Transcript:
it's the beginning yeah perfect observing weather yeah that's
that's a way to look at it
the liquid or observing I like the 10 and 11 hour nights it's fantastic yeah
just gotta dress for it that's all that's all yeah I love it if it's clear it's the 10 or
11 hour nights when it's snowing or raining repeatedly for days on it that
get boring I pulled an 11 hour uh session last year when the was minus two
windshield wow about eight degrees and I managed the whole night it's uh minus
two that's that's that hurts well I spent I've spent a year in Alaska and
did a lot of mountain climbing and skiing so I I know yeah you're well dressed you're okay
yeah [Music]
I've decided to give up that past time of sitting out in the cold
hmm
it's not really the culture that bothers me it's the wind here where we're on the mountain side
you know the wind picks up and that's the real uh the real issue yeah I didn't say anything about wind
when the wind's blowing it's that cold I'm not out there no yeah
let's just say that I when I was younger I was more uh into it in the cold but as
I get older I don't know hmm it's got hard I think you have more enthusiasm when
you have that that's all it is the enthusiasm dies down a little fraction [Laughter]
now the enthusiasm to curl up on a nice warm bed you know well yeah
[Music] so uh Chuck your group liked the
presentation you said oh my gosh normally it was fantastic all right I'm still getting comments even two today
all right good um yeah I mean it was just incredible I'm so appreciative I
can't I can't express myself the the presentation I gave you uh this week I
today I'm going at doing another presentation that comes before that one
um yeah I've done that one in early uh
2009 or something 10 up to 2010 and it was originally in French because I was
presenting that in a in Quebec here and this afternoon I've spent half in the
afternoon just try to translate all the the headers presentation in English
but uh what you will see tonight is the the before the section that you have
presented to you yes the very early days a trip in the memory lane here
makes me feel older too please
what makes me feel old is when somebody says have you got something from such and such a date myself demonstrate the
hard drives and look at how long I've been doing this
I was sitting with a group of amateur astronomers some of whom were in high
school and some were my age and a couple of my friends were talking about things that
happened to them in the 1960s and after after the meeting I said you know when you when you talk about 1960s in front
of these kids it's like when you were in high school talking about 19 somebody talking about 1905.
yeah right yep
put things into perspective that yep we're getting there
the thing is that the 80s and 90s and that they seemed like yesterday they don't seem you know 30 40 years ago
that's the thing well that was the 30 years ago yeah and yet right now 2019
seems like 40 years ago yeah yeah yeah you're right
these kids on the program right now are just going what oh they're talking about yeah
don't worry you can blink your eyes and you'll be 50. yeah yeah
um you were you were quite a bit older than
Libby is now but um you were probably about twice as old as Libby Olivia's now when I when I first
met you David yes that's right yeah yeah it's getting to be some time ago now
isn't it David um
foreign well I got my energy
good for you yes you've proven Einstein correct again
mass and energy or interconvertible
I am getting more mass but you can run around the room 80 or
100 times and burn it off and I do
but James the astrophotographer to find Del Prado
um they're wishing us a happy Global Star Party Aaron Thompson greetings all
looking forward to another fun night all right yeah um book Davies hey hey Space Monkeys are
the Space Monkeys yeah Martin eastburn says hello Norm Hughes
good evening everyone good evening yeah Ed Gunther 23 degrees and overcast
in Plattsburgh New York good time for a global Star Party well I'm glad Ed Gunther is here yeah
I'm really glad he's here
Martin eastburn I spotted the moon through the clouds got out the app and it was planets aligning along with the
Moon guys this guy here tonight in Montreal this
pristine no Club no clouds whatsoever it's a beautiful night for observing the moon and the planets
Finley's astrophotography says hello hello
Martin Nissan says I know adults think that think 60s and 70s are very old I
think 50s are old oh oh oh [Laughter]
ouch welcome Molly
good Molly gonna be clear night here again so got
my telescope set up outside great so what we'll do um
uh we will sprinkle in some like uh two minute live views you know of what
whatever's through a telescope sure until we get to the
to the hardcore astrophotography crescendo
three what's your Sky look like out there the usual Ryan usual rain
now we've had a couple of odd nights uh clear we've got a bit of rain coming
through and then uh I think it looks like it's gonna clear up from tomorrow night for a couple of nights yeah but
it's that time of year yeah we just get a nice change of seasons and the jet
streams of the UK at the moment and I happen to be right where that lands so
um yeah it's just a case of take it when we can get it at the moment sure
okay I got some great views of the sunspots
today I had some some excellent seeing this afternoon so I'm going to be processing those images
yeah isn't that beautiful yeah yeah so I've got those and I'm hoping to see the the pledges that are mixed in with those
as well I just have a white light filter um but the scene was good enough I might
be able to see the pages as well so I saw some of the play just today they were starting to come on yeah
yeah I was Imaging that earlier functionally it cleared for a couple of hours but the problem here is is the
sun's so low it's really low on the horizon so you're just Imaging through all the rubbish
oh that's too bad but it's looking nice anyway
crap it's fun to get started Scott hello hey this is Mike oberhacker hey
Mike how you doing man welcome I'm not too good I've got no video
okay well you know uh I'm not I'm I'm not sure
what's going on because I had video yeah before and whenever I started to uh
log into Zoom yeah I I've lost it how you doing Norman good hey
do you have another device open the like Skype or something that might be hijacking the video just in case
yeah I've um it's given me a uh it's given me an error
um I'll bring it up there you can oh it doesn't show it now there it is
giving me an error utility yeah yes webcam utility
it that it did that before and then it uh I was able to get it up you know the video up no problem
and well uh Mike uh why don't you just um you can uh play you know try to get it
going offline and then just pop back in you know so yeah I'll try to do that okay yeah okay here I'll log out all
right take care Mike careful
we're gonna go ahead and get started sorry seven o'clock eight o'clock
[Music]
from Voyager Titan was so unusual all we could see from voyagers this hazy world
we couldn't see through to the surface and that's why we had to go back with
Cassini carrying the Huygens probe try and see what does the surface of Titan
look like so the Huygens probe parachuted through in 2005. and we
landed on the surface and we saw an amazing world it was incredible how
Earth-like Titan appeared it had River channels it had Lakes it had sand dunes
the only difference is it's very cold on Titan and the liquid that flows through
Titan's Rivers is methane instead of water the Cassini Huygens Mission has
been one of the greatest Voyages of Discovery in the history of science we
have learned and discovered more things about a previously unknown dynamic
system a system that's a billion miles from us the Saturn system than we ever could have imagined one of the Pinnacles
of that has been the discoveries on Titan Titan has turned out to be a very
complex World it has geology it has methane rain it has lakes and seas it
has Dunes of organic molecules and it has a lot more secrets that it's still
hiding from us makes people so excited about Titan is
is this combination of familiarity and alieness we've had
126 close flybys with a spacecraft with a dozen instruments that in each of
those flybys are all taking data about different aspects of Titan Not only was Titan fascinating in its own right a
moon the size of the planet Mercury it was also cassini's gas tank it allowed
us to change the shape and orientation of the orbit to explore the poles of Saturn in the Rings and all of the icy
Moons by carrying a lot less fuel though we would have to have carried otherwise it gave us the energy to go all the way
across the Rings and fly between the gap between the Rings and the planet
because of these flybys of Titan using Titan as a gravitational slingshot and
so many of the other remarkable discoveries that have been made by Cassini for example mapping the
composition of the plume of Enceladus would not have been possible without
Titan there we could not have gotten to these places without using Titan
and so I think Titan has really been a particularly special place to explore just because of all of the complexity in
the system and the the puzzles that it has given us foreign
[Music]
[Applause] well hello everybody this is Scott
Roberts from explore scientific and you are watching the 24th Global star party
we have a an incredible lineup of speakers as we always do
and great astrophotographers are here too and uh so you're going to have a
very pleasant night you might even hear some music or you know
somebody's non-defense sneaking in some music into this show so we love it I'm
pointed here yeah our first Speaker tonight will be David
Levy David has attended every Global star party and I you know I don't know
of any uh organization or Club that's run 24 Global or 24 star parties of any
kind uh you know within a one-year period so normally it's it would be
limited to maybe 10 or 12 star parties you know so we've uh I think we're we're
starting to make some new ground here and uh uh David is of course if you've
been following the show you know he's a dear friend he's a dear friend uh so many people uh in the astronomical
world and uh in the literary world as well um uh and I was I was looking at uh
David's book a night watchman's Journey and I know David so well that sometimes
I forget um you know his uh his remarkable achievements you know
um and so I was reading the back of the book here and it starts off and it says David Levy a native of Montreal and a
long time resident of Arizona his Central role in the discovery of comet Shoemaker Levy nine that impacted
Jupiter in 1994 brought him to the attention of news media around the world I remember watching that that whole uh
spectacular uh event it was it was such a a heady time uh that uh you know I I
couldn't stop thinking about these these pieces of this Comet that was going to impact Jupiter
um and uh you know thousands or hundreds of thousands or maybe a millions of
people got some sort of a view of uh of this event whether it was going to be
through a telescope on television uh you know on their computers maybe that was
still an early time a lot of people weren't really into the web like they are now but uh anyways it was it was
amazing and uh you know and so it says
that unprecedented Comet plus his remarkable discovery of 22 other comments and his many books and hundreds
of inspiring talks on astronomy have made Levy the most widely known amateur astronomer of our time
and that's true folks so I am uh it is an honor Bravo again have uh
Dr David Levy um be here on the global star party and
to share his insights and his poetry with us thank you David
well thank you Scotty and it's certainly great to be here at the 24th star party
and I hope there'll be a lot more really getting used to these uh Zoom
Cloud meetings they really I am
they're hard to get tired they're hard to get tired of but they're very very
special and I also am I was pleased that you say how I am a friend to so many
people in the amateur astronomy and professional communities that's true one
of those people that I was honored to call friend was the astronomer Bart Bak
and I first read from him when I was um
excuse me I first read about him when I was a little little boy reading The
Golden Book of astronomy and some of you may even have a copy of a book like that obeyed Dave Liker has
a copy of that book I'll bet you at Gunther who is in the audience tonight might have a copy of that book I'm glad
that he is here tonight to enjoy our store party
[Music] just a moment
okay and
I was reading that and there was a forward by Bart Bak and what he did was that he he made us
see he forced his Raiders to see the magic of the night sky
he forced as he talked about his beloved Milky Way because he and his wife Priscilla were really champions of the
Milky Way and he forced us to see astronomy as a big picture when we go out under the
night sky so you can imagine when another friend of mine Peter jadaki was visiting
Arizona and I was driving him to the airport for his return flight and Peter said David your assignment
should you agree to accept it is to interview Bart Bak for me and I said oh I can't do that oh no no
no no no no no no no no no no and he said why not and I said well Bart Park is a famous astronomer
he's uh he sits on top of a on a big throne and uh he owns the
universe no no no no no you you can interview well if you want to do it do it
if you don't I'll understand I let Peter off at the airport and I quickly drove home and I said let's get
this darn thing over with except the phone and I called the number Peter had left me the phone rang and
Bart answered hello this is Buck I am just out of the shower I am
dripping wet I have a beautiful girl in the kitchen who is cooking lunch
so be quick and I said Dr balk this is David leaving quick be quick be quick and I said well
maybe I could call you back another time and he said no no no the beautiful girl in the kitchen leaves later today
I told him what I wanted to do be quick be quick and he said why don't you come by tomorrow
and I found out where he lived he lived on Sierra Vista Drive so I
thought he meant Sierra Vista Arizona but uh that's quite a long drive from
where I live but it turns out Sierra Vista Drive is not far from the University of Arizona
I got to his house and I had a whole bunch of questions to ask him we sat down he was a lot calmer there and he
didn't go be quick again and he uh I asked him I said Dr Bach
20 years ago you wrote a book called The astronomers universe and the first five words of that book are astronomy is on
the move twenty years later how would you assess those words
would you know I never got to ask another question he went into this
thing about the progress of astronomy over the last over the 20th century it
was absolutely brilliant an hour went by turned the tape over another hour went by I had to excuse
myself to go to the car to get another tape and that tape we filled up there were
two hours that he spent answering that question I never got to answer another to ask him another question
but he gave me quite a bit to write the article uh to actually send the interview over
to Peter I'm not sure what Peter did with it but I decided that I have it enough that I
would write an article and I wrote it for a magazine that David eicher who you'll be hearing pretty soon
is very familiar with astronomy magazine at the time Richard Berry was the editor
and it was my first major article and I know he'd added a lot of it out
but one thing that I'm glad that he didn't edit out was the first words that I
wrote in the beginning I wrote there was no book and the Milky
Way was without form and void and I remember we went to Riverside
telescope makers conference a few months after that and I
was able to meet Richard Berry for the first time the first thing he did looked at me he said in the beginning there was
no book he said I'm changing a law to your article but I ain't changing that
it was so much fun to see that thing and that turned out to be the opening lines
of the biography that I eventually wrote about him
uh biography that is now called The Man Who Sold the Milky Way a biography of
Bart Bak we got to be very good friends
when Bart passed away in August of 1983 it was it was really hurting me because I felt
I had lost a friend and I had I would lose a lot more friends since then
but barks Bart's death hit me pretty hard and I remember the thing the one thing
he said to his students he was telling me that story and he introduced it by saying by the way all
of my students have to call me Dr Bach until they get their doctorates
and I didn't have a doctorate at the time I said well what about me I've called you Bart ever since I met you and
Bart looked at me and he said you are an exception to every rule I ever made
but this is what Bart advised his students to do and I
think it's the most important advice that any astronomer has ever given any
student and here it is when you are in an observatory at three
o'clock in the morning and you see the clock and it says three o'clock stop your photograph he would
say stop your photometer walk away from the telescope walk down the stairs one two
three go to the front door walk out the front door now walk 20 Paces not 21 20
Paces no more no less then stop and just look up at the sky just to make
sure you're making bloody sense and with on that notice on that note
back to you Scotty thank you oh thank you very much David thank you
um you know I I've been in uh David Levy's observatory
in the johnak observatory many times and I believe that there is a backlit glass
plate of the Milky Way that was from box collection is that right yes there is
it's out there right now and it has a little plaque on it and the
plaque says Priscilla Bach November 1975.
and I asked part about that and he said that the last event that Priscilla ever
went to before she died was the opening of the flandro planetarium and she died about four days after the
opening oh weeks after that uh the the um
director called him Bart and asked him to come back he said you left something at the planetarium
and Bart said well send someone send someone bring it to my house I don't want to leave he said oh no you have to
pick it up please just come so he came they walked him into the theater
and they showed the chair that Priscilla was sitting on
and a little plaque that said Priscilla F Bach November 1975.
