the other was that one which is a three panel mosaic um
so that the full resolution of that is is huge um but
generally calcium is normally like this sort of thing that again is a mosaic but it
it's normally smaller resolution just because it's so hard to image through the atmosphere any disturbance in the
atmosphere means that you can't magnify out on calcium and because it's low down in
the blue area that's where we get the problem
and if you really really think about what you're doing you're imaging through our atmosphere and all the turbulence
and then you're getting up next to the sun and you're coming right the way through the chromosphere on the sun down to the surface the photosphere the
coldest area which is why it's in the blue so i i really look forward to what caesar's
doing there because in certain wavelengths i know how hard they are and oh yeah
involvement and with all that focal length you could get a lot of uh you could get getting close like you like to
do so yeah i i mean the the biggest change is probably coming along to now
what we call h line which means that the older k line which is this which is really deep sort of
purple is very very hard visually to see and generally we say any anybody that's
starting to push over 40 is going to struggle to see um through uh k-line just basically
because our eyes deteriorate but now we've got the k-line sorry hotline systems yeah they mean
that a lot of this is actually visible to us we can see h line quite clearly
um even when we've got defects in our eyes well yeah
yep well dt do you have anything more to add
for our program oh no no no you're just enjoying this i can tell that's good yeah i'm enjoying
learning new things yes that's right how about you mike you got more uh going
on i guess you always have something going on with the
let me unmute me there yeah just uh you know uh more data coming through here and uh
i'm just continuing to blink through so after we get done uh tonight i will start the um astral search uh channel on
twitch and uh and let it run so um anybody wants to check that out maybe i'll i'll put the
link up there uh if you get free to maybe send out but uh yeah yeah we're just uh we're just plugging away looking
through uh right now it's just imaging through the milky way as we're going through and uh just uh
uh just checking some of the images here uh to see if anything pops up so but uh
uh nothing thus far and uh but it will uh it will continue and just keep running running through the night as it
does so i see so cool
i love it well that's great glad to share it man glad to share it it's uh it's uh been
been really exciting for us too and uh definitely bringing something that uh that that nobody else is showing is just
a lot of it's a lot of fun to be able to bring that to people so right so we love it you know well why don't you give me
that link and i'll post that in chat okay last second here
let me get that here real quick and i think that we're close to a wrap-up of our program here
great party as always scott yeah it's been very good
okay so if you guys want to follow us right now do a quick uh
refocus here real quick and then i'll uh i'll get going we're we're we still have to we ordered a custom focuser on on
this but as you know the raza 14 uh is a bit of a challenge to get accessories
for because uh nothing that nothing for the edge 14 fits on the rosa 14 as even though
everybody says oh yeah this this will fit no it does not uh it's uh it's a rare beast in itself um i mean i think
the serial number we have is one 120 or something on our scope so there's obviously very few of these made
but uh we're we're trying to get our uh uh working with uh a starlight focuser and they're sending us a custom uh
focuser for the 14 so then i'll be you know putting our our focus into our script so uh i won't have to go out but
but like last night i focused at the beginning of the night and by the end of the night in the morning it was still pretty spot on so it's uh it's a pretty
credit pretty incredible instrument uh to build to do what it does uh through the night so
um but but we're uh we're looking to try to get that onto our system soon so
right somebody was asking what are the uh
the posters behind me but uh i want to put up the uh the asteroid hunter uh twitch um
i did yeah that's the asteroid search twitch i'll give you the uh i'll give you our normal channel here too so you have it
uh there's our normal channel we stream on sunday nights uh on that channel we all saw our wednesday nights on the
clear skies network as well we come by and uh do some follow-up observations for people to see and
uh but but that's our sunday night stream full-on stream you guys check it out and
what we try to do on some of those streams is help people and just kind of show them how to do follow-up observations
and teach some of that stuff so they can seek kind of some of that so using things like taiko tracker and
stuff so right
okay and occasionally we do giveaways and fun stuff so that's cool
yeah richard won a mousepad i want a mousepad and that probably led to all this
right that's right there it is
there you go i know it all starts at the mouse pad and suddenly you're into it for thousands of
dollars that's right yeah my whole desk is actually a mouse pad so
i use it to cover up some of the other ugly cables coming out of this that's good
let's see if i'm grabbing that let's see
here we go twitch tv asteroid hunters awesome
well mike you're welcome back on our program anytime thank you scott it's good to finally meet you
i'm like i don't know why it's taking so long you know it all happens at the right
time anyway so that's right that's right all right so well i want to thank everybody for
that's participated on our 18th global star party uh i want to thank them very much
dt thank you for waking up so early gary you're up so
late and thank you richard grace for coming on every time
rodrigo as you know it's getting late down in chile thank you so much the same for use cesar in argentina very very
interesting to see and uh very encouraging that you're saving that historic observatory i'll have to
connect you with the alliance of historic observatories that is an organization that we're
uh we're putting together and john briggs is actually part of that
uh and so is ian mclennan by the way and mike from asteroid hunters uh
dazzling really amazing uh what you guys are doing so uh thanks very much and davey you're
behind m51 there somewhere but uh thanks for sharing your images and
you guys keep looking up it's been a it's been a thrill as always
and uh we will be back on tomorrow in our daily show with uh jerry hubbell
uh and the open go to community and as always we're planning our next global
star party so if you are watching and you want to participate please get in touch with me my email is just s
for scott s at com explorescientific.com uh we'll get
you on and so thanks so much thanks scott appreciate it
take care bye-bye [Music]
see you guys thanks guys yep [Music]
[Music] night deal good night
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so [Music]
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wow [Music]
you

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