Transcript:
even got my t-shirt for stuller thing here [Laughter]
but no cellophane this year that's right no cellophane no starfish
no nothing we had we have one in quebec here called the rock roc
and it's been going on for over 20 years and this year nothing
too bad but still do some astronomy and do some
uh observing anyway by your own
actually explore scientific has a star party that's done every april in arizona
and uh we got one of them done but we didn't do this year and i doubt
we're going to do next year but we'll have to see about the year after that yeah
it might take a year and a year and a half to go back to some kind of normal
it will take a while before everyone is immunized and uh
we we live we lived in a in a world that was very free and
open but now we have so much restriction and so much
to think about not only ourselves but everyone around us
our family older family the older folks around i mean
it could we could be us that contaminate them so that's what that's what's really
mind-boggling here that's the problem yep
it's uh in one way i mean it's horrible but in another way
it reminds me of the first time i went diving and they said when you go down don't
touch anything because if you touch something maybe you'll hurt it or it'll hurt you
so it made me very hyper aware okay when i was down
diving that first time and uh you know you're paying attention to your
oxygen you're protected with your environment uh
of course you don't want to get hurt or stung or something like that but at the same time you don't want to damage a coral or a rock or some little creature
you know it made me uh just to float there and to pay attention you know
was really really interesting so
so it's a little bit like that
well are you all guys in confinement still in the united states or the
or more open are there it's arkansas is pretty open very open yeah
um you can go to restaurants uh you have to wear a mask you know
last month near montreal and around montreal all summer we could go to restaurants
and uh like uh we could go to gyms and stuff but uh in
the first of october we went back in the red so they closed all the restaurants all the gyms all the
the gathering no like me my son lives in montreal and i live outside of montreal which is a
orange zone and he lives in the red zone i'm not allowed to go visit him because he's in red or anyway so many
so we went back to where we've started it in april
crazy the second wave is as bad as the first wave and it's very depressing i mean
we thought we were out of it and then we're back in it and most of the restaurant around here are going to close down but they cannot survive
another two three four months doing some takeouts i mean
right oh yeah yeah they're just many restaurants here have closed barely surviving when they have allowed
30 or 40 percent of the the clientele in the restaurant if you just do the uh the take out it's
like no man yeah
but thank god we still have astronomy to cheer up that's right
that's right so we had uh marouska straw who is the
uh she is the um executive director of the world space week on our daily show
today okay and it was touched on we talked about
because i was asking her how you know how successful world space week was and she said that
they had something like 9 000 events around the world
hi terry you said hi how are you we're well thank you
hi terry hi
but we talked about that unifying aspect of astronomy and that's that's our important message message you know with
all of this
whether you're trying to get uh your local community together or
you're trying to do a national thing with a you know star party like winter star party or something that does
attract a somewhat international crowd but still even that group is uh
it's more of a national kind of thing you know you do have some canadian people and some
people fly in from europe that kind of thing um
but in order to do a a real global star party you have to do this you know
yeah you have to do it online you have to use technology
and mariska thought that once
small she thinks that uh it will be a blend
of doing events like this and um
combined with a real you know in-person type of event yeah look at that beautiful image behind
terry don't you wish you were there right now [Laughter]
thank you
how many of you saw jason gonzalez uh solar image
do you want to share on the on messenger i will share it
and unless jason wants to i think he's coming on the show okay i mean really
one of the most phenomenal solar images i've ever seen it's incred you know amazing the one that you sent on
messenger yeah oh yeah wow that was wonderful
acromat telescopes this telescope costs less than a thousand dollars sure unbelievable
well the the just uh very very very good system that probably also helped a lot
though what kind what kind of amazing i would imagine
i didn't see it what was the picture of the sunspot or just the sun it's the sun
with uh detail but it's just it looks like shag carpet it's amazing oh really
yeah and with a um it's done with a uh daystar quark i think is what it's
called yeah yeah wow i'll have to check that out i just saw a picture of the big new sunspot
rotating around right yes this and in fact a few hours ago i
counted 32 sunspots on it wow oh wow 32.
just a couple hours ago oh my goodness i want some aurora
yes you'll probably get your wish
that would be nice i wonder where i can see it
it'll be interesting to see what kind of an audience we get today you know i think a lot of people are still glued on
the uh on the presidential election right that's a bit of a nail biter
right now it is eh yeah
i don't know i i think it's fascinating it really is but i think the outcome is getting
more and more clear now yeah i think the outcome is is virtually certain although it will be close
now yeah may not be so close david but uh the arm waving and i totally agree with
you that the outcome is virtually certain now yeah i'd like to see it separated by
just one vote well it could have been it could have been you
know a tie and going to the house you know for resolution that happened in 1824 you know with john quincy adams as
well as oh my goodness
i think the if if it went to a tie they should give them both boxing gloves and then [Laughter]
scotty that's a wonderful idea and wendy loves it too
right you think only the us is watching it's all over the world
well everybody's watching last one that can walk out that's the president right
yeah
it's the 19th star party 19th yeah and saturday will be the 20th
and that will be an a asia edition who would have thought that that would last that long
yeah i know
like me i usually go almost every week in the small cafe in montreal in the old
part of montreal and they have an open mic for musicians in there and ah
they've been doing the open mic virtual on zoom and skype since
we went down up to about the 35th week it's like wow 35 weeks without
being together and making music together i'm missing yeah i miss it so much
i love seeing the collaborative things though where they're online and you know
i mean they had uh some some pretty major bands doing some of
this stuff though oh yeah rock band called the doobie brothers they cannot survive on nothing not to do
some some virtual show or a presentation yeah yeah nobody has to live
that's true that's true and they have to keep promoting their music too yeah
hmm
everybody looks comfortable yeah i think we're all exhausted
yeah that's true i am comfortable and woefully under slept yeah
i was out doing astronomy last night of course i'm watching the election at the same time
i got to sleep about 1 maybe 1 30
but waking up at like 6 6 30 you know so
i watched it till around four ish i guess and then i was up again at seven
it was so it's so interesting it was galvanizing yeah i've never been so interested in an election as this one
really really caught my attention especially
yeah we got a record number of people uh voting that part's good
i i watched the bbc a lot you know and [Music]
i like their you know it seems almost like a little bit impartial view of what's going on
here pretty good journalistic credibility too
i think so yep i think so
okay my countdown clock is almost exactly right on time
[Music]
we want to find earth-like planets around sun-like stars because that's our
best chance of finding a world with life on it today's the day that truck carrying the
new instrument has arrived over the next couple days we'll start integrating the whole system together but the first step
is to actually get here and today the instrument got here the instrument is a radial velocity spectrometer it measures
to very high accuracy the wobble of a star as a planet goes around we are
trying to do this the level of sensitivity more than anything that exists at the moment
we're really gunning for is one of the most precise measurements of a frequency in astronomy i'm hoping we can get down
to the point where we're really we're really probing the limits of the star and nothing else the idea with new
it is really develop something that is so stable that you're purely dominated by cell astrophysics
not only will it detect planets and and measure masses of known planets but you
can try for direct detection of planetary photons so that you can try to disentangle the very small
reflected light signature from the planet itself instruments like nued present the first capability for being
able to do it one of the things nasa wanted was an instrument that could actually help the
community follow up test objects [Music]
i think it'll be a very valuable resource for confirming test planets so tess provides the one half and newt i
think will do a wonderful job providing the masses for a lot of these confirmed planets another goal for a new aid is to
identify potential targets for jwst because jwst will open the doors to
characterizing these planets by actually looking for atmospheres and images and
so it's very important that you find the right ones to spend time with the telescope
[Music]
uh welcome to the 19th global star roberts and uh this
is an explore alliance live event um uh i am uh very happy to
be with all of you and uh we have um our group of uh astronomers here with us
including uh libby and the stars to my right here at least how it looks to me right now david
levy is with us today richard grace uh is with us um
dt gautam from uh uh nepal uh norman fulham out of canada um david eicher uh
out of wisconsin is that right you're in wisconsin yes he is
how would i not know that and terry mann in ohio so
um uh this is uh you know doing 19 global star parties has been uh
very interesting uh it's caused me to pause and reflect on
uh the um the effect that it's had on uh on our viewers the the effect it's had on on us
and uh you know one of the things that we are uh starting to talk about a lot is uh
how you know the reach of of amateur astronomy in the midst of a pandemic
has been quite a phenomena not only have a lot of people wanted to get into astronomy that would you know
might have had it just in the back of their mind um but uh the
club activity in in astronomy clubs is becoming more active uh with um
uh astronomy clubs figuring out how to use technology like we're using right now with uh uh zoom and broadcasting
software i know that the astronomical league is even thinking
about such things but you know hopefully
when we can return after the pandemic to live face-to-face meetings that we keep up
this outreach that we're doing online because it reaches so many people that normally
could not attend things like this normally could not watch david levy give a talk uh
you know live uh uh or or dave ike or uh or people uh like uh deepti that's
halfway around the world you know so it's it is uh it's something that we're
very honored to be able to uh put together i'm i'm personally happy
about it because uh my whole uh probably eighty percent of the enjoyment
for me in astronomy is educational outreach and and somehow uh touching other people
inspiring them or seeing them being inspired by others or watching them
inspire others you know so and it is that inspiration that that uh
causes us to delve deeper into uh you know this discovery personal
discovery personal exploration and um and it gives us the courage to do the
for some of us the hard work of science and uh you know to take our understanding
of the universe and ultimately ourselves uh ever greater so it's it's uh
it's um you know i i think it's a privilege that we can do this um
uh as our tradition uh we have uh david levy who's now uh done uh undaunted has
done every global star party that we've had david has uh
uh given us the poetry um and the
you know the introspection i think that makes us realize
you know why we why we
why we explore why we love the stars you know it's it's something innate in us
david understands this extremely well he's able to articulate this very well
and uh you know sometimes when he breaks into the his poetry uh
which he does almost every show it lulls you into um
uh you know releasing your um maybe defenses that you might have
and to think about what's possible in the universe and uh
he always leaves a lasting impression and so um i will give my dear friend david levy
the stage thank you scotty and welcome to the 19th
global star party i hope we're going to have a good time last night
at around i'd say about six o'clock at night wendy and i started watching the
election returns on television we were going to watch them for an hour and then i was going to
go out observing which is what happened after an hour i went outside and set up my camera in fact i didn't
think i have the camera to show you it's uh it's this one
and uh it's a big fish eye in the hope that i might be able to photograph a torrent meteor or two
i didn't get any photographed although i did see one faint one and i may try it again tonight
then after an hour the moon came up so i went back inside
and watched the election returns from about
from about eight o'clock until four this morning i forced myself to stop go to sleep for
a couple of hours and then i was up again and watched it all day and you know it's interesting
sometimes an event happens on earth and you kind of think
that the earth itself is reacting to that event by slowing its
rotation a little bit and then a little bit more and then a little bit more
and then more and more and more until it just stops and the earth stops its rotation
and everybody on it just sort of cogitates for a while thinks about it looks up at the stars
and then the earth resumes its normal thing and this is what i think was happening
last night it was uh we were wendy and i were enthralled with it we
couldn't tear ourselves away from the television it was by far the most interesting
election in the united states that i've ever followed and it's not quite over yet although it
looks like it's going to be very soon anyway
the important part of that was the break i took for an hour early to go outside
i was trying to photograph a torrid meteor or two
i didn't get any but it was really fun to go outside and just watch the sky
no telescope just a camera and just having fun looking up at the
night sky and enjoying what there was
jupiter and saturn really close together enjoying one of their great conjunctions
next month there will be a night i think it's the 21st of december when jupiter and saturn
are going to be a tenth of a degree from each other and that's going to be something to see
they'll be visible in the same low power field maybe not so low power field
of a telescope eyepiece that's going to be really something to see
and they might see a meteor if you wait that long it won't be a
torrid that you'll see to see the torrids you have to go out tonight or sometime in the next few nights just to
go out and enjoy these beautiful slow-moving meteors
the brightest meteor i ever saw was a torrid about 25 years ago
it was just arcing across the sky and then it was a bolide so it exploded
and left sparks throughout the sky and the neighborhood dogs all started to
bark it was that bright and it caught their attention
and i'm looking up there and really enjoying it and as the earth begins its rotation
again i'm reminded of alfred lord dennison and his one of my favorite poems of his
ulysses the lights as we look up at the night sky
begin to twinkle from the rocks the long day wanes
the slow moon climbs the deep moans round with many voices
come my friends it is not too late to seek a newer world push off and sitting well in order smite
the sounding furrows for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western
stars until i die it may be that the gulfs will wash us down
it may be that we shall touch the happy isles and even see the great achilles whom we knew
though much has taken much abundance and though we are not now that strength
which in all days moved earth and heaven that which we are we are
one equal temper of heroic hearts made weak by time and fate
but strong and will to strive to seek
to find and yield back to you scotty thanks
it's beautiful thank you thank you very much well you know the
the whole purpose i think or one of the root purposes of uh
of uh astronomy is uh of course to explore and to
um to to make somehow known the unknown and uh you
know so some of this is done by
people that have uh you know work with the uh the great telescopes uh some of them do it through
mathematics yet others do it through um uh writing and literature and uh you know david
levy of course is one of these people but uh david eicher is now
someone that has made his uh a great portion of his life uh
uh about inspiring other people uh getting you to start to explore the
universe you know taking you on that trip that voyage through the written word um
david's probably written i don't know hundreds or thousands of articles uh over 20 books
about astronomy he has been involved in expeditions and
he is also someone that works very closely with the people who
organize in fact he's on the board of directors i think our board of advisors
for the starmis event which is a huge celebration of astronomy
astrophysics cosmology um you know and
he has helped me learn more about this and
opened up even a door of possibility that we can be at this event next year in september the starmus event
um but david uh is
someone that i've mentioned this before but he makes he makes very difficult concepts or this voyage through the
universe very accessible uh you uh you start to read about uh you know
interesting facts and figures and stuff like that but he's he makes it more than just about
the distance and more about uh the work or the interesting
uh aspects of discovery he kind of puts you into it and uh
you know after you're done reading it you feel like you've taken the voyage yourself and um so david i i think that's a that's a
rare gift and i think that that is something that um you know i'm amazed that anybody can
keep that fresh for people uh article after article book after book
and that's something that that uh that you do you're you're part of a rarified group of people that
can do that and we're lucky to have you and uh so i give you the stage
thank you so much scott you're you're way too nice as as always and i thought you know i'm talking
through though well thank you i'm talking about a series of really
interesting mind-blowing topics uh in this star party over some weeks
with what's going on in astronomy and astrophysics and cosmology and planetary science and really the giant leaps we've
made over the last generation or even decade or so really understanding where the big questions are and what we know
about them and i promise you i'm doing this starting from close to home and
moving outward in the universe i absolutely promise that i did not plan this topic specifically for today but i
figured that some of you might have a little bit of anxiety going on here in in the viewership the the last day or
two so i'm going to lighten things up today by talking about the end of life on earth
just you know so we don't take things too seriously okay
let's let's talk a little bit about uh early in the history of our planet long before we were here it was a very
violent early history of course we had long ago what was called the late heavy bombardment in the inner solar system
with a lot of bodies you can see the evidence of this on the moon of course which doesn't uh erode much um
to this day so about 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago the inner solar system was
getting rocked with collisions well following this period though life
emerged we think on earth pretty quickly so let's talk a little bit about life and how we've come so far uh so quickly
here um the oldest rocks on earth we think earth rocks are about 4.4 billion years old
they come from western australia the earliest life we know of is is primitive
microbial life of course so-called cyanobacteria from the streli pool in australia also
australia um they're about 3.4 billion years old these organisms however some
older life in a couple of other locations may be about 3.9 billion years
of pushing 4 billion years so life got going very quickly on our planet when it
was possible to do so because of the conditions there are two really key factors of
course in in what we understand about life our life and life on our planet and
and they are an element and a compound let's mention briefly carbon and water
so carbon is a very reactive element it's good as a basis for life because it's easily bondable it bonds to things
easily it forms a variety of kind of ways to bond with chains with sheets
with ring structures and so on so it's very adaptive to biological molecules
carbon is a big part of who we are water is very important as a compound as
well because you need a solvent to uh dissolve things and a carrier of
energy and so those two come those two elements in a compound are critical for
us well the first billion and a half years or so of life on this planet
featured very primitive microbes of course the whole stretch about two billion years ago however
those little microbes produced enough oxygen in earth's atmosphere to create a
bit of an explosion and and that created the so-called great oxygenation event it was a
an explosion in the diversity and availability of life stepping
