Transcript:
with the website and and with uh social media have exploded this last year you
know has been the the doom of the of the pandemic though has led to quite
a renaissance it seems like in people being at home and observing and so on so
it's been huge um for the for the brand right that's good news dude this year
yeah and i think scott you've had the same sort of experience everybody everybody
in our industry yeah you know if you were involved in amateur astronomy in some
way you know whether you're building gear or doing services or
you know print uh you know anything to do with uh supporting the astronomical amateur
astronomical community it's been really building and building strong you know so
i think it i think we're going to see something uh that we haven't seen in a long time
yeah it's all good it's all good and it's getting exciting too because
we're getting closer and closer towards uh people getting their vaccinations and
you know um so that's uh that's awesome because we're
we're gonna be able to get out eventually uh to our star parties and all of that but i think all the stuff we
learned about um connecting with other people around the world you know i think that's gonna continue on i i i
definitely will continue doing global star party you know and uh i plan to as i go to events
um you know i you know i always ask you know well if
we go to your event can i broadcast live and they're like sure you know you can do that so
i think that because you meet some amazing people at the events too you know and it's it's it's nice to
you know whether you're you know able to interview lecturers or just uh
people that are going to their first event ever you know that kind of thing it's always really interesting so
scott i was going to say i remember this young writer in astronomy magazine that was writing articles on deep sky objects
oh that guy yeah whatever it became of him he's the editor
that was a long time ago it seems like oh
ago you could say last century that's cool i i think we got it right
here on our program it's awesome i love it i think it was very odd very early on it was it was dr david levy who who met
this dumb kid from ohio you know and took pity and started writing
well actually i didn't really take pity on him
but i just started we started to talk and we started to joke around a little bit
and we helped the uh county or the city of milwaukee
explode an expressway right outside the offices of astronomy magazine
that that's a story that need that's a story that needs to be told david at some point and written up the
the it was the 1984 astronomical league convention was in
waukesha of all places near where i am now a little distance west of milwaukee
and uh the the league was there our friends you know from sky and tell were there of course and
if you've ever seen the movie the blues brothers there's a famous chase on a freeway
where the car goes off the end of a of an unfinished freeway well that was a
freeway that actually existed in milwaukee and uh and then the car comes down in
chicago in the movie well they never finished this freeway downtown in milwaukee and so they
decided to detonate it and they did it on the weekend when the astronomical
league meeting was going on david was there with me at astronomy magazine's headquarters and they exploded this
thing and dropped a freeway down a whole story with dynamite and it shattered the
front windows of the astro media building it was at the time which was a couple blocks away they were
it was all it was a glass what had been a law office of the founder steve
walther's brother was the lawyer so it was put into that building so the the joke for that weekend of course was
that sky and tell had dispatched some agents to the astronomy headquarters there
i will never forget that story david that'll be with me and long until i've
gone to have died and gone it was a pretty impressive explosion wasn't it
it really was and i think it cemented our friendship and uh
linda got her first shot today she is a teacher so she is
that's good news and at the end of the month we're going to go partying
yeah awesome yeah the cdc guidelines are looking really good
so as long as everyone's vaccinated it's time to get together
yeah oh yeah well i mean it about 10 of the population's been been vaccinated
but they're hoping to um you know keep vaccinating and it's it's improving the
situation but they'll still they're still recommending that you try to maintain distance and uh
and wear masks whenever applicable good good recommendation
yep you're on the cautious side but we may be only months away from
a partial restoration of of normality at least now i think so yes they're hoping
by summer that things will get better but it's just uh you know we'll keep going and
the more the more people the population get vaccinated and it should improve the situation for
everyone to be able to open their businesses and restaurants and stuff like that let's just hope the number of
uh anti-vaxxers who would rather listen to
teenage movie stars than epidemiologists is not in the hundred in the tens of
millions here yeah yeah hopefully they won't but
yeah there's still a long way to go to to sort of uh
get everyone on the board of understanding what what science is all about here in this civilization
and i think that uh our group can actually go some way towards helping with that problem absolutely yeah we
need people like libby to help us with that problem yeah you betcha well
people like libby are the future that's that's what we need and by
you know i'm sorry that she and everyone else has gone through this but it's a good learning experience
for her and you know in the future so we just have to wait and see what happens but her grandkids will be asking her
about this you know about this time i was wondering if there was anybody from astronomy magazine
who might be interested in asking libby to write an article for them yeah
yes i don't see anybody here who could do that absolutely yes we we should talk
about that libby sometime is she is libby here still yeah i'd love
to just passed writing out story about popularizing
astronomy sometime yeah definitely well we'll have to chat about that i can uh i know the people
there pretty well or at least i can bribe them into uh getting our way with the astronomy magazine
right does libby have a fan club
oh yeah
yeah i remember i i started astronomy more or less when when libby did about her age
how old are you again libby i just turned 11 in december so
wow congratulations that's awesome great you're on a great journey
and as you know already libby this is a golden age to be interested in this
stuff we've never seen this kind of research scientific results exploration
this is the best time by far ever to to get into this stuff and
humanity that's true absolutely the the the rate of discovery of knowledge of expansion of what we know is uh
much much greater than it was a generation ago now oh yeah also the ability and the access to
information and technology i mean you're starting at a great age libby i mean my
daughter is 16 and the stuff that she's doing now compared to when i was her age and your
age it's just amazing yeah enough just talking about the range of
telescopes and gears she has to able to
to get my time when i was libby's age there was
just one telescope or binoculars you get get
and start with and these days
eight to 10 inch telescope was a big big scope then a big scope you remember when an 8-10 or a 12-inch scope was
astronomy clubs had a telescope yeah like that but but not too many
individuals 30 years ago yeah yeah the four four inch was considered small uh
or and then and then a six inch was medium and an eight inch was large
you know this is what i started with my astronomy all right
nice it's an uh pirate scope how's the field of view on that becca i
don't know it's very small but it's 30 times
30. so it's uh quite small but this is a core this is not the
actual my first scope but it's uh very similar
i have the white one and uh i earned it i bought it with my earned money
i because i was eight years old and we just moved from finland to sweden
and it was on the 70s and many families
moved from finland to sweden and and at the christmas time my father
ordered finnish christmas cards to sweden with finnish
greetings texts so i sell them to finnish people in here in local area with
finnish greetings and they sent it to their family in finland from sweden and that was very
popular thing to do so i earned my first telescope by my own money that time 75 75
by selling christmas card yeah wow yeah
and becca and sweden do people amateurs uh build their own telescopes or do they
buy no they buy them yeah yeah but we only have one store in whole
sweden it's called astro sweden and they are out of stock for a long
time ago so because the
manufacturers and and general agents they don't
pre-advertise just one small country and small
business they pre-exercised like a fellow and ts telescope x-rays expressed in germany
so i ordered very very much from germany and england
let's see who's watching this right now we have a pretty good audience going on right at
the moment um looks like um
i think some of these people are from the last show that was that was on here
uh but uh
yeah it's definitely from the last show i've had really good conversations from the last program uh paco was on with us
in the afternoon which was nice and
well carol lots back on with us and um
cameron cameron goes of course you're right here um
nick whittaker mike wiesner uh mick wants to know if james is having
any luck tonight so i think he's going
he's in the middle of polar airlining right now yeah so so hopefully he's having some good luck
with that yeah we have a great program uh i saw uh jason gonzale also uh log in
which is great carlos hernandez is with us yeah and um
uh we will have dr daniel barth of course david levy david eicher uh living in the stars
and more [Applause]
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way
[Music]
wow okay so uh welcome to the 36th global star party i
can't believe we've done 36 of these things um but it's been a lot of fun uh i was
reminded that we started them in the summer of last year so we're not even
quite a year into a cali a 12-month calendar year yet of
uh of these global star parties so i'm hoping that uh we can uh get many
more in uh you know i'd like to see a nice round number like 50 or something before
we end up a 12-month cycle so but it's been a real pleasure to have uh
you know of course our guests on uh to have our audience watching and our audience
participating because we have opened up the program to uh attend the after party
which you know i will again post the link to our zoom waiting room where kent
martz will be waiting for you so starting at about 8 45 central uh you
can log into the waiting room kent will check your audio your video make sure
that you're going to be [Music] on topic for astronomy because that's what it's all about and
and then we'll send you straight over to this zoom link okay which is the live global star party that's being
simulcast on facebook on youtube twitch twitter uh we are also on the home page
of cloudynights.com and a couple other sites as well um i believe we're on uh ontario telescopes
website as well which is really cool uh we have uh a great group as always
and so you know just to recognize some of the people that are that are here uh at
the moment because we have other people that will be logging on later but we have richard grace over here is the way
i see it anyways uh richard grace is um up here with me we have the the red
light you see kind of flashing by as uh james hubbard james the astrophotographer he's out there
setting up and polar aligning dave eicher the editor in chief of astronomy
magazine is with us uh he's been doing this uh almost marathon of uh taking us
you know through the universe uh you know from some of the really kind of
strange and scary stuff that can happen out there um to uh you know showing us
the uh i think tonight is something to do with the distance scale of the universe libby and the stars is with us libby uh
committed herself at the uh very young age she's still very young but she started at 10 years old with a
global star party and committed herself to giving over 50 um lectures and so
i think she's being that's this is the 36th i think that she's done
a couple of extras for us as well so she's probably almost up to 40 lectures
with us right now and she's uh really um got very you know i would say she's getting
expert level giving a a talk especially for someone her age uh cameron gillis
cameron uh watched us for a long time joined into our after parties and uh you
know and and started uh showing us what he does with astrophotography concentrating on smartphone
astrophotography the legendary carlos hernandez is with us uh tonight uh you if you uh are on
facebook and are on these astronomy forums and stuff you'll see carlos's
incredible space art you know and uh uh so he's with us today carlos has a
lineage that goes all the way back to i guess percival lowell
at uh at lowell observatory with people that uh taught uh how to do
you know these incredibly detailed uh drawings of the planets and uh carlos
does it better than anyone else i know uh the incomparable david levy is with
us he's uh not only inspired us with comet discoveries his books um
his lectures but he does so with poetry at the beginning of every global star party
which is awesome the vast reaches jason gonzalez with us uh right now and uh you know
mind-blowing astrophotography uh that uh when i when i think that he can't get any better uh he does he gets
better every time so it's just uh uh just um amazing and remarkable super
nice guy um uh you know he's with us tonight pekka haunted from stockholm sweden uh
pekka was on earlier today talking about his experiences on being on global star
party of course uh uh very much like cameron he was watching us i decided to
participate in the after party and now he's uh he's really uh giving it all he's got to participate in global star
party and we'll hear about his adventures here pretty soon john goss
former uh president of the astronomical league is with us tonight he's representing the astronomical league
with uh as our official door prize sponsor uh very cool and uh dr daniel barth daniel is someone
that uh we've known each other for a very long time uh uh it just seems like
this you know like there must be these parallel universes that somehow collide into each other um
daniel and i know each other from my need days when he was working at scope city and i was a
young sales manager at that time and so that was uh very cool he is now a
major uh influencer in uh science in the state of arkansas and
indeed the country and uh he's written a book on how to teach uh uh how
to teach teachers to teach astronomy so that's and that has been going uh somewhat viral at this point there's a
free download so really cool he's going to be starting a program with us starting on monday so a regular show
once a week rodrigo zaleda the owner of north optics
in la serena chile is on with us as well so this is who's with us right now we have
others coming on but we're going to get started as we always do with
with dr david levy um he doesn't normally use his doctor's uh uh you know
uh uh you know uh name but um
but he is uh extremely knowledgeable uh he always
uh characterizes each one of our star parties uh you know just he just has the feel for
uh the the experience of being at one of these things he's also got the you know when you go to star parties where he's
there in person uh it's it's uh it's amazing and um you know people are
always honored to be in his presence i've been his friend for now decades but i'm always honored to be
in his presence too uh he's a great friend um when you make friends with david it's
it's for a lifetime and uh so david thank you very much for being on the show and i'm gonna give you the
stage well thank you so much scotty and it's such a pleasure to be with all of you
it's looking like our gsb family just keeps on expanding but it's very
close and i really do enjoy it wendy and i have been living at this
current side of jarnak observatory since 1996
and we've had our one of the main buildings of our observatory here since that time
but it's finally giving starting to give up the ghost and so on sunday our roof is going to
need to be replaced on it and fortunately what we did to keep the
open building dry is that we asked the local
city council to forbid any rain and they wouldn't do it
excuse me guess wendy prayed and that didn't do it and we went
to the uh state of arizona and they wouldn't do it so finally we went to the
united states senate and we asked them to pass a law forbidding rain over our observatory
until the roof can be repaired and they did that was nice of them it was very nice of them it was
past 99 to zero and the person who wasn't there to vote
is here right now i think with us that's you david anyway uh we we we're hoping it's not going to
rain it hasn't yet and starting sunday we're going to be getting a new route
uh our poetic introduction for this session of the global star party number
36 is going to be dedicated to libby and the stars and to her
wonderful generation of thousands or millions of young people who all deserve the same chance that
libby's getting to enjoy the night sky just go out you don't need a telescope you don't even
need binoculars although binoculars are fun telescopes even more fun
but all you need is a little bit of an imagination two good eyes or a pair of glasses and
the night sky up there and [Music] we would like to encourage all of you to
get out whenever it's clear even if it's just for five or ten minutes and look up at the night sky just to
just to see what's happening as the sun goes down and the stars begin to come up it kind of acts almost like a
tranquilizer it gives you the big picture of what's happening
the little details of your day begin to fade away yes and when you look up at
the night sky anyway my poem today is by lewis carroll
it is called the walrus and the carpenter and it goes like this
the sun was shining on the sea shining with all his might he did his very best to make the pillows
smooth and bright and this was odd because it was the middle of the night
the moon was charming sulkily because she thought the son had got no business to be there
after the day was done it's very rude of him she said to come
and spoil the fun so if you want to hear more you got to go outside and look up at the night sky
and enjoy it thank you scotty thank you very much david that's awesome
okay all right so um this is a this is a star party i don't know uh if at this
time we have anyone with a live image or or an image that they might have made or
maybe a uh a a some space art or something but i
usually like to transition from one speaker to the next by doing something like that if we don't have it right now that's okay
but anyone
okay okay all right then we will go straight on to
uh david eicher david uh david and i had a great conversation in
the last global star party and we were talking about really
the psychological and uh
kind of the spiritual benefits i mean i if i can touch on spiritual um
the the benefit of being out under the night sky
and experiencing the universe from a you know a larger perspective
understanding the distances of things but understanding too that all your
problems are incredibly small as we live on this
unbelievably small little blue planet you know orbiting this average star as we hurl
through space it uh you know you can you can uh
you can wallow in in problems and they are and they become magnified for you
but uh you start uh you spend enough time out under the milky way looking through your telescope seeing
across the light years knowing that you're looking back into time
this does help put things in perspective and i i personally believe that
stargazing and astronomy is is an excellent way to uh regain um
uh you know to to reduce any kind of depression you might have or uh to um to help help your your
you know help yourself heal you know it is something that is really amazing
and uh david uh i saw david uh uh chime on about it later in facebook
and i was really happy and pleased to see that because i i know that he gets it he is uh
it's something that a lot of astronomers don't talk a lot about but we all know it's there so
but uh david david is so eloquent in uh the way that he can put words
together and um uh and to just uh talk to us uh as if
we're his best friend because i think he he must be the kind of guy that can make instant best friends with
almost anyone so um because he is he is a he is also a best friend for me too
david thank you very much i'm going to give you the stage thanks so much scott it's great to be
here with uh new friends and old friends um and i have a question actually and if
anyone would like to chime in on this to begin with i would love that i'd love to hear what you think
my question is how large is the universe so we will talk a little bit about
perspective about what astronomers call the cosmic distance scale about how big
everything is but does does anyone sort of have a gut feel we know it's large the universe does anyone have a feeling
as to how large 13.8 billion light years
43 okay i'm sorry david 43 okay
just 43. 42.
