Transcript:
okay we are up and running we start down the clock
[Applause] Steve I'll keep up with the chat um uh you can introduce the people
um as we go down
okay I think you know everybody uh I know them or I've met
them some point or no of them yes or no or no of them
yes great it's going to be a beautiful night here wind's going to drop it's
mild it's going to be a gorgeous night I'm going to be looking at uh the
conjunction early and then later watching ursid meteors
yes so you're not going to go to sleep are you David oh yeah oh you are okay oh
you bet I am I'm going to try to wait you might observe all night long until
not a chance I think I'm going to go to about midnight or so and then I'm
done yeah clear light 58 says I have them in
sight here in Boston now they won't be up much longer but uh here but I have a
lot of shots and some video just wish I had a smaller chip camera for this one the atmosphere is not great tonight but
I can see the Rings that's exciting
um where is he writing from where is that where ising Boston Boston Boston so
there's some clearing on the East Coast which is good news yeah Edwardo Simone says maybe the skies
are clear there it's cloudy here in South Jersey which usually happens on every major celestial event okay Scotty
I think you saved the best for last we've got in quite a group here tonight oh yeah yeah we have a big group uh we
have uh scheduled it so that you know the imagers are kind of uh uh you know
just one right after the others so uh Steve you may need to uh just so that
everybody gets um uh some uh air time uh you may have to uh jump from imager to
Imager okay yep I do I have that
control uh you can yell at them I guess no no not a button I'm pressing right
okay well actually uh you know if we have somebody that doesn't know how to unshare their screen I can unshare them
so all right that's cool yeah and woone says Scott you've been burning the
candle at both ends for this conjunction well you know what it's if you can't if
there's a reason to burn the candle at both ends this is this is the reason you know this this event is amazing you know
so um you know eclipses uh special events
like this uh you just need to uh you just need to be there you know uh one of
the things I learned was is if you if you do it um you won't regret it because
you have great memories
one day I'll I'll tell the whole story about my Eclipse trip on Mona in 91
where I stayed up for four days and three nights with no sleep you were a younger person then
Scott I was a younger person yes I was yes I was I didn't think I could do this
today at at age 72 but I'm I did it I haven't slept except for the last 40
minutes or so and uh I'm uh I'm doing okay you definitely have um uh the DNA
of an astronomer um David you've got the right
jeans for this uh let's
see Martin eurn says howdy north and south east and west
yeah we will have a global audience we've had a global audience all day long you know we've been in Africa we've been
in uh uh you know Europe um Asia uh it's
been cool it's been really cool it's been pretty amazing it has right I mean
it's like we've gone we've done this trip around the world you know yep
hi Scott hello
[Music] hello ah there's Caesar yeah see you to see you you're up
on the uh rooftop I think right yes cool
any details on equipment generating the images the image we're viewing now I
have well the um the view that you're seeing
here on the screen right now is from Christopher go and that was done with a Celestron 8 inch
telescope I don't know which camera it was uh but it was a a new qhy camera
that he has he he was using the qhy 183 mono is that what it was yeah yeah
it a cooled camera although I'm not sure if he was using the cooler yeah I don't know but look at the
detail there it's
amazing and he did that with one shot this is not a montage or uh so what he
did is he he took um I guess he saturated Jupiter to 95% % and that
would gave him enough image data to dig out Saturn without blowing out
Jupiter fabulous shot
yeah where are you looking who who Who's oh I see it came
up yes indeed Christopher go yeah well
yeah yeah he does know what he's doing yes he does
[Music] yeah it was interesting because um uh
David and Steve were talking about how quickly he just threw up this 8 in
telescope and connected the camera and focused and started nailing you know unreal shots
so that's that's what Masters do is they make it look easy you know
that's what he is [Music]
yeah Randy Dodge says it's cloudy tonight in St John's New Finland great
view last night though Pekka says hello from Stockholm
Sweden and Mark Tov is here yes
yep who all do we have here we've got Gary Crawford Jerry Hubble Ela maray
David AER Dave Chapman Simon Tang Steve Molly of course David Levy
Bob Denny Jack Newton Cesar brolo and I oh uh Mark tovy Chris Gainer
Kathy I'm not sure which Kathy this is but
Kathy and more will be coming on Heath Creekmore uh who works for us
is watching he works in customer [Music] service thank you again for the
invitation Scott yeah thank you for coming on Bob we love having you on
okay rod rod delay says hello from
Maran James the AER says didn't didn't uh Christopher go mention he didn't pull
her a line before he shot those images I think that's
true IA Anthony Mount Joyce say pre
priest Saskatchewan in the house
well hello everybody um this is Scott Roberts from explore scientific and you
are watching the final segment of a five-part series today of of the 27th
Global star party uh the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter and
we've had a great day today we've had thousands of people watch our programs and um uh it's been really thrilling uh
but this is the this is the crescendo this is the grand finale here and we've got imagers uh Galore and we've got U
great speakers um uh you know I I can't imagine amassing a a greater group of
astronomers uh to uh help you understand uh the great conjunction and what it
means to all of us and what it uh um you know what uh uh the reason why we're all
turning our heads Skyward to see this amazing spectacle so um so uh I am going
this this is being hosted by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada and
representing the RC is Steve Malia Steve is also the owner of Ontario telescopes
um uh but uh and he is a former president of the uh uh which Center was
it again Steve Miss Saga Center C the Mrs Saga Center okay I can barely say
Mrs Saga okay it's okay we've been up for a very very long time very long time
there'll be a short quiz after that's right yeah take notes it'll be a test at the end of the show that's right but we
have some amazing astronomers here uh both from Canada the United States South
America um and uh so it's uh it's really cool and we're glad that you're all here
with us uh this is is an educational Outreach event and so I'm going to ask
people who are watching to share this program with your friends with groups that you belong to on Facebook or
whatever uh uh social media that you're on right now uh if you're on YouTube
you're going to want to subscribe and like us um but uh uh sharing it is the
essence of what we're doing here we're bringing this all to you to uh help you enjoy this event and um you know it's uh
we believe that astronomy is good for you uh it is a Gateway Science as it's
been described uh many times uh that leads to uh future um uh scientists and
and better citizenry and uh uh you know uh new engineers and problem solvers
that we need uh for the problems that face Humanity today and in the future so
um and so anyhow I am going to formally turn this over to Steve and um and here
you go Steve thank you Scott much appreciate it uh thank you for the introduction uh uh
tonight we have a star stuttered event with with some uh uh Titans of the
industry uh joining us today we have representatives from the rural Astronomical Society straight across
Canada from Canada from one end to the other and we'll hear some very interesting topics um everything ranging
from can's contribution in terms of Technology um in the Space Race uh
dating back to the 50s and 60s with the Albert Arrow program and right to um
Canada's traditions and stories in it with its native people uh we have uh
some some big names with us tonight of course D David Levy who is also an honorary president of
the Montreal Center and of the Kingston Center um David Aker from astronomy
magazine right uh Jerry Hubble vice president of uh engineering export
scientific Mr Jack Newton himself right joining us from his home in uh Arizona
is that correct Jack uh BC oh I'm my sorry I thought you were in
Arizona that's true um and uh and others uh former pre president of the cator
Chris Gainer is with us today and we will also have our current president of
the uh of the society um Mr Rober fory
but before we start off there's something I wanted to to to show and I'm going to share my screen not only is
today the conjunction but today is also the solstice and there is a place it's
one of my favorite places i' I've visited and I'm going to just
get this going and that didn't work so I'm going to share my
screen wrong screen you think I would have practiced this was that your front
yard no that's my backyard oh your backyard okay Stonehedge is your front
yard yeah yes yes uh where am I screen two
share okay hope you can all see that now this
is new Range this is a site in Ireland this is your desktop okay there you go okay now
you got it this is newrange this is a site in Ireland it's uh over 5,000 years
old this predates the Pyramids of Giza this predate Stone Henge um it is uh a
tomb but also has some uh uh significance when it comes to the
solstice and what's really interesting about this site is the the the way that it's constructed it just very massive
massive stones and uh they were brought into the site um 5,000 years ago and I'm
sure was was Quite a feat uh to do so the new grain site is located a couple
of hours North of Dublin and what it's a beautiful
beautiful area if you ever have a chance to to go visit it if you're in Ireland I would really recommend that you do so
and what makes it really unique is this box this light box you have the entrance
which is on the bottom there but there's this box that's right above it and the way that this box was positioned is that
on December 21st right and it only happened on December 21st at the start
of the solstice the light from the sun will go directly through this light box and light up the entire
passageway of um newrange right to the very back of this tomb now you can see
that there's this large large Boulder uh in front of the opening and it has these
symbols carved into it and these have been there for the past 5,000 years and there's several of these large Boulders
all around and they are quite big they're about the size of a small car so you can just imagine what it would have
taken to move these without you know modern equipment that we that we enjoy
uh these days this is newrange on the inside
right so you can see it's a straight passage from one end to the other so the light only on December 21st will enter
that light box and illuminate the inside of the
of the Tomb that's so cool yeah which I think is pretty neat considering 5,000
years ago right the importance that that uh
astronomy the importance that took um that people put into astronomy to
determine when to plant something when to harvest um different seasons uh it
was it was a regular calendar um that was that was very reliable and uh this
is an excellent example of of uh how astronomy was used um to
determine uh a specific point within the year and that being the solstice winter
solstice so I thought that was that was something that was uh quite interesting
and and when I one of my trips to Ireland a few years ago I was I was fortunate enough to be taken to the site
by members of the um Irish astronomy society and and they uh shared this with
me and I forever be grateful they took me to a few other sites too that's for another show
um but uh I don't want to uh I don't want to take up too much more time on this we're going to continue on and I
would like to ask uh Mr David Levy if he
would mind taking over
David you're muted yeah David you're muted it is so good how's that is that
any better that's way better I wasn't muted I was speaking in Latin oh oh my
gosh nice anyway um thank you so much it is
so good to see so many RC people here in a way it this is an RC General Assembly
PL because we have probably several hundred members of the RC present plus people
from North America from the United States from South America some people
from Europe and all over the world and uh We've uh we've had thousands of
people during the day from all over the world and I don't believe I've ever I've ever spoken to as an audience as large
as this one before and it really is is a pleasure to be here and uh
welcome well boys and girls girls and boys ladies and gentlemen this is the
day December the 21st it's the winter solstice this is the day of the great
conjunction the last time that Jupiter and Saturn were this
close as they are right this minute was in the year 1623 nobody saw it then because it took
place during daylight hours and uh I think it's it's it's
quite something that we're going to that we have a conjunction that is visible
tonight uh and the next few days the uh planets will still be very close so if you don't get it tonight it's not like a
total eclipse you'll be able to see it on other days the other thing I wanted to say is
that the that this particular
event is really not a scientific event at all this is not something that the uh
World community of professional astronomers would Embrace and if you were to ask the
president of the American Astronomical Society to give a scientific paper on
the great conjunction she or he probably wouldn't be able to do it because there
is no real scientific Merit or value in tonight's great
conjunction but boy is it beautiful to look at this is this is the kind of
event where you go outside and you look up at the night sky and you see it and
uh whether you can split if your eyes are really good you'll be able to split the two planets with the unated eye if
your eyes are like mine you probably won't be able to it'll be just one big elong blob and it is just something worth to
see and uh when I make the point that this is more of an astrological event than an
astronomical one I have a point to it and I'm circling for a landing here to
make a point the the um modern astrologers who write
for the newspapers and things like that are not the ones we're celebrating tonight I I agree with all of you we
don't have a whole lot of room for them I'm talking about the ancient ones the
ones that took careful observations over thousands of years to get the orbits and
positions of of all of the planets and to predict when they would
be uh conjuncting they defined the idea of the great conjunction which is an
astronomical term which takes place when Jupiter and Saturn get get into conjunction it's called a a great
conjunction and I recall one in 1960 on September the 1st 1960 when I went
outside with my first telescope was a little three and a half inch
skyscope focused the eyepiece and looked in and I saw this doughnut with a hole
in it and I thought boy I'm going to return this telescope and the next and the next few
seconds I learned a lot about telescopes the main thing is that they have to be focused and as I slowly move the
eyepiece towards the main mirror down the uh image the the uh the donut
with the hole in the middle of it got smaller and more articulate and suddenly
or gradually became a focused image of Jupiter with four moons Galileo could
have felt no greater thrill than I did that night my parents were out there and
we just had this wonderful wonderful view of Jupiter and I've never forgotten
it in all those years since then I made two good decisions in my
life one of them was to marry Wendy and Wendy actually if you could
come and say hello to everybody because uh I'm sure they'd all like to hear your
voice for a second and Wendy is right here and
uh I am the voice the voice of the faceless person nobody ever gets to
see I hope you're having a wonderful meeting and that you all get to see the
conjunction thanks Wendy thanks Wendy the other good decision that I made the
second one was on the the 17th of December 1965
I began a search for comets which continues to this night last night I did not sleep instead
after the first session and before the second I went outside and I did some com visual Comet
hunting excuse me sorry I do not expect ever to find another Comet but that
doesn't matter the search is what is so important to me I want to introduce you to a
telescope that I recent ly purchased that's this is the telescope
when it's all folded up I'm going to extend it a little
bit it's a refractor and uh Wendy and I were on a cruise to see the
2006 total eclipse of the sun Peter and Diane Jedi were with
us and we uh the the ship stopped on at a port a fairly large port in on the
east coast of Africa about halfway down the continent and we decided to go ahead
and do a little shopping and we got out and uh one of the tables that had been set up there in
this tent had some old telescopes and I found this one there and I thought it kind of
interesting and I asked the person how much it costs and he said oh a couple $
hundred and I took a look at it and I move the draw tubes out and I
saw the words on the final draw tube Dolan
London I was holding for the first time in my life a Dolan refractor from the 19th century a
tribute to what telescopes were like well over a century
ago I didn't have a whole lot of cash on hand at the moment at the time and so I
asked the person selling it if he wouldn't mind if he sold it for say 50
or 100 bucks or something like that I'm not really sure what it was and he said
sure it's just something from somebody's old attic and uh I took a deep breath almost
fell down bought it and then quickly left and
we reboarded the ship Owen Gingrich from Harvard was there he was on the cruise
he met us at the Gangplank he said David did I hear this right or did you
just buy a Dolan refractor for 50 bucks and uh last
night when and I finally had first light with this telescope and that is traditional we looked at Jupiter and
Saturn in the same field and they're almost they almost touching each other
with this old telescope and we're going to do it again in a couple hours hours and uh it's going to be
fun um when we think of astrology ancient
astrology I think of Will William Shakespeare the person who I had almost
as great a passion for as I have for astronomy and someone who wrote in
Julius Caesar when Beggars die there are no comets seen the heavens themselves
bring forth the death of princes and it sort of reminds us that
Shakespeare while he really didn't follow astrology himself he understood his audience as well and he knew they
did so he put some reference to astrology to the night sky to the planets to the Sun to the
Moon to meteor the Northern Lights just about everything he could in almost
every one of his plays and uh I'm going to give you I'm going
to offer two quotes tonight and one is from Romeo and Juliet
this is the only quotation that is actually on a metal plaque on the
moon right next to the remains the some of the ashes that were part of jeene
shoe maker before he passed away in a car accident
um three years after one of our comets collided with Jupiter in
1994 and the words go like this and they beckon us to go out and look at the
conjunction tonight and they go like this come gentle KN come loving black
brow Knight give me my Romeo and when he shall die take him and cut him out in
little stars and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world
will be in love with night and pay no worship to the Gish son the other piece of literature that I
would like to quote is something I quoted earlier today and uh it's my favorite poem in
the English language it is written by Gerard Manley Hopkins It Was Written in
1864 and for my Master's thesis I uh determined that he was looking at
temples comet in in in in the fall of 1864 August 1864
and he wrote the poem only two weeks after the comet passed close to the
Earth and became rather bright I am like a slip of comet scarce
worth Discovery in some Corner SE Bridging the Slender difference of two
stars come out of space or Suddenly engendered by he elements for no one
knows but when she CES the sun she grows and sizes and Spins her skirts out while
her Central Star shakes its cocooning Mists and so she comes to fields of
light millions of traveling Rays Pierce her she hangs upon the flame cased sun
and sucks the light as full as Gideon's fleece but then her tether calls her she
falls off and as she dwindles sheds her smok of gold amidst the sistering
planets and then goes out into the cavernous dark so I go out my little sweet is done
I have drawn heat from this contagious sun to not ungentle death now forth I
run I wish you all the very best wishes of the season and also happier holidays
and years to come and I wish you all good night and a good Sky a clear sky so
that you can go out in a couple of hours or right now or whenever it's happening
and see this wonderful conjunction and now back to you
Scotty wonderful wonderful okay Steve so
umh where are we going next okay so we're hoping to um show some solar
Imaging from Simon but the Sun moved and
uh yes it did um I I I I had asked Simon just to pick up his stuff and move move
it and uh we couldn't get it in time and it wasn't working out so um he's going
to reposition onto another Target but in the meantime uh I'd like to ask Mr David
AER to uh speak with us and
and speak with us sorry thank you so much Steve and uh I I apologize if
there's a little bit of noise in the background here I'm having some work done on our house so if you hear any