and I've never forgotten that he never forgot about about that and that plaque is now on those
transparencies that are in the observatory that you've seen Scotty wow that's very that's very touching
huh a lot of history um that uh David's been able to dive
into uh with knowing such luminaries as Barb Bach and Clyde Tama and many others
um you know I I hope at one point that there's uh you know a compendium of all
of uh David's articles his star Trails articles and all the rest of it that he's written
um it's it's very rich and uh very personal our next speaker
uh is David J Iker and again this is an this is another great
um uh iconic person in the astronomy world uh
David has done uh amazing things through uh astronomy magazine through his deep
Sky magazine before that and whatever he did before that I'm sure he was writing
about the universe and giving lectures about it and inspiring people about
looking up at the at the sky his his uh his latest book is
um is uh let me get a little bit better view here is this is not the latest one
but one of the latest ones and uh it's uh galaxies and um you know the and the
ins inside the universe is star cities uh David was kind enough to do a show with me we talked a lot about the book
and how it was created and everything um what it says about David on the
inside is that he's the editor-in-chief of astronomy magazine and a board member of the International
starmus Festival uh which will kick off next year sometime he has also written
shows for the Adler Planetarium and NASA and is the co-author with Brian May rock
star Brian May of of mission Moon 3D which I think is the latest thing that
that has recently come out and is the author of the new Cosmos uh David is
um uh you know approachable uh friendly
extremely knowledgeable and he's been here now on many of our Global star
parties helping us understand uh the universe in and explaining it not only
the way that David eicher can so David thank you very much for coming on to our program
I am going to give you the spotlight here we have a lot of people here in our
looks like Hollywood Squares here thank you Scott and thank David for that
wonderful talk about bart what they they anyone who ever met Bart Bach knows
they don't make him like that he was really an incredible uh person and your friendship with him is very inspiring
David thank you David they threw out the mold after they made him indeed yep and
I love to talk about galaxies and and actually the latest book with Brian is even newer than than that one it's
cosmic clouds but I won't talk about that really distant stuff tonight that's you know that's far off who who cares
it's way out there in the Deep um tonight I'm going to talk a little bit as we go outward from our talks
about how incredible the universe is from Earth now we've made it all the way out to Venus tonight a little bit I'd
like to talk just a little bit about Venus and why did Venus turn inside out
which is a major uh conundrum discovery of the past generation about our
so-called sister planet well you know that Venus aside from the
Sun and the Moon is the brightest thing in the sky it's often uh claimed to be the sister
planet of Earth although it has essentially nothing to do it could hardly be more dissimilar than Earth it
is uh about 95 our diameter it's a rocky planet it's about 82 percent of Earth's
mass Venus has but after that the similarity ends it's 30 percent closer
to the Sun the surface temperature the first spacecraft that landed on Venus
discovered was in excess of 800 degrees Fahrenheit that ended speculation that
there might be life on Venus of course we had stories not only about Mars but about Venus and essentially everywhere
else we wanted to find life looking back at us the surface pressures on Venus of
course are also crushing there about 90 times greater than the surface pressure
on Earth so it's a very very cruel and hellish environment the planet Venus on the
surface it has a 90 to 95 percent carbon dioxide atmosphere as well that has
undergone a runaway greenhouse gas carbon dioxide heating the atmosphere of
Venus so it's a nasty place and we really discovered the details of
how unearth-like it is beginning in 1966 when the Soviet of an era 3 landed it it
is it and several other Landers operated briefly on the surface of Venus before
they gave way and they returned a lot of basic data about what our so-called
sister planet is like the story really turned on a dime in a big way uh almost
a generation later in 1989 NASA launched the Magellan spacecraft and it was a
radar mapper and a very sophisticated craft that studied Venus in the early
1990s quite extensively this Mission produced a lot of
surprising results about Venus the most incredible came when it really mapped
the surface of Venus in detail for the first time underneath that thick
cloudy carbon dioxide Rich atmosphere unless they have active resurfacing like
our Earth does we have a lot of erosion and resurfacing processes on our planet so we don't see the early record of what
happened in the inner solar system on Earth very much it's very difficult to
see but of course one good glance at the moon or at Mercury or some other body
shows that the inner solar system was an incredibly dangerous violent
place that underwent this so-called late heavy bombardment um early in the history of the solar
system those craters are still very abundant looking out at the Moon even with a pair of binoculars
um and the thing that really stymied planetary scientists early on in the
close examination of Venus was that it lacks craters so why is that what happened with Venus
it's in the inner solar system it's 30 percent closer to the Sun than than we are than the moon is how could Venus be
almost devoid of craters have a very small count of craters something serious
and in a big big way happened to the surface of Venus so that was a major
mystery to investigate starting in the early 1990s on Earth of course we have a
lot of processes one of them that's important is plate tectonics that plays
a major role in our Evolution and helps to resurface our planet moving plates
sink on Earth by subduction that carries a lot of water back into the interior of
our planet on Venus however plate tectonics either existed very briefly uh long ago or it
never existed we don't know for sure but it doesn't exist now and so because of
this continents ocean basins systems of Ridges at plate boundaries all those
things that kind of uh Mark our Earth and how we think about land on our Earth
the continents that we're on they don't exist on Venus it just doesn't happen
so the real puzzle was that on Venus uh the data showed from Magellan that the
surface is very young and it wasn't clear why that is at first craters existed some of them a small
number uh but the planet didn't disappear during the late heavy bombardment so what exactly happened
without that erosion without the plate tectonics there was really one major
culprit left and that was volcanism so to cut to the chase here with a lot
of research that followed Magellan uh Venus had enormous volcanic activity in
the past and in fact the cratering record pointed toward a major if you will a catastrophic resurfacing of Venus
that happened sometime in the planet's distant past and it's thought that that was something on the order of more of of
near of between half a billion and a billion years ago and closer to a
billion years ago so somehow the planet catastrophically resurfaced with lava
with volcanism uh the better part of a billion years ago you can put it
um dramatically in the in the terms of understanding planetary science that it was a catastrophic resurfacing the kids
who like to have fun with planetary science like to say uh that the Venus is
the planet that threw up on itself you'll forgive me for that it's a little
little crass to say that perhaps but that's one way to put it okay because it
was a catastrophic uh Planet changing event now why is that what happened we still
don't know why this cataclysm happened on on Venus and and especially when it did
uh clearly it had an enormous amount of stored energy uh that lasted for a long
long time in the interior of the planet and at some point some triggers happened
uh and that energy was released and it burst outward uh and much lava spewed
forth and it made the Venus that we see today
we don't know why it happened as I said when it did the timing of this is a
complete mystery uh what instabilities existed that suddenly gave way uh but
less than a billion years ago and let's just think about this for one minute this is something on the order of when
animal Evolution began on Earth when the first protozoa appeared as animals were
just beginning to evolve on our planet our neighbor our our sister Earth-like
planet that's nothing like Earth had this incredible violent enormous event
going off uh with no one there to to see it um an event that we're just beginning
really to understand today uh nearly a billion years later so there's the real
mystery of Venus is that it's not Earth-like at all of course but it gives us one of the biggest puzzles we we
talked about how that we we think the moon formed uh from a giant impact
and we know that Venus had this cataclysmic resurfacing we don't know exactly how either of those started yet
but as we go out in successive weeks here uh farther out into the universe we'll have more puzzles and more uh
results to explore so next time you look at Venus remember that it is a terrible place and it's
also the planet that completely reconfigured its surface
thank you Scott will do if I could just make a comment right away here
um I was listening to your wonderful presentation David they get better each day thank you and uh but I was thinking
of when you wanted your visits here when your dad was around you and your dad and
I know how close you were with him came over and I believed we watched Lincoln the movie together yeah yeah knowing how
much he loved the Civil War and how much he admired Lincoln and how much you
admired Lincoln and then just suddenly I'm thinking listening to you talking about Venus and
I'm suddenly thinking about Abraham Lincoln and you and your dad
thank you David and and you know he admired you and Wendy so much and
enjoyed visiting out there sorry don't mean to hijack the conversation here that's all right but but uh what what a
uh you know an extended family that felt like with my dad he had great uh
feelings of of uh of friendship and of love for you guys too he was an amazing
person you not so much but he was oh no you know sometimes the Apple Falls a
great distance you know not in your case real honor to know the man and to know
you thank you David that's a great memory we have thanks so much very cool
thank you David thank you David and David now what's interesting about this
particular star party this is the 24th Global star party today is the 24th of
November and in 1924 this week
um Hubble had published his book on or his theory
about the expanding universe and so that that's very very interesting
um and on this day of the 24th Jeremiah Horrocks
makes a helioscope to safely view the transit of Venus in 1639. so it's a lot
of uh I didn't plan any of this stuff okay so what I don't it's Twilight Zone
stop that's right that's right Scott yes your magic that's what we're discovering
tonight [Laughter] thank you thank you well it's it is I
just started thinking about all this stuff and it's going gosh what is the number 24 I need to go bet on 24 or
something right now so so anyhow but uh I wanted to take a
couple of minutes we have uh we have Molly wakling with us today and we have lots of astrophotographers with this
today but um uh Molly has clear skies and uh she's got the moon there so I
thought we'd take a couple of minutes looking at the moon uh before we go to our next speaker which is uh Libby in
the Stars yeah sure let me get that pulled right up here in just a second
all right um so we are looking at a live view of the Moon from my backyard here in the
Bay area of California I have an eight inch Casa green the one that's in the in the picture there uh on
my Paramount my tea and a monochrome camera mounted on there uh to to look at
the Moon tonight so um these are some live views here now uh some of the uh
the main features here um so we have uh the Sea of Tranquility mare trunculi tatis here and right about
in this area is where the Apollo 11 Landing occurred and where the um the
Lander module still exists um and uh
uh we have uh down over here in the lower left is uh Taiko crater which when
the moon is full is very obvious and you can see the Rays coming off of it all the ejecta from whatever Rock slammed
into them into the moon but in this gibbous phase those rays are a little harder to see because of the Steep
Shadows since since we're it's located near the um uh the Terminus here the Terminator
the Terminator uh and then uh up up kind of in the in the
middle here uh you know this is a large area of what looks like it doesn't have a whole lot of craters and a lot of this
is lava uh back when the moon was was younger and more geologically active uh
that filled in a lot of older craters so kind of have this uh this much larger
sea I think it's probably even referred to as an ocean uh even though of course there's no water there and this crater
here kind of in the middle is uh Copernicus crater one that I'm sure any
Moon Observer has observed many times because it's got a very cool uh the the
edges of it uh the way that The Rock has slumped in on the sides kind of gives it a really cool rigid uh edge with lots of
um man words are hard for you tonight for some reason lots of uh lots of interesting texture on on the sides of
the crater there it's a terrorist thing I think you're talking about terracing on the walls yes yeah that's that's yeah it's a great way to describe it I know
that like like uh diligent Moon observers have terms for all of these things I'm not a selenite myself but
um I do appreciate a nice view of the Moon I just haven't studied it in great detail
you're always welcome to call on Jerry Hubble you know if you excellent yeah
great okay all right so our next uh our next speaker here is
um uh Libyan the Stars Libby's been actually here at explore scientific for
the last couple of days and she she wanted to come here and I get closer to
what we do here at uh at our facility and she's been helpful she's helped put
together orders uh that are going out I'm I'm sure it would be the recipient
would be surprised to know that a 10 year old helped get their order on its
way but Libby also had she did some recording today and showed kind of an
out of the box experience of a four and a half inch Newtonian telescope and so they're putting that video together and
I hope to have it in a couple of days it'll be it'll be fun to show Libby what she's done but um Libby uh you are
um uh giving I can't remember which which
number of of uh uh presentation that you're giving right now but your
presentation is about black holes right yeah okay
yeah Libby we we can't hear you very well maybe you need to get closer
is that better that is way better okay uh so another theme is EXT
um a lot of uh a lot of sci-fi's might like relate to black holes since Sci-Fi
movies May relate to black holes and a lot of people won't think it's real well
it's real I mean it just doesn't seem real because the thought of getting sucked up by a giant
hole in space doesn't seem real you know I mean most of the stuff out there
people won't believe it's true because I mean it sounds crazy and everything well it is true and uh a lot of black
holes I find them really interesting and I think the younger generation
um a lot of that stuff gets them interesting to show me because I think that's not
um someone getting sucked up by a black hole sounds like oh no it sounds like
unrealistic to some people to where they want to start doing astronomy to learn more and I think they're pretty cool
I mean they're not the brightest of subjects to talk about but I mean they're awesome to like observe in every
game um and I know I've been like looking at black holes the past couple of days
but uh I just figured out there's one only one thousand light years away which is pretty close which is right down the
road from us in Galactic terms and everything which is pretty scary I mean
if you're gonna be like hold that seem to come suck us up and we're gonna all die in a couple years
uh I mean it's a little bit scary but I don't know what people think like it's
scary but when you think of really think about it and you start learning about them you're like hey that's pretty cool
um well uh at space camp we would have these little uh little meetings every
day about before bedtime and the lady would talk to us about dinner Ryan nebula and now I'm going to Ryan nebula
there's black holes and a lot of that stuff so I asked her
at the end and I said what happens if you get sucked up by a black hole and
she went you get spaghetti effect because they the gratification
I say that 10 times really fast I see it in a textbook it's a real term
I didn't think that was true um so when I got home from space camp I
first wanted to search that up because I mean the get a vacation
what the heck I mean that doesn't sound real I mean it's not like he could just be like oh
we're just gonna get spaghettified I mean who even came up with that name so of
course I started to have to research about this and I started wondering what happens when you get sucked up in a
black hole because I know a lot of the Sci-Fi movies out there will be like your face warps or you turn purple or
you you go look crazy but I actually found the room like what actually happens so
spaghettification is actually a building and that you will get stretched out and
the radiation will stretch it your body all out and all your muscles into the
black hole and I thought that was pretty cool I mean that's a lot for a 10 year old to be researching
and then just randomly get the answer it's the gamification
um I I thought that was really amazing because a lot of sci-fi movies uh I like
a lot of sci-fi's movies and they don't really like give a real answer what happens when you get sucked up by a
black hole but I thought this was pretty cool because you know this it doesn't sound
real you know now someone won't even believe it's something in the real world
that's like simple they'll be like oh guess what this happened no that didn't
happen you'll get spaghettified I mean it's hard to believe it's it's
it's really cool to think about it though and I think it's really nice for the younger generation
um that's one of the things that got me interested in space because I thought wow that could actually happen maybe if
I researched it I could do something you know to learn more about it and do
some more and like events and learning about black holes and
the other day I was still researching about this because I'm still wondering like this is a hard subject it's a hard
thing to process that you're gonna get turned into a noodle if you get anywhere
near a black hole in that radiation and so um and so I looked it up
you know all that stuff and um I was wondering what would happen if you
get like what happens like do you come out of a black hole you don't just come out in
like a noodle in space and I came up with the idea of a theory
to where basically your whole body shuts out just all torn up and then since
we're made out of the same stuff as stars when we get from the black hole all our stuff will just disintegrate in
the Galaxy that's why I'm going off in my theory I know there's many theories out there that's what I came up with
based on the research that I have it's a lot to take in that
spaghettification um and I was wondering about that name too you know regular Master terms would
be like radiation and radiation lunar observations but this
one just sounded a little bit off because it was spaghettification you know spaghetti
[Music] I wonder what NASA worker thought like oh hey maybe you should call this
the application Libby have you seen um have you been
able to see uh like the first image of a black hole that was published
um yes I have seen a image of a black hole from I have not seen the first
not sure if it's the first announcement but it's from and it's so cool you can see like
redness around it and a lot of the what people think of as the black holes and
what they look like today it doesn't really make sense because they think it's just like
shiny like there's a little shiny American that's just rolling around you know stars are twisting around it and
everything but what I found from the Orion Nebula
from NASA I was shocked and like the next day I was telling my friends like this is a black hole you're gonna get
sucked up by it you're gonna be spaghettified I was like this is pretty cool you know
it's right around it and it was so pretty I mean it's hard to think that
something that can suck you up and like tear you apart get spaghettified but
it's so beautiful I mean I know we're probably not that close to it but that was beautiful for uh
it was beautiful to see uh I mean as beautiful to see death uh
and I was really uh I was kind of surprised because what I see when I look
at black holes I usually like cartoon mics and there's just like stars around
the black hole it's just black and um I was like that's that's what I had
said in my head like my expectations for what it would look like but it was a lot more different
um I know I know uh it it's kind of like a fun thing to talk
about my age at playgrounds you know kids they're like the idea of like black
holes and stuff I know that's one thing that they they're they're really interested to show on me and there's
going to be one thing they'll get kids interested into astronomy that's really it or at least my age level because
I mean the kids don't want to learn about Saturn they want to learn about something that you can get spaghettified
from you know something that comes with the space vacuum
wow okay all right thank you I thought I was 10 years old
he liked he liked the idea he just liked this idea of being
stretched beyond belief you like you like blowing stuff up too
that's right so Mike overacher was able finally able
to join us I'm glad you got your video fixed that's great yep so
um uh thanks for thanks for joining us uh our next speaker is all the way from
Nepal okay uh DT good Tom and she has in
her last two talks she gave talks about satellites and the importance of satellites uh in in our society and you
know the technology that they bring uh but uh uh I I we were talking earlier
she said you know I want to come on but I'm not sure what to talk about not yet I said how about the expansion of the
universe so she so she's put together a great presentation about the expansion of the
universe and we're gonna hear it all the way from Nepal DT thank you for coming on our program
thank you hello to everyone hello
actually uh initially the universe was taught to be Statics and not expanding
yeah you know when all but I understand formulated his gender relativity equation and it has shown that the
Universe was expanding but when he talked with many scientists and the astronomers of that time everyone agreed
that the Universe was static and not expanding though this made Einstein to
think that his theory prediction was maybe wrong maybe the the thing which is acceptable
by everyone maybe it's wrong so he modified his theory and he added
cosmological constant Lambda in his equation that prevented the explanation
of universe but Einstein's Universe was like a pencil holder with its tips with
the universe so as a holding the total uh collapse and forever expand
later in 1929 when hobbels made Landmark observation that stored that the Galaxy
sold a shift toward the red part of the spectrum and there Comes The hovelcon
Stand which is not an actual constant since the rate of expansion of the
universe is increasing and the value of value of the hover constant is also a variable uh and then the and Einstein
removed the Lambda from his equation are referring it uh is the greatest blunder in his life but today we use the
cosmological constant to describe the most unknown things in the universe the Dark Matter Etc so the greatest blunder
of Einstein now this was having said cosmological constant is the greatest Bond blunder of his life and this this
