Transcript:
at the moment yeah yeah so we've been in lockdown i think it was
the week before christmas and they're still running it through um but every five minutes there's a new
variant available yeah so um that's adding to things at the moment
right but it doesn't overly bother me that much anyway i don't like people so you don't like people i don't think
that's true yeah it's um it it is a bit tedious
uh here and there so there are certain things we're trying to get on with that we can't at the moment
right here we go all right
everything good there mom speaking to me yeah yes it's
no problem um things just kind of clunk along here and uh i go out in the morning and there's
two groups of people that uh meet for coffee and uh oh you know we
just visit and then i come back here and i work i've been working very you know i'm gone for maybe an hour in
the morning then maybe an hour and a half that's it so i've been really busy um doing a new
version of pinpoint and also a new version of the scheduler both of which are fairly complex so it
keeps me hopping and then our the inevitable new customer tech support helping
etc so it's been great my life is good
that's good on the phone with cesar bellow earlier um and uh you know i know that uh he you
know he's i i think his family's having some
some issues with kovid but you know i think they're going to work through that so we have to have some impact on explore
scientific too and right after i mean we got through christmas but you know the majority of phone calls to
customer service happen after christmas and and so we had a business increase that was up
10 times over christmas of last year we had a big bump this year also it was
pretty amazing everybody did if you were in the business or if you were uh in an astronomy club
or you would do an outreach or you know whatever you could do uh you know you're gonna see
you you'll see a bump i think even i think gary palmer has been very busy with his classes which is great you know um
we uh carlos aragon might join us later i'm not sure if he
will or not but he was on our daily show earlier today his story is amazing uh
carlos uh was in the uh was in the military and he had
a he got out on a medical discharge because he had damage i guess major damage to his shoulder and
uh and so he got uh you know they gave him painkillers and he got sorry about that you guys
hold on still there
yeah he got addicted to painkillers and became homeless wow and a guy and someone found him
behind a grocery store dehydrated almost dead okay and uh kind of lifted him back
up took care of you know they nurtured him and uh well there it is sorry he ends up buying
a telescope from walmart like a 60 millimeter telescope and discovers jupiter
with it and that changes his whole life that changes his whole life and now he's doing an astronomy
outreach program he cleaned up you know he's not he's not an addict anymore
uh well he's not addicted to painkillers anymore and uh he's doing an amazing job he's
feeding homeless people i think over the last couple of months he he gave
14 000 meals to homeless people in the tucson arizona area so
that's a wonderful story it is that really is yeah so
in the 1990s i was uh right around the time i was finishing up my biography of
clyde i was actually thinking that i may become homeless but that was in the
1990s things have gone a wee bit better since then seriously wow you know
carlos told me he said it only takes one small thing to change your whole life and and you
know you can go from having a normal life to being completely homeless and uh
and that's the story of most homeless people he says he's met lawyers and doctors and uh you know all kinds of people
that are uh that are homeless now and um so it's um uh
you know the a lot of these guys that will be logging on right now uh watching us uh
heard this program earlier today and it's it's phenomenal um i told him this was a secret project
i've had for a while that i wanted to start a book i've never written a book before i've written a chapter i've done some
forwards and stuff like that i've never written a book before and this book is about
how astronomy can uh change you and be better for your life and uh
i'm running into all kinds of people that this has happened to you know vivian white's one of them
you know shelley bonus is another one you know i mean carlos's story is very
dramatic but i i believe that astronomy is
is good for is good for everybody no matter what condition you're in no matter what how
old you are you know uh once you really get in you have past this tipping point and you
really start you know exploring and asking yourself the big questions or
asking other people the big questions uh you know then then you know that
you're really learning you know and uh i know you guys
do it all the time you know you're you're you live it this is your life you know uh for others
um it's like there's dust in their eyes or something and they haven't they don't understand that they're
living on the spaceship earth you know so so it's uh
so i think i think a book like that is um i think there have been other books like this but uh there can't be too many
and and i want i want this to be a collaborative book you know where different people write a chapter you
know
pekka in sweden says so what have we learned of this pandemic next time someone gets a flu get a
warehouse full of gears and gadgets
so right now we have james the astrophotographer uh chatting here with us um
uh book davies is with us aaron thompson so and i will start sharing to
the groups i belong to
but it's great that's what i'm doing right now is posting the link out on thank you a couple places
yeah and those of you watching right now if you would so kindly share the program it would be great
um is an astronomy outreach effort for all of us
wendy says hello to everybody she's at the other part of the room right now but
she says hello to everyone hello wendy back from wisconsin
[Laughter] she can hear you
there's lots of groups about astronomy you know bolivia there's groups all over the
world
astronomy meteorology in france here it is
supernova enthusiast group dogs and cats of astronomy how about
that one
i created a another instagram page uh to with just pictures of my cats
i call it shawna molly cats [Laughter] and i'm working on i'm gonna
put i'm gonna um make pictures of my cats on top of my astra images so like cats
in space i love it i take my cat out she has
she my cat has a stroller and i'll put her in there i'll take her out in the yard with me
oh my god and so she'll sit out there and do something with us i really want to build a um
like a cat enclosure and have a a tube that goes down from my bedroom window
down to the cat enclosure so that they can be outside without
dear space friends welcome back to my video log i'm isa astronaut matthias malda and i've been training at nasa's johnson
space center in texas preparing for a space flight in 2021
today i will introduce you to what kind of psychological and physical support we receive while
being in space and um so we will talk a little bit about what kind of space food we get while on
station and how we train to remain fit enjoy onboard the iss
in the american european japanese segment is the gali that is a dedicated rack in note 1 which
features an oven a hot cold water dispenser and like your kitchen at home it's where we prepare all our food
like everything on station we must be properly trained in the use of this facility before we glide before our mission
we are able to taste the huge selection of available space food in another space food lab and choose
what we like best the food lab specialists even help us to fulfill individual wishes
such as adding new food from our home country here we taste european and japanese food
which is all outstanding the food comes usually in cans or pouches
if it is dried food then we add water before we can eat it in general i prefer to thermo stabilized
dishes over the dried space dishes because they taste slightly better
for my mission i plan to make my own yogurt in space but i'm not yet sure if i will achieve
this being in space means being weightless
our human body is very clever and reacts almost immediately to these altered conditions it starts to reduce
and dissolve many muscles in bones that we don't use in microgravity
but that is not good we want to maintain all muscles and bones strong tower return to earth astronauts perform
two hours of physical exercise every day in space one hour fitness and cardio training and
one hour strength training via weight lifting against a hydraulic force in microgravity
since we have been using the special weightlifting device all astronauts have returned home in
much better physical condition than in the past even if it is more difficult to set up and configure
it is definitely an important training tool for us in space by the way the blue suit that i wear
here is a special suit with ellie charles in a first test of an experiment which might fly with me in space
my training includes how to use these devices correctly for my exercises in space
but also how to repair and adjust them since we are the only mechanics in space for our sports equipment another
training device is a treadmill we call it t2 in this case in weightlessness we have to keep
ourselves attached to the base surface using some bungees which pull us with almost our body weight
onto the belt and then when it's based we even can run on the wall or on the
ceiling because there's no up and down the last device is the sievers bicycle
which was made in europe in denmark interestingly this bicycle has no
shuttle in space cycling is one of the oldest exercising devices we have
in space in the few spare moments i have here the
johnson space center i also love to walk around within the compound the number of personnel on site is still
very limited due to covet 19. the local wildlife is having a great time without too many humans around
it's quite amazing to see deer and other animals happily roaming around undisturbed and that's all for today i
hope you're all keeping fit and healthy as well stay tuned until next time bye
well hello everybody uh we are uh joined by um
are many of our regular uh group of uh in fact all of our regular group of uh
global star party attendees uh and um it is uh
it's awesome to spend time with you today
to bring the 29th global star party and so
to my right here as i see it on the screen i've got bob denny bob has joined us for oh at least half a
dozen maybe more global star parties at this point uh he always tells me he's not an
astronomer but he's a technologist uh but bob denney has done a lot for
amateur astronomy and professional astronomy and so we really value having him on our program we have carol orange yeah
thank you bob we have uh carol orange for the president of the astronomical league with us um
uh carol uh will uh participate by uh reading off questions for the uh
questions and answers for the last global star party um but i think actually you guys already
did that so you already gave out prizes at your at your uh last event so uh but um
i'm not sure of that you you'll you'll tell me when when we get to you we have dt gautam from nepal dt
is extremely active in uh astronomy in nepal and
created her own astronomy club in her high school but
she also belongs to the uh adults uh program in nepal as well so i think that's fantastic
deepti thanks for coming on the program here then we've got david eicher
editor-in-chief of astronomy magazine author um written lots of books is someone that
has inspired amateur astronomers for decades and he himself uh has lived this life of of in
you know uh exploring the night sky and uh writing about it uh to keep people
uh and you know inspired going it's been he has offered much of the fuel uh of the uh
that that has been used by the community of amateur astronomers for a long time and so it's really cool
uh we have the ash astro beard uh richard grace and uh uh he has uh joined
i think almost all global star parties is that right richard all the tuesday ones howdy all
the disney ones okay all right there's been others but uh but that's good you know and so
uh richard is uh uh you know uh very enthusiastic astrophotographer
has been made some great images and it's been awesome to see him uh improve almost every show so it's
been it's been incredible and i think an inspiration for people who are getting into astrophotography
then we have molly wakeling molly's in the bay area of california astrophotographer she's been
many on many of our programs she has quite a following on social media as well
and uh she is um she's a scientist uh she is uh someone has devoted
um her life in many different ways to science and astronomy and we love having
iran so uh next is libby and the stars libby is uh has just turned 11 years old
recently when she started on our program she was only 10 and she is uh i don't even know do you have
you been keeping count how many times you've given lectures libby no i have not
i'm not okay well she presented me with like 56 lectures okay that she wanted to do so
um and then uh and then next is david levy david uh has done
every every broadcast we've done he's done all the tuesday global star
parties he's done all of our special events uh i have not seen anyone do
more lectures more programs than david he probably holds some sort of world
record for presentations and involvement in amateur astronomy and it's awesome to
have him on every day he's a dear friend a great author has written many many books has attended more star
parties than i can count and uh so it's he's a a mentor
a brother uh just all of the above a fantastic uh gentleman
and uh everybody that's met him uh has uh has felt the uh special spirit of
david levy uh bob denny um well i already mentioned bob it's actually different than what i
see here from zoom to what i see on on social media here so a little bit different but the
last one here is gary palmer uh gary um is uh in the uk
and gary has done incredible astrophotography uh incredible image processing he
teaches uh how how to get the very best out of your equipment
and to make uh you know iconic level uh uh astrophotographs so
through his gary palmer astronomy education series and all the rest of the stuff that he does
i know that we were talking earlier and he said he's on lockdown but you know i'm glad he's here to join
us and join our audience our worldwide audience uh tonight and so and thank you to all the people
that are watching right now and all the people that will be watching this program and replay
we get many thousands that come in afterwards after the fact because of time zones or whatever but
we're glad that you participate here too so uh why don't we get started
first as we traditionally do with david levy who uh will give us a uh you know that
this the special uh um you know this special you know
i only call it an effect it's he you know he when he starts these global
star parties he presents them in a way that uh
that really gets you to get your heart going gets your mind going gets your imagination going and and through
through the the poetry that he that he tells us his his own personal uh uh
you know experiences um and all the rest of it uh he does it in only the way that david
levy can do it so david thank you so much and you have the stage
you know orion almost always comes up sideways throwing a leg up over our fence of
mountains and rising on his hands he looks in on me busy outdoors by lantern light
with something i should have done by daylight and indeed after the ground is frozen i should have done before it froze and a
gus flings a handful of waste leaves on my smoky lantern chimney to make fun
of my way of doing things or else fun of orion's having caught me
thanks thanks scotty and today's poetic quote is longer than
usual it's going to be robert frost the star splitter
i think you're going to enjoy this it's a funny story about
robert frost not the poet but the act but the amateur astronomer he was a
avid amateur astronomer and uh he was one of the united states
greatest poets at john f kennedy's inauguration speaking of inaugurations
he was the one that read a poem he was actually going to write something specifically for it but i guess he did
not so instead i think he read the gift outright and then later on he wrote another poem
called gift outright of the gift outright but anyway he lived in vermont
and i've had quite a bit of a history with vermont when wendy and i got together and wendy
is right here right now wendy's parents had a country home in
vermont that i enjoyed visiting a lot but perhaps more important was in three
summers when i was a little boy of eight i spent at twin lake camp
in brandon near near brandon vermont i never got to meet uh robert frost then
but uh i've actually shared states with him
and uh so we got started with this um i have never taken a course in
astronomy but i have spent a lot of time trying to
understand the relationship between the night sky and my other love of english literature
and tonight will be the 1800s time that i've quoted from this magic