sawing or banging you'll know that that's uh what it is and it's not uh infalling
meteorites um but it's it this is December 21st is it not I was worried I
had the wrong day yeah it's the 21st for a moment so we've got the right day well this is exciting because this is a big
big event for us and as David mentioned maybe not so much from a professional uh
planetary science point of view but it's exciting for us all of us who love the sky we have a minimum separation in this
conjunction coming up in a few minutes here of about a tenth of a degree that's
about six arc minutes or about a fifth of the diameter of the Moon between these two planets and Scott you showed
one of Chris Go's great images earlier of the two in in the same field there's
a phenomenal image also from Ian Peach that has made the rounds today that is
just incredible so this is really a rare event this is the closest as David
mentioned since 1623 the closest approach of the two planets since Galileo was under house
imprisonment um which is we can all relate to after the year 2020 um but that that was relatively
close to the Sun as David mentioned as well so in a dark sky to see the two planets uh which are really part of the
trio of the greatest planets that we love as observers Jupiter Saturn and Mars you have to go back to March 4
1226 to have seen uh these two planets this close in a dark sky uh as some of
you are seeing uh tonight and I hope right now and just in a little while here we're going to have the closest
approach of this conjunction um I however am near Milwaukee Wisconsin where the magazine is so this is not one
of the 17 clear nights uh in Milwaukee of the year um so it's cloudy here so
instead of going out and preparing a telescope to look at this event I looked
a little bit back in time this afternoon and I thought well what you know we've had a really really hard year this year
it's been very stressful on people but it hasn't been quite as hard as it was
in the 13th century and so I thought I'd just for a moment give a little bit of perspective and talk about well what was
going on the last time these two planets were really this close together in a dark sky in our world on our our little
planet Earth so um one of the major events of
that period that spring of 1226 was the founding of the Mongol Empire by genas
Khan and as George Carlin liked to say if you ever want to remember what a silly word lifestock is just remember in
a technical sense genas Khan had an active outdoor
lifestyle did just a little context there for you but seriously it was a
troubled world at that point there there were battles going on all over Europe and Asia between uh governments and city
states it was a messy very bad time uh in our history of invasions of Empires
against each other the rise of various Kings religions combating each other in
nearly every nook and cranny of the worlds with with of the world with full-blown Crusades going on as well
interestingly uh historians believe at the Native American settlement of Cahokia near St Louis the population at
that time uh equal that of London England which is pretty
astonishing um well you what happened during that year during that strange
time when not too many people were looking up uh certainly no one was with
a telescope um at that point well in England King John signed the Magna Carta
and there was a sort of a glimmer of hope for the future of uh some kind of
self-representation um apart from a marar monarchy who were the significant people of that Century uh just a sort of
a c of characters here well chimoy was around during that Century he was the
Florentine painter who would sort of turn art from a Byzantine uh uh
cartoonish representation of things to more reality in depth and be the teacher
of Raphael and therefore help to spark the
Renaissance Dante eligar was around in Florence the writer who would unleash
his Inferno of course as is part of the Divine Comedy uh Italy gets a lot of press here
uh Fibonacci the Italian mathematician who devised the Fibonacci sequence of
course of each number following the sum of the two preceding ones Marco Polo the
Venetian traitor and Explorer and Thomas aquinus the Neapolitan Catholic frier
and theologian so this was really a pretty dark time of conflict and of
Terror and just a glimmer of Art and Science beginning to raise uh their
heads out of this dark period on our planet well back to planets other
planets than ours the magnitudes right now of course of Jupiter Jupiter is about minus two magnitude it's about 33
Ark seconds across the disc of Jupiter Saturn is at about 1.4 magnitude so it's
vastly the disc is 15 arcs across although the Rings are just of course a smidge larger
than Jupiter's disc at 35 arccs you probably can't see this let me try yeah
we can see we can see if you were clever enough to have subscribed to astronomy
magazine you could see that the many satellites of Jupiter and Saturn are
potentially visible to you right now in the same field of view is the two planets of course as well the four
Galilean satellites of Jupiter been quite easy and of course Titan the largest and brightest uh satellite moon
of Jupiter uh excuse me of Saturn being pretty readily visible as well well in
terms of distances uh Jupiter right now is about 886 million kilometers from us
uh Saturn of course is a deep background object so this is one of these many events we get as a depth of field
exercise it's about 1.62 billion kilometers away almost twice as far away
and starting at 7:04 p.m. eastern time in about a half an hour there'll be a
nice Transit of ganam uh across Jupiter for those of who were watching
telescopically well we can look uh backwards in time uh and be a little bit
downtrodden about what long journey we've had as a civilization you know we're as you know Jerry Seinfeld said
we're trying to have a civilization here people you know well finally it it slowly makes progress and we stop
fighting and learn what's really going on in the universe um but looking forward we've got really really exciting
times in the future relating to Jupiter and Saturn of course the Galileo and
Juno Missions at Jupiter the Cassini Mission at Saturn have really written
the book on understanding everything that that we know about these planets we know that we're in a nice time right now
as far as Saturn goes because the rings of Saturn uh you know which are
countless pieces of ice from Tiny fragments up to about the size of
houses um will not be there forever orbiting the planet in maybe another two
to 300 million years the Rings will be gone um but we also think perhaps before
then we'll get the American Congress and other politicians interested in science
and fund some more missions and we'll have some exciting times going out and especially looking at these moons ganam
IO Europa Kalisto Titan at Saturn and certainly Enceladus and I apodus in the
saturnian system as well and we've got a whole Cadre of the largest moons there
that may offer lots of possibilities for microbial life perhaps even existing in
Briny subsurface oceans in our solar system let alone trying to detect life
elsewhere far off in the universe so let's hope that we can use this as an expiring an inspiring event for those of
us who can see the sky clearly um and push onward and get excited about some
outer Moon missions in the future to these worlds those are my thoughts on on
this not having a clear sky tonight so thank you Steve so much and thanks Scott
as always for letting me ramble on a bit I Lov it yeah sound like it was very uh a very
nice time in the 1200s right I mean you know well you know they say that talk about the good they talk about the good
old days all the time trust me this is much more comfortable now than the 13th
century no doubt about it okay any Huns trying to burn down your house right so
there were no good old days the good days are now I think y I might add that the conjunction in
the 1200s probably might have coincided about the time of the Magna
Carta we're seeing something that uh really hasn't been seen since the Magna
Carta one wonders what beautiful documents will be produced as a result
of this conjunction that is a very interesting comment David that's
terrific yes wonderful so um let's
see does anyone have a uh a live view that we can we can see right now before
we uh weing on Tim Tim it's nice for you to join us yeah uh it's nice to see
something because right now I'm just looking at clouds
okay okay uh for for those of you who don't know T Tim yoski um he's better
known as uh online as a live Sky guy right living Sky my I'm sorry yeah
because saskat is the land of living Skies yes I uh I I I've been up for a
very long time so I figured I saw you this morning at 5 oh I appreciate that
thank you for tuning in um and uh um you're in Saskatoon is that
correct that's correct yeah and I've been there more than once and ah well
why didn't you stop and say hi it was it was a previous life and I don't like to talk about it but um T
Tim's dedication to cold weather astronomy uh from from Paris through prairies inspires many fans uh he also
films and Records um as me time um videos that are
available on AR rasque YouTube channel and uh Tim will be sharing with us his
experience in cold weather astronomy in the Frozen Canadian prairies which technically you can say is almost
anywhere in Canada right now um so so
Tim I'm going to turn it to you fantastic well I realized for those of you north of the 49th I'm preaching to
the choir here but I'm speaking more to you people who are sitting there who could do astronomy in December in your
Shir shirt sleeves um first off to give you an idea where Saskatchewan is
basically if you can find a cold center of the planet that's it well not really
but Saskatoon is right in the heart of the Prairies we actually call it the Paris of the Prairies and yes sometimes
it does get cold in Paris too but not quite as cold here saskat is a lovely little city about 200,000 people uh
we've got more bridges than highways and we've got beautiful access to dark sky
eyes and the advantage that we have here is where from where I'm standing right now I'm about a probably a 10-minute
drive from my house and I'm out in the middle of the Prairie and I do live in the city but uh I can normally expect
about a 40-minute drive out of town and I'll get a fairly decent dark sky and
but the thing the thing is right now of course we're on the first day of winter it's the solstice so it's the shortest
day so for astronom s this is heaven okay we as as you all know we've got our
nice long dark dark nights the problem that we have in
saskin is they have a tendency of being cold as well and anyone from from the
northern colder parts of of Canada we're at U latitude of about 51 degrees so
normally this is actually right now my warm weather gear uh right now as you
can see I got my my beaver fur hat on here which keeps my bra brain from freezing up uh I've got my light gloves
on today uh but normally if it's getting colder like today it's only about minus5
maybe minus5 Celsius but there's a bit of a breeze blowing across me right now
um so normally when I'm was observing I'm going to have a pair of light gloves on that have the ability to be able to
use touchscreens while I'm with those gloves on and I'll put the very large
and very warm uh downfill mitts over top those now right now I'm just wearing
essentially just a just a T-shirt and a shirt underneath here but that's not my normal gear normally I'll be
wearing in a typical night I'm going to have this full body sco suit on and my
downfill jacket on dressing in layers of course is the key for winter astronomy the other thing is the hardest part is
of course keeping your feet warm and that's where these come into play these
ones here you're kind of like Frankenstein you're when you're wearing them they have absolutely no give
whatsoever but what they do give you is warm feet these ones are good to minus 102 Celsius so I'm not sure where I
build to walk in these but I know they work great in saskat and I'll also throw some foot warmers inside those as well
and the other issue because for me my specialty is astrophotography I'm not an
obser observational astronomer I like to photograph so of course the biggest issue dealing in the winter time is not
so much the camera's freezing up but it's the batteries freezing up uh I shoot with mirrorless mirrorless bodies
mirrorless bodies are notoriously bad at at battery power as
opposed to a DSLR but I I like my mirrorless cameras so what that means on a normal daytime shoot I'll go out with
a couple of batteries if I'm doing astrophotography and I'm doing it night in the win I'm basically multiplying the
number of batteries by four if I want to get through the night um there was if
you all remember the U so lunar eclipse at the end of January a couple of years
ago up here that particular night or morning it was Min -30 de C plus the uh
sorry TR traffic's gotten I'm out in the middle of nowhere and everyone's driven out here so they can see it I'm just
turn around yeah there's still no no no planets popping up um but that particular night I was changing
batteries every 10 minutes to be able to photograph the three and a half hours of
that Eclipse so I you learn to pack for the weather most definitely but what the the payoff is
those beautiful dark skies and I mean for me a 40-minute drive out of
Saskatoon and I've got beautiful Skies if I spent a couple hours driving it's like I've left the planet it's
absolutely gorgeous and that's one of the reasons why I love being out here in the
prairie and the other plus part of it is there's no pesky mountains in the way
sometimes there's a bluff of trees in your way but for the most part the place is nice and flat the place is nice and
clear and it's absolutely gorgeous you could not pick a better spot for for
astronomy until you hit summer and then what happens in summer basically for
about a month in the middle of summer you pretty much write off any astronomy
because we just don't get a good astronomical dart at the latitude we're
at at 51 degrees you'll go out at midnight and you can still read a newspaper in the backyard and that's
with no moon throw a moon into it unless you're a lunar Observer well I guess forget it but
basically what I wanted to say leave you with is there's a a lot of
them this road literally had no traffic in it an hour ago and now it's like I'm
on a highway because everyone's coming out to try to capture the conjunction so
anyway so what I want to leave you with is yes I envy you envy you in those those people in those warm
climates but there's something to be said for being out in the middle of the
Prairie when you can hear the air crackling it's so cold and you hear the
coyotes in the distance and you hear the owls and I even had one time where a moose walked up literally from here to
the other side of the road and just sort of stared at me for about five minutes and decided I wasn't worth the trouble
but what I will what I what I say is I hope wherever you are you've got some clear skies and the next time you're out
and you're out there in shirt sleeves in December just remember that there's people in other areas that are putting
in just a little bit more thought into their clothing but having just as much fun as you are and on that happy note
that's what I'll leave you with unless anyone's got any questions thank you Tim I hope that hope
you remain warm while you're out there and uh that do get a bit of a break in with the clouds yeah um to make to make
your uh your trouble worth it to get to be out in the cold
um before we too much further I I did want to give kind of a shout out to U uh
David Levy um who uh is
um um who uh has written his
autobiography uh and this is a night watchman's Journey it's a fascinating read um uh about David's life and his
adventures and his trials and tribulations and his triumphs and so I do recommend this this book another book
that I recommend is galaxies inside the universes star cities and this is written by David AER uh it's not his
latest effort but fantastic read with some incredible uh images um that uh
you'll definitely want to check out so um and I'll I'll give it back to you
Steve but I didn't want to pass that along thanks Scott I have the Galaxy's
book um me too and signed um before before we move on does anyone
have a live shot from their telescope that they would like to to bring
online I should have in a few minutes um when we plug in
Arizona okay I'm gonna I'm gonna move on then to uh Kathy and uh David Chapman um
and uh go from there the uh bit of an introduction right uh the mcmah moons
project has been carried up by two independent highly motivated and experienced volunteers Kathy LeBlanc is an
Aboriginal specialist in N Native Studies with experience in cultural Outreach programming and Dave Chapman is
a longtime member and fellow of the RC the partnership has advanced her
knowledge and understanding through app through applying the method of two-eyed seeing whereby traditional Aboriginal
knowledge and conventional science each guide the other towards the unified appreciation of the subject matter all
right tonight Kathy and Dave will be sharing a bit about their joint project the mcma moons project Kathy and Dave
I'm going to turn it to you okay well I'll start off I guess um
I hope Kathy's there somewhere um so thank you very much for that kind introduction and also thank you so much
for including us in this evening uh we're coming to from Nova Scotia I'm in
Halifax and Kathy is near Bridgewater Nova Scotia um Kathy and I met 10 years
ago when uh we were she was a cultural interpreter at kimik National Park and
National Historic Site and I as a member of the RC halifa Center was assisting
Kim kuik with setting up a dark sky preserve which took place around in 2010
but Kathy and I started working together more closely a few years later and at first we were only going to do a joint
presentation uh for a group on the moon but one thing led to another and uh we
we started doing lots of presentations together we wrote an essay an award-winning essay uh that was
published in the Griffith Observer um we've done some videos uh a
lot of our material is um uh sort of of all ages so we've done
quite a lot in the project and what we would like to do tonight very briefly is
just to give you an example of what we mean by twoe
seeing so I hope you're seeing the shared screen
um y we can see it okay thank you very much so the migma moons project the way
where you can find us is in two places the main place is on the Facebook we a page on Facebook we we also have a
YouTube channel where we've got some language videos and a few other things that are of Interest so just go to those
places and type in migma moons and you will find us quickly
enough so the twoey seeeing uh way of looking at things it's it's really
taking the best of conventional science and combining that that's one eye and
combining that with the eye of indigenous knowledge and through that to to get sort of a a unified view of uh
the cosmos or well science in general but in our case it's it's about the M
moons and so what we would like to do is
to we would like to talk about the chief moontime which is the moon time we're in right now and and demonstrate to you
house two i' seeeing uh Works in practice and so for so what I'll do now
is I'll turn over the screen um to Kathy who's going to read you a traditional
story Kathy yeah can you can you see and hear me you look great oh
good um first I wanted to say that uh I was inspired by the introduction um to
say that uh my people mile people who have been here for over 13,000 years um
use the phases of the moon and what's happening in nature to tell a passage of time so this is one of the stories um
that has been passed down through generations and uh I would like to share
it with all of you so this story is called Moon chief
long ago in the old times there was a man who could no longer go hunting when
he was young he was a great Hunter and there were always food in his wig Wong
now that he was old and weary and could not hunt he and his wife were often
hungry one winter they had very little to eat and at last one cold night there
was nothing left not even an old moccasin that he could chew the old man knew that they could
not live much longer he said to his wife look out the door and see if Moon Chief
is out tonight the old woman crawled to the door and lifted the
flu yes Moon Chief is out she told her husband the old man crept Outside The
Wigwam and stood in the deep snow he looked up at the Moon my friend how are
you tonight we and our Wigwam are not very well off my wife and I have no food
in the old days remember I was a good Hunter I killed the mo in the caribou
and chased them through the deep snow now I am old and cannot hunt as I used
to will you help me Moon Chief send a moose here to my door the old woman
heard him talking she called to him what are you saying out there in the dark the
old man told her I am asking moon Chief to send a mo to our
door early the next morning the old woman went to the door and looked out
lying in a snowbank beside the Wigwam was a Big Moose she called out to the
old man wake up wake up Moon Chief has sent us a
moose the old man awoke took his bow and arrow and killed the Moose caught in the
snow that lay against the wig Wong so it was in the old days if a man asked Moon
chief for the things he needed believing that Moon Chief would give him what he asked for to say I will try Moon Chief
see if he won't send a moose will not do only if you feel you are bound to get
what you ask for Will Moon Chief send you whatever you need
thanks very much Kathy never get tired of uh hearing that story from you so for
the others the way that twoey seeing works is so there's a story that
involves the moon and uh something going on in the sky and
