Global Star Party 34

Transcript for Part A:

um
um this is the 34th global star party now
other events that we've done it's probably more like um
in the range of the 40th
and james the astrophotographer is the first one on [Music]
ah
uh
we've got clear skies tonight i think a lot of the country does
yep i'm i'm observing right now
you got clear skies jerry
yep and i'm focusing on an object i'll talk about it when that time comes
i'm sharing with the chicago astronomy club right now let's see which is the next one here uh
photo astronomy here we go
and we've got astrophotography enthusiasts let's share
with them book davey says he's out with my nose
right now binos are cool no david what do you know about the
history of binoculars well not all that much actually
with respect to astronomy or overall just kind of overall i mean it's kind of
a i think they were when i started looking into the history of it i think they were
developed right after the telescope you know they looked like these looked like a tapered box kind of affair
you know very elaborately uh decorated
um they can't see you though and they weren't used much i don't think except for sort
of an opera glass type of arrangement for a long time oh maybe
well a lot of them didn't have the adjustment either for the pupils so they just kind of went for
broke on you know picking one size fits all
you're right right either ocular distance be damned
there's a a slogan you probably don't want to use commercially
it could be like the headline on an ad you know like in a display ad and astronomy magazine yeah you had to make
a bumper sticker out of that yeah getting rid of the interpupillary adjustment it's it's all been
you know here's one for you scott see marketing you know is especially how about one size might fit all
might no you don't like that okay all right probably probably fits all
one size can't fit some yup it's like one shoe size
might prob probably will work to a degree
telescope addicts astronomy and astrophotography community here we go
uh oh did we lose scott yeah i think we did i saw it froze and then i'm looking at the
screen and it looks like he's gone we lost our host and we lost our
yeah this is not starting
i suppose is it best to keep the the youtube feed or whatever muted i
suppose so yeah i'll get confused too many uh audio sources here
i'm gonna give him a call and see if he answers
i just call you oh you you dropped your power
so scott lost power oh
oh the power is restarting on him so he'll be five minutes
i hope that this is not an omen of things to come tonight with scott and
with david here well maybe i shouldn't be maybe i
shouldn't be on maybe that's what jinx did
[Music]
here we go we're back that is amazing that's amazing because i
i lost power wow okay i lost power i hope not a rolling
blackout i don't know what it was it was crazy i
was like i'm talking and i oh my gosh here we go okay so okay
i see that that it's back now and what time is it 703 i think we're
going to go ahead and just get started uh let's go ahead and get started with uh mr eiker
um and and there's david levy hold on for a
second hi david
how are you
i started but i can have your voice on on my microphone if you'd like to
i'll send you a zoom link i'll send you a zoom link you won't be on first but when you come on you'll come on okay
okay i sure will sounds real good okay thanks bye-bye all right
all right so david levy will join us later here um i'm going to go ahead and start our
[Applause] program [Music]
the vehicle system test bed is an engineering model version of the perseverance world which means that it has all the same
electronics as perseverance it's important for perseverance to have a twin so that we have a place where we
can test things before we actually operate perseverance then once we do land on mars we need the
twin to test out all of the sequences and plans that we have for the rover before we actually send them up to
perseverance also if we have a problem with perseverance the vstb is going to give
us a place to practice how we recover from that problem [Music]
that's a really big milestone for us today this is the first time we've ever driven a new test bed
so by driving uh we're validating that mechanically we can drive the rover on its own on
earth the vstb is now ready to drive in the margin
today we're moving the vsdb from its assembly facility to margie
[Music]
so [Music]
i'm extremely proud of what the vstb team has accomplished today i'm really excited to see this gstb
album here where we can truly test mobility for the first time
[Music]
today is a great day for the test bed it's the first time that we've driven optimism out into the mars yard we get to
actually drive in the dirt and get this thing dirty and do some mobility testing
[Music]
well hello everybody uh we had a little excitement here uh this afternoon i somehow i lost power
but if anybody could give a testimonial to uh the uh to the zoom guys okay it kept the
program alive and running and so here we are uh oh and david you
david levy's with us that's great okay i'm here i'm right here okay
that's great so we caught david uh he's out uh with his friend out and they are
going to do some observing tonight um i think they got some very looks like they have some beautiful clear skies
so that's great tonight's show we have uh some special programming we have um of
course david eicher from chief editor-in-chief of astronomy magazine he's got a special program he's gonna
he's gonna kind of veer off of his uh his sequence that he was on and tell us a little bit more about himself so if
you guys have questions this is the time you know if you want to look under the hood of what david eicher's all about
uh this is this is the night okay
hi david hi david how are you i'm fine yeah i'm fine uh i'm here i'm glad to be
here yes looks like a good sky above you david
yes it's very very nice beautiful sky beautiful blue sky
yeah libby and the stars with us we've got deep tea deepti could not be on our
program last time uh because of an internet uh connection that sometimes happens so
uh but she's she's back with us tonight and she's gonna talk about uh the moons of mars which is gonna be cool
cesar brolo is with us from buenos aires uh and his son how do you pronounce your
friends how do you pronounce your son's last our first name augustine i would say that
is okay in in spain we say austin
augustine okay well that's great in english uh austin
okay wonderful every man from the astronomical league is with us john
johnson from the nebraska star party is with us jerry hubble from the mark slade remote
observatory uh the astro beard the astra beard observatory is with us
of course he doesn't have an observatory yet but he's building one okay so and it's gonna it's gonna tower over
this uh mountain and we've already uh we've already talked him to expanding that observatory so
that we can set in our own peers uh and uh and be there with him
just joking anyhow um uh david now that you've logged in with
us i guess i we will uh we will have you go on first okay okay scotty thank you so much thank
you thanks for thanks for making it that's awesome i'm glad we were able to work this out
anyway i'd like to show you where we are we are at the uh chiricahua
astronomy complex in southeast arizona and if you see over here
do you see the sun setting it's beautiful the sun is setting and we move across
and we get to uh we get to minerva do you see minerva now
oh yes minerva is the telescope that you see every time when i'm
just there at home but now you're gonna see a minerva actually getting ready to work tonight
and now i'd like to introduce you to one of my closest friends i don't know if he'll be my friend after
this but this is david rosner good evening everybody hey david
nice to see you thanks for joining us and uh this is julia um
you see julia four inch refractor and uh what are you going to put on
julia tonight i think i'm going to be going for a lot of star clusters tonight
maybe uh some especially some globs of course we've got to get the orion nebula in there but are you
going to put the camera on oh on julia i thought put julia on things in the sky
now i've got a new maui camera we're going to be putting on julia tonight
experimenting it's a little video astronomy okay well this will be fun david
anyway i want to wish you all the very best for a um star party tonight i will be
in and out i think yeah i do want to wish you the very best and i do have a
quote for tonight uh my memory has not failed yet i have to do it from memory i have nothing
to look up but remember when i used to be quoting things that lasted for hours and hours
i won't be doing that tonight i'm gonna have to do something for monday i'm gonna quote from ralph hudson and
i've quoted before from him you just imagine it's almost imagine if
he wrote these words in 19 i think was 1917 from england and it's called the song of
honor i'd like to quote the entire home to you but it would take about six days to do it
so i'm just gonna quote the last verse okay and uh here we are this is the uh you can see
we're sort of on a low hill over there
and over to the east you see those mountains over there yes those mountains are the chirikawa
national monument it's one of arizona's most beautiful
areas and we're right next to them anyway so i'm going to give you a little quote and then give you back to
to uh scotty and dave hiker who will give you the really good stuff
for tonight after i give you this amateurish singing song stuff
anyway it's uh ralph hodgson the song of honor
i stood and stared the sky was lit the sky was stars all over it i stood
i knew not why without a wish without a will i stood upon that silent
hill and stared into the sky until my eyes were blind
with stars and still i stared into the sky well scotty
back to you thank you very much and i'll stick around for a few more minutes yeah okay all right well i'm glad you're
out there uh at that site it looked fabulous it's making us all wish we were there
with you uh yeah but there's some more news and that is tomorrow
wendy and i are getting our first vaccines that's great that's great wonderful
yeah yeah that's great so it's one of two shots is that it's
gonna be a a two shot deal is that right it's one of two shots the next one is at the end a little later
in march all right well stay warm david i know it can get a little chilly out there at night so be careful
yeah pretty good the wind has dropped yeah it's really very pleasant right now
wonderful wonderful thank you so much thanks for joining i'll see you i'll see
you again friday you'll see me friday yeah yeah okay scotty all right take care you too bye-bye
bye-bye david i'm gonna stick for a while stick around okay that's great that's great okay so um so
uh it's awesome to see you know i just love to see you guys getting out there with their telescopes
and their real skies you know and man do they have real beautiful skies in arizona so you're
going to have to make it out there sometime if you've never been the chiricahua region is beautiful
many great places in arizona it i think arizona is a as an astronomer's uh you know dream to
to relocate there you know a lot of people amateur astronomers they want to retire
and they they retire out there you know so for good reason yeah so but tonight um uh we are
we will transition to dave david eicher david has a long history i think his whole
life has been wrapped up in astronomy uh we all know him from astronomy magazine but he has
he has done he has had many astronomical adventures and uh um and a vision
towards uh looking towards the universe i think probably since since he was born
you know and uh so uh tonight uh you know we're going to ask him
to talk about himself a little bit for those of you that don't know david eicher and uh
are you are you good with that tonight david absolutely thank you scotty and i actually came across a paper in
trying to organize all of my stuff finally us working from home this year
called growing up with amateur astronomy so i thought i'd do a little read of a paper
that's an autobiographical work that i i tweaked and updated maybe just a tad here but it's from some years
ago that i wrote this so i thought i would read this and and it would either be
maybe inspiring for some or frightening or a combination thereof
um so this is called growing up with amateur astronomy when i was a young teenager i leaned in interest toward
medicine a physician's career i thought then at 14 i went to a local star party and saw
saturn through a small scope that moment changed my life
all other interests ceased i was obsessed with the sky and what lay in it i was a teenager in a
small town in ohio stuck between cincinnati and dayton in a little community called oxford where
miami university an old state school was the main event besides the university the town had rich
outlying farmland and not much else that decision to immerse myself in
amateur astronomy falling in love with the sky led to an adventure i could not have foreseen
the astronomy club that put on the star party needed someone to write about star clusters
nebulae and galaxies in their monthly newsletter the hyper-enthusiastic green kid
drew the assignment armed at first merely with binoculars later an eight-inch telescope i observed
so many deep sky objects and began to draw sketches of the eyepiece views
that i often stayed up all night observing and went right to school high school the next
morning can't do that anymore tell you that soon my love for the heavens led me to create
a whole magazine a first a newsletter really all about deep sky observing the first
issue of deep sky monthly is i creatively titled it rolled off the mimeograph machine in my father john's
chemistry office in june 1977 and i'll show you it was a very
uh um an over assertive term to call it a magazine
it was pretty crude stuff there's a fairly early issue of it
what year is that david that's 1979. that was a couple of years after the
start there and it kind of evolved a bit and that led um thankfully to me making many many
great friendships with contributors writers photographers including people like david h levy
who's with us here tonight yes um back going all the way back to that time so i
was 15 and a fraction years old at that time local club members of
believe it or not what was called the astronomical association of oxford ohio
um to as it was known along with cincinnati and dayton amateurs they really took pity on this uh young
man and subscribed and after a few months uh after a few issues the there were more
than a hundred paid subscriptions well publishing this magazine as i went through high school
and college offered pretty severe challenges but it became a family affair
once a month i traveled with my father to use a press uh loaned to us at the dayton museum of
natural history later we had the magazine printed commercially in nearby hamilton
the publication's theme of observing imaging and endlessly discussing deep sky objects
coincided perfectly with the so-called dobsonian revolution which made larger telescopes available
to backyard sky watchers and helped spawn an information revolution
that led to observers going after many obscure targets they had never heard of even a short
time before then david can attest to this and scott and others too it was a very exciting time
for amateur astronomy right away uh out of the gate comet vest
stunned us all as did other observational events the ear of apollo was relatively fresh
the space shuttle age yet to come dozens of amateurs around the country in
the world wrote me submitted articles sent photos they had
shot and that's what destroyed my astro imaging career because after a few months i could walk
down to the end of my driveway and pull astro images out that were sent to me that were
far beyond anything that i could do so i became a mere observer but it was really a
vibrant time for the hobby i'd become acquaintances with the editors at the two big astronomy
magazines and made no secret that i would love to work for one of them one day in the middle of 1982
richard berry who was then editor of astronomy called me and offered a job as well as
offering to buy deep sky monthly and continue it as a quarterly something that i really wanted to see
happen by the time i started as assistant editor of astronomy and editor-in-chief
of deep sky magazine in september 1982 the latter had a circulation of more
than one thousand and i'll quickly show you uh more or less what it looked like
um under the guise of astronomy magazine deep sky back in the day
uh the publication achieved a circulation of 15 000 and by the early 1990s the company
decided to stop its publication it needed me to concentrate on astronomy
and my career with the larger magazine i could no longer hide in a closet one day a week and
bang out this journal about observing galaxies so it went away
after uh 15 years altogether i guess it was although it was i think it's fair to say
beloved by amateur astronomers i moved to milwaukee and have been with
the magazine ever since going from the junior most assistant editor to the editor-in-chief
for the longest span of the magazine's history times have really changed now observers
of course are used to viewing and imaging sharpless nebulae abell galaxy clusters quasars
strange dwarf galaxies after hale bop and yakataki in the mid 1990s
and the incredible observational event of comic shoemaker levy 9 impacting jupiter
which was also a very big draw of course we were overdue for a very nice comet
but we got a pretty good one of course last year in neowise
i don't get to observe nearly as much as i did in the early days now both from staying busy and living in
a place where opportunities for observing are rare yet through all the experiences of the
last 38 years i can easily go back to the farm field in back of our subdivision in ohio
where i first set up my scope my first telescope celestron 8 and accompanied by my border
collie oscar stayed out all night exploring galaxy after galaxy
it was all an unexplored mystery to me then and i hope that astronomy magazine now
and events like scots star parties here which are very valuable to keep us connected now that they can help uh with
that magical sense of discovery that we all love that uh serves us that that
motivates us all to go out there and look deep into the heavens of exploring a very big
universe that has endless amazing sights for us to ponder uh so that we can get together talk
about them and enjoy them all uh to gather our understanding of them so that's kind of a brief
autobiography either a tale of inspiration or warning
who can be uh no it's very inspiring once you get this infection you know it
doesn't go away yeah that's true that's true you will you will pay for it that's true that's right
but that's kind of how it happened to me it's been a great adventure i have there are many many stories which
someday i'll tell many more of if i get the chance to uh but that's sort of a broad overview
of uh a kid who wanted some kind of a scientific career and went to a star
party one day and the whole world changed yeah yeah that's really
so uh david what were kind of like your breakthrough moments though i mean you
you know trying to get onto an astronomy magazine although you were you were already doing one you know uh
did you you know uh was there like a moment where
um you weren't sure if you had the right stuff or
you know or did you always know that you had it we know you have it but well you know you know i i always knew
that i loved the subject and and just seeing saturn you know floating as a little
globe you know with the rings with that beautiful ochre and orange color you know that you could walk out of a house
in a subdivision in a neighborhood outside a college town and point a
telescope like that and immediately see that and be transported to another world was astonishing and and for a while i
thought i wanted to be a professional astronomer um and and do research and i got to know
many astronomers uh some through day i get to know bart bach through david and clyde
tombaugh and i got to know carl sagan very well who gave me career advice
and you know i i i took a i had a physics education an
undergrad but but i i found that i just loved writing about this stuff and i got
to know the folks at astronomy and sky intel and that's really what i wanted to do and
then i wanted to see that little magazine go on um because when it's your baby you know you don't want to
throw it off a cliff so so i kind of decided i would enjoy more the
journalism the writing about it than going and taking data and i was
very lucky to have many professional astronomy friends who i could go and hang out with
and kind of have that experience and understand it alongside them without actually being
employed as an astronomer myself so it was quite an adventure right yeah and so you had another a
little different professional astronomy life you know so yeah that's right that's right um
harold locke comments on the chat and says david's last appearance push me to bite the bullet and subscribe
to astronomy magazine ah he's a scholar and a gentleman yes i hope i get the april issue
so let's see um harmony surf uh said
[Music] she harmony is uh disabled but uh has been doing tons of astronomy
and is finding that uh astronomy is um is a good path you know and uh
um you know so uh uh thought that uh you know that that uh
maybe i i should have gone astronomy instead of the path that uh harmony went but uh the deal is
is that um it's never too late to start never too late you know so it isn't and of course we
are in such a we've talked about this before but we're in such a golden age of discovery of exploration you know we
found out in the last generation in some ways more than we had
in the previous century about many of these big big ideas like we're talking about in
the regular weekly talks the origin the fate the size the shape the
uh all these things about the universe the galaxy the solar system it's an explosive it's the best time
ever first image of a black hole the you know the finding multiple black holes and globular star clusters uh
just on and on and on you know it's like every week is more
mind-blowing than the last week you know that's right that's right so there's never been a better time to be
interested in this it's it's a fire hose of exciting things going
on now and one thing that despite any of our challenges and struggles on
earth as little people you know riding around on a planet here in this galaxy
um you know it astronomy gives us great perspective you know because the enormity of the universe
and and what we worry about sometimes here on earth uh takes a a new and maybe somewhat
diminished form when we understand it gives us great solace you know exactly when you when you look
at the the big picture and then the bigger picture and then you know the vastness of it all you know and and
think of um of uh quotes from people like carl sagan and the pale blue dot you know
absolutely that puts things into perspective that puts your problems that you think are so magnified
way into perspective you know so uh it makes you think about okay well what
should i do with my life how should i move forward you know when you have a fresh perspective this
becomes very important this is a this is a the turn in the road okay that you can
take uh to make your life really what you want it to be you know and do the things that you
really feel are important you know and it doesn't take the fact that you're alive and the fact
that and and then starting to understand you're connected to the whole universe uh this this really can be very
empowering absolutely it is and and it's it's a key to to rationality into
understanding you know we we see that science is a self-correcting clear analytical
logical process to understand everything and the universe the cosmos
around us and yet um the rational simple straight answers from
science sometimes are nearly miraculous where where the atoms in our bodies
are all from uh either early in the universe or largely from the deaths of massive star
or collisions of massive stars you know we're literally made of the stuff of the universe and yet we have
this great gift of of consciousness and of being able to reflect on it and discuss it
