Transcript:
great i had so much song this week and hello clark hello
dr chapman you're here tonight and it's so good to have you here well so good to see you david
hi scott hi dave and i'm not sure wendy wendy is right here as well
yeah wendy says hi and uh i mean we're going to have a good
night tonight but we're putting we're putting stella we're putting you on first after me because it's late on the east
coast it's okay i brought my tea so i'm good brush your teeth yeah let's have two
together why not right yeah it's nice
it's nice it's nice
our live our mics are hot but right now when i say that everybody gets
really quiet clean up the jokes yeah right coming on
hello joe wright good evening can you hear me yes i can hear you just well all right
hi wendy and then wendy's saying waving she's waving low you'll be able
to hear her when it's her time to speak
oh my goodness we're hosting galileo what a rare privilege
so i didn't come up with my name okay i need to change that
so that's what i use at school with the kids or scaling out that's all right
well i do like to call myself the gentleman astronomer you'll have to grow a bit of a beard i'm afraid
yeah and drink more wine and uh we'll have to put some shackles on your hands
and introduce you to john milton oh my goodness and i can stay home and work yeah
yeah yeah galileo was the first at-home worker
there's scott how you doing just fine house things down there
uh it's good it's good i think we might have a storm coming though so do we yeah i think it's a good
pretty good system let's see
we're starting to carry weather stations and stuff so yesterday i hooked up a weather station that's connected to
the internet so you just log into this webpage and you can see your own private home uh weather
you know and i enjoy mr isher's uh
history family history that he posts on facebook thank you thank you very much oh dave we need to
connect on facebook i didn't know you were there why do you not think about it really absolutely yes
we certainly shall
libby so lovely to see you again hello my internet just disconnected so
and reboot everything well we fear you pretty well and see you
very well right now libby and the stars i'm getting it pretty good and you're
gonna be on pretty early tonight in fact right after dr kafka
when they say that your head is in the clouds your head is in the nebular clouds
libby tonight right smoke in the middle of the milky way yeah she's out there
i'm loving this and i'm loving it that it's the xxx star party
that's pretty soon scott you're gonna outdo the roman
emperors if you keep doing these i know rice isn't that cool
i don't know how many star parties roman emperors actually have had a couple though well we can always
claim that the emperors of the modern world are here
[Laughter] oh that was nice chris mp just sent an
email back he says it was fun you're an easy and expert host
that was very nice that's quite a compliment he's not exactly right and clark
i feel like i'm in rancho europa right now sitting here talking with you this way
well you sort of are in rancho europa and i'm finishing up my
dinner here i'm not sure how this screen sharing is gonna gonna work what what do i do to make
that work when my time comes up um scotty
okay so scotty's gonna have to explain that to you in zoom you can see on your your if you
put your mouse over the the uh video where you see everybody okay
you're going to see a green button down at the bottom and it says i see that see that and if you click on that
it says you cannot start screen sharing with the other particular i'm gonna let you do it anyways okay
we got just about five minutes here so try it hit share screen
okay um and we'll see when you do share
and so yeah there you go that's it and so then i would do uh
um slideshow yeah you do that and it'll take it full screen and it
looks like we're looking at your desktop right now looks good does that look like the first slide
it certainly does clark you're a quick learner quick study okay good so so i stopped
screen sharing by doing what okay so go back up to the top there oh stop
share okay i see it there's another way to stop sharing you
can take your laptop and toss it out the window that will stop the sharing as well also
that's more expensive though definitely solve the problem so with that in mind please
smile i'm taking an e-selfie
oh come on here we are here we are getting ready
getting to know each other getting comfortable with our group and i think we're gonna have a fun
evening i'm just i'm gonna try to keep on the schedule as much as i can tonight
oh dave i'm so ready to hijack your schedule
because you asked for it he said you know why don't you talk about this and then talk about that i'm like
um how many nights are you listening that
the aavso is a very precious organization to me it's like family but
you know people like you is making this organization special
well it's it's going to be fun to hear about it from the boss
maybe it should go
and get our observers coming oh my goodness i was um i was actually exchanging emails with
a friend and i have to admit i was a little bit late on sending him something that they
promised to send him and i'm like please forgive me over the last three days three nove
and one eclipse in binary happened so really i was busy and he was like
yeah i get it hello terry terry's joined us hi there everybody has
joined us hi how's everybody doing oh we're good we're doing
glad you're here with us thank you glad to be here
and stella i wanted to say that your favorite star the other night threatened to get faint
again but it was just haze in front in the sky i know right so it was not the actual star
beetlejuice fading again we're going to talk about that as different time yeah that'll be a different time yeah
but you know depending on the day you ask me it's a different favorite style there's so much going on so much and
such an exciting time to be a part of this amazing community
seriously it's we're having fun we really are and we have serious try we're serious
about work and we're serious about fun so that's what makes everything exciting
yeah it's a good really means party hard and play hard right
yeah exactly wait a minute if you're partying and playing oh work hard and party uh never mind scott you just
confuse everybody
and that's just to know what happens when your countdown clock reaches zero does the earth explode or something
uh some earth somewhere does yes yeah it's randomized you know
it's like a big surprise [Laughter]
okay who do we got watching here we've got
cameron gillos was the first one to log in here um and then we got harold locke
good evening to all of the gsp tonight the rawr the better the rawr rawr
that's right james the astrophotography good evening everybody um matthew walsh says hello
i think matthew i'm not sure if matthew's new or not but uh welcome to global star party
mike wiesner hi from cloudy southern arizona book davies say it says okey dokey yep
clouds win and dampness here and we got this stella kafka is on there
too how could she be there in
and mike weisner says my audio is low again really what's that who's that person
i don't know i know uh it is uh at least from my part of
southern arizona it's just partly cloudy a lot of clearing right now
but uh oh okay kevin habhager says hello everybody i
was able to view my first triple star last saturday night congratulations
very cool which one was it good question evan you have to tell us
which one it was yeah no pressure we just have a team of
expert astronomers here to check it out absolutely and we're eager to just go
out and observe it right now so we can take a a five minute break
yeah yeah at the start of the program that's right rob duke rob duke says
good evening from seaforth ontario hello hello jason hello welcome yeah
thank you ontario so how can you tell how many people are
watching live right now that's a difficult one
uh because we simulcast and we also simulcast onto a couple of websites
where we get no numbers um we are on the home page of
cloudynights.com so we want to thank the people for cloudy nights allow us to do that which is really cool
i know that ontario telescope likes to broadcast us so we thank him
for that and then we are on facebook on a couple of pages
we're on uh maybe three pages on facebook we're on youtube uh and then we're on
twitch and then we're on twitter and so i wish there was like a little counter that you could see
everybody all at once uh part of it that you can see is the people who are
not just watching because there's a lot of people who just watch and they don't uh chat with us
but when you see active chatting going on you can be sure there's a lot of people
you know watching out there too and we love that so we're down to about
a minute 20 right now i hope the earth doesn't blow up
really quite concerned about that i would put a damper on the 40th global star party yeah i think so i was my understanding that we had uh
five to six billion years left before earth was in big trouble or a minute who's counting 57 seconds
yeah yeah if you need an insurance policy see me
and i hope literally to see you and rita pretty soon in uh arizona joe well we are missing it
um that you are we're not sure but one way or the other maybe we'll still just come down
that would be nice i'm having withdrawal symptoms from tucson
especially with the winter we've had here
you and the audience please um if you like this outreach activity that we do please
like share subscribe hit the little bell all those things
[Music] uh
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okay
going pretty
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[Music] um well hello everybody out there um
you are uh with us on the 40th i'm so happy to say this the 40th global
star party with our special guest host david h levy and uh with us tonight uh you can see
just some of the speakers uh there'll be more coming on later but of course there's david eicher with us
david levy of course who's going to be our introducing each person um
clark chapman uh i it's my pleasure to meet you clark it's uh great wendy wallach levy
uh uh david's wife is here with us this is wonderful stella kafka from the double a vso
joseph wright is with us of course libby and the stars terry mann from the astronomical league
jason gonzale the vast reaches and adrian bradley how are you doing everybody
yep great to be here you're doing good good to be here well uh david levy and i
have a uh have had a long-term uh friendship uh
spans over a few decades now and uh um i've had the privilege to go
observing with him i've had the privilege to do star parties with him to conspire on doing outreach activities
we built a telescope together gosh i think you know if if you ever had
an astronomy friend and you wanted to do it all i think david and i have almost done it all
you know so it's been wonderful uh it's been great to watch my friend uh discover comets and
asteroids and to be recognized for all the great things he's done
his articles have been fascinating his uh his insight into
people that he knows has been amazing his his work uh with biographies for uh
clyde tomba and i think you did barkbox uh biography i would love love to have
met him but um you know through uh through david of the
uh entire astronomical community has been able to learn more about the people that are the movers and
shakers in our community and he's definitely one of them himself david thank you very much for being our
special guest host and i'm going to turn over the whole thing over to you well thanks
did we lose you david
i think we just lost david david and possibly wendy
yeah i which doesn't surprise me if something happened both of their uh lines um
hopefully the glitch will record all of itself very soon you don't want it too small because
maybe it doesn't want to go on trails huh okay
that's a first well it's not a first i've done it myself so
okay audience please bear with us for a minute here we're going to get things going to follow the rules
and you know find find out what the weight limit is and then proceed with finding
[Music] ah the phone is
is hello oh we're back in
are we yeah i hear you okay we're back we're back maybe the second try will be a little
bit better can everybody hear me yes yes okay good
it's always a good place to start when the engines turn on and then shut down like germany six
but then a few days later they try it again and maybe this time it'll work
anyway i always begin these star parties with a poetic quotation and i wanted to expand
the expand the reach a tiny little bit and so i took my book of victorian poems the one i used
when i was at acadia so long ago and i opened it up at random to any page
and i bumped into this delight by matthew arnold and it's called self-dependence
and when you might enjoy this as someone as non-dependent as as dependent as i am
well we'll just see if this will work and it kind of says something about
those of us who are trying to look out for ourselves a little bit weary of myself and sick of asking what
i am and what i ought to be at this vessel's prow i stand
which bears me forwards forwards or the starlit sea from the intense
clear starstone vault of heaven or the lit season quiet
way in the wrestling night air came the answer wouldst thou be as these are
live as they o airborne voice long since severely clear a cry like
thine in my own heart i hear resolve to be thyself
and know that he or she who finds himself or herself loses that misery
thank you and on that name then on that note i am now going to introduce one of my
favorite people stella kafka is the current director of the aavso and
and uh i i've the aavso is really not an organization to me it's
family it is a place where i have made friends that have lasted a lifetime
i joined the aavso during the days of margaret mayall and matured hopefully a little bit in
the time of janet maddie and janet janet is the one that wendy
and i met here in tucson just before she became ill but
uh had that not happened she would probably still be the aavso director
but if she were here right now i think she would say oh no i have to turn the wheels of the
organization over to stella kafka who is so good and so wonderful
as a director of the aavso and i would like stella right now
to take over and talk to us a little a bit about this beloved organization stella over to
you dave thank you so much and you know something when i started the abso i
really realized that i had really big shoes to feel it was not
a very an easy task and was definitely something that was um really
overwhelming because when you're talking to legends and when you are taking over from legends
everything can be very overwhelming so today what i would like to talk about are two different aspects but they come
together under a very wide umbrella that has to do with this amazing organization when dave levy
actually calls you and tells you listen i want to hear more about the women of the avso
then you never say no you say absolutely last time i was here last week we talked
about women in science and actually not only that um literally the hidden figures in science
highlighting some of the amazing individuals who actually push the the borders of science forward
to boldly go and enable scientific advances such as
the wi-fi such as computers and programming that we know right now
but let me focus a little bit on behaviors so when i would like to start with the same quote that i started last
time we are standing on the shoulders of giants if i have seen further it is by
standing on the shoulder of giants and that is only newton's quote this quote actually is known since the
12th century way before newton and this is one of the
depictions the understanding of the time of what that meant this is actually
derived from greek mythology i am greek so i can actually make references of that this is a blind giant orion carried his
servants sedalian and his shoulders to act as a giant's eyes and it demonstrates the main idea of the quote
that by using the knowledge understanding and wisdom of major thinkers
and accomplished leaders before us we managed to take progress to make progress ourselves and
push whatever is good to making it better for it so today i would like to start by
introducing the avso to you and discuss some of the giants of the abs so
some of the influential women leaders without which we wouldn't be here and with disclaimer that this is only a
tiny sample of the female intellect that was made that has made extraordinary impact on
the abs over time and maybe in the future i can come up and have like an hour to myself
where i can actually talk about the rest of them i would like to start by a short history of the
abso you know the adso has been around for 110 years now
and for that long history the association has had just a handful of directors actually
the founders were staff of the harvard observatories and they were called
recorders that in total we've had just five directors in our history
four of which were women so to do today i would like to start by introducing
those giants of astronomy those absolutely amazing female leaders of the avso that actually
made an impact and again made the atheists saw what we know and um they had an impact of the
organization to make it what i took over and um
pushes the 21st century and then i can tell you a little bit more of the atheists on the 21st century
and i would like to start with margaret meyer the iron lady of the avso margaret actually earned her
a masters in astronomy from radcliffe college at the time where women were not allowed
to actually get a phd from harvard university radcliffe college was
at the associated university college where women were allowed
to get some kind of a degree that was back in 1920 28 and then she actually spent her
senior year during her studies at harvard observatory working with annie j
cannon and harlow shackley who was the director of the observatory after graduating with a masters she
continued her work with annie cannon on spectroscopic classification of stars
now early in the 1949 harper observatory director harlow shapley a smile to
consider taking over the position of the avs or recorder that was actually the the name the
director at the time from leon campbell who founded the association when he retired she accepted the
position she was named a pickering memorial astronomer harvard observatory and
avs or recorder and actually this title was changed later to become a director of the idea so she in
principle marker and mile was the first director of the avso when sharply retired from the harvard
observatory directorship in 1952 the avso's position became to change a
little bit we changed directorship uh which at the harvard observatory and they changed
in general they changed direction so in 1954 the new director donald
announced at the absol we have to move out of the harvard observatory and that all its funding resources were
discontinued at that time you can imagine a new organization that was just founded
an that depended very deeply on harvard could be in crisis but mile actually
was the person who decided that she is going to protect this organization and move it forward
she oversaw the transition of the avso to an independent non-profit scientific and educational
association and actually as the association struggled through severe financial hardships
because they had no financial support from harvard anymore margaret and mile worked without salary
for a number of years to ensure the future of the avso she was truly an iron lady during the
critical early years of independence she actively sought out new sources of funding from government and private
donors she communicated widely with the astronomical community to solicit both
technical and moral support for the avs or from the professional astronomical community
she actually managed to establish an endowment fund to secure a much more solid financial footing for
the adso and she expanded existing programs and committees and added new to ones that existed to attract a
broader membership of the organization she added more stars to the observing program and actually established a new
system for correlating and publishing data for professional use and back in 1966 before the
the the computers and systems that we know right now she introduced a modern data processing
methods of the adso with emphasis on machine computing and plotting for publication
margaret mile was a director of the avso for 24 years she retired in 1973
and with that she passed the bhutan to another iron lady of the 80 so janet maddie johnny buddy came in the
u.s from turkey where she was born to get her bachelor's in science and
then she became one of dorit hufflet's assistants at the mariah mutual observatory in nantucket in
massachusetts and actually when mayaka and mail decided to retire
janet was selected by the abso council in october of 1973
to succeed margaret as the avso director janet money did not have a phd at the
time where she actually became a director but in 1982 she earned her phd
in astronomy from edge university in england turkey janet money was an avso director
for 30 years and you know something everyone i know knows janet she was a
person who was very loved exactly because she left a huge legacy behind her
she strove continuously to teach the global astronomical and educational communities about
the vital contributions that amateur astronomers make to variable star astronomy she was extremely passionate about the
about the avso and what it means for citizen scientists
worldwide over and over again in her talks she demonstrated how astronomers
educators students could enhance their research through utilizing the talents of variable star
observers viable star observations and the unique resources that the ads
offered and actually giant directorship took place during times of tremendous
challenges and opportunities in astronomy some of those were the advent of satellite astronomy
suddenly we're looking at the the the universe through means outside the earth right evolution
of computer technology that opened up new means for communication and data management
and not only that instrumentation advances that gave amateur astronomers access to observing
equipment and the result of exponential growth and of the size of the avso international
database she was strong and she managed to actually lead the avso through all those changes
and actually as dave mentioned in his introduction margaret janet would have been with us
if it wasn't for health problems she lost the battle
against leukemia in 2004 you know that was a time of crisis with
the adso that was a time where we needed someone to step up and
save the day and there was another woman that actually helped move the absol forward and became
the link between two different directors and kept the organization moving forward
while it was in limbo without a a figurehead come elizabeth wagon elizabeth wagon
started working at the abs in the summer of 1974 fresh out of smith college with a
bachelor's in astronomy she says her one-year position to process data
helped the journal of the avso and help the director with her international correspondents
has turned into an extraordinary 40 years and counting with the avso
quoting elizabeth the interactions with the international astronomical and educational communities are
stimulating instructive and rewarding for what more could one ask elizabeth served
as an interim director for two years a position she held after janet maddie was taken ill in september
2003 as interim director she was responsible for management of the absolute programs
in conjunction with the organizational leadership of the abso executive board and council
she returned to her former position as a senior technical assistant when arnie hendon
became the abso director of march 1st 2005. her main area
elizabeth actually is still working with her and she's working now on the avso international database
quality control and data processing interacting with observers on a variety of issues so she's part of our
active health desk coordinating observing campaigns and alerts and serving as the associate
editor of the journal of the avso this is only a small sample of the
leadership of the avs so so if you want me to talk more about the
women that actually made a difference our board members our observing section
leaders our professional astronomers who actually pushed the science of the avso forward our observers were actually still
working behind the scenes to actually make the abs or the wonderful organizations
i will need an hour so this is perhaps subject for a different time but i just want to say that there has
been a numerous of other extraordinary women who worked and are working in front and behind the
scenes please don't forget the avs of staff that are actually uh right next to our
observers right next to our members non-stop and it's actually a
a function for them it's not a job they are they have as a personal um
mission to improve the value of the avso to its community and the impact of the observer state of the
scientific discovery the absolute today is an international organization we started with a small
group of individuals from the harvard observatory and now we're all over the world and
actually we serve a very diverse community that means people with different needs different priorities
different interests different professional preparations habit and cultural background we have
individuals who are interested in using variable star data for the research projects we work with educators all over the
world who introduce astronomy to their students we collaborate with a very dedicated
group of volunteers we attract individuals who are just interested in learning about advancements in science
and what variable star astronomy is teaching us every single day and of course we work with observers
those who acquire data through the telescope ccds or dslr cameras and they share this information with the wider
community through the avso international database and what brings everybody together in
this business is the love of the night sky and the wish to understand some of the most dynamic phenomena in the universe
so the very core of our work and our program our variable stars starts with brightness whose brightness
is changing with time within timeless timeline lines and time scales that we can't observe
in other words this the stars we're interested in change with time on time scales of hours
days months something we can actually observe and this is one of my favorite ways to
demonstrate what variable stars look like this is a a little movie it's actually
composed of three different images that we're taking with digital means so there was a person who actually pointed
the camera at the part of the night sky this is what we call a globular star cluster stars that were born all
together and took three pictures back to back and actually stuck them together and created
the movie and if you pay close attention to this movie there's not much going on
i mean stars are just lingering there they're hanging out with all of us but if you actually pay a really close
attention really really really close attention can i say it again
you will see that there's some stars whose brightness is changing from frame
to frame they're blinking right here's one and here's another one
oh where are they here and here's the third one and actually i could make competition as in how many variables
stars stars whose brightness is changing you can detect within like a minute
there are lots of them in there these are the variable stars we're studying this is what we mean by variable stars
and you know the reason why those stars are changing brightness is is is very diverse
there's a great a variety of reasons and all those changes reveal something
about the nature and how the stars work so for example eclipsing binaries like
this here are two stars together moving around the common center of mass and as one is passing in front of the
other the collective light is dropping in a very characteristic manner that we're actually generating as a
graph of tracking brightness variations with time um spotted variables like our sun are
those that have big star spots on the surface which change which result we change the brightness of
the system as the star rotates and the spot comes in and out overland side pulsating
stars stars whose size is changing with time how awesome is that so you have a big star
that is increasing and decreasing in size and that is actually depicted in the
likelihood of the stars and the brightness changes with time supernovae dramatic
explosion of the universe and these are just some of the examples of what the abs
observers are observing collecting data in time [Music] all this data is coming in the database
and actually it bec through that database they become available to researchers all over the world
so you know it's not really difficult to take data on this kind of stars
it's not really difficult to observe the brightness variations and the abso is actually here
to help you do this kind of business so the bottom line i guess is that if you are interested you have time and
energy to participate if you have a camera a telescope if you
can take pretty pictures enjoy exploring the night sky you can certainly
do something like that take date on those uh the stars and the absolutes here to
provide you with the tools you need to participate um just give me five more minutes i
would like to actually dedicate the rest of my presentation to tell you how we can help you not only learn more
about variable styles but also start your own observing program and join the conversation we're here for you
most of our resources are open source they're free they're on our web pages so we're very welcome to use them explore them
and actually be part of this our own star party right so let's start from our observing
sections which are ways for you to learn more about all types of variable stars so the
avs was observing uh there's information about all types of objects
including exoplanets did you know that with a small eight inch size telescope you can actually
take data on x-planes we can teach you that we can talk about high-energy targets we
can talk about the sun the sun is a variable star and also we are discussing information and
instrumentation and equipment which is of interest of some of our observers there are people who really
love building their own observatories and this is something that we are discussing through our observing sections
also we are running webbing a webinar series around our observing sections around all
kinds of subject matters that are of interest to the abs or community such as key results
of research that's coming out of our database they're free please just sign up and
enjoy learning about variable stars and how the avso data is
being used by the international community and not only that we have what we call
how to hours these are um a little bit different in the sense that we are
teaching techniques of observing through those how to hours for example this last saturday we were teaching how to
acquire spectroscopy data on a budget how cool is that you don't really have
to have a 30 000 dollar observatory you know to take
spectrostars you can just do it with your dobsonian and with just a small grating in front
of it so everything is recordings on our youtube channel we also have training materials such as
manuals for observations uh choice online courses an active peer mentoring program
that would help and that helps enhance our services uh observers technical skills and
provide advice from experts so please join again the conversation you would like to start
learning different observing techniques we also bring targets of
interest in front of you there are billions of stars in the night sky billions
how do you know what to observe it's tricky isn't it well uh we have a very active alert
system these are targets that are of immediate need of observing these targets come from the professional
astronomical community and their requests for data and we also
help our observers to build their own observing filter throughout our target tool and through
that you can get target information observing cadence when targets uh was observed last notes on those
targets when you should acquire data etc etc
we have also tools practical tools that facilitate observations so for example
finding charts and appropriate comparison stars for star fields based on your equipment that would help
you actually plan your observations uh online tools for data uploads so you
took your data then what just upload them on the avso database tools to visualize your data these are
light curve generator which plots your data alongside data of other observers
and actually you can zoom in and out and actually check who else is observing that particular start the same time that you
have observed it and all kinds of things and of course we have our super catalog the variable star index
that includes the known information of more than two million variable objects right now so if you
discover a new variable star you can list it here and get credit for your discovery you should get credit for
your discovery because it's a result of really hard work um
you know something i can talk for hours but at this point i just gave you a snapshot of what we
do and what we offer to you we live in a golden era of variable star astronomy
there are multitude of space and earth-based missions that aim at exploring the night sky
and they will produce a plethora of interesting stars to study and exoplanets to explore
and they're not enough professional telescopes to acquire the necessary follow-up data and actu that that would
actually help us solve those mysteries it's like you know you are you're opening a book and you're reading an
