Transcript for Part A:
i just wanted to say hi you haven't talked to linda in a while david no i have not not in a little while
[Music] how is she doing i'm doing well i just got home from teaching all day hi linda hi it's good
to see you yeah you too it was a long day i'm teaching middle
school english now so it's a long day how about
how many students i have about 70 7th and 8th graders
[Laughter] you are an angel
i kind of like it i don't feel like i ever really emotionally matured beyond that age
it's not teaching right now with kovid but um not bad i'm staying healthy and
yeah
my daughter um has been a public school middle school teacher in orange county california for 26 years
wow you wouldn't believe it and she has so many students uh it's 40 per times four so 106 she
sees 160 kids a day i went in there one day and taught an
astronomy lesson i'm exhausted after one day
she's amazing i'm out i said i like it i love my content i love
teaching english and i teach at like a freshman and sophomore level so i'm teaching like romeo and juliet and
killing mockingbird and john steinbeck and you know i i try to teach i try to raise and elevate the
curriculum so i really like for you that's what she does too she's a really good english
teacher and if the kids are talking with each other and they ask her a question
she was just saying the other day she goes don't ask me if you're going to fill it with pronouns too many pronouns
come on put the real thing in there i'm gonna launch romeo and juliet tomorrow as a matter of fact nice
okay i'll let you guys get back to work thank you hi good job good job thank you
and i'm over here like oh my gosh someone save her
she's like they they made a pluto uh official planet
and she had all her facts from she was she was like oh no
it's like the opposite of what it actually is there's seven planets
well there's 14. she's like no there's eight million
she made me mad and i was over there face pump face palming myself i'm like
a science teacher she's she's over here telling us that there's 13 planets in the solar system and pluto and pluto was
an official dwarf planet in 2003. she was
myself has
ryan hannahoe is going to join us next week and um uh kelsey poor will join us next week
and we're really really close to publishing skies up
i hear we had a very successful um asian star party last weekend we did it
was really cool [Music]
it was gosh that star party
let's see what the current stats are on it
it's always kind of fun to look at that
28 150 people were reached [Music]
let me see
how long did the star party go on for i had to leave after after the first part but um for quite a while
you were going for like four hours do you think oh yeah uh four hours and 22 minutes and six seconds
okay and i would like to say that i think approximately four hours and 22 minutes and six seconds
after the asian star party called yeah and ended the uh federal election was called
almost at the same moment yep we had seven thousand six hundred views
of that star party people were they were just so tense it
was almost and they were six months from the election it was like a break
it was the first uh pan-asian [Music] star party
to our knowledge at least that's what christopher go thinks
he's pretty smart parties are truly global which is a really wonderful thing
sometimes i'll take my telescope in the backyard and my dog will come out with me he's a husky
and i'll be like i'll tell my mom i'll say even astronomy is for dogs
that's right well you haven't introduced your dog to us yet you've introduced the cat but not
the dog uh uh my dog his name is milo he's a little bit more
doesn't mean he'd be sitting right behind me maybe he he's begging yellow he's a uh
he was my brother's dog but my brother he had a bunch of cats so
they didn't really get along so he was a bus now the dog not my brother
my writer was like my brother has an apartment and they're like you can't own a giant dog and live in our apartment
so you know two cats so we currently in our family we have
two dogs we and two fishes
where did the fish fit in
sounds crowded my cat has a stroller and she'll sit out
in the yard with me and do astronomy sit right next to me
actually learning something i think it's cool like astronomy is for everyone even the cats
that's dogs fish yeah i had a dog in the past that when i
used to go observe outside of the backyard he would go and lay down underneath the the ladder and sleep
there [Laughter] taking care but he was always kind of this talk when i moved to the ladder
every once in a while to change objects like hey hey what are you doing [Laughter]
are they good company for observing
and she's not she won't bark at me like my dogs are crazy but my my cat is like
calming so she there's a car coming by but other than
that it's it's really peaceful well i had a cat once and i had him up
on the roof with me and i was watching the shuttle re-enter the atmosphere and it was so bright
that the cat looked up to see it that was that bright wow
me and my dad have been wanting to take my ten inch far out like in the country to go do andromeda
we've only done planetary stuff for now but we want to do the galaxy
foreign
we had questions from the global star party because uh why is it so difficult to make a german
equatorial mount that would reach the zero degrees
latitude okay um you can make one but the problem is is
and this would be a good problem for for norman to comment on but i don't do equatorial
i don't do equatorial that's not i don't know but in equatorial in equatorial
you're trying to hit a point where it would balance on the tripod right yeah
you got you got the telescope and you got the counterweight and you want to find the center of gravity
balance right over the top of the tripod you lean it over all the way over to zero and what happens you know you're
either pushing the mechanics too far out so now the tripod
yeah tripod wants to fall over right you need a huge you need a huge platform
underneath that's right yeah that's right so you could have like this tall pier so
that you could clear you know and so and the other problem is the counterweight itself not hitting the tripod
not user friendly it's not user friendly that's true no
yeah alt ass is more [Music] way to go in
at that kind of range oh yeah and all it has
for many types of telescopes is really the the way to go i would imagine well yeah
much simpler not only field rotators were cheap right yeah and that's tricky
um i i deal with several big scopes that have
um altas mounts and d rotators and that's a whole nother that is a whole other deal complexity
and failure and you know then you get up to the zenith and you're trying to track something across the zenith and the rotator has to
be able to turn effectively instantaneously yeah right that's that's a whole other
can of worms so there's no perfect amount period no it depends what you want to do exactly
right if you do imaging of course that's another story but for visual i mean how that is just perfect
or just because you don't have to deal with the field rotation yeah yeah exactly
i think ccd can't cmos cameras may make that less of a problem because they will
typically take many short exposures instead of one big long one yeah and that is a problem because then you know
the short exposures if they're stacked in the camera they're going to be the equivalent of one long exposure no but they have a program now they they cancel
that movement yes my friend here does a lot of imaging hugo and then he was
telling me he did some some imaging of of mars lately and then that's what the pro oh yeah that's a whole another yeah
it's like fantastic you can expect some amazing things in cameras in the next five years
with things like nvidia processors inside that can that can align things
and stack them without having to transmit enormous volumes of data back
to the computer cameras are going to be much smarter in another few years
i tend to think that the cameras are going to get a lot more expensive though because i think we're going to move away from consumer level
cameras being converted to astro cams and you're going to have the numbers are gonna go way down on the chips
it's gonna get expensive for the chips even though you have all that horsepower like you talk about uh the chips are
gonna become much more expensive for for astro imaging i think
yeah i don't know i'm not a big camera guy so no any other i'm not
i don't know i should mention that ryan i'll i will absolutely be here next week because
ryan i've known since he worked for mike rice at new mexico skies
and uh when he went to montana learning center we gave him a bunch of acp expert
licenses so that he could support remote observing on multiple telescopes and
they do that and ryan is very sharp and he has really
really done an amazing thing there now besides being a very good teacher
which is what he went through school and became and did that he's an actually a very amazing person
i'm i i really think the world of rhyme so i'll be here to cheer him on you know
excellent i will second that i think ryan is one terrific person
and bob so are you my friend i'm old you know i'm kind of
but i'm here to kibbits i think when you get old you have a right to be have your opinion and say
what you want everyone has a right to their opinion it's either going to be emotional or logical and depending on
who receives it they're going to receive it emotionally emotionally or logically but it's all
good [Music]
[Music]
in april 2020 astronomers detected an unusually bright and powerful radio signal never before recorded in our home
galaxy the source is a magnetar a type of compact object with the strongest
magnetic fields in the cosmos like pulsars and neutron stars magnetars
are the crushed cores left behind when a massive star explodes but their super strong magnetic fields put them in a
class by themselves the fields are up to a thousand times stronger than typical neutron stars and
over 10 trillion times stronger than a refrigerator magnet they can rip molecules apart from
thousands of miles away distort the shapes of atoms and store enormous amounts of energy
on april 27th the magnetar named sgr 1935 produced a rapid-fire storm of short
powerful x-ray bursts that lasted hours the activity first spotted by swift was
also monitored by nasa's fermi gamma-ray space telescope and the nicer x-ray telescope on the international space
station along with other space missions as the storm wound down early on april
28th nicer recorded some 200 x-ray bursts in just 20 minutes
later that day sgr 1935 fired off another x-ray burst this time though it was accompanied by
something new a powerful pulse of radio waves lasting a thousandth of a second
chime a radio telescope in british columbia led by several canadian universities discovered the signal and
determined it came from the vicinity of sgr1935 another experiment called stair 2 and
operated by caltech and nasa's jet propulsion laboratory saw an even brighter signal at different radio
wavelengths since 2007 astronomers have been trying to understand the sources of powerful
millisecond radio signals called fast radio bursts seen from other galaxies
magnetars have been prominent suspects the duration and energy release of sgr
1935's radio signal is closer to fast radio bursts than any other source
for the first time astronomers saw magnetar in our own backyard produce a signal only previously seen in other
galaxies the discovery strengthens the case that magnetars are responsible for at least
some fast radio bursts [Music] data from nicer and fermi on x-ray bursts at the end of the storm
showed that they differed from the one that coincided with the radio signal this event's characteristics set it
apart from the other eruptions and further study may provide clues about how it also powered the radio
burst radio waves from normal pulsars originate high above their surfaces
exactly where and how we don't know a big eruption could launch a cloud of
plasma to high enough that a radio burst could form never before have astronomers seen a
fast radio burst so close to home it's just one more reason to watch the skies
and to keep tabs on the strongest magnets in the universe
[Music]
wow i really enjoy those um visualizations from nasa and goddard
space center you know they they just do some amazing stuff it's it's great and it's great that you know they're they're
free to download and share so if you're an educator uh you are uh doing
something like we're doing here uh tonight with the global star party you know for your own club um you know that's definitely uh a great
resource um if anybody out there needs uh information on where to get some of those things just let me know because i
dig for them all the time uh well i want to welcome you all to the
21st global star party um it's uh you know it's amazing that we've done so
many of these so far but each one has been really fun really special and we've had great people on
and a great audience that watches from around the world tonight
we start our program like we do every global star party which is
a uh introduction and a uh some words of wisdom and poetry from
david levy uh david has uh shared his love of the night sky his
passion of the night sky the stars he is he always seems to
perfectly characterize a great start for our global star parties
um and always makes me feel uh warm and and uh happy to
open these star parties because no one does it like david does
i also wanted to you know recognize david's achievements you know he's
discovered over 20 comments he's written over 20 books
he has written thousands of articles he's done
online radio programs devoted to astronomy uh he's been interviewed on
television uh documentaries um you know he has uh uh
given his gifts of uh of the you know his knowledge of
astronomy and shared his discoveries with people all over the world and uh so
it's great to have uh david with us tonight um and uh
he's 21 for 21 right now in in the global star parties but i think that
david you mentioned that uh since kovad has has um
uh been with us that you've done hundreds of online lectures and presentations
yes indeed i have and i even have them all recorded here um
where i've made a quote from my matt little magic book um yeah you're right but i i wanted to
take this opportunity to say scotty what a wonderful
event the global star party is you've done them here in the western hemisphere you've done them
in europe and now we have one that we've done in asia that is really very very good
so good that uh on excuse me on saturday
morning after while that was going on they were about to call the election
they had they had determined a victor of the presidential election they were just about to call it when someone said wait
the global star party we have to wait until that's finished and so everybody waited until it was
finished and then it was finally finished and they could call the election is that what happened
yeah no that didn't happen quite that way but it might as well have it might as well have yeah
it was fun though it was fun it was such a great star party we had uh i'm going to show later in this in this program uh
uh some of the images of jupiter that were captured and some of the excitement
of seeing uh jupiter in such great scene conditions and jupiter was like only about 30
degrees off the horizon so it was really fantastic
so i'll have that later in this program but uh um david uh
what after doing all these virtual events after i mean you're a guy that has traveled
all over the world to do star parties and see eclipses and stuff like that how do
you feel about doing all of this from your den there
you know are you are you disappointed you can't get out
or are you happy that you're able to reach people around the world like this well
right now i'm actually looking at the photographs or the images
of 11 of the stars of tonight's global star party
ranging from um from bob denney uh down here to deepti from uh
all the way across the world to libby who i've never met in person yet but who hails from your hometown
that's kindly and uh and all the others jerry hubbell
who uh there's a space telescope named after you isn't there well maybe but anyway
right that's right okay it's all mine it's all yours yeah
which brings a kind of an interesting question up to me if this is my opportunity to give my
little spiel now sure okay fine um anyway it brings that question up to
mind what is the most important telescope in the world and i've asked that many times and the
answer ranges from the 200-inch at polymar to the hubble space telescope
and yes yours jerry to others but to me the most important telescope in the
world is your first telescope my first telescope is a three and a half
inch reflector which i've finally given up as i've gotten older and is now
belonging to the linda hall library of science in kansas city and i'm really
glad that it's going to get a renewed life there it's the fall now it is um
november and a lot of us are having cloudy nights and a lot of us are having clear nights
we're having a clear night and if you go outside tonight and look up one of the things you will see will be the pleiades
and that's just wonderful star cluster to look at and of course to me
it reminds me of one of my favorite poets tennyson from whom i will quote tonight
but but i have to say
that unlike almost everybody else here from libby to dave iker to bob and to all the others
i am not a legal astronomer i know absolutely nothing about
astronomy i've wanted to be an astronomer all my life but i never was able to get the math
i was terrible at math and still am a little better now than i was back then
but i was just terrible at math what i loved and still love was the poetry the other poets
who have been able to over the years and centuries get into the
uh world of the night sky alfred tennyson is one of my favorites he owned a telescope did you know he
owned i think a two-inch refractor and from the isle of wight he was able to set it up and observe the night sky and
i'm sure one of the things he turned it to were the pleiades and he wrote in loxley hall one of his most beautiful
poems many a night i saw the pleiades rising through the mellow shade glitter like a
swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver bray blade braid i figured i'd get that eventually
uh beautiful beautiful poem but tennyson wasn't just interested
um in in observing the night sky he also had a fabulous interest in theory
and into the origins of the universe which is something that dave iker is going to be talking about later on
i've always enjoyed listening to david's wonderful presentations and i'm sure tonight is going to match some
of those and or exceed some of those but tennyson
love to imagine the universe the creation of the universe the origins and the ultimate
fate of the universe will it expand forever or will it contract once more to
become a single point of light in tennyson's time we didn't know that now we suspect
because of dark matter and dark energy that it will continue to expand forever
but tennyson i wish i could sit down with him and ask him now
today what what he would what he would what he would do knowing what we know today
tennyson did not know what we know today his great-grandson jonathan tennyson who
i do know and who i am a good friends with does know about that
but in tennyson's most famous poem in memoriam
he wrote the whole thing in 1850 was published in 1850 he wrote the whole
epic to celebrate the life of one of his best friends who died of a stroke when he was very
young and he turned the the elegy
to uh to arthur hallam to a
polemic about the universe and about nature about
evolution about evolution both organic on earth and in the cosmos cosmos
anyway he writes in his final stanza
about whether the universe will end as a in a big crunch or in a forever expansion
today we think it will be a forever expansion but in those days the big crunch was a good possibility
and he ended the pullman warrior with that thought
that friend of mine who lives in god that god whichever lived and loved
one god one law one element and one far-off divine event
to which the whole creation moves and on that
note i would like to turn things back to you scotty thank you thank you very much david thank you
thank you that was beautiful thank you david that's beautiful thank you
very nice very nice that's right heartfelt
well our our next speaker is uh david eicher now david starts
his career probably he had he had things going on before this but he starts his career
with uh with his deep sky magazine at age only 15 years old i i can't imagine
too many other teenagers who had his act together as much as david did uh you
know and knew what he wanted to do once he once he starts his professional career at uh uh astromedia that's right
disaster media is that right yes he has this he has this meteoric rise uh
successfully uh becoming uh you know a greater editor than before he's now
editor-in-chief of astronomy magazine and i believe that astronomy magazine
probably has the world's largest circulation of any magazine devoted to astronomy
it is uh uh you know informative entertaining uh
definitely a a publication that you should subscribe to if you're in to the lifestyle of
astronomy and uh you know
eicher is also on the board of advisors or maybe directors of the starmus event
right and so the starmus event is probably the premier uh astronomy event uh that any astronomer
