Transcript:
okay did you get a count scotty of who was
here for the second one i didn't not yet but i can look um
so
so this one's only about a thousand views
so then we're up to about 4 500 altogether yeah well probably more on
on the first one let's see what that one's like that's 5 200 views
that for the first one is up that high yeah they grow afterwards you know
it's okay hello hello hello everyone
i'm sorry for being a little bit late but we got the schedule differently i think or we got we didn't
get correctly because we thought that the time is going to be a take so harley's going to be a little
bit late uh because he's on the way home he's going to join probably in 10
minutes or something and hello everyone again i am from vera i am part of astronomy club of kosova
from kosovo and currently volunteering in romania through erasmus and the organization
that i'm working here is called navocaradimos uh so i don't know if you started very early
or just right now i would like to talk a little bit how i started here with the astronomy because
in this region of romania astronomy is not very um people don't know a lot about astronomy
as a science they actually confuse it with astrology and in the beginning it was so funny because
i started only with the info info sessions of astronomy and some quizzes because we didn't have a telescope it
was like almost five months ago and um i tried to make it interesting
also with some guys that were helping me but right now we are having also a christmas party and we are going to go
at nine uh for observation because right now it's not uh still um visible saturn and jupiter from here
it's only the moon and we prepared and uh something we have only this telescope
that you're seeing here it's a refactor and uh actually while asking people here
about their conduction they were saying that some people heard about this some people didn't
and one of them said that they actually look like a beautiful couple like together and it was so so nice to
hear from people and yeah last week we since i was talking about
the astronomy sessions we had astronomy sessions i tried to only uh share information about the astronomy
in the beginning uh through quizzes and through through info sessions and then later on
there was some uh local person that he saw that we are doing something related to astronomy and he brought us this
telescope uh so we now we have a telescope and we are going to use
for some people is going to be actually the first time that are going to observe with the telescope and see
at the actual um experience the feeling of observing but
also experience of the feeling that it's not going to happen and then um 800 years
from now um also we had some pictures to share which suhal has blamed and he's supposedly to
share uh some picture also from jordan which one of the guys from here he used to work in um observatory in
jordan and now just yesterday his colleague from jordan he took some pictures of jupiter and
saturn which are amazing and
he's on the way and he's going to share your screen with you and shows that we're trying also tonight to take some pictures
uh we also have some some cameras here that we are going to try to use and so on
yes that's great
hey deepti she's joining us again
if you go please
while we have a little time mike i wanted to once again thank you for sending me to
brazil the other a few years ago i really did enjoy that
yeah well you should you should you should get around to other places too i mean they loved having you
and i know many other places that we'd love to bring you over as well when it's all
safe including uh romania where i was a couple of years ago primavera where
where in romania are you and you're you're in bucharest i am close to timisoara in reshiza
which is in the border with serbia oh yes okay i was in uh i was
mostly in targovishta and uh we had a little trip up into transylvania to visit some places
it's beautiful uh so that's uh someplace uh david uh
that would be good and uh i know others that would love to bring you over there when it's safe for us to travel again
it'll be a little while yeah it'll be a little while i haven't been on a plane in a year now and it's
very strange uh i've been pretty much at our home since late february yeah yeah
same here same here yeah actually tonight we are so lucky
because it's still so clear we can see the moon
and it's because it's the light pollution but we have a place that is like 15 minutes we are going to walk up in the in the
hot hill and to observe nice actually also the people are so excited because all the day they were
texting me are we going to observe today or not um and i was looking at this i was
hoping that it's going to remain like this also during the night and it's still so clear so we are lucky tonight
great well i hope so too it's a beautiful magical conjunction to look at
apparently myself is uh logged in as well and uh hopefully we can get alameda um
to uh be able to connect hi everyone hi hi
hi sir hello hello my car is going yeah it's going well geez it's
been almost 24 hours since i've seen you so i'm late no no no i'm saying that uh
i'm joking and i haven't seen you in such a long time yeah in fact it was outside unfortunately
here in italy this sky is a claudia so let's let's hop for something later on
because it's really cloggy and yeah i'm not sure that we can catch up
something tonight okay that's okay you know the program we had yesterday with uh
and if you and if uh there are people doing something back in tunisia they could uh they could join um
but the program we had yesterday with um with emilio and julio in nicaragua and
mexico was really great and you know you could talk about that and people have watched what was
covered how many watched you had people in more than tunisia
um yeah yesterday we got over 2 000 viewer in our video which is
really a lot for a very short time like two hours we got over two thousand yeah it was a good
meeting that's great the
social media sharing uh social media outreach and astronomy is a fantastic tool and um really
is uh you know an important tool that i think all people that are involved in
educational outreach and astronomy should be uh should be taking advantage of yeah
yeah exactly that was a big message
yeah i'm agree uh mike does there are some other people that they can like um share a view observation from tunisia
because i think the sky is clear there sure if you have somebody else in uh in
tunisia what about um what's his name the medical doctor can't
remember yes sophia and come on i'm not sure i'm not sure if they're gonna organize something or not
yeah yeah you can you can share the login information if you want it's not a problem okay
we have a nice size audience watching right now
yeah i have questions could we share in our social media like we can we live stream
um i don't know you can try okay you can try
mike who are we talking with is it was it myself yeah that's that's my uh there okay
and we had alamia from ethiopia and oh he's there you have you people
there uh i haven't been able to connect with his audio um and we got mice's audio but no video
i'm coming soon okay all right yeah i'm coming soon in the video okay
so
steve i'm going to turn over the uh
you know the uh hosting um with um you know people that mike
is introducing to us i'll have him uh kind of introduce
them to the audience um okay and then um we have
on uh right now so
we'll see how it goes here
we got gary palmer coming on in a few more minutes gary's still not online uh
he was online he's coming back okay yeah last person buys right that is
that rule that's that's right that's right any and even if gary's not the last
person we're making him buy no matter what no matter what
well hello everybody this is scott roberts uh now for the third segment of the third
install of our our global star party of the great conjunction this is actually
the 27th global star party that we've done and we have with us today
um dr david levy steve malia from the royal astronomical
society of camp canada that is co-hosting this event dr mike simmons who has
traveled the world and has done astronomy outreach for many many years
deepti gatam is with us as well and myself um
my sis is uh from which country mike
mice is from tunisia and i met her there and also during a trip to
algeria she's now a graduate student in italy university of padua
so she's there for the moment okay all right and then we have uh we haven't
i i fear i'm going to murder this person's name alemaya and uh
alemaya is um also i believe in uh
was it is it africa yeah it's about the capital of ethiopia ethiopia
that's awesome okay uh so we'll we may have uh at times when we're doing these
connections around the world sometimes we have problems with uh internet which is um you know does occasionally happen
i know that later on in this segment we're going to have gary palmer on from uh from the uk and um
um we have uh also um uh uh prevera bulagi and uh sue hell
on from astronomy the astronomy club of kosovo that we'll be on
and so we will uh we'll go ahead and get
started with uh with david david has uh i don't think david has slept
uh today i i've been getting cat naps um but you're cheating scott what's that