um so at first it's not clear exactly what the astronomy content is and it took me a while to figure this out so
but I did figure it out and with the help of some research and some modeling
so I would like to talk to you about what is going on in the sky at this time of year around the solstice I'm going to
share my screen
again and advance so as we
know at this [Music] winter at the summer solstice the sun is
high in the sky uh and uh um and it reaches its highest point in the sky at
solar noon which means at the winter solstice if there's a full moon near the
winter solstice um it's going to be doing the opposite of what the sun is doing when
the sun sets The Moon Rises when the Sun rises the moon sets if the Sun is low in the sky the moon is
going to be high in the sky and the point on this um
uh chart in front of you here I've got a circle which represents about 30 degrees
in the sky which is about how much the moon would travel uh between one full moon and the next and it's centered on
the spot where the sun would be at noon at the summer solstice
uh and for those of you who are um real you know like really into astronomy if you want to find that on a chart that's
near the star one geminorum the center of that Circle so so what I've got here
is I've I've shown the position of the coming full moon um on December 29th and
you can see that it hits within that Circle so it's in that general area which is at the opposite opposite to the
Sun during the wi at the winter solstice and it's in an area of between geminy
and Taurus above Orion and below origa
and this is just by the way but it's inside the winter hexagon formed by the
bright stars in the winter sky and so the the thing about the the
chief Moon which is the one that occurs at this time of year is that it's the
highest one of all of the year the highest full moon of the whole year all of the other moons in the migma um
tradition relate to Earthly things about animals on Earth or trees or vegetation
frogs croaking but the chief moon for some reason it doesn't relate to anything on Earth it's it's something
very Celestial and i' always was of interest to me that it was so different
but when you realize that it has this special place in the sky uh then you
start to see why it's important and not only is it the highest in the sky at
this time but it's also longest in the sky of all the full moons so from moon
rise to moon set is about 16 hours so you've got 16 hours of Moonlight and
it's a very dark time of year um when you consider the Sun but when if you if
you have the full moon during this time of year you get this additional light at night coupled with the snow um on the
ground you actually have quite good lighting and the migma used to hunt
during the winter and they would use the full moon to help them hunt and they would hunt Moose and they would hunt
Moose in the snow and the snow would slow the Moose down they couldn't move
as quickly and so now you kind of understand the story of the Moon Chief
um they're they're they are um they are appealing to to the spirit
of the moon at this time of year to bring them a moose and and what better
moon to appeal to than the chief Moon the one which is highest and longest in the sky and I just want to show you two
more examples of this now the moon has its own cycle and it's not exactly an ins synchronization with the Sun so you
don't necessarily have a full moon on the 21st of December every year but I'm
just going to show you a couple of other examples sometimes you get a full Moon at the beginning of December and that'll
happen in 2022 and you can see it's over to the west of that Circle and then at
other times you'll get a moon uh on the other side uh which is early in
January um so and then all other moons all other
years you have moons somewhere in between but they're always within that Circle of about 30 Dees so you'll always
find the chief Moon then that general area so that's really the what we were going to hope to convey
today tonight is is to tell you this story of the Moon Chief and the
astronomy that's associated with it and to demonstrate what we mean by twoe
seeing um so I just like to end by saying um again you can find us on migma
moons on Facebook and on YouTube and we're no longer moons just moons anymore
we're also hosting Another Side Story called moon and the Seven bird Hunters on our YouTube uh Channel which is a
very nice story which involves the stars of Ursa Major and boutes if you have a
20 minutes or so to watch those videos I think you'd find them uh very
instructive so thank you for your time and if there are any if there is any
time for questions uh we'd be happy to um U
them thank you Dave great thank you Dave thank you Kathy do we have any questions
from the comment section Scott uh just uh people are getting set up to view the
conjunction um right now they're kind of preoccupied with that um perhaps we have
some live images at this point as well yes I believe Caesar you had you had a
live view that you were able to show us
hi everyone yes I have the two the few minutes more of live view let
me let me share
screen now it looks like also that Al and Mari
has a live view as well so we want to bounce yes if you if you are if you're
watching oh wow there you go hey there you go oh boy I can see
it nice yes is is maybe
at uh 15 degrees over the horizont but
uh weend it's amazing because we can we can see the all
details um nice work yes it's nice it's nice because we are we are at
126 M mhm
um below over sorry level um and this was
have this this make more advantage over
over see this or watching this uh over the surface he here we have a much
better uh seene conditions that's nice man that's really
cool yeah that's great wonderful the view the lay view the view
at that Naked Eyes is amazing because it's totally totally easy to to see the
both planets amazing but it's impossible to share this because it's only with the
eyes yes the visual view is the best that's true yes um I think Al I'm really
glad also has a live viewer now
absolutely I'm really glad that we're able to get some live views because I haven't been able to see anything other than clouds for the past
week yes we are really we had uh we have lucky we are lucky to
to have a very clear hor Horizon area and um well
is it's nice it's nice enjoy the view yeah it's excellent looks like
Simon's got something going over there too yes we are we are enjoying with
people that came coming to the rooftop that my
neighbors and came to to watch
the the both planets that's great just great yeah Simon do you have do you have
a a similar live view as well I I do actually um this is obviously oh still
doing the screen share might have to turn the screen share off
here I'll get it like yes I can stop share
there Simon have maybe this the same view yeah I pretty much have the same
view um the only difference here is as you can see it is still broad daylight
it is still pretty bright out there I can't visually see it but that's what
we're seeing right now and there is actually detail discernable we can see
you know we can see there's uh bands on on Jupiter you can clearly see the rings of Saturn uh the moons won't come up yet
for me because it is just too damn bright right now share your screen so we can really see it oh that's right let's
do a do a screen share yes
so pick that perfect thing we oh
daylight broad daylight that is really cool that's incredible really
daylight I mean if I if like I said if I could swing the camera around so you guys can see outside so I'm going to try
and do that right now you yeah I mean it's let me just bring the exposure down a little bit you know you can see
outside it is just it's all blown out because it is daytime so it's you know
like like we did last time you know it's proof that you can see the planets during the
day Simon are you using any kind of filter or anything at all like that uh
no filter this is just the 2x um Power Mate Barlo whatever you want to call
these things with a million extension tubes I see and pretty impressive we can see
some Banning on Jupiter H definitely see the rings around Saturn I think in about an hour's time the Red Spot should show
up I mean that's probably wishful thinking but who knows we saw it this
morning yeah this morning we had a great view of it oh how many hours ago was that
uh specific oh over 12 hours then it's gone then yeah 14 hours oh so we
probably already missed it then it's probably already gone then nine hours and 506
hour right so unless you want to wait around for another six hours we won't
see it again I won't be awake
then uh I'll still be be awake except I'll lose it by then because uh it'll be
long since Down Over the Horizon but I will show you guys this
real fast um we were looking at the sun that is actually the sun spot that I was looking at earlier on today so I I did a
process of it just so you guys can at least see something going on for those people who love looking at the sun great
image right I'm going to stop the share okay thank you Simon nice
work I okay well let Let's uh keep things
moving um Scott I have a real time live view if
you want oh okay uh how do I do
that down at the bottom you'll see a green share Buton okay
okay there it is it's a black and white camera the
made inia if you go
here see some details in Jupiter but then you can't see Saturn here you can
see both okay excellent expose
more in theory you got the satellites let's see the seeing looks really
good wait no it's not very good the thing is I I went because I didn't find
it automatically and there was one Cloud just in front of the of Jupiter and
Saturn then it went away but I went to look through the 45 inch and it was
really nice because you can see a lot of details on Jupiter and so and S uh so
this is a 10in rich with a zvo 1600 camera
it's only using 50 50% because uh well it's a lot of
pixels so anyway yeah it's kind of cute to see that uh so we showed it to my
granddaughter knowing that she will see it in 2040 I I hope I'll see it in 2040 2060 I
don't think so 20180 she might see it so it's kind of a good thing to pass from
generation to Generation by the way one thing that has not been mentioned is that uh the
2040 uh ground conjunction is not really interesting uh it occurs like on the 1st
of October what you will want to look is the 8th of September because the 8th of
September 20140 in a circle about 9 degrees wide you'll have the whole solar system you
will have a Mercury Venus the Moon Mars Jupiter and Saturn in a circle like that
of course at Sunset so that that's something to look for I think it will be much more interesting that the
conjunction that will be one degree and 16 minutes apart but this one is kind of
cool also outside it's kind of nice to photograph and so on so yeah that's that's what we can see
from Chile how about Jack Newton does Jack
have live image at this point yeah I need to U um just actually sign into uh and open
up the uh the roof of my robotic telescope in Arizona stuck in Canada of course do I
need to share my screen here does that help that would help and
then I need what I'm doing here
you know Scott one of these um fun astronomical facts that I was looking up
was the an eclipse with a planet having a Transit
at the same time and I did find one uh strangely enough but it doesn't happen
until 14,000 years and I think it was Venus yeah so there'll be while I don't think that you
know our audience will wait that that L you never know you know that somebody
could come up with some crazy thing to implant our brains into something and although 14,000 years excuse me of
saying go Scott it took 14,000 years for you to do this so yeah so yeah I did
look that one up is uh an eclipse with a Venus Transit is 14,000
years 58 was saying I was able to see the Rings and and that Jupiter was not
white had better luck with the moons two nights ago but the fact that it cleared up just in time and then closed up right
before that before that they before they set it was very special so it is magical
to to visually observe this thing it is great so I'm just opening the roof of the observatory in Arizona okay the uh
you can see the telescope is sitting in its h n native park position but uh what
I'm going to do is close the uh well I can leave internal camera on now and uh
are you are you trying to share your screen right now or yeah not sharing it
yet okay I hit shared screen share you have to pick pick the one that you want
to share and then you have to confirm that you're sharing oh okay
[Music] um maybe if I bring this
down does that help I'll tell you when you start if I hit share here share okay
now you're starting to share yeah okay there we go okay now what we see is the
U star map yeah okay I need to move this
over and here this is the uh the plane wave Mount
and uh we're going to
uh and then what I'm doing is opening up the I'm gonna home the mount if you
watch the mount you'll see it go into its home position all right I see
that and then uh as soon as it's uh it
I'm going to now send it down to Jupiter I might just mention I'm an RC
life member I'm past president of the Winnipeg Center Toronto Center and the
Victoria center for the RC
group so what I I've gone to
uh telescopes now pointing at uh jup
I believe hang on and if we there it goes to
Jupiter hopefully it'll still be above the Horizon
here and I'll just uh take a quick exposure
[Music]
Jack while you're doing that I'm the current president of the RC when I'm P president will I get an observatory in
Arizona too well if you marry the right woman you
will that ship has sailed the uh hang on here I just uh
want to find out whether we're I've got Robin I was talking to um
Colin ha I talked to him quite frequently actually another past president of our ASC yes and indeed and
Chris Gainer is here he's he's the current past [Laughter] president I've got a a horrible feeling
that that this is the edge of the wall of the observatory and and I may have missed my window
here but
I am afraid what's that I think it's uh
unfortunately it's it's gone too far over and I'm and it's out of my view now
from my my Tel in Arizona so that's unfortunate but it uh it is uh
incredible in these days of electronics to be able to uh be sitting here in a
snowstorm in so British Columbia and uh open up my uh my telescope I can just
confirm that quickly by uh
[Music] by reduce that
[Music] and I'm just going to pick another object up here um and send the telescope
uh to it if uh go to the square in Pegasus
here and send the telescope there and just do a quick
shot and see if uh that mount SLS very quickly
yeah it does uh any point in the sky in about four seconds geez and
uh there it is so that's what's uh that's what's
happened it's I'm certainly it's it's still daylight there but it's moved um
out of my view but uh I can uh I can shoot
U with the this is an Hal Alpha filter and it's very forgiving when I'm doing
deep Sky photography um I can take uh six minute shots with a full moon in the sky and uh
the full moon just doesn't interfere at all and
uh so anyhow that is uh that is uh robotic in Arizona but unfortunately our
targets have have left the vicinity here anybody have any
questions uh there was just some comments about how quickly the mount is moving and uh
um uh but uh no questions yeah it does the uh um
the plane wave is a Ab just an incredible instrument and uh but uh this
is in the Arizona sky village and uh we have uh about uh 35 telescopes uh in the
village now and uh the properties of course been sold out for for years but
uh it's a qu quite a project and uh we've got a lot of happy astronomers
there okay so um uh perhaps someone else has got uh
uh still has a view of the live view of the of the the
conjunction what do you think Steve um well I think I think uh unless
anybody has a view because it's probably going to start setting uh quite rapidly uh for most people um if no one else has
has a view that they can share I was going to ask Mark and uh Peter to
uh um present to us Scott I got one here at headquarters if you wantan
to yeah okay okay yeah this is Arkansas
y well the problem let me see here me I gotta find my
picture Okay so that's going through the law
Manny G11 with uh I know the the glare is not helping at all with those lights
okay and we got 8 inch me sitting over here with Kent if anybody want to come
down and look for visually whil look at it that's not a bad view no it's not a
bad View at all um I'm just trying to mess with the exposures a little bit to kind of give more detail as far as the
Jupiter um I can't turn the gain up too much or I'm gonna blow it out exponentially
right but there's a live view with a 102 that's great
so you're doing this with your with zoom on your phone is that right correct I'm
doing it the zoom on the we couldn't get enough internet power out there to really um to do this
I got enough on my phone we're good to go go and there's there's Kent over
there looking at but as you see kind of in the distance that's where it is right
there right so and we're looking at the the G11 here so we got some views out here
we're good to go awesome thanks a lot yeahuh excellent
thanks Tyler I'm gonna call on uh Mark and uh Peter
um Mark and Peter are members of the racc London Center uh Mark is also a
member of the RC history committee and has been hosting monthly webinars on the
rasque YouTube channel um uh librarian and betus W Welling
assembled a treasury of astronomical poetry at in
1943 inspired by her experiences at the Cronin observatory in London Ontario
however the manuscript was lost and Mark and Peter will be sharing a little bit about beus be's life as well as their
experiences bringing a lost and accidentally rediscovered manuscript to life and excerpts of the
script that have now been prepared for publication Mark and Peter I'm going to hand it over to you okay well thank you
very much are you able to see uh the screen with a cosmic calendar on it I need to check that out in terms of the
screen share um and is it is it showing my speaker notes or is it actually showing the screen share showing the
screen share it's showing the screen share with the cover there okay fantastic so I love the question that
David asked earlier about the kinds of literary creations
um that uh the present conjunction might Inspire in the future that was very
exciting and uh so here tonight we look a little bit back in time to some of the
literary creations of previous centuries this is a sneak preview of a book project that I've been cooking up in my
secret lab which is a picture book of poetry about the N Sky which will come out in
2021 and uh my role in this project was to select astronomical art from previous
centuries to resonate with each of the poems I decided right away that there
wasn't going to be any nudity in this book and although you wouldn't think it
that is surprisingly hard to achieve for an art book about astronomical
poetry if you search for images of the mythological Venus how many examples you think you
will find that are fully clothed answer almost none the current
version of Wikipedia is clear on this point the goddess Venus is usually
depicted nude in paintings this is why within the covers
um of this book you will find gorgeous images of the transits of
Venus or the Topography of Mars but not the Topography of Roman goddesses or
Gods you will however learn about Elizabeth I the Virgin Queen being
identified in her lifetime with Diana the huntress this
may have had something to do with uh Elizabeth the's vaunted Chastity but may
also have alluded to Her Majesty's tendency towards executing those who displeased her Ben Johnson on P P 62
entreats the queen to not let her ax fall on him and I'm going to throw this
over to Peter Jedi here to read Ben Johnson's hymn to
Diana thank you very much Mark it's my pleasure to participate in this and to
give a reading of one of my favorite poems from your new book that's coming out him to Diana Queen and Huntress
chased and fair now the sun is laid to sleep seated in thy Silver Chair State
and wanted manner keep Hesperus entreats thy light goddess excellently bright
Earth let not thy envious shade dare itself to interpose Cynthia's shining
orb was made heaven to clear when day did close bless us then with wished
sight goddess excellently bright lay thy bow of pearl apart and thy Crystal
shining quiver give unto the flying heart a whole bunch of people face to breathe how short
soever thou that makes the day of night goddess excellently
right Ben Johnson's great rival thank you Peter that was wonderful as a poet
and playwright was of course William Shakespeare and no
book of astronomical poetry would be complete as David Levy will attest
without gems from The Bard and so I'm wondering if I could ask you
David um to read a speech which I know is one of your uh absolute favorites uh
from William Shakespeare and um I'm also queuing I
know one of your favorite illustrations here to go along with it oh thanks thanks so much what about
mine Mark Mark asked me a few minutes ago if I wouldn't mind quoting from uh
Hamlet and uh so I'm going to quote my favorite line from my favorite uh
passage from Hamlet and I think a lot of you will remember it um having seen it
on Star Trek where uh Patrick Stewart having an argument with the Q
character he said and and and Patrick Stewart says what Shakespeare says with
irony I say with conviction and then he goes into this this most excellent
canopy the air look you this Brave or hanging firmament this majestical roof
Fred with golden fire what a piece of work is a man how Noble in reason how
infinite in faculties in form and moving how Express and admirable in action how
like an angel in apprehension like a god the beauty of the world the Paragon of
animals and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust when I read that