forward well our ancestors only appeared on the scene of course we we think of as
our distant ancestors our most primitive hominids a few million years ago
so we've been around a relatively short time of course in the whole panel history of life well this all leads to
the question how long do you think we have uh with life on earth here so i'd actually like
to stop and if any of our panelists here would like to proffer and i'd be making
fun of this because you give talks to and to very sophisticated astronomical groups and the sort of intuition here
with this sort of time frame of life on earth is well the sun's about halfway
through its life isn't it as a sequence star we're probably about halfway
through life on earth too i mean that seems reasonable doesn't it would anyone like
to take a guess as to what scientists believe the duration of life on earth could be and i
don't mean i i mean the ultimate uh uh sort of end game i don't mean if we're
really you know even dumber than we appear to be as a species and end it
sooner than that ourselves i mean as long as we can go on earth anyone want to venture a guest perhaps
god david i i would say that
i would say that possibly i mean if we don't do ourselves
then and if we are not uh killed off by some mass
virus you know that that's unsurvivable uh
we don't get hit by a big asteroid right um these kinds of things or you know uh
a nearby supernova that sterilizes the surface of the earth that's happened before
but let's just say we could live it out okay um i don't know i would guess another
billion years any other guesses well i for myself um
i love uh star trek type of uh of uh entertainment and stuff and makes up
make us think about what could happen what could be possible because uh
it's anybody's guess if some tomorrow there'll be a uh a novena coming from somewhere else and
then they're friendly and they show us all kinds of things that we can travel the space and stuff like that that right
now we cannot think about it because it's just impossible but what what if what if it would happen
uh of course i think the earth people on earth will would
change completely attitude against uh each other i mean
we could say the sky is the limit now the universe is the limit so
it's uh i think i'm very hopeful that we will last till that point or we
we will uh join those aliens eventually but um
uh yeah i'm i'm open to this type of a scenario that we eventually gonna travel
across the the universe it could be a thousand years from now or
five hundred thousand years maybe maybe you don't call us humans anymore
maybe we are maybe we are augmented with uh artificial intelligence
and um we live in space yeah we're already a space faring species
our technology evolved right now uh it's not far-fetched to think that
we'll be able to travel between stars in in a relatively short amount of time i'm
saying maybe a few thousand years but when that happened
nothing is impossible after that i'm very hopeful
we we have uh we have people here in the audience that are getting numbers
there uh one of them says uh stephen hawking suggested only 200 years
see fox double o 11 says two billion years maybe norm hughes says 1.5 million
uh jeff wise it looks like he's saying uh one million years
and then norm hugh says i don't think augmented ai is that far away i would agree with them wow i must have missed something sounds
interesting and then beatrice says oh libby has a
cute cat with her
what do you think deep tv how many years do you think humanity has
nothing terrible happens to us we continue to live
do you think it's forever do you think it's just no maybe
it can be indeed because who knows tomorrow what will happen
um yeah maybe some 500 000 like
maybe well a thousand years it's long how about you terry
i was gonna agree with dt i i was thinking 500 000 500 000
yeah i know you know i've never thought about this before it's an interesting there's so many factors that could key
in so many but that would be my guess
yes and libby how how long do you think
um well i mean stars last for a billion years and our son is a star i mean it's
been around for a while so i'm going to say about
half a billion years 500 million
years i think it's been here for a while as a star it's been
here for a long time a couple billion years so i mean it's pretty close
i mean it's not too close but you think about the sun's life and the stars live it's pretty close
then it's elderly it's it's probably going to be
500 million years is what i'm guessing
those are great guesses and great opinions and let's set aside there are a couple of factors here that we'll set
aside for now and we can talk ab great fun to talk about you know are there lots of other dangers
out there that could end things for us yes as scott said you know whether it's you know anti-matter and nearby
supernova that's sterilizing and asteroidal impact it didn't help the dinosaurs
uh you know right on down the line there can be lots of trouble from we're not insulated from space even though not
everyone on earth thinks about outer space all the time um and you know we don't know i mean
travel could be our salvation although it's tough when you get down to energy and logistics and
moving lots of people and so on but you know we don't know because technology obviously will
dramatically and unbelievably improve over time uh but then again physics is physics but
let's talk just about what we do know okay and that is the key here is the sun
is a variable star it's not a constant we look at it it seems like a constant of course every day
um in our sky warming us unless you live in wisconsin and then it seems more like antarctica but uh
for the most part it's it's warm and it's there and it's it's a constant but it's actually not it's increasing its
radiative output it's so-called bolometric magnitude over time
so it's generally getting warmer and heating up very slowly
over time as as time rolls on independent of any you know sort of human induced carbon dioxide fun um you
know so there was a really critical key paper in 1994
that mike rampino who's at new york university and ken caldera and their colleagues produced that was sort of
looking at the long-term habitability of earth just based on the solar radiation and
what's going to happen to our climate because of the sun not because of any
other activity the long story short and there are many many interesting details in this but
long story short within about a billion years or so the sun will
this radiation will increase to the point where the oceans will boil off of earth
now there could be subsurface microbes that would survive much longer than that
period of a billion years a couple of you said a billion years and you were as far as astrophysics goes right on scott you
said a billion years i think just again yeah so that that's the answer really as
far as the solar system and our star goes um now you know microbes could last
a bit longer than that of course especially if they're subterranean we're really fragile though as human
beings at least now of course there's evolution over that time but that's probably going to ruin our
weekend when there's no more water on the surface of earth so that's probably the game over for
human beings um so the strange and interesting thing is that you know if you look back at the
origin of life on earth and that period of you know stretching nearly 4 billion
years back something like 80 of the story of life on earth has
already been written even though people like us sitting around and
talking about astronomy in the night sky have not been here very long compared to the the history of the planet that's
kind of a weird neat thing and it's something we've really only known about for about 25 years so i thought i would
share that it's certainly not meant to put any more anxiety out there on a day
like today for any of you but uh it's a fun fact to know about and when you don't want to talk about politics you
can say hey you know when you know life on earth is going to end [Applause]
so there we go scott thank you so much and i will intend to have a cheerier subject
next time and i'll intend to hang around most of these but i actually have to go and do a meeting thing tonight yeah
understood david thank you so much thanks for joining us thank you take care have fun everyone and don't stress
a billion years as they say we got time you've got time long time between friends
that's right that's right thanks david bye
okay all right so um
let's uh let's change things up just a little bit uh ladies is this okay with you or you
yeah uh norman has been working a long day today i'd like to give him uh
some time uh uh to uh to you know share his uh talk with us and
uh richard you have live images coming down too right
yeah okay so after after norman we'll have uh we'll have uh
richard show give us a peek at the live images uh and uh we'll um we'll check in with
terry to make sure i'm not keeping her up too late and uh uh i know that uh uh you know
you two young ones are are good to uh for the duration so
um let's uh let's turn this over to norman i i asked norm he asked me earlier uh
what what he should talk about and you know uh norman is uh
i mean he makes some of the biggest amateur i guess you can't even call them amateur
level telescopes these are professional level telescopes that he makes but some amateurs buy them okay
and um uh you know so he makes telescopes up to i think it's about 65 inches
of aperture is that right yep yep and uh you gave us a tour of your facility i
was [Music] blown away i mean you made your own
coding chamber you've made your own polishing machines you are self-taught
you know you're one of the great telescope makers of of all time really and uh
you know i was i was reading about uh herschel you know william herschel herschel had uh in his day was making
and selling telescopes and um i was reflecting on they were describing
how difficult these telescopes were he's polishing these big massive mirrors some
of them were well not as big as as uh norman's mirrors he would but his biggest was a
49 and a half inch diameter mirror made out of copper and tin yeah these specular mirrors and
mirrors yeah they would uh even sitting in the in his 40-foot
reflector as he called it uh which had a cast iron tube if you can imagine that
big enough to walk through okay but the the the massive weight of these
mirrors would cause them to sag and deform and so he would have to go and pour new mirrors and and reshape them
and they're polished by hand and the effort is just incredible okay you think
about this and even to use his massive telescopes he had to have guys pushing around a whole building to get different
pointing angles with the telescope he's up in a parapet up there looking
down into his tube okay not comfortable to look through
not easy to use every time you wanted to use it it was
a major huge effort okay uh speculum would oxidize i think within
a matter of weeks and so you have to go back and re-polish the mirrors after a few weeks
you probably had to have several mirrors for your telescope so he got he didn't like his big big
massive telescope that much but i think that you like yours and
i've seen your design at your at your facility um
and uh you know but but it is that people get something that in the
amateur world we call it aperture fever yeah and i think that norman knows all about aperture fever and uh and the
thirst to look ever deeper into space so that's that was the thing that i wanted uh
uh norman to talk about yeah okay oh well aperture fever i i lived it
i lived through it uh in my early years when i started to make telescope and make mirrors
and i'm saying about 25 years ago i remember my first mirror that i
polished uh was a 12 and a half inch f 7.1 and in those days i was arriving at
small star bodies and that was a big telescope 12 and a
half hundred that was a big piece i mean you were the almost the the
the talk of the of the star party that night if you had a line line up behind
next to your telescope because people wanted to see through it yeah
in those days uh we were kind of um how could i explain that
we were contempt to look to a 10 inch 12 inch or 8 inch we were used to look at those
objects and nebula and galaxy through those means small-sized telescope because the
large telescope in those days large mirrors were so expensive okay so very very
expensive to buy and uh if you were lucky enough to go to starbuddy then
there was a 20 inches or 25 inches telescope you were lucky you were you could wait
an hour in line too good just have a little oh yeah right piece because it was something uh different and you you
and then when you you look at let's see uh m42s were 20 inches down it was like
wow man this is unbelievable all the details we can't see that we cannot see in that 10 inch or 12 inch
so very quickly when let's see after about three or four
years when i started to make telescopes everyone was asking me for bigger and bigger mirror bigger telescope or larger
optics and in those days i only had a small machine
polishing machine that could go up to about 16 inches diameters i could push it to a17 but that was
pretty much the maximum that i could do and um i didn't have the experience either to
to to polish and correct with parabola let's say f5 on the 16 inch then it was
something pretty uh challenging and
after so many people asking me for 20 inches and 225 inches well i said okay i'm
going to try to find a place first to to buy the material to make those big
mirrors i mean i need i need the the piece of glass i need the blank itself to make it okay i wasn't making them
there so uh i had some suppliers in the united states i had some in europe
and what really kind of slowed me down in the production of those big mirrors
is the cost was so damn expensive to buy a piece of pyrex
because in those days the uh they weren't they didn't make uh lightweight mirrors
there was a full size i mean a solid mirror let's say a 12 inch was three inches thick it was almost 50 pounds in the mirror so
imagine a 24 inches mirror that is six inches thick oh it was so heavy man and
you need a structure a telescope structure so so heavy duty
that it was so expensive to build and i mean just to build a machine to grind
a very heavy mirror that weighed three 400 pounds you need a big solid machine and then if
you don't have the the money to buy the machine to make it because in those days you could you still can buy those machine but it's not
so expensive so it was a big challenge for me to try
to lower the cost first and to be able to build a machine strong
enough to be able to grind them and polish them and then after that a way to measure and figure the mirror
itself so what brought me to the very large
mirror in optics is i i i talked i told myself that i cannot
buy the material it would be too expensive any for any amateur or something professional
to to buy let's see a 36 or 40 inch mirror and it would be a crazy price
fifty two thousand thousand dollars just for the piece of glass and stuff so there was a a couple companies that
were willing to to to sell pyrex blank
about three an inch thick for those diameters but again
uh get a piece of a glass ship from europe that weighed about a thousand pounds
oh it's shipping fast yeah just
the insurance and the transfer so it's so expensive even from the
united states then in those days i was ordering from newport glass in california
yes and they were good suppliers at some point
but i noticed that i don't know if because i was in canada
uh i wasn't getting uh the quality material that uh most uh american uh
telescope makers were getting probably get the reject so all kinds of a stressed glass that
were wrongly annealed piece of of glass so i got very frustrated at some point that
okay i called the laval university in quebec they are uh they were
very good in in developing uh
not optics but into different uh line of work into optics not necessarily
telescope mirror but in optics contact the head
prof the teacher at the university he said i have a problem and i don't know if you can help me i
need a big piece of glass to make mirror for telescope for large
telescope but i need something that's cheap to buy not too expensive
that will be as good as any other standard mirror on the market right now
but on top of that i want something that would be lighter okay so
we work for three years for uh developing uh what we call technofusion blanks or
mirrors so that allowed me to be able to be able to to
offer a large piece of glass lightweight
not too expensive and that was affordable
for uh so my professional or amateur astronomer
but to do so i needed to buy a big kiln i need to buy
i needed to build a larger machine but because the blank were much lighter
it was much easier to build the machine to grind and polish the mirror so if you want to have a better idea what it is go
on my website you have an idea of the technique what is it i don't want to sell it's not a sell pitch here okay i
don't want to sell you a mirror or telescope it's just to explain that i'll pick it up it makes great
telescopes if you can afford one buy one it's just that it took me about five
years to be able to really offer
a difference in the market to make a difference in the market for the larger updates
from from the first piece of glass that we cut water jet cut
and we put in in the oven with the different uh the kind of sandwich structure how to
fuse it how to make it solid make it viable how to grind it and it took five
years in that five years i still were making
was making the smaller one and so it took me a lot of time off time weekends and nights just to
develop that technology to be able to offer them but once it was out there and available
people i i i felt the uh the end the um
how could i say astronomers were really ready they were ready to buy
large optic telescope because they were used to look to 20 24 even 30 inches
mirror solid mirrors telescopes and they wanted more is the aperture fever i
mean you know what you can see into a 20 inch and then you know it look at the i don't
know uh any nebula the ring nebula through a 20 inch and two or 30 inch it's two
different things i mean and you look at so my personal experience
the first large mirror that i made out of tech for the techno fusion was a 36-inch f4
uh it's a telescope that i built and the first light that i did with that
telescope i mean it was in quebec not the perfect dark area of the to do a first light but
it was kind of an interesting area and i went through all the messy objects
because they were so different so completely what you used to to observe because i
mean you see details in galaxies and nebula that you just dream of to see
because you see them on picture and then you look to a 10 inch or 12 inch telescope
in that area there should be some texture there but you kind of imagine it
yeah yeah live and you see colors and nebulas it's like yeah so yeah so it must once you start
looking through these really large telescopes it must be like experiencing astronomy again for the first time
it's a it's like you you're back to the beginning when you first observe object
and say wow the first time you see jupiter or the first time i don't know m81 or whatever it's always
wow it's brand new it's it's it's a new object so my i think my best experience was uh
with large optics for my aperture fever myself yeah it's the first 50 inch
telescope that i built uh it was a customer in california a doctor
and doctor is still pretty much into astronomy but he was
the type of guy that buy big big stuff install it in an observatory and he goes
once a year to observe it but it's it's not it's not the the my story here would be
when i sold that telescope i said i'm gonna go install it for you
to make sure everything works because it's my first big 50-inch telescope so so
we went there i went there assembled the telescope and of course the first light is the real first light
because i built a telescope i have no place here to do a first light in in
where the shop is this light pollution is about 45 flood lights in the parking lot here i cannot do it first light
right and the cost to uh disassemble the telescope reassemble it to somewhere
place in nearby to to do a first light and this assembly again the cost was it
wasn't cost effective so i said i'm confident in my work i'm confident in what i can
do with the mirror so i'm gonna just go ship it over there and go over there to observe with it and
assemble it so get there took about two days to assemble the telescope in the observatory there
and now you're just sitting you're ready the the the
the sky gets dark and it's in the sierra valley in uh in california the dark oh yeah area yeah
you know everything's gonna be just mind-blowing but you don't know how mind-blowing so right object well
we just settled everything and then open the it is was uh our argonavius with servercat
uh guiding systems or pointed two star to do the star alignment and then
cross my finger punching m3 because it was something right there at the moment so i just cross my finger
that the telescope will go there to m3 and then i will have it at the eyepiece and yes it did
track and then went to the entry and i was the first to look to the eyepiece
nice i almost fell off the the ladder [Laughter]
unbelievable it's like it's another world it's another
it's i don't think i can explain the experience visually you see a picture of every very
deep sky on your laptop or whatever you see all the details but it's an image
it's not live when you have it live in your eye it's
a completely different experience yeah we look we spend that first night
observing maybe 20 objects and every object and we i was lucky
it was in the winter time we had uh m42
in a 50 inch could you see color m42 in the 50 inch
yeah yeah yeah you got the red you got the green you got all the colors you got
texture you got 3d effect of the it's like
completely different experience so each object that we observed was completely different and on top to top it off
i had vinyl viewer to observe oh my goodness on top of that but i had a 3d effect
yeah yes it's bright stars like closer still have those images
right here right behind my eyes there when i think about it i i close my eye
and i see it so it's a very humbling experience but also