is the history for the haunt of the expanded universe but this made this step Stephen Hawking to think if the
universe is expanding what if we reverse the scenario in words it's so the
universe explored it from a single point and this is called that big bang and the Big Bang is formed by this step in
Hawking um and I have some presentation here
okay [Music] here is the expanding universe and it's
all dark is government of galaxy planet dark energy and Quantum flux inflation
Big Bang explanation Etc on here I have uh pictures from the one short video
okay okay wait
are you able to listen the universe is bigger every day and what we understand now is that the amount it's getting
bigger is getting bigger every day the expansion of the universe is accelerating
ironically what this means is that as time goes on even though the universe is getting bigger we see less of it
how is the universe getting bigger finding the answer has become one of the
greatest quests in modern science two years ago we were trying to measure how much the universe is slowing down
over time it makes sense right an explosion happened a long time ago the Big Bang
scientists assume the Big Bang would slow down and gravity would pull things
back together but that's not what they were seeing in the cosmos
astronomers think that the Universe appears to be expanding at an
accelerating rate now we have no idea what's causing this so I'll let you in on a secret here
whenever astronomers don't know something they tend to say dark energy
even though scientists are baffled they know this thing called Dark Energy makes up 70 percent of what's out there on the
cosmos it's stronger than gravity
and may eventually be stronger than the forces that hold atoms together
my body is held together by the electromagnetism in my atoms but what if the expansion of space increases and
accelerates and it even overcomes those forces [Music]
astronomers are calling that the big rip and although we don't know this will happen it's a possibility that eventually the expansion will get strong
enough to rip apart atoms to rip apart our very bodies even matter will fly
apart foreign
way to wrap our brains around the expanding Universe in the Big Bang is to use an analogy for instance tennis balls
on a piece of Alaskan here each tennis ball represents a Galaxy so this one
could be our own Milky Way galaxy and the elastic is space itself
now since we know the universe is expanding it's like taking this elastic and stretching it
now as the elastic expands the galaxies start to spread out and get more and more remote from one another
so our simple model of the universe with tennis balls and elastic literally breaks down if we try to apply it to one
by dark energy because if we're trying to show a universe in which the rate of expansion between the galaxies is actually
accelerating over time our elastic would have to stretch infinitely far and we
would have to run away from each other instantly fast now we can't do that with a simple model and that in a way is an
example of just how bizarre a dark energy dominated Universe could be
um and now initially the universe was thought to be Statics and not expanding
our as I said earlier about this Einstein Aesthetics Universe of constant
positive endless curvatures and here is in the as we know this Edwin have us and
the American astronomer Edwin hovels made the observation in 1925 and was the
first to prove the universe is expanding he proved that there is a direct relationship between the speed of
distant Galaxy and their distance from the earth and uh as we have came there about the Howell's law and Edwin hovels
and uh here is his telescope that's um empty Evans and 100 inch telescope
[Music] expanding universe and Ervin how was determined that the greatest distance
the greatest the distance of the of the galaxies from the earth the creators the
red shift of the light is emitted and revealed for the greater the speed and here's the simple relationship between
the Harvest distance and which we use and um is the hover constant and the current
value of the our constitute is about 70 kilometer but about the according to data just now it is 73.2 something area
of a kilometer per second MPC the Howell constant is 73.4 and
um as we know the doppler's effect also explained the universe and that's about the rare shift
and the evidence of from the Doppler effect is um about the blue saved relates shift and Edwin hovel so that
there is a red seat of the star Spectrum which so the Galaxy are moving away from
us and it can disprove that our expanding the universe about the
expanding universe and how the red shift uh so this universe is expanding like
original wavelength and here is the original cosmological rest shift and here is the original wavelength with
space distance Galaxy is contrast and here is this um where it is expanding
like space and distance Galaxy and from the or they are going far away from the Earth according to the time increasing
enough time in the expanding Universe if everything is moving from away from us then in the
past everything was a lot closer maybe and then density was greater and
pressure was greater and temperature was higher and some uh after this um getting
the balance so we are able to live here because of the balance temperature and density pressure and sometime in the
past it was very small and hot and it is believed that the Universe was on this
contrasting one way in um expanding or dividing with according to the um time and it conclusion they
are still with the residual radiation are left over from his dense hot prayers
and here's thing and here's the expanding universe and that's all about
uh I prepare hairs for today about the expanding universe and I have some
introduction in this theory about the expanding Universe for to present here
thank you wow DT I'm really impressed
I'm really impressed uh I gave DT uh something less than 24 hours to put that
presentation wow so I think she did a very good job so
that's great okay um uh uh our Molly had uh mentioned that
she has Mars in the uh yeah at this point let's take a picture
um give me just a second here there we go uh so this is my uh my monochrome
cameras on here so just a black and white image but uh we do have Mars here
sorry my phone's making noises um and I'm gonna go pull up my little map here real quick to see what future
we are looking at at the present moment uh but you can see with the different colors on the surface uh kind of some of
the larger surface features of Mars um oh my goodness
um yeah so we're not looking at the Mariner Valley side at the at the present moment
but uh there there's a large area of kind of darker red uh geological feature
here um as opposed to the lighter red kind of less mountainous area up um toward the top
uh if I had uh the color camera on there and I process an image of it you would
be able to see the small white spot that is the South Pole however I'm a little
bit short of focal length in this view uh so you can't quite see it hmm great great thank you thank you
thank you there's a dust storm if I if I'm not uh
if I'm right on Mars right now okay all right so I think that I think
I'm sorry go ahead go ahead uh yeah I think I heard that that one was forming but I it doesn't look like it's gotten
too bad yet not as bad as during the 2018 uh opposition at least yeah all
right thank you so uh uh we're going to uh
talk with uh with Chuck Allen uh the astronomical League uh the astronomic
league is the sponsor of the Explorer alliances door prizes
um during the global star party and uh as is tradition uh the league reads the
answers from the last Global star party and then ask the questions for the for
This Global Star Party the answers are to be emailed not sent in chat okay
because they don't count uh but you would uh answer them at explore Alliance
I'm going to put it in chat here at explorescientific.com
and the way that it works um is you would you would put in you would submit your answers okay all the
correct answers will land in the uh in the email um uh and we will at random pick one of
those correct answers out of the out of the group of correct okay uh you will
then have a chance to win one of the door prizes from our prize Partners which include the mark Slade remote
Observatory Gary Palmer astronomy and the vacuum of space astronomy gifts and
and explore scientific as well so um just to keep it fun uh we
um um uh always have the astronomical League uh choose the questions
um they decide who the win you know they verify the winner and uh
um and then we let those winners know by email and so Chuck are you with us
hello Chuck I can see him there
yeah he's in the black hole he's in a black hole Yeah well we're going to come back
then okay later currently being spaghettified okay now I'm hungry for dinner all right
okay since since uh Chuck is uh apparently not there or incapacitated or
something hopefully not incapacitated uh we are going to go uh jump to Mike
overacker Mike is new to the global star party and uh I would I thought that we'd
have him come on uh Mike and I were talking earlier today and um uh he is uh
he's coming on as an explore Alliance Ambassador uh so I thought well gosh we
should have him introduced here on global star party and we started talking about different things that he's uh
passionate about of course he loves all things astronomy uh he loves astronomy
Outreach activities that he does of which there are many um but uh he loves meteorites too he's
also a musician you can see a couple of guitars behind him and so um Mike uh I'm going to give you the
stage here I'm hoping that my microphone is working is it working it's working okay your
videos working your microphone's working what are the other it's all working
yep all right thanks for coming on I'm Mike overracker um I've been in astronomy Outreach since
about 2004 when I just before I retired from the fire department I was a firefighter for 24 years and uh
hazard's materials technician for actually specialist for for about 15
years or so anyways um astronomy is great but on rainy night
rainy nights you know there's good to get something else going so I got into meteorites I am a member of the
international meteorite collector Association and if you've seen my collection you know that I'm definitely a collector
and uh two main types of meteorites uh there's uh chondrites and there's
octahedrides and uh condrites are basically uh
meteorites that are conglomerations of uh collisions of other
of other bodies and they form this uh basically a conglomerate and a crush of
of small pieces and these small pieces are usually circular and they're called
chondrials and uh this is a
gonna try to get this up here so people can see this is a Conjuring it's a little bit
out of oh there we go now we got Focus so those uh shiny um uh pieces in there I guess are
metallic right right those those are those are iron nickel iron and the rest of it is a uh basically a crush of uh
dust and grains of sand and so on and so forth meteoric that's a pretty big
meteor uh yeah this one is easy right this one's about five pounds it's NWA 4488
and uh NWA means northwest Africa is where it was found and uh
these chondrites are rather they're rather common about 90 about 90 of the uh of the meteors that fall onto the
earth's surface is uh our chondrites um about a ton a day
land on the Earth and uh but you also have to realize that you know if a ton of a day
Falls onto the earth the earth is 75 water so chances are good 1500 pounds
splashes in the ocean and we never get to see it and uh
chondrites are rather common that's a uh got them several of them around here
's another one I gotta have to do this and put it in front of my face so the camera will there you go
okay this one is called a Gold Basin oh wow this one comes from Arizona
and you can sort of see on this side a dark patch yeah the dark
patch is called Fusion crust and then you can see the the the inside of it
kind of lighter colored made up of uh small pieces of debris that Fusion crust
is what uh is one of the ways that we tell them meteorite is is landed it's uh
where it burned as it came into the uh as it came into the atmosphere and uh people automatically assume that
meteorites fall all the way to the ground well they all fall all the way around but I mean that they zoom in all the way
to the ground and that's not necessarily true when you see a shooting star most people assume that whenever it goes
out it burnt up in the sky and that's not necessarily true either as they come
in they slow down from friction that's why they glow and have that plasma around them that burns
the surface and they slow down to the point where they're no longer glowing they can still
be 90 100 000 feet into the air and they go into
something called Dark Fall at that time they're just falling to the Earth at
standard falling speeds and they land on the earth and people assume that they're hot
and for the most most part if you happen to see one and land and you walk over
there and pick it up it's going to be very very cold because it's been in the upper atmosphere and before that it was in
space so the amount of short amount of heat as it
comes in is not enough to warm the entire body for the most part okay and those are chondrites and uh
there's several more of them here this is a Wolf Creek this one's from Australia
and you can see the surface is kind of uh
rough and this is all Fusion crust on it there's no there's no look inside this one this is uh what's called this is
what's called an individual in other words it's a complete Stone
and the one thing that really really really is a good indicator of meteorite people
ask you know how can you tell if it's meteorite first of all it's magnetic because it usually has some amount of
iron in it although not always but another way is
is this way this is a Campo de suelo
and look at these undulations
let me get behind it there there you go there you go the camera wants to focus on my face yeah I don't know why
it's kind of but um this is gosh you wouldn't believe how heavy this is to hold down here
um those are called regma glyphs and what they are is as this as the
Stone comes in to the Earth's atmosphere it's usually tumbling and as it tumbles
it creates these Eddies of plasma across the surface and these are very very violent Eddies
and they scoop the material out as it melts this this body as it's coming into the Earth's atmosphere and it creates
these thumb prints or rigmoglyphs and it's uh one of the ways that you can really tell what it is but
sometimes let me get this one up this is really rare
this is the same fall as that last one okay if you look at it there are very very
few regma glyphs this is oriented this one basically came in and flew in
rather than tumble and as it flies in it creates basically a wing shape
oh wow and that's pretty much the way it came in yeah and you do not find them like this very often and another neat
thing about this I showed this to uh kindergarteners all the time
because uh first of all they can handle any of my meteorites I'm not I'm not a
Persnickety about that but this one here I wish we had smell-o-vision this this
is six thousand years old and it still smells burned
it's the most amazing thing the other camper doesn't smell burned but this one it still smells like it like it just
fell it's on it's six thousand years sitting on the Earth's surface and it still smells it's so it's amazing
huh and um one of the really really cool things
about octahedrites which I've been showing you here which are iron meteorites is this uh pattern it only happens in in
meteorites iron meteorites and it takes it's what happens whenever
iron and nickel crystallize and cool over millions of years it
allows us an iron and nickel to form into crystals it allows them to line up
but it only can do that over millions of years we cannot reproduce that process
here on Earth and it creates this thing here
oh yeah called vidmate Statin pattern and this is only in meteorites only in
Iron meteorites and this in Azan Moana this one came from
the Nordic region let's see I'm not sure exactly where I can't even
read here Sweden came from Sweden and but they don't necessarily show that
same thing here's a dornino this is also
yeah some Chinese yeah and it shows no binman Statin pattern at
all and um
just a couple more really cool ones and I'll move on
we already talked about stunning meteorites and we talked about iron meteorites and there's actually one in between that uh actually Scott and I
discussed and they're called palisites or Stony irons really creative here
and this is a breaking and wait let me get
is it focusing on it uh not yet no not quite uh it's trying
it's trying let's try sirachio here this is bigger okay that might work yeah
oh yeah look at that oh cool yeah there's our um
that is metal and amongst the metal is uh our crystals of Bala Bean
and that all those Olivine crystals are actually Peridot meteoric Peridot
Peridot is is you can get on the Earth and uh it's found all over the place
around here actually but meteoric Peridot is quite a bit purer
and uh I'm going to show you you don't normally see them
this is a Peridot Crystal wow they don't normally get this big
that nugget is a crystal that that is one Peridot Crystal yeah this could actually be cut into probably
several gems but normally you'll find them they're
about a quarter of an inch to maybe a half of an inch in size this is rather large
and Just for kicks oh
oh and I'm only gonna be able to hold this
like a crocodile head or something Horizon is all wrecked
this shy of 14 pounds I'm putting that down that one is uh
that's a man right there it's from that it's from nantan Province in China that's actually an observed fall
back in the 1400s and um you can you can usually find them but
they you don't normally find them that big right but um that's just kind of a kind of
very cool that's very cool no one else has ever given a a dissertation on
meteorites on our Global story before that's great thank you you're welcome it was awesome it was
awesome we are going to take a 10 minute break and when we come back uh uh Chuck Allen
is now uh ready and um uh to do the door
prizes but we'll take a 10 minute break and then come back to him and then we're coming back to uh Norman the one and
only Norman Fulham and so yeah
a good thing it's a good thing [Laughter]
uh we'll be back in just a few minutes here so
are we off well the mics are still hot okay
but we're at a 10 minute break sorry about that oh no problem
no problem last minute uh correction it happens
well I should have looked at them before these were the ones given to me by uh someone else
we'll punish them at the next Alcon yes [Laughter]
okay I'll be right back guys I'm going to uh make a little
stop and I will be back with you
foreign
foreign
foreign
[Music]
well we are back and we have uh Chuck uh
from the astronomical league and he is here to
read off the questions from the last Global star party and to read off the
questions for This Global star party now uh the uh the way that this works as I
mentioned before uh you will answer these questions in email and I'll go ahead and put the email down in there
again in chat um in its explore Alliance at
explorescientific.com
and uh when you answer these questions all the correct answers will be put kind
of in a virtual pile and we will at random uh have one selected okay
the the astronomical League officers create these questions and so uh you
know we're proud to have the league working with us on this Chuck Allen has been on our program several times and uh
he always comes up with some uh very good questions I think some some have
been some stumpers too so um but uh uh you know the league is um
the astronomical league is nearing its 75th Anniversary which I think happens next year
um and uh they have uh something like 18
000 members and over 300 clubs and their their reach is now going International
they are working with individuals and I think organizations all over the world
so uh it's a venerable organization uh mostly run by volunteers and
aside from these their presence here at at Global star party they they have uh
events that are held around the country they have a national event called the uh
the uh the Alcon which I've been to several of these and that's where a lot
of the um the the League's presentations of of the uh the awards go out like the
national young astronomers award the um Leslie pelty award the Jack core
climber award all of those are for youth but they have other Awards as well for web design and uh
um I think that for the scientific drawing at the eyepiece and all of these
things so it's um yeah the the tendrils of the league go
go everywhere and uh uh they're a great organization and if you don't belong to
them you should consider joining them now so uh you should uh when you get a
chance goes to Astro League dot org and you can find out more about
them Chuck what what uh where do we start here let's let's do the um I guess the
last Global star party's answers first of all good evening everybody I'm
sorry I wasn't here a little while ago we had a little error on one of the slides that had to be corrected and so
we're ready to go now uh can I share a screen now Scott you sure can all right
all right first of all uh just to hang on this is second
how's that look that's fine okay yeah we always we always like to give a little
uh solar warning to everybody uh before door prizes are handed out it's just a
good thing to review with uh astronomers amateur astronomers around the world especially those who are starting into
astronomy um as I've often said to others uh accidentally seeing the sun through a
telescope can permanently blind you about 500 times faster than you can
react your brain can react to seeing something too bright so it's a mistake you cannot afford to make at all ever
never observe the sum of that professionally made solar filters that include energy rejection filters at the
front end of the telescope that are securely mounted they used to sell telescopes where they have these little
welders glass eye pieces that go on the eyepiece no heat builds up behind those
tremendous heat builds up behind those that can crack them uh never leave a telescope or binoculars
excuse me unattended in daytime where uh young people might accidentally try to
acquire the sun with them if you're using sort of eclipse glasses make sure
they comply with ISO standards the astronomical leak can help you find
reliable sources for eclipse glasses and uh cap your finder scope if you're
showing people the sun through a telescope using proper filters sometimes we forget the cap the finder and people
end up with a hot image of the sun projected on their cheek as they observe
and there are people in local astronomy clubs who are very skilled at solar observing and you can certainly consult
with them I want to I want to also mention some a video that Scott did with the clip
glasses what happens to eclipse glasses at the Sun
yeah it's very bad that's a video you might want to link uh
this this uh to uh Jerry's point there the reason why I made the video is we
actually had an experienced amateur astronomer call us and ask us is it okay
if he looks in his eyepiece wearing eclipse glasses and uh you'll see her in the video which
now I think it's the highest viewed video that we have um but it instantaneously burns through
the eclipse glass filter okay so you can you definitely that part about over the
lens filtration is very important uh you know that's a classic example of
something that is easily omitted from These Warnings perhaps we also we ought to add it and never even occur to be
somebody would try that okay uh the first question this is these were questions uh posed by Carol Lords our
president uh during the last session um and the question was in what years
was the landed meteor shower first discovered and who made the discovery
and the answer was that it was first recorded in 902 A.D and it was recorded
by unnamed Greek Italian and Chinese astronomers so that correct answer was
given by Mark Hilton and he is our winner on question one from those questions
question two was what are the two brightest globular clusters in the sky and the answer uh to that question is
Omega Centauri and 47 to Kenny those of us in the Southern United States have a