wonderful wonderful uh passage I think of all of the screw-ups that humanity is
manages to make certainly in the last few years all over the world and this
same species can get together tonight on the solstice look up at the night sky in
Wonder and amazement as we see the great conjunction on the
soltice thanks Mark thanks for letting me do this thank you David it was a
treat um David was kind enough to write the forward to this book and uh so it's
been great fun doing some back and forth with him about that and
um uh I wanted to tell you just a little bit about how uh this book started uh
with um Peter jedii and with beus Welling so beus Welling
wrote the um manuscript for this or really compiled the manuscript for this
back in 1944 inspired by a visit to her University
Observatory and she is uh she's a remarkable woman she co-wrote the first
book on Library science published in Canada which went through three editions
with Pitman and Toronto so it's a prestigious press and I managed just in the last couple of weeks to find what is
probably the last copy of this in North America uh Library science for Canadians
but um what this means is that finding textual Treasures is beus welling's
superpower and so she sent this man cript to the
observatory and you can see here the actual manuscript and it was received by
The Observatory director probably put into the RAS lenon Center archives and
then lost for 75 years and then last year last year Peter Jedi uh fellow of
the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada found the manuscript and came into the observatory
one day and said to me here Mark do something with
this so I did and so this book is the result of a collaboration with someone
who died in the 1950s she pulled together all of these poems and I
attempted to bring an illustration to the table for every poem in the book so
on every page where you have a poem um there is wonderful astronomical art from
previous centuries available there and uh beatress Welling uh also I
should mention had her feet very firmly planted in both the Arts and the
Sciences she won a gold medal for her undergraduate essay on the role of of
women in English literature and she served as librarian
for the predecessor organization to the National research Council of Canada that was one of her first postings as a
professional librarian so she she had exactly the right kind of brain to be
thinking uh about this problem now uh poets as it turns out
love antique constellation names the asterism that we think of is the Big
Dipper which you can see here in this graphic for example was once thought of
as a wagon rather than as a Dipper can you see that can you see how that would have been conceptualized that way oh
yeah Charles's wagon it was called or Charles's Wayne perhaps due to the similarity in
sound Charles's Wayne was later retconed to be associated with Charlemagne
Charles Charles's Wayne Charles's Wayne Charlemagne maybe we danced about the
mapole in the Hazel cops till Charles's Wayne came out above the tall white
chimney tops in designing this book and in selecting the illustrations accompanying
these poems I attempted to produce a volume that surely would have delighted
beus Welling and which I hope will Delight the reader as
well I will leave you with a few more lines from Shakespeare to enhance your
contemplation of the great conjunction this evening look you how the Floor of Heaven is
thick in laid with patines of bright gold there's not the smallest orb which
thou beholdest but in his motion like an angel sings Still querying to the young
eyed cherubin thank you very much it is such a treat to share the evening of the
great conjunction with so many fellow Travelers and so back to you
thank you Mark thank you Peter greatly appreciate that um Scott what do you uh
what do you think should we take a small break yeah we'll take a short break uh and then afterwards we'll come back with
the astronomical League we have some door prizes to give away and um uh some
winners to announce and um so um I'll uh
I'll take it over from here and um and we'll continue on with our uh 27th
Global star party uh the great conjunction so Scott I can leave up my live image of
um the planets if you want oh that's great let's that would be cool just do
that let's run that for yeah that's awesome about a 10 minute break for that all right so that's the screen share so
I'll just leave it up and I'll just adjust as uh as it drifts away because I didn't actually polar line
today sounds good good wonderful I'm waiting for Darkness
here Molly how are you got my uh gear all set up outside
here hopefully my internet connection holds very
good I have to remember to look at put an eyepiece on there I have to remember
right right okay we'll be back uh here in about 10 minutes
for
this [Music]
for
e
e
e
e
e e
[Music] I had to go out and look at it visually too it it was beautiful I can't see
anything still I just got a big pile of blue sky
one of the moons is starting to show up a little bit um if I kind of pull the exposure just jump dump the gain up a
bit probably it is amazing that you're getting uh the image that you're getting
with your hey man you can get the same thing with one of your
152s I imagine so do you mean you imagine so it's like a guarantee it's a
guarantee it comes with the infamous Scott Roberts
if it doesn't work send it back I'll get you another one I'll get you another one that's [Music]
[Music] right what the hell is Steve doing some kind of a a drug deal in the background
there no no there's a video that I uh I follow a guy on Tik Tok he's local here
and he's uh built from scratch his own his own computer like and when I me from
scratch I mean he's gotten the ic's in the wire and he solded everything up he's designed his own CPU jeez no yeah
it is it is impress and this is his second one and he's still in high school what it's it's amazing what what this
guy has done absolutely amazing
I was try I could even put together two things let loone put a computer together like
you know from the ground up like literal TTL logic right wired everything up soldered
all the connections himself and he designed his own CPU and video card and uh
um you know you know what the funny thing is though if we were to wipe out um all production processes right now as
in like get rid of everything that creates the things that we have and we had to start all over again I'd be
really interested to see what we would do different if we started again does if that makes
sense oh yeah I understand I think it with the knowledge that we have we could
do it relatively quickly so it'd be a setback
but okay so what why don't we uh bring on Carol ore and
um uh if we have Terry man as well but certainly Carol uh who is the president
current president of the astronomical League oh Scott there we are okay good
to be here with everyone and yeah this is really neat experience and I'll admit I took a Peak at the uh visually at the
conjunction a few minutes ago and in L polluted South Kansas City it's okay not
nearly as good as seeing what several are showing but it's good to see it's out there uh let's see can I share a
screen I'm not seeing that option for some reason down at the bottom if you run
your mouse over the bottom you'll see a green share screen button yeah and for some reason I am not seeing that
tonight is it at the top
on Zoom it's at the bottom if you go to your Zoom client still don't see it here
so I may just have to do it uh manually tonight because I just don't see it it's not coming up like it normally does so I
think we're going to just uh uh visual or just orally uh give those uh
results these are the questions from the December 8th uh
start party question number one assuming that all eight planets had
hard surfaces only four doe on what planet's surface would you weigh most
nearly the same as you do on earth and the answer was
Saturn and the comment if Saturn had a hard surface to stand on a 100 pound
person would weigh 106 pounds just 6% heavier and grum roll the winner is
Marie lot l o TT from I believe from the southeast part of the United
States okay question number two what is the popular name for Tomar Rio that's t
o m b a u g h r e g i ohe this prominent
feature on Pluto the answer is the
heart and the winner on that one is Jane Hurley that's Hur l y all right and
number three beier object a planetary
nebula um sorry I'm not able to show that uh
but is known as the little blank nebula the little blank nebula the answer is
m76 and Perseus and is known as the little
dumbbell and the winner is Mike Napper that's n a p p r congratulations
Mike and now we get to tonight's questions okay my apologies for not
being able to show those here you will send your questions in by email to explore
Alliance explor scientific.com you will not answer them in
chat uh and um uh so but explore
Alliance at explor scientific.com sounds good and will you post that also
down there uh Scott so they can see that uh question number one what
spacecraft first disc discovered the rings of the planet Jupiter and in what year so what
spacecraft first discovered the rings of the planet Jupiter and in what year that's number
one number two how did Saturn get its
name question number two how did Saturn get its name
and number three what is the tallest mountain SL
volcano Olympus Mons found in our solar system I repeat where is the tallest
mountain SL volcano Olympus Mons found
in our solar system so send those questions those
answers to uh the address that Scott just gave you explore Alliance at explor scientific.com and thank you so much
thank you very much thank you uh the astronomical league is um uh an
organization that uh uh we work closely with as well um and uh we um we're the
underwriter of the national young astronomers award and the Leslie Peltier Award with them and the newly U um uh
latest award that we're underwriting is their astrophotography award so there's going to be some very exciting news
coming about that new award I think you'll really enjoy the uh uh way we've laid out that program so thank you so
much Scott thank you very much Carol and I before we let you go too I I had um uh
we had talked a little bit about uh uh the relationship that the um Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada and the astronomical League of shared over the years uh uh what what can you tell us
about that yes we don't have anything formal but we certainly want to talk
with our friends in Canada about the possibility of collaborating maybe on some national events uh coming up we do
a yearly one and I know the RSC does yearly uh situations as well and we're
very interested in comparing notes and see if we could uh maybe do some collaborating in a couple of years to
start that process going so we'll certainly be in contact so I would encourage you uh to contact me if you
get a chance or I'll do it vice versa that's president at astr league.org and we'll make this all happen it's great to
see everyone on here tonight thanks very much Carol that's great that's great
okay so hey Scott real quick yes did you know how Saturn got its name
though so when they were making the planets they sat on them
you know that was I think option three or something
yeah oh boy are we gonna are we gonna have a segment of of corny space jokes because
you know corny space jokes corny astronomy J for hours that's right don't you get me
started with the uranius jokes now now now it's a challenge well
there's some great ones out there I'm not going to lie right so where are we at next who who has not
yet uh uh been with us from the Royal Astronomical Society lineup I I think
and I'm going to put him on the spot here I think uh it's time to hear from uh our
president Robin hope that's okay absolutely GNA throw you into the
spotlight right happy to Robin is the president of the royal Asal society as
well as a past president of the Calgary Center Robin has been hard at work uh
during his time as president and he's been creating the nextg committee to increase representation and empowerment
of young people within the RC an initiative that I absolutely love and I think is very important um and of course
this is among many other accomplishments um so Robin will be talking about the
the value of an RC membership and The Observers handbook and it's other
Premier publication which is its Premier publication The Ultimate Guide to what's
happening in space each year Robin I'm GNA turn it to you thank you thank you
Steve and thank you Scott we really appreciate the opportunity to uh to join in in your star party um especially
since most of us are in the midst of winter snowstorms here in Canada I um I
finally was able to see the uh the conjunction last night we had a bit of
clearing in Calgary the seeing was horrible the best we could do was uh magnifi blobs but um yeah it was it was
exciting visually it was better than than anything we could image but it was uh it was nice and I'm sure that if you
see something from Alan Dyer from last night it'll be the best that we could have hoped for in this part of the
country for sure um so I'm going to share my screen and um Steve what I
thought I'd do is just give the audience a little snapshot of who the RC is and what we do and Carol I'm going to take
you up on that I did write down your email address we'll connect and see how we can collaborate more because um we
are all one Community even though we're different organizations so exactly looking forward to it Robin indeed
indeed um let me know when you can see this and hopefully it's the presentation screen and not no speakers notes or
anything like that coming at
you someone's give me a thumbs up or a nod it had there we go thank you Steve
okay so um RC who we are um the Royal
Astronomical Society of Canada also mostly known as the RC uh you'll notice
the the badge up in the top we celebrated our 15th anniversary in 2018
so that puts us at about 152 years old this year um we are in 30 centers across
the country and when when Jack Newton was speaking he mentioned that he was past president of a few of those centers
um so we've got uh local organizations that provide a lot of our local Outreach
because of course Outreach is a very one-on-one experience and we've got over 5,000 members that um provide that kind
of Outreach at those 30 centers across the country um what we're about uh our
vision is to be Canada's Premier organization of amateur and professional astronomers promoting astronomy to all
we do have a professional organization called Casa which is the Canadian Astronomical Society uh Society
astronomic Canada Canada um that is primarily Prof or that is solely
professional astronomers but a lot of those members are part of our organization as well what we attempt to
do our strategic objectives is to provide value to members of the society value to those 30 centers that we
mentioned value to the scientific Community um and value to the public and do so in a financially sustainable way
and there's a number of things that we do and we have uh uh governance from our board of directors from our bylaws and
policy manual we're governed governed federally under the uh not for-profit act um but when you look at our
structure this is it might be a little bit busy but I'm going to point you to the Bottom bar um
in addition to our members and our National Council and our centers and our board of directors and some of the
administrative tasks that we have um at the B bottom you'll see some of our committees and these committees are how
we execute on our strategic objectives and how we deliver astronomy to the public to the scientific Community to
the members Etc so our astroimaging group obviously is a a committee that
focuses no pun intended on astroimaging and you'll find that we've got things as
as as as simple as Widefield astronomy all the way to some some very elaborate
deep space image and processing techniques and the nice thing is that our members have an
opportunity for um critique from really experienced astronomers in in guiding
them along the way to get to become better and better and better Astro imagers and some of the things that you
see coming out of that group are just astounding um the next one is our education and public Outreach and and
that is a group that works with with uh building programs and tools for that oat
which is a really big part of what we do um our history committee and we saw sort
of a taste of that with with um uh earlier presentations where uh we really
do honor the history of the society and the members that brought us to where we are and you'll see a little bit about that when we talk about the handbook
which is one of the things Steve said I'm going to talk about and I promise I will um our it committee keeps us uh
keeps keeps us uh with the right tool set and uh um so
that members and the public have access to all of the things we deliver especially this year um we've had to
Pivot this year and and 2020 has been a challenge for absolutely everyone um I
think there's a lot of good has come out of it uh in in how we reach out to people and I mean opportunities like
this Scott and Steve where you know the the audiences that we have access to are so broader and so much more diverse than
we typically get from a um a public staright in a Park um it's there there's
been some silver linings on this cloudy 2020 our light pollution abatement committee is is is an important part of
what we do um and it it's it's all about education and also providing guidance to
Municipal provincial and federal Parks um we've got a dark sky preserve program
where we designate specific areas and we help those kinds of clients I'll call them um promote and educate the public
on on what it is to be good ambassadors of the night sky and help them avoid the
Perils of light pollution and and that we won't go into that there's a lot of things that this is a we're speaking to
the choir when we talk about light pollution abatement here I think yes inclusivity and diversity is important
everywhere and we've actually created a committee um that focuses on that explicitly because um as much as we like
to think we're inclusive and diverse we we still have a way to go and we're really focused on on um repairing that
part of our organization um our observing committee is we've got some interesting programs
again that that start with beginning OBS observers all the way to experienced
observers and um we introduced challenges for um learning the night sky
learning um the deep space uh learning the moon um and and some of those
programs are are uh um uh quite interesting quite involved
and can take quite a bit of time to accomplish we um one of the one of the highlights in that program we did have
our um explore the universe program completed by um a very young member of
the society um and she um she wrote about that and we highlighted that in one of her magazines and uh she's spoken
at one of our centers and it's been a an interesting journey to get a sense of
uh what it's like to start from scratch and learn the night sky and become um
enamored by it as you go through that journey and those programs that we have in our observing committee are are um
set a pathway for that you're going to hear well you heard from Dave Chapman earlier and Dave is one of the authors of a number of those programs and sits
on that committee our next gen committee Steve spoke to that um we're really trying to create an organization that is
uh shaped and driven by a younger crowd we tend to be um a a common demographic
like me and we really want to make sure that our organization is is catering to the needs of the next generation of of
astronomers um and Jenna I'm not sure if we heard from Jenna earlier I I missed the beginning um but we do have a
robotic telescope in California and uh we're we've brought that online and we're bringing building programs around
it one of the other things we do to help bring astronomy to the public um and to
our members and to the scientific Community is through our Publications um I'll I'll start on the
right and work from right to left so Sky News is a Canadian astronomy magazine that's published six times a year it is
the only Canadian astronomy magazine and and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada uh acquired the magazine and uh
we've changed it a bit but we've made it uh it's always been an important part of of what we offer to our members and the
to the Canadian public um it's been in the marketplace for 25 years um we we've
kind of made it our own and it's uh we're quite proud of where it is and where it's growing to uh the journal is
more of a scientific publication and and it's a it's a place for um research
scientists in Canada to publish their work and and to to gain some recognition in that particular publication um two of
our annual uh um uh Publications are Illustrated on the left the 2021 night
sky Almanac is new uh it came out this year and it's targeted at the uh the
beginning and the merging astronomer and of course the observer's handbook is is a a publication that's been around for
quite some time and I'll talk a little bit about that here um so the the observer's handbook is one of Canada's
oldest scientific Publications um it started as a Canadian astronomical handbook for 19 07 um and it's become an
annual publication since that time and we're currently publishing about 11,000 copies of that
handbook since its Inception in 1907 um there have been eight editors of
that particular handbook Dave Chapman who spoke on the mcma moons earlier as one of those editors a past editor of
that of that publication um I looked today at the 2021 handbook there are 65 contributors
to the handbook so experts in varying uh Arenas including our basic data is our
basic data um Optics and observing insights in depth that you don't find in a typical uh uh annual publication or