you're cheating [Laughter] i have to you know so i guess i could
somehow make it but uh um but anyhow um
david is uh as you all know is a dear friend of mine and a dear friend of astronomers
all over the world um he has uh illuminated the
personal many personal aspects of of of uh icon icons of astronomy
uh through his books he has uh uh he knew clyde tomba um
uh you know and and many other many other people bart bach uh you know
the you know the the guy that um uh
described the bach globules and and loved the milky way and uh um and and so many others his
his numerous articles in skying telescope magazine and parade magazine is a science writer
um uh you know david is probably uh most known for com
the discovery co-discovery of comet shoemaker levy 9 that crashed or smashed into jupiter so that was an
amazing event but uh you know i would say that um
having watched that through a telescope uh you know that that tonight's conjunction
of jupiter and saturn is uh almost as thrilling as that particular event
you know so uh but that was something that was something i think that humanity
had never seen before was a comet smashing into jupiter this has been seen before but it was
about 800 years ago so um and as david pointed out there were no
telescopes around to see it so this time we have telescopes we have
astronomers studying it and it is uh you know we are basking in the golden age of astronomy in the
golden age of discovery as well so but i will uh turn this over to uh
to david in a moment i did also want to introduce steve malia steve is a
former
former president of his his center which i think was toronto the toronto center
uh is that right in ontario mississauga center which is august city next to the royal
astronomical society of canada right yep i'm sure somebody in toronto center is
screaming at the screen right now he's not part of our center that's right
um but you're part of the uh the fraternity of uh astronomers and uh
certainly the fraternity of the resc so yes um so uh uh
and then uh and mike simmons uh uh will uh will guide us through
you know some of the guests that he is introduced to us but steve why don't you uh tell us a little
bit about the rasc to those who are not familiar okay that may be tuning in right now
all right thank you scott i appreciate it um it has been uh quite a fun morning long morning we've
been at this for the past uh oh seven hours i think eight hours how
about that um and i'm having a lot of fun with this so scott thank you very much for having me as part of this
this event uh it means a lot to me to be part of it um i see this as a you know we use words
earlier in the day as magical for what we saw and um you know uh we know this event happened
800 years ago as well um uh 400 years ago but it was only during the daytime so nobody was
able to see it um but what what what i'm what comes to mind is when an event like
this happened so far so far ago so long ago somebody's looking at it and they're not
aware that somebody else in another part of the world is seeing it as well because that concept wasn't i don't
think existed then um per se but um
now with technology we're able to bring the world just a little bit smaller right and we can all share this together
so i think that that's fantastic um yeah so the rafc the royal astronomical society of canada you know
uh we're it's in this 152nd year now uh it just uh celebrated its 151st
completed year on um earlier this month uh december 1st i believe um it started off as uh the toronto
astronomical club in uh the mid-1800s and later became the toronto
astronomical society which then later on became the royal astronomical society
um in the early 1900s um you know there's a lot of history with the rasc
um and uh we we put out a couple of really good documents one of them you know we'll hear more about it
tonight um when we have members of the rasc uh as part of the show and to talk about
uh this one document called the observer's handbook um it was um uh first
uh started uh by a gentleman by name of dr clarence chant and uh dr chant um has been
uh well was very much involved in the rasc in its publications uh right up until
his death in 1956. one of his books that he has uh written
is still used today it's called the wonders of our wonderful universe you can still buy
it it's still being uh published uh which i think is amazing um considering that the book is
nearly 100 years old um you know it the rasc is a
organization um that is inclusive to everyone who wants to be
part of it you don't have to own a telescope uh to to to be a member
um by membership and and you're with like-minded people that enjoy the sciences and like to have the
camaraderie of others that enjoy it as well um with 28-29 centers
across canada from coast to coast all the way up into the great white north of the yukon um it's a
very strong uh group of people and a very proud group of people so um you know i'll talk about more of
the rafc throughout the day but i wanted to at least bring that up with
dr chant and the important contribution that he's made to canadian astronomy through the
handbook and also through the journal which is published bi-monthly by the rafc um
that's all for now scott i guess i don't want to give everything away at
once okay all right now have to come back on the next segment to uh to listen to the rest um yes so
so at this point we will uh we'll turn this over to uh david levy uh david has uh been been
just amazing to uh uh run all this time with uh i think as i mentioned earlier i think
he's doing this all with no sleep so uh um and uh he is uh
uh definitely um someone that can that can stay the uh the course
i remember the last arizona dark sky star party and david
observed all night long into the early morning hours and when everybody else
was going back to sleep but uh david david kept going and was just it was just amazing for all of us to uh
spend that those uh dark sky nights with him out there so it was very cool if if i
could uh if i could just scott sorry david i don't mean to to jump in front of you but i just
wanted to to mention as well uh that david is an honorary president
of the montreal center of the rasc and of the kingston center of the rafc and he's also a
recipient of the chant medal from the rafc which was awarded to him
in 1980 and he is very much loved
by the rafc i wanted to just just put that in there sorry david i
didn't mean to cut you off is it my turn now scotty it is your turn
well thank you so much scotty for that introduction your double introduction yes um i can only add to that that i've
actually made two two good decisions in my life i made a ton of bad ones
but two really good ones the uh the best decision i ever made was marrying wendy
no doubt about that and the second best decision was made so that on december 17
1965 i started a search for comets which i am doing to this night 55 years
later and this morning in between two of scotty sessions here
i went out and i did some comment visual comment hunting and i don't think i'm ever going to find
a comment again but i love the search i love going out and searching the night
sky it's magic to me and girls and boys ladies and gentlemen
today is the day it is the 21st of december it is the solstice and we have
a conjunction a great conjunction that's a scientific term by the way
when jupiter and saturn get get near each other that happens once every 20 years and
it's called a great conjunction but much is the risk of people yelling
and screaming at me this is really more of an astrological
event than an astronomical event not so much recent astrologers but ancient
astrologers it is a chance
to go back not dozens or even hundreds but thousands of years
when people who were into astrology were able to predict the motions of the
planets for thousands of years and they also were able to predict these
close conjunctions i don't know how long ago they predicted that there would be a beauty
on december the 21st 2020 but somehow they did and we've known for a long time i've
known this since january of this year when i got steve's observer handbook and i just
looked up in december and noting noting that jupiter and saturn getting close together
until today when the together the conjunction is so close
that i think it's something like 10 arc minutes the two of them apart the two planets are easily visible in
the field of view of one eyepiece of a single telescope and it's really wonderful i have a
a uh an admission right now to make and that is that i am here under false
pretenses i have never taken a course in astronomy so i believe scotty is already planning
to fire me after this but anyway but anyway i have never taken a course in astronomy
i am i love the night sky
i enjoy i am passionate about going out and observing whenever i can and even though i have
discovered in my career about 23 comets i
uh my favorite thing to do is actually observing meteors and tonight after i hopefully get a view
of the conjunction at its closest i'm going to go out and i'm going to
look for the ursa meteors which have their maximum tonight and i'm hoping that i'll be able to get
some interesting meteors maybe even get one photographed
we go to the last time that there was a conjunction here as steve told us it was in 1623.