with each other this sentience that is an amazing gift that we have it's miraculous it really
is it really is and that and the fact too that uh we built the tools to look back on on
our on the universe that created us you know so it's just uh you know i i when i think of it all
it just makes makes me almost dizzy it's you know so you could almost say that the universe
is observing itself right yeah very true you certainly
could yeah because we are we're definitely chunks of the universe little chunks but chunks nevertheless
absolutely yeah okay uh gary alvin says um will david eicher be doing any book
signings nationally uh i love his book the new cosmos answering astronomy's big questions well
thank you very much and and yes i will but of course we're all sort of on hold
um waiting for normality and the pandemic to get on the other side of it and and
vaccination and hurting hurt immunity and so yeah i think i think you know late this year we'll have some semblance
of normality coming back probably and and next year will be much more like a normal year and and
i'll be happy to not only be doing some book signings but writing a couple of new books
yeah that's great that's great um cameron gillis says great story david i always immensely enjoyed reading your
deep sky observing sketches in astronomy and deep sky magazines
people remember these things they're it's important to them okay um yeah armando elise says very
good works to you david uh let's see
um lots of people saying hello we we're glad that you guys are watching
uh gary alvin says astronomy and astrophotography are my release from daily stressors nothing
reminds me more of how miniscule our troubles are relative to the size of the universe
absolutely that's not like a real i mean when you might say that in just a normal
conversation and some people go oh wow this guy's gone off on the deep end all right but
you know this is so close to the truth of who we are you know um when you think
this way so it's it's and if you've ever had a telescope out and you happen to sort of latch on to a
neighbor who's not into this and you drag them over and they look at jupiter they look at you
know after their eyes are dark adapted the andromeda galaxy or whatever it is
ah you know there's this you can see the light bulb go on they you can see the understanding come
uh almost in a moment like i had with saturn you know that first time um you know i i there's an i i get it
moment then you know of of something that when we walk around on this if you will
kind of 2d surface of this planet worried about going to the grocery or or you know whether starbucks is open
before i have to roll into the of or whatever you know nobody ever thinks of anything out
beyond that you know in fact it was carl carl sagan used to say you know 99.9 of everyone on earth
will be born live their life and die without ever understanding their place
in the cosmos that was carl's statement and so i guess a crusade you know it's your
crusade it's david's it's all of us stars here uh it's my is is to get that knowledge
that that revelation to people about where you really are in the scheme of things
it changes everyone's thinking completely you know who embrace it that's right and and you can see it
happen if you for all of you people out there who have done uh astronomy outreach maybe you've been on
a street corner you've done something for a group of people or whatever there's always that and that aha moment that
david eicher's talking about you can watch it happen and that is
such a powerful charge for people who are involved in educational outreach and
astronomy they do it because they do it because of that just to see that moment you know uh to
me it's a uh i don't i can't even maybe it's a type of enlightenment or
something you know when you see this happen because they go wow okay they that some they get hit
with this like a ton of bricks and uh and they're changed at that point they are changed people so
i i think the the psychiatrists call it self-actualization but i don't know if we need to get that
technical about it you know it's just understanding things and feeling good maybe is a simple that's right that's
right that's wonderful technical term is situational awareness there you go remember what george carlin
said about euphemisms and adding more syllables to everything you know
only george could be with us today oh yeah [Laughter] armando lee says i agree with david j
eiker that we live in a better time of enormous discoveries in astronomy great to be alive at this time
yeah remember they talk about the good old days yeah the good days right now they're
right now [Laughter] that's right the old days were not so
good you know armando finishes his thought by saying even the pandemic
is dwarfed by the discoveries in astronomy now that's true yeah that's true absolutely
um chris larson says love the perspectives of astronomy uh love the perspectives
astronomy gives me for life well said um
and uh let's see david your story is very inspiring and very relatable my
original aspirations were to major in english but you found a way to do both fast
forward 20 years and a different life path and i still find myself writing when i'm inspired oh that's
great yeah stephen hauser says i've been a scientist for most of my life
but i was an astronomer first while i agree that we live in a golden age i still like to think about
how cool it must have been to be a scientist or astronomer at any time in human history
true
imagine being galileo this is book davies and realizing that everything is different than we thought
you know most astronomers have that galileo moment you know it's
been passed on now for thousands of years unfortunately 400
years later we don't have to be in house at rest for the last part of our lives because of it yes that's right
that's right be careful what you write right yeah
yes um but anyways thank you wow uh david thank you so much for uh very
inspiring uh talk and um and for all those comments it's great and thank you to the audience
too thank you and thanks everyone thanks scott appreciate it thanks thank you okay all right so
let's move on here we've got um we've got dt gatom and john johnson
let's have dt come on first she's up very late uh i know and uh dt you're going to talk
about the moons around mars
everyone yeah are talking about over the israel family about the marsh and the
mass and we know the worst mars is and the mass is the red planet with the iron oxide on
its surface and just it's just this before ever the robots presidents
uh landed on the mars basis
i get uh i get a chance to know over the mars and hourglass moon uh when i was
involved in one program that was the mass mission challenge for the students uh where uh we have english for
five weeks and learn about the first week we have learned about the what's the masses and the fun fact of the
march in the second week so we learn we discuss our this was our mission
are in westminster we are going to work for uh in the town and third weeks uh which is
the mission our uh finding the finding the water and the surface of the moon
uh which was trapped inside of our rocks and trapped inside this you know
inside the surface in a different form and as we know there was the water in the
palm ice in the monster still there is a pump water in the mars and um it is said that
there was a large ocean in the past on the marsh and uh so we have uh we have that reason
to choose the mission or finding the uh finding the sponsor of the activities
and the for fourth weeks uh we have designed our robots this uh unlike uh
rovers we have designed our robots that's a just working working mode a lot of models
and we talk about how to land on the mars and how we make the small uh moral
rockets and uh i just work on the principle of in the different principle
we uh demonstrate how to land on the mars and discuss about and last
last last week
was the life uh it was the um it was this uh and it it was very very it was
night on here and uh we were still uh we're still a week of pain was all
the lives uh uh by involving the new palestinian society nasa
and uh in that although i got on i had a lot of attempts to know about mars and
fascinating of fact about the mars about the masses and uh in talking about ours uh today i'm
here to talk about the moons of the mars and as we know that there is two moon of the mars that
is phobos and demons and um purpose and demonstrating
was discovered by uh american astronomer sf halls uh in 1877 in uh
photos and the most uh was named after the greek god
is the personification of fear and panic and
[Music] and they must appear more resemblance to
asteroid both are tiny the larger is the full
voice is only 14 miles across 22 kilometer uh with uh
while the smaller damos is only eight miles and 30 kilometer and making them so the
smallest moon in the solar system and both are also up of materials that resembles type 1 sometimes second there
is a carbonyl and chondrites and substance that make up
asteroids and with their uh elongated shape and the they even look like asteroids
than the moons and even from the mars the the moon doesn't look like a moon it is said that even
from the mass the moon of the mass doesn't look like the moon the more distance moon is uh demons
appears more like a star in the 90s sky which we can see the star
very far it is and uh it's uh seems similar like uh they must appear more
like a star in the night sky and when it is full and shining its brightness
it resembles is seen on earth the kite is star and uh forest has the
closest orbit to its primary of any moons in the solar system but still
one appears a third as wide as earth full moons [Music]
you know there's uh this hypothesis about related to this allen that is the mass
was once surrounded by many focus and demos uh science body and perhaps injected into
orbit around by its collision uh with the large planetary gmails and the high
priorities uh reciprocity of the interior of us are based on the
um of 1.88 gram of gum one centimeter cube voids are
estimated to comprise 25 to 35 percent of force consistent with
asteroidal origins and i already said that uh it's um all this uh
origin of uh phobos and demos is related to the asteroids and this seems like
esther another esteem likes the moon but in actually it seems like asteroid and the character of the
asteroids with observation of purpose observationally improves in thermal uh
inference uh composition continually and which are well known from the
surface of mars and the spectra and distance from those all of
classes of chondrite materials are again pointing away from the
asteroid uh originals and these are the all the fun fact uh or
interesting fact that i uh that i got to know a lot got to learn and about the moons of mars
and uh yeah this is all this one thank you thank you deepti thank you
so out of the two moons so phobos and demos what is the one that interests you most this
was the most it was the farthest and look like star and uh so we see
in from the earth as it's in the moon of the moon of the earth it says uh also the moon uh it appears it looks
uh very close but the demons the moon of mass look like is
star which is the power and it's like a venus we see from the earth uh so uh things uh
attracts me a lot and learning over the demons it was stick
very cool and uh i know that you're very involved in uh your astronomy club you belong to
uh the uh you belong to of course the club you started in high school and
uh what is the what is the nepal astronomical society is that right
yeah yes uh-huh and and what what is happening in those organizations right now
the palestinian society uh has the uh number of uh genius member and uh and i'm the senior
member of the nepal astronomical society and uh actually uh it conducts the
education like uh awareness about an education of that astronomical event and uh connected with
this uh international international programs and give those
and give the chance and uh opportunity for us uh to involve various type of programs
and like uh it is conducting the asteroid campaign on like finding the asteroid uh and
um and this uh we are involved in this uh mission to mars challenge uh through the
being the part of the nepalese student society and uh it conducts the different types of
virtual programs and uh physical programs are talking about and talks about the astronomy and uh
mostly it uh fascinate all the students and give its aim to give the opportunity to all
these students who are very keenly interested in the astronomy and uh this is all over the naval astro
society and uh it conducts uh the uh observation programs also uh in weekly uh it's uh
it kind of in the friday and um photographer of nepal uh this is um also
the part of the of the palestinian society's second of their observation programs
so with the junior members and all those models from the nepalese they can go to
this uh office and they can uh observe they observe this kind of sky um so they are
serving like that and uh and the other there is the one learning program weekly words as
astronomy news program uh is conducted by the nepalese chamber society uh to give us the updates about uh these
updates about the astronomy what is going on what is happening all around the world in the field of astronomy
awesome great thank you so much for coming back on the program
uh and uh for your persistence uh in making it
thank you so much thank you for having me thank you all right yeah we hope to have
you on next time too that's great um armando lee is talking
about uh he's in the philippines and yeah i was just saying look this is the global star party we have
we have people from everywhere around the world and um people watching from around the world
and uh mondo's on watching right now and he says he's seeing the sun shining down in his sky our own star
so thanks armando now armando you should join us with the after party later so i'm going to post the link and
for those of you that are listening uh we're going to run through some speakers here but
towards about 8 30 9 o'clock central time uh we'll be accepting after party guests
when you join us uh be prepared to speak about astronomy and show us what uh
what you know and uh if you've got a live view or something like that through your telescope please share it so it's gonna be very
cool okay all right so um uh coming up next
here let's um uh john did you uh were you able to get your audio system
up and running yes yes i'm i'm back on i don't did you did things kind of fall apart
there for a bit when i don't think so i don't think this might be just my
system then it can happen it can happen happened to me and i lost complete power on my
computers and uh somehow zoom kept the uh the program running it was just uh
unbelievable really so i i uh everything froze up and then and then i
i didn't have any audio for about five minutes and unfortunately it happened i guess i'm back now if you
can hear me i'm back i can hear you fine i can hear you fine i know that you wanted to talk about uh
um star parties during the pandemic uh we're still facing such issues and
um uh of course you're very involved in organizing the nebraska star party
one of the great star parties of the world so um i'll give you the stage here john
okay well thank you scott um yeah i'll get right to the point and then we'll see how much time is
i i wanted to comment on what you and david was talking about too but i'll start with the subject at hand um
as uh almost i think every star party organized star party last year was was
canceled through the the to the virus pandemic including ours we held off until
about the middle of june and then basically uh cash dan gave up although we had an
impromptu no you know impromptu
no invitation just show up type star party and we still had about 60 70 people show up there but
uh and uh and the location we have it up there in the north central part of nebraska and
sandhills uh uh talk about social distancing uh we're all social
distancing up there all the time so we uh we we had a good time and of
course we were blessed with neo-wise commonly always put on a big show but but we've regrouped uh we are definitely
um going to try to have as normal as possible of a star party up there uh this year
um at the location which is at the merit reservoir state recreation area
southwest of valentine nebraska the dates are going to be from august
1st we usually start on a sunday and run through the following friday
you know some people come early some people stay late but that's the official dates and um
as uh as things develop and hopefully things settle down uh with the pandemic we're gonna try to
do as much of a star party as we've normally had in years past
still may be in question is whether we're going to allow to have our speaker program which we do
in the high school in valentine nebraska beautiful auditorium there scott you've been there you know yeah yes
uh so we'll see it's kind of waiting to see what uh that's all uh based on what the high
school uh staff and superintendent feels we're we're hoping we'll be able to do that
but most of the other activities uh out at the site will occur of course the absolutely
gorgeous nice guys will be there um regardless so uh i uh
we were shooting for the first and we did get our website registration open uh yesterday
and i just checked here before we came online and i have uh 15 adults and two
children already signed up and one day and
website nebraskastarparty.org and you can download a pdf document
and print it out and mail in a registration uh there's also a multi-page
booklet guideline that you can download up there too uh giving you more details uh as
any of the you that have been there we are on a nebraska game and parks managed site
so it does require that you have a state park permit and also if you stay
overnight in a camping environment then you have to purchase a
nightly camping permit too but they're phenomenal and it's all spelled out in our
information we supply online there and then there's also links from on our
nebraska store party facebook site too so so anyway uh we're looking forward to it and
invite you all um to come on out enjoy uh a truly dark sky
um we always brag that uh you can actually uh see the the your shadow just from the
light of the milky way and that is true that is absolutely true you can you know so and it's uh remarkable uh
to stand underneath that uh that expanse of you know kind of rolling hills and the was it called the grasslands i think
is what it's called yes it's the native grasslands just goes on as far as the eye can see in any direction
so just that expanse alone and then this this dome you know this
that goes from like this deep blue to like cobalt black and then you've got this
arch of you know this glowing mass that's going across you the milky way
and then you know you see streaks going across of meteor falls and stuff and it's just magic it really
is and it feels sacred and yes and everybody knows it and it's just
uh it's yeah it's a spiritual experience yes they go up there that's right i mean you see yeah you see the milky
way basically at that time of year it'll be like said early august this year
it'll stretch from one horizon to the other yes it does all the way down to the horizon all the way down to the horizon yeah and
that's a lot of sights you know you may have that dark sky clear overhead but to sit there and watch uh stars pop
above the horizon and see them within a degree or two after they've cleared the horizon that's that's kind of amazing too
yes that's true very true okay so i did put in the link for
nebraskastarparty.org um uh you know john encourages you to uh consider uh
uh joining uh you know with you know following you know perfectly acceptable
social distancing rules um uh you know we are getting to a point
where more and more of us are able to get our vaccines and stuff and so uh we'll we'll be out of
you know i i i am hopeful and uh um optimistic
that uh you know we're getting to a point where we come back to some sense of normalcy so i i fully
believe too i think by uh by first of august that uh the vaccines
will be any and all that have wanted to get one hopefully will be vaccinated and
and yeah it's just you know other than that it's just common sense you know you know it's it is a remote area so
plan accordingly as far as any other health needs that you may have uh
the closest medical doctor when we're out there is uh about 40 miles away so uh
not that i didn't want to discourage anybody but you know make sure you're you're comfortable with being out in the
sticks because it's really oh yeah it's it's remote that's true that's true but
that's that's that's what you have to do to get to the superdome that's the beauty of it yeah and also i just wanted to update we we
are forging ahead with our application to make that site an international dark sky
association dark sky park uh we're working in partnership with the nebraska tourism
commission which has jumped on oh big time helping us promoting it and everything
and we've done our sky surveys out there we changed out what few lights that we
needed to worry about around the the camping area over on the north east
side of the lake there's some cabins in a trading post of course the the lake is a nationally known
fishing resort too i mean there's fishermen up there all the time catching huge walleyes and northern pike
out of that lake and recreation on and everything but but we've uh yeah we've gotten really
good support from the nebraska game and parks people and the locals up there to get all that set
so we're hoping and shooting for a possible application going in
towards the end of april and who knows maybe we'll have a great announcement to put out we're up there in august
great thank you thank you john thanks for showing up main thing i want to talk about uh
i um i i was uh listened with uh with the great uh rapture with you and
and david hiker i know david he probably didn't i've met him once uh uh
back at the astronomical league convention 2012 there uh uh north of chicago
uh chicago yeah yeah yeah remember that one yeah that was a good i got i got some great pictures of you playing
in your band ah okay that's awesome
you and michael yeah i don't know if i have any of your books i got your your your
your cohort and crime up there i i got um i got this one
mr buckets yeah mr rocket yeah i i i'll be able to talk about it soon but
michael and i are actually writing a book together now cool over the next few months here
michael came in and uh spoke at our 50th anniversary of i'm also heavily involved with omaha islamic
society too yeah and he came i think that was was that the same year in 2012 i think it was yeah
um he came and gave a great talk on the history of amateur strong man
and we surely enjoyed him too but he is a good guy and he he and holly just retired you know to
tucson yeah so blazing a trail that others of us uh hope to follow yeah from wisconsin
here and talk about your magazine i i've been a total lifelong subscriber of
sky and tell but i also have gotten you guys's astronomy magazine i think down
somewhere in my basement i have every issue of astronomy including the very first one
at least 1990 yeah that those early issues are
rarities now oh i i got them i got the the very i don't i i'm not missing one from the wow
one and was it 19. august 1973. 73 yeah august 1973 uh
i have at least probably 20 years of those wow much to my wife's sugar into having all
those magazines but they're fun they're fun to go back and thumb through and it's you know
great great time and and then like you guys are talking outreach i tell you i i live for outreach and
these last oh you know six eight months it's been tough on me i because i just
yeah it's part of what you know talk about this spark that drives you and that was uh that's one that drives me and i get
i get downright depressed if i don't get a chance to do that yeah and because we typically around omaha here
in the fall we typically uh do outreach for school groups and
we'll we'll go out and see 15 to 1800 kids over the season yeah none of that this past year so we
really miss it right right let's hope we can get things back on an even keel here
right well we're doing outreach right now and uh yeah that's this is good i look alerted