book i'm now going to show it to you it's this is the cover there are over a
hundred poetic quotations in this book and tonight's is the star splitter
as a man i should like to ask no rights these forces are obliged to play respect
to so brad mclaughlin mingled reckless talk of heavenly stars with hugger mugger
farming i am i having failed at hugger mugger farming
he burned his house down for the fire insurance and spent the proceeds on a telescope to
satisfy a lifelong curiosity about our place among the infinities
what do you want with one of these blame things i asked him well beforehand don't you get one don't call it blame
there isn't anything more blameless in the sense of being less a weapon in our human fight
he said i'll have one if i have if i have to sell my farm to buy it that's where he moved the
rocks to plow and plowed between the rocks he couldn't move
few farms changed hands so rather than spend trying to sell his farm and then not selling he burned his house
down for the fire insurance and bought the telescope with what it came to
he had been heard to say by several the best thing that were the best thing that were put here for us
to see the strongest thing that's given us to see with
a telescope someone in every town seems to me owes it to the town to keep one in
littleton it may as well be me after such loose talk it was no surprise
what he did with what he did what he did and burned his house down mean laughter
were about the town that that did to let him know we weren't the
least imposed and he couldn't wait we'd see to him tomorrow
but the first thing next morning we reflect one by one we counted people out for the latest sin it wouldn't take us
long to get so we had no one left to live with for to be social is to be forgiving
something that i think a lot of us might want to pay attention to these days
our thief the one who does our stealing from us we don't cut off from coming to church
suppers but that we miss but but what we miss we go to him and ask for
he probably gives it back that if it's still uneaten and worn out or undisposed of it
wouldn't do to be hard on brad about his telescope beyond the age of being given one for a
christmas gift he had to take the best way he knew how to find himself in one well all we said was
he took a strange thing to be roggish over some sympathy was wasted on the house
a good old-timer digging dating back along but the mouse isn't sentient the house
doesn't feel anything and if it did why not regard it as a
sacrifice and an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire instead of a new fashioned one
at auction out of a house and so out of a farm at one stroke of a match brad had to
turn to earn a living on the concord railroad as under ticket agent at a station where
his job where he wasn't selling tickets was setting up on track and down not plants is on a
farm but planets evening stars that varied in their hue from red to green he got a good glass
for six hundred dollars his new job gave him leisure for stargazing
often he bid me come and have a look in the brass barrel velvet black inside of a star sparkling
at the other end to reflect the night of broken clouds and indeed and indeed down to him
and melting further in the wind to mud bradford and i had out the telescope
we spread our two legs as we spread its three pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it and standing at
our leisure till the day broke said some of the best things we ever said that telescope was christened
the star splitter because it didn't do a thing but split a star in two or three the way you split a globule of
quicksilver in your hand with one stroke of your finger in the middle
it's a star splitter if ever there was one and not to do some good at splitting stars
something to be compared with splitting wood we've looked and looked but after all
where are we do we know any better where we are and how it stands between the night to
night and a man with a smoky lantern chimpany how different from the way it ever stood
and back to you knows scotty thank you okay well thank you very much david
that's awesome um uh i don't think i've ever heard the star
splitter before and it's it's actually a very funny story so but i think there's probably more
than one astronomer who might burn down their house to get a new telescope so
well don't burn down your business scotty to get a new telescope please
oh anyhow um well that's great um i uh i'm
the next up i'm going to introduce uh david eicher but before i do i thought we might take a peek at
uh live image and i think molly wakeling might have something already uh
set up for us is that right i do indeed okay you want to share that
for a couple of minutes here and yeah so um i've got the moon in here
it's still uh still pretty bright outside over here on the west coast
it's uh 5 20 so got a bit of a waste to go before i can get anything uh deep sky object wise but the moon is
so bright that you can see it really at any time and we've got our uh uh waxing
uh well i guess you can call it i wouldn't really call it a crescent at this point we're not quite at first
quarter yet though so waxing you in here beautiful
beautiful and what kind of system what kind of what's your rig that you're using is that the one that i see
um in the uh there that's my eight inch mint casa
grain i have a focal reducer on there because i use it for deep sky imaging and i have a monochrome camera on there
right now with uh with a full set of filters and it's just done the light pollution
filter right now excellent that's great that's great molly thank you let's see more from molly later okay so
next up here is um is david eicher and uh
david is uh someone i love having on this program uh he is um uh
you know you're you are an inspiration to so many people i i think that probably uh over the years if i just
mentioned the name dave eiker in connection with anything to do with astronomy your name would be
instantly recognizable you have you have befriended many people
uh no matter what level of amateur astronomy that they're in
uh and uh you know and i know that you are uh you know rubbing elbows with so many
professional astronomers that you know you've gained the respect
of the whole astronomical world i think and you know love your books
love your galaxy's book and uh i i haven't yet seen the new book that
you did with uh collaboration with brian may uh so i i and what what's the name of
that book again it's like a i will have to send you one scott i'm sorry about that it's called cosmic
clouds i will buy one thank you for the very nice
words as as always and thank you for the commercial i didn't intend on but but uh it there's a
there's a brilliant astro imager in finland whose name is jp mezzovinio
and he has created the first really credible very well done simulations of stereo
views 3d views of nebulae so it's a really cool book and it comes with
brian's you know uh owl glasses abound into the book as well so you can really and it's amazing when you look at
nebulae three-dimensionally how different they appear as opposed to the way we've seen them
for 20 or 30 or 40 years you know they really look interesting when you see shapes
three-dimensionally of nebulae so i'll send you one of those scotty okay great wonderful
um one of the people that watches our program regularly says clear his name is uh his handle is
clearlight58 he said david did a great talk on galaxies last week for the astronomy club that i'm a member
of here in the boston area so uh it's nice that you're getting out to all these clubs and organizations all
over the country and all over the world so it's a great great old uh club of course
the boston atms of boston yeah great club great okay all right well it's all yours
david thank you well thank you thank you scott as as always and and it's what a pleasure it's been to know
uh some of you scott and david for many many many years and uh just getting to know some
of you as well it's a it's what makes astronomy fun the people of course but uh uh tonight i'd like to talk a
little bit more about objects not people and we're moving a little farther out into the galaxy here
uh exploring what we know about various classes of things so i'd like to talk a little bit tonight about
exoplanets extra solar planets few areas of astronomy of course have
exploded in recent times like the cottage industry of exoplanet
discoveries there as of today 4 395
confirmed exoplanets in 3 242 planetary systems that's a lot of
planets we have either nine planets as some of us believe some would even
say eight in our solar system uh so there there are quite a few planets that we're
discovering of course orbiting other stars out around us in the milky way
galaxy the pace of discovery has been so fast in the past number of years that
it's changed often from week to week which means that one needs to keep checking on it to see what's happening
the most productive discovery tool for exoplanet research has been the kepler space
telescope which operated from 2009 to 2018 and it found more than a thousand
planets just with that orbiting instrument the current key mission
that's uh zooming away right now is the tess uh telescope the transiting exoplanet
survey satellite and it is serving the brightest stars near relatively near earth the upcoming
key mission that involves exoplanetary research is the james webb space telescope that
has a different uh spectral uh coverage but is is in some senses
if you will a successor to the hubble space telescope and i have talked recently because we're working on
something a number of times with john mather who is the project scientist
of the web space telescope and he says we're going to launch the web space telescope in october
wow sticking by that it has been delayed in a big way twice and it's nasa's big
big project that is on the launch pad this year so he claims we're going to see that launched this fall
maybe when we'll have a more or less normal world back ideas about
exoplanets first arose with the italian philosopher in the 16th century giordano
bruno um he believed that stars may well be
fiery burning bodies like the sun that could have planetary systems orbiting and what did that get
giordano bruno had got him burned at the stake so exoplanet research isn't always a
safe business to be in um but nowadays generally it is
the first claims of a planet orbiting another star really in a serious way came in the 19th
century a dark body affecting the motion of the star 70 of yuki that's a relatively close
star to us uh in 1855 a later acclaim about a hundred years
later in the 1950s peter vandecamp at the spruell observatory outside of
pittsburgh claimed that he had found a planetary companion orbiting another very close star to us
the famous barnard star both of those claims however were discredited
so when did we really get into the business of finding exoplanets it was 1992
and alexander wilshawn and dale frail they discovered a planet orbiting the
pulsar rapidly rotating neutron star psrb 1257
plus 12. don't worry there's no quiz at the end of this that was the first
extrasolar planet ever found and confirmed and three years later in 1995
michelle mayor and didier kayla they found an extrasolar planet more excitingly if you will orbiting 51
pegasi which is a sun-like g-type star it's a it's a about 51 light years
away so in the wake of the sun-like star having another planet that was a big big
deal in 1995 and that really got the worldwide attention and got the business of a
huge wholesale industry if you will of of going out and looking for
exoplanets it also coincided really with the availability of more powerful
instrumentation and developing several uh clever techniques
to find these planets there are four or five major techniques
just to go through them very quickly the most important uh two are the first ones one is radial
velocity as a star moves relative to earth it's possible to defend
detect a wobble because of gravity the gravity of the orbiting planets
around that star variations in the velocity can be detected with spectrometers
so the radial velocity method is an important one another one is transit photometry that
is as a planet passes in front of its host star it dims the light
somewhat and that can be detected rather straightforwardly there's also gravitational micro lensing
when a star and its planets lie directly in front of a background star
their gravity can actually affect the light of the distant star belonging the existence of a planet
in that system in rare cases a few exoplanets have been discovered
also by direct imaging or by the timing of pulsar variations as
i mentioned that very first exoplanet that was discovered so
although astronomers have found several thousand exoplanets thus far this is an experiment that's still very
much in its infancy tess is often running it's looking at nearby stars that's kind of
the big deal at the moment kepler if you will it discovered several
thousand uh candidates and one more than a thousand confirmed exoplanets but kepler was really looking
at a very small area of sky about 10 by 10 degrees on the sky
so that's an area of sky that is between essentially the constellations cygnus and lyra
surveys thus far have been limited to finding mostly or weighted no pun intended
toward finding mostly massive planets because like gas giants
or ice giants in our solar system uh limited by developing sensitivity still
and they've largely been limited to looking at stars all of these techniques within a few
hundred light years so we're really just taking the first steps
with exoplanet discovery and cataloging the galaxy's disk the milky way's disk
as we know is at least a hundred thousand light years across uh maybe larger there are some studies
about that going on right now um and we've looked generally speaking a few hundred light years away
at many stars so we're just scratching the surface of this notion and on top of our galaxy
the milky way as we know uh if we read our books the way we should be sorry
for that um there are at least a hundred billion galaxies in the universe
well another little plug there sorry about that i the beginners get into my head forgive me that we've really just barely
scratched the surface of this issue and we've already found several thousands of planets
what we're finding is that the universe is teeming with planets again we're finding that
although long ago humans have a long record of feeling like we're incredibly special
we're in the center of everything as you probably know we're not necessarily special at all and
we're not in the center of anything in fact the uterus has no center so that's the most exciting finding that
we could hope for and it may be that there are thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions
of planets just in our galaxy that are habitable that are in so-called
habitable zones of stars so the curious question of course looking out toward exoplanet research
and making it more mature is is there a lot of life out there amongst these planetary systems
certainly the indications are very encouraging for on the side of people like our old
pal carl sagan who used to think that there must be life everywhere out there in the cosmos but
the distances are so vast that we will not shake hands with it so
that's kind of our update for the moment on where we stand with exoplanets and we'll get another
big boom if we launch web at the end of this year absolutely so i i i think that james webb is
supposed to launch october 31st is that right yes indeed yeah and you can read about there's a uh
be shameless tonight normally i don't talk about this stuff but yeah i'm really bad tonight but
john mather is right who's the project scientist the director of the telescope if you will is writing a preview story that will be
a very exhaustive and detailed preview story that you'll see in astronomy magazine in a few months
wow and so how i mean regarding james webb how long has it just been sitting around
ready to launch it's been a while it's been a couple years now yeah yeah yeah so it is a very complex
thing and god help us for even mentioning this you know it has to go up and then deploy
in a very rather tricky way um so we'll cross our fingers and hope for the best
uh because if it doesn't deploy correctly we're we're in trouble but it should be a piece of cake the
engineers believe compared to something like landing a spacecraft on mars with earpieces
yeah so we'll hope that everything goes okay because it will be the next generation
hubble not only will it do a lot with exoplanets um it will do an incredible amount with
imaging the universe in a deeper way and one of the major reasons this telescope was built of course
is to answer the formation sequence which we don't know in the early universe did stars galaxies or black holes come
first and how did the first galaxies and stars and black holes
form so that's a question that webb is supposed to solve after a time for us
as well which will be fundamental to our understanding of cosmology very interesting very interesting i i
wanted since we're plugging at this point i also wanted to plug um uh david kipping who's a researcher
uh at columbia university is going to be on a special program on