those of you who have studied english literature as i have know that 1623 is the year that the
first folio of william shakespeare's plays was published it was about seven years after
shakespeare died which sadly means that he could never have seen that conjunction
but that's okay will because nobody could see that conjunction it took place in broad daylight
this one not only is it taking place at night so that we can all see it it's in the
evening so everybody everybody is able to see it
and it's jupiter and saturn to the two biggest planets in the solar system
you don't even need a telescope you just go out and uh last night i know notice that
wendy could separate them with her unaided eyes i don't know if she'll be able to do it tonight or not
but she certainly did last night and uh i was able to get them both in this field of view shakespeare
loved astrologer astrology no i that's wrong boy i'm i need to get it you need to say
cup or something have some coffee okay all right start again good morning
everybody my name is david levy and i am the best to give a talk i'm going to start over again hopefully i'll get it
right this time shakespeare was not that's what i wanted to say was not
that excited about astronomy and he
he wrote in sonnet 14. that he actually had no real interest in astronomy
and uh he doesn't feel he really has he has no interest in
astrology he um he says in the second line of that
that in the second line of that's that sonnet he says he thinks i have
astronomy so he likes he he's interested in the night sky for its own sake
but not so much for astrology but as a playwright as a playwright here i go again as a
playwright he knows his audience is interested in having their horoscopes
predicted so he has astrology throughout his place
in julius caesar calpurnia says when beggars die there are no comets
seen the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princess a very
interesting thing to be able to uh to see
and we are here tonight
in the scientific age actually looking at an event that actually has no scientific value
the american astronomical society is not having a convention of course they're not having one because of the pandemic but they
wouldn't have one anyway because conjunctions really do not have any
scientific value but they are of tremendous value
to the public especially those of us who follow things like the star of bethlehem which i
believe can be explained as a as a conjunction or as an event that took place when the
moon occulted or got very close to the planet venus in april of 6 bc
two years before king herod passed away he was still alive and that would have been a
very appropriate explanation for what the star of bethlehem is
it is also uh possible if we take a look at the star of
bethlehem and if we don't want to see it as a conjunction wasn't a comet
no bright comets were visible around that time hallie came in 11 bc but
certainly wasn't that's too far away from that and uh there could have been a supernova
but there's no record of any supernova around that time so i would
say it was either a conjunction of two planets or the moon on a planet or it could have been a miracle
and uh for those of you who doubt that a miracle takes place every night when
the sun goes down and i go outside and look at the night sky it is absolutely
wonderful to be able to do that and i have two quotes to share with you
as i close up my comments for right now and the first is william blake's
augury's of innocence he wrote this in 1803 to see the world in a grain of sand and
a heaven in a wild flower hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour just beautiful to imagine in four lines to hold eternity
in the palm of your hand it's just wonderful to be able to do that and the
other one is thomas gray's allergy his famous elegy that i feel is so good
that it probably offers the four most beautiful lines ever
ever expressed in the english language it is commonly interpreted as very
negative and depressing talking about darkness i interpret it as
being optimistic because darkness is coming we go outside and we're going to go and see this
magnificent miraculous conjunction of jupiter and saturn the
curfew tolls the knell of parting day the lowing herd wind slowly or the lee
the plowman homeward plods his weary way and leaves the world to darkness and
to me back to you scotty thanks great great that's wonderful
that's wonderful okay so um we have a number of people on with us
right now uh and i'm going to turn this over to to mike
uh simmons uh and mike can introduce uh uh uh
his um his uh oh my goodness i'm getting sleepy too
guys i've been up too late anyhow and i've
had a little bit of sleep so i have really no excuse but um yeah
you you go take a break we'll talk for a few minutes i i didn't have to get up early and i've
got coffee so yeah i'm drinking a coffee too so but uh we have am i pronouncing your name
correctly is it misa mesa
hello yeah that's right meissa
is on with us as well uh we have gary palmer in the uk with us uh hi gary good to see you grand vera uh
on with this as well you're in romania and um so uh uh and deepti
tom is actually uh hiding behind the curtain over there she was on earlier but uh she just wanted to hang
out low hello deepti again i'll i'll turn this over um and maybe
you can give us a little bit of background uh how you met myself
and um and hassan yeah well you know i i reached out to several
people that i know in different countries uh for this told scott i'd be glad to bring in some
different countries and as you can see you know we're all one planet that's why i love using this
this background here uh some people maybe i could fool into thinking that's where
i am up on the iss now but i wish but
you know there are some good people here that i have met have not met uh maison i was on her program
yesterday and there was a program about the conjunction uh mice is a grad student uh studying at
the university of padua but right now in italy but i met her first on
my last trip to tunisia i've been there a couple of times in northern africa and
we also met uh later when we both attended a program in algeria and uh i've noticed that she has been
really active she was uh younger than uh you know just sort of
getting started she's now the national outreach coordinator for
tunisia for the office of astronomy outreach of the iau and i see things from her all the time
most of which i can't read because it's in arabic it's one of the places where you know
everybody speaks english but when i go to north africa they speak arabic they speak french they translate back
and forth between those and i'm left there with my with my english trying to figure out what's going on but mice's
english is very good so uh my issue we had a uh
a very good uh collaboration yesterday for the program and so what
um one of the things i noticed about tunisia when i was there last time is that there are youth centers in
almost every town every city all over the country and it's a small country and and half of it is filled with olive
trees as far as i can tell to make olive oil but uh and and astronomy is being
introduced uh there um you can
so so i thought it would be interesting to tell us what's going on for the conjunction how that fits in with the things that are going on
tunisian astronomical society what's happening in tunisia right now
and i see you're trying to if you want me to hold on i can talk i will introduce hassan while i see you're setting up to
record this so you can share with us and that's important and uh hassan bhagavani
is in bush iran and let's see this i'll be flying over iran here but i
am not there quite yet but i'll point out the last time i was in iran i've been to iran many times last time
was on an island the persian gulf you can see easily in this this recording so i i love
doing that uh hassan as you can see from what he has there is the president of the
iranian teachers astronomy union what they've done around the country is really fantastic which is to
uh not just train teachers to teach astronomy in the schools but to get them together to share with
each other uh i was hoping to attend their annual event in boucher earlier this year kovid took care of
that of course uh and i have others that want to go with me i led a couple of tours to iran as well
for americans and so on i mentioned that iran is the place where we really
um i started astronomers without borders because of the uh connections that i
made between americans and iranians and how it changed everybody's view and everybody got along because we are all
looking at the same sky and doing the same things with the same telescopes and so uh it was uh
really uh a large part of it um and i love taking people there with
me so that they can see what's up so hassan and i have met before
uh not in iran and not in the u.s but most of the people i work with
around the world i've never met when i do meet them that it's somewhere at a meeting or something else
uh so hassan are you are you there can we haven't heard you or
or seen uh other than the title slide right now hassan are you able to join us
well i asked him to start his video okay he's got a video he's sharing
well he has the video yeah and you know what because everybody's
gonna have trouble connecting remember that uh for those of you who are in the u.s or in western europe or
or eastern europe where the internet connections is frequently better than here it's not that easy in a lot of places um
and i have trouble um from there too and we've also just been joined by susan murabana