absolutely fascinating story and then you're turning a page and that page is blank
how horrible is that so you parts of our community are
called to write the rest of the story based on your data based on your observations based on your collective intellects the
adso is actually an essential collaborator for researchers worldwide if not anything else we need more
observers to acquire and help analyze astronomical data we strongly believe that a diverse and
inclusive scientific citizen science workforce an international citizen science workforce draws from the
widest range of backgrounds perspective and experiences and maximizes the creativity in science
for the benefit of all so if you want more informational word on our work and what we're offering
here's our webpage abso.org if you have any questions you want to come contact us
here's an email address please please please do become a member we are supported by membership
so everything we're offering is for free to the whole community and with that i would like to thank you
for your attention includes you clear skies and i spoke too fast for me and that's the end of my presentation
that's that thank you so much home run that was just wonderful to take
a subject like astrophysics and make it as fun as you do i think the first time that i
encountered you was you had just become director and had written to you and you had wrote back to me and suggested that i write
something about my own favorite variable star and then one thing i learned years ago from
janet is that if the director of aavso asks you to do something the best thing
to do is to drop whatever you're doing and do it if you're driving your car
just pull over and do it whatever you're doing and all kinds of things just do it oh now you're putting everybody in
trouble you know that right because i'm going to start using the power
yes you have the power now i'm certainly not going to do a poem before every speaker but i am going to do one
before david right now i'm going to do a little bit of a quote that i've done before here
this is from leonard cohen and it's a slight rewriting of one of
his songs it's time to go outdoors tonight the sky is dark
some stars are bright the milky way shines overhead now see uh a comet rises
in the east with end to strife it brings us peace and calls us to a cosmic hallelujah
hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah
i don't think you want me to sing any more of that but anyway i've known dave viker for a very long
time since he was a teenager editing his little magazine deep sky monthly
and uh he has been now editor-in-chief of the world's biggest astronomy
magazine named astronomy uh headed out of wisconsin
and has been extraordinarily successful over the years david over to you thank you david very
much and boy how do i follow that and how do i follow stella that those were fanta wow
what moments we've had on this star party already thank you both of you for that stella
mentioned it um in her talk we're in a golden age of astronomy here in many
ways and i wanted to uh come back to talk about a little bit of astrophysics for a few more weeks
now before going on to some other things and tonight i thought i'd talk about dark matter so i'm going to talk about
the mystery of dark matter despite the astonishing progress we're making in many many areas at the most
rapid rate uh ever in lots of areas of the subject we love
um there are quite a few areas that remain a work in progress shall we say one of them is dark matter
we know in recent years the most recent cosmological results from the planck satellite
uh the composition of the universe as well as its age pretty well it's about 69 percent
dark energy 26 dark matter and five percent baryonic or ordinary
matter that is matter made of atoms and quarks um and remember that total 100 percent
is mass and energy in the universe you know the as einstein and others taught us that
those are in interconvertible forms of the same thing
so we know that about a quarter of the universe exists in the form of dark matter but we really don't know what it
is well the story of dark matter is very interesting uh historically about a decade after
hubble's discovery of the nature of galaxies two astronomers began
to find a lot of trouble in the behavior of galaxies with their observations
still kind of called neb spiral nebulae or nebulae but they were known to be galaxies
system large systems of stars the first was the dutch astronomer jan ort who became very well known of course for
the shell of a couple trillion cometary nuclei david has added our knowledge on a few
of those by discovering them in the outer solar system but jan ort
back in the day he studied the motions of stars around the sun's neighborhood
and he found that really the mass of the milky way had to be much much larger than could be accounted for
by the visible matter in our galaxy because of the motions of stars
that is just well soon thereafter one of the most
interesting characters of the 20th century in astronomy came along the swiss astronomer fritz
zwicky and he took up the issue with a passion and in a famous paper it was published
in 1937 he hypothesized dark matter really in in
a formal way for the first time calling it uh duncal matari um
sharing observations of galaxy clusters that he had made over a period of several years
zwiki calculated that unseen matter must exist in very large quantities
or the galaxies in galaxy clusters this is would fly apart into intergalactic space
and could not be held together his paper was called on the masses of
nebulae in clusters of nebulae it would be largely overlooked for many years although he was on the
right track and of course part of the problem was that fritz wiki was a somewhat abrasive
controversial guy and then after a gulf of time uh
came another influential paper that sort of kick-started the whole thinking in a serious way about dark matter that was in 1974 when
the astronomers jeremiah ostriker amos yahil and jim peebles published a study that
assembled is really about dark matter into a coherent proposal for the first time
they calculated that galaxies must have masses of about 10 times the amount of the visible
material in them and that the dark matter must exist in large halos
that are observable because of the rotation curves of galaxies outer parts of galaxies were rotating
much faster than could be explained if the visible matter was all
that there was then in the later 1970s and 1980s vera rubin the superstar of
dark matter came along and she got her working group at carnegie the carnegie institution
working on it along with kent ford and others and really made numerous observations uh
showing in an ironclad way that dark matter halos exist the proof
was in the pudding and vera rubin uh basically wrote the book on the observations of dark matter
still what was dark matter no one knew we still don't know
the leading theoretical idea can be called the cold dark matter dark matter model of cosmology
cold dark matter refers to dark matter particles that are traveling slower than
relativistic speeds when they decouple from photons
the leading culprits for dark matter for about the last 50 years have been many
cosmologists propose among other things fairly massive things called machos
massive astrophysical compact halo objects but none is known to exist other ideas
like free-floating you know planet myriad planets and black holes and things like that um are
not terribly tenable in the ideas of most theoreticians
most of the ideas that that have a lot of credibility and this is especially the case in the last couple of decades
here come in the form of subatomic particles for a long time wimps you may have heard
of weakly interacting massive particles were a leading idea
but the strongest possibility and the one that would explain the most of what we can observe uh in
galaxies and elsewhere in the universe comes from a hypothetical particle called the axion that was proposed in
1974 the problem is that no collider or research group has found
an axion as yet so we know that dark matter exists
remember you have to believe in the scientific method all the time not when you feel like it
so we know we feel that we know that dark matter exists we don't know exactly what it is
but we know that 26 of the mass energy in the universe
exists in the form of dark matter and if we're just if we take dark energy out of it which we'll talk about next week
um if we're just talking about matter then about 80 of the matter in the cosmos exists in
the form of dark matter and if you can figure out what it is we can get you a nobel prize
next week great so let me leave it at that and uh thank you
very much thank you david that was really exciting it was so interesting to notice
having spent an entire lifetime observing comets and variable stars
to be told that 90 95 of it i don't even see anyway david you still
have things to discover yeah uh there'll have to be someone in another generation i think
i'm still out there searching but i'm enjoying the search more than anything else david thank you so much thank you debbie
and now we go to our speaking of our next generation this is a good time to go for it
libby are you about ready libby we need for you to uh unmute
yourself because you are about to be on
i don't uh of course the curse this happened and libby has frozen my wife has been
pretty bad so yeah no okay well we're gonna have to put
libby on a little bit later i guess i guess unless we can get her back within the next few seconds
uh and john briggs is not here yet either i see
and uh so i think we're going to jump ahead a little bit and re-revise the schedule a bit
scotty didn't tell me we were gonna have to do that [Music]
okay what we're going to do now is we're going to skip ahead to another very dear friend of mine from
boulder colorado now clark are you are you ready to unmute yourself and become
yes i met clark i met clark in 19 about 1982 i was
i was just come back from a visit to montreal back to arizona
and the phone rang from planetary science institute and it was clark chapman and he said
that uh we're doing this program of observing asteroids and we're looking
for someone who would like to observe with us each month at kitt peak
uh on the 36-inch number two 36-inch telescope up there
and i'm sitting there breathless and then he said i'm wondering if you could recommend somebody to do that
and my heart just sank and uh you know i thought what do you do when
that happens well i'm thinking do i know anybody you know yeah i knew a couple of people
and i said i do know a couple of people but then i took a deep david breath and i said i really
wouldn't mind doing that myself and i waited for the ex to fall and then
when it fell clark said i was so much hoping you'd say that and that began a number of years of
wonderful collaboration with all of the people at the planetary science institute
clark has written some wonderful books but still one of my favorites is his classic book the inner planets
and uh of course he's going to talk tonight about one of i think his favorite of the inner
planets which is not the one that we live on but one that we could be living on someday
the planet mercury and clark over to you enjoy
well let's see what i can do here
um i am talking i i was told that the theme tonight was night and mercury is maybe
not the best example but uh we're going from the
darkness of zero knowledge almost to uh what we uh will be learning
even more so in the future so let's begin
mercury is a really an extreme planet it's the smallest planet
it's the closest planet to the sun it's kind of like a baked alaska because it's very hot uh during the
daytime and the days are very long on mercury and it's very cold at night
and night is a very long time on mercury as well mercury is made of the densest materials
of any planet um it's uh mostly uh an iron core
uh it's silicate mantle and crust are really very thin compared to the size of its core and
we'll get to this a little later mercury has the longest comet like tail that's ever been seen
now when was mercury discovered uh mercury's bright enough and particularly back in prehistory when there were no
skyscrapers and no street lights and you could see uh
down to the horizon no doubt mercury was seen at that time it was recognized as a planet that is a
moving star millennia ago several millennia ago
mercury of course is seen during dawn or twilight only because it's close to the sun
it is said that copernicus never saw it i think that's apocryphal but it's
widely quoted to see mercury you really need a clear horizon
in theory you can see mercury at night it gets far farther away from the sun
than the sun can get below the horizon uh down bastar end of astronomical
twilight but practically speaking you see mercury and dawn and twilight or even
with telescopes during the day time
uh you can see the night side of mercury as it transits the sun of course
the the the dark part of uh of mercury that's facing you is the
night side at that time the first transit of mercury
across the sun was apparently observed in 1631.
more or less since that time until the middle of the last century it was thought that mercury kept its
sunward face to the sun at all time uh just like the moon keeps one face to
the earth and since mercury goes around the sun every 88 days it thought it was thought that its
rotational spin was uh 88 days and maps were made
during the late 1800s and the early 1900s based on that understanding that it was
rotating every 88 days the the map that you see in the lower
right corner is one made i think around 1930
by antoniotti um and uh well it's not really
a good map it turns out because in 1965
the arecibo radar echoes off of mercury disproved that it had an 88-day period
it was closer to 60 days according to the radar data and
picture of arecibo is down there in the lower left as you all probably know a few months ago arecibo collapsed
and is gone forever but it sure was a great astronomical instrument for
uh for a number of decades and one of its early discoveries was that mercury
rotates in about 59 days um
this uh why it does that was explained a few years later by giuseppe columbo an
italian physicist who uh who pointed out that
as a result of its uh eccentric orbit and the great tides from the sun
uh it's caught on a resonance lock and and spins uh in two-thirds of its uh of its year
59 days is exactly two-thirds of 88 days
now there's a wagon wheel effect um which gives earth-based observers the
illusion of an 88-day period which is why antoniotti was able to make uh a map
the wagon wheel effect actually for the the few of you who are who can see david levy's ceiling fan
to me it's sort of jerking around and not really rotating and it's uh apparently because of the of the uh
um timing of the video in relation to the the spin of the ceiling fan anyway as a
result of that um there's an understanding about why many observers
felt they could make a map of mercury despite the wrong rotation period
i did a map of mercury a couple of years after the new rotation period was
discovered i went to the archives in the harvard college observatory library
and found drawings of mercury that people had made during past decades and centuries
and put them all together assuming the 59-day rotation period and this is a map
of the albedo spots on mercury this has nothing to do with with with the geology of mercury but
it was an attempt to see what mercury looked like now that we knew what its rotation
period was in the 1970s mariner 10 a nasa
spacecraft flew past mercury three times now it was originally planned to just make one
flyby of mercury but the same beppy columbo the
italian physicist who explained the rotation of mercury
was able to calculate that mariner 10 would fly by mercury two more times so it actually flew by
mercury three times now mercury looks superficially
uh like the moon to mariner 10's cameras but it was covered with these scarfs
that that are shown to the left of the text there uh very long
cliff faces and actually the whole globe is looks like it's kind of shrunk and
that's probably what happened is that the interior cooled and the crust
shrank a bit uh causing these uh giant faulting scarps that are very
unlike the moon and uh pretty unique to mercury uh mariner 10 also discovered that
mercury has a earth-like magnetic field although it's it's very weak
it still stands off uh magnetosphere and and uh it's important despite being
only i think like one percent the strength of the earth's magnetic field also mariner 10 discovered aspects of a
very thin atmosphere that mercury has now um aftermarket is a long time before
another spacecraft mission to mercury but earth-based astronomers um
still were making discoveries in the left-hand side you can see a radar image of the north pole of
mercury again by arecibo radar in puerto rico
the late uh late arecibo observatory
and it discovered that mercury despite being so close to the sun has ice in its polar craters both the
north and south pole craters have ice in them and that was really quite a
surprise also mercury is a comet david you should take particular note about that
it's not your ordinary comet um there's a black
bar there and the picture to the to the right which is hiding the glare from the planet mercury
itself but uh sodium uh gets into the atmosphere of mercury and then
streams away thanks to the the solar wind and so on and it's a
mercury's a giant comet did you know that david
probably no no no i did not but this does give me an opportunity to show everybody my ceiling fan
right okay uh here are two books about mercury
i mean there's many other books but these are sort of um professional books about what we learned
about mercury from chiefly from mariner 10 in the book on the left which you'll
see is co-authored by myself and and faith vilas and harlow shapley's
daughter mildred matthews who edited many of the university of arizona space science
series books that was published in 1988 on the right-hand side is a book um
that just just was published a few years ago based on the results of messenger which i'll be
getting to in a moment here messenger was an orbiter around mercury
and this book published by cambridge university press uh summarizes all that we've learned
from that so here's the messenger mission um
it's uh it was i can't even see all my slide here
um ooh um but it was it was launched many years
ago and did a bunch of earth and venus and mercury flybys to get its
orbit down to uh uh or its trajectory down to where it could go into orbit around
mercury and it orbited mercury for several years until eventually it after an extended mission beyond the
original plans it it actually eventually crashed into mercury but it learned a whole lot um
studying the chemistry the geology the magnetic field the core of the planet the polar ices
its thin atmosphere and and so on and let me just show a few of the
things that we learned about mercury from messenger um on the on the
on the right um well here let me let me start with the left hand portion here the three pictures in the
left-hand dominant portion of the slide are all of the same
region on on mercury the very same one and in the upper left is a
image of this region from mariner 10 and below that is a
u.s geological survey sketch map of what
they think is was seen in that picture well messenger took the picture just to the right of
those and as you see over the decades the
cameras have improved a whole lot so so messenger has good images of a large
fraction of mercury's surface now mercury tends to have many more
secondary craters on it than the moon and and other planets do secondaries are
when a a crater is formed it shoots out debris in all directions and the debris
falls back and makes uh craters the debris each chunk of debris can make a crater
uh what you see on the on the right hand side are two examples of
uh rays from a a crater and a close-up showing the uh crater
chains uh of a bunch of secondary craters from two
primary craters that are not visible in this picture
mercury also has some large basins like the uh big basins on the moon like
uh mari orientale or mari crisium um these two uh basins are
a couple hundred kilometers wide and they have very few craters superimposed on them which means they're
really quite youthful they were formed on mercury only i don't know one or two billion years
ago instead of way back four billion years ago like basins on them on the moon
um some other things mercury has uh volcanoes on it uh some recently active
conceivably uh they could still be active in the upper right is uh is a volcano
um one an oblique view the other a colorized uh view from overhead uh
uh near the the base in rachmaninoff a very large bunch of
debris shot out of the volcano and producing that light area around around the volcano in the lower left
you see uh the caloris basin one of the largest probably the largest basin on mercury
and it's got uh some volcanoes that in the this uh false color picture are reddish in
in color around the edges of colorado's basin and uh and a blow up of one of them is uh is
also shown there mercury uh has other interesting
features that don't look very much like the moon perhaps most amazing new features
are the so-called hollows you see some examples to the left these kinds of uh of features
are are obviously not impact craters they're they're depressions but they appear to be due to the
devolatilization of material on mercury mercury's very hot it also has very surprisingly a large
fraction of volatiles in particular sulfur and uh it's probably that the heat just
has gotten so hot that the rocks get eaten away
and dissolve and leave these depressions called hollows that are seen only on
mercury mercury has a magnesium rich area
shown in the left gamma ray spectrometer
shows that that reddish area is very rich in magnesium compared to the rest
of the planet on the right you see the outlines of the
northern hemisphere northern polar smooth plains these are volcanic planes
that happen fairly recently in mercury's history because they're not very heavily
cratered now messenger uh mission ended in 2015.
uh there was a time quite a few years earlier when it was hoped that the european beppy colombo mission named
after that italian physicist i've mentioned a couple of times would be uh arriving at mercury while
messenger was still there but uh it's a very complicated spacecraft and
its development was delayed but it finally was launched uh in i think october of 2018
um and it's been on its way to mercury uh although
mercury isn't very far away just like uh messenger and mariner 10 takes a while
to kind of slow down and and get into orbit around mercury and it and
beppy columbo which is a partial partially european mission and partially a japanese mission
uh will arrive in 2025 and put two spacecraft into orbit
one is aimed at studying the planet itself and another in a very much more
elongated more distant orbit will explore the magnetosphere of of mercury
so that's the future now i just wanted to point out that you know since the days i was an amateur
astronomer and making drawings of mercury that partly went into my map i made back in the 60s
um the capabilities of amateur astronomers have improved a whole lot and here's a
here's a picture a photograph uh taken of mercury uh a few years ago
um that's just com to me completely amazing but a well-equipped amateur astronomer can
do their own studies of mercury until beppy colombo gets there in 2025.
wow so that's it wow well thank you so much clark that was so
inspiring and very interesting to listen to one of the things that
really got to me on a very personal note was the crater rachmaninov and
it kind of reminded me my little david brain was moving around from subject to
subject and i was thinking about an episode of mash which i think had probably the best
writing of any television series ever anyway there's a scene in in the
bar where uh winchester is there and he's telling his servant very rudely
to get him the rachmaninoff and he says it's very easy to find
you just find the album with the letter r the big letter r and then all the other little letters
after it and i just couldn't get that out of my mind as i'm thinking of the crater
on mercury right now i think if match were done now and if the characters were living now
they'd probably have a lot more to say and i believe do we have we have libya
in the stars now then you have john briggs has just arrived and uh we're going to
be putting him on later a few adjustments here but uh i'd like to give libby a chance because
as both clark and earlier stella had told us that really
what we're going to be worried about and concerned about and excited about is getting our next
generation our next generation into astronomy and
to appreciate the night sky and i cannot think of a better example of that
than libby libby are you still here no i guess libby has fallen off almost
trying to return there she is right there trying to return
libby are you there we're going to give you a couple of minutes here to
i'm certainly not going to sing another song song after the reaction i got from the last one
people throwing things at me so i will not sing hello darkness my old friend i've come to talk with you
again anyway um we finally have like well it brought libby it brought libby
alive when you started digging her screen unfroze
and introduce us to the next generation and what's concerning them and what's
exciting them about the night sky and the theme tonight of night presenting it to you libby
okay so um i'm gonna try and do this really quick because i am having very
bad internet issues and have been randomly kicked off so
[Music] i think that we have
yeah yeah your internet issues are starting to affect me again
temperature and how that helps with um [Music] knowing how old a star is
and um i got into this so and
no we lost her okay looks like we've lost libby for now we'll try her again
if we can get her back but i think now i definitely want to hear that
yeah it sounds like a very interesting uh olivia try it again back to you start
try again no i don't think i'm no she's frozen
again if we get her later
dave maybe if you sing again you'll unfreeze her again i'll show you this really quickly
so um our sun is the color that's like a darkish orangish color
and um let's take another star that might be a blue blue star now that start would be harder
than our sun because if you look on the graph
oh we're just having i don't think this is little we'll try to get her on a little later
if possible yeah so we're going to go we're going to proceed now
to our next guest who is someone that i know very well
and this is this is wendy my wife who is here this this evening to
uh to talk with us about her activities in astronomy over the years
and more particularly how she manages to be married to as difficult a person
as me and how she handles it not all of this is going to be
positive about me i hope and i'm really looking forward to it and
wendy it is all yours
hmm i think she's coming to join you dave
um i'm if you've noticed my picture is now lost and um that's because the way
david and i have our little office set up we cannot have my little machine on and david's on at
the same time excuse me david you need this and so i'm coming over to his desk which is far too
big for me but at least maybe you can hear me as i knock everything over um
david asked me to speak on life what it's like living with david
levy and i was thinking about how to proceed and then i remembered
way back when in night in 2017 i had written an article for skies up those of
you still familiar with it oh there i am called
um life with david levy and it was it was very interesting for me to
write because i figured really before you can figure out how i am dealing with
my life and taking care of david you need to know a little bit about my life and david and i had
totally different trajectories we are not the people that as we were growing up
anybody would have ever thought would would be together um so and let me just go a little bit
into my life and then you'll see how it blended with david's and why we do work so well together i had a very
fortunate growing up my life was super well ordered
my family was always together we were very close my parents are always family first we did
things together so i knew what it was like and thought every family in the world was like our loving family
and as i learned later on that was not not so which made me very thankful for
the family i grew up with my life itself sounds very boring because it was all in little boxes like most of
us you went to elementary school you went to junior high school high school then you or middle school
high school and then you realized what you were going to do and then you go off to college to find your career
and see if it is the one you love and my career was
nowhere near astronomy i knew very very very little about the stars and
my parents were both physical education majors that's why they played with
family so much and i followed in their footsteps i also was a physical education major and what i'm
going to do now because i'm a little bit nervous is read you bits and pieces from the article that i wrote
for skies up which is a very short article but it'll give you the feeling of who i am and how david
and i worked and the first part of this that i labeled was no matter what i choose to do in life it
was obvious i would always be a teacher and i would always be an organizer of things
as a physical education teacher and coach i organized every class tournament
every intramural activity in my schools as well as after school extramural activities
my days were long my weekends non-existent as they were filled with school sporting events
on occasional weekends where no school events were planned i did volunteer work for a local
american red cross chapter i organized the annual learnto annual learn to swim programs
i taught first aid cpr i trained instructors in those fields and by the time i wound up leaving las
cruces where i was teaching i was head of the safety services committee in dona ana county so i was
doing a lot and people just kept bumping me up the ladder and if that wasn't enough
in my career and this is all before i met david when i wasn't teaching for the red cross
and i wasn't doing the sporting events i moonlighted up at new mexico state university
teaching a one-hour class on sunday afternoons at their weekend college i was a very busy girl but it was boring
in the extent that it was always the same i knew my school year would go from
we would start with girls softball and then we would go to girls volleyball while the boys were doing wrestling and
then we would go into girls basketball and then we do boys basketball meanwhile i'm organizing all this plus the
cheerleaders so it was the same every year just never stopped
and at one point i was talking with the one of the main organizers in our school
system she was one of the assistant principals and we pondered together what it would be
like after everything we do to take care of one famous person as
opposed to every student in the school and so after 26 years of teaching
and i was figuring it would be easy because by then i knew david and he was
the primary reason i retired from teaching and i knew i was going to be the one organizing
that one famous person that was not nearly as easy as i thought it was going
to be because it was totally different i was ready but i wasn't prepared
when it became obvious that wait what was i going to read in my article here anyway what would end up happening as we
were together i looked at what his strengths were
what my strengths were and then i figured okay i think the way this would
work best i looked at david and most of you know david i'm going to describe this before i go
on into two personalities i learned this added in service day and they gave a number of different
personality types but these were typical personalities the first is the one we would call a
concrete sequential the concrete sequential is the person you know that will come to a meeting
be there 20 minutes early have everything laid out on the table ready to take notes sitting up in the chair
and just in case there's some free time they've brought something to do so they wouldn't be bored the second
personality is your restless romantic could never know they can't find anything they're running around trying to get everything done
they run into the meeting just as that's it's about to start plop down on the chair and go
made it now i think you know by now i am the concrete sequential and david is the restless romantic
um when so when we started to figure out how we were going to have life together
i said to him david you are a wonderful astronomer you write well you hold the audience in the
palm of your hands when you lecture i'll take care of everything else and
that was the mistake because he didn't want me to he said no no no you worked so hard i'll
take care of you and i thought all right this will be easy this will be interesting and after one week
i started little by little i took over the bills i took over the shopping
now it's back to where i originally said i take care of everything um
and part part of this turns out to be that when people look and they say how you
know because we still are so opposite i looked at david and i made him watch a movie i know he had
probably never seen and that was rocking the first rocky movie because of the one line in rocky
where it said we fill gaps and i said dave we and that's what david and i do for each
other we fill gaps i um we have no competition between
us so it's very easy for me to sit back and listen to him speak and he never has pushed me to become
an astronomer so when people today say you're an astronomer i go well by david's definition i'm an