it's very uh for me because i built it so it's like wow i built that yeah i built it
well i can every time i sell a big mirror to someone else i always offer to go and
and either install it with you or do the first light with him to to experience
the same uh the same feeling yeah so i heard your fever is
it's not a fever it's an aperture need
that's right that's right it's a very humbling experience for myself and yes anybody i think that
would have the chance to observe visually on a large telescope
is it's it's an experience
you should never skip the experience if you have a chance to do it go and do it visually yes
yes i agree i agree we uh one of the things that we do
normand is we always tried to also have every year
a 60-inch star party with the historic 16 telescope at mount wilson and
although there is a lot of light pollution from pasadena there are objects that you can look at and see
with amazement you know um particularly planets i mean
60 inch aperture on saturn with you know arc second seeing or sub arc sequencing
is just incredible incredible um you know that you're at a historic instrument you know
but when i look when i think about you norman and i think about your great telescopes that you're building
i place you amongst the great telescope makers you know brashear
uh herschel you know alvin clark uh the these people you are one of them
and so it's it's amazing and wonderful uh you know to have you on our programs
and uh you know and you've shared with us also your artistic uh side and uh
you've also revealed your um you know your trials and tribulations in
life how you got from there to here you know it's a amazing story you are
uh you know i i i love i love uh what you've done for
us on the global star parties and so it's great and i will never leave global star party without a song
okay wonderful wonderful okay
i'm a musician and i every star party that i do i bring my
guitar and i always make music after i'm done observing and i think music and astronomy are made
to go together and i'm going to play you a song not a song thank you
it's an instrument instrumental that i composed maybe
30 years ago 30 years ago of your own composition yeah okay it's
an instrumental not a song okay um when i composed that song that
piece i was in the rockies uh near jasper banff uh i was living there for
many years and the nice the dark sky the sky over there is like
amazing yeah and that's that piece was composed
close your eyes think you are in the rockies next to a lake with a big mountain range
in the background and then there's the sun rises okay that sound that piece is called the
sunrise on rock on the rockies [Music]
do [Music]
do [Music]
do [Music]
do
[Music]
do [Music]
do [Music]
do
[Music]
do
[Music]
do [Music]
[Laughter] i was getting like a knot in my throat
[Laughter] i can almost imagine hearing that out on the observing field and just get
drawn right out into the stars even more that was beautiful that's why i say that
astronomy and music well not not every kind of music type of music but a certain type of music that's uh very
i don't know spaced beautiful it goes well together well
thank you for having me at the global star party scott thank you always it's always fun and a pleasure
and like i said i had a very long day today sorry i know it's what it's uh
here in montreal is uh yeah so i have to go home
see my wife's gonna recognize me yeah thank you for giving your time to
us today it was beautiful thanks my pleasure scott and everyone thank you for listening and uh and be there
astronomy all right thank all of us all of us to be to promote and to to share it's
something to share to everyone yes sir thank you norman thank you take care
wow okay all right so
let's take a a little break and uh uh i know that um richard has a live
image of m31 so that would be a nice thing to kind of soak in some of those
uh photons from 2.2 million light years away you know so
what do you got richard see here let me share my screen
oh wow you can see the spider alarm single 10 minute uh sub uh that uh just
came in uh two minutes and 30 seconds ago i've been uh working with my back focus
um on my flattener and it's been a little more than expected and i need to order a couple of the one
millimeter spacers and i kept going further and further back and i finally was like okay i don't have
the ability to take a small step back so i'm gonna take a right let's call it a two millimeter step back
uh or three millimeter and it was uh you know a hair too much but at least i finally found where the other side of it
is and uh i remember simon was talking about this on one of the streams i don't remember
if it was the coast stream or one of his other ones but uh he said when you're when you're too far
in that uh you know in the corners you get the uh the quake symbol like if you remember
the video game quake it's almost like a three-pointed star with a little thing sticking out in the middle and you know when you're too
far out you get like a comet shaped thing in the corner and i've definitely seen both at this point so i know that i
i need to just get it into the middle but the beautiful part about that is is that i'm not taking this seriously at
all tonight uh so we don't need to keep getting data on this after this so we're going to go
find something else to look at okay all right see the two companion galaxies to m31
um and uh lots of stars and it's sharp and um
it uh you know and a plane or a satellite oh really uh-huh
so right here i guess it could be a meteor as well but
there's definitely oh i can see it yeah there definitely is a faint streak i i just noticed it when i was looking at it
great thank you thank you very much okay richard all right we'll come back to you after uh
after our break um but uh let's move on um
to um you know i'm i'm gonna like let uh
uh libby and terry and deepti kind of figure out uh who who wants to go on next but uh
anyone wants to take that i'm good if they want to go ahead and go first i'm fine
okay all right so between you and libby uh deep to you
what what how's your schedule looking out there in nepal okay libby i have i have all night you you can go
ahead and go have all night got all night okay all right well dvt what time is it
over there uh 7 49 a.m okay all right and what time do you
start your classes no i don't have the classes uh because of the festival and
okay it's vacation okay all right well i guess we'll let you go first
deepti uh you are uh uh we talked about um
uh your uh you know you introduced us to astronomy amateur astronomy in nepal as was your
first talk and then your second talk was about um uh your organization and
what it's doing and and that type of thing which was great
and we get to learn more about you what what what do you what are your hopes and
dreams what what do you what does your group plan to do uh from now and into the future
okay um uh we are just uh planning to have uh this outreach program first of
all um because there are a number of sort of uh number of organizations which
are working in the field of astronomy in the nepal so we will be working more in the
astronomy and field of astronomy by making the outreach of the uh outreach of the astronomy and um
uh increasing opportunity i know yeah i have sought one sort of
presentation okay okay great
okay
is a dream to make something great and something new to the field of astronomy and i want to
contribute in the field of astronomy so army along with my friends has this one organizing that astronomy
enthusiast in nepal and okay first of all our motive is to
connecting people from all around the nepal and international too so they can help us and to make the more outrageous
um of the astronomy and just uplift the status of the astronomy and
spreading the knowledge the main thing is spreading the knowledge about the astronomy and
uh knowing that people different aspect of the peoples that how they take uh the astronomy how they take astronomy so we
are going to conduct the talk so and what they feel about the economy what is
the astronomy in their in other aspect we are going to uh know about that and
we will be conducting the different webinar session and which will be helping other people's uh to
understand astronomy very easily and like uh today uh today we will we are going to have the astrophotography
session with uh miss monizado the astrophotographer of nepal and
will be conducting this program uh tonight after okay india time is on
3 p.m of uh in the this gmt time end
and first ever increase the interest of exploration to all the peoples first we will be focusing to the young people
because uh if you have the interest in astronomy and since young then you can do much
more things it is like me as like an example is just me i have the interest
in the astronomy since nine years uh so i have a fascinate i have a plan uh to
do uh a lot of things so if i dream uh when i will be young then when i'm young
then i can plan up and uh work on it in it and do a lot of works
and yeah first alien uh dreams to have the laboratories in nepal and uh this
telescope ability and all the provincial state and uh we'll be organizing uh all this observation program uh monthly or
occasionally uh and collecting the people's uh physically after this coffee and
now we are going we are conducting the program this virtually uh so after this
copied and all this uh we're going to conduct our programs physically and uh
for that um to make more outreach we'll be our contact we'll be making the
school club and that school club will make more out of our program to uh more
people and connecting people together and we are open for membership and uh more
than a 100 plus uh people have already applied for that of our membership
and uh now medicine will be uploading our members to that and
we'll be working uh together all together from the all this all around the nepal
and yeah so i want to say imagination has no limit imagine a lot
you can imagine a lot imagination has no limit don't limit your imagination and i
also believe on that i don't limit my imagination i imagine and just imagine
has that uh wonderful feeling i think imageness imagination has the
wonder feeling that give you strength to do something new and something different
and you have the unique idea and you can work on that just imagination give that power
and i want to say uh if you don't see the opportunity then make habit to build
it if a person does not know build a door so
uh yeah i have get a lot of opportunity when i explore but i think uh it's not
enough so i have i me along with my friends created the uh astronomy enthusiast in
nepal student club uh to create the opportunity to other people's and
just we want to make the our other generation our coming up generation and our
little sister your little brother and other young peoples that uh they will not be obvious by the opportunity and uh
they will not be faced any difficulty to find opportunity in nepal uh so we'll be working on that
personally and i believe that if we don't work today then uh we can expect from the other two
so start from us start from yourself and at last i just want to say that live
your dream live your dream and i am living my dream and it is just very fun
and i i spent the all days exploring the astronomy talking about the astronomy
with different peoples and understanding their different aspects how the things what the astronomy is yeah and
i just researched and that what should what can i do to make more outreach of the program and
i imagine all day in this i write and want to work on that and i'm planning
and it is going on and different um so along with my friends
i'm just living my dream that is wonderful dt that is wonderful
yeah and you are very inspiring for you know you're inspiring me you know so
i think that uh everybody's their imagination and they should follow their dreams you know it is very important and
uh everything is possible it absolutely is so
main thing is just don't limit your imagination because uh imagination you
can imagine uh and just you can make your imagination with strength of your life so i believe uh
don't limit the imagination i imagine i imagine a lot and just create this
wonder world in my imagination and work on it and uh want to do and
physically too not only in my underworld in my dream
i think i think that that those of us who have also
followed their dreams more than maybe follow the money because you could
you could think of trying to earn your way through life and trying to do what's going to make you
more money somehow but uh and you can certainly do that but
i would say that you'll have a running your dream yeah you'll have to following your dreams
in your dreams yeah yeah yeah yeah that's true that's true
and and there's there's you know another another person that has been following her dreams and and knows what
she wants to do is libby and uh so we're gonna we're gonna let libby talk about uh her favorite subject which
is astronomy it's astronomy and she's on the planets
right now she's taking us through a voyage planet by planet through the solar system uh libby where are you now
where what what planet are you are you working it's the last known well last planet i mean pluto is a dwarf
planet i mean i'm not really counting that but i will do something on pluto
but we're really close to the back of the solar system
and i was wondering like how i know we're in the back of the solar system
but you never realize how far out we are from the sun you know
um i see solar models a lot of the time and then some of them they're just like
they don't show like actually how far away the planets are so if neptune is all the way out of the
solar system they won't show that now just we'll just show the planet it won't be in any order it won't be like okay
this planet is this many miles away or anything but um i was looking at a solar system model
and mercury is like extremely close to the sun
now you look all the way at neptune it's like a million
bajillion miles away like it's huge and i'm like well there has to be some way that the
years are going to be longer and that's because there's gravity and the sun's just pulling them around the farther you
go out then the slower you're going to get so it's 165 earth years for one neptunian year
oh wow okay i'd have a birthday right yeah that's
right you'll have one and then you won't have one for that's it
yeah if they can keep you alive that long yes yeah um and
uranus uranus and neptune like my two favorite planets just because mostly they're colored are beautiful
and i was trying to look at why this is like happening and
like all the chemicals like when they're talking about chemicals and stuff when i was
researching i was like this is kind of related to jupiter and
by a lot um it has hydrogen and helium and
you know stars are made out of hydrogen and helium they just have to be big enough to fuse the hydrogen with the
helium so it's going to take a lot of pressure to build that up and they called jupiter the failed star
because it didn't it was not big enough to fuse the hydrogen with the helium and
i started calling it mini jupiter because if it was even if that was if
neptune was big enough to be able to fuse the hydrogen with the helium
then it would be a star i mean it's i mean it's crazy to think that some
planet you know is able to form a star and i know there's
lots of stars out there in the solar system but solar system like the whole universe the
whole milky way like there's a lot i mean oh there's a crazy amount of stars
but thinking that there could have been one in our solar system really close to us
that would have been crazy we wouldn't even be here you know that tomb was a star
it was big enough to fuse the hydrogen with the helium then we would probably be burning hot
we would have two we would have two suns in our solar system and let's just say humans would not be
here for long so i'm greatly happy that it is not big enough to use the
hydrogen with the helium because then i ignite night until star and we would be burning
even though it's very far out into the solar system it would not be that fun i mean there'd
be planets colliding because if you think about it a star has will make a solar system
hopefully one day i'll have a solar system planets would be colliding because the solar systems are so close
so be grateful i mean it's not a big thing to notice that it has the hydrogen and
the helium but i mean if you think about it far deep down we're very grateful that
it did not turn into a star um but the days are very fast it spins
extremely fast but the years are like 165 earth years
so i mean it doesn't really make a difference but as a joke try having a birthday i mean you'd have one and then
you'd be dead um you gotta make it a good birthday party
right yeah yeah you're gonna have a lot of friends right
um the radius is from the beginning of the planet like the
tiny little piece inside the planet from all the way out so like the layers out um and that is
15 299.4 miles is the radius of neptune
and if you think about it then 15299.4
if there's another 0.6 then it'd be fifteen
thousand three hundred and that be like perfectly leveled off like a perfect
and i was kind of amazed by that i was like that is so close together i'm
i know this is a huge planet but just like by 0.6 that would have been a
perfect round off um and so since neptune is so far away it will
take sunlight forever to reach neptune so it takes
eight minutes for sunlight to reach earth and i was kind of talking about this in
my brother other day we were talking about light years and he was like okay if that light turned on
outside my apartment i would probably see it in a couple milliseconds
and so i was thinking about this and since neptune is so far away it's
extremely far away from the solar system it will take four hours for sunlight to
get to neptune so if you think about it if i
if the light all the way down my street turns on i'll probably see it in a couple milliseconds seconds like
it's pretty cool to think about that because things are happening faster over there
but you get them slower because it's it's kind of a hard concept to get over
it's kind of a hard thing to explain but um it takes four hours for sunlight to
get there and it is also gas giant like uranus and
i started to think in my mind that it was kind of jupiter and uranus kind of mixed
together i mean it's a gas giant like uranus and
it is also able to become a star like um jupiter
but i mean i was also thinking about that gorgeous blue color because
i've you know the planets that i've seen the rest of the solar system they're not
very they're not a nice like deep saturated color and
neptune is um neptune is a very dark color and
i learned that that was from methane so it gives it that gorgeous blue color
and it also another thing that relates to from jupiter's the clouds and
i was like well there has to i'm gonna try and research a lot about the temperature
and scientists think that there's a sea of boiling water under the cold clouds
and i was like that's weird i'm like
i was trying to take it in for a second because it's hard to make that you know
cool clouds and a sea of boiling water i'm like
but whether the cold clouds rain it was a hard thing to get over but i was trying to
look at the temperature and everything is like well that's weird i'm like
that's kind of crazy i mean a sea boiling water
i don't think that really comes too naturally right libby there's a lot of things in
the universe uh that are you know that that are hard to grasp the
distances the scale of things how big things are uh how tiny things can be
how weak forces can create big effects in the universe and that kind of thing i
have a question for you though when you're when you're confronted with these big concepts like this you know that
physicists have studied their whole lives and they're still studying it they're trying to
explain it or understand it on a fundamental basis but when you're i mean you're young and you're you're
experiencing these things for the first time do you all right do you feel um
do you feel intimidated by it do you feel
afraid or do you feel humbled by it how do you feel
well i mean i'm the type of when i tell you that if i was showing you a galaxy that's
millions and millions of light years away maybe we're seeing an exploded star in there and uh you know supernova and
that supernova happened millions of years ago how do how does something like that make you feel
well i'm the type of person that when there's a subject like about astronomy i'm going to learn
it in like 15 minutes and be like a master pro at it i'm the type of person that likes to
be like okay god holding i've mastered this whole subject i understand it i'm i'm
perfectly good um but i have these moments where like some sometimes if i'm like so
astonished i do this a lot when i see rockets the first time i saw a rocket i had this
moment where i kind of fell back a little bit on my toes because i was like so sorry i look up and i'm like whoa
that's huge um back at space camp i was really surprised because um
they had the real saturn v rocket in there and i was
i was under the um i was under the around the engine and the um
under the capsule part and i was looking at it because it was just dangling from the ceiling like an ornament in a
christmas tree and and i was kind of like tripping back a little bit i was like this is crazy um
they also have a model saturn v rocket outside and
it's extremely big like maybe an adult could fit in one of the
boosters it it's kind of those moments where i just fall back a little bit i'm not afraid
i'm not afraid of them it's just um i'm i'm more stunned
astonished that there's a huge space shuttle right in front of my face that i'm standing under
then then afraid that it might follow me um because
like i love seeing rockets i mean thinking that that thing went out of our solar
system and went like a a lot of miles like all the way
out of our earth and taking astronauts doing like history and stuff i kind of had that moment where i
step back or if i discover a star that's huge i kind of step back i'm like well
that's what what that's too big it's too big but um
when i get in the concept of like this is big and everything and once i've learned it a couple times