would dream to go to or astrophysicists would dream to go to um uh we're looking forward to that
event happening in september of next year um but david also is uh someone that has
written many books he's got over 20 books himself devoted to astronomy he's also a historian of the civil war
uh which is which is also very interesting because uh you know david has a um
the ability to uh look back uh and see how
history has really shaped and carved our our present day
existence you know which i i think is is uh very interesting historians just have a way of telling a
story and david's going to share uh yet another
install of the universe with us tonight
and so david i'm going to give you the stage thank you scott and thanks so much for
for doing this for all of us amateur astronomers in this very strange time
to hold these events really means a lot i know to to all of us and to lots of folks who are watching and david thank
you again as always for entertaining us and for inspiring us but uh make no
mistake david levy is a tremendous astronomer and we know absolutely absolutely that's
right i'll argue that point at some other time um
tonight in sort of moving out with these unusual tales of the universe i wanted to talk a little bit about our closest
celestial neighbor for a short time the moon how did the moon form this is as people
looked up at the moon the brightest thing in the sky at night uh has been wondered about for a long
long time and and uh it really is something that honestly we don't know we
probably know but we're not a hundred percent sure about the origin of the moon which is
pretty fascinating and there's some interesting details in this story
well the name moon goes back to about the year 725
from the old english word mona of course which originated
from the much earlier terms the latin term luna and the greek term celine
of the origin but now its name as we know is the moon literally its name now
a lot of people even planetary scientists will say you know what i was thinking about the earth the other day and i think oh
you know it's not the earth the name of our planet is earth you know we don't say i saw the saturn in one of
scott's fantastic telescopes the moon's name however our moon is the
moon so there's an inconsistency there but we want to be careful with the terminology there
well for decades it's been very clear that the moon has some oddities with regard to its relationship with us it
has a high degree of rotational speed orbital speed uh its mass is very large
compared to earth relative to most moons and strangely the moon's uh orbit is
inclined about five degrees to the ecliptic plane to the plane of the planets orbiting the sun
and and its mass uh it's almost uh referred to as a double planet uh off an
earth and the moon so the origin of the moon ideas which festered for a long
long time and nobody really had any great uh evidence of which could be the
the answer uh sort of um bounce back and forth between fission as an idea that is
somehow the moon originated from earth well that was one idea another one was
capture of an object that was simply captured orbitally by earth and orbited our planet or this
idea of co-accretion of the of the moon and earth
accreted they formed out of smaller bits planetesimals building up together
but nobody really had any great ironclad evidence in fact there's a long heritage
of thinking that most lunar craters for many many decades were volcanic which they're not
of course along came our old dear departed friend and close
uh companion and friend of david's gene shoemaker who invented the science of
impact geology and uh showed us that that was all wrong and that most everything on the moon of course
reflects the early era of heavy impacts in the inner solar system
uh bless jean and and uh we sure certainly miss him he was a great great
scientist and man well things began to turn around after
some of the fellows who gene helped to train went all the way to the moon and back
between 1969 and 1972 and they returned 2415
lunar rock samples uh that that was about 842 pounds of moon rocks came back
to earth we now know later of course that some meteorites are lunar but let's set that aside the apollo rock samples
really constituted the major area of research on the origin of the moon
their similarity to moon rocks which we'll get to in a moment here caught among other things caused in 1975
a radical new hypothesis from two planetary scientists in tucson
bill hartman and don davis they proposed what what came to be called the giant
impact hypothesis that a large planetesimal body when all these things were flying around in the
inner solar system long long ago smacked right into earth threw up a ring
of material which accreted into the moon that would explain quite a large number
of things as it turned out some of those lunar mysteries the
rotational and orbital speeds the large mass of the moon compared to earth
the inclination of course and something that was even more important as well scientists named
this hypothetical body fia this is from the greek word from mother
of the moon which is an appropriate thing lots of studies went on continued to go
on since the mid 70s up through the 90s on these moon rocks
and there was sort of a renaissance a rebirth of this of investigating the details of what this proposed giant
impact hypothesis would be from the planetary scientist robin canup
she became really the sort of leading uh defender of this idea and really the
apollo samples produce their strongest evidence in the so-called isotopes the flavors of some
of these elements that are in crystals in moon rocks oxygen and others
are identical to earth rocks so the best way to explain that
and also all of the orbital dynamics is from this collision of what was thought
to be a mars-sized body and you think well where what happened to this sofia then to this
mars-sized body well the answer is mostly we're standing on it most of it
we believe was absorbed into the proto-young earth that ring which existed for a few
millions of years um accreted then into the moon and which then continued to be
battered of course by all the impacts it doesn't have erosion much uh at all
uh compared to the many erosional forces on earth so we see that record of course
in our telescopes of the battering that the moon took in the late heavy bombard
bombardment in the early uh solar system so we don't know absolutely
but the giant impact hypothesis of this early impact there were lots of
planetesimals we think in the early solar system uh protoplanets that were forming
all of the planets we think accreted uh certainly the terrestrial planets from
materials sticking together in the disk of the solar system they moved some moved in and some moved out there's been
a lot of evolution of of places in the solar system but we believe that that is how the moon
formed from this incredibly large impact interestingly enough the new horizons spacecraft or pal allen
stern uh heading that uh passing uh pluto in 2015 a few years ago and
studying the pluto system which has a a one large moon of course cheron which
was discovered uh at the naval observatory by jim christie um long after our pal dear departed pal
clyde found pluto itself but it also has some very small moons
and the idea from the dynamics looking at pluto is that it also suffered a major impact
that created that sort of double planetary system with pluto and sharon and those very small moons as well so
where did the moon come from we don't know it probably came from that early impact
uh that's largely agreed upon but it's not definitive among planetary scientists to
this day so that's the next strange tale stepping out a little bit farther into
the universe and we'll go out a bit farther i hope in uh successive weeks
into the solar system and into the milky way and all the way out there to
the end of cosmic time eventually and if we solve all that we'll we'll uh have really accomplished
something so thank you very much scott and i hope that uh
when you're describing all this i i'm visualizing you know this crazy chaotic
uh you know uh uh you know ring of material uh
surrounding surrounding our planet and uh you know just how hostile it must
have been you know and the early solar system was a phenomenally violent place and and
remember the old george carlin routine that you know we think of what we're doing to the planet now the planet's
been through the late heavy bombardment the planet will be fine it's are we gonna be okay that's right that's right
a lot of people talk about us hurting the planet it's gonna be just fine
right that's fine um i have a question for you too uh
david the rings of saturn what are the thoughts of how long those
rings will last i mean it's not will will they will they call us back down on the planet will they stay out there
what's the current thinking that's an incredibly timely question about the rings of saturn which are blocks of ice
from very small up and to about house size and there are a few of them that
are thought to be larger yet like very small hillocks or tiny mountains but most of
the ring most of the particles that make up saturn's rings are very small up to about the size of
normal houses we're at the right time in the universe to see saturn's rings
because it's probably it's likely that a a satellite a very icy moon uh broke up
that could have been a and a discrete moon and created the the rings which are
of course multifaceted and probably based on cassini uh data which is
new you know it's basically very new in the on the time scale of planetary
science uh they will probably be extant for a few tens of millions or maybe one
to two to three hundred million years and then these rings of saturn will be gone
wow so just as if you go on much longer cosmic time scales if we look at the
expansion of the universe into billions of years from now eventually we will lose sight
of distant galaxies because the look back time will be gone we will
eventually not see the light from distant galaxies because it won't make it to our local group so in that sense
we're in a really good time to have scotty and everyone else as our friends have telescopes and look at galaxies and
we're at a really good time now at least for several tens of millions or longer
uh years to see saturn's rings because they will not be there forever right so you better get out there and
see them while you can that's right okay david david i've got a question
about the moon the moon's one of my favorite subjects and i've like i explained before the
show i i've been taking quite a bit of time this week to do imaging of the moon early in the morning this past week but
the question i have is this this planetary impact this mathea
impacted the earth it had to be it had to be in a crossing orbit for a long time right and how how
did they interact how did the moon and thea interact is there thinking on that well we don't know and that that's a
very good question and you'd really love to know what were the dynamics of these billiard balls flying around early in
the solar system and that's one of the most difficult things that we have to try to trace or to reconstruct and this
is similar to trying to understand the origins of meteorites and what asteroids might be responsible
for meteorites some of which have been identified um because of unique spectral signatures
we know that the hed meteorites come from vesta and so on but tracing things back to where they were in this cosmic
puzzle where everything is moving and it wasn't necessarily uh where it is now
with regard to uh distance from the sun either it's very very difficult and so
we really don't know what the orbital dynamics of this collision were it's thought that it may have been more or
less a glancing collision but it was direct enough to absorb most of that mass of this
hypothetical thea and and produce a ring and there are computer simulations that you can even see online that that
approximate it but again you know it's a surmise it's again we really don't
know this is probably what happened to produce what we know we have now
but we don't have any direct evidence of how it happened so it's a guess really well that's how we
i believe that's how we came to have a large iron core in our planet too with the large magnetic field that's really a
fortuitous thing for us that's right yeah yeah exactly right yeah
it's a fast object you know as much as it breaks the heart of a galaxy observer at times the
moon it's it's a brilliant lovely object and it is our closest brightest neighbor to study in telescope
so we we need to appreciate it one of the things that amazes me
i'm a kind of i'm an electro electrical guy and i when i learned about james clark maxwell
and what he did with electromagnetism maxwell's equations in studying his life
i found out that one of the things he did was he developed a theory of the dynamics of those rings and won a prize
in the middle 1800s for coming up with a dynamic theory of the
existence and why they are stable and all of that it's something worth looking at i put a link in in the uh
the chat on that but i had no idea he did that and it was just one of those things while studying his life that
really surprised me he's one of my heroes um fantastic and really interesting we have a large number of
giants we can stand on the shoulders of as they say yeah
fascinating to study their lives and work into that i also want i want to point
out something to our audience uh we have uh a couple of great authors here
of course david levy's with us and this is his latest book a night watchman's journey
this book how how would someone order this book david
you're muted right now the first step to ordering this book is to unmute yourself
and the second step right we've been keeping that book a
pretty good secret but it's available if you're in the united states i would
recommend that you go to star arizona www.starazona.com
and then just look for for uh for me yeah on the stars on the website
it'll bring the book up and you can get it from them if you're anywhere else in the world or
even in the united states you can get it from the royal astronomical society of canada
website w w w dot r a c dot
c-a that's www.rasc.ca
and you go to their online store the book is available and you can get it from them
and uh it tells you the story and uh both the bad parts and the good parts i tried not to hide too much
including the fact that i was not the best of boys when i was a little kid even as a teenager
in fact i even almost got expelled from the royal ash geronomical society of canada
as i'm sure you all know by now but uh but over the years i've gotten a little
bit better at what i'm doing and uh right
[Laughter]
anyway awesome it is awesome insight into someone that uh you know the trials and tribulations of of
someone that has uh you know uh watched
so many thousands of hours you know to observe the sky and to find all those comets so
it's great this is another great book here this is uh from david eiker
galaxies inside the universe's star cities and uh this one you can buy off
of amazon.com i got my hardbound copy i i don't think it's available in
paperback so uh a beautiful book um you know with uh you know great images
in here i guess some of these images have never before been published so really really really cool uh when you go
to this guy interrupt for just a second scotty sure that's not that's not the only one of david's books that i really
drew another one another one he has written one on comments and considering that neil wise has just
come and waved at us and uh gone away um
i when that book came out i teased david relentlessly about it but i want to say
now that i've read it and i think it is a phenomenal book it's one of the best
books on comments and that's from somebody who's written six books on comments i really
applaud david's book on comments and i recommend it and i can tell you that a a certified
absolute genius wrote the forward to that book of mine his name is david levy oh yeah
that's good well moving right along now scotty well when you get to david's book of
course there's going to be lots of stuff about comments there's also going to be uh information you know his his writings
you know from his from his observing logs are right in here so it's just really cool
and so it's great to have two wonderful authors of astronomy
with us tonight and so anyways we're going to segue into
the young astronomers that we have with us tonight we have libby and the stars libby is 10 years old
she lives here in northwest arkansas right right my own neighborhood out here which is really cool behind her is um uh
i think maybe her first telescope is that right yeah and so that's a that is a mead
telescope a 60 millimeter refractor uh on an alt azimuth mount
it might have been one of the telescopes that i made when i was working in taiwan i worked there for meat instruments for
six years make and we made hundreds of thousands of telescopes
and you know sometimes astronomers that are into
uh you know who are serious into uh our livestock our lifestyle think of such
small telescopes as being uh worthless that uh you know you can't really see anything with them you can't
do anything with them let me tell you a small telescope
a small telescope can take you a long long way and give you
many adventures it's it's not necessarily how
big your telescope is or whatever when you start but that you do just get started and so
um and sometimes that starts with a small gift telescope like that
libby how did you get your first telescope um
i've not i've never really thought about being in astronomy and my mom's a kind of person if she
sees something special probably get it from me she's like so loved she'll love it so
she she's on facebook a lot and anyway there was this uh
person selling a 15 dollar telescope on the facebook market and
it's a pretty big one and it was about in this middle of the
summer we went to go pick it up on a rainy day and i remember going up to the doorstep picking it up from that person
wow and only 15 bucks that was a great deal it was a wonderful deal that telescope
certainly sold for more than 15 dollars when it was new wow but it looks brand new it looks like it's in nice
conditions so that's great that's great i liked my parents every night i was like can we
take it out no it's a school night you can't take it out to school night
well we know that you're an astronomer already libby so uh and um uh you've been going through all
the planets and you're now on the dwarf planet what it's now called
the dwarf planet pluto so why don't you uh once you go ahead and get started and tell us more about it and something i
want to put i want to plant a seed right now i want i want you to start thinking about writing your first book about
astronomy i think that you could do a great job i i i've always loved writing that
shawnee wasn't my passion i i like to write too i know a couple of guys here on this on
this star party that could probably give you a lot of good tips on writing a book so
usually second grade i used to impress my class by writing a full page
the whole page um in my notebook and be like i wrote this in 30 minutes
awesome awesome they'd be really happy they were like oh my gosh
you're crazy um that's what it takes
that's what it takes a little craziness that's right i was really happy for this one because
recently because of coronavirus i quit art lessons and i got a new digital art
name and i thought i might as well get into it and do some um
space scene darts because this person came on here before and she was doing these fantasy ones and all that stuff
and i love doing fantasy ones too as much as i love looking for the telescope looking at real objects it's also fun to
fantasize because i grew up believing on aliens and ghosts that was my whole thing
but um i definitely grew up on a bunch of fantasy stuff and i thought i might as
well start and i wasn't really feeling doing a fantasy one for pluto
so um this art app it's super professional and everything and i'm not that professional with art
and i have all these fancy brushes that i didn't know how to use so i kind of went a little bit crazy and
i did a little art on um on pluto
so i'm going to try and um you want to try to share your screen why
is that button yeah sure
i have it here downloaded on the computer there we go and here it is
it's not a full circle because um if you were to um
the picture that i was kind of basing it all from i found the internet i was looking at pictures to get some
inspiration you know that side is only covered by the moon and
so i had a lot of fun creating this you could see brush strokes where i had some fun with the
i had some fun that with the brushes and i definitely had you can see there's
some texture and everything but i had a lot of fun doing it and i i thought maybe
now that i'm doing more and more galaxies and you're getting prettier more nebulas and
everything i might as well do some more art because um wow um
it's kind of hard to get a blank canvas in real life and then i can't see my pencil
and i've done art for a long time now um and i was it's just hard for me to do
that so i'm switching over to digital so i will be doing more of those um but anyway back to the real planet
not my art but um so pluto is a very confusing planet
because people can't decide whether it's a dwarf planet or an official planet
because it has to be this a big amount to the official planet it's almost there