shot of to make a Centauri 47th to Canada you're going to need a trip South but they are quite right objects
Michaela Jennings is our winner on question number two
and the third and final question what are trojan asteroids um and they are small rocky bodies
asteroids that share the orbits of larger bodies like planets or moons remaining at a gravitationally stable
position either 60 degrees ahead or behind the main body the most famous of
course are the Trojan asteroids that precedes and follow Jupiter in its orbit and the correct answer to this question
was given by Andrew corkel wow okay so our questions for tonight
first one what is the third most massive planet in
the solar system okay
okay good it's massive and question number two
this first magnitude star in our sky is actually a six star system
which star is it
and finally uh before I get to the third question I'd like to show you one of my
prized possessions this is a 1921 Norton star Atlas oh wow
um and in the era of 1921 the constellation boundaries
were drawn very roughly they were drawn in curves as you see in this Norton star Alice from 1921. it was not until 1930
that Eugene Del Port actually Drew up constellation boundaries then comported
with lines of right Ascension and declination and the iau the international
astronomical Union which is the international body of professional astronomy
adopted those boundaries for the 88 constellations in 1930 and so now the
boundaries look squared off like this and the um of course which you will
notice up here at the top is the boundaries are no longer parallel to the lines of right Ascension and declination
because of course of procession of the Earth's axis and that will become
increasingly apparent as time passes so relating relating to these squared off
boundaries it is now possible to determine the number of square degrees in each constellation and so
what is the largest constellation in the Sky by area that's our third question
and Scott that will that that will do it for tonight thank you very much it wraps
it up that's awesome that's awesome okay I will stop sharing okay there we go thank you
I thought that the um you know I I never knew that they had
uh constellation boundaries that were just kind of curvy and you know
uh I had never seen uh you know you you certainly have seen the older uh like
you ran a matria and the older ebayer type of star Maps where they have the
mythological figures drawn in them but um with no consulate constellation
boundaries uh but I'd never seen them with the swoopy constellation boundaries so that's that's very interesting and
I've seen other Norton star atlases too so that's that's almost like a whole lecture in itself is about Norton
we'll have to we'll have to get into that that's really cool that's really cool well our next speaker here is
Norman Fulham and Norman has been on our program several times he took us through
a tour of his uh of his shop uh uh follow him is it up to optic Fulham
is what it is right yes and um
it was absolutely fascinating going on to telescope [Laughter]
[Music] Ben in telescope manufacturing for a while to see to actually know somebody
who's made their own coding chamber uh not just for a little optic but something like 65 or 70 inches in
diameter okay their own giant polishing machine making their own giant
telescopes as well as making these works of art that he carves out of wood that
are also telescopes and um uh you know he he's an artisan he's an amazing
engineer he is someone that has uh you know he he breaks uh you know all
boundaries and as far as uh What uh astronomy and amateur astronomy is all
about I I really admire this guy um I think he's one of the great telescope makers of the world and uh
um so I'm glad to have you back on and he is an incredible musician too
almost every time he puts like a knot in my throat almost every time when he plays so anyway I'm going to turn it
over to you Norman thank you Scott okay um I don't know if you any I think that
some of you guys saw some of my previous presentation and one of my first one was real I was relating the the most of my
life spam and um my presentation tonight is going to be a
PowerPoint presentation that I did uh many many years ago when I first started
it spans the from let's say 1995 to about 2010 so the the really memory lane
for me at the beginning of the wooden telescope making that I have my business started that way with the wooden
telescope and Optics and um Chuck uh saw the the second presentation that lasted
this week from 2010 to today so maybe next time I will present that one but
let's start with the beginning uh I I translate all they had the headlers of
the presentation today it was in France originally so I I translated in English
for you guys and if you find it too long it's a it's quite a lot of pictures a
lot of uh stuff in that presentation if you aren't too long just let me know I will cut it off I will set it up before
and um I'm just gonna share my screen here how did that go here this
share this there we go beginning of the presentation
foreign from the beginning there we go
so does everybody sees sees everything yeah yeah yes yeah okay
so telescope what an adventure it's been an adventure let me tell you
so let's start with uh my first telescope Bertha one that was her name
a 12 and a half inch F 7.1 telescope I did the Optics first and um took about
nine months to do the Optics and then I did the structure of the telescope that's my young oldest son then it was
six he was about six years old then so our plywood trust you pretty basic type
of telescope that you learned to make with the if you read the books of uh how
to make telescopes so I was very proud of that telescope uh a great image of
the planetary the planets uh pretty much all the all the Deep Sky
too so this is the first telescope that I built Bertha number one
then came uh number two the first wood telescope that I built and the reason
why ability out of wood is that the house we just had bought there in Hudson near Montreal the old owner of the house
was a woodworker and he had left a lot of wood in the uh in the shed so I said
why not build a telescope out of wood YouTube with olive wood that's what it was this one is what made of maple it
was a seven and a seven inch F 4.5 uh that I built as a second telescope I
had convinced my my son that he needed a telescope also so but number two
after that well in that those years I was alone in
Hudson with friends and there was no astronomy group in in the area so I
decided to found it my own group so the lunatics of Hudson and on the left is the first logo that I designed for the
for the club and then I people told me he said well maybe you shouldn't you would need a professional
someone to to draw you a nice um a nice
uh logo of the of the of the club so the Hudson lunatics uh the club doesn't exist anymore in the
area it was replaced by the uh a larger group in Valley Field and in Montreal
also in in Dorval but uh there's a few people that uh started the
the club with me that's still together so after that
I will show you please be careful here it's very
stressful area here oh my gosh it's my very very small basement where
it all started well I built my first telescope um I the my basement is just a part of
the house underneath was uh I had a floor and it's very small about 10 feet
by 11 feet that's the size of my my basement the direction the rest is a
crawling space so I couldn't use it so in this area you have uh my first
meromatic machine you see on the bottom right here a tube of telescope hanging
from the ceiling to dry abrasive on the ground here so that had
I had to do what I had I mean I didn't have a choice to if I wanted to build telescope I had to use the space that I
had so of course it was a dust-free environment
he said the back here I had it was no name for dust there was no room for dust
in that that's true [Laughter]
when people were coming over a friend who are coming over to see my what I was
working on especially is about six feet four and you had to
bend because his head was going in between the two in the basement he couldn't believe I
could work in the area in this [Laughter]
environmental telescopes down there lots of room lots of room [Laughter]
we AK but anyway that's where it started that's where I built my my first
telescopes and um after a while well I had to do a logo
for the company and if you know people that know my telescope the altitude bearings of all my wooden telescope is
the man in the moon so I I hand draw the the logo of the company here to start
with to inspire me or how to do the the altitude bearing wow what year is this Norman uh around
90 95 96 1995-96 so here you see
Bertha number two because um uh when I started to do the wooden
telescopes I took my first telescope I took the mirror out and I said well I'm
going to start I'm going to try to build a better and nicer structure to the telescope so that's what I did uh made
of of this one Coco Bolo in three section because a very long focal length
of 7.1 and I got a little crazy on the design
and you see here my first wooden telescope like I showed you earlier that
uh that I had built made of maple the seven inches 4.5
so at that point I was starting really to start to think uh to start a business uh with Bertha to you when I presented
that telescope at Star parties and at stellophane uh cellophane I won first
place Award with this baby here and uh different places yeah all I also had built a manual
equatorial platform here uh with the with the cable and with that you can
move manually and also the focuser also was a handheld
magnet that you can do the focus without touching the telescope so it was
that's Bertha number two very cool that is called number three at cellophane
I I had one first place award again for craftsmanship so you see me here at a
presenting below the the pink Clubhouse and when the awarded the first prize award there was a big a big picture of
the telescope there on a big screen there on site so uh
I kind of kind of got hooked it's still a thing after a while so this is how Al nagler
here at cellophane uh we meet a lot of kind of people over there that you know
normally would meet um on the left corner of the lower left
picture here is this is the the first wooden telescope that I I didn't present
at this s cellophane if you remember the story I was working that weekend in the club of Valleyfield brought the
telescope this telephone to present it and this is my friend Walter uh here that passed away not too long ago
unfortunately I presented the telescope for me there and then called me up on Saturday night said Norm you've won the
first place award yay on the right bottom right is another
another year that presented the uh two two different telescopes
after that what do I have here okay in my area in Hudson uh
not anymore but in the in those years they were doing Artisan tours of all the artists living in the area it could be a
painter could have been any anyone to do arts and I was a telescope makers I was
part of the tour so I was showing my my work in on my in my backyard to people
coming around and it was a very very popular event you can see here my first
full call tester here with the little bench all the abrasive we're showing people uh how I was uh doing the
grinding this is my mirror magic here the background different telescope on
display foreign telescope in my backyard in into the
gardens so there's a there's a nice 12 and a half inch F5 here that I built for
my friend up here is another another one here a 10 inch
it was a nice setup a nice setting for the telescope the type of telescope that was building them to have them in flower
and Gardens people really really enjoyed it yeah tonight
I'll I'll remind the audience that that Norman is self-taught
building all those mirror making everything yeah it would work mirror
making yeah I I read I read a lot books and then how to you about this and how
to do uh how to carve and I was I was very lucky that my good friend Pierre I
was telling you about earlier is that was a a wood carver what it was carving
a lot of wood and when he passed away he got his wife had kept all his tool all his witches and at one point Pierre on
the Christmas they gave me a present that his father's all his father's tool and carving tool he gave them to me uh
as a Christmas present saying the only um reason uh that you're going to be
able to use them is if you use them I give them to you only if you're gonna use them so I put them to work
yeah they're beautiful there's another one beautiful view of a
telescope in the garden and of course you know it's hard work
you have to rest at some point you know that's right
okay and then okay different Awards over the years uh
I got seven first place award that's still a Fame plus multiple other one second and third place and also the
kafta uh competition in Quebec it's a it's also like a small cellophane but in
Canada I have many awards over there and also there's an award called Ovation
uh award in in my area for the the business
uh the newest building business and the
type of business I was making I got a first place award for Ovation competition
okay New Workshop in two thousand so in 2007 I was able to have a workshop
get out of my basement so it took uh about eight years
so I move into uh about a 800 square feet uh shop and then after that I had
expanded a little more so you see I had to build whatever uh
working area that I needed the on the bottom left here I had to make a wall to just all the woodwork on one side and
the Optics on the other side so the dust doesn't get in into my my on to my
grinding machine so yeah I I was a very happy man to get
out of my basement let me tell you
and I finally had enough room for dust now yeah so I was on a building mode so
I'd build all my my table work tables uh I built uh all my tunnel for the for the
focal testing uh install at that point I had three grinding machine built uh with
that to do the cover of all the plastic cover so the dust doesn't fall on the mirrors and this is the area for the
woodwork on the left bottom right sorry okay
after that official opening 2007 so I was ready to open to to work and produce
telescope at my new shop those are my here my good friend
my future employees I was still like no right okay now the real work fun well
it's not work it's fun so I I could really start to produce more and more telescope at the same time so it was
very fun so you can see there on the left the the hand the The Man in the Moon carving uh altitude bearing so
that's that's why it was done that's why it's done the first large 36 inch sandwich mirror
that wasn't the blank wasn't mine uh another guy in Canada was producing a
regular glass blanks for a sandwich he was doing just for fun and I tried this
material for about three or two mirrors where the first 36 was available the
rest center will show you the the second uh stories it wasn't that great so the
first 36 inch mirror I did was in that shop and I had built the the grinding
machine before I moved in in the shop you will see here I built a lot of grits
for of course with the 36 inch so this is the first grinding uh period for that
mirror but it wasn't even the shop it was my friend's Pier basement I had built the machine there because I didn't
have room in my basement to build it so yeah the two 22 inches grinding tool
that I do all my grinding tools also so it's they made a glass cut and square and epoxied on on a aluminum base so
this is the grinding tool that I use for that 36 inch mirror
we started a big adventure of big mirror here so after that
polishing is done I moved everything in my new shop so I did the polishing and then in the new shop and it was a
success for that mirror and this one is in a telescope near Quebec City to the
group they built their own structure for that telescope but they have my Optics in it
but to do that mirror I needed a place to well first I'm going to show you the
testing of that mirror uh the raunchy test and a little bit of the focal
testing that I did for that mirror and just to show people that there's no print through in my mirror
many Opticians say that if you have a sandwich made with pillars in between the two plates you will end up with
print through on the surface and the figure this is a proof that it doesn't happen on mine
I developed a technique to make them so the coding in those days I didn't have
the grand coding machine so I was doing my coding in Pittsburgh a company called flabberg so I was driving the my Optics
down to Pennsylvania do the coating stay in the hotel for a few days and then bring back the mirror at the at the shop
so this is they were very well equipped on for coding not they were the original
company is not for Mirror coating but they were uh giving me the service because I asked
for they were doing all kind of Automotive coding it had dozens of vacuum Chambers
and when they closed down I tried to buy them one one of them they will never sell it to me the the move all the all
their machine back to Germany so uh that's why I had to build my own
so the first mirror was coated there and it was done you can see here the first mirror was coated over there
and uh there we go in the Box in the crate
and deliver it to the to my customer in Northern Quebec there it is
so I was very very happy the first result a very big large mirror that I made
yeah so at that time I started to go to neef
neef Northeast astronomy Forum so uh Alan train alantrano was the the
organizer then for the nif uh forum and so unfortunately passed away a couple
years ago but he's the one that invited me over for the first time yet see my wooden telescope stellophane and he said
Norm should come to sniff and then present your telescopes so I went there
in 2007 my first time the knee this is beneath overview the the floor over
there I'm sure everyone present here or most of the people saw Neath or went to
Neve in in the past it's very very inspiring place for uh
for amateur astronomer here and this is my kiosk I don't see a booth
in English sorry so this is my first booth at Neve the first Neve that I did there I had brought a 12 and a half inch
a few six inches eight inch and uh like I was mentioning on my previous
presentation that uh on my first nieve I had Mr Marcus Lewis about my first house
this first wooden telescope there on site before the opening of neef so he
was very excited of his small six inch telescope they had built so he bought it right down the spot before the opening
and then Nev 2008 same thing pack the fan and you should see the face of
custom boy the the the the agent at the custom asking me where I'm going with what is
then I opened the back doors and they looked at this what the heck is that try to explain to them what it was they
wouldn't understand they wouldn't believe so it happened once and I had to empty the entire truck
showed them assembled one of the telescope and then show them what it was so
just that it's quite an experience already in itself uh and then of course that second year I
had a very nice Booth but this is a 16 inch F 4.5 uh that I have brought over
there and then um after that 2009 add another brought
some more telescopes so I've been to neef many many years in a row
um it's uh it's very it was a very good platform for my for my work uh when I
started yeah and then the one I was telling you about capital in Quebec the cocoa annual
the Fabrica the telescope amateur so the the Canadians telephone it's not as
popular but it was great to have to see all the the Canadian uh Astro astronomy
amateur over there so I've always been there
and I think David David Levy came and did a talk there the kafta one year
and of course the winter star party in Florida I've been there many many times it's a great place to observe in the
winter time without minus 20 degrees yes so again in my previous presentation I
was telling you about uh Marcus Lewis that by bought a telescope again from me on site after seeing uh the Thor's
helmet uh nebula uh with my telescope he he really liked my
nose so he bought it right there on site this is my booth that I had over there
and good deals to be made winter start party hopefully they will happen again
next year or the year after it's one of my favorite place to go observe at the same time and meet people and great
great uh great weekend great week to be on site uh meet a lot of great people
that are good observing too it's the first place that I saw my the Omega
Century nebula I was so blown away with with the view with us the 16 inch that I
showed you that was magnificent hmm after that uh and then I went to Paris
also did it some promo in Europe so I brought a couple telescope uh at uh
it's a biannual uh like a knife exhibition in in France
um and I I was invited by a astronomy store called Galileo in those in those
years so I I was part of their presentation there so uh I was very proud to be in France and present and
show my stuff over there I have brought some very nice telescope that I sold on side too so I was very happy for that
and also I went to deliver the few telescope in Italy
one of my customers here Fabio he's got three of my telescope also
he likes my work this is
liking my work and buying my work is two things
you see the reason why right now just just a little Paradise
now I I had to kind of change my uh my vision to to diversify my product
because if I would have stayed just wooden telescope like that I wouldn't be in business anymore because I mean you
buy a 12 12 and a half inch telescope for maybe three four thousand dollar now and then this one was way much bigger
higher price than that and so it's not everyone's I hope the compressor you know hit the
compressor too much I hope okay we can hear you over it okay because I have no control on that my air
compressor in the shop it starts when once it wants to right it will start
very soon all right let's keep going here uh big project for Orion you probably knew uh
my Orion dub monster dump project that I had conclude with Orion and um
the story behind that I will show you tell you a little bit of the story of that so Orion contacted me to make a big
telescope line and I accepted with my techno Fusion mirror no the Techno
Fusion but a sandwich mirror that I had the guy produced from me so this is the structure that I built in
my small shop uh at them got the altitude bearing the ground
board this is the rocker and uh [Applause]
yes oh and when I was building my that telescope of course my friend came over the inspectors to tell me if it was okay
I always have friend coming over it's looking at my work yeah
and here's the mirror box for that 36 inch and tried to go quicker here because I I
know you guys want to keep moving and because my shop was to the ceiling of
the shop my shop was too low I had to go work some parts at my machinist shop uh
to be able to assemble some parts because I didn't have room in my shop
and this is the the mirror box with the altitude bearing assembled together
and then I brought this part of the shop just to to be able to do the the uh the paint the paint work on it
there's the 27 points floating cell for the mirror of course it was all aluminum for that
size telescope I wouldn't work a wooden parts we will me would be too heavy first and then too wobbly not strong
enough so that's why I decided to do all aluminum it was my first big project for a large
telescope and this is the cage and it wasn't a fold the Newtonian like you saw in my previous presentation this is a
regular so they're very long telescope well uh you saw that telescope Scott at
the uh starfest in Toronto right that's remember
was it very nice telescope and the um what happened though we had the
inspector again when the telescope was completed
the mirror was finished but what happened is uh
I had a tragedy this is the primary mirror
at when I brought the mirror to flabberg in Pennsylvania to have it coated
because the mirror itself was made of is was made of regular glass not Pyrex okay
uh the first mirror that they had coated in a very very large vacuum chamber so
the element that uh vaporized the aluminum was very far from the from the
mirror so the the radiation wasn't affecting as much the glass itself but for that mirror they used a smaller
vacuum chamber so the elements were closer to the glass and it warm up the glass a little more and because it was