because we can figure out the units later you know but it's 43 of them yes
physical universe yeah well let's talk about it a little a
little bit and we'll explore some of its uh large ass here immediately after the big bang of course
the universe was a very tiny place but that was 13.8 billion years ago the
expanding universe means the universe of course now is unimaginably large and getting larger every day
this is one area that two generations of science fiction movies have seriously
distorted in the minds of most of the public in reality we can't shoot around from
star system to star system in cruisers at least yet or ever
the real universe is as douglas adams put it very eloquently
space is big really big and he was right about that
even distances between the nearest objects are very large let alone distances between galaxies of course if
the milky way were a model with stars being the size of grains of sand then
the disk of the galaxy would be 60 000 kilometers across and the closest star is six
kilometers away from us the alpha proxima centauri
system of course astronomers call the size of the universe the cosmic distance scale
let's consider the closest objects at first the solar system
well let's imagine that the earth sun distance one astronomical unit is one
centimeter on that scale just think about that we we've traveled a tiny tiny fraction then
of that one centimeter physically traveled uh
on that scale however jupiter would be five centimeters away saturn 9.5
centimeters pluto out in the vast reaches if you will 40 centimeters
away on that scale and the physical edge of the solar system the oort cloud of
comets would be about 10 football fields away on that scale and we've traveled of
course again a tiny tiny fraction of one centimeter on that scale
and the oort cloud at ten foot handle i'm gonna say it's not football season so i'm gonna say 10 lambo fields
hoping we don't have any you know rivalries going here but that the the 10 lambo fields there
of distance is only about a quarter of the way to the nearest star
moving outward two stars we need to think of course in terms of light years
the distance light travels in one year at 186 000 miles per second
one light year of course that's the fastest speed there is one light year is approximately 6
trillion miles a long hike the nearest star to the sun proxima
centauri is 4.2 light years away the disc of our milky
way galaxy of course stretches at least a hundred thousand light years
across there's some studies that are recent that suggest it's larger than that but it's at least
a hundred thousand light years across the bright disc of our galaxy and the nearby galaxy our friend who will
eventually come and smack us right in the face the andromeda galaxy of course is 2.5 million
light years away but the universe of course is unimaginably larger yet
in the last couple of decades we've gotten a good handle on the size of the cosmos really for the first time
the current estimate is that the the universe stretches across a diameter of about 93 billion light years
well think about that a moment if the universe is 13.8 billion years old and
the speed of light is the fastest speed there is how can that be
because space itself expands over time
we need to get away from this thinking of the big bang as an explosion in an empty box that's filling the box
with things that's not what is happening space itself expands over time so space
over time interstitially expands the one centimeter in the early universe of
space itself expands to become two centimeters and so
on over time space and the objects within it are
expanding there's a rob of course to all of this um one of you mentioned it a as we were
teasing about an answer here a moment ago up to now of course we've been talking about the visible universe in the 1970s
of course two astronomers alan guth at mit and andre linde
uh they independently proposed this idea of inflation theory
of course the idea that the universe a fraction of a second after the big bang hyper expanded in size which
explains a lot of what we see observationally in the current uh universe
and let's let's uh let's set that aside that that really uh brings some big
problems to the size of the universe because it means that if inflation theory is correct most cosmologists
believe of course that it is that means that the universe in fact
could well be infinite and that the visible universe that we see to the edge of the visible
our view of the expanding universe is not nearly the entire universe
that of course sounds like science fiction but it's not
so we know at a minimum the universe stretches across 93 billion light years
a very very long hike and we know that unfortunately for our
hopes dreams and aspirations of some of us that traveling physically is possible in
the universe over very very long distances and at very high speeds like the speed of light
or a some fraction of the speed of light because for example photons are massless
things that have mass even a relatively small amount of mass require an enormous
amount of energy to move across long distances and to move at high velocities
so it's very very unlikely that we will have ufos meaning aliens uh who you know like
in the movies are bipedal organisms with eyes that look kind of vaguely like us
landing in central park and shaking hands with us and having dinner you know at tavern on the green
the distances regardless of the technology are incredibly vast
most astrophysicists would conclude because the energy to move a
lot of matter would be prohibitive to fly around and visit different parts of
even the galaxy so that's what we know about the incredible size of the galaxy that
wasn't really known at all a generation ago with any certainty and it's amazing to think about when
you're outstanding underneath the milky way the stars to think about how incredibly vast it is
but how amazing scott as we said last week that we can be made of the stuff of
the universe you're from big bang nuclear synthesis early on in the universe with hydrogen helium
deuterium and so on or most of the atoms in literally in our bodies
made in supernovae or the mergers of neutron stars or other massive
objects and we can look out into this vast incredible universe that we'll never go
and explore physically but we can understand what it is and what it means and talk to each other
uh through the miracle of electrons as well uh about it all by itself
night after night so so that's an incredible thing it's a big big big place as douglas adams said so
succinctly wonderful wonderful now that doesn't make your head just like
spin i i don't know what what would uh many the the comments here which i also
uh if you're chiming in on chat um i do share those back on the chat
internally with the people that are that are giving presentations here too and uh
you know a lot of people came up with a lot of different numbers as far as how big they thought the universe was uh
uh jeff wise said 34 billion light years norm hughes thought it was 28
billion um you know i
don't know that we'll ever actually come up with the totally correct number because it seems like we're always making yet
another observation and revising these things but that is the process of science and for us to try to understand
uh reality and and where we are and where we're going and all the rest of it and so that's that's a wonderful thing
um but uh some some people think that uh you know it's uh it it
it's beyond the comprehension of the mind uh they think that um you know that
it's uh book davies says it's expanding into nothing but it's really not a question
the universe is and that's all there is no outside of the universe
so yet another you know so there's um
that's right and it brings up scott also this issue of of multiverses of multiple
universes which mathematically could um exist yeah but of course the very
definition we believe the very definition of science of empiricism of
observation and experiments what we can observe and test
would prohibit us from seeing anything that is outside our universe so it becomes an academic
exercise until the last couple or three years when some cosmologists say well maybe there could
be some kind of an indication in our universe of the presence of
another uni you know maybe we'll never know and of course if the universe is infinite we'll never
presumably for sure know that either but you know these things are
possibilities um but do we have evidence for them no not yet
um and of course you can't as we talked about last week also it's fun and it's wonderful and you know
working at home here you know sometimes i have a little star trek on in the back you know we we love our entertainment
but you can't pick and choose when you want to follow scientific reasoning
if you're a scientific thinker you have to follow science
all the time not when it suits you and not accept it when you don't like it
so you've got to systematically believe in empiricism and science and right now
that's telling us that there could be other universes we have no evidence for them there we may never have any
evidence for them we don't know what happened before the big bang we most likely of course never will and that's
what einstein loved to argue about with niels bohr and others and uh we may never know the true extent
of the universe we know it's at least 93 billion light years but that may only be
the visible universe right right how about the concept uh one thing i
wanted to ask this is a really fascinating subject to me uh maybe it's immeasurable in the in
the sense that uh like a you have a imagine there will be a strip right
um mobius strip is just a two-dimensional version of the universe
and then you take that to the next dimension of four-dimensional mobius where basically you just you end up if you keep on going
in one direction you end up in the same location yes so so basically when you look at the
observable universe 13.8 billion that's the edge you hot you have the cosmic
background radiation but what happens is if you follow the logic of
the universe actually expanding at some point it was smaller so actually when you're looking
further away you're actually looking at a converging distance so the distances
are becoming smaller because it's expanding because you're looking back in time so you actually are folding in
itself so in fact maybe the universe is only 13.8 billion
years or beyond that beyond the light years there is a
the event if you will if you believe in the expansion theory right where it becomes a single point
and so you actually look far enough beyond the observable universe and then you actually can look
so that in any direction you face it actually converges on a point
you follow what i'm saying i do and that's a very interesting point and very interesting question and it brings up a
couple of interesting related things the cosmological parameter results most
recently from the planck satellite which give us everything we believe we know about the
nature of matter energy and age of the universe and and therefore size and so on
and also a related matter that that weighs in on exactly
what you were talking about cameron and that is the shape of the universe and maybe that's a maybe
that should be an upcoming thing that i'll talk a little bit about in a week or two or three
because the shape of the universe is also not well known and weighs in on these issues as well
yeah yeah like can i share my screen question sure i just want to take some notes here
so basically um see can you see my screen
so there's this uh you know this is kind of a three-dimensional mobius is called sudanese mobius band
and maybe this is but this is just again only three dimensions but because the universe is beyond four dimensions
we cannot visualize this it's difficult to conformally map that universe in a in a
three-dimensional space so here's here's a klein bottle version of the same so again the concept of as
you look back you're actually eventually you look at yourself right back in an earlier point in time
so yeah anyhow this just that's kind of a visualization of this which we can
extend uh beyond to to our observable universe perhaps
perhaps let you add a uh a shape of the universe talk in here as well to try to
summarize that which is a very interesting and deeply related matter
no less we know even less about it now than we do about the size of the universe but it's interesting to
consider the possibilities sure well like black holes could be just little they're like folds in the universe right
so they are uh basically bumps in the road uh but they help
morph the shape so you have this larger shape but then you have these uh
contours if you will caused by black holes right which fold time and space
space time is curved around very massive objects and including black holes yep
danielle sorry there's some great comments good stuff yeah yeah and some questions okay one question is uh you
know what is the universe expanding into it's not the universe is everything that
there is and again our instinct thinking about the big bang
is that it's like a grenade going off in a room that's filling the room with something
but there is no edge and no center of the universe this is one of the questions
that we get most frequently with ask astro uh at the magazine which is an incredibly popular department of
questions about such things um all of all of space is expanding
so it's not like it's expanding into a pre-existing volume
you know what i mean so that's very difficult for people to get their heads wrapped up oh i know and and it's very
difficult for you to believe when alex filippenko tells you
that the universe very likely is infinite that seems counter-intuitive and nonsensical as well but that's what
the evidence points to it's infinitely finite [Laughter]
the linguists would like that at least another question um
uh let's see this is from uh david kent can david mention what part
guitars play in the universe this is uh you can actually get this
shirt this is a shirt that brian may gave me and it's brian may guitars i finally got around to wearing
a a rock and roll shirt here on one of these yeah i like it so these are
actually brian has a guitar company that he produces replicas of the red special and other
guitars that you can buy from brian may guitars and they also make these shirts
very cool well so you know if every if it's all part of the universe then everything's part of the universe right well as brian
said in guitar you got to use both hemispheres of the brain you know there's science and there's also rock
and roll that's right that's right um one of the good questions we have here
there there's mentions of string theory
book davey says they've have you ever noticed a lot of amateur astronomers are amateur musicians too
absolutely yes and according again to refer back to bro
brian claims that a lot of musicians have been very interested in the sky and he's taken
a lot of them over over the years out to to look at the stars when he's been on tour
so there is you know quite quite an intellectual bridge there start probably starting in a serious way
with william herschel yeah right right uh
scott uh david eicher is also an excellent drummer well thank you thank you carlos
awesome awesome i know he's a musician so uh i have yet to see him perform live
yet so i'm i'm looking forward to that day so there's something we'll have to do at a star party sometime that'll be
cool that'll be cool on a cloudy night yep it would be awesome
even during a clear night that would be all right with me um our next speaker is our youngest speaker
which is uh 11 year old libby and the stars and libby
has covered many topics um ranging from the
nebula nebulas black holes star formation uh
uh the you know distances distance scale of the you know the solar system the galaxy um
and uh she always has a you know she's learning not only about the universe herself but
she's learning about more about space exploration she's ravenous to find out more information
she's literally read every book in her school library about space exploration
and astronomy uh so you know anybody's got some free books they'd
like to send libby's way she'll she'll take them and read them she is currently reading uh some of david levy's books um
which is great and uh some of david eicher's books and um
you know so uh she's uh she's getting the education of a lifetime before we
started broadcasting we started talking to libby about uh
the fact that she is living in the golden age of astronomy david eifer pointed out that
never at any time has humanity experience the rated discovery uh the
breakthroughs and discovery that we're making about uh learning about the universe which is really learning about
who we are ourselves you know our origin story uh and all the
dimensions that that that we somehow are connected to so um
libby i'm going to turn this conversation over to you um
okay so i'm talking about uh the life of a
star i made a presentation to share so here
for that uh this week last weekend um
alert uh how do i share that
okay there we go uh can't find a big screen button
so there we go okay um so i made a presentation
last saturday i took a huge trip up to mount magazine
and i just got to learn a lot about the stars um
i live right next to a highway with many street lights and things that
are very preventable from you doing astronomy so um
it was a long drive up to mount magazine which is the highest point in arkansas
and we were we were out on a little lookout and uh
it was sort of eerily dark out there which i did not like much so we have put the telescope on top of
the car and i sat on top of the sunroof with my legs dangling down into the car
and i just had my it was a tiny telescope uh the tasca one that i got fixed up used to be
my grandpa's old telescope and i don't even know how old that thing is but it
was very starting to fix up an old telescope of my grandpa's and
we don't even know how old it is he does we have he hasn't said how old he's had it but
it just felt nice to use the old telescope and i got to learn a lot about the stars
my goal in that trip to wasn't trying to do too much astrophotography
because all i have to worry about at home is taking pictures and every time i
look for my telescope i'm like hurry take a picture before it moves and uh
and i just told my mom i said my goal on this trip is to not take a picture of
anything i find even if i want to just because i always spend all that time
taking pictures and not just deserving myself and
i saw many stars out there and started to realize how important they are
because stars they make planets they make supernovas and
just being a star alone that's all we look at in the sky like with our
telescopes that's what we look at 24 7 nebulas stars galaxies
other planets that's pretty much the whole night sky and so uh
all of that is made up of stars and i started to realize that we would not exist
either it would just be blackness dark nothing just just gravity
and uh and how important they are because i mean everything is made out of stars
even us humans we're made out of stars everything
and the life cycle of the star it seems so short but
really when you look at the timeline of it it lasts like 5 million millions of years and
a lot of you know a lot of there's a lot of steps in it um
so when you look at a nebula and uh you see like tiny little stars and
10 little stars and then like becoming stars those are predators so they're building up material to be big enough to
be a star so that they can explode in a while or do whatever they want
so the main sequence star is uh just a normal star in the sky probably
about halfway for your life and uh now it has to uh
not has to uh chemically stars don't have vines but they just
eat they either die off normally or they like explode supernova
crazy um and i found this chart helpful for a lot of people to understand um
the protostar the main sequence star and then you see it goes down into
two where it can either just start to lose power and die off or
it can burst into a supernova and uh
and i found this interesting like how does this change like
like that's like i wonder how many more stars in the solar system
just become a red giant storm just die off like that or how many
like that depends how big the universe is connecting to earlier um depends how big the universe is
because how many stars decide to [Music]
become a supernova how many stars just decide to die off and
i know a lot of people say on this call we like to mention a lot that we are actually all made out of stars
and um realizing that like everything is a star
stars are important and i think a lot of people need to realize that we're all stars
and that astronomy is very important because this could lead us back to the beginning of our universe
like it was just blackness how did the first star get into our universe how did the first
star explode did the first star just become a red
giant star and die or did it or was there a second star that became a
supernova and uh there's a lot of tracing back to the beginning of time
in space and the first star that you know created a whole entire uh
the whole entire universe basically us everything the ground the grass earth
our solar system our sun our star and um
i feel like tracing back to the beginning of time is very important for a lot of people to
do um not like for many education purposes
this can help in many ways you know we can learn how earth is like
how do we get on earth how are humans first on earth
like dinosaurs on earth the meteor that came on earth
and killed the dinosaurs like not to repeat history again and um
i know that's a huge part of our day of our age the golden age of astronomy which we were talking about earlier
how uh it's amazing to be in this age because we have all these uh resources to help
us go back and learn i mean you can't google what was the beginning of time you
probably won't get the answer because nasa's been working on that for how many years now
but uh there's so much education and resource and the second that nasa finds out the
beginning of time and how we all started we can all share that information and
who knows maybe even another universe is out there and it could lead to more discoveries
and you know just earth conquering space
and uh i started to realize that all the beautiful stuff that we look at in space
is all made from stars and they're very important and that's when we need to get people interested in
astronomy realizing how important stars are and everybody's lives you know
you know us we all are stars everybody is
um the whole earth and everything and um
if there weren't any stars we'd just be looking at just gravity in the sky it just it wouldn't
be this beautiful nebula you know how even did that get there you know you have to
understand this whole family branch of stars just
out there who created the orion nebula and um
there's like a lot of history behind it um not even looking back at earth's history of when the humans first got
here but way back a long time ago which seems like a fictional thing
but there was a beginning of time and and so the whole world is going to
conquer it and we're going to find out the beginning of time
you know what libby i think that you have uh you have had uh some profound uh
thoughts and uh i i know when i was 11 years old i didn't
have such incredible thoughts as you're having now so um
i was very much wrapped up in the um
you know the adventure and the thrill of exploring the universe
but i had not come to the realization of uh of you know that we are truly all made
of and everything's made from stardust you know so um
so i i think that uh i think that you uh the way that you put it uh so
clearly and uh uh eloquently i think that you've come a long way libby congratulations
thank you and that's a little ryan nebula behind you yeah and that orion nebula slide your
last night was beautiful really like that one yeah
okay all right so um let's um
uh we have uh uh carlos hernandez uh with us tonight i
know that he might be called away at any moment uh he is a you know a practicing doctor
and so it's very difficult for him to get away i've been begging for him to come on to
the program to share some of his space art carlos is it okay can you uh can you share some
with us for a little while yes
uh scott do you have the uh the images i sent you or did you want me to post uh my own you you post them just go ahead
and share them from your own computer okay just give me one moment please yeah
i also wanted to comment on libby's uh that was a nice flow chart that you had there on the star yeah star evolution
that was really nice very clear well done
okay just give me one more thank you
let's see
but no way okay let's go to the photos
no excuse me a moment i was just uh i thought okay it's okay the one that you had
let me see if i can find it you see the little green share button at
the bottom of your zoom client it says share screen
yes i see that yes okay you click on that and then you'll see options for what you can
share whether it's just uh one of your apps or your whole screen
okay so you might want to if you're on powerpoint you might just click on the powerpoint app
itself okay and then you
hit share and away you go
you see
those of you who might have heard of people like don parker
tippi dioria chick capen uh you know some of these astronomers
that many of them were in florida and i guess connected all the way up through illinois
you know are were very close friends of uh carlos carlos hernandez and that team
did some amazing uh observations of uh the planets uh
i re recall um tippy doria and i i'm not sure who tippy
was with it might have been tippy and dawn or you know carlos knows the real story but uh it was predicted that they
would see this this flash uh this flash effect on mars and it was
this kind of transient phenomena that they weren't sure if it was an artifact or
you know some other effect but they made a prediction that they would
be able to see it on a particular opposition of mars at a certain time and
all the rest of it and they all went out i guess with video and were able or
maybe with a quick exposure camera and they were able to capture this uh effect once again so
it's just really some amazing stuff um of course with uh you know these guys
doing such high resolution work uh you know and a guy like carlos uh making careful technical drawings of the
planets it was really an amazing team of uh of planetary photographer or
planetary astronomers
and i actually scott i actually actually started observing about the age of libby and ironically when i was about her age
i was receiving pamphlets from the mariner 9 orbiter from nasa
and that's that's actually when i first got exposed to the planet mars back in 1971.
that's cool about libby's age and then from then on it was the viking
landers and all the other spacecraft that came afterwards
and uh as a background i i've been doing space art um for about 20 25 years now
and the interesting thing is i've been able to improve my art
and also have a better appreciation of uh astronomy and everything else associated
with now let me see if i can fix this this time
trying to get to my desktop to show my slides
let's see
there we go there it is
okay this is a painting a digital most uh i started as
most uh artists drawing you know with a pencil uh
charcoal and then did a watercolor and acrylics and things like that but eventually i got involved
with the computer in digital art digital painting
and i used a graphics tablet along with the computer and i produced my paintings
using adobe photoshop which is an application a very popular one for photo manipulation and for painting this is a
painting of the united launch alliance rocket that launched the perseverance
mars rover on july 30th 2020. it's an atlas 5 541 rocket
and it launched it on july 30th 2020 and after approximately a seven month
journey it finally reached the planet mars on february 18th of this year 2021.