astronomer i can look up i know a few constellations i know some stars but i cannot take what i know and what i
put together and of course my mentor is david levy so i will never feel like an astronomer it's just it's
just the way it is um but one of the things he has done
because one question i asked him early on in our dating we were driving back from our
first date and it was getting a little bit you know dusky out and he pointed out
vega and i you know we saw this a star and i said what star is that he said that's vega and i said david if
i asked you the name of that star every night what would you do he said
i would tell you the name of that star every night and it was like oh be still my heart because in my
practice marriage there was people only told me things once it's all i'm going to tell you and i thought
he has patience this is great and and it and it's worked it never made me feel like i had a push
to learn to be as good as everybody else but one thing david did do is he had whenever he would
write a book and i was you know i was not an english major but i had
okay grammar and he would have me be his first line of copy editing in books which was an interesting trick
and all his book publishers should be saying thank you to me because i would go through his script
and david was a hunt and peck typist which meant multiple typos so i could correct those
pretty easily i knew the stories he was writing about because he would always recap them to me
so when i would get to a sentence that looked pretty illegible what i wound up doing was just thinking okay this is
what he wants to say and then i would rewrite it and hopefully it was right and
if he left things out that i said thought were critical i'd put where is such and such story and and
sometimes i would not know anything is writing about and i'd go huh so this was the kind of copy editor
i was but by the time it got to the publisher they at least could make sense of it and then we'd get it back in the galleys and
i got to read the book again because i went through mistakes we may all have missed
and then i did his index which made me really look at the book and so consequently
my little mantra is i think i'm learning more than i think i'm learning um i just
feel like i am the backup for david because that's one of my strengths in organizing i can
look at a problem and i can see what needs to be done and i can always figure out
how to get it done and um so for those of you who think i like my mother does that i just sit back
and let david do all the work and just take in money which i don't um i do work right alongside david um
there is one thing i want to read specifically at the very end of my article
it says david and i each have our ways of doing things and they are never alike but in the ways we need to be alike we
are truly in sync with each other our brains seem to work at the same speeds we have the same beliefs and
ideals and we each have enormous respect for the jobs we both do to make our lives work so well together
thank you thanks for sweetheart that was great
um let me try to get the chair back here before the rest of the house comes
crashing down and it's it's very exciting and i'm glad that you didn't tell everybody that your
nickname for me sometimes is wrong i didn't want to go down
i didn't want to go into every little nuance i'll have to get to know us better for that well that'll be the next
talk as i was listening to wendy's talk i was finding this letter up here that i'd
like to quote from a little bit written to another dr levy and it says a
life is measured not only by how long it has lived but also by how well it has lived as you celebrate your 100th birthday may
you take this opportunity to look back on the many lives you have touched family and friends and people throughout
your community without you and your lifelong contributions canada would not be as diverse as rich
or as interesting it is my hope that you will share your life's achievements with others
and inspire them to dream bigger aim higher and reach for the stars because that is what you have done and
that is what you will continue to do that letter was written to my mother
edith levy she never got to see it because mom passed away a couple of about six weeks before her
100th birthday and the letter is signed by julie payette governor general of canada
and i just thought i would share that with you and wendy thank you so much for sharing
your part of our lives in the stars and uh
and that's great and now we have john briggs here are you he's waving and if you want to
unmute yourself um i met a new writer
over at sky and telescope a number of years ago and immediately took a liking to him because of his passion for telescopes
he is a very active member of the antique telescope society and as such i complain that he knows
everything there is to know about telescopes he also knows everything there is to know
about the aavso in fact stella and john and i had this big go-around
about who was going to say what and uh i'm so glad that uh stella did
what she did this evening but now it is my great privilege to present the microphone
to john w briggs all yours john david david thank you so much thank you
everyone and i apologize my schedule was has been convoluted tonight because
in in this zoom era uh for the first time i actually had i was obliged to make two presentations
tonight and the earlier one was to the um uh royal astronomical society of canada
uh the historical uh section and so it was a great privilege
and it went a little bit longer than i expected and maybe i goofed something up with the
time zone but anyway here i am and i trust you could hear me and i am going to attempt to share
screen and uh let's see select a window i've not that experience oh this looks
like it let's see if this works and good um from beginning
it's working wonderful wonderful thank you folks and for your patience uh so i want to share
with you a few slides quickly about the one of the one of the great um
events in amateur astronomy in in at least in in eastern united states and it is in
fact where for example david lee david levy and i first met and also david and david
eicher and i first met we met through the community at the so-called cellophane convention
in springfield vermont that runs every summer it's been running since 1926 so
people hear about this event cellophane and it actually is the
name of an observatory and a clubhouse and it's oh it's almost mystical it's it's
uh it's it uh so here's a drawing of it uh uh the of of the so people haven't
been there might have some kind of uh vague conception of what it might be like the strong what's reality this is what it's like in
reality when the annual convention rolls around and what was so lucky for me
in my life was that as a young teenager i got dragged along to attend
the long weekend cellophane convention camp out in 1971 and i have to do the
arithmetic was i like 12 or 13 or something like that and um and i you
know i was just another kid interested in science and nature in general but you know when you're a kid in school
you don't necessarily um understand much about the the community of people who might be
out there who share these kinds of interests with you as a youngster that such a
community exists to discover that early on that's uh a
really an eye-opening thing so for me to go up there to this site to discover the little pink clubhouse
of telescope makers that was built back in the 1920s to discover the white observatory there
the so-called porter turret telescope a very very unusual telescope
built a dedicated 1930 and to see like on the order of 1 000
people show up to go camping and i always love to go camping uh it's
a great event and look at the youngsters in there look at the diversity of the telescopes
almost all of which are homemade because this event really is is traditionally since it
started in 1926 it's a convention of amateur telescope makers even more
than it is like a camp out star party although there's certainly plenty of that too
but anyway let's just go through some of the slides and here's a shot from the second floor of the clubhouse
looking down on the traditional uh a convention site because you see
originally the site was only a couple of acres and uh but now the organization that
runs this uh springfield telescope makers they own all together
about 80 acres so the campground has expanded there are additional observatories
there's a great big building that can seat actually about 1 000 people it's a great big pole barn
so that if it happens to be a rainy weekend in new england and very often they are um you still
have a lot of fun they have fabulous speakers and guests who became
one of the most regular one of the most articulate um and popular speakers at stallophane
as we all grew up and got older of course it was david levy uh so but when i first saw him in action
uh when we were quite young it was as young men running around stalling well let me keep going showing some slides
because they don't want to go too long um but ah there was a founding figure a
visionary making all this happen and i can only allude to him a little bit
his name was russell porter and boy he was an artistic and all-around gifted renaissance man
he'd studied architecture at mit but he had a chance to look through a telescope
when he was a young kid and he he didn't have much money uh he decided he had to have one so he ground and
polished his own and that was he he began talking about it
writing about it it caught the attention of the famous astronomer out in
california george ellery hale and george ellery hale
was creating the palomar 200-inch project in the at the end of hale's life
and oh porter by the way i had been an arctic explorer he was a wonderful
artist and these watercolors of the native people up north that he met and lived with for
a time but it was natural for a corner with his
tallest telescope making skills and everything to be embraced with the design effort
for the tremendous palomar project starting in the 1930s which was building
the largest telescope on earth and this was just a preliminary disadvantaged sketch
in 1936 by russell w porter
i think we might have somebody else with some background noise yes but i i hope i hope you can all
still hear me but anyway we can hear you clear i think you've muted oh good good good um but here let's keep
going these sorts of drawings are what russell porter became particularly famous for at the
end of his life he had built and designed the the the the clubhouse the pink
clubhouse and the observatory back at stalloffing he had founded the
astronomy club that ran the summer meeting that went on for decades and decades still
like i and others here tonight i got to go to when we were younger so inspirational to us but porter made
these design drawings of the 200 inch before it was built
but they were amazing works of art weren't they uh let me just go through a
few they were cutaway drawings that showed the guts
of the telescope this monumental telescope this tall scope where people could
open hatch doors in the mounting mechanism and climb up through it to get to
to to to obscure points of focus and all kinds just an amazing you know
it was one of the greatest scientific efforts of its
era right then starting right before world war ii was delayed by world war ii but um but
then it was dedicated in 1947 unfortunately hale did not
live to see it finished but anyway all these drawings were things that
porter created before the mechanism was built before photographs could be taken of it
just based upon mechanical drawings but you might be able to tell these are really cool um
works mechanical drawing works of art there was a famous artist
of that ear named maxwell parish he was friends with porter he wrote if these drawings had been made
from the telescope and its machinery after it had been erected they would have been of exceptional
excellence giving an uncanny sense of reality with shadows accurately cast and well
like perfect perspective but to think that any artist and had his pictorial imagination in such
working order as to construct these pictures with no other mechanical data than blueprints of plans and elevation
of the various intricate forms is simply beyond belief oh parish went on
praising porter and i was cool as things were but all i'm trying to say tonight is porter was an amazing man and he did
these things but he touched our lives by setting stall fame in motion
and encouraging telescope enthusiasts like this one made by steve dawson of
canada 22 inch back when was it in the late 70s or early 80s it's not a very good picture that i had
but let's look at some of the others some of the telescopes that are displayed are beautiful
antiques by the great makers of yesteryear like this i think it was a five inch refractor
maybe a four um but it was made by alvin clark and sons corporation there's the back of the telescope you
could barely see that it says alvin's clark and sons uh beautiful antique
telescope at least about a hundred years old workmanship exquisite mechanical artistry and these things
you see this stuff when you go to stall fame and get to look through it because all people want to do is share
and let you look at and look look through the telescopes and hang out as late into the night as you can stay
up you meet interesting people like here's dennis to chico a very dedicated famous uh
astronomer and author dennis spent his career at sky and telescope magazine and david talks about i'm supposed to know
uh about telescopes that's chico he's somebody really knows about telescopes but a very good friend
wonderful person you get to get a sense of community by going to events like these um
so and celebrate how much fun it is uh enjoying
this type of equipment so much that you can be inspired to build the stuff yourself now i should
whip right along just showing some of the fairly exotic homemade telescope this is some
kind of newtonian but notice the white hemisphere towards its bottom because
this telescope pivots around the sky by just allowing its sliding motion
on that hemisphere the porter turret telescope there is another weird one and up behind but i won't have time
tonight to describe that though it's very cool but they hear some guy there is that a
telescope what is it he's attracted the attention of the kids it's pray it painted a bright yellow
let's look around a little bit from another angle look at the crowd he's got
gathered you know what he's got in his hand on a stick he has a marshmallow and of course
many of you recognize what that is is a big fresnel lens this guy is
teaching optics you can't help but learn no matter what your age go into something like stall fane this
guy he's cooking uh a marshmallows with solar power man he is roasting those marshmallows
that's where the sun solar focus there of that apparatus is handing them out to the kids and he's wearing a cellophane hat and
it's just another facet of the scene that's going on uh homemade telescopes of all beautiful sorts
um this one's though quite exotic you know these things get big but they're challenging to transport
but this is made with a framework that can be twisted in a certain way this bright engineer
guy he demonstrates how if you twist it just right the telescope collapsed down into
something that's much more transportable i mean how cool is that it's just the sort of thing you see
and some telescopes are designed of metal with traditional equatorial heads
um others have wooden mountings just all kind of things what's emphasized is it shows you
you can think in terms of doing stuff yourself and become hands-on
you can hang out after dark you can look at these things look through these things here's one that uses a green bowling
ball as the pivoting mechanism in the mounting as if that wasn't enough that this year that this was shown for
this type of design here's another one with a bigger bowling ball and it's not green um but an interesting way to facilitate
motion of the telescope around the sky neat things sometimes people paint galaxies on them and a sort of
traditional dubsonian there people have a lot of fun sometimes cellophane is so beautifully clear like
this sometimes it's rainy but we still have fun and that besides all the reflectors
there are traditional homemade refractors kind of along the lines of
this one here the fellow is probably displaying but if you just want to hang out and
enjoy yourself that's my daughter anna sitting there in front of the pink clubhouse i'm so
glad that i've been able to turn my family on to cellophane i live in new mexico now i'm speaking to
you from new mexico but whenever i can i try to get back to new england of course there are many
other astronomy events like this all around the country uh all around the year
i grew up with stauffen i was lucky in new england um and so i miss it and this is just
looking at the panorama from out around the clubhouse a lot of people come from can't come
down from canada to attend stall fame i found that fascinating fascinating when i was a kid
and here's the big crowd and the amphitheater down on the 80 acres for the featured talk david levy has
given these talks alan stern has given the talk twice recently um um sam
hale the grandson of george ellery hale also was the keynote speaker just a few
years back uh but there's the event uh at his traditional location
thank you very much for letting me share my uh enthusiasm for cellophane if you
haven't been there i hope someday you'll have a chance they've got a fabulous website
with tons of information on it and a thank you for your attention again i apologize
i was a little bit out of sync as i so often am on issues of schedule tonight
but that wraps it up for me thank you well thank you so much sean i really enjoyed that it was kind of like going
back into the past during the times that i went to cellophane and enjoyed it so much i'd
kind of like to go back there again some year i hope we'll be able to resume it at some point and we'll all get together
john and stella and scotty and all of you dave clark
terry wendy all of us will be able to go and see each other in person perhaps at
cellophane some future year well actually if cellophane drunk is here i'll be there
yeah i think it's great it's a lot easier for you you're the closest big city to cellophane
yeah you get in the car turn left and you're there okay right and straight and
well sure yeah yeah turn right it depends which way returns what your opinions are you
either turn right or you turn left yeah but i really i really really miss the camaraderie i mean you
walk around the middle of the night with your red flashlight and you're asking people what they're
observing and they're all about showing you through their you know to look through their eyepiece
and sharing their enthusiasm and it's contagious at some point it's becoming a huge star party
um where it doesn't really matter who you are where you come from where your background is all that matters that
you're sharing parts of the night sky and you just get to chat with each other
it's it's kind of uh it's liberating and it's fun there's so many absolutely amazing
people out there and it's it's wonderful to
learn from them because they know about telescopes oh my gosh i've been wandering around cellophane
uh i've been there like three years now in a row i didn't go last year but um i was
wandering around cellophane and just asking people i mean how they made the telescope and let's get
a mini course on telescope making which i absolutely love they didn't know who i was i didn't know who they were
and that's absolutely fantastic i remember one year i was there carolyn hurlis was there
and she grabbed the microphone and announced to everyone that ss cigne was an outburst yeah right there during
the convention anyway john thank you so much for your
wonderful presentation tonight it is now time i don't want to surprise her too much
to introduce terry mann from the astronomical league i believe that terry has some door
prizes to announce and some questions to ask us regarding
future door prizes terry are you ready to take over yes i am okay terry it's all yours
thank you i'll go ahead and share my screen and we're gonna do what we usually do
when we first start off is just warn everybody when you are using optics that if you're going to look at
the sun please make sure that you have the proper filter on that telescope binoculars whatever
you're using and we're going to do we're going to start a new way of doing door prizes
tonight and i will just ask three questions tonight there will be no answers tonight
because i gave all the answers on the previous star party so tonight please send your answers to
secretary astro league dot org and here are the questions what year was
a hubble space telescope launched that's question one
question two what was the date of the last mercury transit
and question three what is the name of the largest crater on the moon
and also we will be back with astronomical league five we'll be here on april 23rd
our keynote speaker that night will be howard eskelsen um he will be speaking i'm not
exactly sure what his title will be but we'll we'll have that out before long so thank you so much and please just
send your answers uh to secretary at astroleague.org and the answers will be next at the next
star party thank you thank you so much terry will the winner
of this league's um quiz please form a line over on the right
thank you okay and now it is a great pleasure to introduce a
close friend of mine joe joseph wright from kansas city kansas city is a holy place it is it is
a place to enjoy
astronomy it is a place to enjoy life it is a place to learn why is kansas city so great for many
reasons like every other city in the world is great but kansas city has one
point up for it and that is that it is the home of the linda hall library which is probably the finest
science library in the world and i notice i have one thumbs up from john about that
i have been there and it is it's like being in heaven it's like being in a
in you know in a church or a temple or a synagogue it is wonderful to be there the wisdom
of the ages all in those books anyway
um one of the other things that kansas city has going for it is joe and rita wright who have been
very enthusiastic astro disseminators over all of their lives they are now
in charge and running the national sharing the sky foundation joe i'm giving it to you now
take it away thank you david and it's a pleasure to be here everybody
just a moment and i will share the screen
and if you've ever used zoom before it likes to hide things
here we go so it as david has said i had the pleasure read i
actually my wife i'm very lucky to have her part of my astronomy interest
and she is with me nearly 99 percent of the time when we do things especially when it
comes to outreach and working at stuart observatory with
don mccarthy and larry lebowski so we get out to see the folks in tucson
nearly every year except for like everybody is saying except for 2020. so
in these uh times that we have been going out there and david has been coming to kansas city
to do research for uh some of his books at linda hall library
uh we had a dinner for him at one of the steak houses and i was the president of the
astronomical society of kansas city then and so um i was invited to be a part of
that my wife and i and that's how we met and ironically um that was about the time that uh
david was having problems with one of the observatories at his house
and so he needed a repair mission and our trip down to tucson for one of the
astronomy events with don and larry we brought the pieces to the tele observatory down there
and did some repairs for it and that's what really uh kicked off our friendship the four of
us back then and we ran out to their house and spent the evening observing because
there was a storm coming in and we wasn't sure if we'd be able to observe while we're up in mount lemmon
but we also encountered something else while we were out there i just have to share this it's not often we have these in a
species of die rattlesnakes in kansas city area in the midwest here scott's got him
down where he's at uh but that was on our on the path between the house and the observatory so
it's just interesting what we got to be introduced our first time so moving
smiling at the camera yeah it was doing more than smiling all right
but um luckily we were able to they had some friends come over i held a
cooler while they put it in it and we transported it over the fence and continued on
and there we are working on the dome as you can see the stops had come off
and i had fashioned some up out of aluminum heavy gauge aluminum and
brought them with me in my carry-on luggage and we installed them on the dome so he
didn't have to run out there or have wendy out there and catch the shutter as it was coming over the top
and then we found out why the the dome wasn't rotating and uh we even got to be on let's talk stars
with them both of us so it was quite an eventful time out there and it really um as many of you said
in the community of astronomy you're able to meet a lot of great people and you build up
friendships and let's face it what better place than under a beautiful sky
to start fostering friendships of any age and so that's what uh i wanted to talk
to everybody about friendships and also sharing the sky with
other people sometime following the schumacher levy 9 event
david and wendy formed sharing this guy national sharon skye foundation
and the mission of this foundation prime primarily and to give you the clip
notes version its mission is to inspire not just uh adults but really
youth to get youth inspired and to get them involved in astronomy and the allied
sciences because if we can get them interested in a young age and they develop a interest in astronomy
physics any science we are doing something that's going to help the future of mankind and this
planet and so david and wendy formed the national sharing of sky foundation that
did just that with members from tucson area like tim hunter
and others out there and around the country down in florida and other parts even
scott's been part of it and it's about outreach and it's a hard
thing to do outreach because it's an intangible thing
you don't know what kind of impact you're having and so during this time david had and wendy he
formed alliances with different organizations the university of arizona
mead and many other entities and explore scientific and so
it is really going forward but you know sometimes
in life people want to slow down when they get to a point and they're looking to pass on the torch
but not put the torch out and keep it burning and so in 2017
2018 i was driving david down to the heart of american star
party and he asked about what i thought if he transferred the
president and leadership of the organization to me
my first thought was i was honored i'll be honest when i started in astronomy at boy scout
camp gaming arrested near osceola missouri where if just like many other areas that you
live in the sky is really polluted but down at the atrial barrel scout reservation the nearest town only has
maybe a thousand people in the sky is marvelous down there
and as a young boy scout 1314 it really started my interest
i never had any idea that when i joined the askc and starting meeting other amateurs and
professionals that i would be meeting the caliber of the people that are here tonight
uh from around the world and it's just been a blessing to rita and i to be able
to take part in meeting these people and in this picture are of course david
and wendy rita in the middle myself and then couple of the other uh people from the kansas city area
charles and carol kennedy that are part of the board of directors of sharing the sky now in
missouri and so we're carrying this torch forward and we are doing events
now that picture let me back up and say this is taken at the adirondack astronomy retreat where david attended
camp as a youth and really
helped him also start his own personal observing projects or
programs and they started having a treat up there and we they invited us and
reid and i drove from kansas city missouri to westport or just north of westport
new york it's not down the street so we really had to want to go
and we went back in 2015 i believe it was and then again we invited uh charles and
carol to go with us in 2017 2018 and so they enjoyed it also
near there and i couldn't leave this out wendy and david near there we drove down
to the museum for star trek where they actually have built the star trek sets by spec
and you know it was great i think they had a pride david and i out of there
and we could have been running around the halls if we had a toy fazer or something like that just having a
blast and sitting in the captain's chair and taking on the kirk position of damned torpedoes full full
warp ahead was a lot of fun so if you get up that away check it out
anyway so we started doing outreach back here in kansas city typical places one of them was the
vidcon public library system invited us out there and so we take my old boy
scout trailer uh it is the astronomy trailer now we have some tubing that we can put the
banner at different heights and we travel around the greater kansas city area doing these outreaches
and if you're rather new to astronomy and you haven't done any outreaches
you don't know what you're missing yes you get off work or it's your saturday you're off or the
evening during the week and they are looking for people to come to a school
when you get there and start interacting with the young people it charges you up i mean you're dead
tired but you get going and you feed off the energy of the little ones here i have some nice
galileo replicas that were presented to me by a member of the askc
many times it's during the day because they're young people they're not going to be out late at night and we set up displays for them where
they can handle meteorites the pst or solar max or some of the others
a c90 or eight inch with a white light filter but when you start seeing young kids
especially the young man on the right it just changes your attitude or
you get invited to a camp with young people with cancer and you know they tell you these kids
will not make 18 and a little girl comes up and hugs you because
you spent the night out there in the middle of the week in june after work and you're showing this young
girl that's eight years old the rings of saturn that she's never seen before
and then later and she hugs you for that and later on you hear her or before that talking to
another girl that there she's on her fourth trial medicine to save her life
it changes you i had to go off in the dark for a moment to compose myself and come back that's
the kind of touch you get from doing these outreach events
many times they want hands-on activities there's lots of them nasa missions have hands on
activities your universities you heard the aaa svo talking about information
it's out there you can do it on a a shoestring budget
we don't ask groups when we go out for these youth groups for donation
if a company asks us to come out and present or do something at their corporation
we will ask would you mind giving a donation to support these types of events that we're doing
we're also looking at doing other places that don't get the attention homes for children with
problems special camps you know kids that have um delinquency problems
you know there are some in some of your could be in your state parks i didn't know one what existed until
i heard a someone lost looking for it that there's a youth home in the state
park just uh across the street from me contact them go to them nursing homes
yes they are not youth but they were at one time and the stories you get from these
people that lived through sputnik the cold war that were um
adults in their 30s or 40s or 20s back then that want to talk about it and share
it's worth having a recorder and getting first-hand uh information like that
we also get to get invited to help at other events i think you know the young man sitting
at the table with the tie on signing a book as david mentioned
the linda hall library the maybe the number one place in the world
for engineering and scientific journals and books
he could tell you about holding galileo's book with notes in the margins
copernicus original notes newtons they have that there they have a
fabulous collection and he was here speaking on his latest novel if you haven't read
it it's it really opened up my eyes and helped me understand some of my life
and he's talking at umkc so outreach national sharing the sky
that's what we do if you want more information you can contact me
david has my information um all of you that are out there uh i'm on the internet national sharing
sky is getting set up we're switching over to uh the internet
we had some issues with that but we're well uh going to be on our way if you have taken
a gone to a event for outreach share it with
other people it's like pulling teeth to get people to volunteer to do this
but once they get out and see the smiles and the questions
it's worth it and talk to anybody that's here on the panel
they will tell you there's nothing better than doing outreach astronomy getting somebody interested when they're young
and keep them interested national sharing of sky is going to be working with girls in the kansas city
area to form a girls astronomy club to get them going
at the borkichevsky observatory on the campus at the university of missouri kansas city
some of them are coming from the girl scouts that will be helping us that have gone to training at goddard uh
have studied under the girls from goddard space flight center that went up there for training so there are ways to do it if you need