some of my uh fellow oas members so maybe they're watching i hope so i hope so but uh anyway more
to follow on the straw party and and uh scott i'll be back down there at some point
yeah i enjoy you guys when you come down so that's great oh yeah that's great um you know there's
been some talk tonight too of this uh close conjunction i guess of mars and the pleiades uh
what are the details on that does anyone know i mean is has been a long time since it's been this
this close i hear science i'm not tracking that at
all hi molly oh hi hi
i'll take a quick look at the uh planetarium program here yeah i think so it's i think this is a uh someone mentioned
that it's been a long time since this has uh been this good i have to say we did have a unannounced
uh event for the saturn jupiter conjunction there on the 21st of
december it was we didn't figure we'd better advertise it and we set up in a local park
even without any advertisement we had 60 70 people show up oh that's awesome we all kept our mass
on and kept our distance so it was great nobody had any issues book davey says tonight
is mars and platy's closest meeting until the year 2038. so there you go so it should be a
beautiful sight um okay all right uh
we are uh thank you very much john for coming on and um uh we will go to
libby and the stars and then we're gonna we're going to um wrap up this first segment with terry
mann from the astronomical league and then come back on after about a 10-minute break so libby you're on well
it is now march and i have been reminded very many times that is now women's
month and uh it's nice to look back at nasa like all those years ago
when there weren't many women workers there at nasa doing astronomy and
now looking at nasa if you like look at nasa videos there's millions
and uh i i made a presentation today on one of the most important and strong not
astronomers but uh nasa workers um katherine johnson
who saved the apollo astronauts and apollo 13. and i made a presentation
that i want to share right here it is i like making presentations
it's funny when i'm doing school once i accidentally put living the stars sometimes and my teachers are like what
that's good um but here's a capsule uh so catherine johnson's one of the most
important nasa workers um it's nice to look back like
a long time ago and it's just history has changed and uh i feel like
a lot of uh nasa workers it's just a whole range of people all over the world
doing space science and um i think catherine johnson is one of the
people who changed it i also wanted to talk a little bit about apollo 13 because
she catherine johnson saved the astronauts and apollo 13. um so here's catherine
johnson and um she is mostly known in nasa for
um for saving the astronauts when their oxygen tank
exploded now imagine you're in space and you're just sitting there
and you're like oh snap my occident tank just split that is like most
astronauts don't think they would like make it at all or you know be able to make it out alive
like honestly it's scary even just going into space and being stranded up there
it's scary and and it's like real scary when it like your oxen
like glitch uh anyway it's scary when your oxygen oxygen take explodes and uh
i find it amazing that the technology back then they were able to like save the
astronauts with that technology and uh many people didn't like know
katherine johnson could you know do anything really um
fun fact nasa actually rejected her the first time she tried to get in and
then she gets a job into nasa and then suddenly she's like saving all the astronauts and serious
situations out in space and it's just amazing to think
that no one gave her a chance and now that she came into mass and she was like
working her job they didn't really give her a high job like many things that she could do at nasa
doing a lot of things for the missions and most of it was just math and
um they didn't really know she could do a lot and they gave her a bigger chance
and she took it far and she saved the astronauts so apollo 13 is one of nasa's like
most known missions um i'm happy that uh my son made it back
alive um because most astronauts when they're going into space the number one thing
that they fear is like having something to smoke or something fall off
because that can uh benefit your whole flight i mean you can't live
without oxygen and you know uh just any astronaut like anybody
not even if you're an astronaut or if you're not a astronaut anybody with your like losing
something of the uh of the spaceship even you like it's just
scary and um it was just so night like nasa they've changed like
and um i know there's many like it's a funny to think like apollo 13
is um well anyway uh i don't know what i was
about to talk about um but when i was little i got to visit a lot of space museums because my brother used to be in space
but he never really followed along with it too much and uh i would go into the space museums
and uh always be like looking at the um capsules because you
know when they come back down from space they say the capsules and um
seeing all the pieces of the capsule they're all so important and it's not really too strongly astronomy
related but we're in the age of space travel so we're gonna have to know about space
travel i mean we might be the next on the flight to the moon and the international space station
because you can you can now pay money to go up there and um you know you have to know about
nasa astronomy and you have to know about nasa history too also so we don't repeat those mistakes
again and um they made it home alive
um which i mean not one of them did but uh anyway
it's just nice for us to know our mistakes that we can go back and we know not to do that again
and i keep i feel like nasa keeps on improving oh like improving a bunch um
i know we have nasa they stopped for a while and one of my friends told me nasa
doesn't do nasa that isn't like alive anymore their companies stop and i was like no they didn't nasa
didn't stop it just stopped the space shuttle and that was like when i was first
getting into nasa history i was more into nasa history before i started studying
astronomy and um and my friend was like nasa doesn't do
like nasa doesn't have a company anymore and i was like no they don't
uh they still do they still do stuff and um i feel like anybody deserves a
chance to do space and astronomy because no one knows what she can do
and you know some kid out there like any age of sorts could have very good
math skills and nasa was like okay do you want to work for us and i just give them a job that doesn't
do anything they can do amazing things i feel everyone deserves a chance no matter who they are and
they just deserve a chance to learn and have an education of space and astronomy
so definitely that um here's some fun facts uh oxygen
tank exploded 56 hours into the flight which is a couple days long the moon
mission to go to the moon is like eight days long so it wasn't too far in so
i mean they weren't really expecting it to explode i mean no astronaut would expect it to
explode and um i feel like nasa was kind of showing the whole world
and then nasa was like honestly for america but i feel like it's worldwide now um
anyway back then they were showing them like we tried to go to the moon but we failed
so we're not there yet but we're gonna keep on improving until we get there to the point where we can go to the moon
where we like put the first man on the moon and um they have many health problems on
the way back home um at space camp i got to experience a simulator if you were
coming back into earth and you like when you were coming back into earth and i remember
everybody was like so sick after it in my crew and my team so many of them
actually had to leave space camp because they threw up from the simulator
of coming back into earth's atmosphere and um i just thought that was crazy i mean i
didn't even go into space and i'm sick from doing a simulator and um catherine johnson
yeah i said that she got rejected yeah everyone deserves a chance in astronomy
um she graduated from college at the age of 18 which is a very young age to graduate
at college um most people graduate in the early 20s and someone graduating
at 18 not many people actually have jobs at 18
and she's going to graduate at 18 and like uh astronomy and space
and math which is pretty crazy um i know a lot of people in school
they can do a lot more but school does not move them up a grade but um it just takes a lot of skill and
knowledge to graduate at 18. i mean even if you tried or you i couldn't even graduate at my age
that would be like crazy i'd be like super smart but um i feel like everyone deserves a
chance whether who you are you deserve a chance to learn astronomy um it doesn't take a lot to
learn astronomy you just not even like just a library card just read books at your library
about space and um it's national women's month so
definitely i feel girls should get a chance to learn astronomy and they should give
a chance to learn in any any subject absolutely yes math whatever subject
they want because they have the right as everyone else to learn whatever they want
and i know a lot of uh when uh space quotes one of the most
famous quotes not even just in space in general is just houston we have a problem now
this is definitely edited um the pr when the uh the quote
is like more so the quote we say today is houston we have a problem
um the quote they said is houston we had a problem which was a little bit different but uh
i never knew where the quote came from i just thought it was a nasa tagline that they just added into
just added in in case they had a problem but i think that uh i think the apollo 13
astronauts um many of the astronauts on board had lots of
um i think one of them have been had like a bunch of experience and going
in space and one of them didn't and you know you i mean imagine going to space in the
first time and your oxygen tank explodes that's going to be scary but uh and also if you've been like doing
space for a long time and you get on board and oxygen tank breaks
that would also be a huge problem too because you won't be expecting that you know you'll only be expecting the
same mission you ever had before and your first time like being on a spaceship
i've never been on a spaceship before i'm only 11. i haven't been on the spaceship
but um it's just i've been on simulators but uh anyway the first time i was scared and
one of my friends she'd been probably coming to space camp for like two years
and she was like so excited to get on and i was scared to death and i got on
and i loved it um but i feel like most the full like
the full like quote of everything of this uh talk that i wanted to get through is
that everyone should have education girl boy age whatever where you're from no one cares
you need an education um whatever science or whatever subject
field you want you can have education of anything you
like dream of anybody's dream job you can be whatever when i was in preschool i wanted to be a
cat and no one stopped me um i still believed i could be a cat
you know you can't be a cat but anyway i wanted to be um i wanted to work for nasa
and many people were like you can't work for nasa and nasa stopped but my friend
was wrong and um i feel like i've
like i like i like when i see kids my age i always get
like to get through that you can have education whatever you want you know it may change
your edu whatever you want to do in life may change a couple years later
but but you can enjoy what you want to do now and uh keep on looking up
at the stars no matter who you are keep on looking at whatever science subject field you want
whatever job you want there's always people there to support you
and whatever job subject anything um heck i wanted to be a cat just
anything you can be whatever you want libby thank
you so much thank you thank you for that inspiring talk um
you know uh catherine um
katherine johnson is so wonderful that we're learning about her life
at this time it should have been celebrated decades ago but you know she has been recognized uh
in many different ways and uh there's a i think there's like a nasa computational facility named after her
right now and um what an amazing woman you know so uh and an inspiration to
women and girls all over the world uh because uh definitely definitely she faced uh uh hardship and
opposition uh with such a brilliant mind and
you know people like her uh i'm sure she worked with a whole crew of people that got the
astronauts back but she deserves a lot of credit so thanks
for bringing that up tonight uh libby and um you know we all i personally think that we're
looking at a future space explorer right now uh in you and um you know so
uh keep following your path that's going to be awesome and yes you will get a lot of support
you will all right i think what we're going to do right now is we're going to transition
uh richard grace has a live view through his telescope we're
going to do that and then we're going to go straight to terry mann from the astronomical league and do door prizes door price questions
and um and then we're going to take a 10 minute break so here we go
all right here give me one second let's share the screen
first uh tonight this is the uh the setup that we're working with we've been uh trying to get everything
uh set up and uh tuned in and did a little bit of uh of uh primary mirror alignment tonight
before the uh the show here and uh changed out some uh filters we're using the
um the obs along l enhanced tonight because it's a little better with some moonlight with it should be coming up in
about an hour uh over here on the east coast and with that so far we've managed to get this from
the nebula beautiful see if i can't make it a little bigger for everybody
there we go yeah ryan won't be around too much uh
longer uh you know you got to get it uh it's almost going down now so uh
figure get it uh get it while the getting is good and use the uh the nebula filter i usually like to transition around between galaxies
nebulas and all that stuff but uh tonight uh just threw in the uh the allen hands uh figure i'll be doing
nothing but uh but nebula tonight and uh getting as much as i could and i started
off on the rosette real fast and then i hit the meridian flip and i figured well i got to jump across the meridian a little bit anyway so i went over to
orion and after this i'll probably go back to the rosette right with that i will stop sharing and
you guys can get on the show the orion nebula has been something that's fascinated astronomers for
for uh a long time uh you know i i i like the uh uh the fact that
uh it's one of the first uh i think it was the first nebula i ever photographed uh uh henry draper photographed it on a
on a a new dry plate okay they were using wet plates before that but uh
this is uh september 30th 1880 we should probably have some sort of big celebration on an orion nebula photography night
on september 30th but uh now i'd like to turn our attention to terry mann terry
thank you for uh joining us tonight um and uh um you have uh
questions from uh the last global star party we did
yes i do and the winners and uh um and some new questions so okay
well thank you scott it's a pleasure to be here uh first let me start with our warning
that whenever you look at the sun please make sure you have the pro appropriate filters you can do a
lot of damage to your eyes if you don't so this is question one from the last star party
standing on the surface of what rocky body of the solar system would a person weigh
the most in other words of the rocky bodies which one has the greatest surface gravity and the
answer is earth and israel montesoro uh was the winner of that all right
question two was neptune is always the seventh most distant major planet from earth
what is the eighth most distant major planet and it says some people would say this
is a trick question but it's not you just need to think outside the box of course
you need to first think of what the box is so the answer is planets orbiting
proxima centauri and again israel montessoro
question three the astronomical league offers up to 10 youth awards each year and thank you to
explore scientific for your sponsorship of the national young astronomer award
and thank you to the horkheimer charitable fund for your relay your sponsorship of the
youth service imaging and the journalism awards so the question is
on most years what is the deadline for the award nominations and the answer is march 1st and richard
grace has won that all right richard [Laughter]
great for tonight's questions a moon in the solar system bears
the name of a condition manifesting itself by the inability to retrieve a word
from memory when needed what world does this moon orbit
okay so we are going to have you email your questions in to explore alliance at
explorescientific.com you don't answer them in chat you answer them in email and uh and then we announce winners on
the next global star party okay and question number two
this galaxy which lies 32 billion light years away today is the furthest
galaxy ever imaged what is its name
aridness the river was one of 48 constellations that ptolemy
identified in the second century aridness was also taken as a latin name
for what real river on earth
great questions great questions okay so you're going to want to send in your answers to explore alliance at explore
scientific um there will be uh
in all fairness because of the difference in our our simulcasting
you know there's a few seconds delay between simulcasts um we
uh take all the people to answer the question right and then they are they are picked at
random uh and then that's that's how you win so a little little bit of luck is
involved uh but also you have to be uh you have to answer the question correctly so thank you terry
terry before you uh before we go to break can you tell us a little bit for people who don't know about the
astronomical league what it's all about why you should join and and where did they go to join
okay thanks scott uh the astronomical league is really an umbrella organization of astronomy clubs
both here in the u.s and we are growing our international clubs too
what we do we have if you as you have heard a lot of observed programs that is one of the strong things that
the league really has along with awards many many other things a lot of
information if you're learning astronomy or an expert in astronomy our observed
clubs are just amazing we have roughly i think over 300 clubs
right now over 18 000 members at this point we have a national conference every year
usually in july or august and this year you know we're gonna wait and see how things are looking
uh for what we will do and that's a great way to meet everybody and to talk to everyone
and to join you can go to astroleague.org and there's a lot of information there
but i will say we are updating our website right now so please forgive us for any the dead
links anything going on we are definitely doing an overhaul there and it might take us a couple
months but we will get everything all back together but you can always uh go to the contact pages if you need
to know anything and it's not there and contact any one of us wonderful that's great well thank you
scott thank you terry thanks for coming on to the program tonight well now we're going to uh take a short
10-minute break uh we'll come back with more speakers more astronomy uh more global star party and so we'll
see in a few
hi terry hey how are you doing okay how about you pretty good
we finally got some clear skies here tonight oh nice yeah definitely yeah i've had uh
not to brag but i've had 10 10 10 consecutive nights of clear skies oh
be gentle ouch whatever it's cloudy tonight so
yeah it's gonna be cloudy and rainy as the moon is going away you know yeah yeah we're sitting at
about 32 degrees right now so it's it's a lot last night i was out
last night and uh with the windchill was 18. that yeah it's kind of chilly but it's
better than it has been you know than it was there for a while so hopefully now we're going to start
warming up and get a few clear nights now nice yeah it's been uh in daytime highs
of the 60s here so you just have to keep hurting don't you
clear that and we hit 80 we hit 80 a couple days uh last week it was it was a real yeah i
like like uh i had to put on sunscreen when i went to outdoor church on sunday because i
burned the sunday prior
i really feel bad for you yeah we all do yeah i can hear that sarcasm dripping
i took a quick break and when you because i had to get out and take a look there and and uh mars and the pleiades yeah that's really
cool i just grabbed my binoculars and took a look at that tonight tonight i was just out not more than 10
minutes ago and looked at it yeah okay yeah i'm gonna have to do that too
okay terry real quick uh did you mention something about all con what's
the status uh now that we're kind of just being among friends here i'll tell you what we are going to probably announce the
status on march 12th at this point we haven't got that answer just yet okay all right because i was uh chatting
earlier today with peggy walker and she didn't know either side yeah i think it will either be virtual
or live or both there will be uh my understanding at this point is there will be an outcome
of one form or another okay okay very good thanks sure
molly i forgot where are you where are you located i'm in uh san francisco bay area
central bay area yeah yeah we have their friends that live in fremont okay yeah i was in the navy with uh the
guy you know okay okay yeah it's uh um up here a little north
of berkeley um we don't really get that fog that settles in over san francisco so we're
down there yeah uh yeah occasionally like some mornings in the fall we'll have a little fog but
um really not not a whole lot so we get a lot of clear nights here i finally
went and did a tally and over the last um about 18 months
that i've lived here i've had 250 clear nights that's amazing
i would have never thought that out there yeah it's incredible i love it um yeah
it's so great so you're ready to move back to dayton right totally yeah i hear ya
you ought to have a good view of the total lunar eclipse on may 26th then it's on my calendar i will it was online
yeah it's it's really late it's like after midnight isn't that right yes i'm just gonna um
uh well see it's a little it's it's a little hard to program because the short
exposure times um let's see what i what could i do i'm gonna find some way to program it in
advance i'm sure you will a multitude of exposures and then go to bed
and just just have the exposures run and i'll go through them in the morning and pick out the ones with the good times and stuff like that
so yeah yeah here it's such a small partial and it's actually happening very close
to sunrise um yeah here we're gonna have next next to nothing we'll have something a
little bit but uh not a whole lot i'd rather be out where you're at yeah well i think there's another one
later in the year isn't there yeah i think in november i think yeah it's uh let's see i think i put it
on my calendar too um yeah november 18th but i don't
remember how uh what part uh like i think i think we're getting some of it but i don't remember if it's mostly over the u.s or
mostly over the ocean so i have to go i was thinking we're gonna
have some of it but not not the whole thing it'll be a partial well i think yeah and i think i think
it's earlier in the evening though yeah i think so too yeah november
definitely 2021. [Music] let's see yeah time and date's like my
favorite website for looking at these things um actually uh the umbra's gonna cover
the whole us it looks like it's gonna be
a widely visible eclipse and it's still okay it's actually it's technically penumbral
but it's deep yeah um let's see when does this happen molly november
18th oh um yeah and it's here it starts at uh
10 p.m so a little earlier um so you guys should probably get some
of it and because it looks like uh it'll be over over most of the us yeah actually like pretty
much the whole us uh here i'll put the link in chat can you look at it
i think some of you that wanted to join the um the after party
did not get the link so i'm going to put that back in
i've got a bit of a backlog of deep sky data i've been slowly working my way through
