Transcript:
hello we have adrian back
[Music]
okay so um if you guys were waiting around for us
we were having a little bit of technical difficulty required a couple of reboots then john
goss from the astronomical league saved the day and recommended that i just create a whole new
instance of a meeting which i did and it worked so um
but anyhow all of you that are chatting with us now mike wiesner
cameron gillis martin eastbourne christy white bergman scooter and harold locke who
says that took forever yes it seemed like an eternity to me so but uh
we are um we're happy to be here with the 41st global star party and we've got a great
program for you so stay tuned
harold block said did i hear all the calls that he made
all right my obligatory sound check cool
good
okay and i've just sent a message to stella hopefully she'll be back
as well and then we can get then we can get our 41st um
41st global store party started scotty
can i hope everybody can hear me if we can hear you good
great loud and clear great oh stella's back
here we are stella we're back and we're we're online and we're doing fine and we're singing
and dancing awesome [Music]
like you know i was running out of fuel with the lunar module you know and just had like 30
seconds to go and all these alarms were going off and and uh
somehow by listening to the sanity of john goss
i made it and still uh thank you for your patience
being so patient with us tonight of course it's a pleasure to be here as always and when we put you on nobody's
gonna cut you off
um
are you there wendy good
okay and i'll be done soon too
uh [Music]
welcome back to earth from space ahead of tomorrow psk's journey to the international space station the
copenhagen sentinel 2 mission takes us over cape canaveral in the united states in a region known as the space coast
cape canaveral is a cape and city and brevit county in east central florida
the cave is separated from the mainland
from east to west the cape area is part of the region known as the space coast
and is home to the kennedy space center including space shuttle landing facility
a visited center cape canaveral air force station
and a space vehicle assembly building launch complex 39a visible along the
coast is where the saturn rocket carrying apollo 11 began its voyage to the moon
in 1969 before the space program was launched
cape canaveral was a stretch of bowering sandy scrub land the cape was chosen from rockefellers
only to its close proximity to the equator as the linear velocity of earth's
surface is greatest towards the equator the southerly location of the cape allows for rockets to take advantage of
this by launching eastwood in the same direction as earth's rotation
the space center is included in the merit island national wildlife refuge visible on the top which occupies more
than 500 square kilometers of estuaries and marshes
the city of cape canaveral lies just south of the space center and is around eight kilometers north of cocoa beach
visible on the bottom is from cape canaveral where french easter astronaut toronto will be
launched on his second mission to the international space station tomorrow will be the first issa
astronaut to fly on a spacex crew dragon launching on a falcon 9 rocket together with nasa astronauts shane kimbrough and
megan macarthur and jaxa astronaut akihiko kushina
tomorrow will be the first european to launch from the us since 2011 when roberto from italy flew on board space
shuttle endeavour during his six-month mission called
alpha tomorrow spent much of his time on scientific research and will also be carrying out maintenance tasks as part
of the station's crew towards the end of his mission he will serve as commander of the station
he will be the fourth european to hold the post of commander after esa astronauts frank the win
ghost and luca
um
well hello everybody this is scott roberts with explore scientific and uh thank you for hanging
in there while while i had some technical difficulties uh uh starting up the stream but we're all
here and um it's great to see all of you in the audience out there and uh
you know thanks for tuning in we have a great program for you today um with uh
you know uh a whole list of i i created the whole uh
schedule for you but like like we always do we start off with
a welcome some welcoming words and beautiful poetry from david levy who's with us
here tonight and uh david thank you so much for coming on and you know each one
of you guys that are on right now i want to thank you very much for your patience and your advice and just kind of hanging
out with me while i get got this thing sorted out um but uh
i guess if it was easy everyone would do it but you know so there you go but um anyhow uh let's take it away
david well thank you very much scott and it's so good to uh that we finally got things
going we lost one a few weeks ago with a similar problem and we were pretty sure sure we were
going to lose tonight but it turned out we didn't so i want to thank all of us who are
able to stay on and all of you all over the world who are able to join us tonight
and specifically i wanted to thank stella kafka who is still here with us tonight very patient and adrian bradley
also very patient tonight and thanks for joining us and you guys are going to be
on very very shortly um tonight's my quote is not actually a
poem it's going to be a prose quotation tonight and it's from the book middle march
by um by george eliot and
she wrote this many many years ago in the early 19th century i believe
and i remember when i was a student at mcgill middle march was one of the books and it
was a great big doorstop of a book and i really didn't read it then it's
probably one of the reasons that i flunked out of mcgill back in 1967 and again in 1968
my doctorate at the hebrew university i stumbled over this book almost
literally again and i started to read it
and it was pretty interesting until i got to this quote
that i want to share with you right now does it seem incongruous to you that a
middle march surgeon should dream of himself as a discoverer
most of us indeed know little of the great originators until they have been lifted up among the
constellations and already rule our fates but that herschel for example who broke
the barriers of the heavens did he not once play a provincial church organ and give music lessons dissembling
pianists each of these those shining ones had to walk on the earth among neighbors who
perhaps thought more of his gait and his garments than of anything which was to give her
or him a title to everlasting fame each of them had a little personal
history sprinkled with small temptations and sordid cares which made the
retarding friction of their courses towards final companionship with the immortals
so this is a little bit of a thought about the idea of discovery you never know
when and where you're going to find something new in the night sky a new variable star
we're going to hear from stella soon about that a new interesting thing that we can
photograph we're going to hear from adrian a little after that about that or even a comet in the night sky
so on that note i hand it back to you scotty take it away and thank you okay
okay great all right so uh up next is uh it's it's my special
pleasure to introduce uh stella kafka stella is uh with the uh american association of
variable star observers and she's been on our program i think twice before and
uh she is uh she's um she's amazing uh
a big force in in the astronomical world uh for us and um uh she uh is one of the
most inspiring people i've ever heard from the double a vso and um so
uh stella thank you for coming on to our program again thank you for having me it's actually a
privilege to be here and thank you for actually the wonderful company on friday nights
it's uh we can't hang out in person but again social distancing doesn't mean
social isolation in the previous i'm going to share my screen for a second the previous couple
of uh times that i had the um
the privilege of being on your show we talked a little bit about the avso and the women of the avs so the avsos work
uh and i'm hoping you're going to hear more from john goss who is a little bit later today
we talked about an international community that we we are and we're building and that international community is
extremely diverse it's all over the world we have people with different needs different priorities different interests
different professional preparation habits and cultural backgrounds we have in our community individuals who
are interested in using variable star data for research we work with educators and students who want to introduce
astronomy to to the classroom we work with an international community that is interested in learning about variable
stars and what kind of information we get out of of science we also
collaborate with a very dedicated group of volunteers and of course our observers those who acquire data through
their telescope ccds dslr cameras and share this information with the wider
community through the avso international database and the beauty of this is that what
brings everybody together in this business is the love of the night sky and the wish to understand what is out
there april is a global volunteer month which recognizes the thousands of people
around the world who serve our communities so celebrating global volunteer months i
would like to acknowledge our volunteers these are extraordinary individuals who are key for the avs for success they
contribute in various aspects of our operation and science they enrich the avso with their knowledge they help us
improve as an organization and help me grow as a person and a member of this organization
truly we're talking about um a group of more than 150 individuals
and it would that bringing a wealth of expertise
other than our observers we're talking about our ambassadors who are our youth
group that is representing the aavso and is doing so much good work to not only disseminate the work of the aavso but
also do research at headquarters we have individuals who are helping with different aspects they
stand uh by staff to even do menial things uh day-to-day things that
are necessary for the the smooth operation of the avso we have a suite of small telescopes save avs or net bsms
and that are run completely by volunteers the last couple of years we have been commun collaborating with a group from
the harvard business school to help us with our strategic plan they were doing pro bono work
and they were key to help us understand the organization from outside in we have individuals who are working
behind the scenes to set the charts and sequences which are essential for observing
campaigns and any observing program we have our instructors for choice courses individuals who are sharing
their wisdom with the community and help observers and and newcomers to different
modes of observation to to sharpen the skills learn more we have data validators what makes our
databases so uh popular and makes professional astronomers trust the data
is the fact that data do go through a thorough validation process and it would have been impossible with a database of
more than 42 million data points the data coming in every single day would have been impossible to do at
headquarters without the the help of volunteers we have our mentors who are
individuals experienced in different aspects of observational astronomy and or software who are
standing by members of our community new observers observers who want to learn and bounce
ideas of a most more experienced individual and actually help them um
improve their skills actually when i started my uh binocular program my mentor was the person who helped me
navigate the night sky and find my star of interest so this is a mode of learning that worked very well for me we
have individuals who are working behind the scenes for software development and support and i can't thank them enough
everything that we have is online and all the tools all the beautiful tools and stable infrastructure that
we're all enjoying at the avso is in their hands we have individuals who work
on translations for our manuals our our educational resources we're bringing
those resources in different languages in front of individuals all over the world in languages that they understand
that can communicate we have the vsx variable star index team
vss is our super catalog right now of the variable star information has more than two million data
stars in there so we're talking about a huge uh huge work that gets into
renewing information on the stars and actually importing new lists of newly discovered variable stars
we have our board our leadership team is actually a group of volunteers who are overseeing um their organization makes
making sure that we have the resources we need to do our work is the they're the individuals who have the
vision the strategic vision of where the organization is moving forward our committees right now we have 10
different committees that are looking uh from programs to membership to um
a diversity diversity committee to our finances and endowment and governance
everything at the journal of the adso are wonderful and dynamic uh
editor-in-chief is a volunteer and so is the editorial board that is actually
behind the the journal and section leaders observing sections that are actually key for our community build and
for uh exchanging ideas and learning from each other and different stars of interest
and um and also what's new what's exciting what's happening in the the observing of
the night sky so these are people that i would like to thank i wish i could thank them one by one but i'm pretty sure
other people would like to talk today uh but for more information on these different teams we're highlighting each
team every day we have a social media campaign please follow us on facebook twitter and instagram if you want to
learn what these individuals are doing who they are and actually if you want you can join us and help us with our
mission join our team of volunteers and be part of the avso and with that i will
stop sharing my screen thank you for the opportunity to thank those who are making this organization great
thank you very much thank you very much stella okay so uh up next um is uh adrian uh
adrian is um uh astrophotographer he's been doing this
beautiful uh night sky photography a good friend to uh
david levy and to i think amateur astronomers everywhere so uh it's great to have you back on the
program again we loved your beautiful uh work from the last program and uh so
adrian take it away all right hopefully everyone can hear me
um i am going to do a quick short presentation on things that
i've been able to see since i've started this journey of imaging the night sky
and let's see i should just be able to share the screen
and there it goes so night sky phenomena is what i call it
um i've done a lot of driving to some dark places and there are nights that i've been
surprised by the things that i notice in the night sky i may be going after milky way which is like my favorite type of
photography but i'll end up seeing something else that i didn't expect
um so so here's a short presentation um this image was i took maybe two or
three years ago um snapped the meteor didn't even see this image take place i was just
imaging this part of the milky way and someone next to me says that you see
that meteor i look up and there's this big bright meteor that ended up next to
the milky way so one of those unique shots that quite frankly you know you get through
luck sometimes or you know how you feel i had just missed imaging a meteor that
was below my frame that i saw and so this was
i was happy i was ready to kick my equipment until i saw this so
so i saw that um here you have something near and dear to
david's heart a comet this is neowise and this is in ann arbor michigan ann
arbor's known for a lot of light pollution michigan stadium and things like that
um pretty bright city but there are pockets that are that are a little darker than you expect
you've got uh lightning bugs here so i was able to frame the comet in june um
in the summer you know this past summer uh 2020 and that's one of the images that i was
able to take of the comet so that's uh type of image you get if we
get another beautiful bright comet in the sky um you can capture it
yeah the lightning bugs are cool yeah it's um well we won't go back but yeah that
was another i'd like the fact that i kind of caught a lot of those light pollution we generally don't have
use for it at all except for if there's flat ice crystals in the sky and when they're in haze and when they
are you get light pillars um they can resemble aurora aurora
towers they're commonly called light pillars the light is refracted
in a column up in the sky and it depends on the conditions i took this shot in december
last year it was pretty cold it was up at alcona um
northern part of the lower northern lower part of michigan where i was able to take this so it was
a uh i almost did not come up here to take the shot i think i mentioned that in the last uh star party that i i almost
skipped coming to this lake or this pond but i'm glad i did
um so coming next uh it'll be interesting to see if next winter
i get a chance to see these again because um i don't know i believe these are pretty
rare so i was happy to have an image of them real aurora
it's a little easier to see if you go to the thumb of michigan or to the u.p but
i picked this particular picture because of the light pillars that are part of watching aurora from a distance
the similarity to the last image with the light pillars and now as a photographer you frame your photos
you know to make them look beautiful this is uh lake huron right there on the tip of the thumb if
you picture the lower peninsula of michigan so far the shots i've shown are lower peninsula michigan
i think just about everything else except for one or two photos that i'll show you are lower peninsula so
because i happen to live in the state there's some beautiful areas that we can go to and we can get these photographs
this is the same place there's light coming looks like it's coming from behind the house
um the zodiacal light usually happens right around the equinoxes this is
probably the last vestiges of the zodiacal light many may not have seen it
but it's um it's definitely out there the darker your skies the better a chance you get
to see the zodiacal light from the equinox a couple of weeks
in fact i'd say a whole almost a whole month after the equinox
and you see this zodiacal light and it's um
it can be quite beautiful i'll have another image of it later on there's something interesting for those
that uh try catching the very moment of twilight
what you have vestiges of the milky way and stars but you have a
blue and increasingly blue sky if you're if you're watching this is from the upper peninsula that's tacloman
falls uh the uppers is kwamen and falls it's amazing how fast the sunlight grows
about five minutes after i took this picture these stars in this milky way were gone
all you had was sunlight it you get an idea of how fast the sun rises especially around uh equinox time
it's around one of the fact it's one of the fastest sunrises you'll see if you watch sunrise around the equinox
here's another view now my camera is pulling in more of the blue light
that um that shows up but here you are you've got a milky way he's got stars
but there's blue light and this is actually the moon rise this was the little afternoon moon so this glow it's
not the sun it's the moon rise when the sun comes up you can see none of this uh it's very bright
at that point but this is this is an interesting it's an interesting target if you're used to night sky
photography especially if you do wide angle photography try catching the very moment
that the astronomical twilight begins and you'll watch as this milky way fades
minute by minute your stars fade to the point where they eventually get
washed out it's a different twist on milky way vistas and this of course is
lake huron again back in the summer another zodiacal light
this is after sunset and [Music] the zodiacal light at the time was a lot
brighter this was a little closer to the equinox day i think i went back a
week after and i saw this it was actually annoying because i wanted to image the milky way
the winter milky way arching over the lake i got the zodiacal light i had been looking for the zodiacal
light for some years and said i want to see it well i got to see it
and for visual astronomers they'll actually get annoyed by but it's still pretty amazing and as we
we believe now zodiacal light it's planetary dust i think we we had a different definition for it but
we know that it's planetary dust on the plane of our solar system and because in the equinoxes that's when it's the
easiest to see it so you'll see this again september 22nd is the fall equinox
you'll have to look for this before sunrise um spring's easier because it's sunset it's
a little easier and there's andromeda also setting um the andromeda galaxy
over here so this is a view this is uh port crescent state park
um trying to combine a couple of phenomena here
lake huron point of bach lighthouse aurora milky way
i thought it was cool um i always try to do something a little different when you get to a portal 2
milky way this is the upper peninsula you can process and you can get really
in-depth with your milky way shots this is a single frame that i've
denoised and processed and look at what i'm getting here this part
of the bulge that we're seeing a lot of dust clouds
you can barely see m8 over here you can barely
see some of the others i believe this is 16 17 i'd i'd have to look some of those
up um there are a lot of um there's a lot of things in this that are
in miniature that you could go up and down the milky way and you'd see light coming from it
so it's um i always liked deeper milky way shots if you if you've got really good
vision the coat hangers right here and this of course is antares
and let's see i think that may be my final slide that was so um
those are some phenomena that you can chase um if you're doing wide-angle photography
at night um mixing it up trying to combine the night
in the morning gets you some interesting results and there are applications out
there that can tell you uh when things like the aurora may be happening
and some of the best places to see it light pillars i think you just have to you just have
to get lucky if it's really cold out um go somewhere
north and hope that there's flat ice crystals in the air if you see a halo
around the moon you may be able to go somewhere and see the light pillars as well the halo
indicates that there's uh that you know there's some refraction going on
in the atmosphere so so good luck with that most of these are visual and i just like to take the
images so that i have i have them with me wherever i go that's my presentation
adrian thank you so much that's awesome hold on scotty just before we go on i would like to just say that we should
introduce adrian as the man who makes his camera sing
yes yes i appreciate that
beautiful images thank you thank you um okay so coming up next here is uh
now uh uh still our youngest uh presenter uh and also one of our most
prolific presenters which is libby and the stars and libby has been on with us um
uh for i just looked it up i think our first
vert the star party used to be called virtual star party when i started it back in
august of last year and uh our first pride program was august uh
uh august 4th 2020 and so it was really uh it was great to have
libby come into our building and i could see her enthusiasm and uh
and she has uh she's grown with us she's she has presented lots of amazing
presentations so libby thank you for coming onto our show so many times
i am looking forward to the day that libby can be co-host of the show
which we'll talk about here later so libby it's all yours take care
thank you for having me on um last time we had a lot of internet issues because
we had some clouds over us and our internet
and i was so sad because i did a lot of work on my presentation and i was excited to do this one so
ago um when i was about eight i went to a lot of shows like planetarium shows talking about temperature and as far as
temperature and um as far as life is a part of how much temperature it has
and i was excited about
[Music]
on data from um
other science
around their color and just
to be able to be like oh that one is kind of a bluish color so
like that temperature and um
that i got kicked off last time because i i worked hard on creating the
chart and um it was like to be shared
um go down there on the right
did we lose the libby again here ah yeah
as soon as i think as soon as uh she began presenting um
it i think she hit a bandwidth bottleneck here she's back so i say we give her another shot come
on libby your internet's gotta hold up for you yeah
[Music] yeah libby why don't you move to a
little better spot in the house and um
you come back [Music] yeah
i made this a short presentation this time um because i'm still working with the wi-fi and stuff but um
[Music] right now i can't lose the school best because i have a full computer set up
and everything real quick this presentation real quick and try to get as much information as i can before it
kicks me off again which i don't think will happen in a couple like 10 minutes so
i can get that done it will stop bloating
yeah i think you got clear again libby when you're when you had shut your video off
um if you go video off and share let's see if that works
give us a sound check now we can't hear audio
so we can see your mouse moving and we can we can hear it now okay we can hear you now sometimes glitches i
need to work on that but um i made a sarchar and on the left you can see is a star
beetlejuice and as you can see that is the color of white and yellowish white
and yellowish orange so it would be around that temperature but another thing is that's at the end of the chart
which means it's mostly at the end of life but um another thing i wanted to talk
about is the stars life cycle because um i love this chart so much because it just gives
a lot of clarification and just makes it so much more simple to understand but when um
when a star is at yellowish white not yellowish white but yellowish orange
and yellow color it is mostly a main sequin star and um
and then it has two parts on the chart so as you can see the main sequence star
most stars spend most of their life into the mainstream sequence star stage so
kind of think of it like i think a bit about
why most people spend most of their [Music]
um
about the same size of the sun and i was thinking oh snap you know juice is going to die soon but you also have to
remember that a cycle can span over billions
and millions of years and most most of the time
that the star will spend much of this life
just after being
okay i was able to get most of that i think we did yeah it was it's very good presentation
it's i just think it i don't know if it's a router or just internet just gets flooded and it just starts chopping her
up it started to get a little better when she turned off her video but yeah yeah still um i think she needs to
perhaps move to another part of the house where the wi-fi is better
but we're going to move on okay um and uh libby can uh try to
are you still there yeah i'll just talk from what's up i'll just talk from what's on my
presentation and just read i'll just read you guys that so our son
is um
[Music]
oranges color almost even red and a lot of them that our sun has a
window dyson that long but um and it will explode now i don't think we'll be
in the generation that that happens and i don't think there will be any more human life on earth