it's like if you own a roller coaster ride and and they're like you're one inch short you're a dwarf planet
um so um the other day my science teacher is
talking about planets as a example for writing a claim
sentence and she said that pluto was named a dwarf planet in
um 2003 and i was over there face calming myself and i'm like
oh my gosh i'm like it was in 2006 and
you know over like the past ever since we discovered it it's been back and forth like every 20 years or so
we'll be like huh maybe it's an official planet i think we've made our nine now hopefully
i mean it's it's definitely one of those planets that we're always active looking
at because we're always like it's a planet no it's a dwarf planet um and i was
um and david he was in chat the other couple minutes ago and he was telling me
he knew the person who discovered it clyde tomba
i i think it was yeah
um and that was in 1930 so about ever since then it's been crazy
with pluto like oh my gosh it's a planet no it's a door flick
um i personally think it's a dwarf planet because i mean if it's not big enough and it's not big enough and
um i think that's a huge part of it um and
as i also like hearing about moons because imagine having
times five the moons in our sky you know that'd be bright
um it'd be definitely huge and bright it it'd be awesome you know all those
fantasies where you have like 10 of the moons in the sky well pluto has five of them and their names
are karen nyx hydra styx and kerberos and i
probably know i'm not pronouncing a bunch of them right but i know definitely that there are five moons and that'd be
pretty cool to have like five moons in the sky you know that'd be
awesome you could just look at five news or imagine living on pluto and being like well
there's so much to deserve which i kind of think it would be awesome if nasa sent a probe to just
order around the demand and take a little time because i mean
pluto didn't get discovered until a long time you know a lot of the planets they're like saturn
got discovered like 2 000 years before
about 200 years before pluto ever got discovered and that's
because it's far out in the solar system and i think it's important that we still
study that because i mean it will take lots of high power technology to be able
to get really close to pluto if you're using a telescope and i've never seen pluto
through a telescope myself i'm working up that way but um definitely it will be
hard to discover it and i mean you got to have a huge telescope
and at least some good eye pieces to get good pictures because if i took a
picture of mars it would be pretty good because that it's close to us but if i
took a picture of pluto that's a
long miles away from us it's it's way too far to um
be way too far away from us um and if you were thinking
so nasa right now their whole goal is to get to mars which is
if you look at a scale on the solar system it's pretty close to us but it's not
it's close it looks like it's really close it's three years now imagine how long that would be to
get to pluto which is far out i mean they're like how do we
have all this supply and we were learning a lot about that at mo at space
camp and they're teaching us about like what nasa's gonna do and at the same time i wasn't fully on thinking that we
should just go to mars i was like we should go to different planets you know take people to different planets
but if you realize how far away those planets are it's a little bit difficult
you need to have a bunch of supply and rocket fuel and enough
and like working on that for i mean if it takes three years to get to
mars and imagine how hard those people have to work just sitting in the office
overnight for almost 10 years or so
and i also wanted to talk about this because i'm extremely interested in this
um i know a lot of movies they talk about the force which is basically
like magnetic pulling and i was i always thought this is a fantasy but
if you think about a planet and it's pulling or a solar system that sun is pulling
the planets around it and it's kind of weakening over
how far out the solar system gets you think that you know
if you think that like neptune last time i was you know saying that it'd be extremely
long like a couple over 100 years to take a trip
around the solar system this was 248 you know
i like making this joke and i always say try having a birthday
it's not
you'll turn one years old and then it's over you know you stay young
um but uh i was i'm really interested in learning about the magnetic field and solar winds
and stuff because that stuff all that is invisible like it's
invisible but somehow it's pulling a full like a bunch of weight around us
and at space camp they would sit down and they would tell us about they just tell us they had a
huge eater and they just have a presentation and i remember them telling me about
magnetic force now when they told me about that it wasn't very
a very good one and when i went to go to space camp i had a
lot of knowledge and i thought they were going to be talking about light years like in depth and stuff now they did give me good
teaching but when i have i definitely have a lot more research from doing it
on my own about magnetic fields than what they gave me at space camp but the
general idea ever since going to space camp i've been recent researching that
because i wanted to learn more about the magnetic field and i thought that that was pretty cool
because mercury's spinning crazy around the sun i mean and then pluto's
2 248 years that's that's a long time um
but that is i've really wanted to learn more about that um
but uh libby what was the most fascinating thing that you you've learned so far
about pluto um i'm kind of amazed on how late we
discovered it i mean back then it was like the roman gods discovered this planet
no the story of the discovery is very interesting it is true
it was crazy how like they're like the roman gods discovered
saturn well it took them a couple 200 years until they could
figure out that there was another plant named pluto in our solar system
it was pretty crazy i mean i was even amazed by that you know
um back then a long time ago when they were um the roman gods and everything when
they're naming the planets and they were the planets in the sky just by looking
and then you realize how long it took for them to find another planet so far
out i mean it's reasonable because it's so far out in the solar system but it's
also a little bit crazy compared
okay okay well libby thank you very much um and uh
we will um we will uh now uh go to
uh dt gautam in nepal and um dt how are you doing today
did we lose her i don't see her i don't see her either
she may come back um she may have lost internet that's possible i i that's too bad
uh dt is uh has been giving uh some very nice talks about astronomy in
nepal and her talk tonight was supposed to be about satellites and the importance of
satellites uh certainly in their country but to people around the world but um
we will move on uh she comes back we'll uh we'll insert her at after our break
but uh let's uh let's turn to uh john goss at the
astronomical league uh john thank you for joining us
and the astronomical league is the official
sponsor of the door prizes for the uh explore alliance and our globe global
star parties uh and um each uh each star party
a different representative of the league comes on and they do it kind of in rotation which is pretty cool
uh you know the uh the people that are involved with the league if i took all the knowledge of
all these these people it's pretty substantial and the uh experience that all these
people have uh you know from uh chuck allen yourself uh uh john um
carol org and terry mann you know all of you have been uh former
presidents of uh the astronomical league uh which is just an amazing organization
uh and growing every year and now going international which is
totally cool but i
want to point out at each one of the global star parties that you too can join the astronomical league you just go
to astroleague.org no matter where you are in the world if if you uh
if you are so inclined to join from another country you can join it as an at-large member
if you're in the united states you can join with your astronomy club uh if they are a league club um
uh i understand from terry mann that uh that the league is looking forward to
having other astronomy clubs from around the world join in so that's that's very cool as well so
but let's go ahead and get started john um and i think that you might be muted as
well no no okay i i saw your lips moving no words
i couldn't hear any words so okay well uh let let me uh see if i can
get on here
alrighty um i'd like to start by bringing something up you know we're
amateur astronomers we like uh sharing our experience in the skies with others we like telling other
people about what's coming up well you probably all know about this really great conjunction coming up next month
with jupiter and saturn i don't want to go into to that but i just want to emphasize that this is an
ideal opportunity uh for all of us to interact with the public because this is something that they they can see they can see
jupiter slowly approaching saturn in the night sky in the in the early evening sky over the next uh
five six weeks something like that so along those lines uh on our
astronomical league facebook page we have a a handout that you can download print and cut out and basically it
describes what's gonna be going on over the next six seven weeks and encourages people anybody
uh to go out and look and see if they can see this happening uh so the idea is for people to to cut these out and hand
them out to people who they think would be like would like to become more astronomically
aware of what's going on in the night sky so you could give them to your friends neighbors colleagues whatever
people who you think might be interested um
it's just a handout showing where jupiter and saturn are in the sky and how to measure the distance you know
that the famous index finger angular size uh estimation uh shows how to do that
tell us a little bit about what's going on so hopefully people get get interested in this and as i said become
more astronomically aware that maybe they'll though i actually want to become more interested in stargazing and
amateur astronomy and uh just be part of our big club here i think that that would be really cool
um so as i said this is on the astronomical week facebook page so i'd like like to start then we have a
few questions to ask um but first i'd like to emphasize that you know
we like looking at things in the sky well the sun is is a special thing a special hazard we want to make sure that
people know what they're doing if they actually look at the sun so we like to have this slide here just reminding
everybody reminding us uh that we have to be careful in doing so we have to have the right filters
we have to uh know exactly what what we're doing when we lift the sun
when we do all the correct steps it's not hard and it's not not dangerous at all but you got to be prepared for this
now for my first question actually i should have turned this
you'll see the first question in a moment i should have turned it over to dave eicher because he he kind of took it over on me i'll show you right here
talk about moon's formation um which he might he might be able to uh
insert some some some better figures here i'm sorry john i did not know my
apologies oh no no no no hey nobody owns the moon buddy
but but anyway you know we talked about how how long ago that was well the current theory you got this thea the
mars sized body striking the earth about 4.6 billion years ago okay uh and then you had this big debris
field and fragments form in it something like 100 years or so it takes for these things to coalesce
into stuff which uh then stick together cree into the moon
so when the moon was first formed how far away was the thought
for her uh i have to be careful hear them speak because i tend to the way the answer
every time when i talk but we have three choices um was was it and still is it
excuse me was it about 240 000 miles which is about about what it is today
um was it zero miles simply because it spun off our planet and there it was
uh or is it some place between 12 12 000 and 20 000 miles from earth so you have your a b or c
and i think i got the answer there don't i don't got it
okay hey b or c okay the next question here
see if i got the answer to this ah get off the side here
okay um i got something wrong here
i think i did it right well i'm messing this up so i'm going to have to uh skip
this part and i'm going to i'm going to i'm just going to have to show it show you what it was
um question number two is if you look carefully at these are these are the answers for last
star party correct yeah yeah uh sorry i messed it up i'm sorry um
that's okay no it's not okay because we don't want to mess things up here
but the question's still valid okay uh if you look at today's star maps
at the constellation taurus you will see that uh the flamsteed numbers represented
are you know 30 31 32 33 stars uh and one to 35 and 36 for a number of
your flam steed star why isn't number 34 found
now this is the one of historical interest uh you could believe that the
star that phlegm c uh indicated was 34 went supernova so it was no longer here that's one
possibility um it was simply an error of a mission okay that that could happen or did
flamsteed number the star uh but it did he just unknowingly assign
it to a uranus thinking it was a star and of course uranus has long since departed that constellation
so those are the three choices for that the next one that i messed up
question number three now the astronomically puts out a quarterly magazine uh and all this members are
eligible to receive it it's something that is um produced by volunteers members produce
it members publish it do everything with it uh so what's the name of this magazine it's been going on for
roughly 60 years is it the astrologer magazine
is it the reflector magazine or is it the observer magazine um
let's refer to dave eicher on one one more thing here dave i uh
on the name earth the earth versus earth you know here i'm talking about is it the astral leaguer
or is it astro leaker magazine well i i heard a talk given by you i'd say about 15 years ago about earth or the earth
and you set me straight and since then i've always been calling it earth i write a
monthly astronomy column for a newspaper and i always say earth never the earth god bless you you know there are
planetary scientists who say the earth you know php you know yeah
but it always seems so silly but i mean everyone says that but but it's the
equivalent of saying the jupiter or the mars you know yeah we have the same problem in french you
know uh we call it la tire and should be tired just
so it's the same we have the same [Laughter] oh you problem people the moon well
that's not earth though that that's that's the moon so but thank you for that i i was listening
and i i learned something from that um okay um
that's all i have then scott okay okay well thanks very much john thanks for
for sharing that and um we are going to take i've been doing
so i've been talking to my son recently i've been i've been talking about search tools and stuff on the internet and i i
started calling google the google so i'd say i'm gonna go to the google to do stuff
so it's funny how you can get the word v in front of stuff to make it that's the
one right so so deputy is back is she back already
yes yeah i'm rick hi deputy how are you
why don't we do this uh why don't we take a ten minute break and after our break uh we will um we'll have dp give
her a presentation okay does it sound alright with everyone okay
okay all right so here we go
good to have you back dt yeah sometimes we get internet problems
that's okay yeah so yeah today i'm going to give my presentation our satellite maybe the satellite signal is giving a good bomb
that's right now are you connected by satellite on the internet is that how you how you connect or no no no no okay
all right yeah but it but automatically internet is linked with the satellite signal
ultimately i'm sure it is yeah okay all right i will be right back too so
anything going on over there
um
um
sorry
um
so
um
that's incredible seeing so good it is very good it's very good look at all the
detail on the belts the great red spot [Music] incredible what can you tell us about
jupiter chris you can see the great red spot here this is probably the largest
storm in the solar system it's been plucked about three uh 600 kilometers per hour
winds of 600 kilometers per hour and uh one thing we know about you at a
great red spot now it's shrinking so it's getting smaller and smaller in fact uh last year it i think dropped
a quarter of a percent of its size basically uh almost a quarter of its
size so it's it's it's it's uh i hope it doesn't disappear on my lifetime because it's gonna make jupiter
quite boring and one thing incredible that happened to jupiter quite recently is the north
north equatorial belt i think we in in one of the [Music] uh
global star party we had we it was a discovery of the one of the outbreaks of this uh north
equatorial belt so this year uh three
very powerful outbreaks erupted on this these are very giant
thunderstorms about probably half the size of the earth running at about 700 miles per hour
so these are incredible violent uh storms that basically erupted on the
north uh not north tropical zone of jupiter no no north temperate zone of jupiter the
npb and this year there were three outbreaks that appeared
around [Music] the area above the north equatorial belt
but you know looking at this image this is really incredible you see so many details in this image in fact um
you know the scene goes in and out and uh sharing are you making are you capturing anything right now this is a
very good image yeah i'm i don't know it's a bit of a dilemma at the moment
you can actually do you can actually do an roi and uh
[Music]
what you were watching was um uh some uh a few minutes of the uh live capture of
jupiter from the 20th global star party um uh that uh that was uh happening at um
uh in in south southeast asia you know you were hearing the voice of
christopher go in the philippines i think that that particular image was coming from malaysia
at that time but it was just uh incredible seeing conditions and uh you know just some of the amazing stuff that
our our astrophotographers capture during some of the global star parties but i i
would say that that particular uh night uh over there uh we were having
some of the best seeing conditions and seeing some of the greatest detail of planets that that we could possibly get
so that was that was really awesome deepti
gatam was supposed to go on before our break here we're going to let her do her
presentation she has been focusing on satellites and uh you
know it's an important part of uh our our space uh exploration is that we'll
have to have not only communications here on earth but uh we have to communicate uh
with uh you know our uh exploration uh the people who'll be exploring the moon when
we get there in 2024 and then on to mars later so um but deepti uh why don't you go ahead
and and start your presentation now and i will give you the
the stage
and i think you're muted there you go hello everyone yeah i have
um made some presentation here
let me prepare okay today i have some talk about the state light and as we know the satellite
is the most important part of our life and i yeah we are all together here
talking each other's is somehow due to the uh this help the satellite and if there
will be no satellite they know we'll be like in the past like uh writing the letters and talking each
other's and that is that's the very hard things as we know uh yeah
first of all i would like to go from the definition of um because i have preferred some of the basic introduction
in uh importance uh for twitter series and like also here is a satellite is the
moon planet or missing that orbit of planet or stars for example our earth is
a satellite because it's orbit the sun likewise the moon is a satellite because it's orbit the earth usually the water
satellites infrastructure that is launched into this space and move around the earth or another body in this space
so our earth itself is a satellite and how we have uh the uh two types of
satellite that is a natural satellite in artificial satellite and um we know the
natural satellite like moon titan gang made and a lot of satellites and
artificial satellites is putting first and are important etcetera and like they are
working and here is some of the fact about which reflect the importance of the natural
satellite do you know our earth will not be safe place to live on without our natural satellite moon yeah
of course we our life will not be a safe place to live on without our next satellite moon uh because without its
gravity earth will open more violently on its axis that drastically altering the climate and the hurricanes and the
all those um natural disaster and all things and do you know that all
signature 23.5 degree tilt on its axis is due to they have due to the moon
keeping it in inspection because the moon keep it in inspection so the earth is still and
all of all the things are balanced in the earth and we can live alive
and here is the one of the uh um which was made by the um