waiting for a simulation to run or or in the evenings or when i don't feel like working anymore
i've uh i've i'm almost ready for my first data set with the with my new opt-along l enhance
or lx stream filter sorry um and i i've got a data set on the rosette
nebula on my takahashi that i'm very excited to to process
with that filter so that'll be fun molly i just got the lx stream myself i haven't tried i tried it the other night
but like i said it's been so cloudy here um i didn't have enough to do anything with i'm hoping over the next week to
start working with it are you impressed um i wouldn't say that i'm i'm really wowed by the subframes but
uh that's just because my standard of reference is you know a three nanometer wide hydrogen
alpha filter on my monochrome camera you know you're just not going to be able to beat that um the contrast seems kind of low but i
think it's largely because on the color and color cameras um have less transmission
so that the the signal to noise ratio is lower than um like hydrogen alpha through a very
narrow filter on my monochrome camera but yeah um i think the real story will be told when
i go to stack it and then i can get a proper look definitely um yeah i'll be uh
um i might write up something about it as well uh in various places uh my blog and maybe
uh probably also for astroger today or something like that um and uh yes i'm excited to see
what comes out of that and i'm also imaging some some dimmer and more difficult targets to get from here as well like jones emerson one
i can just barely see it in the subframes so uh but if i get i've been sitting
i've been getting in the habit of sitting on targets for a couple of hundred subframes uh yeah which ends up being
anywhere between 12 and and 20 hours depending on how many have good tracking um and uh
so i might i might be able to pull it out which would be really exciting because i tried it with um broadband filters on my monochrome
camera couldn't get it i don't think i've re-attempted it on my monochrome camera since i've gotten my
super narrow band filters yet yeah back on my on my imaging list
uh but yeah so i'm doing a several narrow band targets on the on the color camera with the lx stream right now uh
because of the moonlight and stuff like that um and i think i'm probably just going to end up converting over to doing
exclusively narrow band mostly from here because i just haven't been i've been in love
with the results i've been getting wide band and that's because i live in a portal 7 zone so that's what i was going to ask you're a
bortles seven i think mine my yard is like bordeaux four so yeah i'm hoping
well we're all back here um we have a couple of guests uh that are uh are
all the way from buenos aires uh argentina cesar brawler and his son augustine is that correct
yeah right that's right yeah great great so cesar this is your son i'm going to let you
introduce him
could you hear me caesar yes no yes yes yes okay yes i would like for you to
introduce your son for his for his talk yes
yes uh sorry that i i'm moving my mom my equatorial moon and
my camera trying to talk to to take some pictures of orion and okay today i have
pictures of orion yes uh not not near to the building like last
week if not i i had my my uh
[Music] i had the they
they care to take pictures uh earlier uh to to
to have pictures in a clear sky introducing my my son our team uh of course that he
uh he starts to go uh with the family to start paris very early like a baby of course
in the his uh first sister party was in atlanta georgia um
i i have a i have a picture to show to to david aker with the the sign of
astronomy magazine in the in the in the entrance of of the cerbari i i
have in my my arms to augustine with
two two years and half years old a baby yes is i know that is
embarrassing for him but it's good though yes yes you embarrass
your children on the air on yeah broadcasters i know sorry parents are good for isn't it
okay so don't worry yes yes fortunately for i will still we don't found this
picture in my house and um and well and he's
really he um is all-time helping to our customers when
our customers start to photography normally they have more problems with
processing [Music] normally
we we give the content of agustin and how to people from all
ages especially people that from our ages and more
and more of people that sometimes don't have all the all contact with the computers
and all about guiding connecting with the pc photo processing
and he he is very helping to to know to how to the people to
to go ahead with their pictures of the sky and in our surprise he is the
dj but it's a it's a really a rare type of dj because he's working
on time with the telescope computer and and giving all time pictures
alive uh with the to the albums or to the audience uh because he
but maybe from his uh 15 years old and actually he had
well i i don't embarrassing him more and i prefer that he start to talk processing
pictures you know sure and [Music]
and yes yes i know i think that this he know more than me about processing
and i i give him pictures from orion took with the
camera and the equator mount and he and he have
another another pictures uh from neta karina well he's he he can start to talk
about the processing and
what all that that he is doing with this wonderful
all right augustine stage is yours well hey well thanks for having me uh
well my name is augustin as he said i'm 24 years old and
yeah we could say i'm i'm a amateur at this i i would never say that i actually know
how to do stuff but i am always keen to search
stuff in youtube and learn and use the programs we we we all talk about
in this case um i've been i've been trying to learn more in depth
picks inside which is the most popular and user friendly i could say
so yeah um i think you the message you sent to my dad was i
talk about the whys of uh calibration frames
why do we need calibration frames right yes yeah how do you use calibration frames and image
processing why do you need them yeah well why do we need them yeah yeah
yeah okay so there's there we start with a problem here
i mean it's it's not a real problem but it's a more like a static problem in the first
place it will turn into a professional obstacle
but in the first places uh the the most popular thing is here is noise noise
is um it's data that we don't need in our photos and
will actually uh in a professional uh
investigation it will ruin the data you will investigate in this case uh star
brightness values right and background values also so
to remove that noise uh here comes the first and most common type of
calibration frames which is the dark frame what is a dark
frame like why why so what you do to take this calibration
frame which is a normal photo just that you you do it in a kind of different way
because you have to cover up your telescope what you do is um
grab the same parameters the which you use for the light frames which are the
the the normal images you you just took about the the the the object it could be
any any object it could be i know nebula galaxy anything well
when you're the when you're done with all the of the imaging when you already took the
the all the lights with all the the the color filters and everything then it's time to do the the calibration
frame uh preparation so the darks you take the same parameters
iso and exposure time you you copy everything but the only
difference is you put the lead on your telescope you just you just close it so that's when the
dark world comes in in use dark frame same same photo but with the telescope
cover that will actually only uh
uh save the the voltage of the of each
pixels because how how do you gain information in your sensor which is
right right as well right for you to have a color or a brightness in a pixel you
need voltage because it's a photosensitive capacitor right so that's how the camera works
for the camera to be turned on it needs electricity so uh it in
a ideal in a ideal world the camera when it's not taking a photo
when when a photon doesn't rebound in a pixel
the ideal thing will be that the pixel will be black but it doesn't
so the thing is that we you will have pixels that will start at a value
higher than zero and that's when the the noise comes you will see a
photo with a background and you will see that there are like little little clouds with red green and
blue colors and you are like why like really why and for take for taking to
taking that out you need these dark frames which are the the the noise the extra noise your
sensor generates then comes the
the bias frames the bias frames or offset it's something that it
looks a lot like the dark frames but instead of having the same exposure
time right instead of recompiling all the the noise from the from the same
exposure time what you do is using the shortest amount of exposure time possible that your
camera gives you it can be the the ccd or a reflex camera
it's the same you just go to the the shortest time possible right if in my case the shortest one is
uh one over four thousand so uh yeah that's a really fast photo
so this what it does there's something something called banding right
that is this the same idea the same concept as the dark frames but in a very short
motion so the electricity goes in in horizontal arrays it goes from
let's say left to right then goes down that left right goes on so this this uh electricity is not
like a very average it's not distributed perfectly
sometimes in in the photo in in the middle you can have some higher voltage that will uh
light the the pixels more than the other ones so here comes the word banding you will
see literally lines of light up pixels in your photo and this is what
the the the offset or vias frame does it will take one one uh
one refresh of the sensor to take in account okay one one refresh
you will have this type of energy going in into the pixels right and you will see
some lines all red blue and green and that's what now you know that uh
there's some that extra extra noise even adding on the of the dark
so you have the the dark gives you all the noise in in the period of
time of the whole exposure time plus the error between quotes the error of
the the banding right so that's noise related that's all noise related
the whole exposure and the the fast uh refresh of the sensor noise
and then comes the last one which is the flat frame
the flat frame it's something that it i think it will it was uh
it's more people don't use it but is the one that people
should use more because um
it's more it's a more common problem that you wouldn't think of
why let's let's uh remember we are using a telescope
which is round on a sensor that is rectangular so
like it's impossible to have a even lightning on the sensor right so
like you're gonna go process a photo you're gonna stretch the the the pixel
information and you will see that there's a circle of light and then
you have some vignetting in the corners i can't i can't process that obviously you're
losing information right so yeah here is when the flat frame
comes and what you do is grab your telescope slash uh lens
if you're photographing with a camera lens it is a small zoom or whatever you're using
just cover cover the the the the side where the light comes
in cover it up with a a white t-shirt and try to get a
even illumination with any exposure time it doesn't matter just what you could do is respect the iso
this time you can take the flat frame and
use a whatever exposure time you want that will give you the the the right
even uh white image you you it doesn't have to be too dark and
or right it has to be in the middle that will that will show you like the
perfect point is you can see the vignetting like
when you can see the vignetting that's the perfect uh point the perfect exposure time right
so yeah what the program does is it literally just takes your takes your flat after do the
doing all the calibration and registration takes your flat and divides the pixel information of the
flat divides it uh with the light frame and the result is
a more even rectangular image which it will still be
kind of not perfect but i mean it really helps because
having a circle image with the the center object and then beam it in the borders against
having a visible stars in the borders which is really cool because
you can you you will not have to crop the image you will you have to crop less and also
um besides the the cosmetic thing
if when you're processing and when you're doing background extraction or whatever or of
the the first process you do when when you're doing that process in a very
high vignette image it will take in account that uh bad information and it will
do a bad process so if you do the the flats correctly you will have
a better analysis of the algorithm a better result
so yeah that's that's the the the main reason why we we use uh
calibration frames because it's it's not perfect just how it comes out from the camera
and if you are going to do a investigation slash just a hobby from
your house it's either the cosmetic or the
scientific yeah someone is raising hand armando uh uh i've got a question for
you uh regarding calibration frames yeah when it comes to calibration frames would is it beneficial to use dithering
so if you have you know the individual pixels if if you have a you're bound to have a
defect where a pixel is receiving more energy than another just from
the the back lighting what what have you on under the cmos is it beneficial to use
dithering on a camera for calibration photos from from literally my perspective
i've seen really little like really little improvements
like those are i they're those are the things that give you like
little um differences people use it and there are people that don't
the thing is when you use it and you see that your image is more
accurate uh taking in account a reference image let's say i don't know
the hubble or someone with a better equipment
if they use for example this is the problem with algorithms of
integration like there are people that use sigma clipping when uh adding one frame to another and they
say oh you know if you're using more than 30 you you should use windsorized
i've used both in both scenarios with a small amount with a high amount
the only thing like the only thing that really gives you a um difference is when you use
the what is this called the the the process that multiplies the
information of the photo that makes it a bigger crystal yeah drizzle yeah
in in my experience the only thing that actually gives you a better um gives the algorithm a better
compre comprehension about the the information in the image is the drizzle of the
uh during the process the the multiplication of the information but um i've never used
i didn't use different that much to know that little difference if it's actually
useful so um the during helps a lot with color cameras because you get this walking
noise that can make these diagonal streaks in the background but as far as dithering on calibration
frames it's not going to make any difference whatsoever because you're not registering those frames
so even if you move your telescope around that hot pixel is going to be in the same spot every time
plus you want that hot pixel to to be in your dark frame for example because then it will get
subtracted which is what you want yeah um so there's no use in in dithering your calibration
frames but uh there's absolutely use for dithering your your light frames
uh especially if you have a color camera and especially if you're seeing that diagonal kind of uh weird streaky noise in the
background of your images thank you molly i appreciate that i i am using a color camera i'm using an asi
183 mc pro cool so thank you i finally started dithering with my 294
from zwo and it's it's made a huge difference in the amount of background noise in my images surprisingly
maybe i didn't see a difference because i was using the the hot pixel removal so that's why that's why i didn't
maybe yeah with with a deep sky sucker because i i wasn't using uh the batch pre-processing with peaks
inside i started using like very short time ago because it's very
uh it's a very um it asks you for very perfect images
which i don't have so every single uh ellipse every single star that looks like an
ellipse it will reshape that image so that's why i use deep sky stacker
for stacking and then picks inside for like the magic of processing but
yeah that's why i didn't see the actual result the difference of the difference but yeah that's one of
those things that when you're first getting started out you don't really need to pay attention to so much because it's
it's you have higher you you have um uh lower orders of of other issues to
deal with first uh but then once you once your tracking is good enough and your guiding is good
enough uh then you can start looking at the second order issues uh like like dithering and stuff like that
um yeah the specifics of the yeah yeah yeah so it's like it's like a second order
uh thing to look at as opposed to a first order like just getting started in astrophotography
uh kind of a thing to look at if that makes sense yeah right the like the specifics tiers like the
tier one okay you just have a a photo that
you can notice that that's a start and not a plane going in the in the photo
because yeah i mean if you if you have the i know you know backlash or like uh just
a bad polar alignment and or an error in the phd you will have like a big
line that you will this is these are not stars clearly but yeah uh that's that was very helpful
when i when i move from deep sky stagger to
fix inside a light stacking i will take that in account so i wanted to show
the difference between uh how how calibration images look just to to give an idea of
uh what which kind of information each uh frame uh has
the difference between a dark frame a flat frame and a bias frame okay so you so you can see uh
the the error types of the of the camera
i think i will have to do some stacking really fast maybe okay
okay no here i have a master bias and a master dark
i'm gonna show screen in a moment okay go ahead
you can see it right yes okay i'm gonna remove the reflections
okay so this is the master dark i'm gonna it does make it bigger
and i'm gonna stretch it okay so you guys can see the the the error i mean how the
information i think
okay here okay this is more like an even noise
but you can actually see some some grid happening yes
but yeah it's it's main mainly and even noise on the sensor you don't have any actual
patterns you know one of one of the confusions
that i dealt with when it come when it came to calibration frames i thought
you know coming from a very deep photography background into astrophotography i figured that dark
frames and bias frames and flat frames were similar to stacking images and
photography where you're doing looking for high dynamic range and that's not what we're what we're doing
yeah i know right yeah it's it's like a
when you're like an amateur like me it it's like a cosmetic thing but then you realize that it has an
actual impact on your processing and then in the next level on your
investigation because it will actually ruin
your uh your data because there are programs that you just throw the the
image in the the the teeth format and you just throw it in
and then the the the program whatever it is if you are using a
photometric a i don't know you're you're gonna see a star values
for a known nova maybe you will have a non-accurate
star value so yeah that's the main uh the main use so
here's the dark and the bs right here
i'm gonna do a stretch well actually this is in this is not
showing the banding i wanted yeah i i can't really see it
maybe maybe this was a maybe the camera is actually not having
real banding it can be easier to see if you run the super bias process on this yeah on that master
uh bias run the super bias process on that
it's under processes oh i've never used it slipper bias yeah all
the way over on the right oh here right yeah uh you need to have the image open yeah i close it um here
what super bias does is it um let's say you took 20 bias frames and you and you stacked
them um it it does some averaging and i don't know exactly what other math but
it turns it into essentially like having uh a hundred or a thousand bias frames
it smooths out all of the random noise wow oh okay nice so it does
it does a multiplication and then a medium from that um from what i can see here
multi-scale layers the layering is is for detecting the the the scale of the um of the noise
that's present yeah so there's your banding and if you hit the the 24 bit um if you go over to your upper right um
where it says the picture of the computer screen with the 24 um and turn on the that's 24-bit display
on your super bias frame oh now you should close the other one uh leave it open and then hit that yeah
button no no you're super biased frame that you had open that one um hit the 24. oh
oh i thought i had to redo it oh no what that's doing it's displaying it in a higher bit depth
uh so that you can you can see look at that so now you can really see
it there's your banding yeah it also has like
strange noise uh like uh going horizontally as well yeah that um it maybe it may be fixed
pattern or it may be um variations that are artifacts of of
the um stacking and yeah maybe that's that's for four seconds right that's right i keep
seeing that kind of thing in mind too yeah i'm not i'm not entirely sure whether
it's an artifact or whether that's fixed pattern noise um but uh it's you can see how low of a
level it is and how unlikely it is for it to ever actually show up in your in your light frames
but um yeah there's some debate as to whether bias frames
help or hinder with cmos cameras uh i found that it worked all right on
my dslr but uh caused problems on my astro cameras
um so if if you're using biases and you're getting really weird stuff in your light frames then skip using the
biases and just use darks and flats arcs and flats now do you do
um will you take lots of flats and lots of darks and make
like a master flat or a master of dark uh yeah i will use a a master dark
i mean a master everything okay or when you when you have the same iso for
when you have the same iso uh pixel side let's see lets you combine
the x isf with the [Music] with the with the uh
initial format of the of the photo because it it converts it to the pixel inside format and then uses
the the extension that they use i see which
doesn't work with uh dipsky stacker i think because with this skype stacker it
turns it into a teeth but it won't combine the teeth with the main
photo as the pixel side does that it will first convert to teeth in this case
and then combined with the master you selected that's i don't know some programmer
laziness maybe i don't know i mean it's already a very good program
but those details you know it is it is free software so yeah limitations well maybe when i
i'm i'm better at programming i can suggest some i don't know some plugin or some
some lines of code and and do that well i asked to have
have this conversation about these uh calibration frames a lot of times uh when you see uh
image processing be done on at least on my show uh they will say yes i remove the you
know i subtracted the darks and divided the flats and and i used you know i did this and that
and they kind of like gloss over it okay because it's not the real exciting
image you know they're they're trying to get to the juice of uh showing this amazing beautiful shot that
they did yeah you know but you can't get there without really doing this stuff you can't forget
about the the four hours of processing that this takes yeah yeah yeah i say low number kind of low number
these are these are some of the really you know uh foundational
uh things that you need to learn how to do to make a an exceptional image you know and also
to do science imaging you need you need to do this so um so anyhow augustine thank you so much
oh i was going to show i was going to i wanted to show a fast uh flat frame okay so you can you
can guys see because i didn't have one i'm gonna i'm starting what is the difference between a fast flat frame and oh no no no no
no not if i wanted to show it fast oh okay okay yeah yeah my bad got it