long time ago you were talking about this and um i was thinking about this more
we won't be on earth there won't be any humans on earth but um
earth our sun will explode and earth will feel it so earth if we leave any evidence that we were
here if we're thinking like oh earth will last forever it won't i mean that sounds
a little bit dark but um people will probably be here for a long long time
not a million years but i don't think our sun will explode from when we are on
this planet earth and this generation and this these people on the star party
unless something bad happens because our son is at the end of
maybe a mainstream sequence
and um our generation death are going to live to
almost more than a million years old but i definitely think that will happen
someday and i know we were talking about this a long long time ago and i just started to wonder about earth not
earth's color the sun's color because you can tell what temperature it is
and so it would be very very hot like other
stars probably was a long long long time ago the sun would have been much
hotter and um we wouldn't be able to live in the solar system because we'd practice practically be burning right
now because you would be able to feel the heat all the way from our planet earth and um
temperature is also an important thing for when you are um [Music] when you are wondering about like
oh like when you were commencing like maybe you
went from an astronaut to this sort of planet you're not able to
summon there if it's to have the planet venus we can't send people there because
it will melt all of the equipment that they'll know everything
so i think people would have been not been able to live on the earth and i don't think there were people on earth a
long long time ago maybe quite a while ago but not when the sun's color was blue and it was
flaming so thank you guys for having me on um
i'm definitely going to move my desk more by the
router um learn from experiences twice and hopefully the internet goblins will not
get me and win the whole star party but
well that's okay that's okay so a valiant effort libby
yeah absolutely i think that you're the internet goblin slayer
i love this presentation good job lily thank you [Music]
thank you libby okay all right so uh up next is uh john briggs john is
a telescope engineer a great astronomer a historian of
astronomy and is just the guy is magical in so many ways and
uh we're really really happy to have him back on our program john thank you for
coming on and also for some of the nice words you've said about this uh about the
global star party uh comparing it to some of the evening talks at the
cellophane and that kind of thing so thanks very much that's really cool and uh john it's all yours
very much my my pleasure scott and uh what i'd like to do is
um let's see share my screen because i have a pre-recorded thing
and um uh maybe you can refresh my memory how to is isn't there something i do to oh
yeah share computer sound simple as that that's right and uh
i'm let's see if that works and i'm going to stop my video if maybe
it's too late to do that but uh let's try slideshow
slideshow for beginning let's see if this works
hello this is john briggs speaking from new mexico i'm going to tell you a little bit about
the american
oh did it die
yes sir sound died yeah i wonder if the yeah the whole slideshow seems to be
stuck i guess yeah hold on let me let me try it again um
variable star observers and an introduction to observing
variable stars i'm lucky because here in new mexico
i have a backyard observatory and my sky is very dark
and beautiful it's a wonderful place to be interested in astronomy
some of my friends in albuquerque visit my backyard some of them are expert
astrophotographers like bob fugate who recorded this wonderful shot of the milky way is isn't it great
here's the same view recorded just a little bit more deeply
and doesn't a shot like this dramatize
the wonder of the sky and
the appeal of astronomy for all of us most people just don't
realize this stuff is up there um we're lucky those of us who even know a
little bit about it this is the same view of the milky way
recorded by bob fugate when the the milky way was rising above the
magdalena mountains again recorded for my backyard
it's not a trick shot it's not um photoshopped or anything like that it's
really conveying to us the beauty of the sky that's there that's real that's simply just beyond
the ability of of human human vision
now many people think of the sky and the stars and the constellations as mainly
static and unchanging of course the planets move around and then occasionally something dramatic
happens like this recent comment that many of us saw um this shot was recorded
by my friend here in magdalena eric tupes and the two little white dots down
in the lower left those are the domes in my backyard observatory obviously i live in a very
very remote sort of place but the sky is actually
dramatically changing in many ways the sky and its phenomena are actually
wonderfully dynamic if you take the time to tune in to these
dynamic changes
so when we look at an exposure like this of the milky way with near countless stars
the fact is many of these stars are changing
and sometimes in essentially unimaginably
violent ways at least compared to our
humble human scale
the the stars may look static and unchanging and tranquil in their beauty
but there's violence sometimes there are pulsations there are explosions there
are all manner of things going on that if you stop and think about them if you
are aware of these phenomena well it's really pretty mind-blowing it's
potentially very engaging if you tune into it
i want to try to share with you a story of my own first particularly dramatic engagement with
stars the change now i happen to go to a high school that had a six-inch
refractor in a small observatory it was an old telescope but i had great fun
with it so it made me interested in the old observatories in new england where i
grew up and i dreamt of larger observatories that i heard about that
existed around me and college campuses and places like this one at amherst college
observatory recorded in a postcard i would see pictures of these things and
the pictures were almost dream like to me and made me uh very curious
here's another postcard of amherst college observatory this one a little colorized and what i learned is that
this place was built with one of the largest refracting telescopes in new
england in the early 20th century
it made me curious i never attended amherst college as a
student but i instead more economically attended university of massachusetts in
amherst and the nature of the astronomy department there allowed students like
me at the state school to have access to the the the private college
observatory now this picture is a little bit fuzzy uh it's obviously a cool
telescope you can't quite tell how big it is maybe unless you look closely but
let me show you more amherst college observatory sure still
existed all right and a generous professor there gave me a set of keys to
the place and so my student friends and i well it was as though we owned it and we
could crawl all over it we could open the dome we could go up the
the stairway to the top of the dome look out and around it was amazing and
wonderful here's the view from the top
looking across the roof to the smaller dome
but here was the featured attraction a more wide-angle view showing you the
scale of what was in fact an 18-inch aperture refractor made by the alvin
clark and sons corporation and we had free run of this amazing
thing it was not just the telescope that
excited us it was everything about the installation it was the big dome it was the mechanized
observing ladder that's actually me on top of this observing ladder it went
around the pillar of the telescope on little train tracks uh via push button
command and the platform went up and down also via electric push button it was uh just
amazing the telescope we moved by hand though
there were various control wheels to slew it but also hanging ropes to to
further help with the manipulation very old school
here's my friend jim steemer who took most of these pictures a fellow student
at umass this was back in 1977 and there was a control panel there also
in the platform you could hold on to the telescope and and slew the platform
around and pull the telescope along with you as you pointed different uh
different spots of the sky absolutely amazing
but i want to get to the point of this story that still relates to
variable stars this fellow here was the astronomer who checked me out
using the telescope when i got keys to it his name was dr ron zizzle and he was
a specialist in variables variable stars he was quite a character as you could see anybody who plays bagpipes is a
character in my book but he was pretty good at it too
one night when i came to use the tall scope probably blowing off doing
homework which was all too typical for me um i i arrived at the observatory but
i found dr zissel was there and he had an attachment on the 18-inch refractor
that looked something like this now this is not the 18-inch refractor this is the 12-inch lick observatory but instead of
an eyepiece attached there's an electronic device an electronic sound
sensor a photoelectric photometer to measure the brightness of stars
zissel had one of these that he had built himself attached to the 18-inch so
he showed me what he was doing with it he was looking at a star
in aquarius known as cy of aquarius or
cy aquarii and just a little faint star too faint
to see by naked eye but it's circled here in this
uh wonderful map from a free stellarium
software a great way to learn the sky
here's that same software zoomed in a little bit so you can actually see the
star circled see why aquarii this is what zizzle was looking at
and he explained to me why it was special and i sat there and watched for
some time that evening this even more magnified map of the sky
around the star called cy um helps dramatize what was going on that
night cy aquarii is a fast changing
variable star changing brightness let's see
there are seven other stars labeled in this field of view with three digit
numbers and those numbers are referring to the brightness of
the nearby stars these were the reference stars for measuring the
brightness of cy for example the star immediately to the left of it
117 well that was actually a magnitude 11.7 star that's referring to the
brightness of course but they don't put the period in a map like this because they don't want the period to be
confusing for a star image anyway this was the brightness reference map typical
of what variable star observers use
we made a graph like this that night running over about an hour and a half
the amazing thing about this little star is that it changes very appreciably in
brightness over the course of only about 88 minutes
it's fluctuating it's pulsating like the star has a heartbeat
and an easily measurable brightness change
even quite detectable by eye through the telescope though dr zissel happened to
be measuring it electronically but in 88 minutes we were able to watch the star
go through a whole cycle and let's see in this graph an observer has recorded a
total of about four cycles going over a period of of some
five hours or so you have 5.7 hours so the graph is maybe boring
but you have compared to the beauty of the sky but you've got to think about
what the graph represents regarding what is actually going on in
real life in real nature uh before your eyes it the pulsation of a star is
really something of a cataclysmic thing even when it's as regular as the beating
of cy aquarii now out here in new mexico
i happen to have now a big old dobsonian telescope that
belonged to a very close friend of mine named jerry dyke back in massachusetts
he and i were close
close astronomy friends jerry dyke really got into measuring variable stars but simply by eye
it became one of the uh most special happy activities of of his spare time life
here's jerry with that same telescope back in massachusetts in a little observatory like was like a
shed but he called it his merry-go-round observatory because the whole shed
rotated and made it really easy for him to sweep the whole sky standing there
beside the telescope because the entire structure turned
the rotating observatory and nice dobsonian telescope made it possible to
for jerry to look at a lot of variable stars every clear night and he is holding one
of many awards here that he earned and i'm going to explain more about it
because over the course of his lifetime jerry made over 150
000 estimates of the brightness of changing variable stars
he simply loved the activity
he made his own little plaques that he hung in the observatory to commemorate
his progress reading from left to right there's one that of his sixty thousandth
estimate of a star called c z orionis then his seventy thousand
estimate of t z persei and then on and on uh one got water damage the the
little plaque commemorating his fun on the right hand side was his 100 000th
estimate of a star observed at mount wilson in 1995 he
continued this work until he had contributed over 150 000 estimates
here's clyde tombaugh the discoverer of pluto visiting jerry's observatory and signing
his logbook back in massachusetts wow
here's one of the awards that jerry earned and as you can see it was from
this interesting organization that facilitates this type of work the american association of variable star
observers
here's what was probably jerry's most beautiful award from the avso
for his long service um the organization has about 1
400 members if i remember correctly
this little book is what uh old timers like jerry and me used to learn how to
make these observations but nowadays essentially all the information you need
is available on the aavso's website
and here it is it's easy of course to google it
and as it dramatizes astronomers need your help variable stars are stars that change
brightness over time there are too many for professional astronomers to monitor alone
so we need your help to monitor these stars over days weeks and years
and it really is a fascinating activity you feel
like you've connected to these stars when you begin to to become familiar with their uh behavior
there are tutorials that explain everything you need to know about the business
including like what a light curve is the graph of brightness versus time
all sorts of practical information that i fear is not normally taught in
in a college astronomy course nowadays hands-on stuff that you need to
teach yourself or learn with the help of an organization like avso
i'm talking about the real nuts and bolts of the practical astronomy
necessary to make these visual estimates let alone how to do it with electronic
detectors some avso members uh indeed
do it in terms of a high-tech approach with very sensitive equipment but it's
still entirely possible to make these measurements even from urban skies from
light polluted skies because many variable stars are bright enough to see
in less than perfect skies
there's information on the website for using star charts including more
specialized ones specific to variable stars explaining
the uh brightness scale of nearby stars used for making estimates of the
changing star there are suggestions for easy to find
stars that are are are bright so you do not have to be in new mexico
to engage with this activity
and of course there's information on the website about how to record your estimates and submit them to the
organization of course the hope is that interested people will become members of
the organization and fully embrace everything that's offered there are many
educational programs courses seminars webinars
a lot to engage with it is a wonderful opportunity
information look for in the website is the 10 star training program
10 easy to find stars changing brightness for a variety of
astrophysical reasons that you would find up very interesting
everything you need to learn about these stars is there with basic instructions
and if you happen to be in the [Music] of southern hemisphere
there [Music] is an 11 star training tutorial lo
mentioned towards the bottom of this of this uh part of the website um and there
are instructions in english in in in polish and turkish in chinese and arabic
uh spanish and portuguese so so um because although it's the american
association of various variable star observers it is very much an international organization nowadays
it has a long rich history [Music] but it's it welcomes and collaborates
with everyone around the world
so i can't stress too strongly that you don't need these beautiful new mexico
dark skies to get into variable star observing there's a great sense of community that
you will enjoy if you embrace this and there are ongoing uh webinars and
courses uh uh avso member rich roberts has a new
course under development right now to explain to people how to make observations like what jerry dyke did
you don't have to make 150 000 observations over a lifetime
to be a welcome member of the avso but watch out it can become
such a happy addiction uh it might happen to you
but to wrap it up and to thank you for your attention i want to invite you to earn your reward
uh what you need to do visit the avso website it's easy to google for the first five people to answer
these three questions correctly in an email to me i'll send you a cool aavso
hat with built-in controllable red and white leds it's really something uh they
offered these hats on the avso store on the website but here are the questions what year was avso founded
what is j a v s a j-a-a-v-s-o
what is the name of the first star listed on the avso's 10-star tutorial
easy questions from the avso website send me an email with your address you know
there's my my address and i'll mail you one of these hats but only to the first five people they're cool hats they don't
fit my big head um but they're very nice hats hey thanks
for your attention everybody
that's awesome john do you happen to have one around yeah
yeah can you hear me uh yes we can
good um i'm sorry i'm i'm uh
inexperienced with uh zooming
and uh do i need to unshare my screen or have you already done that for you i can do that for you
oh thank you thank you yeah in a minute in a minute i'll flash a hat
and we'll we'll see if i get a great deluge of um
of emails but my presentation was longer than than i meant it to be but i could
resist so thank you for your attention and scott thank you for your tolerance uh as a program director there yeah
thank you very much john is a great presentation um so that's uh that's that's uh it's
wonderful and you come up with something new and interesting all the time and those
images were beautiful you know absolutely beautiful uh
okay so um we're going to be heading into a 10-minute
break but before we do john goss from the astronomical league
will talk about the league a little bit and also conduct
the door prize opportunities that we have here at uh every global star party um
john yes i'm still here yes yes yes you are
thank you thank you for having me um like just to take a moment here to
mention a few words about the astronomical league simply because we are now uh celebrating the 75th year
of the league it was founded on november 15th 1946 so 75 years kind of coming right up
but we've gone from an organization of about 1500 people up to um someplace between 18 and 19 000 i'm
not sure the exact numbers yet but we have many benefits of membership including our um our quarterly magazine
the reflector a lot of you probably know about our observing clubs which we have 70 of which encourage you to get out
underneath the stars and see what's up there for yourself covering a wide range of topics from
well some variable stars uh double stars nebula clusters things things like that
but i guess the main goal of the organization is trying to prompt people to get out under the stars
and enjoy themselves to see what the night sky has to offer one thing that we have here to uh today is a series of
questions um which i i'll show you in in just a moment uh
we had three questions asked last week and so this week i'll be giving you the answers for those three and then we have
another oh we got a hat over here john see john briggs is wearing his hat
say something john i'm gonna try to vogue with this hat but
i'm sorry i didn't mean to interrupt uh but like it looks like
okay then that is a pretty cool hat right there oh yeah
red lights and everything well see something like that would come in very handy uh under the night sky
with red lights you go into it into white light as well so uh
they're all controllable brightness fully adjustable
yeah it's very it's a different graduate degree
oh okay yeah there you go um
i lost my train of thought i'm sorry i i was not helpful
anyway i do have a few questions to ask trivia questions uh and
if you know the answers um you can send them in to our league secretary at uh secretary at
astrology.org i'll show you that in just a moment do a little screen sharing
and i'm going to put it here in chat there we go
good well it'll be on the screen here in just a moment uh first thing we always like to do is remind people that when
they do look at the sun even though this is not a topic about the sun today but when you go out look at the sun please
be very careful which and no know what you're doing with filters and all that um this is something that's going to come
up more and more because since you're all astronomers you know that in just
one week and one day less than three years from now we will have the next solar eclipse come across the united
states so this is going to be more in the public eye and we got to make sure that we that everybody understands that
observing the sun how to do it safely okay from last week we had
uh three questions the first one was what year was the hubble telescope launched
and of course now you know the answer is 1990. that was question number one
question number two is what i guess is kind of a history about your history questions here what was the date of the
last mercury transit it was november 11th 2019 which i have a story for that
because i happened to be as a tourist touring through arizona and visiting uh
flagstaff and i happened to come across on this day without realizing it this is all their telescopes pointed at at the
sun and i got to see mercury right out of the blue i didn't realize what's going on third question what is the name of the
largest crater on the moon a lot of people really don't realize this is south the south pole aiken basin
which is huge it's uh like 1500 miles in diameter pretty deep and it's one of the oldest and largest
craters on the moon as well as any place in the solar system
we had a number of winners from from a couple weeks ago
so these names will be added to our door price list and they'll be randomly uh selected and they'll receive some
prizes from the astronomical league so we had uh six people from that event a couple weeks ago
okay the questions for this week if you have the answers uh please send them to our
league secretary which is secretary secretary at astrology.org
and give the answers and hopefully you'll be a lucky winner first question
one thing we like doing is trying to get people to go out and look at the sky see what's up there so we're
trying to encourage you to go out and understand and see the best you can to obtain the clear sharpest views of
surface detail when is the best time of day to observe the first quarter moon through binoculars or a telescope first
quarter moon will be in another i think three days so now's your opportunity answer a is shortly after sunset b
around midnight c just before sunrise so one of those three
i think is correct second question
on over here
later this month on april 26th 27th and early 28th and 29th mars will lie in the
sky right near the uh open cluster m35
which can easily be seen in binoculars so this would be a kind of a cool thing to see uh on on these evenings you
probably want to wait until the 28th to look at it simply because the moon will be fairly bright and on the 28th the
moon will rise after 10 o'clock so you can see mars in the dark sky before the moon rises but anyway how much further
farther from earth is m35 than mars is m35 100 times farther away
is it about a million times farther away big number or is it over 100 million times farther
away it helps you get an idea on how big big space really is
so we don't we have some a question about eyepieces this is not your brand x eyepiece this is something close to
explore scientific's heart right there when looking through a telescope
an eyepiece with a shorter focal length gives a lower magnification than one with a longer focal length
is that true or b is it false or c uh the focal length of an eyepiece
doesn't play a role in magnification at all so this helps um bring out the idea of
our equipment trying to give you an idea on what our equipment entails and all the cool stuff that that we have and that is
offered out there so this is a question about eyepieces um
scott that's the questions i have that's it okay all right well thank you very much you know
uh it's wonderful to have the astronomical league uh with us uh every
global star party i also want to mention too that they run a um a regular program called astronomical
league live too we are are we're privileged to do the broadcasting
for it but they run they pulled together just an amazing program of speakers and presentations and you can learn a lot
about the league from watching these programs also too we have the astronomical league
convention john do you want to talk a little bit about that sure um i think a lot of people are
aware that we have an annual convention called alcon and what that really is is a gathering
bringing together um people uh who are interested in the hobby to learn a little bit more we have
speakers talking about the whole range of of topics uh people could be talking about at all variable stars always give
variable stars of a pitch here because that it's an interesting topic but we have others we could have astronauts
come in talk about this or that with space we can have uh professors observatory people come in
talk about their their observing projects mission specialists from robotic missions on other planets we
have uh observers talk about whatever they like to see in the sky so that that type of thing but this year
well last year was the first year and since we started this that we didn't have one for obvious reasons
this year we're going to have a virtual alcon um try that out and uh hopefully next year
we'll get back into the swing of things with a traditional in-person meeting but it's a lot of fun and
what i personally like about it is that you meet a lot of people um you meet a lot of people who you already
know but you also meet people you don't know and that really enriches your experience under the stars and with with
the hobby itself so uh you'll be hearing more about alcon as it comes along it'll be in early august
i don't have the dates memorized but i think they have been finalized but i'm not quite sure what they are but it's early august it'd be for a few days then
so i'll turn it back over to you scott okay well that's great all right so uh we're going to take a
well-deserved ten minute break here we're running about 30 minutes behind
that's because of our the technical difficulty that we had at the beginning of our program
that's all been solved at this point i hope you're enjoying a global star party number 41 uh right now and um
uh we'll you know grab a sandwich or take a little break stretch your legs uh and we'll be back in 10.