more information let me know and david and scott and the rest of us can point
you in the right direction and thank you for inviting me thank you joel that was really interesting
and really for me and wendy it was interesting to get a report on how our foundation is
doing under your leadership and i think it's doing just great well are you late i was gonna say we're
about like everybody else we had to put things on hold but uh we're making plans get
back in there you got to run with the big dogs you got to get off the porch
got to get off the porch and i'm really glad i was really glad to hear your presentation tonight
um and uh while we're talking about that i cannot praise scotty highly
enough for starting these global star parties it was something that earns
merits him the nobel prize without question scotty congratulations uh those of you
who can see a picture of me uh oh you're saying starting now but those of you can see my picture will see my
telescope here this is not a background this is a real telescope that you're able to look at i've had it
since 1967 and now um cesar this is a global star
party and we have cesar blue oh i hope i
pronounced your name right all the way from argentina yes thank you and i'm wondering if you would like to
talk with us for a little bit yeah thank you to you
david it's really a honor for me uh um i i
was really um [Music] happy to to accompany
uh to the group of the bloggers party in 40 editions
and it's a really a hollow for me share with you uh
[Music] so a lot of special nights
with the entire group and uh really i enjoyed uh a lot a lot
uh this 40 nights and this was was for me
um a great a great uh uh
was a a great um opportunity to talk about astronomy and
share with with amazing people
the things that we love about the sky the stars
telescopes optics you know and it's great for me
and uh sure uh actually i am in uh working
in an historic restoration of of all burial solar uh
observatory complex and is really great to work
in in a so important project here in argentina in san miguel that is
a town in the buenos aires uh outside buenos aires city but in the world
province uh at only 30 kilometers from buenos aires city and
well we are working really a lot for for have any time
more more near to start to work
with uh this this telescope the sedustrators the the the white light telescope
the lyop h alpha telescope uh well i i'm working with
this uh this group of bishop little cosmos is the name of the astronomy club uh i have some
some pictures of for to share with you if you like
let me check where i have this
only few pictures about this
in the in the last news is that next friday we are going to to remove um
[Music] we need to move uh the main solar uh those it's not the solution
it's an all-size telescope refractor and um something that they have here is when
we found we opening the first time last one year ago
we do um we opened one of this telescope
making a big effort to move the door of the observatory and a
small observatory and here i talk about i thought about this is the obsidian
filter a very old solar white light filter is is not uh a filter with coating with
layers if not it's it's a rock a volcanic rock uh grinding and polish uh
and have we um we think that maybe have a big knock but
big no but maybe uh naturally
this this um [Music] well i don't remember the name in
english this broken part is maybe appear
like uh something natural from the the first time filter maybe it's not
one piece but work really properly but this is the first time that we
opened the observatory maybe before 30 years and this is the
obsidian obsidian filters i remember the last time i say
onyx because i remember the onyx brock instead of silviana no
obsidian i see obsidian yes he would say obsidian obsidian yes sorry
and i guess huh yeah this is this is the the
the the telescope actually we are working with the telescope uh
only we need to paint and and clean a little more this is the
this is our picture from the first time that we found it and because was it like an open treasure
we don't know we don't knew in this time one year ago what uh
what we was founding in in each dome that we are opening
and this is the the this friday we are start to move in this this is
unfortunately is about vandalizing big uh size telescope 20 uh
8 inches refractor size so it's a great telescope
all of this you can see that here the the back focusing the focusing all in
in bronze was stolen it's incredible and we need to
make the complete focus focusing uh um
for this telescope this friday we are we are going to remove the two
from from the from from the equatorial mode because uh
um the people from the government need to move from this area the dome
and reveal the entire observatory more near to the to
to the cellostato and uh well it's it's something that we
start to make this friday and it's really really a great a great uh first step
[Music] this is the first time that we see we
saw the celostato actually we clean uh people from from the majors
the major from from from this this city of san miguel they send us a lot of people to start to
clean to start to get out the pigeons because it was totally
invited by pigeons um we are starting to to work
in the recovering of the mirror that are okay but we need to clean fortunately in in this case in celeste
mirrors uh they don't use uh aluminium
if not they use chrome and it's very very this is the chrome is maybe not reflective
in the percentage like uh aluminum but it's strong and easy to clean and
we started to clean and we have unfortunately a very
great quality and in a great conditions the reflection of the mirrors
of the celestia the two mirrors [Music] but this is all that i have for today
but really i say i i say again that is a honor to share with
the entire people in the global star parties in this very
special edition thank you so much for joining us tonight i think that was a
lot of fun and very special uh i think we should take a little break at this point because
um we have been going for some time let's break for 10 minutes is that okay
scotty okay we'll take a break for 10 minutes i'd like to uh
to give um some of our uh speakers coming in after the break a
chance to prepare a little bit we have rick hill coming we have adrian
bradley from michigan rick is from tucson arizona then we'll have peter gennake all the way from
london ontario and jason who will be filling some astrophotographs
and so we've got exciting stuff coming up after these messages whoops no messages we're just going to
take a break see you in 10 minutes
okay um rick you may i'm we are me all on mute now and have a
general general conversation
so i would actually like to i'd like to test um something that i'd
like to play um during my segment i don't know if it's a good time to do that
or just find out if it works um yeah i'd like to that would be great but i would like i
think rick is a little concerned about about um testing the uh
system i'm good to go you're good to go you go ahead and yeah because you're
going okay we're giving it giving it over to you adrian so if you'd like to test it
that's fine okay we're there's a sharing going on already
so i can't share so i'll find out when it's my turn um
what i have is i have music that will go with my slideshow and um i think the music will transfer
it'll transfer through um if it does that'll be perfect
if not i can explain the images that are there um so i'm either way
i should be good but uh hopefully the music does go through um it's a beautiful piano piece
we hope you'll be good and if not we can all sing along
okay it's good to see you and uh i'm glad you're able to stay up
so late and be with us tonight
and um really glad nice to be here david and everyone
yeah glad you're here nice comments here um people thanking caesar for his uh
presentation uh norm hughes says a great show so far scott tell david he's doing
an awesome job yeah
uh book davey says this is too cool great lineup tonight yes from chris
larson there and uh clearlight58 says david is a great host
so by the way um dave would you like me to read the
resolution we finally came up with one from the warren astronomical society making you a member
i can read it during my presentation or we can read it now i would love it if you'd read it during
the presentation and especially you could say what the vote was especially if there were any
negative votes for it anyway i will tell you what i'll do that
i actually have it i jotted down some notes for what i wanted to do i should be able to
get through my presentation fairly quickly but we'll see okay we've got a little bit more time than i
thought we did um because we had to do some uh last minute
juggling at the beginning but uh i think we're yeah we were able to take this precious 10-minute break and
uh i think everything's going to be fine oh this is it's been running good
yep i'm going to take a quick break myself and i have to remind my wife that i'm still
alive down here and then i have to run back down
because i want to hear uh rick's presentation yeah we don't want to miss that and we don't want to miss yours
and we will uh we will see you all in six minutes and
two seconds
rick i thought last night was such a home run for you and it was
dolores it really was great it was a surprise it was a surprise they really were
interested in the moon which is my main focus so that's not what the surprise was i mean
yeah i thought the surprise that you and us were really so we were completely cut off we didn't
hear any of that presentation for some reason we weren't getting any
sound at that time and it was really sad i wish somebody had recorded it
well i think someone did record it i think the thing is recorded somewhere oh actually no i think um
when we started talking it was after the main presentation was over
um and the uh the wonderful yeah we stopped the
youtube video and all of that wonderful talk about the moon and me moving in and out
and those things that was basically bars basically after uh
meeting bar talk and it basically got lost in the internet it was a
wonderful memory but i don't think we recorded it it would have been it would have been a
great impromptu recording but like the warren the warren club has
stopped the all i saw was she was holding up i didn't know what the plaque was
that was your that was your lifetime membership um i'll look forward to that
yeah we're trying to figure out who's going to drive it down to you gonna be one of us i think uh i i
thought it was i can't remember his name now benton yeah i remember someone said that they
would try and get it to you i remember hearing that too he wanted to come together i said i'm coming
yeah i my plans to i just registered today for uh okie tech so i am
uh i'm actually set for the eight days of which if i get a perfectly clear day
on any of those eight days i will be um i'll probably bolt out of
there to um head to arizona so i'm
yeah i'm i'm hoping to visit with you all
right did you hear did you hear any of my talk tonight no i mean last night um
yes okay you did hear that part you talked about coming up to the borough schmidt and everything yeah
yeah i'll be showing the burro schmidt tonight great great that's that's going to be an
exciting talk that's coming up in uh two minutes and 56 seconds i see the
countdown yes hey the earth didn't explode after the first uh
countdown that that would be funny at the end you hit zero and the earth just blows up
and hi peter i haven't seen you in a very long time i think it's the 1980s was the last time
we saw each other yeah i think i think you're right rick but um you know you're still down there
in tucson and diane and i have been down there to visit a few times in the last couple years this year obviously not but uh we would
love to see you guys again we can do that
yeah now that i'm retired especially oh i love being retired you know you do
nothing all day wake up when you want to stay up till two or three in the morning
tell me yes yes love it and say that i loved your talk on the
telescopes there you're making me jealous i'm an old telescope maker i was an optician in the 1970s that would
be i would love that project that would be so much fun even the cracked lens i can
make a new lens that's not a problem
that particular lens is a piece of flat obsidian yeah obsidian now i thought obsidian was
opaque and black it is well i guess it's it's got optical
properties yes it's incredible that they they make a with with a rock
uh not a glass they make an uh flat parallel uh one
inches uh excellent quality filter and they use it it's incredible
because they use they calculate how many thick they need they needed to use because they only
calculate the in in the diameters of the obsidian they say okay we need maybe one inches
to have a safe
filtering uh to to to watch while we make a picture of the sun
and this instrument have two telescopes one for for observing that is
that actually we are turning the obsidian for observing turning
to to use for a reference camera or ccd
um so i'm gonna have to stop you at this point because we're about to start again we're about to start but thank you
[Music]
good evening everyone and welcome back do i start right away or do why does scotty have to
does scotty want to uh do some introductions first so you want me just to go on okay thanks
scotty a few days ago someone whose will or
name nameless came up to me and he said
i would like nothing more than to discover a comet with you
and the thing that went into my brain was what do you know about searching for
comments are you do you think that you just go outside look through a telescope and oh there's
a comet that's great and oh there's another comet that's great what do you know about the stress
the patience the years it takes for even one comet and the passion that
it takes i know someone here who does know that and that's rick hill
who has discovered no fewer than 27 comments and rick to say that i am proud
to be your friend and to know you for the um for the accomplishments that you've made
with the with everything you've done is is is a serious understatement
and uh now we're going to hear a little bit not about comments from rick hill
but about the thing that he was involved in when he and his wife delores first relocated to arizona working with
schmidt cameras and now take it away rick hill
okay let me uh bring my screen up here [Music]
are we still there oh yes okay good good good good i want to take it into presentation mode
[Music] slideshow mode i'm trying to it's closed
on me
[Music]
there we go when i first came here from uh michigan i was an optician in michigan
and i answered an ad at uh warren swayze observatory for they were looking for a
resident observer and i answered that ad and after a lot of selection process i was
the number two person chosen for the job the number one person was uh dean kettleson and dean got tired of
waiting for the wheels of administration to turn a case he went and got a job direct with kit b
and i got the job uh with case and it was working with a schmidt camera now
schmidt was an optician in germany around the turn of the last century
and uh it was a very unfortunate young man he liked to do something i was always interested in as a kid
and i was building rockets except he did it by packing gunpowder into
pipes and it resulted in an explosion that took off the index finger and the thumb on his right hand
his mother's medical treatment for that led to infection and he lost the whole hand
and so he was a one-armed man understand one armed man who invented one of the most popular
telescope designs ever in world history and that's the schmidt most of you know
what a schmidt camera looks like with a corrector up at the top and then it goes down hits a spherical
mirror and focuses on what used to be a photographic plate but today we use ccds
and the the corrector plate up here is as a plate that creates aberrations
and the aberrations are exactly the same aberrations but the opposite sign of those created by a spherical
mirror and it gives you a wide field with sharp images right to the edge
this is a this is a cutaway drawing by no less than russell porter the same fellow who did all the
great 200-inch drawings um and this is of the burl schmidt
telescope that was at case western in cleveland ohio why anybody would put a telescope in
cleveland ohio i don't know but then again you've got another 40-inch telescope in downtown
toledo ohio and it seems to be doing science all the time uh you have the corrector plate up here
then the primary mirror down here and that's where the photographic plate went i lived to the end of its photographic
era in the beginning of its ccd era this is a picture of the telescope
as it was in in cleveland ohio and that's j.j nassau down there
showing i don't know who's but showing him the setting circles of the telescope
and it was moved to tucson arizona and i met a number of you then uh i peter i think i headed you up at
that telescope at one time and i had uh john briggs up there i know
at one time um and this is what the telescope looked like that's a um mg that's a gm blue
color the fella who had the telescope repainted was bill shaning out at kitt peak and he he revo built
cars for a hobby and he liked this color that gm used on their cars and he had the whole telescope powder
coated back in 1979 with that and now david you use this telescope
when you came out to kit peak you may not remember you use the finder scope here a nine
inch refractor made by uh carl lundin
the understudy of alvin clark and it was a very fine piece of optics
and you used it for um oh you did hundreds of observations of orion nebula variables
and you spent the whole night there the orion variables at the time i can't hear that
but there i am at the eyepiece of the four and a half inch finder scope i was just trying to say that i was
enjoying doing a lot of orion variables at the time yeah you did did you know you forgot to
mention one thing last night in your talk of the night you and i observed all nine planets from from uh
the backyard of this city planets huh how many planets nine pluto was a planet
back then and we and i remember we got to the very end and we said we haven't observed one of them we bent over and looked at the
earth that's that's for another night but uh that's a good point
now this telescope used setting circles and everything but when i left it was all digital and it had a nice ccd and a
4k ccd which was a big ccd back in those days back in see i left in 1993. from there
i went through a period where i was using celestron 14s to travel all over
the earth and chase occultations with the occultation group at lunar and
planetary lab and then i wound up on this telescope this telescope was built originally
for one of the astronomers at lpl who studied comets and she had it rushed through production
because kamika came up all of a sudden was supposed to be the greatest comet in the
century and they had to have this telescope in a big hurry we rebuilt this telescope for the
catalina sky survey it was the first telescope used by catalina sky survey it has found literally thousands of
asteroids it has found more asteroids than existed were known to exist
when i started working with this telescope and it's it's a real workhorse of a
telescope but it's starting to get a little long in the tooth because it's its magnitude limit is around 19.5
20 magnitude and the game is now fainter than that for most asteroids
then i went from there after i retired after using that telescope and several
others i went to my own backyard observatory where i have the old classical schmidt
cassegrain telescope many of you have these and are familiar with them i've had about a dozen of them
um i've had a couple of c-14s as you see up in the corner there in fact that c14 was put on a long-term loan
with me that's the one we chased around the world with we would set it up in all these different
places around the world the last place we set it up and observed occultations before we lost funding for that project
was um on madeira island off the coast of morocco and we watched an occultation of of uh
triton by triton of a distant star we measured the scale height of the atmosphere and
everything and on the way home i took five days off to see london england my first day in london
england was 9 11 2001. and i wasn't sure i was going to get out of
england and anytime soon i was thinking about getting agree with their equivalent of a green card at the
time then a c11 which i had over here in my backyard observatory
and a c5 which i'll never get rid of this c5 the optics were made by a local optician by the name of bob
goff oh yeah and he's he's gone now but these optics and
the optics and all of these telescopes you see here were superb this telescope wound up at the arizona
sonora desert museum i don't know if they still have it i i bought them three more celestron
eights as well and uh it was an excellent instrument uh
these are the schmidts i've worked with and some of them professionally some of them as an amateur still have a
number of them although i tend to like the machsudov cassegrain today and i have uh three or four of
those culminating with the eight inch f-20 mach moxoot off casgrain
that i use for lunar planetary and uh yeah just lunar planetary i don't do
solar observing with that one my site is not good enough for solar observing with that aperture so if you
want to see more about this stuff you can go to my website right there and um and i would be glad to answer any
questions you might have about this
uh i am posting your website up on the um
up on the you're going to right now i see yeah and i on my mac keyboard here i do
not see that squiggly let me find it ah here it is there we go
and there we are
here i could share that too
i think i can yeah it looks like a big gray square the little schmidt that could yes
i think you can all see this now yes so you can go to my website i was
showing this website last night but uh one of the things i did i remember going through it
yeah i um let for the last year and a half i've been laid up and much of the time in a wheelchair um
it turned out it was my hip and i had to have it replaced and during that time i got got this i
was always curious about the quality of these schmidt casagrains the dynomax i'd heard
bad stories about them but this one was 285 dollars how can you go wrong
it was inherited by a son and his father almost never used it it's in pristine condition
when i got it that's my that's my protection for it in the backyard
[Music] and how is it it is an excellent
telescope there are the clouds on venus with it wow some venus images this is on the website
too there's mercury you can see a little bit of modeling but for a six inch aperture what do you
expect jupiter i have pictures of a lot of
things there with it this is this is one thing i like to do each year this is the sealager effect on
saturn where the rings get brighter with respect to the ball of the planet right at opposition
like to photograph that every year it does an absolutely excellent job even
though we had a terribly last summer this is smoke
across the desert southwest last summer it was very difficult i was having to shoot through a lot of
smoke much of the time but you can go there and you can spend
some time looking at it beautiful double stars i got with it this is the triple star beta monasterous
and zeta cancri and other triple star and this is alpha coma bernice's which
doesn't look impressive until you realize its separation is .5 arc seconds
and a six inch aperture is the daw's limit is 0.76 arc seconds so this telescope stood up
very well to the tests i put it to and i have no complaints well these are
my expensive slow motion controls well these are great
they're made with popsicle sticks take about 15 minutes and it just takes one finger to move
those i can easily guide and when i'm taking images or avis of the plants i can easily move it and
declination with one finger very smoothly and slowly and you reduce shake on the telescope when you're
exactly that's a brilliant idea rick and uh you know i just don't have money
to spend on all these expensive motors and everything and so for the quest star i got a little
fancier because a quest star is a fancy telescope and uh i used hemostats that i uh
heated and then reformed so that they would grip the the knobs without hurting them
i'm a cheap guy i'm really cheap i'm a cheap old atm so with that i'll entertain any
questions you're welcome to go to my website and abuse yourself there i've also got a paleo page because
another one of my hobbies is paleontology and there's some paleo area where i work
at i love micro paleontology rick i have a question for you sure do
you know if uh the early history of schmidt cameras in the usa
who built them uh you know before the big one at palomar which i think opened in 1948
were there a lot of schmitz around before that no there weren't and the i think the
first one they built was the 16 inch 15-inch is it 18 18-inch sure
it's in the museum now
that was back in the 30s remember bernard schmidt didn't come up with the schmidt design until the late 1920s yeah that's when he
made the first one which was a 14.5 inch up until then he'd been making ordinary telescopes and camera lenses
since 1901 and he made he made the first one in germany
and then i i guess hale probably saw it and had to have one
but it was it was an innovation because up until then only sky sky surveys could only be done one
degree or two degrees at a time and the imaging at the corners of the field were never good
and so this this was a real innovation and um it it caught on pretty quick but he
built i think that the 18 inch if you will at palomar was probably the first one in
the u.s unless ingalls built one i don't know
unk ingalls is the fella who's responsible for the atm book series i have his name currently in process
with the iau to have an asteroid named after him how long that that that process can take
some time now but uh yeah it's taken over a year i'm really glad you're doing that rick anyway thank
you so much you're welcome i had so much fun observing on with you
just sort of not really using that telescope but uh watching you use it and watching you do
the science you did with it over those years and you and i have so much fun you and i saw pluto through the smallest telescope
i've ever seen it through we saw through that six inch f5 that i had this telescope right here
oh this is my six inch f5 yeah might have been yours anyway
but i remember bringing this one up here it was at a different tube at the time but i think so i brought it up quite often
you brought up with you okay inch cave you had too yeah which i still have and that is the
finest optical system i own right now is there are excellent telescopes yes yeah hey rick
do you say a word about the jim louden observatory i used to know jim back in the day
uh yeah well jim lowden was a personal friend uh we he was a mentor to dolores and me
back in the 1970s and actually got us into planetary astronomy and uh when we came out here he had been
our teacher we got out here he was calling us up all the time to find out what's the latest
and what's the cutting edge and we were just shocked in 1988 when he died at the tender age at 44 years old
and i immediately said that's going to be my observatory name after that there's a if you go again to my website
let me share the screen real quickly and i'll get out of here um you go to the jim loudoun observatory
it says who is jim who is jim lowden i not only have a description of jim
lowden and most of it's his own description of himself but i've got a sear a bunch of his uh
lecture series there that i've uh digitized and
put on the website there so you can enjoy those as well terrific thanks thank you
good question clark and thank you rick and uh this is this is the telescope
that i think that i had up at kid peak with me although it may have been yours yeah i've never i've never looked
through the one with the carbon tube on it no it has had its cube changed in recent years
the optics are the same the optics are the same anyway we're going to move on we're
going to press on right now and as i mentioned earlier tonight
talking about adrian and the quality of the photographs that he has taken over
the years it has been so special to see those pictures
looking up at the night sky is an incredible thing to do but the way adrian photographs it makes
them doubly so and now handing it over to adrian take it away all right well
thank you for handing it over i wrote myself some notes that i could probably forget even though
they're in front of me but uh thank you for inviting me david and to all of you it's an honor to be
here i'm here um several astronomy clubs
university lobra astronomers i'm a member of the warren astronomical society
i met david levy as being a part of the lowbrow astronomy club he gave a talk for us and
um i remember being inspired by his love of the night sky prior to that he gave a talk at the
university of michigan and gave the famous words if you didn't write it down
it's not an observation and as someone who had been learning visual astronomy
at the time i was notorious for not writing it down so part of the reason that i got in the
photographs was if i'm not going to write it down i'll take a picture of it so that it reminds
me of what i saw um so later on tonight you're going to see some amazing astrophotography by
jason gunzel who's hanging in there with his beautiful image of the sun behind him
um so look forward to that but um back to david uh delveed as he's pro
called by all of you columns um we have made him a warren astronomical
society member and i would like to read the resolution i'm going to start sharing the screen
um and what i'll do is share the resolution
that we made for him here it is um this is being sent to you david and i'll
read it dear david at the regular monthly board meeting of the warren astronomical society held
on april 5th 2021 the following resolution was presented for consideration
and adoption whereas in recognition of his contributions to the warren astronomical society paper
and his participation and contributions to the virtual monthly meetings of the
warren astronomical society and his contributions to the astronomical community at large which
all of you have been listening to throughout this star party therefore let
it be resolved that the board of the warren astronomical society bestows on david h levy honorary membership
to the warren astronomical society the motion came from dale timmy supported by
dr dale parton and it says six years but there's really seven because i
i said we should make him a member before it even got to the board and so here
here we are the board of the warren astronomical society um and this is
your official document of honorary membership to our warren astronomical society
so thank you for all that you've done and of course all of you will be invited on this panel
and all of you watching out in the internet are invited to come to
go to an astronomy meeting find out the nearest astronomy society near you
and attend it most of us are doing it online and when we until we can get out and see the stars
um we invite you to go out and see the night sky so now i'm gonna do
another share um this time i will
share my screen you all came here hearing that i take pictures well some of these pictures will be
featured in a video well a a montage that i put together with some music um adrian before i
before we go much further if if the music is in any way uh professionally recorded even if you
are the one that re-recorded it uh-huh apparently that's going to be a problem
uh sony okay and many others they have these new i worried about that algorithms on
facebook and youtube and they pick it up like that and they'll pick it up and they'll shut down the yeah
it's uh five countries okay yeah so so the name of the tune is i
remember well and it actually goes well my chasing of the night sky
i'll uh i'll just share my entire screen those were those are some of the pictures that i'll share so what i'll do
is just go through them then um i was prepared to call an audible um so my chasing of the night sky has
taken me to a number of places and i i jotted all of these down i've
in michigan there are a number of places that you can go that are dark enough to image a
beautiful night sky from the countryside in milan to the lake hudson dark sky preserve in
clayton these are all places in michigan so from wherever you are go to your dark
sky um look up a dark sky page and um look up where the darker areas in your
state your country are and
try to get to them because the night sky is beautiful when you can get out away from lights
brower nature preserve peach mountain clinton township alcona park port austin
highway 123 to clementine falls the point albarkey's lighthouse
is one of the darker places that i've been um bup which i thought yeah highway 123 is
even darker there's a roadside park at port hope where i stopped and imaged port crescent dark sky park about
i don't know i listed 10 or 15 places um but the driving out to those places
um just to see the dark skies is something that i have enjoyed doing
so with that let's share the entire let's share the screen
and um i don't know if i can turn the
if i turn this down here's the slideshow um if music starts playing just let me
know i'm going to turn this down so that it'll just play the slideshow
this is starting with this is my very first um very first image of the milky way
that i attempted um very grainy you got done with a 30d
and a um and a uh an old kit lens 18 to 55. those of
you in photography know that it's pretty impressive to get a result like this
i've actually got something a slight milky way over ann arbor one of the more light polluted places