the um 29th of january uh here on explorer alliance presents and
he's doing work on exo moons you can imagine trying to
you know ferret out an exoplanet imagine trying to get detection of a moon going around one of
these planets so yeah yeah that's uh so very very interesting but it just shows you what uh you know what
the human race is doing you know as far as trying to understand our solar other solar systems our solar
system the universe at large and uh you said many many times david we are
living in the golden age of astronomy this is it there's no doubt about it there's
never been a better time to be interested in astronomy no question by an order of magnitude you know the
good old days they always talk about yeah this is the good old days you're in
the right place at the right time that's right that's right well that's
awesome so um uh let's see uh i would like to switch over to uh
richard grace if he's got uh something live in his telescope uh to show us what uh
what we have and then we're going to uh we're going to go to uh dt gautam in nepal and
wow this looks like the orion nebula look at this wow
beautiful
i like that effect
yeah i got it from watching your intro [Laughter] now this is uh as close to first light
on the 2600 as we're getting uh it's looking good let's see we got uh
it's live stacking that's uh five uh five minute images uh i'll probably uh move somewhere else
after this wow this is first light on a new camera that you have right well last night was
technically first light but i spent more time figuring out what was going on and messing with some stuff and uh i
actually got to collimate the new a little bit it's uh it seems to be harder to collimate when it's cold outside i'm not sure why
yeah maybe because it's freezing [Laughter] but uh it's beautiful yeah yeah i got a
little bit of issues with the uh with that let's see uh there's one other picture i wanted to show here this is
did it just go away it just went away i don't understand that was like a tease
yeah it really really was
now what is this that you're going to tell us let's see this is
the the new setup what look at this oh gosh geez
teasing again just trying to grab this corner look at all the cradle rings on
this newtonian telescope it says david levy on the on the tube what does
i'm like it's a david levy comet hunter that's right yeah and explore scientific uh david
levy hunter there we go all those clamps the thing's not going anywhere
no i gotta put some rings on the 80 because i still got a little bit of movement uh that's
that's next on the list is to uh strap that down real good but uh my
guiding has significantly improved uh going from a 200 millimeter
guide scope with a 120 uh to the uh the ed80 with a vocal
reducer uh to 400 with the 183 the pixel size is uh matched to the scope quite well and
it is helping beautifully you run it with the camera in that up position or do you usually
rotate the newtonian so that it's facing the camera's face in the ground uh i run it in the up position
and you can't really see too much but the saddle plate that's bolted to the top of it is
actually off center slightly uh so the ed80 is slightly off to the
right to actually balance up for the focuser and the camera and it does a pretty good job of it
and i do know that if i turned it upside down that i could uh i could definitely have
better weight balance i'm running 30 37 pounds of weights on it right now
uh but even if i did it upside down like that then i'd have trouble setting it down when i take down
every night and stuff like that uh just because it sits nice and flat on the big nose mandy plate on the bottom
so it's uh easy to set down when uh when it finally lives its life in an observatory one day it probably will get
switched around but right now it's just nice to be able to park it somewhere it looks impressive it really does thank
you color schemes i'm gonna stop sharing here excellent so um our next speaker is
deepti gatam uh dt is uh as i mentioned earlier is from nepal and uh she's
very involved in science and astronomy in in her country and
she has uh she's really inspired a lot of youth in her both in her school
and i think probably around the world um so dt it's great to have you back on our program again
and um what is your presentation today um i made the presentation about the
star and the tom related to star in this formation
okay okay um we're talking about the star uh i remember the things of my
childhood uh when we started when i read in class 11 or grade 11
create a great one and uh the teacher says the first time we were small cyber engineer level of
education and teacher has taught us about the what the star is that star are huge glowing wall of
gases and the closest start to the earth the sun and i remember that first time we read
this definition in our star but being practically an
editors asking to these parents and uh over the um this uh belief over the beliefs over
the stars my grandmother green grandma used to say that the star are the uh others
the signing this um memory of the dead version of our own the dear person of our own let us
believe uh that steve lived in that what the star is and after reading about the star after
game are getting the knowledge uh by the help of internet and by the curriculum and
we got to know what the actual star is and how it's formed uh and um
let's talk over the end the storm we know is the main sequence was the main sequence is
the main sequence uh is a continuous in a distinct uh distinctive band of the star that
appears on float of stellar colors and bars versus brightness
and our sun will stay in this mature phase on this main sequence for approximately
10 billion years and about the red giant red giant
is luminous giant star of lower intermediate mass in late
phase of stellar evaluation and the outer atmosphere is uh inflated antennas making the
radius large in the surface temperature around 5000 kelvin
and or lower in the red giant contains the hydrogen helium nitrogen
and carbon neon magnesium silicon sulfur nickel iron etc
and talking about the supernova what's the supernova is supernova is a powerful and human
distiller explosion and the this uh transits uh astronomical
event occurs uh during the last evolutionary uh stage of a massive star or
when a white dwarf is triggered into run away or nuclear fusion and in a supernova the
stars uh cold collapse and then exploded about 25 to 50 supernovas are discovered
each year in other galaxies but uh must are too far away to be seen without a telescope
so we need a telescope to see the supernova and uh talking about the nibla uh anova is an
interstellar cloud of dust hydrazine helium and other ionized gas
in um originally the term was used to describe any diffuse astronomical object uh including the
galaxy beyond the milky way that's called the nebula and let's continue to tom the what's the
newton star is uh neutrino star uh is the collapse uh core of massive super giant star which
had a total mass of between 10 and 25 solar masses and possibly
more if the star was especially metal risk and nutrient star are also have powerful
magnetic field which can be accelerate or atomic particles around his
magnetic pole and producing powerful beam is the star rotates if a source of beam
is originally oriented uh so that um so that it periodically point toward the
earth and we observe it is a regular process of radiation that
occurs whenever the magnetic pulse swaps past the line of sight and in the
case of uh in the case the nutrient in star is also known as a pulsar and uh we are not about that so what's the
pulsar is and uh talking about white white dwarf uh what's the white dwarf is actual uh
for average uh star like this on the process of injecting its outer layer continuous
until the stellar core is exposed uh that they're about the still furiously hot stellar cinders
is called white dwarfs and white dogs which are roughly the size of our earth
despite containing the mass of star one once puzzled the astronomer
why did not they collapse further but quantum mechanics provided the explanation about this and um
pressure from most moving electron uh keep this star from collapsing uh together
and as we are familiar with the black hole black hole is the region of space time where gravity is so strong
that nothing no particles or no even electromagnetic radiation such as light can escape from it
and the theory of general relativity of freedom that sufficiently compact mass can
deform space time to form a black hole and uh talking about all these uh how
little things how is there are bonds and stubs are formed from giant
clouds of dust and gas and then from the gravity the cloud collapsed into a rotating gaseous
wall and after the collapsing uh into a rotating gases ball the new star gets hot enough
it will begin to create energy from a process called nuclear fission and this created energy
allows the stars to glow for millions of billions and millions of the years
and similarly these stars are born within the cloud of dust and
scattered through our most galaxy and our familiar examples of dust cloud is orient nebula and
turbulence are deep within this cloud and give risks uh rises to north with sufficient mass that the gas
and dust can begin to collapse under its own gravitational attraction
and as the cloud collapse the materials at the center are beginning to heat up and known is
that it's known as the protostar it's called the protester and it is the hot code at the heart of
the coalescing cloud that will one day become star and uh three-dimensional computers model
of star formation predict that uh the spinning clouds of collapsing gas and dust may
break up into two or three bulbs and this will explain why the majority this
star in the milky way are appear or in group
it is and um telling about all these and here is something i have to so yeah
here's one picture we saw this stealer evolution
how this easter river is and how this star are made of the mean sequins or wrist design
supernova and nebula main sequence design planetary nebula white turf
etc and thank you business yes i i'm curious you know
a lot of us have something that really makes us fascinated about
a process that's going on in the universe in this in this talk about star
formation what is it that fascinates you most about
about the life cycle of the star that's the goal of this star uh over
this uh this uh obviously the stars are made of the
flower formation and yeah that's makes me fascinating about that
it's the it's the birth seems like it started the planets and other heavenly
bodies have been interesting well thank you very much dt
that's awesome thank you for being on our program we are going to
uh i will introduce libby and the stars next we are going to switch to gary palmer
for a quick look at some image processing that he's doing um gary thank you for
for coming on to our show and fitting us in i know that you've been very busy teaching people image processing and
astrophotography and i recently saw a great image of the horse hat
is that what you have to uh to show us tonight hi scott hi everyone um yeah
it's been uh a really bad season that is the only way i can put it's been the worst season i think
since i've been in astronomy so for winter uh imaging uh it's been very very
limited in the uk or certainly in this part of the uk and i i haven't seen masses of images coming out of lots of
other places so it's been slim pickings is the easiest way of putting it and grabbing an hour
here and an hour there and um sort of working on that side so
first thing i wanted to sort of run through let me just run up the screen
was hopefully you can all see that okay um presuming that's
don't see an image yet but we do see the uh right so you see a blank image there at
the moment yes okay cool um after we've done the
uh really the registration of images i quite often um select some different settings in
the uh image integration which is where we bring all of the images together
and start work on our um
successive stack of images yeah so having these in here and we seem to be
getting lots and lots of questions at the moment about star link and um how it's going to uh affect us
sort of moving forwards with more and more satellites going up everywhere but working in pics insight does give
you a lot of tools to play around with so by using sort of set
settings in this area and one of the main ones i use is the windsor eyes sigma clipping other
people use other different types but this generally if you've got over 10 images works quite
well and then setting the highs and lows by setting the
sigma low up around 9.1 anywhere between 8.8 and 9.1 and then running the sigma
high up somewhere around 5.1 what that does is when it um subtracts and integrates all of the
images if we actually look at the blank image that's on here now this is a rejection um of all of the
satellites that is taken out of the image okay so why are you using this
this is one of the best tools um against styling and you can see from the
whole so each individual image that we've captured there has got something going
through there whether it's an aeroplane or whether it's satellites running through
and even the odd meteor yeah it will take out the image even though you might want to keep that one in there
but it does help out um moving on to what we've done recently that horsehead image is about
the only one we've had in the last two weeks we did manage to get uh
this was done on the fcd 102 using a starlight express 694
3s camera and that's just the hre filter so it's about um i think there was
somewhere around 15 images 15 three minute images together so it's
turned out okay but we just want the clear weather to get the rest of the data and turn it into a color image would be
quite nice but later on we'll run through some error corrections
um some optical corrections um and removing that from the images where
we get problems with different things creating different uh artifacts in the image
excellent beautiful at the moment there's not like what's going on
well that was uh that was that was great uh and exciting um uh you know i love i never get tired
of seeing the orion region you know it's just so um uh although it may be one of the most photographed
uh parts of the night sky uh you know to see the horses the horse
head that that ridge of nebulosi that stretches across there uh you know so many light years the
flame nebula the you know and the orion nebula and even like wider shots you know where you can
see that huge halo of uh of nebulosity all around bernard's loop
uh it's just a fascinating uh star birth region and just really gets my gears turning
every time i see it so that's awesome there's a couple of targets in that area that i keep trying
for and each year we seem to be getting worse and worse through december and january on the
weather and it is a successive thing that we're seeing and last year was the same thing
you're trying to do some narrow band imaging there and you you're just watching the months actually
pass not the odd night or the odd week you're actually watching a month of time go past and you seem to be missing these
objects now this isn't a case of you think oh i'll jump on them in a couple of weeks time
you're really having to sneak in an hour or something like that
very very quickly and just build up the images over a course of time rather
than one or two nights out i don't know how other people are finding that at the moment but we've
certainly noticed it over the last two or three years i see i see well people especially i
mean you've really had to work with uh with very little clear sky time you know
so it's it's stunning and amazing how productive you really are even in those kind of adverse
conditions so but um um yeah and also too with
with um the pandemic uh adding a layer over all the whole over the whole thing so uh
our next uh our next guest we'll talk some more about that later on this program gary if you're still
up for it um uh our next guest is uh libby and the stars libby can i
say something first so scotty sure of course yeah scotty thanks i just wanted to say
um in appreciation of dt's presentation i really did enjoy that
it reminded me of an article i wrote for astronomy magazine i understand there may be someone here
who has knows about astronomy magazine but anyway that article was decades ago
when richard berry was editor and it was about betelgeuse and i began
it by with the four words stars are people too and i met richard berry at riverside
that year and he came up to me and he said stars are people too and he said i read the first four art
letters the first four words of your article and i accepted it without reading another word after that
i don't care what you said after that i remember that david and then back in those days we also got together
there at the old astronomy and watched them blow up a freeway remember that i'll never forget that but i wish you
didn't throw me under it at the time that's a story for another night scott but it's another night
i'll never forget that okay all right now i noticed that rodrigo zeleda from north optics is with us
tonight so that's great um uh after uh deepti we will have