all right john that's a that is an awesome hat
that's really good all right i'm going to take advantage of the break myself so i'll see you guys
you
[Music]
well hello everybody this is scott roberts back again from our 10-minute break here
we've had some fabulous speakers uh for the fir for the 41st global star party
and um we have a couple of uh astronomers that will be
speaking next uh first up is cesar brollo from buenos aires argentina uh
he's an optician yes hey how are you
hi i'm fine scott how are you great it's great to see you back on the program uh cesar has been on many of our
programs before uh he even took us live to the last total eclipse
of the sun in argentina so that was uh just last year that was fantastic uh he
braved the wind and uh uh you know even under some of the most adverse conditions we still got to see
uh the eclipse happen so that was very nice absolutely it was like a strange weather reporter
i remember a nightmare but beautiful eclipse yeah right yes
and uh cesar before i know you have a presentation but you also
brought on a uh phd astronomer from uh ohio state that now lives in argentina
who is um uh his name is pedro um
yes and so he'll be coming up next after you absolutely so that's great all right
well cesar i'm going to give you the uh i'm going to give you the stage and uh let you uh speak
on your new presentation here yes um tonight i i took uh many pictures
maybe 50 from
an object an area really in the south southern cross constellation
um in the in the zone very south hemifer area
where you have in this area um
the the stars it's one of those of the stars of uh
southern cross let me first of all let me uh
screen let me share the screen sorry
we can start with stellarium
you told me if you can see cerarium it's okay
[Music] yeah we can see it yeah okay okay well
let me see uh well this area of uh uh the song that
i where i took the picture uh i took the picture with a 30
millimeters zoom is the same that the same equipment
that i used last time maybe two three weeks ago to take a picture of i don't remember if
attack arena i guess i remember but uh tonight i focused in the area of uh
jewel box and the stars which name is mimosa
and it's the mimosas is b groups and um
near to the mimosa and is you can see a red colored star
but this really in different the the bright of the stars
um of course that the area of of uh jewelry box is very interesting i
have a very different type of stars but this is not my specialty
my my experiment was only take a picture uh from
from a me change the
stop share and [Music]
i show you the picture
okay i open now the same area that we have
we gotta start watching the the wall picture
in the in the original position is
was this [Music]
well this is how i took the picture today
today maybe only one one hour ago
now is a little cloudy but i have i was lucky
uh to take the pictures the pictures are fresh are not in my my
files if others are really take from the balcony and
near to mimosa i sorry too much
[Music]
it's pretty tight here yes i'm sorry yes this is the red one
star and this is the shareware box
this is um of course that i only took a really really fast
uh processing only with uh this you can see yes you can see the um
this screen i change it to the to the
uh processing program you can see because i don't know if i need to change
any to to be more sure about this
i prefer here this is how i started to to work in the
image i took only 50 pictures and i'm i have the idea to do to talk with the
people that uh the people that are starting with us or photography
that uh this type of photography is not for for uh
only take a a great picture if not is to to understand the sky
especially in the cities my idea sometimes is talk with the people that
using something if for example if they have some type of filter like red filter
blue filter yellow filter i don't know to to use to separate different colors
of a star learn about read about the different kinds of stars the different types
um the idea is is ever
working something more more interesting to to see this picture
use the the the particularity of of uh
each of each
camera that people can can have especially graphics coming up maybe sometimes
all ones and use this type of pictures to take a picture
fast use of course a picture for stacking maybe 30 50
and in the city if you have this picture is
first of all don't over processing
only use that thing that is a picture from from the city and
use this um to to compare with this terrarium or another programs
um of course the people today they can use um
brams or or applications like uh salt uh plate but
sometimes the people have too much information in the picture you know the problem with the soul uh
the plate solve is that sometimes they have a lot of information like a
map um it's much better use the the the the picture
finish it and starting to to see the color of the stars and comparing
the type of of the star in another params like a solarium or another you know
any of uh of uh of program that that they can have
this is very interesting for example well this this or uh
joy box is full of different colors of terms unfortunately
in my pictures i don't have the the great big uh
different colors but you can see maybe that you have different colors between the blue ones um maybe this is
more red and um and this is how
uh kids especially uh that are introducing for astrophotography as a photography it's
not more for astrophotography if not to use uh the camera
like another tool like another eyepiece electronic eyepiece to have
uh an area to to to concern to have
uh to to ask about or or make questions
about they can see in their pictures not only a great picture if not
something to to start to to to are more interested this is the idea
and you know my my sky is is really have a
very very uh it's very polluted area but you know
it's i i took this picture uh with a reference camera with a zoom
objective uh normally this room the zoom is a very
uh 30 millimeters of of
sorry of focal length and if you use the the
the conversion is you are using around 40 millimeters of focal length
when you use cameras with fps as sensor size
but the best thing is with a single a quarter mount with a movement
and rectangle resolution you can you can uh yes crop sensor very
nice crop sensor and yes because you need to when you use a
regular reference camera have not the full sensor size if not uh
how how adrian say is the case is uh thank you adrian um
is um something that we can multiplicate what by
1.6 in canon reference for example um the
it's really interesting for for for kids for to they that they know
how many feel they have in the picture and start to compare
uh of course that plate salt is an excellent tool but they need to start to compare
uh between a celestial map and their picture and understand
all that they have in in the picture who is the information is the color of the stars
you know i i really i love this technical things for
to learn to to teach for people or talk about come on do you have a reference camera
do you have a cultural amount or you know is the best way is the best way
[Music] yes great okay
all right well thank you so much it's a pleasure thank you every time it's a pleasure
and we always get how you want to this team cesar why don't you introduce pedro
scissor to um to our audience and uh and then we'll let him get this
presentation yes i know to pedro saizar
from the 90s 96 i think
and pedro when pedro returned from his doctoral
in ohio and he
went to live in to the south uh very very in the south of argentina
and when he returned to buenos aires to live in buenos aires around 2000
we started to make star parties together with pedro pedro of course that
he helped me all the time uh with the contents of the third party and he
teach to the people about the struggle of me because he really
he's a he's a great friend and really is a is a great teacher uh and really he
loves spend time to to talk with the people very very uh
it's very easy to understand him about astronomy he
he wrote a very nice very nice book that is very
interesting about an easy way to
to know astronomy and in our third parties in mendoza he ever
is is uh concerned about if uh we have a barbecue in the you know at 4
a.m barbecue um because the the
astronomers professional astronomers uh in uh in these third parties for
amateurs really they they enjoy uh the surprise the materials are parties
and really he's a a great part of of our star paris
really um is a genius pedro he's a young he's a
friend pedro it's your time
well good night good evening [Music] and thank you for the invitation
starters it's a pleasure being here um i i really think of a topic just to
introduce myself this first time although cesar did it badly uh when i go
to a star parish what i enjoy is the food
and next the stars
the company the food the stars the view the beer every everything there is to
offer there to me after me is like fishing you enjoy fishing uh
not only because of the fish but because of everything that is surrounding
like the company the scenery the river the water and in our case the stars
um so i don't know what as successors said i i
i did my phd in the high state back in the 90s then i came back to argentina
i'm living in patagonia now for the last over 15 years now
in the southern part of argentina
we are so far south that when we live on a journey
and somebody asked you where are you going you just say north what else
[Music]
ever any of you where is your hand if you've been to
patagonia no no no okay um you should it's
we have a great sky we don't have uh
on the on the set of the mountains the land is very flat so and there are no trees no hills
so it's like living under a huge planetarium dome the
sky the real sky is like a huge planetarium and then especially in winter when the
the milky way is hanging above your head the height of the beauty with hands
above your head is is great it's something that you will never forget
so you you don't need a telescope in patagonia just your own eyes
and and the they are 360 millimeters all around you
so um besides we have the dinosaurs we have the whales the penguins
um many many natural duties to sit here so
if you ever come this way just let me know and we go on
a tour what else
yes i did uh join cesar on several star parties we had a great
times there and uh as since ourselves uh i i like
i i began my career as a as a researcher i worked
uh for some time in nova scotia but
uh over the over the years i i visited uh that i was teaching and writing and
communicating in science with the public in general i did work for
for about 10 years in a dinosaur museum in the city where i lived in paleo
helping the museum to to deliver good information to the public about
the natural history of patagonia which is extremely rich um
so i i i did not work on it astronomy but but on another topic as well
and now i'm teaching physics to future high school teachers
including astrophysics here in our province in church which is in the
center of catalonia we have astrophysics as a subject in high school
in their final years some schools have um after offices as a as a
subject and so after me wasn't slow to come to
patagonia but this is coming in and people are beginning to appreciate the style
a little more so it would be great if you ever came
here and and give talks or share
uh what you know about the skype with the people living there because this very very little astronomy
down there and um
thankful if you ever come just to visit and have a good time with us that would
be excellent so just spread the word the word
thank you thank you very much pedro it was reading uh
your your name appears in many scientific um uh papers and uh you're mentioned many
times all over the internet uh so it was a real pleasure to have you
on our program thank you thank you for sharing um you can find me on facebook uh there
are only two people with my name better sidestar the good looking one is me the
other one is my father okay uh i'm the one sitting on a chair with a
blue wall behind but if you contact my father it doesn't matter
he will send the contact to me so sincerely to contact me if you are
interested wonderful wonderful okay
uh thank you very much pedro um thank you
[Music] thank you i hope to have you back on our program it'll be nice
up next we're going to go from argentina all the way over to the uk uh to
shylendra sharma who's an astrophotographer over there uh he was taking some images earlier of
a galaxy i think m51 charlandra are you still with us hi guys how are you then
thanks for having me can you hear me okay yes excellent excellent really good presentations really informative so far
tonight um let me just share my screen
so i'll go through some of the images i've been taking recently um over the last couple of months um
just because what i've been able to get from the back guard and this is the tadpoles nebula um in just a couple of
different iterations of what i've managed to do and picks inside with it
and a couple of zoomed in ones and there's the spider and the fly nebula i was it was a little bit murky i think
around the time um so i've since then i've cleaned the lenses in fact i've never cleaned my telescope before i've
never cleaned the camera lens so over the weekend i gave those a quick clean um ready for this weekend there's the
pac-man galaxy um i really like that one that one looks really cool um
northern northern california nebula very nice
[Music] ngc 6914 the last couple of months it's been a
bit cloudy so i haven't been able to get out as much the flame nebula again all in auriga the fossil footprint
nebula a couple of the eastern vale that i've managed to get
and then i've had a couple of issues with the mount over the last couple of days i think it's getting back at me for leaving it in storage for two months and
not using it and then the cocoon nebula
and then the california nebula again and there's andromeda i managed to try out my lrgb filters
um still not great processing but it i didn't manage to get too much data
i managed to get about 40 minutes per viewer so tonight is where i've got
most of the data um and i'll show you
i had one issue which i'm hoping gary might be able to help me with um
there we go aliens flying around and i like to call them is this live now
yeah it's actually just finished now so these are the images that came from tonight
um which one was it it was
this one i think
yeah this one oh wow all of a sudden happened and i don't know why
um every other frame is okay just that one frame have you ever seen anything like that gary
yeah it's just random what camera is it 1600 yeah 1600 yeah it
just looks like it's a random dead frame that's come down oh okay
yeah so i missed it and i thought oh no my camera's broken but no every other frame since then has been
okay you you can get it the camera can just trip over itself yeah when sending stuff down so
okay well i'm trying to learn the processing for the lrgb now but
the frames have come out okay actually i think stars around they're all five minute
frames cool i should process them tomorrow and i know what you're going to say gary yeah
my trains out my image train but i could get it for now but
yeah i've got flats to go with it so it should be fine um and so i haven't really been able to do
much astrophotography over the last couple of months um so i've just been doing astronomy in
other ways um i managed to get myself one of those quest shoes that you were talking about scott the vr head okay
um and they're outstanding they really are really good some of these things that
you've got on there the iss spacewalk you can pretend to be an astronaut and it's not realistic isn't it it's very
realistic i think that uh that oculus 2 device i mean just for that one app is
worth the price of admission right there you know you've got the malls experience
and there's the multiverse so you can walk around and they give you talks in the planetarium and things so yes
yeah no there's another way to expand your astronomy knowledge
that's right and you can hook the oculus up to your computer while you're imaging you know so you've got a
huge screen in front of you and it's uh it is a lot of fun it's a little yeah yeah i've caught that and it's really
important it's just odd with the controls for now but yeah we'll get used to it and the
motion sickness he does emotions that's right buy it the first day at
least you can take them off before you throw up okay so yeah yeah so but no thanks for having me good
morning thank you so much great thank you okay so we're going to go from the uk
all the way to nepal uh to um uh another young astronomer deepti
gautam dt are you still there
yeah hello everyone yes and thanks for having me here
as i said uh it's not already that um in this uh goal but here i'll be expressing
the different type of people uh that while the people thinks about the astronomy general peoples and i have
done a kind of a survey that one of the people's
you hear this word presentation
yeah and here's the part of my presentation that the other people thinks about astronomy
okay yeah in as i i have collected a lot of information and uh many uh i got many
definition by with from the different peoples and so define this uh astronomy
the science behind realizing our own significance and um
one of my one of my friends that um uh what do you think about what the
astronomy is in uh linda i think the astronomy is related
all about you know formation of our human body so i will uh he described that he would
like to uh describe astronomy and the science behind realizing our own significance you know when i asked to
another one and he just the reply is like the branch of science
which carries many mysterious and vast theories and information about the celestial bodies
similarly uh like that i asked to other one that's uh over
there or what are the things actually for the astronomy and uh they have said
that the story of this space is stopped
it [Music]
today morning uh say that astronomy attempt to understand this vast universe in our face
and i was really very happy to get his answer like that and when i
come back to the gender peoples and peoples around us and like indian
peoples when i call it the uh concept of the younger peoples and they explained
astronomy is the estrology and doesn't it mean why the people's
law is
and like the examples are like palm palm and my sticks are reading and predicting
the filters what will be going to happen and when i explain and people just people see me as
astrologers and um my friends often used to say that when i just uh when i talk about their
tsunami in this and they used to say mechanically confused and they didn't
agree with the astrology and the department of astrology and mostly the beliefs in the farm breeding
in this and um this story was just like one day it was
the uh no moon daters in a nepalese called aussie
and there's a new moon day my grandma my grandma called me and
pushed the holy scare picada [Music]
and support
uh it's because today is the new moon day and we have forced the car and i
accidentally asked why we need to answer the girls just because of the no monday
like they have the belief that if they worship in this day uh then it will be
something good will happen the power of this and um
i want to go the deep inside is and i got to know that earlier when the
people's used to worship it it's because they award the radiation and all this the
snow moon and the a full moon day is celebrated by earlier in the nepal uh is
because as they have believed that they a full moon alone have different vibes of the energy in the radiation types
and it's like and we're asked with the absolutely one of my friends she's very
holy and uh beliefs
yesterday uh i asked her physical phenomena and what she was simply in the
astronomy and she used to still she said that um i got to know all about
astronomy because i see you uh because you are involved in here and as you describe what's the astronomy is
occurring to you but and i i asked her what's the astrological phenomena you
believe in the most and she said that the most things that attract me is like
calling the departed soul like um it is practice i it seems to be
like people's uh it is believed that they can call the departed soul and talk with its others if i ask if we can't
talk with the departed soul have we have we ever asked whether divided soul lived
in our so-called we say that heaven are here so can we can have you ever asked that uh
when that departed soul is resting or what happens after if we could actually uh talk with this
departed soul so if we can talk about it
like that if where they are and what's happening after that because uh as we are telling yes we don't know about what happens
so that's the talk about i asked and um
[Music]
and that's all i ask for the people and that's all i have done i get uh gathers
all the information by my survey and i have one point of this for the
global star party okay
easter night star party nights mystery falls with telescope rarely see
in bright daylight appears on loans as the sun
goes down waiting constantly for the night they gather in groups with gear despair they
scope aiming so high their personal grace is the fear the view of the star
moving across the sky iridium's flare measures trail brides
bring drama to the night ladies orient jupiter in mars and mitchell astronomers
bring the universe to life thank you wow okay thank you
that was great that was great dt thank you very much uh
i know that um uh you know it's uh still morning there