beginner guide um it's just a compilation of so many detailed things around um topics such as the Optics and
observing our month-to-month Sky objects in the solar system uh stars and of
course deep space and uh C K chant wrote in 1906 uh the misspelled Observer
handbook sorry about that the observer's handbook is intended to be a companion which The Observer would wish always to
have in his pocket or on the table before him consider it's 1906 it's it's
it's not diverse at all um but it it it holds true today and chant was the editor from 1907 to 1957 and again
apologies for those errors on my slide um so I want to thank uh Steve and Scott
particularly for for giving us an opportunity to uh to to get on the stage with you in this in this star party if
there's any questions for me regarding the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada um I'm here uh our past president Chris
Gainer is here um we've got a number of members of the society here so I think
there's enough enough history on this on the panel today if if there's any questions about the society um we'd be
happy to entertain entertain those at this
point uh let's see I'll stop sharing there's um just
some comments um Kevin Kel ISS busy documenting RC
Astro image cert applications plans are next probably during the New Year's Eve
they will be wonderful plans nice
yeah great thank you so much thank you very much thank you and and I want to I want to particularly thank Scott and
Steve for your ongoing support of the society and our members and our centers that you're close to um we're we're
we're we're we're part of a family and we don't just get together here we see we see each other in different different
ways uh throughout the year oh I've got there's one more publication that um we're kind of proud of I have to I'll
hold it up it's uh it's David Levy's uh autobiography yes that's right I have
one too publication of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada um at any rate thank you so much for the time
today really appreciate it and uh thanks for including the RC in the in tonight's
very special event thank you very
much okay uh so Steve um who's up next well
um let let's see Jenna are you there I sure am how are you Jenna good things
how are you doing tonight you must be tired [Laughter]
no lots of coffee excellent invention um how are we with the robotic telescope uh
it's still pretty bright outside I have just taken a photo of Saturn and Jupiter it's clearer that's nice uh yeah it's
I've taken a photo of Saturn and Jupiter with the DSLR and it's yeah it's too bright right now um Sunset was only it
wasn't that long ago and we usually image in about half an hour so so that'd be a really good time to to take some pictures but I do have um a video from
one of our our younger members who does planetarium shows if you'd like me to share that with uh with everyone now
yeah that'd be great excellent so this is I'll introduce her because I'm here
this is Tara Jaffer uh she's a member for of Montreal Center and has been um actually I think you have the bio Steve
but she's been putting together planetarium shows uh in Montreal and hosting them um and she's one of she
does an amazing job of it and she's engaged a ton of people and so tonight's uh timing was a little off um for her
but we I have a video of the work that she's done um with those uh planetarium
shows and I will share that with you now oh shoot hold on I got to share my computer audio
there you go hi everyone I'm Tara and I'm so glad to be a part of this virtual
event for the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn those two planets are some of my favorite night sky objects
especially to share with others during our Ras Montreal events something we didn't really get a chance to do this
past year although now we do get to see them in the same field field of view
which is amazing watching someone's reaction when they see the rings of Saturn the bands
on Jupiter or its moons or order even to get to see the craters on our moon those
moments are so much fun in preco times when we did get
together for Star parties and observing nights I often got questions on how I got started or what other kids needed to
know to become amateur astronomers since this past summer was so different for everyone I took the opportunity to put
together a short video for an online Global stem Festival to share my love of astronomy with other kids was a lot of
fun and I'm very happy to show to you here hi everyone I've been doing
astronomy for 4 years now and I would like to show you the basics of how to become an amateur astronomer first
notice that the sky changes throughout the night and throughout the seasons that is because the Earth rotates around
itself and revolves around the Sun secondly you will see a different
part of the sky depending on your latitude for example me I see the North Star at a 45° angle and the Dipper every
night people in the South will not see that however everyone sees the Moon and
the Sun so follow their path they always take the same path this path is called the ecliptic it's our view of the disc
of the solar system actually all the planets follow a
similar path you can use small binoculars or a telescope to look at these more closely
I like to use a doonan reflector because you can move it manually you can also use a Star Trek made for your specific
region to plan what to watch you tonight for Jupiter you may see its four
Gall moons you can see them move around Jupiter all through the night you may also see its stripes and its big red
spot on the surface for Saturn you may see its rings its moons and also the gaps between the
Rings and The Planets For Mars you may see its sou ice
cap and the Moon is very exciting you can see the details of its craters and if the moon is not full then you see so
much detail along the shadow this line is called the Terminator if you don't move with the
telescope then you will see objects move through your field of view within a couple of minutes you will experience
Earth's rotation in real time this summer I was able to watch
come new eyes move through the sky near the Big Dipper and get dimmer as it went further from us I also saw 23 meteors
during this year's pre meteor shower in a Dark Skys sight outside of town last fall I had an amazing chance
to run Upon A Tam's show and I focused on the winter constellations in particular Orion with
my favorite star Beetle Juice and the Orion Nebula in its sword I challenge you to find your
favorite object in the night sky that was a really fun video to make I've gotten some awesome opportunities over
the past few years including helping out at the Apollo 11 50th Anniversary
festival at the alakan Museum I was also chosen to give a to give a show at the
monreal riotinto alen planetarium and I gave the winter night sky public event
for rasque last January I even helped host the CSA Junior astronaut sessions with Ras uh
just before the co measures began this year has been difficult for many of us but the night sky is keeping
us company I've set up my telescope in the driveway for the Mars opposition in October for Jupiter and Saturn during
the summer and I watched the ISS Passover a few times I also grabbed my
binoculars to look at the Moon whenever I can and like other kids my age I
wonder about life in the solar system I love the idea of life in the
oceans of Europa and Enceladus or some methan creature on Titan
inspired by a local artist and past Center president batina for I gave a bilingual Workshop to kids about
extremophiles which are the likely forms of life in the solar system inspired by
these examples the kids drew their own aliens while I drew a People's Choice alien using the features that were the
most popular as voted by the kids I'm happy to share with you the kids Creations enjoy
no [Music]
oh [Music]
[Applause] o
[Applause] [Music]
and when we look at Jupiter and Saturn during this great conjunction maybe one of these creatures will be looking back
at us ah thank you so much Tara for
preparing preparing that video it was so much fun so that's our here we go that's our
uh presentation from Tara um she's definitely one of our our very on the ball uh younger members and has been
doing some fantastic shows so thank you so much for contributing that was great that was awesome than J for helping with
that thank you and next time we talk to Tara please extend my thanks to her as well for putting that together certainly
well thank you so to move things along I'm gonna call on Chris
Gainer Chris has held many titles in the RC and he's been a member for nearly 30
years um he's a recent past president and also a member of the RC Victoria
Center and Chris's knowledge on space exploration history is unparalleled in
Canada Chris has written five books on Space Canadian space history focusing on the a arrow project and this I'm so
excited about this I really am and his new book launching soon will be about 30
past 30 years of the Hubble telescope so Chris will be talking about the history of the a arrow
project uh one often unknown to those living outside of Canada and if there's
for those who don't know the a arrow was a fighter jet developed in Canada I don't want to steal the show but I have
to say this if it was still around I really don't think that there'd be anything that would be able to touch it
still to this day so that's all I have to say about it Chris I'm gonna hand it over to
you okay it's h it's great to be here um
uh I'm in one of these places in Victoria where we got skunked with the weather this evening but uh I think
there's a chance I might be able to uh see what's left of the conjunction tomorrow so I'm just going to try and uh
do my myh share screen thing and uh just
a second here how does that
look okay so I'm just I'm just gonna start off by talking about a couple of
uh irons I have in the fire right now uh first of all my book about uh Hubble
Space Telescope operations the first 30 years is going to be published by NASA
I'm hoping in January and it will be available as a a free download in
addition to a book you can buy and uh when that happens I'll be uh announcing
it fairly widely just something else I wanted to mention the I uh as a uh Robins
predecessor as president of the RC I am quite involved with the Publications and
the current issue of the RC Journal has uh My article about how space astronomy
got going in Canada uh there was a couple of ideas for uh Canadian Space
Telescope and also for a great big telescope that was going to fly on the
the on a pallet on the shuttle Unfortunately they didn't actually happen but it's an interesting piece of
History nevertheless and in Sky News uh that's just that's just coming out now
the January Sky News I have a little piece about Apollo
14 so uh uh lots of stuff if you want to read uh uh what I've been up to so um so
the Aro Arrow here's a picture of the the AO arrow on the day it was uh rolled
out at a big ceremony in Toronto now the AO plant is actually right next door to
uh today's uh Pearson Airport in Toronto and I know a lot of people uh even the
American even you know people who don't get up to Canada that much have probably
had an opportunity toh fly through Pearson and the AAL plant was there
until a few years ago but the big day for the AO Arrow uh was uh capping years
of design and and Fabrication the first one rolled out on the first Friday in
October 19 57 and uh unfortunately this kind of
uh set the table for what was ahead of the the arrow because some something
else happened that day with which I think a few people will remember and uh for the people who were at that event
what happened is is they had a great time at that event you can see uh people
from the Royal Canadian Air Force there was a lot of America uh USAF people
there too and uh some of the thousands of people who helped build the arrow and
and uh after this ceremony they all went home or they went off to a part party somewhere and switched on their radio
and heard that's Russia had launched Sputnik so
uh uh this uh served notice to the world
that the Soviet Union had an intercontinental ballistic missile which could deliver uh weapons anywhere now
the AAL Arrow could fly twice the twice as uh twice the speed of sound and had
uh really cutting edge capabilities it was one of the first aircraft that had fly by
wire uh capabilities and things like that but the problem was is that it was
built to defend against uh Soviet bombers coming to Canada and all of a
sudden bombers became the secondary threat uh icbms were on their way to
becoming the the primary um threat but anyway all that was ahead uh
and on that day when the arrow was rolled out but uh the the arrow began
its um its test flight program uh that uh it started its first
flight was in U March of 1959 and uh and five of them uh uh flew
uh dur during the following year and you can you can see uh the fifth one just uh
just accelerating it they're just uh beautiful uh uh beautiful aircraft and
and highly Advanced now they they had a single pilot but there was actually a
space behind the pilot uh for a navigator uh or fire control officer as
as it might be needed uh to sit um but there was only
one flight where they had a a passenger on board uh if you look under the 205 you see
what what looks to be like a hatch and there's actually uh a a changeable
payload base so you could put bombs in there if you wanted or or missiles or or
instrumentation or what have you uh the the arrow was was quite uh an amazing
aircraft but uh on February 20th of 1959 the prime minister of the day John Dean
Baker stood up uh and announced that the whole program was cancelled and so those those Five Arrows
uh were all torn up for scrap which of course is wildly
controversial and there was a sixth one at the at the uh the head of the
production line uh that was also scrapped although the front end of it
was actually saved and you can go and see it at the uh uh National Aviation
Museum in of Canada in in Ottawa now the uh the first five that
had flown actually uh used American Pratt wh Whitney engines and um One Flew
just under uh twice the speed of sound and the only reason they didn't go faster was because they were under
orders not to um the arrow was supposed to with a specially built uh Canadian
built engine called the iqua and the six one was to be the first one but unfortunately the
iqua uh never flew um just uh while while I'm on the
on the Arrow the uh AO Canada had become a giant firm in Canada and it built a an
aircraft called the cf101 which is used widely in Canada and some were used in in Belgium
um it was uh actually a subsonic uh Interceptor where the arrow
was a supersonic Interceptor but uh the cf101 was actually capable under certain
circumstances of flying faster than the speed of sound um and uh anyway it AO
became a very big thing but after the cancellation of the arrow basically the
the the firm uh fell apart and the the people who worked on it were scattered
to the Four Winds the first uh book I wrote uh 20 years ago now was called
arrows to the moon it's actually still in print from apigy press and it talks
about how the uh Arrow Arrow uh has an
important links to the US Space Program um the arrow was cancelled just
three or four months after NASA had been established in the United States in
October of 1958 and a few weeks later uh project Mercury was
started and uh um so this was the the
the first uh man or human space program in the United States these capsules that
would carry single astronauts so after the arrow was cancelled some of
the top people from NASA flew up to uh Toronto and hired uh
25 of Arrow's uh AO Canada's top engineers and eventually they they hired
a few more over the over the months that followed uh to to fill uh specific
skills some of these folks were Canadian some of them were British like this this
fellow here you see in the uh in this photo Pete Armitage who's still around
he was a an English engineer and he was put in charge of recovery systems and
this is a great picture of him with Gus Grom uh during some uh tests of the
recovery systems on the Mercury capsule the interesting thing is is that uh um
the AO people started work at NASA in April of
1959 the same week as the Mercury 7 astronauts so they actually uh were did
their employee induction you know it doesn't matter even if you're a high and mighty astronaut you have to go through
employee induction they all went through together Mercury was actually uh there
there weren't it was kind of a small program in a lot of ways and so everybody knew everybody there so all
these AO people became uh Pals with the astronauts because they were working
together a lot of the time now I can't go into great detail about what all
these these people did in the time I've got but uh uh I'll just go through some
of the highlights um first of all uh a lot of these uh uh the Avro people that
were hired were experts in kind of running test flight programs and and so they were put to
work helping to set up the uh the control setup for mercury and actually
this would later was used for the Mission Control Center that we know and love uh in Houston but the the first
center which you see in this slide was uh actually a cap Canaveral right next
uh you know not too far away from the from the the Launchpad and you notice if you look at
this thing you you only see one television screen there and that was uh that was where the flight director was
sitting uh when they moved to Houston everybody had a had uh had a had a
screen and um um but the the the setup for Mission
Control uh required required some some thinking you
know uh I interviewed Chris Craft the the the father of Mission Control while
uh working on this book and he said well some people just thought I should be sitting there I as the flight director
with a red button and a green button and you know red means uh stop or abort and
green means go but they actually uh had a number of positions you know for
example a booster uh uh person who was in charge of of the
U uh of the booster and somebody else in charge of recovery and the flight
surgeon the capsule community Communicator who is usually an astronaut but a special position uh an important
one is called Pho or or our flight Dynamics the person who is in charge of
knowing where the spacecraft was going and where it was going to go and the
first person was uh who had that position was a guy named Tech Roberts one of the Avo
people um now the head of the group now and and actually it wasn't kind of a there
wasn't a Canadian group in the same way the Germans had their group with wer Von brown but the highest ranking Canadian
who was hired by NASA was this fellow here named Jim Chamberlain who was uh
born in cam loops BC but raised in Toronto and he he had a high position at
AO he was the aerodynamicist designing the aircraft but he uh he uh was s after by NASA
because he had production experience and the folks who were building Mercury at Nasa with the contractor mcdonal
aircraft did not have production experience they had built experimental
craft but they were like oneoff things they needed somebody who knew how to how
manufacturers worked and and and all that so uh Jim Chamberlin his first job
was being uh the the the chief engineer on Mercury now he hated the design for
mercury and when uh uh because all the systems are kind of stacked on top of
each other so when they started to talking about longer flights and possibly flights with two astronauts and
doing various things like walking in space and docking with other spacecraft Chamberlain came up with a a whole new
design a for spacecraft called geminy now geminy kind of looks like Mercury on
the outside but it was quite different inside it was much easier to to
service um and uh and the astronauts who
flew uh various spacecraft loved geminy you know the Mercury was kind of the Model T of the Space Program uh geminy
was the sports car you know and Apollo was perhaps a bit more of an SUV so uh Chamberlain designed a geminy
now before geminy started to fly uh uh they they changed the director of the
program but he was the first manager for gy while he was working on gmany uh the
the US was uh or NASA was trying to decide by then they'd heard from
President Kennedy we want you to go to the moon in this in the decade of the 1960s and they had to decide how to go
were they going to go take one spacecraft and would take them to the moon and bring them back
or would they do other things like assemble a spacecraft in Earth orbit then go to the moon or uh would they do
something else called lunar orbit rendevu which involves kind of having a
couple of spacecraft uh uh a mother ship that would go into lunar orbit but not land
and a smaller ship that uh the lunar module as you know that's what they chose but at first uh they were very
very leery of this because uh when President Kennedy made a speech they had
15 minutes of flight experience you know up and down and now they're talking about Rend deing spacecraft on the other
side of the moon that was terrifying but Chamberlain was one of the first people uh who saw the sense in
that you you uh save a huge amount of weight uh which simplifies the the
launching and and a lot of other things but you still have that that rondevo
that makes everybody nervous he helped uh played a key role in persuading NASA
that that was the way to go to the Moon um and what he had done is actually uh
he came up with this idea of why don't we use gemin to go to the Moon uh have
attach it to a centaur rocket U uh which was still being built and use it to
boost it to the moon and then and then have a little uh what he called a bug attached to the geminy that would take
one astronaut down to the moon now he was told forget it that's way too dangerous but it got people thinking
about lunar orbit rendevu so so uh gemy was uh as I said before
was a very successful program and this was one of the highlights the first uh