i've kind of gotten used to it and i'm used to standing under a huge rocket
engine and a space shuttle [Music] from the space camp it was huge
right and you wet is so it's it's you're very comfortable with it it's like you're
wearing uh very comfortable clothes and i might add you have a beautiful
shirt on there somebody was talking about this in the audience you know so you are all about
the stars and uh it's wonderful to um to hear your talks
libby um uh we will um you know we'll be looking forward to your next talk as well is
there anything else that you'd like to talk about with uh neptune at all did you want to share something else or um
it actually has 14 moons and that's another thing that relates to jupiter
and um and jupiter is my favorite planet i mean i'm a before i started interest in space i was
just i wanted to be a storm chaser yeah i've i mean
i've gone to colleges where they'll have like a storm chaser like a full college jing and there's like a bunch of older
guys sitting there learning about storms but i'm also in the back like learning to like taking notes
so i also like happy because like this is like the sister to jupiter but it's a
little bit smaller it's mini jupiter any jupiter that's right wonderful
thank you thank you exhibitor is my inspiration too
you're my friend yeah well that's wonderful
well terry we've we've come to you um uh and uh
uh and the astronomical league uh every uh episode of the global star
party uh the astronomical league joins us and they they are the ones that
sponsor uh the uh door prizes uh that that we give away on this program and um
uh you know one of the things i i wanted to mention was is the commitment of the
league to continue on to to do these things we um
we will have another global star party the asian edition which starts at six o'clock in the morning here okay
and uh so i had offered that uh the league um representative that would
come on could you know pre-record it and uh and then i would just run that recording so that they would have a
normal night's sleep but apparently chuck allen who's going to be doing this said oh no i'll just stay
up all night okay so that i so i can be there in the morning for you
guys so that's uh i think that's really amazing the league has uh has done so much over
the 75 years of of its uh you know since its beginning and um
you know and it to me it seems like it's just getting started because
they are they are uh they have an amazing uh executive uh group uh that also includes
terry mann uh and um they are they're looking ahead to the future of
uh of conferences the future of amateur astronomy the the future of their
observing programs and their awards uh so a very very vibrant organization with
tons of experience uh you know if you don't already belong to the
astronomical league you need to join no matter where you are in the world and um
so uh terry how how long have you actually worked with the league how many years
has it been oh wow probably about 20 something like that
yeah that that's a commitment right there yeah i remember going to my first league convention i believe i was in
rockford and it was shortly after that that i joined the officers
um i ran for an office and was elected and i've been involved ever since then off and on in different areas and
just doing different things and it's right now and we're experiencing the
same thing you were talking about a lot of there's a lot of people right now new to astronomy coming into the league uh
have a lot of questions especially when the holidays are coming up you know what type of telescope to buy and especially
this year with everything going on astronomy i think has been the one thing that has helped pull families together
to get them out in a campground or out under the sky you know they can do their social distancing they can still have
fun learning something or they can just kick back on a blanket with binoculars and look it's something that we are
really seeing very people being very active right now right
yeah i think that's great i think yeah yeah definitely so we're like you said we're kind of
looking ahead doing some online things here in the next couple months with the league um we got all kinds of
stuff that we're really working on right now that's awesome that's awesome
well i'm glad of it um so uh let's see we we start off with uh uh the
questions and answers and the winners uh from last global star parties so let's
let's dig into this let me get back to the beginning here um
and we always just show a warning about the sun that if you're using any type of telescope just make sure you definitely
have it filtered if you're looking at the sun and so i'm going to start with the
answers to my questions from last week
my first question was what's going on all right highlight of december and what is the closest event of this
type since that year and it is a great conjunction of jupiter and saturn on december 21st
and this is the closest um conjunction of jupiter and saturn since the year of 1623. holy smokes wow
that's great yeah that this is kind of a must-see thing to me if it's cloudy here
i'm going to go where i can see if at all possible that's right that's right
yeah our winner is uh andrew corkell
congratulations andrew all right our second question was what is the origin
of saturn's e-ring well the e-ring owes its orange origin to the tiny ocean world
enceladus and the winner of that question is james
hubbard all right congratulations james
third question was what date and year was the first ever photograph of the
moon's far side taken and by what space pro this is the actual copy of the picture
of the moon that was taken on october 7 1959
by the space probe luna 3 and the answer or the winner is clinton
fleming congratulations clinton yeah yeah just i mean 59 so we got 16 17 we
got 60 years ago um what what an amazing difference in in
photography technology and and everything just in that short span within one person's lifetime
uh we've gone from this to really like 4k um you know super high resolution imagery
plus images taken right on the surface itself so yeah it's amazing isn't it
it's i mean i looked at that the first time and thought wow you know you kind of step back and think about that being
the dark side or the far side of the moon yeah i mean take him back in 59 i think that's
amazing the technology we've came up with is even more amazing it is it is it's a nice benchmark
and so the questions for this week okay so before we get started yeah we're
going to uh the the questions will be answered uh by
sending an email to explore alliance at
explorescientific.com i will i will put it down here in the chat
if i can only spell here we go explorer line said explore scientific
dot com when you uh answer these questions
being that we're simulcasting and that different channels broadcast sometimes just a few seconds
before the other one does what we're doing is we're
taking all the correct answers uh that are sent to us in email and then we are
randomly picking uh and a winner out of that group you can
be from anywhere in the world we will ship the prizes to you anywhere
those prizes are uh submitted by our prize partners which include uh gary palmer astronomy uh the
vacuum of space astro gifts um explore scientific and uh
i believe there's one more and i i think that i'm uh oh it's the mark slade remote
observatory yeah i was wondering if you're gonna remember this guy that's right i
was like what okay so anyhow but um uh we uh we will be
um uh selecting those prizes for you also at random and uh
um but uh good luck so here we go all right the sun is the heart of our
solar system it is more than 300 000 times more massive than earth
and it's 864 400 miles in diameter
the sun holds what percentage of the mass in the solar system
okay question two who was the astronomer to first name the northern lights the
aurora borealis ah okay
and three what is the green glow in this image called
oh wow okay and that's it
beautiful terry thank you so much thank you thank you scott appreciate it
thank you okay well let's see who do we have on who's
come on with us we've got um uh our astronomers as
cesar brallow from from argentina we've got jerry hubble from virginia
richard i forget you're in in outside of baltimore boston
annapolis maryland a little below baltimore here out on the chesapeake bay that's right okay all
right so we're going to take a little 10-minute break and we'll come back with the astronomers cesar you're up next i
know that you've been working hard all day long and uh and it's late there so we are
we'll uh we'll let you uh share uh the stage there and um and then we'll move on to
uh to uh jerry and back to richard okay so um
but uh i want to thank uh thank you uh deepti for also uh uh being together with us you're welcome
miss today if you'd like um and um and hang in there and we'll see i'm
expecting a couple of more astronomers to log on a little bit later including
including uh jason gonzale uh who thought he might be able to make at this time if he doesn't show i'm
going to share an image that he he sent out through social media which is
just absolutely mind-blowing so give us a few minutes and we'll be back
so
how's it going again
all right
wow
um
you
so
[Music]
you
um
well hello everybody we're back from break here you're watching the 19th global star party
with me tonight are [Music] astronomers from northern and southern hemisphere
we've got cesar brollo watching uh deepti uh tom is still uh
with us she's all the way into paul which is really cool she got a great talk um
jerry hubble's in virginia jason jason i forgot where you live exactly is it in
michigan is that right michigan yes that's right okay something stuck in my mind there uh for
caesar uh it's it's late where he is i think it's after 11 o'clock at night he's had a hard day at work he's
preparing for the eclipse you know right yeah yes
so that's uh uh you know such a massive thing going
on and you've got um you've got uh the you know the pandemic to worry about social distancing to
worry about how's it going how is this uh expedition uh planning going well um
actually we are officially juicer
to go our companies are called optics we are going to
to a company to valcheta officially um because we are in the
uh we call node of observation nodes where do you have
uh via magi we have lagruntas
where we are going piedra del aguila and a lot of places
more in the line of path the back of the flames and
of course that we don't have expected two weeks ago
to be open uh until the the time
of december but actually only few days ago
we received officially the news that
we are open the province the province we call provincials to
similar to states in the u.s rio negro province
will be open uh for for business uh
from the eighth eighth uh december 8th
and we are going uh you know we start to prepare
all things so fast as possible because we need to prepare equipment
to trade the trip because it's uh
it's like i i think that is in miles is
about uh 600 700 miles
from buenos aires to la rutas is the first point and maybe
100 miles more uh from la juntas to valchetta
because we choose we we west choose for because we
uh we will again the support for the transmission for tv
uh from our no observation node and we
need to to get the
filters for the tv the same work that we made in
san juan last year but of course absolutely yes but we don't
we don't this time we don't prepare [Music]
the telescope for uh public observation because the idea is don't touch
a lot of telescopes from the people if not use only transmission in big screens
uh in the place and the people have their googles to to
watch solar goggles or solar shades sorry to watch the eclipse
actually we are we are you know we are manufacturing solar
goggles and is a neighbor because all people start to to make the
the orders now and we are at only 39 days
um i remember i remember your name yes in the clips of the the pictures in
in yes yes where we will go into this very strong work
i finished today i finished at 10 10 o'clock p.m yeah i lived in my office you know and uh
i say okay i have this zoom are you going to my home so fast as possible and prepare the telescope with the balcony
but uh and i have actually another uh strong work
with uh you know um with the solar observatory in
in the city near to to buenos aires the city of san miguel
where we are restoring and start recovering actually we are
studying all the things that are available to
to repair who is okay who is we need and we
if you like i can show you the the last discover that we have because we can
we could open another another
another door of the observatory okay and we discover we discover
another pro another instrument i can show you the oh yeah here's the screen yes
i have news another another you didn't know it was there okay
yeah i do remember do you remember that yeah yeah remember
yes you can see okay well for example we
uh we found this that is a herschel um
a herschel filter but you have a capacity of regulate it's a car size
instrument very very nice this is from the the big the big one uh
telescope that is really damaged okay and
well i have a lot of work cleaning this but it's okay it's it's uh
is this his zeiss his eyes yes yes
because it's it's amazing her show rotating prison you can
it's an amazing amazing piece of art really
a filter will maybe one a 500 pounds
filter wheel you know oh my gosh they're amazing yes yes how how large
how large is this filter wheel no no no it's it's not so much it's a um it's
around uh six seven seven inches no more but
yeah don't know is it but it's it's really heavy because it's heavy okay yes
it's not for a small telescope no and this is oh sorry this picture this okay
we opening another another dome because you know we are every week we uh when we
have the permission the to visit another another place or we have
the key [Music] every week is a surprise it's very
interesting and we found that this telescope is still still working
and we watched uh last friday last friday we watched
the four four solar dots you know
um because the the first of all the
here do you have a filter that but in this time the filters of
glass have the the the darkness sorry in my english i i
cannot describe but the idea is that in the mass of the glass okay they put
the the pigment that filter in the the glass is
it's not something like a layer if not it's inside the glass inside the glass
in the mask of the glass yes filtering material or pigment
absolutely color the glass itself yes the color that's
is this to reduce uh is this to reduce chromatic aberration um i don't know because
first of all i need to i think that i could see
uh but i i first of all
it's not the objective okay no it's a filter you can remove
unfortunately it's broken the filter the filter is is flat and
parallel okay have one inches one inches
[Music] thick one inch oh wow one inch one inch
of that glass yes and he have some some scratches you know
and it's broken in part uh but still working because you know i
when i found the eyepiece the piece is is a big piece maybe i
thought that was is a 52 millimeters yeah
maybe a type of kellner telner eyepiece and
separately do you have the the three elements for for the objective here maybe in this
and this do you have maybe do do you know because you are optic
optician like me maybe more instrumental that sometimes when you use here for photography here
you have a different correction for chromatic aberration that for the visuality
and this is for visual because we found that this is only to make the to put the
the plate you know in the past i'll show you in another picture
this is maybe six inches uh maybe it's a lot less that maybe four
inches and here do you have a six six inches refractor or upper chromatic
objective because i i i found that it was all
size in the system in size completely and
well this is part of the dome because i i skye
i and sometimes i think that i crazy because i go to the
yes yes as i made doms in argentina
many times in aluminum of course that this is part of my my work to do and to watch or
to see if if this is enabled to to work here
here do you have i don't know if i can ah yes
here is the filter that i tell you you can remove yes this and this and
uncover this and you can see inside the object and here you have
a different system and here is the place
here you have an opening and close uh the path of the
light like in in october is in spain when you you have
your your uh the piece of your camera that open and close well yes have here uh uh
this mechanism yes the shutter sorry yes yes thank you sure
yes and we we think that
we love to repair the the photographic telescope
yes this one is so precise that we can put the
ccd here and of course that we i think that we can
change the filter uh for a new one because uh it's not a problem to to change today uh
uh flat and parallel filter like you know
softened oaks or a good quality filter not a myelin of course
and and here we have the idea
to use this for to to to to
practice size you know that is a wet wet plates collodion plates chlorine plants
yes it's very interesting because in the industry so this was for collodion plate
yes and we would love to make this again sure in the uh
in buenos aires the people of the they have as a very similar
telescope but not for solar but they use use today because it's a very very fun
very very funny practices yeah yeah yeah they make their own wet
collodion plate and they take pictures of of the moon a beautiful picture of
the moon oh my goodness uh yes is it the the association
[Music]
and they have a similar a similar telescope and actually they make their own
place and we love the make this for for this telescope too because it's you know for kids for uh
we can invite to the to the students to to to prepare their own
wet collodion plates yeah caesar when when you start making wet
collodion plates i want one i i want i want a picture of the moon i think that
would be amazing yes yeah yeah absolutely absolutely and it's
very special look the scale of this here is my my friend and this is the the
actual the director of uh bishop victor kosovo the the yeah the association
that are working to recover to recover the
entire observatory the bad news the value of
is that we unfortunately we need to move
100 meter this observatory because it's in a in a place
that will be a really soul
is for sale for for you know for to to will homes and we need to to move
to the big tower near to the big tower that i showed the last week for the of
the celeste and we have a lot of work in the future because you know
that um move this and construct
of course that we can recover entirely the the dome but the
wielding we need to to make another one equal to this
um well you know we have a lot of of work in the future well this is part ah
this is sorry you tell me if this is the mechanism of the shooter
yes here you have another another filter wheel
yeah well we have a lot of work
of course yes no no yes i promise that i'll i'll send
you the next time a place where the people can
make the nation helping or yes we are working in this too this is the size
yeah this is all worth this is worth preserving uh
and uh you know it is um uh you know it's an amazing uh facility and
just to see it go to waste and and deteriorate is really is you know this is this was a
place of inspiration and learning and can still be a place of inspiration
and learning but uh it needs a lot of work you know so yeah yes a lot of work a lot of work we
uh one of the pieces look this another place that we go is a layered monochrome
uh telescope but really it's a a very big
h alpha telescope it's this time this that that appears like a gun
yeah is is a professional h alpha telescope um
this is this is the the most the most uh problematic
thing to to move um well this is of course that all of this is a project
for the next year of course but this year we are working
in present the project and you know the the budget of this is the most important
yes at the the lion this light was from
this is something that we can make in another telescope yes
like something like a cross here this was the last friday
it was very very interesting very interesting bizarre thank you so much
it's a pleasure really later i can show i can
show you i have in my screen um okay a little of mars in monochrome if
you like in my talent okay all right we'll come back to you thank you thank you thank you very much it's
beautiful to er give me share this because it's very interesting
for us we are really excited to to work in this in this project right right
wonderful wonderful um let's take a uh let's take a short
moment here and uh with uh jason gonzale i i wanted him to show
i was going to show it jason your image of the sun uh that you did
and that you were sharing um and then i'd like to come back to you for a little bit
more time uh but uh yeah whatever you wanna do if you wanna share it that's fine or i have it i can
pull up let's see it let's see it i was just amazed i was
enthralled this this image of the sun has got to be one of the best uh
one of the best images i've seen professional or amateur it's really amazing
let me get it pulled up here
is that coming through whoa oh yeah yeah this is this uh
this looks like this looks better than shag carpet this is
there's really some groovy
yeah it's funny i i shared this and then the biggest comments i got were it either looked like a
tabby cat or a golden retriever or a shag carpet
and a lot of people want to pet the sun now apparently but um yeah so this is the um
the sun in hydrogen alpha and this is the sunspot group um i got
it labeled there in the bottom corner it's ar 12779
so this was moving across the sun last week and it just rounded the corner
um on the 31st which was saturday which is the day i took this and uh was just kind of you know going
around the edge and and the cool thing when an active region goes around the limit of the sun as you get a lot of
um even if there's not big prominences hanging off you get a lot of activity in the chromosphere so you know i was able
to highlight that with some of these streamers here low in the chromosphere and then
um you know this is the active region the the bulk of it or what was left of it
there but the uh so this is a hydrogen alpha light which is um you know i'm using a monochrome