you've got a very early this morning to take part in this so we thank you very much dt and we hope to have you on
uh next tuesday okay it's the next global star party all right
up next is john johnson john is an iconic astronomer a stalwart of uh
the nebraska star party uh where they hold uh one of the uh
great star parties of the world and some of the darkest skies in north america um
they are on the verge right now of uh of uh uh getting um dark sky status from
the international dark sky association and um so uh john we'll talk about that
and the next nebraska star party john it's all yours
thank you so much scott yes really appreciate you allowing me to come on and talk a
little more about the nebraska star party as scott mentioned we got some really
great news to share with uh everyone um first of all i'm going to say we are
planning a full-fledged all-activity star party at this point
august uh first through the sixth at our site up in north central nebraska
at the merit reservoir state recreation area i um i have that our website up uh
can i try sharing that then just sure see if it'll work mention that you're gonna have you're gonna do a
full-on star party all activities right yes one of the final things we had to
resolve was we typically um is that up there or not
not yet okay it's there share okay there it is how about now
not yet you have to um you press the green share
button on there okay now we're going now we got it yep oh there we are it's just a little
slow okay uh there we are and our uh best sunday
dress and our telescopes out there on the on the great uh sandhills uh plains
of nebraska uh yes as scott mentioned uh yeah we're gonna have a full activity
star party and uh like i said one of the things that we we just got a resolution from
the valentine high school in valentine nebraska the closest town to our
star party they will allow us into the high school for a full day of
talks and lectures swap meets we'll have an astrophotography contest
there and beyond that then we'll have our regular
events out at the state recreation area there it's about 40 miles southwest of
the small town of valentine and as scott mentioned in one of the darkest spots
that is easily accessible i would say uh anywhere uh
from you know the mississippi uh uh we're probably closest to anything to anybody that's coming east of the
mississippi to get to a really dark uh sky we have portal one skies
uh in fact we uh we brag about it but in um uh when we're up there and and that time
of the year of course the milky way stretches from horizon horizon and uh you actually can see your shadow
cast on the ground uh by just the light from the milky way so along with our observing our premiums
observing we will have a a regular field school which we we try to cater to the beginner
or uh inexperienced astronomers and just people generally interested in
wanting to get out and and see the nice uh there as our our native americans and and pioneer
ancestors did uh we'll have that and then we're going to offer what we call an advanced field
school with a little more technical information and those will be held on monday and tuesday out of the site
and then like i said our full scale of lectures will be on wednesday at the high school that's
august 4th we have a couple really neat uh speakers
lined up let's see if i can switch to
a bio about this gentleman mr rod landis has graciously agreed to
come uh do a talk on what he's doing with the
uh astro materials research and exploration science center down there in
houston i think currently he's he's doing some work with the uh with this sofia um
see if i can bring that the you know this uh the flying observatory uh so he may be giving us some updates
and talks and what he's uh doing with that and then our
other speaker we've gotten for sure is uh diane knutson and she is now president
of the board of directors for the international dark sky association so we feel really excited about being
able to have her come and talk to the audience our attendees about what
the whole international dark sky association is about and uh
apropos we we may have an answer from them by then as to whether they'll um
uh give us our designation our package our preliminary package and our notification of intent to submit went in
believe it or not today uh we'll have a quick review by
uh some of the uh staff members down there at um at uh ida in tucson and then
if they're happy with it then it'll go into the formal review process which usually takes about a quarter
so maybe towards the end of august or maybe we'll get word uh by our star party time in august but like i said uh
diane is is just an amazing lady uh she did stop by for a while last year when
we had a non-star party we didn't have an official obvious starfire obviously do the the coved uh but um
diane will be there this year to speak and if you haven't heard diane speak she is
just such a passionate person about uh the uh saving our our night sky um
i think she has a couple uh ted talks out there on her uh efforts and
everything to promote and and uh uh raise the awareness of
the natural resource of of the national or the natural dark sky so i said we're moving ahead we're
really excited about that we um we anticipate that package to you know
after maybe some tweaks and everything uh here in another week or two will be formally presented
to their uh committee that reviews all the dark sky
uh places parks whatever worldwide so we're looking forward to that uh i think
that's okay the gist of it if uh i can
okay stop share and okay perfect anything else if anybody uh
you know i guess that the group here has any questions or just got it i think i should probably put up the link um oh
yeah website there
john what's what's your website oh it's i'm sorry it's uh yeah nebraska star
party all or case dot org yeah we are a uh a
fully registered uh 501 c 3 nonprofit so okay great
john thanks for coming on tonight well thank you scott see you again and uh appreciate all your support okay
so we're going from uh the usa back over to the uk
to gary palmer gary is a mentor to many many uh aspiring
astrophotographers and he he may he has made a name for himself
both in solar astronomy deep sky astronomy uh his uh tutoring uh programs
on uh gary palmer astronomy are fantastic uh well worth uh the uh the time and uh
the the uh expense to really you know he'll put you in into uh
the level that you want to be uh in astrophotography gary thanks for coming on the program
hi scott thanks for the introduction um nice to see everybody haven't been on for a while
um yeah it's just been really busy um very busy doing all sorts of stuff at the
moment and we've been blessed with some clear skies so that's always a bonus
um certainly after the winter we've had um where it seems pretty pretty quiet right
the way through to be honest so um i'll share the screen over we're just
about going into daylight now so uh
that's live images coming in at the triffid nebula so from where i am that's pushing my
luck yeah because that's clipping the tops of the mountains very low down in the milky way from here
um but it's there we're more or less going to shut this all down now anyway as you can see it's starting to go
daylight um images for the last
let me just uh remove that bring that back up in actual fact didn't
mean to do that in two seconds
images for the last um [Music] week or so that was earlier this evening
um when we had some uh when you're having the technical difficulties with
some of this running in there is actually an over here this style here if we zoom in on that
that style there it's been running for about a month um and he's gradually fading back down now
but these are all single shots these are five minute shots that have come in
over the last couple of days or last week um m13
same again another test image all of these are test images for equipment over the last couple of weeks
um running back down
we have bodes uh same again another test shot
so we have got data stacks there i just haven't had the time to go through anything it's literally been every night
it's been out till four in the morning um so that end on top of uh doing solar as
well uh m27
another test image same again single shot beautiful i think that was around
yeah three minutes on that so once it's dark here and it's clear we're
pulling in plenty of data you could actually process these up as single images um if you want and they still produce
some quite nice images to look at
um part of the valve that was imaged last night
five minutes shot on that one uh leo triplett
it's a little bit on the um [Music] there was some cloud around when this
was done some sort of high-level cloud so same again all single shots on these
well that's tonight that was a little while ago um
five minute shot we've got a whole stack on these anyway so we'll process all of these up
that's those uh solar we had that yes day before yesterday
that was a really nice prominence same again i haven't got around to processing this up yet there's tons and tons of
data um it was there three days ago it's very very faint and
as you can see the scene's not been playing us any favors here um that's mainly because we're getting
the winds from the north and northeast and we've had that for about two weeks at the moment so it really upsets the skies in the
mountains here on solar um but yeah that was quite nice
to see um and i'll bring that screen over
i actually started to put this together so this was that veil so i literally just stacked it up um
and just started to work on it just a dynamic uh background extraction
at the moment and as you can see these were all the stolen satellites that went through the shot i did have a good moan
about them um more on principle than anything because
they seem to be getting everywhere um and there's more companies looking at putting them up
luckily using pics inside we can remove them from the image but it's still the point that i think we're going to get to
an area where there's so many satellites up there that uh even the software is going to struggle but it did manage to remove all
of these out of that image can't see them at all in there so
from my side of things that's really about it at the moment well you've been busy
yeah i mean there's great images and yeah there's a month's worth of months
worth of process in there um you know on some of the stuff but a lot of it like i
say is different mounts different telescopes all sorts of stuff going in and out of the observatory at the moment
um the cameras on there just so you your question on that the camera tonight is
the asi 2600 we've had the 2400 for
uh m27 that was on the big rc 10 inch the
trust in the newtonian oh trust um rc
um 2294 we've had that up and running and the solar was on the player one neptune m
camera so that's all your cameras listed there i was i was really i mean in the
audience today they were talking several of the people that were talking about cameras they want to get or how
many cameras they might have or whatever i'm really amazed that a lot of people have like
three or more cameras some of them have five or more cameras
um in the old days we used to have a camera i've actually got it here
yeah keep it sitting quite local to me um this is one of my old solar cameras
um the sky next yeah luminaire sky next was really really
good and it still is a very very good camera um going back sort of six seven years ago
you would have one camera or two cameras maybe maybe one for solar and one for
deep style you might just be using a dslr and couldn't afford a deep sky camera that was you know quite often the
way um but now with all of these sensors uh that are out on the market and the
the changes in the cameras it means that you can zoom into objects just by changing camera rather than the
change of aperture on telescope so that that prominence um that was
shown earlier that was on the fcd 102 um but it's very very close because they're
using a different camera and this is the thing the pixel sizing on the cameras and having a choice there
now means that you really instead of changing telescopes you're
more than likely going to change to a different camera and the cameras are dropped a lot in
cost when you consider what a camera cost you five six years ago you you'd be paying a
couple of thousand to four thousand for a reasonably good deep sky camera now you can pick one up
for under a thousand you know so um but there are differences you have to remember there are
differences in the sensors so some of these are what we call machine vision sensors the ones used for
giving you uh speeding tickets um reading barcodes those sorts of
things they come from um high-speed reading um you know places like amazon they're
using barcodes all the time and things flying up and down conveyor belts all of those sorts of things those sensors are
made for so why they give us quite good deep sky images they're not truly an
imaging sensor then you have other cameras that are out now which do use imaging sensors so
you'll you'll see the same sensor in a nikon or a top end canon and they're coming over into
a lot of these deep sky cameras now that we're using um something like
yeah that one there if you see if i can get it to reflect some light let's take that off a second yeah
that'll help there we go you just about see the
size huge whoa that is it's all sensor yeah
um yeah you're going to pay the money for it it's probably around 4 000 something like that
but it's going to give you stunning images and it's going to give you a real deep color because it's a proper imaging
sensor um lots of people say well the ccd's dead i still like a ccd camera i think
they're slightly cleaner on the images they look slightly nicer um they're not
dead you know it's just a choice really at the end of the day some manufacturers
only make one type of camera some manufacturers make both um
and you're seeing all of these changes come along now so but you have to remember that sensors
are changing rapidly at the moment so sony don't or panasonic or actinia
they don't make these senses for astronomy that that's the key thing to remember each of these manufacturers
changes and adapts that sensor to their own cameras and therefore
once those sensors are all used up once a couple of companies have bought them all up there's no more of them the the
manufacturers will be bringing out new sensors
so that's the big key thing um i think everybody's got a lot of choice in
what's out there and costs um i wouldn't say that the stuff's outdated
you know just because a new center comes out doesn't mean to say that the one you had last year is outdated it just means
that that sense is probably not available anymore right and you have to remember how many markets that that
sense is actually going into around the world right i think all of these thousands of companies
right yeah they're all clambering for um these sensors there's only so many made
right um so you will see the changes and i think that's what makes it exciting
yeah it's seeing all of this change in equipment and you know this is something like 50
cameras in here yeah and they're coming in and out of the door 30 or 40 of them in the desk
right next to you so yeah that's it um you know there's literally cameras everywhere
um you know from all different companies and you know we're talking about new cameras at the moment designing ones
specifically for solar or specifically for other markets um [Music]
that's the opportunity now whereas before you didn't have that opportunity you just literally had that you know
that that was that was and i can tell you now that camera was about two thousand dollars that was a lot of money to go and spend
on a a solar camera you know or using for planetary um
what would that level of camera cost now ah well the costs have come down
dramatically you know it's still an expensive camera but i think relative that they've come
down massively if you you think of the size of the sensor in in that
it's tiny right you know compared to what we've um using now and also it was a lot of
specialist software you had to pay for the software and you had to pay for
a license for that software to use the capture in certain modes um
so it ended up costing you quite a lot of money whereas the manufacturers now they're all putting in their own capture
software and they're developing other things all of that comes free not necessarily free but built in the
price of the product so you're getting a lot there for your money now
um in a sense but you know those sorts of cameras those high-end cameras i don't think
they're really needed anymore at the particular time we were using them
uh that we just found that they gave the best images for solar and if you pull that out now i did a couple of months
back and put it on the sun it still give all of these modern cameras a good run for their money
you know so at that time yes you paid a lot of money for it but it's still working
you know eight years later right right so that's okay that's it that's okay
well great well gary thank you so much for coming on i know it's
now early there so yes just come 5 00 am here 5 am okay
goodness all right and uh so molly wakeling we go
back to the united states molly's up in the bay area of california and
she is uh tuning her telescope and and um
getting it aimed at uh what what have you got in your in your scope well i was gonna
uh try and get m51 in there but i think it's uh still below my neighbor's garage
now i'm gonna try m101 and see if it's below my neighbor's garage
yeah it's uh this is a difficult time for so i've got my takahashi set up right now um because i'm uh
i just put a new guide scope a new guide camera on my eight inch and i'm trying to get it focused so i can't do any uh
long exposure stuff uh right now because i don't have a guide star in the guide camera yet so
it's gonna pull up something on the takahashi uh but of course right now it's galaxy season so it's difficult to
find a nice target for that um so let me see um i'll go ahead and uh
let's see why don't we
um let's do this i'll share you know what that process
looks like while i'm while i'm doing it here um yeah okay i definitely took the cover
off the scope so i must still be looking at my neighbor's garage [Laughter]
um let's see uh somebody think of something a little more southward oh i know leo triplett let's go there let's
go there which i already happen to have set up as a target
all right so okay so i'm using sequence generator pro
here um which is a a non-free but also non
it's not ridiculously expensive software uh that runs i use it to run all three
of my telescope mounts actually and it um
it controls all my stuff so camera filter wheel focuser telescope it controls all the things
it'll even control your dome if you if you're cool enough to have a motorized dome
right and um so so what it's doing here is i'm
running its centering algorithm so i've got the coordinates for the center of the leo
triplet plugged in because i've been imaging it recently and when i tell it to center it will
slew it will suit the telescope there and then i don't really have a good i don't even think i have an alignment
model on my ioptron mount right now um just because i think every time i
restart it it goes away and i just haven't gotten around to figuring that out yet so
but it's not a big deal because i just have it uh it's well polar aligned so the mount takes a guess at where the
target is and then uh sql screen reader pro runs one of several plate solve algorithms available
one of them is free which is plate solve two from plane wave and it plate solves the image and then
uh so what it's done here is the first time it was 97 pixels away i'm gonna give it
a parameter where it needs to be 50 pixels or less so um it it captured saw how far away it was and
then put it back in the middle um so i'm going to uh now uh super trainer
pro doesn't do a debayer preview i don't think so i'm gonna open it up in uh sharp cap
instead which will debayer the image so we can get a nice color image here and it's just a little easier for me to play
with the controls here um all right so let's up that to
like 30 seconds and let me get started nice nice program i think for a beginner
yeah it's real basic but it's powerful too yeah when you just need to get just i just want to see what my camera is
seeing sharp cap is great um as a starting tool plus i use it for all my planetary imaging as well because it's
really fast at reading your images and it's got a really excellent polar
alignment routine for um uh let's see let's turn on live stack here
it's got a really excellent polar limit routine uh you can use in the northern or southern hemisphere and uh you have
to have the the pro version but it's like 15 a year it's uh
it's nothing crazy right um yeah let's get guiding here using phd2
um okay let me turn off the auto stretch so that i can leave the livestack or
auto stretch instead lightning bolts and lightning bolts it's
fun to watch the fan base for our presenters on in chat here
so yeah yeah uh sharp cap so it does has this
live stacking feature where um you can do live stacking now i i didn't get a
chance to focus the camera yet so it's a little bit out of focus because the takahashi is very sensitive to temperature but it's close
and um i've hit the lightning bolt buttons on the color balance and the um
histogram which uh it does an okay job um
you can see it's a little bit on the pink side so i'm gonna bump up that blue a bit
as we wait on the next frame to come in here and yeah my light pollution is um
it's pretty bad uh so as you can see you can barely see these galaxies popping out from the background here um but