uh probably her her husband uh chu uh they uh i've known susan for quite a
long time and what she's doing now in kenya she does in nairobi uh is actually a business doing
astronomy a traveling telescope and they are taking it around and the purpose is education she's an outreach
person that's been doing outreach and education in kenya for many many years and now she's able to
actually do it as a sustainable program she's gotten a lot of attention from bbc
africa and cnn and they are building a uh planetarium
which is a very unusual thing in sub-saharan africa uh out of materials that they have
readily available bamboo i don't know anything about that yeah maybe susan can talk about that
yeah it sounds cool so let's see who've we got here and uh
so hassan are you are you connected up here
uh you just muted and you did uh his let's see you're you're muted uh hassan
so the lower left there's a button there oh you heard me yeah
we hear you now hassan yada
this is a big deal in iran because for two reasons one the conjunction and the
other the program yesterday was about the solstice in both the winter
and summer the program with brazil but the summer the winter solstice is a
very big thing in iran traditionally it is part of um it is a very important celebration
and uh we have to remember that we think of this well this is the
depth of winter this is the longest night of the year but you know what this is the beginning
of the days getting longer this is the turning point so it's very important and uh
i don't can you say briefly about about yalta hassan and why it's so important there
maybe not
assan can you mention about the the why this moment uh as this guy is
uh is so important for the con uh not just the conjunction but also for the uh
thank you very much you uh i can tell you welcome to my country
because right now you are fighting and come near to us
yes thank you yes and uh i'm happy to know scott
and other friends here yeah uh it's interesting that one of our
clouds uh maybe and very important my colleague here
we and we see each other by mike however
he live in iran but mike introduced us together so
mike is a special person for astronomers in iran
thank you very much mike uh yes yesterday we had a
yaldo yaldo is a great ceremony for iranian uh that
came from uh ancient uh maybe uh thousand years ago many thousand
years ago maybe four or five years ago iranian
at this ceremony and for equinox and
summer celestis i think coronavirus
has a very bad things but and has some good things maybe
never er i saw about
introduce yalda to other countries or maybe share yalda to other countries but coronavirus
show us we must oh yes yell the night in that
mike house i wish i wish my friend
we use the winter celestis equinox
and summer celestis to make important event for
astronomers because it's good ours be together
especially for teachers and a student and now i just
arrived home from our observatory we had a conjecture for
many peoples around the world by uh live and
now i'm here with you for many countries it's very interesting i wish to make a
misfortune to make it this chance for our students and all of the teachers
i wish i wish i wish very soon we could be in this program that
many teachers from around the world could join together thank you my friends
thank you hassan thank you very much hassan and the the what i am sharing here
bring that back up is yalda in california in a house that uh practices uh
christmas i should have some hanukkah things up there but i don't seem to but we have the grinch who stole
christmas um that's one thing and uh and a statue from
pompeii little girl dressed up so my wife and i are at the
core sea at the table which is a traditional table that's set
up in front of the fireplace to allow heat to come in underneath and keep you warm
and it's a very traditional society and this goes back as as sun said millennia i don't think
we have any pomegranate there which should be one thing i don't remember all the other things but they are all traditional my friend on the
other side charoc was a an archaeologist at the national
museum and his specialty was documented period from 2500 years ago so
so he set this all up for us and we celebrated the longest night of the year in in a very traditional
fashion um mais says uh
there you are myself so i was starting to introduce you you needed to get something set up
what's uh he's already recording she's already recording perfect so uh you know what's happening
in in tunisia now it's been uh i don't know how many years now since i've been to
tunisia a few years three years four years it's not seven years oh well time flies
seven years oh my goodness yeah i guess the last time that they saw it was in 2013
if i'm sure uh well i love tunisia i hope to go back
i also so what uh what is happening with the conjunction
in tunisia now are are there programs for it most places i know
around the world are not doing anything in person because of the pandemic
okay first of all i would like to thank you mike for the ambition of today and i'm really glad to be part of the meeting today and to see you all around
here to talk about an interesting event with which is the conjecture of
jupiter and saturn so indonesia we do have a lot of national club and organization
dedicated for astronomy and astrophysics with outreach activity and the most of them are organizing like
online observation or just kind of lectures to just sensitize people about importance of the event
so if i'm allowed to share my screen um okay
so i'm gonna show you here um some here is our official page the iu office
of astronomy outrage you need to use it to like update people about any astronomical
event and any phenomena in which we can observe in tunisia and then um i'm gonna go
straight to um the city the chinese association of younger
summer which i'm working in uh we did yesterday uh online lectures
with mike to talk about the event and what what we can do how can we observe the conjecture of the two
planets at night and resonance that is about people people also about the importance
of the events and today and um then i'm gonna share also uh
with you the link of the chinese science city in which is the biggest
organization that we do have in tunisia in which we can have many events not only outreach activity
dedicated for us army no it's also another a scientific activity so the chinese science city is the
biggest organization in which we can um they they do in fact organize uh event for children and for outreach
and um the gene science city wrote a lot of articles about the conjecture of
today i'm sorry because they are writing anaerobic here so in which they try to explain to
people what is the phenomena how much we can have it like can we observe the conjunction for the whole
night and after how many time can we see the next conjection
so it was here a lot of article writing in by the chinese science city in which they talk about the conjecture and also
some red do interview to talk about the event of today
and also um here is another tv uh passage in which uh the director of
the astronomy section in chinese science city uh talked about the phenomena itself
unfortunately we do not have uh event in person like physical uh person a physical event
but we explain to the public how we can observe the conjunction with naked
eyes with telescope how we can photograph it that we can observe the whole night you can enjoy the conjecture
for for tonight and unfortunately unfortunately we are not able to organize physical event in
in event in tunisia here is also another article they were writing by also the chinese science city
in which um also they they just explain it in easy way to the general public kids
children and also student researcher what is the phenomena itself so yeah according to the pandemic of the
kovit unfortunately we are not able to organize anything any any observation in physical
observation but that does not stop us to still continue working online we are here
tonight even if the sky cloudy they are another team in another country working and unfortunately we we are not able to
go outside and be in large group but even people in with clear sky
are able to even photograph and make live streaming of of the conjunction and share it with
us so that's that's unfortunately what we do have in for for my country and um
yeah i would like to wash a clear skies for everyone from my side today i'm not lucky
i'm still waiting for the clothes to go away so i'm just setting up my camera and my
telescope and let's see if the weather becomes become much more better for tonight
we still have a lot of time like the whole night so let's see that the the weather change thank you and i
hope i hope yeah a clear skies far for everyone thank you maison yeah that's great well
you know we do the best we can i mean uh clouds are an occupational hazard in astronomy
always have been and and uh you know we have gary palmer here with
us some astrophotography setups and uh you know his life would be a whole lot
better if not for the clouds there's nothing we can do about it for most events for most things going on
you can take another night and get out there and the sky is going to be the same unfortunately for these conjunctions as an eclipse chaser uh
i i know that that is the bane of our existence you plan for years to go halfway around the
world for three minutes in the earth in the moon's shadow and if you get
clouds during those three minutes you're done now you're planning for the next one in another two or three years so