uh carol orig from the astronomical league uh uh do the uh the door prizes and ask
all those interesting questions that come from the from the league officers there so the very cool um we'll take a break
and then we'll come back uh to uh rodrigo and uh we'll be doing some
astrophotography uh carousel here so that'll be fun um but uh i'm gonna turn it over to you
libby uh what's your presentation on today i decided to do like the solar system of
how it works because there's a lot of gravity on it i thought it was very cool okay okay
i am sharing i made a presentation i'm pulling that up so
here let me present so solar systems very nice yes uh
so here's our solar system the one that we know it's the only solar system that we know right now that
has life and um i know we do a lot of imaging on our solar system we know it very well
uh from preschool anyone can name the planets in order basically in our solar system very well
um there's also gravity magnetics like gravity magnetics
to talk about too um it's also a big part of black holes too and like radiation and stuff so they're
so like inside of our sound instead of our sun is like a gravitational magnet
and it's able to pull our planets around with the gravity which is super cool to
think about because it's like oh my gosh that's that that's actually real we're being pulled
around by the sun in space which is kind of crazy which i thought was super cool
um and here's like a little scale about like how we're being like in our
own orbit around the sun and then we have a moon orbiting us it just shows how delicate our solar system
is like with moons planets suns
and like maybe even as like pluto maybe even a dwarf planet that shows how
like intricate or solar system is so like so many objects that can be in
our solar system and we know our solar system very well there's also other solar solar systems adding onto
exoplanets uh there's more solar systems out there that could have life
and so i want to talk about the habitable zone because i watch nasa tv a lot and they
talk about this 24 7. and i i always thought this is cool because i've always been interested in
weather and it talks a lot about temperature so if you're too close to the sun like
you would be freezing cool not freezing cold that's the opposite you'd be hot you'd be burning
and uh if you're in the middle you'd be like perfectly fine i mean maybe a little hot maybe a little
cool just depends on how close you are in the middle and how close you are far out and then
if you're far out like away from the sun you'll be very cold so this is also important with weather
uh because like temperatures so mass is going to send an astronaut to mercury in our solar system
the astronaut's going to need a good space suit because facing towards the sun it's going to be
blazing hot almost as you can see in the picture there there's a little flame reaching out for mercury and that looks
torching hot so that's also important with space
travel and stuff you have to make sure your astronauts are comfortable going on different
planets because their spacesuits have to be durable because if it is too hot then they can
probably burn you but just really good spacesuits and that's very cool to learn about
if you're learning like about nasa and how they send astronauts up into space
and then oh wow that changed but uh here's some plants that are just like
earth uh nasa is looking forward to looking forward to sending
like people to different planets like full other earths and i kind of have this idea in my head
since there's seven of them that each continent gets their own planet
i have this idea in my head it's kind of sci-fi but it uh but those are planets are just like
earth they may not look just like earth but uh they have they're
perfect for humans to live on they have good temperatures they can grow plants and if you work it on the right then
you can live on those planets and i have this fantasy idea that each each continent will get their own planet
uh and this is another solar system i've talked a lot about our solar system
that we know a lot this is another solar system which solar systems can be as crazy as
possible like you can have 10 moons
like amaze it's amazing how difficult like how crazy they can be because all
of them are so different i think it's very unique because i'm so used to looking at stars through my telescope and whenever i see
a planet it just has all these amazing colors too it's it's very cool to look at other
solar systems and antarcticans get a planet in the too
cold zone people on the on the continent of
antarctica we'll get we'll get we'll keep them the farthest away so they're like
used to it they're not like well why is it hot we have an image of an astronaut down
here and i was talking more about like how we can keep an astronaut in space on a
different solar system because they're so different as i keep on saying um i know nasa's trying to get to mars
right now you look on the scale in the solar system mars looks like a centimeter away from
us but really it's going to take three years to get there and thinking that like in 30 years or so we'll be
at mars is kind of crazy and uh it's also kind of cool to think that
we also want to go to like the far reaches of the universe and it's going to take us three years to
get to mars and there's a lot of storage to it too
you have to think about the astronauts while you're sending them up in the space because you can't just be like
okay grab your space to grab your supplies you're going in the space you have to think of the place that
they're going because uh at space camp we talked about solar systems and when you're sending an
astronaut and they were talking about how much storage that the moon that not the new mission uh
mars mission is gonna need because those astronauts are going to need three years
worth of supply so think about going to the grocery store and getting stuff for three years of
your life which you'll need tons of storage
and so uh here's our solar system again which is super cool thinking that
there's a million solar systems out there is crazy and we're just one of them and we
haven't even and we're trying to get to one of our plants in our solar syn system
and we haven't even gotten to another solar system yet it's kind of crazy
so yes i wanted to talk about solar systems a little bit on you know sending
astronauts into space and you know what's habitable
and you know like it's very cool because we're in a generation of space
you know we're sending astronauts to mars which is like the next generation of the moon mission which
it's super it's nice to know like what nasa is doing to keep the astronauts safe and
what you can do in the future and like what now how nasa is going to improve
sending people in the space so we can get into the far reaches of the universe
there you go libby your your presentations get better every time you
do them so you're you're getting very polished here so that's great that was really good really good thank
you i'm a virtual student i have google slides etiquette it's very good editing
skills yeah yeah but it's also being comfortable in front of an audience and and uh really uh translating your
knowledge and everything dt uh people think you have a photographic memory um
you are yes [Laughter] very important isn't that the truth they
knew that you weren't really looking at notes too much and uh and really that you know your subject matter so
that's excellent you know so thank you for for uh coming on and uh
i don't know it's inspiring to me so well next up here uh before we take our 10-minute break
we'll be the president of the astronomical league carol org uh carol uh and the astronomical league
have been doing a uh a regular uh program called astro
astronomical league live and we've been um we've been broadcasting these programs
and i i hope that it's uh reaching people that uh couldn't otherwise uh uh really get to
the uh talks and stuff that the astronomical league has to present but i want to turn it over to you i know
that you'd like to have a little safety message about looking at the sun before you get started so
i'll just let you have the stage here carol thank you scott yeah well it's very
encouraging of the reach we're getting i'm sure all of our groups are getting the same phenomena of
being able to reach many more people by assuming that we ever could in person so that's most helpful i was told that we need to
go back to the previous star party and read those okay very terry said read them so
therefore i must there we go okay all right
okay there's the warning that we uh
give if you win a prize that is something like an eyepiece or something
like that then we want to make sure that you're not looking through the eyepiece
directly at the sun so that's what that's about then we go back to the last
global star party those three questions the first question was what well-known
galaxy can be found near the starred arcade
and the answer is messier 51 of course also known as the whirlpool galaxy
the winner on that one was john m keogh oh congratulations john yeah well done
john and see here we alright the second one what did i skip one there i think i may
have okay the next one if we could travel back in time to see another jupiter and
saturn grand conjunction on what date would be be able to see a closer alignment
between those planets and the answer is just before dawn on march the 4th
1226 so that's how we got the 800 years the media was talking about before we
had the other one the winner is dave misky congratulations dave all right dave then the
last one in december the hubble space telescope discovered this nebula was fading what
is the name of the nebula the answer is hen 3
1357 nickname the stingray nebula and harry trees was the winner
congratulations harry all right harry [Applause]
i don't know where that came from uh that was good though it's right on clue okay and then our questions for tonight
the first question is this object to our left there is found in the
constellation toucan in the southern skies what is its name
i read that question again this object is found in the constellation tukhan in the southern hemisphere so
disgust what is its name okay everybody got that one all right
let's go are you supposed to be showing some slides right now what's that are you are you trying to
uh are you supposed to be showing some slides right uh you need to share your screen
because we don't see them we're not seeing them yet let you go over there okay that's right good call thank you
molly one more click how's elsa
there you go okay good much better okay good sorry about that okay the so that's number one
number two is looking at that image to the left
again there's a this is a three-part question the first part of it is what is the name of the brighter object
and then secondly what messier object is that brighter object then the third
one is what is the number of the messier object shown in the upper left corner of this image
so the third part and i'll repeat those what is the name of the brighter object
right in the center or slightly below okay b uh it's a messy object
what is the messier designation and then the c the third part of that is
what is the number of the messier object shown in the upper left corner
oh can you can you bring that full screen can you uh change your powerpoint to full screen
see here so we can see that image i think it'll be down at the bottom
go down all the way down the bottom bottom right hand side down there i think you can go into presentation
mode right on right on the bottom yeah
there you go
okay then number three this nebula observed
in the constellation cepheus is officially cataloged as vdb
141 or sh2 136 carol we're still on the last slide
still on the which one we're on question number two
okay for some reason it's not sharing uh
probably what he's done is he he when you when you show your screen and zoom when you select an
app um and you select powerpoint it will stay on ah there we go okay got it
i'm also on amateur zoom operator addition being an amateur strummer all right so you're in question number
two okay here we go now i'll flash those back up in just a second so we can see them all okay that's cool
yeah uh number three this nebula observed in the constellation cepheus is officially catalogued
as vd3 bdb 141 or sh-2 136
what is its unofficial name and i'm going to go back to one we'll go
through those again to make sure we get all those uh there's number one
uh the object found in the constellation toucan in the southern skies
okay and then the second one uh what is the name of the bright object
there in the center slightly below center and b it's also a messier object
what is the messier number and the third part what is the number of
the messier object shown in the upper left okay
okay and finishing with uh this nebula uh observed in the
constellation cepheus is officially cataloged as vdb 141 or sh2 136
what is its unofficial name and you need to send those to secretary
i didn't put it on the slide here secretary astro league dot
that's right we did change the email address here right let's say secretary yes at
not astrolake.org.org alliance at explorescientific.com anymore that's right so um chris larson
uh wanted to say thank you carol he said he just joined the astronomical league as a member at large
earlier this month and he's looking forward to starting his first observer program so we got a
we got a great uh uh explanation of all the observer programs
uh at the last astro astronomical league live presentations so and i imagine you guys
will be covering all those programs again in future shows but
you guys do so much for the astronomical community worldwide and uh
you know it's great to have you on this program thank you we're up to about uh we're about up to
80 uh different programs right now so we're very pleased about that because there's something for everybody there
thank you that must be more than any other uh you know federation or astronomy club
has anywhere in the world i think that that is correct yes you know so you become this
uh you know ultra master observer which uh as they also have a certificate for um
and this year is this is it right this year is the 75th anniversary year yes we are in the 75th year right now
2021 and we're having a lot of fun as we're going through this process because many of the archives most of we
people in the league now have forgotten all about so it's really fun uh for example we're finding out that
there were youth organizations and lots of astronomy clubs back uh in the early days of the
astronomical league and here we are coming back i think if we're having uh our younger astronomers on these kind of
broadcasts so it's really encouraging to see we're coming full circle about again
yeah thank you very much carol that's great okay so we are going to take a 10-minute
break um so you can grab a sandwich and uh um you know get a drink or something and
um we will be right back so that's great
okay time to make me a sandwich
so
um ah okay i'm fueled back up
same here if if you look in the i don't know you probably can't
see this well never mind there on on right there where my hand is can you
see that or and right to the right of my head i don't know which way but you can see stevie and i
in this observatory it's either on the left or right i can't tell you which it looks on the left here in zoom and
and uh in um let's see what it looks like here on facebook
um yeah i may have my thing muted yeah it's off to the left
it's a beautiful observatory it's a college of the desert it was given to them by a wealthy individual in palm desert
and uh we were there for the first light a couple of years ago because they're
running our software for providing observing to the students
wonderful wonderful it was a great experience yeah talk about more of your your
adventures and observatories uh we are going to
um we are going to go to down to chile to rodrigo zaleda
who is a astrophotographer and also the owner of north optics
in la serena chile and uh how are you doing there today rodrigo
hi scott yeah but tonight i put my equipment in the
a garden minutes close close in the sky okay i
i share with you my last photo of the solved object and
this photo is two weeks ago and i share with you my screen
yes
there you go okay it's good wow look at that do you see my screen
now with a different focal length of
a different telescope this picture
is a four hours integration with a
upper refractor well with a dual narrowband filter
that's very dramatic in this sector is the eta carini star
and this this little nebula in this sector is a heiko nebula
what is it called again
this this nebula yes it's uh a dust for the explosion of the
izakayan star homunculus it's um the homunculus nebula oh
homunculus okay okay
or what is what is it in spanish
oh good yeah and this this photo
is a white white field with a little refractor
this nebula and and this nebula in this sector is a
gavilan nebula in honor of a
uh important a poet right poet writer activist
something like that gabriela mistral
what an honor to have a whole nebula named after you that's fantastic