they're there so let me go identify those for you
what's 65 66 and 36. yeah yeah so let me let me tell you which one is which um
okay so uh this one is uh m66 this one is m65 and this one is
not a messier object actually it's uh ngc 3628 even though it's really just about
as bright as the other two so i'm not really sure how messy i missed that one uh and got the other two but you know
who knows right somebody brought a glass of wine or
something to him yeah maybe maybe somebody bumped the telescope and then he moved down to his
next his next target area um yeah as more frames come in
uh this uh it'll still start to beat down the background some more or if i took some longer exposures um
although i can't go too long do i have the right filter yeah i do huh weird oh i've got the gain up really
high that's what's going on molly do we have to remember of everything of this you have shown us
i know i've gone through this like really quick uh
just because uh you know people want to want to see the good stuff right um
so yeah i dropped my game down so i should help a little bit um uh
but yeah so so if you're ever looking for some for some great tools to use i love using sharp cap it's got so much
cool stuff in it um i use it for alignment because i can turn on a uh
some cross hairs or other types of crosshairs it's got focusing tool
where like if you have a button off mask it will actually go and find the bottom off pattern and will tell you um like
how far you need to adjust and stuff like that on and which kind of which way to move um
or you can just do it by full width half max the size of the star if you don't have a button off mask
um and i think there's other features on here i haven't really messed with like uh scripting
i haven't done their sensor analysis i have used their seeing monitor which is way cool so if you're imaging like
the moon or jupiter or a planet or something like that it will actually
estimate the uh the quality of the frame like the sharpness of it and you can set a threshold
to only capture frames above a certain quality level so uh then instead of like you can really
tar you can you can sit on it for a little while and really target like okay if i'm going to take 2 000 frames i want
to get just like the good ones so um instead of having to toss out a lot of fames and frames and post
processing you can just kind of wait and um uh
wait for when the seeing is good and it will capture it and you can't really do that on jupiter because it rotates so
fast but you can do that on pretty much any other object um or you can set a sequence of
captures like if you're gonna do the sun you can say uh you know here's my threshold i want to take uh 500 frames
every five minutes like if you're doing like a prominence uh time lapse or something like that um yeah there's all
kinds i didn't mean to turn this into a commercial sharp cap okay
they need help too so you know that's all right but yeah here's kind of a dim view of of
the leo triplet and um actually i i have i have a preliminary
process of it i'll show i'll pop that picture real quick um i'm i'm working my
way through adam block's video series right now so i wanted to go back and re-process after i learned because like
i'm i've gotten pretty decent at nebula targets but i'm pretty bad at galaxies so
and he's really good at galaxies um so i'm gonna
see what i can learn from him um okay yeah so here's what i have so far
um on the leo triple i'm actually very pleased with how this has come out so far
uh i got a lot of great detail on the galaxies i need to work on their color right i don't really know
that's unbelievable yeah i'm i'm very happy with this now
i've seen some people recently post some really great pictures where they got this title stream coming off of mgc 3628
here unfortunately i think my light pollution is too high to get the title stream but there is a a a ton
of little of background galaxies like like here's some edge on ones here's uh either a spiral or an
elliptical here's like some kind of a regular looking guy here's a pretty galaxy pair
um you know if you had a really long focal length scope you could zoom in on on some of these but there's galaxies
all over the place galaxy season that's right yeah that's really fun just to go through and and hunt down you know
here's uh one and this this may be a little cluster here i don't know
look it up um because these also kind of look like galactic because you can what you once you look at enough images you
kind of be able to tell the difference between what's a star and what's a galaxy because stars have a particular
kind of look to them whereas galaxies uh this is a jpeg we're looking at so it's kind of compressed but um
uh galaxies just kind of have a different look you know like this here um is probably like an elliptical galaxy
because it's it's a lot the shape of it is just a lot different than the stars so um yeah that's awesome
thank you i don't know i mean you know for sure when you know the visual part uh you know getting the
galaxies visually and then uh when you get into imaging you can start to go much deeper it's beautiful
yeah yeah thank you and and pick it up i mean this is the most detail i've ever gotten on this target and i'm really
excited about it uh i didn't even this is not even with deconvolution i think i just applied like a a very light unsharp
mask um yeah it it yeah so i'm gonna work on this one some more until i get uh the
colors i like and learn some stuff from adam block but yeah i'm pretty happy with it so far
you know molly when we're like me i'm trying galaxies and
it's a large failure but when you when i see your pictures
i can understand what work is behind those pictures
those who have never tried to take a picture of
triplet or any galaxy they don't know what they are
looking for they don't understand the picture what work and planning there are behind
yeah i mean there's um it's definitely [Music] uh there's there's a lot of a lot of
learning to do in uh in astrophotography and and i find galaxies to generally be more
challenging although some people might feel differently um let me show you one of my
older pictures of of the leo triplet um this is from
2017 february 2017. um i'll pull it over here so here's one of
my earlier ones whoa uh dslr actually this is this isn't too bad actually
it's this is with my dslr so um if you if you
hear people poo pooing dslrs i mean definitely astro cameras like um like
like the cool cameras and you know zwo qhy stuff like that are better but you can do really good stuff with the dslr
if that's all you can afford right now or you happen to have one already um i've got a lot of really good stuff with
dslrs and i get better stuff with my cool cam with my cold cameras but get decent stuff with with my dslr so
i have done some uh thinking work for a week now and
for me those pictures you should use now triplet they leave something
to the weaver to their own imagination
so like this you leave something to them
you know they are they are dipping in in this picture and then they are making up
the rest but if you if you you take 110
nice picture you don't leave anything to the weaver to imagine ace imagination
to think what could be there else so
maybe if you take a perfect picture in our language
uh that's it there is there is the we will have seen
everything already that can be discovered but if you make
some little bit blurry there is something left to i think so that was my
philosophy that's interesting looking at it and i
and i like to go back in and look at um you know where where i've come from with my
images so so here's a bad example a good example of a bad example that is a good
example because you need something yeah yeah there is something there is
something to get yeah and this one is it's actually not too different than how you might see m51
from a large telescope in a very dark sky uh not much color
you just kind of see that that arm connecting the two this was with
um my dslr on probably my 11 inch mint casted grain probably back in 2016
15 or 16 i'd have to go look at the data file um one of my one of my very early
astrophotos and uh you know this the stars are a disaster and you know
everything but you know this big it was still a really exciting picture to take because like dang like
there's a galaxy in here you know yeah and more of it than i can see with my eye
from my the live site where i was at you know and then the weaver
they get the feeling that this object is far away but if you have
a 110 perfect picture they don't they can't really
relate the distance to it anymore because it's so perfect
it can't be 10 million light years away because it's too
perfect for them but i think so maybe somebody else thinks different but
i think those pictures are on that way if you think that you leave
something to the weaver to pick up something like this
part of the journey yeah because you mock up your own picture of it and the distance is there
because it's a little bit blurry yeah yeah definitely like when you look at some of those hubble images of
something that's blurry you you you know that that's got to be really far away and really yes yes that's what i mean
but i've learned a new technique recently on the aster imaging channel on um
how to kind of give depth to an image
and uh it was really interesting because the the presenter talked about um you basically like you you uh
if you make the larger stars kind of leave them they're same kind of overblown slightly upper bound shape
and reduce the dimmer stars then it lends it a little more of a sense of depth
and i think that helps bring the mind into that these galaxies are floating in
the vastness of space as opposed to being printed on some dome of the sky and i i'm kind of starting this is one
of the one of the few galaxy images that i've done where i i just start to finally get some of that
that depth that i that that's the technique i've been working on lately is trying to create depth in my images
and um i finally feel like i'm starting to get a little bit of that with this image because it you know it still feels
a little flat but you can kind of almost get the imagination that these things are floating out there in
three-dimensional space and um that's that's what i'm i think that's what makes the best astrophotos are the ones
that make you feel like you're there in space with that galaxy you know yeah yeah
and my explanation was not that i have an explanation
why my pixel because i don't have the knowledge
yeah i mean it's taking me a long time to get to this point you saw my whirlpool galaxy from from yeah you know
exactly and find the right combination of your gears and i am struggling right now because i
have cameras and i have scopes and right now i'm finding what scope
to what object and what camera and what reducer or filter or barlow to it
so it's a mess right now so i'm getting a headache
yeah it's it's uh it's it's a challenge and that's what i see questions on a lot of like you know is this this telescope
and this camera good together and you kind of have to have a little bit of scientific knowledge on that front or at
least a little bit of math yeah and also the knowledge of you know what what what are you shooting for what's your goal
what what what makes a good combination yeah and that's exactly what i am trying to do now
because for me the deep sky objects they are
past for now i know i'm just learning for moon and
solar but that's what scope and what camera and that
that technology i don't i don't have that yeah but to be honest though at the end
of the day you can put you can put any camera on any other scope and you'll see something
now will it will it necessarily have uh the most ideal
uh pixel scale or the most ideal stars or
you know might not like if you put a full frame camera on a schmitt case of green you're going
to have a lot of weird stuff out on the edges um you can put any camera on any scope and
you know just crop it crop the image if you have to or just accept it's going to be you know a little uh a little low
resolution or a little uh blurry where you want things to be sharp because you're you're over sampled or under
sampled and but you still have a cool picture at the end of the day you know so i think you will pay to pay too much
attention to that uh in the early stages like i you know worry about pixel scale
and under and over sampling later after you get all the other basics down yeah
i'm just now the technical and that the mount is working well tracking
well and just taking picture so the technical
part is is is okay yeah then there's all the
hardware to figure out and then there's all the software to figure out yeah before you start optimizing things just
get your work first and then work on it exactly you know and then the software
to process the picture so i left the pics inside for the autumn
and concentrate now i am using a sharpie pro apt and phd too
and uh the sharp cap is good
yeah i like it a lot um it doesn't have the advanced uh scripting features or
like sequencing features that other software does but for you know if you do if you're manually lining up your targets if
you're still um doing a lot of your stuff manually and kind of sitting with your telescope then
it works really nicely and you can cue it you can say like take you know 53 minute exposures go you know
and it it'll do that um but uh yeah so here's here's finally a
somewhat color balanced kind of visible view of the world oh i finally got something to show here
so a little bit out of focus i haven't focused the camera yet but here we are
nice right that's great well molly i think we will take a 10 minute break all right and then we'll
come back with the after party uh uh several you've come on including uh
pekka and uh we've got cameron gillis on with us and time uh simon tang
and i'm only here for the after party you're here for the after party right
now i'm so sorry he's the best but anyhow uh you guys hang in there we'll
be back um here i'll show you here the gallery of people that are still on with us right now so
um including including my microscope with a bunch of uh
euglena swimming around so we're going to take a look at that
all right okay so uh we'll see in 10.
[Music] have you any guys tried to kill and fly
with a green laser pointer no but i i have i happen to have a 200
milliwatt laser because i had a fly in my room
and it's right there and i thought what how can i take it
down and i have a relationship so i thought if i can use that and make it blind
if anything yes so so i ordered a five milliwatt laser
pointer you know the little ones you use for powerpoint presentations and stuff or for i got it for pointing out stars at um at
public stargazers and uh in the mail i received a a
different laser one that was 200 milliwatts
and which is a much more powerful it's on the more powerful end of what's
available to to the casual consumer uh as far as your power goes now you can get our powers in the laboratory but as
far as what's legal for a for a person to own that's up there okay it's the totally forbidden in
sweden sorry it's totally forbidden in sweden
totally yeah i have uh i have spoken now with the
authorities many of them and told them that
we need it only for couple of seconds
and because if you use them we have to contact the uh
area department of the airplanes and so on and what direction
what height what time how long do i point
and i write to them that i never know and it's only a couple of seconds
yeah we have to do that if we're gonna shine more powerful lasers at the sky like for atmospheric measurements and
stuff like that yeah but you can get in a lot of trouble if you point a a laser pointer at an
airplane so yeah yeah i always tell people to if they're going to use one of us at a stargaze gaze you gotta check
for airplanes first yeah there are many good apps for that
so they can see in the phone where the planes are even even even
pipers and small planes and helicopters i have one app for that so you can see
where the airplanes are nice but they told me that they have to look for
because i told them that in canada canada no no it's australia they have a
special how do you say that
who belongs to an australian astronomical association they can use them
okay they will look it for sweden too now so let's see if we can use them
nice hopefully yeah that'd be good yeah because i have kids here i have my
telescope on balcony and today i shot the sun and uh there was playing on the
playground and with with their parents and
you come two children and asking what are you doing what are you looking and i told
them that i'm photographing the sun oh wow and then become their parents and
suddenly there was maybe 10 people under my balcony
asking questions and i told them that after kobi'd they are very welcome up and uh yeah for the
moon and uh and even if there is a evening so if they see me on the balcony they
just say we can come up and look nice so
hopefully i can spread spread it a little bit yeah yeah
yeah i sometimes uh i would do some planetary imaging from my front yard because i i have a better view of um
uh like like the western sky from up there so some of the planets were setting
um then i a lot of pastors by would ask me what what this thing was and stuff like
that so yeah if i had the eyepiece and i'd share the eyepiece or else um usually just show what was on my
computer screen because i was in the middle of capturing um but yeah my neighbors loved it and
yeah they are they are amazed yeah they when they see because i think
i'm only astronomer here in this local total area
i never heard or seen but my telescope mountain telescope
they can see it from a long way and they are
when they are walking by they are looking up and asking
lots of questions yeah that's that's really fun to explain
yeah yeah so hopefully fully this kobe will
yeah it'll be nice to be able to do uh yeah public events again
yeah i gotta jump outside because my my guide camera is just showing a lot of black so i'm gonna make sure
everything is is fine so hopefully it will not happen like me
yesterday last night i was shooting and doing polar alignment and i have a
bunch of cables on one uh like like a sock and uh
the dslr camera cable is the longest one and now i didn't have the battery on it
and it strangled on the leg the you know the fastening screw yeah and i have a
i have this uh camera so that i can see what my mounts are doing and i saw it
going back and forth back and forth back and forth oh yeah and i just run
off the balcony and shoot it down yeah yeah i've had i've had those moments
jesus hey let molly do her sorry
i'll be i'll be right back yeah okay
so how's it going becca that sounds like you're making a lot of awesome progress there yeah
i'm trying i'm trying i messed up my polar alignment yesterday
i had a very very good pool alignment and i don't know what i did but it went off
and then i had a clear night but there was a thin thin cloud cover
so and my guide scope was off i usually have the main scope and guide scope
aligned because i have a 50 millimeter so i have a wide field view
and i i couldn't decide
because one of the alignment star was
uh oh oh my god what is it on the south
horizon uh or at the 2 a.m
i can look that very first let's see but anyway there is two
bright stars or three but the two are
similar brightness and uh
picked the wrong one i can say what the star is uh let's see
the neb was in cygnus or where which constellation uh let's see i can take the watch here
and go back uh let's see
it was boom i'm actually closer i think it was
it was one of those brightest
speaker oh vega yes speaker speaker oh oh spica spike in
virgo in virgo yes i'm right in that area right now yes
i s no if i think it was
i i'm not really sure but there are two bright stars
quite near each other
oh my voice is lagging
so there's you know arcturus you follow the arc to arcturus and then speed down to spica right
and then no i began my polar i mean from the west and then
to east but uh i think i got it
i will test tonight again because it's day the time right now here
oh yeah donnie's up already yeah the sun just set here in the west
um thanks for uh hanging in there with us we're back um
and um we have with us uh brian fanning brian you're from new jersey is that right
yes scott from he's nodding yeah brian you've been you've been watching the show for quite a while so
thank you for for coming on and being a part of the after party um we have simon tang here
with us out in uh uh in uh are you do you live in woodland hills
i live in canyon country canyon country oh okay geez if era if farah could think that i would live anywhere close to the
store i would never be able to leave [Laughter] that's true that's true
uh pekka's in stockholm sweden um cameron gillis is up in uh
in seattle seattle washington that's right
i keep i always get portland oregon and seattle mixed up for some reason but uh yeah
we're in the upper corner here right and then i'm going to show you guys uh a view
of these uh euglena okay and uh they were described by
very famous uh hey caesar how you doing
hi how are you good good you just popped up when uh
when scott was walking away i guess he's getting his microscope or something how are things down in
argentina fine today is uh
it's the first lockdown night uh people don't go outside yes from 6 00
p.m sorry 8 p.m to 6 a.m
this happening because of brazil um i don't know but it's
in buenos aires we have uh the second wave
i don't know it's the second or the third wave of the coming you know