that's the way it goes that's what i'm doing i just set up my camera my telescope and i was like
i'm you got to be ready for those those sucker holes we call it right now you never know yeah yeah that's how i
saw hallie's comet during its peak because uh in the rain with my telescope uh
my my my uh my telescope was getting absolutely soaked and uh the clouds opened up in a hole
right around the comet i got to see it for 30 seconds and then that was it i was happy yeah
yeah 36 it's a lot better than not seeing it right is there you got to wait another 76 years and
uh i don't know about you but i'll need help carrying my uh telescope out when
i'm 150. so right whatever i'll be there
um so we um thank you very much melisa i you know i want to say that i'm going to
do more of these things with scott we can spend more time this is about the conjunction and how it's being viewed around the
world and one of the things about the conjunction we talked about it yesterday it's a huge opportunity for those of us doing public outreach and education
because everybody knows about it they all think that they have to see it on on
this night right when they're the closest and of course you don't have to last night it went out and at first i couldn't tell the two
planets apart and that i've been watching this guy a long time that doesn't happen very often
um but uh then i was able to separate them a little bit
with the help of modern uh science with a new lens in this one and a lens covering this one so they're
kind of working again and uh but uh it's really important because
everybody knows about it again a chance for them to look up and it unifies us all too because we're not
focused on something going on in tunisia i mean mice is in italy right
now and it doesn't matter except that it happens to be cloudy in italy but it doesn't matter where you are so it's
cool and you know we also have susan moribana here
now susan is someone i've known for a long time first met her at the opening ceremony of
the international year of astronomy 2019 in um at unesco
in paris and uh susan with her husband chu has been uh
doing outreach for many many years um and finally was able to develop a
sustainable business plan for an astronomy business in kenya which is a remarkable
thing because so many people try to do this but they have the traveling telescope they've gotten a lot of attention
she's gotten a lot of attention as a african woman entrepreneur on bbc and
other things like that and they are building a planetarium as
well and susan i don't see you or hear you yet but if you are able to there we are oh and
it's night time in nairobi we can see that so you flash in and out every once in a
while susan but there you are hi and chew how are you doing good
nice to see you mike it's very good thanks this is this is a dynamic duo of uh
sub-saharan africa here if you say so actually i don't know if
you can see it but we've got the telescope behind us as well yeah we have the telescope behind us we have a few people and we've just looked at saturn and
jupiter uh together um and uh right now we're looking at the moon i'll
just light them up i'm sorry just just ignore that say hi yeah
hello crowd i was so excited because we hadn't planned to have a public event
uh but a few people got in touch and really wanted to check out how everything was going
and they really wanted to look through our telescope and we thought well we might as well just do it as it
is my birthday happy birthday yes going to say it is
this is so now we know who this conjunction was created for this time around yeah
organizing i mean that's a pretty good birthday present isn't it it's a good birthday yeah this is a moronic conjunction
is double gift is christmas gift and birthday gift
there you go the star of suzelihen and we and we have the planetarium looking at
we can see it from uh um it's right in front of us as it speaks to you so
yeah um you could give them the tour yeah so true and i started the traveling telescope
seven years ago um six how many six yeah uh we met during uh uh total solar
eclipse and we were introduced to each other through you through mike simmons so
i'll be very excited oh i'm responsible for this i i want a cut of the action here
and basically what we do is get people to look to the telescope um mostly school kids
just to spark their interest in science and and education generally but also adults and everyone
else and and through that we also saw the need of complementing that to the planetarium
and that's really what we do we are the traveling telescope you can find us on facebook twitter instagram
and also on our website traveling telescope and how about you have a big telescope
you're using for this yeah we have a 12 inch telescope reflector reflector telescope
um and other smaller ones but this is it's normally the star of the night i
don't know if i'm coming to my telescope but yeah it's normally the star of the night and um uh we we carry it around
um the rugged roads of kenya let's wear the beautiful beautiful night
skies and and just um share our views of the night sky to the telescope
yeah it's just on the edge of possibility it's any bigger and i think my back would have completely broken by now
oh yes well i i can tell you from experience everything seems to get heavier as you
get older so uh so do it while you can so you travel
around the the roads of kenya to remote places all over the country
this is one of the things about astronomy for stem education is you know the people that you're going
out to see the schools aren't going to have any physics lab or chemistry lab but they have a better astronomy lab
than the rest of us do in the cities so that's fantastic yeah and taking it to the people yeah i mean
we we do go into communities where they're so far from any town that they you know they're used to seeing the the
night sky as everybody used to see it once upon a time um you know and so there's a really an
amazing resource that they don't even know they have um and obviously that you know don't
normally look in in telescopes uh but there's there's like a there's a connection i think you know with the sky
which obviously we all have but uh people in the remote areas have an even greater connection with it
you could argue of course just like the rest of us used to over 100 years ago before
electric lights were invented we have lots of connection it's like uh people who have lost their connection
with nature in other ways night sky is a very important part of nature and uh people who grow up with it it's
part of your life you feel that connection and we've lost that these are the people
who are less fortunate in many other ways but i don't realize how fortunate they are
to still have that connection with this important part of nature and so
the uh i have to say first of all the very best i've seen you guys doing see it's morning here the sun is just just coming
up and so seeing you guys doing outreach in the evening uh is is always fun and i'm glad you're
able to come what's that that's impossible the earth is flat yeah it is flat but there's this giant
umbrella which is carried by one of the turtles that holds the earth up
you know i'll tell you i've always said that if the earth was really was flat my life would be a lot
easier because we'd all be in the same time zone um so but the
the best thing is uh your earrings those are fabulous spectrum earrings
i love
we've been too busy to even open presents isn't that ridiculous do you want to hold the phone no it's i i know the feeling i i know
i know the feeling and that's the way it goes and it's a difficult time everywhere right now too uh is it possible to get a quick look at
the planetarium you're building yeah yeah you're gonna no okay
uh sure no problem so planetariums uh in sub-saharan africa are really
unusual there is only one that i know of uh maybe south africa
has something because they have a lot more things but ghana has a planet term that was built with the help of people from
a planetarium in minneapolis minnesota and the u.s and
there are a few mobile planetariums but they are building a unique one here and
if it's too much trouble um don't want to take too much time but oh well you've got some bright light oh
goodness are we inside of this no we're out we're outside can you see that i can't actually see my own camera yeah
i i uh uh well we do see something it's not real well lit but but
oh okay so i can see a round structure there and i see poles and uh yeah i do see some
it's it's difficult there is a round structure there and uh tell us um
oh now yeah now we're seeing more of it okay so if i spin then you'll see it moving so then go in and you'll see the sort of
yeah so you're there's susan yeah and so you are building this
structure and you're using what you have available there this uh looks like a geodesic dome
and it's built out of now tell us about your construction design here
yeah so basically our compound has the most amazing bamboo plant um
and uh all of this stuff i mean this is quite uh it's difficult to get across on camera there's sort of the scale of it
oh i see there there we are right i've got this in the bottom yeah yeah it's good but um yeah so it's actually quite big i
mean if i leave go go over here so this is the entrance over here so susie if you come and stand over here
so this is kind of where you come in come here so i'm gonna yeah stand there
sorry mike just a second ah hold that for you and then i'm going to walk away so you can sort of see uh this
sort of scale to see this sort of scale of it oh it is huge so now i'm on the other