that you would see the milky way from but um this was the start of my journey
just believing you know what i barely see it in this countryside um field and i'm gonna try and image it
so let's see i can it's not letting me step forward afraid
i came back later and image turned to the north and imaged the field
and just got this is a northern star field good luck finding the big dipper in this
it's actually over here lake hudson in the winter it's beautiful
sometimes your clouds help you make a beautiful star thing and this is how i'll go through
just these images um yeah this is um
this effect of larger stars you can buy a filter or you can wait for these high clouds to
be present i've seen this happen for me in the winter more so than other seasons
and it makes for a beautiful star skate there's my truck that's the same truck i
travel with i go here and there and i go places to do imaging these are some earlier images
and of course when you see this part of the milky way you're looking at a summer image
um this is um lake hudson state park in the summer
uh a nice dark sky park in michigan it's actually about 30 minutes from ohio and um
it's a beautiful place to observe the light dome has been getting higher at lake hudson it's been
a little disappointing that the it's not as dark as it may have been two or three years ago
that's kind of the part of the fight with light pollution that we have to deal with
but um you can still pull off beautiful images here we're at another part of lake huts in
the boat launch and um look at all the stars in the sky
this is an image if you live in michigan you'll see this hanging at a camera shop in ann arbor it's
called camera mall um i submitted it for a contest and i came in second to a beautiful
milky way shot over the um over a river in another part of michigan
this one won a prize because i got lucky the quick story behind this is the image
i took prior i saw a meteor go underneath my frame i just i turned it back around started
imaging the core again someone next to me says hey did you see that meteor
what meteor i looked on my look on my camera which was it was a 20 i think it was a
20 second exposure on my camera and at the time i wasn't using a tracker um
and i looked and see this bright streak i sent it to my job it ended up in a ca
in the calendar for that year for our nature preserve in ann arbor
michigan a few people know of this place this was a winter shot you have this beautiful
tree and you have all these stars there you can with the right imaging
tools you can pull stars out in places even if there's
lots of there's cities nearby it's something that i enjoy doing is
uncovering the beauty of a place so let's see that goes that way
i'll click here turn to the south i caught a meteor uh
quick story with this one we had this was a year it was a year since we had lost one of
our club members john koslin owned a huge telescope he always held
um star parties at his house we lost him to um
we lost him to what i think kind of turned out to be a heart condition after a race and it was the anniversary
of his passing i went out the image and i said okay john would be a good time to send me a meteor
just like that other image where i had a meteor i look away as i'm taking this frame
and then i go back and look on the screen again and there is this streak coming right through the
center of the galaxy as the sun as astronomical twilight is ending um so i looked up and i said
thank you john and even though this may not be the best milky way picture i'll ever take
it's definitely an emotional one there's jupiter and there's saturn this was taken of course last year
and as the season went and the milky way started to recede
i captured it over heading towards this big tall tree here
out at peach mountain where the low brows observe i was able to isolate milky way here as
you can tell i enjoy chasing the milky way i consider myself a milky way chaser and
this is a couple years ago because jupiter is right here jupiter moved in 2019 from here
2020 it ended up here and in 2021 it's a little further along so this is a 2019 photo and so is this
um i can find out all of the um
the settings and everything that i use i just prefer talking about my feelings as i take
these photos and um i can always you can always email me if there's a certain picture you like
in settings most of the time 30 seconds um
a high iso and depending on where i'm shooting if i'm at a dark site i go with a higher iso here you have
this oak tree right here and just the
just the night sky i come from an astronomy background so a lot of my pictures will be of the night sky uh more so than
the ground but every once in a while you get a good foreground object and it's cloudy i'll still go out and
take an image so here you have an image with some colors um
which it looks very artsy or there may be a reason that those colors are there
either way i love this picture this is one of the outliers because it's one of the few that i like that
don't have any stars in it but it's still the night sky and it's still a beautiful image to me alcona park
the milky way splitting the trees um brian adam who if he's not watching
one of my mentors in doing night sky photography took me out here and that is one of the images
that i got i just headed back a year later again using clouds um
i call this one lonely road because it's what it looks like
and later i would take this photo light pillars those of you that have not
seen light pillars you are seeing them it's not aurora it's actually light from there's ice
crystals in the atmosphere cold enough and light from the nearby
town is being refracted into columns and if there's enough light and you're at a
certain distance you end up getting this effect where you see all of these light columns
this one had the up the opportunity of being an a-pod i think it either fell short or it's in
purgatory going through some social media sites to see how it responds but i just like the image because i put
orion you notice orion in a lot of the later images that i've taken taurus and
the pleiades are being swallowed up by aliens here from the light pillar cloud
so unfortunate for the pleiades in that shot mackinaw bridge
you can get stars over the mackinaw bridge it's fairly well lit but this is a
single shot you've seen some shots where you may have composites where it'll show you if the milky way is
rising it rises here this is south so the milky way could rise here i haven't gone to see if i can take a
picture of the milky way in one shot i've seen a lot of composites
this is a single shot and yes that's orion it's a star field it is possible to put stars
over the mackinaw bridge i was once at the golden gate bridge but i didn't have the fast lens that i used
for this so i don't know if it's possible to get stars over the golden gate bridge
maybe one day i'll find out this was one of david's favorite images even though the trees are a little blurry
it's more about the composition and i took a long image of this it's around two minutes on
a tracker to expose the rosette some of barnard's loop all of the nebulosity that's here i
think this is the witch's head even even though it's not showing up it's typical blue
at port austin we're talking about dark sites now this is where i would love everybody to
go if you get the opportunity get somewhere dark satellites
go through your dark sky field this is taken with a camera in a lens i would say around 100
millimeters or so maybe more um for about a minute and a
half and at a dark site an unmodified camera pull down this data it can also show you
how many satellites we have to contend with i think there's more over here somewhere
so this is not only just a beautiful star field it's a sign of things to come with the
issues that we face concerning um satellite constellations
uh which we know more of them are coming up uh in the near future so so that image
that's a single throw that is a single frame which is uh
okay and a half so those are jesus single frame yeah
that is one single frame so now the internet that the um and i know
i may be running over my time i know david you want me to speak for 15 minutes and i'm just going
um the internet that the satellites is supposed to spread all over the world
may be useful however we want to see the night sky we're going to have to contend with this
so we don't know of any solutions but i know that i know that there's been
attempts to talk to um
to talk to uh elon musk and figure out cloaking the satellites or doing
something other companies want to put satellites up there too this would probably be a
great place to end but i've got a few more places to show you so i'll just run through them daybreak
at the clementine falls you can still see some stars barely see the milky way's gone by now
over here and my favorite place point out barkey's lighthouse i took a
lot of study shots here before i was able to get some good ones so there's half stars half clouds
um same thing walk right up to the lighthouse just try a few different compositions
and turn around from the lighthouse and this is what you see
i think that same night when it's dark there's your winter milky way
and some of your lights this is a beautiful place to go full moon photography we don't stop
shooting just because the full moon is out we use it to create beautiful lands
beautiful landscapes and sometimes we get lucky and we get a
beautiful shot like this where you've got the moon having risen quite a ways and
you get this effect so this is this is one of those shots i was surprised that
it turned out all right milky way over lake huron
that's the iss and i'll go ahead and move along um
this is kind of the opposite side i think i jumped back towards um i jumped back
towards like uh hudson with this one and there's a winter milky way right
there you can see how much easier it is to image the summer milky way there's a summer milky way
over lake huron at a roadside park um if you recognize this there's the coat
hanger for the visual astronomers there's a coat hanger
in that shot this is daybreak of course i pulled in a lot of
the blue from daybreak this is the point at which the milky way is still visible
but it fades by the minute so you take this shot five minutes later your next shot's not
gonna have any of this another five minutes you lose the entire milky way
when the sun rises so here is a naked eye visible and i
think uh some of you from last night at the war in astronomy i shared this
when you're in bortle to skies this is how the milky way appears you see
color and you see structure it is that visible
in bortle two skies for milky way chaser it was just awesome to sit there and
look at it you know with all the stars are there there is
antares from the scorpion sagittarius rises now of course milky way shooters we like
to edit and make the milky way stand out so when we do this is what we get
all of that detail here i didn't quite catch the coat hanger this time
there's a star cluster i think this is um from aquila the eagle
um yeah i used to know all my stars and now
there's blanks from the summer triangle um [Music]
well the constellation is aquila yeah altair thank you over here you've got
m8 and m20 and you can tell i need to learn my night
sky so i can know what these are i know if you go up the chain you see m16 and 17 um
quite a few objects which should be visible this is my deepest milky way shot to
date and i have more planned so back to point out barkis and
as we as we come closer to the end of this slideshow i did my best to get
some beautiful shots out at point out barkis and there's the milky way again it's not
as dark but it's close and i like you incorporating the lake a large body of
water with milky way shots study shots
i can't i come to this place and i take this shot it just looks like a frozen lake
and i come back it's frozen but there's a bunch of stars in the sky
so these were my aurora hunting shots i was basically taking study shots
because this is north and i figure at some point i'll get aurora here
i thought i had it but no i don't know it's kind of hard to tell but i got the winter milky way
finally at spring solstice aurora
there's the there are the pillars that were visible naked eye the colors
weren't as visible but these pillars were visible and i went and took more pictures
from different spots there's my picture of the aurora a little milky way these are all these
last few pictures you're seeing are among my favorite and pictures i've taken recently those
of you that haven't seen the zodiacal light i happen to catch it at port crescent
and oh there's andromeda the andromeda galaxy makes an appearance over here a winter milky way you can kinda see it
here making an appearance and port crescent this is lake huron
a little different angle as night fall cell the zodiacal light this
is twilight and twilight's done zodiacal light remains you have orion
here you have more milky way there's andromeda hanging out getting ready to set
and at times i'll fire directly into the night sky and pick out large clusters those of you
on the panel probably know what this cluster is based on what you're seeing with the triangle of
stars the triangle here for those that don't this is known as m44 the beehive
and with your camera your tracker a large lens you can take down some large clusters
and um and image those this is a single i think this is a one minute
shot but alas sometimes the day has to break
ruins our night sky and when you see the sun you pack up your
things you go home and you plan to come out the next night that it's not cloudy
so that's the end of my presentation um if there's any questions
about how i take the images feel free to ask those and um otherwise as you can tell by all
those pictures there is a passion that burns for getting night sky images
and representing the night sky the way the way that i see it it's not just a uh
it's not just a bunch of stars that frame some sort of foreground it is the star of the show for me and
that is how i represent it so with that i'll turn it back over to you dave thank
you as the hour is getting later uh if we're going to have an after party
afterwards during which you may ask adrian all the questions you like
except to say that i feel like i've just been on a tour through a museum of fine arts
the emotion the feeling of these images of adrian's just goes right through me like a rocket
launch it's so moving and i really especially
enjoyed the images that he showed us of the clusters coming up
and that brings us nicely to our next speaker now we're going to move all the way
across the border into canada i understand the canadian border is closed but they've just opened it for us
so that we can cross the border at detroit michigan saying farewell to adrian who's going to
stay with us for a while and uh we're going to london ontario
where we're going to see the saturn v rocket and peter chettake sitting right next to
it i love that saturn 5 peter i first met peter
i first met peter in 1979 he was giving a lecture to the kingston
center of the royal astronomical society of canada and i was waiting for i had no idea what
he looked like this tall guy lanky guy got off the train
and he came up to me and i'm about to say hello and he says we gotta wait to white because i love watching the train go
and i said yeah i do too so we just stood there too strange there's like doofuses
watching this train leave the station that was i'll never forget that
anyway peter over the years has developed many talents including being national president of
the royal astronomical society of canada including learning all there is to know
about schmidt cameras that i think he learned a lot of it from rick and dolores hill
and what he didn't learn from rick hill he learned from studying he actually joined us at one of our
18-inch observing runs in 1994 and then
uh he did an awful lot of things but became recently excited about globular clusters and that is what
he is going to talk about tonight so take it away peter jadaki well thank you very much
david and it's really a pleasure to be here of course uh i really enjoy the whole evening as i've seen it so far
it's been great fun and so i'm going to share with you some
thoughts about globular clusters and that's going to start me off
um can everybody see my screen yes very good
everybody seeing my screen okay yes yes yes great okay so i i use this as my splash
screen as david said i'm a keen member of the royal astronomical society of canada it's been mentioned
here a couple times this evening and in fact scott and uh somaria c leaders
did a global star party type of event some months ago already where we did it across canada
and for those of you who are listening to this program right now across canada
friends of mine family uh a big shout out to all of you i'm going to talk about globular clusters and you
know why why might someone take an interest in globular clusters do we hear enough about them
or is there more that we should know and i'd like to maybe answer some of those questions and make
you think of those things most folks when they hear about global clusters and learn what might be printed in a
introductory astronomy textbook usually there's only like one paragraph so you usually see just you know one big
blob of stars and so that kind of sticks in folks minds and i hope that there's
more that i can share with you about that i know that our mc tonight david levy is a big
fan of shakespeare's so i start i thought i'd start with one of my favorite shakespeare quotes from
macbeth where macbeth is starting to contemplate what he might have to do to make himself king
and he's not so sure he wants uh he wants his deep desires to be revealed yet so he
says stars hide your fires and this of course is a photo
from the hubble space telescope from the hubble heritage collection you know when folks think of globular
clusters as just being this incredibly dense conglomeration of stars that's
very impressive and this is a really beautiful photo but you end up losing a lot you end up
overlooking a fair bit of interesting details that folks should should think about a little bit
let's stay with m13 it is the most famous of the globular clusters at least in the northern hemisphere and
so if someone is observing this summer let's say in a couple of months and they want to see
something that inspires them then one of the things they might look like look at is the constellation hercules rising in
the east and you know when you look at the night sky it doesn't come complete with these convenient little
lines joining the stars but that's the artist's license to bring that in and if you look
i'm not sure if my mouse will show up but if you look along the right edge here of what's called the keystone
the four stars that make up the main center of hercules you look along the right edge about a
third of the way along you see a little fuzzy patch and notwithstanding the fact that there are no
lines in the sky your unaided eyes should be able to pick up
a little tiny bit of fuzziness on a decent night there and that is of course uh m13 the 13th
item in messier's famous catalog that is what we're going to start with and i think it's only fair to say that most
folks think of m13 immediately when globular clusters are mentioned especially
in the northern hemisphere if you looked at it through a smaller telescope you might see it a little bit more
detailed the two stars that are sort of upper center and lower left here i often nickname them
the rabbit ears just because they kind of look like ears on the cluster the cluster in this photo which the
credit goes to ryan betts i pulled this off the internet today this photograph kind of shows what it
might look like through a small telescope and you know again it just gives you a hint that there's something really
spectacular waiting for you if you follow these things a little more closely and try and learn a little bit more
about them m13 of course being the brightest of these objects that's visible from the northern
hemisphere probably was the first one that was seen and you know it probably was seen in ancient times but the folks in
ancient times tended to write down only what they expected and not what they actually saw with their eyes
the first mention of anything in the field of globular clusters was that ptolemy did write about it but
he didn't comment about it or you know make any kind of a speculation on why it wasn't star-like
but it was edmund halley of course who's quite famous as being a quite a good observer and having a good
head on his shoulders he wrote about m13 in the 18th century and he usually gets credit for being the
first person to really see it which was a few years before a few decades even before messier made the famous list of
uh false comets and there are actually many clusters on the messier list it turns
out that one of the important things about global clusters for us to learn is that in fact there are only a really
only a smaller handful of globular clusters that are visible in the night sky so
even though we think of thousands of stars and even with the open clusters there's thousands of those
that are accessible with telescopes with globular clusters you have a much more manageable list
and they are impressive because some of them are so bright so huge they're not that far away in
cosmological terms anyway going forward another few decades william herschel had what was at the
time the biggest telescope in the world and he basically found all of the globular clusters that are on the modern
list at least for the northern hemisphere and his son john herschel went to the southern hemisphere
basically picked up the rest of them that were in the southern hemisphere he's also the first person who used the
term globular cluster and he also used the symbol which you'll see in atlases and so on which is the
circle with the cross through it and i always found it a little confusing that that's the same symbol as
we often see for the earth itself when the planets are represented by symbols i don't think there's any reason for
that i think it's just a coincidence that herschel decided to use this symbol and i don't even know
you know which came first the only other name that's really important to mention in the early
history of global clusters is james dunlop he wasn't perhaps the best observer in
history but he was the first person just before john herschel went to south africa james dunlop was in
australia and even with a fairly small telescope he made a long list of discoveries many of them turn out to be spurious but
there were 21 of the impressive southern sky globular clusters which are on his list
so that kind of gives a summary of where we stand with the observational history
of globular clusters uh i i'm not an astrophotographer so i should have asked
adrian to lend me one of his uh one of his milky way photos to do this but instead i took this from a from
a sky atlas program asked it to show me the whole sky with the constellation lines drawn
in just for a sense of perspective the dot structure the individual dots represent the globular clusters
and i purposely chose to have the sky map centered on sagittarius because that's
the direction of the center of the milky way galaxy and it turns out of course that the globular clusters seem to be kind of
organized around the center of the milky way galaxy that's not a coincidence it's uh there's
a very good reason for that it's because they are in fact physically located around the milky way galaxy in three
dimensions and we are off to one side when we look towards the center of the milky way
we are also seeing the center of the geometric pattern of all the globular clusters
again let me emphasize that there's not that many of them there's a a manageable number on this list and
for an observer who had let's let's say i had a background of laziness i didn't want to take on any kind of
projects where i had to do thousands and thousands of observations so i really liked the idea of going
after the globular clusters this is me as a young astronomer
with my home assembled 15 centimeter newtonian in 1974 and it is the telescope that i tried to
look at some of the globular clusters with when i was a youngster but i have to admit i really didn't have
an awful lot of perseverance and i didn't really pay a lot of attention to reading sky maps i can't
honestly say that i made any worthwhile observations when i was that age it wasn't until a
little bit later and david levy already shared the story of how he and i met and i don't mind saying many of you will
understand me if i say that david helped to motivate me and inspire me to take up observing in astronomy as a more
serious thing i had done some astronomy and university and uh loved that in fact i was kind of
interested in variable stars as they uh express themselves in globular clusters
so in fact here's a animation of messier 3 and in fact i chose this to show you
this evening because stella kafka mentioned it earlier when she was talking about the work done by the afo so you might
remember this photo just from earlier this evening you can see it in the animated gif this
it does cycle of course we're not looking at this live or anything but you can see that a handful of these
stars do uh brighten and then dim again while the animated gif is going through its cycle
and that's important for my personal story the interest that i had in
the globular clusters because when i was an undergraduate at the western university here in london canada
i was asked for this for a summer project to measure the brightnesses of the
variable stars in ngc 5897 by professor amelia waylau who
was a student well she was a researcher of these variable stars in global clusters
and i wanted to actually dedicate my talk this evening to her memory because she passed away
on march 22nd at the age of 90. so this is to you professor whalau you'll you'll
see here it's a reverse a negative black stars on a white background ngc 5897 is not known as one of the
richer globular clusters the variable stars are identified with letters sorry with the letter v and then and
then a digit uh and they are the ones that i studied on photographic plates in a dark room in the basement of the
astronomy department at western university in the summer of 1975 turns out the plates were not
particularly clear and even though i did my best with the measurements uh professor whala was not able to get
any data that led to analysis leading to variable star periods at that
time i kept i kind of kept in touch a little bit and over the years
i would check in on whether or not she had published any research uh on ngc 5897 it wasn't
until 1990 that i finally found the paper i think the paper was published in 88 or 89
and there i found my one contribution to the world of professional research astronomy which is in the
paragraph under the acknowledgments in this paper that she published with the final values of the variable star
periods and you'll notice in the red oval it says the help of many student assistants
and i was one of those assistants so that was my big contribution to astronomy that's that's how i'll go down in history as
having made some of these measurements i love ngc 5897 because of that personal connection
it's in the constellation of libra it's one of the uh it's one of the globular clusters
that you might pass over if you're just looking at the brightest ones and i hope that
if you think of my presentation this evening throughout this summer of 2021 maybe
you'll take a moment and look at this globular cluster and have some fun with it now i also want to relate one very
inspirational moment that i had in the summer of 1991 actually spring of 1991 i was at the texas star party
and i was watching omega centauri through one of david levy's telescopes that he had
brought to the tsp that year and i was just watching it and following it because it was the dobsonian and i
was holding it with my hand and dragging it down and i didn't really notice that i was close to the horizon
and suddenly i got kind of startled because into the field of view came this dark shape and it was
literally omega centauri setting against a distant hill with a tree on that hill
this photograph reminds me of that experience was really cool but i again want to kind of switch back
and forth here between observing and astrophysics turns out that omega centauri is one of
these transition type of objects it's not actually a global cluster it's actually a dwarf spherical galaxy
and it just happens to be in the uh family of the milky ways satellite galaxy system so you know we
might be forgiven it looks certainly like a global cluster it was thought of when it being demoted from being a globular
cluster it apparently doesn't have the emotional impact that uh pluto's getting demoted
from the list of planets at because i haven't heard a lot of folks complain when i tell them that omega centauri
is no longer considered a globular clusters so uh i'd like to propose a few
observing projects for folks for instance i call it scopey locks in the three globulars
if you look at the constellation of hercules and there's m13 shown in the chart which
of course you'll spot no problem but if you look to the north a little bit where the uh
where the underneath hercules knees you'll see m92 also a messy object not as high up on
the messier list not as impressive as m13 but a very interesting contrast in comparison
look even further to the north and there you see ngc 6229 make this one of your projects for this
summer see all the three globulars uh basically within a you know a couple minutes
and train yourself to look back and forth between the three and try and appreciate the differences in them this is a really
cool idea ken hewitt wright wrote about white wrote about this in 19 2009 in sky news and that's a really
neat idea in fact there are other triplets there are a whole bunch of places across the sky where i find three
globulars that are worth looking at one after another another is what i call the three pieces in scorpius m80
m4 m4 is a big thing and you can almost see it with the unaided eye even through our um long
view through the south southern atmosphere when we look to the south in in the usa and canada if you're down
in chile or australia you have m4 right up high it's just great m80 is also in scorpius it's much
more compact but in some folks might actually say it's brighter than m4 and you should make that check
yourself look at the difference in the distances of the two of them and then ngc 6144 is the more
challenging of the three objects it's actually quite close just a little jump over from m4
and it's actually not as distant as m80 but it's more diffused it's actually a
larger cluster than m4 and it's interesting to make that comparison so there's a little bit
of a challenge for you to take with you for this summer whether you're a beginning observer or even if
you're more uh experienced and just never thought of looking at the globular clusters
to really see some of the excellent ones you have to head down to the southern hemisphere so this is ngc
4372 in the constellation mooska and south of the southern cross the dark
slash across the middle of the photo is the dark doodad nebula and i've heard lots of folks
comment on the dark dude that and then not even mention ngc 4372 i hope you won't make that
mistake it's quite a beautiful sight if you ever are in the southern hemisphere and uh it's worth a trip of course to go to
the southern hemisphere if you're a northerner like most of us are and you've never been down there you should make that happen once in your
life one of the other really famous globular clusters which is not a uh dwarf spherical galaxy
is 47 to conney which is obviously in the constellation to kanai it's not actually a 47 as in flamsteed
numbers these numbers were added by bode uh at the beginning of the 19th century so it was not observed
along with the other stars that we think of as the two-digit numbers a lot of folks i identify it with the
small magellanic cloud because the smc is right next to it by appearance but it is in fact much much closer
so 47 tucana is part of the milky way globular system now that's not to say that there aren't
worthwhile things in the small magellanic cloud you get yourself a decent atlas and there are at least half a dozen
really nice globular clusters that are uh in that are located attached to the small magellanic cloud they're also in
this photo but i'll leave that to you as a challenge to kind of find them on your own you need to be in the southern
hemisphere for that my own um project in the recent years
has been to use a 47 40 centimeter mirror that was part of a telescope that uh david uh
got involved with and was brought up here to canada and we took it out of the original cardboard
tube and uh my friend and uh fellow aria c member mike haynes
built a 40 centimeter low profile dobsonian scotty was involved in that telescope as
well well i i i was wondering whether you'd like to tell the story davey do you want to tell it an hour
later later okay um but while we are talking about big telescopes
some of the globular class globular clusters are actually far enough away that you do need a bigger
telescope and they are considered more challenging objects i would say there's probably about 40 that are really easy that are in the
messier catalog then there's another 40 that yeah okay you should be able to try and then there's 40 that get a little
bit harder and then maybe another 40 that are really really hard and you might need a really really big telescope so what i did
was i made my own observing list of the globular clusters in four groups which
in the uh tipping of my hat to the fact that astronomers always make nonsense uh categories for