i i have the first question maxine
oh good good yeah it's great yeah
yeah you know every it's it is next two weeks
are coming hard yes yes
yeah we're kind of in the same boat here what we're seeing here is um
oh yeah look at that this is a colony of uh euglena uh they are single cell
um animals uh they have one nucleus uh
and uh chlorophyll containing chloroplasts okay um
and uh well the size of this uh they're roughly about um
oh like .02 inches long okay very small
they do get larger but these this is uh these are these are young ones i don't know
exactly how long it takes for them to grow to full length but uh uh they will get bigger um and uh they
reproduce asexually so they don't need males and females they just divide yes they look happy
they are yeah yeah yeah very happy
yeah you're dancing in a draw this is this is just the edge the very edge of a drop of
water uh yeah they don't they don't care about covet
they don't perfect astronomers [Laughter]
yes that's cool
oh scott we lost your audio no he just waddled off uh yes it's it's uh
he went to the microscope must be another room yep
is this in the same i think that is in the same office
i i used my my microscope uh in a gravel safari three weeks ago i i
have a farmer's microscope i i put off the
[Music] i removed the the screen that is like the head with camera on the
screen uh from the microscope uh because
this one don't work anymore and i make a new tower
a huge diameter to use a reflex camera planetary camera
or microscope camera and an
1.25 classical
regular uh astronomy tsunami ibis
and i try i'm not cool yes i tried the the 82 series uh 14
millimeters focal focal length and it
was amazing it was amazing i i really discovered yes i really discovered my
microscope just the sensation of active 82
degrees to i know in astronomy i use it all time but never never using this
for for microscopy and is you can feel
immersed you know maybe i use a binoculars microscopes are
amazing but this one using only one eyes monocular vision
is is incredible it's amazing because you can feel immersed with the image
only in a miracular vision is it's incredible it's a it's a great
recommendation for anyone that can have far richer or
rare [Music] many people have this type of
are not been there for many five years ago many pop very popular with a microscope
and a good quality of middle quality microscopes for students with screen
[Music] head screen and you can remove this and make
a new system for visual or reference camera
but uh i made this for for my my daughter that
is very interesting my personal image
when we tried the 82 series explore scientific ipis was an
incredible incredible uh
how you decided incredible uh surprise
that's awesome that you can you can reuse that that's fantastic uh because you know it's obviously
excellent optics and then to be able to use the same eyepieces both microscope and scope and telescope
that's that's really cool absolutely yes yes and you have in a
microscope you have a really huge field of view because you have a short
object a very short option focal length
and a very huge comparing focal image length
it's very interesting and you have a a great feel of you without uh vignetting
like big dead or sorry that would make you uses magnetine when
when you have the when you see the borders are very much darker
yes yes you don't have this because the the of course that you need
precise the diameter of the tower but that work very very great this is a
it's a nice a nice uh converting something like
like or making something it's right right
so you have very sharp sharp edge of field so you can go right to the edge and it's a nice
high contrast absolutely yeah that's cool
yes did you try which uh you said the 82
degree series did you try other eyepieces as well uh i i used 82 series but i uh
but uh i think that that all worked properly
because if you have filled for 82 series in 14
in 14 focal length i think that 18 14 12
work very good because of course that i i can
send you the the size that i use it for because i
thought in you know in the diameter of the tower sorry it's got that we are talking about
you do you remember the the microscope that i'll show you yeah two weeks ago i don't remember
two or three weeks in a rainy night in a global solar party i i showed the the microscope that i i
really wish i had a will and a window and um
or i i i don't really remember when you say okay you reform something you make a new
design also you know i only change the tower and then make a tower think in a
diameter for the m42 uh aim for tutoring
for the the the reflex adapter but i i know
i make the the an adapter for for the eyepiece for the
one one 1.25
inches but i never thought he used that and when i tried
this eyepiece that i tell you was fantastic
awesome yeah
i am optic i am fishing and i'm happy making this
this things i love good quality optics uh caesar
it's uh yeah it's really fun to see you know including you know the sharpness the transparency the
the flatness of the field i relieve all all those things are just it's very a wonderful feeling uh
yeah good quality optics i just love that and that's in chester
of for uh for optics yeah yeah waterproof high pressure
it's a whole different story you know if you compare uh
i can show [Music]
you know it's kind of like uh when they made when they made phones waterproof ip67 you know the ip's having
that waterproof a great idea anything in the field
um should i share my screen
does it allow you i think normally you have to get permissions but not yet yeah if you can yeah no yes
okay well i'll just thank you permission
cleaning [Music] substances
for optics and i can show you what i did uh no i don't want to share my screen i
don't just that you want to see this this is what i used to
use you can't see it no i have to take my background off
it's um okay it's optical wonder bothers okay
okay okay and this is only moving the fat and crease if you have a fingerprint
or something this is only moving it around and smoothing you nicely to the optics but
then i spoke with cesar and what is the best solution
and here it is yes yes
the problem is yes yes but really for uh
first of all this sound this sound like a choke that
that the regular regular uh glass cleaners
for window cleaner can be a great solution to clean
properly uh smith corrector plate in a telescope
but the thing is for when you need to make this in your home
is the best way to to make a great work
in your home of course that in our laboratories we use a little or not also little we are we
use ammonia uh pure ammonia or uh
of course we have a lot of different uh chemical cleaners
like in my college in in uh explore scientific
or you know when we disassembly the assembly the uh
uh schmidt cassegrain telescope we wash the the parts
in different solutions but
the cleaners the window cleaners normally that have a different solutions
on different chemical components in different can different countries
for only four four schmidt corrector plates i don't know
about uh i don't i don't
such as this for an achromatic or apochromatic objective
um if not if not this is only for great
corrector schmidt plates where you can use properly very gently
with a soft a soft paper you can use
regular uh window cleaner windows
cleaning solution commercials regular solutions
but the problem is not only in the in the solution that use that you
need to raise him with a um
yes yes in english by yes is is the most important part is how do your rings
because when you when you try to clean something and you have the lines when the water the
regular water from from the pipe is evaporate
make a lot of horrible lines and they are impossible to clean properly
the best of course that the best the best solution ever ever is don't touch
your optics yes yes before everyone and scott
maybe tell me yes it's right when you when do you have in your
surface optics a real problem that is inside in your rematch really do you
have a very dear to optics and you need to to
it's so bad that you really you need to send to your your uh
[Music] where you buy this or your technical support you know
but if if um a fingerprint in your corrector plate
really don't have nothing if in your image no you have a
no this is this is the first thing that uh
when the people told me oh i have you know a fingerprint or
if is something is if it's something like a point uh
uh in your image never never do you you can
search or you can see you can watch this type of fingerprints or because is it the
it's really outside where the the focal uh the
focal area a make image for example if you have if
you have fingerprints in your sensor if your ccd
you really you can see this because this is the focal plane yeah but in your in in the
in the refractor of [Music] refractors
in mirrors or in the corrector plates for the schmidt
casseroles or maxwell if you have a final fingerprint sorry
you never can i can see this in your image visually or in pictures in photography
you you you can sleep uh very happy because it's something like
it's only fingerprint or but if you sometimes uh
for example we have i remember that we found a
criminal with a very huge human and uh i remember
maybe scott remembered that in a 127 a customer
he forget the telescope uh one hour when he
came back to take a dinner and this electron in the in the first summer of
the night received receiving a lot of humid and
inside the telescope and we can remove with
talking with the with the technical support of explore scientific of course
we never touch the uh [Music] the glasses
only we remove with a a chamber with hip with warm air
filtering and the customer never had the problem again for for the fog in
their optics of course that was a lot of fun but of course that we
thought of uh we found uh between the layer between uh
the air the the humid came from
the glasses uh because they have three glasses in a in an apocalyptic uh
objective and we found the fog inside and i don't
remember if it was the the first or the second one uh
[Music] area of between the the air of air between the glasses
but we can remove only with changing their imperative but all good
night molly off good night molly good night molly molly nate trying to sneak out
there yeah i just didn't want to interrupt the conversation hey molly yeah molly good night
good night good morning good night
no no really yeah
yeah but thanks anyway it's solved my problems
but you have to be a very very uh careful with these window cleaners and it has to be
iax ammonia-free definitely ammonia-free
well the original windex original glass cleaner which i know
some guys in the industry actually use okay has uh
let's see two uh it says two dash hey i can't even pronounce it all hexa
exoscience exoxy ethanol okay
isopropyl [Music] oh isopropyl nominee
nalamine okay that's a cleaning agent first one's again yes next one's ammonium hydroxide cleaning
agent then it's lauryl dimethyl amin oxide wetting agent
then it's sodium dota sili benzene
wow i got through that one which is another wedding agent yes
fragrance okay okay uh and then there's something called liquitent which is a sky blue dye
dye the most important yeah this is for make the color yeah
and this type of regular or commercial uh window cleaners it's
only solution in your home when
water of course to to rides but the most important is
how how do you make the mechanic movements yes hands
because if not you can make a disaster because if you if you don't remove
thirds of all particles of of dust or
small ones stones microscopical stones that make a
disaster uh in your coatings over the
the corrector plate scott roberts look knows a lot of this because he
he worked so many years in me yes
and this is that it's a nightmare clean and makeup
it's a nightmare uh to to clean uh
um a corrector plate in a small casing ring and get ready like uh like a new
never never return like in you it's it's difficult there
you there are people who are very skilled at doing it and you know they can take your scope and
make it really look like really make it look production new yes yeah uh they're
just very good at it uh one one secret to that that meat instruments always
used right at the very end was acetone and they would take they would use
kleenex soft teak unscented and lotion tissue you know this this the
kleenex was actually originally developed i believe during world war ii
as a filter material for gas mass okay
this this uh this tissue has no fiberglass in it okay
uh so it's very it's very very soft um and uh so they would take one wipe
they would they would spray down the a pillow of this and do one wipe and then
throw it away one wipe and throw it away one way yeah away okay not use it over here and then come back
no never yeah yes keep spreading around all the debris i'm doing ducting
dot dotting yes so it's um you know
without really applying pressure they would do this and yeah so after a while you can you can do
it but it's there is a movie says it's it's
in the beginning it's unless you do hundreds or thousands of optics optical
cleanings it's uh um it becomes very difficult yes you know in all honesty i gotta say
this because i i hear this conversation countless times with so many people when they fuss over
the optics i wish i could show you my um 150 refractor right now
it's so dirty it's not even funny and the other day
um i actually had to contemplate should i think about cleaning it because it's the side that's on the inside of the tube
that's got little tiny metal flex everywhere there's dust settle down i can tell there's an oil residue or some
description there but if there's one thing i learned is you just it doesn't make any blinding
differences so totally honest for the people listening
at home don't fuss over stuff like this if i showed you my 12-inch newtonian mirror
it looks absolutely clean but then you're gonna notice um scratches dings dents the whole nine
yards it's all over the place it looks like somebody just you know hit it with rocks
but i genuinely don't care because you don't see it and i think that's the thing it's don't
fuss over it sorry my cat wants to be a part of the show too can't really see it now i can see that you have a cat
because you have your t-shirt in black and you're cutting black oh yeah yeah
that's that's why she's a spice cat here these photos right here show
the large telescope i think it's 108 inch at mcdonald observatory yes yes right and
uh right you can see the uh uh
you can see the bullet holes okay the bullets yes bullets okay uh that were
shot all over the mirror and then when when the guy realized he wasn't destroying the mirror this happened back
in the 70s uh or yeah february 2nd 1970 uh he took his hammer to the mirror okay
and you can see dings and dents and stuff like that they lost less than one percent of the
performance of that mirror okay and uh so that that should tell you that
you can probably know scott that my friend
i know his story that is incredible because one time i i i know the the
history of the mcdowell observatory of the bullets but the the the
i have a friend that he worked he he was the
he worked like albert operator of the mcdonald observatory
and one time he told me that his name is this big striker
we can we can invite next time because he he can talk in the first person
how was how was this of the the crazy man of the bullet because he
he left his work and the new guy was the guy that
shoot the mirror i can't believe it's a his name
yes my my friend is a big striker
and he live in california he's an an uh educator
yeah okay yeah yeah big is he's a great person i i i i make a soon with him
talking about this and we never told about this in in this zone
for my company from saraco optica and we started to talk and i never i never knew
that uh the when big striker
left his work on in the mcdonald observatory the new guy that
replaced his replacement was the guy that that yeah
that shoot the mirror wow when big stranger told me is it i
can't believe it's okay no no it's big i can't believe that you are the the
guy before the the new one
that shook the mirror incredible yeah we can invite one time to to
because it's it's very interesting how big tall talk about this his history
yeah vic should come on the show the um uh so there were seven there are
seven bullet holes from nine millimeter handgun in there uh and then
the there are gouge marks from the hammer that he used um
so uh pretty crazy pretty crazy absolutely but
the thing is is even with with so much apparent damage they lost less
than one percent percent of the all light they are so they i mean they still
do research with this telescope they thought they should spend millions and get a new mirror you
know which wasn't true so uh i don't recommend that anybody here
just uh takes a a small revolver and puts a no
no absolutely but you know what some specks of dust are going to do absolutely
zero to you yeah but guys if you own an and
bugatti chiron would you drive with that
very dirty if i had
bugatti chiron oh the bugatti well yeah shiron
and it was very very very dirty would you drive on that street i'm racing if
i'm a professional racer i don't care okay you know that's that's the other thing
that i can't stand is the paralysis of having equipment and trying
to keep it clean that you to the point you never use it it's like it's just a showpiece right
yeah and the difference between people who are users of gear
don parker's 16-inch newtonian telescope which
stayed on his patio okay wasn't really covered
uh stayed on his patio all the time it was rusted
dirty it was it was nasty okay but the images he made through were
incredible we're incredible i can i can for the audience that does not know who
don parker was donald parker was a
he made some of the most amazing high-resolution images of planets uh
guys that you might follow today like uh damien peach uh christopher goh uh these
people that make uh super high resolution planetary images uh their their their hero was donald
parker so let me show you some images that he did years ago
you know um let's see yes it's really
a real fact that dents and scratches don't make nothing
in the finally yeah but it's a very expensive piece of equipment
yeah if you put the 2 500 dollars for a quick
for a tube you'd like to have you you i understand that you
have a sick you cannot see a scratch or something
images that he did he also did look at the moon look at that movie
right there you can definitely see mike just incredible stuff okay it's like
marbles here's his telescope on the right here that's don parker right there
and this telescope stayed outside all the time all the time just sitting on his patio
ready to go every night and this is in florida so you know it's it's
moist air salty air absolutely yeah
the mechanics mechanism is totally plotted
down down below on the picture you can see the gears
[Music] [Laughter]
all the time too so wow all good days
yes i mean i have an eight thousand dollar mount that just sits outside all day
every day throughout the year i used to have a cg pro that set outside forever
and now i have an eq 8 rh that just sits outside just stays there what about the
ring i have a cover for it but it to be honest again it doesn't really do that
much damage so if it's not a big rain you just let it
go yeah it's it's not it's not the end of the world right but i mean it sits under a cover so it's
more than enough excuse the lights because um my screen just turned off um but otherwise it doesn't it just
doesn't do anything so i just gotta log back in
brian what's what's happening out your way
i think he fell asleep there almost i i can't really hear you scott
i said what's happening out your way um a little cloudy today um
we have um a little condominium at the in cape may uh jersey shore southern
jersey and that's where i am now um just a you know one bedroom unit um
not very big hence the um the scopes and back i mean yeah but uh i'm listening to what you guys
are saying about keeping you know the optics clean and everything and i i
thought about the salt air here and uh so i just i bring refractors here and i
never brought a scope with a mirror because i was afraid the aluminum would
oxidize you know i see bikes just eating alive by oxidation with aluminum parts and it
just they turn white and crumble away so but
you know you talked about the guy in florida with he keeps that thing out in the air yeah
it was uh i think coral gables is where he lived yeah that's
i believe that in fact right behind him he had his boat he lived on the
water wow yeah yeah that's pretty crazy
but i i really enjoy uh watching you guys um and uh the pictures and the photography
and you know the talent you guys have i'm just a visual guy and uh an enthusiast a
science teacher and that's cool but it's a great hobby
yeah and uh of course you you guys know as well as anybody everybody's into it now so it's
uh it's very popular and uh but like i said i enjoy
the best entertainment going for me right now i really wow that's very kind thank you brian
i agree totally thank you for all you guys do it's a lot
of work put into a show like this well it's it's the people that that come
together that make it happen so as long as all my connections work
we're good to go yeah just the fact that it's global and you got guys all you guys are from all over
the globe it's uh it's yeah where else could you do this i mean you know you've got you got arkansas
argentina uh seattle um uh stockholm uh you know uh
l.a you know it's it's uh scott can i share it to you
simon a picture of my mount yeah sure
so there is my celestron gcx right 24 7.