this um secondary class secondary school levels student harina saw that he uh she was
the first uh she was the winner of the national space art competition which was organized by nepal astronomical society
nassau and she beautifully presented how the life without the state light and without with satellite um this um
people are confused about them for the map and you know they can use their mobile phone to
detect the places and here if the people can't afford or to go out
and play so they can enjoy and once the was the mess in this televisions due to
the help of the satellites and are you at first um without the satellite you have to write the letters and send to
the very first into your friends and it takes a lot of time uh to receive the
letters and again seeing the letters but um due to the help of the satellite due to the help of the internet um
and facebook and messengers and that instagram email etc and where we get
immediately images so we can imagine our how the satellites are helping us satellite is helping us and
oh we stayed we are in the modern era and the uh to be in the modern era the satellite has played a lot of a lot of
huge big role in yeah here i have pretty represented
the different types of artificial satellites and so that you know some of that is an astronomical society
satellite that uh um get this um different information about the other planets and uh out of the heavenly
bodies and etc and we have the communication satellite and um which make us available to communicate
with each others uh through using the facebook messenger and all the mobile phone signals and call etc you know we
have the earth observation satellites and earth observation satellites uh detect the different uh phenomena in the
earth and the this all the act of uh inside this earth and we have the killer satellite and uh
we know that all the country has their own satellite for the specifically for the uh security purpose and for this uh
war warriors and um this um their killer satellites are made uh to
be safe from the enemies and we have the navigation satellite um we can detect the places and um yeah we use the gps
system we are very familiar with zps and um due to this uh the satellites we are
using gps and we have the weather satellites that we can detect the
what's the temperature and etcetera in uh just i'm using the with the satellite
help of the other satellite and i got to know we have the that's um 16 degrees celsius in nepal
and um here's the special statement um this diff and satellites and space station is uh it's the first satellites
um the international space station uh is itself a satellite and where it carries peoples and uh
astronomers astronomers and um astronaut for many resources and uh
everything and specific solar power the specific only the work of this
specific solar power is to collect the energy from sun and others
heavily body others outside the space and transmit to the different place of the earth for any for the specific use
and furthermore there are a lot of satellites um used for different
powerfuls and more than uh according to data the more than 8900 satellites have been launched
up to now 8 900. that's like more than 8 900
satellites from more than 40 countries wow so it might have been
yeah one of them from nepal too very important to humanity that's for
sure that's for sure yeah dt what do you think is the most important satellite
are the types of satellites that are most important to the future of
of civilization um the most important is
the of course the communication light if you have uh we do not have the communication satellite you can clear
anything do you have the idea of the astronomy do you have the idea of yes do you give the importers uh
any risks and you can't steer with anyone and it's all the pain nothing is important so i think the
communication satellite is most important in my view yes i would agree or definitely
in some of the importance of artificial satellites and where they of artificial satellites um yeah we are familiar with
the communication and uh military purposes security and uh recognizations
and gps and weather forecasting and disaster management itself and
securities and research and history and we did the research different types of research and um
because of the health of the satellite because we got the data after the outside the earth and also the ins
of this uh space uh by the help of the uh satellite use of the satellites and
um in maybe this uh how the electrons are in it uh satellite how they sit like
held in the agriculture so um it goes uh in this artificial artificial satellites help in the agricultures by observing
these um all the types of farmers and observing the field and uh treating the farmer letting the farmer with phil need
to be fertilized to produce more healthy crops and observing the
you know all those phenomena which is happening and um okay and uh communication yeah of course um
we can still just visualize and we can just see the examples we are communicating with each other very
easily very fluently um due to the help of the artificial satellite and gps
system and gps and global person system and how we have the weather forecasting uh yeah we
all got it we have just discussed about the weather of different countries here just in the starting and
due to the help of the weather forecasting and disaster management and
yeah by the use of the satellite you can knew the about the minute about the disaster
happened or going to be happening or over this um about the disaster
for the securities purpose to and as we know uh usa also had these a lot of satellites
for this um many satellites for the security purpose for the future and uh many country has
this um security of security purpose that launched the satellite for the security purpose and
resource and history so yeah of course i got the knowledge about the about the astronomy and about this
space by the help of the satellite and at last i want to say this uh
satellite improved life and it's the yeah as we know it's the slogan of the
theme of this recently space week also and yeah i have done i have started my
research about the satellite um from this space week because i got this topic
very interesting and i love to know about i love to source about the satellite and just i was shocked oh my
god the satellite is just the part of our part of her life is uh i
think without the satellite our life is not not possible so we can we can't
imagine life without possible in this era just we are in the just we said we are
in the modern era and that's due to the satellite yeah and
christmas yeah thank you thank you so much deepti thank you
thank you thank you excellent okay so
i have a question for you deepti what are your thoughts about satellites
impeding uh observing from the earliest with with telescopes uh the the problem
that the imager have about uh taking great image of of the night sky because
of satellites but is there a common ground or some kind of a
a way that we can get past that problem
about the photography yeah because when we we are photographing the night sky from earth
you have all those satellites passing by and that makes it kind of a line in streaks and pictures and
and it won't get any better because they're going to send more and more satellite up there what
are your thoughts about that yeah there's a lot of the satellite there's some pollution in this space too
due to this uh a lot of saturn as i said there's a lot of satellite have been launched uh more
than 8900 satellites and um many many of the satellites are going to be launched
and yeah this is pollution so for that uh
maybe we can get this we can know the timing of the satellite
yeah moving over the timing of the satellite so we can detect that and
yeah of course i think for now we can [Music]
we can have the tiling we can have the timing about knowing the time uh after getting the timing of the
satellites and [Music] getting ready for the ester photography and i think okay now for now i don't
have any idea for that okay thank you
very good okay so let's let's take a moment to uh switch over to richard grace the astro
beard he's been he's been doing some imaging uh and
so i'm really curious as to what he's he's captured so far
here uh we've got the pleiades i've been uh messing around with some
uh this software which is a sharpcap pro oh wow it's the paid version of sharpcap
and it allows you to do a few more things stretch the histogram
and uh also to do live stacking so we've got 15 frames stacked a half an hour
um right now two minute images and uh for the last half an hour it seems like everything's calmed down a
little bit because earlier it was windy it was messing up everything and uh the plastic finder scope bracket on a
150 sky watcher i mean not skywatcher explorer scientific 130 newtonian
um has a little flex to it because you know it's not really meant for an astrograph
but uh it's doing all right not bad you're getting images that's for
sure so i um i'm doing this scope for multiple reasons because i like playing with uh
you know things that are um made of obtainium but also um tomorrow
marks uh one year from the mercury transit which was pretty much my first uh
real thing that i tried to photograph so i'm kind of uh revisiting
one of my earlier scopes which was another 130 that had a much more unacceptable focus there which will go
unnamed um but uh yeah just messing around with this and uh it's not perfect in focus uh
tonight you know rushing for the star party to get together and i i might go out there and redo some stuff in between
um it's not bad though you can definitely see the nebulosity around the stars
um i noticed that it's got looks like a six-point diffraction spike uh that's
due to the uh the three veins that hold the secondary mirror okay in the in the newtonian uh so even
though there's three veins it's going to cross cause the opposite side to do it and cause uh six-pointed stars and i see
they're kind of like snowflakes it's uh it's cool you know diffraction spikes aren't for everybody and they're
definitely not for every object but for some things it really makes them look cool
and uh i also um on what uh was just being talked about
was uh the impact of satellites i uh i had my first experience
with uh the uh the starlink as a matter of fact it did
uh i'd never had an issue with with any of them and i got
photobombed what last week this is the image from last week that uh we were uh doing orion
when we waited till the end of the uh i got bombed by so many starlings came
right through here and i mean i know it had been starling because it was a whole train of them
and i stacked it up and they disappeared so honestly i just want to say that for
when you have some really bright streak down your image might not have been a starling
i don't know but um i know that some of the bigger satellites out there have have
definitely it didn't stack out but i had a whole train of them run through that image and it looks pretty good to me
yeah looks excellent so looks excellent
thank you thank you richard so our next our next speaker will be
norman phillip norman has
been on our show several times he he is a musical he is
he's in my mind one of the genius uh telescope makers of our era uh he is uh
he's making uh telescopes from uh small ones that you would see
uh you know in in your backyard except these are ones that actually you wouldn't see in your
backyard because they are they're beautiful works of art the that um that he carves from wood and uh
uh you know just just amazing inspired uh uh
works that uh should probably be in in not just in a museum but uh certainly on display in a
very special part of your house which many of them are now that you mentioned it scott uh there'll be one on my
telescope in the toronto astronomy museum oh wow very cool very cool yeah
yeah they acquired the telescope last last winter and they they're gonna open a new uh canadian space uh museum
uh and exhibiting all kind of astronomy stuff from canadians so yeah i'll be i'm
very proud of that yeah you should be you said yeah yeah and and
of course he makes he's made all of his own uh telescope fabricating equipment um makes
his own designs uh it's just uh amazing to me what what this guy has
done in such really a relatively short amount of time yeah it's it's a
it's a it's a pleasure to have you back on norman well thank you scott um first of all i would like to thank you scott
to uh to uh to create this uh event the global star party this is great to have
you to see all those people interested in in in star parties even if we not
cannot attend the star body personally at least we have the feeling of a
presence of people that think like we are about astronomy and observing so it's
very um appreciated and especially that to invite me to be part of it is very
very uh special especially it is of course all of you that that
make this uh star party as special as it is yeah the audience as well so i'm just
the guy that's uh adjusting that well you you made it you made it it's made
you you made it yours that's good thank you so uh scott you uh i asked you earlier
today what you wanted me to talk want me to talk about today because i've been through a few a few subjects so far and
you said well why don't you talk about some observing experience that we have that i had
if i have to talk about memorable observing a session we'd have for a few days to
talk about right [Laughter] some that come come up
come to mind uh right away um my early years in astronomy or telescope
making or really getting to observing would be uh first that comes to mind is telephone
uh it's it's probably the first large star body that i attended
and gathering of telescope maker also but most of most of my experience of cellophane that
really impressed me was friendship and contact with human
contact about astronomy uh and observing the sky in the beauty of the universe
it's uh stellar fame is a magical place and
you walk around the site and then you meet people you
don't see them because it's dark you don't know who you're talking to most of the time but
the uh the feeling is the same the experience is pretty much the same everyone is so
happy to make you observe through their telescope and whatever object or nebula or galaxy that that
you're going to look through it's a part of that person
happiness i think and it's special to to share
experience and vision and most of the time people will show you object that you never saw and it makes you think
well that's something an object i would like to observe with my telescope eventually and take notes and then
try to remember uh that object and what
what really really uh gets to me at cellophane is uh
the energy i think the energy of uh that we all create uh about observing visually
because most of most of the people over there do visual observing i'm a visual observer myself since day
one i have nothing i got about images you do you guys make great great great
work i love to see those beautiful image it's it's very inspiring
but for me personally and lots of people is the experience of the eyepiece
the image that you receive in your eyeball i mean it's a direct contact with the universe
it's not um i mean those photons travel
billions and billions and billions of kilometers or light years of distance
thousand millions of light years and you get them concentrated
into your eyes and it's it's the it's the physical it's
not just an image it's it's the particle itself that traveled that distance
that reflects in the mirror and then gets into your eye so it's the direct connection for me
it's it's very very um intimate connection with the universe when you
observe visually that what makes really makes me come back every time and make
me think about who we are where we are
and what is our place and that in this whole big universe
so yeah observing by myself is great but in a group with
friends and to share the experience is very important for me that's why i never
stopped to go to star body even if i my time is kind of short with all the work that i do
i try to to go to most of the the big event but tonight i'm going to talk well first my first impression was
telephone that i wrote down another star party or event that really
comes to mind is the winter star party in florida
one one particularly year i was there i had brought a 16-inch
wooden telescope that i just finished to build and i was very proud of it and and just the
the trip to go down from canada down to key west with my van and all my equipment and everything and i get to
custom and the guy looking at this wooden telescope in the back of my van said what the hell is that
this does that it's an experience in itself it's very fun and then get there get all
my equipment uh exposed and then um that night
uh i had uh three very good friend uh sitting down with me on the beach
uh uh marcus lewis probably know marcus from apm
uh in germany uh i know marcus for many many years uh alan treyno was there yes that was the
way last year unfortunately for the heart of heart attack but alan was the first to invite me up neath
uh the northeast astronomy uh gathering every year in april he's the one that invited me the first
time many years ago and then after that he had bought the couple on my telescope and one other very important person was
always latter that also passed away a few years back i don't know if you know how a lottery
was the one that he was making all kinds of laser for uh
for telescope aligning telescopes and all kind of neat tricks he's a machinist he was
doing all kinds of stuff and lots of he likes to talk about politics
but we won't get into that but that night i remember very very vividly um we
were sitting down we just talking about astronomy what we were doing and then the scope was there and
at one point i i planted an object i don't usually go to in especially at with a winter star
party you want to watch omega century you want to watch the m42 because it's in the winter you get grade
you but right next to it in the canis major you get this ngc 2359 which is uh
also knowing the taurus helmet so it's not an object that you don't
observe very often so i just pointed out there and then we took turn
uh we went to the aip say hey what's that he wasn't very um uh he didn't know
very much about it so i started and then after that alan trainor looked at it and then marcus went at the eyepiece
and he was very very impressed because he could see by lots of details and we all talked about what we could see and
what it means the look that it had and at that point marcus said norm is that
object just sold me that telescope so he bought this telescope right there on the spot
well that was pretty special because mark is a very impulsive person
he's a very impulsive buyer marcus i know that mark is from the first time that i went to to nev
uh he had his uh his uh his booth right next to mine uh on this on the floor and before
neve opened so whereas i was setting up my telescope on tables and stuff and i had that small six inch telescope a
wooden telescope one of my first uh that i was selling um
and he looked at the scope he did some kind of a of a light test on
with with the lighting into the auditorium and uh he said norm you're going to send
that telescope to germany right away [Laughter]
that kind of guy just to say that that night with aoe allen marcus and me looking at the
tour's helmet something that looks casual but for me it meant a lot because we're sitting now all friends
okay the contact between people and the universe
another great event that i can remember uh you were there scott
uh at the uh starfest in toronto near toronto in canada yes
uh you were there i had the 36 in my one of my first 36 inch telescope there on site and then
we were you were you had brought your first i think if i remember right 17
millimeters 100 percent field of view 100 degrees and you wanted to to compare
different type of ips and stuff and then we observed most of the night with the 36 and i don't know if you were there
when we observed that object but m17 uh with the 36 inch telescope it was just
mesmerizing i still see the image in my i close my eye and i see the image of it the entire structure
of the nebula itself was just mesmerizing uh and for my last uh observing
uh memory that i have um i was you were talking with libby
earlier about her small telescope okay uh i was in namibia
uh on two years ago i was invited by
a mining company canadian mining company that has a program for the local in uh
it's called the little shop of physic so the uh they have some kind of a uh
well how could i call that it's uh for the all the school and children around
the the small village in africa and namibia to educational okay about physics and
all kind of biology you know and kind of stuff and the guy had met there i had met the president of the company
in toronto at the meeting bid conference for mining and um he was saying that the next project will
be on astronomy they want to do a planetarium and a planet a small observatory to to educate people in
astronomy in in the media so the year after i was in namibia myself
and visiting the site and then to to to do the uh to start to think about
that project to to to install a planetary mobile planetarium and an observatory with
different type of telescope in it for education purple purpose over there but what we what i want to talk about is
the first night i got to namibia the first time that i was in southern hemisphere and i don't know if any one