things i decided to call them early functional fashionable and late so the early globular clusters are the
ones that are the brightest easiest ones and as you see down the list there uh almost all of the messier objects are
there in that list and then that's brilliant thank you david you yeah i i think you you you know you've
i'm sure someone like you david in fact many of the experienced observers who are on this uh
on this evening tonight have seen all of the early all of the punctual most of the fashionable but i'll bet you
not very many folks have observed any of the ones on the late list it turns out that the ones on the late list
are so far behind the center of the milky way galaxy that seeing them is uh
is obscured by an awful lot of dust and that makes them really tough there may be more globular clusters back there
uh every now and then i do read about a new one being discovered i think i've included them all on this list but i'm not 100 sure
anyway there is a sort of a an ongoing challenge here for anyone if you pick up your telescope and you're
just a beginner you can see a globular cluster on the very first night you open your telescope to the sky
and years later if you've been doing observing all along you'll still be trying to hunt down
everybody on this list and you'll enjoy every one of them and so that's what i wanted to emphasize for you tonight
i'm also going to show my slide of the telescope that john briggs pointed out earlier this is steve
dodson's 56 centimeter dobsonian that was taken to cellophane that one year
this is the telescope on the campus at western university in 1982 if i remember correctly if you
have a nice big telescope like that you can certainly see a few more into the late category
of globular clusters there's my summary folks if you have any questions that i can try
and help you get over with glob your clusters i hope you will somehow realize that
globular clusters are worth maybe more attention than the typical amateur astronomer gives them
and if you are interested in the astrophysics of them there's plenty to learn there as well
thank you peter and that was really quite something we're going to put the questions off to the after party
i'm afraid because uh time is not going backwards for us
it never does and i wanted to thank you for coming for your patience for staying
so late and i'd like to see that list so that i can see how many of the late ones that
i've been able to see if any probably not anyway we have jason gwenzel i hope i
pronounced your name correctly who has been waiting very very patiently to show us some astral photographs and
it is now a pleasure to introduce jaqen take it away jason thanks for having me can you hear
me all right yep yes all right i am gonna share from a different computer here so hopefully this works
out all right
just let me know if it's coming through i should be able to see it okay yeah
all right so i'm gonna um i was uh interested in going through and um sharing some of my
images for those that don't know me my name is jason gunzel i'm an astrophotographer
um basically you know whatev whatever i can i've shot
you know like the wide field milky way stuff all the way to high focal length
planetary photography and things like that what i was thinking about going through
today was some of the images i've shot with this um six inch uh ackerman telescope from
explore scientific um you know i've gotten um some pretty good response off this image
of of this images from this telescope and i think um it's kind of a an underdog telescope
it's um it's got a lot of capability um for for a decent price point and so
you know i tend to steer some beginners towards this this scope or at least this series of
scopes these anchormats uh whether they're looking to get into visual observation or
or some more um targeted photography so i'm just gonna go through
the images i put together but i have up on the screen here and hopefully you can see it you know this this telescope here
um is the telescope i'm using um for all these images i'm going to show
so it's six inch doublet acromat and i use it for
anything from from planetary photography to to solar photography to deep sky
photography for my solar work i do put
a dedicated filter on the back for solar photography as well as an energy
energy rejection filter in front of it and i just want to caution anybody who's considering pointing this thing at the
sun that you need to make sure that it's properly filtered at all times
so i'm going to first go through some solar images here that i have this is the setup
that i use for solar photography and you can see back here i've got the
uh the quark the daystar quark solar filter and the asi 174
mm camera behind
and here's just another view of it so i use it for dual purpose for deep sky and and solar photography as
you can see i've got some like a guide scope up here um for the for the deep sky work but
um and this telescope just recently went through an upgrade this is a
moonlight focus around the back of it now so looks nice things to come
so here's an example of a photograph of the solar chromosphere this was actually shot today
believe it or not this is active region um one two eight one three which is on the
limb of the sun that's currently rotating out of view and it's kind of a fading um active region here as you can see in
the in the center of the screen just some disturbance in the in the chromosphere
and then this is also shot today this is by the opposite limb of the thumb there
is a quite a large prominence hanging off there so i got a shot of that
um really battling with conditions today during this but i was able to get some some images out
of it again um you know for those that don't
know much about the the solar photography this is all shot with a monochrome camera
so it's colorized after the fact because we're only looking at the one specific wavelength of light
wow this is um so this was this was in 2019 this is actually a
pretty old image but i'm just going through some highlights of what i've been able to get with this scope and every once in a while we get
one of these major prominences that are that are pretty interesting to photograph so here's one that
is probably one of the larger ones that i've ever had the opportunity to image
and then also done you know some close-up work here so you can get in you know real close into the details of
these these prominences but where this scope really shines is in
the uh in the chromosphere details so i'm going
to play a video here for you hopefully it plays all right this is
going to loop and rock back and forth and then it's going to slow down um so
you can kind of see some details out the videos coming through all right is it smoothly you know yeah yeah it's coming
through pretty good and there's points there where it's so
sharp it's unreal i mean it's crazy yeah this gives you a feel for what you're kind of up against
with solar photography and the conditions come in and out so rapidly where the the
atmospheric turbulence will disturb the image and make it blurry and then you get these moments of
clarity so it's really it's really challenging to make a video like this that plays
consistently but i've got a few videos here to show so i'll just kind of hop through those
this is an example of a very uh crisp day
with good seam conditions you can see that even the difference from the last video you can see
how much more detail is available in the chromosphere so this plays forward and just loops
through you can see a you know a flare shooting up here out of the active region
so this bright brightening here is considered this is all considered the active region and
active regions don't necessarily even have sun spots although this one has a few
one large one obviously and then a few more peppered in here but these active regions are just where the
local magnetic field is twisted upon itself and uh creates some heating
and some cooling of localized regions and that's what ultimately gives rise to sunspots and
flares and things like that
and here's another obviously colorized but this is a active region on the limb
plays over 45 minutes of looping motion [Music]
one thing you might notice here because this just plays forward and then snaps back to the beginning and loops
as you can actually see the rotation of the sun in these 45 minutes the sunspot rotates up away from the limb
hopefully it's coming through all right it looks a little jerky on my other machine here but that looks good now we're
we're definitely seeing the detail that you're talking about that's mesmerizing
you've got to stare at it for a while and then you look at this this is a flare that erupts
you know these flares typically travel along the magnetic field lines
fields like field lines so you can see it kind of curling around but definitely interesting to
watch the chromosphere kind of you can almost see these snakes
you know in motion
someone wants to know as nasa contacted you yet yeah they got
they got observatories in space which i don't have to deal with the
problems of the atmosphere so i also have a calcium filter on that
scope well from time to time i have it on that scope and that gives you some nice details
in the active regions unless there's a significant active reason there's not
much to see in calcium so this gives you an idea of what a large active region looks like
in calcium so you get these you know the model bright features along
with the the sunspots this is that imagine there's a
difference there's a difference between regular white light and calcium other than the color
so is there a little more detail that calcium gives you that white light gives you and i may be
answering my own question looking at the texture that you've got here that i know the white light doesn't always show
yeah the white light typically will show sunspots but you don't see these um
these brightenings around the spots in the active region as well in calcium so that's kind of
what calcium gives you is the base you know what the wavelengths are for the calcium filter
uh this one shoots it's calcium h so i think it's it's just below 400
nanometers it's like um i should know this so 392 or
396 somewhere around there at nanometers
well gee jason i wish uh you were a member of the alpo solar section
i'm the coordinator i'm writing a report on ar 2781 right now
i might have some shots of that yeah you just showed them they were beautiful
which one 2781 oh here yeah yeah
yep and you had another shot of it further in the middle of the disc
yeah feel free to reach out if you ever want to oh don't worry about that you will get
an email from me yeah all right no that's fine
actually this one yeah this is 27.81 too so this is when it already traversed almost all the way across the disk right
actually this shot if you you imprint this in your mind
is taken within minutes of this shot so it's the same active region
two different wavelengths and you get a feel then for how much different hydrogen looks you
know from the calcium it was the second largest region of the last quarter
on the sun yeah i believe it
did that spot have anything to do with some of the aurora activity that we
caught over the solstice was that something different was that the well this one that was the
from november this is november 9th the shot was okay so that wouldn't have
um something else you know when these active regions are pointed toward the
earth is um you know is when they send out a stream of charged particles and then end up yeah
getting entrained in the earth's magnetic fields and filtered towards the poles and ended up looking or creating
didn't have any x-ray flares but it had several high energy events
i remember one of those events um turned out to be a bit of a dud because
of the way it hit the earth it got absorbed as opposed to
spectacular i think i remember going out one night looking for aurora and it happened to be one of those
nights where the it got swallowed up so we had nothing of course just wait a month later the
solstice came and that time we had something
thing is it spews out charged particles and the solar wind comes out in a spiral because the sun's turning solar wind
comes out in the spiral we have to be just in the right spot to catch that that that pulse of uh high energy
particles so you know it can be you can have a big coronal mass ejection
and it completely misses the earth yep i believe that
this was this is another one from 2019 but um this is one of the one of the better
looks that had it and a sunspot near the limb and a large sunspot i've got the earth
down here in the lower right hand corner to get a sense of scale so that's appropriately
scaled against the sun the sun spot is larger than the earth
and in white like that whole follower spot which is on the uh left that whole follower spot area was a
profusion of spots and and detached penumbra
uh rick let's if you don't mind let's hold the questions until the after party so that
jason can get a chance to complete his presentation we'll have plenty of time in the after party for more questions
is that okay yeah yeah yeah this is uh active region 2804
so this was just uh what a month and a half ago uh it looks like
february 27th and this was as the spot the sunspot
this is an inverted image so the sunspot's bright but this is as it's rotating out of you
and then this was i don't have a date on this one but this was probably in the last few
weeks
[Music] but then this is another sunspot from
the uh end of november this is extreme close up one of the closer
sunspots so that's beautiful a lot of detail
all the way down in
all right so that's the tasting of the solar work with the ar 152 i've got
a set on planetary 2 but you wouldn't typically think to use this scope for
planetary photography but it's an extraordinarily sharp
telescope in green light so i i've got i typically would take
um you know the detail or the luminance layer in in green and then uh shoot the other
colors separately with a monochrome camera you're able to get some pretty decent
um planetary shots considering you know it's an achromatic telescope so
you have the uh the violet fringing to to contend with
but if you look at it in a pure mono sense with a green filter
significant detail on the on the lunar surface including you know some hills and
valleys out on the limb which i think i always think is a cool thing to catch
and uh also with an eyepiece just thinking about a cell phone shot you know through the
ip sync a lot of people start this way it's a good telescope to use that way
also and then this is again with the green
filter as jupiter was rising so the video kind of starts off a little bit soft but you can see
i think this is about two hours uh looking at jupiter this seeing just
like pops in kind of a cool look as you see the moons
those are wearing the planet rotating
i don't know why that one looks so christopher go would be proud
yeah i'm sorry this one is looking is it coming across all right yeah i'm scottie robertson
well this is uh venus shot with um ultraviolet and infrared and green
filters to get the uh the tricolor mask so it's a false color image but it's shot in
you know with the ultraviolet and near-infrared filters to give it the uh
the coloration there
i think i had some more venus yeah just some different looks of venus
amazing look at that [Music]
sort of an artistic look with this star background but um i've actually been able to image the
dark side using an infrared filter the dark side of the planet to get to
give a full disc appearance
and then one other thing you can do which is uh use a white light solar
filter and this is a an uh iss transit across the distance i know incredible
huh you got that jason that's wonderful yeah
that that transit happens in less than a second i think this one was
so it's uh shot at 128 frames per second
if you freeze it you know the individual frames are pretty sharp on the
highest tennis
more recently been trying to use it to do deep sky photography
that set up for deep sky next to a couple of celestron scopes
i was using last year
this is the dumbbell nebula i actually imaged this one live on one of the first star parties we had i
remember obviously but just to look at the nebula in detail the cave nebula
shot in hydrogen and oxygen narrowband
so a lot of times jason people ask me about uh these uh achromatic telescopes
and um you know and they wonder you know if they can get away without
having to spend so much money on a big apple you know and uh you look at images like this and
it's really inspiring yeah i mean you got you just have to know what you're working with right you
gotta you gotta know you can't really shoot in broadband with it um at least not get you know
as good of results as if you if you shot in mono and selective bands or in narrow
band like i'm doing here but yeah the scope can produce a ton of detail if you're looking at
uh narrowband imaging and i think jason you have to refocus
right every every time in different filters right yeah that's absolutely required
with that scope yeah yeah so this is the lobster claw nebula
and uh this is the wizard this is just an h a so monochrome
and then uh this is a wolf freya star wr134 wow
nebula associated with that we'll forget star
looks 3d that's just it same same target just in a different
color scheme but
yeah that's all i have i just wanted to show kind of a demo of what i've been getting out of that scope
of i mean you can see from this collection i've used that scope a ton for imaging almost exclusively looked
through it a few times but thank you so much jason that was really
exciting i missed a little bit of your presentation because i went outside to try to get a look at tombaugh's star
clyde tombaugh star and i did i didn't see the star but i did get the field it's fainter than 13.4
anyway uh molly does not seem to be here tonight scotty so if you don't mind
we're going to sort of be fading in pretty soon to our after party which i think all of you are looking forward to
but before we do that i would like to know if scotty if you would be willing to answer just a few questions sure would that be
okay yeah thanks i guess about six seven months
ago you called me because at the time you were doing a lot of uh advanced
almost daily advanced zoom sessions on certain types of telescopes
and i was trying to come to some of those as many as i could sure but you
you asked me if i'd be interested in participating in something new you're going to do
more for our people called a global star party that you would hold every week on
tuesdays and i of course that i thought that was wonderful and uh you asked me if i'd like to do a
little poetry at the beginning of each one i said yes and i've managed to do that
what gave you scotty the inspiration to do the star party and lead us up
to this 40th global star party oh jeez well uh myself like
many of us i you know i i felt um you know i'm someone that
likes to go to uh astronomical events i like to go to star parties
um i love doing educational outreach and during the pandemic it was just
it was just an impossibility um i had um leading up to this i
i always made a point of shooting like little videos with my iphone and trying to capture some of the
fun and excitement uh and some of the community aspects of
of what it is to be uh involved in amateur astronomy um i i think that our community is
built of some of the greatest people around um uh some of the most sharing people
around and uh i i just um you know i i've
i just don't you know quite see that kind of engagement in a lot of other community
activities so you know i was a photographer had a
photography background photographers don't give up their secrets okay
the guys that that do terrestrial photography but uh you talk to a guy like adrian or jason
or something like that you know and uh uh they're doing amazing work and they will tell you
everything they will tell you how to do it all you know um and so that's that's kind of
uh i mean that's just one indicator of of what kind of community we have but um uh i felt it was important
uh you know i kept hearing about people being depressed being
feeling isolated these kinds of things and i go there's no reason that
amateur astronomers have to stop getting together you know um
amateur astronomers are some of the very early adopters of the internet the early adopters of e-commerce shopping
you know if it was digital sharing you know uh they were involved in it and um so
uh as i started learning to use some of the tools and stuff i realized it was possible
to have uh to get people together on zoom and connect up broadcasting software and
to make it uh enjoyable and uh and for us not only to
reach out across our own country or you know within north america but good lord around the world
you know and this was the only way to do it but i really felt it needed elements uh that uh make people
remember a star party and part of that and the reason why i asked you to do the
poetry david is because um you know the uh um
kind of the uh sacred parts of of being out under the stars
and the sacred parts of remembering why we do it is locked into a lot of the
poetry that you read and so that's that was the reason why
well thank you scotty uh we're going to be phasing in just a moment to our after
party which is kind of patterned i think after after would you say scotty the saturday
night live after parties that they do is that where you got the idea and this will give all of us a chance
from facebook and all the others to ask questions of all the remaining panelists and everyone who is still with
us tonight on the uh on our screen but tonight's theme was
night very simple one word theme or i wanted to get a chance to have from
different perspective clark to talk about mercury adrian to show some of his some of his
absolutely heavenly photographs john briggs to bring us back to other earlier times
with telescopes rick hill to describe the wonderful work he did with a specific type of telescope
peter to talk about his favorite types of objects in the universe and
uh all the others that we have heard tonight have such a good time but i'm going to close with a poem
that kind of addresses the theme of our star part of our global star party tonight
acquainted with the night by robert frost i have been one
acquainted with the night i have walked out in rain and back in rain
i have out walked the furthest city light i have looked down the saddest city lane
i have passed by the watchman on his beat and dropped my eyes unwilling to explain
i have stood still and stopped the sound of feet when far away an interrupted cry came over
houses from another street but not to call me back or say goodbye
and further still at an unearthly height one luminary clock against the sky
proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right i have been one acquainted
with the night and on that note i'm giving it back to you scotty to get us going with the after party
thank you thank you david that's awesome that's beautiful uh okay so
i have been posting uh the link uh to join up with the with the uh
after party um and um i think we've cameron gillis is logged
on with us and uh not sure if anyone else is uh up for it but kent is just logged on
yeah and ken's here with us too so everybody that's great um uh but um
really wanted to uh invite you to participate if you'd like to um
being on the global star party is your chance to reach out to amateur astronomers and other people
just interested people that are watching from around the world and those that will re-watch this program because
we get uh we get thousands uh that watch it in in after it runs so um
but uh if you got something to contribute an image a live view through your
telescope you know a little presentation uh by all means
and i will take it to what i call hollywood squares here we go
all right hey scotty if you don't mind i i just wanted to my contribution tonight
is just an enthusiasm you know in enthusiastic recognition of this
panel that you have here um that david has assembled and you know i just
if i can just address each person and what i what i kind of take away from
each of these clark um you know i i really was i thought the uh the sketching
of the albedo on mercury that was really fascinating you know just that that that discovery to be able to
to do that and be able to get that type of detail you know uh it was really was really neat um
and then and then and then jason uh obviously your your master mastermind uh uh
in your ability to do all sorts of photography and astrophotography and pushing the limits
of everything and it's really uh awesome work uh love your solar work love your nebulas
you make you make the the galaxy and the universe just full of fabric and colors it's uh
you know it is incredible um and adrian adrian when you showed me the the
pictures of all the uh milky way i just i just remember my time in uh
what was 20 years ago i think in the soyuz uh in british columbia uh and
was in peaceland and uh i had my 11 by 80 binoculars and the milky way is rising over the
mountains and uh this is fantastic very memorable but i'm sad to say that
i haven't had that experience so when i saw your pictures it just made me feel you know i really want to go and see the
milky way and this is kind of getting to kent mart's uh you know the whole light pollution thing
right um some of those pictures uh just made me think it would be so nice that you could
just walk out your front door and see something like that um so thanks adrian that's really good john
uh i love uh uh his historical uh you know uh restoring all that that's
fantastic the history and and and preserving it and bringing it kind of uh contemporary right making it
modern updating it taking care of of our history and and bringing it
to today's renaissance you know i think that's that's awesome um and then rick uh loves schmidt
casagreens uh you know the the you know of all sizes i think it's a fantastic
uh optical design i have an eight-inch schmidt cassegrain i've had you know and um and it was really neat to see the
different scales and and and and uh your talk there that was really good things
and uh and then peter oh global clusters man i mean uh who doesn't like them
it's a it's a great uh great uh outreach uh uh you know uh it's a great outreach uh
thing because i always love showing my family or whoever you know if you look at that you say hey there's millions of stars
or there's hundreds of thousands of stars and it just looks really cool right even in a small telescope but of course
in a dobsonian oh man it's the most beautiful thing when it just fills your whole eyepiece you get one of those wide field
eyepieces and you look through a dob globular clusters are great
and then on fortis 47 taken i haven't been to the southern hemisphere but there was a recent talk where they uh
they showed that 47 tuckaney and then uh and and then they had
a smaller global cluster that's actually in the small magellanic cloud in the distance it's in
the background and and and so that was that's a little uh easter egg in that uh which is really
neat anyhow and of course david uh awesome uh i love your your singing your poetry it's it's
wonderful it's uh it's uh it's great of course scott and then and kent
i think david is is away right he's he's not uh logged in right now but um he's logged
in oh okay david of course i mean i i've said it before and you know since
the times in the 80s and 90s when you were writing for astronomy and doing the sketches of these sky objects i just
love that that was one of my favorite articles um you know just looking at what you can see in an eight
inch you know what you could see in a 17 and a half inch all that kind of stuff love it anyhow so
just wanted to thank everyone here this is this is a great way you're doing scott and uh it's awesome
thank you cameron it's it's wonderful yeah sorry scotty i'm interrupting you sorry no i i just said it's it's everyone that
comes together that really makes it happen you know and uh it's our audience too you know because
it's uh you know we couldn't do this any other way you know there's it would just be impossible to have
people in the southern and hemisphere in the northern hemisphere and other countries and all of us get together without us doing
it online so i don't i don't ever see this kind of uh event going away i do see us getting
together in person uh when that's possible though as well so
and i'm sorry i interrupted you david september 2022
do you want to tell us a little bit about that september 2022 we plan to have the next arizona dark
sky star party uh we we had one pre-covet it was fantastic
it was held at karchner caverns uh state park it was a wonderful venue uh david uh
uh was uh showed us all up by observing from you know
dust to dawn uh and uh he he had he brought so much energy to
the star party was amazing um we had astrophotographers there uh
and it was you know karcher caverns is just an amazing state park it's just really comfortable
beautiful facility if there's a five-star state park in the united states that's it
for sure and so we do plan to do it again in september and um so things still have to be firmed
up but we will you know i fully expect it to happen and all you guys are invited
yeah that's all the energy i had until i got my second coved shot but anyway
that's going to be fun it would be great an opportunity to meet all of you or see all of you some of you again others to meet for the
first time in person dolores you've got a cat there
we have seven seven cats yeah they're all rescues
you just saw demos and phobos or sisters in the other room i thought it was against the
law to have seven cats do they speak latin we're down to seven
cats down to seven do they speak three we lost three in the last two years
oh do any of them speak latin no they speak catadioptric oh i see you
well that's good yeah i think a lot of us are cat people i
used to be a cat person and before in the pre-wendy days i used to be a cat person
and pro now now in the wendy days i've become a dog person
and it's interesting the difference though that cats you take care of dogs but cats have
staff so little known fact that time period is
also in michigan we do uh astronomy at the beach which we went virtual
and a few of you dolores you were there dave you volunteered to give a talk
um yeah we um we managed to pull off a uh a virtual
event and i'm hoping that our events don't cross because um i'd
like to attend one and deal with the and then we have to go
back and do the other we're not sure that our event is going to be whether it's going to be virtual or some
sort of a hybrid yet because i live in the state with the highest rate of co of
covet cases going so we're not sure what's going on in our state we know that uh the
university of michigan had a deep run and as a result folks got
together to watch it and students tend to be spreaders unfortunately
and it kind of it led to our numbers starting to go up but the summer could because the fall
could be completely different so we don't know i just know that i plan to travel in october
so i'm hoping to come out and meet all of you after making a quick stop at the
oklahoma texas uh border and that star party i just registered for
to add to some of my deep sky uh wide photography i'm looking forward to
seeing the milky way the way it looks in my pictures with the naked eye
observation okey text is definitely going to be a real in person star party or is it going to
be a um a virtual pants optional star party
they are they're having folks register so they they're saying it's definite um
a few of us from camp lowbrow which i hope some of them some of them from our club are
watching from all the clubs that i'm in i hope they're all watching um there four or five of us have
registered already to come down so um i'll i'll have a lowbrow t-shirt on
or sweatshirt when i come to visit west and uh i'll have a lot of maintenance to
do on the truck to make it down there and then make it even further west
visit you all i used to play baseball in arizona but um now looking at the stars is now
more important um then of course i have to make the trip back so it promises to be a really fun
road trip we'll see we'll see how it turns out but hoping to meet a lot of you
out there when i can come out and of course uh fresh batteries to image some of
these uh nice night sky vistas that you'll have without getting myself into trouble rick
you you warned me about south of phoenix i i plan to stay away from that
i don't need my last image to be somebody coming up to me with a gun with the milky way in the background
that's not going to work his last image no we don't want that
nothing to contain north of phoenix the only thing you got to contend with are the rattlesnakes
well we can handle that um at least i think i say that now one
comes after me that could be a last shot too it was a beautiful shot and we don't know what
happened after that because he collapsed we have a saying in arizona you grab the
first rattlesnake and bite its head off and the rest of them will leave you alone oh my god hey rick ricky dolores
i have a question for the two of you thanks adrian um speaking of rattlesnakes and uh
being killed south of phoenix what is the what do you think is the oldest book in
your library collection oh goodness our first anniversary she
gave me a copy on on uranus's satellites by william herschel signed by john
herschel to uh smythe to admiral smythe
that's one of the oldest oh no no no no no you and whitaker before he passed away
he was cleaning out his library and he had boxes of books in the garage and the live u of a library didn't want
them and he says you can have anything you want out of there and i got a three volume set on um
fragmente of the moon by um oh my gosh i'm having a senior moment on
the name it's from 1735 so that that would probably be the oldest one and that's now in boxes with