always outside right always outside yeah i have a small small window i can open
to let out the heat i say that
sometimes in the summertime it gets really heat inside
so yeah you can see it's a white cover so yeah
yeah very good it's always ready it's always ready it's always ready it takes
two seconds to pull out this see that's the difference right there that's what lets you be productive you
know yeah being ready as you can see it's daytime already 7 18 right here and i i know you have
street lights you've shown before how you cover the street lights yeah i can
show how it's looked like yeah you should show that again yeah meet some new people watching so
thanks um okay i can't see the street lights down down below but i can see
i can show a little bit
it's great there is one right ahead in the middle of
it's the high one and that is uh something that uh
uh it's it that is really bad that one because it's totally open you can see
the bar about and it's led pekka is this light um
is this light does it have a automatic on off switch no
they are on function they don't they because they just
uh in the beginning of last year the landlord was changed
and it's a new how do you say landlord
who owns all these buildings and they can't find that computer system
that controls hot lights so it's 24 7 on all the timeline yeah
and for 30 years ago when they built this area i was working as a
householder or what do you say this uh is it landlord who fix everything in
your apartment and if something broke and i was working for this old company
as a landlord and i know where the computer system and all these uh
sensors are and i have told them three times that they
where they are after they are on the roof of the uh office building ah
[Music] they won't do anything about it i think they are so dirty
that because they are sensors and they they are uh reacting for the light
sunlight when sunlight comes it's like um sun uh
you know when the sun comes the sun can't get
through to the through the dark right yeah the sensors think it's uh
night time all the time all the time so uh
yeah so i have written now two letters for them
that then also to the community that they have to do something i'm really
into this light pollution propaganda right now in in stockholm
sure because uh it it makes a huge difference if they just
for for me if they just put a small piece of plate
yeah that it uh the light is uh directed downwards
not for the whole community flooding everything yeah
right it's enough for the street right i don't need i don't need it no no
no and they are that's true for all the other
the birds and the insects and everything that needs to live they don't know they don't know
that's the problem and if somebody takes up this it's everything
everything starts from somewhere somebody sometimes it takes a lawyer for
other people to understand yeah somebody has to start
somebody have to start it let me ask you something
with the led light revolution i thought light i thought it would be improved
it's not like i live no no our house is west of philadelphia like uh like 25 minutes away and it's
terrible it's what a lot worse was you know 15 years ago before led lights
were dominant now it's the sky you could i mean the difference is unbelievable
yeah it's too it's cold and it's too uh a lot of the led lights uh that were
sold uh at very low prices uh emit a lot of blue
yeah yeah which is very very bad very bad yeah you know it's bad for your health and uh yeah
i haven't sleep in two days they're gonna be there for a long time yeah they last so long you know it's not like they
were now like regular lights do so look at me i haven't sleep a minute today
yeah [Laughter] yeah it's seven o'clock when i haven't sleep
yes well because for the cicada club that all we have the blue one the
blue color of the light is is a wake-up cycle for for our instinct
biologic uh line it's something like uh
something that is very interesting because for for example in buenos aires city
we can see more stars signs
all uh all lights was turned to lev to l l id sorry
uh this is it's a stranger it's something that we don't uh
spend of this but people that really watches starts in the sky here
inside the city they looks more stars now
with the lid like in the past maybe 10 years ago with a
mix of neon mercury and
why because something that is more work properly
the system of lid is that optically
is more efficient because don't
don't spend light on the sky because optically
each layer each id each component
put the light to the floor not from the sky if you see when when you
[Music] are coming in a plane for example
watching buenos aires for the plane in the night coming from the airport you can see
less light [Music] from ups from from the sky
like in the past because the normally the components are more efficient
optically it's not it's not the same that we are watching how many light you
have going to the sky but um
something that is is uh surprisingly worth right here is that the
the quantity of life going to the floor is more than the quantity of life going to the sky but it's for the design of
the each led component that optically is more
efficient but the blue one color is horrible
i agree with this we i'm working optics in october and
every all of our optics lenses have the
blue uh blue filter
you can see that that my color is is nearly between green and blue because this is the designer to reflect
these colors the
yeah this is like a minus b filter you remember the filter of of for a
chromatic level objective in astronomy you have a minus pilot
filter that filters only the violet color for the borders of the aquamatic
aberration well this is the same now the people use this for phallic
lenses to to don't pass the filtering sorry the
violet color that that in hid have a lot more that we
need or needs more cool
all right so yes i was gonna say speaking of speaking of
light um so i'm gonna cut in and actually show some pictures and a story
to go with the whole thing so this is a setup okay um so let me start with the screen share
i'm just going to share the entire screen so i don't have to bounce around so
oop didn't want to click on that something's going to be loading in a
second probably yep there it goes okay so i'm just gonna show you a quick picture this is me
and i'm out doing my thing and i left something at home
oh my god can you all guess what it is that i forgot counterweight counterweight and what
makes it worse is i don't even have the shaft with me right um
your mount gave you the shaft right literally i got shafted yeah so
what i was doing is uh i was imaging the iss so the thing is though this is like nothing
stops me i will just go no matter what and this video is handheld okay just to
give you an idea of how crazy this all is this is me trying to hold the telescope still
to catch the iss that's brief all right so i'm just going to fast forward it a bit
you'll see that i kind of settle down and in my head i've got to count down and then any minute now
the iss will go whoop how long does it take oh yeah
so this was 130 frames so now i play this back at 130 frames as the rate so
it's nice and smooth okay so you can actually see the iss going past
beautiful awesome yeah amazing makes it worth it that's that's that's persistence
perseverance and then obviously here's the still images from all of that
so you get an idea of it there's a nice little close-up of it it's it's past so high for you guys
it's the highest in the sweden it's i think 50 degrees from the horizon
horizon oh gosh this was like 80 degrees this was a really good pass that day yeah
and i never i i can never throw my balcony image iss
oh you should be able to every now and then so anyway go back to this um the other part so i think um gary was talking about a
prominence that was happening earlier um during the talk and just to give you a guys an idea of
how big this prominence is this is jupiter and that's the sun and you're gonna watch this prominence
grow on the bottom hand corner of the screen that's how big this prom actually was and then all
you'll see it'll arc across have you taken this no no no no this is uh nasa sdo
okay so just to close up a little bit slower slow down just so you guys can see how
big this um prominence was [Music]
and it actually goes off the screen yeah wow throwing this at the debris
so i managed to get a small portion of it um and i did an animation so this is
basically what it is so it's basically uh an image taken every 30 seconds so it's a thousand
frames every 30 seconds stacked together and then to create an animation
so for those of you who've seen my stuff before they'll you know you guys will know that i do a lot of these animations
so it's just some of the stuff that you can see that's going on and then i have a more
or a higher contrast image it was interesting on the last one wow i
mean yeah there's almost like there's there's uh filaments that are actually almost like uh
an upper atmospheric uh you're kind of suspended hanging out there yeah they're just hanging out
you've got specules you've got some of the um the plasma just hanging around in the sky i mean it's it's quite it was
quite an active uh couple of days oh this is gonna be so expensive for me
so just you know this is um uh one a couple of other pictures real quick so this was
taken today and i haven't had seeing this good to show granularity and white light imaging as clear as this
couple of sunspots happening i took those two today i can show you
afterwards yeah we can come we can compare an amateur
and simon this these this was taken
and it was like the best scene for a brief moment in time i know it's crazy
i've never seen it as clear as this it was just absolutely unreal how good it was today
those
that's awesome what's your gear simon um i'm using a
150 refractor with a herschel wedge um i also have a
daystar quark solar filter which is what this is this is hydrogen alpha prominence or chromosphere
well this is chromosphere right now so the pictures that you just saw earlier on these
let me go back to this so these are the photosphere
okay so that's the photosphere and now these are oops the chromosphere
okay so that this little sunspot here is is actually what the reason of these giant
flares that we had this was actually not in view at the time so when it was out of view all of those eruptions that we
were seeing earlier on is actually because of this yeah it pop up to today
uh actually it popped up two days ago now it's it's actually quite far in
and this is a multi-panel three different uh series it's
53 23 14 to 16. yeah there's there's a couple of um
things going on right now so you've got the an active region over here um this one here is actually ar12814
so this is probably going to get designated eight one five um this one here is actually still part of eight one
four there is something else that is starting to form up here but i don't think it's gonna gather
strength because it's gonna come and go just as quick as it appeared but and there up you have the 14.
let's see i think we have a different
different maps
uh well this is the uh the h alpha gong map so it's basically part of nso uh and
all their data just situated all over the world so this particular shot is in australia for example
okay because i am looking for space where they're live
oh yeah that's another website that i go to as well oh yeah that's tony phillips's site
really a great site and there they call it 28 14 to 16.
those groups yeah i think it's um
just going to go to the site right the biggest one is 28 16. yeah so it's 14 15 and 16.
yeah yeah 16 is the newest one that's come across
yeah it's in that you saw the first one that the big one
well here's the interesting thing so 16 which is the newest one has a 20
chance of c-class flares so this thing might flare up again and i hope it does
because i want to be there to see it yeah good
son simon every time that i see a amateur astronomer or astronomer that
shoot the special [Music]
state station international i told to the people to say okay we are
lucky that he's an amateur strummer and he's not a sniper because if not
this is uh [Music] well i don't know if the joke
is is easy to translate but uh we thought we'd see
that it's so difficult to shoot the to
to take a picture of the international space station the space station sorry
that i compare with the snipers and i say okay it's great that you are a
mature stormer and not a sniper because the precision that you have
fortunately for us yes every time there is that people show me
the the pictures of of this is incredible really
the timing that you need to have and the solar pictures are amazing
well you know what i'm going to tell most people who want to image the iss there's two ways to do it either you
wait for it to come to you or you go after it and nine times out of ten i normally
advise people to let it come to you what i mean by that is you know where
it's going to be all you have to do is get there so there's a couple of websites out
there the one i use specifically is a transit finder uh just do a google search for transit finder and you'll
find it no pun intended and the idea behind that is you look at the list
of all the possible transits or near past transits and just basically be at the right place all right can you
prepare it yes and you feel right yes so at that point you're just waiting for the thing to just fly past and just hit
record you know a minute ahead of time and just go from there i mean there is an experiment that we're going to do at
some point um so there is one particular pass that we're looking at
which goes from los angeles to san francisco for a lack of better description
and the idea of what we want to do is first of all see how accurate the time is of the timing prediction for it is
and then how long does it take for the iss to get from la to san francisco
now needless to say i could just look at the numbers and figure that out and i don't need to do all of this useless
nonsense just to find that out but it'll be amusing to do it while i'm on the phone with him say i just saw it and
he'll go oh yeah and then you know he stands between los
angeles and right and where he is yeah yeah who can count the distance
right so it's it's a you know we wanted to make it fun and put a little bit of science behind it because you know it's
all great taking the pictures but there is still science at it with it at the end of the day uh yeah i don't just do
this for the fun of it just for the sake of pretty pictures i do like to understand some of these things uh and
learn more about it i mean when i posted this stuff on instagram somebody actually sent a question and it
was an interesting one asking me how big is each one of those cells and the funny
thing is as i sat there i thought you know what i never really thought about it i mean i know the image scale in my head and i was like now that i think
about it it's like north and south america combined some of them are the size of asia and
then some of them the size of the earth so it's it's a really hard one to fathom how big these individual cells are on
our screen they look like tiny little pieces but in reality they're they're just huge
you know they're bigger than most of us uh or the path to planets some of the size of the moon and people just don't
quite fathom that how big big really is and i think that's the thing that um
i've always been intrigued about is watching the solar parka probe doing its close-up flybys
what do you see in between the two cracks of each cell you know kind of like scott looking at the microscope
yeah you know you see a blob of water but you don't know what's in it until you get the microscope up inside it
speaking of which didn't you say you had another slide prepped up in there well what i did is i i put uh my dark
field on okay it's still the same euglena okay but shown in dark fields
all right
i'm kind of intrigued what he's doing because i noticed that the screen was different
yeah you must have it set it up in the adjacent room he's just behind him
oh it's behind the camera yeah so you see the scope his desk behind the desk that's where
scott is right yeah that's where it is yeah yeah that's why his microscope's hiding
but he he moved away from his desk so oh yeah no he just goes around the desk
yeah around the desk yes you know he's a ceo and he have a big
desk he's a big officer yeah yeah usually he usually has the uh
oh there he goes oh nice oh there we
that is cool you can see how the dark field uh yeah you know makes that
the background just black and you have scattered light coming up it's
and the lights being reformed through a lens at the top but there's just a disc there's like an
occulting disc uh almost covering all the light and uh
it it makes edge lighting on the specimen and um
you know it's crazy these things are just completely oblivious to you even being there
they're in a drop of water right but the thing is though i mean i don't even know if they have eyes to
be honest i mean there's no way for them to perceive you being there and even if they could see for argument's sake they
couldn't even see us because we're so damn big to them that we just fill up the entire field of
view yes yeah it's like to use the microscope
yeah it's like astronomy in the daytime and this is its own universe
yeah it's the same it's the same universe you know what are these days scott
you're going to put a sample down on that thing and you're going to look at it carefully and there's going to be some guy that looks
just like you but it's an amoeba with a telescope looking at you going this is awkward
i have some amoeba oh you do yeah you guys want to see yeah
all right yeah although it has scott's face on it i'm gonna freak out
[Music] have you guys seen an amoeba before
i have i have to check what that is in swedish oh uh it's another single cell
organism it looks like a fried egg for like a better description okay
[Music]
oh it's like islam it's like uh you know
it's nothing yeah well the size is nothing
yeah but it's like uh you know drop of water microns yeah
how do you find microns jesus
can we crank up the magnification scott on this one i don't know if you can hear me
it's got installed
don't you crack his camera simon i'm sorry um don't you have a call
to his camera crack it and send him a message in the camera directly
uh well i think he's looking at his uh set up so he's probably not paying attention
i'll wait till he comes back and see if we can up the magnification on this yeah i thought
if you could crack with the code you know like a hacker in the camera directly
yeah no that's not my kind of thing [Laughter]
does the does the camera is using on the microscope is it just coupled with the existing eyepiece and you can just
change it out or how is that uh i think it's a direct insert so it replaces the eyepiece completely
ah yes you know the funniest thing is though a lot of these um
microscope uh cameras are the same as the cameras that we use for astronomy
purposes yeah that's interesting because caesar we were just talking earlier about
we can use an astronomical eyepiece right an 82 degree in in that and so why
not use an imager yeah exactly yeah and i think scott's microscope has
an outlet 4 camera he has two four eyes and one in the middle for
the camera especially for camera
i mean with uh with microscopes i think colossals would work the best with some of these things like more so than other
types of ones well maybe orthoscopic eyepieces would probably work really good too
yes this one was normally the the size of the micro cult
diameter is item we're gonna make us uh 0.96
oh yeah zero point nine six five four nine five yeah that's all all right
yeah yeah the o'kellner el
it's not like the whole quantity of uh
diversity that you have in astronomy i faces and
uh that i tell him earlier
it's something that i i refurbish my microcode
i changed the tower i removed the camera and screen all in a one piece and like a
head because like the screen don't work anymore
it was impossible to to repair of course i'm changed
only i used optically the the microscope to
use for a graphics camera or a planetary or microscope camera
and of course that the one change the the size of eyepiece
uh to 1.25 millimeters but i i never
try trying at [Music]
science uh not science at uh two weeks ago when i
i i told about this in the in the global cell party two two weeks ago or two
weeks ago and was interested interesting thing
how you can improve your vision in a minuscule and monocular vision
with a great design high pace especially 1892
degrees field official it's very interesting
and he might be getting close
um so i i i'm sorry
no i'm seeing how uh how far along scott's getting along with the uh
with the sample but it looks like he's almost there i don't know it's hard to tell because uh i'm looking
at the corner of the screen and i i know what he's up to so he's getting pretty damn close
ah yes i i can see in another he's he's searching now
he's moving the blade and another camera
yes it's so this is something that is incredible because it's so hard
find something in a in a very very small area
like we are searching something uh maybe the the ssi
optics are are yes when the angle is very small
it's not easy to to center the image in a microscope or in a telescope yeah i
think i mean at the end of the day a telescope and a microscope are the same thing uh in my
mind that they have there's no differences between the two it's just you're looking at
one end of a scale to the other that's all it really is absolutely but we are in the middle
yeah if you want to if you want to look at it that way sure absolutely yeah
yes in the telescope are more difficult sometimes because the size
all mechanical things work works in a big size
about dilatation flexible flexible a lot of different things
we are awaiting the amiibo
oh here we go wow yes
oh yeah so you see that yes yes
that's an amiibo he's very small this one's very small but you can see there's a lot going on
inside of it and uh wow it's almost comple i mean it's
totally transparent except for these absolutely yeah oh what's that going past well there's
all kinds of stuff in there
yeah there's actually you've got three amoebas there haven't you uh perhaps
yes two is three yes oh i see down at the bottom there's another one yeah yeah
i'm telling you scott it's like there's all this stuff that's just going on they're just minding their own business they have no idea what is going on
i know it's that often occurs to people you know when they
either seeing a live view through a microscope or or they're or they're
doing it themselves and you and and you wonder you look at this little you know
three or four millimeter drop of water you know and there's this whole universe there you know so this whole micro
cosmos the overview effects but yes that's right
you know that's the funniest thing is it's like if we want to flip the the script on this
we can just imagine that there is another life form out there that is you know just literally billions of times
bigger than us and we just can't observe them for all we know we could just be a piece of dust on somebody's jacket
right yeah very possibly i i don't know you know
it's it's uh you you look at um you know that that pale blue dot image
that uh carl sagan made with the voyager spacecraft and you know it's just it's two pixels it's
nothing you know nothing yes it's very profound you know and uh
the in his dissertation on pale blue dot you know
he talks about the imagine self-importance of people and
the rivers of blood spilled you know because one tiny
you know egomaniacal uh yeah human you know wanted to you
know decided that you know this is going to be the way it's going to be or whatever you
know and and uh uh you know it's just uh
that whole thing is really it should be something that people wake up and read every morning you know
just just everything just have interest you know view of what humanity and what we're
doing you know flying on this tiny blue planet through space you know yeah
just out of interest scott on the uh picture that we're seeing what is that line almost yeah i was looking at that
too let's see and it's almost like it's eaten something and it's still you know
messing with it having his veggies
it's like a building and people i believe it's a piece of vegetation of some sort um it's inside
the uh amoeba oh yeah that's that's why being digested that's what i'm wondering it's just like
you don't see that very often with something inside of it like that right is this the insides of something
yeah it's the inside of an amoeba that kind of smear that you see in all
the little things around it that's inside the amoeba yeah and what does those
those moving things it's
microbeast or well
let's find out this is this is an amoeba proteus okay
so there's different kinds of uh amoebas
like the ones that eat your brain could i guess yes although there really is a brain eating