of you guys went to namibia but it's one of the darkest site in the world
i think 70 of the country is a desert and the rest is uh half desert half uh vegetation
but there's 90 i think it's 90 of the country is not electrified so
there's no electricity uh available to a small village so it's pitch deck black
so there's no light pollution whatsoever so the first night i got there
my my host took me to the back country and then
he stopped the car the the vehicle and then you close the light and said wait five minutes so your eyes
gets used to the darkness and we just walked out of the car
and the night this the the view that i had of the milky way
it was just i was blown away completely blown away just no telescope nothing just a few
okay it's like it was like a picture you had the two millennia cloud there the center of the galaxy
right above and we it was casting shadow on the ground drilled by the medic
it was just unbelievable and the guy oh and the guy had a small i think was a tesco two and a half inch telescope in
the back of the knee [Laughter] i saw things in a two inch telescope
that i haven't seen in the 20 inch here those go here it was unbelievable wow
and i'm so happy because that project is going to come to to the future uh it was supposed to start
beginning of 2020 but with pandemic you know the project was put on on hold so
hopefully next year the year after it will become a reality and i'm sure as
hell i was going to go there and install all the equipment there just to have a look at the night sky
over there but yeah so observing visually is something that's
always will be my thing um and also like i say uh there's thousands
and thousands of opportunity to observe with the but i think the important ones is when you are you're with friends
around you and you can share the experience and share your thoughts about what you see
and um for that reason i'm gonna sing you a song about friendship
[Laughter] so if it's my tradition that every time
i come to the global star party i will make a song so here
so you probably all know the song i don't know if i played it before anyway it's a great song about
friendship [Music]
when you're down
and you need a helping hand
nothing oh nothing is
[Music] going close your eyes and think of me
and soon i will be there [Music]
too bright enough even
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
i am i come running
to see you again
and when the spring summer falls
[Music] you've got a friend [Music]
in the sky above you
should turn dark and full of [Music]
not cold
[Music] keep your head together
and call my name out loud now make sure
i'll
i am [Music]
fall [Music]
[Music] got a friend
you've got a friend you've got a
[Music] you friend thank you
the best part of this star party [Laughter] always always music in the star party
with me i was singing along with you
i was singing singing i love that song anyways is it a
beautiful song carol king wrote that song
friendship is such an important part of the you know the astronomy community
experience you know oh yeah oh yes it is well thank you everyone for having me on
thank you thank you very much norman you take care and thanks for sharing your uh evening with us thank
you take care take care bye-bye all right so uh
someone that just has with us for has just a couple of minutes where he has to leave is dustin uh
gibson uh so dustin thanks for thanks for coming on uh right after this we're gonna have uh
cesar brollo down from argentina on with us but definitely wanted to give you a couple
of minutes here to to hang out with us
so it's been crazy i imagine at opt and uh um
give us a sense of what what's been happening in your world yeah man it's been uh it's
it's been wild you know in all all the best ways we have a lot going on but you know we're also doing uh i'm doing
thursday and friday night streams here on clear skies network and um so i'm getting the observatories
back up and running with um you know when coronavirus started it made it exceedingly difficult to get out and
uh get people out to texas and the other place we're doing installs but um you know we're finally able to at
least send myself or one person places to install some stuff and uh yeah so we've got several
observatories going back live and that's exciting because this is man i live for this stuff these celebrities every week
it's like this is this is all i want to talk about every day which is why we bought opt so we could just talk about
this all day long yeah that's all we do is the nine to five and then you leave there and you just talk about it more
that's right and i look to see if you're on so i can come on here and talk about it more oh it's great to have you come on so i know you're really
really buried and busy so but uh it's awesome to to see you and you're looking well
you're looking you know you're looking uh rested and everything a lot of us have
been have been working like crazy trying to keep up but
you know i know that uh opt has uh has been uh super busy so
we have yeah and explore scientific i know that um you know explore scientific is leading the charge as well you know
getting out there and being here doing our best you're committed yeah every time i turn
this thing on you know i'm like he's on here for hours and hours and it's it's so good to see
and you know i see a lot of people on here thank you i try to pop in or at least have this running in the background when i'm working
and um i hear a lot of people thank you and i'm so glad because i mean it is a monster commitment
um to be on inspired by you inspired by you so thank you thank you
for i uh i i love that you're doing it and the the people that you bring on here it's like you know this is about
people ask me why i love this so much it's like man i'm surrounded by all my heroes you know all the time and and you bring
half of them here on the show so it's like everywhere you look you've got these incredible people
yeah these people have shaped this industry from like the software we use to the telescope designs to every aspect
of it it's like it's such i mean the stories are unbelievable and so that's why i leave
it running is like just hearing people's stories hearing how they got to where they are or what brought them into being
this defining character in an industry that has shaped all of us yeah it's like
that's that's an important story and one that needs to be told because it's literally changing perspective on a
daily basis and very few things can do that for the positive
oh um no man i absolutely love very much appreciate you doing this all the time thank you dustin thank you yeah well
thank you also for letting us uh broadcast on clear skies network as well because that's a it's a it's an honor to
be a part of that so very cool yeah yeah any of our avenues any of the vehicles we can create to help push this message
forward man that's that's what uh that's what this needs we got to get this out i tell people we're not going to stop
until every kid i meet is taking better images than we all are you know so
do you have more kids on on your show now uh we do we we bring uh you know we're
actually i've been doing a lot of stuff just one-on-one helping kids you know kind of like get into the system and
learn the first steps i mean you really have to start with the basics because it you know exposure is not a word that
most people understand unless you've been in photography so it just starts with the basics and then we go from there but i think it's just that
confidence building because astronomy is intimidating um it can be intimidating
it's intimidating to me still um so i think starting with the basics and we take the we do opt university for
our staff every single day they have to go through 30 minutes of training every single day
and then i bring the opt university stuff that conversation and just try to you know push that out and say like we
can do this not only can we do this it's not as hard as everybody kind of makes it seem we can do this together oh sure
sure well i i know that your programs are successful and uh you're carrying
along the entire community with you so you're doing a great job dustin and thank you i very much admire what you're
doing too so thank you thank you thank you i wish i could hang out longer man i'm so sorry i know that things will
things will settle out in a bit we just got these uh these releases this week and so um you know we're we're
buried okay all the best kind of problems in the world so and thank you to everybody that's here
for everything you're doing love the stories i'll keep this running in the background um yeah thanks again scott
thanks dustin take care man all right let him get out of there without singing a song right oh i should i should say
really quick jason man you guys yeah jason the vast reaches that's right he's
with us tonight so i i think i was probably happier about it than you were jake
he got an astronomy picture of the day to it was today right yeah yeah it's running today it's
awesome okay so we'll get to that uh we'll have you up next uh jason uh
uh right now we're going to go to caesar in argentina uh he is uh
he's been up late it's of course later over there and um
we'd like to uh to check out what he's doing so what do you got for us tonight caesar
well only we will have a chloe chloe night conversation because
it's still cloud this is a club
now and uh i think that that i do have chances
here to have a clear night but well okay
we only we can talk about astronomy sure you know and this week we have uh uh
interesting interesting uh activities in our company in our business
because uh you know the the total eclipse is coming to argentina
uh in less that or near that one month and um
and one of the things that we sell is is the film of polymer
uh polymer with uh with a mylar from united states and
this time we don't have time to to make the support for the future for
telescopes and only we sell the film
and we are talking a lot with us with the amateur astronomers uh
about how to prepare the support for for the
for the future uh because we are really concerned to to
that the people that buy this film make a very safe support and all people now in argentina
that that by us provided us this film is
hand make a handmade [Music] proper filter
for this their telescopes and of course all the time we are we are giving support about how to to make
proper uh support for the film and this week last week was was very very
easy because okay we don't have time to make the that you know the
any every support for every type of telescope because
now is impossible for us but we are talking a lot by skype or you
know what's up or all video call but okay is your filter okay show me okay
oh no you need you to use this or this or be safe in this or you know
um this is our our work uh in the last two weeks
but of course that we are giving support of everyone that that have this film
and need to make for their telescopes or binoculars make a proper and safe
[Music] support not support stories
my english i'm sorry it's um the the the right the right uh
um system to to support the film over there
over the telescopes right now support
yes yes um and uh this was part of our work in this week
and um uh well and we are every every
day we are working more because we this this year we manufactured
with the film the solar shades and
in the quality of the of the mounting very mounting of
the films yeah very important too yes because
maybe the people say okay it's just only paper no but you need something like
that when you when you start to manufacture in something like
it's very important to to see the quality or you know it's well
you you have the experience of distribution of solar system in the
great eclipse of uh 2000 uh
2016 was the the great american last great american eclipse
yes 2016 2017 17 17 sorry yeah yeah
what we are here with uh for our next uh
total eclipse and uh the the fortunately for only for local
tourists or or uh countries near to argentina
only uh it's open but we don't know uh uh
nothing about if for another countries it will be open but of course that with
only one month yeah only only we know that we can go to
the place and this is we don't have more information
than this actually yes we are going to patagonia
and we are preparing the the all the trust me the transmissions for
for the clips i'm talking with the local tv to make a
transmission for for you know for uh internet and tv
we are working in now we're only capable about cameras telescopes and i prepared
all for to go to patagonia i have my yes
so caesar cesar you you will have the internet connection there will you have a good internet connection
well this is something that we are talking with the authorities of the of the place because we are talking to
because we need a good internet connection in this place but you know that
the the towns are very small and you know maybe they have internet but you you
need internet you'll need we will need internet in an open area yeah
near to the to the town to the small towns and i don't know how they can
they can bring us but you know we are we are talking that really we
need a very good recognition last year in san juan we have an amazing
internet connection yeah but the problem was that we
we have uh the firm of you know when you have the
password i didn't need to talk to anybody
and i don't know why everybody does yes i say why pokemon is secret it's
about the is you say look don't tell anyone
yeah yes please don't deliver yes we yes
everybody everybody yeah three thousand people trying to bring in the internet come on
my family yes look this eclipse is wonderful yes collapsing
for everyone of course right uh but um this situation comparing with
our last situation in in san juan last year that was like a
lollapalooza of eclipses because was a really huge huge party with
a a lot of different points in each point you have between
7 000 from 3 000 to 7 000 people in
in each node or need each uh place of of observation but of course this year
we think in um more like official events we think that the people is
you know is going to only to the side of the road
um without a huge event like last year
uh last year was was an amazing it was amazing in argentina it was
incredible uh san juan province uh made a very very huge uh
event in in the in the impact of totality in the san
juan province but this year you know the conditions are really really different
and we are going to make an official event but we don't know
how you don't know how many people can show up for this right yes yes for example the town of valencia they say
we will close the town we yes they told us that
we can make everything outside the town come on it's incredible but they are really
scary this the problem with the problem with this this pandemia is oh yeah when
the people is over scared and you say of course that
every everyone are are taken care about this
but it's bad when you have the over over um [Music]
you know uh well over scare or over uh worry people and say come on
it's too much but we are working a lot for filters for
you know uh solar trades or everything everything
we have a lot of work fortunately i have the the place i rented a place for me
and my family and family friends um we are i have all prepared but
really it means i miss a lot of people that like you that came to argentina
to know you know really really i miss them you know the pandemic was not going on i
would definitely be down there totally totally yes yes totally
changing everything yes that's right yeah well uh cesar i think that uh
you know you're gonna be in in a very strange way involved in a very historic
um eclipse uh you know and um uh you know i know that you will try to
share uh you know this is as well as you can with uh you know this adversity and um
you know uh hopefully you're able to uh share it also through the internet uh
somehow um but um with you
we'll get uh absolutely yes yeah so i i'll give you
when i when i have all completely uh prepared i give you the the
you know the address or all of okay for the you
have yes you if we are the first one because yes sure yes
oh and yes we are awaiting the the
the the quality of the signal or all that this people can prepare
it will be in a good way but you know that we are waiting for this
and i understand it may not happen for that way but uh maybe after if we are unable unable to
connect live um then uh you know i'll certainly turn to you to uh uh we can
rebroadcast after after the event so that's that's also possible
but uh we wish you good luck you know we wish you good luck we know it's going to be a lot of work uh getting there uh the
total eclipse happens on december 14th uh what time will be totality what time
is totality um how many times or no no what time will
it be what time will it be uh on december 14th uh at what time at 12
at noon but i don't remember exactly sorry because okay either yes it's at noon
it's noon sorry that i don't remember exactly exactly today that's all right that's time um i know that in balchetta
we have one of the the times yeah long times longer times uh maybe a
little more in the in the in the west do you have a little more time but we are
near to the to the more longer time of totality in in this town of pancetta but
you know the problem is that data this is time this is towns are really really small because
it's a place it's a place like it maybe you in the united states uh have a line
over arizona and the desert and you have a really little little small tiny town
right yes and remember a bunch of them here yes and we are argentina
we are only in the entire country but for people when today then i listened that
about the equatorial modes and many many times i i heard from my
customers different problems and sometimes i don't
understand why they told me about problems with the you know that touch
sometimes touch the counterweight touch the
something of the telescope because the problem is that we have a latitude from 66 in the south
right 21 you know and in the same
the same quarter mode that you sell is for different people in different places
and this is a we are only we are
only 50 millions in argentina it's a very very large country and we have we are
only 50 millions maybe less many people is empty yes we are
we are a lot of people live in buenos aires of course but patagonia is really empty the distance
are far far far always far far away and it's very interesting because you drive
a lot and you can see nothing [Laughter]
but that's good astronomers like that we love this because they have an amazing
yes yes i i just i choose a house in a in a san antonio sorry that
my speech is too long sorry but it's a place it's a place that i'll i'll
love to enjoy because the the the milky way in this part of near to
the sea and mixed up with a kind of desert the landscape and you
have a clear skies that are amazing and you know when you have eclipse you have
nights with uh with a new moon and
this is the best time to to to have a really to enjoy places to
to make photography or something or only to watch the sky like like talk
uh our friends uh just because it's really really i i um
i miss to to watch the sky yeah because
come on it's amazing yeah we were all talking about how we need our
time under the stars you know how that makes us feel better absolutely
well i'd like to make a big shout out for jason gonzale
the vast reaches he's uh he's with us tonight today he got an
nasa astronomy picture of the day and so that's a big congratulations um
how many is this your first time it's not your first time to get no this is yeah that's
the first one i've gotten it's the first one it is yeah good lord well we're very we're very
honored to uh to have you on uh on the show uh today and uh
i i can't personally i can't believe this is your first one so because you've had so many amazing images but uh it's
fantastic so i've been i've been telling people it's not for a lack of trying i've
definitely um put a lot of images in the ring for that one but you know anybody that's kind of
grown up you know in the internet age is familiar
with that webpage and um oh yeah it's famous you're this is the pinnacle astronomy that's
you know that's that's one page that's been through this hobby you know for
you know from the beginning and it's funny you know you look at that page and the the layout the the look of
that page hasn't changed since they first published you know an apod
they uh they kept that same format the entire time but you know it's uh sustained succinct and it gets the
message you know across so i guess that it works um
but yeah it's exciting um you know any many astro photographer
will tell you um you know that's one of those things that you don't you always like to see your image up there someday
oh yeah yeah it's like having your your uh for a rock and roll person have your
picture on the cover of the rolling stone you know i mean it's it's the school it's the uh it's the top so
um uh yeah i don't have much of an acceptance speech plan but we can
you could uh you could talk about the uh this image of the soul nebula that you did and um
uh you know um yeah i realized you don't really need
you know the image speaks for itself i mean it is stunning uh um
uh but do you know my screen here please do
here and i'm gonna share the link so that everybody else can see this
all right it's my screen coming across yes sir okay so this is the image um
so i actually uh created this one as a somewhat of a halloween image because i