cotton gloves and all of that human fingers don't touch those books
anymore [Music] yeah but you're not really human rick so you can touch them yeah
i need to get one of those things where they have them in the in the libraries like the library of congress where they turn the
pages with these little paddles but that's probably the oldest one in
1735 ewen had books in his library on the moon that went back into the 17th
century so it was quite an amazing library and i finally got the u of a convinced to take
some of that into their special collections well i'm glad you did that rick i think
that's a very noble thing to do well he had a lot of pages you you yourself has
he had a lot of people yourself have yeah yeah but you yourself have an awful lot
of wonderful ancient books you can take a dip down into what people were like it's like you
go into the living rooms of all these people and they tell you come in sit down
this is what life was like when i was alive and that's the magic of having a
an antique book an old book now why they have to be preserved you
and whitaker are preserved you just had a couple of sheds on the back of his property
and there were file cabinets in him and he had worked on every moon program in the in the space program from the
first days of ranger right up until they landed the apollos on the moon he even helped select
some of the apollo sites for landing and these papers were correspondence
between him the other scientists nasa and even the astronauts and when he
had died nobody knew those were there they were fodder for the crickets
and i brought i brought the university aware of that with the help of tim swindle over at lpl and
we got those in special collections too i'm really glad you did
really really glad you did and what you've done oh sorry clark yeah i'm
just going to say that i i met with you in a year or two before he died
to try to find the missing crater catalog that was done at lpl in the 1970s
by uh i guess his name was leif anderson who who died young and
uh ewan went through his garage and hauled out all kinds of stuff and
basically that that crater catalog just has disappeared it's uh
it's crazy because you would have he brought lots of stuff about the moon and uh from the 60s and and so on as you
said but there's this missing lunar crater catalog that a lot of people worked on in the
1970s and it just disappeared how big is it
do you remember what it looked like well it it wasn't published it was on decks
of cards i guess or some ancient ancient medium and uh
punch cards pardon punch cards yeah punch cards and you know we
searched the basement of philando planetarium and you know all kinds of things but it
uh it's gone if anybody's ever ever comes across it uh let me or chuck wood know yeah i
think the punch cards are gone they've reorganized a lot of the imagery
center and uh i'll keep an eye out
you yourself have been very very notable in what you've done with bennu over the over the years you've
done a wonderful job with venue you've really made it come alive to the world nice work
dolores thanks well i mostly been the cheerleader up until now
now we uh prepare for the sample she knows a fella who lives literally
across the street from the uh what is it a testing ground utah test and training range yeah you
utah testing trainer he lives across the street and we're going to invade his front yard
the day that that comes back and lands at the testing range he doesn't know it yet but we'll bring the pizza so
when is that slated to happen there's a date on there yeah oh yeah
september 24th 2023 what time i i think it'll be in the morning
okay well i figured by then we'll be back to the old 2019 normal
or something close to it i have a feeling masks is still going to be a flu season thing but they wouldn't
have to be year-round it would just if you don't want to catch
anything during flu season but in the labs we'll have to be suited
up so we don't contaminate the sample yeah that's that's been forever though
right you always have to the mask up and everything else up for that yeah we
would prefer that to be alternative spilling coffee on the sample yeah
that's something i'd probably do get fired the first day yeah rick one
thing i wanted to to check with you is that i know how careful the library of congress and most
libraries are handling books a notable exception to that is linda hall they encourage
users especially children to touch the books they think that touching the old book
even though you might cause a little bit of wear is an important part of the experience
and i think i subscribe to that i think that's important it depends on the book you know if it's galileo's books no you keep
your finger oils off of the paper not at linda hall you don't oh
no in fact dave you've touched galileo's books
i have touched i have touched one of galileo's books i have touched one of john herschel's books
i got to touch those kind of things at the vatican uh library
that's one place i'd like to go to i know they're out there too somewhere in arizona
i have to give brother guy a call or an email i have his email address
i gotta let him know he's gonna be that way or if he's gonna be across the seas
you know he's from birmingham michigan i think i'd heard that at one point when
he he also gave a talk at glasgow from birmingham
tightly knit community i didn't find out he was from birmingham michigan until i
went to work at the vatican observatory in gandalf he met me at the airport they said
brother brother consommano is going to meet you at the airport and i immense instantly had an image in my head nobody
told me it was from lpl i had an image in my head of guido sarducci
and and and i get off the plane in this fellow speaking perfect midwest english
to me which is of course god's english and uh
and and uh i said where are you from and he said birmingham michigan i said i got to come to rome italy
to meet somebody from my own home we never knew each other even though we're all about the same age
we never knew each other through astronomy we all went to cranbrook at one time
and uh it's just kind of a funny world
you know it happened to me go ahead whoever was going i've talked enough this is ken i
i think that happens more often than we realize i've had customers who have connected
through um the the es the pmc8 users group literally
he's like are you the mark johnson that lives in clearwater florida and the message back yeah he says
do you live on johnson street turns out they lived five houses away
from each other and did not know they were both into astrophotography and they were
they were literally right there together and but we do it at night it's invisible
and you know it's it's it's not like you go to a football game and do astrophotography
you know so that's how we met i i sold a telescope put the ad in the detroit news
two million circulation back in 1960 what no it was 1971. 2 million
circulation back then i got one answer to the ad and it was this girl that lived six houses away
from me that's crazy it's crazy and you know who knew we'd get wind up getting married
and that was 47 years ago was it a good telescope our rv six we still have it
yep that's awesome hey i have a question i have a question for adrian a technical
question looking at all those pictures with with lighthouses in them how do you
handle the exposures because i mean you can't get much more extreme than a
lighthouse and faint lights of stars how do you handle that so the lighthouse itself the light if
you're there watching the light go off it's more diffuse than my images make it look and
um of course i tr when i end up doing the long exposure
i'm shooting about 30 seconds i may be tracking the stars or i'll do a 20 second untracked
um image and some i'm shooting at a high iso 6400
so and usually it's a fast lens so it's like yeah it's a great question
the only answer i have for you is that that light isn't as bright as my images are making
it look um it's uh it's a fairly deceased
it's a fainter light and it go you know it flicks on and then it flicks off and it flicks on
again after a few seconds and it's off and during the exposure time when that
light is off is when all the other light from the stars and everything else is getting imprinted in that exposure so
it uh it's not a constant light and it's not as bright um as you may think and it
does it's diffused but it does spread out over the two different parts so
so i i only have to contend with it for a couple seconds at a time and if i image where it's not directly
in view it's you know it's a little easier to deal with it basically light paints
it becomes something that light paints something you know if i'm shooting out over to the north
it just helps me light paint that part of the shore so so yeah it's the fact that it's not
constant helps me get everything else that i'm getting in those shots
so that it despite shooting wide open high iso full frame camera
and even track i've done some two-minute images just tracking with the with the tracker
there it uh you know it it mitigates that uh light
so yeah not it's not as not as dominating as you would think it
would be considering it is a lighthouse yeah directionally it's directional though and it's not pointed at you
this sound right yeah we're lighting up
yeah yeah if you were there if you were there you'd be surprised
it's you know because it's high up and it's aiming straight out it doesn't create as much light as you
might it's basically like a very faint it's even fainter than moonlight when
the moonlight's out there um there's this other annoying red light that casts a little more light out there
um sky's dark so so i deal with it and then there's places you can go
where you can kind of shade yourself from from all of it from behind the lighthouse itself
and where is that lighthouse at i didn't i don't remember so stay of michigan
way up here point out barty's lighthouse you can take i you can take highway 25 and you'll run
in the lighthouse road you'll take a right turn on lighthouse road and go right into the park um
and then you'll see the lighthouse every i want to say every 20 seconds or so flashes a couple times and then that's
it for like the next 20 seconds i'm just trying to look it up on a light pollution yeah point uh
yeah you'll you'll see it's it's around portal three um is that traverse city near a traverse
city in that area no i don't think so i think um further
over yeah it's the best way i describe it is if you're going into the thumb
it's on the northeastern tip of the thumb very northeastern tip there's also a
spot called eagle bay that i was going to check out right wrong hand yeah you got to do it so that
it shows up right it's way over here yeah see unlike port crescent
which is over here and then there's port austin there's a lot of light
it goes dark when you get here there's a spot called eagle bay there's uh that lighthouse um
you can come down there's a little area i think it's uh private owned land though so yeah you have to be careful but um
you're you're about as far away from any of this this light over here
this shines all the way up till you get to about the tip of the thumb you finally lose the light domes from
southeast michigan you see those light domes all the way up the thumb till you get to right about
here you're about 20 minutes away from driving straight into lake huron before
the light don't go away michigan so far my sister lives in east lansing and michigan is so flat
that getting away from the light i noticed on the light map there's
no place in michigan that's below portal 3 i think i may there might be one not
in the lower peninsula in here yeah you get up here you start getting in the portal too
yeah that's that was the uh yeah you can get up here and you're by
i think whitefish bay is over there and um yeah here's the pizza yeah see
yeah not until yeah there you go yeah yeah right here where yeah this is um
i forget where this is but it may all be farmland in that area i know that one of
the places where i shot um the light pillars is nearby there um alcona county
and the areas out here do get pretty dark but if you go across the bridge
and go a little bit further north you can get into some portal 2 land up
there too that area i think if you that area east of grayling or gaylord there is uh
indian river yeah right there that's indian river we used to go camping there all the time take our
telescopes up there i'm not sure everybody can see my screen other than the
participants i can that's nice yeah we can see it yeah yeah i don't know if it's being
broadcasted out though yeah i can see it on youtube
yeah the headlands is in that area that starts to get dark to the north
the uh northwest the headlands is over there but as you can see that where i shoot in
the thumb um that's where the uh
that's where point albarkey's lighthouse is it's basically up there
in that eastern part of the thumb there's a few spots that they're portal 3 but they're
surrounded so if you look straight up in the sky you see all the stars you see some structure in
the milky way you won't see any color you look you look toward the canada side
you look behind you there's some neighborhoods you're kind of surrounded by light and
it lowers the portal rating uh well i guess opposite it raises the
number on your portal rating to portal four you're in border force
guys you're still you're still pretty good for observing and you're definitely a lot
better than anything in southeast michigan the little there's a little oasis down
here lake hudson where i took some shots but it's been getting worse and worse
because the light domes have been growing from surrounding towns it's a dark sky preserve so
i think portal 4 bortle five on a great night at lake hudson it gets
to portal four and you can you can see a little bit of milky way there you can if you image it
you can you know you can pick something up but you know there's a lot of light coming
from some neighborhood town that northern view is not good at all
so you get a better you get a little bit better southern view at um at lake hudson um i like how we
you use this is a map we i do cape cod up here and this is this is cape cod
yeah yeah we say okay this is hyannis is down here and the province town is up here and
boston is in my ear so yeah you have to use a lot more
we just have a we just use our hand it's a lot easier it's a little more portable the whole
body to show cape cod that's right all of massachusetts
it's all here it's that's interesting good to know mark you had some uh images that you
wanted to show us yeah i wonder first of all i want to say i'm honored to be on the same screen
i'm mark by the way uh mark helton i live in uh north of boston i was living in boston
before the pandemic but i live you gotta show us the uh well let's see i'm up here i'm
here now because i'm up near new hampshire i'm in uh ipswich massachusetts which is
um up the coast past gloucester glaucester depending on how you
pronounce it i am actually from the midwest originally i'm in ohio and since cincinnati and my sister is a
professor at uh michigan state so there you go not michigan for all of you
[Music] yeah there's lots of points that you're losing here because
you look for she's the head of the opera departments
there so you know she every time she looks over at the stadium and they put a new luxury box she goes oh there's my new opera theater
that just went into the luxury box so you know um yeah anyway it's an honor to be on
this screen with all of you uh john i saw you talk the other day and i am also a member of apmob um
here in boston so and i had heard that you were a member of apmob and that's a great group of of people um
they're just about to open our observatory again there's about
10 telescopes the biggest being a 25-inch and then
they just installed a new telescope it was donated by a former member i can't
remember the size of it but it's going to be used for variable star observation and it will be
available to pretty much anybody it's going to be it's remote based
um they it's not installed yet because the mit is not letting us put it on the
property yet because we're near the haystack uh observatory is where our uh
our uh observatory is and so you'll be able to literally hold the
topple open up and it'll rise up and uh it has a flat they
we just figured out how to put a place to do flats at the end of the night
and i it's designed even though you'll be able to use it for regular observing it's also designed for
variable star research and i can't remember the size of it it's pretty big i think it's
i think i know that's probably the telescope that belonged to the late david middlemen is that it is
the middleman yes that's the name david middleman was the manager for a
while one of the senior managers in charge of the harvard endowment of all things and when i was
teaching back in new england not so long ago i um i met this fellow he came to an adult
education class that the school i was teaching at that encouraged me to run
and it was just a three-night thing but uh david middleman was in the audience
and he gave me his business card at the end and he's he said to me uh john you have a lot of
texture and color i didn't know this guy at all that's
what he said and i i thought it was funny but it turned out he wanted to hire somebody
to to help him learn astronomy he was a very wealthy financial guy and he had he had become a
hedge fund manager after his success uh with the harvard endowment it was all
pretty spectacular and i ended up going to work for him and my family and i moved
to colorado where i i ran the nice uh observatory that he had
built in colorado but then unfortunately he got cancer and died very suddenly
but but in the same way a person might hire um somebody to
to to to train their horses or teach them to ride i had the amazing experience of working
for david middlemen to help him uh progress in his astronomy interest and after his after his death the i
think that that was a 17-inch plane wave i think it is yes that's what it is it's a paramount and
that whole observatory was on the roof of his house in dover massachusetts but
his family decided to sell after his death but he was an absolutely amazing man and he was involved in many other
astronomy things but i was very lucky in my association with him for for all
together about four four more years well you should know that the telescope is going to good use
uh it's it's actually in kind of a container now and that container is going to be they've
just built it and designed it to be totally remotely used i don't know how the access to it is
going to work you know i it's through the club but i also think that there was part of the agreement
i'm just a member of the club i don't know a lot of inside stuff but uh but i've been i think that it's going
to be available to other people to do research with variable star research i believe it
was a nice robotic system that the observatory i mean the container it's in was really
a raw a little raw off roof observatory he had the whole thing on top of his house yeah and alan slickey was the man uh
back there in massachusetts who designed uh uh the the system for him
so um but a lot of fun he was he was a great guy his his uh family uh foundation is
continuing to do a lot of things to benefit astronomy in
in various quiet ways but talking about boston atms and their observatory there in westford
massachusetts when i was relatively recently back in massachusetts area new
england area it was really really fun going to the uh the clubhouse
yeah the atms of boston maintained because uh that club was one of the
all too few i think in the country nowadays but still is running a very very
vital um mirror making program and my daughter
and i were grinding and polishing mirrors together in the clubhouse out at westford and you
could go out there almost any night of the week and there would be people there and a level of vitality there
and friendliness a happy uh uh social scene and again uh like it's stellathing a
a spirit of community and for the sake of telescope making people talk about telescope making becoming passe because
telescopes like the ones that scott offers for us is so wonderful and it's just
true but yet it's so compelling in its own right to learn how to make optics there are
some places where you can still go to do it in a group effort that's one of
them it's interesting yeah because i uh i've been into astronomy my entire life and i
tried to build my own six inch telescope when i was probably 15 years old and and i didn't have any mentors back then
and i gave up i had designed a nice kind of dobsonian style telescope that i found in
books this was in this early 60s and but again i i got i couldn't figure
out how to grind the mirror properly and i didn't know how to you know so i kind of gave up peter i wanted to
just show you a quick photo i took if i can let me see if i can share my screen
uh make sure i share the right one all right can you see this yes
that's m3 i think yeah yeah m3 uh i took this the other night
i thought because i i kind of was feeling like well
globular clusters and clusters aren't getting any love everybody likes to look at galaxies and i have the galaxy photos
and everything but this is with a six-inch newtonian i have
a zwo asi533 that i just got i'm i'm kind
of a beginner at this i'm a professional television cameraman if you've watched tv in the last
40 years you've seen something i've done i've worked on antiques roadshow and evening it pops and ballroom dancing
and zoom and tons of tv shows but i astrophotography is a
brand new world for me and i'm learning uh i've started to do my own processing
finally i've had a friend that has been helping me but i've actually been doing my own so um but i thought you would appreciate
this having you know i i don't do too much planetary yet because the six
inch scope doesn't really do well for for planetary yet not without a barlow
mark if you don't mind sharing that file with me you can dump it in the chat uh click file and
send me that file uh and i you know i i keep a big folder full of
you know excellent amateur photos of globular clusters did this one does this one pass oh yeah
and to me to be honest of course i also i also keep photos that aren't excellent
just to show them for a comparison well i i i share on instagram now
i'm not a big social media person but um because i've been in fact uh jason left
unfortunately i don't know or maybe he's still here but um the vast reach has i just been blown
away by his work and the guy and uh yeah his work with
the sun and so and even some of his nebula work is just blows me away and so i've been learning
so much by just you know sharing with other amateur astrophotographers and then with
all of these star parties that scott has been doing i've just learned a lot uh this
was comet neowise um this was taken
just down the way from me i live very close to the ocean here this is actually called plum island sound
which is up near newburyport and uh i guess the gentleman from michigan left
but um this is i'm in bortle force guys here but this is the sky glow from
newburyport which is and then actually i'm looking kind of up the coast of maine
so when you look out over the ocean you think oh i'm looking into nothing and the next thing is portugal
but actually you're looking up towards nova scotia and all of the coast of maine so
we get the sky glow to the north and then to the south i have a my view out my window here
i have 180 degrees from west to south to east but
i've got nothing but the glow of boston so when i'm going into galaxy season which
is now everything's low in the sky you know all of the good galaxies so
that gets a little tough but yeah this was this was with the sony um and then this is the rosette nebula
which i took and then that's the crab nebula which i got the
other day and then now you said i love that this is my favorite galaxy bo
bodies is definitely my favorite um i took this one the other night
um and then m82 here and then this is not the best because i
can't get rid of the noise i'm getting better at getting rid of the noise in the photography but uh m51a and i don't know what this
little there's a little galaxy right there um but as you can see i do
uh i do the sun as well and these aren't as good but um this is just with a
just a regular white light filter so anyway i just wanted to share some of these and uh
say that it's just really fun watching all of you guys it's just been amazing to uh yeah i i uh
echo what cameron was saying it's just an honor to meet all of you guys and be able to talk
to you and watch you and learn from you so thanks for letting me share
have you on as well pekka's there in mission control all right hey pekka finally i finally
get to see you hello nice nice backdrop good stuff can you hear me also yeah loud and clear
good good so i made it i just say hello to you to my doctor and gave him a tissue with
your blood sample from an also you'll be have divine it's it's uh
noon it's noon right for you no it's morning it's eight eight a.m oh eight am i got it wrong
you're here yeah yeah yes yes yes nice to be here again
yeah oh yeah i go i tried to get some sleep but no no
yeah i have this will take a couple of minutes from me but
i will stick on the same topic that has been up today already
like pollution and i have
just now realized that because i have done astronomy for a long time
but on in my childhood it was on portal 9 in finland
in the deep deepest forest you can imagine that time
the winter was really winter we got to minus 30 degrees was the normal winter
one and a half meter snow was very normal and i don't know how many of you have
seen your own shadow on the full moon
uh i have sure yeah because today i can't see it oh no
on this light pollution it's no chance partly you can see the like moon full
moon today you know that's a good test of white pollution i hadn't thought about
yeah if you can't see your shadow from a full moon that means that the light is brighter
than the full moon and that's actually a very interesting test you know how
deep of a shadow can you see it might be interesting coming up with sort of a
bortles shadow scale yeah moose game
yeah what i will share today is some d i u
project i have done because we have a lot of cloudy nights so there is no possibility
to make some astronomy so i sitting inside and doing some device
do it for yourself projects and can't you saw my video this uh the
sound behind is it properly to to show the video or should i show only
the pictures without the sound show the video with the sound it shows
your creativity okay because the sound has some messages
did you show the pictures then if that's what you got to do yeah but the the the sound is what they say
on apollo 8 mission yeah about light i you know yeah i thought that was an interesting
juxtaposition between light pollution and you know and because we are we are
already now messing with the night sky we are messing with our
rain forest we are messing with our seas we are messing with our uh with everything
and now we are destroying our knights so uh i will show the video and
and if there is some uh questions and and so on so let's see if
i can find the video
to set the stage pekka has a light outside of his apartment and uh he's created a unique
way to uh uh extinguish a dc civilization 2.0
that does not involve a bb gun no a yeah yeah and this is a version two
uh upgraded version of it oh let's let's see if i can
wait i have to share first you have to share first yes yeah pause
post that and then i have to move this let's see i have i will close it and
remove that let's see share screen
and which one is it that one so and now i
don't get back anymore to share oh i still
i will share this and then i will start moving okay do you see it yes
moon video
so we see your icons your thumbnails oh it's thumbnails yeah okay so let's see how i
looked at this and then i opened this but i have to move it
from here somewhere no i can't
let's see i i move my this screen oh
yeah i think you probably have to go into a window make it a instead of full and then drag it over to the other screen
i saw it yeah
i will start it from the beginning there we go there we go okay how's the sound yes
uh we hear you but not the sound from the movie no okay how do i do that
because that's how do i share sound from shared video
uh when you go to share share your screen unshare for just a minute okay go back
and hit share and then there's a little check box that says share system sound
sheer sound yes thanks thanks god
let me start from the beginning now then
and play sorry
[Music]
you're now approaching a lunar sunrise and uh for all the people back on earth
the crew of apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you
in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form and void
and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of god moved upon the
face of the waters and god said let there be light
and there was light and god saw the light that it was good and god divided the
light from the darkness
god called the light day and the darkness he called night and the evening and the morning
was the first day and god said let there be a firmament in the best of the waters
let it divide the waters from the waters and god made the province and divided
the waters which were under the permanent the waters which were above the province and it was so
and god called the room in heaven and the evening and the morning was the second day
[Music] god said let the waters under the heaven
be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear and it was
salt and god called the dry land earth and the gathering together of the waters
called these days god saw that it was good [Music]
okay that was it and
we think it's uh uh your setup is so um has so much ingenuity
in it you know uh you know he's out there with a fishing pole
yeah yeah lowering these things down onto the lights down yes and this one is a little bit
heavier so i haven't tried yet okay but if it's too light
so the wind will catch it i will buy some 50 centimeters of chain
and tape it inside so i have so it's going down or i will
mount an um and small camera pointing camera so i can see downwards
like cranes have so they can pinpoint the lamp
but i have two more uh small uh
so you lower you lower those from your apartment down over the lights to block from parking oh that's clever i like
that yeah and the lights are about three meters from the balcony
reel so i have to come out from the balcony three meters
that's clever i like it it's the only way because i want to
run down put it on and then run up and see that okay this is close and how
do how do your neighbors react to this when they see these they know they know i have gone round
to everybody and told that because i told the woman who lives
downstairs that don't be afraid if there is a guy moving around in the
middle of the night and turning off the lights i think this is the better idea
i mean i've seen some clever things on these star parties i tell you he gets an award for this yeah that's
definitely uh there is uh other
let's see where i have them um
there is two more let's see how i can share i share hold
i mean there's a book idea for somebody is doing all of the odd things that people have come up with to deal with
all of the things that we all have to deal with you know it's like in my business in the
tv business it's a thousand and one uses for gaffer's tape or duct tape you know and
how to figure out how to get rid of light pollution that's it i i have also problem with
the sun we all have and that's heating up our gear and mount they are black usually
cholesterol is black and if you have it in the sunlight the it's getting hot and the grease
inside will melt and drop down and you have to you know
but i will show you some this
fabrics i have used is that fabrics you put on your uh window
shield in your car for summer time uh so
i have put it on my computer room in my balcony so there is a mini pc for steering can
you see it yes yes so this is a foster tarpaulin and over its uh this silver
folia so it's reacting it is so good reacting signals that i don't have
a signal to the to the temperature sensor inside
so i have made a small window so i get the signal
then i this is my new mount cover made of tarpaulin and there is a
small window because i have a small fan on the ground level here
so putting up the heat from the window and when it close it's uh it's
rain cover this is my logo for my observer sorry i don't know scott
that looks marketable this is also from window i'm serious
that that looks like you know you put a put a little explorer scientific brand on there and
yeah you know it's three of them and the cost for this is 1
15 of the cost if you buy from i don't
i don't want to make some competition with the manufacturers and
dealers but i can spare some money to buy a better
mount from explorer and my 128
ed i mean from pekka so i don't want to do that
one thing i would if i could have a second one thing i would like to say about those the recording that you played just now
yeah is that some of us in this group were are old enough that we were there when it actually happened
i was sitting with my family my parents and my uh i think my sister
we were all watching the thing and it says live from the moon yeah and we heard what was going on and
walter cronkite was saying a word here and a word there but most of the time he was just quiet
and watching the events unfold but when they said then they did that reading from genesis
and at the end when they said merry christmas to all of you all of you on the good earth yeah we
were all crying that was just yeah i can understand that it has moved me too and i have uh
studying uh quite a lot uh apollo 11.