amoeba wonderful yeah that's not even yeah that's not not a good one
not a good one um could it be in the plus
those moving things maybe yeah
well let's see i'm looking it up now so the edges the edges which are really
not very clearly defined here okay absolutely is is the you know there's an ectoplasm
there's an endoplasm uh the um
the thing that we see kind of moving around
is um nucleons or no
nucleus that's not held well maybe but that's
not yeah that's not how they're described let's
see uh let's read about how they eat okay the
food sources of amoeba vary some amoeba are predatory and live by
consuming bacteria and other protists some are
detritivores and eat dead organic material amoeba typically ingests their food
uh by fa fagio phagocytosis
extending odds to encircle so it kind of comes around okay
and then closes it off so it can't get away and then they engulf the the live prey
and uh and then they um and then they make it one within itself
which is kind of what we're watching here they're eating that that he's like even
he his entire uh body is like uh
stomach yeah sometimes yeah i think because i have a picture
where there is a three kind of vacuum oil vacuole yes there is a decay
food vacuole and contrasts three kinds of
so i think these are those moving things too small
right three different kinds of bakula
oh my god and we have to see inside us oh yeah well you know when you
when you listen to biologists talk about the human body for example
we are you know thousands of different organisms
we're just kind of the host of all those of all those because that's
and those things allow make life for us possible okay
i agree not any one thing you know you can't just say okay that's a human being over there he's separate from everything
else that's not true okay scott you know if you want to read something
very interesting read about our cells yeah what ha what really happens inside
each cell it's like a factory they think messengers their fins deliveries their
fees adore gardens they feel there are
people out doing that and somebody starts waiting what they should
do and they feel they are things that delivers messages that you
should do this one and that one right only inside ourselves
that's amazing i think the whole the whole uh
the whole you know all the surface of the skin and all the dust mites and and all the uh
the whole ecosystems that exist at different parts of our body is very fascinating yeah you know like what's on
your fingernails versus what's on your your your arms or whatever around your eyes
all different types of uh ecosystems yeah it's amazing how they they are
devouring whatever that is hey scott and they protect you yeah damn
i was actually going to ask him what difference does it make with a color versus a monochrome camera in this
case because we can almost see the debayering
um pattern happening here this is a color camera and i'm getting a better camera i'm
getting this is a three megapixel camera i'm getting a 20 megapixel camera which
i hope arrives in a couple of weeks but uh yeah there this is just the raw image
coming down uh you would uh you know you would process the uh image
you know with by subtracting dark frames and all kinds of stuff very very similar
to making an astrophotograph and processing the images very similar to
uh astrophotography so if you're really good at image processing uh you know
like i mean like yourself or you know gary palmer uh you know uh if you're practiced you
could make stunning um microphotographs well i was just curious to see what the
difference would be on a monochrome camera
i'm sure you can use different filters right i mean there was the dark light filter and then like you said
the monochrome camera should give you really good resolution because it doesn't like you said simon they
wouldn't have the bayer matrix the pixel size must be
extremely small i don't know man this is a three megapixel when he's at 1920 by 1080 and
i don't know if that's the native resolution of this camera
i mean we have the the concept has got of uh resolution right like the uh
diffraction limited for example in telescopes how does that apply for microscopes i mean how how far can the
optics be limited how do you measure that because we measure it in arc seconds i
guess or whatever for yeah like uh in microscopy it's measured in microns
and uh um it's it's all very very similar you know so
uh you know we we do a full width half max you know match
of us of a star you know with spread over two pixels uh you're also to get
the very best images in micro uh you know micrography you are
also matching the resolution of the of the optics to um
to the camera itself as well but that's determined by aperture i'm a
beginner i'm just like slapping a camera on there i'm learning how to uh work with these uh different
specimens and and you know i'm still kind of learning it's like you're learning constellations or something you
know when you're a beginner as an amateur astronomer that's kind of where i'm at with a microscope right now i know how to
basically operate it i know how to basically prepare specimens
but you know the more i'm learning about it and by the way i think yesterday or the
day before was world microscope day so you know there's a huge community of
people that have amazing microscope setups at home okay
like you know multi-thousand dollar uh la you know full-on professional lab
uh microscopes as a hobby at home you know and uh this one right here that we're
looking through the microscope's about a thousand dollars cameras a few hundred dollars
you know so i don't know which i was gonna say you don't know which sensor is in there do you
i don't yeah because i'm looking at the specs uh on this thing and it's uh 20
20 48 by 1536 at three megapixels so it's going to be a three point
three point one megapixels as well oh sorry yeah 3.1 bit so it's going to be what 3.2 microns in size per pixel
give a take
but i guess you don't have to worry about atmospheric conditions but the
what you do i'm just wondering about like normally obviously the resolution of the telescope is
is is determined by its aperture how is that in microscope scopy
i think the same thing is still applicable it makes as far as i know it should not make any difference
okay so so the objective i guess on the bottom the larger that is the the higher the
resolution some big things swimming around all of a sudden
oh yeah
oh someone's messing around with the scope
name that scope just by the sound i'm going to go with a vx mount
you heard you heard you heard that sounds like chelsea's throne
that's basically one has a vx mount now i have the uh it's evolution
evolution oh okay so yeah okay same motor but yeah similar oh what's that
was that just a piece of dust
stop wiggling yeah i'm using my left eye to uh to watch the screen into my right eye
keep it dark adapted i'm cruising uh losing virgo galaxies right now
that's not a piece of dust that is that is a serious string
that's something i don't know what it is nice mix together i've mixed together
some paramecium with uh those so those are the big things you saw swimming around okay
so we'll see some more come come through but there's uh you see kind of those transparent things kind of floating
around those are amoeba they are swimming because you can see them they're floating
water because i i don't have a cover slip on top okay you can see the shadow of them on the bottom yeah yeah there's
a big paramecium that just went flying past yeah now amoebas can
capture paramecium and devour them okay so how long do we need to wait for that
to happen no no i have no idea you know this is worse than looking for
a supernova right you're the boss look at these guys
these little guys they're like swimming around in circles those are that's something else you know so i'm not sure
what they are scotty you are the best of the work
it looks like there's a ghost party grade on the left side
oh my god this like yeah you can watch the
evenings one time i ran eight hour or a nine hour long live
stream and it was just what was that that was a paramecium
they're fast okay they are really fast uh this is the right magnification to
look at them where you can see details but uh um i watched a paramecium like get very
very still one time and i didn't know that paramecium will hunt
down tardigrades okay so i had some tardigrades i had some paramecium in the same
environment and this thing you know the the this tardy gray was climbing out of
its out of its exoskeleton okay so
he had dried out i'd refresh the the i put some water in there you know with
paramecium okay and this thing just i mean he waited you see how fast they're swimming right now
they're hunting oh look at that guy go
but this thing is just like like like a cat you know just waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting and then
this tardy grate climbed out of its shell and everything it was like you were witnessing something beautiful like
and this thing came down and like just ate that thing just boom
in one bite what and went by i was like oh my god
gee wait do you have this on film uh did you record it where i do i i'll find it for
you i gotta see that there was a similar similar skid where they were
they had a butterfly or whatever just came out of his cocoon and it was flying pigeon eats it
exactly exactly yeah short life yeah you know what i
when i went and shut my camera because i forgot my
on the counterweight bar you know the knob this groove and i left it on a balcony
and i saw this big uh bird because they love everything at syllable
you know this big gives black uh [Music]
they love everything that's silver yeah and i and i saw it you know camera
that they were standing and one and looking for my my vault for my
counterweight bar might run and took the bolt inside
it gets you taken they love they are they are sampling uh
silver don't mess with it scott this just got really active all of a sudden no
it's like look at all these things you're swimming around wow
one that's really fascinating is phosphorus uh you know those things that are
well sorry what's wrong with us oh the phosphorus yeah and all the little uh
little bugs that are in the ocean i forgot what they call them all those little round and then all sorts of
different uh glowing they just uh it's just amazing you know the worst part is this is if
you're swimming along you're not paying any attention you get a mouthful of that water and you're like going hmm
yeah exactly what's got found now is this like an insect leg or something
ew that is not something living but it almost looks like a scratch on
the um on the glass the uh the slide stuff
because that's what all those pits and scratches are i think
it could be a human skin fling or something from scott's fingers
i was going to say because it looks like the imperfection from the uh from the slides
yeah that's exactly what it is what the imperfections of the slide yeah oh okay
so i was right then they don't polish the slides for like polished glass or something you know so not an adeline
right i don't know what these little guys are they're all over the place
maybe it's put in there for the amoeba to eat i have no idea
but anyways can i simon show you my picture of the sun
today yeah i think uh we might have to wait for scott oh there he goes yeah go for it
now okay so it this is taken with the
sky watcher ed 80 and celestron smith next image 10
actually so there you can see
the same spots oh yeah excellent this is uh
pictures today oh great that's excellent attractor
can you zoom in can you zoom in
uh yeah no but let's zoom out
let's see how can i move this one it's behind behind
yeah ah there we go it's quite good for
yep i am so what filter were you using
none it's a white filter white light filter oh okay so it was so do you have other
filters in front of the camera like a uv ir filter no no nothing so if you're gonna do white light i
strongly suggest or recommend at least that you use a uv ir filter as well as a green filter
okay so get some more yeah that's that's what actually gives you the granulation
or at least gives you more contrast okay okay
because you i can see parts of it almost it's almost there but you've kind of lost it it's almost there yes but it's
the glare is too strong so in other words you're actually letting in too much light so by
using a uv ir filter i'm cutting out the uv light i'm cutting out infrared light and then on top of that i'm going to
make it even more awkward by sticking a green filter in and only passing green light from the photo sphere
and that's what actually gives you that more defined um edges of those uh
granulations okay
i mean if you've got an lrgb set you you have a greenfield i don't i don't i i i
have uh do you have uh and ir uv block fit there
yep at the very least you should use that in fact in fact when you do any type of solar
and i you know recommend this for everybody else who's watching this um always use a uv ir filter
regardless of the size your scope i don't care if you've got an 18 millimeter 72 millimeter or 150 you
should always use one the reason behind it here is the ir portion of it is designed to reflect the heat back out of
the scope yeah so you don't store the heat inside of the skull but those which is installed in camera they don't
they are nothing yeah you can't really rely on what the camera has on their filters to be
totally honest i've come across filters like uv ir filters that are pretty bad
and they have either uv leaks or ir leaks there are more reflection filters yeah
and to be quite honest in some particular cases if you have a bad ir cut filter that has an ir leak and
you're doing visual that can also be quite dangerous so that's why i always tell people always make sure
you know you know where you got this filter and it's a trusted one or it's known to not have uv ir leaks
yeah okay so this is the next one there is some
small small stuff and there is those two two
parts oh okay so it is there yeah it's there it's not one nice okay
yeah it's not dirt on my screen no there is uh 14 15 number 14
15 and 16. no it should be the other way 16 is on the edge
16 is here yeah 16 there 16 is there that's 15 it should be 14 14 here yeah
uh one off the moon yesterday hold on has that actually been
officially designated yet as 16 oh it has been okay i just had to make sure yeah
those must picture this week that's nice
did you see the suns yes yes they did yes i did good
thank you very nice yeah so
let's see if there some uh some today yeah some uh training i have to
that's the only way that's there is no short ways no
and those those uh skills those can't not been buyed
you can't you must do it you have to earn it yeah yes
and for simon's pictures probably
those pictures for you is not even wow anymore for you
thing it's um it doesn't matter what level somebody's at i always like looking at other
people's work because it's there's a there's a level of inspiration that it has and i'll give you a prime example
uh somebody recently bought a a hydrogen alpha filter and he shot some data with it and he was
just struggling and he was at this point where he wanted to return the filter thinking that the filter was damaged
didn't work or because he wasn't getting the results that i would get so i asked him send me the original
files and i'll process them just to check to make sure your filter is good and then i sent him back uh the picture
files and it goes oh i've got a long way to go yes
yes it's the same when i sent my picture of the m42 to molly
but that's not good the data the data that you acquire the data is there it's
just do you know how to extract that data out and it's taken me
oh geez i don't know a couple of years to really refine this process doing solar
and the worst part of it here was i actually had no one to talk to about this i couldn't go up to somebody and
say oh what's the processing technique yes exactly that's the problem for me because
we are so rare we are so few here in sweden well it's not like you can go to a dinner party and ask you
know no there is no king of sweden we don't have styles that i'd like to
kind of work on here together we don't have stock parties we don't have this like communities we don't have these uh
forums like you have scott that's why i'm except in arkansas you
can go to a bar okay and just sit down and talk about image processing it's no
problem lift your telescope on the ball on the table you have does this bar happen to be in
the other room to you scott it's actually this drawer right here
okay yeah this ball just springs out so but that's why i'm hanging here every every
night when uh smoke descending that's cool because
this is the only way i learn it's listening asking and then doing
well i mean i'm not trying to solicit anything here so please don't misunderstand what i'm saying here but
there is a there's a big thing that i'm trying to work on where it's it's a giant solar tutorial and i want to go
from like start to end but my problem here is is like i need to support from
uh everybody else in terms of the manufacturers
and the biggest thing here is this i'm at this point where there's only really one device that i'm using which
is seems like i'm really biased but i want to be able to get access to all the other manufacturers products but
it's it's been such a challenge to talk to anybody and just to say look i don't want you to give me anything for free if
i can just loan something for a week two weeks you know depending on how good or bad weather is shoot through it
create this this um this massive video because it was i actually have it scripted it's actually going to be it's
six parts certain episodes will be an hour long some will be slightly under an hour so
i'm only 30 minutes but it covers everything from setting up
how to polar align during the daytime which sounds crazy but it's not as hard as you think
and people make it over complicated for no reason so
it's right now i have enough things to get it started
but not enough support from the manufacturers to make it something big
will help well unless you unless you want to start kicking out solar filters then you know
i'm all ears simon i know you have experienced well we have the absolutely
clear solar filter that uh gets every wavelength through so
the daytime filter the daytime filter yes
you are experienced and i am a beginner and i have looked a thousand of videos
on youtube tutorials and the experiences when they are making tutorials
they can't any longer think like a beginner
are thinking so they can they can't go back to this
uncertainty unknownness
if you make a tutorial and you you think this is so simple
the thing that i don't take it within the tutorial but
that simple okay can be so so important right so let me let me make
sure you understand this the video that i'm creating all this gigantic library is not a tutorial i do not teach
you steps on how to do anything what i'm doing is i'm showing you
all the pieces that you need in order to do solar photography
description okay so and the reason you have to know already yeah
and there i actually already have a solar tutorial out there that quite a few people have followed and some of the
results from before and after like before they they watched this video they were
showing these types of images when they after they watch the video they you see
the learning gap just suddenly jump up because they get it and the reason why i do my videos
differently and it's not a tutorial like a step by step i show people what the program does what
the button does and that's the fear a lot of the times i watch too many of these um
guys that do their thing their master class and they say press this button here press this button
here and press that button here yeah yes and i'm not going wait why why does it do what it does that's what
i'm saying exactly good salmon that's the big problem with the software
tutorials they just push the button and don't explain what
will this do what yeah what what do you expect it might be
they don't know themselves yeah you know honestly though scott um you we laugh at that but a lot of the
times it is because they just watch somebody else's video yeah i mean i caught the guy's attention his name's
philippe who the programmer of impg and i just went through it in a
with a fine-tooth comb but i did it in such a way to keep it simplistic for new people i didn't get into the the hard
parts where you can do the custom adaptive um whatever filters i just showed them the slider and then i showed
them the histogram and i said this is what a histogram is this is what it does and this is what happens when you do
this and you get the idea very very quickly of what i'm doing so you see an image
that's just blurry and then suddenly it slowly comes together but as it comes together i'm
explaining every step of the way what is it doing and why does it do the thing it does
that's good that's that that's what we are missing on like uh uh uh
instruction videos because the probably like you say and scott say they
they don't probably know by their self what that button does right
and what why you have to push that button so here's here's a fun one um so polar
alignment is one of those ones that gets people and i watch people struggle all day long
and they eventually get into a situation where they start using software driven things pole master
the the polar alignment feature in sharp cap so forth and so on if you go out of your way do all of
those things then mechanically look at your mount and then look at where you physically are
geographically you're going to find certain numbers suddenly just match up for example if
you look at your uh gps coordinates that you punch in there so for la's 118 and
34. the 34 actually has a massive significance in fact if i actually was
pointing the polar scope directly at polaris and then i got a protractor or a
way to measure what the angle of the scope is at miraculously it's 34 degrees it's it's
not coincidental and then where am i looking at is also not
coincidental yeah and all i'm doing here is when you're doing the polar alignment and you
turn your scope it just calculates what your offset is that's all it does yeah
and that's why if you understand this you can do polar alignments during the daytime i don't even see need to see the
north star any longer i couldn't care if there was a tree in my way i have a i have a salad
my house first aid i i can't see when i'm doing my polar alignment i can't see
polish it doesn't matter i have never seen that so i i'm doing in cpui
aspa and yet type no no zero zero
error so you know the one of the biggest things is if you actually go to the sun um when
you do your rough polar alignment during the daytime and you've got a solar finder if it gets close
where the solar finder gets illuminated and you see a part of the dot somewhere do not adjust the altitude because your
altitude is fixed so again for me it's 34 degrees all you got to do is change the azimuth and as soon as the sun
creeps into view in your camera i guarantee you it you are so close to being polar aligned that that sun will
not drift off ah and again this is daytime yeah so again
this is the type of stuff that the way i do it i don't just say oh turn this knob and turn this knob in there you're polar
aligned the way i'm explaining it that i just did it just now is the type of tutorials like no well
it's the type of uh lessons that i'm trying to put out there where it's less about here is my procedure
this you know this is my method of doing something i do reveal it because people want to know
but i want people to know the software the camera the scope why does your scope do this what is this problem that you're
seeing yeah you know you can you can see also when you
type like my i uh photographing moon i take a three to five minutes uh movie
and you can see how much it's drifting like mine it's drifting also almost nothing it stays
like a rock in the picture and then you know okay
i got a good alignment i hate to say this scott i recognize that look on your face it's
the one where your eyes are burning yeah yeah i was upset this morning folks
yeah and i've got i got a lecture for the uh for marcelo
souza's aeronautics and astronautics
symposium that he does so i have i have down in brazil so i have to be ready for that tomorrow
so i think we should call this then shouldn't we yeah i'm going to call it yeah it's a lot of fun though thank you
guys yeah thank you very much thanks like i said i only came here for the after party yeah that's cool that's
great that's fine i love it thank you so much thank you very much thank you scott okay
bye-bye good night good night everyone good cheers
[Music]
[Music]
so
and now folks it's time to say good night we sincerely appreciate your peppermint and hope we've succeeded in
bringing you an enjoyable evening of entertainment please drive home carefully and come back again soon
good night
wow
peace out scope good night good night good night scott