side now i'm on the other side and then there's up at the moment
there's a massive scaffolding tower right in the center because we are we've
been remaking the roof and also we've been opening out the sides uh which you probably can't see too well
it's sort of weird showing you at a really difficult time because in the dark yes
well that's that's fine you sort of designed um these hubs which uh
we've tied together if i show you that that's that one of the hubs so what i wanted to do was to um to use
bamboo only can you can you make that out oh yes we see it clearly okay so the reason the reason is you
know in the planetarium we always talk about um you know sustainability and uh
and environmentalism i don't think we need that we've got the other one there um and you know it's we always kind of
zoom out a little bit likes behind you mike you know you see the earth from afar and you know they always say that that's
that's how the environmentalism movement started the earthrise photo yeah and uh we do that in the
planetarium and through that we always talk about uh you know being good stewards of this planet this fragile ball that we all
live on um and there's you know you're a bit of a hypocrite if you then go and you know
uh fly around the world eat nothing but beef um you know use a diesel sugar i mean i
don't like the fact that we have to use a bit of an off-road diesel car but to get to all areas in
kenya there's really no other alternative yet um that electric car comes along
that's not sourced from batteries from the congo anyway there's all these issues that go with it and i'm waffling i know
but i'm trying to say that we we we wanted it to be bamboo because um it's one of the fastest
growing um materials that you can make anything out of you know to make something out of an
oak tree the oak tree has to grow for 200 years bamboo is mature in six years
and even in four years you can you can start to use it for construction so we want to sort of promote the idea that there are other ways of doing
things that's one of the reasons we did this out of bamboo yeah and then another is obviously it's less
it's less expensive or affordable it's more affordable in comparison to
all the other planetary fixed planetariums you know and i would like more of africa to have
planetariums so it's something we're happy to share with the rest of the continent or other
imagined communities who would like to have cheaper options for a planetarium so once we figured out
how to do it well somebody's got to be first and not many people wanted to be the first one
but you guys you're you're way ahead here and that's
fantastic and you know it shows the value of everything we do in astronomy in terms of teaching
some very important things for the future too in sustainability and and so on uh we should all do that and
uh note also that susan is one of the officers of the african astronomical society which has been
newly rebooted very active this year and i've talked with jamal and susan and
some others about [Music] planetarium a planetarium project for
africa pro mostly mobile planetariums and so you can have a traveling
planetarium as well but these big facilities that people can come to are
critically important to as a center for all of this it's not one or the other so um you know i want to have you guys
on i'll do some more programs next next year in the new year maybe we
can see this during the daytime too although we saw it very very well but i'm glad to have been able to see
you guys out there doing outreach for the conjunction uh like so many others around the world
and susan and i met uh at the opening ceremonies for
for highway 2009 as i mentioned and and i ran 100 hours of astronomy we had
probably a million people looking through telescopes in one night and i know susan was out there i know just you know i don't remember what you
did but i know you were out there one of the one of the many it shows what we can do when we work together
thank you thank you thank you guys so good to see you happy birthday susan
yeah happy birthday thank you everyone and i know it's difficult times but it's
it's made meeting up so easy and i think that's something we should all appreciate
yes absolutely okay thank you guys
okay so uh scott now uh there are others from
different places uh you know cranberry i saw suhel joined us as well who i know but why didn't you
talk to them i have not been to i've not been to kosovo i've seen what some of them are doing and others in
kosovo which is is really wonderful uh a la mia dropped out here um
and maybe he'll be able to get back alamia's in addis ababa ethiopia um and i'll just
you know what let me mention because he's not here now but what um and we'll have them on another
time because doing it this these evenings is really difficult but
i visited ethiopia a couple years ago and let me i'll just this can be real
crude i'll just show like two pictures and let's see if i got the right one here
[Music] um is not what i wanted that what i want
that's what i want okay all right so um that's not really the way i want to
do it but this is the
oh god okay okay now i can uh do this real quick so
i visited there when they they had a northern
eastern african uh conference this is the ethiopian
space science and technology institute and they have been doing this for uh
quite a few years they're uh they've built this is including astronomy because the
two don't usually um they aren't they aren't seen as separate studies in um
in most of the world they go together and let me see if i've got some other pictures like inside there and this is the director
who founded this now i think it's been probably 12 years ago they've put their first satellite
into space they have the support of the government they have
they have two two meter telescopes for education and uh so they've
uh done quite a a job there and alamia would be able to tell us about it if we he doesn't get back on this time then
we'll we'll catch him another time uh next year sometime and i'll just mention let's see here's a selfie it's not so
far away mike i do what are they no no next year next next year oh
next year is so far away it's it's a few weeks well we've been in a time warp all year
it's like yeah this it's like going through a tunnel it never ends and at the same time it's
like was that already eight months ago so um and then a quick shot
of uh me with some others she's actually serbian but she lives in
africa has most of her life she's one of the important people at the institute and a selfie taken by josefa and i can't
remember her name from sudan who visited an ethiopian and
katrin kohlenberg from the netherlands i believe so uh it was
quite international a bit of hubbub and addis ababa there so that's a teaser for next time
great wonderful okay so why don't we bring on um uh
our other guests here we've got uh suhil and prem vera pranvara you're in romania is
that right that's right and i'm sorry because when
i came in the conversation in the the link i thought that i'm already late and i was so excited all
day for the meeting so i just started talking everything i'm sorry if i deserve anything
you can repeat it all it's okay okay yeah they could see your face so
yeah as well he's in kosovo and you guys have worked together with
the uh astronomy club of kosovo so that's that's great yes i am from astronomy club of kosovo
and i'm volunteering here in naval paradise it's an organization through erasmus
uh we start i started together with this uh guy that he's from jordan and he worked
in uh observatory in jordan and we have some pictures to share with you that were taken yesterday from his
colleagues in jordan and they sent to us and now we are getting ready to go for observation in two hours
because still the moon is uh is up we are waiting for the moon to go a little
bit more down in order to go for the observation we have only this one telescope that was brought from locals
actually because they saw that we are doing astronomy sessions and a lot of people were
uh very interested to know more about this science so they brought this as a gift for us
and we um hopefully are going to have much more telescopes than this and they will
continue working on the astronomy also suhar has something to share an app
or pdf that is going to make it easier for people who want to do also astrophotography
and share a screen share all the pictures that we are talking about
sure i think provera is this picture right
would you tell us more about this picture yeah yeah so this this picture let's take in jordan
today okay in desert in jordan that's we call it it's a protected area so
there is no light pollution no no no any pollution in this area so it's easier to see the stars all the
time yeah if you could get closer to the microphone uh it's
difficult to hear you okay so i'm i'm sorry i am alive from jordan this
photo is taken from in the protected area and there is that in jordan we call it its place without any
pollution without light pollution or any other pollution so it's easier to to take
photos like this or to have uh astronomy to take it look to the sky you know so this photo
except today before yeah there is another picture that they can show it for us
yeah yeah you see the place is the same place where they uh filmed the martian if you
know it's in y d rom in jordan oh wow very cool yeah so it's easier
yeah i was work there the photo you see their sign for abdel haibi is one working there at this time he's doing a