thought and i think i shared it actually on your stream here a couple weeks ago but i
just um i took a larger image of the the soul nebula and cropped it down to this this little um
crop in the very center um you know as i was processing this i started seeing a face staring back at me
and uh yeah i mean a lot of people people see all kinds of stuff in here um
the two most common are this face you know seen there in red and then the indian subcontinent down here
at the bottom there's a pretty striking resemblance to india
um you know straight up through you know nepal and the himalayas up there you can kind of visualize it all
but um yeah so i started seeing this this face staring back at me when i was when i was processing it i just thought
it was a cool crop um not a real common rotation or orientation to look at the
soul nebula in um i started kind of seeing all these things pop out of me right
well you know when i first looked at it i the the the the
nebulosity that's kind of at at an angle up there and then this kind of brighter one that's off to the side it looked
like some sort of you know alien kind of uh uh face you know that it was was the
first uh impression that i got from it but then afterwards i was able to see the
the uh uh the face that you were talking about some people see a bat there some people
see a singer sewing machine you know it's just the list goes on but it's funny when you you know remove the stars
from an image all of a sudden your eye and your brain just starts fabricating these
these patterns and shapes right uh
but i can share the larger version of that image that little uh that little
finger sticking down in the lower right hand side it kind of reminds me of a hand pointing down
with a finger yeah yeah let's do that over here so
this is actually the uh the full frame for my telescope
of that shot so you can see how much i crop down into the center there
and this is more recognizable as the the soul nebula uh this scent center column
and i think the uh next image over
is with the with the stars overlaid so you can kind of see how the stars were taken out of that right
well it's spectacular that's all i can say well what is your combined exposure here
jason well this one ran about uh 36 hours i i ran i i've kind of
settled on shooting trying to shoot 12 hours of narrow band data
per channel so this was taken in sulfur hydrogen and oxygen
it's beautiful right
and the way you process your images too they you know they're not uh they don't look over processed they
don't look um you know too hard-edged but yet there's so much detail in them
you know so your eye really can spend a ton of time
you know going from one tiny feature to the next um yeah that's kind of you know that ends
up being the balance right yeah
well i can't scroll around on that thing over here i know look look at all the i mean there's so much star formation
going on here beautiful yeah and that really dark nebula is that
is that is that a hole through the nebulosity or is that are you talking about that's dark yeah
yeah that's actually uh i mean don't quote me on it because i'm not positive but i think that's just a dust
cloud hanging in front of the nebula kind of blotting out what's behind it
you can kind of see that looks like yeah david eicher might know i don't
know you can kind of see some you know texture in there which makes it look like it's a dust cloud does
there's that uh hand sticking up pointing up that looks like a index finger
right
yeah so thanks for uh thanks for the love everyone and we got
a good response so it's awesome for you to share this you know to
get the chance to share an apod uh with someone that we know uh like you as j jason is really cool uh
andrew corkels is asking what prompted you to remove the stars is it a technique
he says yeah i generally do that now when i'm processing um
processing these narrowband images and it it just um
it helps be able to process the you know all the various brightness
levels in the nebula to kind of bring out the my new contrasts um when you don't have
the stars present because if you work with the stars and in that
in that context you can end up pushing the stars into into some
sort of uh ugly territory so i just i just prefer to take them out and work
the nebula and then and then overlay them back in you know to the finished product
sure and that way you can kind of click them on and off and you know depending on your taste uh which way you like it you can you can
work with either one it's awesome i think it's kind of
a little bit ironic you know that you know as an astrophotographer your
image that is selected for a pod has no stars in it but i don't they don't really pick many
starless images for for a pod so right right
well congratulations man that's a big thing you have something else to show here um
that i was working on um i don't have any live imaging tonight because it's been
cloudy but sure i took this the other day
i thought this was cool this was a animation of the uh sunspot group that's
oh very nice on the sun right now and actually let me
look at this other video because this one doesn't zoom in it's a little bit easier to see but um
so this is that sunspot that just rounded the corner of the sun and is tracking around and is not
reaching the opposite side i shot this on the fourth which is almost a week ago now
but you can see all the texture in the uh in the chromosphere this is 45 minutes
of movement and it gets to the end and it just repeats
so that's why it kind of jerks you can actually see the sun the rotation of the sunspot around the sun there i i see
uh excellent that's great
then we had the other one that zoomed in a little bit on it
that's got that 152 never never disappoints with the uh
the solar resolution yeah it's it's amazing what you do with it look at that yeah oh my goodness i'm waiting for the
uh ar ar-200s coming right
i'm pushing for it right i'm pushing for it that's beautiful
man wow jason you are you are a master at this stuff it's great thank you
well thank you thanks for having me thanks man yeah i hope sharing it
yeah we love it too thank you yeah
so what's next on your horizon what's what are you going to be shooting uh or going after next or do you even know
well i've got oh i've got so many i've got
no less than 45 deep sky images that i've captured and still have
yet to process okay that far behind in this stuff because i generally capture every every
time i can sure i end up running out of time doing the the editing so it's
something i always have it's a little bit of a weight on my shoulders trying to get through all that and it's just been
stacking up and stacking up well i think you kind of have to work that way i mean if you get the sky for
it you gotta shoot right and and yeah but at some point it becomes a little ridiculous when i look at the
mountain of hard drives that i filled up right i'm just one person
hire a team to process or something yeah right yeah i've been trying to you know
that have a team that does you know all this other work so
but uh you know the the sun's been active again so i've been trying to get out doing that and uh you know the plane
trying to get my last shots and on mars in so just been uh busy doing that stuff
and all the while capturing the deep sky stuff in the background and uh never finding the time to process it
right you'll get to it you'll get to it i think that's that's really that's got to be uh
that image has got to be a source of personal pride and uh it is a remarkable
uh image for anybody to look at so it's really cool thank you man yeah thank you
thank you all right so um uh jerry i think that you're up next
here okay i uh it's cloudy here
the clouds have finally come i was talking to jason earlier out over the entire world is that what happened this
time that was actually i was talking to jason the last week has been beautiful you know so we have to pay for that at some
point you know yeah we've got all this time richard's got sky so that's cool
yeah i i uh i was going by this clear sky chart i didn't actually go out i didn't i'm on
the observatory but i did i was on earlier but i didn't try to open it up to look at the sky actually i i looked
at the uh so it might be a little better but i did that this this morning thinking it was going to be good
to do some i've been doing a week-long uh every morning doing the some lunar
imaging early in the morning from like two to five o'clock depending on what day it was
and uh so i can show one of the images that i've processed uh
absolutely a little bit different typically when you do lunar imaging um
you know you you gear up the uh the system you
you tailor it to do planetary by having a very long focal length you know of high focal ratio right f20
to maybe f30 if your skies will support it and uh but what i've been doing at the
msro we've got it configured for deep sky so we've got a deep sky astro camera on
there it's not a planetary video camera and the focal ratios f5.1
on the 165 uh telescope which is a six and a half inch refractor that we have as a main instrument
and uh so i've been playing around with this uh
image that i took i've been taking full disc lunar images so it's just one
full frame no mosaic and i was trying to push the limits to see what kind of resolution i
would get in terms of how small of craters i can see on the moon with that setup you know
typically you do you know close-ups of the lunar surface and you do mosaics and patch it all
together but i wanted to i wanted to get away from that and just push the limits
on the system and my skill to see what i could pull out of these images and of course we had great seeing this past
week so i was able to do quite a bit and get some of the best full disc images i've been able to get so far
and the zoom panel kind of gives you a feel for it but i wanna i want to zoom up on can you see that okay
yes uh i'm gonna zoom up here on copernicus actually i've got another image that i
can show also that's probably better um
well jerry what what is it to get this kind of high resolution you're shooting
more than a full i mean you've got this crop down okay yeah so
this is the full disc right here this is actually not even a full frame this is like uh
this is like through uh about 0.8 5.7 by 0.7 degree field of view
uh actually it's a little smaller than that this is like well it's a half a degree for the moon so
it's like 0.7 by 0.7 degrees the full frame is 1.3 by 0.9 degrees is the full
frame of the camera so i've cropped i've done a region of interest that that encompasses the moon
a little closer but again this is still the full this deep sky camera it's a 16 megapixel
camera all right and the image scale is about 0.9 arc seconds per pixel
which is okay for d it's great for deep sky you're basically critically sampled for deep sky but it's very poor for
planetary imaging and uh so you because you don't you can't pull out all the details when
you're doing lucky imaging and you're stacking hundreds of frames
you can pull out tons of detail when you have that that small of a image scale like point two or seconds per pixel
but again i wanted to see what i could get with just a full disk image and process it so i'm gonna
i'm gonna zoom in on this and show you start to show you what kind of stuff i get now i'll show you an example of what
okay as these craters are gone so you can keep zooming in and zooming in yeah yeah
we looked at the damage earlier and uh yeah and it was to me it reminded me of
some of the gigapixel uh images that uh was being done at microsoft research you know where they
would start off by being across the bay from you know this in seattle you know and uh
um and and zooming in on like the windows of the space needle right you know
so for example this uh this crater this is the main one is called fauth f-a-u-t-h
that's false right there this larger one this fouth a and these two this is false b this
little see these two craters right here i see my cursor um
hopefully right next this crater is two miles in diameter
okay and you can see hints of craters that are less than two miles in diameter over
here so the ejecta blanket that came off of copernicus when the impact happened
that's what all this hummucky material is all around the crater yeah and then it threw off chunks it created these all
these little craters here all these little craterlets you can see them over here too so for example this crater
right here is less than two miles in diameter okay
which is uh pretty close to the that's pretty much the limit of the resolution of the pixel scale
so i was able to pull out all the details that you could possibly get out of this camera you can see this chain of
craterlets here they're three three four miles in diameter some of them are maybe less
than three miles but that's that whole chain of craters there is like three to four miles
in diameter so let me let me i'm gonna slowly zoom out so you can get a feel for the
well i'm gonna go all the way in that's all the way in i'm gonna slowly pull it out you can see
like you said it's like these you keep going and going and going and going and going and going and there
it is crazy so and then let me show you this is a cool
part what tycho looks really cool and then the straight wall let me pull these uh so there's the
straight wall let me zoom up this is the setting sun shining on the straight wall
so that's it right there that is crazy good
and uh yeah it gives us a sense of scale what do how
how tall or how oh what is the strength the straight wall the straight wall is i think like
80 kilometers long and then the slope it's a it's it's not as steep as slope
as it appears it's like a 30 a 20 degree slope okay 15 to 20 degree slope
but it's like a half a kilometer it's like 500 meters tall okay so what we're seeing is basically
a slope that's 500 meters tall i think uh that's got the sun shining on it so
and then here's a the crater tycho with a central peak
right there that's kind of cool look at that that's a really dramatic uh view of it
and uh let me pull back just a little bit so you can see and then you can see over here across the terminator you can see
all these little crater rims that pop out all these little peaks right here you
know right that's all that tiny little dot that's kind of the limit of the resolution of this thing it shows that light spot on
top of that peak like here uh here over here you've got these little peaks
picking up into the sun the last you can imagine standing on this peak and looking at the sunset on
the moon yeah gazing out towards the sun is stefan del prad would like he wants
to know which camera you're using to get these images so i'm using a deep sky camera it's a 16 megapixel qhy 163
c color camera the color camera it's a color camera and so i've combined you know i'm using a bin one of course to
get the highest resolution it's 0.9 arc seconds per pixel but i've created you know the i process
the image into a monochrome image basically to pull out all this detail
and um and again like you get these little crater that's right here you know
two three miles in diameter i just love looking at these things and then there's a another section of the moon that's
that's kind of flat out here right and the shadows are this is a the
last quarter moon so the craters look different on the last quarter they look like dark
spots instead of light spots you know you see all these dark spots and it gets even more pronounced as it gets further
on into the cycle but but you can see um
you know is that the best time to image the the moon is this last quarter well it just
depends on it you know first quarter is the most common you see most images of the moon you'll see are first quarter or near
first quarter but you'd rarely see it last quarter because you have to get up at three o'clock in the morning
you know to image that so that's why on at least in uh the northern hemisphere you know
so i guess anytime i guess but that's when that's when you have to get up are lazy to get up at that time i guess
so right right so i just wanted to share that so i've got a week's worth of i got six days worth
of uh the cycle going from day like 17 to 23 days in the
cycle and i'm going to be processing all those images and i think i'm going to turn them into a series of charts
for the lunar 100 chuck woods lunar 100 objects i've been doing articles about it for the alpo
uh newsletter the uh the lunar observer newsletter i do
every two months i do an article and the last series of articles have been about the lunar 100 chuck woods
list of lunar features and i'm probably going to turn this into a chart a bunch of charts that point out
all those different features oh here's here's another uh neat created to look at
that's uh eratosthenes or rasc i call it erraticines or eratosthenes
uh is the name of this crater and uh actually i've got
the chart here let me let me zoom out so here it is right here here's eratosthenes
all right that's another that's on the um virtual lunar virtual moon atlas program
i used to to identify craters but that's this crater right here
and this is a great chart because it it uh it it gives you a good idea of all the
names that are on the plant on the uh of the craters on the moon and up so
this image that i've taken it will show every name every every item in the database in this
chart program so for example so you can see let me go back to this
[Music] so there's fouth okay
on the chart and you can see the two craters there and this is south b
uh right there okay which is the second one of that foust b
is on the chart says it's two miles in diameter that's how i know it's two miles you all
were wondering probably how do you know it's that yeah and that's how i know because this chart told me
and there's a there's a way i've got another tool that you can do measurements on the moon also on your images that'll tell me how big stuff is
but i wanted to share that um that's the kind of work i've been doing the last
week that's what my mom always asked me how do you know that
no that's right because other people have found it out
right oh goodness so bob you've uh
you've been uh um on our show all this time and and you haven't uh on and off
tonight yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah right it's nice to have you on you know
well thank you for inviting me i can't often get here every week but i try to get here every few weeks
and i totally enjoy this i really do um it's just
such a nice break and um thank you for having me
um it's it's neat to see deep tea it's the cesar sometime i have to talk to you what the heck you actually do in
in argentina um i know kind of but you know
i wonder that i have a lot of customers all over the world that do remote observing in one
form or another automated and remote and i'm not sure i've crossed paths with
you yet so that's why i'm curious anyway
um thank you for having me on yeah we're kind of at the part of our um
of the global star party where it's just kind of open to share and free form free form at
this point so you guys want to have any kind of conversations dt i saw the uh
what was the nasa certificate that i saw that you posted uh that was of uh extra resource
campaign very cool huh so
uh you know i know that um a lot of people are very uh you know honored to have anything
associated with nasa i mean jason jason's uh nasa astronomy picture of the day is
there which is really cool uh i flashed that up i hope that didn't disturb anybody i
just when you started i put it up there just so people could see it yeah it's cool it's great
yeah let's show it again show it again oh i it's not on my browser anymore i just uh just
search for it apod i think is all i needed yep there it is so
share what share screen go to my browser come on click there we go
one why isn't it showing oh it's right here this should show
um it's a black square here but let's see what happens is that showing
uh it's showing yeah there it is and at the bottom there it is jason winslow
that's right yep that's pretty amazing but the
this is the key and you're right this this apod website has remained constant for
so long oh my goodness jerry bennell there he is that's the guy we we see him at a lot of uh
of uh you know conferences and so forth yeah i've been lucky enough to talk to
jerry a couple of times uh about he's so he's so enthusiastic you
know look at the e in going to his page is
probably pretty good too now i i'm going to take up a few seconds of everybody's time to tell you that there's a service
pack on the ascom platform that's out that just came out last week thanks to um peter simpson also there are two
videos on here that have replaced the older one from darren and i can't
remember his last name star stuff in australia one is a live demonstration of the new
alpaca new ish alpaca technology by the people at optek and simon tang at
woodland hills and also simon they're both captures from live streams the other one is a
totally comprehensive view from square one all the way up to the current of
universal connectivity for astronomical devices that's what azcom's all about is
universal and now it's truly platform independent and language independent
connectivity between programs and the devices and this goes through the whole
thing um you can you know kind of i guess i probably that probably cut
that off huh oh well anyway um it's it's right there and that's
azcom-standards.org if you want to see it so