so this is about 8 500 light years away it's huge in the sky um i think it's uh
what a couple of degrees in diameter something like that um so that's uh and it's really bright
um having seen it you know through a small telescope it's just i mean it's spectacular to look at
and uh uh you know amazing to see images of it you know so
this nebula with with a medium or large telescope with a oxygen
filter is is wow in the
observation absolutely
and how is uh how is astronomy activity down in chile at this time uh is it still uh
very active with um you know you're selling telescopes um uh is the is
many people still buying telescopes in chile right now right now um very interest in
astronomy but for the the coming situation uh
not um go to the field uh to observation many people uh um
buy telescope for your house and er is very very er
in their backyard just like you you you have your telescope set up in your backyard of your your house yes right yes
very very people in chile like like that in in your house for a
pandemic situation right the the astroturf is very very um
stop it for the situation
right it'll come back the astrotours will come back after the pandemic and this is to create
new new system they have to do in a by a zoom platform or
a solar restroom another a way
wonderful well we have we have some observers watching from argentina
tonight and you know i imagine you have some watching in chile as well
uh is there anything that you'd like to add anything you'd like to say to to these people and you can speak in
spanish if you'd like
yes
okay so this is my my presentation now okay okay all right well thank you so
much rodrigo thanks for coming back on and we will
we will switch over to molly wakeling molly do you have more live
views coming up now almost i'm um i'm livestocking the crab nebula in hydrogen alpha
okay i'm just got the first frame in so you can't really see much yet okay um i can show you or we can come
back uh later on we'll come back we'll come back okay um that leaves uh uh richard and gary
here um what do you guys have to uh to share
all right um we got the horse head
showing a little uh tracking error um probably due to some flexure on the
guide setup uh but we went for 15 minute subs
okay and that's two of them wow so we already got the you can distinctly
see the horse head uh you know a big section the uh flame nebula i was like this little part
here and on attacks like one of the hardest things to contain ever i see like roundness coming from it
like this area uh-huh uh-huh yeah just like a little nebulosity to
the star just underneath the uh horse's head yeah it's right almost
not quite in the middle there but uh that whole region of course is just
filled with nebulosity you know and you could just keep shooting longer and longer until you know the orion region is almost
unrecognizable you know so i recall um a night uh where i was invited to go
to the 48 inch schmidt camera when they were still shooting on plates and seeing
a seeing a glass plate with the orion region this goes back many years
ago and i did not know what i was looking at i mean it was just that it was that deep of a shot you know and
uh still on film at that time you know you know glass plate film so it was pretty cool it was pretty cool
but um beautiful image there right on thank you i'm gonna move on to
another one here and i'm gonna stop sharing okay back to you guys okay
all right let's uh when we stop and talk to um to uh bob here for a little bit
uh bob you you always have uh a a very unique aspect of uh
of astronomy to share with us so and you're muted
bob you're muted i uh i started by apologizing to you for
cutting in at the beginning of the segment and talking about the image behind me because i thought we were still offline
so that's cool that's no problem that's right so now i'll talk about the image that's
behind me this is the observatory at the college of the desert and if you look up to the left of my
head i think um you'll see me and then my wife stevie
uh and amongst all the other people inside this observatory this was a plane wave system that was
given to the college of the desert in imperia uh imperial california and uh
by a person who lives in palm desert it was a total gift
and it is running now for the benefit of the students there it was
quite we were there for the first light on this it was really cool
as i usually say every time i have a chance to come on here is i'm not an astronomer i'm a technologist
my job is to build tools and software tools for people
to help them do more astronomy and also uh you're kind enough to put
me in your little uh in the the uh banner that you you know the
whatever you call it the banner that you send out inventor of azcom well that might be the idea
it wasn't me really er the idea of a common interface between instruments and
things is goes quite a ways back in computing but i did kind of bring it into astronomy
and now there's other people who do much more work than i do and have brought it into the modern day and
it in the last couple of weeks there have been some more exciting things happening
i'm not going to bore people here with that kind of technology it's plumbing but uh there's some very cool things
happening with regards to being able to connect things together in a universal way
and that's kind of where i fit in so still that's my thing astronomical systems
right so yes right so if go ahead oh no go ahead if you have a
question or if somebody has a question i'm looking at the the comments i don't see anything there
but um it's well the comments idea it says go ahead and bore us we love new stuff
well i don't want to do that uh the idea of it all is
it's difficult to get things to operate with each other and if you have a universal set of of rules that you can use
if if you remember the old haze modem i don't know how many people are that old but
that just didn't work very well uh for for talking between computers and
modems but between the i guess the lx 200
protocol quote-unquote is sort of the same type of thing that just didn't evolve into something
that really worked all that well in the long run so a group of people including myself have
put together a very strict set of universal rules by which you can talk as a program
to a focuser or to a dome or to a camera or to a mount and that's kind of what i do so
for for the community and it's now gone beyond the windows connectivity
which uses a feature of the windows operating system to a network connectivity that's universal
across all proto all um platforms so right and it's taking off quite nicely
there's a guy who has done so much stuff i was just talking to him yesterday i
cannot even believe it he came out of the woodwork about nine months ago i talked to him
and he went completely crazy and developed all this stuff to work on unix
using python that is a set of tools for universal connectivity that that i i
don't even believe it there's a lot of stuff going on right now in that whole space and i'm
i'm not prepared to give a formal talk about it give it another few months when
originally when ascom was dropped into the scene in 2001 and
two it took five years before it caught um alpaca which is the new technology
has only taken about two years and it has really caught so it's kind of it's rewarding right
well a lot of uh uh you know equipment and software cameras you know telescopes all
this stuff is matured and yes it doesn't seem so foreign of a
concept for someone to do networking or to try to connect all these disparate
you know separate parts you know that before would it would have taken gosh
like a programming genius such as yourself right actually make it happen right and uh so there were very few people that
were being that productive in the amateur astronomy world
but you've made it possible for not me i i'm only one piece of the puzzle yeah
i guess i get a video story big movement uh in the amateur astronomy world and i
understand you had lots of help you know but uh well the the the idea here
is that if you're writing a program just let's say and again i want to if somebody put
their hand up and shut me up if i'm going on too long but if you were writing a word processor and
you needed to print and you had to print to any printer out there what are you
going to do how many printers are there and what happens to the new when a new one comes onto the
market next week and it speaks a totally other different protocol right what do you do when you're in your
word processor how many printers do you have listed in there so the idea is which is the way word
processing works windows has drivers so when you buy a printer you put in a driver boom and it shows up
in your chooser and there it is you can print to that printer word and and notepad plus plus all these
different programs can print to the printer without knowing anything about the details of that printer
as comms the same thing but for astronomy just take mounts for an example all these different mounts with bits
bites different you know xyz wives wet spaghetti
usb serial whatever but the program sgp sequence generator
pro talks to the mount it just knows a certain set of calls to make and it doesn't matter what amount it is
just like for the printer you have a call here's a page make it come out on paper
i don't care how you do it for the telescope here's a place i want you to go i don't care how you do it just get
there and track right and that's it it's a universal interface so that's the concept if you can get
that in simply enough i don't know i don't know how to make it much simpler here's some commentary
okay and i i think that uh i think aaron thompson uh has said it well he said bob is a humble
guy okay it is more i don't think so best programming skills to make software you
need vision okay and software is more art than people give it credit
it takes vision and skill you know and somebody that's going to stick it through my experience with programmers is that
they always are running the program mentally in their head they never quite leave it because
they're always they're always uh you know improving it and uh you know so um you know and i'm sure
that you you have that kind of mindset as well so software is an art it's not a science
anybody who says software's a science doesn't know what they're talking about software is an art you learn
technical bits and pieces and you have a million little brushes and pallets and canvases and techniques
and things but in the end it's an art and anyone who's an artist which
is stevie is also she'll tell you the same thing and i will too you can work on a
painting forever oh god i gotta put another little thing here or another leaf in there
it'll look better if i make this background a little darker you know we're finished only abandoned
over and over and over the secret to being a successful programmer is to know when to stop
right stop put it out and then start getting things back from
people and cranking that into successive
versions software is a service business it's not a product business anybody who sells you
software as a product they don't know what you know and there's the good people always do it
that way it's here's my software now work with me
help me make it better for you so i can do better for you it's a process so yeah and product development of any
kind is kind of like that yes it is it's a it's an art but programming is absolutely an art
yeah yeah well great bob thank you man thank you thank you i didn't know what i was gonna
say until five minutes ago but here it is i'm just here as a kid
sir i do the same thing so but you guys inspire me and you know so what i say comes from
the hard and and uh so and if that that's that's what you get you know so
well scott you opened a door for me years ago in astronomy jim scotty at kitt
peak did he open the first door adam block opened the second door and
scott roberts opened the third door those were the three doors early in my career that made you know
that i jumped through those doors and here i am 22 years later i was i was kind of blown away because
you flew your own plane into john wayne airport i remember and i was just like
you flew your own plane in and to big bear i flew that airplane to big bear so
many times for the old i i a triple p in sas meetings uh i i flew it into
into a big bear too but yes when i came to meet i flew into john wayne and then went over to the
uh meat factory there that was cool i still remember the
meeting very clearly me too all right and you were so gracious oh thank you it was great i knew i was
talking to a gentleman you know and i knew that well great things i did ditto it was it was truly a memorable
experience and you know this is what makes astronomy great i the people i meet here i've met here um
i i'm happy to be here let's just put it that way yeah yeah we're we're happy to have you
um thank you gary i i i think it's probably starting to get a little late over there did you want to uh yeah some more
yeah time's sort of flown away tonight it's about just coming up to 3am so yes it's pretty late yeah all been
pretty interesting um what i thought we'd look at it's just a bit of error correction really in in
images um let me just find a screen share might be a
good idea okay there we go um lots of imaging that
i do is test imaging um i'd love to say that i get hours and hours to do my own
imaging most of it is with the equipment that turns up and needs some work doing on it somewhere along the lines so when we
first throw it up um either settings are wrong spacing's wrong
something's wrong with it and then we end up with loads of errors but the actual data in the background is quite good so using this as an
example it's got quite a few errors in there while it's got a lot of nice data in
there for a short amount of time it was imaged using a eight inch
um newtonian uh three point f three point two so with it
being very bright there are lots of different areas that cropped into this area
and that was partly some of my mistakes on the initial camera settings to start with
and so on which you need to do a couple of runs at this but sometimes you don't get that luxury
um so if we start looking in the image we can see we've got some reflective light
coming in here there's also some reflective light down the bottom there and that can be
caused by 101 things um generally it's normally too high a gain setting on the camera
yeah that will start to kick that in so all i've done on this is stats these up
and then running through a few processes to get them to a point where we've done a mass stretch
on the image and that helps to hold the brightness back yeah which is the key thing but at this
point here it's quite a good idea to actually bring it out of
pixinsight and run it into photoshop because to get the corrections in the background there
why you can use the clone stamping pics insight it's not quite as good as the one in
photoshop the photoshop one is a lot easier on the tolerances
and it also holds the textures where you run over something in the copying of the area
so if we flick up the photoshop screen and bring it in um all i've done is
remove the styles before i bring it into photoshop and that's going to make the correction easier because there is a complete ring
of styles in this area here to do any correcting with the styles in
there is more or less impossible to get those absolutely
perfect and all i've done here is use the clone stamp um one of the uh clone stamping
tools up in the top here um or the spot healing brush
on this particular one and then set it up to a proximity match yeah or a content aware and it's a
coaster trying in each image both of these work slightly different depending on the textures in the
background and then i've run through just cloning these out basically if you
do use a content aware it will copy the background which is one
of the key things and then you can just run through the image a lot of people won't do this
because to bring it out of pixel insight you have to convert it into a tiff
but it's still holding all of the information there so the tiff file will still hold all of
the relevant colors and everything else in the image so if we actually look down here i've
run right the way through this and i've cloned all of this out i've brought all of these out now
just by literally running through with the clone tool so if i wanted to do some more
i could take the tips off of these long style points here and just run through if there are any
residual satellite trails that maybe i couldn't get out in the initial image integration
then i can run through using this or it might be that i actually wanted to turn this image fully into a stylus image
and whilst the star net works very very well in picks inside it will leave a lot of
residual stars certainly in really dense style field areas and you can just enlarge the tool
so if we just go into the top setting now just change the size and then we could go over some of these
points where there are still styles there and we can just take them straight out of the image it works a lot better than the clone the
actual clone stamp in photoshop problem with the clone stamp is the phone stamp is going to