stargazing and take a astrophil astrophotography so this is the place thank you
thank you also thank you so much
wonderful uh so i think uh from vera finished uh so hello everybody guys so mike is very
nice to see you i haven't seen you in ages
it's very nice to be imports uh such a an astronomical event because this
even though we're so far away from each other thanks to technology we're together and
we're witnessing something that's all astronomers around the world are
observing and seeing and uh fortunately in kosovo there is cloud disguise and i was
talking with from vera earlier why is always how do we cloud this guy for
these astronomical events like we were so mad
maybe it's because you're getting new astronomy equipment so every time you buy a new piece of
astronomy equipment a new telescope a new eyepiece you are guaranteed clouds
we've purchased also some yes some stuff from explore scientific and uh we can't wait to use them here in
kosovo special now we have we have an observatory here which we are almost finished renovating and we're
gonna open it for the public and just a small
just to say so this is us we're basically founded to
2014 we organize different astronomy events and uh we're also an affiliate
organization of explore scientific but this is kosovo where we are so we're basically here in
the balkans in europe and uh what uh what we since we couldn't make an
observation a public event we did this survey here we interviewed like 50 people in kosovo
and basically we made them ask like astronomy questions and we asked them if they know what a
juventus and a salter collection is nobody knew only five people so like ninety percent some said
they don't know what it is and only ten percent said that they know or they heard
in the news so this does that uh uh we need to have this kind of
astronomy events here in kosovo so we can spread the beautiful meaning of astronomy to everyone
and uh it's so sad because this tells that we still have a lot of legs in
the field of science and astronomy and we are doing everything we can to have like observations observe
and uh so we did this survey and we hope that in the future this
more people are going to know about this astronomy events and i don't know if it's just in kosovo or other countries
but uh this is our what we so it's only like 10 10 percent that
people knew and i today we had the bad weather
but this is what i took yesterday oh very nice so uh from vera said that i'm gonna
share something with you guys i think scott i sent the link on the chat yeah uh so there's this pdf
file it's made by nasa and uh it's basically telling you how to do a smartphone as
soon astrophotography and this one i took through my phone and uh i'm surprised
how it turned out so well i wasn't expecting i have a 152 millimeter
refractor and so this is saturn and this is jupiter they're almost coming
together so i did it yesterday but today we have foggy cla claws of course and uh
this i want to ask you guys i saw this in the internet and people
were saying that the what's happening today could also be related that the star of bethlehem like
the christmas star like the kepler the scientist he
believed that the star of bethlehem it was a conjunction between jupiter saturn and venus
i don't know what you guys think about this or maybe if audience have questions but maybe we could be witnessing
something similar what uh they witnessed during this christmas star
i don't know if you all agree about this right because the um uh there's
there's lots of ideas um about uh the star of bethlehem um uh some
theologians have actually weighed in um uh and um
it's difficult it's actually difficult to pin it down um because of uh uncertain dates
and um uh you know there's um
you know there's uh many interpretations of what it might be i think the biggest and most important
part about this though is that um is the inspiration that it gives people
you know and the interest level uh to study it and to you know to look up and to
you know explore um what uh what might have been the star bethlehem or
just to get a greater understanding of what what these conjunctions are the you know the dance of the planets that
we are witnessing right now uh just makes it so interesting and uh
allows people to take the next steps to understand the universe they live in yes because at that time we weren't
really clear about how the sky looked like but like three people witnessed like a
similar event and still uh astronomers are speculating so maybe this had to be uh related or maybe it
had to be another conjunction or maybe supernova so this is why it was something very
interesting that i saw in the internet and i wanted to share with you guys since since it was related with today's
event and it's really rare astronomical event because uh it's very closest observable since
like 800 years i think most time we it was this close was like 800 years ago
even though we had a similar conjunction 2000 in the year 2000 it was still not as
close as observable as it is today and
this is the guide to smartphone astrophotography it's also written by dr steen odenwald
he basically tells you guys how to take pictures and for those who don't have planetary cameras or other cameras it's
a great chance they can go through this pdf file and maybe get some information about how to
take pictures or and this observatory we're still as i told we're going to
renovate but before that i wanted to share this this platform is called slaw
and i took this picture of jupiter some moments ago it's a it's a platform
for students professors or astronomers you pay like an annual
subscription and this was the jupiter that i took some moments ago and
this is saturn it's basically they have this kind of
they have this observatories in the gunner sorry did you take these pictures with a
phone or with camera so basically this is like
yeah this is an online platform so this scanner funds are located here
in near morocco and spain and portugal in atlantic ocean and
according to the unesco world heritage is very nice place to observe the stars
and they have this different different telescopes which you can book them
for example which one you want to observe and you can just have like a schedule
you're observing and you can go and take a picture and i took this picture of saturn and jupiter
it was very nice i think everybody can see this in the live yeah it looks like there's a moon
transit going on on jupiter at that time yeah i'm sorry i
asked if you need to pay for the observation uh i think they have annual uh subscription
uh for students is i think 50 dollars and then there's two more i think one is
for educational purposes and one is for astronomers i think it's not so expensive but
it's very nice because you can for those who don't have like bigger telescopes it's very nice because you can go online
and take pictures and show like the to the audience but you have just to go online and schedule
your what you want to observe wow that's so cool um can you share with us the link in the
chat if it's possible
and i think scott i think you know about this this is flu is that right yeah yeah so for those who
are unable to observe because they have claw disguise they can go online here and i think they have an
event also and you can go and witness this conjecture yes that's the reason i share
that's all for me if anybody has questions i'm here to answer i think that we are the luckiest one we
have a very clear sky tonight it's probably because we have only this telescope
well it was wonderful to have you all on um you know i think we learned a lot
about astronomy from around the world um our next uh guest is gary palmer uh gary is uh
has been teaching many astrophotographers through these global star parties how to
improve their their own technique and how to get the very best out of their
equipment and expending the least amount of time to do it so
uh gary i'll i'm going to turn this over to you hi scott hi everyone hope you're all well um
yep it's cloudy in the uk it's pouring of rain we'd have more chance of getting struck by lightning in the delta tunnel
and then actually seeing a conjunction or seeing an astronomical event yeah it just doesn't happen um so yeah
um it's actually been a pretty bad month all round for imaging um so
it's a case of going online and looking at what everybody else is doing and that's what's good about this
sort of event it's a day-long event and there's a good chance that you're going to see it from
one of the different uh people on here around the globe so at the moment i am
just processing up some other stuff but hopefully the computer will allow me to do
two things at once so what i thought we would do is just look at some real simple planetary processing for the
moment and then maybe uh have a look at something else a little bit later on
um so we're going to start off i'll share the screen over hopefully it will jump onto this one
okay let me just get myself organized because i've got stuff working in the background as well so if we go to
now one of these i set up earlier what we're going to do is just set up a
basic saturn image um which is all pre-recorded in an seo file
um it's only uh a thousand frames and then we're gonna analyze
see what comes from it
how many frames do you typically want to get to it depends on how good the sky is if
it's really nice and clear i'd like to get 30 000 frames somewhere around there if not a
little bit more but the cameras are really high speed so we're looking at um i mean i've i've got a camera here
that records 500 um yes 500 frames a second yeah