totally looks like a photograph thank you nice
then on february 18th uh this is another
digital painting the uh mark perseverance mars rover and
helicopter were inside this capsule and heat shield
as it encountered the atmosphere of the planet mars even though it's not as
extensive as our own it does cause uh any object falling into it to develop an
intense friction and heat and at about a thousand miles above the surface
the probe started to encounter the uh the atmosphere of mars
and as it was entering the atmosphere the friction created a temperature
produced a temperature of 33 800 degrees fahrenheit
which is about 1300 celsius over the capsule as it entered the
atmosphere and this is the beginning of the famous uh seven minutes of terror as the probe
the capsule enters mars the atmosphere and we lose contact with the probe
and uh this is the uh seven minutes of tear amazing
then as the probe enters the atmosphere perseverance is still within its capsule
and heat shield and at approximately seven miles above the surface of mars
the parachute opens up to slow it down so it was going at a speed at a thousand
miles above of uh 13 000 miles an hour at that that altitude
and because of the friction and now with the help of the parachute it slowed its speed down to nine percent
of that speed at seven miles above the surface so you see the uh the capsule and the
probe and it entering slowly into the atmosphere of the planet mars
as as you're describing this it's really you really understand kind of the physics of it
as you're putting the artistic uh effects right yes that's why i try to um
you know i enjoy producing my paintings but i try to make them so that it explains what is
occurring in nature and what we're seeing and the incredible images that are being
returned by perseverance and other probes so i try to combine both science and art and in in my
paintings to make them as accurate as possible that's cool it is cool
this is a painting showing the uh what's called the sky crane
which is a sort of a rocket sled that separated from the capsule that we
saw beef previously and that occurred about a mile a
mile or so above the surface of mars and then it's being uh you see the uh
rover beneath the perseverance rover and it's connected to the sky crane above
by three nylon ropes and an umbilical cord and as the pro as they descend towards
the surface at approximately 40 feet above the surface the sky crane
uh lowers the perseverance robe onto the surface and as soon as it touches the
perseverance rover touches the surface the sky crane cuts the cables and flies
away from the rover so that it doesn't crash into it
and this occurred on february 18th of this year yeah the live or not live video but the video
that they showed was just amazing it was just some of the most incredible st things that i'd seen
and your your your paintings are so incredibly detailed you know
well thank you scott um and this is the actual perseverance rover uh over the surface of mars it
landed in the northern hemisphere of the planet within a crater called gizero
crater named after a town in bosnia herzegovina and it means it's translated
to the lake because the gizero crater is believed to have
contained a lake of water approximately three and a half to 3.8 billion years ago
when the atmosphere of mars was denser and water may have existed over the
surface of the planet so at that time there could have been a lake there and that's why the perseverance of older is
there because it's going to look for evidence of past water and possible life
if there was water
awesome it's like carlos you're telling a
scientific story story through art it's beautiful well thank you
thank you now a companion
of the perseverance rover and the nickname for the perseverance
rover robots and the perseverance wrote mars rover was named percy now accompanying uh
the rover is a technology uh a new technology called the a mars
helicopter called ingenuity the the nickname for this one is ginny jenny so
you got percy and jenny now um this is the new technology now the thing
about flying a helicopter on mars is that the atmosphere of mars is only
six percent that of that of the earth's so you need a heavier thicker atmosphere
for a helicopter a normal helicopter to work over the surface
so the scientists and the engineers had to come up with a design
like of the planet mars and so what they did was they developed a
helicopter about the size of a bread box it's about 19 inches tall and the legs
are about 15 inches long now the rotors there's two counter
rotors here that each of them are four feet long four feet longer but a little bit over
one meter in length and the reason is is because to be able to have lift
in the atmosphere of the planet you have to have large rotors now the other thing that's required is
in order to overcome to develop lift in such a tenuous thin atmosphere
it has to go very very fast and so the rotors in on this uh
helicopter on ginny have to rotate at two thousand four hundred rpm
of rotations per minute and that's five times the typical rotation speed of a helicopter on the
earth but that's because of the atmosphere of the planet now jenny is still tucked it's tucked
underneath perseverance because it's going through its own uh check
checkout uh the rover but uh they're also waiting to make sure
that the local conditions are such that they can release the helicopter over the
surface of the planet because um once the helicopters released from the
the rover it's on its own and it's getting power now from the
rover but once it's released it's going to rely solely on solar power in lithium
batteries that it contains but the other thing is that the
temperature over the surface of mars gets down to minus 130 degrees fahrenheit
so a lot of the energy that jenny and perseverance uh generate is in order to
overcome that extreme cold temperature of the surface of mars
so they have to make sure that that it can have power on its own and survive the martian night
and that should be within the next 30 to 60 days or
on mars it's called a soul sol and that's uh approximately uh one soul
is 40 minutes longer than a day on earth so in about 30 or 60 days they hope to
be able to release ginny so they can do a test flight now they plan on doing
five up to five test flights of jenny and it's going to fly up to an altitude
of up to 16 feet about not at 6 meters or so
and for up to 90 seconds and they're they're hoping to get five flights
out of jenny and possibly more depending on every all the conditions
and this is a new technology because they hope to create develop
future helicopters for exploration of mars but the future
ones are going to be bigger and they're going to be based upon what they learn from ginny uh when they once they test
the uh technology amazing
yeah i'm very excited about this uh carlos their uh comments are you know the beatrice
sciences and speechless charles it's so beautiful um uh
you know the [Music] the details your expressiveness and uh
in capturing these moments you know uh it it they're they're very personal uh
they're very technically accurate but they're also very personal as if you know you're almost standing there
you know so it's very cool well thank you and that's because also because of the incredible
images obtained by spacecraft in the past about
the conditions on the surface of mars and mars and uh everything we've learned about it so using that information that we've
learned we've learned in the past i'm able to to produce these uh paintings
and i also enjoy doing it this is a painting showing the possible
what if you were standing on the surface of mars uh about 100 meters away
uh next to the perseverance uh this was this is what the first test flight of
jenny might look like because um when it drops it on the surface the
rover's got to move 100 meters back so it doesn't crash into so the helicopter
doesn't crash into it and so the first test will be up to a height of 16 feet and
it'll last for approximately 90 seconds and this is what it might look like to
an observer an astronaut on the surface of mars
very cool
now the crater that the perseverance rover is going to is called gizero crater and as i
mentioned earlier uh they think that there was water in it uh within it approximately three and a half to three
point eight billion years ago and that's because the atmosphere of mars was a lot heavier a lot thicker
than that it could sustain the surface pressure for water
this is what it looks like at the current time based upon orbiter images of the crater
and in the far distance you can see the opening of a channel or what used to be a channel
and the red dot at the left lower part of the image of this painting
it's a painting is where the approximate location of the perseverance rover
and the rover is going to be moving all around this area uh looking at
using its vast array of instruments to analyze the rocks
and the the soil in order to determine uh if there was a presence of water and
possible the possible life but mostly looking for chemical chemistry and other
things that it will indicate that there was water over the surface of mars at this location in mars
amazing what an exciting place for them to
explore awesome pictures
art thank you thank you if we were able to be on mars three and a half to three point eight
billion years ago this is what gizero crater would have looked like i call this gizero lake
because it's not just a crater it's a lake so if water was present at this location
in jesuit crater up in the northern hemisphere of mars then you can see the channel in the
distance bringing the water into the into the uh the lake
and this is a scene of what uh an astronaut or someone on the surface of mars would have seen
at uh over the uh locate in the present location of gizero crater
and here we have a painting of percy doing this thing
uh analyzing rocks and stuff within gizero crater in the near future
now it's moved a little bit uh and they showed some pictures of of its tracks moving but it's just going through
motion of making sure that everything's working the wheels the instruments and everything but eventually it will move
out it will move out within the crater um just like curiosity
uh and it will start to explore the the environment including the rocks
looking for evidence of water and other elements
and and possible life if it did exist at that time hey carlos i just realized something do
you have multiple monitors uh not at this time no
okay because i think what's happening is we're seeing your your big thumbnails
but we're not seeing a full are you trying to show us a full screen i i'm trying to why it doesn't show up
on your screen it shows only the the large thumbnails it's still good i didn't want to interrupt your flow too
much but i just the images are so for the artist so nice i would like it would be great if you could get it oh
you can plug into the app you can plug it into your observations somebody has the mute
what the weather condition is
in the background that's what it's talking about but that that's just my main thing here
so while you're doing that carlos um yes yeah so try to move that picture uh because we don't see the full
screen see if you can um
uh i don't know if there's like if you go uh alt hold on alt tab are you on a pc
uh i'm on a mac okay um yeah because you should you want to be
able to share that that full screen view somehow is it
possible to double click on the image and have it bring up full screen as a preview or as a view
i think that's what i was doing i was just saying the thing is it's it's muted because when you highlight the image it
mutes it meets the image it makes four colors though a little bit more grayed out
try scrolling down uh uh clicking clicking on another image and
then just scrolling uh to the side so that you bring up the image that you want to see and that that
might actually show a better oh yeah that's a good idea it's got it maybe just click on click on the image
just above this one okay yeah okay
let me see now your mouse is right over this picture but go to the picture above
it and click on that without without moving the position
okay
so right now we still see your mouse in the in the middle of the screen okay does that improve the image here
no i think you're seeing something different than what we're seeing yeah it looks like the screen is frozen
are you changing your mouse location yes yeah so you probably stop sharing and
re-share again yeah and then refresh it because it's uh it got hung up
okay i can i can do that i can do that um i'm i'm almost done with with the
presentation i'm sorry it just it's just such nice uh
beautiful art that would be nice to see be good um let me uh let me just finish and what
i'll do is i'll go back into my system preferences and try to see if i can share and then i'll just real quickly
show when we have an opportunity okay yeah great idea again
no thanks for pointing that out so thank you
and this is the last painting that i wanted to show and one of the things that the
perseverance rover is doing is uh accumulates its
yeah it's um it's it's going to collect samples of the surface
into these test tubes and it's going to drop them over the surface of mars and a future uh space probe
is that's going to be accommodate uh produced by the european space agency and nasa
is going to fly to mars and uh land on mars pick up the uh test
tubes and take them to a ascent rocket and that rocket will take it to orbit
around mars and a spacecraft orbiting mars is going to pick that up and bring
it to the earth and hopefully bring back samples of the surface of mars by 2031.
awesome that is amazing yeah cool okay so what i'll do is i'll try to figure
out how to share so you can see the full screen and i'll let god continue
okay awesome all right while you're doing that in the background we are going to transition to john goss from the astronomical
league and um uh who uh the astronomical league is the
official sponsor of the uh door prizes for the global star party and uh
so they start off with uh they they the officers rotate uh so you
know they everyone gets a chance to uh to do these questions and participate
um the way that it works is you send in your answers to explore alliance at
explorescientific.com and i will write that down here
in the chat so you're not going to answer it in chat
because you can't win that way explore alliance at
explorescientific.com uh correct the answers are picked you
know that no matter how many people uh get correct answers we then
take at random one of the winners and uh uh that winter winner is announcing the
reason why we do it that way is that we're simulcasting and if you are watching youtube versus twitch or facebook versus
uh twitter uh you may find that one of the uh uh the uh
streams is a little faster than the other so we do it this way so that we don't uh we give everybody an equal
chance but uh john i'm going to turn it over to you okay already already
thank you scott um before i begin the question and answers a bit i was just uh
thinking of what everyone's been saying tonight uh starting out with uh david levy and
recommending that everyone go outside and look up and see what's up in the sky for themselves
um and then i started thinking about what um uh dave iker said
some of the numbers he gave uh this 93 billion light year wide universe
um you know fantastic numbers that we can comprehend and then hearing what
what what libby was saying about the number of stars and the size of the galaxy being a hundred
thousand light years wide and all this well it's it's kind of been my but in my
experience that uh what would draws some people to amateur astronomy or to astronomy
are the the astronomical numbers we all see
and you know everyone here is talking about these huge numbers they're talking about uh infinity you know they're talking
about eternity um so there are a lot of huge numbers we we deal with in this hobby
um but there's another number which i think is is is as important or it as as intriguing
to people not just infinity or eternity but the lonely number one
number one is the number of known inhabitable planets yes
uh you know you go out look at look at the stars everyone starts talking about how big the universe is and always the
conversation comes down to being how many other civilizations are out there well so far
so the whole hobby ranges the whole gamut of scales of numbers from both distance and time from
one up to eternity or infinity 93 billion light years
okay get on here with some of these questions
we'd like to do you do see my screen correct hope so okay now what we like to start each
session is it's trying to remind people the hazards of looking at the sun
through improper equipment through improper filters
looking at the sun's really pretty easy it's very rewarding if you have the right filters so if if you're not
familiar with how to do this uh get advice in person from someone who does
um if it's done correctly it's not dangerous at all but it has to be done correctly
okay answers from last uh global star party
uh choosing among uh excuse me choosing among um
young stars with different colors blue star uh and and uh red star yellow star which one is
the hottest well blue uh since any minutes the shorter wavelength of light is the
hottest uh and red would be the coolest in this
and the winner of that was richard grace all right [Laughter]
so this is from the last uh star party okay the dog days of august come from the egyptians when they
thought that the the extra heat from the dog star combined with the sun to create a hot
hot days in the winter what star did egyptians call the dark star i'm going through this pretty
rapidly well uh james hubbard hey there he is james um serious now during the summer
series is high in the sky along with our own sun in in the daytime sky and the
egyptians felt that that's what caused the extra heat number three
from last week uh the man and unmanned missions have landed on planetary moons uh of course
there's the earth's moon uh what is the the moon scene here well they've been
unlanded on they have landed on two moons uh saturn's moon titan
along with our earth's moon winner is andrew corkel thank you andrew
questions for this time around
um this is kind of it reflects to what uh david levy was saying you know go out
and look look for yourself go out tonight and see what's up right now the only only bright planet in
the uh early evening sky over the next two months is mars for a couple of weeks every two years
including from tonight to early next week the red planet slides between two prominent star clusters
what are the two clusters a the beehive and the coma berenices open
cluster b m8 and m20 c
pleiades and hyades so again after this uh star party's concluded go out and look look tonight
and see what you can see about mars and where it is that's the first question
second with a spiffy new telescope galileo observed many so-called nebula some of
which we no longer recognize as being nebula in particular he he called one nebulosa
orionis what do we call it today a the trapezium stars
b lambda orionis and surrounding stars c m42 m43
one more question which i try to focus on the astronomically so you know a little bit more about it about how many volunteers does the
astronomically have who contribute to the operations of the organization making it a success
a 100 more b the five members of the national council
c ten one from each of the ten regions of the astronomical league
and we always we always like to thank our volunteers without their help without their efforts uh we could
astronomically would not be the organization that it is today that's very true yeah so yeah
that's what makes it a great organization too okay that's that's what i have
awesome okay folks uh we are going to take a
we are going to take a 10 minute break and then we're going to come back we have a lot more
uh to cover uh we'll be coming back with um uh dr daniel barth and then uh on to uh
the vast reaches so stay tuned
here on the global star party
those beautiful artwork carlos
oh carlos you're unmuted
uh no the video says it's on um i was on mute
audio-wise but uh can you do you see me logged in
okay
we see you on there on the zoom doug but no video
um
is my audio working any better than earlier
it sounds better than before does it okay i won't touch nothing now i'll just i'll
just try to speak as loud as possible yeah if you speak a little louder it's
it'll be fine it should be okay okay i just you know i mean i'm i'm out in the field
so it's kind of difficult doing everything and trying to get a keep a connection and
everything else not on a farm in the middle
there's no power around i have a generator about 100 feet away running power for myself right now
this
so
[Music]
hmm
oh
so
[Music] yeah we can see you now doug okay good can you hear me okay
can hear you yeah okay
i gotta i gotta bring up everything i was talking about before i closed it all out to restart
yes
so
so
so [Music]
you have clear skies out there doug yeah actually it's going pretty good
good
so we're going to go um we're going to visit with daniel barth we'll do jason gonzale and then we go to doug
strobel oh jason yeah yeah
we're uh really close friends i don't know if you know that oh i didn't know yeah that's great we actually live
pretty close to each other too so oh you can hear me guys y'all and you got chuck iu out there really
close by so it's like this epicenter of incredible astrophotographers
yeah it's awesome
yeah i'm not sure why my webcam was having a problem i had to restart yeah sometimes just needs to handshake
better
well it doesn't look good
then we have rodrigo zaleda i think we might also have opeka is
in stockholm so these guys are up late um and uh we've got uh i think we might
have cesar as well i thought he saw something oh okay
i'm actually working on a live image here i started right when we started this broadcast oh very cool what did you
decide to do jason m81 okay not to ruin the surprise
[Laughter]
okay here we go all right let's uh
um we're all back uh thank you for uh you know uh taking that pause with us
um we have uh more people who've logged on cesar brolo from argentina's on with us
and and uh doug strebel is uh is on with us as well we are going to um
uh segue to dr daniel barth uh he is a
uh he is a longtime friend of mine um and uh you know comrade in uh
in the telescope industry as well that uh he became an educator i think following his lifelong dream and
he is a major influence in science outreach here not only in the state of
arkansas but nationally as well and starting on monday he is going to have
his own program showing um astronomical stem uh
activities that people can do to not only uh teach uh youngsters or or to teach
educators uh how to um how to educate others about how the
universe works but uh to to discover things about it yourself so
uh like to prove to yourself that uh not just because you have read it somewhere or somebody told you that the moon is
round uh how do you really really know and so these are the kind of conversations i have with daniel barth
so anyways daniel i'm going to give you the stage well thank you nice to be here scott and uh
one of the the things for those of you don't know me um my program is called astronomy for educators and uh
we're now in uh about 42 different countries about 3700 schools around the
world are using the program the whole idea that i've fought against all my life is that teaching astronomy
has to be expensive difficult and require big pricey equipment it's just not so
i had a teacher recently asked me hey doc you know um i want to show my
students about uh earth and mars and the moon and i i want to model this in my
classroom but it's it's so expensive i've looked up things online i said no no that's that's not hard i said um you
know go ahead and start with with a baseball here's your earth and if this uh four-inch baseball is
your earth then uh here's your two-inch ping-pong ball it's it's lovely decorated here by one of my students to
look like mars and if this is mars what's the moon well the moon would be a a one-inch marble and so you can put a
model of earth the moon and mars into students hands for a couple of dollars
and you can really show them oh okay why is mars gravity you know one-third of
what the earth is well look at this relative size of the planet and we can talk about gravity and other
things i'm going to go ahead and share a screen for you one of the interesting
things that i do is we take a look at how do you know
we start students out and we say okay go look at the moon tonight and let's say the moon is that right now we're
just about that quarter phase so the moon is half lit so here you go predicting ink please what you think the
moon is going to look like in the next few days and then go out and see if you're right
the idea we think we know things and so we take students along and we say okay well
let's now that we've looked at the moon for a few days here and we've looked at the phases let's go ahead and make a
model of this and we have this lovely uh little salt dough model that one of my students made and i said oh great so now
you know that what happens next and they said oh yes well we can see here if we're we're waxing and we're at the