camera and hydrogen alpha is in the deep red end of the spectrum so this is
colorized after the fact just to give a pleasing image but
yeah i was really happy with how how this turned out the detail and all the uh spicules as they're
you know these plasma features here and uh this was shot with uh ar 152 and
the daystar quark chromosphere i'm just amazed at the you know the ability
to get this kind of detail with um with equipment that is uh arguably
uh you know nowhere up you know near the
the level of a professional instrument but uh you know jason i i looked through
i was at uh holly aquila one time and they let me look through the solar telescope visually okay in h alpha up
there and uh i did not see this level of detail uh
oh yeah this is just incredible i mean just incredible
you know there's certain advantages to you know i've looked through solar telescopes myself and
the visual experience is one heck of a lot different than what a camera can bring you um
you know number one when you look at hydrogen alpha light it's
the human eye is um doesn't discern details that deep into the spectrum very well at least my
eye doesn't you know so that's one of the reason reasons i like taking the pictures is
because you get the opportunity you know to you know have a little bit of fun with
them afterwards to kind of tease those details out um how much work is this for you
to to get yeah i mean the the um
not as much as deep sky i guess if that's a fair answer um you know i i can
[Music] generate one of these images um
all right well i mean if you want to talk about the whole process you know there's there's an afternoon of recording images that went into this
yeah um and i recorded i think 200 some videos um of the sun each one
containing thousands of frames i think i summed it up and i took about three hundred thousand pictures of the sun
that afternoon oh uh okay and i threw almost every single one of them out
actually you know 299 999 of about to get this
one but right um you know you have to wait for the
conditions to be good so i mean that's that's definitely one of the limiting factors um shooting the sun through any
telescope is you know if the conditions aren't good you're not going to get a great image and so you have to wait until the
atmosphere is very still and uh you know for a brief moment of
time that's what i got so um you know after i've got that video recorded you know stacking uh a single video like
that doesn't take you know much more than five minutes and then um off the processing and
i've got pretty repeatable steps um here and and um
you know just you know maybe an hour of playing around with it you know after the fact
so it definitely doesn't take as long as is uh deep sky imaging the the main challenge with doing
solar imaging is um how hard it is on on hard drives and
and computer resources because i've got an external hard drive here
sitting next to me that i've been using you know over the last week and it's eight terabytes and it's almost filled
up now you know if you're just using it for like a week wow um you know jason's i mean it's just
it's really spectacular it is uh you know i i i don't know if you have uh
images that you consider to be masterpieces but i i consider this to be one of your masterpieces for sure
thanks for that you know it definitely looks amazing seems to have struck a chord with a lot
of people yeah so that's good yeah that is beautiful can i ask him what
type of camera he's using or what camera he used yeah this is uh the asi 174
mm camera that's beautiful yeah the advantage to that camera
is that it shoots um it's not necessarily a very high resolution camera it's got large pixels
and a decently large sized chip for
um you know a planetary astro camera and
the combination of those large pixels and the large chip
gives you a really great recording of surface you know that camera excels on solar and lunar
capturing because you can um you can capture frames really fast over
the whole surface of the chip so you know i can record this at this is recorded at 128 frames per
second wow what's that is that a mono camera it is
a mono camera yeah yeah i believe that's a global shutter too
yeah it is um and i've got i was just working on um this was actually from today
um wow oh crap i didn't mean to close that
[Laughter] but um but you can see that let me see if i can
get this back up here david said he counted 31 sunspots today
is there a bunch of is that a chain of uh sunspots or yeah so this is the
active region that just came around the uh the opposite limb of the sun um
so it just came into view and this is an inverted look
um and the reason why i invert it is it helps you see
the uh the chromospheric details uh pretty well if you don't invert it the uh
the plasma that's above the photosphere actually looks dark against the background
and by inverting it you you take the um the chromosphere and you make it brighter than the photosphere behind it
okay allows you to see you know the brighter regions here would be
um higher altitude off the of the photosphere so
you can begin to see um some nice depth um looking at it this way the only drawback
to looking at a sunspot inverted as the sunspot becomes bright and it looks pretty unnatural but
um the uh it's definitely an interesting active
region that just just popped around the corner so i shot i think about 100 frames of um
of this one today so i can sequence those into a video
i actually have a video here i can show
maybe oh yeah here you go so this is the same the same sunspot
that we just looked at here this is the video of it two days prior
yeah let me see if it'll play here
yes this is two hours of motion of that oh wow active region yeah it's just rocking back and forth
mm-hmm the natural motion of this the active
region is towards the limb of the sun here i'm just uh rocking it back and forth because it kind of helps your eye track track
movement sure but i mean this is a good demonstration how much seeing can change during a
session um you know it fades in and out and you get some really nice detailed
images and then you get a bunch of garbage in the middle but once you string them together
if you play it back fast enough the eye kind of smooths over all the the uh it does blurry ones and you can kind of see
the movement there that's wow
at times it just really pops you know so yeah and you can see like there's a you
know nice i don't know if you'd call this a flare but a finger that reaches out of the
active region here yeah and that that grip over to the left is
is pretty interesting oh yeah
beautiful amazing jaw-dropping stunning
it's nice to have active sun again we've it's been so boring for for
the last year for a long time oh yeah for a long time that's right
let me ask you a question jason uh based off of the ability the skill level
of astrophotographers now that are able to really kind of you know ferret out
the details of uh of um you know the sun or or any object that
they might be photographing you know they've taken it to you know you and you know
experi other experienced astrophotographers have taken uh imaging to a level that
really is unprecedented uh when you
even though the sun is not what i would call super active you know i remember
back in 1991 seeing a incredibly active sun okay
um you know uh you know you're you're able to pull out images that are still uh
you know heart stopping incredible um but there's compared to like some of these really
active times that you know it's it's you know the sun is not being so uh
spectacular itself
what is the question i want to ask you it is you know are you
do you think astrophotographers are having to work that much harder to to
bring out the information that people want to see in this in in an object like the sun or is this uh
is the software and the equipment
catching up or is it a combination of the two you know i mean you're at the bleeding edge of this so
what can you tell us as far as being an astrophotographer and uh and having a great software to
work with because i think the software is better yeah definitely right and the camera i
mean there's there's just there's no doubt that there's more tools that our disposal now to to
you know enhance the details and astrophotography software has come a long way
traditional photography software has come a long way you know they've got um
you know a lot of advancements in image processing and that allows you to
really pull out the micro level contrasts in the image and
that's what makes it you know pop visually and i
think yeah i mean it's a combination of what i call working harder which is you
know using more advanced tools and you know i guess my question is
yeah now that you have these kind of tools where you can get in and really attenuate fine contrast and find details and stuff
like that are the image processors you know the the people that uh i mean you're doing all of it
you're grabbing the data you're doing the image processing and all the rest of it
but as an image processor are you are you having to work harder
because you can work harder at it or is it is it easier do you think or what how do
you feel i mean to get the best stuff you know to get the best stuff yeah i mean i
you know i spend a lot of time and you know resources trying to capture
these images so i feel like i mean my philosophy is you know i want to do it justice i want to you know
reveal what's there to the best of my ability and i kind of feel like i owe it to the
image if i spend all that time collecting it um you know it's kind of a bummer when you
you know you can look at any hsha you know hydrogen solar monitor like
they have websites that show the activity on the sun today and it's been so boring for so long so
you see like a you know an active region come across the sun and um
you've got all the solar images like going crazy trying to you know capture every moment of it but
um you know i think over the next couple years when we start getting into the solar maximum it's going to be
um you're going to see some amazing images come out i think like this solar cycle coming up
the image processing and the image capture techniques that come so far that um it's
probably going to blow away everything that we saw before in the last solar cycle
yeah i believe you're right i believe you're right hey scott i've got i got a couple
comments about that okay i think the tools the cameras and the speed of the tools
um especially the uh real short exposure times and the number of the storage space needed
has become available over the last two or three years to where you know this is kind of a form of lucky
imaging where we're ferreting out these perfect frames out of all the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of
images to combine statistically into the very best image as possible so
the more time and the more data you can get statistically you know jason is ferreting out these really
excellent frames that these fleeting moments that this everything comes together with
the seeing in the sky and and everything else so i think that that's the main improvement that
we've had for in terms of planetary lunar or solar imaging type stuff uh
the the technology that we can throw at this pro problem or process has
come a long way in terms of performance and i think jason's taking excellent
advantage of that those tools and presses them to the limit you know when you're thinking about 300 000 frames of
data you know you know hundreds of gigabytes of data you know
in an afternoon that's that's pretty amazing i know i've i've done 30 gigabytes a night of lunar
imaging and uh that to me was a huge amount of data but it's nothing like this that uh
jason is talking about he's brought it up to another level yes and yeah so i think that's a big part of
being able to that coupled with you know the like like jason said the new tools and new ways of
processing but it's i'm not taking away jason's got highly is a highly skilled
astrophotographer he knows how to set these software programs up to get the data he wants the very best of it and
process it so as a combination of both of those things
processed with you last night is setting up everything is really giving me a
level of appreciation you know it's giving me a level of appreciation to
you know of what the kind of dedication that it takes i think that once you're on a path
though and you've got a clear idea of where you're going it is just a matter of time until
you know that you're going to to you know collect out the right images and
and process them in a way that that can give you a result like this but um
i'm still i i am in awe i really i've definitely
you know as as i've gotten more into
you know planetary or solar imaging like that you know you i've found that it's it's it's almost a
matter of you know you find something that works and it sends you down the path
and you keep refining and fine-tuning and you know improving
um any aspect or any um yeah
any part of it that's deficient you pretty much um
you start honing in on and getting some some really excellent data
out of a you know a system or parts that you know initially didn't
give you the same results you know i've been using this system
um for quite a while now uh solar imaging and i can look at my progression um oh
yeah over the last two years doing it and it's it's a steady improvement
but what's actually changing there is mostly my ability to work with the data
because the equipment has stayed largely the same processing tools have changed a little
bit but you know my ability to optimize that system is really what's
changed and been able to you know
improve my ability to produce you know better and better images right it reminds me jason of um
the years that i spent working and learning the zone system uh so you know i as a teenager i was
corresponding with the ansel adams i was i was shooting a large format cameras
going ultimately up to an eight by ten and uh you know doing um you know all on
film uh and this is regular photography but we learned sensitometry i had a
macbeth sensitometer we're making transmission measurements of the the negative and and calibrating our films
and calibrating our chemicals and all the rest of that stuff you know it wasn't just taking an image
you know it was diving deep into printing and all of that stuff and i see that i appreciate what you're doing here
because to to achieve this kind of stuff is very very similar to the kind of discipline
that it took ansel to create those masterpieces so uh there's a lot of work that goes into
something like that and uh you're to be really congratulated that's fantastic it is i appreciate that
thanks for uh having me on too and give me the opportunity to share it was great thank you thank you
okay so um let's uh let's let's uh go around to uh
we've got jerry uh i think with some live images i think uh richard has
a better uh uh image capture of m31 right now
you want to show us what you have richard
we got m33 um not m31 and i uh i finally figured
out how to uh change some of my white balance stuff in here before we hit the uh the screen stretch
right so uh for a 10-minute sub um straight in sharp cap
um i'm i'm pretty happy i think something something changed and uh
i've been messing around with um trying to uh get rid of colors that were in the
camera post-processing i think i just figured out a way to adjust some of them going in on the front end
because it doesn't look blue like andromeda did um so i'm pretty happy with that i can't
cut any more green out of it so i i got it about as good as i can get for that but uh
for one sub straight and sharp cap um i am using the auto stretch feature i
tweaked it around a little bit but i mean all right that looks almost as good as
my last triangle image that i published beautiful sharp
stars are tracked perfectly looks very good it's zoomed in too and that's uh one of your 8080s
oh wow okay beautiful beautiful you can see the spiral arms go way out there actually so
yeah yeah i mean if i stacked up a few pictures i'm sure it would be great but uh like i said we're just playing around
so we can show as much as possible tonight so uh thanks for letting me share that real quick and uh i think i'm gonna go
off to the pleiades okay all right thank you richard that's great back to
you okay all right so uh let's see let's go back to
um to you uh jerry let's let's see what's going on at the msrl
so i started up the msro we've got you know i'll i'll share my desktop and then um
the uh thing to notice here you know is is
i'm got it trained on can you see that i've got it trained on um
m74 in uh pisces right and uh oh wow you can see the dome you
can see the picture of the observatory you can see the sky how bright it is that's because the moon is coming up
and it's going to get really bright and but uh this is a three minute one i'm showing
there's a three-minute image that i just took about five minutes ago and um
you can see how you can see this is uncalibrated so you can see the
the vignetting the sky background is really bright here in this image and but you can
definitely see the uh spiral structure of that and this is actually
i did a google um uh our wikipedia on this object and i i
came up with this description here um
that right it's called the phantom galaxy phantom galaxy and is it's considered
one of the hardest uh well it's a low surface brightness makes the most difficult messy object for amateur
astronomers to observe in the eyepiece i assume that's that's what they're talking about there in the eyepiece sure
so it's a so it's a fairly dim uh galaxy and in fact i think i can get
some my chart i've got some information about it also um
you can see it's here in pisces it's getting ready to cross the meridian we're about 13 minutes away
right um so you're about to do a meridian flip on your television right so i'm gonna
see what does this say so the brightness is it's 14th magnitude
okay so that's pretty dim and this is only a six and a half inch scope yeah six and a half inch scope but
you can see how sensitive the camera is to be able to bring out this kind of detail you know it's a
single image yeah yeah and you can see how bright the internal you know the
center of the galaxy is but these spiral arms are you know probably 16th magnitude surface brightness yeah
they're very faint so uh that's pretty good and but you can also see the sky you know the moon this is why
deep sky people don't like the moon because of this problem [Laughter] you know i'm not i don't consider myself
that rap because of that so yeah i don't really consider myself a deep sky imager per se you know i'm more into science
stuff but it's always good to understand the limitations of this
and you can see how nice the stars are you know around with a three-minute image this is using
telescope drive master you know no auto guiding on this image it's really nice uh feature of the observatory oh you can
see here i don't know if you can bring that out or see that let me go to 100 view see this big dust spot right here yeah
that's that's a dust that's a dust mote on a refractor that's what doesn't look like a donut of course because there's
no central obstruction yes yeah so that's uh that's one of the this is why you do
flat fields to to uh normalize all this noise and all this uh
response and correction for the flat for the uh data
so that's what i've been messing with the last few minutes it's getting ready to do a meridian flip so i'm probably
gonna wait for that and then start a run on this object uh three minute images probably an hour's worth just to see
what i can get so this is 32 million light years away right 32 million light years away that's
far yeah yep so let me uh that's
yeah so here in wikipedia says the
uh the large angular size of the galaxy in the face on orientation makes it an
ideal object for professional astronomers who want to study spiral arm structure and spiral density waves
100 billion stars in that galaxy 100 billion so all in one little smudgy
light blob give or take a few million right that's right so it's hard it's hard for these
uh alien civilizations and m74 to be grouped all
together like that yeah they look at the milky way and they go okay well now which planet are we going to go to
jeez pretty daunting 32 million light years that's quite a
ways well that's that's what i'm uh doing right very cool
all right how about you richard do you have any uh
are you grabbing more images here at this point or
i'm trying to but uh i just had a minor technical difficulty i'll definitely
need a couple minutes and probably 10 minutes to sample
how about you caesar you got uh mars there yes everything yes i have okay
check it out okay i i share okay yeah please do okay
[Music] because uh we can start to say bye bye
to mars actually it's okay it's okay i don't know how many
seconds eric's have now but i think that many people think that okay mars is no
no mars is surprised yes yes you need to
just i need to say to the people that say oh no don't forget mars because it's near
now you can have the
opportunity because maybe this size is a normal approach
maybe it's not uh and actually the people forget the pictures
of mars but many people's are making a an excellent image this last week
because it's it's near at this time yeah sorry that they're using uh
the simult mode not the ex of one hand that they have
inside and have a lot of
uh glitch but it's okay it's okay it's something for for fun you know yeah
no more than this
very nice very nice it's a simple pretty much after the
amazing pictures of the sons of the sun
you know but the idea is ever ever make
something from the places that normally people think that
are impossible to to make something of astronomy and
actually maybe next week i try to make live image of the sky
from here right maybe from tarantula
i promise all right that's great
okay uh do you guys want to go to a break
right now do you want to show more images or how do you want to go
you can do a 10 minute break if you'd like i got eight minutes till i can share anything
okay all right well we'll take a little break um that's okay and uh
uh we'll come back in 10 minutes all right okay
sounds good yeah
[Music]
ah
so how's it going
life is good life's good huh watch the countdown 13
12 11 10.