okay i wanna i'm gonna say do i i'm gonna do it is fast stacking here with five photos okay so i can get the
the master flat i see i am not doing it with pixel inside because i haven't
well yeah i could have done it with the image integration my bad but yeah i want to show it
because from the flat frame you can
gather some information which is maybe counter intuitive there's a way
looking at the at the flat frame which is a very specific case but you can tell if
your equipment is aligned like maybe your camera is like a very
small amount of degrees non-aligned with the telescope and that
will show in the flat frame you will see that the vignette is
has like an offset to a side which is really interesting it's a really specific problem and a
non-common problem but if you ever find that you will know
what that means right right
okay i'm opening the the master flat now
[Music] um
where is it
okay i'm gonna do it here real fast
image integration where is it here
wait can i hide this i can't hide oh nevermind
so pixel rejection nothing okay average
no normalization don't care
this is the flats that i took a few minutes ago yes
this is the the newest class
doing the magic
okay here this is what i wanted you to see as you can see here it's very
prominent the vignette in the corners and there are some
[Music] dust speckles in the sensor
i don't know if you can see them but up here there's a darker sector
yeah with the with the compression i don't think you will be able to see it but i can see some some big dust
of structures in the center up here in the in the upper right corner it's very
very different from the other pixels but there's a common one
it's a it's a song from the assume from the
the 80s oh yeah it's a it's a cheaper zoom for for
35 millimeters and a logic cameras using you know and
they have they have the problem of vitamin c
okay yeah it's a 100 to 300 millimeters i think and it has a
it's a it's for full frame but yeah right that was the idea to see the vignetting yeah so yeah this is the
this is what you should use more than biases instead of the specific uh banding which
is which doesn't really show up because when you're doing no noise reduction in the image before
stretching you're kind of already uh lowering that bonding with all the
noise reduction so it's a bit less important and i will use it as a third option
like the main the main preoccupation will be darks and flats yeah then if you have a real
strong noise bs like a strong result but yeah that's it
that's the having terrible eyesight right now but
it were the were the white dots were those the dust uh uh um
no no talking about it were those hot pixels uh they they can be
but the thing is i just did a really fast and i didn't check the actual uh good algorithms for flat frames
so that could be just a an error in the in the algorithm and this in the stacking
okay thanks you can see them sometimes i've got a question for you
when it comes to capturing data as accurately as possible is there a calculator that will uh
online or an app that will allow a astrophotographer to
get the measurement of a image so
we can overshoot the size of the sensor so we don't have the vignetting
uh no i think the the vignetting will happen every single time because of the the
geometrical figures stacking one onto another
but what what you said there's a natural calculator which is exposure time over iso and
that gives you a number and using that number you can kind of guess which golden spot is your
camera like not going higher than 800 iso or something like that like if
you're going five minutes iso 800 is the way to go or if you're
going 15 minutes don't go over i don't know 1200 or 1600
well as far as sensor size versus telescope image circle goes you can have more
vignetting if your center is too large for the image circle of your telescope um you'll always have some vignetting
but it can definitely be worse if your sensor is much larger than the image circle yeah um
i'm not aware of a calculator for it but um if you look at the spec on the camera and see what your image diagonal
your sensor diagonal is and go look at the spec on your telescope to see how big the image circle is
and also don't forget to take into account that reducers and flatteners uh change the value of
that image circle um but so if you're then you can uh you just kind of compare those two numbers
so if you have a telescope like a takahashi that has like a i don't know a monstrous image circle
like 86 millimeters or something and uh pretty much any sensor will fit on that but if you have
a much smaller and cheaper telescope that has an image circle let's say only uh 45 millimeters across you're not
going to be able to use that aside well if you use like the asi 6200 on there with its like
i don't know how that monster sensor size yeah yeah you will have more vignetting all
right um the the pic the value for the image circle on the telescope can be a little
harder to track down but a lot of folks on on the forums uh have found these values that's a good
place to work thank you very much experimentation works too if you have a couple of different scopes
or if you have a single scope with uh you know a reducer flatteners those
kinds of things that's what i've been doing is uh just playing around with all of the optical chains i have
and seeing what uh you know what the what i'm catching you know you know and
for a couple scopes i see that uh you know uh it's better off that i have a really huge sensor and a smaller frame
gives me a nice wide angle look at the sky to play with
and you know so when i crop it out i get much more of a rectangle than a square and i kind of like that
yeah i just replaced the secondary mirror in my newtonian to give myself a larger
lit spot an option for some certain types of scopes as well interesting okay guys that was really
interesting thank you um uh we are going to
molly has a special presentation she wants to give us um about the voyager spacecraft which is
like my most favorite of all spacecraft okay i love the voyager uh one and two
uh missions that are still active still working uh all the way back from the seventies
so um and now in interstellar space so that makes us and we all fell in love with percy's
combat yes
so uh we are going to we're going to spend uh jerry hubble's got the crab
nebula stacking up we're going to transition through young and see a couple of minutes of the the
crowd nebula through the mark slade remote observatory um i also want to recognize that we have
some people joining us in our after party which includes armando lee from
the philippines steve houser where are you from
hi i i uh scott and all i i'm here in the southeast corner of idaho
uh pocatello i would like to call myself the fortneth bench observatory i'm about uh right at 5200
feet great great and gary um gary alvin where where are you
tuning in from i'm down here in kendall florida a member of the uh southern cross astronomical society
wonderful thank you yeah yeah wonderful all right so uh jerry we're going to transition to you
and let's uh let's see what's happening with the crowd i'm actually not stacking these i'm i'm
just gathering data right now so these are raw one minute i'm doing one
minute frames i i typically don't do deep sky stuff this is just something that's easy to
share with everybody and how the mark slade remote observatory operates
um so do you see that now not yet oh here we go oh it's impressive
so this is a wide field i mean this is zoomed in quite a bit you can see the telescope
and the observatory on the right hand side there in the dome you can see it looking out the slit
and here's the here's the size of the frame right here huge field of view
yeah so one 1.3 by by 0.9 degree field of view basically so this is
pretty much it's probably only about three to five arc minutes across right here and these are one
minute frames and and just to talk about the marks lead remote observatory
for a minute this is uh this is our test observatory for explorer scientific where we
test our equipment and we do upgrades and and do uh i do testing on the mount system it's
a g11 mount with a pmc8 system on it and it's also got the telescope drive master
on it to control the um the level of tracking i don't
auto guide the system at all it's i find auto guiding tedious and painful and i don't like it
at all so so i i just i just like to be able to turn this
the uh telescope drive master on and it corrects the mount uh without having to no fuss you know
you know auto guiding is great as long as you have good skies and you don't have
clouds getting in the way of the guide star you know or you don't have or if you're
it's a problem if you're having less expensive mounts that have
ticks and burrs and all kinds of little defects on the gear train that cause spikes in your images that
you cannot correct with the auto guider system so that's what turned me on to the telescope drive master
10 years ago anyway this is a these are images i've got two hours of
data a little over two hours of data now um and none of these are stacked that's
an inventory no this is just a raw image okay it's just a raw image
and uh and you can see it does a good job uh i've got the focus pretty tightly
tuned it's uh the full width at half maximum is around uh two and a half
pixels which is the sweet spot for critical sampling that's one thing you want to
focus in critical sampling is two of the things that beginners kind of miss they they struggle with
focusing they don't understand how good focusing really i i would say it's 50
of a grade images focusing the other 50 is how good you're tracking or how good
you're guiding so people don't realize that focusing is that important
um so that's that's what and this system has an autofocus system on
it and this i'm showing the graph for the last time i ran it this is a v graph so it moves the focus or in and
out of in and out of focus and and measures the full width at half maximum or the half
flux diameter of the star image and then it calculates a position to put
the focuser at uh that's the sweet spot for the for the
for the current time and so that's how that works so i just wanted to share that that's
wonderful and uh yeah i'd like to give a shout out for uh for jerry hubbell too he is uh he is
an author he is actually i think the the guy that is uh responsible for the patrick moore
uh practical astronomy series and um this is one of his books i'm the editor yeah i'm the editor of
that series i springer came to me and asked me uh it was really an honor to be asked to do
that yeah yeah that's a big responsibility uh big shoes to fill with patrick moore
for sure you know so that he was the carl sagan of uh britain you know so that's uh um uh you know and
and any anyone in the uk knows who patrick moore is for sure and a lot of us in the united states do too
uh this is an incredible book for setting up a remote observatory whether it's in your
backyard or halfway around the world this is something that you need to read he also does a book on scientific
imaging which gives you a critical thinking path towards constructing any kind of astronomical imaging system
so a couple of books you definitely want to pick up from jerry um and jerry also is uh with me
live weekly uh on the open go to community program and uh if you have a
pmca system you definitely want to join up with the open go to community on groups dot i o so
um and now we'll uh we'll transition to mali and talk about my favorite uh two uh
distant spacecraft hey glad to be back on here um it's cloudy here tonight so no live
telescope views from me um but uh if you heard me during the break i've had 10 clear nights in a row
so i suppose we'll go back to the universe to have some clouds tonight right so i don't have slides excuse me
but um there's a there's a story that i came across that that i want to tell about um the
ultimate fate of the voyager spacecraft because um you know we know they're hurtling out
into space at high speed um but what's going to happen to them not just 100 years from now but
a billion years from now um what what where are they going to end up so uh
as as you know voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977 and they had those golden records
on board that contain uh the sounds of earth and and also some images inscribed into
them as well and both voyagers are now beyond the sun's st
the influence of the sun's stellar wind so they are considered to be in interstellar space
uh and and uh in in a few more years from now their radioisotope thermoelectric
generators their rtgs will no longer have enough power for them to continue to communicate with
earth but they're still going to be hurtling out into space even though they cannot they'll no
longer be able to talk to us at the at january's annual american
astronomical society meeting a phd student from a university in the netherlands site cap the capeton astronomical institute
his name is nick oberg he presented on some modeling that he did to estimate
where the voyagers might end up in the distant future i don't know if he was doing this for his his research or if he was just doing
this for fun i think he was doing it for fun uh but it's some pretty sophisticated uh
modeling that he did using the latest releases of the gaia catalog
so using using some of this recent data he simulated the gravitational interactions
between between the stars and how they'll move around and how they'll interact with the
voyager spacecraft as they travel through interstellar space so uh even though voyager 1 is traveling
at 38 000 miles per hour and voyager 2 is traveling at 35 000 miles per hour
it will still take 20 000 years for the two voyagers to pass out of the oort
cloud which is the comets and icy chunks that are orbiting the sun out at 100 000 astronomical units so
even though they're out of this did you say thirty thousand years uh uh twenty thousand years old twenty only
twenty thousand years not thirty thousand years all right because the
oort cloud goes out to a hundred thousand astronomical units uh so the distance between the earth and the sun
um and so they're still even though they're considered to be in interstellar space they're still within the gravitational
interaction of the sun so it won't be for another 20 000 years before they start to feel the
gravitational interaction of other stars in our neighborhood wow it will take
another 10 000 years after that before they fly anywhere near
another star and they'll be coasting by a red dwarf called ross 248
which is at the current day is is 10.3 light years away but it's actually more accurate to say
that ross 248 will coast by the voyagers because that star is actually traveling faster
with respect to earth than the voyagers are it's traveling at 181 000 miles per hour
oh my goodness so um by far eclipsing the the actual speeds of the voyagers so
it's almost like the voyagers are still in space and the star is going to whiz by them yeah if we look further into the future
500 million years from now both the solar system and the voyagers will have completed an
orbit of the milky way galaxy this span of time is equivalent to the
time span that it took the supercontinent of pangaea to form and then to break apart
as the earth was tectonically shifting and stuff like that to put that time scale into perspective
um and uh so that's so they're still orbiting that uh even
they're not going to be there they have enough escape velocity to escape the sun's gravitational pull
completely but they're still going to be in the in in orbit in the milky way as kind of their own
objects now in their oscillations up and down through the galactic disk
along with with our solar system and a lot of other things they'll encounter a lot of dust
particles at high speed uh a few miles per second of high speed which will slowly
chip away at the spacecraft however those golden records were designed to
last a billion years or more and we knew about that dust that's out there so the the the records are made of
copper inside of an aluminum casing inside of a layer of gold and they put the engraved
side of the record toward the spacecraft so they would be protected from all of those high-speed dust
particles so it's expected that uh an alien civilization that might
encounter one of these uh in the extremely long odds that that happens um we'll be able to still read those
records some billions of years from now now after about five billion years the
modeling starts to get tricky because the milky way and the andromeda galaxies are going to begin their collision at about
that time and it's really hard to model that because there's so many different variables
and uh the the trajectories of the stars and the gravitational interactions are going to be all over the place
so it's hard to predict but looking at things statistically
the um the collision has a one in five chance of actually
ejecting the voyagers from the milky way galaxy wow so they could go out into
intergalactic space depending on how the gravitational dynamics pan out in the collision between the two galaxies
so at the end of the day the likelihood of of each of the two voyagers passing
within 150 astronomical units which is three times the sun pluto distance
within the next five billion years is actually very likely that they'll coast by some other star
but we have no idea which star that will be because of all the craziness that's going to happen with the collision
and that star is may not even be born yet and you know could pass by a star star
still our lifetimes last from hundreds of millions of years for the really hot giant blue stars
and uh for for billions of years tens of billions of years even for the little red dwarfs so uh
there's it may pass by a star that exists now or they may pass by and they're going in two different directions so um they won't be passing
by the same star but uh the star that they do pass by may not even be born yet
we may not even be aware of its existence and uh depending on on how lucky the
voyager spacecraft are with the dust and whether or not at some point in time they
really get completely shredded just by thousands of tiny cuts they may actually
last trillions of trillions of years gliding out into the darkness after solar formation has
ended and the only light sources left in the universe are a dwindling number of white dwarfs and neutron stars
and still floating out there in the blackness may be the two messengers from earth voyager 1
and 2 gliding out there out into space so cool i love this
i really love this thank you molly that's great yeah you're welcome that's great okay all right so
um uh we have uh uh let's let's bring some of our uh
uh after party guests one of our after-party guests and then we'll switch over to cesar over in buenos aires um
uh would gary or steve do you have a um do you
have anything that you would like to uh share with the audience uh well thanks scott uh um uh hello from
idaho again uh actually all i have to share is a tale of woe uh you know we've uh i've had uh
almost 35 days with no uh well nothing but clouds
oh no clear skies at all and and and for the few hours where the clouds did break
the wind was blown 35 miles an hour and then uh uh
and then last weekend uh got a big snowstorm and i put about three feet of snow in my
backyard and on my observing platform what i the what used to be a dog kennel that i
uh you know generously call my observatory that's awesome
and uh um and and tonight it's beautifully clear i stepped out with the binoculars had a look at mars
pleiades and loved it but there's still three feet of snow on my uh observing platform and
hope not to make anybody sick but see i was ready to go all right all right everything ready to
take outside and uh just couldn't get snow cleared today um and then uh but uh it's just uh
it's a pleasure to uh to be part of this group and see what other folks are doing and uh it was great hearing what molly
had to say that was just in the first place i'm really glad that uh you know that my fears and
carl sagan's fears and gene roddenberry's fears and uh you know we're we're we're all pretty
safe from that voyager issue and uh you know i i i know they're gonna be lonely
but that's probably a good thing directions on how to get to earth
it's only going to take us a billion years to get there but we'll get there that's right now that is to to add though that uh the
star map that's on there was for this time period if it's caught a billion years from now those stars are
going to be in different places with their advanced technology could backtrack the positions
yeah and still potentially find us molly the same thing happened to me one time when i was in
bangkok okay so yeah just kidding
[Laughter] just the pleasure and you know and you
know since i retired uh 32 days ago this is my social life thank you all very awesome thank you
very much man thank you how about you gary well uh i'm just enjoying the information it's
great information augustine he gave some really really good information that i definitely can use molly very
interesting very very interesting stuff um you know i'm looking forward to hear
what's uh cesar has to offer but scott i would like to know if you
know of a reducer that works with the comet hunter which you see right above my head i do
not i do not i do not you would have to probably try uh you know try something on it i
have not you know it's a um the reducers that we build are
are for our appos okay uh and i have not to be very honest with
you i've not tried in combination with the uh uh the comment hunter it that comment
hunter's already kind of a faster scope it's an f 4.8
f ratio i mean not super fast not not what i would call a a a rich field
telescope but close you know close um but
do you have a large sensor small sensor it's actually a smaller sensor it's a
one it's a 183 uh color so it's a smaller what is a 15 mil
okay you you might be able to get away with just a uh you know a standard uh reducer maybe
for schmidt casagrain for example they have um f 6.3 focal reducers they
made 3.3 focal reducers that's kind of the direction i would go with it you know
and see what you can come up with i'd be really interested to know your results
okay well thank you i would add that uh not far off the side of the 183 sensor my first
cam is probably where you're gonna start running into dark spots um because i do live imaging i replace
my secondary mirror because i don't wanna have to correct for things on the fly but i'm sure you got a little room
for error there but uh there's always the uh the the option if you're gonna go with the full imaging and not
flipping it back and forth between eyepieces and whatnot to add a larger secondary mirror and that will give you
a little more field of view to use something like a reducer on um i've seen a couple of companies who
have done the f28 newts i believe but they start off as like f4 notes and it's just a reducer
on there but they have some pretty gigantic secondaries astro beard is is uh is it
is the comet hunter capable of changing out the secondary it's a maxitoff i just did it yeah he
did it i just did it like last week i gave him the name
i talked to terry ostohowski he sent me this beautiful box that came with the 2.6 inch quartz mirror
and uh what is it here um
3m vhb what kind of telescope is the comet hunter uh it's a maxitoff newtonian
it has a spherical corrector plate on the front like a maxitoff cassegrain wood but in instead it has a
spherical um you know newtonian set up after it i'd be leery about using a schmidt casa
grain uh corrector or reducer for it because uh those tend to also be
field flatteners which are designed uh to be used with the um the the plate that's on schmidt cast
of greens the corrector plate which is probably a different shape than the one that's on the mac that's true
but the the primary thing that's going on is it's got a spherical primary and spherical secondary so it's
the closest thing we're not working with a hyperbolic uh system or a uh
a parabolic system it's a it's a sphere so that would be that would be maybe the closest thing
because there was never made a reducer for that particular telescope so
i would i would probably use a reducer that was made for a spherical system you can borrow
one from somebody to test out oh of course right actually i would love to hear the result of that yeah