quarter phase we're going to go to gibbous and then we're going to go to full and then back around again i say oh that's great so you know what happens
next the students say yes we do and then i ask what i like to call the clock
stopper question how does it work the kids are like but i just figured out
what happens next like oh yeah okay science is like that you can't rest on your laurels you know what happens next
how is it working and so at this point we say well is the moon really flat
and kids will say no well what shape is it well it's round and like round
no no no no no it's frowned like a ball how do you know well you know the problem is that uh
science the way it's been taught for the last half century is learn believe repeat
right learn this believe it because i said told you so it's in the book right it's on the internet
and now repeat it on a test know you're smart and if you think about that learn believe repeat model of standards based
education and now you're smart now you belong to a good school it's just silly
and so i say well okay well if you're smart how does it work and i say well okay well if we're going to figure that
out let's go away from modeling the moon is flat let's model the moon as round and so
we need something really big and expensive for this let's get some ping-pong balls and
we can go ahead and we can model the earth and i think i've got a little model here and it is this is me this is
one my students did and it's very nice and it has north and south america and the atlantic and the pacific and see the
other that's that's night the dark side that's that's where night is and you okay so
we've got this round model can we figure out how the phases work and then we start
putting the moon on the table and we start running it around and i get the kids to take out their cell phones and
they take pictures and they make a gif and they say oh my god the phase has changed because the moon rotates yes
but how about if you step away from your table and observe it from oh it doesn't work from over there
i'm like oh yes so our privileged position on the earth looking out from
the center of the moon's orbit and the sun that's what gives us phases well can you
expand this model yes sure you can here's here's the sun and venus and mars
and earth and the moon and you can actually use this five ping pong ball set
and you can prove as galileo did the sun has to be in the center
because those of us who go out and observe we know oh venus has phases well
how does it work well it turns out unless you put the sun in the center it doesn't
you can try to put the earth in the center the way you know the pope used to say oh and aristotle used to say a
geocentric system you can't get phases out of inferior planets and disks out of
superior planets if the earth is in the middle it doesn't work
and so oh okay we can do this well what about the moon teachers say i want
to talk about the moon i want to talk about planetary surfaces and gee
that's so hard i can't do that i'm like do you have a pound of clay
do you have a pound can you make some salt oh that's like 10 cents of flour and some
water and some salt and can you model a surface of the moon now this isn't people ask me oh is is that a
particular place on the moon i'm like no of course it's not it's just like you know this isn't really you know mars
it's just something decorated to look kind of like mars the art isn't important
students they spend some time in my class and they go okay let's let's make this model of the moon and we start with
a big depression we put some dark clay that's a mario all the dark clay is lava and then oh but mario are really old so
there's been other impacts on top of them so we see other craters and we see that oh some some craters are new and
they have little mountains in there and what makes us with a little pinch of clay and some are really new so we have
these splatter marks we called rays and then we oh notice how these mountains they they form around this
mario why they're not made by plate tectonics the moon has mountains in a
minute it's like instant mac and cheese you get an asteroid it hits kaboom and mountain-sized pieces fall down like
splatters around the rim of the maria and you get these lovely mountain chains that are formed not over millions of
years by plate tectonics but like that boom here's a mountain
what's wonderful is you spend some time modeling the moon's surface and then you
say okay well let's let's make a map let's take a pizza cutter and go ahead and put lines of latitude and longitude
in here let's make a map well if we make a map can we use pythagorean theorem and find distances
can we use some pins in our clay model and run string around and find
perimeters and areas and yes we can do all these things but what's the value
the value comes when we take people out to see the moon through a telescope we were talking scott and i
were talking about this the other day i've i've been to many many places doing outreach and you
set up this lovely telescope here we are and people will come up and they'll put their eye and you get
one of two reactions you get the first reaction the reaction was wow it's the moon oh my god there's
craters oh look at the dark spots the light spots oh and people are just a gog
with the experience it hits them literally like a pie in the face and they are a gog
the other reaction the one we don't like so much is somebody comes up and they go and they look in the eyepiece and they go oh yeah it's the moon i've seen it
and you go what have you used a nice telescope like this look i've had this 120 millimeter refractor and have you
have you seen a telescope this big well no but it's the moon i've seen it and they'll inevitably hold up their fondle
slab right their little smartphone and they'll say oh yeah well you sit back and you think how many
images do people see every day especially since we all carry around our little screen everywhere we see
thousands of images every day so for those of us who want to teach astronomy whether it's casually
you know if you're one of these guys like me i take my telescope out in my front yard on halloween and they put a
bowl of candy under it and little kids come up wow is that a telescope yeah you're brave enough to look at the moon okay oh
you're so brave you got a piece of candy bigger kids come up and go oh dude can i see your telescope i'm like sure look at
the moon cost you one candy bar put it in the bowl i don't play any candy
i recycle it from the older kids to the younger kids well the thing is if you spend some time and you have children
students people of any age and they play with clay and they model the moon when they go to the telescope they're
bringing knowledge to it they look in the telescope and they say oh wait
i know what that is that's amari isn't that dark spot isn't that all lava yes it is can you see the mountains i see
them oh my gosh there's the shadows and uh we see all these crazy things and then people go oh my god it's amazing
when they bring a little bit of knowledge to the eyepiece the experience that they take away is far richer
and we don't have to spend lots of money or buy expensive equipment
from fancy catalogs i'm kind of on a crusade against that you know where i got this i spent
36 years teaching astronomy in california mostly in places where i had no money
and people would say oh i'd say oh can i can i buy this model of the earth and moon and look it spins around how much
does it cost 600 we could never afford that you could buy it if you want to well i only have 600
so i had to go back and i had to figure out how do you make it yourself how do you make it for cheap can you do it for
a dollar you know it sounds like a groucho marx if you're that old or someone can you do it for a dollar
yes i can do it i can do it for a dollar and i don't have a cigar so you get deeper into the moons and you
say well gee why is there a tide on the opposite side of the moon and i have i have this uh
this lovely photo and i don't know if i i can find it for you in a second here but i have this this lovely photo and
somebody said well how how do you uh how do you explain that there's uh
a tide on the opposite side of the moon and i said well here you go i said it's very easy all you have to do
is you have to go ahead and take a cup of water and go outside and yank the cup out from underneath the water they're
like what i said go hold up a cup of water and yank the cup down my wife very
very nicely came out to our driveway and we spent about half an hour wait i need another cup of water and she said well
how are you going to explain this to kids for for cheap and i said well that's not
hard that's not hard because all i have to do is i have a baseball and i tape a fishing weight and this is a piece of
elastic from an old uh coveted mask and you just go ahead and if you yank the ball up and what you see is
the weight underneath lags behind there's inertia so on the side nearest the moon gravity
dominates and the waters are pulled toward the moon but on the far side the earth
is actually being pulled out of place the water lags behind it inertia dominates so you get a tide on both
sides and oh gee if the moon comes too close what happens there well we have
something called the roche limit gravity pulls on one side of the moon is closer to the planet than the other the moon is
stretched and it's eventually torn apart and well that's that's terribly hard math you can't explain that to kids
certainly not fit i said yes it can't just watch me you know it's kind of i was a stubborn kid i said shut up just
watch me it was kind of the teenage version of hold my beer so i said okay here's what you do you take a lump of
clay you say how skinniest string can you get where a 30 centimeter piece will
be able to support its own weight without parting and you keep rolling it out on a piece of wax vape and you roll out skinnier
skinnier and you finally get to a piece where 30 centimeters it just weighs too much and it won't support its own weight
anymore that's the roche effect right there when gravity becomes stronger than
the cohesive forces that hold the material together then it parts and
you get this lovely lovely ring around saturn we think now that the inner moon
of mars phobos we think the inner moon of mars which is spiraling into the planet has crossed
the roche limit and been shredded and then reassembled many times over history about every 200
million years it should shred and then reassemble it's like watch rinse repeat
you know i went through a whole bottle of shampoo one time before i figured out you're not supposed to just keep doing that mars hasn't figured that out yet it
keeps on destroying this moon we want to try to prove this the japanese are sending a mission called mars moon
explorer the mmx they hope to get samples of phobos if it's a captured asteroid the way some
people say it should be three to four billion years old but if it's actually this cyclic
shred and reassemble moon you know like lego toys then it should only be about a couple
hundred million years old and that should be easy to tell from a sample but the wonderful thing
is that astronomy doesn't have to be expensive it doesn't
have to be hard it can be taught to any level of student
about third grade on up and you can add in the math once you have the concept of oh roche limit is
this string of clay and eventually it tears apart under its own way you can add the math and the math makes sense
how many of us ever went into a math class where johnny has three x minus seven friends and two z plus five apples
and you're wondering who the hell is johnny in why does he talk like this but on the other hand if you play with a
ball of string a ball of clay make a string of clay and you find it parched and go oh it won't
hold up its own weight and you go oh yeah no matter what it's made of titanium if you have a long enough reel
in a helicopter aren't you going to spool out enough where it'll rip well sure once you do that
then you go ahead and add the math and all of a sudden the math is about something you've seen already the math
is about an experience you've already had and you know what else is neat about the little models
i found this out teaching in california where most of the kids in my classes in the low desert they didn't speak english
at home the way i did every child built that model in their own language in their head
my job was to help them learn enough stem vocabulary to express what they knew
because every student at every age is smarter than they can express
and as teachers that's one of our biggest challenges haven't we all had a test where they go oh dang it if they would have asked that
question i would have got a better score because i knew that i just didn't know this our challenge is to give children the
tools to express what we've helped them learn and if we're saying here's a mindless sheet of vocabulary learn this
words mean other words on the other hand if we say oh gee hey make yourself a clay model of the moon
now go ahead and take your smartphone flashlight and move it over the top and
see the shadows change just like the phases do on the moon and now they've had an experience now you say let's
learn how to express what we know that's the entire idea behind the astronomy for educators program and
anyone who's interested can go into google and put in astronomy for educators daniele barth it'll come right
up for you and i gave the book away the university of arkansas library press
publishes it anyone can have a copy for free and uh if you're out there i've already
put the link up i've already put the link for you right now um and scott and i said you
know we got to do we got to do a show we got to do a how do you know show and we got to stop the clock we got to
stop the learn believe repeat cycle and we've got to get teachers with
students and say you know what put down the worksheet turn off the smartphone
and pick up some clay pick up some ping pong balls and some markers let's create some astronomy and
once we have an experience then we can go outside in the night sky and we can make observations
and we can link what the universe gives us to what the classroom experience
gives us and making it cheap means that it's accessible everywhere to everyone
there's no financial barrier to enjoying the universe and that's the beauty of it
and that's my mission and scott thanks so much pal for giving me uh
my pleasure thanks very much i love it when he comes on uh daniel's
uh not only a a brilliant educator but uh he's very entertaining and uh and that's that that comes from
you lots of time in front of students and trying to get the message across so that's very cool
thank you thank you daniel okay well next up is um
uh the one and only the vast reaches uh jason gonzale and uh jason uh i think uh
you gave it away that you already have uh some live uh images coming through your telescope is that right
yeah that's right scott thanks for having me on um i i did uh join in today trying to do some
live imaging tried to pick a bright target um we're going to transition from
um [Music] you know the last topic being the simplified uh ways to think about the
universe in a simplified way to a kind of complex process of astro imaging
but yeah i'll try to walk you through it i just thought it'd be interesting to show kind of uh what we go through
you know imaging the night sky and and uh so i've got um
the galaxy m81 um in the sights of my telescope so i'll
share my screen here so you can see that
is my screen being shared
looks like it i'm on two separate computers here so i'm looking back and forth yeah yeah it's coming we see the
moon right now that is distinctly the moon yes um
all right so this uh this software here is the sequence generator pro
be able to see this here yes
what i have here is then live images coming in of the m81 galaxy and this is
shot with a monochrome camera so you're not going to see color in these live images but um
right now i'm shooting a luminance frame which is essentially a clear filter except for the
infrared and the ultraviolet light are trimmed off of the the um
the result but what you're essentially seeing that is all the the brightness
information coming through in the image this is the m81 galaxy
here and i can dim it down a little bit so you can kind of see even in the sing single sub
sub exposure you can see you know kind of the spiral arms of the galaxy and the dust lanes coming through here
um so i started imaging this and at the beginning of the program
so it's been about two hours um and a little while ago i pulled off
some data and i stacked it so we could take a look at the galaxy uh how it looks
as you integrate the the subs that are coming off of the camera so i shot this
as i said with the monochrome camera i shot at red green and blue images
five sub exposures of two minutes each so ten minutes per channel so i've got a half hour of color data
and then i've been uh acquiring the luminance data uh currently
and so let's hop over here into
pixen site all right can you see that
yes yeah so this is what the galaxy looks like after we take those sub exposures and combine them so this
is um after 12 minutes of data here on the right and on the left this is 25 and a half
minutes of data so it's almost double double the exposure time this gives you a good look at what happens when we you
know why we shoot long exposures because um as you
add exposure to the image it essentially starts dropping the noise level and
and then it allows you to stretch the data more which is to you
know to look at the differences in brightness and you can see more of the galaxy
structure start popping up so if you can you know notice on the on the left hand side the the brightness of the image is
increased it's because you know we're able to look at more of the tonality of the image and then the
spiral arms start becoming more evident there and also the the dust lanes within so if
we zoom in a little bit you can start to see the star forming regions of the arms
popping out here um and then some of the dust lanes
and so i've taken that and i combine it with the color data which this this is the stack of the color data combined
so you can start to see some of the uh the colors in the in the galaxy
and so if i combine the luminance data then with the rgb which is the color information
uh it pops out to this image then you can really start to see the
you know the warm blow of the the galactic core there along with the
magenta hues and the the hydrogen alpha regions which are the star forming regions on the arms
and then the uh the blue tint of the supergiant stars out here in the in the arms themselves
so i thought this is a kind of a good demonstration of about an hour's worth of imaging but how how an image it comes
together you don't know if there's any questions
on this this is just the lightning fast damage standing there with their jaws you know dropped through
so in a typical image like this i will gather probably
in excess of 10 hours of luminance data and then uh you know a few hours of of
each rgb and once you add that time you can kind of see here from this
little demonstration you know what what doubling the integration time does
as you keep doubling that you keep lowering the noise and in the background
information and being able to pull out fainter and feature feature details so
the crash course in the process but um
yeah i mean a pretty cool look overall um definitely a lot more than you can see you know in the eyepiece which is you
know one of the reasons why i'm drawn to astrophotography is i just want to see those little faint bits
that are hard to see visually
very good so outside of that i mean i have a couple
other images i can show i've been doing some some new solar work
and also some some galaxy work i can show off a galaxy um
now you're going to see the solar image first as soon as i open this up so we'll talk about that
this is one of the recent solar images i took this is the sun with the hydrogen alpha
solar filter behind the my favorite solar telescope which is the
explorer scientific ar152 it really gets you in there close to see some details this is active region
2804 which was on the sun about a week ago and there's a there's a sunspot here
along with some other you know activity in that region [Music]
right i've been working out a new process to kind of show off the
in the details in the solar chromosphere with a lot of contrast enhancement so this is kind of a
new deal i'm working through seems to get a pretty good response out of people beautiful
then also um where is it oh yeah this this is a the
phantom galaxy m74 that's just an example of what happens when you when you take a you know
a ton of luminance data and then stack it with rgb and saturate it as i like to do and then you
know pull out all the faint faint details so there's uh you know quite a lot of information down
here in the in the core of the galaxy along with the uh the faint arms and the of the galaxy itself so
you know you start looking through and there's you know just tons of background galaxies little edge-on spirals and
faint fuzzies out here you know little tiny spiral galaxies out in the distance
some of these galaxies are on the order of 10 times further away from us than m-74 which is
i think around somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 60 million light years away from us
beautiful i just love that it looks electric to me it's incredible
and then i'll show one other solar image here this is uh well that's really close up
this is a close-up of the of a sunspot that was uh i think shot at the end of november last year
but this is uh you know zoomed in to get as much detail as i could get out of this
sunspot i was really happy with this result too and again this is with the daystar quark
solar filter behind the ar 152 the six inch acromat telescope
wow i gotta get me one of those the results are amazing and you know
i've shot there's i'm not gonna lie the the results in narrowband out of that
telescope are amazing too i think i have one of them
i love that yeah this this lobster claw that's really zoomed in this was shot
again with the ar-152 telescope uh in narrowband so this is just in hydrogen alpha and
oxygen wavelengths spectacular
they're so cool i never get tired of looking at it it's beautiful [Music] beautiful
this is uh another did i i don't know if i showed this one here i apologize if this is a repeat but this is this is a
pretty cool galaxy i imaged at the beginning of the year this is ngc 660
which is a polar ring galaxy polar ring galaxies are unique because
they um they're actually
theorized to be caused by the merger between two galaxies like a lenticular type
um basically capturing a satellite galaxy and
stringing the that captured galaxy out into a ring around
around the the progenitor galaxy but the the the
cool thing is is that they normally call polar galaxies because those
those remnants orbit the poles of the the central galaxy but in this case it's
uh canted almost at 45 degrees yeah and
it's a really active ring it's got you know the bright blue
supergiant stars and the hydrogen alpha star forming regions and some pretty dark dust lanes if you
see you know it silhouetted against the the main galaxy it's
it's got a lot of dusty material in there too so it was a rather sizable galaxy that was captured there and uh
basically ripped apart and strung around this uh galaxy that's gorgeous
and again there's you know the distant galaxies visible out here this
is a nice edge on spiral reminds me a little bit of the neo galaxy
oh that's beautiful and then this smudge which is just a weird
thing i don't even know what to call this yeah it's got almost no structure to it but it's got
some hydrogen alpha blobs in it oh wow
wow i think you're inspiring a lot of
viewers right now it's really cool we're good oh i don't know if there's any questions i
don't look at you know the chat or anything i think they're all blown away um comments like beauty beautiful
incredible you know so it's good i ordered a uh ar 127 a few weeks ago
[Music] simply because some of the images you've taken jason they're just amazing
yeah thanks i mean those scopes are great um you know you gotta be conscious
of how you use them they're not necessarily designed for for imaging
um you've got some issues to contend with with the color correction
which can really be addressed with you know using narrowband filters i'll
be it for the the solar imaging or for deep sky i mean they really produce good results
uh bang for the buck for sure
okay so um i want to keep on marching along with uh
m81 and and i hope to you know get that a little bit more clear
maybe next time around but um if anybody wants to see any of my work you can find me uh you know scott
mentioned the vets best reaches but pretty much on all the social media channels that's what i used as my
username and just all one word the best reaches
awesome thanks for having me on scott thank you good lord thank you very much
okay so we're we're going through some astrophotographers now uh up next will be
uh doug strouble who's just i guess down the street from jason godzilla
and just down the street from uh from chuck ayoub who's been watching the program tonight so
uh uh doug i i will uh i'll i'll let you have the uh