here comes it's gonna pop up any second
that's good you got something already huh yep all right we're gonna stop uh
stop the intermission here that's cool uh let's see
there we go let's say bring you in here
i like your little mission control that you've got going on here richard thank you it's cool i've been working on
it for a while and uh yeah yeah i'm uh i'm gonna be moving in the uh the
spring summer so i'm not trying to add too much to everything that's going on right now but uh next year things are
going to be a whole lot better in bordeaux four not bortles six and uh right we're going to put a pipe in the
ground and some some good stuff but yeah let's find this share screen button where is
it
oh very nice and we got the pleiades with a 10-minute sub and we're definitely starting to show some amp
glow over here in the corner uh with that stretch for sure without any
subtracted uh files or anything but uh we're definitely showing nebulosity
um the pleiades is cool
and uh during the break i ran outside and i stood next to the telescope down by
where it's pivoted on and i looked over the top of the the house and i said oh it won't be too long until orion i
didn't know how how many months would go by before we could get get it on the star party but if we uh if we hold out
and party for like another half an hour it can happen right
it's beautiful it's great hang on
well once again i'm gonna send it back to y'all okay well let's do that let's do that
oh great um well we're kind of at the part of our
uh global star party where it's kind of free-form you guys can share whatever you want if you have something to show
something you want to talk about yeah i've got actually during the break i went ahead and i had to do a meridian flip so i
went ahead and went to mars first so caesar inspired me to go look at mars like he did
so i'm gonna share my uh screen i've got i'm using sharp cap
right now to look at mars so um can you see that
yep that's what mars looks like in virginia
i got i got mars from michigan we can compare from buenos aires to virginia
it's the same mars that's the same mars that's right it's it's mars know that everybody's looking
at it it's like uh right like um
war of the worlds you know if you would have believed that people are appearing at you know from the
depths of space you know eyeing mars
you know we've set our sights against it
[Music] so yeah they sent me a poster today old mars attacks movie oh yeah mars
attack that's cool
you think they're going to find life on don't mars
um my maker who is a microwave
yeah yes microphones maybe i don't know
i think they're gonna i think they're gonna dig in the mud they're gonna find some wet mud
and i think they're gonna find some stuff whether it's fossilized or whether it's
i think they're going to find something my own personal view about life on myers is that
it probably came from here you know we had a big asteroid impact a bunch of bacteria and stuff was viruses
whatever thrown into a space solar wind blows it out mars gets some of it okay
or maybe with the curiosity maybe we put a
we put enough uh those rovers down where if it wasn't there before yeah
don't clean properly um if somebody sneezed on a rover you know
when no one else is in you know
you know clean room yeah who knows i don't know
i got a mars here too if you guys want to see it we're talking about it let's see it
is that coming through oh yeah oh yeah yeah that's nice that's very nice
now okay so you're using um which telescope do you have right
um this is with a 12-inch newtonian 12-inch newtonian what is the effect of
focal length here 6500 millimeters okay
lots of image scale yeah that's uh that's different than my mine is the standard astra cam so mine's only 850
millimeters that's 5.1 so that's a big difference yeah got uh
the asi 183 camera so the pixels are you know two i think they're 2.4 micron
oh yeah it makes the planet pretty big yeah you can see some good detail
popping out there everyone yeah that's the that's infrared um we can look at it in the red filter
here i mean my focus points a little bit different let me switch this up
yeah my scene's not the best but no it looks great looks great we look at
it with um green or blue you can start to see the ice ice cap down here oh yeah uh yes
yeah so this is blue i mean in blue you can see start to see
the the haze around the limb you know the limb looks brighter right edges in the north pole
i bet if we looked at i've got a uv filter in here too that'll bring out the clouds
you can see the clouds there oh yeah that's nice
not much uv signal gets through on these cameras because they have a blocker i see
so it's really grainy but dt i promise that uh you'll be you'll be
uh uh using our telescope very soon we're we're making lots of headway with it and
um now we just have to have a run of clear nights so
all right i'm excited for that it is yeah that's great
scott and i did a shakedown run of his system last night um for two and a half hours and
we got to where it was working pretty well i think
i had alex look at um last night drive system son yeah
did you yes i i went to you and jerry uh trying and
i see i i was expected to see the focusing you know with the stars are
making it's every time every turn is is uh
this is the first time when you try to make something especially robotic because it's yeah all
the systems work together uh i love this yeah i want to have an operating i want
to have a software interface though that uh dt and her team can use um
you know it's not so uh difficult you know um you know so and and i'm not sure what
that what that interface is going to be like you know uh jason from your perspective
you know we're using nina right now but it just it does not seem you know i mean
you would expect things to be on a certain uh dialogue box or whatever and it's just
uh it's not there but it's someplace else you know so you're kind of jumping around in the program what do you think
would be easiest for a dt and her team to use
right we actually scott and i talked about this earlier today with the software but
you know sequence generator pro is is a really nice software to use um
you know it's it's um it's not free like nina is um obviously so you guys have an investment there it
doesn't need to be free i i was half convinced to buy
maximum dl you know yeah i talked to scott about maximum deal because i like using i'm so used to it at the
observatory you know it's easy for me to to go and directly and start the thing up in two or three minutes and get
everything like i want but it's it takes a little time to learn these programs but uh
so but and maxum dl is a professional it's used in a lot of professional observatories so it's been such
it's been pretty rel i mean it's shaken down and it's it's been it's almost 20 years old i think 15 years old so
it ought to work good i mean you're paying enough for it yeah i feel the same way about sequence
generator pro i mean i've i've i've used it for years and and it it's
reliable and and you know i'm comfortable using it so it's
it's hard for me to change and i've been wanting to try out some of these other software packages but
we got in there yeah right
i'd like to go back to my mars for a minute i adjusted the exposure yeah you guys are in control of
the program right now it's your star party
so i adjusted my exposure and you can see a little more detail in terms of the yeah
um dark markings anyway so let me i'm going to zoom up a little bit more on it so there you go so that's
that's a full color image and that's at uh about 0.9
um arc seconds per pixel image scale
i think it's pretty good nice let's see in color yeah it's not
going to be like uh what jason had of course because he's got such a much larger scope and a
longer much longer focal length but uh again i'm amazed that a deep sky camera
that's configured you know this system's configured for deep sky that it can actually pull out this type of detail
you know with the with the planetary lunar image i do i do full disc lunar images with
this system and i like doing you know finding that we can get the craters down to
five kilometers or less you know on those images and it's the whole moon so it's like a
survey of the moon every time i take a picture in fact this morning i was up at three o'clock in the morning
doing uh pictures of the uh of the moon full disc images of moon
with this system
it's great you need like three 3x barlows though
well just one stacked on top you could we could make a little bit of trade off we could probably boost the uh
focal length from 850 millimeters up to around 1200 or
millimeters um to split the difference the field of view on this camera it's it's nice on
this system it's one of the 1.3 by 0.9 degrees field of view so you can get a good
portion of the sky and still be critically sampled you know
which is what i like you know i like to be able to critically sample but as big a piece of the sky as you can get
because it makes it easy easier to point easier to find stuff just it makes the whole operation a lot
more efficient be one of those camera selectors on the
back of that thing yeah rotate it get a camera rotator that'd be kind of a cool instrument to put on it'd probably weigh
about 25 pounds or something but not maybe we looked at it before i think
uh yeah it makes one no really um it's like a four port it's just got a
rotating mirror in there that sends the light back off to different you can put different cameras on the
back your telescope and um you know it's motorized and automated
right so the um that would work if as long as you could
like i've got the uh field flattener focal reducer the three inch field flattener poker reducer on this system
um that works great i guess you'd be able to put that on there with your with your
deep sky camera and then rotate around with your with your tele extenders on your planetary camera
that would be pretty awesome really
so is that that view there is that at that remote observatory the the mark slade yeah this
is at the mark slade remote observatory yep yep and uh here's what it looks like
right now so you're just logged in remotely to it from there yep yep so let
me bring that back up i don't know if you can see so there it is right there you can see the moon's
starting to come up see the oh yeah right let me let me make this bigger something
i wanted to say to the audience here i i put out a text there but anyone that's interested
in uh in joining up with us on the global star party and sharing your
work your images um you know your you know if you have art uh music
whatever um we're we're interested in having you participate so send me an email i'm
going to give my email address out there and uh we'll be happy to get you hooked up
it's a lot of fun it's rewarding and i think that it uh it it helps uh if
you're someone that wants to do learn how to do presentation uh
you know we can we'll get you on you know you can see that we're not very
hard on our guests you know i don't know i don't beat our guests up or whatever you know we we encourage them to uh to
give their talks and stuff and you'll be you have a global audience
you know we have people watching from all over the world i get uh
you know great comments from everywhere so it's really it's a lot of fun
it's great i you know i think jerry i think what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and buy the
um you know maxum dl you know because i know that you know it so well it's what i want to match kind of what's going on
at the msro and uh okay yeah
the whole system sure right yep
you'll be using uh some great software and working with somebody that is uh very good at doing science here so
yeah i know that's where you want to go
caesar you look like you're like in a dark tunnel with blue glowing eyes
yeah the coating of my glasses yeah absolutely yeah
yes actually uh we would make this coating that is a
typical coating with a blue it's something of of tunnel make but
it's interesting because do you remember the guys sure isn't is it yes it's a cutting of
the blue the the quantity of of blue that having led
screens and you know the name of the filter is uh
actually is a blue cut blue out blue blah blah blah but it's
uh it's um yes this filter really we know
from a lot of time in astronomy like a minus b but
yes yes and actually um we
uh put in the in the recipes of filmology
we make this this type of glasses to blocking the
the quantity of blue light from the lead system because
they are not so so uh dangerous for for
division but uh the idea of of leads uh the quality the
separated of quantity of blue light in the left illumination on the screen
is that change your perception of the
psychotics
and this is right yes it's something blocking it's a reflective blue
it's working sorry
if you buy glasses if you go buy glasses to your or your business is this less expensive
than buying glasses like in the united states
um say probably is this is the same yes it's the same difference
if you go to new york to making coins optics you know because i i know these
guys because they show you more uh different brands
like barry loops all that we use normally is very focused
and when you go to the very focus options you are
going to spend more money in every in any country united states have a achieve achieve
options and argentina too but when you go to the very focus or you
know when change with the light of the sun this type of filter and you put
money and money like telescopes sometimes yeah
and it's it's fun when i have in the same in my our in
the same business we have our customer of astronomy
go coming to to make the recipe for these glasses right there's the glasses they say okay
this is another part of your eyepiece that's right your most this part right here is the most important part yes
absolutely um i when i receive people that
that coming from astronomy i have one of our customers it's an excellent
an excellent work measuring and comparing variable stars
only with with watching without instruments and he his name is
sebastieno tero he worked for the valuable star uh american variable star
as you say yes okay yes yes yes and uh
you know when you make a glass for this guy he's because he
have a very sharp he need really a very sharp condition
yeah and you you need to resolve the stigmatism
presby well you know my of the uh all right
all the entire yes yes if the they are the most our customers that came in from
astronomy are the most when i make the refraction and and try the glasses
yes they gotta be yes yes
yeah absolutely right yes interesting it's interesting
work in the both sides because of talmix is is very interesting
it's where the the image of the sky end in your retina yes is incredible that's
true if the photons hit your
your cones um it's in english i don't remember the
name of the cons is one of the cells another one of for black and white i
don't remember baton is in spain and um i forget the name in english and
really the photon from from the sky that that traveling maybe
i don't know one million of years uh hit your retina
it's magic really sun magic right
that's right it's amazing it's really amazing
so richard you have uh something uh something else coming up
we're gonna make richard do the all the mercy objects and one night that you can see
okay well honestly when you originally uh told told me about the star party i kind
of figured that was what it was going to be like okay well we'll turn it but but but i
like the uh i like the overall uh no actually i do have i i have something
i can show okay um let's do it let's do it this one i named a ride in the trees
orion in the trees okay oh wow okay we we got orion here
still in the trees right it's like a bird yeah
yeah yeah if that's the it's kind of upside down it would look better in the trees if it were the other way
i've always thought it looked like a bird since the first time i saw it oh yeah but um i did want to say one other
thing actually um one of my friends had a uh a bonfire uh for halloween uh some of the people that
he he works with and i went up there and set up a telescope and uh
i'm glad i just took the little travel uh the little um uh whatchamacallit uh sky guide or
whatever um and uh took a little small mac
uh with it too and uh it was funny because it was at least 90 percent cloudy you know one
of those nights where i wouldn't have even bothered setting up more of the equipment just because
but because it was cloudy and the moon came out for like three to four seconds
in between the clouds it was hilarious to watch the excitement of people jump
out of their chairs run over the scope look into it for three seconds and then go back and sit
back down but right i think because it was such a limited time to catch a view at something it
caused more excitement and it was really cool we all enjoyed our time uh doing that together i i do find
when i do outreach like sidewalk astronomy that kind of thing that uh
you know the most gratifying objects of course number one is saturn it really is
um uh probably number two has got to be the moon uh if you are in a dark sky site
objects like m13 m92 m42 you know these objects capture
people's imaginations if you can get them to stay at the eyepiece for a little while okay that
that right there that's that's the you know now you're moving this person closer and
closer to actually becoming you know they they will tip over and go
into where their minds they become astronomers at that point
you know so but you have to take them in uh and carefully
uh without blowing them away with facts and figures or something that sounds really boring but somehow
making the universe come alive for them you know and personal for them
then then they then they then they can become very very interested in
diving into this personal exploration this personal discovery
uh situation where they really start becoming quite fascinated
with seeing what they can see what they can explore you know and
it's it's actually quite joyful for me when i see people jumping into it
sometimes they're too enthusiastic and i start to see them
where they want to spend a lot of money or something like that and i'm like whoa you know just just take it you know
throttle it back a little bit enjoy every little piece of this okay
uh because um you know sometimes they'll spend a lot or they'll
jump in too deep or going too fast or something and uh they don't um
you know they they kind of burn out quickly is what i would say you know maybe buy
the wrong gear just because the either wrong gear nobody told them it was very true so
my mac ceased my uh my ownership that night too uh because uh it did bring uh others to uh
want to get into the hobby and i guess that's the most important thing but luckily my my friend he wanted to you
know mainly look at the moon and planets and i was like well i mean you know a small little max kind of the perfect
thing i mean you know especially you know 100 millimeter size one or something it's
very travel friendly um so yeah it was a great night a great time i
i love uh exposing people um to uh the the hobby if you want to call it that
the lifestyle if you want to call it that uh mm-hmm you know whether you know is online or in person or
you know however it can be right it's it's uh
it seems cliche to call it a hobby because it's more than that you know people it takes over
people it occupies their mind so much you know once they get into the voyage of uh
of um you know exploring the universe you know
like you know jason here and jason is
so deep into you know really uh seeing the
you know these amazing details in the universe and stuff and i know you know from the way he describes his
images and stuff and and all the rest of it he has spent a lot of it's uh