in high speed mode so to record 30 000 frames it is just so easy and so simple
so i've marked the alignment points around the ring of saturn
and i've just set out to take 35 percent for the best frames yeah and reject everything else out of
this and also because the image is quite small i've drizzled it so i'm going to enlarge the image at the
same time by a certain amount and then we're just going to stack these
once they're stacked they're going to come straight into registex
now it does look a little bit dim there again planetary's not been brilliant for about
the last four years in the uk uh we've had some better images of mars this year
but in general the planets have been very very low on the horizon so that means that you're imaging
through all of the rubbish in the atmosphere as you look through and you're literally looking straight
through a line and you notice this when the moon or the sun rises
red or an orange and as the moon or the sun gets higher they change the color and that's
basically our atmosphere you're imaging through that so from a planetary point of view that's
quite bad we like to get the planets up as high as possible to get as much detail as
possible i'm just going to give this a couple seconds as you can see in the background there it's racing away doing another
task but i can't stop at the moment i wasn't expecting you to come over to me then i was hoping it was going to be
finished by that time but anyway there it goes so it's already sent this through to registex
and then we would adjust the wavelet so if i reset this now yeah we're just going into a reset on
the wavelets you can see it's quite bland it's quite out of focus
and it's not the best of images as i said the last few years we've so what we're really doing is playing
around with this and getting it as reasonable as possible so
we'll look at the initial layer here some people will work on all of the layers depending on the
quality of it i normally switch the initial layer up and just bring the initial layer across to number two
and just slightly sharpen it but it is a balance of bringing out detail and not bringing
out noise this is the the key thing in the image so if we weren't really harsh on layer one we
might bring out more detail but as we zoom into the image yeah we see lots more noise
going on once we've processed in this i generally color balance these in pics
inside that's my go-to tool for color balancing um some people do it in registex but i
find that it strains the colors quite a lot and it's very very hard to get a nice color
balance in there so if we actually look at the jupiter one which i did earlier which has got a
bit more detail in it it's quite straightforward to doing um pics inside and gives a fairly good
result we can use the split rgb channels at the top and we can split
this into its royal colors so we notice that the blue as always is very very dark
and we're going to use a system in here called linear fit and what that's going to do is balance
the colors in the three images it's nice and straightforward so go in here i'm going to open up linear fit
there okay and then i'm going to select the green channel because it's the brightest
out of all of them so going to green and then we apply this to
the blue in the red channel
once we've done that we can combine the image back together again
and then we can go into this and we can sharpen this we can do whatever else we want we can contrast it
but that's the easiest way of balancing the uh one shot color channels um
in the image sometimes even with the rgb channels if there's a very big difference i'll
use that same process um a lot of people say you can't use pixel insight for planetary
work but you can do quite a lot of stuff in here solar imaging lunar imaging you can play around with all of these
sorts of things and get some quite reasonable colors so now we could just take this into photoshop and sharpen it
um or we might have a lot of noise in there that we've got reduced so we could go into photoshop and reduce the noise on it
so hopefully that's given some people some things to think about yes fantastic
fantastic well that's great um well i think that we have uh reached uh
kind of the end of this segment is there anyone that would like to share some uh final thoughts at all
pretty quiet go ahead suell well it was such uh nice i feel very
honored me and pran vera vegoli to be for such uh to be part of such a great astronomical
event with you guys even though we're so far away from each other we're still thanks to technology we
come together and be part of this astronomy event i just wanted to wish you a happy
holidays thank you and i hope uh 2021 will be
a new year it's like this new year new me so i hope you like that and uh
i really appreciate what what you guys are doing um uh with us and uh
you know with uh your local communities and what you're doing right now to uh
inspire people around the world so that's it's very very important the uh
the images that you took in jordan are beautiful um i visited jordan uh many years ago i went to albaya al
i'm not sure if i'm pronouncing it correct i'll buy it university uh to work on
their 16-inch mead telescope so uh it was quite a long time ago but um
uh it was uh amazing when you say they have dark skies they have dark skies in jordan it's really
incredible so um yeah i could and it was very strange too
we're out in the middle of the desert and i could hear people's voices from miles away yeah so i that was very
a very strange effect for me and and uh but uh the hospitality the uh food uh
everything was just wonderful about it and i hope to return some time
so we officially invite you to kosovo next year
okay next year i am supposed to go to
um to the starmus event in september which will be in uh
yerevan uh armenia or is it dark i don't know i think so your
event and uh uh so maybe i can make uh
no promises yet but maybe i can make uh a stop and and visit so that would be really
incredible for me we were in contact with the us service
here in kosovo and they have this program which they invite different like professional
speakers from the us to kosovo and we want through that program to invite you guys here
also mike because i think we're the most hospitable country in uh
in europe and in the world probably and i think everyone everyone for their countries
are the most want hospitable show you guys what the progress we made here
and uh thank you for making this possible so we can tell everybody what we're doing here okay and i just
received a video from rich oser from the chabot space and science center
he's also the guy that leads the golden state star party which is
a really large star party they hold in northern california every year but he had a video that he would like
for me to share so i'm going to do that let's see
here we go i just have to grab the file and there it is
hello let me just share my screen
and here we go good evening everyone my name is rich oser i'm a volunteer with the
spouse-based science center in oakland california we're going to be watching the
conjunction tonight through the 36-inch research reflecting telescope otherwise known as delhi and uh we'll be
starting our program five o'clock and going for about 30 minutes uh that is roughly sunset till the
telescope hits its limit of 15 degrees above the horizon so i hope you can join us tonight um
it's very easy we have both a facebook live link and a youtube link and they'll both be
simulcast so uh feel free to tune in to either one of those two
whichever is more convenient let me put up a slide that's got the link on it and
here we go and uh for facebook users just go to facebook.com slash chabot
space slash live and wait for the program to begin it'll show up on the live page uh at
roughly uh a quarter til port until five uh for youtube users uh you want to go
to youtube.com and then do a search for chabot space and science center
and the live program should show up as a thumbnail there so anyhow i hope you join us tonight i
hope you've had a good time looking at the conjunction from all over the world
you should also know that we have a regular program at these same links every saturday night
at nine o'clock where we do live viewing from this telescope and i hope you can join us sometime
anyhow that's it for me uh have a good evening
okay all right so um i do want to i do want to
mention that that the times he's giving were pacific time shabbos space and science center is in
the bay area of california our next uh event will happen
um uh we we've been broadcasting all day but the next event will happen at 1
50 central okay which is 1950 universal coordinated time so uh
so we hope that you're still watching um we have two more segments uh coming up one at
this 1 50 pm uh central 1950 utc and
then the final portion of our program which will have the most people in it is going to be at 4 45
p.m or at 22 45 utc and we do expect to have um
live imaging quite a bit of it in the very evening
program but we are going to um be meeting up with
people we're going to be meeting up with jack newton in the in the next couple of programs
here and uh we will also talk to our friends down in south america so
stay tuned uh you know this is a historic day uh you know a magical time
uh the great conjunction of saturn and jupiter and we'll see you
thank soon goodbye you guys thank you everyone
so good to see all you guys
and you might thank you we will we will uh have you on again
i'll do more
and i think our audio is not going out right yeah so uh yeah thank you hassan
we'll talk to you soon