Rondevu in space and we had docking in space uh with Armstrong and Scott on
geminy 8 the first space walks the most important thing is that it it gave the
uh us astronaut team real life experience in space flight and also the
controllers so uh uh and one of the first flight directors was uh was uh one
of the Avo people uh Chris Craft at the right there in kind of the the plaid
jacket there he was the father of Mission Control and he was the first flight director on a lot of the flights
uh sitting uh at his left there is Jean cran who we all know from Apollo
13 um uh you know failure is not an option and all the great things uh he
and his team did there and above uh Lonny or sorry uh cran is the fourth
flight director a fellow named Glenn lny who is actually quite involved in Apollo 13 to but the the uh the the uh handsome
fellow in the dark jacket was one of the Avo people and he was the second flight director uh and his name was John Hodge
he was one of the uh English people and uh he actually uh left the ranks of the
flight directors during uh Apollo early in Apollo but he was a flight director
in Mercury uh and geminy um and he was the flight director when
uh the United States had the first emergency in space in gmany 8 when uh the gmany 8 started spinning out of
control and uh they had to bring Armstrong and Scott back to Earth uh he
was the guy in the hot seat um and uh
and so he's quite an interesting character uh another person here uh
important uh person here is the guy closest to the spacecraft on the right Owen Maynard uh who is from sarna
Ontario just like somebody else from there I think his name was Chris Hadfield but uh Owen uh had very high
position in the Apollo program uh some people called him the the chief engineer
you can argue about that but anyway his job was kind of keeping the the this the
the all different parts of this spacecraft working together he was also
uh one of the first people at Nasa to get involved in designing the lunar
module but you can see here he's showing uh Prince Philip uh the Command Module
uh in uh and that was in 1966 so anyway people like that uh uh
played important roles in in Apollo 11 and uh and the the missions that
followed um uh some of the Avo people even were involved in things like the
shuttle actually Jim Chamberlain uh had uh had a role in in
the shuttle program and some of them were involved in the there was a couple of them who even hung around long enough
for the ISS um uh one of them Bruce head came back
to Canada and uh was involved in in uh in setting up uh the Canadian space
program and Brian herb actually had a full career at Nasa while he was down
there and then when he retired from NASA the CSA hired him and he was involved in
getting the uh the space station going so um anyway they uh they had uh they
had quite a long run uh working in the uh in the US space
program so I was only given a few minutes so that's kind of the once over lightly of the Avo people and the US
Space Program it's uh Chris it's it's uh information I think a lot of people
don't know and it was very fascinating so um you know uh it's um it's not
surprising to me though that Canada has had such a a great influence uh in the technology and um the success
of uh space flight you know so uh thanks for bringing that forward to us and uh I
hope to have you back on the program again uh so we can talk more about it we
are going to switch to Jenna uh who apparently has some live images right
now from the robotic telescope so uh Jenna do you want to you want to come back on to uh uh the program and share
what you have U on your screen absolutely so um for those of you who
didn't I don't know if I was ever introduced but I'll just quickly introduce myself yeah let's let's I I
please tell us more about yourself I don't I don't need a long introduction but just for context I'm the Outreach
coordinator at the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada so that's very important I get to host star parties as
well and I'm very relieved that I am not hosting this one thank you so much for doing all the work
I I think we found your next co-host just oh no what have I done yeah yeah um well I'm I'm here uh
with our robotic telescope I will uh just throw a caveat in immediately and say that our telescope is really set up
for deep Sky Imaging not planetary Imaging but we're going to use it for planetary Imaging anyway um so our scope
is in California um I'll bring up the photos we have so far I just have it framed on Jupiter and Saturn I we're
using like the the um H the darkest filter We have
basically so that we can take this photo and the shortest exposure time that we have so that we can take the photo so
I'll bring up a a quick photo of the planets uh as we see them right now in our nice clear skies while I do that
I'll just mention um the Outreach programs we've been doing with this telescope um I've we've got it set up so
that students um especially the ones uh in high school later in high
school can choose an exoplanet that they'd like to that they're interested in that they'd like to know more about
um have us send us essentially a data request form and then have us image it for
them follow the transit line and plot it themselves so that's what we've been using our scope for for the most part
for high school students and it's been a blast and we've had so many students um learning so much
about um just in general things like you never really get to do until you get to University so stuff like how to pull
data from an image instead of pulling it from usually the numbers that you get
from you know say some sort of testing equipment um so it's been a really a really fun program um actually uh Tara's
dad uh teaches astronomy at a cup School in Montreal and we've had several of his classes go through the program and they
absolutely love it um so here's our here's our little view really again not the best not the best uh camera for
seeing it but we can see Saturn and Jupiter right next to each other uh and if you Dim it all the way down you can
see uh not quite the cloud bands on the other on sometimes you can see the cloud bands of
Jupiter beautiful little bit of a view and what we've been doing I'll just uh I
believe can you show you can see the screen eh yes uhhuh okay let me now this telescope is is what kind of telescope
it's an rcos uh 16 inch f8.9
functional focal length of 3,550 millimeters wow okay and we have one of
the things that we've been doing since our since our telescope is not particularly well set up for um for the
for Imaging planet planets is we have a camera packed on the back of it we've been taking photos every day can you see my finder window here and then
subsequently the gift see we can see Jupiter and Saturn there yes okay so we've been taking photos every night
that's been clear and some nights that it hasn't been you'll see some of the clouds that we managed to shoot through
to to sort of watch the planets catch up to each other um so we'll be taking our last photo in this series in maybe maybe
10 minutes or so great okay okay it's been great F
thank you very much no problem I will I can take uh that photo quickly we can see if we can get a good shot of it with
the DSLR on the back um we're kind of still fighting the sunset a little bit
um but we are very thankful to even have views in California to be looking
looking at because I think almost everybody in Canada has been clouded tonight many people have I think all
right there's our the roof's starting to come in there's our little planets there and the RO you can see the roof creeping
in in the corner the roof of the observatory yeah got to cash it quickly yeah
fantastic now where in California is this this is in the up near sort of Just
Around Fresno aubery California and the at Sierra observatories oh they've been
fantastic to hosts to us um and we're in good company with telescopes from with JPL and all sorts of wonderful people we
know that very well um so we have we have a good time up there it's been the telescope was
originally P purchased as something to entertain all of us at rasque for the six months of the year that it's cloudy
here um and we're getting to the point where we're going to be able to open it up to members to use um and they'll be
able to be part of teams that get to choose targets and work together to do all the Imaging we originally had plans to um to use ACP the program that lets
you just tell it what you want and then it gives it all back to you um but upon learning how to do this just a
I am not an astronomer um and you wouldn't believe the amount of impostor syndrome I feel in my job I'm a marine
biologist uh so I the amount of Joy I've had learning how to do this stuff um
that's what I want to share with people I don't want them to just have be able to plug stuff in and get their information back I want them to be able
to learn how to do it um and and gain information from that that's actually the number one reason I was so excited
about our outreach program is because when I was planning it I had to learn how to to image exoplanets and their
transits uh and the day anyone who was in the office that day the day that I actually figured out how to plot the
information I just spent the whole day walking around with my laptop going look what I did do you see it do you see the graph do you see it I was so excited
yeah J could you let everyone know when you started with us because I I remember
in your early days uh watching you in Fascination learning how to use this
telescope on your own nobody had set up any manuals nobody had put a workflow
together you just pounded your way through it and selftaught so when did you start all of this I started at the
rasque two years ago and I started working on this project one year ago yeah and when when was the first time you looked through a telescope
I only I only purchased my own telescope in June yeah so um it's amazing from
Steve yes it's amazing how far Jenna's come in two years yeah she's doing a great job it's amazing sorry Jenna I I
had to point that out thanks and it's only because of the support that I've received from various different Ras
members and from staff and from volunteers uh that I've been able to to do this and so it's been an absolute
pleasure being part of Ras um and getting to learn from such knowledgeable
people um I I don't know what I would be doing if I wasn't here I absolutely love
working here fantastic fantastic thank you Jenna
thanks for having okay all right so uh we have another astrophotographer um uh with us and it's
Molly Wakeling uh Molly do you want to um having a couple of technical issues
um I keep having a backup away from the fence to keep it in view so I'm going to uh reenter again because I'm getting cut
off on my fence and I'll be back in a couple minutes okay all right I have the moon Scott okay I know
it's not as exciting as the conjunction but it's something though let me do a screen share so you
guys can see it in uh glorious high
resolution so there it is beautiful Let's uh do a 100% zoom on this thing
just so you can we can Dart around on
it so yeah it looks pretty good
right seeings a bit wobbly little bit are you looking over
the roof of your house no um it's almost like above me right now the moon so it
can't be any better position right now right um hope I can show you guys this
but I just captured a couple of things real
quickly see if it's this one
here ah it does need to be processed I did actually get quite a lot of the moons to show up on this if I can mess
around with this is there any way to control this
thing processing
ah yeah this is obviously unprocessed but um this just shows how crazy the
conjunction actually is and then you can see all the different moons around Jupiter and Saturn and I think one of
those is a star actually so hopefully you guys can kind of see it yeah so you've got one I don't see any moons
around Saturn but I see oh no there's I do see two um it's kind of dim let me
see if I can bump this up a little bit more on
this I mean they're very very small yes so there's one right here if you can see
my mouse ccon there's one right here okay I believe this this is one as well this should be a
star uh I have no idea what this is yet so I haven't actually done a plate solve or checked anything yet to see what any
of these things are but we've got all four of the Galilean moons it's a shame cuz I was hoping to see some of the
other moons and you to the Lesser known ones uh sometimes when you do exposures for two seconds 3 seconds or something
like that they do show up so yeah
wonderful thanks Simon no problem no problem good Simon any now an aliens
going to come flying past yeah
[Music] I apologize if you guys could hear me typing I forgot that I had that's no
problem M you were typing very quietly I could
tell I was typing a message to Jenna actually oh so how long have you been
awake now for Scott um well I've taken little catnaps uh uh
a couple of them I meant to get like three of them in but I I wasn't able to get the third one in so but I've been
working since uh got him I work basically is what happened so all right
let me get let me screen share so we can go back to Molly
yes uh okay so um I have an 8 inch SCH C
grain that I've got in the picture on on the screen there uh set up on my altaz mount just um I I couldn't it's blocked
by the tree from from the mount I usually have it set up on so I uh I set
it up on this one I on the other side of my yard um I keep having to move it back though so I don't hit the fence um but
let me m around with the exposures a bit here to oh because there there's such a brightness difference between the two of
them that in order to see uh in order to see both of them I
have to do a bright like over exp Jupiter so that I can see Saturn so let me find a nice exposure so we can see uh
sat a little bit of detail on Saturn here and this is a a monochrome camera
that's on here so why it's not a a nice color image and um I will zoom in a
little bit here
see go centered nice
[Music] stream look how close they are and you can uh see a couple of
Jupiter's moons there if I bump up the [Music] exposure um let me just actually up the
exposure
instead see a few more of them there got one two three number four
see further out I haven't looked at my planetarian out to see where the uh
moons are right now um but yeah so you just had to like physically drag the
telescope back away from the fence or um sorry can you say that again I
said did you physically grab your telescope and move it away from the fence so that you can clear it um yeah so my fence is very high so I
keep having to to back up away from it um but if I if I um I'm going to
eventually like my tree is going to start blocking it uh if I back up too far good job it's a delicate
dance yep Richard ligh Hill says a whole new meaning to drag and
drop that's cool very much so and Dave Chapman uh is commenting to us uh from
inside our chat and says ganam is in transit at the moment
um I'm I'm afraid my internet connection is a little bit unstable out here I'm having trouble hearing
you yeah we can hear you fine uh okay yeah we're I'm losing Saturn behind the
or yeah Saturn behind the fence now I'm going to have to back up again the the curse of having an 8 inch telescope is
that while the finder scope is several degrees above the fence line um the
aperture of the telescope is being blocked by the fence because the aperture is so enormous so uh yeah I'll
have to back up again to just last C but maybe trim a few more tree branches I did bring my tree branch loppers out
here just in [Laughter] case very cool all right that's what I
got okay all right so um we are uh
looking for um we have a someone that's just joined us as well uh John Schwarz
who uh and and uh his friend Mike um are
uh joining us also from California uh not sure John are you are you uh able
to hook up here and share your screen yeah we're on baby we're on and I got to tell you something this 6 inch that you
hooked me up with is the sharpest telescope I own I love it Scotty thank you so much
man great I want everybody to remember something remember Pluto we must not
forget she was one of our planets see [Laughter]
that Pluto's still a planet in my mind but we uh we've been really working
hard on this I want to show you the scope um real quick that's it right
there we'll show you can what are you guys looking at are you looking at the
that's you John okay can can you show yeah we can see the telescope this is a
gosh dude it's my surgical instrument my friend great and we also see the image
of Jupiter and Saturn that you're taking with it looks very nice very sharp we are live and I had to really tweak the
settings uh uh to get the banding to get the banding and sat the moons aren't going to show because the image will be
blown out great uh so John give us a quick
introduction to yourself uh I've known you for a long time but uh this is the first time for you to be on the global
Star Party um and I have to get my ducks in a row because most of the people on
there are so amazing everybody every one of you I want to tell you you have given me so much strength through this year in
covid and Mike and I have been working working real hard to see your face oh okay just sorry
we're practicing um you know protocol because we don't want to get covid but um yeah everybody's really
been great um on the stuff you've shown and all the beautiful poems and just
every even Norm fulman with the music I almost teared up one night but this is
really uh very special to be a part of yeah and um to get the image I'm getting
it just is a testament to explore scientific what a great instrument they have made because I've tried like
different Scopes and I couldn't get this and um I mean the seeing is not that
good but you can see how good those rings are resolving yeah and um you know
I want to also say thank you uh Woodland Hills Camera they've been very helpful
for me I'll tell Daniel that yeah Simon I was throwing that your way
too I don't know if you've met me yet but um well of course I've met you yeah
like how many times have I seen you at the store well pretty many but uh yeah this is amazing I mean
it's um Saturn is 455 million miles from
Jupiter and it's uh as you all know it's extremely hard to resolve both to get
banding and some detail on Saturn yeah yes but uh I've been lessed with this um
6 inch that I got from Scott which six inch is it that you got
John this is a special 6 inch oh here we go got carbon fiber that was Maurice he
he just left no um the carbon fiber triplet um with a 3-in feather
touch and uh it's just an amazing my Sur IAL scope for the best
Imaging for planets in uh the Moon and the Sun for sure I haven't really got to
the to the deep space yet um but we're planning on it I gotta I gotta say this uh John does
it have Platinum compression rings I want to tell you do not insult me like
this these are gold compression brass
it is a a beautiful instrument I mean to tell you and I I went with the all black
attire tonight on Los M yeah I want to get the um PMC
eventually um but uh this is a very nice telescope in my collection yeah thank
you very much how many Scopes do you have John um well I'm up to 20 I think and 20
I'm trying to get some more well it's uh it's going to be used for
you know educating and and doing public work as you know which I love to do yes
and um you know with the The Way co is now uh this is a whole new platform I
think it is tough to learn I mean we've been like struggling you would laugh if
you had a time lapse of us I I bashed my head on the scope because I was down low
trying to look and then I stood up too quick and and we got wires everywhere and anything and anything couldn't have
happened I mean it was we almost couldn't get it up and we did it man we just barely made
it last minute yeah but uh yeah it's
amazing um actually a big success John so you did you did great decent seeing
right yeah yeah I mean look at that Saturn last couple nights it's been terrible yeah I you guys have not met
John Schwarz before I mean he is uh he is so full of enthusiasm and just loves
to uh share the night sky with other people um he was uh he he brought on his
game at the Starlight Festival that we held a number of years back and showed I
don't know a couple of thousand people uh awesome views through his telescope and uh it was a lot of fun so I've
always really admired what John uh has done and what he brings to uh you know
the community of Outreach um you know enthusiasts and so John represents some
of the best of those people that's great man thank you yeah we are we are really
enjoying this and um uh can I show you another picture I took sure of course
real quick and and this is a tribute you know I also want to say if if we're around the world and um you know we've
just been connected together and and we're all connected to the univers and everything out there we're a part of
and it's so wonderful to share these to the world it doesn't matter who or what or where we are all the same and we all
came from there and we all have that connection and as Scott would always say
when you're down just keep looking up and it's true I I have been so grateful
and thankful when I just look up because the heavens are just glorious the creat
that God has given us to look at and um when you see those in their Splendor with these instruments and especially
the astrophotographers what they're bringing out of this stuff I mean we are in a great time and um we have a lot of
great instrumentation Scott you've done so much good stuff for so many people
and and your products and uh your customer service parone no better I mean
oh thanks very much it's really great I want to tell you about this picture um
so I did a little tribute to America this year with my Christmas lights are they seeing the flag and uh can you guys