gosh how do you describe it it's like this real intimacy with uh trying to
understand the universe you know so and that's what that's what all of you guys are doing you know and the
people that are watching here this is what they're doing too it's it's really amazing i don't claim
to ever uh well i don't think i'm ever going to figure it out well you're never going to understand it
you know if stephen hawking couldn't do it uh you know and and i think he was i
think he he felt he was close you know um uh
you know it's it really it it takes uh it takes something but i think that i think that all of us really
do understand that um you know we feel this connection to the
universe at large sometimes i i jason this is funny but sometimes i'll be
outside anywhere and i just kind of look up at the blue sky in the daytime and i
just go you know i'm still looking out across the universe you know and uh
and i i try to just for a moment stop stop to think that okay we are
flying through space you know we're flying through space at incredible speeds you know where we're
you know our planet is spinning around this little star as this spiral arm is
moving what half a million miles an hour around the center of our galaxy the whole galaxy's moving at
i don't know a million a half miles per hour to a new part of space we've never been to
before all the time all the time
and this 100 kilometers of atmosphere this right distance from the sun
all these and these things where we're in this quote gold goldilocks zone
uh it's amazing and we're down here visiting
these uh polishing up these lenses and doing this stuff so we can look out
and try to understand this you know it's it's an incredible voyage you know it really certainly gives perspective
it sure does i got a couple images that i took um well that i recently
finished up if you want to look at them yeah we're doing like a show-and-tell here so
uh this one here you see my screen
this is the uh the draco trio of galaxies wow that's amazing look at that
in the constellation of draco uh the cool thing about this grouping is that they are three um
visually different galaxies in the same um you know high magnification field of view
so we've got a uh elliptical galaxy here
yeah flanked by two spiral galaxies this one at the top is uh
almost perfectly agile you can see the little dust lane running through it yep
and then this one down here is a rather beautiful spiral
that's cool that's cool there's always little background galaxies if you go looking in here
that looks almost three-dimensional yeah it's beautiful the way those dark
areas are yeah it is three this is the this is the same
group called the 59 um or the um 5982 group
uh that sounds right ngc 50 yeah that sounds right yeah ngc 59 76 59 81
yeah 59.85 uh these three galaxies are known as the
draco trio draco group although there's no evidence that they
form a compact group okay interesting they are
wikipedia huh yeah they are neighbors though um i don't know the separation but they all
um have a distance of just over 100 million light years these three
it says the separation is 7.7 arc minutes um
i guess the larger galaxy in there is a hundred thousand light years across it was discovered by william herschel on
may 25 1788 wow
yes i don't know that was a that was a cool image i love these galaxy groupings and and
shots um right especially it's the center galaxy that is 5982
that uh william herschel discovered must be brighter
it's got an apparent magnitude of 11 magnitude
amazing it was just a little what a great observer william herschel was really
yeah he's got a lot he had really good no light pollution
covered the first planet with a telescope right
well you know i mean just reading about you should read about william herschel and what he had to go through to do that
his observations it's unbelievably hard you know unbelievably difficult
him and his sister both and then his son you know this one here is the
soul nebula just the center column of the soul nebula
because this is a pretty nearby star-forming region yeah
and um this was taken in hydrogen oxygen and
sulfur emission bands
ended up with a nice nice amount of detail in there beautiful
yeah we're talking about you know new processing techniques so you know all the rage now is the uh the
starless look at these
nebulae so i i just think this is pretty cool it looks like almost impressionistic yeah
i really like this area down here jason do you ever print up your work do
you put it up on the wall or um yeah i do um
not as much as i probably should but i do
so those are just too amazing this area has got to be i mean so rich
in star formation you know
yeah these uh these areas here like these little columns it kind of reminds you of the pillars of
creation i know they are that's exactly what they are smaller scale but right
actually i don't know the physical scale between them but they look like whatever it looks small
even on the right side there you can see one like a you know star kind of embedded in dust
up there you know yeah this one down here looked uh
you can almost see this this star here carved out this whole pocket for itself
there's all kinds of little looks like young stars kind of igniting in these in the dusty pockets here
yeah it's kind of like looking down at a um
sometimes you look at a pond of water where there's you know
moss or whatever growing in there and these you just start looking deeper deeper into it and
and uh you know you realize there's all kinds of stuff going on in there you
know you scoop up a little bit of it and put it under a microscope wow you know there's all kinds of things
going on and this is what this is the same thing look at that
incredible so this must be like i don't know what do you think like stellar wind kind of blowing off the
the yeah it's like whispering kind of pushing out the interstellar dust down you know and kind
of reflecting it back yeah i don't really know the mechanism i mean my understanding of these is like
these these uh pillars are carved out by the you know basically when these stars
ignite they yeah exert pressure on the gases and kind of compress them into these columns
i don't really know how things like this form you know that's a there's a pretty thin column out in the middle of nowhere
right
i suppose if you were to somehow be able to fly up close to them they would entirely disappear though
you know you wouldn't be able to see them oh yeah that would be disappeared but
for all we know we're sitting inside of one of those we're inside exactly i think they i
think they did say recently that we are surrounded with gas and dust like this
in our in our region uh i can't remember where i saw that story at but they think that
our system we could be inside of a nebula just like this so we could be looking
to be like one little dot of a star that would be our son yeah it's an
interesting perspective when you think you know if you were at you know at one of these
stars looking back at us what would you see yeah look something like this i think it would
yeah i don't think it's clean you know like we're out in empty space
it's amazing it's amazing terry mann and i got in this conversation uh
earlier today about kind of the uh recycle of everything in the universe
you know and it's uh
it's kind of somber because we were talking about people have passed on you know but
when you think about it there's like no end you're going to
you know whatever this door is that we call life and then you go on it just keeps going
on keeps going on
it's beautiful i want to thank uh clear skies network and and wade for the raid on twitch
oh they gave us a rain thank you that's cool
yeah that's very cool
oh i see it right there what is what is a raid i don't i'm not familiar with that
i don't know i see it says ray ray ray you know up here actually he's jumping off his audience to us that's what he's
doing so it's great
so dt what do you think about all this
[Music] i said i said what do you think about all of this what how did those
how do jason's images make you feel
i just wonder for this it is so wonderful i'm just looking and
staring at that picture and feeling like yeah i mean to me i look at them and
it's like it's like seeing the hubble space telescope images or something you know
right it's amazing yeah he does love me
so how how dt how do you explain to your friends uh their
their relationship to the universe i mean
you know i know that you know you know uh you you've studied astronomy and you
have an astronomy club how do you how do you describe
the relationship between people and the universe okay for that
i believe we all are the part of the universe
and this earth is also the part of the universe so we are in this space we are in the universe
so yes in fact it is not exploded how directly
our life is uh linked but uh in overall uh just we are link up
like uh our maybe th this uh it is believed that the small part of our body is also the part
of the universe it is the maid artist made similar is like the how the universe is made
so yeah it's our bodies uh our life our body is just
similar is like the universe how the universe is created then it is directly linked up with all this
universe and what we do it is uh related and astronomy it is written in every
field of astronomy it is this best in our life totally based upon our life day to day
activities
i would say you're right on the mark i would say that that's a very
accurate description when i look at the images
i am i don't know something stirs inside of me it really does
you know i know that uh um it changes your perspective your
frame of mind you know and uh
it's wonderful to see astronomers uh work so hard to to kind of show you that
you know in such startling detail you know so it's great
i think about caesar caesar is taking people uh
literally like holding their hand to show them what's possible you know
uh from their backyards and uh yeah
yeah right yeah absolutely yes okay
and from balconies yes richard is
yes i remember
yes i remember when we started to talk
this year um when i called to i don't remember if uh
if we are talking about products and i was in the chat not not talking
um i say that i i prefer many times solve
first the mode like the small mount and go to mount because people have sometimes have a
reflex camera and they don't know more that to take the typical pictures
you know in the day the daylight uh regular pictures
and when they put their own reference camera over a uh a
cultural moment and of course that in this time we was talking about about
the exodus 100 but the idea was more to say sometimes to
when the people uh capture the sky uh a small part of the sky
maybe a cluster or or a a part of a landscape with a few seconds
of exposure the magic appears some colors of a
nebula and this year was a year where the people was not
was not able to to spend a lot of money in argentina because it's just it's
really heavy yes everywhere in argentina but you know we have a record for economic crisis
i can teach you who have the worst economical crisis
here and but for many people uh
follow me they'll say whoa a idea because um first day they
buy amount and they start to first they used
a single tripod with their reference camera in second place they uh
they buy by the uh go to mount with a
with a with a quattro mount with low tube
and put the reference camera over the mould and in the
first place they choose a optical tool
but knowing more about astronomy because because they
make them work to take pictures of the part of the sky and
this the people that chose this they they had a better experience because
they they make the experience in in the steps
that was amazing for for these people because they loved
photography they loved the sky and when they put all together camera optical tube and mount
they had a much better experience because they know how to use
the old system together and don't spend
all money in one time right right
wasn't and that was an interesting experience yes
right hey richard do you have another image of
uh of orion that you can show we are still in the tree
but we can definitely still show it again is it getting better
maybe let's see depends on what part of the tree you're
in i guess yeah i think the worst part's about to just stomp right on oh yeah look at that i think this part
is coming this way it's a healthy tree very tall yeah it is
that's right well it's still kind of low tree is part of the universe
yes you know you have to appreciate all of it right is your dream is in your backyard
uh it's my neighbor's tree uh that's in my backyard
okay um it's one of those ones that's like planted right on the fence line and you know
oh yeah maybe if you need good for sticks for for the next winter you know
yeah well next winter i'm there will be in a different way winter winter
yeah right well yeah there's two solutions cesar one is
uh chop down the tree make firewood out of it the other one is just move and that's that's what astro that's what uh
richard's doing he's moving yes yes so moving the darker skies uh darker
skies yes guys only wait because
we love astronomy only we wait because we know that the sky is
it's not quiet yeah i'm not sure how much my plan is going to change but my original plan i have uh
i'm putting up a i call it a two-story shed but it's more like half a barn
um and my plan is to find a um a water main pipe and bury it in lots of
concrete so i can get the scope high enough to see above uh some of the forest in the area to
give myself a whole bunch more sky as opposed to being down in the in the hole kind of be up on top of it a
little bit yes right right right
one thing i i would say you know people that a lot of people think you need
you know very good to excellent conditions and everything to do astronomy that's not the case at all you
should really don't give away opportunities to observe just because you're waiting on perfect
anything that's true you know you know you've seen the uh the horizon around the msro it's
terrible right but there's a great view of the sky of the ecliptic and there's lots of opportunity to
observe regardless of the blockage that we have to the north and everything else
and it's too early to to take pictures of oreo now right
so and then that's the same thing with your backyard don't just because you don't have you know you've got two arc second or
three even three or four arcs i can sing doesn't mean you can't image or observe i mean it's really
don't think you have to be on top of a mountain to get because the goal is to observe it's not the not to compete
against these high dollar professional straw observatories that are up on a mountain that's not the goal
at all that's right it's to observe i mean take every opportunity you can
and people people buy into big scope systems and everything else and it gets to be cumbersome to set up
oh yeah and they don't use after a while they don't use them after a while right so yeah they have to work a
60-hour work week or something you know they're they're not going to take that big telescope out you know not no
that's right so get something small and enjoy it and and you can do a lot with
these spawns and caesar knows about this backyard you know use it from your backyard now if your
backyard's important one sky's great okay but if it's not you know there's there's
ways to make some amazing images you know i mean jason's like one of the guys that
chuck aiub is another guy you know that's doing that uh doug strouble another guy you know so
make the best of what you have don't don't complain about it and just plan for the future because you know you
never know what's going to happen that's right my borderlands says portal 6 but i have
an led street lamp 100 feet away so i think that probably at least puts me in
portal 7 at least at least that's right and i mean
i honestly feel like i don't have a problem imaging with that i mean and
i travel to uh bordeaux four um well i used to more regularly lately
i've been hanging around the house because obvious reasons um but
i mean honestly being around here helps to be able to get everything you know set up and i mean it's it's taken me a
while um you know like i said before my first official kind of image was last year was
mercury on november 11th so i'm uh i've officially been doing this
for a year and wow you're doing really good so we're we're going to keep going
because i'm i'm still learning stuff every time my brain has the ability to
take more in because it comes in faster than i can learn it it really does i mean you know
it's just more like if you if you if you learn something when somebody tells you a whole bunch of something you're still
moving forward so you don't have to feel like you gotta pull it all in at one time because it's it's a lot to take in
you know and you just take little steps and your images get better and
you know um and it's about the journey it's about the journey it's not about the goal of getting a certain picture or a certain
quality you know you're going to always appreciate it says you know i mean he's you know he of course he's discovered
you know tons of comments but it's not about the comet discovery it really is about
for him it's about the search for comets you know he he loves that more than
i think the actual discovery you know although i've been around him when he's made discoveries
and stuff and it's uh it's a huge thrill but um
but i think the thing that keeps him happy and keeps him focused is uh
and has healed him i don't know if you guys know this but david had a severe stroke
and this goes back years ago and i really i believe that it was astronomy that healed him
you know because uh he still got out he still even when
you know he couldn't write he couldn't you know there's a lot of things he couldn't do after a stroke
he was able to step by step
you know rewire himself and now you see him give lectures and
all the rest of it but that was not how he was right after his stroke he really had a
big debilitation and i think for a lot of people if they don't have something like that
you know it's it's uh they're they're wounded for life but you would almost not know that at all about
david at this point so astronomy is good for you
it heals you it gives you more to think about it keeps you on a path of discovery and exploration that's
the most important part i completely agree yeah yeah absolutely
i wanted to ask you something dt do you want would you like to be on more of the these programs um
[Music] okay all right we'll have to figure out some
more uh topics
you know so think about what what you would like to uh just still do i think you've been very
very good for this uh program and i know people are interested in
[Music]
wonderful okay well uh gentlemen is there anything else
you'd like to share or i was waiting to see if the moon would
pop up above the trees i'd like to do something but it's still got some time you know i'm still not it's not up
to high enough yet it doesn't transit until uh 3 3 30 in the morning so it's gonna be
probably another hour right i may have to get up early in the
morning again take an image and then show it uh on friday actually i've had the uh
i don't know how much time you want to spend i've got uh the video that i took this morning i could probably go through
and see if i could process it uh with registex just to see what we get
i haven't even looked at it yet show how that's done let me stop sharing
all right [Music]
i've still got uh sharp cap on mars here i've been
taking a bunch of i've been taking a bunch of data for that so uh
i'm actually going to dump out of this [Music] so i don't use up a lot of resources
while i'm doing this or you know um sure you can see how bright our sky is