the stage here i'm uh sharing my desktop screen right
now okay
uh let's see here share screen
okay hold on one second wants me to grant permission to show the
screen go ahead
you should be able to do that yeah let's be a second here
like to call your attention to space kitty while uh he's kidding
this is orion and he's uh floating in space on my green screen in space
how does he do that yeah he is space kitty
he floats in space
uh
are you able to uh to share your screen there doug
can we lose him okay i think i got it okay good there we
go yeah so you can see my screen i see your screen yes sir okay so uh
yeah i basically want to talk about astrophotography when it comes to a
major you know red white zone what have you um
so first of all um i'm working on two projects right now one is strapless-224
which is a uh planetary nebula which i'm doing in hydrogen and oxygen
and then the other one i'm working on right now is able 30
which is a small planetary nebula and that one is mostly in
in mostly oxygen [Music] there's
a lot of misconceptions when it comes to doing astrophotography
can you hear me okay are you just fine yep okay so um one of the biggest things
is people think that you need to be in a dark area to do astrophotography and that's not true at all it used to be
maybe back in the 90s or 80s and before
but with the capabilities of doing narrow narrowband national photography
you could do a lot more within the city limits um like chuck i'm uh
15 minutes from the detroit area and um
back in 2016 i i well
i guess i've always wanted to do astrophotography all my life i've loved astronomy as a kid
but i knew to do it right and to do it where i was at would require
you know amount of investment and patience and uh back in 2016
a uh a drunk driver told my car in my driveway it was a performance challenger
and i got a payout somewhat for like over 20 000 uh which i started
you know thinking to myself well if we're getting astrophotography i got a good substantial investment to do it now
and so i i made my initial investment and then once i started getting into it
i realized that patience is the number one investment needed to do astrophotography within city limits
so i started building an observatory it's just a slide-off roof it's nothing
too crazy but i started building in my backyard
and as a result i have two rigs running
my primary rig is a 165 millimeter explore scientific
apo and then i have a stellar view a hundred two millimeter on my second rig
and then i have two laptops uh that control each one
uh that i monitor from inside my house using teamviewer um
in my studio wow and the dog uh guards your equipment
uh they're huskies they don't make for very good dark guard dogs
yeah yeah they're uh they're kind of funny that way so yeah these these are my two main rigs
right here um i have my explorer scientific sitting on a uh astro uh physics mach 1. wow
beautiful yeah and uh the focal length is around 12 or
actually 1156 millimeters which is which does me pretty well um
i like to get a little bit more focal length maybe a bigger even bigger apo some down down the road
but for the time being it does really well so
getting back to doing astrophotography in a uh light polluted area
being 15 minutes from detroit just like chuck is and then
jason who just talked before me he's uh about maybe
45 minutes from me and jason has actually been a wealth of
information i had to uh i had to do some
soul-searching and digging when it came to doing astrophotography but
um even broadband can be done um in this area as well too this is my
m1 m51 i did a couple years ago
but if you were to look at what it took to do that
um i had 50 hours involved so when you're doing astrophotography in
a major light polluted area you gotta really pile on the integration time in order to pull that signal out above
the noise floor um and that's kind of what i do so like
it's like one of those things like you know a watch pop never boils that's kind of what i have to do here so a lot of
the time when i have my um my rigs going um i'm working on actual
work myself i'm independently employed i i produce advertising production to tv
commercials stuff like that um so i'll work on that kind of stuff while it's kind of going
you know in the background um and then you know
um when you really pile on those hours you can get that signal to really pop up
through the noise but for the most part i do a lot of broadband stuff uh
this is the latest image i just did recently of the m1 crab nebula
um and as you can see there is a part of oxygen being ejected from the core
which is not really picked up in broadband a lot so it gives me some capabilities of doing some things that
maybe aren't often captured in a certain type of palette i i tend to do a lot of hydrogen alpha
and oxygen pallets with and then i'll include like you know some rgb stars
uh to give it some color uh in there as well um
i i don't know this is the first time presenting i'm not really sure how you take questions
but i would really love to help people out that are living in a have a light fluid
area to give them some direction on what could really help them
uh produce you know some really nice images um
and uh you know i guess when it comes to broadband i do really short exposures
like around 60 seconds a piece uh at zero gain
otherwise the the histogram uh tends to move far to the right
and you tend to overwhelm the uh the camera sensor itself
so uh i do really short exposures even with narrowband i tend to do only
two minute exposures with 200 gain so it really eats up a lot of hard drive space
but you know it really helps you know compiling the data
together uh bringing out the signal and uh
you know ultimately i'm able to produce some really some really cool things uh
that can't normally be done around this area right i had a question i had a question doug
about your uh strategy for storage do you do you get rid of your raw data after a while i mean or do you just keep
buying hard drives to store your raw data so i have a nas unit it's a 48 terabyte
network attack storage that's that's pretty big yeah yeah well i'm i'm fortunate enough
where i can write it off because i own a production company advertising production company too
so i use that for both work and astrophotography so
i have i have two um i have two
mac desktops one is a newer one that just came out last year it's a 16
um core system and then my other one's a 12 core system from a few years ago and i run both of
them a lot to process the data and they're both attached
via a 10 gigabit switch uh to a nas uh
network drive
yep beautiful i have a question too have you ever used being that you're in advertising media
um have you ever used any of your astrophotography in your advertising programs
i have not i have not found a purpose for it uh specifically for that no
i've been featured a lot of magazines uh bb ski sky at night sky and telescope astronomy magazine
apod and and so forth yeah but in terms of
this meeting what i actually do for a living there's been no crossover i see
aside from it aside from the equipment you know right sure yeah
and out of all the images that you've made i mean what do you consider to be like your top
three um this one was one of my favorite the
flaming skull planter and everything um i think i had probably around you know
36.4 hours between hydrogen alpha and oxygen
but one of my favorite ones i did was
where is it at here this one is part of uh
this is part of a super giant or uh supernova giant uh sharpless 96
and um i did this one um probably about a year ago yeah look at
that um like lace work it's beautiful
or gone it's incredible um i i think you know i have a lot
i have a lot more um i guess
success when it comes to apos uh tractors um i've had a
10 inch uh rc i've had a smith cast grain
i've had a 12 inch newt i have a lot of reflectivity problems
because of the light pollution here once i get below 40 degrees
it starts to overwhelm the telescope and i don't have that problem with apos
as much so i tend to use a lot of refractors uh more than anything else
um the uh one of my favorite ones i did was
it's uh where's that this one right here it's a wolf ryan uh wr134
yeah and um this one is not really captured that often with the full
disk circular disk of the auction data and so i really try to pile it on
you know
i guess with that i mean i would like to take some questions i don't know if there's any questions about people who are having a hard time
uh with a light polluted area yeah we i don't i don't see any
questions yet in the chat but um uh what is uh obviously this is gonna
get the gears turning uh with people uh uh you know i agree with you about um
you know that you can do amazing i mean obviously you could do amazing stuff even in a light polluted sky
uh jerry hubble and i have had a lot of programs uh in kent mart's and i as well
where we we talk to the audience about uh trying to do as much astronomy as they can from their own backyards you know
because it's it's it's it's time in you know that makes you the better astronomer and if you're waiting to go
to a really dark site or you you know you're waiting for conditions to be perfect or these kinds of things
uh you don't get as much time in uh to you know get the experience level
that you need uh to make you know what jerry hubbell and i talk about making
the equipment disappear you know because you want to have it all working so well that you don't really have to think
about the gear too much you know and so um and you can concentrate on gathering the
data and doing all the rest of it that you need to do to do amazing work like you're doing so
um i uh you know i'm stunned uh by by the
quality of your work and uh um you know always love uh seeing um
images come from you recently you showed us a crab nebula shot that was like 31
hours and change uh also an amazing image so
yeah i mean i think the biggest thing you know to take away when it comes to doing astrophotography with the light
polluted area is that um uh
when it comes to obviously narrow bands you know it's going to be
easier to do it levels the playing field um
when you get into the narrow band the band pass you know of each narrowband filter you
know like a seven or six is really good for hydrogen alpha and sulfur
but when it comes to oxygen um [Music] you really need
a shorter band pass like around 3 nm
to do oxygen because of the light pollution how it affects oxygen
uh especially with the moon so like with the moon i can go up to
about eighty percent of the moon within 30 degrees of the moon at 80
percent and still have good good data you know good signal to ratio
uh good signal to noise ratio anyways um and um that's kind of like a rule of
thumb for me so um uh my oxygen filters i use on both rigs
are astrodome 3m and i realized that you know
astrodon you know they got sold off and they're not really doing well you know uh i
think chroma might offer a 3m filter but i'm not exactly sure
uh so so on both rigs i have the three nanometer hydrogen and
oxygen filters from chroma and um on my schmidt casa grain at f 6.3 so far
they've worked really well i haven't tried them on f5 yet but i expect that they'll work well at f5 as
well yeah yeah been really good so far is there a reason why you went uh three
and em on aha and sulfur i live north of san francisco
okay well i mean you're like i'm the narrower the better yeah i know exactly i'm 15 minutes from
detroit so i'm gonna borrow sky scale of eight um i'm in a white zone
yeah i find six to seven to be fine with aj and sulfur okay i haven't had a problem
uh but oxygen is the major problem for me and that's where i use the three nm
filters for those okay yeah and the um uh for chroma the
five nanometer and the three nanometer filters at the same price so i just went ahead and dropped the three nanometer
how much how much you charge for those um
they were cheaper than astrodon's but more expensive than all the other ones i can't remember
a year ago you know they just doubled their prices on everything right
yeah yeah i mean me and jason were just talking about that the other day it's terrible is that the fault of some
really amazing astrophotographers driving the prices up who knows i mean i don't know
but uh yeah since i don't use um like hyperstar and stuff like that um
there was any reason for me to go any wider than three uh because if you probably know know this but for
everybody else out there if you have a fast imaging system like a an f2 camera lens or if you're using hyperstar or
rasa at f2 really narrow band filters can actually put you off band with in those really
fast systems yeah that's what i've heard yeah so i um uh so like three nanometers wouldn't be
good for those systems but i don't i um uh don't tend to image on on really fast
vocal ratios so uh the three nanometers is going to work well for me but i do have also the
optilong lx stream uh duo narrowband filter and that one's i think five nanometers in h alpha and
seven in oxygen um to to grab all those oxygen lines there
are you are using that in a dslr he's not on the zw294 color camera so
yeah i'm using that on on color okay yeah i have my favorite great things about that filter yeah i mean i hit my
first data set with it on the rosette nebula is ready to process so i'm going to be processing that very shortly here
i'm really excited about it yeah i mean the only thing i've heard is the oxygen ratio seems to be pretty low
but that's normal for the universe so that's not really a matter of the filter itself it's a
matter of you know just touch the visual yeah yeah yeah i'll have to see what i need to end up doing to the image to to
get the colors to balance in a pleasing way um but yeah we'll see how it turns out the the subframes
on the rosette so far look really promising they've got a nice uh spread of red green and blue and
green the green and the blue are like right on top of each other so i think they did a good job with the design of of this filter going over the different
colored channels on the bare matrix and stuff so oh good turns out yeah
with this particular image i did 21 hours of oxygen and i only did around seven hours of
hydrogen so this this object seems to look very oxygen centric
um but it was important to me to pull out that little tail
of ejected matter that's coming out from the core um so that is extremely cool i i have to
go double check and see if i pick that up in my oxygen data i did notice in the crab nebula because i also did it in in
ho recently that the oxygen signal does seem stronger for the same exposure time
um which was really interesting to see uh i'll have to go back and look for that stream that's really cool i've not
seen that very often yeah yeah it's uh i've always seen it a few times um and that's what i was
really curious about um going after a broadband or a narrow band
uh is something that i can do you know relatively more easily here
than than broadband of course um like in this particular one right
here this is uh able72 which is more
more oxygen based and actually it's almost all oxygen based
fascinating yeah and it's pretty small um so when it comes to some of these smaller
nebulous i i tend to uh i tend to uh remove all the stars using starnet
and then i use topaz de noise uh to help sharpen up the object itself
but i do it within each channel before i bring it into photoshop so i do all my
pre-processing first in pixel site and then i uh go through photoshop for
the final processing yeah i know a lot of people who do it that
way uh i never really got good at photoshop so i just do everything in pixel sight but uh yeah i see people get
some incredible results by kind of mixing the two pieces of software but i've not gotten rid of my photoshop
subscription yeah i know it's interesting like because when i first learned pixel sight
i um i wanted to see how much i could do in pixel sight and then you know i had such a huge
learning curve and then i found myself backtracking back to photoshop
after pre-processing so like i'll do pre-processing and picks inside i'll do
some you know dynamic background extraction i'll do you know some typical things
but for the most part um i'm uh you know
processing each channel independently in photoshop and then i'll bring them in there
for the most part great wonderful
doug thanks for uh thanks for sharing and coming on tonight i've wanted to have you on the show for a long time uh
but um you know and i hope we can get you on again you have a lot to share here that's
great yeah i'd love to i love to help out people where i can um you know like i said especially when it
comes to uh you know doing astrophotography in a heavy light polluted area um i wish i
would have had something more you know i guess dynamic you know presentation to show but
um just mind-blowing images i mean i i don't know how much better it can really get
yeah if you want to uh if anybody wants to contact me uh astrophotography by
douglas j struble on facebook and then i have an astrabin account you know for uh yeah well what's the best is
is the facebook account itself the best one to reach you you think either one's fine um you know astrobin or on facebook
those are my two main things i i use astro bin as a repository so i can go back and look at my integration time i
spent on things well astro bin is a great great uh resource too so it's pretty awesome
yeah and uh let me see if i can just find your
astrophotography by douglas j strubel on facebook i'll go ahead and
post that and share it in the chat okay there you go and um
and then we've got i went and checked the chroma filters
were 750 a piece when i bought them i have to go ouch oh my god that's
expensive yeah but you know uh if you're gonna spend money on on
other good components uh having good filters will let you actually take advantage of them and when
you're in light areas no that's that's what i spent my my stimulus money on so
no i i agree i mean i i think i spent 450 dollars per filter on astrobin
or on astronaut filters uh two two three years ago
um so it's amazing how much they come up in price and that's for the the the price i
mentioned was for the two inch size because i wanted to oh two inch okay yeah yeah
cause i wanted a future proof because right now i don't have a large format camera but the odds are pretty good at some point that i will um so i
figured i'd go ahead and get them now as opposed to buying one and a quarter inch ones and then later buying two inch ones
no that makes sense yeah i've been thinking about doing the same and the next set of filters i'm going to do is a two
inch filter set just in case i decided to upgrade down the road too and i know uh jason
uh has been looking into two-inch filters too he just spoke before me were pretty good friends
living in the same area um for the same reason
i i think he just bought a new uh zoo apc uh
size camera sensor so yeah awesome awesome
okay all right i think what we're going to do now is we're going to um
transition through um richard grace the astra beard to molly
wakeling uh molly has a presentation she'd like to give then after molly we
will go on to uh rodrigo zaleda in la serena chile with cesar brollo in
argentina and they're going to talk a little bit about southern hemisphere astronomy so
so let's uh let's go ahead and um and make that transition
all right very much doug it was awesome i probably just need to say something
oh that's what it is i got it now all right and uh well i want to share this because
i got this in the mail uh it's not uh framed or anything yet but uh guys that explore scientific
oh yeah that's the big print yeah there we go yeah very good awesome
is that going right over the fireplace is that where is that the best place
it'll be going on a wall i gotta sit down sorry i gotta sit down so it's safe
sorry about that no that's awesome um i definitely uh will probably lighten up
things too because the only other time i've done prints i had to uh blow it out so it looked like there was tons of
noise on the computer screen before i uh printed it in case anybody's never printed things
um i do have one other thing i want to share really quickly okay
and this is anybody who is on the european star party already saw this oh yeah but
for those who weren't uh last thursday we were looking at orion for a little bit and that's what came out of it
that's nice very nice lots of dynamic range there
yeah yeah i think the the 16-bit cam is uh is doing its work and uh
looking forward to getting some some clear skies here uh it seems like the uh the moon goes away and so does the clear
skies but uh yeah right on i'm gonna pass it back all right as i find the button there it
is there we go and molly it's all yours you have the stage all righty
um so i'm gonna share my screen because uh streamlabs would not pull my camera feed today so i'm gonna do this the
old-fashioned way okay all right um i know you do that you you
have uh you have a stream lab um app or something that kind of brings you
together with your uh yeah so it it's it's easier to see what
i can do with it when i um so it's on on universe today's virtual star party uh
well and actually here here as well when i do actually have live telescope views yeah i use stream labs to pull together
multiple uh sources onto one screen that i can have be my i can set that to my virtual
webcam and then uh for zoom and other programs so then whatever is on my streamlabs
screen uh we'll go out to whatever uh you know video caller or youtube stream
or whatever so like i've when i do my uh star party like live live telescope
views i've got like a picture of my telescope i have the the remote desktop app uh
picture like like live feed from my backyard computer i've got the webcam video of myself
um and it had with the uh it handles green screens and stuff and um
zoom has its own uh green screen detector it's actually working better than streamlabs this one so
i had to go play with the settings a bit anyway um
yeah so i i it ended up raining today raining very
hard here so um no live telescope views from me tonight
but i decided to throw together a quick presentation on the american association
of variable star observers variable star of the month which is probus um
the uh i'm an aavso ambassador and uh so to try and um
tell people about aavso and and the kinds of uh amateur science that people
can do and contribute to either taking data or processing data or all
kinds of stuff um and also to try and recruit more people to the aavso especially a wider diversity of people
like women and people of gothic so um and younger people in general actually to be perfectly honest
yeah so um they've teamed up with uh ball state university to um
to do this series on variable star of the month so i'm going to talk about this month's star which is probus
or at least that's how i'm pronouncing it maybe it's pravis um all right so uh the
the catalog name is uh geminorium so it's the uh whatever letter of the
alphabet etta is uh eda i've heard it pronounced both ways i prefer etta but who knows
um so it's in gemini it is uh propus is greek for foot
and that makes sense because it's in the foot of one of the two gemini twins
it was uh first recorded in 1865 by
german astronomer and geophysicist julia schmidt he was the one who noticed that it was
dimming and it dims by by 50 over the order of 234 days so it's a long period variable
um but a visibly noticeable like if you're doing a visual observing
visibly noticeable dimming like how this guy in the 1800 is able to spot
and i so this the star propus is a red giant of the of the m3
class so um up there in the spectral type uh it's 2400 times
uh more luminance than more luminous than the sun and it's about 350 light years away
and it's in its asymptotic giant branch stage so
it's expanding and swelling and is currently estimated to be
about uh two-thirds of the earth's sun distance so to about
two-thirds of an astronomical unit in diameter uh or in radius as it were so
uh its orbit would would go out two-thirds oh my goodness i can't talk tonight its size would go out to
two-thirds of the distance between the sun and the earth that's been a long day um it lies near
the ecliptic which is also cool because that means that occasionally it gets occulted by the moon and vary
occasionally by some planets it was occulted by venus in 1910
and i didn't i didn't have enough time to look and see when the next occultation would be
uh by a planet or by the moon but it is within that that area that can be occulted by
the moon and planets there's actually a navy cargo ship the uss profis that is named after it
so here is a a plot that i pulled from the aavso variable star or sorry the light curve
generator portion of the aavso website where you can go and this this is real
data contributed by uh by amateurs that is loaded on this website and you can
see how it varies in brightness now i said i said fifty percent dimming in magnitude if you know
anything about how stellar magnitudes work that still only means a difference in brightness between
3.15 and 3.9 magnitudes but it is still noticeable difference visually and
certainly easily measurable by cameras and you can see uh the type of variable
star that it is it's not a regular variable it's it has a lot of irregularity in its pattern
and this is because it's in that early asymptotic branch stage