regular glass it just shattered yeah wow and that was three weeks before
going to neef with the telescope to present the telescopes yeah
a very uh weird conversation on a phone with the uh Kevin over there when that happened
so yeah here it is is that the leftover of the mirror in the vacuum chamber yeah
I still have uh this part here in my in my closet here in my shop just a reminder
that's good
um but that didn't stop me I borrowed the mirrored yeah the first mirror that I had made out of glass to my friend in
Quebec I skimmed if I could borrow his mirror to put it in the telescope to do the presentation at neef uh the focal
length wasn't the same so we couldn't use it but at least there was a mirror in this in the structure and we could
present the telescope at neef right that's what we did so I brought the telescope at Neve there it is on on the
floor over there so we could show the telescope there it
is so when I bring came back to Quebec with
the telescope um I had to build another make another mirror
and the second mirror I did with my technology that I was done in my
workshop into after 2010 the Techno Fusion which is the subject of my next
presentation maybe of uh that I will do for you guys if you want about how I
developed the Techno fusion and how I did those first mirrors
um here this is my new shop the one when I moved in here uh in 2010 so I had to
bring some of my my uh working bands working table some of the telescope I already had started
and uh hey I had an office about something right a place to work and
design and draw my telescope and I was very very very happy when I moved in uh
the grand opening was in 2010 so that was an empty area that about three times
the size of what I was have I was having at the my first shop and there's a door right there after
about three years I had to expand on the other side due to up to about 3 500
square feet of in my shop so uh maybe next
presentation will be that shop and thank you very much for listening to
me thank you so much okay that's great okay so um I guess at
this point uh we will see what uh I know Molly has still got some clear skies
um so Molly what do you want to show us uh so I've got two things to show uh first the Andromeda galaxy in color and
then nebula in monochrome hydrogen Alpha so let me
know uh the Moon is pretty bright tonight as we saw earlier it's uh waxing gibbous so I have a lot of a lot of
background so Andromeda galaxy ended up looking more or less just like a blob
like like it does with the eyepiece but uh here we have uh the core of of the
Andromeda galaxy and if I were to process this a bit to remove the background we'd get a lot more of the
Dust lanes and whatnot but um yeah this is a live a live view of M31 I'm doing a
live stack in nice do the best things a little bit there
beautiful um let me switch machines real quick I
have two two laptops out back that um I've got one running one rig and one
running the other rig and I can promote into both of them so I don't have to go outside really ever to do anything with
them oh I see no nice [Music]
um a dear what happened to my photo here um so you have your own mission control
like in your living room I I had an image I don't know what
happened to it oh dear um and let me turn off the livestock and see what's going on here
okay well uh I will see what's going on with this and get back to you okay we
did see some Andromeda though yeah yeah yeah that's good I mean that's the nearest Galaxy 2S two and a half million
light years away uh it's it's actually moving toward us and will eventually merge with our galaxy although no
there'll be no actual collisions of stars and whatnot but the two black holes will have a strong gravitational
interaction and eventually emerge and probably merge into one black hole but it'll be quite the the show in the sky
probably all kinds of new nebula new star-forming regions forming however it's about five billion years from now
so you might have to wait a while that's right that's right
that's awesome but looks like Norman's uh ready to play some yeah for us that's
right my usual uh Global star body song here yeah yeah well you have a choice I
give you a choice this week um either an old Tom Waits song called heart of Saturday night or I'll still
have uh my 12 strings here I have uh could play Billy Joel uh Piano Man up to
you guys I'm not gonna pick it
everything Piano Man on the 12 string would be cool to hear yeah okay I'll
change change guitar there too old
it's an old guitar it's 1970. Norman made in Quebec too
[Music]
thank you
it's nine o'clock on this Saturday
[Music] there's an old man
sitting next to me making love to his tonic engine
set sometimes I'm not really sure
but it's sad and sweet and I knew it completely
[Music] [Applause]
us
[Music]
[Music] gets me my dreams for free
and he's quick with a Jew while he line up the smoke but there's some place that
he'd rather be foreign
yes I'm sure that I could if I could get out of this place
[Music] [Applause]
[Music]
bring us a song [Applause]
for amenities
[Music]
never had time for a while talking within who's still in the Navy
and Robin they will be
touching politics as the businessman slowly gets stoned
and is sharing a dream and it's called loneliness but it's better than drinking
alone
sing us a song
good night while we all in the room for a melody
thank you
it's a pretty good crowd for a Saturday as the manager gives me a smile
as you know that it's me now they're coming to see to forget about life for a
while I know sounds like a carnival and the
microphone smells like a beer and they sit at the bar put in bread in
my jar and said man what I used to do here
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
while we all know for a Melody you got us
around
thank you oh yeah yeah
so Mike's breaking out his guitar oh oh okay that was good that's good I've
already I already explained I I lost my I lost my my singing voice over the past year so I know um I was just playing
along with Norm he's he's cranking that 12 string really really nice
thank you everyone it was a pleasure again with you thank you so much Norman
thank you for uh sharing as you do enjoyable all right
so uh waiting all the way down in Argentina is uh Cesar brolo and Caesar
has taken us to um you know historic uh observatories
and um he has shown us uh you know amazing views of the planets from just
on his balcony so um you know we are really happy to have
Caesar with us today I know it's cloudy down there maybe raining right uh yes
it's raining Buenos Aires is it stormy with lightning balls and you know
lightning bolts no time no time to go to the balcony and uh
I am today in my living room and
um well uh but um awaiting this uh this uh weather
condition for for tonight yesterday I collect some pictures uh in the
in after the noon uh of uh making solar
solar image but the first thing yesterday was that was holiday in
Argentina was that I don't have solar filter in my home
and fortunately I I found a film a real
film safe a real safe film for for solar eclipse you know oh yes because uh if I
talk about after that check talk about the safety and solar I say come on no no
of course that I am telling for the people all time um about the the safety that they need
to take care really really very concerned to to have a really
um a lot of of uh of safety points to to make a solar
solar filter here we are in our company in our business we are selling this year
um the solar Shades the glass around glasses and uh we are selling the the
film in in cut in a different size
um because yes my idea first was import the
the extra scientific solar filters that have the the framing cover but this year
we have so so complicated import condition for for
this uh the environment that they say okay we can uh input only the film the
role and we prepare the the glasses in another way yes we solve we saw the
the film but no when when the people ask me I ask access to
the people that how to make uh um how to make a safe
film uh not so a safe sorry uh a filter
solar filter with the film and was I had
my my own experience yesterday because I say okay all the time I told the people
I I did a lot of of sore future with film with this film but yesterday with a
very very low uh quantity of materials in my home I thought how I can make a
solar a solar uh um filter with a with the performance to to
make it in a safe mode a safe filter holder way to make
absolutely and first of all the people told me yes but what type of cardboard I
don't have cardboard to make this solar filter okay but I send you I send you
the the film in a box this box is a is of a cover and
first of all I make the same of this yes
make a hole of course yes here I have
I have my my homemade solar filter okay okay of
course that is made of um duct tape and cardboard
and work and it's safe and um for different telescope you need to make
really really sure that with the wind or something you you can't uh remove this
uh in middle of of the solar of observation this is only it's like this
like a ring but you need to to have a lot of
[Music] sorry in English I don't remember the name when when you make something that
uh to to we say in Spanish
I don't know if it's in French but I don't know but you need to to make
something really really in a Safe Way Mount the filter onto
uh yes and um here I normally we make uh we make uh
something like a l uh edit shape uh that that adjusts properly to the to
the telescope um last year we make all this in a plastic material or we sometimes we use
uh 3D printers um of course that this is a this is
something like this okay if you like to make this in your home and you can you
yes okay no yes I I I I I felt like uh
returning to the kindergarten making this but uh well I have pictures I I have a
really um there was part the worst part is that I felt sure is
confidential yeah confident to go to the balcony and make pictures with this and
put my eyes too because Mom I'm an optician yes I'm right yes okay let me
I'm sorry uh
and uh well see what you got yes this is first of all the materials
this was real duct tape the cardboard of the same box that where
the people receive the receive the the the film this is the the black part of
the film The the black because this is very important because they use the same
the same material in in your filters and
instead the another materials in the past more um more able to break more with with
less thickness this material is really safe in two ways
because first of all the the vase of the material the the polymer is a cr6 that
is the same material that is in the glasses of your uh in your glasses is
the same material 636 it's a military grade material and before they have the
layer of aluminum and this made a a safe product and the iso
Norm is that is do you have a 12 3 1 2
um two is is the the norm of safety where do you use this
well this is my my own work
with the tape really I felt confident with this I
don't know why but you know so I I really I like sometimes I like to to
return to my my first time of of to be a
material astronomer and I like this I never make this normally I make this in
a 3D printer or you know in our mechanics facilities
or okay but it's funny yeah yes
yes okay and this is with the y-axis 100 of the balcony ready
to to go to the Sun I'm working
this was always yesterday you know here the the I use it again I I
I'm I found how to bring us pictures right now because we're seeing a folder
with pictures um do you have a full screen picture that you're trying to show yes yes yes this is oh yeah we don't see
the full picture we just see the ah I'm sorry but this is because it's it's a
it's a it's only do you have uh two screens
okay no because it is a cell phone picture sorry ah no no no yes this is
the best way to because it's too small if not this is Molly that they tell me
I I mean we're seeing a folder with pictures as opposed to uh a picture that
shows that fills the whole screen ah yes
no yes you can see the the pictures that I show
you now uh we can I can see a very small very small pictures all the pictures uh
showing it at once in the folder now yeah there's one two three four five six
seven eight nineteen thousand fourteen pictures present
because yes you are watching yes you are not watching them you're
watching only the the let me check sorry okay you might need
to share your whole screen yes yes yes I need to share
yes let me try
let me check if I can share now
yeah now here it's okay
ah yes that's it no yes okay
sorry what I hear no yes you you see the the the the the small ones the the
thumbnails I'm sorry yeah well here
we have
now you can see that this was real [Laughter]
so the first show The the thumbnails I was following along on the thumbnails
this is that made in the in the holiday when I was worried worried
okay I'm here well this is where we can we
can see that the filter is is uh is put
in the telescope yeah um working properly here
yeah nice looking mount yeah it's good yes yes the best the best
of all is that I I'm recover my my Wi-Fi
connection uh uh before write a email this this
aspirate email to Jerry I I I'm my son I
asked me come on you have a lot of tools in in the computer about the exos 100
and PC BMC system and he teach me
to me how to recover the the Wi-Fi connection it's really easy but um
the best way was uh yes yes I I I love this moment it's not the first time that
I tell this thank you and thank you Caesar yeah it's real is it I I I talk about uh really
about this because but something that is excellent for for
this type of moon when you have a moment that you can make
um align with the Stars because it's it's a a a you had a dialogue you have
the Sun and the best way is put the mode uh Auto
outer line mode and leave them on to go to stars that
you can't see but when you go to the sun you go near to the sound to the sun
sorry and you need only to to to point to the sun go of course
watching with the filter and or eyepiece or in the screen
and and only put uh synchronize and you
have the Sun really tracking perfectly with a Rowley with a Rowley uh
equatorial alignment this is the best way because I choose this mod for the
show in the clips because it is the most uh trustable uh uh
system that I that we we have wow this is a a really really a a good
choice for for our show in in three weeks more in the eclipse
huh right this one here you can see this box
this was really yes this was was a a lot
of fun in the sunny day yeah very very easy to
to enjoy this is very important that I found with a three steps I I
had a lot of fun in in a without complications and this is the things
that I like to encourage the people if the people love to use a telescope
yeah you know right here do you have the the the the video the streaming
using Shark up and a very nice uh a very
small and nice camera planetary camera camera
that is a new brand it's sipony um work properly it's nice
and this was a later in in the night with the same system with the moon the
the in the Moon
[Music] another another picture that I processed
a few minutes ago
I'm here very nice yeah yes the the final the final results for for
this filter this
let me let me show you with a little more
no more not a lot of here no more like than this because
I put a lot of wavelengths and I make a little of artifacts but
but were properly and the exos 100 were really really
proper really really good thank you ah what's a pleasure thank you that's
great every time is a pleasure Scott yeah it's great you've been on many of our Global
star parties I really appreciate it yeah thank you okay so uh how about uh Molly did uh did
you get um I got the Helix back although it's not as good as it was earlier but okay you want to see it uh also uh here
beside me I have one of my cats this is Orion and he's happily snoozing on top
of my green screen let's see looks a little funny because there's a
flashlight on him yeah it does look kind of looks like a lump of Stellar material
kind of glowing up there a little bit it's funny all right let me go ahead and share that
view here um then switch back over all right so oh
there it is yeah you can kind of see it it was better contrast earlier but it's getting lower in the sky I think it's
about to go behind my my uh uh lemon tree but this is the Helix
nebula which is the uh I think it's the largest from our perspective here on
Earth planetary nebula and because it's so large the light is spread out quite a
lot over a large area so it's actually pretty hard to spot visually although I
did see it once uh with a nebula filter that helped bring it out it's also pretty low in the sky for us Northern
Hemisphere viewers but this is a hydrogen Alpha view so I have a a
hydrogen Alpha filter in there which is selecting a wavelength of the deep red
656 nanometers that is an emission of hydrogen gas that is excited by stars in
space okay and it's uh it's very common uh that's where a lot of the red comes
from and all those nebula images you see or um kind of the the greenish orangish
color and a lot of those Hubble pictures and stuff like that planetary nebula are they're actually
the end stage of main sequence Stars much like our own about the mass of our
own Sun that are in their death throws they're at an end stage of their life where
they're ejecting tons and tons of gas off of them in all directions not evenly
which is why they have some really cool structure and stuff like that the dumbbell nebula the Ring Nebula those are some other examples of planetary
nebula from different angles where we can see that structure in different ways so we're kind of seeing this one uh
um face on like the Ring Nebula the bigger basically because it's closer to
us I think it's only like 700 light years away or something like that it's really close oh that's closed
geez yeah I'd have to go double check that figure um but uh yeah it's it glows both in
hydrogen and has a lot of blue in it as well a lot of oxygen gas that that glows really brightly on this teal blue
wavelength although I'm just looking at the the red here with this hydrogen filter
Somali are you the uh when you make Astro photographs and and you make color
astrophotographs are you trying to do you really try to match what you think the real color
is or are you do you think that um you
know that you could assign any color um to uh to a nebula to bring out
details it depends on on the data that I'm processing and how I want to process it so most of the time a lot of my data
is is a wide band color so red green blue and then I I'll enhance it with red
from hydrogen Alpha gas hydrogen Alpha emissions and blue from oxygen and I'll
I try to keep as realistic of color as possible for those wide band color
images that I enhance with narrow band data for better color and for better detail but if I had access to a sulfur
filter which I've been able to borrow a few times sulfur gas also has a very strong emission line that's actually
very close to the hydrogen line it's also a deep red color now if you were to
assign those their natural colors you wouldn't be able to tell the difference and where the hydrogen gas was versus
The sulfur gas because they're both a deep red so that's why things like the Hubble palette exist where you assign sulfur to
be red hydrogen to be green even though the actual light is red and oxygen to be
blue that way you can see in the nebula where the different types of gas are and
even though it's not a true color image like how your eye would see it it still has a lot of scientific value and also
makes really gorgeous images oh sure that's true that's very true
well wonderful that's great well on the other side of the hemisphere
we have Rodrigo zaleida with live images through his telescope in La Serena Chile
um so let's uh let's go down to La Serena and um
and visit with Rodrigo and what he has in his telescope
that's good hello when
now in La Serena is a clear Skype and I look in the other nebula with my explore
scientific upper refractor wow nice and and I
um I make a composition for a different
um time of intellectual the the center of the oil nebula in the
in um there's a of the the center this little
star in with if you take a long position in
photo the the center of the nebula is um very light and do you know the
the tile is is very very difficult and I
share with you my my ice cream okay
um okay
by the way Rodrigo owns a telescope shop called North Optics
it's the only telescope Shop in La Serena and one of the few telescope shops in all of Chile
maybe the most popular telescope shop in Chile oh it's good
okay this is a short time is position
and in the center the nebula is
and put the tiles and I take um
send a photo for a 30 seconds
the late I photo for a longer position
and another photo with more time position
my my idea is a major competition for this different
position time for
um the idea in external the nebular
need more position time but in the center of the nebula
small time yeah it's already getting very bright
yes um it's very common with the photo in
July photo like this in the center the
do you don't see the The Little Star in the in the nebula this is very difficult
a great photo which detail the the literature
and is uh I work for many many pictures
do you stake and combinate for the
good good photo and this is my my scheme
with the the camera
[Music]
do you see my screen Scott yes yes I did camera yes this is my my
my photo now in foreign
in in the center is very very light
and I combinate this difference in position for the the final photo
and
a The Last Knight and the last Star Party I take picture for the
uh large Mariana clothes in the actual
Facebook and oh cool my last photo
um
this is my my photo for the actual fraction in the
oh wow so this was the last star party right yes
one shot of this this area
is very nice nebula in the in the nerd for this galaxy yes
amazing I think that one that's near the center with the red and then the blue circle I
think that's where the Hubble uh the 30th the 30th Anniversary uh image that
they released earlier this year is of yes this this this area
yeah yeah that that blue circle thing looks looks very distinctive uh familiar
from uh the Hubble image that that I saw recently
yes special special anniversary image yes in the
in this galaxy is many idea for the these Strokes in the more important
stroke is the tarantula is more bigger and
many with the wife view telescope is great for the
astrophotography oh yeah yeah you can see
this is this image um uh from Hubble is
um of course bigger and everything but you got a lot of detail in your shot
that's good beautiful yeah yeah beautiful thank you very much Rodrigo
thank you okay yes
okay all right so we will go to um uh Mr Richard Grace
Richard what do you got for us I know it's cloudy out there it is cloudy
um that comes with the uh the new gear mm-hmm oh you bought new gear okay they'll do
it oh you got an exos too
it is cool but uh I do have one thing that I haven't shown off yet
that's nice I like the Colors oh very nice yeah very nice
yeah tell us more about this image of course it's the Orion Nebula but um
uh any um I think I think it was one minute
exposures but I could be wrong um it was a lot of them
uh I knew I was gonna blow out the uh
I always forget the name of it trapezium yeah uh-huh yeah I knew I was going to blow
it out but uh I I did a good job of kind of separating that last year and this time I just kind of wanted to go for
nebulosity I even probably pushed it a little bit far but uh it's still early it's Orion season but it's a Ryan season
you know all winter long you know what I mean we got we got plenty got your Ryan hunting license with you or
no just the hunter safety card but you know take those photons you know Rags
some Stars right and go back some stars back to the photons absolutely right that's right
yeah so um hopefully we're uh gonna get some some clear skies here okay all right uh
test out some new gear and I know that there's a astrophotography contest uh
gonna be finishing up uh right before Christmas so uh that's part of the reason for getting the explore
scientific Mount so now I can participate in a few more categories and
I'll be putting some work in towards that and um yeah really not a whole lot of what's
going on here and I was I I definitely can't fill a 10-minute segment tonight
and I just wanted to see what uh what you had for tonight that's great yeah