i'm going to be digging into that stuff deep here moving over to alpaca here soon bob it's pretty cool if especially
if you want um you know devices that don't have usb connections that's was my big thing is
get rid of usb haven't now you can afford to have a little baby web server and wi-fi
my router my thirty dollar router has uh i'll let it know you know anyway yeah yeah so
uh and if i go back here as a little quick no that's not right this one here we go
can you see this again is this showing let me see is it showing a website
yes what do you see it's not a black square right say your old desktop yep my
whole desktop hold on that's weird let me try this again
all right i'm going to move this here and move zoom to the other monitor
and see if i can share it like that okay now i see it has my whole desktop
what's this nope i'm not i don't know why this isn't working one more time i'm sorry and i
won't bore you anymore uh shoot
this is not right nope all right well i'm going to share my whole desktop then yes that's all
it's letting me do how's this you see my web browser here
yeah you can maximize your browser yeah that's what i'll do i'll maximize this out all right now of course it looks
weird because this isn't written for a high-def entire monitor but the
idea jerry is go to the developer section here and
everything about alpaca starts here
introduction to alpaca and don't let this window stuff fool you you don't need it it's you can do everything
without it right and there's this and more things and the api is documented and
so everything's there we've there's quite a lot of activity
in this area that's occurring right now and it is occurring
and i don't know why i don't see my uh menu here of of
this is irritating i do have a question bob about the uh general driver development
under the platform and that's uh the templates that are available for doing the uh
server version of the driver are are difficult
well the server is a difficult thing i mean they did the best they could possibly do and rick rick burke and
peter and myself can help you but it's difficult but you don't need that
anymore you don't have to do that that's what i'm wondering how to because what we're
doing right now basically with our driver we tell people to use we did use the paw tub and and of course
you moved to the device hub already and deprecated the pothole but that's what people have been using to connect
multiple clients to our driver and that's clunky yeah yeah that's so we started down the path
of doing a server development on the ascom driver but again it's been a little difficult
if you're not really good with visual studio it can punk you out pretty quick i mean
it it takes a fair level of skill to do it there have been a lot of successes doing it
but it's not for everybody i get it and so the
the place to go for info on this
again i don't know why i can't get my browser to show but if this is showing
do you see my browser now yeah it's got the groups yeah okay so it's the ascom developer
group here that is the place and you can get help there there's lots
of activity there's people constantly doing things there's a bunch of people doing alpaca based things
and if you use you know the you don't even you don't need net you don't i mean you can do it
in python you can do it in whatever uh so right right uh it's
what did i just shot myself in the foot here how do i get rid okay i see so that's that's uh that's what the future
looks like uh is uh platform and department development and you you can write it and
run it on windows or on a raspberry pi you you can put the whole thing in your
mount yep right with a with a wi-fi antenna
and today's you only have to write the mount part you don't have to write anything on
linux anything on the mac anything on windows well i don't know
on linux there are already several two at least
hn sky and what's up patrick chevalie's planetarium
cartoon yep both of those will talk straight to straight to your mount no
windows needed no com no.net no browser no nothing it's talk straight to your
wi-fi enabled mount with alpaca on it and anything running on windows goes
through the middleware that's already out there that's part of 6.5 platform
and boom so you could run the sky tell the sky to connect to an ascom
mount it comes up as an ascom mount you connect to it and it goes through the middleware and then out over the airways
to your wi-fi enabled mount boom it's done so you don't have to
write for windows you don't have to write on on the mac you don't have to write on on
linux just the little um microprocessor with its own little web
server and rest library and you're done so that's really the future and that's you know you can credit peter simpson
with the technology on that it's phenomenal yep i think uh yeah we're definitely i
don't want to give anything away with our product no but it's definitely moving that way well
the universal connectivity is the key you know not having that is a killer and the really tough part of it all is
cameras that's where it's a mess for a lot of reasons and the biggest
reason is trying to get enormous amounts of data from point a to point b
that's really the killer and you know
it's one of the things that is already there on a couple of cameras is the stacking
that is inside the camera for cmos that's really important because now when you ask for a 20-minute image you're not
taking 20 one-minute images and trying to transmit you know all that data gigabytes of data over
your wire and then stacking it on the computer that's like the old days when they had unbuffered cameras and they had
to you know anyway so that's a big one and then smart stacking is
yeah once i can do that with planetary images that would be the awesome application to where they where you can
actually select the planetary images like sharpcap can do now yeah it's like running regis stacks inside your camera
exactly but you know what as cheap as the nvidia processors are right
they're dirt cheap the processors themselves are 25 50 bucks something like that from nvidia and they're
totally capable of doing stuff like that so in the future you can see the cameras
being smart at their end and then transmitting the already selected out
stacked and aligned image as the final product that's where i think it's going to go but it's not going to work over
ethernet or wi-fi until that happens because of the huge amount of data that has to go from a
cmos camera into the computer it's just totally impractical yeah one of my one of my lunar videos was uh like
eight gigabytes 10 gigabytes you know yeah i mean and that's that's lossy
that's a video right that is already jpegged or you know mp ford if you're a science
astronomer that data cannot be compressed so now you're talking about not 10
gigabytes but 200 gigabytes right forget it
hey guys i wanted to uh share this uh certificate that uh deepti
shared on there today so you can see that international astronomical search
collaboration hey we hereby express our sincere appreciation to
this um asteroid asteroid asters okay in recognition of valuable
connections yes it's awesome
so you you analyze images from panstarrs congratulations that's cool great thank
you very cool i love it you may not know this but that's where i
started in astronomy in 1999 and 2000 was asteroid hunting
that was what put acp on the map scott remembers i do remember
e.t there's a question uh someone wants to know can anyone join your
your uh astronomy club in nepal or is this only anyone can join
yeah yeah so how do they do that do they contact you on facebook or yeah they can
contact me on my facebook i will guide them okay yeah so
just go to deepti's facebook page and she will she'll help you get uh
become a member i'd like to be a member is that is that possible
yeah of course you can be advisor first okay i'll be an advisor
all right and a question to you uh jason um
uh they they wanted to know the the commentary that's with the image was
that did you write that or did they write that no well they uh i'm not sure exactly who writes it um
but it's one of those it's either jerry bonnell or uh robert neymar off i see
um yeah i think says i think below the image commentary written by a
professional professional astronomer right yeah so they've been doing that looks like i
went back to archive.org and it looks like their first entry was the 19th of august 2006 but
um maybe it goes before that but i really don't see any uh instances of that unless they
were on a different web you know website that's basically a 1990s look and feel for the web page it
very much is that's right that's right yeah
let's see what else what other uh questions we have here uh
that's the level of my my web page program june 16 1995 was the first one
oh okay that was yeah i think you answered this already but uh stefan de pere
said that's very cool how would connecting the mount via wi-fi connect to your imaging capturing software
guiding etc but i think you already explained that
um i i i answered something there norm is that
the one you're responding to uh no that was stefan del pro oh sorry i missed
that one i'm on the youtube feed with restream yeah this is a facebook
he said that's very cool why see how it connect in the mount by wiper connect to your imaging capturing
software guiding etc each device has its own connection just like today
your your uh guiding camera and your imaging camera and your focuser and your
filter wheel and your dome and your mount connect to an automation program such as sgp ccd autopilot acp my thing
or they all connect in and then the in the uh automation software or the or a
planetarium could do it and line things up and move the scope and then you know there's a lot of
software that will manage all of the devices in the observatory so that connection
whether it's wi-fi wet spaghetti usb serial it doesn't matter what it is
because it's universal connectivity the programs talk to an interface and they talk to the devices and that's how it
works today on windows and that's how it's going to work on alpaca with with wi-fi or ethernet
but as i said trying to get images from a camera over the guiding camera would
be no problem because it's small images and the rate is once a second or once every couple of
seconds you don't want to guide it most mounts more often than that anyway and they're usually little
you know 256 by 256 images with a guide star in it right so that's not an issue
but a 4k by 4k chip trying to image 10 times a second big problem
so it's it's it's moving but that's if you're taking
deep sky images where you're going to take 20 minute images 4k by 4k and you're willing to wait 20 30 40
seconds for the the image to come back and the camera stacks
the 20 images that make that up on the camera then it's totally practical and there are cameras out there right now
i'm not going to say who because it's would be an advertisement but there are already a couple of cameras that stack inside
and return a single image just like an older ccd camera would do
so and that's more more practical
excellent excellent i hope that makes sense yeah richard you have uh you have some new
images up there what do you have i do can you check here
sure
oh all right it's windy it's hazy and i'm out of focus
now this telescope you're using is damn good this is just a
one of our inexpensive 130 millimeter newtonians right
yep one of the first ones and yep just uh just a 150 entry level scope
and uh that's the the the cheapest cold astrophotography camera that uh money can buy new
currently at least uh as far as i know it's cool and uh you know we got a
little vignetting here and there we got a couple of issues but i mean you know everybody upgrades their scopes a little
bit too so i mean i'm definitely going to be putting a metal finder shoe on it because
that's a bigger weakness than the stock focuser but i'm going to be working with that too because i want to see what it
can do and i don't feel bad and i don't take things too seriously so
it's awesome no it's awesome you know images like these i mean
getting them on film it really i mean truly would have been uh a huge
uh you know effort and an achievement so you know these
there's nothing to be ashamed of with these images i think it's uh i think it's great and um
it really shows what you can do with uh very modest investments right very modest investment it's really
how how easy it is to really get into this hobby if you're interested you could do science with with the setup
absolutely yeah absolutely yep if only i knew how to do science
yes there's a guy right here that could help you it's definitely nice just to know that
uh i think i just lost some guiding oh well that's fine it was perfect timing you guys saw it already anyway
um but uh yeah i just think it's nice to know that you know you you don't need to spend an
arm and a leg you just need a go-to mount that can track and a decent scope that you know points
straight doesn't flex around and stuff i mean you know you can you can buy all the nice stuff but it's it's amazing to see
what you can do with less uh i'm looking forward to your amounts coming back in stock one day because i'd like to see uh
what that i could actually get the whole budget down to to still be able to do something like this because
you know right now the uh a couple of parts in the kit are still quite expensive and i'd uh i'd love to
try this out on a um an exercise two and i'm gonna be uh looking into one of those from uh
somebody i've been talking to recently as well but uh yeah i'm gonna uh un-share this
and send it back to the the crowd here very cool
yeah the thing is that we forget
the telescope now have more uh accessible or more
[Music] easy to buy from the people but we
of course that we don't forget but it's like like we forget that
so complicated that is make a mirror polish me
in the industry now you can have a lot of things affordable
that only 30 years ago was impossible to
to get and [Music] how the industry of optics
became more more uh
to have more affordable optics very very high
quality like by the bike but that's bad but
it's incredible
i know i i think of i i i really applaud uh you know of course
to see the very best images with the with the greatest equipment it's always wonderful um
you know when i when i look at uh jason's images of the sun with uh an
ar-152 when we designed that telescope we really did not i mean we thought okay
people will do astrophotography with it i didn't think that anybody would be doing cutting-edge
imaging with it i really didn't so it's a it's very gratifying to see that uh
that happen and you know by the same token i look at what caesar does with
you know very inexpensive telescopes and shows people how they can start imaging from
their backyard you know with a modest investment i think that's incredible
and richard you're doing you're doing the same thing there tonight so that's great thank you it's really great
yep dt i have to tell you there are people on our shows that are trying to figure
out how to all of us can pitch in together to get a telescope for your astronomy club so we're we're gonna
we're gonna try to get that solved and uh uh you know the the the uh
um the conversation today was you know what will it cost to get a donated telescope to you
through customs you know so we need to understand what yes that challenge is going to be there so
but um because it we don't want it to be tell us you know things get donated
sometimes to people in other countries and then it gets stuck in customs
because um you know someone wants to uh charge a lot of money just to get it
through the government red tape there so we'll have to study that a little bit more
norm hugh says scott you need to put a tab on your web page for images from users of your equipment we're working on
it norm we are so it's coming
um and andrew corkill asked about
communicating with cameras over 5g network i don't know
i don't know anything about it so too slow too slow
yep 5g yep gigabit ethernet is
um people want those images in seconds
yeah and the images are honking huge yeah so
i don't know yeah that's the thing about disk space too
disk space you can eat up a disk drive in no time and i know jason understands that pretty well yes
so you have to be smart about how you take your data you really have to study the issue and what you're trying to get out of it
probably buying another 16 terabyte hard drive on black friday [Laughter]
[Music] yeah the great basin observatory has a
big disk farm and then they have microwave internet service so during the day
it it syncs their dropbox to all of their students and that still takes a fair bit of time
so yep well dt i see a telescope in your future
here so there's there's people who want to make this happen so
it'll be very cool viber well gentlemen i really
i appreciate everybody joining in tonight um i
you know really grateful to the audience here for participating and asking so many
interesting questions again want to congratulate jason gonzale for his astronomy picture of the day i
think that's awesome dt congratulations to you for your
certificate from nasa that's cool as well thank you
jerry you know thank you for showing us what's possible
with uh you know in high resolution lunar imaging a lot of people tend to avoid the moon you know they're
astrophotographers but uh yeah you know it's it's really cool to to i mean you can embrace the moon even
with your deep sky set up you can embrace the moon you can embrace the moon that's right that's right
that's right and cesar thank you again for sharing your insights and everything hopefully
we can find a way to connect over the eclipse that's coming up here on december 14th
you know so that'll be very cool uh if you think that's going to be
possible i will start uh i'll start really promoting that and
we'll uh we'll ride through with you on on the eclipse so that's very cool
um yes my idea is
to share the transmission with you you know but if we have the conditions of course that
i have a cable for you with the image just don't give out the password
yeah yeah no no don't share [Laughter]
i almost forgot something what's that uh well what's running around doing all the astrophotography
gear i forgot uh i wanted to share the updated battery system oh yeah that's right oh here we go a
pelican case bright yellow so you can't trip over it at night is easy right
oh i love that we've got whoa holy smokes 32 amp hours of lithium iron phosphate a
battery management system wired in and you should sell these things
that move a truck yeah that's right you should sell them yeah we got a little bit of room over
here to stick some capacitance over in this side and okay we still got to hook it up with some
accessories and some outputs and stuff but uh i just wanted to show that because especially anybody who's doing
remote operations you can build your own if you're you know so inclined it's not too much different than putting
four batteries in a flashlight in a row it's you know not too much different or you can reach
out to astro beard and maybe he'll build you one yeah for the uh you know
for those of us that are cool to build our own i will definitely help walk you through
uh plenty of things um i i guess that's a possibility i think you could probably make a living
doing it so any hold on yeah yeah yeah very cool nice to have reliable
power when you're out there so that's true my other system is kind of heavy so i needed something in the middle
that's cool that's awesome i ha i have the big one pedicam
uh maybe i think it makes something
amazing uh yes this this cases are incredible
yeah income cases i've got a handful of them and they they take abuse uh
the uh the portable command center behind me with the um the big screen in the back of it and all the hf
communications and 180 amp hours lithium and solar charge controllers and vhf coms and blah blah blah blah blah
it rode in the back of the truck all the way down to georgia through two states of torrential rain and it didn't leak
and it's got you know two inch hole saw through it with the boat switch and you know screws holding the monitor in from
the back side anything there wasn't a drop in there yeah yeah i used them especially if
you're gonna do i was considering using a you know an ammo box for a minute and then i started realizing that to
insulate the metal box from the electrical system was more work than it was worth and i just uh got another
pelican yes yes all
when i i go to the store parties and or or the eclipses i need all
very hard cases and have everything everything in in very
trustable level reliable
high quality cases and we choose a pelican for
to move everything yeah are expensive but are they the the only one
system that have a military grade because really the army uses
they are they're very safe i learned the hard way i built a nice little pelican box for uh all my explore
scientific eye pieces and uh i used the olive drab one um
and at night that's not a good idea in the grass oh
so since then all the astronomy cases are bright yellow because you can see them
yeah just a hint in case anybody doesn't like tripping over dark colored stuff in the middle of the
yes we have a guy that have a uh in any store party have their own uh
eye pieces and he he having three different cases
actually he have 83 83 eyepieces
yes yes that's more than i have many of them yes yes i i don't know if
yes many of them are uh explore scientific [Laughter]
yes alejandro vareli his name is
his investment because he used a very hard case