see it it's a blown out flag that I had to that was done with my cell phone no
we still we'll still see the shot of uh Jupiter and sat all right let me show you this one
um so you see that there yeah so there is the conjunction with my cell phone oh
yeah over there with I was watching your last show a few back with one of your fellows who was doing the cell phone
work and he was amazing man and uh yeah so I've given it a little bit of a shot
and it can be done it's just a miracle but um you know we live in a great place
and uh it's a great time to be here and uh experience gosh can you imagine if uh
some of the old guys like Isaac Newton had one of our telescopes today or oh my goodness
right they would be like loving it extremely but um so yeah I thought I'd
show you this one because it was just a a tribute you know to to America because
it's a tough time here and I know as around the world it's it's very hard
hard times here but we'll get through it just got to keep looking
up yep well thank you very much John that's awesome miss you did it I
couldn't have done it without Mike um Mike is my network guy he's uh man you
Mike Garrett you would have laughed if you seen us and and I know Simon you can relate uh you know how these things get
you when you when you're trying to get stuff up and running it just boy I'll tell you whatever can go wrong will go
wrong yeah visual sometimes I almost just said I want to be visual but we can't bring it unless you do this so I
think a lot of the times for me it's uh it's the wires are always too long too short and I'm forever tying myself up
yeah all right much respect to you you know uh for what you do and and and it's
you know it's amazing it it's a learning curve for sure but the rewards are far
greater you know especially with light pollution and it's just amazing that we can even do this from here
so in December in December that's right well John will you on again so that's
great I appreciate yeah I can't wait to do the uh get my deep space game on yeah
and uh Simon will you tell Daniel that he is in trouble after this night after
he sees the images that he doesn't do any Imaging he's he's
strictly visual only oh yeah he did a little bit at the Starlight he was um
had some nice images of uh sombrero and 51 a few other things with his
Takahashi yep okay folks all right well my pleasure I am grateful to have had
this opportunity and and I wish you all the best and um during these times and I
pray for your families and that you're all safe thanks very much thanks you got you
have a great Christmas you Mike 21's coming not not the year telescopes um
oh should be an explored scientific 21
inch all right so Steve um uh who who do we have coming up next here uh thanks
Scott so I'd like to introduce Gary Crawford Gary are you
there hi Gary hi yeah here Gary uh was a professor the University of Toronto um
in the archaeology department is that that right yeah anthropology yeah anthropology I'm sorry anthropology no
no um and Gary had given a talk to our Center uh a few weeks ago um
unfortunately I I missed it so being selfish I I uh I I made sure
that Gary was on the list for tonight so that I could I could um I could see the talk all right Gary I'm gonna I'm gonna
hand it to you okay I'm gonna share my screen now
um let's see which one will I okay I'll do that
one so hopefully you are seeing whoops I'm G to start at the beginning
um there we are by the way I I love this subject archaeoastronomy and okay uh so this is
going to be a real Joy well maybe we'll uh spend a little more time than I expected so uh so I really want to thank
um Steve and Scott and Jenna for organizing this uh it's been I've really
been looking forward to it and it's been amazing hearing everyone speak and all the rest it's been fabulous and um
hopefully I can add to this um so the
um the world of arch astronomy is a fascinating one and I I guess just a little bit about myself I've actually
been interested in astronomy for a long time this is my High School uh my high
school um telescope along with our family pet in the snow and this is back
probably around 1967 uh that dates me uh for sure but um
I even uh with my father's help built built a pedestal for this telescope back
then and um you can see him taking a look at the sun we've got the sun's image looking at Sun spots reflected on
a on a plate in the back and then as an undergraduate I studied astronomy a bit
at University of Toronto so I got a buddy of mine back then take this photograph which I haven't shown anyone
until around now so now I've got a reason to show it and this is my setup uh Thursday and Friday night taking a
look at um at the conjunction and you can see that I'm shooting in the daylight and through some clouds but it
was really incredible to to get something I mean this is about the third
planetary shot that I've ever done but um the bottom line shows Jupiter and
Saturn just getting into the frame on Thursday and then on Friday evening a
little bit easier to get them in the frame and then I switch cameras to a high-speed camera to get um Jupiter and
Saturn just sort of a little bit in better resolution but yeah it's kind of fun really enjoying it and um and I've
only been into the astrophotography gig for less than a year now and uh and
really got going this with on this with Steve's house good job fabulous just
having a lot of fun gotta tell you I retired specifically to get into astrophotography truth be told so there
you go but um that that's probably the one of the best reasons I've heard to
retire I think Gary I'm going to follow your lead and do the same thing in a month there you go do it now you have my
BL well no you don't have my blessing cuz who would I go to at least locally anyway but um but
you know the the thing about Astron about anthropology and particularly the archaeology branch of it is that you can
you can study just about any subdiscipline within the field you can study so my my main expertise is
actually ecology and botany within um within archaeology so I study things
like the origins of Agriculture and human ecology in Japan and China and Easter North America but wherever I go
the stars are with me and i' I've heard other people say that tonight that you know the stars are constant they're
there for us and uh and um they're Faithful Friends and uh but um so people
who are interested in archaeology or history as well as astronomy have a have
a subfield here that they might tackle and uh and it's not often that you find
an archaeologist with expertise and a strong omy but um the more I talk about
astronomy astronomy with my colleagues the more I discover that my colleagues are are quite interested in our in in
astronomy and the the Common Thread is time we're we're we're all interested in
in time as well as space and and and so this helps pull everything together and
so if someone is interested in pursuing this there's a recent book out by um Julio magley
called Arch astronomy of all things and I just refer people to that book if you want to learn something more about that
in detail and there's actually a center for archaeoastronomy that you can find on the web and I just wanted to point
out that out to you um so I mean the big question that we're all we all think
about in this field is is why why are people throughout time kind of encoding
astronomical information in their art and architecture their belief system systems and so on and that's kind of the
overriding question to think about here um and and I know several people
referred to the thousands and thousands of years of experience and of humanity in in um learning about the skies and I
want to sort of take us through in a in a in 10 15 minutes uh sort of a brief
story about how that appears to have unfolded and um but when you but to put
it in perspective you think about it throughout most of of Humanity's
history we have spent half our lives our ancestors spent half their lives under
nonl polluted skies I mean think about that I I just it it was phenomenal so
the the skies were had to have been such an integral part of everyone's life and
I just sort of want to put that there so I put this out there and um and it's
sort of Steve actually alluded to this a little bit earlier but uh the way I'd like to sort of organize this just with
a few examples is is to show that when when our populations were really low and
we were hunting and Gathering we needed to kind of be in the right place at the right time so we knew when the fish
would be spawning when we could when we could fish for them when plants could be harvested when the sap would be running
and so on but but there wasn't really a need for people to know that it was going to be a per a specific day that
they'd have to get out there sort of a general idea that um we better start storing food because Winter's coming
kind of thing and um but but you also had to navigate you had to communicate
with your distant with relatives across the landscape you had your um your
groups that you'd be trading with for for goods that you didn't have for example and so the kinds of things that
people would would need to know would be sort of basic asterisms and lunar and S
solar Cycles as we heard um Kathy talk about in terms of of telling time by the
moon and also the solar Cycles so there's a lot going on and as and as um
Society became more complex populations Rose people developed agriculture you
had to have a little bit more specific information about timing for planting and harvesting avoiding Frost like I say
here and and you still need to navigate and communicate in trade so you still have to have some fundamental knowledge
but what we begin to see is you you start to get Specialists like sun priests and shamans who who knew about
these timings who had the knowledge they kept the knowledge they would set the dates for the community for rituals and
so forth and and make sure that uh the rituals unfolded in the way that they
should and then as we get political hierarchy and more centralized political
organizations that's where more detailed astronomical knowledge becomes kind of important and so no matter what we might
think about astrology and and I know that uh we've all been told that it's
fabulous to have such an interest in astrology right where where's no no no it's astronomy how many times you know
do we hear that it's like as an archaeologist um whenever I tell people I'm an archaeologist I usually people
tell me oh yeah I'm really interested in dinosaurs too but uh I'm interested in
people and and the relationship to to this kind of knowledge so so that's sort of the background of of how it comes so
astrology was kind of a a crossing point where where detailed information about
the Stars the planets and their movement with respect to the Zodiac became kind of crucial in terms
of understanding human relationships and even making certain day-to-day decision decisions about what you were going to
do and um and so there you go but the the archaeoastronomy as a field isn't
that old it would really goes back to the 1960s when Gerald Hawkins um
hypothesized that Stonehenge was a computer and he did this incredibly detailed analysis and this is a diagram
from one of his Publications where he got a lot of the alignments right and so
what he was really telling us that archeoastronomy is primarily reverse
engineering you you have to look at these structures and then try to reverse engineer what might have been going on
and but part of the problem you have to be careful with is that if you have enough
Stones you can make all sorts of alignments out of them but which ones
are real which ones have some kind of meaning and that's where where the where the skill comes in and we're actually
partnering with with um with people who have that knowledge is crucial it be it
a professional astronomer an archaeologist who knows the archaeology or indigenous people who have this
knowledge of of the past unfortunately we can't go to Stonehenge and talk to the people who built it and that's where
reverse engineering becomes really important but although Hawkins pioneered
this it was is a really great effort but it really hasn't withstood the test of time I mean he had people he had people
moving stones and circles in particular holes and when they when they would when Stones over a particular cycle would
land in certain holes and that would predict an eclipse or something um and
and it just it was just too much and and the details of the hypothesis really haven't held water but but the
fundamentals still do hold water so they are basic alignments like Sumer csis
Sunrise which we heard about um earlier from Steve and then there are other
alignments too and you can even go for for example in um in some software you
can actually replay certain events and this is the winter salsa Sunset that has
a particular alignment and it's beginning to look like Stonehenge wasn't wasn't really a computer but it was a it
was part of a huge landscape of of um of of of interaction with the spiritual
world the skies communities across Europe to some extent and there was even
a recent model that came out that that looked has looked at the Acoustics of this place almost in in the way a
cathedral would have a very specific acoustic and so you know here's a view
of the sumers sols the sunrise in a particular angle so clearly the skies were part of this but it wasn't the way
that uh that Hawkins thought it was but there's some weird things that go on too and I'm I'm sure we've all
heard stories about Ancient Aliens and so forth and the data can really be misused and here's here's just a
classic example of misuse of this data from toan in Mexico and near Mexico City
for example um you may have heard of Von donak of
course people My Generation certainly knew the know the name I mean the guy published countless books on on that
that are really in The Fringe but people love this stuff but one of the stories
that he tells is that the people at teot aan were taught about the planets by
Ancient Aliens and they encoded the knowledge in the layout of of temples
and and and important buildings at teoton and they draw nice circles not
ellipses so I guess I guess they didn't really pass on all the correct information to the people at toot toon
but and they claim even that they were able they even knew about Pluto and uh and of course but the there no there are
no writings in teoton about these connections or anything but but here's
the mistake they made I mean they they start with a conclusion and then they
they look for evidence that supports their conclusion rather than doing it the other way around so if you take a
the archaeologist map of Tean and those red buildings are all the significant
temples and um and significant buildings and then if we kind of line it up the
way the map is lined up um you could draw any number of circles through the
site centered on on this particular um structure in the bottom and you'd get
all kinds of alignments and so you get these kind of Just So Stories that um
just don't cut it but the public um the public eats it up and uh we just need to
be more vocal but but we can go back in time and so one of the oldest um uh Stone circles
that has some kind of astronomical significant that we've really been able to qualify is found um here in Egypt in
southern Egypt at a site called naapa and these Stones appeared out of a out
of an ancient dried Lake Bed and there are some interesting alignments so they
do get north south aligned and and not only that but here you
have the summer solstice Sunrise again and it's set up just like we see at new
Grange and other places um but there's nothing more here so this is a sacred
space that's tied to the skies and tied to some very specific
directions and and the other thing you need to keep in mind is that um on June
21st at about 12:30 or 12:40 the sun is right at the Zenith and of
course the important thing about that event is that those stones then are not casting
shadows and that's meant marks an important event the onset of the rainy
season so it's all very likely that people are working on the timing and they're trying to figure out when the
rainy season is going to begin so that life is renewed and it's tied to these
these Cycles and I won't need to say much more about new Grange because Steve's already introduced it to us he's given us a
really great uh introduction to new gra but what about other places we can go to
um we can go to Malta for example and there's a there's a tomb structure there
that has exactly the same alignment and I don't think it's that these people
were talking to each other but it's just that these events were recognized as
significant to people probably a lot longer than we see from the architecture
so probably longer in the P longer ago in the past than than than 5,000 years
or 7,000 years it's just that's when we begin to see these markers but you might be familiar with
um a set of caves in France and Spain that are just rich with with art and
these date anywhere from 177,000 to 30,000 years ago they're they're amazing
so one of these caves Lasco is kind of phenomenal because if
you look at this at the at the lineup so I've overlaid this drawing on top of this this Hillside to show what's
underneath those trees what you see is are the cave passages and these are the passages that
have all the cave art on them there's one kind of cool thing about last
go if you look at these directions and if you look at this oh well
boom they don't get it quite right in a sense that they are actually seeing the
Sumer Solstice sun set and the light then passes down this
chamber and it must have been just such an extraordinary thing to see on this day
that the that the the skies were were the skies lit up these paintings and and
inside this cave and and how would they know this it's likely that they were using a
horizon calendar and you can see that you can Mark certain places on the mountains on the hillsides on certain
dates and when the Sun hits certain spots on the horizon you can then figure
out when this event is going to soon occur and it's not it's not for rocket
science sorry sorry say that but then we could go across to the new
world into into New Mexico and chako Canyon is this extraordinary area uh of
indigenous American Life dating to around 8:30 ad to 1150 and if we go back
in there I mean it's a fairly you know it's not not an exactly Rich area but to
them it was it had richness this is probably the largest single building in indigenous
North America this is this is a single building with um with a great deal of
significant ritual significance with these circular keas and so forth this major wall along here is within a degree
or so of being East West wow and then there's a North South
Road that is a spiritual pathway that that ignores Cliffs it ignores
everything it just goes up and down Cliffs and rough territory to keep that trajectory so so these have incredibly
specific meanings and there were and we we begin to see that the elite here um
included Specialists like Shaman priests who who are specialists in keeping the
calendar and there are well-known and documented Horizon calendars down in the
southwest and this is one that's been recorded that shows where the sun sets on particular
dates and not only that but the structures were built I'm not sure if
you'll get the audio on this but it may not matter particularly but um maybe if
I maybe you'll hear my audio um uh if I'm not sure if you'll hear my audio you
may pick up my audio I'll put my microphone near the screen just in
case but
um no I don't know if you hear that or not but just a little bit but but what
you're saying
is essentially a
theater check that
out so that's the sumers solsa sunrise going through a window the light going through a window and falling on a cubby
on the other side of the wall and this is all part of of of understanding trying to understand the relationship
between the spiritual world and and the the landscape of the living and then a
while back um there was the discovery of of a spiral calendar in a sense Behind
These slabs of stone at um not far if I had a but near the chako site and
essentially what is it's a spiral that marks particular calendrical dates so
they would have marked the Cal these they would have marked these spots during those days and then drawn the
spiral afterwards but the but the um and so here's a Time laap showing the Sun
moving across and when it hits the center that's the summer solstice this dagger goes through the summer solstice
wow the center there you go and um and when you think about that think of the
drama that that you would that that this would entail but it likely was only the
Specialists that came in to see this and so you get animations um on different
sites so it's really incredible so here's another animation showing how this how look at that and um right oh
that's amazing isn't that incredible and and you're not it's not particularly precise because of the speed of the of
the light changing it gets very very slow at certain points but but at least there
there's drama there's a connection between the skies and rock and people and
spirituality it's it's incredible and of course one of the most dramatic connections between so that that
structure was a natural structure that people took advantage of but here's one that was built to take advantage of of a
particular of a particular event and to show a connection with the spiritual
world too so if we we go to chich chinita at the E spring equinox
Sunset there you go there's the sunset okay it's precisely in the west precisely in the west and then if you
look at this angle so here's the sun setting in the in the west and this is the Temple of kukul Khan at
chichin many of youve probably even been there but take a look at this so the light is going to interact with the