now with the moon coming up in the observatory uh picture oh yeah
yeah um i'm trying to move my this video stuff around can you see like a black
spot on the screen i don't know if you even see it you probably don't no it doesn't look like it no so i'm going to um
i'm going to start is that on the second story or is it it looks like it's high up doesn't it so for
example so look here see this see this area right here that's the door and that's a full-size door okay it's
actually seven foot tall so the the building part is seven foot tall and there's a six foot
dome above it and the pier is actually where the white is that's seven foot
so the mounts that's up on top of the pier which is seven foot tall and so it's a seven foot square or
basically almost a seven foot cube building and there's room to walk around underneath the scope but it's up above
i do have um probably another picture i can show you that shows a better perspective but that's basically because it's such a
wide angle lens it makes it look much higher than what it actually is
um you start where it just stacks
and uh this will be a quick and dirty run through see we can find what we can get
um let me see here
now this is from this morning [Music] is that right capture
yeah that's mars kind of sworn i got more than that let's
see what we got here
i guess that's from this i guess that's it
i thought i took more than that one video yeah maybe i didn't
see what we got here oh i know what i
i did some um i did some sharp cap and i also did some
full frame images like i talked about with the uh deep sky camera let's let's look at these right now
so first thing you do is like i did you open up the file you bring in the data and then you you
can set the align points and it'll pick for that and i like to i don't like to use all of them
i like to back off a little bit uh
[Music] you run the middle point midpoint in the selection so you can you can use a slider to
select the least amount of alignment points for the most about so the alignment points are basically these are
anchors that it's going to look for movement in each section and these are it picks them
based on little details that are in the image i think and that keys off of that little detail and keeps
track of it where it's where it's moving when you do the alignment it'll try to align all the all the files
all the images and the other thing is you can see here how the how it moved over time
and and and the brightness change and everything so there was some clouds
going on during this time you can see the clouds going across oh yeah and uh but overall
thing is pretty good you can see it's fairly steady it's not really getting too blurry it's just that it's wavering around a
little bit that's because i the exposure time was very fast on things and it
freezes the atmosphere so i'm gonna go ahead and
put the alignment
it takes a few seconds for this for about 30 seconds or so
well it says it's got 50 seconds left so it's gonna take about a minute
um i'm just looking to see where we'll
point it so that's that's chart right there shows an example of what our i said what our
local horizon looks like so that's what it looks like that's the patch of sky we have in it
and all the brown stuff is our tree line this is our trees so it's not too good
although there's quite a bit of sky still available right um
all right so this is like you have the telescope at lord ross which just kind of aims straight up yeah right right yeah exactly
you just have to wait for stuff to float in the end i have to wait first yeah you take your opportunity whatever's up at
the time you just observe it you know right
all right so this is almost done here um then we'll go to the next time so what
my normal practice and there's different techniques people do all these different things when they're doing these processing
this is just my particular technique it's not probably not the best not may not be the worst but it's just the way i
do it and one of the things i do is i don't i don't do the limit at this level you can
you can select the best frames but i include all because there's another way to set the limit and i'll
show you that in a minute in terms of the state the number of frames that you're stacking
um so this kind of shows you a little bit about how the moon moved over time or how the image moves
um the next thing i do is i go to the stack ref okay
and what this does this shows you the quality it ranks all the frames by
quality so it goes from the worst to the best on the the left-hand side is the best
and the right-hand side is the worst you can see there's some pretty bad frames in there and we're talking a quality
level let me let me for example um the cutoff point right now we're at
this position is um that's really low it's really
okay now it starts to get into 25 quality down here was zero so it was pretty bad
um so come on
lagging on me so let me drag this around so what i'm going to do is i'm going to try to get this up
there's really some bad frames in there typically i get much higher quality
so we'll just live with what we got in terms of the frames i thought because typically the quality will be from 80 to
95 98 but this is just such a this low quality is 38
that's pretty low i'm surprised that it's that low but we'll we'll go with this and see
what we get uh
so i select the the number of frames i want to stack right now it's set to 100 100
frames out of i think there's 2 000 frames that i collected here
kind of surprised that the quality level's so low but anyway
let's uh do with that so then once i've selected that
i pretty much leave this mostly default here there's some other things you can do i'll get
into in terms you can create an avi with the file you can do all kinds of other stuff which is a video
to play back all the files or the images and but i'm just going to
go with the stack so this is kind of a quick and dirty thing so uh
see how long this takes
all right there's a stack all right now okay
so you can see how it you see these lines that it basically shifted the alignment and it shifted the image so it
aligned all the things and it looks pretty good i mean it's pretty uh
pretty clear right now right but let me show you the uh the real magic of this process and that's the
wavelet filtering uh sharpening it's pretty awesome the way this works
so i'm gonna i'm gonna create a zoomed i'm going to zoom up on
a section of the moon actually quite a bit so you can see
there it's a little bit blurry and i can select what section
we'll look at but we'll concentrate on these two craters and um
and then i'll start these sliders control the wavelet filtering i think i've discussed in the past what the
wavelet process is what the calculation is but i'm i'm not fully versed on it i haven't studied it
a whole whole lot i just i just it's more like uh to me this is the closest thing to magic
and processing that i understand right now okay so you can start to see as i drag
this slider around see how it starts to get a little sharper yeah and uh and so this is the kind of thing
you can do to play with the image it's really cool that you can start bringing out these details
you can push it too hard you start to get a little bit of noise and the other thing is this is a
this is a color image also you can see some of the color artifacts
all right start to come out a little bit um you
start to emphasize certain things so i'm going to do all so right now it's just doing a preview in this little center
section so i'm going to do all and you can see as i do it you can see the original and then it comes out and
shows you the difference there see that oh yeah
so one of the things we can look at here
yes now again this is this is what the this is not with the planetary camera set up this is with the
deep sky camera all right and i zoomed in with cat was
so what i did this is a full disc image with our astro camera and what i did with uh sharp cap is i zoomed in a
region of interest like i was showing mars there i was zoomed into that region of interest that's what i did here on
the moon and captured it sure uh so this is this is not like a video cam it is kind of like a video
camera but it's not it's not it's a deep sky camera uh so it's really different but you can
see here yeah i could ask i've got a program i use called virtual uh
moon atlas yeah it's really a nice tool to identify craters and stuff you know i don't
i know a lot of craters on the larger craters on the moon but i don't know the smaller ones and how big they are
but right now looking at this image like you know typically i can get a resolution of around
three to five kilometers on a crater so for example see this crater right
here yeah can you see that it's like an impression of a crater it's not a completely
well-defined image but i would i would estimate that to be around um
three or four kilometers that little that little crater right there and
that's pretty amazing when you think about it you know that you can use a uh 850 millimeter focal length f5
and still image the moon and get some really good views of it you know
you definitely would have to have a high powered this is like using a high powered eyepiece on the moon
is what it's pretty much like this is what you would be able to see
with your eye but it'd be fleeting it's not like we're freezing the image you know and really
taking advantage of the camera oh i think this is just yeah you'd have to really sit there to find this crater
on the moon or to look at it you really have to watch for a while and train your eye
so that's that's a quick and dirty process that i used [Music]
to do this um with the registax
that's some sherry i'm sorry i i something that you made in the wavelets
if you watch the controls of the uh on the every layer
is like a cure of where you have the layer one
uh is the most change and if you see the controls make like like a
like a cool like mathematic one but this is something
that we say to the people don't over um don't over sharpen
right yeah because but this is the the cure that you can
that the people need to to make in the in each control of the
wavelength right from the yes this is the best
the less versatile sexy
so one thing i can do here uh also is um
i think you can adjust the gamma you know which is basically
you know how linear they call it the uh the response is for each of the
depending on the brightness you can enhance the shadows or the light you know so i can bring out detail in the
shadows a little bit more by doing this actually down here
down here i can't keep grabbing a thing
you know you can see it it's a little messy but you know there's all all kinds of stuff
you could do with this um yeah you pull it back one way and push
it the other way and you can decrease i like you know the color is a little muddy here
you know i i typically convert all my lunar images to a monochrome but the reason i'm using a
color because i've been one this is a one shot color camera and i want the full resolution so i'd
i do a bin one and then when it processes it it combines it keeps the resolution it
combines all the color pixels into each pixel uh now it's not the full resolution it's
it's actually when you when you take uh four pixels and combine them into one month you know
full color pixel yeah you lose about it's about a 1.4 times
reduction in resolution basically okay but but when you uh
but when you do a statistical summation and selection of the image
then you increase the resolution and especially that's what you're bringing out uh
with the uh wavelet filtering so depending on your skies you can get full
diffraction limited uh especially if you get your pixel size small enough you can get full diffraction limited
resolution on your image and that's what that's what jason does
also with the small pixels on mars
you know that's how you can bring all that detail out it's because the pixels are small and you're really
you're you're over sampling big time because you're combining data statistically
and it can pull out all that image detail that you normally wouldn't see
sure i'm sure jason could could do an
excellent tutorial on how he processed it i'm sure he could mars images
yeah i'm sure he could this is kind of a hack right here it's just a quick and dirty look at how the thing works yeah
right um you can um hit that
rgb balance or what's that button oh yeah let me let me go back there
to neutralize the color yeah rgb balance or uh
right here yeah i can auto balance it yeah like that
and it makes it a monochrome but you can see how it's you know i would crop this of course there's all this stuff on the left edge
yeah what's all is that like the edges of the frame or something yeah different frames that were combined those are the
edges when it moved around and it did the alignment but yeah so that's uh right
uh just trying to see if there's any other details here so what i do i the and i've demonstrated this before on
on other episodes so one of the things i do with these images is i take them and load them into another tool called the
lunar terminator visualization tool or ltvt and i can actually do measurements of
these shadows and the size of the craters and do all kinds of topographical measurements to
measure the peaks how high the peaks are that type of thing so if you look
i mean it's really hard to see on this this is really pushing the limit of this thing
so if you look here this the central peak inside this crater right and you can see
this little triangle shadow see that what i'm outlining here sure
so this tool allows you to set up a measurement point right at the peak of
the shadow and know so you tell it the time and date of the exposure and it knows where the sun is located
this program knows the sun angle that's coming in to form this shadow okay
okay so now you can sit there and you identify this peak and then it projects a line back to the sun
along that peak and and you basically set the measurement point there and then you
see where the that line intersects the shadow line right here
yeah and from that it can determine the length of the shadow and from that
the height of this peak it's really a cool thing yeah that's cool
and uh so that's showing us that before and and yeah let's see the
the elevation of each object and right and you can you can also calculate
with these shadows see this shadow of the rim yeah calculate how high the rim is above
the floor of the crater and all kinds of things like that um that's amazing how big some of these
features are really oh yeah but
this is probably a little pushed a little hard uh let me back off of it just a little bit
but you know you just you learn you learn things and uh
that's really zoomed up quite hard too so yeah
um but you push the limits of your equipment that's way and you learn how
to these techniques you know here's another mountain that's kind of cool
right here see that
that would you could measure that peak now this is a again this is a low
you know a low resolution version of a high resolution moon image
you know you can get much better than this and
i can i could actually show some examples maybe real quick
see if i got something here actually
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i'm not trying to see if i've got any uh actually do a search
i may not have anything i may have it on my other my other desk my local desktop instead
of on the uh msro i'm gonna go to my i'm gonna share my other desktop here
stop this real quick and
share again
all right
i have something here that i can show i guess i can show
i'm using here's an example i'll show this real quick this is an example of a full
disk image which is basically what i did in sharp cap is
captured um
that's not very good
yeah actually
there we go there we go you can see how big this this image
actually is
that's before that's the crop this is this is taken with the deep sky camera
right it's amazing yeah that's just it just floors me that it's
able to do this like that's how sharp that's how that instrument how sharp that instrument is
um that's not that's not a so i want to show what a real uh
picture looks like with um i've got some back here
as i'm scrolling through here you might see some secrets off my desktop
i got a bunch of stuff here now what i need to do is uh
search the secrets
draw your necks here's an example of what i'm talking
about with this measurement
and i'm trying to recall oh yeah look at that uh
so you can see these are the peaks right here like this mountain here it's got this
peak and it's that's 728 meters it's a measured value
that's pretty cool yeah that's like uh 2200 feet
you know right so you can see this kind of this level of uh
resolving for that type of thing you know resolving power
and i like to compare these measurements with the uh charts that are put out the lack charts
the lunar aeronautical charts that are available right
so that gives you an idea of what's possible there
oh very cool well i think i'm winding down gentlemen
lady do you mind if i show this real fast now that it finally came out of the tree
yeah let's see it man let's see it
there we go oh yes finally the the trees
in south of the english nice right very nice
that's just 10 minutes no that's just one minute one minute okay that's a 60.4
second sub so it says so and actually that's normally much
longer than i would go uh on orion um because it's going to totally blow out
the core at a minute once i stretch it out and do everything in stack but for the uh
the purpose of showing it on the star party a minute seemed appropriate sure
sure yeah nice beautiful beautiful cool
that's great glad i could show it we definitely got the most pictures uh in that uh we've ever got on a star party
tonight so that's awesome that's awesome that's very good stop this in here and
yeah well i i really appreciate you all being on tonight and uh
you know sharing with the audience all of your knowledge and images and
all of that it's great that's great love the music norman fulham's instrumental i don't
know if uh you were on for that jason no i missed
talked about the uh you know the big telescopes that he makes he makes
he actually constructs his own mirrors and everything up to 65 and a half inches
you know and uh you know just the experience of looking
uh through big telescopes and that kind of thing is really amazing he's uh
it's great to have him on the show terry mann also did a great job uh deepti thank you very much
you know for your presentations it was awesome i hope that you're getting a
good benefit from being on these shows we want you back you know so
it'll be great um cesar thank you for coming on to so many of these programs it's awesome
and richard you've been i think on all of these programs everyone is that right
um yeah all the all the uh besides the european editions yeah but been on all okay
all right there he hasn't always been clear but uh i thank you for the invite to the party i mean because you're thanking all
of us but i mean none of us would be here if it wasn't for you doing this so we really appreciate it
it's been my pleasure you know my pleasure
well thank you very much i think i'm going to call quits tonight and
we've got uh saturday morning i've got to somehow figure out how to
well i know what i got to do i just got to wake up like really early in the morning to be ready for that one so
it seems like the earlier something happens for me the earlier i've got to wake up you know so there's like this
multi-hour wake-up time for me but all right i really do appreciate it uh
you guys have a great night thank you thank you very much we'll see you tomorrow uh jerry
and uh jason thanks for that solar image man it's really awesome so
i really appreciate it take care yep good night
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