copy exact coloring from an area so if you move very very slightly off
into the red here and you were trying to clone something in on the blue it's going to bring red in and it's
going to change the whole shape of the star area once these are all taken out then we
just bring it back in to pix insight so just literally save the image and bring it back into pixel
inside then you can add your styles back in yeah
um we can also reduce the amount of styles in the image you have to be quite
careful using the newtonians you're going to get the peaks on your stars running through
so using circular structures on that doesn't really work
you know so i generally just gotta find where i put the uh icon for that and just go in and open it
up it's probably easier so when we're using the morphological
transformation yeah i actually use depending on how well i've got the camera aligned so if
i've got the camera aligned and the points on the styles are dead straight like crosses towards you
yeah then i will actually use the orthogonal structures yeah if i'm like what i am
here where the stars have got diagonal lines on them then i switch this over yeah and use the
diagonal structure if you use circular structure on these
you will actually put holes in the styles so as you do further processing into the image those
holes are going to show up as donuts in the middle of the styles but once we've actually got all of that
so if we start looking around in the image now we've removed all of those residual
problems that are in the background and that just makes life nice and straightforward
it helps us produce an image even though we had lots of problems in the image yeah it's beautiful the final image once
it came out in photoshop was pretty much looking like that so we can zoom right in
if you've got good focus on the and good optics on the system you can get away with zooming right into
this and you'll get some nice detail in there could do with a bit more color added in but this was a quick thing for tonight
so um i'd probably play around a little bit more with this but you could shrink these lines down a
little bit more if you wanted it's totally down to you each person is different on what they like to see in an
image i've seen people add uh diffraction
spikes on refractor images because they just love that diffraction spike look you know yeah
there are some um processes that you can add them in uh some actions that add them in i think
astronomy tools does that uh in photoshop but they're generally quite short so they end up looking like
a church cross on the style um and when you actually
look at them they really look like they're more hanging um in the sky
so it depends on what what your um what your outlook is on it every person
is different a lot of people i've seen that have taken the um the secondary veins of and put curves in
them to actually reduce them out by newtonians so if you curve the veins there yeah that reduce them out and it makes
it easier to subtract them out in the initial stacking right excellent well gosh
uh gary thank you so much for coming back on today hope you're fit hope you had a great holiday season i don't think
i've talked to you since it must be busy yeah so but uh i hope that that was all
good and uh you know we know that um as you mentioned earlier that the uk is on complete lockdown right now
so that's uh that is uh tough uh you know on everyone
there but um hopefully it it's all over soon so yeah yeah and it's i think it's the same
everywhere everywhere is gonna have to change around these things and they're going to
put strains and stresses on people in different areas and that's what's good about this sort of thing is
bringing all of these different things out to people yeah and hopefully you know people are
having a bit of fun they're enjoying what everybody's doing and getting some different ideas on different things
yeah great gary thank you man that's awesome thank you okay so uh
we've had we've had two new people join us i know molly is back there busy tracking
and stacking the crab nebula but carlos is
brand new to this program he was on earlier today
and uh he is in tucson arizona and he's just he's relatively new to
astronomy outreach but is now developing a a pretty big following um and uh
he he has developed a way that has been city approved okay um
for people to observe through telescopes and so he's giving uh star parties he's
doing astronomy outreach at a safeway parking lot and um and he's got
an incredible story uh so i'll let i'll let carlos tell it he's he's a he's an inspiration and um
i'm really glad that you decided to come on tonight carlos thanks absolutely let me know okay you can hear
me good yeah we can hear you um thanks for having me on i i feel so small joining um
you know legends in this in this um in this hobby i'd say it's more than a
hobby out honestly um it's more like a lifestyle for most of us
um yeah so hey everyone my name is carlos i'll try to briefly go
through this last time i was on for quite a while but uh i was in the military
for um for nine years and i got injured i crushed my shoulder
inside of an aircraft and i was put on painkillers
after six years i became addicted to those painkillers and went through a divorce and became
homeless so i was homeless for about a year and a half and um i had lost myself i lost my
morals i lost everything that meant something to me my family and all that so i went through a pretty
rough time and someone found me behind
a safeway parking lot where i was staying in literally in the bushes and
brought me to the re the to the va rehab center and that's when i made the decision to
either continue to use and um not change my life and die basically or
to change my life and um you know start a new path so i went into
rehab it was awesome absolutely wonderful program that the va has
and uh and got clean and you know i got out
met my girlfriend i still hadn't quite found myself yet this was about a year later and
one day you know i was never into astronomy before but one day i went and bought a walmart telescope
so that you know of course a terrible decision
but i went into my backyard one day i stumbled across the brightest thing i could find which
was jupiter and literally the the views that that little tasco
telescope brought in for my you know newbie eyes blew my mind so much
um i i loved every second of it tracking focusing trying to stop the
dang thing from vibrating and wiggling around um it was a pain in the butt but that
night i came inside i realized i did not have any stress anxiety any of my ptsd
symptoms that i usually have every day um and you know i
was ecstatic i wanted to share it with as many people as i as i could um so we bought an eight-inch
dobsonian brought it to the safeway parking lot a different safeway but um and
and uh just let anyone come look come look at the moon and saturn and jupiter while they were up
um and it was a hit we have we don't we at the time we
didn't have any astronomy programs on the east side of tucson the west side and star arizona had their
stuff but we didn't have anything over here and so i i honestly i reached out to
dean and he he gave us our first sponsored full telescope package
in evolution 8 and we're so grateful to him but um but yeah he helped us bring
astronomy to the east side and ever since we've been doing star parties every month
and because i was homeless i had you know an interaction with that community and i really cared for them because
they're just normal people um it could be anyone and uh
and so we me my girlfriend and i continued to volunteer at non-profits full-time and then we
decided why not bring astronomy and charity work together so we created a non-profit last year in
june called reach for the stars now we have about 16 telescopes right
now most of them were donated by the community and by random people around who believe in
what we're doing and we it's all ran out of our home
our home is stacked with shelving telescopes and fun equipment
nothing too crazy but you know we make do with what we get um we have about 10 mead etx
60s a bunch of little guys but i use those to train people i use
those to um to train people anyways the the the um foundation or this non-profit that we
started we do a star party every month that's one of our main programs we also feed anyone in need out of our
home and then we also help the homeless with backpacks filled with a bunch of cool stuff
essential items um yeah so we when coveted struck that's
when we were we're just getting started and we're like the star party program is so important to us
we want it you know for me it helps with mental health um issues as well as being a hobby
gives me quality family time we just we wanted other people to have that and to have something to look forward to
so um so we came up with a way to continue to to have the star parties every month
with city approval um basically we have a list of items that we follow
like everyone wears masks families stay in groups together with their family 10 feet from
the next family in line normal precautions like that but as well
we did some searching and wanted to find some some type of plexiglas sheets so we
bought these their picture frame plexiglas sheets 4x6
from amazon they come with dual sided um cellophane that you can peel off
and when you peel it off it's the plexiglass is crystal clear i could put that in front
of the camera you wouldn't even tell a difference it's crystal clear and it doesn't impede the viewing for
the telescope at all which is really cool and it allows children
normal people to get right up to the telescope not touch anything and we do right on one side eyeball the
other side scope um so they know not to uh you know mix the two and and all that um and so that's
allowed us to continue along with the list of other small things we do but this was the main one and
and they're really you know they're not that expensive it's 20 bucks for for um or no
14 for 20 of them you can cut them in half if you need to you don't need to to um glue a popsicle
stick onto it i just do it for the kids it helps them not keep their sticky fingers off the
off the clear part so so yeah it's really um it's been a it's been awesome it's been
working we've been having star parties every single month our next one is january 30th and um
[Music] yeah all the programs are completely free and i just love advocating for this awesome
um this awesome hobby i love all the people in it everyone who does what they do everyone who talks
online all of you who are here watching this all of you who are the presenters you
guys are all my heroes and i hope to be on your level
someday and i just want to share the beauty the wonder the fascination and
the happiness that we get the reward that we get with every single person that we can so
that is awesome that is awesome uh earlier today you were talking about how many meals you've already supplied i
think you said like something 14 000 meals last month was was 14 000 yeah
last month yeah last month last month yeah we every each month is 13 or 14
000 meals out of our garage it's crazy that is amazing well i know that you're
you must be having a huge effect on people uh especially homeless i'm sure many of
them think that no one cares for them or you know then no one takes the time to inspire them
you're doing both and uh you know i'm sure that uh you keep that up they're gonna erect
a statue to you in in the middle of tucson so i think it's wonderful
i think it's one yeah and and i you know to be honest being i used to be ashamed to talk about
the addiction but it can happen to anyone i wasn't abusing them i was just taking the
prescription as normal and um and yeah so
all the homeless people they're just they're just normal people who felt on hard times i was spit on before and it's not a good
feeling so we want to we want to con we want to bring star parties to them
too to the homeless parks um to show them we've done it twice so far and the
reactions we get when we show them what's been lying above them the whole time that they're out on the street at
night is incredible you know most tear up it's a it's a really good great experience so
yeah a comment here no shame in telling your story it is what makes you you you know and
thank you yeah other people i'm watching this program right now that have uh
suffered the same problems and uh you know you're showing them that there's a way out
um and that you can turn your you know your life around to be the kind of life you want it to be and and uh it takes takes hard work
but uh you know uh it's just i've been on a high all day since uh uh
you've uh you came on our program earlier and i was like wow i i was i was praying that you would
actually come on this show tonight and call it again so thank you so much and you are welcome anytime
you know uh thank you so much scott i know that we have uh uh very iconic astronomers on this
program uh but um you know you're you are an inspiration to anyone
and uh thank you that's great thank you thanks guys thanks for having me on carlos take care
have a wonderful evening yeah yeah and so uh let's go to let's check back in with
molly because i checked in with her earlier and she uh said i only have one sub at
this time so i yeah it looks like i have enough to to show here
so um let me uh zoom this in a bit and change the target
name here [Music]
how many scopes are you running out in the backyard right now [Laughter]
um hang on just a second let's do this
there we go okay um so this is the uh crab nebula uh this is
a supernova remnant up in what's it in taurus i should know this
all right anyway supernova remnant and um this is a hydrogen alpha image of it and
it it almost looks kind of like a brain to me with all the the lines and the filaments and stuff
like that and it's it's uh it's kind of just a fuzzy thing if you look at it visually
but especially when you take it in narrowband so hydrogen and oxygen and sulfur it
really just pops out from the background it's got this uh so the the progenitor star the original star
that um went supernova the core of it became a neutron star and that neutron star became a pulsar
uh which is a rapidly spinning neutron star that that emits a lot of energy and so that's why we can
still see the struminate today is because the energy from this pulsar is is lighting it up like a candle
and or like something much brighter than a candle like a spotlight um
and uh it's it's a really fascinating object because the the pulsar is actually spinning at a rate that if
you have a like some people are actually able to see the rapid blinking of it i think it's like i think the the
rotation times like 30 milliseconds or something like that really and some people go ahead they visually see it i there's
been a few reports and some people who've been able to see the pulsar blinking as it's as it spins around it's only been a few
um who uh whose you know eye frame rate is particularly fast or
something like that but um yeah it's it's a fascinating object
and uh it continues to be studied now and there's some there's an incredible hubble image of it as well so this is just a
stack of five minute frames it's actually only three frames uh because i was having some trouble getting the guiding to to get rolling um
but yeah it just pops right out you know the the crab nebula is
constantly studied um you know hubble did uh some a sonification
uh scan or something like that on on it recently you can see that on uh
on i think it's on nasa's website it says nasa share sonification video
of the crab nebula and it's amazing uh that's when they like like assign a
sound to different brightnesses and colors and stuff like that right yeah yes and um you know there's uh
there was an amateur astronomer who did a 10-year time lapse of the oh yeah
and that's that's that's really amazing you know yeah it's still expanding and the supernova went off like
what a thousand something years ago and it's still expanding right yeah so it's just uh it's an amazing
object i love looking at it as well and i love seeing astrophotographs of it so
we'll come back to you if you got more data towards the end of this sure uh and right now we'll switch to uh
jason jason thank you for coming on the program um uh you know you have uh
you've been blowing people away with your images i earlier today you know we had a product development
meeting and um we started talking more about the ar series of telescopes
and i use your images to show the people who actually build uh those
telescopes what you've been doing with them and uh uh they were utterly stunned
you know so it's it's great yes it's uh i wish you could have been in that in the meeting it was pretty cool
so yeah playing in my signature model good you know very um
yeah so i um yeah i enjoyed um carlos's talk and that was pretty
yeah a good story i love you know hearing that people you know turning it around like
that it's a great story me too i i'm uh i've actually secretly i have had a
secret project in the form of a book i've never written a book before i've written
a chapter with asp that put out a book on astronomy outreach and i've done some