me too yeah well there's somebody listening out there that loan him a
schmidt castle grain reducer uh i have one i might get to that at some point all right that would be very cool
well thank you guys and again i really appreciate the content here thanks gary thank you very much okay and
then the other uh person that's on our uh after party is armando lee from the
philippines how are you doing arondo hello everyone i'm doing fine uh if you
notice it's uh morning it's almost noon right now here um we're plus eight from gmt so it's really uh
the other side of the world right now yes um yeah i'd just like to share the
local scene here we just finished the national astronomy week celebration yeah
we do that every year uh super special degree and uh several societies here has come up with
different activities promoting astronomy and i was involved in in one of the government agencies the
pagasa european astrophysical geographic and uh the astronomical uh
associate authority where i was one of the judges in the photography
astrophotography competition excellent the um the lockdown is
really uh you know has really taken a lot from our crusade here
doing uh sidewalk astronomy and um a good thing that we already have some
formal astronomy courses set up so we have classes ongoing but it's
online and i also i'm also involved in that i'm a professorial lecturer in one of the
universities here teaching uh observation astronomy one and two for the graduate school yeah my setup
right now is really um um hanging i was
supposed to set up my c11 with my um with my atlas mount last year but a
volcano erupted also yeah the the volcano i don't know if you
heard about it so early last year we had a volcanic eruption a month before the pandemic lockdown so
and i thought i had problems never mind
so what i'm doing now is just cleaning my optics you know i have i have the c11 in my
telescope room i'm just about to set it up again but i need to clean the mirror you know the
corrector plate i also have eight inch newtonian waiting to be cleaned and mounted um
before this meeting i was setting up my uh atlas mount here in the in the terrace i
want to show you maybe let me give you yeah let's see what you do so if you can see um here it's a
blue sky like now almost noon and some of my equipment here waiting in
my terrace that's nice that's nice yeah and uh you can see here i don't know if you can
beautiful yeah it's beautiful out there yeah this is the um it's just habit covered up this is the
uh atlas mount right in the terrace and you can see the sky here very nice blue
blue sky it's not it's not been like this all the time uh recently as i was telling you we had
uh the rainy season and uh we're just getting out from it um but it's cool right now in the
evening and hot in the morning and noon time the cloud the club the sky is getting
clear lately so it's uh you know it's a silver lining and not letting the pandemic ruin my my plan
it was just the volcanic eruption last year that really you know put me on hold because of the
the asheville the acidic asphalt from the volcano wow
yeah i mean was it covering like i have seen ash falls from other you know
nearby volcanic eruptions and it's i mean it's horrible you know what happens but uh uh how
severe was it where you live we're uh i'm just leaving uh some
17 kilometers away from the lake where the volcano is located so we had a quarter
of an inch thick of asheville then last uh yeah last second week of january then uh we have
to wait for the dust to settle before we clean it you know and that was a dry season here in the
philippines so you know all the dust blowing with the wind so i cannot really set up my equipment
for you know you know how it is the silica dust on the volcano so i have to
wait for several months to you know wait for the dust to be cleaned and all the dust in the
air settled but then the pandemic lockdown came so uh
there's a lot going in uh and as the pandemic lockdown was established here then comes the
rainy season with the fourth season here we only have the wet
and the dry season oh man yeah so you know it's really late but you know
as you mentioned earlier you know it's not late to start to restart with astronomy but uh yeah we're doing everything
online right now and uh the problem is the um you know the university cannot open the
observatory so yeah of the 16 inch and the 14 inch there
that we cannot use because we cannot you know do face-to-face instruction with the students
and i cannot even go in there and you know clean or align or
do my astronomy adjustment astronomical adjustment with the telescope [Music]
so i think that's about it scott and uh okay well you have a lot of obstacles there i
i know that uh uh you know there are times where
uh you know astronomy also is is um you know something of uh imagining uh
you know through scientific understanding uh uh you know our universe uh
you know much like the talk that molly just gave you know about voyager uh we can only imagine what it's like
but as she's talking and i've seen these spacecraft hurtling out into space and stuff flying by you know you know like a
freight train passed uh this spacecraft so i think that it's
i think it's great for amanda i'm really glad you joined us on
our program i've seen you you know in chat on a lot of our other programs and i
hope that you uh join us with a global star party at any time
so and that goes for all of you that have uh joined for the after party so thank you very much thanks for
inviting me too yeah it's cool that's cool so we got more to go here um
let's uh let's go to cesar uh cesar you are what time is it there now in
argentina um yes while 12
it's mid 90 or yes 12 54 we are we are three three hours
ahead central time yes and uh mostly cloudly but
we i have uh i i was lucky to to take the pictures uh earlier and
have pictures that aguten is stacking and processing now only
with the camera and we are trying to see how good is
uh we can get our nebula from the city with only a camera and a
reporter a small small quattro mode you know that um
sadly this this week something that i i can tell you to grow that you know that
normally the the club astronomy club where i go mostly of the time
uh is the habitat cosmos is it
[Music] where i go where we are working
and i'm helping and working with this group about the to recover and restore in the
uh astronomical observatory uh history solar observatory and
unfortunately with the sadness absolutely yesterday we lost a member
that passed away by kobe yeah horrible yes
rodriguez residential was a very very sad new because he
he was fighting uh 10 days really was it was really sad um
yeah yes i i know that it's a sound new in in paris but you
remember yes yes is so so when
when no we don't uh can accept that the uh how they covet
this type of virus the pandemic is when one shot so near or not so near to
the people is
very very sad about about the in the in the world about this it's very suddenly sure and
yes thank you and um well but we will continue with the club
because this um he was really really energetic guy to especially to restore
and make all things about the the the improv
improvements and restoring the observatory is it's a it's a real it's a real
face of the news today um well something
that sorry that is sometimes i i know that is um
well it's something that when you know guys that that
really enjoy the stars and maybe he he can choose between gold to his
home or come with us to the star parties and really he's he tell us
no no i need to go to the eclipse or i need to go to some party impossible to stop and this energy
is that we take more enthusiasm
for for recover as soon as possible the the wall observatory because
people like rodriguez i think that is they they teach us
about the energy to put in in in the projects um
in the love that he put in astronomy because he was a uh really um
a matter of stormy for for many many years he was returning
to the activity in the last two years um you know when with the new equipments
and all that done um
that have the the sense of when you was amateur astronomer
in the 80s and when you returned to the activity that you love
he in the last years he enjoyed a lot a lot the activity with the club members
and in this activities that i show you a few weeks ago
yeah it's it's the life it's yes you know that's yeah that's right
absolutely absolutely yeah yes so yeah uh
you know i want to say um caesar is also an honor to have your son join us it's
nice to see a father-son team on the global star party you know so
uh it's inspiring to see how uh knowledgeable he is um you know that
must have uh happened over many years of uh you and
taking him to star parties and introducing him to the community and uh yeah it doesn't always
happen it doesn't always happen you take your kids you show your kids those stars as an amateur astronomer and
they're just like god dad that's great you know but they're not into it you know so uh but uh obviously
austin uh you know uh augustine and and have enthusiasm to
the people of explain and this is very good really it's it's something that i i never told
him about how to um you know only he he went to our star parties
because with the family you know and he's starting to to to try
with the with the telescopes and i i remember that he's starting to use at his 11
years old at 11 years old i go to telescope perfectly i say come on you never watch the
you you never read the manual no you never read the manual
no you know yeah yeah this is all right so you must have generation dna it's
nice that we can receive the helping
of of the young people with technology because we
we our generation receive all we try like computer telescope
changing a lot in 30 years and people like you and me and well you
you are a legend about the technology in telescope [Music]
you uh especially um no you are talking to you
no but really really in your history in telescope and you really
think that that we experiment the completely different
things in in amateur astronomy equipment yes only 30 years
like never never in the history of maybe 200 years right only three years
only 30 years ago the same telescope was the same one century ago because you you had a
telescope only with two maybe motoring as a rec ascension but no more like this than
this and you had a telescope with no more technology that
one century ago today is a pretty much true possible yes when you we i when i
listen to the people talking about phd or the program for guiding or you know
oh i can't believe my graphics are very bad and you know i say come on enjoy this run
well yes of your hdd you see the sky or enjoy something
come on and really thinking about maybe well with this uh
news yesterday and today i thought a lot and in the things that we need to enjoy more
but for today that these are tools that are really really very
very enjoyable and when the people that understand more
than i than our generation and they can help you can help us is is amazing i'm really a
proud from uh for uh agustin it's real yeah
yes yeah it is it is amazing you know what the um
you know what we are enjoying now in technology and um uh you know one of the things i
really enjoy a lot is working with our product development team
uh you know it's uh i pinch myself sometimes thinking that gosh you know i'm so lucky to work every
day in something like this you know this is just yeah you know i'm just an amateur astronomer
and i just love i just love the community and uh the you know the people who
you know the self the discover personal discoveries of things you can have although you know maybe they've been
observed a zillion times before when you first see them yourself that's a discovery and there's that rush
there's that feeling you know and absolutely and i have confirmed you know that kind
of feeling with uh with uh uh you know discovers like david levy and carolyn shoemaker and gene
mueller and you know on and on the the other amateur astronomers have just seen things for the very first time
ever you know and they say that feelings are the same it's the same yeah you know so well and
if you do it enough you get it twice because you forget what you saw 20 years ago exactly
yeah and let me let me let me say something about
today we see they believe in action in a telescope in a place it's like to
see to shakusto again going to the deep because it's a it's an
opportunity in the last time we watched to david levy in their office now
you know but today for me was very wow it's david levy with the telescope
that's right yeah really really enjoy this because it's
it's was a story they say come on it's they believe me i i don't know if you if you feel the
same but i feel like he was
he looks younger with more energy that's right that's
right absolutely this this the these kind that kind of experience so you can see it on his face
you can see it in his energy uh as he's out there under the skies
all of us that are amateur astronomers get that energy you know and that is something it's good
for us you know uh you know there are it's it's similar it's actually i think it's
somewhat more stronger than the energy that someone gets from just hanging out in nature you
know out in the woods for example you know out in the trees or uh camping or something and and the
reason why i think that is that um as a as a young man and as a
boy i spent a lot of time camping you get that feeling of flow from being out in nature
but it takes a few days you know it tastes like two or three days in
astronomy you can spend one night underneath the milky way under an amazing sky
and get that in minutes okay it happens very quickly and this this is good for
you because it it lowers your blood pressure it um uh it gives you uh uh it lifts your mood
uh there's lots of things that are happening you know the very similar things that have been studied by
scientists of people hanging out in nature for you know going on nature walks and these kinds of things
but it happens in astronomy very very quickly and so it's it's good for you
to do that it's good for your health you know it's good for your mind uh it helps you put things into
perspective you know um uh you know a lot of times in
especially in our world today there's so many things we instantaneously hear of bad news we hear
all kinds of things instantaneously and to slow down and to contemplate the
universe is very very good very good so
i agree with you yeah absolutely yeah well gentlemen uh we are uh
we are towards the end i think uh does anyone have any richard do you have a uh an image or two
you'd like to share i do let's see it
the moon's starting to come up and here we got the rosette it's looking a
little green nice well we'll pixel peep it a little bit here
all right you and i talked about this a little bit
before richard i was asking you if you felt that your uh
skills as an astrophotographer got better because you were presenting on a live program
and i and you said yes what what why do you think that uh you you you um i guess anyone that might
have to stand in front of people to show their stuff will really press hard you know to do the best they can
i would say definitely repetition i mean yeah just um you know having to set up and um
you know honestly having to do it on the clock too um you know because i usually get set up in
an hour yeah so sometimes less than that um like i said tonight even had to
collimate the scope after uh you know secondary swap and some stuff like that uh yeah
uh i put it on the laser uh before but after i do that i always go to the um you know
just collimating i used sirius tonight um
i would say yeah it's definitely made me a better astrophotographer just having to do it
more often and also because i have the setup to do it here i've been getting a lot better here
where i kind of used to set up more different places but um again more gear to set up in a
different place means less time actually getting kind of the photons that you're looking for
that's right ideally it'd be nice to just open a roof and you know start going and hopefully it
won't be too awful long you know next year that uh we'll we'll be doing something like that and you'll be doing that
really looking forward to it i do have one other thing uh speaking of the moon
uh this is from last week uh we shot marcarian's chain is that
showing up oh yeah okay let's see we'll we'll even put it full screen for the
the moment anyway it looks better like that uh but you can see this part here where
you got that haze and that was uh the full moon from last week and we're not too far away from it now but uh we're
gonna be revisiting this one uh and i just wanted to show you know this was the maximum amount i was able
to stretch the image without bringing just yeah but look at all those galaxies wow the whole
background uh you know into bright haze but uh when we revisit this
one we're gonna see more galaxies in a whole lot more detail in a lot of them uh because we're going to be doing some
some new moon work on this particular target you know when i look at the the faint
galaxies they look like i mean you know they're not stars they're little smudges and those are galaxies and there's just tons of them
as you look deeper and deeper into the shot you know it's cool i like this one this one's one of my favorite but
oh yeah oh yeah that kind of edge on your little watch here a little splotch there
i mean everywhere in that picture here here here i mean everywhere everywhere
one of my favorite targets uh marcarian's chain and uh now that i have the uh the aps
sensor on the common hundred i can actually get it in with my uh with my six inch scope uh because last year i was
playing with it with the 183 and the 80 and uh just wanted that little bit more and
i'm pretty sure i got it so anyway i'm gonna stop sharing and back to the show once again
oh it's wonderful thank you thank you very much well gentlemen is there anything else
that uh you'd like to add share any words of wisdom
i would like to ask something okay has anyone tried
using smartphones in imaging deep sky objects
i know richard has i know richard has done it quite a bit so tell us something about it
what was the question again yeah can you tell us something about um
you know doing smartphone photography or deep sky objects
what is your experience about about it okay um well i started uh with smartphone
astrophotography uh and it was in dark skies and that's really gonna help uh because getting any light in between
an eyepiece uh and the smartphone is going to make a big deal um i don't know about all eyepieces but i
know all the explore scientific ones that i use have the nice flip up rubber cup to them which really help
out with that i found focusing to be somewhat of an
issue sometimes because it's more like how exactly far do you want the phone from the eyepiece slash
all focus do you want the eyepiece but that's kind of another thing all together uh take as many pictures as
you can with as long of an exposure as your phone will allow if you have raw capability to
get raw data off your phone you definitely want to use that if you have 12 cameras on the back of
your phone make sure you use the right one um the
the xyz mount is pretty good for adjusting um and it will hold some of the larger
eyepieces i've never i've never tried it on this guy yet but we'll we'll try that
sometime soon i don't know if it can quite grab ahold of that that job but uh yeah it's uh i mean you can
definitely get a whole lot um i'm not gonna try and dig it out right now but uh the brighter targets i
got a really impressive picture of the ring nebula uh through a phone and i will say
um i use a a note phone i've had a note phone for a long time but the
little little pen that comes out of it has a button on it you can use it to
take the shutter to take the picture oh that's cool so you don't have to sit there and touch
the screen and hope everything stays still and stuff like that um
dusty haskins recommended uh you can also do it by voice i believe i i don't know how to do that but uh you
know if you can tell the the camera take a picture that's better than touching it while you're trying to keep everything uh
perfectly still i don't know of any cameras that do you know long exposures for
for a cell phone so that's the only thing i mean i think mine goes to like 10 seconds uh i've heard of people getting extra
camera programs that stack and stuff like that but i mean if it's not taking a longer exposure in
the first place i'd rather stack it myself um and i'm definitely planning on revisiting it
um i'm hopefully also planning on revisiting some dslr stuff in the next couple weeks
because there's a dslr contest for explore scientific that's uh ah that's true
what's going on the explorer alliance category in the next one so i'm kind of
getting warmed up and getting ready to you know try and do a little bit of that and maybe we'll we'll film the outing a
little bit too because i won't do that here i'll i'll do that someplace out in uh
dark skies because i won't be guiding or you know anything like that while i'm doing 10 second
exposures you know we'll just let them out do it if some of them are bad we'll throw them out
yeah i will show you an image of m82 done by michael wiesner this is with an iphone 11
let me uh bring that up and this will give you an idea now this is an unstacked image he did he
did stacking as well um but uh this will give you
and this was from last week or maybe even this week so you can see definitely the structure
in the galaxy um nice pretty nice round stars this is probably
shot through his uh mead uh schmidt casa grain telescope with a 15 millimeter
eyepiece i think the magnification was like 150
power something like that and um he is using a program i think it's
called night cap which is uh available and so
uh pretty impressive really um for um for smartphone
astrophotography that was really neat uh richard uh just to let you know the
new note 20 offers a 30 second uh shut the shutter time so cool
i i really do like my headphone jack and it still works so i'm gonna keep it for now uh but yeah i am gonna show one
thing here uh i showed this i believe last week but it just uh that was
that's a quick one shot of the ring nebula with a smartphone pretty amazing it looks like you can see the smartphone
he's a central star a little bit there smartphone i mean
that means that almost everybody in the world has a uh has a uh astro camera so
i i feel less absolutely the accessory telescope to attach it to right yeah
they broke and removed the lens of the cell phone smartphone to use because the phone was
unusable to to talk you know and
when he bought a new cell phone he the old one removed the lenses
uh and used in the primary focus the center oh wow yes i need to invite
this guy from argentina yeah invite him okay he made it he made
incredible pictures with their ciaomi or i don't remember china's
china side phones or you know but incredible pictures
i think for popular class
yeah i would like to say huawei you know yeah p10
oh wow yeah but actually he only uses like eight seconds of exposure
but it's really useful um the techniques you described earlier
augustine can it be applied in smartphone images yeah that that was what i wanted when i what i
wanted to say when scott showed the photo that you can see a clear vignetting you know because
[Music] the the galaxy you could see the galaxy but like a a circular glow
that that means that the guy who throw that image into the processing program
stretch the values to make the the galaxy pop but he over
he overdone it and that's where you can see that circular glow if he did a flat frame for
that you just grab the the cell phone put a i don't know a white paper or something that covers the
sensor try to do some wide photo with that
that can show you the the vignette and it's literally just like a normal calibration
frame the only thing is that you're using a different camera in this case but the same logic
applies to everything you can try it one might think oh but it's a cell phone
you can't do calibration frames but you actually can you just have to
think of a way to make it work right well you don't need
so much white t-shirt to go over the smartphone so you know yeah right yeah it's like a tiny one by
one yeah augustine but how about the image format