yeah like uh at least I had something uh try to at least bring something every week so yes you do that's good all right
so let's go all the way over to the UK to Gary Palmer um Gary has uh has has been a very busy
guy and has been on our programs for a little while but I'm glad to have you
back Gary hi Scott hi everyone I hope you're all keeping well yeah just
um the usual over here a bit of clouds bit of rain clear sky
um I'm just rotating that around really so um so tonight I've not really got overly
much I've just been working on something in the background so I'll run that up and just run through what we've done and
where we've got to with it is probably the easiest way yeah so
let me just share a screen up even your leftovers Gary look pretty
good so right well that's what we've started with
um that's nice after it's integrated okay um so we've had to
uh mess around with this a little bit just to get some color out of it and uh bring all the detail out
so um pretty simple processing on this no major
massive techniques on it just did a simple background neutralization
um then we went into a color calibration on the system
once with all of that it's resetting everything back down um then we did the noise reduction on the
background multi-scale linear transform most of these processes we've done in the uh the previous style parties right
the way through um and then we did a mouse stretch on this that's really to hold core detail
in the image and not get the background too bright so doing the marsh stretch on
it and then we just reset that so now we can see it's looking pretty
dull um still lots of detail there and moving on
adding in a little bit of color using Color um the curves transformation tool to
bring that in key thing is for that is not to go too mad because we're going to do other processes with the image yeah
if you're adding too much color you're going to distort the color yeah as you move forward but really what
we're after is is bringing out a lot more detail in the spirals on the Galaxy
so moving on from there we added a little touch more color on it
yeah and then um morphological transformation was just to pull the Styles back and just shape
the edges of the stars and generally if I'm with a lot of these objects there's too many stars in the image anyway so
the day you take your eye off of the object so quite often dim some of the brighter Styles down using that process
um as you can see there once that's done um
then I did a star net on it so I removed the stars out to do the next processes
and then went on to um so we've got the separate star mask there
and then I made a luminance layer and did the detail work on the luminance layer
um which is quite straightforward it's nice and easy to do and then we combine the
um the luminance layer by splitting these into their RGB channels so we
basically end up with another TB and we can add those in with the lrgb so we're
adding aluminance back in with all of the detail and that game is preserving the color in the background
um once we got to that stage we combine the stars back in a little bit of contrast and add some color into it
and that's where we've got to beautiful so a little bit more work to
do on it but that was basically what I've been working on in the background while the uh been watching the star party
um right apart from that not what else is really going on at the moment I did do
um well we he's actually in now I haven't processed any of the images
but we did manage to get some of the sun spots today which are better ones are
down there
that was it so we've got the new large Sunspot group coming around oh yeah um
now this is the same Sunspot that uh Caesar was Imaging I think yeah it's
just um here today it was quite late in the afternoon and the sun slow so getting onto these was actually quite
hard but it is looking like they've all shown quite a lot of activity as they're moving around I did see a time lapse
uh from this area earlier and it looked like there was quite a lot of activity going on in there but at the moment
the UK is not best close for Imaging the Sun so that's about it really
that's uh as far as we've got in the UK at the moment yeah there's images there
are just having a ton to process all of them so we'll get around to that over the uh the next week or so
sure Gary how many images I mean will you process
in a given month I um I can't really keep counter that
um there's something like probably 200 000 images on the hard
drives um depending on what we're doing with solar lunar planetary yeah and then all
of the customers data coming in so we're taking in customers data because generally if I'm working with a customer
it's nicer to work on their images just at all possible then you so you're
forever got the systems downloaded and bringing stuff in um and that's quite a long process
depending on what cameras they've used to have the image folds are and what
we're working on so I'd hate to say what we process in a month um it's nowhere close to what we
actually put up online probably only put up four or five images a week if we're lucky online okay
actually processing in the background there's probably anything up to 100 images a week
um getting processed and then you would add your solderons I see yeah it's always a work in
progress I guess yeah and it's really funny because Imaging from the UK you
can't just turn around and do lots of processes because you are taking each image as it comes up to you on face
value once you've got it integrated together or once you've got it statue looking at each image
[Music] um as it is so therefore running processes on them doesn't always work where we
would run one process on that image and then move it over to the second image there are some processes there so it
does take quite a lot of time certainly on new equipment if we're working on Prototype equipment in the background
we'll be trying 20 30 40 different processes yeah to make the best of those
images um and a lot of the images come through damaged in one way or another that might
be through not having a match um reducer flattener it might be because
of other reasons I mean this week we had a new filter drawer over and it seems
that it's getting condensation inside it even though it's got a heater strip running down by so
it it's a good idea to sort of check the images every half hour and actually pull an image out of the capture and throw it
into a piece of software light picks Insight or Astro art so you can stretch the image up and really see what's going
on in the background nice because you can correct anything then otherwise you waste your whole night you know you get
it get up in the morning put your images on the screen and you go well they're bad that was always good night yeah not
a lot I'm gonna do with those International um yeah so it does pay to do a lot of uh
that sort of thing but at the moment because we've had poor weather there's a massive backlog of equipment to go
through so we're running at the moment I'm running through quite a lot of equipment in any one night just to try
and get that through the uh the processing system so it's not all just dealing with customers because
as you know we're dealing with companies in the background where we're working on different equipment we get to send new
things for reviews or whatever so if you get a bad month you end up with 30 boxes sitting there to deal with in
you know two nights or something um yeah
and there will be mistakes here you know I make mistakes on things you don't know everything you pull it out it's brand
new and there's no manual for it no nothing it just turns up with a packing
yeah and you've got to sit there and work everything out yeah as you start running through so the
first couple of images if they come through really good it's like the result we're straight on it then we're Imaging
otherwise it's out there measuring everything and working everything out so we get spacing correct or
you know we might have 20 or 30 reducers here to try out on something to get it
actually up and running nicely so yeah it keeps you on your toes is
what really really what we say um keeps you running around and keeps you busy
yeah it's full of plate as I do you got as full of plate as I do Gary yeah it's like I got a bite out of every little
dish and the whole in the whole uh Buffet you know it's like a thousand things on the buffet that you guys
that's true yeah it it does go mad some weeks and obviously like when we're
doing the processing courses and working with customers it's not just processing
so it's working on their equipment they might have equipment that we've never seen before
uh you know the equipment on the other side over your site can be different to
ours it can have a different spec it can have different things on it so you end
up doing a lot of reading and a lot of working out on equipment you've never seen before it's not even in your hands
and then trying to advise the customer how to use that or get around the problems so
yeah um the and that's also working on a different time zone so you know if we're
working on a Californian time zone um there's eight hours difference between us and them and that means uh an
early morning finish um you know once you you sort of running through everything but it's good fun
it's um it's nice because you're seeing all different equipment you see it all
different people uh and you never know when you go into a zoom meeting what you've got sort of
sitting there waiting for you so it's a different thing each time whether that's with a company or whether it's with a
person right there's always something new to learn
yeah yeah you never stop learning you you never stop learning no no
because really technology has taken over in it isn't it it's the old days of just
working on a really a a set of uh maths through a telescope and a lens yeah
they're out the window now because of the amount of Technologies that's coming in whether it's through
um computers connecting up mini PCS ASI hairs Eagle units all of these different
things and then the way they're controlled and you know supporting that as well
uh it takes quite a lot of working out with this equipment
um where it's going and solving different issues for different people
yeah so like what I've said before you can get one computer and um half the cameras won't work on that
one computer for some reason it's trying to work out the reason why and that
could be a real top end you know Alienware gaming computer for instance and your plug off does some cameras into
it and they're not working and it's normally to do with the background of the Windows system or the
background of the operating system is the reason why it's not working you just got the headache of working that out
yeah I don't know of anyone that uh that you could go to that has the range of
combinations of gear and the depth of knowledge that you have about all
different kinds of Brands and products and combinations of things you know because people you know as Jerry points
out in his book scientific Imaging you know he takes you through the process the mental process of creating a you
know an astronomical imaging system uh but there are all these little nuances you
know about it you can get it to work to a level but to make it perform at its very very best
um you know you need frankly you need someone like you uh to to be a mentored
to them and so you know it's it's a it's wonderful that you offer that service
thanks I enjoy doing it I really do I enjoy my key thing is not actually
getting the images and processing them that's just a byproduct of what I really do yeah it's actually getting all of
this equipment together and getting it working so you get half a dozen boxes turn up and it's actually getting all of
that equipment to work together because when it sent through quite often nobody's actually had it working
it's normally you know it's on a cat drawing and then it's manufactured and
then it's here and then it's the process of getting that together so the thing I
like is actually getting all of that equipment together and getting the images far down the line once you're
seeing them up on the screen there you're going yep that's you know that's where we wanted to be
um and as you know dealing with problems on things it's going to take quite a long time so you know a piece of
equipment might be pulled off it might sit there for you know three or four weeks while we're trying to work out
what needs changing on it and then back to the drawing build but that then leads
to the End customer how having the unit that's fully working but up and running
you know they they don't see what goes on behind the scenes in the background
in a sense they pull it out set it up and away it goes and and that's the key
thing but I do find these days I have to write a lot more stuff down the memory
is going a little bit as I'm getting older you know it's always good to document things oh yeah
now Gary do you mostly work with manufacturers or do you work with individuals or is it 50 50 or it's
really everything um it could be vendors you know some of the vendors want as to what packages out
and equipment for them um manufacturers different ones here and there so sometimes you want to work with
a manufacturer for a long long time and then all of a sudden they come out with something and
um you know where we go we're we're up and running with it um quite often with a vendor it might be
a new piece of equipment that they've taken on um so we're there to sort of test it for
them and really advise whether they should buy it or not is is the long one they're sure what if it's good they're going to stop
it if it's poor you know then the actual manufacturer that equipment used to do some work I think so
you just never know what you you're going to pull out the box because it can look nice it can be a little shiny and
brand new and you go yeah well I'm not saying anything like this before but the actual performance and it can vary you
know um no difference the equipment coming in and getting Drop Kicked around by The
Courier you know it might have all been perfectly nice oh that doesn't happen yeah you know you shake the box and you
feel the movement inside and you just know when you open that box that there's going to be a world of pain inside it
um that's life you you know Gary one time I
went to the the first time I went to the winter Star Party um I was working at meat instruments and
I would build my telescopes so that I knew that they were built right and
there was nothing loose or nothing bad about it you know and and uh test it and
then I would disassemble it pack it in the Box ship it to where I need to ship it to well I ship it across the country
uh by FedEx and FedEx has a station in a
marathon and so I flew out there drove up to Marathon collected my telescope
very confidently opened this box okay which had my my sealed tape mine okay I
sealed it so I knew it was mine it was original and everything I opened this thing up and every Bolt
this telescope had come loose and I'm not talking about just like a couple of bolts and hold the four crimes together
I'm talking about the motor mount bolts I'm talking about the perimeter bolts on the corrector plate the corrector plate
was spinning around all this stuff now if I had not packed this thing myself I
would not believe because there was no dents on this box there was no damage that you could see
okay and it was just I guess like high
frequency vibration or something that made this thing come apart you know yeah
I have one answer France uh very similar to the sort of stuff behind him
yeah and knowing what happens with this sort of stuff I actually put a separate bag
around the secondary mirror and taped the bag and the customer did say to me
that the secondary more or less come off oh wow in transit but the bag had held
it there so I hadn't actually dropped down onto the framework that's the reason for the bag you learn when these
things turn up to you yeah how loose so or who sings rattling around and it's
not necessarily anybody dropping it it's just emotion and in the way that the boxes is set
um but you do see all sorts of things um go up and the world of couriers is
really a world of their own in a sense you you never know what's going to go on
by each company that's right but it turns up I need equipment a few weeks
back it was actually signed for eight o'clock on a Friday night yeah by somebody I don't even know and that's a
it's meant to be here on the next day delivery yeah it wasn't delivered but so
that they get paid yeah somebody signs for the box and then delivered it on the Monday
absolutely crazy so yeah yeah that's right it's one of those things you know
it's not what you can you can do about it um but yeah it's all good fun the
industry is quite interesting it's because you move from different areas
certainly what I do and dealing with sort of solar and lunar and the Deep Sky
aspects there's so many different uh pieces of equipment and components in that there's always something new coming
along sure that's right Gary I you and I have been talking I
don't know if you're going to have time about we talked about you might want to write a book
I think uh the reason it's been busy is really just a knock-on with the pandemic
yeah this is all it is we were actually quieter earlier in the year
um but then all of a sudden there seems to be a lot of new uh prototype equipment oh yeah floating around and
you you just go through a couple of months so the last two months have been a little bit busier starting to quieten
down again but I expect the rush to pick up um certainly coming up towards Christmas again where I start getting busy
um but also with people getting the time getting time off you know people work seven days a week very similar to what
we do in the sense I don't mean to rush or anything I'm just I just made an observation I think
it's cool that uh the book's definitely something I want
to do so it's going to be a key thing of me making the time um that that's really it definitely
takes it takes some dedication it is you know I've written two books from Springer and it's a it is a lot of work
there's no doubt about it it's a lot of work it's a lot of work but I think if you've been doing it a long time a lot of the
stuff you know off the top of your head without even thinking about you know you you can more or less do
this stuff um with your eyes closed you know blindfolded right in a sense that's
right that's how I wrote my first book it I basically spent four years learning it and almost another full-time job and
then I dumped it out into the book you know it's like you you've got all this stored knowledge in your head you just dump it out
yeah in the drafts and then you then you work on it you know after you get all the material out there
yeah I mean I've been asked quite a few times to do it over the years and it was I think it's more point of when I'm
ready to do it and I feel like now you know the time I always said I was never old enough when I retired all right
I thought that I thought the very same thing and then the opportunity came about you say what am I going to do I'm
going to grab the opportunity and do it yeah you know you have to do it yeah
um but you know you sort of I I work quite well on depression if I've got an
easy week uh not a lot gets done even though I should be getting on with it when I had a deadline there to get on
with it is when I really sort of kick in with things um yeah yeah I'll probably play quite
well with a deadline you know it actually I quite enjoy getting something up and running and done for a deadline
um quite close to it yeah I'm kind of the same where I get bored if I get bored I'm just lazy as
hell yeah I need a challenge to keep me going you know really yeah that comes out that's
what all of this is behind me it's a challenge yeah it is it's a big Airy challenge
okay I have a special meeting lined up tomorrow morning
yeah I know you follow some more stuff on me go ahead
you know so they've been with you Joe you like it yeah you sit there for months in the
background working on something physically there and up and running it
is really what flicks you're sweating since what keeps you you're sort of moving along but that time in between
when there's nothing more that you can really do apart from wait for a manufacturer or whatever another part of
the train is quite boring right that's where it all goes goes quite
um and then it normally gets busy once it comes out and everybody wants to know the news and that's of how everything's
working on it or um so so on from there but at the moment I'm just waiting for
really more activity on the sun I still got you know ton of work that we've been doing the last three or four years and
it's going to be putting that into practice now now that we're starting to get the larger Sunspot groups come
around we just need um two big ones yeah right side by side with the ribs in the
middle and that will do me fine I've got me weeks worth of work then to get on and work all of that stuff
down well Gary thank you very much man thank
you no problem it's always a pleasure yeah thank you so
um Molly Richard Jerry
my telescope sequences are getting running and uh both the targets I want to image are still behind their
respective objects trees garages whatever so okay yeah nothing right now okay all right I brought that picture up
from the Hubble Space Telescope that we were talking about earlier it could bring up
yeah this is this is the part of our show where it's just kind of you know you can freely show what you
like talk about what you like uh yeah sure I'll go ahead and uh let me
let me pull it over to this screen here I'm in the process of processing them at
the moment this guy
we are getting a thunderstorm here what we are getting a thunderstorm here oh
boy let's see I will share and I'll share
the screen uh yeah okay so uh here's a picture of
the sun I took earlier this is with a uh sorry my cats using the litter box back there if y'all can hear this
um all right oh man that smells terrible okay
that uh that I got um just like the sheet of it a while
back and I made a homemade filter cell for it that I'll show in a second but it's just a white light filter I don't
have a like a solar telescope but uh the conditions were good enough today that I
was actually able to get some detail on those sunspots as well as the pages and
stuff through a white light filter so that was very exciting yeah
uh a lot of this other stuff is dust spots and whatever else is on my camera lens and
then here's the other swim spot here uh and that uh that homemade filter cell
uh much like um uh oh yeah face ours was uh also
cardboard and duct tape and uh in my case Gaffers tape as well to just kind
of well to make everything light tight on the inside and then I put like when I at first it was black on on the front
and the I don't know this is the temperature inside got really hot like when I took it off it was it was pretty
warm in there just from uh like absorbing the heat from the black tape so I covered it with the white tape and
now it doesn't warm up in there at all the white tape just reflects all the all the heat so um it's a good idea really well very
good idea and then I I have uh I put Velcro on either side of the where the
filter is at on both sides of this filter cell and then I put cardboard
pieces on there on each side to protect the filter so and I'm not using it uh because you don't want to get any
pinholes or anything in it otherwise you can't use it anymore and I decided to make an off-axis one
because I only had an 8 by 12 sheet or sorry nine by twelve sheet of the paper
and it's an eight inch telescope and that would have only given me a little bit on the sides and it was just too
close for comfort on on whether I could make that and have it be sealed and stuff like that so
um I just moved a little off axis one here yeah this is when I was at the uh
Mercury Transit back in last November yeah it looks like you're having a good time works very well oh yeah
that's great but yeah so that's um that's familiar today this is the sun image and I'm working on processing that
into I'm gonna make a gif to see if I can see any changes from frame to frame or else I'm just going to go through and
clean up the single image and get that published you know on my social media