of course that everybody go to the to the cases of alejandro vareli to to take
and he's very very a very good person because okay use but remember
remember to do that yeah yes yes and the pieces in our store parties
came from from the boxes from alejandro vareli and he know a lot a lot of
optics really i i need to invite some somebody another
people from argentina to the council party because i i know people that you know that
everywhere maybe maybe we everywhere
you can found jewels people that know a lot of things
everywhere in any country and it's very interesting
from people that we can invite um like what
you know if you like i can share
a few few pictures uh of a dom that i construct
yeah please okay
this is one of my favorite domes that i made oh wow you made the
stone yes yes actually um i i'm i made aluminium domes
um the one of my favorite domes was this one because it was for a
tower in a hotel in bariloche in patagonia because it's a very very windy
uh windy place it's a it's a sky resort area
yeah and i thought it made a very strong dome
with more uh metal parts uh that actually made for example if i made
something or i design something for buenos aires it's not the same condition
that this one that was for patagonia
here is when we finished the dome and we put this in the truck
yeah and and start a trap to traveling to patagonia
1600 kilometers maybe maybe one thousand miles
wow that's far yes yes and now later i go i fly to patagonia to
variloche i received my dome in good conditions nobody my dumb the
they don't for my customers for the hotels sure and we start to to
with the crane the crane started to to
how big is this dome how many meters no only no no no it's small this was small
was only three three meters no more okay
this is a small one for for uh uh for one eleven inches telescope
okay we we put a 11 inch telescope in the system
here's the grain you have here do you have the yes the mound and snow this was in october
uh 10 years ago [Music] i don't know if today i support this the
stress of this wow [Laughter] when do you have wind in patagonia
look at this this is a this is a home a part of the hotel in construction but
this will maybe you can see that this area is broken
yeah the wind oh my goodness nowhere storm
yes when the people told me oh this one what is this no no this is the last snow
storm last week so it's a very um
very tough place to uh build uh yes yes yeah
is it yeah but it is the most popular sky area uh for ski area sorry ski of
skiing okay not the sky yes yes and the sky yes this is the
combination and i i took the picture um
[Music] before i received the dawn in the tower
because we are waiting you know with the balls to put so fast as possible
to to uh to buddhists
when pushing the dome a little bit yes um
yes yes yes we make all the in the in the morning because at noon
you can uh feel how the wind is every
time yeah faster oh boy yes a few hours later uh a door in this
area blow up by the wind start to fly in
yes yeah fortunately we have the dome uh
you had a security yes yes yes that's cool here
yes no it looks very cool yeah really nice
yeah this is a guy's welding not me
a guy that well very well not me because i work a lot in this dorm room i
remember because um i well
i will a lot of parts and we put a change not um
sometimes we use a different system but like we thought a lot of in ice and
snow and wind we use a change a chain sorry
to have a very strong movement without the problem you know with
about eyes or another uh another uh situation that that make your
dumb uh unable to rotate
really good idea yes yes you can break the ice only with
the motor because you don't have problem because here do you have a
change like a change of the motorcycle or you know it's the same
it's all check all chain uh welded to the to the around the dome
well then sorry sorry that i need english class when i
today i i listen to the the english teacher
okay and this is okay you don't yeah and actually how was
not actually because of this picture of the same year that i made it but uh
actually is in the same place and still working with the telescope was
that was a great a great work because in a in a very hard
condition of wind snow you know
was was one of my favorite works in
dom's installations yeah it's excellent it's nice of course
only sometimes i made this because here in argentina the people don't have the all-time money to spend in this but
first we we made uh uh a number of of this maybe
near to 10 actually i don't make in in fiberglass because i
don't know the techniques but i i i am good because i know yes yes because i i am
i have in my my preparatory and my high school and
the technical school and my father is a really really genius
about this and he teach me a lot of things and normally when i i make this i work with
my fa i work with my father actually he have 82 year 82 years old
and he's a genius and today when i need something about
mechanics and journaling yeah i told i told with my father dante brollo
is he's a genius 82 years old this is the generation that you know everywhere
in the united states or argentina is the same it's people that know
everything really yeah well they had to do everything yeah
no you had to do it all i'm trying to learn yes yeah that's good that's very good
do you have your own observatory susan no really really i need to make one of
these one for me yeah yeah yes yes yes uh this uh this year we had a
really huge crisis because you know you know about economical crisis and
well actually normally argentinians move one year a i have our plans
come on yes maybe next year i can i can make my own observatory my idea is
made something remote because of buenos aires
but the idea is is make something with uh with a dome with a remote
explorer scientific yes this guy robert denney can
give you some good advice on remote observatories so yes i i know that i have the best the best uh
staff to to talk right yeah jerry consider absolutely jerry too
yes that's right yes yeah that's right
absolutely i'd appreciate they they have any help into this there's lots of help i think that
in the future sure and something that that
they found that the people can make something that
about uh the things that told them
is that every time the people can make their own
remote observatories more affordable more less less expensive because
you can make with this with the exos 100 perfectly you can make a remote observatory yes
very small well one of my ideas is made like a box something like a box
maybe we want us we got one of those at msro we have a box station like that
sure yes yes one of my ideas is is make something like this because it's a it's
a very interesting challenge make something small and put it in the place i have friends that that
have have their farms and
mendoza or have uh places where i can put an observatory very small
and make remotely without problems let me show you uh
i'm bringing up the facebook page for um this is myron's little setup right for
the mark slade remote observatory yeah that's on our facebook page i want to show you yeah what
uh what we what we've done here what the heck i'm lost on this page
anymore i can't uh [Laughter] i'm gonna bring up the photos album let
me see it's amazing online oh here it is right here
um there's a little box here it is
really yes that's a one meter box with a roll-off little roof
and we've got the 102 on there this is actually a cge mount that we retrofit the nch system too a rebate of
uh or yes this is cls from old mode yeah but we we put the pmc8 motors and drive
system on there we were absolutely exhausted on there yes because
this model had a very good mechanics yeah but the the closest system
of this was not so good and if you put the psm system
you have a great choice so there's the that's what the msro looks like the observatory this is this
is what the uh that's the one amazing jerry amazing yeah
wow the last one yeah yeah so that's what we have
to play with but that little box we use that that's station number three
we use it to train people on we run it remotely every clear night and it works
great yes and
encourage people to have to make this is amazing it will be amazing because
many people think that it's impossible but today the facilities are open and
well all about the the tall uh rubber along the
all the things that you can make with us consistently alpaca
it's amazing uh jeff wise is asking you jerry uh have
you posted the plans for this observatory yeah we've we've got some documentation
not a whole lot we could we can um
really have that what that box is you saw the group this the aluminum uh structure inside that's actually one of
those water tanks that myron got from a friend it's one of those portable water containers
yeah that he's got and uh cut it up and and
put it in there but so byron actually built another box before that uh which was just a small structure
with the corrugated plastic panels as the siding type thing but there's a lot of different ways to
build these small boxes anything you can design your own box to build
uh it's basically a one meter cube yeah with with a roll-off roof um
and uh yes and you can carry to the your your uh a friend in
here we talk for example mendoza this is in the west and it's very very dry
weather and you have a very clear skies and you can if you have a internet
connection it's it's great another design for that box is you could
have a flip top lid of course that you just manually open that's we we've talked about or having
it motorized too but uh that mo that particular box there has a lead screw along
one meter lead screw to open and close the roof
yes the most critical thing is if you are if you don't are in in the place
is have a a trustable system that we open and really close if
a bad weather it's coming you know right if you have if you have somebody
that can help you if you have problems it's always okay
yeah this we're lucky to have myron he's hosting in his backyard he's got a big backyard so he hosts our observatory
there uh we've got those three stations yeah excellent
wow this is my my project for next year yeah you need an observatory yeah we all
need money yes the balcony is okay but come on
we don't need anymore we need a balcony too uh yes yes really really was in the time of
pandemic here was really fun and
in this time of the not in this time of the year but um
i i have from the balcony uh in
winter i have a part of the sky fully of uh you know i have the milky way of course we don't
see the milky way in buenos aires but this is full of objects to
take pictures and i have pictures of of yeah
here and i have a lot of items from man bye-bye
oh i was waving to deepti because she messaged me [Laughter]
on facebook so hello
that's right i think we all want to be part of your club deepti
yes yeah we all want to be mad yes indeed it's good for us
i have to look down to type so i'm kind of messed up that way that's all right
it's time for that i need to move my camera down here like jason he has is low and i
think that's much better all right does anybody else have anything that
they would like to share and we're kind of towards them you want
to see the sun spot from yesterday of course yeah of course we do
i just stacked it up
oh my gosh nice whoa
yeah that's really nice that's fantastic yeah look at that you see that big
pillar come out of the left yeah it looks like it's out of this world anger coming out or this
yeah i think that's a giant plasma finger actually sticking out above the surface
this is for this is from today yeah this was yesterday yes oh sorry
so is this is the dark part of this like shadow or
whatever it can't be shadow i mean what what is it why is that it's just cooler it's uh it's a cooler this yeah the
sunspots are cool i mean it looks like this shaft is coming out you know so
it's amazing i suppose once it gets up
yeah you can kind of get lost in there you just look at look at certain spots yeah these things
so that was taken over the span of um probably about an hour
hour and 15 minutes i was taking a frame up
just under every minute i ended up taking getting 90 frames here
look at that it looks like running water running like yeah many different directions you know
and only in one hour is so fast because if you consider the the size of this
is it's incredibly fast the energy is
unbelievable the fields of
of you know that sunspot's got to be the size of the earth right yeah it's about the size of
the earth the dark yeah so like i said it moves fast i mean look how
fast this stuff moves the distance of the earth in an hour you know it's like yeah this is one hour
yeah i could actually tell you for sure here let me look it up i got it on my other computer here
you can totally see the magnetic fields it's just it's i don't remember when you were kids
you'd put a bar magnet down on the piece of paper and put iron filings on there and
visualize it i mean that's kind of the same thing well this was shot from uh
18 17 17 1954 so it's an hour and a half
an hour and a half an hour and a half okay awesome beautiful
yep is this uh is this inverted color no
this is this is just natural natural yeah but a lot of times i'll do the the
solar stuff and inverted color just because it helps the the texture stand out but it really
looks weird when you've got a sunspot in there because when you invert it in sunspots
and uh yeah beautiful
so the dark you know the dark structures you see there is actually the chromosphere
so it's the hydrogen plasma tendrils over top of the the surface
they're a little bit cooler than the or i don't know which they are if they are cooler but they're not as bright as the
photosphere below they're kind of silhouetted against the photosphere when i was at the uh 91 eclipse uh i was
in waunakea and i was working with the nova film crew there but the they had a professional uh
french team that was at the cfht where we were set up and uh
they had uh they were after trying to explain the connection you know because
the the the sun heats up to like i think like over a million degrees or something
uh as it as it gets from what you know what we would have called the surface of the sun
you know the the and they were trying to find out why
you know as as the you know as you got up into the higher atmospheres
why it was getting so superheated you know what was the action there
so amazing i don't know that they
understand that even today that's why the social worker solar probe is going down there to check it out
right you know i thought that was pretty neat
i just uh that was very deep very cool i mean very hot
yeah that was you know the scene was excellent
yesterday and oh yeah it really uh really makes that
data shine you've got the good uh still atmosphere to shoot through
that's very cool yeah i can for every good example like this i can i can point to several where the atmosphere just
destroys the image
well it's wonderful to see the these these kind of magic moments here so that's really cool it's really good
yeah
sound like you sound like a kodak commercial these magic moments
so we are going to get a song that's my song right there i have one-liner songs
yep well thank you everybody thanks for
thanks for coming together again um uh we have uh
on our daily show coming up on thursday we have andrew fracknoy is going to join us
he'll be talking about a couple of subjects so he'll be on thursday and then i think he comes back again on monday
so we have our daily shows at four o'clock 4 p.m central
and we have a lineup of other people who'll be joining us as well so tune in and uh
we'll be back with another global star party i i don't think this this friday unless uh gary palmer hits
me back up uh to say hey scott we're going to do a a friday night global star
party um i can't wait to do another asian uh asia
edition of the global star party that was really really great uh dt
participated in that as well oh nice so that that is getting a tremendous
traffic still and well
it's just an honor to be here with you guys so thank you very much and uh
we'll let uh caesar what time is it getting to be uh um
one 1 48 yeah a.m of course it's early for you
yeah i know you'll go and make a nice pizza and uh
yeah it's nice i can hardly wait to get down yes
i want a pizza and yeah look at some really dark skies and i made this for in
the european edition yes i i i i put my italian as
essence it's great yes it was great yes yes
all right well uh we are going to call it a night um i think i will play um
i have another little feature video to play for you guys and there'll be some ending credits
but thank you so much and uh yeah thanks everybody for uh being here
i appreciate it thank you yeah thank you awesome congratulations to everyone so really
great yeah thank you so much thanks for coming on bob it will uh welcome i loved it
yeah me too take care of us thanks thank you richard good night bye
bye okay
the human exploration of space still in its infinite day
the apollo missions were just the first step in our goal to have astronauts working on the surface of worlds beyond
our own and as nasa plans its return of humans to the moon and eventually onto mars
a team of scientists have come together to test and build some of the tools our future explorers may use on these
journeys based out of nasa's goddard space flight center in greenbelt maryland this group is called the
goddard instrument field team otherwise known as gift [Music]
[Applause] [Music]
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the scientists in gift collect data on some of the most unique terrains on earth such as glaciers in iceland lava
tubes in hawaii mar craters in new mexico and the desert regions of chile
the goal is to conduct field research in geologic settings that share similarities to locations on other
planets moons and even asteroids scientists call these sites planetary
analogs as they help us learn how to interpret data from across the solar system while also getting a better
understanding of earth in these environments gift researchers
test both commercial and newly developed scientific equipment these are portable devices that could be
used by astronauts or used aboard future rovers or other types of spacecraft
these field instruments are capable of multiple types of analysis with some providing instantaneous feedback
the team uses devices that can observe and characterize the landscape around a user as well as ones that analyze the
chemical composition and physical properties of materials found at and below the surface
the team also works with instruments that measure aerosols in the atmosphere magnetic fields and solar radiation
no matter which field campaign they are on the scientists in gift are selecting and using their instruments to answer
high priority science questions and to more fully capture the essence of how humans would explore the surface of
the moon or mars gift members also simulate astronaut evas or extravehicular activities at the
planetary analogs they study both former and current astronauts have accompanied gift on these simulations
overall the goddard instrument field team provides a unique resource to nasa and the external science community by
combining the studies of planetary science earth science and hardware technology
all of the tests experiments and data collected provide a blueprint for the human exploration of other worlds
and that's a great gift for those taking the next giant leap
[Music]
so
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wow [Music]
Transcript for Part B:
A lot of people think that a
virtual party means that you
would have like some sort of V
thing on, but actually the
virtual Star Party is a real
star party with the stars from
around the world coming to you
live uh to share their passion
and their knowledge of what
they know about the universe.
Uh we hope that you join us
tonight. uh you can watch it on
explore scientific.com forward
slash live from there you can
jump to our YouTube channel our
Facebook channel our Channel or
our Twitter channel uh so that
you can actually chat with our
guest live uh we will have uh
David Lee comment discovered
David Levy uh the chief editor
of Astronomy magazine um David
J Eer uh we have D Tom from
Nepal. uh she's a sixteen
year-old young astronomer We
have ten Year-old Libby and the
stars will be joining us. We
also have other astro
photographers in the northern
and southern hemisphere.
Including some I think from
Europe so anyways, it'll be a
lot of fun uh the astronomical
League will be joining us and
we have door prizes and we hope
to see you tonight at 7 PM
Central um right here on this
channel take care and keep
looking up. That's incredible
seeing so good. It is very
good. It's very good. look at
all the detail on the belts.
The great Red spot incredible.
What can you tell us about uh
Jupiter Chris uh you can see
the great red spot here. This
is uh probably the largest
storm in the solar system. It's
been plucked about three uh 600
kilometers per hour winds of
600 kilometers per hour and uh
one thing we know about at a
great red spot now it's
shrinking so it's getting
smaller and smaller, in fact uh
last year it I think drop. A
quarter of a percent of its
size basically uh almost a part
of its size. so it's it's it's
it's uh I hope it doesn't
disappear on my lifetime
because it's gonna make Jupiter
quite boring and one thing
incredible. that happens the
Jupiter quite recently is the
built I think in one of the.