usually the the smartphone has a jpeg right yeah there are some and amazingly there
are some by gary there are some
smartphones that let you shoot raw amazingly which is really rare is
let me check because my phone does it says samsung note 5 oh note 5. i thought this which isn't a
chinese jpeg if you use a smartphone yeah let me let me send let me check because i have the option
to shoot raw here uh yeah save us raw file no
it will you know it will possibly impossible but yeah that's there's the option yes but many many
cell phones have the same like raw five row five cr2
or another another yeah i mean obviously the the the
the pixel count is kind of low even if even if it says 22
megapixels it's not a real 22 megapixels because of the the the size of the
sensor and how lights how how light comes into a small area
so it's not really 22 billion pixels or whatever number the cell phone brings in
but yeah it's it's still very doable like very doable this guy that my dad just talked about
he he literally puts the cell phone into the ocular or like in some way and he does processing
as it was a normal dslr or ccd it's like the only thing that
changes is the the quality like the the the dynamic range and the color the contrast
that's the the only important difference i noticed some of the smartphones have different
nightmare settings you know yeah that's where the major differences are between cell phones yeah
that's very cool my phone's got the raw setting i never even noticed that thank you that's that's very good yeah there you have the
rope last jpeg right yeah so that's the thing um
you can really just use whatever thing that takes photos the only the only
the only thing that the main thing that gives you the ability to do astrophotography is to is the ability to control
exposure time and that is called manual mode if you have an option to
control exposure time that's it you're over you are already gone because you should you can just
choose whatever you you want to use like you need you need eight you need ten
okay maybe there are some phones that are limited to 10 seconds or eight seconds
which is the most common but maybe in the united states uh which
technology and prices are more accessible because it's the main you have them all made there you can
just buy a very good phone like a higher tier phone and it will
surely have that setting and it will probably have as armando said a 30 second option
now as gary said said so yeah 20 seconds is already like more than enough for
some for some photos for some uh bright objects like the main
nebula and the main moon for example you don't need more than 30. yeah so
sorry some phones doesn't have the manual mode but they do have the night mode
yeah so you know to take photos of the bright deep space objects yeah yeah the thing
is maybe the night mode kind of uh
brings the iso way too higher and it also does like an artificial lightness uh
increase which i don't know if that's are they just like boosting pixels yeah
yeah i've been i've been playing with that night mode and i think it's it's kind of more like uh like the hdr
mode right so it's like like three or four exposures and yeah and combining them yeah is
also a very useful automatically stacking the images yeah yeah i mean here like
the best option is to have either very controllable exposure time or
the rob plus jpeg file extension because there you can just do the light
imaging and then do the the the calibration frames and then just throw it
all into the program and uh try to get the best out of it
for spending fifteen hundred dollars on a ccd large format yeah sensor camera yeah
i mean you're if your cell phone is eleven hundred dollars [Music]
yeah right yeah just just go directly and and buy a
cwo and ac 1600 or something i don't know yeah with a filter wheel yeah i don't
want to advertise but yeah it cost me some money but that but that's useful for people
that ha oh yeah i have a phone like an iphone 11 or 12 which is really
common to this these days and if you oh i can't get into astrophotography because i don't have a
telescope well that's where you're wrong because
we uh amateurs and uh people that really like uh this hobby
we we know this kind of stuff and we we can tell these guys no you can
actually take these photos put this mode in and yeah from there is a really steep
learning cue i i'm gonna admit that it's very hard to learn but it's not impossible i mean you just
have you just need to have the the the will well there's also mentors out
there uh you know augustine you might be doing this i think you are doing this yourself with
uh people showing them each step of the way you know uh molly uh molly wakeling does this gary palmer
does this a lot of astrophotographers who have accomplished uh some uh uh some expertise and
experience uh you know feel the uh need to um help others learn this process
because once you've kind of mastered some of it then you can kind of take off you know and do some pretty mind-blowing
yeah i mean it's like our own little private master classes yeah really i tend i tend to
uh oversimplify things which i mean it can be bad and good but in this case when i i'm teaching these clients or
people that just i'm doing the the teacher role um when i oversimplify it really helps
for that person that doesn't really want to learn oh how how does the sensor work
how does the the voltage distribute over the pixels and what is this algorithm for stacking
what is this one no they don't care about they just want to take the photo with of that option brights in the sky
and have a really nice looking colorful whatever yeah so it's good to simplify
and like um
like uh don't care about like the details
like for example what are armando asked yeah there's an option with the phone
you just click click to take the photo and and that's it just like put a number
into it uh put uh 10 seconds and it's trial and error just try to take a photo you don't need to
learn before the yeah yeah as they accomplish something they get to a
certain level yeah then they will learn you know they will like something yeah i think those next steps but uh
but it's very easy you know for someone uh yeah augustine you're you're doing a
very good job as an educator because uh you know once you know a lot
it would be very very easy to overwhelm your students you know yeah and just yeah leave them
in a state of yeah wow i cannot understand this exactly that was too much information
for me uh i always tried to explain i go back to my comfort zone you know so
yeah i i always try to explain everything if i was explaining it to a 12 year old yeah like
there is no need to like tell everything the way it actually is i mean
there's both ways exist you can there's people that wants to know everything and then okay
take the step but from the my experience i had only like one or two
uh people that were like that and i really enjoyed it because i could like just throw all my knowledge into
them but there's the the other people that's like uh okay i don't really care about all that
just tell me how to do it yeah and yeah yeah
i mean besides the there's also like a barrier people don't want to break like they
fear this barrier that they are gonna like get something wrong or they are gonna break something
it's like yeah but don't really worry about it just trust me that i've doing this
and you guys are doing this for like years and this can happen this other thing can
happen you just go with it touch all the the knobs in your
of your equatorial mount try to see what happens try to click every single button of the
of the of the controller and see what happens if it doesn't work just turn it off reset to home position
and try again that's it right wow
do you have the picture of orion no it's it's still getting stuck saturday no yeah next week next week
next week that's right yeah there were there were too many light images uh uh augustine we will have a
um uh global star party on friday that starts earlier okay so it started
about four o'clock central this would be with gary palmer um so your logins and everything that's
true for all of you here your logins and stuff will still be good if you want to join us on the
friday event thank you this friday so same same id
okay but different time right you said it yeah it's going to be it will start about uh three hours earlier wow
early morning here it was very early morning that's right my third party is committed with big sun
yeah in armando if you want to uh if you want to maybe co-host um
a uh you know a global star party from starting from the philippines you know
we've got christopher go we've got you you know there's others um uh you know and uh we haven't done one
for a little while so it'd be nice it'd be nice to have one so yeah sure yeah i know this guys
i'm friends yeah yeah just to touch base with them and um uh christopher uh
you know he knows the score as far as uh the schedule and everything so okay um but it's it's pretty you've seen
how we run the program so it's pretty straightforward very simple yeah um
but i'd be happy to uh to host that um tomorrow we will have damien peach
who is a world-renowned uh yeah planetary photographer he's gonna be on
the afternoon uh at 3 p.m central uh talk about a master class yeah yeah
he was uh he he was on last wednesday we had an internet interruption on his
you know on his side unfortunately and uh so i said we'll come back and and we'll do it again for another
afternoon with you and so that that'll be great um
and cool i i i i was trying to watch that knee dropped off and died right back to work yeah
right as he was getting into i'm sorry no see it ruined my whole day
yeah yeah yeah but he was showing some beautiful images of jupiter and storm systems
and yeah i just you know i do that uh and i do that patreon thing with him so
i get all of his you know what uh just i i talk about a fire hose of
yeah yeah yeah he's uh he says he's got like maybe a year of
data to to work through right now so but uh yeah so it'll be good to watch him
tomorrow um and uh you know we have uh more coming up um
there is uh live events with the astronomical league there they've got a calendar so
if you go to explore scientific dot com forward slash live you'll see our calendar there
and and lots of things are coming up including the northeast astronomy forum which will be broadcast live um uh the
there's a possibility of some talk about having some parts of the texas star party uh
broadcast live so that'll be nice i think that's actually going to be a real in-person event as well so uh
they were yeah the texas star party uh down by um fort davis texas
west texas uh where the mcdonald observatory is so there's a ranch out there called
prude ranch where they have the texas star party so um well the governor
dropped their mask mandate there today so yeah so it looks like that could happen
yeah very good very good so yeah so you know i think that they're
you know i think they're set to you know be more than uh you know uh socially
distanced out there there's a ton of uh property out on that that big ranch
and uh so you know if you're waving 100 yards away or something like that to
your friend with your red flashlight i think that's okay um i really appreciate you guys being on
tonight um you know it's an honor and uh uh you're all welcome to come back and
if you want to be regulars on the program you have uh presentations you want to give um
you you're sharing live images uh anything like that um let me know and
i'll have you on the regular uh mailing list for the global star party up until then it's just as easy to join
as a uh in the after party so thank you thank you very much everyone thank you
thank you though good night to the audience good night thanks guys everyone good night everybody thank you see
augustine cesar and richard bye-bye this is our great talk and
thanks a lot thanks take care
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so [Music]
so [Music]
and now folks it's time to say good night we sincerely appreciate your patronage and hope we've succeeded in
bringing you an enjoyable evening of entertainment please drive home carefully and come back again soon
good night
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bye

Transcript for Part B:

there we go
damian it got hot today it's like uh 71 degrees fahrenheit in our offices
right now it had been really really cold
yeah where but where abouts all of you exactly uh are you familiar where
arkansas is yeah yeah we're in the upper extreme northwest corner
of our council and so we're right up against oklahoma and missouri and
you can be in oklahoma i don't know half an hour or something 45 minutes in missouri you can be there
in about 30 minutes from where we are [Music] and so yeah it's nice you're ever in the
states um uh you should come by and i'll show you around
i'm sharing this to some groups here
there any groups you belong to in particular on facebook um i suppose the main one really is the
astronomy planetary imaging group
that's probably the the most active one
uh-huh
there are so many astrophotography groups these days yeah it's uh it's crazy isn't it yeah
it's good it's good though you know lots of
different outlets for people to
you know find the kind of group they like the best
the royal observatory astrophotography group we're sharing to them
astrophotography enthusiast photo astronomy okay
yesterday during our global star party we had uh dt gautam from nepal on and we could
hear elephants in the background elephants trumpeting
wow we're like in the chat going was that an elephant we just heard
i didn't know if it was or not and other people like going yep that was an elephant and after thinking about it that's
exactly what it sounded like i was not aware that nepal has as many elephants as they do
actually they have quite a few interesting like four different regions in the
country with large populations of elephants
but europe and the united states are relatively in canada you know relatively quiet countries you
know you go to some other countries and the streets are noisy
yeah yeah that's very true music fireworks just part of the normal day
yeah that's quite a placid placid lifestyle isn't it and uh yeah yes that we have really compared to some
places some people think it's boring
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do [Music]
so [Music]
oh my god [Music]
go [Music]
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well hello everybody this is scott roberts here with the explore alliance presents uh explore now with you know it's an
afternoon another afternoon with damian peach and uh we were rudely interrupted by uh
a a failure in technology where the internet decided to uh
um but i was telling damien that last night uh during the global star party i had
i i was just really lucky because i had a complete power failure here in my office and for
two terrifying minutes here you know i'm trying to figure out how to get back on and stuff because i'd already started
the program and uh lo and behold uh zoom which is the platform we get on uh was
holding the stream and so everybody else is still on just waiting for me to get back on so that
worked out okay so i i i'll give yet another big shout out for the for the zoom platform so but um
uh you know i think it when we left off last time uh damien we were going through some of
your iconic planetary images and uh you were describing
um i believe we were into uh looking at some of the storms on jupiter is that right
yeah yeah right yeah i mean i mean jupiter is obviously an object that i've always had a passion
for uh throughout my career and i've spent a great deal of time
photographing it over the years and you know it probably remains for me the primary object of my interest
when it comes to uh planetary observing and imaging right so do you i mean is there like
one image that you just love maybe something you got hanging on your wall or something i think we i think with
something like i mean with jupiter in particular because it's kind of changing from year to year yeah and
sometimes though changes can be really dramatic so it it kind of varies there are certainly
images that i prefer but you know that i find that maybe kind of more you know aesthetically pleasing than
others but would i say i have like an overall favorite no not really
not really oh yeah not really so you really enjoy the change in the kind of uh planet i guess
yeah yeah i mean it's it's you know it's such a fantastic target for amateur
astronomers you know even those with the right the most rudimentary equipment
even with you know small telescopes you can see details from jupiter and
and that's kind of one of the reasons that i think a lot of people you know it will be one of the first
objects you know provided it's available in the sky we were one of the first objects people generally point a telescope at
and it's also one of the few planets that you can really see easily see details on
right right i heard i think we talked about this a little bit too the
comet shoemaker leaving nine impacts and just yeah that was that was mind-blowing to me
because i had at that time i'm working for meat instruments and i had at my home
a 16-inch lx-200 okay yeah uh set up aimed at jupiter uh of course you could see all
kinds of details in the in the disturbance from the impacts and stuff but then i had
uh in in our inventory uh we had a toy tasco
tasco brand 50 millimeter i mean literally plastic tube not plastic lenses but darn near okay
yeah just maybe single lens element and everything and uh even through that telescope i could see these impacts
okay so i was i was rest assured that uh anybody that was pointing their telescope to the sky was getting a real
treat and it it it also made me realize too that uh that you can do
astronomy with almost any piece of equipment that you got you know it's it's not that you you know
better equipment of course is always nicer and better but uh um to experience the sky and and to
start uh down that path that voyage personal exploration you start with
whatever you have you know so yeah i mean these days it's one of the great things about astronomy
these days is it's kind of never been easier to kind of for example try your hand at astrophotography of some kind
so you know when i started planetary imaging it was really only in the realms of the higher
you know those with highly you know a great deal of experience and an enormous amount of patience yes
that's right and a lot of skill a lot these days
you know cameras and software is all so affordable um it's never been easier to to get
involved with and it's probably also one of the reasons that we now see so many poor more people around
the world regularly imaging the planets and there must be easily
20 or 30 times as many people as there were 20 years ago true true
the really great guys though and who always pushed the envelope and you are
truly one of these people um uh gosh they're maybe you could count them
on just two hands so there wasn't that many uh because
it did take so much effort before and so much patience before
um what does it take to become a damian peach level kind of planetary
photographer today what would you say if uh if you were taking somebody to that
level because that's what every that's my viewers right now they're like going gosh disney they do once one shot images and stack
them did you pull them from video you know i would say i would you know i would say i would say the primary uh
requirement is you know a serious case of obsessive compulsive disorder
[Laughter] i think with anything that that you
really want to excel at doing you need to really have a a strong passion for
and you need to go beyond just a kind of cursory interest it's
you know i can remember in the early days and i'm literally you know not a day went past where i
didn't kind of spend some time doing something to do with you know planetary observing planetary
imaging obviously just had this you know this earth prove and know more
and understand more and when you have that within you it it just naturally
you know drives you forward to to improve right yes i think maybe
perhaps you would be born with that i i don't know that people just naturally have it you know so or or
oh i i think i'm going to be really driven about this and just one day wake up and think that that's going to happen
but uh i don't think anyone kind of you know anyone sets out with the idea of kind of excelling in in
anything they do it's just they'll start off in something and it will naturally happen as as it should i think
you know it's some people are some people just don't have the time to commit
you know that you need to commit to maybe excelling to a really high level in something and they're happy in in
kind of doing what they do and that's that in itself is great you know it's it's
i think everyone has their own kind of level of passion and interest in in a subject it's true i think it's
important that you find it you know so yeah uh you know parents will often uh you know expose their children to a
variety of different things maybe some of them they don't particularly care for like some parents
make their kids take piano lessons for example and and they don't like it you know because they're forced to do it or whatever
yeah later maybe much later in life they develop a better appreciation for it and
i've heard kids actually blame their parents for not making them do things you know or exposing them
you know divorce stuff so um and and we talked about some of your
early uh experiences with uh you've been very interested in
space and and astronomy and uh spending a lot of time in the library reading all these books about it
um and uh you know then you getting uh your first telescope
and um uh starting to make images so that that's that's wonderful uh when i first um heard of you
uh you know i think i i might have heard of you through thierry lago um gary's another great uh uh planetary
imager uh very extremely patient uh doesn't live in a particularly great
spot you know he told me that many times his seeing conditions are not that wonderful
you know where he is and i think he lives in paris um and uh uh
so uh you know of course being in a geographically better spot that
is treated to more favorable scene conditions does help quite a bit um but uh tierra thierry's big secret
too is he is obsessive compulsive uh and uh he um and he's he's shooting every
chance he gets you know so that's that it's the experience and and um i remember working with him on
some equipment too and he was extraordinarily picky about what he was using so yeah i mean
it's patience really is is a massive virtue when it comes to amateur astronomy
i think you know particularly when people are kind of you know maybe they'll start taking
images and they won't be happy with the results initially you know and you start to realize that
you know it's going to take a a fair amount of time to kind of develop in what you're doing
and you know often many people live in locations where the weather is far from optimal you know such as here
in the uk and you do have to have to have an enormous amount of patience
at times you know but also you need to be dedicated to kind of trying to catch
those nights when the seeing conditions can be really really steady because for most locations you know
unless you're living in you know somewhere like south florida or you know some other tropical location
for most places nights very very stable seeing where you can take detailed images of the planets and are
relatively rare so you know to catch those nights you need to observe
as frequently as possible yes that's right that's right so we we had a
um we kind of uh uh concentrated on ways that um
you could more or less inexpensively have a uh telescope always set up you know and if you were
your name was don parker uh that meant that you left your telescope exposed to the elements and uh you remember how rusty and nasty
looking his 16-inch newtonian telescope was because he's living in florida he's
right on the ocean okay so you have that salty air and all the rest of it but uh he kept his optics clean
his uh his cameras in working condition and uh i guess the gears lubricated
enough so that everything is still tracking and moving uh but uh it was one of the most rusted