awesome that's great feel free to share it on on my personal page you know so
happy to share your work thanks that's great yeah I'm going to share this image real
quick this is kind of cool
right that is that's the 30th Anniversary image yeah from Hubble
that's uh yeah Rodrigo had quite a lot of that detail yeah he did capture quite
a bit of the detail in this yeah yeah I thought that was cool
mm-hmm now we just have to uh just invest another 100 million dollars into a
telescope for us to use remotely from here that's in space right
would it cost that much I would imagine at least well it depends on how big a telescope is it could be a
really small one we could talk to Elon Musk and see if we could hitch a ride on one of his
70 millimeter quad you know yeah and then they have a little big Imaging
chip yeah we could build a satellite uh our own telescope satellite the problem is uh being able to control the pointing
would be oh yeah difficult got the the guy who made that Hubble
image uh we we had him on the Astra Imaging Channel recently uh Joseph day
Pascal he works at the uh what's it called the um
you know I'm gonna get it wrong but uh he he processes most of those Hubble images that that you see out there oh
wow and uh we had him on the Imaging Channel recently and he talked about what that was like and he uses pics
Insight just like the rest of us so it was very cool
well it just showed you how to dance that program is too so yeah yeah
how about you deep T you have anything to share with us
no
hanging out with us that's good how about you Chuck you've been here the whole time
you're muted I'm unmuted hopefully yeah yeah let me
um share with you one image here that I
think is interesting let's see if you
okay this will show you what amateur astronomers can do now this is an image
taken with an eight inch telescope by a friend of mine in Evansville and a comparison of an image taken with
a 322 inch telescope um really a lot of difference really
because I'm not excessively just resolution yeah that's right the tracking of the
Stars yeah but I thought this was remarkable and it's an image I show
uh when I start giving programs about the League's observing programs I've
been asked to give a bunch of those lately uh there seems to be a lot of interest uh one thing I start off by
doing is explain all the reasons why people might not want to do that if they're doing variable star work or
Imaging like many of you do uh whatever you're passionate about do that but if
you like visual astronomy then the observing programs are wonderful also to direct you to new Vistas but this just
shows you the work that can be done by amateur photographers that's true that's true it is uh I I remember early on when
the you know digital Revolution started taking off and people started comparing their work against you know 1970s
Palomar 200 inch images you know and that was kind of The Benchmark it now seems like
a lot of amateurs will Benchmark against the Hubble you know or something like
that you know so um Scott honestly the images that people
take of especially planetary images today exceed that of not powerful
no question I would agree you know the images I've seen from Christopher go and
Damien Peach and some of these people they rivaled the Voyager they rivaled
the spacecraft Voyager and Pioneer yeah right oh yeah
absolutely no I'm I'm referring to Palomar days in the 50s not not right necessarily
working oh that's true true but even spacecraft shots done in
the 70s you know um man I tell you the the the detail is
incredible including getting details on the moons around Jupiter and Saturn you
know in some cases so it's just it's wow you know I love it I love seeing I love seeing
amateur astronomers break the boundaries you know you tell an amateur you know the you set up a standard that you think
that no amateur could possibly do you know and within months often yeah
they have figured it out and they're doing it you know so it's it's really impressive it's very
good well gentlemen ladies
any more uh any more to share my mind so out to you depends on the
time if you want I'm just waiting for a process to finish on here could uh run through a sunspot process as we've got a
lot of sunspot coming round sure yeah I just need this to finish saving
what it's doing and then I'll share a screen up okay um as we've got these uh
larger Sunspot groups coming around it might be a a thing to go through I just gotta wait
for this to uh finish writing about 10 files and then it'll be ready
um it's also worth bearing in mind that um like what Molly is doing now
um with the solar film you know it's so easy you can even use the solar film and
a cat stand a camera yeah you can put a solar film over the lens
yeah an image these sunspots a couple of years back we image them using uh the
solar sunglasses in a mobile phone yeah so we put the solar sunglasses over
the mobile phone and zoomed um zoomed in on that you know
um and that was quite interesting it was quite uh quite good to see
all right let's see if we can get this up and up and running if not I will quit it
yeah it's actually stopped anyway so
there we go right we use uh this one here
okay hopefully you can see that yeah yeah
so not too dissimilar from what's going on at the moment we've actually got the two
Sunspot groups or two sunspots that are there hopefully over the next
week they're um start running some uh linking structures between the two
sunspots that would be nice to see um but there's nothing to say that it won't uh there won't be another Sunspot
still ready to come round the last active group that this came from
in 2017 uh there were three or four of them and
that was on the decline so they can all come round um
sporadically really you never know what's around the corner so we're going to set this up anyway and set up as
improved tracking run at a global and we're gonna increase the noise robust
run it up to about seven on this particular image I've already
set on one of the frames by running the slider along and then we're just going
to analyze it let it run through
it is quite close this you're on about a seven and a half meter focal length into the sun
so um that's that's pushing it a little bit from the amateur base but it was done on
under 2 000 pounds worth of equipment so um that that was quite interesting just
a pretty standard uh 152 doublet using a cork and then using some barlows on the
cork itself even though it's already got those in we added some more to it and uh
up up the focal length to run through so
it's getting there will take a couple of minutes for it to run through this
come on let's use the same process doesn't matter whether you're zoomed in or whether you're on the uh
a smaller aperture
okay when we get this tuned in I pretty much ignore the quality graph here
um it will change and it certainly changes a lot in the UK just basically because of uh High Cloud
so we're going to set it out for um 250 frames out of the two thousand
leave all the just sharpened and everything alone and then we're going to run the alignment points at 104 and
place those across the image and then we're just going to stack it
okay I'm going to switch it over to register the image should come in
it doesn't and my uh resend it there it goes
Okay so we've got it to show the whole image and then we need to set up the initial
layer here um this is the key thing as to how many numbers you run on the initial layer depending
on how zoomed in you are so I generally run with a linear and a
default on this start with the initial layer two and then run it up to about 40 somewhere
around there that's a little bit too much there so we're going to run back
bring it back down somewhere around 22. and then double
that's looking pretty good so let's save that out
and then we'll open that back up in Photoshop let's close some of these screens down
and now
and there's our image sitting there okay so nice and straightforward I'm gonna crop the stack lines off of the
edge
I'm gonna move it into grayscale yeah
and then we're gonna move it into an eight bit so that we can change the color on it
and we're going to go into duotone set this up as a tritone
and let me double click on the colors the spices there we're going to need are black in so the next one down then I'll
go to color libraries you can play around with these I personally prefer true match colors
it just give me a nicer blend on these so run into somewhere
around the oranges just around there
and then we have a yellow for our next color
a little bit lighter on that there we go okay and then we switch it back to an
RGB image and we can start playing around with the
um color balance then really change this to whatever you want
it's down to you
and then we can bring in some contrast and that will Tone It Up
and then we're just going to do some noise control do special it
cancel that out because helps if you pick the right filter and then we are
just run some sharpening on it running on Sharp mask on there
I will just bring a bit more detail out look at that
that's nice and then if we want some more black in there is is to go into the actual
selective colors yeah so we can go to the blacks
I've actually installed another copy of Photoshop in here tonight so all the settings are out of the box
but you would play with this a little bit more you would balance the image up yeah either side you can do all sorts of
things to this um you could even come back yeah in your history
um to the point where it is a an 8-bit image and it's grayscale we couldn't even run into something like uh HDR
toning yeah and then we can balance this around a little bit more
and play with this this would bring out some more detail
foreign from there and then you could go on and color it so there's a multitude of
different ways that you can play with this wow but
it's close to getting the the data to start with and then you can play with the images
right beautiful man
incredible incredible I wonder if anybody's got an airpod with
like less than five minutes of editing before
I know you know it's something I never ever enter images for iPods
never have I entered any I don't think ever
so um Yep they're all stored on the computer here
that's right
so what's happening in California Molly
like in general uh I'm wondering if yeah in general
because I'm still not able to get any Targets acquired so I'm going to pop outside here in a minute and see how
things look now it is you can just grab off my context camera so I could see what's going on so okay well why don't
we take like a 10 minute break okay and then we'll come back and see what else is left and and
um uh and then we'll conclude the the start party okay
sound good okay great
foreign
foreign
foreign
foreign
hmm
foreign
foreign
[Applause] is getting a little smaller
a little smaller time zones man yeah that's right that's
right I got myself some ice cream in a Star Wars mug all the way around
[Laughter] I don't want to waste a Whole Bowl I have tons of mugs not a whole lot of
bowls that's right that's right that's right I eat my ice my uh my cereal out of that
mug you know it's a good one yeah there's my other cat about to yank down
my green screen this is Apollo so you have two cats yeah
uh so it did clouded out here my whole Sky clouds okay forecast so it still
says that it's currently clear but you know that's just like the bay area that is so weird when like you put that green
screen over there it's like you're stretching the universe you know kind of out to the end it's kind of weird
show you a peek behind the curtain of the universe
that was so funny yeah so no more images from me
um no more okay but I could talk about uh configuring like sequence generator
Pro to bend it to your will if we need something to talk about yeah why not
something else excellent yeah I don't know how many uh
astrophotographers watch versus like members of the public who would not be interested actually it's a it's a lot of
astrophotographers uh they tend to watch um
the end of the show you know we have more astrophotography going on generally you
know but I've started you know I like having um uh peeks through people's telescopes
that are that have something live going on as the show goes along because it's just
it is a star party it's a star party right so Stars that's right
well how about you Richard you got anything for us oh boy
oh boy I saw you mentioning the chat there that you've been thrown under the bus
what happened um a friend of mine said I didn't play the guitar
you do play the guitar I do play the guitar
um oh [Laughter] let's hear it after going after Norm I
don't know I know it's like going on after the Beatles but you know [Music]
let's hear it oh boy just a little gym
okay it's just a little rock and roll let's see what kind of guitar is this by
the way oh this is a Jackson Warrior well it looks cool
[Laughter] can you hear it yeah now were you in bands before I mean
really not really no you just all right my neighbors are gonna love
this oh yeah Crank It Up crank it up dude thank you
[Music]
oh my God I like it
[Music]
oh yeah
[Music]
thank you
[Music] [Laughter]
I loved it it's good it's good the the guy's in Chad liked it
very good another like being put on the spot yeah that's right I think you did
all right yeah you're with friends it's all cool yep
well great so anger beard I have a question for you working on
what happens if one day you don't have the beard what will you call yourself
uh well I'm hoping that I'll have a nice father timely beard on my corpse one day so
it's gonna stay around forever is that the plan landing on it
been around for a while already [Laughter] a good 15 years
so when did mother-in-law period as well I got him some some beard
care products for Christmas last year what are beard care products yeah it's a
clean it condition it brush it you know right I thought you just use like shampoo and
stuff although I could never grow a beard you know so you know this is honest to God truth the way I
shave in the morning is I put cream on my face not shaving cream real cream and then I
let a cat lick it off okay
and that's how I shave in the morning it's like how we used to clean the basement floor you spill bacon grease
and let the dog lick it up look up yep
works great I'm no beard expert but I think that the
that the beard hair is a different like texture and kind of has different different needs than the the top hair
you know I use the same thing on birth and same brush on posts
I see the same care products that you've spoken about beard oils and maybe it's
all a scam I don't know it's Gotta Be It's gotta be
I know it did save my neck once from a road impact on a motorcycle so it's
staying so here's some some comments from the chat okay from Norm Hughes my
mother-in-law has a beard too okay
I don't know if I said that clearly or not if you've never seen it says I've got
some great Italian made Sandalwood beard shampoo I use for mine okay sounds fancy if you've never seen the
video of Dave Canterbury starting a fire with his beard look it up it's incredible it's time to see this it's
it's kind of a joke but it's still incredible is that like like in a similar way like
like steel wool and a battery [Laughter]
except it smells horrible I'm sure oh one of the only electrical fires I've ever meant to make yeah
my cat's knocking things off my desk as cats do um
Norm says I have a beer but mine's close and short book Dave he said he just shaved his off
and Martin Eastman says I used two dabs of shampoo in the head and one on the beard
hmm absolutely sitting on my mark Lewis says my wife says kissing a man without a
beard is like kissing your sister [Laughter]
so let's see between that one and the one with the Mother-in-law that has the beard those are
those are pretty funny
so Aditi and Nepal do do they have men with long beards or short beards or any
beards yeah people so I have yeah they are
my brothers um either Brothers love to for the beer he likes to pull the Bears
yeah long beard like Estroven yeah yeah I just never could do it you know so you
gotta have something to stroke when you're thinking right you know it's just imaginary you know beer
photography nights when you're out in the cold somewhere not in the living room controlling everything remotely did
a lot of that to start off with and it's looking forward to more like right it keeps your face warm yeah I'll just get
one of those like you've seen those crocheted hats that have like like the crochet like yarn beard attached to them
but I'm not outside a whole lot anymore because I my telescopes uh they run pretty well sometimes I have to go
unplug and replug a cable or go you know go see if the clouds rolled in or not but otherwise I operate everything from
inside it's uh it's real nice well you're spoiled uh it's taking a lot of
work to get here so certain targets last year certain targets Go real well a
lot further away from 100 foot away from that led Street lamp out front yeah I
have so well let's see when I'm out at the dark site I sit inside my heated camper oh that's cool yeah and you got a
pretty cool camper too yes so what's what is the most ingenious things that you've seen
astronomers do so that they can they can get dark skies
um like like as far as darkening their their local Skies their local Sky how do they darken their local Sky legally I've
seen people I don't know if it's like take like pipes kind of add an extension to their fence with like black cloth oh
wow okay I'm in the fortunate situation where I have like six seven foot high fences around and then my house blocks
the rest so I don't get any direct light spillage just whatever light reflects off of off of my neighbor's house
ambient out there so that worked that was a very fortunate happenstance of the house that I got
I had a guy a client in Malibu that had an observatory now Malibu's
kind of a nice you know it's off in a you know
towards the beach area and uh um it seems like it's dark but there's
lights everywhere you know and uh this guy had three street lights
and you know this is way before narrow band filters and and I said so
how do you deal with all these uh you know these Mercury lights around here you know and he says watch this and he
flipped a switch he had three lasers aimed at these three Street lamps
should wait for it wait for it and they all went out boom that is brilliant I forgot that a lot of
those have like light sensors on I have a light sensor on there right like switched on by some system
so what would happen is is that the neighbors would complain that the lights were faulty okay and they would send out
somebody to go and change the bulb and and fix it up and stuff but
he never got caught red lasers no green lights
infrared ones will work yeah uh they're probably visible light sensors but they might they might accept
infrared as well because if especially if they're cheap you remember when the the line guy comes
out and puts his hand right in front of you you wouldn't see it in that case yeah
what's up the line guys they're not going to come out and fix it at night when you're when you're trying to use it no no no
yeah they just thought maybe there was a connector that was faulty or something like that
Jeff wise said he tried a green one on his on his street light and it didn't work so yes but it does work I I've seen
it work so I wonder how like how carefully I don't
know how big the sensor is if it's difficult to aim or not you can't just be like hand holding the
laser because you're gonna you'd have to set it up on it's got to be mounted right
and it didn't take a very powerful laser I don't think they were very powerful so
um Daylight's not that bright compared to a laser that's relatively focused
Norm Hughes says he's currently in the top and talk with our electric company to Shield one light on on the street all
right asteroid Hunter says you get to know the guy who who works on the street lights
in your area show them what you're doing and buy him a beer
and then he'll make adjustments to the street lights around you that's what we did
that's that's probably better that's right more permanent Maybe
[Music] um we do have a couple of programs that are coming up that I wanted to talk about we
have uh um on December 4th we have the live
Mount Wilson event where we'll be going in through uh live tours through the 100 inch and 60 inch telescope maybe through
the 150 foot solar tower and um uh we'll have lectures with the
Carnegie astronomer and uh and then we hope to do live Imaging through the
60-inch telescope that that evening so that'll be cool that's December 4th on
December 5th uh we are doing a live event with the astronomical league and
it's their first Live program and um so this is for people that of course
obviously League members but uh and non-league members and just people that might be interested in the league in
general or just like astronomy it's going to be a good program they've got great lectures and this will be
co-hosted I I guess uh Terry Nance running the uh the uh lecture series and
you're going to be there right Molly I am I'm going to talk about the uh how to get started in astrophotography as uh
part of their their new Imaging program that you can work on just like they're observing programs
perfect perfect yeah uh and um
that's all I have for right now as far as uh knowing what's coming up uh of
course we'll continue to have the Tuesday Global star parties I may take a
vacation um I haven't had one in a long time so uh that may be coming up
[Laughter] uh is the star party for the
um the great conjunction going to be on Monday it's gonna be on the 21st so we're gonna have to figure out exactly when
you know yeah I'm going to a friend's house to get a better line of sight
because I I'll have no chance of even getting it here there's good internet but I'm not sure if I'll be able to stream in or not so we'll see what we
can do you know most likely be able to stream it uh depending on I'm pretty sure I'll
be able to sit up at my house but I haven't checked the sight lines really carefully yet I think I'll be able to
but we'll see yeah Saturn and Jupiter are getting really low now so um but I'm thinking that it may be
possible you know given enough aperture that you could actually see Saturn and Jupiter in
the daytime you know or maybe towards the the afternoon um yeah I know I mean I've I've done it
with a 12 inch telescope
so I'm probably gonna start early I can I can usually get them like an hour before Sunset even
sometimes so yeah right they're apparently going to be so close I was looking in stellarium and it said
even with my small censored 183 with a C8 and a Barlow that it's all going to
be in the same frame and a Barlow okay and a Barlow yeah I was looking at mine
my C8 um pretty sad that it's gonna it's gonna be able to be in there
it's only six minutes of Arc the closest really six minutes oh my goodness
it'll just look like a double star up there right oh that's gonna be so cool
I want the blown out traps the same eyepiece feel
I'm just trying to figure out what my odds are there I'm gonna have a clear sky
do you not buy any new equipment for the December 21st opposition you're going to be clouded out if you do so it's
actually delayed my trip to go home for Christmas by a day or two so that I
could do this part of the conjunction know what you're doing I told my parents
I'm like hey so like I was gonna come home on the 20th but like there's a construction doing this thing and
they're like yeah all right we'll see you on the 25th I read now
I don't know if this is all true or not I believe it is uh that it's supposed to be the closest
that they've been in like 380 years or something like that yeah I
think I think I saw the last time they were this close like Galileo was alive or something like that I haven't
verified this but you know it might be true 21st great and they call it a great
conjunction sounds about right right okay so okay here we go this is
Wikipedia uh great conjunctions conjunction with planets Jupiter and Saturn
uh they occur regularly uh every 19.6 years on average due to the combined
effect of Jupiter's approximately 11.86 year orbital period and Saturn's 29.5
year orbital orbital period uh the next great conjunction conjunction occurs on 21st of December
2020. um let's see
let's get to this one
the great conjunction of 2020 will be the closest since 1623.