basically it's got a it's burning a hydrogen fusion has largely run out in this star and it's
burning a helium shell and that causes the star to
expand and inflate and uh at the core of the star is pretty
much a dead core of carbon and oxygen because it's not massive enough to be able to fuse carbon and oxygen um if you
ever wondered where oxygen comes from in planetary nebula uh it's because of these heavier mass stars that produce
oxygen in their later stages of life and that's where oxygen in in the universe comes from
uh so uh because in this phase it it grows in in physical size it swells
and because the outer edges of it get so much further away from the main
core of the star it's gravity can't hold on to it anymore and it starts to lose its matter out into space and this is
what causes the variations in brightness and the thermal pulses can cause the star to
lose more mass over periods of time so um that's why there's this periodicity of
less than a year um it will eventually become a more unstable mira
type star which can have really huge dips and spikes in brightness over
readily measurable periods of time and some of its variability is actually due
to the fact that it's also an eclipsing binary system every eight years one of its companion
stars passes in front of it and um it it brightens a bit and then dims as it goes
around the back so there's there's a lot of different dynamics going on with this very interesting long period variable
uh so i mentioned it was a i had it was an eclipsing binary this is actually a triple star system it has a really close
companion that's only seven astronomical units away so this is called what's called a spectroscopic binary because uh
we can't actually resolve distances that small at the distance that the stars at uh opt like you know with like a regular
camera and telescope but uh losing radial velocity we can see that that there's a smaller companion that's
tugging at them at the main star propus a so uh we know that there's a small star
there 1.4 arc seconds away from from propis a is another companion star and that one
you can resolve easily in in a lot of telescopes it's an eighth magnitude main
sequence star it lies 150 astronomical units away from propis a and has a 700 year orbit
as as a as opposed to the nearby companions eight year orbit
and this nebulosity you can see here in this uh sloan digital sky survey image uh is actually from the jellyfish nebula
region uh ic 443 so kind of a um nearby to a place that
many astrophotographers have uh it's been a very hot target this time of year
being being up there in gemini and finally if you want to go find propis and observe it for yourself and
maybe even take some observations for the avso you can find it up here in the constellation gemini right now gemini is
high in the southwest in the evening and so here's here's a map
of the region and you've got the two prominent and easily recognizable twin stars of pollux
and castor and if you go down castor to where his foot would be
that's where in this you know roughly magnitude three three and a half ish
depending on where it's at in its cycle so visible uh by by naked eye and certainly visible
in in binoculars and telescopes and it's it's just southwest of the bright um
open cluster m35 i think that's an open cluster i forgot to write down what type of cluster it was i think it's an open
cluster um so uh that that's how you can find propus and this is the greek letter eda
here for those who are unfamiliar um yes if you want to find out more about how to observe propus
you can go to aavso.org featured variables and every month they have a new featured variable star that
new observers and experienced observers uh an easy one to go spot that has some interesting characteristics
so yeah go ahead and give it a try tonight if it's clear where you are
wonderful great presentation molly thank you thank you very much thanks
okay so up next will be uh uh pekka hotel from stockholm sweden and
jerry hubbell from the mark slater remote observatory and they will
they're going to talk about their experience at in remote astronomy
thank you scott and that's really hard realistic you passed over for me after
those guys so
i will just a few words about my last days
and then we can get with cherry i have done work with my remote
observatory which is quite far away 20 feet away
exactly and i have done work with the computer mini
computer with installing all software and all data they need
and you can take a look now when i got
the picture from my cameras so this is
my view from from observatory what i can see
so we can you can see this guy how limited
this guy is got snow today so i have a balcony
can you see this picture yes yeah we see it yeah so i have a balcony over from
30 40 degrees up and upward and
those trees i have you have seen those trees before so i have limited with sky
but i will do the best what i get so in astronomers
get what you get or just leave it so there is my mount
waiting for better days it's rapid for the we have a minus
three celsius right now and snowing small bit
so i'm working on that and maybe next season i will get some
deep sky photos maybe this season because it's the
galaxy season begins and it's right forward to the south
so it's south is right there between those trees ah that's a little
bit of snow it looks like on your uh yeah it's dropping down a little bit snow
so we can look the other other wheel i have two cameras
yes you can you can see a little bit snow in the rail there
so you can you can see there all the lights and light light pollution i have to struggle
with so this is right now it's uh five in the morning
i think here and uh it's it's quite good cameras it's a ir camera so it's not so
bright outside really so it's a night time right here it's
cold black outside yeah that's my observatory
and now we can take with cherry and yes i had a really
really quality time yesterday with cherry uh
in msro and uh yeah it was a great time we had a great
time last night we spent about two hours two hours talking about using the system and i want to show some of the pictures
we took last night yeah a couple of pictures and uh and also i want to first
i want to share um
let me get back to this hold on
so i want to share first
this is this is the book i wrote back in 2015 with my co-authors richard williams
and linda bellard about remote observatories i wrote a previous book but this is uh
this is a book that's all about how to design and build your remote observatory
and also how to use so that's the first part of the book and the second part is how to use commercial services
richard williams ran the sierra stars observatory network for several years
and uh so he's an expert in that area he was one of the pioneers in commercial
services for telescope systems and uh linda ballard uh
coordinated with uh i think 12 different uh astronomers
that had different projects that they sent to us to describe they wrote little sections of the
third part of the book about how they were using the um remote observatories to do science and
beautiful picture imaging and and also doing education so there's that's the third part of the book is all
about how people all over the world are using uh these remote systems
and so overall it's a very nice uh i think a nice overview of what you can do with remote
observatories um that's published by springer books
resource yeah the uh so let me bring up this one image
i think this is the one that you you thought was really awesome um pekka yeah when we did it was it 180
seconds or 60 seconds this is a hundred this is a three minute of ngc 2175
um you see that an only
three minutes that's a three minute yeah that's a three minute exposure
and this is actually i looked on uh wikipedia this this object is actually a
star cluster but it's got nebulosity all around it and uh this is this is through uh
yeah so you can see this is you see the performance this is a this
is the same telescope that uh
doug struebel has that's the 165 at our msro observatory and i'll show a
picture of that in a minute but this this uh i've got it the f7 focal reducer on it so it's got a
focal length of 853 millimeters and uh f5.1
and it does a great uh wide field view of the sky this image is 1.3 by 0.9 degrees uh in size but it's
critically sampled so you get all the information this guy will give you our location we're not on top of a mountain we're in
the backyard in an urban rural suburban area it's basically a
cross uh it's a transition between a rural rural and uh
and uh suburban area with portal four skies and um
so when uh pekka first saw this image come across he was pretty happy with uh the
way it was turned out yeah and i was so amazed about the
accuracy of of the focus focusing remotely focusing oh yeah the software
it blow my mind yeah so maxum dl has a nice autofocus
system and it'll automatically step through the different positions and take an image and then
plot the the half half flux
diameter uh our half flux radius uh plot that on a chart and then it will uh
we'll draw it's a v curve a v shaped curve so it will draw the intercept to calculate the focus the correct focus
position and then adjust it there so that's really handy it takes all of about a minute to do the
autofocus and with the fiber uh
carbon fiber scope this temperature stability on the system is very good so
very rarely do i have to refocus over maybe once every hour or two at the most
uh if the temperatures are actually changing uh once you get to that point um
let me show a picture of the but it was a quite expensive night for me because in the morning i ordered two
focusing motors for my refractors oh did you yeah
i think i think this is showing the system right do you see that
[Music] msr station one
yeah we see it okay so this is this is uh what the system
looks like actually this is an older picture we don't have the 102 on top of the
scope right now we just have we have that in a different station now we've got three stations at the mark
slater mode observatory this is station one within the uh domed enclosure
and we use the qhy cameras the one we have that we took this image with is a qhy
163 color camera that i've been to and and
use that as a science camera with filters also as with bend two and it works very well
in that in that mode i mostly do science work but
when i'm showing the system off to people like pekka and introducing this the observatory
i you know it's easier to go to some deep sky objects i'm typically i'm not not the best or claim to fame in deep sky
imaging at all but this system you know if it's tuned up for doing science it will do deep sky
images very well uh so and the opposite is true also so if
you're an expert deep sky imager you could do science work very easily and i would i would
promote that you start looking into that
but those words cherry told me was mind-blowing for me because i was
only thinking my system for imaging but when jerry
told me that you can make visually take a picture and look at the picture
right and take a random picture so you don't have to image you can't just
take a picture and look it and uh yeah
i was fine like newborn yeah let me show another one
this is another one that we took that uh pekka really liked here's my
this is uh ngc 2264. yeah
and if you look here look at the look at this dark detail here and this is
let me see how long is this this is a three minute image also
and this is not auto guided so the the tool we use to
correct the mount is called the telescope drive master we don't do auto guiding we don't have to mess with that at all
and you can see how good a job it does over a three minute period this is zoomed up quite a bit
this is four hundred percent zoomed up uh how many double stars we found and triple star
in the middle triple star
no in the center oh in the center
oh is that the cone nebula yeah yeah this is the this is also called the christmas tree i think is
that right yeah yeah yeah the the christmas tree star cluster is is um below the bottom of that image yeah yeah
right right so this is the cone right here
yeah yeah yeah that's like the tip of it okay um yeah i'm not i'm in the process of imaging that guy
on my eight inch cast grain at the moment in hydrogen and oxygen as well
okay really cool will you post it i certainly will it's gonna be a little
it's gonna be a little while before i get all the data on it okay good
yeah but i guess what what pekka's talking about is so you we just went around the sky and looked at different
objects and took single frames and just started looking at them you know this is kind of like a visual experience when you're looking through
an eyepiece i look for at the amount of the stars yeah that's the other thing yeah
yeah it's uh that that um where so that object is in uh monoceros which
is um just to the left of of constellation orion and that's right in the wintertime milky way so very uh not
not as star dense as the southern milky way the summertime milky way of course
when we're looking toward the core of the galaxy but this is looking in the plane of the galaxy but outwards so a
lot a lot more stars than above and below the plane yeah hey okay
oh it always strikes me about these linear strings of stars that are in the images
they just sew up as just you know it's another one in the right hand corner there's a right here like
along here yeah yeah it's kind of cool to see those lines of stars that are just lined up
yeah yeah i've come across a lot of a lot of those and even little like like little
miniature corona borealis shaped kind of c shaped star groups as well
uh and yeah it's just uh there's a term for it where the brain
sees patterns right yeah right like there is something i forget
you see them in yeah you see them in you know land forms all kinds of things
you know so yeah yeah seeing us seeing finland in the moon pekka yeah yeah
did you see it yes actually after you showed me the picture of the map uh and then the picture of the moon i i think i do see
it yeah yeah and it will change your view of the moon the rest of your life
yeah pekka showed me that last night too that was kind of interesting
when you looked at the moon do you think about finland every time
i do that i put a link into uh in the chat for the mark slade remote
observatory uh pekka you were talking about it um earlier today on our daily show
how i mean what was your overall feeling i mean do you think it was the time was well well spent
yes yes and i can recommend for everybody who ha who is interesting
about remote controlling and what you can
do more than imaging yes and you can find that you can do
you can combine that with the visual and that gives you more
valuable time because if you take like me and jerry took yesterday 180 seconds
you can watch that picture for hours and and explore the picture that's right
and after that just slew to another object take a picture and
look at it so you have you don't have to stand in the cold you can
of course stand in the cold but
and take a picture over there over there that's true right do this as a survey
over an hour or two and just do a bunch of different objects and just look at them as if you're looking through an
eyepiece yeah because i had i had some some designs on doing um
a photography messier marathon uh where i'd take a couple of subframes
on on each uh each messier object over one night just like somebody would do a
visual observing messier marathon i haven't scripted it out yet but it's
march so i better get on it that's right that's right it's mostly a marathon month i wonder how many how
many targets can i put into one sequence generator pro script we're going to find out
that's great well thanks guys thank you thank you is good thank you everybody transition now
to south america uh where rodrigo zeleda and cesar brollo
are going to talk a little bit about southern hemisphere astronomy you guys want to come on
hi it's called good night how are you good rodrigo
[Music] why um
um you can hear me good uh scott i think we're getting a little bit of
feedback sounds like there's a um a machine or a vacuum cleaner or
something running in in the background uh and for me yes
maybe yes maybe it's uh these are the filters of the pool of the
wine something like this are our noise of the city
maybe yeah oh it's real yeah it could be a microphone
is the open yes it's not this it's not this microphone if not
the open microphone of the notebook if not i need to connect with my cell phone
[Music] i can i can change i can recognize him
five minutes how do you prefer if it's impossible to hire me [Music]
yeah you can he he's suggesting that he um uh reconnects using his phone's microphone
instead of yeah that's fine that's fine yeah for potentially better audio feed
yes wait one minute [Music]
okay all right who's got some good astronomy
jokes i've actually heard some but i can never
remember them molly my brain is too full of science i can't
yeah i've got a i've got a really old one that's uh you know you never trust an atom because they make up everything
they make up everything have you seen the big picture of an australian rocket
no okay it's like a boomerang because it's always return to the earth
hey everyone can you hear me yes all right great so you'll see i have two
two connections and um one is my original live stream and then i went for a walk and i was
like whoa i got some clear skies so i'm outside with my eight inch
just starting to calibrate the go-to so i'm just looking at orion some clouds a
little bit in the way but i see mars played ease and that and so i'll pop in and out when i'm i'm
set up here and share some of my views oh how far has mars moved away from this
ladies now i would say looking at my head it's about a five degrees away from ladies
right now five degrees i missed my opportunity to to image it
but i did see some other nice images from some folks yeah yeah i've seen it gradually uh
like last week it was pretty close so probably if you had a three degree field of view you could probably catch
both but now i think it's just outside of that
yeah it's uh so i'm just uh
just setting it up right now looking at serious and calibrating and i'll be in touch
okay sounds good here's a joke sherlock holmes and dr watson go on a
camping trip they set up their tent and fall asleep some hours later holmes wakes his
faithful friend watson look up at the sky and tell me what you see watson replies i see millions of stars
what does that tell you watson watson pondered for a minute astronomically speaking it tells me
there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets astrologically it tells me that saturn
is in leo time wise it appears to be approximately a quarter past three
meteorologically it it seems that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow what does it tell
you holmes is silent for a moment than speaks watson you idiot someone is
stolen our tent [Laughter]
that's good okay the puzzled astronomy student spent all night wondering where the sun
went but then it dawned on him
that's a clyde thomas that's a clyde tombaugh pun
okay do we have uh cesar back
no yeah i don't see him yet rodrigo why don't we get started with you and uh and then cesar can join in okay
okay can you help me
you can hear me yeah you can share it sure okay
very quiet here we go white tonight in la serena is chloe and
i share with you with the activity for astronomy in in chile in las vegas
well when the the pandemic situation is stopped very activated but
[Music] i participate in very
activity for um astronomy in myself in la serena
and chat with you in some activities great
[Music]
can you see my picture yes yes well and
when my my company is neuroptics is a company of
telescope in chile and either from naroptics for
scientific and [Music] many
activities uh for the community uh go to the schools to the
uh with the academy astronomy of
students and a show with the telescope on
is it learning to the the the skies and
sometimes and go to a star parties in elky valley
and when it is open for the community and
if um go to many many peoples for the this is their parties
and go to person is first time to see from the telescope and
wow this cell is calling the valley skies and
another activity is uh go to the astrophotography
uh go away in the city in the dark skies
is amazing uh beachfront for the galaxy in the
in the dark night
yes this is a it's a a nice picture with the
the telescope with the milky way this picture is two years ago
and in la serena the principal activity is
organized for the germanity observatory
it is astroday uh this activity is in
in march uh but the pandemic is is is stopped
but a another gears this is a
very important activity in chile for the astronomy go to the
scientific for the observatories and another
person work for the astronomy for the open the
this activity for all our community in chile
this is the principal activities it is one day
the is for a are they
many many people go to the planetary rocket in
observatory in the night in observatory the the sun in the day
this is the principal activity and another activity
in chile is in [Music]
is the astroturf astroture in the valley is a wonderful inequivalent
this is a amazing experience in the in the
observatories uh uh a matteo like a mama yoga
[Music]
it's important yes yes yeah this year for the pandemic
is topic but in one month in february the authority
astroturf operator is working one month for many many clients wow
sure sure you know i think it's wonderful that astrotourism is so
so uh thrive so much uh in your region uh you know it's it is uh
that part of chile and well i haven't been to any other part but uh you know where where you are in los arena
ctio and all of that area up there and molly you've been up there i mean it's just
it's an astronomer's disneyland it's incredible you know yeah i'm already planning my next trip back once the
pandemic is over right yeah and uh anyone watching this program
should should definitely uh you know make that trip down to chile
uh you know if you are heading down towards la serena you know certainly stop in
and uh hook up with um rodrigo um because he knows he knows the lay of the
land he knows all the uh he's very connected to the astronomical community you know he's an
astronomer himself and uh so he's really make
set you up for a great experience and cesar you made it that's great yes yes first of all i found that i
didn't have i remove it maybe in a moment assume from the zoom
application from my my uh my smartphone
yes yes no no i am again yeah
well it's a better camera and much better sound so it's it's good it's very yes yes yes because it's
my notebook is powerful but all and maybe have some problem in
in i don't know the cooler or something that makes noise i don't know
but it is it's good for to to manage the
equipment but but for for zoom or meeting
apparently well
we have a maybe you can see the the clouds in the sky yes i know that both both you
and rodrigo got clouded out uh tonight yes so um rodrigo was uh talking about
the community in uh chile and uh what that offers to amateur
astronomers and astrotourism what can you tell us about uh about uh
you know visiting astronomers into argentina what is that like
um astronomers for professional astronomers
or or amateurs okay yes yes
well you know that
despite despite the pandemic situation this year the
the activities uh in argentina are very
strong about amateur astronomy uh it exists a huge community
of astronomers and of course that many of them work in
astroturismo because it's a i think that it's
a huge movement in the world because everywhere the people
is going to to start to to to work in this area
[Music] here in argentina exists many many groups
that work in astrotourism in
san juan or in mendoza or in the patagonia
where the people go to the to see the stars in very dark areas
and it's a it's a wonderful they have a wonderful
um experience um it's a uh
it's different for example we we every year um
we make uh surprise in mendoza and san rafael
where we have a meeting of uh we invite professional astronomers some physics
that work in different areas because we are amateur astronomers or
and we are very interested in listen uh professionals
that um that connect with the people about their experience um
how is work in big observatories and this is very interesting
um we receive every year uh people from everywhere
that work in biggest observatories in chile or san
juan argentina or many times we receive people that
from sharapon that work in remote mode
for example in in hawaii mauna kea observatory and for us
is amazing to to to receive this this
people that connect with a a very intensive work and our surprise is that
every year these people that came to our serpari
uh in mendoza they are amazing too because they connect with the people
with the real sky without using the screen if not only the sky and the telescopes
you know we use and in the sarparis uh uh 15
inches dobsonian or you know binoculars telescopes of
every any type and of course that we make after photography
but yeah it's different when you make a live astrophotography under an
incredible sky that if you are in a biggest a bigger observatory uh
maybe in a place where you don't see the sky and you are
working over a over uh um
you know graphics with numbers about about measures measures of photometry or