forwards and stuff like that but um this book that i'm putting
together is uh about uh how astronomy changes
people's lives and uh uh so i've asked him to write a chapter and i i hope he does you know so
that yeah i think you find that most people that are into it have um you know a story about how
you know it filled a void that that was there um you know for some people it's you know a
bigger deal than others but um definitely you know it draws people in um because
i think a lot of a lot of people find perspective in it you know um you know the cosmic
perspective kind of reflects back into their own life so
yeah that's a good story but i um i don't i i haven't had any good weather
to be imaging so i just thought maybe i'd take a tour of some of the images i've been shooting lately and um
share those i'll share my desktop here
and also i get you know i always uh get in this meeting but i never really introduced myself because
you know i've been in here a few times but i guess for any newcomers um what's that
i said probably a good idea to reinvent yourself like i can start off by i mean uh
uh jason's uh popular handle is called the vast reaches uh and um he is someone that
you haven't been in astrophotography very long have you um how many years i got a telescope in
2013 so i mean i've been in you know probably eight years now so um
you know i originally bought a telescope thinking i was going to do visual astronomy and i had an eyepiece in that thing for
maybe three sessions and then there was a camera on it ever since then i never took it off but um yeah i mean i started out slowly
and i never i never committed to it at least uh
initially uh it took me a few years to to kind of decide it was something i
wanted to pursue seriously and then yeah i would say around probably 2015 i kind of
got got rolling with it and got serious and kind of picked up steam with it but yeah
so i started you know sharing stuff around online and um you know kind of building a following
there's there's really a large appetite for space images and again i think you know
it connects with people um everybody seems to connect to something different some people love the deep
space stuff some people you know just love moon photography or solar photography or planets and stuff
like that so i'm kind of a jack of all trade master of none kind of
kind of person i try to experiment with as much as i can and uh
jack of all trades but yeah i mean so this to anybody watching this is my instagram
page where i have you know probably the biggest well it is the biggest following i have but um so you can find me under my handle
which is the best reaches all one word like that so i'll pull up some images here these are some recent ones
i've been working on so i've got a couple nightscape type
pictures um something i like to do um and what i like about nightscape
photography is you can you can do it uh when the can you see my
screen is it sharing okay um you know you can kind of do it even if the weather's uh iffy for for astronomy you can see
you know light clouds moving through the frame but you know you get yourself in some nice spots and you can you can pull off some
pretty interesting images that way so this is um the first quarter moon
setting um in northern michigan over um the mackinac bridge which connects the
upper and lower peninsula of michigan so the moon the moon's here saturn is a
little bit um hidden by the haze and then this is the the bright jupiter um
and this is a historic location um in the war of 1812 this was a place
where the british had invaded uh this island so mac mackinnon island out in the out
in lake huron but it's a kind of a strategic strong point um
you know in early early times when they were trading in the area and stuff like that
so i didn't understand what that was in the the foreground there but it's a cannon yeah yeah so this is a this is a
historical marker this is called british landing that's where the british landed on this shore and um
invaded the island and took the took the fort that's on the high point of the island
so they marched with cannons across the uh the wilderness for two miles but uh
they actually snuck through in the dead of night and surrounded the fort and that fort was surrendered without
loss of life on either side it was an american american outpost fort
there and this is a similar location just
kind of around the bend from that last one and this is looking towards the east over lake huron
a different night but this is mars rising out of the haze and this was taken back
when the california wildfires were raging and we'd get these um even in
michigan we'd get these nights where the hayes just moved in and um the cool thing about it is it
put this color i've never seen before on the horizon line it's just this murky kind of kind of
orange brown color it is beautiful though it's a very nice composition
and so this is the little dumbbell nebula it's messier 76
and um it's framed here interestingly with a with a red giant star so this
when i posted this one i kind of told a little story about it but this is um you know kind of a look into
the fate of our son because we've got this this red giant shining there
and then you know the next stage of evolution is into a planetary nebula where it sheds its atmosphere and
you know internally illuminates the nebula so that's what we see here in the in the little dumbbell that is an
amazing shot of the little dumbbell nebula yeah i didn't even know that it had that that
hydrogen region on the on the bottom right kind of yeah it's got these little wings that come out either side
yeah those are dim but yeah they're um they're there could you zoom in on the
on the little dumbbell yeah actually this this image here is a look at that
there's a holy catfish yeah i've never seen it like that before
wow you know that this one
is a huge challenge to make look right because when you zoom in there's so much going
on there that it just it it looks messy you know but
yeah there's just layers of hydrogen and oxygen you know the the hydrogen illuminates
or glows red and then the oxygen is the blue blue colors i'll be honest to me it
looks like a tardy grade under a microscope you got eyes off to the left
and like your body kind of scrunched up a little bit with its legs my goodness those do look like eyes
i think you've uh changed what it's called i don't know anymore yeah the unfortunate thing about
the names of these objects is they don't change right i mean they were named at a time when people were just looking at them
visually so maybe one part of it looked like something and now you see this image where it's got all this extended
nebulosity and it doesn't look anything like i've seen a lot of astrophotographs of this i've never seen it like this before
it's it's awesome yeah i think i put about 30 hours into this total
just probably just over 12 hours in hydrogen and oxygen and then rgb for the coloration of the
stars over how much clock time did it take you to acquire
all the data for that how many days weeks months whatever yeah it's it's months because i
generally what i do is i sequence up my targets for the night and i'll shoot them when they're in
you know the best position during the night so i might shoot
you know probably maximum of you know four or five hours on a target and a night so that that right there
means it's it was taken over i mean even if i got that much time every every session i was taking over you know
six seven nights and then um you know those are spaced out obviously right
you know to avoid the moon and things like that so yeah definitely an image like this will
take me a couple months to to complete this fantastic totally fantastic thanks
but the uh you know capturing was one thing and then getting around to processing it takes me
a whole another few months i think i shot this one in early uh early last year
i think in the spring it's beautiful i didn't mean to diminish the art in
that i was just curious on the acquisition side no no i mean it's that's the artist where it is i mean
that's just unbelievable
i'm waiting for a um a um you know a book an oversized book
of the from the bathroom which is a coffee table
and so this is um this is jupiter in ultraviolet which is again an uncommon
uh way to look at it but i got an ultraviolet filter last year to try to shoot
venus with and i i show shown on this on this uh on the star party i've shown those
pictures of venus i got with that filter because you can start to see the cloud details in the planet um so i thought well why
not just try to shoot jupiter with it so this is what jupiter looks in ultraviolet interesting thing i thought
in this image is how dark the storms look and especially the great red spot um even it's almost no ultraviolet
which is interesting inky inky black and then this is that ultraviolet image
layered in with an rgb image so this just extends the the range of the visual spectrum into
the into the ultraviolet so it looks perfect are we looking at
the shadow of a moon the dark spot yeah this is ganymede here uh-huh if you can see my mouse and then
the shadow's there
yeah the detail doesn't come through in ultraviolet uh as much as the other channels so that
the channel is kind of murky beatrice heinz is asking jason how did
you learn to process like that all by yourself or did you did you uh
follow um some classes courses i never took any
courses i um you know initially i spent a lot of time
on the cloudy nights forum and just kind of i'll grab tutorials there i could find
um either video tutorials or text based tutorials and i just kind of learned
that way and then you know once i get to a certain point i think everybody you know that gets into processing gets
to the point where you start to see the end goal
at the beginning of the process and you you know start figuring out the steps it takes to get there and you kind of build
your own workflow and techniques so that's kind of been the progression for me
someone is wanting to know what size scopes you're using i know you have several um yeah so this was this one the little
dumbbell was taken with my eight inch sct it's an edge hd eight inch
and then this uh the jupiter is taken with a 12-inch newtonian awesome
and i just have a bunch of them with the conjunction i haven't been on this since we had the conjunction so this is
uh i think this was december 7th so this is when they were approaching
uh jupiter and saturn there um in this in the sunset see the moons of jupiter
strung out there and these are just 100 crops of those of
this image just this is sticking with the 600 millimeter camera lens you can just barely begin to make out
the detail and the saturn rings and uh playing into jupiter
and this is kind of uh the full more full frame of that
and then this was the night before the conjunction the 20th of december this was taken with the
12-inch newtonian again um so i got some you know decent detail
of the planets saturn with the rings and
there's some moons speckled around here if you can see them a lot of dust on my computer screen so i
can run but um then jupiter also
um interesting thing is it there's a ton of pictures i saw online of this this night
and kind of catches you off guard initially because it looks like jupiter's got five
galilean moons here but this star this this what looks like a moon here is
actually a background star shining about about the same brightness as the moons and and right in line of
that plane that's pretty
and this this image just shows my workspace and picks insight
of the conjunction and shows this right here is the frame of my
camera and you can see how close these were to fallen off the edge so i had to go back
and take a mosaic to get that image i just showed where i took several
images and this down in the bottom are the different sets i took to get the moons of saturn
moons of jupiter i had to do that in two separate frames and then i did one for the overall scene
then i did these close-up shots or crap shots to get the the planets in detail
that just shows kind of how that image came together yeah jupiter was so much brighter than
saturn yeah yeah this so this gives you an idea of the relative brightness between them
too this was just a single shot
and then during that session uh from my backyard i found that these planets lined up perfectly over top well
i moved around quite a bit to get it to line up over the tree and then i took
a shot with my camera lens of the tree in focus and then the
planets in focus and then i overlaid that close-up image
i shot with the 12-inch newtonian to get the detail in there so jason i'll
have to say this looks like you know like one of those metaphysical compositions i mean it's just so
incredible well so this was coming up on christmas right so i at least in this in this wide shot i i
rendered in these star spikes to make it look like a tree topper but yeah those obviously aren't there um so i've
got a few shots of that you know this is without the the rendering but um this is with
all those shots layered on top of each other and then just some close-ups here
so yeah beautiful yeah so at full scale i mean this it's a huge image because of the way i i
layered it in there but these are just the low res resolution
files but and then since that was the only clear
span i had for the whole conjunction then i packed up my camera and i drove over to the park and
got a shot of the conjunction as it was setting over the lake so that's this shot
it's a nice shot i had two hours of clear sky and i took full advantage that is just gorgeous
yeah thanks that what i really like about this is the ice lake and the the reflection of the planets in the in
the lake oh yeah it makes the image that's for sure
then this is the iris nebula shot with a uh celestron rasa telescope
and uh asi 533 mc camera so i was able to get from my
light polluted location uh tons of background signal on that way more than i've ever
been able to pull out so that's the advantage of shooting at f2
got down you know quite a bit of detail down into the core too
tiny little stars and this is what i'm working on right
now this was shot with the ar 152 there's obviously a starless image but this is a uh
it's called wolf wr-134 it's a wolf rant star
and um i'm putting on my glasses for this one the halo surrounding it but this is just a work
in progress i figured i'd share it since it was on my other desktop
it's just in hydrogen and oxygen yeah it looks like it looks dangerous or
something it's amazing yeah actually let me flip this over this looks like uh
i think it looks like a dolphin right here yeah it does i could almost see it as a as an eye as
well with the top part being like the eyelid and then you can kind of see like the iris and like kind of a people
yeah this so this this little fringing that goes all the way around here which i'm going to work to accentuate is
actually part of that nebula that's shed out by that star in the middle
another um nebulae while the most popular or
famous one is the crescent nebula which is the same same type but i think that one's
significantly younger than this one this one's a lot more diffused you know especially this section out
here is just almost faded to oblivion
incredible i love seeing new stuff like that too you know yeah that uh that scope works
well in narrowband not gonna lie this is a lot less
integration than i normally put into images too with my sct
and then this is the uh that's the sun shot that a lot of people liked this is me too
i call it a stylized version because i like way way uh i went super deep into the processing of
this one but um you know i was able to extract just a ton of contrast and
you know details in the chromosphere
so this is yeah this is the solar with the ar152 also is that with like a like a cork
yeah it's a daystar quark on the back you know asi 174 mono camera that's good to know because
i wasn't sure um how the performance between like a quark and like having an actual solar
telescope like a lund would be but um this looks pretty promising
yeah well no so i've used both and i i definitely have my opinions on them um
you know this system with the with the 152 and the quark i get
loads of detail but i get really low contrast and to get the contrast to reveal itself i really need to push the
image really hard um and that's especially true for prominences you know these
these wisps of chromosphere that hang over the limb of the sun
with a dedicated solar scope like a lunt i've used this uh 60 millimeter line
pressure tune and that provides loads of contrast um
but it's hard to get the same level of detail and that may be just you know due to aperture but yeah
you know the good thing about the ar 152 is you get a lot of aperture for the for the for the money and um the quark
you know adding the clark under that telescope puts you about in the same price class as you know getting a
sale 160 millimeter so it's as it really kind of depends on what you're going after if you
are wanting to image or time-lapse prominences um
you know it might make you lean towards a lot whereas you know if you want
chromosphere details i think this this system has served me well and i really like