and because apollo 8 and this
statement when he was reading this there was a pastor or or
or you say priest that
was su make it suit the whole uh country
the united states of the usa because there was uh
uh
responded by suiting the united states government aligning violation of the first amendment
about this that's really true and you have to do that and the founding fathers wanted
to keep several miles between church and state but sometimes you just got to say what the hell and this is one of those
times yeah and uh but uh i think that our country
has a lot of good things going for it but it also has many many problems that you're working
with right now was ready to read something from from
bible meanwhile armstrong was climbing down the stairs for moon
surface and he contacted houston and days told that
keep it keep it a little bit short to the point yeah
so he had his ship and chips and wine with him but
he couldn't read it from the bible because they weren't they didn't want the of this suiting
and love stuff again i was what ten i think i was ten i
remember watching it on our black and white television that where the tube was slightly tilted so everybody tilted
their heads to watch it the tube was never mounted right and
yeah i'll never forget that yeah how much
difference how much difference does that reflective material make on the interior temperature have you made it
not without my tarpaulin under so i have to check because i if you can see i have both
so it was this is just for testing and knowing how i will uh
how do you say uh turn out and because it's you have to turn over and out and tape
inside and so on so it will fit on one shot down so uh i haven't
we didn't we don't have had any clear days so i can test but
i i probably five six uh celsius degrees
because it's from east south and west and this is open because it's for for
north and uh you never get uh i could
just cutting up the whole thing to get in some fresh air but i want to
to decrease the humanity who maddie who humidity humidity too
because summertime the here is 98 humidity and winter time is only 30.
what part of the world are you in again sweden you're in sweden okay are you near the water are you near the
ocean are you interior no no no i mean suburban and it's uh about 10 kilometers
to the water start to see yeah okay so i'm living a little bit in in inwards
land about 18 kilometers from coast but you're still close enough to get
some of the huma humidity yeah yeah yeah yeah and this uh building area i'm leaving it spilled
over an old sea bottom so it's uh it's mud
so when they polled you know they have to pull them for first because before they
build they i think they got 30 meters underground
i i i live right very close to a large marsh here and
i've had beautiful clear skies and i've been looking up and all of a sudden i noticed that my
images are getting dimmer and dimmer and dimmer and i look up and the stars look great but the fog has lifted yeah and it just
sits right at the level of the i'm about 30 feet above sea level so it just sits
right at about 30 feet and i can't see if you know it's like i've got it's 10 feet
up and i could see have perfectly clear skies we have problem with smog and and so on only
two times a year but the downwards sweden uh
in the coast to south they got problem with that one so they
yeah i've got to go to bed i suppose scott has permission to come in late but kent does not
[Laughter] so hey good to see everybody thank you
always a great start party it was great you take care thank you david bye
everybody hi i have a question to david because i he i have heard that you have a dog
and a beagle we used to have a beagle ah okay um actually when wendy and i got
together she had two beagles and a ger and an australian shepherd okay do you can you recommend it for an
amateur astronomer is it like a friend that is laying down and looking for me when i'm studying and
doing astronomy oh yeah in fact one of the beagles actually looked through telescopes with us
okay and that was kind of fun i had a picture of him looking through one of my telescopes um but the legal the latest people we
had which we named the beagle was uh didn't do that he didn't really
go in for that okay because i want to take care thanks for coming
i just want uh bye john bye bye folks see ya see you
later and take care thanks for coming i hope to be at st at cellophane this year so i'm
hoping that they i guess it's happening but it's going to be a lot uh they still haven't figured out how
it's happening yet i guess that the word is that it's some form of cellophane is happening but
i'm not sure exactly it might be more more careful with registration this year and possibly limiting the size
of the turnout but but i i i think it's gonna run and um and at least at least there's gonna be
some kind of program but you know since i you're still hearing me i'd like to leave
by just injecting something optimistic regarding light pollution if i may uh we you know i live here in
new mexico and we have basically very dark skies in rural new mexico
but so therefore we're especially vulnerable but we had a gentleman visit our our
village and actually make a presentation to lo our local astronomers including the mayor of the
village um and he was from um a a light fixture company in oklahoma
uh oh boy called um oh now i'm afraid i'm overtired i've got
a mental block but it's a it's a it's a relatively young company i believe
that make um lighting fixtures and a clear way of
comp or some led or something like that i believe that i've seen our skies get much worse in the years
that i've been here in new mexico because of the change over to leds where the leds that are being chosen by
some municipalities like albuquerque the the the uh the big city
in our state uh they're choosing leds but with a strong blue component yeah there's three three three thousand
i think yeah things of that nature um this fellow and his company
um have a new product and he believes that the product that the the nature of
leds that will be the appropriate color and furthermore
with essentially no blue output these ele these sorts of products are
coming out and there is going to be an improvement in these things
in the same way that we have something like moore's law describing the the
improvement in computing power he thinks something like that is going to apply with uh led
technology and his company has invested a million dollars recently
be in a dark sky of led that is is truly revolutionary according
to what he's described and i i i want to believe it's it's true
um he believes that here in the southwest united states we have a particular
market for uh care with light pollution where his company has invested to
produce um a technology to meet a market demand
and he is having some success uh with his product and flag staff and recently in santa fe
and i won't go on and on about it but i have been discouraged by light pollution like so many of us
are but after this fellows very recent visit here um and our interaction with him and his
long story and there's more to it but i have some hope that maybe all is not
necessarily lost in the long term because there are many forces arguing
for improved lighting and there are arguably some surprisingly revolutionary
technologies that will address the color temperature issue appropriately but also true to truly minimize
uh the blue component which he argues is so important to eliminate so anyway i just wanted to
end on that for myself on that optimistic note and as i learn more about it i'll share it with you all in this forum
thank you all okay take care john thanks for joining us thank you very much
scott thank you for doing this yeah yes yeah this is this is so much fun
yeah it's great it's like a daily food or drink this is like water
well it's funny now that i'm going back to work after being out of work for a year uh it's been i i i was like oh
i'm gonna miss these things now because like i can't always make them you know it's like
tonight i lucked out because my job finished early i i actually went and visited a friend who also got vaccinated for the first time
in a over a year it's just amazing how liberating
this is get you know having the vaccinations and and i find it amazing that you know we
live in a time when science can come up with these things as quickly one of my biggest clients is a very big
biopharmaceutical company that makes they make all the stuff that you need to make vaccinations
so um and i've been working with them for many many years and it's kind of cool to see
everything that i've been videotaping for all these years being used in a truly world
wide manner so um but and i still want to see a comet
from far away david i i that's something i i see things floating through my now i
know that something the comet's not going to go floating past my screen like a satellite or a meteor but um i i think that's got
to be the coolest thing in the world and to you know i just it amazes me that you actually saw
the comet that ran into jupiter i mean that's i remember when that happened i remember
that you know when the first dot showed up on jupiter and it was like oh that's what a comet does to a
planet and then to see how far that went around the planet
and you kept seeing the trail of of damage that it had done you know we
still don't know how what is down below all of the gas in jupiter if there's anything solid or if
it's just literally mostly gas most of the way down but just to see that and say
thank you jupiter for grabbing all those comets and keeping them from coming towards us
jupiter's our big friend he's our he's our buddy if i think if it wasn't for jupiter we
would probably not be sitting here talking to each other probably not and jupiter is also my very favorite
planet partly for that reason and partly because it's so damn beautiful
and i'll tell you those latest hubble images the more and more of the and both of jupiter and saturn the more
those come out the more fascinating it gets it's like you know even in the movie uh 2001 and
2010 they couldn't even come close to getting the i don't think art can match
what jupiter is producing for us when it comes to 1960s psychedelic art
i think mark with all due respect i agree with you but uh i think that the artwork in those
movies almost matched what we're seeing now with the hubble that was especially in the original
movie it was superb artwork that they did oh no no
trust me i uh i 2001 and it was i saw that when it first came out
on cinerama with my dad and i think that was what 19 i think it was 1968 that that came out
so i would have been i would have been 10 or 11 a 10 no 11.
well i can kind of see what you're talking about i mean look at the this is from the juno uh spacecraft oh that that's
no not that that looks like that's this work of art okay look at this i know it's just phenomenal
it's like marble yeah look at that how you know art can't even
no it's just phenomenal to look at it's just phenomenal and i will say i followed the uh the
conjunction of saturn and jew i took pictures of it all the way uh
and it it luckily the day of conjunction it cleared just in time for me to get
it was literally it cleared for an hour and i had i ran out and set my telescope up and i aligned it as close as i could get
so that it could track yeah it's just phenomenal
speaking of psychedelic scott before we all leave can i show one last picture
this was something i took the other night and i think you'll enjoy it it's it's kind of funny uh it's gotten more likes on instagram
than any of my good photos that all right so let's see
okay so that's m51 a again
and i and this kept showing up in my in my photo and i'm like i thought well
maybe i'm looking at my house because sometimes when i get the house in with my frame it'll show up as like a blob in
the foreground and i went outside and the scope was pointed straight up because m51 is
was it was like two in the morning and it was pretty and i'm like what am i shooting well i have
three usb c cables that are powered running out to my scope
okay i'm not doing wi-fi so i run usb 65-foot usb cables out and the light
from the usb cable was lighting up the but it's a red led and i haven't taped them over and it
was lighting the bottom of the mirror and it as so as the scope was kind of
slewing around this i love this picture to be honest with you i think it's you know just from a
wacky artistic i thought it was kind of funny but it just goes to show what
you know the things that we run into as amateur astronomers and astrophotographers all right
that's a great picture it has so much character to it it's just fun yep it's
you know david when i when i was giving my presentation and i showed
my my telescope our telescope you mentioned about it being connected with scott does
scott actually know the story of how it how it came to be where it is today you didn't want to tell it because we were
running late do you want to tell it now i think you might want to tell it i think that oh i'd be happy to but
why don't you tell it peter well i don't know what part scott played in it all i know about is when it got to my house
well i guess the only thing before that is that scotty and i were talking quite a bit in
those in those years scotty was working with me with john biebel
and uh i remember telling him that i had a friend in ontario who would
like like to get him a decent telescope and right away you suggested a 16-inch dog and with the
cardboard and everything it kind of made its way up to canada and peter got it and uh it was kind of
okay until uh mike haynes was able to with working with you
really turn it into what it is now yeah but i've told you a part of the story that
really it's leaving out all the good stuff so why don't you tell us the good stuff well
there's a lot of good memories with every telescope of course but i think what ended up happening you
know the star the mead star finder the 16-inch version had those black pucks on either side
that you know for the altitude bearing and remember that yeah yeah i see you nodding so i
so you know there was one screw in the middle of the puck to hold the thing to hold the puck to
the side of the telescope and you know within a year it got to the point where you'd move the telescope and
the pucks wouldn't move the the that screw had gotten you know so
weak that you know the the the pucks were grinding into the cardboard
so one of the first things we had to do was put a little bar on the inside of the telescope tube
with two extra screws on the outside on each side right and that held it down perfectly made a
huge difference so anyway we you know that was 1995 and you know
i used the scope for something like 12 or 13 years before my keynes had built a couple
other scopes and i was really liking those low profile you know dobsonians with the truss tubes and
somebody one of well one of our club members who likes doing optical testing and stuff he took
the mirror into his basement put it on the fuco tester and it was really really really good it was he said
it was one of the best mirrors mirrors that ever tested and he wanted to know where i got it well of course i told him the story
and then he said yeah because on the back in black magic marker it says levy
we all thought that would be that that was that was probably probably had something to do with why it left the factory in
in such good condition such a great figure anyway that was that was when we decided
to upgrade it to uh to the low profile thing yeah very cool very cool it was it was
it is a wonderful telescope it is today you still use it yeah it's it's it's right here it's
disassembled when it's in my in in the room in the office here but i can take it out on the deck and
set it up i haven't done it lately i just feel more lazy these days i guess
but it's still just as good as it ever was yeah the guys
his name was phil and uh he was just uh that guy just had a knack for making
great great optics he's he's one of the unsung opticians of of our day and uh
uh sadly he took his own life at one point you know so but uh but he did those objects well
i'm so sorry to hear that scotty that's a part of the story i have not heard yet yeah yeah that was maybe you could tell
me a bit about him sometime yeah um but peter
uh will you be taking it out on the 26th of may um okay i'll say yes okay because there
is a total eclipse of the moon that night and i don't i you might be not getting
the whole thing where you are in london but we do here in arizona but uh i think
i think it's going to be worth setting the 16 on inch for it what time is that one happening do you
know the check the handbook because i had heard something about that it's total eclipse
oh yeah should i should have my book but i didn't get that this he just got
it so he's gonna put it up and give us the times
well i don't know how to read the times there's six million times in here i'm never sure which one
is the one you might be interested in but you might be able to read that chart right there
no what is the um what time in universal time does uh
totality begin um it says moon at
greatest eclipse eclipse contacts
11 11 ut oh 11 11 ut yeah oh
so it's the end of the night sorry peter
that means we have to stay up all night yeah and then that's going to be that's really going to kill a lot of the
interest i'm afraid so you you won is it 9 44 ut
so that's when that's when that's when the partial phase starts that's six hours for me here in boston
so what is that that's uh 344 yeah for you and me that's you know you're in ontario yeah
which part southwest okay halfway between detroit and toronto oh
i love it yeah you can you can see in the in the chart here it's got the uh it's got the regions and
it says for for for the western united states it says eclipse uh at moonset
okay so it'll be right down on the western right it'll yeah that'll that'll be well
that could be a nice shot i might have to just stay up for that you have to go yeah
for free or get up either get up or stay up yeah yeah on the east side i get on the
east side of north america i guess we just get the tail end of the eclipse
just i guess it's just starting when the moon sets right that's that's the way to read that right david i think so yeah
i got it backwards but i'm a backwards kind of guy so uh the hawaiians get to see the whole
thing peter one of my favorite pictures i took uh this was i think
four or five years ago was the blood moon it was one of the uh what are they
called the eclipse where it's not a total is it a blood eclipse or something like
that but but i could yes in fact actually one of the
other favorite pictures i took was the night that the red sox won the first world series that they had won in 60
something years i was living just west of boston and i took a picture of the blood red
moon and it was literally it went eclipsed right when they won
the world series most people don't know that that happened it but it was literally i they won i walked outside i looked at
the moon and it was blood red and it was like that's cool it is i mean it was like you know wow
that couldn't have ha i mean i'm from cincinnati but i'm a red sox fan now so um but the other picture i took that i
love is the you peter is i got one with the beehive cluster and the not total eclipse
but it was you know another one of the blood eclipses um with the bee high cluster right next
to it that was kind of cool yeah so that eclipse you're talking about mark was uh
28th october 2004 it was the first time that a lunar eclipse ever took place during a world series game
yes and it had and it literally went total right when they won i kid you not i
watched it i watched the last they were running up the road i walk outside the door i look up and i'm like oh i can't
believe this this is like you know it doesn't feel like that long ago i'm surprised i don't remember that because
i do remember them winning it was 86 years mark not just
oh no that's right 86 because i could can't remember the cubs was uh something a little longer um
but anyway that was kind of a cool astronomical event that not a lot of people
know that the two kind of timed out with this wonderful sports event yep another one for a book actually
the the our women's basketball team came within one point of winning
the championship this year that was really close okay they were outmatched stanford had a better team
yeah they played really great it was yeah oh you're you had a pretty good team now now where
are you david you're out west arizona okay which is close to what
oh okay my cousin used to live in tucson i've been to tucson a couple times hot as a uh i it was like we did an
antiques road show there many years ago and i remember walking out of the convention center to go to
lunch and it was like it was like opening a stove it was like oh my god because it's dry heat
though you know you're not gonna you know [Music] i like yeah i i like dry heat
well you'd love tucson then no tucson was a very nice town mark have you been in finnish pastures
sometime and where in finnish pastu it's like a room there is uh you throw
water water to those heat stones oh yes i've been in a real finish
in finland oh no i've never been to finland i'd love to go over there okay because
the the temperature could because the it's so dry air so
it's different in here in sweden they have in finland it's surreal it's dry in
finland that's interesting yeah because the heat is so dry
uh it it can be up to 110 degrees in finland yes no no we're talking about
in the sauna in the i'm sauna
i'm like 110 degrees in finland wait a second i knew we had climate
change but it's all dry the air yeah in sweden
we have 50 degrees but it's so humid humidity it's so wet the air so it's
enough no that's what i want to go up to your area because i i i want to go
for i want to see the northern lights that way i've seen them down here and i've seen them up in maine
but i i want to see them yeah and then you have to try the the
really finnish smoke smoke sauna oh boy yeah it's totally smoke
in there [Laughter] that sounds like some of the michigan bars i've been in yeah and
afterwards you have to jump into the snow you know and swimming in the snow and then back
to sauna it's like uh torture yourself but it's
clearly your mind no i've done that skiing i've done that up in maine where you run out of the sauna and you go out into the snow and
roll around in the snow and then run back yeah yeah so clear afterwards you know ahead
peter you're up in ontario you you're you know it's although you're not super north no there
no our our weather's not too awful bad when we had a thank goodness we had a
less harsh winter than normal this year because i i promised myself when i
retired four years ago that i would never spend another february in ontario
that sounds like most bostonians like we're not gonna be here and then everybody goes oh but
the summers are so nice well i don't mind being here through most of the year but the winters
as i get older i just don't like don't like it so being here this year because of the pandemic really really cheesed me
off and i and i hope i get to go to hawaii or tucson next winter but you send all your snow to buffalo
yes we do you know it's like all that water that comes across the lake and you the cold air blows over the lake and
buffalo gets dumped on every year yeah we love watching buffalo local news yeah right
seven feet of snow it's like oh it's a dusting i grew up in niagara falls which is even
closer to buffalo than where i'm living now and you know that growing up that
buffalo was always fun to talk about the canadian side of niagara falls is absolutely beautiful driving up the
niagara river on the canadian side is such a different experience and every time i go to if you talk about light
pollution every time i go to niagara falls and i see the statue of
tesla and i think if you were to have taken a picture of earth from space back when he was alive
he and both he and edison and if you watched the electric
path go out it all started basically not probably not everything but the
majority of it started in buffalo right or or that area and you think
about that one you know the uh they've been here lately mark i mean the uh
one of the original power plants from 1902 or something like that which was closed
about 15 20 years ago um is now being reopened as a museum
i think they were doing i i i shot a story up there a while ago for cnn and um so that was
maybe five years ago um so i know this is a fairly recent development
it'll be open to the public in the summertime this year provided the pandemic doesn't interfere
with that as well but you know i mean the plant is is beautiful and most of the artifacts are original going
all the way back 100 years i i just want to make it absolutely fabulous museum it it would just be
phenomenal to have like a star trek thing where you you're looking at earth and you watch you know that oh yeah web of electricity
just go around the earth just fascinating of course if we had satellite spike then we probably
wouldn't have needed the electricity you're right a clear sky should be
a tourist attraction so only buses to the bottle free area from stockholm
could sell a lot of because i myself i have not seen
portal 3 sky on 10 15 years and my son built a cottage in the middle
of the sweden somewhere and i visited his cottage
in november and when i saw that sky in the middle of the night i couldn't
orientate because i saw so many stars so i didn't know
what uh star was what because there was a dark sky
yeah and i was totally blown out i was like in shock a couple of minutes
i i will say that i'm more positive as well with with when john was talking about that
company and you know we have people here in our club that are highly active
in the international dark star association and there's a lot of people who are who are
doing a lot of lobbying and they're starting at the local level in at the local towns to get them to switch
you know the problem is is when these towns get sold leds at a very low price
they're not necessarily looking at the color temperature of the led and saying you know oh this is not good for humans it's not
good for animals because it really messes up your clock they're looking at price and somebody
comes to them and says hey we can we can you can switch to total led for this price and they're going to go oh
great i can sell that to my mayor i can sell that to my town council and the operating cost is at least as
important as the capital cost because the leds are so much less expensive to light
but then this the health part of it did come out you know within the last few years where
they you know that literally doctors are looking at this and saying this is not having a good health effect on people
and so now the towns are actually you know people are coming back in and saying well we can sell you i think it's
4 000 degrees kelvin um because blue is on the uh yeah
yeah blue is on the higher like 5600 i have to deal with this as a lighting
guy so but don't they use reverse the
the spectrum is reversed for lighting in other words cooler means bluer right
but yes but 5600 degrees kelvin is considered blue light
it is okay yeah because 22 is warm so if i'm lighting like my the lights
that are in my room right here around 2200 degrees kelvin daylight
daylight is 5600 degrees average that's considered cool so daylight is
considered cool light which is why when you look at a house from outside it looks warm it looks brown
or dark you know tan so um yeah i have to filter trust me to
balance stuff it's right there's a scale right here 1000 is like almost orange yeah yeah and
10 000 is like deep blue it's based on the black box you know heating up a black box
and it gets you know that's the same with stars yeah except that the terminology is
reversed we call it warmer and hotter whereas they call it
cooler and warmer yes yeah so uh yeah it's fascinating stuff i mean
you know it and i think anytime you have new technologies that start to come out and people get all excited you know led
was big in my business and and there's a lot of things i still keep tungsten lights because
lighting an interview with people sometimes the led lights don't have the quality of light yet it's
getting there because leds currently don't come in bulbs and a bulb reflects light slightly
differently than a than a small pinpointed led light so you it's the way you
filter them and um you know i the place i was working at today had
some old led technology and the thing is it's red green blue and you see the red green blue shadows
projecting on the wall so you don't want that you want a clean shadow so but the newer technology
they've worked on getting that better that light under my balcony it's pure lead
yes it has 100 of those square small lead
the micro leds yes and that's killing me
and those are on day and night because they have some fault in their system so they are
on 24 7. oh that's okay they're they're running less energy now i just yeah
and that's another misconception with led lights is that they're they are physically war cold
and that's not the case with with the bigger led they do put out heat because
it's still you know electricity going through a circuit yeah they don't put out as much
heat as say a tungsten bulb by far they don't put out that much heat so they're much easier to use in a in a
studio because you don't heat up a studio the way you would with the old tungsten lights somebody knows about
electrical magnets with the function with nine volt you know when you get
power so they get like magnetic and you turn off it's like those uh
big car uh destroyer machines that oh yeah they have
electricity and when they put on it gets magnetic and when you turn off the electricity they
got no magnets i love i love magnets i think that's yeah because i'm building i have a very high
street lights and i if i will use my uh my rod i will have
battery and then trap down the cover because i can't use a hook
i love this this is it's like that fishing it's like the fishing game where you used to pick up the position
with the magnet but i have i have i need electricity that i can drop it down and then pick it
up necessity is the mother of invention right yes you have to have a problem to come
to resolution that's right that's right well gentlemen it is getting yeah it's two o'clock in the
morning here it's almost like it's three o'clock it's three o'clock here yeah
yeah yeah yeah nine a.m and our audience is going to sleep too
so scott are we still on on facebook are there people paying more attention really we're still streaming yeah well
hello to everybody out there in the world oh wait wait no no that's michigan here michigan is there
yeah yeah that's right toronto's david thank you
so much for hosting this it was awesome thanks for inviting me david
yeah yeah you're uh you're david doesn't realize he's muted after all these hours
he's and david it's an honor honor to talk to you and i hope to maybe someday be able to meet you at
cellophane or somewhere like that we're in arizona i'd certainly like to to meet you in person too mark yeah
thank you okay all right good night everybody good night scott thank you thank you very much yeah
thanks very much good night everyone good night bye-bye
bye bye
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hi i'm nicky cox a spacecraft operations engineer i've been lucky enough to work
for u.s space command in the commercial space industry as well and now
i'm at nasa's jet propulsion laboratory working on the mars 2020 perseverance rover don't forget to
visit me the virtual experience april 10 2021 it's the world's largest space and
astronomy expo go to neath expo.com i hope you have a great time
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[Music]
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[Music] and now folks it's time to say good
night we sincerely appreciate your patronage and hope we've succeeded in bringing you an enjoyable evening of
entertainment please drive home carefully and come back again soon good night
you