different things of us and they they really
enjoy when we connect with us professionals
they they enjoy uh really the third parties it's very interesting because it is the community
in argentina between professionals and amateurs is really
is really connected it's it's incredible but normally it is easy to
to get professionals uh that enjoy amateurish or parties yes this is it
it's nice that's nice hey caesar inside can i interrupt for a second
okay i have clouds surrounding everywhere but i have a little people and i want to try a little experiment if
you don't mind i'm going to share my screen okay uh see your
screen start now okay
is my screen sharing let's try that again
okay no yes start now and i want to say
zoom where is it
say yes okay okay now can you see my screen yes
awesome okay we're gonna have some fun now okay so this is a live view of my uh can you see the um the field of
view it just looks black i i can see stars you can see
three stars yes okay okay so i'm going to zoom in and then this is actually the eskimo
nebula and what what i'm going to do
is i have it at 3 200 4 second exposure i'm just going to take a picture okay
this is your smartphone yeah this is my smartphone wow i'm going to give it to because of the vibration
i'm going to give it two second delay okay and then let's move this uh
over there oops all right how come it's not uh working here
wait somehow it's blocking okay let's try that again
oh the the screen share is blocking my let me try to try here oh there we go okay here we go
and you can see everything right it says taking picture yeah and all that great great great i mean and then now
yeah and then if i click there there you go yeah
wow excellent excellent
so i i wanted to see how this works because i i joined the live stream on my computer
and of course now i have to have another instance uh on my phone and i'm just i got i was like hey you know there's
clouds all around and then there's just a little pocket there and so and and this is the way i can share
my viewing experience so this is this is great um so now if you don't mind um i'm gonna
zoom out here and let's uh let's go to mars it mars uh it hasn't
cooled down so there's a lot of tube current but uh just just for fun let's go tomorrow
yeah you take pet better pictures with your smartphone and i do
no no no no no no no no no no no hey you know what matter you know what
matters pekka is is is we're both having lots of fun yeah you know exactly yeah but those pictures
make the smartphone okay so there you see a pretty not bad
pretty good alignment so i got mars and if i uh zoom in here and just do a little bit of
adjustment it's going to be not very good but you know i can probably take a video and do
some stacking and stuff but there you go there's mars and if i change the exposure this let me play with this so this is 3200
let's make it a little lower here
a lot of uh modern smartphones have a manual or sometimes they call it a pro
mode um so you can go that's what i suggest and telling the rest of the audience because oh yeah sorry
[Laughter] uh yes so you can do what he's doing and adjust the iso and the exposure time and
and the focus and the color the white balance and stuff like that
i think i will wrap up my stuff tomorrow and buy your smartphone
so this is uh ten times digital zoom you can see a little bit of atmospheric uh
uh dispersion or refraction i should say a little bit of red on the left
but uh anyhow you could you know if i play play with us a little bit more let's go
can you detect a little bit of the gibbous phase of that too you can it's in the upper right it looks like and
that would make sense yeah yeah i would say so so not not bad you know so uh
and now one more one more thing uh the cloud is unfortunately the clouds are blocking orion nebula so it's uh
let me go um
this is uh i don't know how this is gonna look like i have to change the exposure now let's get it all the way up
and all right there we go this is the pleiades um if i
probably just uh go there right here
there you go see if we can get the
recognized you have a steady hand yeah he does
oh actually you know what actually i got i went the wrong way let me just i'll increase the speed a little bit there we go there there you go
there's the center of the ladies whoops i went a little bit fast let me just slow it down again
sorry about that there we go and there's the center of the pleiades this
is a little bit if i put the 40 millimeter eyepiece in i could i can do it but the smartphone adapter is
is a little bit unstable i've done it on the uh on it and it it goes around the eye cup and it but it's uh but i prefer
to stick it all the way around to get a solid connection so there you go and then what i do is uh
you know jerry's famous uh half power uh maximum bandwidth or whatever or full
uh half full width half maximum i should say if i zoom right in this is how i i focus without a baton off mask
i just uh like ten times is pretty good oh yeah and then and then i just basically just play with that until i
get it it's not awesome but it's you know it's it's okay and then once i got that
to where i want then i can zoom back out and then have pretty pretty decent view
and then uh what else can i show uh oh yeah yeah this is a good one yeah
let's go there double cluster is in prime location let's let's go to double cluster
okay so and i'll show you afterwards how i'm doing all this i have my tablet uh on a one of those uh
those little um what do you call it uh those little grabby things or whatever
the little holders they live with like a metallic bendable metallic
arm and that that rotates with the telescope so it makes it very easy
to um okay let me just go down here this is an excellent way to learn kids because
every kid from five years and older has a smartphone
and there's your double cluster and then if i if i uh if i just change the let me just do a quick uh four second
and let's do it 400 you know maybe maybe 500 let's do that take a picture
i'm sorry i got one two
and then bang let's see how it turned out
wow there you go oops sorry about that there you go
no that's that's the artifact i i use this black electrical tape but i haven't figured that out yet there's an infrared
thing that goes in there it gets in the eyepiece the reflection so it causes some artifacts so so yeah
yeah i've i've learned you know after you look at a lot of galaxies that are like 15th magnitude and an 18-inch dove
you start to see things you know and uh and then you start recognizing what's what's real and not
but i can tell you what's really helped let me show you now um i'm gonna take uh take this uh off the eyepiece
for a second here is that camera celestron set e x holder you have so now i'm going to
share i'm still sharing my screen but let me stop sharing my screen i'm going to i'm sorry that was not the one uh where how did it go
oh there we are not sharing it's not sharing right now cameron okay i'm going to start my video
and uh is it recording the video can you see
anything video and then
sure camera here we go share camera
is it uh looks black right now it looks black and darn okay sorry
i'm gonna stop sharing my screen take off the sh okay so i'm not gonna share and then i go video oh here here's
probably the problem if i go video and i go around ah yeah that was it
okay now can you see yeah okay
uh does it work when i put it horizontally does that throw off the orientation no it flipped
okay great great great so um you can't see the scope but uh anyhow this is i don't know if you can
see the sky it's yeah i never mind but this is my tablet and what is really nice is you can see i was just at the
double cluster right now and what's really nice is uh you can actually
out right in there and and it's great for plate solving right you can get right in where you want
and then and then go exactly uh where this is sky safari
and if i go like let's say right now i want to go back to mars
i just go to mars and then i click on that and go go to
and you can see you know you i know you've shown this a lot jerry in your
with carte de soleil and stuff and basically it goes there and then
oops and then what i've done is i've
all these rings here are the different fields of view for my eyepieces so for example i um
go to my scope display i have my uh
40 millimeter in there is well it's a little bit fuzzy sorry for that uh 40 millimeter i got my 26
i got my uh 13 and my seven and so that basically comes up with these
and that really helps when you're trying to plate solve even if you can't see the object you can
triangulate there's usually enough stars in the field of view to be able to find exactly where that
object is so that's how i'm able that's what i want to do with these in the future is
is get get good enough with the smartphone so that i can start stacking and taking pictures of
areas where i know the galaxy is or i know that faint object is and then and
then basically uh show the image on stuff that i couldn't normally see with my
you know visually anyhow so let me stop
the video yeah thanks so uh
so hopefully that was interesting really really nice yes it was
so caesar um and uh rodrigo we were kind of we were finishing up uh
uh maybe rodrigo's already already hit hit the the bed here but uh
uh caesar it seems like uh there's just a ton of stuff to do uh for
professional and amateur astronomers in argentina what's the best way for what's
the best way for them to get connected is there a particular club should they go to should they contact you directly
or how do you think i access a lot of different clubs clubs
in argentina the the the oldest club in argentina is um
association argentina amigos
and this is in parque centenario in in the middle of the city of buenos
aires this is a very huge class astronomy club with domes
is from the from the from the first time of the 20th century
uh is in a material astronomical from from the maybe 1910
um it's really really an old club it is in buenos aires but
any any place have an astronomy club um today
it's very easy to find clues or associations in
facebook or instagram and the people uh
have really really um uh a good opportunities to
to start to know astronomy um exists a a huge
[Music] replaces uh
about about or where you can get and use the
telescope first opener telescope or second opener telescopes
is really is uh today is a is a golden age of
amateur astronomy in argentina the only problem is that with the
successive uh economical crisis
the people normally is done affordable to to
to have a better equipment not all people have a good equipment for astronomy
especially in astrophotography where the people need more spend more money in in equipment
but uh they have really opportunities to to go to an astronomy club
um in many many places do you have a lot of opportunities in argentina
to to make astronomy
that's wonderful um is there a particular website you'd like to direct them to caesar
uh for example in our in our business uh our facebook is
amateur astronomy sorry astronomy dot amateur in spanish in castiano
that is amateur astronomy but in castiano yeah it's our our facebook page
uh it's a huge community another another community in facebook very is with more
that 30 30 thousand people is amigos astronomia the same name like
the club and the old spanish community uh enjoyed this this facebook
um well the people from bishopvista cosmos the
the clue uh of uh the solar observatory that you know yeah uh
have a very is is growing with only less than five years of activities they
are growing a lot really well i am part of this club too
i am part of many many clubs because i am every time i'm sharing they are the
people sharing with me activities um i am i'm really
i am fortunate to to be every every all time invited to the
to to be part of of uh of the of the community this is nice
really because it's it's not only the suitor of telescope if not i am
really uh um participative uh uh
uh part of of the the entire community
astronomy community is it is nice really is is nice wow that's really great it's
really great yeah i can't wait to get to uh down to buenos aires sometime and visit
you and visit the shop where you work and uh and also to meet a big group of amateur
astronomers they'll be a lot of fun yes absolutely okay
all right well uh also up very late is uh gary palmer in the uk what time is it
there gary hi scott hi everyone um it is
ten to five roughly 10 to five
so yeah thanks for hanging in there with us um we had a long uh
line of uh astronomers today so it was but it was great it was wonderful and uh yeah i've been i've been watching it
it's been very interesting some nice images from different people yeah yeah a lot lots of different things
and how are things going on in your your part of the world yeah it's okay storm in tonight
um so it's poor in the rainy um outside him for a couple of days and then
hopefully it'll start clearing back up again but it's still not got warm yet that's the problem yeah absolutely still only about five
more there's a bad combination yeah yeah it's um it's pretty boring so
there's not um not overly much been going on um i'll share over the
screen there we go the
european edition of the global star party that you uh co-hosted was fantastic and uh
thanks it was good fun i think everybody enjoyed it who was on there lots of messages afterwards
so um on the european one we discussed that all sky camera and we were looking at
images off of it that's right so the night after i left it running um we
caught meteor straight through right overhead that was one of the shots for me
which seemed to work quite well um [Music] also did a time lapse video from the
shots that night um there we go
so that's that running through you'll see all sorts of different things the milky way coming up
yeah so it was about two and a half hours
something like that um while we were doing the style policy we
had the scope on m51 we didn't have any guiding on it and it was sort of high lots of high cloud coming through so
that was about as good as that got from the evening um it was cloudy too so yeah also the leo
triplet that come out a little bit better wow that's nice that's very nice um oh that's beautiful
yeah you put the all of the images from the sky camera
into a style trail so that that was about it for the last couple of days since but
um what i did i had quite a lot of questions
on my facebook page of how are you doing these um movies and style trails so i thought a
quick look at the the movies was the easiest thing to do and they are really simple to do you can
do this in photoshop now um nice and straightforward so if you just go to
your folder and open the image so on the first image there
yeah if we just select the image and then down the bottom it's got image sequence
click on that open the image up and then we select a frame rate of what we want um we haven't
got a lot of time here so it's better to select a lower frame rate with it
but you can change this to whatever you really want it it's totally down to how many frames you want
and you can do this with images from any camera really so dslrs they're ideal if
you've been out shooting multiple images of a nighttime so we can select that 10 frames a second
and then if we go into window go down the bottom there we can put up timeline and this now starts to put it
into movie mode and what we can basically do is extend
the bar right across it's going to uh trip itself up a little bit as we're doing this
there we go here we go and then we can play it as a movie
and you can export this back out so we can export this out as an mp4 or whatever but it's a real simple way of
actually doing this yeah you haven't got any work if you want to do any work to the actual images so if
we wanted to we we've played that if we wanted to crop this yeah and bring it in and remove the
trees we can do all of those sorts of things yeah it really depends on on whatever you want so if we crop that up for
instance there we go and then we play the movie again
so this will adjust all of the images that are in that folder so it's not adjusting your actual
original images it's adjusted what photoshop's loaded in i like that
and you you can play around with this to your heart's content i mean if you've done a whole night's imaging on star
trails you can load all of those in um nice and straightforward and nice and
easy on this but yeah i just thought i'd share that out because there was quite a few uh questions on it
yeah that's very cool and it's it's pretty simple and straightforward yeah it's
it takes you literally seconds and then um you know all of those images in there is about 180 images in there they exported
out in probably about two or three minutes it's one of the fastest ways to doing it rather than sitting there for hours
waiting for it to convert um into a video format
right and did you gary did you hear about the meteorite that fell and uh
uh yeah we saw the images of that going over yeah so
apparently that was visible from scotland really down to around the bath area which is more or less the length of
the country yeah um and then apparently today it's come up in the news they've been
finding parts of it in gardens um some of the scientists though have worked out exactly where it landed
because in this day and age we forget that everybody's got cameras in doorbells
they've got cameras on buildings they've got media cameras like what i have so the the whole country's got cameras over
it so it's very easy now to start working out where these things are landed
and the headlines over here are um some of the first meteorites found for about 30 years over here so
yeah that's not bad going yeah it's really cool it's really cool i posted a link in
chat that's a cnn article but it's on the bbc it's everywhere so
uh yeah really remarkable um uh you know somebody would be earning some good
money out of that yes yeah they're worth quite a lot these days um once you start slicing them up
so uh i expect to see that going up on uh a couple of the um
the uh trading places for the meteorites yes yeah right
very cool very cool hey scott and gary can can i interrupt for one quick uh yes
okay sorry for that uh but let me just quickly share my screen here yeah okay
part of the program this is open discussion at this point and uh so you guys can share and talk about
anything that you like of course so okay
yeah okay so let's move this other way so this is my with my 40 millimeter
um and this is in the schmidt castle green so this is maximum field of view so i managed to frame the pleiades
just can you see it yes yeah so i managed to get the
ladies just in there just in there yeah and so if i take a quick quick quick shot here
and you can take a look at it there you go so just wanted to have a quick share
and because it really you can see the big meaning of course i didn't optimize it but at least uh
you know it's it's uh it's um it's really nice i love this is the uh this is your explorer scientific this is a 68
from uh i got from you scott uh actually over over uh the holidays so it
works beautifully with my uh with my eight inch wonderful anyhow i'm just uh yeah it's good
now app is this that you're using in particular so i'm just using the i'm just using the uh i'm just using the
phone um so basically this is what happens so you can still see my screen right okay so so if i if i go to the normal
camera phone uh it just goes into photo mode this is where it automatically does
everything and that's all nice but then if i go to more here go to more
i see then then there's pro mode and if i click on pro mode then you have
uh i always uh i set the uh the focus to uh to infinity right
and then i change the iso to whatever so you know if i want to maximize the
amplifier the good part about changing the iso settings where you're framing the object as as you can see it
changes the exposure live oh yeah so you can go if you go down here you
can see nothing but then if you go all the way up to 3200 it gives you a good view already right without even taking a picture
really fairly low noise i mean you're at 3200 days yeah
right and uh yes so i have an old iphone 8 and when i do
that i have an app that will take me to that iso setting and it just blows it out
you know so i have to go to a much lower uh iso setting but
it's uh the other thing scott no no you're right and the other thing that they've done
with smartphones now is they increased the custom exposure time so it typically
was 10 seconds yeah but with with this phone you can go all out to 30 which is which gives you another
another dimension which is nice great for galaxies
speaking of which i'm going to quickly slew over
um feel free to interrupt me anytime but i'm just going to slow over to the triplet
here because that's uh clear there's there's no cloud so let's quickly see if i can
probably it won't be able to do that without a picture so what we'll do is when it gets over there i'm gonna
we'll frame it get the right uh visual plate solve and then once i got that then i'll
but we might be lucky we might be able to see the core the core with uh 3200 and
and then i can take a quick snapshot of course it's in the opposite direction so it's it's almost there
but it's not very good transparency right now it's uh like i say there's a bunch of high clouds in between
okay it's just getting there right now okay perfect
okay so let's see here i don't really see anything right now so let's just take a
what i do if i can't see anything is i i take a quick
oh there is something okay great oh hey there might be something there okay so let's take a quick four second exposure
at 3200 sure so see what happens with this
i'll test shot oh there you go so you can you can you can see there's part of it yeah and then and
then this is the artifact unfortunately the artifact is right on top of the see this this is not a spiral arm this
is a part of the artifact but you can see the so if i shift it a little bit let me just shift the image a little bit
uh let's move it probably this way it's good
oh by the way helpful when there's a star in in the view
you can frame it yeah okay let's take another another shot here
and i'm also of course i'm only seeing two of the three there you go so we ignore the artifacts but you can see uh
uh 66 and uh what's at 66 and 65
right there and then not bad actually actually this is you can see a little bit of the spiral
structure in this guy here and then you can play with the iso what i do is this is a four second so let's let's just uh
if you if you don't mind uh bearing with me i'm gonna go with
lower iso 1600 is kind of optimum and then i go higher exposure so let's do a
fifth a 15 second and do that and see how that turns out and that should be a cleaner image it's
still gonna um it's still gonna have those artifacts i i when i get rid of those and i start
stacking stuff this is gonna be a lot a lot niftier but uh i'm just happy to be able to share this with you
guys real time see here okay so see this is now you can see less
grainy yeah that's definitely a little more a little more blown out but uh but not bad right no not bad yeah
and so and anyhow so and this is with the 40 millimeter um so uh
you can see it's kind of using the edge of the field there but uh yeah so
that's what i got i'll stop sharing now didn't wanna
but i tell you i'm just so happy to um oh well there we go yeah stop sharing
yeah so i'm just so happy to be able to to share this because there's not too many clear nights here in the winter in seattle so right
this is great thanks it's so it's so um
you know straightforward and easy i mean you know there's a technique but looks very promising that you can do uh
smartphone astrophotography like that if you'd asked me you know years ago uh if people would be using their phones
to take astrophotographs i would have said absolutely no way i just couldn't imagine it but
but here we are so well i was i'm flabbergasted because the size of the pixels keep shrinking and they still get
the noise down and i don't understand how they're doing that it's like alien technology to get that noise level down
oh yeah like the the the cameras that i mean there was a time when when they were shifting of course from film into
digital photography and then finally digital photography you everyone had those little quick cameras and stuff and
then finally the smartphone and then we finally ditched the the the digital cameras because uh you know
ninety percent of our pictures were with a smartphone were pretty darn good and uh you know it's like uh it's
amazing now i just carry one device you know just carry the phone around and and and uh you know you still you can't
beat of course the larger optics on the uh on the on a full dslr
but but boy if you look at the percentage of time and and the quality that that equation
is really in favor of the smartphone now they have now multiple cameras with different optical zoom levels
so the so to jerry's point what's amazing is these are very tiny ccds they're they're not large at all right i
mean but they're they're super high density and yet low noise that's that's
i don't know how they do it but anyhow it's it's really cool right and the multiple optics you can
emulate what larger optics do with with depth of field and all the other tricks and gizmos you have with the software to