I remember that yeah on the 21st of December
at 13 30 universal time Jupiter will be 0.1 degrees south of Saturn and 30
degrees east of the Sun meaning both planets will be visible in the same telescopic field of view
though they will be distinguishable from each other without Optical Aid
the two planets will be visible low on the southwestern Horizon and the constellation of Capricorn after sunset
for mid-northern latitudes the planets will be less than 15 degrees in altitude one hour after sunset
the great conjunction occurs seven weeks after Jupiter passes Saturn and heliocentric longitude
a heliocentric conjunction
and this was yeah they are going to be six arguments part that's yeah maybe I
will toss a Barlow on there do you mind if I share my screen real quick
please
uh might look funny because this is an ultra wide screen um but this is a stellarium on the uh
the night of the 21st okay and if you um
turn the camera a little bit you can definitely get them both
in the same field of view all right so that's with a C8 and a 2X Barlow and
a sensor that's like 8.8 by 12 millimeter it's pretty small sensor for
the um the 183 but depending on what you're working with it you can use a lot
of power and still get them in the same frame that's all I wanted to really show though yeah
there's many plans that are probably going to ruined hahaha
I practice romance our evil laughter yes everybody
needs to have their everybody needs to have their their evil
like super villain that's right horrible laugh you know that's right I don't have
one I I I have to admit I'm super excited about this December 21st event it's
going to be too so yeah anybody listening out there that wants to try
their hand at uh joining in I can have 50 people on Zoom at the same time so it
would be it would just thrill me to no end to see uh 50 astrophotographers with
live views of this uh this event you know that we could scroll through and
and show people what's what's happening so um and then you know the the after that
after the event all the processed images there's going to be I know there's going
to be some spectacular stuff so
I'll just be the man behind the curtain switching between astronomers
yep well so there's your challenge folks
um and uh we hope to see you on the fourth and the fifth and uh of course
the 21st but other events that we do of course we do daily shows
um you know with uh Jerry Hubble and Kent Martz and uh
um it's a lot of fun to spend this uh these times with you and
um you know I hope that you're getting something out of it because we sure do so anyways and thank you each one of you
you know uh Richard thank you Chuck uh Michael thanks for coming on your
first time it's great DT hope to have you on next next star party so okay I'll
challenge you again but I'll give you like maybe 48 hours notice instead of 24 hours notice
I was amazed at what you pulled together you know really so
um now DT are you are you um would you consider yourself to be
good at mathematics or physics or what what's your specialty do you think
in school um in physics physics yeah yay physics
he hopes to come also the United States and maybe go to school here so yeah I
hope that works out and um yeah yeah maybe maybe you'll be working
for NASA or something you never know so that'd be really cool
well yeah I think yeah I have reported kick from the Libby and me myself okay
something yeah
we're discussing earlier when uh [Laughter]
that's good we are discussing about our cat in our
school okay awesome is your Club growing deep tea is yours up growing good yeah
yeah we are planning to have the program this day but uh some of our from some of
the members are from this high school level ending and they're they have the examination so we have stuff for now so
after December one we will continue and on December we are planning to have a lot of programs
that's great yeah all right
DT thank you so much chuck thank you thank you
and uh Astro beard thank you yeah I'm interested in Liga too
you're at you're interested in the astronomical League good yeah yeah maybe
you can make her Club in an astronomical league club that would be good
if you give me an excuse to go to Nepal and check it out hang in just one second
better Ryan back up here uh yeah
just it's Orion I just messaged yeah sorry it's still cloudy but because
of Ryan is uh happy to share his views yeah that's right
to you I I just uh chat in the chat window I
sent you my email just just drop me a line and I'll tell
you all you need to know about the lead okay thanks
oh I'm just now seeing this message here Chuck this is if you need five minutes to fill I do have a shortened extremes
and astronomy slide set let's see it we're gonna do it now yeah okay
uh how much do you want it's a it's a full program and I'm not going to do it all tonight I'll just do the the
close-in items yeah okay uh hold on one second
okay I've gotta find it again okay give me one second please
I'm getting ready to send in my next uh my my next award program how are you
yeah yeah I'm gonna finish up the planetaries oh yeah I'm about seven short of those I
have to wait until February to finish those I finished it up a couple weeks ago is that right yeah
that's a tough one it is okay let's see here
all right let me share the screen and we'll go here
slideshow through the current slide okay um this is part of a program I did on
Extremes in astronomy and it sort of starts close to Earth and then Works its way to the depths of space so this will
be the close-in stuff for tonight um this one's the distance and duration
record in space for humans belongs to Valerie polyakov of Russia who's uh
aboard the mirror for 7075 Orbits for 441 days the dates are visible on the
screen here covered 186 million miles during that time quite a quite a record
uh the altitude record is still held by the Apollo 13 astronauts who of course
had a little bit of a problem in route to the Moon but they looked around the Moon rather
than dropping into orbit and the moon's distance from the earth and the nature of their swing around took them to a
distance of 249 205 miles from the surface which is a record still
um the speed record human speed record still belongs to the Apollo 10 astronauts from 1969 as they approached
the Earth on return they reached the speed of 24 846 miles per hour goodness
this is the first lunar Landing the first photo taken from the surface of the Moon this was taken by the Soviets
who landed luna9 on the surface of the Moon on February 3rd 1966.
wow and the first man landing of course we
all know Apollo 11. this was a shot taken from the limb
and that's a beautiful shot I love this
which one oh this one here this one yes yes well no the the man uh the the man
that's walking I'm sorry there you go this is this slide relates
to the longest stay on the moon which was Apollo 17. they say it on the moon for three days and three hours
uh-huh the highest known Mountain
belongs oddly enough to a mountain called Ria Silvia on the asteroid Vesta
uh above the average plane of the mountain it rises 72 178 feet
which is just slightly higher than Olympus Mons uh probably its average
plane wow the first unmanned landing on another
planet of course was Venera 7 which uh we heard from Dave eicher about earlier
tonight uh the spacecraft of course essentially melted after about 15 or 20
minutes I can't remember the exact period of time but it didn't last long um with temperatures in the 800 plus
degree Fahrenheit range and 90 atmospheres pressure that's 90 atmospheres pressure by the
way is about the equivalent of being three thousand feet deep in water to give you an idea of the pressure on the
surface of Venus the guys in the chats are saying you're
giving them answers to the Future contests
[Laughter] exactly yeah look into this uh Blinky
thing here yeah yes this is the fastest spacecraft ever
uh this is the Parker solar probe and on January 29th of this year it reached a
speed of 244 225 miles per hour drive to the Earth yeah
um and on December 24th Christmas Eve this year it will reach a speed of 450
000 miles per hour relative to Earth so there's your new record holder
most distant unmanned Landing of course we also heard about tonight uh was at
the landing on Titan by the Higgins Lander and on January 14 2005 and a
distance of 885 million miles incredible stuff yeah
first asteroid Landing uh took place in
2001 on the near Shoemaker mission to Eros
will play at a distance of 158 million miles
cool and this is a picture taken from the surface
lots of gravel and of course the oh yeah first comet
Landing the Rosetta Mission uh the felai Lander landed on 67p curium after
semenko in 2014 just an incredible Mission I still can't believe we landed
on a comic I know I mean what yeah it's amazing
um it's in the the thing that makes it so hard of course is the gravity is so light if you land with any impact at all
you bounce so that that was the difficult part and here's a picture from the surface you have to tickle their way
down I mean this could be in Utah and if you've ever seen the skies in
Utah you'll know they're the questions over here too in Utah at night and it looks exactly like that yeah except
maybe the the land wouldn't be eliminated quite something oh yeah okay full moon full moon this is the most
active volcano in the solar system uh it's iOS Pele which is a constant state
of a Russian uh you're seeing a 190 Mile High plume here holy smokes it just looks like a little
stream of water and then you remember that like this is an entire Moon that this is coming off of like the scale of
that and the largest known natural satellite
would be ganomy Jupiter's largest moon 3267 miles in diameter quite a bit
larger than our moon as you can see here oh yeah almost more sized
and bigger the Mercury and the largest known impact structure
lies on Ganymede you see the dark area here uh oh damage this is uh an impact
structure that was determined to exist just this past August uh
determined to be an impact structure from an examination of some of the terracing around the edges it's
4836 miles in diameter unless we hit another moon or something
and what about the largest known storm everybody's thinking great red spot right well yeah currently yes but the
largest known storm ever was the great Springsteen spring excuse me Springtime
storm on Saturn uh that roiled the uh the saturnian surface from the cloud
tops from December of 2010 all the way to August of 2011. storm itself covered
1.5 billion square miles uh eight eight times the earth's surface in size and
here's a close-up of the the bottom screen show the entire surface of Saturn
at that latitude and you can see the length of it nearly wrapped completely around the planet
it's beautiful tallest known cliff in the solar system belongs to Verona roops on Miranda
it's 63 000 feet tall it's about 12 miles tall you can jump you can jump off of it and
have a glorious ride to the bottom um it would take 12 minutes but when you
reach the bottom you'll regret it you'll land at 124 miles per hour
the furthest man-made object from us of course is Voyager One
and Voyager now which we're still in communication with amazingly lies at a
distance of 14 billion miles one two thousandth of a light year from us
and you see the orbits of all the planets here the uh
and trajectory yeah okay the furthest photo of Earth ever taken
was taken by Voyager One when it was four billion miles from Earth so this is a view looking back at us from 4 billion
miles further than Neptune and I will ask you now Skyler I'm about
to leave the solar system so would you like to save the rest of this for later or continue it would be no let's leave
let's see what happens outside the solar system let's see what happens okay nearest start of the sun of course uh
Proxima Centauri you can certainly see it in this picture can't you
yes yeah you can pick it out there it is right there yeah I see it yeah
it's a REV drawer 4.25 light years that's about 25 trillion miles
uh that's about 8 330 times further than Pluto
um and this will give you some idea of scale this on the left you see the Earth
yeah the sun they're not to scale as far as distance is concerned excuse me the this is merely
uh showing you the size of the star compared to the star Proxima which is much smaller
um and Proxima Centauri has a Planet
approxima B which is approximately the size of the Earth this is an artistic representation only
that of course garnered significant interest from the astronomy Community because it's the closest planet outside
the solar system to us and the trouble is even though the view
from Proxima B to Proxima Centauri would be roughly equivalent to that on Earth
Proxima Centauri is a flare star and that would make life on
approxima B uh completely implausible yeah looking back from Proxima however the
constellations would look the same if you looked back from Proxima centauri's vicinity toward the constellation of
Cassiopeia you would see one extra zag and the zigzag of Cassiopeia and that
would be the sun approximately that bright and speaking of which uh what about the
closest Supernova Remnant to us while we're in the middle of one it's called the local bubble spot to relate to a
supernova called jamanga for a while but new study suggests that it was a supernova that occurred very close to us
in the vicinity of the present location of the Pleiades which is only 444 light years away
uh this is the most sun-like star that's ever been found it's 18 Scorpio
look at the comparison Mass almost the same Luminosity the same diameter the
same temperature the same rotation rate virtually the same age
virtually the same so if you want to go out and look at a star that you can see with your unaided eye you'll see one
that matches the sun almost perfectly no planets have been detected around 18
Scorpios so far now it's only 45 light years away but bear in mind that in
order to detect planets you need some help you have to have planets transiting across the face of the star they might
be orbiting in the circular pattern around it you know that we're looking down on from the North Pole of the orbit
yeah so we might not see that the largest apparent diameter of a star
seen from Earth belongs to R doradas which tends an angle of uh
0.057 seconds of Arc slightly larger than Myra and Beetlejuice and you can
see how big these Stars angular diameters apparent angular diameters are in comparison with Pluto as seen from
Earth [Music] those are actual star images at the top by the way
huh the smallest known planet is this little
world Kepler 37b it's roughly the size of Earth's moon
it orbits its star at a distance of uh excuse me for the period of 13 days the
surface temperature is around about 800 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface it's about 215 light years away
and the largest known planet if it is one is hd100546b
lost 320 light years away it's about seven times the mass of Jupiter
but at some point it's really hard to define the boundary between a planet and a and a star uh if Jupiter were more
massive uh it would become a brown dwarf if there were even more massive still a red dwarf and making the cutoff between
the two is very difficult this is more than likely a brown dwarf the darkest known planet is
t-r-e-s-2b it orbits a star called kepler-1 and Draco and it's a slightly
larger than Jupiter and it reflects only about four percent of the light that hits it huh
this is sometimes considered to be the most symmetrical deep Sky object
known that's the red rectangle and monosaurus the 2 300 light years look at
the patterns I mean the shock patterns on all sides are virtually identical looks like a gem yeah
the most planets around a star well we used to hold the record until Pluto got
demoted and now we're in the tie with kepler-90 it has eight planets that
orbit very close to its star in fact all eight of their planets of Kepler's 90s
planets orbit inside the distance of the Earth's orbit here
and oh it's a nice boat this is the coldest place in the universe
known it's the boomerang nebula and Centaurus and it's expanding so fast that it has cooled its gas at the center
to only one degree Kelvin um it's releasing its gases at about 310
000 miles per hour and this nebula lies at a distance of five thousand light years
wow and here we have the hottest known star this is a wolf rat Ray a star 102 WR 102
and Sagittarius it has a radius of about 60 percent out
of the Sun and its surface temperature I'll tell you the sun surface
temperature runs about 10 000 degrees Fahrenheit this star the surface temperature is 378
000 degrees Fahrenheit and this is the Little Dot in the bottom
is the fastest spinning Pulsar it's a neutron star that rotates 716 times per
second that means that the equator of this neutron star is rotating at 24 the speed
of light wow and only gravity that strong could hold
it together spinning that fast of course this is the largest known star uh it is
Stevenson 218 and scutum uh it has a diameter of 1.8 billion miles and to
give you some comparison which we're looking at here is the orbit of the Earth around the Sun at the left
compared to the surface of Stevenson 218.
jumbo star look at that and here we have the fastest moving star
this is an image of stars rotating around orbiting rather the central black
hole Sagittarius A star at the center of the Milky Way galaxy and the fastest moving
star detected in this group is moving at eight percent the speed of light in a very tight
orbit around that Center so strong as the gravitational attraction of that
black hole the closest galaxy to the Milky Way the
Canis Major Galaxy which is actually already entwined with our own these
stars have been categorized and traced and form a pattern like this it's
already being absorbed by the Milky Way its nucleus has a defined location
however its form a nucleus here hmm
sometimes yeah this is the fastest spinning star it's
an artist's conception of course called vfts 102 in the large magellanic cloud
it's rotating one million miles per hour at the equator it's about a hundred
times faster than the sun the stars of this type that is not neutron stars but
ordinary Stars can only rotate so fast before they fly apart
largest known spiral galaxy is the Condor Galaxy NGC 6872 and Pavo lies at
a distance of 522 000 light years and is 212 million light years
excuse me it's 212 million light years away and 522 000 light years from tip to
tip half a billion light years from tip to tip hmm
and this is the largest known Galaxy this is ic1101 in Virgo
as approximately 100 trillion Stars that's about 500 times more stars than
the Milky Way and its Halo is approximately 4 million light years wide that is greater than
the distance between the Milky Way and Andromeda and it lies at a distance of about 1
billion light years from us and the largest known structure in the
universe is the huge large Quasar group I'm not kidding that's what they call it
because there's a large Quasar brute but this one's the huge one because they're so good at naming things
the very large array
s this happened with the with the large telescopes you know they had the the
large telescope and then the overwhelmingly large telescope and and so forth
um superlative at some point right yeah this consists of 73 quasars uh in Leo
and Leo minor and the chain uh is associated with it's about four billion light years long
um the hottest place in the universe is a gap in a galaxy cluster called
rxj1347 another really clever name in Virgo and it's a cloud of gas that has
been determined to have a temperature of 300 million degrees Kelvin
it's about five billion a lot years away the most massive Galaxy cluster known uh
is in the constellation of Phoenix that lies at a distance of 7 billion light
years has three quadrillion Suns worth of stars in the galaxies that form the
cluster well um and uh I guess political correctness
hasn't reached this particular Galaxy yet because it's astronomers call it El Gordo which means the fat one that's the
the name of it hmm the largest known black hole ton 618 and
k n a spinatus i uh the uh black hole has a mass of 66 billion
solar masses and a diameter of 240 billion miles it's 1 25th of a light
year and you've seen Neptune's orbit for the snow in Galaxy is Quasar excuse
me the brightest known object in the universe is Quasar APM zero two zero
eight two seven nine five two five five in the links now this one's interesting because it's a magnitude 15.2 it's
accessible to amateur instruments um and lies at a distance of 12 billion
light years lights only had about 13.4 billion years since galaxies began
to form 400 million years after the big bang in which to reach us so you're looking here at virtually 90 plus
percent uh the distance to the furthest object that light would have had time to
reach us from this galaxy uh is rather interesting because it's the largest
known repository this Quasar is the largest known repository of water
known to exist in the universe
and the furthest Galaxy ever imaged is gnz11 the Hubble Space Telescope took
this image we're looking here at an object whose light has traveled to us for 13.4 billion years you read the
reports that say it's 13.4 billion light years away of course that's not where it is today because the whole time that
light's been traveling to us the universe has been expanding so today this Galaxy's actually a mature much
larger Galaxy that's merged with others and it lies at 32 billion light years but this is the furthest one in terms of
light travel time ever imaged it's so new uh that this object only it was only
about 600 light years wide has only about 1 billion stars in it so you're seeing a brand brand new Galaxy
that is forming and of course that takes
us pretty much out as far as we can go and I'll terminate it right there right
I think it's amazing that we can see that like all those especially All Those Distant things from Earth just with our
little humble you know not cosmologically sized telescopes you know
I yeah they might include the Hubble but that's still not a massive telescope you know it's it's amazing
and there's so much more to do so much more to see James Webb's face Telescope yes put that
thing up there please someday eventually Crush fingers
all right folks well I do think that will conclude it uh that was a great uh ending to a great start party Chuck
thank you so much you're welcome thank you thank you you guys have a good night thanks for joining Molly of course
Richard D thank you again for joining good night see you all and of course our audience
thank you very much good night
shared subscribe thank you like share and subscribe that's right
and pet your kitty and Pat your kitty or you're not if you
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