uh like using it get you in really close the uh i get maybe with the lunt you could get
a full disc image i'm not sure but uh yeah this is my full
field of view so i there's right if i have to mosaic this out to get the whole disc i
have to take like i've done it before i think i think i did six panels
up and three panels over so 18 20 panels maybe to get the whole thing
yeah i've gotten full disc with like an aps-c or four-thirds chip on a line uh 80
before yeah yeah yeah i got the full disc with the same camera on the 160
that made a photo focal length so so there's there's lots of questions
being asked and comments um let's say uh
people just blown away uh saying jason that's awesome uh clearly 58 says i either need to get
a new camera or give up his stuff is amazing um uh andrew corkel i'm not sure i have
the patience to learn and do that processing it does it does take a lot of dedication
and patience um people just blown away wow um let's see uh
richard lighthill um he says with this ar 127 it's a 152 that you have um does he
still use a solar filter in addition to the cork yeah so what i what i do or the setup
that i use is i have a um the ar-152 is the telescope
obviously now quark um daystar
the recommendation from daystar is it's usable without a front mounted energy rejection
filter up to six inches of aperture so i'm at that limit um
which initially was pretty concerning to me to put you know expensive equipment at the back
end of the telescope so what they do recommend you do is to reject energy back out of the scope is
to use a dielectric uv-ir cut
filter and then a dielectric filter will reflect energy back out the front of the scope
so all the infrared and all the ultraviolet gets reflected back out the front of the telescope
and then behind that i have a quark to handle the rest of the you know the
rest of the filtering and then the camera behind that um the one thing i want to make sure is to get
that any piece of glass you put at the back of the telescope's potentially subject to heat so i wanted
to get that uv ir cut filter as far forward as i could so i i've got um i've got it placed
probably six inches in front of the cork maybe a little bit more to really
do that filtering um before the light cone reduces enough to heat heat it up
and you're not you don't think that you're cutting off any of the light cone coming in down to to the tube you got
the large enough of the filter i guess yeah i don't know i don't think so i mean the
the way the quark works is that the front aperture of the cork is maybe a centimeter big um
yeah um i've i've placed it in a few different positions i haven't seen any lightfall okay but it's definitely i
mean i guess the message is you want to be real careful with the solar telescope especially one
like the clark set up where you're configuring it yourself you definitely want to be confident in it
before you use it and it's one thing to put equipment the cameras back there but
it's another thing to put your eyeball back behind there so anybody who's thinking about it do your
research and make sure you're following all the recommendations before you mm-hmm right this is a setup like that
totally agree just seeing people also make mistakes of leaving uh finders on and uh not covering them and
you know uh you can catch your hair on fire literally yeah i've done i've done things i'm not
gonna lie i think any anybody who's done solar um
has an oopsie every once in a while and um yeah i definitely had an oopsie but yeah i was at
i was uh during the 91 eclipse uh i was on mauna kea uh
filming the eclipse with the uh uh there's a science program called nova on pbs and so i was part of that
crew and uh and so they were showing that the the keck telescope had not yet been
completed okay but they had a few mirror segments inside of it and uh i guess in all their excitement
uh during the day because the governor was up there and everything they left the dome open
okay and when i i guess they went off and had lunch or something anyways the sun the sun comes okay
and bounces off those mirrors and actually starts to smoke the inside of that dome
okay i can't imagine what the energy of that was yeah yeah but um anyhow
yeah it's no joke my finder scope doesn't have crosshairs in it anymore
i went up to new mexico skies to visit mike rice and he showed me a camera that had been melted
all the way through to the back by having left the telescope just randomly pointed
at the sky and the sun came up and just burnt the whole thing all the way out the back
it's quite an artifact i'm always so afraid of that happening like when i sleep in a star party because
occasionally there'll be a fault in like uh like the plate solver that i use for
secret generator pro and so the sequence will freeze and it won't park the telescope and then at the
end of the night so i'm always worried that one of these days it's going to be pointing south from the
sun when the sun goes by before i wake up and catch it i hope
like hell you're not using pinpoint with sgp that no that didn't freeze no i i it
tends to happen more often with aztap i i use aztap on one instance of it and plates off i
have two instances running on one computer controlling two different mounts i discovered you can't use
the same plate solver for two different rigs because it will steal from the other one if they happen
to go at approximately the same time so i use s tap for one and plate solve two for the other and aztap tends to
have weird like uh faults and like uh so it's weird errors and stuff where the
sequence won't continue until you hit okay so that's a relief
yeah it i i haven't really figured out what causes the error um yeah i don't really know i'm just
like one of these days i need to figure that out
so it looks like richard has a uh stack of the uh rosette is that right
thank you thanks
uh 45 minutes on the rosette uh before we hit the meridian okay so you can start to see some of the
structure uh on the inside those nodules and stuff where all that dark nebulosity is
that's beautiful i'm getting used to the uh larger sensor i think the uh the dirty word
flats are gonna have to start getting used around here i don't know what they are entirely i mean i know what they are
but i've never done them yet so by the way the middle seems to be uh
brighter than the outside i think i'm gonna have to start doing some flats here sometime soon
but uh yeah just wanted to show that and uh i think we got a little clouds coming in by the signal of noise on the guiding
but uh it's been a good night all right yeah you thought you were gonna get
clouded out entirely i i didn't expect it to be this good tonight the weather didn't say it was
going to be this good tonight so i'm happy that's awesome richard
where are you annapolis maryland
right on the chesapeake bay uh surrounded on three sides uh i have to run dew heaters all the time
all the time yeah molly you have um you have another
image you're working on there unless i continued on on the crab to see if we can get some
better uh contrast so um let me switch screens here
there we go oh yeah yeah so i've got 10 frames here now so 50 minutes
of data and you can see now that the the background's starting to get darker and crabs starting to get brighter
it helps that we've you know we're further past sunset now and it's getting higher in the sky
but yeah you can start to see a little more detail there um let me zoom in
i don't know how well this will come through oh it's nice yeah it is nice but yeah so yeah you can
see a lot of some of the the larger uh structure here and a lot of the smaller ones and i i
think the the um pulsar is is pretty much exactly in the middle of you know kind of where you would expect
it to be um but we can't we can't see it here i think i think it's too dim to see with like
amateur scopes but i'm not entirely sure um it's like a three-quarter uh face view
of darth vader you know oh it does it kind of does yeah
interesting it does i'm starting to see things more and more
into nebulosity anymore maybe i need to go get mentally checked i don't know but it's getting on in the
evening you know [Laughter] beautiful yeah i think it's a trait of
astronomers to see shapes and stuff in space some are always naming things
yeah there's always some new nebula and like and i'll have a relatively young or newer
amateur astronomers say did you see the such-and-such nebula or and i'm like what you know i didn't even know it
existed so um but uh yeah yeah there's there's some nebula that i've been discovered like in
the last decade or two that's right photographically with with the newer equipment and now that cmos cameras are
on the scene we might see some more as well um just because like
amateurs like us who can just take it wherever we want to in the sky and kind of troll through it
um you know we have more time to do those kinds of things than the professional telescopes do
oh sure so um probably more of those types of degrees to come yeah i often would have after spending
that time on mauna kea for i was there for four days and three nights and
and i got that was that was really my first dose of what professional astronomy was like you
know at you know mauna kea certainly at that time and it still
is a place where you know people you know fight to get time on those telescopes it's not it's not the
kumbaya experience of what amateur astronomy is these people you know they they are they they are um
uh you know fighting for uh the same science dollars you know for their
grants uh they are fighting for time on an instrument you know to to make it all is
super competitive i mean you're super competitive and and they you know they
um uh they're not always um
you know standing around uh thinking about how wonderful it is you know uh i know after the fact they
do but but uh there's there's a struggle in there and uh and maybe that's the way science
should be um uh you know for people to try their best at all times and and uh you know giving
the greatest possible effort that they can you know that that makes it a little tough uh
if you're in that environment but i i was going at the elevator to get oxygen
uh and uh there were i was surrounded by a group of uh
astronomers from from france and another group of astronomers and they're all yelling and screaming at each other as
we're going up the elevator and i was thinking they're either it's a
lack of oxygen or or they just really don't like each other or something but uh
that's why like like amateur observations are still actually really valued uh in the
scientific community like i'm in i'm an ambassador for the american association of variable star
observers and uh because of that battle over time on the few major telescopes
that are out there and battle for dollars and things like that um actually rely on the amateur community a
lot of the time to do follow-up observations on exoplanet candidates
and variable star candidates and uh like a recurrent novi and all kinds of
stuff and we contribute millions of observations per year um and they're used by by professional
scientists and in their analyses of variable stars and stuff like that so those pro amp collaborations have
probably not you know there's probably more opportunity now than there ever has been
you know yeah because like especially with cmos cameras and um access to better tracking mounts
better design telescope designs things like that there's you can go pre you can go pretty deep with with amateur equipment uh
i've imaged on a on a c14 actually with a ccd camera i imaged a
magnitude 19 nova in like portal 5 skies you know
you can go quite deep and and also the ccd the ccd camera had has big juicy massive pixels but um you
know with the sensitivity of cmos cameras it lets us get that deep in shorter exposures and then be able to
follow higher cadence variable stars and things like that so
yeah tons of opportunity we just sent our contribution in to double a bso as a
gold sponsor today and uh that is a great
organization the um aavso net we donated we donated our software
and the whole thing runs on our software and uh so and the apas project that made the
catalog that was all done with our scheduler it could not ernie hinden will tell you that you it could not have been done
without the scheduler because it was a huge hundreds of thousands of observations and it was all
hands off so yeah you know we kind of we love the double avso
and it is our favorite favorite thing of anything really we
love it that's awesome yeah and uh i think uh once once i kind of get my
my science rig in a stable configuration i'm repairing one of my older mounts right now that
i will do a better job at tracking with my heavy newtonian stuff like that but once
i kind of get it stabilized um i it's i've been asked if if i might
be interested in putting my scope on the aavso net so um i might have it do that part-time
or something like that because i get quite a few clear nights here in the base so well you could be a bright star monitor you could run that and that
that is that's a good deal and that when once you start contributing to as a as a
bsm station you'll end up running our software because we donated it to the whole double abso net
for that purpose awesome yeah i've used it a little bit with uh well on the c14 that i did image
the nova with uh the the the guy who i collaborated with out there uses it to run a scope so
i was able to to cue up the targets i wanted to image remotely and stuff like that so that was pretty cool
cool clearlight 58 says i joined double a vso after the president of the organization
gave a talk at my astronomy club and right down the street from where we meet at the harvard smithsonian
observatory in cambridge nice place to meet that's great yeah dang
that's cool very historic that's awesome
yeah i got recruited into aavso when i got to meet um dr stella kafka who's their director
when i was i was connected to her via a friend of mine back when i lived in the midwest who was
like she's a female phd you're trying to get your phd y'all should talk
and i i told talk her about how i was wanting to get into scientific observing we didn't really know where to start
and uh she got me hooked up with with some people in aavso to help me get started so
yeah she's a total dynamo she's awesome yeah that's great we'll have to get her on
our show sometime yeah she she comes out she's been on the astra imaging channel
um and then she does she does uh you know stuff for the avso all the time
so i'm sure you could get her to come on i hope so i hope so um
i was trying to think of some shows that we have coming up uh we already talked about the uh astronomy
magazine uh we'll be co-hosting an event a global star party here so we're looking
a couple of weeks out um so you know a lot of the editors and contributors will be
part of that show um the um we have david
kipping who is a researcher at columbia uh university and he is studying exo
moons around exoplanets so that he'll be giving a talk which would be very cool
um we have uh linda spielker
who is the uh you know principal uh scientist at on the cassini mission uh
will be uh visiting us at one point so we just need to pin down a date but she's agreed to do it
um so we have a lot of really interesting um programs coming up a lot more global
star parties of course and uh um you know i'm i'm uh
i'm excited to uh uh you know just the stuff that comes out of these is just
awesome and i really appreciate you guys being on today is there anything else that um that you
guys would like to share before we uh wind it up
everybody have a good one hope you have some clear skies to check out the stars
yeah thanks everyone i haven't had clear skies since the month
oh boy sky's your way okay so that's great well i want to thank the
audience too lots of interesting comments and questions and um
we will be on i'm taking uh tomorrow off i have to do some personal things but
i'll be back on on thursday and um and until that time uh
um you know keep looking up oh one other thing i did want to mention too is that uh and i might have mentioned it
earlier is that we are going to be broadcasting the winter star party and they are using uh our uh
our website to do that uh that you know as a place to go and and watch that
program so um you can go to uh explore scientific dot com forward
slash winter star party there's a link there and you can go and uh sign up
for a winter star party which is going to run like four nights starting um i think it's february 8th uh and
uh maybe more nice than that and um uh um it's free so that's that's the
great part of it you're gonna see some lectures from some of the iconic astronomers tippy diorio will be giving
they'll be replaying some of his uh talks um i'm sure you'll see uh stuff from uh
you know mike reynolds and and uh uh you know perhaps don parker and some of
these others that uh unfortunately are no longer with us but uh
we're huge contributors to our community and as well as new speakers as well so i'm
excited about that um and i guess uh until thursday we'll see you
we'll see you then okay good night everybody take care thank you thanks scott bye
thank you scott
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