mounts and corroded mounts that i'd seen ever you know yeah i mean i mean i remember seeing.16 and it's
you know you look at it and you'd think you know i mean it looks i mean it's so far removed from kind of
your typical glossy modern telescope yeah as a telescope itself it was superb
for what he wanted to use it for that's right um optically it was
excellent it tracked really well and it was you know it was ideal for for
that purpose and kind of in similarity we've done i've kind of always been similar in that
with my telescopes i've always they've always been kept outdoors um so
and with large aperture telescopes i'm kind of of the opinion that they really need to
be kept outside permanently otherwise they simply for generally for kind of thermal and
cool down reasons that they generally won't work properly because large optics
um you know there's no way you can take a large telescope from inside the house and outdoors and expect it to perform
even if you leave it out for two hours it's still not enough time to reach thermal equilibrium
and things like this are vitally important when it comes to really exploiting the potential of a telescope
you know things like collimation cooling etc all of these things need to have a meticulous attention a paint
uh paid to them yes um you know to get the telescope performing to to its
potential right and most people probably over 70 percent of amateur astronomers
don't don't uh don't do this i when i go to uh star parties uh you know and i'm looking
through people's telescopes uh most of the telescopes have are slightly out of collimation you know
and uh you know they they're they're traveling cross-country with them they're setting them up
uh they're they'll polar align them um but uh they don't take that extra
unless they're also very attuned to how how good this collimation should be
um you know they'll just uh say that's good enough and if you're just doing deep sky work okay
you know maybe that's all right planetary work though it gets very demanding
it does i mean it's it i mean compared to deep sky you know with deep sky you kind of the
the important considerations are somewhat different and uh you know things like the tracking of the mount for example is
is really important as with planetary imaging it is kind of other issues that that
come into play but perhaps above all the singular most important issue
when it comes to planetary imaging is the saying yes right you know without without good
seeing you are regardless of what telescope you're using you will not get good images it is crucial
and and uh when you're when you're measuring uh seeing damian how are you doing are you just um is it
just by experience that you know what the sky is like it's a one or two art second night
or yeah i mean over the years you know it's it's quite funny when over the years
these days like here at home i couldn't i could almost walk out outside into the garden and without even
look without looking through the telescope i'll kind of have a pretty good idea of what it's
going to be like from kind of how humid it feels uh which direction the wind is blowing etc
and all these things that come into play and one of the good things is is that
these days you have really really impressive kind of online forecasting tools for weather
and you can learn patterns where good seeing conditions are more likely
to occur and and it's kind of during those periods that you kind of really need to make a concerted effort
to observe so you almost start to learn about
meteorology and yeah indeed yeah right right so that's
that's great yeah i mean the amount of time you know the amount of time i've expended over the years on
kind of looking at forecasting models and things like that you know i probably know as much about
meteorology as i do about astronomy right you have a couple of uh comments
here let me um your questions maybe uh i did ask uh uh eduardo eduardo simone did want to
know if you're um if you're stacking individual images of your plan uh planetary shots
or you're pulling from video as i recall you you shoot video is that correct yeah yeah that's right so kind of
the kind of cameras we use for planetary imaging shoot high-speed video sequences and generally what we'll do is
stack a certain number of frames out of those video sequences into a final image right
gary palmer astrophotographer in the uk is saying uh hey guys move move away from the uk for
better skies yeah that's uh yeah that's that's wise
advice there are i mean particularly i mean the winter we've had here over the last
kind of you know over the last four or five months has been especially poor it's only really it's only really in the
last week or so that we've actually had a nice kind of extended spell of dry weather
so yeah it can be it can be very frustrating at times
and jessica looks like moquin uh she says she has a william optics
zs61 apple and sky guider pro on the way she's a complete beginner national
photography uh no tracking or stacking experience and i've only used my nikon d3500 dslr from milky
way in shots and shots of um
of some planets while attached to my six inch newtonian dobsonian telescope uh any targets you
suggest for the upcoming galaxy season since its wide angle i hope to find clear skies and time to
shoot orion before it disappears uh in the season from my massachusetts sky
any tips would be great yes i understand it's going to be a lot of work learning to stack and process images
polar line et cetera but you've got to start somewhere what would you give what advice would you give to a ranked beginner
i mean you know when it comes to um you know shooting galaxies i mean it's
it's something i've actually you know done a fair bit of myself over the years um with various forays into into deep sky
and obviously i mean we're coming into that period of the year where you know the big areas of uh kind of
galaxy clusters in virgo and leo uh are well on view really the best
advice is starting with the brighter targets so when you've got objects such as i mean messier 51
the whirlpool galaxy you've there are various bright galaxies such as m86 m87 etc in virgo and starting with the
brighter targets and see how you go because obviously i mean you know 61 mil aperture is
is fairly small so it's always good to start with brighter targets to begin with but
things like you know messier 51 you'll easily be able to see the spiral structure with uh even with a small telescope like
that m33 maybe you know
all the kind of yeah and all the all the you know your typical bright brighter targets and
you know as you gain more experience then you can try your hand at you know more challenging
targets and you know there's no shortage of uh there are no shortage of galaxies out there
to try that's for sure absolutely yeah one of our uh uh the people is on global stock
party last night he loves to shoot uh markarian's chain you know and uh yeah
just the countless galaxies that are in that field you know it's just uh make sure mind uh really kind of spin
uh thinking of yeah i mean yeah the distances of things so
the virgo cluster is is a particularly good target for smaller telescopes that's right that's
right well good um uh there is another question here uh
uh from my moments of zen which is a cool handle here what is your capture software of choice
for shooting video with a debt with a designated astro camera
over the years i've tried lots of different packages but for planetary imaging by far and away
the most popular piece of software is called fire capture and that can be fully downloaded yeah
that can be freely downloaded online so if you do a google search for fire
capture you'll find the website and this software is by far and away the most popular software
for operating planetary cameras let's see let's see if i can find it
final capture correct fire capture fire capture got it yeah
here we go yes we've been around yeah it's been around a fair fair few
years now and yeah it has lots of useful features within it to uh
to use for uh planetary imaging in particular so there's the link
now the other thing i think is very very important uh you know aside from
being driven to to do the astrophotography
and to get really excellent results i think it requires having a mentor and
i know that you do this uh kind of thing maybe damian maybe you can talk a little bit about
um uh you know i know that you can go on your site on your patreon page for example and um
and buy some sessions but what's what's that experience like for for your students yeah i mean
over the last few years i've kind of added lots and lots of tutorial videos to the
side cover all manner of of different things i mean there are so if there's kind of so many
videos there i can't even remember all the issues that i've covered but generally you know pretty much
everything you can think of to do with planetary imaging and also
comic for fee as well which is something i've i've been quite heavily involved in over the last
uh several years in particular so yeah i mean it's a wide range of
material from advice from beginners to advanced
processing work throughs to show you how to capture and process data
you know things to consider when it comes to producing images you know kind of advice on the pitfalls
to avoid software cameras telescopes or all manner of different things
i see a um planet a video uh called a modern guide to planetary
imaging yeah that is on star arizona's website here in the united states
um this is just i guess one of the many videos that you've made
yeah right yes i've made um three dvd tutorial uh
videos which are available as i say as uh hard copy dvds but during the last few
years i've kind of migrated everything including a lot you know tons and tons of new material onto
the online uh web page for tutorials of patreon as a you know it's
a really good interface for for reaching a audience
right i'm going to put that link up too so here it is
oh wow it's very reasonable like a three dollar a month membership yeah just and they're the top
memberships only ten dollars a month how good of a deal was that you know yeah so i kind of
i've always you know i mean you know it's just kind of something i set up maybe you know to make a little bit of you know extra
income on the side as as just some kind of re you know repayment for the work that goes into producing all of
the material so yeah i mean it's it's kind of proven popular over over the last few years and
i've had you know to be honest nothing but kind of positive feedback on it so yeah it's been a rewarding thing to have
done i tell you what i'm going to join up on your top tier level right now so
since we get off i'm taking my my credit card and i'll be one of your one of your uh students so that's great
i should also point out that i've also available on there you've got
data sets you know real data sets that i've taken with various different telescopes over
the years that you can actually practice the processing takes on so you can get an idea you know maybe if
you haven't got your own data you can use the data that i've uploaded on posts to actually
try your hand at processing and see how it goes right right i think that's excellent
you know having uh you know there there have been other kinds of photographers who've done that as well i think i might
have even mentioned it on the last show but uh landscape photographer
ansel adams gave all of his negatives to the university of
arizona so that students could rent make their own renditions of you know
moon over moonrise over hernandez or the moonrise over dome these kinds of things
can you imagine having one of those you know but that's what you have when uh yeah
you're getting a master astrophotographer uh sharing uh original data sets with you
so yeah i mean one thing i'm kind of exploring as well at the moment is because obviously i mean
over the last 20 years or so i've collected terabytes worth of data
um so i'm kind of looking at the moment in a way to kind of maybe put it all into a central archive
that will be accessible yeah so it would be i think it would be something really really nice to do for
you know for the community and you know give people access to today so again try it try to handle um
processing i think so you know the other part is too i mean even years from now you know decades from now
uh there may be some sort of discovery that someone makes in uh in combination with a recent
observation they've made you know so they can go back and look at a nice uh you know it's like a plate vault or
something you know where you go back yeah and can see uh you know an evolving
um uh long-term type of thing that might happen you know you know what the storm cycles on jupiter are
really like you know are there any that happen over a hundred year period for example
you know that kind of yeah yeah i mean you know you know i think we are approaching a stage you know now we are
beginning to see you know longer term patterns in in weather cycles on jupiter john rogers the
director of the jupiter section of the british astronomical association himself has over the years identified longer term
patterns within the jovian atmosphere based you know primarily on the analysis of amateur images
it's you know when you think about it it's pretty amazing that amateurs can still contribute quite
significantly to the science and understanding of a planet like jupiter
absolutely provided provided that you actually are you know properly archiving your
data and recording your observations uh these kinds of things uh make a huge
difference and um so uh you know don parker was very much into uh looking
at the long-term effects of uh you know the global warming uh you know
he he was uh i know that he was very convinced that uh we were that you know planet earth is
coming out of a you know still coming out of an ice age you know
and um that um and you know he made a compelling argument by comparing the
weather on mars you know and with the sun is the driving force of all weather in the solar system of
course you know so um and i think that the more that we uh occupy our solar system you know not
just you know we tend to think you know everything is all about us and we're very centrally thinking almost
like in you know ancient days of of how we would look at the universe you know is
everything revolving around us there is that tendency for us to still do that you know i mean how many people i mean you just
might say to someone gosh that that guy thinks the whole world revolves around him well
actually he you know that's a that's a tendency that i guess all of us have to a degree astronomy helps you get out of that
okay and yeah very yeah i would agree i would agree with you there right it very much does expand
your kind of mental horizon yes yes that's right
that's right well um amy and i i appreciate you spending
another afternoon with us do you want to show some more of your images perhaps uh give us a tour of uh
of your uh you know your patreon page or you know uh things that you would uh uh
steps that you might go through in uh working with students i think that would be very interesting to this
audience yeah okay yeah i can now i can do some of that uh let me just
uh get it ready and i've known this guy long enough i
can vouch for him okay definitely i would sign up to uh to
uh get uh any kind of uh tutorial that you can from him if you are interested in making uh
images that you'll be proud of
not that damian needs me to voucher him he stands on his own
okay okay so uh
so yeah this is the this is the site so basically consists of a dashboard of
posts that are ongoing and you can look through the archive of
all of the posts on uh patreon over the course of uh
the time it's been in existence so here you have um around
present i think around maybe 105 videos covering various things and you've got a
multitude of different data sets posted that you can download and process
so and as i say it consists of a whole manner of different material covering things from kind of the
beginners will find useful such as you can see here this recent post on a question and answer
session covering questions from those subscribed which i've tried to directly answer
here you can see a data set for example so this is a real data set of uh saturn taken in
august 2020 um and you can download the data the raw data and process that
yourself and have a go see how you get on again
if we just move further down there's another data set this one being a color one
uh color data set for jupiter again you can download that and process
now this is a recording of a recent uh hour-long talk with a q a
just covering high resolution astro imaging in detail that i made recently for a society
also a recent data set on the conjunction which we had of jupiter and saturn in
december uh yeah and i was we were quite fortunate actually we had um
one clear eve here in the uk that's it i think it was on i think it was on the
uh i think it was on the evening of the 20th of december so the day before closest okay and i
actually had a really good view of them both visually through the telescope in the same field
of view on that evening oh yeah but i was also able to um show my son as well so uh so he got to
see it as well so that's why it was uh yeah it was uh it was successful and
you know thank god we actually did have a clear evening to see it yes yeah so as i go through this
uh as i say just lots of video and data sets so i've done here
something one of the patrons asked for um fairly recently was a video covering
imaging double stars which is something i've done um quite quite a few times over the
years and it can be good fun to try so that's a video there that covers uh it tells you how to image binary
stars with uh modern equipment and
yeah as as we go on yeah there are lots of uh different videos a video here on getting
started in astrophotography this is a one hour long presentation and that's that 16-inch telescope we were
talking about earlier yeah yeah there's uh there's dom you know he's gone with his
uh immense 16-inch uh f6 newtonian reflector
and kind of just seeing that picture kind of uh it makes me you know i kind of remember
the evenings that i spent there and yeah i got to view mars with it and i remember asking him about this uh
this picture because this is quite a well-known photo of him with the telescope and the question i had was what what on
earth all of this stuff is he has attached to the side of the telescope
and he's and he looked at the photo and his answer was simply beats me [Laughter]
well you know and that kind of i'm not really some something's gone up perfectly i've
always had people visiting you know so the the the thing that he told all his friends is he says uh
you know don parker's house we're always open always open but we don't do mornings you
know so he had this constant stream of visiting astronomers uh come over and stay at his house and
stuff and uh i think a lot of them did uh do things to his telescope
you know the at least the ones that he trusted and uh you know he was so giving that uh you know somebody said yeah i'd like
to try this or try that he'd probably let them you know so yeah he was unless they didn't pull the mirror out or something
so he was uh yeah but i can't i can't i've got nothing but good things to say about
donald trump oh yeah he's an amazing guy yes you know he always had time for you no matter
what questions you had and i remember when i was starting out i would i'd be like emailing
questions constantly and you know he'd always reply or have you know some something funny to say and
you know he's such an entertaining uh entertaining guy oh very much so that's right
we all miss him yeah so um as i say i mean that kind of
uh you know pretty much covers what what's on uh on the tutorial site
and as i say you could just scroll through all of the posts one by one and yeah there's lots and lots of
material there to keep you busy for for a very uh a very long time on time
as time progresses and you know i'm always adding new material as uh as the weeks and months go on
uh particularly you know um as the planetary seasons become more active i always you know concentrate on adding stuff
particularly around those periods so yeah that's uh hopefully that's given given you all uh
an overview of uh yes right right well joining joining your
patreon uh was easy um i did it with uh two or three clicks so
uh you know again uh this this is something i highly recommend you know
it's uh certainly cheaper than a car drive or a plane ticket or anything that
you could do to uh to work with damien and he will um you know he's made himself available and
that not every astronomer does that so uh you know so that that's
that's something that speaks to damian's character you know so uh you know being willing to
uh to take you to the next level so that's what it's all about and uh yeah i
would like to make images like damian does too so one day one day we'll see
but um well that's wonderful damian is there is you know uh is there any parting words
of wisdom or is there anything else that you'd like to share with us or you know i think it in terms of kind of
you know just start i mean really kind of uh advice for those starting out and just getting interested is just just
be patient you know don't don't expect to start taking you know amazing stuff off the bat because you
know i certainly didn't you know it took a lot a lot of work and effort to
to iron out all of the problems and there are indeed lots of you know lots of hurdles that that
you'll come up against when it comes to astrophotography but you know it's it's
never been easier to get involved there are there are so many people around to to support and ask for advice and you
know perhaps the the biggest piece of advice i can give above all is is enjoy
it you know just enjoy what you're doing right you know i think that's beyond
anything is the most important thing is to enjoy yourself that's right yeah that i
think that's what sustains uh people long term and nourishes them and
and uh you know so i have seen i have seen people get very worked up
okay over over things not going right or um some problem that they get stuck in and
uh and they and become such a problem that they stop you know yeah and that's that's
i mean i've i've encountered yeah very similar things i mean i'd be lying if i said i hadn't kind of
had nights like that myself in past years you know where you just coming up against one issue after another it can
be it can be trying at times but as i say patience really is a virtue when it when
it comes to doing this kind of thing right well excellent well damien thanks
for thanks for coming back on with us to spend another afternoon of your valuable time and uh you know i
know our audience loves it and they love your work and uh we look forward to seeing uh
more of your images uh you mentioned that you have about a year of data that you're working with right
now is that right yeah i've still still got more data from last year that i'm still working through
so i mean jupiter is starting to re-emerge in the dawn sky again so yeah yeah we'll be
uh back to observing that again in a couple of months sign right oh very good
okay well thank you so much and um thank you to the audience for tuning in uh we have um
we have another global star party that's happening on friday it starts at 4 p.m central
here and that's being co-hosted by gary palmer uh of gary palmer astronomy and um
so that should be a lot of fun um and uh we have more surprises more
uh interesting guests uh coming up and you'll see those uh in our calendar on
explorescientific.com forward slash live so if you go there uh you'll see us make updates to our
calendar and uh editions as we're going along um currently right now we're getting
ready for the northeast astronomy forum which happens on april 10th so there's a lot of
video preparation stuff for that because it's it will again be a virtual event um but uh you know
it's it's great to have that because it's teaching us all how to do even more outreach we're we're now
talking to a glob global audience instead of a room full of people so which is nice
all right so take care thank you again yeah damian thanks very much and uh i'll see you on
patreon okay take care
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