emulate what a larger uh lens element would do for you with the depth of field and other things
right jerry and in fact i want to get to that equation on pixel scale
to make sure i get the optimum size the right eyepiece focal length and
an image scale to match these smartphone ccd
is chips because there's there's a way probably to optimize it uh so that you you can get even more
sharper stars right yeah i'm sure there's you want to be critically sampled no matter what you're imaging
because the sky will only give you so much so you don't want to over sample and you don't want to under sample but that's correct you could probably figure
it out by looking at different images and different eyepieces yep yeah that's what one of my
one of my homework that's great that's great
well is uh are we do we have uh more to uh
share tonight or how's it looking with the group here well there's no correct i'm surprised
i'm still awake yeah you are still awake [Laughter]
yeah richard was really tired after uh working all day so
yeah there's not not a lot from this side the uh the view off of the all sky camera is um
that that's it for today so um yeah nothing much going on there well the
sun's coming up now oh don't i sympathize gary i i see that a lot
being here yeah i'm in the uk so we spent most of the winter like that yeah
um it has started to get better i will say that i think we had four or five of those
here were there last week where we got a few hours and in immigration
is it better during the day gary sometimes so you can do your solar imaging or no it's it's funny i mean as
winter seasons go even on the solar has been really bad um normally i'm managing to pick off you
know you can drop down scalar telescope and all sorts of things to counteract the
low sun but we're just not getting the clear skies so yeah um
and and that's it so although luckily now with the sun's just
starting to rise up a little bit so if we get onto the um sun at the sort of two or three in the
afternoon it's getting high enough now to still get some reasonable quality images
um but really you're at the end of so the end of this month early next
month and then it's really starting to get higher so if you get that little bit of high cloud there or something going on you can
punch straight through it and that's the thing whereas when you lower to the horizon it it sort of
it collapses together very similar to your poor seeing overnight time if you're down near the horizon then your
styles are all bouncing around but the image solar images are doing exactly the same thing in the daytime
through the winter so but yeah um it looks like it's getting more
active we're getting a lot more sunspots uh there's another one wrote it rotated in yesterday
um and you you're starting to see a lot more uh complex prominences and
filaments on the sun now so um we're gradually starting to see a rising activity
um looking forward to the summer really all the stuff we've been working on in the background for
um while it's been in solar minimum we can now start putting to use and trying those ideas out and see what
we come up with so some of them i've been putting in over the last couple of weeks and they
seem to be working okay so just need some nice dense active areas
and then we can really see what we can do yeah i'm sure you're going to turn out some pretty amazing stuff coming up here
you know you're yeah it it it's all weather related it's the same old thing
you know in the daytime i say i see on solar what you're looking through at the night time i see it every
day of the week and obviously with some behind it it really highlights what's happening in the atmosphere
so overnight time we just see you know the styles really twinkling we don't really understand what's
going on up there but um a good few hours on solar sun shows you how good or how bad the skies are and
sometimes you can get a few days back um we had some cloud there but in between
the gaps the scene was phenomenal it was really really nice um so you can't tell
until you get the scope out and start looking you can tell what it's going to be right
right wonderful we've had a great star party today i mean
you know david levy starts off with his poetry and
you know talking about um you know just uh
the various aspects of being a into astronomy uh david eicher
took us across the distant scale of the universe we had uh libby libby gave
probably her best uh talk um you know the
that she's given she was actually invited by uh dave eicher to write an article for astronomy magazine she's
only 11 years old my goodness you know she's done great yeah it's great huh so
she did a great uh talk about the uh sequence of stars you know they're going uh you know into uh
uh you know to uh you know a door stage or a supernova stage you know in their
in their life cycle um you know incredible astrophotography uh
you know doug strouble showed uh you know came out with uh showing live images and then all those
amazing planetary images that he loves doing uh you know and he's importal eight skies i mean he's just you know super
light polluted his uh his uh mission is to show people that they can
do high quality astrophotography from the city you know um
uh you know and uh molly wakeling with her work with the double abso um
caesar and uh rodrigo from south america you know uh telling telling us what it's all about
and uh even the astrobeard being here when he's dead tired and yeah you know
and cameron gill is showing what's up what's possible just with a smartphone it's kind of mind-blowing so
i think part of this thing so part of the philosophy that we're starting to see emerge and we talked about scott is that
that you know we're trying to break these traditional
rules of thumb and the traditional knowledge that people have the way astrophotography's been done for the
last 20 30 years yes we're breaking those molds you know we're trying to say no
there's a lot more to it than that there's a lot more you can do if you just look into it and get some skills
and knowledge then you start to understand that yeah maybe the traditional knowledge that you find on cloudy nights isn't so
and so good you know well you know what it is i think it's like a bridge we're building a ladder
with the technology so you know now you're bringing accessibility to a lot more people right
like so the the traditional a lot of the old school and a lot of the knowledge that was gained from the hard
work of astrophotography still carries to today and and so that's that's that
will always be there but then now those were those expensive rigs and you know all the cool stuff that you can do
that's something that everyone can aspire to but it now is such not such a big reach to get there
it's not out of reach it's starting to you're starting to make people you know just like it's like the
american dream sorry to be political but you know just getting it so that everyone can have
access and then everyone has a chance at contributing and and then they can start to say hey everyone can go at their
level right there's much more granularity now which is really good i think it's also about everybody
thinking outside the box you know you don't don't take everything for granted of what you read and what
you see right is that you know thinking about things and and you know if you've got ideas run with them
have a go at them it's very hard to find some information on lots of things
uh yes until you play with those things you don't know
and it might be that eureka moment you come up with something and you come up with your way of doing it and your way
of enjoying it yeah that's true that's that well that's been your whole story gary you know yeah i
mean you know on the solar side right i mean my whole thing was
right from the beginning um i love the dynamics of it i love looking at it i
never look on any of the uh satellites in the mornings i always want
to look at the sun myself and see what's there and that then becomes the challenge the
challenges you see in conditions the position of maybe a prominence whether it's further around the limbs so
it's very dim or whether it's moving really fast um
and then it's kicking the brain in as to what equipment's going to be the best once you've seen what you're going to go
after it's what we're going to change to now to you know capture that close-up or get in
there um and there is that balancing act you know the seeing conditions um
all of those sort of things come together and it it becomes that daily challenge
yeah because no one prominence is going to move the same as the other one and that that's the key then that that's
what you're after so um but if i'd listened to people in the
past i wouldn't be doing it you know they were also and we did it the other day we took a color camera and
we imaged the sun with the color camera you know when i first got into everybody's going oh no you can't do
that color cameras don't work in hydrogen alpha it's like well watch [Laughter]
right yeah that's great that's what i mean by thinking outside the box it's a case of like don't rely
on all of the information there because some of it is older you know it's coming from the old days
so technology as cameron's proving is moving along a real rapid pace now
and it's giving people the options to really uh play around with and have fun
with the this stuff not get too bogged down in all the seriousness of it
right and people a lot of times people customers will say well can your equipment do this
or that or can i try can i do this you know just do it just try it we're even trying it right i mean try it yeah just
try it i mean don't ask us i mean mix this with that don't ask us just do it and see if it
works for you and if you have some if you have a question about it then then you come to us and ask well it looks
like you did this and it was working for you so maybe you try to tweak that jerry i mean if they can't you know when you
go and you're buying a uh you know an adapter or something uh
you know even if it's 50 bucks or a couple hundred bucks or a thousand dollars or whatever it might be you know
you'd like to get as much information as you can so i understand that part but there's
people that already have all the gear they already have it and they they want to ask well you know
from the expert okay is this is this the way it's supposed to go you you you
become the expert by trying it you know and and figuring it out and um right uh
you know it's nice to bounce ideas off of people but uh um but yeah dive in you know buy them
that that that's part of it and i i don't think anyone can know the answers for all the equipment no you can you can
take an educated guess yeah yeah but you could be completely wrong
you know somebody can surprise you and and come up with some different use for something or
uh whatever but you know really the the whole of this is about enjoying it and it shouldn't be a
chore you know whatever you're trying to do in it shouldn't be a chore it should be
enjoyment and you're having fun and that that's the key um to this
and i think yeah and you know what i what i love is what's happening now gary and scott terry
um the uh the smaller telescopes are kind of going through a revolution now right i mean
because of the imaging capabilities i mean i'm seeing stuff now with with
these simple smartphone phone shots on on a on a little i can't wait to get my
ed80 but i i you know on my mac 102 4 inch uh that you know it takes a much larger
aperture to visually see that and you can get a you can have a blast and this is kind of topeka's point
earlier you know he he must had a great time gary uh and it was a jerry i think it was jerry right yeah with you uh when
you were showing him that that live kind of stacking uh that must have been fantastic because it's it's so nice to
zip around and you know have that hybrid approach where you're you're doing imaging but you're also
observing at the same time right it's a single frame imaging where you just go to a different
target and see what you can see with the three minute image or one minute image depending on how bright the object is
you know you can you can zoom into the image and just look around and say look at this look at that you know
yeah and it's like it's like an enhanced eyepiece view is that is what it is basically
yeah and people do that with eaa stuff with the outreach and things with video
cameras but but if you've got your system set up for deep sky imaging you can do the same
thing yeah for outreach i mean they can you know i love it what people are doing
with these projectors and stuff you know just hey just protect it on a big screen and then everyone can look at it in one shot
right and it's uh really it makes it give everyone a excitement because everyone's
enjoying that view at the same time right you know the changes in the cameras over
the last five years this is one of the reasons why the small telescopes are really kicking off at the moment
and it is what i've i mean some of the images we did of mars they were on a 102
millimeter telescope you wouldn't have dreamed of doing that five years ago
you know there was you might have got a fuzzy image of it but you certainly wouldn't have got
detail or started to pick out olympus mons or things like that offer 102 ml scope
it's a combination of sort of optic changes and with the cameras and by changing the
camera now you can zoom right in on something without having the barlow there or
cutting down on the the magnification of the bowl and as everybody knows if you you stick
it five times in there it's going to really darken up the image you're going to have to up the exposure and that's where
everything's going wrong if you can remove that back down to a three times by changing the pixel size on the camera
and having um slightly nicer optics in some of the cheaper telescopes
um that's what's there you know and certainly from a uk point of view i think we're selling a
lot less um smith casserones than what we were 10 years ago 10 years
ago smith cascarones were everywhere and everybody wanted one um now everybody's after a refractor
yes the scene conditions are just not allowing for to make real good use of an
sct in this day and age yeah software
has come a long way too that's a big part of it to be able to pull out every bit of data out of that you know i've
i've taken 30 gigabytes of video doing lunar imaging in a session
and you can compile that down into you know five gigabytes for each movie and
compile that down to one image it's a lot of data yeah i i mean like an average
hour and a half session with the cameras we're using here probably be about 150 gigabyte
yeah that's a lot of data um that that's an average sort of hour a
couple of hour sessions something like that you normally have to keep an eye on where it's going because you have to
start shifting it around if you're not careful certainly if you've left stuff on from the day before and right yeah exactly
yeah so um but i think it also takes a lot longer i mean as we said the other day you know you used to get your images
you'd have your images there by 12 o'clock and you'd be posting images up somewhere by
sort of one o'clock i passed one after running through them all the the file sizes now are so big or for
some of the cameras it's taking ages to process them even just to go through the video and
check it for any errors before you start processing is taking forever now so
um but yeah and that's why quite often a lot of the images don't get out until the next day
and i actually don't like that i like to get a solar image out on the day that is captured
that's the key thing i've never really one for putting them out you know a couple of days uh after the event or whatever's
occurred so um but everybody's different on that
um it does get to a point though where you you've got to sit down for a half a day and go through the hard
drives and start removing ser files because they're sort of dotted around in folders
everywhere from um thinking oh i'll keep that one i have a look at that one later and never getting
around to going back to it and looking at it mm-hmm
yeah doug strouble earlier say he's got a uh how many terabytes did he have
80 some or 40 49 terabytes or 48 terabytes or something of storage
yeah on a nas drive yeah i i can't quite believe it i mean if we
were doing all day imaging here it would be nothing to hit you know two terabytes of data easy
um and that's not recalled him fully that's just grabbing things
certainly if you go into doing uh time lapse on the sun yeah you're gonna grab a video every um
sort of 30 seconds to a minute um depending on how long you're going to run that in the session
there's so much data there and it's always also worth bearing in mind how much computers
have changed over the last five years i mean five years ago you'd struggle to get a laptop unless you were going to
spend really good money a laptop to sit there and actually watch a video steady without pausing my
loading was still loading the video as it was playing whereas nowadays you know the the
average laptop it fly through some of this stuff you know certainly with the advent of
solid-state drives and things like that they're making the capture as well you know we can we can start moving
these cameras up some of them here like 500 frames a second yeah um and
you know that sounds ridiculous to say that you know you could recall 30 000 frames in
you know under a minute you you wouldn't dream of that five years ago so
the computer technology is helping us a lot as well
right right i was going to say that i think that uh pix insight's actually one of the
better bang for the buck things out there for astrophotography even though it's quite expensive
without it i mean you know you could replace any piece of gear with any other
piece of gear to a point without stepping too low but without pix insight what it's
capable of being so powerful i mean i don't know that's kind of that's kind
of the way i feel about maxim dl it's expensive software but again how much is your time worth that's what i always
look at how much is your time worth is it is it worth the investment for a piece of software or piece of technology
the biggest example i have is a telescope drive master not having to auto guide is a godsend
you know you waste so much time with messing with your auto guiding system it's just a pain it's just a pain
yeah i found that early on
has its little quirks and its little gimmicks and it's little bits here and there i
mean if i want to process something really really fast i need to look at the data and work out what's going on with
it i use astro astros the fastest piece of software on the planet
yeah it will you know rinse through uh full frame images
um and they come back out in a fraction of the time but then picks insights doing doing it
mathematically so it's going to take time you're going to get a better result out of the end of it
um so it's down to what people really want but i think my attitude to it is if you
spend over a thousand bucks on the equipment then you should start looking at pics inside
a lot of people out there with thousands thousands of dollars a gear and complain about the price it picks
insight and it's like you know not one of those the gear that you spend that much money on is that
weird well for 300 bucks or whatever it is that people don't want to pay for software
we've said that before on the shows and i've always said it that astronomers are tight
yeah they will pay for the equipment and that's where the payment stops
all of the software needs to come free after that but see this is no different to photoshop if you look how quick we put
that time lapse video together you would be paying 600 or whatever you
know a couple of thousand dollars a few years back for the whole adobe suite or whatever it was yeah and it couldn't do
what this can do now um when we're doing mosaics the black area or the sky area
yeah it will always be hard to match and because of the orientation of the moon or the sun there will be panels missing
yeah in there in the sky area um and to get those to match used to be a nightmare
because you don't realize how many shades there are just in that one frame
yeah across the image so if you've got lots of these missing to actually patch these all in
photoshop does it all for you now it can literally look at the whole image and you know i'm on about big mosaics
i'm on a 120 panel mosaics it can look at that whole image
yeah and work out every shade of the black that's missing and insert it for it
and then people are saying i don't want to pay eight dollars a month or whatever it is
okay yeah you want to go and fix that by yourself yeah somehow um just i mean like if you look at all
of the software for doing time lapse that was so easy to do that it'd be worth eight dollars a month if you're doing time-lapse videos
you know well if you if you're you know a lot of the amateur astronomers i mean in my mind
do professional level work you know and and you want professional level tools for that too so
you've earned it yep so sorts of things as well it's color calibration isn't it you know a lot of
us use adobe 1998 for our color palettes things like that so
lots of these other programs actually strip the color out of your images if they're free they either can't render it
or they they take it away so if you make a slight adjustment in that program you lose all the color and you look at
the image you know lately i think well where did all the color go oh yeah i adjusted the rotation very
slightly in the other program and it just as soon as i did that and saved it it stripped all the color out especially
if you're using like a 16-bit camera and you're using an 8-bit program to
you know kick out your file when it's done um so there are a couple of programs out
there that are okay but generally most of the free ones come with
some bugs somewhere along the lines that are going to drive you nuts
but they're good starting points you know so deep sky stacker is a good starting point for people to get used to
stacking and the process of taking dark frames and uh all of those sorts of things and
integrating them without spending any money and then deciding you know they want to go further so
there is a place for some of the free software um it's just limited i'd still be using deep sky stacker all
the time if it wasn't for they just didn't patch the cr3 files for canon fast enough when they came out and
i bought pics inside never looked back but i mean it was working great for me until i
bought a new camera and it had a different uh raw file and they just didn't cover it at the time now they do
that's right and you'll find that with adobe so if canon launched the camera tomorrow
yeah and it's out in the market and you you know you go to your favorite store and buy the camera and you get your raw
files and you go and put them in the photoshop that goes nope can't see it and it won't see it until adobe pay
cannon yeah for the royal file license it's been an ongoing thing for years and
years and years and it's all down to how long it takes for the money to transfer across and that could be three months
before you get that raw file working once it's released normally into photoshop you generally find it goes in
the deep sky stacker and the other pieces of software afterwards but that's generally the the tier
structure with it um and you find that those cameras are not going to work for you you might so
say for a good couple of months after release
my case i think it was well over a year from the original release of cr3 files
because that would have been on the eos r i think and i got a 90d last
about a year ago and the esr has been out for what at least two years
and it didn't last last fall i mean last um spring at the earliest
we used to find deep sky stacker would have the newer version on its yahoo group
and on its web page it'd have one that's about you know two years old or something yeah so if you didn't know
about the yahoo group thank you i'll never find the the raw driver for your camera to work in there
but yeah it's all part of the way it goes and and how um software goes
cool but anyway i'm um i'm gonna take my leave now yeah i'm gonna do the same
thing i i have a knot off yeah guys it's um it's uh
very late for gary very early um jerry's at uh running about midnight 30
here cameron thank you so much for being on with us and uh showing us uh
you know all the uh tips on smartphone astrophotography
richard thanks for hanging in there with us all night long and and uh gary you too man so yeah it's
always great star party and uh for all of you in the audience that we're watching
thank you so much um uh great audience um
i think that we um it just what was brought to the whole
star party was so nice because it was uh uh such a variety of things you know
from you know daniel barth with his uh
educational aspects to you know astronomy to teachers and uh
um you know my head's just swimming right now thinking all the different aspects of uh
astronomy that we covered tonight so it was really it was wonderful thank you very much everyone gentlemen
uh thank you scott thank you thank you good night have a good night everyone thanks so
much have a good one all right take care thank you
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