corner of this pyramid and then there's going to be shadows falling on that staircase that
goes down the face of that right there so there's that so they've they've so
architecture The Architects the engineers who built this were no
slouches these Architects had astronomical knowledge so take a look at
this time lapse the serpent k a quaddle is Slithering down the pyramid and then
it goes down a road theoretically into to this cot where they were making
sacrifices and so forth so wow it's incredible I mean this isn't about Ancient Aliens or gaining sophisticated
knowledge these were people who learned this stuff on their own and um and had
Specialists and people who were incredibly sophisticated in their knowledge and relationship to
architecture and then we heard about kokia earlier and um just want to show you something specific about Cahokia as
you said this is this is the largest urban center North of the Rio Grand this is this is a huge site and a lot of
people even living in a St Louis area don't know about it because it's in East St Louis in part and um and uh I
remember the first time I went out here it was I felt like I was what am I doing here there was a there was a huge liquor
store with barred up Windows and all of that and then you get you get out to the site but it's it's incredible if you're
ever in the St Louis area and haven't been to cohoke you you have to go there
and um and so there's a wood henge at Cahokia and um it's not clear exactly
what the woodhenge was built to do but there are certainly certain alignments
with the summer solsa Sunrise with Equinox sunrises and so for you know
winter um anyway there there there are you can go to this Kia
ms.org website and you can see what's going on in the left hand image you get a sense this is a real urban center and
these are not these are kind of similar to the Mayan temples but these are
essentially residential um areas where the the the the family the kin group the
chieftain who who were essentially in Authority um ruled they were a spiritual
group they were um and um and their power was really in in Serv ofice
Theocratic rule but um but they other than that um
it was I me this is just an extraordinary site estimates of population are anywhere from 20 to 40
50,000 people but they've reconstructed this woodhenge there and what is it that
they're trying to do are they are they are they doing a particular analysis is
it secular um likely not um however how old how old I mean what does this Dat
Back to well it dates back to about 800 uh 900 ad it begins now it it's
essentially a a continuation of a culture called Hopewell who seem to have
there seem to um I don't want to get too much detailed but there was some illusion to this earlier there was an
astronomical event I was I forget when it was 800 900 ad and the the the people
sort of got up and moved and and kok was set up with a particular set of measurements and a particular alignments
and it was so it was planned this is not sort of an ad hoc construction this was
this was um this was built to measure and one of the curious things is the
alignment so it's precisely on a north south east west axis and there's there's
the um there's the wood henge but but when you look at at the summer C the
Sunrise it's like what's going on here okay so they could see it it but it
doesn't seem to interact with the other structures but what you do see here is in is is something happening that's
auspicious here during an equinox sunrise
here and what it is is this and they've done a a a quick time lapse of this and
what you see is the sunrising on the face the entrance the
sort of the the staircase up to this Temple Mound and these are all earn
Mounds not not made out of stone and so again what we're seeing in a sense is a
type of theater it's a demonstration that that the world is is unfolding as
it should and that if you conduct certain rituals you you may likely be influencing the fact that the world will
continue in a in a in a way and that life will will Blossom again and so forth so it's
intriguing and then just as a f final example or two if we go to Egypt which
how can we talk about archaeoastronomy without visiting Egypt but there's a fringe theory about
the role of Orion in the design of of the pyramids and their layout and that
they fit Orion's Belt and therefore there are these connections with aliens and you know if you don't really know
what's going on it's it's aliens right so so the idea here is that um there's
ayan's belt and we were all aware that the the the stars of the belt don't form a precisely straight line and nor do the
the peaks of these pyramids and so the Fringe has made a lot out of this but
what they miss of course and there's an overlay of of the
Stars they're not quite right but you can flip them and they will they'll line up okay um they go they're kind of
reverse and looking to the north but what The Fringe people Miss is that the
corners these these these corners of the pyramids are precisely lined up and the
only reason this third pyramid is smaller than the others is simply because of the geological situation and
the opportunity to build a bigger pyramid simply wasn't didn't present itself so it just didn't didn't happen
so they're perfectly aligned and so the argument that oh we have to there's something auspicious about the lack of
alignment is is wrong because they are perfectly aligned and um but again we can come back to
this sort of the idea the the the Astron the the skies and the landscape and the
spiritual world are all integrated when we think about the culture of the time
rather than imposing a culture on them you have to contextualize in terms of
this culture and so kufu was the pharaoh who had had these pyramids built and and
in a sense The Horizon so for sunset set and sunrise The Horizon was symbolic of
of resurrection and death death and Resurrection death and Resurrection coming and going and coming and going
repeating and so kufu of course was going to die and the pyramids related
were related to him his death and afterlife but the relationship to this
is that um is that um when you look at this territory and where the pyramid are
up here in relationship to the Nile and where travel was taking place this is
the major highway for the torontonians you know what I mean when I say this was the 401 of of of Egypt at the time I
mean this is where you how you traveled and when kufu was traveling here he
could actually see his Horizon he could see these pyramids rising from the horizon
symbolizing this resurrection and this is and so that's probably in all
likelyhood what's going on here so those pyramids being sort of offset in the particular direction they were all lined
up on in this on their Southeast Corner was partly about making them visible to
kufu from the Nile so that they would kind of Rise Up from the Horizon as
you're going down the Nile to see them so so that's that's what archaeologists
think is really going on here and then finally we can get to astrology and um I
managed to get to jur a few years ago and see this Observatory complex there
are 19 observing tools here that were built over a period of time and they get
larger and larger in order to become more and more accurate and it wasn't about secular astronomy and learning for
the sake of learning and explaining the universe it was in order to make astrology far more precise this is my
understanding from the literature I'm not an expert on this but my understanding from the literature is that this was about being able to make
predictions about or or be to be able to observe precise locations of stars and
planets at the time of of your birth so that decisions about marriage and other
things in your life could be made with precision and so we see that that that
um observational astronomy has has roots in in this type of of observation and
this is all now coming to fruition in in a state Level Society so in a very
complex kind of kind of situation so that's my story it's about
contextualizing all of this this this knowledge and understanding the cultures in which this knowledge is is being
created and and um how it's being handed down as another issue but um but there's
my introduction wow Gary that was awesome uh there was um uh some comments
here um uh Norm Hughes uh was commenting
that um he used to work at Carl's bag taverns and he said okay on the summer
solsis and winter solstice they would get a shaft of light as the sun set in the west directly into the cave so I
don't know if that was um I mean I'm sure there's some you know natural many
natural U uh things that uh would be uh conducive for that kind of uh alignment
and uh maybe that also inspired um you know building things you know seeing
seeing some of these things happen I I think that's a that that's I think that's a good point I think we're seeing
um points of inspiration of Revelation in a sense yes right and that we have
inherited in a sense this the the knowledge based on these Revelations and what it must have meant to people in
those days you know just incredible oh yeah and and and these caves in France
and Spain I mean in particular in the dordoy region of France are and not all of them of course are
lined up as you point out there has to be some kind of natural alignment because they're not people didn't build
these caves right but stat statistically there are a number of these caves that are lined up with these with these
seasonal sunsets particular on the solstice and these particular caves have
carvings have that indicate the season for example uh spawning salmon carved in
the entrance and and so forth that that show that people understood that there was some relationship between these
caves which at least in certain cultures are are thought of as being link links
to the underworld and the world doesn't necessarily have to mean hell as it
might in say the judeo-christian tradition it can mean the source of of
the origins of of of life it's the origin it's where Spirits dwell it's the origins of of humanity in a sense and
and so um it has different meanings and to different people yes right uh book
Davies made a comment he says I wonder about the British hold dolmans I wonder
if they have some kind of alignment or if they face Any Which Way yeah I haven't been there and not much
information on them there's i' I've read one or two papers about this and it's a
bit controversial but in fact there has been a statistical study that um that
that actually shows that the dolmans are statistically kind of laid out in such a
direction in such a a a way that that they are a um kind of a platform for the
passage of the Moon so that that there is a the one hypothesis out there is that it actually
encodes the 18.6y year lunar cycle which most archaeoastronomers say
has never been documented um archaeologically but there is this one paper out there that that
says that these so the the dolans there's a a flat stone that's horizontal that is then flanked on
either side by vertical Stones kind of locking it in place and so the these flat stones are thought to to line up so
if they're kind of lined up East West looking depending on where you're standing they're looking towards the
Zodiac and the moon the path of the Moon and so um the thought was that um that
there is somehow this 18.6 year cycle encoded in it but um please don't ask me
to explain that okay well another comment here from uh
uh person uh goes by ashes a a lot of religions and communities incorporate
the moon and stars the Islamic calendar is based on the lunar cycle which is
beautiful um so anyways I think that you got a lot
of people thinking here uh very very interesting that's great thank you so
much thank you for bringing that on my pleasure and thank you for inviting me to to speak yeah it's really nice
excellent thank you Gary you're welcome thank you well Bob
Bob and Terry I think that uh we're down to uh to the two of you um
uh I I'd like to uh get your impressions on what you thought the night was like
and you know you you've attended several of these events Bob so yep um how do you
how did you think it went it was great I really enjoyed it I would not have left early under any circumstances I have a
couple things to show okay one is there is an astronomer locally here uh named
Tom pus you probably or may or may not have heard of him um he's quite clever
and he always does things that are out of the box so I wanted to show his
picture of the conjunction uh share screen if you don't
mind um let's see how's this one maybe this is the one I want to show
okay how does that look can you see this oh yeah wow look at that it is
unbelievable yeah um you can see moons and the bands of Saturn and I mean the
Rings and the bands and the bands and Jupiter and everything and he just took that a little while ago uh well you know
when it was good here uh I thought this was outstanding that outstanding it's
great a really really nice job okay so then there's one other thing I want to show you which you may find interesting
while I was on this um Stevie who for the rest of you is my wife and my
business partner as well in DC3 dreams um she went out to look at the uh let me
make this bigger just a sec let me expand this so it's possibly easier to see
okay now can this be shared like this what do you see now do you see just
this uh Facebook post okay so there is the
link I sent her to our program this evening um 3:45 for several hours and
then at 600 she went out and went down the street with our Canon Image stabilized binoculars and here was her
reaction I see it blah BL you know so she was very happy to have seen the conjunction
that way while I was sitting in here attending this uh party so that was a
cool event also um I love this uh I I again I want
to thank you very much for inviting me to attend really do appreciate it we
always enjoy having you on these are great yep so always have bring a uh uh
you know stimulating intellectual um well I don't know about that angle to
this so you know and and I do I I I really appreciate your uh uh opinions
and um your insight into these things so thanks for thanks for being a part of it
I loved every bit of it and um I'm for those of you who don't know me I'm a technologist and not an astronomer so
Scott has in here and I'm not quite sure why but I love attending and uh we need the technology here in ours I am a
technologist an engineer and not an astronomer I build the race cars and give them to the drivers to go out and
win races that's my life so that's awesome Bob thank you for your
contributions it's great all right great and uh and then we still have uh Terry
man and Carol ore here from the astronomical League um and Robin uh for
from the uh uh Royal Astronomical Society of Canada um I think I'm seeing
like an alignment of three uh uh Celestial U uh uh you know uh entities
here that will uh may do some amazing stuff here in the near future so what do you guys
think sound like a hor I think we can always do amazing stuff you get ACH of together that like
what they're doing doing you can do amazing things yeah that's right where there's a will there's a way to do it
that's right yep now if everybody could have made my clouds disappear that would have
been really good well I like your background so
that's second best well thank you right right Terry I my background is the only
way to get above those clouds that's halaka 10,000 foot elevation in Hawaii
that sounds fantastic well excellent well I hope you
all enjoyed it uh we it has been a uh fantastic day it's been a very long day
um I want to thank uh Steve Mia David Levy for hanging in there for all of
this time um we uh we started uh uh working on this uh all through the night
last night and um uh you know it was great to have Christopher go on so so
early in the morning uh uh it was totally unexpected uh that he would be
on but he got Clear Skies over his island of Sabu where he lives and um uh
he took some amazing uh images and all day long it's been kind of like this
magical um time you know where people are just so affected by this beautiful
amazing super rare you know conjunction and uh you know I feel like we all got
to see uh a total eclipse kind of experience I mean that's it's it's just
that kind of an amazing thing I know I'm going to miss it U uh you know it's you
know total eclipses of the sun are things that you can go see every year and a half or so but uh um but this is
this was once for us and you know Scott it reminded me the total uh Eclipse just
a little bit and just a very fast side note while I was out observing just tonight I had two Neighbors come up and
says what are you looking at and I says look right over there look over there and they could not believe they say oh
those are the planets are you kidding I said yeah that's them so it's really a need
experience yeah I I imagine that there will be hundreds or thousands of images
shared uh in the days and weeks ahead of this amazing conjunction and um you know
so I I I just uh am really happy and pleased that so many of us came together
to share this in this whole day long um uh Global Star Party um and um you know
we had five segments that came on uh uh with uh people from all over the world
uh we had astronomers in Africa and Europe and Asia and young and old and
and uh so it was really it embodied the spirit of what I would call the global
Star Party it was just just amazing overall so thank you thank you everyone
for participating uh for those of you who were in chat in the audience that
watched and participated and helped us get uh this educational outreach program
launched uh through social media um this will Mark the last Global Star Party of
this year um and uh we will come back uh we will come back next year uh with more
uh we have more programming coming on as well and uh um you know we will have um
live uh astronomy League uh uh astronomical League events happening
every month and uh so uh we're just getting started folks so uh but uh I am
I will be taking a two week long vacation and
uh and uh and then I'm gonna look forward to really coming back with a lot more so it's G to be a lot of
fun um so Scott before before you sign things off sure I I I think um uh your
efforts definitely need to be recognized in putting this event on weekly
sometimes multiple times a week for various world and um you're up at all
hours of the day as well um I don't think you you've slept yet since yesterday because you were still
emailing me at one o'clock in the morning and my time I got that string of emails too epic and then we're we're
both online at 3:30 in the morning so I don't think you slept yet um uh and the
the tiredness is starting to affect me a little bit but um Scott thank you for uh creating this forum for for all of us
and for everybody around the world to enjoy it is truly truly um uh an amazing
um event that you've put together and and I I think that it's all you that
make it what it is you know so I'm I'm just happy to there he is being humble
again I'm just the cheerleader I'm just the guy that just connected some wires or something you know so um because uh
you know this is uh I I think I think that um uh we we demonstrated how
vibrant and interesting and amazing the amateur astronomical Community is
worldwide and the interest that people have all over the world um you know
everyone knows in in innately that we share one sky uh we are all um uh uh we
all understand uh that uh you know we talk about being made of star stuff and
everything well here we are U reflecting it in in the images and the poetry and
the songs and the stories uh that uh that all of you uh
totally get and so it's just uh isn't an amazing that we get to hang out like this and and do this yeah so awesome
Scotty thank you thank you very much uh any other comments from anyone else uh
before we do sign off Bob those were
amazing yeah very wonderful probably the best I've seen those were incredible
man yep yep I agree we're gonna see more of it too well we you uh have shown so
many great views um it's just amazing I I'm like it really comes cross quite
detailed too um considering we're zooming it you know right Bob are you in Hawaii is that
where you live are you talking to me yes Bob no
I'm in Mesa Arizona and the picture that I showed just now was produced not by me
but by Tom pus who is a local Phoenix astronomer and u a very clever
imaginative and I mean he does things that are totally outside the box that's his thing and he's always posting things
that are just mindblowing and this was his from tonight so I wow I do not take
credit for that that was from Tom poas and it is really quite remarkable I'm
just emerging From the Ashes I've been
incinerated just call me Phoenix next year thanks very much you take care love
you guys have a great evening thank you everybody also for hosting and uh allowing this for for us Mike and I in
more Park California to um we got lucky man you know the the Stars tonight we
were given a gift they gave it to us excellent every night the seeing was
garbage and I don't know how it was so good tonight but it we're blessed thanks very much thanks all
right well uh for everyone out there there uh also we want to wish you happy
holidays um we hope that you're able to connect with family and friends um
somehow and uh you know uh we're um uh I
feel fortunate that uh we've been able to do something that has been so enjoyable and so insightful and so
meaningful uh during these last few months so thank you very much and we're coming back for more so take care see
you all next year have a safe holiday everyone thanks everyone all the best bye
everyone oh yeah loving it did I see I got you on
the map I told you I would believe me
[Music] I now I'll leave my score card on the table uh wait the job we get the job and
then
we and success I am so
happy you know who bluses dude I don't feel bad at all that
that guy is so gnarly
what is it